Silver Sundays: CozyNoir? Out of the Past (1953), by Patricia Wentworth

Genteel English 'manners" mystery fiction arguably achieved its apogee in the late mid-to-late 1930s and the 1940s with such crime writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, Patricia Wentworth, Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake, to name some of the subgenre's most prominent exponents.  Even writers not directly association with manners mystery, like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, published manners-ish mysteries like Five Little Pigs and The Hollow (Christie) and The Emperor's Snuff-box (Carr).  Even a sober "Humdrum" mystery writer like John Rhode at this time published a succession of books about a posh policeman who falls in love with and marries a genteel suspect in one of his cases.  

At the same time, however, American hard-boiled writers, along with their British imitators, were producing tough mysteries that were anything but genteel.  You might argue that these too were "manners mysteries," reflecting the manners not of posh society but rather of the mean streets and grim back alleys.  Not public schools, but the age old school of hard knocks.  

Raymond Chandler published his first head-boiled crime novel The Big Sleep in 1939 and two years later saw the release of director John Huston's adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled crime novel The Maltese Falcon.  The tough stuff was really on its way, both on the printed page and on film.  It was soon supplemented by film noir, which was even harder than hard-boiled was.  That particular egg was not just hard-boiled but positively rock-solid.  

One of the greatest of noir films, Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas, was released in 1947.  (It's #7 here.)  Out of the Past was also, seemingly incongruously, the title of crime writer Patricia Wentworth's 23rd Miss Silver crime novel, which was first published in 1953 in the United States and appeared in England two years later.  

Despite the tough reputation of United States as the land of hard-boiled and noir crime fiction--not to mention, in real life, rampant gangsterism and gun violence, police corruption and third degree, race riots and lynchings--cozy crime fiction was extremely popular there, arguably more so than in England.  It's two greatest progenitors, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series and Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver series, while both English in origin were beloved in the US by the 1950s.  Some Americans valued escape into cozier pastures, it seems.  Still, cozy does not necessarily mean insipid, as insufferably chauvinistic, mansplaining detractors like Otto Penzler pronounced back in the 1980s and 1990s.  

The English first edition cover illustration
(also used on the first pb edition)
simply screams noir.  It comes straight from
a scene in the book, as Pippa returns late in the
night to Cliff's Edge, her white dress stained red
with blood--a scene crying out to be filmed.  

Could Queen of Cozy Crime Patricia Wentworth have had the great noir film in mind when she chose her title for her 23rd Miss Silver mystery?  I don't know, but her Out of the Past is indeed rather on the dark side a Miss Silver mystery.  A Miss Silver mystery is never going to end truly bleakly, but the novel does have some real midnight moments from the author.

For one thing the novel's first murder victim, Alan Field, is a real right bastard whom you truly get to despise before someone finally knives him in the back one deadly night in his beach hut.  We learn in a prologue--another noirish feature, uncommon in trad crime novels back then--that three years earlier innocent, young Carmona Leigh was to marry charming, so handsome Alan, much to the dismay of James Hardwick, who had fallen in love at first sight with her after glimpsing her in a box opposite him at the theater.  (Tres romantique!)

Then in Chapter One we find that Alan for some reason dumped Carmona--on her wedding day, no less.  This sort of thing seems to happen with alarming frequency in Wentworth novels. 

That done, Alan then headed out to parts unknown in South America, leaving his formerly intended Carmona to wed, yes, James Hardwick on the rebound.  The rest of the novel is mostly set at James Hardwick's family home, Cliff Edge, which he has just inherited but will have to sell, the Fifties not being a great decade for private ownership of great country houses.  (See my last blog review, of Georgette Heyer's Detection Unlimited.)  

The Hardwicks are entertaining guests at Cliff Edge, naturally, including Carmona's platinum blonde old school friend Pippa Maybury, who has a nice solid, even stolid, obliging husband in the background, but is rather a reckless and wayward flirt.  Then there's Carmona's Aunt Esther Field, who also is Alan's stepmother. (Like the Menendez brothers Monsters series, these Wentworth novels get almost incestuous at times.)   

Esther's husband and Alan's father was the late famed artist Penderel Field.  Alan has his father's fair good looks and fatal charm, if none of his artistic talent.  He does have a certain talent, I should say, though of an altogether less admirable sort.  

wicked Alan Field, depicted in a 1961 American newspaper serialization of Out of the Past

There's also well-preserved Lady Adela Castleton, one of those handsome and outspoken "public" women in vintage English mysteries, and Colonel and Mrs. Trevor, the colonel's garrulous wife.  And there are the neighbors the Annings, mother and daughter, who to get by have to make their home available to paying guests.  In their employ they have a sneaking French maid, Marie, a listener at doors who could have stepped right out of the pages of Bleak House.  

Into this milieu returns Alan--out of the past, as it were--and nobody's happy to see him.  For one thing he promptly begins to blackmail, in varying degrees, no fewer than three of the women and he viciously imparts some devastating information to Carmona that threatens to destroy her marriage.  It's clear that Alan not only uses women, but that he derives considerable cruel enjoyment from doing so.  He's a  despicable, conscienceless and sadistic character and you're glad to see him removed from this world. Did his crooked South American doings finally catch up with him, or did someone closer at hand--and altogether more genteel--put paid to his existence?

Jane Greer in Out of the Past

For Wentworth, this seemed a dark book.  There is adultery--up to a point--illegitimate birth (but not abortion), apparent suicide and dementia--and I'm not even talking about the servants!  The mystery, I would allow, is not one of the most intricate deception, but the anxiety level is sky-high.  I think it really helps in terms of evaluating Wentworth if we stop trying to force her into Christie's Chinese puzzle box and let her exist independently as an artist.  In some ways she seems to me the British Mignon Eberhart (who was called, erroneously, America's Agatha Christie), putting a high premium on the emotional drama inevitably generated by cases of unnatural death. On her own terms I find Wentworth a compelling crime writer.  This is a true detective novel, but it's also a novel of domestic suspense, yet another feminine subgenre that came to fore in the Fifties, along with cozy crime fiction.  

Indeed, Out of the Past is so serious that Miss Silver, who just happens to be staying at the Annings with her niece Ethel Burkett, only coughs 14 times.  This is just not the time to indulge oneself!