Emma Lou Fetta's Susan Yates trilogy and other Coachwhip Golden Age Mystery Reprints

Coachwhip's reprints of Emma Lou Fetta's Murder in Style (1939), Murder on the Face of It (1940) and Dressed to Kill (1941) are now available on Amazon and Amazon.co.uk, though the pictures are not up yet. 

You can see the covers here, however! Fetta's series sleuth Susan Yates is a New York City high fashion designer.  Her love interest happens to be assistant district attorney Lyle Curtis, but it is Susan who is the primary crime solver.

The books are charming and intricately plotted murder mysteries by a woman who was a syndicated fashion columnist and a co-founder of the Fashion Group.

There's a twelve-page introduction by me too, I might add.  Other Coachwhip mysteries for which I've written introductions are the nine Todd Downing mysteries (you should have seen a lot about Todd Downing here by now), 1933-1941, Kirke Mechem's The Strawstack Murder Case (original title, A Frame for Murder), 1936, Willoughby Sharp's Murder in Bermuda, 1933, and Murder of the Honest Broker, 1934, and Anita Blackmon's Murder a la Richelieu, 1937, and There Is No Return, 1938.  And oh! let's not forget my book Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing (2013).  What an attractive set these books make on the shelf!

One of the thing that really pleases me with this series is it gives some sense of the regional spread of the American Golden Age detective novel.  We have sophisticated settings in New York (Fetta, Sharp), but also settings in Texas and Mexico (Downing), Kansas (Mechem), Bermuda (Sharp) and Arkansas (Blackmon). And look out some more authors over the course of the year!

For Coachwhip's J. J. Connington reptints, see this blog post from a couple years ago.

Worsleying Around with the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Part Four: The Final Fury

After Parts One, Two and Three of my look at Lucy Worsley's A Very British Murder, I take a last gaze with Part Four, which concerns Dr. Worsley's analysis of the "end" of Golden Age detective fiction.

As I discussed in Part Three of this piece, in Worsley's Chapter 23, "Snobbery with Violence," Worsley, rehashing arguments made over four decades ago by Julian Symons and Colin Watson, emphasizes the social conservatism of the Golden Age detective novel. She refers sweepingly to "the less attractive aspects of these books: the stultifying, repetitive, hide-bound and reactionary world whose values were only reinforced by the solution of the crime."  She declares that mystery writers "so often seemed to set their work in cosy English villages like St. Mary Mead."*

*(yet Miss Marple and St. Mary Mead itself only appeared in one novel and a book of short stories between the two world wars and probably could not have been identified by most Golden Age readers in 1940)

Just how well known was this lady?

I have previously argued that such portrayals as Worsley's hugely simplify the complexity of the period (for example, like P. D. James before her, Worsley does not even discuss the important work of Franics Iles), and I will leave readers to look at my blog or (better yet!) my book Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012). There are also excellent, academically informed studies from the last twenty years or so that take more nuanced views than does Worsley (though none of these studies are cited by Worsley, they are referenced in Masters).

This invariably orderly, rigidly stratified, Edwardian world of Golden Age English detective fiction that Worsley, Watson, Symons and James posit was destroyed, according to Worsley, by World War Two and "the horrors of the atom bomb and Auschwitz."  It has always seemed a little inconsistent to me that the insanity of trench warfare and poison gas (World War One) created a desire for detective novels, while the madness of atomic warfare and death camps (World War Two) caused an aversion to detective novels, but this war-determinist view is one of long standing (see Julian Symons) and many people subscribe to it.

What replaced Golden Age detective fiction, ostensibly no longer tenable after World War Two?  In her short Chapter 24, "The Dangerous Edge of Things," Worsley references psychological crime fiction, mentioning Graham Greene, and what she calls "the American-led thriller movement," by which she means hard-boiled detective fiction (Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are invoked).  She also throws in filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock.  However, it's all quite cursory, crying out for more detailed treatment (what about the impact of Eric Ambler, Georges Simenon, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith, not to mention other names, and film noir?).

And I'm dubious about the whole end of Golden Age detective fiction stuff that Worsley touts. Concerning the decade of the 1940s, she writes at one point of "a final nail" being put "into the coffin of Mayhem Parva" and at another about how "the popularity of the detective story continued to wane."

Obviously at some point the Golden Age of detective fiction, defined as the period when so-called "fair play" detection was the dominant form in mystery genre fiction, ended, but both (1) puzzle-oriented detective fiction and (2) Golden Age "style" British detective fiction, with quaint villages and country houses (Worsley conflates Golden Age form and style) in fact lived on past the 1940s to make many more fictional murders.

Complete with a new title and a
country house illustration Lucy
Worsley's A Very British Murder
comes to America this fall

Indeed, Agatha Christie became the publishing powerhouse that she is today only after World War Two, with the onset of the great paperback revolution. Worsley acknowledges, as she must, the phenomenal perennial popularity of Christie, which does not sit well with this "final nail" business. If the appeal of Golden Age detective fiction is dead, why doesn't the Agatha Christie industry die? Far from dying, it seems more active than ever.

Post-WW2 paperback publishing was in fact a boon in general to more traditional Golden Age detective fiction authors (for example, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout), just as it was to the tough guys who wrote about hard-boiled crime. For every person who ever bought a Mickey Spillane there have been more who bought an Agatha Christie.

Further, the so-called "cozy" mystery that Worsley associates with the Golden Age of detective fiction became a true identified sub-genre only after the Second World War; and it is a hugely popular one today. Much original Golden Age work is being reprinted and over the many decades since the 1940s a goodly number of modern authors have continued to write puzzle-oriented detective fiction and/or to write in the Golden Age British country house/quaint village style (including cases of outright pastiche; see, for example, Jill Paton Walsh's Lord Peter Wimsey books and the upcoming Sophie Hannah Hercule Poirot mystery). It seems to me that the reports over the years of the death of Golden Age detective fiction (both in form and style) have been exaggerated.

What most disappoints about A Very British Murder is that while the book may join P. D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) as the primary go-to source for readers eager to learn the history of the detective fiction genre--it will be published in the United States this fall--in the main it simply repeats old arguments from the books of Julian Symons and Colin Watson (the major difference is that Worsley, like James, holds Dorothy L. Sayers in much greater esteem than do Symons and Watson).

Like James' book--which, incidentally, I would recommend over Worsley's--Worsley's work constitutes a lost golden opportunity to say something new about the Golden Age. There has been a lot of original, stimulating thinking about the Golden Age of detective fiction since the publication over forty years ago of the landmark books of Symons and Watson, and it would have been wonderful to see a high-profile book like A Very British Murder include some of those insights.  Ah, well.  Better luck next murder book!

The Ballad of Baggy and Schmidty; or, The George Bagby Novels of Aaron Marc Stein: Part One, The Corpse Wore a Wig (1940)

"Baggy," Schmidty murmured, "don't be a dope."

With his long-running series of George Bagby detective novels--51 were published between 1935 and 1983--American crime writer Aaron Marc Stein merged the Great Detective and police procedural formulas by introducing two series characters, George Bagby and Inspector Schmidt, friends who refer to each other as Baggy and Schmidty during the course of criminal investigations.

George Bagby, you see, is Inspector Schmidt's "ghost"--he follows Schmidt around New York as he collars criminals and then chronicles his hero's exploits in books (this device was soon adopted across the pond by Englishman Rupert Croft-Cooke in his Leo Bruce "Sergeant Beef" detective novels).

Bagby, then, is Watson to Schmidt's Sherlock Holmes, Van to Schmidt's Philo Vance--although Schmidt is a far cry from an eccentric consulting or amateur detective. He does have one eccentricity, emphasized in the early books at least: his feet flattened from beat patrols, he always takes his shoes off indoors, even when he's on a case.

Otherwise he's a gruff cop, not too distinguishable from other gruff New York cops that I can see, aside from the fact that he actually solves his own cases and does not have to rely on Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, Drury Lane or Nero Wolfe to save his bacon. However, the early cases do not seem very procedural-ish in form, despite the trimmings.  On the whole we are in the world of the classic Golden age detective novel, American style.

Case in point: The Corpse with the Red Wig (1940).  A doctor, Jeremy Bullock, is found dead, with a wig covering the bullet hole in his head.  He was also dosed with chloral.  It soon emerges that Dr. Bullock may have been up to some shady doings. Other murders follow, a pair of poisonings by cyanide and again by chloral.  Additional establishments are implicated: those of a doctor across the street from Bullock, a wigmaker and a hairdresser.

This is a short novel, but even at about 60,000 words it felt rather like a padded short story. It probably would have made a superb short story, but is a bit lacking in narrative punch for a novel. Too often one hears the machinery click and the ending seemed rushed.  Still, there was enough of interest here to encourage me to look at additional Bagby titles.

There are some colorful and perceptive descriptions of modern doctors' offices and of tenements and some quirky characters.  I especially liked the cleaning lady Oleander, who is that rare thing in American Golden Age detective fiction, a black servant character who does not speak in overdrawn, southern plantation dialect.  Nor is Oleander servile or frightened, but to the contrary quite self-assertive and pugnacious.  I was wishing she would play a bigger role in the story.

Also interesting was the wigmaker Louis Davis, who, we learn, is an ex-con who used to play the female role in badger games.  As a seventeen-year-old he would dress as a young woman and entice men into hotel rooms, where his accomplices, masquerading as policemen, would burst in to find the couple in suggestive poses.  It would then be "discovered" that the mark was with "not the young woman he supposed her to be but an adolescent boy."  The mark would thereupon conclude that "the opportunity to pay imposing sums of hush money was heaven sent."

As this account indicates, the novel happily is rather more frank on sexual matters than many detective novels of the era.  I liked this exchange as well:

"So he gave me a mink coat," she howled.  "What's it to you?"
"What did you give him?"
"Use your imagination!"

My conclusion: The Corpse Wore a Wig was not outstanding but it was promising.  I hope to have a review of Bagby's earlier and much longer Ring around a Murder (1936) up by Sunday.

Aaron Marc Stein (1906-1985), Modernist

As mentioned in my last blog piece, crime writer Aaron Marc Stein (1906-1985) graduated from Princeton in 1927 and published his first novels, Spirals and Her Body Speaks, penned under his own name, in 1930 and 1931; and his first George Bagby novel, Bachelor's Wife, in 1932.  All this by his mid-twenties!

Spirals and Her Body Speaks are modernist, stream-of-consciousness novels, Stein's great grab at the brass ring of great literature, while Bachelor's' Wife, described as "the story of Tommy, a modern girl about town, who thought she was hard-boiled until she tried to forget the man she loved," appears much more a mainstream effort.

the Grosset & Dunlap reprint edition of Bachelor's Wife, by "George A. Bagby"

All these of these books, as well as Stein's first three detective novels, which appeared between 1935 and 1937, were published by Covici-Friede, a New York City firm that had published Radclyffe Hall's controversial, landmark lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928.  The firm also published John Steinbeck and a small amount of mystery fiction, including the the early Anthony Abbot detective novels and Rudolph Fisher's pioneering African-American mystery, The Conjure Man Dies (1932).

Aaron Marc Stein as a Princeton student

Stein wrote hopefully about his literary prospects to Hugh L. Bell, Secretary of the Princeton Alumni Association:

I am now engaged in writing the second book [Her Body Speaks] in such time as I have to spare from the activities by which I earn my bread and an occasional bit of butter.  My hungry mouth is fed by the proceeds derived from the writing of an odd form of art criticism for the New York Evening Post.  I have been acting as editor and critic of the antique section of that daily for two years....I have been also writing occasional articles for magazines.

A bit of a dust-up followed the publication of Spirals, when it was attacked in the pages of the Princeton Alumni Weekly [PAW], by a pseudonymous reviewer, "Jenkins Gruffanuff" (see the works of William Makepeace Thackeray), who condemned the novel as obscene.

At least two Princeton alumni came to Stein's defense, writing letters of protest to PAW. Robert Rau demanded a retraction of the review, insisting that the failure to make one would "stand as an insult to every Princeton gentleman."  David McKelvy White expounded on the iniquity of Mr. Gruffanuff at even greater length.  The reviewer had launched a "diatribe" against Spirals, declaring the novel "lewd, lascivious, filthy and obscene," complained White, yet he, White, found himself

quite unable to guess what it was that caused the outburst...Jenkins gives us no hint, content with quoting, at considerable length, the Federal Statutes relating to "lewd literature."...I can only wonder what curious obsession in Jenkins' mind is thus hinted at....

According to his New York Times obituary, Robert Rau (1907-1994; Princeton '28) was "an import-export executive and a civic leader in Manhattan."  He also served on the board of directors of the United Jewish Appeal, a philanthropic organization.

David McKelvy White (1901-1945; Princeton '25), the son of a prominent Ohio Democratic politician, earned a graduate degree at Columbia University and taught English Literature at Brooklyn College between 1928 and 1937.

He was a member of the Communist Party and in 1937 went to Spain to fight for the Republican cause in the civil war there.  He apparently committed suicide in 1945, for reasons that, according to historian Matthew Young, "remain obscure, although explanations tend to find their source in his imminent expulsion from the CP.  David's openly gay lifestyle (having lived with a long-time partner during the 1920s and 1930s), combined with his close associations with recently denounced CP leader Earl Browder, made him a target."

I think this matter sheds some interesting light on Stein at this time. Stein was the son of a Dr. and Mrs. Max Stein who in 1930 lived at 799 Madison Avenue (now home to the fine French linen store Frette).

His older sister, Miriam Anne Stein (herself later an author of three mystery novels), graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1925.

Aaron Marc Stein (or "Rod" as he was known to friends) obviously came from a prominent Manhattan Jewish family and was ambitiously seeking to make his way into higher literary circles. The New York Evening Post once noted that when Stein first appeared to work at the paper he "was carrying a copy of Aristophanes' 'The Frogs' under his arm....his copy was in the original Greek."

What was it about Spirals that so vexed Jenkins Gruffanuff? I haven't yet read Spirals (I have ordered a copy; it is rather a rare book), but it is described in a review in The Sentinel, a Chicago Jewish newspaper, as a "narrative in brief, swift strokes" in the mind of  a student, Anthony Todd, of "outstanding incidents of four years in college life at Princeton" (The Sentinel, 25 April 1930, 47).

An interesting tidbit about the novel comes in a New York Evening Post article, "Womanless Book By Stein Published."  In the body of the article it is noted, tongue-in-cheek, that "Mr. Stein has been asked to write several magazine article to explain the absence of the fair sex from his novel. As soon as he evolves an interesting theory, he expects to respond to the requests for an explanation."

Did Jenkins Gruffanuff detect homosexuality in Spirals, a "womanless" college novel?  I do not know, but I am finding some suggestive elements in Stein's crime fiction.  Perhaps Stein was--like, in all likelihood in my view, Patrick Quentin/Q. Patrick/Jonathan Stagge (Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler), Milton M. Propper, Rufus King and Todd Downing (all reviewed on this blog)--one of the notable 1930s gay American detective novelists, not acknowledged as such at the time.

In any event, Stein's second novel, Her Body Speaks, supplied the women Spirals lacked.  Another stream-of-consciousness novel, with a strong psychological element, Her Body Speaks tells the story of "Edith Kent, a sex-starved unmarried woman of thirty-three" who witnesses a murder.  The review of the novel in PAW (not by Jenkins Gruffanuff but by Franklin Gary '27) concluded that

Mr. Stein is more interested in psychology and technique than in telling a story or in creating characters.  His technique often suggests the techniques of well known  modern novelists, Joyce, Faulkner, Mrs. Woolf, even O'Neill.  But none of these writers is interested primarily in technique for its own sake....

What was a fiction writer more interested in technique than characters to do in the 1930s? Why, become a detective novelist, of course!  Next post, I will be writing in detail about (finally!) Aaron Marc Stein's George Bagby mystery fiction.

The Corpse Wore a Wig (1940), by George Bagby

The American author Aaron Marc Stein (1906-1985) published over 100 crime novels between 1935 and 1984, making him one of the more prolific mystery genre writers, yet he seems not to get much mention since his death.

Close to half Stein's crime novels, written under the name "George Bagby," detail the investigations of Inspector Schmidt, who debuted in 1935 and made his final appearance in 1983. The Inspector Schmidt series offers an interesting combination of police procedural and "Great Detective" traditions, at least from what I have seen of the earlier novels.

The seventh George Bagby crime novel, The Corpse Wore a Wig, was published in 1940.  The particular copy I read (see illustrations) was inscribed by Stein to John Ball (1911-1988), author of In the Heat of the Night (1965).

Stein graduated from Princeton in 1927, got a job as the "antiques and decorations" editor for the New York Evening Post and a few years later published two modernist, stream-of-consciousness novels, Spirals (1930) and Her Body Speaks (1931), as well as the first George Bagby title, Bachelor's Wife (1932). He then shifted to crime writing with his first George Bagby mystery, Murder at the Piano (1935).  I haven't read that book, but I am reading, and enjoying, Wig.  I will have to full review up this weekend.

Country Houses

One of the things I enjoy about Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford novels, which now cover a half-century of English history, from 1964 to 2013, is the depiction of social change.

In Rendell's Simisola (1994), the novel's ambitious grocery store chain millionaire couple, Wael and Anouk Khoori, bought a Kingsmarkham country estate, Mynford Old Hall, which they promptly demolished and replaced with another structure, because the older house had the misfortune of being a nineteenth-century Victorian mansion. Wrong style--as any reader of Golden age detective fiction will know!

Mynford New Hall is what Rendell calls a "mock-Georgian" mansion, done in the best Jane Austen taste. But it's just not the true article, outside or inside.

During the course of their murder investigation in Simisola, Wexford and Mike Burden call on the house and interview the Khoori's two Filipina servants, Juana and Rosenda:

There seemed no need to penetrate farther into the house.  The hall was a vast chamber, pillared, arched, alcoved, the walls paneled and with recessed columns, very much the kind of room guests must have been welcomed into at a Pemberley or a Northanger Abbey.  Only this was new, all new, barely furnished.  And even in the early nineteenth century, even in winter, no great house would have been as cold inside as this one.

It is interesting to see how the classical country house still serves as such a potent symbol in the English mystery novel, so many years after the end of the Golden Age of detective fiction, a literary period with which the country house has been so strongly associated.

Murdermarch? Simisola (1994), by Ruth Rendell

The American hardcover edition of Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford detective novel Simisola (1994) carries a blurb from Publishers Weekly that describes the novel as "at times like a contemporary Middlemarch with a murder mystery at the heart of it."

There is no doubt that with Simisola Ruth Rendell was aiming, like P. D. James in her Inspector Dalgleish novel, Original Sin, which appeared the same year,  at what she would see as a higher thing than a "mere puzzle" about a murder and its solution, a novel of realism about social ills afflicting modern England.

I would say Simisola is a considerable success. Beyond doubt, it is a great improvement on a previous Wexford "social problem" novel, An Unkindness of Ravens (1985).  If Ravens is much inferior to P. D. James' contemporaneous A Taste for Death (1986), I would say that Simisola is superior to James' Original Sin.

It is difficult to fully evaluate Simisola as a social problem novel because of a practical problem inherent in all mystery reviews, that of the imperative of avoiding "spoilers."  So I will try to be as circumspect as I can in my discussion (warning to anyone who picks up the American edition: it reveals too much on the jacket about the plot, in my opinion).

It is true that Simisola is Rendell's premier racism novel, yet I would argue that class issues--particularly the exploitation of the poor by the rich--ultimately are the strongest concern here (race and class do intersect, of course, and gender issues also are addressed, although more cursorily).

Since the 1990s Rendell, though herself politically to the left, has in her Wexford novels continually decried what her surrogate Wexford deems "political correctness," to the extent of creating a character evidently deemed by many the most irritating person in the Wexford canon, the excruciatingly and arguably impossibly politically correct Hannah Goldsmith.

Although Rendell continually raps racism and misogyny in her books, she has also made clear that she does not believe "political correctness" should exempt from criticism misdeeds by women and members of minority groups.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this attitude can be found in the interesting but ill-fitting Not in the Flesh (2007) sub-plot about female circumcision, a subject about which Rendell has spoken out publicly with passion and conviction.

We see this attitude as well in Simisola, in Rendell's portrayal of the ambitious and wealthy couple Wael and Anouk Khoori.

To be sure, in Simisola Rendell includes some wealthy characters who are more sympathetic than the Khooris (and also some who are even less sympathetic than the Khooris). Yet it is clear that the frequent lack of sympathy for the poor is something Rendell is greatly concerned with indicting.*

*(not only the wealthy are indicted: Wexford's subordinate, Mike Burden, is on hand, as always, to represent middle-class obtuseness and complacency, while indifferent government bureaucrats also are pummeled).

The events of the novel take place against a backdrop of economic recession and much of the action revolves around events at the local Employment Service Jobcenter (ESJC), which also houses the Benefit Office. Bringing this matter even more to home for Wexford, both his all-too-frequently hapless daughter Sylvia and her husband have lost their jobs and are spending a great deal of time with Wexford and his wife, Dora.

Given the economic state of affairs in the United States for the last five years, this subject in a twenty-year-old British novel seemed rather timely.  I found both the race and class issues were deftly integrated with the mystery plot by Rendell.

So what is the plot?  Inspector Wexford learns that Melanie Akande, daughter of his physician, Raymond Akande, a Nigerian immigrant, has vanished and he launches a police investigation into the matter. Melanie Akande disappeared after a visit to the ESJC, a fact that becomes sinister after the woman with whom she had her appointment is found dead, strangled in her bed.

The investigation of Reg Wexford and Mike Burden into the presumably related murder and disappearance is long and involved, allowing Rendell to introduce a large cast of memorable characters, including the fulsome local politician Anouk Khoori, wife of a multi-millionaire grocery store chain owner; Raymond Akande's stately spouse Laurette; Carolyn Snow, a highly vindictive wife of an adulterer; Cookie Dix, the much younger wife of a wealthy architect; Ingrid Pamber, with her amazing blue eyes; flat-bound witness Mr. Hammond, ninety-three years old but still mentally sharp; the blind but ever-mirthful Mrs. Prior; and Nigerian-born crossing guard Oni Johnson and her ESCJ habitue son Raffy (played by Idris Elba in the 1996 film version of Simisola--his sixth acting credit on imdb).

Rendell offers a clever alibi gambit and a particularly Christie-esque clue in the text; yet as the tale reaches its terminus the logic of the themes severely circumscribes the field of suspects, which leads me to disagree with the stated view of some contemporary reviewers that the solution is an astonishing surprise.

Thus I would not rate Simisola Rendell's greatest success among the Wexford novels as a puzzle.  It clearly is, however, a notable example of the modern crime novel that uses the mystery to explore social issues.  The whole thing is compellingly done by an author working at the height of her writing powers, making Simisola a book that I can enthusiastically recommend to mystery fans, even those of the more traditionalist sort. Incidentally, in a brilliant touch the novel's strikingly simple title is invoked but once, in the final line.

See also, at the Passing Tramp:

Going Wrong (1990) by Ruth Rendell
Asta's Book (1993), by Barbara Vine
Not in the Flesh (2007), by Ruth Rendell (Wexford)