Walk a Mile: Dead Man's Shoes aka Appleby Talking (1954) by Michael Innes

From its 1936 publication of Seven Suspects--the American title of Michael Innes' first detective novel Death at the President's Lodging (an apt-to-be-misleading title for American readers)--Dodd, Mead's Red Badge Detective mystery fiction imprint employed, with a few exceptions, a specific design style for Michael Innes novels, one which the publisher maintained for over four decades, up through the publication of The Gay Phoenix in 1977.  

Most of the 27 John Appleby detective novels, 3 John Appleby short story collections, and 10 non-series detective novels published in this period had jackets reflecting this design scheme, composed of a black background with minimalistic strokes in red, white and gray.  As far as I am aware this is a unique feature in long-running mystery fiction in this period.  Why the switch-over took place in 1978 I don't know, but the change stayed in place until Innes' (and, indeed, arguably the Golden Age generation's) last detective novel, Appleby and the Ospreys, was published in 1986, during which time there appeared from Innes a total of five more Appleby detective novels, including Ospreys, and three more non-series ones.  

One of the eye-catching exceptions to this rule is Dead Man's Shoes (Appleby Talking in UK), a collection of 23 pieces of John Appleby short fiction published in 1954.  Although the black/white/red/gray color scheme is adhered to, there is a more detailed design, emphasizing, appropriately, a dead man's pant's cuffs, socks and mismatched shoes.  One of the shoes in an unexceptionable black while the other is red--certainly a striking and odd color in this context.  

Sadly, in the title novelette of about 16,000 words we find that the mismatched shoes are actually black and brown, not black and red; so the jacket turns out to be misleading in this regard.  

Before reading the story I had been innocently looking forward to the explanation of why the shoe was red (like John Rhode's green hedgehog): Was it like radioactive or something?  Alas, however, the eventual explanation which the author provided did not involve any weird and woolly science.  

Happily, however, this is still a very clever, well-clued mystery, however, which I probably would have read over twenty years ago, when I was on my first Innes reading jag, had the novelette not had an espionage background, which predisposed me against it at the time (plus the copy I had then was a drab paperback edition).  

Fear not, however, "Shoes" is a "fair play" mystery in the classic mode and a very good one at that.  I loved how it opened with the time-honored gambit of the imperiled "girl on the train" who implores our young hero for help, as she has just escaped from a man in another compartment whom she believes was about to murder her.  These "girls" really should stay away from trains, don't you know.

First there was Agatha Christie's "The Girl in the Train," from 1924 and much later we had Paula Hawkins' Girl on the Train from 2015 (filmed with Emily Blunt in the title role the next year), with a plentitude of other troubled train "girls" in between them, like Ruth Kettering in Christie's Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) and Iris Carr in Ethel Lina White's The Wheel Spins (1936), famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as The Lady Vanishes.  So all you "girls" out there reading this blog post really should know by know: Beware of the trains!  Read "Dead Man's Shoes" if you still don't believe me.  

Of course trains can get men in trouble too.  See Patricia Highsmith!

A girl in trouble is a temporary thing?

The other 22 works of short fiction in the collection are much shorter--indeed, the majority of them are short-shorts of under 2000 words.  Throughout the 1950s Innes specialized in the newspaper short-short mystery and was quite adept at it, but many of these tales here, I must admit, get rather whimsical, and are even on the shaggy-doggish side. 

Typically they take the form of Appleby talking (hence the English title) about some past crime with some of his male acquaintances (the vicar, the doctor, the lawyer, etc.) in the seaside town of Sheercliff (setting of "Dead Man's Shoes," by the way).  Some of these are clever and a bit more developed, however, like poisoning tale "The Furies" and "The X-Plan," another crime story with espionage trappings, and "Appleby's First Case."  (I think I have seen "The Furies" before in an anthology.)  

J. I. M. Stewart
aka Michael Innes (1906-1994)

Then there are a few short stories proper, about 4000-6000 words long say, which are quite good indeed: "Lesson in Anatomy," "A Dog's Life," "Pokerwork," "The Key" and "Tragedy of a Handkerchief."  "Anatomy" concerns a murder which takes place when the lights go out during an anatomy lecture at Nessfield University.  (See Innes' 1943 John Appleby detective novel The Weight of the Evidence, where in the English edition it is "Nesfield," I believe.)  

This is well-devised detective story, although I must admit that the "rags" which the medical students callously perform with anatomical "specimens" (i.e., blameless human corpses) rather rankled me.  Innes always indulgently gives university students great scope for consummate assery.

Not for the first time was I struck by the obnoxiously privileged behavior of college students in Innes' books, which really hung on over the entirety of the author's fifty year mystery writing career.  The author himself--whose real name was John Innes Mackintosh Stewart--was a longtime academic and taught English literature at Oxford for 24 years, retiring at the age of 67 in 1973, when changes were really starting to roil the system.

The other four stories all involve, in one way or another, murderous consequences of illicit passions among men and women.  "A Dog's Life" oddly anticipates the tragic drowning deaths of Daniil Gagarin and Emma Monkkonen which took place just a few months ago and which, due their horrific nature, went viral on the internet.  

Of these four clever tales I particularly liked "Pokerwork," about a murder committed with one of the classic slaying weapons.  (A number of the story titles, as you will see, are puns.)  Shorn of the dazzling literary embellishments of the Innes novels (particularly the early ones), these stories make manifest just how able Innes was at the craft of clueing, a skill at which he is underrated.  In a contemporary review of Dead Man's Shoes influential crime fiction critic Anthony Boucher called the collection "an approximately perfect book" and he asserted that "even readers who have shied away from the long Innes novels may be charmed by these briefer samples."

Dodd, Mead's first edition of Michael Innes'
Lament for a Maker, now selling for $750

Still in my view one needs to read Innes' novels to get the full flavor of Innes.  In a review of Dead Man's Shoes at Jason Half's blog, Jason asks, "Is it fair to judge a novelist based on a set of short stories?" and answers: "The immediate answer is, of course, yes."  I would argue, however, that the answer is, to the contrary, "Heck, no!"  

Set aside the "great" novelists, to really appreciate Michael Innes (and whether you can really appreciate him) you simply must read some of the earlier books, the great detective extravaganzas like Hamlet, Revenge!, Lament for a Maker, Stop, Press, The Daffodil Affair or Appleby's End, say.  (Or you could just start with this one, which is quite good, from the author's middle period, or even this one, from his later period.) 

To do otherwise is like thinking you have done justice to Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe saga by reading, say, "Murder Is Corny" (see my review), rather than Some Buried Caesar or And Be a Villain, for example.  It just won't do, sir!  Though it's actually even worse in Innes' case because the bulk of his short fiction are the merest of trifles by design.

Jason, who posted this review nearly three years ago, in December 2018, admitted then that he had not read any of Innes' novels, so his question is a pertinent one.  At the end of his review he speculates that he might owe it to the author "to sample more of his writing, to see what he can do with one novel-length story instead of 23 too brief but promising little ones."  To which I would add, I should say so!  

Anyone who likes Gladys Mitchell like Jason does should like Innes' early novels, I would think.  I haven't seen a review of a Michael Innes on his blog since then, however.  Did he ever give it another go with Innes?  I hope so.  When it comes to crime fiction, you have to walk a few miles in the dead man's shoes.

Ye Beastie Dyde It: More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James (1911)

the 1955 Pan paperback edition

I wasn't surprised to find that medievalist scholar and Cambridge provost Montague Rhodes James, who wrote supernatural horror fiction under the name M. R. James, was a reader of detective fiction by Agatha Christie (and presumably other authors).  The milieus of his stories--villages, country houses, universities--are so often what you find in Golden Age detective fiction.  

But more than that, James' tales often concern investigations into past mysteries, conducted by learned, even eccentric, gentlemen of means.  Even if the resolutions typically are not so tidy as those in a detective story, we are still trying, as in the detective story, to get to the bottom of decidedly queer enigmas.  (Some authors of that time explicitly merged the genres with the employment of "occult detectives.")

More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911)--originally simply entitled, I believe, More Ghost Stories--was the follow-up to M. R. James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), a cornerstone of supernatural horror fiction.  I don't believe that the second volume measures up to the first, although it has some fine tales in it.  

The leadoff frightener, "A School Story," is by far the shortest of the bunch and the least substantial, a simple tale of revenge from beyond the grave taken upon a schoolmaster, which makes similar creepy use of a well to the Japanese horror film Ringu and its American remake The Ring.  

"The Rose Garden" details what happens when Mr. and Mrs. Astruther (the latter a most imposing matron), decide to lay out a rose garden at a secluded corner of their newly acquired country house.  It's an entertaining enough story, but I thought the scariest thing in it was the intolerably bossy Mrs. Anstruther.

"The Tractate Middoth" and "Casting the Runes" (great titles both) concern scholars in desperate search of mysterious objects.  In the former, there's even a hunt for a lost will, like something out of Agatha Christie.  (Indeed, the Queen of Crime has an Hercule Poirot short story about a missing will.)   

On rereading these stories I found neither as frightening as I had recalled, but "Casting the Runes," I must add, has a simply smashing setup, which was brilliantly adapted in the 1957 horror suspense film Night of the Demon, one of my all-time favorite movies.  

"Runes" is about an amateur scholar and, well, rather nasty demonologist named Karswell who gets a wee bit, um, wrathful when his academic article is turned down for publication.  Coming from an academic background myself, I didn't find this part such a stretch!  

It all results in a sort of supernatural duel to the death, revolving around a slip of enchanted runes, between Karswell and Dunning, the outside reader responsible for Karswell's article getting rejected. Among the things for which the article is condemned, by the by, is its having had split infinitives, which made me sympathize a bit with that poor devil Karswell, I must admit!

Holden (Dana Andrews), aka Dunning from "Casting the Runes,"
senses the presence of unearthly menace in Night of the Demon

Although the "Runes" is not nearly as terrifying and thrilling to my mind as the film (I really could have done without all the stage Cockney dialogue, for example), it has some very neat elements.  The line "However, Mr. Karswell was an astute man" has stuck with me for decades.  It's deliciously chilling in context.  

Moreover, there's an episode, described at second hand, where Karswell "entertains" village children with a "magic lantern" slideshow which is genuinely horrific.  This was only very loosely drawn on in the film, but it surely inspired the slideshow sequence in the latest film version of Stephen King's horror novel It.  (See below.)  Was this is King's novel as well? I'm guessing it was meant as an homage to James.  I thought it was the scariest thing in the film!

My favorite stories in James' second collection, however, are the last three: "The Stalls at Barchester Cathedral," "Martin's Close" and "Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance."  "Stalls," set in the early nineteenth century and told largely in diary form, concerns the strange demise of John Benwell Haynes, the late Archdeacon of Sowerbridge.  Essentially this is an inverted crime story with monsters.  It's very creepy!

Martin's Close is a true tour-de-force, told largely in trial record form, about the murder of a homely common woman, Ann Clark, by the aristocrat who was emotionally toying with her and his subsequent trial before Baron Jeffries, the infamous real-life seventeenth-century English "hanging judge." 

It's a brilliant variant on the "spectral bride" legend, about which I want to say more when I get to posting about Joseph Shearing.  It should have been titled, "Madam, Will You Walk?," however.   Along with Mrs. Anstruther and a garden maze expert named Lady Wardrop (see below), Ann Clark is the only notable female character in this collection of short stories.

Speaking of Lady Wardop, there is, finally, "Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance," which tells of the sinister supernatural goings-on at the hedge maze at Wilsthorpe Hall.  Mazes have been great settings for scares since the time of Theseus, as anyone who read mythology and seen the film version of Stephen King's The Shining or read J. J. Connington's detective novel Murder in the Maze will know.  (Is the maze in King's novel?  Is this another homage?)

M. R. James really delivers the goods here, in a story that's rather more ambiguous than the others.  And, after all, surely that's the ultimate horror to a Golden Age mystery fan: having a resolution which fails fully to resolve the mystery!  We are all afraid of the unknown and even more so of the unknowable.

The Monday Club Murder: "Sight Unseen" (1916/21), by Mary Roberts Rinehart

The body lay in the room overhead.  But what of the spirit?  I shivered as I thought that it might even then be watching me with formless eyes from some dark corner.

--"Sight Unseen," Mary Roberts Rinehart

In "Sight Unseen" by American Crime Queen Mary Roberts Rinehart the Neighborhood Club meets weekly on Monday nights to discuss topics of current interest.  The club is composed of six well-off suburbanites, three men and three women.  These are:

first American edition, 1921

• stolid Horace Johnson, an attorney and the narrator of the tale, and his wife, "known throughout the neighborhood as a perfect housekeeper"
• literary editor Herbert Robinson and his sister Alice, "not a young woman, but clever, alert and very alive"
• Sperry, a heart specialist and "bachelor still in spite of much feminine activity"
• elderly but engaged Mrs. Dane, who, although confined to a wheelchair, is "one of those glowing and kindly souls that have a way of becoming a neighborhood nucleus"

The "fun" begins when the Neighborhood Group, on a Monday evening on November 2, has as its special guest Miss Jeremy, an attractive young woman spiritualist.  A séance is held, at which Miss Jeremy seems to channel a woman who has just committed, or at least been very recently on the scene of, a shocking murder! 

Later that night, Horace learns that one of their neighbors, fast living Arthur Wells, has died, ostensibly by a self-inflicted shooting.  Was is really suicide, however, or murder???

Avon paperback edition, 1946

Could this have been the murder that the medium Miss Jeremy seemed to be experiencing?  Both events took place around the same time, about 9: 30 in the evening.  Horace and his friend Speer, who starts falling for the pretty spiritualist, begin to investigate and come up with some shocking answers.

This is an entertaining murder story, especially original for its time I would think.  Does anyone know of a situation like this in an earlier story?  

I know of mysteries where murders are committed in the same room during seances, but I'm blanking on mediumistic revelations about murders which are taking place elsewhere while the séance is being held.  There's Agatha Christie's The Sittaford Mystery, but that dates from 1931.

Mary Rinehart knows how to spin an engrossing tale and "Sight Unseen" certainly is one.  Nor is it disadvantaged by its shorter length than much of her work--indeed, rather the contrary I think.  (By my count it's just shy of 40,000 words, so it's a long novella.)  

I'm struck again, however, by how Rinehart was more interested in writing stories about crime and character than meticulously clued puzzlers of the Agatha Christie sort.  There's some spiritualistic activity in Christie's detective novel Dumb Witness, which I reviewed recently, and you can bet that when there's a séance in that book there's a good fair play style clue wedged in there!  With Rinehart you don't really get that; it's more a parade of revelations.  And while the mystery is fine and engrossing, there's no shocking twists in culpritude.  

1989 Zebra paperback edition,
which gives "The Confession"
top billing

Indeed what I probably enjoyed more than the murder is the gradual detailing of Horace's life with his wife, that perfect housekeeper as he tells us.  I don't think we ever even learn this imposing matron's first name.  Poor dull Horace comes off as rather a henpecked soul, as it were, and it all makes an interesting portrait of upper middle-class marriage around the time of the Great War.  Just don't hold out great expectations of this linking in with the murder!  

Some of the writing in the novella is actually quite funny.  The blurb on my Avon paperback copy of the story, which has been coupled in published editions with a shorter Rinehart novella, "The Confession" (reviewed by me here) dramatically tells readers, "You Will Tingle and Shudder," but, nah, you won't.  

Truthfully, there aren't any real scares here --"The Confession" actually is rather creepier as I recall--although there is some interesting speculation about spiritualism and the existence of an afterlife.  This being Rinehart, there's a little romance too, though its nothing cloying, as her successors sometimes were with such material.

Originally published in a magazine in 1916, "Sight Unseen" first appeared in book form with "The Confession" in 1921 and has been reprinted in paperback several times since.  Avon's edition, pictured above, appeared in 1946.  Its whimsical cover of a cigarette-smoking skull, cocktail glass and knife bears no relationship whatsoever to the story, but it's a pretty cool visual!

Halloweekend at The Sign of the Passing Tramp, 2021

Classic Arthur Hawkins jacket to a
classic creepy Thirties crime novel by
Joseph Shearing,
aka Marjorie Bowen,
aka Margaret Campbell Long
(1885-1952), who will be one of
our honored guests this weekend

Murder and horror go hand in the hand, even in the era of vintage of crime fiction, when murder could be fun, even rather jolly.  The Golden Age of detective fiction was also, after all, the Golden Age of the Horror/Supernatural Story.  In the United States, where there was pulpish hard-boiled crime fiction, there was also the pulpish, hard-boiled horror fiction of HP Lovecraft and others--visceral, weird, hair-raising stuff.  Meanwhile in England we continued to see classic donnish ghost stories, more restrained but in their own way quite eerie, of M. R. James and his followers. 

Like Arthur Conan Doyle, still around as the Grand Old Man of Mystery during fully half of the Golden Age of detective fiction, M. R. James continued to publish genre fiction in the 1920s, with his last book of ghost stories, A Warning to the Curious, appearing in 1926-- although, again like Doyle, James' best work generally dated back to the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Over this weekend I plan to look at some of the work of M. R. James, to whom I was introduced thirty years ago in a marvelous collection introduced by the late English crime writer Ruth Rendell, a huge admirer of his.  (Rendell herself wrote a few ghostly tales and she well knew how to induce frissons of fear and unease in her murder fiction.) 

Reflecting, I suppose, my general bias in favor of all things olde and English, I greatly preferred James' subtly frightening antiquarian ghost stories to Lovecraft's freakish and ghastly creep shows.  James in turn was a reader of Agatha Christie (who herself wrote some supernatural and "weird" fiction) and I want to look a little about how James' works can resemble classic crime fiction.  At the same time I also want to look at some examples of vintage mystery fiction with supernatural elements.  So buckle of your broomsticks, guys and ghouls, it's going to be a goose bumpy ride!

And Now for a Stairy Story: Dumb Witness, by Agatha Christie (1937)--with a possible cameo by the author herself (and her little dog too)

In a not insignificant portion of vintage mysteries, the primary murder victim dies from having been fatally impelled in some foul fashion down a staircase.  (This happens in Miles Burton's A Will in the Way, recently reviewed here.)  Naturally this murder ploy faded away with the rise of bungalows and ranch houses.  The classic instance of the "true crime" staircase death dates from the sixteenth century, when all the most fashionable people lived in castles and such, don't you know, and had plenty of stairs that they needs must tread.   

This was the death of Amy Robsart, first wife of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.  Indeed, after his wife's death, Dudley's enemies intimated that he might have engineered her untimely demise in order to marry the Queen; and ever since historians have debated the famous question, did she fall or was she pushed?  No one knows the answer to that one.  

Fall Gal
Emily Arundell takes a near fatal tumble
down the stairs at Littlegreen House

In Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novel Dumb Witness, wealthy, elderly spinster Emily Arundell is NON-fatally propelled down the staircase at her home by means of of a trip wire, although this attempted slaying is covered up to look like an accident.  Emily owned a terrier named Bob, you see, and Bob had been trained to drop a little rubber ball down the stairs while recumbent at the half landing.  It's assumed that to her near-death Emily tripped over the ball, which evidently inadvertently had not been picked up and put away in its drawer.  (Someone removed the telltale trip wire, you see.)

However, Hercule Poirot appears on the scene after Emily's later, ostensibly natural, death.  (After the staircase incident Emily had written him an agitated, disjointed letter asking him down, but Poirot received the epistle only after her death.) 

Naturally Poirot discovers this criminal hanky panky and he decides, perhaps a bit quixotically, to stick around to snoop some more into the matter of Emily's ostensibly natural death.  Attempted murder followed by "natural" death he finds a little too hard to swallow, n'est-ce pas, like a plate of bubble and squeak--although his friend Hastings thinks the little Belgian is just dramatizing himself again.  (Hastings will never learn!)

Yes, Hastings comes along for the ride as well, in what would be his last appearance in the Hercule Poirot canon until Curtain was published nearly four decades later.  According to the Agatha Christie Fandom website, Dumb Witness marked the seventh appearance of Hastings in a Poirot novel, which somehow seems fewer than I recalled. However, it's true.

first English edition by Collins, with Agatha Christie's own dog, Peter, gracing the cover as Bob

Hastings appeared in three Poirot novels in the 1920s, followed in the 1930s by Peril at End House, Lord Edgeware Dies, The ABC Murders and Dumb Witness.  After his back-to-back appearances in Peril and Edgware, Hastings missed three consecutive Poirot novels until The ABC Murders (a three-year gap), then missed two more novels between ABC and Dumb Witness.  So it does appear that Christie indeed had become something less than enamored with Hastings in the mid-thirties and was in the process of gradually dispensing with his services.

Certainly Hastings' late appearance in Dumb Witness seems a bit off-kilter, because Christie presents the first four chapters of the novel as having been written by Hastings in the third person, artfully dramatizing the events within Emily Arundell's demesne, Littlegreen House, before he and Poirot arrive on the scene.  Now I know such literary devices are a legitimate conceit of fiction writers, yet, really, I think we all have to admit that such imaginative skill would have been utterly beyond Hastings' capacity.  I can't help feeling that Christie was really ready to move beyond Hastings.  

Bob drops the ball

So why did she use him at all here?  Were the fans clamoring for the return of Captain Hastings?  This seems unlikely, as reviewers at the time mostly just commented, in reference to Poirot's Watson, that he was just as dumb as ever.  My theory is that Christie needed Hastings to relate to the dog Bob, who in fact is a major character in the novel.  Hastings even allows Bob to "speak," in passages which readers likely will either find delightful or painful depending on how much they like dogs.  Being a dog lover myself (like Christie; see below), I don't mind it.  One of the many transgressions of the television version of Dumb Witness, in my eyes, is that it portrays Poirot as Bob's special pal.  Does Poirot have to have everything in this life?  I say at least give Hastings the dog! 

So for better or worse Hastings narrates most of Dumb Witness, which has largely been regarded, since its publication almost 85 years ago, as the weakest of the Thirties Poirot novels.  (Admittedly they set a high bar.)  I have been writing lately about underrated Christies so as I reread Dumb Witness I had to ask myself, is it underrated?  

Poor Hastings! Poirot (David Suchet)
makes a new friend in the 1996
television adaptation of Dumb Witness

On the whole, I think not.  It probably indeed is the worst of the Thirties Poirots, although it is important to add the caveat that even a subpar Thirties Christie was likely better than 75% or more of the detective novels of the time.  She was that good in those days.  

First off, does the title even make sense?  Bob obviously is the "dumb" (i.e., mute) witness, but in the book he's neither dumb (Hastings has him "speak," seriously) nor a witness with anything important to impart to the detective.

This contrasts, for example, with Belisarius, the delightful feline in Miles Burton's detective novel The Cat Jumps (1946), who literally witnesses the murder and could have told sleuth Desmond Merrion all about it, had he but possessed the power of speech.  No wonder the Americans changed the title of Dumb Witness to Poirot Loses a Client--not that that's a great title either! 

Also, what possessed Christie to have Hercule Poirot name the culprits in murders from four of his previous cases (i.e., four of Christie's past novels)?  That's a lot of wanton spoilerage in one book!  I wonder if this indiscretion on Poirot's part still occurs in later editions of Dumb Witness, or in the American edition?  I will have to check.

a long way down

Critics since 1937 have pointed out weaknesses in the puzzle structure of Dumb Witness, but I can't discuss that aspect of the book without massive spoilerage, as it were.  However, I will say that most of the novel's cast of characters is composed of an exceptionally pallid bunch by the Queen of Crime standards.  To be sure, Emily Arundell and her latest beleaguered companion, Wilhelmina "Minnie" Lawson, are done to a turn--Christie always portrayed imperious spinsters and their skittish companions well--but Emily's relations are a forgettable lot, aside from her Greek doctor son-in-law, who is interesting not so much in and of himself but for how the author treats him.  

Truthfully, the dog Bob is more developed than any of these humans.  (Maybe that's the authentic Hastings' touch!)

Strikingly it's Emily's dead relations--her sisters and her brother and her domineering drunk of a father, the General--who strike the most powerful chord.  There's a passage where Emily wanders though her house late at night thinking about the shades of her late family that is quite moving.  It may have been beyond Hasting's literary ability but it certainly wasn't beyond Christie's!  How interesting a Christie murder novel set in the Victorian era would have been.

this "special edition" with pictures
(see photos) probably followed
the first UK edition the next year

As we learned from John Curran, Dumb Witness had its inception in an unpublished Christie short story, "The Incident of the Dog's Ball," written a few years earlier.  Was this story inspired by real life practice of Christie's own terrier, Peter, dropping a ball down the stairs at Christie's own house?  It seems too colorfully specific to have been entirely imaginary.

I assume Christie's main house at the time would have been Winterbrook House, a lovely red brick Georgian house, coincidentally now up for sale, just outside the town of Wallingford, Oxfordshire, in the village of Winterbrook.  Wallingford is said to have been the model for the town of Market Basing, Berkshire where Emily Arundell's Littlegreen House is located.  Winterbrook at the time was part of Berkshire too.  From what I can tell, Littlegreen House seems a lot like Winterbrook House.

So presumably Christie modeled Littlegreen House after Winterbrook House.  She affectionately dedicated the novel to Dear Peter, Most Faithful of Friends and Dearest of Companions, A Dog in a Thousand.  Peter, who also had been a co-dedicatee of The Mystery of the Blue Train nine years earlier (reviewed here), died the year after Dumb Witness was published.  

Peter was photographed as Bob, it has been claimed, in the "special edition" of the Dumb Witness which The Book Club published in England, not long after the original edition.  So this claim goes, Peter appears at the half landing of the stairs, having just dropped his ball, while no less than his mistress, appearing as Emily Arundell, lies prone at the bottom below--at least according to some booksellers.  (See pics above.)  Christie authority Mark Aldridge disagrees, however.  I'm told John Curran emphatically doesn't buy this notion either.  Me, I'm keeping an open mind about it.  (Peter definitely appeared on the cover of the Collins hardcover edition of Dumb Witness, published slightly earlier; see pic above.)

If true, I think Christie most definitely must have had more than a passing affection for the book to have done this.  She must not have deemed it the dog that some of the critics did.  Or perhaps that's some other lady at the bottom of the stairs!  Who was that lady?  And who was that dog?

pictured: Agatha Christie's home Winterbrook House, the model for Littlegreen House?
"These large Georgian homes fronting the street must be the devil to get rid off."
(Hastings to Poirot on Littlegreen House, Market Basing, Berks in Dumb Witness)

Midsommar Murder--and Midwinter too! The Menace on the Downs (1931), by Miles Burton

The Menace on the Downs is a frustrating book to me, because one feels that it should be better than it is.  While there are some good parts to it, the novel is more "interesting" than it is "good," I would say.  Interesting for its material, that is, rather than for how the author handles the material in an entertaining fashion.  It's really rather plodding, predicatable and dull on the whole, without any compensating ingenuity on the part of the frequently ingenious author.

Miles Burton was noted for the authentic rural settings of his mysteries, and The Menace on the Downs certainly offers one of the most rural of his rural settings.  John Street, aka Miles Burton, published the novel in 1931, the year after one of his most memorable detective novels, The Secret of High Eldersham, and its sequel of sorts, The Three Crimes, both of which feature the investigative team of Scotland Yard's Inspector Young and his gentleman amateur sleuthing buddy, Desmond Merrion.  

Young exited the Miles Burton books after The Three Crimes, although Merrion would return in 1932 in Death of Mr. Gantley and remain until the the Miles Burton books came to an end in 1960.  In the meantime there was this odd little number, The Menace on the Downs, in which neither Young nor Merrion appears but where we do see the debut of Inspector Arnold, who features in almost all of the Miles Burton novels from here on out, usually in the insouciant company of Merrion.  

What menace lurks on the English downs?  You'll never guess! (Actually, you will.)

Like The Secret of High Eldersham, Menace on the Downs draws on European folklore, but where Eldersham is exciting and moves at a good clip, Downs just trudges along in the country muck.  It's a shame because the material should be rather thrilling.  

Significantly, the novel opens with a quotation from philosemitic Czech writer Oskar Donath on the Polna Ritual Murder case, in which, in Austria-Hungary at the turn of the nineteenth century, a Jewish man, Leopold Hilsner, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for ritually murdering a teenaged Czech Catholic girl, who was found dead in some woods with her throat cut and little blood around her body:

The medical evidence called by the prosecution showed that insufficient blood had been found to account for the bloodless condition of the body.

autopsy on victim in the 
Polna Ritual Murder Case

The Polna madness was a typically repulsive instance of the judicial application of the primitives European Christian folk superstition of the "blood libel"--the belief that Jews slaughtered Christian children as part of their religious rites, using their blood in baking matzos, the unleavened flatbread eaten over Passover.  Roll your eyes if you must, but how different is this wicked nonsense from the QAnon conspiracy theories which a not insignificant part of the population of the United States of America--ostensibly a civilized country--believes in today?

At the time an enlightened Czech college professor, Tomas Masaryk, played a major role in having Hilsner's death sentence commuted to life imprisonment by Austro-Hungary's Emperor Franz Josef.  Hilsner would finally be pardoned in 1918 by Franz-Josef's briefly ruling successor, Emperor Karl.  

Masaryk himself went on to become the first president of Czechoslovakia and one of Europe's most admired between-the-wars statesmen.  John Street for his part published a biography of Masaryk in 1930, a year before he published The Menace on the Downs, in which he castigated the Polna Ritual Murder case as an outbreak of  pernicious European primitivism.  

At the same time, however, he obviously decided he might be able to make use of the case for one of his Miles Burton thrillers.  (More recently, the events in the Polna Ritual Murder case were dramatized in the 2016 Czech film Murder in Polna, which is highly recommended to people interested in this dreadful subject.)

Leopold Hilsner (Karel Hermanek) charged with the blood libel in the film Murder in Polna

Let me emphasize that there are no Jews in The Menace on the Downs, so the book is in no way an endorsement of the blood libel, which Street expressly and vigorously disavowed in his Masaryk biography.  Rather in Downs the culprit--and this is so obvious that I'm giving nothing away if by chance you ever come upon a copy of this book--is...

the head of a religious group numbering some several hundreds, known as the Dukeites. 

In some ways the book reminded me of the recent horror film Midsommar (2019) and an older one (now nearly fifty years old in fact), The Wicker Man (1973), but unfortunately Street's tale is so ploddingly told that it's entirely lacking in the delicious frissons of fear and unease which distinguish these eerie films.  

Definitely having a bad hair day
The late Christopher Lee as Lord Saruman,
I mean, Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973).
He easily could have played Mr. Winterbourne
in a film adaptation of The Menace on the Downs.

Where The Secret of High Eldersham is a thriller with a mystery and detective element, The Menace on the Downs is a thriller that gets buried buried by the dullish (in this case) mechanics of detection.  In some ways it almost feels like a police procedural, which makes it interesting to the genre historian, but not necessarily entertaining. 

It all starts in a rural English district (likely in south central England) with the discovery, on the afternoon of December 22 (hmmmm), the day after winter solstice, of the dead body of Sidney Harper, a teenage delivery boy.  

The boy's throat has been cut and his head and neck lie in shallows at the edge of a stream, with a jagged broken bottle nearby.  Little blood is present, the fluid presumably having emptied into the stream.  Sidney's bicycle is nowhere to be found.  

Was Sidney's death accident, suicide or murder?  Local police are disinclined to think it's murder, as they can't conceive of any motive anyone might have had for murdering a boy.  (No one conceives that it might have been a sex crime, even though sadistic sexual maniac Fritz Harman was executed just six years earlier for assaulting and murdering more than a score of men and boys.)  

In fact the only suspect anyone can think of is the boy's no-account laborer father.  Nor does it seem likely that young Sidney would have killed himself.  If an accident, the boy must have skidded off the road and cut his throat on the broken bottle as he fell.  But then where is his bicycle?

Eventually police end up arresting Sidney's father, but the case collapses when Mr. Winterbourne, wealthy landowner and head of the Dukeites, provides an alibi for the man.  This takes up the first 160 pages of the book (believe it or not), which essentially up until this time is a rural police procedural, although no one used that term back then.  

Medieval tithe barn at Great Coxwell,
Oxfordshire, about nine miles from
Swindon, Wiltshire, possibly
the approximate setting of
The Menace on the Downs.
Built for monks around around 1292, 
The barn may have been the one which the
author had in mind for the one in the novel. 
I just get all Ellis Peterish just looking at it!

In addition to a local inspector by the name of Griffin and a doctor by the name of Lorimer there is on the scene as well a gentleman amateur scholar of note who glories in the name of Montague Veringhame and sounds, as Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor in A Catalogue of Crime have noted, a lot like John Street himself.  

Veringhame is an expert on Central Europe and has written about Tomas Masaryk and knows all about the Polna Ritual Murder case, although amazingly he fails to connect any of this with the local murder it so queerly resembles--or the one which follows it.

Yes, after the police case against Sidney's father collapses, leaving the boy's death unsolved, yet another boy is found dead in very queer circumstances six months later--on June 22 to be precise (hmmmm), the day after the summer solstice.  What's the deal with these solstices, anyway? 

Well, the riddle is all-too-obvious to modern readers, schooled on The Wicker Man and Midsommar.  Actually even if you haven't seen these films it's all-too-obvious.

It's the time of the season for murder, you might say.

The novel, which is over 80,000 words long, spends so much time on the plodding construction of the obviously misguided case against Sidney's father that we lose the sense of thrill and horror which Street genuinely captured in The Secret of High Eldersham.

After the second boy is found dead and Inspector Arnold from Scotland Yard shows up (three-quarters of the way into the novel), things finally pick up a bit, but it's much too late.  Arnold manages to solve the case, but only because he speaks German (a skill never hinted at in later books) and idly reads about the Polna Ritual Murder case in one of Veringhame's history books.  Problem solved!  Mr. Winterbourne meets a suitably dramatic end.  Story over. Yawn.

I just wish the tale had been better told.  As it stands it's mostly of antiquarian interest, as it were.  Miles Burton had done better in Eldersham and he would go on to do better over a prolific three decade career.

I must say, though, that the thought of the horrific actions performed at a setting like the Great Coxwell Barn is distinctly creepy!  It just doesn't translate in this book where the "shocks" are kept too distanced from the reader.  If you're going to write a shocker, be sure to shock!

Mara and the Dame: The Mid-Seventies Agatha Christie paperback cover art by Mara McAfee

Mara McAfee cover art for Agatha Christie's
Hickory Dickory Death, aka Hickory Dickory Dock
one of the covers she did for Pocket paperback editions
of Christie detective novels in the 1970s

I will always associate Agatha Christie mysteries with paperbacks.  It probably wasn't until the dawn of the 21st century that I ever even owned a Christie mystery in hardcover.  I started buying Christie Pocket pbs with my own "pocket" money waaay back in the Seventies, before I was even a teenager.  And, frankly, the art on those pbs was much nicer than the dreck which Dodd, Mead and the Collins had been putting out on Christie hardbacks for some time.  (Sorry, Collins, at least you have done much better with Christie hardbacks over the last 25 years!)

I have already written on the blog about the late, great Tom Adams (1926-2019) and the Agatha Christie covers which he did for Pocket.  (He also did weirder, truly surreal, ones for English pb publisher Fontana--see John Curran's book Tom Adams Uncovered.) 

So today, on the occasion of Dame Agatha's 131st birthday, I would like to write about the unheralded woman artist whose work graced Christie Pocket pb covers in the mid-Seventies: Mara McAfee.  I remember this artwork so well from when I was reading Christie pbs in the late Seventies in junior high school in Alabama.  

aka Sparkling Cyanide
cover art by Mara McAfee

Pictured below and to the left are five Christie pbs with McAfee cover art which Pocket issued in December 1975, just weeks before the Queen of Crime's death at the age of 85 and about a year after the release of the hugely successful film adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express (1974), which earlier that year had received six Oscar nominations, winning one (for Ingrid Bergman's memorable supporting performance as a conscience-stricken Swedish missionary--she also won the supporting actress BAFTA). 

You can see how the late Albert Finney's depiction of Poirot influenced McAfee's rendering of the great Belgian detective.  Her Miss Marple is less successful, I think, although Joan Hickson's Eighties portrayal of Miss Marple occupies the space in my head, so I may be unfairly biased.

On the whole, however, I think these are striking and vivid depictions of the murder world of Christie.  All these years, though, it never occurred to me, until recently, to look up information on the obviously talented artist who drew them.  

It turns out that Mara McAfee, who was born in 1929 and died much too young in 1984, got her start as a film and television actress and dancer in the 1950s.  Often she was uncredited in her films, as in the landmark brutal Fifties noir Kiss Me Deadly, where she plays the beatific, silent nurse looking down upon the stricken Mike Hammer.  She also had parts in the genre films Women's Prison--starring Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Audrey Totter and Phyllis Thaxter (Wow!)--and Las Vegas Shakedown (she actually gets credited in that one), both also from '55.  

Mara McAfee with Dennis O'Keefe in Las Vegas Shakedown (1955)

Mara McAfee as the briefly appearing beatific nurse in Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

McAfee was an attractive and, well, busty brunette, but interestingly she only acted to finance her way through art school.  She had no high opinion of her thespianic talent but she said she did have brass.

Mara McAfeee

As an artist she became best known in the Seventies for her sardonic and satirical artwork for National Lampoon, where she frequently sent up Normal Rockwell's wholesome depictions of Americana.  You can see some of these pieces below.  So, all in all, she was quite an interesting choice for Agatha Christie covers by Pocket, and reflective of just how highly Christie was esteemed.  (McAfee did Pocket covers for mainstream novelists as well.)  

Mara McAfee was smart, sexy and funny--just like Agatha!  So happy 131st, Agatha--and let's not forget Mara McAfee's 92nd on November 27.

Enjoy this sampling of MM's work for National Lampoon and some of her book covers for other writers, and even a piece of film poster art.  Think Norma Rockwell with a heap of Norma Desmond.

yes, Brooke Shields

cover art for Joan Aiken's Dark Interval
Yes, it's Gothic but our heroine is more fashionably dressed this time,
in orange cape and teal slacks rather than a filmy white nightgown

Wuthering High School

poster art for Bill Murray film Meatballs (1979)