Murder of the Publisher: Who Killed Claude Kendall?

Death on the Eighth Floor
a grim murder mystery
at the Madison Hotel

On Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1937, former publisher Claude H. Kendall (1890-1937) was found beaten to death in his room on the eighth floor of the Madison Hotel, at 21 East 27th Street, near Madison Avenue (this is the narrow, mansard-roofed structure on the left side of the photograph to the right).

Around 11:00 a.m. a maid discovered Kendall dead on the floor, a bed sheet wrapped loosely around his neck. Kendall had a black eye, lacerations on the lips, a swollen jaw, hemorrhages on the head and body and lacerations below the knees, the latter probably caused from kicking.

An inebriated Kendall had been put to bed in his room by two friends shortly after midnight.

However, Kendall later emerged from his room and went down to the hotel restaurant, where he joined "a slightly built youthful white man." This other man was "a familiar figure in the Madison Square district where Kendall lived."

Kendall returned with this man to his, Kendall's, room around 3:30 a.m., according to the hotel elevator operator.  About a half-hour later, a tenant on the floor above, a writer, heard noises in Kendall's room like thumping on a heating pipe.  These thumps continued at intervals for half an hour.

When he was found dead later that day, Kendall, apparently a lifelong bachelor whom other tenants described as "a quiet man," had no money in his room.

This is all I have discovered about this real-life murder so far.  Two days after the murder, the New York police predicted a quick arrest, but I have not yet found a news report of one.

Claude Kendall was born in 1890 in Watertown, New York, located in the northwestern part of the state near Lake Ontario.  Kendall's brother Clarence was business manager of the Watertown Daily Times, still in circulation today.  Claude Kendall had left Watertown for New York City around 1910, joining an investment firm.  He also studied for two years at New York University before serving in the navy during the Great War. 

In 1929 he started a publishing firm, Claude Kendall, Inc. Between 1934 and 1936, he went into publishing partnership with William Willoughby Sharp (1900-1955), a former stockbroker, and the firm's name was changed to Claude Kendall and Willoughby Sharp, Inc.  In 1936, the wealthy Sharp seems to have left the firm, and it went bankrupt.  After he was murdered the next year, Kendall was reported to have been employed in the last year of his life a "salesman in a publishing house."

Claude Kendall had a sad fate, but at least he enjoyed some notable years as an independent publisher.  Probably his firm is best known for publishing two popular crime novels of a sort by Tiffany Ellsworth Thayer (1902-1959), Thirteen Men and, naturally enough, Thirteen Women (the latter book was made into a film thriller starring Myrna Loy).  He also published a small number of detective novels, including two written by his publishing partner Willoughby Sharp.  I will be talking about some of these books over the next few weeks.

The Controversies of Claude Kendall, Publisher

No further word on the seemingly unsolved murder of Claude Kendall, but I thought I would write some on Kendall's career as a publisher, pending a Friday piece on the two Willoughby Sharp detective novels Kendall published, in 1933 and 1934.

Claude Kendall's first published book
a scathing critique of American culture

From the beginning Claude Kendall seems to have been something of a controversialist, looking for books to publish that might create a stir.  Kendall's first published book was Kanhayalal Gauba's Uncle Sham: The Strange Tale of a Civilization Run Amok (1929), a scathingly critical study of the United States, written in response to Katherine Mayo's scathingly critical study of India, Mother India (1927).  When review copies of Uncle Sham were sent to the United States from India, where it was originally published, the United States Customs Service seized the copies, having deemed the book obscene (Gauba spends much time disparaging American sexual mores).

After Kendall successfully published an American edition of Uncle Sham (the obscenity determination didn't stick), it was announced the next year that Aaron Sussman, an ad man and book designer, had gone into partnership with Kendall (though the title of the firm remained Claude Kendall, Inc).

The first book the two men published was Freak Show, a collection of short stories by Russian writer Andre Sobol.  The next book was Tiffany Thayer's Thirteen Men, a titillating tale about the trial of a mass murderer. It was a tremendous commercial success, seeing thirteen printings between May 1930 and June 1931.

Altogether Claude Kendall published four Tiffany Thayer novels, Thirteen Men, Call Her Savage, Thirteen Women and An American Girl.  The first three of these novels had sold over 387,000 copies by February 1933, but, unfortunately for Kendall, Thayer left him for greener publishing pastures.

Incidentally, I am going to be reviewing Thirteen Men next week, and John Norris of the Prettysinister blog will be reviewing Thirteen Women.

Kendall had other strings to his bow besides Mr. Thayer's works, however.  In 1931 he published the first American edition of Octave Mirbeau's classic Decadent Movement "exposition of sadism and masochism," Torture Garden ("Tiffany Thayer's Call Her Savage is good enough, if you like them savage," quipped the Virginia Quarterly Review, "and Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden is for those who want to be tortured"). 

The same year, Kendall unsuccessfully attempted to secure the American and Canadian rights to James Joyce's Ulysses, anticipating the overturning of its proscription on obscenity grounds (this occurred in 1934). 

Other controversial novels published by Kendall in the early 1930s include G. Sheila Denisthorpe's Loveliest of Friends, a lesbian novel, and Frank Walford's Twisted Clay (Take a good look at the illustrations of Twisted Clay.  Needless to say the jacket design is eye-catching, but also note the fine decorative motifs on the book itself).

Twisted Clay, which Kendall pointedly announced in the New York press had been banned in Canada, sounds fascinatingly lurid.  The protagonist, Jean Deslines, has been described as a psychopath "whose downward spiral goes from premarital sex and lesbian tendencies to patricide, prostitution, serial murder, drug running, and eventual suicide."  It was banned not only in Canada, but in Australia, Walford's native country, for three decades!

Then there's Cecil De Lenoir's The Hundredth Man: Confessions of a Drug Addict, which was called "an excellent piece of journalistic writing," in the New York Times Book Review.

With classic publisher ballyhoo, Kendall called Lenoir a modern day Thomas De Quincey (see Confessions of an English Opium-Eater).

Kendall did find time to publish some less sensationalistic mystery novels (some of them even Simon Pure detective tales), about which I will be posting in more detail tomorrow!

Willoughby Sharp, Claude Kendall and Murder

Madison Hotel
where Claude Kendall was murdered

Six years ago Coachwhip reprinted two vintage mysteries by stockbroker turned mystery writer Willoughby Sharp, Murder in Bermuda (1933), and Murder of the Honest Broker (1944), for which I wrote introductions.  Sharp's two detective novels were published in the United States by onetime Golden Boy publisher Claude Kendall, who for a few years in the Thirties made a great hit with such salacious and controversial books as Tiffany Thayer's Thirteen Men (1930) and its inevitable follow-up, Thirteen Women (1931), the latter of which John Norris reviewed. Such books made Kendall rich for a time, but soon his success faded and his eponymous publishing company failed in 1936.  Researching further into Claude Kendall's life, I found that he was murdered under mysterious circumstances the next year.

Recently Kendall's unsolved murder received two short paragraphs in an excellent book, Indecent Advances: a Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice before Stonewall, by James NYU scholar James Polchin.  (I hope to post a review here soon.)  Given this renewed attention to Claude Kendall, I thought the occasion called for a new article about him and Sharp (who briefly became his publishing partner as well), which I wrote a few months ago and contributed to CrimeReads.  They have just published it under the title "The Playboy and the Publisher: A Murder Story."  Go here to read.  I hope you find it interesting.

Incidentally, you may recall that Claude Kendall's name popped up in the Henry von Rhau saga which I have recently been chronicling here.  I will have the last part of that story posted this week.

A Literary Munchausen: The Amazing (and Sometimes Appalling) Adventures of Henry von Rhau, Part One

American author Henry von Rhau (1896-1960) wrote whimsical satires and tales of romantic adventure, including a couple of books that can be categorized as crime or thriller fiction, yet nothing in his fiction, arguably, was stranger than the events in his life and the lives of his wives.  Divorce, extra-marital affairs, bigamy, illegitimacy, impersonation, pornography, miscegenation, homosexuality, spousal abuse, a perfectly sane spouse shut up against her will in a madhouse--it would have taken a triple-decker Victorian sensation novel to contain it all!  And now allow me my tale to unfold....

Henry von Rhau was born Henry Louis Gustav Adolph Rau at Staten Island, New York on January 19, 1896 to Gustav Adolph and Clara Rau, immigrants originally from Germany and England respectively.  Born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurttemberg in 1850, Gustav Rau after migrating to the United States as a young man became a wealthy wood pulp importer and manufacturer with offices at 41 Park Row, Manhattan (formerly the location of the New York Times).  He passed away in New York in 1911, leaving behind his wife Clara and two sons and a daughter.  In descending order of age these three children were Herbert, Hilda and Henry.

Henry von Rhau
(probably taken in the late 1940s,
when he was around fifty)

At this point, when writing about the life of Henry Rau (as he was then), we lose the steady ground of verifiable fact and must move forward on the words of Henry himself, admittedly a shaky foundation for truth.

Keeping this in mind, however, I will note that according to Henry's 1960 obituary, young Henry "received his early education in private schools in the U. S. and Europe," afterward briefly attending the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.  Upon leaving West Point, he served with the U. S. Cavalry on the Mexican border during American operations against the paramilitary forces of revolutionary leader Francisco "Pancho" Villa.

Afterward Henry attended classes for a year at Columbia University, before enlisting as a second lieutenant in the U. S. Infantry.  He did not serve overseas, however, rather spending the period between June 25, 1917 to August 20, 1919 at the Training Camp at Plattsburg, New York.  By the end of his term of service, he had been promoted to the rank of Captain, and, according to his obituary, he had become an "aide to the Chief of Intelligence, having pioneered in prisoner interrogation" (a plausible claim given his German heritage).

After the war, his obituary states, Henry Rau was "engaged in the oil business in Venezuela and traveled widely."  However, by 1920, anyway, he was back in New York, where he resided in the upper West Side of Manhattan with his sister Hilda, a former student at Barnard College and a future "pioneer tanning stylist" and their housekeeper.  While Hilda became a Jazz Age career woman in the shoe business, Henry, with his good looks, aristocratic continental bearing, proficiency at equestrianism (he was a noted competitor at horse shows) and marked disdain for everyday employment, became a habitue of New York's cafe society.

Henry von Rhau's sister, Hilda Rau
(taken around 1930, when she was
in her early thirties)
The Detroit Free Press stated of Hilda:
"Where once she was hailed as a radical,
devoid of commercial knowledge, she is now
acclaimed as a leader in the shoe world"

In 1922 Henry gave a supper party at Broadway's fashionable Club du Montmartre, which made the pages of the New York Times when a dust-up took place there involving a trio of his society friends--future mystery writer Willoughby Sharp, John Magee "Jack" Boissevain and Louis Bertschmann.  Strolling over at three a. m. to the Montmartre from a dance at the Hotel Vanderbilt (Jack's father was president of the company that owned the hotel), Sharp and his two chums were curtly informed by the doorman that Rau's party had ended, although in fact it was still ongoing.  Thereupon the doorman attempted to shut the door in the lads' faces. 

When the trio of fun seekers rowdily barreled their way into the building anyway (resourceful Jack had gained them entry by inserting his walking stick between the door and its frame), the doorman and the two elevator operators promptly assaulted them, resulting in the police being called to the scene.

The sympathies of the newsman who reported the affray in the New York Times lay decidedly with the three gay society blades, two of whom were present again four years later, in February 1927, when, at St. James' Episcopal Church in Manhattan, their old pal Henry Rau, who was now thirty years old and more formidably known as Henry von Rhau, wed Aline Blanche Stumer, the attractive twenty-three year old daughter of the late Louis Michael Stumer, one of Chicago's leading businessmen. 

A highly successful retail merchant, Louis Stumer had co-founded the trio of popular fiction magazines known as The Red Book, The Blue Book and The Green Book. Thus Henry's father, Gustav Rau, it will be recalled, had imported wood pulp, while Aline's father had co-founded pulp fiction magazines.  Appropriately Henry would soon be writing, if not pulp fiction, then something resembling it in spirit.  Indeed, it might be argued that the life of Henry von Rhau, as we must now call him, began to resemble fiction, the "von" in his name evidently being spurious, as was Henry's claim that he was the heir to a German baronetcy, which he had quixotically, if patriotically, eschewed, all out of his love for America.

Eighteen-year-old Aline Stumer's 1922
passport photo,taken after the last one was stolen,
along with her jewels at the Gare de Lyon

A passport application submitted at the American embassy in Paris by Aline Blanche Stumer five years earlier, in 1922, when she was eighteen, includes a striking photograph of her, in which she appears as a frizzy-haired brunette with big intense eyes, a Cupid's bow mouth and a rather woebegone expression.  One almost hears the words "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" to issuing from the pretty lips of this particular Blanche. 

In an affidavit dated September 1, the young woman, who was then staying in Paris with her mother and sister at the Hotel Ritz, explained that she needed a new passport because a thief had absconded with her previous one. 

Aline Stumer sounds for all the world like she just stepped out of out of Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928):

On August 29, 1922, I was getting out of the Gare de Lyon, at Paris, France.  I had my passport in my jewel case which I was carrying myself, but which I laid for a short moment on top of my hand luggage, and which was stolen during that very short time when I was not actually holding it.  I immediately notified the French police but all their efforts failed to trace either my missing jewels or my passport.

Three years later in Manhattan, Aline's wealthy forty-two-year-old widowed mother, Blanche Regina (Griesheimer) Stumer, in 1925, married twenty-seven-year-old Phillip Harris Giddens, a promising etcher from the state of Georgia. Two years after that blessed event, Aline left her mother's and stepfather's household to link her future with that of Henry von Rhau. 

Willoughby Sharp (1900-1955)
stockbroker and mystery writer

At the Stumer-von Rhau weddings both Willoughby Sharp and Jack Boissevain--old pals, as we know, of Henry's--served as ushers, as did Maurice McKim Minton, son of the late managing editor of the New York Herald; Richard Boyd Ayer, a young stockbroker and relation of patent medicine tycoon James Cook Ayer; and noted gay playwright John Colton, at the time the recent author of the popular Far East dramas Rain (based on a Somerset Maugham short story) and The Shanghai Gesture. 

Colton probably made the acquaintance of von Rhau while both men served with the U. S. cavalry during the American incursion into Mexico in pursuit of revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. 

Henry's best man was Thornton Wallace "Wally" Orr, a son of an official in the New York office of the American Gypsum Company who later married one of the richest heiresses in Canada, while Henry's sister Hilda served as Aline's maid of honor, Aline having no other attendants besides a matron of honor, her recently wed sister Lois Margaret (Stumer) Sidenberg, wife of stockbroker and former Yale football player George Monroe Sidenberg.  Aline's section of the wedding party seems to have been oddly truncated.

A few months before his marriage to Aline, Henry briefly took up acting on stage. perhaps for this auspicious event first adopting his new, weightier surname, von Rhau.  His first acting gig was in the minor role of Mr. Dudley Gregory in his friend John Colton's hit play The Shanghai Gesture, which ran for 206 performances between February and September 1926.  In the script von Rhau's character is described as an American, "youngish and alert." 

Jack Boissevain (1901-?)
much married man-about-town

The next year Henry got to play a German, Sergeant Franz, in Denison Clift's A Woman Disputed, a melodrama, based on a celebrated Guy de Maupassant short story, about a French prostitute who gives her all for the cause during the First World War.  Starring Ann Harding in the title role and described as a surefire melodrama in the New York Times, the play surprisingly ran for only twenty-seven performances in September and October 1927.  Fortunately, von Rhau did not need to rely on acting for his livelihood.

After he and Aline spent a month-long honeymoon in Bermuda, a favorite playground getaway of Eastern seaboard urban elites, the newlywed couple resided at a recently constructed luxury apartment building located at 717 Madison Avenue, just off Central Park. 

A talented athlete, Aline played in Women's golf tournaments while Henry, supported by his rich wife, continued riding in society equestrian competitions.  A son, Anthony, was born to the couple on July 17, 1928. 

That same year marked a major new life course for Henry when he began writing his first work of fiction: a quirky satire of Radclyffe Hall's controversial landmark lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (which had been banned in England), entitled The Hell of Loneliness.  Two illustrations by Henry's gay best bro John Colton were included. 

A short work of only forty pages of text (and about 7000 words), Hell was published in 1929 by the obscure Inwood Press, though it was soon picked up by the newly-launched, self-named firm of publisher Claude Kendall, which specialized in risque or spicy fiction.  In "The Week of a New Yorker" column in the Brooklyn Daily News, Hell was described as a "short, zippy" tome that was "funny enough to rate a whole flock of rereadings."  Claude Kendall, who like Colton was gay, deemed Hell "impudent and delightfully scampish."

Henry von Rhau takes a leap
(see second photo)

Although as stated The Well of Loneliness is a landmark of lesbian literature, the novel is also remarkable for what lesbian author Mary Renault termed its "earnest humorlessness," making it a natural send-up for satire.  Well is about the travails of a female "invert" (i.e., masculine woman) named Stephen, but in Henry von Rhau's hands this character becomes a randy male named Otto Kugelmann, who from an early age evinces a lustful urge to bite women on their fleshy calves.  I don't know that this would be funny in any case, but in light of later accusations made against Henry it strikes me as unsettling.

Anyway, later in life Otto loses his wife Connie to her Amazonian Russian friend Ivanova-Feodronova, who shares the same tailor with Otto.  Mannish lesbians soon begin displacing men generally in society.  At a bar Otto commiserates with some of his similarly displaced friends:

married men mostly, but where were their wives now?  God pity the men who must live alone!  There was Coogan, the genius, the author, the playwright, for years sought after by great actress stars.  There was Kendall, for long called the happy boy lover dissembling his years by the ardor he felt; and Boissevain, the thrice married young boulevardier.  They were men who had known life, and lived it and loved it.  Now they were outcasts, and their horrible secret showed in their eyes.

Coogan of course is John Colton, while Kendall the "happy boy lover" is Claude Kendall.  Thrice married Boissevain is Jack Boissevain, who at the time of the publication of Hell was on the verge of divorcing Estelle Carroll (who claimed in the society pages that she was descended from the Carrolls of Carrollton but in fact was descended, ignominiously, from the Carrolls of Brooklyn Heights) and wedding one Princess Suzanne Soroukhanoff, the divorced second wife of the handsome, relentlessly self-promoting, pseudo archaeologist "tomb raider" "Count" Byron Kuhn de Porok. 

This latest marriage went bust after a few years, and in 1933 Jack would make the news for shooting himself in the chest at a Parisian cafe during a conference with his lawyer.  Was it about alimony payments?  Jack would survive to marry yet again, however.  And again.

ready for his closeup
Count Byron Kuhn de Porok (1896-1954)
in Byronic profile

Claude Kendall would be murdered in 1937 by a young slim man he picked up and brought back to his apartment on Thanksgiving morning.  (I'll have more on this in an upcoming CrimeReads article.)  Henry's characterization of Kendall as a "happy boy lover" is cheekily ambiguous--was Kendall a "happy-boy lover" or a "happy boy-lover"?  To those of us in the know, the answer is clear.  By "boy lover," by the way, Henry meant, I suspect, not literal "boys" but younger men.  Kendall at this time was nearing forty years old and older than most of his cronies by a decade.

Later in the tale, Otto and his pals find more and more bars closed to their kind.  The speakeasies have become speakeasiettes and Tony's is now Antoinette's, so they are forced to settle on a bar frequented by "ginny collegians" who "behaved very queerly."  This inspires Coogan to declare defiantly, "We will carry on and on....And when we grow old there will be these young boys...."  To which Otto counters sharply, "Never mind these young boys....They play by themselves."

John Colton's name was included
prominently on the cover of Hell, even
though he provided only two illustrations,
including the one of the cover, presumably
a caricature of Radclyffe Hall herself

What are we to make of this?  Henry's text in Hell has been condemned by modern-day scholars as "homophobic and misogynistic," but I don't know.  What are we to make of the fact that Henry's crowd included two prominent homosexuals--Colton and Kendall--whom the text makes clear were known to be such to Henry and his other, presumably heterosexual friends, like Willoughby Sharp and Jack Boissevain?  That their boys' club may have been sexist, even misogynistic, I'll grant, but it seems to have been far from homophobic, at least as far as male homosexuals were concerned.  Indeed, it might even be designated "bi-curious."

Born around 1900, Otto Kugelmann, the compulsive biter of women's calves, may well have been somewhat autobiographical too, just as Stephen in The Well of Loneliness is believed to have been biographical of Radclyffe Hall. 

Note Otto's heavy German name, for example.  Also, the "country seat" of the Kugelmanns is "the most hideous house in existence," a "smelly, drab, damp horror" located in urban New Jersey across the Hudson River from New York City.  ("Not very far from Weehawken, between it in fact, and Hoboken," as Henry put it, in a droll send-up of Hall's formal, precise writing style.)  One is reminded of Henry's father, Gustav Adolph Rau, and his Staten Island paper mill.

One day...[Otto] came upon the Kugelmann maid of all work--Fanny Rumpelbauch.  She was bending over as Otto entered the room.  He saw a generous ankle and a fat calf encased in an ample red yarn stocking.  It was his first consciousness of SEX; it overwhelmed him.  He was gloriously unrestrained and, lunging at Rumpel, bit her in the calf.  She slapped at him vigorously but Otto's teeth held firm....It took the combined efforts of the Kugelmann family to pry him loose.  Such was Otto's LUST.  The Baron cauterized Rumpelbach's leg with a hot coal and thereafter took the precaution of locking Otto up in the coal bin while Rumpelbach tidied up the nursery. (Text by Henry von Rhau, illustration by John Colton)

Claude Kendall declined to publish Henry's next impudent book, Tale of the Nineties, although this "lighthearted story of a bawdy house and three girls who worked there--Trixie, Jasmyne and Ophelia," should have appealed to Kendall's taste for naughtiness.  Likely Henry's Tale was a bit too bawdy.  My copy of the book has a randy inscription, ambiguously made to P. K. from J. C. (John Colton?), which gives an idea of what people--men, one assumes--were expected to get out of the book:

the three lovely Hoars
who live at the Old Hoar House
Trixie, Jasmyne and Ophelia

To P. K.
To whom "tale" is spelled "tail"
And assail is a sale of ass!!!!
May this bawdy confection
Induce an erection
That'd make a she-whale
Become pale!
J. C.

The Tale is basically an excuse for a series of bawdy puns, as the chapter titles and illustration captions indicate:

I. The Old Hoar House
II. Leopold's Wang (Wang is Leopold's Chinese servant)
III. Jasmyne's Box

"Oh, I like to come," his worship wheezed, "as often as I can."
 "Trixie," she said, her voice was cold, "let go of the bishop's nuts!"
"Sir, don't make free with my sister's box," Ophelia added warmly.

You get the idea!  1050 numbered copies of the book were privately printed in Normandy Vellum paper imported from France by the Heron Press in association with John Edward Mullins, a grandson of the founder of New York's John Mullin & Son Furniture Company who had removed himself to Antibes, on France's Cote d'Azur, to live the good life.  Apparently Mullins, to all appearances a Riviera idler, helped underwrite the cost of the book, the publisher being a one-man operation who, not having an office, conducted business in his car--a forerunner, indeed, of today's internet micro presses!

Included were woodcut illustrations by noted commercial artist Frank Wagner Peers.  The short-loved Heron Press specialized in high quality editions of literary fiction, including such outre items as Erskine Caldwell's earthy The Bastard and Hanns Heinz Ewers' horrific short collection of contes cruels, Blood.

Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943)
author of The Well of Loneliness

During this time Aline continued to play a lot of golf (in 1932 she made it to the finals of the Bermuda women's gold championship), while her husband continued both riding and writing.  Von Rhau's third book, To the Victor (1931), was his first actual novel and his first work published originally by mass market publishers, Longmans in the United States and George C. Harrap in the United Kingdom.  Set in the second decade of the twentieth century, To the Victor was described in The Leatherneck, the United States Marine Corps magazine, as a "well-plotted, romantic adventure that keeps you guessing as to how the young Prussian officer is going to extricate himself from his web of difficulties," while the Brooklyn Times Union found it "a romance with everything in it to make it gripping and absorbing."

With his first full scale novel, essentially a Ruritarian/Graustarkian thriller of the type associated with popular novels by Anthony Hope and George Barr McCutcheon, Henry, now going by the appellation of Major Henry von Rhau (not sure where the Major came from), played up the supposed authenticity of his aristocratic Continental European background, presumably in order to enhance his credibility as an author of such a tale. 

Reviewers swallowed whole this glittering German bait.  "Major von Rhau knows his Germany and his German army man," wrote an ingenuous Brooklyn Times Union reviewer.  "A native of the United States and a soldier in the war in the American army, he studied in a German university when an uncle of his was chief of von Hindenberg's staff years ago." 

Ironically, there was a German hippologist named Gustav Rau who became known as "Hitler's horse breeder" during the Thirties and Forties.  However, Henry, quite understandably, did not claim this Rau as a relation.

Another newspaper reviewer commented of Henry and his new novel:

Of late we have been bearish about romantic fiction until along came Henry von Rhau...who literally steps out of a German background.  Accustomed to a continental youth with the foaming stein, the single eyeglass, the calling card with crossed sabers, he dropped all that to enlist in the U. S. Army.  From thence, he fetched up in the U. S. diplomatic service.  And now, despite the fact that, like many a musical comedy hero, should he set foot on his native heath he might lay claim to a baronetcy, he prefers the seclusion of a Connecticut farm, where  revolting against city smells, taxi horns, and the machine age, he loses himself in creating just such high romances as "To the Victor."

Truly, this was laying the liverwurst on thick!  Notwithstanding such fulsome puffery, which painted the author as a charmingly anachronistic Prussian gentleman lost in the vulgar modern era, Henry in truth was soon to lose himself in modern marital friction with his wife Aline, culminating in a hugely embarrassing divorce suit that she filed against him in April 1933, after just six years of marriage. 

Henry, who had seemed to be making some headway in his writing career with To the Victor, would over the rest of his life publish in hardcover, so far as I know, just one more novel, and that one not for another sixteen years (although there was a serialized tale, The Green Hussar, which was very much in the vein of To the Victor.  Before that there was the ordeal of a melodramatic divorce scandal to be undergone.  In this bitter legal contest between Henry and Aline, who would emerge as the victor?  See how the brouhaha sorted itself out in Part Two.

Dying High: Death Rides the Air Line (1934), by William Sutherland

William Sutherland's Death Rides the Air Line, published by Claude Kendall in 1934, is something of an experimental Golden Age mystery. 

Probably what will most immediately strike a lot people is its resemblance to a 1935 Agatha Christie detective novel, Death in the Clouds/Death in the Air.  In both novels, there is a murder of a passenger on an airplane.  Did Christie read Sutherland's novel, which was published in England, or was this just a coincidence (or did she read Freeman Wills Crofts' The 12.30 from Croydon, also published in 1934)?

a very fragile copy of the Death Rides the Air Line dust jacket (Claude Kendall)
note the advertisement for the controversial Twisted Clay on the back panel

Aside from the initial setting, however, there is not much resemblance between the novels.  Christie's tale is a classic puzzle mystery from the 1930s, with a fiendishly clever plot and clueing.  Sutherland's book moves the emphasis elsewhere.

As Sutherland writes in his preface: "I have endeavored, moreover, by the use of a somewhat unusual structural design, to help the reader see the people concerned in it as they really were, rather than as the conventional, puppet-like characters of works of fiction."

After only fifty-three pages--in which Sutherland assembles the crew and passengers on a plane taking off from Boston, murders one of the passengers over New York (stabbing), and brings Detective-Inspector Grady in to investigate--Sutherland leaves the present in order give us flashbacks into the lives of the murder victim, ruthless newspaper publisher Walter Schlaf, and four passengers: Russell DeWitt, New York judge, Marguerite Rose, good time gal, Timothy Cowley, gangster, and August Jensen, pilot.

These flashbacks provide motives for the passengers, but are mostly designed to give the novel greater character interest.  The flashbacks for Schlaf, Rose and Cowley I thought were especially engrossing (Judge DeWitt's was more hackneyed).

the English edition
has a stylish jacket too

In his introduction Sutherland notes that the events depicted in the novel occur "during the final days of Prohibition" and he hopes that this fact will "add some special interest, as well as throw some more light on the conditions which that unfortunate law produced in America."  The Rose and Cowley sections take particular advantage of this setting.

Marguerite Rose is like a character out of the musical Chicago (which doesn't necessarily mean she "done it," mind you, though you can definitely imagine her breaking out into her own personal rendition of "He Had It Coming").  This is one hard-boiled dame!

At sixteen or seventeen, evidently, Rose sidles up to her teenage soda jerk boyfriend, Freddy, and tells him she needs fifty dollars:

"What do you want it for?"
"Well, I'm going to have a baby, and it'll take fifty dollars to get rid of it."
"What?  you don't mean--"
"Yeah.  You're the proud father.  That time at the cottage."

Marguerite eventually ends up as a burlesque performer in New York.  In one of her acts she appears as the Statue of Liberty:

The latter production was raided by the police, who seemed to think that the torch, the only thing she had on, gave too much light to the scene.  The legal proceedings lasted long enough to enable Joe Biggum to parade his whole chorus in the court-room.  Then he agreed to give Marguerite a smaller torch, and the case was dropped.  After that the theatre was full every night.

title page (Claude Kendall edition)

I think an entire novel devoted to Marguerite Rose, with or without her torch, might have been interesting.

After the flashbacks the last seventy pages are again devoted to the present, in which Inspector Grady providentially finds one material clue that lets him solve the case.

As a mystery, Death Rides the Air Line is hardly one of the classics, but there is more character interest than one often finds in books from this period, and the Prohibition setting is well done.  The flashbacks actually left me wanting more, however.

So I would say that Air Line something of a neither-fish-nor-fowl book, though it is not without appeal.

A Literary Munchausen: The Amazing (and Sometimes Appalling) Adventures of Henry von Rhau, Part 2

For part one of Henry's saga see here.

The headline was horrific.  "Wife, Beaten for 6 Years, Can't Take It Anymore," blared the title to the story about Aline (Stumer) von Rhau's divorce suit against her husband, author Henry von Rhau, in the New York Daily News on April 27, 1933. 

Before a Bridgeport, Connecticut courtroom packed with "society folk," the Daily News reported, "the wealthy and socially prominent Aline Stumer von Rhau" testified before Superior Court judge Arthur F. Ells that the "six years of her married life were marked by one long series of beatings, featured by an occasion when her husband devoted an hour and a half to punching and kicking her."  The "stunning brunette" and "attractive brunette society woman" pleaded for a divorce from her "tall, dashing husband, Major Henry von Rhau, United States Army, retired, now a novelist and actor," on the grounds of intolerable cruelty.

Once the story got into the nasty nuts and bolts of the case, things did not seem to get any better for Henry's cause.  Testifying in support of Aline were friends Mary Messmore, daughter of famed New York society art dealer Carman H. Messmore, and Katherine Fiske, daughter of the late Haley Fiske, president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.  Miss Messmore told of being on a visit to the couple's summer estate at Fairfield, Connecticut when she saw the Major stride into the house, elegantly clad in his riding habit, and kick Aline. 

it was testified that Henry had beaten Aline
over a game of backgammon
(pictured: Gracie Allen and George Burns)

Henry was just as unpleasant to Aline when in the City, according to the testimony of Miss Fiske, which was was briefly quoted in the Daily News.  "I was sitting with Mrs. von Rhau in her apartment at 955 Park Avenue one afternoon playing backgammon when Major von Rhau came in," she related.  "'Haven't you two got anything to do but play backgammon all the time?' he demanded."  Thereupon, she claimed, von Rhau punched Aline in the jaw and ordered her, Miss Fiske, out of the apartment.

Another newspaper account, in the Scranton Times Tribune, rather less formally quotes Miss Fiske's testimony on this point as follows: "He cried: 'You lousy so-and-so, haven't you two got anything to do but play backgammon all afternoon?  And he punched her on the jaw and said to get out of there."

Details of the worst episode in the von Rhau's married life together came directly from Aline herself.  She contended that Henry had conspired with one of his friends, Thomas McHugh, to frame her for infidelity, giving von Rhau an excuse for administering to her the worst beating that she ever received from his hands.  According to Aline, on the night in question she had been on her way to have dinner with her GBF Claude Kendall, publisher of the first book written by her husband (and the two novels of Kendall's and von Rhau's friend Willoughby Sharp), when she received a phone call from McHugh inviting them to have cocktails at his apartment before dinner.

fighting continued after cocktails
(pictured Clark Gable and Constance Bennett)

At McHugh's place it was not long before Claude Kendall, who by the time likely was suffering from increasing alcohol addiction, had passed out from imbibing too many cocktails, leaving Aline alone with McHugh, who, she said, suddenly got up and left the room.  No sooner had he left than von Rhau entered the room and locked the door, announcing fiercely to Aline, "Now, I am going to kill you."  Stripping to his waist, he proceeded, in Aline's words, "to beat me with his fists and [knock] me around the room for an hour and a half, ripping my clothes."  When McHugh finally returned to the room, leaving the door open behind him, Aline fled for her life, out of the building and into a taxi.  She spent the next month recovering in bed.

To top off this tale of wanton masculine viciousness, Aline added that during their marriage she had essentially "kept" her spouse, supplying Henry with four saddle horses, a valet and a car, paying all the household expenses and advancing him money so he could continue writing.  "He could never find a publisher," one newspaper noted, "so finally she organized her own firm and put one of his novels on the market, but she lost money on it."  (Was this Inwood Press, which originally published Henry's satire The Hell of Loneliness?  Did Aline get a friend, American expat John Mullins, to help finance von Rhau's Tale of the Nineties?)

Additionally (and rather humiliatingly), Aline had even born the cost of her three-week honeymoon trip to Bermuda with Henry, even to the extent of picking up the tab for the travel fare of the freeloading Thornton Wallace "Wally" Orr, "Manhattan clubman and crony of the Major's, who made the voyage with them."  According to Aline, her new husband actually had spent most of the honeymoon not in her company, but that of Wally Orr, who, it will be recalled, had been best man at their wedding.

Aline found three a crowd on her honeymoon in Bermuda,
when Henry's best man tagged along

Of course the defense did not allow Aline's parade of horribles to go unchallenged.  Henry's attorney demanded of Aline to know why she had married von Rhau when she knew that he was a man of "nervous and irritable" temper, to which Aline invoked the power of a woman's true love, replying, "I thought if I married him and gave him a good home, which he had never had, it would cure him." 

Additionally, several former army associated and friends of von Rhau's took the stand in his defense, making the case very much of a "boys versus girls" affair.  (The newspapers did not quote the men, however, so I do not know whether such pals of Henry's as Willoughby Sharp, Jack Boissevain and famed playwright and Henry's GBF John Colton took the stand.)

For his part, Henry emphatically denied that he had ever beaten Aline.  One newspaper reported that the former bit part actor "presented a picture of abject humility on the stand."  He called himself "the world's worst husband," explaining that he was "temperamental because I'm a literary man, selfish and thoughtless."  Yet he insisted that although "my shortcomings as a husband were of the gravest kind,,,,I love her, and I never beat her."

Henry admitted to only one physical misdeed with Aline, which took place, he said, at a dinner party they had given, where Aline had twice abandoned their guests to go for a car ride with the same male guest.  "On the second occurrence I slapped her.  I'm sorry I did."  On another occasion Henry admitted to using force with Aline, but in that instance it was done "to keep her from jumping out a window."  Von Rhau insisted that he wished to reconcile with Aline, in part for the sake of their four-year-old son, Anthony, but also because he still loved her.  Aline remained "the loveliest girl I have met," he declared on the stand, bringing tear's to his wife's eyes.

Impressed with von Rhau's testimony that "his one idea in life was to become reconciled with his wife," Judge Ells "summoned the couple to his chambers, excluding even lawyers, and sought to bring them together."  This attempt was unsuccessful, however, with Aline emerging after thirty minutes with Henry in the judge's chambers still resolved upon obtaining a divorce.  Such was granted a week later, Judge Ells having determined that "intolerable cruelty was proved by a fair preponderance of the evidence."  Yet Judge Ells, in a pregnantly suggestive comment, also made a point of commending von Rhau's "chivalry during the trial."  Had "dirt" about Aline been left out of the courtroom?

Perhaps Judge Ells heart was gladdened when, just a few weeks after he granted the divorce, Aline and Henry remarried.  The next year Aline gave birth to the couple's second child, a daughter named Cynthia, on November 28.  A month later the von Rhau hosted a Christmas Eve "cocktail party for intimate friends."  Over the next two years, newspaper society pages were full of accounts of the whirl of activities engaged in  by the seemingly happily reunited Mr. and Mrs. van Rhau.  In February 1935, the couple departed on an eighteen day cruise to South America.  The next year the von Rhaus left New York for Los Angeles, perhaps with the goal of introducing Henry to Hollywood.  Their doings were frequently detailed in newspaper society pages.

Soubrette, by Alexander Mann

In LA the couple was frequently accompanied by Henry's playwright pal John Colton, in keeping with Henry's habit of having a stag male friend tag along with him and Aline. 

In June Henry and Aline attended a buffet supper dance in costume.  Henry was decked out as a Prussian military officer--seemingly his favorite performative role--while Aline, recalling  Henry's bawdy book Tale of the Nineties, came dressed as an 1890s burlesque soubrette.  (One imagines the couple enjoyed a lively fantasy life.)  John Colton was present as well, though sadly no information was provided about the costume he wore.

Aline and Henry made news as well when they appeared separately.  In August Aline attended a "Bavarian party" (questionable taste, perhaps, in 1936), where famed soprano Rosa Ponselle "sang Strauss waltzes divinely," and attended a performance of John Colton's new stage comedy, She Tripped up the Queen.  In September Henry along with John Colton attended a dinner party given by screenwriter and composer Sam Hoffenstein and his wife Edith in honor of Chester Alan Arthur III (aka Gavin Arthur), grandson of the American president of the same name and a future pioneering gay rights activist.  Other guests included author Anita Loos and her husband, director John Emerson; actor Fredric March and his wife, actress Florence Eldridge; and pianist Alex Steinert, who during the "wee small hours" played the entire score of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, along with his own arrangements of pieces by the Russian composers Rimsky-Korsakoff and Borodin.

dude ranching in the Thirties
(not Henry and Aline)

It was for relaxation from this hectic social whirl that Aline and Henry, with John Colton in tow, went to a California dude ranch, the Rancho Verde, in October, a chatty LA Times society column informed its readers:

While "Hank" was busily learning to become a cowpuncher by chasing...steers around and around, John relaxed on the front porch of his cottage with his feet in the sun and head in the shade and a flit gun in his hand.  Oh, for a camera! 

Aline got aboard a horse for the first time in ten years and isn't sitting down with any comfort yet.  And it all comes under the head of fun--which as a matter of fact it really is.

But the fun was over by December, when, five days after Christmas, Aline again filed for a divorce from Henry, accusing her husband for a second time of intolerable cruelty and asking for custody of their two children, eight-year-old Anthony and two-year-old Cynthia. 

This time no details of the divorce suit were published in the newspapers, but Aline's suit had been granted seven weeks later, in February 1937, when French Riviera habitue John Edward Mullins, who it will be recalled had underwritten (At Aline's behest?) Henry's book Tale of the Nineties, was divorced at Grasse by his wife, Silvia Marietta Jose, on grounds of desertion.  Immediately after the divorce, Mullins announced his engagement to Aline Stumer, formerly von Rhau.  Mullins planned to depart from Marseilles aboard the steamship Excalibur, his destination being Beverly Hills and Aline.  In the event, however, Mullins wed not Aline, but one Gladys Celene Carroll, on April 26 in Manhattan.  Two months later he died aboard the Italian ocean liner Rex, the diagnosed cause being "delirium tremens, with hepato-cardiac insufficiency" (meaning, I assume, that chronic long-term alcohol abuse on Mullins' part had led to fatal heart failure).

Riviera expats

Sadly, the perils of Aline would continue over the next dozen years, much to the enjoyment of the newspapers, which liked nothing better--with the exception of murders of course--than lurid tales of erratic heiresses.  In 1938, while residing in LA at 7959 Hollywood Boulevard, Aline was arrested with her twenty-two-year-old brother Louis on suspicion of drunk driving and embarrassingly booked at the county jail, where she gave her name as Mrs. Aline von Rhau--von Rhau, to be sure, having more aristocratic cachet than Stumer. 

Meanwhile multiple-handled Aline's mother Blanche Regina (Griesheimer) Stumer Giddens did her part to keep the Stumer clan in unfavorable headlines.  In 1938, having divorced her second husband, Blanche at age fifty-five married forty-six-year-old Count Eugenio Casagrande, an Italian Great War hero, celebrated aviator and naturalized American citizen who not long after Pearl Harbor was detained as a dangerous enemy alien by FBI agents at an internment camp at Ellis Island.

Casagrande, "a darling of the Park Avenue circles" who before his arrest had been general secretary of the Unione Italiana di America, a federation of three hundred Italian and Italian-American societies, was characterized  by the ever-informative New York Daily News as "an original Fascist." Blanche--or, as she was now known, Countess Casagrande--divorced the Count the next year.  The Stumer women seem to have relinquished their own Jewish heritage, incidentally.  Blanche, for example, altered her hefty surname Grieseheimer to Gresham, as did her daughters, and all three women seem to have had Christian weddings.  Doubtless those Park Avenue circles that were so admiring of Eugenio Casagrande would not have had it any other way.

Eugenio Casagrande

Although apparently politically anodyne, at least, Aline's matrimonial record in the Forties proved every bit as disastrous as her mother's, if not more so.  Successively she wed and divorced three different men in under a decade, beginning in 1940 with Ernest Irving Rodehau, a salesman and son of German immigrants, continuing with Walter C. French in 1943 and concluding, most enticingly ingloriously, with Turkish native Orhan Lambiro in 1949. 

From the last listed of the spouses, Aline sought a divorce after merely twelve days of marriage, bringing to mind the appellation "Aline of a Dozen Days."

Although with her third and fourth marriages and divorces (after the two with Henry), Aline seems to have avoided adverse notice from the press, the third sequence simply had too many outre elements, by postwar American standards, to let pass unmentioned in the newspapers.  At the time he wed forty-five-year-old Aline, Orhan Lambiro was but twenty-three, working as a lifeguard and "beach boy" at Miami Beach.  Initially newspapers reported that Lambiro was the son of Turkish diplomat, but the modest young lifeguard--described, predictably, as "dark" and "husky" by the newspapers--corrected the record.

Speaking to reporters Lambiro explained that he was not the son of the Turkish delegate to the United Nations, his father being merely an employee of the Turkish delegation.  Aline, he claimed, had been responsible for the propagation of that falsehood: "She didn't want her fourth husband--me--doing common work, so I suppose she didn't want my father to be a working man either."  Lambiro added that he had been an American Army staff sergeant during the Second World War, serving overseas in Europe.

Aline had her own complaints, however, as she had years ago concerning Henry.  Lambiro, she asserted, had pressured her to finance a Miami Beach bookie joint and additionally had, like Henry, beaten her.  (Lambiro did have gambling offenses in an arrest record.)  She demanded one hundred dollars in weekly alimony from Lambiro, who attested that as a lifeguard he made but fourteen dollars a week (about one hundred and fifty dollars today). 

Lambiro countered with his own tale of woe, insisting that Aline had humiliated him by frequenting bars with another man.  He also claimed she told him that she had married him "solely for spite."  He asked that the divorce petition be dismissed at Aline's cost.  Certainly Aline's case was not helped when her attorney called off the alimony hearing upon learning that Aline had an income of seven hundred dollars a week--today about $7500 a week, or $360,000 a year.  $360,000 may have seemed like penury to Aline, but it would not have seemed so to most people, and certainly not to Orhan Lambiro.

However it was all finally worked out, the unblissfully wedded couple successfully divorced the next year.  Aline would marry one or two more times before she passed away at the age of seventy in 1975.  But what of Henry van Rhau?  He married again too.  How did that marriage turn out?  More soon, in the last part of the saga of "Baron" Henry and his wives.

Murder Spree: Thirteen Men (1930), by Tiffany Thayer

"A Tale of Murder which is neither a Mystery nor a Detective Story"

As promised, here is the posting on Tiffany Thayer's 1930 bestseller, published by Claude Kendall, Inc., Thirteen Men (John Norris of the Pretty Sinister Books blog is posting on Thayer's Thirteen Women).  By the way, Thayer was a man, baby (yes, I'm doing Austin Powers).  His full name was Tiffany Ellsworth Thayer (1902-1959).

This is an unusual book, and I haven't completed it yet, to be honest, so the full review piece will be coming later!  I've nearly finished a 6000+word piece on Willoughby Sharp, which will serve as the introduction to the the forthcoming new editions of his two detective novels, Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934).

But back to Mr. Thayer's first novel!  Surprisingly, given Thayer's popularity in the 1930s (which provoked the ire of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker), not a great deal seems to be available about him on the net.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
termed Tiffany Thayer's
books "slime"

The frontispiece to Thirteen Men suggests one source of Thayer's popularity: there is some salacious (by 1930s standards, anyway) sexual detail. There are other sources too, however.

Some of his work has criminous elements that put it at least on the borderland of crime fiction.  Thirteen Men somewhat resembles the classic jury mystery subgenre: you know, the type of mystery that takes place during a murder trial and focuses on the deliberations of the jury.

Raymond Postgate's Verdict of Twelve (1940) is probably the best known of this type of book from the Golden Age today, though in fact that were two other novels, both titled The Jury, by Eden Phillpotts and Gerald Bullett, that preceded it (published in 1927 and 1935, respectively; both are recommended).

The thirteen men of Thayer's book are a confessed serial murderer (he has admitted to shooting 39 people in several different cities) and the twelve people serving on the jury at his trial.  A chapter is devoted to each man, plus there's an opening chapter detailing the horrible events in the killer's crime wave.  The murders, which include the slayings of some children, are really rather grisly.

The chapters devoted to the jurors are character studies, each ending with the particular man getting the summons to jury duty.  These so far are well done, but I'm wondering where it all leads.  Are there any surprises in the final chapter?  What was the killer's motive?  Is he really the killer?  Is he found guilty?  I'm looking forward to finding out!

A Stop at Willoughby: Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934), by Willoughby Sharp

William Willoughby Sharp (1900-1956) came from a prominent New York family.  His father, also named William Willoughby Sharp, moved to New York from Norfolk, Virginia, where the Sharps had lived for generations (the Sharps claim descent from a certain James Sharp, who was living in Jamestown in 1621 and served in the House of Burgesses in the 1630s).

William Willoughby Sharp I was the senior partner in a brokerage firm when he was struck by a taxicab while crossing a street and killed.  A year before his father's death in 1926, William Willoughby Sharp II, a marine in the Great War and a Harvard graduate, formed his own brokerage firm, the forbiddingly named Harde & Sharp.  However, only three years later Sharp retired from business and moved to Bermuda, where he lived until 1935, when he returned to New York.

Muriel Manners Sharp
see Sharpville

Sharp married Muriel Manners, a Ziegfeld chorus girl, and the couple settled in Sands Point, Long Island, the wealthy enclave that inspired the setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby.

In 1936, the Sharps had a son, predictably named William Willoughby Sharp.  The third Sharp became a conceptual art guru in the 1960s and 1970s.  When he died in 2008, he received a sizable obituary in the New York Times.

William Willoughby Sharp II is rarely mentioned today (even accounts of his son's eventful and quirky life show much more interest in Muriel Manners Sharp's chorus girl background), but he was an interesting individual in his own right.

What concerns us most here, of course, is Sharp's brief venture into publishing and mystery writing.  For two years he was in partnership with publisher Claude Kendall, the man, much discussed here lately, who published Sharp's two detective novels, Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934).

I will have full reviews of these two excellent detective novels up on the blog later today.

Coachwhip's Willoughby Sharp Reprints Are Looking Sharp!

Coachwhip now has available the two 1930s detective novels, Murder in Bermuda and Murder of the Honest Broker, by William Willoughby Sharp (1900-1956), one-time stockbroker and dilettante detective novelist.

I found these two books quite entertaining and I think Coachwhip has done a great job with these editions, to which I contributed a sizable introductory essay about the author and his publisher, Claude Kendall.

Murder in Bermuda is an early police procedural style detective novel, with a lot of local color and a good plot.
After the great stock market crash, Sharp, in an attempt at downsizing, gave up his seat on the New York Stock Exchange and moved with his wife and children to the island, where they lived for several years.

With both his detective novels, Sharp seems to have been a firm believer in the adage, "write what you know."

Murder of the Honest Broker, which came next, is about a double murder at the New York Stock Exchange (as Sharp well knew, there was a lot of resentment against brokers back then too!).  I particularly enjoyed the sarcastic police detective, who hates gentleman amateur sleuths.

Included with Murder in Bermuda is a pulp crime story Sharp published when he was a college student.

If you like classic mystery--and if you don't, why are you here--you should like both these novels.

Also check out this earlier blog piece on Willoughby Sharp, which includes a photo of him from the 1930s (the reprints include a prep school photo as well).

There should be one more mystery reprint project with Coachwhip--a woman author--out this year, so stay tuned. Coachwhip also has reprinted Todd Downing and Kirke Mchem, in editions with introductions by me, all part of an effort to further capture the world of Golden Age American mystery (it wasn't just hard-boiled!).

Ritzing It Up with Murder: The Detective Story Club (1928-30?)

Here comes the judge!
Carolyn Wells

The Detective Story Club was formed in New York in August 1928, for the purpose of selecting and distributing detective fiction to readers.  The Club, which met at 11 East 44th Street, had a selection committee (Board of Selection) composed of mystery author Carolyn Wells; true crime writer Edmund Lester Pearson; Francis Lewis Wellman, a former Assistant District Attorney of New York and author of The Art of Cross-Examination; Robert Hobart Davis, a journalist and longtime editor of Munsey's Magazine; and William J. Flynn, former director of the Bureau of Investigation and editor of Flynn's Weekly Detective Fiction (Detective Fiction Weekly).

The Detective Fiction Club ran along similar principles to the Book-of-the-Month Club, which had been started a couple years earlier, in in 1926.  Every month the Club's selection committee's chosen mystery was mailed to subscribers, at retail price.  The Club also issued a monthly publication called "Secret Orders," wherein were found the individual vote tallies of the committee members and committee critiques; a list of recommended books; and an original general interest article written by a prominent lawyer, psychologist, criminologist, etc.

Robert Innes Center, a member of old New York society descended from the Livingstons who lived in a Manhattan row house, was elected President of the Club.  On November 1, 1928 he gave a dinner in the small ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for the Club's Board of Selection (numbering only four members, since the death in October of Flynn).

Among the additional guests were various luminaries from the New York publishing world. Each guest received a copy of The Cobra Candlestick(1928), by Elsa Barker, which was the first Club Selection. Barker, who was also a prominent spiritualist, was present in spirit only, one might say. To the gathering she "sent a cablegram of greeting from her Winter home on the Riviera."

the Ritz-Carlton

Barker's book had not bested its competition without a fight, however. Three Club Board members voted for The Cobra Candlestick, but one voted for Herman Landon's Murder Mansion and another voted for Lynn Brock's The Slip-Carriage Mystery.

In December author and critic Fredric F. Van de Water was chosen to replaced the fallen Flynn.  Of detective stories Van de Water phlegmatically stated, "I'd rather read 'em than write 'em and rather fish than do either."

When the new Board voted for the Club's January 1929 selection, the winner was proclaimed Anthony Gilbert's The Mystery of the Open Window, though it was a very close race. Edmund Pearson and Robert Davis voted for Window, but Carolyn Wells and Van de Water voted for Anne Austin's The Avenging Parrot and Francis Wellman opted for Lee Thayer's They Tell No Tales (all the vote-getters were women authors, incidentally).  Francis A. Skelton, the detective fiction editor for The Bookman, was prevailed upon to cast the tie-breaking vote, which went to Window.

at the sign of the
Crime Club Gunman

Of course Doubleday, Doran's own Crime Club, started in April 1928, had a much greater long-term impact than the Detective Story Club. However, apparently Robert Innes Center, along with his friend Nancy Evans, a Doubleday, Doran employee, had played roles in the creation of the publisher's Crime Club imprint (see illustration at left, showing the famous Crime Club gunman logo).

There is a tragic footnote to this story, concerning Nancy Evans.  She married NBC executive Louis Titterton in 1929, leaving Doubleday, Doran. In 1936 she was brutally murdered, in one of New York's most notorious Thirties homicides.*

(*on another see my post about the murder of publisher Claude Kendall)

Articles on the murder of Nancy Evans Titterton noted that the slain woman had had a great fondness for detective fiction. It was stated that Nancy Evans Titterton "conceived the idea that murder mystery fans would richly reward a mystery-book-of-the-month-club. She developed the "Crime Club, Inc.," sold it to Robert Innes Center, who, in turn, sold it to Doubleday, Doran" (New York Post, 11 April 1936, 1).

Note: Above are linked pieces on Elsa Barker (by TomCat), Anne Austin (John Norris) and Anthony Gilbert (by me).  

On the Doubleday Crime Club, see Ellen Nehr's fascinating encyclopedia, Doubleday Crime Club Compendium, 1928-1991 (1992), discussed here by John Norris. Based on a 1970 speech by Ogden Nash, who worked at Doubleday for seven years (including briefly as a Crime Club editor), Nehr's introduction gives "full credit" for the inception of the Crime Club idea to Doubleday advertising manager Daniel Longwell. See also the Crime Club blog.