I.
 |
| Mystery Girls |
Inspired by some recent sites I saw in Memphis I decided to take a look at one of the last mysteries John Dickson Carr ever wrote: The Ghosts' High Noon, which is set in New Orleans in 1912.
Memphis you may know is about 400 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and is the biggest city on the river between New Orleans St. Louis. A few weeks ago in Midtown I came across a short street called Carr Avenue, I like to imagine it was named for John Dickson Carr, even though sadly that is not the case. However most of the home on it were built around 1912, many of the New Orleans style shotgun houses for streetcar workers. Walking down it, it's like being back in 1912.
As Carr fans will know the locked room maestro in his writing turned increasingly to historical mysteries with the publication of The Bride of Newgate in 1950, when he was 44 years old. Over the next 22 years he published only five contemporary Dr. Fell detective novels, these in two brief spurts over 1958-60 and 1965-67, while his Sir Henry Merrivale detective novels petered out with a trio of volumes published over 1950-53. Compared to these eight books, he published fully a dozen historical mystery novels over this two decade period.
Carr suffered a significant stroke in 1962, after publishing the historical mystery The Demoniacs, and, while his books had already suffered something of a decline in the 1950s, their quality "fell" significantly more afterward. Like Agatha Christie an annual producer of a mystery tome, Carr had to put together a collection of previously published short stories for his 1963 outing and in 1964 he revised an older obscure historical mystery from the Thirties for publication. It was not until 1965, three years after the publication of The Demoniacs, that he was able to produce an original volume, The House of Satan's Elbow, in 1965.
While in my opinion Elbow, a Dr. Fell mystery, is the best of the seven mysteries Carr published between 1965 and 1972, the drop-off in writing quality from earlier Fell tales, even In Spite of Thunder (1960), is definitely discernible. Anyone who reads my review of Thunder will see I didn't like it much at all, and the truth is I actually enjoyed Elbow more for perhaps sentimental reasons of my own; but I'll readily concede it's a more lumbering, listless narrative than what is is found in his earlier tales. However, compared to the final pair of Fell mysteries, Panic in Box C and Dark of the Moon, which followed over the next two years, it almost seems like a masterpiece.
Panic and Moon share the general problems from which Carr's mysteries had been suffering for some time: too much talk, too much mysteriousness, irritating, adolescent character who frequently act like idiots. Despite his insistence that he was one of the pillars of the true, simon-pure detective novel, Carr for some time had been littering his mysteries with as much irrelevant incident as any hard-boiled detective novel. Raymond Chandler may have advised mystery writers that when stumped they should have have a man come through the door with a gun, but with Carr it is more a maddening woman with a silly secret or some supernatural folderal.
In his heyday, Carr was able effectively to incorporate such business into a mystery: novels like The Crooked Hinge (1938) and He Who Whispers (1946) are genre masterpieces. But even before his stroke Carr's was fumbling the ball, as it were. I'll quote myself in my review of In Spite of Thunder:
Again, for someone who professed to hate hard-boiled mysteries, Carr evidently felt that in his story he had to pile on incident (shouting and screaming if not actual fisticuffs and sex). If "Humdrum" mysteries can err on the side of being too cerebral, Carr's books at this time can err on the side of being too emotional. Carr is always telling us, as if we can't tell for ourselves from all the exclamation points, that the emotional temperature in the room is going through the roof, etc. Yes, there's a very heavy use of exclamation points (!), what with characters shouting and roaring and crying "Yes!" and "No!" You just want everyone to calm the f--- down already.
One of Carr's most irritating quirks is to introduce the woman who is acting mysteriously for what turns out to be a really insufficient reason. The worst of these women is actually Audrey Page in In Spite of Thunder:
Audrey is a stock character too, and not just because she's a young and sexually attractive "heroine" and love interest. There is nothing else to her personality besides that she's a maddening ditz. She's there simply to bewitch and frustrate, to tantalize and tease, the hero, Brian, through a series of annoyingly capricious actions. This sort of thing became a given in Carr novels, but the problem here is that Audrey really is exceptionally irksome even by Carr's standard of irksome women. "I've been very silly, you know, and I've behaved about as stupidly as anyone could behave," she admits to Brian. Yes, indeed you have, Audrey! But does that stop her from continuing to behave that way? As a Carr character would say: "No, no, a thousand times no!"
We learn that Audrey came to Geneva simply to get Brian Innes to chase after her, because, you know, she simply couldn't tell Brian she loved him, I guess. It's interesting that Carr expressed hatred for hard-boiled crime fiction, because characters like Audrey behave a lot like femmes fatales in those books, existing solely to bedevil the hero, though ultimately Carr's young "charmers" usually prove to be good girls after all, just rather maddeningly flighty and childish. She "began to slap at the table like a woman in a frenzy or a child in a tantrum," writes Carr of Audrey at one point, mentally likening women to children in an unflattering comparison.
All Brian and Audrey do the whole book (until the very end) is bicker. This "battle of the sexes" motif is a prominent feature in later Carr (indeed it features in earlier Carr too), but it's so damn obtrusive in this novel. It's hard to understand just why these two love each other--they certainly don't seem to like each other, What they really need is not a murder investigation but a relationship counselor:
"But can't you s-say you love me," Audrey cried out at him, "without swearing at me and looking as though you wanted to strangle me?"
"No I can't. That's how you affect people."
"All right. I don't mind; I love it."
Brian tells Audrey, in the anachronistically stilted language characters in which male characters speak in this book, "You're a female devil, a succubus of near-thirty masquerading as nineteen....I've been looking for you my whole life." What a charmer! I guess Audrey, who seems to have masochistic tendencies, loved that endearment as well.
Audrey is the most tiresome of these she-witch Carr characters, but they pop up over and over again. We'll get to more in the books I'm going to talk about below.
But Carr has all sorts of tiresome quirks in the later books, all of which have been noted by Douglas G. Greene in his masterful Carr biography, The Man Who Explained Miracles, published thirty years ago this year. There are the radio-script style stage directions, a carry-over from his work in that field in the Forties and Fifties. Carr was probably the greatest radio mystery writer who ever lived, even better than Ellery Queen, but what worked in radio doesn't work in novels.
In his narrative Carr will include these long descriptions of house layouts which read like radio stage directions; whether put in his characters' mouths or in the third person narrative, it's tedious writing indeed. Then he will stop a chapter with some sort of climax and then open the next chapter several hours later with characters talking about what happened in the intervening period, promptly deflating his climax.
But there is so much talk generally it's hard ever for Carr to sustain the excitement he is going for. It doesn't help that the characters speak so anachronistically and floridly and oracularly. Carr does a thing I call "dashing," where he has a character about to tell something pertinent to the mystery, only promptly to interrupt him or herself with some sidetrack, like this:
"But you simply must hear this minute what I finally have come to realize, the precious golden key to the mystery that we all in our varying fumbling ways have been striving so desperately to grasp in order to unlock this devilish puzzle box of a conundrum! The reason no footprints were left in the dust in the armaments room room of the castle was--"
"Is that the tea kettle I hear whistling?"
Then five chapters later, if we're lucky, this person, if they aren't aren't murdered in the meantime, may get around to telling what they know.
All of these faults are present in the earlier Fell mysteries In Spite of Thunder and The Dead Man's Knock, but Panic in Box C and Dark of the Moon (and The House at Satan's Elbow to a lesser extent) take these and add some more. At least in the earlier books Carr was able to generate a sort of synthetic excitement, even if he was trying much too hard. These later books are just dull, the characters tiresomely verbose and silly, the narrative prolix, the climaxes duds. The characters behave like juveniles (or immature college students), even calling each other by silly nicknames. In Dark of the Moon Dr. Fell gets called magister, maestro, gargantua Torquemada and other terms I can't recall. It just makes me want to tear my hair out.
Part of the problem was Carr just could not believably portray the contemporary scene, with which he himself was completely out of sorts. Increasingly he made his heroes in their thirties or even forties, his heroines shy of thirty (though they usually "look nineteen"), but none of them, however old, sound like actual people who could have lived in the mod era.
Happily Carr finally dropped Dr. Fell and the modern world after Moon and his last four novels--Papa La-bas, The Ghosts' High Noon, Deadly Hall and The Hungry Goblin--were set in the past, two in the Victorian era and two in 1912 and 1927 respectively. Are they any better? I haven't read The Hungry Goblin, which the estate oddly has repressed from republication, apparently on the grounds that it is such a terrible book, but I would say that the New Orleans trilogy of novels is at least a little better than the final two Fells.
II.
The first of these novels, Papa La-bas, launched Carr's New Orleans trilogy of mystery novels. It's an improvement over Panic and Moon, but it's still not that good. It exhibits all of the problems of his later books, if somewhat less conspicuously than the previous two.
There was actually material here to make a good book, had the younger Carr written it. Set in 1858, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War (or War Between the States and Carr, like raymond Chandler, always called it), the novel draws on the notorious real life case of Delphine LaLaurie, a rich New Orleans socialite who is believed to have tortured and murdered many of her slaves. An infuriated city mob actually invaded and burned down her mansion in 1834, forcing her to flee the state and the country and settle in Paris, where she died fifteen years later. In Carr's novel it appears fairly early on that LaLaurie's adopted son--a character invented by the author--has returned to New Orleans to avenge himself on the mob's ringleaders, all of whom are socially prominent men (in Carr's handling).
As stated, this is good material for a mystery melodrama, but sadly none of it ever really takes flight, being held down by the prolix, tedious narrative. Voodoo is introduced--or more accurately rumors of voodoo--but it never really goes anywhere, despite much mention being made of real life New Orleans "Voodoo Queen" Marie Laveau.
Very quickly the book descends into characters dully orating at each other, including the book's nominal amateur detective, real-life southern politician Judah Benjamin (Benjie). The fictional character Isabelle de Sancerre goes on and on to similarly fictional English (actually Scottish) consul Richard "Dick" Macrae about various New Orleans legends. Even Carr refers to this lady in the book's Notes for the Curious as "that tireless talker." Then there are not one but two young women--Margot de Sancerre, Isabelle's daughter, and Ursula Ede, her friend (what I call in Carr's books the brunette one and the blonde one)--both of whom are behaving maddeningly mysteriously.
There's not much nicknaming in this one, though Ursula insists on calling Dick "Quentin" for some reason. There are a couple of stock English comic cockney characters who speak in maddening, overdrawn dialect. The murder method seems to have been cribbed from a Dorothy L. Sayers novel, while the central concealment device for the murderer seems to have come from a Cornell Woolrich opus. I think it becomes obvious who the murderer is around page 100.
All in all it's a tired work. One thing this time around I noticed (it's my second read) that I thought was kind of funny, however: Dick has two pals, Tom Clayton and Harry Ludlow, whom he goes to a "quadroon ball" with; and it finally occurred to me this time that they are "Tom, Dick and Harry."
Speaking of quadroons (people one-fourth black), Carr basically seems to view slavery as more or less on par with the old English class system of masters and servant.s (It's how southern slave-holding "aristocrats" liked to view themselves, however self-deceivingly.) This doesn't add one bit to the charm of the book, to say the least. When a character casually mentions having won himself a slave in a card game, no one bats an eyelash.
At one point our good English consul, the "hero" of the story, so lectures his underling Harry when he thinks (wrongly) that Harry is about to object to the morality of quadroon balls, which comely free "mulatto" women attend in hopes of finding wealthy white men to make mistresses of them:
"The situation exists, and must be faced; let's have no moralizing or cant!"
Well, isn't that special? Actually it's quite clear that all three men are rather sexually titillated by these balls. Of course they are all sexists as well, thinking spanking is a great way of disciplining willful, headstrong women like Margot. Little problem apparently is seen with beautiful women having essentially to sell themselves sexually because they have in them some drops of "black blood."
Did Carr see all moral stances as cant (i.e., sanctimonious, self-righteous lecturing), or just the ones he himself didn't care about personally? What about, say, concern over genocide or pedophilia? (On the latter matter see below.) Elsewhere Dick Macrae sneeringly refers to objecting to slavery as singing "pious hymns" and Harry Ludlow announces: "I can't be as shocked by slavery as people at home think I ought to be."
Doug Greene in his Carr bio says social systems per se didn't trouble Carr, though he did think one had an obligation to behave honorably within them: i.e., masters should not mistreat servants, freed or enslaved, like Delphine LaLaurie allegedly did. There's a gambler character who behaves badly to Dick's free black servants and is upbraided by Dick for doing so.
Yet sometimes social systems are so bad they ought to be reformed, surely; individual acts of kindness don't do nearly enough to mitigate the overall evil of the system in place. But Carr and the characters with whom he sympathizes in his books are all self-proclaimed "conservatives" who instinctively oppose social reform. Carr himself, like his dearest enemy Raymond Chandler, professed to take the part of the Confederacy in the Civil War, likening southerners to his beloved English cavaliers, and in his later years he left England to settle in Greenville, South Carolina, of all places, where he praised the southern states as bedrocks of conservatism and sarcastically dismissed concerns about civil rights as egregious exaggerations. (My family moved to Alabama the same year but my parents never deluded themselves about the reality of the endemic racism.)
III.
Compared to Papa La-bas, The Ghosts' High Noon is actually something of an improvement, and not just because we aren't having slavery thrown in our races. (In slavery's place we get something else odious and objectionable thrown in our faces; see below.) Carr actually repeats some of the plot points from Papa, but he at least comes up, this time around, with a pretty good and original "impossible" murder.
 |
| homes along bayour st. john, scene of crime in The Ghosts' High Noon |
It's 1912 and our hero, James "Jim" Blake, is a successful journalist turned successful spy novelist. His recently published debut novel, a bestseller, is The Count of Monte Carlo. Carr here alludes, accurately enough, to the English crime writer E. Phillips Oppenheim, who had already become a hugely popular author in the United States with his tale of international intrigue in Monte Carlo and other swanky European locales.
In New York Jim is asked by George Brinton McClellan Harvey, a real life prominent conservative Democrat (soon to become a Republican) and editor of Harper's Weekly, to report on rumors of political intrigue in a congressional race in New Orleans concerning Democratic nominee Jim Clayton "Clay" Blake. "The underground wire has it that some enemy is out to ruin him," Harvey explains.
 |
| George Harvey, Carr's kind of guy |
Clay, Harvey tells Jim, is "like most southerners...as conservative as you are." (Harvey means white southerners of course.) Jim himself confirms, without explanation: "I'm a conservative, even a reactionary...I distrust progressives and hate reformers." 113 years ago near the height of the Progressive Era, there was much, one might believe, that needed reforming, such as the franchise (women could not vote) and racist Jim Crow laws, but not so to our Jim Blake, who, conveniently for himself, doesn't actually like talking about politics. If he did, he might have to articulate defenses of some of his heinous positions!
But anyway off goes Jim by train to New Orleans, with a stop at Washington, D.C., which allows Carr to indulge himself in some nostalgia about streetcars and such. (He lived in DC as a small boy when his father briefly served as a US congressman--a Democrat!) Chunks of exposition have already been served up to Jim and the reader by Harvey; and in DC yet more is ladled out by Charley Emerson, an old bachelor whose interests, sounding a lot like Carr, are "old books and toy trains." Then it's off to New Orleans!
Along the way on his New York trip Jim literally twice runs into fetching, fair-haired Jill Matthews, for whom in Carr tradition he immediately falls emotionally. Yes, it's another one of Carr's age-mismatched romances, Jim being thirty-five and "not ill-looking in a strongly Anglo-Saxon way [?]" and Jill being twenty-seven and "very pretty" with "admirable body proportions" and "a sense of humor struggling though" her delectable "pink mouth." Very soon Jim is rather familiarly calling Jill "my sugar-candy witch," one of those weird anachronistic endearments (even for 1912 I suspect) for which Carr had a penchant.
Jill maddeningly keeps running away throughout much of the book and when she explains her behavior much later on, her explanation hardly seems sufficient. Unfortunately this not very compelling subsidiary mystery around vanishing Jill swallows much of this book. There is eventually a "miracle" murder but it's not until around page 200 in a 300 page book that Carr really gets serious with it. There's also the supposed "miracle" mystery of the person who knocked on the door of the train compartment where Jim, Jill, and a New Orleans friend of Jim's, Leo Shepley, are discussing the Clay Blake matter and then vanished, but this little mystery, never very compelling in the first place, fizzles miserably. At least it doesn't take up as much of the book as Jill's Jilting Behavior.
Jim finally gets to New Orleans on page 84 and the murder of Leo Shepley takes place about fifty pages later. Witnesses, including Jim and Jill, see him drive down the Bayou St. John road in his snazzy red Mercer Raceabout into a barn-like shed on the grounds of a mansion and then apparently shoot himself. But, wait, where's the gun?! Could it be murder?! I still like miracle problems (Carr at his best is an abiding delight in this regard) and this was an enjoyable one, much better than the shenanigans in Papa La-bas, where there are also a surfeit of mysteries, including Margot's vanishing from a moving carriage, and not a single one one of them compelling.
I found the period atmosphere in Noon enjoyable enough, though many of the characters in the book sound more like callow 1920s college students (like Carr) rather than Edwardian adults. This is how Jim and Leo greet each other on the train:
"Leo, you old bastard, how are you?"
"Jim, you unregenerate son-of-a-bitch, have you visited any good whorehouses recently?"
Later they boyish pair sit down in a compartment with Jill, have drinks and chat about whores and homosexuals. Jill is Carr's perfect type of girl, the type that looks prim and proper on the outside, but is really way into sex underneath, pally with the boys and sympathetic to all her beau's masculine foibles. She's the kind of girl you can throw up on at the college football game when you're drunk out of your mind and she will gamely smile and wipe your vomit off her dress with a handkerchief (or more likely several of them). "I want you to do mad things," she admiringly tells Jim. "I love it!" Remembering she's living in the Edwardian era, she won't smoke in public, however, at least until late in the book.
IV.
In a good number of later Carrs, illicit sex between older men and younger women (or "girls" as they are called) is a central interest. And of course it's New Orleans, which had an infamous red-light district known as Storyville, so Carr has come to the right place for illicit sex. I don't know of any reviews mentioning this (or Doug's bio either) but the illicit sex in this one takes place between adult men and what Carr refers to as "pubescent girls" around the ages of 12 or 13, which raises the "ick" factor considerably. Worse yet, Carr adopts the same attitude to child prostitution that he does to the octoroon balls: judiciously neutral, if one wants to be generous, though one might more accurately say pruriently interested.
Carr seems to intimate that pedophilia, at least when the girl is a "willing" participant, is something less aberrant than homosexuality. This first comes up when Dick, Leo and Jill are discussing the Clay Blake affair. The rumors about Clay Blake concern "something abnormal or unnatural," speculates Jim. "The slightest suggestion of homosexuality, for example...." This speculation provokes Leo to smite his fist on the table, rattling the glasses and china. "What kind of friends do you think I have, for God's sake?" he roars. "No, Jim, I won't hear that for a minute! It's nothing at all abnormal or unnatural, at least in the way you mean."
So Leo objects to Jim suggesting he might have gay friends, but pedophiles are a-ok, apparently. Later on in New Orleans Jim discusses with a couple of Crescent City pressmen the criminal case of Etienne Deschamps, a New Orleans dentist who was tried and executed at the age of 62 in 1892 for the murder three years earlier of thirteen-year-old Juliette Deitsh. (She was actually, contra Jim/Carr, twelve.) Dr. Deschamps chloroformed and sexually assaulted Julia, but administered too much chloroform to her one day and she died.
 |
| Jerry Lee Lewis and his "half-grown nymph" Myra |
Jim declares of young Juliette that Deschamps "made the girl his mistress" and that "she seems to have entered heartily into the affair and had all the essential attributes of a woman." Pardon the cant and pious hymning here, but am I the only Carr fan who finds this rather on the grotesque side? Okay, I know that in Mississippi in 1957 22-year-old rock singer Jerry Lee Lewis married a 13-year-old cousin and that under the English common law of rape the age of consent was set at twelve or even ten, meaning that if a man had sex with a twelve-year-old, the girl was compelled to prove that she had not consented for her violation to be deemed rape. But Carr was writing in 1969 not 1669, for God's sake.
On Carr goes throughout this book. Later Jim visits Flossie Yates, a New Orleans madam who specializes in providing young girls for her clients, what Carr calls "pubescent girls," presumably meaning they have "all the essential attributes of a woman." Flossie talks of two such girls, Sue, who is 14, and Billie Jean, who is not much over 12. Billie Jean, she declares, "is exceptionally mature for her years." She calls such girls "half-grown nymphs."
Other characters, when this topic comes up (which it does frequently), call them "the near nubile" and refer to Flossie's "stable of underage ones" and "the joys of the pubescent" and "men with a passion for half-formed bodies and the caresses of the immature." Clay Blake explains that he was "accused of spending my nights in orgies with girls twelve or thirteen years old. Don't look so shocked, any of you." He adds this even though, Carr tells us, "in fact nobody did look shocked; the women merely looked thoughtful." Women in Carr's books strive hard to look proper, but under the skin, they are, like the colonel's lady one imagines, greatly interested in sex of all stripes.
V.
I'm not suggesting that Carr was, like Eden Phillpotts. a secret pedophile, but a lot of the notions expressed in Carr's books about sex come off as juvenile and prurient. "Sex amateurish and repulsive at the same time," wrote Humdrum mystery devotee Jacques Barzun of Carr's 1949 detective novel Below Suspicion, though ironically The Ghosts' High Noon was one of the few Carrs Barzun actually liked. ("One of his sober and sustained efforts.") Certainly, however, Carr's novels over and over feature old men attracted to much younger women or women who "look about nineteen." Then there's the very sexualized and smitten description of Lady Brace in the The Cavalier's Cup (1953):
The very pretty girl who entered [Chief Inspector Masters'] office, he would have sworn at a first quick glance, could not have been more than fifteen years old, despite her modish clothes.
First of all, even wearing her heels she was only five feet tall. Her soft and silky light-brown hair fell to her shoulders and curled out a little in artless, young-girl fashion....
[...]
"I'm awfully sorry to intrude, Chief Inspector said the small girl, in a warm and sweet voice as feminine as herself. "But do you mind if I sit down?"
[...]
....her figure...was a fine one....for all its innocent and demure appearance, her expression held a quality of the impish. The small girl...used her rather heavy-lidded gray eyes and pink lips in a way which would have inspired speculation in any man who had been married for fewer years than Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters.
1953 was the time, I have speculated, that Carr, a happily married yet perpetually dissatisfied man who engaged in a number of extra-marital affairs or assignations, was having a midlife crisis. (He was 47.) In his books and his life he seemed was obsessed with the past, the world's and his own, wanting the joys of his own youth.
 |
| All the essential attributes of a woman? Brooke Shields as a child prostitute in the 1978 film Pretty Baby |
Back to The Ghosts' High Noon, late in the novel police detective Zack Trowbridge admits that the police know all about Flossie Yates and her underage girl harem. Why isn't she prosecuted? It seems that "if the girls are proved professionals [!] it's hard to touch anybody." So these girls remain available "to anybody who's got the dough." Storyville is like Epstein Island, in other words.
Interestingly five years later Louisiana writer Al Rose published Storyville, a history of New Orleans' red light district which included an account of a young girl who was forced into prostitution by her own mother. The account served as the inspiration for the 1978 movie Pretty Baby, which starred actual twelve-year-old model and actress Brooke Shields as the child prostitute. Carr died the year before the release of this flick at age 71, so he never got see how his then forgotten novel anticipated one of the most controversial films of the Seventies.
No comments:
Post a Comment