Debates about when the Golden Age of detective fiction ended will go on, but obviously the decade of the 1940s accelerated the flux of traditional detection. Espionage novels predictably became the vogue with the explosion of the Second World War, while hard-boiled mystery continued to increase in popularity, much to the chagrin of George Orwell. The wartime paper shortage constituted a death knell for the leisurely ratiocinative prewar detective novel, for the most part, as novels of 60-80,000 words (or even fewer) became the norm. The page numbers of most books in the Collins Crime Club shrank by 20% and the lost wordage went unrecovered with peace. Readers became used to a more rapid pace in crime fiction, with less thinking and more acting.
Admittedly, bestseller Mary Roberts Rinehart, with her leisurely, mammoth mystery novels, soldiered wordily on, but more and more the American grand old mistress of mystery seemed an honored anachronism in an impending age of atom bombs, TV dinners, instant cake mix and space rockets. Rinehart, a young matron when Queen Victoria passed away, had published her first mystery novel the year Henry Ford introduced the Model T and it had been filmed when movies remained silent.
The term "psychological suspense"--generally called domestic suspense today, due to the missionary work of Sarah Weinman--had not quite come into vogue in mystery, but its practitioners were gathering in the dawn, murder weapons glinting in their hands. Two of the biggest coming names in the U.S. were Margaret Millar of Canada and California (even Julian Symons, often chary of women writers imo, acknowledged her) and Charlotte Armstrong of Michigan and California. Another fatal femme, vastly less heralded today (surely to some extent on account of the fact that her books unaccountably remain out-of-print), was Doris Miles Disney, a deep-dyed New England Yankee.
Each women, each of whom was young enough to be a Rinehart daughter (or granddaughter in Millar's case), followed a similar pattern of publishing relatively traditional detective novels in the early Forties, followed by a shift to psychological suspense by the mid-Forties. Let's take a quick look at chronology:
MARGARET MILLAR (1915-1994)
The Invisible Worm 1941
The Weak-Eyed Bat 1942
The Devil Loves Me 1942
Wall of Eyes 1943
The Iron Gates 1945
CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG (1905-1969)
Lay On, Mac Duff! 1942
The Case of the Weird Sisters 1943
The Innocent Flower 1945
The Unsuspected 1946
DORIS MILES DISNEY (1907-1976)
A Compound for Death 1943
Murder on a Tangent 1945
Dark Road 1946
Who Rides a Tiger 1946
I think The Iron Gates and The Unsuspected are pretty well-acknowledged classics of crime fiction, but so too should be Disney's Who Rides a Tiger, beyond cavil I think, and Dark Road as well. For Doris Miles Disney 1946 was, one might say, annus murderbilis. At the beginning of the year came Dark Road, at the end of it Who Rides a Tiger. In my view Disney's accomplishment is the sort of artistic feat that recalls what Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine regularly used to be able to pull off in the 1980s and 1990s. Someone gets this woman back in print! If, having read all the books she had then written, I had been asked back in 1946 who was the greatest talent of these three (Millar, Armstrong and Disney), I would have said it was Doris Miles Disney (though later on the balance shifted I would say).
Now that I have gone and unwisely raised expectations, let me expound.
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DARK ROAD is a classic inverted crime novel in the manner of Freeman Wills Crofts, yet with much more credibility in the depiction of human emotions. To my mind the inverted crime novel needs a strong emotional core as well as a ratiocinative one, in order to foster the building up of suspense. The inverted mystery is a cat-and-mouse game between investigator and investigated and if we don't care at all about the characters a lot of the potential dramatic impact is lost.
Crofts, a modern Puritan at heart, could only really portray one emotion--one sinful emotion--successfully: avarice. Lust for gold he could envision, not lust for sex.
And his moralism made his inverteds predictable: Crime does not, must not, pay! Of course all too often it does pay, and pay very well, as Crofts doubtlessly knew, and the wicked flourish like the green bay tree. But for Crofts depicting life as it really often unpleasantly was would have been altogether too demoralizing and bad for impressionable youth.
With Doris Miles Disney (DMD), you never know what might happen, however. She's not afraid to go there.
In Dark Road Disney introduces, as reviewers at the time noted, quite a flawed set of characters, beginning with her Madame Bovaryish, suburban housewife Hazel Clement, a blonde beauty of regrettably low social origins who in the Thirties snagged a modestly well-off businessman husband, much older than she and physically unappealing to her (he's pink, hairless and flabby), with a decided tendency to tip the bottle, yet a good provider nonetheless.
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Hazel has been getting along with steady if boozy Ralph, taking pride in their house and their lakeside cottage and fending off his occasional need for nookie, until she meets her old flame Eugene. The latter man slept with her but never married her on account of her coming from the wrong side of the tracks, but now some fifteen years later he is bored with his proper, right-side-of-the-tracks wife and ready to start something up with Hazel again.
Hazel falls, and she passionately decides that if she can just get rid of Ralph, Eugene will divorce his wife and they can start over again, as they were meant to do. Now it's just a matter of how to get rid of Ralph....
Once Hazel decides on an extermination plan she carries it out with ruthless efficiency, baffling the local police but not, it increasingly seems, insurance investigator Jeff DiMarco, who is investigating the insurance claim on the late Ralph from his ex-business partner. There's also Ralph's vengeful sister in the mix, who hates Hazel like poison. As DiMarco closes in, what will the resourceful Hazel do next?
I found Dark Road a tremendously suspenseful crime novel, with some shades of James M. Cain's classic 1943 crime novel Double Indemnity. DiMarco, for example, is rather attracted to the alluring Hazel. The reader, further, is given some grounds to sympathize with her, although the nasty way she chooses to deal with Ralph should be alienating. However, I found Ralph's sister genuinely awful, as I think we are meant to. In a more conventionally pious crime novel, the avenging female would be more angel than harpy. This moral ambiguity is just one of the ways Dark Road is ahead of its time, another being its credible depiction of sexual desire. It's a real, living, heavy breathing thing in Disney, not a theoretical construct as it is in Crofts (which is fine for a classic puzzle but not so much for an inverted mystery).
Dark Road is a strong novel all through but what really turns it up to the top notch is its denouement, about which I shall say nothing, dear readers! See for yourselves--at least if the novel gets reprinted! It was previously reprinted a few times in paperback, but the copies have been vanishing off the market. DMD is a highly collectible author.
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Even better than Dark Road is Who Rides a Tiger, which deliciously anticipates the brilliant nineties mysteries of Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) in the way it weaves back and forth between the present day (World War Two when DMD was writing it) and the past (mostly the last two decades of the nineteenth century). I was amused to see one contemporary review complain that the time hopping, as it were, made the novel too confusing! Verily, some readers just weren't ready for this sort of thing back then. Not Anthony Boucher, however, who called it a "warm, full-bodied, well-written reconstruction of the past." A great DMD fan from her second crime novel, he called Dark Road "a well-written and well-plotted novel of murder, ironic and moving."
Tiger opens with the thoughts of a dying bedridden woman, octogenarian Harriet Lowden, a wealthy, curdled old lady who hates her own relations (like poison!) and has resolved to leave all her money away from them. Her great-niece Susan Lowden, who happened to spend Harriet's final day with her, resolves to find out more about Harriet and her life after she discovers the old woman's diaries. She is fascinated with the enigma of how Harriet turned out like she did--and she'd like to find some way of proving that the old woman was of unsound mind too. She and her father could use some of Aunt Harriet's money!
So off the diaries take us on the story of Harriet's life--and a gripping tale it is too, full of passion, both bound and boundless. Those of you who read Barbara Vine might immediately think of Asta's Book, published almost a half-century after Tiger in the way DMD's tale sets a modern-day framing story around a narrative from the past, made available by a diary record. Both these books are exemplary crime novels, but DMD's central enigmatic figure, Harriet, may be the most memorable character in either tome. I won't soon forget poor Harriet. Neither did Disney, who declared later in life that Tiger was her favorite among her many books. For once a prolific mystery writer made a good estimate of her own work.
Going against some of what I said above, Tiger is a long book for the period by my count, some 100,000 words, though I think it's still quite a bit shorter than Asta's Book. But it benefits from that depth and spaciousness. Dark Road is about 80,000 words and somewhat longer than the average for the period too. Disney went on to write over forty more books in thirty years and as reliable a producer as she was, these two early novels, especially Tiger, suggest to me that her work might have been even stronger had she perhaps cut back a bit on the book production. Yet she was the primary--and all too soon only--breadwinner in her family with a young daughter to raise, which I suspect was a spur to production. It would be lovely to sit back and write leisurely as out wimsey takes us, but in the real world all too often privation is the primary spur--and it doesn't relent!
NOTE: There are copies of Tiger available on the used market, but at all costs I implore you to avoid even glimpsing the Eighties/Nineties Zebra edition of the book. Zebra had a set design for the Disney reissues which was remarkable stupid, is all I can say. It's especially bad with Tiger, but also for another title by her, The Magic Grandfather, as blogger John Norris has noted. The Reade is Warned! I'm trying to get DMD reprinted now.
Where can I get the full novel?
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