Todd Downing on Nicholas Blake (and Nigel Strangeways)

Todd Downing (1902-1974)
the Choctaw Nation's contribution
to Golden Age detective fiction writing
--he also reviewed the stuff

Todd Downing reviewed Nicholas Blake's debut detective novel, A Question of Proof, in August 1935, a few months before Blake reviewed (and raved) Downing's Vultures in the Sky (see the Blake post below).  Like a commenter on this blog, he found Blake's detective, Nigel Strangeways, grating, but he liked Blake's writing very  much otherwise and recommended the tale:

....Likewise, we were tepid about the amateur sleuth, Nigel Strangeways--answered examination questions at Oxford with limericks, found the Duchess of Esk’s diamonds, likes tea and lots of bedclothes, murmurs, “Mon dieu, quel hulerberlu!" Quel, I might even say say, toho-bohu!”--although we are assured that “he is a simple soul, really.”

As frequently happens, superlatively good writing minimizes first novel defects....

Nicholas Blake/Cecil Day Lewis
 (1904-1972)
prominent exponent of
classical amateur detection

The full review, along with nearly three hundred more, is found in my book Clues and Corspes: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing. Todd Downing and Nicholas Blake were nearly exact contemporaries, Downing having been born two years before Blake and dying two years after him.

Of course Nigel Strangeways was Nicholas Blake's contribution to the Golden Age facetious gentleman detective breed, so popularized by Dorothy L. Sayers, S. S. Van Dine, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, among others. I like Blake's detective fiction, though I must concede that Raymond Chandler complained about Strangeways too (and Strangeways' brilliant explorer wife for that matter). Downing's primary series sleuth, Customs Agent Hugh Rennert, isn't tough like Chandler's private eye Marlowe, but he is more down-to-earth than them toffs!

The Country House Murders of "Edgar Box": Death Before Bedtime (1953)

In part one of the piece on Gore Vidal's Edgar Box mysteries, originally published in the 1950s, I wrote about their origin as the joint brainchild of Gore Vidal and Victor Weybright (publisher of Signet paperbacks) and then went into some detail on the first one, Death in the Fifth Position, which is the most pronounced of the three in what might be termed outre subject matter (especially in the 1950s).  Although the last two Boxes, Death Before Bedtime (1953) and Death Likes It Hot (1954), both include coital couplings between Vidal's amateur detective, Peter Cutler Sargeant II, and lady friends of the moment, on the whole the sex element (certainly the gay sex element) is toned down somewhat and there is a more concentrated focus on detection.  While neither novel, particularly Bedtime,  has as memorable characters as those in Fifth Position's ballet company (who tend to dance away with the tale), both books are more successful than Fifth Position as true detective novels.  And both books admirably display the wickedly satirical writing that graced the first. Both are herewith recommended.  Bedtime is reviewed here, Hot in the last installment.

Death in the Fifth Position belongs to what surely is a tiny subgenre, the ballet mystery/thriller (as additional examples there's the three novels published from 1937-1940 by Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon and Lucy Cores' Corpse de Ballet, 1944, available from Rue Morgue Press).  Death Before Bedtime and Death Likes it Hot, on the other hand, essentially are country house mysteries of the sort most commonly associated today with Agatha Christie, with a slightly hard-boiled twist.

Although it is the fashion today in many circles to disparage Agatha Christie and her novels, Vidal, like John Updike (see this earlier piece by me) admires Christie as a writer.  During an interview last year conducted between Gore Vidal and Stephen Heyman of the New York Times ("Gore Vidal, P. I."), the following exchange took place:

England's Queen of Crime
influenced "Edgar Box"

Heyman: Agatha Christie is a particularly strong influence in these books.
Vidal: In everybody's books.  Don't single me out.

Heyman: And there's also one passing reference to Holmes...
Vidal: I like Christie because I thought she was a great naturalist--those are real villages she writes about--and it's fascinating.  I used to like to read not for the mysteries but I read her for the characters.  They are of no use to an American writer, but anyway they are very nice to read.

Heyman: Edmund Wilson called detective stories a vice that "ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles."
Vidal: I don't think mystery stories are any lower than stories of how George and Emily failed to get status at the university or to English department politics.  That to me is about as tedious as it can get in print.  

P. D. James, for example, has credited Dorothy L. Sayers with effectively portraying an English village in her 1930s detective novel The Nine Tailors, but contrarily she often has scoffed at the notion that anyone could find much to praise in the writing of Agatha Christie; so it was quite pleasing to me, as an admirer of such English village mystery tales by Christie as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and A Murder Is Announced (1950), to see a literary titan like Gore Vidal come to Christie's defense (the last of these Christie novels, incidentally, even includes a quite effective portrayal of a lesbian couple).

Christie "cozy" mysteries
often are quite satirical

And Vidal says he read Christie "not for the mysteries," but "for the characters"!  Himself a brilliant satirist, Vidal appreciates that there in fact is fine satire in Christie's village mysteries.  What would journalists who have written so condescendingly of Christie's novels--such as Rachel Cooke ("hack-work") and Lindsay Duguid ("One can hardly bear to read on")--say of Gore on this score?  That this "upstart" doesn't know good writing when he sees it?

Christie's influence can be seen in both the Edgar Box books under review here (there is also a healthy splash of Christie's purported antithesis, Raymond Chandler).  Basically these two Box novels are 1950s American versions of the stylized closed-circle English house-party mysteries of the Golden Age of detective fiction (roughly 1920 to 1940), of which Christie today is the most renowned exemplar.

Death Before Bedtime takes place in the Washington, D.C. mansion of an unscrupulous, ultra-conservative Midwestern senator with presidential aspirations, Death Likes It Hot in the Hamptons "beach house" of a socially ambitious matron.  In both cases Vidal's amateur detective, publicist Peter Sargeant, is hired by the mansion owner to do a publicity job and thus is conveniently on hand when murder inevitably strikes (under the circumstances it's surprising the police don't come to suspect that Sargeant is a serial murderer).

Senator Thomas Pryor Gore (1870-1949)
Gore Vidal's maternal grandfather

Gore Vidal's maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore (1870-1949), was a prominent United States senator from Oklahoma.  T. P. Gore began his political career as a Populist Democrat but later became an isolationist in foreign affairs, opposing America's entry into World War One under Woodrow Wilson,  and in the 1930s criticizing much of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (FDR engineered Senator Gore's defeat in 1936, when Gore Vidal was eleven years old).

Vidal himself today sounds rather like his famous grandfather on foreign affairs, though less like him on other matters.  He also appears to have idolized his grandfather.  In contrast, Vidal despised his egocentric, tipply and flighty (as he portrays her) mother, Nina Gore Vidal, who divorced his father and later, through her second marriage, ultimately became inter-connected with the Kennedy family (see Vidal's 1995 memoir).

This material is brought into Bedtime in rather an interesting way by Gore Vidal.  Leander Rhodes, the villainous Midwestern senator who is murdered in the novel (by explosives planted in his fireplace) would not appear really to be a portrait of Thomas P. Gore, but it sure seems to me that Senator Rhodes' dissipated daughter Ellen was inspired by Vidal's mother Nina.

Gore Vidal

Bedtime opens memorably with Ellen Rhodes and the always ready and willing Peter Sargent about to commence copulation on a D.C.-bound train:

"You know, I've never gone to bed with man on a train before," she said, taking off her blouse.
"Neither have I," I said, and I made sure that the door to the compartment was securely locked.
"What innocents we are," she sighed, then: "I wish I had a drink."

This gives you a pretty good idea of Ellen.

On the whole, it must be admitted, the characters in Bedtime are less interesting than those in Fifth Position, despite Vidal's own fascinating background among the country's political elite; yet Ellen Rhodes makes up for any deficiencies in this regard.

After Senator Rhodes is messily blown up in his own study, the guests in his home act as all guests should in a proper country house mystery, where death essentially is a game.

In short they're blase.  Explains Peter Sargeant:

I was surprised at how calmly the guests took the sudden, extraordinary turn in their affairs...especially Ellen, who was the coolest of the lot.
"Do fix me a Scotch," she said....I sat beside Ellen on an uncomfortable love seat....
"This is awful," I said inadequately, conventionally.
"I should hope to hell it is," said Ellen, guzzling Scotch like a baby at its mother's breast.

Ellen quickly loses interest in Peter and begins pursuing another eligible young male, a virginal writer for an advanced leftist intellectual magazine that was doing an expose on Senator Rhodes when the Senator suddenly and violently expired.  Here is more frank repartee between Peter and the not-so-blushing Ellen:

"By the way, have you gotten into the Langdon boy yet?"
"What an ugly question!" she beamed; then she shook her head.  "I haven't had time.  Last night would have been unseemly...I mean after the murder.  This afternoon I was interrupted."
"I think he's much too innocent for the likes of you."
"Stop it...you don't know about these things.  He's rather tense, I'll admit, but they're much the best fun...the tense ones."
"What a bore I must have been."

grandfather and grandson

Not for nothing is the cover of the Black Lizard edition of Bedtime illustrated by a woman's eyes looking out of a brandy snifter!  The fantastically uninhibited Ellen is something of a female version of Louis from Death in the Fifth Position.  Still, there is barbed humor directed at other subjects besides (I think) Vidal's mother.  Note this bit:

I found [Camilla] off by herself in a corner of the drawing room, studying the latest issue of Harper's Bazaar.  She was reading the thin ribbon of text which accompanies the advertisements; this thin ribbon was, I could see, the work of the latest young novelist: it concerned a young boy in Montgomery, Alabama, who killed nine flies in as many minutes on the eve of the Fourth of July...I had read it earlier, being of a literary turn (though I belong to the older literary generation of Carson McCullers and have never quite absorbed the newcomers even though they take mighty nice photographs).

Truman Capote
Gore Vidal was not his number one fan

Perhaps needless to say, another one of Gore Vidal's great dislikes (besides his mother), extending back over half a century now, is In Cold Blood author Truman Capote (1924-1984).

It looks like in Bedtime Vidal handed "Edgar Box" a stiletto to deftly stick between Capote's ribs!

But what of the mystery, you may well be asking, at this late point in the review?  I found the detection in Bedtime superior to that offered in Fifth Position. Though the later section again is too huddled, here Vidal makes more serious stabs at clueing.  There certainly are plenty of suspects as well, including, in classic fashion, a butler and a private secretary (John Dickson Carr warned readers to watch out for those private secretaries).

I thought the ending was a surprise, though in retrospect I should have seen it, which is always a nice feeling with a detective novel. And Vidal does provide some real--and rather subtle--clues.

In Death Before Bedtime Vidal shows he was learning the game--and playing it. In my view, he went on to produce the best of the Edgar Box bunch with his last mystery, Death Likes It Hot. See my next blog post for more!

Gore-y Death: The Edgar Box Detective Novels of Gore Vidal, Part 1

Death legs it

Although not, to be sure, exactly on the level, in terms of fame and repute, as the works of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the short "Edgar Box" series of  detective novels by the distinguished man of letters Gore Vidal--Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death Before Breakfast (1953) and Death Likes it Hot (1954)--also is not exactly forgotten, either.  The novels were frequently reprinted over the years since their original publication, but as of last year they had been out of print for two decades.  Now all three of the Box novels have been brought back in stylish new paperback editions by Vintage Books' Black Lizard imprint--you know, the one that also brings us Hammett and Chandler, as well as Ross Macdonald (No slouch, that Black Lizard!).

Girls with Guns: a Signet combo

Are Gore Vidal's mysteries on the exalted level of Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald? The blunt answer (and Gore Vidal himself is nothing if not blunt) is no.  Gore Vidal himself terms them potboilers, claiming that each was written in eight days, in order to earn money after the critical shunning he received over the publication of his pioneering gay novel The City and the Pillar in 1948.  This story has always struck me as exaggerated: The City and the Pillar was a bestselling book and Vidal's novels continued to be reviewed in the following years in the New York Times Book Review--some of them favorably.  Still, there's no question they did not sell like The City and the Pillar--controversy could do wonders for a novel's sales back then just like today--and Vidal needed needed money, especially after buying a stately 1820 New York Greek Revival mansion in 1950.  

"SPILLANE IN MINK"
the sort of blurb
for which publishers yearn

Happily, along came Victor Weybright, the publisher of Signet Books (what Vidal calls "an extremely adventurous paperback series"), with the suggestion that Vidal write mysteries, in the style of Mickey Spillane, who was making a fortune for Signet with his racy and violent Mike Hammer novels.  These would be reprinted in paperback by Signet, with the same sort of titillating covers Signet used for books not only by Spillane, but also for higher-browed authors such as James M. Cain, Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner.  According to Vidal, Weybright declared that with a salacious cover he could sell any book, even a "nearly unreadable" William Faukner novel like Absalom, Absalom!--though comprehensible sex and violence in the text was a plus. These Signet covers are fascinating mementos of the literary culture in the 1950s: the sort of stuff that could get Congressional committees all hot and bothered but that sold books like hotcakes.

Spillane's canny combination of sex and
violence--along with steamy illustrations--
had paperbacks flying off shelves

In the Edgar Box detective novels Gore Vidal seems not to have been interested in violence (he loathed Mickey Spillane), but he did supply the desired sex (the name Edgar Box, by the way, was derived in part from a famous "Edgar"--Vidal thought Poe, while Weybright thought Wallace).  In short, Gore Vidal clearly did his best to live up to Signet's reputation in the sex line! Ultimately the Box series as a whole is most interesting for the sex elements, plus the lightly biting, satirical tone Vidal adopts.  To be sure, as detective novels the Boxes are pikers compared to the great Dame Agatha, or, for that matter, to the hard-boiled boys Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald; though it must be conceded they do show improvement as detective novels over the course of the series (Death Before Bedtime and Death Likes It Hot will be discussed in part 2).

John Kriza of the American Ballet Theatre
was one of Gore Vidal's ballet interests

Because of knee damage he sustained while serving on a ship based in Alaska during World War Two, Gore Vidal after the war took ballet lessons as restorative therapy.  During this time he became interested in ballet and ballet dancers--particularly male ones.  With dancer Harold Lang Vidal had an affair, discussed in the 1995 Vidal memoir, Palimpsest, which also shows a photo of Vidal on the beach with John Kriza, best known for dancing the lead role in Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid.  I wondered whether Louis Giraud, the most memorable character in Death in the Fifth Position, might have been partly drawn from Lang and Kriza, but Vidal does not say.  However, Lang was known as "the Beast of the Ballet" according to Vidal, which certainly accords with the character of Louis (on this matter see below)!

Death in the Fifth Position concerns a rash of violent demises afflicting the Grand St. Petersburg Ballet Company while it is performing at the New York City Metropolitan Opera House.  Vidal's amateur detective in this novel and its two sequels is the brash P.R. man Peter Cutler Sargeant II, Pacific War veteran and Harvard graduate.  Vidal himself saw neither actual fighting in World War Two nor a Harvard degree (he published his first novel at the age of twenty), but in other ways he seems rather similar to Peter Sargeant. Like Vidal, Sargeant has a biting wit and he despises fifties Red-baiters and American police in general.  Here's Sargeant (i.e., Vidal, on the subject):

I have a dislike of policemen which must be the real thing since I've never had anything to do with them up to until now, outside of the traffic courts.  There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of a group of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

Gore Vidal and a really big ship
(not the one on which he served in WWII)

Sargeant also resembles Gore Vidal in being a sexual swordsman, though Sargeant's conquests are female and Vidal's were male (of Harold Lang's promiscuity during the time of their relationship, Vidal in Palimpsest writes: "This hardly bothered me, since I was almost as promiscuous as Harold"). Sargeant's frequent couplings with the ballerina Jane Garden and Jane's fetching physical features are described at length by Vidal.  

Yet much of the historical value of Death in the Fifth Position stems from the gay subject matter, which is rather remarkably detailed for the 1950s.  The star male ballet dancer Louis Giraud--who, we are informed, "started life as  a longshoreman in Marseilles"--hits on every attractive man who crosses his sight and it seems that for most men resistance is futile.  To his displeasure Sargeant becomes Louis' particular object of interest over the course of the murder investigation.  This is humorously treated by Vidal, in contrast to how one imagines Spillane would have handled it (one suspects Mike Hammer would have killed Louis in some particularly unpleasant fashion).  Here's a bit of conversation between Sargeant and his girlfriend of the moment, Jane, about Louis, which should demostrate how this novel must have been quite spicy in the day:

"[Louis] pads, you know."

"He what?"

"You know...like a falsie: well, they say he wears one too, when he's in tights."

"Oh, no, he doesn't," I said, remembering my little tussle with the ballet's glamour boy.

"You, too?"  She sat bolt upright.

"Me too what?

"He didn't...go after you, too, did he?"

"Well as a matter of fact he did but I fought him off."  And I told her the story of how I had saved my honor.

She was very skeptical.  "He's had every boy in the company... even the ones who like girls...I expect he's irresistible."

"I resisted."

this Signet cover gives full force
to the phrase "a come hither look"

Even detection purist Jacques Barzun praised Louis in Death in the Fifth Position ("There is...one extreme parody of a homosexual bruiser-type dancer, which is really funny because free from sniggering"), so Louis apparently is irresistible--at least as a comic character, anyway.  There are some other good amusing characters too, particularly the "elderly" (she's 51) prima ballerina assoluta, Anna Eglanova. Unfortunately the detection is not so good.  Vidal indulges himself in what can only be called an information dump near the end of the novel.  Sargeant intuits the solution (heck, who couldn't at this point), but he has no proof, since the whole thing is conjectural.  So Vidal allows his hero to literally stumble over the proof he needs. This is kind of unsatisfying if you are a detection fan!  Vidal takes the easy way out in this respect, but after all he was just a beginner in this one.

Gore Vidal (alias Edgar Box)
 gets the Signet treatment

So in all honesty I cannot recommend Death in the Fifth Position as a tale of detection.  Yet I can recommend it as an entertaining satirical 1950s American novel.  In its witty depiction of sexual farce in a ballet company confronting a murder investigation, it gives us an interesting picture of the fifties that we don't get on television!  As Peter Sargeant puts it:

[I]t's all very confusing and I intend one day to sit down and figure the whole thing out. It's like that poem of Auden's, one of whose quatrains goes:

Louis is telling Anne what Molly

Said to Mark behind her back;

Jack likes Jill who worships George

Who has the hots for Jack.

Kind of flip but the legend of our age.

this dame means trouble year round

In part 2, I will discuss Death Before Bedtime and Death Likes it Hot, where sexual content (particularly gay sexual content) is reduced and the detection, coincidentally or not, improved.  In Bedtime, Gore Vidal lets his satirical eye wander over to the political world of Washington, D. C., while in Hot, he takes on the upper crust society of the Hamptons.  Both novels essentially are country house mysteries in the classical English tradition, with the difference that both the men and women in them are something less... inhibited, shall we say?

For more on Edgar Box, see my reviews of Death Before Bedtime and Death Likes It Hot.

Forgotten Novel: Crime in Corn Weather (1935), by Mary Meigs Atwater

"Corn as high as an elephant's eye"--I was reminded of this line by this forgotten mystery novel from 1935: Crime in Corn Weather, by Mary Meigs Atwater.  Though the line comes from the musical Oklahoma! I don't see why it shouldn't appy to Iowa as well, especially after reading Atwater's book.  The atmosphere of corn is so palpable that as you read you feel it all around you...As in fact do the citizens of the town of Keedora, Iowa, the setting of the novel:

Keedora lay like an island in a sea of corn that lapped at the fringes of the town. Houses that ventured out only a little way beyond the concrete, the iron lampposts, and the clipped lawns were overwhelmed in it--a vast green tide that stood half-roof high like a tidal wave about to break.

smoldering, baby-killing, soul-sickening weather

Atwater describes "corn weather" as "smoldering, baby-killing, soul-sickening weather." Corn may thrive in that sort of weather, but humans don't. Yet excitement comes to enervated Keedora citizens when Will Breen, "president of the People's State Bank, ex-mayor, and prominent citizen"--disappears.  Like banker Mr. Potter of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), for whom he could have served as a prototype, Will Breen is hated by everyone in his home town, so if he's been murdered (and he has--readers are shown the killing at the beginning of the novel), there's no shortage of suspects. Heading the list is his nephew, Harold, whose inheritance Will was to control until Harold turned 25.

I'd say "Murder is Corny"
but Rex Stout beat me to it

Atwater does a fine job of portraying life in small Iowa farm town in the 1930s.  She shows how a murder is, first and foremost, just plain exciting to the locals, especially when the victim is Will Breen, someone no one liked anyway, not even his mother, old (she's all of seventy) Grandma Breen.  Although, in contrast with some of the people who have read Corn Weather (it was reprinted in 1992 by Interweave Press--see left--but since forgotten), I do not see the book as a comic novel, there are some excellent sardonic passages about the townspeople's reaction to the "tragedy" in their corny midst.

When a spade is discovered that might have been used to bury Will Breen in a shallow grave somewhere in the cornfields, there's considerable morbid fascination among the townspeople:

The spade was carried, in great excitement, to the sheriff's office.  For months it might have been seen there, standing in a corner against the wall.  Perhaps it is still there. Mrs. Belinda Blum, the Woman's Club poetess, wrote a sonnet to it, beginning:

O implement of honest, useful toil,
To what dread use hast thou been put, alas!

She sent the poem to the Bugle and it appeared, in a neat box of black lines, in the middle of the editorial page on the day of the great mass-search for the "corpus delecti," and it was later copied by many papers all over the country.  So it was to William Breen that Mrs. Blum owed her literary triumph.  She later delivered a paper on "The Art of Poesie" before the Woman's Club in which she explained just why she had decided on "implement of honest, useful toil" rather than "honest implement of useful toil" or "useful implement of honest toil."  It made a very profound impression.

I was reminded at times of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street. although I would say Atwater's satire is more affectionate than condescending (Atwater ultimately is more Willa Cather than Sinclair Lewis).  She seems genuinely to like many of the people in the town and to have sympathy for their troubles.  Among others we have:

Grandma Breen, forced to endure the indignities of her cold son gradually taking over her house;

Norman Jeffers, a Great War veteran who never recovered from his battlefield experiences (he sneers in disgust when someone mentions his local medal ceremony of long ago);

Milly Slater, the nice young woman "in trouble" who in desperation visits an abortionist (the harrowing aftermath of this visit is directly described by the author: the patient, suffering from hemorrhages, is bundled out of the house by family members, the abortionist all the while demanding that the bedsheets the girl is wrapped in be returned to her). To allude to out-of-wedlock pregnancy and even abortion by a "nice" middle-class girl in a mystery genre novel from the 1930s is extremely unusual in my reading experience.

In addition to her bluntness on sexual matters and her strong grasp of setting and character, the author has a nice touch with prose imagery.  See, for example, this passage that comes from the section of the novel detailing Keedora's carnival-like "corpus delecti" hunt, for which practically every citizen--man, woman and child--has turned out:

The big ice-cream freezers standing under a tree were guarded by a severe woman armed with a long spoon, who was holding off with difficulty the usual swarm of small boys that always gathers about a parked ice-cream freezer as fruit flies gather to a basket of grapes.

Gradually, it dawns on us that Crime in Corn Weather is less a a detective novel than a novel about a murder and its impact on a community (and that impact isn't quite what W. H. Auden--see his "The Guilty Vicarage" essay--thinks it should be!).  In fact Corn Weather is more an inverted crime novel, with memorable rural local color (pretty early on the reader should realize who the murderer is, by the author's intent).  It is well worth reading as such--just don't expect an Agatha Christiesque clue puzzle!

Mary Meigs Atwater (1878-1956) and son

Who was Mary Meigs Atwater (1878-1956)?  A granddaughter of Montgomery C. Meigs (1816-1892), Quartermaster General of the United States during the American Civil War, she was born in Illinois but raised in Iowa and educated in design at the Chicago Art Institute and in Paris.

After marrying mining engineer Maxwell W. Atwater, she traveled with him around the American West, Mexico and South America, after his death settling permanently in Montana, where she organized a nationally influential hand loom weavers' guild (today she is known as "the dean of American handweaving").

According to Linda Ligon of Interweave Press, author of the preface to the 1992 reprint edition of Crime in Corn Weather Atwater was fascinated with the criminal mind and "frequented the scenes of violent crimes, attended local trials, and wrote 'whodunits' and articles for True Crime magazine in the wee hours of the morning, after finishing her work for the Shuttle-Craft Guild of American Handweavers."

Linda Ligon comments that Crime in Corn Weather "doesn't fit into either of the major mystery genres of the day--the 'tough guy' stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler or the bucolic 'cozies' of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayer [sic]." Of course there were many, many mystery novels of the day that did not fit "cozily" into these two "genres" (and I dispute the claim that all the novels by Christie and Sayers were bucolic cozies), but Crime in Corn Weather is still something out of the common rut.

Reading Crime in Corn Weather--a small number of copies of the reprint edition can still be found at low prices--is educational as well as entertaining.  Try it!

Note: For more on Mary Meigs Atwater, see the Thrums blog.--The Passing Tramp.

"As Flat and Artificial as a Picture Postcard?" Maigret in Holland (1931), by Georges Simenon

Maigret had only a faint idea of what it was all about when he arrived one May afternoon in Delfzijl, a small town squatting on the low coast in the extreme northeast of the Netherlands....

So begins one of my favorite Maigret mysteries by that publishing phenomenon Georges Simenon (1903-1989).

Un Crime en Holland is the eighth of ten (ten!) Maigret crime novels Simenon published in 1931, although it was not published in English until 1940, under the title of, naturally enough, A Crime in Holland, translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury.  Since 1980 it has been published in Britain and the United States under the title Maigret in Holland, evidently in an attempt to distinguish  the novel as one of the Maigret series, rather than one of Simenon's roman durs, or hard ("noir") novels*

*(note: the publishing history detail above is drawn from the fantastic Maigret website).

So, why do I like this novel so much?

Three reasons, I think: first, Simenon's portrayal of the Dutch setting; second, the novel's resemblance to a classical British mystery, which is much more pronounced than what one usually encounters in the Maigret series; and third, though the novel is written in Simenon's rather spare early style (and a new English translation is badly needed), there is in it some interesting character psychology and wit.

Maigret is in Holland semi-officially, to look into the shooting death of a native that has involved a French citizen, Professor Jean Duclos, a distinguished criminologist traveling on a lecture tour through northern Europe.  On page two, we are given a list provided by Duclos to Maigret of the victim, Conrad Popinga, a teacher of cadets on the training ship at Delfzijl, and potential suspects in the killing: Liesbeth Popinga, his wife, daughter of the headmaster of a lycee in Amsterdam; Any van Elst, Liesbeth's younger sister, a would-be professional woman recently awarded a law degree; and Beetje Liewens, a nearby farmer's daughter.

Maigret soon discovers additional suspects, including the father of the fetching Beetje and Cornelius ("Cor"), a cadet on the training ship possibly infatuated with her.  Then there are the actual material clues, the butt of a Manila cigar and a sailor's cap left at the scene of the crime....Could the killer have been someone from Popinga's past life as a captain in the merchant service?

This is one Maigret that actually could have used a house floor plan (plans are referred to in the text, but we never see them).  Popinga was shot outside his house by someone, the police believe, in the house. The logistics of who was where when come under serious scrutiny; and they do matter, though Maigret seems to discount those clues of the cap and the cigar and psychology plays an important role in his deductions.  In the closing chapters Maigret even stage manages a reenactment of the night of the murder.

When writing Maigret in Holland Simenon seems to have been thinking of the more classical style, clue-oriented English detective novel, for in the book he includes satire about the methodical, materialistic, scientific detective, as represented by the criminologist, Professor Duclos. The Great Man condescends to Maigret at every turn. Simenon portrays Duclos as a pompous ass of an intellectual, arrogantly certain that he can reduce crime investigation to an exact scientific formula.  We enjoy seeing him naturally getting his ultimate comeuppance at the hands of Maigret.

Maigret in Holland also is of interest for Simenon's portrayal of the straitlaced, conservative, bourgeois Dutch community in which Maigret uncomfortably finds himself. Fans of classical English detection often maintain that the incongruity of murder in genteel surroundings heightens reader interest in the story, and I think Maigret in Holland supports this contention. Certainly Simenon himself through his character Maigret seems to express such a point of view:

Georges Simenon

Such quiet, such serenity--it was almost too perfect, so perfect that it was difficult for a Frenchman to believe that life here was life at all.  Was it?  Or was it all as flat and artificial as a picture postcard?

Turning his back on that scene to study the town, [Maigret] was faced by well-built, well-painted houses, windows beautifully clean, curtains spotless, cactuses on every windowsill.  But what was behind those windows?

Raymond Chandler thought murder needed to be taken out of the Venetian vase and dropped into the alley, but what happens when murder shatters one of those fine Venetian vases (or perhaps in this case we should say a Delft vase)?  Maigret of course eventually answers the question of what messy things went on behind those pristine Dutch windows--to his own satisfaction, if not that of the local inhabitants:

Early next morning Maigret took the 5:05 from the small station at Delfzijl.  He was alone. Nobody had thanked him. Nobody had come to see him off.

There's Death in Them Thar Hills: Nightshades (1984), by Bill Pronzini

Leaving the fictional southern California coast, I hitched up to the fictional northern California mountains.  Then I rode fictive rails to some much less hard-boiled, far more genteel locales in the northeastern Unites States: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, New England.  Then it was across the Atlantic to old England (on a tramp steamer of course).  A lot to tell you the next couple of weeks about my travels in crime literature.--The Passing Tramp

Bill Pronzini's Nightshades takes us from The Barbarous Coast of Ross Macdonald to the mountains and lakes of northern California.  Pleasingly, Nightshades is a real detective story, with true detection and deductions--and not just on the part of Pronzini's Nameless Detective.

English edition of Nightshades
(Severn House, 1984)

Nightshades dates from the 1980s, when Bill Pronzini was writing some very clever tales and expanding the emotional range of his Nameless Detective through, among other things, the character of Nameless' girlfriend, Kerry Wade.  In Nightshades, Kerry accompanies Nameless on his trip to Musket Creek (formerly Ragged-Ass Gulch), an isolated Gold Rush ghost town near the Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area, 250 miles north of San Francisco and twenty miles from Weaverville, "the nearest town of any size."

Weaverville, twenty miles from fictional Musket Creek
("Ragged-Ass Gulch")

California gulch

Musket Creek, pop. 16, is being "threatened" by developers who want to turn the ghost town into a tourist attraction.  The individualistic locals differ from the commercially ambitious developers, vehemently objecting to any such encroachment from the business world. Recently some of the historic buildings in the hamlet have burned down in suspicious fires. When one of the developers dies in a house fire, Nameless is called in to investigate the death by the Great Western Insurance Company (there's a matter of a "double indemnity" policy).  If the man died from arson, the suspects certainly include the denizens of Musket Creek, but there also may be a number of other suspects as well....

In some ways Nameless differs from his great hard-boiled predecessors.  The first chapter of Nightshades is full of complaints from Nameless about secondhand smoke, his struggles with dieting and his fear of dangerous curves (on roads, not blondes).  It's hard to picture this litany being recited by the Op, Spade or Marlowe (of course who, based on films at least, would expect Marlowe to smoke a pipe or play chess?).  But then Nameless at this point has passed through the sensitive seventies, so we could hardly expect him to be other than he is ("Some tough guy I was," he comments ruefully at one point).

Was this what Kerry was reading?

And the truth is, it all makes a nice contrast.  I enjoyed following Nameless' relationship with Kerry and was pleased to see her contribute as much as she did to the solution to the mystery.  Not for nothing are we informed at one point that Kerry is lying on the bed of their hotel room "reading a mystery novel by somebody named Muller" (a terrific inside joke).

Besides the mystery plotting and the byplay between Nameless and Kerry I quite enjoyed the smart-alecy, quite Chandleresqe narration by Nameless.  Some examples:

She let me look her over for about five seconds, while she did the same to me.  I was more impressed by what I saw than she was, but not by much.  Her expression was even more snooty than it had seemed in the photograph.

She went out of the room through a doorway beyond the fireplace, rolling her hips a little the way she had on the way in.  It wasn't an exaggerated roll, but I thought that it was deliberate.  Whatever her reasons, Helen O'Daniel was about as subtle as an elephant's hind end.

He was annoying me again.  I still hadn't managed to work up an active dislike for him, but I was getting closer to it.  It wouldn't be long now.

But Nameless' hard-boiled routine ("Philip Marlowe, circa 1940") doesn't always pan out, as during his interrogation of the denizens of a...beauty shop:

I put on a little more tough-guy for them, in the form of a glower, and it would have worked out fine if the damned salon smell hadn't been so strong in there.  I sneezed in the middle of a glower, none too quietly, and scared hell out of them and me both.

You'll be glad to know that Nameless makes it out of the beauty shop alive.  What happens to him, though, in rustic, roiling Ragged-Ass Gulch?  Read Nightshades and find out.  I enjoyed my stay and I think you will too.

Life's a Beach, Then You Die: The Barbarous Coast (1956), by Ross Macdonald

The Passing Tramp is still passing time in California--the California of hard-boiled fiction that is.  He's just been on the coast with Ross Macdonald, and he'll soon be hitching up to the mountains to see Bill Pronzini.

The cleverly titled The Barbarous Coast is the sixth Lew Archer detective novel by Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) and the last, I believe, of his more Chandler-derivative tales.  Beginning, I would argue, with The Doomsters (1958) and certainly by The Galton Case (1959) Macdonald definitively established a voice independent of the Chandler-Hammett tradition. Since Kevin Burton Smith puts it so well at thrillingdetective.com, I will quote his words:

The Galton Case became a watershed, both personally and artistically, in Millar's life. Archer's (and Millar's) obsession with the twisted, secret history of families, and how the sins of the past shape the present, were finally nailed down, for all who cared to see. Although the early Archer's were well-written and tightly plotted, The Galton Case really got down to business. From that point on, it has been noted, Macdonald wrote the same story over and over, endless variations on the same themes of lost and abandoned children, absent parents, family secrets denied.  

The Barbarous Coast is not quite in this mold, but it does seem to me transitional in some ways.  As explained in Tom Nolan's splendid biography of Macdonald, this period, the mid to late 1950s, brought difficulties to the lives of Macdonald, his wife (the equally distinguished crime novelist Margaret Millar) and their troubled daughter, Linda.  Though Macdonald actually completed The Barbarous Coast before 1956, when his daughter Linda was embroiled in a hit-and-run fatal accident case (a shattering event in Macdonald's life), Macdonald's interest in psychiatry--something that was to become a dominant element in his later books--already plays a pivotal role in Coast, as well be seen below.

Coast is the third of the early group of six Archer detective novels that I have read and I think the most problematic (my favorite is The Ivory Grin).  Macdonald's uncertainly over Coast's title may suggest some uncertainty in its composition. His publisher, Knopf, rejected Macdonald's proposed title, The Dying Animal; we hardly can blame Knopf for this, although some of Knopf's proposed alternatives, it must be conceded, were simply horrendous:

Skull Crasher
Cut the Throat Slowly
My Gun Is Me
The Blood Pit
Blood on My Knuckles
His Head in the Gutter
A Fist in the Guts
A Handful of Guts

Some people at Knopf seemed to be under the impression Ross Macdonald was Mickey Spillane!  In the end Macdonald had the brilliant inspiration of "The Barbarous Coast"; yet, unfortunately the novel is not, in my view, as successful as the final title.

Knopf seemed to be under the impression
that Ross Macdonald was Mickey Spillane

Still, this is a Ross Macdonald novel I am discussing, so there is plenty of interest in it. Certainly Coast does not lack incident: we have a couple young nymphettes (one already murdered when the novel begins, one possibly about to be); a schizophrenic matron; a pretty boy boxer turned actor ("He's got prettier muscles than Brando"); a corrupt movie executive making the move into Las Vegas; a crooked cop; vicious mobsters (straight and gay); and some first rate beatings-up of our hero, Archer, in the best Chandler style (at one point Archer gets sapped three times in a few hours by my recollection and never has to seek medical assistance--the man gives extra meaning to the word hardheaded).

Unfortunately the plot is not one of Macdonald's most inspired and the portrayals of the film industry and of Las Vegas remain more quick, bright sketches than sustained, in-depth canvases.  The comparative dearth of true ratiocination is especially disappointing from my perspective.  Archer does do a bit of good deduction from the clue of a dropped earring, but mostly he wanders around getting people to spill their guts to them (sometimes this happens literally).  Much of the solution is handed to Archer near to end of the book, in the form of a long lecture from a psychiatrist (here we have wandered a long way from Casa Chandler and Hammett Hideaway).  Despite said lecture, I found the culprit for the many murders unconvincing.

this one is more distinguished
for writing than for plotting

At this point it must sound like I am not recommending this novel, but, hey, not so fast, buddy!  Besides colorful incident, there is the writing: like Chandler, Macdonald is always worth reading for that.  Major and even minor characters come alive in this tale (so that we want the latter to become major characters): the vain yet at her core realistic mother of one of the nymphettes; the aging, retired boxer turned security guard; the young African American lifeguard who came back from Korea determined to better himself through education (this utterly winning character makes one entire chapter and allows Macdonald some commentary on fifties racism); the homely, sourpuss Las Vegas hotel manager, and others.

This latter character, the hotel sourpuss, gives rise to something I have found a comparative rarity in the usually ever so serious and sober Macdonald: a really good Chandleresque jokey one-liner. When sourpuss thinks the attractive woman she has been asked by Archer to talk about may be in big trouble her face brightens:

"Are you after her for some crime?"
"Third-degree pulchritude."
She chewed on this like a camel, then shut the door in my face.

Archer tries to be cynical and tough-hearted, like the hard-boiled patron dick, the Continental Op.

As here:

"You leave a trail of destruction like Sherman marching through Georgia."

 And here:

I braced myself for another life-story.  Something about my face, maybe a gullible look, invited them.

Yet he simply cannot help helping people.

As here:

I put George in my bed.  My cleaning woman had been there that morning, and the sheets were fresh.  Hanging his torn clothes on a chair, I asked myself what I thought I was doing and why.  I looked across the hall at the door of the bedless bedroom where nobody slept any more.  An onion taste of grief rose at the back of my throat.  It seemed very important to me that George should get together with his wife and take her away from Los Angeles.  And live happily ever after.

And here:

The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them.  I was a long way from solving that one.

Scattered throughout the novel are some beautiful examples of Macdonald's fine writing. Here are some I highlighted for this piece:

He reached for the string that controlled the light, and jerked the grief-stricken room downward into darkness.

Dancers were sliding around on the waxed tiles to the music of a decimated orchestra.

I felt his glance like an icicle parting my hair.

Self-pity stalked me, snuffing at my spoor.

That was the trouble with alcohol as a sedative.  It floated you off reality for a while, but it brought you back by a route that meandered though the ash-dumps of hell.

The brightness left his eyes like something quick and timid retreating into its hole.

Memory had given him a sudden stab.

The [swimming] pool was gray and restless like a coffined piece of the sea.

Such writing makes a Ross Macdonald crime novel always worth reading, even when the plot is not his most entrancing.  The Barbarous Coast is worth a stop and a dip.

Detections and Tribulations: Short Stories by Dashiell Hammett and Bill Pronzini (Then and Now #2)

Stories considered:

By Bill Pronzini
It's a Lousy World (1968) (Casefile, St. Martin's, 1983) (C)
Death of a Nobody (1970) (C)
The Pulp Connection (1978) (C)
Cat's-Paw (1983) (Spadework, Crippen & Landru, 1996)
Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg (1984) (S)
Twenty Miles to Paradise (1985) (S)
Ace in the Hole (1986) (S)
Here Comes Santa Claus (1989) (S)
Worried Mother Job (1996) (S)

I got out one of the issues of Black Mask I keep in desk drawer to pass idle time, but I couldn't concentrate on the Frederick Nebel story I tried to read.  I put the pulp away and lit another cigarette.

--"Death of a Nobody"

"It's a Lousy World," Bill Pronzini's original Nameless Detective short story, was published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in 1968, thirty-five years after the appearance in The Black Mask of Dashiell Hammett's first Continental Op short story, "Arson Plus."  Unlike Hammett, whose entire body of Op detective stories appeared in a relatively short creative burst, the eight year period from 1923 through 1930, the Pronzini Nameless stories under consideration here were published over three decades.  It is fascinating to study the evolution of the hard-boiled detective story in the creative hands of Bill Pronzini, a writer adept at providing both human and puzzle interest in his work.

The two early Nameless tales, "It's a Lousy World" and "Death of a Nobody," both published before Pronzini was thirty years old, reflect the influence, I think, of Hammett but more particularly Raymond Chandler.  Consider the classic cadence of the writing:

Colly Babcock was shot to death on the night of September 9, in an alley between Twenty-ninth and Valley streets in the Glen Park District of San Francisco....I reed about it the following morning over coffee and undercooked eggs in a cafeteria on Taylor Street, a block and a half from  my office.  The story was on my inside page, concise and dispassionate; they teach that kind of objective writing in the journalism classes.  Just the cold facts.  A man dies, but he's nothing more than a statistic, a name in black type, a faceless nonentity to be considered and then forgotten along with your breakfast coffee.

--"It's a Lousy World"

He was drinking whiskey at the long bar, leaning his head on his arms and staring at the wall.  Two men in work clothes were drinking beer and eating sandwiches from lunch pails at the other end, and in the middle an old lady in a black shawl sipped red wine from a glass held with arthritic fingers.  I sat on a stool next to Tommy and said hello.

He turned his head slowly, his eyes moved upward.  His face was an anemic white, and his bald head shone with beaded perspiration.  He had trouble focusing his eyes; he swiped at them with the back of one veined hand.  He was pretty drunk.  And I was pretty sure I knew why.

--It's a Lousy World

His name was Nello....He was what sociologists call "an addictive drinker who has lost all semblance of faith in God, humanity or himself."  And what the average citizen dismisses unconcernedly as "a Skid Row wino.

--Death of a Nobody

In these two tales "Nameless" seems a morose, disconnected loner (he does have a cop friend named Eberhardt, however; a long-recurring character).  The bleakness is indicated by the change in title of the first story, "It's a Lousy World" (its title in Casefile).  In its original magazine appearance it is called, more hopefully, "Sometimes There is Justice."

In both tales, however, Nameless acts from a genuine sense of empathy to find the truth about downtrodden murder victims: his ex-con friend in "Lousy World" and a homeless wino in "Nobody."  Though I think it's a myth that the Continental Op never shows any sympathy for his fellow human beings in the Hammett stories, Pronzini feels closer to Chandler here.

Both are moving stories, with rather simple plots that feel like they could have come straight from the newspapers.  Something significant was to change in Pronzini's work, however.  The author himself writes about this change in his Casefile collection.

Pronzini, it seems, had determined to kill off Nameless in 1975, by giving the heavy smoker terminal lung cancer.  Once he changed his mind, making that lesion on Nameless' lung providentially non-malignant, Pronzini not only had Nameless give up smoking but also "change his outlook and...develop in a different direction," becoming "mellower" and "more cheerful" and showing "more of his sense of humor."  Also notably for Pronzini's readers, Nameless' cases became more "puzzling than his straightforward investigations during the pre-lesion period."

One sees this new style immediately in the 1978 story "The Pulp Connection" (published, appropriately, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine).  Here is a story where Pronzini breaks with Chandler, who as we know from his "Simple Art of Murder" professed disdain for "gimmicky" plots.  Fortunately, I love them, so I appreciate this development in Mr. Pronzini's work!

Chandler might not have approved of "The Pulp Connection"--oh well!

Despite being associated with hard-boiled writing specidically, Bill Pronzini has a great love for and vast knowledge of the mystery genre in general, including works of classical detection ostensibly incompatible with the hard-boiled style (for evidence of this see his and Marcia Muller's 1001 Midnights and his Gun in Cheek and its sequel Son of Gun in Cheek).  In "The Pulp Connection," Pronzini has Nameless confront both a locked room problem and a dying message!

"He's dead--murdered."
....
"He was found here by his niece shortly before one o'clock.  In a locked room."
"Locked room?"
"Something the matter with your hearing today?...Yes, a damned locked room."

Some hard-boiled fans wear it as a badge of honor that their favored mode of crime writing is "above" such things as locked rooms and dying messages, but I don't see why.  Surely it is no crime for any genre writer to be entertaining.  Dashiell Hammett himself wrote a story that has a locked room situation ("Mike, Alec, or Rufus") and one that is in effect a closed circle country house mystery (Night Shots).  "The Pulp Connection" fits right in with the spirit of those tales.

Pulp fiction functions as a dying message
in "The Pulp Connection"

As do the Cats-Paw, an award-winning Pronzini tale, and Ace in the Hole, a little tour de force--both collected in the Crippen & Landru collection Spadework.  In the latter story Nameless functions as an armchair detective, in the manner of Baroness Orczy's Man in the Corner, solving a miracle problem ("locked doors, disappearing guns--screwball stuff") during a poker game.

In the later tales, Pronzini also humanizes Nameless by letting him have sustained personal relationships, most importantly with his girlfriend, Kerry.  In "Twenty Miles from Paradise," Kerry is along for the ride when Nameless nimbly realizes appearances can deceive, and she helps provide an amusing (and somewhat racy) ending.

In another tale, "Here Comes Santa Claus," Kerry puts Nameless into a situation in which one could never imagine the Op, Spade or Marlowe getting inveigled, especially by a dame: acting as "Santa" at a Christmas party.  Detection is light in this one, but the story delights.

Nameless makes a better Santa than this guy, anyway

My two favorite Nameless short stories, "Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg" and "Worried Mother Job," represent the crime tale at its peak, combining genuine detection and fair play clueing with genuinely moving situations.  "Skeleton," built upon a Francois Villon poem, offers a powerful and memorable depiction of a depressing residence hotel for senior citizens and some of the most haunting closing lines I can recall in a short story, genre or otherwise.

Worried Mother Job for me recalls Ross Macdonald's favorite Hammett short story, Fly Paper, with its searing portrayal of dysfunctional family relationships (it recalls the work of Ross Macdonald too, for that matter).  It's another one you will remember--both for the anguished characters and the adept clueing.

Bill Pronzini's short stories honor both the hard-boiled tradition and that of the classical detective story--as, I would argue, do many of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op tales.  While he frequently offers  readers clever and teasing problems Pronzini does not neglect the human dimension either.  While Pronzini tales like "Pulp" "Cat's-Paw" and "Ace" are pure puzzles, in stories like "Skeleton" and "Job," murder is very real--and it really hurts. The great Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald storytelling tradition is done ample justice by Bill Pronzini.

For part one of this piece, which considers short stories by Dashiell Hammett, see http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/02/detections-and-tribulations-short.html