Burton Egbert Stevenson | Meredith Nicholson | Henry Sydnor Harrison | Donald McGibeny | Henry Kitchell Webster | Hugh MacNair Kahler | F. Scott Fitzgerald | Dorothy Cameron Disney | Anne Nash | HIBK school | Ethel Lina White | Mignon G. Eberhart | Lenore Glen Offord | Leslie Ford | Mabel Seeley
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
The Mystery of the Boule Cabinet (1911)
"Miss Hinch" (1911)
32 Caliber (1920)
"The Crooked Wire" (1920)
"Fair and Stormy" (1930)
Bits of Paradise
The Price Was High
Death in the Back Seat (1936)
Strawstacks / The Strawstack Murders (1938 - 1939)
The Balcony (1940)
Thirty Days Hath September (1942) (written with George Sessions Perry)
Said With Flowers (1943)
The Dark Garden (1933) (Chapters 1 - 2)
The Cases of Susan Dare (1933)
Uncollected Susan Dare stories
Mignon G. Eberhart's Best Mystery Stories
Five of My Best
Mr. Pinkerton Goes to Scotland Yard (1934) (Chapters 1 - 12)
Mr. Pinkerton Grows a Beard (1935) (Chapters 1 - 7, 14)
Mr. Pinkerton Has the Clue (1936)
"Death Stops at a Tourist Camp" (1936)
Evan Pinkerton stories
The Woman in Black (1947) (Chapters 1 - 8)
Homicide House (1949) (Chapters 1 - 6)
Skeleton Key (1943) (Chapters 1,8,9)
Walking Shadow (1959)
"An Unlocked Window"
During 1903 - 1912, Burton E. Stevenson published 5 mystery novels, focusing on reporter detective Jim Godfrey, and narrated by his lawyer friend. (A sixth, non-series, novel, Affairs of State, came out in 1906). Stevenson's work is the closest I know of to Mary Roberts Rinehart's early, pre-W.W.I books, in atmosphere and feel (but not in plot technique). It is hard to tell in which direction influence flowed, as I have only read 1911's The Mystery of the Boule Cabinet. Burton was publishing novels two years before Rinehart, so it is certainly possible that he influenced her. Or vice versa. There is the young lawyer narrator, as in The Man in Lower 10. There is the constant attempt by sinister people to break into a house, as in The Circular Staircase. There is a Rinehartian feel to the characters in the story.
Although not formally separated by the author, the action in The Mystery of the Boule Cabinet breaks into two nearly equal parts. Part I reminds me of Rinehart, Part II of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin tales. Part I hardly ever gets out of the victim's New York house, or even a few rooms in that house where most of the action is concentrated. It builds up an almost claustrophobic sense of menace. While a few scenes take place elsewhere, the author makes clear that the focus of danger in the novel is in the rooms which contain the cabinet. (Godfrey makes this explicitly clear at one point, speaking for the author; but the whole tenor of the story reflects this as well.) By contrast, Part II is a duel of wits with a French master criminal, and takes place all over New York City. Disappointingly, there is neither much pure detection in Cabinet, nor is there a clever solution of a puzzle plot. Despite its subtitle, "A Detective Story", Cabinet is hardly a mystery story at all in the modern sense. It is more like a melodrama or tale of danger. Unbelievable coincidences abound, as well. On the plus side, the novel is elegantly and clearly imagined and written. It is extremely readable, and the vivid scenes stick in the imagination. The strange first half is especially rich in mise-en-scène. Cabinet is most recommended to those who want some cultural context for Mary Roberts Rinehart.
All of the main characters in Boule Cabinet are bachelors, single men. Many are obsessed with art collecting. After the victim's death, his art collection is willed to the Metropolitan, and broken up and lost among their vast holdings. The narrator reflects on the pointlessness of the victim's life, and how little he ultimately accomplished through his collecting. This memorable moment forms the climax of Part I.
Stevenson, too, describes the unhappy marriage of a woman to a rotten European aristocrat. It is a clear portrait, written long before modern woman's lib, of a woman linked to an abusive husband. It anticipates similar relations in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920). Moffett's Through the Wall also looks inside a similarly unhappy marriage. American fiction of this era clearly made a significant attempt to explore the injustices perpetrated on women through the marriage bond.
In her autobiography My Story, Rinehart recalls pointing to a bookcase full of mystery novels, and complaining that none of them had any humor, unlike her own writing. This was shortly before the hardback publication of The Circular Staircase, circa 1908. I've always wanted to know what books she was talking about. Well, just maybe, one of then was Meredith Nicholson's The House of a Thousand Candles (1905). Nicholson was a leading figure in Indiana literature, which was then a going concern, with both numerous authors and publishing houses. Rinehart's own first books were published by the Indiana based firm of Bobbs-Merrill. After all, Rinehart lived in Pittsburgh, not far from Indiana. In those days firms in the Midwest published their own; the Chicago based magazine Poetry revolutionized American verse, for example. House was a once famous book, that now seems completely forgotten by mystery fans. Its reputation survives only among scholars who study Hoosier fiction; it has been reprinted in recent years in a series of Indiana classics. Nicholson's novel anticipates Rinehart's fiction in a number of ways. Its hero is a young architect, not unlike the hero of Rinehart's The Afterhouse (1913), and he moves in the upper middle class professional setting of Rinehart's world. His grandfather's will puts him in charge of a mysterious old mansion in the countryside, and numerous nocturnal break-ins occur. This is similar to Rinehart's The Circular Staircase. There are rumors of a hidden treasure in the mansion, as well. The whole book seems like Staircase's immediate ancestor. It also precedes and perhaps influenced the Stratemeyer Syndicate books of my youth, such as the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, both of which also often deal with the same "mysterious mansion full of treasure and mystery" paradigm. Nicholson's title recalls Anna Katherine Green.
H.S. Harrison's "Miss Hinch" (1911) is apparently the prototype of tales in which there are two characters, one of which is clearly a villain, and the other is a detective on the villain's trail, but in which the reader is not initially informed which is which. The reader is left to try to deduce who is good and who is bad, and does not learn the author's version of who's who till the climax of the story. Typically, the reader of such stories first suspects that A is good and B is bad; then new evidence emerges that seems to suggest that A is the villain and B is the detective. Then further evidence suggests that A is really the sleuth after all, and that B is the real criminal ... And so on, till the final revelation of the actual truth at the end of the story. These stories are fascinatingly ambiguous, and form a very small but interesting subgenre of detective fiction. In them, the mystery is not "who done it" (as in the formal mystery or "puzzle tale") and not "how will the detective deduce the villain's guilt" (as in the inverted tale) - William L. DeAndrea calls this latter approach "how-catch-em". No, here the mystery is: "who is the villain and who is the hero?"
Other works in this genre include such short stories as Hugh Pentecost's "Challenge to the Reader" (1947) and Bill Pronzini's "Strangers in the Fog" (1978). Madeline L'Engle's sf novel The Arm of the Starfish (1965) has some elements of this technique.
Quite a few movies have used this approach, and fall into this small subgenre. In fact, I suspect it is more prevalent in films that in prose mysteries. A recent science fiction film, writer-director Kevin S. Tenney's Peacemaker (1990), focuses on two aliens. Each tries to persuade the human heroine that he is the real good guy, and that he is chasing the other, a wanted criminal. This film is very well done and entertaining, as are the Harrison, Pentecost and Pronzini tales. The use of an sf background allows a whole series of new, science fictional clues to the identities of the two protagonists to be explored, clues not present in the non-sf ancestors of the film.
McGibeny's 32 Caliber (1920) is set in the same American upper middle class world as Rinehart's fiction. Its lawyer narrator serves as an amateur detective, just as in Rinehart's The Man in Lower Ten, and it's a good thing he does, because the police in his small city are some of the least competent in detective fiction history. There is a good deal of romance in McGibeny's novel, and if it were published a few years later I would say this romantic writing was influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Fitzgerald was barely known in 1920, and both writers must be drawing on a tradition of popular romance in the post World War I era. In addition to the country club main characters, McGibeny sets his book in part against the same background of radical labor unrest as Rinehart's Dangerous Days (1919) and Fitzgerald's "May Day" (1920). Later, Dashiell Hammett will describe similar events in Chapter 1 of Red Harvest (1927). One gets the impression that many people thought the US was virtually on the edge of civil war, and McGibeny's book refers interestingly to animosities between capital and leftist labor from before, during and following W.W.I. McGibeny is firmly on the side of capital here, as was Rinehart; neither at all share in Fitzgerald's left wing sympathies. There are signs here that the right wing political views spouted by the narrator are not fully endorsed by the author; he is flatly contradicted by other characters in the book, on occasion, usually to gently humorous effect. Politically speaking, he is what academic critics refer to as an "unreliable narrator", someone whose ideas cannot be taken at face value, and whose comments are simply those of one character, not the author himself. Similarly, the complex sexual politics of the book is not resolved into a unified authorial viewpoint, but rather each character gets to present their own differing opinion of the book's divorce case. However, one doesn't want to give the impression that the book is a political tract. Mainly it is a well done Golden Age novel, with a well constructed mystery plot.
The three main suspects in the novel reflect social anxieties of upper class WASP men of the era. There is the far left labor leader, heavily ethnic. There is the adulterous wife, endorsing feminist values and the 1920's sexual revolution. The war profiteer represents a class of men, not quite upper crust, who used World War I to move into the upper classes. All three of these characters represent challenges to the social hegemony of the WASP male elite. The war profiteer in the novel moves about socially in his Army officer's uniform; such a uniform serves to disguise his lack of upper class connections. In a civilian era, his middle class clothes would have typed him as a non-elite character, but Society is forced to accept any officer as a social equal. In real life, this was exactly how F. Scott Fitzgerald gained entree to the country club set, meeting his ill fated rich wife to be Zelda; his gangster turned millionaire Gatsby has similar adventures. What seemed to the middle class Fitzgerald a social opportunity, albeit one with tragic consequences, is portrayed by McGibney's narrator as a social threat. The narrator is simply on the other side of a social divide than Fitzgerald.
Who Is the Next? (1931). Yecch! Unlikable characters, morbid atmosphere, slow moving storytelling. His eventual big surprise is surprising, all right, but it also seems completely unbelievable to me, even by the generous standards of realism we apply to Golden Age fiction. Set in the same American social world as Rinehart and Frances Noyes Hart, but much closer to the latter in its dullness. Webster is completely lacking in any sense of what makes a plot, an all too common problem today, but much more unusual in the 1930's. Where does Webster fit in mystery tradition? It is hard to say: the best guess would be to include him in or near the Early American school of Rinehart, S.H. Adams, Frederick Irving Anderson, etc., but as an author who couldn't write for sour apples.
Before he broke into the slicks, Kahler was a prolific writer for a pulp, Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, during the years 1918-1922. This weekly pulp emerged in 1915, long before Black Mask. Among the principal contributors were Kahler, Johnston McCulley, Herman Landon, and Ernest M. Poate. Carolyn Wells and Isabel Ostrander also appeared occasionally, although more often with serializations of their novels, rather than with shorter fiction. (Ellery Queen read this pulp as a young person, and later wrote about it nostalgically - see the Sturgeon introduction in the February 1964 EQMM. He especially liked Landon and McCulley.) Kahler once collaborated with Poate on a story, "The Vicious Circle" (1920), so presumably the two men were friends. Apparently none of the over 60 Kahler stories here have been reprinted in anthologies; I recently acquired two issues that contain Kahler novellas. Kahler's "The Crooked Wire" (1920) is a genuine detective story, with a well done puzzle plot. Set in a small town, it offers the same contrast between small town and the big city that would reappear in his slick story, "Fair and Stormy" (1930). The tale starts off slowly, setting up the background of the crime, and methodically narrating each detail of the hero's life. This storytelling technique recalls that of Mary Roberts Rinehart. So does the American setting, the use of a lonely country house, its cast of professional people, such as lawyers and bankers, and the emphasis on public crimes, such as fraud and theft, as opposed to the family and personal passions motivating many Golden Age writers. Kahler includes many subsidiary mysteries along the way; in fact, each new section of the story tends to include a plot development adding more mystery to the basic situation. Kahler is careful to alternate these subsidiary mysteries among his characters, so that suspicion is widely cast, and each one looks progressively more guilty. This would become a common technique among Golden Age writers, such as Agatha Christie. Kahler's storytelling can lack color, but the details of his plot often dovetail in unexpected ways, and his works can become quite absorbing reading. Kahler's Poate collaboration, "The Vicious Circle" (1920), apparently is another story with the same detective as "The Crooked Wire".
The lesser of the two novellas is "Queer Coin" (1920), a thriller about tracking down counterfeiters. It shows some not bad storytelling, especially in its middle sections. Its "surprising" plot revelations at the end should be long since obvious to most modern readers, however, and there is no real mystery or detection. If "The Crooked Wire" recalls Rinehart, "Queer Coin" reminds one of Frank L. Packard in its storytelling, with various officers of the law going undercover as crooks, its high powered criminal conspiracies reminiscent of Packard's Crime Club, and its concern over honest people gradually being pulled into a life of crime. It also recalls Harry Blyth's Sexton Blake stories of the 1890's, and even Harriet Prescott Spofford's "In a Cellar" (1859), with its scene of the hero inadvertently being present at and overhearing the meeting of a top level bunch of criminal conspirators. We are deep into Victorian melodrama here.
Kahler's work makes a striking contrast to Dashiell Hammett's, which will emerge just three years later in Black Mask. Kahler is far more middle class and genteel in his picture of society. There are plenty of underworld crooks in Kahler, but they tend to be criminal masterminds, not the low lifes that flit through Hammett. These masterminds tend to be more like businessmen than hoods - in "Queer Coin" they actually are businessmen, gone bad. Kahler has an edge in social criticism over Hammett, however. The hero of "Queer Coin" is a workingman who broke his arm while on company business, was promptly fired as he was unable to work, received no compensation from his company, was forced to live off his meager savings to survive, and who is slowly starving to death as the story opens. There is nothing like this in the whole history of Black Mask, as far as I can tell. Or in any Golden Age mystery either. Kahler's blunt look at the lives of ordinary working people in the days before workman's comp and unemployment insurance seems to be unique in its era. Black Mask often showed police and civic corruption, as well as underworld violence, but economic social criticism seems largely absent from its pages. There are other signs of economic realism in "Queer Coin". We learn the salary of the brilliant police detective who plays a role in the story - $4,000 - and what he would be paid if he accepted a job at a leading private agency: $25,000. This is one of the few detective stories I have ever read in which the detective's yearly income is specified. We also learn about stenographer's wages, and the costs of boarding houses. This is all perhaps appropriate in a story that literally revolves around money; the counterfeiting job threatens to undermine the whole economy of the United States.
The characters in "The Crooked Wire" tend to be more economically desperate than Rinehart's, as well. The young lawyer who is the protagonist is just barely getting by, and faces serious economic woes in a way that Rinehart's professionals rarely do. Rinehart did set "The Case of Jennie Brice" (1912) in a slum boarding house. But its theater people denizens seem more Bohemian, and less like ordinary workers facing economic hard times than Kahler's. Many Golden Age novels today evoke considerable charm. One would like it if everybody on Earth were able to live the carefree, glamorous, sophisticated life style depicted in them. This lifestyle was probably a pure literary fabrication of an escapist era, but it gives humanity something to work towards! By contrast, the small town world depicted in "The Crooked Wire" seems more suffocating than appealing. Even Kahler's hero wonders if he should get out and move to the big city, and little that happens in the course of the story seems designed to change his mind. Kahler's story appeared at a time when Americans were expressing doubts about small town life; it is contemporary with Sinclair Lewis' Main Street (1920), for example.
Kahler's "With Variations" (1920) is a short, minor but pleasant tale of con men, with features of the Rogue tradition. It is closer to Raffles and Arsène Lupin, than to Frank L. Packard. The crooks like to dress up in upper class clothes to carry off their schemes, and there is much about swaggering and being the dominating figure in their psychology. The works I have read by Kahler all seem quite different in their basic narrative approach: detective tale, thriller, con man tale, courtroom drama.
When Fitzgerald was a teenager, his favorite author was Mary Roberts Rinehart. He would grow up to write for Mary Roberts Rinehart's main market, "The Saturday Evening Post." The influence of her style lingers on every page he ever wrote; it is at least as significant as any influences from "literary" writers. In 1926, he would publish what is today a little known mystery in the Post, called "The Dance". This excellent short story is definitely an imitation and a homage to Rinehart. (There is also a brief, humorous homage to Gertrude Stein's Three Lives in it.) The quality of this piece makes one regret that Fitzgerald wrote so little mystery fiction (there are also a pair of short shorts from his last years).
Fitzgerald, in turn, would influence other mystery writers. Erle Stanley Gardner's early pulp stories contain Fitzgerald-inspired flappers. Of course, Fitzgerald's depiction of the Jazz Age and its heroines would influence a whole generation of American writers, including Ring Lardner and John O' Hara, so influence on mystery writers should not be surprising. Fitzgerald was the main literary model for the early fiction of Cornell Woolrich, and his poetic style left a permanent mark on Woolrich's stories.
Fitzgerald is much more of a short story writer than a novelist. His first book, This Side of Paradise, is really more a story sequence than a novel in any sense of the word. His masterpiece "The Great Gatsby" is actually novella length, but it is often called a novel, partly because there is so much academic prestige given the novel over the short story that academic critics want it to be a novel. So are other such prominent novellas in American literary history: Kate Chopin's "The Awakening", Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage", Thorton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey". Kate Chopin and Stephen Crane are short story specialists, too, as is Sarah Orne Jewitt, but American critics just do not want to admit that many of the most important American fiction writers are actually short story makers. In addition to "Gatsby", my favorite Fitzgerald stories are "Winter Dreams" (1922) and "Love in the Night" (1925). These and many other outstanding stories can be found in the big omnibus of Fitzgerald stories edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. One often sees the classic ghost story "A Short Trip Home" reprinted from this collection in suspense anthologies.
Dorothy Cameron Disney is one of Rinehart's most gifted followers. Her books have long since been out of print, and she was not very prolific either, publishing 9 mystery novels. She deserves to be revived today.
One can summarize Disney's career, which falls into some distinct periods. Her first two mystery novels are exercises in pure mystery plotting. These are Death in the Back Seat (1936) and The Strawstack Murders (1938 - 1939) (also known as Strawstacks). These books have very ingeniously constructed, complex plots. They are the Disney books closest to the Golden Age tradition. The Strawstack Murders is particularly impressive, and is Disney's masterpiece, considered as a puzzle plot mystery.
Then Disney veered off into social commentary for two books. The Golden Swan Murder (1939) denounces Hollywood. It has interesting social comment and is quite readable, but the mystery elements are skimped and perfunctory. The Balcony (1940) is much better. This book looks at the American Old South, including its dismal heritage of slavery. This is a much more profound target than Hollywood misbehavior, and is a remarkably forward looking work for its era. The story also returns to Disney's skilled approach to puzzle plot construction. The puzzle plotting does not achieve the heights of Disney's first two novels, but it is still most satisfying and well crafted. The Balcony is one of Disney's most important books, one in which intelligent social commentary and skilled mystery construction are fused.
Thirty Days Hath September (1942) (written with George Sessions Perry) is an oddity. It is full of Disney's imaginative puzzle plot construction. However, none of the ideas here are as plausible as those in Disney's earlier books. Some of the ideas in the finale seem like complete non-starters, in fact. Still, it is an entertaining read.
Next comes a period of decline. Disney tried a complete change of pace with The 17th Letter (1944 - 1945), a spy story featuring a Bright Young Couple. I didn't like it at all. Explosion (1948) is a depressed book, one in which weary characters ooze gloom. It is a pure mystery, but one in which the author uses a different and less creative technique than her earlier classics. Four chapters dealing with the explosion itself are interesting, however. Disney's last book, The Hangman's Tree (1949) attempts to imitate Disney's earlier style, with plot ideas borrowed from The Strawstack Murders and a Southern setting recalling The Balcony. But nothing here is very good.
Despite the similarities in their names, the mystery writers Dorothy Cameron Disney and Doris Miles Disney do not seem to be related. Disney is the maiden name of Dorothy Cameron Disney; The Strawstack Murders is dedicated to the memory of her father, L.G. Disney. By contrast, Doris was born Doris Miles, and married George J. Disney in 1936, according to the invaluable Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection.
Disney's The Strawstack Murders (1938 - 1939) seems to be less a member of the HIBK school per se, and more like a direct imitation of Rinehart herself. It takes place at an isolated country mansion presided over by a middle aged spinster narrator, just like Rinehart's The Circular Staircase. Many of the events take place at night, and involve someone trying to penetrate the house, also as in Rinehart's novel. Other similarities to The Circular Staircase: the family from whom the heroine recently obtained the house also plays a role in the book, and the heroine's young independent minded niece is hiding mysterious secrets, adding complexity and romance to the plot. The novel also recalls many of Rinehart's later books, in that many members of the family seem to be concealing secrets, and that sinister plots seem to be afoot. These plots are long term conspiracies of the characters, that start before the murders, lead to all sorts of mysterious events, and persist throughout the whole murder investigation. Disney's novel is full of domestic detail, describing household routines in the kitchen and home repair. This detail is integrated as much as possible into the detective plot. This is part of the Rinehart tradition: see The Album (1933), for instance. Also Rinehart like are the presence of doctor and nurse characters, and some medical background. The friendly relation that builds up between the narrator and the police inspector also seems Rinehart like. It seems to me that Rinehart fans should enjoy this well done work of a Rinehart student.
Disney's storytelling is vigorous throughout. Each chapter leads to some new, interesting plot revelation. The murders in the book are related to such fundamental elements as fire and water. Disney uses a variety of techniques to keep her plot moving. There are a large number of subsidiary mysteries. These are small, individual mysteries - why did someone withdraw money from a bank, what happened to the garden shears - that eventually get worked up into larger patterns in the book, and get solved. Such subsidiary mysteries are a Golden Age staple, one that delights the reader. The narrator sometimes sums these up in lists, a technique labeled by Carolyn Wells as tabulation. Another technique in the book is that a sequence of events that looked one way to the reader, and to the narrator, at the time they were happening, eventually get a different interpretation. Both this approach, and the subsidiary mysteries, take considerable ingenuity.
Unlike Rinehart, Strawstacks does not include maps or floor plans. While the action corresponds to carefully thought through time tables, there are no Rinehart style movements through space. The house as a whole is of less interest to Disney than to Rinehart. Instead, Disney concentrates on describing bedrooms. These include the narrator's room, and the personal quarters of the three murder victims. Much of the novel's action actually takes place in these four rooms. Anxiety about one's home base is a key motif of the novel; the book starts out with the narrator trying to build a home for herself and her family, and the killer's motive turns out to be an attempt to preserve the killer's home. Several other key events in the book relate to preserving a home or family, or people obtaining entrance to a household.
Death in the Back Seat (1936) is Disney's first mystery book. It is almost as clever in its plotting as Strawstack, and forms a worthy start to her mystery career. It too is in the Rinehart tradition, although less extremely so than Strawstack. As in many Rinehart books, there is a criminal conspiracy, something that was treated as taboo by most other schools of Golden Age authors: one of S.S. Van Dine's rules of detective fiction states that there should be just a single villain in a mystery novel, with perhaps one minor accomplice. This single villain rule was thoroughly ignored by H.C. Bailey, but most other Golden Age writers adhered to it. Rinehart started this conspiracy tradition long before the Golden Age, in such books as The Circular Staircase (1907), and it persists in such Golden Age era Rinehart novels as The Door (1930). Both Rinehart and Disney repeatedly indicate throughout their novels that a conspiracy is afoot, instead of waiting till the end to spring it on their readers. This helps preserve fair play: the idea of a conspiracy is introduced near the start.
Disney also follows the Rinehart tradition by piling up a mountain of corpses. The genteel Golden Age tradition of one murder at the start, followed perhaps by a second crime two thirds through the book, was ignored by both writers. Death in the Back Seat is especially gruesome in this regard. One has to go to Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1927) to find anything more extreme. This helps give Death in the Back Seat a nightmarish quality, combined with the constant jeopardy the hero and heroine find themselves in, and their mistreatment by the police.
Death in the Back Seat is notable for the ingenuity in which it enmeshes its characters in complex schemes. The book has a very small cast, much smaller than the typical Golden Age mystery, each of which is up over his head in countless mysteries. When starting to read it one wonders how Disney can produce any mystery plot at all out of such few people and such everyday looking material. Then she starts building her plot...
Disney's The Golden Swan Murder (1939) is her third mystery novel, published after Strawstack. It starts out in true Rinehart fashion, narrated by a starchy spinster aunt of a young niece in trouble. However, the locale of the book soon switches to Hollywood, and there is a real fish out of water effect: a Rinehartian spinster sleuth Vs the denizens of La La Land. The Los Angeles atmosphere is etched with poisonous splendor, and stands comparison with Raymond Chandler, who was also publishing his first novel that year, The Big Sleep (1939).
Disney's book was published two years before Stuart Palmer sent his own spinster sleuth Hildegarde Withers to Hollywood in The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941). Withers later returned there in Palmer's Cold Poison (1954), and one of the characters in that book has similarities to one of Disney's: a young composer of dubious background, who is romancing the heroine while trying to get a musical job at one of the studios. The heroine in both novels has a film industry connection, and helps the young man to get a job. Both stories also have a movie producer, and a scene in a studio projection room, although both of these settings are probably de rigeur for mysteries with a film background.
Disney's book is well written, especially in its first half, which contains the murder and an attempted murder. Too much time is spent in its second half with the police and district attorney, who are much less interesting as characters than the Hollywood types. Disney succeeds with her storytelling. However, there is much less puzzle plot imagination here than in Strawstack. This is unfortunate.
The first half of Disney's novel is a variant on the "inverted detective" story. In the classical inverted tale, invented by R. Austin Freeman, we see the criminal commit the crime, then try to cover up his traces. Then the detective tries to track him down. In Disney's variant of the form, it is not the killer who covers up the crime, but some innocent person who conceals the murder. This person is usually someone who loves one of the suspects, and tries to protect them. This person goes through all of the plot developments of the traditional inverted tale, destroying evidence, concealing the corpse, but is not actually the guilty party, of course. This variant on the inverted story became popular in the 1940's. One thinks of Erle Stanley Gardner's "Clue of the Runaway Blonde" (1945), Rufus King's The Case of the Dowager's Etchings (1943), Cornell Woolrich's "Death Between Dances" (1947), many of Gardner's and Craig Rice's stories where the lawyers Perry Mason and John J. Malone conceal the murder for their clients.
Disney shows a corrosive skepticism about the police in these books. They are shown as honest, and not corrupt, but also as self seeking and determined to railroad suspects into prison. They can be quite vicious about hounding suspects. They are thoroughly unpleasant and unlikable people. Her point of view is very unusual for HIBK writers, most of whom seem to have an upper middle class comfort with the police. The police interrogation methods in Golden Swan seem more like the brainwashing sessions done by secret police in totalitarian states, than anything one commonly encounters in most mystery novels. I've seen Communist interrogators tormenting captured freedom fighters in spy novels who have exactly the same approach as the police in Golden Swan. The cop Timothy Dwight in Explosion is also loathsome.
Disney's point of view in Golden Swan is both similar and different from Chandler. Her depiction of Hollywood does not quite reach the sordid extremes of The Big Sleep. While Chandler deals with gangsters and the pornography business, Disney looks at the film industry. While Chandler's book explores drug addiction, Disney looks at gambling. Disney's relative restraint here perhaps reflects the taste standards of the women's magazines for which she and the other HIBKers wrote. However, both writers are surprisingly alike in point of view. Disney's film industry insiders may not be actual gangsters, but they have been thoroughly corrupted by their milieu. Disney paints them as people with every sort of spiritual decay. Her portrait of wide spread social corruption caused by a vicious economic institution is as least as grim and pointed as Chandler's. Both authors are equally convinced that they are in a society that has reached a moral nadir. Similarly, Chandler's treatment of drug addiction and Disney's of gambling have a similar point of view. Both are sinister portrayals of addictive behavior taking over and utterly ruining people's lives. Both authors are utterly condemnatory of these activities, and the human wreckage they leave behind them.
Disney's spinster sleuth narrator does not partake of the corruption around her. It is not so much that she is saintly. Rather, she is a starchy representative of a traditional Code of Conduct. She always performs in obeisance to this code, that of Philadelphia's Main Line, and avoids the social decay around her. Her constant comparison of Hollywood to Philadelphia at first seems funny, and is milked for comic relief. But as the book goes forward it seems like a fence keeping her out of the abyss.
The Balcony (1940) continues Disney's interest in architecture. Once again, it is the bedrooms that are the most vividly described. They are the rooms where people actually live. These include bedrooms in the mansion, and other living quarters as well, in the stable and the cave. In The Balcony, architecture is truth. Looking at it, the heroine realizes the underlying reality of the book's experiences. It has a revealing quality, an exposer of hidden truth.
The Balcony has some of the best storytelling of any of Disney's books. The characters and events are gripping, and involve the reader. The book has a background of the legacy of slavery. It has plenty to say about race relations. It must have best extraordinarily courageous in 1940. Even today, the book's forthright treatment of slavery makes an impressive contrast to the denial that many right wing Americans still feel on this subject.
The Balcony makes a welcome return to Disney's skill in puzzle plotting, after its abandonment in The Golden Swan Murder. The book has several of Disney's trademark plot surprises. It is also closer to the Rinehart tradition than Golden Swan, which was somewhat of a change of pace experiment for its author. All the material in the book about the bank and gold reminds one a bit of Rinehart's The Album (1933). The book is a little less exuberant in its puzzle plotting than Disney's first two novels. For example, the choice of the villain at the end of the book is not associated with any ingenious twist. It is psychologically "right", however, and makes a satisfying ending.
Thirty Days Hath September (1942) resembles Death in the Back Seat (1936), in that the protagonists are a New York City couple who've rented a cottage in a rural area of New England. Both mysteries have as a victim a visitor from New York City. Both couples are also hounded by the local police, who are sinisterly determined to pin the murder on them. Both also have many strange events invading their home. These stories can be contrasted with Strawstack, The Balcony and The Hangman's Tree, all of which take place in a large family mansion somewhere in the South. These stories tend to take place among relatives, whereas the New England stories involve a lot of unrelated neighbors in a small town. The New England tales tend to feature some working class local residents prominently, whereas the Southern tales tend to have everyone but the servants on one social plane.
September is unusual in that the narrator is a man, the husband in the couple, and that he is the one that has the frightening HIBK encounters in the middle of the night. This is very non-sexist. He behaves in exactly the same way as the heroine-narrators of countless HIBK novels. He experiences exactly the same fears and terrors, too. While I applaud such equal treatment, I also have to admit it seems really odd to me. I am really unused to seeing a male in such a role. He conceals evidence from the police to protect his friends, just like at HIBK heroine. The hero also does all the grousing one expects from HIBK narrators about the difficulty of social events, tensions at gatherings, the struggle to keep up appearances after losing money and so on, the sort of comments almost universally restricted to females in HIBK novels up to this point.
September is also unusual in that all three main male characters are unemployed. By contrast, the women seem to be far more dynamic and effective workers, both at home, and in the business community. One would have thought that by 1942 the US economy was beginning to expand again, and such massive male joblessness was declining. This is clearly part of this book's interesting role reversal between the sexes.
September shows Disney's extreme skepticism about the police. Rinehart tended to show the police as decent, hard working, and nearly all knowing. By contrast, Disney's police are horrible human beings, always trying to pin crimes on someone innocent.
The best parts of Disney's Explosion (1948) deal with the crime itself (Chapters 4), a second section depicting it in further detail (Chapters 8 and 9), and its reconstruction at the end of the book (Chapter 29). These sections form three different views of the crime. Each view is progressively more interior, revealing a hidden inner working not seen in the previous version. Each focuses more and more closely on the actual action in the basement: the first shows the house as a whole, the second a general account of the basement, finally the third shows the events in sharp detail. These three views are nested within each other, like a series of Russian dolls. Such progressive views recall the work of John Dickson Carr, such as his far more complicated The Arabian Nights Murders (1936). They also recalls the many different perspectives on the crime continually set forth in Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton (1932). The three views continuously get lower in terms of height. The first is on the first floor level of the next door neighbor; the second focuses on the basement, much of the third actually takes place on the floor of the basement itself. This gives a sense of geometric progression as well to the series. The three views are progressively more life oriented, as well. The first is the mechanical, annihilating explosion. The next deals with people in the abstract, and normal rooms. The third actually shows us the people and their actions in detail. There has been a progression from the physical to the human. Also, the characters seem more and more alive. The first deals with total annihilation; the second with death; the third shows us people actually living under these circumstances. It is like running a film backward: we progress from the finale to more and more life.
The crime imagery of Explosion is related to World War II. Again and again, Disney compares it to the bombed out buildings of the war. Much of the plot also depends on the just finished war as a background.
Disney's novels show the surrealism sometimes found in modern detective fiction. In Strawstack, The Golden Swan Murder and Explosion, the crimes always take place right in a character's bedroom. It is this room treated as a character's basic living space, that is the author's point of view. This place often becomes extremely surreal, and transformed.
Anne Nash wrote four mystery novels in the 1940's; the first two employ middle aged police detective Mark Tudor. The first, Said With Flowers (1943), shows several features of the Rinehart school. Its narrator is a forty-ish business woman and spinster: she runs a flower shop with another woman of the same age. This emphasis on unmarried women who make their own way in the world recalls Rinehart's spinster narrators. Rinehart's spinster detective's closest relationship is usually with a woman servant. By contrast, the narrator and her partner have a relationship of complete equality. This is closer to Rinehart's comic Tish stories, focusing on three middle aged friends, than it is to most of Rinehart's detective fiction.
A major character in the book is a beautiful young woman, the kid sister of a close friend of the narrator. She recalls the narrator's niece in Rinehart's The Circular Staircase. Both women have secrets, and are not Telling All They Know. Both also are the object of tremendous sympathy and affection from the narrator. Similarly, a mysterious young man who shows up and takes a job at the flower shop recalls the young man who goes to work as the heroine's gardener in Staircase. Both of these are handsome, noble young men with the personalities of hero figures; but both also have a mysterious past and are probably concealing something. The novels make it ambiguous whether they are in fact heroes or the killer. Much of the mystery in Said With Flowers in fact centers around this young man's character, and that of the young heroine. By the way, the young man's name is Barney Miller. Today this seems absurd, after watching the comedy TV show, but in the forties it sounded perfectly normal.
The use of a police detective who shows up, and who makes respectful friends with the narrator, is also in the Rinehart tradition. As is Rinehart, detection is done partly by the police, who use scientific methods, and partly by the narrator, who performs amateur sleuthing. Both the narrator and the police detective fully share information with each other, and seem to enjoy and respect working with each other towards a solution of the mystery.
The use of spinster narrators and a fairly middle class background make Said With Flowers resemble Rinehart's early fiction. By contrast, the mystery plot of the book turns on woman's issues, something that recalls Rinehart's late works. The story invokes feminist concerns that are still timely today.
The puzzle plot in Said With Flowers is ordinary. The one really clever idea was already anticipated by Dorothy Cameron Disney in The Strawstack Murders (1938 - 1939). The book is instead more readable for the storytelling, characters, and unfolding sense of mystery.
The narrator and her partner are roommates as well as business partners, sharing a house. Although the heroine becomes friends with the cop, neither have any actual romance. It is hard not to wonder if the narrator and her partner are in fact lesbians. The book does not make this clear. It would have been very difficult in 1943 to publish a novel with a pair of sympathetic, explicitly gay characters at its center. However, Said With Flowers comes close. It goes as far in this direction as the censorship of the time would allow. It makes a pleasant contrast to all the homophobia that was sweeping through America in the 1940's.
The followers of Mary Roberts Rinehart today have little cultural prestige. Often tagged as the Had I But Known (HIBK) school, after a spoof of Rinehart by Ogden Nash, these writers, largely American women of the 1930's and 1940's, are generally considered inoffensive but low brow. Their writing is often more categorized and dismissed than read and analyzed. Several misconceptions abound. For one thing, Rinehart herself does not seem to have been a member of this school. She first emerged much earlier, around 1905, and seems to have been imitated by these authors without her consent or conscious participation in a literary movement. There are some signs, however, that she might have experienced some reverse influence from them. In particular, Mignon G. Eberhart published the first of a series of nurse-detective novels in 1929. Three years later, Rinehart revived her own nurse detective, Miss Pinkerton, who had hitherto appeared only in two novellas of 1914. Perhaps Eberhart's example encouraged her to do this. Eberhart is in fact the earliest author known to me in the Rinehart school, and she as much as Rinehart might be considered the founder of the movement. (However, little is known in depth about this school of fiction, so take this assertion with a grain of salt.) Kay Cleaver Strahan's first novel, The Desert Moon Mystery (1928), also shows some features of the HIBK school at an early date; it is not a very likable book.
There is no respectful name for the HIBK school. In the delightful critical omnibus The Fine Art of Murder, they are relabeled as "Women's Suspense", in an attempt to give them some cultural dignity. I am all for this, but this name seems possibly misleading to me. For one thing, although all of these writers at least occasionally incorporated suspense elements into their tales, most of their works are essentially mystery stories. They are influenced by their Golden Age contemporaries, and have a mysterious murder, suspects, clues, a character serving as detective, and so on, in addition to their suspense elements. Both these writers and Rinehart herself largely wrote mystery fiction during this era. It may be a lot more suspense oriented than Christie or Carr, but it is still very recognizably a detective story. Even the very vivid suspense passages of Eberhart contribute to, and are integrated with, the complex cat's cradle plots of her mystery stories. Far from being merely in jeopardy, Eberhart's heroine usually continues her sleuthing during these episodes.
Another odd thing about the name Women's Suspense, is what it implies about such genuine suspense writers as Dorothy B. Hughes and Charlotte Armstrong. They are both women and suspense authors, but they have little in common with the Rinehart school.
The whole "Women's" aspect of the Rinehart school also has some ambiguities. The term could either apply to the writers or readers of the fiction. Admittedly, many of the more fluttery stories seem geared to the taste of "women's fiction" readers of the era, but some of the writers were clearly trying to appeal to readers of both sexes. Rinehart herself fought bitterly all her life against being labeled as a woman's writer, and she claimed she had equal number of readers of both sexes. The only male author in the school I know is Baynard Kendrick, who included some aspects of the school in The Odor of Violets.
I have read a lot of Rinehart, who is a favorite author of mine, but very little of the Rinehart school. Some of the school's fiction is admittedly pretty cornball, with little to recommend it. Especially hard to take is all the gloomy soap opera in bad HIBK books about upper crust society. Several works I have read are outstanding puzzle plot stories, however, and there are probably more about which I know nothing. Hopefully, I will someday get a clearer understanding of the achievements of this school. The puzzle plot technique of Rinehart, Eberhart, Offord is clearly closest to the intuitionist school, such writers as Agatha Christie. It is hard to tell the roots of this approach. Some of it perhaps is direct influence from Christie and other Golden Age writers. But some of it comes from a common ancestor in traditional detective puzzle plot fiction, such as Doyle. After all, Rinehart and Hopwood wrote their masterpiece The Bat before Christie, Carr or Queen had published a line.
The use of science is a continuing tradition in many HIBK writers. Rinehart herself has strong affinities with the school of Scientific Detection, especially in her Miss Pinkerton stories. It can be seen in Mignon G. Eberhart's nurse detectives and medical experimenters, and the puzzle plotting of her "Postiche". There is also Leslie Ford's interest in both mechanical devices, and aircraft, and the scientist characters in Lenore G. Offord's Skeleton Key, as well as Baynard Kendrick's blind detective Duncan Maclain. This interest in scientific detection seems directly descended from Rinehart and Reeve, and is independent from the British Realist school of Freeman and Crofts.
A hard to place writer who might have connections with this school is Ethel Lina White. She is British (actually Welsh), not American, and the suspense elements are even more highlighted in her fiction than in the American writers. Still, she also includes puzzle plots in some of her works. She also shows some similarities with both Rinehart and her followers, such as nurse detectives, night scenes, lonely country houses, mysterious bad men on the prowl. I know nothing of White's cultural context; she seems very atypical of other British detective writers of her period.
Suspense passages in Eberhart often show the heroine with a heightened sensory awareness of her surroundings, and are almost hallucinatory in their intensity. Sometimes these concern the heroine's driving during bad weather: see the thunderstorm in "Murder Goes to Market" (1943), and the fog in Chapters 1 and 2 of The Dark Garden (1933). There can be unusual effects of hearing as well: see the humming and the Gombies and their music in "Bermuda Grapevine" (1938). These passages are written with remarkable literary skill. The Dark Garden evokes modern art to describe both the effects of the fog, and the buildings that the fog conceals. Clearly, Eberhart felt that modern art was a high energy expression of powerful social and cultural forces, currents affecting the lives of everyone in society. She also conveyed the idea that it was a little frightening, involving the breakdown of normal perception, and the transfer of the viewer to a different kind of consciousness. The Dark Garden uses all the senses to express the heroine's perceptions: hearing, sight, touch and heat and cold perception. It also uses words: the strange sentence the heroine hears out of the fog. This sentence seems completely nonsensical. It derives from the forms of modernist literature, such Symbolist influenced writers as T.S. Eliot and, especially, Gertrude Stein.
Eberhart's view of modern architecture also includes the technological forces used to build it, and the laws of physics that lay behind them. Like Rinehart and most of the HIBK writers, she was fascinated by science and technology. In a memorable passage, Eberhart describes the world as being built up out of energy. This is both scientifically sound, and an almost mystic vision of a hidden reality under the everyday appearance of things.
If The Dark Garden draws on Modernism, both literary and visual, to express its altered states of perception, it also builds upon the Golden Age mystery, HIBK concern with landscape architecture. The estate in the book is drawn with the complex geographical patterns of the classic mystery tradition. Nor is the drive into the estate from downtown Chicago separated from the landscape architecture of the estate itself. On each stage of the drive, Eberhart supplies precise geographical coordinates, showing her heroine's progress through the city and the fog. This turns both the cityscape of the drive, and the estate it finally reaches, into one large geographic entity, described with the full precision of Golden Age mystery's fascination with landscape. Similarly, the architecture of the hotel in "Bermuda Grapevine" (1938) plays a key role in the plot.
The Mystery of Hunting's End (1930) shows good atmosphere in its opening chapter, which is set in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, according to Jay Fultz' informative introduction. The rest of this minor novel is rather repetitive; it is at its best in the explanation of the locked room mystery, in Chapter 14.
Lenore G. Offord's Skeleton Key (1943) is the first mystery novel to feature her continuing characters. It introduces her amateur sleuth Todd McKinnon, and marries him off to her heroine, Georgine Wyeth. Its central puzzle plot is pretty ordinary; far better is a subplot about what looks like a grave. Offord introduces this plot at the end of chapter 1; she concludes it with the interview at the professor's house at the end of chapter 8 and in chapter 9, halfway through the novel. The subject of graves seems to trigger off something in Offord's creative imagination; it is central to her later classic, Walking Shadow. Offord, like other HIBK writers, does a very good job of describing the physical setting, buildings, and geography of her tale. The isolated road, its houses and the canyon are all imagined in interesting ways. Offord's HIBK mannerisms are very mild. There is a lot of sensitive human interest in her tale, but the undertones of hyper sensitive emotional hysteria sometimes found in HIBK are thankfully absent in her work. Her heroine is sensible, and gainfully employed. Offord instead stresses the puzzle plot elements of her tale, and her work is close to the intuitionist writers of the Golden Age.
There is a mildly interesting typology of murderers in Chapter 10. Perhaps this classification, which has more to do with murderers in mystery fiction than in real life, shows Offord's budding interest in mystery criticism: she would go on to be a prolific mystery reviewer for San Francisco papers. One hopes that someday her reviews, and the Edgar winning criticism of Helen McCloy, will be collected and made available. The typology is given by McKinnon, who is a writer of pulp detective stories in the tale. Offord never contributed to the pulps, at least not under her own name, and there is no pulp atmosphere whatsoever to her tale. Instead McKinnon seems like the generic "writer of mystery novels" so often encountered as a character in Golden Age mystery fiction: see Ellery Queen, or Christie's Ariadne Oliver, or Eberhart's Susan Dare.
Offord's My True Love Lies (1947) is a non-series mystery, set in San Francisco's art world. This is a far more cultured San Francisco than we are used to seeing in say, private eye novels. This is a minor book. The mystery and the main characters involved in it are none too interesting. Far better is the heroine, and some of the detective work. The best parts of the book are Chapter 1, which introduces the heroine, and both her romance and thriller involvement, and Chapters 4 - 6, in which the heroine sleuths along with her police bodyguard, a likable lug who combines comic elements with some shrewd detection. My True Love Lies has many thriller elements. These are vividly atmospheric, and put the heroine in considerable jeopardy. Despite this, the book never degenerates into a thriller, unlike so many 1940's novels. It remains a pure whodunit. How does Offord accomplish this? For one thing, the book is filled with mystery. There seem to be at least four mysterious situations going, each in need of explanation. In addition, the reader is hard pressed to see how there can be a connection between the plots at all, which seem at first glance to be restricted to different spheres of characters. Because of this, the story seems to be getting deeper and deeper into mystery all the time. The heroine is menaced by unknown pursuers for unknown reason. Unlike many novels, in which it is clear that the heroine is being chased because she has the McGuffin in her purse, neither the reader nor the heroine can understand why she is being pursued. Every fresh new incident adds to the sheer mystery of this part of the book. Offord gradually builds up a miasma like effect, in which the characters seem to be getting deeper and deeper into a mysterious darkness. The sheer variety of the events in the book also add to its effect. On the one hand, things seem more life like and believable. The characters are not restricted to a few events, but seen in a wide variety of life time situations. On the other hand, the variety of events make the book seem more surreal. It is if the characters are trapped in a large, hermetically sealed world, one in which shadows stretch out in many strange and unexpected directions.
Offord's characters spend a great deal of time reconstructing past crime situations, adding many new details and making them seem more real. This is rather similar to what Rinehart does in Miss Pinkerton (1932), building up a visionary view of the key crime events.
Offord also has affinities with the Realist tradition. Her classic Walking Shadow (1959) contains a mysterious corpse, with the mystery turning on "the breakdown of identity" so popular in the Realist tradition. The book also has a "background", a loving depiction of a real life Oregon Shakespeare festival. Offord's book is the last novel known to me that displays the Realist tradition in full force, although Blochman continued writing short stories into the 1970's, and these also qualify as representatives of the same school. Earlier Offord books like Skeleton Key also contain science and scientists as part of the plot, another Realist characteristic.
Leslie Ford's novella "Death Stops at a Tourist Camp" (1936) contains a well done impossible crime plot. Somewhat unusually, how the crime was committed is revealed half way through the story, with the revelation of whodunit reserved for the actual ending of the tale. These later sections are a bit anticlimactic, whereas the earlier impossible crime part is first rate. Apart from the impossible crime, the basic story setup in the novella recalls Rinehart's The Circular Staircase.
"Death Stops at a Tourist Camp" (1936) seems to be somewhat unusual in Ford's work in that it contains a well done puzzle plot. In most of the Ford novels I have read, the puzzle plot is pretty weak. There is a mystery, and its solution, but there is little imaginative or clever about it. So far, the only Ford novel I have read with much puzzle plot ingenuity is Mr. Pinkerton Has the Clue (1936). Instead, the best part of Ford's writing is her storytelling. She often unrolls an interesting situation, and gives her lead characters an adventure while investigating it. The best parts of many Ford novels are the opening chapters. Here her storytelling is strongest, and her imagination at its peak. These sections often take place before any murder has actually transpired. When the murder does occur, late in the novel, the charm of the book often stops dead in its tracks, and we get a routine murder mystery. What all of this means is that Ford is something of a specialized taste. She does not show the virtue of mystery plot brilliance demonstrated by many of her contemporaries. And few of her books are successful from beginning to end. Yet, lurking in her work is some real accomplishment. I always look forward to starting one of her stories.
Ford's novella "The Clock Strikes Twelve" (1935) (also known as "The Supreme Court Murder") is reasonably pleasant reading, but it could be much better, considered as a puzzle plot mystery. The elaborate schemes of the killer, entertainingly typical of the Golden Age, seem absurdly unmotivated. The author wonders early on why the killer took the risk of murdering someone in the Supreme Court chamber, no less, but she never comes up with a decent explanation. The story shows Ford's interest in mechanical devices and machinery. There is some good Washington atmosphere in this tale, and a portrait of an Amelia Earhart type woman flying ace that has some intriguing feminist slants. Washington settings were popular among the HIBK school. Mary Roberts Rinehart, who lived in Washington for a time while her husband was a government official, wrote about the city in her non mystery, "One Hour of Glory", and Mignon G. Eberhart set "Murder Goes to Market" (1943) there. Disney's The Strawstack Murders (1938 - 1939) is set in Maryland near Washington. Even Patricia McGerr's Selena Meade spy stories in the 1960's show signs of the HIBK tradition. Washington settings were good for HIBK writers partly because much of Washington's "business" is transacted at social events. These social events are run by women characters, often sophisticated power brokers, and yet the events are full of government activity, intrigue, spies, lawyers, and big businessmen with agendas. It allows the writers to mix social activity and glamorous woman characters naturally with mystery, intrigue and suspense. Even away from Washington, Lenore Glen Offord postulated spies operating in Berkeley, California in Skeleton Key; see also Rinehart's "Murder and the South Wind" and Kendrick's The Odor of Violets. Admittedly many of these stories are set in the early 1940's World War II era, when espionage was much on Americans' minds. In any event, the Washington setting of the tales allows writers to reflect on the nature of basic American values: what is really important about American life, what are its essential traditions? There is a mix of patriotism about American traditions, and skepticism about politicians and diplomats. It also allows for an exploration of ambiguity. This is a place where even the good characters wear masks, where nothing is as it seems. Both the American themes and the ambiguity have a common basic approach: an attempt to find solid, worthwhile reality hidden under a maze of alternatives.
"The Clock Strikes Twelve" features her series sleuth, Colonel John Primrose. It was published before any of the Primrose novels, and is one of the many novellas by Golden Age writers that appeared in The American Magazine - Ford did eight in the 1930's. The short, bird-dog like Colonel reminds one a little bit of Ellery Queen's Inspector Queen, and his aide Sgt. Buck Queen's Sgt. Velie.
Ford's The Woman in Black (1947) is an early, skeptical look at what Dwight D. Eisenhower would call the military-industrial complex. It shows a successful but corrupt industrialist, grown rich off the war effort, attempting to move on into the civilian sector after the end of World War II in 1945. The story makes it clear that he is little more than a vicious con artist. Ford's story is very mainstream in feel - apparently it was syndicated in The Saturday Evening Post, as were many of Ford's novels. So presumably it reflects widespread skepticism at the time about such enterprises. The feel in the story is more of a financially sophisticated writer showing an inside Washington story, than of anything else. The story also concerns the hunt for synthetic rubber, and what it would mean to the economy. Ford, like most of the HIBK school, was deeply interested in science and technology, an interest for which the school has never received much critical credit.
The Woman in Black takes a long time before it gets a murder going (Chapters 1 - 8), and these are the best parts of the novel. After this, the book becomes a much more routine mystery tale. Ford employs an unusual strategy early in the book, by declaring one of the characters, the detective Grace Latham's friend, to be morally innocent and of outstanding character. This unequivocally removes her as a suspect throughout the novel, and gives the detective an ally and friend. This character is embedded deep in the network of suspects in the story, and normally she would come under suspicion too. Ford is not interested in the paranoia of suspecting everyone, however. She is much more interested in the feminist vision of women working together, and supporting each other in a time of crisis. Technically speaking, other writers have created such allies for their detective by having this ally be constantly in the company of the detective at the time of the first murder, thus giving them an unshakable alibi, and permanently removing them from the list of suspects. Ford did not have such an option here, because her first murder occurs so late in the book. Latham has to accept her friend's innocence on faith and friendship alone, something she gladly does.
Leslie Ford was a pseudonym of Zenith Brown. She also wrote puzzle plot, Golden Age, intuitionist style fiction under the name of David Frome, set in England and featuring the Welsh detective, Mr. Pinkerton. Frome's Evan Pinkerton story, "The Man on the Iron Palings" (1941), shows a strong influence of Chesterton: There is the impossible crime plot, resolved partly through a look at the geometry of the murder situation. There is the mousy, diffident detective, a bit out of place among a bunch of aggressive society higher-ups. Ford pushes this social difference to an extreme, with her shy Mr. Pinkerton a bullied bundle of nerves. And there is a common background of London club life, somewhat eccentric organizations that have dinners and get togethers: see Chesterton's "The Queer Feet", for example. Like that other American Chestertonian, John Dickson Carr, Ford wrote so convincingly of London life than many people thought she was British.
If Chesterton's Father Brown was less socially high powered than the people he investigated, he at least had the dignity of the cloth to protect him, as well as his moral seriousness and gigantic intellect. Little Mr. Pinkerton has none of these defenses, and his social humiliations achieve mammoth proportions. They are the most extreme of any detective protagonist since J.S. Fletcher's The Million Dollar Diamond. Other Chesterton influenced writers generally have not attempted to duplicate Father Brown's shy, humble qualities. Carr's Dr. Fell is a portrait of Chesterton himself, not a Father Brown clone. And Anthony Boucher's Sister Ursula, while sharing Father Brown's religious vocation, is aggressive and confident. However, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple is often undervalued as a little old lady detective.
Ford's Mr. Pinkerton Grows a Beard (1935) is not a mystery novel per se, but a spy novel, although it opens with a murder. The early sections show delightful storytelling, as Mr. Pinkerton has a series of adventures at the British Museum and its environs. There is no puzzle plot, but there is a vein of sparkling humor. The tale recalls Stevenson's story of fantastic adventures in London, New Arabian Nights (1878), and also plot elements in E. Phillips Oppenheim's spy novel, The Great Impersonation (1920). Like Ford's "Death Stops at a Tourist Camp" (1936), Pinkerton's adventures involve moving to new lodgings overnight.
David Frome's novels are sometimes far from the standard paradigms of the Golden Age. Mr. Pinkerton Grows a Beard (1935) is mainly an adventure story; it "justifies" this by being a spy novel, not a conventional mystery. It is a successful work, full of charm and humor. Much less successful is The Man From Scotland Yard (1932), which is a complete botch. It is a mystery story of sorts, but has little fair play, and Mr. Pinkerton is only marginally related to the events it depicts. Far closer to the British Golden Age mystery than either of these is Mr. Pinkerton Has the Clue (1936). It has such conventional features as a murder, a closed circle of suspects, and Mr. Pinkerton on hand from the start to observe the characters and detect the mystery. This book shows aspects of the Realist school. There is a pleasant Background of the city of Bath. Such realist school interests as shadowing suspects and alibis play a prominent role, and so do some technical approaches in the solution. However, the book has an overwhelmingly intuitionist feel. Mr. Pinkerton solves the case through thinking, not through leg work, and his thinking comes in an especially deep burst of insight. The story has some clever plot twists, that are presented like the puzzle plot ideas of intuitionist writers. In fact, the story seems a lot like John Dickson Carr in tone. The atmosphere in the book, of an unknown evil presence stalking a house by night, committing serious crimes, is exactly like that in Carr novels. The cleverest plot ideas come half way through the story; the second half, while anticlimactic, is still pleasant reading. This two part construction anticipates that of "Death Stops at a Tourist Camp" (1936); in both works, the first half concentrates on the ingenious murder plot, and how it was done; the second half on who dun it.
The Mr. Pinkerton series largely appeared between 1930 - 1939. They are part of a Golden Age world that became less fashionable after the War in the early 1940's. Homicide House (1949) is the sole-post World War II Mr. Pinkerton novel. Its opening paragraphs describe Mr. Pinkerton as being "nostalgic"; perhaps his creator was, too. It is also known by its British title of Murder on the Square. This perhaps a better title; it refers to the setting of the story in a London residential Square. Its physical setting is very similar to Mr. Pinkerton Has the Clue (1936). Clue took place in a rooming house in the British city of Bath, in which Mr. Pinkerton was the last and least of the lodgers. Homicide House takes place in a similar London establishment. In both stories, Mr. Pinkerton has a tiny room on the upper floors. In both he is bullied and despised by the aggressive staff and inhabitants - the houses maintaining a huge staff of servants and managers, that seems astonishing to people like myself who are more familiar with staffless modern American apartment buildings. In both, he is a witness, and then a detective, when sinister doings engulf the residents of the buildings. The crimes in both books revolve around one large family, and its systems of romances, family secrets, and financial control of a lot of wastrel dependents by one rich, domineering elderly woman. Homicide House is routine as a puzzle plot mystery, with Mr. Pinkerton doing very little actual detection. Its opening Chapters (1 - 6) succeed as a romance, however, with mysterious events, an intriguing setting, and characters having adventures.
The Chuckling Fingers (1941). The Fingers of the title are an unusual rock formation near Lake Superior in Northern Minnesota. Seeley describes them very well; apparently they are imaginary, and made up for the novel. There is also a clever bit of business about some destroyed clothes on a vacation trip. This is genuinely ingenious, and would grace a much better puzzle plot novel than this. Otherwise this book is largely undistinguished. It suffers from the steady undercurrent of hysteria about personal relationships that mars so many lesser HIBK novels: reading these books can be downright emotionally exhausting, and nothing in the main plot is anywhere as good as the clever bit about the clothes. Seeley's titles often have the same linguistic pattern, a verb-ing noun: The Listening House, The Crying Sisters.
The Listening House (1938). Very different in style from The Chuckling Fingers. The writing is neither hysterical, nor especially concerned with personal relations. The first 70 or so pages are closely tied to mysterious events happening in a decrepit old house that has been carved up into apartments. Both the house itself and the dramatic events that take place there are fairly well imagined. These segments show the strong influence of Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase, as various intruders keep trying to get into the house, and as mysterious nocturnal events keep happening. After this, the novel drifts off into a deep and dull investigation of hidden past crimes, all of which, through a tissue of unbelievable coincidences, turn out to be relevant to present events. The house succeeds as a Golden Age architecture extravaganza, (I just love the unusual buildings that are always getting explored in Golden Age mysteries), and the creepy initial events are not bad as melodrama, but the book never really takes off at all as a puzzle plot mystery. Years before Steve Thayer's Saint Mudd, Seeley's book reminds us that the Minneapolis-St. Paul area was once one of the most corrupt in North America. It makes Chandler's "Bay City" look saintly. This book also shows the somewhat startling realism about matters of sex, mistreatment of women, etc., displayed by the HIBK novel of the era. It's a tradition that mixes feminism with realism, even naturalism.