Murder as a Fine Art: Travers, P. I. --Christopher Bush's Ludovic Travers on Fifties dust jackets

the secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius)
--the raptor to which detective
Ludo Travers frequently likened himself in the
Christopher Bush mysteries

Dean Street Press has a new tranche of Bushes--Christopher Bushes--out now, just in time for all those dreary (though necessary) quarantines and lock downs and what not.  These ten titles, beginning in 1952 and ending in 1957, are the cases of the Counterfeit Colonel, Burnt Bohemian, Silken Petticoat, Red Brunette, Three Lost Letters, Benevolent Bookie, Amateur Actor, Extra Man, Flowery Corpse and Russian Cross--the last of these, incidentally, being Bush's fiftieth, "Golden Jubilee" Ludovic Travers detective novel.

I shall be reviewing a few of these here soon, but in the meantime I wanted to pay tribute to the British Bush dust jackets of these years, when Ludo Travers became one of the best visualized of vintage crime fiction detectives.  Alan Hunter, author of the George Gently mysteries, at this time dubbed Ludo the "English Marlowe" (referencing Raymond Chandler's famed sleuth). 

If Bush's novels are ever adapted as films, the filmmakers certainly will have a ready model for casting the lead, courtesy of these splendid Macdonald jackets from the Fifties.  What actor looks like Ludo to you?

No social distancing going on here!

The Case of the Silken Petticoat (1953)
Here Ludo is consigned to the role of an onlooker on the jacket spine as a mysterious brassy blonde confronts arrogant critic Clement Foorde at the Cafe Rond.  This is a truly superlative jacket which really captures the scene from the book:

It was almost half-past six and the bar was pretty full. There was plenty of chatter and so much of a smoke haze that I had to give my hornrims a polish before I could see clearly to the far end. Behind the bar, and against a long background of multi-coloured bottles, a cocktail-wallah and a couple of barmen were busy as beavers.

A fat man had slid off a stool and put on his hat, and I was on that one vacant bar stool before its temperature had sunk by half a degree and ordering a treble whiskey and soda.  Then I had  a good look to my right, and there was Clement Foorde.

....Had I leaned forward I could have stroked the voluminous cape or the silky head of swept-back white hair.  I could almost have counted each hair in the mustache and the little imperial that barely reached the bottom of his chin, and I could see every detail of the setting of the handsome antique ring that flashed as he gently waved a white, gesticulating hand. 

He was in one of the deep leather chairs with a low table between him and his listener, a donnish-looking man whom I did not know....

...the girl--or should I say woman?--...came past us....she was what is known as an uncommonly good-looker...a blonde...the fur cape she wore was probably nutria.

The Case of the Benevolent Bookie (1955)In past cases lanky and bespectacled Ludo, who narrates his cases, often self-deprecatingly compared himself physically to a secretary bird.  This cover, depicting Ludo and a plainclothes policeman investigating a dead body found in a burned hayrick, brought the image of a secretary bird to  my mind.

The Case of the Extra Man (1956)
Here Ludo really looks like a PI spying on a couple--including another blonde--from an alley.

The Case of the Russian Cross (1957)
Ludo trails a suave suspect who has just left his photography studio, with its exterior woodwork painted in turquoise blue and cream: "I saw the beautifully trimmed dark beard as he turned, and the smartly cut black overcoat and the dark Homburg hat."

The Case of the Running Man (1958)The titular running man appears on the cover, fleeing Ludo's presence in a high-end antique shop. 

This novel will appear be reissued next year, with the dozen other remaining Bush Ludovic Travers titles.

With Malice Toward All: A Simple Case of Ill Will (1964), by Evelyn Berckman

I have an article coming out next week at CrimeReads, in which I look at poison pen letters in fact and fiction.  One factual case which I found rather mordantly amusing (happily no suicides were involved) occurred in 1934 in the small town of Vermilion, Ohio (located west of Cleveland on Lake Erie).  Perhaps there are people alive today who recall it.  Two of the main combatants in the affair, Mrs. Zenobia Krapp and Mrs. Marvell Snyder, proved remarkably long-lived, dying respectively in 1984 and 2000 at the ages of 91 and 104.  Enmity dies hard.

Over several months in 1934 members of the Vermilion chapter of Sorosis--a national women's literary and social club originally and ironically founded in New York in 1868 to promote among women "mental activity and pleasant social intercourse"--had been inundated with what newspapers termed "vile and obscene letters," the contents of which "cannot be be decently repeated." 

Handwriting experts pointed the finger of guilt at no less than the President of the Club, one Zenobia Krapp, who as a result was promptly expelled from its ranks.  Mrs. Krapp thereupon went to court (it's the American way), filing a $10,000 defamation lawsuit against eleven of her former Club members.  Undaunted, Marvell Snyder, the newly installed president, affirmed her belief that the culprit behind the letters was indeed the former president, elaborating thusly: "Mrs. Krapp plays the piano.  There are several other members of the Club who play it too, and in the opinion of some people they can play better than Mrs. Krapp.  That's what's back of the whole thing."

What might be termed the unpleasantness at the Sorosis Club made national newspaper headlines in the United States, although this poison pen affair, unlike most others, was treated rather mirthfully by the press.  Despite its humorous manifestations (including the fact that the putative villainess in the affair was named, well, Zenobia Krapp), the Vermilion poison pen case beautifully illustrates how intense rivalries and feuds among women in uncomfortably close proximity could produce unexpectedly bitter jealousies and animosities.

This fact is illustrated as well--very well--in fiction, in author Evelyn Berckman's tenth crime novel, A Simple Case of Ill Will (1964). 

Berckman was once a highly regarded suspense novelist who today has largely fallen out of the public eye.  Formerly a promising composer and concert pianist, Berckman published her first crime novel in 1954, at the age of 53, simply to assure herself of an adequate income in middle age.  She produced well-reviewed nine crime novels between 1954 and 1962.  Between 1964 and 1977 she published an additional seventeen novels, but these are more of a mixed lot, some being classic crime novels, some not so classic crime novels and others not crime novels at all.

I reviewed one of the good crime novels, The Victorian Album (1973), seven years ago.  Since then, works by her have been highly favorably reviewed by additional bloggers.  (One of them called my review "cheerfully fulsome," something I don't recall my writing ever being called before....)

Many of Berckman's novels are set in England, where Berckman herself migrated (she was originally from Philadelphia), and they have more than a touch of distinctly English disquiet, like a serving of tea and cakes where arsenic has been surreptitiously added to the menu.

Like The Victorian Album (1973), A Simple Case of Ill Will is one of the good Berckman crime novels.  The American edition of Will, published by Dodd, Mead, copied the British edition on the front cover but on the back produced, in its entirety, crime writer and reviewer Julian Symons' rave notice of the novel in the Sunday Times.  (Despite this rave, Symons oddly neglects to mention Berckman, as was the case with so many women suspense writers, in his genre survey Bloody Murder.)

Symons' review is indeed worth quoting in full:

Julian Symons' full review made
the back cover

Uncommon Wit And Style
A Simple Case of Ill Will, by Evelyn Berckman

There are few more likely settings for crime than a bridge club, and the club at which Armina Clere is a hostess is full of characteristic small greeds, fears and enmities.  Tottering, wheezing Lady Mellish and her niece Evadne whose subterranean rebellious fires never quite break out; the club's anxious owner Phyllis Dalton; its distinctly sinister servant, Arthur; and Armina herself, daughter of a Dean and now come down in the world to the point where the sum of her ambition is to be given a bedroom on the club premises-Miss Berckman shuffles them together and asks us to spot which of them is activated by some more powerful motive than common malice.

Why was there a strong smell of gas in a gasless basement, who tried to push Armina under a lorry, who is going to die and how?  The atmosphere of the bridge club is touched off perfectly.  Miss Berckman really takes trouble about the way in which her book is written.  Wit and style in crime stories must not go unmentioned.

This is a fine short review, which gives an apt summary of the plot of the novel, while also emphasizing its ample stylistic merits.  In my own case, I am once again reminded of the late Ruth Rendell, an crime author who had just commenced her writing career when Berckman's Ill Will appeared.  The tone of subtle menace is apparent from the novel's first sentence, in the way the second part of the sentence undercuts the first: "Hatred was a stranger to Miss Armina Clere, in the usual course of things."  What follows, of course, is not the usual course of things....

Armina Clere, the Dean's daughter, is another in that long line, in English crime fiction, of precariously positioned aging English spinsters (to indulge in that antiquated word).  What is reminded somewhat of Dorothy Bowers' Fear and Miss Betony, recently reviewed here.  In Ill Will, Miss Clere has to make a living as a hostess at a bridge club in a lovely old Victorian row house in London, a lone survivor, in the vicinity, of the Blitz and commercial development which followed after the war.  She covets moving from her dismal, distant flatlet to a storage room in the house, which would convert, in her eyes, into a lovely little bedsit.  This her great ambition in life, as the author poignantly captures:

She thought of the small dark room that hemmed her in with her few possessions, she thought of its gas fire and the greedy meter that gulped the shillings; she thought of the unheated house that contained it, its dank halls, its icy lav and chilly bathroom with its unconvincing hot water....It was all part of the deterioration that was taking place within her from the abrasions of worry and poverty, of making do with a small wage, a microscopic income and the scanty old-age pension.  She knew herself to be a person of good-nature and goodwill whom these pressures were turning into a woman of ill-nature and ill-will....

skulduggery at the bridge table

To what extremes of their own will ill-willed people in extremis turn? Miss Clere is the protagonist and point-of-view character of the novel, and we are intensely drawn to following her fate; but there are other interesting characters as well at the deadly bridge club, including

Phyllis Dalton, the club's austerely remote owner

Fleur Daintry, the house's florid second floor tenant

choleric Lady Mellish, the owner of the house and devoted patron of the club

Evadne Raikes, Lady Mellish's disgruntled, dependent niece

Arthur, the club's elderly, satyric and subtly malevolent butler

Ellen, the young woman who helps Arthur serve the patrons ("staff, very minor staff, yet no staff was minor these days")

The tone is predominantly feminine, but most wickedly so--malice domestic at its best, as it were.  I think it's true that Berckman lost interest in plot over the years (like other crime writers, she had an urge to write "novels," if you know what I mean), but here the plotting is intricate and devious, while the writing and characterization is as much as devotees of the crime novel could ask.  This is a splendid mystery story, richly deserving of a reissue.

When Will You Pay Me? The Bells at Old Bailey (1947), by Dorothy Bowers

When Will You Pay Me?
Say the Bells at Old Bailey
--Oranges and Lemons aka The Bells of London (trad. English nursery rhyme)

But I believe you--oh yes.  Women aren't content with suicides.  Nothing short of murder for them.  And we call 'em the gentle sex!
--The Bells at Old Bailey, Dorothy Bowers

In 1947, after an interval of six years since the appearance of her last mystery, Fear for Miss Betony, Dorothy Bowers published what proved to be her fifth and final work of crime fiction, The Bells at Old Bailey.  In remembrance of "the dark years" (presumably the late Second World War, during which she had not published a book), Bowers dedicated the novel to her steadfast English publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, who had issued all her mysteries in England, to much critical acclaim. 

a novel of detection
Hodder and Stoughton edition

On the dust jacket, Bells was pugnaciously subtitled, in the dawning era of the psychological crime story, "a novel of detection," which may have helped spur Bowers' elevation to membership in England's Detection Club.  She died the next year, at the age of forty-six, doubtlessly resulting in the loss to the world of at least several more of the author's quietly literate novels of detection.  So Bells remains our last word on Dorothy Bowers and where she was headed as a mystery writer.  How does it toll for thee?

In a slightly earlier blog piece, I commented about how markedly feminine is the milieu which Bowers presents readers in Fear for Miss Betony.  The same point obtains as well in Bells, although here we see more of the forces of the official--and hence, at that time, mostly male--world of police, doctors and lawyers. 

The main setting is Miss Bertha Tidy's establishment "Minerva's," a hat shop and beauty parlor with cafe located in the village of Ravenchurch.  Miss Tidy's charming cottage, The Keepsake, located in the nearby village of Long Greeting, where she dwells with her Breton housekeeper Leonie, is also a focal point.  With one exception, the main characters--Miss Tidy and Leonie, the girls employed at the hat shop (I was reminded, with them, of Christianna Brand's Death in High Heels), antiquarian bookstore owner Emmie Weaver, tweedy, Dorothy Sayers-ish mystery writer Kate Beaton--are all female. 

The exception is "great novelist" Owen Greatorex, who remains a somewhat amorphous character. There is also clever Inspector Raikes of Scotland Yard, who may have been intended as a new series sleuth; but he mainly struck me for his sweeping sexist comments about women, a proclivity he shares with other male characters in the book.  I think Bowers was making a point here!

Bells has been called a poison pen mystery, by the by, but it really is not, as I define it.  Poison pen mysteries ideally involve masses of anonymous missive sent to various people at a specific location, preferably an English village, making scurrilous and scandalous accusations.  In threatening letter mysteries, like Bells, Philip Macdonald's RIP, Ngaio Marsh's Photo Finish and PD James' The Skull Beneath the Skin, menacing letters are mailed to one specific target, forecasting imminent death or harm.

There have been five recent deaths in Long Greeting, all of them ruled suicides.  These have not been the result of poison pen letters, however, but something else, something rather insidious as well....

corn measures

When the novel opens Miss Tidy is planning a visit to the local police to bring to their attention a couple of anonymous, vaguely threatening letters which she has received.  After she makes her carefully tailored complaint to the police, it's not long before she herself is found dead, battered with a corn measure and strangled with a scarf.  During the heyday of the Golden Age of detective fiction, when bizarre murders rather than subtle psychological delineations were the thing, this might have resulted in the novel being mechanically titled The Corn Measure Murder.  I was reminded of Agatha Christie's early Fifties detective novel Mrs. McGinty's Dead, where the murder weapon was a sugar cutter.

American edition

Bowers is as interested in characterization as well as detection, however; and this is well done on the whole, especially with the splendidly named murder victim Miss Tidy and several other women.  The plot is good, though there are some flaws in my view, which I can get into without spoilers.  There seem to me a few signs of haste around the edges, despite the fact that it is a long detective novel for the period, close to 100,000 words by my count.  Still, I would say that all in all this is a fine mystery that presaged more fine mysteries, but for a life sadly truncated.

A few words on the title.  It references a well-known English nursery rhyme, verses of which provide the headings for chapter titles (more relevantly so than you typically find with other mystery writers, like Gladys Mitchell). 

The dust jacket of the English edition (see above) incorporates the early nineteenth century sampler by young Adelaide Bascomb, age eight, which illustrates the nursery rhyme and hangs in Miss Tidy's quaint, if something less than cozy, cottage.

Coming Attractions in February and March: All for the Love of the Crime Ladies

I was kept rather busy most of January, so was not even able to finish my Ten Carrs of Christmas.  Which puts me in a quandary: do I do finish them now, or in December?  What do you think?

What I was doing, however, was completing introductions to Dean Street Press' new set of Golden Age Moray Daltons and first set of Golden Age Henrietta Clandons (including one of my absolute faves from the era, Good by Stealth), as well as a new article on poison pen mysteries in fact and fiction for CrimeReads and an introduction to the latest Bernice Carey "twofer" by Stark House, which collects her mid-century crime novels The Reluctant Murderer and The Body on the Sidewalk. 

The Reluctant Murderer I reviewed, quite favorably, here in 2018.

Speaking of Stark House, their new Ruth Fenisong twofer, for which I wrote the introduction, is out now.  At this blog I have written enthusiastically about both the author and her work.  Like Bernice Carey, she is another accomplished mid-century American woman crime writer.  Although her career in the genre was longer lived than Carey's, both she and Carey fell out of print, most unjustly, after they stopped writing crime fiction.

So that is four women vintage crime writers, two British and two American, whom of late I have been involved with resurrecting, which is always a great feeling.  Except one of them wasn't actually a woman: Henrietta Clandon.  As Austin Powers might say, she's a man, baby!  But don't fret: as someone else said, approximately, a rose by any other name smells as sweet.  More anon.

Women's Worlds: Fear for Miss Betony (1941), by Dorothy Bowers

When in 2005 Rue Morgue Press reprinted the five detective novels of Englishwoman Dorothy Violet Bowers (1902-1948), it presaged the wave of vintage mystery reprinting which really began in earnest about a decade later.  Consequently, Bowers may have been somewhat superseded in readers' minds by the more recent stuff of the last five years (though her books have also now been issued in attractive new editions by a rival press, Moonstone).

Speaking for myself, I first read Bowers' books about twenty years ago, and was especially impressed with The Bells at Old Bailey (1947), the last novel she published before her premature death at age forty-six from tuberculosis (a few years before the disease also claimed George Orwell).  Another I like is Fear for Miss Betony, published in 1941. However, I found on rereading the two novels recently that I had forgotten a lot about them, including whodunit!

autograph in my copy of Fear for Miss Betony

On rereading both Fear for Miss Betony and The Bells at Old Bailey struck me in the overwhelming dominance of the books, masculine legal apparatus aside, by women's characters in women's worlds.  In Fear for Miss Betony, there is really only one significant male character, a fortuneteller known as the "Great Ambrosio," and though he is much mentioned, he actually only speaks in one chapter. 

Bowers' series Scotland Yard detectives, Inspector Dan Pardoe and Sergeant Salt, appear, rather perfunctorily and without much personality, only four-fifths of the way into the book, with Pardoe only doing clean up duty.  Aside from these men and an arrogant male doctor named Bolt who occasionally strikes a pose in the tale, the characters in Fear are almost exclusively women, headed by the title character, Miss Emma Betony, a sixty-one year old retired governess of limited means facing a crossroads in her life when the novel opens. 

Residing on the attic floor of a drab boarding house in the provincial town of Churchway, Miss Betony rejects an invitation to reside at the "Toplady Endowed Homes for Decayed Gentlewomen," even though this means, with her declining resources, that she will have to go on parish relief.  The impetus for her decision was one of the snobbish shabby genteel "Topladies" warning her that her application might be rejected, as her "dear father was in trade, after all."

Yes, it seems that Miss Betony's father was a greengrocer.  Heavens!  This catty comment from her supposed friend mortifies Miss Betony, but also sets her resolve to turn thumbs down to Toplady and the people it represents: "the most vulnerable order on earth, the little people with small incomes, smaller brains, and smallest talents...."

Providentially, Miss Betony gets an invitation to visit from one of her former charges, the only one with whom she ever kept up correspondence, Grace Aram.  For a woman who had charge of children so long, Miss Betony has surprisingly negative views of them (or perhaps this is not surprising):

Privately, she thought them odious, and wondered increasingly why the thought should have to be private. Why was it taboo to confess antipathy to the human young?  The lip service universally paid to love of them was, she felt, defensible only on the grounds that we had got to make the best of a bad bargain....It was a colossal game of let's pretend...Like smothering a pill with jam.

These books are supposed to be cozies, recall!

Anyway, Grace, all grown up now (and then some), is now running a small girls' school, Makeways, in the town of Bugle in Dorset; and she needs help from Miss Betony, or "Bet," as she calls her.  First, she wants her to teach a few girls in senior German and French.  Second, and more importantly, she wants help with some mysterious problem afflicting the school which she can't mention in the letter.

So off Bet goes to Makeways--where the fear begins.  Bet learns from Grace that Makeways formerly was a private nursing home "charging unheard-of fees for coddling the rich who wanted to be coddled."  Grace had to take over two of these residents who wouldn't leave--a Miss Thurloe and a Miss Wand.  It's fussy Miss Thurloe who is the problem to which Grace referred in the letter, because it appears that someone has been poisoning the noisome old dame with arsenic.  Grace tells clever Bet that she wants her to help discern just what devilry is going on at Makeways.

the devil made him do it

Once on the case, Bet finds a very strange affair indeed, somehow involving a magnetic (at least to many of the women of Makeways) fortuneteller who goes by the name of the "Great Ambrosio."  Not for nothing, readers will find, does his name recall the title character of Matthew Lewis' landmark Gothic horror novel The Monk (1796).

Indeed, Fear has the trappings of a Gothic horror novel, with its setting of a dilapidated country house (it's even dark a lot of the time because of the wartime blackout) and its devilishly charming male up to...well, what is he up to, precisely?  And at the novel's center we have a woman detective figure, Miss Betony, though she's far off in age from the imperiled ingenues of Gothic mystery.* 

*(Indeed, we keep hearing about she old she is, which gets a little tiresome as she's only sixty-one!)

It is Miss Betony who solves much of the mystery herself (eventually there is a murder, and another attempted one), leaving the professionals, as I mentioned, to do clean-up.  Dorothy Bowers is to be commended for "going long," so to speak, with her plot resolution.  The payoff is immense if you don't see it coming ahead of time.  I did, but then some of the reviews of this novel over the years have been a little free with their plot descriptions, in my opinion.  (I hope I haven't been!)  To be sure, there are some improbabilities, but the whole thing is nicely clued and the puzzle, if unlikely, flows naturally from character as it is given to us.  In other words, it rings psychologically true.

Altogether it's an impressive affair, a sort of transition between the Golden Age detective novel and mid-century domestic suspense, one part Agatha Christie and one part Ethel Lina White.  And aside from the purely entertainment aspect, the novel offers an interesting portrait of unmarried women in an age which still spoke dismissively of "spinsters."  Both Miss Betony herself and her former charge, Grace Aram, as well as other women in the novel, are all of them unattached, from the young to the elderly.

I was compelled to wonder how much of this novel drew on the life of the author.  Dorothy Bowers was herself was the daughter of a man in "trade," confectioner Albert Edward Bowers.  Her mother, Annie Dean, was the daughter of a shoemaker.  Dorothy never married and lived most of her life in the small city of Monmouth, Wales.  Her father was committed to the education of his three daughters (besides Dorothy, these were Gwendoline Lillian and Evelyn May); and he managed to send Dorothy and Evelyn to Oxford.  Both graduated from the Society of Oxford Home-Students (now St. Anne's College), which allowed students to lodge in houses around Oxford rather than in the expensive women's halls.

Dorothy had been educated at the Monmouth High School for Girls and received a scholarship to Oxford.  She sat three times before successfully completing the Latin entrance exam.  She graduated with a third class honours degree in Modern History and worked a series of unsatisfactory temporary jobs as a teacher of history and English.  She composed crossword puzzles, under the pseudonym "Daedalus," for John O'London Weekly.  A 1929 advertisement in T. P.'s Weekly shows "Oxford Honours Graduate" D. V. Bowers offering tutorials in history at moderate terms.  (Did she use initials to cloak the fact that she was a woman?)

Dorothy was afraid of getting trapped in Monmouth, but that seems to have been precisely what happened to her for many years.  In 1939 she was living with her parents at the family home, Westbury House, at the age of thirty-seven, having just published her first and second detective novels, Postscript to Poison (1938) and Shadows Before (1939).  (Her sister Gwendoline had passed away three years early at the age of 39, unmarried, at the family home.)  But her novels, though successfully published in both the US and UK, did not provide her an avenue of escape.

With the commencement of the Second World War, Dorothy did some work in London for the BBC's European News Service.  Her familiarity with early wartime London found its way into her third detective novel, Deed without a Name (1940).  Yet Dorothy was still living at Westbury House the next year, when a pair of young girls from London were evacuated to there.  One of these girls, Rita Doughty, recalled that they stayed there for thirteen months and dubbed their kindly benefactor "Auntie Dorothy."  They had to leave when Dorothy's father became terminally ill, but young Rita was later able to impress some of her friends by getting Auntie Dorothy to sign a copy of one of her detective novels.

Dorothy's father died in 1943, leaving Dorothy his substantial estate of, in modern value, about 358,000 pounds (461,000 dollars).  After the war she settled at Tupsley in Herefordshire, on the Welsh border, but she died a few years later, in 1948, shortly after completing a final detective novel and finally being admitted to the Detection Club.  Her sister Evelyn passed away thirty years later, also unmarried.  In her will Dorothy left her money (in modern value about 133,000 pounds or 171,000 dollars) to a pair of individuals: her sister Evelyn and, most mysteriously, one John Pigott, omnibus conductor.

In Fear and Miss Betony, Bet finds herself thinking affectionately of her self-sacrificing and generous greengrocer father, "who struggled hard to give me a good education--he was never properly alive to the inferiority of women...."  The parallel between Miss Betony and Dorothy is obvious, though Bet would have been born a generation before Dorothy, around 1880.  (Dorothy would have been around the age of Grace Aram.)

Miss Betony's precarious and lonely life in boarding houses is sharply conveyed (with some exquisite turns of phrase), suggesting a personal familiarity on the author's part:

She had lived there four years, in the tall, self effacing house in a back street where the pavements marched sheer with the front doors and coffee colored net screened from the infrequent passer-by the occupations of the grounds floors.  Her sojourn there had been marked by a significant ascent.  Beginning at the first floor with windows commanding the complacent features of the Toplady Museum over the way, she had moved eighteen months later to a small but pleasanter room up the next flight, whence she looked down on five strips of walled garden, a budgerigar house, and the backs of homes that early each week flaunted their laundry like festive bunting.

Climbing had indeed its compensations, for the next move which nine months ago had brought her to the attic floor, with two buckets of sand in grim attendance at the top of the uncarpeted stairs and the homely world of Monday washing and apple trees and cage birds dropping away beneath her, had given her too what none of the other boarders shared, a view of sky and distant hills, and bright gleams of the river slipping smoothly away to the sea that lay somewhere behind them.  Sometimes she fancied she could taste its breath on her lips.  It was a salutary reminder that life had not been spent wholly in Churchway.

Up in her attic room Miss Betony on one occasion reflects that

years ago, in the last war, when emotions ran high and loneliness and doubt and feelings of insecurity could be appeased in all kinds of strange ways, when she had been thirty-six and pretty enough not to hesitate about sending a photograph to someone she had not seen, there had been a club--well, a matrimonial bureau really--and a secretary, and a man....

Had there ever been a man in Dorothy's life?  Just who was John Pigott, omnibus conductor?  One of the things I find most interesting in Fear and in The Bells at Old Bailey, which I will post about next, is the profound sense of isolation.

Ironically, given Miss Betony's sentiments about children, Westbury House, the stately quoined, gabled and bayed Bowers family home in Monmouth, is now a daycare center, Little Einsteins (see above), complete with a discordantly festive magenta door and picket fence.

No Cornflakes, Kiddos! The Case of the Nervous Accomplice (1955), by Erle Stanley Gardner

"I wish I had one of these facile plotting brains, like Erle Stanley Gardner, or somebody.  I have good ideas for about four books, but the labor of shaping them into plots appalls me."
--Raymond Chandler to Charles Morton, 1944

Younger than Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) by all of a year and six days, Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) indeed was possessed of a nimble and prolific plotting brain.  Gardner published eighty Perry Mason detective novels in the thirty-six years between 1933 and 1969, with an additional pair published posthumously after his death at the age of eighty, nearly a half-century ago on March 11, 1970. 

This sum accounts for one novel for each year of his life and over two novels a year for nearly four decades, an impressive rate of achievement indeed; yet it isn't even counting:

• Gardner's twenty-nine Bertha Cool and Donald Lam mysteries, published between 1939 and 1970 (an additional rediscovered novel in this series was published a few years ago)
• his nine Doug Selby mysteries, published between 1937 and 1949
• at least seven other crime novels published between 1935 and 1950

This comes to 125 crime novels published in that thirty-six year period, more than three as year.  Between 1953 and 1964, Gardner published three Perry Mason novels every year and during much of this time one or even two Cool and Lam novels as well, meaning that he was publishing four or even five novels a year.  With his literary fecundity  and genuine plotting skill Gardner reminds me a great deal of so-called "Humdrum" mystery writer John Street, who primarily under the pen names John Rhode and Miles Burton published over 140 crime novels between 1924 and 1961.

You might, indeed, call Erle Gardner an American Humdrum: an awesome plotting brain who for decades was able to churn out (via dictation) book after book that maintained an impressive level of plotting ingenuity, even as the books were peopled by thin characters and increasingly shorn of descriptive passages.  Perry Mason may be an iconic detective, but we never really get to know him deeply.  We don't even know whether he was really, like his creator, sleeping with his longtime secretary or, like the man who so brilliantly incarnated him on television, Raymond Burr, leading a covert life of a queerer sort.  Who knows?  The reader can use her own imagination.  From my reading the characters in the series remained remarkably static, at least after Gardner mostly shook off the series' pulpish Thirties roots and settled down to the depiction of Mason's snappy courtroom battles with DA Hamilton Burger, so familiar to us from the television series.

Gardner's remarkable consistency as a crime writer over the years, coupled with his amazing fecundity, helped make him one of the biggest selling crime writers of the twentieth century.  (The television series didn't hurt either.)  Yet after his death his star faded, though there was a nice paperback reprint series by Ballantine in the 1980s and early 1990s.  In the last decade his novels have become available in eBook editions and one was brought back last year as an American Mystery Classic by Otto Penzler; but Gardner still gets far less attention than Agatha Christie, herself enjoying a pronounced renaissance, both commercially and critically.  Maybe the coming Perry Mason series on HBO will help, though as it depicts Mason (Matthew Rhys) as "living check-to-check as a low-rent private investigator" and "haunted by his wartime experiences in France and...the effects of a broken marriage," series traditionalists may be outraged (yet again).

In a 1955 column largely lauding Gardner, mystery critic Anthony Boucher observed that

The most successful writers of mystery novels have not necessarily been the most able or enduring.  Indeed, when one thinks of Fergus Hume, J. S. Fletcher and S. S. Van Dine, who sold hundreds of copies of books unread and unreadable today, the reverse seems almost to be true.  But commercial success and genuine merit can at times be allied, as with Conan Doyle, Ellery Queen, Georges Simenon and Erle Stanley Gardner. [I have no clue why AB left Christie off this list--TPT.]

Boucher allowed (indeed, he said he knew it from experience) that some of his readers were likely to challenge the inclusion on the above list of Gardner's name:

Mr. Gardner has never been a pet of the more intellectual murder devotes...and it must be admitted that there is some basis for their charges of lackluster prose and oversimplified characterization....

Gardner, of course, needs a critical defense as much as Liberace needs a rave from John Crosby; but I can't asking the articulate few who scorn the Perry Mason novels to look more closely at their virtues--not only the extraordinary narrative pace, the solid craftsmanship of construction, the legal ingenuity, but also the half-accidental quality of genuine naturalism.  Gardner's murders are, like most in fact, committed for simple motives (usually profit) and by simple means....

This 1974 cover
(the sixth Pocket printing) is
surprisingly accurate in its depiction
of the novel's love triangle

A Perry Mason novel which I recently read, The Case of the Nervous Accomplice, which was published the same year as Anthony Boucher's column, illustrates Boucher's contentions beautifully, in my view.  This novel concerns the efforts of Sybil Harlan to win back her man, realtor Enright "Enny"Harlan, from that designing "little minx," as she's called throughout the novel, Roxy Claffin.

Roxy, you see, is five years younger (!) than Sybil (making Roxy all of twenty-one or twenty-two), and as Sybil puts it, Enny's "entranced by the color of her hair, the smooth contour of her skin, and he simply loves those great big soulful brown eyes."

Considering how often Gardner novels deal with sexually errant spouses, they are remarkably "clean" books, by the by.  Nowhere do we hear that Enny loved Roxy's great big bazooms, for example.  (I don't even know if they were big, I'm just assuming.)  I think Perry's and Paul Drake's strongest oath in this book is "Good heavens!", which I find quaintly charming.

Sybil hires Perry to use her money ($32,750 to be exact) to buy stock in a real estate concern, the Sylvan Glade Development Company, to which Roxy, who is represented by Enright (I just can't bring myself to call him Enny anymore), wants to sell her valuable property.  (Hillside property which is going to be leveled off for a freeway, with the dirt sold.)  Sybil wants Perry to gum up the works of this transaction, with the aim of putting Roxy (That mercenary little minx!) at odds with Enright, with the result that he will see Roxy For What She Really Is and come running back to his loyal wife.  Got that?

Perry, legal genius that he is, immediately recalls the doctrine of lateral support--the right of all property to have the natural, normal support of the adjoining property--and, having become a stockholder in the company, he complains that Roxy, by having gone ahead and had her property excavated, has violated this rule.  Instead of leveling the hill and all its properties, Perry argues, the company could terrace the hill and develop a fine hillside property.

the house on the hill

It seems Perry has accomplished his task on behalf of Sybil, but a monkey wrench--or rather a revolver--is thrown into the works when Sybil finds one of Sylvan Glade's stockholders, George Lutts (the man who sold the stock to Perry), shot dead on the interior staircase of an abandoned house on the Sylvan Glade property (the one from which she spies, with binoculars at a third floor window, on her poolside husband and his bikini-clad mistress at Roxy's adjoining house down the hill.) 

Sybil runs from the house, gets a taxi and eventually makes her way to Perry's office, where she spills the beans.  Or is she keeping some of those beans to herself?  And will Perry have to climb a beanstalk of falsehoods to get to the truth?

Perry wins a victory over his legal nemesis Hamilton Burger at the pre-trial hearing over the matter of the taxi driver's identification (a clever sequence and gambit on Perry's part), but despite this Sybil is soon on trial for her life, with the odds against Sybil looking steep indeed.  Will Perry find a way out for Sybil?  Well, of course he will, but getting there is the fun part!

The resolution of the murder plot, when we learn the meaning of the title, I found quite ingenious indeed.  I spotted the culprit, based on the matter of alibis, but the exact mechanics of the crime eluded me.  I was rather reminded, in the dazzling technical precision of the plot, of another British Humdrum mystery writer, Freeman Wills Crofts.  Like Gardner, Crofts and John Street were professional men (an attorney and engineers respectively) who all first published novels in their forties (though Gardner had written for the pulps for ten years) and valued plotting above all else. 

Some would argue, however, that Gardner, with his swift narratives and legal pyrotechnics, is a different sort of writer altogether.  I see similarity as well to Rex Stout, for example, Stout being an author who might also be seen as "formulaic" (though crucially Gardner lacks the sparkling and brilliantly original narration of Stout's Archie Goodwin).  Readers of both series derive a lot of enjoyment from seeing the ways in which their heroes, Nero Wolfe and Perry Mason, nimbly manage to outwit their police rivals. 

For his part Julian Symons classified Gardner not as a Humdrum but as a "big producer and big seller," (which he certainly was), along with Leslie Charteris, James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyney, John Creasy, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Mickey Spillane, Dennis Wheatley and Edgar Wallace. 

The latter man was the only one in this group, opined Symons "who possessed genuine imaginative talent."  Of the rest

they have not influenced the development of the [mystery] form, and few of their books are of individual interest....their work has a machine-like nature that removes it from the sphere of literary into that of sociological consideration.  a popular character is devised, the formula for treating him established, and it is then just a matter of producing stories to feed the demand.

In short in Symons' view this is crime fiction as a "ready-made product like cornflakes or puffed wheat."

I don't know that many writers want to see their books compared to packets of puffed wheat, but for his part Gardner, who forthrightly referred to himself as a "fiction factory" (in paperback editions his novels were selling in the Sixties at the rate of 2000 copies an hour) was modest about his writing, saying:

Most readers are beset with a lot of problems they can't solve.  When they try to relax, their minds keep gnawing over these problems and there is no solution.  They pick up a mystery story, become completely absorbed in the problem, see the problem worked out to final and just conclusion, turn out the light and go to sleep.  If I have given millions that sort of relaxation, that is enough.

Maybe Gardner was a victim, when it came to critical esteem, of his own sheer competence.  I will concede that in my reading of him it's hard to pick out one book that stands as a masterpiece above others, as you might say, with Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr.  What is Gardner's Murder of Roger Ackroyd, his ABC Murders, his Three Coffins, his Burning Court?  Yet the fact remains that a book like The Case of the Nervous Accomplice, Gardner's 48th Mason novel and the third one he published in 1955, is a terrific mystery story.  It's also, in contrast with most of the work produced by writers like Charteris, Chase, Cheyney, Creasey and company, a genuine detective novel, legitimately clued.  And that ain't cornflakes, kiddos!

From the series: When Perry (Raymond Burr) met Roxy (the late Greta Thyssen)

The Ten Carrs of Christmas: Death in Five Boxes (1938), by Carter Dickson, aka John Dickson Carr

On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Death in Five Boxes!

You probably guessed that one was coming, but I also genuinely believe that Death in Five Boxes is an underrated Carr, deserving of more attention.

And, just in case you were wondering, Vox tells us that the twelve days of Christmas run from the birth of Christ (December 25) through the coming of the Magi, aka the three wise men (January 6, the Epiphany).  So I'm on track actually to get this done on time, praise the Lord and all the saints!

Death in Five Boxes begins as so many vintage mysteries do: with a young man who secretly dreams of adventure encountering a pretty "girl" in distress.  She's standing by an elegant row house in the light of a street lamp and the young man, toxicologist John Sanders, at first wonders whether she might be "an ordinary night-prowler"--i.e., a street-walker or lady of the night.  (Carr's mysteries tend to be more sexually frank than other "classic" mysteries.  In the Golden Age, this frankness was rather refreshing, although by the Sixties it seemed merely jejune.) 

However, the girl--or young woman as we would say today--is no hooker but rather respectable Marcia Blystone, daughter of eminent doctor Sir Dennis Blystone. 

Marcia is worried about Sir Dennis, who went out to keep an assignation at the flat of businessman Felix Haye.  Marcia, who followed Sir Dennis to this building, gets John to go up with her to Felix Haye's fourth-floor flat, where, after encountering a surly clerk named Ferguson on the third floor at the Anglo-Egyptian Importing Company [AEIC], they find Sir Dennis and the two other guests of Felix Haye--Bernard Schumann, heard of the AEIC, and art dealer Bonita Sinclair--drugged and insensible in Haye's flat.  Haye himself is dead, stabbed with an umbrella sword-stick.  (See the illustration of the 1991IPL edition, the one I read, at the above right.)

Each of Haye's guests has queer objects in their pockets: four wristwatches, the ringing mechanism of an alarm clock, and bottles of quick lime and phosphorous.  Now there's a fine Chestertonian situation for you!  Carr by his own admission was an adept of Chesterton in everything but religion--admittedly a rather large exception.

It turns out that all four individuals were poisoned with atropine in their drinks (white lady cocktails and a whiskey highball)--under circumstances which seem to have been impossible!  Also, Ferguson soon disappears from the building--under circumstances which seem to have been impossible!

Now the latter impossibility is soon explained, reasonably but prosaically, and while the explanation of the latter matter is held to the end of the novel and it's clever, it's not among Carr's most elaborate pieces of hocus pocus.  So perhaps this is why this novel isn't so well known as many other Carrs. 

Aside from the impossibilities, however, Boxes offers an intricate and well-plotted, fairly clued mystery problem (along with five mysterious boxes, which are broken into, their contents stolen, at the offices of Hayes' firm of lawyers).  I found it all quite satisfying.  On my second reading  of Boxes, I found had forgotten about everything about it after two decades except the poisoning method and I enjoyed it all immensely. 

John Norris has called Boxes one of his favorite Carter Dicksons.  To be sure, those Carr-hating curmudgeons Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor carrped that the novel depends on"false excitement" and "gimmicks" that are "barely plausible," but we know what wet blankets those two could be about anything they didn't (rather arbitrarily) deem "realistic."  Also people sometimes complain about the identity of the murderer, but I have no real problem with what Carr did here, aide from one niggling doubt about something the murderer did.

1940s Dell mapback edition
after which the back of the 1991
IPL edition was modeled over

John Sanders isn't the ass some Carr heroes are, although Carr-like he does to decide to commit the offense of breaking and entering in order to impress a girl (Marcia, of course).  This leads, incidentally, to a section of the book which would have graced any hard-boiled tale in terms of its splendid narrative tension.  (There's another such section as well, involving posh policeman Sergeant Pollard, who played a prominent role in The Ten Teacups, which would have fit wonderfully in a domestic suspense novel.)

Marcia Blystone seems very much a standard Carr leading lady, in both her youthful attractiveness and willfulness and her underlying sympathy with naughtiness, but she doesn't cross the line into irritating, for me anyway, in contrast with some Carr leads I could mention.  (I'm looking at you, Miss Audrey Page.)

Sir Henry Merrivale doesn't come into the story until it's a third over, but he's in splendid form throughout (aside from his pratfall introduction), humorous yet withal a figure of some real character.  (It wasn't for some more years yet that Carr would turn poor HM him into a buffoonish performing monkey.)

It's Sir Henry who here expresses an important credo of Carr's (it's important in the book too): "There's a lot of stuffin' that needs to be removed from shirts, and a good spring-cleaning wanted in the home of the humbugs."  Carr loathed the canting pious hypocrite, who committed sins in private which he sanctimoniously denounced in public; and if that isn't a timeless message I don't know what is.  Bravo, JDC, I shall raise a white lady to you!

recipe at Basco Fine Foods (recommended to readers of the book)