Whence did our prolific lad Philip MacDonald derive the pen name "Martin Porlock"? My theory: he got the name by combining two villages in far northeastern Devon, about twenty-five miles apart by Exmoor National Forest, Combe Martin and Porlock. One of the early crime fiction books MacDonald wrote with his father Ronald, The Spandau Quid, was said to show great familiarity with Devon.
You can see Combe Martin and Porlock above in the northeastern corner of the map.
Next, where did the name of the titular house "Friar's Pardon" in Mystery at Friar's Pardon come from? I'm guessing from Rudyard Kipling's 1909 short story "A Habitation Enforced," about an old dilapidated house in rural southern England named Friar's Pardon. In his detective novel The White Crow MacDonald alludes suggestively to having read Kipling's book Soldiers Three as a boy. I'm betting that he read more than his fair share of Kipling.
My thoughts, anyway! What say you, my English and worldwide Anglophile readers?
One more Philip MacDonald detective fiction review and then on to something else. This one's of The Wraith, the sixth Anthony Gethryn crime novel and the first of three which the author published in 1931. By the way, I now think this is the correct chronological bibliographical information on the Gethryn novels.
Warrant for X, in UK The Nursemaid Who Disappeared 1938
The-Wood-for-the-Trees (short story, second place finish in Queen's Awards) 1947
The List of Adrian Messenger 1959
It's all a bit confusing, honestly, because some of the Gethryn novels were published first in the United States, sometimes under altered titles (see above). With his fifth Gethryn mystery The Maze, which was actually published originally in the U.S. under the title Persons Unknown at the end of 1930 and in England over a year-and-a-half later (1932!), MacDonald first attempted to do something new with his Gethryn crime fiction: what he subtitled, in the American edition, "An Exercise in Detection"--in other words, a "pure" detective novel, in which Gethryn analyzes an inquest transcipt to discover the identity of the murderer. The novel anticipates in this way the documentary popular "Crimefile" mysteries of the late Thirties.
With the next installment of the Gethryn crime investigation saga, The Wraith, MacDonald has Gethryn in 1931 talking over with his wife Lucia and a mystery writer friend named Toller his first murder case, one from over a decade earlier from 1920, several years before the events detailed in the debut Gethryn detective novel, The Rasp. The book is mostly narrated by Anthony himself, as he recalls the events from that time, though part of the novel is told as well in third person in 1931. The novel appears never to have been reprinted in paperback (though the Collins Crime Club reprinted it several times in hardcover) and consequently is one of the more obscure Gethryn titles.
Which is too bad, because The Wraith is, in my opinion, one of the better Gethryn titles, along with The Maze and Rope to Spare, the latter of which I recently reviewed here. It's actually rather reminiscent of Rope to Spare with Gethryn sojourning at an inn at a quaint, obscure English village. In The Wraith the village is the East Anglian habitation of High Fen, and the inn is The Good Intent.
Like in Rope to Spare, not to mention the non-series detective novel Mystery at Friar's Pardon, also published in 1931, events come to center on a country house, Fridays (in Rope it was Corners). This is the home of John Manx, one of the amateur gentleman scientists beloved of between-the-wars detective fiction and mystery thrillers. Manx, 53, whom Gethryn skeptically calls "a man with a few degrees and a lot of money," is said to be philanthropically "engaged in cancer research."
terrifi Italian giallo edition of The Wraith (Il Fantasma) see Death Can Read
Manx's blue-eyed, Titian-haired, "admirably-shaped" wife Joan, 31, has two "semi-permanent" neer-do-well male relations, her blond-haired second cousin Arthur and her dark-haired brother William. On the scene as well are Manx's dependent sister Penelope Marsh and niece Mary Manx. There's also Paul Grimdale, Manx's secretary, who is smitten with Joan.
Also featuring in the tale are the Reverend Battersby-Pickersgill and his wife and, rather more significantly, a certain Alfred Georgius Host, a disfigured Great War veteran and "cripple" who leases the West Lodge of Friday. A confirmed eccentric, he lives alone with a brood of beloved cats (not Manx cats as far as I know).
Someone, as the tale transpires, is cruelly and gruesomely killing off Host's cats, driving the poor man to distraction. Animal cruelty abominators be warned!
Host accuses Manx, the cancer researcher, of vivisecting his poor creatures. When Manx is found shot dead right between the eyes in his detached study known as the Hut, Host is the prime suspect, especially after the gun turns out to be his, but the case turns out to be rather more complicated than that....
Alfred Host on the Collins reprint cover. I don't do the whole cover because its a spoiler, for shame Collins!
Inspector Ruddock of the local police was lent to Gethryn for intelligence work during the late war, so of course he invites Gethryn, as coppers will, to help him on the case. Unfortunately Ruddock soon has everything ass-backwards and Anthony has to save the day, by means of some extremely high-handed methods, the sort of which Sapper's at time rather fascistic character Bulldog Drummond doubtlessly would heartily have approved.
The Wraith is a highly classical case, employing classic mystery devices of deception in a fun, bravura way. It's shorter than most if not all of the other Gethryns, some 70 or 75,000 words I estimate, and it would have been even shorter had the author not chosen to shift constantly between past and present, a device which gives the novel more of a modern feel and adds probably 10,000 words that could have been omitted had the events been told more directly.
Suggesting the comparative paucity of story, Gethryn actually solves the case about two-thirds of the way through and spends the rest of his time trying to extract a confession, keeping the police in the dark. This confession extraction, if you will, happens as well in Rope to Spare and, to a less time-consuming extent, in Friar's Pardon. You might say the thriller element simply will make its presence felt in a MacDonald detective tale somewhere.
Amusingly if you are a fan of the series, Gethryn brings in Spencer Hastings, his old pal from his literary review, The Owl, to help him out. A couple of journalist on the staff of The Owl appear in Rope to Spare, by the way.
JRR Tolkien colleague Charles Williams, a keen critic of detective fiction who preferred the outre sort of writer like MacDonald and John Dickon Carr, declared of The Wraith: "It is a creepy, ghoulish, facinating case, and suits Gethryn, who is an intellectual public-school sadist if ever there was one."
Definitely this case brought out not only the sadist in the cruel cat killer but in Gethryn himelf, who seemingly will stop at almost nothing in the name of justice. This is a novel which should film well, if one could get over certain logistical hurdles....
What does the title of the book mean, you may be asking yourselves? Well, you'll have to read this one for yourself and see, when it's reprinted. It hasn't been in English, as far as I know, for nearly ninety years.
I do have one quibble with what might have been dubbed Gethryn's First Case, however, besides the one that everyone who reads it will inevitably have. It has to do with
SPOILER DON'T READ IF YOU HAVENT READ THE BOOK
the matter of Host's background war record. Police get that information, we are told, from diaries at the West Lodge. Oh, come now, they would not have checked for his war record from the war office? How slipshod can you get?! It is interesting in light of MacDonald's own possibly embroidered war record, however.
Mystery writer Philip MacDonald completed the manuscript of Mystery at Friar's Pardon in August 1931 and in England it was published, under his new mystery writer pseudonym Martin Porlock, in October. The book was not published in the United States. Pardon was one of seven (!) novels published that year by MacDonald, the others being the Anthony Gethryn opuses The Wraith, The Choice and The Crime Conductor, the nonseries serial killer thriller Murder Gone Mad and the mainstream novels Harbour and Moonfisher, published under another pseudonym, Anthony Lawless.
With four crime novels under his own name under his belt, MacDonald evidently decided he needed a pseudonym for his non-Gethryn mysteries. Even Murder Gone Mad, which I call non-series, actually has as its lead investigator Inspector Pike from the Gethryn series.
1931 was the author's peak productive year as a novelist: in 1930 he published four novels and he would go on respectively to publish two and three novels in both 1932 and 1933; all of these crime novels. There was one Martin Porlock novel apiece in 1932 and 1933, respectively Mystery in Kensington Gore and X v. Rex, though in the United States the two novels were published under MacDonalds own name, under the titles Escape and The Mystery of the Dead Police. Both of these mysteries are thrillers, in contrast with Pardon, which is a genuine detective novel.
MacDonald achieved Edgar Wallace rate of production in 1931, but the quality of the books he published that year was surprisingly good under the other circumstances. One of them, Murder Gone Mad, is generally deemed a crime fiction classic. Another, Mystery at Friar's Pardon, has been acclaimed as a classic locked room mystery by some afficanados. Because the novel was not published in the United States, however, copies have been very hard to find for nearly a century now.
There is a lot in Pardon to appeal to classic detective fiction fans. For one thing, as mentioned above it's a true detective novel, which, truth be told, MacDonald mysteries not always were. For another the book's trappings are highly classical. The setting is a party at a haunted country house, the murder an impossible crime in a locked room. What's not to like, hey? Let's go into some details.
The protagonist is series sleuth Anthony Gethryn stand-in Charles Fox-Browne, your classic between-the-wars not-so-young gentleman--when the novel opens he's "at the beginning of his thirty-fifth year"--on his uppers. We get five pages (all of Chapter II) of his backstory, largely unneeded although it's of interest that Charles' martial history in the Great War seems to bear considerable resemblance, somewhat embellished, to the author's own.
At the opening of the novel we find the cleverly named Fox-Browne (the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog) installed at a modest private hotel for ladies and gentleman (and Charles is very much a gentleman); but soon enough he has accepted a providentially offered position with Enid Lester-Greene, a popular romantic novelist, as her manager at her newly purchased Jacobean country estate, Friar's Pardon, designed by real-life famous architect Sir John Vanbrugh.
Several of the mansion's previous owners have died mysterious deaths, the most recent of which was, so it is said, an inexplicable death indoors by drowning, but our Mrs. Lester-Greene is very much a wordly materialist who scoffs at such tales as silly superstition.
Oh, such folly, dear Enid!
MacDonald has some fun mocking the romantic dreck Enid Lester-Greene publishes--the novels named are Paradise for Two, Sir Galahad Comes Home, Oasis Love (a reference to The Sheik, of course), Kismet and Drusilla, The Man in Homespun and A Star Despite Herself. Enid is not a terrible person, but she is your standard overbearing murderee, who spends close to half of this long novel giving her family members and dependents reasons to kill her on account of her domineering ways.
Of them we have:
first edition (I have no idea what the cover depicts)
Enid's sulky daughter Gladys Lester-Greene
her lovely niece by marriage, now divorced, Leslie Destrier
Lord Pursell of Mitcham, a Wodehousian silly ass aristocrat whom Enid wants to marry her daughter Gladys
Major Claude Lester, Enid's scoundrelly brother
Norman Sandys, Enid's smooth secretary
Mrs. Barratt, the housekeeper at Friar's Pardon and some sort of distant relation
and, last but not least, at least in terms of social position, Lady Maud Vassar, an authority on the supernatural and occult (like Lady Cynthia Asquith?)
There is a lot of talk about supernatural doings at Friar's Pardon, poltergeists disturbing the guests by throwing vases around and such, but Enid dismisses all these manifestations as so much folderol. However, it's Enid herself who ends up mysteriously dead, like previous owners of the mansion. She is discovered expired in her locked study, drowned despite the fact that there is no water or source of water present in the room.
An impossible murder in a locked room? Heavens to Carter Dickson!
While MacDonald declines to present the local police, who are nicely characterized, as incompetent idiots--Inspector Willis (didn't Freeman Crofts have an Inspector Willis?) even has "a manner which was very nearly that of a gentleman"--they make no headway with the case and seem perfectly content to have Charles Fox-Browne, the obligatory amateur gentleman on the scene, assist them. He's an old friend and war colleague of the outspoken police doctor, Riley. They were together at "that Chateau Leroy business," don't you know.
Collins Crime Club boasted that Friar's Pardon was their most successful "first book" by crime writer--though in fact "Martin Porlock" had already published about a dozen novels and most of them were criminous
The baffled police end up convinced that the murder has no rational explanation, but "Foxy," as Riley calls him (Foxy is his old nickname from the war and. I'm guessing, public school), knows better. It is he who cracks the case, first by showing how the crime must have been committed, and then, after the police arrest the wrong person, by revealing who the actual worldy fiend really was, by means of a dramatic seance confession scene.
In the name of honest reviewing, however, I have to allow that Mystery at Friar's Parson is by no means a perfect mystery story. The locked room aspect of the mystery itself is uninspired, for example.
Also Pardon is another MacDonald 100,000 worder by my count, which I feel is too long for a conventional detective novel. It's slow to get to the book's single murder and the supernatural stuff isn't done with the spooky conviction that John Dickson Carr would have brought to the matter in the Thirties. But the plot is quite well-structured and the impossible crime is very nicely constructed and clued indeed. One particular bit to the murder is somehow repellently, stupendously ghoulish, anticpating a later famous tale. I could easily see this book inspiring Carr himself.
Sadly, Pardon as mentioned above was only ever published in England and it is quite rare today. Evidently there was not enough visceral excitement in it for the American crime fic fans. But modern fans of vintage classic puzzlers should enjoy it. Observed a contemporary newspaper reviewer: "The inevitable murder, if gruesome, is undeniably original in execution, and the solution of the mystery surrounding it is neat and plausible." I fully agree! Collins itself declared it "one of the most ingenious stoeies that the Club has ever published." Certainly MacDonald's murder mechanics are ingenious and memorable.
"Would you rid the world of a dangerous snake? Of course you would."
"It's all so senseless! These things happening! Unreasonable! Good Lord, man, it's like a bad mixture of [MR] James and Edgar Wallace...."
--cryptic and meta observations in Rope to Spare (1932), by Philip MacDonald
American first (and to date only) edition
Like Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, Philip MacDonald's super sleuth Anthony Gethryn can never enjoy a little bit of R&R in the country without its turning into a snooper's holiday, as it were. Case in point: Rope to Spare, the ninth--the seventh in three years!--of the dozen Anthony Gethryn detective opuses.
When the novel opens Anthony Gethryn is recuperating at an inn quaintly called the Spanish Guardsman, located at the rustic hamlet of Ford-under-Stapleton. In this investigative adventure he has his manservant, his former Great War batman Alexander White, along for the ride and White plays a substantial part in much of the novel, rather like mystery writer Margery Allingham's Lugg, the conspicuously cockney manservant to her own super sleuth Albert Campion. It seems that Gethryn sadly acquired life-threatening septicemia during that recent "horrid business of the lunatic taxidermist" which the press dubbed "The Voodoo Murder." (Some modern-day pastichist should write up this officially unrecorded case.)
Soon our Anthony is having his peaceful rural idyll (which includes perusing correspondence from his wife Lucia and his young son) interrupted by the receipt of anonymous letters penned on pink note paper with green ink, warning him cryptically not to get involved in a local affair concerning a woman whom the vengeful letter writer evidently has marked for retributive unnatural death.
"Would you rid the world of a dangerous snake?" this person asks Gethryn rhetorically. "Of course you would." This strange business concerning weird anonymous letters sent to the detective in a rustic village reminded my of Margery Allingham's brilliant little novella, frequently republished as a novel, The Case of the Late Pig, which followed Rope to Spare into print by five years.
A manx badge on a wood pigeon's breast?
Naturally, these threatening pink letters have the opposite impact on Gethryn, who immediately wonders just who is the woman in the vicinity of Ford-under-Stapleton under imminent threat of death. Yes our Anthony been "roped in" to yet another weird mystery.
After some protracted wandering around the village, Gethryn with White by night encounter a fleeing village natural, a gypsy poacher named Lemuel Farra, who was badly "frit" by an encounter at the local old haunted mill. (Every village has one, don't you know.) Farra tells them, in his highly idiomatic gypsy natural way, that at the mill there was a rope swinging from a beam which brushed his neck!
When Gethryn and White investigate they find as well a dead wood pigeon, with "an almost perfect replica of the Manx badge on its breast." Dead birds feature in this case, like dead cats in Gethryn's earlier case The Wraith.
MacDonald strives to build up a sort of haunted village atmosphere like you find in John Dickson Carr's debut Dr. Fell detective novel Hag's Nook (1933). Did this novel influence Carr? We know he was a MacDonald reader. But admittedly Carr does it better.
In many of his novels, MacDonald has a tendency to ramble, and his narratives are too discursive for my taste. I know for a fact that at least several of the Gethryns run to 100,000 words, which in my opinion is too long for most mystery novels. MacDonald wrote mainstream novels as well, and one gets the feeling that he was a frustrated "serious novelist" at heart. Personally I think that his serious intentions found better expression in his psychologically acute and economical short stories.
But to get back to my main narrative, eventually Gethryn--with the help of his friend, the local padre Reverend Charles Aloysius Grafton Bellew (MacDonald has a preference for long handles for his elite Anglo characters)--locates the mystery woman of the letters. This discovery takes him to the Jacobean country house Corners, tenanted by ancient Egypt expert Adrian Conway, "perhaps the greatest living archaeologist."
Conway lives at Corners with his embittered brother Ferris, who lost both his legs in the war and is crudely described variously as a "cripple" and "half a man" (those were the days); his secretary George Delafield, a powerful, headstrong fellow who greatly resembles the country house secretary in The Rasp; his loyal manservant and butler Ling; and his drop-dead gorgeous blonde wife, Rosemary Conway. This is over seventy pages into the novel, and that's where it really begins.
Close to page 100 there is a suitably horrific murder, of Adrian's butler Ling, and by page 107 the county's chief constable, Brigadier General Sir Francis Spooner Withington, an utter idiot martinent, has arrived on the scene to investigate. Don't feel cheated of mystery, however, boys and girls; there's still over 200 pages to go!
In classic dumb cop fashion General Withington tags another local gypsy--what are we supposed to say now, Romani?--as the murderer. But another murder follows and then a suicide--or is it a murder too? Police arrest someone else for the third death, but Anthony knows they have it all wrong. He knows who the real culprit is, but he needs someone else's help to prove it and save the innocent person from the gallows. Can he force this reluctant one's hand?
The fast-moving final forty pages of this novel are somewhat reminiscent of MacDonald's earlier can-Gethryn-exonerate-the-wrongly-imprisoned-man novel The Noose. Indeed the whole country house and village setup recalls both the earlier Gethryn novel The Wraith and the nonseries Mystery at Friar's Pardon (written under the pseudonym Martin Porlock), both of which were published the previous year, 1931. Given his prolificity, MacDonald could only be expected to recycle some of his materials.
more abstract British first (and to date only) edition
Along with its immediate successor, Death on My Left, Rope to Spare has never been reprinted and consequently it is one of the least well-known Gethryn detective novels today. Here, by the way, is a list of all the Gethryn adventures, if you are interested, with the reprinted Gethryns starred (most recently reprinted two stars):
**The Rasp 1924
*The White Crow 1928
**The Noose 1930
*The Link 1930
**The Maze, aka Persons Unknown 1930
*The Wraith 1931
**The Choice, aka The Polferry Riddle 1931
*The Crime Conductor 1931
Rope to Spare 1932
Death on My Left 1933
**Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared 1938
The-Wood-for-the-Trees (short story, second place finish in Queen's Awards) 1947
**The List of Adrian Messenger 1959
The fact that the two last installments of Gethryn's great run of novels published between 1930 and 1933 were the ones that were never reprinted suggests to me that the bloom had come off Gethryn's rose a bit with the public by this time. The fact is, MacDonald was simply writing too much too fast. Some more editing of his somewhat prolix narratives would have been good for him.
Rope to Spare, subtitled in the States "An Anthony Gethryn Detective Story" and in England "A Colonel Gethryn Book," probably represented Gethryn's plateau of popularity. For the American edition MacDonald was asked to provide a prefatory note, "About Anthony Ruthven Gethryn." In the note we are significantly informed that "in Anthony's opinion the present case is the most unusual and interesting of his career to date, involving, as it does, not only violence and danger, but a psychological aspect which is truly terrifying."
For the most part I actually agree with Anthony assessment of his latest case. My own favorite of Anthony early cases is that experiment in pure detection, The Maze, where the author's exuberance is suitably tamed; but I certainly preferred Rope to The Rasp, The White Crow, The Noose, The Link, and The Choice, none of which are superlative in my opinion, despite being better known than Rope. Once the novel truly gets started, about 100 pages in, it's an interesting case turning on the personalities of three men and the striking, enigmatic woman with whom they are all infatuated. One might almost deem it a Ruth Rendellish "crime novel" but there's definitely detection and interesting crime mechanics.
The county's chief constable being an absolute dunderhead, Anthony has to get down to brass tacks, investigating the case himself and installing his man White as the slain Ling's replacement to scope things out at Corners. The murders themselves are mechanically rather interesting, if baroquely outrageous, the kind of thing that both Carr and his mystery writer colleague and drinking buddy John Rhode indulged in. In fact the method of one of the murders reminded me of a specific later Carr novel, I won't say which. And the psychology behind it all is acute and intriguing. Rosemary Conway's East Asian background story (recall the pink letters) reminded me of something right out of the more melodramatic pages of Somerset Maugham.
In the end Anthony has to secure the help of his old pal, going back to Rasp days, Asst. Commissioner Sir Egbert Lucas, the big wheels at Scotland Yard being far more smitten with Gethryn's insouciant amateur detecting ways than is our stiff General Withington. There's a nice ironic epilogue too, entirely resonant with our cynical modern era of grifting social media.
Recommended for patient vintage mystery readers!
For an alternative review (the only one I could find) of this obscure PM novel, see this blogger, who *really* hated the author's writing style.
"I'm slaying in the rain...." 1944 Collins Canadian pb ed of Murder Gone Mad oddly suggesting it's set in Canada
WHO IS THE BUTCHER?
HOLMDALE PANIC STRICKEN
IS OUR CITY TO BE ANOTHER DUSSELDORF?
"You get along, Pike, and don't forget to show the world how that Dusseldorf business ought to have been handled."
[I]n his postscript the Dusseldorf policeman admitted that the Holmdale Butcher had made all his prototypical predecessors look like the smallest beer....there seemed, even when the kindly, gay, winter sun shone brightly upon it, a loathley black shadow over Holmdale. Everyone in this pleasantly facdaded little town was living with stretched nerves.
"Oh, hell!" said the Chief Constable. "I never did like that damn Garden City place.
--excerpts from Philip Macdonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931)
Between the spring and summer of 1930-31, newspapers round the world repelled (one hopes) their readers with, yes, repulsive accounts of the "Vampire of Dusseldorf," Germany, one Peter Kurten, a sadistic serial killer who tortured and killed at least nine people, mostly women and girls (he had two boy victims when he himself was a boy), in some cases attempting to drink his victims' blood--hence the vampire nickname.
In May 1931, while Kurten awaited execution for his crimes, German director Fritz Lang's lauded serial killer film, M, featuring, in a star making performance, native Hungarian actor Peter Lorre, was released.
German serial murderer Peter Kurten
The film is said to have been based upon the monstrous exploits of Peter Kurten, although around this time there were so many serial killers atrociously active in Germany--Fritz Haarmann, the "Vampire of Hanover," who killed at least two dozen men and boys between 1918 and 1924; Karl Denke, the "Cannibal of Muensterberg," who killed and cannibalized dozens of easily missable people between 1904 and 1924; Karl Grossman, the "Butcher of Berlin,'" who killed at least twenty women between 1918 to 1921--that one can't really say for sure.
Let's face it: they didn't call Weimar Germany decadent for nothing. Come to the cabaret!
Whatever Fritz Lang's specific inspiration for M (assuming he even had one) British author Philip MacDonald made no bones about the fact that his morbosus inspiratio for his crime novel Murder Gone Mad, which was first published in Britain by the Collins Crime Club in February 1931, was none other than Düsseldorf's very own verminous vampire.
The Düsseldorf murders are specifically mentioned several times in Murder Gone Mad and, over three decades after the original publication of the novel in 1931, Macdonald himself stated flatly that Kutner's heinous killings "suggested" the novel to him.
society gone mad Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray in the film Cabaret (1972)
Philip MacDonald published nearly thirty novels, mostly tales of crime, but just a few remained in print for substantial periods of time: his debut detective novel, The Rasp; Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared; Rynox; and the serial killer novels Murder Gone Mad, X v. Rex, and The List of Adrian Messenger. Oddly, of these films, only Murder Gone Mad remains unfilmed. Was it deemed too horrific for the silver screen? (Weimar Germany made M.)
For it is, indeed, a rather horrific book. Its minority of detractors from the day condemned the novel as "sensationalistic." MacDonald later claimed that with the novel he wanted to explore how a clever, motiveless killer (i.e., a murderer with no rational motive) might be caught by the police; and, indeed, there is a strong proto police procedural element to the novel--the dullest part of the book in my opinion. To me what really makes Murder Gone Mad interesting, aside from its social realism, are the elements of horror which the author injects into his tale.
Murder Gone Mad is set in Holmdale, a habitation of some 6000 people located "forty miles and forty-five minutes" from London's St. Pancras station and one of those topical planned modern "garden cities" that pop up in novels of the day. (Its name has recently been shortened from Holmdale Garden City.) British detective fiction writer Margaret Cole even unsubtly titled one of her better mysteries, Poison in the Garden Suburb.
Some of the best sections of Murder Gone Mad satirize the small city's smugly complacent satisfaction with itself, like mainstream American Sinclair Lewis had done more famously a decade earlier in his novel Main Street.* Into this carefully ordered community of Holmdale comes a devouring demon of disorder, and it proves passing hard for people to expel this insatiable destroyer from their midst.
*(Some enterprising mystery author should rewrite Lewis' classic novel as Murder in Main Street--there are plenty of people in that book whom one might want to murder.)
In his writing Philip MacDonald admittedly can get patronizing of the middle and lower classes. MacDonald himself was descended from writers and actors and only briefly held a government job before attaining his own success as a writer. He could get somewhat smug toward the middle and lower classes in his writing. For example, he refers, seemingly condescendingly, to "the would-be-smart, artificial-silk-stockinged live-on-your-credit class" and "the cheap ready-made sports suits of the holiday-making clerk"--the type of classist remarks, common to MacDonald's own class of Golden Age British mystery writer, that tend to make bad impressions on modern readers.
Fritz Haarmann, the Vampire of Hanover
A certain Mr. Colby, who is returning home from his London work when Murder Gone Mad opens, sounds very much the complacent petit bourgeois as he makes the following observations to Mr. Harvey, a visiting friend:
Philip MacDonald in his fiction the author himself evinced a thirty-five year interest in the subject of sadism
"You don't find any long-haired artists and such in Holmdale. Not, of course, that we don't have a lot of journalists and authors live here, but if you see what I mean, they're not the cranky sort. People don't walk about in bath gowns and slippers the way I've seen them at Letchworth [Garden City]."
"I don't think anyone would call me snobbish, but I must say that I find it rather extraordinary of the authorities to let this row of labourers' cottages go up here. They ought to have that sort of thing for 'The Other Side.'"
Yet Mr. Colby is an essentially kind man who takes, with his placid, motherly wife, doting pride in his quite promising eleven-year-old son Lionel: "I must say--although it really isn't for me to say it--that a better, quieter, more loving lad it'd be difficult to find in the length and breadth of Holmdale."
Terribly it is Lionel who at the end of chapter one is found dead, butchered, his stomach "slit open from bottom to top," leaving his parents, naturally, broken and crushed by their grief. Other murders follow, along with taunting letters from the apparent culprit, who signs himself "The Butcher."
After the second and third murder, these of Pamela Richards, a pretty and popular young townswoman, and Amy Adams, the humbler server at the Holmdale Theatre chocolates counter, Scotland Yard's Superintendent Arnold Pike, of the author's Colonel Anthony Gethryn series of detective novels, is sent along to Holmdale to take charge of the murder investigation. Amusingly, he hopes to bring Anthony Gethryn with him on the case, but for once the good Colonel is indisposed and unable insouciantly to butt into an official investigation, as is his wont.
But Pike is unable to prevent a fourth murder, this one of Albert Calvin Rogers, a breakfast cereal factory worker with "magnificent legs" carrying "thirteen stone of well-proportioned bone and muscle" who to his intense delight has just become a "fully fledged and comparatively highly remunerated member of the Woolwich United Association Football Club." Someone cruelly slit Albert's stomach open from bottom to top, just like they had done before to Lionel, and this splendid specimen of an athlete died young.
A fifth murder follows, then a sixth, this latter the cruelest killing yet. After this last one a riot against the seemingly incompetent police is only narrowly averted.
In one of Pike's reports to the Yard he perceptively speculates that The Butcher
chooses for his victims young persons of either sex (a) whose deaths come at a time when they are having a run of good fortune, and (b) who leave behind them persons, residents in Holmdale, to whom the deaths are more than usually painful.
I've read people complain that there are "no clues" the the identify of The Butcher in Murder Gone Mad, a claim which perplexes me as it seems to me that MacDonald boldly waves the identify of this person before his readers for virtually the entire novel. It's actually rather cleverly done.
I've also seen it claimed by critic S. T. Joshi that in Mad the author gravely errs by failing to probe "the deep psychological malady that a serial killer must have in order to commit to such crimes." Well, duh! MacDonald himself wryly admitted in 1963 that had he written the novel in the Sixties he would have felt compelled by modern practice to "reveal that the whole trouble was caused by the fact that, at an early age, this unfortunate homicidal maniac (like the character in Cold Comfort Farm) had seen something nasty in the woodshed." In his defense the author added that thirty years earlier "[i]t was enough, then, that the murderer was mentally unhinged."
Personally I feel it's enough now. MacDonald actually quite capably suggests this character's sadism and in a chilling final scene, where The Butcher encounters another would-be victim (unfortunately speaking truly egregious, wearisomely phonetic Cockney) he might well be detailing one of the Dusseldorf Vampire's deadly encounters.
The Butcher's murders in Murder Gone Mad, two in particular, are truly wickedly cruel--so much so that, if they were accurately depicted on film today, they likely would provoke complaints from the public. In that respect MacDonald was ahead of his time.
I was interested that one of the killer's victims is named Amy Adams (dreadful name, The Butcher sneers in a letter). Aside from the fact that this is the name of one of our most highly regarded modern actresses today, the alliterative handle of The Butcher's third victim, a server at a movie theater snack counter, rather reminded me of one of Agatha Christie's serial killer victims, the waitress Betty Barnard, in her serial killer novel, published five years after MacDonald's, The ABC Murders. How much inspiration was MacDonald's novel for Christie?
American first edition In the United States MacDonald himself was proclaimed the new Edgar Wallace
Less attractively we get condescension from the author toward the novel's conspicuously Jewish character, Mr. Israel Gompertz. "He was, very obviously, a Jew," Macdonald cringingly tells us. He's given the usual lisp British mystery writers of the day liked to assign to their stereotypical Jewish characters. Surprisingly MacDonald's American publisher left this passage unaltered in their edition.
Fritz Haarmann and his alleged accomplice and lover Hans Grans
However, the character is actually sympathetically represented, notwithstanding the fact that he is carrying on a clandestine affair with a certain "Miss Aarons." MacDonald himself was an adulterer in his first marriage (with his secretary no less), so he could hardly criticize Gompertz on that score.
On a reread of the novel, it seemed to me that Murder Gone Mad, whatever its flaws, deserves its landmark status. True, MacDonald goes "cute" with the ending, blithley eliding all the emotions the novel has raised. I'm not sure that Mad actually is MacDonald's best crime novel (I've actually come to prefer his short crime fiction--more on this soon), but I do believe the book still stands as a classic of the genre.
To put it blurbably, Philip MacDonald's Murder Gone Mad is Golden Age British crime fiction's frank acknowledgement that in a world of depraved vampires, butchers and cannibals--fiends in human form--murder in truth was not solely committed cozily and rationally with blunt instruments and untraceable poisons in baronets' country house libraries and studies, as if amused players were moving pieces on a tidy Cluedo board.
What did they expect, or dread or hope from the death of the lake?
--Death of a Lake (1954), Arthur Upfield
In the 1980s the nation of Australia attained a certain quirky cachet in the United States as the country of Crocodile Dundee, Men at Work and vegemite sandwiches and Outback Steakhouse, with its Bloomin' Onion and its Shrimp on the Barbie. Outback was a real big thing for a while here. We still have an Outback about three minutes away from where I live.
However, in 1986 there popped up in the US Australian rock band, Midnight Oil, that, while it may have been, to US eyes, quirky, was emphatically not silly, cheesy or, um, vegemitey. To the contrary, Midnight Oil was very serious indeed--and very angry, with songs, like "Beds Are Burning" and "The Dead Heart," about the abuses committed by British colonials against the smallest continents' indigenous, or aboriginal, people, those who carried in "our hearts the true country," as the lyrics of "The Dead Heart" ran.
Midnight Oil had actually been around in Australia for seven years before American radio picked them up in 1986. "The Dead Heart," the first single from their album Diesel and Dust, charted at only #53 in the US, but the second single, "Beds Are Burning," made it up to #17 and remains their most iconic song, with nearly 300 million views on youtube. I loved these two songs and I bought the Diesel and Dust CD (I had just gotten a CD player), but I have to admit I only remember one other song on the album, "Put Down That Weapon." I'm listening to it now on youtube (and yes they just aired an Outback Steakhouse ad between songs) to see if I recall others. (Okay "Dreamworld," which I'm listening to now, sounds familiar.)
Immediately memorable about Midnight Oil are the raspy, sometimes menacing vocals of frontman Peter Garrett, the horn parts and the driving percussion of Rob Hirst, who at age seventy died three weeks ago. BOOM, BOOM, CRASH, BOOM! On my stereo system these percussive bits sounded literally earth shattering, especially on "Beds Are Burning."
Australian ephemeral lake
Rob Hirst's death got me thinking again about Australia and that naturally got me thinking about Anglo-Australian crime writer Arthur Upfield (1890-1964), who had a similar interest in indigenous culture and a famed "half-caste" series detective, Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte. Upfield maintains a following today but lies somewhat in the shadow, in the land of vintage mystery, of American hard-boiled and British classic mystery writers. He portrayed a world all his own, with a great many (most?) of his Bony tales taking place in the great Australian outback, which comprises most of Australia's' physical space but little of its population (though the smallest continent, Australia is larger than the continental United States).
Although it abounds in isolated locations, Bony's world is not that posh country houses, gentry and quaint villagers, nor of mean urban streets, nightclubs and gangsters. With my long-standing preference, now somewhat discarded, for classic country house and village mysteries I had a somewhat equivocal relationship with Upfield's crime novels. Their strongest feature, I think it's generally agreed, is their strong settings, but those settings often throw classic detection into the background. Moreover, for hard-boiled fans, the books may be a bit slow-moving and lacking in such rapid-fire action trappings as beatings and beddings. Although he was of the generation of Chandler and Hammett, Upfield was not really a hard-boiled writer. Still one can see affinity to both American and British mystery in his writing.
Although Upfield commenced the Bony detective series in 1936 the series was not actually published in the United States until 1943; but then he was received there with great fanfare. Here's Anthony Boucher welcoming Murder Down Under (aka Mr. Jelly's Business), the first Bony book published in the US: "Unusual and timely setting, good puzzle, and unique setting. Long and slow but richly rewarding." Three years later, he wrote in a notice of The Devil's Steps that Bony was "one of the greatest figures of modern detection."
death of a lake
A significant faction of American mystery addicts agreed with Boucher. In an article published about Upfield in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1954, the year he published his 18th Bony mystery, Death of a Lake, the features writer claimed that while "the average American mystery novel sells 3500 copies, Napoleon Bonaparte sells between 30,000 and 40,000." This was easily enough to make Upfield one of the most popular crime writers in America.
What was the great appeal of Bony mysteries for the American mystery reading public? Again, setting. As for the author himself, "setting, not the puzzle, was his first concern." Of Death of a Lake specifically, Upfield declared: "My primary objective was to describe the death of a lake. I've purposefully soft-pedalled the mystery to emphasize the background." And with that title the book does sound more like some sort of catastrophizing Rachel Carson-esque environmental tome.
Upfield divulged that he spent five months writing, then rewriting, a book, after which he would "have a loaf for a couple of months before I get down down to the next one." Unlike many mystery writers Upfield made enough from his worldwide book sales to make a good living from crime fiction.
New south Wales map showing the towns of Menindee and Broken Hill, also mentioned in Death of a Lake, in the northwest
Upfield genuinely knew his settings. He based Death of a Lake on time he spent in the early Twenties at the Albemarle sheep station on the Darling River above the town of Menindee in western New South Wales. In the novel he reimagines this station as Porchester Station, a vast area which comprises "sixty thousand sheep in the care of some twenty wage plugs." Most of the action in the novel takes place specifically at an outstation at Lake Otway, the dying ephemeral lake of the title. From the Lake Otway outstation a lone telephone line spans fifty miles to Porchester Station--how's that for an isolated location?
Lake Otway fills with water only once in a generation and then it stays filled for about only three years. The novel takes place in January and February at the peak of an Australian summer heatwave, when the temp hits over 100 in the shade; and the lake is sure the evaporate in a mere matter of weeks. And there's something in the lake which seems particularly to interest seven whites--five men and two women--at the outstation. (There are two full blooded indigenous Australians as well on the scene for a time, but they do not figure in any real sense in the tale.)
abandoned Holden vehicle rusting in an unforgiving Australian climate
After laying out the setting (a map would have been nice), Upfield in chapter two lays out a procedural chronology of a possible cold case:
Ray Gillen, a debonair, devil-may-care stockman and Korean War veteran, had a half-share in a winning lottery ticket, netting him 12,500 dollars, or over half a million today (about $400,000 USD). He left the city of Toowoomba in Queensland on a motorbike, declaring his intent to see Australia (he "never cared a hoot for money"), and arrived on September 3 (1952?) at Lake Otway, where he decided to stay and work for a time. Nine weeks later on November 7, Gillen, a strong swimmer, went for a late-night swim in Lake Otway and was never seen again; presumably he cramped and drowned in the lake.
So what happened to the lottery money? Could Gillen have been murdered for it? In late January (1954?), fifteen months after Gillen's original arrival at Lake Otway, D. I. Napoleon Bonaparte, having come across the official records of the Gillen affair in the police Case File, comes to the Lake Otway outstation in the guise of a humble horsebreaker to investigate matters. (Many of Bony's cases fall into this pattern of having him appear in disguise to investigate criminous events at remote locales)
the real life Albemarle sheep station where the author himself once worked in the early 1920s, before he began his life as an author
The majority of Death of a Lake is devoted to Bony sounding out the handful of inhabitants of this remote outstation about past events there. The local men, headed by Overseer Richard Martyr, are sufficiently but not especially memorably characterized, while the women, a mother and daughter from Broken Hill by the surname of Fowler, are more memorable. "These two quarreling women gave [the outstation] life."
Like two true daughters of Eve, however, the mother and daughter, while they have come to this homosocial environment and domesticated it with feminine cookery and cleaning, have also infested it with the vipers of sexual provocation and designing womanly wiles.
Bony knows, we are informed, "that to be a wanton a woman needed no training." Warns a trucker darkly of Lake Otway: "Women! You go careful with the women at Lake Otway!...Ruddy termites, both of 'em. They eats into a man's dough from the inside out."
a man's world, passing wary of women workmen at a sheep station
One bitten hand bitterly predicts:
"There's going to be crackers and volcanoes before long. Them two women are schemers all right. Proper trollops. Take a mug's advice and go easy, Bony. Better spit at 'em than smile."
Another hand tells Bony misogynistically of the distaff side of humanity:
All they thinks about is what they can get out of a bloke. Only the blacks get their women in a corner and keeps 'em there....They gives their women a beltin' every Sunday morning regular, and there's never no arguing or ruddy funny business during the week.
Who says Australian whites didn't respect aboriginal culture? I can see modern readers now proclaiming this novel grievously dated, on account of such sentiments, when it's really nothing of the sort, as we should have learned by now in the Age of MAGA and the manosphere. So-called "woke" culture didn't extinguish such "dated" beliefs; it merely suppressed them until the advent of social media and its conservative influencers.
Personally, I've never believed overmuch in the myth of the dated mystery novel. Usually we just like to imagine they are dated in their sentiments. Certainly this one I suspect is an accurate enough depiction of many men in rough working environments. At least the bossman, Martyr, is more sophisticated, even writing poetry, but he is drawn to the women too--what straight man wouldn't be in such a place?
Indeed, though Lake Outway may be dying, the outstation perched above it is positively awash in sexual cross currents. The men pursue and buy gifts from Sydney and Adelaide for mother or daughter or both as the case may be, while the woman--the girl, Joan, but 21, and her mother, barely past forty--compete with each other for favors from the men. Ray Gillen himself stayed on at the outstation, it seems, merely to dally with bewitchingly lovely young Joan. Bony's task for much of the novel is navigate these dangerous crosscurrents and discover just who was plotting what with whom.
Meanwhile the lake is dying and Upfield's descriptions of the fight for survival as the water supply literally dries up among the local feathered and furred creatures--the various birds, the rabbits (millions evidently), the roos, the foxes, etc.--is gripping. Eventually the water in the lake will completely evaporate and Gillen's drowned body presumably will thereby be revealed, along with the gold locket which he wore around his neck--and then what?
Well, I won't spoil that for you of course. But there is, also near the end of the novel, a deadly house fire and another death. Finally Bony gets down to brass tacks and conducts a brief though genuine investigation of these events, discovering in the process the sordid truths surrounding Gillen's demise and other later events.
It's a slow-moving tale yet somehow a compelling one. Upfield excels at nature writing and the idea of people having to await the "death" of a lake to uncover the body that lies beneath the diminishing water and its secret is an intriguing one.
It feels rather like some sort of Somerset Maugham or Ernest Hemingway humans in the wilds story, like "Rain" or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." For a while the situation with the unforgiving natural elements turns so dire that it starts to resemble what I call a "survival mystery"--that tiny detective fiction subgenre where the characters fight for their very survival as they grapple as well with the nominal murder problem.
Upfield's scenic writing is superb and while the characters are stock they move the tale along. At times I was reminded rather of an American hard-boiled novel with its femmes fatales, potentially more deadly than the male. People may deem to novel anti-woman, but on the other hand it seems of a time and place where women had to use what weapons nature endowed them with, as the purported "weaker sex," in order successfully to manipulate men. Sisters couldn't quite do it for themselves then, especially in the Australian outback; rather, they often had to work behind a man to accomplish their ends. Blame not the women, but the male-dominated society which cast the sexes into these performative roles, what MAGA lovingly terms "trad."
All in all, I think Death of a Lake is a fascinating mystery novel of an unusual time and place and it remains, in my view, one of Upfield's finest efforts in the crime vein. Had Agatha Christie written this book I can see her having riddled the tiny outstation with an ingenious if unlikely welter of obscure motivations and false identities; but Upfield was not Christie and we can live with that surely. Different knife strokes for different crime folks, say I. Pick your own poison.
See also my 2012 review of Upfield's earlier detective novel Venom House (1952), an account of a Bony case which is mentioned in Death of a Lake. I think that's the author's closest take on a classic English country house mystery.
What were the most popular mystery novels in the first forty years of the twentieth century, encompassing both the brief Edwardian era and the between-the-wars period of the Jazz Age and the Depression? Well, there were eight mystery novels and thrillers which made the annual yearly top ten bestseller lists between 1900 and 1940. What do you think they were? Never fear, I won't keep you in suspense!
The eight books are the world of five individuals, three men and two women, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Phillips Oppenheim, S. S. Van Dine, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Daphne du Maurier. And here the books:
"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" The first top ten yearly mystery bestseller of the 20th century.
1902: The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle (No. 7)
1909: The Man in Lower Ten, Mary Roberts Rinehart (No. 4)
1910: The Window at the White Cat, Mary Roberts Rinehart (No. 8)
1920: The Great Impersonation, E. Phillips Oppenheim (No. 8)
1928: The Greene Murder Case, S. S. Van Dine (No. 4)
1929: The Bishop Murder Case, S. S. Van Dine (No. 4)
1930: The Door, Mary Roberts Rinehart (No. 6)
1938: Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (No. 4)
1939: Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (No. 3)
How many of these books have you read? I have actually read them all, though it has been quite a while in some cases. All of them, I believe, are still in print today, which is more than you can say for a great deal of vintage bestselling fiction. What distinguished these particular mysteries, we may ask, and made them so popular?
There were two books by male Britishers from the Victorian/Edwardian eras, Conan Doyle and Oppenheim. Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the most famous mystery novels of all time and was published when Sherlock Holmes fiction was at its popular peak, when people were panting for new Holmes tales. They got a good one with Hound!
The Oppenheim book, Great Impersonation, is by far his most famous tale, but probably today even a lot of vintage crime fiction fans have not read it. It's an espionage story, a tale of a German spy up to no good in England, which I think owes its success to its being topical with the Great War.
This was a time when Germany was not exactly held in high esteem in much of the western world. E. Phillips Oppenheim was an extremely popular writer on both sides of the Atlantic for much of the 1910-40 period, though he is mostly forgotten today.
And then we have two Americans, Mary Roberts Rinehart and S. S. Van Dine. Rinehart's first two top novels come from the Edwardian era, when she was just starting her writing career.
Rinehart had hit it big in 1908 with The Circular Staircase, the novel which is widely considered to have started the so-called HIBK (Had-I-But-Known) school of feminine suspense, which has proven popular right to this day with books like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train (both 21st century bestsellers).
With The Door Rinehart was back in the top ten with a mystery after two decades.
I think Lower Ten and White Cat, which are rather more backward-looking books, benefitted from the rolling success of Circular Staircase, which did not actually making the yearly top ten bestseller list. In 1930 Rinehart returned to the foreboding female narrator style with The Door. It should be noted that Rinehart also made the yearly bestseller lists as well in nine additional years, but with mainstream fiction titles. She was a tremendously popular author in general.
Then we have something of an anomaly, S. S. Van Dine, who for about a decade with his novels and the films adapted from them personally incarnated for Americans the "pure" detective novel of ratiocination.
All of the other books above elevated atmosphere, character and writing to a great extent, even Hound of the Baskervilles, which is a true detective novel also. They are, in short, novels of considerable suspense, i.e., pageturners. The Van Dines are rather drier affairs, though Greene and Bishop are his most outre tales (about multiple killers) and represented the peak of his popularity in the United States.
a cover as dry as detection
Finally we have Daphne du Maurier, the youngest writer of this select group, by a full generation or more. (Conan Doyle was born in 1859, Oppenheim 1866, Rinehart 1876, Van Dine 1888, du Maurier 1907). Her classic Rebecca, which was so popular that it made the yearly bestseller lists for two years in a row, was a full-scale Gothic novel, rather a return in style to the sensation novels of the Victorian era. Along with Conan Doyle's Hound, it remains the most widely known of these books today. Du Maurier would continue to make the yearly bestseller lists into the Swinging Seventies.
Ture detective fiction, popular as it was, tended not to produce yearly bestsellers. Even Agatha Christie had only two top ten bestsellers, in 1975 and 1976 at literally the end of her life, with the much-publicized Curtain and Sleeping Murder. Christie made her fortune in paperbacks sold around the world in drugstores, railway stations and airport stalls.
Now I'm off to dream again of Manderley. Happy New Year's!
