Tey for You and Tey for Me

Well, it's a new month at The Passing Tramp and that means, of course, that it's time for another blog post taking issue with Julian Symons!

Julian Symons

Readers of this blog will know that I have most recently disagreed with Symons about hard-boiled crime writers, humorous crime writers and Rex Stout.  But it's not just your Passing Tramp who disagrees with Mr. Symons.  Lucy Worsley, it will be recalled, was so outraged by Symons' comments in his book Bloody Murder about Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night--a book she considers one of the great 20th century crime novels--that she threw her copy of Bloody Murder on the floor and stamped on it!

While the generality of opinion these days no doubt agrees with Symons that the modern era of the "crime novel" is superior to the Golden Age of detective fiction (What Golden Age, one wisenheimer modern crime writer, recently asked, Dan Andriacco tells us), it strikes me that a lot of Symons' opinions about specific crime writers actually are out of sync with modern views. 

Josephine Tey

Take Josephine Tey, for example.  Of Tey's eight crime novels, published between 1929 and her sadly premature death in 1952, Symons likes The Franchise Affair (1948) best, praising the opening section as "wonderfully good."  However, Symons goes on to pronounce that the "solution is a little disappointing, not only because it is foreseeable, but because the central figures are no more than conventionally sketched."

Symons doesn't mention another great Tey favorite, Brat Farrar (1949), but he considers Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951) at greater length.  He does not like this book, which was voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers Association in 1990, four years before Symons' death (by the by, Symons won a Gold Dagger from the CWA in 1957 for his crime novel The Colour of Murder).

Most readers of this blog no doubt know that The Daughter of Time tells the story of Tey's Inspector Grant, laid up in hospital, researching the mystery of Richard II and the infamous murder of the Princes in the Tower. When The Daughter of Time was first published in the middle of the twentieth century, it was heartily praised for doing something different with the mystery fiction format (though John Dickson Carr's The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 1936, somewhat anticipated Tey's book).

Framed? Richard III

Symons, however, was not impressed with Time, complaining that there 

is nothing new about the theory [of the murders advanced by Grant]....Grant's almost total ignorance of history is the most remarkable thing about the book.  The pleasure taken by critics in the slow unfolding of a thesis already well known suggests a similar ignorance on their part.  Still more to the point is the fact that this amateur rehashing of a well-known argument, interspersed with visits from friends to the detective's bedside is, as one might expect, really rather dull.

Whatever one thinks of Tey's books, Symons concluded, they were "not only preoccupied by the past but also belonged to it."  The cutting edge novels of the mid-twentieth century, Symons argues, were concerned with realism and human psychology.

Yet don't Tey's fans believe that Tey's novels--at least the six post-WW2 ones--have much greater realism and character depth than most Golden Age puzzle-oriented mysteries? Don't they admire them precisely because they feel they are "real novels"?  Was Symons possibly reacting more to the traditional social milieus of the Tey novels (schools, villages, country houses).  What do you think?

And what are your favorite Teys?  I think it's safe to sat that the Big Three are The Daughter of Time, Brat Farrar and The Franchise Affair, with Miss Pym Disposes perhaps nipping discreetly at their heels.  The other four Tey mystery novels tend to be comparatively neglected.  I soon will post a review of one of the latter four books.

Bringing Down the Hammer: Crack of Doom (1963), by Leo Bruce

....An ordinary, well-used very heavy hammer such as may be used for anything from breaking coal to driving in a stake.  Such a one I have kept by me for years.  No one knows I have it. It is small enough to carry with me unnoticeably and large enough to be effective....
                                                                  Crack of Doom (1963), by Leo Bruce

Rich Westwood of Past Offences suggested that crime fiction bloggers review a 1963 mystery this month.  Here is my choice: Leo Bruce's Crack of Doom.

In the 1950s and 1960s, one of the best English authors of the clued detective novel was "Leo Bruce," the pseudonym of prolific author Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-1979).  

Rupert Croft-Cooke

Many of his Leo Bruce novels are in print today, Croft-Cooke's native Indian secretary and companion, Joseph Susei Mari, having inherited the copyrights to the Leo Bruce novels at the author's death and sold them to the publishing firm of Academy Chicago, which was absorbed by Chicago Review Press last year.

In the fall of this year, CRP will be reprinting the last Leo Bruce detective novel, Death of a Bovver Boy, which was originally published in 1974, five years before Bruce's death (Croft-Cooke suffered a debilitating stroke that year and afterwards was only able to complete one more work, his final volume of memoirs).

I have blogged about Croft-Cooke here and here, so will not go once again into a great deal of background on him, but I should note that there are two Leo Bruce novels series, one with the earthy British copper (later PI) Sergeant Beef (8 novels, published between 1936 and 1952, including the indisputable Bruce classic, Case for Three Detectives, 1936) and one with the history schoolmaster (Queen's School, Newminster) and amateur sleuth Carolus Deene (23 novels, published between 1955 and 1974).

The Beef books were conceived as satires on classical detective fiction, particularly the "gentleman sleuth" type (Beef is no gentleman), but they also simultaneously offer cleverly designed puzzles.  The Deene books are less overtly satirical (though the earlier ones especially have considerable humor), with Deene himself being a gentleman detective (private income, you see), but they also often have very good puzzles.  The Deene novels Furious Old Women (1960), A Bone and a Hank of Hair (1961) and Nothing Like Blood (1962) have especially clever plots, I think, but most of the books are quite good.

By and large the Deene mysteries are set in the same sort of provincial English milieu so often favored by Agatha Christie.  Bruce also is, like Christie, particularly adept at subtle clueing.  Personally I find him one of the English mystery writers who comes closest to Christie overall, including in sheer readability.

the English first edition
with the splendid dust jacket by Val Biro

Leo Bruce's Crack of Doom (retitled, for no compelling reason that I can see, Such is Death in the United States) inaugurated a period of lessened levity in the Deene books.  Its plot is rather grim.

The opening pages of the novel are taken from the diary of an aspiring murderer in the resort town of Selby-on-Sea. This person discloses therein that s/he is planning to commit, for the sheer thrill of it, the perfect murder: one that is without motive ("I shall simply kill the first person who comes along").

The body of the novel then commences, with a man being found dead in a shelter on the Selby-on-Sea promenade, his head battered by blows from a coal hammer, on a blustery night a few weeks before Christmas (yes, Crack of Doom is also a Christmas mystery, with events coming to a head on Christmas Day, which echoes the "Day of Judgment" idea invoked by the novel's title).

The dead man is Ernest Rafter, who, it turns out, had only recently returned to England. He had long been presumed dead, killed in Burma in the Second World War.  Investigation by the police reveals that during the war he had been a collaborator with the Japanese, and in this fact the police believe they may have found the motive for his murder.

Fearing suspicion is directed at her family--Rafter has two brothers and two sisters living in the vicinity of Selby-on-Sea--one of Rafter's sisters, a wealthy, pompous widow with a son at Queen's School in Newminster, persuades Carolus Deene to take on the case.

Bruce's regular cast of amusing supporting characters in Newminster is downplayed in Crack of Doom, but as is so often the case in the Deene books a public house plays a key role in the tale and there are two winning barmaids, Doris and Vivienne, to brighten things up a bit (when it comes to female characters, Bruce excelled at barmaids, stuffy matrons and plainspoken elderly women).

The novel offers a difficult murder problem, with some very good clues, that really tests the murder mettle of Deene and the reader (by the by, Queen's School splendid windbag headmaster Mr. Gorringer shows up for Deene's exposition at the end, as per tradition). The coal hammer as a macabre murder weapon has always stuck with me, rather like the sugar cutter in Agatha Christie's Mrs. McGinty's Dead (1952).

I unhesitatingly recommended Crack of Doom to fans of classic English mystery.

A Forked Plot: Brazen Tongue (1940), by Gladys Mitchell

If you like Poirot and Miss Marple, you'll love Mrs. Bradley.

             --Publisher's Blurb on the Vintage reprint of Brazen Tongue (1940), by Gladys Mitchell

....I think there were too many characters to keep up with in Brazen Tongue...By the end of the book I was confused as to who was the murderer.

              --Amazon.com customer review of Brazen Tongue (1940), by Gladys Mitchell

Gladys Mitchell
(1901-1983)

It is to be expected that publishers seeking to market the mysteries of Gladys Mitchell (1901-1983)--now more widely available to readers around the world that at any time, including during the author's own lifetime--would hail her as another Agatha Christie; but in actuality Mitchell was very much her own woman, with a beguiling voice distinct from not only that of Christie, but also the other most publicized Golden Age Crime Queens, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.

Bizarre is a word often applied to Mitchell's sixty-six novels, published between 1929 to 1984, about the crime-solving capers of the unorthodox psychiatrist Mrs. Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley. Exuberant is another. Inscrutable, others, less enchanted, have added. Mitchell can surpass Allingham at her most opaque.

"Mitchell's plotting style was uniquely hers," truly writes Nick Fuller in his introduction to Sleuth's Alchemy (2005), Crippen & Landru's collection of Gladys Mitchell short fiction. Occasionally, notes Nick, Mitchell's mystery "maze-building would get out of hand, and she would lose herself in the labyrinth, whereupon the critical Minotaur would gobble her up, and, like Icarus, she would come plummeting down to earth a fantastic wreck."

Even Mitchell's most coherently plotted mystery novels demand careful attention from readers--more, perhaps, than some may care to give to escape fiction.  Yet for those of us willing to make the commitment, Mitchell's best work is an absolute and abiding delight.

beware the critical Minotaur

Case in point: Brazen Tongue (1940), which Mitchell wrote in the early months of the "Phoney War" in Europe (the period in 1939-40 before the German attack on France and the low countries was launched). Like Nick Fuller, who deems this book one of Mitchell's three or four best Bradleys, I find it a superlative crime novel, with an interesting plot, sly humor, a memorable depiction of life in a provincial English town in the early days of the Second World War and the saurian Mrs. Bradley just as wonderfully outre as ever.

Although the puzzle, revolving around three suspicious but seemingly unrelated deaths occurring in the provincial town of Willington within a twelve hour period, is quite complex and somewhat non-linear in its elucidation, this is a true detective novel, with creative clueing and a relentless investigation by Mrs. Bradley.

the 2005 Minnow Press edition

While praising Brazen Tongue on his page about it at his Gladys Mitchell website, Jason Half somewhat faults what he terms the "meandering reveal" of the solution.

I think that Mitchell was going here for the Anthony Berkeley twist-style ending, seeing how many times she could shake the pieces in her crime-kaleidoscope to make a new picture of the solution.

I found it a tremendously fun, indeed bravura, performance; although others, like the Amazon reviewer quoted above, may well find it all too much (serious armchair sleuths should pay attention to the title of the book).

Half also criticizes Mitchell's brief depiction of a Jewish character, the wife of one Councillor Zacharias. Mitchell gives this character a stage lisp, a convention in English fiction going back to Charles Dickens' Fagin. Besides simply being rather silly, the exaggerated dialect  makes the character's testimony difficult to understand. In her work Mitchell had an unfortunate predilection for impenetrable dialect speech (another book where she indulges herself in this penchant to ill effect is Dead Men's Morris, with its acres and acres of "colorful" country dialect).

However, Councillor Zacharias and his wife are both portrayed quite sympathetically by Mitchell. There is no parallel here to dubious passages concerning Jews that we occasionally find in Golden Age mysteries by, for example, Christie, Sayers and Berkeley.

The fact that Mr. Zacharias is a town Councillor is indicative of the interesting social dimension to Brazen Tongue.  Despite the wild plot, the milieu depicted by Mitchell in Brazen Tongue seems more "real world" to me than that of many Golden Age mysteries of the country house and cozy village stereotype. Mitchell goes up and down the social ladder with ease, adeptly portraying people from the varied classes; and her sympathies, contra GA stereotype, often seem to lie with the less privileged (there is some feminist subtext as well). The novel makes an interesting companion piece to Henry Wade's brilliant The Dying Alderman (1930), published a decade earlier.

Happily, some of Mrs. Bradley's relatives also are on hand: niece Sally Lestrange, sister-in-law Selina Lestrange and son Sir Ferdinand Lestrange.  I always like reading about the twice--or thrice--married Mrs. Bradley's vast network of family relations (someone really should do a family tree).

We also get to see a little of Mrs. Bradley's chauffeur George and the measures he goes to, in the early days of rationing, to get petrol for his employer's investigative jaunts. Mrs. Bradley herself is as amiably highhanded as ever, and, appropriately enough, gets the novel's thought-provoking last line.

Mrs. Bradley on the case: the dust jacket of the first edition

Disappointingly for the author's Brazen fans, Gladys Mitchell in a 1976 interview with Barry Pike named Brazen Tongue as her most disliked novel, along with Printer's Error (1939). It seems odd that she chose two books published back-to-back, nearly forty years earlier. On the other hand, she named her three then most recent books, the mediocre A Javelin for Jonah (1974), Winking at the Brim (1974) and Convent on Styx (1975), as being among her favorites, so in my view this just goes to support the old adage that authors aren't necessarily the best judges of their best--or worst--work.

For years Brazen Tongue was one of the rarest Gladys Mitchell titles.  It was reprinted in an attractive hardcover edition in 2005 by Minnow Press, but this edition now is itself a collector's item. Fortunately the title now is available, like other Gladys Mitchell mysteries, in affordable formats in both the United States and the United Kingdom. It is pleasing to think that the company of devoted admirers of "the Great Gladys" has a chance of growing.

Kids Are Murder! My Son, the Murderer (1954), by Patrick Quentin

For Father's Day I thought I would offer a piece on Patrick Quentin's My Son, the Murderer (1954; in UK, The Wife of Ronald Sheldon).

For many years murders were
Hugh Wheeler's meat

This was the tenth Patrick Quentin crime novel and the first under that name probably written solely by Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912-1987), who later went on to write for films and the stage, winning Tony awards for his books for A Little Night Music, Candide and Sweeney Todd.

The previous nine PQ novels, beginning with A Puzzle for Fools, were written together by Wheeler and his then-partner Richard Wilson Webb (1901-1966), between 1936 and 1952. 

All but one of them have the series character Peter Duluth, a theatrical producer and amateur sleuth. Along with his actress wife, Iris, Peter appears one last time in My Son, the Murderer, although his brother Jake plays the lead role.

Also appearing is Lieutenant Timothy Trant, a suave cop who originally surfaced in another Wheeler-Webb mystery series, written under the name "Q. Patrick."  Trant appeared in the Q. Patrick books Death for Dear Clara (1937), The File on Claudia Cragge (1938) and Death and the Maiden (1939), before crossing over to appear in the Patrick Quentin novel Black Widow (1952).  After My Son, the Murderer Trant intervened in three more Patrick Quentin novels, including the final one, Family Skeletons (1965).

It's all rather confusing and may have something to do today with Patrick Quentin's relative obscurity, despite the fact that the books were highly praised and that Wheeler, as mentioned above, went on to achieve great prominence in film and stage work.

Of the two men, Richard Webb was, as a mystery writer, the more aesthetically traditionalist of the two. The books offered solely by Hugh Wheeler are less like formal detective novels and more like psychological crime novels, with great emphasis being placed on the emotional trauma suffered by the people involved in a murder investigation, in the modern fashion.

Certainly we see this in My Son, the Murderer, the story of a father, Jake Duluth, trying to prove his estranged son did not commit murder.  Jake, who narrates the tale, is a partner in the publishing firm of Sheldon and Duluth. When the novel opens he and his son both are trying to recover from the seemingly inexplicable suicide of Felicia Duluth, the wife of Jake and mother of Bill.

Nineteen-year-old Bill is leading an especially aimless life. Now he's talking of going to Rome with an aspiring Greenwich Village writer, Sylvia Rymer. But then Jake's middle-aged publishing partner, Ronald Sheldon, returns from a trip to England with a beautiful new wife, Jean (age nineteen, just like Bill), and events take a sudden, disastrous turn.

Jean is the daughter of the unsuccessful but esteemed highbrow novelist Basil Leighton; and with his daughter's marriage to Ronald Sheldon has come, most conveniently, a lucrative book contract with Sheldon and Duluth. Basil has also accompanied Jean to the United States, along with his slavish wife Nora and his aloof "muse," Phyllis Brent, of some backwater English gentry family.  The whole odd menage is installed with Jean, Ronald and Ronald's spinster sister, Angie, in Ronald's mansion.

You may have guessed already that Bill Duluth falls in love at first sight with Jean Sheldon. Young love, it seems, can't be denied. When Ronald Sheldon is found shot dead at his home, Bill is the main suspect.  Can his father--the only person who believes Bill's insistence that he's not guilty--save him?

As befits a 1950s crime novel, in Son there is a lot of time devoted to emotional travail and psychological speculation, but at heart this is still a fairly clued detective novel, and the last portion, where the finger of suspicions shifts rapidly from person to person, is especially good.  There is also a pointed satirical look at British attitudes toward the United States--Wheeler himself, like Webb, was an Englishman by birth, although by the time of the publication of Son he had lived in the US for about twenty years--as well as at the odd personality cults of would-be Great Novelists (by the latter item I was rather reminded of Ruth Rendell's 2007 Wexford mystery, Not in the Flesh).

This is a admirable specimen of the 1950s American crime novel and should be brought back into print. Hugh Wheeler went on the write six more crime novels under the PQ name, some of the quite good, though with Son he bid adieu to the Duluth clan, witnesses through the years to so many mysterious murders.

Polishing Up: Miss Silver Comes to Stay (1949), by Patricia Wentworth (Review)

"I find it very difficult...to read [a detective story] not set in rural England."

                                                       --W. H. Auden, "The Guilty Vicarage" (1948)

In Masters of the Humdrum Mystery and other writings I have argued that the view of most Golden Age novels as taking place in highly socially stratified villages and country houses is exaggerated, being a construction partly of post-WW2 retrospection.

W. H. Auden's "The Guilty Vicarage" essay has influenced the development of this view, as have, I suspect, the Miss Silver novels of Patricia Wentworth (1878-1961). Although in setting and milieu they seem like what we tend to think of as classic Golden Age English mysteries, most of them were in fact published after the outbreak of the Second World War, commonly seen as the end point of the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Miss Silver Comes to Stay (1949) is the fifteenth of the 32 Miss Silver mysteries, and one in which, I find, Wentworth is clearly embracing the mythic or magical aspect of the detective story, what Auden in his essay calls the "Great Good Place."  Murder disrupts the state of order in the village, requiring the detective to expose him or her and cast him out, restoring the disrupted order.  I think Wentworth's novel is an extremely good example of this sort of mystery.

In this particular tale Miss Silver comes to stay in the village of Lenton, to which she has been invited by an old school friend.  Her appearance is providential, for a most shocking murder soon takes place, one that threatens to produce a grave miscarriage of justice.

James Lessiter, son of Mildred Lessiter, widowed mistress of the decaying Melling House, after many years away making his fortune in business has returned to the family home, his mother having passed away.  Philistine that he is, Lessiter has no respect for tradition and plans to sell: "He had no regrets. The house could go.  If he wanted a place in the country, there were more amusing spots than Melling....Something modern and labour-saving."

Vindictive and, indeed, sadistic, Lessiter is determined as well to settle some old village scores. Soon, however, someone settles him.

Rietta Cray makes an ill-timed call

Lessiter is found dead, most classically: in his study at Melling House, his head stove in by the fireplace poker. Official suspicion quickly focuses on an old flame of Lessiter's, Rietta Cray, and her tempestuous nephew and ward, Carr Robertson.

Wentworth makes clear that neither of these characters, both of whom have their own love stories, can be guilty (with Agatha Christie one can never be sure of these things), so much of the novel has the quality of a suspense tale: Will Rietta or Carr be arrested, we wonder, and how will Miss Silver get them out of their grim predicament?

A good part of the novel involves Miss Silver uncovering a fact that we, the readers, already know; yet the final portion offers some rather fine deception and detection, I think.

Throughout it all, Miss Silver, the upright and elderly governess turned sleuth, functions superbly, in her quest for truth probing to people's emotional cores while placidly knitting "a cosy coat and knickers for her niece Ethel Burkett's little Josephine."

The characters in the book note the awesome phenomenon that is Miss Silver:

"I don't quite know why she impresses one, but she does.  It's a sort of mixture of being back at school again and finding yourself wandering about in the fairy story where you meet an old woman and she gives you a hazel nut with the cloak of darkness packed inside it."
....
"She knows people.  All the things they hide behind--appearance, manner, the show we put up to prevent other people knowing too much about us--she sees right through them, and judges you on what's left."

Throughout the novel as well, Wentworth compellingly conveys the social strata of the village, from the seemingly inevitably decaying genteel folk, to the professional class and tradespeople, to clerks, servants and inquisitive telephone operators.  One can debate the exact realism of this setting in 1949, but it is undeniably a well-conveyed one.

Through Miss Silver Wentworth continually invokes traditional standards of decency and honor. Usually what is older is deemed better ("There was nothing that was not suitable, but the general effect was that everything was a little too new").

The ethos is undoubtedly conservative.  At one point the author refers to "this hard post-war world," as if for many the pre-war world had not presented its certain share of hardness.  Miss Silver regrets that "labour shortages and heavy taxation" has led to the reduction of "so many fine country places." She allows that now "the good things of life were being spread more evenly," yet she laments "the passing of so much that was beautiful."

"...in moments of stress a man
could be dreadfully in the way."

However, there are some seemingly unorthodox notes. In an era where the word cougar referred only, I presume, to a big cat, Miss Silver sees a young man's romantic interest in an attractive, designing older woman (age 43) as something quite natural.

She also strikes something of a feminist note in this clever sentence: "With every esteem for the manly virtues, and a good deal of indulgence towards the manly failings, it had often occurred to [Miss Silver] that in moments of stress a man could be dreadfully in the way."

Perhaps one manly failing throughout the decades since the advent of Miss Silver has been a failure by many male mystery readers to appreciate the many "feminine" virtues of this lady detective.

For whatever Julian Symons and Jacques Barzun (see my previous post) may have thought about it, Miss Silver indeed did come to stay upon the literary scene--and she shows no sign yet of leaving it.

Polishing Up: Miss Silver Comes to Stay (1949), by Patricia Wentworth (Introduction); plus a short tribute to "Peff"

In Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver Deals with Death (1943; Miss Silver Intervenes in UK), Wentworth's Inspector Ernest Lamb delivers what surely must be taken as artistic statement on the detective novel by the author:

"Human feelings are things you're bound to take into consideration.  That's where a lot of these detective novels go wrong--there aren't any human feelings in them.  They're clever the same way a game of chess is clever, or a problem in mathematics, and nobody with any more feelings than one of the chessmen or the plus and minus signs.  It isn't natural...."

This is a statement about detective fiction that surely is as "advanced" for its time as that dramatically unfurled by Raymond Chandler in his "The Simple Art of Murder" essay, published the next year. With it, Wentworth, who at this time was moving decisively in her writing from crime thrillers to detective fiction, was aligning herself with the vanguard that wanted to infuse (opponents would say dilute) the cerebral detective novel with discernibly human passions.

Girlish and trivial?

With each Wentworth I read the author strikes me more and more as a significant figure within the genre, despite the fact that she has been mostly ignored in genre studies.

In 1001 Midnights, Marcia Muller made a case for the merits of the Wentworth crime novels, yet in Bloody Murder Julian Symons--you had to know it wouldn't take me long to mention dear old Mr. Symons--lists Wentworth as one of the British mystery authors who, says he, refused "to be serious about anything except the detective and the puzzle"; while Symons's aesthetic nemesis, Jacques Barzun--a much admired individual here--for his part was similarly dismissive, writing in A Catalogue of Crime of Wentworth's novel Miss Silver Comes to Stay (1949) that "it is clearly aimed at the tired and somewhat distrait reader: language and gesture and event are girlish and trivial."

Is this is a male thing, then?  Not entirely, surely.

Anthony Boucher, most esteemed of American crime fiction critics, came to be a great fan of Wentworth by the 1950s; however, I do think the inevitably prominent romance element in the Patrica Wentworth detective novels has been a turn-off to many male readers over the years, as has been the widespread perception of Wentworth as an anodyne (to borrow from Jacques Barzun), or cozy, mystery writer.

There is no doubt in my mind that Wentworth is a notable figure in mystery genre history precisely for popularizing--indeed, I would say, playing a huge role in originating the very popular conception of--the cozy detective novel.  Beginning in 1943, when she published The Chinese Shawl and Miss Silver Deals with Death, Wentworth over fifteen years published more than two dozen Miss Silver mysteries, most of them, I believe, true detective novels and all of them "cozy," set in genteel milieus where the social order is disturbed but restored at the end (her last detective novel, The Girl in the Cellar, published the year of her death in 1961, seems almost universally considered a failure, her Postern of Fate, of you will).

To sweepingly dismiss these "cozy" novels at "girlish" and "trivial" is, I think, missing a lot of what is going in on them.  I believe Patricia Wentworth quite consciously and intelligently embraced the mythic aspect of the classical detective novel and that her Miss Silver emerges over the course of these novels as an awesome--I use this much overused word advisedly--figure, one of the true Great Detectives in English detective fiction.

The novel I will use to support my case is, yes, the one so dismissively treated by Jacques Barzun, Miss Silver Comes to Stay.  I found it the best Patricia Wentworth novel that I have read, as well as one of the best mysteries I have read this year.

Incidentally, this novel was also cover-illustrated, in its 1958 Pan paperback edition, by the late Sam Peffer (1921-2014), one of the great crime fiction artists of the 1950s and 1960s, who signed his work as "Peff."  Some fantastic example of his covers are posted below.  You can see Patricia Wentworth was in some very good--if rather fast--company.

"Oh! You Hound!!" Sherlock Sensationalized (Paperback Novelties)

no subtlety here

The lurid, menaced woman crime fiction paperbacks of mid-twentieth-century American publishers have been much commented upon over the years. Most infamously these covers, which drew on the tropes of pulp fiction, were associated with Mickey Spillane and other hard-boiled authors, but the proven sales appeal of such art led to its being used to push as well non-hard-boiled mysteries, such as Ruth Fenisong's The Lost Caesar (1945; retitled for this Popular Library paperback, Death Is a Gold Coin--was the publisher making an allusion to Charon's obol, I wonder, or did they simply want to get death in the title).

"How Much Evil Can a Woman Endure?" pants Popular Library. I suspect that some sensation-seeking readers may have been disappointed with what was actually between the covers, however.

For some reason I had never thought to check Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels for this sort of treatment.

Well, witness now Bantam's 1949 paperback edition of Holmes' "most famous case,": The Hound of the Baskervilles.  Judging from this cover, the "hound" of the title would seem to be a man.

As I recollect this cover actually has some basis in events from the book, described at second hand. But you have to to flip to the back cover to learn about the actual hound of Baskerville legend.  Perhaps a better title to go with this cover would have been The Woman in Red.