Collectors of vintage paperback mystery fiction will know all about Dell mapbacks, those cute little paperbacks with the crime scene maps on the back covers. According to Wikipedia there were at least 550 titles in the series between 1943 and 1951, mostly mysteries. But did you know that #1 through #4 did not have maps on the back? So they were not really in any way mapbacks. I have the first two, the first of which is Death in the Library by Philip Ketchum, a really obscure choice it would seem for the first Dell not-mapback. The second is Dead or Alive by Patricia Wentworth, which oddly is I think the only time Dell ever published her work. (She was mostly published in the US in pb by Popular Library.)
#4 was Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery, later reissued with a map. But I don't know what #3 was. Now it's been bugging me. Does anyone out there know? Please tell me!
By the late 1930s "manners mystery" was all the rage in the world of English detective fiction. Pioneered and actively propagandized by Dorothy L. Sayers, manners mystery aimed to merge the detective novel with the mainstream novel of manners, looking at live people, not just dead bodies, how they live, not just how they died. There is more focus on society, characters, love interest--traditionally a minor aspect of detective fiction--and usually plenty of social satire. Dickens and Collins and Trollope are models. not so much Conan Doyle and S. S. Van Dine.
Once Sayers achieved huge success in both the UK and US with her 1935 Lord Peter Wimsey manners mystery Gaudy Night, manners mystery naturally received great impetus. Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh were deemed her most important followers and late Thirties books like Dancers in Mourning and Death in a White Tie are considered high points of manners mystery. There were others as well, like Georgette Heyer, Gladys Mitchell and Josephine Tey, who produced manners mysteries. Then there were Anthony Gilbert and Moray Dalton, women with male pen names who had long produced "novelistic" mysteries. There were men who did so too, like Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake, whom I call the Detection Dons, the male counterparts of the Crime Queens. Although not part of that group Henry Wade began writing notable novelistic mysteries, like Mist on the Saltings and Lonely Magdalen. E. R. Punshon was another.
All this writing really came to a head in the late Thirties and early Forties and it forever changed the face of detective fiction. While supposedly "pure" puzzle writers like John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie maintained their popularity, others, the so-called "Humdrum" mystery writers (just the facts, ma'am) like Freeman Wills Crofts, John Street and J. J. Connington, began to seem more old hat. Christie and Carr actually produced more mannered mysteries in the Forties, like She Died a Lady and The Emperor's Snuff-box and Five Little Pigs and Taken at the Flood and The Hollow. Even John Rhode introduced a handsome, young, public school educated cop, Jimmy Waghorn, into his Dr. Priestley mystery series in 1936.
Another big contributor to English manners mystery, Patricia Wentworth, has gone generally unacknowledged as such, and invariably is left off lists of Crime Queens, despite her popularity for a century now. Why is this?
Partly, I think, because she emphasizes the love element more strongly than any of these other writers, even Sayers when she has Lord Peter a-Wimseying Harriet Vane. The Wentworth Miss Silver mysteries may have struck people almost as romance novels, which isn't really quite correct in my opinion.
The author also was essentially a romantic thriller writer for much of her career. For fifteen years "shockers" dominated her output between 1923 and 1938; then something starts to change. In 1939 she published, as was her custom, two mysteries, these her third Miss Silver novel Lonesome Road and The Blind Side, which introduced her series police characters Detective Inspector (later Superintendent) Ernest Lamb and Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Frank Abbott, the latter one of those posh, public-school educated coppers who had become popular in manners mystery.
The first Miss Silver, Grey Mask, dating back from 1928, is a thriller, though even here there is genuine wit and satire in PW's portrayal of the naive young heiress who is the target of the master criminal's wicked plot. You might almost call it a manners thriller. Wit and satire is not something thrillers of the period are known for. Still, it's very much a thriller.
The second Miss Silver novel did not appear for nine years. PW had had a few intermittent series characters before, Benbow Smith and Frank Garratt, and in 1937 she decided to add Miss Silver to her recurring character crime file. (Critics had loved Grey Mask back in 1928, but they had not taken much notice of Miss Silver.) The Case Is Closed actually is built around a murder problem, spiritedly investigated by a bold young woman, Hilary Carew, but the the story as it unfolds is essentially thrillerish, as Hilary's life is repeatedly put in peril. Miss Silver appears and professionally investigates, but her work is kept in the background.
When Miss Silver next appears in Lonesome Road in 1939 she is very much on the scene as she attempts to determine who is trying to kill a rich middle-aged heiress, Rachel Traherne. She actually stays incognito as a guest at Rachel's country mansion. (Rachel doesn't want to bring the police in because it appears the villain in a family member and she does not want bring down bad publicity on innocent people.)
This is a detective novel, but there are still strong thrillerish elements in that it does not detail the investigation of a murder problem, but rather the attempts on the life of the heroine and the attempt to determine who is behind them. Christopher Morley compared Lonesome to Rebecca, and it does have the suspenseful quality of a Alfred Hitchcock thriller. I would actually say that the earlier The Case Is Closed is more of a true detective novel.
But then we come to The Blind Side, from the same year, which introduces Wentworth's yard men. Here I think we see the true genesis of Wentworth's detective fiction. The next year Lamb and Abbott would appear as a team in another detective novel, Who Pays the Piper?, while Miss Silver would appear comparatively briefly in a thrillerish mystery, Danger Point, in 1941.
In 1942 there would be Pursuit of a Parcel, a topical wartime thriller with Lamb and Abbott and an older character Frank Garratt. Then in 1943 Wentworth would unite Lamb and Abbott with Miss Silver in a true detective novel, Miss Silver Deals with Death, aka Miss Silver Intervenes. After this all but one of her crime novels would be Miss Silver mysteries, for the most part true detective novels rather than thrillers. The Miss Silver books are investigative manners mysteries in the Crime Queen mold and deserve to be credited as such. Let's finally give Patricia Wentworth the crown she deserves.
On Wentworth Wednesdays I'll be talking about The Blind Side. But I'll try to find some space next week for something non-Wentworth as well.
This piece is largely culled from my 55-page article at Crimereads from a few years ago, but I wanted to highlight here the raging homophobia in this book, given my recently publicized assertion that a certain retrograde comment by Otto Penzler, publisher of Dream, suggests how a homophobic book like Dream won an Edgar in 1989. (This offended Otto so he apparently bounced me from doing an intro for Mysterious Press on gay crime writer Rufus King.)
Penzler's comment was actually a claim that men supposedly write better than women because men try to write literature, so it wasn't about homosexuality at all. Yet retrograde sexism and retrograde homophobia frequently go hand-in-hand. Though actually I said it was Nevins' bio that was homophobic, not the publisher of the book.
But what I was trying to get at and maybe not conveying in a one sentence comment, was that there must have been an obtuseness on the part of Otto and other people (like the Edgar Award committee) not to see the dreadful homophobia in the book, assuming they really read it. Or maybe they simply shared Nevins' attitudes. I don't know. I think people just easily bought into the "self-hating homosexual" cliche which is the keystone of Nevins' Woolrich thesis. This cliche was dutifully trotted out for decades by people writing about Woolrich and it still is even today, so it's been a hardy perennial.
Writer Barry Malzberg has said that Nevins regards homosexuality as a "pathological" condition. It does appear that way from his writing, because Nevins seems convinced that to be gay (a term he never uses) is to be self-hating. If you're interested in this subject read below the excerpt from my article. It still amazes me how the nasty anti-gay attitudes emanating from the book never drew any offended notice, with a few exceptions like Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, until my article appeared. Malzberg and Pronzini are straight guys and they definitely managed to notice it. Anyway, here's the article excerpt. Gird your loins and grab your wig for this look at homophobia in the Eighties AIDS era!
Self-hating, tearful Catholic homosexual and supportive friend in the original film version of The Boys in the Band (1970)
How is the self-loathing
homosexuality which Francis Nevins believes to have been the black wellspring
of Cornell Woolrich’s unique writing genius reflected in the author’s
voluminous crime fiction? Here are
examples from Dream of
what Nevins terms "homosexual symbolism" in Woolrich's work:
"I was carrying Death around in my mouth," the reporter tells us
near the end [of the story "Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair," where
a dentist fills cavities with cyanide], and if one is determined to find subtle
traces of Woolrich's homosexuality everywhere in his work, one might as well
begin here. (p. 129)
While struggling with Cook over a gun, the hobo is shot in the mouth (here
we go again, homosexual symbol seekers!) (p. 141)
....they arrange for a pickpocket accomplice to take a ride on the same
train that is bringing Bull to the state pen, sit in the seat behind the
mobster and quietly puncture Bull's rear end with a hypodermic full of germs
(homosexuality symbol hunters take notice!) (p. 157)
All these instances seem reductive to my mind--not to mention
remarkably puerile and in dubious taste. Since Woolrich was a gay man, so
the reasoning seems to run, inevitably any time in his tales when poison,
bullets or germs enter a man's mouth or buttocks it symbolizes homosexuality. In
this juvenile egg hunt for "homosexual symbols" Nevins focuses relentlessly
on sex acts. Is it Woolrich who associated gay sex with death or is it
Nevins who has imposed this meaning on Woolrich's texts? Dream appeared
in 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, something
which may have influenced Nevins' take on this matter. Yet unless he was endowed with second sight, like
his seer character in Night Has
a Thousand Eyes/"Speak
to Me of Death, Woolrich
could not have foreseen this calamity.
I have read my share of
Woolrich (granted, Nevins has read everything, as Dream makes abundantly clear)
and for my part I cannot say that in the author’s work I am strongly struck by
intimations of same-sex attraction on his part.
Woolrich often does write well from a woman’s viewpoint, but he writes
convincingly from a tough male viewpoint as well. Seemingly absent from Woolrich’s fiction is
the sustained interest in the male body which I have found in the work of gay
male vintage crime writers like Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb (aka Patrick
Quentin/Q. Patrick/Jonathan Stagge), Rufus King, Milton Propper and Todd
Downing.
I am powerfully
struck in Woolrich’s work by an aching depiction of loneliness, despair and
doom, yet, Nevins notwithstanding, this is not a state of mind which is
specific to gay men. Any person, whatever his or her sexual orientation, might
have these feelings and give expression to them in fiction.
Given
Nevins’ writing about Woolrich, it is not surprising to see that he authored an
1977 article about Milton Propper, identifying him as another “tragic”
homosexual, and that in a 2010 Mystery*File article he condemned Patricia
Highsmith along the same lines as Woolrich, whom he passingly denigrates in his
harshest terms yet: “If you think Cornell Woolrich was
something of a psychopath and a creep, you don’t know the meaning of those
words till you’ve encountered Highsmith.
Both, of course, were homosexual.
I gather from [Joan Schenkar’s biography] that Highsmith…was never
terribly comfortable with being a lesbian….Woolrich was perhaps the most deeply
closeted, self-hating homosexual male author that ever lived.”
If you are sensing an invidious theme
here, I would hazard to guess that you are right. Elsewhere in Dream Nevins refers passingly to “the special agonies of the
homosexual whose religious roots are Catholic” (Woolrich’s father had been a
nominal Catholic and Woolrich adopted the faith, at least nominally, near the
end of his life); and he speculates that Woolrich and Catholic film director
Alfred Hitchock, who adapted a Woolrich short story as his renowned flick Rear Window, shared the same pessimistic worldview--that the world was “a hideous and terrifying place”--on account of their “longing
for physical relationships which the obesity of the one man and the
homosexuality of the other seemed to put forever out of reach.” Evidently both stoutness and queerness constituted
crippling hurdles to human happiness in Nevins’ mind.
When gathering such black pearls of
wisdom about members of the queer community in my basket of literary boners, I
am frequently reminded of the morbid line from the pioneering if at times
problematic queer film The Boys in the
Band, which premiered in March 1970, just a year-and-a-half after Cornell
Woolrich’s death. “Show me a happy
homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse,” pronounces one of the film’s
characters. (Yes, this character is a
self-loathing, lapsed-Catholic gay man.)
In his writing about Woolrich and other crime writers whom he deems to
have been queer, Nevins seems to have drawn this dismal credo deep into his heart.
I love writing, in fact it's the only thing that has kept me going the last year. And DSP is interested in publishing a Wentworth book, so there's that. But after Otto Penzler's very deliberate slap in the face I'm asking myself, should I go on with any of this anymore? Doing that Rufus King intro meant so much me. It just gets hard to keep the will going anymore when you get treated like that. I'm told Otto felt insulted by my comment, but his statement was sexist and the book he published was homophobic. If I summon the will I will draw the relevant portions from my Cornell Woolrich article to show you.
Obviously the political thing would have been to have said nothing, which is why most people say nothing when it comes to Otto or any person in power who might be able to impact their career negatively. I thought he said a dumb thing, but it probably wasn't worth losing the Rufus King intro to say so. The thing is this never comes up with other publishers. They don't do or say things like Otto does. But I guess I just have should not have posted even a brief comment. You have to kiss up to the big shots, even when you think they said something stupid. Success in life is more politics than ability. But I know what the Nevns book is, even if Otto doesn't.
Certainly it's not just Otto who doesn't see it. People who accuse him of sexism and racism are mystified by the homophobia stuff. And, again, I wasn't calling Otto homophobic, though I notice he still seems to use the term "sexual preference." I think he just has, as I said, retrograde attitudes and an obtuseness. But the Woolrich book is riddled with antigay prejudice and what I think is an inaccurate, unsound and hatefully cruel and bullying attitude toward its pathetic yet also valiant subject. But I've said all this before and now I'm just being punished for it. A lot of people praised my Woolrich article, but where does it really get you? Which brings me back to my original question: Should I go on with all this? Is there any point to it anymore? I don't know.
I received a message today from one of Otto Penzler's employees, telling me that
Otto, in the midst of the pile-on last winter, went on Facebook to see what people were saying about him and was surprised to see you jumping in to criticize him and his publishing history....I think he was particularly hurt by your suggestion that he might be homophobic. As such, he has said he’s not interested in working with you going forward….
This all occurred during the dust-up (or "pile-on") over Otto speaking at the Boucheron earlier this year. Ironically I originally made my initial comment on mystery writer Lee Goldberg's post saying why I wanted to stay out of the whole fuss:
Been reading about the fuss with Otto Penzler at the Bouchercon. Looks like that will leave a lot of bad feelings all round. I guess the Edgars over their history have mostly undervalued the traditional mystery, but Otto has done a lot for it with his publishing ventures. I've gotten a few jobs, good paying ones from MP, which I have to say I appreciate. Honestly, I would do more for them if they asked me. His editor has been very nice to me. My book Murder in the Closetwas nominated for an Edgar, the first queer nonfiction study so nominated I think. No Anthony nomination, lol. So, really, I feel I will just stay out of this one.
I thought that actually was pretty measured. Honestly, the Bouchercon has never done anything for me. But then I reacted to a quote from Otto that Lee Goldberg included in a blog piece criticizing Otto. Here's my "homophobia" comment from back in February:
"Men take [writing] more seriously as art. Men labor over a book to make it literature." Eek. I remember this but didn't remember it was that blatant. It's these sorts of attitudes that help explain how the homophobic First You Dream, Then You Die won an Edgar.
That's it, that evidently is what led to my proscription by Mysterious Press. But I stand by what I wrote.
I did not say Otto was homophobic. I was even told, in the year of our Lord 2024, that Otto has "gay friends." (Yes that old chestnut.) Good for Otto!
Myself I think he is more criticism-phobic, but I'm in no position to judge him personally on this matter. However, I did suggest that he had been obtuse to the homophobia in the Francis Nevins Cornell Woolrich bio he published. I think quite obviously plenty of people were over the years. No one publicly commented about the vile antigay subject matter matter in this book for decades until I did. I go into detail about the homophobia of the Nevins bio here. Also myriad other problems with it.
Otto strikes me as rather sensitive for someone who seems to have something of a history of going out of his way to say insensitive things about others. (There is plenty more that could be quoted.) But his proscription of me illustrates Lee Goldberg's point about his "fellow mystery writers, who are so afraid of speaking out against Otto Penzler...." (See linked article.) They appear to have reason to feel that way. Otto must have gone through scores of posts on Lee Goldberg's FB page looking for anything in any way deemable of being criticism of himself.
The last few years I wrote intros for reprints of Roger Scarlett, Q. Patrick and John Rhode for Mysterious Press. Otto himself praised my Scarlett intro to me (see below). After that I corresponded only with his employee, but his employee, someone I always enjoyed working with, praised my work too.
But now I have been proscribed because of an honest criticism I made of a needlessly offensive and to be frank rather dumb comment Otto made. You should have read what other people were saying. At least I acknowledged the good things Otto had done for the genre. If I criticized his publishing history it was for the one homophobic book. I'll post more on that book later.
I have done a huge amount of work on queer mystery writer Rufus King and know even more that I haven't written about concerning him. No one, but no one, knows this author like I do. But I wasn't asked to write the intro to the Murder by the Clock reprint, it now appears to me, because I offended the Great Man. And it illustrates precisely the problem that Lee was writing about. If I hadn't posted an honest thought on Otto's silly statement and the homophobia in the Woolrich bio I might have gotten to write about Rufus King.
I said what I honestly thought about a current issue in the mystery world; and if I'm to be punished by the power-that-be for that, that's how it goes I guess. I am but a poor scholar, not a rich suck-up.
If, like the Elon Musk of the mystery world, Otto out of wounded vanity thinks it demonstrates his commitment to queer history to kick to the curb the queer guy who has devoted much of his life to these projects so be it.
It's a challenging struggle doing my work the last year with all its adverse circumstances, but I will keep at it as best I can. Once Otto wrote me of my work: "You have done a masterful research job on an author (s) that have always seemed somewhat remote and unknown. Thank you for taking so much time and care with this amazing introduction."
That was nice. Moods change though.
After Otto sent these words I just worked with his employee, but, still, it was nice to be appreciated for a time. I guess he felt I owed him my silence. Whatever the case with that, I don't now.
The cover art is out for the first five Sara Woods detective novel reissues, nos. 1 through 5 of Woods' 48 mysteries about barrister-sleuth Antony Maitland. These were originally published in the United Kingdom between 1962 and 1964. Anglo-Canadian author Sara Woods was a major figure in what I call the Silver Age of detective fiction, around 1940 to 1980, by the end of which the major figures of the Golden Age had passed away.
Among women mystery writers, inevitably called Crime Queens, Dorothy L. Sayers had died in 1957 and Josephine Tey five years earlier; yet Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell and Margery Allingham were still active in the Sixties--though Allingham, actually the youngest of the lot, would pass away in 1966. Among others who might be added to their number, Moray Dalton retired in 1951 and ECR Lorac was retired by death in 1958.
That great blood-soaked blanket Julian Symons by this time had begun prophesying the imminent end of the "detective story" (to be replaced by the crime novel, don't you know), but though he kept this theme going up until his death in 1994, the detective story to the contrary never really died. Among British women mystery writers, new blood was transfused into the crime corpus with the debuts of such durable and prolific Silver Age crime queens as Patricia Moyes (1959), PD James and Sara Woods (both 1962), Ruth Rendell (1964), Catherine Aird (1966), Anne Morice and Margaret Yorke (both 1970). A very notable American detective writer who was very popular in England might be added as well: Emma Lathen (1964). All of these women got in the murder game early enough, even Morice and Yorke, to have their books reviewed in his crime column by Golden Age stalwart Anthony Berkeley Cox, aka Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles.
Both Woods and Morice died in the 1980s while Moyes retired from writing in 1993 and died in 2000. PD James died almost a full decade ago, after having published her last detective novel, the Jane Austen mashup Death Comes to Pemberley, in 2011. Ruth Rendell published The Girl Next Door in 2014 and died the next year, with one further mystery posthumously published. Amazingly Catherine Aird, six months older than my late father, at age 93 published, after a lapse of four years, a series detective novel in 2023, the year he died. That is 57 years after her first one!
Both Sara Woods and Anne Morice fell out-of-print after their deaths (as did Patricia Moyes), but they have since been picked up by Dean Street Press, Morice a few years ago, Woods this year. Woods' 48 series mysteries, as I discussed in an earlier blog post, concern the criminal investigations and courtroom maneuvers of barrister Anthony Maitland and his uncle Sir Nicholas Maitland. (Anthony's wife Jenny also appears in the all books.) In his day reviewers sometimes dubbed Anthony the Perry Mason of English mystery. Woods was a particular favorite of the late, great Hannibal Lecter--erm, no actually Franco-American scholar and public intellectual Jacques Barzun, who was a staunch reader and eloquent defender of classic detective fiction.
Over the last decade or so more and more oop Golden and Silver Age detective writers, female and male, have come back into print, and I am pleased to see Sara Woods reentering the lists. The Dean Street Press editions show a bewigged barrister, our friend Anthony--a tall, dark man with a thin, intelligent face--as the centerpiece on variously colored backgrounds:
Bloody Instructions: Red (blood)
Malice Domestic: Green (envy/jealousy)
The Third Encounter: Black/Grey (nazis)
Error of the Moon: Blue (luna)
Trusted like the Fox: Orange (vulpine)
This was fun, but I don't know that symbolic colors can be kept up over the course of 48 books; we shall see. At the rate of five a year it would actually take nine more years to republish all of her books (2033!); maybe it can be amped up to ten annually. Again, we shall see. Woods for Whitsun? Not this year! But this deadly lot should be here by Christmas, just like the Christies used to be.
The man didn't seem to have any hair or any jaw; he was just a shirt front and a cloak and a greyish blur that had no form or feature. It was rather beastly.
Grey Mask (1928), by Patricia Wentworth
Although in the Forties and Fifties she became renowned in the mystery writing world for her "cozy" Miss Silver detective novels, featuring perpetually knitting spinster and professional sleuth Miss Maud Silver, for much of her crime writing career, which extends back over a century to 1923, English author Patricia Wentworth was best known as a woman competing in the man's field of mystery thrillers, or shockers as they sometimes were called.
Most of the big names in the thriller were men--Edgar Wallace, "Sapper," John Buchan, Sax Rohmer, Sidney Horler, Nigel Morland, Francis Beeding and many others--though there were some exceptions, most notably Ethel Lina White, Patricia Wentworth, Margery Allingham (who started off writing colorful, oddball thrillers under her own name in the late Twenties and early Thirties and also produced a trio of them in the Thirties under the pen name Maxwell March) and the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie.
Ethel Lina White was sui generis, anticipating modern suspense with her tales of insidious psychological unease, several of which were adapted as suspense films and television episodes (most famously The Wheel Spins as Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes). If White resembled anyone it was more "serious" author Daphne du Maurier, a writer who broke into bestselling mainstream fiction, though some her most famous fiction included strong elements of crime, mystery, horror.
Agatha Christie adhered much more to traditional formula with her thrillers, though she memorably introduced a pair of bright young investigators, Tommy and Tuppence, sounding a feminist note with the insatiably inquisitive Tuppence being the one who usually seizes the investigative initiative in their tales. However, with the 1930s Christie mostly stopped writing thrillers in favor of her classic detective novels, which then mostly featured that inimitable not-Frenchman Hercule Poirot. Similarly Margery Allingham shifted mostly into detective novels in the Thirties, when she helped craft what has been termed the detective novel of manners, a fusion of the mystery and straight novel--though she returned some to thrillers later in life.
Patricia Wentworth, on the other hand, consistently wrote mostly thrillers for two decades, until she too shifted mostly into her Miss Silver detective fiction in 1943 (and entirely after 1945). Even before that she had started writing some mysteries featuring series police characters, Ernest Lamb and Frank Abbott (who would also appear in the Miss Silver series), beginning with The Blind Side in 1939. One of the author's brothers-in-law from her second marriage was Commissioner of the City of London Police, so, belying her modern-day "cozy" reputation, Wentworth was not entirely unconversant with police procedure.
For most of the 1920s and 1930s, however, Wentworth wrote classic thrillers, sometimes with espionage elements (there are some secret service type tales), but more often outre stories of gangs and diabolical criminal masterminds in the classic style of Edgar Wallace and company. Where Wentworth differs from the fellas is placing heavy emphasis in her tales (she did this in the Miss Silver detective novels too) on romantic interplay between her male and female characters, or what was sometimes in that day derisively termed "love interest."
Indeed, one might see the Wentworth tales, to borrow and modify a phrase from another woman vintage mystery writer, as love stories with mysterious interruptions. These tales arguably owe as great a debt (if not greater) to Charles Dickens and the great Victorian sensation novelists like Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Braddon as they do to Edgar Wallace and his ilk.
Some orthodox detective writers, like S. S. Van Dine, sternly pronounced that this "love interest" had no place in the ratiocinative detective novel and they created sexless, or let us say celibate, detectives. If there was love interest at all it was confined, often rather perfunctorily, to subsidiary characters.
Love is a postulate, observed T. S. Eliot of Freeman Wills Crofts' dry timetable mysteries in the 1920s. Much to the contrary, in her non-series thrillers Wentworth's love-smitten characters are the lead characters. Even in the series books the non-series characters' love relationships play a big role. The author attempts to give us, in short, an emotional interest in the proceedings (who will fall end up with whom) in addition to a cerebral one (whodunit).
Wentworth's feminized thrillers ironically made a bigger hit, as far as I have been able to determine, in the United States, known between the world wars as the land of corrupt machine politics, murderously out-of-control gangsters and virtually unlimited police brutality (the "third degree"). Here in the U. S. violent, male-oriented pulp fiction had been popularized. But there was, after all, a huge, largely female reading audience that was not being serviced by pulp crime writers. This was the audience that made such female American mystery writers as Mary Roberts Rinehart. Mignon Eberhart and Leslie Ford tremendously popular. This sort of audience--and it was not all women--also loved Wentworth thrillers.
This 1993 American pb ed does better with the mask then some, but doesn't get it exactly right either
A contemporary American reviewer, California poet Bert Cooksley, wrote about the gendered audience for mystery fiction in the Twenties, as he perceived it, praising Wentworth for drawing women readers to the genre through her commitment to love interest and her downplaying of violence.
His observations appeared in 1929 in a review of the author's thriller Grey Mask, about a month after the publication of Dashiell Hammett's epochal, blood-soaked debut crime novel, Red Harvest, a book which was violent, cynical and loveless even by today's standards.
She has written a dandy mystery book for that great army of feminine readers who like mystery but find the present-day blood-and-thunder gangster fiction pretty much beyond their ken," Cooksley avowed of Wentworth.
"It's not that [the woman mystery reader] is afraid of a little blood, a bit of fighting, a parcel of sinister intrigue. But it's the fact that so many thrillers leave out the feminine element. They are concerned mainly with sapattering up the hero, killing the villain, and incidentally polishing off the book with two or three pages of what they believe passes for a romantic conclusion. Miss Wentworth has gone about it in a different way.
Cooksley declared that in Grey Mask "romantic appeal is sustained from beginning to end." So just how does Wentworth go about it? Well, let's talk about the book.
Grey Mask opens with handsome Charles Moray returning to his ancestral London home after four years of world exploring. Four years ago he was jilted on his wedding day--is there any other way to jilt a man?--by his fiancée, Margaret Langton; and, being stinking rich, he did what any other man worth his salt and social class would do: he became a world explorer. I miss those days when if you were rich and idle enough you could become a world explorer, snap, just like that. Nowadays all the idle rich do, at least in the United States, is make vanity runs for president and weirdly cart dead bear cubs around in SUVs.
After his father dies Charles returns to England and unexpectedly turns up, as mentioned above, at his ancestral (four generations) London mansion. There he overhears a meeting of a gang of crooks headed by one of those theatrical criminal masterminds prevalent in fiction of that day--you know, the type that always has to dress up in a disguise and give himself some fancy appellation. This one calls himself Grey Mask, because, well, he wears a grey-colored mask made of rubber over his head. No, it's not a kinky sex club!
We can laugh but we should recall that in the United States the Ku Klux Klan had reconstituted itself in the Twenties. They were led by a Grand Wizard and they dressed up in white robes and hoods, so the get-up of Grey Mask was not actually as outlandish as it seems today. In fact some of the portrayals of Grey Mask from the day make "him" look like a Klansman.
Charles is all set to turn these felonious fiends--who it's clear are planning to defraud an heiress of her estate, and perhaps even bump her off--over to the police, when he realizes that among their number is none other than his ex-fiancée, Margaret! What's a gentleman to do?
Clearly it wouldn't be the thing at all to snitch on Margaret, even though she did jilt him in the most hurtful way imaginable, without providing him with any explanation. (A woman's prerogative!)
So Charles decides to play a lone hand. His Wodehousian man-about-town pal, the native Scot Archie Millar, advises him to seek the services of a private detective named Miss Maud Silver:
"Get a trained sleuth....I can put you on to one if you like."
"A good man?"
"A sleuthess," said Archie impressively. "A perfect wonder--has old Sherlock boiled."
Charles frowned.
"A woman?"
"Well, a sleuthess." She's not exactly a bit of fluff, you know."
"What's her name?"
"Maud Silver."
"Mrs. or Miss?"
"My dear old bean!"
"Well-which is she?"
"Single as a Michaelmas daisy," said Archie.
"But who is she? And why drag in a sleuthess when there are lots of perfectly good sleuths?"
"Well," said Archie. "I put my money on Maud. I only saw her once and she didn't make my heart beat any faster."
So goes our introduction to the first, along with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, of the elderly spinster sleuths whom we still read about today, as far as I'm aware. Grey Mask was serialized over the summer of 1928 before appearing in novel form and Miss Marple first appeared in a short story published in England in December 1927, but we don't know for certain when Grey Mask was actually written, whether in late '27 or early '28.
Probably the close appearance of these spinster lady sleuths was serendipitous. For that matter, Dorothy L. Sayers introduced her delightful minor "sleuthess" spinster character Miss Climpson in her Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel Unnatural Death in 1927.
Critics have debated the significance of these spinster sleuths, with some complaining of their desexualization, though this was the fashion for many detectives, male or female, at the time. (Sherlock Holmes "Woman" Irene Adler was a Platonic ideal.) But it is notable that Miss Silver is a professional manhunter from the get-go, unlike Miss Marple and Miss Climpson, and her competence in this capacity, despite Charles' initial expressed skepticism, is never mocked or even questioned.
When she is introduced she is described in this unprepossessing fashion: "She was a little person with no features, no complexion, and a great deal of tidy, mouse-coloured hair, done in a large bun at the back of head." She quotes Tennyson and knits continuously, "holding the needles in the German way."
Once Miss Silver is on the case, she works effectively behind the scenes, but we don't see that much of her on this occasion. Indeed, she's in the novel so little that she only meaningfully coughs in that way she has thirteen times. Most reviews did not even mention her, though one declared of the book's "little woman detective": "That is a novelty!"
Personally I find The Sheik more frightening than Grey Mask.
Most of the novel is given over to the doings of Charles and Archie and Margaret and the imperiled heiress, who turns out to be a lovely and lovable nitwit, eighteen-year-old schoolgirl, Margot Standing. Some reviewers adored Margot, while others hated her. I think that she, along with Miss Silver, is the most unique feature of the book. Wentworth is fun here portraying the mindset of the more sheltered and shallow sort of teenage girl.
The brightest (i.e., funniest) sections of Grey Mask are Margot's letters to a former schoolgirl friend back in Switzerland, in which she naively details events in her imperiled life. For the most part she is oblivious of the dangers around her, being interested mostly in clothes and the question of whether Charles or Archie would make a better boyfriend. Charles glares a lot, she reflects, but he would look frightfully fetching in sheik drag. (She's a big film fan.)
Wentworth actually evinces quite an abundance of humor here. In one of the novel's striking coincidences, Margaret runs into one of her late mother's childhood friends, whom she hasn't seen in nearly two decades, just when this woman can impart some important information pertinent to the heiress case. Said old friend is named "Lesbia Ravenna." There's a name you don't encounter every day!
Now the name Lesbia is derived, we're told, from an adulterous heterosexual woman in ancient Rome, but the name does remind one of the word "lesbian" and the isle of Lesbos, whence came ostensibly queer poetess Sappho, along the adjective Sapphic. It's rather a "loaded" name as it were.
In the book Lesbia wants to have a nice, intimate lunch with Margaret, but since Margaret after her breakup with Charles had to become a working girl--being genteel she models hats in a millinery, don't you know--Lesbia has to square things with the manageress. No problem though! Lesbia comes right back, telling Margaret:
"I've made love to her [the manageress] very successfully. I told her it was a very romantic meeting [between Lesbia and Margaret] and she says you may take an extra half-hour. So we can have a real, good talk. We'll come along to my hotel."
How can this sudden outburst of, erm, lesbian innuendo be a coincidence? Or maybe I just have a smutty mind?
Grey Mask reminded me a lot of Agatha Christie's criminal gang novel from the next year, The Seven Dials Mystery. The scene where Lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent spies on a meeting of the Seven Dials gang, headed by the mysterious, elusive mastermind No. 7, is very similar to the meeting where Charles covertly observes Grey Mask and his wicked gang. Possibly there was an influence, but there were a lot of thrillers about criminal gangs in those days, to be sure.
Both novels have bright humor, though Christie's book is more cleverly plotted. As far as the mystery plot goes Grey Mask is pretty standard issue. Reviews of the novel, which were mostly highly laudatory, kept pronouncing that that the revelation of Grey Mask's identity was a real shockerooni, but, honestly, I suspected this person nearly immediately. I guess we really have become more sophisticated today, at least in this regard.
Still, the book makes for an enjoyable light read, if ultimately it its significance lies mostly in introducing Miss Silver to the world. The sleuthess would not make a second appearance for another nine years, in a much less outre book.
