More Golden Age Reissues: The Two Pats, Patricia Wentworth and Patrick Quentin

You may know that Patricia Wentworth wrote a lot of mysteries--in fact a slight majority of her output--without her most famous series character, Miss Silver.  Despite the fact that Patricia Wentworth has maintained a loyal following since her death over half-a-century ago, only a few of these Silverless mysteries have ever been reprinted in that time, until now.  Outside of the US these titles are being reissued by Dean Street Press, in three batches.

Follow this link to see the first group. I wrote an introduction about Wentworth and her life expressly and exclusively for the DSP reissues, which I do hope people will find interesting.

I have also written the introduction to Crippen & Landru's reissue of the complete Peter Duluth short fiction by Patrick Quentin, which consists of two novelettes and two short stories.  Three of these pieces were written in collaboration by Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler, while the last was written solo by Wheeler, after Webb left their home in the Berkshires and moved to France.

There will be yet more about Webb and Wheeler in an essay by me dealing more with their personal lives, in a forthcoming multi-contributor essay collection on LGBTQ writers of and themes in pre-Stonewall crime fiction.  I also have a blog piece on one of Webb and Wheeler's Jonathan Stagge novels coming soon.

Additionally I will be posting here about some of the Wentworths in the first batch of DSP reissues.  I think this is an exciting development in GA mystery reissues, as Wentworth is one of the major figures from Golden Age mystery and most of these titles have been difficult for fans to locate for many years now.

I do hope that the crime novels by Webb and Wheeler will be reissued to go along with this fine Crippen & Landru volume.  Their omission from the recent wave of vintage mystery reprints has been more unfortunate, their work under the Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge pseudonyms being some of the most notable crime fiction of the twentieth century.

Gilt-y Parties: The Annulet of Gilt (1938), by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (Tuesday Night Bloggers: Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Week 3)

"The dear quaint Cape," Asey said, "with its dear quaint windmills, and its dear quaint characters and its dear quaint--"

                               Asey Mayo, The Annulet of Gilt (1938), by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

First, the links to our other Club member posts this week:

Accents and Cape Codders (Your Freedom and Ours, Helen Szamuely)

Review of The Six Iron Spiders (Cross Examining Crime, Kate Jackson)

The Devil's in the Details (The Corpse Steps Out, Jeffrey Marks)

And now a consideration of The Annulet of Gilt:

By the time of the appearance of Phoebe Atwood Taylor's twelfth Asey Mayo detective novel, The Annulet of Gilt (1938), Mayo, the Sherlock of Cape Cod, was one of the best known American series detectives, popular in both the United States and the United Kingdom, where Taylor was published, like Agatha Christie, by the Collins Crime Club.

Fans of the Mayo books enjoyed the narrative zip and humor of the tales, as well as, yes, the "quaint" New England local color found in them.  Indeed, coastal New England has remained a popular American mystery setting up to the modern day, the most prominent example of this popularity, I presume, being the Angela Lansbury's hugely successful Murder She Wrote mystery series.

As I recollect, the cheeky Taylor claimed that she wrote her mysteries in about three weeks, getting them to her publisher just before deadline.  (You'll find greater details about Taylor, along with other American women mystery writers of the era, in Jeffrey Marks' book Atomic Renaissance.)

While this assertion may be an exaggeration, Taylor's enjoyable mysteries not only move quickly, they feel like they were, indeed, written quickly.  In them the emphasis is on motion and rapid fire events rather than the deliberate accumulation of clues (or "clews" as the word invariably--and to me a bit preciously--is spelled in Taylor's books).  After the explanation for the murders finally comes, you may still have some questions in your head about plot details, but you likely will have enjoyed your trip.

After Taylor in 1937 started her madcap "Leonidas Witherall" series (under the pen name Alice Tilton), the Asey Mayo series started getting zanier as well--sometimes a bit too much so for me.

Surprisingly, The Annulet of Gilt, despite being stuffed with an enigmatic foreign woman, a conniving businessman, a couple of beautiful blondes, a houseful of green-shirted, dagger-wielding bodyguards, assorted shootings and stranglings and, last but most definitely not least, a missing elephant, is not as chaotic as the immediately preceding Mayo mystery, Octagon House, which should tell you something about Octagon House.

I actually followed the plot of Gilt pretty well and enjoyed the author's colorful convolutions, though Taylor strains pretty hard to make her intriguing book title relevant.

sodas and suspicions
a delicious denouement

Some reviewers at the time complained that the novel did not have enough local color, but I found Gilt a nice change of pace, with its references to world politics at that time. (One always finds interesting sociocultural aspects to Taylor's books.)

We learn that Asey Mayo, who despite his quasi-bumpkin routine became more and more of an all-round Superman as the series progressed, was involved in high-level intelligence in Europe during the First World War; and these events intriguingly resurface to play a role in the present day. Yet incongruously and rather charmingly the climax of this tale of international skullduggery takes place in the penultimate chapter at a sleepy village drugstore (there's little business because it's not "movie night"), as strawberry sodas and banana splits are consumed.

Something you don't see in an Agatha Christie mystery! Now that Sophie Hannah has taken over for the Queen of Crime, however, perhaps Hercule Poirot, a helpless marionette in a bid to make him more "accessible" to modern readers, will start slurping sodas and sundaes rather than delicately sip sirop de cassis.  I mean, how many people have even drunk sirop de cassis, or even know what the heck it is?  So elitist.

See also my earlier review of Banbury Bog, a Mayo mystery also from 1938.  Not quite so outre, but still quite local colorful.

Mystery Dates: Three Dates with Death (1947), by Victor Gunn

The Golden Age of British detective fiction--roughly 1920 to 1940 (though some have argued, with some reason, that the latter year should be stretched somewhat to 1945, or even to the early 1950s)-- was also the Golden Age of the classic thriller: exciting tales full of fiendish criminal masterminds, ruthless gangs, seductive adventuresses, conniving foreigners (the type fabulist Donald Trump conjures for his stump speech audiences), assorted dastardly cads and despicable hounds and, arrayed against these powerful forces of sheer nefariousness, those square-jawed, hard-fisted heroes and winsomely plucky "girls."

In the 1920s and 1930s British thriller writers such as Edgar Wallace, "Sapper" and Sax Rohmer actually sold more books than true detective fiction writers, including in softcover even before the paperback revolution of the 1940s.  These naive, escapist thrillers continued to be published well into the 1940s and 1950s and also enjoyed popularity overseas, in the United States and Germany, for example. (Adolf Hitler is said to have been a great Edgar Wallace fan, something later Wallace publishers likely were not anxious to point out.)  When Ian Fleming started the James Bond saga in the 1950s, his books were seen as sophisticated updates of the classic between-the-wars thrillers.

Many of these British thriller writers, despite their once great popularity and terrific productivity, are today remembered mostly, if at all, by genre specialists and collectors. Yet they were undoubtedly a hugely important part of the crime fiction genre in their day. Some of them wrote, in addition to thrillers, more generic "mystery" and even some true detective fiction as well.  (As Agatha Christie fans well know, the Queen of Crime returned the favor, publishing, alongside of her detective novels, a smaller number of thrillers, such as the Tommy and Tuppence tales.  Other Crime Queens who also wrote thrillers were Margery Allingham and Patricia Wentworth; much more on the latter author soon.)

One of the more notable classic thriller writers who also wrote mystery and detective fiction was Edwy Searles Brooks (1889-1965), a close contemporary of one of my favorite Golden Age detective novelists, Cecil John Charles Street (1884-1964). Where Street wrote mostly true detective fiction, however, Gunn was more of the thriller school. Both men were incredibly prolific. Under his two best-known pseudonyms, Berkeley Grey and Victor Gunn, Brooks published nearly 100 novels.  Additionally he also published more then 2000 pieces of short fiction (including Sexton Blake tales), a staggering amount. Not surprisingly, some of the novels are expansions of earlier published short fiction. For more on this author, see this profusely detailed and authoritative website.

The Berkeley Gray novels are straight-up thrillers, while the Victor Gunns are more in the nature of "mystery," though many of them have strong thriller elements in them as well.

Though misleadingly packaged by publisher Collins as a seeming novel, the Victor Gunn book Three Dates with Death (1947) in fact is a novella collection.  All three stories--On the Road to Gallow's Cross, By the Side of the Grave and Within Sight of Eros--detail the investigative adventures of Gunn's series characters, the tough and steadfast Chief Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell and his young, rather more posh, assistant Johnny Lister (great name, that).

By far the best of this trio of tales, I think, is the first, On the Road to Gallow's Cross.  It opens with a late-night death on a bus making its final round of stops for the evening. "Old Iron" happens to come on the scene and almost immediately he is explaining to the examining police doctor not only that the dead man actually was murdered, but how he was bumped off.

Tough and smart this fellah!

The suspects are the six regular passengers on that leg of the bus's rounds.  (The chorus girl emblazoned on the cover is one of them.)  Gunn does a good job of bringing the bus and its passengers alive (at least while they are alive) and there is some true detection.

Inspector Cromwell decides that the murder must be hushed up for the time being (Old Iron has rather lax notions about legal niceties), so that he and his assistant can ride the bus in disguise the next night to see whether they can pick up any clues.  As they ride the bus another murder is committed, in identical fashion no less, leaving the chief inspector with one less suspect but something approaching egg on his face.

Happily he redeems himself the next night by catching the murderer on one final bus trip. A fun story with narrative zip, though it seemed odd that the murderer didn't realize that with each night's kill on the bus s/he was rather dangerously reducing the pool of suspects.

The next two stories I liked less.  In the second one, By the Side of the Grave, Cromwell must find the killer of a struggling member of the landed gentry (reverently treated by the author).  We know from the start that the murderer is a despicable London crime boss, which for me makes the story less intriguing, but again there is good pace and some social interest.  In crime genre fiction it certainly wasn't only Margery Allingham (in the celebrated The Tiger in the Smoke) who was writing about postwar moral decay in London!

The third tale, the misleadingly (not to mention irrelevantly) titled Within Sight of Eros, was a very far-fetched tale about a murder scheme involving dead cats and a dead cat burglar.  It is more a police tale than fair play detection.

So this one is rather a curate's egg, as they say, but it does leave me interested in looking at some of the Gunn novels, though unfortunately they can be quite hard to find!

Cod Corpses and Mirthful Mayhem: Tuesday Night Bloggers, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Week 2

Here are this week's posts on Phoebe Atwood Taylor. I'm working on mine (still!), but we have on board this week the following fine bloggers:

Crime on the Home Front, Your Freedom and Ours, Helen Szamuely

Phoebe Atwood Taylor writing as Alice Tilton, Clothes in Books, Moira Redmond

Mayo and Miss Marple under the Microscope, Cross Examining Crime, Kate Jackson

Beginning with a Bash! Tuesday Night Bloggers: Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Week 1

In April the Tuesday Night Club Bloggers look at American Golden Age mystery writer Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1909-1976), author, under her own name, of two dozen books (2 novels and 2 novella collections) about Cape Cod amateur sleuth Asey Mayo and, under the pen name Alice Tilton, of an 8 additional mysteries about Boston amateur sleuth Leonidas Witherall. (She also published one standalone mystery, Murder at the New York World's Fair, as Freeman Dana.)

Taylor is notable in the mystery genre both for contributing, with the Asey Mayo tales, to the "local color," or American regional, mystery and, with the Tilton books, to American screwball mystery--  though to be strictly accurate the Asey Mayo books got increasingly screwy as well as the series went along!

Let's just say that in both the Taylor and the Tilton series people tend to get "bashed" and "biffed" a lot.  Taylor's mysteries definitely call for headgear.

Here is an old review I did at my blog of Taylor's novel Banbury Bog.  Next week I will have  a fresh Taylor post.  And here's the new stuff from the rest of the Club:

World's Fair (The Corpse Steps Out, Jeffrey Marks)
The Hollow Chest (My Reader's Block, Bev Hankins)
The Cape Cod Mystery (Clothes in Books, Moira Redmond)
Punch with Care and the Battle of Pen Names (Cross Examining Crime, Kate Jackson)

Hasty Pudding: The Plot Thickens

For chapter one of this classic HIBK tale, as imagined by the Passing Tramp, see here.

Hasty Pudding

Chapter Two

In the vast, old-fashioned kitchen of Brulee Hall, ancestral home to generations of proud and tempestuous Brulee gourmands, Creme sprinkled cinnamon and ginger over the cornmeal and milk mixture that was the base of the Brulee family's hasty pudding, renowned throughout Bayou Brulee--and several adjacent bayous even.

Soon in the still elegant, if admittedly now somewhat dilapidated, dining room of Brulee Hall Creme would present a steaming, mouth-watering pudding to the assembled guests who had gathered to welcome Creme's former fiancee, strapping Boeuf Bourguignon, and his new bride, Creme's very own stepsister, Star (Anise) Bourguignon, on their return home from their honeymoon in the delightful and fascinating Dutch town of Vlaardingen, home of the world's largest herring festival.

As the warm, pungent smell of cinnamon and ginger tickled Creme's delicate, aristocratic nostrils, Creme thought back to that day--could it really just have been a few days ago--when she had returned to Brulee Hall to see the man she had always dearly loved married to the woman she would have dearly loved to shove head first into the hasty pudding she was making.  Well, just a little bit, anyway.

Creme in the event had not been able to attend Boeuf and Star's wedding after all.  Creme's beloved great-aunt, dear old Vicky Soise, for whom Creme served as companion, had come down with yet another one of her sudden, painful attacks of gout, forcing kindhearted Creme to stay with the ailing lady for two weeks, until the worst of the perils had passed.

When she had recovered somewhat, darling Aunt Vicky had insisted, in that endearing imperious way she had, that Creme personally deliver to Boeuf and Star her wedding present of five dozen solid silver herring forks, just the thing for a young couple recently returned from the Vlaardingen Herring Festival.

"You can never have enough herring forks, child!" boomed indomitable Aunt Vicky from the depths of her sickbed.  "Give Boeuf a peck for me, and for goodness' sake, don't go and kill Star!"

Words Star was to remember long after that succession of bloodcurdling horrors at Brulee Hall had culminated in Creme's fearful midnight quest to the Brulee family cemetery, where Creme had discovered, to her uttermost terror, that it really was true: you can't have enough herring forks.

It had been old Gumbo, the loyal Cajun family servant to the Brulees for more years than Creme could remember, who had greeted Creme at the massive double doors of Brulee Hall.

"Oh, Miss Creme, can it really be you?" cried Gumbo.  "Thank heaven you're here!"

"Oh, Gumbo," answered Creme, tears pricking her eyes at the staunch loyalty of this good old retainer, "It is indeed I, your little Creme!  It's good to be back, though I wish...."

"I reckon I knows what you wish, Miss Creme," answered Gumbo, crafty in her unsophisticated yet rustically charming country way, "And I sure does wish it too!  What Master Boeuf, a rare fine man if ever there was one, sees in that Miss Star with all her highfalutin airs and graces, when everybody round these parts knows what her momma was--a shameless hussy and a gold digger to boot--I'm sure I can't say!"

"Hush, Gumbo," chided Creme.  "I know you mean well--and I can't say I really disagree with you--but we mustn't talk of these things.  For Boeuf's sake, if for no other reason."

Muttering that there was a thing or two that she could tell Creme about that Star, you couldn't pull the wool over old Gumbo's eyes, the faithful Gumbo led Creme to Creme's old childhood bedroom, once the precious sanctuary where a young Creme--though admittedly shy, such a lovely and sweet-natured child--had dreamed her fond, adolescent dreams of life happily ever after with Boeuf, though now only a poignant reminder of dreams dashed and hopes hurled down to the floor and stomped with Star's stiletto heels.

"Aren't there other servants?" Creme queried curiously.  "Surely Star can't expect you, an old woman, to manage Brulee Hall all alone, especially when she now has Boeuf's cattle fortune at her beck and call."

"I'd sooner run Brulee Hall all by my lonesome than have to rely on them two no-goods she brought with her back from some of them foreign parts!" spat Gumbo disgustedly.

"Those two who?" queried Creme, wondering in her head whether that sounded quite right and thinking how tiresome it was being the lead genteel character in a Golden Age mystery and thus expected always to speak properly.

"Those two who?" quoted Gumbo, who was thankful not to have to worry about those things, being a rustic local color type.  "I'll tell you who two, Miss Creme!  Why, that nasty, sneaking butler, Bovril--from England I here tell--and that French maid Bernaise--a saucy one she is, always prying and peeping about!  They'll be back soon--don't trust neither of 'em whiles you're here, Miss Creme!"

"I don't expect that I shall be here very long," mused Creme, making  a melancholy moue.  "Star will probably find that too many cooks spoil Boeuf's broth....How is Boeuf, by the by?"

"Oh, Miss Creme!  He's aged but he's handsomer than ever!  To me he don't look too happy, though...with her, that is."

"Hush, Gumbo!  We mustn't speak of such things."

But could it be true, Creme wondered to herself.

But even if it were true, Boeuf now was married to Star.

He was her lawful wedded husband and she was his awful wedded wife.

Boeuf had even honeymooned with Star at the Vlaardingen herring festival.

You couldn't get more married than that!

Resolutely Creme decided that she must not let false hopes rise.  She deftly changed the subject.

"Who else will be staying at the house, Gumbo?"

"Besides you, Miss Creme, there's your Daddy's old law man, Mister Chowder, and Mister Haricot Vert--you remember him, don't you, Miss Creme?"

Haricot Vert!  Of course she remembered handsome Hari Vert!  The Verts were an old, aristocratic family from one of the neighboring bayous, Bayou Vert.

Hari Vert had always looked so dashing in his green jacket when he came to take Creme riding!  People had thought he and young Creme might make a match of it someday, until Hari had inherited his wealthy lifelong bachelor uncle's whisk factory in Chicago and moved away, leaving an open field in which the brash Boeuf had boldly grazed.  It had been years since she had seen Hari--what would he be like today?

And old Clem Chowder, that salty and sagacious Brulee family lawyer and friend.  Originally from New England (of fine stock that went all the way back to the Mayflower), Clem had long ago established a successful practice in New Orleans, where he did a brisk bushiness with people from all the best bayous.  It was Clem's legal expertise, Creme recalled, that had rescued Brulee Hall from the more importunate of the Brulee Hall creditors.  Dear, old Clem Chowder!

"Well, I have things to be seeing to, Miss Creme," said the practical Gumbo, breaking into Creme's reverie.  "You'll be wanting to take a nap, I reckon?"

"No, Gumbo, I find my memories assail me.  I believe I shall take a stroll around the grounds of Brulee Hall.  When will everyone be here?"

"Not for some hours yet, Miss Creme."

Creme contemplatively wandered out to the veranda, thinking of times long ago at Brulee Hall.  Mint juleps on the lawn....All those hasty puddings....Hari Vert in his green riding jacket....And Bouef....

Bouef and Star....

The Stately Homes of Patricia Wentworth

Popular and prolific Golden Age mystery writer Patricia Wentworth (1877-1961; her birth year usually is given as 1878 but appears to be have been 1877) was born in India, daughter to a  prominent military family, but she spent many of her childhood years in England, where for part of the 1880s and 1890s she resided at Lennox House, her grandmother's large home in Blackheath, and attended the recently-founded Blackheath High School for Girls. 

Lennox House (front)

Many years later Wentworth and her second husband, George Turnbull (1877-1970), resided at Camberley, Surrey, from 1936 until Wentworth's death in 1961 making their home at stylish Heatherglade House.

drawing room

master bedroom

dining room

In addition to the room shown above, there was a study, kitchen, breakfast room and garage on the first floor and six additional bedrooms above.  Plus, unlike some of those houses you see on floor plans in Golden Age mysteries, there were bathrooms!  If there had been a ballroom and billiard room you could have staged Cluedo (aka Clue) here.

Here Patricia Wentworth wrote some forty of her sixty-five mystery novels, including all her Miss Silver Detective novels (outside of the first, Grey Mask), including two of my favorites, Miss Silver Comes to Stay (1949) and The Watersplash (1951).