The Lost Stories of Christopher St. John Sprigg and Eden Phillpotts on Detective Fiction

When people think of English women detectives from the Golden Age of detective fiction, they think first, I would imagine, of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, followed by Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver and Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley.

Christopher St. John Sprigg

Well, here's one you won't have heard of: Christopher St. John Sprigg's Mrs. Bird.

And for good reason.  As far as I know she appeared only in two unpublished short stories: "The Case of the Misjudged Husband" and "The Case of the Jesting Miser."

The original typed manuscripts of these two stories are found in Sprigg's papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Both are longish short stories of around 6000 words apiece.  While neither is a classic of the form, they have a certain appeal and certainly the detective in them, Mrs. Bird, is worth noting.

Although Miss Marple and Miss Silver often are referenced as prominent Golden Age female detectives, in fact most of the books about them were written by their creators after 1940.

Of the twelve Miss Marple novels, only one, The Murder at the Vicarage, was published before World War Two (Miss Marple also appeared in a short story collection, The Thirteen Problems, published in 1932).  Similarly, of the 32 Miss Silver novels published by Patricia Wentworth, only three appeared before 1940.

To be sure, both Christie and Wentworth were well-known mystery writers before 1940.  However, in the 1920s and 1930s Christie won her fame primarily as the creator of Hercule Poirot, while Wentworth was best-known for her numerous non-series mysteries and thrillers (her biggest pre-WW2 novel, a bestseller in the United States, was a thriller called Mr. Zero).

In the United States, the Oklahoma Choctaw mystery writer and reviewer Todd Downing reviewed both the pre-WW2 Miss Marple books and highly praised the "no end quick-witted spinster" Aunt Jane (who likely reminded him of his Iowa grandmother, Awilda Miller), but how many mystery readers in 1935, say, would have recalled either Miss Marple or Miss Silver, compared to readers in, say, 1960?  Many, many fewer, doubtlessly (it was at this time that Dorothy L. Sayers flatly declared that Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley was the greatest woman detective).

Interestingly, however, Christopher St. John Sprigg's seems to have been influenced by Christie's Miss Marple when he wrote his two Mrs. Bird short stories.

the inspiration to nosy amateur village detectives everywhere

To be sure, there are some differences between Miss Marple and Mrs. Bird, the most obvious being their dissimilar honorifics.   

Mrs. Bird, obviously, was married, though she is now a widow.  Mrs. Bird also once was employed outside the home, working as a nurse before her marriage.  And Mrs. Bird is a comparative youngster compared with Miss Marple, being only forty-five.

However, there is considerable similarity between the two women.  Like Miss Marple, Mrs. Bird lives in a village (Mirtleham in the latter's case).  Like Miss Marple, Mrs. Bird has insatiable curiosity, and makes it her mission in life to know the affairs of everyone in the village.  And like Miss Marple, Mrs. Bird is quite adept at solving murders.

Of Mrs. Bird's two cases, the purer detective story is "The Case of the Jesting Miser," which revolves around the strange doing of a village recluse.  I, however, preferred "The Case of the Misjudged Husband," the story of Mrs. Bird's confrontation with a professional ladykiller.  Both stories have some clever lines that I can't quote, for fear of violating the Ransom Center's policy.  But I thought it would worthwhile mentioning these stories, for we now have another instance of a woman detective from the 1930s.  Maybe someday they will be published, if only for historical sake.

marker for the English dead at Jarama

After his conversion to Communism, Christopher St. John Sprigg referred to his detective fiction as "trash" that diverted him from that which he now saw as his true work, heavy tomes of earnest Marxist philosophy, like Illusion and Reality and Romance and Realism.

Those of us who admire Sprigg's detective novels would have preferred a few more of them, but such was not to be, sadly.

Fired with revolutionary ardor, Sprigg joined the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and was tragically slain at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937.

The attitude that Sprigg came to have about his genre writing can be found in other writers of detective fiction (if not so extreme and negative).

Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes because he thought he was a distraction from his "serious" work (of course he relented and brought him back again).   

R. Austin Freeman thought the significance of his Dr. Thorndyke tales paled in comparison to his supposed masterpiece, Social Decay and Regeneration, a tome on eugenics.

Lord Peter Wimsey
Dumped for Dante?

Dorothy L. Sayers left Lord Peter Wimsey for her religious radio plays and her Dante translation.
In a 1949 letter she impatiently complained of "sentimental Wimsey addicts" imploring her to write another Lord Peter mystery.

Todd Downing too, I found, had ambitions to give up detective novels for mainstream fiction, even though he genuinely loved detective fiction and continued to read it long after he stopped writing it.

I discovered another expression of this attitude recently in correspondence of the English author Eden Phillpotts.

Phillpotts was tremendously prolific writer who wrote quite a few mystery novels but was most highly-regarded for his highly serious Thomas Hardy-esque mainstream regional novels set in Dartmoor.  He is best known today, within the mystery field, for urging a certain young neighbor of his, Agatha Christie, to stick with writing.

In a letter that is undated but that probably comes from the 1920s, Phillpotts writes:

"But then I write miles of tripe...'Shockers' amuse me and rest me.  They take the place of 'golf' or other distractions.  America has no use for my serious folk books....But for murder, detectives and nonsense of that sort grown-up children are always avid."

What a disappointing attitude from someone who wrote 26 crime novels between 1921 and 1944!  But not altogether surprising (perhaps Phillpotts excepted from the category of "tripe" his 1930s Avis Bryden trilogy, quite a fine piece of work, in my estimation, from a purely literary standpoint).

Tripe!  Trash!  Do many modern mystery writers have this sort of "inferiority complex" about their mystery writing today?  What do you think?

Doctored Death: Murder in Hospital (1937), by Josephine Bell

University College Hospital

I plan to do a Life of Crime for the prolific English crime writer Doris Bell Collier Ball (Josephine Bell) (1897-1987), but Friday's Forgotten Book is falling fast upon us, so I am going ahead and doing the review of Josephine Bell's first and most highly praised detective novel, Murder in Hospital.

This book was reviewed a couple years ago by Elizabeth Foxwell, but Foxwell summarizes its plot up to a major revelation made around page 150, halfway through the novel; so in deference to people with spoiler concerns I'm not linking to the review, though I will refer later to some interesting points she makes in it.

Doris Bell Collier Ball was really quite an interesting and accomplished person.  The daughter of Joseph Collier, a distinguished doctor who died at the age of fifty when she was but eight years old, Doris Collier herself attended the Godolphin School (Dorothy L. Sayers was a classmate her first year), Newnham College, Cambridge and the University College Hospital in London.

Doris Collier married a fellow doctor, Norman Dyer Ball, and the couple had four children, in addition to maintaining a joint practice in the pleasant city of Guildford, Surrey, where they had moved (they must have been lived in fairly close proximity to Freeman Wills Crofts).

Tragically, Norman Dyer Ball was killed in 1936 when a car he was driving (or he may have been the passenger) collided with a lorry.  Doris Collier Ball was left to support their children alone. Losing her husband when he was only forty must have been made even worse by the knowledge that she had lost her father when he was only fifty.  These were bad blows, but they didn't break Doris Collier Ball.

In addition to continuing to practice medicine, Ball began a life of crime writing, under the pseudonym Josephine Bell publishing Murder in Hospital a year after her husband's death, in 1937.  The book is dedicated to TO THE MEMORY OF N.D.B.  This was the beginning of a very long fiction writing career for Ball (she would publish her forty-fifth and final crime novel at the age of 85 in 1982).

Murder in Hospital is a remarkable detective novel in many ways. It's one of the best and most authentic British "workplace" mysteries of the 1930s, the most famous example of which today probably is Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise (1933).  Clearly in the novel Bell is drawing on her experiences at London's University College Hospital.

there are certain similarities
in narrative voice between
P. D. James and Josephine Bell

Murder in Hospital also is a fascinating precursor to P. D. James' great nursing school mystery, Shroud for a Nightingale (1972).  I repeatedly found myself thinking, when reading this novel, "this is like P. D. James."  To be sure, Hospital is not nearly so bleak as James' books, yet there is a sort of formal and sardonic eloquence to the narrative that definitely brings Baroness James to mind (worth noting is that P. D. James also lost her husband and she went to work in hospital administration to support her daughters).

When Nurse Greenlow is found dead, strangled, her body dumped in a laundry basket at St. Edmund's Hospital, it's hoped by everyone at the Hospital that an outsider was responsible.  Unfortunately, lovely Nurse Greenlow had rather a winning way with men, and several young members of the junior staff who became enamored of her quickly emerge as possible suspects.

However, Inspector Mitchell's investigation begins to flounder and it is left to Medical Registrar David Wintringham, with the help of several other staff members, to find the truth about the death of Nurse Greenlow.  Things are more complicated--and vastly more sinister--than they first appeared.

I would love to discuss the solution to the mystery in this novel, but of course I can't.  However, I will say that the last chapter is a tour de force of irony that I am sure admirers of P. D. James would  appreciate (there's also a section detailing a confrontation between the Matron of nurses and a Sister that in its handling of sexual neurosis and misery is strikingly redolent of James' work).

One of the most interesting things about Murder in Hospital, which I can discuss, is the setting, at fictional St. Edmund's Hospital.  One really gets a strong feeling of what life in a 1930s London teaching hospital must have been like.

The many characters in the novel are not portrayed in depth, but strong general impressions will remain with readers of the lives of senior doctors, junior doctors, nurses, porters, patients and police (Inspector Mitchell is a stout bourgeois copper in the mold of Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French; he even has, like French, an underling sergeant named Carter--was this deliberate on Bell's part?).

All told, it is quite an impressive achievement, and rather unusual in a Golden Age detective novel, I think.

University College Hospital

The social milieu is remarkably diverse for a Golden Age detective novel as well.  Since there are women and foreign-born students at the hospital, we get to see, unusually for the period, women competing in a professional capacity with men, as well as Asians and Africans as everyday people rather than the thriller villains we typically get in this period.

In her review of Murder in Hospital, Elizabeth Foxwell writes that in the book "Bell has interesting things to say about medical ethics, race relations and the position of women in medicine."  It certainly is true that the book's coverage of these matters is interesting; however, it's also bound to be controversial today and it's best, I think, for me to acknowledge this fact up front.

Josephine Bell better handles gender issues than racial ones.  Obviously she herself would have plenty experienced the former first hand, and she doesn't disguise the casual sexism of many of the men. 

Noting that St Edmund's' nurses resent "the presence of women students at the Hospital," Bell observes "their fears were unnecessary; nursing was an entirely womanly occupation, a nurse's complete submission to male medical authority both becoming and gratifying...."  Conversely a woman doctor was, "if plain,...a revolting object" to the men, "if beautiful, a source of terror to all but the most intellectual."

It's easy to imagine the sardonic observations of P. D. James here, I think, concerning the matter of male insecurity about competing in the economic arena with women.  We know James read Sayers' Gaudy Night when she was sixteen; is there any chance that around the same time she read Murder in Hospital?  It would definitely have been fitting.

dust jacket for Josephine Bell's second detective novel
note the praise for Murder in Hospital on the back panel

Bell also does a good job conveying the St. Edmund's nurses--as the Illustrated London News wrote, "the Matron is magnificent"-- and the patients.  The latter are working class Londoners, and their interactions with the Hospital staff are of great interest.  Unfortunately, Bell is less successful with the West African staff member, Livingstone.

In a sequence where the junior staff "rags" the newspaper reporters who have invaded St. Edmund's (this sequence is quite convincingly done, suggesting that Bell knew about such rags first-hand), Livingstone plays a major role, much to the delight of his colleagues, but in the celebration afterward he becomes "very drunk," sings "several native songs," draws out "a large and wicked-looking knife from his pocket" and expresses "a desire for blood" (he is, we are told, "disarmed without much difficulty and taken home to bed").

A couple white staff members casually use the n-word (or a variant) in referring to Livingstone, while the lead character, David Wintringham--he would serve as Bell's series detective in a dozen novels, from 1937 until 1958, when his creator unceremoniously dropped him--after the great rag of the journalists gives Livingstone "a friendly but sufficiently distant nod," thinking that it won't "do to let the fellow get to uppish."  Ugh.

This sort of thing doesn't stop with Livingstone.  Sir Frank Jamieson, the most eminent doctor at St. Edmund's, admired and beloved by all, thinks, as he looks over a group of students, about how much he prefers Tom Ford's "six feet of handsome brawn and his cheerful smile" to "Samuelson's shining black curls and encyclopedic replies."  The whiff of antisemitism here on Sir Frank's part is unmistakable.

Josephine Bell's third detective novel
continues to carry praise for Murder in Hospital

There also is considerable classism to be found in the staff, and it's not clear just where the author's sympathies lie.

In the novel there is recurring antagonism between the public schoolers and the lesser beings who weren't so blessed to attend such institutions. Tom Ford, who is old money and country and the star of the Hospital's rugby team and who comes off like a character out of a Bulldog Drummond novel, is particularly disliked by some students.

I couldn't really blame them personally, but I got the impression that Bell, like Ngaio Marsh in some books, was more concerned with the problem of "inverted snobbery" (i.e., lower class people prejudiced against upper class people).

Even the women get involved here, when, during, the rugby game a genuinely likeable woman doctor, Rachel Ludwick--she is one of the people who helps David in his investigation and is also one-half of an appealing little love story with another doctor--and Jill Blackthorne (David's fiancee, not so likeable, I thought) look down their noses at the date another doctor brings to a rugby match.

She's lovely, but not quite out of the same drawer as Jill and Rachel, it appears.  "Clothes just a little too smart," thinks Rachel, "and heels just a little too high"; whereas Jill bluntly pronounces: "Her figure makes me faint with envy, but her voice brings me to again."

This brings us to the whole vexed matter of the social attitudes found in some Golden Age detective novels.

Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie have been decried for instances of antisemitism in their work, and all the Crime Queens (Sayers, Christie, Marsh and Margery Allingham) have been judged guilty at various times of classism (or in plain words snobbery).

Criticisms of these writers (and also Josephine Tey and Georgette Heyer) have not prevented them from being reprinted over and over again, however (sometimes with offending comments shorn from the texts).

I think it must be recognized that Bell's portrayal of these social prejudices may well be an accurate depiction of attitudes of that time and place, making the book a fascinating social document. It would be idle to pretend that these prejudices didn't exist.

Nevertheless, to a modern audience of mystery readers, Bell's cast of amateur detectives may not be as sympathetic characters as they likely seemed to many in the 1930s.

"Sadly," writes Elizabeth Foxwell, "Murder in Hospital is out of print."  I agree this is sad, but I recognize that some of the matters discussed above might make the book unpalatable to some publishers, who like to avoid controversy (at least controversy of that sort).

Unfortunately, Murder in Hospital, along with Death on the Borough Council and From Natural Causes, is one of three pre-WW2 Josephine Bell novels that was never reprinted in the United States.  All three of these titles are very rare indeed today.  All of them, however, are interesting mysteries that have long merited reprinting.

Note: I'll have some more material up soon on Josephine Bell, Anthony Gilbert and Christopher St. John Sprigg, along with, finally, reviews of some new stuff!  TPT

A Tale of Two Citizens, Part 2: Oklahoma Crime Writers Todd Downing (1902-1974) and Jim Thompson (1906-1977)

Todd Downing, c. 1930

Last week I wrote about the Oklahoma life of noir novelist Jim Thompson, who was a near exact contemporary of Todd Downing, the Oklahoma mystery writer and book reviewer.  I've written about Todd Downing before on this blog (as you probably know!), but while working on Clues and Corpses, my book on Downing and his crime fiction and book reviews, I decided it would be interesting to explore independently the stories of these two contemporary Oklahoma crime writers, alike in some ways, but so different in others.

Physically, they were very different in height, with Jim Thompson standing high at 6'4" and Todd Downing a modest 5'6".  However, both had Native American ancestry (as was often the case in Oklahoma).

Thompson is said by his family to have been one-eighth Cherokee through his maternal grandmother, while Downing believed he was one-fourth Choctaw (though a modern family researcher says that Downing's paternal grandmother, who died when Downing's father was five, was not full-bood, but rather half-blood, Choctaw, which would make Downing, like Thompson, one-eighth Indian).  Certainly in photos of the two men Thompson's high cheekbones and Downing's dark eyes and hair carry the suggestion of indigenous ancestry.

Jim Thompson's literary reputation certainly is alive and well
Will there be any sort of Todd Downing revival?

Robert Polito, Jim Thompson's biographer, reports that though "all through his life Jim Thompson voiced pleasure in the awareness that he was one-eighth Cherokee," nevertheless "his Native American heritage never composed a conspicuous plank in his personal identity."

This is far different from Todd Downing's case. Both Todd and his father, Sam Downing, were enrolled and active members of the Choctaw Nation (Todd's mother, Maud Miller, was a native Iowan of German, English and Scotch-Irish descent).

Sam Downing all his life was involved in Choctaw social and political affairs and Todd for his part signaled his views in 1926 when he, then a student at the University of Oklahoma, published a short piece in the Oklahoma journal The American Indian called "A Choctaw's Autobiography," wherein he unambiguously signaled his ethnic identification as a Choctaw.

Todd Downing's Choctaw heritage and his interest in indigenous culture influenced him to study Mexico in college, to become an instructor in Spanish at the University of Oklahoma and to set most of his detective novels in Mexico.  His exploration of Mexican culture in his detective novels is his signature achievement in the mystery genre.

In addition to sharing a Native American heritage, both Jim Thompson and Todd Downing had scandals in their family backgrounds.

Caddo County courthouse, completed in 1906
the year Jim Thompson was born and a year before
the Thompson family fled Oklahoma

Jim Thompson's farmer grandfather, a casualty of the Panic of 1873 and the years of economic distress that followed, fled Ipava, Illinois with his family to escape possible imprisonment over his irredeemable financial obligations.  Three decades later, Thompson's father, the sheriff of Caddo County, Oklahoma, with his family in tow fled Oklahoma when he was accused of embezzlement and threatened with imprisonment.

As discussed in part one of this piece, this latter event led to a downward spiral of wandering and privation for Thompson's family and it hugely influenced Thompson's dark crime fiction (psychopathic sheriffs figure in two of his most famous novels).

In Todd Downing's case both his grandfathers committed crimes of varying sorts.  In 1866, Todd's grandfather George Thornton Downing left his Texas wife and children (after deeding over all his property to a son) and moved to Indian Territory, Choctaw Nation, where he married a Choctaw woman, Melissa Armstrong, said to have come to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears as an infant.

Before their deaths (Melissa probably in 1877, George in 1880), the couple had four children, including Todd's father, Sam.  Apparently the children of the second marriage never learned that their father was a bigamist; certainly Todd Downing and his sister Ruth never knew such was the case, for they believed that their grandfather's first wife had died before he came to Oklahoma.

Todd's other grandfather, Daniel Miller, originally had been an upstanding citizen of Albia, Iowa.  A Civil War veteran, Secretary of the Albia Lyceum, former Deputy District Court Clerk and dry goods merchant, Miller married Awilda Shields, the daughter of a respected doctor, in 1868.

Victorian commercial block in Albia, Iowa

Seven years after his marriage, Miller became cashier of the newly formed Monroe County Bank.  Miller was one of the most popular men in Albia, according to a contemporary account, until it was discovered that the bank's liabilities greatly exceeded its assets.  In 1883, Miller was convicted of embezzlement, forgery and fraud and sentenced to seven years in the Iowa state penitentiary.

After his release (with time off for good behavior), Daniel Miller and his family made their way by 1891 to Atoka, Oklahoma, where his wife Awilda had prominent cousins.  Daniel's and Awilda's daughter, Maud, married Sam Downing in 1899.

Although both Todd's grandfathers had scandalous secrets in their pasts (and one served jail time), his parents were model citizens.  Left motherless at five and fatherless at eight, Sam Downing was taken into the home of a prominent local merchant family, the Blossoms, and raised to be a devout Presbyterian and Republican.  The parents of Sam Downing's foster mother had been Quaker teachers and Sam was educated for two years at Earlham College, a prominent Quaker college in Indiana (the school began admitting non-Quakers in 1865).

Downing House, Atoka

After Sam Downing returned to Atoka he became County Clerk and later started a successful drayage business.  When the Spanish-American war broke out, he served in Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, as a Choctaw and Chickasaw interpreter in the Indian Territory Cavalry.  After his marriage to Maud Miller Sam built a two story Victorian foursquare house that still stands today.  Here, Sam and Maud Downing raised their children Todd and Ruth.

Also living with them, after her husband's death, was Awilda Miller, Todd's one surviving grandparent.  She would live in the Downing home until her death in 1939 and was a great influence over her grandchildren.  Like Sam and Maud Downing, Awilda Miller was a highly devout Presbyterian. 

As I discussed in part one, Jim Thompson hated his own pious maternal grandmother and when his family's financial circumstances forced his mother to take him and his sisters back to Nebraska to live with her parents his grandmother's presence was a torture to him, by his account.

In Todd Downing's case, however, the maternal grandmother was a warm and supportive presence, even standing behind Todd's sister Ruth when she turned down a chance of marriage and moved to New York to do graduate work at Columbia University (she became a social worker of note).

So the Thompsons were a family that led an economically volatile, peripatetic and often unhappy existence, while the Downings, despite scandals in their past, became pillars of their small Oklahoma community, Atoka, and provided a stable, happy and ordered upbringing for the Downing children.

As I also discussed in part one, Jim Thompson, despite the difficulties in his childhood, became a great reader of imaginative literature, thanks to the good offices of an uncle. Todd Downing did as well.  He read, for example, a great deal of Sir Walter Scott and H. Rider Haggard.  In the 1910s his eye was caught by the books of Arthur B. Reeve, creator of scientific detective Dr. Craig Kennedy, and Sax Rohmer, creator of the diabolical criminal mastermind Dr. Fu Manchu (Edgar Wallace would follow in the 1920s).

one of the Arthur B. Reeve books read by Todd Downing as an adolescent

Jim Thompson attended classes at the University of Nebraska but dropped out after two years, married and sought to make a living during the Depression-wracked 1930s as a freelance writer in Oklahoma City. Todd, on the other hand, got both a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Oklahoma, and he also taught there as an instructor, from 1925 to 1935 (he resigned as a teacher in the latter year, hoping to make his living solely from writing).

Jim Thompson wrote true crime articles for magazines in the 1930s before becoming, as discussed in part one, head of the Federal Writers' Project in Oklahoma between 1936 and 1940.  After he left Oklahoma and moved to San Diego, California in 1940, Thompson would publish two mainstream novels, one in 1942 and one in 1946.  He would not launch the crime fiction career that would make his name until 1949, when he was 43.

Todd Downing, on the other hand, published his first novel, a mystery called Murder on Tour, in 1933, when he was 31 (it was written, mostly in Mexico City, the previous year).  Downing would write a total of nine detective novels between 1933 and 1941, seven of them with his most important series detective, U. S. Customs Agent Hugh Rennert.

Todd Downing's first detective novel, soon to be reprinted

Like Jim Thompson, Todd Downing had aspirations to be a mainstream novelist, and he planned in 1942 to publish a historical novel about Mexico called Under the Rose, but it never appeared (in 1940 he did, however, produce a well-regarded non-fictional study of Mexico, called The Mexican Earth).

Also like Jim Thompson, Todd Downing would leave Oklahoma in the 1940s.  Thompson once disgustedly referred to Oklahoma City as "a God-forsaken place" while Downing in 1939 wrote that he had of late become "rather at odds with Atoka and all it represents."

After Downing left his native state, he worked in the advertising business in Philadelphia in the 1940s, then taught at schools in Maryland and Virginia in the 1950s.  Yet, in marked contrast to Jim Thompson, Todd Downing returned to Oklahoma in the 1950s and spent the rest of his life there.

After his father Sam died in 1954, Downing came back to Atoka to live in the old family home with his mother Maud, now an octogenarian.  He lived there for about two decades, from 1955 to his death in 1974, three years before Jim Thompson's demise.  During this time Downing  taught at Atoka High School and later Southeastern Oklahoma University, in the nascent Choctaw language program.

Todd Downing's own crime writing is much different from Thompson's noir fiction.  For one thing, it's true detective fiction, each book offering readers a puzzle to be solved.  As Downing's book reviews show, he loved the fair play detective fiction of Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, S. S. Van Dine and many others.

Moreover, Downing's detective fiction looks outward, to Mexico and its culture, which Downing believed could impart North Americans lessons of value about life (and death).  Thompson's fiction, on the other hand, looks inside himself, seemingly, to a midnight place of darkness and despair.

There is evidence that Todd Downing himself had in his life some times of darkness and despair, deeply personal unto himself (for more on this see Clues and Corpses); yet, though he believed detective fiction could have higher literary elements to it, he accepted the then prevalent view of the genre as escape literature, something to put oneself on better terms with life.

Hell on Earth

When Jim Thompson portrays a Mexican locale in his famous crime novel The Getaway (1958), it's an existential nightmare, a hell on earth.  Downing hardly had a polyannish view of the world--in fact there's a great deal of tension in, for example, his novels Vultures in the Sky (1935) and Night Over Mexico (1937) (in the one novel people are trapped and dying on a train, the other in an isolated ranch house)--but he thought knowledge of Mexican culture could help one better cope with life's myriad cruelties.

It's also interesting to note how in Thompson's novels The Killer Inside Me (1952) and Pop. 1280 (1964) Thompson portrays southern sheriffs as horrific murdering fiends (of course they're hardly alone in this respect in Thompson's novels).

Conversely, Todd Downing's Texas sheriff Peter Bounty, introduced in the Hugh Rennert mystery The Last Trumpet (1937) and the solo detective in Death Under the Moonflower (1938) and The Lazy Lawrence Murders (1941), is an admirable human being--as is Hugh Rennert himself.

Left unasked, until the very end, has been the question: Did these two men, both crime writers molded by Oklahoma in the first decades of the twentieth century, ever actually meet?

Jim Thompson's friend Louis L'Amour
like Todd Downing was a book reviewer
for Oklahoma City's major newspaper

Robert Polito has no answer, nor do I.  Todd Downing's mentor, University of Oklahoma languages professor Kenneth C. Kaufman, knew both men, or at least knew of both.  He's mentioned several times in Polito's biography of Thompson.

Todd Downing reviewed books for Oklahoma City's major newspaper, the Daily Oklahoman, as did Jim Thompson's friend from the Federal Writers' Project, future bestselling Western novelist Louis L'Amour.

The newspaper's literary page was edited by Kenneth Kaufman.  Polito refers to "the lively Sunday literary page that University of Oklahoma Professor Kenneth Kaufman edited for the Daily Oklahoman."

Yet by the time Thompson became involved with the Federal Writers' Project in 1936, Todd Downing had left the University of Oklahoma (located in Norman, which neighbors Oklahoma City, home of the University) and returned to live with his family in Atoka (he became known back in the university community as "the hermit of Boggy Creek," after Muddy Boggy Creek, which runs by Atoka).  Still, he occasionally sallied forth to participate at writers' conferences at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma state, until he stopped writing fiction and left Oklahoma in 1942.

Did Jim Thompson and Todd Downing ever meet?  This remains an unsolved mystery.  Yet whether or not the two authors actually met, they are both products of the Oklahoma of a century ago, and they both did the state proud with their fine--if very different--works of crime fiction.

A Short Life of Crime: Christopher St. John Sprigg (1907-1937)

Christopher St. John Sprigg
on the left side of the blog

Christopher St. John Sprigg (1907-1937) is one of those fascinating people who briefly entered the field of detective fiction during its Golden Age, but is better known for other things besides his mystery writing.  He published six detective novels in a flurry between 1933 and 1935.  A final tale appeared in 1937.

The first six of Sprigg's seven detective novels are delightful, whimsical tales that should find favor with fans of writers like Dorothy L. Sayers, Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake.  Dorothy L. Sayers herself praised Sprigg's mystery fiction, as did Todd Downing (you just knew Downing's name would pop up somehow, didn't you?). Sprigg was aware of Sayers' praise for one of his novels and sent her a thankful letter.

Born a Catholic, Sprigg like many in the 1930s transferred his spiritual fervor into Marxism.  He was soon scorning his detective fiction as "trash" written to make money and immersing himself in massive, serious, intellectual  tomes that attempted to interpret everything in the world through Stalinist lenses (the word bourgeois is mentioned a great deal, and naturally not in a good way).  Sprigg's volumes of Marxist thought, published under the name Christopher Caudwell, are considered significant contributions in this field.

Much of Sprigg's work, including the final, post-conversion detective novel, The Six Queer Things, was published posthumously, for Caudwell was killed in the Spanish Civil War, before his thirtieth birthday (like many idealistic leftists of the day he had gone to Spain to support the Republican side).

In contrast with his other detective novels, The Six Queer Things, an attack on Spiritualism, is quite grim in tone, with a notably nasty last line (see this interesting review of the novel at The Study Lamp).

Back in 2012 I came across two unpublished detective stories by Sprigg, as well as an unpublished mystery play.  I'll be commenting more about these works in my next forgotten book post (plus there will be reviews of The Bughouse Affair and more on Anthony Gilbert and part 2 of the Jim Thompson-Todd Downing article, also another Life in Crime--wow, I'd better get busy!).

The Detective Novels of Christopher St. John Sprigg (Christopher Caudwell)

Crime in Kensington/Pass the Body (1933)
Fatality in Fleet Street (1933) (not published in the US)
The Perfect Alibi (1934)
Death of an Airman (1934)
The Corpse with the Sunburnt Face (1935)
Death of a Queen (1935) (not published in the US)
The Six Queer Things (1937)

Downing Contest: And the Winner Is....

Agatha Christie was one of the favorites
of Todd Downing (he's not alone here!)

I know everyone has been nervously awaiting this announcement, so here goes!

It was close, but the winner of the Downing Contest is...Patrick!  A certain someone with whom you may already be familiar in the mystery blogosphere.

But it was so close that I'm going to give offer a consolation prize to the second place finisher, David, out of the same group of five books, after Patrick has picked one.

I hope both these percipient gents will find something to their liking.Thanks to those who participated!

The top six contestant guesses for the most reviewed authors by Todd Downing were:

1. John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson
2. John Rhode/Miles Burton
3. Ellery Queen/Barnaby Ross
4. Agatha Christie
5. Mignon Eberhart
6. Rufus King

Which actually wasn't all that far off from the actual top six.  Out in front among authors reviewed by Downing is:

Ellery Queen/Barnaby Ross (eight books)

followed by

Agatha Christie and Eden Phillpotts (tied at seven)

and

H. C. Bailey, John Dickson Carr and Carolyn Wells (tied at six).

The highest anyone ranked Baily was sixth, Phillpotts seventh, Wells eleventh.

So you could say Carolyn Wells was the real dark horse here.  But the truth is, Downing's reviews of Wells books are some of his best, quite wry.

like Todd Downing and Bill Pronzini
John Dickson Carr was a onetime reader of Carolyn Wells

 
Downing with considerable prescience writes about Wells's dotty crime fiction in the same splendid satirical manner as Bill Pronzini three decades later in Gun in Cheek, Pronzini's wonderful salute to "alternative" classics (if you haven't read this book and its sequel already, you really should get copies on the used book market).  Wells can become addictive, alternatively speaking, as Pronzini can tell you.

The truth is, though, that Carolyn Wells was a tremendously prolific mystery writer during the Golden Age and had quite a devoted following who took her quite seriously, including a young John Dickson Carr (he later went back and reread her in middle-age and was crashingly disappointed--you can't go home again!).

The other five authors most reviewed by Downing--Queen, Christie, Phillpotts, Bailey and Carr--Downing held in the greatest esteem.

You will find much, much more on the authors reviewed by Todd Downing in my Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing.

Reviews are a great primary source for people who want to have a better understanding of what Golden Age mystery fiction was really like (you can't simply judge it from handful of authors still widely in print today); and there are hundreds of fascinating (and fully annotated) reviews in Clues and Corpses.

Additionally, you get a good picture of the personality of Todd Downing as a man, mystery writer and mystery reader.  At his death in 1974, his library was donated to an Oklahoma university, where it is kept intact today, so I was able to even further analyze his aesthetic tastes in mystery (mystery fiction made up about 25% of his library).  The man not only wrote accomplished detective fiction himself (now reprinted by Coachwhip), he reads great quantities of it for many decades.

I hope more collections of mystery reviews will appear in future.  In particular, those by Dorothy L. Sayers and Dashiell Hammett should be available in book form.  There is so much still to be learned about the earlier decades of the ever-fascinating literary genre of crime and mystery fiction.

By the Light of the Television: Poirot Season 5 (1993)

This was the last season of filmed adaptation of Agatha Christie's Poirot short stories, pending the story cycle found in The Labors of Hercules.  As with the others, I will rate these on a one to five star (or asterisk) scale.

The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb*****

He who robs the graves of Egypt...dies!

A superlative Poirot outing: eerie, suspenseful, great on location shooting and sense of period, lots of horrid murders.  Obviously it's all a nod to the sensation that followed the discovery of Tutankhamun's fabulous tomb in 1922 (and the supposed curse that followed members of the expedition).

Here, the members of a tomb-hunting expedition are dropping like flies in the heat, dying right and left.  Is there a supernatural curse, or is some diabolical human fiend at work?  Will Poirot save the day?  But of course, mon ami! Hard to find any fault with this one.  Even Hastings gets something to do, making a solo side trip to New York (pay attention!).

The Underdog***

A somewhat flat country house murder story.  This one's not really bad; there's just nothing particularly memorable about it. Here the adapters seem to have been stymied by the source material.  While quite long, the story "The Underdog" is just not very interesting.  nor is this adaptation.

Yellow Iris*****

Another superlative episode, based on one of Christie's best short stories (she later expanded it into the novel Sparkling Cyanide).

This one shifts from Argentina to England, as murder in nearly identical circumstances strikes twice among the same circle of people (with Poirot on hand of course).  It's rather a sinister outing for the series, and more serious than was the norm back in the 1990s.

The puzzle is excellent too.  Though it uses one of Christie's classic ploys, chances are the viewer will miss it!  The ploy is impressively carried off, even though it's more challenging to do on screen than on the written page.

The Case of the Missing Will*

They say where there's a will there's a way, but here while the adapters may have found the will they couldn't find their way (sorry for the terrible puns).  They have my sympathy to some extent, however, because they were faced with having to adapt this lame tale, which is barely a sketch, and, indeed, probably the worst Poirot story Christie wrote.

They responded by completely rewriting the story (though there is still a missing will of course) Unfortunately, the story concocted for this episode, which deals with the higher education of women, feels like it came out of Dorothy L. Sayers, not Agatha Christie.  And as a fair play (or even coherent) mystery it's an absolute botch.  Call it Gauzy Night, if you will.  Agatha Christie herself never exhibited  poor plotting until near the very end of her writing career.

The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman*****

Who killed the count?

The original Christie story, about the murder of an Italian count, has a clever little puzzle, though the background, as is the case with many of the Poirot short stories, is thin. 

The adapters here did a marvelous job of fleshing out the short story.  Here we have diplomats, gangsters and blackmailers, all mixed up in an entertaining and lively way.

The adapters had the brilliant notion of giving Miss Lemon (who was not much used this season) a romance of sorts with the manservant of the dead count, a device that works splendidly.  It's not textual Christie, admittedly, but it's tremendously entertaining.

The Chocolate Box****

sweet death

A step into Poirot's past is occasioned when he accompanies Inspector Japp to Belgium, where Japp is to receive an award in honor of his distinguished police work (no kidding!).

Poirot tells the story of a murder case he was involved in long ago, when he was a young member of the Belgian police.  There's appealing pre-WW1, Continental atmosphere and nostalgia, though the murder plot is pretty simple.

Dead Man's Mirror*****

This is one Christie's best short stories (which in fact exists as both a short story and a novella).  This adaptation is a fine one, preserving the story's first-class fair play puzzle (which employs a classic motive).

Outside of a vivid fire sequence, Mirror takes place mostly in the confined setting of a country house (complete with a most proper butler), but it's one of those fantastic modern ones this series showcased so frequently and evocatively.

The murder victim is one of the series' most memorable ones, plummily played by the late Iain Cuthbertson.  A youngish Jeremy Northam is in this one too, as the nephew, but he's pretty bland, sadly.

Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan****

the pearls were just too tempting

The swan song of the short stories, this is a sprightly jewel theft case.

The original tale had a good plot, which is preserved and ably expanded in this adaptation.  It's all about the theft of a famous pearl necklace that in a publicity gimmick is being used as the key stage prop in an Edgar Wallace mystery thriller play about...the theft of a pearl necklace (cool! meta!).

A nice young couple gets the blame, but we know that can't be right--can it?

Fortunately Poirot, on a rest cure, is on hand!  As ever, he finds that crime is the best restorative.

Well, that completes my reviews of all the short story adaptations.  See these links for the others:

Season One

Season Two

Season Three

I will be back soon with my listing of the top twelve Poirot short story adaptations, according to Passing Tramps.

Books To Try For (if you can find them): A Review of Christopher Fowler's Invisible Ink (2012)

"Sadly, we live in a time where there is no patience for barmy British sleuths who uncover insanely complex murders."

                   Christopher Fowler, Invisible Ink (2012)

they faded into air....

And how sad that is, isn't it, Mr. Fowler!  If you love old books, particularly mystery novels from the 1920s through the 1960s, Christopher Fowler's Invisble Ink is a book for you.

Readers of this blog will recall how I discussed Christopher Fowler's recent piece decrying what he sees as the omnipresence of police procedural gloom in modern British crime writing.  Fowler urged that more modern crime writers look back (like he does) to the past.

Maintaining as I do a blog that is to a great extent righteously devoted to keeping alive the memory of old mysteries, I naturally was pleased to see Fowler's impassioned advocacy for yesterday's crime fiction.

Looking at Fowler's blog I found that he recently published in England a short book on past writers, Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared (2012).  It's a small book of about 200 pages that collects his Independent columns on the subject of "forgotten authors" from the last several years.  Not having read most of these columns, I was interested to see Fowler's thoughts on this subject in book form.

Christopher Fowler

There are a few oddities to Invisible Ink that should be noted, some arising out of discordance with that subtitle, some perhaps out of the fact that the columns were written for an English newspaper and may not have been updated before appearing in book form (there also is no table of contents, which is rather exasperating in a list book).

For example, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde are two of Fowler's forgotten/disappeared authors, and--Wait, what?! you might be saying right now.

Ah, but you see, what Fowler means is that certain works of theirs are forgotten, or not as well known than they should be. 

Okay, I'll accept that; yet there are some questionable statements too, like when Fowler writes that one of his "disappeared" authors, Georgette Heyer, "is not entirely out of print."

I'll say she's not!  In fact, if there's anything by Heyer that's not in print, both in the U. S. and the U. K., I'm not sure what it is (maybe those early, self-suppressed mainstream novels?). There's now also a second biography of Heyer, published less than two years ago.

Heyer "has fallen into a strange and rather airless niche market," writes Fowler, meaning the fans of Heyer's beloved Regency romances, apparently.

Well, I don't know.  As a blogger who writes about old books on a regular basis, I can tell you I would love to get the sort of blizzard of comments on my blog that you see on some of those "airless" Regency literature blogs!

this lady is actually pretty popular

One of Heyer's most admired books, The Grand Sophy, is ranked #27, 923 currently on internet bookselling giant Amazon.com.  Not bestseller status to be sure, but the tale is ranked above several million books!  In the United States, that ranking puts it ahead of, for example, reprint novels by two great Ians--Fleming and Rankin (on the other hand the Ians edge out Heyer on Amazon.co.uk).

Similarly, Fowler writes that the "first Judge Dee novel [by Robert van Gulik, disappeared author #68] has since been republished, but the rest are harder to find."

Not if you're looking on Amazon or its affiliates (this is starting to sound like an Amazon commercial, I know), they're not!

They've been available for years in attractive paperback editions by Harper Perennial and The University of Chicago Press.  And these editions are available in Britain too.

Similarly, Margery Allingham is a "disappeared" author?  Fowler admits "many readers know her name, even if they haven't read her."  "However," he argues, "very few of [those who have read her] have really got to grips with her novels."  Well, again, I don't know. It seems to me that people who have read Allingham (quite a few, actually, by the standard for long-dead Golden Age British mystery writers not named Agatha Christie) tend, like Fowler, to admire her writing rather intensely.

the old gel's still kicking

And if one thinks that "many of Allingham's books appear to have vanished" one had better look again.  The Campion books were reprinted by Felony & Mayhem a couple years ago (and they are available in the UK too--heck, even the non-fictional The Oaken Heart is available in the UK).  All "disappeared authors" should be so fortunate!  The same, by the way, can be said about Fowler's disappeared author #47, Eric Ambler.

So admittedly one certainly can't take everything in this book as gospel, but nevertheless one should give due credit to Invisible Ink for its being what it is: a commendable effort on Christopher Fowler's part to kindle--I'm not talking about Amazon this time!-- broader reader interest in the following worthies:

1. utterly vanished authors

2. kinda/sorta vanished authors

3. arguably not as well-remembered as they should be authors

4. remembered but really rather insufficiently appreciated authors

5. actually quite well-remembered authors who, nevertheless, have some particular books that are forgotten

Discussing these books, Fowler reveals a good sense of authorial worth.  Since this is a crime fiction blog, I'll confine myself (mostly) to the crime writers he includes:

#3 Margaret Millar
# 5 Horace McCoy
#6 Boileau and Narcejac
#14 Harry Hodge (launched the Notable British Trials series)
#18 Charlotte Armstrong
#21 Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon
 #22 Sarah Caudwell
#38 Margery Allingham
#40 Hugh Wheeler (Although if I read this correctly Fowler seems to think that Wheeler was solely responsible for all the crime fiction of Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge.  If Fowler thinks Hugh Wheeler is forgotten, he should consider Wheeler's longtime collaborator in many of the books written under those pseudonyms, Richard Wilson Webb--now that is forgotten, to go unmentioned in a book on forgotten authors in which your collaborative partner is included!)

the product of two minds, actually

#44 John Dickson Carr (actually the last few years more of Carr's books have made it back into print in some form, including some titles from Rue Morgue, who also reprinted Dorothy Bowers, see immediately below)
#45 Dorothy Bowers (as Fowler notes, however, Bowers' small body of work has been brought back into print by Rue Morgue, so she's not really "disappeared," is she?--So add another category: once disappeared, but recently rescued from oblivion by a valiant small press)
#47 Eric Ambler (Fowler's included with Nevil Shute, so we actually have 101 authors in this book--wait, actually there are even more if we count the actual collaborators separately)
#58 Lionel Davidson
#62 HRF Keating (Fowler singles out for praise the 1965 detective novel Is Skin Deep, Is Fatal. The late HRF Keating deserves notice, to be sure, but Fowler also mistakenly asserts that Keating "produced the definitive biography of Agatha Christie." Keating himself would have demurred at this over-generous declaration; what he did do was edit a collection of essays on Christie, back in 1977)

#67 Georgette Heyer (though the piece is devoted to her Regency romances)
#68 Robert van Gulik
#69 Gavin Lyall
#72 Marjorie Bowen (Another writer who defied boundaries, best known for her supernatural fiction today; but she also was important in the field of crime fiction.  Fowler also includes William Fryer Harvey and Shirley Jackson, two other fine genre-straddlers)
#77 Edmund Crispin (yet, again, this is another "disappeared" author who was reprinted several years ago by Felony & Mayhem)
#84 Gladys Mitchell (although as much as I like her writing, was Gladys Mitchell ever really widely judged one of the "Big Three" women mystery writers, along with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers?  Mitchell never had the mass popularity of and, to be honest, the broad critical acclaim afforded Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Ngaio Marsh)
#89 R. Austin Freeman (Hooray for this one, the father of the "Humdrums"!  Yet though Fowler writes that Freeman's books began as "homages" to Sherlock Holmes, my impression is that Freeman was trying to debunk what he saw as Holmes' bad science!  Certainly Freeman's detective Dr. Thorndyke is a much better scientist than Holmes, though the latter is a superior showman)

"certainly worth rediscovery"

#93 Edgar Wallace
#97 Michael Gilbert
#98 SS Van Dine

So, about one quarter of the entries are on crime writers and a good lot of selections they are (there are also quite a few brilliant supernatural fiction writers, such as Arthur Machen and Robert Aickman).

Interesting observations are scattered throughout this volume.

"Her novels were concise and short, very much in the style of the 1950s," writes Fowler of Margaret Millar, "but the ideas they contained were unusually complex, so that her characters took on a life of their own.  This is a hard trick to pull off; we're used to modern mysteries clocking in at over 400 pages with everything explained and examined, often to the detriment of the book."

brevity is the soul of fright?

I feel this point cannot be emphasized enough.  People forget today that waaay back in the 1970s the great Ruth Rendell, to cite another example in addition to Margaret Millar (and Charlotte Armstrong), wrote some of the best suspense novels ever (The Lake of Darkness and A Demon in My View, for example), and they are short books.

Suspense stretched out too long can snap and become tedium, I find.

However, I have to query Fowler's argument that Millar's "books fell from fashion partly because their psychology dated."  As an example of this "dated" psychology he notes that in one of Millar's novels a "gay character kills himself after the shame of exposure."

Sadly, one might question whether Millar's psychology has really completely dated in this instance (see the Tyler Clementi suicide, for example).  For my part, I find Millar's writing and grip on character is so strong that I don't see the works primarily as "period pieces," as Fowler says.

Yet in any event, let's give Fowler credit for highlighting Millar, who indeed is one of the timeless greats.  It's barmy, to use Fowler's word, that Millar is mostly out-of-print.

Similarly, I liked this point from Fowler in the entry on Eric Ambler (and Nevil Shute):

"What links them...is their ability to tell 20th century stories filled with enthralling action sequences and characters you care  about, linking events into larger political settings.  This basic storytelling skill lately seems to have become buried within vast self-important volumes, so it's a shock to note the brevity of most Shute and Ambler novels."

Hey, I said this point about brevity couldn't be emphasized enough, didn't I?  Hope I haven't gone on about it too long!

oddly, no murders

Concerning other authors in the book, I have to applaud Fowler for including another one of my favorites, Arthur Machen, about whom he writes, "Shockingly, a recent straw poll among young authors yielded just two recognitions of Machen's name in a group of twenty."

And I was delighted to see EM Delafield (disappeared author #1 no less), for her Provincial Lady Diary series of novels from the 1930s and 1940s (Invisible Ink emphatically is not just a boys' book of boys' books).

"The English sense of humor is almost impossible to explain," pronounces Fowler drolly; yet this American found these books charmingly amusing when he read them fifteen years ago (there's sharp social satire too).

Fowler writes forcefully here:

"[The publisher] Virago did [Delafield] no favors a few years ago by shoveling four volumes of the diaries into one dense, ugly paperback prefaced with a foreward explaining why we should not find the books funny.  In America, facsimiles were printed with the original drawings, and found a new audience that was prepared to appreciate [Delafields's] qualities of grace, endurance and quite optimism."

This describes this American to a T (I even bought and admired the same attractive facsimile editions that Fowler mentions).

Fowler also recommends Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven (Renault is disappeared author #46).  That's one of the titles from Todd Downing's personal library, I should note.  There definitely are interesting authors in the book as well who are not crime writers!

So, despite some quibbles, I believe Invisible Ink is a book that will repay a book lover who seeks it out.  And if you weren't a book lover, why would you be here, reading all this?

P.S. Don't forget the Downing Contest.  You have only today to enter!