Stock-taking

Time, I felt, for The Passing Tramp to do a bit of stocktaking of recent and forthcoming work:

I have written introductions to forthcoming editions by Coachwhip Publications (about which see All Hail Max! my review of Coachwhip's Ernest Bramah Max Carrados short story collection) of three J. J. Connington (Alfred Walter Stewart) Sir Clinton Driffield detective novels: Murder in the Maze (1927), The Castleford Conundrum (1932) and The Tau Cross Mystery/In Whose Dim Shadow (1935).  These are limited to American distribution.  If sales are good more titles may be made available and the distribution widened, I hope.  These titles should be available in a few weeks.

I also have a short book on another mystery author that will appear by April, I hope.  I will have more details in a few weeks.

My recent essays "J. J. Connington on Detective Fiction: The Gould-Stewart Correspondence, September 1935-December 1936" and "T. S. Eliot: Detective Fiction Critic" appear in volumes 61 and 62 respectively of CADS (Crime and Detective Stories).  These issues can be ordered from the editor, Geoff Bradley, through his email address, Geoffcads@aol.com.

My fifty-four page CADS Supplement, Was Corinne's Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play, 1930-1953, also can be ordered through the above email address.  I believe the individual issues and the pamphlet each cost about 10-12 U.S. dollars with air mail.  Corinne is, I believe, the longest piece ever published on England's venerable Detection Club.

Finally, May 31 is the listed publication date for my book with McFarland Press, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961.  See here for my book's McFarland page.  I plan to blog a bit more on these authors as we get nearer to the actual publication date.  In addition to the material on these three authors, there is a great deal of detail on the English detective novel in general.  Nearly ten years of research and reading when into this book, so that should give you some idea!

Happy reading!  I will be back soon with Part Two in my Then and Now series: a discussion of the short stories of past master Dashiell Hammett and modern master Bill Pronzini.  After that will be the commencement of yet another series: Crippen & Landru Cavalcade, wherein I review a different book each installment  by the exquisite mystery short story publisher, Crippen & Landru.  One of the Pronzini books I write about, in fact, was published by Crippen & Landru.  The late and great Edward D. Hoch will be the first author I discuss in this series, followed by Ross Macdonald.  Finally, there will be another in-depth exploration of the life and work of a neglected Golden Age traditionalist mystery writer, another American.

Busy weeks ahead for The Passing Tramp! I hope you enjoy the stuff I bring back from my travels.

Nancy Spain and the Game of Murder

Journalist, television and radio personality and “iconic lesbian” Nancy Spain (1917-1964) was a well-known individual in fifties and early sixties Britain. (conversely she was little known in the United States and remains so today.)

Although Spain had many accomplishments, one of her most significant undertakings was a series of ten mystery novels published between 1945 and 1955, a period when the classical British detective story was being increasingly marginalized by the crime novel, which placed less emphasis (sometimes no emphasis) on fair play puzzle construction.

While Nancy Spain’s mysteries maintain a formal commitment to the puzzle structure, nevertheless the author typified the period in which she wrote in placing far greater emphasis on other elements besides ratiocination, namely humor and character.

Spain was considered for membership in the Detection Club in the early 1950s but was turned down, on the ground that her mysteries offered much more in the way of belly laughs than brain burning (for more on Nancy Spain and the Detection Club see my CADS Supplement 14, Was Corinne's Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play, 1930-1953).

Especially notable in Nancy Spain's books is the author's sly subversion of the sexual mores of the post-WW2/pre-sixties era, a time not remarkable for its embrace of alternative lifestyles (note, for example, the arrest and incarceration of the English writer Rupert Croft-Cooke--who wrote mysteries as Leo Bruce--for "homosexual offenses" in 1953-54; see my essay The Man Who Was Leo Bruce ).

As her 1997 biographer, Rose Collis, notes, Spain was a “trouser-wearing character” — a sort of “not in though not exactly explicitly out” lesbian who humorously winked at her straight audience (not all of whom got the joke) and inspired her gay and lesbian one. One sees this quality as well in her mysteries.

Nancy Spain’s best-known mystery is Poison for Teacher (Hutchinson, 1949), which was reprinted by Virago Press’ Lesbian Landmarks series in 1994. At the drolly named girls school Radcliff Hall (obviously a play on the name of author Radclyffe Hall, author of the milestone 1928 lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness), murder strikes a blackmailing, scheming teacher during the performance of a school play. Another murder of a teacher, this time a shooting, follows.

On hand, rather improbably, are Spain’s amateur (very amateur) detectives. The first of these is Natasha DuViven, former Russian ballet star and estranged wife of Johnny DuVivien, an Australian former wrestler and current English nightclub owner who was Spain’s amateur detective in her first four detective novels (Poison in Play, Death Before Wicket, Murder Bless It! and Death Goes on Skis).  The second is Miriam Birdseye, an actress Spain based on the real-life English actress Hermione Gingold (who, incidentally, was married at one time to Eric Maschwitz, who under the name Holt Marvell co-wrote crime novels with Val Gielgud, Sir John Gielgud’s brother).

Herminone Gingold (not Terence Stamp in drag),
model for Nancy Spain's humorous if improbable
actress turned detective, Miriam Bridseye

Natasha is, like her soon-to-be ex-husband Johnny, a well-conveyed character (Spain has a particularly good ear for native dialect).  Although indolent by nature, she does most of what actual detecting is done in the novel.

On the other hand, the irrepressible Miriam Birdseye (who debuted in Death Goes on Skis), though she has rather surprisingly set up a detective agency, making her technically a professional, I suppose, is in the tale solely for humor, such as that which we see in this exchange:

“And she is telling you that you are going mad, I suppose?” said Natasha.
“Yes,” said Miss Lipscoomb, and sank into a chair. She put her head in her hands. “I think it is true,” she said. “But how did you know?”
“That’s an old one,” said Miriam briskly. “I always used to tell my first husband he was going mad,” she said. “In the end he did,” she added triumphantly.

There’s also a local policeman, one Sergent Tomkins, who is an enjoyable character (in grand tradition he immediately, though unbelievably, works in tandem with Natasha and Miriam). Also assorted “queer” lady teachers (some lesbian, some not); some objectionable students; an amusing if stereotypical recurring gay male character, Roger Partick-Thistle (we learn here that he is hiding a scandal from his past that took place when he was a scout leader, something played for laughs); a male detective novelist (much inferior to the Crime Queens, we learn); and a Jewish doctor (Spain emphasizes his Jewishness, just as she emphasizes the “queerness” of the obviously gay characters).

There is humorous satire directed against girls’ schools (Spain herself went to Rodean) and sexual foibles, as well some interesting asides on detective fiction. Regrettably, the mystery is rather a mess, however. While there is fitful investigation, intricate clueing is absent; and the solution is handed to the investigators.

You may be left with questions at the end, assuming you care about the mystery. Most of Spain’s readers probably did not! (for another review see http://emilydewsnap.wordpress.com/tag/nancy-spain/)

Though Poison for Teacher is Spain’s best-known detective novel, I preferred the earlier Death Before Wicket (Hutchinson, 1946). Johnny DuVivien, Spains’ first series detective, is a good character and an energetic investigator; and though the mystery plot in no classic, to be sure, it is better managed than the one in Teacher and its resolution is more plausible.

The setting is again at a girls school, this one in Yorkshire (Johnny’s daughter from his first marriage, Pamela, is a student there); and in addition to the school satire there is convincing and amusing portraiture of the local gentry (Spain herself came from northern England, of “good stock”).

The murder victim in this tale is a fetching games mistress who before her untimely demise slept with an impressive number of men, including an odd ex-army gent with a pronounced sexual fetish for mannish women.  More alternative sexuality turns up in a brief visit to a club with a gay clientele, of your standard “flaming queen” variety (here portrayed more harshly than in the case of Roger Partick-Thistle).  While not quite as quirky as Teacher, Wicket has a more comprehensible plot, something I, for one, appreciated.

Nancy Spain had a gift for humor and character portrayal that makes her mystery novels worth reading even today, over half-a-century after the last of them was originally published. Just don’t expect anything close to Crime Queen level plotting, and you should not be disappointed.

Today Nancy Spain is best known in the mystery world for having had, despite her longtime relationship with another woman, a brief fling with Margery Allingham’s husband, Philip Youngman Carter (an affair that produced a child--see http://golden-duck.co.uk/the-adventures-of-margery-alli/ ). But her enjoyable madcap mysteries should get some attention as well.

Nancy Spain adored
Margery Allingham's detective fiction
--and also had a fling with
Allingham's husband

The Crime Novels of Nancy Spain
Poison in Play (1945)
Death Before Wicket (1946)
Murder, Bless It (1948)
Death Goes on Skies (1949)
Cinderella Goes to the Morgue (1950)
R in the Month (1950)
Not Wanted on the Voyage (1951)
Out, Damned Tot! (1952)
The Kat Strikes (1955)

What "Killed" Crispin? The Creative Life and Death of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin, Part Five

"Worth waiting for!" the publisher Gollancz assured Edmund Crispin's fans when The Glimpses of the Moon finally appeared in 1977, twenty-six years after the last Crispin detective novel, The Long Divorce (1951).

Bruce and Ann, husband and wife, 1976

Bruce Montgomery had started the novel as far back as 1965 or 1966, but had been able finally to complete it only after his marriage to his secretary Ann Clements in 1976.  Clements was able to manage her alcoholic husband, difficult as he could be at times. "In many ways," notes Montgomery's biographer, David Whittle, "Ann became Montgomery's nurse, but she was an exceptional woman."  She needed to be in dealing with Montgomery:

"In the 1970s, [Kingsley] Amis recalls  receiving telephone calls from Ann introducing Montgomery who, when prompted by Amis, would reply with no words, just vague noises.  He was probably so drunk that he could not speak.  Amis would keep on trying to get a word out of him, with little or no success.  Montgomery's sister, Shelia Rossiter, recalled visiting Ann to have coffee one morning and arriving slightly early.  Montgomery was still in his dressing gown, drunk and abusive, and demanding to know what she was doing there.  Rossiter could not tell whether this was the effect of the previous night's drinking or because he had made an early start.  From time to time Ann would pack him off to Moorhaven for another course of treatment.  Against Ann's wishes Rossiter visited him, and on one occasion found him more or less crawling up the walls.  Although he had nothing in his hand, he was flicking the ash of an imaginary cigarette and stubbing it out."

Incredibly, Montgomery's so-called "friend" Kingsley Amis (Amis comes out of the Whittle biography as a jealous backbiter in my view) declared himself baffled by what Montgomery saw in Ann, in one letter making what Whittle calls, justly, a "typically ungenerous comment."  Amis, writes Whittle, "thought that someone who had known plenty of attractive film starlets should have had higher standards":

"I say, why's he going to marry that woman with all the teeth, eh?" (this in a letter to poet Philip Larkin, another Montgomery friend).

Kingsley Amis: with friends like these....

Fortunately "the woman with all the teeth" shepherded the rapidly declining Montgomery into finally completing The Glimpses of the Moon.  Was it worth waiting a quarter century for?  Personally, I find it a weak book, a succession of sometimes forced comic vignettes strung together by a frayed murder mystery plot; yet it is nice to see Gervase Fen back in a novel again for one last time, in a bucolic setting and confronting some whimsically oddball characters and situations.

All the emphasis in Glimpses on misplaced body parts in rural surroundings suggests that Montgomery had been reacquainting himself with the works of a fellow Detection Club member he had enjoyed as a student back in the 1940s, Gladys Mitchell (then approaching eighty), particularly her joyously macabre second tale, The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (1929).  Gladys Mitchell also was a favorite, incidentally, of Philip Larkin.

The murder victim rests in pieces.

Montgomery bemoans modernization throughout the novel, condemning both the invasion of the countryside by the "South Western Electricity Board [SWEB]" (particularity as manifested in the form of a huge menacingly vibrating pylon--see the dust jacket--known locally, even to little old genteel ladies of the neighborhood, as "The Pisser") and omnipresent television jingles, which evidently have taken over the brain of the seemingly rather simple-minded local Major, who incessantly repeats them.

Something like "The Pisser"?

Whatever one thinks of The Glimpses of the Moon, Montgomery had other creative accomplishments in his generally unaccomplished later years (those past the age of forty).  He edited notable anthologies of both detective and science fiction, contributing as well significant prefaces.  Whittle's Appendix One, "Montgomery and Detective Fiction," profitably examines Montgomery's views of crime fiction.

Although in his own genre writing Montgomery's comic exuberance could overwhelm his commitment to fair play detection (who really cares about the formal puzzle plot in The Moving Toyshop?), as a critic of the genre, "Edmund Crispin" was a passionate and articulate defender of the traditional fair play form, often taking issue with his friend, the crime novelist and critic Julian Symons, who advocated the superiority of the literary "crime novel" over the puzzle-oriented "detective story."

"I'm also faintly discouraged because the 'better' reviewers over here all seem to be highly contemptuous of orthodox detective fiction nowadays," Montgomery wrote the great American crime fiction critic Anthony Boucher in 1960.  "None the less, I'm convinced that there's still a large public for that kind of thing, as opposed to sub-Chandler thrillers, realistic stodge about police routine, or spineless pseudo-profound guesses at criminal psychology; so I shall push on regardless."

Anthony Boucher

In his capacity as a Sunday Times crime fiction reviewer, "Edmund Crispin" proved particularly astute in noting the promise of modern day British Crime Queens P. D. James and Ruth Rendell.  Both women, Whittle notes, wrote him appreciative thank you letters for his critical support:

"There is no one whose encouragement and criticism has meant more to me than yours (the more so because of my great respect for you as a writer)....You have been kind to me from the beginning and it was your generous review of 'Shroud for a Nightingale' which gave me the breakthrough I needed and which seemed so long in coming" (P. D. James, 1977)

P. D. James

"[Y]our two reviews, so generous and enthusiastic, have made me really happy and give me a confidence I sometimes lack." (Ruth Rendell, 1970)

Ruth Rendell

Montgomery was generous to and supportive of other writers (he was also very supportive of Julian Symons' seminal genre study Bloody Murder, even though he disagreed with much of it), yet he bemoaned the path British mystery fiction was taking in moving away from the the detective story and toward the crime novel.  The original idea of the Detection Club, he noted in 1976, had been to get mystery writers "to stop propounding imbecile plots in appalling English" in the manner of the Edgar Wallace/Sapper school of crime fiction; now, rather mortifyingly, the body in his view had become "to all intents and purposes, a thriller-writers' Club."  Despite his concerns about the direction it was talking, however, Montgomery never resigned from the Detection Club, though he did just that--resign--when the Crime Writers' Association in 1976 awarded its coveted Gold Dagger to Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution, a book he deemed "a preposterous and inept pastiche."

Worth quitting the CWA over?

It was at a Detection Club dinner in 1977 that Montgomery's mystery writing friends saw a "clearly very ill and...much reduced figure" of a man.  "His neck was so thin that it was not touching the collar of his shirt, and his voice was so weak that only those close to him could hear what he said," writes Whittle, paraphrasing a 1992 letter form Julian Symons.  At the time, crime writer Josephine Bell (an octogenarian who had begun writing detective fiction back in the 1930s), wrote Ann Montgomery worriedly that at the dinner she had found Bruce "woefully changed."  Bell was right to worry.  Within a year Bruce Montgomery was dead (not from liver failure as many suspected, but from heart failure, the latter organ being unable to withstand the stress of needed surgery on his body).

Certainly the later years of Bruce Montgomery tell a sad tale, but they were not years entirely bereft of accomplishment.  Nor can anything detract from the glittering successes that Montgomery enjoyed in the 1940s and the 1950s with his detective novels and films scores.  Concerning the detective novel, "Edmund Crispin" wrote several delightful and enduring genre classics that will continue to be remembered in the decades to come.  As should be David Whittle's biography, a fine tribute to an accomplished and interesting man.

Dirge for a detective novelist....