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 uncircumsized 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 uncircumsized."  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 circumsized 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 Inpector Suggs' case, because he wanted to see if the "Semitic-looking stranger in Mr. Thipps' bath was by any extraodinary 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 extraodinarily like Sir Reuben if he had a beard."  Peter agreesthat 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 circumsized.  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 circumsized 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 circumsizing the poor little babies...."  Had the corpse been uncircumsized, 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 uncircumsized it could not have been Levy.  But if it were circumsized, as it apparently was, that would not have established that it was Levy.  There were other circumsized 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.  

Some Porlock Pickings: Two additional thoughts on Philip MacDonald's "Martin Porlock"

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?

Dead Cat Bounce: The Wraith (1931), by Philip MacDonald

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.  

The Rasp 1924

The White Crow 1928

The Noose 1930

The Link 1930

The Maze, in US Persons Unknown 1930

The Wraith 1931

The Choice, in US The Polferry Riddle 1931

The Crime Conductor 1931

Rope to Spare 1932

Death on My Left 1933

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.

END SPOILER ALL SAFE NOW

No Joke! Mystery at Friar's Pardon (1931), by Philip MacDonald as Martin Porlock

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.  

Gethryn Gets Roped In Again: Rope to Spare (1932), by Philip MacDonald

"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.  

old mill at Lower Slaughter

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.