Shall We Join the Ladies? Death in Lord Byron's Room (1948), by Sally Wood

Ann and Nancy Thorne
look on Death's grim work
For the Angel of Death
spread his wings on the blast
And breathed in the face
of the foe as He passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers
waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved
and forever grew still!
from The Destruction of Sennacherib
by Lord Byron

...Ann unlocked her dressing case and drew out the pearl-handled revolver.
"You might slip this in."
Diana's eyes were like saucers.
"Oh, I say!"
"It's only a toy," said Nancy, putting it in her purse.  "I hope it doesn't drop out when I buy my ticket."
But she applied her lipstick with a new interest, wiping it all off twice.
Miss Ann was watching from the window.  The stout craft, with paddle wheels at the side like Mississippi steamboats, was warping into the dock.
"Ready, girls," she said.

Damn all female Americans!  Not women really at all, that one could mold, could teach, but wayward tomboys, not properly conscious of their sex, yes, even at fifty still eluding one, playing with danger, running headlong....

"If you were the kind of girl who screamed," her aunt said, "you wouldn't be in Switzerland." 

"These fascist parties that spring up in France, they have caches of the latest weapons, handsome uniforms, their own newspapers.  They are waiting till the Communist threat gets very bad....Then they will say democracy doesn't work.  They will seize control, join with the Nazis who are still strong in Germany and," he spread out his hands, "we will have a fascist Europe."

                                        --From Death in Lord Byron's Room (1948), by Sally Wood

Lord Byron

Well, this prophecy did not prove correct in 1948, when Sally Wood published Death in Lord Byron's Room, but perhaps, after all, we just needed to give it 70 years or so.  In Europe and the United States.  It can't happen here?  Let's see about that!  Give the march of folly some time....

Like the fear of resurgent fascism, the theme of femme force, or less alliteratively female empowerment, in Sally Wood's novel also has resonance today.  In the novel it is around 1947 and Ann Thorne--socially-connected former ambassador's daughter and Connecticut "spinster" and clever amateur sleuth in Wood's prior mystery, Murder of a Novelist (1941)--and her sort of surrogate daughter/niece, beautiful and recently bereaved Nancy Thorne (she appeared in the prior novel too, at the age of 17), are sent to Switzerland on a secret mission to help ferret out a deadly fascist cabal that threatens the postwar security of Europe--and the world! 

Okay, this seems more believable when you read it in the book, I promise.

Once in delightfully scenic but surprisingly deadly Switzerland, Ann and Nancy encounter many mysterious and often handsome men--Swiss, American, English, French and German--and a gangling young Englishwoman named Diana who becomes a sort of satellite of Ann and Nancy.  But in this land of double identities and double crosses, where hearts have as many holes in them as, well, the cheese, which men can the women trust?

path of Lord Byron through Switzerland

I enjoyed this little novel quite a lot--in large measure, I think, because the lead characters are women, not professional spies but amateur ones.  Ann and Nancy are rather like Tuppence, doubled, of Tommy and Tuppence fame, yet they are more believable than that larking she-adventurer because they aren't relentlessly jolly and gung-ho.  Yet at the same time the book offers a charming break from the dour professional spy novels from the era.  (A more apt comparison might be with the work of Manning Coles.)

I thought the pairing of the sophisticated middle-aged Ann with the young, supposed ingenue Nancy works splendidly.  How nice it is to see a middle-aged women fully share the spotlight with the pretty young thing in a mystery novel!  Nor is the middle-aged "spinster" made into some matronly old maid figure of fun, as is so often the case in HIBK (Had I But Known) mystery. 

Here the middle-aged woman is not only tough but alluring in her own, more mature and seasoned way--and she most definitely attracts men of a certain age. (Her own!).  I just wish the stunning dust jacket brought out Ann's alluring aspect more--though it certainly catches her toughness and no-nonsense personality.  And Nancy--va-va-voom!  She is beautiful.  And pretty tough herself.

The setting in Switzerland, in the towns and cities along the shore of Lake Geneva that the doomed English poet Lord Byron once haunted, is very well done, with a dangerous ride by paddleboat making a particularly fascinating tableau.  (There's also a deadly Wagner recital: Tristan und Isolde, beware!) 

A Gathering of Evil
Martin Boorman and his master

The fear of a Nazi revival so soon after the war might seem overwrought today (or not), but interestingly the novel mentions as a possible ringleader Martin Bormann, Secretary to the Fuehrer (and a staunch advocate during his infamous tenure of mass deportations, murders of Jews, thefts of art treasures and implementation of forced labor programs).  Until 1973, when his remains were discovered in Berlin and he was officially declared dead, Bormann was thought to have left Hitler's Bunker and escaped somewhere abroad. (In fact he had been killed the very day of his bunker breakout.)

This monster in human form was sentenced to death in absentia at the Nuremberg Trials.  Britain's MI5 was particularly obsessed with tracking down the supposedly absconded Bormann and seeing that the Nuremberg sentence was carried out, prompting one skeptical and snarkish British official, when told in May 1947 that Bormann might be coming through Ceylon:

I think Perera might be commended for his enthusiasm, but it might also be broken to him gently that the late but peripatetic Herr Bormann is currently being seen in Switzerland (the most persistent locale), Bolivia, Italy, Norway and Brazil--in the last country sitting in state on a high mountain beside his pallid Fuehrer....The press is doubtless waiting to break the silly season scoop: that he has been been seen riding the Loch Ness monster. 

loathsome Bormann

The John Dickson Carr locked room crowd may be disappointed with Sally Wood's mystery, because with a title like this one people might be expecting a locked room detective novel.  Nothing of the sort!  There is much mystery and a Christie-like plot (not to mention three deaths in the novel and several attempted murders), but no locked rooms.  Yes, Lord Byron once stayed in the murder room, but his presence hovers but lightly over the novel, despite the novel's title.

lordly Byron

That point aside, it's a very good book, I think, and one I'm pleased to say is being reprinted this year. (Along, I think, with Murder of a Novelist, coming soon here in review).

World War One American nurse

The author Sally Calvin Wood (1897-1985) lived a life something like her charming and spirited creations Ann and Nancy Thorne.

From a socially prominent family in Rochester, New York (her father was a noted attorney and her grandfather, Horace McGuire, Deputy Attorney General of New York, once had been a typesetter on abolitionist Frederick Douglass's newspaper, where he witnessed a meeting between Douglass and antislavery militant John Brown), Sally graduated from Wellesley College in 1918 and patriotically enlisted upon graduation in the Army Nursing Corps.

Back at Rochester after the Armstice Sally completed her training and worked among the impoverished as a Public Health nurse. 

Sally's first husband was Stephen Raushenbush, a government investigator of labor conditions in coal mines.  After their marriage the couple settled in Greenwich Village in 1924, where Sally became close friends of Caroline Gordon, future novelist and then wife of noted Southern Agrarian poet and essayist Allen Tate. Sally's second husband was Lawrence Albert Kohn (1894-1977), a professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine.  The childless couple adopted the orphaned son of some colleagues who as Ted Kohn became a Rochester sculptor. 

As this short biography indicates, Sally Wood was a woman of progressive ideals who fervently believed in the credo "Never again."  Hers was a life well-lived, most-assuredly; but better yet, from the mystery fan's perspective, hers was a life which included the publication of some entertaining mystery novels!

BONUS: should Ann and Nancy worry about you, dear reader?  Take the F Scale and find out!

It's a Ruthless World: Cut Throat (1932), by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush detective novels 21-30 are being reissued by Dean Street Press next month.  In the meantime, I thought I would post here my own take on Bush mystery #7, Cut Throat, as it is found in the introduction to the DSP volume.  It provides some background to the novel.--TPT

During the fall and spring of 1930-31--when ideas likely were germinating in Christopher Bush’s crafty and fertile mind about Cut-Throat (1932), the seventh Ludovic Travers’ detective novel--the devastating impact in Great Britain of the global Great Depression was casting British politics ever further into disarray.

Beset by crisis upon crisis, the weak and unpopular Labour government of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald continued to flag, propped up only with Liberal and Conservative acquiescence.  Yet Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Tories since 1923, himself was under immense pressure, with powerful right-wing press lords--Max Aitken, 1^st Baron Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express and Evening Standard, and Harold Harmsworth, 1^st Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror and younger brother of the late press titan Alfred Harmsworth, 1^st Viscount Northcliffe-- having united in an effort to oust him as party leader over the issue of free trade.

In the 1929 general election, Lord Beaverbrook had launched the Empire Free Trade Crusade, a political movement designed to promote free trade among member states in the British Commonwealth while erecting tariff walls, including a so-called “tax on food,” against the rest of the world; and in 1930 he joined Lord Rothermere in forming the United Empire Party, a dagger aimed at Baldwin’s political heart.  The shadow conflict between Baldwin and the press lords came to a head in a hotly-contested and much-publicized March 1931 by-election contest in an affluent constituency in London’s West End.  There Beaverbrook and Rothermere’s man, Sir Ernest Petter, ran an Independent Conservative campaign on behalf of “Empire Free Trade” against rising Tory star Alfred Duff Cooper, a Baldwin supporter.

Just two days before the by-election, in what historian William D. Rubinstein calls “one of the most famous political speeches of the twentieth century” (see Rubinstein’s Twentieth-Century Britain: A Political History), Baldwin dramatically denounced the newspapers of the press lords as “engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal wishes…of two men” and the two men themselves as power-hungry prostitutes: “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, but power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”  After Baldwin’s so-called “harlot speech,” Duff Cooper won the election handily, effectively saving the career of the opposition leader, who went on with Ramsay MacDonald in August to form a National Government, which won a remarkable landslide victory in the October 1931 general election. 

In addition to being a corker of a detective novel, Christopher Bush’s Cut-Throat, which saw publication in the spring immediately following the 1931 general election, is reflective of early Depression-era domestic politics in the United Kingdom, particularly in its highlighting of the political ascendance in between-the-wars Britain of the press lords.  Much of Cut-Throat concerns two fictional newspaper tycoons, elderly Sir William Griffiths, who recently divested himself of the Mercury (“so Cobdenian that it creaked,” fatalistically comments Ludovic Travers of the newspaper, referencing Richard Cobden, the mid-Victorian Liberal thinker and free trade ideologist), and punningly-named Lord Zyon, owner of the Evening Record, with which the now defunct Mercury has been amalgamated. 

Drawing on the Record’s slogan, “Free Trade with a Difference,” the enterprising Lord Zyon has created the protectionist “Work-for-All Crusade,” which he plans to formally launch, against an “enormous background of Union Jacks,” at a grand rally at the Albert Hall.  On account of his extensive economic expertise, Ludovic Travers—author, as any Bush mystery fan by this time surely knew, of The Economics of a Spendthrift and other highly brainy yet charmingly written treatises--has been personally invited by Lord Zyon to attend the rally, though he believes that “in the panacea which his lordship was prescribing for the nation’s ills there should be far less syrup and more Epsom salts.” 

Travers arrives at the Albert Hall, where he learns from Lord Zyon that Sir William Griffiths has sent him a note informing his lordship of his unexpected conversion to the “Work-for-All” cause.  In the note Sir William has promised Lord Zyon not only that he “will most certainly be on the platform to-night,” but that he has sent to the Hall a hamper filled with evidence of illicit dumping, personally secured by himself.  (The economic term “dumping” refers to predatory pricing of exports in international trade.)  Sir William’s hamper duly arrives at the Hall and inside it there indeed is evidence of dumping--but not quite the sort of evidence that people were expecting.  Upon opening the hamper Lord Zyon discovers, amid a scattering of cabbage leaves, Sir Williams’s corpse, his throat cut from ear to ear.

Could the murder of Sir William Griffiths in such a brutal and demonstrative fashion have been some form of domestic terrorism?  “A burnt offering!  Mightn’t there have been a fanatic so frantic in his devotion as to have presented that sacrifice?” asks Travers in a flight of fancy.  “The slain body of a man who more than any other stood for reaction: the old, obstinate creeds of Free Trade and the weary shibboleths of a dead political age?”

To this theory Superintendent George Wharton of the Yard, who has been called into the case, scoffs.  However, he allows Travers--or more accurately Travers’s man, Palmer--to drive him down to Sir William’s Devonshire country house for further investigation.  There the pair interviews Sir William’s nephew and heir, the intrepid—or so publicity has it--world explorer Tim Griffiths, only recently returned from outer Mongolia; Sir William’s uxorious financial secretary, Bland; Bland’s distressingly vulgar wife (“What on earth had she been before Bland married her,” a bemused Travers wonders. “Barmaid?  Chorus girl?  Third-rate schoolmarm?”); Bland’s chess-playing pal, local vicar Reverend Cross; Sir Williams’s housekeeper, Mrs. Rigg; and Sir William’s “soft-footed” and “slimy” (Travers’s words again) butler, Daniels.  Also participating in the investigation is Chief-Inspector Norris, Wharton’s right-hand man, of whom we shall more in future novels, and an intrusive crime reporter named Sanders, who always seems somehow to wheedle his way into a crime scene. 

When required at one point in the novel to dally with Mrs. Bland (for the good of the investigation, of course), Travers may come off to readers as a tad priggish, though he gives lovers of manners mystery glimmers of hope that there might be some form of a romantic fling in his future.  (“Given the right woman—and every other propitious circumstance—all sorts of things might happen,” reflects Travers after his ordeal by flirtation with Mrs. Bland.  “But this was appalling!”)   

Additionally, in Cut-Throat Bush again gives scope to his extensive familiarity with classical music, as he had in his previous detective novel, Dead Man’s Music (1931), with mention being made of Mendelssohn’s overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Wonderful!  So utterly expressive of the play!”) and Ravel’s then cutting edge composition Bolero, first performed only four years prior to the publication of the novel (“All drum taps and things,” remarks Travers.  “Works up to a tremendous climax.”; “Gets on your nerves a bit,” responds Wharton.) 

Overall Cut-Throat is a beautifully-constructed and hugely-entertaining detective novel, with some unexpected moments of melancholy concerning the troubled social condition of Great Britain in the early Thirties.  “All this case seems nothing but times!” wails one fretted investigator late in the novel, but the alibi problem Bush presents his readers is one of the finest such from the Golden Age, which is saying something, given the high standards of detection in those years.  As the crime fiction blogger Nick Fuller once aptly observed, Christopher Bush “was to the unbreakable alibi what [John Dickson] Carr was to the impossible crime.”

"I am a policeman":The Contentious Case of Constable Callingham and the Criminals Crutchey and Colwell

From the Minutes of the Central Criminal Court, London (Old Bailey), 1 January 1838:

WILLIAM JENNINGS and ANNE COLWELL were indicted for assaulting Mary Anne Matthews, on the 27th of December [1837], at St. George the Martyr, Southwark, and robbing her of one shawl, value 2s., 3/4 of a yard of silk, value 2d., 1 purse, value 2d, and 2s., the goods and monies of George Matthews; and immediately before and at the time of such robbery beating and striking her.

Justice looking down at us like ants on an ant pile 

MARY ANN MATTHEWS. 

I am the wife of George Matthews and live in Pitt Street, Old Kent Road.

I was at the Bull Public House, in the Dover Road, on the 27th of December--both the prisoners were there with other people--I left the house about a quarter past seven o'clock--I was rather the worse for liquor--I had sufficient recollection to know what happened--the private door of my house is in William street--the front door goes into Pitt Street--when I got to my door in William Street I observed the prisoners but not till they struck me on the head--Jennings came up and struck me first on the head with his crutch--(he is lame and walks with a crutch)--it broke the comb in my head--he then put his hand into my pocket, and took out 2s. in my purse; and he took a piece of silk out, about three-quarters of a yard, which I used for a handkerchief--the woman took the shawl off my shoulders at the same time--

--they went away afterwards, but I was so frightened I scarcely knew they went--I ran indoors and screamed out, as I was so frightened--I had known the woman sometime before by sight, but never saw the man before--I daresay they were half an hour in the public house before this happened--I saw my piece of red silk and shawl again at Union Hall [the Surrey Magistrates Court].

Jennings. 

Q. Did you not give me the handkerchief off your neck?  A.  I never saw you before--I never gave you the silk--you did not pawn you own handkerchief to get beer with for me.

Colwell. 

Q. Did you now give me the shawl off your neck to pawn?  A.  I never did.

John Coles.
I am a policeman.  I was on Dover Road, on Wednesday evening, the 27th of December, about seven o'clock, and saw the prosecutrix [P] come out of the Bull, rather the worse for liquor, followed by the prisoners,--I asked Colwell if she knew where P lived--she said she lived at No. 5, Pitt Street, Old Kent Road--that was correct--she did not say why she was following her--there were two other persons there with the prisoners--they left them at their Sunday toll--the prisoners continued to follow her to the end of my beat, in the New Kent Road--that was not one hundred yards from where she was robbed.

Thomas Watkins (police constable N. 174)

I apprehended Colwell, at No. 16, Ann's Place, Kent Street--I said, "Ann, I want you"--she said, "Oh, Crutchey is coming"--the male prisoner is called Crutchey about the street--I said I want you for robbing  awoman in Pitt Street, and asked where the shawl and purse were--she said she knew nothing about the purse, but the shawl was pawned at the top of Kent Street, in the name of Johnson, for 1s.--I went there and found it.
Samuel Hobell.

I am a pawnbroker, and live in White Street, St. George's.  I produce a shawl, which was pawned on the 28th of December, in the name of Ann Johnson, 7 George Street.  I cannot positively swear who by.

John Callingham.

I am a policeman.  I apprehended Jennings on Friday the 29th, at the Black Horse, Kent Road, in the tap room.  I beckoned to him, and told him I wanted to speak to him, and said, "I suppose you have heard what for?"--he said, "Heard What?"--I found this piece of silk round his neck, which P claims.

Mary Anne Matthews reexamined.

This is my piece of silk, and the shawl is mine, and the same I lost in company with the prisoners.

Jennings.

She gave me the piece of silk to put round my neck, while she sold my own handkerchief to get liquor.  Witness.  There is no truth in it--I did not allow him to have it in exchange for pawning his handkerchief.  He took it out of my pocket.

Colwell.

She took her shawl off her neck, and gave it to me to pawn.  Witness.  I never did.

JENNINGS GUILTY AGE 19
COLWELL GUILTY AGE 21

Transported for fifteen years.

The Horseshoe Inn, at present-day 26 Melior Street

Both William Jennings and Anne Colwell duly arrived, presumably much unwilling passengers aboard convict ships, in New South Wales, Australia later that year.  Punishment moved swiftly in those days!

13 years later, the woman who likely was Anne Matthews, Prosecutrix in the case, was living with her husband, George, a barman, at 26 Melior Street, Southwark. 

Ann and George had no children living with them, though Ann was 44 and George 42.  Quite probably Ann's maiden name was Taylor, and she had married George in 1835, just a few years before the attack committed upon her by Jennings and Colwell, when she was around 30 years old.  The couple was still living together in 1871, still in St. George the Martyr, Southwark.  Were Jennings and Colwell still in Australia, having served their penal terms? 

And, wherever they were, had the pair, like a rather more notorious and transgressive ill-doer, Constance Kent--redeemed themselves before the eyes of their fellow men and their God?

the clue of the crimson scarf

To be sure, this tawdry little episode of assault and battery by two youthful miscreants (one known as Crutchey for the crutch he carried) upon a vulnerable, drunken woman (excuse me, I mean a woman "rather the worse for liquor," as the court minutes delicately put it) surely will not go down in what one might term the Annals of Deeply Astute Detection, but the police do seem to have acted quite capably and firmly in the  sordid affair.

For my purposes I want to highlight one particular cop in the case: Police Constable John Callingham, the man who late in December at the Black Horse in Kent Road collared young Crutchey with that telltale scrap of red silk wound round his neck.

By 1851 John Callingham, who at the time of the Jennings-Colwell trial was 32 years old, had left the Metropolitan Police and moved to the southern English county of Hampshire, where he became Superintendent of the County Constabulary.  There his daughter Eliza Jane married Samuel Wheeler, Official Receiver and Liquidator of the High Court of Justice. 

Before her death Eliza Jane gave birth to seven children, one of whom, Harold Wheeler, a Board of Trade Examiner, became the father of author Hugh Callingham Wheeler, whose body of fiction, penned under the names Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge, includes, as we have seen at The Passing Tramp and other blogs, numerous tales of glamorous and sophisticated crimes--ones rather more glamorous and sophisticated, one sadly suspects, than those with which Hugh's policeman great-grandfather, for whom he was named, dealt in real life.

"Out of My Own Self I Dare to Phrase It": Mystery Writers and Partners Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Wheeler

In February 1945 Richard "Rickie" Wilson Webb was writing Hugh Callingham Wheeler nearly every day from the port of Hollandia, New Guinea, where Rickie was posted as a Warrant Officer.  Before the Second World War Hollandia was part of the Dutch East Indies, but during the war the town was captured and occupied by the forces of Imperial Japan, who built an important air base there.  Seized by the Americans during the Battle of Hollandia in April 1944, what was left of the town was converted into the site of a major American naval and air base; and it served as General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters until the General made his famed "return" to the Phillipines at Leyte Island in October.  (Today Hollandia, known as Jayupura, is part of Indonesian New Guinea.)

Hollandia (upper left)

Mattie E. Treadwell in The Women's Army Corps evokes the harsh living conditions at Hollandia that were endured by WACS (and many others) during the American occupation:

Rain was continual in some seasons, clothing was generally wet from perspiration, and heat prevented more than a few hours of sleep at night....everyone shortly turned yellow from the required atrabine [a drug used in the Pacific Theater to treat malaria]....Men and women alike began to get skin diseases....

path of the righteous
baptism of American troops in Hollandia
New Guinea, Sept 5, 1944

Rickie Webb, who evidently was sent to Hollandia in 1945, complained about all of these things in his letters to Hugh Wheeler, as he discussed the couple's latest Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge crime novels (these likely written entirely by Hugh) and his own plans for reviving the Q. Patrick mysteries--Q. Patrick once having been entirely Rickie's own writing baby, so to speak. Rickie, who as a Philadelphia pharmaceutical executive in the 1930s had been prominent in the promotion of Benzedrine in the US, always kept his eye in the main chance.  That was how he found Hugh, I think!  (Interestingly, in one letter Rickie praises the mystery element of Jane Austen's Emma, just as PD James would some 75 years later).

In addition to these other topics, however, there is also in Rickie's wartime letters a great deal simply about his desire to come back home to hearth and Hugh, let us say, at Twin Hills Farm, the couple's eighteenth-century farmhouse in the Massachusetts Berkshires. 

For a time Hugh served in the Army Medical Corps. "I never even left Fort Dix [New Jersey]," Hugh later recalled of his war service. "They just asked me if I wanted to be in the Medical Corps and handed me a white coat."  Yet in 1945 Hugh was receiving Rickie's mail forty miles away from Fort Dix at the Lumberville, Pennsylvania house of his friend Princess Caracciolo (the former Dorothy Adrian of Poughkeepsie, New York, not to be confused with Margaret Clarke of Peoria, Illinois, also a Princess Caracciolo).  This is just as well, for Rickie's letters to Hugh might well have raised official eyebrows at Fort Dix. (Incidentally, the Princess appears to have served as a basis for the character Princess Patricia Walonska--nee Cheney--in Q. Patrick's Death for Dear Clara.)

Hollandia (Jayupura) today, with its harbor, so strategic in World War 2

Rickie's sentiments about Hugh range from the the mundane--he hungrily looks forward to making pot roasts in the pressure cooker with Hugh again--to the elevated.  Sentimentally he twice asks Hugh to be his Valentine on February 14, while typing his lovelorn missive to his man in bed.  (He managed to secure a rare typewriter for this one occasion, and he hoped to get proficient enough with it finally to help Hugh with typing their books.) 

In yet another letter after praising Hugh in the highest terms for his varying sterling qualities in a manner reminiscent of William Shakespeare in his Sonnets, Rickie strikingly quotes to Hugh from Robert Browning's 1855 poem One Word More, which the great poet dedicated to "E. B. B."--his famed wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  The poem addresses the expression of one person's deepest, inner love for another--a love so personal and so precious it is hard to give true voice to publicly. (Certainly a feeling a gay man would have appreciated in 1945.)

These lines below Rickie quoted in the letter, either from memory or having drawn them from a copy of Browning he had with him in the jungle:

Robert

There in turn I stand with them
and praise you.
Out of my own self I dare
to phrase it.
But the best is when I glide 
from out them
Cross a step or two of 
dubious twlilight
Come out on the other side,
the novel
Silent silver lights and darks
undreamed of
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.

--from One Word More (1855), by Robert Browning, dedicated to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

It's a poignant episode in a poignant letter.  Sadly, Rickie and Hugh's personal relationship, then of over a dozen years' standing, would take some hard hits in the late forties, so that their ship of love foundered in the early Fifties. 

Elizabeth

Rickie left Twin Hills Farm and his writing partnership with Hugh (which Rickie himself had started) and moved to France, where he died in 1966.  From what I can tell he never quite recovered, either professionally, physically or emotionally, though the two men did get on better terms again.  (I will have more to say on this.)

For Hugh, movie-star-handsome, prodigiously talented and much-adored in his circle, life prospects only ascended ever higher, however, as he continued the Patrick Quentin series of mysteries to  acclaim until 1965 and in the Sixties and Seventies achieved the pinnacle of his career success as a distinguished and lucrative writer for film, stage and screen. 

Ultimately Hugh won three Tony Awards before the curtain finally was brought down on his life in 1987. The best known of his Tony wins is for his "book" for the hugely successful dark musical Sweeney Todd, which was adapted into a popular film, netting Hugh a place in the no-doubt coveted Johnny Depp Zone.

People have commented on how the Patrick Quentin novels from this period of Rickie and Hugh's impending breakup are darker than the Golden Age norm, in that the marriage of series amateur sleuths Peter and Iris Duluth suffers grave emotional strains and stresses.  Peter and Iris don't just wittily banter between cocktails, as was the wont of mystery couples from that era, they fight and get hurt--and there's always a danger that the psychic wounds inflicted by one spouse upon another won't ever heal.  I would argue that the troubled fictional relationship of Peter and Iris to some extent reflects the contemporaneously deteriorating real-life relationship of Rickie and Hugh.

a prematurely aged Rickie Webb (45) and a seemingly eternally youthful Hugh Wheeler (34)
(photos taken on the same day in 1947)

Time in New England: Books, Books and...More Books!

I wanted to post some more of my Providence Atheneum pics as wells as some of a fine Boston bookstore, Commonwealth Books.  Two things I love about as much as anything in life are old libraries and bookstores.

At the Atheneum I fell in love, Pygmalion-like, with the previously posted HP Lovecraft bust, but the interior of the whole building is alluringly lovely.  And for a small library, there's a fine mystery section of crime fiction, both classic and modern. 

Commonwealth Books has everything I like in a bookstore: marvelous old building, enticing and intriguing nooks, interesting cuttings affixed to the shelves, and books, books, books, piled high everywhere one looks.  I came back a second day and there was a new pile of Rex Stout pbs in immaculate shape, those nice Bantam editions from the 80s and 90s.  I made some nice finds indeed, including both paperback and hardcover titles.  More in the photo captions!

I definitely want to come back to New England--the pungent aroma of old books and ancient (well, by American standards) learning was everywhere. 

Providence Atheneum: a severely classical exterior, yet what bookish beauties await within!

quite an impressive pack of Peter Loveseys

Delight and Darkness:
I was amused to see Golden Age patrician Margaret Armstrong
--a writer I believe was instrumental in getting reprinted
(though the publisher never bothered to acknowledge this)--
rubbing shoulders with "gritty" specimens of Icelandic Noir

Now on to Commonwealth Books.  Follow me, dear readers!

Duck between those two buildings....

Down that alley....

Keep going!

Through this door....

Say hello to Willa, Bill, Oscar and the rest....

You should see my mantel...

On to the mystery section, of course!

a happy customer with his convivial author friends

Some of my haul at hand....

A better copy than mine of Carolyn Wells's Furthest Fury was here (far left at top), so I bought it.
I hope HarperCollins will reprint Fury, the best title by her which I have read, I think.
Also, note the Crippen & Landru volume at the other end! (I have that one too.)

The rivals of Nancy Drew....I bought the Judy Bolton!

Addie must have been a good aunt indeed.....

Buoyed in Boston: On the Trail of...Murder, Naturally!

my last day in Boston

 After the Edgars I was able to take a trip to Boston for a few days, to see an old friend and his wonderful spouse, whom I met for the first time.  I was taken around Boston, where I made a haul at Commonwealth Books, as well as Providence and Fall River, Rhode Island. 

In Fall River I naturally wanted to see the Lizzie Borden house, which I did, though I got there too late for a tour. I also saw the house of the wife of a mystery writer we are reprinting this year, who lived about a two minutes' walk from the Borden house.  I also saw Maplecroft, the more elegant house on the hill where Lizzie, newly acquitted of axing her father and stepmother and flush with their cash, went to live with her sister. 

In Providence I saw some vintage Lovecraftiana (places associated with local horror writer HP Lovecraft) and numerous beautiful locations on College Hill. 

Lovecraft bust at the Providence Atheneum
in front of the mystery section

I can't help wondering if Murder Among the Angells, by Roger Scarlett (companions Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page, who lived in Boston at the time of its writing), is an allusion to Lovecraft, who was born and lived most of his life at Angell Street. Both detective fiction and Lovcraft's horror fiction were ridiculed by that froggish croaking aesthetic scold Edmund Wilson, who wrote of the latter's work: "The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad art and bad taste."  Oh, Edmund, so cutting and unkind!

However, the most important thing, from my perspective as a researcher and writer, was getting to look at the Hugh Wheeler archive at Boston University. 

Hugh Wheeler, as devoted readers of this blog likely know, was one-half--with his twenty-year companion Richard Wilson Webb--the writing team of Patrick Quentin, Jonathan Stagge and Q. Patrick (the latter pen name had other people involved in early stages as well). I found quite a bit of riveting new detail on the writers, confirming all my suppositions (and that's always nice), as I will discuss a bit in a later post and more, much more, in depth in a forthcoming book.  Some more trip pics coming too!

Striking up a new acquaintance in Providence

The 2018 Edgars and Murder in the Closet

We Happy Few: the Closet Company, if you will
 John Norris, Curtis Evans, Moira Redmond

I think I started reading Edgar Allan Poe when I was in the seventh grade, which would have been about four decades ago.  The stories from the volume I had that I recall tend to be the horror tales--The Masque of the Red Death and The Cask of Amontillado being the ones most memorable to me--but I also recall reading the treasure and coded message story, The Gold Bug.  The canonical Poe mystery stories came later, and by that time I had already started reading Agatha Christie, who became rather the empress of my genre lit domain.

Panel Moderator Sarah Weinman, followed by (l-r) Curtis Evans, Kirby Larson,
Rachel McCarthy James, Brad Ricca, Michael Sims

Well, Malice Domestic didn't nominate Murder in the Closet for an Agatha, though we had essays on Christie, Gladys Mitchell, Josephine Tey and others of that sort; but the Mystery Writers of America, bless 'em, did nominate Murder in the Closet for an Edgar, in the critical/bio category. And thus I attended my first Edgar Awards, surrounded by busts of Poe and even getting to sit on a panel discussion, to which I hope I managed to contribute intelligently.

Curtis Evans, Michael Moon

On that day and the next, the night of the awards, I got to meet Grand Master Award winner Peter Lovesey, nominee Michael Sims and Joe Goodrich, all of whom I had communicated with over the years but had never met in person.  All were as great as I could have expected, so eloquent and erudite. (Peter could make a living as an after dinner speaker, if he ever decides to give up the the mystery writing gig.)

I did not get to meet Grand Master award winner Bill Link, but he delivered a vastly moving speech about his career in classic crime fiction for television. If you grew up like I did watching Columbo and Ellery Queen you will appreciate the thrill. 

And I got to meet, and sit at table with, bloggers Moira Redmond and John Norris (Clothes in Books and Pretty Sinister Books), both of whom contributed wise and witty essays to Murder in the Closet.  So wonderful to meet blogging colleagues face-to-face!   Another Closet contributor, Michael Moon, I saw on the day before the banquet.  So it was all great fun and a great experience in general. The book didn't win, but who could be disappointed under such circumstances?

the nominees--and the winner is...Chester B. Himes, by Lawrence P. Jackson
Congratulations!  Well, maybe next year, right?

After the Edgars I went to Boston, about which more soon.