Stormtroopers: "Wetback" (1956), by William O'Farrell

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best....They're sending people that have lots of problems....They're bringing drugs.  They're bringing crime.  They're rapists.  And some, I assume, are good people."

"I will build a great, great wall on our southern border."

-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, campaign launch speech, June 16, 2015

"Never seen a Mex that wouldn't sooner lie than eat....These goldbricks are no damn good.  Lazy, lying agitators, every goddamn one."

"I had the same sort of job there [in South Korea] as I had here.  Keeping undesirables out."

Carter smiled.  "I hardly think wetbacks can be compared to Chinese Communists."

"What we need is a fence."

Thompson chuckled.  "Couple of months ago the merchants in Brownsville came up with the same idea.  They got all agitated and virtuous about Mexicans crossing over from Matamoras, stealing things and selling marijuana.  Anyway, that was their excuse.  So we got an engineer to design a fence.  Big deal.  It was going to be steel chain with a V arm on top, and a patrol road on the riverside....

"That should have done the trick."

"It didn't.  They thought it over again, and changed their minds.  Decided they wanted to keep the Mexicans  coming over after all.  There was  a lot of yackety-yack about international trust and friendship...but the fact is that they were doing good business with the Mexicans and didn't want to lose their trade.  

"'We need them and they need us'....I don't go for that kind of crap."

Wetback, William O'Farrell, 1956

Seventy-two years ago in the United States, the presidential administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in June 1954 commenced "Operation Wetback" in the country's southern borderland in order to expel from the country undocumented Mexican immigrants, contemptuously dubbed "wetbacks" in an allusion to their allegedly having crossed over the wadeable Rio Grande River to get into the U.S. to find work.  The word likely would not be used as the title of a novel today, even a well-intentioned one.  

Over a single year in 1954-55 about a quarter of a million Mexican nationals were "returned" from the United States to Mexico.  Under the direction of Border Patrol head Harlon Carter, Border Patrol agents--Eisenhower had refused urgent requests to federalize the National Guard--were used to round up masses of Mexican agricultural workers and transfer them back to Mexico. 

By the provisions of the Bracero Program, an agreement between the U. S. and Mexico, Mexican laborers were allowed legal, documented entry into the country; yet Texas farmers frequently objected to the guaranteed wages that they were required to pay to the braceros, parsimoniously preferring illegally to employ "wetbacks" to pick their cotton, okra, etc. at piddling wages.  If the wetbacks got troublesome about it, an anonymous tip could conveniently be provided to Border Patrol agents and the Mexicans would be duly ejected from the country.  

Harlon Carter on horseback

It was a corrupt system and ripe pickings for an author like liberal/left author like William O'Farrell, who tackled the timely subject in the penultimate novel published during his lifetime, Wetback.  A Dell paperback original ("Dell First Edition"), O'Farrell's novel bears resemblance to provocative works published around this time by authors like Jim Thompson and Erskine Caldwell.  

There's an oversexed, sluttish farmer's daughter by the name of Gloria Jean who goes after any handsome man on the scene (rural southern Texas between McAllen and Brownsville), her coarse father Elwood Hansen (one can almost see Burl Ives in this Big Daddy of a part), whose wife ran off with a handsome virile Mexican, and, with more than a brush of Jim Thompson, a good-looking, blond, sociopathic, racist rapist who is a rising member of the Border Patrol, one Rudolph Valentino Callahan.  (His doting New Jersey mother was a great film fan.)

Harlon carter strutting for the camera

Unlike Jim Thompson, William O'Farrell, who was three years younger than Thompson, never lived in Texas, but before his birth in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904, his railroad executive father, along with his mother and his three older siblings, had lived, like Thompson later would, in Fort Worth, Texas.  As an adult, however, O'Farrell enjoyed a much more cosmopolitan, if wayfaring, life, and resided in New York City and California, toured Europe and, on a mission with the marines, personally witnessed slayings of Haitians during the American military occupation of their country.  Hence was a born a strong liberal/left consciousness that later found expression in his Forties and Fifties crime writing.  

In Wetback the author's disgust as he casts his eyes upon Texas is blatantly evident.  "If a man can't actually be from Texas, seems to me the next best thing he can do is pretend he is," announces the sluttish, racist Gloria Jean, a rich man's spoiled brat if ever there were one.  

The irony is clear, as we see all the abuses heaped daily by the privileged whites upon the powerless Mexicans, even when they need Mexicans--preferably ones with just Spanish blood, like Hansen's foreman Armando Castro, who are deemed "technically white"--to run their farms for them and speak Spanish to the humble laborers.  When Armando vanishes for a time, Hansen has to get his cook Conchita to address his "wetback" workers for him.  

Like Jim Thompson, O'Farrell came to specialize in the depiction of embittered, envious sociopathic men, losers in the capitalist game determined to get ahead at any costs.  In Wetback this toxic male is the aforementioned Rudolph Valentino Callaghan, a handsome but vicious and venal racist and rapist.  (He had been much spoiled by his doting mama, who let him get away with anything.)  

When Rudy becomes a member of the Border Patrol it's ripe pickings for beating up insolent "wetback" men and forcing his unwelcome attentions upon a vexingly virtuous married local Mexican-American woman, Rosa Mayorga.  

After he commits his rape--his first rape--Rudy thinks to himself:

Sometimes...a guy who is fundamentally a right guy is pushed into doing things that, to people who don't know him well, make him look as though he's acting like a heel.  You'd think a guy would be forgiven an occasional mistake.

I'm guessing Rudy with his pathologically oblivious self-pitying self-justification for abusing women would be a big hit on the manosphere today!

At one point in the novel the rich farmer, Hansen, scowls when thinking 

of the airs some of these greasers--the ones who somehow got hold of citizenship papers--had got the habit of giving themselves these past few years....Insisted they were Americans: Latin Americans, if you please.  Wetbacks swim the river, and one way or another find good jobs. They have kids, and the kids are Latin Americans.  They go to school with white kids, and when they grow up they're allowed to vote.  They own farms and businesses, and their wives and daughters get their pictures on the society page of the Valley Sentinel [the local liberal paper which runs editorials against the "stormtrooper" tactics of the Border Patrol].  They'd call themselves Texans, by God, given a chance.    

Mexicans en route to deportation

O'Farrell here incisively points out that the greatest fear of anti-immigrationists is not Latin Americans coming to the United States and failing, but their coming and succeeding.  When you read Wetback, which you should, you are pulled along into the story and want badly for Rudy Callahan simply to fucking die, but you also learn something about a time and place from which we regrettably no longer seem so much to have evolved, if we have evolved at all.

In the novel William O'Farrell allows Christine Peters, the wife of his relatively liberal Border Patrol character, Bill Peters, to voice some liberal sentiments concerning Mexican farm laborers which he himself surely shared:

"They've got so little; it wouldn't be natural if they didn't think we had too much....How can you arrest those poor people?"

Were she alive today perhaps Christine might have dared to protest an ICE operation in Minneapolis--and been shot for her pains.  

Postscript

NRA kingpin and cock of the walk
Hanlon Carter in later years
a half-century after a youthful murder
he thought was forgotten

Later during the Seventies then Border Patrol chief Harlon Carter became a big wheel, Executive Vice President, at the NRA--National Rifle Association--and in that office he was instrumental in shaping the organization's stance toward political opposition to all forms of restrictions on gun rights during the Carter and first Reagan administration. When in 1981 when he was running for reelection it was revealed that Carter, then 17, shot and killed Ramon Casiano, a 15-year-old Mexican boy whom he suspected--wrongly it appears--of knowing something about the theft of his family's car. He pointed a gun at the youth and demanded that he return with him to the Carter home for questioning.  When Casiano refused, Carter shot the but in the chest and killed him.  No autopsy was performed, but there were eyewitness accounts of the affray.  

At his trial Carter was convicted of murder by the jury within thirty minutes.  To the jury the trial judge had disallowed a self-defense claim (Carter claimed that Ramon had drawn a knife), explaining that the defendant had no right to force the boy at gunpoint to come back with him to his home.  

However, the Texas Court of Appeals overturned the conviction, claiming that the judge's instruction on self-defense was in error.  In 1981 Carter refused to talk about the case when it made the news again, except to say that he had nothing whatsoever to apologize for about his  actions.  It appears that he altered his name from "Harlan" to "Harlon" to obscure his background as a man tried and convicted (initially) of murder.  

Not long before he died, nearly eighty years old, in 1991, Carter wrote an article in the wake of the Los Angeles Rodney King riots condemning people (black people) taking the law into their own hands.  

Carter's newspaper obituary, carried across the United States, omitted to mention the Ramon Casiano killing.  Carter's replacement at the NRA, Wayne LaPierre said of his predecessor that Carter's vision had 

transformed the National Rifle Association into the nation's largest and most effective defender of the Second Amendment....America's 70 million law-abiding gun owners largely own their freedom to own firearms for hunting, competitive shooting and self-defense to one man--Harlon Carter.  he was our champion and fiercest warrior.  

What a truly American success story: a white man kills a Mexican boy and grows up, as the dead boy molders forgotten in his grave having not even a photo behind him, to head the border patrol and serve as Executive Vice President of the NRA, preaching all the while about the virtues of law and order.  

President Reagan shows off his piece before beaming Hanlon Carter (third from left)
Wayne LaPierre possibly lurking in background. He always had to be in the picture.

Ramon Casiano was memorialized in 2016, during the first Trump presidential campaign, in the timely song of the name by the Drive-By Truckers.  Pictures of his much-honored murderer, Hanlon Carter, illustrate this review.  Old Hanlon certainly liked his guns and his uniform.  

Harlan Carter as he was then known
in Laredo High School in 1928,
three years before he shot
and killed Ramon Casiano

So did, for that matter, William O'Farrell's Rudy Callahan, of whom the author writes on the first page of Wetback:

He was a young man, tall and blond, with regular, strong features and a tanned skin which stretched tightly  over high cheekbones.  Small green eyes set a little too close together and not precisely on a level did not, at first glance, detract materially from his good looks.  He wore his olive-green uniform as though he had never known civilian clothes.  He looked like a man who had everything under control, which was what he intended--and which was almost one hundred percent untrue.

The pretense of toxic boy-men having everything under control--how like Donald Trump and his male courtiers.  

Here's "Ramon Casiano" by the Drive-By Truckers.  

A Dream Collection: Dream No More (2026), by Philip Macdonald

[Philip] MacDonald is at once a craftsman of writing, whose prose, characterization and evocation of mood (comic or terrible) might be envied by the most serious literary practitioner, and a craftsman of plot technique, whose construction and misdirection should delight (and startle) Carr or Christie.  

--Anthony Boucher, NYTBR review of Macdonald's short fiction collection Something to Hide

The author [has] a quality which few detective story writers possess, the ability to construct situations of almost unbearable suspense.  Common sense may tell us that right must triumph, but until we reach the last page our harrowed sensibilities will not allow is to lay aside the book.--The Times

Golden Age mystery writer Philip MacDonald (1900-1980) had one of the more unusual careers of the genre writers of his generation, enjoying a sort of rebirth after World War Two with short crime fiction written in a much different style.  He embodied in his one person the transition from the more labored formal ratiocinative detective fiction of the Golden Age to the sleeker, faster-paced suspense fiction of the modern mid-century.  

To be sure, MacDonald, a native Englishman who at the height of his mystery writing career in 1932 migrated to Hollywood to write film screenplays, was something of an odd man out even back in the Twenties and Thirties.  

Strong suspense or "thriller" elements often invaded his detective fiction and some of his crime novels, like Murder Gone Mad, X v. Rex, Menace, aka RIP and Escape, aka Mystery in Kensington Gore, essentially are thrillers.  In his Twenties mysteries The Rasp and The White Crow his murderers have deeply aberrant psychological motivations.  

Although in the mid-Thirties MacDonald wrote the first original screenplays for the Charlie Chan mystery series (Charlie Chan in London and Charlie Chan in Paris), in the Forties he would also write screenplays for suspensers like Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, Strangers in the Night, The Body Snatcher, Dangerous Intruder, Love from a Stranger, The Dark Past and The Man who Cheated Himself.  

During his peak productivity as a crime writer in the early 1930s, Philip MacDonald published 14 crime novels in four years.  Within a year after his move to Hollywood, however, he stopped writing crime novels for five years, until he published Warrant for X in 1938.  Over the next two decades he would publish only four crime novels, culminating in 1959 in the Edgar Award best novel runner-up The List of Adrian Messenger. 

In the field of crime fiction MacDonald after World War Two instead concentrated on shorter works, novelettes and short stories, which he gathered in three collections: Something to Hide, (Fingers of Fear in the UK), The Man out of the Rain and Death and Chicanery.  "I feel occasionally the need to blow off steam," MacDonald told a newspaper in the late 1940s.  "When this happens I write a short story."

Indeed he did and these stories he wrote were steamy with morbid criminal psychology and suspense.  Critics and his fellow mystery writers responded very favorably to them; the Mystery Writers of America awarded MacDonald two Edgars for his short fiction, one for his first collection of tales, Something to Hide, and one specifically for the 1955 story "Dream No More."

Dream No More is the title we have given to to this new retrospective volume of Philip MacDonald short crime fiction, which is comprised of fifteen short works, novelettes and short stories, which MacDonald published over 35 years, between 1927 and 1962.  The table of contents is as follows:

Dream No More: Fifteen Memorable Tales of Murder, Malice and Mayhem by Philip Macdonald

I. Horror/Weird Stories

His Mother's Eyes 1927

Ten O'Clock 1931

Our Feathered Friends 1931

Private--Keep Out 1949

Solitary Confinement (Hub) 1951

II. Crime Stories

Malice Domestic 1946

The-Wood-for-the-Trees 1946 (Anthony Gethryn) 1947

The-Green-and-Gold String (Dr. Alcazar) 1948

The Go-Between (Harry-the-Hat) 1949

Love Lies Bleeding 1950

Fingers of Fear 1952

The Man out of the Rain 1954

Dream No More 1955

Deed of Mercy 1960

The Ticker Tape 1962

Philip Macdonald in the late 1940s
around the time he started 
writing short crime stories for
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

"His Mother's Eyes," set in a foul muddy trench in Mesopotamia during World War One, is MacDonald's original serial killer tale (why has this never been televised), "Ten O'Clock" is a weird tale originally anthologized by Dashiell Hammett, and "Our Feathered Friends," which anticipated a certain later famous avian tale by Daphne Du Maurier, was originally anthologized by Lady Cynthia Asquith.  All of these works were written when MacDonald was a young man and show how he could have been a major writer of "weird" stories.  

The postwar "Private--Keep Out" is an eerie and uncanny Forties sci-fi tale which was highly praised by Isaac Asimov and the original inspiration for the famous Twilight Zone episode "When the Sky Was Opened," while the more obscure "Solitary Confinement" (aka "Hub"), much shorter but similarly dark, sees publication in book form here for the first time. 

After World War Two MacDonald began publishing tales in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; all eight of the MacDonald EQMM tales published during the author's lifetime appear here in this volume. The first three of them, the maliciously "cozy" suspenser "Malice Domestic," the sole Anthony Gethryn detective story "The-Wood-for-the-Trees" (another serial killer at work), and "The-Green-and-Gold-String," about mentalist conman Dr. Alcazar, who stumbles onto evidence of a murder with another one impending, were all second-place finishers in the EQMM short story contests.  

What happened to Tonathal?
This answer will surprise you.

"The Go-Between" is the sole comedic story in the collection, a sort of O. Henryesque locked room problem concerning a vanished Teddy bear, if you can imagine such a thing, while "Fingers of Fear," a tale about a depraved child murderer that originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, is a pioneering police procedural.  "The Man out of the Rain" and "Deed of Mercy" are nailbighters about protagonists whom odd people put in dire personal predicaments.  

Arguably "Love Lies Bleeding," "The Ticker Tape" and "Dream No More" are the most psychologically incisive and sinister tales of the lot.  

"Love Lies Bleeding" concerns the deadly love triangle of two men and a woman.  Brush up on your sexual geometry for this one!

"The Ticker Tape" concerns the sexually sadistic slaying on a beach of a "beautiful" adolescent Mexican boy.  This one was too frank for the mystery magazines and it appeared originally in the volume Death and Chicanery.  It was the last story MacDonald wrote, at age 62, the coda to his writing career.

"Dream No More" concerns a handsome crew-cut, collegiate mama's boy who falls heavily under the sway of his exceedingly charming and charismatic middle-aged male English professor.  With this trio of tales in particular, MacDonald presaged the modern crime novel with his unblinkered look at outre sexual situations.  They were really ahead of their time, and pretty remarkable for a man who was born when Queen Victoria still reigned over much of the world.

Readers of MacDonald's 1955 story "Dream No More" may gets some vibes of
gay author Christopher Isherwood's 1962 novel A Single Man. Isherwood lived not
far from MacDonald on the California coast and it's possible the two men knew each other.
Pictured: Colin Firth and Nicholas Hoult in the 2009 film version of A Single Man.

I do hope you take a good look at Dream No More; it was a labor of love for me and I think a hugely deserved tribute to one of the great figures in vintage crime fiction.  My 6300 word introduction to the volume is packed with more information on MacDonald's writing and his life, about which over the years there have been quite a few errors made in the telling. MacDonald was a rather private, if not secretive, man.  During the summer I imagine I will be writing more about MacDonald's personal life and his writing for the screen, big and small.  

Repeat Performance: The Return of William O'Farrell (1904-1962), Midcentury Crime Fiction Noirist

William O'Farrell
in his late thirties (!)

How many crime writers publish their first novel when pushing forty?  PD James was 42.  Raymond Chandler had passed fifty. Dashiell Hammett was 35.  So perhaps pushing forty isn't so exceptional. Life makes time-consuming exactions on one, to be sure, and sometimes creative ambitions don't gel into reality for many years.

In any event, author William O'Farrell, as he called himself, was a few days shy of 38 when his debut crime novel, Repeat Performance, was published in November 1942.  The originality--an actor embroiled in a murder gets to live the last year of his life over--and genuine quality of the novel won it considerable favorable notice from reviewers and in 1947 it was, somewhat altered, made into a film starring Louis Hayward and Joan Leslie.  

O'Farrell, who had not published a crime novel (or any novel) since Repeat Performance, the year after the release of the film version of his debut novel suddenly published two more of them.  It was the beginning of his relatively brief highly productive period as a crime novelist.  Between 1948 and 1956 he published a dozen crime novels, two under a pseudonym, William Grew.  

In the remaining six years of his life he produced only two more crime novels, both paperback originals, the later one posthumously published.  However, between 1955 and 1964 he had eighteen short stories published in crime fiction magazines.  Fifteen crime novels and eighteen short stories make for a significant crime writing career, but William O'Farrell was rapidly forgotten after his death in the English-speaking world, though his gritty crime fiction retained some popularity in France for a time.  (Some of his writing, with its vicious sociopathic killers and theme of "doubling," is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith.)

a pair of thematically similar "doubling" novels
soon to be reprinted in one twofer volume by Stark House

Paperback publisher IPL reprinted Repeat Performance in 1987, but there was no follow-up to that.  (That pb edition is now itself collectible, to say nothing of the hardcover first edition.)  Finally Stark House reissued Repeat Performance in 2021 and the following year Flicker Alley reissued a restored edition of the film.  Now four years later Stark House is reissuing two O'Farrell suspense novels, The Devil His Due (1955) and, a William Grew, Doubles in Death.  I was asked to write an introduction for this volume and in doing so I turned up quite a bit of detail on the author's interesting life.  

O'Farrell at age 17

William O'Farrell was born William Buchanan Farrell in St. Louis in 1904.  Why he added the "O" to his name is a bit of a mystery, but as the Farrells were of Irish Catholic origin, presumably the "O" may have been adhered to the name at some earlier point.  

William's father Henry was a proudly self-made railroad executive and his mother the daughter of a men's clothier. (His father's father had been a tailor, so his parents had something in common.)  The family moved to Pittsburgh in 1917 when William was 12, his father having been appointed president of the Pittsburgh and West Virginia Railroad. 

William was the youngest of four children, having two older brothers and a sister.  He was nine to twelve years younger than his elder siblings and definitely the odd one out in the wealthy family, leaving prep school in 1921 at the age of sixteen to work as a newsboy at the Pittsburgh Post. The next year at the age of seventeen he took off to travel around Europe, presumably with the financial assistance of an indulgent father.  

Farrell home in Santa Monica on ritzy San Vincente Blvd.,
residence of William's father from 1929, when it was built, until his death in 1931
as well as William's mother and two brothers during the rest of the 1930s. 
William stayed here too sometimes, until his marriage in 1940.  

One of the author's best-reviewed books
a tale of corporate corruption
and killings that got
 the ashcan art treatment from
pb publisher Bantam 

In 1923 William returned to attend Cornell University (a bargain with his father?), but he dropped out to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City for two years.  Yes, first he wanted to be a newsman, now he wanted to be an actor.  He was a handsome, rangy, wavy-haired youth, over six feet tall and about 180 pounds.  

This takes us to 1927, when twenty-two-year-old William, now sporting a fashionable pencil-thin moustache, decided to join the merchant marine.  The year before his father, now in his sixties, had retired from the railroad business and moved to sunny Santa Monica, California with his two unmarried elder sons and his married daughter and her family, where they entered the burgeoning real estate business in the Golden State. William listed his father's fancy Mediterranean revival home as his place of residence, but he once again had mostly gone his own way.

O'Farrell at age 22, looking quite actorly
he might almost have shot Abraham Lincoln

Two years later in 1929 he joined the marines a found himself in Haiti, a perpetually beleaguered country under American occupation between 1915 and 1934.  In the early 1930s he returned to the United States, settling with his widowed mother and his two unmarried elder brothers (the married sister, Eulalie, lived down the road in her own mansion) and ostensibly writing for radio and moving pictures, though the only evidence I have found for this is a notice in the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News stating that "William Buchanan Farrell, writer of 12273 San Vicente Boulevard, was under orders to pay a fine or serve ten days following a conviction on a drunk driving charge" in the Beverley Hills Court.  

His publicity photo (see top of article) for Repeat Performance, presumably taken when he was around 37, shows a worn, raffishly-handsome, Clark Gableish figure prematurely aged, one suspects, from drinking and smoking.  

Farrell in his late twenties (?)
looking rather more worn in the face

By the late 1930s, William O'Farrell, as he now called himself, had begun submitting short stories to the women's slicks and he finally hit paydirt with the publication of "Smart Dog" in Collier's in April 1941.  He published two more slick stories the next year in Collier's and The American Magazine and then came Repeat Performance.  

Two years earlier in 1940, William at age 35 had wed a previously divorced, 34-year-old physician's secretary, Carol Page Royce, and finally left the Farrell family nest for good, though apparently the marriage foundered and produced no children.  Evidently he served in the merchant navy during World War Two, which may explain why there was no quick follow-up to Repeat Performance.  

Perhaps the filming of the novel served as a kick in the butt for the fledgling novelist. In any event O'Farrell enjoyed a successful writing career in the late Forties and throughout the Fifties and into the early Sixties, culminating in his writing some scripts of television series, including Perry Mason and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  

Valeria Golino and Thierry Lhermitte looking rather retro noirish in Dernier ete a Tanger

James Congdon (still with us) and Bette Davis 
as the handsome dog-walker doorman
and the predatory rich widow in 
Out There, Darkness

Additionally O'Farrell's novel Doubles in Death in 1960 served, under the title "The Twisted Image," as the premier episode on the suspense anthology Thriller, hosted by horror icon Boris Karloff.  O'Farrell's short story "Over There, Darkness," an indictment of the casual cruelty of the selfish leisured rich which won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America in 1959, was adapted, under the slightly improved title "Out There, Darkness," as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents with Bette Davis in the lead role.  It's a strong, well-acted episode with real emotional punch.

This 1961 O'Farrell pb original 
ended up in a bargain bin

A decade earlier O'Farrell's Thin Edge of Violence was filmed as an episode of the suspense anthology series Suspense.  As late as 1987 his novel The Devil His Due was made into the French film Dernier ete a Tanger (Last Summer in Tangier)

Despite his accomplishments William O'Farrell died obscurely in 1962, at the rather premature age of 57.  One suspects the author was very hard on himself, packing two lifetimes into one.  Just what devils drove this youngest scion of a Missouri and Pennsylvania railroad executive (and why) are unclear and may never be known, but they produced at least 33 works of crime fiction, long and short, that remained after him.  

Happily nearly sixty-five years after the death of this wayfaring vagabond of writer, his works, with their interesting takes on murderously materialistic mid-century American culture, are getting new leases on life.  Repeat performances, you might say.

More on That Member Mystery: A Note on the Origin of the Story of the Uncircumcised Corpse in the Bath in Dorothy L. Sayers' Whose Body?

Two posts ago, you may recall, I discussed the matter of whether the bathtub corpse in Dorothy L. Sayers' debut mystery, Whose Body?, had a circumcised or uncircumcised member.  I concluded that it obviously was circumcised, though a certain, um, body of opinion over the decades has pronounced--errantly, it seems to me--otherwise.  Where did this idea that the bathtub body was uncircumcised originate?  I've been on the prowl on this mystery, my dear readers, busily detecting; and here's what I found out.

Like a Ross Macdonald baffler, the answer to this outré riddle seems to lie decades in the past.  Old sins have long shadows, don't you know.  In the late Leroy Lad Panek's Edgar nominated Watteau's Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain 1914-1940 (1979), Panek in his chapter on Dorothy L. Sayers writes:

in her original version of [Whose Body?], [Lord Peter] Wimsey deduces that the body in the bath is not Sir Reuben Levy's because it is uncircumcised.  Her publisher demurred at this and forced a change in the physical evidence.  

Panek having been an academic, he happily left us a footnote for this claim, though sadly it's to another secondary source, the erratic first biography of Sayers, Janet Hitchman's Such a Strange Lady, published four years earlier than Panek's critical study in 1975.  

Hitchman writes:

After many stops and starts [Whose Body?] was finished in 1921 and offered to several publishers who turned it down on the grounds of "coarseness."  An American publisher took a chance on it, provided certain matters were cut out.  The story concerned the disappearance of a Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy.  A naked, dead, Semitic-featured gentleman has turned up in a bath and the bumbling Inspector Sugg was anxious to identify him as Levy.  Peter Wimsey, however, knew "it to be no go by the evidence of my own eyes."  The evidence was, originally, that the body was uncircumcised, which definitely ruled out Sir Reuben Levy, and ruled out the book for acceptance.  [Sayers], no doubt, made a fight for her clue....

Hitchman not being an academic, there is no source cited for this account.  So we have a inquisitorial dead end, seemingly!  

Whence did Hitchman derive this claim?  Is there an original Whose Body? manuscript somewhere in existence, in which the bathtub corpse is uncircumcised?  This certainly doesn't comport with the evidence in my (American) edition, from which I concluded that the corpse was obviously circumcised.  Was the British edition different?  My Eighties British paperback edition appears the same as the American edition from the 1980s.  

In the years since the Seventies accounts from some people have evidently garbled things and claimed that the corpse in the published edition is uncircumcised, which seems clearly wrong, whatever may or may not have once existed.  But I would love to see the evidence for Janet Hitchman's uncorroborated account of the uncircumcised corpse.  Hitchman, a freelance writer, died at the age of 63 in 1980, just five years after the publication of Such a Strange Lady, so, she, alas, cannot tell us.  

Note: In this and the previous Sayers article, I noticed I kept misspelling the word circumcised/uncircumcised, so that it's more like supersized!  I admit I never before used the word so much (if ever) in writing.  But I stand...corrected.

5 million views and the Hugh Wheeler/Richard Webb (Patrick Quentin) Critical Biography

As the Passing Tramp blog achieved fifteen years of existence late last november, its views also starting shooting upward.  In December there were around 140,000 views, in January 146,000, in February 135,000, in March 267,000 and in April 213,000 (month not quite over).  A few days ago, the lifetime blog views surpassed five million.  If the current views rate holds I will be adding 2-3 million views every year.

I have committed a quarter-century of my life now to chronicling vintage crime fiction history so this development, at least, is gratifying.  There have been a lot of disappointments as well, however.  One such disappointment is not having gotten my joint critical bio of Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb published.  I didn't go the academic route this time but rather commercial and I found that publishing non-fiction commercially is a tough row to hoe.  Agents were duly impressed, if not amazed, with the depth and breadth of the research, but felt the book needed more of a "narrative history" approach.  Non-fiction that reads just like fiction, as it were.  I've always been told I'm a good scholarly writer, though I did make an effort to write more commercially this time around.  

What's frustrating to me is I know this is an important book.  Vintage mystery fans will love all the detail on Rickie and Hugh's crime fiction, but this book also is an important contribution to twentieth-century LGBTQ history.  So what to do?  Perhaps I will self-publish.  The book is completed, standing at 582 manuscript pages and about 181,000 words (about 173,000 main text, plus 8000 in appendices).  It represents a massive amount of research into social history as well as the lives of these two men, adding enormously to what we know about them.  I provide the table of contents and first three paragraphs of the introduction below.

On the blog I have written a lot over the years about Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb, but for those who don't know they are best known for their mid-century Patrick Quentin mysteries (first written collaboratively, then later by Hugh alone), but they also wrote fine mysteries as Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge.  Hugh went on to write film screenplays and the book for Sweeney Todd and other broadway musicals.  Here's a prior general post on their writing and one rather more personal on the authors themselves. 

I've been disappointed over the years with various larger mystery publishers who have relied on my spadework, which has been extremely substantial for over fifteen years (I've dug up a lot of graves over the years), without acknowledging it, as well as additional boorish behavior like that by that rather egregious old fellow OP, but I did hope the queer press might come to bat for this book, a history of one of the more significant gay couples of the twentieth century. It's hard to document such couples before the Stonewall Riots, when most of them lived closted lives.  

Anyway, we shall see what happens, but I realize I have to get this book out somehow,  I've been trying off and on for a couple of years now.  Ironically it's probably the best of my many books.  I would like to have made some money on it, but if that's not to be I'll just self-publish to get the story out there in some form.  But anyway, here's a little hint of it.  Roughly 40% of the book is bio, 40% discussion of their crime fiction and 20% looking at the queer themes.  

Introduction (3-7)

Part I

Rickie and Hugh: Men Alone (1902-1932), Men Together (1933-1951), Men Apart (1952-     1987) (8-220)

Part II

Rickie and Hugh’s Crime Writing: Q. Patrick, Jonathan Stagge, Patrick Quentin, Short      Fiction (221-432)       

Part III

Stranger Things: Queer Matter in Rickie and Hugh’s Crime Writing (433-544)

Conclusion: Puzzles for Posterity (545-546)

Appendix A: Works by Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler (547-558)

Appendix B: Philadelphia Freedom: Rickie and Hugh’s Gay Circle in Philadelphia

(559-566)

Appendix C: The Patrick Quentin Fan and Friend List (567-576)

Appendix D: Richard Wilson Webb Juvenilia (577-582)

Introduction 

            Over the last decade of researching LGBTQ+ history for this book I have come to feel like a sleuth in a detective novel, for so often I have found myself dealing with suppressions, evasions and outright lies, all of them designed to hide deeds done in darkness from exposure to light.  Sometimes it seems as if Ross Macdonald’s private eye Lew Archer, who in novel after novel is beleaguered by the deceptions crafted by generations of close-mouthed, dysfunctional, upper-class California families, had an easier time of it.  With the perseverance of an Archer, I was able in 2018 to trace the whereabouts of the ninety-one-year-old nephew of Richard “Rickie” Wilson Webb (1901-1966), one of the two subjects of this joint critical biography.  Webb’s nephew, to whom I had hopefully reached out from halfway around the world through the miracle of modern electronic communication, gave me for my pains a polite but coldly cursory two-sentence reply: Thank you for your enquiry about my uncle.  I am not in a position to help you.  So shut a final door, fifty-two years after Rickie Webb’s death, on probably the last living portal into his elusive family history.  Even in the internet age, family secrets can be carried to the grave and the love that dare not speak its name thereby finally fail to give tongue. 

            Thus it is that Rickie Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912-1987), an Anglo-American same sex couple of two decades standing who wrote some of the finest crime fiction from the mid-twentieth century, could remain, until the last few years, publicly unacknowledged as precisely that: a same sex couple.  To the mystery readers of 2010, Rickie and Hugh had remained exactly what they were to the mystery readers of 1950: two men, best buds perhaps, who happened to have written their mysteries together.  The truth was implicit to anyone who could but read between the lines, yet precisely because the truth lay between the lines it could still be determinedly overlooked by those who refused to see it.  In this way same-sex relationships throughout the course of history have been allowed effectively to vanish from the annals of history. 

            The full personal histories of other, more famous men than Rickie Webb and Hugh Wheeler were long successfully concealed as well.  Over two decades ago, 1998 was a banner year for truth in this regard, with the publication of Keith Hale’s Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914 and Alan Bishop’s and Mark Bostridge’s Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, wherein we learned respectively of Great War poet Rupert Brooke’s bisexuality and the homosexuality of author Vera Brittain’s brother, Edward, the exposure of which to his commanding officers likely led tragically to the soldier’s decision to sacrifice his life on the field of battle at Asiago, Italy on the fatal morning of June 15, 1918 rather than endure public disgrace.  Fortunately, telltale primary material about these men survived, allowing determined scholar-detectives eventually to elicit the truth in the face of decades-long obfuscations.  Geoffrey Keynes, brother of bisexual economist John Maynard Keynes and trustee of Rupert Brooke’s literary estate, had vowed that James Strachey’s illuminating correspondence with Brooke would be published only “over my dead body,” and so indeed had it transpired.  Similarly, 2002 saw the publication of Dominic Hibberd’s Wilfred Owen: A New Biography, which exploded the myth of the gay Great War poet’s saintly asexuality, perpetrated over the years by many individuals.  In doing so they followed the lead of Owen’s brother Harold, who had selectively edited, effaced and even destroyed Owen’s letters, Hibberd notes, partly out of “a desperate anxiety to suppress anything that might assist rumors that Wilfred had been gay.”  Wilfred was no “homo-sexualist,” avowed Harold, who emphatically disdained homosexuality.

The Mystery of the Member: Identifying a Corpse in Whose Body? (1923), by Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers began writing Whose Body?, her first Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel, in London in January 1921, when she was was 27 years old.  A letter that month from Sayers to her mother reveals that the novel rather changed in the writing. In the novel as published the naked body discovered in the bath belongs to a "semitic-looking stranger" who is at first thought might possibly be the vanished Jewish financier Sir Reuben Levy; but in fact the corpse turns out to be that of some other, stubbornly anonymous individual.  But here's how Sayers conceived this plot in her 1921 letter:

My detective story begins brightly with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez.  [Sayers herself wore pince-nez at this time.]  Now, why did she wear pince-nez in her bath?  If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands on the murderer....

By October, when Sayers had finished the novel, the dead body in the bath had altered from a fat woman wearing a pince-nez to a middle-aged Jewish man wearing a pince nez.  I have read, however, that Sayers originally made sufficiently clear that Lord Peter immediately perceived that the corpse had an uncircumcised penis, so that it cannot be Jewish and thus is not Sir Reuben Levy, but that her publishers demanded that she censor this detail and she complied. 

In her 1993 biography of Sayers, Barbara Reynolds thinks there is still left in the text evidence, circumspectly presented, of this circumcision plot and states flatly: "the body in the bath is uncircumcised."  In his Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics (2014), Australian academic Stephen Knight suggests the plot of Whose Body? actually turns on this supposed circumcision plot.  The late crime writer PD James heaps up error on this subject in her book Talking about Detective Fiction:

In Dorothy L. Sayers' first detective novel, Whose Body?, the corpse is found naked in the bath of a nervous and innocent architect, and the book begins with this image.  The first question facing the police--and, of course, her detective Lord Peter Wimsey--is whether this was the corpse of Sir Reuben Levy, the missing Jewish financier.  Whether the victim had or had not been been circumcised would have answered the question at once.  

Lord Peter suavely
examining the body in the bath
(this seems an amazingly good likeness)

For her part Barbara Reynolds writes that in Whose Body? Lord Peter knows at once that the corpse is not Sir Reuben Levy because he espies that the corpse's own peter is uncut, as it were, a detail that Scotland Yard inspectors Sugg and Parker somehow failed to perceive.  However, having read, for the third time, Whose Body?, I just don't see how these accounts make sense, at least going by the edition I have.

In Chapter One Lord Peter learns from his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, that Mr. Thipps, the London architect who is "doing the church roof" at the village of Denver, had been put on the spot back in London by the titular body turning up in his bath.  Whose body is it?  Peter goes to investigate and is soon inspecting Mr. Thipps' bathroom, complete with its naked corpse in the tub.  

At this point there has been no mention whatever made of Sir Reuben Levy.  This is absolutely not the first question facing Wimsey, as PD James insists.  In fact it's not a question for him at all.  

Sir Reuben's name does not come up until page 28 of my edition of the novel, when Sir Peter encounters at his flat Inspector Parker, who tells Peter that he too went to investigate the matter of the corpse in the Thipps tub, even though it is Inspector Suggs' case, because he wanted to see if the "Semitic-looking stranger in Mr. Thipps' bath was by any extraordinary chance Sir Reuben Levy."  Inspector Parker has been tasked with looking into the Levy case, you see.  

Gladys the maid gets in a good look.
Maybe she could answer my question.

Parker sees immediately that the corpse is not Sir Reuben Levy and it's not because of the intactness of the corpse's penis, but because the corpse has a head and a face and the head and face simply are not those of Levy, though Parker allows that the corpse "would really be extraordinarily like Sir Reuben if he had a beard."  Peter agrees that the dead man can't be Levy: "I've seen the body, and I should say the idea was preposterous upon the face of it."  

But again this has nothing to do with the state of corpse's penis.  Peter's deductions about the corpse are based on his having determined that the dead man came of working class origins, not that his member had been snipped.  

Apparently both Sir Reuben Levy and the corpse are Jewish and hence circumcised.  Parker tells Peter that Inspector Sugg told him the body in the bath is that "of a well-to-do Hebrew of around fifty," adding contemptuously of Sugg: "Anybody could have told him that."  Someone, he says, presumably struck dead this "tall and sturdy Semite."  So surely, contra the asseverations of Reynolds and Knight, the body in the bath was circumcised and Peter, Parker and Sugg and everyone else who actually looked noticed the fact?  

Even the Dowager Duchess of Denver blurts out the obvious (as she will).  When burbling away about Judaism she says: "of course it must be very inconvenient [being Jewish], what with not working on Saturdays and circumcising the poor little babies...."  Had the corpse been uncircumcised, surely even dim Inspector Sugg would have noticed?

Also, I simply have to disagree with PD James' notion that the state of the corpse's penis would have "at once" established whether or not the corpse was Levy.  Yes, if the corpse had been uncircumcised it could not have been Levy.  But if it were circumcised, as it apparently was, that would not have established that it was Levy.  There were other circumcised men in London, one presumes, besides the unfortunate vanished Jewish financier.

Enduring Young Harmers: Scandal at High Chimneys (1959), by John Dickson Carr

"Would you care to marry the daughter of a vicious murderess?"

"You are concerned with sensationalism, Mr. Strickland."

--John Dickson Carr's Scandal at High Chimneys (1959)

The crime writing of John Dickson Carr, like that of Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, clearly entered into a state of decline sometimes in the 1950s.  Did Christie ever write a truly first-rate detective novel after 1953, the year she published After the Funeral and A Pocket Full of Rye?  The decline was more extreme in Carr's case.  To be sure, he reinvigorated his crime writing in the early 1950s with his impressive historical mysteries The Bride of Newgate (1950) and The Devil in Velvet (1951), but how many really first-rate mysteries did he publish in the Fifties?  Maybe Captain Cut-Throat and Fire, Burn!?  

I have a soft spot for Carr's late Dr. Fell mystery The Dead Man's Knock (1958), which a lot of people seem sort of to hate; but what about Carr's Victorian mystery Scandal at High Chimneys?  When I first read it two decades or more ago I was underwhemed; and having reread it more recently, I found that my feeling about it hasn't changed.  Is it better than Carr's late Sixties mysteries?  Certainly the historical atmosphere is stronger; but the book yet has noteworthy flaws.  

In contrast with the author's other historical mysteries, Scandal at High Chimneys is set in Victorian-era England, specifcally the year 1865, the 28th year of Queen Victoria's reign and the fourth year of her stodgy widowhood.  Carr was not really temperamentally suited to the Victorian era.  One thing a Carr fan will know about their locked room legend is that over and over and over again the author, through his stand-in writer protagonists, condemns puritans as nothing more than canting hypocrites and defends libertines as men (or even women) who at least knew how to live and made no apologies about it.  

notorious party gal
Queen Victoria in 1865 at the time
the novel takes place; she was 45

Basically Carr never forgave Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell for having had Charles I's kingly head lopped off in 1649 and spoiling everyone's fun in England during the Interegnum until his own death a decade later saw the ascension of Charles II.  Aside from the Interregnum itself, there was not a period in English history with which Carr could have been more out-of-sorts than those years when Queen Victoria wore mourning, partook copiously of multi-course meals and glowered at the camera.

Appropriately for a later Carr mystery, Chimneys opens with the ages of two lovely younger women undergoing discussion.  These enduring young charmers are sisters Kate and Celia Damon, who when the novel opens are 20 and 19 respectively. (We aren't leeringly told in this particular Carr opus, however, that the young ladies "look younger" than their actual ages.)  

The sisters' father, the stern and forbidding Victorian criminal prosecutor Matthew Damon, "deeply religious in the old Evangelical way" (a Carr reader will know this means he's really a horny old goat at heart), doesn't seem keen on the girls, one blonde, one brunette, getting married.  He proclaims that they are too young for all that, an assertion at which scoffs his kittenish younger second wife, Georgette Damon.  Presumably Georgette, a former actress, is in her thirties--the sophisticated adventuress age don't you know--while Matthew is 48 but acts 20 years older. 

Next we shift over to Carr avatar Clive Strickland, a rising sensation fiction serialist, discussing at his London club with Victor Damon, Kate's and Celia's brother, the matter of just "what's wrong at High Chimneys"--the Damon country domicile.  In the usual matter of Carr characters at this time in Carr's career, Victor maddeningly starts to tell Clive, but is immediately interrupted and sidetracked by someone else.  Then, when queried again by Clive about it, he demurs from talking: "I can't tell you....I can't tell you."  Whatever the reason, however, Victor seems fervently to desire that his sisters marry and get away from some low doings at High Chimneys.  

This is the first of many times in the novel that a character refuses to tell something important they know or is interrupted (or killed even) when about to tell something important they know.  Here are some examples from the book:

"Then it is time for plain speaking--what was that?"

"It's so absurd that I prefer to keep it to myself."

"If you don't mind, I'll keep that to myself...."

"I won't tell you.  It would shock you too much."

Not for nothing does a character beg of another:

"....let us have no more mystification....I beg you to draw it mild and spare me more of your blasted mystification."

This suspensive delay, as it were, is a narrative device which Carr picked up from his radio playwriting that quickly wore out its welcome in his novels.  As his biographer, Doug Greene, explains:

Carr artificially creates what he calls an "atmosphere of tension and hysterics" by overusing his trick of saying obscure things, and by beginning to explain a mystery only to have the revelation interrupted.  I counted thirteen separate instances in Scandal at High Chimneys in which someone, for insufficent reasons, refuses to reveal something. It is easy to sympathize with the protagonist when he moans that although two people say they know who the murderer is, and two more certainly do, "no one will say a word."

just trying to have a little bit of fun
King Charles I (1600-1649)

This is all very true.  Most maddening of all is the second Mrs. Damon, who keeps refusing to speak until just the right moment and of course makes it possible for the murderer to bump her off before she finally--finally!--is about to speak.  You really feel the woman brought death upon herself.  

These stylistic matters--which plague all later Carr books--aside, how is the plot?  Plot is, after all, the main thing in a Carr mystery.  Here, it's...not so great. As in all late Carr, there's a great deal of mysteriousness (one might say blather), with about everyone acting yet mysteriouser and mysteriouser, but the basic mystery is not all that involved.  Let's explain.

At his club Clive Strickland learns an unhappy fact from arrogant Lord Albert Tressider, a sneering snob whom Victor Damon wants to marry his sister Celia.  (He could have been borrowed from one of Carr's swashbuckling Jacobean mysteries).  

Dear me, it seems that Victor's papa Matthew Damon 

"used to have uncommonly queer tastes.  He enjoyed making up to women who committed murder.  He would prosecute 'em, all as virtuous as an Old Testmament prophet.  Afterwards he'd go to Newgate [Prison] and visit 'em any number of times before they were hanged three weeks later.  Of course he pretended it was to pray with 'em and relieve his conscience....[In fact he] was quite spooney about two or three 'em, the young and pretty ones.  It seems he couldn't resist 'em."

Enduring young charms? Daughters darkness and light

Clive soon apprehends that the scandal at High Chimneys is that one of the Damon girls--either dark-haired, spirited Kate whom he loves or blonde, demure and seemingly submisive Celia (it seems like the The Last of the Mohicans' Cora and Alice all over again)--is the daughter of the executed Harriet Pyke (Harriet Vane?), one of Matthew Damon's convicted murderesses (she shot her lover and then for good measure strangled her maid, who witnessed the crime), whom the prosecutor adopted as an infant in a misplaced act of horndog piety and passed as his own and his first wife's child.  Tainted blood!  To his credit, Clive doesn't seem too worried about this (Carr heroes like their women to be worldly sisters under the skin), but, this being the Victorian Age, everyone else seems to be in a dither and frantically searching for their fainting couches.  

But which sister is really the offspring of an enduring young harmer, as it were?  Matthew Damon is shot in his study before he can tell Clive the truth.  Bizarrely, Matthew's killer seemingly is a headless spectre in "a frock-coat, a dark waistcoat, and patterned trousers...of a red-and-white checkered design."  That's something you don't see every day! Carr does manage to give us a frisson or two with this tidbit, but was Damon really killed by a ghost?  Fortunately retired copper Jonathan Whicher, he of the infamous 1860 Road Hill House murder case (aka the Constance Kent murder case), is soon on hand to investigate.  

At Chimneys as well, I should mention, we find a butler named Burbage and his daughter Penelope, an eyewitness of the "ghost" who seems inspired by The Moonstone's Rosanna Spearman.  (In his Notes for the Curious at the end of the novel Carr calls Rosanna "the most moving and effective character in the book.")  Also there's Rollo Thompson Bland, a pompous older society doctor--a favored "type" of Carr's--and a prying housekeeper, Mrs. Cavanaugh, "a middle-aged, straight-backed woman full of piety and unctuousness," so we know that  she's up to no good, anyway!

In his Notes to the Curious Carr forthrightly allows that he pays scant attention to Victorian poverty and filth, because, heck, that's just not much fun! "[S]qualor and degradation are not necessarily interesting no matter how pitable," he explains.  He's writing a mystery not a social document.  And that's fair enough.  He does, however, give us one of his creepy hebephiliac moments about preteen girls, when he has Georgette Damon observe of London slum girls: "They think very little of a 'virtue' they lose as a matter of course when they are eleven or twelve years old." Huh!

Did poor Victorian girls in England lose their virginity "as a matter of course" when they were 11 or 12?  To whom exactly did they lose it?  Carr certainly seems to have some interest in this subject, as I have noted before, here and here.

Though it's not an exercise in historical social realism, Chimneys is, to be sure, competently enough put together as a mystery, but the telling of the tale is flurried, the characters uncompelling and the central deception ploy is seemingly cribbed from an earlier mystery by another famous mystery author, just as Carr's immediately previous detective novel The Dead Man's Knock seemingly cribs from Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night.  Having forgotten most of the book's plot in the two decades or more interval between my readings, I was still able to spot the trick immediately; and thus I read the rest of the novel merely for confirmation of my near-certain suspicion.  Just call it The Suspicions of Mr. Evans.

So regrettably the book all fell rather flat for me.  I recollect Carr's slightly later The Witch of the Low Tide (1962) as a better mystery than Chimneys, but I'll have to reread that too again someday.  Later Carrs tend to yield disappointments, I find.