The Stranger: Grey Mask (1928), by Patricia Wentworth

Some are satin, some are steel

Some are silk and some are leather

They're the faces of the stranger

And we love to try them on.

The Stranger (1977), Billy Joel

The man didn't seem to have any hair or any jaw; he was just a shirt front and a cloak and a greyish blur that had no form or feature.  It was rather beastly.  

Grey Mask (1928), by Patricia Wentworth

Although in the Forties and Fifties she became renowned in the mystery writing world for her "cozy" Miss Silver detective novels, featuring perpetually knitting spinster and professional sleuth Miss Maud Silver, for much of her crime writing career, which extends back over a century to 1923, English author Patricia Wentworth was best known as a woman competing in the man's field of mystery thrillers, or shockers as they sometimes were called.  

Most of the big names in the thriller were men--Edgar Wallace, "Sapper," John Buchan, Sax Rohmer, Sidney Horler, Nigel Morland, Francis Beeding and many others--though there were some exceptions, most notably Ethel Lina White, Patricia Wentworth, Margery Allingham (who started off writing colorful, oddball thrillers under her own name in the late Twenties and early Thirties and also produced a trio of them in the Thirties under the pen name Maxwell March) and the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie.

Ethel Lina White was sui generis, anticipating modern suspense with her tales of insidious psychological unease, several of which were adapted as suspense films and television episodes (most famously The Wheel Spins as Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes).  If White resembled anyone it was more "serious" author Daphne du Maurier, a writer who broke into bestselling mainstream fiction, though some her most famous fiction included strong elements of crime, mystery, horror.  

Agatha Christie adhered much more to traditional formula with her thrillers, though she memorably introduced a pair of bright young investigators, Tommy and Tuppence, sounding a feminist note with the insatiably inquisitive Tuppence being the one who usually seizes the investigative initiative in their tales.  However, with the 1930s Christie mostly stopped writing thrillers in favor of her classic detective novels, which then mostly featured that inimitable not-Frenchman Hercule Poirot.  Similarly Margery Allingham shifted mostly into detective novels in the Thirties, when she helped craft what has been termed the detective novel of manners, a fusion of the mystery and straight novel--though she returned some to thrillers later in life.  

Patricia Wentworth, on the other hand, consistently wrote mostly thrillers for two decades, until she too shifted mostly into her Miss Silver detective fiction in 1943 (and entirely after 1945).  Even before that she had started writing some mysteries featuring series police characters, Ernest Lamb and Frank Abbott (who would also appear in the Miss Silver series), beginning with The Blind Side in 1939.  One of the author's brothers-in-law from her second marriage was Commissioner of the City of London Police, so, belying her modern-day "cozy" reputation, Wentworth was not entirely unconversant with police procedure.  

For most of the 1920s and 1930s, however, Wentworth wrote classic thrillers, sometimes with espionage elements (there are some secret service type tales), but more often outre stories of gangs and diabolical criminal masterminds in the classic style of Edgar Wallace and company.  Where Wentworth differs from the fellas is placing heavy emphasis in her tales (she did this in the Miss Silver detective novels too) on romantic interplay between her male and female characters, or what was sometimes in that day derisively termed "love interest."  

Indeed, one might see the Wentworth tales, to borrow and modify a phrase from another woman vintage mystery writer, as love stories with mysterious interruptions.  These tales arguably owe as great a debt (if not greater) to Charles Dickens and the great Victorian sensation novelists like Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Braddon as they do to Edgar Wallace and his ilk.  

Some orthodox detective writers, like S. S. Van Dine, sternly pronounced that this "love interest" had no place in the ratiocinative detective novel and they created sexless, or let us say celibate, detectives.  If there was love interest at all it was confined, often rather perfunctorily, to subsidiary characters.  

Love is a postulate, observed T. S. Eliot of Freeman Wills Crofts' dry timetable mysteries in the 1920s.  Much to the contrary, in her non-series thrillers Wentworth's love-smitten characters are the lead characters.  Even in the series books the non-series characters' love relationships play a big role.  The author attempts to give us, in short, an emotional interest in the proceedings (who will fall end up with whom) in addition to a cerebral one (whodunit).  

Wentworth's feminized thrillers ironically made a bigger hit, as far as I have been able to determine, in the United States, known between the world wars as the land of corrupt machine politics, murderously out-of-control gangsters and virtually unlimited police brutality (the "third degree").  Here in the U. S. violent, male-oriented pulp fiction had been popularized. But there was, after all, a huge, largely female reading audience that was not being serviced by pulp crime writers.  This was the audience that made such female American mystery writers as Mary Roberts Rinehart. Mignon Eberhart and Leslie Ford tremendously popular.  This sort of audience--and it was not all women--also loved Wentworth thrillers.  

This 1993 American pb ed
does better with the mask
then some, but doesn't get it 
exactly right either

A contemporary American reviewer, California poet Bert Cooksley, wrote about the gendered audience for mystery fiction in the Twenties, as he perceived it, praising Wentworth for drawing women readers to the genre through her commitment to love interest and her downplaying of violence.  

His observations appeared in 1929 in a review of the author's thriller Grey Mask, about a month after the publication of Dashiell Hammett's epochal, blood-soaked debut crime novel, Red Harvest, a book which was violent, cynical and loveless even by today's standards.  

She has written a dandy mystery book for that great army of feminine readers who like mystery but find the present-day blood-and-thunder gangster fiction pretty much beyond their ken," Cooksley avowed of Wentworth.  

"It's not that [the woman mystery reader] is afraid of a little blood, a bit of fighting, a parcel of sinister intrigue.  But it's the fact that so many thrillers leave out the feminine element.  They are concerned mainly with sapattering up the hero, killing the villain, and incidentally polishing off the book with two or three pages of what they believe passes for a romantic conclusion.  Miss Wentworth has gone about it in a different way.

Cooksley declared that in Grey Mask "romantic appeal is sustained from beginning to end."  So just how does Wentworth go about it?  Well, let's talk about the book.  

Grey Mask opens with handsome Charles Moray returning to his ancestral London home after four years of world exploring.  Four years ago he was jilted on his wedding day--is there any other way to jilt a man?--by his fiancée, Margaret Langton; and, being stinking rich, he did what any other man worth his salt and social class would do: he became a world explorer.  I miss those days when if you were rich and idle enough you could become a world explorer, snap, just like that.  Nowadays all the idle rich do, at least in the United States, is make vanity runs for president and weirdly cart dead bear cubs around in SUVs.  

After his father dies Charles returns to England and unexpectedly turns up, as mentioned above, at his ancestral (four generations) London mansion.  There he overhears a meeting of a gang of crooks headed by one of those theatrical criminal masterminds prevalent in fiction of that day--you know, the type that always has to dress up in a disguise and give himself some fancy appellation.  This one calls himself Grey Mask, because, well, he wears a grey-colored mask made of rubber over his head.  No, it's not a kinky sex club!

We can laugh but we should recall that in the United States the Ku Klux Klan had reconstituted itself in the Twenties.  They were led by a Grand Wizard and they dressed up in white robes and hoods, so the get-up of Grey Mask was not actually as outlandish as it seems today.  In fact some of the portrayals of Grey Mask from the day make "him" look like a Klansman.  

Charles is all set to turn these felonious fiends--who it's clear are planning to defraud an heiress of her estate, and perhaps even bump her off--over to the police, when he realizes that among their number is none other than his ex-fiancée, Margaret! What's a gentleman to do?  

Clearly it wouldn't be the thing at all to snitch on Margaret, even though she did jilt him in the most hurtful way imaginable, without providing him with any explanation.  (A woman's prerogative!)  

So Charles decides to play a lone hand.  His Wodehousian man-about-town pal, the native Scot Archie Millar, advises him to seek the services of a private detective named Miss Maud Silver:

"Get a trained sleuth....I can put you on to one if you like."

"A good man?"

"A sleuthess," said Archie impressively.  "A perfect wonder--has old Sherlock boiled."

Charles frowned.

"A woman?"

"Well, a sleuthess."  She's not exactly a bit of fluff, you know."

"What's her name?"

"Maud Silver."

"Mrs. or Miss?"

"My dear old bean!"

"Well-which is she?"

"Single as a Michaelmas daisy," said Archie.

"But who is she?  And why drag in a sleuthess when there are lots of perfectly good sleuths?"

"Well," said Archie.  "I put my money on Maud.  I only saw her once and she didn't make my heart beat any faster."

So goes our introduction to the first, along with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, of the elderly spinster sleuths whom we still read about today, as far as I'm aware.  Grey Mask was serialized over the summer of 1928 before appearing in novel form and Miss Marple first appeared in a short story published in England in December 1927, but we don't know for certain when Grey Mask was actually written, whether in late '27 or early '28.  

Probably the close appearance of these spinster lady sleuths was serendipitous.  For that matter, Dorothy L. Sayers introduced her delightful minor "sleuthess" spinster character Miss Climpson in her Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel Unnatural Death in 1927.  

Critics have debated the significance of these spinster sleuths, with some complaining of their desexualization, though this was the fashion for many detectives, male or female, at the time.  (Sherlock Holmes "Woman" Irene Adler was a Platonic ideal.)  But it is notable that Miss Silver is a professional manhunter from the get-go, unlike Miss Marple and Miss Climpson, and her competence in this capacity, despite Charles' initial expressed skepticism, is never mocked or even questioned.  

When she is introduced she is described in this unprepossessing fashion: "She was a little person with no features, no complexion, and a great deal of tidy, mouse-coloured hair, done in a large bun at the back of head."  She quotes Tennyson and knits continuously, "holding the needles in the German way."

Once Miss Silver is on the case, she works effectively behind the scenes, but we don't see that much of her on this occasion.  Indeed, she's in the novel so little that she only meaningfully coughs in that way she has thirteen times.  Most reviews did not even mention her, though one declared of the book's "little woman detective": "That is a novelty!"

Personally I find The Sheik more frightening than Grey Mask.

Most of the novel is given over to the doings of Charles and Archie and Margaret and the imperiled heiress, who turns out to be a lovely and lovable nitwit, eighteen-year-old schoolgirl, Margot Standing.  Some reviewers adored Margot, while others hated her.  I think that she, along with Miss Silver, is the most unique feature of the book.  Wentworth is fun here portraying the mindset of the more sheltered and shallow sort of teenage girl.  

The brightest (i.e., funniest) sections of Grey Mask are Margot's letters to a former schoolgirl friend back in Switzerland, in which she naively details events in her imperiled life.  For the most part she is oblivious of the dangers around her, being interested mostly in clothes and the question of whether Charles or Archie would make a better boyfriend.  Charles glares a lot, she reflects, but he would look frightfully fetching in sheik drag. (She's a big film fan.)

Wentworth actually evinces quite an abundance of humor here.  In one of the novel's striking coincidences, Margaret runs into one of her late mother's childhood friends, whom she hasn't seen in nearly two decades, just when this woman can impart some important information pertinent to the heiress case.  Said old friend is named "Lesbia Ravenna."  There's a name you don't encounter every day!

Now the name Lesbia is derived, we're told, from an adulterous heterosexual woman in ancient Rome, but the name does remind one of the word "lesbian" and the isle of Lesbos, whence came ostensibly queer poetess Sappho, along the adjective Sapphic.  It's rather a "loaded" name as it were.

In the book Lesbia wants to have a nice, intimate lunch with Margaret, but since Margaret after her breakup with Charles had to become a working girl--being genteel she models hats in a millinery, don't you know--Lesbia has to square things with the manageress.  No problem though!  Lesbia comes right back, telling Margaret:

"I've made love to her [the manageress] very successfully.  I told her it was a very romantic meeting [between Lesbia and Margaret] and she says you may take an extra half-hour.  So we can have a real, good talk.  We'll come along to my hotel."

How can this sudden outburst of, erm, lesbian innuendo be a coincidence?  Or maybe I just have a smutty mind?  

Grey Mask reminded me a lot of Agatha Christie's criminal gang novel from the next year, The Seven Dials Mystery.  The scene where Lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent spies on a meeting of the Seven Dials gang, headed by the mysterious, elusive mastermind No. 7, is very similar to the meeting where Charles covertly observes Grey Mask and his wicked gang.  Possibly there was an influence, but there were a lot of thrillers about criminal gangs in those days, to be sure.

Both novels have bright humor, though Christie's book is more cleverly plotted.  As far as the mystery plot goes Grey Mask is pretty standard issue.  Reviews of the novel, which were mostly highly laudatory, kept pronouncing that that the revelation of Grey Mask's identity was a real shockerooni, but, honestly, I suspected this person nearly immediately.  I guess we really have become more sophisticated today, at least in this regard.  

Still, the book makes for an enjoyable light read, if ultimately it its significance lies mostly in introducing Miss Silver to the world.  The sleuthess would not make a second appearance for another nine years, in a much less outre book.