Silver Sundays: CozyNoir? Out of the Past (1953), by Patricia Wentworth

Genteel English 'manners" mystery fiction arguably achieved its apogee in the late mid-to-late 1930s and the 1940s with such crime writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, Patricia Wentworth, Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake, to name some of the subgenre's most prominent exponents.  Even writers not directly association with manners mystery, like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, published manners-ish mysteries like Five Little Pigs and The Hollow (Christie) and The Emperor's Snuff-box (Carr).  Even a sober "Humdrum" mystery writer like John Rhode at this time published a succession of books about a posh policeman who falls in love with and marries a genteel suspect in one of his cases.  

At the same time, however, American hard-boiled writers, along with their British imitators, were producing tough mysteries that were anything but genteel.  You might argue that these too were "manners mysteries," reflecting the manners not of posh society but rather of the mean streets and grim back alleys.  Not public schools, but the age old school of hard knocks.  

Raymond Chandler published his first head-boiled crime novel The Big Sleep in 1939 and two years later saw the release of director John Huston's adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled crime novel The Maltese Falcon.  The tough stuff was really on its way, both on the printed page and on film.  It was soon supplemented by film noir, which was even harder than hard-boiled was.  That particular egg was not just hard-boiled but positively rock-solid.  

One of the greatest of noir films, Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas, was released in 1947.  (It's #7 here.)  Out of the Past was also, seemingly incongruously, the title of crime writer Patricia Wentworth's 23rd Miss Silver crime novel, which was first published in 1953 in the United States and appeared in England two years later.  

Despite the tough reputation of United States as the land of hard-boiled and noir crime fiction--not to mention, in real life, rampant gangsterism and gun violence, police corruption and third degree, race riots and lynchings--cozy crime fiction was extremely popular there, arguably more so than in England.  It's two greatest progenitors, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series and Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver series, while both English in origin were beloved in the US by the 1950s.  Some Americans valued escape into cozier pastures, it seems.  Still, cozy does not necessarily mean insipid, as insufferably chauvinistic, mansplaining detractors like Otto Penzler pronounced back in the 1980s and 1990s.  

The English first edition cover illustration
(also used on the first pb edition)
simply screams noir.  It comes straight from
a scene in the book, as Pippa returns late in the
night to Cliff's Edge, her white dress stained red
with blood--a scene crying out to be filmed.  

Could Queen of Cozy Crime Patricia Wentworth have had the great noir film in mind when she chose her title for her 23rd Miss Silver mystery?  I don't know, but her Out of the Past is indeed rather on the dark side a Miss Silver mystery.  A Miss Silver mystery is never going to end truly bleakly, but the novel does have some real midnight moments from the author.

For one thing the novel's first murder victim, Alan Field, is a real right bastard whom you truly get to despise before someone finally knives him in the back one deadly night in his beach hut.  We learn in a prologue--another noirish feature, uncommon in trad crime novels back then--that three years earlier innocent, young Carmona Leigh was to marry charming, so handsome Alan, much to the dismay of James Hardwick, who had fallen in love at first sight with her after glimpsing her in a box opposite him at the theater.  (Tres romantique!)

Then in Chapter One we find that Alan for some reason dumped Carmona--on her wedding day, no less.  This sort of thing seems to happen with alarming frequency in Wentworth novels. 

That done, Alan then headed out to parts unknown in South America, leaving his formerly intended Carmona to wed, yes, James Hardwick on the rebound.  The rest of the novel is mostly set at James Hardwick's family home, Cliff Edge, which he has just inherited but will have to sell, the Fifties not being a great decade for private ownership of great country houses.  (See my last blog review, of Georgette Heyer's Detection Unlimited.)  

The Hardwicks are entertaining guests at Cliff Edge, naturally, including Carmona's platinum blonde old school friend Pippa Maybury, who has a nice solid, even stolid, obliging husband in the background, but is rather a reckless and wayward flirt.  Then there's Carmona's Aunt Esther Field, who also is Alan's stepmother. (Like the Menendez brothers Monsters series, these Wentworth novels get almost incestuous at times.)   

Esther's husband and Alan's father was the late famed artist Penderel Field.  Alan has his father's fair good looks and fatal charm, if none of his artistic talent.  He does have a certain talent, I should say, though of an altogether less admirable sort.  

wicked Alan Field, depicted in a 1961 American newspaper serialization of Out of the Past

There's also well-preserved Lady Adela Castleton, one of those handsome and outspoken "public" women in vintage English mysteries, and Colonel and Mrs. Trevor, the colonel's garrulous wife.  And there are the neighbors the Annings, mother and daughter, who to get by have to make their home available to paying guests.  In their employ they have a sneaking French maid, Marie, a listener at doors who could have stepped right out of the pages of Bleak House.  

Into this milieu returns Alan--out of the past, as it were--and nobody's happy to see him.  For one thing he promptly begins to blackmail, in varying degrees, no fewer than three of the women and he viciously imparts some devastating information to Carmona that threatens to destroy her marriage.  It's clear that Alan not only uses women, but that he derives considerable cruel enjoyment from doing so.  He's a  despicable, conscienceless and sadistic character and you're glad to see him removed from this world. Did his crooked South American doings finally catch up with him, or did someone closer at hand--and altogether more genteel--put paid to his existence?

Jane Greer in Out of the Past

For Wentworth, this seemed a dark book.  There is adultery--up to a point--illegitimate birth (but not abortion), apparent suicide and dementia--and I'm not even talking about the servants!  The mystery, I would allow, is not one of the most intricate deception, but the anxiety level is sky-high.  I think it really helps in terms of evaluating Wentworth if we stop trying to force her into Christie's Chinese puzzle box and let her exist independently as an artist.  In some ways she seems to me the British Mignon Eberhart (who was called, erroneously, America's Agatha Christie), putting a high premium on the emotional drama inevitably generated by cases of unnatural death. On her own terms I find Wentworth a compelling crime writer.  This is a true detective novel, but it's also a novel of domestic suspense, yet another feminine subgenre that came to fore in the Fifties, along with cozy crime fiction.  

Indeed, Out of the Past is so serious that Miss Silver, who just happens to be staying at the Annings with her niece Ethel Burkett, only coughs 14 times.  This is just not the time to indulge oneself!

A Trifle too Unlimited: Detection Unlimited (1953), by Georgette Heyer

"From what I've seen, I shouldn't think there's a house or cottage in Thornden where they aren't chewing over the crime at this very moment."

[Mrs. Haswell] and Miss Patterdale were agreed that although it was disagreeable to persons of their generation to have a murder committed in their midst, it was very nice for the children to have something to occupy them, Thornden being such a quiet place, with really nothing to do in it at this season, except to play tennis.

--Detection Unlimited, Georgette Heyer

The late Professor Jacques Barzun, who died a dozen years ago at the age of 104, was a vocal defender of classic detective fiction for over half a century.  While he could be unappreciative, even patronizing, of  women suspense writers, castigating them not merely as HIBK (Had I But Known)--a dismissive acronym which had been applied by critics before him to popular authors like Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart--but as, to use his own term, EIRF, which stands for Everything Is Rather Frightening.  

What interested Barzun in his preferred examples of crime fiction was not domestic disquiet but devoted detection.  He was especially uninterested in the tribulations of mid-century housewives which filled the pages of books by such women crime writers as Celia Fremlin, Ursula Curtiss and Charlotte Armstrong.  Sounding like a judgmental bystander in Eden, he pronounced EIRF novels a "feminine error."

However, there was a group of women writers whom Barzun adored: the cadre of detective novelists from the Golden Age of detective fiction who had been collectively dubbed England's Crime Queens: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.  Novels by each of these authors he included in his and Wendell Hertig Taylor's reprint series One Hundred Classics of Crime.  (These were The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Strong Poison, Dancers in Mourning and Swing, Brother, Swing). 

There was one other English lady from the Golden Age of detective fiction whom Barzun believed merited inclusion in these august ranks, one who ironically was not known primarily for detective fiction: prolific regency romance writer Georgette Heyer.  Her mystery A Blunt Instrument was another of Barzun and Taylor's entries in their Classics of Crime.  

Georgette Heyer published a dozen detective novels between 1932 and 1953, ten of these between 1932 and 1942 at the height of the Golden Age, with two stragglers appearing in the early 1950s, after which the author retired from the mystery field, though she continued steadily publishing her regency romances nearly up to her death in 1974 at age 71.  I think Barzun is well-justified in his admiration for Heyer's detective novels.  There are a few weaker numbers in the lot (see below), but generally it's a most impressive body of work for fans of classic genteel detective fiction.  

Thriller Book Club ed. from the 1950s

When I started reading detective fiction again in 1989--I had stopped reading it for six years when I was enrolled in college and law school--one of the authors I started reading was Georgette Heyer, who had recently been reprinted in paperback by Berkley.  I read most of the Heyers over the course of a year or less, I believe.  

Yet I didn't read the last one or the first two, where Heyer was still acquainting herself with the style and mechanics of detective fiction.  Her last one, Detection Unlimited, I actually started several times for no fewer than three decades but I never got anywhere close to finishing it.  My attention always wandered.  

Why was this?  Having finally stuck with it this time and read it over the course of about a week, I see why.  It's rather long by my count (95,000 words maybe?), very talky and discursive, with underdeveloped characters.  Of course all of Heyer's mysteries are chitty chatty, as it were, and usually the chitchat, at which the author typically excels, is a high point of her writing, Heyer (pronounced "hare," like a rabbit) being a very witty writer.  But here the talk just went on and on and on.  One character talked in a two-page paragraph of about 900 closely printed words.  The attention inevitably wanders.

I think Heyer's return to detective fiction in 1951 was a bit half-hearted.  Her commitment had always been somewhat shaky: Her lawyer husband, George Ronald Rougier, actually plotted the books as far as the murders went, though she did all the writing; and her romances far outsold her mysteries so she had less financial incentive to write them.  Also her disdain for modern, post WW2 (i.e. Labour governed) England really comes through in the last book, which is classically set in a provincial English village.  The denunciations of how much the owners of big houses in England are suffering gets a bit heavy-handed.  The passage below is one of the most sweeping condemnations of Labour-era England that I have come across in a detective novel from the period.

Coming upon, in the village of Thornden, the the dilapidated country mansion Old Place, home of the Squire and his wife (their childless son was killed in the Second World War and the estate and will be inherited, upon the Squire's death, by a cousin in South Africa), Chief Inspector Hemingway, in charge of the investigation of the local murder of obnoxious solicitor Sampson Warrenby, disgustedly says: "Progress."  Then this passage follows:

But he said it to himself, well-knowing that his companion, inevitably reared in the hazy and impracticable beliefs of democracy-run-riot, would derive a deep, if uninformed, gratification from the reflection that yet another landowner had been obliged, through excessive taxation, to throw out of work the greater part of his staff.

Hemingway's companion, poor, young Constable Melkinthorpe, recalls that there once were many more people employed at the Old Place, adding: "Of course, things are different now."  This draws the ire of Hemingway, who snaps: "They are....And the people as notice it most are those gardeners and grooms and gamekeepers.  So you put that into your pipe, my lad, and smoke it!"

a very 70s take on a 50s novel
presumably this is Charles and Abby
(see below)

Most of the Golden Age British detective writers looked unfavorably on the welfare state, but Heyer probably more so than most.  When Joan Aiken Hodge published her biography of Heyer in 1985 an Australian newspaper reviewer was struck by the author's strident conservative misanthropy.  By the Fifties, the reviewer observed, her "blacklist" encompassed writers, publishers, agents, the Department of Inland Revenue, bureaucrats, socialists, publicists, Americans, weak Tories, the Irish and the Welfare State.

Of course the Labour Party did want to redistribute wealth and make society more equitable.  Did they go too far, or not far enough?  Or did they get it--like the porridge upon which Goldilocks, doubtless a covetous leftist, impudently supped--just right?  This is a subject for debate, but Heyer in her books was not really interested in debate but rather declamation. 

In defending the privileges of the landed gentry, the author impugns the motivation of those desirous of promoting greater social equity as nothing more than envious desire to do down the landlords.  She's not thinking of the wealthy, mind you, it's their servants.  We have to keep up the Great Houses in private ownership in order to provide employment for butlers, gardeners and lady's maids.  Don't do it for the lords of the manors; do it for their lady's maids!

Of course other beneficiaries of this regime were classic English mystery writers--we fans love us our country house parties, whatever our political persuasions.  There's no question that the austerity era in England took a lot out of the vintage English mystery.  Many writers adapted pretty well to the changes, but some did not. 

I tend to think that someone as out of tempo with modern times as Heyer was probably would not ever have adapted.  In her regencies society could be kept in stasis for as long as she wrote them.  It reminds me of how mystery writer John Dickson Carr--who, though an American, was temperamentally like Heyer (though she apparently didn't like Americans and she didn't like Carr's mysteries)--turned decisively to period mystery fiction in the Fifties because there was so much about modern England that he couldn't abide.  So Heyer was probably right to abandon detective fiction when she did.  In any event, I believe that around this time her husband became too busy with legal work to contribute his share to the effort.  

Detection Unlimited doesn't make a bad swan song; it's just a bit of a curate's egg: only good in spots.  In his summary of the novel in A Catalogue of Crime, Jacques Barzun, a conservative himself, complained that the detection was "a trifle too unlimited," with altogether too much idle chatter.  I think he's right.  There is a lot to like in this book if you like classic English detective fiction of the more genteel sort, but the action is too diffuse.  The novel needed tightening and some weeding out of characters.  Those discarded country house gardeners might have been of some use here, metaphorically speaking!

the placid village of Thornden
in Detection Unlimited

Heyer plunges us right into village life on page one and the hopefully hardy reader really has to weather a welter of character introductions in the first few chapters just to get on with it.  There is a frontis map of the village (which does matter), but inexcusably no cast of characters, at least in my edition.  Besides the squire and his wife, there's another rich guy, an estate agent, and his wife, who are the parents of the male love interest in the story, Charles Haswell.  He's interested in Abby Dearham, the pretty secretary of a novelist and niece of a local spinster.  

These two characters, probably around the age of my parents at the time, as mentioned provide the obligatory love interest in the book, but it's a minor thread in a rather busy tapestry, crowded with characters.  

Not surprisingly love interest is normally a big part of Heyer's detective stories.  Heyer's lovers exchange great repartee and never get soppy or gushy about things.  That sort of thing--emotional exhibitionism--just isn't done by sensible people in a Georgette Heyer novel.  

Anyway, back to the characters, there's Thaddeus Drybeck, a fuddy-duddy older attorney who hated the younger, more energetic and successful upstart Sampson Warrenby, the novel's murderee.  Then there's Mavis Warrenby, the dead man's niece, who clearly has a yen for a handsome displaced Pole in the village, of whom her uncle disproved.  He's not the first Pole encountered in a mystery by Heyer, who despite her extreme Britishism was of Russian descent.  On hearing there's a Pole in the case, Chief Inspector Hemingway is nonplussed, to say the least of it:

"If I'd been told there was a Pole mixed up in this case I'd have reported sick....I've had one case with a Georgian mixed up in it, and two more with Poles, and they pretty nearly gave me a nervous breakdown."

Mavis Warrenby is a pious doormat, and if there's another thing Hayer hates, it's pious doormats.  She's even dismissed as "pi."  Against all evidence she's always insisting that her uncle was a nice man and that she liked him as any niece should, though he clearly wasn't and she clearly didn't.  We never see Warrenby alive, but it's made clear that everyone in the village couldn't stand him because he was a pushing upstart newcomer who wanted to be the top dog--a "pocket Hitler" as someone calls him.  "He is recognizable as a character created only to be murdered," says waspish local detective novelist Gavin Plenmeller in a meta moment, accurately enough.  

The niece is repeatedly disparaged--and not solely by Gavin--as a gormless nitwit.  After enough of this I started to feel a little sorry for her and even for her uncle.  (We never actually get to see him alive, we just hear him repeatedly disparaged after his death.)  Heyer's attitude to dutiful do-gooders is a lot like John Dickson Carr's: utterly scathing.  See these comments from the author's lovers, Abby and Charles:

ABBY: "There was a girl at school awfully like [Mavis], always saying, 'Oh, I don't think we ought to!' and being kind and forgiving to everyone, and saying improving things.  She was the most ghastly type! And the worst thing about people like that is that they actually believe in their own acts.  I wouldn't mind half so much if they were doing it deliberately, and stayed honest inside, but they don't."

CHARLES: "All I know about her is that she chose to come down here and act as a sort of unpaid drudge for an out-and-out swine, who wasn't even decently polite to her, rather than get a job and be able to call her soul her own."

This is ironic given that Charles ostensibly has a job but seems able to spend all his time with Abby doing amateur detecting. (What fun!)  Abby even asks him at one point if he ever goes to work.  In truth I think Heyer liked best her Regency bucks who never had to dirty their hands in trade.  Her favorite characters are blunt types who speak their minds--at least if it's conservative entiments coming out of their mouths.  She puts these characters in all of her mysteries, and frequently they are quite funny, if sometimes unwarrantably cruel.  In Detection Unlimited the top "blunt" character is aforementioned mystery writer Gavin Plenmeller, who inherited an estate in the village from his late brother.  He perennially offends everyone in the village--well, not goody-two-shoes, forgiving Mavis--with his outspoken comments.  

There is also a major and his Pekinese-breeding wife.  Her pack of prize-winning Pekes, all of whom derive their names from the letter "U," may be the most amusing thing in the book.  Then there's a London stockbroker turned gentleman farmer and his young wife and baby.  It's a lot of characters to remember--at one point Chief Inspector Hemingway announced he has nine or ten suspects.  This novel could have been called Too Many Suspects, but that title was already taken.

Sampson Warrenby is found shot dead on his garden bench after a tennis party attended by most of the village notables and then we are off to the races.  Scotland Yard, in the form of Hemingway and his underling, Inspector Horace Harbottle, make an entertaining investigative team.  Birdlike, inquisitive and perceptive Hemingway goes back to the Thirties, when he was a deputy to Superintendent Hannasyde.  He's always been one of my favorite fictional police detectives.   

I like Harbottle a lot too and I think it's a shame this is his only appearance.  A "walking tombstone" with a "quelling sort of face," sober Harbottle is an abstemious evangelical type whom it's easy for Hemingway to get a rise out of, but in this case it's affectionately done.  I enjoyed this exchange:

"It's all very well to be sent into the country," [Harbottle] said suddenly, "but I don't like this case, Chief!"  

"That's because you've got an inferiority complex," responded Hemingway, unperturbed.  "I thought there'd be trouble when they started talking about the Squire.  It set you off remembering the days when you were one of the village lads, carting dung, and touching your forelock to the Squire."

"I did no such thing!" said his indignant subordinate.  'What's more I never carted dung in my life, or touched my forelock! I hadn't got one, and I wouldn't have touched it if I had!"

"One of the Reds, were you?  Well, it's no use brooding over the equality of man here, because that won't get us anywhere."

Sorry you only got one novel, Horace, my lad. We hardly knew ye!  With Horace you might be reminded of PC Glass from A Blunt Instrument, whose Bible quotations invariably got under Hemingway's skin.  

The murder plot mechanics provided by Heyer's husband are good, but the whole thing feels rather labored and the denouement is rushed with a rustic ex machina, not to mention anti-climactic, as if Heyer realized, damme, I had better be getting this thing over with.  I'm glad I finally read Detection Unlimited, but I'm guessing I won't ever read it again, something I never thought about her other books, which reward rereading.  

I'll draw to a close with this bit of conversion between Gavin, the detective novelist, and Abby, the secretary to a mainstream author.  It's rather in the nature of shop talk for a mystery writer.  What do you prefer, persons or problems?  

"There is nothing to solve except the comparatively uninteresting matter of the identity of the murderer.  No hermetically sealed room, no unusual weapon, too few seemingly unshakeable alibis."

"Well, I think the identity of the murderer is far more interesting than those other things," objected Abbey,  "Fascinating, when one actually knows all the people," she added naively.

"Ah, yes, but you, my sweet, are a female.  Persons are more interesting to you than problems."

Sundays with Miss Silver: Make New Friends, but Keep the Old, One is Silver.... The Chinese Shawl (1943), by Patricia Wentworth

After four installments with thrillerish elements, the Miss Silver series really came into its own as a true detective series in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl.  Just as the author would give English mystery fans some paradigmatic village mysteries in the 1940s and 1950s, in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl she gave her readers a classic country house party mystery, just as the mystery subgenre's heyday was passing  during the Second World War.  England would never be the same after the war and neither would classic mystery, though both would find a way to survive austerity--austerity both of means and of murderous invention.   

it was such a lovely thing--
black ground and deep black fringe,
every inch of the ground worked over
in a pattern of fantastic loveliness
and all the colors of a fairy tale

Unlike a lot of other mysteries from the time, The Chinese Shawl frankly acknowledges the war; indeed, the war permeates the book from the first page, when mention is made of German air raids.  The protagonist of the novel is twenty-one year old Laura Fane, a lovely, sweet-natured, orphan gel who has just come into control of her inheritance, which consists of an income of L400 a year (about 24,000 pounds today or 31,000 dollars).  

Three-fourths of this amount comes from the rental of the country estate The Priory to her first cousin, once removed, Agnes Fane, who lives there with her first cousin Lucy Adams (also a first cousin, once removed to Laura).  Both women are spinsters of a certain age, imposing Agnes being stated to be 57 or 58 and dumpy Lucy presumably thereabout.  

Laura lives in the country with an aunt and does war work as a secretary at a home for convalescing soldiers and she also has plenty to do around the house, what with her aunt only having one maid these days.  (Drat the war!)

At The Priory Agnes and Lucy raised another, much younger orphaned cousin: Tanis Lyle, who if this were a contemporary book by Anglo-American hard-boiled author Raymond Chandler would unquestionably be the femme fatale and likely murderer of the tale.  Instead, she's our murderee.  Well, what else can you do when you have an exotic name like that, other than engage in femme fatalery?  

A stage actress in her late twenties, Tanis has already been married (and divorced) and she has a young child, who is being raised away somewhere, in Scotland I think, by its grandmother.  (They did call young children "its" in those days.)  She now specializes in flirting with other girls' boyfriends, taking and then casually discarding them.  She is not exactly beautiful but knows how to present herself.  She has ambitions of "going Hollywood."  All in all, it's a classic good girl-bad girl contrast between the virginal, naturally blooming English rose Laura and the hothouse, forced Tanis, who presumably has been not just around the block but a multitude of surrounding neighborhoods, if not entire towns.  

Laura is in London to meet her lawyer and when she does she discovers from him that Agnes wants to buy The Priory outright from her, for 12,000 pounds (over 700,000 today, or not too far off one million American dollars).  Agnes through Tanis invites Laura to a house party at The Priory, which she has never actually ever seen due to a family feud.  You see, over two decades ago her father, Oliver Fane, was supposed to marry his cousin Agnes but he backed out of the engagement when he fell in love with another woman, Laura's future mother.  Intensely passionate Agnes responded, naturally enough, by taking her favorite horse out for a ride and driving the poor beast so hard that they both ended up in the local quarry, where the horse was killed and Agnes crippled for life.  (Don't worry: she gets around expertly in a wheelchair.)  

This is quite a bit of backstory.  You see, we are in the world of the spacious detective novel of manners, which takes its time to background characters and lavishes attention on dialogue.  Laura doesn't even make it to The Priory until page fifty, a-fifth of the way into the novel, and Tanis stays alive and kicking and femme fataleing until page 108, nearly halfway into the book.  There's even another house party that takes place in London before the murder house party, where we first meet many of the characters, most of whom will become suspects in Tanis' slaying.  

There's intensly handsome RAF pilot Carey Desborough, recovering from a crash, whom Tanis' cousins (or aunts, Tanis calls them, on account of their being so much older) Agnes and Lucinda think is engaged to Tanis, though in fact Tanis has already thrown him over.  Carey of course falls in love at second sight with Laura.  Then there are two airmen on leave, brothers Robin and Alistair Maxwell.  The latter is one of Tanis' current victims (she's got several on a string, including her ex-husband), much to the frustration of kittenish young Petra North, who loves Alistair.  (Tanis and Petra--seems Agatha Christie wasn't the only Golden Age mystery writer interested in the middle east.)

I'm not even mentioning Miss Sophy Ferrers, a relation with whom Laura is staying in London who is like a character out of a Jane Austen novel.  But she disappears from the book after the scene shifts to The Priory.  Happily, Miss Silver, armed with her knitting bag and myriad Victorian maxims, is there, however, having been hired by Agnes to investigate some thefts at The Priory.  (Could it be their evacuees?)  

a cubist rendering of a triangle

I'm trying to pin down Miss Silver's age and here we find the retired governess turned sleuth was formerly a schoolmate of Lucinda, who presumably is around her cousin Agnes' age or a bit older.  The author herself was 65 when she wrote The Chinese Shawl.  She was born in 1877 and married a man old enough to be her father a couple of weeks after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, when she was 23.  

I think it's safe to assume that Miss Silver is around the age of the author.  People find her anachronistic in Fifties mystery, but after all there were then people, like the author, who had grown up under the reign of the first and last Empress of India and were young governesses when her son Edward ruled.

Miss Silver was in fact the governess of Randal Marsh, now Superintendent of fictional Ledshire, where The Priory is located.  He was introduced two years earlier in the more thrillerish Miss Silver mystery Danger Point, which in the current one we are told took place in Autumn 1939.  We also are told that Miss Silver actually saved Randal's life in the much alluded to case of the poisoned caterpillars, which presumably took place in the spring of '39, not to long after the events detailed in Lonesome Road.  Someone needs to do a pastiche of this lost case!

Conversation between these Randal and his former governess is affectionate but very proper and genteel, with much exclaiming of "My dear Randal!" and "My dear Miss Silver!"  Perhaps a bit precious but the author herself has plenty of experiences of governesses and nannies and no doubt knew her stuff. 

The murder investigation works its way to a dramatic--and dramatically satisfying--conclusion, and all in all I would say this is one of the best Miss Silver detective novels, pleasingly redolent with wartime atmosphere.  I see I haven't mentioned Laura's beautiful Chinese shawl, a gift from her father to her mother.  Don't worry: it's mentioned a lot in the book and it does play a part in the tale.  

Oh, yes, by my count Miss Silver coughs 22 times.  That cough will get more pronounced.  

Wentworth Wednesdays Putting One's Foot in It: The Blind Side (1939), Patricia Wentworth

Patricia Wentworth published 65 crime novels, 32 of them Miss Silvers and 33 of them not-Miss Silvers. As part of my Patricia Wentworth book project I'm rereading her books and trying to determine how many are true detective novels.  Grey Mask, the first Wentworth Silver, which was published back in 1928, is very much in thriller mode with a fiendish masked master criminal and his gang and an imperiled hero and heroine.  The next three Silvers--The Case Is Closed (1937), Lonesome Road (1939) and Danger Point (1941)--all have thrillerish elements.  However, the next one in the Silver series, The Chinese Shawl, is a classic manners mystery, absolutely a true detective novel and a very good one indeed.  (I hope I'll be talking about it this Silver Sunday.)  

Most of the 28 Silvers published in the series' heyday--the years between 1943 and 1961 (or really 1958)--are true detective novels, albeit with a good deal of romance in the mix.  But Wentworth also had some non-Silvers that are true detective novels, beginning, I believe, with The Blind Side (1939), in which Wentworth introduced her series Yard cops Inspector Ernest Lamb and his posh subordinate Sergeant Frank Abbott.  

The next year Lamb and Abbott would appear in another detective novel, Who Pays the Piper?, then in 1943, the year of the pivotal shift in Wentworth's writing, she would pair the two policemen with Miss Silver is Miss Silver Deals with Death, aka Miss Silver Intervenes.  Ernest Lamb would then appear in a dozen more Miss Silver novels, the last of them The Listening Eye in 1955, and Frank Abbott another twenty including the last in the Silver series, The Girl in the Cellar, in 1961.  

Appearing without Miss Silver in The Blind Side, Lamb and Abbott make a classic English cop team, Lamb being the older, married, more rough-hewn one and Lamb the younger, posher-than-thou public school educated type who started becoming quite prevalent in English mystery in the Thirties.  

A leading example of the "glamor boy" type of Yard man is the King of the Swells, Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Roderick Alleyn.  Then there are posh young detective sergeants like E. R. Punshon's Bobby Owen, John Rhode's Jimmy Waghorn and Freeman Wills Crofts' Rollo.  (I forget the latter's first name, but the surname "Rollo" always seems to indicate poshness in English mystery.)  

Lamb and Abbott are quite enjoyable here, even if they don't manage to solve the case.  This job is left to an amateur, the romantic hero in the tale, which reflects the author's thriller background.  This person is very similar to Wentworth's thriller heroes, a handsome and personable thirty-year-old India Army man named Peter Renshaw.  Practically all the major men in the author's life were Army, particularly India Army, including, from the latter group, her father, uncle and first and second husbands. 

Like Frank Abbott, Peter comes from an elite public school background, just like the men in the author's life.  Indeed, it turns out Abbott and Peter were at the same public school at the same time.  I quote this exchange between Lamb and Abbott, which is apt to provoke snickers today, especially from Americans:

"Well, sir, we were at school together for a bit.  He's older of course.  I--well, as a matter of fact, I fagged for him."

"And you say he's a cool card?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, remember you're not fagging for him now."

Get that, man: none of that Peter fagging!  Abbott's nickname at school was "Fug," so of course Peter calls him Fug throughout the story.  If Peter ever wrote a book about their relationship, doubtlessly he would have titled it My Fag Fug.  

Probably now I should back up a bit and explains just who gets murdered and who the suspects are.  The book is set at Craddock House, the ancestral London home of Ross Craddock, whose father divided the swell place into lucrative flats.  There's an all-important family tree, which doesn't appear until page 75 of the 1991 Warner Books edition I read, page 66 of the Forties Popular Library edition.  These things should always be frontis exhibits in my opinion.  

Death at the Flat

Anyway, at the opening of the novel Ross lives in a flat at Craddock House.  He let additional flats on the same floor gratis to his older first cousins, once removed, sisters Lucy and Mary Craddock, and to Peter, his first cousin.  Mary Craddock has recently passed away and Ross plans to evict her sister Lucy, who makes a habit of butting into his life about his rakish romancing of young, vivacious Mavis Grey, his second cousin and Lucy's niece.  Ross, you see, is something of a wicked man-about-town, don't you know.  Impetuous young stockbroker Bobby Foster doesn't like Ross' avid pursuit of Mavis either.

modern Dean Street Press ed.

Then there is another second cousin of Ross, pretty Lee Fenton, who has this little problem with sleepwalking.  Did she go sleepwalking after falling asleep in Aunt Lucy's flat while reading The Corpse with the Clarionet?  Was it she who left all those bloodstained footprints in Ross' flat on the morning of the murder? Drat!

When Ross gets shot in his flat early one debauched morning, all of his surviving relations, all of whom just happened to be on the scene at various times around the time of his death, are suspects.  Every one of them, it seems, had motives to kill the rich basta--erm, I mean, the poor victim.  

These complicated genteel class cousinly relationships are a staple of Patricia Wentworth novels, but the author also has some good characters of a more modest nature, like proud caretaker and Great War veteran Albert Edward Rush, who doesn't say "sir" to officers of the law, and his bedridden wife, as well as bibulous char Mrs. Green.  

The comic char is a staple, if not cliche, of not only Golden Age detective novels but more recent ones (see Ruth Rendell and PD James, for example); but she's done to a turn here.  And let's not forget that nosy spinster on from a floor above, Miss Bingham--Wilhelmina Ethel to be exact.  Wentworth knew her spinsters.  

This is a very enjoyable detective novel in the classic Thirties style, wryly amusing and brightly characterized with the love interest pretty lightly and pleasingly etched in; and it even manages a surprising ending--at least it was such to me.  Very much recommended.  

I will be interested to see whether the second Lamb and Abbott mystery maintains the standard set by The Blind Side.  And whether they can manage to solve the case themselves.  We know they never got to when Maud Silver was around.  

Just a Dell Will Do it: A Note and Query on the Dell Mapback Series, 1943 to 1951

Collectors of vintage paperback mystery fiction will know all about Dell mapbacks, those cute little paperbacks with the crime scene maps on the back covers.  According to Wikipedia there were at least 550 titles in the series between 1943 and 1951, mostly mysteries.  But did you know that #1 through #4 did not have maps on the back?  So they were not really in any way mapbacks.  I have the first two, the first of which is Death in the Library by Philip Ketchum, a really obscure choice it would seem for the first Dell not-mapback.  The second is Dead or Alive by Patricia Wentworth, which oddly is I think the only time Dell ever published her work. (She was mostly published in the US in pb by Popular Library.)   

#4 was Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery, later reissued with a map. But I don't know what #3 was.  Now it's been bugging me.  Does anyone out there know?  Please tell me!

Sunday Nights with Silver: The Evolution in the Crime Writing of Patricia Wentworth

By the late 1930s "manners mystery" was all the rage in the world of English detective fiction.  Pioneered and actively propagandized by Dorothy L. Sayers, manners mystery aimed to merge the detective novel with the mainstream novel of manners, looking at live people, not just dead bodies, how they live, not just how they died.  There is more focus on society, characters, love interest--traditionally a minor aspect of detective fiction--and usually plenty of social satire.  Dickens and Collins and Trollope are models. not so much Conan Doyle and S. S. Van Dine.  

Once Sayers achieved huge success in both the UK and US with her 1935 Lord Peter Wimsey manners mystery Gaudy Night, manners mystery naturally received great impetus.  Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh were deemed her most important followers and late Thirties books like Dancers in Mourning and Death in a White Tie are considered high points of manners mystery.  There were others as well, like Georgette Heyer, Gladys Mitchell and Josephine Tey, who produced manners mysteries.  Then there were Anthony Gilbert and Moray Dalton, women with male pen names who had long produced "novelistic" mysteries.  There were men who did so too, like Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake, whom I call the Detection Dons, the male counterparts of the Crime Queens.  Although not part of that group Henry Wade began writing notable novelistic mysteries, like Mist on the Saltings and Lonely Magdalen.  E. R. Punshon was another.

All this writing really came to a head in the late Thirties and early Forties and it forever changed the face of detective fiction.  While supposedly "pure" puzzle writers like John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie maintained their popularity, others, the so-called "Humdrum" mystery writers (just the facts, ma'am) like Freeman Wills Crofts, John Street and J. J. Connington, began to seem more old hat.  Christie and Carr actually produced more mannered mysteries in the Forties, like She Died a Lady and The Emperor's Snuff-box and Five Little Pigs and Taken at the Flood and The Hollow.  Even John Rhode introduced a handsome, young, public school educated cop, Jimmy Waghorn, into his Dr. Priestley mystery series in 1936.  

Another big contributor to English manners mystery, Patricia Wentworth, has gone generally unacknowledged as such, and invariably is left off lists of Crime Queens, despite her popularity for a century now.  Why is this?  

Partly, I think, because she emphasizes the love element more strongly than any of these other writers, even Sayers when she has Lord Peter a-Wimseying Harriet Vane.  The Wentworth Miss Silver mysteries may have struck people almost as romance novels, which isn't really quite correct in my opinion.  

The author also was essentially a romantic thriller writer for much of her career.  For fifteen years "shockers" dominated her output between 1923 and 1938; then something starts to change.  In 1939 she published, as was her custom, two mysteries, these her third Miss Silver novel Lonesome Road and The Blind Side, which introduced her series police characters Detective Inspector (later Superintendent) Ernest Lamb and Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Frank Abbott, the latter one of those posh, public-school educated coppers who had become popular in manners mystery.  

The first Miss Silver, Grey Mask, dating back from 1928, is a thriller, though even here there is genuine wit and satire in PW's portrayal of the naive young heiress who is the target of the master criminal's wicked plot.  You might almost call it a manners thriller.  Wit and satire is not something thrillers of the period are known for.  Still, it's very much a thriller.  

The second Miss Silver novel did not appear for nine years.  PW had had a few intermittent series characters before, Benbow Smith and Frank Garratt, and in 1937 she decided to add Miss Silver to her recurring character crime file. (Critics had loved Grey Mask back in 1928, but they had not taken much notice of Miss Silver.)  The Case Is Closed actually is built around a murder problem, spiritedly investigated by a bold young woman, Hilary Carew, but the the story as it unfolds is essentially thrillerish, as Hilary's life is repeatedly put in peril.  Miss Silver appears and professionally investigates, but her work is kept in the background.

When Miss Silver next appears in Lonesome Road in 1939 she is very much on the scene as she attempts to determine who is trying to kill a rich middle-aged heiress, Rachel Traherne.  She actually stays incognito as a guest at Rachel's country mansion. (Rachel doesn't want to bring the police in because it appears the villain in a family member and she does not want bring down bad publicity on innocent people.)  

This is a detective novel, but there are still strong thrillerish elements in that it does not detail the investigation of a murder problem, but rather the attempts on the life of the heroine and the attempt to determine who is behind them.  Christopher Morley compared Lonesome to Rebecca, and it does have the suspenseful quality of a Alfred Hitchcock thriller. I would actually say that the earlier The Case Is Closed is more of a true detective novel.   

But then we come to The Blind Side, from the same year, which introduces Wentworth's yard men.  Here I think we see the true genesis of Wentworth's detective fiction.  The next year Lamb and Abbott would appear as a team in another detective novel, Who Pays the Piper?, while Miss Silver would appear comparatively briefly in a thrillerish mystery, Danger Point, in 1941.  

In 1942 there would be Pursuit of a Parcel, a topical wartime thriller with Lamb and Abbott and an older character Frank Garratt.  Then in 1943 Wentworth would unite Lamb and Abbott with Miss Silver in a true detective novel, Miss Silver Deals with Death, aka Miss Silver Intervenes.  After this all but one of her crime novels would be Miss Silver mysteries, for the most part true detective novels rather than thrillers.  The Miss Silver books are investigative manners mysteries in the Crime Queen mold and deserve to be credited as such.  Let's finally give Patricia Wentworth the crown she deserves.

On Wentworth Wednesdays I'll be talking about The Blind Side.  But I'll try to find some space next week for something non-Wentworth as well.  

"Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse": The Retro Homphobia of Francis Nevins' Cornell Woolrich Biography First You Dream, Then You Die (1988)

This piece is largely culled from my 55-page article at Crimereads from a few years ago, but I wanted to highlight here the raging homophobia in this book, given my recently publicized assertion that a certain retrograde comment by Otto Penzler, publisher of Dream, suggests how a homophobic book like Dream won an Edgar in 1989.  (This offended Otto so he apparently bounced me from doing an intro for Mysterious Press on gay crime writer Rufus King.)

Penzler's comment was actually a claim that men supposedly write better than women because men try to write literature, so it wasn't about homosexuality at all. Yet retrograde sexism and retrograde homophobia frequently go hand-in-hand.  Though actually I said it was Nevins' bio that was homophobic, not the publisher of the book.

But what I was trying to get at and maybe not conveying in a one sentence comment, was that there must have been an obtuseness on the part of Otto and other people (like the Edgar Award committee) not to see the dreadful homophobia in the book, assuming they really read it.  Or maybe they simply shared Nevins' attitudes.  I don't know.  I think people just easily bought into the "self-hating homosexual" cliche which is the keystone of Nevins' Woolrich thesis.  This cliche was dutifully trotted out for decades by people writing about Woolrich and it still is even today, so it's been a hardy perennial.

Writer Barry Malzberg has said that Nevins regards homosexuality as a "pathological" condition.  It does appear that way from his writing, because Nevins seems convinced that to be gay (a term he never uses) is to be self-hating.  If you're interested in this subject read below the excerpt from my article.  It still amazes me how the nasty anti-gay attitudes emanating from the book never drew any offended notice, with a few exceptions like Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, until my article appeared.  Malzberg and Pronzini are straight guys and they definitely managed to notice it. Anyway, here's the article excerpt.  Gird your loins and grab your wig for this look at homophobia in the Eighties AIDS era!

Self-hating, tearful Catholic homosexual and supportive friend in the original film version of
The Boys in the Band (1970)

How is the self-loathing homosexuality which Francis Nevins believes to have been the black wellspring of Cornell Woolrich’s unique writing genius reflected in the author’s voluminous crime fiction?  Here are examples from Dream of what Nevins terms "homosexual symbolism" in Woolrich's work:

"I was carrying Death around in my mouth," the reporter tells us near the end [of the story "Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair," where a dentist fills cavities with cyanide], and if one is determined to find subtle traces of Woolrich's homosexuality everywhere in his work, one might as well begin here. (p. 129)

While struggling with Cook over a gun, the hobo is shot in the mouth (here we go again, homosexual symbol seekers!) (p. 141)

....they arrange for a pickpocket accomplice to take a ride on the same train that is bringing Bull to the state pen, sit in the seat behind the mobster and quietly puncture Bull's rear end with a hypodermic full of germs (homosexuality symbol hunters take notice!) (p. 157)

All these instances seem reductive to my mind--not to mention remarkably puerile and in dubious taste. Since Woolrich was a gay man, so the reasoning seems to run, inevitably any time in his tales when poison, bullets or germs enter a man's mouth or buttocks it symbolizes homosexuality. In this juvenile egg hunt for "homosexual symbols" Nevins focuses relentlessly on sex acts.  Is it Woolrich who associated gay sex with death or is it Nevins who has imposed this meaning on Woolrich's texts?  Dream appeared in 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, something which may have influenced Nevins' take on this matter.  Yet unless he was endowed with second sight, like his seer character in Night Has a Thousand Eyes/"Speak to Me of Death, Woolrich could not have foreseen this calamity.

I have read my share of Woolrich (granted, Nevins has read everything, as Dream makes abundantly clear) and for my part I cannot say that in the author’s work I am strongly struck by intimations of same-sex attraction on his part.  Woolrich often does write well from a woman’s viewpoint, but he writes convincingly from a tough male viewpoint as well.  Seemingly absent from Woolrich’s fiction is the sustained interest in the male body which I have found in the work of gay male vintage crime writers like Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb (aka Patrick Quentin/Q. Patrick/Jonathan Stagge), Rufus King, Milton Propper and Todd Downing. 

I am powerfully struck in Woolrich’s work by an aching depiction of loneliness, despair and doom, yet, Nevins notwithstanding, this is not a state of mind which is specific to gay men. Any person, whatever his or her sexual orientation, might have these feelings and give expression to them in fiction.

Given Nevins’ writing about Woolrich, it is not surprising to see that he authored an 1977 article about Milton Propper, identifying him as another “tragic” homosexual, and that in a 2010 Mystery*File article he condemned Patricia Highsmith along the same lines as Woolrich, whom he passingly denigrates in his harshest terms yet: “If you think Cornell Woolrich was something of a psychopath and a creep, you don’t know the meaning of those words till you’ve encountered Highsmith.  Both, of course, were homosexual.  I gather from [Joan Schenkar’s biography] that Highsmith…was never terribly comfortable with being a lesbian….Woolrich was perhaps the most deeply closeted, self-hating homosexual male author that ever lived.”

If you are sensing an invidious theme here, I would hazard to guess that you are right.  Elsewhere in Dream Nevins refers passingly to “the special agonies of the homosexual whose religious roots are Catholic” (Woolrich’s father had been a nominal Catholic and Woolrich adopted the faith, at least nominally, near the end of his life); and he speculates that Woolrich and Catholic film director Alfred Hitchock, who adapted a Woolrich short story as his renowned flick Rear Window, shared the same pessimistic worldview--that the world was “a hideous and terrifying place”--on account of their “longing for physical relationships which the obesity of the one man and the homosexuality of the other seemed to put forever out of reach.” Evidently both stoutness and queerness constituted crippling hurdles to human happiness in Nevins’ mind.

When gathering such black pearls of wisdom about members of the queer community in my basket of literary boners, I am frequently reminded of the morbid line from the pioneering if at times problematic queer film The Boys in the Band, which premiered in March 1970, just a year-and-a-half after Cornell Woolrich’s death.  “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse,” pronounces one of the film’s characters.  (Yes, this character is a self-loathing, lapsed-Catholic gay man.)  In his writing about Woolrich and other crime writers whom he deems to have been queer, Nevins seems to have drawn this dismal credo deep into his heart.