Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: Witch's Moon (1941), by Giles Jackson (aka Dana Chambers, aka Albert Fear Leffingwell)

"Whoever likes [their] murders multitudinous will find them here....[There's a] plethoric flow of gore short [only] of Nazi warfare."

--"How the Blood Runs!" Review of Witch's Moon in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 28, 1941

First American edition
Two paperback editions followed, 
one with the title changed to,
alliteratively but rather ridiculously,  
Blood on the Blonde

Between 1939 and 1947 former intelligence officer, retired adman and crime writer Albert Fear Leffingwell published 13 crime novels, the last of which appeared posthumously.  Only one of these was published under his own name, with another nine appearing under the pseudonym Dana Chambers and a pair under the pseudonym Giles Jackson. Seven of the ten Dana Chambers novels were series tales about amateur sleuth Jim Steele, a gent with the most hardboiled detective name this side of Mike Hammer (though he wasn't one), while the remaining three were non-series.  

The Jim Steele novels are currently being reprinted by Stark House as twofer volumes (though there will be an odd book out).  I just wrote the introduction to She'll Be Dead By Morning/The Blonde Died First, which will be out later this year.  The first volume, to which I also wrote an introduction, pairs Someday I'll Kill You with Too Like the Lightning and is available here.

the author's grandmother
Jane Elizabeth Jackson Leffingwell 
who died at age 90 in 1907 when her 
grandson was 12

The first of the two Giles Jackson novels, Witch's Moon, is forthcoming.  (Both Moon and its successor, Court of Shadows, feature as series sleuth New York newsman Nile Boyd.)  

Although the author's mother, Elizabeth Fear, had English immigrant parents, the ancestry of his father, Albert Tracy Leffingwell, went back many generations into the New England states of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Almost inevitably, it seems, he was a Mayflower descendant. His paternal  grandmother, Jane Elizabeth Jackson, was a granddaughter of Giles Jackson of Tyringham, Massachusetts, a locally renowned Revolutionary War veteran--though the claim of his family that he served as General Horatio Gates' chief of staff at the Battle of Saratoga seems not to be true.  In retirement the good gentleman sired nineteen children.  

social reformer James Caleb Jackson
the author's great-uncle

Jane Jackson Leffingwell's brother, James Caleb Jackson, the author's great-uncle, was a noted abolitionist and vegetarian who is credited with inventing the first dry breakfast cereal, Granula, in 1863.  Jackson forced a rival food faddist, a certain James Harvey Kellogg, to stop using the name Granula for his breakfast food, alleging Kellogg had stolen it from him.  Kellogg then coined the name Granola.  

Jackson was a prolific reformist writer, authoring such deadly serious, earnest tomes as The Sexual Organism and Its Healthful Management, How to Treat the Sick without Medicine (Shades of MAHA!), Dancing: Its Evil and Benefits, and American Womanhood: Its Peculiarities and Necessities.  

In 1858 he also founded the Jackson Sanatorium, a hydrotherapeutic resort, in Dansville, New York, which became for many decades a lucrative family business.  

Scenic ruins of the main building
of the Jackson Sanatorium, or the Castle on the Hill
as it is locally known today

Albert Tracy Leffingwell
the author's social reformer father

James Caleb Jackson's equally earnest nephew Albert Tracy Leffingwell was also a noted reformer, an anti-vivisectionist and progressive social activist.  Albert's wife, Elizabeth Fear Leffingwell, daughter of a Wesleyan Methodist lay preacher and coal miner who was killed by a hurtling train of runaway mining cars, was a pioneering female gynecologist.  

The brilliant couple's eldest son, the crime writer Albert Fear Leffingwell (back to him again), was proud of his distinguished family ancestry and expressed a certain left-wing sensibility in his writing--his sleuth James Steele fought on behalf of the Republicans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War--though he did not share their piety.  

To the contrary, Albert Fear Leffingwell lived a life that in some of its aspects his more puritanical New England ancestors would have frowned upon, one suspects.  Initially his life course ran highly commendably, at least on the surface.  After graduating from Harvard at the age of twenty-two, Leffingwell served in army intelligence in the First World War.  Upon leaving the service in 1919 he wed Helen Lillian Urie, daughter of an attorney, and with her had two daughters. 

the author and his wife in 1924, when he was 29

In 1925 he co-founded the poshly named New York advertising firm of Olmsted, Perrin and Leffingwell, which four years later was most profitably merged into the firm McCann, now the massive global advertising network McCann Erickson.  In the 1930s, before he had even commenced his later-in-life writing career, Leffingwell was drawing an estimated income, in modern worth, of some $362,000 a year.  He resided with his wife and young daughters at the family home in Bronxville, an affluent suburb about twenty miles north of Manhattan.

In 1935, however, this placid facade was ripped apart when Helen Urie Leffingwell brought a separation suit against Albert, alleging, as newspapers wryly reported, that he had abandoned his family on the advice of a meddling psychoanalyst who had informed him that his family "cramped his style."  Helen remained with the girls at the Bronxville home while Alfred took up residence at the Park Hotel in the Connecticut town of Winstead, located in the Connecticut Berkshires, about 38 miles from Tyringham, Massachusetts, the abode of his heroic Revolutionary War great-great grandfather, Giles Jackson. There he commenced the writing of crime fiction.  He was divorced from Helen by 1940 and never remarried in the six years of life left to him.

the author at time he was writing crime fiction

In 1939, the same year in which Raymond Chandler introduced to the world tough guy detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Leffingwell commenced the investigative saga of Jim Steele with a pair of crime novels, Some Day I'll Kill You and Too Like the Lightning.  Five more Jim Steele mysteries would follow between 1940 and 1946, the year of the author's untimely death at the age of fifty-one.  He had battled a drinking problem for over 25 years and died from kidney disease at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut.  

In 1940 the author published only one novel, a Jim Steele mystery called She'll Be Dead By Morning, but in 1941 there came from his busy hand no fewer than three crime tales: 

The Blonde Died First (Dana Chambers)

Witch's Moon (Giles Jackson) 

Nine Against New York (the only novel he ever published under his own name)

Witch's Moon would be followed in 1943 by another novel with the same amateur sleuth, Court of Shadows.  Obviously Leffingwell derived the Giles Jackson pen name from his revolutionary was ancestor Giles Jackson, whom the Jackson clan revered.  

While Court of Shadows was a timely World War Two spy thriller, Witch's Moon is something of a madcap couples mystery, albeit with no fewer than four murders, two of them quite gory.  Considering it takes place over one late night and early morning, that's an impressive tally indeed.  

Park Hotel, Winstead, CT, demolished in 1960s, where the author wrote Witch's Moon

When the tale opens, New York crime reporter Nile Boyd and fashion writer Anne Warriner are nearing the town of Oldfield, Connecticut, where they will stay overnight at the Lake Hotel--"Cachet of respectability.  Apotheosis of New England virtue," as Anne puts it (rather ironically as things turn out).  They were going to stay at Anne's lake place, but her cook can't make it till tomorrow, you see.  "I can't spend the night alone with you in a lake cottage, you ass," Anne bluntly explains to her semi-boyfriend.  "The whole town would be up bright and early tomorrow cutting out scarlet letters."  

From the novel:
"A copy of the Ladies Home Journal
for August, 1938 lay face down
in front of the fireplace."

Surprisingly the Lake Hotel proves to have quite a collection of dipsos and other assorted quirky characters, male and female.  One of the guests gets her throat cut in her room, while another unaccountably vanishes and a man, identify unknown, takes a fatal tumble from the porch roof.  And this is just in the first few hours!  

Nile helps the state troopers investigate, on account of his familiarity with the New York police.  You remember the "Rauber case...one of the most famous--and sickening--kidnaping cases in police history"?  It seems Nile "found the body."

The tough newsman will solve this case by sunset, but not until after much mayhem has ensued, including a fatal shooting and the discovery of...well, you'll be able to see soon enough, I expect, for yourself.  There is a lot going on in this book, and it switches viewpoints with some frequency; but things never get unduly murky.  

Through his characters more potshots are taken against local puritanical mores by the author, of whom I have gathered in his own life had replaced Christianity with psychology, Saint Paul with Sigmund Freud and the Bible with Psychopathia Sexualis.  

A local lawyer is said to have the suspicious, subversive habit of reading books, particularly tomes of Freudian psychology.  "Real books," emphatically adds local mathematics teacher Mary West. "[T]hat's a habit no one in Oldfield understands or condones."

Granula, the original American "granola" 
though apparently it looked more like grape nuts

Only some 43,000 words, this novel moves fast as a freight train toward its surprising end.  I thought it quite entertaining, as reviewers of the time did as well.  "Fast-moving, humorous and satisfactorily baffling," declared the Chicago Tribune.  Huzzahed the Birmingham News: "'Witches Moon' is a pleasant relief from the old stock stories written in the same dull way.  Giles Jackson has plotted a fascinating murder mystery and has written it in a way to hold the attention of the most jaded reader.  This is a thriller you shouldn't miss."

In Australia the Goulburn Evening Post called the novel a "breathless and exciting thriller written in an original and engaging style."  To put it in a way the author's virtuous ancestors might have appreciated: 

"Witch's Moon--It's even better than a bowl of granula!" 

Appendix: A Leffingwell-Jackson Family Album

early 1840s naive painting of the young, beardless and righteous James Caleb Jackson
showing him holding a copy of the abolitionist newspaper
The Liberty Press of Utica, New York, which he edited

James Caleb Jackson, age 39 and still beardless,
at the 1850 Fugitive Slave Convention, which had been held
to protest the recently passed Fugitive Slave Act
Among other things the Act denied accused runaways legal due process.
Over fifty fugitives attended the convention.  Note Frederick Douglass, 
two places over from James Caleb Jackson on the left

gravestone of Deacon John Jackson, a remote ancestor

James Caleb Jackson and his saintly wife Lucretia,
known as "Mother Jackson"

James and Lucretia's handsome but sickly elder son
Giles Elderkin Jackson 
who died tragically at age 28 in 1864,
a year after his father invented granula.
First cousin once removed of the author.
Today a Jackson descendant, James M. Jackson,
uses Giles Elderkin as a mystery-writing pseudonym

gravestone of Thomas Leffingwell
who around 1675 built the Leffingwell Inn in 
Norwich, Connecticut (see below)

Leffingwell House, started as an inn by Thomas Leffingwell
His grandson Christopher Leffingwell, a member of the
Sons of Liberty and owner of paper and chocolate mills,
corresponded with George Washington during the Revolution.

the author's mother a pioneering woman gynecologist
and devoted parent who took her
three teenaged boys on a tour of Europe

Leffingwell home in Aurora, New York
where the author grew up, 52 miles from Dansville
as the crow flies

Jackson Sanatorium

Dana Jackson Leffingwell, the youngest brother of the author
a Cornell graduate and a professor of zoology and ornithologist
who tragically died of pneumonia in 1930 and the age of 28

the author, third from left,
at Soames School 1910/11, either 15 or 16
this is the author's own handwriting 

the author at Harvard

Come to the Cabaret: "Yellow Iris" (1937) by Agatha Christie, on the page and on radio

Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot short story "Yellow Iris" was first published in The Strand in July 1937.  Four months later, on November 2, 1937, "The Yellow Iris" appeared as a play on British radio.  It too was written by Christie, who based the play on the prior published story.  The story was first published in book form two years later in The Regatta Mystery, a middling collection of Christie short fiction.  

"Yellow Iris" had one more incarnation, as the plot nucleus of Christie's 1945 mystery novel Sparkling Cyanide.  In the United States, this novel was published, somewhat bafflingly, under the title Remembered Death.  Three years earlier Christie had published one of her finest novels, Five Little Pigs, a title which her American publisher, Dodd, Mead, had altered to Murder in Retrospect. Both Five Little Pigs and Sparkling Cyanide concerned murders committed in the past, hence the American titles, but somehow Murder in Retrospect to me has more oomph to it than Remembered Death.  

I also have trouble fathoming what problem Dodd, Mead had with Sparkling Cyanide as a title.  Apparently Dodd, Mead had a preference for "Murder" or "Death" being in the title.  Just so their readers would know they were reading a mystery novel, don't you know.  But what else on earth would people have imagined a book with a title like Sparkling Cyanide was?

"Her name is Lola, she is a showgirl." "Yellow Iris" in The Strand 
see Adrian Harrington, Ltd.

Anyway, I'll talk more about Sparkling Cyanide in a later post; here I want to discuss is the short story and its radio adaptation.  "Yellow Iris," a tale in my edition of 21 pages (probably about 5000 words), just doesn't amount to much, in my opinion.  In it Poirot, sitting at home alone at night admiring his electric radiator--such symmetry it has--gets a phone call imploring him to investigate a matter of life or death at the nightclub Jardin des Cynges.  He's to look for the table with the yellow irises.  

Poirot looks on at the table with the yellow irises
David Suchet in the television adaptation of "Yellow Iris"

When Poirot arrives there he learns that the table belongs to Barton Russell ("an American--immensely rich").  At the table is an amiable young man he already knows, Anthony Chappell.  There's also Barton Russell himself; Stephen Carter, the rising politician; Lola Valdez, a, but of course, exotic dancer of Latin extraction who says words like eet and ees, just so you don't forget it (eet ees eemposseeble to forget it); and Pauline Wetherby, a lovely young lady and Russell's sister-in-law.  

Poirot learns from Barton Russell that four years ago at a New York nightclub Iris Russell, Barton Russell's wife and Pauline's sister, died after imbibing cyanided wine, with the remains of the poison packet in her handbag.  The verdict was suicide, but Barton Russell is restaging that fatal night tonight with the very same people at the table (except Poirot). How he thinks this will accomplish anything he doesn't really explain.

Barton Russell gets up to talk to the dance band, allowing Stephen Carter to observe, "Extraordinary business...the man's mad," and Lola to affirm, with her stereotypical Latin exoticism, "He ees crazee, yes."  Then Barton returns and the cabaret starts. 

Out comes a "coal black girl with rolling eyeballs and white glistening teeth" to sing a song in a "deep golden negro voice" full of "thick cloying emotion"--it's the same song that was sung on the night of Iris' death!  Christie, to be sure, was hardly the only white crime writer of the time to describe a black person this way (coal black, rolling eyeballs, white glistening teeth)--heck, Patricia Moyes was still doing it in the 1970s--but, still, ugh.

illustration from an American newspaper version

Does the affair have a similarly deadly climax as the one four yours ago in New York?  Well, if you don't know, you'll have to read the story, won't you?  

But I can tell you that along the way that Argentinian--no, wait, Peruvian--spitfire Lola cries out, "That ees a pack of lies....I spit upon you," before lapsing emotionally into Spanish imprecations.  Another character threatens, "You'll hang for this, you dirty dog," while Poirot gets called "You interfering little Belgian jackanapes."  Vintage chauvinism and derisive British lingo!  

Poirot only speculates on a motive for the criminal, which is not quite satisfying.  It's worth noting that Christie had recently completed her novel Death on the Nile--there's a title her American publishers liked--which was published on November 1, a day before the performance of the radio play "The Yellow Iris."  You can see some similarities.  The not particularly impressive murder gimmick in the tale Christie later would use--and happily much embellish--in Sparkling Cyanide.  

There really wasn't much here, seemingly, for a radio play, but a radio play it became.  There was an added gimmick, however.  Since the story took place at a nightclub and singing and music were integral to the tale, the radio adaptation was able to take advantage of this by including singing and music in the play.  It was called a "rather unusual linking of drama and light entertainment" and it lasted for an hour.  

Some reviewers complained that it felt like a ten-minute drama sketch extended to sixty minutes with musical acts.  The musical entertainment included singer Inga Andersen, known during World War Two as the "Blackout Girl" for her brave performances under dangerous wartime conditions, and the musical comedy trio The Three Admirals.  The script has been published and is available today, but I assume neither of the two live performances on radio has survived.  Pity, that!

This idea of a radio mystery with music was not a new one.  The BBC had actually done a musical seven-part mystery serial two years previously, Sydney Horler's secret service thriller The Mystery of the Seven Cafes, which was later published as a Tiger Standish spy thriller. 

Above: The Three Admirals perform in 1937.

Many years later in 1993 "Yellow Iris" was adapted in a one-hour episode of the Poirot television series, starring inimitable David Suchet as Poirot.  The teleplay extended this flimsy bit of fiction by having an extended flashback scene set in Buenos Aires, Argentina during a coup.  Now there's something new!  

Poirot is present in both the Buenos Aires and London sections.  There's a performance of the story's torch song, "I've Forgotten You," for which Christie had provided lyrics in the original story.  I actually recollect the episode as being pretty good.  Below is "I've Forgotten You" as performed in the television episode.  

More soon on how "Yellow Iris" became the vastly improved novel Sparkling Cyanide.