"Murder!" He Rasped: The Rasp (1924), by Philip MacDonald

"What do they call the thing?"

"Wood-rasp [answered Gethryn].  A file for wood."

"If you love me, call me mister, call me mister, Boydie dear."

Boyd Laughed.  He found Anthony refreshingly unofficial.

"I love little pussy, her hair is so black, and if I don't catch her she'll never come back.  Now, where did you come from, Blackie dear?  And have you left any other cards?  O, Shades of Doyle!  What a game!"

"I am Dupont [Dupin?], I am Lecoq, I'm Fortune, Holmes and Rouletabille.  Good night."  

"Gethryn, you're fatuous.  Take to crochet."  

Anthony Gethryn speaks, and speaks, in The Rasp (1924)

two Forties Penguin eds

We often refer carelessly to "detective fiction from the Golden Age," which is generally taken to mean mysteries published in the period between the two world wars, but if fans of the period really think about it, it probably occurs to them that most of their favorite mysteries from this period, with perhaps a few exceptions like books by Christie, Sayers or Crofts (or Van Dine to the diehards), come from the Thirties not the Twenties.  

Many of the "Golden Age" mystery favorites did not even begin publishing books until the Thirties or the very late Twenties (Queen, Carr, Allingham, Mitchell, Marsh, Innes, Blake, Bruce etc., etc.).  The Detection Club did not form until 1930.  Really, the Twenties is best understood as the decade when the form was only beginning to establish itself and take firm shape.  The hangman's tree was planted in the Twenties, one might say, but it didn't fully bloom until the Thirties.  

I think British crime writer Philip MacDonald personified this phenomenon.  He published two series Anthony Ruthven (pronounced "Riven") Gethryn detective novels in 1924 and 1928, then opened a floodgate of inventiveness between 1930 and 1933, producing no fewer than 14 detective and crime novels during this time, along with two more mainstream novels, averaging four books a year. 

MacDonald grew restive with straight detective fiction and at least six of his novels in this period can better be termed mystery thrillers rather than detective fiction.  Perhaps his major innovation was the serial killer novel.  He was one of the most important popularizers of this subgenre with his books Murder Gone Mad (1931) and X v. Rex, aka The Mystery of the Dead Police (1933).  

After he moved to California to write screenplays for the film industry, MacDonald's book output dropped significantly.  There came just five more crime novels: another thriller (with Gethryn) in 1938, one if his most highly regarded, Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared, then a spy novel in 1941, a psychological thriller in 1948, a domestic suspense thriller in 1955 and an adieu to the genre with a final Gethryn novel, The List of Adrian Messenger, more a thriller, in 1959.  

MacDonald said that during these years he wrote an occasional novel to "let off steam."  Afterward he retired from writing for the most part, having reached his sixties.  In the 35 years between 1924 and 1959 he published 21 crime and detective novels, 14 of them between 1930 and 1933 (plus one more in 1938).  

The Thirties truly were the author's heyday as a crime writer, though his sporadic work in the forties and fifties is worthy of his name.  His two Twenties Anthony Gethryn novels, now, I'm not as crazy as about.  I see them rather as 'prentice works and curate's eggs, with some good parts but not the main components of a truly enticing omelet.  

I recently reread MacDonald's debut detective novel (discounting two which he wrote with his father in the early twenties), The Rasp, and confirmed my original judgment of it; and I am now rereading his follow-up, The White Crow.  Both of these novels received boffo reviews back in the day, and The Rasp, which saw its 100th anniversary last year, remained in print over much of that time and is still in print today.  From the very year it was published The Rasp was praised as a crime fiction classic, and for many decades it was regarded as such, though today it strikes me as rather dated.  (It struck me as such back in 1990s as well to be honest.)  

Basically, it's your cliched body-in-the-study book.  Gethryn himself says as much in it.  Yes, this situation was already cliched in 1924.  I'm not sure MacDonald really does enough with this setup to justify the novel's "classic" status, although Gethryn's meta asides on the mystery are amusing.  

young MacDonald

Philip MacDonald was all of 23 when he published The Rasp.  If that didn't make him a prodigy like, say, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (I'm listening to his third violin concerto right now, which he composed 250 years ago at age 19 in 1775), Mac compared well with other crime juveniles like John Dickson Carr, who published his first, It Walks by Night, at the same age, 23, in 1930 and Margery Allingham, who made her mystery debut at 24, I think, with The White Cottage Mystery in 1928.  

World War One had been over for less than six years when Mac--I have no reason to believe this was his nickname but for convenience I'm using it henceforth--published The Rasp and he claimed to be a war veteran of four years' experience.  This claim has never been challenged as far as I know, but I simply don't see how to swallow it.  Mac was only 13 when the Great War, as it was then known, commenced, and just barely 18 when it ended.  If he lied about his age and served in 1917-18, say, surely he could not have gotten away with serving at 13 or 14!  This was no longer the age of drummer boys.  

Whatever the truth of his war service (I've never actually seen any record of it), Mac created in Colonel Anthony Ruthven Gethryn (he modestly prefers to be called Mister), a suitably heroic personal alter ego.  Yes, it seems an author once again has gone aMarySueing, or whatever the male equivalent of that form of dream casting is called.  

English author EC Bentley had supposedly cut the Great Detective down to human size with his mystery Trent's Last Case in 1913, but if these men (and they were almost almost always men) were, in contrast with Holmes, constantly flippant and insouciant about life, they were also something in the way of amateur geniuses.  Gethryn is very much in the mold of Bentley's Trent and Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, not to mention Van Dine's Philo Vance, who was to pop up in a couple of years, dropping his 'g's, patronizing everyone around him and airily discoursing on everything under the sun, like tropical fish, scotties and Chinese and Egyptian antiquities.   

Mac actually provides us with a bio of the amateur detective in chapter two of The Rasp--very kind of him, I'm sure.  We learn from it that he's the "son of a hunting country gentleman of the old type, who was yet one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his day, and of a Spanish lady of impoverished and exiled family who had, before her marriage with Sir William Gethryn, been in turn governess, dancer, mannequin, actress and portrait painter."

Mac allows that with such parentage "it was perhaps to be expected that [Anthony Gethryn] should be no ordinary child.  And he was not."  Of course among Golden Age gentleman amateur detectives Anthony was a dime a dozen, a penny packet.  Gethryn would have been right at home with the Crime Queens' Wimsey, Albert Campion and Roderick Alleyn, a natural genius who wears his genius lightly if not frivolously, and a consummate charmer of the ladies.  Let's see how many other boxes he ticks:

prep school and Oxford, where "he covered himself with academic glory which outshone even that of his excellence at racquets and Rugby football" and excelled not just at math but history and classics

left Oxford at 23 (he was born in 1886, btw), then "read for the bar; was called, but did not answer.  He went instead round and about the world...."

after four years "returned home to settle down, painted two pictures which he gave to his father, wrote a novel which was lauded by the critics and brought him not a penny, and followed up with a book of verse which, though damned by the critics, was yet remunerative to the extent of one hundred and fifty pounds."

served as private secretary to a promising M.P.

long-limbed with sensitive hands

joined the army eleven days after the British declaration of war on Germany and was wounded in 1915 ("a rifle bullet, an attack of trench fever, and three pieces of shrapnel"), but was soon in Germany doing intelligence work due to an intervention by his uncle Sir Charles Haultevieux de Courcy Gethryn, "a personage at the War Office." ("Anthony spoke German like a German.")  Promoted to the rank of colonel, he was awarded a bunch of medals, but he doesn't talk about those and he prefers to be called mister.  

His father and mother died, leaving him only "a few hundreds a year," so he had to find work.  He wrote another novel and painted three more pictures, then returned to his secretaryship with the M. P. but was "bored to extinction."  

Fortunately (?) his uncle died, leaving him "a dreadful house in Knightsbridge and nine or ten thousand a year [about three-quarters of a million pounds today!].  Anthony left the secretaryship, sold the house, set up in a flat and removed from carking care, did as his fancy took him."  (I don't know about you, but I had to look up "carking.")

Getting reacquainted with an old college friend, Spencer Hastings, Anthony--I'll get familiar like the author--decided to invest in Hastings' weekly London review The Owl.  He also "designed the cover, wrote a verse for the paper now and then, sometimes a bravura essay."

I don't know about you, but after learning all these details about Anthony, I sort of hated the guy.  

But he's not quite as insufferable as all that in practice.  Raymond Chandler abominated these sorts of Mary Sueish dream projections gentleman detectives, most of them created by, as he saw it, fatuous middle-class women--though his "antidote" was to create a Mary Sueish professional detective.  However, plenty of people adored them.  

Although Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey preceded Anthony by a single year, in The Rasp Anthony set the mold for this superior genteel sleuth breed in many ways, most notably in falling madly in love with a suspect in the case and later marrying her in the second novel.  By the time Wimsey, Campion and Alleyn had got around to getting themselves hitched Anthony had mostly retired from the game.  

*******

It's through The Owl that Anthony is called into the murder case in The Rasp.  At the prompting of his efficient secretary Margaret Warren, Spencer Hastings sends him down to Abbotshall, the Surrey country house where cabinet minister John Hoode has been beaten to death in his study with a wood-rasp.  (Yes, you read that right.)  

Down there Gethryn encounters Superintendent Boyd of Scotland Yard, a former pal from his intelligence days when he, Boyd, was "lent" to Anthony during a "great and secret roundup" of German spies in London in 1917.  Happily Boyd evinces "none of the chagrin commonly attributed to police detectives when faced with the amateur who is to prove them fools at every turn."

As that quote shows The Rasp is filled with meta observations about detective fiction, about which many cliches had accumulated even by 1924.  Earlier Anthony thinks to himself: "A cabinet minister murdered without a mystery?  Impossible!  All the canons were against it."  Later we get:

"No originality!" said Anthony plaintively.  "It's all exactly the same.  Ever read detective stories, Boyd?  They're always killed in studies.  Always!  Ever notice that?"

"It's too rule of thumb.  The Profligate Secretary, the Missing-Banknotes, The Fingerprinted Blunt Instrument!  It's not even a good shilling shocker.  It's too damnation ordinary, that's what it is!"

Anthony continually invokes past masters like Doyle, Gaboriau and Freeman, insisting that the case is more complex than it seems.  It's a sort of locked room situation, but the police go for the obvious solution, naturally, and quickly fasten upon Hoode's manly private secretary, Archibald Basil Travers Deacon.  John Dickson Carr actually once pronounced the private secretary the person most likely to be the murderer in a Twenties mystery, and I suppose he should know.  

When the police find Deacon's fingerprints on the rasp, it's all over bar the hanging, as far as officialdom is concerned.  But Anthony thinks otherwise; and flippant gentleman amateur sleuths can never be wrong, surely.  You can be certain he will clear A. B. T. Deacon and find the real dastardly killer who has set the private secretary up for a fall.  By the way, could Deacon, with his cumbersome Christian names and his initials, have helped inspire, over a decade later, Agatha Christie's Alexander Bonaparte Cust in The ABC Murders?  

Anthony also falls in love with a neighbor of Hoode's, Lucia "Loo" Masterson Lemesurier, a beautiful youngish brunette war widow.  At least I think she's a war widow, the book tells us her husband died four years earlier, which I'm guessing would have been 1918, setting the book in 1922. She's involved in the case because on the night of the murder she was trying to protect her brother, a neurasthenic war veteran who was Hoode's previous private secretary.  (Hoode fired him.)  Gosh, what is it with these screwy private secretaries?  

Lucia thus falls in with the long line of magnificently devoted sisters willing to get themselves involved in murder cases and to nobly sacrifice all in order to help their deeply problematic male siblings.  Jefferson Farjeon, mystery writer and brother of children's writer Eleanor Farjeon, simply adored this trope.  Don't know what Eleanor thought of it!  It gets rather soppy The Rasp at times.  

The older book this mystery actually most resembles is the prewar Trent's Last Case, though I don't believe Anthony mentions Bentley or Trent.  He does Bentley two better (or worse), however, with not just one falling in love story but three!  There are three impending marriages at the end of this book: Anthony and Lucia, the exonerated Deacon and Loo's younger sister Dora, and Spencer Hastings and Margaret Warren.  It's a bit much, I think.  This matrimonial plum pudding is too fruity.

I regret to say it, but I think the best section of this mystery is the first chapter, which is not even about Anthony, but rather Spencer and Margaret.  Their relationship is charming and the satire of the press is cute.  "Abbotshall Murder!  Cabinet Minister Assassinated!  Horrible Atrocity!  Is it Bolshevism?"  (This sounds like FOX News on antifa.)  Mac could have made Margaret an intrepid girl reporter and sent her down to investigate the murder rather than Anthony, but, alas, convention demanded an insouciant gent for the occasion rather than a plucky lady.  Anthony I find a bit tiresome in this outing.  He's ever so facetious, like a stage comedian who can't "turn it off."

I like the title of the novel: there's something sinister about a rasp as a murder implement.  The explanation for Doyle's fingerprints being on the weapon is clever, probably the cleverest thing about the book, though I don't believe modern foressices would have been stumped very long.  R. Austin Freeman, author of the 1907 detective novel The Fingerprint is mentioned and I was also reminded of Crofts.

Anthony delivers a 35-page written explanation of how he solved the case (45 pages in the hardcover editions), which may be a little too much of a good thing even for devoted puzzle fans.  For me a lot of the book drags.  

Happily, however, both Anthony and the author improved in later outings.  It's only fair to add that the book was raved in its day and became an almost instant "landmark" of detective fiction.  Five years after it was published in 1924, S. S. Van Dine included The Rasp as a selection in his Scribner's Detective Library, six volumes with, in addition to The Rasp, the following titles: Doyle's The Sign of Four/Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery, Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Freeman's The Eye of Osiris, Crofts' The Cask and Mason's The House of the Arrow.  

The Twenties were represented by Crofts, Mason and MacDonald; Van Dine evidently could not bring himself to include Mary Roberts Rinehart or Anna Katharine Green or Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or something by Sayers (women, bah!); and modesty (ha!) compelled him to omit one of his own books.  But, still, whatever Van Dine's own biases, The Rasp would reappear again and again, remaining in print, I believe, over every decade of the twentieth century.  Ellery Queen, a great Philip  MacDonald admirer, would declare it a cornerstone of mystery fiction.  It was reprinted by three different American publishers as late as the 1980s.  Just in that one decade!

But I think Mac went on to do much better things, a sentiment with which the author himself would have agreed.  In his introduction to a 1963 omnibus volume of three of his novels, including The Rasp, he wrote of his debut solo effort that after he was finished with writing it, he wasn't sure whether it was any good at all.  The writing of mysteries that were "literate and credible as well as scrupulously fair to the reader," he declared, was "pure self-torture!"  

Perhaps this is why afterward Mac gravitated increasingly to crime novels with strong thriller elements.  Puzzle construction needs more than a rasp to fashion things into shape.  Mac never did become a member of the Detection Club, something which still seems rather odd, come to think of it.  He remained in the UK for part of the early 1930s, as we will see.