Mignon Eberhart in Valentine, Nebraska, c. 1928-1930

Mignon Eberhart

Mignonette Good Eberhart, known to the world as the mystery writer Mignon Eberhart, was born in Nebraska on July 6, 1899 and died in Connecticut on October 8, 1996, age 97, making her surely one of the last Golden Age mystery writers to expire. In 1923, she married Alanson Clyde Eberhart, a civil engineer, and the couple moved to Chicago, where they lived for two years.  The Eberharts then returned to Nebraska, eventually buying a house in Valentine, a town of under 2000 souls located near the South Dakota border, in the Nebraska sandhills region.

Eberhart published her first mystery story, a novelette titled "The Dark Corridor" in Flynn's Detective Weekly in 1925, but her first mystery novel, The Patient in Room 18, only appeared four years later, in 1929.  Room 18 and her next two mystery novels all were written in Valentine.

In the Spring of 1930, Eva Mahoney, an Omaha newspaper journalist best known for an interview with Willa Cather that she had conducted nearly a decade earlier, interviewed Eberhart at "her pleasant little home in Valentine" and found that the young mystery writer had chosen a Nebraska sandhills "hunting lodge for the setting" of her next novel (to be titled The Mystery at Hunting's End).  Explained Eberhart:

That gives me a legitimate right to get my characters off into an isolated region where just anything may happen. (shades of P. D. James!)

The author expounded on the atmospheric advantages of her new mystery setting:

The lodge owner collects antique pewter lanterns as a hobby.  He uses them for illuminating the lodge.  Naturally they don't give much light so I can employ darkened corners and shadows to heighten the horror.

plans of the lodge in
The Mystery at Hunting's End 

Yet Eberhart worried whether the interior design she envisioned for the lodge would allow the characters to do all the things they needed to do in a murder mystery:

I'm having difficulty with that hunting lodge in my new book....It must have a mezzanine or balcony floor.  I don't know how I'm going to have it architecturally correct and still be able to obstruct the view from that balcony.  My husband has promised to come to my aid with a set of blueprints.

Those blueprints apparently helped, because Eberhart's novel appeared later that year.  It's one of my favorite Eberharts, incidentally.

Eberhart claimed that it took her "three months to complete a mystery novel."  During this period every day she would be at her desk promptly at 7:00 a.m. and type until noon or thereabouts.  Before she started the actual writing of a novel she would assemble the characters, block out the plot and make a general synopsis.

Eberhart's first novel was a tremendous success generally, but it went over especially big in Valentine and its environs, Eva Mahoney reported:

Word went round that a citizen of Cherry County had written a thriller. Only one copy had reached the cattle country as yet.  That was owned by the author.  One of the cattle kings asked to borrow it. After he had finished reading it, his 20 cowboys asked the same privilege.  They solved the question of reading priority by shaking dice.

main street in Valentine
the Yeast hardware store was, I believe, located in the stone front building to the right

There's more of interest in this interview, but I will save the rest for later.  What I want to mention here in closing is that I found this fascinating newspaper article in an old clipping tipped into a copy of The Mystery of Hunting's End by a former owner, Helen Bachelor Yeast (1894-1972), wife of Harold Proctor Yeast (1890-1977), owner of a hardware business on Valentine's main street. (the picture of Eberhart shown above comes from this newspaper article)

Helen Yeast also added the following note:

Mrs. Eberhart had used a hunting lodge on lakes south of Valentine, Nebraska, as her locale.  Her publishers asked her to change it, so she substituted Michigan dunes.  See page 13. Mrs. Eberhart lived in Valentine for several years, in an old square house a few doors north of the old Haley house. 

More detail to come.  Mrs. Yeast obviously found quite interesting this article about her one-time Nebraska neighbor turned world famous mystery writer.  I agree with her.

I Saw it with My Own Two Eyes: Independent Witness (1963), by Henry Cecil

Henry Cecil Leon (1902-1976) was an English judge who in 1951 started, under the name Henry Cecil, a series of two dozen novels, very often humorous, dealing with foibles of English law.

How many of these legitimately can be called mysteries or crime novels, I don't know, though I suppose the case be made for calling them all crime novels, because some form of crime invariably seems to crop up in them, I believe.  The first book I read by Cecil, A Woman Named Anne (1967), seems to me indisputably a mystery, and a very good one, although the puzzle presented is not one of murder, but rather whether the male party to a divorce action was having it off with the dazzling Anne of the title.

Independent Witness, the Cecil novel under review here today, is more a suspense novel.  The story opens with a car driver who, after properly stopping at a "halt" to a crossroads in the town of Needham, by the pub the Blue Goose, begins crossing, only to collide with a speeding motorcyclist coming round a sharp bend.

Although the motorcyclist has been injured--we later learn he makes a full recovery, though has no memory of the accident--the driver leaves the scene of the accident, much to the anger of the eight or so eyewitnesses who have gathered there. A few days later, Michael Barnes, an MP, turns himself in as the culpable driver, and, after appearing before the Magistrates' Court, is committed to trial (Michael explains, by the way, that he was in a hurry to get to his wife, who was having a difficult pregnancy and, he believed at the time he was driving, might be going imminently into labor; but he insists nevertheless that he did stop at the halt.)

Michael gets a brilliant attorney named Olliphant to mount his defense.  The two men have the following exchange about the subject of so-called independent witnesses:

"But why should the jury believe me and not the witnesses against me?  They're all independent.  They've nothing against me...."

"Nothing against you?" said Olliphant. "Haven't they?  First of all, you came off best.  You weren't hurt.  The motorcyclist was.  When an accident happens, it's human nature to take the part of the under-dog if you haven't seen what happened."

"But they'll say they did."

"Of course they'll say they did, but the chances are they didn't....None of them is going to tell deliberate lies, but they won't think they are lies....within seconds after your departure I bet most or all of those witnesses, talking about it together before the police arrived, created a picture for themselves of you dashing across the 'halt' line.  By the time the police arrived, you'd charged across the line without even slowing down."

A Blue Goose native to Scotland not England

Olliphant's task is to expose the independent witnesses as captives to their own preconceptions.  What follows is a tremendously interesting and entertaining courtroom fight, where we learn a good deal about the personal backgrounds--some humorous, some sad, many very odd indeed--of these men and women.

The funniest of the witnesses is a recurring character in Cecil's books, one Colonel Brain, who has a great enthusiasm for testifying in court.  Barzun and Taylor grumpily pronounced Colonel Brain "egregious" and in fact he is; but quite delightfully egregious, in my view, if you will permit paradox. In this novel the good colonel gives one of his classic performances:

"Colonel Brain, in what vicinity were you at about 12.30 p.m. on the 12th December last?"

"Vicinity?" queried the colonel.  "How big is that?"

"Were you anywhere near the Blue Goose?"

"Definitely," said the colonel.  "The bitter's excellent."

"Colonel Brain," said the chairman, "we are today concerned with an accident, not with the quality of the beer you drink."

"Really sir!" said the colonel, "I have sworn to tell the whole truth."

When I read Henry Cecil's fiction, I invariably find it delightful and instructive about some fascinating point of English law.  I think Cecil was one of the finest writers of twentieth-century English crime fiction, if we can call what he wrote all such.  Happily, I believe all his novels are currently available from the House of Stratus.

The Golden Age in Modern Memory: Historians of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

"A crime novel, however ingenious and exciting the plot, can only succeed if we care primarily about the people."

                               --P. D. James, Introduction to The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins

I quoted the above line from the late P. D. James in an essay I recently wrote for the January 2015 issue of CADS: Crime and Detective Stories, wherein I discuss the introductions to editions of Willie Collins's classic Victorian sensation novel The Moonstone that were written over the years by four detective novelists: Dorothy L. Sayers, the couple G. D. H. and Margaret Cole and P. D. James.

Douglas G. Greene

Both Sayers and James deemed The Moonstone a true detective novel, but a superior one that, unlike purely puzzle-oriented detective novels of the Golden Age of detective fiction (usually delimited as the period between the two world wars), attained the status of True Literature (the Coles, incidentally, did not see The Moonstone as a true detective novel; see the essay).

Up until very recently in mystery genre histories we have typically seen the Golden Age of detective fiction relatively dismissed as the period when "mere puzzles" reigned, in contrast with the modern age of the "crime novel," which, so the argument often runs, harkens back to the literary values and emotions of nineteenth-century novels like The Moonstone and has much greater artistic depth than its bright but spiritually shallow Golden Age predecessor, the puzzle-oriented detective story.

Some prominent critics for decades cast doubt on this claim. The late Jacques Barzun--author, with Wendell Hertig Taylor, of the mammoth tome A Catalogue of Crime--apotheosized the Golden Age and argued that the modern crime novel had foolishly shed its essence, entertainment, in a futile pursuit of higher literary values, while Douglas G. Greene, in a series of works, including his much-lauded biography of the great Golden Age detective novelist John Dickson Carr, has repeatedly and persuasively made the case for the admirable artistic integrity of the Golden Age puzzle mystery.

Jacques Barzun (1907-2012)

Yet most often this view was embraced in genre studies, not only by professional critics but by crime writers themselves.  In his 2010 interview with P. D. James for Spinetingler Magazine, Jim Napier aptly summarized the prevailing attitude with this paean to the woman who up until her death last week was commonly regarded as one of the two modern queens of the English crime novel (the other being Ruth Rendell):

By moving crime fiction from traditional plot-driven tales with ingenious but often far-fetched puzzles at their heart to character-driven stories, about three-dimensional people with believable lives full of conflicting emotions and contradictory actions, you raised the genre of crime fiction to the level of serious and mainstream literature.

The previous year P. D. James herself had drawn this distinction in her short--a little over 40,000 words, I estimate--mystery genre history, Talking about Detective Fiction (2009), wherein she repeatedly downplayed "ingenuity"--apparently a somewhat tarnished Golden Age aesthetic value in her eyes--in favor of "credibility." On this matter James opined: "It is apparent that publishers and readers are continuing to look for well-written mysteries which can afford the expected satisfaction of a credible plot but can legitimately be enjoyed as serious novels."

James pronounced that "realism and credibility have supplanted ingenuity," adding that the latter value, ingenuity, is "one which we [modern crime writers] have largely outgrown."  Continuing to speak on behalf of modern crime writers, James avowed, "We feel entitled to be judged as novelists, not as mere fabricators of mystery."

P. D. James (1920-2014)
no mere fabricator of mystery

There is a bit of an eat-your-vegetables mindset at work here, it seems to me. You may get just a bit  of the sweet, a smidgen of rice pudding say, in the form of a strictly "credible" mystery, but don't expect any decadently rich ingenuity on your plate. Forget astonishment, you're going to get improvement!

Of course there is nothing wrong with crime novels that aim primarily at divining not the puzzle of murder but the riddle of life's higher meaning; yet surely the avid mystery reader occasionally wants simply to get a taste of the luscious meringue of ingenuity.

It certainly would not be fair to single out P. D. James for this view, however, for she merely provided one of the most recent iterations of it.  In popular genre histories this attitude goes back over forty years now, to the early-Seventies genre studies of two crime writers of James's generation, Julian Symons (1912-1994) (Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, 1972) and Colin Watson (1920-1983) (Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and Their Audience, 1971).

Julian Symons (1912-1994)

Watson is credited with coining the term "Mayhem Parva," which he used to describe the highly socially stratified villages where most English Golden Age mysteries supposedly took place. Symons, though he rather less grudgingly than James admitted to genuine enjoyment of the ingenious Golden Age puzzles of John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, S. S. Van Dine and others (he was not as enthusiastic about Dorothy L. Sayers), argued in Bloody Murder that the Golden Age detective novel was an entertaining but ultimately frivolous and dead-ending bypath that diverged from the main literary highway of the serious crime novel.

This view was echoed by academic scholars who in the 1970s had begun serious study of the crime novel.  The English Golden Age, or "classical," detective novel largely was contrasted unfavorably on literary grounds with the American hard-boiled detective novel (American "classical" detective novels from the period received little academic notice).

In the last twenty years or so, academic scholars like Alison Light, Gill Plain and Merja Makinen began treating the novels of the Golden Age Crime Queens--including not just Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh but even Christie--with increasing respect. In popular mystery genre histories there similarly has been greater receptiveness to the idea that Sayers at least was a serious literary writer, even while these studies have remained somewhat disparaging of the Golden Age as a whole.

In her 2013 book A Very British Murder: The Story of a National Obsession, Lucy Worsley, not an academic but a PhD popular historian and BBC presenter, does not indicate broad familiarity or interest on her part with works of Golden Age mystery and does not take us much beyond Symons and Watson, on whom she often relies, but, unlike Symons, she heaped praise on Sayers's lengthy detective novel Gaudy Night (1935), which she considers one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

Lucy Worsley

P. D. James similarly prized Gaudy Night, which she first read as a teenager in the 1930s, probably a year after it was originally published. In Talking about Detective Fiction, James wrote quite favorably not only of Sayers, but of Allingham and Marsh, tellingly declaring of the latter pair: "both women are novelists, not merely fabricators of ingenious puzzles" (James makes clear she believes this to be true of Sayers as well).

In my 2012 book Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery, about three Golden Age English detective novelists dubbed "Humdrums" by Julian Symons on account of their focus on the puzzle aspect of the mystery, I mounted a defense of the puzzle-oriented detective novel associated with the Golden Age of detective fiction (Masters was co-dedicated to Jacques Barzun and Doug Greene, as well as the great American crime writer and critic Bill Pronzini; see Mystery Scene review by Jon L. Breen here, review by Rich Westwood here and review by Martin Edwards here). But I also pointed out that already well underway in the 1930s was a substantial revolt against the strictures of the classical detective novel, a revolt that extended beyond the American hard-boiled school and the British "manners mysteries" of Sayers, Allingham and Marsh.

Earlier in 2011 I had already looked at this Thirties revolt in Was Corinne's Murder Clued: The Detection Club and Fair Play (see Jon L. Breen's review here and Martin Edwards's review here).  I also discussed the matter in Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing (2013), concerning an American Choctaw mystery writer and critic of the 1930s and 1940s whose books I was instrumental in helping to get reprinted (see Jon L. Breen review here).

Martin Edwards

There are bloggers around the net who are doing a lot of new thinking about the Golden Age (many of them linked at The Passing Tramp), both in praise of the traditional detective novel but also to point out that there was more going on in the supposedly artistically static Golden Age than often is appreciated. One of these bloggers is the English crime writer Martin Edwards, a contributor to a recently published book I edited, Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene (2014).

Martin has his own study, The Golden Age of Murder, coming out next year.  It is, as understand it, about the writers who were members of England's prestigious Detection Club--including those Humdrums--and how they "invented the modern English detective story."

I haven't seen the manuscript, but I suspect that Martin will seriously revise the long regnant Symons-Watson thesis and produce the best study of the genre in its Golden Age by a crime writer since Julian Symons's own Bloody Murder.  Bloody good show, I say! Concerning this matter it's time that the critical tide turned. For a look at more evidence that this may be happening, check in again with this blog later this week.

It Takes a Village: Whispering Tongues (1934), by Laurence Kirk

"An absorbingly interesting story, excellently written, natural, convincing....If every thriller were as worth while [as Whispering Tongues] one could understand the national appetite for battening exclusively on the species."

                  --London Morning Post on Laurence Kirk's Whispering Tongues (1934)

Laurence Kirk's Whispering Tongues, the novel that immediately preceded his fine book The Farm at Paranao, previously reviewed here, is a classic English village murder mystery from the 1930s, though it is not a detective novel.  In fact at the time the book was published there was some disagreement about whether it was even any sort of mystery genre novel at all.

In the United States, Whispering Tongues was published by Doubleday, Doran, though not under its Crime Club imprint; and the publisher expressly compared the book to Francis Iles' influential psychological crime novel Before the Fact (1931). Yet Saturday Review placed Tongues in its detective fiction column, rejecting the comparison to Fact and declaring that Tongues was "interesting for mystery, not psychology" (the verdict rendered on the novel, however designated, was "very good").

The New York Times Book Review similarly included its notice on the book in its mystery stories column, yet mystery reviewer Isaac Anderson noted that Tongues "differs from the ordinary crime story...in the placing of the emphasis not upon the murder with which the story deals but upon the manner in which a hitherto peaceful English village reacts to that murder and the events following it."

On the other hand, Kirkus Reviews speculated that Tongues "might almost be sold as a mystery--but the interest lies not in the...deaths but in the revelation of the inner secrets of the people who live in the village where the deaths take place.  A strange study in female psychology, where the women outnumber the men, and where ingrown, morbid emotions play havoc with lives outwardly placid."

In other words, we are dealing here with a "crime novel" (huzzah!)--a very good one.

Tongues opens in 1931 at the trial of Harry Forster-Daintree, who was arrested the previous year for the arsenic murder of his wife, Millicent. The couple had married in the chaotic year of 1919, over the objections of Millicent's exceedingly snobbish family, the Forsters, indisputably the great personages of the village of Brackenbury:

That Forster family was everywhere, with its awful tradition of always being important....They had a faculty for breeding old maids, old maids who were somebody, so much somebody that no one was ever good enough to marry them.

The current head of the female-dominated Forster family, Miss Emmeline, barely condescends to "know" the local nobility, the Earl and Countess of Wexe, on the grounds that, in her view, the members of this ancient family "never failed to marry beneath them" (the current Countess of Wexe, we find, formerly graced the stage).

Harry Forster-Daintree--formerly merely Harry Daintree, he was required to add the Forster name when he married Millicent--is acquitted early in the novel, leaving Brackenbury under a pall of mutual suspicion.  If her husband really didn't do it, then precisely just who did poison Millicent Forster-Daintree?

Concurrently a charming love story develops between the local doctor's daughter (and distant Forster relation), Sarah Felsted, and the Earl of Wexe's son, Hugh, who due to his family's depleted fortunes is now employed as a salesman in a city department store. Eventually there is another arsenic death and from there the novel, which for the most part had up to this point been gently satirical, gathers steam as it heads to a dramatic climax, wherein a murderer's malign machinations are shockingly revealed.

Laurence Kirk
Eric Andrew Simson (1895-1956)

Whispering Tongues confirms my impression that Laurence Kirk, the pseudonym of Eric Andrew Simson (1895-1956) is a most unjustly forgotten name from Thirties fiction.

Kirk writes particularly well of women characters of varied ages and backgrounds (incidentally, Sarah Felsted's favorite novelist, as in the case of Fanny Verney, the heroine in The Farm at Paranao, is Jane Austen), he creates vivid impressions of places and his satirical wit is impeccable.*

*(Here he is on the analysis of the comestibles at Mrs. Slaney's tea, where the second of the novel's arsenic deaths takes place: "Mrs. Slaney's cakes had revealed traces of nothing more deadly than the cheapest brand of margarine.")

Additionally, Kirk's social observation is acute.  He makes plain that England's Victorian/Edwardian class structure has cracked and that the Forsters are hopeless anachronisms (as much so "as the Star Chamber," a character observes), however high Miss Emmeline may hold her proud head.

Deference to rank is collapsing--"Servants always were so cheerful when things went wrong," one character frets--and to try to survive and perhaps prosper village "betters" must strive to keep up with the shifting, tumbling times. References to economic depression and unemployment and the rise of totalitarianism are made in the novel, indicating awareness of a world that is perilously dislocated:

Look at the world!  There's food and plenty for all, but they can't find a way of distributing it. Starvation in plenty.  There's misery for you.  And futility....and madness....And these debts and disarmaments!  They'll never manage anything, because the suspicion is still there. They're just heading for another war...more mud, more blood, more agony....

As I write these words this weekend we are still awash in merited tributes to the late P. D. James, who was, to be sure, one of the most important English mystery writers in the history of the genre. But when they tell you in these tributes that before writers like James and Ruth Rendell English mystery writing had nothing to offer but "mere puzzles"--well, don't believe them!

Incidentally, next week I will have a lengthier consideration of the writing carer of PD James and its complex relationship to the Golden Age detective novel.  Additionally I should note that today is the 108th birthday of the late John Dickson Carr (only fourteen years older than James), one of the Golden Age greats.  At his fine blog Sergio Angelini has compiled a master-list of people's favorite Carr detective novels, including mine. Interesting stuff.

Coming also will be a bit more on Laurence Kirk himself.

P. D. James (1920-2014)

I was very sad to learn, getting in late from Thanksgiving festivities, of the death of P. D. James.  I have enjoyed reading her crime fiction since becoming acquainted with it in the 1990s, and some of her earlier titles, like A Mind to Murder (1963) and Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), are among my favorite modern detective novels, beautifully plotted and movingly narrated, confirming that the detective novel can fruitfully blend the probing of puzzling incident with the scrying of perplexing character.

In Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery and the introduction to Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene, I query much in James' views of detective fiction, particularly her relative dismissal of "ingenuity" in favor of "credibility," a view that would have been anathema to many Golden Age mystery fans; yet there is no question that the modern Crime Queen was one of the most important figures in the history of British crime fiction and a remarkable person in her own right, someone who not only in her life overcame considerable personal adversity, but positively triumphed over it, becoming in the process an inspiration to us all as she advanced indomitably into her nineties. Her presence in this world will be much missed.

Previous P. D. James articles at The Passing Tramp:

A 2012 Salute to P. D. James
P. D. James: Cozy Writer?
Follies: A Review of The Black Tower (1975)
A Review of The Maul and the Pear Tree (1971)
P. D. James' 2002 BBC Desert Island Disc Discussion

Vanishing History: Wilders Walk Away (1948), by Herbert Brean

Other people die of mumps,
Or general decay,
Of fever, chills or others ills
But Wilders walk away.

Herbert Brean's first crime novel, Wilders Walk Away (1948), was tremendously praised by the mystery fiction critic Anthony Boucher, and it's not hard to see why: it reads like a fusion of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, probably Boucher's two favorite mystery authors.

Wilders must have seemed to Boucher like a blessed return to the great days of the Golden Age. Probably in no small part due to the hugely influential Boucher's praise, Wilders almost walked away with an Edgar, for the best first mystery novel of 1948.*

*(it lost to Mildred Davis' The Room Upstairs)

Though it falls short of the great masterpieces of classic miracle crime fiction, Wilders is a good mystery tale, blending the small town New England atmosphere of Ellery Queen's Wrightsville novels with the antiquarianism and miracle problems with which John Dickson Carr is so strongly associated (scattered throughout Wilders there are even footnotes, reminiscent of earlier Carr novels like The Crooked Hinge and The Reader Is Warned).

The story opens with freelance journalist Reynold Frame arriving in Wilders Lane, Vermont, one of those perfectly-preserved New England towns where most of the structures date back to the eighteenth century. He's planning a photo story on the town for a big national magazine (one assumes something like Life, for which Brean himself did many articles).  Once there, however, Reynold soon finds himself embroiled in a mystery--or, to be precise, a whole host of mysteries!

It seems the town's most prominent family--the Wilders, naturally--has a history of highly mysterious vanishings.  So prominent has this history been that a Lizzie Borden-like jingle to describe the phenomenon has arisen (see above).  One Wilder even was among the ten people who vanished in 1872 from the infamous real life ship the Mary Celeste--which is really going something extra!

Will Constance be next to walk away?

Reynold Frame just happens to be a paying guest at the home of Constance Wilder, whose father vanished from the town a year earlier. On the very day Reynold arrives, Constance's sister vanishes as well. Other vanishings follow, and eventually dead bodies start appearing. Reynold keeps quite busy working on the story he came there for in the first place, as well as solving mysteries past and present and perhaps even winning the heart of the rather imperious Constance (she won't call him by his first name until over the half the book is over).

The appeal of this novel to any fan of John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen is obvious, though ultimately it doesn't quite live up to the best works of the masters, in my view.

Basic plotting imperatives early on suggest to readers the identity of the fiendish culprit of the present crimes, even before they have the chance the deduce the solution from the clues that are (quite fairly) provided. Reynold Frame solves three miracle problems from the past--all Wilder vanishings--but the solutions are not up to complexity of the Carr brand (indeed, one of them seemingly invokes not Carr but rather Carolyn Wells).

The solution of the modern-day crimes stretches plausibility in the manner of Golden Age Baroque style, but if you're a fan of this kind of mystery I doubt you will complain much. Unlike PD James, say, you will admire the ingenuity of a mystery more than the strict credibility of its explanation.

For me the best elements of Wilders Walk Away are the New England local color and the enticing way in which Brean weaves the Wilder legend into the story.  It really does feel like some bizarre regional folklore (in the book Brean indicates that he was quite familiar with Charles Fort, the great expert in what has been termed "anomalous phenomena").

Brean is more interested in regional antiquarianism than the supernatural per se (his footnotes deal with such things as New England antiques and recipes), so at times one is more reminded of a non-zany Phoebe Atwood Taylor than John Dickson Carr; but fortunately I like Taylor too!  I will read more by Herbert Brean (1907-1973), who published three additional Reynold Frame mysteries in the 1950s, as well as, after he halted the Reynold Frame series, three non-series crime novels, the last of which appeared in 1966.

By the way, although Reynold Frame solves some half-dozen or more mysteries during the course of the events in Wilders Walk Away, regrettably he leaves unsolved the Mary Celeste affair.  Darn.

I wish American readers a Happy Thanksgiving and I assure everyone that I will be back with a new blog review for Friday, no matter how lethargic I may feel by then!

How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Rio? The Farm at Paranao (The Farm at Santa Fe) (1935), by Laurence Kirk Full Review

Up to that afternoon one would have felt quite certain in predicting the course of Fanny's future life. It would be a dull, safe, respectable life, without any high lights; if there were any love in it, it would be a sedate, placid kind of love; if there were any money in it, it would be a small regular income; if there were anything worth remembering in it, it would be only the sweetness of her own disposition. 

Chillingham always had the same effect on the young ladies who were brought up there and went on living there.  After a brief and ineffectual struggle they slowly became all the things which in the first vigor of youth they had resolved they would never be.  Their ideas were ten years behind the times, their clothes one year behind fashion, their hats were perched on the tops of their heads, and they couldn't think what had come over the younger generation.

That was the kind of life for which Fanny seemed inexorably destined, but about four o'clock on that Wednesday afternoon fate quietly stepped in and switched over the points away from the slow suburban line on to a track of its own....

Chillingham is one of those classic provincial English towns that between-the-wars English mystery writers loved to portray, often with varying degrees of satire (for classic examples see Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage, 1930, and Gladys Mitchell's The Saltmarsh Murders, 1932).

In The Farm at Paranao (1935), Laurence Kirk's portrayal of his aptly-named Chillingham is quite definitely satirical. The reader soon is in full sympathy with  the desire of young Fanny Verney to escape from Chillingham, her widowed mother--invariably called "Mrs. Verney" by the author; we never learn her name--and their "old-maidish little house."  Fanny's favorite writer, by the way, is Jane Austen.

Fanny is offered such a chance by Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson (we know their first names: Wilkie and Rosie), a plain-spoken retired North Country boots manufacturer and his wife, who have taken a shine to her and want her to see something of life.  They offer to chaperon her on a South American cruise and pay her costs. Mrs. Verney graciously assents, once she learns there for Fanny there will be a couple of marriageable males--i.e., gentry stock--on board the ship.  This doesn't mean that Mrs. Verney has any actual regard for the Wilkinsons, who pronounce a's as u's (as in "Funny," not "Fanny") and once went "to a Fancy Dress Ball as Tweedledum and Tweedledee and won first prize on their own merits without any stuffing."

"It wasn't everyone in Chillingham who wanted to know the Wilkinsons," notes the author:

indeed nobody wanted to know them, but they gave such good and lavish parties that it was very hard to resist.  Retired manufacturers started at a disadvantage in Chillingham; to be accepted there it was advisable to be scholastic, military or professional. The late Mrs. Verney for instance had been a teacher of Higher Mathematics, and Mrs. Verney never forgot the 'Higher' when she spoke of his occupation; she didn't want him to be mistaken for one of those inferior persons who taught multiplication and addition.

Incidentally, I always think of books like this when we invariably read in mystery genre histories--see PD James and Lucy Worsley for recent popular examples--that English Golden Age crime writing venerated, and wanted to preserve, purportedly idyllic Edwardian village life.  So often that claim turns out to be off the mark, as in this case. The author of The Farm at Paranao obviously is much more sympathetic to the nouveau riche--and genuinely kindly--Wilkinsons, who made their money in manufacturing, than he is to the chilly representatives of Chillingham society.

Once Fanny and the Wilkinsons make it to spectacular Rio, Fanny encounters a handsome tango-dancing stranger, Keith Buchanan--yes, not of Portuguese, but Scottish derivation, like the author--who turns out to be the manager of a farm outside Santa Fe, Paranao (Parana). Fanny falls in love and not long afterward has lost her virginity on the beach to Keith (the Wilkinsons admittedly may have slipped up slightly here in their roles as chaperons). Naturally, the lovers now decide to get married, though Fanny says she must return home first to do battle with her frostily genteel mother.

When the victorious Fanny returns to South America to marry Keith she has moments of foreboding about what she may be letting herself in for in Brazil, but she brushes these aside, being so happy to think about what she got herself out of back at Chillingham. It turns out, however, that there was something, after all, to Fanny's moments of foreboding!

Fanny is utterly enchanted by Rio
but will the enchantment break at Santa Fe?

The reviewer is brought up short at this point, unfortunately, because there is practically nothing left to discuss about the book without "spoiling" it.  Let me just say the the story takes a couple of very interesting twists, neither of which I foresaw, even though all is foreshadowed. One of the twists is intensely suspenseful. Again, I will quote from a contemporary review:

"It is a fine yarn, well told, and the publisher's advice not to read the last few chapters in bed is not merely a good advertisement....you may need a sedative."

The Farm at Paranao is an impressive suspense novel, with not only a fiercely effective climax but clever writing and some excellent characterization (including Fanny herself, who, though not romantically idealized by the author, is one of the most genuinely impressive women protagonists in suspense fiction that I have encountered). On the strength of this novel alone I would say that Laurence Kirk is a between-the-wars popular writer who has been most undeservedly unforgotten.

Better yet, the previous year he produced another fine genre novel, Whispering Tongues, a village mystery most originally and winningly told.  I will be reviewing that one next week, with some more about the author.