More from 1970: Patricia Moyes' Who Saw Her Die?/Many Deadly Returns

the British first edition 
of the novel

Patricia Moyes' Who Saw Her Die? (aka Many Deadly Returns in the US) may have followed the Golden Age of detective fiction, but it is very much of the period.  Aside from occasional mentions of mini-skirts and some examples of Seventies slang ("he's shacked up with some little broad somewhere"), the novel almost could have been written during the between-the-wars period.  Even Emmy Tibbett, the wife of Scotland Yard's Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett (newly promoted in this book) who always seems to get involved with her husband's cases to some degree, has precedents in Golden Age detective fiction. There is also a woman doctor, Sarah Massingham, subjected to sexist remarks, but women locums are not completely unknown in Golden Age detective fiction.  

The murder takes place at a house party given by Crystal Codworthy, Lady Balaclava, at her country estate, which she keeps up like a time capsule in decaying Thirties modern style.  (Her late husband, nouveau riche Charlie Codworthy, made a fortune in the toilet business.)

The murder method--Lady Balaclava appears to have been poisoned at her birthday party but no poison is detected in her system--is suitably mysterious.  The suspects--her three daughters, Violet, Primrose and Daffodil and their husbands, and her companion-help Dorothy Underwood-Threep--are sufficiently characterized, all of them distinguishable personalities in their own right.  

All in all Who Saw Her Die? is a model classic style detective novel, recalling certain works by Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and John Street, all of whom were adept fictional poisoners.  (The book resembles Christie in another way as well.)  To me this is a much stronger example of classic crime fiction than the Catherine Aird novel I reviewed in my last blog post. 

It may be as much as 40,000 words longer than the Aird, but to me it reads more smoothly and cogently.  There may be a bit too much travelogue for my taste during the side investigative trips to France, Switzerland and the Netherlands by the Tibbetts, but not nearly as much as you get from Freeman Wills Crofts.  Indeed, it's a most tidily told tale, complete with an afterword by the author explaining how she came upon the murder method.  Highly recommended to lovers of Golden Age mystery.  

American mystery critic Anthony Boucher, a great booster of Moyes since her debut in '59, would have loved this one had he lived to read it, I'm sure.  The only thing left unexplained, for me, is the British title.  I don't really see the urgency of the titular question.  I prefer the more prosaic but obviously pertinent Many Deadly Returns, since it's believed in the novel that Lady Balaclava was poisoned by one of her birthday presents from her in-laws: a marzipan cake, champagne and a bouquet of roses.  How did she die? would seem to be the more pertinent question in this novel.

Sucking in the Seventies 1: Catherine Aird's A Late Phoenix (1970)

A dangerous title, as the rock group the Rolling Stones must have known when they used it for their 1981 compilation album.  A lot of critics at the time suggested that it was in the Seventies that the Rolling Stones' remarkable musical output started to decline.  (The harshest critics argued that it began  to "suck.")  However, I'm definitely using the title, in reference to detective fiction in the vintage mold that was published during the seventies, in the sense of retrospectively assessing it, taking it all in, as it were.  How was classic-style mystery fiction from that decade?  Had it declined from the lustrous pre-war standard of the Golden Age?  We are now a half-century from the year 1970, just as in 1970 they were a half-century from 1920, the dawn of the Golden Age.  Certainly time to take a look.

I'm starting, for no particular reason (not even alphabetical), with Catherine Aird's fifth detective novel, A Late Phoenix.  Aird had debuted four years earlier in 1966 with the well-reviewed The Religious Body and followed it with A Most Contagious Game, Henrietta Who? and The Complete Steel (published under the disappointingly literal title The Stately Home Murder in the United States), all of which were well-received as well.  

American crime fiction reviewer Anthony Boucher, then terminally ill with cancer, lived long enough to review Aird's first two novels in the New York Times Book Review.  The first he praised in January 1967 in spite of some concerns he had about about its technical flaws. These concerns seem pretty damning in my eyes, yet after mentioning them Boucher sweeps them aside on account of the authenticity of the setting and charm of the author's writing:

One could easily object to Catherine Aird's first novel, The Religious Body.  The action sags badly in the middle, the ultimate explanation is quite unconvincing; and inadequate evidence is available to the reader.  But these are, really, fairly minor flaws in a genuinely attractive debut.  Miss Aird writes about a nunnery and its infinitely diverse nuns with far more insight and skill than the various mystery novelists...who have previously attempted it; and she does equally well by the Calleshire Constabulary.  We may hope that both Inspector Sloan and the Convent of St. Anselm may reappear soon--and with just a little more technical finesse.

It shows how far we had moved away from the high plotting standards of the High Golden Age when a detective novel received a good review from Anthony Boucher, dean of American mystery critics, in spite of an "ultimate explanation that is quite unconvincing" and "inadequate evidence" provided to the reader (i.e., a lack of fair play), all on account of some prettily portrayed cops and sisters. But The Religious Body provided the flavor of a vintage detective novel and even that was something in 1966.  

Incidentally, classic mystery fan Patrick Ohl had similar reservations about the novel when he reviewed it six years ago, calling it a book of "tremendous promise" that "falls completely flat."  He's a priest now, so he has interesting perspective here.

Aird's second novel, A Most Contagious Game, wherein we are presented with both a modern murder and one in the distant past, was praised by Boucher as a "charming book" that should appeal to admirers' of Josephine Tey's much praised (and in my view over-praised) historical "true crime "mystery The Daughter of Time (1951).  (In the same review column Boucher noted that PD James' Unnatural Causes showed that she was "steadily improving" and coming "very close to the level of Patricia Moyes.")  He included Game, along with Moyes' Murder Fantastical and Emma Lathen's Murder against the Grain (though not James' Unnatural Causes) in his list of the thirteen best "thrillers" of 1967, the last such list he would live to compile.

Less than five months after the publication of his review of A Most Contagious Game, Anthony Boucher succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 56.  His successor at the NYTBR, Allen Hubin, reviewed Aird's third detective novel in three years, Henrietta Who?, less than three months after Boucher's death.  Hubin found this one "shrewdly plotted" with "entrancingly crisp" narration.  For my part, I think it is the best Aird I have read, even though the title sounds distressingly like the name of a character from Dr. Seuss' children's 1957 book How the Grinch Stole Christmas, first broadcast in the U. S. as an animated Christmas special a couple of years before Henrietta Who? was published.  Was Aird, evidently a mirthful sort of person, having her own little joke?

I enjoyed as well Aird's first two detective novels, which I read, along with Henrietta Who?, back in the 1990s (though I recognized some of the problems with the first one that others did). Aird's fourth book was spoiled for me by an absolute a'hole reviewer on Amazon who reveals the murderer (Be warned: I think the review is still there),  Later Airds I read never really grabbed me because, while they all had classic-style plots, they just struck me as too chatty and desultory, with too many "colorful" characters. Having read A Late Phoenix, I'm afraid that I find it shares the same qualities, making it a slog for me, despite the fact that it is a short book, probably under 60,000 words.

In theory I should have liked it.  The affair in it arises out of a construction crew's unearthing of a human skeleton buried on a vacant lot, left cleared almost three decades previously by a Nazi bomber.  The skeleton appears to go back to around 1941, the time that the house there was leveled.  Was the woman whose skeleton it is the victim of the bombing?  It is assumed so until it is discovered that a bullet is lodged in the skeleton.  Since the bones of a fetus are discovered as well with the skeleton, it may be that some man from long ago wanted to get an inconvenient pregnant woman out of the way.  (Everyone assumes that it must have been a man in the book,)  But what man?  When another death follows, of someone connected to the property in the days of the Second World War, it appears that a murderer is still around and active, willing to kill to prevent his dirty work at the crossroads to be exposed.  

So far so good.  It's an interesting enough problem in theory, but my main problem is with the telling and the tone.  We get a hint of where things are going right off the bat, when we find that each chapter opens with a quotation from Mrs. Beeton's Cookery and Household Management, for no good reason that I can see.  Gladys Mitchell was probably the Queen of Utterly Irrelevant Chapter Quotations in British Detective Novels, but Catherine Aird may have run her a close second in this regard.  Of course no one can beat Michael Innes for egregiously excessive literary quotations throughout the text any given book, but sometimes his do actually relate somehow to the story at hand.

Like Aird several of the characters in the book are given to "amusing" chitter-chatter, particularly Superintendent Leeyes and Dr. Dabbe.  Clever names--if Leeyes is meant to make us think of lees, or dregs, that certainly describes the irrelevancies so frequently uttered by this tiresome character.  Leeyes spends the book in his office looking out of his window at "Dick's Dive" across the street and complaining about the androgynous looking men (looking rather like Mick Jagger probably) coming in and out of the place.  I was thinking maybe this would actually have something to do with the plot, but alas not.

If you like this kind of thing, there's certainly a lot of it to like here.  Personally it makes me miss the austere Humdrums of yore like Freeman Crofts and John Street, who don't go in for it and just get on with the investigation.  Happily, Aird's Inspector Sloan is very much in the classic British copper mode and he's fine.  I can even take Sergeant Crosby, whose dimness and enthusiasm for driving offers yet more comic relief.  But when there's too much comic relief, what is to relieve us from the comic relief? It seems especially jarring in a story about a murdered pregnant woman.  But no one in the novel ever sheds any tears over the victim and her unborn child, so why should we?

The suspects in the case, on the other hand, are a drab lot, whom I could hardly keep apart in my mind.  When the revelation came of which one "done it," I honestly couldn't have cared less.  I was just flipping through the last thirty pages to get to the end.  In A Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor called this book "featureless and humdrum" and they are right (though Allen Hubin liked it).  Outside of a charming chapter where Sloan and his wife Margaret reminisce about being children during World Two (like the author), I really did not enjoy reading A Late Phoenix.

Aird has some stylistic oddities as a writer that really get on my nerves as a reader, like these sort of hanging adverbs:

"Yes." Enigmatically.

And she loves single short sentences for emphasis.

Which I hate.

You know these sentences.

Like this.

And this.

And this.

And this, from the book:

Perhaps Dyson was right to take refuge in flippancy.

Sloan didn't blame him.

There was nothing pretty about Dyson's job.

Photographing the aftermath of human folly.

Maybe Aird should have written a mystery in free verse and gotten it out of her system once and for all.

It might have been interesting.

More interesting than the book she actually wrote.

Sorry for the negativity.

Chin up, though.

I have another review of a Seventies mystery coming up soon.

A positive review.

Gives us hope for the new year.

See you then.

Christmas Drear: The Inn Closes at Christmas/He Dared Not Look Behind (1947), by Cledwyn Hughes

...those that passed my front window knew nothing of what was going on behind the cozy lighted greenness, knew nothing.  Soon the streets would be empty.  It would be late.  But it did not matter.  I had the whole night in which to kill her.  

Why must we assume that there is a God part in every soul?  Does not Satan have his little hold, his little plot, too?

--The Inn Closes at Christmas (1947), by Cledwyn Hughes

This is definitely a Christmas crime novel, but it certainly won't leave you full of Christmas cheer!  It's grim indeed.

Actually I should say Christmas crime novella, because by my count the tale is about 35,000 words long.  In the United Kingdom it was published with another short work of fiction by the author, Welshman John Cledwyn Hughes (1920-1978), but in the United States it appeared as a standalone novel, under the title He Dared Not Look Behind.  (Behind what, you ask?  Behind him of course!  Alternatively the book could have been titled He Dared Not Look Over His Shoulder, but I suppose that's a bit clunky.)  

The American title of the book makes clearer its association with the crime/horror genre, yet the original British title is rather brilliant, for a reason I cannot explain here.  

Cledwyn Hughes, as the author was known, was a promising young writer of but twenty-six years of age when he wrote The Inn Closes at Christmas, a novel which makes prominent use of his background as a qualified hospital pharmacist.  It's about a dentist in Wales whose mind deteriorates after he and his wife are in a car accident, as a result of which his wife has to have one of her legs amputated and replaced with an artificial limb.  The dentist finds said limb ever more repugnant by the day and finally he concludes that he must remove his wife from this earthly life in order to get rid of her artificial leg for good.  (The protagonists in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King no doubt would have approved.) 

To carry out his mad intention the dentist devises an ingenious murder plan, reminiscent of something out of Francis Iles' bump-off-your-wife opuses Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and murderers....

Cledwyn Hughes (1920-1978)

This is a very dark tale indeed, with a particularly impressive final page, which illuminates why the book has the title it does (in the British edition).  I don't really have too much more to say about the book, as I don't want to spoil the story and also because it's such a lean and economically narrated exercise in psychological horror.  It's a book I think should be reprinted, although I recommend it for those who like their Christmas cocoa on the bitter side....

I could see critics saying that the story is either too short or too long, but some of us will find it just right.  In the United States, where as I mentioned it was published as a short standalone novel, Inn was placed in a notice in the New York Times Book Review with William Irish's (aka Cornell Woolrich) Waltz into Darkness and another book under the headline "Three New Shockers."  The reviewer praised Hughes' "limpid Welsh-English prose," concluding that the author's macabre "sonata is twice as effective because of its rigorous underplaying."

For Stagge Hunters: Some Pictures of Hugh and Dawn Westlake

Vintage mystery writers Rickie Webb and Hugh Wheeler are most renowned for their Patrick Quentin detective novels, many of which were about series characters Peter and Iris Duluth, a charming murder-foiling couple, yet as Jonathan Stagge they also published nine entertaining novels and a novella, all of which detailed the sleuthing adventures of rural New England country doctor Dr. Hugh Westlake, whose irrepressible daughter Dawn frequently appears in the tales as well. 

If you ever wondered what Dr. Westlake and his daughter looked like, here is one artists' notion, taken from the serialization, eight decades ago, of the Stagge novel Turn of the Table, under the title The Table Talks.  It comes from the pages of the October 27, 1940 issue of The American Weekly, a Sunday newspaper supplement published by William Randolph Hearst.  "Filled with scantily clad showgirls and tales of murder and suspense," The American Weekly boasted of having over fifty million readers.

In the first illustration an accusatory Dr. Westlake confronts golden-haired siblings Linette and Oliver Thorpe and their stepbrother Greg Banister.  Dawn appears in the third picture.  What do you think of the likenesses?  I threw in the back cover ad as well!

Hunt in the Dark and the Puzzles of Peter and Iris Duluth

Hunt in the Dark and Other Fatal Pursuits, the new volume of short fiction by our ever-busy boys Rickie Webb and Hugh Wheeler, aka Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge, will soon be out with Crippen & Landru (probably next month, I'm guessing) and I'll be saying more about it then.  But let me say for now that it will have six pieces of short fiction, as follows:

The Frightened Landlady (1935 novella with Hugh Westlake)

Killed by Time (1935 short story)

The Hated Woman (1936 novelette)

Hunt in the Dark (1942 novella with Peter and Iris Duluth)

The Woman Who Waited (1945 short story)

This Way Out (1947 novelette)

the memorable pulp illustration for Q. Patrick's haunting novelette This Way Out

Excitingly for fans of series heroes Peter and Iris Duluth and Hugh Westlake, this collection includes two rediscovered novellas with these characters, respectively the title tale "Hunt in the Dark" (Peter and Iris) and "The Frightened Landlady" (Hugh Westlake).  Presumably these will be their final recovered adventures.  Neither novella was ever expanded as a novel, so these are genuine rediscoveries.  

"Hunt in the Dark" is more of a mystery adventure story in the style of the couple's previous novelettes "Death Rides the Ski-Tow" and "Murder with Flowers" (republished in 2016 in Crippen & Landru's The Puzzles of Peter Duluth with the Peter and Iris short stories "Puzzle for Poppy" and "Death and the Rising Star").   while "The Frightened Landlady" is a classic detective story, in its exploration of the darker side of human nature bearing some resemblance to the Q. Patrick novel The Grindle Nightmare."  (Hugh Westlake's daughter Dawn is absent from the grim tale, though she is mentioned by her father several times.) 

"Killed by Time" and "The Woman Who Waited" are clever non-series detective short stories, though the latter could easily have starred the authors' other series sleuth, Lieutenant Timothy Trant.  The former reminds me of a certain gruesome John Dickson Carr story.

"The Hated Woman" and "This Way Out" are notable non-series novelettes, the latter especially as one of the authors' finest essays in the noir vein.  All in all, this book represents the pulpier and often darker side of Rickie and Hugh's mystery fiction legacy, with plenty of flawed men and fatal women.  I selected the stories for this volume and wrote an introduction for it, which I revised after the two strange Fifties short crime stories by Rickie Webb, published in Weird Tales, were cut on length grounds. (As it stands now the book will run to 300 pages.)

Meanwhile I have remained at work on my joint critical biography of Rickie Webb and Hugh Wheeler and I am now on the part where I discuss the Patrick Quentin fiction specifically, so expect to hear more about PQ in the coming days.  I thought for today you might be interested in seeing this chronology of the Peter and Iris' adventures, including not only all their novels but their novella, novelettes and short stories as well.  With "Hunt in the Dark," the total number of tales now comes to fourteen, taking place over two decades:

1. A Puzzle for Fools (1936) (novel)

2. Puzzle for Players (1938) (novel)

3. Death Rides the Ski-Tow (1941) (novelette)

4. Murder with Flowers (1941) (novelette)

5. Hunt in the Dark (1942) (novella)

6. Puzzle for Puppets (1944) (novel; expansion and revision of Murder with Flowers)

7. Puzzle for Wantons (1945) (novel)

8. Puzzle for Poppy (1946) (short story)

9. Puzzle for Fiends (1946) (novel)

10. Puzzle for Pilgrims (1947) (novel)

11. Run to Death (1948) (novel)

12. Black Widow (1952) (novel)

13. My Son, the Murderer (1954) (novel)

14. Death and the Rising Star (1955) (short story)

It was quite a run while it lasted for our glamorous if murder-ridden couple!

Saboteur (1942)--with very best (though belated) happy birthday wishes to Norman Lloyd!

Alfred Hitchcock's suspense film Saboteur suffers in comparison, I think, with the films which immediately preceded and followed it (Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, even the oddball screwball Mr. and Mrs. Smith, on the one side and Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat, Spellbound and Notorious on the other); yet it's an entertaining film in its own right.  Its plot is animated by one of Hitch's most characteristic devices: the flight-and-pursuit "wrong man" plot, in which the hero--and it's always a hero as opposed to a heroine, I think--is wrongfully blamed for some form of wicked malfeasance and has to flee both the law and the lawless until he can find the real villain and establish his innocence.

Man (Bob Cummings) in trouble; Woman (Priscilla Lane) at the wheel

In this case it's sweet-faced Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), a wartime worker in an aircraft factory in Glendale, California.  (My grandmother used to live there and I stayed at her apartment there way back in 1974.)  Poor Barry gets blamed when a hellish fire ravages the plant, killing his best friend in the process, and he has to go on the run.  (But naturally!)  Then through a series of set pieces he evades the goodies and baddies, ending up in New York, where he has a climactic confrontation with the true saboteur, whose identity we have known since the beginning of the film (like most Hitchcock films this is a thriller, not a mystery): a mysterious malevolent individual named Fry, superbly played by Norman Lloyd, who just celebrated his birthday a week ago.  His 106th birthday!  He has been around a long time.  Amazingly, he is only two years younger than Hugh Wheeler of Patrick Quentin fame, whose biography I am writing, who died back in 1987.

Norman Lloyd drops out of the film

The climactic set piece takes place on the small deck around the torch of the Statue of Liberty and is one of the most memorable scene in the Hitchcock oeuvre to my mind.  The film itself, however, strikes me as thrilling only in fits and starts. It consists of a series of set pieces all across America, some more striking than others.  The film is something of a retread of Hitchcock's earlier, and more celebrated, English film The Thirty-Nine Steps, where actors Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll spend a good chunk of the film handcuffed to each other and bickering as Donat drags the attractive but aggrieved Carroll along with him.  In Saboteur Cummings ends up forcing an attractive but aggrieved young woman (Priscilla Lane) to come along with him as well (after he gets out of a pair of handcuffs).  My favorite scene in this section of the film takes place when Cummings and Lane encounter a group of circus "freaks" on a train--and a most engaging and philosophical group of individuals they are!

Otto Kruger makes a reliable silky villain, but I was more interested in Alan Baxter's blond and bespectacled and vaguely pervy baddie Freeman.  There's a scene he shares with Cummings, where apropos of nothing he starts talking about how he wishes his young sons were little girls and how he himself had the most beautiful golden locks as a lad and how everyone admired him.  It's such a weird scene but certainly made me wonder about this character!  Author Dorothy Parker was involved in punching up the script and I am curious just what bits she might have contributed.

Freeman (Alan Baxter) creeping out Barry Kane (Bob Cummings)

People are of mixed opinion about the leads, Cummings and Lane, and while I found Lane pretty bland I thought light comedy star Cummings' "aw shucks" Americanism was well-suited to the role.  It must be this quality that gets so many people, like the majority of the circus freaks and ultimately the "girl" herself, to believe in him, when, really, they have no logical reason to do so!

Still the stand-out presence in the film is villain Norman Lloyd, who after the first ten minutes disappears from the film--but when he finally shows up again, things really take off!  Not only do we have the death battle atop the Statue of Liberty, but there's also a boffo shooting sequence at Radio City Music Hall.  Lloyd doesn't have a lot of dialogue, but he makes an excellent cruelly sneering blond villain, presumably a native German or American Nazi sympathizer, the irony of which must have been appreciated by the then twenty-six year old actor, who was born Norman Perlmutter.  This fine villain is rewarded with an exquisite film demise, which, if you're a vintage film fan, you have probably already seen before, even if you haven't seen the film in its entirety.  

Surprisingly to me Saboteur received no Oscar nominations, in contrast with Hitch's earlier espionage thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), which was nominated for six Oscars, including best picture.  (Hitch actually had two films nominated for best picture that year, this and Rebecca, the latter of which won.)  I would have thought Saboteur would at least have been nominated for best visual effects for the impressively designed arson and Statue of Liberty sequences.  (Ten films were nominated that year, including Mrs. Miniver.)  Ah, well, posterity remembers.  

Norman and Hitch on the set of Sabotage

As for birthday boy Norman Lloyd, this was the start of a fruitful artistic relationship between him and the Master.  Saboteur was his first full feature film.  In genre work he went on to co-star in The Unseen (1945), an adaptation of an Ethel Lina White thriller, and Hitchcock's own Spellbound (1945), as well as the American remake of the classic German serial murderer film M and the noir crime drama He Ran all the Way, both from 1951.  However, his career stalled after his role in Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952), when he became yet another victim of the Hollywood blacklist.  I think Limelight was his last film until the supernatural thriller Audrey Rose with Anthony Hopkins and Marsha Mason, which came out in 1977!  He was also in the Oscar-nominated films Dead Poets Society and The Age of Innocence and had a major role in the acclaimed Eighties hospital drama St. Elsewhere, which is how I originally knew him.  

Back in the Fifties it was Hitchcock who came to Lloyd's aid by hiring him as an associate producer on his popular television suspense anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  (He was later the executive producer of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.)  Lloyd acted in a few of the episodes as well, performing memorably in my mind as the title character in "The Little Man Who Was There" (1960).  It's not exactly a mystery per se, but it should appeal to all lovers of good tale telling. 

A dozen years later Lloyd appeared in "A Feast of Blood," an episode of the Rod Serling horror anthology series Night Gallery that scared the bejesus out of me when I was a kid.  It looks cheesy to the adult me, I must admit, but if not the special effects then Lloyd's performance holds up, as does Sondra Locke's as the beautiful blonde recipient of Lloyd's unusual gift.  His last work as a producer seems to have been on the suspense series Tales of the Unexpected, an Eighties anthology based on the work of Roald Dahl.  All in all, a fine legacy in film and television (not to get into stage)--and to think it all began with a fatal fall from the Statue of Liberty!

The Game Goes On: Death in the Grand Manor (1970), by Anne Morice

By 1970 the Golden Age of detective fiction, which had dawned in splendor  a half-century earlier in 1920, had sunk into shadow like the sun at eventide, yet there were still a few old hands practicing the fine art of finely clued murder, plus there were some new ones in the offing.  A good thing too: murder needs new blood.  For example, Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner, a veritable fiction factory in and of himself, died that very year, in March, at the age of eighty.  His last detective novels were published posthumously, in 1971 and 1972.  Eighty-four-year-old Christopher Bush published his final mystery, The Case of the Prodigal Daughter, in 1969, the same year eighty-three-year-old Rex Stout published Death of a Dude, which would be remain most recently published mystery for four years.

On the other hand, Agatha Christie, who like Gardner was eighty years old, to much fanfare produced what her publishers dubbed an "extravaganza," Passenger to Frankfurt.  While admittedly not (ahem!) the greatest moment in Christie's career, the novel was an international bestseller.  John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen, mere youngsters in their sixties, respectively published The Ghosts' High Noon and The Last Woman in His Life, though neither of those titles was, sad to say, a great example of detective fiction either.  

Mr. Campion's Falcon, the second Albert Campion mystery penned by the late Margery Allingham's spouse, Philip Youngman Carter, was published, albeit posthumously "Pip" having passed away himself in 1969.  Seventy-five year old Ngaio Marsh published a travelogue mystery, When in Rome, not one of her better books in my view.  Gladys Mitchell and Anthony Gilbert, both around seventy, published respectively Gory Dew and Death Wears a Mask, neither of which I've read.  Leo Bruce, nearly seventy himself, published Death on Allhallowe'en, by no means his best mystery but certainly a worthy effort.  

Sixty-four year old Michael Innes, who would hang in the writing game for nearly two more decades, published Death at the Chase, easily outlasting his fellow "Detection Don" Nicholas Blake, whose last novel, The Private Wound, appeared in 1968.  (Blake would pass away in 1972.)  Elizabeth Ferrars, who came along at the tail end of the Golden Age and was now sixty-three, published The Seven Sleepers, which is pretty interesting as I recollect and one of the few by her which takes place in her ancestral homeland of Scotland, always a great setting for mysteries.

However, there were also other, younger authors, many of whom were at the top of their games.  Writers like Patricia Moyes, who had been at it for just over a decade then, who published the excellent Who Saw Her Die?  There was HRF Keating, who also debuted in 1959, with another of his Indian mysteries, Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg.  There were also Anglophile Americans Emma Lathen, who had promisingly debuted in 1961, with Pick up Sticks, and Amanda Cross, who had promisingly debuted in 1964, with Poetic Justice.  Back in England there was Joyce Porter, who had memorably debuted in 1964,  with Dover Strikes Again and Catherine Aird, who had followed Porter two years later in 1966, with A Late Phoenix.  

There was as well Ruth Rendell, who had debuted in 1964, with another of her reliable Inspector Wexford series mysteries, A Guilty Thing Surprised.  And there was newcomer Peter Lovesey, who debuted with his Victorian mystery Wobble to Death, recently reissued in a commemorative edition, and  Reginald Hill, who likewise debuted with  A Clubbable Woman.  (Both Lovesey and Hill were just lads in their thirties in those days!)  Another newcomer of promise was Margaret Yorke, who debuted with Dead in the Morning, the first in her short-lived Patrick Grant detective series.

And then there was another debut performer, Anne Morice (1916-1989), with her self-professed "novel of detection" (it says so right on the front of the dust jacket), Death in the Grand Manor.  Truly 1970 was a good year.

the graphics may be Seventies 
but the milieu is Thirties

Anne Morice's Death in the Grand Manor introduced the author's admirable series sleuth, Tessa Crichton, who would appear in and narrate 23 detective novels between 1970 and 1988.  Tessa is a young actress who has a penchant, as all amateur detectives do, for crossing paths (and swords) with Murder in all its foul and fair guises.  In Manor Tessa is staying with her willful and eccentric playwright cousin, Toby Crichton, at his house in the tiny wealthy community of Roakes Common, located not far from London, in order to look after Toby's precocious eleven-year-old daughter Ellen, while his second wife, Ellen's stepmother Matilda, is mostly away at a stage acting gig.  

Roakes Common is a village right out of the pages of Agatha Christie, as Tessa--who is compared to a youthful Miss Marple in reference to her nosiness when she scents murder--reveals in her narration:

Roakes Common....consists of twenty or thirty houses, two pubs and a combined post office and store, set in a hundred acres of commonland.  The Common is divided down the middle by the road which joins Storhampton, in the Thames Valley, with Dedley, twenty miles to the north.  

There's even a gardener named Parkes and a housecleaner named Mrs. Grumble!

Sadly a most objectionable family, the Cornfords, has recently purchased the derelict old manor house in Roakes Common, upsetting the pleasant status quo.  Douglas Cornford, "the son of an industrial tycoon from the Midlands," comes with an overbearing wife, Bronwen, and two exceedingly obnoxious children.  Bronwen, in particular, manages to offend everyone in the community, including a gay (in both senses of the word) male couple, the Biblically named Peter and Paul, who rather reminded me of the lesbian couple in Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced, published two decades earlier.  

Halfway though the novel occurs the expected murder--and then Tessa is on the hunt!  She's also on the lookout for the handsome blond man she briefly talked up at the pub, when batty Bronwen stormed in and caused a dreadful dust-up.  Could there be romance as well as murder in the air for our Tessa?

When it was published in 1970, Death in the Grand Manor received stellar reviews, though "light" was an adjective almost invariably applied to it.  Apparently reviewers had not yet discovered the term "cozy," of which Manor seems an early example.  Yet despite the cozy setting there's a tartness to Tessa's narration and the brittle dialogue which reminds me of the Golden Age Crime Queens and even, to part from mystery for a minute, Noel Coward.  It may be cozy but it's certainly not cloying.  Morice  definitely avoids soppiness and sentimentality and her Tessa repeatedly reveals a nice turn for phrase. "Sackcloth and ashes would have been overdressing for the mood I had sunk into by then," she observes at one point.

Fittingly the novel was enthusiastically reviewed by Golden Age stalwarts Edmund Crispin and Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley Cox).  Crispin found it a "charming whodunit....full of unforced buoyance" and prescribed it as a "remedy for existentialist gloom."  Iles, who would pass away at the age of 77 less than six months after penning this review, deemed the novel a "most attractive lightweight," adding:

entertainingly written, it provides a modern version of the classical type of detective story.  I was much taken with the cheerful young narrator...and I think most readers will feel the same way.  Warmly recommended.

It was like a benediction from one of the high priests of English murder, back from the time when fictional foul play was an amusement.  

Once the bright young hope of classic English crime, Edmund Crispin, long sunk in bouts of existential gloom, would survive Iles by only seven years, dying in 1978 at the age of 56.  But happily for detective fiction fans, new talents like Anne Morice had entered the ranks and would remain there for some time to come.

I am pleased to report that Anne Morice's Tessa Crichton detective novels will be reprinted by Dean Street Press next year.  For more on the fascinating background of the author, see an earlier post by me here.  Look for an interview with a daughter of Anne Morice at this blog later this year.

Friday Fright Night Five--Last Dance for Ginger? The Dancing Detective (1946), by William Irish (Cornell Woolrich)

Friday Fright Night is upon you!  Happy Hallowe'en!

My Reader's Block

Sweet Freedom

Sweet Freedom (some more)

Clothes in Books

A Reading Life

And here's my post for the occasion:

The Dancing Detective (1946), by William Irish, aka Cornell Woolrich

Contents

The Dancing Detective (published as Dime a Dance, Black Mask, 1938)

Two Fellows in a Furnished Room (published as He Looked Like Murder, Detective Fiction Weekly, 1941)

The Light in the Window (Mystery Book Magazine, 1946)

Silent as the Grave (Mystery Book Magazine, 1945)

The Detective's Dilemma (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1940)

Fur Jacket (published as What the Well-Dressed Corpse Will Wear, Dime Detective, 1944)

Leg Man (Dime Detective, 1943)

The Fingernail (published as The Customer's Always Right, Detective Tales, 1941)

                                                              *************

The Dancing Detective was the third volume of short fiction by William Irish (aka Cornell Woolrich) published, after I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (1943) and After-Dinner Story (1944).  As Irish, Cornell Woolrich had also published the novels Phantom Lady (1942) and Deadline at Dawn (1944), so he was on something of a roll with this pen name, as he was with his own, under which he was then publishing his famous "Black" series of crime novels (e.g., The Bride Wore Black, Black Alibi, etc.).   

still of Joan Crawford from her film
The Taxi Dancer (1927)
about a young southern woman
who moves to the big city

The title story of The Dancing Detective is the only out-and-out "frightener" in the bunch: a modern-day Jack-the-Ripper fable.  It's yet another Woolrich tale about a an attractive young taxi dancer--aka a young woman employed at a dance hall as a paid dance partner.  (The customer paid a dime a dance for the privilege, of which the woman received a small percentage, the rest going to the house.) 

How many stories did Woolrich write about these characters?  But he did it so well.  I'm always reminded when he does of Horace McCoy's bleak 1935 dance marathon novel, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?  Woolrich's young taxi dancers always seem so hard-bitten and hopeless despite their youth, blighted as they are by the urban anomie which Woolrich so powerfully portrays.

Here the dime a dance girl, a redhead named Ginger Allen (not Ginger Grant), stumbles into the deadly path of a serial murderer who, it seems, follows taxi dancers to their apartments, strangles them, and then dances with their dead corpses to the tune of "Poor Butterfly" (a popular song about the doomed title character in Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly; see below).  He repeatedly stabs them all the while.  It's like a murderous version of Tom Petty's perverse 1993 music video, Mary Jane's Last Dance.

Now, why hasn't this been adapted into a modern day horror film?  It's certainly gruesome enough, if too gruesome to have been filmed back around the time it was originally published.  It's a terrific story, full of pungent taxi dancer slang, with some good subsidiary characters (like Mom Henderson, the ladies bathroom attendant who avidly gorges herself on true crime fiction).  It's marred only by its rather too pat ending, in my view.  Also Dime a Dance is the better title!

My favorite story in the collection, however, is the second one, Two Fellows in a Furnished Room.  This one is about Stewart "Red" Carr (Perhaps Red knows Ginger from the last story?), an earnest young fellow given to taking improving night school classes who comes to suspect, to his horror, that Dixon, his apartment mate and good pal, has brutally murdered his, Dixon's, pretty girlfriend, Estelle, who on the night of her death "Red" had briefly met for the first time, coming up the apartment stairs.  There is plenty of suspense here, but also genuine cluing and detection, and the ending is not as pat as in the previous story, having that authentic Woolrich frisson.  Is it a coincidence that when you put the two fellows' surnames together you get "Dixon Carr"?  I think not!

I understand a film version of this story, The Guilty (1947) was made, although not altogether successfully.  

I also liked The Detective's Dilemma, which is essentially a true puzzle problem story with a different, more glamorous milieu than one usually finds in Woolrich.  It's about an exiled European prince who comes to the police to tell them his wife is going to murder him and that he wants them to charge her with murder after she inevitably succeeds.  He's a hemophiliac, you see, and it's so easy in such cases for a malevolent individual to arrange a fatal accident....

When the prince does indeed die, the detective's dilemma is to determine whether his death was really an accident or murder.  This was a "fun" mystery problem story--at least as much as Woolrich can be fun--with the detective making his rationally deduced conclusion on the final page.  

I also have to hand it to the final tale in the collection, The Fingernail, for being one grisly little potboiler.  (At ten pages it's by far the shortest story in the collection.)  I won't say more, except that for its morbid humor it recalls certain classics of British crime fiction.

The other stories didn't do so much for me, sadly, even The Light in the Window, which starts off as a superbly written murder mood piece, but succumbs to the over obvious ironic twist, which you can see coming  a mile away.  Probably some people will like it anyway, though.  To be sure, there is definitely some prime Woolrich in this collection, and prime Woolrich is as good as crime gets.

Friday Fright Night Four: Too Terrifying for Television? Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV (1957)

Here's are this week's frightabulous Friday links!

Clothes in Books

Cross Examining Crime

My Reader's Block

Sweet Freedom

Pretty Sinister

And here's my FEARSOME contribution!

....eerie tales of the supernatural make up a part of the book, but the chief staple is that ever popular crime--murder.   

However, you will look in vain for the story of an underworld killing--homicide as practiced by hoodlums.  I have nothing against gangsters, you understand.  Some very delightful murders have been committed by professional criminals.  By and large, however, the more interesting work in the field is done by amateurs.  Highly gifted amateurs, but still amateurs.  They are people who perform their work with dignity, good taste and originality, leavened with a sense of the grotesques. 

Furthermore, they do not bore you afterward by telling you how they got the way they are.  Here is polite and wholesome mayhem as practiced by civilized people and I think it makes good reading.    

--preface to Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV (1957)

Alfred Hitchcock (or more accurately someone else under his name) edited a half-dozen crime and horror story anthologies in the 1940s, but these "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies really came into their own only in 1957, when the book series was relaunched, due to the popularity of the superb television anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents [AHP], which ran from 1955 to 1965 (the last three years under the title The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) and was famously introduced to the mirthfully macabre strains of Charles Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette. 

The revamped book series would run for over three decades until 1989, outlasting the series and even Hitch himself (by nearly a decade).  They used to be familiar to me on bookstalls back in the 1970s, along with Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, launched in 1956 and still around today.  You could say that Hitch had a brand, and he made the most of it.

The first of these relaunched book anthologies was Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV.  Ostensibly these were stories that were "too shocking, macabre or grotesque" for television in the Fifties.  But some of them did make it on to television, after all--some of them even presented by Hitch himself.

It's a huge anthology of twenty-five stories (one a novella), which, when reprinted by English paperback publisher Pan in 1960 in their "Giant" series, ran to nearly four hundred pages.  About half of the tales are what I would call suspense/horror chestnuts.  How many of these do you know? 

The lead off story, Being a Murderer Myself, (1948) by Arthur Williams, is about a chicken farmer in South Africa who murders a tiresome ex-girlfriend. 

The police follow the woman's tail--I mean her trail--to the narrator's farm, but then are stymied because they simply can't find the woman's body.  What happened to her?  Only the narrator knows....

Two years after the publication of Stories they Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV, an adaptation of Being a Murder Myself aired on AHP, under the title "Arthur." 

It was directed by Hitchcock himself and starred Oscar-nominated Angry Young Man actor Laurence Harvey and film Scream Queen Hazel Court and co-starred Patrick Macnee, I recollect, in a familiar pre-Avengers role as a police inspector.  It's one of the classic Hitchcock television episodes, buoyed by Hitch's creative direction, a wicked script (an improvement on the story) and Laurence Harvey's brilliantly sardonic performance.  If ever there was a man who charmed like the Devil himself, it was Laurence Harvey.

Laurence Harvey as Arthur putting an end
to a domestic problem

The actual author of the story was Peter Barry Way (1917-1969), a South African himself, who likely based his account on a real life murder case from the Twenties in England.  Although, to be sure, "Arthur" came up with a much better way of getting rid of the body....

Next is Lunkundoo (1927) by Edward Lucas White, one of the classic African curse stories.  What a source of imaginative horror was Africa for writers of the colonial era! 

Certainly this one was too grotesque for television as it is written, though it's a bit derivative of a superb, and more subtle, HG Wells story, Pollock and the Porroh Man (1895), which had been previously anthologized by "Hitchcock."

From here, I'm going to highlight the more successful stories in the collection, in my view.  "The Perfectionist" (1946) is oddly one of only two stories by women in the collection, the one here being Margaret St. Clair.  It's about a scapegrace nephew (a familiar character from fiction of this era), who comes to live with and do odd jobs for his well-off Aunt Muriel, a nice older lady who has developed a nice new hobby: still life art.  This is a clever tale, reminiscent of Roald Dahl, though like several in the collection you can deduce ahead of time where it's going.

The Price of a Head (1919) by John Russell is another warning to white men about the dangers of tropical locales, this time the Solomon Islands.  It's a good story but it was spoiled for me because I read a cribbed version of it years ago in the gruesome Tales from the Crypt comic book.

Lake Patzcuaro, Mexico, where Love Comes to Miss Lucy climaxes

Next is Love Comes to Miss Lucy (1947) by Q. Patrick, or more accurately Hugh Wheeler, who will be quite familiar to readers of this blog.  Hugh Wheeler and his partner Richard Webb spent the winter of 1946-47 in Mexico, and this superb short story was one of the fictional fruits of that stay.  In a way it's another peril in sunny climes tale, although it has emotional resonance to go along with its shock value, and in my view it thereby cuts deeper than older tales like Lunkundoo and The Price of a Head.  Also the protagonist is a woman, not a man.

In the story Miss Lucy Bram is touring Mexico with two other proper middle-aged Quaker ladies from Philadelphia (people with whom Wheeler and Webb were quite familiar, having lived in Philadelphia), when she shockingly (to herself) becomes enamored with her young Mexican tour guide, Mario.  This a very cleverly constructed story with an ending which is both jolting and moving.  Probably the best thing Wheeler and Webb ever did in the way of the short crime story.

Lucy was never aired on AHP, but belying the title of the anthology, it aired six years before the book was published as part of the television anthology series Danger, in an adaptation directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Maria Riva, the only child of Marlena Dietrich, who is still around at age 96.  Anyone ever seen Danger?  I'd love to see this episode.

Sredni Vashtar (1912) is one of the classics by the great satirical short story writer Saki (HH Munro), and another one of his tales about a child pitted against the cruel adult world; if you haven't read it, read it!  It is highly cathartic if you had an unhappy childhood.

Love Lies Bleeding (1950) by English crime writer Philip Macdonald is a much-praised and awarded short crime story with an ending that I suppose must have been a shocker in its day, but to me has lost some of its impact.  Still, it's one you often see mentioned.  Once you read it, you'll know why it would have presented problems for Fifties television.

Casting the Runes (1911) by the great English Edwardian supernatural writer MR James is here as well, probably on account of the fact that the story had been filmed as Night of the Demon the same year in which the anthology was published.  I was exposed to MR James' horrors in the 1990s through a volume of his selected stories introduced by the subject of last's week entry, Ruth Rendell, who was a great admirer of MR James (as well as PD of course); and I was impressed indeed with his work. 

Until I read MR James, I had only known American horror writers like HP Lovecraft, who for me was always a tad much.  Rereading Runes two decades or more later it feels rather like a detective story, albeit one with major supernatural underpinnings! There is, however, a splendid horrific bit which has always stuck with me, though it's told only at second-hand, about the villain of the piece terrorizing a group of children with a diabolic slide show.  Ever so malevolent, it was ripped off to good effect in the first of the two-part It films.

I simply adore the film version of the story, Night of the Demon, possibly my favorite horror film of all time.  It was directed by the great Jacques Tourneur (of Cat People fame) with an Oscar-worthy supporting performance by Niall MacGinnis as the antagonist.  (Dana Andrews and Peggy Cummins head the cast.)  And the interesting thing is that, despite its being a huge expansion of the story, Demon is quite faithful to James' concept and even what details there are in the story. 

By the by, as someone with experience in the academic world, I have always loved the idea of a man summoning a demon to avenge himself on the person who blackballed his proposed journal article.  But naturally!

It's certainly one way to deal with rejection!

The Voice in the Night (1907) by William Hope Hodgson and How Love Came to Professor Guildea (1900) by Robert S. Hichens are Edwardian/Victorian chestnuts of horror, the first about the fate which befalls a couple shipwrecked on an uncharted and deserted (?) isle and the second about the horrible thing which befalls a scientist who declares affection an abomination to himself.  The former was adapted as the freaky Japanese film Mantango in 1963.

The Moment of Decision (1955), about the run-in between a know-it-all man and his retired magician neighbor, is by the great American crime writer Stanley Ellin.  Arguably the story is his nod to the classic tale "The Lady or the Tiger," beloved of middle school English classes.

Nunc Dimittis (1953) by Roald Dahl is one of his delightfully nasty little tales about humanity, in which a priggish old bachelor gets his highly vindictive revenge on a woman he believes insulted him--but where does that get him?

Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game (1924) is the one about the great white hunter who hunts humans, the source for the classic 1932 film of the same title.  Classic notion, but the film is better!

Rockstown Castle, Ireland

The Lady on the Grey (1951) is by the English author John Collier, one of the great writers of mid-century weird tales.  At least four of his stories were adapted as AHP episodes--though not The Lady on the Grey, which is brilliant little episode drawing on Irish folklore (and yet older).

The Waxwork (1931) by AM Burrage made it to AHP in 1959.  It's the classic tale of the man who spends the night in the popular Murderers' Den of a wax museum. 

What happens?  Nothing good you can be sure!

Couching at the Door (1942) is a supernatural story by DK Broster, aka Dorothy Kathleen Broster, the only other woman author in this collection.  It tells of the comeuppance of Decadent poet Augustine Marchant.  It's very convincingly fin de siecle, hard to believe it was published in 1942.

Three of the last ones are The October Game (1948) by Ray Bradbury, Water's Edge (1956) by Robert Bloch and The Jokester (1952) by Robert Arthur.  Despite being exceedingly nasty and gruesome in the events it details, to be sure, the Halloween-set Bradbury story somehow didn't scare me, perhaps because I could see it coming from a long way off.  Bradbury always seems so full of humanity and human understanding to me too, he's like the Charlotte Armstrong of horror. 

Ann Sothern (!) and John Cassavettes in
Water's Edge

The story by Robert Arthur, an important person in the Alfred Hitchcock publishing empire, as he wrote some of the Three Investigators books and edited Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, was also too predicable to me.  If I described the plot in a line or two, you could tell me the ending I'm sure. 

However, Bloch's Water's Edge was terrific, though somewhat reminiscent of a similarly terrific Cornell Woolrich story, The Living Lie Down with the Dead (1936).  (See my blog post on Cornell Woolrich short fiction here.)  

I hadn't read Water's Edge before, although it was discussed seven years ago by John Norris at his blog.  (You should read the story before reading John's blog post, on account of spoilers.)  

Water's Edge appeared originally in Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine and it's definitely hard-boiled, a superbly hateful slice of noir about an ex-con who will do anything to get his hands on some hidden stolen money--even seduce and plot the murder of his former cellmate's wife!

Water's Edge made it to AHP in the series' last season in 1964, where it was one of the highlights of the season, along with Ethel Lina White's fantastically eerie An Unlocked Window.  Even then they had to tone down the ending for television.  Just what you'd expect from the author of Psycho.  Read it for yourself and see--and then have yourself some sweet dreams!

Friday Fright Night 3--Death Card: The Lake of Darkness (1980), by Ruth Rendell

Week three of Friday Fright Night.  How fright flies!  You have the heebie-jeebies yet?  We'll see about that.  Here are your creepy links:

Cross Examining Crime

A Reading Life

Sweet Freedom

Pretty Sinister (last week)

Pretty Sinister (this week)

And here is my contribution this week. Read on, ye stout of heart!

Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness.... 

--King Lear (William Shakespeare)          

Scorpio is metaphysics, putrefaction and death, regeneration, passion, lust and violence, insight and profundity; inheritance, loss, occultism, astrology, borrowing and lending others' possessions.  Scorpios are magicians, astrologers, alchemists, surgeons, bondsmen, and undertakers.  The gem for Scorpio is the snakestone, the plant the cactus; eagles and wolves and scorpions are its creatures, its body part is the genitals, its weapon the Obligatory Pain, and its card on the Tarot is Death.

Finn shared his birthday, November 16, with the Emperor Tiberius.  He had been told by a soothsayer, who was a friend of his mother's whom she had met in the mental hospital, that he would live to a great age and die by violence.

Emotions, passion, jealousy, desire, even hatred, were beyond or outside his understanding.  They bored him.  He preferred magic.

--The Lake of Darkness (Ruth Rendell)

                                                                  *************

Under the zodiac I, like Ruth Rendell's Finn and the Roman emperor Tiberius, am a Scorpio, meaning my birthday falls at this time of year.  I could never quite figure out how I was meant to be a Scorpio, because my personality does not seem to accord at all with this passionate and rather fearsome celestial sign.  But that would mean astrology is hooey, and that surely can't be right, can it?  It is written in our stars, is it not?

Astrology and the role of fickle fate in our lives are major elements in Ruth Rendell's non-series crime novels, of which The Lake of Darkness (1980) was the ninth to be published.  It appeared at a time when Rendell was growing restive with her Inspector Wexford series of novels, of which ten had appeared up to this time.  After 1980, up to the year of her death in 2015, Rendell would publish fourteen more Wexfords, but nineteen Wexfordless Rendells and fourteen novels written under another pseudonym, Barbara Vine.  Over time it seems that Wexford became for Rendell more of an obligation than an enthusiasm.  

The Lake of Darkness receives much less attention than another non-series Rendell from around this time, the unpleasant tour de force A Judgment in Stone (1977), but in a crucial way, in my opinion, The Lake of Darkness was more pivotal to her development.  While Judgment is more of a social problem novel dealing, quite murderously to be sure, with the problem of illiteracy, Lake plunges us into more familiar topics in crime fiction: deep-dyed deception and madness.  What seems original about Lake to me is how Rendell brings this seemingly unconnected group of characters together with quite deadly results, like a criminous version of Thornton Wilder's 1927 bestselling mainstream novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  

This was a pattern which Rendell would use over and over in her non-series Rendell crime fiction, right up to her final, posthumous novel, Dark Corners (2015). but rarely did she do it better than in the compulsively readable and lean and tightly plotted Lake of Darkness, a novel of around 75,000 words (about half the length of some of her later ones).  Sometimes less is more!

The main characters in Lake, which like so many of Rendell's books is set in London, are psychopathic hit man Finn (see quotation above); twenty-eight-year-old Martin Urban, an accountant of the social genus people soon would be calling "yuppie"; Tim Sage, an stunningly attractive old college chum of Martin's (Rendell unaccountably loved that name, Martin), who works as a freelance journalist; and a lovely young woman half-prosaically named Francesca Brown.

The already well-off Martin has won 105,100 pounds in a football lottery (over a half million pounds today) and being, in contrast with the yuppie stereotype, an altogether modest and conscientious-to-a-fault fellow, he decides to give much of the money away to deserving, needful people.  This, of course, is where he gets himself into deep trouble.  

Martin is one of Rendell's early examples of the dangerously ingenuous protagonist, someone who wants to help others but is impeded by his own naivete and ingrained conservatism.  He is also, I think, the first really notable gay male in Rendell's non-series crime fiction--although Martin being the dunderhead that he is, he takes an unaccountably long time in the novel, at age twenty-eight, to realize that he might be gay.  It may be be harder for people today to buy this, but personally I, who was half Martin's age when this novel was published, can believe there were people like this in 1980.  Indeed, I think we still have them today, four decades later.  

Unlike much of Rendell's later crime fiction, Lake keeps plot firmly at the forefront and can be safely recommended, I think, to people who prefer plot-driven mysteries.  In terms of structure, the story looks back to the prestidigitation of, say, the landmark 1955 French suspense film Diabolique (based on the 1952 novel She Who Was No More), rather than forward to the meandering, portentous formlessness of much modern-day character-driven crime fiction.  The characterization in the novel is sufficient to carry the story along, in my view, although you may have trouble sympathizing with Martin because of his, well, utter cluelessness about life.  He seems a born victim.  But then look at the maddeningly dense protagonist in Francis Iles' landmark suspense novel Before the Fact (1931).

The message of Lake seems to be that acts of kindness can ironically redound on one with devastating results.  I often wonder about Rendell's politics.  She used to tell people over and over again that she was a hardcore leftist and she aligned with the Labour party in Parliament, but I always get the sense with Rendell that there was a conservative within her struggling to get out and hector people.  Later in life she repetitively denounced what she termed "political correctness" in her fiction and she he often seems to have viewed members of the white working class with outright disdain.  Black and Muslim women she adored (I'm not so sure about the men), but that seems more a matter of race and gender than class per se.  

Certainly in Lake Martin and his parents, for all their knowledge about moneymaking, seem, on account of their lucre, insulated from and oblivious to unpleasant realities.  However, one of the most irksome characters in the book is Martin's cleaner, Mr. Cochrane, who presumptuously calls Martin by his first name but flies into a fury when asked for his own, and is, in the author's words, "a ferocious racist."  Rendell's writing is at her most dryly ironic as she details how poor Martin got stuck with Mr. Cochrane:

That his cleaner was a mister and not a missus was due to the Sex Discrimination Act.  When Martin put his advertisement in the North London Post he had been obliged by law not to state that he required female help, and when Mr. Cochrane turned up similarly obliged not to reject him.  He was lucky enough to get anyone at all, as his mother pointed out.  

[Upon Mr. Conchrane's arrival Martin] wished that he was about to admit a large motherly charwoman, an old-fashioned, biddable creature, who, if she didn't exactly call him sir, might nevertheless treat him with respect and show some consideration for his wishes.  He had read about such people in books.

Another way in which this novel looks back to the past is in its seeming nostalgia for an earlier era, when good help--or any help at all--was not so hard to find.  Even, as lovers of a certain classic Agatha Christie Miss Marple detective novel from three decades earlier will appreciate, a ditzy, caricatured au pair refugee from Middle Europe named Mitzi.

Friday Fright Night 2--Gorey Night: Edward Gorey's Lost Dust Jacket Design for Margaret Erskine's Dead by Now (1954)

Well, dear readers, I see you have survived to week two of our Friday Night Frights!  (Or perhaps at this rate we should call them Saturday Shudders?)  Here are this week's spooky links.  Click them for ghastly literary insights, if you dare! 

Cross Examining Crime
Clothes in Books
Sweet Freedom
My Reader's Block
A Reading Life
Pretty Sinister (this is John Norris' piece from last week)

                                                                xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Although he has been dead for two decades now, author and book illustrator Edward Gorey (1925-2000) lives on!

rejected jacket design for Margaret Erskine's
mystery Dead by Now by Edward Gorey

Dubbed high camp macabre, Gorey's work is well-known within the Gothic fiction genre and surely was a major influence on such younger artistic figures as author Lemony Snicket and filmmaker Tim Burton.  Indeed, before his death at century's end Gorey had become a minor celebrity with a devoted cult following. 

Less well-known, however, are Gorey's illustrations for mystery fiction.  In the next few days I am going to look at additional examples of Gorey's works within the mystery genre, but for now I want to focus on his design for the cover of Margaret Erskine's detective novel Dead by Now (1954)--some of his best cover work in my opinion, though ironically it was never published.  It sold in a 2016 auction for over $9000.

Despite his affiliation with horror (or camp horror), Edward Gorey grew up reading not masters of shudders  like HP Lovecraft but mystery mavens like Agatha Christie.  On a 1943 scholarship application he admitted that mysteries were "my favorite form of reading" and listed specific titles he had perused by John Buchan, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, GK Chesterton and the indubitable Agatha.  Four decades later he avowed that "Agatha Christie is still my favorite author in all the world."  A few years before his death he estimated that he had read each of her books "about five times."  (See Mark Dery's excellent 2018 Gorey biography, Born to be Posthumous.)  

This revelation didn't surprise me so much, because I came to know Gorey on American television through PBS' Mystery! series, which debuted in the United States in 1980.  I used to watch this series, which was then hosted by Vincent Price (later the late Diana Rigg), with my parents in the early eighties, with the big television set on the corner of the brick fireplace and our drowsy Spitz dog Sheba curled up in a ball underneath it.  Gorey did the series' drolly spooky title sequences, which included a distressed, moaning woman in white on top of a high brick wall (see above).  Sheba, no lover of mysteries, would always prick up her ears at that part!

Doubleday's bland cover

In 1953 Gorey, then twenty-eight, moved to New York, where he had secured a job with the art department of publisher Doubleday, Doran.  That same year he submitted a design for the jacket to Margaret Erskine's detective novel Dead by Now, which was published by Doubleday, Doran's Crime Club reprint. 

It's a superb piece of work (see top pic, above left), immediately recognizable as Gorey with its black and white images of Victorian/Edwardian macabre.  Gorey in fact was ideally suited for Erskine, whose novels typically involve wealthy English families living in creepy old piles of decayed mansions.  Although Erskine published mysteries until 1977, her books often have an anachronistic feel to me, like they would be easily at home in pre-WW2 days. 

Additionally there often is, as is emphatically the case with Dead by Now, more than a touch of pitch, usually in the form of frightening spectral hauntings, or rumors of such.  Erskine herself grew up in a great haunted mansion in Devon.

Dead by Now concerns mysterious events around a private family theater, the Luxuria, constructed in neoclassical style back in the Victorian era for a retired stage actress, Rosette, by her doting husband, "a very rich gentleman by the name of Julius Cadell,"  in order to showcase Rosette's thespian talent.  Tragically, however, she expired from a fall down a theater staircase (or was she pushed?!), after which the desolated Julius hanged himself. 

Edward Gorey and friend: an illustration of the illustrator

Now, in the present day after the Second World War, the Luxuria Theatre seems to be haunted by Julius' ghostly presence, bowler-hatted with a bent neck.  Gorey's jacket beautifully captures this aspect of the story, but evidently it was too much for his employer, who opted instead for a flatter, much more utilitarian design by a Sam Fischer.  You can still see the ghost, but barely, and, honestly, from the picture you wouldn't even know that it's supposed to be a ghost (see pic above right). 

Pretty tepid, really.  Perhaps Doubleday was afraid that people might think the novel was a horror story rather than a mystery.  Apparently Gorey's jacket design was too atmospheric for its own good.

jacket design for English edition
of Dead by Now

No such doubt assailed Erskine's English publisher, Hammond, who published Dead by Now with a memorably macabre cover (see pic to left).  However, I believe that Gorey's fine handiwork survives in the content and design of the lettering of Doubleday's description of the book's plot (see pic below).  What do you think?

As for the novel, it's good Erskine.  The spectral stuff is nice if you like that kind of thing in a mystery (I do), but what I actually enjoyed most of all was the banter between Erskine's series detective, Inspector Septimus Finch, and the policemen of Grovely Wood Division, where Finch is temporarily in charge.  Finch is considered distinctly odd by the locals (the story gets round that he's a drunk who has fallen madly in love with the dead actress), and this is entertainingly portrayed by the author. 

In fact, I can't understand why Finch has been dismissed as a colorless sleuth.  To me he seems clearly to come from the Roderick Alleyn gentleman tec school, quoting poetry and everything, though he's not treated with unstinting adoration by the author.  He's just the sort of sleuth you'd expect to find on a case concerning a crook-necked ghost in a haunted theater.

the hand of Edward Gorey?