Thedora DuBois (1890-1986) and Her Sleuthing Couple Anne and Jeffrey McNeill: Guest Post by Lisa Kucharski

Readers of the blog may recall that I disliked Death Is Late to Lunch (1941), the first Theodora DuBois mystery I read.  Particularly grating to me was Anne McNeill, the feminine half of DuBois's sleuthing couple team.  She just seemed too snooty by half. However, I more recently read DuBois's Death Comes to Tea, praised as a "small masterpiece" by Anthony Boucher, and liked it rather better, indeed quite enough to encourage me to peruse other DuBois mysteries.

Yet there's someone out there who has read about all of the McNeill mysteries already and that is my guest blogger, Lisa Kucharski, a friend of mine from Goodreads and the Facebook Golden Age Detection group. (The latter is open to invites for friends of the members, so if you are interested in joining and not already a friend of mine on Facebook, just friend request me on Facebook and I will be happy to give you an invite.)

And now Lisa's guest post about the DuBois's Anne and Jeffrey McNeill mysteries.  I hope you enjoy another take on this series, from someone who is very familiar with it. (We don't totally agree about Anne!)

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

American mystery writer Theodora DuBois (1890-1986) started her sleuth series at the age of 46, in 1936.  She had begun writing commercially after contracting tuberculosis and spending several months in a sanatorium. Little by little she expanded her writing endeavors from stories for magazines to novels and plays.

Ride the pink horse....

With the McNeill series DuBois embeds personal experiences--sailing and her work on plays, estrangement from her stepfather--into an eclectic series of suspenseful mysteries.  She had an ability to conjure characters (was she inspired by people she knew?) who are truly unpleasant or broken.

Her last Anne and Jeffrey McNeill novel, the suggestively titled Seeing Red (1954), was published during the McCarthy Era and met with some backlash because it negatively portrayed the Red Scare, with her heroes, the McNeills, getting called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

FIRST ENCOUNTER

I came across Theodora DuBois's Death Wears a White Coat at a flea market.  It caught my eye because it was an old mystery novel, copyright 1938.  I got it got a couple of dollars.  It languished in a pile of other try 'em out books for a while before I read it.

I was expecting a standard cozy but what I got was a mystery field with creepiness and suspense galore.  I loaned it to two other people and they had the same experience: they could still feel the book a month after reading it.  The hunt was on!  I needed to find more books by this author, Theodora Dubois.

Death Wears a White Coat is the second mystery in the McNeill series by DuBois.  The first novel, Armed with a New Terror (1926), is the only one I haven't read.  It is extremely difficult to find.

According to Colleen Barnett its story line is as follows:

Anne and a child were part of an extended household dependent upon the largess of a dominating grandfather,  Jeffrey McNeill, a neighbor and distant relative intervened when Anne was accused of the murder of a cousin from whom she inherited.  Anne loved Jeffrey, but he did not share his feelings for her until he had unmasked the surprise killer.

THE HAPPY COUPLE

In Death Wears a White Coat, Anne and Jeffrey McNeill are married. Jeffrey works as a medical researcher at an elite Connecticut university. [The Passing Tramp: In real life DuBois's husband, Delafield Dubois, was employed as a medical researcher at Yale.]

Over the series the McNeills reside in various houses--I won't spoil all the why's--on the east coast.  They also sail quite a bit.  (The nautical information in the novels is accurate.)  They have children whom they adore.  In his capacity as a scientist Jeffrey gets involved in government jobs. Anne is a lovely wife with blonde hair and charm to spare.

Of course this happy couple proves a magnet for murder.  The stories are mostly told through Anne's viewpoint, and when Jeffrey is involved he tends to strike me as a bit cold (though he does seem devoted to Anne), in contrast with other husband-and-wife sleuthing teams who are more affectionate, such as the Lockridge's Mr. and Mrs. North.

DuBois's series has some intriguing plotting set-ups, the earlier ones being a bit more interesting than the later books.  DuBois' strength is that she is really good at creeping out the reader, building tension with palpably real characters.

Her mysteries are also a bit quirky as money is not the only reason for murder-- though, let's face it, it's pretty high up on the list!  She reminds me a little of Elizabeth Daly, whose detective uses tiny anomalies to highlight a crime.  Anne McNeill also observes and remembers elements (e.g., the details of a dress) that end up pointing to the murderer.

THE SERIES

The series seems to fall into three categories: mysteries that involve Anne while her husband is buried in work (The Case of the Perfumed Mouse, The Devil and Destiny); mysteries the spouses both encounter while traveling (The McNeills Chase a Ghost, Death Sails in a High Wind); and mysteries that intertwine with Jeffrey's scientific work and involve government secrets. (Murder Strikes an Atomic Unit, Seeing Red, Death Wears a White Coat). There is even one that is not so much a detective novel as a suspense thriller, in which Anne is kidnapped.

AND LAST
A DuBois Half-Dozen (Six Favorite McNeill Mysteries)

1. Death Wears a White Coat (1938)
2. Death Comes to Tea (1940)
3. Death Tears a Comic Strip (1939)
4. The Cavalier's Corpse (1952)
5. Death Dines Out (1939)
6. The Body Goes Round and Round (1942)

Tea'd Off: Death Comes to Tea (1940), by Theodora DuBois

After an affair as shocking as my tea party on January twentieth, you naturally think back and try to discover the origin of the trouble....

By 1940, when Theodore DuBois published Death Comes to Tea, the British Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh had become the most notable representatives of classic, ratiocinative mystery for many detective fiction readers.

a terrific American dust jacket, I think
--note the face in the vapor and the
skull and crossbones pattern
around the rim of the teacup

Early in Death Comes to Tea Anne McNeill, the feminine half of Theodora Dubois' series sleuthing couple and the novel's narrator, is found lying on a couch "before the living-room fire, re-reading a book by Dorothy Sayers," indicating to readers that they are perusing the sort of literate manners mystery that people had come to associate with Sayers, Allingham and Marsh (puzzle mistress extraordinaire Christie at this point was already in her own class).  Classical music (Mozart) and poetry (Pope) are referenced and the murderer is condemned not so much for wicked ways as for beastly bad form.

Although associated more with England than the United States, many such mysteries in fact were written by American authors, such as Theodora DuBois. Those who followed my links to earlier blog pieces in my previous posting will have learned more about DuBois and have seen that I greatly disliked her 1941 detective novel, Death is Late to Lunch, to a large extent on account of the snobbishness of Anne McNeill, wife of Dr. Jeffrey McNeill, a medical researcher at a prestigious Connecticut university (obviously Yale, where Theodora DuBois' husband, Delafield DuBois, was employed as a medical researcher).

Anne still strikes me as something of pill, but she is much more bearable here, where the novel takes place within an authoritatively-presented college milieu and her phlegmatic husband is much more in evidence than he was in Lunch.

Anne does go on about those with good breeding and those without it, speak condescendingly of an "ethnic" person--in this case her faithful maid, Mary (this when complimenting her own flower arrangements, which have "an artistic touch impossible to Mary's practical Irish hand")--and take time to wonder, when one of her husband's colleagues is fatally poisoned at her tea party, whether a stain will come out of a chair's upholstery.

Yet the murder is rather brilliantly carried out, the narrative smooth, the entanglements interesting and the writing good.  I even was in Anne's corner when she had to put up with a smug district attorney, prone to speaking patronizingly about "the ladies."

There is as well a good clue that allows Anne to solve the mystery, although I thought my choice for murderer would have made a stronger ending.  Is the novel a "small masterpiece," as Anthony Boucher believed?  I don't know that I would go as far as Boucher, but I did enjoy Tea; and I have been encouraged by it to keep reading DuBois.

Death Is Late To Lunch (1941), Theodora DuBois

Theodora DuBois (1890-1986) was a longtime prolific professional writer who, among other things, wrote detective and suspense tales.  Between 1936 and 1954 she published twenty detective novels about her series detectives, the couple Jeffrey and Anne McNeill.

She was born Theodora Benton Eliot McCormick in Brooklyn to Eliot McCormick (1849-1891) and Laura Case Brenton McCormick (1869-1923), a seventh-generation descendant of Roger Williams. You will notice that her father was twenty years older than her mother and died just a year after Theodora's birth, when he was about 42 (it is claimed Theodora was christened at her father's funeral).

Theodora's widowed mother married Charles MacDonald, a lawyer and Wall Street broker. The family moved from Booklyn to Yonkers and bought the Hudson River mansion Seven Pines, previously owned by a nephew of William Tecumseh Sherman, who named it for seven huge pines on the estate, which reminded him of the Civil War battle, so the story goes.  A 1945 newspaper story stated that one of the pines was 106 feet tall and more than 150 years old.

The French Chateau style house was originally built in 1845, was three stories high with a cellar and sub-cellar and had twenty-eight rooms, including a tower room, and a dozen fireplaces. It has since been demolished, but a neighboring house, Glenview (now the Hudson River Museum), survives to give an idea what it may have looked like.

Glenview

Although brought up in circumstances of wealth, DuBois, according to this account of her life, "hated her stepfather all her life" and felt "socially isolated" in Yonkers (well, who doesn't, darn it all).  She planned to enroll at Vassar, despite opposition from her mother and stepfather. However, after being accepted there, she came down with tuberculosis and never did go.

In 1918 she married Delafield DuBois, a Harvard graduate and electrical engineer and researcher. She published her first short story in 1920 and from then on wrote professionally for many decades.  She wrote most of her detective novels in the period when her husband had taken a position as a researcher with Yale Medical School and the couple and their children lived in New Haven, Connecticut.

The influence from her own life on her mysteries is clear, for her sleuthing couple consists of Anne McNeill and her husband Dr. Jeffrey McNeill, a researcher at a Connecticut medical school.  DuBois was one of the early creators of a sleuthing couple in the wake of Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles (of Thin Man fame), but where some sleuthing couples have thrived in reprints in the last several decades (the Roos' Jeff and Haila Troy and the Lockridge's Pam and Jerry North come to mind), DuBois' McNeills have not.  I have my theories as to why, which I will explore tomorrow (or later today!), when I post my review of Death Is Late To Lunch (1941).

Murder Most Haughty: Death Is Late to Lunch (1941), by Theodora DuBois

In my earlier blog post today on Theodora DuBois I noted that, despite having a bright young couple as her detectives (a popular mystery fiction variant), she is mostly forgotten today and has been out-of-print for the last forty years.

Admittedly, Death Is Late to Lunch was not considered her most accomplished mystery, but from it I can sense what may be the key factor that would limit her popularity today: the excessive snobbery of Anne McNeill, the female half of her sleuthing duo.  A book like this today, even were it written, would never be published without some severe editing.

Of course Golden Age British detective fiction often is accused of snobbery (see Colin Watson's book Snobbery with Violence, for example), and, one must admit, it's not entirely without justification. But people often forget that during the Golden Age there were many "English-style" American mysteries as well, set at posh houses among the upper crust; and the authors' attitudes towards these characters often was a far cry from the cynical and iconoclastic Raymond Chandler's.

DuBois' Anne McNeill is so hoity-toity that she makes England's Crime Queens Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh look like a band of Jacobins by comparison.  And since she narrates the book you have to put up with her all the time.  Her more likable medical researcher husband pops in and out of the novel (primarily to discover the murder means and finally collar the killer through some technical gizmo), but Anne we always have with us.

Certainly a colorful dust jacket
(note the little death's head stamens)

Death Is Late to Lunch takes place at a posh "convalescent inn" (the setting reminded me of P. D. James' The Private Patient), where Anne has gone to stay with her college-age brother "Bud," a former tuberculosis patient who came down with measles. Anne's toddler son Michael has been left at home, under the care of a nurse (naturally Anne has plenty of servants).

Anne assures us right off the bat that the people at the convalescent inn "were well bred, at least most of them." Soon she has gotten more specific, dividing the guests into the categories of "nice" and "not nice."

The four maids, incidentally, never get named by Anne (not even a "Gladys" or an "Ethel"), leaving one with the impression she doesn't know their names.  When two are singled out by Anne for special mention, she complains that the one is stupid and that the other is insolent--help these days, really!

After the doctor's male secretary suspiciously slides to his death off the mansard roof of the old house, Anne isn't too concerned, because she puts him in the not nice category (not coincidentally for Anne, I suspect, he's of South American origin and he reads D. H. Lawrence); and nice people would be inconvenienced were his death ruled murder rather than accident.

Among the adult guests of the inn, three are nice and two are not nice (we know the latter are not nice because they are unattractive, have poor fashion sense and exhibit emotions in public).  Our Anne is certain that if the secretary was indeed murdered it was one of the not nice people who did the deed.

When one of the remaining not nice people dies suspiciously from sunburn, Anne's husband Jeffrey starts snooping into things (the local cops being utterly incompetent), even though Anne herself is still not all that interested (what's one less not nice person in the world). Jeffrey discovers an interesting medical murder method, but is then called away again, leaving Anne to hold the fort.

Anne has as much contempt for the police as she does for the servants.  Says she of one cop, "....his uniform was a little too small for him. He looked bunchy and the buttons were too tight.  His face was bunchy too, but not the amiable puffy kind of Irish face; antagonistic, suspicious."  Take it from me, by Anne' standards "amiable puffy kind of Irish face" is as close as she gets to a compliment when she's dealing with what she would deem an "ethnic" person.

At one point Anne and Bud find and hide a murder weapon from the police and when, after eavesdropping on her telephone conversation, the police discover it, she berates them for "wiretapping."  I was waiting for them to clap her in irons at this point, but no such luck.

Here's how Anne's mind works as she describes the nice mother of the nice female love interest in the book:

There was attractive elegance about her.  One knew that her clothes must have come from the best Madison and Fifth Avenue Places.  Her gray hair was always immaculately set and waved.....She was the president of the local garden club and had done so much for the community, planting roses on the banks along the roadside, stimulating the school-children to plant flower borders and to wage war against ragweed.

As she talked I thought "No garden club president could ever murder anyone."  Besides which she would never bring herself to wear so uncouth a garment as the Tyrolean cape, even to go on a roof at two o'clock in the morning.  She would wear her own spring evening cloak.  She belonged to a generation and a caste [the author's own naturally--TPT] that did not lightly throw around one's shoulders borrowed "wraps."

the jacket back to
Death Is Late to Lunch

This sort of thing likely quickly pales on most modern readers as a matter of tone and sentiment, but, even worse, from the technical standpoint in a mystery, is that the author so determinedly exonerates all the "nice people" from the get-go.  If this were Agatha Christie, one of those "nice people" would likely be the killer! "Trust no one," that was Dame Agatha's motto.

We are left with hardly any suspects, although given her self-imposed constraints the author does manage something of a twist solution. Unfortunately, it is not a fair play one, and the book quickly comes to a halt, as if the author were simply tired of the whole affair.

Indicative of this exhaustion is the lazy title, which kept up the "Death" series DuBois had launched several years earlier, but barely even makes sense for this book. With more accuracy it could have been called "Death Pushes a Guy Off the Roof" or "Death Gives Some Screwy Dame Sunburn." Tellingly, this was DuBois' last "Death" title.

Despite noting in a 1945 book review that "Anne's snobbery...grows less endurable book by book," the great American mystery critic Anthony Boucher liked some of DuBois' earlier mysteries, referring to her 1940 novel Death Comes to Tea as a "small masterpiece."  DuBois does have some virtues, namely a smooth narrative and a good murder means, so I might give her another try someday, even though I'm afraid that

Anne McNeill
Needs to get real.

Next up: some info on the owners of my copy of Death Is Late to Lunch, along with what they left inside the book.

A Parade of Jackets: Theodora DuBois and Sam Zaccone

Reviews of Mabel Seeley and Reginald Hill to come, but in the meantime I thought you might like seeing these Theodore DuBois book jackets.  After a bad experience with DuBois' Death Is Late to Lunch (1940), I rather enjoyed her Death Comes to Tea (1941), so I am giving DuBois' books another look. Plus, I just like the jackets.

From its jacket you might think The Body Goes Round and Round (1942) could have been titled Ride the Pink Horse.

Of course Dorothy B. Hughes made rather good use of that novel title four years later--not to mention that, six months before Hughes, A. B. Cunningham published a mystery titled Death Rides a Sorrel Horse. Evidently a sorrel horse is a copper-red shade of chestnut.

Interestingly, DuBois originally planned to call this novel Death Rides a Flying Horse, maintaining her "Death" series of titles.  I don't know why the title was changed.

It's Raining Violence (1949) presents a classic Salvador Dali-esque image.  Surreal jacket designs cropped up a fair bit in the Forties, but I think this is an exceptionally nice one.

It's credited to Zaccone, who also did the evocative jacket for Jonathan Stagge's The Scarlet Circle, as well as Triangle's edition of Edgar Allan Poe tales and Cornel Woolrich's The Black Path of Fear (1944)--a prestigious, if grim, portfolio!

Du-Over: Theodora DuBois and Death Comes to Tea (1940)

Well, this always goes to show you that you can't always judge an author by one book.

I was hugely disappointed with Death Is Late to Lunch (1941), by Theodora DuBois, to a great extent because of the unbearable snobbishness of the author's narrator and sleuthing couple half, Anne McNeill, about whom, in homage to Ogden Nash (Philo Vance/Needs a kick in the pance), I composed this immortal couplet

Anne McNeill
Needs to get real.

Anthony Boucher called DuBois' Death Comes to Tea "a small masterpiece," however, and on Goodreads the discerning Lisa Kucharski gave this novel five stars; so I felt I should give DBbois another go. And, what do you think?  I quite liked Tea (Anne is still something of a pill, however).

Just how much did I like my Tea?  You will see later today, in the full post.

Coming Attractions

Just what kind of ghost do the McNeills hunt?

I had never seen this particular Theodora DuBois mystery book jacket before, but I think it is quite a nice design.  This DuBois novel immediately followed Death Comes to Tea(1940) and Death Is Late to Lunch (1941), which, you may notice, are depicted on either side of the library shelf to The McNeills Chase a Ghost (1941). Cute.

In the coming weeks I will be reviewing this novel, genre histories by Lucy Sussex and Martin Edwards, Crippen & Landru's latest collection of classic mystery short stories, a couple by Reginald Hill and a couple of books from the British Library/Poisoned Pen Press.

Whew! And that's just the writing for the blog.  See you soon.

Life and Death at Sunset: The Wall (1938), by Mary Roberts Rinehart

"Maybe we'd better get at it from the start.  It's not a pretty story; but as a matter of human interest and--well, human motives, it's a humdinger."

the excellent Mysterious Press
kindle edition

Our twenty-nine-year-old heroine-narrator, Marcia Lloyd, is quoting local good old boy sheriff Russell Shand (a quite appealingly-presented character, by the way), about the murderous goings-on in the 1938 Mary Roberts Rinehart novel The Wall.

In 1937, Rinehart bought a house, Fairview, in Bar Harbor, Maine, so I suppose it only makes sense that she set her 1938 murder mystery there, in a suitably fictionalized version (the house burned in 1948, a year after Rinehart was nearly killed there by her deranged cook; see more on Rinehart and Bar Harbor here).

A great part of the appeal of the novel is Rinehart's portrayal of this setting; it will be a rare reader who won't want to make a visit to Maine after reading this book.

I think The Wall is the sort of mystery novel to which the term cozy applies.  Despite unpleasantness and nasty murders, order is restored by the end in classic fashion.

"It is all familiar and friendly again," Marcia Lloyd writes, "this rambling old house, built by my grandfather in the easy money days of the nineties, and called Sunset House, generally corrupted to Sunset."

Of course with the Depression and all, life is somewhat tougher for Marcia and her brother Arthur. Mainly she worries about being able to keep up her retinue of servants--what would they do without her?  I know this sort of thing can sound self-serving, but, I will give Rinehart credit, she presents Marcia's paternalism in a much more sympathetic light than does, say, Theodora DuBois with her insufferable Anne McNeill, who comes off simply as a snob.  I think most readers will like Marcia and want things to work out for her.

1940s mapback edition
with an inaccurate Victorian house

As nice as the island is, there is a serpent that comes slithering into Marcia's midst at Sunset, her brother Arthur's scheming, common hussy of an ex-wife, Juliette Ransom (aptly named, because she is always demanding more money from Arthur).

Juliette soon gets fatally dispatched (with a golf club) and Marcia and the readers are off on a murder-go-round that doesn't come to a stop until there are three more deaths.

Rinehart said that for her crime novels she first wrote out the "buried story" (the true events of the mystery we don't know about until the end), then overlaid it with the surface story. Her narrators offer teasing hints and foreshadowing of things that were to come in a dramatically effective way, in my view.

Some critics mocked this as "had I but known" narrative, but it's simply a tool of suspense. Yes, with some writers it could get silly, but Rinehart was the master at this sort of thing and does it well.

Rinehart received the modern equivalent of over one million dollars for the serialization of The Wall in the Saturday Evening Post, so I can't blame her for taking a leisurely pace.

the frightened lady in nightgown motif
popular in late 60s/early70s "Gothic"
paperbacks--seemingly the setting
has changed to somewhere in Europe!

The novel is long by the standards of the era, about 120,000 words.  Yet there's a richness to the milieu that compensates for any slowness.

Dorothy L. Sayers appreciated this quality, comparing Rinehart's novels to the three-deckers of Victorian sensation writers like Wilkie Collins.  Rinehart isn't that good a writer (few people are) but I can see why Sayers made the comparison.  I'm reminded somewhat of the Barbara Vine novels of Ruth Rendell, though Rinehart is more cozy and genteel.

Considering how popular she once was and that she wrote books that are more like modern-day crime novels, focusing on characters and emotions more than physical clues, it seems odd that Rinehart isn't so well-known today, compared with contemporaries like Sayers and Agatha Christie.

It probably didn't help that Julian Symons was so dismissive of Rinehart in his influential Bloody Murder (published in three editions between 1972 and 1993) and that in Talking about Detective Fiction P. D. James doesn't even mention her (James seems to think Americans of that era wrote only hard-boiled crime fiction).  But for mystery fans who like older fiction Rinehart's criminous works (by my count 16 novels and 6 novellas, as well as short stories, written between 1906 and 1953) are a rich legacy, to be enjoyed at leisure.

Circe of Suspense: Two Novels of Suspense by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, The Innocent Mrs. Duff (1946) and The Blank Wall (1947)

The 2002 Quality Paperback
Book Club edition of this
classic Holding suspense "twofer"

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novels The Innocent Mrs. Duff (1946) and The Blank Wall (1947) may not necessarily be the peak of her crime writing achievement--I haven't yet read all her books to say-- but they certainly are high points in a mighty range. It's hard to imagine her doing better than these superlative crime novels.

This pair of short novels of about 60-70,000 words apiece--The Blank Wall is the longer of the two--were reprinted together in one volume by Academy Chicago (now Chicago Review Press) in 1991, after a long, nearly three-decades-long drought, during which none of Holding's books were in print. After the success, a decade later, of the critically acclaimed film The Deep End (starring Tilda Swinton in a Golden Globe nominated performance), the Quality Paperback Book Club issued an edition of the same "twofer" in 2002.

The next year, in 2003, the small publisher Stark House began reprinting additional Holding twofers (through this series Stark House currently has ten of Holding's eighteen crime novels in print, and two more are on their way next year). Finally, a decade later, in 2013, Persephone Books, an excellent press devoted to older fiction by women authors, reprinted The Blank Wall solo.

An excellent Holding novella was included in Sarah Weinman's Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, which also was published in 2013.  Reviews of Weinman's anthology have repeatedly referred to the writers collected therein as "forgotten," "overlooked," "unjustly neglected," etc., while never mentioning the laudable efforts of Academy Chicago and Stark House, among others small presses,which I think is a shame. Small presses have been doing great work for decades keeping fine authors from the past in print, but they often don't have access to the publicity mills. So consider this my shout-out to Stark House and other fine smaller presses. Let's hope you get some of the attention (and the sales) you deserve.

the striking cover illustration of the
first paperback edition of
The Innocent Mrs. Duff

In an article entitled "The Godmother of Noir," Jake Hinkson compares Holding's The Innocent Mrs. Duff to the work of noir author Jim Thompson, claiming that this book and others by Holding read as if they "could have given birth to Jim Thompson's unhinged psychos." This may strike people as an extravagant comparison, but, having read Duff, I understand what Hinkson is talking about here.

To be sure, I disagree with the tendency these days to proclaim ever crime novel with serious or dark elements as "noir." When Hinkson writes that Holding "was a woman [publishing] in a distinctly masculine field," he errs, in my view. Hard-boiled and noir may have been a masculine field, with some exceptions, but psychological suspense, which is what Holding wrote, was more a feminine field (Weinman has adopted the term "domestic suspense" for these books).

Having published her first suspense novel in 1929, Holding is more accurately seen as, along with Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart of the once-derided "Had-I-But-Known" school, an American founding mother of psychological suspense.

Holding, however, feels distinctly more modern than Rinehart, whose roots go back to Gothic fiction according to Catherine Ross Nickerson, and most definitely more original and interesting than Eberhart, who all too quickly devolved into the bland, if highly profitable, formula fiction of the slicks (the hugely popular glossy women's magazines of the 1930s, so loathed by Raymond Chandler). Holding's books--some of which were serialized in the slicks as well--are darker and more adventurous; though they are not noir, from what I've read, they definitely have affinity with it.

The Innocent Mrs. Duff certainly is not anywhere as viscerally horrific as Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952), but in its more genteel way it remorselessly anatomizes a main character who is utterly loathsome to spend time with, just as in Thompson's novel. Jacob Duff is another of Holding's middle-aged drunks from an upper crust New York background (as indicated in my last blog post, there is a similar, though much more sympathetic--and much less interesting--character in Holding's earlier The Obstinate Murderer, 1938).

Jacob Duff, we soon learn, is easily bored and perennially dissatisfied.  He invariably locates the sources of his unhappiness in others besides himself. After the death of his first wife, Helen, he married, on the rebound, young Regina "Reggie" Riordan, a photographer's model--a move he now bitterly regrets.  Once Reggie was charming to him, but now everything she does he finds alienating.

He sees her no longer as charmingly unsophisticated, but irksomely common, indulging in slang (even the very name "Reggie" he can no longer stand), enjoying doing housework herself ("You'd never have caught Helen alone in the kitchen with an apron on, he thought") and associating much too freely with servants. Additionally he deems her annoyingly inexperienced sexually  ("she's like a schoolgirl"). Already Duff's roving, bleary eye has alighted on Miss Castle, governess of Jacob Duff, Jr., his seven-year-old son with his first wife, the dead and sainted Helen.

the "mapback" of the Dell edition
showing the beach cottage of the Duffs
Just what happens there?
Read it and see for yourself.

Irony abounds in all this, because we, the readers, see the tremendous gap between Duff's perception of Reggie and the way she seems to be to us and everyone else, which is remarkably charming, forbearing and empathetic.

The more self-consciously refined sort of Anglo-American crime writer of the period--Theodora Dubois, for example--might have portrayed Reggie as gratingly "vulgar," to use a favorite word of this sort of author, but Holding does no such thing.  It's Duff's condescension to Reggie (and others) that she skewers.

Late in the book, there's an amusing exchange between Duff and a gas station attendant in a village where Duff owns a beach cottage, which illustrates the more democratic ethos of Holding's novel:

"I'd like to rent a car for a couple of hours," said Duff.
"Couldn't do it," said the man, a young man with a broad, turned-up nose.
"My name is Duff," said Duff.
"Well, I can't help what your name is," said the other.  "We don't rent cars no more."

This goes on for a while, Duff getting more and more flustered at the phlegmatic young man's refusal to be impressed by his name and his property-holding status ("Look here! I told you my name was Duff! Jacob Duff. I'm a property owner here. Everyone knows me."/"Well, I don't," said the young man.)

Over the course of the novel Duff becomes more and more dependent on on liquor (he progresses from whisky to gin, which at the start of the novel he hates) and more and more loathful of his wife. He begins to think how much more pleasant marriage with the superior Miss Castle would be....

Jacob Duff's truest love

The Innocent Mrs. Duff is a wonderful crime novel, achieving all those things that advocates of the form want to see.  Unquestionably it's a suspenseful "page-turner" (I read the book in two sittings and was tempted to go for one).

Yet the novel is also a fine study of a repellent drunk in a state of advanced moral and mental disintegration. This is where the comparison with Jim Thompson holds (liquored) water. Jacob Duff makes you cringe, but you can't look away; you feel compelled to keep reading about him.

Other characters are well observed too. There's "innocent" Reggie Duff of the title; the circumspect Miss Castle; little Jacob Duff, Jr. (Holding clearly understood children as well as she did middle-aged drunks); Mrs. Albany, Jacob Duff's wise and wealthy aunt (from whom he has great expectations); and Nolan, the Duffs' attractive and enigmatic chauffeur, late from the war.

Jake Hinkson says that in Duff "we find domestic life rendered as a kind of living hell."  I would argue that it is Jacob Duff who has made domesticity a kind of hell for those around him.  It's Duff who condemns life in suburbia and likes to imagine himself as a "natural man" who should be free to act however he desires.  It's clear, however, that Duff would never rest content for long in any environment.  "The worst sort of unfaithfulness there is," Mrs. Albany tells him, "is to get tired of people, as you do.  You're fickle, Jacob....You've got tired of [Reggie]--and when you're tired of people, you're inclined to be ruthless...."

As good as The Innocent Mrs. Duff is (it came as no real surprise to me to learn that Raymond Chandler, who greatly admired Holding, worked on a screenplay adaptation, sadly uncompleted, of the book when he was in Hollywood), Holding excelled it the next year with the novel commonly regarded as her masterpiece, The Blank Wall.  I'll have some words about this novel next week.

"The Nile" Ain't Just a Novel By Christie, Part 2: Death Sails the Nile and the Life Journey of Frances Burks

Because everything she wrote gets remembered—and her writing typically is rather memorable to mystery fans—Agatha Christie often is assumed invariably to have been a crime fiction originator.  Often she was, but sometimes she was not.  We find an instance of the latter case—where she was not--with her classic detective novel Death on the Nile (1937), wherein her great Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot, confronts a murderous ménage of devious European and American sophisticates on a tour boat in Egypt.  The novel was not in fact, as is generally believed, the first Nile River cruise mystery.  In novel form, anyway, that distinction would appear to belong to Death Sails the Nile, a detective novel published four years earlier by American author F. Burks McKinley.[1] 

Death Sails the Nile was well-received by critics, with the Saturday Review, for example, pronouncing the novel “good” and explicating: “Authentic Egyptian background succeeds in producing unique atmosphere of terror.  Plenty of clues and strange occurrences.”  Yet until its reissuance this year by Coachwhip, the novel had been out-of-print for 85 years, with the author evidently having abandoned for good and all her stated intention of launching a mystery-writing career.

Frances Burks was publicized as
a "new star in mystery fiction"
but her writing light burned but briefly

Her—yes, the person hidden behind the androgynous name of F. Burks McKinley was American Mary Frances Burks McKinley, who at the time of the publication of her sole mystery novel was but 26 years old, a recent college graduate and near newlywed.  She was a year younger than another elite college graduate and traveler of Europe, John Dickson Carr, who had published his first mystery novel a few years earlier. 

The only daughter of James Willis Burks and Linnie Mai Atkins, the author was born Mary Frances Burks on November 24, 1907 at the farm of her maternal grandfather Asa Allen Atkins (formerly part of her great grandfather James Atkins’ 800-acre tobacco plantation), near the small town of Newbern in Dyer County, a “severely conservative” (to quote a recent presidential candidate) corner of northwestern Tennessee. 

Nine miles away at the county seat, Dyersburg, a Confederate memorial had been erected on the grounds of the courthouse in 1905, two years before Frances’ birth, on the 43^rd anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh.  A dozen years later the stone rebel soldier that stood impassively at the top of the memorial looked on, along with thousands of vocal flesh and bone citizens of Dyer County, as Lation Scott, a black man accused of raping a white woman, was brutally tortured with red hot pokers for several hours before finally being incinerated at an impromptu stake.  “It was the biggest thing since Ringling Brothers’ Circus came to town,” one eyewitness later recalled with gusto.[2] 

Perhaps some of the onlookers and/or participants at Lation Scott’s ghastly lynching just over a century ago were among those who had been “saved” at massive religious revivals conducted in the county in 1904 and 1907.  In any event, Mary Frances Burks in her own life left the strangely mingled savagery and sanctimony of the Jim Crow era South far behind her, eventually attaining heights known only, in both her day and in ours, to a fortunate few and living the sort of life at which the locals of Dyer County might have looked askance.

James Willis Burks II,
his wife Linne Mai Atkins
and their two children
James Willis Burks III
and Mary Frances Burks
around the time their
solider father was serving in the
Pancho Villa Expedition (1916)

Frances’s father, James Willis Burks II, came from another rural Tennessee County, Overton, located in north central Tennessee.  Educated at Livingston Academy in Livingston, county seat of Overton, and at Draughon’s Business College in Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, Burks became a druggist and served in the National Guard.  Over two decades he saw action in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Pancho Villa Expedition and World War One, rising to the rank of Major and receiving the Congressional Medal.  During this time he also ran drugstores in Livingston and Nashville, Little Rock, Arkansas and Toledo, Ohio, where his and Linnie Mai’s only other child, James Willis Burks III, was born in 1911. 

Frances and her brother spent their adolescent years mostly in Livingston, where their father and grandfather, Robert Lee Burks (a Civil War veteran, eulogist of the “lost cause,” ardent prohibitionist and devoted member of the Christian Church), owned the Burks Drug Company on the courthouse square, and in Nashville, where the Burks family moved in 1920, when Frances was twelve years old. 

Mary Frances Burks at Vanderbilt
(lower right, by the faculty sponsor)
She was chosen as the outstanding
student in Arts and Sciences at
Vanderbilt ninety years ago in 1929

After graduating in 1925 from Nashville’s Hume-Fogg High School, where she played on the girls’ basketball team, Frances matriculated at Vanderbilt University, where she joined Tri Delta sorority and majored in Classics.  A 1927 photo of Vanderbilt’s Classical Club, organized to promote the study of Latin and Greek, shows a nineteen-year-old Frances looking forthrightly at the camera, attractive and boyish-looking in a dark dress with checkered belt and collar and a fawn coat and her arm about the shoulder of another young woman. 

On the same day she received her BA degree, June 12, 1929, she wed the socially prominent Silas Bent McKinley, a 35-year-old graduate of Harvard University and assistant professor of history at Vanderbilt and a nephew of noted journalist and author Silas Bent.  (Among McKinley’s distinguished ancestors were Kentucky senator and US Attorney General John J. Crittenden and Alabama senator and US Supreme Court Justice John McKinley.)  Frances had proven a promising student at Vanderbilt, having been awarded the Founder’s Medal as the top graduating student in the College of Arts and Sciences and served as an assistant to Professor Clyde Pharr, the noted head of the Classics Department, in Pharr’s landmark translation of the Codex Theodosianus (Theodosian Code).[3] 

However, after receiving an MA degree at Vanderbilt in October 1930--her thesis was on Cicero’s essay Cato Maior de Senectute (On Old Age)--Frances left Vanderbilt and moved with her husband, who had accepted a position at Washington University, to live in an opulent $75,000 mansion (about $1,135,000 today) in the wealthy enclave of Brentmoor Park, Clayton, a suburb of Saint Louis.

Mary Frances Burks upper right

While living in the lap of luxury in Brentmoor Park, where the newlywed couple enjoyed the services of a chauffeur and cook, Frances in November 1933 published what turned out to be her only mystery, Death Sails the Nile, for the writing of which she drew upon her experiences in Egypt during the three-and-a-half-month Mediterranean honeymoon idyll she had enjoyed with her husband. 

Frances dedicated the novel, which was handsomely produced by an interesting Boston publisher, The Stratford Company, to Silas (though she is referred to as “Miss McKinley” on the back cover) and had the endpapers illustrated with an Egyptian motif by a talented friend, Marie Agnes Benoist (1907-1968), whose acquaintance she had recently made.[4]

Agnes Benoist, an independently wealthy dilettante artist and sculptor, was one of the many grandchildren of one of 19^th century Saint Louis’s wealthiest and most important citizens, banker and financier Louis Auguste Benoist.  Not only did Agnes design the endpapers for Frances’s book, she also executed the murals in two of the bathrooms at Frances’s house at Brentmoor Park.  Downstairs bright blue and red ships sailed upon a deep blue sea while upstairs planets majestically glittered. 

you can't go home again
Confederate memorial statue
at Dyersburg, TN

Just as Frances’ relationship with Agnes was taking sail, however, her marriage with Silas was foundering.  The couple's holiday cruise to the West Indies in December 1934, during which Frances had planned to work on another mystery, was beset with acrimony as Silas demanded a divorce from his wife. Informing Frances upon their return to St. Louis that he could no longer live happily in the same house with her, Silas "packed his bags and went home to mother" (as the saying goes) a few days after Christmas, declaring that he would never return to Brentmoor Park to reside with his lawfully wedded wife. 

In January 1935, Frances sued Silas for divorce, alleging “general indignities” and asking for alimony and a return of her maiden name.  Frances’s suit, which made national headlines in an era when divorce could still be considered shocking news (“Woman Writer of Mystery Tales Sues for Divorce”), was quickly granted; and in March, while her now ex-husband Silas wed another woman, Frances traveled to the island of Bermuda for a lengthy stay with her friend Agnes.  That same year, she took up residence in her and Silas’ apartment overlooking Central Park (now the site of the Park Lane Hotel), informing inquiring newspapers that she planned to study journalism.  

In 1940 she was still residing off Central Park, along with Agnes, although she seems to have abandoned journalism as a profession.  In 1943 she again enrolled, at the age of 35, at Vanderbilt University, registering for four classes, but she withdrew after only a couple of months.  In the end Frances’ life--which ended on September 5, 1970 at a house far from Tennessee in the historic Spanish-American city of Antigua, Guatemala which Agnes, who had died two years earlier, used to visit--seems to have consisted of a series of false, if promising, starts, with much potential sadly left unrealized.

*******

James Willis Burks III
brother of Mary Frances Burks
and father of James Willis Burks IV

In 1937, two years after her divorce from Silas McKinley, Frances hosted, at her Central Park abode, a wedding reception for her 26-year-old brother James Willis Burks III, a Vanderbilt graduate and student at Washington University School of Medicine (he had earlier dropped out of Virginia Military Institute, rejecting his father’s martial way of life), and alluring chanteuse Alice Weaver, daughter of a locomotive engineer from Carbondale, Illinois and a former vocal teacher at the Fanchon and Marco School of the Theater in Hollywood, California.  The songstress likely had caught Burks’ eye at the Hotel Kingsway tavern in St. Louis, where, it was chattily confided in the St. Louis Star and Times, the “lovely and gracious doll” had performed an engagement with her “he-man pianist,” Herme Zinzer.

In 1945, after a stint in the army during the Second World War, the younger Burks received an MSc degree in dermatology and syphilology from the University of Minnesota Graduate School of Medicine.  Although his "lovely and gracious doll" of a wife sued him for divorce two years later, after a decade of marriage and the birth of a daughter, Mary Frances, who was named after his sister, his professional life flourished, as he became professor of clinical medicine in dermatology at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans.  He later married a second time, to Alma Rita Limberg, a New Orleans native 16 years younger than he, and with her fathered a boy and a girl. 

In 1961, a year after the birth of his son and namesake James Willis Burks IV, Dr. Burks delivered a paper at the annual Academy of Dermatology and Syphilology Symposium in Therapy held at Chicago, Illinois.  He opened his speech by wryly recalling a “pessimistic, dyspeptic colleague-in-training” from the Forties who had been dismayed by all the advances being made in medicine, which the colleague believed would destroy the medical practice by making disease obsolete:

He pointed out that half of our practice had already disappeared.  Hopes for survival dimmed through the years every time I heard from him….the only things remaining for us to treat would be acne and ringworm.  Since griseofulvin [a medication used to treat ringworm] has appeared, I have not had the heart to speak to him.  I sincerely hope he is spared the knowledge of the monumental breakthrough in therapeutics I will reveal in the latter part of this presentation.

Dr. Burks died in 1978, not long before his handsome, tousle-haired son Jamie enrolled at Tulane University.  After his graduation from Tulane in 1982, Jamie for a time attended graduate school at UCLA.  He later worked as a model in Europe.  He was living in Los Angeles again when he was hospitalized for complications from AIDS, from which he died, at the age of 34, on November 7, 1994, seventeen days before what would have been his Aunt Frances’ 87^th birthday. 

Jamie was interred in the Burks family tomb at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans, where his father and Frances had already been laid to rest.  Mourners were urged to make memorial contributions to the fight against AIDS, a scourge which Dr. Burks’ dyspeptic colleague in dermatology and syphilology should have found highly gratifying, as the treatment of it presented dilemmas indeed for the medical specialist.
  

New Orleans artist Jan Gilbert, a friend of Jamie's, dedicated her Light in the Head" exhibition in the Crescent City to him.  You can see pictures of the exhibition (and Jamie) here.  And here is Jamie's name on the AIDS Memorial Walk in West Hollywood.

A college photo of a nineteen-year-old Jamie Burks can be found on a page Instagram’s The Aids Memorial website, where Jamie is one among thousands of posted casualties of the dread disease.  At the site Jamie’s tragically foreshortened life of passion and promise is given moving remembrance by his friend Jonathan Taylor:

Jamie and I met in New York, 1981.  Kappa Sigma photo shows him in college—a snapshot I kept from his belongings (he would be very embarrassed by this image).  Jamie, pictured right, the funniest, silliest crazy boy and man.  The sweetest face.  The best laugh—gasping for air, nearly silent in disbelief, tears streaming down our faces with laughter.  How I remember him.  A great friend I miss terribly.  Jamie had a horrible, painful, ugly passing, in contrast to his brief, wonderful life, 1960-1994.

Certainly the Burks family, from Frances and her brother James to her nephew Jamie, seem to have lived lives that were relatively freed from the traditional constraints of the rural South, with all the pinnacles and pitfalls which such untethered lives can entail.  In Frances’ case she left mystery fans, amid an unfortunate litter of false starts and dead ends, a worthy detective novel to enjoy, now reissued 85 years after its original publication. 

Postscript: Like Frances Burks I graduated from Vanderbilt, almost 30 years ago; and of course I edited the Edgar-nominated anthology of essays on LGBTQ mystery writers and themes, Murder in the Closet.  I was fascinated by Frances Burks' personal history and that of her family.  Normally I don't write about younger relations of mystery writers, but I was very moved by the story of Frances Burks' nephew, Jamie, who was much beloved by those who knew him. 

World AIDS Day was a month ago, on December 1, and I regret not getting this piece posted then.  I'm making a New Year's Resolution to support AIDS charity this year, however, and I hope some of my blog readers will consider doing the same. (See here for a list of well-regarded AIDS charities.)

Despite what you find in so much Golden Age detective fiction, untimely death is not a game but rather a grim and wicked thing, the real thing I mean, laying waste to promising lives and destroying so much human potential.  Harm and hurt is a hydra-headed monster in this world, but we can but try to do what we can, when we can, to hinder it, in whatever form of disease or disaster it may take.  I'm going to make it a point to do more of my bit this year.--TPT

---

[1] However, Agatha Christie may get the last laugh yet again, for the same year, 1933, in which Death Sails the Nile appeared saw the publication by Christie of a Parker Pyne mystery short story entitled—you guessed it—“Death on the Nile.”  Of course the Western world at this time was especially fascinated with ancient Egypt as a result of the discovery, eleven years earlier, of Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s marvelous lost tomb.  Christie herself had opportunistically published an Hercule Poirot mystery short story, “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb,” in September 1923, less than a year after the opening of tomb of “King Tut,” as he had been colloquially dubbed.

[2] In modern value James Atkins’ real and personal estate was worth over a million dollars in 1860, though the wealth he amassed was widely distributed at his death among no less than fourteen children.  On the Lation Scott lynching see Margaret Vandiver’s Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (Rutgers University Press, 2006) and the key contemporary account, “The Burning at Dyersburg: An NAACP Investigation, The Crisis 16 (February 1918):178-183.

[3] See Linda Jones Hall, “Clyde Pharr, the Women of Vanderbilt, and the Wyoming Judge: The Story behind the Translation of the Theodosian Code in Mid-Century America,” Roman Legal Tradition 8 (2012), 24-25.  Hall reports that at the time Frances Burks attended Vanderbilt women “dominated graduate studies in the Department of Classics” (p. 13).

[4] Perhaps the best known book published by The Stratford Press is civil rights activist and author WEB DuBois’ The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924).  It was published as part of the Knights of Columbus Racial Contribution Series, which also included George Cohen’s The Jews in the Making of America (1924), also published by The Stratford Company.  This was a daring project in the decade that saw the mass revival in America of the Ku Klux Klan and a successful effort to curtail the immigration of ethnicities and races deemed undesirable by many White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.  The Stratford Company also published Silas Bent McKinley’s first book, Democracy and Military Power (1934), which included a forward by famed progressive historian Charles Beard.

Gone Fishing: A Mystery Artifact

Lake Wallenpaupack     Aug. 20, 43

Dear Son & Daughter: We caught 3 Pike and 1 calico Bass yesterday, 3 Pike today, 3 pike 17 in, 1 pike 19, 2 pike 20 in, the best catches of the week.  It was very cold last night.  I was cold under 4 blankets. We are using the [lend?], could not get a cottage.  It was very hot on the lake this afternoon.  The lake was very calm this afternoon and the fish would not bite at all.  My worms are in bad condition, may not hold out for my vacation.  Mother & Dad.

Fred Adams
Mt. Greenwood Road
Trucksville
Luzurne Co.
Penna [Pennsylvania]

This whimsical (and slightly racy) postcard was tucked inside my copy of Theodora DuBois' Death Is Late to Lunch.

Signed in the front of the book is Jane H. (or L.) Adams.  I assume this was Mrs. Fred Adams.  I hope for the sake of her 1943 summer vacation she enjoyed fishing like her husband.  Or did she spend much of it reading Death Is Late to Lunch?  If so, I hope she liked it better than I did!

But most of all I wonder, did the worms hold out?!

The Countdown Begins: The Passing Tramp's 2013 Best Books Blogged

Well, it's time again to pick the best crime novels reviewed this year on the blog.  I think I reviewed 72 works of mystery fiction this year, mostly novels published before 1960, as well as some books about mystery fiction.

Were there some disappointing novels reviewed here this year?  Sure, like Theodora DuBois' Death Is Late to Lunch, Doriel Hay's Murder Underground, Ed McBain's Jigsaw and the late Robert Barnard's The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori, but I won't dwell on the disappointments.

So, without further ado, here are numbers 20-16:

20. I'll Tell You Everything (1933), by J. B. Priestley and Gerald Bullett (reviewed 8 March)

An affectionate and humorous pastiche of English Golden Age thrillers, this novel is about a Cambridge lecturer and the strange adventures that befall him after he meets an odd Italian professor urging him to accept an iron casket holding the bones and ashes of the Iron Prophet, Yann.

Both Priestley and Bullett were well-regarded English mainstream writers who made additional contributions to the crime fiction genre that are well worth looking up.

19. Murder in Maryland (1932), by Leslie Ford (reviewed 4 June)

With a strong sense of place, bright writing and an excellent narrator, a middle-aged woman doctor, Murder in Maryland is a well-crafted exercise in genteel American mystery, despite some condescending portrayals of African-Americans, unfortunately an issue with this author.  Her Maryland will be a bit too much "old South" for some readers in the age of Paula Deen and Duck Dynasty.

18. The Curved Blades (1916), by Carolyn Wells (reviewed 31 October)

Classic American murder at a country house party, with the victim a nasty rich woman who spends the first chapter giving everyone around her reasons to kill her.

For once Wells eschews improbable locked rooms, leaving the reader with a tricky and bizarre murder problem (the victim is found dead with a smile on her face and a Japanese paper snake wrapped around her neck).  Wells' Great Detective Fleming Stone falls in love, rather tiresomely, but you can ignore that and concentrate on clues.

17.  Southern Electric Murder (1938), by F. J. Whaley (reviewed 21 June)

As this title indicates this is a dense English murder mystery of railway movements and times.  It makes use of a real railway line that runs from Victoria Station, London to Brighton, Sussex, and many of the stations in it are still in existence today.  A great book for those who like to concentrate on a meaty murder problem (and for those who love railroads).

16. Written in Blood (1994), by Caroline Graham (reviewed 19 February)

A great wickedly satirical English village mystery--one might call it a curdled cozy--at which Caroline Graham most definitely excelled (her books inspired the seemingly never-ending British television mystery series Midsomer Murders). Some splendidly unlikable characters (Sergeant Troy, whom I described in the original review as "a boorish, sexist homophobe" and Brian Clapton, surely one of the most repulsive creatures in crime fiction) and a fairly-clued solution that is withal a genuine surprise.

I don't rate it higher because of its excessive length and over-the-top finale (written with TV in mind?), but it's a fine modern English mystery.

Fifteen more to go!  Are you as excited as I am?

Even if you're not (perish the thought!), be sure to check in tomorrow for Nos. 15-11.