Spirit Messages from MAGA World: The Surly Sullen Bell/Lost Lake (1962), by Russell Kirk

Michigan writer and intellectual Russell Kirke (1918-1994) has been called the Forgotten Father of American Conservatism and the greatest twentieth-century conservative man of letters, but, outside of strictly politics, he was also a proponent and practitioner of the classic ghost story most prominently associated with the English academic medievalist scholar M. R. James (1862-1936).  

Detective fiction, as we know here, often has been called an inherently conservative form; and so has been termed supernatural fiction.  One of the most interesting pieces in Kirk's first supernatural short fiction collection, The Surly Sullen Bell (originally published in 1962 and reprinted in 1966 as Lost Lake, arguably a more appropriate title), is its afterword, "A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale," which makes precisely this assertion. It was originally published in The Critic in 1962.

no one who tries to live beside Lost Lake lives very long....

In his Note Kirk argues, as others have, that ghostly fiction derives its frisson from the reader's susceptibility to a belief in the supernatural.  Materialists, so this argument runs, will be far less inclined to feel shivers from the specter of, well, spectres.  Yet even purely materialistic people want to believe in something, a fact reflected in their escape reading.  If one rejects God and His Heavenly Host, one perforce turns to the likes of hard-boiled dicks and little green men.   Saith Kirk:

To most modern men having ceased to recognize their own souls, the spectral tale is out of fashion, especially in America....Perhaps the cardinal error of the Enlightenment was the notion that dissolving old faiths, creeds, and loyalties would lead to a universal sweet rationalism....Credulty springs eternal, merely changing its garments form age to age.  So if one takes away from man a belief in ghosts, it does not follow that thereafter he will concern himself wholly with Bright Reality; more probably, his fancy will seek some new field--possibly a worse realm.  

Thus stories of the supernatural have been supplanted by "science-fiction"....[M]any people today have a faith in "life on other planets" as burning and genuine as belief in a  literal Heaven and literal Hell was among twelfth-century folk, say--but upon authority far inferior....Having demolished, to their own satisfaction. the whole edifice of religious learning, abruptly and unconsciously they experience the need for belief in something not mundane...they take up the cause of Martians and Jovians.  As for Angels and Devils, let alone bogles--why, hell, such notions are superstitious!  

On the covers of Sixties Gothic
paperbacks heroines have always 
lived in castles.  

As for crime fiction, Kirk manages to get off a shot against the hardboiled stuff, which he sees as providing the readers the spiritually banal thrill of "real horrors": 

The august schools of Mr. Dashiell Hammett and Mr. James M. Cain provide for appetites that find phantasms not sufficiently carnal.

I'm not sure what Kirk, a confirmed Anglophile, made of classic, genteel detective fiction of the type associated with the English Crime Queens, which flourished between the wars right along with the sort of classic supernatural fiction which MR James wrote.  I suppose at mid-century it did seem for a time in the field of escape fiction that the carnal ashcan realists and the imaginative sci-fi scribes were carrying the day, but I don't believe that the classic frights and thrills epitomized by writers like MR James and DL Sayers ever really went out of fashion.  

But that's Kirk as the intellectual theorist.  How was he as a practitioner of that dark art which he preached?  The Surly Sullen Bell, or Lost Lake as I shall shall call it henceforward, collects ten pieces, one of which, "Lost Lake," is not fiction (purportedly).  Ironically it's one of the best pieces in the collection. Kirk was a natural essayist.  

Russell Kirk, man of the people

"Lost Lake" is all about Mecosta County, Michigan (where the author lived), as he sees the place.  Mecosta is a county in north central Michigan, about an hour north of Grand Rapids, with a population of about 40,000 people, 93% of that white and 4% black.  (It's about double today what it was back in 1960.)  The largest habitation is the county seat, Big Rapids, with about 8000 people.  

Median income is about $34,000, with 16% of the population living below the poverty line.  Barack Obama came within 137 votes of carrying the county in 2008, but since then it has gone increasingly Republican in every presidential election, with the Nameless One taking about 62% of the vote against Joe Biden in 2020, even with all the Democratic election fraud that MAGA says rampantly occurred all across America, but particularly in swings states like Michigan.  (Guess in that state it all took place in Detroit.)  

Recently, the county has been engulfed in controversy over the planned building of an electric car battery plant with Chinese connections. In August JD Vance showed up in Big Rapids to denounce the plan.  

So opens Kirk's essay about the place:

A fatality clings to some places:  not merely to historic houses or to battlefields, but to obscure corners recorded only in the short and simple annals of the poor.  One such place--almost at the back of my old house in Mecosta, Michigan--is Lost Lake, with the derelict fields and neglected woods around it.  The genius loci is malevolent.

...Mecosta is an impoverished and forgotten village, set in a township that has only two real farms cultivated.  A mile-long stretch of wide street, faced with false-fronted white frame buildings as in a western movie set: that is Mecosta.  There are more gaps than buildings along the streets nowadays, and our biggest store burned recently.  

Mecosta: a village of false fronts and great gaps

This is a terrifically well-written and deeply evocative piece about what the author deems a magnificently creepy region.  If you want to commune with witches and hants come to macabre Mecosta, he could be saying.  But it's also kind of horror porn-ish?  The jury roll includes "the names of indigent persons, as a means of poor relief," Kirk tells us.  But he treats the appallingly ignorant poor of Mecosta as ghostly material for our entertainment.  It feels like the Midwest version of Deliverance.

Kirk at Piety Hill before it burned down in 1975

I wouldn't harp on this except for the fact that as a traditionalist conservative Kirk, I gather, idealized feudal European society, with its fixed hierarchies and social structures.  

Certainly he disliked modern, progressive, "big-government" do-gooders, brimming with ambitious plans to upset the social order and help out, even raise up, the people in "backward" parts of the country.  

Kirk himself had a family home in Mecosta: Piety Hill, built by his mother's grandfather in 1878.  (Another source says 1868.)  To Piety Hill he retreated after he quit his job teaching at Michigan State University, to much newspaper fanfare contemptuously denouncing the college as nothing more than a degraded diploma mill that had reduced its professors to the status of multiple-choice testing "menials."  Kirk did not intend to be a mere cog in an academic machine, even a brightly polished one.  

out of the ashes: Piety Hill II

With the success of his classic book The Conservative Mind (1953) and his thriller Old House of Fear (1961), Kirk was able to establish himself, like a veritable gentleman dilettante, as an independent scholar and public intellectual and practitioner of idiosyncratic aristocratic noblesse oblige.  Piety Hill was referred to as Kirk's "ancestral home," as if he were some sort of European feudal lord, an American seigneur.  

When Piety Hill--which appears originally to have been a modestly Italianate, rambling, if not ramshackle, frame structure--burned to the ground in 1975, Kirk replaced it with a modern building, rather synthetically archaic.  Perhaps he meant it for a Scottish keep out of the romantic tales of Sir Walter Scott, apparently a favorite author of his.  The Kirks of course were of Scottish descent.

That's the thing about Kirk; there's something synthetic to him.  As he freely admitted his maternal great-grandfather was a lumber baron who despoiled the countryside and his maternal grandfather was a banker.  He was born and grew up in Plymouth, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where his father was a railroad engineer.  Banks and mills and irons rails--one can't get much more of a capitalist bourgeois background than that.  

Born to be brainy
Russell Kirk was a
bookwormish young man.

Kirk has been called a "northern agrarian" (to distinguish him from the Southern Agrarians), but his own family helped industrialize Gilded Age America and deforest the Michigan countryside.  Kirk may have fancied himself a genteel agrarian, but his privilege was obtained through rapacious modern industrial capitalism.  Only settled on the eve of the Civil War, had Mecosta with its sandy soil ever been a utopia of sturdy, ruggedly independent farmers before the lumber mills came along in the postbellum period?  In any event, what was afterward to be done for the dispossessed people of Mecosta, besides using them as local color in rural fright tales?  Of those earnest men and women from the government who wanted to help, I suppose Kirk would have said that "I'm from the government and I want to help" are some of the most terrifying words in the English language.

In Kirk's stories these impudent government interlopers invariably come to bad ends, and it seems that the author believes this is just what they deserved for their humanistic folly.  Kirk seems to want Mecosta to stay just as he sees it: a dark breeding ground for loathsomely lovely horrors.  

It's really rural horror porn like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, albeit much more tasteful and refined.  And the way Kirk portrays it, the lesser people in Mecosta--the peasant class, if you will--despises the interlopers just as much as Kirk does, if not more.  They may roll around in the ghastly muck but they like that muck just the way it is, thank you.  Progress?  I'm agin' it!

This is most obviously indicated in "Behind the Stumps," where nosy census taker and general human mediocrity and waste of space Mr. Cribben comes to a bad end in the country, and "Ex Tenebris," which is actually set in an ersatz England, but carries the same message.  Then there's "Uncle Isaiah," where the title revenant materializes to rescue his WASP-ish, genteel nephew from the clutches of a nasty, ethnic rackets gangster demanding protection money.  

One of my two favorite stories in the collection, "What Shadows We Pursue," breaks out of this confining ideological framework.  In it the author rides another of his hobbies, this one bibliomania.  What happens when Mrs. Corr and her daughter sell off Dr. Corr's 11,000 volume book collection?  Read and see.  This one is for the bibliophiles out there.  And I do know you're out there.  Book collecting as far as I know has no ideological component.  

library at Piety Hill (Kirk did not watch television)

My favorite story, however, is "Off the Sand Road."  This one supposedly draws on a real-life case of suicide (?), which Kirk mentions in the "Lost Lake" essay.  In the late Forties (I presume) a recently-married World War Two veteran and tenant farmer supposedly hanged himself from a great sycamore tree on the property.  

In the story a Mecosta visitor from Chicago goes out for an afternoon of berry picking with two local boys, sons of his host.  They enter the "House of Death" as it's charmingly known, and therein the visitor finds, as the sun loses its intensity, clippings that shed grim light on the sycamore hanging affair.  This is a beautifully written, subtle and poignant ghost story (if a ghost story at all) that also feels like it could have come out of the pages of a true crime magazine.  Indeed, it could fittingly find a place in crime fiction anthologies.  So it just figures (sigh) that Kirk's biographer, Bradley J. Birzer, gave it scant attention in his biography.  

I was reminded not of MR James for once but rather of New England author Mary Wilkins Freeman, especially her classic story "The Wind in the Rose-Bush" (reviewed by me here).  This is the one tale from the collection that I would place in the pantheon of great ghost stories.  

Kirk has no real ideological axe to grind against modernism here, merely taking some glancing blows at tacky consumerism and evangelical religion, to him indices, seemingly, of shallow minds.  (Like so many conservative intellectuals, he converted to Catholicism, after marrying a Catholic in 1964.)  

Movie magazines, confessions-pulps, evangelical tracts, mail-order novelties--all these sorts of frivolous things distracted the juvenile mind of the vet's new wife, a member of the Followers of God church who has no appreciation or the rural, contemplative life.  The author himself didn't take a wife until he was 46 years old.

Russell Kirk letting his hair down, for him.

Russell Kirk died thirty years ago at the age of 75.  I don't know what he would have made of modern conservatism (if "conservatism" is the proper term for it), with its bizarre blend of apocalyptic evangelicals, billionaire tech bros, old-fashioned snake oil salesmen and grifting internet influencers. Talk about a witch's brew!  They make the Gilded Age tycoons and their tyros gleam like 24 karat gold.  Are tarnished people like Elon Musk, Hulk Hogan, Laura Loomer avatars of the Permanent Things which Kirk so venerated?  

The Kirks didn't even own a television set, so I can't imagine what he would have made of social media.  Yet, setting these quandaries aside, at least Russell Kirk's ghost stories can be enjoyed by the spiritually agnostic, despite what he himself argued, and the politically disengaged, if not downright disgusted.  The best of these tales stand as genuine art in this form.  

Would it make bibliophile Kirl happy that little Mecosta, a village of just a few hundred people, has a bookstore with an inventory of 90,000 volumes?  Knowledge is power and power to the people!  Deliver us from abject ignorance.  Say what you will about Mecosta, I just wish there was a bookstore like this in Memphis where I live.  

located at the former drugstore, behind the false front, a bookstore with 90,000 volumes
just watch out for ghosts jostling you in the aisles

Brown Study: Correcting Some of the Biographical Details on Fredric Brown

I looked into the biographical information on Fredric Brown over the weekend and found a lot of it is wrong.  So I thought I would go over some of the issues here.  It strikes me that "Brownie," to use his high school nickname (though in spite of his surname he was blond), was one of the most important mid-century noirists or hard-boiled writers.  Much of his work is back in print again, but he still seems not to get quite the credit that he should in my view (and the view of those in his coterie of devotees, one of whom is Lawrence Block).  

The hard-boiled triumvirate of Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald seems, after having been set for a half-century or more, something inviolable, while in noir Highsmith, Goodis and Thompson have been rather more the thing with genre critics.  Woolrich too, to some extent, though some critics like Julian Symons hated Cornell's work.  Symons didn't even deign to mention Brown in his idiosyncratic but once very influential survey Bloody Murder, even in the last edition, from 1992, after some of Brown's books had been reprinted.  

Fredric Brown may be too plot-driven for critics to take seriously and perhaps he has too many alcoholic loser protagonists for mass appeal.  Raymond Chandler thought the hard-boiled fiction which he himself wrote was vastly more "realistic" than the genteel English and American variety, but the truth is hard-boiled fiction is like a lot of genre wish-fulfillment fiction; it's just promulgating a different sort of fantasy, one geared more toward men than women.  

Instead of poisoned tea and scones at the vicarage, it's sluggings and shootouts in the back alleys; but the latter is, if anything, far more removed from the lives of a lot of average middle-class mystery readers.  Certainly it is from mine.  I've sipped tea in polite company, though not with vicars, but the only hoodlum I ever "met," to my knowledge, was once when I was serving jury duty. 

Just another nice middle-class kid?  Fredric Brown's Senior Class photo (Class of '25)

I think people--more often men--who read hard-boiled fiction identify with the tough-guy protagonists.  Brown and for that matter Woolrich bros are a little too neurotic for mass appeal.  Even a lot of the noir anti-heroes are often tough guys.  They may be twisted, nasty murderers, sure, but they impose their will on others, at least for a time. (Often they meet their fatal matches in those mystic dames known as femmes fatales.)  

Brown's and Woolrich's men more often seem to be frightened, frazzled losers desperately on the run, at least in my experience.  These authors often identified with victims, Highsmith and Thompson with victimizers.  At least that's the theory running through my head at the moment.  I've read rather more Woolrich than Brown.  

We all know about the tough life, to some extent self-imposed, that Woolrich had, but what about our bud Brownie?  Like Woolrich, who was less than three years his elder, Brown was an only child of a marriage from around the turn of the century.  He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, two days before Halloween in 1906, meaning that, as I write this, his 118th birthday is fewer than 24 hours away.  If Brown were alive today, he would be the world's oldest person, beating out current title holder Tomiko Itooka of Japan, a mere lassie of 116.  

A conveniently located biographical page for Brown at the Ohio Center for the Book--his wikipedia page is rather inadequate--obviously draws on Jack Seabrook's interesting thirty-year-old critical study of the author, but a lot of the biographical information in it from 1993 simply is wrong.  

According to this bio Brown's parents were Karl Lewis Brown, a newspaperman, and Emma Amelia Graham; and he was born and grew up in Cincinnati.  His mother died in 1920, when he was 14, and his father died the next year.  Brown supposedly resided with a family friend until he graduated from high school in 1922 at the age of 15.  

He also had an uncle in Oxford, Ohio, who helped him out as his guardian and he worked as an office boy in a "machine tool jobbing firm" until 1924.  Supposedly three years later he attended single semesters at Hanover College in Indiana and the University of Cincinnati.  

In 1929 he married Helen Ruth Brown, a woman to whom he may have been distantly related.  This ostensibly was after his, lonelyhearts like, only ever having corresponded with her and seen her likeness in a photo.  

In 1930 the newlywed couple moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Brown worked as a proofreader and typesetter for the Milwaukee Journal.  It would be close to the end of the decade before he started placing stories in the pulps, leading to an explosion of productivity in the Forties and Fifties, though Brown, in poor health and an alcoholic (I suspect), would essentially be played out by the mid-Sixties.  He lived on until 1972, dying at the age of 65.  He had divorced Helen and married again, in the Forties after the war, and for his health went to live with his second wife in the Southwest, in New Mexico and later Arizona, leaving Helen to raise their two boys.  

one of Grandpa Waldo's
instructional pamphlets

Much of Brown's early life detail is, however, as I have stated, wrong in detail.  If people relied on written material from the author for this information, he was not, for whatever reason, being truthful.  

One strange thing is an omission of fact: Fredric Brown actually had quite a prominent grandfather, Waldo Franklin Brown, who died at the age of 74 in 1907, the year after Brownie was born.  It seems odd that the author never would have mentioned Waldo.  Had his father and grandfather been alienated from each other?  It's not an unreasonable inference to draw, as we shall see.  

Karl moved from his family's little home town of Oxford, Ohio to Cincinnati, where in 1894 he married Emma Graham, daughter of a mail clerk, when he was 22 and she was 20.  Karl was a correspondence clerk with what seems to have been a rather shady mail-order business (see below). 

Karl and Emma did not have their first and only child, Fredric W. Brown, until 1906, after a dozen years of marriage, while Waldo Brown married twice, in 1859 and 1871 (after the death of his first wife), and sired six children between 1861 and 1874.  His second wife, Laura Alma Cross, by whom he had two sons, Karl and Linn, was a schoolteacher who graduated from Oxford Female Institute.  She died in 1929 at the home of her son Linn in Oxford at the age of 88, outliving not only her husband Waldo but her son Karl and daughter-in-law Emma.  

Oxford Female Institute
Fredric's grandmother Laura Cross Brown
graduated from this school in 1857.

Waldo Brown was actually quite a distinguished man, having been a nationally known progressive agriculturist who edited the farm pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer and Gazette.  He frequently published highly valued farming pamphlets as well as newspaper articles under the name "Johnny Plowboy."  Up until the advent of little Brownie himself, the Great Waldo aka Johnny Plowboy was easily the most famous and distinguished person in the Brown family.  

On his father's side Fredric Brown was descended from New England stock going back to Massachusetts and Vermont, while on his mother's side he was descended from the Grahams: Presbyterians, surely Scots-Irish, going back to Pennsylvania.  His mother Emma's grandfather was Reverend Jacob Graham, minister of the gospel at Graham's Chapel in Lodi, a tiny village in rural Ohio.  No relation to the late Reverend Billy Graham of North Carolina as fas I know, though the lines probably intersect somewhere in Scotland if one goes back far enough.  

Great-Grandfather Graham

Fred--let's go to his nick as an adult--apparently later claimed his father was an atheist, as he was himself.  His mother's Graham ancestors would not have been happy with that, nor so would his father's Brown ancestors.  

Grandpa Waldo was a Presbyterian Church elder and Sunday-school superintendent for two decades.  One of Waldo's brothers was a Presbyterian minister.  I'm guessing the Browns were originally English Puritans who made the switch as the stern righteousness of Puritanism and Congregationalism attenuated in the 18th century.  

Fred's two sons with his first wife would be baptized within the Presbyterian Church, despite their father's atheism. Maybe Helen insisted.  Fred stated that he himself was made to attend a Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati between the ages of 9 to 14.  He called these years (1915 to 1920) the "most mixed-up period of my life." 

The Brown house in Newport, Kentucky

This was probably Brownie's bedroom.  The furnishings seems strangely appropriate.

For a few years years the Browns lived across the Ohio River in the small city of Newport, Kentucky (pop. then about 30,000) in a narrow two story brick row house on Linden Avenue.  They were living there when the census was taken in 1910, when Fred was a small child, along with Emma's widowed mother Sarah Graham.  Fred's father Karl's occupation was listed as "correspondence clerk."  He was not a newspaperman.

Why did the family move from Cincinnati across the river to Newport in an adjacent state?  Possibly because Karl landed in hot water in Cincy.  In 1908, when he was a salesman for Gray Manufacturing Company, a maker of an electroplating apparatus, he was arrested on a warrant sworn by visiting Mexican businessman Benjamin Arboleda, who charged him with obtaining from him under false pretences a draft for nearly $420 (about $14,000 today).  

I do not know the outcome of this case, but in 1911 Karl was back in court again in Cincinnati, where he testified in a federal mail fraud case concerning vacuum cleaner makers R. Armstrong and Company, for whom he was bookkeeper.  Both this concern and Gray Manufacturing Company were owned by the same individual.  

I'm sensing these mail order firms were somewhat on the shady side (more on this coming up in future).  From his father I think young Fred must have gotten a lot of the feel in his fiction for urban seediness and petty criminality, which he often transposed to the more bankable burg, for a writer, of Chicago.  

The Brown house in Cincinnati

Yet Karl managed in spite of brushes with the law, for in 1920 the Browns were still living in Cincinnati, residing in an old but attractive Italianate brick house on Chase street.  Karl was now the managing a machine tool company.  But then the roof caved in on the browns, figuratively speaking.  

The chronology of events from Fred's life in the Twenties is, to be blunt, rather screwed-up.  Let's get started on this.  

First, Fred's mother Emma did not die in 1920, she died in 1923 (apparently from cancer), while his father did not die in 1921, but five years later in 1926.  

These are still untimely deaths, to be sure, at ages 50 and 54 respectively, but why did Fred move the dates up, if that is what he did, to make himself an orphan at age 15?  He actually became an orphan at nearly 20 (still terrible).  His mother died when he was 17.  He wrote that Emma's death, after he prayed and prayed to God not to allow her to die, caused him to lose his faith in God for good. 

Graham's Chapel

It was Fred's Grandmother Graham who died in 1920, at age 72.  Granted, to lose his whole immediate family--his grandmother, mother and father--at such a young age in the space of six years would have been devastating to most people.  

The dates of Fred's graduation from high school are also wrong.  He did not graduate from high school at the age of 15 in 1922, he graduated three years later, just like most people, when he was 18.  

Nor was he an orphan when he graduated, as his father did not pass away until the next year.  Again, did Fred lie about this, and if so why--to make himself seem like a prodigy?  Or has this just been an error by researchers?  

The "machine tool jobbing firm" with which Fred was employed as an office boy would have been the business his father managed in the Twenties, R. Armstrong Manufacturing Company.  He later wrote a novel drawing on these work experiences: The Office, published in 1958, the same year that Cornell Woolrich published his straight novel Hotel Room, which similarly drew on details from his own life.  Odd that both men both made bids for mainstream writing success the same year.  

Fred's supportive Oxford, Ohio uncle was Linn Waldo Brown, his father's younger brother, for whom Fred would name his younger son, Linn Lewis Brown, in 1932.  (His elder son was named James Ross Brown, Ross being the middle name of his father-in-law; see below.)  

It was Linn, not Karl, who was a newspaperman.  After having retired as a grocer, Linn became Oxford correspondent for the Hamilton Ohio Chronicle.  (Hamilton was a city of over forty thousand people located fifteen miles from Oxford.)  Linn was also Oxford's public health officer.  He too would die an untimely death, from a sudden heart attack at age 62 in 1937.  

Oxford was a small town of some 2000 people about thirty miles north of Cincinnati.  It was where Fred's Grandfather Waldo died and was buried and where his father Karl was buried, even though Karl's wife Emma was interred, along with her mother, in Cincinnati.  The Browns were lauded as one of "Oxford's oldest pioneer families."

Langstroth Cottage, where Fred's Aunt Florence was discovered bolt upright in her chair, dead

Karl and Linn had four older half-sisters: Alice, Winona, Florence and Berta.  One assumes that Fred would have known all of his Brown aunts, who passed away between 1929 and 1944.  Alice taught at Holbrook College, a teachers college at Lebanon, Ohio and took over the family farm after her father's death.  She served on the editorial staff of the farm paper Rural New Yorker, which reached thousands of subscribers throughout the northeastern United States.  Winona was a doctor who moved to New England and married a farmer there.  

For many years Fred's Aunt Florence, who died in 1929 at age 65, was a stenographer who later had charge of Langstroth Cottage at the Western College for Women in Oxford, a national historical landmark where famed beekeeper L. L. Langstroth, a friend of the Browns, lived for three decades.  Her lifeless body was discovered bolt upright in a chair in her bedroom by a history professor who had gone to check on her.  There's a good macabre story for the Fredric Brown reader, though Florence had not been stung to death by bees or, presumably, affrighted by supernatural midnight manifestations.  

Brown family friend
LL Langstroth with his hives

Another strange tale concerns Fred's Aunt Berta, who married Oxford farmer and antique dealer Alvin Gaston.  Berta made news back in 1922 for being one of the first women in the county to serve on a jury.  She served with eight other ladies and three men, which struck the local press of the day as a decided novelty; but presumably the ladies managed to pay attention and not lapse into womanly chatter about the latest labor-saving home appliances (vacuum cleaners say) and the best recipes for potato salad.  

After Berta died in 1934 at the age of 68, six months later in 1935 Alvin, said to be deeply despondent over the loss of his wife, committed suicide by slashing his own wrists and throat. Or so the county coroner concluded. (You can't read mysteries without being suspicious of this succession of deaths.)  

It really is something out of a Fredric Brown novel, with some notable parallels to The Screaming Mimi, recently reviewed here (antiques, razor death).  Interestingly, Alvin was said to have owned "one of the largest and finest collections of antiques in the state," much of which was sold at auction, the Gastons having had no children.  Alvin's hoard of more than 1000 Native American relics, including arrowheads and axes, went to his nephew Victor J. Smith, a prominent geologist at Sul Ross Normal College at Alpine, Texas.  

Not sold in stores!
One of the Armstrong 
Manufacturing Company's
amazing products, a home
vacuum cleaner for only $6
($199.99 today)

Was their incompatibility and conflict between Fredric Brown's parents?  There does seem to be a dichotomy between the pious Presbyterian backgrounds of the Browns and Grahams and Karl's trips to court to deflect business fraud accusations.  

Clearly, Karl was not an "honest farmer" like his father.  He seems rather more like one those guys you used to see on late night TV ads hawking miracle inventions and get-rich quick schemes (which now are seen on Youtube and in certain high profile, corrupt presidential campaigns).  

Then there's the matter of Fred's first wife, Helen, whom he wed in Cincinnati on April 13th, 1929.  He was 22, working as a stenographer, and she was 21 and staying at the Gibson House hotel.  

Helen and Fred weren't what I would call distantly related.  Rather they were, Poeish-like, second cousins.  Helen's father Thane Ross Brown was Karl Lewis Brown's more prestigiously employed first cousin.  On their marriage license the couple had to attest that they had never been previously married and that they were no nearer kin than second cousins, which just barely fit the bill.  The state of Ohio prohibited first cousin marriages on genetics grounds.  

It seems unlikely that Fred and Helen would never have met before they wed.  When they moved to Helen's native city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin after the marriage, they lived for a year or so with Helen's family at their attractive gabled, shingled Queen Anne-Dutch Colonial-Craftsman home.  

Thane Ross Brown, Fred's first cousin once removed, was a structural works civil engineer, as was his son, also named Thane, who worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression.  Intriguingly, Fred worked not with a newspaper but rather as a stenographer with a detective agency.  

And here I thought all of the detectives' secretaries back then were good-looking dames in love with their bosses!  Looks like our Brownie was already intrigued with crime.  He may not have been a Pinkerton op, like Dashiell Hammett was (however much Hammett exaggerated his work), but he may have typed up the reports of Pinkerton ops.  

Fred and Helen's little white picket fenced house in Milwaukee

By 1932, he and Helen, who now had two young sons, had moved out of her parents house and into a pretty yet tiny 1100 square foot cottage built in 1923 with two bedrooms and one bathroom.  Fred now worked as an agent for the New York Life Insurance Company.  He also began writing for trade journals.  In five years he would go to work as a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal and begin publishing the pulp fiction that would change his life.  

Here accounts of his life seem to get on surer ground.  But I thought I'd do my bit to straighten out the earlier years.  One thing I haven't found: what the "W" in Fred's name stood for.  Was it just possibly Waldo?  Maybe someone else has already discovered that, but I thought I would ask where's the "Waldo"?  

Noir Weekend Benders I--Scream Queen: The Screaming Mimi (1949), Fredric Brown

"It isn't a nice story.  It's got murder in it, and women and liquor and gambling and even prevarication."

--The Screaming Mimi

Eleven years ago I blogged a short review of my favorite Fredric Brown crime novel The Far Cry.  It remains such to me (and, indeed, one of my favorite crime novels generally), but, as some commenters at the time pointed out, other "Brownies" have their own favorites.  A lot of people plunk for The Screaming Mimi (1949), Brown's fifth crime novel, which followed by a couple of years his Edgar-award winning debut The Fabulous Clipjoint.  Part of its prominence in the Brown canon may be due to its having been filmed twice, in 1958 in the United States as Screaming Mimi and a dozen year later in Italy as the classic early giallo flick Lucello dalle piume di cristallo, aka The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.  

Relatively few of Brown's crime novels have been filmed, it seems, Knock Three-One-Two and His Name Was Death being the others, both French films.  (Knock also appeared as an hour long episode of the American television anthology series Thriller.)  So Mimi stands out in that respect.  

I think it also helps that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a really fine horror-thriller film, although it actually doesn't credit Brown in any way, a most unjust omission because if you have watched the film and read the book, the debt to Brown is obvious.  But more on this later, let's get the book, which is certainly an impressive piece of work in its own right.  

The book was clearly a big hit at the mid-century; I've seen ad copy claiming that it sold two million copies and was the "best-selling shock novel of all time," with five million readers.  It's easy to see why it would have been popular.  

It's "hard-boiled, but not offensively so," as Dorothy B. Hughes put it, with definitely salacious elements, but it's very nicely plotted so as to appeal to the puzzle fans.  Like so many of Brown's books it is narrated by an alcoholic: Bill Sweeney, an ace Chicago newspaper reporter and royal flush drunk, or a "down and out lush" as the back cover of my Carroll and Graf edition of the novel calls him.  

To be fair the book tells us insistently "Sweeney wasn't an alcoholic," that he just needs to have binges every so often.  Likely referencing Charles T. Jackson's bestselling novel The Lost Weekend (1944) and the Oscar-winning film made from it in 1945, the book assures us defensively: "There's that type of drinker [the periodic binger], too, although of late the alcoholics have been getting most of the ink."

Well, maybe so.  Nevertheless, I always feel like, when it comes to Brown's characters--and perhaps Brown himself--that this is just prevarication.  If, like Sweeney, you're waking up on a park bench, after a blackout binge, utterly broke and disgustingly disheveled and talking to God (actually another drunk named Godfrey), you're in pretty damn bad shape.  

Don't listen to me, listen to the Guardian, Gen Z!  If I have Gen Z readers.  

Sweeney even contemplates rolling a harmless passing fairy on the sidewalk for the cash in his wallet.  (Actually I'd better be careful with my slang here because while I mean robbing the word now can refer to, um, f---ing as well, and Sweeney most certainly does not want to dally sexually with a fairy princess of the queerer sort.) 

Here's Sweeney's thought process on this matter:

Someone was coming toward him on the sidewalk.  A pretty boy in a bright checked sport jacket.  Sweeney's fists clenched.  What would be his chances if he slugged the fairy, grabbed his wallet and ran into the alley?  But he hadn't ever done that before and his reactions were too slow.  Much too slow.  The fairy, edging to the outside of the sidewalk, was past him before Sweeney could make up his mind.  

How often in hard-boiled novels does the "hero"  contemplate assaulting and robbing hovering fairies, something admittedly that happened all too often in real life?  I don't even think the pretty boy in the loud plaid jacket actually was on the sexual make.  Our hero has really hit the skids morally.  

Judging by what Sweeney looks and must smell like after his binge, I don't believe any self-respecting queer--or maybe even a self-loathing one--would willingly get amorously close to this guy.  

This is an extended aside, but queer references in Brown's books are interesting and even suggestive, at least to me.  I'll leave aside the sentence, "Sweeney dragged deeply at the fag," cause it's referring, at least literally, to a cigarette, but a few pages later Sweeney is hitting up (threateningly) Goetz, a buddy (straight), for money.  He strips to take a badly needed bath at his bud's place and, naked, tells him: "Don't call copper, now, Goetz.  With me dressed this way, they might get the wrong idea."  Just a couple of congregating fairies!

Then there's an important point, later in the novel, when Sweeney is told about Raoul, owner of Raoul's Gift Shop.  Apropos of nothing, a man bluntly informs Sweeney: "This Raoul is a faggot."  A taxi driver  taking him to Raoul's tells Sweeney: "I know the joint.  The guy tried to make me once.  He's a queer."  Stop the presses!  QUEER MAN NAMED RAOUL OWNS GIFT SHOP!!!

Beware of "freaks" bearing gifts?

Observing the gift shop Sweeney comments cattily: "Two customers, both women, were within.  With Raoul, the proprietor, that made the feminine complement of the shop one hundred percent.  No one would ever have to wonder about Raoul."  YET Sweeney doesn't feel the urge to beat up Raoul and in the shop in fact is quite civil to the swish, in words and thoughts.  He even accompanies Raoul back to his apartment to get a glimpse of the man's statuary.  (Seriously.)  Outside Sweeney uneventfully passes Raoul's dinner guest for the evening: "A plump, beautiful young man with blonde curly hair."  

In short (on this matter), this is a book with quite a bit of incidental gay subject matter, or lavender color, shall we say.  In their language about gay males, avowedly straight men are pretty dismissive of them to other avowedly straight men as fairies, faggots, pansies, etc., yet on the other hand they are rather casual in their recognition and even acceptance of their existence, with Sweeney even adjuding some of them as pretty and beautiful even.  The attitude is actually better than what you would get from Elizabeth Linington's fictional cops in the Sixties and Seventies into the Eighties, God help us.  

I came across Brown's senior pic in his Cincinnati high school annual in 1925, when he would have been eighteen, and was struck to find that he was, yes, a pretty young man with blond hair.  Not plump; he stood 5'5 and 1/2" and weighed only 120 pounds.  I wonder whether he ever got hit on by other men?  

"Brownie" as he was inevitably known, gave his motto as "a poet is a musician of words" and he was stated to be one of the high school's "littérateurs."  Precociously, he had already "received notice" for his poems and stories.  He was also a "musician of note."  (He played the flute, not traditionally deemed the most masculine of instruments.)  The annual concluded with a reference to his diminutive stature, writing: "It seems that his ability is inversely proportional to his size, for he one of the smallest members of out class."  Yes, annual, small men can be talented at other things besides jockeying.  

the youthful author, age 18, small of stature, but of great promise

It was a surprising find for me, because if you see his author photo from the jacket of The Fabulous Clipjoint, which presumably was taken when he was about forty years old, Brown is not pretty at all and, indeed, he looks prematurely aged, even wizened.  He could pass for someone in his fifties.  

The fresh-faced, angelic-looking kid of two decades earlier is long gone.  He married young in 1929, a few years out of high school, to Helen Brown, a second cousin, then worked as a newspaper proofreader for the Post in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home of his wife's family, publishing his first pulp fiction a decade later, opening a floodgate of writing in the Forties.  

I would not have recognized the man from his later photo, which just goes to show that all those detective novels hinging on someone's looks having drastically changed over twenty years may not be so unlikely after all.  The malevolent miracles that booze and tobacco could do!

Fredric Brown around age forty. Sweeney's
description from the book, except for height
and weight, seems to fit the author to a T:
five feet eleven inches tall...a hundred and 
sixty-three pounds.  He had sandy hair that 
was receding at the front and getting a little 
thin on the top, but was mostly still there. 
He had a long thin face, 
vaguely horse-like, but not, on the   
whole, unpleasing to the uncritical eye. 
He looked to be about forty-three,
which is not stange, because that is how old
he really was.  He wore glasses with light-
colored shell rims for reading and working.

I suspect a lot of the drinking in Brown's books was biographical.  I don't believe any man can write that much about boozing without having partaken a great deal from the baneful bottle himself.  If you look at Sweeney's description in the book (see right), the author seems to be describing himself, barring height and weight, to which he adds inches and pounds.  

In a column from 1982 the late Ed Gorman wrote that Brown a decade earlier had "chain-smoked himself into a horrible death at age 65."  Me, I'm guessing that alcohol assisted in the push-off. I think pretty clearly this was a man bedeviled by a lot of demons.

But the fact that Brown wrote what he knew--stenographer at a detective agency, a newspaper proofreader and a writer for newspapers and pulps--gives his books a solid realistic base, even when he soars, as he often does, into flights of fantasy.  (He was a noted sci-fi writer as well and even his crime fiction has strong elements of the surreal and fantastic.) 

In Mimi, Sweeney loves classical music.  A whole page is devoted to Sweeney listening to Mozart's 40th Symphony, his favorite piece of music.  More biography, I am guessing.  

Now, let's get--finally--into the plot of Mimi.  

Wandering the streets of Chicago at night, thinking how to get some money after blowing his wad, Sweeney stumbles onto a most memorable crime scene indeed!  

Beyond a six-foot wide double doorway, in the lighted hall of an apartment building, is a beautiful, bleeding, blonde (female this time) lying prone on the carpet, a great dog over her, growling at onlookers.  Was she attacked by the dog?  No, it turns out that this is Yolanda Lang, Chicago stripper, and she uses the dog in her act.  (He unzips her dress, I kid you not.)  It seems she's the latest victim of the Ripper slayer who is going around stabbing beautiful blondes in Chicago, though fortunately she, unlike the other poor women, survived the attack.  

Sweeney is quite smitten with the lovely lady (especially after she ends up stark naked in the hallway) and he resolves to get back on the wagon again so her can get onto to Yolanda's.  This necessitates that he get his reporting job back, so he files a great eyewitness account of this latest Ripper attack.  His editor actually was using Sweeney's vacation days to cover his binge, so Sweeney still has some time left to investigate the Ripper killings on his own.  What he finds on his own bat is pretty astounding. 

Central to the grim mystery is an ebony statuette of a beautiful female body positioned in a stance of utter, abject fear, nicknamed "Screaming Mimi."  (This is where Raoul's Gift Shop comes in.) 

It seems that our deranged serial killer is dangerously obsessed with the mass-produced Mimi statuette.  Raoul happens to have another at this place and it's not a come-on from the gift shop owner. ("Would you care to see the statuette?...I assure you I have no ulterior motive Mr. Sweeney.")  

Now Sweeney has a copy....

I think that will suffice as a plot description.  I'll just add that the plot is clever indeed, probably an original spin on the serial killer plot.  I was not as emotionally engaged with The Screaming Mimi as I was with The Far Cry, I have to admit.  Mimi is more of a classic detective novel, with cops and quite a bit of discussion of alibis and timetables and the like, where Far Cry to me seems more like the intricately plotted, page-turning suspense novels of writers like Margaret Millar and Ruth Rendell. 

However, Mimi is very clever indeed and I am not surprised that it made it onto the big screen, though with the first go-round that probably had something to do with the fact that a stunning stripper is one of the main characters.  Although it changed a lot of things, the second film version is actually more faithful to the book. I'll have more to say about both film versions of the novel soon.  

Finally, I want to include one little bit of writing from the book that actually made me smile.  Fredric Brown can be a very funny writer.  The first thing I ever read by him, over forty years ago, was a reprint of his comic Fifties sci-fi novel Martians Go Home, which, admittedly, I hated at the time, but would probably better appreciate now.  Discussing the prior Ripper killings with a press colleague, Sweeney learns that one worked in Raoul's Gift Shop (yup, Raoul again), one was a B-girl (a pretty woman hired by a bar to get patrons to drink more) and one a private secretary.  This prompts Sweeney to ask sardonically:

"How private?  Kind that has to watch her periods as well as her commas?"  

Kudos to Brown the proofreader for slipping that line in the book!  It's almost as good as Hammett's gunsel.  

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."