Speaking of Agatha...Nicholas Blake Reviews Some Crime Fiction

No doubt being the mystery fanciers that you are, you've all heard the news by now that crime writer Sophie Hannah will be publishing an authorized Hercule Poirot mystery next year.

I view this with some trepidation, but will hope for the best.  Expect to see a review from me coming soon of a Sophie Hannah novel!

Hannah, who like The Passing Tramp and I'm sure many others who read this blog, read Agatha Christie voraciously as a youngster, regards the Queen of Crime as "the greatest crime writer of all time"--putting her at odds, I suspect, with many of her fellow crime writers (including her second favorite crime writer, Ruth Rendell), who take a more condescending view.

I had been planning to post this piece anyway, oddly enough, but it may have special interest now.

It's drawn from a review article that crime writer Nicholas Blake (poet C. Day Lewis, who also wrote the well-regarded Nigel Strangeways mysteries) did back in 1936 in the Spectator.  He reviewed seven novels:

The ABC Murders, by Agatha Christie
Murder Isn't Easy, by Richard Hull
Scandal at School, by G. D. H. and Margaret Cole
A Word of Six Letters, by Herbert Adams
Who Killed Gatton?, by E. Charles Vivian
Vultures in the Sky, by Todd Downing
The Nursing Home Murder, by Ngaio Marsh

Here are some choice bits from Mr. Blake:

On The ABC Murders: "The characters, particularly that of the murderer, are rather too perfunctorily sketched.  Apart from this, one can have nothing but praise for The ABC Murders, which is really a little masterpiece of construction."

one of the great plots

On Murder Isn't Easy: "Mr. Hull, on the other hand, as we realised in his first book, The Murder of My Aunt, has great gift for character; and here again he gives it full scope by recording events in the first person....holds the interest throughout....

a few years later Christie countered that, actually, Murder Is Easy

On Scandal at School (The Sleeping Death in the United States): "The Coles have paid much more attention to character than in some of their earlier books.  The dialogue is consistently lifelike, the setting, too, is well done....Less convincing is the character of the victim....This weakens the motive....The plot, also, rather resembles a clockwork mouse: erratic in direction, and requiring too frequent winding-up."

leftist intellectuals like the Coles (and C. Day Lewis for that matter)
read and wrote detective fiction too

On A Word of Six Letters: "Must be criticised on the following counts: (1) Supineness of police (2) Padding: there is too much superfluous eating and drinking; this is only permissible when the author (cf. Mr. H. C. Bailey passim), and therefore the reader, gets a kick out of it (3) Title: crosswords play a very subordinate part in the plot (4) Archness: e.g., "Ramp it was.  There can be some merry doings in searching pretty girls for an elusive slipper."

over his long life Herbert Adams (1874-1958) published numerous mysteries and thrillers

On Who Killed Gatton?: "We turn from the arch to the heroic-on-stilts style....The book also contains a great deal of cap-lifting whenever England, the dead, &c, are mentioned, a magnificent 1890 vintage proposal-of-marriage scene, and a ditto never-set-foot-in-my-house-again one.  Those who, like myself, revel in this sort of thing will be rewarded as well by an exciting and cleverly worked-out tale."

On Vultures in the Sky: "I have not read The Cat Screams, but if it is as good as Mr. Downing's new book it is very good indeed.  He has that command of tempo without which a detection writer can never rise into the first class.  He avoids the American tendency to overwrite the trivial, yet he can write up to the dramatic situation when it comes.  He has the sotto-voce, ungesticulating way of leading one up to the edge of a precipice which makes a walk with Dr. M. R. James so deliciously uncomfortable.......This book puts him into the Van Dine--Ellery Queen class: I do not expect to read a better detective novel for a long time."

the third of Todd Downing's Hugh Rennert detective novels

On The Nursing Home Murder: "sound motives....a charming detective, local colour obviously put on by a professional hand, a pretty wit, and a perfectly reasonable solution...unreservedly recommended...."

While Blake certainly paid Christie and Marsh their dues, he seems to indicate his favorite of the lot (and his favorite for some time) was Todd Downing's Vultures in the Sky.  As old hands here will know, I have taken some interest in Downing, publishing the book Clues and Corpses on his life, crime fiction and crime fiction reviews.  Vultures in the Sky also is available in a very nice edition from Coachwhip.

I happen to have read six of the seven books reviewed by Blake and I would rank them as follows, in terms of personal favorites (please note that I recognize the brilliance of the plot of The ABC Murders, but it is not a book I as much enjoy rereading as Vultures, after knowing the twist):

1. Vultures in the Sky
2. The ABC Murders
3. Murder Isn't Easy
4. The Nursing Home Murder
5. Scandal at School
6. A Word of Six Letters

As for the E. Charles Vivian novel, I have no idea who killed Gatton!

Teddy, Todd and Sam

In my book Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing, I write about Todd Downing's Choctaw Indian background, which was very important him, and about the role of his father, Sam, in local Choctaw affairs in the small city of Atoka, Oklahoma, where the Downing family lived for many decades.

Todd Downing
Golden Age Choctaw mystery writer

In a 1926 essay, "A Choctaw's Autobiography," Todd Downing (1902-1974) refers to Sam Downing as someone who "has always been a power among the Choctaws."

Downing also mentions how his father served in the Spanish-American War with Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, as an interpreter for the Indian Territory Cavalry. 

I recently came across some material that certainly supports Todd Downing claims about his father being a "power" among the Choctaws.

In 1906 Sam Downing traveled to Washington, D. C., for a meeting with Roosevelt, who now, of course, was serving as President of the United States.

The elder Downing hoped to persuade his former Rough Rider commander to disapprove an "act of the Choctaw legislature that authorized the employment by the principal chief of the Choctaw nation [Greenwood "Green" McCurtain] of the firm of Mansfield, McMurray & Cornish" [it seems it was felt the monetary compensation allowed the firm was too great]. 

Theodore Roosevelt
whether or not he said "Bully!" he did
what Sam Downing requested

Accompanied by two prominent territorial politicians, Downing met with Roosevelt.

This is the how the meeting is retrospectively portrayed in The Daily Ardmoreite (June 27, 1910, 5):

"What can I do for you fellows, Sam?" the president asked of his former comrade.

"Mr. President, we want that McMurray contract disappoved," replied Downing.

"Put your request in writing," said the president, and turning to Secretary Loeb he instructed him to tell the secretary of the interior that the contract would not be approved.

Downing, who was also a member of the Republican territorial executive committee, "got the presidential ear," declares The Daily Ardmoreite on January 28, 1907 in the article "Republicans Want Indian Vote," "and told the president in so many words that that with a little encouragement the Indians of the Indian Territory, although now for the most part Democrats, could be converted to the Republican fold if the administration went about the thing in the right manner."

"Mr. Downing," the article concluded, recalling language Todd Downing used two decades later, "is said to be a power among Indians."

If only Theodore Roosevelt had lived to read Todd Downing detective fiction in the 1930s!

80 Years Ago Sunday: The Week in Todd Downing Mystery Reviews

On March 26, 1933 the Oklahoma detective novelist Todd Downing reviewed four mysteries for the Daily Oklahoman newspaper:

The Tuesday Club Murders (The Thirteen Problems), by Agatha Christie
The Hanging Captain, by Henry Wade
Red Warning, by Virgil Markham
Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap (The Motor Rally Mystery), by John Rhode

Short excepts:

The Tuesday Club Murders: Downing applauds the reappearance of "Aunt Jane"--that "no end quick-witted spinster of The Murder at the Vicarage"--in this short story collection.

The Hanging Captain: Downing praises Henry Wade's "eminently sane yarn written in the King's English."

Red Warning: There's "creeping horror" in this tale, Downing notes.  "For shudder addicts."

Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap: "Add and subtract with Dr. Priestley," writes a something less than enthralled Downing.  "For mechanically-minded folk."

Note the stylistic similarities to The Tuesday Club Murders--
Both books were published by Dodd, Mead,
one of the premier American publishers of mystery fiction.

There's much more on Todd Downing--his life, his detective fiction and his mystery review--in my 2013 book Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing.

Personally, I've read all four of these books and I liked them all!

Murder on Tour (1933), by Todd Downing

It's out now!  Todd Downing's first published detective novel, Murder on Tour, which introduced sleuth Hugh Rennert.  The original edition of this book is so rare even I never had a copy of it.  It's a great thrill to be able to make it available again, after eighty years, to fans of classical mystery fiction.

There is also a new introduction by me, never published before, with new information about Todd Downing, courtesy of his sister Ruth's son. It's titled "Day of the Dead: Todd Downing and Murder on Tour."

Without further ado, here is the publisher's blurb to the book:

U. S. Customs Agent John Payne was hot on the trail of the party he suspected of smuggling Mexican antiquities across the Texas border into the United States. Too hot on the trail to be left alive! On October 27, 1933, Payne was found dead, strangled, in his San Antonio hotel room. Three days after the discovery of Payne's savagely slain body, senior Customs Agent Hugh Rennert is in Mexico City to join the thirteen members of the Inter-American Tours party, late of San Antonio. Rennert is hunting for Payne's calculating and callous killer. The party of American tourists seeing the sights around Mexico City initially seems innocuous enough, yet in actuality Murder travels masked among them, patiently waiting, as the macabre Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) approaches, for the opportunity to strike again. Who will be the next to die by violence, before Hugh Rennert finally cracks the case and corners his quarry? First published in 1933, Murder on Tour is the first in Todd Downing's acclaimed series of seven Hugh Rennert detective novels. Read it and see why the New York Times Book Review proclaimed Murder on Tour a "well fashioned baffler" with "characterization . . . contrived with unusual skill."

It has been about fifteen months since I visited Todd Downing's birthplace of Atoka, Oklahoma, and decided to do my bit to revive his work.  It has taken some time and effort, but I'm glad I did what I did.  Working with Coachwhip, I will continue to do what I can to help get other Golden Age mystery authors back in print.  There is yet another middle American mystery writer coming back soon.  Stay tuned!

Detecting Todd Downing: A Conversation with Professor James H. Cox

James H. Cox

James H. Cox is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

He is the author of Muting White Noise: Native American and European Novel Traditions (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009) and The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

In two chapters of the latter work, The Red Land to the South, Professor Cox discusses the writing of Todd Downing (1902-1974), the Oklahoma Choctaw Golden Age detective novelist who published nine mysteries of his own between 1933 and 1941, in addition to reviewing several hundred mysteries in the 1930s.

Todd Downing is the subject of my own Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing (Coachwhip, 2013).  Moreover, eight of Todd Downing's nine detective novels (including his highly praised The Cat Screams, 1934, and Vultures in the Sky, 1935) were reprinted by Coachwhip in 2012, and the remaining title, Murder on Tour (1933), will be reprinted this March.

For previous posts discussing Todd Downing and another Oklahoma crime writer, Jim Thompson, see A Tale of Two Citizens, Part One and Part Two.

Professor Cox was kind enough sit down with The Passing Tramp for an interview about Todd Downing.  I hope you enjoy it!

Todd Downing

Curt Evans: In The Red Land to the South, you call Todd Downing “one of the most prolific and most neglected American Indian writers of the twentieth century.”

Three questions: Why do you think he is important, why do you think he has  been neglected and how did you become interested in him and his work?

James Cox: From my position as a scholar of American Indian literature, Downing is important as a writer who depicts contemporary Indigenous American people in a popular genre.

As anyone who watches television or regularly goes to the movies knows, nineteenth century American Indians are far more prevalent in popular and mass culture than contemporary Native people--particularly urban Indigenous people like the ones Downing sometimes represents. Downing's novels, though, show Indigenous people living in the modern world. It is much easier to ignore the civil and human rights of Indigenous people if you believe, (1) that they have disappeared, and/or, (2) that once they are modern they are no longer really Indigenous.

Downing's neglect in part has to do with the fact that his books went out of print so quickly. Research has become much easier now with the presence of on-line book dealers!

Downing's neglect in American Indian literary studies is curious, though. He was fairly well-known in Oklahoma. He lived into the 1970s, too, and scholars have had at least a little familiarity with him since then.

However, literary scholars have only recently--say in the last twenty years--started to think critically about popular genres like detective fiction or science fiction. Downing also didn't write about the kinds of American Indians that were interesting to many scholars: not the nineteenth century Plains Indians of so many Hollywood movies, but the activists and otherwise politically engaged Native people of the civil rights era. Downing was working against the grain of multiple trends, both popular and academic.

I became interested in his work when I started writing my second book. I had read several works by American Indian writers about Mexico and Indigenous Mexican people. I ran across a reference to The Mexican Earth, bought a copy, and read it in one sitting. 

I confess to appreciating the politics of the book, that is, his passionate defense of Indigenous Mexicans. It is a great book in other ways, though. Downing writes in a clear style. He is clever and funny and often just this side of scandalous. He is very good at depicting the Mexican landscape as well. I bought his novels, then, whenever I could find an inexpensive copy. I read Vultures in the Sky first and was completely hooked.

I enjoyed Downing's mastery of the conventions of detective fiction--classical British rather than hard-boiled American--but particularly liked the Mexican settings and, of course, the presence of Indigenous peoples and Downing's consideration of the social and political issues that shaped in part their mid-twentieth century lives (manual labor; health; the theft of remains and artifacts).

Finally, Downing is simply a fascinating person: the Indian Territory-born, fluent Choctaw speaking son of a Choctaw politician who was a Professor of Spanish, a tour guide, an employee of several East Coast advertising agencies, and a novelist.

Atoka, Oklahoma county officials and courthouse employees, c. 1910.
County Treasurer Henry Bond, a full-blood Choctaw and friend of
Sam Downing, Todd Downing's father, is seen in the center of the photograph.

Curt Evans: Downing’s sense of humor comes out in his book reviews as well.  I agree, it’s very appealing.

The Mexican settings of most of Downing’s detective novels seem to me his signature contribution to Golden Age detective fiction.  In his day especially, such intensive exploration of the culture of a foreign country—England excepted, of course!--in an American detective novel seems remarkable. 

Although many people still seem disinclined to embrace mystery literature as a serious art form, as you point out, I know you would agree with me that Downing, despite his sense of humor and modesty, felt strongly about a number of important issues and intentionally used the mystery form to explore these issues, just as writers did in mainstream literature. 

In The Red Land to the South you discuss Downing’s second published and path-breaking detective novel, The Cat Screams, at considerable length.  You argue that in this book “Downing disguises a story of indigenous resistance and revolutionary promise within a conventional story of detection.”  I think that’s very well-put.  In fact, I quote it in my own book!  Could you expand on this idea a bit here?  Without spoilers, of course!

James Cox: There is a funny but also serious scene in The Mexican Earth during which Downing stops to give a ride to two Indigenous Mexican farm workers. He describes other cars with U.S. license plates driving by the farm workers at high speeds. Inside the cars he sees startled faces. The next day at a hotel, another American says he thought Downing had been accosted by Communist agitators. Downing humanizes Indigenous Mexicans and the working class while suggesting that many Americans do not understand either Mexico or Indigenous Mexicans.

Thank you very much for the kind words about my reading of The Cat Screams! Downing does such a wonderful job in the novel describing the American colony in Taxco.

To avoid spoilers, I'll just say that the novel contains two overlapping mysteries. The first is the conventional mystery that Rennert investigates. The second is not a conventional mystery but a political, cultural, and historical mystery about Indigenous Mexican people in the modern world. The reference to a revival of Native practices and curanderas in the opening newspaper article begins this part of the narrative. The meaning of a word in Nahuatl -- or what I recently learned speakers of the language usually call Mexicanoh (thank you, Adam Coon) -- is also important. There is a jade mask of an Aztec god that is important, too.

All the references to Indigenous Mexican people form a set of clues. I propose one reading of these clues, but I'm sure other readers will have better ones!

Curt Evans: Well, I personally think you show how The Cat Screams is really an exceptionally sophisticated Golden Age detective novel. 

I found the depth of the novel quite fascinating on rereading it.  There are these two worlds, this outer one of these American tourists and expatriates and Mexicans of European lineage and then this inner world of indigenous people that eludes so many of the other characters, who are either hostile to it or simply indifferent and superior.  Hugh Rennert, of course, is interested in it, because, like Downing he is fascinated with Mexican culture and believes it has something to tell him about life.

It’s a cliché to talk about mystery novels that “transcend the genre” but I think in The Cat Screams Downing does show how you can combine a complex mystery plot with thematic depth.  Do you feel he was able to do this in other detective novels as well?  Personally, I find the one he published after The Cat Screams, Vultures in the Sky, another really fascinating story in its depiction of Mexico, not to mention that’s it’s simply a thrilling book, one of the most tense mysteries I have read!

James Cox: Yes, I agree, The Cat Screams is a rewarding mystery that also encourages readers to think about the colonial history of the Americas and the conflict between Europeans and Indigenous people. I can't emphasize enough, too, how unusual and important it is that Downing represents Indigenous people as maintaining their sense of who they are as Indigenous while they are also fully participating in the modern world.

the 2012 Coachwhip edition

This last observation is a good segue into Vultures in the Sky [note: see my review of this novel here--TPT], in which an Indigenous man plays a small but important part as a porter on a Pullman. Downing creates another complex -- and, yes, an exciting and tense! -- plot involving a kidnapping, rumors of a Pullman strike, and the Cristero Rebellion. 

Downing is attentive to the labor of the working classes (waitresses, cooks, and servants as well as the porter and Indigenous people selling food and small items at train stations or by the side of the road), and the Cristero Rebellion is a horrifying but in the U.S. not very well-known part of Mexican history--I don't know  how much the recent Andy Garcia and Eva Longoria film helped!

Yes, then, I would say that he writes very clever mysteries in which he embeds observations about the social and cultural worlds produced by Spanish colonialism, U.S. interventions in Mexico, and the general economic climate of the 1930s.

Murder on the Tropic is also one of my favorite Downing mysteries. Like Vultures in the Sky, Murder on the Tropic has a wonderful and diverse cast of characters, and Downing situates the plot in a precise historical moment: during the construction of the Pan American Highway in Mexico.

Downing is also almost always thinking about the U.S./Mexico border -- especially in The Last Trumpet -- in a way that resonates today. In fact, we should remember that there were mass deportations of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, when Downing was publishing these novels. His apparent sympathy for Mexico and Mexican people can be understood in that historical context.

Murder on the Tropic includes a reference to the murder of two young Mexican men in Ardmore, Oklahoma on June 8, 1931.  Downing chose not to take a tour group to Mexico that summer and, apparently, stayed home and started writing Murder on Tour. His career as an author of mystery novels, therefore, appears to have its origins in a real act of fatal racial profiling. This dark side of racial conflict within the U.S. and Mexico and between the two countries is a sub-text that runs throughout his novels.

Ardmore, Oklahoma today

Curt Evans: Yes, I think Downing was rather conflicted about Oklahoma.  In some ways he had a conservative, small-town upbringing and I think some of this “stuck”; yet he was repelled by the Ardmore killings, as you point out, and more generally by the parochialism and anti-intellectualism of Oklahoma in the 1930s.

For a while he did relocate to the Northeast, like his sister had before him, but, as you know, he came back to Atoka and spent the last twenty years of his life there, teaching at Atoka high school and later Southeastern Oklahoma University.  And he was buried beside his parents and maternal grandmother in Atoka, though today there’s no special recognition of him there, which seems a shame.

I too found Vultures in the Sky so evocative of a time and place.  When I was young, my family made several trips—not by train, sadly, but by car—to Mexico City, along a similar route to that described in Vultures.  Reading the novel really took me back.  The way Downing describes those lonely little train stations in the heat and those Indigenous street vendors (I remember the latter so well too), it’s extremely effective.

Edward Powys Mathers ("Torquemada")

All the Rennert novels were published in England and it’s interesting to see that Downing's books got excellent reviews not only in the United States but England as well, with comments from reviewers about how well-written and atmospheric they are.  The critic Edward Powys Mathers, known as “Torquemada” for his fiendish crossword puzzles, wrote that Todd Downing was “a born detective story writer” and compared him to Matthew Arnold, in terms of his technique for revealing hidden aspects of his characters’ personalities.

I’m looking right now at a review of another Downing novel that you praise—and I definitely agree with your praise--Murder on the Tropic.

This review is from a newspaper in Tasmania. 

I think everyone will agree that Mr. Downing is a good writer of good detective stories,” the reviewer starts out, then: “As a well-told crime and detective story I regard this as one of the really masterly ones.  But, as well as the plot and its unraveling, there is a remarkably vivid description of the Mexican landscape.

There’s the double praise again, for the plotting and the purely literary quality.  Yet by the late 1940s, Downing’s novels all are out of print.  They would stay out of print for some sixty years.  Now eight of them are back in print and the ninth will soon follow.

Do you think there’s a chance now that, with the reprinting of Downing’s books and reviews and your own book, Downing's name will become more familiar to people as a writer well worth reading, an entertainer who also has notable things to say in his entertainments?

Dutch edition of The Cat Screams

James Cox: I'm so glad to see you emphasize that Downing had an international reputation. His books were translated into Dutch, Finnish, Italian, and Spanish, at least. An edition of Murder on the Tropic (La Luce Gialla) was in print in Italy as late as 1958, and an edition of Vultures in the Sky (Il Terribile Viaggio) was in print in Italy, too, as late as 1977. So the Italians appear to have appreciated him more than we have!

I once found a copy of Vultures in the Sky in Spanish (Buitres in el Cielo) in Brazil. He made it to Tasmania, apparently, too. I would love to know if his reputation in these other countries endures into the early twenty-first century.

I'm optimistic that Downing will become more well-known. I sure hope so. A major problem was that his books were inaccessible, and the new editions thankfully remedy that issue and make it possible for teachers to assign his books.

Downing's novels have the potential to interest a broad audience that includes general readers as well as scholars of American literature. There is a little something (literary, cultural, historical, borderlands, transnational, American Indian, Mexican, Indigenous Mexican) for everyone in the novels.

Curt Evans: I like your optimistic assessment.  Thank you so much for the interview, Jim. By the way, this blog has a few Italian readers who have read Todd Downing, which bears out your comments.  Let's hope his readership expands all round!

James Cox: Thank you so much again for this chance to talk about Downing!

A Tale of Two Citizens, Part 2: Oklahoma Crime Writers Todd Downing (1902-1974) and Jim Thompson (1906-1977)

Todd Downing, c. 1930

Last week I wrote about the Oklahoma life of noir novelist Jim Thompson, who was a near exact contemporary of Todd Downing, the Oklahoma mystery writer and book reviewer.  I've written about Todd Downing before on this blog (as you probably know!), but while working on Clues and Corpses, my book on Downing and his crime fiction and book reviews, I decided it would be interesting to explore independently the stories of these two contemporary Oklahoma crime writers, alike in some ways, but so different in others.

Physically, they were very different in height, with Jim Thompson standing high at 6'4" and Todd Downing a modest 5'6".  However, both had Native American ancestry (as was often the case in Oklahoma).

Thompson is said by his family to have been one-eighth Cherokee through his maternal grandmother, while Downing believed he was one-fourth Choctaw (though a modern family researcher says that Downing's paternal grandmother, who died when Downing's father was five, was not full-bood, but rather half-blood, Choctaw, which would make Downing, like Thompson, one-eighth Indian).  Certainly in photos of the two men Thompson's high cheekbones and Downing's dark eyes and hair carry the suggestion of indigenous ancestry.

Jim Thompson's literary reputation certainly is alive and well
Will there be any sort of Todd Downing revival?

Robert Polito, Jim Thompson's biographer, reports that though "all through his life Jim Thompson voiced pleasure in the awareness that he was one-eighth Cherokee," nevertheless "his Native American heritage never composed a conspicuous plank in his personal identity."

This is far different from Todd Downing's case. Both Todd and his father, Sam Downing, were enrolled and active members of the Choctaw Nation (Todd's mother, Maud Miller, was a native Iowan of German, English and Scotch-Irish descent).

Sam Downing all his life was involved in Choctaw social and political affairs and Todd for his part signaled his views in 1926 when he, then a student at the University of Oklahoma, published a short piece in the Oklahoma journal The American Indian called "A Choctaw's Autobiography," wherein he unambiguously signaled his ethnic identification as a Choctaw.

Todd Downing's Choctaw heritage and his interest in indigenous culture influenced him to study Mexico in college, to become an instructor in Spanish at the University of Oklahoma and to set most of his detective novels in Mexico.  His exploration of Mexican culture in his detective novels is his signature achievement in the mystery genre.

In addition to sharing a Native American heritage, both Jim Thompson and Todd Downing had scandals in their family backgrounds.

Caddo County courthouse, completed in 1906
the year Jim Thompson was born and a year before
the Thompson family fled Oklahoma

Jim Thompson's farmer grandfather, a casualty of the Panic of 1873 and the years of economic distress that followed, fled Ipava, Illinois with his family to escape possible imprisonment over his irredeemable financial obligations.  Three decades later, Thompson's father, the sheriff of Caddo County, Oklahoma, with his family in tow fled Oklahoma when he was accused of embezzlement and threatened with imprisonment.

As discussed in part one of this piece, this latter event led to a downward spiral of wandering and privation for Thompson's family and it hugely influenced Thompson's dark crime fiction (psychopathic sheriffs figure in two of his most famous novels).

In Todd Downing's case both his grandfathers committed crimes of varying sorts.  In 1866, Todd's grandfather George Thornton Downing left his Texas wife and children (after deeding over all his property to a son) and moved to Indian Territory, Choctaw Nation, where he married a Choctaw woman, Melissa Armstrong, said to have come to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears as an infant.

Before their deaths (Melissa probably in 1877, George in 1880), the couple had four children, including Todd's father, Sam.  Apparently the children of the second marriage never learned that their father was a bigamist; certainly Todd Downing and his sister Ruth never knew such was the case, for they believed that their grandfather's first wife had died before he came to Oklahoma.

Todd's other grandfather, Daniel Miller, originally had been an upstanding citizen of Albia, Iowa.  A Civil War veteran, Secretary of the Albia Lyceum, former Deputy District Court Clerk and dry goods merchant, Miller married Awilda Shields, the daughter of a respected doctor, in 1868.

Victorian commercial block in Albia, Iowa

Seven years after his marriage, Miller became cashier of the newly formed Monroe County Bank.  Miller was one of the most popular men in Albia, according to a contemporary account, until it was discovered that the bank's liabilities greatly exceeded its assets.  In 1883, Miller was convicted of embezzlement, forgery and fraud and sentenced to seven years in the Iowa state penitentiary.

After his release (with time off for good behavior), Daniel Miller and his family made their way by 1891 to Atoka, Oklahoma, where his wife Awilda had prominent cousins.  Daniel's and Awilda's daughter, Maud, married Sam Downing in 1899.

Although both Todd's grandfathers had scandalous secrets in their pasts (and one served jail time), his parents were model citizens.  Left motherless at five and fatherless at eight, Sam Downing was taken into the home of a prominent local merchant family, the Blossoms, and raised to be a devout Presbyterian and Republican.  The parents of Sam Downing's foster mother had been Quaker teachers and Sam was educated for two years at Earlham College, a prominent Quaker college in Indiana (the school began admitting non-Quakers in 1865).

Downing House, Atoka

After Sam Downing returned to Atoka he became County Clerk and later started a successful drayage business.  When the Spanish-American war broke out, he served in Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, as a Choctaw and Chickasaw interpreter in the Indian Territory Cavalry.  After his marriage to Maud Miller Sam built a two story Victorian foursquare house that still stands today.  Here, Sam and Maud Downing raised their children Todd and Ruth.

Also living with them, after her husband's death, was Awilda Miller, Todd's one surviving grandparent.  She would live in the Downing home until her death in 1939 and was a great influence over her grandchildren.  Like Sam and Maud Downing, Awilda Miller was a highly devout Presbyterian. 

As I discussed in part one, Jim Thompson hated his own pious maternal grandmother and when his family's financial circumstances forced his mother to take him and his sisters back to Nebraska to live with her parents his grandmother's presence was a torture to him, by his account.

In Todd Downing's case, however, the maternal grandmother was a warm and supportive presence, even standing behind Todd's sister Ruth when she turned down a chance of marriage and moved to New York to do graduate work at Columbia University (she became a social worker of note).

So the Thompsons were a family that led an economically volatile, peripatetic and often unhappy existence, while the Downings, despite scandals in their past, became pillars of their small Oklahoma community, Atoka, and provided a stable, happy and ordered upbringing for the Downing children.

As I also discussed in part one, Jim Thompson, despite the difficulties in his childhood, became a great reader of imaginative literature, thanks to the good offices of an uncle. Todd Downing did as well.  He read, for example, a great deal of Sir Walter Scott and H. Rider Haggard.  In the 1910s his eye was caught by the books of Arthur B. Reeve, creator of scientific detective Dr. Craig Kennedy, and Sax Rohmer, creator of the diabolical criminal mastermind Dr. Fu Manchu (Edgar Wallace would follow in the 1920s).

one of the Arthur B. Reeve books read by Todd Downing as an adolescent

Jim Thompson attended classes at the University of Nebraska but dropped out after two years, married and sought to make a living during the Depression-wracked 1930s as a freelance writer in Oklahoma City. Todd, on the other hand, got both a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Oklahoma, and he also taught there as an instructor, from 1925 to 1935 (he resigned as a teacher in the latter year, hoping to make his living solely from writing).

Jim Thompson wrote true crime articles for magazines in the 1930s before becoming, as discussed in part one, head of the Federal Writers' Project in Oklahoma between 1936 and 1940.  After he left Oklahoma and moved to San Diego, California in 1940, Thompson would publish two mainstream novels, one in 1942 and one in 1946.  He would not launch the crime fiction career that would make his name until 1949, when he was 43.

Todd Downing, on the other hand, published his first novel, a mystery called Murder on Tour, in 1933, when he was 31 (it was written, mostly in Mexico City, the previous year).  Downing would write a total of nine detective novels between 1933 and 1941, seven of them with his most important series detective, U. S. Customs Agent Hugh Rennert.

Todd Downing's first detective novel, soon to be reprinted

Like Jim Thompson, Todd Downing had aspirations to be a mainstream novelist, and he planned in 1942 to publish a historical novel about Mexico called Under the Rose, but it never appeared (in 1940 he did, however, produce a well-regarded non-fictional study of Mexico, called The Mexican Earth).

Also like Jim Thompson, Todd Downing would leave Oklahoma in the 1940s.  Thompson once disgustedly referred to Oklahoma City as "a God-forsaken place" while Downing in 1939 wrote that he had of late become "rather at odds with Atoka and all it represents."

After Downing left his native state, he worked in the advertising business in Philadelphia in the 1940s, then taught at schools in Maryland and Virginia in the 1950s.  Yet, in marked contrast to Jim Thompson, Todd Downing returned to Oklahoma in the 1950s and spent the rest of his life there.

After his father Sam died in 1954, Downing came back to Atoka to live in the old family home with his mother Maud, now an octogenarian.  He lived there for about two decades, from 1955 to his death in 1974, three years before Jim Thompson's demise.  During this time Downing  taught at Atoka High School and later Southeastern Oklahoma University, in the nascent Choctaw language program.

Todd Downing's own crime writing is much different from Thompson's noir fiction.  For one thing, it's true detective fiction, each book offering readers a puzzle to be solved.  As Downing's book reviews show, he loved the fair play detective fiction of Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, S. S. Van Dine and many others.

Moreover, Downing's detective fiction looks outward, to Mexico and its culture, which Downing believed could impart North Americans lessons of value about life (and death).  Thompson's fiction, on the other hand, looks inside himself, seemingly, to a midnight place of darkness and despair.

There is evidence that Todd Downing himself had in his life some times of darkness and despair, deeply personal unto himself (for more on this see Clues and Corpses); yet, though he believed detective fiction could have higher literary elements to it, he accepted the then prevalent view of the genre as escape literature, something to put oneself on better terms with life.

Hell on Earth

When Jim Thompson portrays a Mexican locale in his famous crime novel The Getaway (1958), it's an existential nightmare, a hell on earth.  Downing hardly had a polyannish view of the world--in fact there's a great deal of tension in, for example, his novels Vultures in the Sky (1935) and Night Over Mexico (1937) (in the one novel people are trapped and dying on a train, the other in an isolated ranch house)--but he thought knowledge of Mexican culture could help one better cope with life's myriad cruelties.

It's also interesting to note how in Thompson's novels The Killer Inside Me (1952) and Pop. 1280 (1964) Thompson portrays southern sheriffs as horrific murdering fiends (of course they're hardly alone in this respect in Thompson's novels).

Conversely, Todd Downing's Texas sheriff Peter Bounty, introduced in the Hugh Rennert mystery The Last Trumpet (1937) and the solo detective in Death Under the Moonflower (1938) and The Lazy Lawrence Murders (1941), is an admirable human being--as is Hugh Rennert himself.

Left unasked, until the very end, has been the question: Did these two men, both crime writers molded by Oklahoma in the first decades of the twentieth century, ever actually meet?

Jim Thompson's friend Louis L'Amour
like Todd Downing was a book reviewer
for Oklahoma City's major newspaper

Robert Polito has no answer, nor do I.  Todd Downing's mentor, University of Oklahoma languages professor Kenneth C. Kaufman, knew both men, or at least knew of both.  He's mentioned several times in Polito's biography of Thompson.

Todd Downing reviewed books for Oklahoma City's major newspaper, the Daily Oklahoman, as did Jim Thompson's friend from the Federal Writers' Project, future bestselling Western novelist Louis L'Amour.

The newspaper's literary page was edited by Kenneth Kaufman.  Polito refers to "the lively Sunday literary page that University of Oklahoma Professor Kenneth Kaufman edited for the Daily Oklahoman."

Yet by the time Thompson became involved with the Federal Writers' Project in 1936, Todd Downing had left the University of Oklahoma (located in Norman, which neighbors Oklahoma City, home of the University) and returned to live with his family in Atoka (he became known back in the university community as "the hermit of Boggy Creek," after Muddy Boggy Creek, which runs by Atoka).  Still, he occasionally sallied forth to participate at writers' conferences at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma state, until he stopped writing fiction and left Oklahoma in 1942.

Did Jim Thompson and Todd Downing ever meet?  This remains an unsolved mystery.  Yet whether or not the two authors actually met, they are both products of the Oklahoma of a century ago, and they both did the state proud with their fine--if very different--works of crime fiction.

A Tale of Two Citizens: Oklahoma Crime Writers Todd Downing (1902-1974) and Jim Thompson (1906-1977)

"A future writer of crime fiction and westerns could do worse than turn-of-the-century Oklahoma."

             --Robert Polito, Savage Art (1995)

the native ground of crime writers Jim Thompson and Todd Downing

 
Both Todd Downing, a largely forgotten though once admired (and happily now reprinted) detective novelist, and Jim Thompson, the today much-toasted titan of twisted and terrifying noir fiction, were born within just a few years of each other in that quintessentially American space that soon was to become the state of Oklahoma (Thompson was born to the west at Anadarko in Oklahoma Territory, in the blue patch in the southwest corner of the map above, Downing to the east at Atoka in Indian Territory, in the purple patch in the southeast corner of the map above).

Jim Thompson's nightmare tale of 
wasting, sucking nihilism

These two men, sons of the nascent Oklahoma of a century ago, had some interesting similarities. Yet they also were markedly distinguished from each other in notable ways, which helps to explain why two crime writers from one time and place produced such very different books within their specialized genre.

Changes in critical standards helped create a situation where Jim Thompson became more famous after death, with all his books reprinted by a major imprint, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, while Todd Downing languished forgotten and out-of-print for decades, only recently brought back into print by a little press called Coachwhip (eight Downing detective novels, all but the rare first one, are now available at Amazon; the first will be available as well soon; also see my review of Downing's third mystery, Vultures in the Sky, here).

After his death Thompson's art in all its uncompromising bleakness was enthusiastically endorsed by intellectuals and filmmakers, helping to win him much posthumous attention from a larger audience (for example, the 1990 film The Grifters, based on a Thompson novel and true to the author's aesthetic spirit, was nominated for four Oscars).

Thompson may have been a writer ahead of his time, but the times finally caught up with him and his dark vision of life (and death).

Noir is where it's at for many modern readers of crime fiction.  To call a work "noir" is to bestow it with genre-transcending literary significance (for my part, I've taken to calling Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None noir--and I'm not really joking either).

Todd Downing
a more life-affirming writer

Yet Todd Downing's life and body of work has unique and impressive qualities that should make him better known than he is.  This is something I talk about in my new book, Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing (just out; see here).

Now that Downing's work has been reprinted, perhaps posterity, having embraced Jim Thompson with the greatest ardor and affection, will afford Todd Downing at least a few chaste yet fond caresses. 

Nearly twenty years ago, the biography of Jim Thompson, Savage Art (1995), was published by Robert Polito to much critical acclaim.  This 543-page tome received both the National Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.*

*(incidentally, Polito's main competition at the Edgars was Doug Greene's wonderful biography of the great Golden Age mystery writer John Dickson Carr, a book surely beloved by many readers of this blog)

Let Robert Polito describe Jim Thompson's twisted crime fiction (Savage Art, pp. 7-10):

Buried under the shabbiest conventions of pulp fiction--all but three of the twenty-six novels he published between 1942 and 1973 were paperback originals--and picking at the banality with offhand brilliance, his books pursue the most debased imaginative materials....

Crime fiction, however violent or macabre or sordid, ordinarily--if paradoxically--constitutes a comforting and conservative genre.  Whether the prose is soft- or hard-boiled and the author is Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy L. Sayers or James M. Cain, most crime novels tend to borrow their trajectory from (for all the obvious differences) classic comedy [Polito goes on to argue that this comedy-derived trajectory involves the containment of "a demonic impulse" and "a calamitous action"]....

Thompson's boldest writing about criminals transgresses, even inverts, the consolations of the genre....he overturns the formal and thematic resolutions of the crime novel for a more disruptive, devastating ambiguity. In The Killer Inside Me, for example [Thompson's most famous novel, originally published in 1952 ]....both Thompson's hero and Thompson's society achieve not a new life but a terrifying nothingness.

The nods to hard-boiled conventions do not so much toughen Thompson's novels as humanize them--they're all we have to hang on to in the downdraft.  Everything else is wasted, sucking nihilism that's as unsparing as the most lacerating rock'n'roll...and as final as snuff film.

savage tales

My own experience with Thompson's writing is described in Going to Hell in a Samples Case, my 2011 Mystery*File review of the author's nightmarish tale A Hell of a Woman (1954).  I disliked The Killer Inside Me so intensely it put me off Thompson for some time.  I still would never want to make a steady diet of his bleak and twisted work, but I can see the power in it that many find so compelling.

From what particular hell does such a dark vision arise?

"Crime fiction," writes Polito, "offered Thompson a scaffolding to stage his obsessions and inward dramas, and to transform his chills and fevers into vivid literature."

Polito argues that Thompson's obsessions--which he jarringly deems "as American as a serial killer"--arose from the circumstances of the novelist's life in the American Midwest in the first part of the twentieth century.

Jim Thompson's father, James "Big Jim" Thompson,  was the sheriff of Caddo County, Oklahoma when young Jim was born, at Anadarko, the county seat.

Big Jim Thompson was descended from Pennsylvania Quakers, though the family had become Baptist by his time.  His father Samuel had been a successful farmer, but he suffered severe reverses in the 1870s and with his family fled the home in Ipava, Illinois to avoid prison.  "Like a fairy tale in reverse," writes Polito, "the Ipava mansion was transmogrified into a two-room log and sod cabin in Wahoo, Nebraska."

sod house, North Dakota, 1895

In Nebraska Jim Thompson taught school and became a principal but in 1900 he sought more exciting work in law enforcement.  In 1902, he became sheriff of Caddo County.  He also married Birdie Edith Myers of Nebraska, who apparently was one-fourth Cherokee (she also had Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite ancestry).

Jim's and Birdie's son, Jim, the future author, was born in 1906, in the family apartment, right over the Anadarko jail cell block.  This made a good story for a future crime writer.

Sheriff Thompson's success was sadly short-lived.  In 1907 an audit of the sheriff's department disclosed nearly $5000 in missing funds.  Embezzlement accusations were made.  Big Jim, like his father Samuel had before him, fled with his family "in the middle of the night, under threat of imprisonment."

The future author grew up in less than ideal, less than stable, circumstances, variously in Nebraska, Texas and Oklahoma.  His much-absent father worked a myriad of jobs, and sometimes had money, but more often did not.

Birdie Thompson and her children were often packed off to live with her father and mother, the latter of whom was a devoutly religious individual who "never left the house except to attend Sunday services at the First Christian Church and to witness evening prayer meetings."  Young Jim Thompson hated his grandmother intensely.

Thompson did have fondness for a Nebraska uncle, a successful grocer, who introduced him to the delights of reading fiction: Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle and many more. But more often there was poverty and rootlessness, wearisome work as a bellboy in Fort Worth and a manual laborer in Texas oil fields, heavy smoking and drinking.  Thompson by fifteen had already shot up to his full height of six feet, four inches.  But he was rail thin and looked distinctly malnourished.

Texas oil field worker, 1930s

And there was always his embittered resentment of his father.  Polito sees much of Thompson's fiction as fueled by the boy's rage against the father, who failed his family and finally impotently "receded into dullness and paralysis."  Thompson's novels The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280, writes Polito, "roil with Oedipal anger: popular, smooth-tongued sheriffs unmasked as psychopathic killers."

see pulpoftheday.com

In 1929 Jim Thompson enrolled at the agricultural college of the University of Nebraska, where, majoring in farm journalism, he evinced an interest in and talent for creative writing, but he dropped out of college two years later.

Now married, he moved to Oklahoma City, where he maintained a tenuous existence as a freelance writer.  During this time he wrote sensational true crime articles for True Detective.

Two big events took place in Thompson's life in 1936: he joined the Communist Party and found employment with the Oklahoma's Federal Writers' Project, one of the many New Deal programs started during the Depression-wracked decade of the thirties.

One of Thompson's colleagues on the Project was the future famous writer of Westerns Louis L'Amour.  At this time L'Amour also wrote book reviews--mostly of Westerns, appropriately enough--for what Polito calls the "lively" literary page of the Oklahoma City newspaper the Daily Oklahoman (Todd Downing reviewed crime fiction for this paper).

Louis L'Amour (center) and Jim Thompson (right)

Eventually Thompson would become director of the Project, but antagonisms arising out of his left-wing sympathies eventually would result in his resigning and leaving the state in 1940, in the hope of finding greener pastures in California.

Thompson would publish his first novel, a mainstream tale portentously entitled Now and on Earth, in 1942, his first crime novel, Nothing More Than Murder, in 1949.  In the 1950s he would become one of the key figures in the transformation of the mystery tale into the crime novel, but his signal importance was not realized at the time.

How did the life of Todd Downing compare and contrast with that of his crime writing Oklahoma contemporary Jim Thompson?  Did their paths ever cross in the 1930s?  We will see in Part Two!

Tempests: Murder on the Yacht (1932), by Rufus King

As I write this post Hurricane Isaac is making landfall in Louisiana as a minimal (75 mph) hurricane.  It's much a much weaker storm than Hurricane Katrina, but let us hope the rains it brings don't produce anything close to a repetition of Katrina's flooding in New Orleans.  I lived in Baton Rouge for some years and my thoughts are with you, Louisiana.

stormy weather

The second of Rufus King's trio of Lieutenant Valcour maritime mysteries--Murder by Latitude (1930), Murder on the Yacht (1932) and The Lesser Antilles Case (1934)--involves a hurricane.  Adding a natural disaster to a mystery seems an obvious way of increasing the suspense quotient, but Murder on the Yacht is the first case I am aware of where a mystery author does this.

The next year Ellery Queen produced in The Siamese Twin Mystery a tale of people trapped in a house on a mountain gradually being engulfed in a forest fire who just happen to have on their hands a murder case as well; while in 1934 and 1935, respectively, Todd Downing (whose favorite mystery writer was Rufus King) and Newton Gayle (an American-English duo) produced mysteries, Murder on the Tropic and Murder at 28:10, in which hurricanes played major roles in the story lines.  Since then, I suppose the device has been using many times, but these are some of the most important early instances.

Will Crusader make its destination?

In some ways, Murder on the Yacht is imitative of Murder by Latitude.  Valcour thinks a murderer is on board the yacht Crusader and he joins its voyage to try to spot the killer.  This time a smaller craft is involved, but still there is clear similarity between the two books.  Yet King succeeds in creating another fantastic mystery, full of suspense and genuine detection.  

Crusader is owned by New York millionaire Anthony Bettle.  He is on an unspecified mission to the Ragged Island of Jumento Cays, "a forgotten group of islands rimming the southern edge of the 330-mile-long great Bahama bank in a hundred mile arc."  Only Ragged Island is inhabited (by fewer than 100 people).  What is Bettle up to?  Valcour doesn't know.

Also on the ship are Bettle's wife Helen (a society matron type who married Bettle in the classic exhange of position for money); their son John; Helen's dilettantish brother Wharton Luke; Horatio Barlowe and his lovely red-haired daughter Freda; Freda's companion Miss Singlestar; Peter Moore, nephew of Bettle's attorney Waverly Hedglin; and Carlotta Balfe, famous medium and spiritual guru of sorts to Anthony Bettle.  There's also a complement of crew, several of whom are quite nicely sketched in as individuals and not the usual comic "servant" throwaways that you find all too often in Golden Age mysteries.

Waverly Hedglin was on the yacht but apparently disembarked and has since disappeared.  Valcour thinks Hedglin was murdered on the yacht.  Is he right?

many dangers fill the deep

Two-thirds of Murder on the Yacht passes before an "on-stage" murder takes place (although Hedglin's body briefly appears on a deck chair--or does it?), but this murder, of one of the passengers listed above, is a real doozy, occurring in a chapter that would have graced a first-class horror tale.

From this point on, this narrative never lets up and the suspense is something extra.  Soon the hurricane strikes and Valcour is left giving the traditional drawing room exposition in truly unique circumstances.

Characterization again is excellent, with each named person distinctive, and some quite memorable.  Dialogue is sparkling, descriptive writing evocative.

There's an interesting theme too about the hubris of the American moneyed class in the 1930s.  Rufus King himself came of money, of parents who lived in a posh Manhattan townhouse and wintered in Florida and could send him to a fine prep school and to Yale (where King most distinguished himself playing women's parts in Yale Dramat. musicals.); but in this novel, published in the early throes of the Great Depression, King takes a dim view of the mental effect that masses and masses of money can have on people:

Porpoises looped slickly at the bows, looping, looping, strange projectiles hurtling, all with incredible swiftness and grace, an amusing circus with the Gulf Stream for their rings.  But Valcour was not amused.  Sunlight sank richly with its glow and heat, jading blue water and adding soft glitter to creaming crests, but he saw no beauty in it and felt no warmth.

He thought: Just as love makes you blind so does wealth, and of the two blindnesses wealth is the worse because of the incalculable harm it is able to do to people other than yourself.  Bettle was wealth.  And Bettle was stone blind.

This is mystery genre writing of unusual sophistication, either in the Golden Age or today or any other age, in my view.  Why on earth (or sea) have Rufus King's books dropped out of the canon?