Delving in the Mines: Golden Age Prospecting, Part One

I've told the general outline of this story in Masters of the Humdrum Mystery, but since I presume a lot of the readers of this blog haven't read Masters I trust I'm not repeating myself for most people!

the art of storytelling

One of the charming things about Michael Dirda's both charming and illuminating book On Conan Doyle (2011) is his discussion of his childhood mystery reading.  I had touched on this subject in my own case in the introduction to Masters, which came out a few months after Dirda's book.

I started reading Agatha Christie when I was eight years old. We were living in Mexico City and while shopping at Sanborns Department Store (I loved two things most of all about Sanborns, the bookstalls and the milkshakes) my mother had bought, for eight pesos apiece I believe, four Pocket Christies: Easy to Kill (Murder Is Easy), Funerals Are Fatal (After the Funeral), And Then There Were None and The ABC Murders.

I read all these on a love seat in our third-floor apartment under a big window from which streamed in a wash of afternoon rays from the sun.  I also remember reading a story in one of my Mom's Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazines which I recall as being titled "The Machete Murderer," but I don't believe I have the title quite right.  However I do definitely recall it as quite horrifying. (I think there was a drawing over the title of a machete and various detached arms and legs).

on the rack at Sanborns in 1974

I liked the Christies but, kids being quite easily distracted, I didn't read another again until, a couple of years later, we were returning from a year in Mexico at the very end of 1976 and at a Sears bookstall in southern Texas my mother bought the first American paperback edition of Curtain, Hercule Poirot's last case. Then later on, in 1977, I read the first American paperback edition of Sleeping Murder, Miss Marple's last (published) case.

By this time I was hooked on Agatha Christie and wanting to get her books myself, without waiting for Mom to pick up some copies.  Over 1978-79 I ordered a number of Christies through the mail, with those order slips which there used to be in the backs of paperback books.  I probably read about two-thirds of her books at that time.  I also discovered the Sherlock Holmes stories at this time and read all those in a boxed gift set from Bantam, I believe, which my parents got me for Christmas, in 1978 I think.

Later on in the mid-1980s, when I started college, my interest in mystery fiction attenuated, but it revived in 1989, when I was in law school and visiting a friend in Chicago.  At a bookstore there I came across the Mysterious Press reprint of English professor and mystery writer Robert Barnard's critical study of Christie, A Talent to Deceive, and IPL paperback editions of John Dickson Carr, a writer I had never heard of, some of them with introductions by Douglas G. Greene, a fellow whom I had never heard of then either.

Doug Greene and Robert Barnard

Spurred by Doug's incisive introductions, I was instantly captured by Carr's spell and set out to read everything by him I could find, as I had done with Christie and Doyle back in the 1970s.  Just as important, I was also intrigued by Barnard's theories about detective fiction.  It was Barnard who introduced me to the mystery criticism of Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) and Julian Symons (1912-1994) and the great dialectic they had engaged in for nearly two decades concerning the nature of crime and detective fiction.

Briefly, Barzun was the great advocate for the detective story, wherein the focus is on detection and ratiocination, Symons the renowned spokesman for the "crime novel," essentially a novel where the focus is on the depiction of crime in a psychologically and procedurally credible manner, unbound by strict "rules" concerning "fair play" clueing and such plot devices.  This lively debate continued into the 1990s and partisans of both sides often could be quite dismissive of each other's favored form of genre fiction.

Jacques Barzun

I considered myself a Barzunian and rather dogmatically I only wanted to read true detective fiction, the stuff with clues and startling though deducible revelations at the end of the novel.  Besides Carr, I read Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Georgette Heyer, Nicholas Blake, Cyril Hare, Edmund Crispin and other older writers who were still in print or reasonably available at used bookstores, as well as modern authors like Robert Barnard, Peter Lovesey, PD James and Ruth Rendell.

You can see I gravitated toward British crime fiction!  I also read classic short story collections published by Doug Greene's then new imprint, Crippen & Landru, and further mystery criticism by Doug (firstly his great Carr biography) and people like Barry Pike and Bill Pronzini.

In graduate school at the LSU library I read Armchair Detective--a great fanzine, started by Allen J. Hubin, that was published for three decades, from 1967 to 1997--and learned about other "new" old writers, but often they were hard, or impossible seemingly, to find. (These were the days before the internet, kids.)  This was true as well of writers highly praised by Jacques Barzun in his and his colleague Wendell Hertig Taylor's magisterial A Catalogue of Crime, which for years became my detective fiction Bible.

Julian Symons

Where did one find John Rhode (who also was Miles Burton) or J. J. Connington (Alfred Walter Stewart) or Henry Wade (Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher), for example?  Why were these writers, dismissed as Humdrums by Julian Symons, not available? Why, damn it, weren't publishers listening to Jacques Barzun?

The arrival and rise to world hegemony of this thing called the internet ultimately was to change everything, however. More on this soon.

Note: You will find much more about this time, touching upon a lot of people and entities not mentioned above, in Marvin Lachman's The Heirs of Anthony Boucher: A History of Mystery Fandom (Poisoned Pen Press, 2005).  Magazines like CADS and Mystery Scene, which go back three decades now, and the more recent Give Me That Old Time Detection, and groups like Malice Domestic and the Dorothy L. Sayers Society and the Margery Allingham Society and, of course, the Bouchercon mystery conferences.  You'll find out about them all in detail in Marvin's book.

Let It Shine: The Golden Age Detective Fiction Revival

Martin Edwards' recent win of not only the Agatha but the Edgar for mystery criticism for his book The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story (2015) seems like something of a turning point in attitudes toward the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Winning the Agatha, to be sure, was great for Martin, but not exactly an improbable event, for the Agathas have never been what one would call indifferent ground for books on British mystery. The Edgars, however, are always a tougher nut to crack with studies of British subjects, unless they deal with Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. (The history of Edgar wins shows Arthur is even more popular than, well, Edgar; seven books about Holmes and his Great Detective have won Edgars in the last twenty years, versus three about Poe.)  Winning the Edgar in this case feels like quite a big deal.

Twenty years ago Douglas Greene's classic biography of classic mystery writer John Dickson Carr--American, a member of the Detection Club and an Anglophile, not to mention one of the great exponents of the clue-puzzle detective novel--lost out to Robert Polito's masterful biography of noir master Jim Thompson--a decision that, whichever book one might have sided with at the time for the win, long seemed symptomatic of the general preferences of Edgar voters.  Aside from Doyle and Poe, the Edgars by and large seemed to go for tough stuff and noir.

When my book Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961 (very academic-ish title, I know), which looked at the rise and comparative fall of the clue-puzzle mystery through the careers of a trio of British puzzle purists and Detection Club members, was published four years ago in 2012, it received, both publicly and privately, high praise from a number of people who happened to be past (and in the case of Martin Edwards future) Edgar winners and nominees, (See Jon L. Breen's review here.)

However, Masters was not nominated for an Edgar, so certainly was not in a position to win one. One of the books which was nominated that year was Books to Die For, a tome which repeated a lot of the dismissive conventional wisdom about the Golden Age of detective fiction. (See my review here.) The juxtaposition seemed telling to me.

A year after the publication of Books to Die For, we saw the publication of the disappointing A Very British Murder: The Story of a National Obsession (2013), Lucy Worsley's book on British mystery fiction, which has a very superficial take on the Golden Age.  A few years earlier there appeared P. D. James' similarly disappointing (though elegantly written) brief mystery genre survey, Talking about Detective Fiction (2009). None of these books, it seemed to me, were really bringing anything new to the table, as far as the Golden Age of detective fiction was concerned. (See my four-part review of Worsley's book: one, two, three, four.)

Meanwhile there was a great deal of very interesting discussion going on at internet fan groups, websites and blogs, where you found people who were really well read in Golden Age detective fiction (more on these sites--some of which have been around for quite some time now--to come this week).  Something was in the air, which even the James and Worsely books, limited and blinkered as they were, indicated.

In my case, I have been involved, since the publication of Masters, with other writing projects, including my books Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing (2013), Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene (2014) and The Spectrum of English Murder: The Detective Fiction of Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher and G. D. H. and Margaret Cole (2015).

I also published as a pamphlet essay of nearly 20,000 words, Was Corinne's Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play, a study of how the Detection Club handled the fair play requirement to membership over the years (as well as the disruptions of the Second World War). People will see mentioned this work in the endnotes in Martin's book along with Masters and some additional, shorter pieces from Geoff Bradley's great magazine CADS. (People who go in for reading endnotes, anyway.)

I have also been involved in reissuing Golden Age detective fiction with Coachwhip Publications.  I think the greatest success in this venture so far has been with J. J. Connington, one of my book subjects--his books now all have been reprinted--and the American Choctaw mystery writer Todd Downing.

However, what really captured wider public attention, surely, was the British Library's reissue a couple of years ago of titles by largely forgotten Golden Age mystery writers John Bude and Jefferson Farjeon. (I will pass by in silence M. Doriel Hay. Okay, not quite, Mavis.) The success of these and other reissues have proved what I had long contended: that there is a significant market for Golden Age detective fiction by "forgotten" writers.

On my blog back in 2011, on the day after Christmas, I had reviewed the very Farjeon title the BL chose to reprint, Mystery in White, a holiday bestseller in England for them.  My review, as far as I know, was the first blog piece on a Jefferson Farjeon novel anywhere on the net; the very name of my blog was a tribute to Farjeon's tramp series character, Ben.

It was wonderful to see this particular reissue take place and enjoy such resounding success, though I doubt many people who read the book were aware I may have had any connection with it.  The British Library has gone on to score other successes with their attractively designed volumes with introductions by none other than Martin Edwards himself, including titles by my book's other two Humdrums, John Street and Freeman Wills Crofts.

The success of the British Library (joined in the United States by Poisoned Pen Press) has encouraged other publishers to get involved with reprinting Golden Age mysteries, including Dean Street Press, with whom I have done quite a bit of work over the last year. DSP has brought forth titles by Detection Club members E. R. Punshon and Ianthe Jerrold, as well as Annie Haynes, Harriet Rutland, Robin Forsythe, Basil Thomson and Patricia Wentworth--and more is on its way this year.

Martin Edwards' Golden Age of Murder tells the fascinating story of the lives of the talented men and women who were members of the Detection Club in the 1930s, arguably the greatest decade in the history of true detective fiction.  Though Martin includes chapters on Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, many of the writers he discusses obviously were terra incognita to many mystery fans out there and I think his book is having a great impact on popular perceptions of the period.

A fan of Golden Age detective fiction for many years now (as well as a writer of esteemed modern detective fiction), Martin has not only ventured beyond the Crime Queens in his own critical writing but has read blogs and books which have delved more deeply than was traditionally the norm into myriad untapped veins of research.  Just as Sarah Weinman's recent work on psychological suspense fiction has revivified popular interest in mid-century mistresses of psychological mystery praised by a variety of knowledgeable bloggers, Martin's book is shining more light on the Golden Age, beckoning readers to explore its riches for themselves.

Let it shine, oh, let it shine.

Expect a fuller review of Martin's book soon, along with more on the various websites, blogs, authors and presses which have been and currently are involved in this exciting ongoing revolution in the perception of the Golden Age.

Tuesday Night Bloggers, May Edition, Week 1: On a Sordid Track: Death on the Last Train (1948), by George Bellairs

All aboard as the redoubtable Tuesday Night Bloggers take you on a murder tour during the month of May. We will be looking at detective novels which include travel, holidaying, and/or transportation in some significant way.  Here are links to posts by contributors to the Club:

Death in Clairvoyance, by Josephine Bell (Moira Redmond, Clothes in Books)

Holiday and Travel Mysteries Top Five (Kate Jackson, Cross Examining Crime)

The Holidays of Carolus Deene (Bev Hankins, My Reader's Block)

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be....Murder! Crime on Vacation (Brad Friedman, Ah Sweet Mystery)

Deliver Us from Wolves, Leonard Holton (John Norris, Pretty Sinister Books)

Only the first chapter of George Bellairs' Death on the Last Train (1948) actually takes place on a train, but its grimy cloud of sordidness hangs over the entire short novel.  As the book opens a "fagged out" Inspector Littlejohn, Bellairs' series sleuth, is traveling in connection with a case on the Salton-to-Ellinborne train, which, we learn, is in quite a sorry state:

jacket by the great
Arthur Hawkins, Jr.

The train consisted of three rickety wooden coaches in disgraceful condition.  The three first-class compartments were dirtier than the thirds.  The lighting was of the kind introduced at the outbreak of war when a glass globe covering a small bulb in the middle of the roof was blacked all over and then the light allowed cautiously to percolate through a glorified pinhole.  The whole sorry contraption was drawn by an aged tank locomotive with steam leaking from every joint.

We are a long way from Agatha Christie's Orient Express: no international cast of Russian princesses, Hungarian counts, wealthy American matrons and nosy dapper Belgians here!

When a shot rings out and a passenger, Timothy Bellis, if found dead in a compartment on the stopped train, Littlejohn finds himself marshaled into yet another murder investigation.  The dead man was a notorious adulterer  and there was much bad feeling against him in the declining town of Salton, where he had been the victim of a series of increasingly threatening letters.

an earlier. altogether brighter
 train jacket byArthur Hawkins, Jr.

Littlejohn essentially does what he did in his Death in the Night Watches (1945): he goes around interviewing a series of individuals until he finally gets information which points out the murderer for him.  Utterly lacking is the kind of complex murder plot you so often get in, say, the transportation mysteries of Freeman Wills Crofts.

What Bellairs offers in the place of plot complexity is a series of satirical portraits of the townspeople of Salton.  In contrast with those etched in the dull and bland Night Watches, the acid portrayals in Last Train often are amusing, but there's a cruelty to them as well which some might find distasteful. So many people are mocked for physical attributes--squints, pendulous breasts, poor teeth, bad breath, etc.--one gets the feeling that Bellairs sees Salton as some sort of circus freak show.

I have read two additional, very early, Bellairs detective novels, one of which is being reprinted by the British Library, and these are both, I'm happy to say, superior to both Night Watches and Last Train.  Indeed, both of them are really rather good.

I shall be reviewing these two books here soon. However, if you're not looking for plot complexity and you don't mind the nastiness to much of the satire in Last Train, you might well enjoy the bumpy ride.

Submarine Sightings: Cape Cod in Fact and in Phoebe Atwood Taylor's Crime Fiction

Give me the city editor quick!...A German submarine is shelling a tug right in front of my cottage. Sure I can see it.  There goes another shell--can't you hear the guns?  The barges are being raked with machine guns.  Boats are pulling away.  Some of the crew are wounded; I must go to help them. Stand by and I'll call you later.

In her review of Phoebe Atwood Taylor's [henceforth PAT] Asey Mayo detective novel The Criminal C. O. D., published a year before American entry into the Second World War, Kate Jackson at Cross Examining Crime mentions that two characters in the novel "apparently pulled a prank on the coast guard about sighting a German submarine." Mention of German subs is made in additional wartime PAT crime novels as well. (I will let readers see for themselves.)

German subs lurking off the coast of Cape Cod? All a figment of the fertile fiction-writing mind of PAT?

Wa-el, as Asey Mayo might say, in fact there is an interesting story here, from PAT's very own family.

During the First World War, on July 21, 1918, PAT's physician father, J. Danforth Taylor--who will be recalled from my previous post--was right on the spot at his summer cottage above Nauset beach in Orleans, Cape Cod when a German U-Boat sent shells harmlessly but frighteningly into the beach. More seriously, the sub, U-156, sank a tug boat and four barges off the coast.  Orleans became the only location in the United States to come under fire during the First World War.

Nauset Beach

In this crisis Dr. Taylor did what any other quick-thinking, red-blooded American surely would have done: he got on the phone to report the event to a newspaper in Boston.  His initial comments are quoted above.  He called back later in the day with more war news:

The tug has listed and is still burning....The barges are drifting and one is sinking.  I can see a man still clinging to the stern.  Capt. Ainsleigh of the barge Lansford was wounded by splinters and I have attended him and the other wounded.  Capt. Ainsleigh has his wife and two children with him.  His eleven-year-old son saved the American flag from the barge and brought it ashore....Wait a minute, I hear more firing.  Say, we can see the sub very plain now.  It has come in closer, between the barges, shooting in every direction.  Lots of the shells are landing in the surf and some in the sand dunes. Wait--yes, siree! here comes a plane.  It must be from the Chatham Air Station.  I am going out to see the Navy sink that sub.

The patriotic Dr. Taylor was overconfident with that last sentiment, however.  The bombs failed and the U-Boat made its escape. No one had been killed in the affray and the nation soon moved on to other, graver war news; but certainly the event was recalled by Cape Codders, including PAT, when, two decades later, German subs again prowled the Atlantic Ocean.  It seems likely that a nine-year-old PAT was present at the Orleans cottage that eventful summer day, though newspaper accounts do not mention her.

The Boston paper that Dr. Taylor phoned that day, the Globe, got a great scoop out of the story, of course, and was duly grateful to the doctor, sending him the very next day a check for $150 and a box of expensive cigars.  No smoker himself, the doctor gave the cigars to the local men who had helped rescue the wounded sailors.  One Cape codger tried one of them for a few seconds, then drawled, just like a crusty character in a PAT novel, "Pretty good cigar, Doc, but I like my 2-for-5-stogies better."

Cape Cod Case History: Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Her Parents John Danforth and Josephine (Atwood) Taylor, Sanderstead Court and the Florence Rush Affair

And the last week of the Tuesday Club Bloggers claims three participants this week: me (see below) and Bev Hankins and Kate Jackson, over at, respectively, Cross Examining Crime and My Reader's Block:

Review of The Criminal C.O.D.
Review of Death Lights a Candle

As befits a Cape Cod local color mystery writer, Phoebe Atwood Taylor [henceforth PAT] knew Cape Cod down to the ground. By my calculation, she was was a tenth generation Cape Codder on her mother's paternal side of the family (the Atwoods), an eleventh on her mother's maternal side of the family (the Freemans) and a (mere) eighth on her father's Taylor side. All these lines extended back to Cape Cod in the first half of the seventeenth century.

PAT's migrating Atwood ancestor was John Atwood (1582-1644), of Sanderstead Court, Surrey. Members of the Atwood family resided there for some three centuries (Justice Peter Atte Wood purchased the land back in 1346), but by the time PAT was writing her mysteries the house had been converted to a hotel named Selsdon Court. Occupied by the RAF during the Second World War, the house sadly was gutted by fire in 1944 and almost entirely pulled down in the 1950s.

John Atwood migrated to Plymouth, dying there in 1644.  His distant descendant Ebenezer Tilton Atwood (1835-1900), of Wellfleet, Cape Cod, married Clara Maria Freeman (1842-1911) and with her had three children: Alice Tilton (1872-1942), Josephine (1875-1929) and Freeman Dana (1879-1885).  You will notice that PAT derived her pseudonyms Alice Tilton and Freeman Dana from, respectively, her aunt and long deceased uncle, who died when he was only five.

Alice never married, but Josephine wed John Danforth Taylor (1876-1964), a prominent Boston doctor who had graduated from Harvard Medical School.  Danforth Taylor's family came from Orleans, a town near Wellfleet, where he maintained a summer cottage, and young PAT spent much of her time in Cape Cod.

Sanderstead Court in the early 19th century

Danforth Taylor was a notable freethinker, belonging to the Boston Rationalist Society and contributing articles to the Truth Seeker, a journal modestly devoted to "science, morals, free thought, free discussions, liberalism, sexual equality, labor reform progression, free education, and whatever tends to elevate and emancipate the human race."  Although PAT's crime novels hardly are saturated with weighty political and philosophical sentiment, certainly an irreverent attitude to life finds its way into her books.

Danforth Taylor also was professionally involved in a nine days' wonder criminal case in Boston in 1920, when PAT was eleven years old.

On the Sunday morning of July 18, 1920, a seventeen-year-old girl named Florence Rush, who was employed as a clerk in a jewelry store, departed her house at 62 West Eagle Street, East Boston, having told her mother she was going to church. Instead of church, however, she went with her "chum," sixteen-year-old Gertrude Smith, to spend the day at Revere Beach, five miles north of Boston and the cite of numerous Coney Island style attractions.  Florence, five feet one inch tall and weighing 125 pounds, was clad "a blue dress, pink scarf, black stockings and brown pumps."

July 18, 1920 was *not* a day at the beach

Later that day it started to rain and the two girls began looking for shelter.  Up came an automobile with six young men in it, and the girls promptly asked them for a ride.  After a few minutes in the car, however, things took a troubling turn, according to Gertrude, for "the men began to act in an improper manner."  Gertrude hit one of her assailants in the face, then bit another before jumping from the car and escaping.  Florence, however, remained in the vehicle, which drove off down the street.

Three days later a dazed Florence stumbled into Gertrude's house, babbling incoherently. Having been summoned to the scene, Danforth Taylor concluded that the girl had been drugged with some form of liquid poison and "criminally assaulted."

Phoebe Atwood Taylor's father was
the physician in the case and testified
concerning Florence Rush's condition

Several days later, when Florence was able to talk cogently, she stated that she had become unconscious after having eaten some proffered cake in the car. When she recovered her wits she found herself in a house in Providence, Rhode Island, with three men in an adjoining room discussing what should be done with her.  One man suggested shipping her to Cuba, but the others "had different plans for her."

According to Florence's account, after several hours of wrangling among her captors she was taken by a blonde woman named Alice and her companion named Fred and put aboard a Boston-bound train, where she lapsed into unconsciousness.

Hearing all this, the Boston police declared themselves confident that Florence had been held in the clutches of a nefarious Providence white slavery gang.

After receiving an anonymous letter with information about the affair, police investigators traveled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they were able to identify all the men who had been in the car. The men insisted that Florence had willingly gone in the car with them to New Bedford and that "the invitation also had been extended" to Gertrude as well, "but she declined."

What happened to the putative gang of Providence white slavers, the poisoned cake and the enigmatic blonde named Alice?  Was this a "Wonderland" tale on the part of the dazed Florence?  In her crime fiction PAT herself later pooh-poohed the veracity of sensationalist white slavery stories in Boston newspapers.

In the event one of the men in the car, Cornelius Vanderbilt Sweeney (his parents apparently were admirers of the great American business magnate), was in fact arrested and charged with Florence's "enticement" (i.e., persuading a minor to accompany one for the purposes of sexual activity).

Florence Rush

In the next month, August, Cornelius was found guilty on this charge and sentenced to one year's imprisonment, which sentence he appealed.  A few years later he married and with his wife had a daughter. He continued to reside at New Bedford, where he labored as a truck driver in the building trade. Born in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1897, he was 23 when the incident with Florence occurred.

A year after her abduction Florence Rush wed a Boston taxi driver.  The couple raised eleven children together.

Escapades with mysterious blondes and automobiles are known to take place in PAT's mysteries, but I don't believe PAT ever allowed sexual assault into her cozy fictional Cape Cod world.  However, her father had played a role in an important part of Cape Cod history just a couple of years before the Florence Rush affair; and this did make it into PAT's books after the outbreak of the Second World War.  More on this soon.

Final Fright: The Three Fears (1949), by Jonathan Stagge

The Three Fears, the ninth and final Jonathan Stagge detective novel, appeared in 1949, three years before the two men behind Jonathan Stagge (as well as Patrick Quentin and Q. Patrick), British expatriates Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler, stopped writing novels together.

In that three-year interval there appeared three additional collaborative crime novels between the two men--two Patrick Quentins, The Follower (1950) and Black Widow (1952) and the final Q. Patrick, Danger Next Door (1952)--as well as solo novel by Wheeler, The Crippled Muse (1951), dedicated "to Rickie" (see this review by John Norris).

After Rickie Webb retired from the writing partnership and left his and Hugh Wheeler's home in the Massachusetts Berkshires for France (where Webb died in 1966), Wheeler stayed on and wrote some additional mysteries under the Patrick Quentin pseudonym, though he now is best known for his later written work for film and stage. (Among other things he wrote the Tony award winning books for A Little Night Music, Candide and Sweeney Todd--no small achievement!)

So in 1949 Webb and Wheeler were looking ahead to a time of transition, both professional and personal--something reflected, I think, in The Three Fears.

The series characters in the Stagge novels are New England country doctor and occasional amateur sleuth Dr. Hugh Westlake (note a certain resemblance in the name to Hugh Wheeler) and his precocious young daughter, Dawn. While the Stagge novels tend to have eerie trappings somewhat reminiscent of a John Dickson Carr novel (see this review of The Scarlet Circle), Dawn Westlake, who is something of a hellion I must say, brings humor to the series. Typically she manages, quite inadvertently, to help Dr. Westlake solve the bizarre murder problems that cross his path.

However, The Three Fears seems to me to provide evidence of the highly literary Wheeler's waxing influence over the Webb/Wheeler collaborations in this period.  Rather than Carr, say, the novel reminds me of the British Crime Queens and their celebrated "manners" style.  There is an interesting problem to test the reader's mettle, to be sure, but much of the appeal for readers of this novel stems, I think, from the emotional tempests depicted and that biting satire directed at Lucy Milliken and Daphne Winters (aka he Divine Daphne), two eminent stage prima donnas who are "rival queens," in the classic tense of the term. Lucy Milliken also has a cloying family radio program, allowing the authors to jab at mid-century American radio in a fashion that reminded me of Rex Stout's brilliant Nero Wolfe detective novel And Be a Villain.

Additionally Dawn never appears in the novel, having been packed off to camp. Hugh, perhaps relived by her absence, makes only two brief references to the boisterous child over the course of the tale.  He himself has a mild romance of sorts--none too convincingly--with one of Daphne's young aspiring actress disciples, known in aggregate as the "Five Sweet Symphonies."

Lucy Milliken is married to a hunky, younger husband (this reminded me of the marriage of the diva character in Black Widow), while Hugh's psychiatrist friend, Don Lockwood, has a beautiful, substantially younger wife, Tansy.  Age difference in couples and the problems which that can create seems a preoccupation of the novel. I couldn't help but wonder whether this might have reflected events in Hugh Wheeler's own life.

Rickie Webb was eleven years older than Wheeler and a prosperous business executive when in 1933 he became involved--intimately as well as professionally, it appears--with Wheeler, then a 21-year-old recent college graduate of exceptional promise.  By 1949, Wheeler, now 37 to Webb's 48, had become the dominant force in the two men's creative partnership and there may have been something of a personal estrangement between the two, though they remained friends after they parted ways.

In The Three Fears the Divine Daphne, who is "resting" with her entourage at the exclusive coastal New England town of Bittern's Bay, is subjected to a campaign of terror based on the three things which frighten her most: poison, enclosed spaces and fire. When one of Daphne's "Symphonies" dies from poisoning during a recording of Lucy's radio show (Lucy had inveigled Daphne into appearing), this appears to have been a misfired attempt on Daphnes's life. Will the culprit's next killing gambit succeed?

This is a subtle, cleverly clued detective novel with one of the authors' patented twisting denouements. You may think you have figured it out, but don't be too sure of yourself! Rickie and Hugh were quite the tricksy lads.

Also see:

The Grindle Nightmare (1935), by Q. Patrick
Death and Dear Clara (1937), by Q. Patrick
Black Widow (1952), by Patrick Quentin
My Son, the Murderer (1954), by Patrick Quentin

Back in a Big Way, Baby! Vintage Crime Novelist George Bellairs

Later this year the British Library will be reissuing three mystery titles by George Bellairs: The Dead Shall Be Raised (Murder Will Speak in the US), Murder of a Quack and Death of a Busybody.

Earlier on this blog I reviewed, admittedly quite unfavorably, the ninth Bellairs mystery, Death in the Night Watches, but the immediately previous Bellairs title, Calamity at Harwood, is much better and, in fact, most of the earliest (wartime) Bellairs titles were well-praised by contemporary reviewers.

I happen to own most of these books and plan to review some additional titles this year.  Meanwhile, enjoy these dust jackets from earlier American editions that I am posting below.

And listed here are the first 18 Bellairs crime titles.  He published 40 more through 1980, plus 4 under a pen name, Hilary Landon. (His real name was Harold Blundell, by the way.)

62 mysteries in 40 years makes this author quite a prolific producer!  In the US he has been reprinted in eBook form by Mysterious Press/Open Road.

Littlejohn on Leave (1941)
The Four Unfaithful Servants (1942)
Death of a Busybody (1942)
The Dead Shall be Raised (1942)
Turmoil in Zion (1943)
The Murder of a Quack (1943)
He'd Rather Be Dead (1945)
Calamity at Harwood (1945)
Death in the Night Watches (1945)
The Crime at Halfpenny Bridge (1946)
The Case of the Scared Rabbits (1947)
Death on the Last Train (1948)
The Case of the Seven Whistlers (1948)
The Case of the Famished Parson (1949)
Outrage on Gallows Hill (1949)

The Case of the Demented Spiv (1949)
The Case of the Headless Jesuit (1950)
Dead March for Penelope Blow (1951)

Personally, I think you have to give credit to a man who dared to title a mystery The Case of the Demented Spiv.