Telephone Line: Twenty Plus Two (1961), by Frank Gruber and its 1961 film adaptation

Frank Gruber was a successful and above all else extremely prolific pulps writer of the Thirties who like Cornell Woolrich and other pulps writers transitioned into publishing crime novels in the 1940s.  He produced several series, the most significant of which was the fourteen-book series about loveable scam artists and incidental murder solvers Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg.  Twelve of the Fletcher and Cragg books appeared over the Forties, followed by a couple of more, one in 1954 and another a decade later in 1964.  There were two other series as well, one with Otis Beagle and Joe Peel, and the other with Simon Lash and Eddie Slocum, both numbering three books apiece.  

All of these books are light and and slick and they tend rather to resemble each other, but Gruber also published some non-series mysteries which are more original.  One of these was the noirish crime novel The Lock and the Key (1948), filmed as The Man in the Vault in 1956, which is being republished this year by Stark House, with an introduction by me.  Another was Twenty Plus Two (1961), filmed the same year it was published under the same title.  

In the early 1940s Gruber moved out to Los Angeles with his wife and son Robert to work in the film industry.  Among other things, he wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Eric Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios, co-wrote with Steve Fisher the script for Johnny Angel, and worked on scripts for films in the Sherlock Holmes and Bulldog Drummond series.  In 1960 he wrote Twenty Plus Two with a film adaptation expressly in mine.  The novel was published in March 1961 and the film opened seven months later in October.  It must have gone into production about the time the novel was published. 

the Bantam pb ed

Gruber not only wrote the film's screenplay, but he produced the film as well.  It was directed by Joseph Newman, whose greatest accomplishment to my mind was directing the 1965 adaptation of Ethel Lina White's shuddery (shuttery?) short story "An Unlocked Window" on the television series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. (It's the one about the nurse and the serial killer.)  Newman also directed the series' earlier adaptation of Margaret Millar's Beast in View.  But let's leave off the film for a bit and get back to the novel.  

The novel, which is set in 1960, is about the the investigation by 41-year-old WWII veteran Tom Alder, who is not a PI exactly but rather a professional finder of missing heirs, into the murder of Julia Joliet, a dowdy, middle-aged fan mail secretary to film stars, including 34-year-old WWII hero and screen heartthrob Leroy Dane.  

Tom thinks Joliet's death may have had something to do with the famous unsolved Doris Delaney kidnapping case--fifteen-year-old heiress Doris disappeared in New York in 1938 while cutting school to go to a malt shop--and he is soon looking into that affair, which is much more promising.  Doris' grief-stricken father is now dead, but her mother, a recluse, is still around, still very rich and utterly convinced that her daughter, who would be 37 now, is very much alive.  

Who killed dreamy war vet film star
Leroy Dane's fan mail secretary?
(actor Guy Madison, 1922-1996)

Tom spends the novel flying back and forth across the United States, with stops in New York, Chicago, and, of all places, Bismarck, North Dakota, mostly spending his time making long distance phone calls to get people to dig up information for him.  The phone bills must have been horrendous!

Along the way he's pursued across the country by his sexy twice-married, twice-divorced, gold-digging, long-ago fiancée Linda Foster, who heartlessly Dear John'ed him way back in '42 when he was fighting in the Pacific.  Now Linda, it seems, brazenly wants him back.  

Linda's modern menage includes her pet stockbroker fiance, Harris Toomey, and her filthy rich friends Walter and Nikki Collinson.  Before he leaves LA Tom spends the night with amorous Linda.  On his flight to New York the next day, however, Tom encounters beautiful Nikki, who like Linda is a few years younger than he, and becomes rather smitten with her.  

Nikki alights in Chicago, but Tom finds plenty to do when he gets to NYC.  There's a drunken newspaper reporter who covered the Delaney case to be located, for example, not to mention a call to be made upon reclusive Mrs. Delaney.  Then there's the big fat man named Jacques Pleshette who has his own case for Alder--he wants him to find his long lost brother Auguste--and just won't let him alone.  

Late in the novel Gruber manages a moving wartime flashback to Honolulu and an exciting, violent climax somewhere in the sticks in North Dakota. You might even be reminded of the great Nineties crime film Fargo. No wood chippers are involved though!

Fully a dozen years ago at this blog in happier days I reviewed a non-series Gruber novel which I hardly remember now but I quite evidently enjoyed; and I similarly enjoyed Gruber's Twenty Plus Two.  It has a complex plot (people's ages matter), some interesting characters and a good resolution.  I believe it will be the next Gruber reprinted by Stark House.

It's interesting to compare the film with the book in this case, because rarely does a crime writer have his fingerprints all over the film adaptation like Gruber did.  The film is not terrible, but on the whole I have sadly to conclude that Gruber somewhat mucked up his own adaptation.  

Of course the production values of the film were low--at one point on a supposed small plane flight you can see an insect crawling in front of the front window of the "plane"--and it looks like an episode in a TV crime series, but that does not in itself make for a bad film.  The biggest problems stem from the casting and the changes which it prompted in the time frame of the book.  Gruber just blew it here.

David Janssen and Dina Merrill chat with fifty-six-year-old Frank Gruber on the set of
Twenty Plus Two.  Oddly Merrill looked younger here than she did in the film, as did Janssen.
Both he and Gruber, who definitely looked his age and died nine years later at 65, have cigarettes.
A hard drinker as well as a smoker, Janssen died of a heart attack at the age of 48 in 1980.

Thirty-year-old David Janssen of TV series The Fugitive fame plays Tom Alder and gives a creditable "tough" detective performance of the sort we would have seen in Forties hard-boiled detective films.  He's actually over a decade younger than his book character but arguably could have passed for closer to forty.  However the script chooses to make him a veteran of the Korean War, rather than World War Two, and moved the Doris Delaney case up a full decade to 1948.  Gruber, in short, makes a hash of his own novel's crucial timeline.  I can't go into full detail, but it's a definite plotting problem.

Janssen's female co-stars Jeanne Crain and Dina Merrill were both older than he, respectively 35 and 37.  This is actually around the age of their characters in the book, but the discrepancy with Janssen's age, particularly in  Merrill's case, is noticeable.  The script would have us believe that Dina Merrill is fully a decade younger, younger than Janssen, and it's just not plausible--even less so when she appears in a flashback scene in Korea, where she's supposed to be around twenty.  There is no conceivable way that Merrill could be a near teenager.

Aside from her age, the somewhat matronly Merrill just doesn't have the chops for this complex character, or the raw sex appeal.  Crane on the other hand is a better fit as the alluring yet perpetually artificial Linda.

David Janssen and Jeanne Crane 

David Jansen and Dina Merrill
looking like matronly Donna Reed of The Donna Reed Show (or maybe even her mother)

The worst (indeed incomprehensible) case of miscasting, however, belongs to Brad Dexter as Leroy Dane.  There is no way this beefy, 43-year-old westerns actor is credible for a minute as a teenybopper film idol. (Think someone like pretty boy Guy Madison.)  There's an unintentionally hilarious scene where Dexter as Dane is pursued by a pack of smitten young girls at a hotel--I can't imagine what Gruber was thinking, particularly as he created the book character.  

"And I'm telling you, bud, them teenyboppers love me!"

William Demarest and Agnes Morehead are in the film too, but both of them are only in one scene apiece (as the alcoholic reporter and Mrs. Delaney respectively). The novel ends appropriately with Mrs. Delaney being crucially referenced, but the film ends frivolously instead with a throwaway bit of humor concerning Jacques Pleshette.  

About frere Jacques, he's a great character in the novel, though Gruber obviously cribbed him from Caspar Gutman in The Maltese Falcon.  (There are elements of Mask of Dimitrios too.)  In the film actor Jacques Aubuchon, in decided contrast with Brad Dexter, is technically right for the part (though too young by two decades), but I was aching to see Sidney Greenstreet, sadly dead and gone for seven years when the film was made.  When you read the novel you will none other than him.  What zest he would have given to this role!  Aubuchon I found a little too understated.

One piece of casting that Gruber got right was his own twenty-year-old son, Robert, or Bobby as he was familiarly known, in the twelfth-billed position as "bellboy."  Perhaps unsurprisingly given his father's connections Bobby was an aspiring actor, but in IMDB he has only has this role and "sergeant" in a 1975 episode of M*A*S*H to his credit.  He also published a single known mystery short story, quite credible, which I expect to see reprinted with Twenty Plus Two.  He died unmarried in Los Angeles in 1982 at the age of 41.  There's a tragic story there, I suspect.  Was Bobby Gruber an early casualty of the AIDS plague?

The studio desperately tries to sex up the film and make sense of its title.
If there are twenty clues in this film, I missed them and the "beautiful victims"
both make it out of the film alive.  The stilettoed blonde dish apparently is
supposed to be Dina Merrill, who never exhibits a-tenth of that raw sex appeal.

The most egregious part about Gruber monkeying with his own timeline in the film adaptation of his novel is that the title, which was kept, now makes absolutely no sense!  It's been not 22 years since the Doris Delaney kidnapping, but 12.  Did no one involved in this film ever point that out to Gruber?  I guess Ten Plus Two didn't sound as good, though Ed McBain two years later would publish the crime novel Ten Plus One.  

Gruber evidently adhered to the pulp fiction ethos "Don't ask questions, just get it down!"  A little more care in casting would have made a better film, however.  It also must be admitted that watching a guy make a series of phone calls from hotel rooms is not necessarily thrilling viewing.  Some extra effort might have turned a fine little crime novel into a truly effective, cinematic film.  For example, would it not have been more interesting to open the film with the Doris Delaney disappearance, then flash forward to the murder of Julia Joliet?  

My advice on this one: read the novel when it's reprinted, don't see the film first.  Currently, although the novel was reprinted in paperback and published in the US and UK, it's extremely rare; but that problem should soon be rectified.

Red Flag! Miss Brown of X.Y.O. (1927), by E. Phillips Oppenheim

"[W]e shall hear the Red Flag sung in Westminster Abbey within the next twelve months."

--Miss Brown of X. Y. O. (1927), by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Then raise the scarlet standard high

Beneath its shade we live and die.

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,

We'll keep the red flag flying here!

"The Red Flag" (1889) worldwide socialist hymn, sung to the tune of "O Tannenbaum"

Thriller writer E. Phillips Oppenheim is strikingly forgotten today, given that he was perhaps the single most popular English crime writer during the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction (essentially the decades of the Twenties and Thirties of the Twentieth Century).  Nope, it wasn't actually Agatha Christie.  

During the Depression-wracked years from 1930 to 1937, Oppenheim in modern value earned in America some twelve million dollars, two-thirds of this amount from American magazine serializations and a third from royalties on his fiction from his American publisher.  Royalties from his English publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, and from publishers in other countries accounted for about another million, comparative peanuts compared with the golden American fleece.  America made Oppenheim a multimillionaire who owned a country mansion in Norfolk and villas on the Isle of Guernsey and the Cote d'Azur.  

Serializations of Oppenheim crime fiction in the American slicks Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post earned Oppy, as he was nicknamed, as much as $400,0000 a pop.  His 1927 novel The Glenlitten Murder sold nearly forty thousand copies in hardcover in the US and was serialized in the Chicago Tribune, netting him around $420,000.  Honestly when it came to the big green, the slicks, as they were called after their paper they were printed on, crushed the pulps.

Between 1887 and 1943 Oppy published 115 novels and forty collections of short fiction, making one of the age's most prolific, as well as profitable, authors.  Yet today if he is remembered at all it tends to be for a single pioneering espionage novel, The Great Impersonation (1920), his most popular work, which sold a million hardcover copies alone through his American publisher, Little, Brown.  The novel was reprinted by the British Library over a decade ago, but if you look at it's Amazon sales ranking, it's around 5.6 million.  His novel The Ghosts of Society, which I introduced for Stark House, does better in its Kindle edition, having made it up to a rank of nearly three million.  We have another one coming out, a collection of the novella For the Queen and the novelette Blackman's Wood and some additional short stories: will it do better?  Check it out.  

It would be pretty to think so, anyway.  I feel Oppenheim is much underrated today.  (How could he not be?)  So, how came about this state of affairs?  I detect partly the misguided hand of the late academic scholar Leroy Lad Panek, who was openly contemptuous of Oppenheim, in rather a smug academic way, in his 1981 study of espionage fiction, The Special Branch.  

At the moment I don't know where my copy of Panek's book is, but I recall he writes about what a terrible writer Oppenheim is, which I think is flat wrong.  Panek was similarly contemptuous of most  Golden Age detective fiction writers in his egregiously misguided book Watteau's Shepherds (1979), one of the worse pieces of analysis ever done, in my opinion, of the Golden Age of detective fiction (see my explanation in my book Masters of the Humdrum Mystery).  

These early works of Panek's are typical of the rotten Seventies criticism that it took crime fiction decades to recover from.  (He wrote some good stuff later on his career.)  Today we have rescued a great many unjustly dismissed and egregiously neglected Golden Age detective fiction writers--but what about the thriller merchants like Oppenheim?

E. Phillips Oppenheim
Prince of Storytellers
1866-1946

Oppenheim was not a bad a writer.  Read The Great Impersonation and you will find it's a fine, if extremely improbable, story with considerable narrative drive and suspense.   And there are other books in his canon that are well worth reading.  To me, indeed, Oppenheim seems more relevant today than he has been since the Thirties.

Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who also wrote about Gilded depression-era life on the French Riviera, Oppenheim in his crime fiction was one of the great chroniclers of life among the opulent supposed masters of an increasingly chaotic universe, the proud people who deigned to think that they could run the explosive world until it all completely blew up in their faces (sometimes literally) when Nazi Germany and the Marxist USSR invaded Poland in 1939.  

Like Scott Fitzgerald, Oppenheim was fascinated by the lifestyles of the rich and privileged and he wrote about them in book after book.  Today when I look around at the world (and particularly the United States), with it rising authoritarian, nationalistic, fascistic movements and cliques of contemptible kleptocrats and oligarchs, I feel like we could be back in the world of ninety years ago.  The only thing we are missing, MAGA hysteria notwithstanding, are the Communists.  

American first ed. with cover by
Bip Pares

The Communists--Russians no less--are decidedly present in what was celebrated as Oppenheim's 100th published book of fiction, Miss Brown of X. Y. O., in 1927.  The previous year The General Strike had convulsed the UK for nine days in May as a broad swath of British laborers attempted to succor striking mine workers.  The strike failed, but fears of militant, Marxist-influenced labor action remained.  

Agatha Christie--in many ways a complacent bourgeois despite what revisionists, including myself, have told you--had actually anticipated by four years the General Strike, which she most sinisterly appraised, in her thriller The Secret Adversary; and the possibility of a similarly General Strike looms large in Oppenheim's 1927 novel.

Relations between the UK and the USSR steadily worsened after the publication in the Daily Mail in October 1924, a few days before the general election, of the Zinoviev Letter, which purportedly was a missive from Grigory Zinoviev, Russian head of the Communist International (Comintern), which promoted the cause of world communism, to the British Communist Party of Great Britain, in which Zinoviev ordered the CPGB to engage in sedition against the British government.  (It is now believed to have been forged by so-called "White Russian" counter-revolutionaries, generally much beloved in Golden Age thrillers.) 

slightly different ill. on the 
Hodder & Stoughton first ed.

Britain had only recognized the USSR nine months earlier in February.  In the October 1924 election the Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin decisively defeated Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party, in part it was believed because of the Zinoviev Letter.  Russian machinations were feared during the General Strike two years later; and in May 1927, a year after the General Strike, relations between the two countries were severed after British police under orders of the government raided the London offices of the All-Russian Co-operative Society in search of evidence of espionage activity.  

Evidently they didn't really find anything new, though the British government pretended that it did.  Relations between the two countries weren't restored until Labour got back in power two years later.  

This short history gives a notion of the poor state of affairs between the capitalist UK and communist USSR during the Twenties.  The British Communist Party also had a tough time of it.  The Labour Party expelled CP members and banned them from running for parliament under their banner.  During the General Strike, Labour disbanded constituencies it deemed too sympathetic to the CP.  Much of the CPGB leadership was convicted of seditious conspiracy and jailed on account of the Party's loyalty to the Comintern.  

So Oppenheim's Miss Brown of X.Y.O. is highly topical if nothing else.  Where Christie's novel The Secret Adversary is patently absurd--the Communists are not really ultimately behind the labour troubles, you see, because there's a single man, one of those criminal masterminds no less, behind the Communists (Golden Age British thrillers very much adhered to the Great Bad Man Theory of History--social upheaval couldn't simply be because there were genuinely grave social problems in the world, see Elon Musk on George Soros)--Oppenheim's novel actually has a more realistic background, even if the actual events in the novel aren't always logical.  

In her thriller Christie openly embraced sheer daft nuttery, where Oppenheim in his offers us a realistic background which sometimes is at war with the thrills.  Miss Brown we are told "had visions...of being abducted, of being tied hands and feet to her chair whilst bearded Russians applied inhuman tortures to induce her to part with what she remembered of the contents of her precious notebook," but she soon laughs this off as a "ridiculous" flight of fancy.  And in fact nothing like this ever comes close to happening, though it actually might have made sense for the Russians to try this tactic and it certainly would have been more thrilling.  (There is, however, a terrorist bombing in London which probably kills a score or more of people--the bad guys like to do things the hard way, it seems.)  

Let me finally go into it all.

Stranded on a doorstep in an enveloping London fog with her trusty typewriter case, secretary Edith Brown find herself called into the house to type notes for a dying British intelligence agent from X.Y.O., victim of an affray with one of those nasty Russian operatives.  (He potted the bloody Commie, however.)  Soon Miss Brown finds herself pursued by wicked agents of international Bolshevism, who are desperate to get their hands on those notes, which are sure to discredit the British Communist Party.  

You have to suspend a lot of disbelief here because it's hard to understand why the good guys simply can't manage to get the notes to Downing Street or Buckingham Palace or Scotland Yard or what have you.  But if you just go with it, the story is pretty entertaining.  Edith Brown has been denigrated--by academics again--as virtuously dull, which honestly she is, but her heroism is undeniable.  We are told that Edith like Agatha Christie thriller heroines "had suffered all her life from an untapped spirit of romance."  

Even her best friend Frances Austin calls Edith a prig, however.  Among other things she won't entertain a man in her bedsit and dislikes the notions of "spinsters" going on the prowl for cocktails and men.  At 26 she herself has never kissed a man on the lips.  Honestly I would have thought all that untapped romance in Edith would have caused her to explode by now.  Edith seems to have presaged filmdom's Doris Day as a perpetual virgin.  

In contrast with Christie's Tuppence in Secret Adversary, say, Edith is dull, there's no denying it, but there are compensations.  Best friend Frances is far more interesting, as is often the way in melodramas with grimly good girl protagonists.  The heroine is imagined perfection, as the moralists would have it, while the friend is lefty free to be more like a real person, more like the actual readers of the book, one presumes.  Frances, who runs a chicken farm in the country with another "girl," is always visiting Edith in London to get a taste of cocktails and and men.  Frances has even kissed men on the lips!

That Miss Brown has never kissed a
man on the lips is a little harder to believe
of this recent cheapo edition of the novel

She tells Edith despondently:

I'm nearly thirty years old [27], and half the good times I might have had in life I haven't had because there have been things connected with them which one shouldn't do, or isn't supposed to do.  I'm fed up with it, Edith.  You come and look after my chickens for a time and see how you'd feel.

When Communistic MP Noel Frankland, a coarse man of rough working class origins, starts making up to Frances in a bid to make her his mistress--he freely tells her he's unhappily married--pious Edith observes that the MP isn't  a"nice man," to which Frances tells chiding Edith exasperatedly:  

Nice?  Of course he isn't nice....I don't think that any men are nice nowadays.  He's coarse and he's domineering and he's almost humorously egotistical, but he has power, Edith, and a quaint impressive kind of virility.  He makes me realise all the time he's a man.  Some of them don't.  

Isn't this the age-old story of Caesar and Cleopatra or Hitler and Eva Braun?  Or Trump and Melania?  Or Putin and the former Russian ballerina mistress he collected and stashed in Switzerland with his bastards?  Or Elon Musk and his myriad MAGA influencer baby mamas?  Somethings never change.  

Frances allows that her morals, or scruples as she calls them, have decidedly lapsed with the passing of time and opportunities: "I honestly believe that they only scruples I have left are scruples of taste."  She's held off sleeping with Noel, in other words, not because it's "wrong," but because he has manners that repel her.  There you have the ethos of a lot of Golden Age detective fiction, like that of Ngaio Marsh, for example.  Women may have lost their morals, by and large (men never really had them); but the "good" ones still have their good taste to fall back on.  

This side plot is interesting because we have a woman character, someone presented as sympathetic and essentially good at heart, deliberately contemplating becoming the mistress of an utterly odious man (and a Communist to boot).  Will she or won't she?  "Men are really all pretty well alike," she pronounces jadedly, "only the Frankland type are too clumsy to conceal what they want."  

It turns out that Oppenheim himself was, like Noel, a great ladies' man, though you wouldn't have known it to look at him; and I think his worldly sophistication finds its way into his portrayal of the Frances-Noel relationship.  Oppy's long-suffering wife, whom he seems genuinely to have loved after his fashion (their marriage lasted over half a century), readily put up with her wayward spouse's seemingly endless trysts with women aboard his yacht off the Riviera.  

Fortunately for Frances though there's a Russian knight in white armor--one of those White Russians if you get me--who is pursuing her as well.  But, drat the luck, he's a poor waiter with parents and a sister to support, despite being, don't you know, an exiled prince.  If some authors loved a lord, Oppenheim had a mad pash for princes (and princesses of course).  You can always expect one or more to pop up in his books.  No mere baronets bludgeoned in the library for our Oppy!

This gets at a point about Oppenheim's crime writing that helps explain its onetime wide popularity, I think.  It somewhat "transcended the genre," in the sense that a lot of it is essentially romantic melodrama, albeit spiced with crime.  Oppenheim clearly was very popular with women readers, who made or broke the lucrative American slicks.  

Politically Oppenheim charts something of a middle course in the novel.  Even most of the British Communists seem not to be all bad fellows at heart; it's the internationalists and the Russian schemers who are the really bad aggs for the most part.  Oppenheim even portrays most Labour pols and Socialists sympathetically, which is more than we usually got from British crime writers of the period.  He even suggests that capitalists need to make compromises with workers, who have legitimate grievances. For someone who has the reputation of having been blinded and bedazed by the bejeweled rich in his writing, this was a more progressive pose than I expected.  Oppy seems to have been a sight less reactionary than our MAGAs of today.  Though, like Trump, he really hated the income tax!  It's why he left England for the Roviere--an ill-fated decision as things turned out.  More on that to come.

End of an Era: Peter Lovesey (1936-2025)

Peter Lovesey in the 1970s, when he began
publishing crime fiction

This is a hard piece for me to write, not because I think Peter Lovesey isn't manifestly deserving of tribute, but because a part of me doesn't want to acknowledge that Peter, a truly wonderful man, isn't with us in this world anymore.  

Peter Lovesey died on April 10 at the age of 88 from pancreatic cancer, having published what he announced would be his final Peter Diamond detective novel in November of last year.  He promised to keep writing short stories and he did finish several of them I believe.  

I hadn't personally exchanged emails with Peter in several years and I did wonder if there were health issues involved or whether he had just decided to retire to a great extent as he neared the age of ninety.  PD James published her final Adam Dalgliesh novel at age 88, but ended up following it up with her Jane Austen murder pastiche Death Comes to Pemberley three years later at age 91 (reviewed here recently), and she lived to the age of 94.  

I had noticed, however, that Peter didn't seem to be posting on Facebook for several months last year in the spring and summer, but then around the fall he was at it again like usual.  Four months ago he even gave one of wonderful interviews with The Poisoned Pen Bookstore.  He looked older and frailer but he still had his wonderful plummy voice and he made incisive, sparkling conversation.  

I had posted a piece on his final short story collection, the wittily-titled Reader, I Buried Them (2022) on June 6, 2024.  Lo and behold Peter commented on the piece (the only person to do so) four months later on October 5.  It was typical Peter, kind and generous: 

Thanks, Curtis, I came late to this.  I'm in awe of all the excellent research that went into it and I thank you for your warm remarks.  

This was the last time we ever "spoke," though he liked one of my FB posts just six weeks before he died.  (I had posted pics of our local old used bookstore which had some Loveseys on the shelves and linked his name).  I feel like I should have done more, but there are always tasks to do and since my Dad's death in late 23 I've found it harder to keep up the blog along with all the other things I try to do in mystery publishing.  At least I did get this one post down and Peter saw it.  Over the years I reviewed Waxwork and Swing, Swing Together and The False Inspector Dew, I know.  (Peter also commented on SST piece.)  I actually read a couple of his other books of short stories and and his first two Bertie novels (reread in one case) and I wish I had done some more blog pieces.  I meant to....

I felt like there might be something wrong, but I didn't know what exactly and no one told me.  I lost Peter's email address in my move, but I could have tracked it down again.  I always hated to presume on him, which is silly, because he really was about the kindest and most generous man in the world.  There are plenty of prominent people all full of themselves who will never miss a chance to talk down to you if they can, but Peter was not that sort of person at all.

It was Doug Greene (another kind man) who introduced me to Peter when Peter was preparing one of his famous talks, this time on the history of Detection Club.  (This was before Martin's book.)  At that time, around 2010 or 11 I suppose, I had published the most substantive thing ever written on the DC in the late fanzine CADS.  (It was later revised for Crimereads.)  Peter repeatedly told me how impressed he was with the piece and all the original research I had put into it.  He mentioned it again 2018, where he happened to be the featured speaker at the Edgar Awards in New York, where I had been nominated for the mystery criticism Edgar.  

It was so exciting to meet Peter there.  I introduced myself and we had a great little talk, until I got more or less shooed off by the woman who was going to introduce him because my questions to Peter were starting to poach on her introductory comments territory.  I didn't talk to him again at the Edgars and the last time I saw him there he was sitting with Otto Penzler, who at the time had no idea who I was and certainly no interest in finding out.  (Below: Peter charms the 2018 Edgars.)  

But after the Edgars I did a nice piece on his Cribb novel Swing, Swing Together, about which Peter commented.  He obviously was pleased with it and impressed with the thought that went into it, which certainly bolstered my morale as a researcher and writer of these pieces.  We occasionally mutually Facebook posted and he commiserated when my father died.  He didn't have to do that, he was just a very kind man, one of the last, it sometimes feels, of the real English gentlemen.  

Now he's gone, and with him it feels like the Silver Age of Detective Fiction is now officially over.  For me personally the big early milestones in this century, in rapid succession, were the deaths of Reginald Hill and HRF Keating and Margaret Yorke (2012), Robert Barnard (2013), PD James (2014) and Ruth Rendell (2015).  Then Catherine Aird died late last year and now Peter Lovesey.  These were all people whom I began reading regularly in the 1990s.

Peter, Hill and Barnard were the youngest of the group, all having been born in 1936 (what a year), but for all of them the Second World War was vividly impressed in their minds.  Sadly I never got to communicate with the others, excepting a brief exchange with Harry Keating (I'll always remember he said I needed a more vivid title for my book Masters of the Humdrum Mystery, like Hurrah for the Humdrums!); so Peter will always be special in my mind.  

Happily we have Simon Brett, who published his first mystery a half-century ago, still with us, and he's even under eighty still.  But Brett is really more of a boomer; unlike the others he has no memory of the war--he was born shortly after it ended--or of life before it.  Peter was more of my parents' generation; he was about six years younger than my Dad and five years younger than my Mom, who also died from cancer at 88 while in terrific possession of all of her faculties still.  

I was always a bit shy and intimidated around Peter, even though he could not have been more easeful. I didn't even ask him to take a pic with me back in 2018.  I was always very conscious of his significance in the field: he was one of the major figures of the Silver Age of Detective Fiction.  (By my estimation, around 1945 to the 1980s.)  Peter was first published at the comparatively young age of 33 in 1970, back when Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner were still alive and writing, with the much-praised Wobble to Death, one of the best of the Victorian period mysteries, which were then not nearly as common as they would become.  You could say, alliteratively, that Peter was a pioneer of the period mystery.  His Sergeant Cribb series ran for eight books over the Seventies, ending with Waxwork (1978).  Cribb appeared over the years in some short stories too.  

Peter in the 2010s

During the Eighties he dabbled in non-series mysteries, including another much-celebrated title, The False Inspector Dew (1982), as well as Keystone (1983), Rough Cider (1986), Bertie and the Tinman (1987) and On the Edge (1989).  In the 1990s his single Bertie mystery became the first in a droll trilogy consisting of it, Bertie and the Seven Bodies (1990) and Bertie and the Crime of Passion (1993), but Bertie (none other than Albert, Prince of Wales) soon became overshadowed by Peter's police procedural-ish Peter Diamond series, which ran over three decades, from 1991 to 2024, encompassing twenty-two novels.  At 55 Peter had reinvented himself as a modern English proceduralist, one of the best.  

Peter also was one of his generation's greatest masters of the short form, writing over 100 short stories, most of which were published in five collections between 1995 and 2008. 

Peter always respected the puzzle in his mysteries and he greatly admired the Golden Age generation of crime writers.  One of the favorites in the Peter Diamond series is Bloodhounds (1996), a locked room mystery which Peter was inspired to write after reading Doug Greene's biography of Golden Age locked room master John Dickson Carr.  Peter really linked the past which he partially personally recalled with the present.  

Peter's death will always be linked in my own mind with the deaths of my own parents.  A fine generation is passing from the scene, leaving us in what feels a much more tawdry and degraded age in all manner of ways.  Peter Lovesey was one of our last true gentlemen.  I am so sorry he is gone, but I am glad I got to know him.

Plain Jane: Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), by PD James

"But this light-heartedness was not to last."

--Death Comes to Pemberley 

In the final chapter of Pride and Prejudice (1813) author Jane Austen takes time to tell us, like a tantalizing gypsy reader of tea leaves, something of the futures of her novel's many characters.  The neurotic--as we might say now--mother of Elizabeth Bennet (now Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy) "still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly," which surely comes to us as no great surprise about this exasperating lady.  In accord with Mrs. Bennet, most of the characters seem to go on much as before, like Lizzy's would-be profound but in reality entirely commonplace and dull sister Mary, now "obliged to mix more with the world but [moralizing] over every morning visit."  

Fittingly the ones for whom things definitely get worse are that distressing married couple George and Lydia Wickham.  George, a charming rogue who briefly enchanted even sensible Lizzy Bennett herself, and flighty Lydia, Lizzy's youngest sister, clearly were not souls destined for settled lives, whether spent together or apart.  "They were always moving from place to place in quest of a cheap situation, and always spending more than they ought," Austen tells us chidingly.  "His affection for her soon sank into indifference; her's lasted a little longer...."

Naturally Austen's extremely devoted fans--the Janeites as they became known--wanted to know yet more, Pride and Prejudice being Austen's most beloved novel; and Austen continuations since have abounded, including in the mystery field.  Jane Austen herself never wrote a murder mystery, of course.  She died sadly prematurely at the age of forty-one in 1817, when Edgar Allan Poe was but an eight-year-old lad--though she did mock Gothic mysteries in her amusing posthumously published novel Northanger Abbey, which she had actually completed amidst the Gothic novel craze back in 1803, when it seemed as if every other English novel was set in a crumbling European castle inhabited by a beautiful, imperiled ingenue and her scheming guardian or wicked uncle.  

The author of Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Emma and Mansfield Park probably would have deemed Poe's ghastly ghouls and ghosties a pack of fanciful nonsense.  I can't imagine she would have admired Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  A nice cozy manners mystery, however, might just have done for a nice read by the fireside....

Despite not having written an actual detective novel, Austen became a major influence on Golden Age detective fiction, when the English Crime Queens--most prominently Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh--began publishing what became known as manners mysteries, detective tales clearly written in the style of Austen's witty Regency Era novels of manners.  Like Austen, these Crime Queens boldly placed love interest at the center of their books, having their debonair gentleman detectives over the course of their chronicled investigations fall in love with and marry brilliant bluestocking ladies.  Mystery fans ate up every dainty murderous morsel, especially women.  

One of these contemporary women fans was PD James, born in 1920 and arguably the modern crime writer most influenced by the Golden Age Crime Queens.  The late author, who died a little over a decade ago at the venerable age of ninety-four, was also a fervent admirer of Miss Austen, though she made her own name as a novelist with her rather grim Adam Dalgliesh police series, which ran for nearly a half-century, from 1962 until 2008.  

James nearly died from heart failure in 2007 and might never have completed The Private Patient, what proved her final Adam Dalgliesh novel.  But she did live to complete it and in 2009, with publicity for the book over, she was looking ahead, as successful novelists will do, to her next novel, "increasingly aware," as she put it, "that neither years nor creative energy last forever."  She decided with what might be her last book (and it was) to be "self-indulgent" and "combine my two lifelong enthusiasms, namely for writing detective fiction and for the novels of Jane Austen," into a single mystery novel set in the world of Jane Austen.  This novel, published in 2011, she called Death Comes to Pemberley (Pemberley being Mr. Darcy's great country estate).    

Chatsworth House, though to have been the inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice
just ignore the line of horseless carriages

James completed the novel at the age of ninety, an impressive achievement. A realist, she herself felt her age keenly, worrying that reviews of the novel might run along the lines of this is an extraordinary book for a nonagenarian, but it's not vintage PD James.  (She seemed not to allow the possibility that critics might not think it was very good for a nonagenarian either.)  

James needn't have worried about the critics, however; by 2011 she, like Jane Austen, actress Judi Dench and the Queen of England, was a veritable institution and certainly no one in the press was going to accuse their reigning  Mistress of Murder of possessing no crown and wearing no clothes.  Pemberley netted the usual praise, rest assured.  Having finally read the novel now myself, however, I have to say I pretty much concur with James' feared imaginary reviewers: I think it's a remarkable novel for a nonagenarian, but it's not vintage James.  

Actually I think the book is better James than Jane, but that is the problem with the novel: it is fundamentally at odds with itself.  James obviously greatly admired Austen, but she herself is a much heavier, gloomier writer than Austen, who is beloved for her wry humor, sprightliness and brightness.  James, it's apparent to me, had a fine sense of humor, but she rarely gave it much play in her novels.  Even in James' Pemberley, wit is only in limited evidence; and once the dead body rolls into the tale, out goes humor for the most part.  

in some (blood) spots James' novel 
owes more to Edgar Allan Poe
than it does to Jane Austen

James herself was aware of the problem, writing amusingly in her author's note: "I owe an apology to the shade of Jane Austen for involving her beloved Elizabeth in the trauma of a murder investigation....No doubt she would have replied to my apology by saying that, had she wished to dwell on such odious subjects, she would have written the story itself, and done it better."  This disarming nature of this candid apologia is somewhat lessened by the fact that it is so clearly true.  Austen and the word "trauma" do not belong in the same sentence, it seems to me.  

On page 54, several pages before Lizzy's sister Lydia Wickham comes shrieking of murder to the very  doors of Pemberley, PD James has Elizabeth morosely thinking, as the wind shrieks too in the trembling trees (our old friend, the pathetic fallacy): 

outside there is another world which wealth and education and privilege can keep from us, a world in which men are as violent and destructive as in the animal world.  Perhaps even the most fortunate of us will not be able to ignore it and keep it at bay forever.

This is the world of the contemporary French Revolution or Edgar Allan Poe ("The Masque of the Red Death") or James' own crime novels, but is it the world of Jane Austen?  I suppose in Austenland implicitly there is always a fear of "marrying poor" and sliding down the social scale into outright privation, but do you ever see it so gloomily expressed?  This is a James sentiment, not an Austen one, or so it strikes me.  

On Goodreads Pemberley received many poor reviews from Austen fans--Janessaries shall we call them--and I can see why.  James had too pronounced an authorial personality and writing style to be a really successful pastichist, which requires an author to subordinate herself to the subject of the pastiche.  If you can't do that don't do it would be my advice.

Where Pemberley succeeds best is as a PD James mystery.  Some critics of the novel have dismissed it as a mystery as well as an Austen pastiche, but I actually thought the mystery plot was pretty good.  Though one point as I far as I can recall is not clued at all--and some inkling should have been given--the construction of the plot is rather admirable, I think.  I particularly like the mystification around the death instrument.  

The problem, however, is that the pace lags.  There's the night of the murder and a brief investigation, followed by mostly tedious recapitulations at an inquest and a trial.  Then there's a letter of confession, followed by a coda of sixty-five pages!  Critics called this a more streamlined James novel, but by my count it's still around 100,000 words.  James hadn't really written a genuinely streamlined mystery novel in over four decades, if that word carries any actual meaning at all to critics.  

Still, I'm glad James lived to write Pemberley.  Like the curate's egg, it's genuinely good in spots and the basic mystery plot would have made a first-rate crime short story.  Now pray allow me to go, like James, into more detail.

*******

Death Comes to Pemberley, like other later James novels, is divided into books, plus a prologue and epilogue.  The prologue, in which James updates us on just what the P&P gang has been up to these last few years, is the most Janeian portion of the book.   As James explains in an afterword, Austen wrote the original draft of the novel in 1796-97 and revised it fifteen years later in 1811-12.  James sets her own novel in 1803, six years after the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy.  

My favorite part of the prologue is when James explains how envious neighbors from Meryton, the market town near the Bennetts home in P&P, deemed that "Miss Elizabeth's triumph was on much too grand a scale," so they conjured in their minds a sinister alternative history, wherein "Miss Lizzy," like a classic scheming adventuress, "had been determined to capture Mr. Darcy from the moment of their first meeting."  James then goes through all the events of the P&P to show how Elizabeth might deliberately have plotted step-by-step to achieve this mercenary objective.  It's all tongue-in-cheek, rest assured, but I can see it appealing to James' skeptical view of human nature.  Austen herself took a sardonic view of the foibles of man and woman kind, but James did her several times better (or worse) in this ill regard.

Oh! Charlotte, you schemer
Charlotte and Mr. Collins in the 2005
big screen version of P&P

Later on James even suggests, seriously this time, that Elizabeth's best youthful friend Charlotte Lucas, who married that sublimely odious vicar, Mr. Collins, deliberately attempted to sabotage Lizzy's marriage to Mr. Darcy by tipping the news of their infatuation to his formidable aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  This seems to me too dark a view of Charlotte and Lizzy's relationship (I always put the blame on spiteful Miss Bingley), as does James' pronouncement that Elizabeth's sister Lydia always "disliked" Lizzy.  Really?  I don't sense that all.  Did butterfly Lydia ever trouble herself seriously to dislike anyone?

Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, James always seems to be looking for fiendish mysteries.  Of course James' own tragic life--both her mother and husband were institutionalized, the latter for most of their two-decade married life, and he ultimately committed suicide--understandably may have soured her view of human nature.  James emphasizes that Lizzy never would have married Darcy had he not been a rich man.  

Certainly we don't see much interaction between the Darcys in Pemberley and what there is of it is not very romantic.  In truth the Darcys come off rather as a dull old married couple.  Particularly disappointing is Elizabeth, who really is never given much of interest actually to do in the novel.  Her only noteworthy scene, as far as the mystery plot goes, is a charity visit she makes upon the denizens of the woodlands cottage in the company of her sister Jane Bingley.  

To be sure, women then were excluded from such unpleasant aspects of the real world as murder investigations, but I have a notion that, had Jane Austen actually written a detective novel, she would have found some way of effectively feminizing it.  Perhaps she would have invented the cozy mystery!  

An old married couple: The Darcys in the 2013 film version of Death Comes to Pemberley

Darcy's younger sister, Georgiana, provides what there is of love interest--both Darcy's cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and a character invented by PD James, a brilliant, handsome lawyer and baronet named Henry Aveling, are courting her--but none of this is really compelling either.  

The plot picks up when the Wickhams arrive on the scene--you can always count on the Wickhams for mayhem!--but the problem there is we don't get to see much at all of them.  They rarely even speak in the novel, even though it's Wickham who is arrested and charged when a murdered body is discovered in the woodland on the grounds of Pemberley.  

It's James' own characters whom the author endows with more life, but because these characters have to share the stage with the pale Austen people, they never get the attention which they merit.  It's the dark and mysterious woodland, though it be on the hallowed grounds of Pemberley, which really belongs in the heart of Jamesland.  We learn that Darcy's eccentric great-grandfather built a cottage there, where he lived as a recluse, ultimately shooting himself!  This seems not at all like Jane Austen, but it is very James.  Indeed, it is very similar to the dark Victorian backstory of the folly in The Black Tower (1975), which I reviewed here on my blog thirteen years ago.  

Living at this very cottage in 1803 is the family of the superannuated Pemberley coachman, now an assiduous polisher of the family silver, Thomas Bidwell: his wife, daughter Louisa, dying son Will and grandson Georgie, by his other daughter Sarah.  There's also, if we believe in the supernatural, a ghost of a woman periodically wandering the woods, whose appearance portends--What else?--death.

All this is interesting, but it sounds nothing like Austen.  Louisa Bidwell in particular sounds like a nod to PD James herself, an intellectually precocious girl in whom the scholarly local minister, Percy Oliphant, has taken a charitable interest, lending her books and including her with a few boys in his small private Latin class.  

Before PD James there 
was ME Braddon

This sinister setting, with its forbidding woods, phantom lady and violent suicide, sounds rather more like one of Austen's mocked Gothic novels, or, as it develops, a Victorian sensation novel by Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.  I suspect James could have written quite a good Victorian detective novel, something rather better than this neither fish nor fowl affair she gave us in Pemberley.  

The official investigators as well are a promising cast of characters, but they never get to do much. To be sure, Darcy's fellow local magistrate, the officious Sir Selwyn Hardcastle, who once insisted on hanging a man from the Pemberley estate for poaching a deer, is set up by page 100 to serve as a great nemesis for the master of Pemberley, as he assuredly would have been in one of John Dickson Carr's historical mysteries. 

Of his grave suspicion of Wickham in the crime, Sir Selwyn menacingly informs Darcy: "I am a simple man, Darcy.  When a man confesses, one who is not under duress, I tend to believe him."  Oh, what Carr would have done with this sinister man!  Yet this never really goes much of anywhere at all, despite an effective vignette when Darcy visits Sir Selwyn's country mansion.  There is even a butler named Buckle.  

The Darcys needed to get out of their own house more in this novel.  Much of the book is a country house mystery without any mystery, with even a sideboard breakfast spread of domed dishes right out of a Golden Age detective story: "eggs, home-cured bacon, sausages and kidneys."  Then we have the trial sequences which get so repetitive and boring, then the confession and a long explanation after that.  As a whole the narrative too often is inert.  

I can understand why James did it this way though.  Despite her protestations, she loved classic country house mysteries and additionally way back in 1971 she co-wrote The Maul and the Pear Tree, a fine study of a true crime, the Ratcliffe Highway serial murders, which took place in 1811, just eight years after the events detailed in Pemberley (see my 2012 review of the book here).  But all the legal stuff fit better into a study of an actual criminal case.  

Clunkingly anachronistically, James has "radical" Henry Alveston make a speech on the need for appeals courts, concluding presciently: "I can see no reason against such a change, and we are hopeful that it may come before the end of this century."  (Indeed it was 1876.)  With unintentional sad irony near the end of the novel she also has a character predict that the United States will become "a country as powerful, if not more powerful, than [the United Kingdom], and one which will continue to set an example of freedom and liberty to the whole of the world."  Well, at least until 2025, when it became an utter shame and disgrace to the world.

James was a very formal writer by nature and in her writing and her characters' speech she was never able to capture the real inflections of modern-day speech in the 21st century, when she published no fewer than three contemporary Adam Dalgliesh detective novels.  That formality, however, helps her mimic Austen, though she mostly lacks Austen's light touch.  Yet there also are times when her characters' speech sounds too like the later 20th century to me, with such phrases as these: "age difference"; "I was a disaster"; "made a move"; "clear and concise"; "the main facts"; "point out"; "take charge"; "blurted out the news"; "inappropriate"; "got it right"; "make a move"; "out of date"; "rent-free."  

I may be errantly nitpicking here, however.  I just know that it's not James but author Stephanie Barron, who transformed Jane Austen herself her series detective in a fifteen-novel series running from 1996 through 2023, who makes me feel like I am actually in Jane Austen's world.  Naturally British television has left Barron's fine books untouched, while rushing out and filming an adaptation of Pemberley in 2013, a year before James' death.  Jane Austen + PD James: sure winner, right?   

endearing young charmer: the talented Mr. Wickham

The film version has as the Darcys Matthew Rhys and Anna Maxwell Martin, good actors both but to my eye miscast here, especially AMM, who was too old for Elizabeth and rather looked it.  Rhys on the other hand strikes me as a bit too glowering and formidable, even for Darcy.  One reviewer noted amusingly that in handsome, charmingly dimpled Matthew Goode, however, filmmakers had finally cast a sufficiently attractive Wickham.  I can only assume his part was greatly expanded from that in the book, because in the book he hardly does anything except protest his innocence and make a boring explanatory speech near the end. 

But then I can't think of a single character from P&P to whom James really does justice.  Colonel Fitzwilliam plays a large part in the events in Pemberley, but he doesn't resemble the character from Austen's novel to my mind.  Mr. Bennett makes a forgettable cameo appearance (in the Pemberley library naturally), while Mrs. Bennett, Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh merely send letters.  To be sure Lady Catherine's short epistle is amusing. She divulges to the Darcys her certainty that had she been a man she would have made a most estimable attorney.  But all this good character material is essentially wasted for the most part.  

Had I written this novel, which I freely admit I would have had neither the wit nor ability to accomplish,  I would have set it in Longbourne and Meryton and brought in all of Elizabeth's vivid relations.  I think that is what Austen fans would have wanted and then we could have had a true village mystery--perhaps even with a nosy old village biddy who solves the case and turns out to be Miss Marple's great-great grandmother.  

HUGE SPOILER to PEMBERLEY

I also would have had a twist ending, where, after the confession, which proves to be false, Wickham admits to really being the murderer after all, then toddles nonchalantly off to America, leading us to fear that during the trip poor dim Lydia may very well get pushed into the pond, dropped into the drink.  Personally I think it would have been entirely in character for Wickham, who has all the making of a great criminal sociopath; but James in her novels generally could not bring herself actually to allow her murderers to get away with their murders entirely scot-free. 

END SPOILER

This final James novel has a very moral ending, which I suppose both our dear Aunt Janes--Marple and Austen--actually would have approved of.  James even gives us a character I don't recall from Austen: a genuinely good and admirable clergyman!  But then PD James herself remained a pious Anglican churchwoman to the end.  

Black bird scheming in the dead of night: 95 Years with The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett

"What's this bird, this falcon, that everybody's all steamed up about?"

"You're a fine lot of lollipops!"

--PI Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, published 95 years ago this month, is such a landmark archetype of detective fiction that it feels kind of hard to say anything original about it at this point.  If you had to compile a list of the ten most important detective novels it would have to be on there, along with what?  The Moonstone? The Mystery of Orcival?  The Hound of the Baskervilles?  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd?  Those few titles come immediately to mind.  I suppose some people would include Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, but I've always felt that one was actually somewhat dreadful, the wonderful fractured stained-glass similes notwithstanding.  The Long Goodbye, now...

From the previous year, 1929, American reviewers had loved Hammett's Continental Op crime novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (the latter, to be sure, to a lesser extent) and they were primed to embrace Hammett's new tough detective, Sam Spade.  In 1930 they simply went bonkers over The Maltese Falcon.  

Everyone wants the bird....

Author and El Paso Times book review editor Eugene Cunningham raved: "I shall be surprised if it doesn't find a niche among the Best Detective Stories of All Time."  Popular newspaper columnist and satirical wit Franklin P. Adams, a member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, pronounced The Maltese Falcon "the only detective tale that I have been able to read through since Sherlock Holmes."  

It was the realism of the book that appealed most strongly to American reviewers: the realism of the cops, the crooks and most of all the private detective. They felt like they had read an account of something that really might have happened on the streets of San Francisco, where the novel is set.  The precious falcon statuette which nominally drives the plot--the dingus as Sam calls it--is something out of an Edgar Wallace thriller, sure, but the desperate, dangerous characters hiding it and hunting for it make the story feel real.  The vitality of Hammett's writing makes these people live (until they die).

"Until the coming of Mr. Dashiell Hammett in Red Harvest and now in The Maltese Falcon," observed Donald Douglas in the New Republic

the memorable detectives were gentlemen.  The ever-delightful M. Lecoq and his copy, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, are fair gods against the gnomes.  Their only worth successor, Father Brown, is a priest.  Scratch every other detective and you'll find an M. Lecoq.  Now comes Mr. Hammett's tough guy in Red Harvest and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and you find the Pinkerton Operative as a scoundrel without pity or remorse, taking his whiffs of drink and his casual amours between catching crooks, treating the police with a cynical contempt, always getting his crook by foul and fearless means, above the law like a satyr--and Mr. Hammett describing his deeds in a glistening and fascinating prose as "American" as [Ring] Lardner's, and every bit as original in musical rhythm and bawdy humor.  

There is nothing like these books in the whole range of detective fiction.  The plots don't matter so much.  The art does; and there is an absolute distinction of real art.  It is (in its small way) like Wagner writing about the gnomes in "Rheingold."  The gnomes have an eloquence of speech and a fascinating mystery of disclosure.  Don't get me wrong, bo.  It's not the tawdry gum-shoeing of the ten-cent magazine.  It is the genuine presence of the myth.  The events of The Maltese Falcon may have happened that way in real life.  No one save Mr. Hammett could have woven them to such a silver-steeley mesh.  

Alberich in Wagner's Das Rheingold

Reviewers disagreed over whether the nominal hero of the novel, Sam Spade, could even be seen as a hero at all.  Barend Beek at the Book Nook in the Miami News observed that after finishing The Maltese Falcon "one still wonders whether the hero is a hero or a deep-dyed villain."  In England in the Daily Herald reviewer Maurice Fagenck expressed no doubt that the ending of the novel would leave readers "better disposed to the murderers than towards the gloating detective."  

Reviewers in England generally seemed less enamored with the novel than besotted Americans.  I think the public school honor code ethos still held greater sway among the Brits, at least the elite tastemakers in the papers and journals.  

Sam's motivations were a mystery to a lot of people because of the way Hammett weaves his silver-steely mesh, his exterior third person narrative capturing people's words and actions but not their thoughts.  So in judging Sam we can only judge him by what he does and says.  And for most of the characters in this book their words aren't worth shit, to be blunt, and their actions are elliptical, if not downright shameful.  

The plot that so many found startlingly original at the time seems fantastically familiar a century later.  So imitated was Hammett that the plot must have seemed cliched even a decade later.  The whole thing opens at the detective offices of Sam and his partner Miles Archer.  Their secretary Effie Perine ushers in to see them a luscious young redhead, wonderfully named Miss Wonderly.  The lady explains that she wants someone to shadow a certain unsavory character named Floyd Thursby, who has run off to San Francisco with her younger sister Corinne, only seventeen, five years younger than she.  Archer, obviously very smitten with Miss Wonderly (as is Sam but he keeps a better grip on himself), volunteers for the job.  

That's the end of chapter one; chapter two opens with Sam learning from the cops that Archer has been found shot dead in the night on the job; soon afterward he learns that Thursby has been shot dead as well.  Sam himself is suspected by the cops in their murders.  Worse yet, he also finds that Miss Wonderly has been lying to him (which he already suspected) and that her name is not even Wonderley but, supposedly, Brigid O'Shaughnessy.  She's a crook of some sort, and there are other crooks in the game as well.  

What is the game?  Well, whatever it is, it involves a statuette of a black bird known as the maltese falcon.  A certain dingus as Sam Spade colloquially calls it--a gizmo or a thingummybob, say.  

Alfred Hitchcock would have called it a macguffin--the mystery object that propels the story's plot, even if we never actually see it. The thing everyone is after.  Hammett certainly didn't invent this sort of plot--you can look back to Conan Doyle's "The Six Napoleons," for example--but he certainly put a new, modern gloss on it.

Maltese Falcon is such an epochal work of mystery fiction that most of us can never capture the excitement of the novelty which 1930 readers felt when first perusing it.  But we can feel excitement at seeing so many genre tropes really come together and into scintillating life for the first time.  

And, here, I guess, I'm going to get into some major Maltese Falcon SPOILERS, so if you actually haven't read it yet or seen the '41 film and you keep on reading, I WARNED you.  

Humphrey Bogart playing Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941)
It's the iconic hard-boiled detective on film, although Bogart looking nothing
like Same Spade as described in the novel  ("pleasantly like a blond satan")

First we see here the client who lies to the detective.  And, man, does Brigid lie!  Practically every word out of this woman's mouth is a lie, including "and" and "the."  She is, for all practical purposes, a malignant sociopath, the mother of all femmes fatales.  The story is largely the story of a man, Sam, overcoming his poisonous attraction to this fatal woman.  Brigid killed one man outright and is directly responsible for two other men getting killed.  And then she expects Sam to play the sap for her!  Sensibly Sam declines.  

Hammett establishes the whole PI ethos here with the line "I won't play the sap for you"--no man is going to let himself be taken advantage of by a woman--and also his honor system: "When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it."  Brigid killed Archer--whom Sam didn't even like and in fact was cuckolding by having an affair with his wife--and now she has to take the rap for it.

That's it, there you have every hard-boiled detective novel for years to come.  Spillane may have made his detective an outright psychotic, which Spade emphatically is not, but he's simply imitating Hammett. It was Ross Macdonald who finally brought something new to PI detective fiction, by bringing psychology and sensitivity into it--taking the egg out of the boiling water a couple of minutes earlier, as it were, where Spillane left it in so long the yolk hardened into an unpalatable slab of sulphurous rock.  

Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon 

Hammett also introduced decadent queer villains into the hard-boiled detective story, in the form of that emphatically gay Levantine, Joel Cairo, with his chypre-scented handkerchiefs, not to mention notorious gunsel Wilmer Cook and the falsely avuncular fat man, Caspar Gutman.  

I don't know why people assume Gutman necessarily is gay--he has a daughter, Rhea, and unctuously refers to Wilmer as being like a son to him.  However, Joel Cairo undeniably is flaming.  He's your classic crime fiction queen, elegantly nasty and frequently bitchy.  It's not long before he and Brigid are literally scratching at each other like cats and slanging like a pair of dolled-up Dynasty divas.  

Bridgid resents it when Joel sneers to her that long-lashed pretty boy killer Wilmer was "the one you couldn't make" in Constantinople.  (The city's name was changed to Istanbul the year Falcon was published.)  It's Joel who cooingly caresses Wilmer when he is dealt a great blow late in the novel.  It's obviously they who have been intimate, not Wilmer and Gutman.  It's hard, actually, to imagine anyone having sex with Gutman, certainly in the present day of the novel.  Did anyone else see him, by the by, as inspiration for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe?  Actor Sydney Greenstreet, who memorably incarnated Gutman on film, also played Nero Wolfe on radio, I recall.  

Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.),
Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet),
and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), 
all perfectly cast

I always read that Hammett in referring to Wilmer slipped in the word "gunsel," meaning catamite, tricking publishers into thinking the word meant gunman.  But Cairo gets called a fairy and a pansy and there's not any doubt what those words meant in 1930!  So just why would gunsel have been such a tough sell?  Hammett also alludes to Wilmer, that nasty little tyke, telling Sam "Fuck you" without actually spelling the words.  Sam calls the whole queer gang "a fine lot of lollipops," which may be another example of Twenties gay slang.  

Amusingly The Film Experience website described The Maltese Falcon basically as "the story of a group of gay men that went on an antiquing trip that got out of hand."

I have to say Chandler ripped off a lot of this in the very derivative, vastly inferior novel The Big Sleep. When old Ray got mad about Ross Macdonald ripping off "his" signature Big Sleep PI patter in The Moving Target, he should have thought about how a decade earlier he had brazenly ripped off from The Maltese Falcon actual plot elements, like Wilmer, in The Big Sleep.  But then almost everyone in the field ripped off Hammett in one way or another.

END SPOILERS

What is it about this
damned black bird?

Hard-boiled crime fiction's debt to The Maltese Falcon is incalculable, like the value of the fabled bird itself.  It's fascinating to reflect how much the hard-boiled ethos owes to a man who himself was an op (however much he may have exaggerated what he did as one) and had terrible relations with women as a chronic adulterer and even a sexual assaulter.  Did it take a deeply flawed man like this to shape all the inchoate "tough" hard-boiled elements into a landmark novel, a book that forever changed the landscape of crime fiction?  

Often the central theme of The Maltese Falcon feels like "Women are the very devil."  Brigid, of course, is no picnic, shall we say, but then there's Iva too, Miles Archer's wife whom Sam is having an affair with and at this point just wants taken off his hands.  As portrayed in the novel she is a genuine pain.  

Spade is attracted to women, but also repelled by them.  The only woman in the book he actually likes is his loyal secretary Effie Perine, who is always being described as "boyish" and desexualized.  (Maybe Joel Cairo might have been attracted to her.)  

Mary Astor as Brigid and Humphrey Bogart as Sam in The Maltese Falcon
Both are too old for their parts by a decade are more, as described in the book,
yet both of them are great in the film.

"You're a damned good man, sister," Sam tells Effie, rubbing her cheek.  This, incidentally, is another one of the classic hard-boiled tropes, the loyal secretary in love with her boss whom he never actually has sex with.  Spillane ripped this element off as well, making sure for good measure to satisfy his and his readers' sadistic urges by having Hammer's secretary get stripped and tortured.  (Brigid is "only" forced to strip before Sam in Falcon.)

My friend of a quarter century now (!), the brilliant blogger Nick Fuller, hates this book and deems Sam Spade a sociopath.  All I can say is Nick should meet Mike Hammer.  Or maybe not, I really wouldn't wish that crazy, murderous bastard on anyone.  I can happily abide the company of Sam Spade, however, and I love The Maltese Falcon.