Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: Witch's Moon (1941), by Giles Jackson (aka Dana Chambers, aka Albert Fear Leffingwell)

"Whoever likes [their] murders multitudinous will find them here....[There's a] plethoric flow of gore short [only] of Nazi warfare."

--"How the Blood Runs!" Review of Witch's Moon in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 28, 1941

First American edition
Two paperback editions followed, 
one with the title changed to,
alliteratively but rather ridiculously,  
Blood on the Blonde

Between 1939 and 1947 former intelligence officer, retired adman and current-day crime writer Albert Fear Leffingwell published 13 crime novels, the last of which appeared posthumously.  Only one of these was published under his own name, with another nine appearing under the pseudonym Dana Chambers and a pair under the pseudonym Giles Jackson. Seven of the ten Dana Chambers novels were series tales about amateur sleuth Jim Steele, a gent with the most hardboiled detective name this side of Mike Hammer (though Jim wasn't one, actually), while the remaining three were non-series.  

The Jim Steele novels are currently being reprinted by Stark House as twofer volumes (though inevitably there will be an odd book out).  I just wrote the introduction to She'll Be Dead By Morning/The Blonde Died First, which will be out later this year.

The first of the two Giles Jackson novels, Witch's Moon, is, I can assure you, forthcoming.  (Both Moon and its successor, Court of Shadows, feature as the series sleuth tough New York newsman Nile Boyd.)  Although the author's mother, Elizabeth Fear, had English immigrant parents, the ancestry of his father, Albert Tracy Leffingwell, went back many generations into the New England states of Connecticut and Massachusetts. 

social reformer
James Caleb Jackson
the author's great-uncle

Leffingwell's paternal  grandmother, Jane Elizabeth Jackson, was a granddaughter of Giles Jackson of Tyringham, Massachusetts, a locally renowned Revolutionary War veteran--though the oft-repeated claim of his family that he served as General Horatio Gates' chief of staff at the epochal Battle of Saratoga seems not to be true.  In his retirement the good gentleman sired nineteen children.  

Jane Jackson Leffingwell's brother, James Caleb Jackson, the author's great-uncle, was a noted abolitionist and vegetarian, or vegan as we would say today, who is credited with inventing the first dry breakfast cereal, Granula, in 1863.  Jackson forced a rival food faddist, a certain James Harvey Kellogg, to stop using the name Granula for his breakfast food, alleging that Kellogg had stolen is from him.  Kellogg then coined the name Granola.  

Jackson was a prolific reformist writer, authoring such deadly serious, earnest tomes as The Sexual Organism and Its Healthful Management, Dancing: Its Evil and Benefits, and American Womanhood: Its Peculiarities and Necessities.  In 1858 he also founded the Jackson Sanatorium, a hydrotherapeutic resort, in Dansville, New York, which became for many decades a lucrative family business.  

Albert Tracy Leffingwell
the author's social reformer father

James Caleb Jackson's equally earnest nephew Albert Tracy Leffingwell was also a noted reformer, an anti-vivisectionist and progressive activist.  Albert's wife, Elizabeth Fear Leffingwell, daughter of a Wesleyan Methodist lay preacher and coal miner, was a pioneering female gynecologist.  

The brilliant couple's eldest son, the crime writer Albert Fear Leffingwell (back to him again), was proud of his distinguished family ancestry and expressed a certain left-wing sensibility in his writing--his sleuth James Steele fought on behalf of the Republicans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War--though he did not share their piety.  

To the contrary, Albert Fear Leffingwell lived a life that in some of its aspects his more puritanical New England ancestors would have frowned upon, one suspects.  Initially his life course ran highly commendably, at least on the surface.  After graduating from Harvard at the age of twenty-two, Leffingwell served in army intelligence in the First World War.  Upon leaving the service in 1919 he wed Helen Lillian Urie, daughter of an attorney, and with her had two daughters. 

the author and his wife in 1924, when he was 29

In 1925 he co-founded the poshly named New York advertising firm of Olmsted, Perrin and Leffingwell, which four years later was most profitably merged into the firm McCann, now the massive global advertising network McCann Erickson.  In the 1930s, before he had even commenced his later-in-life writing career, Leffingwell was drawing an estimated income, in modern worth, of some $362,000 a year.  He resided with his wife and young daughters at the family home in Bronxville, an affluent suburb about twenty miles north of Manhattan.

In 1935, however, this placid facade was ripped apart when Helen Urie Leffingwell brought a separation suit against Albert, alleging, as newspapers wryly reported, that he had abandoned his family on the advice of a meddling psychoanalyst who had informed him that his family "cramped his style."  Helen remained with the girls at the Bronxville home while Alfred took up residence at the Park Hotel in the Connecticut town fn Winstead, located in the Connecticut Berkshires, about 38 miles from Tyringham, Massachusetts, the abode of his heroic Revolutionary War great-great grandfather, Giles Jackson. There he commenced the writing of crime fiction.  (He also was divorced from Helen by 1940.  He never remarried.)

the author at time he was writing crime fiction

In 1939, the same year in which Raymond Chandler introduced to the world tough guy detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Leffingwell commenced the investigative saga of Jim Steele with a pair of crime novels, Some Day I'll Kill You and Too Like the Lightning.  Five more Jim Steele mysteries would follow between 1940 and 1946, the year of the author's untimely death at the age of fifty-one.  He had battled a drinking problem for over 25 years and died from kidney disease at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut.  

In 1940 Jim Steele published only one novel, a Jim Steele mystery called She'll Be Dead By Morning, but in 1941 there came from his hand no fewer than three crime tales: 

The Blonde Died First (Dana Chambers)

Witch's Moon (Giles Jackson) 

Nine Against New York (the only novel he ever published under his own name)

Witch's Moon would be followed in 1943 by another novel with the same amateur sleuth, Court of Shadows.  Obviously Leffingwell derived the Giles Jackson pen name from his revolutionary was ancestor Giles Jackson, whom the Jackson clan revered.  

While Court of Shadows was a timely World War Two spy thriller, Witch's Moon is something of a madcap couples mystery, albeit with no fewer than four murders, two of them quite gory.  Considering it takes place over one late night and early morning, that's an impressive tally indeed.  

Park Hotel, Winstead, CT, demolished in 1960s, where the author wrote Witch's Moon

When the tale opens, New York crime reporter Nile Boyd and fashion writer Anne Warriner are nearing the town of Oldfield, Connecticut, where they will stay overnight at the Lake Hotel--"Cachet of respectability.  Apotheosis of New England virtue," as Anne puts it (rather ironically as things turn out).  They were going to stay at Anne's lake place, but her cook can't make it till tomorrow, you see.  "I can't spend the night alone with you in a lake cottage, you ass," Anne bluntly explains to her semi-boyfriend.  "The whole town would be up bright and early tomorrow cutting out scarlet letters."  

From the novel:
"A copy of the Ladies Home Journal
for August, 1938 lay face down
in front of the fireplace."

Surprisingly the Lake Hotel proves to have quite a collection of dipsos and other assorted quirky characters, male and female.  One of the guests gets her throat cut in her room, while another unaccountably vanishes and a man, identify unknown, takes a fatal tumble from the porch roof.  And this is just in the first few hours.  Nile helps the state troopers investigate, on account of his familiarity with the New York police.  You remember the "Rauber case...one of the most famous--and sickening--kidnaping cases in police history"?  It seems Nile "found the body."

Nile will solve this case by sunset, but not until after much mayhem has ensued, including a fatal shooting and the discovery of...well, you'll be able to see soon enough, I expect, for yourself.  Through his characters more potshots are taken against local puritanical mores by the author, of whom I have gathered in his own life had replaced with religion with psychology, Saint Paul with Sigmund Freud and the Bible with Psychopathia Sexualis.  A local lawyer is said to have the suspicious, subversive habit of reading books, particularly tomes of Freudian psychology.  

"Real books," emphatically adds local mathematics teacher Mary West. "[T]hat's a habit no one in Oldfield understands or condones."

Granula, the original American "granola" 
though apparently it looked more like grape nuts

Only some 43,000 words, this novel moves fast as a freight train toward its surprising end.  I thought it quite entertaining, as reviewers of the time did as well.  "Fast-moving, humorous and satisfactorily baffling," declared the Chicago Tribune.  Huzzahed the Birmingham News: "'Witches Moon' is a pleasant relief from the old stock stories written in the same dull way.  Giles Jackson has plotted a fascinating murder mystery and has written it in a way to hold the attention of the most jaded reader.  This is a thriller you shouldn't miss."

To put it in a way the author's virtuous ancestors might have appreciated: "Witch's Moon--It's better than a bowl of granula!" 

Appendix: A Leffingwell-Jackson Family Album

painting of the young James Caleb Jackson
showing him holding a copy of the abolitionist newspaper
The Liberty Press of Utica, New York, which he edited

James Caleb Jackson at 1850 Fugitive Slave Convention
held to protest the Fugitive Slave Act
Over Fifty Fugitives attended.  Note Frederick Douglas 
two places over from James Caleb Jackson

gravestone of Deacon John Jackson, a remote ancestor

James Caleb Jackson and his wife Lucretia

James and Lucretia's elder son Giles Elderkin Jackson 
who died tragically at age 28 in 1864
First cousin once removed of the author
A Jackson descendant today uses Giles Elderkin
as a mystery-writing pseudonym

gravestone of Thomas Leffingwell
who around 1675 built the Leffingwell Inn in 
Norwich, Connecticut

ruins of the Jackson Sanatorium,
aka the Castle on the Hill, in Dansville, NY

Leffingwell House, started as an inn by Thomas Leffingwell
His grandson Christopher Leffingwell was a member of the
Sons of Liberty and owner of the local paper and chocolate mills.

the author's mother a pioneering woman gynecologist
and devoted parent who took her
three boys on a tour of Europe

Leffingwell home in Aurora, New York
where the author grew up

Come to the Cabaret: "Yellow Iris" (1937) by Agatha Christie, on the page and on radio

Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot short story "Yellow Iris" was first published in The Strand in July 1937.  Four months later, on November 2, 1937, "The Yellow Iris" appeared as a play on British radio.  It too was written by Christie, who based the play on the prior published story.  The story was first published in book form two years later in The Regatta Mystery, a middling collection of Christie short fiction.  

"Yellow Iris" had one more incarnation, as the plot nucleus of Christie's 1945 mystery novel Sparkling Cyanide.  In the United States, this novel was published, somewhat bafflingly, under the title Remembered Death.  Three years earlier Christie had published one of her finest novels, Five Little Pigs, a title which her American publisher, Dodd, Mead, had altered to Murder in Retrospect. Both Five Little Pigs and Sparkling Cyanide concerned murders committed in the past, hence the American titles, but somehow Murder in Retrospect to me has more oomph to it than Remembered Death.  

I also have trouble fathoming what problem Dodd, Mead had with Sparkling Cyanide as a title.  Apparently Dodd, Mead had a preference for "Murder" or "Death" being in the title.  Just so their readers would know they were reading a mystery novel, don't you know.  But what else on earth would people have imagined a book with a title like Sparkling Cyanide was?

"Her name is Lola, she is a showgirl." "Yellow Iris" in The Strand 
see Adrian Harrington, Ltd.

Anyway, I'll talk more about Sparkling Cyanide in a later post; here I want to discuss is the short story and its radio adaptation.  "Yellow Iris," a tale in my edition of 21 pages (probably about 5000 words), just doesn't amount to much, in my opinion.  In it Poirot, sitting at home alone at night admiring his electric radiator--such symmetry it has--gets a phone call imploring him to investigate a matter of life or death at the nightclub Jardin des Cynges.  He's to look for the table with the yellow irises.  

Poirot looks on at the table with the yellow irises
David Suchet in the television adaptation of "Yellow Iris"

When Poirot arrives there he learns that the table belongs to Barton Russell ("an American--immensely rich").  At the table is an amiable young man he already knows, Anthony Chappell.  There's also Barton Russell himself; Stephen Carter, the rising politician; Lola Valdez, a, but of course, exotic dancer of Latin extraction who says words like eet and ees, just so you don't forget it (eet ees eemposseeble to forget it); and Pauline Wetherby, a lovely young lady and Russell's sister-in-law.  

Poirot learns from Barton Russell that four years ago at a New York nightclub Iris Russell, Barton Russell's wife and Pauline's sister, died after imbibing cyanided wine, with the remains of the poison packet in her handbag.  The verdict was suicide, but Barton Russell is restaging that fatal night tonight with the very same people at the table (except Poirot). How he thinks this will accomplish anything he doesn't really explain.

Barton Russell gets up to talk to the dance band, allowing Stephen Carter to observe, "Extraordinary business...the man's mad," and Lola to affirm, with her stereotypical Latin exoticism, "He ees crazee, yes."  Then Barton returns and the cabaret starts. 

Out comes a "coal black girl with rolling eyeballs and white glistening teeth" to sing a song in a "deep golden negro voice" full of "thick cloying emotion"--it's the same song that was sung on the night of Iris' death!  Christie, to be sure, was hardly the only white crime writer of the time to describe a black person this way (coal black, rolling eyeballs, white glistening teeth)--heck, Patricia Moyes was still doing it in the 1970s--but, still, ugh.

illustration from an American newspaper version

Does the affair have a similarly deadly climax as the one four yours ago in New York?  Well, if you don't know, you'll have to read the story, won't you?  

But I can tell you that along the way that Argentinian--no, wait, Peruvian--spitfire Lola cries out, "That ees a pack of lies....I spit upon you," before lapsing emotionally into Spanish imprecations.  Another character threatens, "You'll hang for this, you dirty dog," while Poirot gets called "You interfering little Belgian jackanapes."  Vintage chauvinism and derisive British lingo!  

Poirot only speculates on a motive for the criminal, which is not quite satisfying.  It's worth noting that Christie had recently completed her novel Death on the Nile--there's a title her American publishers liked--which was published on November 1, a day before the performance of the radio play "The Yellow Iris."  You can see some similarities.  The not particularly impressive murder gimmick in the tale Christie later would use--and happily much embellish--in Sparkling Cyanide.  

There really wasn't much here, seemingly, for a radio play, but a radio play it became.  There was an added gimmick, however.  Since the story took place at a nightclub and singing and music were integral to the tale, the radio adaptation was able to take advantage of this by including singing and music in the play.  It was called a "rather unusual linking of drama and light entertainment" and it lasted for an hour.  

Some reviewers complained that it felt like a ten-minute drama sketch extended to sixty minutes with musical acts.  The musical entertainment included singer Inga Andersen, known during World War Two as the "Blackout Girl" for her brave performances under dangerous wartime conditions, and the musical comedy trio The Three Admirals.  The script has been published and is available today, but I assume neither of the two live performances on radio has survived.  Pity, that!

This idea of a radio mystery with music was not a new one.  The BBC had actually done a musical seven-part mystery serial two years previously, Sydney Horler's secret service thriller The Mystery of the Seven Cafes, which was later published as a Tiger Standish spy thriller. 

Above: The Three Admirals perform in 1937.

Many years later in 1993 "Yellow Iris" was adapted in a one-hour episode of the Poirot television series, starring inimitable David Suchet as Poirot.  The teleplay extended this flimsy bit of fiction by having an extended flashback scene set in Buenos Aires, Argentina during a coup.  Now there's something new!  

Poirot is present in both the Buenos Aires and London sections.  There's a performance of the story's torch song, "I've Forgotten You," for which Christie had provided lyrics in the original story.  I actually recollect the episode as being pretty good.  Below is "I've Forgotten You" as performed in the television episode.  

More soon on how "Yellow Iris" became the vastly improved novel Sparkling Cyanide.

"Talk 'em in a tea shoppe": Philip MacDonald's Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared (1938)

Very interesting, Gethryn!  A pretty story!  A little forced, perhaps, but who can help that nowadays with so many people writing these things [mysteries]."

Damn it all, Gethryn, it makes about as much sense as Lewis Carroll."

"Anthony! I've been thinking! Those things don't happen in England!"

"Everything happens in England."

"No. Not kidnapping."

"It has.  And it will again."

"It American! It's American!"

"And England, in common with the rest of the world, is becoming more Americanised every day...."

"I don't like spiders....But their webs are pretty."

"What did I tell you!"  Never talk secrets in a private house. Never talk secrets in a public park.  If you must talk secrets, talk 'em in a tea shoppe."

in the book the teashop is dim olde English rather than bright American art deco
a sanctum for whispered dark secrets and deplorable sins

Philip MacDonald's "new" short crime and weird fiction collection, Dream No More, comes out in a week, but in the meantime I thought I would take one more look at a couple of famous MacDonald crime novels, separated by 21 years, Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared and The List of Adrian Messenger.  Here we take on Warrant.

When MacDonald published Warrant for X in 1938, it became his first new novel since 1934 and his first new crime novel since 1933. Over those years MacDonald devoted himself to scriptwriting in Hollywood, penning screenplays, for example, to the series detective films Charlie Chan in London (1934) and Charlie Chan in Paris (1935) and Mysterious Mr. Moto and Mr. Moto's Last Warning (both 1938).  He stayed busy and accumulated quite a bit of lucre.  In 1939-40 he would become one of the individuals who worked on the script of Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Rebecca, though how much of his work survived intact in the final script I don't know.  (His name is in the credits.)

This latter fact is appropriate enough, for if Warrant for X is anything, it is Hitchcockian.  Indeed one is surprised that the master evidently never considered filming it.  (It was filmed twice by other directors, in 1939 and 1956.)  Perhaps MacDonald's novel was a bit too similar to Hitchcock's own The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), which Hitch himself apparently liked so much he remade in color in 1956.

Doris Day doesn't sing but a child is endangered in Warrant for X

Warrant for X (it was published first in England under the title The Nursemaid Who Disappeared, but I prefer the terser American title), is nothing if not cinematic.  At around 100,000 words by my count, it's a dense but fleet narrative, with a succession of surprising (and sometimes appalling) happenings to keep the reader engaged.  It also has some of MacDonald's best writing in the crime fiction genre.  In its evocatively sinister depiction of the "sprawling unreason" of late-Thirties London, Warrant is reminiscent of Margery Allingham's later, celebrated postwar thriller, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952).  

At its publication Warrant for X was elevated, especially in the US, into the pantheon of crime fiction classics, along with the author's own earlier serial killer novels Murder Gone Mad (1931) and X v. Rex (1933), aka The Mystery of the Dead Police. (Funnily American publishers later went with the title Warrant for X after having rejected X v. Rex.) In a much-quoted comment American critic Alexander Woollcott declared that Warrant "was the best detective story I have ever read in any language."  Praise can't climb higher than that!

In England the Sunday Mercury proclaimed that MacDonald had "never done anything better" than his latest novel and that the tale was an "aristocrat of a story certain to appeal to the elite and the mob alike."  In the London Observer the esteemed crime fiction reviewer Torquemada commented:

Setting aside the lifelike detecting and the unconventional angle from which it is applied, "The Nursemaid Who Disappeared" scores very heavily, in its last forty or fifty pages, as a thriller of quite masterly suspense.  In fact, those pages are the only ones I have read since I started reviewing detective tales which have produced in me the physical symptoms of anxiety.

that rarest of things 
a thrilling chess problem

Torquemada was right and insightful too.  Warrant for X is rather unique in combining methodical "humdrum" detection with genuine thrills.  Not for nothing is Humdrum Father R. Austin Freeman mentioned in the tale, though somewhat dismissively, for the detection is not really scientific; no one resorts to test tubes in a laboratory.  It's just more methodical investigation, powered by amateur genius sleuth Anthony Gethryn's incisive intuitions.  It's somewhat like Freeman Wills Crofts' Twenties mystery The Box Office Murders, though a great deal more suspenseful and exciting.  Let's go into a bit, shall we?

Although Gethryn functions as the premier sleuth of the tale, its protagonist and male half of the love interest is supplied by an American, Thomas Sheldon Garrett, a writer with a hit play in London.  MacDonald had lived in the States for six years and knew the value of the American market.  

Inspired by a reading of GK Chesterton's novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, he visits the area and ends up in a settle seat in a dim Notting Hill teashop, where he happens to overhear a highly sinister conversation in the adjacent settle between two women, "one short and solid and square...with a subtle suggestion of unperverted masculinity" and "the other tall, slender and with that charm which makes a man want to see the face."

Garrett comes to suspect that the two women are involved in a prospective crime, possibly a kidnapping. (One of them is a nursemaid who is told by the other at one point: "Nobody is going to hurt it."  I always marvel how babies and young children often were referred to as "its" in those days.)  Distressed, he follows the women, never seeing more than their backs, but loses track of them; so off he goes to the police, his artist and society friends, in a rather Hitchcockian scene of social satire, proving themselves useless.  

Just two years before the publication of Warrant for X
Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and murder of the Charles Lindbergh baby
The Lindbergh Case occupied world attention four four years and led to the publication
of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Todd Downing's Vulture in the Sky (1935), and, a few years later in the rear, Warrant for X

Alas, the police don't take him seriously.  There's a stolid and obtuse inspector by the name of Horler, likely a nod to dreckish English crime writer Sydney Horler ("Behind him Garrett's mind could see, ranged in orderly, passive ranks, the ratepayers of Great Britain"), who dismissively suggests that "one of the women had gotten into a scrape of some kind" (i.e., gotten pregnant). Fortunately Garrett's lady friend Avis Bellingham is able persuade him to visit that brilliant amateur sleuth Anthony Gethryn and his wife Lucia.  Anthony always gets his man--or does he?

I don't recall a monstrous hound in this
novel, but there is most certainly a
Napoleon of crime, but the name of Evans.
He knows all; someone should ask him.

Like in all the best thrillers, there seems to be a criminal mastermind--by the name of Evans of all things--plotting a wicked crime, perhaps kidnapping; but Garrett and Gethryn have no idea who the target may be, or who the women in the tea shoppe were, or who this Evans might be.  It's all hideously nebulous.  The only clue is a shopping list left at the teashop....

With this list Gethryn makes some remarkable deductions and the hunt is on in what proves to be a fascinating and frequently frustrating investigation.  MacDonald's merging of the thriller and deductive traditions from classic English mystery strikes me as nothing short of brilliant.  

Mac even tops it off at the climax with the revelation of a truly Christiesque piece of misdirection.  In this novel he dually demonstrates the craftsmanship of a master carpenter and the sleight of hand of a stage magician.  It probably is his finest achievement and the best deductive thriller from the Golden Age.  

Anthony's still his facetious self, but not nearly so much as he was in the early days.  To be sure he says things like this:

"I was born suspecting the doctor.  I shall die indicting the priest." (pretty pithy, that one)

and

"If at first you don't succeed, Pike, pry, pry, pry again." (okay, less so)

and 

"Three little articles belonging to Who.  One gave a message and now there are Two."

to which his wife, Lucia, long used to this sort of thing, replies:

"Whimsical aren't you?" 

the list

But overall he has greater gravitas and makes a truly impressive figure, one fully meriting the doglike devotion of Superintendent Arnold Pike.  MacDonald, who had a daughter himself (then 12 years old), drives home the genuine horror of kidnapping with an emotional force few traditional Golden Age detective novels attempted.  The main reason Garrett is so determined to pin the tail on the crime is that his own nephew was kidnapped (remember, he's American), Gethryn explains to Lucia.  When his nephew finally was returned to his parents "it left half its mind behind it."  

I won't go into detail, but in the final section of the novel you really do, as Torquemada himself did, feel frissons of fear for the sake of the lily-white innocent target of a despicable, inhuman crime.  

MacDonald doesn't hold back much.  Reflecting the time, descriptions of bestial violence are circumspect but our good guys discover too late a dead woman absolutely butchered bloodily to death in her kitchen by the remorselessly merciless Evans.  "Looks like the work of a madman," pronounces an appalled Pike, to which Anthony provocatively retorts: "Who's sane?"  A frustrated Sergeant Mather utters a "Chaucerian word."  I think this is just one of the times MacDonald tried to get the profane oath "Fuck!" into his text, though I'm told Chaucer didn't actually use that particular word in The Canterbury Tales (though he did use queynte, look it up if you need.) 

Throughout the novel MacDonald demonstrates a splendid knack for turns of phrase.  When Gethryn giddily cries, "By gosh! A safety-deposit ticker, by Jing!", the author observes that the "schoolboy oaths...rang with all the brazen fervor of profanities."  This description of a dying man's thoughts is rather poignant I think:

He fell, slowly and floatingly, down into a deep black cavern.  It was soft and warm and enticing in its utter restfulness.  It was death, his mind told him dimly, and he welcomed it and felt, through his absolute relaxation, a small pang of triumph that death was so exactly as he had, alive, always imagined it would be.

Try finding that contemplative flight of death fancy in an Edgar Wallace, let alone a bleeding Sydney Horler.  

I loved this line: "If Daisy Street by day--even in rare sunshine--is a grey and desolate reminder of the calculating bitterness of civilisation, by night its hopelessness is abysmal."  I liked "that drab gallimaufry known as the lower middle-class," even if this has more than a whiff of condescension.  

Throughout Gethryn functions splendidly as that beau ideal of Golden Age detectives, the flippant knight errant who disarmingly restores right to the world and insouciantly vanquishes the forces of evil.  This was probably an unnerving yet ultimately consoling work to read in 1938.  Warrant offers us one of the great investigative triumphs of the Golden Age amateur sleuth.

The modest love interest element is plausible enough and pleasing.  Lucia's presence is light and limited but welcome and nicely etched.  Her and Anthony's son Alan appears, adding poignancy to all the concern about kidnapping.  It is Alan, seeming to have aged very slowly, who makes the ingenuously symbolic observation about repulsive spiders spinning pretty webs.  

There's a little bit here and there indicative of the author's interest in sexually aberrant psychology. Garrett rages: "It doesn't matter a damn, Gethryn, whether it was a sudden woman acquaintance, a man she picked up, or an old friend of either sex! It doesn't matter if it was an hermaphrodite [emphasis added]!"  Another time he writes: "[S]he was a sight to give pleasure to they eye of any young man, and to arouse hope in the breast of those of their elderly brethren who like their women dominant."  What an odd observation, but it won't necessarily surprise a reader steeped in MacDonald crime fiction.  See the forthcoming Dream No More.  There's much in Philip MacDonald's biography I still would give to know.  In his work he evinced interest in dominant women in heterosexual relationships (and occasionally dominant men in homosexual ones).  

Lesley Brook and Peter Coke as Avis Bellingham and Garrett (just Tom Sheldon here)
in The Nursemaid Who Disappeared (1939)

One Night in Laguna: The Dark Wheel (1948), by Philip MacDonald and A. Boyd Correll

American first edition

The page-long authors' blurb on the back of the dust jacket of The Dark Wheel (1948), a suspense novel co-authored by Philip MacDonald and A. Boyd Correll, informs us that the two men "met over a game of chess" and "decided to continue their friendship over a good book," adding: "This is the book."  

The previous year in May 1947 Boyd Correll--his full name was Augustus Boyd Correll, so now you know why as a crime writer he reduced his first name to the single initial "A."--had hosted, with his Turkish born (of American parents), operetta singer wife Helen, a reception for MacDonald's twenty-year-old daughter Caryl when she married a local electrician, so they evidently had indeed become good friends.  

Boyd and his wife Helen, a childless couple, and Philip and his second wife Ruth (Caryl's stepmother) lived about a mile apart in Laguna Beach, California, a small, charming, then remote oceanside community about sixty miles from Hollywood that was home to bohemian, arty types like writers and painters, who didn't want to live in LA.  

Author! Author!

Already in 1952-53 Laguna Beach had an active branch of the Mattachine Society, a pioneering national gay rights organization.  Early Mattachine Society activist Gerry Brissette recalled sweepingly of the city: "Laguna Beach was a community of gays....the mayor was gay, the sheriff was gay, and the librarian was gay.  They just seemed to be running everything and they were very wealthy." 

How deeply Philip MacDonald and Boyd Correll personally absorbed this Laguna Beach bohemian and queer environment is unclear.  Both authors were married men, though Boyd and his wife Helen as mentioned above never had children and Philip's one offspring, his daughter Caryl, he youthfully sired with his first, English wife, Mona, way back in 1926.  

Philip and Mona divorced officially separated eleven later after Mona discovered that Philip had been carrying on an affair of several years with his platinum-blonde Canadian-American secretary, Ruth.  After Philip and Mona divorced, the crime writer married Ruth in 1942.  

Boyd Correll's only crime novel
which he published in 1950

Several of Philip's Fifties short crime tales, all of them included in the forthcoming Stark House collection Dream No More (particularly "His Mother's Eyes," "Fingers of Fear," "Love Lies Bleeding," "The Ticker Tape" and the title story), are remarkable for their frankly queer sexual content.  For his part Boyd in his single solo crime novel, Murder Is an Art (1950), set his queer crimes among Laguna Beach's bohemian arts community.  

Philip, the only child of an actor-playwright and an actress and a grandson of fantasy writer and minister George MacDonald, lived a rather quirky life which seems to have included dropping out of school at the age of sixteen or seventeen to fight in Mesopotamia during the Great War and many other adventures. Smitten with the film industry, Philip at the height of his crime writing career left England for Hollywood in 1932 and remained in the United States until his death in 1980.  

Boyd, who was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on October 2, 1905, making him five years younger than Philip, seemingly trekked down less traveled back roads as well.  A handsome though slightly built (six feet and 145 pounds), blonde and blue-eyed youth, Boyd took business courses at Wofford College in Spartanburg, then worked as a salesman in the jewelry store of his father, for whom he was named, until his father's accidental death in 1930. (The senior A. Boyd Correll fell into an unmarked washout hole in a sidewalk after a torrential rainstorm.) 

English first edition

The next year young Boyd, then 25, moved out to Beverly Hills and somehow became connected with the Laurence D'Orsay literary agency.  When in 1936 he married singer Helen Caldwell, daughter of missionary and math and science professor Samuel Lee Caldwell of International College at Smyrna, Boyd was called a "literary critic of Beverly Hills."  

Boyd is known to have published 27 pulp crime tales over the decade between 1941 and 1951.  During World War Two he worked for Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation in charge of a 200-woman night shift work force.  He also called himself, somewhat vaguely, on the back of the jacket of The Dark Wheel, a "newspaper man, a barnstorming aviator and a writer for Walt Disney Classics."  

So what about the crime novel the two men published together?  The Dark Wheel is a straight suspense novel about Cornelius Van Toller, an insane New York millionaire--is there any other kind--who is dangerously obsessed with Kay Forrester, a stage actress whose play he is backing.  The "dark wheel" refers metaphorically to his madness; when the wheel in his head begins to turn, bad things happen as obstacles to his desires are ruthlessly eliminated.  

The Dark Wheel gets the Fifties
femme fatale treatment

One such obstacle may be Kay's wheelchair-bound husband, Larry Bradford, who was gravely wounded as a pilot in World War Two (another wheel).  There are some others characters in the novel as well, of course, principally Caroline, Van Toller's nervous older sister with a heart condition, his loyal but conscientious manservant Larsen and Kay's Lothario leading man, Denis LeMay, the latter of whom becomes the third point in a sort of love triangle.  

It's a short sparely written novel that moves swiftly to its close; and it reads rather like a film script, which is not surprising, given MacDonald's scripting work in Hollywood for nearly two decades.  (The back of the jacket somewhat misleadingly implies he wrote the script for Hitchcock's Rebecca, when in fact he wrote what was only an initial draft, apparently much altered.)

One can imagine while reading the book what actors might have been cast in a film adaptation: 

Zachary Scott as Dennis LeMay

Cornelius Van Toller: Claude Rains

Caroline Van Toller: Miriam Hopkins

Kay Forrester: Joan Fontaine

Larry Bradford: John Garfield

Denis LeMay: Zachary Scott

A decade after the publication of MacDonald's last thriller published under his own name, Warrant for X, it's a bit disappointing as a novel, but probably Wheel would have made a ripping film.  It's just not as interesting as MacDonald's short fiction at the time, nor for that matter Boyd Correll's own solo novel.  

Stormtroopers: "Wetback" (1956), by William O'Farrell

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best....They're sending people that have lots of problems....They're bringing drugs.  They're bringing crime.  They're rapists.  And some, I assume, are good people."

"I will build a great, great wall on our southern border."

-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, campaign launch speech, June 16, 2015

"Never seen a Mex that wouldn't sooner lie than eat....These goldbricks are no damn good.  Lazy, lying agitators, every goddamn one."

"I had the same sort of job there [in South Korea] as I had here.  Keeping undesirables out."

Carter smiled.  "I hardly think wetbacks can be compared to Chinese Communists."

"What we need is a fence."

Thompson chuckled.  "Couple of months ago the merchants in Brownsville came up with the same idea.  They got all agitated and virtuous about Mexicans crossing over from Matamoras, stealing things and selling marijuana.  Anyway, that was their excuse.  So we got an engineer to design a fence.  Big deal.  It was going to be steel chain with a V arm on top, and a patrol road on the riverside....

"That should have done the trick."

"It didn't.  They thought it over again, and changed their minds.  Decided they wanted to keep the Mexicans  coming over after all.  There was  a lot of yackety-yack about international trust and friendship...but the fact is that they were doing good business with the Mexicans and didn't want to lose their trade.  

"'We need them and they need us'....I don't go for that kind of crap."

Wetback, William O'Farrell, 1956

Seventy-two years ago in the United States, the presidential administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in June 1954 commenced "Operation Wetback" in the country's southern borderland in order to expel from the country undocumented Mexican immigrants, contemptuously dubbed "wetbacks" in an allusion to their allegedly having crossed over the wadeable Rio Grande River to get into the U.S. to find work.  The word likely would not be used as the title of a novel today, even a well-intentioned one.  

Over a single year in 1954-55 about a quarter of a million Mexican nationals were "returned" from the United States to Mexico.  Under the direction of Border Patrol head Harlon Carter, Border Patrol agents--Eisenhower had refused urgent requests to federalize the National Guard--were used to round up masses of Mexican agricultural workers and transfer them back to Mexico. 

By the provisions of the Bracero Program, an agreement between the U. S. and Mexico, Mexican laborers were allowed legal, documented entry into the country; yet Texas farmers frequently objected to the guaranteed wages that they were required to pay to the braceros, parsimoniously preferring illegally to employ "wetbacks" to pick their cotton, okra, etc. at piddling wages.  If the wetbacks got troublesome about it, an anonymous tip could conveniently be provided to Border Patrol agents and the Mexicans would be duly ejected from the country.  

Harlon Carter on horseback

It was a corrupt system and ripe pickings for a liberal/left author like William O'Farrell, who tackled the timely subject in the penultimate novel published during his lifetime, Wetback.  A Dell paperback original ("Dell First Edition"), O'Farrell's novel bears resemblance to provocative works published around this time by authors like Jim Thompson and Erskine Caldwell.  

There's an oversexed, sluttish farmer's daughter by the name of Gloria Jean who goes after any handsome man on the scene (rural southern Texas between McAllen and Brownsville), her coarse father Elwood Hansen (one can almost see Burl Ives in this Big Daddy of a part), whose wife ran off with a handsome virile Mexican, and, with more than a brush of Jim Thompson, a good-looking, blond, sociopathic, racist rapist who is a rising member of the Border Patrol, one Rudolph Valentino Callahan.  (His doting New Jersey mother was a great film fan.)

Harlon carter strutting for the camera

Unlike Jim Thompson, William O'Farrell, who was three years younger than Thompson, never lived in Texas, but before his birth in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904, his railroad executive father, along with his mother and his three older siblings, had lived, like Thompson later would, in Fort Worth, Texas.  As an adult, however, O'Farrell enjoyed a much more cosmopolitan, if wayfaring, life, and resided in New York City and California, toured Europe and, on a mission with the marines, personally witnessed slayings of Haitians during the American military occupation of their country.  Hence was a born a strong liberal/left consciousness that later found expression in his Forties and Fifties crime writing.  

In Wetback the author's disgust as he casts his eyes upon Texas is blatantly evident.  "If a man can't actually be from Texas, seems to me the next best thing he can do is pretend he is," announces the sluttish, racist Gloria Jean, a rich man's spoiled brat if ever there were one.  

The irony is clear, as we see all the abuses heaped daily by the privileged whites upon the powerless Mexicans, even when they need Mexicans--preferably ones with just Spanish blood, like Hansen's foreman Armando Castro, who are deemed "technically white"--to run their farms for them and speak Spanish to the humble laborers.  When Armando vanishes for a time, Hansen has to get his cook Conchita to address his "wetback" workers for him.  

Like Jim Thompson, O'Farrell came to specialize in the depiction of embittered, envious sociopathic men, losers in the capitalist game determined to get ahead at any costs.  In Wetback this toxic male is the aforementioned Rudolph Valentino Callaghan, a handsome but vicious and venal racist and rapist.  (He had been much spoiled by his doting mama, who let him get away with anything.)  

When Rudy becomes a member of the Border Patrol it's ripe pickings for beating up insolent "wetback" men and forcing his unwelcome attentions upon a vexingly virtuous married local Mexican-American woman, Rosa Mayorga.  

After he commits his rape--his first rape--Rudy thinks to himself:

Sometimes...a guy who is fundamentally a right guy is pushed into doing things that, to people who don't know him well, make him look as though he's acting like a heel.  You'd think a guy would be forgiven an occasional mistake.

I'm guessing Rudy with his pathologically oblivious self-pitying self-justification for abusing women would be a big hit on the manosphere today!

At one point in the novel the rich farmer, Hansen, scowls when thinking 

of the airs some of these greasers--the ones who somehow got hold of citizenship papers--had got the habit of giving themselves these past few years....Insisted they were Americans: Latin Americans, if you please.  Wetbacks swim the river, and one way or another find good jobs. They have kids, and the kids are Latin Americans.  They go to school with white kids, and when they grow up they're allowed to vote.  They own farms and businesses, and their wives and daughters get their pictures on the society page of the Valley Sentinel [the local liberal paper which runs editorials against the "stormtrooper" tactics of the Border Patrol].  They'd call themselves Texans, by God, given a chance.    

Mexicans en route to deportation

O'Farrell here incisively points out that the greatest fear of anti-immigrationists is not Latin Americans coming to the United States and failing, but their coming and succeeding.  When you read Wetback, which you should, you are pulled along into the story and want badly for Rudy Callahan simply to fucking die, but you also learn something about a time and place from which we regrettably no longer seem so much to have evolved, if we have evolved at all.

In the novel William O'Farrell allows Christine Peters, the wife of his relatively liberal Border Patrol character, Bill Peters, to voice some liberal sentiments concerning Mexican farm laborers which he himself surely shared:

"They've got so little; it wouldn't be natural if they didn't think we had too much....How can you arrest those poor people?"

Were she alive today perhaps Christine might have dared to protest an ICE operation in Minneapolis--and been shot for her pains.  

Postscript

NRA kingpin and cock of the walk
Hanlon Carter in later years
a half-century after a youthful murder
he thought was forgotten

Later during the Seventies then Border Patrol chief Harlon Carter became a big wheel, Executive Vice President, at the NRA--National Rifle Association--and in that office he was instrumental in shaping the organization's stance toward political opposition to all forms of restrictions on gun rights during the Carter and first Reagan administration. When in 1981 when he was running for reelection it was revealed that Carter, then 17, shot and killed Ramon Casiano, a 15-year-old Mexican boy whom he suspected--wrongly it appears--of knowing something about the theft of his family's car. He pointed a gun at the youth and demanded that he return with him to the Carter home for questioning.  When Casiano refused, Carter shot the but in the chest and killed him.  No autopsy was performed, but there were eyewitness accounts of the affray.  

At his trial Carter was convicted of murder by the jury within thirty minutes.  To the jury the trial judge had disallowed a self-defense claim (Carter claimed that Ramon had drawn a knife), explaining that the defendant had no right to force the boy at gunpoint to come back with him to his home.  

However, the Texas Court of Appeals overturned the conviction, claiming that the judge's instruction on self-defense was in error.  In 1981 Carter refused to talk about the case when it made the news again, except to say that he had nothing whatsoever to apologize for about his  actions.  It appears that he altered his name from "Harlan" to "Harlon" to obscure his background as a man tried and convicted (initially) of murder.  

Not long before he died, nearly eighty years old, in 1991, Carter wrote an article in the wake of the Los Angeles Rodney King riots condemning people (black people) taking the law into their own hands.  Carter's newspaper obituary, carried across the United States, omitted to mention the Ramon Casiano killing. Carter's replacement at the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, said of his predecessor that Carter's vision had 

transformed the National Rifle Association into the nation's largest and most effective defender of the Second Amendment....America's 70 million law-abiding gun owners largely owe their freedom to own firearms for hunting, competitive shooting and self-defense to one man--Harlon Carter.  he was our champion and fiercest warrior.  

What a truly American success story: a white youth kills a Mexican boy and grows up, as the dead boy molders forgotten in his grave having left not even a photo behind him, to head the border patrol and serve as Executive Vice President of the NRA, preaching all the while about the virtues of law and order.  

President Reagan shows off his piece before beaming Hanlon Carter (third from left)
Wayne LaPierre possibly lurking in background. He always had to be in the picture.

Ramon Casiano was memorialized in 2016, during the first Trump presidential campaign, in the timely song of the name by the Drive-By Truckers.  Pictures of his much-honored murderer, Hanlon Carter, illustrate this review.  Old Hanlon certainly liked his guns and his uniform.  

Harlan Carter as he was then known
in Laredo High School in 1928,
three years before he shot
and killed Ramon Casiano

So did, for that matter, William O'Farrell's Rudy Callahan, of whom the author writes on the first page of Wetback:

He was a young man, tall and blond, with regular, strong features and a tanned skin which stretched tightly  over high cheekbones.  Small green eyes set a little too close together and not precisely on a level did not, at first glance, detract materially from his good looks.  He wore his olive-green uniform as though he had never known civilian clothes.  He looked like a man who had everything under control, which was what he intended--and which was almost one hundred percent untrue.

The pretense of toxic boy-men having everything under control--how like Donald Trump and his male courtiers.  

Here's "Ramon Casiano" by the Drive-By Truckers.