Get Ready To Rumble: The Rumble Murders (1932), by Mason Deal (Henry Ware Eliot, Jr.)

What one does with a dead body has always been a pressing problem for murderers, both in crime fiction and in real life crime.  During the 1920s and 1930s a fictional or actual killer could always conceal his unfortunate slaying victim in a convenient "rumble seat": upholstered exterior seats which folded into the rear decks of two-seater cars.

Between-the-wars newspaper headlines indicate that the "rumble" indeed offered go-to disposal for gangsters saddled with inconvenient cargo (for example, "Two Gunmen Slain, Left in Parked Car: Blood Stains on Mudguard Lead to Finding of the Bodies Jammed in the Rumble Seat").

"Mason Deal" not only wrote about bodies left in rumbles in his only detective novel; he named this novel The Rumble Murders. It is being reissued in the coming month, with an introduction by me and an afterword by David Chinitz, professor of English at Loyola University Chicago.

rumble seat, filled this time, happily, with live bodies

One of the admirers of this entertaining detective novel was mystery fiction fan and renowned poet, playwright and essayist T. S. Eliot, who in 1932 wrote the author an admiring letter about his book:

I read any detective story with enjoyment, but I think yours is a very good one; I am simply amazed at any human mind being able to think out all those details.  I am quite sure I could never write a detective story myself....But apart from my astonishment at your skill in plot, I was especially interested by the book as a social document....

Henry Ware Eliot, Jr. and his
wife, artist and illustrator
Theresa Anne Garrett

Admittedly, T. S. Eliot was already partial to the cause of the author, as "Mason Deal" was in fact Tom's elder brother, Henry Ware Eliot, Jr (1879-1947).  At this time Henry had recently left a partnership in a Chicago advertising agency and seemed to be contemplating a career as a detective fiction author. (He wrote his brother Tom that he was writing a second detective novel, but it never seems to have appeared in print.)

Henry later became a Research Fellow on Near Eastern Archaeology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard, where his principle work, published posthumously, was Excavations in Mesopotamia and Western Iran: sites of 4000-500 B.C.: Graphic Analysis (1950).  As this title suggests, Henry had a mind for intricate detail that was well-suited to the writing of classic detective fiction.

The Rumble Murders is set in a wealthy suburban development (Tom Eliot divined that the setting of the novel was Winnetka, Illinois, near Chicago) and concerns the disruption of life that takes place when two dead bodies are inconveniently discovered in rumbles in the area.  Several of the locals, including a visiting detective and a detective story writer, decide to investigate the crime for themselves, as a sort of moonlighting "homicide squad."  One reviewer noted the series of delicious complications which follows:

What with footsteps going up a concrete wall; a burglarized silo; a missing Colt 45; a barrel of excelsior; a lost family cemetery rediscovered, the queer cryptogram...; and the baboon shooting the babyroussa; not to mention the two bodies crammed into the rumble seats of two cars, one driven into the lake--Mr. Deal provides all the elements necessary for a neat little puzzle.

T. S. Eliot

Modern fans might be reminded of the donnish detective fiction of Ronald Knox and Michael Innes. Eliot and his characters don't treat murder with grave solemnity, seeing it more in the nature of a mental game.  I think you will enjoy playing.

Coming Out: Murder in the Closet (2017)

A book I had the privilege of editing and introducing, Murder in the Closet: Essays on Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall (McFarland), is now out. 

The book collects 23 essays by 17 contributors on LGBTQ writers of and themes in crime fiction published before the Stonewall Riots (1969), an epochal moment in LGBTQ history.  By no means were all of the subjects of the essays LGBTQ, but quite a few of them were; and additionally the essays look at "queer" themes in vintage crime fiction by both LGBTQ and non-LGTBQ authors (and some who still remain mysteries in this respect).

In my introduction I argue that the essays collectively reveal that there is more LGBTQ material to be found in vintage crime fiction published before the liberating impact of Stonewall took place than has customarily been recognized.

Fergus Hume

"Locked Doors," the first section of the book, covers authors who established themselves in detective fiction from the 1880s to the 1930s.  Lucy Sussex looks at the "The Queer Story of Fergus Hume," an author made famous by his crime novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), though in fact he wrote scores of additional mysteries and other works, never replicating that first great success.

Sussex, who is also the author of Blockbuster: Fergus Hume & The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (2015), highlights quite a few queer threads in the tapestry of the author's life and work.

In the other essay in the book which concerns a pre-WW1 author, "A Redemptive Masquerade," John Norris looks at a fascinating find from the hand of the muckraking journalist and author Samuel Hopkins Adams (best known among mystery fiction fans for his "rival of Sherlock Holmes" short story collection, Average Jones): a rather queer novel called The Secret of Lonesome Cove (1912).

Josephine Tey

The next group of essays get into the Golden Age of detective fiction proper.  A half dozen pieces, by Noah Stewart, John Curran, Michael Moon, Brittain Bright, Jamie Bernthal and Moira Redmond, queerly illuminate crime fiction by perennially popular British Queens of Crime: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell and Josephine Tey. 

The following pair of essays, by Michael Moon and Curtis Evans, look at a couple of trebly-initialed male English mystery writers: CHB Kitchin and GDH Cole, the latter of whom appears prominently in Martin Edwards' The Golden Age of Murder (2015) and my own The Spectrum of English Murder (2015).

Then in "Two Young Men Who Write As One," I take the latest look at the British expatriate couple Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler, who wrote some of the finest mid-century American crime fiction, under the pseudonyms Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge. More and more has been trickling out about Webb and Wheeler in the last few years, as can be seen in an essay by Mauro Boncompagni in Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene (2014) and the introduction and afterword by, respectively, me and Joanna Gondris, to Crippen & Landru's Patrick Quentin short story collection, The Puzzles of Peter Duluth (2016).

Todd Downing

The last three essays are devoted to the vintage American mystery writers Todd Downing, Rufus King, Clifford Orr and Mignon Eberhart. 

Downing, a part-Choctaw Oklahoman whose mystery fiction, once praised, had fallen into neglect. However, his books have recently been rediscovered and reprinted (see numerous posts on this blog and my book Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing, 2013), and they are the subject of "Queering the Investigation," an essay by Charles Rzepka. 

In "A Bad, Bad Past," I look at the the queer college backgrounds of Rufus King, one of the most important (and unjustly neglected) pre-war American crime writers, and Clifford Orr, who wrote only two detective novels before becoming a columnist at the New Yorker; and I relate these backgrounds to their crime fiction.

Ross Macdonald

In the last essay in section one, "Foppish, Effeminate, or 'a little too handsome'," Rick Cypert looks at one of the most read American mystery writers, Mignon Eberhart (dubbed, more on account of sales than real similarities, America's Agatha Christie).  Specifically, Cypert analyzes how this very popular author treated men and masculinity in her books, particularly those men who are just "a little too handsome."

The second section of the book, "Skeleton Keys," mostly covers writers from the post-WW2 period, though the first two essays--James Doig's on the outre Australian serial killer novel Twisted Clay (1934) and Drewey Wayne Gunn's on the real life WW2-era Canadian-American convicted murderer Wayne Lonergan and his murder scandal's influence on crime fiction--are precursors for the more explicitly LGBTQ fiction of this period.

Gore Vidal

Tom Nolan's "Claude was Doing All Right" analyzes Ross Macdonald's attitude toward homosexuality, in his fiction and his own life. My "Elegant Stuff...Of It's Sort" details the crime fiction career of Edgar Box (aka Gore Vidal).

Going back across the pond to Britain, John Norris' "Adonis in Person" studies the crime fiction of gay British man of letters Beverley Nichols, and Bruce Shaw's "More Than Fiction" the life and writing of iconic lesbian Nancy Spain.

Finishing the book are three essays, by Nick Jones, Josh Lanyon and John Norris, on the writers Patricia Highsmith, Joseph Hansen and George Baxt, whose fiction reflected cultural changes as we moved toward Stonewall.  Mystery fiction certainly wasn't in Kansas anymore, if you will, though in truth it never really quite was.

I'm very proud of this book and I think the essays in it make a significant contribution to LGBTQ history, mystery genre history and cultural history more generally.  I hope mystery fans five it more than a passing glance.

Nancy Spain

Family Update and an Introduction to Golden Age Mystery Writer Elizabeth Gill

My mother's biopsy was Wednesday and it's possible we may hear results today so I am praying for the best possible result and would love you to do so too.  I thank all the very kind people who commented on my last post and in fact a comment from Kathy Whalen inspired me to post a "shop" post.  I know there are people out here with grave difficulties in life to be dealing with who enjoy this blog and I don't want to let anyone down despite my being so upset about my own family situation.  So I thought I would try a short post.

Elizabeth Gill

In fact I was expecting this month to do a lot of of discussion and interviews for the Murder in the Closet essay collection to which so many fine people have contributed.  I will have to see if I can mentally get that all put together.  But for now I thought I would talk about Elizabeth Gill (1902-1934), another forgotten woman mystery writer from the Golden Age of detective fiction who is being reprinted by Dean Street Press.

I wrote a general intro and sub-intros for Gill's three detective novels, The Crime Coast (1929), (1932) and What Dread Hand? and Crime De Luxe (1933), all of which tell of the sleuthing exploits of Benvenuto Brown, French Riviera artist and amateur sleuth.

You will notice that Gill died when she was only 32.  Had she lived longer I feel confident she would have emerged as one the more notable British women crime writers from the Thirties.

"The Hope of the World" (1915)

Gill was born Elizabeth Joyce Copping in Sevenokas, Kent 1901 prominent illustrator Harold Copping and second wife, Edith Louisa Mothersill.  Her father was best-known for his Biblical illustrations, especially "The Hope of the World," a depiction of a beatific Jesus Christ surrounded by a multi-racial group of children from different continents that became an iconic image in British Sunday Schools, and the pieces collected in what became known as The Copping Bible, a bestseller in Britain.

Young Miss Copping married for the first time, when she was only nineteen, Kenneth De Burgh Codrington, a brilliant young colonial Englishman then studying Indian archaeology at Oxford.

Codrington, a correspondent with T. S. Eliot on matters of religious philosophy, would become one of England's premier authorities on Indian antiquities.  However, his marriage with Elizabeth lasted less than six years.

Tower House

Her second husband, whom she married in 1927, was a talented English painter, Colin Unwin Gill, one of the notable names in English art to arise out of the Great War. 

(See below for two of his paintings, Heavy Artillery, 1919, and King Alfred's Longships Defeat the Danes, 1927.)

The new couple occupied a ground floor studio flat at the Tower House at Tite Street, Chelsea, an abode of artists and writers for decades.

(Indeed, in a coincidental pairing of artist ancestors and detective writer descendants the Gills occupied the very same flat the famed artist James Whistler, great-uncle of mystery writer Molly Thynne, had before them.)

Two years after the marriage, Elizabeth Gill, who also dabbled in watercolors (a great-grandfather was a prominent watercolorist) and dress design, published her first detective novel, Strange Holiday (The Crime Coast in the US, the title under which Dean Street Press is reprinting it.) Three years later came What Dread Hand?

the striking, and strikingly lurid,
dust jacket design to the American
edition of Gill's second detective novel

Both novels concern murder in England, though investigation takes the characters to southern France, a region with which Gill obviously was quite familiar, and the home of her amateur sleuth, the brilliant artist Benvenuto Brown.  Crime Coast deals with artists, while Dread Hand expands the canvas to include stage personalities.

The third Gill detective novel, Crime De Luxe, takes place on a luxury transatlantic ocean liner traveling from the UK to the US, where Brown is giving an exhibition of his works.  This clever and thoughtfully-written novel actually is one of my favorite shipboard mysteries.  The author traveled several times to the US with her husband and seems to have had a high opinion of the country.

Literate, witty, well-plotted and altogether charming, Elzabeth Gill's trio of detective novels were reprinted in the US, where they were very well-reviewed and her untimely death was reported nationally; yet after her death the books remained out-of-print for over eight decades.

Happily, that has now changed, with their reprinting by Dean Street Press.  I hope you give them a look and enjoy them.

The Passing Tramp Passes for a Time

My wonderful mother's stage one breast cancer from 2013 the doctor thinks has spread to her liver.  She has a biopsy today.  I am so down right now probably won't be posting much on the blog for a while.  Lots of concern with how this was handled.  She's 85, but she was in great shape, physically and mentally.  I know a lot of people my age have been having these sorts of issues with parents and I now personally know your grief.  Love to you all, and to your parents.  I hope I will find my way toward blogging here again in the future.

Ladies of Fashion: Two Golden Age American Manners Mystery Writers, Eleanore Kelly Sellars and Emma Lou Fetta

Eleanore Kelly Sellars (1903-1972) published one detective novel, Murder a la Mode, which won the Red Bridge Mystery Prize in 1941.  Sellars' novel was contemporary with, and similar in style to, the murder mystery trilogy by syndicated fashion columnist and Fashion Group co-founder Emma Lou Fetta, which consisted of Murder in Style (1939), Murder on the Face of It (1940) and Dressed to Kill (1941).

Eleanore Kelly Sellars

Fetta's entertaining trilogy of murder centered on the characters of fashion designer Susan Yates and her boyfriend, New York assistant district attorney Lyle Curtis, while Sellars' focal character (and narrator) in Murder a la Mode, which details a series of fiendish murders impacting a Fifth Avenue department store, is Deborah "Debbie" Wood, like Sellars herself a retail executive and advertising copywriter.

The novels by these two women had similar settings and characters because the two authors had similar personal and professional backgrounds. Both came from small cities in the north central states (Fetta from Richmond, Indiana, which had a population of around 18,000 in 1900, and Sellars from Monessen, Pennsylvania, a factory town which had been founded in 1897 and in 1920 had almost the exact same population as Richmond had had in 1900.)

Emma Lou Fetta

Fetta graduated from the Quaker Earlham College in 1920 (her mother, Ellena Fulghum, was descended from a long line of American Friends, while her father was the son of a German immigrant) and was one of two children of Robert Henry Fetta, owner of the Fetta Water Softener Company.  Sellars, who graduated from Wellesley College in 1925, was the daughter of James Howard Kelly, a businessman of Scots-Irish extraction who seems to have had fingers in most of Monessen's economic pies. (Among other things he was President of the First National Bank.) Both women moved to New York and married, but kept their careers.  (Fetta kept her maiden name professionally as well.)

I think that clearly both writers were influenced in their mysteries by the socially observant and posh British "manners" detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. In 1938 Allingham herself had published a hugely successful and much lauded mystery, The Fashion in Shrouds, that was set in the London fashion industry milieu. 

Sellars suggested such a connection, I believe, when she stated that with Murder a la Mode she had aimed to "write a murder mystery in which all the people were intelligent and logical in their behavior and remained intelligent and logical throughout the book."  In her story, she declared, "everyone did what shrewd, well-bred and practical people would do if they were actually living through the experiences of murder." 

opening the door to manners mystery
Margery Allingham

Both authors' books were well-received in the US. The Detroit Free Press, for example, wrote of Fetta's first essay in crime, Murder in Style: "If Clare Booth Luce had put her characters of "The Women" [the smash hit play adapted into a smash hit film] into a murder maze, she would have come up with something like this....This is an exceedingly smart and funny book, with a mystery above average"; while reviewer Maxine Garrison in the Pittsburgh Press raved that "Mrs. Sellars tells her story very deftly indeed, dramming it with suspense right up to the last page. Her first hand knowledge of her background is obvious...." 

Fans of the tony books of the British Crime Queens or the American author Elizabeth Daly (who also started writing mysteries at this time) should agree.

Merchandising Murder: Murder a la Mode (1941), Eleanore Kelly Sellars

Winner of the $1000 Dodd, Mead Red Badge prize for the best mystery by an author not previously published under the Red Badge imprint, Eleanore Kelly Sellars' Murder a la Mode (1941) is an excellent detective novel of the "manners" school that is associated with such Golden Age Crime Queens Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. The novel details a series of slayings involving the officers and personnel of Dexter & Cole, a fashionable Fifth Avenue department store, and is narrated by executive assistant Deborah "Debby" Wood.

The first of these fiendish killings takes place at a business conference at a great neoclassical house above the Hudson River, making Murder a la Mode something of a classic form country house mystery, yet the novel is also very much a workplace milieu mystery in the manner of Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise (1933), Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds (1938) and Christianna Brand's Death in High Heels (1941).  Though there is a lot of interesting detail in the novel about an early Forties business environment that included women in important positions, the mystery plot itself is excellent and quite twisty.

Eleanore Kelly Sellars (1903-1972) was well-suited to write such a book, having herself been a Manhattan retail executive and copywriter. As Eleanore Kelly the author grew up in comfortable circumstances in Monessen, a steel making town located in southwestern Pennsylvania's Monongahela River Valley (see pictures below), the daughter of bank president James Howard Kelly, one of the most prominent men in the town. (Like many other towns in this region, Monessen since has lost its manufacturing base, with a resultant large population decline; then presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared in the town in 2016, promising to restore the region to its former industrial glory.)

Eleanore Kelly graduated from Wellesley College in 1925 and moved to Manhattan, where four years after that she wed Raymond Sellars, a General Motors auto loan officer. In the 1940s the couple moved to San Francisco, where Eleanore continued to write, publishing short stories in Collier's Weekly and Liberty. 

Though once very physically active, Eleanore suffered spinal trouble in the late 1940s and as far as I know only produced one additional work of fiction, a play (non-criminous) starring faded Thirties Hollywood film star Kay Francis.  Yet though her writing career likewise faded, Eleanore Kelly Sellars' one mystery novel deserved again to see the light of day.  Happily the novel has now been reprinted by Coachwhip and is available on Amazon.  For this reissue I wrote an introduction of 3000 words.  Give Murder a la Mode a try, I think you'll like it.

You Just Can't Keep a Bad Man Down: The Gazebo (film, 1959)

Two years after mystery writer Patricia Wentworth's crime novel The Gazebo (reviewed by me here) was published in the US in 1956, Alexander "Alec" Coppel's play The Gazebo, starring Walter Slezak and Jayne Meadows, opened on Broadway on December 12, 1958.  It ran for 266 performances, closing on June 27, 1959.  On the American tour which followed its closing on Broadway, the leads were Tom Ewell, of The Seven Year Itch fame, and Jan Sterling.

With Ian Carmichael (television's original Lord Peter Wimsey, I believe) and Moira Lister in the leads, the play premiered in London's West End on March 29, 1960, and ran for 479 performances. No Mousetrap, to be sure, but no "mouse" either!

Wentworth's The Gazebo and Coppel's The Gazebo seem to have almost nothing in common, beyond murder and, yes, the presence of a summerhouse, aka a gazebo--though I suppose it's possible the idea of centering a crime tale on a gazebo may have come to Coppel from Wentworth's novel. In any event, Coppel, a successful Hollywood scripter, playwright and novelist, enjoyed much success in his own right.

An Australian by birth, Coppel, born in 1907, moved to England in the late 1920s to study at Cambridge; but he dropped out before graduating, like Dorothy L. Sayers entering the advertising business, writing fiction on the side (or maybe fiction was what he wrote in the advertising business as well).

Coppel scored a stage hit with his third play, a light mystery play called I Killed the Count (1937). After 185 performances in the West End, the play was filmed in England two years later and it opened on Broadway in 1942, though in the US it proved something of a bomb--that's a bad thing in the US-managing only 29 performances before closing. (More on Count coming soon at the blog.)

During World War II Coppel moved back to Australia, where he enjoyed more stage success, but after the war he returned to England, where he wrote additional plays as well as novels and screenplays. (He had already novelized Count in 1939.)  Both the crime novels A Man About a Dog (1947) (in the US, Over the Line) and Mr. Denning Drives North (1950) were filmed in England, the former as Obsession (The Hidden Room in the US) and directed by Edward Dmytryk.  The latter film starred John Mills as the titular Mr. Denning.

Coppel's screenplays include No Highway (1951) (aka No Highway in the Sky), adapted from a Nevil Shute novel, and The Captain's Paradise (1953), starring Alec Guinness and Yvonne De Carlo (for which Coppel received his sole Oscar nomination).

Coppel also worked on the script for Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief (1955), and wrote the original draft of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Around this time his fiction provided the basis for no less than six episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including a three-part adaptation of I Killed the Count.

Thus The Gazebo, Coppel's return to the light mystery thriller form, was filmed at the height of the writer's success.  For the film--which was directed by George Stevens, director of the 1940 Bob Hope supernatural comedy thriller The Ghost Breaker; Murder, He Says (1945), another mystery comedy, starring Fred MacMurray; and the Raymond Chandler scripted crime drama The Blue Dahlia (1946)--two of the most popular mid-century American film actors, Glenn Ford and the late Debbie Reynolds, were cast as the leads: nervous and agitated television crime show writer and director Elliott Nash and his irrepressibly cheerful singer and dancer wife, Nell. (Yes, this role was surely quite a stretch for Debbie Reynolds!)

Handyman Sam Thorpe (John McGiver)
contemplates the "gaze-bo"

Most of the film takes place at the Nash's suburban Connecticut home, where Nell is busily planning the installation of an English Victorian-era gazebo on the grounds while Elliott is busily plotting the murder of a nasty blackmailer who has in his possession incriminating photos of Nell ("art" nude photos done when she was eighteen).

Could Nell's precious gazebo prove providential for Elliott's desperate murder scheme?

I found The Gazebo an amusing and entertaining murder farce. Some contemporary reviewers pronounced that Glenn Ford was miscast in a comedy part, but I think he is quite good in the film's key role. Debbie Reynolds is reliably spunky (she really was unsinkable on film in the Fifties); and a cheerful song and dance number with the consummate entertainer appears early in the film (because, I presume, she's Debbie Reynolds, don't you know). Reynolds sings snatches of her ditty a couple of more times, but, most happily from my perspective, the film soon settles down into pure comedy--and murder.

Enjoyable as the leads are, however, I imagine Tom Ewell, Jayne Meadows and the underrated Jan Sterling would have been great as well. I can't recall Walter Slezak in a film at the moment, though I saw Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat some time ago and Slezak was supposed to be very good in it, though definitely not humorous.

don't worry, folks: I assure you there will be a murder

Carl Reiner plays Harlow Edison, the Nash's nosy district attorney neighbor (uh-oh!), but for me the stand-out comedic supporting performers are the always wonderful John McGiver, the homespun building contractor who pronounces gazebo as "gaze-bo," and the always wonderful Doro Merande, as the Nash's very loud! housekeeper. Also notable is a young Martin Landau, whose part in the film, however, is not comedic. Indeed, the same year he played a similar role, very memorably, in Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

Comedic bits early in the film remind me of the New York suburbanite comedies George Washington Slept Here (1942) and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948). For the rest, you'll probably be more reminded of Hitchcock's ambulatory corpse comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955)--or even, given the pivotal part played by Herman the Pigeon, The Birds (1963)! But The Gazebo is not for the birds.  Rather, it is a clever comedy for connoisseurs of the fine farce of murder--by all means, check it out.