A Runic MacGuffin: Night of the Demon (1957) (film)

John Hobart (Dana Andrews) at Stonehenge investigates the clue of the parchment runes.
Or as The Rocky Horror Show irreverently put it in 1975:
"Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes and passing them used lots of skills."

Happy Halloween!  For this friday fright night I thought we might take a look at one of my favorite vintage horror films, Night of the Demon (1957), indeed one of my very all-time faves, which I first watched about 25 years ago, long after I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  The film is also by way of being something of a mystery.

What did Rand Hobart see on the night of the murder,
the night of the demon?

The atomic Fifties was the great decade of sci-fi radioactive monster movies, like the landmark Japanese film Godzilla (1954), about a great mutated dino from the vasty deep who wrathfully rises from the waters to devour Tokyo. There were plenteous American horror stories too, like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) (another prehistoric beast strikes, this time in America) and It Came from Beneath the Sea (giant octopus tangles with the Golden Gate Bridge), both with special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. So, some filmmakers thought, how about a fire demon?  

Sure, this supernatural creature may have been spawned by the Prince of Darkness rather than Oppenheimer and his science boys, but wouldn't a monster from the literal Hell be damn scary too?  And indeed it was, when the film first showed up back in 1957, under British auspices, under the title Night of the Demon.  (In the US in 1958, where it had some minutes shorn, it was known, rather more pulpishly, as Curse of the Demon).  

For inspiration, the filmmakers drew not upon some sci-fi author but rather a proper Edwardian don and amateur ghost story writer, one Montague Rhodes James, aka M. R. James, to my mind the greatest ghostly yarn spinner of them all.  His original book of horror tales, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) is, I think, the greatest such collection extant.  

Night of the Demon actually is based on a later James short story, "Casting the Runes," which is drawn from a follow-up volume, predictably titled More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.  (1911)  Give the people what they want, what?  I have reviewed that volume here. 

On rereading it a few years ago, I realized that, as with the case of Robert Bloch's Psycho, I liked the film better than the source, where the action seems to me a bit attenuated, though there are some brilliant bits and the overall conception too is brilliant--demonically brilliant.

MR James

I have a great yen for classic horror films and my favorites in this field--Night of the Demon, Night of the Living Dead, Psycho, The Birds, The Spiral Staircase, The Uninvited, The Innocents, The Haunting, The Old Dark House, Frankenstein, to cite a few--are some of my all-time favorite films in general.  I think Night of the Demon generally does not get quite the credit it deserves, though I believe it is more appreciated as a notable film today than it was at the time of its release.  

In your typical Fifties monster film, the slay's the thing, as it were.  It's all about the monster sowing vast quantities of creative destruction and you just hope that the acting and dialogue will be barely adequate along the way.  

However, Night of the Demon, in essence is, really, a Hitchcockian thriller, its "MacGuffin"--Hitchcock's invented word for the object that propels the plot--a piece of parchment inscribed with cryptic ancient runes.  It's a mashup of a monster movie with a suspense thriller, with quite a bit of noir thrown into the picture as well.  And the acting quite lives up to the story.  Director Martin Scorsese has placed Demon on his list of the Eleven Scariest Films of all time.  Good for him!  See also this appreciation by British Film Institute curator Vic Pratt.

a rather noirish shot from Night of the Demon, when a weary and deflated
Professor Holden (Dana Andrews) and his loyal semi-love interest Joanna Harrington
futilely try to persuade local police that Holden's life is being menaced
by a satanic warlock who employs sorcery to kill.

One of the major driving forces behind the film, appropriately enough, was friend of Hitch Charles Bennett, who between 1929 and 1942 worked on the scripts of six of the director's films: Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Young and Innocent and Foreign Correspondent, receiving his sole Oscar nomination for the script of the last of these films.  

not an obscene phone call but certainly a frightening one
Gladys Cooper in "Night Call"
wherein a bedridden old woman is terrorized
by a late night caller from beyond the grave

Demon was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who is best known, I suppose, for the trifecta of "literate" horror films he did with famed Forties horror film producer Val Lewton--Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man--though Tourneur also directed the very well-regarded noir flick Out of the Past and one of the classic Twilight Zone television episodes, the eerie and sad "Night Call," which starred elderly English actress Gladys Cooper, a three-time Oscar nominee whose first American film was Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, where she played the sister of Laurence Olivier's handsome Gothic brooder Maxim de Winter, who may or may not have slain the first Mrs. de Winter.

Is this a demonic manifestation or a carnival stunt?

Though Tourneur like Bennett himself had qualms about the film as it transpired, Demon actually is my favorite among the films of the director's that I have seen, including Out of the Past.  Known for his economy with explicit fright effects (he was a master of low-budget ambiguous scares), Tourneur apparently didn't want actually to show the demon explicitly in the film, where it appears not once but twice, at the beginning and at the end.  

Both Tourneur and Bennett were highly critical of the producer Hal E. Chester's monkeying around with the film. Chester brought in a blacklisted American screenwriter, Cy Endfield, to pepper up the script, which he deemed too tame and British.  Bennett later said that if Chester "walked up my driveway right now, I'd shoot him dead."  But there's obviously a great deal of Bennett's handwork left in the script.  

modern film poster which refrains from
showing the demon

Among fans of Demon, the matter of the monster's visibility has become a matter of debate: should the demon have actually appeared directly in the film; and, if so, was two times one time too many?  A contingent condemns the first of the demon's appearances as gratuitous, and I can understand the criticism, though ultimately I don't share it.

First, a little about the plot of the film.  It opens with a very frightened man, an English academic named Harrington (Maurice Denham), driving alone at night down a country road to the stately Georgian mansion of satanically goateed "cult leader" Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis).  

Upon meeting Karswell, Harrington, clearly in a state of mounting hysterical fear, begs the cultist to "call it off" and promises that he in turn will halt the impending investigation of Karswell's cultish activities which he has organized.  Karswell tells the frightened man that he will do what he can for him, but he clearly is far more interested in getting Harrington the hell out of his house before ten o'clock chimes on his antique mantel clock.  Karswell is fearful too, but of what?

A reassured Harrington departs Karswell's mansion but upon returning to his own house sees to his horror a ghastly flaming demon materialize out of the darkness and pursue him.  In his panicked flight he electrocutes himself on a fallen telephone wire; and then the spectral beast falls viciously upon him, rending his dead body in its claws.  The police, we learn, declare that Harrington's death was an unfortunate accident and that his body was sadly mangled by "some kind of animal."

Harrington entreats Karswell to "call it off"

Next Professor John Holden, an American psychiatrist, shows up in England to attend the conference Harrington had organized.  He is a confirmed skeptic of the supernatural who vows to carry on Harrington's investigation of Karswell.  Well, the satanist isn't going to take that lying down!  He has prepared another runic parchment, which he surreptitiously passes on to Holden at the British Museum.  Now the demon is scheduled to make a repeat performance, this time for Holden's benefit (?).  Can Holden, unlike Harrington, somehow evade his diabolic fate?

A very meek and mild Karswell "accidentally" encounters John Holden
in the library at the British Museum

Holden watches a triumphant Karswell distortedly depart

The debate over the first appearance of the demon is a tactical one over circuitousness versus directness in horror films.  Critics of the demon's first appearance say the viewer should be left in agonizing doubt whether there really is a demon at all, allowing them to think that Harrington might have been a hysteric and Karswell a faker.  

I get the point about the uses of ambiguity, but I tend to agree that knowing that there really is a demon, and really quite a horrible one at that, greatly raises the dramatic stakes throughout the film.  Supposedly Tourneur didn't direct either of the demon's scenes at the beginning and the end of the film, as they were forced on him by Hal E. Chester; but fortunately they are superbly done, like the rest of the film, if less subtly.  

Admittedly Tourneur was a master of subtlety and of economical scares.  I rewatched Cat People last night and still loved the film, which really has only three, highly ambiguous and brief, fright scenes.  Most of the film could be simply a relationship "chick flick" about a man, his beautiful troubled wife, the man's gal pal who comes between them and the Lothario psychiatrist who is called in to "help" the wife.  

Cat People premier, 1942
So the story goes, audiences laughingly "meowed" during the credits
but soon realized how serious the film actually was

Tourneur relies on strong acting--French actress Simone Simon as the wife, Irina, and British actor Tom Conway, George Sanders' half-brother, as the psychiatrist, Dr. Judd, are especially fine--and superb cinematography and editing to propel the story and create tension.  The actual scares are few, though when they come they are impressive.  (The indoor swimming pool scene with Jane Randolph's terrified Alice Moore is especially famous; I think that the indoor swimming pool scene in the horror film It Follows must surely be an homage.)  

What is that shadow stalking me?
the swimming pool scene from Cat People

Irina is a Serbian native who thinks she is a "cat person," a descendant of wicked Serbian satanists who transformed into fierce cat creatures and were put to flight long ago by "King John."  (Is this Jovan Vladimir?  I'm not up on Serbian history before 1914.)  Alice and Irina's amiable husband Oliver (Kent Reed) thinks sadly that Irina is losing her mind.  Just what the truth is long left in doubt.

While Tourneur may have wanted to use the same approach for Night of the Demon, Fifties film audiences expected more obvious bumps in the night for their bucks.  (Demon was released the same year as Hammer Film's big, blatant color horror hit Curse of Frankenstein.)  And Night of the Demon indeed is an exciting roller coaster thrill ride.  What Demon really reminds me of is an Alfred Hitchcock film, like one of the movies Charles Bennett scripted for Hitch in the olden days, like The 39 Steps, Young and Innocent or Foreign Correspondent.  

Dana Andrews' John Holden and Irish actress Peggy Cummins' Joanna Harrington, niece of the dead man, figure as the boy-girl romantic couple you will find in many a Hitch thriller, though romance is rather downplayed this time around, perhaps on account of the age difference between the two players.  Andrews was 48 at filming and looked a decade older, while Cummins, who co-starred in the noir cult classic Gun Crazy seven years earlier, was 31.  Cummins later in life said she felt she had only three really great moments in films, presumably Gun Crazy, Night of the Demon and, I'm assuming, the fine Victorian crime suspense drama Moss Rose (1947)--all "genre" you will notice!  

Strangers on a Plane: Joanna (Peggy Cummins) and John (Dana Andrews) meet, disagreeably.
Her writing with the light on is keeping him awake and he's very grumpy about it. 
Don't worry, they make up.

Joanna fends off the horny man to talk about the horned demon.

Andrews gamely and arguably pestily (it's the 1950s) tries to out some moves on Cummins, but Cummins, whose character is unusually strong-willed for a female horror leading lady of the time, is mostly not having any such nonsense.  But still in classic fashion the pair have a "meet cute" bickering scene on the plane coincidentally taking them both across the Atlantic to England; it could be a scene not only from a Hitchcock film but a John Dickson Carr novel.   They continue to bicker, off and on, throughout most of the film.  For what it's worth Joanna is completely right about everything!

Once Karswell passes the parchment to Holden to call the demon down upon his enemy, the game, as someone once said, is afoot; and the pace doesn't let up.  Tension is maintained throughout the film, which is punctuated by a series of virtuose set pieces.  (In this article I will try to do some justice to them with some screenshots I took.)

haunted at the hotel: Dr. Holden starts hearing and seeing things at London's Savoy Hotel

inspiration for The Shining?

When John and Joanna visit Karswell at his rural Warwickshire mansion (the real life Brocket Hall), the satanist is giving a Halloween Party for the local children.  I always wondered a little about this.  We know that news of Professor Harrington's investigation into the Karswell "cult" has been getting into the newspapers; would local parents be all that crazy about having their children entertained by a Satanist?  I guess we are the assume that the stories have been quite vague so far about Karswell's actual activities.  

Anyway, when John and Joanna espy Karswell, he is a dressed as a clown (another possible red flag, in light of the tendencies of serial killer John Wayne Gacy), pulling "magic puppies" out of his top hat to the delighted squeals of the young ones.  John decides that Karswell is really just a kindly old man at heart, albeit a con man and grifter of the gullible, but Joanna believes there is real danger.  (The film would have us believe that Andrews is quite a bit younger than Karswell, though in fact Andrews was the elder by four years.)  

The childrens' party possibly owes its inception to the magic lantern show which Karswell gives for adolescents in the James short story, but where that is genuinely diabolical and terrifying--it's clear that story Karswell is an utter sadist--film Karswell seems genuinely to like children. In an amusing bit Karswell's kindly but someone overbearing mother, with whom he lives, tells Joanna that her boy loves children and should be married but he's just so fussy.  Then she recalls that Joanna is not married either.  

I should say a few words about Karswell's depiction in the film and Niall MacGinnis' inhabitation of him.  Love both!  MacGinnes' Karswell totally dominates the film (with the exception of the demon's appearances).  Alternately menacing, charming, sulking, chiding he's fascinating to watch.  And underneath it all he himself seems is terrified of the unearthly forces he has invoked.  MacGinnes' performance is a joy to watch and in modern times, with a big budget behind the film, it might have snagged him an Oscar nomination.  (On the other hand Nicol Williamson's enchanting performance as Merlin in Excalibur didn't get nominated either--so much for wizards!)  

Athene Seyler as Mrs. Karswell is marvelous as well.  It's a good role for her to have worked with.  Initially Mrs. Karswell seems simply the sort of comic relief matron beloved of Thirties films (including Hitchcock's own), but you gradually realize that there's much more to this woman than simply being a doting, indulgent mama.  She really doesn't like what Karswell is doing and occasionally allows it to show for all her self-effacement.  "Have I done something wrong?" she asks her pettish son at one point, clearly more out of exasperation than guilt.  It's a wonderful passive-aggressive moment.  

Karswell may be a satanist but he does indeed seem genuinely to like children and he is kind to his mother, a dotty enthusiast of spiritualism but clearly no hellish fellow traveler in the depths with her son.  A "confirmed bachelor" (possibly gay; see his comments on the children's snakes and ladder game), Karswell seems to anticipate modern kooky basement-dwelling incel influencers, only they derive their power not from Satan, but, worse yet, social media.  

Karswell even talks of the money he gets from his "followers" that has made his and his mother's comfortable life possible.  He can't have meddlers like Harrington and Holden threatening all that, he tells his mother; but, it's even worse than that: if it's not Holden's life that is taken it will be his.

While talking with John at the party, Karswell, frustrated with John's obstinate American skepticism, casually conjures a cyclone (wind storm) to demonstrate his powers to his nemesis, but that simply isn't good enough to do the job with know-all John. In doing so Karswell endangers the children, who are sent scattering across the lawn like bits of wrapping paper with their adult chaperones, in a scene reminiscent of the first bird attack on the schoolchildren in Hitchcock's The Birds, which came six years after this film.  (I admit I'm not the first person to make this observation by any means.)  

Finally Karswell bluntly tells John that he will die on the appointed date unless he drops his investigation.  Yet John still scoffs.

The bulk of the rest of the film is devoted to John gradually realizing, finally, that the danger is real, that there is indeed a hellish supernatural menace at work to bring about his demise.  Gradually the demon becomes more and more manifest on earth.  The climax comes aboard a train--trains are so important in Hitchcock films--with John and Karswell essentially playing a sort of frantic game of keep away with the parchment (except there is no one who actually wants to get it).  As for the parchment, it actively attempts to destroy itself, so that the demon can never be averted.  

One man's life depends on who wins this game.  

Along the way there are some smashing set pieces, which were Tourneur's great wont.  There's the seance with medium Mr. Meeks (Reginald Beckwith), for example.  Mrs. Karswell persuades John and Joanna to attend the proceeding, which she hopes will convince the American that the danger to him posed by her son is very real indeed.  

This proceeding quickly goes from quite comical--Mrs. Meeks (Rosamund Greenwood) and Mrs. Karswell warble the tune "Cherry Ripe" because the spirits do like music so, don't you know--to rather horrible as Mr. Meeks becomes inhabited by the spirit of the late Professor Harrington and begins shrieking in horror that the demon is up there, in the trees.  John angrily switches on the lights, bringing Meek out the trance gasping in pain (to the great chagrin of his doting wife), and marches out of the Meeks' home, convinced that this is all just a cleverly calculated con.  

This is a scene straight out of a Hitchcock film, with the kind of colorful performances from minor players that really enhance the story.  After spending only six or seven or so minutes with this couple, the Meeks, I was utterly delighted with them and wanted to see a whole film about them as well.  I recall Beckwith playing a nudist in the droll Pink Panther farce A Shot in the Dark, so obviously he had an affinity for eccentric characters; but Greenwood as his wife is great too, in a part of few words.  

Then there's John's tense and explosive scientific hypnosis session with rustic farmer Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), an accused murderer in a catatonic state and a member of the Karswell cult.  Also involved with this session is Professor O'Brien (Liam Redmond), a genial Irish Catholic professor rather less skeptical than Holden.  Both Wilde and Redmond (the latter of whom appears periodically throughout the film) bring terrific conviction to this scene (see pic near top).  

Wilde, who appears for only about five minutes, during that time is so good he does about as much to sell to the viewer the reality of that damn demon as the demon itself does.  Even John gets persuaded.  It's a scene which would have graced any noir film.  (And here let me add for Andrews' detractors that I very much enjoy having one of the great Forties/Fifties noir actors in this film.)

I exclude from this article pics of the demon itself in the hope that it will be a surprise for people who are lucky enough to watch the film for the first time.  (Since the demon was pictured in all the film's promotional material, it's probably a fat chance, however.)  

Personally I love its appearances and find both of them quite terrifying, though the demon is only a model (and at one point a man in a suit I suppose), rather than a computer simulation.  But then I find the giant ape in the original King Kong awesome too.  You decide for yourself!  

Holden finds himself but an incidental fragment in a fearfully malevolent world.

Setting that matter to one side, however, I still think Demon is a great film.  I've heard people say that The Spiral Staircase is the best film Hitchcock never made, but I can't help thinking that had Hitch made a supernatural monster film, it would have been a lot like Night of the Demon.

Below: Julie Andrews sings "Cherry Ripe" in Victor/Victoria (1982).

Mothers Are Doing It for Themselves: Psycho (1959), by Robert Bloch

Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed.

--Psycho (1959), Robert Bloch

NOTE: Spoilers to Psycho, both novel and film, if, improbably, you have neither read nor watched.

The short novel Psycho, author Robert Bloch's sixth published novel, first appeared 66 years ago in 1959.  It made a decided hit with impressed newspaper critics, who applauded the book as a nail-biting pageturner not to be read while sitting alone in the house in the dark of the night.  One of the most interesting reviews of the book came from author August Derleth, a noted horror and mystery writer himself, in the pages of Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times, where he was the lead book reviewer.  

Of course Derleth loved it.  Psycho, which was published by Simon & Schuster's Inner Sanctum mystery imprint, "ranks well above the average whodunit or suspense novel," Derleth pronounced, before enthusiastically concluding: "Lovers of the mysterious and horrible will not want to miss Psycho." 

accomplished trickster Robert Bloch

Most interesting about Derleth's review, perhaps, is his having taken the time, in praising Psycho, to bury Agatha Christie's classic detective novel, then 33 years old, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  Christie's novel received criticism before World War Two from detractors like S. S. Van Dine, who pronounced the mystery "unfair" because of certain narrative slights of hand on the part of the author.  In 1959 Van Dine was long dead, but Derleth was still waving the bloody hatchet at Ackroyd.  

"The psychosis on which [Bloch's] novel turns," declared Derleth, "is credible and acceptable--unlike the famed trick, illegitimate and unfair to the core, Agatha Christie pulled on her readers in THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD...."  

As if to show his disgust for the Christie mystery, Derleth proceeded to reveal, immediately before disparaging it, just what the so-called "Roger Ackroyd trick' was.  Poor show, Derleth!  But was he right?

Personally I've never taken issue with Christie's novel on this count, but certainly Robert Bloch in Psycho has sound psychological basis, as we shall see, for his book's trickery.  I have no problem with the book there.

In the twilight
Anthony Perkins rests between takes
on the set of Psycho

As a novel, however, Psycho's legacy will always be complicated by the Alfred Hitchcock film adaptation which followed it the next year.  Barely more than a dozen months separated the publication of the novel Psycho in 1959 from the release of the film version in 1960, which was a huge hit and received four Oscar nominations--though not, incredibly, for lead actor Anthony Perkins in the iconic role of mother-loving Norman Bates.  

Generally deemed the most important trailblazing "slasher" flick, Psycho now is probably the best-known film of Hitchcock's entire stellar career, not to mention arguably the film made before 1970 that people under the age of, say, forty are most likely actually to have seen or at least have heard of.

Speaking for myself, who am not only over forty but over fifty as well (and well over it too), I can't quite remember for certain when I saw this film.  I'm thinking it was 1977 but I'm not quite sure.  I recall seeing Alfred Hitchcock's name on movie marquees in Texas for his final film, Family Plot, in 1976, but I never saw that one at the theater.  

I think I saw it when it first aired on TV, probably in 1977 too.  (My older sister said that the male lead, Bruce Dern, looked like the late Daryl Dragon from the Captain and Tennille.)  Around that same time I also saw The Birds.  So I was definitely familiar with Hitchcock, who was still alive at the time, though his health was failing.  I remember when he died in 1980.

"Mary was not inclined to smile at the quaintness of it all
and even the inevitable hand-crocheted motto on the wall
seemed appropriate enough. God bless our home."

Seeing Psycho, along with watching Scooby-Doo and Agatha Christie film adaptations at a young age, was one of my formative childhood screen mystery experiences.  Happily I went into it cold; I don't even think I knew about the infamous "shower scene."  

Indeed, everything unfolded as a surprise to me.  I think my Mom, bless her, worried I would be traumatized by the violence; she thought the same thing a couple of years earlier when I saw Jaws.  

I certainly wasn't, however, though like others I had a phobia about taking showers for a while.  Basically though I was just plain mesmerized by the artistic flair, thrills and audacious trickery of the whole affair.  Psycho (like Jaws) was one of the films that taught me how amazing films could be.  

As mentioned above Hitchcock died in 1980; tributes and documentaries followed and then came...Psycho II in 1983, 23 years after the original film, with Anthony Perkins, now 51, back as a middle-aged Norman Bates, ostensibly restored to mental health by two decades in a mental institution and rehabilitated.  (Nine years earlier Perkins had been in another fave of mine, Murder on the Orient Express.)  After two decades of struggling with being stereotyped on film as unstable neurotics, Perkins finally just embraced it in the last decade of his life.  (He died of AIDS-related causes at the age of 60 in 1992.)

Oh, no, Mother's at it again!
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960)

I saw Psycho II at the theater and enjoyed it on its own merits, but I thought it wasn't any patch on the wonderful original and it simply seemed unnecessary.  (I agree with this take.)  The film famously opens by reshowing the infamous "shower scene" from its predecessor and, compared to contemporary slasher films from the period (late Seventies into the Eighties) it is relatively restrained and tasteful--at least until that exploitive scene in the fruit cellar near the climax, which is more something you'd expect to see happen to a naughty girl in the Friday the 13th franchise.  

I do feel, however, that the film gives us one twist of the screw too many.  Three years later I saw Psycho III as well (not bad), but after that I checked out of the franchise as it continued to appear on film and television screens in various incarnations.  I thought the 1998 color remake of the original Psycho was an abomination.  

Psycho 2

With all these screen Psychos, it's not surprising that the book would tend to take a back seat on people's murder buses.  Bloch himself published his own Psycho sequel, a meta satire on modern slasher films, in 1982, which the film studio wanted nothing to do with when it made its own Psycho II.  Bloch also published Psycho House in 1990, his last novel before his death at age 77 in 1994.  

Bloch was a much-admired horror and crime writer, something of a prodigy who was a protege of horror icon HP Lovecraft, who died in 1937 when Bloch was only 19, and a friend of August Derleth.  Before he published Psycho at age 42, Bloch published numerous short stories in the weird pulps as well as five novels, all but one of them, I believe, paperback originals.  

When he wrote Psycho Bloch was familiar with the horrific case of Fairfield, Wisconsin's mother-fixated necrophiliac murderer Ed Gein, which made news late in 1957, when it was discovered that the barmy farmer had murdered a couple of women, disinterred multiple corpses from graves, and lavishly redecorated his home with ghastly repurposed female body parts.  As macabre wags joked Gein took the word armchair literally.  

Gein farmhouse of horror outside Fairfield, WI

Bloch actually lived with his wife and daughter in Weyauwega, Wisconsin, a town about 150 miles north of Fairfield at the time that news of the Gein horrors broke.  Bloch claimed he didn't follow the ghoulish details too closely, a claim which, despite this having been the pre-internet era, is a little hard for me to credit.  My parents, who were then students at the University of Wisconsin, certainly knew all about them, though admittedly my Mom sold Cap Times newspaper subscriptions so she literally had her nose in the news at the time.  But it's hard for me to imagine that this would not have been irresistible copy to a horror writer like Bloch.  

Earlier this month the third season of the Monster series, which focuses this ghastly go round on Ed Gein, premiered, largely to horrific reviews.  Lurid exploitation dressed up as serious drama!  They always say that of horror.  Sadly, Ed Gein was not a subtle man in his field.  

Will the series despite its critical pannings lead to a recurrence of interest in the Psycho franchise, or perhaps that of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which also derived inspiration from our good farmer Gein?  We shall see.  But for my part I at least decided finally actually to read Psycho, which Overlook Press reprinted last year in a no frills but nicely-designed 65th Anniversary Edition.  Herewith my take.

*******

Psycho is a short novel, by my count about 50,000 words, and a very quick read indeed.  I think it's a good book, the slight-of-hand well done, but I do feel its impact is undermined by the film, which to my mind is a masterpiece.  

It's actually one of the rare source novels which Hitchcock bothered to follow closely in terms of the plot.  Even the names of the major characters are mostly kept. 

Mary/Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) on the lam with $40,000

The book starts off with a chapter introducing us to the menage of Norman Bates and his mother, countryside motel keepers on a stretch of highway now largely abandoned due to the building of a new road.  There follow two chapters in which Mary--Marion in the film--Crane makes her entrance and exit.  

We learn that from her employer Mary/Marion has stolen $40,000 (about eleven times that amount today in case you wondered) to run off and marry small-town hardware store owner Sam Loomis, her boyfriend in another state.  (She's going to tell him she inherited the money from a relative.)  Having lost her way in a storm, however, she checks in at the Bates Motel.  But she doesn't check out.  

not the Norman we know and love
an accurate book illustration of 
Norman Bates from the 2023 
suntup edition

The film of course opens with the story of Marion's impulsive folly.  The book takes place in Fort Worth, Texas (in flashback) and the environs of Fairvale, a small town set vaguely in the Midwest (Chicago is mentioned).  How close Fairvale sounds to Ed Gein's Fairfield!  Surely no coincidence.  Meanwhile the film takes place in Phoenix, Arizona and the environs of Fairvale, now a small town in California.  

Book Norman rather differs from film Norman, in that film Norman, played as mentioned above by matinee idol Anthony Perkins (then just 27 years old), is boyish and handsome, if nervous and awkward ("sensitive," you might say), while book Norman is "fat," we are repeatedly told, bespectacled, balding and middle-aged, essentially of no appeal sexually to women whatsoever. (We even learn for good measure that he's impotent, which kind of seals the deal.)  

Where film Norman draws sympathy from the viewer (such a sweet boy), book Norman is repellent.  It doesn't help that he repeatedly tells himself women like Marion are all bitches, tempting and teasing men with their worldly wiles, just like his mother always warned him.  It seems clear Norman really hates women too; it's not just mother Norma.  

The real world Ed Gein, if you can set aside all the grotesquerie, actually may not have been a bad-looking guy and naturally the Monster series has him played by former Queer as Folk heart (and other organs) throb Charlie Hunnam, now 45, in a performance which even many of the critics who hate the series have praised.  But he's still no Anthony Perkins in my opinion.  

the real Ed Gein at the time of his arrest in 1957
he died almost three decades later in a mental institution

In the book Marion and Norman have a scratch meal in the kitchen of the Bates' Victorian house behind the motel, while in the film they dine in the office of the motel.  Their conversation is essentially the same, though the dialogue in the film much improves upon that in the book.  (The film scripter was Joseph Stefano.)  

The pregnant line "I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times" is still there, though in the film it's altered, slightly but more forcefully and memorably, to "we all go a little mad sometimes."

I think I have heard that Marion is dispatched from the film about 40% of the way through (I have to check this), where in the book she appears in just two of the seventeen chapters, just 25 out of 167 pages, or 15% of the book.  

Like Anthony Perkins, 32-year-old Janet Leigh as Marion makes a stronger impression than the book's Mary Crane, with a more, um, developed story and a terrific performance.  In the book Mary Crane mainly seems desperately worried about being 27 and unmarried.  (Thirty is just around the corner, or so she thinks.)  

Both versions of the ill-fated woman, however, are like characters out of a noir novel--one by Jim Thompson perhaps--who to their horror suddenly find themselves trapped in a slasher story.  

the infamous shower scene
where we see neither the killer's face
nor the knife entering the victim's body
but are scared shitless anyway

If you've seen the film, and surely you have, it's with a definite frisson that you read in the book the line "And that's what she was going to do right now, take a nice, long hot shower."  Of course Janet Leigh's "shower scene," in which we see, or think we see, her horribly stabbed to death with a butcher's knife by a maniacal older woman, is one of the most famously edited scenes in film history, but even taking that into consideration, the book description falls a bit flat, I think:

....It wasn't a mask.  It was the face of a crazy old woman.

Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher's knife.  It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.

And her head.

Well, that's certainly direct!  I guess this passage might have been really shocking at the time.  But the stabbing death by seemingly a thousand brilliantly edited cuts in the film strikes me as rather more credibly horrifying.

On the other hand, the famous final film line, "Why, she wouldn't even hurt a fly," does come from the book, though of course the virtuoso visual merging of Norman's face with his mother's, um, rather more bony visage, can't be replicated in print.  Another reason that I just don't believe that the book can compete with the film.  

The novel is workmanlike horror fiction with some bold ideas for its time; the film is an unforgettable frightmare with powerhouse performances.  (Martin Balsam as the ill-fated investigator Milton Arbogast and Vera Miles, still around today as possibly the sole survivor from the Psycho cast, as Marion's angry sister Lila Crane, are very good too.)

I do not feel the same way, incidentally, about Daphne du Maurier's short story "The Birds," which is every bit as much a masterpiece as Hitchcock's film version.  

Happy Halloween!
But don't worry I'll be back a few more times in October.

Crow's on the Cradle: Philip MacDonald's The White Crow (1928)

Rockabye baby, the black and the white

Somebody's baby was born for a fight

Rockabye baby, the white and the black

Somebody's baby is not coming to back

Sang the crow on the cradle.

"The Crow on the Cradle" (1963)

Philip MacDonald's second Anthony Gethryn detective novel The White Crow was his follow-up, after four years, to his much-lauded debut mystery The Rasp, reviewed in my last installment at The Passing Tramp.  In between those two books there came Phil's--I've found out his friends really did call him Phil--war thriller novel Patrol, which like The Rasp was made into a film in the Thirties.  Both novels have been reprinted many times as well.  

The White Crow, on the other hand, is far more obscure to even vintage mystery connoisseurs today.  In the Thirties English publisher Collins reprinted White Crow in cheap hardcover editions a couple of times, but postwar the novel seems to have been reprinted only twice--first in 1958 by Collins' paperback imprint Fontana, along with Phil's rather better remembered The Nursemaid Who Disappeared/Warrant for X, which like both Rasp and Patrol was filmed; and second in 1966 in crime writer Michael Gilbert's Classics of Detection and Adventure series with Hodder and Stoughton.  

I'm actually surprised both Gilbert and H&S went for it with this book, although I can see an influence on Gilbert (about which I will got into more detail someday). I would dearly love to read Gilbert's introduction to the reprint.  

Reading White Crow today, anyone would understand why this novel has faded into obscurity.  It's not that it is a terrible book and indeed there are actually a number of interesting, even remarkable, things about it, but there are aspects to the conclusion that are just impossible today, even in the MAGA era, outside of Young Republican text chats anyway--and even there they didn't quite get away with it, I suppose.

Philip MacDonald hadn't even originally planned to return to the mystery fiction form after Rasp, but he couldn't resist the lure of crime.  White Crow is rather similar to Rasp in its plotting structure.  (If it ain't broke don't fix it.)  Gethryn is called in after another important personage is murdered, not a cabinet minister this time, but a "Napoleon of finance," one Sir Albert Lines-Bower, formerly Leinz-Bower.  ("Some sort of middle-European with a dash of Jerusalem," explains Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Lucas in blessedly the novel's only arguably antisemitic reference.)  

Phil continues to evince a taste in his writing for a spot or two of ghastly wanton violence.  John Hoode, the murder victim in the first Gethryn, was beaten bloodily to death with a wood-rasp; Lines-Bower is dispatched by having his throat most messily cut indeed.  Hoode met his end in the study of his country house, while Lines-Bower is killed in his private London office in the skyscraper of the Empire and International Trading Corporation, of which LB at his death was president and controller.  Both murders provide readers with rather similar demi-locked-room situations.

A piquant detail comes when we learn that when a charwoman discovered middle-aged LB dead in his chair, his throat cut from ear to ear, he was clad only in a pink undershirt and pink boxer shorts.  Among the investigators Gethryn is the only one who seems to divine that this particular apparel might have any significance.  After his success in The Rasp, Gethryn's attendant policemen--AC Lucas, Superintendent Boyd, Inspector Pike--act very dependently on the amatuer sleuth,  treating him with an obsequiousness remarkable even by Twenties detective novel standards.  

An interesting scene takes place when the police higher-ups bring Gethryn before an Agatha Christie-esque Important Personage named Thwaites, one of these obscure but powerful movers and shakers behind the headlines.  Thwaites imperiously tells Gethryn that in investigating this murder they simply must get on with it: 

"[T]here's more in this matter than the police point of view....We can't have a lot of muck-raking and mud-slinging....Just the essentials.  And speed.  Above all, speed....Speed, speed.  Get the thing over and decently done with....You understand me?"

The overweening arrogance of this nettles Gethryn who snaps back:

"Do I understand you?  I think so.  At least I understood your speech.  You can't have the case drag on.  You must have it cleaned it up without delay.  You must, in other words, have speed, speed, speed.  You also want no fuss and bother; no undue publicity about the matter.  You want, really, someone quickly arrested and hanged, preferably, perhaps, the guilty party.  You can't allow any mud-taking or mud-slinging, and the dung heaps, whatever they conceal, must be left alone....

Who, exactly, are you?...Where, precisely, do you imagine yourself to be--in Tammany Hall, N.Y., or Heaven or both?"

Ba-Boom!  I've rarely seen a better illustration of the genteel British ability, at least in fiction, to tell people to fuck off, in so many pretty words, glittering amidst a cascade of precisely placed commas.  I know there must be actors who would adore delivering this speech in a film adaptation.

The attitude conveyed here, the disgust for corruption and depraved vice in high places, can't help but carry resonance today, when virtually every day we have it shoved in our faces.  Thwaites and Gethryn might as well be talking about the Epstein files.  

Gethryn similarly is righteously disgusted by the very offices of the Empire and International Trading Corporation.  "I don't think I like it, Boyd," observes Gethryn disdainfully, "....all that marble.  And the go-o-old...."  With the dead man's private secretary he shares this bemused exchange about the place:

"I say, is it all like this?  I don't think I can bear it--"

"The--er--authorities have been lavish in decoration.  There's--er-- more to come for you."

"I thought so.  I felt it."  Anthony hook his shoulders.  His long legs resumed their pacing, then halted him beside the ornate table.  He looked up at the frosted skylight, then about the walls and the pictures which hung upon them.

"No," he said.  "I must go.  That stag!  Oh, my heart, that stag!...Lucas, lead on." 

What, I wonder, would the man have made of the new interior decoration of America's oval office?  What would he make of the coming colossal ballroom?  I think I know.  

Philip MacDonald was by no means a radical writer, but like both leftists and some of his fellow English conservatives, including some who like him wrote mystery fiction, Phil was critical of the modern order that was being promulgated in the non-Communist sector of the world by increasingly opulent and omnipotent international global capitalists, who pulled the strings of puppet-like world leaders, often with dreadful consequences to humanity.  (Another one of Lines-Bower's corporate do's is Torrance Explosives and Armaments.)  

Of course the late LB's office staff must be questioned, and this includes a couple of attractive secretaries, one of them a brunette and the other a blonde with a rather dodgy American accent, and an eighteen-year-old office boy named Lennet; but he has vanished since the murder.  Investigating the lad's disappearance, Gethryn finds that Lennet at his lodging house has a collection of books including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Monsieur Lecog.  An imaginative lad, this!

These books undoubtedly were some of the key texts which influenced Phil's own creative imagination when it came to the writing of mystery fiction.  Could all the books mentioned here have been tomes which MacDonald himself had owned?  It would not surprise me.  Some other volumes mentioned are:

John Ruskin's Fors Clavigera (critique of the worker's place in modern capitalism)

Joseph Conrad's The Arrow of Gold

a four-volume set of  works by George Bernard Shaw

Rudyard Kipling's Soldiers Three

Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (a collection of fairy tales; it will be recalled Phil's brilliant grandfather George MacDonald was an influential Victorian writer of fairy tales; George was also a friend of Ruskin and both MacDonald and Ruskin were deeply critical of industrial capitalism)

another Sexton Blake adventure with 
a cartoonish, grotesque villain

It turns out that Lennet also writes Sexton Blake-ish boys' mystery tales about a fearless crime fighter named Carlton Howe.  Gethryn's friend and brother-in-law Deacon, the suspected private secretary from The Rasp, reads out loud a passage from Carlton Howe's adventure The Missing Twelve:

Immovable as a statue hewn from marble, Carlton Howe stood erect against the wall.  Through the all-enveloping and malignant darkness he could hear the soft, sibilant hissing breaths of the Spanish Pedro who crouched, deadly knife in hand, waiting for his arch-enemy the detective!

Gethryn takes a liking to Lennet, though he has never met him, and he exonerates him of being a murderer.  He fears, rather, that the boy may be another victim.  

"An intelligent, industrious boy of an advanced eighteen," Gethrun pronounces of Lennet.  Keen on his job, hoping for a rapid promotion.  A boy who reads good stuff and who makes pocket-money by writing bad with a precocious tongue in his downy cheek.

MacDonald like Poe could have a
lurid imagination

I suspect that Phil to some extent is describing himself here.  His first two novels, the oddly named Ambrotox and Limping Dick (1920) and The Spandau Quid (1923), were fanciful thrillers co-written with his father when Phil was just 19 and 22.  Even The Rasp and The White Crow, which are less obviously burlesques, have a great deal of self-aware meta references.  Coming from a family of Victorian/Edwardian writers and thespians, Phil naturally was destined for his own life of drama.  He was a precociously talented and strikingly handsome young man.  He must have had experiences.  

As Gethryn comes to understand just how fiendishly depraved are the circumstances behind the murder, he comes to fear desperately for Lennet's fate--with good reason.  

I'm afraid I'll have to get into somewhat spoilerish territory in a minute, but I will post my readers a warning.  The outcome of the novel is simultaneously advanced and regressive: the former because it dives into morbid sexual psychology, a fascination of the author's throughout his writing career, and the latter because of its sheer downright racist bilge.  

It's a frustrating combination!  On the one hand modern film and television producers would love the sexual aspect, which is far ahead of its time, but the racism would simply be unfilmable.  

I'm not going to give away culpritude, but I am going to talk briefly about just what happens to Lennet, so 

SPOILER WARNING!

It turns out that Lennet fell into the hands of the murderers who, among other things, were sexual sadists (particularly the one) who in a folie a deux manacled Lennet hand and foot and tortured the boy mercilessly for three days and nights.  When Gethryn and the police find him they descry chained to the wall a "scarred and naked young body, huddling itself like a thin animal into a shape hopelessly attempting defense from outrageous enmity."  

This sadism is a motif, a theme, that the author came back to several times throughout his career.  Obviously it was something that powerfully and peculiarly affected him.  Why, I don't know.  I have a notion personal psychology is involved.  

END SPOILER!

The racist aspect to the novel, about which I won't get into detail (Nick Fuller discusses it here at his blog if you want to see), has, I'm afraid, doomed this otherwise worthy book to oblivion, but a defense I will attempt of it is to point out that its main models are Sexton Blake and Edgar Allen Poe and the sort of bizarre and lurid things we see in this book are far from unknown in its models.  I dearly wish Phil had shown more adult restraint in this novel, but in fairness I have to point out that the book like its predecessor The Rasp was much lauded in both the United States and United Kingdom and I have not discovered a single review which criticized, or even pointed out as in way notable, the blatant racism.  

One prescient reviewer even essentially likened the book to a modern crime novel (in 1928!), writing: 

In "The White Crow' Mr. Macdonald has not only amply fulfilled the promise revealed in his earlier detective novel, "The Rasp," but has achieved something which, in this class of writing, is as welcome as it is rare--a story that is interesting for its characterisation and psychology as well as for its plot.  In no other class of fiction would we so often and so patiently overlook a lack of care and indifference to style as, but for too few exceptions such as this book, what we have to accept for the sake of a little mystification and excitement....Mr. Macdonald is to be congratulated on so singular a triumph.  

That's the sort of criticism of the mystery novel that readers have heard over every decade for almost a century now! But it wasn't nearly as common in 1928, when detective fiction was being widely celebrated precisely for it artifice and artificiality.  

The main charge leveled against the book was that the culprit unfairly does not appear until late in the tale, a charge against which the author strenuously defended himself in print.  Phil pointed out that this culprit was what he termed the secondary culprit.  The main culprit, on the other hand, he had introduced early on indeed.  Phil deemed that fair play:

[T]he accusation, which is not true, has been made against me that I have not followed the canons of detective story writing.  I have, to my mind, followed these canons--which I consider absolutely essential--with rather painful scrupulousness.

"Rather painful scrupulousness"--I think the author's three words keenly suggest his growing discomfort with pure detection.  The White Crow itself as I have indicated has quite its share of lurid sensation, along with patches filled with Gethryn's case memoranda which tend to drag.  His best works, in my view, are more in the vein of such virtuoso thrillers as Murder Gone Mad or wildly original extravaganzas like Rynox.

"Murder!" He Rasped: The Rasp (1924), by Philip MacDonald

"What do they call the thing?"

"Wood-rasp [answered Gethryn].  A file for wood."

"If you love me, call me mister, call me mister, Boydie dear."

Boyd Laughed.  He found Anthony refreshingly unofficial.

"I love little pussy, her hair is so black, and if I don't catch her she'll never come back.  Now, where did you come from, Blackie dear?  And have you left any other cards?  O, Shades of Doyle!  What a game!"

"I am Dupont [Dupin?], I am Lecoq, I'm Fortune, Holmes and Rouletabille.  Good night."  

"Gethryn, you're fatuous.  Take to crochet."  

Anthony Gethryn speaks, and speaks, in The Rasp (1924)

two Forties Penguin eds

We often refer carelessly to "detective fiction from the Golden Age," which is generally taken to mean mysteries published in the period between the two world wars, but if fans of the period really think about it, it probably occurs to them that most of their favorite mysteries from this period, with perhaps a few exceptions like books by Christie, Sayers or Crofts (or Van Dine to the diehards), come from the Thirties not the Twenties.  

Many of the "Golden Age" mystery favorites did not even begin publishing books until the Thirties or the very late Twenties (Queen, Carr, Allingham, Mitchell, Marsh, Innes, Blake, Bruce etc., etc.).  The Detection Club did not form until 1930.  Really, the Twenties is best understood as the decade when the form was only beginning to establish itself and take firm shape.  The hangman's tree was planted in the Twenties, one might say, but it didn't fully bloom until the Thirties.  

I think British crime writer Philip MacDonald personified this phenomenon.  He published two series Anthony Ruthven (pronounced "Riven") Gethryn detective novels in 1924 and 1928, then opened a floodgate of inventiveness between 1930 and 1933, producing no fewer than 14 detective and crime novels during this time, along with two more mainstream novels, averaging four books a year. 

MacDonald grew restive with straight detective fiction and at least six of his novels in this period can better be termed mystery thrillers rather than detective fiction.  Perhaps his major innovation was the serial killer novel.  He was one of the most important popularizers of this subgenre with his books Murder Gone Mad (1931) and X v. Rex, aka The Mystery of the Dead Police (1933).  

After he moved to California to write screenplays for the film industry, MacDonald's book output dropped significantly.  There came just five more crime novels: another thriller (with Gethryn) in 1938, one if his most highly regarded, Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared, then a spy novel in 1941, a psychological thriller in 1948, a domestic suspense thriller in 1955 and an adieu to the genre with a final Gethryn novel, The List of Adrian Messenger, more a thriller, in 1959.  

MacDonald said that during these years he wrote an occasional novel to "let off steam."  Afterward he retired from writing for the most part, having reached his sixties.  In the 35 years between 1924 and 1959 he published 21 crime and detective novels, 14 of them between 1930 and 1933 (plus one more in 1938).  

The Thirties truly were the author's heyday as a crime writer, though his sporadic work in the forties and fifties is worthy of his name.  His two Twenties Anthony Gethryn novels, now, I'm not as crazy as about.  I see them rather as 'prentice works and curate's eggs, with some good parts but not the main components of a truly enticing omelet.  

I recently reread MacDonald's debut detective novel (discounting two which he wrote with his father in the early twenties), The Rasp, and confirmed my original judgment of it; and I am now rereading his follow-up, The White Crow.  Both of these novels received boffo reviews back in the day, and The Rasp, which saw its 100th anniversary last year, remained in print over much of that time and is still in print today.  From the very year it was published The Rasp was praised as a crime fiction classic, and for many decades it was regarded as such, though today it strikes me as rather dated.  (It struck me as such back in 1990s as well to be honest.)  

Basically, it's your cliched body-in-the-study book.  Gethryn himself says as much in it.  Yes, this situation was already cliched in 1924.  I'm not sure MacDonald really does enough with this setup to justify the novel's "classic" status, although Gethryn's meta asides on the mystery are amusing.  

young MacDonald

Philip MacDonald was all of 23 when he published The Rasp.  If that didn't make him a prodigy like, say, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (I'm listening to his third violin concerto right now, which he composed 250 years ago at age 19 in 1775), Mac compared well with other crime juveniles like John Dickson Carr, who published his first, It Walks by Night, at the same age, 23, in 1930 and Margery Allingham, who made her mystery debut at 24, I think, with The White Cottage Mystery in 1928.  

World War One had been over for less than six years when Mac--I have no reason to believe this was his nickname but for convenience I'm using it henceforth--published The Rasp and he claimed to be a war veteran of four years' experience.  This claim has never been challenged as far as I know, but I simply don't see how to swallow it.  Mac was only 13 when the Great War, as it was then known, commenced, and just barely 18 when it ended.  If he lied about his age and served in 1917-18, say, surely he could not have gotten away with serving at 13 or 14!  This was no longer the age of drummer boys.  

Whatever the truth of his war service (I've never actually seen any record of it), Mac created in Colonel Anthony Ruthven Gethryn (he modestly prefers to be called Mister), a suitably heroic personal alter ego.  Yes, it seems an author once again has gone aMarySueing, or whatever the male equivalent of that form of dream casting is called.  

English author EC Bentley had supposedly cut the Great Detective down to human size with his mystery Trent's Last Case in 1913, but if these men (and they were almost always men) were, in contrast with Holmes, constantly flippant and insouciant about life, they were also something in the way of amateur geniuses.  Gethryn is very much in the mold of Bentley's Trent and Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, not to mention Van Dine's Philo Vance, who was to pop up in a couple of years, dropping his 'g's, patronizing everyone around him and airily discoursing on everything under the sun, like tropical fish, scotties and Chinese and Egyptian antiquities.   

Mac actually provides us with a bio of the amateur detective in chapter two of The Rasp--very kind of him, I'm sure.  We learn from it that he's the "son of a hunting country gentleman of the old type, who was yet one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his day, and of a Spanish lady of impoverished and exiled family who had, before her marriage with Sir William Gethryn, been in turn governess, dancer, mannequin, actress and portrait painter."

Mac allows that with such parentage "it was perhaps to be expected that [Anthony Gethryn] should be no ordinary child.  And he was not."  Of course among Golden Age gentleman amateur detectives Anthony was a dime a dozen, a penny a packet.  Gethryn would have been right at home with the Crime Queens' Wimsey, Albert Campion and Roderick Alleyn, a natural genius who wears his genius lightly if not frivolously, and a consummate charmer of the ladies.  

Let's see how many other boxes he ticks:

prep school and Oxford, where "he covered himself with academic glory which outshone even that of his excellence at racquets and Rugby football" and excelled not just at math but history and classics

left Oxford at 23 (he was born in 1886, btw), then "read for the bar; was called, but did not answer.  He went instead round and about the world...."

after four years "returned home to settle down, painted two pictures which he gave to his father, wrote a novel which was lauded by the critics and brought him not a penny, and followed up with a book of verse which, though damned by the critics, was yet remunerative to the extent of one hundred and fifty pounds."

served as private secretary to a promising M.P.

long-limbed with sensitive hands

joined the army eleven days after the British declaration of war on Germany and was wounded in 1915 ("a rifle bullet, an attack of trench fever, and three pieces of shrapnel"), but was soon in Germany doing intelligence work due to an intervention by his uncle Sir Charles Haultevieux de Courcy Gethryn, "a personage at the War Office." ("Anthony spoke German like a German.")  Promoted to the rank of colonel, he was awarded a bunch of medals, but he doesn't talk about those and he prefers to be called mister.  

His father and mother died, leaving him only "a few hundreds a year," so he had to find work.  He wrote another novel and painted three more pictures, then returned to his secretaryship with the M. P. but was "bored to extinction."  

Fortunately (?) his uncle died, leaving him "a dreadful house in Knightsbridge and nine or ten thousand a year [about three-quarters of a million pounds today!].  Anthony left the secretaryship, sold the house, set up in a flat and removed from carking care, did as his fancy took him."  (I don't know about you, but I had to look up "carking.")

Getting reacquainted with an old college friend, Spencer Hastings, Anthony--I'll get familiar like the author--decided to invest in Hastings' weekly London review The Owl.  He also "designed the cover, wrote a verse for the paper now and then, sometimes a bravura essay."

I don't know about you, but after learning all these details about Anthony, I sort of hated the guy.  

But he's not quite as insufferable as all that in practice.  Raymond Chandler abominated these sorts of Mary Sueish dream projections gentleman detectives, most of them created by, as he saw it, fatuous middle-class women--though his "antidote" was to create a Mary Sueish professional detective.  However, plenty of people adored them.  

Although Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey preceded Anthony by a single year, in The Rasp Anthony set the mold for this superior genteel sleuth breed in many ways, most notably in falling madly in love with a suspect in the case and later marrying her in the second novel.  By the time Wimsey, Campion and Alleyn had got around to getting themselves hitched Anthony had mostly retired from the game.  

*******

It's through The Owl that Anthony is called into the murder case in The Rasp.  At the prompting of his efficient secretary Margaret Warren, Spencer Hastings sends him down to Abbotshall, the Surrey country house where cabinet minister John Hoode has been beaten to death in his study with a wood-rasp.  (Yes, you read that right.)  

Down there Gethryn encounters Superintendent Boyd of Scotland Yard, a former pal from his intelligence days when he, Boyd, was "lent" to Anthony during a "great and secret roundup" of German spies in London in 1917.  Happily Boyd evinces "none of the chagrin commonly attributed to police detectives when faced with the amateur who is to prove them fools at every turn."

As that quote shows The Rasp is filled with meta observations about detective fiction, about which many cliches had accumulated even by 1924.  Earlier Anthony thinks to himself: "A cabinet minister murdered without a mystery?  Impossible!  All the canons were against it."  Later we get:

"No originality!" said Anthony plaintively.  "It's all exactly the same.  Ever read detective stories, Boyd?  They're always killed in studies.  Always!  Ever notice that?"

"It's too rule of thumb.  The Profligate Secretary, the Missing-Banknotes, The Fingerprinted Blunt Instrument!  It's not even a good shilling shocker.  It's too damnation ordinary, that's what it is!"

Anthony continually invokes past masters like Doyle, Gaboriau and Freeman, insisting that the case is more complex than it seems.  It's a sort of locked room situation, but the police go for the obvious solution, naturally, and quickly fasten upon Hoode's manly private secretary, Archibald Basil Travers Deacon.  John Dickson Carr actually once pronounced the private secretary the person most likely to be the murderer in a Twenties mystery, and I suppose he should know.  

When the police find Deacon's fingerprints on the rasp, it's all over bar the hanging, as far as officialdom is concerned.  But Anthony thinks otherwise; and flippant gentleman amateur sleuths can never be wrong, surely.  You can be certain he will clear A. B. T. Deacon and find the real dastardly killer who has set the private secretary up for a fall.  By the way, could Deacon, with his cumbersome Christian names and his initials, have helped inspire, over a decade later, Agatha Christie's Alexander Bonaparte Cust in The ABC Murders?  

Anthony also falls in love with a neighbor of Hoode's, Lucia "Loo" Masterson Lemesurier, a beautiful youngish brunette war widow.  At least I think she's a war widow, the book tells us her husband died four years earlier, which I'm guessing would have been 1918, setting the book in 1922. She's involved in the case because on the night of the murder she was trying to protect her brother, a neurasthenic war veteran who was Hoode's previous private secretary.  (Hoode fired him.)  Gosh, what is it with these screwy private secretaries?  

Lucia thus falls in with the long line of magnificently devoted sisters willing to get themselves involved in murder cases and to nobly sacrifice all in order to help their deeply problematic male siblings.  Jefferson Farjeon, mystery writer and brother of children's writer Eleanor Farjeon, simply adored this trope.  Don't know what Eleanor thought of it!  It gets rather soppy at times.  

There are ten house servants, including the lady's maid Elise Duboise (Mac seems a bit uncertain about her social status), and Mac lists every single one of them by name.  There's two housemaids, a kitchen maid, a parlourmaid, the cook, the butler, the "other manservant," (footman?), the gardener and the chauffeur.  They play small roles in the tale, but maybe listing them all provides atmosphere.  A decade later Ngaio Marsh listed all the servants as well in her debut country house detective novel A Man Lay Dead, though she didn't bother to name them all.  That was definitely to convey how grand the house was.  

The older book this mystery actually most resembles is the prewar Trent's Last Case, though I don't believe Anthony mentions Bentley or Trent.  He does Bentley two better (or worse), however, with not just one falling-in-love story but three!  There are three impending marriages at the end of this book: Anthony and Lucia, the exonerated Deacon and Loo's younger sister Dora, and Spencer Hastings and Margaret Warren.  It's a bit much, I think.  This matrimonial plum pudding is too fruity.

I regret to say it, but I think the best thing in this mystery is the openingchapter, which is not even about Anthony, but rather Spencer and Margaret.  Their relationship is charming and the satire of the press is cute.  "Abbotshall Murder!  Cabinet Minister Assassinated!  Horrible Atrocity!  Is it Bolshevism?"  (This sounds like FOX News on antifa.)  Mac could have made Margaret an intrepid girl reporter and sent her down to investigate the murder rather than Anthony, but, alas, convention demanded an insouciant gent for the occasion rather than a plucky lady.  Anthony I find a bit tiresome in this outing.  He's ever so facetious, like a stage comedian who can't "turn it off."

I like the title of the novel: there's something sinister about a rasp as a murder implement.  The explanation for Doyle's fingerprints being on the weapon is clever, probably the cleverest thing about the book, though I don't believe modern forensics would have been stumped very long. (It's definitely "bookish.")  R. Austin Freeman, author of the 1907 detective novel The Fingerprint is mentioned; I was also reminded of Crofts.  I have learned that Mac also had a great uncle who was important in promulgating the investigative use of fingerprints.  

Anthony delivers a 35-page written explanation of how he solved the case (45 pages in the hardcover editions), which may be a little too much of a good thing even for devoted puzzle fans.  For me a lot of the book drags.  

Happily, however, both Anthony and the author improved in later outings.  It's only fair to add that the book was raved in its day and became an almost instant "landmark" of detective fiction.  Five years after it was published in 1924, S. S. Van Dine included The Rasp as a selection in his Scribner's Detective Library, six volumes with, in addition to The Rasp, the following titles: Doyle's The Sign of Four/Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery, Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Freeman's The Eye of Osiris, Crofts' The Cask and Mason's The House of the Arrow.  Have you read them all?

The Twenties were represented by Crofts, Mason and MacDonald; Van Dine evidently could not bring himself to include Mary Roberts Rinehart or Anna Katharine Green or Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or something by Sayers (women, bah!); and modesty (ha!) compelled him to omit one of his own books.  But, still, whatever Van Dine's own biases, The Rasp would reappear again and again, remaining in print, I believe, over every decade of the twentieth century.  Ellery Queen, a great Philip  MacDonald admirer, would declare it a cornerstone of mystery fiction.  It was reprinted by three different American publishers as late as the 1980s.  Just in that one decade!

But I think Mac went on to do much better things, a sentiment with which the author himself would have agreed.  In his introduction to a 1963 omnibus volume of three of his novels, including The Rasp, he wrote of his debut solo effort that after he was finished with writing it, he wasn't sure whether it was any good at all.  The writing of mysteries that were "literate and credible as well as scrupulously fair to the reader," he declared, was "pure self-torture!"  

Perhaps this is why afterward Mac gravitated increasingly to crime novels with strong thriller elements.  Puzzle construction needs more than a rasp to fashion things into shape.  Mac never did become a member of the Detection Club, something which still seems rather odd, come to think of it.  He remained in the UK for part of the early 1930s, as we will see.  

A Sprig of Laurel: Philip MacDonald, Some Preliminary Biography and Bibliography

Phillip MacDonald (1900-1980)
in his early thirties at the time of his
height of popularity as a crime writer

British novelist and screenwriter Philip MacDonald (1900-1980) was once of the most famous crime writers extant, but today he seems something of a forgotten man. Some of his books actually remained in print into the 1980s, after his death at age eighty in 1980, and for many decades at least five of them were deemed classics by vintage mystery aficionados: his debut mystery The Rasp (1924) and the crime novels Murder Gone Mad (1931), X v. Rex (1933), Warrant for X (1938) and The List of Adrian Messenger (1959), several of which were pioneering serial killer novels.  

Part of the reason for MacDonald's comparative obscurity is due, surely, to the fact that he did little to publicize himself personally.  

When he died in 1980 at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, his obit in the Los Angeles Times was pitifully short, neglecting even to mention his crime writing career, describing him as a "veteran motion picture screenwriter" and "playwright in his native Scotland."  Prior to coming to California he was born and and lived in London and as far as I can tell did not write a play.  There are many other recorded details about his life that are in error as well, I have found.  

one of the many reprint editions  
of The Rasp

Several of MacDonald's titles had been reprinted by Avon and the Collins Crime Club in the 1970s and Dover Press reprinted The Rasp in 1979.  Vintage Books would reprint another round of his titles in the early 1980s after his death.  Carroll & Graf would reprint The Rasp in 1984.  When I started reading mysteries as a young man MacDonald was one of the authors I used to look for in used bookstores, where something by him usually could readily be found.  

One senses that MacDonald himself had something of an aversion to being known as a mystery writer.  After publishing The Rasp, which introduced the author's future series sleuth Colonel Anthony Gethryn, in 1924, when he was only 23 years old, MacDonald did not publish another Gethryn saga for four years, despite the acclaim that The Rasp had won acclaim from reviewers.  

MacDonald married the following year and the couple had a daughter in 1926, additional facts the recorded history omits to mention.  Unfortunately the marriage would founder in the 1930s.  

Also in 1927 MacDonald published a very successful war thriller novel Patrol, in it allegedly drawing partly on his own combat experiences.  It is said that he served in "all the campaigns in Mesopotamia for three years during the World War," but if he did he must have lied about his age, because he turned eighteen less than a week before the armistice was signed.  I know teenagers of the day lied about their ages to serve in the war (one was supposed to be nineteen to serve overseas), but it seems a bit much to believe that MacDonald got away with serving in combat at the age of fourteen or fifteen.  If he did, that is some story in itself!

One of the few facts that ever was consistently reported about MacDonald was that he was a grandson of Scottish minister and noted fantasy fiction author George MacDonald (1824-1905), who must have been a remarkably charismatic person indeed, judging from his rather mesmeric, Rasputin-like photos.  In contrast with the great big bushy beard of his Victorian grandfather, who died in 1905 when he, Philip, was shy of five years of age, Philip sported only a fashionably clipped moustache.  Oddly when Philip died in 1980, it was on the same date, December 10, that George had been born in 1825.  

not the mystic Rasputin
but the minister George MacDonald

George MacDonald's most renowned grandson published a second Gethryn mystery, The White Crow, in 1928, but he did not open the crime fiction spigot until 1930.  Then he kept it flowing at an impressive rate for the next four years. Between 1930 and 1933 MacDonald published 14 mystery novels, eight of them with Gethryn and three of them under the pen name Martin Porlock.  These were successful and highly publicized works in both the United States and the United Kingdom.  Then there was a gap before a single Gethryn mystery, The Nursemaid who Disappeared, aka Warrant for X, appeared in 1938.

What else was going with the author in the Thirties?  Well, it is said that MacDonald moved out to Hollywood to write screenplays in 1931, but I query this.  

The author's first wife seems to have been living with their daughter in London in Earl's Court in 1934, but both mother and child traveled by ship from London to Los Angeles that year.  Was MacDonald living in LA alone for three years, or did he maintain a transatlantic existence, or was he simply in London for most of that time?  I think Macdonald probably did not actually relocate to LA until 1932/33 (not that long after Edgar Wallace went there to work on the script for King Kong and ended  up dying there), and his wife and daughter followed him out there in 1934.

Both grandfather and and son were tellers
of tales with lively imaginations.  
George had eleven children; Philip just one.

Between 1929 and 1931, MacDonald was involved as a screenwriter with seven ENGLISH films.  The first of these was Lost Patrol, a silent adaptation of MacDonald's novel Patrol.  Then there came Raise the Roof, the first British musical (a talkie obviously).  Then there came five films helmed by noted director Michael Powell (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, etc.).  The first two of these, Rynox and The Rasp, were co-written with Powell and crime writer Jefferson Farjeon (who himself had a famous grandfather) and adapted from Macdonald mysteries.  

There in fact appears to be no connection between MacDonald and Hollywood until 1933/4, when director John Ford made his own film version of Patrol, called The Lost Patrol.  Made around the same time was The Mystery of Mr. X, which obviously was an adaptation of MacDonald's X v. Rex, and Menace, adapted from MacDonald's novel RIP.  MacDonald also worked at the time on three other screenplays, including the series mystery Charlie Chan in London.  He stayed a busy fella in the Thirties!

In the early 1930s
MacDonald left England and made
a name for himself in Hollywood

I don't believe it's any coincidence that MacDonald's American screenwriting credits start in 1934, nor do I think it's incidental that the author's crime fiction career suddenly comes to a screeching halt, for four full years, at the end of 1933.  For what it is worth, his paltry 1980 LA Times obit states that he began his screenwriting career in 1933.  

Moreover, a 1933 newspaper publicity article (one of the rare ones) about Macdonald posted from Hollywood certainly makes it sounds as if the author is a newcomer to LA.  Ironically the main theme of the piece is how Macdonald hates publicity: "A comfortable apartment, a pipe and a can of shag is more to his style."  How English!

Some time between 1934 and 1943, MacDonald and his first wife divorced, for he married again in 1943.  (She remarried too.)  Their daughter married in California in 1947.  The two women were still alive in 1980, when MacDonald died, but sadly he seems to have been estranged from them.  No mention of them, or of his first wife, or even of his grandfather is made in his obituary.    

Ellery Queen, or more precisely Fred Dannay, seems to have cajoled MacDonald back to mystery fiction again in 1946, when he published MacDonald's "Malice Domestic" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1946.  A Gethryn story, "The-Wood-for-the-Trees," would follow the next year.  A suspense novel, The Dark Wheel, which MacDonald co-wrote with a friend, appeared in 1948, making it the author's first novel in a decade.  

a much lauded crime writer in both the US and UK

Four years later in 1952 MacDonald published his first crime story collection, Something To Hide (Fingers of Fear in the UK), which was awarded the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for best short fiction in 1953.  Three years after that MacDonald published a second short story collection, The Man out of the Rain, and a suspense novel, Guest in the House.  "Dream No More," one of the stories from the second collection, won a short fiction Edgar as well in 1956.  

Gethryn returned in the final, much-lauded MacDonald novel, The List of Adrian Messenger, in 1959 (it was nominated for an Edgar for best novel, though it did not win); and a final fanciful short fiction collection, Death and Chicanery, appeared in 1962.  I'll be back soon to post on some of MacDonald's short fiction, providing some more details about his life as well.

I am pleased to say that I will be involved in the upcoming months with reprinting some of his work.