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| American first edition |
The page-long authors' blurb on the back of the dust jacket of The Dark Wheel (1948), a suspense novel co-authored by Philip MacDonald and A. Boyd Correll, informs us that the two men "met over a game of chess" and "decided to continue their friendship over a good book," adding: "This is the book."
The previous year in May 1947 Boyd Correll--his full name was Augustus Boyd Correll, so now you know why as a crime writer he reduced his first name to the single initial "A."--had hosted, with his Turkish born (of American parents), operetta singer wife Helen, a reception for MacDonald's twenty-year-old daughter Caryl when she married a local electrician, so they evidently had indeed become good friends.
Boyd and his wife Helen, a childless couple, and Philip and his second wife Ruth (Caryl's stepmother) lived about a mile apart in Laguna Beach, California, a small, charming, then remote oceanside community about sixty miles from Hollywood that was home to bohemian, arty types like writers and painters, who didn't want to live in LA.
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| Author! Author! |
Already in 1952-53 Laguna Beach had an active branch of the Mattachine Society, a pioneering national gay rights organization. Early Mattachine Society activist Gerry Brissette recalled sweepingly of the city: "Laguna Beach was a community of gays....the mayor was gay, the sheriff was gay, and the librarian was gay. They just seemed to be running everything and they were very wealthy."
How much Philip MacDonald and Boyd Correll absorbed this Laguna Beach bohemian and queer environment is unclear. Both authors were married men, though Boyd and his wife Helen never had children and Philip's one child, his daughter Caryl, he sired with his first, English wife, Mona, way back in 1926. The couple divorced a decade later after Mona discovered that Philip was carrying on an affair with his platinum-blonde Canadian-American secretary, Ruth, whom he married, somewhat dilatorily, in 1942.
Several of Philip's Fifties short crime tales, all of them included in the forthcoming Stark House collection Dream No More (particularly "His Mother's Eyes," "Fingers of Fear," "Love Lies Bleeding," "The Ticker Tape" and the title story), are remarkable for their queer sexual content. For his part Boyd in his single solo crime novel, Murder Is an Art (1950), set his queer crimes among Laguna Beach's bohemian arts community.
Philip, the only child of an actor-playwright and an actress and a grandson of fantasy writer and minister George MacDonald, lived a rather quirky life which seems to have included dropping out of school at the age of sixteen or seventeen to fight in Mesopotamia during the Great War and many other adventures. Boyd, who was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on October 2, 1905, making him five years younger than Philip, seemingly trekked down less traveled back roads as well.
A handsome though slightly built (six feet and 145 pounds), blonde and blue-eyed youth, Boyd took business courses at Wofford College in Spartanburg, then worked as a salesman in the jewelry store of his father, for whom he was named, until his father's accidental death in 1930. (The senior A. Boyd Correll fell into an unmarked washout hole in a sidewalk after a torrential storm.)
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| English first edition |
The next year young Boyd, then 25, moved out to Beverly Hills and became somehow became connected with the Laurence D'Orsay literary agency. When in 1936 he married singer Helen Caldwell, daughter of missionary and math and science professor Samuel Lee Caldwell of International College at Smyrna, Boyd was called a "literary critic of Beverly Hills." He is known to have published 27 pulp crime tales over the decade between 1941 and 1951. During World War Two he worked for Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation in charge of a 200 woman night shift work force. He also called himself, on the back of the jacket of The Dark Wheel, a "newspaper man, a barnstorming aviator and a writer for Walt Disney Classics."
So what about the crime novel the two men published together? The Dark Wheel is a straight suspense novel about Cornelius Van Toller, an insane New York millionaire--is there any other kind--who is dangerously obsessed with Kay Forrester, a stage actress whose play he is backing. The "dark wheel" refers metaphorically to his madness; when the wheel in his head begins to turn, bad things happen as obstacles to his desires are ruthlessly eliminated.
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| The Dark Wheel gets the Fifties femme fatale treatment |
One such obstacle may be Kay's wheelchair-bound husband, Larry Bradford, formerly a World War Two pilot (another wheel). There are some others characters in the novel as well, of course, principally Caroline, Van Toller's nervous older sister with a heart condition, his loyal but conscientious manservant Larsen and Kay's Lothario leading man, Denis LeMay, the latter of whom becomes the third point in a sort of love triangle.
It's a short sparely written novel that moves swiftly to its close; and it reads rather like a film script, which is not surprising, given MacDonald's scripting work in Hollywood for nearly two decades. (The back of the jacket somewhat misleadingly implies he wrote the script for Hitchcock's Rebecca, when in fact he wrote what was only an initial draft, apparently much altered.)
One can imagine while reading the book what actors might have been cast in a film adaptation:
Cornelius Van Toller: Claude Rains
Caroline Van Toller: Miriam Hopkins
Kay Forrester: Joan Fontaine
Larry Bradford: John Garfield
Denis LeMay: Vincent Price
A decade after the publication of MacDonald's last thriller published under his own name, Warrant for X, it's a bit disappointing as a novel, but probably Wheel would have made a ripping film. It's just not as interesting as MacDonald's short fiction at the time, nor for that matter Boyd Correll's own solo novel.
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