Error in Judgment? Anthony Boucher, Patricia Highsmith and the Edgars

not among the very best of 1955?

Edgar nominations will soon be out and the winners will be announced in May.  Nearly fifty-seven years ago, back on May 6, 1956, New York Times critic Anthony Boucher too a look at the Edgar winners that year in his "Criminals at Large" column.

Of the top prize Boucher wrote:

The Edgar for best mystery novel of the year went to Margaret Millar's "Beast in View"--an award with which this department heartily concurs, though I confess to being puzzled by the runners-up (which received scrolls).  Patrica Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and the Gordons' "The Case of the Talking Bug" are good books, but hard to envision in the year's best class.

best in show?

 Did Boucher miss the boat?

To be sure, Margaret Millar is greatly admired by many mystery fans well-versed in older works (I heartily include myself in this company; I think Millar is brilliant).

Yet Millar's work is, I believe, almost entirely out of print today (most unjustly), while Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley surely is one of the best-known and most praised works of twentieth-century crime fiction.  Do you think Boucher (who did like much of Highsmith's work, it  must be conceded) underestimated Mr. Ripley's talent?

And what about The Case of the Talking Bug?  I've never even heard of this one, let alone read it!

Loch Death: The Portcullis Room (1934), by Valentine Williams

"[I]f there is any better place for a murder
than an English country house
it is a Scottish castle"--Todd Downing

Then to the castle's lower ward
Sped forty yeoman tall
The iron-studded gates unbarr'd
Raised the portcullis' ponderous guard
The lofty palisade unsparr'd
And let the drawbridge fall
--Sir Walter Scott, Marmion (1808)

After he read Valentine Williams' mystery novel The Portcullis Room, the American detective novelist Todd Downing remarked that the novel's setting in a Scottish castle reminded him of the poetry of Sir Walter Scott.

Having read the tale myself, it's easy for me to see why Downing made the comparison.  The Portcullis Room is redolent of antique and eldritch Scottish atmosphere (appropriately, one of the characters is reading Shakespeare's  Macbeth).

As I've discussed previously, Valentine Williams was a man of action and even when he was writing a detective novel rather than a thriller, he deemed it imperative to make the story zip along.  "A murder story has to move," Williams avowed in World of Action.

Although a third of The Portcullis Room passes before a murder actually takes place, one doesn't cavil at this, for the interesting setting and lively characters and plot development keep one engrossed until a body obligingly drops.

Here Williams has smoothly fashioned the classic closed setting, or isolated location, situation, so beloved by Golden Age mystery fans today (even P. D. James is quite partial to it).

Visiting Toray Castle, located on an island, is a rich American (query: is there any other kind of American visitor to Great Britain in Golden Age mystery?) named Stephen Garrison (maybe a relative of mine--Garrison is a family name).

For Stephen Garrison, Phyllis has IT
But then there's Flora McReay....

He's come on his private yacht, naturally, along with his longtime business assistant Philip Verity, his new girlfriend Phyllis Dean and, just to make things all right and proper, Phyllis' mother, who is quite intent on seeing that Stephen actually marries Phyllis.

Phyllis Dean is a memorable character.  She is very modern and very "American" and says things like this (when first surveying Toray Castle): "Quaint old dump!....Do you suppose they have a bathroom?"

I definitely could see the brash Miss Dean swanking it around Gosford Park or Downton Abbey at some future point.

The laird, a fine, courtly gentleman who is sadly pressed financially, is interested in selling the castle to Garrison, but his daughter Flora McReay is firmly opposed.  "It's hateful, you Americans and your money!" she plaintively cries at one point.

Well, some things haven't changed!

But there are worse problems for the McReay clan than the arrival of the wealthy and American Mr. Garrison.  Ensconced at Toray Castle is another, quite disreputable, group of guests, headed by the silky Comte d'Arenne ("gigolo and chard-sharp") and the shady Oscar Berg ("clumsy clothes and vulgar manner").

The Comte was a friend of the laird's late black sheep son, who died in the Foreign Legion, but what, oh what is the story behind the presence of the objectionable and ill-bred Mr. Berg (who, by the way, we are pointedly informed is not Jewish but Scandinavian; in fact he seems almost like a stand-in for Williams' famous Prussian-esque German villain Clubfoot)?

When one of the guests is found dead in the portcullis room (which legend says is haunted--of course!), the laird's ceremonial dirk sticking out of his back, those still alive find to their further dismay that Castle Toray is cut off from the outside world by a storm (of course!).  Will Death strike again before the police can get there?  Of course!

Dorothy L. Sayers strongly praised The Portcullis Room, declaring that it was "full of colour and suspense."  The reviewer for Punch speculated that never had a thriller "been furnished with a neater or more ingeniously contrived solution."

What do I say about the solution?  Check in on Saturday and see, when I complete my look at Valentine Williams' interesting life of crime.

Man of Action! A Review of World of Action (1938), by Valentine Williams

Valentine Williams in Egypt

When one writes about mystery writers of the past, one finds oneself wishing that many more of them had penned autobiographies.

Yes, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, for example, both did so, yet even those works are characterized as much, if not more, by reticences as by revelations.  And perhaps this is only fitting.  Mystery writers of the Golden Age often seem to have embraced mystery fiction, surely the great genre of concealment, precisely because they were emotionally circumspect by nature.

What would the highly private Ngaio Marsh have thought about a modern biography that attempts to prove Marsh was a lesbian, or Agatha Christie about books that obsess over her infamous 1926 disappearance?

Probably they would not be too pleased with them, I imagine, because these were reticent women who valued keeping their private lives private.  But the thing is, when a person becomes an accomplished writer, inevitably people want to know more about that person, and how her/his life reflects on her/his work.

a tribute to old masters

What I would have given for biographical reminiscences by the subjects of my Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery!  Actually, Cecil John Charles Street (John Street for short) wrote about his Great War experiences, but there was so much more of interest about his life that in fact illuminates his own fiction writing.

Although Street has been portrayed as a "Humdrum," in his fiction he often defies unthinking expectation, I find. For example, Street wrote sympathetically of unorthodox women and unusual marriages, a characteristic of his work that one understands better when one discovers that Street, estranged from his wife, lived with another woman as his spouse for over two decades.*

*(Street finally was able to marry the second woman, Eileen Waller, upon the death of his first wife; the pair lived happily together for fifteen more years, until Street's own death.)

The devout Christian Freeman Wills Crofts is interesting by virtue of his virtue, you might say; but  Alfred Walter Stewart, who wrote fiction under the name J. J. Connington, was a highly opinionated, acerbic and unconventional chemistry professor who could have penned a fascinating autobiography, I'm sure.  Alas, however, he failed to do so (though his correspondence with the now celebrated horologist Rupert Thomas Gould, discussed in my book, itself is fascinating).

All this brings me (finally!) to Golden age mystery writer Valentine Williams, who did pen an autobiography, in 1938, when he was 55.  This volume is called World of Action.

World of Action is filled with engrossing accounts of Williams' life as a journalist and experiences in the Great War, but additionally, I'm also pleased to note, it does not stint on the author's life of crime writing (as, oddly, do some lives of mystery writers).  For instance, Williams discusses the creation of his great master spy criminal, "Clubfoot," noting that the "villains of fiction, rather than the heroes, were ever my meat.  Fagin, Count Fosco, Doctor Nikola, Count Dracula, those were the boys for me."

Williams in WW1

The Man with the Clubfoot was published in 1918, writes Williams, "and has continued sell ever since," being "translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Estonian, Dutch and Japanese.  For some reason, when it first appeared it was considered suitable reading for the young, and several men have told me it was read out to them at their private schools."

So many Golden Age British mystery writers saw service in the Great War, but relatively few of them wrote about their experiences in any detail.  John Street and Valentine Williams are exceptional in this regard.

Intriguingly to me, John Street was an artillery observation officer in the Great War (he writes about his experiences as such in With the Guns and The Making of a Gunner) and Williams writes in World of Action that, "thanks to an artillery observation officer's mistake, I found myself a novelist."

During the Battle of the Somme, Williams tells us, a British "shell landed beside me, and blew me sky-high."  This errant shell changed the course of Williams' life.

American soldier with WW1 artillery shell

Williams personally learned the meaning of shell-shock:

Shell-shock is the result of the wearing down of the normal nervous resistance beyond nature's ordinary guards.  I have seen men suddenly smitten with shell-shock after a spell of sharp bombardment, led, sobbing and shrieking, like people possessed of the devil in the middle ages, from the trenches.  I was not in as bad a pass as that, but the reaction came when I found myself installed in the Empire Hospital, Vincent Square....Every night I would dream of corpses, mounds of them....

Over a long convalescence, Williams found mental refuge in composing an escapist spy thriller and the deliciously nefarious Clubfoot was born.

Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll inspired
a fictional Valentine Williams character

In World of Action Williams also has interesting material on the United States, a country he visited frequently in the 1930s.

We learn that the American gangster Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll (the baby killer with the matinee idol looks) was the inspiration for a character in Williams' US-set 1933 Trevor Dene mystery novel The Clock Ticks On (Nicholas Cage played Coll fifty years later in the 1984 film The Cotton Club).

Contrary to the image of the Golden Age British mystery writer as a hopelessly obtuse reactionary, Williams writes sympathetically about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and with perception about the place in modern American life of the burgeoning metropolis of New York:

And here let me interject a word about the familiar dictum that "New York is not America."  It may be that the seven-million metropolis with its tremendous foreign-born population--its one and a half million Jews, its Italian elements growing in numbers and powers so rapidly that they are ousting the Irish in city politics, its Irish and Poles and Greeks--appear to millions of God-fearing, puritanical New Englanders and Middle Westerners, to millions of southerners steeped in the Cavalier tradition, as a blot on the face of the Republic their fathers wrought; it may be that for voting purposes the raucous cacophony of Manhattan and its four allied boroughs is not the authentic voice of America.  But with every year the social and cultural influence of New York over the rest of the country is becoming, for better or worse, more marked.

Interesting words to note, not long after the divisions seen in the recent 2012 political campaign in the United States.

Coming this week, more on Valentine Williams' thoughts on crime and mystery writing, a review of one of his novels and Todd Downing news!

A Life of Crime 2: Valentine Williams (1883-1946)

While convalescing from shell shock suffered during the Great War, the English journalist George Valentine Williams, who served as a captain in the Irish Guards, took up writing "shockers" on the advice of the prominent genre writer John Buchan.

With The Man with the Clubfoot (1918), Williams introduced Dr. Adolph Grundt (or "Clubfoot"), who became one of the great "master criminal" villains of thriller fiction of the 1920s and 1930s and launched Williams on a lucrative career as a crime writer.

Between 1918 and 1946 Williams published twenty-five crime genre novels and two short story collections.

Many of these works are master criminal thrillers in the Edgar Wallace/E. Phillips Oppenheim mode (some with Clubfoot, some not), but some are detective novels (or at least "mystery" yarns) as well.  I believe all the following works, close to half his output, would qualify as such:

The Yellow Streak (1922)
The Orange Divan (1923)
The Eye in Attendance (1927)
Death Answers the Bell (1931) (Dene)
Fog (1933) (with Dorothy Rice Sims)
The Clock Ticks On (1933) (Dene)
The Portcullis Room (1934)
Masks off at Midnight (1934) (Dene)
The Clue of the Rising Moon (1935) (Dene)
Dead Man Manor (1936) (Treadgold)
Mr. Treadgold Cuts In (1937) (short stories) (Treadgold)
Skeleton out of the Cupboard (1946) (Treadgold)

Williams' series detectives were Trevor Dene, an English policeman (though most of his cases seem to take place in the United States), and Mr. Treadgold, a Savile Row tailor and amateur sleuth.

Williams also authored some interesting essays on the writing of detective fiction and thrillers and contributed to the round robin mystery novel Double Death.

He often traveled to the United States (in fact he died in a New York hospital, where he had come for treatment of his ultimately fatal malady) and his works often reflect convincing familiarity with Americans and the American scene (in contrast with many other British-authored mysteries!).

I will have a piece up in the next day or so on one of the above-listed books, so stay tuned!

A Formal Affair: Jacket Designs for Eden Phillpotts Mysteries

Eden Phillpotts' Golden Age mysteries and crime novels were published in the United States by Macmillan, who did the author proud.  Here are some of nice examples of Macmillan's work:

The Captain's Curio (1933)

This jacket design by the talented Vera Bock (b. 1905), whose mother was a Russian concert pianist and father an American banker, conveys the pastoralist setting of Daleham-on-Exe, a village left "horror-stricken" when old "Martin Knox is stabbed through the heart and left dead on the floor of his bedroom." 

Implicated in the shocking criminal affair are "two rubies of great value."

 Bred in the Bone (1933)

Nothing fancy here, but certainly the stark, blunt jacket design gives an impression of the deadly seriousness of this  Phillpotts tale.  "This is much more than a murder story," we are told on the inside flap.  "It is a study of character as it develops in a man and a woman under stress of terrible happenings."  Wonder of wonders: Could we have evidence here that "crime novels" were written in the Golden Age of detective fiction too?!

 Mr. Digweed and Mr. Lumb (1934)

This jacket is by Norman Guthrie Rudolph (1900-1985), a Pennsylvania artist.  I think it does a great job capturing the simple, archetypal quality of this modest but charming Phillpotts' detective story, about murder and "two elderly bachelors": Mr. Digweed, who "lived only for his garden," and Mr. Lumb, whose "only interest was his stamp collection."  This is one of Phillpotts' shortest and most straightforward detective stories.

Macmillan even went the extra mile with the book boards themselves, where the jacket design of the "two elderly bachelors" with their prized possessions is repeated.

 Lycanthrope: the Mystery of Sir William Wolf (1937) 

A scary jacket design for this novel, called "a masterpiece of the macabre" by Macmillan. "[A]long with suspense and horror," Macmillan adds, "the novel has a dark complexity, a plot that will require all the reader's skill to unravel."

Well, I didn't find it quite that hard to solve!  And the loquaciousness of the archaic characters will dampen interest for some modern readers, I suspect.  Still, I do think Lycanthrope has a certain elemental power.

Flower of the Gods (1943)

This late Phillpotts mystery, published in the United States when the author was 81 years old, bored Anthony Boucher to tears, yet others liked it.

Whatever people think of the novel itself, the jacket, seems to me undeniably splendid.  Involved in the tale is "a rare plant from the jungles of the Andes...."

"Another first-class, spacious [how true!], fascinating Phillpotts," pronounces Macmillan.

Coming next week, an in-depth look at another important English crime writer from the Golden Age of the detective novel.

Monkshood (1939), by Eden Phillpotts

"There are worse poisons than Monkshood--remember that, my beloved boy."

"There is no light....We move under a blanket of foul smoke from hell, and the spawn of Satan that creates it will laugh, as he laughed before, to see us lost.  And they will bury [him] and say he took his own life no doubt; and we shall wait, like sheep in the slaughter-pen, till we are struck again.  And who will it be then?  Perhaps you, perhaps me, perhaps Pietro, perhaps the village priest.  We cannot tell, we can only wait this unknown devil's pleasure."

"Many people have fought for the truth, John, and, when they reached it, wished to God they had been content to let the matter remain a mystery forever."

Monkshood: "Queen of Poisons"

Aconitum, or monkshood, gets quite a workout in the late Eden Phillpotts tale Monkshood, published when the author was 77 years old.  Three deaths in a Cornwall village are attributed to this deadly flowering plant. Will you be able to determine what really was the meaning behind all the carnage?

It's an interesting problem that the author has set, though, characteristic of his later work, Monkshood moves slowly and is filled with lengthy, archaically worded dialogues (see the second quotation above).

The solution is given by the amateur detective to a friend over four successive evenings (and 71 pages).

Though references are made to telephones, cars and those twin terrors Hitler and Mussolini, the events seem as though they belong to the 1890s, say, rather than the 1930s.

Yet I have to admit I enjoyed the novel.  I suppose I am with Jacques Barzun, who wrote of Monkshood: "Perhaps it should be taken like a Bruckner symphony, on its own terms, which are not those of a modern detective tale."

a shipwreck in Cornwall in the 1890s leads
ultimately to multiple murder in the 1930s

With Monkshood, one has to be prepared for a leisurely, even ponderous, old-fashioned murder affair, more in the manner of the Victorian novel than the zippy Golden Age tec story.  Yet I was engrossed both by the problem and the psychology of the characters as well.

"Montaigne remarked that there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people," opines one character, "which is psychoanalysis in a nutshell."

Psychology gets quite a workout here too.

Probably the finest contribution of Eden Phillpotts to the crime and mystery genre is his Book of Avis trilogy--comprised of three novels published over 1932-1933, Bred in the Bone, Witch's Cauldron and A Shadow Passes--which tells of the remarkable activities of a remarkable Devonshire countrywoman, Avis Bryden.  But Monkshood is of interest as well, and it is a genuine detective novel.

A Life of Crime 1: Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960)

Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960)

Happy 2013!  I hope everyone has a great year of crime and mystery fiction reading.  Which reminds me, I thought it was high time to say something about this gentleman to the right.

The awesomely prolific and long-lived Dartmoor regional novelist Eden Phillpotts (considered a literary disciple of Thomas Hardy) came late to sustained crime writing, with the publication of his mystery The Grey Room in 1921, when he was nearly sixty.

To be sure, Phillpotts had produced some crime fiction before 1921, but it was only in the 1920s that he began publishing it regularly.  From the 1920s until the early 1940s he was a fixture on the mystery scene, both in his native England and in the United States.

Here follows a breakdown of his crime genre work in this period:

1921-1927 (8 novels, 1 short story collection)

The Grey Room (1921)
The Red Redmaynes (1922)
Number 87 (1922) (as Harrington Hext)
The Thing at Their Heels (1923) (Hext)
Who Killed Diana? (1924) (Hext)
The Monster (1925) (Hext)
A Voice from the Dark (1925) 
Peacock House and Other Mysteries (1926) (short stories)
The Jury (1927)

1931-1944 (18 novels)

Found Drowned (1931)
Bred in the Bone (1932) (Vol. 1, The Book of Avis)
A Clue from the Stars (1932)
The Captain's Curio (1933)
Witch's Cauldron (1933) (Vol. 2, The Book of Avis)
A Shadow Passes (1933) (Vol. 3, The Book of Avis)
Mr. Digweed and Mr. Lumb (1934) 
The Wife of Elias (1935)
Physician, Heal Thyself (1935)(aka The Anniversary Murder)
A Close Call (1936)
Lycanthrope: The Mystery of Sir William Wolf (1937)
Portrait of a Scoundrel (1938)
Monkshood (1939)
Awake, Deborah! (1940)
A Deed without a Name (1941)
Ghostwater (1941)
Flower of the Gods (1942)
They Were Seven (1944)

Eden Phillpotts, much later in life

There also was a very late bloom on the plant, George and Georgina (1952), which appeared when Phillpotts was 90 (his last novel, not a mystery, was published in 1959, a year before he died, at the age of 98).

This is a substantial legacy, at least in terms of sheer quantity.  But what about quaility? 

Although today Eden Phillpotts' crime writing is mostly forgotten (he now is best known for having encouraged a certain young neighbor of his, a woman by the name of Agatha Christie, to stick it out with writing), in fact his genre work was much praised back in the Golden Age of detective fiction.

In 1927 S. S. Van Dine, then near the height of his own fame as a mystery writer, pronounced: "Eden Phillpotts has written some of the best detective stories in English." Author and New York Herald literary critic James Lauren Ford ranked Phillpotts as a detective novelist with Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins (and, less thrillingly it must be admitted, J. S. Fletcher).

Another reviewer declared that Phillpotts' crime fiction possessed, rare for the genre, "qualities of psychological understanding, of interpretation of character and motive, together with an admirable force, fineness and spirit in the narrative style."  Dare I suggest that this sounds like it transcends the genre?

James Lauren Ford (1854-1928)

The 1920s were very good years for Phillpotts as a writer.

In addition to his success publishing detective novels, both under his own name and that of "Harrington Hext," he made a great hit on the London stage with rustic comedies, particularly The Farmer's Wife, adapted to film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1928.*

*(Phillpotts shares with genre writers Daphne du Maurier, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Ethel Lina White, Jefferson Farjeon, Francis Beeding, Josephine Tey, Cornell Woolrich, Selwyn Jepson, Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson of having work translated into film by Hitch)

Yet Phillpotts' novels tend to be slow-moving and talky, with characters speaking in highly formal, stylized speech that fell out of fashion over time.  By the late-1930s, Phillpotts' mysteries were becoming lengthier and slower; and while he still had his admirers, the influential critic Anthony Boucher was openly contemptuous of the grand old man in the 1940s, writing of his novel Flower of the Gods, for example, "infinite talk and no action.  A doctor's prescription should be required for this powerful soporific."

In the 1970s, Julian Symons summarily dismissed Phillpotts in his influential genre survey, Bloody Murder, apparently on a reading of a few of the Dartmoor regionalist's 1920s mysteries.  On the other hand, the late Jacques Barzun and his colleague Wendell Hertig Taylor were great admirers of Phillpotts and his genre fiction.  Barzun selected Phillpotts' Found Drowned as one of his 100 Classics of Crime Fiction.

Agatha Christie remembered Phillpotts fondly

For her part, Agatha Christie never forgot the friendly encouragement Phillpotts had given her (a letter of his to the future Crime Queen wisely advises, "You have a great feeling for dialogue....You should stick to gay, natural dialogue.  Try to cut all moralizations out of your novels....").

Agatha Christie dedicated her classic 1932 Hercule Poirot detective novel, Peril at End House, to Phillpotts, and, when he died in 1960, Christie published a warm obituary for him in the Sunday Times, not mentioning his detective fiction, but highly praising his 1910 children's fantasy novel The Flint Heart, recently reprinted in a modern edition.

For my part, I have more to say about Eden Phillpotts' detective fiction.  See you soon.