Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene

the door is open....

We now have a cover for this collection of essays on mystery fiction in honor of Douglas G. Greene, the distinguished academic scholar--among other things he wrote the much-admired biography of John Dickson Carr--and founder of Crippen & Landru, publisher of short form mystery fiction.

Mysteries Unlocked will be published next year by McFarland Press.  It boasts two dozen contributors from around the world, including ten Edgar winners and nominees.  The wide-ranging essays cover a great number of mystery works, from J. S. Fletcher's The Investigators, serialized shortly after the death of Queen Victoria, to P. D. James' Jane Austen pastiche (with murder mystery), Death Comes to Pemberley, published in the last month of 2011.

Hard-boiled authors are included as well as writers of classical detective fiction. There is an essay on Doug specifically, as well a a foreword, introduction and afterword about him and appendices on his scholarly publications and Crippen & Landru editions. The book highlights both mystery fiction itself and the impact that Doug and his work have had on the world of mystery readers.

I hope people will find Mysteries Unlocked an illuminating and entertaining book, as well as a worthy tribute to the dean of academic mystery history in his seventieth year.

Life and Death at Sunset: The Wall (1938), by Mary Roberts Rinehart

"Maybe we'd better get at it from the start.  It's not a pretty story; but as a matter of human interest and--well, human motives, it's a humdinger."

the excellent Mysterious Press
kindle edition

Our twenty-nine-year-old heroine-narrator, Marcia Lloyd, is quoting local good old boy sheriff Russell Shand (a quite appealingly-presented character, by the way), about the murderous goings-on in the 1938 Mary Roberts Rinehart novel The Wall.

In 1937, Rinehart bought a house, Fairview, in Bar Harbor, Maine, so I suppose it only makes sense that she set her 1938 murder mystery there, in a suitably fictionalized version (the house burned in 1948, a year after Rinehart was nearly killed there by her deranged cook; see more on Rinehart and Bar Harbor here).

A great part of the appeal of the novel is Rinehart's portrayal of this setting; it will be a rare reader who won't want to make a visit to Maine after reading this book.

I think The Wall is the sort of mystery novel to which the term cozy applies.  Despite unpleasantness and nasty murders, order is restored by the end in classic fashion.

"It is all familiar and friendly again," Marcia Lloyd writes, "this rambling old house, built by my grandfather in the easy money days of the nineties, and called Sunset House, generally corrupted to Sunset."

Of course with the Depression and all, life is somewhat tougher for Marcia and her brother Arthur. Mainly she worries about being able to keep up her retinue of servants--what would they do without her?  I know this sort of thing can sound self-serving, but, I will give Rinehart credit, she presents Marcia's paternalism in a much more sympathetic light than does, say, Theodora DuBois with her insufferable Anne McNeill, who comes off simply as a snob.  I think most readers will like Marcia and want things to work out for her.

1940s mapback edition
with an inaccurate Victorian house

As nice as the island is, there is a serpent that comes slithering into Marcia's midst at Sunset, her brother Arthur's scheming, common hussy of an ex-wife, Juliette Ransom (aptly named, because she is always demanding more money from Arthur).

Juliette soon gets fatally dispatched (with a golf club) and Marcia and the readers are off on a murder-go-round that doesn't come to a stop until there are three more deaths.

Rinehart said that for her crime novels she first wrote out the "buried story" (the true events of the mystery we don't know about until the end), then overlaid it with the surface story. Her narrators offer teasing hints and foreshadowing of things that were to come in a dramatically effective way, in my view.

Some critics mocked this as "had I but known" narrative, but it's simply a tool of suspense. Yes, with some writers it could get silly, but Rinehart was the master at this sort of thing and does it well.

Rinehart received the modern equivalent of over one million dollars for the serialization of The Wall in the Saturday Evening Post, so I can't blame her for taking a leisurely pace.

the frightened lady in nightgown motif
popular in late 60s/early70s "Gothic"
paperbacks--seemingly the setting
has changed to somewhere in Europe!

The novel is long by the standards of the era, about 120,000 words.  Yet there's a richness to the milieu that compensates for any slowness.

Dorothy L. Sayers appreciated this quality, comparing Rinehart's novels to the three-deckers of Victorian sensation writers like Wilkie Collins.  Rinehart isn't that good a writer (few people are) but I can see why Sayers made the comparison.  I'm reminded somewhat of the Barbara Vine novels of Ruth Rendell, though Rinehart is more cozy and genteel.

Considering how popular she once was and that she wrote books that are more like modern-day crime novels, focusing on characters and emotions more than physical clues, it seems odd that Rinehart isn't so well-known today, compared with contemporaries like Sayers and Agatha Christie.

It probably didn't help that Julian Symons was so dismissive of Rinehart in his influential Bloody Murder (published in three editions between 1972 and 1993) and that in Talking about Detective Fiction P. D. James doesn't even mention her (James seems to think Americans of that era wrote only hard-boiled crime fiction).  But for mystery fans who like older fiction Rinehart's criminous works (by my count 16 novels and 6 novellas, as well as short stories, written between 1906 and 1953) are a rich legacy, to be enjoyed at leisure.

The Wall (1938), Mary Roberts Rinehart---and The News

This will be the first of two books from Judge Lynch's 1938 "best of" list (see immediately below on the blog) that I will review in the next several days.  It's also the first Mary Roberts Rinehart book I have read since novella "The Confession" (reviewed here last year).

How does it hold up seventy-five years later?  On the whole I think The Wall is the best Rinehart book I have read.  But you'll be hearing more about this later today (I really should have the full review up before the end of the day).

Also, I will have some news this weekend about the collection of mystery essays in honor of mystery scholar and publsiher Douglas G. Greene that I've been editing this year.  We now have an official title for the book--and a cover illustration.  I look forward to talking more about this soon.

The Best of 1938: Judge Lynch Renders His Verdict on Crime Novels

Earlier this year I posted Saturday Review mystery critic Judge Lynch's list of the best novels of 1939.  Here, without further ado, is the sequel, his list for 1938:

The Fashion in Shrouds (Doubleday, Doran), Margery Allingham

Albert Campion at his shrewdest as a sleuth, glittering background of London gown-shops and gaudy restaurants, galaxy of interesting characters and first-calls writing.

Fast Company (Dodd, Mead), Marco Page

Tough goings-on in the rare-book biz, a detective--and his wife--who can deduce and wisecrack at top-speed, dialogue that crackles and an A-1 puzzle.

The Crooked Hinge (Harpers), John Dickson Carr

Aura of supernatural around quite mundane but mystifying murder of claimant to old English estate adds triple zest to marvelously well-spun puzzle for adipose Dr. Fell.

Murder on Safari (Harpers), Elspeth Huxley

Complete education in big-game hunting (African); delightful obnoxious tycoons--American and English; robbery, murder, and a jungleful of excitement.

Lament for a Maker (Dodd, Mead), Michael Innes

Eerie Scottish castle houses eccentric laird who goes boomp over battlements.  Continuously creepy chapters lead to totally unexpected ending and all is braw--but for the tale-bearing rats.

Death from a Top Hat (Putnam), Clayton Rawson

Ex-Magicker Merlini manipulates coins while solving strange deaths of occultist and card-trickster. Huge amounts of fascinating facts on magicians, much humor, and a hurricane finish.

A Puzzle in Poison (Doubleday, Doran), Anthony Berkeley

Death--by arsenic--of retired English engineer brings numerous nice people under suspicion. Detectives clear them all but an amateur comes to conclusion that leaves reader agasp.

The Wall (Farrar & Rinehart), Mary Roberts Rinehart

Divorcee, lurking round ex-husband's seaside home, slain with gold club.  Other deaths, and romance, follow--all satisfactorily solved in spite of clues left hanging.

Warrant for X (Doubleday, Doran), Philip Macdonald

American playwright on London holiday overhears plot, almost gets bumped off before Anthony Gethryn, in class A comeback, nails plotters.

I have read all of these, but the Marco Page novel, which in its day was very popular and also successfully filmed.  I will be writing about one next week (I think you can guess which).

How many have you read?  What do you think of the judge's list?  I think it stands up pretty well, though there are some notable omissions.  No Agatha Christie (Appointment with Death, Hercule Poirot's Christmas), most obviously, and no Rex Stout (Too Many Cooks); they wouldn't make it in 1939 either.

On the other hand, Innes, Carr and Rawson made it both years.  Men predominate, accounting for six of nine titles, while Brits outnumber Americans 5-4.  Only one of the novels really has any affinity with the hard-boiled school (or maybe two, come to think of it, the Page and the Macdonald; the latter man had been living for some time in the United States, where he had moved to work on Hollywood screenplays).

Overall, my impression from this list is that 1938 was a very good year in crime!

Mary Roberts Rinehart, Golden Age Crime Queen

The real Crime Queen in the decade of the 1930s, in terms of money and sales anyway, was not, I suspect, Agatha Christie (brilliant as she was), but the American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958).  At this time her books, which included mainstream novels as well as mysteries, regularly sold over 100,000 copies per title in the United States (this in a period when people mostly rented mysteries for a few cents a day from libraries).

with her book earnings in the 1930s
Rinehart could buy lots of sheet music
--not to mention grand pianos

Moreover, Rinehart's serialization figures are awesome.  The real price of the serializations of her crime novels The Door (1930), Miss Pinkerton (1932), The Album (1933), The Wall (1938) and The Great Mistake (1940) in The Saturday Evening Post was something close to five million dollars today. Then there were her serializations of the many short stories she wrote.  These were primarily non-criminous, but among the crime shorts "The Lipstick," for example, was purchased by Cosmopolitan for about $70,000 modern USD (compare this with a dozen years later, in 1954, when Rinehart published "The Splinter" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for about $3500 modern USD, chump change for this author; this story was published, by the way, in the Fall 1955 issue of EQMM and a list of its contents can be found here).*

*(figures drawn from Jan Cohn's 1980 Rinehart biography, Improbable Fiction)

There was really no one to compare to Rinehart in terms of classical mystery fiction sales during the Golden Age, I think, unless it was S. S. Van Dine, briefly, in the 1920s. Rinehart's fans considered her something more than a "mere" mystery writer (as did Rinehart herself), someone concerned with the emotional impact of crime rather than puzzle mechanics.

Julian Symons once rather patronizingly termed Rinehart's audience as "maiden aunts"; but in fact I think Rinehart's popularity encompassed a much broader demographic. Her mystery fiction not only sold well, but it was well-received by (predominantly male) newspaper book reviewers, despite Ogden Nash famously ridiculing Rinehart's sort of "Had I But Known" mystery fiction [HIBK] in his satiric poem "Don't Guess Let Me Tell You."

I'll be saying more about Rinehart in a few days, when I talk about one of those 1930s mystery novels.

The Fourth Letter (1947), by Frank Gruber

Frank Gruber

Frank Gruber (1904-1969) was one of the great pulp fiction writers of the twentieth century. The Frank Gruber webpage over at thrillingdetective.com lists over one hundred stories by him, as well as more than thirty novels (he also wrote western tales).  He obviously had a quite a work ethic!

Often Gruber's tales revolve around interesting depictions of different sorts of employment.  His longest crime series was the Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg series of novels, fourteen of which appeared between 1949 and 1964 (a dozen of these in the 1940s, by far his most productive decade as a crime writer).

This series, about two guys who are constantly on the make for big moneymaking chances and who just happen to constantly encounter murder along the way, probably influenced Craig Rice's own excellent Bingo and Handsome series (The Sunday Pigeon Murders, 1942, The Thursday Turkey Murders, 1943, The April Robin Murders, 1958).

I can't help suspecting that one of Gruber's non-series titles, The Fourth Letter (1947), also influenced, just a bit, Craig Rice's 1948 novel The Fourth Postman, recently reviewed here.

Aside from the presence of "fourth" in the titles of both novels, mail plays a key role in both books. Given the close proximity of their years of publication, I think it not unlikely that there was a connection, whether conscious or not, on Rice's part.

I quite enjoyed The Fourth Letter, but more for the milieu than the mystery per se.  Frank Gruber was born on a farm in Elmer Township (population 151 in 2010) in Minnesota's iron triangle, about an hour northwest of Duluth, and judging by The Fourth Letter, he probably was glad to get out of there. His view of small town life is definitely akin to that of Sinclair Lewis in Main Street (1920).

The novel details newsman Tom Haggerty's relocation from Chicago to little Elmhurst, Iowa, where he has accepted a job as circulation manager for the rural newspaper The Farmer's Helper.  Within twenty-four hours of his first day at work, he is falling in love with one of the newspaper secretaries, who happens to be the most beautiful "girl" in Elmhurst, and coping with a murder on the premises, for which he becomes the chief suspect of the stupid and unethical local police.

The mystery is honestly worked out and interesting enough, but, as stated above, it is Gruber's depiction of life in a small Midwestern, mid-century American town and the workings of a rural newspaper that most interested me.  The author also has a good light touch with character and dialogue.  At a bit under 60,000 words, Letter is quite a short book and it won't change your life, but it's a good, quick mystery read.  I will definitely seek out more of Frank Gruber's writing.

Gone Fishing: A Mystery Artifact

Lake Wallenpaupack     Aug. 20, 43

Dear Son & Daughter: We caught 3 Pike and 1 calico Bass yesterday, 3 Pike today, 3 pike 17 in, 1 pike 19, 2 pike 20 in, the best catches of the week.  It was very cold last night.  I was cold under 4 blankets. We are using the [lend?], could not get a cottage.  It was very hot on the lake this afternoon.  The lake was very calm this afternoon and the fish would not bite at all.  My worms are in bad condition, may not hold out for my vacation.  Mother & Dad.

Fred Adams
Mt. Greenwood Road
Trucksville
Luzurne Co.
Penna [Pennsylvania]

This whimsical (and slightly racy) postcard was tucked inside my copy of Theodora DuBois' Death Is Late to Lunch.

Signed in the front of the book is Jane H. (or L.) Adams.  I assume this was Mrs. Fred Adams.  I hope for the sake of her 1943 summer vacation she enjoyed fishing like her husband.  Or did she spend much of it reading Death Is Late to Lunch?  If so, I hope she liked it better than I did!

But most of all I wonder, did the worms hold out?!