Of Mysteries Unlocked and Closeted Murders

Last year I was much pleased to be able to shepherd into print with McFarland Press, Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene, about which Jon L. Breen has written very kindly here.  "One of the finest essay collections on the detective-story genre ever published" certainly are nice words to hear from a reviewer, especially one as distinguished as Jon Breen.  The work of Doug Greene was a great inspiration to me back in the 1990s, when I started thinking seriously about mystery genre history; and it was wonderful that everything came together over 2013-14 to allow the "Doug Book" to be published, with a raft of really fine contributors.

I have decided to try my hand at editing another McFarland essay collection.  Although I have, like Doug, a PhD in history, I try, like Doug, to adopt a somewhat more "popular" approach to my mystery genre history writing, while preserving the scholarly apparatus.

While I don't look as in depth at personal lives as it sounds like Martin Edwards does in his forthcoming book on The Detection Club, The Golden Age of Murder, I always have been very interested in the personalities of crime writers and how this impacts their writing (Doug's biography of the great Golden Age mystery master John Dickson Carr is a model in this regard).

I have so much biographical detail about mystery writers on my hands, I am always thinking about what to do it with all.  One thing I discovered in my various researches is that there are a good number of gay and lesbian mystery/crime writers from the more closeted era before the Stonewall Riots (1969) who have never been acknowledged as such in mystery genre histories (along with, of course, some who have been, like Patricia Highsmith and, in my view more questionably, Cornell Woolrich).

I thought looking at these writers, as well as, more broadly, gay, lesbian and transgender themes in the works of both gay and straight mystery/crime writers might be of considerable interest in the academic world, and, perhaps, the fan world as well.  So I have launched another multi-contributor essay collection on this subject, which will be out next year.  A dozen contributors have signed on so far.  I believe this book can make a noteworthy contribution to mystery genre studies and I look forward very much to its publication in 2016, as we near the half-century anniversary of Stonewall.

Murdermarch 3: Harm Done (1999), by Ruth Rendell

As I mentioned in my piece on Ruth Rendell's Simisola (1994), in a contemporary review of this twenty-year-old novel Publishers Weekly compared Rendell to great Victorian-era novelists, deeming Simisola "at times like a contemporary Middlemarch with a murder mystery at the heart of it."  I would argue that along with Road Rage (1997) and Harm Done (1999) Simisola forms a sort of Nineties English society trilogy, in which Rendell uses the mystery form to explore contemporary mores and conflicts.

Before Simisola Rendell's Inspector Wexford novels tended to be more strictly puzzle focused (offering some of the best puzzles in modern English mystery) or, if they did concentrate on broader social concerns, the results could be pretty mixed (see the feminism novel An Unkindness of Ravens),

After Harm Done, Rendell's Wexford mysteries declined in quality, I think, being neither as interestingly plotted nor integrating social issues as well.  Not in the Flesh (2007), for example, which I actually have rather an affection for, has a subplot about ritual female genital mutilation that simply does not link with the main story, which in itself is a strictly workmanlike mystery, punctuated by some interesting observations on aging and agriculture.

Harm Done, the third of this Nineties society trilogy, has three mystery problems, all of them linked by disappearances of children. First two teenage girls vanish, then suddenly reappear, not wanting to talk about what happened to them.

Meanwhile a pedophile has been released from prison and is being resettled at his daughter's home in a Kingsmarkham council estate, much to the objection of his neighbors.  When a third disappearance occurs--a toddler girl this time--many assume the "pedo" is responsible, even though, as Wexford points out, he was convicted for actions involving adolescent boys. Eventually there is a riot against the police station, in which a petrol bomb is thrown, killing a policeman.

Too late for the dead cop, Wexford solves the mystery of the vanished child and this solution eventually leads to a murder, which becomes the only formal murder problem in the novel.  This murder story pivots on the issue of spousal abuse, which in turn links with a continuing subplot about Wexford's less-preferred daughter, Sylvia, who has her own marital problems (non-violent) and is now working part-time at a shelter for abused women (happily by the end of the novel there's a bit of resolution, or at least a turning point, in the relationship between Wexford and Sylvia).

I was impressed with how Rendell wove this involved and lengthy tapestry together so efficiently. Fans strictly of the puzzle mystery likely will find all the social detail extraneous, but if they stick with it they do eventually get a classic murder problem with one very clever clue and even a twist ending.

On the whole I think I preferred the plot of Harm Done to that of Simsola, although Simisola probably has the more memorable characters.  Much of the characterization in Harm Done focuses glancingly on the lower class residents of a council estate, about whom Rendell writes unsentimentally (Minette Walters explored a somewhat similar subject three years later, in her novel Acid Row). Rendell has some good pointed satire here, though some may discern a scornful edge that may make them uncomfortable.

With the formal murder problem in the last part of the book, we find ourselves in upper, or upper middle-class, surroundings, familiar to the reader of the traditional British mystery; but, though Rendell has some interesting thoughts on domestic abuse, none of these characters are really developed with great depth.

On the other hand, Rendell peoples her novel with an impressively broad gallery of individuals and gives a compelling picture of a place and time.  It's a pleasure to lose oneself for a time in Rendell's Kingsmarkham, with the wise Wexford as our guide. Probably no one was doing the British manners mystery better in the 1990s than Ruth Rendell.

Incidentally, I call this Murdermarch III because the novel Road Rage came between Simisola and Harm Done.  I will have to go back and review that one someday!

Was Corinne's Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play (2011/2015)

This may seem a bit self-serving, but my forgotten book selection for this week is my 20,000 word booklet, Was Corinne's Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play, published in 2011 as a CADS (Crime and Detective Stories) Supplement.  It detailed the debates among Detection Club members about the standards for admitting new members over a near quarter-century period, from 1930 to 1953.  There is quite a bit about the personalities of the members, especially during the Second World War, when the conflict menaced the Club's existence. There were nice reviews of it at the time by Jon L. Breen, Martin Edwards and Patrick Ohl.

The booklet was printed in the UK and I believe did not reach many people outside that country, so I am pleased to announce that it will be the lead piece in a collection of my essays and reviews to be published this Spring, Was Corinne's Murder Clued and Other Mysteries: Essays on Crime and Detective Fiction.  It will include CADS articles and Coachwhip introductions as well as additional pieces I have written over the last four years, covering classic English crime, classic American crime, thrillers and pulp fiction, Victoriana and genre historiography.  It is structured to provide a pretty broad overview of American and British crime and detective fiction published over about 150 years.

Additionally I have another book project with McFarland for 2016 that has been shaping up nicely, about which more soon shall be forthcoming.  Also, my book on Henry Wade and GDH and Margaret Cole should be out soon and I hope to finish a genre survey this year (about 200 pages have been written).  There will also be some more mystery reprint introductions, some, but not all, for Coachwhip.

On another, sadder note the news is that Ruth Rendell, a great favorite at The Passing Tramp, has suffered a serious stroke, as reported here at the Guardian.  I know you will join with me in wishing her the best.  I had recently completed Rendell's 1999 Wexford novel Harm Done, and you can expect a full review soon. This month I also reviewed one of her collections of short fiction, Blood Lines.

Putting Carnage into Crime Fiction: Robert M. Coates and Wisteria Cottage (1948)

(And across Richard's mind there flitted swiftly, glancingly, a vision of the tools on the oilcloth floor and the man in his overalls, bending, preoccupied, by the sink; it would be in the kitchen, musty and dusty from long shut-upness, and as Richard crept though the door there would be only the faintest creak of the flooring to betray his presence.  But it would be enough to make the man turn, and see, and shriek.  God!  What shrieks!  I could make you remember, Richard thought.  And then the limp, salt-soused figure, the face oozing blood, and the blood sluicing off the waves.  "I could make you forget too, too," he said.)

He was good, he was goodness himself, he knew that; he was an influence for good, or he could be if his goodness were accepted. But he knew too that when good meets evil it is frequently rejected....

Wisteria Cottage (1948), Robert M. Coates

Although Robert Myron Coates (1897-1973) today probably is best-known as a long-time art critic for the New Yorker (it is said he coined the term abstract expressionism), to the crime fiction genre he contributed three novels, as well as a number of short stories, many of which originally appeared in the New Yorker, with some of them collected in three volumes published between 1943 and 1965.

Coates' crime novels are The Eater of Darkness, first published in France in 1926 and in the US in 1929, a surrealistic spoof of crime thrillers (after graduating from Yale in 1919 Coates moved to Europe and resided among the American expatriate artist community in Paris from 1921 to 1926); Wisteria Cottage (1948); and The Farther Shore (1955).  The latter two novels are studies of criminal pathology that straddle the line between crime and mainstream novels.

Coates followed The Eater of Darkness with two non-criminous works, also surrealistic in form, that met with mixed receptions from critics, from what I have seen. However, Wisteria Cottage seems to have been nearly universally applauded as a tour de force study of madness and mayhem.

As one review put it, "It is a perceptive account of how a sick mind, confusing its own need for self-destruction with a desire for world salvation, can seduce itself into crime." Another reviewer bluntly dubbed the novel "the outstanding blood-chiller of the year." Anthony Boucher, dean of American crime fiction critics, referenced the novel a number of times in the 1950s and 1960s, indicating he thought it a model fictional study of criminal insanity.

Wisteria Cottage details the mental disintegration over several months of Richard Baurie, a young bookstore clerk (and supposed struggling poet) in New York. Richard has attached himself to the Hacketts, a family of three women, a mother and two adult daughters (the husband, an engineer, is mostly absent); and for them he finds an ideal Long Island summer beach house, Wisteria Cottage, where is allowed weekend use of the studio on the property.

Unknown to the Hackett women--well, Louisa, the older daughter, has an bit of an inkling--under Richard's amiable facade is a seething mass of lusts, repressions and complexes (some of his back story is explored by means of snippets from a psychiatrist's report).

Over the summer Richard comes increasingly to believe that it is his divinely-appointed mission to save the younger Hackett daughter, Elinor, from the baneful influence of her worldly older sister and her coquettish mother, Florence.  How far will Richard go in his mission to make the world "safe" for his vision of goodness? Well, quite far, as we learn in the penultimate chapter of the novel.

The cover illustration of the Dell paperback edition of the novel (see above) is lurid, no question, but it captures the mood of this novel's grim and disturbing finale, which takes us into the realm of Jim Thompson and is indeed not for the squeamish reader.  Not surprisingly, Wisteria Cottage was reprinted by Lion, who often published Thompson's nightmares, with a typically risque illustration (see below).

Off His Loaf: Wisteria Cottage (1948), by Robert M. Coates

the lurid Dell paperback edition

I love the title of Robert M. Coates' Wisteria Cottage (1948), because it conjures the world of cozy mystery when it is anything but.  The hardcover edition was subtitled a novel of criminal impulse, which gives a clue to what the book is: a sober suspense story about a mentally disintegrating psychopath.

Wisteria Cottage was extremely well-reviewed and went through three paperback editions, including one as late as 1985, but since then seems to have been almost entirely forgotten, one of those vagaries of literary fortune.

I'll be writing about the novel, and Mr. Coates, more this weekend, as well as a novel by another author, one published merely fifteen years ago--imagine!

By the Bookplate 1 The Telltale Thumb Mark: The Story of the Thief, the Book Plate and Dead Man Twice

the bookplate

Dead Man Twice (1930) for some reason is one of the easiest-to-find early Christopher Bush detective novels, even though most all of Bush's earlier novels were published in the US and UK.  I actually have copies of both the American and British first editions, but it is my copy of the British edition that carries the book plate of of Asa Guy and Rosamund Gurney, who today lie buried, far from England, in Michigan City, Indiana. (Rosamund Gurney died only four years after Dead Men Twice was published.)

The Gurney bookplate is an attractive one, depicting in the foreground a man and woman--Asa and Rosamund themselves?--at a Paris bookstall.  The man has a book in hand and in the background the awesome Notre-Dame Cathedral.

However, for the purposes of this blog, what is most interesting about the Gurney bookplate is the Gurneys themselves, or, more particularly, Asa Guy Gurney, who, it seems, once featured prominently in a noted American criminal case.

Notre-Dame Cathedral

Back in 1894 $22,500 was found missing from a safe sent from the Bank of Commerce, New York to the Whitney National Bank, New Orleans.  This would be worth over $662,000 USD today, making this no petty theft, to say the least. David N. Carvalho, an expert in handwriting from New York, was called in to investigate the case.

On the American Express envelope containing the key of the safe, Carvalho discovered, under the lens of his microscope, "the faint impression of a man's right thumb in the wax of a broken seal."  He determined that the telltale thumb mark identically matched that of the agent of the American Express Company in New Orleans, who happened to be--you've probably guessed it--one Asa Guy Gurney.

As explained by the Microscopical Journal the next year: "It has been shown in numberless instances that the thumb or finger impressions of no two persons are alike, and further, that the impressions stay the same from the cradle to the grave."  Yet "such evidence was too subtle for the rural jury which tried the case," noted a newspaper account.  The wily defendant was acquitted, though he later confessed to the theft, validating Carvalho's work.

Apparently in the leisure years he enjoyed after his crime, Asa Guy Gurney as a hobby perused crime fiction. Assuming the owner of Dead Man Twice was the same Asa Guy Gurney who pilfered the bank safe back in 1894, one can only say, how appropriate!

Mystery writer R. Austin Freeman later explored the matter of crime and thumb marks in his landmark scientific detective novel The Red Thumb Mark, while Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have publicly praised Carvalho's "nicety of reasoning" in the Gurney case.

Death in Its Shorter Forms: Blood Lines (1996), by Ruth Rendell

Since the death of Agatha Christie P. D. James and Ruth Rendell jointly ruled as England's Queens of Crime Fiction, right up until James's own death last year.  Probably the dual monarchs reached the apex of their popularity and prestige in the 1990s.

In Rendell's case she had begun downplaying in the 1980s her Chief Inspector Wexford detective novels, in favor of the psychological suspense thrillers written under her own name (such as The Crocodile Bird, 1993, The Keys to the Street, 1996, and A Sight for Sore Eyes, 1998) and the multi-layered Barbara Vine mysteries that she launched in 1986, with A Dark-Adapted Eye (followed with such popular and critical successes as A Fatal Inversion, 1987, The House of Stairs, 1988, King Solomon's Carpet, 1991, Asta's Book, 1993, No Night Is Too Long, 1994 and The Brimstone Wedding, 1995).

Even with the Wexford series, Rendell offered a sort of reboot of it in the 1990s, with much longer novels that are filled with greater detail about social concerns (racism and the exploitation of the poor in Simisola, 1994, environmentalism in Road Rage, 1997, spousal abuse and pedophilia in Harm Done, 1999), yet still have interesting mystery plots (if not up to the level, in this latter regard, with her best earlier Wexfords).

Between 1976 and 2000 Ruth Rendell also authored seven collections of short crime fiction.  On the whole I would say that, in contrast with her novels, Rendell's later works of short fiction are inferior to her earlier ones. Yet there are some notable exceptions.

Of Rendell's later three volumes of short crime fiction, which appeared between 1991 and 2000, my favorite is Blood Lines: Long and Short Stories, published nearly twenty years ago, in 1996.  The American edition of this book, by Crown, is a beautifully-produced volume.  Within the covers are a novella, a novelette and 9 short stories. Fortunately both the novella and the novelette are winners, but the short stories are a less enticing melange.

see Stu's Photos

The fruit of the arbutus is beautiful, red and shiny; it looks like strawberries but it has no taste.--Ruth Rendell, "The Strawberry Tree"

The cream-or should I say crime--of the crop is the superb novella (about 25,000 words) "The Strawberry Tree," which originally was published in 1990 and in style and mood resembles the Barbara Vine novels of that period (it is easy to see how it could have been expanded into a full-length novel).

Like a lot of Vines it shifts back and forth over a lengthy, treacherously tangled, space of time. Much of the novella takes place, retrospectively, on the island of Majorca several years after the Second World War, among a small group of people, all but one of them English, vacationing there.

As with the best Vine and Rendell books, one reads on compulsively from a sheer desire to know what will happen next.  Rendell beautifully exploits the classic Had-I-But-Known technique of Mary Roberts Rinehart to keep us in suspense (there's even a haunted house):

Perhaps, in the light of what was to come, it would have been better for all if Piers had not spoken. We would never have come to the Casita de Golondro, so the things that happened there would not have happened....If Piers had been less than he was, a little colder, a little more reserved, more like me.  If we had all been careful not to look in the boy's direction but had swum within the harbor enclosure with eyes averted....

When I think of all the ribbing Rinehart once got for this sort of writing (in truth, wonderfully atmospheric), and I see that whoops, here it is, decades later, in the pages of a highly praised Ruth Rendell novella, well!  All I can say is good on you, Ruth Rendell.

"The Strawberry Tree" is Rendell at her best in crime fiction: atmospheric, mysterious and poignantly observant of the melancholy of human failings.

Also very worthwhile is the Wexford novelette, "Blood Lines," original to this volume, which offers an interesting clued murder mystery involving an extended family of market gardeners.  As was Rendell's wont at this time, she uses the tale to make certain sharp points about relationships between the sexes.  This novelette is worthy of inclusion with the other Wexford short fiction, collected, aside from a single story that appears in The Copper Peacock (1991), in Means of Evil (1978).

Regrettably of the nine short stories, all but one of which was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine over 1995 and 1996, I really liked only one of them, "Burning End."

Like "Blood Lines," "Burning End," is set among an extended family of farmers and scores points against sexual double standards. In the story it is Betty who has to look after Brian's aged mother at the old family home, even though Betty has her own salaried job, in addition to having to act, as best she can, as a traditional homemaker. Betty's mother-in-law is not only ungrateful for Betty's sacrifice, but positively spiteful. Classically, Betty's thoughts start trending in a criminal direction....The twist at the end is superb--on dual levels.

The additional stories others may enjoy, but I found them mostly flat and predictable (some are short shorts of under 1000 words, a very hard form to pull off, in my opinion). One, "Clothes," about a woman's compulsive shopping addiction, is a study in psychology, really, and only a crime story by the most generous of definitions.  And thrilling it isn't.  In all honesty, "In All Honesty," though highly praised by Kirkus Reviews, is not exceptional; however, it does have its share of mordant humor (you will never look at shag carpet the same way again).
,
Still, for me, the presence of "The Strawberry Tree," "Blood Lines," and Burning End," which together account for over half the book, make this attractive volume of short fiction well worth owning.