B is for Borgias: The Borgia Cabinet (1930), by J. S. Fletcher

Striking jacket design for Knopf's edition of
The Borgia Cabinet. JS Fletcher was one of
the publisher's most lucrative authors, though
Knopf had a shiny new pony in the stable
by the name of Hammett.

The Borgia Cabinet was the first of at least three mystery novels published in the United States in 1930 by veteran English mystery writer J. S. Fletcher.  Cabinet popped up in January of that year, followed by The Yorkshire Moorland Mystery in May and The South Foreland Murder in September.  1931 would see The Dressing Room Murder start up the Fletcher production line all over again in the following January.  Fletcher was, you might say, a prolific writer.  

And say it they certainly did at the time.  One newspaper wag speculated in 1930 that English thriller writer Edgar Wallace had actually "written all of England's literature," only to be corrected by J. S. Fletcher's publisher Knopf that Wallace works accounted merely for half of England's literature, the other half being supplied by their man Fletcher.  

One of the ways in which mystery genre history has gone wrong, as history, is to omit inclusion in studies of once hugely popular writers who have fallen out of print.  Fifteen years ago, mystery genre history, when it came to its so-called "Golden Age," was largely confined, in Britain, to the Crime Queens Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh (and sometimes Tey), and, in America, to the tough guys Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  

Practically no one--there were a few exceptions--was studying Freeman Wills Crofts, R. Austin Freeman, Earl Derr Biggers or Erle Stanley Gardner, say, and they certainly weren't perusing Edgar Wallace or Carolyn Wells or J. S. Fletcher.  Yet the latter two authors, the first American and the second British, were during the 1920s and into the 1930s two of the most popular mystery (as opposed to thriller) writers in the United States--a fact which is still greatly lost on people today.

Unlike the also very popular Mary Roberts Rinehart, Wells and Fletcher were mass producers of mysteries, often publishing three or four (or more) crime novels in a single year.  Fletcher took off in the States after American president Woodrow Wilson famously praised his book The Middle Temple Murder (1919), which until this last decade remained the one and only Fletcher book that remained often in print.   In the United States in the Twenties Fletcher sold better than Christie or Sayers and to many American crime fans he most represented modern English mystery.

There was a great irony here, in that Fletcher--who was only four years younger than Arthur Conan Doyle, just a year younger than R. Austin Freeman and Carolyn Wells and three years older than venerable E. Phillips Oppenheim--was a very old-fashioned writer indeed.  His Twenties mysteries ostensibly took place during the Twenties, I suppose, but they really were products of the Victorian or at best Edwardian era.  And they weren't really tales of detection, or let us say deduction, either.  

Fletcher's mysteries have plenty of mystery to them, to be sure, but they tend to have very little genuine intelligent detection by the police detectives.  They investigate, vigorously follow leads, then usually get a surprise solution generously handed to them by the author in the last few pages of the novel, at least in my experience with reading Fletcher.  The man certainly had this formula down and his books are easy to read and often enjoyable, but it was really S. S. Van Dine and to some extent Earl Biggers who brought the art of detection home to American mystery readers in the second half of the Twenties (followed by Ellery Queen).  

I have a hardcover American first edition of another Fletcher mystery, False Scent (1925) that has some rather interesting marginalia in it on a couple of pages.  I wish I knew more of the book's provenance.  The letter "H" is stamped in it and there is a bookstore stamp on the front endpaper from Pomeroy's, a department store chain in eastern and central Pennsylvania (where my own mother is from--she may have been to a Pomeroy's in Harrisburg or Pottstown for all I know).  

Anyway, the presumably native Pennsylvanian buyer of this book was pretty dubious as to its merits, judging from the marginal comments.  He (?) complained that the detective figure in the novel, one Stevenage, was quite a dull dog indeed.  Fletcher tells us that "in spite of his comparative youth... [Stevenage was] already a man of achievement and of further promise in the Criminal Investigation Department....at eight-and-twenty....[he had] peculiarly acute instincts, stiletto-like perception, and a habit of cool procedure as dependable as chilled steel."  This particular reader, however, wasn't buying it.

On page 258, there's an inadvertently funny exchange between Stevenage and another man, a civilian named Featherstone, with whom Stevenage gets quite chummy.  The latter man informs Stevenage that a certain suspicious character was clean-shaven, leading Stevenage to lament that this man then could not be his suspect Whatmore, because that man is bearded.  To this Featherstone ingeniously suggests that Whatmore might "easily have shaved his beard off....Don't you think that's just what he would do?"  To this Stevenage assents: "Maybe!"

This exchange prompted the reader to scrawl testily in the margin: 

Who is the detective--Stevenage or Featherstone?  Query: Could a C.I.D. man be as stupid as Stevenage and still be C.I.D.?

On the final page of the book, 295, the reader frustratedly adds: 

Again--How can a detective be as stupid--and lucky--as Stevenage?  Answer: His brains were "abstracted."

Well, the truth is this sort of police detective is a stock character in Fletcher's books; we see him again and again.  And, yeah, he is rather ingenuous, to put it generously.  But he steadfastly sees it through to the end and gets his man (or woman), mainly due to some timely good luck late in the book.  

Let's see how it all works in The Borgia Cabinet.  

This book is a highly traditional country house murder mystery.  Fletcher came up with a more intriguing title than usual for this one, but it could easily have been called Murder at Aldersyke Manor.  What is the eponymous cabinet you may be wondering?  It's a repository of obscure deadly poisons which the eccentric murder victim, Sir Charles Stanmore, thought it amusing to keep, unlocked, in his study.  Of course Sir Charles has been bumped off with one of these criminally accessible poisons!  

Certainly it appears that there are plenty of people who might potentially have wanted to do away with Sir Charles, starting with Lady Stanmore, a younger woman who despised her husband and may have been seen in the woods kissing her cousin James Beck, a Wimpole Street physician.  Then there's Sir Charles' young secretary, Miss Fawdale, his nephew and heir, Guy Stanmore, and his sister-in-law, Guy's mother, the widowed Mrs. John Stanmore.  

Of course there's a solemn-faced butler, Bedford, as well as a nosy housekeeper, Mrs. Protheroe, and a parlor maid, Purser.  There's Sir Charles' helpful law partner, Mr. Gilford, and a man by the name of Mapperson, who wanted to purchased a valuable diamond necklace, vanished since the murder, from Sir Charles.  (There are also, for some reason, minor characters named Holmes and Watson.)

Detective-Sergeant Charlesworth of Scotland Yard goes investigating and eventually forms a theory, but it's knocked aheap in the last twenty pages of the novel.  

There's no brilliant Christie-like clueing or even the rigorous detection of a John Rhode or Freeman Crofts.  But it all reads pleasantly and smoothly right up to the very late solution of the crime (s); and there's nothing wrong with that. It turns out quite a few readers over the last century and more did not really want to have wrack their brains too hard when perusing a mystery.  

J. S. Fletcher

What's odd though is how Fletcher was presented to the public by American publishers.  "The Dean of Detective Story Writers," we are told on the back of the dust jacket of False Scent.  This follows:

The world is full of confirmed Fletcher addicts.  His mystery-detective stories of the puzzle variety have made him the favorite story teller of thousands.  The secret is that he plays fair with his readers in his stories.  All the facts that his detectives have to go on are there for his readers to see--and he tells a surprising story in a soothing, artless manner.

Does Fletcher pull surprises, on his detectives and readers?  Absolutely, yes.

Yet his mystery stories, at least the ones I have read, are not puzzle stories, in the sense that they provide readers with a puzzle they can solve.  Fletcher only hands out key pieces of the puzzle to his detectives and readers right at the end of the story.  Neither the police or the readers can really solve the crime; they merely are allowed to witness the revelation of the truth.  Inevitably this is disappointing to the more demanding puzzle fans, though it may be closer to the actuality of most crimes as they are really solved.  

The future in American mystery lay not with Fletcher, who would pass away, an anachronism, in 1937, but with Dashiell Hammett, the other major mystery writer in Knopf's stable.  Not only was Hammett a more exciting writer, he was actually a better deviser of puzzles.  And he influenced many more writers.  Yet there has always remained a fair flock of Fletcher fanciers.