From Sweet Delight to Sheer Dross? George Orwell on the Transformation of British Detective Fiction, 1890-1940

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war.  The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk.  You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by a suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood.  Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight. The air is warm and stagnant.  In these blissful circumstances, what is it you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder....

                              --George Orwell, The Decline of the English Murder (1946)

It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid.  Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel--the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novels--seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories.  [Emphasis added--TPT.]  But their consumption of detective stores is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the same book twice.  Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash...was stored for ever in his memory.

In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones....

                              --George Orwell, Bookshop Memories (1936)

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.  In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be "This book is worthless," while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would probably be "This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to." But the public will not pay to read that sort of thing.  Why should they? They want some kind of guide to the books they are asked to read, and they want some kind of evaluation.  But as soon as values are mentioned, standards collapse.  For if one says--and nearly every reviewer says this kind of thing at least once a week--that King Lear is a good play and The Four Just Men is a good thriller, what meaning is there in the word "good"?

The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books, and to give very long reviews--1,000 words is a bare minimum--to the few that seem to matter....

                              --George Orwell, Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946)

By his own declaration, George Orwell (1903-1950) was not a fan--to quote one of the favorite cliches of the most recent American president--of the Golden Age mystery novel, either in its puzzler or thriller variants. (Neither Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men, see above, nor Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night, see below, met with his approbation.) This fact makes it odd to me that it has been speculated that Orwell might have "ghosted" Murder at Liberty Hall, a 1941 detective novel by an old school chum, art critic Alan Clutton-Brock. (Review coming!)

Yet Orwell for all his adult life retained great affection for the detective writers he had read in his youth: Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), R. Austin Freeman (Dr. Thorndyke), Ernest Bramah (Max Carrados).  In 1949, less than eleven months before his death, he passingly wrote his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom of his fondness for Freeman, asking her:

Do you remember our passion for R. Austin Freeman?  I have never really lost it, and I think I must have read his entire works except some of the very last ones.  I think he only died quite recently, at a great age" [RAF in fact had passed away six years earlier, having reached his 81st year, which may well have seemed quite an advanced age to the 45-year-old, grievously ill Orwell]

In a 1945 essay, Good Bad Books, Orwell classified under this heading--which he defined as "the kind of book which has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished"--the crime tales of Doyle, Freeman and Bramah, as well as the Raffles stories of E. W. Hornung.

His longest statement on the subject is found, however, in "Grandeur et decadence du roman policier anglais," an essay originally published in 1943 in the Free French journal Fontaine that has remained obscure for decades (perhaps because it first appeared in the French language, or perhaps because Orwell authorities simply have not been interested in a somewhat lengthier exploration by Orwell of this topic).

In this essay Orwell again praises the trio he read in his youth--Doyle, Freeman, Bramah--while condemning that which was then "modern" crime fiction.  Appallingly to admirers of between-the-wars, or Golden Age, detective fiction, Orwell pinpoints precisely this era as the period when detective fiction declined into the "frightful torrent of trash" to which he had referred so scathingly in Bookshop Memories:

It was between 1920 and 1940 that the majority of detective stories were written and read, but this is precisely the period that marks the decline of the detective story as a literary genre.  Throughout these troubled and frivolous years, "crime stories" as they were called (this title includes the detective story proper as well as the "thriller" where the author follows the conventions of Grand Guignol), were in England a universal palliative equal to tea, aspirins, cigarettes and the wireless. These works were mass-produced, and it is not without some surprise that we find that their authors include professors of political economy [this presumably a reference to the leftest English academic GDH Cole, one of the subjects of my book The Spectrum of English Murder] and Roman Catholics [apparently a reference both to Ronald Knox, a priest, and to G. K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown detective tales seem to receive short shrift, or no shrift whatsoever, from Orwell, whose 1945 essay Antisemitism in Britain accused Chesterton of engaging in "literary Jew-baiting...of an almost continental level of scurrilty"] as well as Anglican priests.  Any amateur who had ever dreamed of writing a novel felt capable of tackling a detective story, which requires only the haziest knowledge of toxicology and a plausible alibi to conceal the culprit.  Yet soon the detective story started to get more complicated; it demanded more ingenuity if its author were to satisfy the reader's constantly growing appetite for violence and thirst for bloodshed.  The crimes became more sensational and more difficult to unravel.  It is nevertheless a fact that in this multitude of later works there is hardly anything worth re-reading.  

Things were not always like this....

Orwell then goes on to contrast this current dismal state of affairs, as he saw it, with the detective fiction of the years of his youth (the 1910s):

a spot of violence, surely

Entertaining books are not always bad books. [How about "good bad books"?--TPT]  Between 1880 and 1920 we had in England three specialists in the detective story who showed undeniably artistic qualities. [Orwell then cites, once again, Doyle, Freeman and Bramah] The Memoirs and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Max Carrados and The Eyes of Max Carrados by Bramah, The Eye of Osiris and The Singing Bone by Freeman are, together with the two or three short stories of Edgar Allan Poe which inspired them, the classics of English detective fiction.  We can find in each of these works a quality of style, and even better an atmosphere, which we do not usually find in contemporary authors (Dorothy Sayers, for example, or Agatha Christie or Freeman Wills Croft [sic]).*

*(In a review of Sayers's Gaudy Night, Orwell wrote:

By being, on the surface a little ironical about Lord Peter Wimsey and his noble ancestors, she is able to lay on the snobbishness ["his lordship," etc.] much thicker than any overt snob would dare to do.  Also, her slickness in writing has blinded many readers to the fact that her stories, considered as detective stories, are very bad ones.  They lack the minimum of probability that even a detective story ought to have, and the crime is always committed in a way that is incredibly tortuous and quite uninteresting.)

Was Orwell like the users who haunt music upload pages on YouTube, lamenting--albeit in his case most eloquently at 1500 to 2500 words at a time--how today's songs are so much worse than the wonderful tunes of their youth?  I can imagine admirers of Dorothy L. Sayers scoffing at the notion that R. Austin Freeman's works--which crime writer and critic Julian Symons, a friend of Orwell's (see below), compared the reading of to chewing straw--have more "atmosphere" and "quality of style" than Sayers's.  (Of course Symons had some dismissive things to say about Sayers as well.)

Whatever you may think of Orwell's criticism, however, it is clear that he thought crime fiction from the between-the-wars period was far from representing, to borrow a recent term, a "Golden Age of Murder."  In his view, as he expressed it, Golden Age crime fiction was not golden but rather, dross--the so-called Golden Age being a time when, as he saw it, sensation and over-complication overtook the genre, to its grave detriment.

Dorothy L. Sayers: an extremely
morbid interest in corpses?

In  a letter written to Julian Symons in 1949, at about the same time he was writing Jacintha Buddicom extolling the merits of R. Austin Freeman, Orwell urged Symons to send him a copy of Bland Beginning, Symons's latest mystery "thriller."  "I'm rather an amateur of detective stories," Orwell confided to the younger author, "although, as you know, I have old-fashioned taste in them.  I recently by the way read for the first time The Postman Always Rings Twice--what an awful book...."

Given his consistently expressed repulsion for violence in crime fiction, Orwell's distaste for the shocks and horrors that James M. Cain's Postman delivered hard on the nose is not a surprise (though perhaps the fact that he waited fifteen years after the book's publication to read it is).

In one of his more famous essays, Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944), Orwell, drawing on the tales of Hornung's hero and James Hadley Chase's crude Sanctuary knockoff, the crime novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), again contrasts English crime fiction "then and now," condemning what he deems the sadism and authoritarianism of the modern stuff. 

"Some of the early detective stories do not even contain a murder," notes Orwell, again drawing on his sacred trio, Doyle, Freeman and Bramah. "Since 1918, however, a detective story not containing a murder has been a great rarity, and the most disgusting details of dismemberment and exhumation are commonly exploited. Some of the Peter Wimsey stories, for instance, display an extremely morbid interest in corpses."

Orwell is one of my favorite writers and a brilliant and brave essayist, but I can but conclude that in the paragraph above he is rather talking out of his hat, which certainly is not the first time a carping intellectual has done so about detecitve fiction.

Part of the problem here is Orwell's loose language in this context. Just what does he mean by "stories"? In the pre-WW1 period, mystery writers like Doyle, Freeman and Bramah wrote primarily longish short stories, while in the postwar period the novel became unquestionably the more popular form for mystery.

During the Golden Age the ratiocinative detective novel was considered the province of murder, not because of morbidness or sensationalism, as Orwell suggests, but because it was believed that murder was the only crime worth the candle, so to speak--the only sin that was sufficiently serious to justify lengthy fictional investigation. Jewelry thefts and financial frauds were all well and good, and they continued to crop up with considerable frequency in the short stories of the Golden Age, but they were merely appetizers to the main course of murder in most people's eyes. Similarly pre-WWI crime novels (as opposed to short stories) by Doyle and Freeman, like later ones by Sayers and Christie, most often concerned not lesser crimes, but murder. (I am sure some fans out there could provide some exact statistical breakdowns.)

Of course Orwell was perfectly free to dismiss the modern thriller, including the hard-boiled and noir variants, on the grounds that they were too coarse and sensationalistic for him (many modern fans of classic mystery feel the same way); but I think Orwell erred in so sweepingly condemning the Golden Age's true detective novel.

To be sure, there were plenty of hacks churning out hack work and even, let's be frank, flat-out rubbish in that era, but then so too were there in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.  Freeman and Bramah were undoubted aces from that age, but the "rivals of Sherlock Holmes," as they have been termed, also included some pretty pale imitations, individuals who were not producing genre gems but rather pure paste.  Yet both periods deserve ultimate judgment based on their better writers, surely.

a good violent murder with lots of blood

However, Orwell professed not to like first stringers Sayers or Christie or Crofts either. I think Orwell went through a process some of us go through, when we feel we have "outgrown" detective fiction upon reaching adulthood and attending college--though Orwell still retained a nostalgic fondness for his childhood favorites, Doyle, Freeman and Bramah. 

I know this happened with the late James Yaffe and the author and critic Michael Dirda, who has charmingly written about this subject in his work, and it definitely happened with me as well. Some of us, like Yaffe and Dirda (and myself as well, obviously), later returned to mystery fiction with a renewed passion for it, recovering for it the zest of our youth, tempered in a fashion by time.

With this in mind, I suspect that Orwell was frequently more tempted by detective fiction than he preferred to acknowledge (just like Raymond Chandler had more of a liking for classic British detective fiction than he cared to admit publicly--he shared Orwell's admiration for austere R. Austin Freeman, for example, though neither man liked Sayers's more posh stuff).

There is something rather puritanical about Orwell's attitude toward crime fiction: touch not the unclean thing, it's escapist entertainment!  Like Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), the American writer and critic of "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" infamy (to vintage mystery fans), who also had derived pleasure from the Sherlock Holmes tales in his youth, Orwell thought there were better and more important books to read in the insufficient mortal time we are all allotted on this earth.

So, while I doubt Orwell actually wrote Murder at Liberty Hall, it wouldn't surprise me at all if he talked about it with Alan Clutton-Brock--a bit of a vicarious thrill, as it were.  But I'll be talking more about this matter in my review of the novel, coming soon as mentioned!

Debbie Downer: Double Doom (1957), by Josephine Bell

This is a deplorable book, full of preposterous characters, not one of whom can be admired even for his vice.  Professional detection is nil, and the amateur halfhearted; the real heroine, if any, is mentally deficient; and the three murders are uninteresting and crudely carried out.

         --Review of Josephine Bell's Double Doom (1957) in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor's A Catalogue of Crime

Well, I liked it!  Double Doom, I mean.  I liked it both times I read it, the first more than a decade ago and more recently this summer.

As inflexible aesthetic ideologists of the traditional, ratiocinative detective novel, academic Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) and his longtime friend and colleague Wendell Hertig Taylor (1905-1985), were loath to allow into the form too much of that which savored of the depressing real world.  In their favored "light" reading the two men intensely disliked perpetually depressed characters and downtrodden detectives, so it is not surprising that Double Doom got two decisive thumbs down from the pair.

However, at the time of the publication of Double Doom, a period when mystery critics were avidly embracing greater realism in tales of crime--after all, crime frequently is rather a sad and degrading thing in real life--he novel received generally good notices. 

For example, Kirkus Reviews found Double Doom "tempting," the Manchester Evening News praised its "tension, fine characterisation and good writing" and the London Observer its" most complicated puzzle." 

The review of Anthony Boucher, dean of American crime fiction critics, was not, in a way, so far removed from that of Barzun and Taylor, except in that what the two academics saw as contemptible, Boucher deemed praiseworthy.  In Boucher's eyes Bell's "portrayal of a 38-year-old woman with a mental age of 12" was "extraordinarily moving." He believed that this portrayal gave "rewarding substance to an otherwise dullish puzzle."

In essence Boucher's review concedes the central criticism of B&T while putting it aside by praising the mystery for a purely novelistic quality: the depiction of the plight of someone with a developmental disorder. To this B&T would have responded, no doubt, that had they wished to read about developmental disorders in a work of fiction, they would have sought out a "true" novel, not a detective story.  Never the twain shall meet, was the motto of B&T, but they were fighting against the temper of the times.*

*(I should note that Agatha Christie's own depressing genteel Fifties family dysfunction novel, Ordeal by Innocence, was published the next year and that the ever-reliable B&T didn't like it either: "A very unpleasant group of ill-assorted adopted children, finding that one of their number must have murdered their 'mother,' spend most of the book wondering which one did it.  Detection nil, entertainment ditto."  Once again I beg to differ with this B&T assessment.)

For my part, I thought the Double Doom had a better puzzle than B&T and Boucher allow, and I also found the characterization and dramatic situation in the novel quite interesting.  I think the accusation that the book is "deplorable" is absurd. What is deplorable, one might argue, is the implication that one ought not write about "mentally deficient" characters in a detective novel.

Double Doom gets its title from the dual deaths of twins Hugh and Hilary St. John Strongitharm, gentlemen siblings of Marsden House, in the village of Farthing-on-Hone.  When the novel opens Hilary Strongitharm has died unexpectedly in hospital, while Hugh has only just expired from exposure to deadly fumes in the family's greenhouse.  What the twin deaths disturbingly have in common is that they were in fact mortal exits precipitated by malign human agency.

Double Doom is basically a country house and village mystery (though where you have a Josephine Bell book there usually will be, as here, a prominent place for a hospital and its personnel as well). As such, I found Double Doom an excellent example of the subgenre from the 1950s, when country house tales were becoming rather  thinner on the ground, so to speak.  The postwar years were not a great era for country houses in fact, and English crime fiction, once the glorifier of the country house, reflected the times.

Since the late world war the genteel Strongitharm brothers--born, like the author, shortly before the turn of the century--basically had just amiably pottered around at Marsden House, where they lived off their inherited income with their blind octogenarian stepmother and her late-in-life daughter, Joyce, the aforementioned 38-year-old with the mind of a 12-year-old.  Then there are old Mrs. Strongitharm's redoubtable personal maid, Mabel; two dailies, a cook and a housemaid, from the village; and Mrs. Stringer, who comes in three days a week to do the "rough." Nary a butler in sight!

There is also Mrs. Strongitharm's attractive but brassy village neighbor and reader, Diana Fawcett, called "Mrs.," though a husband is not anywhere in evidence.  Others who come around to Marsden House are the bespectacled Strongitharm family attorney, Lionel Pusey, and kindly Fiona Goddard, wife of Bill Goddard, the doctor who treated Hilary Strongitharm. Fiona effectively functions as the reader's surrogate, though good chunks of the novel are seen instead through the rather hazy perceptions of the nearly middle-aged but perpetually childlike Joyce.

 I think Josephine Bell displays a fine eye for social detail in this milieu, as when she notes Diana Fawcett's lack of ease around 'perfect maid" Mabel, whom she suspects views her as a vulgar and common interloper at Marsden House:

She was always a little afraid of Mabel.  It was totally beyond her power to get behind that perfect facade of willing, respectful service.  She had never in her life employed a well-trained, superior servant, only a succession of half-competent daily helps, who treated her with the easy familiarity of modern social conditions.  Mabel was an anachronism, like her mistress, but none the less formidable on that account.

Doubtlessly B&T found this novel unpleasantly offputting because it is offputting--or at least the characters are.  Josephine Bell had an unnerving tendency to "tell it like it is"--at least, let me emphasize, tell it as she saw it; and this tendency is evident in Double Doom.

What I find striking in Double Doom is how simply vexing most of the characters deem the existence of Joyce--even the ones who actually try to sympathize with her.  Some are frankly only appalled by her, like lawyer Lionel Pusey:

A little wave of disgust swept though him.  All this fuss, all this thought, about the future of that scatty object.  Why didn't they allow them to be put quietly away as children?  'They had no future, anyway.

This is a chilling passage, and I don't mean to suggest that Bell shared the sentiment, but everyone-- even as I wrote above, the more sympathetic people--view Joyce not so much as a person but as a problem.

Bill Goddard, the tale's main doctor, once refers to Joyce offhandedly as "the nit-wit," while another physician, Dr. Matthews, admits, "I feel ashamed of myself for resenting her, but I do resent knowing there is absolutely nothing to be done to help her."  Later on, he reflects of Joyce, in a passage that seems to regret the social mobility which took place in the UK during the late Victorian era and the twentieth century:

If she had been born of humble parents a hundred years ago it [her "mental deficiency"] would have been overlooked.  She would not have been expected to reach a high standard of academic knowledge.  Not even to read and write.  Her parents would not have achieved any of those skills.  She would have learned housework and cooking and the care of children, and she would not have felt inferior, or not often.  We have very exalted standards now.  We do not approve of people who must be termed "simple."  There is no place for the unfortunate Miss Morleys.

When Fiona meets Joyce, she is aghast to discover that Joyce has normal romantic/sexual feelings:

Fiona was speechless, and against her will, against her true feeling of compassion, repelled.  She could accept Miss Morley, plain, thickset, middle-aged, as a child, an innocent child; but as an adolescent, and a knowing one at that, no--it was too much, it was repulsive.  

Then there is this brutally frank exchange that takes place between old Mrs. Strongitharm and Fiona:

"You are very kind to my poor child," murmured Mrs. Strongitharm.

Fiona was honest.

"I keep reminding myself how young she really is, and then it isn't difficult.  For a short time, anyway."  She paused and went on.  "It is usually easy to follow a principle for a short time, isn't it? Keeping emotional prejudice out of the way.  Like the colour bar.  I mean, I think it's wrong, and I don't feel it, if I meet them only for a short time.  We get a lot of different races of foreign doctors as residents at the hospitals, and foreign surgeons coming from time to time to talk to my husband and the other specialists.  Bill brings them out to out house occasionally, and it all goes off very well.  But I know it would be different if there were more at a time, or I lived where they were in a majority.  I should still believe the principle was right, but I might not follow it emotionally.  So if I lived with Miss Morley, or if one of my own children--"

She broke off, afraid that she might have gone too far.

"Yes," sighed Mrs. Strongitharm.  "Time does not make it  any better.  Rather the opposite."

large scale racial tensions emerged in
Fifties Britain

What a bleak passage this is: "Time does not make it any better.  Rather the opposite."  One would love to sympathize with the obviously suffering Mrs. Strongitharm in this novel, but she's such a stiff upper-lipped, emotionally shuttered Englishwoman, it's challenging, I suspect, for the modern reader (perhaps even the Fifties one). 

And, oh! Fiona, darling.  I note the line "Fiona was honest," followed by those casual "thems" and "theys"--damning signifiers of ever-so-nice, educated and progressive Fiona's underlying, and perhaps unconscious, racism.

Does Fiona voice the author's own views here?

Given Bell's portrayals in her first detective novel, Murder in Hospital, which I reviewed here four years ago, she may well be doing so.  Certainly, Fiona, with her doctor husband and three children living contentedly in the country sounds a lot like Josephine Bell, who before her husband's death in an auto collision, it appears, had moved with him and their four children to a village near Guildford, Surrey.  But, on the other hand, Fiona may simply be a realistic character for her time and place.  (There are similar depictions of characters in Christie's Ordeal by Innocence.)

Or, more insidious thought yet, Fiona may be a realistic character for this time too, given recent events in the US and UK.  Should we fault Bell for portraying people as they can be, and all too often are--i.e., flawed and not always moved by the better angels of their natures? 

And Bell is right about one thing: the issues that Joyce presents to people are not easy ones with which to deal, not by a long chalk.  To be sure, Bell is more of a Debbie Downer than a Suzy Sunshine for pointing this out, but sometimes it's Debbie's writing rather than Suzy's which we want (some of us anyway).

Joyce is poignantly aware, after her own manner, of the problem she presents to everyone around her and the concomitant shying away from her emotionally:

"Why are you so kind to me?" she asked, with a certain awkward dignity.  "You can't like me.  No one does.  I'm too different."

How about the mystery, some may be asking--We thought that you, Passing Tramp, author of Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery, cared first and foremost about such things?  Well, guess what, I found the mystery plot an engaging one, with suspense and clues and the whole bag of tricks. One of Bell's better plots indeed.  All this make Double Doom one of my favorite mid-century British detective novels, certainly on par with efforts by some of her better-known compatriots at the time, like Christie and Ngaio Marsh. Strongly Recommended.

Collision: Norman Dyer Ball, Shelagh Clutton-Brock, Alan Clutton-Brock, Josephine Bell and George Orwell

"I suppose you heard about Alan Clutton-Brock's wife?  A bad job, & he has two small kids, too."

"I used to see Alan Clutton-Brock in 1928--just recently his wife was killed in a motor smash."

                                                          --1936 letters from Eric A. Blair, aka George Orwell

On January 7, 1936, some sixty years before a rather more famous fatal car crash, Dr. Norman Dyer Ball (1895-1936), the husband of Dr. Doris Bell (Collier) Ball (future crime novelist Josephine Bell, 1897-1987), died in a hospital in Dartford, Kent from grievous injuries which he had sustained earlier in the day when the car in which he was riding collided with a lorry on Rochester Road, in the southeastern London borough of Bexleyheath.

The other occupant of the horribly mangled car was Shelagh Mabel Stoney (Archer) Clutton-Brock, wife of Alan Clutton-Brock (1904-1976), who in the 1930s was a Times art critic and author of popular art books. Shelagh, who was killed instantly in the collision, was also the daughter of the Anglo-Irish George Johnston Stoney Archer, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Ethel Mary Beauchamp. 

The accident that claimed the lives of Norman Dyer Ball and Sheilah Clutton-Brock took place about seven miles down Rochester Road from the district of Blackheath, where the Clutton-Brocks lived with their two young children, Juliet (1933-2015), the late prominent archaeozoologist, and Francis, in a Georgian house overlooking the Thames, "among beautiful objects and chaos overlaid with dust and cobwebs."  (The Clutton-Brocks were "given to a Bohemian lifestyle," notes author Robert Cumming.) 

Stately! Chastleton House

After Shelagh's death, the Clutton-Brock children were sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe, where Francis died from polio.  I assumed these relations were Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock, the famous Rhodesian liberals and racial reformers (in the Thirties Guy was also a social worker in London's East End), but it appears that Alan had only two brothers and that neither of them was Guy.

Later in 1936 Alan married Barbara Mitchell (1912-2005), a young woman who "combined an enthusiasm for party-going and night-clubs with a dedication to radical politics." From 1954 until Alan's death in 1976 the couple resided together at Chastleton House, a "near-perfect example of early 17th-century architecture" which Alan inherited from a distant cousin.  (I always wanted to have such a distant cousin myself.)  In 1955 Alan was made Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge (a three-year term).  One could say that the mid-century smiled upon him!

For some time after their marriage in London in 1923, Norman Dyer Ball and his wife Doris (aka Josephine Bell) appear to have resided at Warwick Mansions at 37 Pond Street in Hampstead and additionally they are said to have practiced medicine in Greenwich, which is very close to Blackheath, where Alan and Shelagh Clutton-Brock had lived in the Thirties, until Shelagh's death.  However, Norman's will stated that he was a resident of Headley, Hampshire, a village near Guildford, Surrey, where Josephine Bell is stated to have moved with the couple's four children only after the death of her husband.

Whatever the case, it seems likely that Josephine Bell and Alan Clutton-Brock were, like their late spouses had been, acquainted at some point in London.  They shared at least a couple of additional points in common, namely their interest in mystery fiction and a certain connection to a much more noted writer, it must be admitted, than either of them: George Orwell. 

Readers of this blog will know of my interest in Josephine Bell's prolific crime writing, but Alan Clutton-Brock in 1941 contributed a notable mystery to the genre: Murder at Liberty Hall, which I will be blogging about in the next day or so.  It has actually been contended that George Orwell ghosted Murder at Liberty Hall, a claim that seems overdrawn to me, considering, for example, Orwell's professed disdain for the genre.  But it is true that Orwell knew Alan Clutton-Bock, who was an old Eton contemporary of his.

In letters, as quoted above, Orwell noted the tragedy that struck Alan when his wife was killed in the terrible auto collision (without mentioning Normal Ball's presence and demise), and the two men seem to have run into each other from time to time over the years.  In March 1941, according to D. J. Taylor's Orwell: The Life (2003), Orwell wrote the Air Ministry about obtaining a position with the Public Relations Department, a "popular berth for literary men in wartime" that was then being administered by no less than Alan Clutton-Brock. 

A contemporary coworker recalled that Alan, looking "resplendent in his blue squadron-leader's uniform," informally interviewed Orwell at his digs about the position; and he reproduced this amusing scrap of the supposed conversation:

ACB: I can't say anything about the work, of course, but I assure you it's tedious beyond belief.  And the dreadful people you meet!

GO: I wouldn't want a commission, you understand.  I'd be quite happy in the ranks.

ACB: And you have to do six weeks of foot training first--insufferable!  In fact, until it occurred to me to think of the whole thing as a kind of ballet I didn't think I'd survive it!

GO: But I like drills.  I know the Manual by heart.  I need the discipline.

I don't know whether or not this conversation--so reminiscent, on Alan's part, of the comment attributed to the great camp English actor Ernest Thesiger about his service in the Great War ("Oh, my dear!  The noise!  And the people!")--really took place, but, gosh, I sure hope it did!

Unfortunately, Orwell didn't get the job Air Ministry, but he kept busy writing reviews and essays. Some of Alan's Murder at Liberty Hall, which was published in the summer of 1941, may reflect in part the interaction between himself and Orwell that took place around the time of its writing, but see my future post on this.

Josephine Bell's connection to Orwell is more speculative, to be sure, but in 1934-35 Orwell himself lived in Warwick Mansions, in a room in a flat at the top of the building occupied by the owners of Booklovers' Corner, the bookshop on the ground floor where Orwell worked at this time (and which inspired his great, mordant essay "Bookshop Memories," which I quote in Masters of the Humdrum Mystery.)

Were Josephine Bell and her husband neighbors of George Orwell, or had they left Warwick Mansions by this time?

George Orwell worked in the former bookshop on the ground floor.

Two decades later after the horrific collision that claimed the lives of their respective spouses, when Alan Clutton-Brock had become Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge, Josephine Bell published her final David Wintringham mystery (of a dozen, extending back to Murder in Hospital, 1937): The Seeing Eye (1958).  The book concerns the murder of a celebrated art critic.  Coincidence? 

In 1935, not long before Alan's and Josephine's personal tragedies, Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1903-1983), a postwar Slade professor of fine art at Oxford, wrote, with a certain quantity of poison in his pen, to the American art historian Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) that "[Clutton Brock] is a perfect ass in the flesh (also grubby and querulous) but rather good on paper."  We'll see soon how Josephine Bell felt about her fictional (?) art critic in The Seeing Eye!

Death Can Be Dynamite: Trio for Blunt Instruments (1964), by Rex Stout

Anthony Boucher, longtime dean of American crime fiction critics, opined that Rex Stout's best productions in mystery fiction after the Second World War were not the Nero Wolfe novels but rather the Nero Wolfe novellas.  I don't know that I agree with this, in fact I'm pretty certain I don't, but I have to admire Stout's mastery of this shorter length, which many people have considered ideal for the mystery form.(See the long detective tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and R. Austin Freeman.)

Some of the Stout novellas are better than others, to be sure, but the quality level of these works is remarkably high, given the author's fecundity for more than three decades.  Of course he had ample incentive to produce these works, as the serializations were quite lucrative!

Trio for Blunt Instruments [TFBI], the last collection of Nero Wolfe novellas, appeared in 1964, in between the novels Gambit (1962) and The Mother Hunt (1963) and A Right to Die (1964) and The Doorbell Rang (1965), a time when he seemed to be responding the the times by introducing some more overt "youth" references and political content into his works.  (Heads up: a review of The Doorbell Rang is coming this month, I hope.)

The three novellas in TFBI are Kill Now-Pay Later, which was first published in the Saturday Evening Post in December 1961; Murder is Corny, original to the volume and the last novella Stout wrote; and Blood Will Tell, originally published, two years after Kill Now-Pay Later, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

I often hear people dismiss Stout as a plotter--"he's no Agatha Christie," etc.--but a serviceable plot with genuine ratiocination is something I always look for in a work billing itself as a true detective story; and Stout rarely disappoints me in this regard.  He certainly doesn't disappoint in TFBI.

First Instrument: Kill Now-Pay Later

"I must tell you.  To my father you are a great man, the greatest man in the world.  I must tell you."

There are few men who would not to like to be told they are the greatest in the world, and Wolfe isn't one of them....

The first novella in the collection, Kill Now-Pay Later, is very much in Stout's classic mid-century mode, with Wolfe pursuing a case involving some high-toned corporate shenanigans.  The first murderee in the novella is Dennis Ashby, vice-president of Mercer's Bobbins, in charge of sales and promotion. He was quite the whiz kid, and had elevated the company's fortunes in the ever-spinning world of bobbin manufacture, but he was disliked by rather a number of people as well.

Ashby dies from a fall from his tenth-story office, though he had been bashed on the head first, which I suppose adheres to the title of the collection, if only barely.

Next to go is Nero Wolfe's shoe shiner, Pete Vassos, who also shined shoes foe the execs at Mercer's Bobbins; he's dead from a fall from a cliff, a suspiciously similar death to that of Ashby. The easily (mis)led police conclude, however, that Pete killed Ashby (believing that his daughter, Elma Vassos, a secretary at the Bobbin concern, had been "seduced"--their word--by Dennis, who had quite the roving eye), then, with the cops closing in, killed himself.

Elma shows up to hire Wolfe to exonerate her father and find his killer (and incidentally Ashby's), touchingly offering all her father's savings from his shoeshine jobs for Wolfe.  Archie warns her, not to get up her hopes, confiding, "It's December, and his tax bracket is near the top": but Wolfe, whose heart is not entirely stone it seems, agrees to take the case--though he glares malevolently at Archie for bringing this doom upon him:

I had let her in, I admit that, but from his look you might have thought I had killed Ashby and Pete and had seduced her into the bargain.

Admittedly, Wolfe later avows that he took the case to spite his egregious series semi-nemesis, Inspector Cramer, but I think Wolfe is a bit softer than he allows.  An interesting aspect of this story is the way it highlights how a "small" man, a hardworking Greek immigrant who believes in the American Dream, is abused both by the corporate world and the police yet finds an avenger in the man he so admired.  Wolfe himself enjoyed talking about ancient Greece with Vassos, though Wolfe did most of the talking on the subject, as he is wont to do.

"Wolfe's line," explains Archie, "was that a man who had been born in Greece, even though he had left at the age of six, should be familiar with the ancient glories of his native land, and he had been hammering away at Pete for forty months."  Later on he wisecracks, "Pete and I would have known each other a lot better if it hadn't been for ancient Greece."

Wolfe finds the solution to the crimes through some solid deductions.  The mystery is fair play and satisfying.  In essence, Kill Now-Pay Later reads very much like a shortened Nero Wolfe novel (one of the better ones) with some nice characterizations (the Vassos father and daughter and the tipsily pithy widow of Dennis Ashby) and good byplay among the crew of regulars, including Fritz, Wolfe's superb and devoted chef, who at one point has to serve as a sort of reluctant hall monitor, if you will, shepherding suspects in Wolfe's brownstone while Archie has been away:

Mr. Wolfe...said to put them in the office and stay in the hall.  I told him I was making glace de viande, but he said one of them is a murderer.  I want to do my share, you know that, Archie, but I can't make good glace de viande if I have to be watching murderers.

A delightful tale.  Read now--You'll enjoy it both now and later.

Second Instrument: Murder Is Corny

"Mr. Cramer.  Knowing your considerable talents as I do, I am sometimes dumbfounded by your fatuity.  You were so bent on baiting Mr. Goodwin that you completely ignored the point I was at pains to make."  He pointed at the piles on his desk.  "Who picked that corn?  Pfui!"

"By God.  Talk about stubborn egos."  Cramer shook his head.  "That break you got....You know, any normal man, if he got a break like that, coming down just in the nick of time, what any normal man would do, he would go down on his knees and thank God.  Do you know what you'll do?  You'll thank you...."

Murder Is Corny is the second mystery story concerning corn I have reviewed here. (Make sure you check out the first, since reprinted by Coachwhip.)

This one's the story of the farmer's daughter who implicates Archie in a murder and how Archie gets extricated from Inspector Cramer's clutches--by Nero Wolfe, of course, to whom Archie, it musr be conceded, is even more useful than was Pete Vassos.  It's an enjoyable enough tale, though the suspects are forgettable and the farmer and his daughter much less interesting, I would say, than Pete and Elma from Kill Now-Pay Later. The daughter, Susan McLeod, now a New York model (!), is an amiable egoist played for laughs but, like Archie, I got a bit tired of her.

The stand-out part of this book for me concerns, yes, corn.  Farmer Duncan McLeod of Putnam County, New York supplies Wolfe with sixteen just-picked ears of corn every Tuesday from July 20 to October 5; and Wolfe is rather particular about this corn.  Wolfe's following "corny" exchange with Cramer is, I think, one of the best in the series (including novels and novellas):

"Do you eat sweet corn?"

"Yes.  You're stalling."

"No.  Who cooks it?"

"My wife.  I haven't got a Fritz."

"Does she cook it in water?"

"Sure.  Is yours cooked in beer?"

"No.  Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day.  They are turning a superb treat into mere provender.  Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia.  No chef's ingenuity and imagination has ever created a finer dish.  American women should themselves be boiled in water...."

All this superb harumphery leads up to some excellent deductions on Wolfe's part.  This one was televised in the Maury Chaykin-Timothy Hutton series.  The literally explosive climax of the tale is well-suited to television drama. (I'm not giving anything away here, as the image of dynamite mixed with ears of corn has been used on the covers of paperback editions of the book for a half-century now.)

Third Instrument: Blood Will Tell

"She deserved--No, I won't say that.  I believe it, but I won't say it."

"Pfui.  More people saying what they believe would be a great improvement.  Because I often do I am unfit for common intercourse."

In Blood Will Tell, Archie's receipt in the mail of a bloodstained tie leads to another murder case for him and his boss.  Anthony Boucher proclaimed this possibly the finest Nero Wolfe case since the excellent Prisoner's Base (Out Goes She in the UK), from a dozen years earlier. (At least I presume this is the book of which Boucher was thinking.)

Although the case is rather simply solved, what gives this story the resonance to which Anthony Boucher responded so strongly is the character of a man who is desperately, inarticulately in love and very grateful indeed to Archie Goodwin.  The last two lines pack an emotional punch unusual for the series, paying fine tribute to one of the finest characters in American mystery fiction.

Upstairs (1925), by Mrs. Victor Rickard

"There is no real security anywhere.  We pretend that there is.  Things like railway time-tables and regular hours keep up the fiction, but behind that little defence life is waiting in ambush.  Let me tell you this much, Mr. Herrington, I am not afraid of death, but life has moments of stark terror for me."

What sort of woman was Mrs. Chance, he wondered. Did she belong to the type who played elegantly with the dangerous passions of men, and was dismayed when reality insinuated itself into the game, and ended it on the crashing realism of death?

"....he was shown into the big drawing-room, where everything was so quiet, serene and impeccably respectable.  "Crime," he thought to himself, "can happen anywhere, but it is much stranger to think of with this kind of background."

"One reads of  a murder and is told that it was first discovered by the man's wife, but of the real drama and the terrible intensity one realises very little.  Yet these things happen...they actually do happen to people one may have met or seen.  If one reads of them in a book one immediately says 'Melodrama,' but the drama of life goes far beyond anything one has ever read."

All the strange secrecy which surrounds the lives of people living in towns was complete here [in Hamilton Street] as elsewhere in London.   Hardly anyone knew who their next-door neighbours were; they were divided by a gulf as wide as though miles separated them, and to this rule, which included almost everyone in Hamilton Street, there was but one solitary exception.

                                                                          --Upstairs (1925), by Mrs. Victor Rickard

This exception, in Mrs. Victor Rickard's crime novel Upstairs, is Daniel Harrington, a bachelor in his early forties, lately returned, "temporarily crippled," from work on the Gold Coast (then a British African colony, today Ghana). Like Jimmy Stewart's obsessed voyeur character in Rear Window, Daniel spends a lot of his time observing his neighbors, including a beautiful woman who lives across the street, in a house with "outside shutters in which little crescent moons were cut," which "added to the delicate hint of mystery which surrounded her."  Daniel "had seen her several times wearing a close-fitting red hat, which attracted him."

Then there's mysterious Miss Garrett from upstairs:

It tantalised him to feel that he could never see the other people in his own house....The opposite side of the street at least gave the objects of his interest a background.  He could not put a window, a door, a garden, or anything whatever, behind the name of Garrett.

Late one night the voyeuristic Daniel espies a a man letting himself into the house opposite and later yet a man and the sometimes red-hatted woman alighting from a chauffeur-driven car and entering the house, the woman seemingly not desirous of having the man accompany her. Daniel falls asleep before seeing anyone coming out of the building.  Unbeknownst to him, a ship of mystery has been launched, which will engulf the lives of a goodly number of people on Hamilton Street and elsewhere.

In the next chapter we learn that Sir Hector Montague has not returned to his home in Shelton Gardens from his visit to a certain house in Hamilton Street, outside of which he had left his chauffeur spinning his heels in his car. (Eventually tiring of this, the chauffeur in a show of proletarian spirit returned to Sir Hector's abode alone.)  Just what has happened to Sir Hector?

The sense of urban alienation and anomie that Mrs. Victor (aka Jessie Louisa, or "Louie") Rickard captures at times in Upstairs reminds me of the superb crime novels which Ruth Rendell began publishing some half-century later, like A Demon in My View (1976).  What I'm not reminded so much of is detective novels of the 1920s.

For Upstairs is a crime novel too, with a relatively simple mystery but plenty of melodrama, making it more reminiscent not only of modern crime novels but of Victorian mellers.  Emphasis is laid on the characters impacted by murder more than the mechanics of murder investigation, though there is a Scotland Yard inspector and private detective, floridly named Cosmo Rouselle.  Now, there's a name that needed a mystery series to go with it!

In The Golden Age of Murder, Martin Edwards wonders why Ianthe Jerrold and Louie Rickard were admitted to the Detection Club when what he terms "several more gifted and interesting writers," like Philip Macdonald and Josephine Tey, were not.  Of course readers of this blog will know that I think Ianthe Jerrold's detective novels are rather good ones, though, to be sure, there are only a few of them.  Mrs. Rickard presents a knottier problem, however. 

Whatever we may think of the merits of Upstairs as a crime novel, as a detective novel (and detection supposedly was the raison d'etre of the Detection Club in those days), it's simply not remarkable. Was Mrs. Rickard really a distinguished detective writer in any meaningful sense, and, if not, why was she invited to become a charter member of the Detection Club?

I think the cases of both Ianthe Jerrold and Louie Rickard, like those of some other early Detection Club members I might name, such as Helen Simpson and Clemence Dane, offer evidence that even in its natal days, the Detection Club was susceptible to the "Great Writer" lure.  One of the reasons Jerrold and Rickard and Simpson and Dane--successful mainstream writers all--were invited into the Detection Club, I posit, was that they had added prestige to the mystery writing genre simply by taking it up for a time and after a fashion.  Even in 1930, mystery writers were sensitive to the charge that theirs was a lesser literary craft, perhaps not true literature at all!

More on Mrs. Rickard's crime fiction coming soon.

"That Mysterious Individual Mrs. Victor Rickard": Jessie Louisa Rickard (1876-1963), Crime Writer?

In the summer of 1939, as Europe sped toward a calamitous conflagration, English mystery writer John Street (aka John Rhode, Miles Burton and Cecil Waye) was undergoing an ordeal of his own: editing the Detection Club anthology known as Detection Medley. (Street chose this title over such doozies as Detective's Ditty-bag and Detection Pie, phlegmatically writing Dorothy L. Sayers of that last precious pair and some others, like Here's to Jack Ketch,"I can't say that I am personally in love with any of them.")

As editor of the collection, Street was tasked with trying to track down all of the current Detection Club members (nearly forty people), seeking from them contributions to the, erm, ditty-bag.  Street had particular trouble locating several members, including the person he dryly termed "that mysterious individual Mrs. Victor Rickard." Just as Mrs. Rickard was to her fellow Detection Club members in the 1930s, she has remained an elusive presence today within the mystery fiction genre, being far better known for her marriage to Victor Rickard and her Great War fiction than for her crime writing.

Jessie Louisa Moore Rickard
1876-1963

Mrs. Victor Rickard was born Jessie Louisa ("Louie") Moore in Dublin, Ireland, in 1876.  She was the daughter of Reverend Canon Courtenay Moore (1840-1922)--a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, enthusiastic cyclist and amateur archaeologist and, during Jessie's youth, rector of Mitchelstown in County Cork (he later became Canon of Cloyne)--and his wife, the native Scottish Jessie Mona Duff, a granddaughter of Garden Duff, 8th Laird of Hatton and master of Hatton Castle.*

*(Canon Moore was not a fortune hunter, for some time before her marriage Jessie's father, Captain Benjamin Duff of the 92nd Gordon Highlanders, had been disinherited by his father, who, in classic terminology, was "dissatisfied with his conduct.")

Hatton Castle was in the news recently when the Duff family put it up for sale after over three centuries of ownership. Some news sources pointedly noted at the time that the family was deeply displeased with the actions of the SNP, or Scottish National Party.

Hatton Castle

Courtenay Moore was, notes John Hayes (in "C. S. Lewis and a Chronicle of the Moores," Irish University Review, 2009), a progressive man for his time in some ways, advocating "change in respect to Irish land tenure...Home Rule, and the fostering of Gaelic, in public lectures and articles."

Moore published two novels, served as vice-president of Royal Society of Antiquaries in Ireland and edited the Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, the Anglican newspaper in Ireland. Rather less progressively, he also opposed his daughter Louie's divorcing of first her husband to marry the Catholic Victor Rickard, and left her out of his will.  (Louie Moore would herself convert to Catholicism in 1925, three years after her father's death.)

The youngest of Courtenay and Jessie Moore's children, Louie Moore had two brothers and a sister (another sister died in infancy), the brothers being Alexander Duff Moore, future Archdeacon of Glendalough, and Courtenay Edward Moore, a civil engineer who married Jane ("Janie") King Askins, daughter of Reverend Canon William James Askins.

CS Lewis

Before their separation in 1907 Edward Moore and his wife Janie had two children, Edward ("Paddy") Francis Courtenay Moore and Maureen ("Daisy") Helen Moore.

Paddy Moore was a roommate of author and theologian C. S. Lewis during the pair's wartime army training at Keble College, Oxford; and at the altogether too young age of 19 he was killed in France during the last year of the Great War.

After the war Lewis lived with Paddy's mother Janie Moore (many Lewis authorities believe Lewis had a sexual relationship with the more than two decades older Janie, who never returned to her husband, Louie Moore's brother, whom she bluntly dubbed as "The Beast") and her daughter, Daisy, a future baronetess (one of only four in British history) through her Duff family lineage.

C. S Lewis, it has been pointed out by scholar John Hayes, shared a markedly similar personal background to the Moores: the Lewises and Moores, he notes, "were Irish, Anglican, markedly clerical, and literary."

Let's move on to the most literary Moore, Jessie Louisa Moore, future crime writer.  In 1901 Louie Moore married Robert Dudley Innes Ackland, but the couple divorced in 1907 (provoking a rift with her father), after Jessie had given birth to a daughter. A lieutenant in the King's Liverpool Regiment in September 1914, Ackland was dismissed, for reasons unknown to me, from the service the next month, rejoining the army as a private in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Whatever his personal faults, he gave his life for his country, becoming one of the last soldiers killed in action at Gallipoli in 1916.

Victor Rickard
1873-1915

Louie Moore next wed Lieutenant-Colonel Victor George Howard Rickard in 1908 and the couple had a son together.  He too would die in action in the First World War, in France in 1915.  Louie married one more time, this time to Tudor Fitzjohn, whom she divorced. In contrast with Louie's first two husbands, he survived the Great War, in which he fought valiantly, passing away a year before Louie at the age of 87.

At his death on May 9, 1915 at the Battle of Aubers Ridge, characterized as an "unmitigated disaster for the British" (in part because of the poor condition of British artillery and ammunition, a fact which precipitated the so-called Shell Crisis of 1915), Lt-Col Victor Rickard was leading an advance out of the trenches by the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, which he had commanded since February 6. 

Fifteen paces from the British lines he was killed instantly by a bullet to the spinal column in his neck. Despite 151 deaths of officers and men, the battalion managed to capture German trenches, the only unit to manage this feat on that day, though they soon were forced to withdraw.

The day before the attack Rickard had halted his men at Rue Du Bois, before a roadside shrine (the altar of a war-shattered family chapel), in order to speak to them about the forthcoming battle; afterward the men received absolution from their pastor, the beloved Father Francis Gleeson, a moment commemorated in a famous painting commissioned by Jessie Moore Rickard, "The Last General Absolution of the Munsters at Rue du Bois," by Italian artist Fortunino Matania.

Last Absolution of the Munsters
Father Gleeson on horseback in foreground
Lt.-Col.Victor Rickard on horseback in background

Widowed and with a daughter and son to support, Louie Rickard, nearly forty years old, turned to her pen to make her way.  She had actually published two novels before the outbreak of the war: Young Mr. Gibbs (1912), a comedy, and Dregs (1914), described as a "psychological" novel.  In 1915 she published The Story of the Munsters, about her husband's battalion, following it with a trio of popular and critically well-received war novels: The Light above the Crossroads (1916), The Fire of Green Boughs (1918) and The House of Courage (1919).  She became a great friend of Hazel, Lady Lavery, an American-born artist and the second wife of celebrated Irish portraitist Sir John Lavery.

Louie's novel A Fool's Errand (1921), introduced crime and adventure elements into her oeuvre, yet it was not until the mid-Twenties, with Upstairs (1925) and Not Sufficient Evidence (1926), the latter drawn from the real life Charles Bravo case, that Louie Rickard really made a splash in crime fiction.  Other novels by her with definite criminous aspects are The Mystery of Vincent Dane (1929, The Baccarat Club in the US), The Dark Stranger (1930), The Empty Villa (1930) and Murder by Night (1936).

Jessie Moore Rickard published at least 26 novels between 1912 and 1936, roughly one a year.  After the publication of Murder by Night, however, Louie's production declined drastically.

On the strength of her small output of crime fiction (excluding Murder by Night), which probably accounted for less than a fifth of her novels, Louie Rickard was invited to become a charter member of the Detection Club: a testament, surely, to the respect her fellow authors (or at least some of them) had for her reputation as a serious writer. 

The crime novels by her that I have read are works more reminiscent of mature Ruth Rendell than, say, Agatha Christie; and I'll have more to say about them this month.

As John Street's letter indicates, Louie Rickard seems to have had little, if anything, to do with the Detection Club in which she had accepted membership.  Like other older Detection Club members in the 1940s, she suffered from increasing infirmity and in 1948 she returned to her native Ireland, settling in Cork.  She died in 1963 and since then seems to have been almost entirely forgotten by posterity, except as a Great War lady novelist and as, as her official author name suggested, the wife of the fallen hero Victor Rickard.

"Not a Blah": Plot It Yourself (1959), by Rex Stout

"There is something about the idea of a very successful author stealing his material from an unsuccessful author that seems to appeal to ordinary people, and juries are made up of ordinary people."

                                --Thomas Dexter, publishing executive, Plot It Yourself (1959)

"....I can't dismiss the possibility that one or more of the supposed victims is a thief and a liar.  'Most writers steal a good thing when they can' is doubtless an--"
"Blah!" Mortimer Oshin exploded.
Wolfe's brows went up.  "That was in quotation marks, Mr. Oshin.  It was said, or written, more than a century ago by Barry Cornwall, the English poet and dramatist.  He wrote Mirandola, a tragedy performed at Covent Garden with Macready and Kemble.  It is doubtless an exaggeration, but it is not a blah.  If there had been then in England a National Association of Authors and Dramatists, Barry Cornwall would have been a member."
                                --Plot It Yourself (1959)

In Plot It Yourself The National Association of Authors and Dramatists, or NAAD, is in a pickle, and has come to Nero Wolfe, Great Detective, to get them out of it.  Several of their more successful members have been hit with plagiarism allegations and are being sued for heavy damages by their accusers.  NAAD, and the accused individual members, insist the claims are fraudulent, but there is, or seems to be, considerable damning evidence against them, in the form of similar manuscripts that were written by the accusers and submitted to the publishers of the later, successful, works.  Did the authors and publishers shelve and then steal this intellectual property, or are they the victims of a clever criminal enterprise?

The more I read of Rex Stout, the more I'm convinced that of all the writers working within the mystery genre it was he who was the greatest chronicler of elite corporate culture in mid-century America--what we might call "Mad Men culture," though I think Stout can be said to have written, with a few exceptions, his best books before the 60s (at least, surely, before Woodstock).  Perhaps this is why academics and literary critics have tended not to be that interested in him, in contrast with enduring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin fans.  He doesn't write so much of dark mean streets, but of scheming corporate cheats.  And I find it fascinating.

As social history and simply as pure entertainment, I don't rank Plot it Yourself as highly as I do And Be a Villain (1948), Stout's delightful and hilarious take on commercial radio and corporate sponsors, but it's still a satisfyingly solid and engrossing entry into the Wolfe canon.  The first half of the novel moves a bit slowly, but in the second half the bodies begin really to pile up, as a ruthless killer seeks to block every one of Nero Wolfe's gambits by mercilessly sacrificing human pawns on the crime chessboard. It's a bit like Game of Thrones even!

Rex Stout named one of his Wolfe novels Gambit and they really do feel like chess games, as Wolfe from his brownstone fastness shrewdly maneuvers to collar a killer and collect his fee.  I've read commentators dismiss Stout as a plotter, but PIY has a good plot, and it's a fair play plot.

Late in the novel Wolfe's legman, Archie, even essentially offers us what is in effect an Ellery Queenian "challenge to the reader," where he tells us that he, Archie, should have seen the solution as his employer has, because the main clue was presented to him, and he assumes the reader has had the sense to see it. (I hadn't!)  This is the definition of fair play.  Frugally clued fair play, to be sure, but still fair play.

Plagiarism--the use of another's words, ideas and work without attribution--is an interesting subject to me, as I have mentioned previously, and Stout treats it much more authoritatively than Josephine Bell would two decades later.  (Had someone ever tried to accuse him of it?  He was certainly a successful author!) 

I enjoyed seeing Wolfe spotting similarities in author's texts by checking for duplicated usages of phrases and other matters of style.  This was what convinced me a few years ago that Anthony Gilbert was the woman who completed Annie Haynes' The Crystal Beads Murder (1930).  I believe this still, even though I have been challenged by the eminent modern crime fiction writer and critic Martin Edwards.  Gilbert really liked the phrase "flotsam and jetsam," I'm just telling you!  I believe Nero Wolfe would agree, and, as Archie says, he's a genius.

see Keble College, Oxford

In PIY Wolfe reviews at length how the phrase "not for nothing" is used repeatedly in the supposedly plagiarized manuscripts, leading Archie to quip, "Not for nothing did you read the stories."  This is main reason why, in the eyes of most fans, the Wolfe canon has endured: Archie and Nero and their wonderful, witty banter. 

Without that (and Archie's narration) PIY would be a solid enough plotted example of a mid-century American mystery, but it wouldn't be nearly as memorable as a novel, even with the asides about plagiarism.  With Archie and Nero it is memorable indeed. 

There's also a splendid burn Wolfe blasts Inspector Cramer with, but I'll leave you to spot it yourself, if you will (if you haven't read the book already).  As much as I dislike Wolfe's self-centered eccentricities sometimes, the perpetually blustering, stogie-chomping Inspector Cramer is vastly more objectionable and I always enjoy seeing Wolfe (and Archie, though his victim seems more often to be Sergeant Purley) score off him.

Coming soon on the subject of plagiarism, possibly the most egregious example of it in the history of mystery publishing.  And it happened at the height of the Golden Age of detective fiction!  Stay tuned, I shall blog it myself.