No Past Is Dead: The Last Talk with Lola Faye (2010), by Thomas H. Cook

the American hardcover edition
by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's
(an Otto Penzler book)
--a beautfiul edition

Lola Faye peered at me with what seemed quite deep sympathy.  "It's a sad sort of story, the one we've been going over."

"It's Southern gothic, that's for sure," I told her.  "Families with dark secrets.  The war between fathers and sons.  Selfishness.  Greed.  Violence.  The debts of the past.  Old bills too high to pay, but which keep coming in."

           --The Last Talk with Lola Faye (2009)

Anyone who reads one of the classic crime novels by Thomas H. Cook should not be surprised to learn that the Alabama-born author is an admirer of the works of the great Mississippi-born author William Faulkner. One of the famous Faulkner quotations is "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The same can be said of the past in so much of Cook's fictional work as well. In his books, as in Faulkner's, the past is palpable.

Thomas H. Cook was born in the small town of Fort Payne, Alabama, in 1947.  When Cook made his entry into the world, Fort Payne's population numbered around 6000; it has since crept up past 14,000.  Like Cook's fictional Glenville, Alabama in The Last Talk with Lola Faye, Fort Payne is not of the American South of cotton fields and crumbling plantation houses that people associate with William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams.  It is not part of Alabama's Black Belt--named for the rich, dark soil--but rather the state's Appalachian Highlands.

Fort Payne, Alabama

Cook received a BA in English and philosophy from Georgia State in 1969, then went on in the 1970s to obtain advanced degrees at Hunter College (history) and Columbia University (philosophy).  He taught English and history for several years but since 1982 has made a career from writing.  His great breakthrough came, I think, when his 1996 novel, The Chatham School Affair, won the Edgar award from the Mystery Writers Association for the best novel of the year.  It was in the 1990s that Cook really hit his stride as a writer, producing what I believe are a series of crime fiction masterpieces.  The Last Talk with Lola Faye is, in my view, fully up to that 1990s standard.

In Lola Faye one can see Cook's resemblance to Faulkner as a writer (with more readily intelligible sentences).  Faulkner himself enjoyed crime fiction and wrote some legitimate mystery tales, as I discuss on the blog here.

When I first read Faulkner in high school and college in the 1980s I had been an Agatha Christie reader since the age of eight and I immediately was struck by the resemblance in some respects between classic mysteries and Faulkner's novels.  The intricate plots, the fractured narratives, the unreliable narrators--these are all literary elements that have been long familiar to mystery readers.

I found Faulkner novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! to be real page-turners, in part because of the driving need I felt simply to find out what had happened. For all the prolixity of Faulkner's (seemingly endless) paragraphs, I felt he was a terrific storyteller at heart.

So I feel about Thomas H. Cook. In prose leaner and less ornate than Faulkner's but still richly rewarding (part of the joy of reading Cook is purely the prose, his wonderful turns of phrase, such as "all our actions justified, none of them justifiable" or "life's darkest acts pool and swirl, but never go under the bridge"), Cook in Lola Faye tells another one of his intricately plotted and narrated tales of deceits and deceptions that cause grievous death and lasting despair.

Lola Faye concerns a series of deaths that struck the narrator's home town of Glenville, Alabama two decades earlier. The narrator, Luke Paige, is an embittered history professor who once had aimed to produce great narrative histories, but now churns out a dismal succession of works written in dull academese, definitely unloved and mostly unread (invariably, writes Cook of Luke, he would start out big with a "passionate concept," then watch it "shrink to a bloodless mongraph").

I won't deny that Luke is a character of particular appeal to me.  I grew up in Alabama (though farther South, in a university town) and have a history MA and PhD. I even have dared to aspire to write prose that people might actually want to read.  But the character of Luke has broader appeal, I think, as a fascinating portrait in unfulfilled aspiration, whatever the reader's exact background.

After twenty years Luke encounters another past Glenvillian, Lola Faye Gilroy, on a wintry night in St. Louis, at a sparsely attended lecture he is giving on his latest dull book.  After the lecture the two go for drinks in the lounge at his hotel.  It is clear Lola Faye wants to have a good talk. This talk between the two lasts most of the rest of the book.

Who is Lola Faye?  Well, I don't want to give away too much, but Lola Faye knew Luke's father--many said quite intimately--when she worked for him at the Glenville Variety Store. Luke's father was shot dead one night in the kitchen of his house twenty years ago, evidently by Lola Faye's jealous husband.

As Lola Faye and Luke talk, Luke's mind travels back to the past, giving us his view of these earlier events. We start to realize, of course, that the accepted explanation of things may not provide the full picture.  We also start to wonder, with Luke, about Lola Faye's motivations.  Why did she determine to meet him in St. Louis?

stopping for an appletini and a chat
--a fateful December evening meeting in St. Louis

I should add that, in addition to the strong plotting, narrative dexterity and moving characters in Lola Faye, there is a powerful sense of place, conveyed both in the overt narrative of Luke, who despises his home town, and the subtext.  One of my favorite passages in the novel occurs where Luke contrasts the Faulknerian southern town of fiction with the shabby reality that is Glenville:

Now take that domed courthouse and replace it with a gray concrete monstrosity that sits on a parched brown slope overlooking a single narrow street of squat buildings artlessly festooned with crude hand-lettered signs....

DeKalb County Courthouse, Fort Payne, Alabama--
a "gray concrete monstrosity" on a stark, slight slope, 
built in 1950,when Thomas H. Cook was but a toddler, 
replacing an improbably grandiose Victorian structure.
Happily, the grim 1950 courthouse was remodeled
a half-century later. For more see
courthousehistory.com

This courthouse description called to my mind a bit the Barbour County, Alabama courthouse in the town of Clayton (see illustration below). In the novel there also is a Confederate war memorial in Glenville, as there is in Clayton (on the other hand Clayton also boasts an octagonal house and a tombstone shaped like a whiskey bottle, so top that). Coincidentally, just across the Barbour County northern borderline in Russell County is an unincorporated community named Glennville (two "n's"--though this was once a place where cotton planters lived.

Barbour County Courthouse, Clatyon, Alabama

For me The Last Talk with Lola Faye has, among crime novels, all the compulsive readability and narrative tension of a classic Barbara Vine or Margaret Millar (French blogger Xavier Lechard has compared Cook to Millar and he is right), along with a lasting poignancy in its depictions of place and people. It's an impressive piece of fiction.

By the Bookplate II The Philanthropist Forger: Moe Turman, The House of the Missing and the Money that Vanished

Are people who commit crimes more likely to be attracted to crime fiction? Or does fictional crook stuff inevitably fizzle with crooks?

From this blog we know it's possible that shortly before his shoot-out with federal agents outside the Little Bohemia Lodge in 1934 John Dillinger may have relaxed by reading Rufus King's Murder on the Yacht; and we know that Asa Guy Gurney, who illegally extracted $22,500 from a bank in 1894 and was exposed by a thumb mark in a celebrated case of forensic detection, owned a copy of Christopher Bush's Dead Man Twice.

Now let's peruse the story of Moe Turman (1896-1957), the once nationally known Jazz Age financial whiz, philanthropist and forger.

the Turman bookplate

The attractive book plate of Moe Turman and his wife Anna, depicting the Hebrew Temple Menorah, graces the edition of Sinclair Gluck's first crime thriller, The House of the Missing, that I own (see illustration to the right)

The House of the Missing was originally published in 1922 by the Inter-Continental Publishing Corporation of New York and was reprinted in 1924 by Dodd, Mead and Company, one of the powerhouses of American mystery publishing during the Golden Age of detective fiction (it's this slightly later edition that the Turmans owned).

Moses "Moe" Turman was born in 1896 in the Lithuanian city of Vilna (today Vilnius), then part of the Russian Empire.  Moe was a son of Pincus and Sarah Schlossberg Turman (Moe had four siblings: Irving, Jack, Sylvia and Esther). Pincus Turman, a Vilna rabbi, brought his family to the United States in 1903, where they initially settled in Trenton, New Jersey, residing at 209 Fall Street.

Pincus Turman became rabbi of the Congregation Brothers of Israel Synagogue in Trenton for some half-dozen years before moving on to Chicago.  A 1908 booklet, Trenton's Foreign Colonies, praised his children for "attending the American schools [in Trenton] and outstripping many of their American school-mates in progress." In a dozen years young Moe would be making a name for himself in New York City, in the world of finance.

Congregation Brothers of Israel Cemetery

After working as an office boy for Samuel Phillipson & Co. in Chicago, Moe following the death of his father moved to New York in 1914, where he took courses at New York University and later attended Eron Business College from 1918 to 1921. Now the breadwinner for his family, Moe, so the story goes, in 1914 or 1915 borrowed $100 at 50% interest to send to Chicago in support of his widowed mother and his four siblings--a fateful decision. He started borrowing from others to pay off previous obligations ("borrowing from Peter to pay Paul," as Turman put it), setting up a pyramid of debt that eventually collapsed on him in 1925, making newspaper headlines around the nation.

In 1921, Turman, but 25 years of age, formed the Equity Finance and Service Company to lend money to businesses. For a time the firm seemed to be prospering and, with his wife, Anna Krasnow Turman, the "boy financier," as he was called, went in for philanthropy and society. Turman served as president of Young Judaea, a Zionist youth group founded in the US in 1909, as well as secretary of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, built in 1920.

the impressive Brooklyn Jewish Center opened in 1920

In an attempt to keep afloat a financial boat that in reality was foundering, Turman began forging the signatures of prominent businessmen on notes.  When he was arrested in 1925, prosecutors claimed that his outstanding monetary obligations totaled 1.3 million dollars, while his bank account amounted to just 14 dollars (Turman claimed his actual debt was "merely" $400,000).

sensation of 1920
Charles Ponzi (1882-1949)

Turman's forgery trial made national news in 1925, with papers comparing him, perhaps inevitably, to that infamous grandiose Twenties schemer Charles Ponzi (the Chicago Tribune dubbed Turman "Ponzi Moe").

Despite such evident scorn in the press, Turman seems to have retained a certain amount of popular sympathy within the Brooklyn Jewish community, where he had been well-liked and, indeed, much admired for his commitment to social welfare and seeming business acumen.

It was avowed that Turman had never defrauded any of the philanthropic associations with he had been involved. Turman himself fervently denied insinuations that he might have cheated charities.

The young man even declared to reporters, "I hope when it's all over I can go back to my work with charities."  And for his part the New York District Attorney stated of Turman that if his story was true he was no Ponzi but rather "a frightened young Jew who went from one debt defalcation to another."

When Turman was found guilty of second degree forgery, however, he was sentenced to five to ten years at Sing Sing.  Judge Alfred J. Talley, who presided at Turman's trial, a few months earlier had debated famed liberal lawyer Clarence Darrow on the matter of capital punishment (this shortly after the Leopold-Loeb murder trial, where Darrow had been the defense attorney); he was not a man who took a lenient view of misdoing.

Sing Sing prison by night

After the murderers Leopold and Loeb were spared death at the behest of Darrow, Judge Talley thundered: "It is not the criminals, actual or potential, that need a neuropathic hospital, it is the people who slobber over them in an effort to find excuses for their crimes." At his trial a few months later, Turman got no sympathy from Talley, who additionally recommended that the young man, who had never become a naturalized US citizen, be deported from the country at the expiration of his prison term (as Charles Ponzi would be when he was released from prison in 1934).

"I realize that deportation would be a harsh sentence for him," Judge Talley lectured Turman's defense attorney, "and that is the reason I make the recommendation.  I am sorry I cannot issue the order for deportation myself.  I want this case to be an example to young foreigners who come here and attempt to become captains of finance through criminal means."

Ultimately Turman served a little less than four years in prison.  When he was released in 1928, he was not deported, surely to Judge Talley's disgust. Indeed, in 1933 Turman was pardoned and he prospered again, more permanently this time, as the president of an office furniture company. He and his wife again became active in charities, including the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and the Hudson Guild.  At his death in 1957 it is said that he had paid back "virtually all" of his debt.

As his world was about to come crumbling apart all around him in 1924, did Moe Turman seek "escape" at his house at 1047 President Street, Brooklyn, with Sinclair Gluck's thriller The House of the Missing?

Was he one of those "tired businessmen" of publishers' promotional copy who liked to relax with a good mystery?  Or maybe it was Anna Turman who read the stuff? Whatever the case, even the events that take place in The House of the Missing may not have been quite as thrilling to a lot of people as the real life secrets about to be divulged to the world concerning Moe Turman's tempestuous business ventures.

Note: a picture of Moe Turman can be seen in this contemporary news article (and don't miss the bit on "John Hoover" directly below.

A Couple of (John) Christmas Mysteries: The Studio Crime (1929) and Dead Man's Quarry (1930), by Ianthe Jerrold

British author Ianthe Jerrold (1898-1977) wrote two detective novels, The Studio Crime (1929) and Dead Man's Quarry (1930).  Both books were quite well-received, and on the strength of the first mystery the author was invited to become a member of England's Detection Club when it was officially formed at the beginning of 1930.

Ianthe Jerrold came from a literary family (she was a great-granddaughter of Douglas William Jerrold and a great-niece of William Blanchard Jerrold) and she turned to writing at a young age. Before her two detective novels appeared she had published poetry as a teenager in the 1910s and in the 1920s she produced four mainstream novels.  Her mainstream novels were praised for their narrative charm and appealing characters, qualities that enhance her detective fiction as well. Besides being engagingly written, Jerrold's detective novels are well-plotted, satisfying the exacting standards of the Detection Club at this time, as well as such purist puzzle sticklers as Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor (see A Catalogue of Crime).

The Studio Crime is set in London, where on a foggy night foul murder fells a malicious artist at his studio in St. John's Wood. Jerrold's amateur sleuth, John Christmas, happens to be on hand, at a friend's party at a flat on a lower floor; and he is soon investigating a baffling murder case involving a locked door, a cryptic message from a dead man, a vanishing lady and an intriguing individual in a fez. You might see certain resemblances to Golden Age murder master John Dickson Carr in all this.

the second John Christmas mystery

Dead Man's Quarry takes John Christmas to the countryside--the beautiful Welsh Marches, to be more exact--where the ever-clever amateur sleuth encounters a charming cycling party that at the moment is rather vexed because one of its members has gone missing. When a dead body shows up in a local disused quarry, the police find they have a case of murder on their hands. Convinced that the authorities are after the wrong person, Christmas starts a-sleuthing once again.

Dead Man's Quarry boasts such classic English mystery elements as quaint country villages, rustic inns and cottages, an ancestral manor house, a frontispiece map and an engaging (and ultimately poignant) love triangle.

Fans of England's Golden Age Crime Queens--Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh--should enjoy excavating Quarry, a notable precursor of the Thirties English manners mystery. Indeed, both Dead Man's Quarry and The Studio Crime are admirably accomplished detective novels, long overdue for recovery. The two novels will be available worldwide, in both paper and electronic editions, later this Spring, courtesy of Dean Street Press. And more is yet to come.

Star Power: Crime on My Hands (1944) and Stranger at Home (1946), by George Sanders

I was pleased to see that the distinguished critic and author Michael Dirda devoted his most recent piece in the Washington Post to the Golden Age crime writer Todd Downing, including discussion of Clues and Corpses, my 2013 book on Downing and his writing (including his crime fiction newspaper reviews and other critical pieces). For some more on Downing and another, admittedly rather more famous, Oklahoma crime writer contemporary, Jim Thompson, see "A Tale of Two Citizens," Parts One and Two.

Among Michael Dirda's vast reading interests is classic detective fiction and, in contrast with some, he takes notice of the worthy efforts of small presses and micro-presses, who often today are making some of the most interesting choices in genre fiction publishing.

I have been involved for a few years now with Coachwhip, who has republished not only the Downing mysteries but a number of other vintage mystery writers.  I'll be saying more about this a bit later.

George Sanders is back in print
dealing with crime and mystery
in his most inimitable fashion

Currently I've also been doing some work with Dean Street Press, who has recently reprinted Crime on My Hands (1944) and Stranger at Home (1946), the pair of mystery novels credited to that exceedingly suave British actor, George Sanders, filmdom's Saint and Falcon and a notable player in a number of other movies of interest to crime fans, including Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and Foreign Correspondent (1940) as well as The Lodger (1945), Hangover Square (1945), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) and Lured (1947) (and we must not forget his Oscar-winning performance in All About Eve, 1950). Mystery authors Craig Rice and Leigh Brackett have been listed as the ghosts behind the first and second Sanders mysteries, respectively, although the publisher's foreword to the new editions states that "there is certainly forensic evidence that Sanders contributed substantially to Crime on My Hands."

get acquainted
Stranger at Home is back in print

The two novels were well-received in their day, but have been out of print for many years now (Crime on My Hands was last reprinted a quarter of a century ago by IPL).

Crime, in which George Sanders himself serves as narrator and detective, is, as the foreword states, "a clever spoof on Sanders' screen persona," as well as an entertaining mystery in its own right. Stranger is a fine example of the more hard-boiled style in Forties mystery fiction ("California casualties in high chrome," as Kirkus Reviews alliteratively put it).

As the foreword to the novels notes, the Sanders mysteries "had an important precursor in Gypsy Rose Lee's The G-String Murders (1941)," a bestselling mystery novel with a celebrity author/narrator (it has been claimed that Craig Rice ghosted Lee's novel as well, though this claim has been disputed by others). Together with the Sanders tales and Mother Finds a Body (1942), Lee's own follow-up to her hugely successful first mystery, these works constitute notable examples of the modern celebrity novel.

Both George Sanders mysteries are now available on Kindle from Amazon and Amazon.com. Dean Street Press has some other interesting classic crime authors in the queue, some of whose books will be available in both paper and electronic versions; and I will be discussing another one of them later today, as well as posting some more cover illustrations.

The Bells and the Bees: Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov Discuss Detective Fiction

American literary critic and author Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) famously (infamously to many) voiced his disdain for detective fiction in a couple of New Yorker essays, "Why Do People Read Detective Stories?" and "Who Care Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?"  In these memorably splenetic pieces Wilson dismissed detective fiction fans as desperate junk-lit addicts who should have been embarrassed with themselves for spending time scarfing such trash. Naturally enough, this attitude did not endear the outspoken critic to detective fiction fans, and many of them wrote him letters telling him so.

Are we having fun yet?
Edmund Wilson, aka "Bunny" (derived from plum bun)
flayer of detective, supernatural and fantasy fiction

There were, however, a few people who wrote Wilson agreeable letters on the matter. One of these individuals was the emigre Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). The same month that Edmund Wilson's first essay on detective fiction appeared in the New Yorker, Nabokov, who in 1940 had begun what was to be a correspondence of three decades with Wilson, wrote his friend:

I liked very much your article on detective stories. Of course, Agatha is unreadable--but Sayers, whom you do not mention, writes well.  Try Crimes Advertises [Murder Must Advertise].  Your attitude to detective writing is curiously like my attitude towards Soviet literature, so that you are on the whole absolutely right.

Nabokov then proceeded to quote to "Bunny" (Edmund Wilson's rather unexpected nickname) excerpts of poor writing from tales collected in Eugene Thwing's World's Best 100 Detective Stories (1929). He predicted they would give the sensitive and superior Wilson "slight nausea."

Valdimir Nabokov praised H. F. Heard's
A Taste for Honey as "very nicely written"--
"though the entomological part is of course all wrong"

Unlike Wilson, however, Nabokov himself in fact had a certain partiality toward detective fiction (the well-written ones, of course), as his favorable reference to Dorothy L. Sayers suggests. The previous year, he wrote Wilson that after some excruciating dental surgery

I was lying on my bed groaning...yearning for a good detective story--and at that very moment the Taste for Honey sailed in...Mary [McCarthy, Wilson's then wife, like him a prominent literary critic and author] was right, I enjoyed it hugely--though the entomological part is of course all wrong (in one passage he [the author, H. F. Heard] confuses the Purple Emperor, a butterfly, with the Emperor moth).  But it is very nicely written.  Did Mary see the point of the detective's name at the very end?  I did.

Nabokov may have liked H. F. Heard's beekeeper mystery, still in print today, yet that same year he complained that he "did not think much of" John Dickson Carr's The Judas Window, also still in print today, which Mary McCarthy had read.  The way in which the murder was accomplished he deemed droll after a fashion but unconvincing, and he admonished McCarthy, "you ought to have found something better."

Mary McCarthy
enjoyed detective fiction, no matter what her
persnickety plum bun husband had to say about it
(she panned Sayers' Gaudy Night, however)

For his part Wilson admitted in a 1944 letter to Nabokov that "I have been getting dozens of letters from [detective fiction] addicts protesting against my article and only three so far approving it." Wilson's 1945 follow-up essay in the New Yorker, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?", did tackle the fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers, specifically her bell ringer mystery The Nine Tailors; but Wilson, in contrast with Nabokov, was wholly dismissive of the highest-browed Crime Queen:

I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well, and I felt that my correspondents [concerning his first essay] had been playing her as their literary ace. But, really, she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective story writers and she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level.  In any serious department of fiction, her writing would appear not to have any distinction at all.  

Of The Nine Tailors Wilson declared damningly that he found it "one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field."  He likened the beloved mystery novel to "an encyclopedia article on campanology."

At least Sayers' fans have the satisfaction of knowing that Vladimir Nabokov was an admirer of Sayers' writing (though not Christie's)--in French translation, anyway!

Note: Letter quotations in this piece are drawn from Simon Karlinsky, ed., Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971 (rev. ed., 2001).

Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!

A Life of Crime: Sinclair Gluck (1887-1956)

the author of mellodrammers
strikes a most dignified pose

With so much of American Golden Age crime fiction the focus in genre studies is on hard-boiled and noir, with little attention given to what might be termed "traditional" detective novels and thrillers. Those, it seems, are the province of England.

Although some of the work of the between-the-wars genre author Sinclair Gluck was influenced by Dashiell Hammett and other "tough" crime writers, much of Gluck's mystery fiction resembles the work of the more fanciful English thriller writer Edgar Wallace. 

In her "In the Library" column for the San Jose News, San Jose, California City Librarian Edith Daley (1874-1948) (see here and here for photos of Mrs. Daley) highly praised Gluck's novel The Man Who Never Blundered (1929). 

Under the byline Sheer Melodrama, But Very Exciting a most enthusiastic review followed:

If you want to forget, completely, that bothersome business deal or the troublesome housekeeping, just make yourself comfortable in the old easy chair, adjust the light and open to chapter one....Sheer melodrama--should be spelled "mellodrammer"!  But no end of excitement--cumulative excitement, with thrill following thrill, clear to the end of the last page.  It didn't happen, of course not.  And it just never could happen.  And it isn't literature--not even a forty-second cousin to literature, the kind of literature that William Dean Howells would have tipped his hat to on a busy street corner, with everybody on the old hotel porch looking on.  But, all the same, once in a blue moon, we need to be jostled out of the work-a-day rut into complete forgetfulness of US and our small concerns.  You'll smile at the book while you read it--but just try putting it down unfinished. It's by Sinclair Gluck.

As Daley's delightful review indicates, we are far from mean streets realism in the typical Sincalir Gluck "mellodrammer," but these sorts of thrillers were quite popular in the 1920s and into the 1930s, both in the UK and the US (and, indeed, around the world).  Gluck also wrote at least a couple of books that were more in the nature of actual detective novels: The Last Trap, which was filmed in 1935 as The Dark Hour (see Scott Ratner's recent posting here), and Death Comes to Dinner (The Shadow in the House).  

Gluck also was a prolific writer for the pulps, with works by him appearing in, for example, Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, even Black Mask.  At least half of his published novels, including The Man Who Never Blundered, were originally serialized in pulps.

Sinclair Gluck was born Jasper Sinclair Gluck in Buffalo, New York in 1887, the son of James Fraser Gluck (1852-1897), a prominent lawyer, and Effie Dunreath Tyler, the daughter of a distinguished  Congregational minister, Charles Mellen Tyler (1832-1918). Gluck's lawyer father graduated in 1874 from Cornell University, where he was president of his class and received the school's highest undergraduate honor, the Woodford Prize for oratory.  

James Gluck had a great interest in books and amassed a large collection of original literary manuscripts, including Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which he donated to the Buffalo Library. The matter of the Huckleberry Finn manuscript made national news in the early 1990s, when the first half of it, long thought lost, was discovered by one of Sinclair Gluck's daughters in an attic trunk in Los Angeles, where Gluck settled in the 1910s.  It was thought that James Gluck borrowed the first half of the manuscript and forgot to return it. The elder Gluck died at the age of 45, in 1897, when Sinclair was but ten years old.

Sincalir Gluck's sister, Margel Gluck, was a violinist who studied at the Prague Conservatory with famed teacher Otakar Sevcik and later in St. Petersburg with Leopold Auer. She made a number of acclaimed American and European performance tours, including one where she was accompanist to the great operatic soprano Lusia Tetrazzini.

Sinclair Gluck was educated in New York and London, at Manlius Military Academy and the University of London.  He himself never attended Cornell University, but he had strong connections to the school, for not only did his father graduate from Cornell, but his maternal grandfather, the Congregational minister, was a Professor of Christian Ethics there and his wife, Nancy Lee (1904-2003), whom he married in 1925, was a daughter of Duncan Campbell Lee, a Cornell oratory professor, crusading newspaper owner and lawyer who later moved to London (Nancy Lee grew up in a house in Highgate).

Gluck's mother married again, to London literary agent James Hughes Massie, of Curtis Brown and Massie and later Hughes Massie and Company. After receiving his education at the University of London, Gluck returned to the United States.

Before the US entry into the Great War, Gluck published, as Melrod Danning (quite a moniker), several novelizations of silent films, including a Mary Pickford vehicle, The Foundling. After war service with the British Army in Mesopotamia and later on the Western Front, he edited the automobile trade magazine The Commercial Vehicle, before turning to the writing of crime fiction in 1922. And once he started he didn't stop for two decades. Between 1922 and 1941, Gluck by my count published 18 thrillers and detective novels, which are listed below.  I plan to review a few of these in the weeks to come, starting with The Last Trap, his one book adapted to film.

Crime Novels by Sinclair Gluck
The House of the Missing 1922

The White Streak 1924

Thieves Honor 1924

The Green Blot 1925

The Dragon in Harness 1926

The Four Winds 1926

The Deeper Scar 1927

The Last Trap 1928

The Man Who Never Blundered 1928

Death Comes to Dinner (The Shadow in the House) 1929

The Blind Fury 1930

The Wildcat 1931

Red Emeralds 1932

Minus X 1933

Sea Shroud 1934

The Great London Mystery 1936

A Delicate Case of Murder 1937

Come and Kill Me 1941

Guest Post from The Strolling Player: Twelve Favorite Film Adaptations of Golden Age Detective Novels

The Passing Tramp is proud to introduce to you Scott Ratner, known here as The Strolling Player, author of the Agatha Christie-inspired play Kill a Better Mousetrap (click the link to see the impressive celebrity endorsements from Golden Age Hollywood), with an interesting piece on his dozen favorite film adaptations of Golden Age detective novels. I have blogged every so often about crime and mystery films (including films mentioned below), but I most definitely bow to our Strolling Player's knowledge of Golden Age crime cinema. And now over to Scott Ratner and his list, with some illustrations and captions by me, followed by some comments from me. Scott and I would love to hear the opinions from readers of this blog as well. What do you think?

1) AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (1945--based on the novel by Agatha Christie)

Yes, it's a total Hollywoodization, but a brilliantly executed one, vastly entertaining, and with a great deal of intelligence employed in its elements of plot deception. So until a truly faithful (and still entertaining) version comes along--and no, the Russian version doesn't really qualify on either of those counts.…

2) GREEN FOR DANGER (1946--based on the novel by Christianna Brand)

In many respects this film is superior to the very fine source novel (though it does leave out a few of my favorite clues). Make sure to see the Criterion version--it makes all the difference. Incidentally, a quickie adaptation of Christiana Brand's first novel Death in High Heels was released the following year (and can be found on video), but it's not very good.

3) THE KENNEL MURDER CASE (1933--based on the novel by S. S. Van Dine)

This one is all it's cracked up to be, in my opinion. Michael Curtiz perfectly captures the brisk world of the American Golden Age Detective novel. William Powell may not be as smug and insufferable as the Philo Vance of the novels--but he's so damn cool to watch!

4) DEATH ON THE NILE (1978--based on the novel by Agatha Christie)

My favorite of the more recent big screen Christie adaptations (well, 37 years ago now). I think Anthony Shaffer did a brilliant job of simplifying Christie's complex plot, keeping the core stuff, and jettisoning the least necessary. Peter Ustinov is not Dame Agatha's Poirot, but he's an amusing presence, and I much prefer his portrayal to Albert Finney's weird, stiff disguise work (see the film Murder on the Orient Express, 1974).

5) THE VERDICT (1946--based on Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery)

Yes, I'm stretching the chronological boundaries of the Golden Age, but Israel Zangwill's novel was undoubtedly a key template for many subsequent Golden Age puzzle plots (it's arguably the first to employ its particular impossible crime solution). Don Seigel, in his feature directorial debut, actually improves upon Zangwill's plot (with the help of his screenwriters, of course). And the starring duo of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre is, as always, wonderful to watch.

6) LOVE LETTERS OF A STAR (1936--based on Rufus King's The Case of the Constant God) 

A very difficult film to find, unfortunately--I was lucky enough to see it at last year's Cinecon. A faithful and exciting adaptation of Rufus King's novel. There was an actual gasp from the crowd at the sudden revelation of the culprit--followed by a brief, welcome explanation of the detective's deductive process.

still from Love Letters of a Star

7) THE NIGHT CLUB LADY (1932--based on Anthony Abbot's About the Murder of the Night Club Lady)

An excellent adaptation of Abbott's novel, capturing its very Philo Vance-ish metropolitan atmosphere, featuring a fine performance by Adolphe Menjou as sleuth Thatcher Colt, and also one of the truly great, "I did it and I'm glad! Glad! Glad!!!" speeches of cinema history.

8) THE DARK HOUR (1936--based on Sinclair Gluck's "The Last Trap")

It's poverty row stuff--Chesterfield Pictures--and hardly dynamic filmmaking, but this is an extremely faithful adaptation of its source novel, with a terrific last five minutes of multiple false solutions.

9) THE NURSEMAID WHO DISAPPEARED (1939--based on the novel by Philip MacDonald)

An very exciting adaptation of Philip McDonald's novel, very reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's late '30s British work. Unfortunately, this is another film that is hard to track down (I saw a copy at the British film Institute). Much more faithful--and interesting--than the 1956 American remake, 23 Paces to Baker Street, which is nonetheless a good film.

a gripping film

10) THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS BRIDE (1935 based on the novel by Erle Stanley Gardner) 

More dynamic filmmaking from Michael Curtiz.  Erle Stanley Gardner apparently wasn't all that crazy about it, but his plot is left fairly intact, and the Warners stock company gives it more verve and excitement than was ever found in the 1950's Perry Mason series.

Okay, not the bride, but it is Errol Flynn, and from the film!

11) THE NINTH GUEST (1934--based on the novel "The Invisible Host" by Bruce Manning and Gwen Bristow, and its stage adaptation by Owen Davis)

An atmospheric precursor to Christie's And Then There Were None, admittedly lacking Christie's plausibility and ingenuity, but excitingly directed by Roy William Neill, who would later direct the Universal Sherlock Holmes series. Lots of fun.

seven guests

12) MENACE (1934 - based on Philip MacDonald's R.I.P.)The screenwriter changed the identity of the culprit; but then, in this case, the identity of the culprit in the novel wasn't all that satisfying anyway! Actually, neither the novel nor the film has a solution that lives up to the its opening premise--how to identify the revenge-seeking brother of a dead man, whom  no one has ever seen before--but the premise is pretty great, keeping the viewer (reader) wondering all along. One of three films on this list to feature Paul Cavanagh, and he also showed up in several other interesting whodunits--the man certainly left his mark on the genre.

Menace--the film

Unfortunately, several of my favorite whodunit films (Affairs of a Gentleman, The Last of Sheila, The Phantom of Crestwood, Crime on the Hill) don't qualify, because they weren't made based on novels.

Menace--the novel

Thanks Scott!

I've seen the first five of the twelve films our Strolling Player lists, including The Verdict, and, I agree, they are all quite good.  Death on the Nile I recall seeing at the movie theater when I was, I think, twelve years old.

It's not the last of this mousetrap!

I wasn't aware of most of the other films that Scott lists, but they are a fascinating group to me, including two films based on fine novels by Philip MacDonald, one of the most cinematic of crime writers, who left England to work in Hollywood; a Perry Mason before Raymond Burr; another two films based on novels by today insufficiently acknowledged Golden Age American crime writers, Anthony Abbot and Rufus King (there's been quite a bit posted about King on this blog); one film based on the controversial And Then There Were None precursor, The Invisible Host, hilariously mocked by Bill Pronzini in his classic Gun in Cheek but also defended by others over the years; and, lastly, a film based on a novel by Sinclair Gluck,an author forgotten by just about everyone, I suspect, but about whom I shall have more to say this week.  I happen to have a number of novels by Mr. Gluck, including The Last Trap.