Friday, November 14, 2014

Now Before You: The Dagger (1928), by Anthony Wynne

She raised her eyes.
"That is how men love me....Suddenly--like a gale."


Having been thinking a good bit about "pulp fiction" this week, I was struck by how in its more circumspect British way Anthony Wynne's detective novel The Dagger (1928) resembles what people usually think of as "pulp."

In the novel there's a striking character at the center of events, a disturbed Apache dancer named Muriel Deans, "in whose own breast," the dust jacket blurb of the American edition dramatically tells us, "lay a dagger more deadly than any weapon of steel...."

I love the stylized jacket of the American edition of The Dagger, which depicts a sinister and sexy Deans with this deadly weapon in her hand; but I couldn't help thinking how well this design could have been updated to the mean streets realism of post-war paperback "pulp" art, when classic sleaze cover illustrations enjoyed their heyday--though perhaps the title would have been changed to something like The Derringer.

Anthony Wynne (Robert McNair Wilson)
1882-1963
Anthony Wynne in fact was published in the pulps in the 1920s (both short stories and serialized novels), along with other British mystery writers not normally seen as "pulp" fare today, such as Agatha Christie and J. S. Fletcher--though by the 1930s Christie had moved on to more lucrative slicks. However in the United States Wynne was never warmly embraced by paperback publishers. (I'm only aware of one American paperback edition of a Wynne novel, from 1942, and it was not a major edition.)

Indeed, while all of Wynne's first two dozen books of crime fiction--23 novels and a short story collection, Sinners Go Secretly--were published in the United States between 1925 and 1939 by Lippincott, who also published the redoubtable traditionalist mystery writers Patricia Wentworth and Carolyn Wells, I believe only one of Wynne's last four novels, which appeared between 1940 and 1950, was taken up by an American publisher, and this publisher a relatively minor one.

So Wynne was abandoned in the United States just at the time paperback fiction was ascending. (In the mid-1930s, Wynne's political views began to intrude into his novels, slowing down the narratives--see my review of his Death of a Banker--and this missionary zeal on the author's part may have reduced his popularity in the United States.)

Although Wynne was never really able to participate in the paperback revolution, many of his mysteries, with their considerable melodramatic content, would have been well-suited to lurid paperback cover art of the 1940s and 1950s.  Certainly this is true of The Dagger, which tells of the plague of murders that afflicts the Dangerfields, a family of ancient Northumbrian gentry stock, when Muriel Deans, scion John Dangerfield's first wife--believed for a year to have been been drowned off the coast of southern England--resurfaces, most unpleasantly alive. John's father, Sir Magnus, promptly disappears, and the disfigured body of an elderly man, both his hands severed, is found in the neighborhood--but is it or is it not Sir Magnus?

Soon additional mutilated corpses are cropping up, with alarming frequency.  Could Muriel Deans be the culprit?  But her interest seems to be blackmail, not murder. (John Dangerfield inadvertently committed bigamy by marrying again.) Muriel, however, has quite a seamy past, what with her vocation as an Apache dancer and her association with some rather violent and unsavory characters....

Apache dancers
--for more see the fascinating blog article
"Shocking Violence...Or Fantastic Dance? The Apache!"
at http://www.jeredmorin.com/apache-dance/

Admittedly, Anthony Wynne's prose is rather stodgy, but The Dagger reads like a Victorian sensation novel updated to the Jazz Age. (I think it could film wonderfully.) Moreover Wynne and his sleuth, Dr. Hailey, are clearly interested not just in the puzzle (which, though lacking one of Wynne's customary locked room problems, is interesting), but in psychology as well. Of the main characters in The Dagger only Muriel Deans really draws the breath of real life, but she has a vivid enough presence to brighten the cardboard figures around her.

One censorious contemporary English reviewer of the novel primly avowed "we like our detective fiction to be of rather less gory a type than is here presented in a narrative of not one but a number of violent crimes:"; but I would say that The Dagger left its mark on me.

13 comments:

  1. It certainly does leave a mark! I'll always remember this Wynne novel for the bizarre events surrounding the removal/retrieval of the titular murder weapon. The tell-tale puddle of water that ought to have set off alarm bells fooled me outright. That particular scene and what the culprit had to do in order to get the dagger is the kind of thing you find regularly in the shudder pulps. I can't think of anything more grisly in modern crime fiction until you get to the murderer's frantic retrieval of a tie pin stuck in his victim's hand in Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, aka Frenzy. But Wynne wins (ha!) in topping that scene with a far more gruesome act of desperation.

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    1. I'm thinking how this could make a terrific film, with the writers taking some of the stodginess out of the prose. The scene you're talking about would be one of memorable horror.

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  2. Very interesting post, Curt. That is a fantastic book cover design.

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    1. Isn't it, though? Aside from Muriel looking all Lady Macbeth like with that dagger, the dagger background design is wonderful. It would make a great, if macabre, wallpaper design! I must day, the art deco era sure had style in abundance.

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  3. I know embarrassingly little (i.e., nothing) about this author, and must try to track down some of his work. Many thanks for the introduction.

    That cover is truly wonderful.

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    1. I hope he'll be reprinted someday. I've been in contact with a grandson.

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    2. I love how the four colors on Muriel (black, red, tan, a sliver of white) are replicated on the daggers and borders. Honestly, it's one of my very favorite jacket designs from that era.

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    3. My suggestions for new readers to Wynne: ROOM WITH THE IRON SHUTTERS, MYSTERY OF THE ASHES, THE RED LADY (aka THE HOLBEIN MYSTERY), THE FOURTH FINGER which is one of the rare (perhaps the *only*) book of Wynne's that displays a sense of humor. I do not recommend THE BLUE VESUVIUS, THE HORSEMEN OF DEATH (the most boring of all his books I've read) or THE TOLL HOUSE MURDER.

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    4. I was reading The Horseman of Death. Is there ever a murder, or is it just murder-in-the-past? This was one of the novels of his that was serialized in a pulp mag.

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    5. Wish I could tell you. It dragged so much I never finished it. I wouldn't dare try to read it again. All his energy is spent on building up creepy atmosphere and dire forbodings but there is no pay off. I ditched the book just short of the halfway mark. If there is a pick up in genuine action rather than endless talk and scheming it must happen well past the 100 page mark. Just wasn't worth it for me.

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    6. I've just gotten to the point where Sacha is seemingly lashed around the neck by the phantom horseman in a locked room at Ninon's flat. So, finally, there is a locked room problem apparently, though no (new) murder. This one does drag more than The Dagger; I wonder if the serialization encouraged him to tarry? A lot of melodrama too; the whole marry-me-or-I-will-destroy-the-man-you-love thing is straight out of Victorian sensation.

      In Carr's hands this probably would have been terrific. I still think ti would make a great film scenario, though! Oh, well, I will stick with it and let everyone know how it comes out!

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  4. I agree with John. The Horseman of Death is tedious. Unlike him, however, I read the whole thing. I'm funny that way...

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    1. Was anyone ever murdered (in present time) in it? I'm nearly halfway though and there have been no present-time murders! The Dagger was shorter and kept the murders a-coming!

      Gosh, I hope I'm not sounding bloodthirsty or anything here. I knew a girl in junior high school who couldn't abide any Christie unless it had at least two murders and she really preferred three (or more).

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