Off the Map? Beyond This Point Are Monsters (1970), by Margaret Millar

In her crime novel Beyond this Point Are Monsters (1970), Margaret Millar helpfully has a character give us the meaning of the title and theme of the book:

"Did Robert ever show you his old maps?"
"No."
"My sister sent them to him for his birthday one year.  They were framed copies of early medieval maps showing the world as it was presumed to be then, flat and surrounded by water.  At the edge of one map there was a notice saying that further areas were unknown and uninhabitable because of the sun's heat.  Another said simply, 'Beyond This Point Are Monsters'....The world of Robert's maps was nice and flat and simple.  It had areas for people and areas for monsters.  What a shock it is to discover the world is round and the areas merge and nothing separates the monsters and ourselves...."

Margaret Millar began her crime writing career with a relatively traditional series of three books about the archly-named amateur sleuth Paul Prye, published over 1941-1942.  In her next two novels, Wall of Eyes (1943) and The Iron Gates (1945), she shifted to another, professional series detective, Inspector Sands, and to a newer, less conventional approach.  The Iron Gates, in particular, seems to me more like a grim mainstream novel about a woman's descent into madness than any sort of "mystery."

Millar's sixth crime novel, Fire Will Freeze (1944), is something of a return to her earlier style, but by the 1950s she really hit her stride as a novelist of psychological suspense, producing compulsive page-turners with clueing and misdirection as deft as that offered by the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie.

Up to 1964, she published, in my opinion, at least a half-dozen genre classics, including the Edgar-winning Beast in View (1955).  After 1964's The Fiend, however, she published no more crime novels until 1970, when Beyond This Point Are Monsters appeared.  With Beast in View, Monsters was included by English crime writer H. R. F. Keating in his Edgar-nominated Crime & Mystery: The Hundred Best Books (1987).

Beast in View, though a brilliant crime novel, has lost a bit of its impact today, both in its twist and its subject matter. However, I was struck reading Monsters by how up-to-date it seems, with its plot involving illegal immigration and the treatment of migrant California farm workers (so many of these issues lie unresolved over forty years later). There are Millar's characteristic twists too.

In form much of the novel is devoted to testimony at a legal hearing.  Recently-wed ranch owner Robert Osborne vanished a year ago and his young widow has petitioned a court to declare him legally dead. Millar takes us through the testimony, along with flashbacks and actions of characters outside court.

It appears that Robert may have been killed in a fight with a couple of migrant workers who promptly disappeared into the hinterland, but as the quotation at the top of this piece suggests, matters in life (and death) are not always so cut-and-dried. They certainly aren't in Margaret Millar novels!

I noticed a key clue, so one of the twists I was able to foresee, but I did not anticipate the final events, which are more a matter of psychological than material clueing.  As always with Millar, the morbid psychology is fascinating.

It might be argued that the title creates the wrong impression on the reader, particularly the modern reader, in that it creates the expectation of there being some sort of Hannibal Lecter style serial killer at work.  In fact Millar's novel is far more subtle than that. Yet the final twist definitely has a frisson of horror that is uniquely (Margaret) Millar.

Incredibly to me, Beyond This Point Are Monsters has been out-of-print for over a quarter century. Since the demise of the wonderful International Polygonics, Ltd. (IPL), Millar, in contrast with her husband, Kenneth (Ross Macdonald), has been oddly neglected by publishers (Doug Greene's short story publishing house, Crippen and Landu, excepted).

Perhaps Margaret Millar's inclusion in Sarah Weinman's recent anthology of twentieth-century women suspense writers will inspire some publisher to get all her novels back into print.  They certainly merit republication.  Margret Millar is, in my view, one of the crime writer immortals.

Beyond This Point Are Monsters (1970), by Margaret Millar

One of the few titles by one of my favorite crime authors, Margaret Millar, that I had not read until this week is Beyond This Point Are Monsters (1970).  I decided to rectify this gap in my reading and I expect to get my post on the book uploaded by tonight.

Suffice it to say for now that the book has all the human interest, intriguing mystery and compelling narrative that is characteristic of the splendid author, who was one of the great twentieth-century writers of what was termed "psychological suspense."

In her recent anthology of tales by twentieth-century women crime writers, Sarah Weinman calls the type of book Millar wrote "domestic suspense." Whatever we call it, it is great stuff. Not to mention possibly Millar's single best book title--who could fail to be intrigued by it? Come take a trip with me this weekend into the unknown depths of the human psyche....

"It Will Mean the End of Britain as We Know It! Call in the Amateurs!" The Secret Adversary (1922), by Agatha Christie

"It's--it's so lovely to think of things--and then for them to really happen!" cried Tuppence enthusiastically.

"Speak, you swine of an Englishman--speak!"
"Don't get so excited, my good fellow," said Tommy calmly.  "That's the worst of you foreigners.  You can't keep calm."

Tommy took to his heels and ran--none too soon.  The front door opened and a hail of bullets followed him.  Fortunately none of them hit him.

--The Secret Adversary (1922), Agatha Christie

the superb jacket of the
British first edition
(available in a modern facsimile edition)

Coming off the triumph of her first published detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), Agatha Christie followed with a thriller, The Secret Adversary (1922), in which she introduced two new crime fighters, the irrepressible Thomas Beresford and Prudence ("Tuppence") Cowley.

Tommy and Tuppence ultimately would appear in four crime novels (besides The Secret Adversary, N or M?, 1941, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, 1968, and Postern of Fate, 1973) and a book of short stories, Partners in Crime (1929), which collected tales originally published in 1923 and 1924.

Christie's biographers, Janet Morgan and Laura Thompson, do not make clear why Christie chose to follow Styles, a Hercule Poirot detective novel, with the lightweight thriller The Secret Adversary.

Thompson writes that although Christie's publisher, the Bodley Head, wanted her to write another Poirot mystery after Styles and was disappointed with Adversary, the new novel actually sold better than Styles.  I suspect the general sales success at the time of the English crime thriller had something to with Christie's decision (I think also that Tommy and Tuppence reminded her more than a bit of Agatha and Archie).

The between-the-wars period was not only the "Golden Age" of the English detective novel, it was also the Golden Age of the classic English thriller, as epitomized by such writers as Edgar Wallace, Sax Rohmer, Valentine Williams, Sapper, Leslie Charteris, Francis Beeding, Sydney Horler, John Ferguson, Laurence Meynell and John Buchan, among others.  Indeed, in the 1920s and 1930s readers purchased more copies of crime thrillers than they did detective novels.

Here is a little English thriller chronology up to 1922:

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), John Buchan
The Power House (1916), John Buchan
Greenmantle (1916), John Buchan
Stealthy Terror (1918), John Ferguson
The Man with the Clubfoot (1918), Valentine Williams
The Secret Hand (1918), Valentine Williams
Mr Standfast (1919), John Buchan
Bulldog Drummond (1920), "Sapper" (H. C. McNeile)
The Dark Geraldine (1921), John Ferguson
Huntingtower (1922), John Buchan
The Black Gang (1922), Sapper
The Return of Clubfoot (1922), Valentine Williams
The Secret Adversary, Agatha Christie (1922)
The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922), Freeman Wills Crofts (Christie wasn't the only detective novelist to horn in on the thriller game)

Agatha and Archie Christie in 1919

In addition to these, between 1905 (with The Four Just Men) and 1922, Edgar Wallace published some two dozen thrillers, culminating in the best one by him I have read, The Crimson Circle; and between 1913 and 1922, Sax Rohmer contributed some dozen himself, including three about his most famous creation, the nefarious "Oriental" criminal mastermind, Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Novels by Wallace and Rohmer preceded the onset of the First World War, but one can detect the impetus of the Great War in the works of Buchan, Ferguson, Williams and Sapper (Ferguson's Stealthy Terror, incidentally, was also published by The Bodley Head and is puffed in the recent facsimile edition of The Secret Adversary).

Political and social conservatism characterized the thrillers of Sapper and the others, and today they often are condemned for racism, sexism and xenophobia.  For a time these books seemed to have disappeared from public favor, but I notice that novels by Sapper and Sax Rohmer have been reprinted in nice editions that have been well-received in some quarters (John Buchan, the most literary animal of this breed, has always remained in print).

a public school bruiser

So when Agatha Christie decided to write The Secret Adversary, she certainly was not doing so in a vacuum. Indeed, the plot of Adversary resembles that of Sapper's hugely popular Bulldog Drummond.

The latter novel, which sold nearly 400,000 copies between 1920 and 1939 and launched a long series of sequels and films, introduces a bored Great War veteran in search of excitement, Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, who places the following ad in The Times:

Demobilised officer,...finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion.  Legitimate, if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection.  Excitement essential.

Hugh soon finds his desired excitement, stumbling on a wicked plot to engineer a Bolshevik takeover of Britain.

This plot is very similar indeed to the one Agatha Christie employs in Adversary (and, to be sure, the plots in scores of other Golden Age thrillers). Christie's hero, Tommy Beresford, could in fact be a Sapper character.  Although less arrogant and physically intimidating than Sapper's "Bulldog," Tommy comes from the same privileged, public school social background (his uncle has been knighted and has pots of money, though Tommy has been cut off from it) and like Bulldog is a bored Great War veteran.

I think where Christie came up with something new--and something that helps explain the longevity of the popularity of the Tommy and Tuppence series--is in the character of Tuppence.  In my experience of English Golden Age crime thrillers by male writers, the clever women characters are villains (or to use the original term, adventuresses).  The "good girls" tend to be rather dullish creations, there to provide love interest and occasions for derring-do, as invariably they are kidnapped and must be rescued from horrid fates by the hero.

However, in Christie's Secret Adversary, country vicar's daughter Tuppence Cowley, Tommy's partner in adventure, is a genuine female action hero.  "Did you really think I am the kind of girl to roll about on the floor and whine for mercy?" Tuppence triumphantly queries after getting the better of a fiendish female who tried to put an end to her.

a dangerous woman

Without disparaging Tommy as a fool, Christie repeatedly makes clear that Tuppence is the brains of their particular operation.  Here's the mysterious government official Mr. Carter evaluating the respective mental qualities of Tommy and Tuppence:

Outwardly, he's an ordinary clean-limbed, rather block-headed young Englishman.  Slow in his mental processes.  On the other hand, it's quite impossible to lead him astray through his imagination.  He hasn't got any....The little lady's quite different.  More intuition and less common sense.  They make a pretty pair working together.

I was reading recently about a campaign in the United States to ban the word "bossy" because it is felt that its use in schools inhibits young girls from taking leading roles in public and business life. So let's not call Tuppence bossy, but rather, well, assertive.

Whatever one calls Tuppence, with her Agatha Christie--who so often is accused of being fusty and old-fashioned--helped create the fictional archetype of the "modern" twenties flapper, who smokes, drinks, drives, bobs her hair, shortens her skirts, scorns subtlety and sentiment and speaks her mind at every opportunity. Both her given name, the ironic Prudence, and her nickname, Tuppence (as in "I don't care tuppence"), are inspired.

Within the mystery genre, Tommy and Tuppence (should it not be Tuppence and Tommy, really?), are one of the more significant Golden Age "sleuthing couples"--bright young things who crack wise while they crack cases (a hard-boiled version is Dashiell Hammett's crime-solving couple, Nick and Nora Charles).

To be sure, some people have always loathed Tommy and Tuppence.  In A Talent to Deceive (1979), his study of Agatha Christie, the late crime writer Robert Barnard sweepingly terms the pair "everybody's least favorite Christie sleuths," while Christie's most recent biographer, Laura Thompson, deems them "appallingly twee."

In contrast with these esteemed authorities, I like Tommy and Tuppence--much more than I do Bulldog Drummond, by the by--and have always enjoyed their short story collection, Partners in Crime, as well as their second novel outing, N or M? (of their two later entries, By the Pricking of My Thumbs has its points, but Postern of Fate, the last novel Christie wrote, is a disaster, at least in its current form). The couple's ingenuous love of adventure appeals to the romantic in the hearts of many of us, I believe.

Who is the secret adversary???

Yet I have to admit that I find The Secret Adversary a pretty lame tale.  The plot, about an evil criminal mastermind, Mr. Brown (the man behind the Bolsheviks, don't you know), who wants to get his hands on some embarrassing papers in order to induce England's Labour party (well-meaning but rather dim, don't you know) to bring down good--i.e., conservative--government in Britain, reads like a pastiche of other, veteran thriller writers.

By the middle of the novel, it should be obvious to the reader that Mr. Brown has to be one of two people, and I think the experienced Christie reader can figure out which one that is, even though Christie makes a game effort to throw dust in the reader's eyes. A better plotted Christie thriller is, in my opinion, an old grade school favorite of mine, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)--not to mention the amusing The Man in the Brown Suit (1924).

Plaguing The Secret Adversary, I'm afraid, is the banality of Christie's writing.  A "humdrum" mystery can get away with dull writing if there is a good plot, because reader interest is in clue analysis and deduction.  A thriller needs color and verve, which Adversary lacks.  I will quote again one of the passages from the book already quoted at the top of this piece, because it made me laugh out loud, it is so decidedly unexciting:

Tommy took to his heels and ran--none too soon.  The front door opened and a hail of bullets followed him.  Fortunately none of them hit him.

Christie's writing is flat and unimaginative throughout Adversary.  A dingy house is "filthy beyond words" (beyond words is an unfortunate phrase for a writer to use when attempting to describe something). A cheap hood is "obviously of the very dregs of society."

two determined women face
the sinister Mr. Brown at the climax
of Agatha's Christie's first thriller

And then there is the stereotypical American millionaire, Julius P. Hershheimmer (in books like this there is always a middle initial to the American millionaire's handle and an uneuphonic, multisyllabic surname), who uses the phrase "I guess" thirty-three times, by my count, in the novel.

I guess that I guess must have been the greatest single linguistic prop for the British Golden Age genre writer who wanted to portray an American.  However, a more convincing American would be less "American," if you get my meaning.

Julius sounds ultra-American even when he manages to avoid saying "I guess" for a few sentences:

"Here I am, son.  Your British traffic beats description!  Put me wise to the crooks right away."

Julius even carries a gun with him everywhere.  He keeps it in his pocket and fondly refers to it, with alarming frequency, as Little Willie.

Of course Americans come off lightly compared to German nationals and those ill-kept Bolshevik types who hail from what I presume the average Englishman of that day saw as the semi-barbaric nether regions of Europe.

"He was fair, with a weak, unpleasant face, and Tommy put him down as being either a Russian or a Pole," Christie notes early in the novel.  I'd love to think this is just a non sequitur on the author's part and not deliberately put!  But this sort of thing is what you get in most British Golden Age thrillers.  Christie knew the rules for a successful between-the-wars British thriller and she wrote accordingly.

Now, goshdarn it, don't get me wrong, guys and gals (hey, I am an American): on the whole I think Christie is underestimated as a pure writer. She wrote some excellent satire (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Seven Dials Mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage) and had an admirable ability to portray character through dialogue (see the wonderful forties Poirot mystery The Hollow, for example).

Unfortunately, I don't believe the Queen of Crime set much of a bar for herself with The Secret Adversary. Over her long career she would write many, many superior books and Tuppence and Tommy would have more engaging adventures.  I plan to talk about some of them in the future.

Tommy & Tuppence To Go Atomic?

News has come that the BBC and the Agatha Christie estate, never ones seemingly to squander an opportunity, plan to go "Sherlock" with the Queen of Crime's third-string sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence, and modernize them in a new adaptation of the 1929 short story collection Partners in Crime (though they are only going to go "halfway," so to speak, setting the series in the 1950s).

I have mixed feelings about this.  Tommy and Tuppence seem such creatures of the Jazz Age--classic bright young things--in Partners and Crime and the novel The Secret Adversary (1922).

Even when middle-aged (N or M?, 1941) and elderly (By the Pricking of My Thumbs, 1968, Postern of Fate, 1973), the spirit of the twenties still dances within them (of course some people find that aspect of T & T rather tiresome--even Christie fan Robert Barnard harrumphed about the couple's "intolerably high spirits").

Will ripping them from the art deco twenties and dropping them into the atomic fifties work? Will Tommy and Tuppence now bandy quips while sipping cocktails at a tiki bar?

Will the new Partners in Crime be tiki-tacky?

Of course I know people can say, well, what about Sherlock?

So many people thought Arthur Conan Doyle's classic creation was all about gaslight and hansom cabs, yet the modern-set series has been hugely successful.  But still I don't know about Partners in Crime.

I think Holmes and Watson are such strong, timeless archetypes that they could appear in any age and place and win us over.

But in any event, the die is cast, and we shall see whether it comes up craps or not.

I thought I might take this opportunity to review a bit this week the subject of Agatha Christie's thrillers, the disrespected "poor relation" of her work.

Tuppence looks decidedly skeptical
about this development

Speaking of crime in the mid-twentieth-century, I have finally resolved to read Christie's Destination Unknown (1954), the only mystery by her I have not even started.

However I'm going to start next week talking about our old pals Tommy and Tuppence.

The only Christie, incidentally, that I have started and never been able to complete was the decidedly odd Passenger to Frankfurt (1970)--don't know whether I should give that a try again, just to say that I have really read them all!

I Put a Spell on You: Voodoo'd (1931), by Kenneth Perkins

The Juvenal case had gripped the city like a yellow-fever plague.

"Apparently the murderer tried to get him three different ways: poisoned wounds, poison in the stomach, and choking to death.  Quite an orgiastic proceeding."

"Please, messiers, if you will let me go away from this house....This house is voodoo'd, messieurs.  I would rather be put in a room with copperheads crawling over my body."

--Voodoo'd (1931), by Kenneth Perkins

Did his gland make him do it?

Originally serialized in five parts in 1930 in Argosy before its publication as a novel in the United States and United Kingdom in 1931, Kenneth Perkins' Voodoo'd vividly tells a tale of a series of horrid murders at an old New Orleans mansion.

With this story Argosy readers definitely got full value in thrills for their fifty cents!

Basil Boyean, wealthy scion of New Orleans Creole aristocracy (or, as he is dubbed in the city press, "New Orleans capitalist and club man"), has a little problem: he recently had a gland transplant--and it seems that the gland he received came from one Bouche, the notorious convicted murderer of Bertram Juvenal!

The latter man was found dead at the Juvenal manse"with his throat lacerated by finger marks and swollen from a virulent poison."

Upon his conviction for the terrible crime, Bouche dramatically "escaped from the courtroom to the street, where he fell under a rain of bullets from three different patrolmen" (happily--or unhappily as the case may be--the cops missed that gland).

After discussion about all this at the Bourbon Club, Boyean, an impressionable sort, begins to imagine that his personality is being taken over by that of the notorious Bouche. This part of the novel resembles Arthur Conan Doyle's 1923 story, "The Adventure of the Creeping Man" (glands were a hot subject in those days).

death comes creeping....

Boyean decides to stay at the Juvenal manse, a decaying mansion owned by Bertram Juvenal's brother, Abel.  The very night he arrives there, Abel's son Lucien is murdered!

Lucien Juvenal is found dead in a locked bedroom adjacent to Boyean's, his throat lacerated like his father's.

Could the the murderer be Boyean, either under the dead Bouche's control (that gland, you see), or mad and thinking he is?  Or is something else afoot?

Along with the New Orleans police, Boyean tries to solve a murder that he fears he himself might have committed.

Other suspects in the Juvenal manse murders include Abel Juvenal; Abel's beautiful, tempestuous adopted daughter, Ninon; Lucien Juvenal's handsome brother, Jacques; and the inscrutable Africa-American servants of the Juvenal family: Oedipe, the butler; Zozo, the "quadroon" maid; and Gumbo Lou, the cook.

We're in for a wild ride, as three more deaths take place and the hand of voodoo is raised against the Juvenal manse....

I liked this book.  It's atmospheric, with an interesting plot, and a genuine detective novel despite all the thriller elements.

The locked room problem is almost immediately solved (and is no great shakes anyway), but there is clueing throughout the novel and some clever mechanics in the plot.

I actually was rather reminded of S. S. Van Dine's classic tale of family extinction in a decaying old mansion, The Greene Murder Case (1928). There is an evocative pall of doom that hangs over the house, as people drop like flies.

Perkins, who was familiar with New Orleans, did a better than usual job depicting local dialect, I think, distinctively delineating the speech patterns of Creoles and Irish cops, blacks and whites. There are three major black characters in the novel, and all of them speak differently from each other (it is mentioned in the novel that there are black cops on the New Orleans police force--it would have been nice to see a few).

Voodoo'd would have made a suspenseful film or radio play.  Perkins took some elements from the book (including some of the character names) for his stage play, Dance with Your Gods (1934), in which, as mentioned in my previous blog post, Lena Horne played the "quadroon girl."

Unfortunately, the play decidedly flopped on Broadway; yet Voodoo'd works its magic on readers, putting them under a spell of suspense.  This was one of Harper's Sealed Mysteries, all of which came with a seal near the end daring readers to return the book with the seal unbroken and the book unfinished (John Dickson Carr's It Walks by Night had been published in this series a year earlier).

I can't imagine anyone not breaking the seal in this case.

A Life of Crime: Kenneth Taylor Perkins (1890-1951)

Kenneth Taylor Perkins was born in 1890 in Kodaikanal, India, the son of American missionaries James Coffin and Charlotte Perkins, and died in Los Angeles in 1951. After the death of his mother in 1897 and his father's remarriage in 1904 (and around the time of a certain earthquake), he was sent to San Francisco to live with his wealthy, shipping merchant grandfather, one of the original Argonauts in the California Gold Rush.

Kodaikanal, India, where Kenneth Perkins was born to American missionary parents

Like his father, Kenneth Perkins graduated from the University of California (Berkeley) with a masters degree in English (his father later received a degree in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and served as an Indian missionary for 29 years).

As a student at UC-Berkeley, Perkins was a member of the English Club, which performed two of his plays, "Blind Alleys" and "Baghdad" (in the latter play events are seen successively through the eyes of first a spiteful woman and then her amiable husband).

Between his graduation in 1914 and the American entry into the First World War in 1917, Perkins was employed at Pomona College as an assistant instructor in English and drama to Reginald Pole, an Englishman who had been a close friend of poet Rupert Brooke and was an admired stage actor, director and playwright (Pole's son Rupert--named after Brooke, I presume--married the writer Anais Nin).

Charlotte Perkins
the author's mother

During the war  Perkins was a second lieutenant in the United States field artillery. Afterward, spurred on by Frederick Schiller Faust, a friend of his from UC-Berkeley who wrote Westerns under the celebrated name Max Brand, Perkins began publishing stories and novels.

Some of these works were mysteries and some--those written under the pseudonym J. O. Quinliven--were horror; but most were westerns.  Perkins' novel Ride Him, Cowboy (1923) was filmed twice, the second time (1932) with John Wayne in the lead role.

Wayne is not the only star with whom Kenneth Perkins' name is linked. The author made a stab at stage glory and had three plays performed on Broadway: Creoles (1927), Dance with Your Gods (1934) and Louisiana Lady (1947; a musical version of Creoles).

All three plays are set in Louisiana.  Creoles, a comedy, was the most successful, but Dance with Your Gods, a voodoo thriller, is best known today, because it was instrumental in the rise to fame of Lena Horne, who played the key role of the "quadroon girl."

Unfortunately, the play itself was panned by New York critics.  According to James Gavin's book Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne (2009), New York Herald Tribune critic Arthur Ruhl took time in his review to denounce "gay audience members who went to see the 'animated pornography' of the shirtless, muscular black actors."

I don't know, sounds like it might be ripe for a modern revival! Anyway....

Kenneth Perkins around 1930

Kenneth Perkins published two mystery novels, Voodoo'd, upon which Dance with Your Gods clearly draws, and The Mark of the Moccasin, set in a creepy mansion on the Texas coast.

From what I have made out, The Mark of the Moccasin was serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1927 and first published as a novel in England in 1929.

Under the title The Moccasin Murders the novel saw publication in the U. S. in 1931, after the success of Voodoo'd, which was serialized in Argosy in 1930 and then published as a novel in 1931 in the United States and England, in the latter country under the splendidly Gothic title The Horror of the Juvenal Manse.

So, in summation, here is Kenneth Perkins' contribution to the crime novel literature:

The Mark of the Moccasin (serialized 1927; published UK 1929; published US 1931, as The Moccasin Murders)

Voodoo'd (serialized 1930; published US 1931; published UK 1931, as The Horror of the Juvenal Manse)

I've read about forty percent of Voodoo'd so far and, considering its subject matter, which includes not only voodoo but gland transplants, it's a surprisingly restrained and dignified book.  Will Perkins manage to keep it up until the end or will the novel collapse into a rubble of nonsense?

For what it's worth, William C. Weber--as "Judge Lynch," the longtime crime fiction critic for the Saturday Review--favorably compared the "voodoo passages" in Perkins' Louisiana mystery thriller with those in The Magic Island (1929), William B. Seabrook's bestselling book on Haiti that is credited with popularizing the concept of the zombie.

As far as I know, Voodoo'd was the second American crime novel after the publication of The Magic Island employing voodoo as a central motif, the first being John Esteven's Voodoo (1930).  Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor were dismissive of Esteven's novel in A Catalogue of Crime. We'll see what I think of Perkins' Voodoo'd.

For more on Kenneth Perkins and his family see Life and Light for Woman 24 (August 1894): 385-386 and Back Numbers Can Be Easily Procured 14 (January 2005): 11.

Also check out this review by John Norris of a later mystery dealing with some similar subject matter, Hulbert Footner's The Obeah Murders (1937).

Perkins family bungalow in Arupukottai, India, c. 1894

Slip Slypeing Away: The Slype (1927), by Russell Thorndike

"A secret path, covered way or passage.  A space very frequent in Abbeys, intervening between the transept and the entrance to the chapter-house, often called by the expressive name of the Slype." New Oxford Dictionary

"Take any cynic who will not believe in ghosts and let him meditate alone in Dullchester Slype, and that foolish soul will wish he had not boasted."  The Slype (1927), Russell Thorndike

"Dickensian" is the adjective that reviewers have often applied to Russell Thorndike's The Slype. It is easy to see why.  The novel is set in "Dullchester," based on Rochester, Kent, where Thorndike was born.  His father was a minor canon at Rochester's great cathedral and in the novel Dullchester Cathedral is the focus of events. Naturally enough, readers of The Slype have been reminded of Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), which similarly details mysterious goings-on in a city based on Rochester.

Rochester horizon, with the cathedral and castle

Complementing an evocative setting are well-drawn characters.  In the brilliant second chapter of The Slype (a novel long for its day and its genre--about 125,000 words by my count), Thorndike lays out all the characters (people who "mattered" in the Precincts of Dullchester and one who did not):

Potter (caretaker)
Styles (head verger)
Dean Jerome
Norris (keeper of the Old Curiosity Shop--yes, there's one of those too--take note, John!)
Miss Tackle (gentlewoman and beekeeper)
Canon Cable
Alfred Watts (Chapter Clerk and Mayor)
Mr. Trillet (organist)
the Archdeacon
Dr. Rickit
Dr. Smith (he did not matter in the Precincts, as he had "damned himself with the Cathedral folk by attending Chapel, hobnobbing with the defeated Labour Candidate, who was regarded as a Bolshevist, and by wearing a football trophy on his watch-chain")
Jane Jerome (the Dean's granddaughter, a businesswoman and provider of love interest)
Minor Canon Quaver
Minor Canon Dossal (great names, these two)
Mr. McCarbre (wealthy Cathedral benefactor)
Boyce's Boy (errand boy to Mr. Boyce, greengrocer)

the Paper Wizard at work

In the first chapter we are introduced to Daniel Dyke, a young writer returning to visit Dullchester, and the memorable Paper Wizard, a man who makes his living cutting silhouettes (in Dullchester he evinces a predilection for "silly-wets" not of cathedrals, as one might expect, but of gallows).

Then there are also the representatives of the police: the local, bumbling, Sergeant Wurrin, and the young, keen and intrepid Detective-Inspector Macauley of Scotland Yard.

Twenty characters (admittedly, a heavily male ensemble), plus additional ones introduced later on: wives, domestic servants, tradesmen/women, errand boys and, less pleasingly, a nefarious "Chinaman."

Were The Slype to be filmed, there would have to be multiple awards nominations, the roles would so demand good actors to play them.  Dean Jerome would be a threat for best actor and Boyce's Boy almost a sure thing for best supporting actor (though arguably the latter is really a lead too).

One of those Dickensian urchin types, Boyce's Boy really is a marvel, surely one of the great working class characters in a Golden Age mystery:

So Sergeant Wurrin watched [Boyce's Boy] from the window of the Police Station, and although cats would spit at him and High Street dogs growl when he amused himself by shooting unripe gooseberries at them from a catapult, the animal world followed mankind and gave Boyce's Boy as wide a berth as possible. He had something about him.

I generally like to quote from the books I review, but The Slype has so many lengthy beautifully-written passages it's had to select just one.  On a day when snow swirled outside the window as I typed and the temperatures plunged to a bitterly cold level, I thought how appropriate it was to be writing about this book, with its atmospheric descriptive passages about, among other things, the passing of the autumn into winter.

Rochester Cathedral

So what is the plot, you ask?  Well, it involves a man with a guilty secret and several schemers intent on discovering something they think is to be found within the bowels of Dullchester. Plot is secondary to the characters, setting and writing, but readers should be intrigued by the series of bizarre disappearances that besets Dullchester (eventually eight people vanish, along with a sty of pigs, a panel from a stained glass window and a set of wind-up mechanical soldiers).

Near the end some action stuff with the evil Chinaman takes us out of Dickens-Land and into the more fantastic yet at the same time altogether less wonderful (Edgar) Wallace-World of the 1920s, but on the whole I would say The Slype makes marvelous mystery reading, especially if you like Edwin Drood and Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors (1934).  As Mark Valentine says in the introduction, the novel has "a sense of great gusto, a panache in the plotting and storytelling, strong pace and vivid color."

For fans of Thorndyke's Dr. Syn books, there's a chapter in The Slype that ties up certain loose ends from that saga. That's another reason, in addition of course to its rarity (despite having been published in the U. S. as well as the U. K.), that the book has commanded such high prices on the secondhand market. Fortunately, the new nice quality Valancourt Books edition makes a more than adequate substitute for the original (and you don't need to have read Dr. Syn to navigate The Slype).

For more on Russell Thorndike, see my review from last month of Six Against the Yard (1936).