Death Wears a Mask: The Accomplice (1947), by Matthew Head

Art teacher and critic John Canaday (1907-1985) as "Matthew Head" wrote seven crime novels between 1943 and 1955.  The best known of these books are the four "Mary Finney" mysteries, particularity the three that are set in Africa.  Two of these were reprinted within the last decade in typically attractive editions by Felony & Mayhem. To my mind, however, the most striking crime novel by "Matthew Head" is a non-series take, The Accomplice (1947).

Set in Paris and Kansas City (the "Paris of the Plains") in the 1930s, The Accomplice reminds me a great deal of one of those between-the-wars American expatriate novels, like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1934) and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), although the subject matter in Head's tale is a great deal more lurid.  From more recent times I was rather reminded of Ruth Rendell's The Bridesmaid, 1989.

The novel starts with a love triangle of sorts, which we eventually find is actually a rectangle, and a very strange one at that. Hank Bewley, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, becomes enamored with pretty Corrie Walters of Kansas City, but Corrie is besotted with Lex Abbott, also of Kansas City and a quite rich and quite visually arresting young man.  Here's a descriptive passage to give you some idea of the striking writing in the novel, which is told in Hank's voice:

a beautiful design

Whenever Lex and I walked down the street together there was always a ripple of faces turning in our direction, and that never happens when I walk down the street alone.  I've seen people stop dead in their tracks when Lex came along toward them, and then turn around and follow him as if they had lost all control over their direction of movement.  Strangers were always edging up to him at bars or sending him notes in restaurants, yet as long as I knew him I never knew anybody to react to that face with an immediate smile or that happy feeling of expectancy you get sometimes from a new face that you want to know.  It was a sullen and stony face, but as a piece of pure design it was a joy to look at, in shape and in color.  "Joy" isn't the right word, because the face didn't promise anything good.  The word popped up there because I was trying to avoid the word "beautiful," but I might as well go on and say that as a piece of pure design, Lex's face was beautiful.

Initially Hank reminded me of a Nick Carraway outside observer type (see Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby,1925), but he becomes very personally involved indeed in an emotional imbroglio that grows increasingly bizarre when Mimi de Couer, a sort of female roue, appears on the scene.  She is quite an old friend of Lex's, it seems.

a not entirely accurate
but remarkably arresting
and sexually suggestive cover

Later the scene shifts to Kansas city and Mimi's odd interior decorating establishment there. Events finally culminate in murder, of an especially horrific and unforgettable nature. Although The Accomplice is primarily a character novel, there is a neat little murder problem to be unknotted. After that there is a haunting coda in Paris.

This is a first class crime novel, notably sexually suggestive for its period, that unaccountably has been out-of-print for nearly fifty years, a situation that I hope can be rectified.*

*(Be warned the Dell paperback editions from the 1940s have poor, brittle paper.  Also watch out for a blog review of this novel that reveals too much, imo).