Carr Talk: Four Capsule Carr Reviews

This fashionably surrealistic 1940s cover
captures some of the eerie nature
of the novel

 The Reader Is Warned (1939)

John Dickson Carr's The Reader Is Warned is graced by exceptional impossibility and the marvelously sinister idea of "teleforce."

A mysterious psychic named Herman Pennik pronounces that one of the people at a country house party gathering will die at a certain time; and, sure enough, this person dies at that time.  No indication of the man's cause of death can be found.  Pennik insists that he accomplished the death by means of a psychic power he calls teleforce.

The next day the dead man's widow denounces Pennik as a charlatan and he, nettled, tells her that she too will die, also by means of teleforce.  And, sure enough, she dies. How she came to die is yet another mystery.

Is teleforce for real?!!  Sir Henry Merrivale is on it!

Most of us, I imagine, can think of thrillers with outlandish premises like this one that ultimately disappoint, but amazingly John Dickson Carr, the old maestro, comes up with a plausible (well, by Golden Age standards, anyway) and fairly-clued explanation for all the outre events.

The resolution, which involves a rather melodramatic and implausible trap and a quite incredibly garrulous killer, is the main weakness of the tale, I think.  But the teleforce idea around which the novel is structured is a brilliant, bravura device and the last lines of the novel are unusually thoughtful for Carr (if perhaps a bit optimistic--one thinks of the advent of atomic weaponry).

As mentioned in my previous blog post, the murder method in Warned is quite similar to one that appears in a John Street novel from the same year, 1939.  Whether Carr discussed with Street this murder method, the exuberant narrative obviously is all John Dickson Carr.  The Reader Is Warned is one of Carr's most brilliantly constructed and engagingly told detective novels.

An attractive Hamish Hamilton reprint edition
illustrating the inadvisability of hanging weapons
over fireplaces in haunted country houses

The Man Who Could Not Shudder (1940)

I wrote first-rate! in my paperback copy of The Man Who Could Not Shudder back in 1993 (nearly twenty years ago!), when as a graduate student I was first buying Carr in all those nice IPL, Harper and Zebra editions that were still readily available in those days.  On re-reading Shudder I found nothing to make me change my original opinion.

This is the one involving the miracle problem at, yes, yet another country house party gathering of a guest who is shot in the study of the house by a gun that seemingly moves of its own volition.

Oh yes, the house is haunted.

There are strange stories of the ankle-grabbing ghost of a former owner of the house who died in 1820 and, from a hundred years later, of a chandelier-swinging, octogenarian butler who died when the chandelier crashed down on him.

Though Shudder is a haunted house tale, Carr does not lay on the Gothic trappings thickly this time.  The novel's house to the contrary is a very modern haunted house indeed, convincingly set in the late 1930s, and the characters act like real, normal, 1930s people (barring some jealous behavior on the part of the narrator's girlfriend).

A couple of the characters, including the egoistic current owner of the house and one of the female guests, the highly desired wife of the murder victim, are very well done (concerning the latter there is some discussion about sex that is pretty frank for the period).

Dr. Fell is on hand in this one, and though I sometimes find his mannerisms irritating I didn't here.  Inspector Elliot appears too--Shudder is a prequel to his later appearances in The Crooked Hinge and The Black Spectacles.

The house in Kent where John Street and John Carr
devised their Fatal Descent.
Originally the area around the house was wooded,
hence the name, The Orchards

Shudder is one of Carr's more John Streetish tales in its murder mechanics.  It also takes place on John Street's stamping ground--coastal, southern England--in a Tudor mansion that resembles John Street's Kentish house, The Orchards, where Carr and Street in the late 1930s collaborated in writing the detective  novel Fatal Descent. As with The Reader Is Warned, I could see Street and Carr discussing plot points of The Man Who Could Not Shudder over pints at the local pub in the little village where Street and his companion Eileen Waller lived.

It's also worth noting, perhaps, that the 1943 John Street novel (published under the pseudonym John Rhode) Men Die at Cyprus Lodge involves a haunted house and some other bits similar to those found in Shudder, though the plot turns out quite differently.

The murder method in Shudder is, as usual with Carr, deftly clued; and there is the bonus as well of a fantastic triple twist solution.  The readers who clears these successive hurdles in The Man Who Could Not Shudder is a clever reader indeed.  One action by Fell I thought utterly outrageous, but for me it was explained sufficiently by the end, when we learn how justice has been done.

He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944)

This is the one involving mysterious gassing deaths in a locked and sealed room in the home of a London zoo director and, for good measure, a snake named Patience.  Could murder be involved?! Oh, come now, surely we don't have to ask.

Sir Henry Merrivale, who appears in the first few pages, is on hand to solve the crime, along with Inspector Masters, who does very little, and a pair of rival magicians, one male and one female, who provide us with the doubtful joy of observing their constant bickering over silly matters.

I found the obligatory bickering male-female couple easier to take here because they are, literally, theatrical people (and the man actually is not that bad).  There are no other memorable characters outside of a splendidly misanthropic zoo caretaker, but they are sufficiently portrayed and not irritating (except for a middle-aged woman who is meant to be irritating).

There is some first-rate slapstick humor at Merrivale's expense in the beginning of the tale, and H.M. is in superb form throughout it.  The zoo setting is nicely done, amusing and sinister by turns, and it is effectively melded with a menacing London Blitz.

Near the end something happens which seems absurd, but it is all beautifully explained a few pages later.

Ironically, the weakest part of the book may be the sealed room problem, the explanation of which might disappoint some by being...not quite so miraculous.  But it is fairly clued, as is the identity of the murderer.  Though not generally considered one of the great Carrs, He Wouldn't Kill Patience is one of my personal favorites.

He Who Whispers (1946)

Carr's splendidly-titled and much-celebrated eerie tale about the mysterious murder on the top of the ruined tower in prewar France that bedevils a group of people in postwar England is considered by many fans today to be his single best work.  A good case can be made for it.

As Douglas Greene has pointed out, Whispers effectively combines supernatural elements of his earlier work with the male-female sexual and emotional tension of his forties works.  The tale is both thrilling and moving, with greater character interest than is the norm with Carr.

Indeed, the character interest is arguably the strongest element of the book. Concerning the murder puzzle, I would think many readers might identify the culprit of the book's crimes (hey, I did), though the mechanics of the tower murder and the motivation behind it may well prove elusive.  They are quite deftly clued.

Character interest in fact is so strong in Whispers, that I felt the presence of Great Detective Dr. Fell obtruded somewhat, though thankfully he is pretty restrained here.  Still his huffing and puffing, ahemming and harrumphing presence takes me a bit out of an exceptionally serious story.

Other than that, there is nothing I can conceive of criticizing in Whispers.  It's a grand book. The opening section of the novel, where the visiting Professor Rigaud tells the tale of the murder on the tower, and the closing section, which takes place in a powerfully portrayed blitzed London, in particular are bravura narrative set-pieces.

From rooftops
or even murder-haunted tower tops
I would joyfully shout the praises of
He Who Whispers.

The Street-Carr Connection: John Street and John Dickson Carr

The greatest English mystery-writing friend of John Dickson Carr, the Golden Age master of the locked room detective novel, was Major Cecil John Charles Street (known not as Cecil but John Street--like Cecil Day Lewis aka Nicholas Blake Street did not want to be called Cecil either!). In England Carr and his wife Clarice during the 1930s regularly socialized with Street and his companion Eileen Waller (Street was married to though separated from another woman and did not marry Waller until shortly after his first wife's death in 1949).

Both John and Clarice found Street a delightful storyteller, with a vast store of colorful and sometimes racy tales of his army days from earlier in the century (among other things Street was an artillery officer in World War One and later served in military intelligence), while John was quite awed and impressed with Street's pronounced ability to hold immense amounts of beer without showing any outward physical effect (John Carr himself was not so blessed in this regard).

John Street's and John Dickson Carr's collaborative novel Fatal Descent,
written under their pseudonyms John Rhode and Carter Dickson
Note the jacket back flap blurb for the John Rhode novel
The Tower of Evil (The Bloody Tower in England)

At John Street's and Eileen Waller's spacious mock-Tudor residence in Kent, Street and Carr collaborated on the novel Fatal Descent (Drop to His Death in England), Street helping to plot it and Carr writing it.  The novel was published in 1939 under the pseudonyms John Rhode (an obvious pun on John Street) and Carter Dickson and it was quite well-received.  Huge Walpole memorably declared in a review, for example, that men as clever as the two authors should be "running A.R.P. or settling the Palestine question." Street and Carr planned more such collaborations, but unfortunately World War Two disrupted these plans.  

Yes, there's no arm attached to that gun-wielding glove--queer indeed!

This interesting if short-lived collaborative effort between two highly regarded Golden Age detective novelists has been discussed by Douglas Greene in his classic biography of Carr, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles.  Doug also explains how Carr based his short story detective from this period, Colonel March (he of The Department of Queen Complaints), on Major Street.

John Street
model for John Carr's Colonel March
 March is described by Carr as "a large amiable
man (weight seventeen stone) with a speckled
face, an interested blue eye,and a very short pipe
projecting from under a cropped moustache
which might be sandy or grey"

In my own book Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel 1920-1961, I discuss the Street-Carr friendship as well as some additional books by the two men that show hints of mutual influences. Street and Carr both published novels in 1939--the same year their Fatal Descent appeared--that show striking similarities in murder mechanics.

Further, a 1940 Carr novel, the haunted house tale The Man Who Could Not Shudder, besides being highly Street-ish in its murder mechanics, is set in a Tudor mansion probably inspired by Street's house in Kent. Further yet, Street himself in 1943 published his own haunted house tale, Men Die at Cyprus Lodge.

Although today Street is, to be sure, much less read than Carr, the Major shared with his younger friend a positive genius for devising dazzling murder mechanics (however he used the specific locked room plot device only sparingly and was a rather more deliberate writer).

Dazzling murder mechanics were just the sort of thing that Golden Age readers loved, though admittedly  today, as P. D. James has written in her short genre history Talking about Detective Fiction, there is in many quarters a preference for what she calls "credibility" over ingenuity.  But doesn't it seem odd to so downplay the idea of ingenuity in a detective novel, as James does?  Carr, I suspect, would have declared that "credibility" is simply another word for drabness.

If you feel as I do and as Carr and Street did and believe that ingenuity should not be shamefacedly shunted to the narrative periphery but, rather, placed at the very heart of a mystery, seek out some Streets to rub shoulders on your shelves, so to speak, with your Carrs.  They would not disgrace Carr's august company (for an interesting recent piece on John Dickson Carr, see Tipping My Fedora).

Was the setting inspired by John Street's home in Kent, where Street and Carr collaborated
on the novel Fatal Descent?  Certainly the murder means in the novel are quite Street-ish.

More Street-ish murder mechanics are found in this Carr novel
Note the blurb for Street's and Carr's collaborative novel
Drop to his Death (Fatal Descent) on the back flap of the dust jacket

as the skull might indicate (dead men do tell tales)
this 1943 John Street tale concerns a lethally haunted house

More on J. F. W. Hannay and Todd Downing

author J. F. W. Hannay

I heard from Owen Hannay (also of Dallas, Texas) and he provided me with a photograph of his grandfather, author and cotton broker James Frederick Wynne Hannay (1906-1984), the son of writer James Owen Hannay (George A. Birmingham) (1875-1950) and subject of my immediately previous blog post, Death in Dallas.

J. F. W. Hannay published his first mystery novel, The Thirteenth Floor, in his twenty-fifth year, making him one of the more precocious Golden Age mystery writers (John Dickson Carr, also born in 1906, published his first detective novel only a year earlier, in 1930).  Hannay migrated to Dallas at an even younger age (about nineteen), in order to join his elder brother Robert's cotton brokerage business.

Arguably Hannay should be seen as a John Dickson Carr in reverse, a Briton who became an "American" mystery writer; yet only his first crime novel, I believe, is set in the United States.  Of the additional two I have read, one, Gin and Ginger, is set on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, while the other, the inverted tale When the Wicked Man..., takes place in England.

I plan to review this pair of novels over the coming weeks, as well as the detective novel authored by one of Hannay's sisters, Theodosia Frances Wynne, and The Hymn Tune Mystery, the best detective novel by Hannay's eminent father.  Though less well known than the Knoxes (of Ronald Knox fame), the Hannays were a talented British writing family who deserve more of a spotlight (or perhaps I should say bloglight) than they have received in the last sixty odd years.

author James Owen Hannay (George A. Birmingham)
like father, like son

On the Todd Downing front, I got the page proofs for chapter one back today so have hopes of having the book out next month (this will be a less expensive book!).  I will be writing more over this month about this project, which began back in late November after a trip I made to the author's home town.  Some interesting things are happening with it. Here are my previous posts on Todd Downing:

Todd Downing: Murders in Mexico

The Todd Downing House in Atoka, Oklahoma

The Precious Right to Read a Murder Mystery

I hope to be back with a new review post on Sunday-TPT.

Death in Dallas: The Thirteenth Floor (1931), by J. F. W. Hannay

Dallas Cotton Exchange
built 1926, imploded 1994

The book under review in today's piece is a hard-hitting 1931 crime novel with a jaundiced depiction of a trial that is set in the American South.  William Faulkner's Sanctuary, you might think (at least if you haven't read the title to this piece)? But no: It's J. F. W. Hannay's The Thirteenth Floor (there also are--at first blush only--some odd reminders of the John F. Kennedy assassination, in that that later event occurred in Dallas and involved the sixth floor of a building).

James Frederick Wynne Hannay (1906-c. 1985) is, I think it can be fairly said, almost entirely forgotten today as a crime and mystery genre writer--most unjustly so in my view.  He was one of four children of the Reverend James Owen Hannay (1875-1950), a Anglican minister and popular novelist and playwright (his own fictional work, written under the pseudonym George A. Birmingham, included at least two detective novels and several thrillers).  Both James Owen Hannay's two daughters wrote as well.  One, Theodosia Frances Wynne (Hannay) Hickey, in particular became a successful children's writer and also published a mystery for adult readers (look to future posts on James Owen Hannay and Theodosia).

James Owen Hannay (1875-1950), noted Anglo-Irish author
 and father of James Frances Wynne Hannay (1906-c.1985)

With this very British background, how did James Frederick Wynne Hannay come to write a 1931 mystery novel set in Dallas, Texas?  Hannay's elder brother, Robert, had migrated not long after World War One to Dallas, Texas, where he became a prominent cotton broker.  By 1925, he had started his own brokerage firm, Hannay Brothers, with James, who had followed his brother to Texas.  The firm prospered and both men remained in Dallas for the rest of their lives. Many of their descendants still live in the city today.

Though cotton may have been his business, ink--a hereditary stain--was in the blood of James Frederick Wynne Hannay, and in the 1930s he published seven (now hard to find) novels, five of which fall within the confines of the mystery genre.

These latter books are, besides The Thirteenth Floor: Gin and Ginger (1931), a detective story set on a transatlantic ocean liner; When the Wicked Man...(1934), an inverted crime novel; Murder of Me (1937); and Three Alibis (1938).  Why Hannay apparently stopped writing fiction in 1938 at the young age of 32 I do not know, but I think it is to be regretted.  I have read his first three mystery novels and they are uniformly excellent.  None of them were published in the United States, not even his Dallas-set novel (more on this below), which helps explain their rarity and obscurity today.  Whatever the reasons, however, the novels are deserving of at least a modest modern revival.

sinister staircase

Hannay's debut novel, The Thirteenth Floor, takes full advantage of the author's work background as a cotton broker.  The title refers to the thirteenth floor of the Dallas Cotton Exchange building, a sixteen-story structure erected the year after Hannay Brothers was formed (it is pictured above).  The novel's two murders take place in the Exchange, the victims being pushed into the well of the interior staircase on the thirteenth floor of the building and falling horrifically to their deaths.  This image of this sinister staircase, which Hannay vividly describes as a kind of death-trap, lingers in the mind after one has finished the novel.

Hannay is decidedly blunt about both his workplace and his city (though he cloaks Dallas under the name Ensign).  

"The Cotton Exchange Building at the city of Ensign, Texas, viewed from the north, must be one of the ugliest buildings in the world," he pronounces, through his narrator John McCallum.  "....It is a sky-scraper construction reduced to its simplest terms.  In its austere blankness it resembles a gigantic sheet of postage stamps, a post office clerk's nightmare."

As for Dallas, Hannay does not hold back in portraying an unattractive racism found in quarters of the city (and, indeed, Texas).  Perhaps it was this bluntness that led to the book never being published in Hannay's adopted country (the country's loss!).

view of Dallas from the Cotton Exchange Building

The local atmosphere is a great part of the novel's appeal.  One really gets a feel for Dallas at the onset and immediate aftermath of the Great Stock Market Crash, the time in which the novel is set.  Both the Dallas cotton brokerage business and the social life of the city's business elite--its golfing outings and its bootleg liquor drenched parties--are convincingly portrayed by the author.

The first murder victim is John McCallum's uncle, the wealthy, self-made cotton broker George Earle. Besides John McCallum himself, obvious suspects in the eyes of the world include Earle's wife, Maud--who by her own admission married him for his money--and his dissolute son, Alvin, who wants to run off with a winsome waitress, much to his father's displeasure.

Fortunately for the bereaved (?) family, George Earle's death is ruled an accident, but then another person plummets to his death down the well of the staircase from the thirteenth floor, under circumstances that admit of no other explanation but murder.

An arrest and a trial follow, and here we find Hannay at his most strikingly astringent.  Both the prosecuting and defense teams engage in atrocious demagoguery in attempts to get the respective verdicts desired (I won't say the truth, because it is clear neither side is interested in the truth).  In particular, the defense attorney's closing argument is a tour de force of scathingly satirical writing, as the shameless lawyer puts the murder victim, a Jew, on trial, to a large extent for the "crime" of being Jewish (earlier one of the prosecuting attorneys had tried to touch the jury's hearts by pointing out that the murder victim left a wife and children, to which the narrator--disgusted by the demagogic turn the trial has taken--devastatingly comments: "The fact that Jews have wives and families the jury probably regarded merely as regrettable").

One is reminded at times of the infamous and appalling Leo Frank case in Atlanta, which took place less than twenty years previous to Hannay's writing The Thirteenth Floor.  I suspect this similarity was deliberately devised by the author.

Caprock Escarpment

This is a very good genre novel, quite unusual for its time, indeed rather ahead of its time (I should also mention the interesting section describing the pursuit of a witness/possible suspect to Lubbock Texas, across the Caprock Escarpment in an old car under pouring rain).  But how is it as a detective novel?  Well, to be sure it's not the most complex and convoluted Golden Age mystery ever devised, but there is scope for deduction on the part of the reader and the narrative is suspenseful and well-paced (though the ending perhaps is a bit abrupt).  All in all, I would say that The Thirteenth Floor is one of the most interesting and entertaining Golden Age mysteries that I have been privileged to read.

Stock-taking 2: The Humdrums Have Landed and More on Mr. Mechem

Well, my Masters of the 'Humdrum' Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel now is out, from McFarland Press, American publisher of a great deal of mystery genre history.  I actively began this project ten years ago, so it has been a long item coming (I have grown old--well, middle-aged, anyway--in the service of genre history).

It can be purchased directly from McFarland

http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-7024-2

Or amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Humdrum-Mystery-Detective-1920-1961/dp/0786470240

Or amazon.co.uk

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Masters-Humdrum-Mystery-Detective-19201961/dp/0786470240

I also now have a few copies I could sell direct and sign for those who might have difficulty getting it some other way.  There likely are other sellers as well that you can find, if you do an internet search.  It's an expensive book, admittedly, but it's over 300 pages with nearly 40 illustrations.  It's also a larger format book, about 9 by 7 inches. It actually looks more like a coffee table book, though I wish it were hardcover!

I've discussed in previous postings what the book is about, and link to that here:

http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2011/12/masters-of-humdrum-mystery.html

But let me add a bit.  The book is about three Golden Age British detective novelists--Freeman Wills Crofts, Cecil John Charles Street, who wrote primarily as John Rhode and Miles Burton, and Alfred Walter Stewart, who wrote genre fiction as J. J. Connington--and their relationship with and influence on British detective fiction over a forty year period.  I make the case that each of these writers merits a revival in terms of intrinsic quality. More broadly I also argue that mystery genre studies have become too singularly focused on American male hard-boiled authors on the one side of the pond and British "Crime Queens" on the other.  As any connoisseur of the period knows, things were a bit more complicated than that!

The Introduction and Chapter One, which run to forty pages, provide something of a history of the genre between 1920 and 1960, chronicling how attitudes to detective fiction changed and how many modern critics are getting key matters wrong.

I think Masters is a book all lovers of Golden Age mystery fiction would enjoy, though I do wish more of the books by these authors were readily accessible.  Three Connington books were reprinted by Coachwhip and about five Crofts titles have been reprinted by Langtail (Crofts is still pretty easy to find on the used market as well) and I am trying to make headway getting Street's books reprinted.  Small publishers want to reprint his books, it's just a matter of getting Street's literary agency to go along!

On another front, I received a very interesting communication from author Kirke Mechem's son, the composer Kirke Mechem.  Among other things, I learned from him that his father, author of the Wichita detective novel A Frame for Murder, was Kirke Field Mechem, and that he is Kirke Lewis Mechem, so they are not, properly speaking, Senior and Junior. My error!

Originally meant to be titled The Strawstack Murder Case,
but Doubleday "didn't think strawstacks would sell books"

I also learned that Mechem's desired title for his novel was The Strawstack Murder Case, which, as those of you who read my previous blog post will surmise, certainly makes more sense to me as a title.  Mechem's publisher, according to his son Kirke, "didn't think strawstacks would sell books."  How wrong they were is indicated by the success of Dorothy Cameron Disney's Strawstack just three years later.

I think we may be able to get this novel reprinted, will keep you posted.  It would be lovely to bring back a fine but forgotten Golden Age detective novel back for modern-day readers.

Finally, my book on Native American detective novelist Todd Downing (1902-1974) will be out, I hope, in July (and it will be much cheaper than Masters!).  I think I can promise you some good news soon on reprints as well.  I will be reviewing Downing's first detective novel, the fantastically rare Murder on Tour, next week.  And on Thursday comes a review of a rather fine 1931 crime novel set in...Dallas, Texas. Yes, long before someone shot J.R., there was foul play in Dallas!  See you soon, I hope--The Passing Tramp.

Whacked in Wichita: A Frame for Murder (1936), by Kirke Mechem

Who gets murdered in Wichita, Kansas in Golden Age detective novels? Well, wealthy oil man Ralph "Lucky" Loundon does for one, in Kirke Field Mechem's A Frame for Murder (1936). Loundon's bludgeoned body is found buried high on a strawstack on the grounds of his hunting lodge, located north of Wichita.

Why isn't this novel called Strawstack, you may ask?  I have no idea (especially since I still don't understand why the book is called A Frame for Murder), but at least this mischance allowed Dorothy Cameron Disney to title her second mystery novel Strawstack three years later, in 1939 (see reviews of her book here and here).

Dorothy Cameron Disney (1903-1992) was a native Oklahoman, Kirke Field Mechem (1889-1985) a native Kansan. Educated at Barnard College, New York, Disney I believe permanently left Oklahoma (despite what one might think, her Strawstack is set in Maryland, not Oklahoma), while Kirke Mechem stayed in Kansas all his life, becoming Executive Director of the Kansas State Historical Society.  He also wrote plays, including the award-winning John Brown (1938), about the controversial Civil War era abolitionist and insurrectionist.  Mechem's son Kirke Lewis Mechem, is a prominent American composer.

Ralph Loundon, the murder victim whose body is found
buried in the strawstack,was a prominent Wichita Oil man

Kirke Field Mechem's only published novel is the mystery under review here today (A Frame for Murder was not his title choice for the book--wise man!).  

Frame is a classical-style thirties detective novel, fairly clued and solidly constructed and benefiting from a unique regional setting for the period that lifts it out of the Golden Age American rut.  As such it merits reading--if you can find a copy (it was published by Doubleday, Doran's Crime Club but is rare today).

In classic tradition there is no shortage of suspects in the matter of Ralph Loundon's murder.

There are business partners, bootleggers, wives, girlfriends, husbands of wives and girlfriends, a mendacious man of the cloth--heck, there's even a monkey (yes, Poe is referenced). Mechem clearly modeled his detective, Steven Steele, after S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance, though Steele is without Vance's insufferable pretensions and downright twittery (if you can even imagine Philo Vance without insufferable pretensions and downright twittery).

Like Vance, Steele comes complete with an adoring Watson, who is constantly assuring us how absolutely wonderful and brilliant in every way Steele is.  However, unlike Van Dine's Watson, Steele's--a Wichita newspaper reporter--exhibits some personality and even a bit of a spine at times, which is refreshing.

an oil derrick fire, like something out of the film There Will Be Blood,
 lends some excitement to A Frame for Murder

Basically A Frame for Murder offers a straightforward investigation of material clues and alibis.  In some ways I was reminded quite a bit of the great Golden Age English detective novelist Freeman Wills Crofts, though instead of railway schedules in London and Liverpool we are investigating driving distances to Kansas City and El Dorado and speedboat times along the Arkansas River.

times and distances over Kansas highways are matters of some significance
for Great Detective Stephen Steele  in A Frame for Murder

However, Mechem has more writing flair than Crofts.  Steele's Watson tantalizingly keeps mentioning Steele's extraordinary solution of the Grayland Case (this seems to have been one of those nice decaying and degenerate family multiple mansion murders, a la Van Dine's The Greene Murder Case), so that I was absolutely dying to know just what the heck happened in that case!

One imagines this could have been the Grayland mansion, site of Steven Steele's
great murder case; but it also could be the Goodhugh mansion in A Frame for Murder.
It's "a great sprawling pile of brown stone...erected during Whichta's boom days [the 1890s]."
The mansion is situated on the bank of the Arkansas River, a fact of significance in the story.

Additionally, one of Mechem's suspects, the radio minister Reverend Van Roth, is treated with so much disdain by Mechem, in a memorably withering satirical portrait, that I had to wonder whether Van Roth was based on a specific Midwestern clerical radio personality.

There also are numerous Kansas City locations sprinkled throughout the book: an old mansion on the Arkansas River (see above), the Sedgwick County Courthouse, the Wichita Town Club, Riverside Park, the Cannonball Highway, the Union Station, the Harvey House lunch room and the White Castle hamburger stand. As a lover of local color in mysteries I found all this quite interesting.

Can you imagine Philo Vance and his adoring Van discussing, say, The Scarab Murder Case
 over hamburgers at a White Castle?  Well, Steven Steele and his Wichita Watson do!
The White Castle hamburger restaurant chain was founded in Wichita in 1921.

But my very favorite bit occurred near the beginning of the novel, when Steele expresses his disgust with his new-found fame in pulp fiction (rather like Sherlock Holmes in the new British television series). Opportunistic publishers have fictionalized the real life Stephen Steele as "Vincent Veale" and all their accounts have ignored Steele's impressive feats of ratiocination in favor of fantastically imagined blood-and-guts exploits.

The particular account that Steele is reading, with much disgust, is called The Slaughterhouse Mystery.  "Readers nowadays don't want reasoning mixed with their detection," complains the outraged Steele.  "Action and gore--that's what they crave." Writing in 1936, Kirke Mechem undoubtedly had caught a Culturally Significant Trend in crime writing.

Wichita's Union Station (1914), where a murder suspect is apprehended by the police,
while s/he is dining at the Harvey House lunchroom

Regrettably Mechem was never to publish another account of Stephen Steele's brilliant ratiocinative feats.  But you can enjoy A Frame for Murder at least, if you can detect yourself a copy!  Maybe with luck it will be reprinted in the not so distant future.

Note: the black and white photos appearing in this piece are from the impressive repository wichita photo archives.

By the Light of the Television 2: Intruder in the Dust (1949)

Despite being one of the most highly-acclaimed American novelists, William Faulkner generally never saw his films translated to film with much success.  The Long Hot Summer (1958) , The Sound and the Fury (1959) and Sanctuary (1961) seem like rather standard southern soapers, failing to capture to singular intensity and brilliance of their source material  I understand The Tarnished Angels, the 1957 film version of Faulkner's mediocre novel Pylon, is supposed to be rather good; and The Story of Temple Drake, the original film version of Faulkner's crime novel Sanctuary, sounds interesting (it was pre-code and considered quite scandalous at the time, like the book).

However the best film made from a Faulkner novel generally is considered to be the 1949 mystery Intruder in the Dust, directed by Clarence Brown.  Chances are viewers won't find Dust as memorable as the beloved To Kill a Mockingbird (based on the Harper Lee novel), with which which Dust has more than a few points in common.  But it is well worth watching in its own right.

Intruder in the Dust was published by Faulkner after a six year drought during which he worked in Hollywood on scriptwriting.  For central characters he turned to lawyer Gavin Stevens and his young nephew "Chick" Mallison, character who appeared in a series of short mystery stories and a novella he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s (these would appear in in 1949 in Knight's Gambit, already reviewed here).  Like these works, Intruder in the Dust is a mystery tale, though Faulkner has much more in mind than "mere" mystery-mongering. In Dust Faulkner grapples with the racial problems then coming to a head in the United States by making the person arrested for the novel's murder an innocent black man threatened with lynching at the hands of a white mob.

By 1949, Hollywood was willing to explore issues like racism and anti-Semitism, though often in ways that seems timid and tepid today.  Intruder in the Dust holds up well today, however.  It's shot in the stark, realistic, quasi-documentary style popular in the late 40s and early 1950s, on location in Oxford, Mississippi itself, Faulkner's own stamping ground. Brown got Oxford locals for the extras in the film's amazing crowd scenes, lending  a lot of authenticity to the film (I had to wonder whether these people were aware they were playing a bunch of horrid yokels, basically, come to watch a lynching).

The Lyric Theater in Oxford, Mississippi
Originally a livery stable owned by William Faulkner's family,it was converted into a theater in the 1920s.
Faulkner walked over from his home, Rowan Oak, to watch Intruder in the Dust at its premiere.

The black man arrested for the murder of a white man (shot in the back) is Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez), a local landowner resented by many whites for his independent ways (he himself is an offspring of a local planter and a black woman).  Through a quirk of fate he has a friendship of sorts with young Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman), who gets his uncle, lawyer Gavin Stevens (David Brian), involved in defending him, though Stevens himself believes Beauchamp is guilty of the foul deed.  It falls to Chick, along with an eccentric old southern lady, Miss Eunice Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson) (surely Faulkner's nod of sorts to Miss Havisham of Great Expectations?) and Aleck (Elzie Emanuel), the son of the Mallison family's cook, to make something happen--which they do by, following a hint from Beauchamp, digging up the grave of the murder victim. They find it empty!

This discovery gives the wily but not essentially mean-hearted sheriff (Will Geer) a chance to investigate the crime to find the true culprit, but in the meantime a lynch mob being formed by the victim's brother  has to be stymied....

Director Clarence Brown, a six-time Oscar nominee, apparently brought a lot of passion to this film (the son of a Massachusetts cotton mill operator who moved to Atlanta with his family at the turn of the century, Brown as a teenager witnessed the horrific Atlanta Race Riot of 1906) and it shows.  There are some memorable images: the line of men staring at Beauchamp as he's taken from the police car to the prison; Beauchamp's eye looking out of the prison door; the carnival-like atmosphere as spectators gather to watch the expected lynch mob descend.

This latter scene in particular reminded me a great deal of Billy Wilder's film Ace in the Hole, which would follow Dust a couple years later.  It is quite striking in its own right.  You won't forget the woman with the baby marching up to the lynch mob ringleader and impatiently asking when's it all going to start, or the man literally drooling in anticipation of the event, or the ringleader filling his tank of gas at the station and marching with it across the courthouse square to the jail.  The grave-digging scene also is well-filmed and suspenseful.

I think To Kill a Mockingbird is so much better-remembered than Dust today is in part due to the characters.  People are rightly drawn to the characters in Mockingbird, particularly Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch (another country lawyer) and his two young children.  In Dust Brian's Gavin Stevens and Jarman's Chick don't have the same charm.  Brian in particular seems miscast, rather cold and hectoring (he seems like he has stepped out of an urban film noir).

Juano Hernandez

The characters that really stood out for me are Juano Hernandez's Lucas Beauchamp (Hernandez totally nails this essential role) and Elizabeth Patterson's Miss Habersham (Will Geer's sherriff also has great authenticity, as does Nub Gowrie, the one-armed father of the murder victim, played by Porter Hall, in quite a different turn for him).  Elizabeth Patterson, who played Miss Habersham, is best known today as I Love Lucy's spinster Miss Trumble, but she's really good here (no wonder she's authentic too: she was born in 1874 in Savannah, Tennessee, the daughter of a Civil War veteran and judge).

Though the novel Intruder in the Dust is controversial today because in it Faulkner through his mouthpiece Gavin Stevens insists that the South must be left alone to solve its race problem itself (these sentiments are not to be found in the film), it should be remembered that Faulkner himself in his own community was considered by many to be objectionably liberal (a "n-word lover" was the term some used to describe him).  Both as a novel and a film Intruder in the Dust is an historically important example of social consciousnesses art.

But how Dust, you may ask, as a mystery film?  Well, it's certainly not Agatha Christie.  There is a bit of genuine ratiocination concerning the missing corpse, but that's about it.
There's pretty much only one other plausible suspect in the crime (the identity of this person is kept secret in classic fashion until dramatically revealed near the end of the film).  Christie would have thrown in about six other suspects for good measure!  Still, I think mystery readers--as well as those benighted souls who don't read them--should enjoy this well-made film, which hasn't gathered dust much at all in the last sixty-three years.