Rockabye baby, the black and the white
Somebody's baby was born for a fight
Rockabye baby, the white and the black
Somebody's baby is not coming to back
Sang the crow on the cradle.
"The Crow on the Cradle" (1963)
Philip MacDonald's second Anthony Gethryn detective novel The White Crow was his follow-up, after four years, to his much-lauded debut mystery The Rasp, reviewed in my last installment at The Passing Tramp. In between those two books there came Phil's--I've found out his friends really did call him Phil--war thriller novel Patrol, which like The Rasp was made into a film in the Thirties. Both novels have been reprinted many times as well.
The White Crow, on the other hand, is far more obscure to even vintage mystery connoisseurs today. In the Thirties English publisher Collins reprinted White Crow in cheap hardcover editions a couple of times, but postwar the novel seems to have been reprinted only twice--first in 1958 by Collins' paperback imprint Fontana, along with Phil's rather better remembered The Nursemaid Who Disappeared/Warrant for X, which like both Rasp and Patrol was filmed; and second in 1966 in crime writer Michael Gilbert's Classics of Detection and Adventure series with Hodder and Stoughton.
I'm actually surprised both Gilbert and H&S went for it with this book, although I can see an influence on Gilbert (about which I will got into more detail someday). I would dearly love to read Gilbert's introduction to the reprint.
Reading White Crow today, anyone would understand why this novel has faded into obscurity. It's not that it is a terrible book and indeed there are actually a number of interesting, even remarkable, things about it, but there are aspects to the conclusion that are just impossible today, even in the MAGA era, outside of Young Republican text chats anyway--and even there they didn't quite get away with it, I suppose.
Philip MacDonald hadn't even originally planned to return to the mystery fiction form after Rasp, but he couldn't resist the lure of crime. White Crow is rather similar to Rasp in its plotting structure. (If it ain't broke don't fix it.) Gethryn is called in after another important personage is murdered, not a cabinet minister this time, but a "Napoleon of finance," one Sir Albert Lines-Bower, formerly Leinz-Bower. ("Some sort of middle-European with a dash of Jerusalem," explains Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Lucas in blessedly the novel's only arguably antisemitic reference.)
Phil continues to evince a taste in his writing for a spot or two of ghastly wanton violence. John Hoode, the murder victim in the first Gethryn, was beaten bloodily to death with a wood-rasp; Lines-Bower is dispatched by having his throat most messily cut indeed. Hoode met his end in the study of his country house, while Lines-Bower is killed in his private London office in the skyscraper of the Empire and International Trading Corporation, of which LB at his death was president and controller. Both murders provide readers with rather similar demi-locked-room situations.
A piquant detail comes when we learn that when a charwoman discovered middle-aged LB dead in his chair, his throat cut from ear to ear, he was clad only in a pink undershirt and pink boxer shorts. Among the investigators Gethryn is the only one who seems to divine that this particular apparel might have any significance. After his success in The Rasp, Gethryn's attendant policemen--AC Lucas, Superintendent Boyd, Inspector Pike--act very dependently on the amatuer sleuth, treating him with an obsequiousness remarkable even by Twenties detective novel standards.
An interesting scene takes place when the police higher-ups bring Gethryn before an Agatha Christie-esque Important Personage named Thwaites, one of these obscure but powerful movers and shakers behind the headlines. Thwaites imperiously tells Gethryn that in investigating this murder they simply must get on with it:
"[T]here's more in this matter than the police point of view....We can't have a lot of muck-raking and mud-slinging....Just the essentials. And speed. Above all, speed....Speed, speed. Get the thing over and decently done with....You understand me?"
The overweening arrogance of this nettles Gethryn who snaps back:
"Do I understand you? I think so. At least I understood your speech. You can't have the case drag on. You must have it cleaned it up without delay. You must, in other words, have speed, speed, speed. You also want no fuss and bother; no undue publicity about the matter. You want, really, someone quickly arrested and hanged, preferably, perhaps, the guilty party. You can't allow any mud-taking or mud-slinging, and the dung heaps, whatever they conceal, must be left alone....
Who, exactly, are you?...Where, precisely, do you imagine yourself to be--in Tammany Hall, N.Y., or Heaven or both?"
Ba-Boom! I've rarely seen a better illustration of the genteel British ability, at least in fiction, to tell people to fuck off, in so many pretty words, glittering amidst a cascade of precisely placed commas. I know there must be actors who would adore delivering this speech in a film adaptation.
The attitude conveyed here, the disgust for corruption and depraved vice in high places, can't help but carry resonance today, when virtually every day we have it shoved in our faces. Thwaites and Gethryn might as well be talking about the Epstein files.
Gethryn similarly is righteously disgusted by the very offices of the Empire and International Trading Corporation. "I don't think I like it, Boyd," observes Gethryn disdainfully, "....all that marble. And the go-o-old...." With the dead man's private secretary he shares this bemused exchange about the place:
"I say, is it all like this? I don't think I can bear it--"
"The--er--authorities have been lavish in decoration. There's--er-- more to come for you."
"I thought so. I felt it...."
What, I wonder, would the man have made of the new interior decoration of America's oval office? What would he make of the coming colossal ballroom? I think I know.
Philip MacDonald was by no means a radical writer, but like both leftists and some of his fellow English conservatives, including some who like him wrote mystery fiction, Phil was critical of the modern order which was being promulgated in the non-Communist sector of the world by increasingly opulent and omnipotent international global capitalists, who pulled the strings of puppet-like world leaders, often with dreadful consequences to humanity. (Another one of Lines-Bower's do's is Torrance Explosives and Armaments.)
Of course the late LB's office staff must be questioned, and this includes a couple of attractive secretaries, one of them a brunette and the other a blonde with a rather dodgy American accent, and an eighteen-year-old office boy named Lennet; but he has vanished since the murder. Investigating the lad's disappearance, Gethryn finds that Lennet at his lodging house has a collection of books including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Monsieur Lecog. An imaginative lad, this!
These books undoubtedly were some of the key texts which influenced Phil's own creative imagination when it came to the writing of mystery fiction. Could all the books mentioned here have been tomes which MacDonald himself had owned? It would not surprise me. Some other volumes mentioned are:
John Ruskin's Fors Clavigera (critique of the worker's place in modern capitalism)
Joseph Conrad's The Arrow of Gold
a four-volume set of works by George Bernard Shaw
Rudyard Kipling's Soldiers Three
Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (a collection of fairy tales; it will be recalled Phil's brilliant grandfather George MacDonald was an influential Victorian writer of fairy tales; George was also a friend of Ruskin and both MacDonald and Ruskin were deeply critical of industrial capitalism)
It turns out that Lennet also writes Sexton Blake-ish boys' mystery tales about a fearless crime fighter named Carlton Howe. Gethryn's friend and brother-in-law Deacon, the suspected private secretary from The Rasp, reads out loud a passage from Carlton Howe's adventure The Missing Twelve:
Immovable as a statue hewn from marble, Carlton Howe stood erect against the wall. Through the all-enveloping and malignant darkness he could hear the soft, sibilant hissing breaths of the Spanish Pedro who crouched, deadly knife in hand, waiting for his arch-enemy the detective!
Gethryn takes a great liking to Lennet, though he has never met him, and he exonerates him of being the murderer. He fears, rather, that the boy may be another victim. "An intelligent, industrious boy of an advanced eighteen," Gethrun pronounces of him. Keen on his job, hoping for a rapid promotion. A boy who reads good stuff and who makes pocket-money by writing bad with a precocious tongue in his downy cheek.
As Gethryn comes to understand just how fiendishly depraved are the circumstances behind the murder, he comes to fear desperately for Lennet's fate--with good reason.
I'm afraid I'll have to get into somewhat spoilerish territory in a minute, but I will post my readers a warning. The outcome of the novel is simultaneously advanced and regressive: the former because it dives into morbid sexual psychology, a fascination of the author's throughout his writing career, and the latter because of its sheer downright racist bilge. It's a frustrating combination! On the one hand modern producers would love the sexual aspect, which is far ahead of its time, but the racism would simply be unfilmable.
I'm not going to give away culpritude, but I am going to talk briefly about just what happens to Lennet, so SPOILER WARNING!
It turns out that Lennet fell into the hands of the murderers who, among other things, were sexual sadists (particularly the one) who in a folie a deux tortured the boy mercilessly for three days and nights. When Gethryn and the police find him they descry chained to the wall a "scarred and naked young body, huddling itself like a thin animal into a shape hopelessly attempting defense from outrageous enmity." This sadism is a motif, a theme, that the author came back to several times throughout his career. Obviously it was something that powerfully and peculiarly affected him. Why, I don't know. I have a notion psychology is involved.
END SPOILER!
The racist aspect to the novel, about which I won't get into detail, has, I'm afraid, doomed this otherwise worthy book to oblivion, but a defense I will attempt of it is to point out that its main models are Sexton Blake and Edgar Allen Poe and the sort of bizarre and lurid things we see in this book are far from unknown in its models. I dearly wish Phil had shown more adult restraint in this novel, but in fairness I have to point out that the book like its predecessor The Rasp was much lauded in both the United States and United Kingdom and I have not discovered a single review which criticized, or even pointed out as in way notable, the blatant racism.
One prescient reviewer even essentially likened the book to a modern crime novel (in 1928!), writing:
In "The White Crow' Mr. Macdonald has not only amply fulfilled the promise revealed in his earlier detective novel, "The Rasp," but has achieved something which, in this class of writing, is as welcome as it is rare--a story that is interesting for its characterisation and psychology as well as for its plot. In no other class of fiction would we so often and so patiently overlook a lack of care and indifference to style as, but for too few exceptions such as this book, we have to accept for the sake of a little mystification and excitement....Mr. Macdonald is to be congratulated on so singular a triumph.
That's the sort of criticism of the mystery novel that readers have heard over every decade for almost a century now! But it wasn't nearly as common in 1928, when detective fiction was being widely celebrated precisely for it artifice and artificiality.
The main charge leveled against the book was that the culprit unfairly does not appear until late in the tale, a charge against which the author strenuously defended himself in print. Phil pointed out that this culprit was what he termed the secondary culprit. The main culprit, on the other hand, he had introduced early on indeed. Phil deemed that fair play:
[T]he accusation, which is not true, has been made against me that I have not followed the canons of detective story writing. I have, to my mind, followed these canons--which I consider absolutely essential--with rather painful scrupulousness.
"Rather painful scrupulousness"--I think the author's words suggest his growing discomfort with pure detection. The White Crow itself has quite its share of lurid sensation, along with patches filled with Gethryn's memoranda which rather drag. His best works, in my view, are more in the vein of thrillers Murder Gone Mad or extravaganzas like Rynox.
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