On the Occasion of Hitch's 123rd birthday: Mending the Reputation of "Torn Curtain" (1966):

For two decades film director Alfred Hitchcock, whose 123rd birthday was on August 13, had such a great run in Hollywood: Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicions (1941), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960).  (I think Hitch's Agatha Chistie-ish mystery film Stage Fright [1950], which I rather like, was actually a British production.)

That's 20 films (21 counting Stage Fright) in twenty years, most or even all of them arguably classics of film!  And that's not even counting the comparative "duds," ostensibly: Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) (Hitch does screwball, pretty well, acturally), The Paradine Case (1947) (yaaaaaawn), Under Capricorn (1948) (zzzzzzzz).  I mean, this guy was practically a film industry unto himself.

After the hugely influential Psycho, Hitch slowed down, comparatively, making just six more films before his death in 1980: The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964), Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969), Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976).  

Torn Curtain seems to be a film that tends not to get much respect, a certain scene excepted (see below).  The critics at the time didn't like it--though the film, starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, was a modest box office hit--and it hasn't really undergone major "reassessment" over the years, in contrast with some other undervalued Hitch films.  I finally watched it for the first time on Saturday the 13th, and I have to say I rather enjoyed it.  It's derivative of earlier Hitchcock films in a lot of ways, but in my eyes derivative Hitch is better than no Hitch at all--not to mention most other films.  

In retrospect, Torn Curtain seems like a sort of last hurrah for Hitch, unless we count his genial minor screwball crime coda, Family Plot, a throwback to his English films of the Thirties.  I still haven't seen the "starless" (by American standards, anyway) Topaz, but I've always found the serial murderer film Frenzy utterly repellent and compelling evidence of Hitch's putative misogyny, about which his former leading actress Tippi Hendren has spoken out and written.  Torn Curtain, however, is classic Hitch in a lot of ways, the sort of romantic suspense thriller with big name attractive leads that he had made so successfully throughout his career.

In Torn Curtain Paul Newman--apparently Hitch wanted Cary Grant again, but he, now past 60, was on the verge of retirement; he would have been twice Julie Andrews' age--plays nuclear scientist and university professor Michael Armstrong and Julie Andrews his loyal (but how loyal?) secretary and fiancée Sarah Sherman.  The film opens picturesquely with the couple on an ocean liner in a fjord off the coast of Norway. (There is some location shooting in the film, though it is minimal.)  

The fjords are alive with the sound of passion! 
Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews) in bed with Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman)

In an ill Cold War omen, the temperature on board is freezing, the ship's heating being on the fritz, but Michael and Sarah have piled into bed together under blankets and coats to keep warm.  This is the sort of cutesy couples stuff Hitch had been putting in his films for years, but here it's made clear that our unmarried heroine is not virginal.  (Neither is Janet Leigh in Psycho, of course, but she gets severely punished for her transgressions.)  

We get to see Newman's bare chest, the first of several times in the film, which is not surprising since he was probably deemed the sexiest American man in film at the time.  Newman even gets his own "shower scene," like Janet Leigh in Psycho, though things end better for him!

Paul Newman unbuttons himself.

Soon Sarah finds that Michael, who is supposed to be speaking at a scientific conference, is planning instead to fly over the "iron curtain" to East Berlin!  Now what is that about?  Naturally, Sarah gets a seat on the same plane to find out what her man is up to--and she finds to her dismay that he is defecting!  Of course it all gets more complicated than that, as you may imagine. 

It seems that Michael is playing his own double game....

Eventually the film turns into Hitch's fave, a flight and pursuit thriller, as Michael and Sarah have to flee for their lives from East Germany with the "MacGuffin." (This is Hitch's term for the prized object people want in the film--this time it's in Michael's head.)  

In the middle of the film comes its most famous and praised sequence, where Michael and a supposed  "farmer's wife" (Carolyn Conwell) who is working with American intelligence are caught in the act, as it were, by Michael's sinister East German security minder, Hermann Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling) and, well, they simply have to murder him, even though Michael, a university professor, has no idea, really, how to go about it.  And, to be sure, the murder does not go exactly as planned.  Gromek proves to have a horrific Rasputin-like indestructibleness.  

Murder isn't easy.

Even people who don't like Torn Curtain praise this sequence and it really is bloody brilliant, though the grimness it rather at odds with the tone of much of the rest of the film.  I think this gets at much of the problem the film has had with critics.  Torn Curtain is a Sixties spy film, but despite the continued popularity of the arch James Bond franchise, the tone of spy films in the Sixties was getting bleaker and more "realistic."  

Just the year before the release of Torn Curtain, critics and audiences alike applauded The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, adapted from John le Carre's jaded novel and starring a world-weary Richard Burton in an Oscar-nominated performance. The film, incidentally, was directed by Martin Ritt, who directed Paul Newman in four films, including his praised Sixties performances in Hud (best actor nomination) and Hombre.

Both the opening and ending scenes in Torn Curtain are cutesy couples scenes (cleverly matched) that would have been at home in any of Hitch's older films but feel somewhat out of place here.  So many of the sequences are reminiscent of older Hitchcock films, in fact, but the tone fits at least in most cases and they are nicely done on their own terms for the most part.  

There's the extended sequence where Michael and Sarah are fleeing East Germany on a defectors' group bus, which recalls the scene in the train car with the circus "freaks" in Saboteur.  The brilliantly done ballet sequence near the end of the film recalls the Fifties version of The Man Who Knew Too Much as wells as Saboteur and the The Thirty-Nine Steps.  Michael and Sarah have to hide in baskets at one point, recalling, as I recollect, The Lady Vanishes.  When Paul Newman falls (after being tripped) down a flight of stairs, he looks like Martin Landau in Psycho.  When Carolyn Conwell holds up that butcher's knife to stab Gromek, we're reminded of Anthony Perkins. The farmhouse is an unervingly lonely and  isolated rural building, reminiscent of the Dutch windmill hideout in Foreign Correspondent.  You might almost expect a crop dusting plane to appear (North by Northwest).

Two Pairs of Blue Eyes: Michael and his helper are not thrilled to welcome Gromek.

But who cares if Hitch is imitating himself, it's damned entertaining, or at least I thought it was.  Another criticism this film gets is aimed at the leads, Newman and Andrews.  As already mentioned, Newman was not Hitch's choice, and nor was Andrews.  He was "saddled" with them as it were because they were huge stars.  

Torn Curtain came between Paul Newman's hits Harper and Hombre, while Julie Andrews had just come off Mary Poppins (best actress Oscar) and The Sound of Music and had Thoroughly Modern Millie in the pipeline, though her film career was soon to take huge hits with the musical bombs Star! and Darling Lili and would not recover for some time as Hollywood tried to figure out what to do with their on the whole wholesome star in the Swinging Seventies. 

a couple apart

Like everyone else Andrews wanted to work with Hitchcock, but Hitch had wanted Eve Marie Saint, the female lead from North by Northwest.  I have to say I think Saint would have been better than Andrews (or, say, Newman's distinguished actress wife, Joanne Woodward, who was in Alfred Hitchcock Presents).  

Andrews distractedly reminds me in this film of a koala bear with her prominent eyes and boofie head of hair, and I find her rather bland, but the role really is not really a very substantive one anyway, so I'm not sure it matter that much.  (Andrews does nail a scene where she called upon, finally, to lose her temper.)  It is true you kind of expect her to break out in song at any moment, as Hitch supposedly complained.

Newman gets dinged for being sullen, but I think people are reading into the performance the fact that Newman and Hitch did not get along personally.  Newman was one of those younger "method" actors who wanted to have long, intense discussions about his character with the director and Hitch has no time for that. When Newman asked his director what his motivation was, so the story goes, Hitch drolly responded, "your motivation is you salary."  But Newman was right: his character is underwritten and the script had to be rushed because Julie Andrews had only a short window in which to participate in the filming (another reason not to have hired her).

another couple apart

I think Newman does fine, though, though like Ryan O'Neal in the Seventies screwball comedy What's Up, Doc?, he seems too fit and tan to be a college professor!  If Newman's character is limited, it's probably more due to the script, which really does not give him any big speeches to explain himself.  His character is supposed to be hampered by the fact that he does not want his girlfriend trailing him and he cannot explain to her what he is up to.  He is tongue-tied, in short.  The most important thing, however, is that Newman steps up to the plate during the Gromek murder scene, the pivotal piece in the film.

Footsteps will follow till I'm dead: Michael tries to evade his determined pursuer Gromek

Critics have also faulted Hitchcock's continued reliance in Torn Curtain on stage bound locations, particularly the use screen projection and matte paintings, the latter of which is definitely evident in the sequence at the East Berlin art museum and the hilltop reconciliation scene between Newman and Andrews.  It is definitely old-fashioned by 1966, but nevertheless the "footsteps" museum cat-and-mouse pursuit with Michael and Gromek manages to be quite suspenseful due to the photography and the sound effects.

Gromek rises
You can't keep a bad man down

Speaking of Gromek, there are numerous secondary characters in this film and the actors playing these parts strike me as uniformly terrific.  Aside from Gromek, who as mentioned above  is really memorably played by German actor Wolfgang Kieling (It doesn't hurt that his character, even with his limited screen time, is better written than either Newman's or Andrews'), Carolyn Conwell as the "farmer's wife" really makes an impression.   

Why did Conwell not have a bigger career, I wonder; she is really good and intense here and looks like Liv Ullmann, yet her primary acting work seems to have been for a quarter century on the soap opera series The Young and the Restless.  

Anyway, besides these Kieling and Conwell, there are also:

Hansjorg Felmy as the handsome, dapper East German security chief

Native Austrian Jew Ludwig Donath as the irascible University of Leipzig scientist from whom Michael hopes to extract information (he would have made a great Dr. Priestley)

Gunter Strack as another East German university professor and bespectacled minder to Michael and Sarah

American Jew David Opatashu, a familiar presence from American television in later years, as the head of the East German defectors' group

Gisela Fischer, another German Jew whose family fled the Nazis, as an agent of the defectors group (an attractive woman and a medical doctor, she functions as a sort of romantic engagement for Newman--in two scenes he respectively dances with and disrobes for her--and admittedly she is more interesting than our own Sarah Truehart)

Showstopper: Tamara Toumanova

Former émigré Russian ballet prima donna Tamara Toumanova as, yes, an East German (?) ballet star, a particularly nosy and nasty one (she pops up three times in the film and has a great story arc; one of her bits on stage during a performance of Tchaikovsky's Francesca de Rimini is highly dramatic and recalls another brilliant scene from the Thirties Hitchcock film Young and Innocent)

And, last but certainly not least, Lily Kedrova, another Russian émigré who the pervious year had won the best supporting actress for her performance in Zorba the Greek.  She appears late in the film and chews the scenery terrifically in three scenes.  In contrast with Newman and Andrews, it seems this darling Lily made a big hit with Hitch and his wife and he refused to trim any of her bits when the film was edited.  She plays a colorful former Polish countess who is desperate to escape from the Eastern Bloc to the United States.  Some critics dismiss her performance as ham.  It is, to be sure, but it's juicy, succulent ham.  

Countess Kuczynska (Lily Kedrova) needs sponsors!

Kedrova's role was intended as a nod to all the captive peoples of the Eastern Bloc, and it is indeed striking how many of the members of this cast were refugees from totalitarian regimes, be they fascist or communist.  Several of them came to America, where one could be free, although ironically their castmate Wolfgang Kieling, who compellingly played the menacing Gromek (who likes to chew gum and talk at the same time about the days he spent living in New York City), decided to defect to East Germany after witnessing the Watts race riots at first hand while shooting Torn Curtain at Universal Studios in Los Angeles.  

Upon his defection Kieling denounced West Germany as a handmaiden of the the United States, which he vociferously condemned as the most dangerous menace to the world, committing egregious "crimes against the Negro and the people of Vietnam."  Still, he died in Hamburg, West Germany in 1986 (he was only 61), which leads me to conclude that he may not have been so crazy with life in East Germany either.

Certainly Torn Curtain presents a much different view of the world than Kieling's, one that would have been at home with Hitch's wartime films from the Forties: America as a beacon of liberty for beleaguered sufferers from shattered European nations.  No doubt that view held less currency in the deeply conflicted Sixties, but just ask the Ukrainians about it today, in our troubled times.

It Was a Blue Novel You Wrote for Me: The Blue Hammer (1976), by Ross Macdonald

"Give Me One More Song to Go." --"Blue Letter" (1975), Fleetwood Mac

Three years separate Ross Macdonald's penultimate Lew Archer detective novel, Sleeping Beauty (1973), from his final one, The Blue Hammer (1976).  During these years Macdonald's affliction with Alzheimer's Disease, from which he began showing symptoms as early as 1971, the year The Underground Man was published, worsened.  After 1976 he was unable to get another novel off the ground (although he completed a  never used screenplay for his novel The Instant Enemy in 1978) and by late1980 he could no longer compose letters.  He stopped recognizing people the next year, and in late 1982 he was placed in a care home, where he lived for seventh months until his untimely demise at the age of 67.  

Black Lizard edition of Blue Hammer

Alzheimer's and dementia are tragic at any age and with any person but it's especially poignant in the case of a celebrated writer who started suffering from the disease so early in life, as early as the age of 55.  Alzheimer's ended RM's writing career and finally his life, but how did it impact his final books?  His biographer, Tom Nolan, says there is evidence of RM's affliction in the last book, The Blue Hammer.  He notes that a high school teacher wrote RM a letter pointing out narrative errors in the book.  RM thanked him and asked him to proofread his next Archer opus, which of course never came.  Earlier California crime writer William Campbell Gault had at RM's request proofread the book and suggested numerous and substantial edits, which RM without demur made.  RM dedicated the novel to Gault.

Another friend who saw the manuscript, Robert Easton, "was shocked to find uncharacteristic lapses in tone and diction," Nolan imparts, and "he suggested various revisions in word choice and structure," all of which RM made, again without complaint--very unusual for a writer!

I haven't read The Underground Man yet (one of three RMs left that I haven't read), but I have read RM's last two and I can say that, while I found Sleeping Beauty mostly a chore to get through, it was not the slog that The Blue Hammer was.  Hammer is certainly not the equivalent of the last novel that Agatha Christie wrote, Postern of Fate (1973)--a disastrous book though one oddly winsome in its sheer dementedness (I use that last word advisedly, since the octogenarian Christie seems clearly to have been suffering from dementia when she wrote it, as speech experts have since argued)--but to me Hammer obviously is the work of an author with failing power: not the power to conceive a complex narrative, but the power to carry out and complete it.

"I Owe It All to Agatha Christie, and Arthur Conan Doyle...."--"I Owe It All," Something's Afoot (1972)

1974 saw the publication of Ross Macdonald Selects Great Stories of Suspense, which included four crime novels, including Agatha Christie's Miss Marple saga, 4.50 from Paddington.  During the time when RM was putting the book together he corresponded with his intimate pen friend and highbrow fan girl, author Eudora Welty, about the project, discussing with her what authors merited inclusion in the tome.

Both RM and Welty, it turns out, were Christie enthusiasts.  RM wrote Welty in September 1973:

I'm sorry (for my own sake) if I gave the impression that my anthology will exclude detective stories. On the contrary, it will probably include a Christie (what do you think of is Miss Marple? I like her, and as of now propose to use What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw [the American title of 4:50 from Paddington], which moves beautifully.) and, if I can get away with it, include a Margaret Millar [RM's crime novelist wife].  

Margaret Millar was another cunningly twisty plotter.  Welty shared RM's admiration for Christie, writing RM:

Yes, I do like What "Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw"--that's the train one, isn't it--also I like "Mrs. McGinty's Dead"--do you remember that's Poirot and Mrs. Ariadne Oliver--Christie is endlessly diverting to me.

endlessly diverting

RM and Welty found occasion to discuss Agatha Christie again on the occasion of the Queen of Crime's death in January 1976.  

Welty:

Just now I heard on the news that Agatha Christie has died.  Was she a friend?  I remember hearing from Elizabeth Bowen, who came to know her well, what a marvelous person she was.  She really was an era all in herself, wasn't she? 

Macdonald:

No, I never knew Agatha Christie except through her books.  I think she wrote well, don't you? People I know who have known her have nothing but praise for her courtesy and goodwill.  She was even modest.

How, in contrast Christie was, RM might have been thinking, with Raymond Chandler, who in his correspondence notoriously termed RM an imitative "literary eunuch."  (Ouch!)  In a series of interviews with RM that Rolling Stone writer Paul Nelson conducted in 1976, the year The Blue Hammer was published, RM, who bittelry felt Chandler's derision, at one point exploded, when being questioned about Chandler, either "Chandler tried to kill me!" or "Chandler tried to murder me!" according to varying recollections.  (Nelson at RM's request erased his outburst from the tape.)  These interviews with RM, which are fascinating, were published in 2015, the centenary of RM's birth in a lovely coffee table book entitled It's All One Case (drawing on a line from The Zebra-Striped Hearse).

The Blue Hammer appeared in July of 1976, about six months after Christie passed away, and, when reading it for the first time recently, I was struck by how much it resembled a Christie novel in terms of plotting, if not in tone.  There are even specific echoes of what were several then-recent Christie novels, the author's last several books: 

SPOILERS

Nemesis (1971) (long buried body in greenhouse)

Elephants Can Remember (1972) (murder in past, siblings and impersonations)

Postern of Fate (1973) (more murders in the past, along with repetitiveness in the telling)

END SPOILERS

There's even, to go back to a much earlier Christie book, a mysterious man in a brown suit.  The exact words "the man in the brown suit" are even uttered by Lew Archer, specifically recalling the title of that 1924 Christie novel.  Were these deliberate nods from RM, or, considering his declining mental state, could they have been unconscious borrowings on his part?  He had been thinking a lot of late about Christie and her work.

"I've worked on several dozen murder cases, many of them involving multiple murders.  And in nearly every case the murders were connected in some way.  In fact, the deeper you go into a series of crimes, or any set of circumstances involving people who know each other, the more connectedness you find."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I'll be glad to explain.  It may take a little time."

"I don't quite follow that."

"It's a fairly complex chain of events."

I sat in my car in the failing afternoon and tried to straighten out the case in my mind.

--Lew Archer Investigates in the The Blue Hammer

His newest--his best yet--
his coast-to-coast bestseller

While Raymond Chandler is seen, not altogether fairly, as a slapdash plotter who cared nothing about plotting, terming it disparagingly "coolie labor," RM loved plotting.  Indeed one might argue he loved it too well. 

Sometimes RM's plotting strikes me, in its very ingenuity, as fundamentally odds with his serious intent as a writer.  The plot of The Blue Hammer might have been a lovely adornment in a Christie novel, but in an ostensible "serious novel" which has "transcended the mystery genre," as RM's later novels were said to do, I think its problematic.  

I don't see how The Blue Hammer can be said to transcend the genre when its ingenious, although frankly implausible and even absurd plot, drags it back down again into fairyland of classic detective fiction.  

It is, indeed, the sort of baroque plot you might have found not only in a Christie but in early period Ellery Queen; and that is about as far removed from reality as imaginable, at least in Anglo-American mystery.  Golden Age detective novels often are accused of being filled with cardboard characters, plot puppets whose strange fates no one can really care about.  Well, in my view there is not a single memorable character in The Blue Hammer.  

All of them wear masks which come from RM's by now very familiar box of stage props.  There's the boneheaded, angry father, the discontented, frigid wife, the misunderstood and confused boy and girl.  I didn't care about any of these people.  To be sure, the book does have serious intent, but it doesn't have living characters, rather a ghastly company of drear, dysfunctional ghosts and zombies.  Christie's characters, often much criticized (though not by RM), live far more than RM's, at least in this book.

RM's writing is flatter and grayer than it was in the past too.  I went back and compared the writing in The Blue Hammer with that in his third third Lew Archer detective novel, The Way Some People Die (1951), one of RM's supposed synthetic Chandler imitations, and the comparison does not favor The Blue Hammer.  The prose in Die moves and scintillates; that in Hammer stumbles and bumbles and only very occasionally flashes.  And there is such repetition, with Archer and other characters continually repeatedly basic plot points, as if the author himself needed reminding of them, or had forgotten that he had mentioned them.  (Granted, the plot is very involved.)

[My son William has] been dead for over thirty-two years," says a character on page 213, before repeating "My son William died thirty-two years ago" on page 215.  These repetitious conversations seem interminable, numbing the reader like Novocain.  At least they did this reader.

Characters keep expressing their confusion to Archer, recalling eldelry Tommy and Tuppence Beresford and the other characters in the last novel which Agatha Christie wrote, Postern of Fate, composed by Christie when she clearly was in a state of senile decay, as they used to say in vintage mysteries.  Granted RM manages, unlike Christie in Postern, finally to clear things up--more or less--but this is not to say he plausibly explains.  He doesn't.

In his pan of the novel at the time it was published, New York Times Book Review critic Anatole Broyard wrote:

Anatole Broyard

A fully imagined character is not altogether at the disposal of his creator.  He acquires a certain autonomy, based on qualities attributed to him by the author, who often unconsciously makes him richer and more complex than he had originally planned.  This is one of the elements that makes good fiction an adventure for the author as well as for the characters and the reader.

In "The Blue Hammer" by Ross Macdonald, things are just the other way around.  Anyone can be made to do just about anything....To try to unravel this Chinese box of circumstance on the evidence of anyone's motives--the classical way to read a mystery novel--is impossible.  You just have to wait until Mr. Macdonald tells you why so and so did such and such....

The novel is compulsively tied up in an almost endless series of knots.  Mr. Macdonald's motto seems to be: Give them enough rope and they will knot it.  This does not, however, have the effect of making his people complex: They resemble, rather, a group of birds--parrots, perhaps--mindlessly beating their wings against the cage of the plot.

Broyard outlines myriad implausibilities in the plot, spoiling a great deal of it along the way, for shame.  Yet I have to concede his points: I agree with him.  I found there was ingenuity to The Blue Hammer, but an almost total lack of plausibility.  This might not be a problem in a classic Ellery Queen novel from the early Thirties, an era when many still proudly prized ingenuity over plausibility (actually, though, I think it would be a problem there too); but in a sober novel from a writer boosted as a serious and significant American novelist with important things to say about the human condition, it is, I think, fatal.

Let me outline the murder plot of RM's book below, with SPOILERS galore, be warned:

There were these two half-brothers in Arizona, Richard Chantry and William Mead, sons of copper magnate Francis Chantry.  William is the illegitimate son of Francis (but see below) and Mildred Mead, an artist's model who apparently had sex with half the men in the state.  Both men were artists and Richard, while William was away during World War Two, stole both William's work and his "girl," Francine, and then, when William returned in 1943, murdered him for good measure.  Then Richard married Francine, who apparently knew about the murder, and moved with her to Santa Teresa, California, where he carried on painting and became a local hero.

Then in 1950 Gerard Johnson, an old army buddy of the late William, paid a visit on Richard with William's widow and son in tow, apparently with suspicions about William's death.  Richard killed him and buried him in his greenhouse.  Francis knew about this evidently, as well as their swarthy manservant Rico.  (I don't believe we ever learn his last name.)  Then, "as if in penance," Richard staged his disappearance to live, as a virtual prisoner at a house in the same town, as Gerard Johnson, a drunken recluse, with William's widow, Sarah, who knew about the murder (s) too, and her son Fred.  Wait, what?

What the hell--I mean, heck--
I just don't get it!  Gee whiz, those 
people were nuts!

Okay, let's keep going.  Richard kept painting in seclusion and I think around 1963 produced a "memory painting" of Mildred Mead, which at some point was bought by a Ruth Biemeyer, the unhappy wife of Jack Biemeyer, a Chantry relation who took over running the Chantry Arizona copper mine until he retired, moving with Ruth to Santa Teresa.  This couple has a daughter, Doris, a drugged out college girl flower child who has taken up, kinda sorta, with Fred, a professional student type who works at the art museum.

Fred steals the memory painting because he somehow intuits that it might be a Chantry and he "unconsciously" intuits that his father, who painted it, might really be Richard Chantry; and he wants  definitively to identify it.  (Query: How?)  

Crafty Richard, however, steals the painting back and also, while he's about it, kills two men, art dealer Paul Grimes, and artist Jacob Whitmore, who were involved in purchasing the painting from Sarah Johnson and selling it to Ruth Biemeyer, in order to protect his identity.  (Query: Do memory paintings hold up in court as proof of murder?)

Ruth bought the painting, by the way, because her husband had slept with Mildred Mead too--who hadn't?--and she unconsciously wanted to guilt trip him by hanging it on the wall.  Wait, what?  

Have you followed this so far?  Let me know if I got something wrong.  It's possible!  But wait, there's more.  RM typically produced last minute twists in his books and there's one, or two, here:  Richard Chantry, aka Gerard Johnson, has really been William Mead all along! It seems he murdered Richard back in '43, rather than vice versa.  And, brace yourselves people: William is really Jack Biemeyer's son!  

In the last pages of the book, Jack and Archer go visit William in jail, where William tearfully acknowledges that, yup, he's William!  Fade to black, or rather blue.

The last line of fiction that RM ever published is "Jack Biemeyer stepped forward and touched his son's wet face."  I guess this is supposed to be moving.  I was thinking, rather, about how William killed four--I think it was four--people, not to mention kidnapped Archer's new (first?) girlfriend, pretty newspaper writer Betty Jo Siddon and tied her naked in a chair in an attic while he painted her picture.  (Don't ask.)

END SPOILERS

Frankly, my reaction to this book is that it's all rather silly.  It doesn't help that the telling is so repetitious and dull.  There's another part of the book where RM gets off on a discussion of the reputed bisexuality of several of the male characters (I lost track), which has nothing to do with the rest of the book and goes precisely nowhere.  Is it supposed to be a red herring, or was RM just exploring his sexual issues, like he did his daddy issues and wife issues and daughter issues and grandson issues?  Granted, the man had a lot of issues! In previous books he was better able to absorb them into the narrative in an entertaining and illuminating way, however.

RM also introduces a few minor black characters, in an attempt to diversify his fictional world of mostly lily-white wealth.  Probably aware on some level that this might well be his last novel, RM also narratively bookends Hammer with his first Archer mystery, The Moving Target, an altogether better book, synthetic Chandler or not.  A couple of times Archer mentions his (justifiable) killing of a character in Target, contrasting his violent past with his pacific (and duller) present.  There's also a visit to a kooky mountaintop religious cult like the one in Target, where it had much more point and purpose.

This is a better finish for an author than Postern of Fate was for Christie or The Hungry Goblin for John Dickson Carr, to be sure.  The swansongs of longtime prolific mystery writers often are sadly disappointing, and The Blue Hammer, in my view, is no exception.  What is exceptional are the raves which The Blue Hammer received from critics and the nearly 50,000 hardcover copies it sold.  

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty, probably RM's number one fan, gushed to him of the novel: "I applauded it all.  It was an interesting subject and I thought you made the painting story and family story and murder story astonishingly believable in their multiple connectings and connections."   Welty observed that "you were allowing yourself a little freer reign, more ease of the old strictness...and more scope. and more length"--a charitable way of describing the meandering, repetitive narrative.

English Crime writer and critic Julian Symons, a transatlantic friend of RM, told RM that The Blue Hammer "was your best book for a long time, and one of the very best you've written."  

For his part, HRF Keating, another English crime writer and critic who often echoed Symons in his critical judgments, included the novel in his book Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books (1987), pronouncing it "in many ways...the peak of [RM's] achievement."  What a damning thing to say about his earlier books!

I do agree with Keating that "the blue hammer" image which gave rise to the book title is a moving one and beautifully written (although irrelevant to actual mystery plot).  However, this is a couple of sentences out of a very long and tiring narrative.  

I'll have something to say about a much better RM book soon.  The Blue Hammer also made me want to take another look at Margaret Millar's Ask for Me Tomorrow, an altogether better book which she published the same year, 1976, as her husband published Hammer.  The fact that RM has gotten so much more attention over the last half-century and counting compared to MM may attest to sexism--unconscious, of course--in the world of American crime fiction and the powerful psychic hold of the PI novel.  

He is hugely important in the genre, of course, but then so is she too.  They were a remarkable crime writing couple.  Just as it recalls certain early Seventies Agatha Christie titles, The Blue Hammer also recalls, on one key plot point in particular, Margaret's then recent recent crime novel Beyond This Point Are Monsters (1970).  

Oh, Ross! Ross Macdonald and His Critics

If ever a crime writer has had waves and troughs with critics it's been Ross Macdonald. 

Since his death Ross Macdonald has remained steadily in print, to be sure with Mysterious Press' Black Lizard imprint having taken over producing his books in the mid-1990s.  When Tom Nolan published his fine biography of the author in 1999, however, the New York Times Book Review handed off the task of assessing Nolan's book--and Macdonald's stature as a writer--to someone, Terry Teachout, who was distinctly unimpressed with both.  

Terry Teachout, who died earlier this year, was, like the late conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh, from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the metropolis of Missouri's "Little Dixie" region; yet Teachout, though he was, like Limbaugh, a "heartland" conservative, was no philistine.  Long ago he moved to New York City and established himself as a music and literary critic and a member of the city's "intellectual elite," a term that sends shivers down the spines of today's Mega MAGA types, who associate the pointed-headed professor types with CRT, BLM, LGBTQ+ and GKWE.  (That would be "God knows what else.")

Himself one of those liberal academic types by education, California author Ross Macdonald, an ostensible hard-boiled crime writer, had been embraced, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, by much of the country's intellectual elite as well as the New York Times Book Review itself.  Indeed, it was a front page review in the NYTBR in 1969 by author William Goldman--who scripted the film Harper, the 1966 film version of Macdonald's first Lew Archer detective novel, The Moving Target--of Macdonald's fourteenth Lew Archer detective novel, The Goodbye Look, that finally catapulted Macdonald, after two decades, onto the national bestseller charts.  

Two years later the acknowledged Great Writer Eudora Welty, a tremendous mystery buff, gave a similarly euphoric front page reception to Macdonald's' next Lew Archer detective novel, The Underground Man. Macdonald's hardcover sales more than quadrupled with all the attention.  

However, what the NYTBR giveth, it can taketh away, and two years later, it down right tooketh, publishing not one but two pans of Macdonald's penultimate Lew Archer detective novel, Sleeping Beauty, one of them by prominent literary critic Anatole Broyard.  Broyard would similarly pan Macdonald's last Lew Archer detective novel, The Blue Hammer, published in 1976.  Macdonald died seven years later, not long after having been institutionalized due to his incapacitation from Alzheimer's Disease.  

At the same time, Macdonald's popularity began a slow but continual decline, as people rediscovered his hard-boiled predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who were altogether more hard-boiled and "fun."  RM may have been deemed the third in the so-called hard-boiled triumvirtate, but he was the gang's weak sister, comparatively speaking.  Surely a great part of the reason Macdonald had briefly caught a big wave, as it were, in the late Sixties and early Seventies was that his books captured the ephemeral gestalt of the times (to use a word which gets used in Macdonald's books).  

Ross Macdonald (1915-1983)

From the publication of the seventh Lew Archer detective novel, The Doomsters, in 1958, Macdonald, reflecting his own personal problems, grew increasingly obsessed with multi-generational family dysfunction and traumatic mental disorder, troubled youth, obtuse parents and the "generation gap."  His "tough" private investigator, Lew Archer, transforms into more of a kindly family therapist and the hard-boiled tone of the early books gets soft and runny--although the books could hardly be called "sunny side up."  To the contrary, the later ones in particular are sober, oh-so sober, with any sense of humor from the earlier books dissipated.    

You might guess from these remarks that I prefer the earlier Ross Macdonald books, a distinctly minority view today, seemingly.  Certainly I think several of the early books are underrated.  

Often the earlier books are dismissed as synthetic imitations of Raymond Chandler (Chandler himself nastily dismissed them as such.)  I disagree with this assessment, for in them one can find discern, under a hard shell, many of the sensitive themes found in Macdonald's later books.  They are also crisply written and plotted.  

Personally my favorite books by RM--I will call him this henceforward--are what might be termed middle-period Archers, The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962) and Black Money (1966), though I think some of the early books are terrific too.  Although I read both over a dozen years ago and need to reread them, I was underwhelmed at the time with The Galton Case (1959) and The Chill (1964), though many deem those RM's best books.  On the other hand, the early Archer The Drowning Pool (1950) was not to my taste at all.  

Sometimes you just can't decide about a guy.

I tend to agree with the naysayers of RM's last books, however, that the author ironically was running out of steam at the time he was receiving his greatest praise and had started, as one critic remarked, writing the same book over and over again.  I still have yet to read The Underground Man (1971) and am reading the very long (100,000 words) The Blue Hammer, for the first time, but I tend to find his books from The Instant Enemy onward repetitious and dull.  I'd prefer reading Chandler's The Big Sleep or the Long Goodbye to RM's Sleeping Beauty or The Goodbye Look any day.

Still, when RM was good, he was very, very good indeed, often brilliant.  I have greatly enjoyed The Moving Target, The Way Some People Die, The Ivory Grin (the book that hooked me on RM), the non-series Meet Me at the Morgue and The Ferguson Affair and the aforementioned The Zebra-Striped Hearse and Black Money.  I read Zebra recently and it's one of the best detective novels I have read in many decades of reading.  Yet Sleeping Beauty for me was the literary equivalent of an overdose of Nembutal and The Blue Hammer is currently hammering me into senescence.  (I have just passed the halfway point and will struggle to finish it; it is better plotted than its immediate predecessor but Archer's murder investigation is a crawl.)  

Evidently Terry Teachout (getting back to him) once held RM in high esteem, for in Tom Nolan's RM biography, Nolan notes that in the conservative magazine National Review Teachout in 1981 praised RM as "one of this country's most consistently undervalued literary artists."  

Two decades later, however, Teachout proclaimed that, just the opposite, RM was rather overvalued, at least by Tom Nolan.  Teachout expressed bemusement that "anyone" had ever "seriously suggested in print that [RM] was...'a major American novelist.'"  

He continued damningly:

Terry Teachout (1956-2022)
Wait a minute on this Ross Macdonald thing!

What the reader [of Tom Nolan's biography] will not find, alas, is any critical skepticism about the ultimate value of [RM's] work.  Yet such skepticism is clearly in order: returning to the Lew Archer novels for the first time in a decade: I found them repetitive and often dully written...while Archer himself is too good to be true.  Several of the middle period books, like The Zebra-Striped Hearse and The Far Side of the Dollar, are still perfectly readable, but they are also full of naïve dime-store psychologizing.  

[RM] was one of the unfortunate folk for whom therapy took the place of religion, and in retrospect it seems clear that the reason he became so fashionable at the end of the 1960s was that his obsessions were in accords with that naval-gazing decade.  No doubt that explains why he has aged so poorly, especially by comparison with Chandler, whose smoky, side-of-the-mouth prose remains as tartly satisfying as ever.

It's interesting that the NYTBR, which did so much to build up RM's literary reputation, published this extremely dismissive take on him, three decades after the epochal (to crime fiction fans) publication of The Goodbye Look.  One wonders, incidentally, whether Teachout's restrained praise for RM's The Zebra-Striped Hearse and The Far Side of the Dollar as "perfectly readable" was prompted, on his part, primarily by conservative critic Jacques Barzun's strong notices of them Barzun's and Wendell Hertig Taylor's A Catalogue of Crime.

I'd argue there's a certain amount of conservative "idealoguing" behind Teachout's dismmisve assessment of Macdonald.  (Teachout goes on to disparage Lew Archer as a powderpuff male, a "soft-boiled shamus.")  

His New York Times obituary states that Teachout was generally "apolitical" in his criticism, but he was part of Ronald Reagan Eighties generation of conservatives who imagined that the conservative movement would produce a national cultural renaissance on the Right (a view that in Trumpian retrospect seems perhaps a tad overoptimistic); and I think the above take on RM is, again, somewhat ideologically inflected.    

Was sensitive Lew Archer the Phil Donahue
of "hard-boiled" tecs?
Terry Teachout thought so.

For conservatives, the Sixties and Seventies were self-indulgent, liberal Baby Boomer decades that saw the rise of feminism, free love, no-fault divorce, birth control, abortion, same-sex relationships, minority militancy, the breakup of the nuclear family, challenges to the authority of elders, particularly fathers, and the odious omnipresence of the so-called sensitive male, as embodied by Jimmy Carter, Alan Alda and Phil Donahue. 

You wouldn't catch Chandler wearing his sensitive heart on his sleeve like RM, no sir!  

Tender not tough?
Alan Alda consoles in MASH

Yet you also wouldn't find Chandler, who in his second Philip Marlowe mystery Farewell, My Lovely (1942), gave us the immortal line "The Indian smelled," writing sympathetically about racial minorities or homosexuals, like RM did.  To the contrary, Chandler was more likely, when it came to writing about black people in his letters, to carp  that they didn't make good help around the house anymore.

Didn't Teachout find that that sort of thing "dates" too, like sour cream left in the refrigerator months past its expiration date? 

The truth is writing inevitably dates to some degree, because it represents the values and mores of another time.  The hard-boiled paradigms embodied by Hammett and Chandler and their slavish followers couldn't last forever, the times having changed; and if Ross Macdonald hadn't shifted the paradigm in the Sixties with a great shove of his manful, if sensitive, shoulder, someone else would have done the needful deed.  

I don't know whether Teachout read RM again in the last twenty years of his life, but in fact RM's prose, rather than having "aged so poorly" began capturing readers (and critics) again, when in 2016 the Library of America began republishing his books, following early efforts with Hammett and Chandler.  Tom Nolan, still very much around, has been resoundingly vindicated.

The Moving Target, RM's most reviewed book on Amazon, now has nearly 350 reviews/ratings, though, it must be admitted, Chandler's Big Sleep has ten times as many, at over 3500/ratings.  Sarcasm and pithy snark outsells sensitivity and earnest soulfulness, it seems, but I think RM's books will continue to live, in part because they expanded the limited boundaries of the "mean streets" world of the PI novel.

Maybe Ross' gears got stuck in the late Sixties, but someone had to switch lanes with the machine; and happily he did.  Whether or not he's a "Great American Novelist," RM is a damn important one within the history of crime writing, just as are Hammett and Chandler.

Detecting in the Seventies/Heroes: The Snatch (1971), by Bill Pronzini and Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977), by Marcia Muller

When I was a kid

I thought I'd save the world

Running round and chasing all the criminals....

Well everybody needs a hero

But I'm not everybody else

I walk alone

Yeah I walk alone, yeah I walk alone, yeah

You know I tried to be a hero

But I was lying to myself 

I walk alone

Yeah I walk alone, yeah I walk alone, yeah....

It's not that I don't love to solve a mystery

But life is hard enough with one identity....

--Hero (2020), Weezer

At the end of 2020 I had this notion of doing a retrospective series of reviews on mysteries from the Seventies, the earlier ones from that decade being, amazingly to me, a half-century old now.  Having been born as a Gen X'er in the Sixties, that makes me feel really old!  It was in the Seventies that I first started reading mysteries (or, heck, reading, period), beginning with Agatha Christie in those old Pocket paperback editions.  A bit later came Sherlock Holmes.

So how do the Seventies fit into the history of mystery fiction?  It's an important decade for classical detective fiction, to be sure, because it's the decade when practically all of the remaining "Golden Agers" expired, including some of the biggest names in the field, like Christie herself, John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner, half of Ellery Queen and Rex Stout.  But it's also a decade when new names like Peter Lovesey were entering the field, and relatively new names like PD James were getting more established.  I evaluated works from the time by Catherine Aird, Patricia Moyes and Ruth Rendell, before my thoughts were distracted, predictably enough, by other projects.  

I was inspired by the Rolling Stones' rock album Sucking in the Seventies, but I didn't want the series to carry the connotation that these books "sucked," so I am now using the title Detecting in the Seventies.  Now, let's get on with it!

Of course there was much more to the Seventies than classic mystery; indeed, in the Seventies some proclaimed that classic detective fiction was actually dying, even gasping on its deathbed.  

How about classic hard-boiled PI crime fiction--you know, tough gumshoes with their bottles and their broads--how was that going?  Raymond Chandler had died in 1959 and Dashiell Hammett in 1961 (and Hammett had been creatively dead long before that) and in the early Seventies they had not yet posthumously accomplished their great commercial and critical renaissance.  Hard-boiled mystery was deemed an anachronism.  

Leigh Brackett, a co-scripter of the seminal (if overrated in my book) hard-boiled film The Big Sleep (1946), based on Chandler's debut 1941 crime novel of the same, was called upon to script the 1973 film version of Chandler's penultimate crime novel, The Long Goodbye (1954).  She later reflected that "time had gone by...the private eye had become a cliché":

Legions of private eyes had been beaten up in innumerable alleys by armies of interchangeable hoods.  Everything that was fresh and exciting about Philip Marlowe in the Forties had become cliché, outworn by imitation and overuse.  The tough loner with the sardonic tongue and the cast-iron gut had become a caricature....the idiom had changed.

"ruggedly handsome" Bill Pronzini

So what was a neophyte writer of private investigator novels to do as the jaded Swinging Seventies shimmied into the dawn?  Let's look at the then very young Bill Pronzini, today still an active writer, indeed one of the most prolific such in the genre.  At the age of 24 Pronzini published his first short crime story in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, "The Running Man."  This was the first of a dozen works by him to appear in AHMM between 1968 and 1971.  

The El Paso Times pronounced that latter year that the "ruggedly handsome Bill Pronzini" had sold over 80 short stories in a wide variety of fields since he started professionally writing in 1966.  

1971 also saw Pronzini publish his first two crime novels: the Edgar-nominated The Stalker and The Snatch, the first of his long series of "Nameless" PI tales, which eventually totaled to over forty novels between 1971 and 2017, as well as several novellas.

Set like the other Nameless novels in California, Pronzini's own native state, The Snatch was praised by none other than Jacques Barzun (no noted hard-boiled fan himself), who in A Catalogue of Crime wrote: "Here Pronzini has done a fine job of adding something new to the nearly worn-out kidnapping ploy.  The twist at the end is masterly, and not unclued."  High praise from our good Professor B!

People who have read some of the later Nameless novels may be in for a bit of a surprise with The Snatch.  For one thing, Nameless is old!  He is stated flat out in this one to have attained the age of 47, meaning he was born around 1923.  Not surprisingly, given that natal year, he's a veteran of World War Two.  He also was a cop for fifteen years before becoming a private eye.  

Now he's got a girlfriend, an attractive, younger double divorcee named Erika, who affectionately calls him "Old Bear" but hates his job like poison.  That's bad by itself, not to mention he suffers from a hacking smoker's cough that could be an indication of something worse, like cancer--though he can't bring himself either to quit smoking or to see a doctor.  

All in all he's rather a depressed guy.  (We don't learn his name here, hence he's "Nameless.")  The greatest pleasure which he seems to derive comes from collecting old pulp magazines detailing the bare-knuckled adventures of the steely-eyed, heroic private dicks he grew up reading as a kid.  Down those mean streets Nameless needs must go, though he doesn't feel that he lives up to his fictional forbears.  But all a man can do is try.

In The Snatch Nameless is hired by Louis Martinetti, a financial consultant in the wealthy enclave of Hillsborough, seventeen miles south of San Francisco, to make a drop of money to ransom Martinetti's kidnapped son.  Nameless does so--and almost dies in the process.  Things gets more involved from there. 

As Jacques Barzun stated, Pronzini comes up with a welcome new wrinkle on the snatch plot and it's very nicely clued, with some Carrian/Brandian finesse.  By my count the book is only around 54,000 words, Pronzini being a master of the art of the short crime novel--they way God intended it, in my opinion.  

Steeped in pulp crime fiction tradition, Pronzini is fully conversant with the mythos of the "hard-boiled" American private eye which by 1971 which had been built up over the last half-century from its origins in Black Mask in the early Twenties.  Nameless loves the pulps, but he isn't a tough guy, he isn't hard-boiled, his isn't a wisecracker, he's just a (rather morose) middle-aged guy trying to do right in a world of myriad wrongs and much human hurt.  

Sure he won't mow down fifty people like Hammett's "realistic" Continental Op and his fraternity might, but he still just might crack a case and even save some poor soul.  As he says near the end of the novel, mentally addressing Erika, his now ex-girlfriend: 

tough guy, wise guy

You said that I'm nothing more than a little boy playing at being a detective, that I'm living in the past, in a world that never existed.  But the world I live in, you live in...is...a lousy world that requires men...to keep it from becoming sicker and harsher and crueler than it already is, dedicated men...men who care.  I'm one of those men...and because I am, I'm not living the lie you think I am.

Shorn of the grandiose, tough guy bravado of the shoot-'em-up pulps, it's a more believable and arguably compelling picture, at least for me.

In the Seventies and Eighties the ranks of the PI's would see female entrants too, like Sharon McCone, created by Bill Pronzini's future spouse, crime writer Marcia Muller.  

It was no longer just a man's world!  I will be looking at her first detecting saga, Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977), next.

Note: If any of my readers are Weezer fans, they will know that the lines from their song "Hero" quoted at the top of the piece refer to superheroes, not gumshoes.  But to the those kids reading the pulps in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, those daring crime-busting dicks in trench coats and fedoras were superheroes of another sort.  Down those mean streets....

The Mystery of Mother Love: Cornell Woolrich, Milton Propper, Todd Downing, Hugh Wheeler, Richard Webb and Rufus King

"[Woolrich] had an unnatural relationship with his mother....the true picture of a homosexual's relationship with his mother....A combination of dependence, adoration, hatred.  All the things you'd expect."--Mystery editor Lee Wright in a 1979 interview with author Francis Nevins

"He is a good, a nice young man but badly controlled by his mother.  You have the expression--a mama's boy?"--Miss Fernandez in "Let Her Kill Herself" (1956), by mystery writer Rufus King

The consensus on gay men--whose "abnormality" in their eyes was a condition that had to be explained and pathologized--used to be that they were unable to develop "normal" relationships with women due to an imbalance in their own parents' relationships, the mothers being "strong" and the fathers "weak" or "distant" and the mothers dominating their sons to an unhealthy degree.  

Angel of Death
Katherine Hepburn in
Suddenly Last Summer (1959)

Gay men were "mama's boys," in other words, who, if not actual "sissies" and "inverts" altogether more effeminate than masculine, were so under the ball-crushing weight of their mother's thumbs that for them relationships with other women become impossible.  In this context I always think of Katherine Hepburn as genteel iron lady Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer, the 1959 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' 1958 one-act play, and her dead gay son, never actually seen in the play or film, Sebastian.  That's a codependent relationship which leads to some dire results indeed!  On stage there have been a long line of distinguished Mrs. Venables, including Patricia Neal, Maggie Smith, Elizabeth Ashley and the recently deceased Diana Rigg.  

Of course straight men can be mama's boys just like gay men--hence the trope of the wife having to deal with her meddlesome mother-in-law.  Back in the Fifties Hugh Wheeler wrote a superb short story, adapted as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents starring William Shatner, about this phenomenon, called "Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?"  However, it is true that if you look at certain famous gay, or reputedly gay, male vintage mystery writers, you do often find that the men had very close--and sometimes personally disabling--relationships with their mothers.

Probably the most famous "queer" male American mystery writer was Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968), except for the needling fact that we don't really know whether he actually was gay.  A queer, very queer fellow, yes indeed, but, gay?  Well, we just don't know, as I pointed out in my Crimereads article on him from last January.  

Cornell Woolrich in 1925
He was in his early twenties
and writing his first novel

Cornell's relationship with his mother seems almost like the textbook case of a smothering mama (at least later in life; when he was a child she seems to have been rather neglectful),  Yet frustratingly we almost never hear from his mother, Claire, at first hand, and get her side of the story.  She likely would have responded that her boy was a mess and needed a mother's steady hand.  And it's true that Cornell was one messed up dude, physically as well as psychically.  

If Cornell was gay in a repressive era, that was the least of his problems, in my view.  Right now I lean to his having been more likely asexual.  Cornell actually was married, briefly, but his wife annulled the union on account of his having been unable to consummate it.  It seems unlikely that he had any other serious intimate relationships, although a couple of hearsay accounts claim that he cruised men.

"Dependence, adoration, hatred," Lee Thayer called it, when discussing Cornell Woolrich's attitude to Claire with Francis Nevins.  "All the thing's you'd expect" with "a homosexual's relationship with his mother."  How does this Thayer's sweeping generalization stand up with some other gay male American/Anglo-American vintage mystery writers?

Milton Propper 
in his early twenties
after he had published
his first novel

Mystery writer Milton Propper (1906-1962), a brilliant young Jew from Philadelphia--people joked that he was still wearing short pants when he enrolled in college at the age of 16--was said to have had a very close relationship with his beautiful and charming mother Helen, to whom he dedicated his first detective novel.  He also dedicated a detective novel to his smart sister Madelyn, but, even though he published 14 of them between 1929 and 1943, he never got around to dedicating one either to his father Jake or his brother Walter, neither of whom, according to a cousin, was that bright a bulb in the family chandelier.  

Milton's mother died in 1944 and, coincidentally or not, Milton's life went decidedly downhill after that and he committed suicide in 1962, having never published another book.  While he was known to have been gay and to have picked up men, whether he had any stable intimate same-sex relationships is unknown.  

Todd Downing (1902-1974), who authored nine detective novels between 1933 and 1941, lived most of his life in the town of Atoka, Oklahoma and was one-eighth Choctaw (through his father) and half-Yankee (through his mother).  Although his father was an important man in local politics and a tribal leader, the Downing household was decidedly gynocentric, dominated by his outspoken, long-lived maternal northern-born grandmother, Awilda, and his mother Maud.  

His elder brother Gordon having died as an infant, Todd's only sibling was his lesbian sister Ruth, who graduated from Columbia University with a degree in social work and long lived with a female companion.  The family was, quite frankly, better educated and more cultured than most of the town of Atoka, and they always stood somewhat apart from it, leading to a certain insularity on their part.

Todd Downing in his early twenties 
when he was a college instructor

I've never actually received any confirmation that Todd was gay, but his writing and his personal collection of books are hugely suggestive in this context.  Todd never married or, indeed, had any intimate physical relationships of which we know. During the Forties, after he gave up writing and college teaching as a profession, Todd, now himself in his forties, moved from his parents' home in Atoka to Philadelphia and worked with an advertising firm.  In the early Fifties he taught at some private schools before moving back to Atoka after the death of his father to live, yes, with his mother until her death a decade later.  He lived alone at the family house and taught at Atoka High School until his own death, another decade after his mother's passing.

Now we come to some gay writers who had--like Cornell Woolrich, who was active as a crime writer from 1934 to 1968 (although his greatest years were in the Thirties and Forties)--far greater longevity within the mystery genre: Anglo-American partners Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler, who wrote as Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge.

Hugh Wheeler
in his early twenties, when
he began writing crime fiction
with his partner Richard Webb

Handsome Hugh Wheeler (1912-1987)--who floated through life, seemingly, on a cloud of serene self-confidence--is the only one of these men who seems not to have been arguably mother-dominated in any sense.  His closest family relationship was with his only sibling Jack, his elder brother.  

He and Richard Wilson Webb (1901-1966) are also the only men among this group, apparently, who ever were able to maintain long-term sexual relationships.  They themselves lived together  as partners between 1933 and 1951, although the relationship became "open," at least on Hugh's part, when they were parted during World War Two.  Hugh lived with another man, whom he met during the war, from 1951 (after Rickie moved out) until his death in 1987, although he had additional, more transitory relationships as well.  

Richard Wilson Webb's health severely declined after the war, but he too seems to have lived with another man in France, a Frenchman named Jean, in the fifteen years that lay between his breakup with Hugh and his own death in 1966.  Webb seems to have been much closer to his mother (he compared Hugh's face to hers, a great compliment in his eyes) and even to have disliked his father.  There's a highly suggestive short story by him in this context.  

Richard Wilson Webb
in his twenties around the time 
of the publication of his first
detective novel

Rickie also grew up in the youngest in his family, with a bunch of sisters and one significantly elder brother.  I tried to communicate a few years ago with the son of this brother, Rickie's only nephew as far as I know, a retired law professor who is now in his nineties; but he pointedly refused, via email, to talk with me.

Now we come to Rufus King (1893-1966), the elder of the lot and the only one old enough to fight in the Great War, which he did, most heroically.  Courtesy of a recent interview which I conducted, I now have more information on the author concerning this subject.  

I've written a bit now about Rufus' interesting family background, but I will recap here briefly.  He was the only child of a New York doctor, Thomas Armstrong King, and Amelia Sarony Lambert, a great-niece of once-famed celebrity photographer Napoleon Sarony.  

The family maintained two residences, one the Lambert family home at 141 Lexington Avenue in Kip's Bay, described in a 2017 New York Times article as the "least fashionable neighborhood of Manhattan," and the other an 1818 Georgian home at the small upstate New York town of Rouses Point, two miles from the Canadian border on Lake Champlain.  It's a lovely home but no one was exactly beating down the doors to live in Rouses Point.

Rufus' father's family was New England Yankee of undistinguished lineage as far as I can tell, (Thomas' father, Washington King, was a dry goods merchant of Mooers, another small upstate New York town), while Amelia, through her father's French Canadian Catholic relations, could regard her own family as "artistic."  Among her siblings she had a younger brother and sister, Thomas and Nora, who were actors and artists, although they enjoyed no great success and, indeed, lived with (and off?) Amelia and Thomas, along with their mother, Maggie, for much of their lives.  

Did Amelia regard herself as culturally superior to her husband, like playwright Tennessee Williams' mother Edwina Dakin, and pulp writer Robert E. Howard's mother Hester Ervin?  This sort of thing crops up frequently with the parents of artistically creative men, who often were closer to and fostered in their artistic inclinations by their mothers.  (On the other hand, author Georges Simenon hated his mother.)

Rufus King age 27
when he was working as a 
steamship wireless operator

Thomas King seems to have tried to keep Rufus' nose to a practical grindstone.  After Rufus graduated from Yale in 1914 and declined to enroll in law school at Columbia University, his father put him to work in a silk mill in Paterson, New Jersey.  Two years later, "Rufe," looking for a more adventurous life, heroically rebelled by joining the New York National Guard and serving in the Mexican expedition against Pancho Villa and later the First World War, where he was awarded the Silver Star Medal.  He then became a wireless operator on a steamship, returning to the States in 1920, at the age of 27, only after selling a pulp adventure story to Argosy and determining to make his living from fiction writing.

But where did he live?  Why, with his parents!  We talk about adult children living in their parents' basements today, but of course this was a common enough phenomenon back then too (though you can be sure Rufe was not living in any basement).  

All through the Twenties, as he established himself as a successful pulps writer and novelist (two of his works had been adapted as films by 1925), Rufus lived with his parents in Manhattan and Rouses Point, often wintering with his mother in Florida.  I get the impression much time was spent apart from his busy father, one of whose patients was playwright Eugene O'Neill, but in any event, Thomas King contracted pneumonia from a patient in 1927 and the next year at the age of 62 he died a lingering death from the wasting disease.  He had taken more than ten months to expire.

Amelia herself was 60 at the time and she proceeded to live as before, only she now had control over much of her dead husband's money.  A trust fund had been set up for Rufus by the terms of his father will, giving him no control over the capital, though by this time Rufus was 35 years old.  It seems Rufe was considered too improvident to be trusted with money.

Rufus remained living with his mother at Rouses Point, wintering with her in Florida, even though in 1929 he published a very successful mystery novel, Murder by the Clock, which was successfully filmed in 1931.  He was a very popular mystery writer throughout the Thirties and Forties, with his books reprinted in paperback, and he wrote three Broadway plays, including the book for the mystery-musical hybrid Murder at the Vanities (1933), a big stage hit, adapted successfully as a film in 1934.  

Carl Brisson and Kitty Carlisle in 
Murder at the Vanities (1934)
Liberace would have added some glitter.

Like Cornell Woolrich, Rufus King must have been making a great deal of money by this time (even with his inheritance from his father tied up in a trust), although evidently money went through his hands like water.  (He once bought a Rolls Royce in cash.)  

Like Cornell Woolrich, once again, Rufus chose, despite his success, to continue cohabiting with his mother.  He apparently never left her side, except for short periods. (He seems to have made a trip to England by himself in 1931 and they were necessarily separate, for example, when his plays were going through rehearsal.)  

People at the time seemed bemused by Rufus King maintaining his distant fastness in Rouses Point, seemingly about as far removed from New York City civilization as Manhattan, Kansas.  The situation  is reminiscent of Todd Downing, whom local newspapers dubbed "the hermit of Atoka."

"Anything for a quiet life," quizzically observed one New York newspaper article of Rufus' sticking it out at Rouses Point.  To a newspaper interviewer in 1932 Rufus himself put it this way, typically drolly, of life at his "sheltered nook":

You've got to lead a quiet life to write about crime, says King, whose books are beginning to rival in popularity those by the late Edgar Wallace.  And what he means by quiet is lake, wood, roadhouses, bootleggers, boarder jams, army posts, French-Canadian taverns, baseball, customs jambles, in the summer--hunting, sadness, chills, log fires and peace, in the fall--snow, ice, Belasco winds, drifts, snowshoeing, skiing, mulled ale and a passion for spring, in the winter--with a substrata of auction and contract, dogs, scandal, gossip--and that's all.

The granddaughter and daughter of Rufe's successive trustees suggested that Rufus was a charming profligate, beloved by women and children, who needed looking after by his male trustees and his Mama:

The author was a family friend.  His father, Dr., King, was a friend and client of my grandfather, who was a lawyer and Rufus' trustee.  (Dr. King somehow knew that Rufus needed his money looked after.)  My father, also a lawyer, inherited this position.  As a child and young person, I adored Rufus; he was an enchanting person.  We had an obligatory weekend chez Rufus every summer, at his home in Rouses Point, NY.  My father found Rufus alarming, but my mother and Rufus laughed gaily and understood each other.  When asked, he presented her with a copy of his [mystery novel] Museum Piece No. 13, inscribed.  Knowing him, my mother said, "Now Rufus, please writing something I can show to my dignified friends."  Upon which he wrote, "For Jane, to show to her dignified friends.  With love to her. and nuts to them."

....Rufus said that his "reader" was his widowed mother.  She was given the manuscript halfway through.  If she could guess who the murderer was, he rewrote.

Cornell Woolrich alienated people, Rufus King captivated them.  Woolrich was perpetually unhappy with his lot in life, Rufus King was--well, what, exactly?  The above account paints a picture of a man loving life and even getting along swimmingly with his widowed mother and his trustee's wife and daughter, even if the staid trustee himself found Rufus' gay antics "alarming."  For three years Rufus to much acclaim performed women's parts in drag in productions of the Yale Dramatic Society, while with much valor he commanded field artillery during the Great War.  For several years afterward he was the wireless officer on a steamship and traveled around Latin America.  It's impossible to imagine the neurasthenic Cornell Woolrich, who fearfully lived out his life in a series of New York hotel rooms, doing such things.

Yet there was, it seems, one crippling fear which possessed Rufus: fear of his mother.  

I'll look more at this next blog post, when I go over what happened to Rufus during the last 15 years of his life (1951-1966), after his mother died in 1950 and he left Rouses Point for good the next year.  How much did Rufus' last, motherless years resemble or differ from those of Cornell Woolrich--ten years (1958 to 1968) which were for Woolrich, sad to day, even more dismal than all of his previous ones.

Just Friends
Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in their rooms during the shooting of 
Suddenly Last Summer (1959)