Sundays with Miss Silver: Make New Friends, but Keep the Old, One is Silver.... The Chinese Shawl (1943), by Patricia Wentworth

After four installments with thrillerish elements, the Miss Silver series really came into its own as a true detective series in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl.  Just as the author would give English mystery fans some paradigmatic village mysteries in the 1940s and 1950s, in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl she gave her readers a classic country house party mystery, just as the mystery subgenre's heyday was passing  during the Second World War.  England would never be the same after the war and neither would classic mystery, though both would find a way to survive austerity--austerity both of means and of murderous invention.   

it was such a lovely thing--
black ground and deep black fringe,
every inch of the ground worked over
in a pattern of fantastic loveliness
and all the colors of a fairy tale

Unlike a lot of other mysteries from the time, The Chinese Shawl frankly acknowledges the war; indeed, the war permeates the book from the first page, when mention is made of German air raids.  The protagonist of the novel is twenty-one year old Laura Fane, a lovely, sweet-natured, orphan gel who has just come into control of her inheritance, which consists of an income of L400 a year (about 24,000 pounds today or 31,000 dollars).  

Three-fourths of this amount comes from the rental of the country estate The Priory to her first cousin, once removed, Agnes Fane, who lives there with her first cousin Lucy Adams (also a first cousin, once removed to Laura).  Both women are spinsters of a certain age, imposing Agnes being stated to be 57 or 58 and dumpy Lucy presumably thereabout.  

Laura lives in the country with an aunt and does war work as a secretary at a home for convalescing soldiers and she also has plenty to do around the house, what with her aunt only having one maid these days.  (Drat the war!)

At The Priory Agnes and Lucy raised another, much younger orphaned cousin: Tanis Lyle, who if this were a contemporary book by Anglo-American hard-boiled author Raymond Chandler would unquestionably be the femme fatale and likely murderer of the tale.  Instead, she's our murderee.  Well, what else can you do when you have an exotic name like that, other than engage in femme fatalery?  

A stage actress in her late twenties, Tanis has already been married (and divorced) and she has a young child, who is being raised away somewhere, in Scotland I think, by its grandmother.  (They did call young children "its" in those days.)  She now specializes in flirting with other girls' boyfriends, taking and then casually discarding them.  She is not exactly beautiful but knows how to present herself.  She has ambitions of "going Hollywood."  All in all, it's a classic good girl-bad girl contrast between the virginal, naturally blooming English rose Laura and the hothouse, forced Tanis, who presumably has been not just around the block but a multitude of surrounding neighborhoods, if not entire towns.  

Laura is in London to meet her lawyer and when she does she discovers from him that Agnes wants to buy The Priory outright from her, for 12,000 pounds (over 700,000 today, or not too far off one million American dollars).  Agnes through Tanis invites Laura to a house party at The Priory, which she has never actually ever seen due to a family feud.  You see, over two decades ago her father, Oliver Fane, was supposed to marry his cousin Agnes but he backed out of the engagement when he fell in love with another woman, Laura's future mother.  Intensely passionate Agnes responded, naturally enough, by taking her favorite horse out for a ride and driving the poor beast so hard that they both ended up in the local quarry, where the horse was killed and Agnes crippled for life.  (Don't worry: she gets around expertly in a wheelchair.)  

This is quite a bit of backstory.  You see, we are in the world of the spacious detective novel of manners, which takes its time to background characters and lavishes attention on dialogue.  Laura doesn't even make it to The Priory until page fifty, a-fifth of the way into the novel, and Tanis stays alive and kicking and femme fataleing until page 108, nearly halfway into the book.  There's even another house party that takes place in London before the murder house party, where we first meet many of the characters, most of whom will become suspects in Tanis' slaying.  

There's intensly handsome RAF pilot Carey Desborough, recovering from a crash, whom Tanis' cousins (or aunts, Tanis calls them, on account of their being so much older) Agnes and Lucinda think is engaged to Tanis, though in fact Tanis has already thrown him over.  Carey of course falls in love at second sight with Laura.  Then there are two airmen on leave, brothers Robin and Alistair Maxwell.  The latter is one of Tanis' current victims (she's got several on a string, including her ex-husband), much to the frustration of kittenish young Petra North, who loves Alistair.  (Tanis and Petra--seems Agatha Christie wasn't the only Golden Age mystery writer interested in the middle east.)

I'm not even mentioning Miss Sophy Ferrers, a relation with whom Laura is staying in London who is like a character out of a Jane Austen novel.  But she disappears from the book after the scene shifts to The Priory.  Happily, Miss Silver, armed with her knitting bag and myriad Victorian maxims, is there, however, having been hired by Agnes to investigate some thefts at The Priory.  (Could it be their evacuees?)  

a cubist rendering of a triangle

I'm trying to pin down Miss Silver's age and here we find the retired governess turned sleuth was formerly a schoolmate of Lucinda, who presumably is around her cousin Agnes' age or a bit older.  The author herself was 65 when she wrote The Chinese Shawl.  She was born in 1877 and married a man old enough to be her father a couple of weeks after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, when she was 23.  

I think it's safe to assume that Miss Silver is around the age of the author.  People find her anachronistic in Fifties mystery, but after all there were then people, like the author, who had grown up under the reign of the first and last Empress of India and were young governesses when her son Edward ruled.

Miss Silver was in fact the governess of Randal Marsh, now Superintendent of fictional Ledshire, where The Priory is located.  He was introduced two years earlier in the more thrillerish Miss Silver mystery Danger Point, which in the current one we are told took place in Autumn 1939.  We also are told that Miss Silver actually saved Randal's life in the much alluded to case of the poisoned caterpillars, which presumably took place in the spring of '39, not to long after the events detailed in Lonesome Road.  Someone needs to do a pastiche of this lost case!

Conversation between these Randal and his former governess is affectionate but very proper and genteel, with much exclaiming of "My dear Randal!" and "My dear Miss Silver!"  Perhaps a bit precious but the author herself has plenty of experiences of governesses and nannies and no doubt knew her stuff. 

The murder investigation works its way to a dramatic--and dramatically satisfying--conclusion, and all in all I would say this is one of the best Miss Silver detective novels, pleasingly redolent with wartime atmosphere.  I see I haven't mentioned Laura's beautiful Chinese shawl, a gift from her father to her mother.  Don't worry: it's mentioned a lot in the book and it does play a part in the tale.  

Oh, yes, by my count Miss Silver coughs 22 times.  That cough will get more pronounced.  

Wentworth Wednesdays Putting One's Foot in It: The Blind Side (1939), Patricia Wentworth

Patricia Wentworth published 65 crime novels, 32 of them Miss Silvers and 33 of them not-Miss Silvers. As part of my Patricia Wentworth book project I'm rereading her books and trying to determine how many are true detective novels.  Grey Mask, the first Wentworth Silver, which was published back in 1928, is very much in thriller mode with a fiendish masked master criminal and his gang and an imperiled hero and heroine.  The next three Silvers--The Case Is Closed (1937), Lonesome Road (1939) and Danger Point (1941)--all have thrillerish elements.  However, the next one in the Silver series, The Chinese Shawl, is a classic manners mystery, absolutely a true detective novel and a very good one indeed.  (I hope I'll be talking about it this Silver Sunday.)  

Most of the 28 Silvers published in the series' heyday--the years between 1943 and 1961 (or really 1958)--are true detective novels, albeit with a good deal of romance in the mix.  But Wentworth also had some non-Silvers that are true detective novels, beginning, I believe, with The Blind Side (1939), in which Wentworth introduced her series Yard cops Inspector Ernest Lamb and his posh subordinate Sergeant Frank Abbott.  

The next year Lamb and Abbott would appear in another detective novel, Who Pays the Piper?, then in 1943, the year of the pivotal shift in Wentworth's writing, she would pair the two policemen with Miss Silver is Miss Silver Deals with Death, aka Miss Silver Intervenes.  Ernest Lamb would then appear in a dozen more Miss Silver novels, the last of them The Listening Eye in 1955, and Frank Abbott another twenty including the last in the Silver series, The Girl in the Cellar, in 1961.  

Appearing without Miss Silver in The Blind Side, Lamb and Abbott make a classic English cop team, Lamb being the older, married, more rough-hewn one and Lamb the younger, posher-than-thou public school educated type who started becoming quite prevalent in English mystery in the Thirties.  

A leading example of the "glamor boy" type of Yard man is the King of the Swells, Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Roderick Alleyn.  Then there are posh young detective sergeants like E. R. Punshon's Bobby Owen, John Rhode's Jimmy Waghorn and Freeman Wills Crofts' Rollo.  (I forget the latter's first name, but the surname "Rollo" always seems to indicate poshness in English mystery.)  

Lamb and Abbott are quite enjoyable here, even if they don't manage to solve the case.  This job is left to an amateur, the romantic hero in the tale, which reflects the author's thriller background.  This person is very similar to Wentworth's thriller heroes, a handsome and personable thirty-year-old India Army man named Peter Renshaw.  Practically all the major men in the author's life were Army, particularly India Army, including, from the latter group, her father, uncle and first and second husbands. 

Like Frank Abbott, Peter comes from an elite public school background, just like the men in the author's life.  Indeed, it turns out Abbott and Peter were at the same public school at the same time.  I quote this exchange between Lamb and Abbott, which is apt to provoke snickers today, especially from Americans:

"Well, sir, we were at school together for a bit.  He's older of course.  I--well, as a matter of fact, I fagged for him."

"And you say he's a cool card?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, remember you're not fagging for him now."

Get that, man: none of that Peter fagging!  Abbott's nickname at school was "Fug," so of course Peter calls him Fug throughout the story.  If Peter ever wrote a book about their relationship, doubtlessly he would have titled it My Fag Fug.  

Probably now I should back up a bit and explains just who gets murdered and who the suspects are.  The book is set at Craddock House, the ancestral London home of Ross Craddock, whose father divided the swell place into lucrative flats.  There's an all-important family tree, which doesn't appear until page 75 of the 1991 Warner Books edition I read, page 66 of the Forties Popular Library edition.  These things should always be frontis exhibits in my opinion.  

Death at the Flat

Anyway, at the opening of the novel Ross lives in a flat at Craddock House.  He let additional flats on the same floor gratis to his older first cousins, once removed, sisters Lucy and Mary Craddock, and to Peter, his first cousin.  Mary Craddock has recently passed away and Ross plans to evict her sister Lucy, who makes a habit of butting into his life about his rakish romancing of young, vivacious Mavis Grey, his second cousin and Lucy's niece.  Ross, you see, is something of a wicked man-about-town, don't you know.  Impetuous young stockbroker Bobby Foster doesn't like Ross' avid pursuit of Mavis either.

modern Dean Street Press ed.

Then there is another second cousin of Ross, pretty Lee Fenton, who has this little problem with sleepwalking.  Did she go sleepwalking after falling asleep in Aunt Lucy's flat while reading The Corpse with the Clarionet?  Was it she who left all those bloodstained footprints in Ross' flat on the morning of the murder? Drat!

When Ross gets shot in his flat early one debauched morning, all of his surviving relations, all of whom just happened to be on the scene at various times around the time of his death, are suspects.  Every one of them, it seems, had motives to kill the rich basta--erm, I mean, the poor victim.  

These complicated genteel class cousinly relationships are a staple of Patricia Wentworth novels, but the author also has some good characters of a more modest nature, like proud caretaker and Great War veteran Albert Edward Rush, who doesn't say "sir" to officers of the law, and his bedridden wife, as well as bibulous char Mrs. Green.  

The comic char is a staple, if not cliche, of not only Golden Age detective novels but more recent ones (see Ruth Rendell and PD James, for example); but she's done to a turn here.  And let's not forget that nosy spinster on from a floor above, Miss Bingham--Wilhelmina Ethel to be exact.  Wentworth knew her spinsters.  

This is a very enjoyable detective novel in the classic Thirties style, wryly amusing and brightly characterized with the love interest pretty lightly and pleasingly etched in; and it even manages a surprising ending--at least it was such to me.  Very much recommended.  

I will be interested to see whether the second Lamb and Abbott mystery maintains the standard set by The Blind Side.  And whether they can manage to solve the case themselves.  We know they never got to when Maud Silver was around.  

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.