Gone Grandam: Poor Harriet (1957), by Elizabeth Fenwick

In 1950, after some months spent at the Yaddo artists' and writers' colony in upstate New York, Elizabeth Fenwick (1916-1996) published a well-received mainstream novel, Afterwards.  Six years separated this novel from what appears to be her next one, a mainstream work titled Days of Plenty. The next year Fenwick published a suspense novel, Poor Harriet.  It was quite well-reviewed, and seven more suspense novels would follow from Fenwick's hand over the next eleven years.

What happened in the intervening six fallow years between Afterwards and Days of Plenty? One thing I know from correspondence of Fenwick's good friend from Yaddo, Flannery O'Connor, is that Fenwick had married by 1952. Her husband was Clark Mills McBurney (1913-1986), a modernist poet (under the name Clark Mills) and 1930s friend and mentor of the playwright Tennessee Williams.  The two young literary aspirants both had been students at Washington University in 1935-37 and during that time had outfitted the basement of Mills' parents' house as a "writing factory," in Mills' words.

Cover Girl: Flannery O'Connor
thought Elizabeth Fenwick
lucky with her book jacket art

Whatever took Fenwick away from novel writing, she was emphatically back at it by the late 1950s and 1960s. In a 1960 letter to a friend, Flannery O'Connor stated that Fenwick wrote mystery novels to "make money," alternating them with novels written "to suit herself." Actually, it appears that after 1956 Fenwick never again wrote another "straight" novel, unless she was doing so under a pseudonym; so perhaps she found that psychological crime novels suited her too and it wasn't just about the money.

Certainly Poor Harriet, Fenwick's first essay in this subgenre, suited the critics.  For example, Margaret Millar, one of the finest twentieth-century crime novelists, declared, in a penetrating and pithy sentence, that the novel had "some of the most macabre mood writing since the Gothic tale looked under the bed and found Freud."

Male critics agreed with Millar. Anthony Boucher proclaimed Poor Harriet "the work of a highly skilled novelist" and James Sandoe deemed it "an astonishing evocation."

From Georgia Flannery O'Connor joined in the chorus as well.  Writing Fenwick from her country home outside Milledgeville on August 4, 1957, a few days before the novel was officially published, O'Connor wrote praisefully (and amusingly):

Well cheers for Poor Harriet!  I enjoyed her and also my mamma enjoyed her and I must say you are lucky on your [book] jackets....I have never read anybody else's mystery stories....My mother read Poor Harriet straight through and kept saying, "Well I just don't see how she figured all this out, I just couldn't do it."

often in 1950s crime fiction publicity
suspense was emphasized
 and detection downplayed

What greatly impressed many of the critics was the novel's sensitive depiction of mental aberration, but in fact Poor Harriet offers a ratiocinated murder problem as well; so detection fans need not be disappointed, I hope.

The novel follows the dire events that occur after Marianne Hinkley, a loyal office manager for a Connecticut contracting firm, embarks on an errand in New York City on behalf of Irma, the demanding, high maintenance wife of her boss, Tom Bryce.

Irma tasks Marianne with selling the diamond bracelet that Tom recently gave her (she's had financial reverses, she says). In New York Marianne encounters an odd, old woman named Harriet, setting in motion a succession of events that culminate in violent death.

I found Poor Harriet an excellent fifties "novel of suspense," with interesting characters and a teasing plot.  Flannery O'Connor's mamma got it right.

Note: I hope to review another Fenwick novel next week, one of her early detective novels; and when I do I expect to have her photo posted here.  In the meantime, here is a photo of her at Yaddo in 1948 (Fenwick is the blonde in white on the left).

Flannery's Favorite? Flannery O'Connor and Elizabeth Fenwick

Sarah Weinman's path-breaking Library of America anthology Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s will be out later this year, and high time too (up until now female-authored crime fiction has been represented in the noir and hard-boiled focused LOA by, I believe, exactly one author, Patricia Highsmith).  Included in the two-volume set are novels by Vera Caspary, Helen Eustis, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Charlotte Armstrong, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar and Dolores Hitchens.

If there is ever an additional volume in the series, another good candidate for inclusion might be Elizabeth Fenwick (1916-1996), an author who offers an interesting example of the writing path taken by a number of mid-century American women crime writers, as the puzzle-oriented detective novel lost its predominance within crime fiction.  Here is a list of the fourteen novels Fenwick published over a quarter century period:

The Inconvenient Corpse 1943
Murder in Haste 1944
Two Names for Death 1945
The Long Wing 1947
Afterwards 1950
Days of Plenty 1956
Poor Harriet 1957
A Long Way Down 1959
A Friend of Mary Rose 1961
The Make-Believe Man 1963
The Silent Cousin 1966
The Passenger 1967
Disturbance on Berry Hill 1968
Goodbye, Aunt Elva 1968

The first three of these novels, published under the androgynous name E. P. Fenwick when the author was in her late twenties, are relatively traditional detective stories, while the next three, published, like all this author's later novels, under the more revealing name Elizabeth Fenwick, are "mainstream" novels. Finally, the last eight novels are all crime thrillers, or psychological suspense tales, for which Fenwick became best known.

Presumably Fenwick deemed the first detective novels, which were well-reviewed but never well-known, as something of an apprenticeship to her main interest, "straight" novel writing (although in the late 1950s she apparently abandoned straight novel writing for tales of psychological suspense).

In 1948, shortly after the publication of her first "serious" novel, Fenwick was accepted at Yaddo, the famous upstate New York artists' and writers' colony. There she completed her second mainstream novel, Afterwards. In a 1950 Saturday Review notice of this book Kathleen Sproul advised: "Those who are bewailing the lack of successors to our aging, and in some instances, declining novelists, would do well to contemplate Elizabeth Fenwick."

Yaddo

Two years before Fenwick came to Yaddo Truman Capote had worked there on his novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, while the same year that Fenwick was at Yaddo, Patricia Highsmith and the great American novelist and short story writer Flannery O'Connor were guests there as well (Highsmith was working on Strangers on a Train, Yaddo have decided to accept a writer working in a "lower" form of writing because she was deemed a better stylist than many "serious" writers).

Apparently Fenwick's and Highsmith's time at Yaddo did not overlap, but Fenwick's and O'Connor's did; and the two became good friends, which is more than you can say for O'Connor, who was religiously devout, and Highsmith, who was...anything but.   

"In any collection of so-called artists you will find a good percentage alcoholic in one degree or another," O'Connor wrote sardonically to a friend in a 1959 letter.  "In such a place you have to expect them all to sleep around. This is not sin but Experience, and if you do not sleep with the opposite sex, it is assumed that you sleep with your own" (see Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor).

Patricia Highsmith

For her part, Highsmith--one of those Yaddo residents drinking alcohol and sleeping around (with both sexes)--apparently did not form a great impression of O'Connor, whom she identified at the time as the "new writer Capote [a friend of Highsmith's at this time] likes very much.  Maybe another McCullers, I don't know....I expected from the name a racy colt with reddish hair, a six-gear brain [but she] personifies Iowa once removed from Georgia, which she is."

Many years later Highsmith is said to have complained that O'Connor never socialized with her boisterous crowd (O'Connor in 1959 wrote, "I went to one or two of these [Yaddo parties] but always left before they began to break things").

On coming back to Yaddo from one such party, so this story goes, Highsmith found O'Connor kneeling on a porch, raptly staring at a knot of wood and declaring that she discerned in it the face of Jesus.

"And ever since then I've not liked that woman," Highsmith is said to have told a young friend, in the story's punch line (see Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith). Whether or not this event actually took place, it certainly reeks of antipathy for O'Connor on Highsmith's part.

In Elizabeth Fenwick, however, O'Connor found a friend; and the two corresponded until O'Connor's tragically premature death in 1964.  Fenwick, nearly a decade older than O'Connor, was, like Highsmith, originally from Texas, but I have yet to see anything in her writing that identifies her as a southern regional writer (indeed, all the books I have read by her are set in Connecticut's New York City exurbs).

Flannery O'Connor

At the time of her stay at Yaddo, Fenwick was working for a Columbia University professor and residing at the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A male guest at Yaddo at this time recalled Fenwick as "a kind of sexy creature, very attractive physically."

Sally Fitzgerald, a friend of O'Connor's and editor of The Habit of Being, a collection of O'Connor's letters, recalled that "Flannery spoke of Elizabeth, whom she always referred to as 'Miss Fenwick,' often and fondly."

 In 1960 O'Connor wrote rather a paean to Fenwick, in correspondence with another friend:

She writes novels, writes one to suit herself and then one mystery novel to make money, then one to suit herself, etc.  She lives by a kind of rhythm, has nothing to say but is full of lovely feelings, giggles, is a big soft blond girl and real nice to be around except that she bats her eyelashes....She is kind of a complement to me, and we get on famously.

In another letter, one to Fenwick, O'Connor discussed Fenwick's first psychological suspense novel, the highly-praised Poor Harriet (1957).  I'll be having more to say about this novel, and O'Connor's discussion of it, for Friday.

And for more on Patricia Highsmith in the 1940s, see this Passing Tramp post from last year.

Murder Farce: The Deadly Dove (1945), by Rufus King

"I will tell you more," Joe said, "about the Dove.  He is a gentlemanly, mild-mannered old guy, and for looks you would think that a sneeze would blow him away. With him you never have to worry. Just give him a  job and you can forget about it."

--The Deadly Dove (1945), Rufus King

In The Deadly Dove, Rufus King's assassin, the mild-mannered murderer known as the Dove, is, course, ironically named.  Rather than a man of peace he is a professional hit man, one highly-regarded within the slay racket.  His professional services are called upon in The Deadly Dove.

In New York actor Alan Admont has married the widow Christine Belder. Christine is wealthy and imperious while Alan is handsome and impecunious. Also, Christine is sixty and Alan is twenty-five.

Alan owes a very substantial sum of money to gangster Joe Inbrun, who concludes that the best way for Alan to be in a position to pay him back would be if Alan were to inherit a chunk of change from a rich, dead wife.  Joe tells Alan he has hired the Dove to eliminate Christine at her crumbling Gothic pile of a mansion in the Catskills, where the couple is staying, surrounded by a very odd coterie of retainers.  However, the best-laid plans....

Christine returns from a trip to New York having been persuaded by her conservative, perpetually suspicious attorney, Stuyvesant Swain (a loyal friend of her dead first husband and bemused observer of her own affairs), to create an immediate lifetime annuity. This means that upon Christine's demise gold-digging Alan will get nothing but her jewels, which are enough to cover his debt to Indrun and Indrun's debt to the Dove, with precisely nothing left over for him.  Suddenly Alan has every reason to keep his wife alive. But the deadly Dove already has set flight for the Catskills! What to do now....

The Deadly Dove is a short, farcical murder novel that, as others have commented before me, reads very much like a novel adapted from a play. Like The Case of the Dowager's Etchings and Museum Piece No. 13, both reviewed on this blog, it was originally lucratively serialized in a "slick"; however, I have seen no evidence that it actually was a play, although Rufus King in the 1930s enjoyed some success with play writing, as John Norris has documented.

The Dove is very much the sort of villain one might have expected to see on stage, during the between-the-wars years, in an Edgar Wallace crime thriller; yet in his novel King plays the criminous situation more for laughs than for thrills. I enjoyed the proceedings, but then I enjoy murder farces.

another Belarski pb cover,
clearly adapted from the pulps
(this scene doesn't actually quite
happen in the novel--the Dove
is not so crude a killer)

Rufus King's wealthy father, who died when Rufus was 35, appointed the King family lawyer as Rufus's trustee; and the relationship between headstrong Christine Belder and cautious Stuyvesant Swain may bear some resemblance to that between Rufus and his trustee (a family friend wryly commented on John Norris's blog, "Rufus needed his money looked after").

A relationship between an older wealthy women and a younger attractive man is a familiar motif in King's writing and I think one that reflects the likelihood that King was almost certainly gay. That King's fiction has certain gay aspects to it seems obvious to me, as well as John Norris and Mike Grost; yet this is something that had never been alluded to within the mystery community, as far as I know, before we three began blogging about his books.

King portrays Christine Belder as an eccentric, no question; but ultimately he seems impressed with her determination to live life as she pleases, with little concern for conventional opinion of the day. Can Christine be seen as a female "gay icon" archetype? I think so.

The Case of the Dowager's Etchings (1944), aka Never Walk Alone (1951), by Rufus King

Mrs. Carter Giles, for decades the dowager of Bridgehaven, decided that her contribution to the war effort would be opening her house to the war workers who were overcrowding her little city.  She expected to be able to pick her lodgers with the discrimination for which she herself had always been noted.  But Fate and the lodgers decreed otherwise, and a few hours after the invasion of her motley crew, Mrs. Giles found a body under the bushes next to the house....

--from the front jacket flap of The Case of The Dowager's Etchings (Doubleday Doran, 1944)

River Rest was a JUNGLE--And he would be king of this jungle.  He moved down the carpeted hall, his animal senses alert and quivering....Only an old woman stood between him and his dream of wealth....Without realizing it, Carrie Giles had become a stranger in her own home.  Four roomers had moved in.  Three were cold-eyed men.  The fourth was a predatory female whose every word and gesture was a wanton invitation.  All four were interested in Carrie's etchings.  But she never knew why--until a silent killer walked into her room!--from the back cover of Never Walk Alone (formerly The Case of the Dowager's Etchings) (Popular Library, 1951)

Going stag: the hardcover edition

Surely nothing in crime fiction illustrates the calculatedly salacious marketing of fiction in the early years of the paperback revolution than the startling transformation of Rufus King's The Case of the Dowager's Etchings (a 1944 hardcover) to Never Walk Alone (a 1951 paperback).

This remarkable publishing alchemy is a process that academia now metaphorically designates "pulping," i.e., making books more available to readers as cheap paperbacks with vivid, sexualized covers--often adapted by artists from original pulps art--guaranteed to catch the eye, titillating many, while outraging others (in the 1950s Congressional pressure would encourage publishers to tone down the covers).

In 1944, The Case of the Dowager's Etchings was published by that great warhorse of American crime fiction publishing, Doubleday Doran's Crime Club. By this time the Crime Club had a visual categorization system with an array of symbols meant to immediately signify to Crime Club members and potential buyers what kind of mystery they were getting with each title.  The Case of the Dowager's Etchings was denoted with a clutching hand, signifying "character and atmosphere."

Rufus King in the 1930s

This is a fair classification.  Although in the 1930s Rufus King, like John Dickson Carr, opted in his mysteries for fleeter, more thrilling fictional narratives than those of the so-called "Humdrum" school of Freeman Wills Crofts, John Street and others, he nevertheless fashioned these narratives in the form of classical detective fiction. By the 1940s, however, King was moving away from the traditional detective fiction form to something more on the order of the suspense thriller. Perhaps the best known of this group of King crime novels is Museum Piece No. 13, a modern Bluebeard fable that was filmed, with significant differences from the novel, as The Secret Beyond the Door (1947) (see my review of the novel here).

The Case of the Dowager's Etchings is a fine example of suspense fiction, but where Museum Piece No. 13 is predominantly Gothic and gloomy, Etchings conforms much more to the novel of manners style most associated today with the British Crime Queens Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, with some good character studies, witty writing and minute social observation.

The protagonist of Etchings, the blue-blooded Carrie Giles (Mrs. Carter Giles), is a skillfully-delineated character, one of a long line of memorable wealthy matrons in Rufus King's fiction. King, who grew up in New York City in privileged circumstances--prep school and Yale; summers in Rouses Point, a town at the northern tip of Lake Champlain just below Canada; winters in Florida) no doubt knew such people well (I suspect he drew partly on his own mother).

Although it is unquestionably a slighter novel, Etchings reminds me to some degree of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's brilliant crime novel The Blank Wall, which it preceded by three years. Holding's novel, also set during the Second World war, offers a fascinating look at social changes wrought by the conflict, particularly in the roles of women, including, in the case of the protagonist of that novel, wealthy, sheltered white matrons.

King skillfully navigates this same process of personal growth with Carrie Giles, who feels, in an increasingly democratic age, obsolete and resented by the local hoi polloi, some of whom make their feelings vocal when they see her being driven about town, to their disgust, in a Victorian carriage, pulled by a "roached black mare" (Mrs. Giles brought out the carriage again because of wartime gasoline rationing).

Rooms to let: all just as Papa left it

Her dashing grandson is a war hero, but Mrs. Giles wants to do more personally for the patriotic cause; so she decides to open her mansion to take in a quartet of war factory workers, having learned that housing for these people is inadequate and overcrowded. Regrettably for Mrs. Giles, trouble soon flows from this noble resolution.  As the hardcover edition explains, not long after she takes in her new boarders, she finds a dead body in the bushes. Soon Mrs. Giles is tangling with mysterious forces that seem to have criminal designs centering on her house.  Who can she trust?  And will the killer feel compelled to kill again?

Mrs. Giles does some investigating in her own right and King offers readers one splendid clue, so there is genuine detective interest in Etchings, but I think readers may enjoy the novel most, like I did, for its "manners."

One of my favorite aspects of the novel is how King has Mrs. Giles, a woman in her seventies, constantly reflecting on the things her Papa did or said. It seems like practically everything in the mansion, River Rest, was purchased by Papa or chosen by Papa.  It's a wonderful portrait of a masterful Victorian father, sublimely confident even when utterly mistaken and though long dead still a great influence on his daughter (however there are signs his grip finally may be slackening).

In its blurb the hardcover edition of Etchings doesn't mention, oddly, the Victorian-era etching, a pastoral scene with stag done by Mrs. Giles, that figures significantly in the plot, though it is depicted in the somewhat stodgy front cover illustration.  On the whole, however, the plot description details the novel's doings dutifully, if a bit dully.

Cinematic: ready for their closeups

With the 1951 Popular Library paperback edition, The Dowager's Etchings got  a major makeover. On the cover we have quite a dramatic moment, courtesy of Rudolph Belarski (one of his best pieces of work I think). A character in the book explicitly is compared to Humphrey Bogart, and certainly that man on the cover bears resemblance to the actor.

In the novel there also is a sexy, brassy woman factory worker (Rosie the Ravisher one might say, or, as the back cover blurb rather overheatedly puts it, "the predatory female whose every word and gesture was a wanton invitation").  I assume this is meant to be the woman on the cover who resembles Rita Hayworth (it's certainly not Mrs. Giles).

The problem is this scene never quite occurs in the book! Nor does the new title seem very particular to the novel. Perhaps it's meant to reflect how Mrs. Giles has to rely, amid great danger, on her own devices in the crisis she faces, with her beloved grandson frequently sidelined? Was the publisher drawing on "You'll Never Walk Alone," the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit from Carousel (1945)? (The song is vastly more familiar to my British readers, I suspect, in this version by Gerry and the Pacemakers.)

Don't let any misleading cover art or blurbs spoil your enjoyment of the actual text of the book.  The Case of the Dowager's Etchings is another great novel from an American Golden Age Crime King, whatever one puts on its covers.

Other Rufus King novels reviewed at The Passing Tramp:

Maneaters: Murder by Latitude (1930)
Tempests: Murder on the Yacht (1932)
Reefs: The Lesser Antilles Case (1934)

Good news too for fans: All the Rufus king novels are being reprinted, by Wildside Press. I wish I could say I has something to do with it (I had been trying for years), but at least it's finally happening.

Paperback Novelties: Death and Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983)

Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983), one of the great names in twentieth-century pulp and paperback fiction art, was born at the turn of the century in the coal mining town of Dupont, Pennsylvania, the son of immigrants from Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungarian Empire). Belarski quit school at the age of twelve to work in the local mines. After a decade had passed he began taking mail-order art courses from the International Correspondence School of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Soon after seriously taking up art Belarski moved to New York City to study at the Pratt Institute, from which he graduated in 1926.  He also taught at the school until 1933.  Two years later after leaving the school he began painting covers for pulp magazines published by Thrilling Publications.  After serving in the USO during World War Two he emerged as what David Saunders at pulpartists.com calls "the foremost paperback cover artist for Popular Library until 1951."

Like other Belarski pulps illustrations, this
one was adapted for a paperback cover, in
this case Patricia Wentworth's Pilgrim's Rest
(re-titled Dark Threat); see below

Rudolph Belarski unquestionably designed some of the most indelible banners of the post-WW2 paperback revolution.

One of my favorites by him is his cover for Fright, by George Hopley (Cornell Woolrich), a title which aptly designates Belarski's favored theme on his crime fiction paperback cover art. To be sure, this cover is somewhat exceptional, for the woman on the cover actually is dead, not in imminent danger of death; it is her murderer, a man, who is stricken with fright--quite pathologically--that his murder will out.

Usually on Belarski covers it's women who are the terrified ones, menaced by men. Occasionally a woman appears to strike back, and we see a male lying dead before her (see below the last cover, that for Rufus King's The Case of the Constant God, where the woman appears, mostly faceless, like some sort of dark, avenging angel).

On another cover (see the illustration above right) a blonde woman threatens a dark-haired woman. Whatever the variation, however, Rudolph Belarski provided memorable visions of sex and death in Cold War crime fiction.

Rufus King was one of the authors most favored with Belarski covers, and I will be reviewing a couple of these King crime novels this week. In the meantime, take a look at some of Belarski's work, mostly drawn here from non-hard-boiled crime fiction.

Also see previous posts on Arthur Hawkins, master of art deco mystery fiction jacket art, here and here.  And, since the cover of The Pink Umbrella Murder has been discussed so much below, see here for a review of the novel by Noah Stewart.

Neighbors! Disturbance on Berry Hill (1968), by Elizabeth Fenwick

I never can resist a map....

I bought my copy of Elizabeth Fenwick's Disturbance at Berry Hill at a used bookstore in Baton Rouge, Louisiana back in the 1990s, when I was in school down there.  I have to be honest, it was the frontis map that did it.  I recently came across the book again and decided to read it, having never actually done so before, making this probably a near twenty-year lag between purchasing and reading! Well, better late than never, right?

Elizabeth Fenwick (1916-1996) is an interesting author in that she illustrates the case of talented mid-century women mystery writers who in the 1940s and 1950s moved away from true detective novels to "psychological suspense," or "domestic suspense," as Sarah Weinman calls it.

Fenwick published three detective novels during World War Two, the several straight novels in the 1940s and 1950s, before moving into suspense crime fiction with Poor Harriet in 1957.  Over the next dozen years she published seven additional crime novels, ending the run with Goodbye, Aunt Elva in 1968.

Fenwick's crime fiction was quite praised in its day by critics, including the influential reviewer Anthony Boucher. However, since then she seems to have been mostly forgotten, although Academy Chicago reprinted one or two of her books in the 1980s or 1990s.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that Disturbance on Berry Hill, her penultimate crime novel, was a a disappointment to me. In some ways it reminds me of Mary Roberts Rinehart's crime novel The Album (1933), which I also found disappointing.  Both have excellent closed settings in exclusive suburban northeastern U. S. neighborhoods, rather resembling what we Americans call "gated communities" today; but the mystery plots fall flat (that in The Album is too convoluted, that in Berry Hill too predictable).

Someone in Berry Hill is causing disturbances, prowling about and sneaking into homes, etc., causing people in the neighborhood to lock their doors for the first time (this was along time ago). Eventually there's a death, which is an even greater disturbance.  Who is behind all this? The answer, I must admit, was not a great surprise to me.

Berry Hill is a short novel, probably not too much over 40,000 words, and although I thought the setting was interesting, the characters were not as developed as I would have liked. I did note how "traditional" Berry Hill was, with all but one of the adult women residents being homemakers (one with a live-in maid) with commuting husbands; the one middle-aged career woman is sympathetically presented, but exceptional.

I wanted to like this novel more than I did, but the suspense is a tad tepid and the characters insufficiently engaging. However, from past reading I have a good opinion of Elizabeth Fenwick's writing, so I will take another look at her work, in a post that will have more about the author herself.  Also there's exciting news about Sarah Weinman and domestic suspense fiction, which I will be writing about more next week too.

Carolyn Considers: "Why Women Read Detective Stories" (1930)

In 1930 True Detective Mysteries published a column by American mystery writer Carolyn Wells, in which she considered the question, "Why Women Read Detective Stories."  This may seem an odd question today, when we read so many articles about how men do not read fiction at all anymore. I recall several years ago reading a post on Martin Edwards' blog where he pointed out that at his talks on mystery fiction his audiences were mostly women.  The comments on Martin's piece as I recollect seemed to be the effect that men didn't like reading fiction or, if they did, they gravitated to action and event. Women, on the other hand, liked the cerebral aspect to detective fiction.

George Orwell: men's "consumption of
detective stories is terrific"

This view often is applied backward in time as well, to the Golden Age itself, in explaining the popularity of the British Crime Queens, read, so the argument runs, more by women; yet it is in fact precisely the opposite of the then current wisdom of those days, which was men wrote and read detective fiction in greater numbers than women.

Recalling his days working in a bookshop, George Orwell, for example, wrote that while "women of all kinds and ages" read novels by such mainstream bestsellers as Ethel M. Dell, Warwick Deeping and Jeffrey Farnol, "men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories....[T]heir consumption of detective stories is terrific."

To the extent that women were seen as mystery readers in the 1920s it was more as readers of "thrillers," books that were less about cogitation than palpitation. The English shocker king Edgar Wallace was said to have kept more women up at night than any man in England.

It was only with the rise in the 1930s of the novel of manners mysteries associated most strongly today with the British Crime Queens Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh (and the concomitant decline of the "Humdrum" mysteries associated with male writers like Freeman Wills Crofts, J. J. Connington and John Rhode/Miles Burton--see my book Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery) that observers began to associate women more with detective fiction per se (in the US women readers had long been associated with the mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart and the so-called feminine HIBK--Had I But Known--school, yet these books were not considered pure detective fiction but rather watered-down "mystery" bearing some considerable relationship to the thriller).

This perceived gender shake-up accelerated after the Second World War, with the paperback revolution and the great success of hard-boiled, noir and espionage novels, all of which were seen as being more read (in droves) by sensation-oriented men in search of the visceral thrills of violence and sex, the two qualities often emphasized on the paperback covers of these books.

The "traditional" detective novel now was being associated, in a way it had not actually been for much of the Golden Age, with women readers and writers (increasingly the "official" British Crime Queens Christie, Sayers, Marsh and Allingham, but also Patricia Wentworth, Georgette Heyer, Josephine Tey, Christianna Brand, Elizabeth Ferrars and others).

Often elements besides the detective plot were emphasized in discussions of these books, like "love interest" (romance rather than raunch), wit (genteel repartee rather than slangy wisecracks) and minute social observation (quaint villages rather than "mean streets"), qualities that, again, were seen as appealing more to a female than a male audience. (Although in paperback these books too sometimes received the sexed-up covers we associate with hard-boiled and noir "pulp.") Eventually the term "cozy" began being broadly applied to these books and their modern day incarnations, cementing the idea that these were more "women's mysteries," the visceral American tough stuff being the natural province of the male reader.

What did Lou do?
Lou Henry Hoover and her husband, an
American president and acknowledged
detective fiction fan

But before the Second World War (certainly before the mid-Thirties), the situation was, as discussed, much different, with its being assumed that it was the male sex was the one that more preferred genuinely ratiocinative detective fiction.

So when Carolyn Wells in 1930 wondered "Why Women Read Detective Stories" this was not an odd or quirky question. Women detective fiction readers often still were seen as something of a novelty.

Wells began her article by asserting that "woman's interest" in detective fiction, though of "comparatively recent growth," was real:

The list of detective story fans, continually appearing in newspapers, includes Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings, Statesmen, Scientific giants, and celebrated men of all types, but never does a woman's name appear on those lists.  We are not informed that Mrs. Hoover or Queen Mary eagerly buy thrillers at the station news stands or order them from the booksellers by half dozens.  Yet recent statistics compiled by the editor of this magazine, tend to show that the interest in detective fiction is about evenly divided between the sexes.

Of course True Detective Stories, founded in 1924, was a true crime magazine and, according to authority Leroy Panek, lent "toward sensation"; but it's interesting to see Wells challenging what was then conventional wisdom about detective fiction readership.

Wells then argued that concerning detective fiction authors in the United States "there are more well-known feminine names than masculine." (However, she claimed--this may surprise people--that just the opposite was the case in England, where "there are many more celebrated masculine pens...writing detective fiction than feminine.")

Wells believed that when, after the Great War, "the better class of writers...combined the horrors of murder with the intellectual interest of problem solving, the keen logical interest present, even if partially dormant in the feminine mind, awoke, and women began to see that detective stories had a lure of their own, as compelling as crossword puzzles or village gossip."

no doubt she's now planning to curl up
with a good detective story

In the 1920s, according to Wells, women became desirous of emulating "all male pursuits," including reading detective fiction.  Woman "wanted to vote, wanted to cut her hair short, wanted to smoke, wanted to ride astride, wanted pajamas, and wanted the same untrammeled frankness of speech that man hitherto had hitherto monopolized.  These things she achieved, and it may be that detective stories fell into line."

Wells asserted to that the "feminine mind is often quicker and more direct than a man's mind....women are coming to realize more and more that detective stories appeal to the feminine mind that is willing to exercise its own peculiar gifts of logic and deduction."

Yet, Wells allowed, detective novels also offered women readers "scope for the working of their emotions....in a well-written detective story [a woman reader] finds someone to pity, someone to hate, someone to become enraged at, someone to love....she tingles with fear, she sighs with relief, she revels in the dangers and dilemmas, and her quick wits try to outrun the detective in his deductions and often do.

"As for the old love stories," Wells concluded, the woman reader "knew all seven of their plots and they held no surprises for her experienced interest....detective stories proved a new field, and women have fallen for it."

"Intellect is impartially distributed between the sexes," Wells significantly added, "and if in all ages man has achieved more lasting fame, raised to himself more enduring monuments, it is not because of a superior brain, but because of a multitude of other reasons and causes, which may not be enumerated here, however."

Perhaps the male readers of True Detective Mysteries weren't ready for such an enumeration!