From The Fletcher Files: The South Foreland Murder (1930), by J. S. Fletcher

If I had had the very slightest premonition when I took that bungalow that I was about to be mixed up in an affair such as that which developed from a certain night in June, I should probably have fled to the ends of the earth--or, at any rate, have remained in my old lodgings at Dover.

The third J. S. Fletcher mystery novel from 1930 that was published in the United States was The South Foreland Murder.  I like this book rather better than the first from that year, The Borgia Cabinet, mainly because it feels more "real world."  Cabinet was a generic artificial country house mystery but Foreland seems more like something that might really have taken place.  

The story is narrated by a Dover solicitor bachelor named Savvery, who has rented a bungalow near the village of St. Margaret at Cliffe, located between Dover and Deal, not far from the South Foreland Lighthouse.  It is set explicitly in 1911, three years before the outbreak of the Great War, though the book was published in 1930--a nineteen-year disparity!  The Fletcher mysteries from the later Twenties and the Thirties which I have read have all felt decidedly anachronistic to me; perhaps they are all meant to be set in the past, within a few years on either side of the war.  

Fletcher was only 57 in 1920, which is hardly, I would say (perhaps defensively), superannuated; but he doesn't seem to have been concerned with keeping up with modern times, making it surprising that he seems unquestionably to have been the most popular "modern" English mystery writer in the United States during the Roaring Twenties.

Perhaps the bulk of Fletcher's anglophiliac reading audience missed the "good old days" before the war, an ostensibly gentler time when autos were still a novelty, less forward women wore big hats and long dresses and gangland slayings seemingly were not a weekly occurrence in Chicago and other perilous urban American citadels. 

Another hugely popular English mystery writer during the Jazz Age was the similarly old-fashioned E. Phillips Oppenheim, not to mention the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose detective Sherlock Holmes made his "last bow" on the eve of the Great War, only to take the stage again to solve yet more murder cases, retrospectively set, between 1924 and 1927.  It took nothing less than the Grim Reaper Himself finally to put a full stop to the crime writing careers of these Victorian/Edwardian men.  

As a group Doyle's last Holmes stories are, truth be told, pretty weak broth compared to those from the glory days, though "The Problem of Thor Bridge" is generally beloved and there's much to be said for the final Holmes tale, "Shoscombe Old Place."  Fletcher's later works from the 1930s generally are shorter and weaker than the ones from the late teens and early Twenties.  I think Foreland is one of the better ones, however.  

To get back to this book (finally), lawyer Savvery's bungalow neighbors are:

Mr. Rennard, a friendly, obvious man of means, "always ready to pass the time of day and to invite you into his bungalow for a whiskey and soda and an uncommonly good cigar."

Mr. and Mrs. Thacker, a "grocer and Italian warehouseman" and his pretty, younger wife, who is "gay, vivacious and something of a chatterbox."

Mr. Chettle, in a cottage a little further away, "a quiet, moony-looking chap," one of those artists.  

This sunny setup is soon disturbed when Mr. Rennard one early morning is found shot to death at his bungalow--most efficiently, narratively-speaking, at the end of chapter one.  Savvery finds himself at the center of events (the ingenuous police are quite nice about frequently including him in their investigative efforts); there are vanished jewels, a favorite plot contrivance of Fletcher; and, much less typical of the author, at least in my experience, a rather shockingly bloody climax in Monte Carlo (tactfully told at second hand, but still....).  

It's the usual Fletcher formula in many ways, including the solution that comes to both the investigators and the readers by happenstance, but it's highly readable, the narrative going down like, one presumes, those whisky and sodas of Rennards.  I have to give Fletcher credit: he was good, and supremely efficient, at what he did.  As long as you don't expect by the book fair play detection, locked rooms and ingenious clues and  the like, you should enjoy it all if you like classic British mysteries.  

Was Fletcher really a sort of precursor of the police procedural?  Perhaps so, the more I think about it, though admittedly his depiction of police work makes old Freeman Crofts look like Jack Webb or Ed McBain. But, really, while we are revising everything else about there vintage era of  mystery, we really should think about beginning to reckon with the "Dean of Mystery Writers," Mr. J. S. Fletcher.

B is for Borgias: The Borgia Cabinet (1930), by J. S. Fletcher

Striking jacket design for Knopf's edition of
The Borgia Cabinet. JS Fletcher was one of
the publisher's most lucrative authors, though
Knopf had a shiny new pony in the stable
by the name of Hammett.

The Borgia Cabinet was the first of three mystery novels published in the United States in 1930 by veteran English mystery writer J. S. Fletcher.  Cabinet popped up in January of that year, followed by The Yorkshire Moorland Mystery in May and The South Foreland Murder in September.  1931 would see The Dressing Room Murder start up the Fletcher production line all over again in the following January.  Fletcher was, you might say, a prolific writer.  

And say it they certainly did at the time.  One newspaper wag speculated in 1930 that English thriller writer Edgar Wallace had actually "written all of England's literature," only to be corrected by J. S. Fletcher's publisher Knopf that Wallace works accounted merely for half of England's literature, the other half being supplied by their man Fletcher.  

One of the ways in which mystery genre history has gone wrong, as history, is to omit inclusion in studies of once hugely popular writers who have fallen out of print.  Fifteen years ago, mystery genre history, when it came to its so-called "Golden Age," was largely confined, in Britain, to the Crime Queens Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh (and sometimes Tey), and, in America, to the tough guys Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  

Practically no one--there were a few exceptions--was studying Freeman Wills Crofts, R. Austin Freeman, Earl Derr Biggers or Erle Stanley Gardner, say, and they certainly weren't perusing Edgar Wallace or Carolyn Wells or J. S. Fletcher.  Yet the latter two authors, the first American and the second British, were during the 1920s and into the 1930s two of the most popular mystery (as opposed to thriller) writers in the United States--a fact which is still greatly lost on people today.

Unlike the also very popular Mary Roberts Rinehart, Wells and Fletcher were mass producers of mysteries, often publishing three or four (or more) crime novels in a single year.  Fletcher took off in the States after American president Woodrow Wilson famously praised his book The Middle Temple Murder (1919), which until this last decade remained the one and only Fletcher book that remained often in print.   In the United States in the Twenties Fletcher sold better than Christie or Sayers and to many American crime fans he most represented modern English mystery.

There was a great irony here, in that Fletcher--who was only four years younger than Arthur Conan Doyle and Fergus Hume, just a year younger than R. Austin Freeman, Eden Phillpotts and Carolyn Wells and three years older than venerable E. Phillips Oppenheim--was a very old-fashioned writer indeed.  His Twenties mysteries ostensibly took place during the Twenties, I suppose, but they really were products of the Victorian or at best Edwardian era.  And they weren't really tales of detection, or let us say deduction, either.  

Fletcher's mysteries have plenty of mystery to them, to be sure, but they tend to have very little genuine intelligent detection by the police detectives.  They investigate, vigorously follow leads, then usually get a surprise solution generously handed to them by the author in the last few pages of the novel, at least in my experience with reading Fletcher.  The man certainly had this formula down and his books are easy to read and often enjoyable, but it was really S. S. Van Dine and to some extent Earl Biggers who brought the art of detection home to American mystery readers in the second half of the Twenties (followed by Ellery Queen).  

I have a hardcover American first edition of another Fletcher mystery, False Scent (1925) that has some rather interesting marginalia in it on a couple of pages.  I wish I knew more of the book's provenance.  The letter "H" is stamped in it and there is a bookstore stamp on the front endpaper from Pomeroy's, a department store chain in eastern and central Pennsylvania (where my own mother is from--she may have been to a Pomeroy's in Harrisburg or Pottstown for all I know).  

Anyway, the presumably native Pennsylvanian buyer of this book was pretty dubious as to its merits, judging from the marginal comments.  He (?) complained that the detective figure in the novel, one Stevenage, was quite a dull dog indeed.  Fletcher tells us that "in spite of his comparative youth... [Stevenage was] already a man of achievement and of further promise in the Criminal Investigation Department....at eight-and-twenty....[he had] peculiarly acute instincts, stiletto-like perception, and a habit of cool procedure as dependable as chilled steel."  This particular reader, however, wasn't buying it.

On page 258, there's an inadvertently funny exchange between Stevenage and another man, a civilian named Featherstone, with whom Stevenage gets quite chummy.  The latter man informs Stevenage that a certain suspicious character was clean-shaven, leading Stevenage to lament that this man then could not be his suspect Whatmore, because that man is bearded.  To this Featherstone ingeniously suggests that Whatmore might "easily have shaved his beard off....Don't you think that's just what he would do?"  To this Stevenage assents: "Maybe!"

This exchange prompted the reader to scrawl testily in the margin: 

Who is the detective--Stevenage or Featherstone?  Query: Could a C.I.D. man be as stupid as Stevenage and still be C.I.D.?

On the final page of the book, 295, the reader frustratedly adds: 

Again--How can a detective be as stupid--and lucky--as Stevenage!  Answer: His brains were "abstracted."

Well, the truth is this sort of police detective is a stock character in Fletcher's books; we see him again and again.  And, yeah, he is rather ingenuous, to put it generously.  But he steadfastly sees it through to the end and gets his man (or woman), mainly due to some timely good luck late in the book.  

Let's see how it all works in The Borgia Cabinet.  

This book is a highly traditional, if not to say somewhat generic, country house murder mystery.  Fletcher came up with a more intriguing title than usual for this one, but it could easily have been called Murder at Aldersyke Manor.  What is the eponymous cabinet you may be wondering?  It's a repository of obscure deadly poisons which the eccentric murder victim, Sir Charles Stanmore, thought it amusing to keep, unlocked, in his study.  Of course Sir Charles has been bumped off with one of these criminally accessible poisons!  

Certainly it appears that there are plenty of people who might potentially have wanted to do away with Sir Charles, starting with Lady Stanmore, a younger woman who despised her husband and may have been seen in the woods kissing her cousin James Beck, a Wimpole Street physician.  Then there's Sir Charles' young secretary, Miss Fawdale, his nephew and heir, Guy Stanmore, and his sister-in-law, Guy's mother, the widowed Mrs. John Stanmore.  

Of course there's a solemn-faced butler, Bedford, in the wings, as well as a nosy overbearing housekeeper, Mrs. Protheroe, and a parlor maid, Purser.  There's Sir Charles' helpful law partner, Mr. Gilford, and a man by the name of Mapperson, who wanted to purchased a valuable diamond necklace, vanished since the murder, from Sir Charles.  (Whimsically there are also minor characters named Holmes and Watson.)

Detective-Sergeant Charlesworth of Scotland Yard goes investigating and eventually forms a theory, but it's knocked aheap in the last twenty pages of the novel.  

There's no brilliant Christie-like clueing or even the rigorous detection of a John Rhode or Freeman Crofts.  But it all reads pleasantly and smoothly right up to the very late solution of the crime (s); and there's nothing wrong with that. It turns out quite a few readers over the last century and more did not really want to have wrack their brains too hard when perusing a mystery.  

J. S. Fletcher

What's odd though is how Fletcher was presented to the public by American publishers.  "The Dean of Detective Story Writers," we are told on the back of the dust jacket of False Scent.  This follows:

The world is full of confirmed Fletcher addicts.  His mystery-detective stories of the puzzle variety have made him the favorite story teller of thousands.  The secret is that he plays fair with his readers in his stories.  All the facts that his detectives have to go on are there for his readers to see--and he tells a surprising story in a soothing, artless manner.

Does Fletcher pull surprises, on his detectives and readers?  Absolutely, yes.

Yet his mystery stories, at least the ones I have read, are not really puzzle stories, in the sense that they provide readers with a puzzle they can solve.  Fletcher only hands out key pieces of the puzzle to his detectives and readers right at the end of the story.  Neither the police nor the readers can really solve the crime; they merely are allowed to witness the revelation of the truth.  Inevitably this is disappointing to the more demanding puzzle fans, though it may be closer to the actuality of most crimes as they are really solved.  

The future in American mystery lay not with Fletcher, who would pass away, an anachronism at age 71, in 1935, but with Dashiell Hammett, the other major mystery writer in Knopf's stable.  Not only was Hammett a more exciting writer, he was actually a better deviser of puzzles.  And he influenced many more writers.  Yet there has always remained a fair flock of Fletcher fanciers.  I'll try to review a better one by him soon.  He did do better mysteries than this.  

Out Now! Nothing Darker Than The Night (2025), by Curtis Evans

I'm happy to say that the publisher Stark House has published Nothing Darker Than The Night a collection of essays from the last fifteen years by me (many of them revised and expanded) on hard-boiled and noir crime fiction.  48 (!) articles and essays, ranging from around 1300 words to nearly 18,000 words.  (Most follow in the middle of those two lengths.)  It's a big book, 424 pages.  Definitely a book to dip into at one's leisure and pleasure.  Also available as an ebook.

I hope some of my fellow bloggers will get around to reviewing the whole thing someday but in the meantime a Goodreads reviewer, "AC," gave the book five stars and commented: "A wonderful collection of essays by a rather cranky reviewer and critic that covers a great deal of interesting biographical information about Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, as well as a host of lesser known books of crime fiction and noir, including many of the short stories of Cornell Woolrich.  Lots of interesting material to browse and to read in."  

I was pleased with this take and will even cop to "cranky"--though I might just say opinionated!  You definitely will get opinions in this book.  

It's also reviewed here in Steve Steinbock's The Jury Box column in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Night starts off with with a nine-page introduction on how I came to get interested in hard-boiled and noir crime fiction in the first place.  (Readers of this blog may recall how I started reading Agatha Christie at age eight and remained an exclusively Anglophile classic mystery reader for decades.)  The two sections, roughly equal in length, are devoted respectively to hard-boiled and noir crime fiction.  

'Hard-Boiled" has multiple essays on Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, as well as pieces on Hammett's Thirties and Forties shadows (lesser known writers who followed him) and on Gore Vidal (his Edgar Box mysteries) and two women crime writers, Margaret Millar, Ross's amazing wife, and Mignon Eberhart (!).  Yes I look at hard-boiled influence in unexpected places, like work by Eberhart and traditionalist crime fiction guru S. S. Van Dine.   

Crime may or may not pay but it
certainly inspires some fascinating fiction

On Hammett there is original research on the mystery woman in his life, Elise De Viane (the girlfriend he likely drunkenly sexually assaulted), a new look as his short Continental Op stories which challenges received wisdom on them, and analyses of four of his novels.  With Chandler I analyze his attitude toward classic British crime fiction (something widely misunderstood), his bitter and rather stupid feud with Ross Macdonald, and his ironic epistolary relationship with crime writer James M. Fox.  With Macdonald I look largely at his attitude to crime writing and the evolution in his own work.  I greatly admire the "hard-boiled triumvirate" but I don't pull occasional punches when it comes to criticism either.  

I also look at some obscure right-wing and left-wing hard-boiled crime writers, as well as the depictions of Asians in American pulp fiction.  That latter piece was inspired by a letter written in the early Thirties by a Chinese immigrant in rural Arkansas to a pulp magazine, in which he politely complained about the way Asians were portrayed therein. 

down the boulevard of broken dreams

"Noir" starts off with a very long piece--if it were fiction it would almost be a novella--in which I revise the "tragic homosexual" legend which has grown up around Cornell Woolrich.  A great deal of new biographical information here.  I also look at his seminal noir novel The Bride Wore Black, and, as the goodreads reviewer stated, a good deal of his short fiction, including pieces which have been very little studied.  

Probably the second most significant piece in the collection is on the colorful, quizzical life of Fredric Brown, a great vintage crime writer similar to Woolrich in some ways.  Huge amount of new biographical details here.  There's also a look at Brown's novel The Screaming Mimi.  There are two articles apiece respectively on Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. 

The last sub-section collects nine introductions I have written to Stark House reprints of noir novels that were adapted to film, including James Gunn's rather amazing Deadlier Than The Male (filmed as Born to Kill), Theodore Strauss' rural noir Moonrise and Edna Sherry's spectacular Sudden Fear, adapted as an Oscar-nominated film starring Joan Crawford.

I'm pleased with this book and hope my readers will take a look.  If it does well enough, a collection of my vintage true crime essays (a score of those) will follow.  And then lastly, I hope, essays on classic crime fiction, which is where I started.

Sudden Fear