The "E. P. Fenwick" murder trilogy (1943-45), by Elizabeth Fenwick

Readers of this blog may recall that a few years ago I made some posts about American crime writer Elizabeth Fenwick (1916-1996), an author who still remains sadly neglected, despite the recent resurgence of popular interest in mid-century women "domestic suspense" writers following Sarah Weinman's crusading efforts on their behalf. 

As far as I'm aware, Fenwick's last book to see a print issue was the 1987 paperback Academy Chicago edition, now itself rare, of Goodbye, Aunt Elva (1968), which just missed being made into a film by Robert Aldrich, maker of the classic so-called "deadly biddy" films What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969), the latter starring Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon and based on the excellent crime novel The Forbidden Garden (1962) by domestic suspense doyenne Ursula Curtiss. 

Impresario Aldrich planned to follow Alice with What Ever Happened to Dear Elva?, based on Fenwick's novel, but Aunt Alice had lost money and plans for Elva accordingly were shelved in the early Seventies.  Today, some fifty years later, Elva remains unmade and Fenwick's books most regrettably are out-of-print.  The film may never be made, but I hope that the books come back in print soon.

It has taken me a while to untangle Elizabeth Fenwick's personal history, but now I have, or much of it at least.  I shall be reporting more on that soon, but here I wanted to talk about the author's first crime novels, what I call her "E. P. Fenwick" trilogy, published in the US by Farrar & Rinehart between 1943 and 1945, when Fenwick was in her late twenties. 

It's not Lord Peter, but rather Sammy on the case
in The Inconvenient Corpse.

Afterward Fenwick wrote three "mainstream" novels, not resurrecting her crime fiction career until 1957, when beginning with Poor Harriet, she produced 11 crime novels over the next 16 years, retiring from the field in 1973.  This later crime fiction made the author throughout the 1960s one of the better-known American domestic suspense writers, but it is her earlier "E. P. Fenwick" mysteries from the Forties that I want to look at here. 

These are, as mentioned, three in number, which I call a trilogy, although in fact they are non-series tales.  The titles are The Inconvenient Corpse (1943), Murder in Haste (1944) and Two Names for Death (1945).

The first two novels take place in New York City and suburban/rural New York, the last in Boston.  All three seem to have been generally well-received.  The Saturday Review, for example, called Corpse an "exciting and well-written exercise in untrammeled emotions" and declared of Haste that it was "good," with "competent" sleuthing and a "surprising" conclusion. 

Especially interesting, as is often the case, are the reviews of the E. P. Fenwick books by noted American crime writer and critic Anthony Boucher.  The soon-to-be mystery reviewer for the New York Times had reservations about Corpse, observing that while it made smooth reading it was "unconvincing in characterization and solution."  However, with Haste Boucher heralded this "disquieting story of odd psychologies and obscure menaces" as "not unworthy of [American crime writer] Elisabeth Sanxay Holding."  Indeed, he opined that "you might call it the first novel of the Holding school, hitherto represented solely by Mrs. H; and a fine foundation for a school it is." 

When Two Names for Death was published, Boucher concluded that the novel enhanced Fenwick's good criminal name even further: "simply and subtly written, with knowable characters and plausibly complex motivations, this won't disappoint those who recognized Fenwick in Murder in Haste as a possible major contender."

A review like that would have made me want to keep at it, but apparently in Fenwick's case it spurred her to try for the "real thing": mainstream fiction.  (Events in her personal life may have been a factor as well.)  A dozen years passed before Fenwick published her next crime novel.  Yet even the three E. P. Fenwick books alone would have constituted a more than respectable crime writing legacy.

In the first of these novels Fenwick makes use of many of the beloved devices of classic mystery: the isolated snowbound house party, the solitary woman in peril and the vanishing corpse (a most "inconvenient" one indeed).  Maggy Simon, assistant to noted NYC journalist Sebastian Evers, with her loyal Boston terrier Sammy and her dashing boss--to whom the reader will conclude she has formed a (one-sided?) romantic attachment--attend a reunion of Sebastian's old high school friends in rural New York, probably around Ithaca, home of Cornell University, where Fenwick was living with a poet and instructor of French at the college. 

Also showing up for the event is Sebastian's bold, bibulous and blonde lady friend, Anna Rose:

"That's my whole name, you know--like Annabella, in the movies, and that French actress, I forget her name."

"Mistinguette?" suggested de Vries, with a Gallic gesture.

"That's it," agreed Anna Rose, showing all her beautiful teeth."

native French actress Annabella with her matinee idol husband at the time, Tyrone Power

The house in the country is owned by Freddy and Susan de Vries, Freddy being the editor of the highbrow quarterly review The New Age ("'Oh, that one,' said Maggy, who had been filing away unread copies of The New Age for several years.").  The morning after everyone's arrival there, Anna Rose disappears. Supposedly she  stormed out into the snow in a huff, determined to go back to New York even though the nearest town with trains and a bus station is twelve miles away. 

The De Vries couple and their other guests, Professor Harold Jameson and Morgan Dillard, formidable daughter of a judge and a former girlfriend of Sebastian's, downplay Anna Rose's disappearance, but Maggy has her doubts about the "official" story, doubts which are confirmed when she stumbles over Anna Rose's brutally bludgeoned body in a storage shed!  With Anna Rose's corpse later vanishing and the telephone line getting snipped, Maggy begins to find her stay in the country rather an unpleasant one.  Who can she trust?  Perhaps no one but her steadfast Sammy!  (If you want a friend, get a dog.)

This is a briskly paced and suspenseful crime novel that reminded my quite a bit of Anita Boutell's Tell Death to Wait, a crime novel which was published four years earlier, though Corpse actually is a rather warmer and more human book, despite both the cold weather and people (Boutell, an American living in England, wrote a convincingly frosty British book.)  Maggy finds herself opposed by Sebastian's old friends in her attempts to get at the truth about Anna Rose and the motivations of Sebastian himself are not always clear to her; yet she defiantly soldiers on until the truth comes to light.  She's an appealing heroine, not a dithering wet noodle like so many of the protagonists in Mignon Eberhart's hugely popular mysteries from the period.  The continued popularity of those young women has always rather mystified me. 

Fenwick's second mystery novel Murder in Haste offers a more deeply drawn milieu and greater plotting complexity than its predecessor, which I appreciated, even if the denouement with all its twists got a bit involved for my tastes.  In this one it is a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, Gerald Chase, who vanishes, from the Potter School for Boys, a private school (i.e., a public school in the UK) outside New York City. 

Three months later the lad's corpse turns up at the bottom of the river bluff behind the school.  The body shows wounds consistent with a fall--but did he fall, or was he pushed?  Or something else entirely?  It's up the local sheriff Thad Shaw to find out, with the help of the headmaster's brainy unmarried thirtyish daughter, Eunelda.

This one rather reminded me of a Q. Patrick or Patrick Quentin mystery, including the Q. Patrick public school mystery, Death Goes to School (1936).  It's a sophisticated story with some compellingly dark psychological portraiture, particularly concerning the odd Chase family and its satellites.  I just wish the denouement had been a little tighter.

Everything, however, comes together beautifully in the final "E. P. Fenwick" mystery, Two Names for Death, which has the complexity of Haste and the narrative fleetness of Corpse.  This one was a real corker of a classic mystery, I thought.

Set in Boston, the novel's main focal character is young Barney Chance, a college student working as a cabdriver over the summer, when the deathly events take place.  Barney becomes involved with a police case when one of his fares, an enigmatic woman named Lenore Bellane Schafft, is found dead in her hotel bedroom, with both of her wrists slit.  Suicide or murder? 

By coincidence (indeed!) this woman is closely connected to the household where Barney himself rooms, along with the owner of the cab company for whom he works, a fifty odd bachelor named Edward J. Bottman.

Midway through the novel another death occurs, this time that of a man who falls fatally from the window of his six-story hotel room, and again the police (and the reader) are left with the question, suicide or murder?

I don't want to say too much about the involved family dynamics in this story, for fear of spoilage, but I found Names an immensely enjoyable detective novel, complexly yet cleanly plotted with characters that actually live (until they die, that is).  For someone who later excelled at the stripped down mid-century crime novel, Fenwick here produced a densely packed true detective tale with quite credible police investigation.  I fully agree with Anthony Boucher's opinion of the novel and highly recommend it to vintage mystery fans.

Fenwick could have gone from here to write a whole series of Boston set mysteries but instead she produced only three mainstream novels over the next dozen years.  I will look at this matter, as well as the mysteries in Fenwick's own life, in an upcoming post. 

Like just what does "E. P." stand for?  Elizabeth...???  More soon.

My 12 Favorite Country House Horror Haunts in Film, From the Thirties to the Sixties, Part 2

You might have noticed in part one in this series that five of the six films were from the Forties.  Here, all six of them from the Sixties.  Fifties country house horror seems kind of flat to me, though I know there are fans of The Maze, for example, and The Bat, a remake of a classic silent film, itself an adaptation of a play, which was adapted from Mary Roberts Rinehart's iconic country house mystery The Circular Staircase (with horror elements added).  One of my favorite horror films does come from the Fifties, however, though it's not really a country house film--yet it is a super-duper supernatural thriller, based on a short story by the greatest master of classic British horror, MR James: Night of the Demon.  I'll have to review it sometime!  In the meantime....

You'll also notice that all of these Sixties films offer horrors in black-in-white.  With all due deference to Hammer Studios and Roger Corman, who indeed made moviegoers see the color of blood, I like my vintage horror in twilight shades.  I don't need to see red.  So without further ado:

7. Psycho (1960)
Source: Psycho (1959), by Robert Bloch

If your house in the country is running down rather a bit, what better way to make it a paying proposition than by taking in paying guests?  Or--this being mid-century America in Alfred Hitchcock's classic horror film Psycho--building a cheap motor court for various weary and unwary travelers (such as pretty blonde absconding secretary Marian Crane, played by Janet Leigh in an Oscar-nominated supporting turn), right below your incredibly creepy, paint peeled, Addams Family Gothic house?  If your name is Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins, not Oscar nominated, in one of most shameful awards snobs ever) it will naturally be called the Bates Motel.

One of your guests may be murdered, very memorably and horribly, in the shower of one of the hotel rooms, but in truth the heart of the darkness at the Bates domain lies within the house itself.  People who invade this sanctum have a way of being cruelly and bloodily done to death.

So is Psycho country house horror?  Sure.  And it takes things to far darker spaces than the earlier films I listed, just as the book Psycho is a far nastier piece of work than the literary sources for those earlier films.  With Psycho lay the future of horror, and the film provided one of my most unforgettable experiences as a movie watcher when I, a mere youngster, saw it in on television for the first time in the late 1970s. 

While the next film on the list is an elegant Sixties throwback to classic country house horror, it has moments that are no less terrifying than the flashing knife strokes in Psycho.

8. The Innocents (1961)
Sources: The Turn of the Screw (1898), by Henry James and The Innocents (1950), a stage adaptation of James' novella by William Archibald

The first term paper I ever wrote, back in my senior of high school, was on Henry James' masterpiece of maddening ambiguity, the novella The Turn of the Screw.  Being a mystery fan (I read my first Agatha Christie novels when I was 8 and never looked back), I was attracted to the central mystery of the story: Is the governess sent by an indifferent wealthy uncle to his palatial country house, Bly, to look after his young niece and nephew, Miles and Flora, actually seeing spirit manifestations which threaten the children, or is she, well, completely off her nut? 

I made the case for ghosts.

Others of course have seen it differently.  That supreme killjoy, the American critic Edmund Wilson, found time, in between bemoaning people who enjoy detective fiction, to opine of The Turn of the Screw, that "the young governess who tells the story is a neurotic case of sex repression, and the ghosts are not real ghosts at all but merely the governess' hallucinations."  Well, he would say that!

I watched The Innocents, the 1961 film version of The Turn of the Screw, back in the 1990s and then more recently, in its Criterion Collection edition, a few months ago.  The second time around I was blown away by it.  What a wealth of talent went into this film!

The Innocents was directed by Jack Clayton, just off his Oscar nomination for Room at the Top, which starred Laurence Harvey and Simone Signoret and was one of the most admired of the then cutting edge "Angry Young Men" movies of the period.  With The Innocents Clayton turned seemingly backward to a formal Victorian ghost story, but The Turn of the Screw was a product of the Decadent Movement and there is a lot of truly insidious stuff going on in the subtext of the book, which the film, which was co-scripted by Truman Capote and William Archibald, author of a stage adaptation of Turn (see above) certainly picks up on.

In discussions with the housekeeper at Bly, Mrs. Grose, the new governess, Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), learns some disquieting things about life at the country house in former days.  Miles has been sent home from prep school, for undisclosed transgressions which might relate to troubling goings-on at Bly. 

It seems that the former governess, Miss Jessel, was having a torrid sexual affair with Peter Quint, the deceased valet to Miles and Flora's uncle (to whom Miss Giddens, a near forty-year-old vicar's daughter and virgin--going by Deborah Kerr's own age, which was quite older than the character in the book--seemed obviously attracted).  The children are amazingly poised and charming, but gradually they start to seem rather too much so, disturbingly old beyond their years.  Miss Giddens begins to wonder whether the children could have been "corrupted" by their elders, Jessel and Quint, who, she learns, did not trouble to conceal their affair from their charges.  Is this why the youngsters seem so knowing?

However, things take a worse turn when Miss Giddens starts to see manifestations of Jessel and Quint around the estate.  Have the dead returned to take possession of the living?  Miss Giddens now sees herself as contestant in a holy battle with the forces of darkness to save the children's very souls.  Who will win the contest?

This film succeeds on all counts for me, starting with the performances.  It's always nice to see Michael Redgrave (Dead of Night), in his brief scene as the uncle, but everything depends on Miss Jessel and the two children, played by Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin, and this trio is simply superb. 

Of course one would expect such from Deborah Kerr, but Jack Clayton deserves credit for getting such mature performances out of two young children, respectively aged 11 and 10 at the time.  Honestly if Anna Paquin could win an Oscar for The Piano, these two kids should have been taking home a pair of them back in 1962, yet they weren't even nominated!  Stephens only did 14 films, including his famous role as the lead "child" in the sinister scifi thriller Village of the Damned the year before, and Pamela Franklin briefly enjoyed a promising film career, which oddly fizzled.

In the event the film was entirely ignored by the Oscars, despite the literate script by William Archibald and the great Truman Capote (it did win an Edgar, however, dear mystery fans) and the masterful cinematography, by ultimate Oscar winner Freddie Francis.  Really, the whole thing is a model of how a classic ghost story should be filmed.  (Just note the scenes where the "ghosts" of Jessel and Quint make their appearances.)

It's a far darker ghost story than The Uninvited, listed in my previous post, which makes it feel more modern, yet it is based on a book that is 120 years old.  Which just goes to show you don't have to be "modern" to be dark.  Take note, Agatha Christie adapters!

9. Carnival of Souls (1962)
Source: Likely inspired by Lucille Fletcher's radio play The Hitch-Hiker (1941)

An extremely low budget, independent film that made little impression at the time, but has since become a horror cult favorite; and I'm one of its cultists.  It's about a woman, Mary Harvey (Candace Hillgloss), who survives a terrible car accident in Kansas which killed the two other occupants of the car.  She continues on her way to Utah, where she has secured a job as a church organist.  She gets a room in a boarding house with an oily, unctuous fellow lodger who keeps trying to score with her, to her frigid distaste.

Still she does like playing the organ, even though she has no religious faith and has terribly odd and unsettling visions when she plays.  Things are okay, though--until she starts seeing a ghoulish man who seems to be pursuing her!  She finds herself oddly drawn to an abandoned pavilion by the Great Salt Lake--the now destroyed Saltair Pavilion, a mesmerizing, haunting structure once located 15 miles from Salt Lake City.

The scenario of the film is familiar and I would think must have been inspired by Lucille Fletcher's 1941 radio play, which was televised as a highly-regarded Twilight Zone episode in 1960.  (Fletcher also gave us Sorry, Wrong Number and Night Watch, the latter of which I reviewed on this blog here.)  But the devil's in the details, and the details are devilishly superb in this film.  The cinematography and organ score are really impressive--and really eerie. 

People have criticized the often wooden acting in the film, and I can see that; but to me this gives it, up to a point, an air of Middle American authenticity.  Fortunately Candace Hillgloss is effective.  She only has one other film to her credit, the similarly low budget The Curse of the Living Corpse (better than the title, in my opinion), but with cultivation might she have been one of Alfred Hitchcock's icy blondes?  She makes me feel her character's plight, wanting to be part of society, but also feeling ill at ease with it, and pursued by visions she doesn't understand and which no one else sees.  Her pushy greaseball neighbor, who sadly is her closest contact with the everyday world, isn't bad at all either.  He is played by the late Sidney Berger, who you can read about here.  

The country house in the film?  Definitely the Saltair Pavilion.  Wait to you see just who, um, lives there!

10. The Haunting (1963)
Source: The Haunting of Hill House (1960), by Shirley Jackson

The American ghost film The Haunting is very similar to the British ghost film, and why not?  Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is quite reminiscent of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.  Both are triumphs of teasing, maddening ambiguity and psychological terror.

The film is quite faithful to the novel.  In both the leading character is shy, downtrodden Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris, adept at playing such characters), who when the story opens is living in cramped discomfort with her grudging married sister, her demanding invalid mother, with whom she previously lived, having recently died.  (Truly, Eleanor is one of the saddest characters in fiction.) 

Because of a psychic experience--a shower of stones pelting her family's house--which occurred when she was young, she has been invited to participate in a study being conducted at a purportedly haunted mansion with a history of deep unhappiness and macabre death: Hill House (It's "not sane," as Shirley Jackson scarily tells us).

At Hill House ("not sane," mind you) Eleanor is joined by swinging lesbian empath Theodora, memorably played in sexy Sixties style Claire Bloom; the skeptical and scoffing playboy heir to the mansion, Luke Sanderson, pertly played by snub-nosed, curly-haired Russ Tamblyn of West Side Story and Peyton Place fame (both West Side Story and The Haunting were directed by Val Lewton horror alumnus Robert Wise); and sober team leader Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson, whom I feel I must have seen in something before, I'm just not sure what.) 

Once the group settles in at eerie Hill House ("not sane"), uncanny things start to happen--strange sounds in the night, cryptic writing on the wall--but is this the doing of whatever might haunt the house, or of psychic Eleanor herself, who seems increasingly unstable--perhaps dangerously so?

Some have criticized this film as too subtle and sparing in its scares, but others have praised the virtuoso fright scenes.  Put me in the latter camp.  And there is quite a climax, I think.  Russ Tamblyn dropping that bottle is far more effective than the cgi decapitation of Owen Wilson in the truly horrific--in a very bad way--1999 cinematic re-imagining.  Bring back subtlety, for pity's sake!  Well, at least there's always the recent Haunting of Hill House series.

11. Hugh, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)
Source: Whatever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? (novella and scenario for the film), by Henry Farrell

What better for a scary country house setting then a decaying, white columned Louisiana mansion? 

Inhabited by Bette Davis, acting crazy as a loon.  Not to mention chewing the scenery like no loon ever did.

Her house is visited by a barking mad ax murderer--are they one and the same? 

For more see my post on the Oscar-nominated fright film, a follow-up of sorts to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, here.

12. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Source: Supposedly inspired by I Am Legend (1954), by Richard Matheson

That the "country house" in Night of the Living Dead is a dumpy old Pennsylvania farmhouse that never for a moment had any pretensions to grandeur or anything more than bare utility tells us we are at the end of the road...just like the characters in this film.  "They're coming to get you Barbara!" the teasing brother shouts to his sister in the cemetery at the beginning of this classic frightener.  What a great shout-out to vintage horror master Boris Karloff, who starred in the first house on our list, The Old Dark House.  But where the menace come from within in The Old Dark House, the menace in Living Dead, lies without--or does it???

In summary, we have

The Old Dark House (1932)
Rebecca (1940)
The Uninvited (1944)
Dead of Night (1945)
The Spiral Staircase (1945)
Dragonwyck (1946)
Psycho (1960)
The Innocents (1961)
Carnival of Souls (1962)
The Haunting (1963)
Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Sweet country dreams! TPT

"They're coming to get you, Barbara!"

Coming Attractions: Carolyn Wells, Bernice Carey, Webb and Wheeler and Some Mysterious Miscellany from Dean Street Press

I have been working a lot on book deadlines over Christmas vacation, so as a consequence I was not blogging as much as I might have liked.  With that work behind me, however, I thought that I should write about just what I have been doing.

a bibliophile bites the dust

First off, I have received some copies of Carolyn Wells' recently reprinted 1936 detective novel Murder in the Bookshop, Book 50 in HarperCollins' Detective Club Crime Classics series (to which I wrote the introduction eleven months ago).  It's a lovely book, with its superb original jacket sign reproduced, complete with a rare Wells short story, "The Shakespeare Title-Page Mystery," to go with the novel--a fitting combination, since both tales revolve around bibliomania.  One of America's most popular mystery authors during the Golden Age of detective fiction, Wells, about whom I have written a goodly number of times, made quite a lot of lucre from mystery writing and was able to indulge her own bibliomania.  At her death she bequeathed her valuable Walt Whitman collection to the Library of Congress.

I was greatly honored to be asked to participate in this HarperCollins series and I hope that it may continue.

Readers of this blog may recall that I wrote about California crime writer Bernice Carey a few times last year.  Now I can announce that a new edition of two of her novels, The Man Who Got Away with It (1950) and The Three Widows (1952), will be published by Stark House this year, with an introduction by me and back cover blurbs by, among others, noted authorities Anthony Boucher and Xavier Lechard. 

Stark House is also doing a "twofer" by Carey's crime-writing contemporary Jean Potts, with an introduction by John Norris, so it's looking like another good year for mid-century women crime writers at Stark House.  I think yet more will be in the offing too, all in good time.

Next, I co-edited and wrote an introduction to a new Crippen & Landru edition of short stories by my vintage mystery besties Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler (aka Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge).  This is The Cases of Lt. Timothy Trant, which collects all the known short form investigations of Webb and Wheeler's posh and perceptive police detective--22 in number, including a novella, novelette and a score of short stories. 

It's an impressive collection and one most certainly that fans of the keen crime writing couple--and fans of fair play puzzle detective fiction generally--should very much enjoy. Anthony Boucher urged the publication of a Trant collection over half a century ago.

It was fun indeed working with Doug Greene and Jeff Marks on this one.  The book was supposed to come out last year, but late in the day we found a new Trant story from an English source located by indefatigable Tony Medawar and I located a 1940 Trant novella, which appears to have been the sleuth's debut appearance in short form.  Also included in the book is a pic of Rickie and Hugh around 1940 with their Scottish terrier, Roddy.  There will be, I hope, several more Webb and Wheeler short fiction collections to come from Crippen & Landru.

Finally I wrote introductions for three newly reprinted British authors of vintage detective fiction...but I can't tell you their names yet.  More in February, however.  Included is one of my favorite mystery writers from the Golden Age, whom I have been trying for years to get reprinted.  I hope you like him!  (Or is it her....)

Murder Gone Meta 2 The Week-End Mystery (1926) by Robert A. Simon

Note: The Week-End Mystery has recently been reprinted by Coachwhip, with an introduction by yours truly, from which the piece below is drawn. For a preliminary post on this book, see here.

PART ONE
By 1926, when the 29-year-old American author and critic Robert A. Simon published his single detective novel, a charmingly whimsical murder story entitled The Week-End Mystery, the conventions of British and American detective fiction, then in its so-called Golden Age (conventionally dated as around 1920 to 1940), already were well-established, if not highly formalized.

Long before Anglo-American hard-boiled crime writer Raymond Chandler in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (originally published in 1944 and revised for book publication in 1950) derided what he termed the “Cheesecake Manor” school of class-bound, hoity-toity mystery writing, the weekend country house party attended either by landed gentry (in the UK) or the merely wealthy (in the US) had become the classic, indeed clichéd, setting for fictional murder; and it is precisely this setting which Robert A. Simon employed and wryly lampooned in his clever detective novel.

Seemingly not quite getting the author’s joke, the reviewer of the The Week-End Mystery in the New York Times lamented the novel’s “hackneyed situations and conventional characters,” while simultaneously allowing that these demerits did not much matter when “the story is so well told.”  “Mr. Simon has an ingratiating ability to take the reader into his confidence, to put him completely at his ease,” pronounced the reviewer of the author’s smooth narrative style, before concluding that “‘The Week-End Mystery’ must be classed among the superior detective stories.”  The novel was also published the same year in the UK by Collins, who the same year put out a certain little number by Agatha Christie of which you may have heard: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Robert A. Simon
(1897-1981)
author of The Week-End Mystery (1926)

The author of The Week-End Mystery, Robert Alfred Simon, was a member of the irrepressible American Jazz Age generation that during the Roaring Twenties took to detective fiction like it did to sitting on flagpoles--with, to be sure, less transitory results.  Robert was born in Manhattan, New York on February 18, 1897 (less than five months after Jazz Age bard F. Scott Fitzgerald), to Alfred Leopold Simon, a wealthy feather and silk manufacturer and milliner, and his wife Hedwig Meier, both of whom were of German Jewish heritage.

In his early years he resided in Midtown at a four-story brownstone  townhouse at 116 East 55^th Street with his parents and younger sister, Helen, as well as an uncle and aunt, Leo and Anna (Meier) Simon, and their eldest son, Richard Leo Simon, a live-in maid and a German nanny. (German was Robert’s first language.)[1]

Two years younger than Robert, Richard would grow up to co-found the publishing firm of Simon and Schuster and father four children, including the famed singer-songwriter Carly Simon.  Other cousins of Robert’s included Richard’s three brothers: George Thomas Simon, a jazz writer and early drummer in Glenn Miller’s orchestra; Henry William Simon, an opera critic and professor of English at Teacher’s College, Columbia University; and Alfred Edward Simon, a rehearsal pianist for George Gershwin and radio programmer of light opera and show music.  In his own life and work Robert Alfred Simon evinced similar literary and musical interests to those of his multi-talented cousins. 

Max Schuster and Richard Simon with their first book
(a book of crossword puzzles)

Both Robert and Richard Simon attended Columbia University, where Robert received the degree of Bachelor of Literature in Journalism in 1921, after an interlude of a year’s service during America’s participation in the Great War as a Sergeant in Columbia University’s School of Military Cinematography. 

During his college years Robert was a student in the renowned creative writing class of Dorothy Scarborough, who later became the author of the searing regional novel The Wind (1925) and the future teacher of acclaimed southern novelist Carson McCullers.

After graduation Robert for a couple of years published articles on jazz and classical music in New York newspapers.  Then in 1923 the prestigious firm of Boni and Liveright (among their authors in the Twenties were novelists Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, poets T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings and Hart Crane and playwright Eugene O’Neill) published Robert’s first novel, Our Little Girl, an amusing satirical tale about “a young girl who was brought up to imagine herself a great singer and who came to believe it.”  At a party a year earlier Robert had wryly bet Boni and Liveright’s owner, Horace Liveright, a single dollar that he could write a novel which Liveright’s firm would accept.  Having won the bet, Robert dedicated Our Little Girl to his cousin Richard, who was then Boni and Liveright’s sales manager. 

Richard Simon's "little girl" Carly

Over the next few years Robert continued to produce interesting literary work.  In 1925 the newly launched New Yorker hired the young author as its first music critic (a position he would hold for the next 23 years) and Simon and Schuster, which Richard had co-founded the previous year, published his translation of Fraulein Else, Arthur Schnitzler’s highly regarded tragic novella.

The next year Robert produced his second and final novel, The Week-End Mystery. This book was published not by Simon and Schuster, but rather by G. Howard Watt, publishers of Clinton Stagg, whose tales of the amazing sleuthing exploits of visually impaired detective Thornley Colton, the so-called “blind problemist,” were gently lampooned by Agatha Christie in her 1929 Tommy and Tuppence Beresford short story collection Partners in Crime.  (The Thornley Colton cases have been reprinted by Coachwhip.) 

Although The Week-End Mystery was the only detective novel Robert ever published, in 1927 he versatilely produced Bronx Ballads, a humorous collection of Jewish songs with illustrations by American humorist, cartoonist and radio personality Harry Hershfield, and served as general editor of Simon and Schuster’s The Pamphlet Poets series,  designed “to promote poetry to the masses through paperback offerings sold for twenty-five cents.”[2]  Volumes in this laudable Simon and Schuster series included Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Witter Bytnner, Four National Negro Poets (including Langston Hughes) and The New York Wits, the latter of which Robert personally edited. 

Despite evident promise as a writer of both mainstream and mystery novels, Robert soon focused his creative writing energies exclusively in the field of music.  In 1927 he produced a widely praised translation of Charles Gounod’s Faust for Vladimir Rosing’s American Opera Company; librettos for modern operas by Robert Russell Bennett, Albert Stoessel and Vittorio Giannini followed in the Thirties.

In 1928 he wed like-minded concert pianist and music teacher Madeleine Marshall, who the year before had co-authored a book of gaming scenarios, published by Simon and Schuster, for Guggenheim, a Twenties games craze similar to today’s Scattergories.  Madeleine was one of two talented daughters of Benjamin Marshall, a prosperous Syracuse, New York hide, fur and leather manufacturer and a niece of Jewish community leader Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee and one of the most prominent constitutional attorneys in the United States (as a legal eminence he was considered an equal of the “other Louis,” Louis Brandeis). Together Madeleine and Robert would have two children.[3] 

Robert A. Simon died in 1981 at the age of 84, having lived a most interesting and rewarding life, though regrettably his sole detective novel—a comparative trifle, if rather a charming one--had been long forgotten at his death by the vintage mystery reading public.  Happily modern-day murder fanciers at leisure can now take the opportunity to relax for a few happy hours with The Week-End Mystery.

PART TWO

Another loathed American tycoon bites the dust
at weekend house party at his stately country mansion

Robert A. Simon’s The Week-End Mystery lies firmly within the tradition of the “Murder?  What fun!” school of detective fiction associated with A. A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery (1922) and several Twenties works by Agatha Christie, including The Secret Adversary (1922) and The Secret of Chimneys (1925), all tales written with a light hand and the tongue in cheek.  (Notorious sourpuss Raymond Chandler did not appreciate A. A. Milne’s joke and spent a good chunk of his “Simple Art of Murder” essay dismantling The Red House Mystery for its lack of realism, in one of the great examples of utterly-beside-the-point literary criticism.) 

Yet Simon’s novel is even more “meta” than Milne’s and Christie’s books, in that it openly revels in mystery genre self-reference from nearly its first page. 

The story opens in the “little office on 94^th Street near Broadway” of Dr. Hugh Farrigan, orthopedic specialist.  28-year-old Jimmy Wrome, assistant to the head of the refined sugar department in the Universal Sugar Refining Company, has come to Dr. Farrigan’s office seeking a cure for his aches and pains.  The doctor quickly diagnoses Jimmy’s malady as a broken heart and prescribes—but naturally—a steady diet of detective fiction, which Jimmy is to borrow from Curtin’s, the drugstore around the corner.[4]  Farrigan’s playful prescription reads:

Detective Stories.

Read one daily until relieved.  Dose may be increased if desired.

Hugh Farrigan, M. D.

Dr. Farrigan starts Jimmy off with a mystery novel he happens to have on hand at the office: The Shower Bath Enigma, one of the many popular tales about series sleuth Bernard Gatlin, “the Man of a Million Masks.”  Responding well to his course of treatment, Jimmy next reads The Porterhouse Murder, another Bernard Gatlin exploit, and after that there is no return.  From the Bernard Gatlin series Jimmy soon has devoured What Happened in Rochester, The Pumblewaite Legacy (“not so good, that one”), Eighteen Minutes Past Five, The Face in the Dark, The Rosenbaum Case, The Cryptic Bride, The O’Reilly Affair and the latest Gatlin opus, The Statue of Liberty Tangle, concerning the vexed question of just who “knifed the senator at midnight in the Statue of Liberty torch.”

Jimmy also reads tales about Great Detectives Hamilton Boone, Lord Hembury and Wilhelmine O’Connor, but the Man of the Million Masks remains his mainstay.  Soon he seemingly has gotten over his late love affair, but Dr. Farrigan starts to wonder whether the young man, who is now making Holmesian deductions about everyone he encounters, may be coming down with a severe attack of “detectivitis.”

Jimmy feeds his raging fever for detection when Dr. Farrigan invites him to a weekend house party being held by his most prominent patient, wealthy bachelor banker Leed Payne, “the Mystery Man of Wall Street,” at his country estate, Olean, in Bellechester.  (Westchester?)  Also among the weekend guests at Olean are

New York assemblyman Francis Gulvin and his theater enthusiast wife

jive-spouting jazz saxophonist Eddie Endle, who plays nightly at the nearby Shuffle Inn

beautiful Claire Trevor, who just happens to be the woman who violently wrung Jimmy’s withers

and Claire’s mystifying new love interest, bland bond dealer Blake Hesbe. 

All these people, along with Olean’s mysterious butler, Stelke (naturally there is a butler), become suspects when Leed Payne is discovered dead in his locked bedroom, having been mortally wounded from a single gunshot, seemingly self-inflicted.

Jimmy has other ideas about Payne’s sudden death, however, and he promptly communicates them at length to a local reporter.  Soon the case is being reluctantly investigated by Edgar Brinze, Captain of the Bellechester Police Reserve Force. Yet Jimmy has no confidence in the sleuthing capacities of Brinze, the son of a local cement manufacturer who had shown such “an alarming inaptitude for the niceties of the cement business” that he was foisted by his wealthy and politically influential father onto the police department, where he has proven every bit as inapt. 

Jimmy concludes that he will have to conduct his own investigation of the mystery, especially after Claire, whom it seems he has not quite gotten over after all, becomes Brinze’s lead suspect!  Can lessons from The Shower Bath Enigma, The Porterhouse Murder and The Rosenbaum Case help Jimmy mimic the crime-busting methods of the Man of a Million Masks and beat Bellechester’s bullying and boorish Captain Brinze to the solution of the Leed Payne murder case?

Thus begins the competition  for clues in one of the most meta mystery novels from the Golden Age of detective fiction.  The reader will not fully appreciate just how much so until she has reached the last line of the last page. 

---

[1] The Simon’s townhouse was later purchased by Robert B. Roosevelt, Jr., a cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt.  It was torn down and replaced with an elegant neo-Georgian mansion at the behest of its new owner, millionaire William Ziegler, Jr., in 1927.  Today the house is the site of the SUNY Global Center. 

[2] Quoting Randy Mackin, George Scarborough, Appalachian Poet: A Biographical and Literary Study with Unpublished Writings (McFarland, 2011), 6.  Dubbed the “Jewish Will Rogers” on account of his wryly humorous wit, Hershfield is best known today for his Abie the Agent, which featured the first Jewish protagonist in an American comic strip.  He also created the comic strips Desperate Desmond and Dauntless Durham of the U. S. A., in which he amusingly parodied cliffhanging crime melodrama.  Simon and Schuster did not launch its celebrated “Inner Sanctum” mystery imprint, edited by Lee Wright, until 1936.  It would include such lauded mystery writers as Patrick Quentin, Anthony Boucher, Cornell Woolrich and Craig Rice. 

[3] On Madeleine Marshall Simon (1899-1993), see Sheri Cook-Cunningham, “The Many Facets of Madeleine Marshall,” International Journal of Research in Choral Singing 4 (2): 52-76.  Madeleine, who performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic under Arturo Toscanini, would later teach English diction at the Juilliard School for over a half-century (1935-86) and author the standard school text The Singer’s Manual of English Diction.  She was coach and accompanist for many artists, including Lily Pons, Helen Traubel, Leontyne Pryce, Lawrence Tibbett and Lauritz Melchior.

[4] Jimmy Wrome is of the same age as the author when he was writing The Week-End Mystery.

No Relation to Ryan Gosling: Christopher Bush Through the Ages

Images of some Golden Age detective writers are as elusive as those of their (often sadly forgotten) sleuths.  However, there actually are quite a few images out there of Christoper Bush, whose Ludovic Travers detective saga is currently being reprinted by Dean Street Press.  (Books #31-40 will be released in May.)

Below I've arranged some of these images chronologically.  Christopher Bush was born on Christmas day in 1885 and died in 1973, publishing his first Ludo Travers detective novel in 1926, when he was forty, and his last in 1968, when he was 82 years old.  Only a few of his prewar colleagues from England's Detection Club--Agatha Christie, Gladys Mitchell, John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes and Anthony Gilbert come to  mind--outlasted him as active mystery authors, Christie, Carr and Gilbert by only as few years.

Maybe I'm alone in detecting a resemblance to Ryan Gosling in the earlier Christopher Bush pics, particularly the that second one.  (I don't see it in the later ones at all.)  What think you, Gosling stanners?  I think it's the eyes more than anything else.  Bush was rather the ladies man in younger days, with some, erm, sticky entanglements, one of them producing a (presumably out-of-wedlock) son, noted composer Geoffrey Bush.  The first Bush photo dates from Egypt, where Bush served in the Great War, in 1919; in the others I am roughly guessing his age by decade.

Bush at age 33

Bush in his forties

Bush in his fifties

Bush in his sixties

Bush in his early seventies

Sleuths in Pictures--Visualizations of Golden Age Sleuths (Hercule Poirot, Ludovic Travers, George Wharton)

Hercule Poirot is now one of the most visualized fictional detectives in history through the medium of film, having been played by a succession of famous actors--Tony Randall, Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, David Suchet, Kenneth Branagh, John Malkovich--over the decades.  Indeed, he's starting to rival Sherlock Holmes in this respect.  And before all that, illustrators liked to portray him on books.  The "book cover Poirot" I personally remember best is the Albert Finneyish one who used to appear, after the actor's Oscar-nominated appearance in Murder on the Orient Express, on Pocket paperbacks in the 1970s, which I talked about here.

But the real heyday of Poirot paperback visualizations seems to have been in the 1940s and 1950s, during the early years of the "paperback revolution," on softcover editions by Pan (UK) and Dell (US).  I think you could say that these were of varying success.  All the Poirots were consistent in key ways though--bald or balding (when hatless), mustachioed, generally Gallic looking.  (On the Pans he usually has a bow tie, which I think suits him.)

Poirot uncovers a secret
in the shrubbery!

Belgian Noir?
"Mon Dieu! I did not order
ze room service!!"

Caught in the headlights!
This attempt at a hard-boiled Poirot
cover always makes me laugh.

"The daughter's name is...Cynthia."
Poirot as mentalist?

He might need this as "evidence."
Poirot as shoe fetishist?

Color him red
Poirot looks more like Sinestro from
the Green Lantern comic book here.

They took that whole
"egg-shaped head" thing to a
new level here--or is M. Poirot
the "moon" over the cypress?
And why is she testifying outdoors?

But Poirot wasn't the only Golden Age sleuth portrayed on book covers of course.  For example, when I was working on illustrations for Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery, I was thrilled to find a book jacket front panel from the Twenties that had been preserved, which actually included a likeness of John Rhode's Dr. Priestley.  It suited him too!  I made sure to include it in the book.

After the Second World War Christopher Bush's veteran sleuth Ludovic Travers maintained enough of  a following of his long-running series in the UK that his publishers decided that his fans might like to know what he looked like.  Certainly Bush described Ludo enough over the years: tall, lean, horn rimmed, and even somewhat hatchet-faced. 

The first visual depiction of which I'm aware is on the cover of Bush's 1952 detective novel The Case of the Happy Medium (pictured right).  This image was used for a time on jackets and in the front matter of Bush's Travers mysteries, though not on front covers again, as far as I'm aware.

Travers appeared on several jackets in the Fifties in fine fettle indeed, followed by odder Sixties appearances in photo fashion.  Who was that glassed man?  To me he looks rather like a Viennese psychoanalyst who should be appearing in books of a rather different order, like The Case of the Mother Fixation, The Case of the Skinner Boxes, The Case of the Anal Retentive Client, The Case of the Penis Envy and The Case of the Cigar That Wasn't Just a Cigar.

He's definitely not quite Travers as I imagine him, but he's certainly more mod, in keeping, to be sure, with the woman with the massive beehive-ish hairdo.  But the Fifties Travers on the covers of Colonel and Cross (especially Colonel) suits Bush's Travers to a "T."

But let's not forget Travers' police pal, Superintendent George Wharton, who likes to set suspects at their ease as he beams down at them, avuncularly, his wire rim glasses sitting low on his nose--and then pounce!  Wharton may not appear on book jacket covers, as far as I'm aware, but in the books Christopher Bush helpfully pointed out the Yard superintendent's marked resemblance to two people, the real life American silent and talking film comedian Chester Conklin and the rotund musician in Punch artist George Belcher's painting "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls," which exhibited as the Royal Academy in 1936, and was the Academy's award winner that year.  See here.

British television series makers, take note!  If you ever get tired of Christie adaptations that move ever farther away from Christie's texts, there's also Christopher Bush and the 63 cases of Ludo Travers.

Note: Books #31-40 in the Ludovic Travers series (with George Wharton), spanning the postwar years 1946-52, are scheduled to be reprinted this May, followed in the fall by Books #41-50, spanning the years 1952-57.

Chester Conklin (1886-1971)
The famous film comedian's span of life was nearly
identical to that of Christopher Bush (1885-1973).

"I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls..."