The Vultures Gather: The Grindle Nightmare (1935), by Q. Patrick

"When the buzzards roost in Grindle Oak, Death comes to the valley."--The Grindle Nightmare.

The Grindle Nightmare (1935) was the first Q. Patrick crime novel co-authored by Richard Wilson "Rickie" Webb after he met Hugh Callingham Wheeler, his living partner in Massachusetts for more than a dozen years and by far the most important of the four mystery writing collaborators he worked with over the years. Grindle had been preceded by Cottage Sinister (1931) and Murder at the Women's City Club (1932), co-authored with Martha Mott Kelley; Murder at Cambridge (1933), authored by Webb alone; and S. S. Murder (1933), co-authored with Mary Louise White, who is also credited as the co-author of Grindle.  I can't help wondering whether Hugh Wheeler may have had some influence on Grindle, however.

The next year Webb published another Q. Patrick mystery, Death Goes to School, which evidently was authored by himself alone, but Death for Dear Clara (1937) and all the Q. Patricks that followed were written collaboratively by Webb and Wheeler.

The Grindle Nightmare was, it seems, one of the more successful Q. Patrick crime novels, which were later eclipsed by Webb and Wheeler's Patrick Quentin mysteries. Reprinted by Popular Library in 1949, it appeared a final time in paperback in the Sixties in a Ballantine edition; but since then it has been out-of-print for over a half century, like all the other books in the Q. Patrick line, sadly.

At the time it was originally published in 1935, Grindle was noted for its horrific criminal subject matter, which includes animal mutilation and child murder.  The novel is set in New England in the Grindle Valley, twenty miles from the city of Rhodes, home of Rhodes University Hospital.  There are a half-dozen or so main households in Grindle (see map), populated by a group of mostly unlikable middle and upper class professional types beset by myriad physical and emotional dysfunctions, some quite bluntly presented for their day.  It all struck me rather like something out of a Patricia Highsmith novel, say Deep Water (1957).

When The Grindle Nightmare was published
mystery was made about the identity of the
author, "an important eastern executive."

When the depraved crimes commence, the reader doesn't really have much of anyone to root for, which certainly casts a wide net of suspicion.  Even the narrator, Dr. Douglas Swanson, and his housemate, Dr. Antonio Costi, "one of the youngest and smartest professors of pathology in America," in whom readers may discern the Watson and Holmes figures of the story, seem rather clinical and even callous about the mayhem.

Today such a story would be told strictly for horror and shock value, at two or even three times the length (Grindle is a short novel of only about 60, 000 words), but in 1935, the events, while no end gruesome, are intellectualized as part of a problem to be solved.

The solution is very interesting, especially for its time, but of course I can't say more about that without spoiling.  Surely someday this novel will be reprinted, so I don't want to do that.  However, I do have more to say about Grindle in a forthcoming essay included in a collection to be published next year, so stay tuned!