"Talk 'em in a tea shoppe": Philip MacDonald's Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared (1938)

Very interesting, Gethryn!  A pretty story!  A little forced, perhaps, but who can help that nowadays with so many people writing these things [mysteries]."

Damn it all, Gethryn, it makes about as much sense as Lewis Carroll."

"Anthony! I've been thinking! Those things don't happen in England!"

"Everything happens in England."

"No. Not kidnapping."

"It has.  And it will again."

"It American! It's American!"

"And England, in common with the rest of the world, is becoming more Americanised every day...."

"I don't like spiders....But their webs are pretty."

"What did I tell you!"  Never talk secrets in a private house. Never talk secrets in a public park.  If you must talk secrets, talk 'em in a tea shoppe."

in the book the teashop is dim olde English rather than bright American art deco
a sanctum for whispered dark secrets and deplorable sins

Philip MacDonald's "new" short crime and weird fiction collection, Dream No More, comes out in a week, but in the meantime I thought I would take one more look at a couple of famous MacDonald crime novels, separated by 21 years, Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared and The List of Adrian Messenger.  Here we take on Warrant.

When MacDonald published Warrant for X in 1938, it became his first new novel since 1934 and his first new crime novel since 1933. Over those years MacDonald devoted himself to scriptwriting in Hollywood, penning screenplays, for example, to the series detective films Charlie Chan in London (1934) and Charlie Chan in Paris (1935) and Mysterious Mr. Moto and Mr. Moto's Last Warning (both 1938).  He stayed busy and accumulated quite a bit of lucre.  In 1939-40 he would become one of the individuals who worked on the script of Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Rebecca.  

This latter fact is appropriate enough, for if Warrant for X is anything, it is Hitchcockian.  Indeed one is surprised that the master evidently never considered filming it.  (It was filmed twice by other directors, in 1939 and 1956.)  Perhaps MacDonald's novel was a bit too similar to Hitchcock's own The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), which Hitch himself apparently liked so much he remade in color in 1956.

Doris Day doesn't sing but a child is endangered in Warrant for X

Warrant for X (it was published first in England under the title The Nursemaid Who Disappeared, but I prefer the terser American title), is nothing if not cinematic.  At around 100,000 words by my count, it's a dense but fleet narrative, with a succession of surprising (and sometimes appalling) happenings to keep the reader engaged.  It also has some of MacDonald's best writing in the crime fiction genre.  In its evocatively sinister depiction of the "sprawling unreason" of late-Thirties London, Warrant is reminiscent of Margery Allingham's later, celebrated postwar thriller, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952).  

At its publication Warrant for X was elevated, especially in the US, into the pantheon of crime fiction classics, along with the author's own earlier serial killer novels Murder Gone Mad (1931) and X v. Rex (1933), aka The Mystery of the Dead Police. (Funnily American publishers later went with the title Warrant for X after having rejected X v. Rex.) In a much-quoted comment American critic Alexander Woollcott declared that Warrant "was the best detective story I have ever read in any language."  Praise can't climb higher than that!

In England the Sunday Mercury proclaimed that MacDonald "has never done anything better" than his latest novel and that the tale was an "aristocrat of a story certain to appeal to the elite and the mob alike."  In the London Observer the esteemed crime fiction reviewer Torquemada commented:

Setting aside the lifelike detecting and the unconventional angle from which it is applied, "The Nursemaid Who Disappeared" scores very heavily, in its last forty or fifty pages, as a thriller of quite masterly suspense.  In fact, those pages are the only ones I have read since I started reviewing detective tales which have produced in me the physical symptoms of anxiety.

that rarest of things 
a thrilling chess problem

Torquemada was right and insightful too.  Warrant for X is rather unique in combining methodical "humdrum" detection with genuine thrills.  Not for nothing is Humdrum Father R. Austin Freeman mentioned in the tale, though somewhat dismissively, for the detection is not really scientific; no one resorts to test tubes in a laboratory.  It's just more methodical investigation, powered by amateur genius sleuth Anthony Gethryn's incisive intuitions.  It's somewhat like Freeman Wills Crofts' Twenties mystery The Box Office Murders, though a great deal more suspenseful and exciting.  Let's go into a bit, shall we?

Although Gethryn functions as the premier sleuth of the tale, its protagonist and male half of the love interest is supplied by an American, Thomas Sheldon Garrett, a writer with a hit play in London.  MacDonald had lived in the States for six years and knew the value of the American market.  

Inspired by a reading of GK Chesterton's novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, he visits the area and ends up in a dim Notting Hill teashop, where he happens to overhear a highly sinister conversation between two women, "one short and solid and square...with a subtle suggestion of unperverted masculinity" and "the other tall, slender and with that charm which makes a man want to see the face."

Garrett comes to suspect that the two women are involved in a prospective crime, possibly a kidnapping. (One of them is a nursemaid who is told by the other at one point: "Nobody is going to hurt it."  I always marvel how babies and young children often were referred to as "its" in those days.)  Distressed, he follows the women, never seeing more than their backs, but loses track of them; so off he goes to the police, his artist and society friends, in a rather Hitchcockian scene of social satire, proving themselves useless.  

Alas, the police don't take him seriously.  There's an solid and obtuse inspector by the name of Horler, likely a nod to dreckish English crime writer Sydney Horler ("Behind him Garrett's mind could see, ranged in orderly, passive ranks, the ratepayers of Great Britain"), who dismissively suggests that "one of the women had gotten into a scrape of some kind" (i.e., gotten pregnant). Fortunately Garrett's lady friend Avis Bellingham is able persuade him to visit that brilliant amateur sleuth Anthony Gethryn and his wife Lucia.  Anthony always gets his man--or does he?

I don't recall a monstrous hound in this
novel, but there is most certainly a
Napoleon of crime

Like in all the best thrillers, there seems to be a criminal mastermind--by the name of Evans of all things--plotting a wicked crime, perhaps kidnapping; but Garrett and Gethryn have no idea who the target may be, or who the women in the tea shoppe were, or who this Evans might be.  It's all hideously nebulous.  The only clue is a shopping list....

With this list Gethryn makes some remarkable deductions and the hunt is on in what proves to be a fascinating and frequently frustrating investigation.  MacDonald's merging of the thriller and deductive traditions from classic English mystery strikes me as nothing short of brilliant.  

Mac even tops it off at the climax with the revelation of a truly Christiesque piece of misdirection.  In this novel he dually demonstrates the craftsmanship of a master carpenter and the sleight of hand of a magician.  It probably is his finest achievement and the best deductive thriller from the Golden Age.  

Anthony's still his facetious self, but not nearly so much as he was in the early days.  To be sure he says things like this:

"I was born suspecting the doctor.  I shall die indicting the priest." (pretty pithy, that one)

and

"If at first you don't succeed, Pike, pry, pry, pry again." (okay, less so)

and 

"Three little articles belonging to Who.  One gave a message and now there are Two."

to which his wife, Lucia, long used to this sort of thing, replies:

"Whimsical aren't you?" 

the list

But overall he has greater gravitas and makes a truly impressive figure, one fully meriting the doglike devotion of Superintendent Arnold Pike.  MacDonald, who had a daughter himself (then 12 years old), drives home the genuine horror of kidnapping with an emotional force few traditional Golden Age detective novels attempted.  The main reason Garrett is so determined to pin the tail on the crime is that his own nephew was kidnapped (remember, he's American), Gethryn explains to Lucia.  When his nephew finally was returned to his parents "it left half its mind behind it."  

I won't go into detail, but in the final section of the novel you really do, as Torquemada himself did, feel frissons of fear for the sake of the lily-white innocent target of a despicable, inhuman crime.  

MacDonald doesn't hold back much.  Reflecting the time, descriptions of bestial violence are circumspect but our good guys discover too late a dead woman absolutely butchered bloodily to death in her kitchen by the remorselessly merciless Evans.  "Looks like the work of a madman," pronounces an appalled Pike, to which Anthony provocatively retorts: "Who's sane?"  A frustrated Sergeant Mather utters a "Chaucerian word."  I think this is just one of the times MacDonald tried to get the profane oath "Fuck!" into his text, though I'm told Chaucer didn't actually use that particular word in The Canterbury Tales (though he did use queynte, look it up if you need.) 

Throughout the novel MacDonald demonstrates a splendid knack for turns of phrase.  When Gethryn giddily cries, "By gosh! A safety-deposit ticker, by Jing!", the author observes that the "schoolboy oaths...rang with all the brazen fervor of profanities."  This description of a dying man's thoughts is rather poignant I think:

He fell, slowly and floatingly, down into a deep black cavern.  It was soft and warm and enticing in its utter restfulness.  It was death, his mind told him dimly, and he welcomed it and felt, through his absolute relaxation, a small pang of triumph that death was so exactly as he had, alive, always imagined it would be.

Try finding that contemplative flight of death fancy in an Edgar Wallace, let alone a bleeding Sydney Horler.  

I loved this line: "If Daisy Street by day--even in rare sunshine--is a grey and desolate reminder of the calculating bitterness of civilisation, by night its hopelessness is abysmal."  I liked "that drab gallimaufry known as the lower middle-class," even if this has more than a whiff of condescension.  

Throughout Gethryn functions splendidly as that beau ideal of Golden Age detectives, the flippant knight errant who disarmingly restores right to the world and insouciantly vanquishes the forces of evil.  This was probably an unnerving yet ultimately consoling work to read in 1938.  Warrant offers us one of the great investigative triumphs of the Golden Age amateur sleuth.

The modest love interest element is plausible enough and pleasing.  Lucia's presence is light and limited but welcome and nicely etched.  Her and Anthony's son Alan appears, adding poignancy to all the concern about kidnapping.  It is Alan who makes the ingenuously symbolic observation about repulsive spiders spinning pretty webs.  

There's a little bit here and there indicative of the author's interest in sexually aberrant psychology. Garrett rages: "It doesn't matter a damn, Gethryn, whether it was a sudden woman acquaintance, a man she picked up, or an old friend of either sex! It doesn't matter if it was an hermaphrodite [emphasis added]!"  Another time he writes: "[S]he was a sight to give pleasure to they eye of any young man, and to arouse hope in the breast of those of their elderly brethren who like their women dominant."  What an odd observation, but it won't necessarily surprise a reader steeped in MacDonald crime fiction.  See the forthcoming Dream No More.  There's much in Philip MacDonald's biography I still would give to know.

Lesley Brook and Peter Coke as Avis Bellingham and Garrett (just Tom Sheldon here)
in The Nursemaid Who Disappeared (1939)

One Night in Laguna: The Dark Wheel (1948), by Philip MacDonald and A. Boyd Correll

American first edition

The page-long authors' blurb on the back of the dust jacket of The Dark Wheel (1948), a suspense novel co-authored by Philip MacDonald and A. Boyd Correll, informs us that the two men "met over a game of chess" and "decided to continue their friendship over a good book," adding: "This is the book."  

The previous year in May 1947 Boyd Correll--his full name was Augustus Boyd Correll, so now you know why as a crime writer he reduced his first name to the single initial "A."--had hosted, with his Turkish born (of American parents), operetta singer wife Helen, a reception for MacDonald's twenty-year-old daughter Caryl when she married a local electrician, so they evidently had indeed become good friends.  

Boyd and his wife Helen, a childless couple, and Philip and his second wife Ruth (Caryl's stepmother) lived about a mile apart in Laguna Beach, California, a small, charming, then remote oceanside community about sixty miles from Hollywood that was home to bohemian, arty types like writers and painters, who didn't want to live in LA.  

Author! Author!

Already in 1952-53 Laguna Beach had an active branch of the Mattachine Society, a pioneering national gay rights organization.  Early Mattachine Society activist Gerry Brissette recalled sweepingly of the city: "Laguna Beach was a community of gays....the mayor was gay, the sheriff was gay, and the librarian was gay.  They just seemed to be running everything and they were very wealthy." 

How deeply Philip MacDonald and Boyd Correll personally absorbed this Laguna Beach bohemian and queer environment is unclear.  Both authors were married men, though Boyd and his wife Helen as mentioned above never had children and Philip's one offspring, his daughter Caryl, he youthfully sired with his first, English wife, Mona, way back in 1926.  

Philip and Mona divorced officially separated eleven later after Mona discovered that Philip had been carrying on an affair of several years with his platinum-blonde Canadian-American secretary, Ruth.  After Philip and Mona divorced, the crime writer married Ruth in 1942.  

Boyd Correll's only crime novel
which he published in 1950

Several of Philip's Fifties short crime tales, all of them included in the forthcoming Stark House collection Dream No More (particularly "His Mother's Eyes," "Fingers of Fear," "Love Lies Bleeding," "The Ticker Tape" and the title story), are remarkable for their frankly queer sexual content.  For his part Boyd in his single solo crime novel, Murder Is an Art (1950), set his queer crimes among Laguna Beach's bohemian arts community.  

Philip, the only child of an actor-playwright and an actress and a grandson of fantasy writer and minister George MacDonald, lived a rather quirky life which seems to have included dropping out of school at the age of sixteen or seventeen to fight in Mesopotamia during the Great War and many other adventures. Smitten with the film industry, Philip at the height of his crime writing career left England for Hollywood in 1932 and remained in the United States until his death in 1980.  

Boyd, who was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on October 2, 1905, making him five years younger than Philip, seemingly trekked down less traveled back roads as well.  A handsome though slightly built (six feet and 145 pounds), blonde and blue-eyed youth, Boyd took business courses at Wofford College in Spartanburg, then worked as a salesman in the jewelry store of his father, for whom he was named, until his father's accidental death in 1930. (The senior A. Boyd Correll fell into an unmarked washout hole in a sidewalk after a torrential rainstorm.) 

English first edition

The next year young Boyd, then 25, moved out to Beverly Hills and somehow became connected with the Laurence D'Orsay literary agency.  When in 1936 he married singer Helen Caldwell, daughter of missionary and math and science professor Samuel Lee Caldwell of International College at Smyrna, Boyd was called a "literary critic of Beverly Hills."  

Boyd is known to have published 27 pulp crime tales over the decade between 1941 and 1951.  During World War Two he worked for Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation in charge of a 200-woman night shift work force.  He also called himself, somewhat vaguely, on the back of the jacket of The Dark Wheel, a "newspaper man, a barnstorming aviator and a writer for Walt Disney Classics."  

So what about the crime novel the two men published together?  The Dark Wheel is a straight suspense novel about Cornelius Van Toller, an insane New York millionaire--is there any other kind--who is dangerously obsessed with Kay Forrester, a stage actress whose play he is backing.  The "dark wheel" refers metaphorically to his madness; when the wheel in his head begins to turn, bad things happen as obstacles to his desires are ruthlessly eliminated.  

The Dark Wheel gets the Fifties
femme fatale treatment

One such obstacle may be Kay's wheelchair-bound husband, Larry Bradford, who was gravely wounded as a pilot in World War Two (another wheel).  There are some others characters in the novel as well, of course, principally Caroline, Van Toller's nervous older sister with a heart condition, his loyal but conscientious manservant Larsen and Kay's Lothario leading man, Denis LeMay, the latter of whom becomes the third point in a sort of love triangle.  

It's a short sparely written novel that moves swiftly to its close; and it reads rather like a film script, which is not surprising, given MacDonald's scripting work in Hollywood for nearly two decades.  (The back of the jacket somewhat misleadingly implies he wrote the script for Hitchcock's Rebecca, when in fact he wrote what was only an initial draft, apparently much altered.)

One can imagine while reading the book what actors might have been cast in a film adaptation: 

Zachary Scott as Dennis LeMay

Cornelius Van Toller: Claude Rains

Caroline Van Toller: Miriam Hopkins

Kay Forrester: Joan Fontaine

Larry Bradford: John Garfield

Denis LeMay: Zachary Scott

A decade after the publication of MacDonald's last thriller published under his own name, Warrant for X, it's a bit disappointing as a novel, but probably Wheel would have made a ripping film.  It's just not as interesting as MacDonald's short fiction at the time, nor for that matter Boyd Correll's own solo novel.  

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 a 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 owe 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 youth kills a Mexican boy and grows up, as the dead boy molders forgotten in his grave having left 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/Sci-fi 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

Of the stories in Dream No More, five are taken from Something To Hide/Fingers of Fear, five from The Man out of the Rain and two from Death and Chicanery.  One story from both of the first two volumes has been omitted and two from Death and Chicanery.  As you can see, MacDonald's known horror/weird tales have been included as well.  It's a big collection of about 350 pages.  

MacDonald's short fiction was much praised in its day, with prominent mystery reviewer Anthony Boucher opining that arguably MacDonald "is even better in his shorter stories."  Boucher highly praised all the of his crime fiction collections.  From the final volume he singled out the two tales included in Dream No More, "The Ticker Tape" and "Deed of Mercy."  He called Ticker Tape "an extraordinary novelette of love and evil with an all but unique use of the unconscious mind as the detective" and the "comparably striking" Mercy "a fine melodrama on justice, Portia, and the nature of actresses."  Let's take a brief closer look at all these fine tales, beginning with the weirds.

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.)

"Double, double, toil and trouble"
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 received
 the ashcan art school 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.