Sunday Nights with Silver: The Evolution in the Crime Writing of Patricia Wentworth

By the late 1930s "manners mystery" was all the rage in the world of English detective fiction.  Pioneered and actively propagandized by Dorothy L. Sayers, manners mystery aimed to merge the detective novel with the mainstream novel of manners, looking at live people, not just dead bodies, how they live, not just how they died.  There is more focus on society, characters, love interest--traditionally a minor aspect of detective fiction--and usually plenty of social satire.  Dickens and Collins and Trollope are models. not so much Conan Doyle and S. S. Van Dine.  

Once Sayers achieved huge success in both the UK and US with her 1935 Lord Peter Wimsey manners mystery Gaudy Night, manners mystery naturally received great impetus.  Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh were deemed her most important followers and late Thirties books like Dancers in Mourning and Death in a White Tie are considered high points of manners mystery.  There were others as well, like Georgette Heyer, Gladys Mitchell and Josephine Tey, who produced manners mysteries.  Then there were Anthony Gilbert and Moray Dalton, women with male pen names who had long produced "novelistic" mysteries.  There were men who did so too, like Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake, whom I call the Detection Dons, the male counterparts of the Crime Queens.  Although not part of that group Henry Wade began writing notable novelistic mysteries, like Mist on the Saltings and Lonely Magdalen.  E. R. Punshon was another.

All this writing really came to a head in the late Thirties and early Forties and it forever changed the face of detective fiction.  While supposedly "pure" puzzle writers like John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie maintained their popularity, others, the so-called "Humdrum" mystery writers (just the facts, ma'am) like Freeman Wills Crofts, John Street and J. J. Connington, began to seem more old hat.  Christie and Carr actually produced more mannered mysteries in the Forties, like She Died a Lady and The Emperor's Snuff-box and Five Little Pigs and Taken at the Flood and The Hollow.  Even John Rhode introduced a handsome, young, public school educated cop, Jimmy Waghorn, into his Dr. Priestley mystery series in 1936.  

Another big contributor to English manners mystery, Patricia Wentworth, has gone generally unacknowledged as such, and invariably is left off lists of Crime Queens, despite her popularity for a century now.  Why is this?  

Partly, I think, because she emphasizes the love element more strongly than any of these other writers, even Sayers when she has Lord Peter a-Wimseying Harriet Vane.  The Wentworth Miss Silver mysteries may have struck people almost as romance novels, which isn't really quite correct in my opinion.  

The author also was essentially a romantic thriller writer for much of her career.  For fifteen years "shockers" dominated her output between 1923 and 1938; then something starts to change.  In 1939 she published, as was her custom, two mysteries, these her third Miss Silver novel Lonesome Road and The Blind Side, which introduced her series police characters Detective Inspector (later Superintendent) Ernest Lamb and Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Frank Abbott, the latter one of those posh, public-school educated coppers who had become popular in manners mystery.  

The first Miss Silver, Grey Mask, dating back from 1928, is a thriller, though even here there is genuine wit and satire in PW's portrayal of the naive young heiress who is the target of the master criminal's wicked plot.  You might almost call it a manners thriller.  Wit and satire is not something thrillers of the period are known for.  Still, it's very much a thriller.  

The second Miss Silver novel did not appear for nine years.  PW had had a few intermittent series characters before, Benbow Smith and Frank Garratt, and in 1937 she decided to add Miss Silver to her recurring character crime file. (Critics had loved Grey Mask back in 1928, but they had not taken much notice of Miss Silver.)  The Case Is Closed actually is built around a murder problem, spiritedly investigated by a bold young woman, Hilary Carew, but the the story as it unfolds is essentially thrillerish, as Hilary's life is repeatedly put in peril.  Miss Silver appears and professionally investigates, but her work is kept in the background.

When Miss Silver next appears in Lonesome Road in 1939 she is very much on the scene as she attempts to determine who is trying to kill a rich middle-aged heiress, Rachel Traherne.  She actually stays incognito as a guest at Rachel's country mansion. (Rachel doesn't want to bring the police in because it appears the villain in a family member and she does not want bring down bad publicity on innocent people.)  

This is a detective novel, but there are still strong thrillerish elements in that it does not detail the investigation of a murder problem, but rather the attempts on the life of the heroine and the attempt to determine who is behind them.  Christopher Morley compared Lonesome to Rebecca, and it does have the suspenseful quality of a Alfred Hitchcock thriller. I would actually say that the earlier The Case Is Closed is more of a true detective novel.   

But then we come to The Blind Side, from the same year, which introduces Wentworth's yard men.  Here I think we see the true genesis of Wentworth's detective fiction.  The next year Lamb and Abbott would appear as a team in another detective novel, Who Pays the Piper?, while Miss Silver would appear comparatively briefly in a thrillerish mystery, Danger Point, in 1941.  

In 1942 there would be Pursuit of a Parcel, a topical wartime thriller with Lamb and Abbott and an older character Frank Garratt.  Then in 1943 Wentworth would unite Lamb and Abbott with Miss Silver in a true detective novel, Miss Silver Deals with Death, aka Miss Silver Intervenes.  After this all but one of her crime novels would be Miss Silver mysteries, for the most part true detective novels rather than thrillers.  The Miss Silver books are investigative manners mysteries in the Crime Queen mold and deserve to be credited as such.  Let's finally give Patricia Wentworth the crown she deserves.

On Wentworth Wednesdays I'll be talking about The Blind Side.  But I'll try to find some space next week for something non-Wentworth as well.