Just a Dell Will Do it: A Note and Query on the Dell Mapback Series, 1943 to 1951

Collectors of vintage paperback mystery fiction will know all about Dell mapbacks, those cute little paperbacks with the crime scene maps on the back covers.  According to Wikipedia there were at least 550 titles in the series between 1943 and 1951, mostly mysteries.  But did you know that #1 through #4 did not have maps on the back?  So they were not really in any way mapbacks.  I have the first two, the first of which is Death in the Library by Philip Ketchum, a really obscure choice it would seem for the first Dell not-mapback.  The second is Dead or Alive by Patricia Wentworth, which oddly is I think the only time Dell ever published her work. (She was mostly published in the US in pb by Popular Library.)   

#4 was Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery, later reissued with a map. But I don't know what #3 was.  Now it's been bugging me.  Does anyone out there know?  Please tell me!

Sunday Nights with Silver: The Evolution in the Crime Writing of Patricia Wentworth

By the late 1930s "manners mystery" was all the rage in the world of English detective fiction.  Pioneered and actively propagandized by Dorothy L. Sayers, manners mystery aimed to merge the detective novel with the mainstream novel of manners, looking at live people, not just dead bodies, how they live, not just how they died.  There is more focus on society, characters, love interest--traditionally a minor aspect of detective fiction--and usually plenty of social satire.  Dickens and Collins and Trollope are models. not so much Conan Doyle and S. S. Van Dine.  

Once Sayers achieved huge success in both the UK and US with her 1935 Lord Peter Wimsey manners mystery Gaudy Night, manners mystery naturally received great impetus.  Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh were deemed her most important followers and late Thirties books like Dancers in Mourning and Death in a White Tie are considered high points of manners mystery.  There were others as well, like Georgette Heyer, Gladys Mitchell and Josephine Tey, who produced manners mysteries.  Then there were Anthony Gilbert and Moray Dalton, women with male pen names who had long produced "novelistic" mysteries.  There were men who did so too, like Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake, whom I call the Detection Dons, the male counterparts of the Crime Queens.  Although not part of that group Henry Wade began writing notable novelistic mysteries, like Mist on the Saltings and Lonely Magdalen.  E. R. Punshon was another.

All this writing really came to a head in the late Thirties and early Forties and it forever changed the face of detective fiction.  While supposedly "pure" puzzle writers like John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie maintained their popularity, others, the so-called "Humdrum" mystery writers (just the facts, ma'am) like Freeman Wills Crofts, John Street and J. J. Connington, began to seem more old hat.  Christie and Carr actually produced more mannered mysteries in the Forties, like She Died a Lady and The Emperor's Snuff-box and Five Little Pigs and Taken at the Flood and The Hollow.  Even John Rhode introduced a handsome, young, public school educated cop, Jimmy Waghorn, into his Dr. Priestley mystery series in 1936.  

Another big contributor to English manners mystery, Patricia Wentworth, has gone generally unacknowledged as such, and invariably is left off lists of Crime Queens, despite her popularity for a century now.  Why is this?  

Partly, I think, because she emphasizes the love element more strongly than any of these other writers, even Sayers when she has Lord Peter a-Wimseying Harriet Vane.  The Wentworth Miss Silver mysteries may have struck people almost as romance novels, which isn't really quite correct in my opinion.  

The author also was essentially a romantic thriller writer for much of her career.  For fifteen years "shockers" dominated her output between 1923 and 1938; then something starts to change.  In 1939 she published, as was her custom, two mysteries, these her third Miss Silver novel Lonesome Road and The Blind Side, which introduced her series police characters Detective Inspector (later Superintendent) Ernest Lamb and Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Frank Abbott, the latter one of those posh, public-school educated coppers who had become popular in manners mystery.  

The first Miss Silver, Grey Mask, dating back from 1928, is a thriller, though even here there is genuine wit and satire in PW's portrayal of the naive young heiress who is the target of the master criminal's wicked plot.  You might almost call it a manners thriller.  Wit and satire is not something thrillers of the period are known for.  Still, it's very much a thriller.  

The second Miss Silver novel did not appear for nine years.  PW had had a few intermittent series characters before, Benbow Smith and Frank Garratt, and in 1937 she decided to add Miss Silver to her recurring character crime file. (Critics had loved Grey Mask back in 1928, but they had not taken much notice of Miss Silver.)  The Case Is Closed actually is built around a murder problem, spiritedly investigated by a bold young woman, Hilary Carew, but the the story as it unfolds is essentially thrillerish, as Hilary's life is repeatedly put in peril.  Miss Silver appears and professionally investigates, but her work is kept in the background.

When Miss Silver next appears in Lonesome Road in 1939 she is very much on the scene as she attempts to determine who is trying to kill a rich middle-aged heiress, Rachel Traherne.  She actually stays incognito as a guest at Rachel's country mansion. (Rachel doesn't want to bring the police in because it appears the villain in a family member and she does not want bring down bad publicity on innocent people.)  

This is a detective novel, but there are still strong thrillerish elements in that it does not detail the investigation of a murder problem, but rather the attempts on the life of the heroine and the attempt to determine who is behind them.  Christopher Morley compared Lonesome to Rebecca, and it does have the suspenseful quality of a Alfred Hitchcock thriller. I would actually say that the earlier The Case Is Closed is more of a true detective novel.   

But then we come to The Blind Side, from the same year, which introduces Wentworth's yard men.  Here I think we see the true genesis of Wentworth's detective fiction.  The next year Lamb and Abbott would appear as a team in another detective novel, Who Pays the Piper?, while Miss Silver would appear comparatively briefly in a thrillerish mystery, Danger Point, in 1941.  

In 1942 there would be Pursuit of a Parcel, a topical wartime thriller with Lamb and Abbott and an older character Frank Garratt.  Then in 1943 Wentworth would unite Lamb and Abbott with Miss Silver in a true detective novel, Miss Silver Deals with Death, aka Miss Silver Intervenes.  After this all but one of her crime novels would be Miss Silver mysteries, for the most part true detective novels rather than thrillers.  The Miss Silver books are investigative manners mysteries in the Crime Queen mold and deserve to be credited as such.  Let's finally give Patricia Wentworth the crown she deserves.

On Wentworth Wednesdays I'll be talking about The Blind Side.  But I'll try to find some space next week for something non-Wentworth as well.  

"Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse": The Retro Homphobia of Francis Nevins' Cornell Woolrich Biography First You Dream, Then You Die (1988)

This piece is largely culled from my 55-page article at Crimereads from a few years ago, but I wanted to highlight here the raging homophobia in this book, given my recently publicized assertion that a certain retrograde comment by Otto Penzler, publisher of Dream, suggests how a homophobic book like Dream won an Edgar in 1989.  (This offended Otto so he apparently bounced me from doing an intro for Mysterious Press on gay crime writer Rufus King.)

Penzler's comment was actually a claim that men supposedly write better than women because men try to write literature, so it wasn't about homosexuality at all. Yet retrograde sexism and retrograde homophobia frequently go hand-in-hand.  Though actually I said it was Nevins' bio that was homophobic, not the publisher of the book.

But what I was trying to get at and maybe not conveying in a one sentence comment, was that there must have been an obtuseness on the part of Otto and other people (like the Edgar Award committee) not to see the dreadful homophobia in the book, assuming they really read it.  Or maybe they simply shared Nevins' attitudes.  I don't know.  I think people just easily bought into the "self-hating homosexual" cliche which is the keystone of Nevins' Woolrich thesis.  This cliche was dutifully trotted out for decades by people writing about Woolrich and it still is even today, so it's been a hardy perennial.

Writer Barry Malzberg has said that Nevins regards homosexuality as a "pathological" condition.  It does appear that way from his writing, because Nevins seems convinced that to be gay (a term he never uses) is to be self-hating.  If you're interested in this subject read below the excerpt from my article.  It still amazes me how the nasty anti-gay attitudes emanating from the book never drew any offended notice, with a few exceptions like Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, until my article appeared.  Malzberg and Pronzini are straight guys and they definitely managed to notice it. Anyway, here's the article excerpt.  Gird your loins and grab your wig for this look at homophobia in the Eighties AIDS era!

Self-hating, tearful Catholic homosexual and supportive friend in the original film version of
The Boys in the Band (1970)

How is the self-loathing homosexuality which Francis Nevins believes to have been the black wellspring of Cornell Woolrich’s unique writing genius reflected in the author’s voluminous crime fiction?  Here are examples from Dream of what Nevins terms "homosexual symbolism" in Woolrich's work:

"I was carrying Death around in my mouth," the reporter tells us near the end [of the story "Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair," where a dentist fills cavities with cyanide], and if one is determined to find subtle traces of Woolrich's homosexuality everywhere in his work, one might as well begin here. (p. 129)

While struggling with Cook over a gun, the hobo is shot in the mouth (here we go again, homosexual symbol seekers!) (p. 141)

....they arrange for a pickpocket accomplice to take a ride on the same train that is bringing Bull to the state pen, sit in the seat behind the mobster and quietly puncture Bull's rear end with a hypodermic full of germs (homosexuality symbol hunters take notice!) (p. 157)

All these instances seem reductive to my mind--not to mention remarkably puerile and in dubious taste. Since Woolrich was a gay man, so the reasoning seems to run, inevitably any time in his tales when poison, bullets or germs enter a man's mouth or buttocks it symbolizes homosexuality. In this juvenile egg hunt for "homosexual symbols" Nevins focuses relentlessly on sex acts.  Is it Woolrich who associated gay sex with death or is it Nevins who has imposed this meaning on Woolrich's texts?  Dream appeared in 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, something which may have influenced Nevins' take on this matter.  Yet unless he was endowed with second sight, like his seer character in Night Has a Thousand Eyes/"Speak to Me of Death, Woolrich could not have foreseen this calamity.

I have read my share of Woolrich (granted, Nevins has read everything, as Dream makes abundantly clear) and for my part I cannot say that in the author’s work I am strongly struck by intimations of same-sex attraction on his part.  Woolrich often does write well from a woman’s viewpoint, but he writes convincingly from a tough male viewpoint as well.  Seemingly absent from Woolrich’s fiction is the sustained interest in the male body which I have found in the work of gay male vintage crime writers like Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb (aka Patrick Quentin/Q. Patrick/Jonathan Stagge), Rufus King, Milton Propper and Todd Downing. 

I am powerfully struck in Woolrich’s work by an aching depiction of loneliness, despair and doom, yet, Nevins notwithstanding, this is not a state of mind which is specific to gay men. Any person, whatever his or her sexual orientation, might have these feelings and give expression to them in fiction.

Given Nevins’ writing about Woolrich, it is not surprising to see that he authored an 1977 article about Milton Propper, identifying him as another “tragic” homosexual, and that in a 2010 Mystery*File article he condemned Patricia Highsmith along the same lines as Woolrich, whom he passingly denigrates in his harshest terms yet: “If you think Cornell Woolrich was something of a psychopath and a creep, you don’t know the meaning of those words till you’ve encountered Highsmith.  Both, of course, were homosexual.  I gather from [Joan Schenkar’s biography] that Highsmith…was never terribly comfortable with being a lesbian….Woolrich was perhaps the most deeply closeted, self-hating homosexual male author that ever lived.”

If you are sensing an invidious theme here, I would hazard to guess that you are right.  Elsewhere in Dream Nevins refers passingly to “the special agonies of the homosexual whose religious roots are Catholic” (Woolrich’s father had been a nominal Catholic and Woolrich adopted the faith, at least nominally, near the end of his life); and he speculates that Woolrich and Catholic film director Alfred Hitchock, who adapted a Woolrich short story as his renowned flick Rear Window, shared the same pessimistic worldview--that the world was “a hideous and terrifying place”--on account of their “longing for physical relationships which the obesity of the one man and the homosexuality of the other seemed to put forever out of reach.” Evidently both stoutness and queerness constituted crippling hurdles to human happiness in Nevins’ mind.

When gathering such black pearls of wisdom about members of the queer community in my basket of literary boners, I am frequently reminded of the morbid line from the pioneering if at times problematic queer film The Boys in the Band, which premiered in March 1970, just a year-and-a-half after Cornell Woolrich’s death.  “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse,” pronounces one of the film’s characters.  (Yes, this character is a self-loathing, lapsed-Catholic gay man.)  In his writing about Woolrich and other crime writers whom he deems to have been queer, Nevins seems to have drawn this dismal credo deep into his heart.

Should I Go on with All This?

I love writing, in fact it's the only thing that has kept me going the last year.  And DSP is interested in publishing a Wentworth book, so there's that.  But after Otto Penzler's very deliberate slap in the face I'm asking myself, should I go on with any of this anymore?  Doing that Rufus King intro meant so much me.  It just gets hard to keep the will going anymore when you get treated like that.  I'm told Otto felt insulted by my comment, but his statement was sexist and the book he published was homophobic.  If I summon the will I will draw the relevant portions from my Cornell Woolrich article to show you.  

Obviously the political thing would have been to have said nothing, which is why most people say nothing when it comes to Otto or any person in power who might be able to impact their career negatively.  I thought he said a dumb thing, but it probably wasn't worth losing the Rufus King intro to say so.  The thing is this never comes up with other publishers.  They don't do or say things like Otto does.  But I guess I just have should not have posted even a brief comment.  You have to kiss up to the big shots, even when you think they said something stupid.  Success in life is more politics than ability.  But I know what the Nevns book is, even if Otto doesn't.  

Certainly it's not just Otto who doesn't see it.  People who accuse him of sexism and racism are mystified by the homophobia stuff.  And, again, I wasn't calling Otto homophobic, though I notice he still seems to use the term "sexual preference."  I think he just has, as I said, retrograde attitudes and an obtuseness.  But the Woolrich book is riddled with antigay prejudice and what I think is an inaccurate, unsound and hatefully cruel and bullying attitude toward its pathetic yet also valiant subject.  But I've said all this before and now I'm just being punished for it.  A lot of people praised my Woolrich article, but where does it really get you?  Which brings me back to my original question: Should I go on with all this?  Is there any point to it anymore?  I don't know.  

Otto Penzler's Proscription

I received a message today from one of Otto Penzler's employees, telling me that 

Otto, in the midst of the pile-on last winter, went on Facebook to see what people were saying about him and was surprised to see you jumping in to criticize him and his publishing history....I think he was particularly hurt by your suggestion that he might be homophobic. As such, he has said he’s not interested in working with you going forward….

This all occurred during the dust-up (or "pile-on") over Otto speaking at the Boucheron earlier this year.  Ironically I originally made my initial comment on mystery writer Lee Goldberg's post saying why I wanted to stay out of the whole fuss:

Been reading about the fuss with Otto Penzler at the Bouchercon. Looks like that will leave a lot of bad feelings all round. I guess the Edgars over their history have mostly undervalued the traditional mystery, but Otto has done a lot for it with his publishing ventures. I've gotten a few jobs, good paying ones from MP, which I have to say I appreciate. Honestly, I would do more for them if they asked me. His editor has been very nice to me. My book Murder in the Closet was nominated for an Edgar, the first queer nonfiction study so nominated I think. No Anthony nomination, lol. So, really, I feel I will just stay out of this one.

I thought that actually was pretty measured.  Honestly, the Bouchercon has never done anything for me.  But then I reacted to a quote from Otto that Lee Goldberg included in a blog piece criticizing Otto.  Here's my "homophobia" comment from back in February:

"Men take [writing] more seriously as art.  Men labor over a book to make it literature."  Eek.  I remember this but didn't remember it was that blatant.  It's these sorts of attitudes that help explain how the homophobic First You Dream, Then You Die won an Edgar.  

That's it, that evidently is what led to my proscription by Mysterious Press.  But I stand by what I wrote.  

I did not say Otto was homophobic. I was even told, in the year of our Lord 2024, that Otto has "gay friends." (Yes that old chestnut.) Good for Otto! 

Myself I think he is more criticism-phobic, but I'm in no position to judge him personally on this matter. However, I did suggest that he had been obtuse to the homophobia in the Francis Nevins Cornell Woolrich bio he published.  I think quite obviously plenty of people were over the years.  No one publicly commented about the vile antigay subject matter matter in this book for decades until I did.  I go into detail about the homophobia of the Nevins bio here.  Also myriad other problems with it.  

Otto strikes me as rather sensitive for someone who seems to have something of a history of going out of his way to say insensitive things about others. (There is plenty more that could be quoted.) But his proscription of me illustrates Lee Goldberg's point about his "fellow mystery writers, who are so afraid of speaking out against Otto Penzler...."  (See linked article.)  They appear to have reason to feel that way. Otto must have gone through scores of posts on Lee Goldberg's FB page looking for anything in any way deemable of being criticism of himself.  

The last few years I wrote intros for reprints of Roger Scarlett, Q. Patrick and John Rhode for Mysterious Press.  Otto himself praised my Scarlett intro to me (see below).  After that I corresponded only with his employee, but his employee, someone I always enjoyed working with, praised my work too.  

But now I have been proscribed because of an honest criticism I made of a needlessly offensive and to be frank rather dumb comment Otto made.  You should have read what other people were saying.  At least I acknowledged the good things Otto had done for the genre.  If I criticized his publishing history it was for the one homophobic book.  I'll post more on that book later.  

I have done a huge amount of work on queer mystery writer Rufus King and know even more that I haven't written about concerning him.  No one, but no one, knows this author like I do.  But I wasn't asked to write the intro to the Murder by the Clock reprint, it now appears to me, because I offended the Great Man.  And it illustrates precisely the problem that Lee was writing about.  If I hadn't posted an honest thought on Otto's silly statement and the homophobia in the Woolrich bio I might have gotten to write about Rufus King.  

I said what I honestly thought about a current issue in the mystery world; and if I'm to be punished by the power-that-be for that, that's how it goes I guess.  I am but a poor scholar, not a rich suck-up. 

If, like the Elon Musk of the mystery world, Otto out of wounded vanity thinks it demonstrates his commitment to queer history to kick to the curb the queer guy who has devoted much of his life to these projects so be it.  

It's a challenging struggle doing my work the last year with all its adverse circumstances, but I will keep at it as best I can.  Once Otto wrote me of my work: "You have done a masterful research job on an author (s) that have always seemed somewhat remote and unknown.  Thank you for taking so much time and care with this amazing introduction."  

That was nice.  Moods change though.  

After Otto sent these words I just worked with his employee, but, still, it was nice to be appreciated for a time.  I guess he felt I owed him my silence. Whatever the case with that, I don't now.

Color Schemes: The New Dean Street Press Editions of the Sara Woods Mysteries

The cover art is out for the first five Sara Woods detective novel reissues, nos. 1 through 5 of Woods' 48 mysteries about barrister-sleuth Antony Maitland.  These were originally published in the United Kingdom between 1962 and 1964.  Anglo-Canadian author Sara Woods was a major figure in what I call the Silver Age of detective fiction, around 1940 to 1980, by the end of which the major figures of the Golden Age had passed away.  

Among women mystery writers, inevitably called Crime Queens, Dorothy L. Sayers had died in 1957 and Josephine Tey five years earlier; yet Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell and Margery Allingham were still active in the Sixties--though  Allingham, actually the youngest of the lot, would pass away in 1966.  Among others who might be added to their number, Moray Dalton retired in 1951 and ECR Lorac was retired by death in 1958.  

That great blood-soaked blanket Julian Symons by this time had begun prophesying the imminent end of the "detective story" (to be replaced by the crime novel, don't you know), but though he kept this theme going up until his death in 1994, the detective story to the contrary never really died.  Among British women mystery writers, new blood was transfused into the crime corpus with the debuts of such durable and prolific Silver Age crime queens as Patricia Moyes (1959), PD James and Sara Woods (both 1962), Ruth Rendell (1964), Catherine Aird (1966), Anne Morice and Margaret Yorke (both 1970).  A very notable American detective writer who was very popular in England might be added as well: Emma Lathen (1964).  All of these women got in the murder game early enough, even Morice and Yorke, to have their books reviewed in his crime column by Golden Age stalwart Anthony Berkeley Cox, aka Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles.  

Both Woods and Morice died in the 1980s while Moyes retired from writing in 1993 and died in 2000.  PD James died almost a full decade ago, after having published her last detective novel, the Jane Austen mashup Death Comes to Pemberley, in 2011.  Ruth Rendell published The Girl Next Door in 2014 and died the next year, with one further mystery posthumously published.  Amazingly Catherine Aird, six months older than my late father, at age 93 published, after a lapse of four years, a series detective novel in 2023, the year he died.  That is 57 years after her first one!

Both Sara Woods and Anne Morice fell out-of-print after their deaths (as did Patricia Moyes), but they have since been picked up by Dean Street Press, Morice a few years ago, Woods this year.  Woods' 48 series mysteries, as I discussed in an earlier blog post, concern the criminal investigations and courtroom maneuvers of barrister Anthony Maitland and his uncle Sir Nicholas Maitland.  (Anthony's wife Jenny also appears in the all books.)  In his day reviewers sometimes dubbed Anthony the Perry Mason of English mystery.  Woods was a particular favorite of the late, great Hannibal Lecter--erm, no actually Franco-American scholar and public intellectual Jacques Barzun, who was a staunch reader and eloquent defender of classic detective fiction.  

Over the last decade or so more and more oop Golden and Silver Age detective writers, female and male, have come back into print, and I am pleased to see Sara Woods reentering the lists.  The Dean Street Press editions show a bewigged barrister, our friend Anthony--a tall, dark man with a thin, intelligent face--as the centerpiece on variously colored backgrounds:

Bloody Instructions: Red (blood)

Malice Domestic: Green (envy/jealousy)

The Third Encounter: Black/Grey (nazis)

Error of the Moon: Blue (luna)

Trusted like the Fox: Orange (vulpine)

This was fun, but I don't know that symbolic colors can be kept up over the course of 48 books; we shall see.  At the rate of five a year it would actually take nine more years to republish all of her books (2033!); maybe it can be amped up to ten annually.  Again, we shall see.  Woods for Whitsun?  Not this year!  But this deadly lot should be here by Christmas, just like the Christies used to be.