Just Deserts 2: Absent in the Spring (1944), by Agatha Christie (Mary Westmacott)

Absent in the Spring is the third of Agatha Christie's "mainstream" novels written under her Mary Westmacott pseudonym.  I find Spring the most fascinating of Christie's Westmacott novels, because in it Christie successfully employs her exquisite mystery plotting technique to structure what is a psychological "straight novel," rather than a murder mystery.

Though published in 1944, Absent in the Spring takes place in the 1930s, a few years before the outbreak of World War Two (in the later part of the novel there is some discussion of Hitler's rise to power and his threat to European peace).

Joan Scuddamore is a seemingly invincibly smug and complacent provincial English matron in her late forties with a lawyer husband and three adult children ("Oh, no, my dear.  I'm a very busy woman in my small way.  I'm the Secretary of the Country Gardens Association--And I'm on the Committee of our local Hospital.  And there's the Institute--and the Guides.  And I take quite an active part in politics.").

Joan is returning from a visit to her daughter Barbara, who married young and moved out to Iraq.  The novel opens with Joan encountering an old school friend, Blanche Haggard.  Joan is very superior when meeting the much married and rather Bohemian Blanche, who has moved down in the world.

 In a bit of foreshadowing, Blanche speculates on what Joan would do were she, Joan, to be stranded at a railway Rest House on her way back through western Iraq (the weather is unpromising):

"If you'd nothing to think about but yourself for days and days I wonder what you'd find out about yourself--"
Joan looked skeptical and faintly amused.
"Would one find out anything one didn't know before?"
Blanche said slowly:
"I think one might..."  She gave a sudden shiver.  "I shouldn't like to try it."

Well, sure enough, Joan gets stranded and she finds that being alone with her own thoughts for days on end proves an intensely uncomfortable ordeal (she quickly runs out of reading material, having brought only three books with her--one a detective novel, though she doesn't much like them).

The bulk of the book is devoted to Joan's enforced stay at the Rest House and to her thoughts about her relationships with the people in her life, past and present.  She unwillingly starts to reinterpret earlier events and to see them in new, unpleasing, ways.

This part of the book is rather like one of Christie's detective novels, in that past conversational exchanges start to take on new meanings when looked at in a different way.  There is a puzzle here (complete with psychological red herrings), but it's a puzzle of personality, not crime.

In Absent in the Spring
 there's no oasis in a mental wasteland

I was reminded of the "Dark Christie" mysteries of this period, the tales that dare to make us uncomfortable and that refrain from offering neat and tidy--or "cozy"--resolutions (as Christie's books so often are stated--over-sweepingly--to do).

And Then There Were None (1939), Five Little Pigs/Murder in Retrospect (1943), The Hollow/Murder after Hours (1946), Curtain (1940s): Absent in the Spring dovetails neatly with all these novels.

Three of the above novels are Hercule Poirot tales. Though Poirot is absent from Absent in the Spring, Spring shares some affinity with Five Little Pigs (retrospective analysis) and And Then There Were None (the idea of being trapped in an isolated location and compelled to engage in unpleasant self-analysis).

Additionally, the character of Joan Scuddamore's elder daughter Averil is very similar to Arthur Hastings' daughter Judith in Curtain (even the central story line concerning the two characters is similar). The resemblance is so close, indeed, that it's hard not to see Curtain having been written around the same time.

People who have accepted the stereotype of Agatha Christie as a complacent and commonplace thinker would be surprised, I think, at some of the attitudes expressed in Absent from the Spring.  The author in the book argues against always doing the safe and "sensible" things in life.   

Absent from the Spring is a fascinating novel, in its own way as much of a compulsive page turner as Christie's best mystery tales.  In the New York Herald Tribune it was praised at the time by Rose Feld as "a gem of a psychological portrait" and I think this is true.

Just Deserts: The Affair in Death Valley (1940), by Clifford Knight

Clifford Reynolds Knight (1886-1963) authored twenty-four crime novels between 1937 and 1952, beginning with the Dodd, Mead Red Badge prize winning The Affair of the Scarlet Crab and ending with Death and the Little Brother:

Clifford Knight was the son of Wesley Charles Knight, a Houghton, Massachusetts native who as a young man migrated West, where he was employed as a St. Louis-San Francisco Railway station agent in Missouri and Kansas.

Clifford Knight was born in what surely is one of the least populated places to produce a Golden Age detective novelist: Fulton, Kansas (Pop. 163 in 2010).  He moved to Los Angeles, married, worked as a journalist and traveled a good deal in California, Nevada, Arizona, Mexico and the Pacific, which explains what was considered the most distinctive feature of his mysteries: exotic murder settings.

Characters in the novel stay at Death Valley Junction's famed
Armagosa Hotel and Opera House

Certainly its setting is the most notable element of Clifford Knight's The Affair in Death Valley.  In the novel Knight mentions numerous ghost towns, buildings and natural features of Death Valley, California (a map really would have been nice).

The novel's puzzle plot, which entails three murders and another attempted murder, is highly classical, if on the far-fetched side. 

These are the positive features of this novel.  Less positive features are the cardboard characters and snail's pace of the narrative.  And I say this is a fan of the British "Humdrums"!  But, truth be told, John Street, Freeman Wills Crofts and J. J. Connington typically have better pacing in their novels than one finds in Knight's tale.  It helps too, I think, that they usually offer denser material clueing, something on which Knight rather skimps.

Knight's amateur detective, California English professor Huntoon Rogers, is one of the least memorable amateur detectives I have ever encountered in my reading.  Again, Street, Crofts and Connington all created more interesting sleuths.  Some amateur detectives may have too much personality (Philo Vance), but "Hunt" Rogers has too little.

Despite the drab writing, there is this gem: "Let's go and see if we can find the bullet....Since it isn't in Dick's skull, it ought to be in the room somewhere."  This has an ingenuous ring of Carolyn Wells to me.

a deadly climate

Admittedly, it took me several days to finish The Affair in Death Valley.  One could fairly say it is put-downable.  On the other hand, it's a solid enough classical mystery story, and if you enjoy that kind of thing, as I do, you should enjoy this one too.

First editions of Clifford Knight's books tend to be scarce and highly collectible (the exceptional dust jacket art on many of the titles surely doesn't hurt).  Happy hunting!

Note: I hope you forgive the pun in the title to this piece, "Just Deserts," because it's going to be the title as well of the next piece, a review of Agatha Christie's Mary Westmacott novel Absent in the Spring (1944).  There's more affinity between this mainstream novel and Christie's crime fiction than people might think.--TPT.

Stock-taking 3: Mystery Scene and News on Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012)

Before I try to get in "Friday's forgotten book" (by Clifford Knight this time), I thought I would post a bit of news on my most recent work, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961 (McFarland, 2012).  Yes, it's been mentioned here once or twice.

Masters--I prefer this as my shorthand title for the book to Humdrum!--has been reviewed by Jon L. Breen in the most recent issue of Mystery Scene.  Now, readers of this blog will know how I, like so many others, hold Jon Breen in great esteem (see my review of his essay collection A Shot Rang Out) so his review of Masters was especially pleasing to me.

"This is an important book of detective fiction history and criticism," Jon Breen writes, "with all the scholarly care and rigor of a first-rate academic study combined with an enjoyable literary style....This should be a certain Edgar nominee."  This is very gratifying to read, especially when it concerns a project that took such a sizable chunk of my life to complete!

Jon Breen also favorably reviews Max Allan Collins' and James L. Traylor's Mickey Spillane on Screen: A Complete Study of the Television and Film Appearances (McFarland).  This sounds like an interesting book, though I have to admit that I have never been a Mike Hammer fan (I love the film Kiss Me Deadly, however).

There's lots of interest in this issue, but my personal highlight was Martin Edwards' "Robert Barnard: A Talent to Entertain."  I was surprised to learn in this piece that Robert Barnard plans to retire from "regular professional writing," according to Martin Edwards.  Edwards' piece is fine tribute to a man who has carried the torch of the classical English mystery since the mid-1970s, when Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh were still with us.  He has published nearly fifty mystery novels and short story collections.

I also was pleased to see Bill Crider mention, in his review of short story collections, a new volume of very old Sax Rohmer short stories with supernatural elements, from Black Dog Books.  I'm so glad to see presses devoted to golden-oldies. May others follow suit!

Masters has now made it into fifty-three libraries.  I hope to list them by region soon.  Most of them are in the United States, but there also are six in Canada, as well as one in the Netherlands and one in Germany.  I do hope Masters makes it into some British libraries, considering that it's about the British detective novel--eh, what?

Half Full: Halfway House (1936), by Ellery Queen

[A]ny fashioner of crime tales these days will tell you that the modern public--at least, that part of the public which seeks its escape in detective fiction--is a very good guesser indeed; much too good, if you ask me.  In fact, from the letters hurled at my poor head it would appear that the reader who is fooled is the exception rather than the rule.

But....Guessing isn't fair....

For many years I have been a voice crying in the wilderness--I trust not vainly--beseeching readers to repress heroically their guessing proclivities and play the game scientifically.  It's harder, but immeasurably more fun....

--Ellery Queen, "Challenge to the Reader," Halfway House (1936)

The tenth Ellery Queen detective novel published since 1929 (fourteenth if you count the "Barnaby Ross" tales), Halfway House is classified as the first of "Period Two" Ellery Queen, where the author began moving away from the ultra-formal, extremely dense clue structure of his period one mysteries.

I think one might argue that Queen began this transition in The Spanish Cape Mystery, but one can certainly see in Halfway House an attempt by the author to focus more on emotional situations and less on pure puzzle plotting.  While there is some typically ingenious EQ clueing here, there also is emotional melodrama that is less successful, in my view.  If the world divides into people who prefer different periods of Ellery Queen writing (there are four, according to EQ expert Francis M. Nevins), put me down as a Period One man.

Period Two Queen

Halfway House concerns a man stabbed to death at a dilapidated dwelling in Trenton, New Jersey (the title of a Hulbert Footner mystery, Ramshackle House also occurred to me).

It turns out that the dead man was implicated in the lives of two women: Lucy Wilson, purehearted middle-class Philadelphian, and Jessica Gimball, rich-bitchy New York society matron.

Ellery Queen, amateur detective extraordinaire, is friends with Lucy, wife of the dead man, and her brother, upright attorney Bill Angell, and on hand in Trenton when Bill discovers his brother-in-law's body at the place dubbed "Halfway House" (because of its location between New York City and Philadelphia).

Naturally Ellery is allowed in on the case by the local police (he's solved some murders before, don't you know).

Lots of material clues are found on the scene, including a plate of burnt matches (in the foreward to the book it's stated that the novel could have been called The Swedish Match Mystery, in keeping with EQ's previous four word "nationality" titles, and this is certainly true).  Give some thought to those matches!

English paperback edition

The murder victim helpfully made a dying declaration to Bill: "Woman.  Veil.  Heavy veil--face.  Couldn't see.  Knifed me."  This declaration and later discoveries get Bill's sister Lucy arrested for the murder, much to the chagrin of Bill and his chum Ellery.

The third section of the book depicts Lucy's trial. Despite Bill's able defense, she is found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. But don't worry, folks, it's Ellery Queen to the rescue!

I found Halfway House an enjoyable detective novel.  I particularly liked the lengthy final section, where we get to follow Ellery's deductions from the various clues (especially those matches!).

However, I do have a few criticisms of the book.

First, Bill Angell falls in love at first sight with Andrea Gimball, daughter of Jessica Gimball, and immediately covers up (literally) evidence that implicates Andrea in the crime, even though he's fearful (justifiably) that his sister, whom he adores, may be arrested for murder.  We get this love at first sight stuff sometimes in John Dickson Carr too and I invariably find it tiresome, because it always seems to give the young man a license to behave like a total ass.  But then maybe I'm just a middle-aged sourpuss!

Second, it becomes clear that Andrea is lying about something that could impact the case and when we finally find out her motivation for lying it seems flimsy to me; yet both Ellery and Bill immediately let Andrea off the hook for her perfidy, on rather sexist assumptions, I think (maybe it was the sight of Andrea in her "pink and lacy" brassiere).

Don't trifle with Society, darling.

Third, with Dickens in mind it's rather grandiosely stated in the foreward that the novel could have been called A Tale of Three Cities.  Queen seems to have some sort of moral schematic in mind here.

Andrea excepted (though see my caveat above), the Gimball crowd is presented as an unrelievedly revolting bunch, prone to making the most asininely oblivious public comments about how contemptible middle class people are.  It seems a bit overdone.

Granted some rich people may well have felt this way about "the masses," but they might also have had the sense, in the fourth year of the Roosevelt presidency, to not be quite so "in your face" about it, at least amid a police investigation and public scandal.

I'm reminded of the great British detective novelist Henry Wade (Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher), himself a wealthy baronet, who was able to write more subtly yet for that reason more convincingly and thus damningly of the moral failures of his class.  Still, it's interesting to see such material, when non-hard-boiled mysteries from the 1930s often are declared "conservative."  As Jon L. Breen has noted, it ain't necessarily so.

Henry Street Settlement

Fortunately, Ellery--just a salt of the earth sort of gent at heart, really--awakens Andrea's dormant social consciousness by taking her to see the Clifford Odets play Waiting for Lefty and "that settlement house on Henry Street" (oh, he gives her a copy of William Faulkner's Pylon too).  Soon Andrea is Doing the Right Thing and spilling about what she really saw at Halfway House on the day of the murder.  This gives Ellery his break!

All this is to say that Queen spends more time that usual in Period One on characterization and emotional content, with rather mixed results in my view.  At times it feels like one is reading a Mignon Eberhart novel. The writing of this sort of book was probably best left to Mignon Eberhart, who had down to a T the hyper-emotional style that it requires.

Yet a lot of the puzzle plot itself is quite clever, to be sure.  Though even here I have a few qualms. Besides points raised by Mike Nevins in his Royal Bloodline (which are kind of spoilerish), I might add that one point seemed to me so darned glaringly obvious I got a bit irked when none of the characters (except Ellery, who kept it to himself of course) ever thought of it.  Also, Lucy unbelievably forgets to mention a fact that is central to her case, which is the main reason she gets convicted. 

Still Halfway House stands, I think, as an impressive example of the Golden Age detective novel.  I'd say this glass is at least half full.

The Scarlet Circle (1943), by Jonathan Stagge

October is here and thus I thought I would choose as my Friday book a spooky detective novel: Jonathan Stagge's The Scarlet Circle.

As mentioned previously here, the Jonathan Stagge series of mysteries was the brainchild of those literary wunderkinds Hugh Wheeler and Richard Wilson Webb, aka Q. Patrick and Patrick Quentin.

This great Zaccone dust jacket illustration of an open grave in a dark churchyard suggests the macabre quality to The Scarlet Circle:

The Scarlet Circle benefits tremendously from its creepy setting: Cape Talisman, one of those crumbling (literally) H. P. Lovecraftian oceanside New England villages where seemingly everyone is sitting around waiting for Yog-Sothoth or some such creature to appear from another dimension.

Surprisingly there is to be found in this dying village a place of lodging: the Talisman Inn.  Equally surprisingly Jonathan Stagge's series detective, middle-aged widower Dr. Westlake, likes to vacation at the Talisman Inn with his daughter Dawn (who debuted in the series with her father seven years earlier at age ten and seems not have aged one month since).

And the Westlakes' favorite time to come visit is in September, after Labor Day, when the inn is nearly empty and the wind is apt to squall....

This year murder is added to the list of local attractions.  Three of them actually!  It seems that there is a serial murderer afoot, strangling women, laying their bodies out artistically under the eerie light of red Chinese lanterns and drawing circles with scarlet lipstick around each of their single most prominent moles.  Meanwhile, graves are being dug up in the church cemetery, also by the light of red Chinese lanterns.

How's this for a bizarre set-up?  The Scarlet Circle should be guaranteed to please devotees of John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen and Hake Talbot, to name some of our most admired outre detective novelists.

In The Scarlet Circle the dead don't stay buried

Under the conventions of this sort of tale, Dr. Westlake is invited by the local police (in over their heads of course) to participate in (i.e., take over) their investigation.  He's solved some murder cases before, don't you know.

I suppose that the most original contribution of the Jonathan Stagge novels is the character of Dawn Westlake.  Children aren't too common a feature of Golden Age mysteries.  Dawn seems to be in the book mainly to provide comedy relief, she being one of those irrepressible Tom Sawyeresque hellions you often find in books.  Some may find her irritating (I kind of did), but I must admit that Stagge manages to integrate her into the book's resolution pretty effectively.

The setting is perfect and the characters sufficiently memorable.  Particularly striking is Mr. Usher (hmmm), the unctuous undertaker who seems rather too interested in female corpses.  Then there's Buck Valentine (now there's a name you won't forget!), the terrifically muscled lifeguard at the Talisman Inn ("Standing there in his swimming trunks, he looked like a maiden's dream of Flash Gordon"), who may have been romantically linked to all three murder victims.

There is in fact no shortage of suspects.  Moreover the plot is pleasingly complex and the clueing fair.  The Scarlet Circle is a top-drawer baffler in the classical style, and the best of the Jonathan Stagge books that I have read.

Listed: 100 American Crime Writers (2012), edited by Steven Powell

Here's a brand new reference book in Palgrave Macmillan's Crime Files series: 100 American Crime Writers.  I hope to be able to review it in the future, but it's extremely expensive: $85 on Amazon.com (Gad! And you thought my book was dear!).

On Amazon I looked at excepts from the book, which had fourteen contributors.  Naturally I was curious to see which authors made the cut, so to speak.  And naturally I was especially interested in authors of classical Golden Age detective fiction.

Here they are (all these authors were alive and publishing in the Golden Age, c. 1920-1939, even though Arthur B. Reeve, for example, is considered more pre-GA):

100 crime writers
in under 400 pages

John Dickson Carr
Mignon Eberhart
Erle Stanley Gardner
C. Daly King
Ellery Queen
Arthur B. Reeve
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Rex Stout
S. S. Van Dine
Carolyn Wells

Conveniently, they number to ten (William Faulkner shows up too, though his contribution to genuine mystery/crime genre writing is slight relative to his overall body of work). There are about the same number of hard-boiled/noir writers from the same period (no George Harmon Coxe though).

So what do you think?  Would these be your choices, were you limited to ten?

Exclusively pre-Golden Age, by the way, we have Jacques Futrelle (d. 1912) and Edgar Allan Poe (d. 1849).  Among more recent writers I was glad to see our crime fiction power couples Margaret Millar and Ross Macdonald and Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini.

I also was pleased, incidentally, to see how many of these writers I have written about on this blog:

John Dickson Carr
one of the 100

John Dickson Carr
John Dickson Carr
John Dickson Carr (and John Street)
Mignon Eberhart
Ellery Queen
Mary Roberts Rinehart
William Faulkner
William Faulkner
Ross Macdonald
Bill Pronzini
Bill Pronzini

Not bad for a ten-month-old blog, I think!  There's also my Carolyn Wells pieces on Mystery*File, those were great fun.  Anyway, as is evident from these pieces, I have my own opinions of the GA authors included in 100 American Crime Writers, but what about you?

Rub-a-dub-dub, There's a Dame in My Tub: Murder with Pictures (1935), by George Harmon Coxe

George Harmon Coxe (1901-1984) is one of those 1930s American hard-boiled detective writers who started writing novels in between the appearances of The Thin Man (1934) and The Big Sleep (1939), but he doesn't get much attention, because, well, he's not Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, is he?  But that's a high standard to set, to be sure.

Coxe's first crime novel, Murder with Pictures (which first appeared in 1935, not 1937, as seems to be the date given on the net bibliographies), is certainly not in the league with Hammett and Chandler, yet I found the book interesting, though admittedly more as a social document than a tale of detection.

"Is that your bath brush
or are you just happy to see me?"

Probably what made the greatest impression with Coxe's first novel was the scene where the knock-out blonde, Joyce Archer, bursts into the apartment of our hero, newspaper photographer Kent Murdock, while he is taking a shower.  Demanding that she let him hide in the shower, she barges right in there with him (it's one of those footed tubs with a circular shower curtain).

Gee, just make yourself at home lady!

This blonde had caught Murdock's eye at a party earlier that morning and he's a game fellow anyway, so he plays along, bantering the cops who shortly show up in his place too, as she cowers behind him.

In the fashion of these sort of tales, it seems that Joyce Archer found herself on the murder scene at another apartment (the one where the aforementioned party took place) and naturally she picked up the gun, getting her fingerprints all over it...well, you've heard this one before, right?  I'm pretty sure this happens in every other Mignon Eberhart novel, for example.

Why did Joyce show up at the murder victim's apartment at 4:30 in the morning, you may be asking?  Well, it seems she feared that her brother, wealthy and dissolute man-about-town Howard Archer, was going there to run off with the wife of the murder victim (Mark Redfield, ace defense attorney, by the by).  This is another convention in mysteries of this era: nice girls can always be counted on to get themselves in heaps of trouble on account of their feckless brothers.

Oh, yes, despite her evident propensity to jump in showers with naked newspaper photographers, Joyce is indeed a nice girl.  Blogger John Norris has already reviewed the second Kent Murdock mystery, The Barotique Mystery, in which Kent and Joyce are on their honeymoon, so it won't spoil anything to tell you that they are about to get hitched at the end of Murder with Pictures.

I think back in the 1930s a couple had to get married if they spent any time in a shower together--well, at least when one of them was naked, anyway.

In a Hammett, Chandler or James M. Cain novel, Joyce would be that dreaded thing, a femme fatale, and either shot dead or adorned in bracelets as she's carted off to the paddy wagon, but Coxe's novel is more semi-tough than tough and spares us this sort of unpleasantness.

In fact Murder with Pictures is not so different, it seems to me, from a classical detective novel in its resolution (admittedly the incident is more colorful, in terms of sexual innuendo, gunplay and manly fisticuffs).  Order is rather nicely restored by the end of the tale, with Kent Murdock's estranged current wife, one of those low class calculating chorus girl hussies, effectively bought off, leaving him free to marry good girl Joyce.  Oh, and Kent solves the murder too (all of this is expertly dovetailed by Coxe).

I was engaged less with the mystery than with Murdock's efforts to get everything straightened out satisfactorily.  Murdock likely served as something of a role model for some of Coxe's readers.

We are informed that Murdock had three years of college, where he learned to like books and fine things (he has a copy of Green Mansions in his apartment), and that he's presentable in classy company; yet he's not an effete twit like that rich playboy Howard Archer.  He has a sense of honor that Howard lacks and he knows the value of honest work.  As Joyce says, he's just not like those other, cocktail-swilling society boys she knows, unlike them, he does things.

George Harmon Coxe (1901-1984)

Coxe himself attended college for two years (one year at Purdue and another at Cornell), before trying work at all sorts of places: auto factory, lumber camp, dance orchestra.  Eventually he became a--surprise!--journalist; his hobbies included--surprise!--photography.

We often read how 1930s hard-boiled fiction was ideologically subversive or politically left.  I didn't get the sense of that from Murder with Pictures.  Heck, Coxe even defends Boston cops:

Neither man was brilliant, neither was spectacular, unduly imaginative, or blessed with more than average intelligence.  But in their own line of work, which as often dull and almost always routine, both were hard, competent, and so honest they leaned over backward.

Just to prove this, Murdock doesn't get beaten to a pulp by a cop even once, or even slapped around a bit.  Heck, the cops actually like Murdock.

I don't imagine I will ever be tempted to read this particular mystery again, but I probably will read something else by George Harmon Coxe, something, I hope, with a bit stronger plot (this was his first novel, after all).  But Murder with Pictures was not without interest.

Note 1: Apparently it was adapted into a film as well.  I would love to hear from anyone who has seen the film.

Note 2: A number of George Harmon Coxe novels now are available as eBooks from Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press.  And of course there's always the used market!  Back in his day, Coxe was quite popular in paperback.