Kindertotenlieder: A Question of Inheritance (1980) and Easy Prey (1959), by Josephine Bell

"Excuse me, was it your poor child?"

      --Mrs. Lancaster to Tuppence Beresford, By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968), by Agatha Christie

A Question of Inheritance (1980)

Published when the author was 83, the detective novel A Question of Inheritance(1980) is Josephine Bell's penultimate novel and the second of her two engaging Amy Tupper mysteries.  A "resting" actress, long retired from the stage, Amy Tupper is, I think, the most appealing of Josephine Bell's amateur detectives. (The roster of sometime sleuths includes, but is not limited to, heavy hitter David Wintringham, who appears in a dozen books; attorney Claude Warrington-Reeve, who appears in three; and Dr. Henry Frost, who, like Amy Tupper, cracked a couple of cases in novel form. There's also, I should add, Bell's Inspector Mitchell, who appeared in nine of the Wintringham books and all of the Warrington-Reeve books, as well as in at least one solo venture.)

Amy Tupper is, in short, Bell's Miss Marple, her contribution, admittedly minor, to the spinster sleuth genre.  She has a good case in A Question of Inheritance, a short novel of about 55,000 words, divided into two parts.  The first part, of about 15,000 words, is set in 1953, while the second part, about 40,000 words, moves 22 years ahead in time, to 1975. 

With the temporal shift that takes place in the novel, one could see how the plot, in the hands of Ruth Rendell, might have been expanded into a Barbara Vine opus of 120, 000 words, but Josephine Bell was a less ambitious (or if you like, more economical) writer than the Rendell who gave us the rich and rewarding A Dark Adapted Eye, A Fatal Inversion, The House of Stairs, The Brimstone Wedding and Asta's Book.

Still, Part One of A Question of Inheritance is rather Rendellian, being a suspenseful and indeed somewhat Gothic depiction of a wife, Florence Bennet (the former minor stage actress "Maisie Atkins"), who is trapped in a loveless marriage at the remote country mansion of Garwood House (Florence's husband, we learn, only married her to beget an heir to his estate).

After her infant son, the begotten heir, abruptly dies, a casualty of cot death (SIDS, or sudden infant death syndrome), on a night when Florence is totally alone in the house, the panicking wife decides to flee her husband and the country, covering both her tracks and the traces of her son's death.

Florence ends up in Italy, where she meets a distraught native woman with an infant son who just happens to be the age of her dead child....

Bell has Florence herself thinking how her situation is like something out of a Victorian stage melodrama: "Could it have been a dramatic version of the famous East Lynne?  Quite likely.  It always went down famously in the provinces."  It's also like something you might find in an Annie Haynes novel.

Part Two takes Florence Bennet forward to 1975, where the events of the past embroil her and those around her in a very modern murder case.  Amy Tupper, an old friend of Florence (or Maisie as she was then) from acting days, is on hand to help out, happily, and it's she who grasps the meaning of a clever clue (one daringly staring readers in the face throughout the book, even though I didn't quite grasp it).

The plot involving a dead infant reminds me of the Rendell novel A Fatal Inversion (1987), except that as I recollect Rendell's characters in that book are Sixties hippy types and sexual swingers and Bell's young couple is ever so nice and spruce and "sensible" (as Bell puts it), making them rather akin to the nice young couples in Ngaio Marsh's mysteries.  (They even know their way around a sherry bottle.)

I'm reminded also of that haunting vignette, which actually pops up in several Agatha Christie novels, of the mad old woman in the nursing home asking, "Was it your poor child?"  But Bell's book is more a classic mystery, complete with house servants and a battle over the inheritance of an ancestral country estate. This is a good late Bell (though with some implausible bits, as Moira Redmond has noted), and more of a traditional mystery than most of her other late novels.  In fact it was Bell's farewell to classic detective fiction.

Note: Moira Redmond's 2013 review of this novel makes, as expected, quite an entertaining read.  Check it out.

Easy Prey (1959)

Easy Prey was published during Josephine Bell's heyday back in the 1950s, a year after the final appearance of her longtime series sleuth, David Wintringham. 

Here we have an abundance, or indeed an overabundance, of sleuths, including a young husband and wife, the wife's mother, the canny lawyer Claude Warrington-Reeve, and several impressively able policeman, including Superintendent, formerly Inspector, Mitchell and Inspector Frost.*

*(Any relation to Bell's later series sleuth Dr. Frost?)

The complicated case concerns another dead child, this one appallingly murdered in his crib, allegedly by his own mother, sixteen years earlier.

In the opening chapter of the novel, Reg and Mavis Holmes, a nice young married couple with a nice infant daughter, Joy, come home in their nice London neighborhood to find their nice middle-aged lodger (I think she is forty--"a dangerous age for women," we are told) nearly dead from gas poisoning, in an attempted suicide.

Or is it attempted murder???  To their horror, Reg and Mavis learn that their wonderful lodger, Miss Trubb, served sixteen years in prison for the murder of her young son.  But they begin to suspect that all is not as it seems, and they start snooping into the past, with some deadly results....

Easy Prey is an interesting and complexly plotted detective novel, with an especially good character portrayal of pathos in Miss Trubb, the sort of complex personality type who shows up in more modern crime novels like Minette Walter's The Sculptress (1993).

My only complaints about the novel are the somewhat huddled and muddled conclusion, something that happens sometimes with Josephine Bell mysteries (like Sophie Hannah, Bell is not blessed with the miraculous clarity of Christie), and the somewhat irritating way the wife, Mavis Holmes, is portrayed.

four years around the corner

It's all very Fiction from the Fifties in the portrayal of fictive marriage, with Mavis occasionally flipping out over stressful events ("She was on the verge of hysteria," he decided), afterward sitting like a child on her husband's knee to be calmed ("Reg took his wife on his knee") and having her mother brought in to help her cope when her husband is absent. ("I'm a lucky old woman, and you are a lucky young one, having a man like Reg to look after you.")  There's no suggestion that any of this is odd or unusual, it's just a typical Fifties husband-wife relationship apparently. 

Needless to say, Reg takes the lead in the amateur investigation, masterful Fifties fellow that he is. It's hard to imagine that Josephine Bell, a doctor who supported four children entirely herself after the tragic accidental death of her husband when he was not even forty years old, all the while managing to write at least one novel a year, would have been so passive.

Some Bells Toll for Me: Such a Nice Client (1977), A Swan-Song Betrayed (1978) and The Innocent (1982), by Josephine Bell

"No one is basically wicked, Elaine.  We were taught that and I still believe it...."

     --Mrs. Chandler, almost pathologically naive social worker, in Such a Nice Client (1977), by Josephine Bell

The 1970s and 1980s were lean times for admirers of the detective fiction of the Golden Age writers, unless they were content to reread the old books. For the most part, the old boys and girls weren't writing new stuff, even if they were still alive and kicking (and few of them were).

Agatha Christie's Curtain and Sleeping Murder were great events for classic crime fiction fans, though of course we learned that they weren't newly composed works.  I was eleven years old when I first read Curtain and Sleeping Murder in paperback in 1977; I had been introduced to Christie paperbacks as an 8-year-old tyke by my mother in 1974 in Mexico City, where my family and I were then residing for a year. 

By 1978 and 1979, I, avid bookworm that I was, was ravenously devouring all the Christies I could lay hands on; she was my "series" reading staple at that time, after I had lost interest in the OZ books of L. Frank Baum and the Little House books of Laura Ingalls Wilder and before I got interested in the fantasy and sci-fi fiction of JRR Tolkien and Frank Herbert.  How I loved Poirot and, to a lesser extent, Miss Marple. (Tommy and Tuppence, on the other hand, just seemed plain dotty to me, though I did like feisty and facetious "Bundle" Brent.)

By the time I started reading Ngaio Marsh in the 1980s, the New Zealander had passed away just a few years earlier, in 1982.  I didn't really like her much compared to Christie, because the few books by her that I read seemed interminably full of what Robert Barnard memorably termed "Marshy inquisitions" about who was where when.  I loved Dorothy L. Sayers, however, barring the moiderless and lovey-dovey Gaudy Night, and over about a year I read every bit of mystery she ever stitched.  But Dot had died long ago when I first picked up a book by her, and her mysteries had petered out even farther back in time. (Not long after my parents were born.)

Even very late Golden Age writers (arguably more Silver Age) like Christianna Brand and Elizabeth Ferrars I started reading just after their respective passings.  John Dickson Carr had been dead for over a dozen years when I discovered his fantastic murder fiction.  Ellery Queen I only started after the death of the longer surviving half of the team, Frederic Dannay, though I had enjoyed the Jim Hutton/David Wayne Ellery Queen television series when it originally aired (back when I was first reading Agatha Christie).

There were some true Golden Age writers who were still active in 1970s and even 1980s, but I didn't know about them.  Anthony Gilbert's last mystery was published in 1974, a year after her death. Had she survived to her eighties she would probably still have been producing into the 1980s, as did, in fact, two other hardy Golden Age ladies, Gladys Mitchell, whose last detective novels were published posthumously in 1984, and Josephine Bell, who published her last crime novel at the age of 85 in 1982. (She died five years later, in 1987, when she was nearly 90.)

picking at the crusts of the Golden Age

Josephine Bell's last seven crime novels, published between 1975, the year Hercule Poirot with the hardcover appearance of Curtain passed on to that great crime scene in the sky, and 1982, are an interesting group of books, though variously successful.  Bell's first mystery, the once much-lauded Murder in Hospital, had appeared way back in 1937.  A widowed doctor with several children, Bell, like PD James, was a late, but long-lasting, arrival to crime fiction.

Bell was someone who grew bored with the "classic" clue-puzzle detective and over her long writing career veered more into the crime novel form, in addition to writing both "straight" novels and, later in life, period novels set in the Tudor and Jacobean eras.

Daring to do what Christie would not (Poirot was too popular and lucrative), Bell ruthlessly ditched her series sleuth, Dr. David Wintringham, who appeared in a dozen mysteries between 1937 and 1958 (half of them, including Murder in Hospital, from 1937 to 1940 and half from 1944 to 1958).  She tried a few other short-lived series sleuths, one of whom, elderly retired stage actress Amy Tupper, appeared in two of her very late books, Wolf, Wolf! (1979) and A Question of Inheritance (1980), which I'll be talking about here later; but she wrote far more non-series works, many of which are more in the nature of crime novels than classic detective fiction.

Three of these examples are from late in her career: Such a Nice Client (1977), A Swan-Song Betrayed (1978) and, her final novel, The Innocent.  (Her subpar American publisher, Walker, though it needed to sex up these titles to remind readers they were, after all, murder stories: Client became Stroke of Death, Swan-Song became Treachery in Type, and Innocent became A Deadly Place to Stay.)  I had read, and quite enjoyed, Client some years ago and, having read the other two books back in April and been disappointed with them, decided to reread Client, which I again, I'm happy to say, enjoyed very much.

perhaps the young woman (left) is horrified by the cover to A Swan-song Betrayed (right)

A Swan-Song Betrayed has a promising set-up, involving a woman who was briefly a bestselling mainstream novelist in the later 1930s attempting to make, late in life, a comeback, after decades of having written nothing.  She rashly employs a young woman typist with numerous shady friends, two of whom involve her in a plot to steal her employer's novel and publish it as her own.

Plagiarism is an interesting subject, especially for someone like me, who has been the victim of plagiarism; but the plagiarism plot just kind of peters out, as does the focus on the elderly author, as Bell transfers her interest to the hoods and con artists in the typist's world.  There is a murder, but it feels perfunctory.  (Another, admittedly more incidental, debit for this book for me is the absolutely hideous Hodder cover.)

It's obvious that Bell was, like a lot of people of her generation (my grandparents' generation), deeply disturbed by the chaos which they discerned all over the world in the 1970s (as if there hadn't been a few problems here and there back in the 1930s). 

Bell addressed juvenile delinquency in a sociological study, Crime in Our Time (1962), and in her Seventies crime fiction.  Like many of her generation, Bell was a tough cookie, hardened by hard times, and she tended to fault what she deemed the sentimentality and social permissiveness of the 1970s for such problems as violent crime, drug use, out-of-wedlock birth and poverty. 

These concerns often found tart and blunt expression in Bell's later novels, reminding me of my late friend Helen Szamuely, an outspokenly conservative blogger and mystery reader who passed away in April.  I don't actually know whether she read Josephine Bell, but I think she must have enjoyed her if she did.  Although there are ongoing revisionist efforts, including those by Martin Edwards as well as some of my own, to nuance the conservatism of British Golden Age detective novelists, there is still no denying that a great many of them were indeed conservatives who were greatly shaken by the new order that arouse after the Second World War.

Josephine Bell's The Innocent is a more interesting book than Swan-Song, having something of the feel of one of Ruth Rendell's later (and much longer) social problem crime novels.  Here Bell looks at the life of a thoroughly unappealing teenage girl runaway.  After nearly killing (inadvertently) an old woman from whom she was stealing, she ends up in the home of an oddball fringe Christian sect, which she soon learns is more of a cult that is presided over, most dangerously, by a messianic leader with a penchant for sadism. (He likes to brand disobedient women sect members, for example.)

This was at the time very timely subject for a crime novel (the horrific mass suicide of Jim Jones' and his tragically deluded followers had taken place four years earlier), and Bell handles confused (or "innocent," in the sense that they are bereft of morals instruction from higher authority) modern young people better than, say, Agatha Christie did (see Third Girl), though this is setting, I think, rather a low bar. Actually, though, Bell allows her characters to use the f-word more than PD James and Ruth Rendell ever did!

Again, there is a late murder, but, although it's a smidgen more interesting than the one in Swan-Song, it still has something of a tacked-on feel. (There also a nice boy-girl team of cops investigating, providing some of the romance that a lot of people want in their mysteries.)

More clarion than either of the above Bells, however, is Such a Nice Client, published four decades ago, when Bell was eighty years old.  What lifts this one up for me is the medical milieu, about which Bell as an expert, and the author's splendidly tart and trenchant writing.

menaces, menaces

I'll admit that, on rereading the novel, it especially interested me because the partial focal character is a nice, even noble, young physical therapist working with geriatric patients. This is an occupation about which I have become quite familiar of late, because of my father's health issues. (There's also a good bit of reference to speech therapy.)

It's certainly a striking opening the book offers: Lucy Summers arrives at The Old Farmhouse to keep a rehab appointment with old Mr. Lawrence, speechless and confined to a wheelchair since his recent stroke, and his stylish daughter-and-law and caregiver, Dorothy.

Mrs. Lawrence is nowhere to be seen, but old Mr. Lawrence is in his chair in the back garden beside the bird table.  As a horrified Lucy looks on, she sees the stroke victim with his one good hand scatter the birds and grab the bread crusts off table, before ravenously stuffing them into his mouth. 

Is the elderly man being starved or is he simply suffering from dementia?  Doctors and nurses investigate, but they have to contend with an astoundingly dense social work administrator and her unfathomably incompetent underling.

During the course of the novel there are three murders and enough twists and turns to keep things quite lively for the reader (and quite deadly for the characters).  But also notable in Client is the scorn that Bell expresses for a social work bureaucracy that she sees as too often stymieing the proper authority of doctors.  As Bell's fellow crime writer HRF Keating put in in a review of the novel: "...plenty of sharp smacks for social services paranoiacs plus neat mystery."

Special pleading on Bell's part if you like, but the doctor and novelist is not one to mince words on the subject:

Miss Carr was small and dark with a pinched little face that had not changed much since her early childhood and would stay about the same for the next thirty years.  People wishing to be kind to her had called her "knowing" when she was very young.  Later they were less inclined to use an adjective of such doubtful worth.  For Molly Carr did poorly at school at all those subjects where exact knowledge was essential. Her wayward mind floated uncertainly hither and thither without any particular direction.  Her imagination was lively; she produced a few remarkable infant drawings and paintings.  Later one one or two poems in entirely free verse astonished her teachers by the striking misuse of some long words they did not expect her to know and in some cases had themselves to look up in the dictionary.  Possible it was this collection of insubstantial artistic triumphs that won her a place in a minor college where she elected to pursue Social Studies.  The result was a diploma and further training.  Miss Carr continued to enjoy meeting vague, large ideas.  She continued to be incapable of observing or learning any single detail of exact knowledge about anything.

But the diploma earned her a job.  Having passed through several spheres of activity where her deficiency appeared to be much greater than her worth, she discovered a final interest in the great, heaving, clouded sea of human psychology.  Another course, another diploma and Miss Carr, as a psychiatric social worker, was ready to paddle about in shallow waters of that ocean where Dr. Faiclough took his lifecraft on its desperate ventures.

It's the kind of passage I think Helen Szamuely would have appreciated.  Josephine Bell could always deliver one formidable burn.

Petrella Perfect: Blood and Judgment (1959), by Michael Gilbert

oh, let's just say "a classic"
with no qualifiers

"In books of course it is quite simple. I believe that private detectives of great ability abound. Very often, having been invited down for the week-end, before the murder occurs, they are handily on the spot before the police arrive.  They have friends in every walk of life, private laboratories at their disposal, and unlimited money.  I can only say I have never had the good fortune to meet one.  The private detectives that I have been called upon to deal with have been different."  Mr. Harrowing paused again, and added, "Quite different."
                                      *****
"His first book is out in the autumn.  Murder, Mayhem and Mirth it's called.  I get two mentions in it.  'My old friend Albert Dodds agreed with me'--page ninety-two, and 'Sergeant Dodds expressed a contrary view'--page a hundred and four."

"I believe your'e making the whole thing up."

"Cross my heart, I'm not.  It'll be in the Gazette tomorrow."  Sergeant Dodds picked up three darts from the counter and flung one of them idly into the dart-board.  "One case I don't mind betting he leaves out though, that's the Binford Reservoir Case.  Between you and me, it wasn't really one of our best."

                                                           Blood and Judgment (1959), Michael Gilbert 

The "Binford Reservoir Case" is just what Blood and Judgment, Michael Gilbert's tenth crime novel, details.  A woman's body is found hidden away on the grounds of a London water reservoir and, after it's discovered she has been murdered, the great machinery of the Metropolitan Police is put in motion to solve the case.

An individual is arrested and charged with the crime, but that dogged young detective sergeant, Patrick Petrella, has his doubts that the case has been handled correctly by that showboating celebrity cop, Detective Superintendent Chris Kellaway.  What will Petrella do to see that a fair judgment is delivered?

Michael Gilbert (1912-2006) produced several landmark works of English crime fiction, and surely Blood and Judgment is one of them.  It's not only an important English police procedural, following in the footsteps of the wonderful Henry Wade (see my book The Spectrum of English Murder), of whom Gilbert was a great admirer and whose wryly cynical tone Gilbert shared in his books, it's a nice little puzzle, at its heart the sort of thing you find in Golden Age detective fiction from the between-the-wars years.

The milieu is realistic, the puzzle meticulously designed and the writing masterful. (The final paragraph is especially good and should stay with you in memory.)  Honestly, for what more could you ask in a police detective novel?

This may be my second favorite Gilbert, after Smallbone Deceased (1950), one of the finest examples of post-WW2 ratiocinative detective fiction and a book that postively "wowed" his brother and sister Detection Club members.  My Hodder reprint edition of Judgment (see above) says the book is a "near classic London police novel."  I have no idea why Hodder tempered their the praise with that "near."

Petrella appeared in only one other Gilbert novel, Roller-Coaster (1993), many years later, and the story is not as appealing to fans of classic detective fiction, I would opine.  However, Gilbert's appealing character also appeared in in numerous excellent short stories (fifty I believe), the majority collected, during Gilbert's lifetime, in Petrella at Q (1977) and Young Petrella (1988), but almost two dozen others appearing in additional, scattered volumes, some published posthumously.  One mega-volume of Petrella stories would be simply brilliant!

Passing Glances from the Passing Tramp: Garve, Gilbert, Bell and Blochman Part One: Garve

My posting on this blog ground to a virtual halt this Spring after my father was hospitalized with COPD and pneumonia.  He was in hospital, including ICUs, for six weeks and at a rehab center in Holly Springs, MS (insurance vagaries) for a month.  I was only able to get him back him at the beginning of May, where he is making progress.  Of course as you know from reading this blog earlier in the year, my mother also was diagnosed with stage four cancer, so this has not been a good year.  But we just feel fortunate my father made it off the ventilator and into recovery.

Especially when my father was in Holly Springs, I was having to spend a lot of time away from home, and blogging was just out of the question, as I chronicled on my Facebook page.  However, I did have time to do some actual reading of crime fiction and I thought I would give here, now that am here, some short takes, starting with:

Paul Winterton (1908-2011)
aka Andrew Garve, Roger Bax and Paul Somers

Andrew Garve (Paul Winterton, 1908-2001)
Although he published his first crime novel before the Second World War, under the pseudonym Roger Bax, the bulk of Andrew Garve's crime fiction was published in the three decades between 1947 (the Ilesian Disposing of Henry) and 1978 (the excellent thriller Counterstroke).  Until he began slowing down in the 1970s, Garve published a novel every year in that period, sometimes two or three.  He even created a third pseudonym, Paul Somers, to facilitate all his output.

Garve was what Julian Symons called, with perhaps a faint trace of condescension, an "entertainer," i.e., someone who had no pretensions to loftier artistic aims with his crime fiction. 

In an earlier era Garve probably would have been a consistent writer of true detective fiction, but, in what might be termed the Silver Age of detective fiction (c. 1941-c. 1985), he more often than not produced crime and espionage thrillers, or what was then ubiquitously termed the "suspense" novel. Still, his books often had enough actual detection in them that they won praise from the great detective fiction purist, the late academic scholar and public intellectual, Jacques Barzun.

My favorite book by Garve remains Murder in Moscow (1951), which Barzun highly praised and Symons liked too but decades later declared had "dated."  Partly it appealed to me precisely because it is dated. It's an excellent picture of the USSR in the early stages of the Cold War, when Stalin still reigned by terror, and it's also an excellently plotted detective novel.  I've yet to read anything by Garve I've liked quite as much.  I'm sure my late blogging friend, Helen Szamuely, must have liked this book very much, for she would have seen Garve as having had his eyes wide open about the true nature of Stalin's Russia, also portrayed in the film Child 44.

No Tears for Hilda (1950) is another Garve book Jacques Barzun praised, and it was largely responsible for getting Garve into the Detection Club. (I've written about Garve's admission into the Detection Club in my booklet Was Corinne's Murder Clued? but I may write about more here.)  It was nicely reviewed at the Cross Examining Crime blog in January, so I'll just add that on the whole I found the book a bit disappointing.

When housewife Hilda is found dead with her head in the gas oven, police initially suspect suicide, but the husband ends up getting arrested for her murder, and an old war buddy is tasked with trying to exonerate him.  As the old war buddy goes about uncovering the truth about Hilda's nature, the book is quite compelling, and there is plenty of detection; but well before the end of the tale it turns more into a suspense novel, losing its appeal for me.  The book is also dated, though in a fascinating way, as Hilda is repeatedly condemned for her failings as a homemaker.  Poor Hilda, she didn't live to see the "Me" Decade!

The Far Sands (1960), published a decade later, is cut to much the same pattern as Hilda.  (No one can say that Garve wasn't economical; one of his Paul Somers' novels used the exact same plot as one of his Roger Bax tales, Garve essentially plagiarizing himself.)  In Sands, James Renison weds beautiful Carol Harvey, a twin, whose twin sister, Fay, is married to wealthy Arthur Ramsden.

A shocker lies in store for the seemingly blissfully married James and Carol, when Arthur is found dead, apparently from foul and insidious means, and Fay turns up dead too, evidently having accidentally killed herself after having contrived Arthur's death! 

Stodgy James accepts this police conclusion, but Carol does not. Tension ensues as Carol pushes her husband to investigate with her, insisting that Fay could never have done such a thing..

Sands held me in suspense for a while, but when it became clear well before the book was over where things were going I lost interest for the most part.  I couldn't help thinking how much this book resembled a Ruth Rendell story, except that it simply wasn't as good.

I still look forward to reading more Garve though.  One thing I like about Garve, the entertainer, is he kept his books short.  His era admired brevity in crime fiction, while today readers seem to expect their murders to go on forever.  Early Ruth Rendell, I might add, had the brevity of Andrew Garve.

It Takes a Village? The Case of the Unfortunate Village (1932), by Christopher Bush

"Another accident in the unfortunate village of Bableigh...."

                      --The Case of the Unfortunate Village (1932), by Christopher Bush

Mysteries set in English villages remain perennially popular with fans of both classic detective fiction and the modern "cozy."  I like English village mysteries a great deal myself, as readers of this blog will know.

Because of this interest I was long anxious to track down a copy of the directly titled The Case of the Unfortunate Village, by the frequently quite excellent Golden Age detective novelist Christopher Bush. (See my review of his first-rate Dancing Death here.)  Well, I have now read the novel, which I have made available to Dean Street Press (who, I'm pleased to say, is reprinting the author), and here's my report.

Any classic mystery fan who reads Bush's Village will be immediately struck, I think, by similarities the novel has to mysteries by Agatha Christie and Gladys Mitchell, as well as to The Secret of High Eldersham (1930) by Miles Burton (aka John Street). The latter book was much praised by Jacques Barzun back in the 1970s and later myself, in my book Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012).  Eldersham, I should note, has recently been reprinted by the British Library.

Eldersham incorporates the witchcraft theme, drawing heavily on sociologist Margaret Murray's once popularly influential tome, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which posited the existence of an organized witch religion throughout Europe.  (Street's good friend John Dickson Carr brilliantly employed the witchcraft theme in several of his detective novels, but not so much in the village context as I recall.)  Though long discredited by scholars, Murray's book was surely quite a boon to both lurid occultists and thrillerists of all sorts, from crime writers like Burton to film studios like Hammer.

As the dust jacket to Bush's Village suggests, the novel also plays with the witchcraft theme, inviting comparison not only with Burton's Eldersham but Christie's Murder Is Easy (1939), where putative Satanists also raise their heads.  (Burton aka Street, who was fascinated with European folklore, takes the subject much more seriously than Christie, however.)

Another similarity between Bush's book and Christie's is the way a series of fatal "accidents" takes place in the respective villages.  In Bush's book, there is an accidental shooting, a cycling accident, an accidental fall in a well, etc.  Or are they accidents????

In Village Bush's amateur detective, Ludovic Travers, is drawn into an investigation into the strange goings-on at the village of Bableigh by an old public school friend, now the local gentleman and magistrate. Voltaire's philosophical novel Zadig (1747) plays a role in the solution, which is certainly something you don't encounter every day!  Another unusual aspect of the novel is the way Bush frankly admits  to choosing character names in a Pilgrim's Progress manner to illustrate their basic "types." (Parish, Faithful, Frail, Mould, Crome, etc.)  It gives the book something of a Cluedo feel.

Although Bush doesn't dwell on the subject, he's forthright about sex in the tale, through the inclusion of a group of artists and sculptors in the village population.  Those artists!  Such randy folk they be. This forthrightness reminded me a bit of Gladys Mitchell's village mystery masterpiece, The Saltmarsh Murders, coincidentally published in 1932, the same year as Bush's novel.

Where Village is uncharacteristic of Bush is in its failure to present the reader a complex alibi problem, as was the author's wont at this time. (see the previous year's splendid Cut-Throat, for example.)  However, Village is still a most interesting read.

Peter Drax's Golden Age Crime Fiction

This month Dean Street Press has reprinted six of the seven Golden Age crime novels of Peter Drax (Eric Elrington Addis), one of the great, though in modern times largely unheralded, exponents of the realistic crime novel during the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Addis was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1899, not long before the commencement of the Boer War, and died during the Second World War in 1941, a casualty of a German air raid on the British Royal Navy base at Alexandria, Egypt.

During his brief life Addis published a half-dozen "Peter Drax" crime novels: Murder by Chance (1936), He Shot to Kill (1936), Murder by Proxy (1937), Death by Two Hands (1937), Tune to a Corpse (1938) and High Seas Murder (1939).  An additional crime novel, titled Sing a Song of Murder, having been left unfinished by Drax at his death and completed by his novelist wife, Hazel Adair (Hazel Iris Wilson Addis), was published in 1944.

Together the Drax novels constitute one of the most important bodies of realistic crime fiction published during the Golden Age.  Rather than the artificial and outsize master sleuths and super crooks found in so many classic mysteries from the Golden Age, Drax's novels concern, as contemporary publicity material for the books put it, "police who are not endowed with supernatural powers and crooks who are also human."  They are, in other words, books about "real" people.

a thrilling murder story

Two of the Drax novels, Death by Two Hands and Tune to a Corpse, were published in the United States, home of Dashiell Hammett and his progeny, to quite strong reviews. (In the US they were re-titled, respectively, Crime within Crime and Crime to Music).

The Saturday Review of Literature, for example, pronounced of Crime within Crime that "as a straightforward eventful yarn of little people in the grip of tragic destiny it's brilliantly done" and of Crime to Music "London underworld life is described with color and realism."  The Drax books were very well received in the UK too, where mystery writer and Sunday Times reviewer Milward Kennedy was a particularly enthusiastic and notable booster.

I'll be saying more here about the two "American" Draxes soon, I hope.  In the meantime, Eric Addis, I should mention, was a distinguished British naval officer, serving in the Second World War as Commander on HMS Warspite during the Second Battle of Narvik, a naval affray which took place during the Norwegian campaign; and dying in the line of duty, as mentioned above, at Alexandria, Egypt.

In the 1930s he left the navy and practiced as a barrister, specializing in fields of admiralty (naturally) and divorce. During commutes to work in London he read and dissected thrillers, and concluded that the vast majority of them were lamentably unlikely affairs. He set out to writer thrillers that were "credible."

Happily, in his relatively short live Addis achieved that goal, in addition to spinning seven gripping and often grim tales--not at all what people often think of, stereotypically, as the stuff of the "Golden Age."  Try them for something different, or if you are already a fan of the "tough" American crime fiction from the same era.  There's more on Addis/Drax and the books in my introduction to the series.

Worth Fifty Years of Late Fees? The Shocking Tale of William Faulkner and Marion Mainwaring's Murder in Pastiche (1954)

William Faulkner, like his mother, was a great reader of detective fiction....The classic cases and sleuths are there in hardcover and paperback.  Nero Wolfe and Inspector Maigret appear alongside the works of [John Dickson] Carr, [Carter] Dickson, [Dashiell] Hammett, [Ellery] Queen, [Mary Roberts] Rinehart and [Dorothy L.] Sayers.

John Faulkner, the author's brother, also confirms that the whole family enjoyed detective fiction.  He recounts one amusing occasions when Bill pretentiously declared that he never read anything more except Shakespeare and the Bible," although he had asked his mother, "only minutes before, if she had anything new about Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin."

                             --From "Studying the Masters: Influences from Classic Detective Fiction on Faulkner's Knight's Gambit," by Suzanne Bray, in Faulkner at Fifty: Tutors and Tyros (2014)*

(*This essay quotes The Passing Tramp on page 113, by the way.)

I remember one day walking with Faulkner over to the drugstore where he was going to exchange a stack of mystery stories for a new stack.  I asked him, "Why do you read all of these damn mysteries?" and he said, "Bud, no matter what you write, it's a mystery of one kind or another."

                             --Albert I. Bezzerides, quoted in William Faulkner, Life Glimpses, by Louis Daniel Brodsky (1990)

William Faulkner's interest in detective fiction is well-known among Faulkner aficionados, and has, indeed, been discussed previously at this blog.  In his attraction to the mystery form Faulkner hardly was alone among great writers of the 1920s and 1930s : other mystery fiends of his distinguished breed who might be mentioned are T. S. Eliot (blogged about here a number of times), Fernando Pessoa (subject of an essay by Henrique Valle in Mysteries Unlocked), Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis.

Yet with its emphasis on murky mystery embedded in complex and tricky narratives, Faulkner's "straight" fiction is especially suggestive of a man who liked mystery tales. Faulkner himself also wrote a small amount of self-disparaged crime fiction, collected in the volume Knight's Gambit; and, coincidentally, some of his early novels had dust jackets designed by one of the great between-the-wars mystery jacket artists, Arthur Hawkins, Jr.  One of these jackets, that for the notorious 1931 Faulkner novel Sanctuary, bore a strikingly similar design to that for a 1931 John Rhode detective novel, The Hanging Woman, about which I blogged here exactly three years ago today.)

There is, indeed, as much mystery in Faulkner novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! as there is in any of the most baroque Golden Age detective novels. When I read those two novels over thirty years ago I found them as purely page turning as any classic mystery in the sense of their drawing me into the dark tales with the tantalizing lure of discovering just what the heck it was that had happened to the various characters. Absalom, Abaslom! in particular draws on all sorts of classic southern Gothic tropes familiar today in the writing of such writers as Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Flannery O'Connor and films like Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

In her enjoyable memoir of the Faulkner family, Every Day in the Sun, the Great Man's late niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, documents how at his home town of Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner made a habit of issuing forth from his domain at Rowan Oak to borrow mystery fiction from the nascent rental library at Gathright-Reed's Drugstore.  Writes Wells of Oxford and her distinguished yet frugal uncle [or Pappy, as she calls him]:

What did Oxford have to offer [Faulkner]?  The [town] square shut down at six.  The county was dry. There were no bars.  Restaurants stopped serving at nine.  Where could he go?

There was a single oasis on the square, Garthright-Reed's Drugstore, on the south side of the square where it had stood for thirty years, stayed open until ten.  Here was Pappy's ray of hope, his light in the window.  It wasn't exactly a watering hole, but this friendly neighborhood drugstore offered something that bars couldn't: a lending library.

Of course, Pappy had his own magnificent library at Rowan Oak, a beautiful room, understated and elegant,  Bookshelves lined two walls.  He collected everybody from Shakespeare and Henry Fielding to Henry Miller and Dostoyevsky....

Having read all the books in his library, however, Faulkner resorted to Garthright-Reed's Drugstore "for something new to read."  Pharmacist Mac Reed was a great admirer of Faulkner's writing, keeping copies of his out-of-print books for sale, "stacking them next to the cash register." Since Oxford had no bookstore, "Garthright-Reed's was the only place in town to purchase Faulkner first editions--signed when the author was in a good mood."

Square at Oxford (Mississippi)

In 1955 Reed's drugstore associate Gere Hopkins, who would later marry the best friend of Faulkner's daughter, installed a mostly paperback lending library in the drugstore.  Recalls wells:

As soon as heard about the lending library, Pappy was there.  The square was a ten-minute walk from Rowan Oak.  He could puff his pipe and pretend that he was going someone besides Garthright-Reed's and be grateful that as long last there was somewhere to go in Oxford after nine at night. He could "drop in" at the drugstore and sort through the paperbacks, greet other regular lending-library patrons, and perhaps exchange an opinion on this mystery or that.  Hopkins serenely presided over this burst of nocturnal activity.  An avid reader and devoted fan of William Faulkner, he welcomed Pappy to the store night after night.

One day, however, one of the volumes from the lending library vanished!  "The overdue book," writes Wells, "was Murder in Pastiche...by Marion Mainwaring."

Readers of this blog will recall that in my last, more than month-old post I wrote about Marion Mainwaring and her first of two detective novels, Murder at Midyears.  In the post I also mentioned how highly praised Mainwaring's second detective novel, the aforementioned Murder in Pastiche, had been by the United States's then premier crime fiction critic, Anthony Boucher. 

Boucher, it seems, was not the only fan of the book.  Continues Wells:

After several weeks Hopkins went to Rowan Oak to pick up the book [Murder in Pastiche].  I don't know if he went out of his way to track down every overdue item.  Maybe he was just caught up in the art of detection, or maybe he just wanted to visit with Pappy.  When Aunt Estelle [Faulkner's wife] came to the door, Hopkins explained why he had come and she said, "Just a minute, I know right where Bill put that book."  She gave it back to Hopkins and apologized for its being late. Hopkins thanked her and brought it back to the drugstore.

A mere week later, however, Hopkins

William Faulkner at Rowan Oak

noticed that the mystery had been checked out again.  He looked at the call card. The book had been signed out by...William Faulkner....

After several weeks passed, and Pappy still had not returned the book, Hopkins faced a dilemma. Should he go back to Rowan Oak again, or should he wait and let the situation resolve itself? Discretion proved the better part of valor. Hopkins relinquished Murder in Pastiche to posterity. (I have a hunch that Pappy loaned the book to Nannie [his mother]. She would have been beside herself to get her hands on it after he mentioned it.  And he would have.)

Years later Hopkins told Wells this anecdote at the annual Faulkner Conference at the University of Mississippi.  "Not long afterward," Wells wryly reports, she and her husband "purchased a copy of the paperback and presented Murder in Pastiche to him with an apology for having "kept it" so long and, considering that the book was fifty years overdue, with a request for special consideration regarding late fees."

More on Faulkner and Square Books.

More coming soon on Murder in Pastiche!