Anthony Abbot | C. Daly King | Dorothy Stockbridge Tillett | Rex Stout | Rufus King | Clyde B. Clason | Gregory Dean | Rink Creussen | John T. McIntyre | Rufus Gillmore | Richard Burke | Blanche Bloch
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
About the Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930)
About the Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress (1931) (Chapters 1 - 4)
About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932)
About the Murder of a Startled Lady (1935) (Book One: Chapters 1 -3, Book Two: Chapter 4)
Thatcher Colt stories
The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant
The Red Box (1936 - 1937) (Chapters 1 - 8)
Too Many Cooks (1938) (Chapters 1, 3, 10, 11, 16, 17)
Some Buried Caesar (1938-1939)
Might As Well Be Dead (1956) (Chapters 1-5, 7, 12-14, 18-19)
Champagne for One (1958) (Chapters 1 - 6, 15 - 17)
Plot It Yourself (1959) (Chapters 1 - 4, 16, 19)
The Final Deduction (1961) (Chapters 1-2)
A Right to Die (1964)
Target Practice
Black Orchids
Not Quite Dead Enough
Trouble in Triplicate
Triple Jeopardy
Three Men Out
Three Witnesses
Three For the Chair
And Four To Go
Three For the Chair
Homicide Trinity
Trio For Blunt Instruments
"Santa Claus Beat" (1953)
Alphabet Hicks stories
The Strangler Fig (1930) (Chapters 1 - 3, 14)
Murder Masks Miami (1939)
Holiday Homicide (1940)
The Case of the Dowager's Etchings (1943)
Reginald De Puyster stories
Diagnosis: Murder (1939 - 1941)
Uncollected Dr. Colin Starr stories
Malice in Wonderland
The Steps to Murder
Uncollected Stuff Driscoll Stories
The Faces of Danger
Ashton-Kirk, Investigator (1910) (Chapters 1-13, 24, 25)
Chinese Red (1942) (Chapters 1-5, 7, 19)
Quinny Hite stories
"The Silver Dollar" (1948)
Abbot seems to have a natural liking for the complex plot. Even when he does a tongue-in-cheek short story that consciously combines humor and mystery, such as "About the Perfect Crime of Mr. Digberry", there is a delightful, well constructed mystery plot full of unexpected turns and complexity. Abbot's work also has the quality of "readability": they carry one along, and one can enjoy one of his books in a single sitting.
Abbot's interest in misdirection can lead to vivid evocations of the difference between illusion and reality. Although Abbot does not conspicuously underline any philosophical implications of this theme, the strong plots cause this theme to emerge anyway. Abbot's fiction has a haunting quality. Both humans' ability to understand reality, and human life itself, seem frail and fragile. There is a note of pathos in his work, that seems autumnal, in contrast with Ellery Queen's springtime vigor. There is a sense of a last look at things, before they disappear into the mist.
Another contributor to this effect is Abbot's emphasis on the investigation of murder scenes. Described gently, and with delicate but powerful mise-en-scène, Abbot's vivid descriptions of houses, rooms, streets and yards show an architectural imagination at work.
If Abbot's work looks forward to the pulp techniques of the 1930's and 1940's, it looks backward to the scientific detectives of 1905-1914. About the Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930) digresses from its main mystery to offer a full portrait of "high tech" police techniques. These seem oddly similar to those of Cleveland S. Moffet and Arthur B. Reeve of twenty years earlier.
Abbot's detectival setup offers an intriguing variation on Van Dine's formula. In Van Dine, and in Ellery Queen as well, a genius amateur detective works closely with the New York Police as an unofficial, but highly respected, consultant. Each has a personal connection with officialdom: Van Dine's Philo Vance is a personal friend of the DA, and Ellery Queen is Police Inspector Richard Queen's son. In Abbot's books, the genius detective Thatcher Colt is himself the Police Commissioner, and his connection with the New York Police come about naturally as the head of police. There is still a bit of "amateur detective" status about Colt: like Philo Vance, he is from a higher social stratum than most of the police, and the Police Commissioner's job is usually considered administrative and political, so Colt's involvement in solving actual cases is unusual, and the result of his rare personal abilities. Just as Vance is an art expert and connoisseur, Colt is an expert on literature, collecting rare books and writing poetry in his spare time.
Abbott wrote four Thatcher Colt detective novels in 1930 - 1932. They are especially Van Dine like in their tone, and in their detectival approach. He then paused for three years, without publishing any more Colts. During 1935 - 1943, he published four more Colt novels, at long intervals. These later novels are much less Van Dine like in tone, perhaps not surprising, in that Van Dine was no longer anywhere near as popular as in the early 1930's. They also contain much more about an Abbot enthusiasm of those years, psychic phenomena.
Abbot was deep into what might be called "WASP Macho". There is tremendous emphasis on Colt's power and prestige as head of the police. He is also big on intimidating criminals. Abbot has really bought into ideas about leadership of social institutions equaling manhood and masculinity. Of course, this leadership was a privilege reserved in his day to WASPs, and one that they valued very highly. While there is no sign of prejudice against immigrants or other ethnic groups in Abbot, it is clear that he was deep into the social ideals of his own ethnic group, and felt that his hero should be a leader of men. Colt is the literary equivalent of the sympathetic, jut-jawed, well tailored men seated at big desks in big offices that showed up in so many 1930's movies (think of Walter Huston as the factory owner in Dodsworth).
Paradoxically, while Abbot idolized men in leadership positions, his fiction is more rooted in middle class life than are most other authors of the Golden Age. This is especially true of the non-police characters in his tales. The investigation into the death of Geraldine Foster reveals a poignant look at the stresses and strains in the life of a young, middle class woman of the period. Similarly, "ordinary man" Mr. Digberry's survival and even triumph suggests an allegory of the survival and triumph of the middle classes.
Although it is not pointed out in the story, further reflection suggests that the novel's characters exist in doubles. The hero and heroine, a pair of married aerialists, employ a second couple of aerialists to assist them; they have even had this second couple change their stage names to match the husband's. Another pair of similar characters includes the circus' manager, and the circus' millionaire backer; both are older businessmen. The heroine employs both a personal maid, and a male assistant to help her with her act. Both the hero and heroine had a previous spouse. The District Attorney, a none too intelligent blunderer who is always wrong in the story, is accompanied by his two nephews, who seem to be miniature copies of himself.
Perhaps the most striking pair of doubles in the book includes Thatcher Colt, and the witch doctor Keblia. Keblia is the leader of a tribe of Ubangis that have been imported to form an exhibit at the circus. Both Keblia and the Ubangis are sympathetic characters in the story. Just like Colt, Keblia plays the role of detective in the story. With the aid of his tribe, Keblia tracks down the real killer, and tries to intervene to protect the heroine. In fact, he finds the real killer long before Colt. Just as Colt is assisted by his "tribe" of policemen, Keblia is assisted by the tribe of Ubangis - another set of doubles in the story. Keblia is dressed in a fashionable suit in the story - a costume that in other Abbot works is strongly associated with the elegant Colt. The sophisticated Colt treats the Ubangis with the greatest respect. One striking scene shows a pact between Colt and the Ubangis to share information about clues to the mystery. Abbot's novel contrasts the respect with which his hero Colt treats the tribe, with the racist dismissal they are given by the low brow District Attorney in the book. The book's narrator falls somewhere between these two extremes in his attitude. While not sharing in the DA's contempt, he finds the Ubangis to be eerie and frightening. He clearly finds the strange and exotic to be threatening. The narrator is not supposed to be as intelligent and knowledgeable as Colt.
The treatment of the African Ubangis is progressive, especially for its day. They are depicted as both intelligent and kind hearted. Their religious ceremonies are depicted with dignity, although they are also milked for maximum eerie effect, like all the other events of the novel. The books portrayal of the Ubangis' social organization is in the "tribal" tradition, one that has roots in Jack London, and other turn of the century authors. Just as in London, the tribe is shown to be dominated by a witch doctor, and devoted to a set of superstitious rituals and beliefs. This portrayal of tribal life was very popular from 1900 through the 1940's. Today it seems old fashioned and out dated, having been replaced by more sophisticated anthropological ideas about tribal culture. Still, it seems to be the "best" model of tribal life available to literary authors of its day. Also dated today is the constant emphasis on how "eerie" the narrator finds the Ubangis. Despite this dated portrait of tribal life, Abbot's treatment of the Ubangis is clearly in the anti-racist tradition of Van Dine and other authors of his school; see the article on Anthony Boucher for a discussion of this.
The Ubangis are associated in the story with enclosed spaces: trunks and underground chambers. They are chthonic, and associated with the earth. The aerialists, by contrast, have there domain high in the air, on their trapeze wires, and in a high apartment. They have glittering clothing, and are associated with powder and greasepaint and gasses. The aerialists have a circle, a circus ring, under their domain, whereas both the Ubangis and Colt seem associated with rectilinear geometry. Colt keeps discovering boxes associated with the murder, the trunk and the box like room of the flood light chamber. Colt also seems to have a special affinity with Madison Square Garden itself, a building considered in the book as the last word in progressive modern accomplishment. It is made of concrete over a steel frame, and such hard construction seems symbolic of Colt. The trunk and the bunker like flood light chamber also seem rock hard constructions. Colt also owns Police Headquarters and his apartment. Colt's association with both modern buildings and modern organizations such as the police department and science are seen as emblems of a splendid masculinity.
Colt never actually climbs into the aerialists' trapeze area, whereas he has no trouble penetrating to the Ubangis' regions. He is the opener and discoverer of the Ubangis; he is always opening up their domains. He also brings in the professor who understands their language and customs, and serves as the professor's sponsor throughout the story.
Unlike buildings, guns, bullets and shooting are associated not with the police in the novel, but with the older male authority figures of the circus: the animal trainer, the millionaire backer, and the circus owner. Such guns are seen only negatively as emblems of destruction, never of accomplishment. Colt instead works to outlaw guns; he is an enthusiastic advocate of gun control, as part of his role as Police Commissioner, and chief preventer of crime in New York City. The Ubangis also have the role of protectors of people and preventers of trouble, another affinity between Colt and the Ubangis.
Instead of fighting, Colt's ability to see and perceive everything is emphasized. He is unusually good at sight, hearing, smell and the other senses. Colt is the one who hears the changes in the drum beat, for example. His senses are almost as heightened as the hero of the TV series, the Sentinel. He also has the brain power to interpret what he sees as clues. Colt also has a magnificent physique, as do the aerialists in the story.
Unlike private eyes, Colt is rarely stonewalled by witnesses in the story. P I's are always spending hours grilling witnesses who refuse to talk, or who lie to them. By contrast, Colt, like the other detectives of the Van Dine school, has little trouble acquiring mountains of information. The Van Dine school sleuths have a number of techniques: they use the exhaustive search of both victims' rooms and crime scenes; they query disinterested passerby who have tons of information to share; and they institute resourceful police inquiries for information. Because of this, they are always purposively filling in their picture of the crime. It is only the murder itself that is an obstacle to the Van Dine school detective: it is always "a carefully planned crime" perpetrated by "one of the most fiendish brains that it has ever been the misfortune of" the narrator to encounter. Despite this satire, the Van Dine school's approach is plainly a lot more fun to read. Their detectives go right in and detect, and this is the way it should be.
Abbot's The Shudders (1943) seems more like a horror novel than a mystery book. It has some plot twists, but they are not imaginative enough to make the book fascinate the average mystery fan. The book does show plot complexity. Many of the scenes display considerable mise-en-scène as well. Images of ruination recur throughout the novel, including malaria on a tropical expedition, and a visit to the fleabags of 42nd Street. Most remarkable is the ruined greenhouse at the end of Chapter 3 and in Chapter 4.
The Shudders repeats imagery from Abbot's About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932). There is the death that results from a drop from a high place. There are the explorers who travel in the tropics, looking for rare chemical knowledge: here it is New Guinea, in Circus, Equatorial Africa. Both encounter an extremely colorful group of aboriginal people: the Dyaks in Shudders, the Ubangi in Circus. Both books deal with the possibility of killing someone at a distance, without leaving any traces. Both contain home movies, that are projected in a private dwelling. Both have scenes of men dressed up in white tie and tails. Both open on a rainy night of Friday the Thirteenth, and both contain much horror imagery. Both describe Colt's army of police recurring characters in detail, making them part of the plot. These recurring police characters are part of the Van Dine tradition. Both contain life histories of the suspects, exploring their professional and romantic lives in great detail. Both have a background of the chemical industry. Both contain references to Germany's involvement with the same. Both contain an apartment, which people enter and leave through a high window. Both contain a romantic triangle of sorts, with a younger couple, and an older man of considerable wealth, and dubious morals. Images of death are often linked to those of rebirth, both in the body in the trunk in the opening of Chapter 10 of Circus, and in the solution of Shudders. Many of the male characters seem to be in trouble in Abbot's books; this emotional mood probably subconsciously reflects the real life general vulnerability of men during the Depression, who were often unemployed and lacking in prospects.
One villain in The Shudders is a Uriah Heep type. He worms his way into a position as confidential secretary to a millionaire banker, takes over his life, and promptly murders him for his money. Although the author does not point this out, this seems to exaggerate and parody the relationship between Thatcher Colt and his secretary, the Watson-like narrator of the Colt novels. The narrator is a born number two, who owes his entire existence to being Colt's secretary.
Why does Abbot include scenes of home movies in his books? This is hard to say. He is certainly not sneaking clues into the stories with them, as John Dickson Carr would be. One reason is that Abbot is a writer interested in high technology and scientific detection, and during the 1930's such movies partook of high tech. Also, it allows him to show highlights of his characters' past lives, always an Abbot interest. Most importantly, however, is the structural role these scenes play in Abbot's architecture. Abbot's books are marked off into distinct episodes, like movements in a piece of classical music. Introducing an episode narrated in a distinct fashion, through film, allows Abbot to build a fence around one part of the narrative. Each episode plays its own unique role in the design of the book. They add to the beauty of the overall pattern. Similarly, in Circus, there is a stretch in Chapter 16 in which Colt reports on the results of his officer Inspector Flynn's investigations into the characters' backgrounds. This forms a deeply satisfying extension of the book's plot to date, offering a formal conclusion to several plot threads in the book. Its position in the story seems like a sort of coda in music, or other part of a formal pattern.
The impossible crime is framed within a situation derived from Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men (1905) - a ploy that has been much used in films and comics ever since Wallace invented it. Abbot's explanation of the impossible crime is different from Wallace's, however. There is also little in Abbot of anything political, while Wallace's book is soaked in social commentary.
Abbot's howdunit solution brings the novel into the realm of the Scientific detective story. So do some other aspects of police lab work. Several of Abbot's tales involve such scientific and technological details - it is a running strand throughout his fiction.
Impossible crime aside, the novel shows less colorful storytelling, and less imagination its plotting, characters and setting, than the best of Abbot's writing. It's night-club opening scene, and the Night Club Lady's penthouse apartment where most of the action occurs, while well described, are hardly novel settings for crime fiction. Both seem like female settings, elaborate ornate boxes that contain entire lives of the heroine and her female relatives and friends. These womb symbols are constantly contrasted with the male police officers and their masculine and phallic symbols, with Thatcher Colt in top hat and tails, uniformed officers on motorcycles, a policeman undercover in doorman's uniform, etc. The women are in white, with occasional flashes of red, while the men are in dark colors such as Colt's black tail coat or blue police uniforms. White tie and tails are a tradition in Abbot books. The glittering night-club is full of mirrors, crystals and jewels, and is underground; the penthouse is high in the sky: two extremes that will re-appear in About the Murder of the Circus Queen. The penthouse has a high window playing a role in the plot, not unlike other Abbot books. The two young women in the story have plot-lines that move in parallel: they are perhaps examples of the doubling characters that will appear more systematically in About the Murder of the Circus Queen.
Abbot once more features life histories of the characters, that play a role in the solution. While other Abbot books such as About the Murder of the Circus Queen and The Shudders, open on Friday the Thirteenth in a rain storm, this one is set on New Year's Eve in a snow storm. The male characters are once again in deep trouble. While those books refer to the chemical industry, and have ties to Germany, this one is set against the medical supply business, and refers to the characters' past lives in France.
The final quarter of the book, after the explanation of the howdunit three quarters way through (Chapter 13), is also anticlimactic, and not as successful as the previous three quarters of the novel. Its plot elements are less interesting than those that went before.
Abbot will return to the setting of this novel, the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in New York, for his fine short story, "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932).
After these excellent opening sections in Clergyman's Mistress and Startled Lady, virtually a whole new novel begins. For the first time we meet the characters of the mystery story. Up till that time we had been dealing with a discovered body, vividly described murder locations, and the police. Now we are introduced to the suspects, and a whole, conventional murder mystery ensues, with most of the focus on the motives of the suspects and their personal relationships with the victim. These later chapters in both novels are far more routine. There is much less actual detection, and what revelations ensue tend to be the result of routine police inquiries: realistic, but not very imaginative. Towards the end of both stories Colt builds a straw case against each of the characters in turn. Both books also come to a similar kind of solution to their puzzle plot, although to say more about this would spoil the reader's interest in the mystery.
The opening chapters of Startled Lady are full of people with a show business background: the sort of cheap entertainers that might hang around carnivals or fair grounds. There are the medium and her husband in the first chapter, then the artist with a waxworks and amusement park life history in Chapter 3. These people's colorful life stories recall the circus performers in Circus Queen (1932). The professor in Chapter 1 of Startled Lady also recalls the savant Colt meets in Circus Queen. Abbot likes to include a whole "life history" for the characters in his novels. While it is not likely in real life that the police would have thumb nail biographies for everyone they meet, one tends to accept this as a bit of poetic license. It does add to the storytelling charm of the book, as well as making the characters more rounded.
The best section in the later part of the novel is Book Two: Chapter 4. This resolves the medium subplot of the opening chapter. Abbot shows a flair for one type of impossible crime, the apparent supernatural event. Abbot does not describe the kind of physical impossibility we associate with G.K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr and their successors. Instead, this tale is in the same genre as Craig Rice's "Beyond the Shadow of a Dream" (1956), a case of apparently supernatural knowledge that eventually is explained in realistic terms.
Unfortunately, after its early sections, Startled Lady declines into a far more ordinary novel. Most of the suspects in the book are unpleasant, even psychologically abnormal. Much of the book is taken up with descriptions of their emotionally disturbed personalities. There is also a consistent tone of sordidness struck throughout, something that is not typical of Abbot, and not consistent with the personality shown in his other works.
Abbot has tried to add a little raciness to the novel. The narrator-Watson of the book, Thatcher's male confidential secretary, is repeatedly accused of being jealous of Colt's new fiancee. This leads to the encounter in Chapter 9, Section 2, one of the more deliriously baroque in the popular fiction of the era.
The Creeps lacks all ingenuity. The explanation of the medium's message shows none of the cleverness of the earlier novel. None of the murders in the books show any cleverness either. The story is labored and dull.
King's work is full of horror. He likes to depict bizarre religious rituals as part of his horror atmosphere. These rituals often seem to involve cycles of time: the Aztec cycles in "The Codex' Curse", the repetitions of the Requiem in "The Nail and the Requiem", the nightly events on the highway in "The Headless Horrors". Light and darkness, and their alteration are also important elements in King's storytelling, adding both drama, and contributions to the puzzle plots. There is also a theme of "policemen in jeopardy", that seems to involve their uniforms. King seemed to have a special sympathy for these "hard young men", as he put it, and their lives seem to be in danger in his tales. One of the best locked room tales in The Curious Mr. Tarrant, "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem" (1935), oddly anticipates The Silence of the Lambs, of all things. The mad killer's escape from the box-like penthouse in King, seems oddly similar to Hannibal's escape from his box-like cage toward the end of the movie (I've never read the book). King's tale, in turn, bears a family resemblance to MacKinlay Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock" (1930). Other possible influences on King's fiction are discussed in the articles on Stuart Palmer and Sax Rohmer.
King's impossible crime technique seems to focus on hidden places and hidden spaces. Although presided over by images of women, never living women, men seem to emerge from these spaces, or be swallowed up by them. The images of women are naked, and emphasize their sexuality. Perhaps these hidden spaces are womb symbols. They also seem to have a magic or ritual quality to them.
King's horror motif contrasts oddly with the country club, fun young couples background of his Watson, Jerry Phelan. Phelan, his girlfriend, and his sister, who winds up dating detective Tarrant, seem right out of the world later to be occupied by such Bright Young Couples as seen in the works of Q. Patrick, or The Norths, by the Lockridges. "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" (1935) does much to characterize Phelan and his family, and has some pleasant romance. It is set in a small town in New Jersey; King himself lived in Summit, New Jersey, and frequently set his works either in that state, or in nearby New York City. Another set of perennial characters in King are the mild mannered, ineffectual authority figures of various institutions where the horror is taking place, who have clearly lost control of their turf. These include the museum director in "Codex", the apartment manager in "Nail", and the police chief in "Headless Horrors".
Not all of King is horror based. "The Episode of the Vanishing Harp" is a country house, Golden Age style mystery, complete with a wealthy couple, the family secretary, the family banker, and the family physician. It is a pleasant enough piece of storytelling, but its locked room problem's solution, while fair and believable, is easily guessed.
King is far from being my favorite author. Just as in Clayton Rawson, there is something distasteful about King. King's strongest suit is his ability to create suspense. His better tales sweep one along as a reader, and show some real excitement, as well as some creepiness in the horror department. But they often turn upon clichés, including the disagreeable ethnic stereotypes of their era. And their mystery plots tend to be obvious, and easily figured out. There is often only one real suspect, and sure enough, at the end he did it - not much of a use of the whodunit potential of the mystery tale. "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem", however, succeeds as a puzzle plot tale - it is a significant contribution to the locked room story. By contrast, King's version of the Mary Celeste, "Torment IV", is ridiculous, one of the all time dumb mystery tales. Caveat lector! (Which could mean either "Let the reader beware"; or "Beware of Hannibal Lector" - not bad advice either way. This is my first Latin pun.)
Crippen & Landru has republished the Tarrant stories, together with four additional tales not in the first collection, as The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003). Three of these later tales add considerably to the mystery value of the series as a whole.
"The Episode of the Little Girl Who Wasn't There" (1944) is a locked room story. It is full of ingenious ideas. It keeps proposing different solutions to its central riddle, in the tradition of Anthony Berkley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), and other Golden Age multi-solutioned tales. The story is hard to read, and lacks gracefulness. It is perhaps more intriguing than fun. But still, it shows lots of thinking. Aspects hearken back to "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem", and can be considered as a development of the ideas in that tale.
"The Episode of the Sinister Invention" (1946) is a minor pastiche of Sherlock Holmes. Aside from the zany inventions mentioned in the tale, the main interest here is some of Tarrant's use of deductive reasoning. Both this tale and the previous one show Tarrant functioning as an armchair detective. The hall where the murder takes place is another of King's rooms. King here deduces some architectural features of the hall from the story told him about the killing there by his policeman friend. Once again, King shows an interest in the engineering and construction of a room. And here, these features are made the center of logical deduction, an interesting extension of King's ideas.
"The Episode of the Perilous Talisman" (1951) is a combination fantasy and mystery story. Such hybrid works are fairly common in the sf world. This tale is nicely done, with some clever ideas, and King's patented ability to create suspense. Although the plot deals with a small box, the ideas in the story seem oddly architectural. The box is of the oblong dimensions favored by King for his locked rooms, and is a similar complex engineering construction. The box also has features that recall "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" (1935). King's interest in light and dark is also present. This seems to be King's final work of fiction published during his lifetime. King's interest in optical devices recalls R. Austin Freeman. In general, King's concern with engineering and mechanical constructs is in the tradition of scientific detection.
The Egyptian box is "a foot long by about eight inches wide". This means the box is roughly in the Golden Ratio. There is much discussion today if ancient Egyptian architects consciously used the Golden Ratio in their work.
"The Episode of the Absent Fish" was not published till long after King's death (EQMM April 1979). It is an imaginative story, in the tradition of "The Nail and the Requiem". Like that earlier story, it is a locked room problem, which takes place in an architecturally complex penthouse apartment. King's "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" is also architectural in subject. King was fascinated with architecture, and many of his most creative works deal with it. Even when it plays little role in the mystery plot, such as the New Jersey highway landscapes in "The Headless Horrors" and Obelists Fly High, it is a fascinating part of the tale. King likes the engineering aspects of architecture, such as the infrastructure of the buildings, machinery in them, such as elevators or gas stations, and their industrial construction. King's creative use of architecture is part of Golden Age mystery tradition, while his interest in their engineering aspects is relatively personal and unique.
Obelists Fly High has some common imagery with other King works. Much of it takes place in an enclosed area, the airplane. This is similar to the penthouse of "Nail", the museum room of "Harp" and the basement room of "Codex". Most of these areas seem to mechanical constructs. They are not the simple rooms of much Golden Age fiction. Instead the story emphasizes their constructed nature, the materials and the properties of the walls, their slightly irregular geometry. These areas tend to be over twice as long as they are wide. They tend to be associated with wealth and property: the 1935 airplane is the domain of the wealthy, as are the museums in the short stories.
The early sections (pp. 33 - 70) of Obelists Fly High depict Newark Airport. This is embedded in a New Jersey landscape similar to "The Headless Horrors". Both landscapes feature, not nature or traditional vistas, but modern highways centered around technological buildings: the gas station of "Horrors" and the hangars of Obelists. The vivid background description of airports and air travel Way Back When is one of the most appealing features of the novel. There was much interest in stories set on planes during this period: see Stuart Palmer's The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933), Philip Wylie's "Death Flies East" (1934) and Agatha Christie's Death in the Air (1935). The vivid illustration that accompanies Wylie's story, showing the interior of the plane's cabin, would make an excellent cover for King's book as well. It helped me visualize the setting of King's novel. The illustration emphasizes that pilots of the era were armed, a fact made much of by King. Ostensibly, this was because they carried mail, and hence were officials of the US Government. But in reality, it seems to be contrived to make them authority figures during flight, and for the sake of image, along with their uniforms.
Obelists Fly High also has the fanatic ideologues of King's short stories. These extremely creepy characters generate horror from their participation in monstrous rituals and activities. But whereas the characters in Mr. Tarrant are members of fringe cults, those in Obelists Fly High are supporters of mainstream American belief systems: scientists. This gives the novel much more topicality and social punch, as well as controversy.
Michael Lord, King's series sleuth in his novels, has some features in common with other Van Dine school detectives. Like them he is New York City based. In many ways, he is related to the "genius amateur with personal connection to the police" of Van Dine's Philo Vance and EQ's Ellery Queen. He is a young policeman, not an amateur, but he owes his association with the police to his friendship with the Police Commissioner, just as Vance has a friendship with the DA, and Ellery is the son of Inspector Richard Queen. He is a wealthy, sophisticated young man whose father was the Commissioner's best friend. The Commissioner made him a Lieutenant, but his genius detective skills made him rise rapidly to the rank of Captain. He is a Special Officer attached to the staff of the Police Commissioner. As a social sophisticate attached to the police, he resembles Abbot's Thatcher Colt. Like Abbot, he is concerned with his leadership position. Lord's "I am in charge here" routine on the airplane in Obelists Fly High would make Al Haig blush. The Commissioner in King also resembles Colt in his insistence on saluting and other forms of discipline.
However, like other authority figures in King, Lord manages to completely lose control of his turf. The novel opens with an Epilogue, showing how Lord has botched his case, and lost control of the airplane to an armed criminal. In fact his performance here is one of the least effective of all Golden Age detectives. Abbott has presumably been reading E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1912): in addition to the ineffectiveness of his detective hero, Lord manages to fall in love with his chief suspect, just like Trent, and his author explores multiple solutions, in the tradition of Bentley's novel. Lord's physical vulnerability is also related to the fact that he is a policeman: young men in uniform are always in the greatest danger in King's works. The young Army pilot in the novel also collapses.
Tillett's descriptive powers have grown. The early scenes (Chapters 1 - 3) presenting the island are a vivid piece of writing. Fig also shows Tillett's interest in rooms which are the scenes of crimes. They tend to be studies, and full of the personal and professional effects of the victims, and clues to their murder. People in Tillett's books like to look out upper story windows. They see large panoramas and vistas. They also watch processes develop from beginning to end. Unfortunately, after its opening The Strangler Fig also largely degenerates into a mechanically worked out story. Brown does little actual detection. Tillett does have an interest in social corruption, especially how large money interests do things that hurt society. Here it leads to the interesting discussion of the Neptune (Chapter 14).
Stout's strongest feature as a writer is his superb dialogue. This dialogue shows the influence of that in the S.S. Van Dine books. Both authors indulged in complex, point-counter-point dialogues. Behind both authors is the stichomythia in Greek drama - the ingenious line by line counterpointing dialog that is so brilliant in Aeschylus and other writers. Stout's storytelling can also be superb. Like Van Dine, he knows how to make a really interesting tale unfold.
Stout's weakest feature is his puzzle plotting. His novellas are often well plotted, but his novels seem much weaker. The best Wolfe novel I have yet read with a good mystery plot is Some Buried Caesar. This book also has some of Stout's best humor and characterization, as well as some of Stout's most resonant symbolism, as discussed above. It is universally admired as one of its author's finest works. So we can all agree on something... Stout's fiction has been much praised by top critics of the 1940's (Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr), and the 90's (Jon L. Breen, William L. DeAndrea). The recent paperback release of Stout contains glowing introductory tributes from dozens of mystery writers. So why can't I enjoy much of it? Stout's bad plotting drives me crazy. I work my way through many of his novels, and get nothing in return. The Tecumseh Fox novel, Double For Death (1939), is especially disappointing in this regard, as is And Be a Villain (1948). So far, the Stout novel I have most actively enjoyed on all levels, puzzle plot and storytelling, is Some Buried Caesar.
Also, there are some more idiosyncratic factors at work. All the fierce, unfriendly deal making in Stout's books is a big turn-off to me. I dislike purchasing something in an antique shop, or being involved in any situation where I have to negotiate a price with an antagonist out to get me. I just don't like adversarial situations. I never play combat-based computer games either. Adversarial negotiations have little to do with today's business world. Corporations are looking for people who are good at working with and supporting others on their team. Business negotiations center on trying to move toward win-win situations, coming up with creative ideas that benefit all parties. Antagonism is out, problem solving is in.
Stout also wrote a sequel of sorts, many years later, in which one of the characters from the earlier book returns. A Right to Die (1964) is a lively look at the Civil Rights era, and shows good storytelling. But its puzzle plot is weak. A Right to Die develops an interesting pattern of personal relationships among its characters, that interacts with the political ideas and issues of the era. The pattern is creative, and helps make the book one of the most enjoyable of Stout's novels. Each character in the story has their own relationship to the murder victim, and their own political beliefs about Civil Rights; the political beliefs and the relationship are often connected. While many Stout novels focus on a business, this one centers on a Civil Rights organization, playing the same structural role in the novel as a business typically does in a Wolfe book. Please click here for a discussion of Civil Rights in Van Dine School Writers.
The Doorbell Rang (1965) is shorter than many of Stout's novels, and its technique seems more similar to his novellas than to that of his novels. The book is best in its first third (Chapters 1 - 5), when Wolfe is taking on the FBI. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the book is taken up by a poorly constructed murder mystery. Wolfe resumes his encounter with the FBI in the second half of Chapter 11 and Chapter 12, leading to some mildly ingenious comic fun.
Van Dine often included collectors and enthusiasts in his tales. Examples are the dog lovers in The Kennel Murder Case (1932), the tropical fish lovers of The Dragon Murder Case (1933), the Egyptologists of The Scarab Murder Case (1929). Ellery Queen followed suit with the rare book lovers of many of his tales, and the stamp collectors of The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934). Stuart Palmer had the museum setting of "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933), and the dog show setting of "The Riddle of the Blueblood Murders" (1934). Rex Stout followed this Van Dine School tradition by using an orchid grower and/or flower show background for several of his works, including Some Buried Caesar (1938-1939), "Black Orchids" (1941), and "Easter Parade" (1957). There are also the expert chefs and gourmets of Too Many Cooks (1938) and "Poison à la Carte" (1958), and the fishing expedition of "Immune to Murder" (1955).
Van Dine often included bizarre, ingenious murder methods in his work. These occur frequently in Stout as well. The opening sections of a Stout mystery often depict a mystery against a colorful background. How the crime was committed is completely unclear. Eventually, Nero and Archie figure out the details of the bizarre murder method used. The solution to this problem is revealed almost at once, often around half way through the story, or even earlier. Throughout the rest of the tale, the focus is figuring out whodunit, the actual killer. This is revealed at the end of the story. This two part construction, figuring out the method of the murder in the first half, the identity of the killer in the second, occurs in such works as Some Buried Caesar (1938-1939), "Black Orchids" (1941), "Cordially Invited to Meet Death" (1942) and "Poison à la Carte" (1958). Stout often put his greatest creativity into the first half of these tales. Both the colorful background, and the mystery puzzle surrounding the hidden method of murder, are often brilliantly done. By contrast, the actual whodunit section in the second half tends to be much less ingenious. There is a different sort of two part construction in The Red Box (1936 - 1937). Stout solves one, preliminary mystery (Chapters 1 - 8), which immediately leads to a second mystery taking up the rest of the book (Chapters 8 - 20). Stout's writing in the first section is quite lively.
Van Dine's work emphasized the individual psychology of the characters; their diverse psychological profiles served as identifications of the killer. Some of Stout's novels focus especially on individual attributes, especially tastes and preferences. In the first half of The Red Box (1936 - 1937), the varying tastes of the individuals for different kinds of candy serves Wolfe as a window into the crime's mechanism. In And Be a Villain (1948), Wolfe looks at approaches to soft drinks.
Stout's prose also has little in common with the hard-boiled writers. It has few metaphors or wisecracks, although Archie lets off some startling similes in "Black Orchids" (1941). Nor does Stout indulge in the ornate descriptive passages of the hard-boileds.
One might also point out that Stout was not an alumnus of Black Mask magazine, unlike many hard-boiled authors. His Wolfe stories appeared in books and slick magazines right from the start.
One can also question whether Archie really relates to the hard-boiled dicks of his era. He talks in a direct way, and has few pretensions as an All-American kind of guy. But he also seems much fresher and less cynical and hard-bitten than Sam Spade, for instance.
Stout had an early writing career in the 1910's, long before Nero Wolfe debuted in 1934. The collection Target Practice (1998) reprinted his short fiction from All-Story, a pioneer pulp magazine. A few of these are crime stories. "Secrets" (1914), which the book's back cover describes as Stout's first crime short story, deals with a lawyer. The crime in the tale is embezzlement from a bank. This is a favorite subject of the early American Scientific school: it occurs in Jacques Futrelle's "The Man Who Was Lost" (circa 1906), Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1907), and Clinton H. Stagg's "The Keyboard of Silence" (collected in book form in 1915). The use of a painter as a character also recalls Futrelle.
Stout's work has some similarities to the American Scientific School. His detective Nero Wolfe is a genius, like Futrelle's detective the Thinking Machine and Arthur B. Reeve's scientist-sleuth Craig Kennedy. Wolfe has some interest in science, as an orchid grower, and science sometimes plays a role in the Wolfe stories, especially animals and mathematics. The use of individual psychology in Stout's novels recalls the word association tests favored by the Scientific school. Wolfe works as a private detective on a consulting basis, just like the Thinking Machine, Craig Kennedy, Thornley Colton, and other of the school's detectives. He tends to deal with crimes that center around business, and less around the personal lives of his characters. The characters represent the upper levels of finance, industry, and public life, just as in Arthur B. Reeve and the others. Stout's technique of having Archie gather all the suspects together for the big finale also derives from Arthur B. Reeve, who is the earliest writer known to me systematically using this device: it is regularly used in Reeve's first collection of Craig Kennedy tales, The Silent Bullet (1911). Other Stout features recalling Reeve: the way Wolfe listens in on conversations, reminding one of Reeve tales with listening devices. An episode in Fer-de-lance (1934), the first Nero Wolfe novel, recalls the plot of Reeve's "The Black Diamond".
One does not want to carry this relation between the Scientific School and Stout too far. The other main mystery work in Target Practice, the novella "Justice Ends at Home" (1915), has as its amateur detective not a scientist, but middle aged lawyer Simon Leg and his 20 year old office boy Dan Culp. The back of the book also points out that these could be rough sketches for Wolfe and Archie. Leg is as lazy as Wolfe: having inherited money he wants to sit around all day reading adventure stories, just as Wolfe loves orchids and food. However, he is a lot more good natured than Wolfe, and far less brainy. The real detective genius of the pair is Dan Culp. This likable young man does a lot of energetic leg work, just like Archie, and it is this vigorous detective work that is the stories' focus. There are some good ideas about a cinema in Chapter 6. The novella is very readable, but the puzzle plot is obvious, and the story can only be recommended to people curious about Stout's evolution as a writer. Among the tale's other merits: a look at corruption and "influence" being brought to bear on the police authorities of the era - such frank looks at civic corruption being part of the American Scientific School's traditions.
Before that, the opening scenes depict a party with many aspects of a fertility ritual. This formal society dinner party embodies all the rituals of that strangely elaborate social protocol. These are combined with an unusual asymmetry between the men and women guests. In many ways, the men are on display here as potential romantic partners to the women, and vice versa. This gives an odd and interesting effect to all the ritual. The institution with the women recalls the female factory in "Bitter End" (1940), and its comparison to a maternity ward. The romantic exhibition of the men, including Archie, who are their most polished and suave here, also recalls tales such as "A Window For Death" (1956), and Archie's friendship with Arrow. Archie clearly enjoys taking part in this refined ritual exhibition. The novel demonstrates Stout's abilities to create unique situations, ones loaded with symbolic resonance. The dinner party and the women's institution recall a bit Hulbert Footner's The House With the Blue Door (1942), while the actual murder is somewhat in the tradition of Ellery Queen's Calamity Town (1942).
Champagne for One also has a creative puzzle plot, one with aspects of the impossible crime. Once again, Stout shows ingenuity in showing how an inexplicable crime was actually done. The book's subject matter, an ingenious poisoning with a dinner party set-up, also resembles Stout's novella "Poison à la Carte" (1958) written immediately after Champagne for One, although the two works' puzzle plots are quite different.
The opening of the story echoes Some Buried Caesar (1939) in dealing with the mass production of food. The manufacture of the food, in an antiquated factory run entirely by women, is compared to a maternity ward by Stout. This bizarre production of food-as-children in the first half of the story is echoed by the real and even more bizarre child raising practices in the second half. The deliberate spoiling of the food seems rather analogous to the sacrifice of the bull in Caesar. It also anticipates the rejection of the child in the second part of the story. The architecture of the factory also seems interesting, with tunnels for trucks leading in and out representing the female body. The idea of a female factory symbolizing the reproductive process recalls Herman Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids" (1855), which describes a paper factory. There are important differences between Melville and Stout as well, however: Stout seems to deal more with the actual creation and raising of children, whereas Melville's imagery reflects sexuality. Melville's tale tends to depersonalize the people caught in it, whereas Stout's work heightens his characters' unique personalities.
"Not Quite Dead Enough" (1942) includes one of Stout's best puzzle plots. He returned to the mood of this story in two novellas he wrote in early 1959, "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo" and "Counterfeit for Murder". "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo" has another fine puzzle plot in the tradition of "Not Quite Dead Enough". It also shows good storytelling throughout. "Counterfeit for Murder" is weak in the puzzle plot department, but its characters have charm. Both "Counterfeit" and "Not Quite Dead Enough" have a similar setting, a cheap but respectable rooming house run by a crusty old landlady. The denizens of these houses are among the few financially strapped groups of suspects in Stout's work; he tended to write about upper middle class New Yorkers, in the Van Dine tradition. Even here, however, in "Counterfeit for Murder", the characters are all theatrical types, and preserve the intellectual character of the Van Dine school.
I'm not sure whether to recommend "Booby Trap" (1944) or not. The central puzzle plot is completely ordinary. It is one of those tales in which Wolfe finds the killer, not through logical deduction from clues, but by setting a trap for the killer. This sort of thing violates fair play; logically, the killer could have been any one of the six suspects in the tale, and there is nothing to suggest one over the other. However, the subsidiary mysteries in "Booby Trap" are all quite clever. Stout derives many paradoxes from the military setting; this is one of the few works of his that has such a background.
Stout was an ardent patriot, who spent the war years doing public service on the war effort. Yet he is quite skeptical about the military. He depicts it as an institution riddled with both politics and corruption. This is the point of view that will be found later in Lawrence G. Blochman's service tales. Stout's point of view seems to stem from a suspicion of the rich and powerful in all areas. Since such people tend toward corruption, he logically deduces that they will be equally corrupt when put in charge of the Armed Forces. Stout's politics can be described as liberal, but definitely not radical. After the war, in the late 1940's, Stout will be just as savagely critical of the Communist far left as he was of fascists and appeasers during the war. This anti-Communist stance also anticipates Blochman, and his work of the 1950's.
If Stout was critical of high level Army officials, he was fascinated by the way the Army was run. He clearly loved the uniforms, the saluting, and all the military and Intelligence ethos. His attitude echoed that of the 1940's American public, who regarded such things with similar enthusiasm, almost as a new toy. By the 1960's, such things will be unfashionable with the general public, and much ridiculed. Stout was plainly thrilled to put Archie in uniform, and give him an officer's rank. This is the closest Archie gets to an independent life in any of the tales. It is also the most recognition Archie gets from society as a person of ability. There will be a little of the same effect again, when Archie goes out on a solo social outing at the start of Champagne for One (1958), and gets involved in a murder mystery. The tuxedo that Archie and the other men wear is referred to metaphorically as a uniform.
Many of the transitional novellas Stout wrote in the late 1940's and early 1950's are not that good. But "The Cop-Killer" (1951) is a solid work, with a well hidden plot idea in its solution. Like "Too Many Detectives" (1956), the plot focuses on the "economy of knowledge", showing how information is passed around. Several of Stout's puzzle plots involve such an intricate dance of knowledge. The milieu, a barbershop, is far more working class than much of Stout's fiction.
The sheer amount of mystery in a novella like "Invitation to Murder" (1953) is notable. It starts out with a mystery being proposed to Wolfe to solve: which one of three women is having an affair with a millionaire? It moves on to add a murder mystery. Then a third mystery question is introduced. Finally, during Wolfe's solution, his chain of deductions results in a fourth mystery being briefly dangled before the reader. This plethora of mysterious situations is very satisfying. The story also shows Stout's flair for buildings which are more than homes, and also have elements of an institution. Wolfe's brownstone is one such establishment, and the Huck home in this novella is another, one than echoes Wolfe's in subtle ways: both have elevators, both have elaborate arrangements about kitchens and food, both have studies in which Wolfe propounds his solutions.
Stout brought back some of his prewar non-Wolfe detectives, such as his woman private eye Doll Bonner, and Alphabet Hicks, including the former in his Nero Wolfe series. "Too Many Detectives" (1956), with Bonner, has an Ellery Queen like approach to its puzzle plotting, complete with such EQ traits as: a deductive finale; the solution subtly emerges from an in-depth investigation of circumstances; it focuses on what people knew and could not have known, just like EQ's The French Powder Mystery (1930); and a plot whose pattern comes with many surrealist echoes and repetitions. Even the choice of villain is in a Queen tradition. But the style and storytelling of this tale is sweetly Stout's own.
If "Too Many Detectives" is Stout's Ellery Queen tale, then "The Next Witness" (1955) is his Erle Stanley Gardner and Perry Mason story. While the puzzle plot is easily guessed, the storytelling has charm, and one likes the courtroom background of part of the tale. It is very unusual for a courtroom story not to have a lawyer for a protagonist, but Stout pulls it off. Stout's interest in legal ideas is continued in the next two tales, "Immune to Murder" and "Too Many Detectives". The opening of "Detectives" also builds upon some plot ideas in the opening of "The Next Witness".
When Ellery Queen reprinted "Die Like A Dog" (1954), he retitled it "A Dog in the Daytime". This is a clever allusion to "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time", a quote from "Silver Blaze" (1892), my favorite Sherlock Holmes story. The story has often been reprinted under this title, but it does not seem to be Stout's official name for the story. "Dog" shows Stout's fondness for animals. It also has some very good plotting, with a complex mystery situation becoming gradually unveiled, in the Anna Katherine Green style. Along with Some Buried Caesar, it is Stout's best mystery work. It seems significant that both of these outstanding pieces have animal backgrounds. Stout is also good with stories that deal with Wolfe's beloved orchids, such as "Easter Parade" (1957). This latter story reminds us that S. S. Van Dine liked to experiment with unusual murder methods; Stout's version of the same sometimes involves mechanical contraptions. Such strange devices show up here and in the first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-lance (1934).
Some of the other stories in And Four To Go have merits, and almost made the list of recommended stories above. "Christmas Party" (1957) has some good ideas in its opening sections, especially dealing with Archie and Wolfe's relationship, but its later mystery elements become routine. "Murder Is No Joke" (1957) is pleasant reading. The weakest of the tales is the uninspired "Fourth of July Picnic" (1957).
"Method Three for Murder" (1960) shows Stout's ability to tell a story backwards. Each section reveals more and more of the underlying mystery situation, characters and relationships. A steady pace of revelation is set right at the start, and continues throughout the tale. In this it recalls "Die Like a Dog". It also recalls "Die Like a Dog" in its Greenwich Village setting, and its background of artists. Such looks at artists are part of the Van Dine School tradition, of backgrounds of the intelligentsia.
The mystery puzzle recalls, in general terms, "Too Many Detectives": both involve access to knowledge. Stout comes up with a clever puzzle gimmick in the solution.
The story's main weakness is that the murder plot is so unmotivated: something Wolfe recognizes and tries to dance around in his solution.
"Method Three for Murder" has a number of subplots that are not mysteries, but which greatly enrich the story. It has an imaginative architectural setting for the crime: a Golden Age tradition. This involves a whole cityscape. Characterization is rich. There is a highly pleasing look at the Archie-Wolfe relationship, that gets played out as a story with a beginning, middle and end throughout the tale.
Another mathematical story is "Poison à la Carte" (1958), the first three chapters of which involve permutation theory. Chapter 5 of the novella goes into a more vivid illustration of the mathematics involved. These chapters describe an interesting investigation into a murder mystery. Unfortunately, here murder leaves off and misogyny takes over, with the latter sections of the novella showing little real detection. Too Many Cooks, Stout's earlier mystery about chefs, also has elements of permutation theory in its mystery plot.
Despite all the talk about food in the Wolfe stories, there is little actual description of eating, or of food as a sensuous experience. Stout is much more oriented to the act of preparing the meal: setting the menu, getting the ingredients, cooking, and serving the food. It is this whole preparation process that intrigues Stout. Food descriptions in Stout tend to focus on the ingredients. We read about mango ice cream, or steamed fish with a sauce made of mussels and mushrooms. These descriptions are more recipes, descriptions of how the food is made, than they are of what the food tastes like.
Stout in general is a process oriented writer. His stories are full of processes, from methods of detection, to Archie's repeated challenge of gathering together the suspects, which is always described in detail. In The Black Mountain (1954), the most enjoyable part of the story is the process of getting Nero and Archie from the US to Montenegro (Chapters 4 - 6). In "Poison", the whole crime and the events surrounding it turn out to be one large process. They are integrated together in one single pattern. By process, I mean a step by step series of events that take place in time; this is similar to what the artificial intelligence researcher Roger Schank calls a script.
The rest of the book tells a murder mystery. This recalls the novellas Stout was writing in this era. (SPOILERS) The central idea of the solution, is to look to see who had the knowledge and ability to stage an important event. This recalls the key idea of "Too Many Detectives" (1956) of the same year. The details of the two plots are highly different however, despite their common structural approach. Another difference: in "Too Many Detectives" this knowledge-ability concept is only revealed in the solution at the tale's finale. In Might As Well Be Dead, it emerges in Wolfe's reasoning midway through the book. It is implicit in Wolfe's instructions to his detectives (Chapter 7), and fully explained by him in a later scene with the police (Chapter 12). The latter chapter has two fine episodes of detection as well, one building on the other. At the end, during the solution (Chapter 18), we get a full depiction of the details of the knowledge-ability situation.
Stout includes a few mild clues to the identity of the killer: a relationship (Chapter 10), some of the killer's behavior (Chapter 13). However, these hardly amount to the sort of rigorous fair play one finds in an Ellery Queen novel, say. The identity of the killer is not perhaps a triumph.
Worse is the killer's motive, which is completely withheld from the reader before the finale.
Might As Well Be Dead is unusual in Stout's work, in that the suspects do not all work in the same industry or business. Nor do we get an inside look at any business or institution, also unlike Stout. The characters all work in various white collar New York City jobs, some fairly upper middle class in the Stout manner, but we learn little about their work. These are the sort of people who run through Stout, but divorced from their business backgrounds.
One of the women in seems to be a lesbian, although this is never made explicit. There is also what seems to be another essentially sympathetic lesbian character, the more mannish Judy in next year's "Method Three for Murder" (1960).
Later sections (Chapter 3) take place in a house with an elaborately decorated set of rooms. The decor emphasizes yellow and red, like Nero Wolfe's office. The house might be seen as something of a dark parody of Wolfe's brownstone. Both are west side Manhattan houses, with elaborate interior design, presided over by a wealthy, powerful man and his support staff. Both involve wish fulfilment fantasy, and personal relationships. After this opening, the book becomes much less interesting.
There is a clever mini-mystery in the opening (Chapters 1-2), which is the best part of the book.
The Hand in the Glove (1937) is an unpleasant book. This is due to the relationships of the characters, who are both full of guilty secrets, and given to lying to each other about their romantic relationships. Because of this, a nightmarish anxiety hangs over the work. Few people ever speak up and are honest with each other, and when they do the results are so traumatic they are not to be born. The character of the servant De Roche recalls Stout's early story "Sanétomo" (1915), but without the intelligently sympathetic presentation of that tale.
All of this does not do justice to Stout's detective heroine Dol Bonner, who is far and away the most interesting character in the story. She is an exemplary feminist, battling male authority figures for her right to be a detective. Stout makes clear all the opposition she has to face from men in the book, and her intelligence, courage and principled resistance to their oppression in struggling to perform as a detective. Dol does not wimp out. She consistently shows intelligence in solving the crime, and successfully performs all the detection in the book, with little help from either the police or men associates.
Dol Bonner is shown at her best in Chapters 4 - 10. These are the sections describing the initial investigation of the crime. These are also the best mystery plot chapters of the book. Like many Stout works, we see how the crime was committed in the first half of the book, and then, often anticlimactically, who did it in the second half. The Hand in the Glove adheres to this pattern. Chapters 4 - 10 set forth the "how dun it" of the crime. This material is nowhere as clever as such later Stout howdunits as "Black Orchids" or Some Buried Caesar, but it still makes interesting reading.
Unfortunately Stout never brought Dol back for a second case, although she makes cameo appearances in some Nero Wolfe stories. She remains a good character in what is largely a bad book.
Dol Bonner's office, like Wolfe's, is full of brightly colored furniture. We are also informed of the materials from which it is made. It is as if Stout is appealing to all the senses to make this place real.
De Puyster was spoofed by Isaac Asimov, no less, in his story "Author! Author!" (1943), a fantasy which focuses on a mystery writer whose fictional detective Reginald de Meister comes to life. Asimov's basic situation has been much imitated by later writers and filmmakers.
Differences include less of an interest in pure detection: Valcour seems less relentlessly focused on detective investigations than are Philo Vance, Thatcher Colt or Ellery Queen. There is considerable emphasis on the emotional life of King's suspects, often at the expense of the mystery plot. The overwrought emotionalism of the opening chapters of Valcour Meets Murder (1932) even recalls the Had I But Known school. Some of King's stories show a tendency to degenerate from mystery tales into thrillers, for example, Murder by the Clock (1928-1929).
Valcour Meets Murder (1932) opens with a "biography" of King's series sleuth, Lt. Valcour. Valcour is French Canadian, and the son of an émigré; French police officer. The biography states that Valcour was trained in the "brilliantly" intuitive methods of the French police. It explicitly contrasts these with the "plodding detailed routine" of British police officers. I have no idea if there is the slightest real life accuracy to these images, but they certainly do reflect the intuitionist / realist divide in 1930's mystery fiction. King is allied with the Van Dine school, and hence is a confirmed intuitionist. Here he is explicitly disassociating himself from the plodding approach of the British Realist School, then immensely prestigious. King has gone so far as to make his detective of French ancestry, to suggest an intuitionist affiliation for his hero. Similarly, such intuitionist detectives as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin, and T.S. Stribling's Henry Poggioli, were made non-WASPs. Christie was likely directly inspired by Gaston Leroux's French novel Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907) when she created Hercule Poirot, and there clearly was an association in the minds of intuitionist school writers between French culture and intuitionist methods. Carr's first novel, It Walks by Night (1930) also mentions Leroux. At the end of Chapter 11 of It Walks By Night, Bencolin also explicitly denounces the routinely plodding investigator. He says that this is a terrible ideal. Here he is speaking as the (fictional) head of the Paris police. He also satirizes the tough guy world of American civic corruption. Bencolin does not mention nationalities when discussing the plodding investigator, but he views the French approach as different from these.
Some later passages are almost science fictional. They are not believable, but they aren't dull, either. King's apprenticeship as an sf writer shows here.
After its vividly written opening, this book declines in interest. This is one of several Valcour novels which largely deal with the denizens of a single house, most of whom are decidedly odd. Valcour spends a lot of time interviewing them, and trying to understand their abnormal psychology. I confess I do not enjoy such characters, and find this sort of King novel generally dull.
Murder by Latitude. Murder by Latitude (1930) is a whodunit, but it is not especially fair play: there is not a single clue that would let the reader identify the killer. It is well written, however, and there is a small surprise twist in the solution. The book has a sustained atmosphere, and is interesting reading throughout. This shipboard novel lacks the high spirits one might associate with cruises. Instead it is mournful and elegiac in tone. It has a tragic quality, and reminds one of Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Much of the novel involves mourning for the first victim, a member of the ship's crew. Especially close to him was a sailor on the ship. Also, a woman among the passengers was touched as well. These elegiac passages are written in King's most lyrical style. They alternate with descriptions of the sea and sailing, also written with poetic vividness. This mixture of descriptions of the sea with more philosophical material seems especially Melville like. Also like Melville, King had been a sailor in real life: The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection says that he was a ship's radio operator circa 1920, just like the first victim in Latitude. Presumably that book's portrait of ship board life is based on King's personal experience.
King's early Valcour novels are full of water imagery: the sea and the wet fogs in Murder by Latitude, and the rain, dew and flooded rivers and bogs in Valcour Meets Murder. Liquids are often referred to by him as well: ink, tap water, creams, drinks, wax. King's novels are full of abstract imagery, used to describe mental processes or emotions, and this imagery is full of references to fluids, too: tears, lakes, rain, protoplasm, jelly, and words like "floating" or "drenching".
Murder by Latitude seems to show a gay sensibility. The first murder victim, and his close sailor friend, seem to be a loving couple in the Melville sense. Dumarque notices other men's looks. And the women in the novel who are attracted to men are perhaps surrogates for men with gay feelings.
SPOILERS. Both the shipboard setting, and aspects of the murder plot, have technical aspects. They link King to the Scientific School of detection.
Murder on the Yacht. Murder on the Yacht (1932) collapses after a promising beginning. It tries to repeat the success of Murder by Latitude, with a ship-board setting and an important role once again played by the radio operators of the ship. However, the plot and the writing both become less interesting as the novel progresses.
Also, one of the characters is racially stereotyped. This is a rare lapse for King, whose books are usually free from prejudice. By contrast, Murder by the Clock ridicules racial prejudice, with Valcour distancing himself in disgust from racial "jokes" popular then. There are also brief spoofs of the "foreign" villains so popular in cheap crime stories of the day.
The Lesser Antilles Murder Case. The Lesser Antilles Murder Case (1934) is another shipboard mystery. It is a pure puzzle plot tale, with a fairly elaborate solution in the Golden Age style. Unfortunately, the solution manages to be both easily guessed and preposterous. The writing is much thinner and less stylish than Murder by Latitude, and the characters are not likable either. It is one of King's least enjoyable books. The plot does anticipate some of John Dickson Carr's books.
The diving sequence anticipates a better and more elaborate one in King's Holiday Homicide (1940). In both books, the diving is both exciting in its own right, and woven into the mystery or detection plot.
The victim seems to be one of a middle aged gay couple, although we see very little of their relationship. Such gay characters recur throughout King's writing. They are rarely if ever explicitly labeled as gay, but they are often elaborately characterized, and easily recognized today.
The Case of the Constant God. The Case of the Constant God (1937) is one of King's hybrid suspense and mystery novels. It is unusually downbeat, and is not much fun to read.
Murder Masks Miami. Murder Masks Miami (1939) is the last Valcour novel. It is a genuine who done it, not a thriller, and is exceptionally readable. Murder Masks Miami is just plain fun. When mystery fans say they would like to read a Golden Age mystery novel, this is the sort of book they are talking about. This book is a formal detective novel, like King's next novel, Holiday Homicide (1940). Why a writer who so often strayed away from Golden Age norms should suddenly adhere so closely to the formal mystery is not clear. Still, I think it has made for one of King's most entertaining novels. King has mastered the mystery art of telling a story backwards. Each scene unearths some new hidden facts about the characters and the plot, and the book gradually reveals the whole story of their relationships, and what took place during the crimes. The ultimate solution does not contain any great ingenuity, although it does have a small twist. It is plausible and emotionally satisfying, however.
The book takes place in a vacation area near Miami, and is pleasantly escapist. King writes with tremendous verve, and is in his more upbeat mode. There is a great deal of romance and soap opera about the characters' loves, all of which is closely integrated into the mystery plot, so it is not a digression from the main detective work. Once again, the heroine's longing for the good looking life guard can be seen as an expression of gay feeling. The ambiguity surrounding the life guard - he is a suspect in the story, along with everyone else, and could be the killer - seems like a referendum on the validity of such longings. The book keeps one in suspense till the end about how this affair will turn out. Valcour himself invites a young male security guard to breakfast, thus dropping some broad clues about his own sexual orientation. There is a definite party like aspect to this scene. If Murder by Latitude was King's tragic gay novel, Murder Masks Miami is his comic one.
By the way, the title of the story is never explained in the book. The title has plenty of alliterative punch, and is very suggestive in its imagery. But what is being masked, or how murder does it, is not made clear.
King's pastiche of Archie Godwin is especially good. King has caught Archie's bemused, intelligent, slightly smart alecky tone of narration very closely. King has combined this tone with his own vivid writing style, to make a very interesting synthesis. The descriptions include King's interest in rich concoctions, such as food, perfumes, and fluids. King also uses his examination of conventional story telling ideas here, constantly turning over stock phrases and situations, commenting on them all the while - this is an early use of a technique that will reach its apogee in King's "The Faces of Danger" (1960). Since Archie is also a somewhat sardonic observer of the human scene King can fuse his own meta-narrative approach with Archie's common man take on the well to do world about him. Bert is a bit more bitchy than Archie usually is, in keeping with the campier tone of King's fiction.
Some of the evidence collected in the earlier chapters is simple forensic data, based on the state of the corpse (Chapters 2, 8). This links Holiday Homicide in approach to the medical short stories King was writing about Dr. Colin Starr. Some footprint evidence (Chapter 6) also is of a technical analysis of evidence kind. The snow containing the footprints also embodies King's love of vividly described soft materials.
The diving sequence also links Holiday Homicide to the tradition of Scientific Detection. It is pure technology, put in the service of sleuthing.
While Holiday Homicide is well written, it has problems as a puzzle plot. There is no fair play: Moon identifies the killer because he discovers the killer's fingerprints at a crime scene. This clue is not shared with the reader, and there is no logical way for the reader to deduce who the killer is. Nor is the mystery's solution especially clever. It does succeed in making a logical story out of the book's scramble of events and clues, and this shows a bit of ingenuity.
The subplot about "where the nut comes from" (Chapters 8, solved 24) is in King's tradition of mysteries of origins of objects. The subplot comes to an ingenious solution. It perhaps has elements of the Impossible Crime: it looks impossible that the nut could have been obtained. In addition to the solution of how it was committed, the subplot has some indications of who did it. These indications are the closest the book comes to real fair play clues to the identity of the murderer.
Holiday Homicide has a similar status as Murder by Latitude in King's career. Both books are 1) genuine whodunits, not suspense novels; 2) mainly lack fair play in their solutions; 3) are well written, with special gifts of prose style and verbal adroitness; 4) show good storytelling.
Many of the medical mystery ideas show ingenuity. However, they are not always fair play; King does not always share clues with the reader. However, the tales make interesting reading anyway.
Characters. The Starr tales take place among the country club set of a small Ohio town. These rich people are mainly dedicated to l'amour. King perfects the tone here he will later use in his South Florida short stories, of love affairs wryly narrated, and set among the luxurious homes and clubs of the well to do. The stories are rich in color, and a sensuous feel. The third person narrator maintains a tone of sly cynicism in describing these affairs. This Ohio town is near many rivers, and the presence of water also anticipates the Florida Gold Coast setting of the later short stories.
Intermixed with Society people come intellectuals. Some of these are men in arts sponsored by the rich. Others are Society people themselves with artistic or intellectual pretensions. King's attitude towards these people in the arts is uniformly negative. They tend to be destructive, financially exploitative, and often downright crooked. An air of decadence hovers over them. These sinister intellectuals seem only involved with the arts, not science or politics.
By contrast, wholesome young men who are interested only in sports or their jobs are King favorites.
As in other King books, there are a lot of extremely handsome young men in the Colin Starr tales. As always with King, these are leading men types, what we today might call "hunks". Starr himself notices these men's looks in "The Case of the Three Baleful Brothers" and "The Case of the Buttoned Collar". "The Case of the Buttoned Collar" has an interesting sentence, about how the man's looks impress both women and men.
Setting. Trying to figure out where King's imaginary town of Laurel Falls is, leads to inconclusive results. It is explicitly set in South-Eastern Ohio. Some tales put it on the real-life Muskingum River, like the real-life cities of Zanesville and Marietta. Other stories say it is on the Onega River, an apparently fictitious waterway: there are a real life Lake Onega, Onega River and Onega Bay in the far north of Russia, but apparently nothing in Ohio. "The Case of the Prodigal Bridegroom" places Laurel Falls right between the Plains region of Ohio and the Appalachian Plateau. This means that Laurel Falls is definitely not on or near the Ohio River, but further inland: more like Zanesville, and definitely unlike Marietta. Hills and a cliff play a role in the story "The Case of the Buttoned Collar", so we are more in the start of the Appalachian Plateau, and less in the Plains region.
In any case, Laurel Falls is not too far from Abner Country in West Virginia in Melville Davisson Post's tales; the West Virginia panhandle setting of Ellery Queen's The Egytptian Cross Mystery; or Mary Robert Rinehart's Pittsburgh stories.
Mystery Plots. SPOILERS. "The Case of the Three Baleful Brothers" and "The Case of the Imperious Invalid" have a two-stage cover-up of the crime by the killer. The two stages take place at two different times. In both tales, this is linked to an alibi situation. The alibi aspects are not fair play (fully shared with the reader as a puzzle), but they do show some imaginative plotting.
The nature of the cover-up itself is also a mystery in both of the tales. This cover-up gets the main medical clue in both stories, one linked to the state of the bodies.
Several of the stories have a hidden relationship involving the killer. This relationship motivates the murder to take place. In "The Case of the Three Baleful Brothers", this hidden relationship is the subject of a full-scale puzzle plot, with clues to its existence. The hidden relationship is more perfunctory as a puzzle in other tales, such as "The Case of the Prodigal Bridegroom" and "The Case of the Imperious Invalid". In all the tales, King develops sleuth's account of the hidden relationship into a large-scale piece of storytelling in the finale.
"The Case of the Three Baleful Brothers" has interesting mystery subplots about the origin of objects (guns, money). "The Case of the Prodigal Bridegroom" also looks at the origin of an object (the matches), but does not treat this origin as a mystery puzzle.
"The Case of the Buttoned Collar" shows variations on the paradigms of some other Colin Starr tales. It has a cover-up involving two different times. This leads to an alibi puzzle, like some other tales. But the cover-up does not lead to or cause the story's medical clue.
The medical clue in "The Case of the Buttoned Collar" does involve the state of the body, as in "The Case of the Three Baleful Brothers" and "The Case of the Imperious Invalid". Unlike them, where the state of the body involves forensic facts that apply to almost all corpses, this state in "The Case of the Buttoned Collar" deals with the specific method of death.
"The Case of the Buttoned Collar" gives an explanation of the source of an object (the charcoal).
Architecture. "The Case of the Three Baleful Brothers" and "The Case of the Buttoned Collar" have similar three-part settings: a large mansion, a rustic nearby dwelling where an artist lives (a houseboat and a cabin in the woods, respectively), and a nearby place where the artist does his work (a theater, a forge). These show the Golden Age interest in unusual architecture. However, at least in the edition I read, there are no floor plans or maps in the book.
"The Case of the Sudden Shot" and "The Case of the Imperious Invalid" have two mansions in close proximity, where the suspects can walk between.
The Case of the Lonely Ladies. Diagnosis: Murder also contains the less interesting "The Case of the Lonely Ladies". This long novella is written in a different style from the rest of the Starr tales, grim and not much fun. Starr has a smaller role than usual, and the simple medical evidence he uses to identify the killer is routine, and not part of any sort of puzzle plot. In fact, the story is fairly thinly plotted as a whole.
Best puzzle element: the contest the daughter wins, and her subsequent picture in the paper. This perhaps relates a bit to the "visionary" mystery subplot in "The Patron Saint of the Impossible".
The solution involves one of those scandalous Big Secrets that plague rich women's families in the later books of Mary Roberts Rinehart. King's is different from any in a Rinehart story.
The story's two elderly black servants at first look like countless others in mystery fiction of the era. But they turn out to be more active and more sympathetic than most. There is perhaps a pro-black, anti-stereotype message embedded.
The early chapters (1 - 13) are well written, with King showing in detail the trap that confronts his heroine. These chapters show King's feel for sailing material, taking place on a sea going yacht. Unfortunately, the book as a whole is flat. Design in Evil is in the tradition of the "innocent young woman forced into a new identity" school. It follows such pioneering works as Helen McCloy's The Dance of Death (1938), and Anthony Gilbert's The Woman in Red (1941), the latter being made into a superb film directed by Joseph H. Lewis, My Name is Julia Ross (1945). The story is never plausible, unless everyone is in on this bizarre plot; yet King wants only one person to be guilty, and everyone else to be an innocent dupe.
The later sections of the book contain a murder mystery. However, there are only two serious suspects, and the mystery is never developed into an interesting or even very elaborate plot.
King indicates that Joseph Conrad is one of his hero's favorite authors (Chapter 15). It certainly makes sense that King admires Conrad: both were sailors in real life, and wrote frequently about the sea, and both men wrote rich descriptive prose. King will refer to Conrad again in "Miami Papers Please Copy", along with Jack London, and Conrad's Typhoon is discussed briefly in "The Case of the Lonely Ladies" in Diagnosis: Murder.
King is of two minds about psychiatry, then becoming unfortunately fashionable in the media. Psychiatry is treated as a serious science, and yet the older psychiatrist is the book is shown as a completely mistaken dupe. This is at least more skeptical than the religious reverence with which psychiatry was usually held in this era.
The Case of the Dowager's Etchings shows signs of influence from Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1907), which also deals with a well to do elderly woman sleuth's slightly comic but thrilling adventures with murder and detection in her mansion, mainly nocturnal. King's novel also has a thriller finale in the top floor of the mansion, just like Rinehart's book. Just as Rinehart's spinster has to help out her niece, who is involved with the case and covering up what she knows, so does King's sleuth have to aid her grandson. King's stories do not partake of the characteristics of the later HIBK novels of the Rinehart school, however - they do not seriously look at personal relationships, for example, or maintain a solemn tone. One suspects that King might have been familiar with Rinehart's plot in the form of its stage adaptation, The Bat (1920): his next book, The Deadly Dove, also shows signs of influence from The Bat.
Among King's works, The Case of the Dowager's Etchings (1943) and "The Faces of Danger" (1960) are the same kind of story. Both are an unusual combination of the thriller and the mystery story. Many mystery stories have elements of suspense or adventure; this is not the sort of combination we are talking about here. Instead, it is a question of knowledge, and when it is revealed to the reader. In these King tales, several of the villains and their schemes are identified right away, and shown to the reader. The reader knows these people are up to no good, and knows that they are menacing the good characters in the story. However, the reader does not know all the details of their schemes - these aspects will be hidden, and only emerge much later, at or near the solution. In addition, there is a murder in the story, treated as a full puzzle plot mystery. The reader is not told who did the murder, or why. There is also a detective in the tale, as well as amateur detection by the good characters; at the end of the story, these detectives will solve the murder, reveal the killer, and reveal all about the villains' schemes. The whole tale is a combination of two types of story. The villains and how they menace the innocent characters are right out of a non -puzzle plot thriller, a melodrama where all is known to the reader as the story goes along, and where there is an exciting confrontation between good and evil. Combined with this is a classical murder mystery.
In addition to their unusual, shared form, both stories have similarity of approach. Both have well to do female protagonists who live in a large mansion. Both stories have a tone of escapist adventure - many of the melodramatic elements of the tale form an exciting adventure story for their protagonists. Both stories have much comedy, and are light hearted in feel, despite all the melodrama they contain. Both contain elements of international intrigue - not surprising in a work like Dowager written and set during World War II.
King's works of the 1940's show an interest in art. The Dr. Starr tales refer to paintings of the Hudson River School, while Dowager refers to Bougereau. These are realist painters of the 19th Century, artists who preceded the modernist movement, and took absolutely no part in it. One might contrast King's taste with Stuart Palmer - his Cold Poison (1954) refers to such modernist painters as Klee, Picasso and Dali. King's references in both cases are designed to illustrate the contents of old mansions, buildings whose art was acquired a long time ago by their occupants' ancestors. Under these circumstances, fairly old movements in art are most appropriate. King's comments show considerable sophistication about art.
The heroine, a Society woman with an active interest in the arts (as the creator of the title etchings), also recalls the many Society people with ties to the arts in Diagnosis: Murder.
Dowager also contains some self referential comments on the mystery field. His protagonist is thinking of Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (1844), and is not sure whether it was written by Poe or Gaboriau. Once again, this is a very 19th Century sort of reference.
The Deadly Dove is the sort of middling work that is hard to evaluate. The book is well written, and full of dark humor. But it is nothing as a puzzle plot, and many of the characterizations are minor. I enjoyed reading it, but am afraid to recommend it because I'm not sure if anyone else would like it. It is definitely one of King's minor works.
The Deadly Dove is in roughly the same genre as The Bat (1920), Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood's stage-play adaptation of Rinehart's The Circular Staircase. Both works are set in the living room of a country mansion, both contain a diverse group of characters who are menaced by a mysterious professional criminal who wanders in and out of the spooky mansion. The hit man here, the Dove, even has the same sort of winged animal nickname as the criminal the Bat. Both works mix comedy and thrills. The owner of the mansion is a sixty year old woman, just as in The Bat, and her niece and the niece's boyfriend also play roles in the plot, just as in the earlier play. King's novel even mentions Avery Hopwood by name, as the leading light of an earlier era of Broadway theater. One wonders if King had met Hopwood in gay circles earlier - Hopwood was certainly gay, and one strongly suspects that King was. Hopwood lived the sort of bon vivant life style on the Riviera often aspired to by King's characters.
The characters in The Deadly Dove are much nastier and more murderous than Rinehart and Hopwood's innocents. Also, the story has little of the earlier authors' gift for ingenious plotting.
I found the novel Museum Piece No. 13 disappointing. It does contain the key ideas and characters that later would populate Lang's film version. But the storytelling runs out of steam after the first few chapters, which contain all of King's creative ideas.
There are three collections: Malice in Wonderland, The Steps to Murder and The Faces of Danger, as well as some uncollected tales in magazines.
Malice in Wonderland. "Malice in Wonderland" (1957) contains some of King's most magical atmosphere and mise-en-scène. The tale is written as a sort of sinister fairy tale, full of events that can be given a supernatural interpretation - although there is no need to accept this interpretation, to enjoy the story. King used rich and brilliant color in these Miami stories, especially in his descriptions of deserts. In "Malice", we see exotic ice cream dishes that are described in full color.
By the way, "Malice in Wonderland" was originally the title of a 1940 novel by Nicholas Blake. When Ellery Queen first published King's short story in EQMM, he thought the phrase would make a good title for the story, and he used it, with the permission of both Blake and King.
"Malice in Wonderland" is a whodunit, combined with suspense and thriller elements. Like some other late King Florida stories, the mystery involves Dying Message elements. The Dying Message is more complex and more puzzling than those in "Rendezvous with Death" and "The Faces of Danger". It also involves an unusual, inventive way that the Message is communicated, which gives the plot an extra dimension.
"Miami Papers Please Copy" (1956) is a delightful comedy tale. It has no mystery to be solved: it is a tale of suspense. A principal plot twist is thriftily re-used by King from Murder by Latitude. Here it is used by the good guys, not the villains. The good guys also resemble the bad guys in earlier King tales, in having an interest in the arts. While artists in Diagnosis: Murder were financially exploitative young Adonises who preyed upon the rich, here the newspaper editor has a regular job, and is a skilled professional who earns his paycheck.
"Miami Papers Please Copy" is rich in King's imagery of water, drinks and fluids. They help give the story its beautiful style. Especially nice: the brief sun shower, a delightful kind of weather, here appearing in the suspense genre that typically emphasizes major storms. The sun shower is perhaps a metaphor for the characters' problems in this tale.
"The Body in the Pool" (1955) is a pure suspense tale. It is lively, and builds up a central character who seems routine at first, but who subtly gathers in complexity as the tale progresses. The setting, a Florida estate with a private house and a rockpit pool in one corner and suspenseful goings on, seems like a initial sketch for the locale of "The Faces of Danger" (1960). This might be the earliest of King's Halcyon, Florida short stories.
"To Remember You By" (1957) is an inverted mystery. King telegraphs most mystery plot developments ahead of time, but the tale is oddly satisfying anyway. This seems to be the debut of Monsignor Lavigny, who returns in "The Patron Saint of the Impossible". The elderly Monsignor seems to specialize in helping young people in big trouble. He is an amateur sleuth, unlike the professional police officials or occasional insurance investigators that run through King's Florida tales.
"Agree--Or Die" (1957) is a whodunit mystery. The killer's identity in the solution is plausible, but it is not actually clued, and the tale lacks any sort of puzzle other than this simple choice of killer. But the characters and their relationships are complex, linked to motives and an unfolding story. This gives interest to the plot.
"The Body in the Rockpit" (1955) is an indifferent suspense story, without mystery.
"Let Her Kill Herself" (1956) is a whodunit novella. It has a repulsive title, and is unlikable as a story, filled with unpleasant characters and relationships. The story's motel setting is also one of the least colorful in the late King tales.
We see the murder committed, by an unnamed, shadowy person. This means we readers know all about how the killing was done, but not who did it. Later, King's series cop Bill Duggan has to figure out how the crime was actually done, after the killer disguises the murder as an accidental drowning. These parts essentially have the structure of an inverted tale, in which the reader knows about the crime, and watches the sleuth gather evidence about its true nature. These parts are of mild interest, involving forensic investigation. Although the crime is not medical, the forensic investigation is.
By contrast, the whodunit aspects are skimpy. Duggan eventually uncovers evidence that identifies the killer, but there are hardly any clues or evidence shared with the reader that would allow the reader to do so. And this whodunit side hardly involves much puzzle ingenuity, either.
"The Pills of Lethe" seems to be the same story as "Each Drop Guaranteed" (1958), collected in The Faces of Danger, and discussed there below. It is unclear why it is in two King collections. In this earlier version, the doctor is a non-series character. In "Each Drop Guaranteed", he has been changed to be the series Medical Examiner Dr. William Ainsworth in the Stuff Driscoll series. I think this is an improvement, and that the slightly re-written version is the better one. King also removes a phrase explaining what Halcyon is, presumably figuring it is not needed in the context of the later book.
The Steps to Murder. "The Patron Saint of the Impossible" (1958) has a better subplot (the heroine's apparently visionary experience) than a main murder plot. The murder itself is solved through routine mystery ideas.
King's stories sometimes have phallic imagery. Men are compared to jets of water: the father's nickname in "Miami Papers Please Copy" is Old Faithful, after the geyser; the boyfriend in "The Patron Saint of the Impossible" is Raul Fuentes: Fuente means fountain or spring in Spanish. Both men are dramatic and emotional, although good guys. And his calmer detective figures are linked to phallic machines: the editor in "Miami Papers Please Copy" has his silver pencil; sleuth Monsignor Lavigny in "The Patron Saint of the Impossible" has a spray gun he uses to shoot insecticide on his flowers.
"Rendezvous with Death" (1958) is a thriller combined with mystery. The mystery puzzle recalls "Miami Papers Please Copy" and Murder by Latitude, involving an attacked ship. While it has a different puzzle than those tales, like them it is a technologically based crime. King includes a Dying Message from the ship's Captain, a kind of puzzle not common in his pre-1955 tales. The mystery is easily solved, but this hardly affects the enjoyment of the story. It is a delightful suspense tale about a "nice young woman in jeopardy". And if the mystery is not hard to figure out, it is richly detailed, including a full investigation from a non-series sleuth.
"Rendezvous with Death" includes a vivid description of a beach, and the marshy area leading to it. This links it to King's interest in water-side areas.
"The Tigress of the Chateau Plage" (1959) is an inverted tale, with the first part leading up to an attempted crime, the second showing a police investigation. It is a direct ancestor of King's later inverted "Gift for the Bride" (1962). Both tales star a similar pair in their first sections, a sinister male blackmailer and a middle-aged female victim anxious for her daughter's wedding to proceed. However, unlike "Gift for the Bride", "The Tigress of the Chateau Plage" concentrates on its first part almost entirely, with the second part investigation being much shorter.
SPOILER: The crime in "The Tigress of the Chateau Plage" shares a methodology with that in Murder by Latitude. Both tales involve disorientation of a victim's location to accomplish their ends. The plot also depends on a ferocious rainstorm, in keeping with King's interest in fluids. END SPOILER. This brief tale is far from King's best, but it does succeed on its own terms as a straightforward look at a clever crime.
"A Borderline Case" (1959) is another inverted. As a mystery it is pretty routine. And its final twist can be spotted long in advance. But the storytelling is decent. The sections early in the tale, showing how the protagonist lost his social standing after his father lost his money, have some bite.
"Murder on Her Mind" (1957) combines a thriller about psychiatry, with an eventual whodunit murder mystery. It is one of King's poorest stories. The identity of the killer is arbitrary, and there are no clues associated with it, and no ingenuity. The thriller aspects about a psychiatrist getting blackmailed show a bit more inventiveness. The characters and the setting are nothing special.
Crime events in "Murder on Her Mind" involve a back-story of characters fleeing from the Holocaust. I'm of two minds about King's treatment. King should get credit for mentioning this important subject, at a time when it was often ignored. But his treatment also seems a bit tacky.
The Faces of Danger. "The Faces of Danger" (1960) is written in a partly summarized style. This style recalls, to a degree, that used by Ellery Queen in his Q.B.I. stories and parts of his Calendar of Crime. However, King's approach is less condensed than Queen's. Queen used it to tell a whole story in less than ten pages, while King's novella sprawls over forty. Both writers like to use the approach to invoke, and partially lampoon, the clichés of storytelling. In both, there is a certain sophistication of tone, a suggestion of sophisticated satire on conventional plotting. There is the feeling in both writers in which a game is being played by the author. In this game, the author tries to come up with the "best" response by the characters to each new situation. For example, a body might be discovered, and the next step in the story is tell what the characters are going to do. Sometimes this response is original, sometimes conventional. The more conventional responses are presented to the reader with irony, using a summarized statement to invoke the chief elements of the familiar situation. Less familiar responses are sometimes contrasted with the clichés of fiction, to underline the originality of the situation. So a description will contain both its true content, and its opposite.
The whole effect is of a game the author is playing with the reader, challenging them to guess how the characters will behave in any new situation, suggesting a duel of wits between the writer and the reader over the most original response to any event in the plot. This is in keeping with, but further extends, the basic active reading approach of most mystery fiction. In most mystery tales, the reader is not supposed to sit back, and just let the events of the tale wash passively over them. Instead, the reader is challenged to deduce the true solution of the mystery at every turn. The reader, in turn, constantly monitors the author's plot for logical consistency, and surprise. This sort of active readership is applied to every event in the mystery plot. In Queen and King, this approach is extended not just to the mystery puzzle plot itself, but every fictional development in the story: the characters' attitudes, responses to events, social conditions and backgrounds, police procedure, the romance subplot, details of the social milieu such as butlers and mansions, in short, every aspect of the story. This allows active readership as a universal response to the tale.
King always likes verbal fireworks in his tales; such an approach gives him many opportunities in that direction. It allows for an exuberant writing style, one filled with elaborate turns of phrase and much wit.
"The Faces of Danger" is an inventive combination of a thriller and puzzle plots. Some of these puzzles are medical mysteries, such as the cause of the poisoning. The explanation of the poisoning might not be fully clued, but it is ingenious. The main mystery, that of the identity of the villain, has numerous fair play clues embedded in the story. Oddly, King does not highlight all of these clues during the solution. But they stand out in a re-reading of the story. This is one of the most clued whodunit puzzles in King.
King also throws in a simple Dying Message mystery subplot. It is even simpler than the one in "Rendezvous with Death". While not especially good in itself, it does contribute to the rich inventiveness of the tale, which is bursting in all directions with both thriller and mystery plot ideas.
"The Caesar Complex" (1963) is a full-fledged medical mystery, very much in the tradition of the Dr. Colin Starr tales. The medical aspects recall "The Case of the Buttoned Collar" in their general approach. Both tales deal with markings on the body left by methods of death. In both, one method is mistaken for another method, that leaves similar marks. King also include a great deal of vividly described medical background information.
Some of the Starr tales have cover-ups involving two different times. "The Caesar Complex" is not so elaborate: but the killer's actions do involve two different stages and processes. Both sections also involve water, that King favorite.
"The Caesar Complex" has a nice, if tiny, subplot about a Florida ranch where one of the characters once worked. A series of motives are ascribed for this job. The ranch setting extends King's world into the sexual mystique of the Cowboy.
"The Caesar Complex" also reverses the Colin Starr tales, in which athletes are good, and intellectuals and people involved with the arts tend to be evil. Here we have an athlete looked at skeptically.
"The Gods, To Avenge..." (1963) was published shortly before "The Caesar Complex", and like it, deals with fake evidence left on a body for one method of death rather than another. But it is a simpler and much easier to guess story. It draws on botany, for a simple clue. While it is a whodunit mystery, it doesn't have many suspects, and it is easy to guess the culprit, who King hardly tries to conceal. There is some atmospheric writing about tisane, another fluid appearing in a King story. But mainly the tale is grim and unpleasant.
Its modest merit is the subplot about the hypnotist, which has some mild ingenuity. Like the murder method in "Each Drop Guaranteed" and the blackmailed psychiatrist in "Murder on Her Mind", there are aspects of "subverting or fooling doctors, and their medical treatment" in this subplot.
"Each Drop Guaranteed" (1958) is also a medical mystery. But it differs from many King tales about Dr. Colin Starr in that it involves no cover-up, and no alibi. Instead, it is a howdunit, where the means of killing seems obscure. It is decently crafted, if simple - I found the plot easy to figure out. The tale also is a real whodunit with multiple suspects, unlike say "The Gods, To Avenge...", which has only one obvious suspect.
The tale stars a different detective, Medical Examiner Dr. William Ainsworth. He will later be seen in a supporting role in Stuff Driscoll tales like "The Gods, To Avenge..." and "The Caesar Complex".
"Each Drop Guaranteed" is full of King's fluid imagery, everything from a torrential rainstorm to the drinks served to the victim.
"Gift for the Bride" (1962) is a pure inverted story, in the tradition of R.Austin Freeman. First we see an attempted crime from the point of view of the criminal, then investigator Stuff Driscoll's attempt to bring home the crime. The idea used by Driscoll to expose the crime is sound, apparently original, but far from brilliant. It is technological, but not medical, unlike much of King's fiction.
"Gift for the Bride", like many inverteds, suffers from gloom, forcing us into the mind of a criminal.
The tale shows us Stuff Driscoll's home life, which is mildly interesting. Driscoll is depicted as middle class, in distinction to the upper crust suspects in the tales. He is educated, but also a tough cop: a combination of the old style tough policeman and the new middle class American dream of the era. The story emphasizes that Driscoll is one of King's muscular he-men. Driscoll and his wife live near a canal, echoing King's love of water. The earlier investigator in the Florida tales, Bill Duggan, is also a young muscular man, who is some ways seems like a rough sketch for Driscoll. However, Duggan is unmarried, unlike Driscoll, and is not as well characterized or developed. For better or worse, Duggan also seems more purely working class, with a background as a life guard.
"Happy Ending" (1958) is a pure thriller. It is morbid, and the poorest tale in the book.
Uncollected Short Stories. "The Seeds of Murder" (1959) is an impossible crime tale. There are clues that allow one to deduce who the killer is, at least after you have figured out how the crime was done. This is the paradigmatic detective situation in such Ellery Queen works as The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935). This story seems even closer to Queen than to Van Dine. It focuses on the sort of rich, eccentric, multi-talented extended family of adults that often pops up in Queen tales. "The Seeds of Murder" appeared in EQMM (August 1959) and was reprinted in the anthology EQMM Annual, Volume 15 (1960).
"The Bluebird Persuaders" (1960) is another inverted tale. It shares situations from another sordid King tale "Happy Ending". Its readability picks up in its second half, when the murder elements enter and take over from the ugly date-rape aspects. It is not quite a pure inverted: we don't actually see the criminal commit the crime, but it is so obvious what has happened that the story is close to a pure inverted. The policeman's reasons at the end for disbelieving in the apparent set-up are not convincing or especially clever. All in all, a minor story. The tale does involve medical facts. And it centers on another fluid: blood. It appeared in EQMM (May 1960).
Many of Clason's novels are available as reprints from Rue Morgue Press.
The basic construction of the book comes from Van Dine's The Scarab Murder Case (1929). That novel dealt with murder in a private museum of Egyptology, a museum located in a private mansion, and whose suspects were mainly specialists in Egyptian art. This book uses a similar approach, with Tibet substituted for Egypt.
There are several limitations of characterization in the book. The lama is never convincing, with his child like personality. The rich son is constantly condemned for a lack of masculinity. This was a popular theme in the Depression, but measuring a man against standards of machismo seems inaccurate and cruel. Many of the other characters seem like stick figures. The non-impossible crime elements of the mystery are also fairly simple and uninventive.
All this said, The Man from Tibet is surprisingly entertaining. Clason has researched his subject in remarkable depth, and builds an appealingly intellectual novel out of it. The opening chapter of The Man from Tibet is pretty good. It is mainly a flashback to an adventure in Tibet, not a mystery story. Clason was interested in other Asian cultures, too. The sequence in the Japanese restaurant is delightful (Part Thirteen).
The Man from Tibet shows Clason's series sleuth, Roman historian Theocritus Lucius Westborough, working on a soon-to-be published book, Heliogabalus: Rome's Most Degenerate Emperor. The book is mentioned again in a later novel, Murder Gone Minoan, as already published, and selling well. Since Heliogabalus is mainly known for extreme homosexual behavior, this perhaps offers some clues to Westborough as well, who has no heterosexual love life in the novels. It might be a hint that Westborough is gay, too.
SPOILER: The impossible crime bears some resemblance to "A Chess Problem" in Agatha Christie's The Big Four (1924).
The book's second half adds little to what has gone before, and its emphasis on romantic triangles and intrigues lacks appeal.
The mystery elements here are weaker than in Clason's best books. There is no impossible crime, in the strict sense. The book's mystery plot is extremely simple, with a solution that contains only one idea, and a not particularly creative one, at that. Also, the choice of killer seems implausible. The book is best read for its lively first half.
The opening murder does indeed have a corpse found in a locked room. But there is nothing mysterious about this: the killer simply locked the room from the outside after the murder. Such mysteries are never called "locked room" puzzles.
The impossible disappearance is in Part Five: 3-5, Part Six: 1-5. It is fully resolved there, and these sections read like a short story within the novel.
The book's look at a business as a background for a crime also resembles Rex Stout. As in Stout, we have a group of suspects that work as officers and consultants for a small, successful business. They are upper middle class, educated people of considerable business skill. Stout's businesses tend to have an intellectual feel, such as a design firm, publishing or broadcasting. Clason's perfume firm is steeped in cultural traditions of the world of scent production.
Unlike some other Clason works, Poison Jasmine does not recreate another culture. It does offer a sympathetic, anti-racist account of the Chinese chef, which is in accord with the anti-racist views expressed in Clason's other fiction.
Poison Jasmine has a simple, but effective impossible crime puzzle. (SPOILERS) It anticipates ideas John Dickson Carr will use in The Nine Wrong Answers (1952) (END OF SPOILERS).
Poison Jasmine shows Clason's flair for color imagery. Both the flowers, and events of the mystery plot, are described in color terms.
Agatha Christie in The Big Four (1924) included a section called "The Yellow Jasmine Mystery" (Chapters 9-10). This deals with the same poisonous plant that gives the title to Poison Jasmine.
Poison Jasmine seems padded. Like many mystery novels, it would have been better as a novella. Most of the meat of both the mystery plot and perfume background are in Part Two, Part Three: Sections 1,2,6, Part Four: Sections 3-6, 8, Part Five: Sections 1 and 4, Part Nine: Sections 1 and 3. These sections total around seventy pages.
Green Shiver has a similar structure to the earlier The Man from Tibet (1938). In many ways, this second novel is an extension or variation of the first. Both center around the culture of a particular foreign country: China and Tibet, respectively. Both deal with wealthy American collectors who have a private museum of Asian art in the geometric center of their homes. Both collections contain a valuable stolen cultural object from Asia around which intrigue swirls, and both novels have a distinguished visitor from Asia. Both have frequent flashbacks to turbulent adventure in Asia. Green Shiver is much less linear than The Man from Tibet, and this is a good thing. The reader is often hard pressed to see the underlying significance of events in Green Shiver, meanings that are only revealed at the solution. This extra dimension of mystery in the book adds to its complexity. The imagery of Green Shiver is much more upbeat. Its depiction of Chinese culture concentrates on favorable aspects, while The Man from Tibet often focuses on horror material. Green Shiver is not Pollyanna-ish, but its dark side is in its depiction of the Japanese invasion of China, not its very positive look at Chinese culture itself. Characterization also seems richer in Green Shiver.
Clason is sensitive to color, and his book is a riot of color imagery. Clason is also knowledgeable about botany, and many exotic plants are described. The names in the story also seem to have symbolic meanings. Green Shiver includes such names as Jocasta (wife of Oedipus), Faith, Jasper and Eugene (meaning "well-born", a name given to the spoiled son of a wealthy family). Green Shiver is rich in discussions of Taoism. Westborough is depicted as a follower of Taoism, and the author is clearly sympathetic.
Much of the novel takes place in a large, Chinese style house built by a well to do collector in Los Angeles. Even by the standards of the Golden Age and its interest in architecture, this building is unusual. Oddly, Clason does not make the architecture play a role in the mystery plot. A well done suspense passage (Part Seven) is set against the building and its grounds, however.
This book was published before the US entered World War II, but Clason makes no secret of his pro-Chinese, anti-Axis attitudes here. Clason's Chinese sympathies recall those of Erle Stanley Gardner. Clason, like many others of his day, was outraged by Axis bombing raids. Bombing is treated in this book as a horrific war crime. It makes a telling contrast to today's attitudes in the United States, where bombing is considered the most popular way to wage war.
Like many Van Dine school works, Murder on Stilts has mild locked room features. As in such Van Dine books as The Kennel Murder Case, the locked room is more explained by some simple gimmicks, than by any profoundly imaginative puzzle plot ideas. Still, Dean's locked room concept is pleasant enough, although its ideas would have been considered a bit dated even by 1939.
The best parts of the novel are the opening (Prologue, Chapters 1-5), a deepening of the mystery (Chapter 15), and the solution of the locked room problem (Chapters 22-23). The rest of the novel is taken up by a dull, uninteresting look back at the early lives of the characters.
The first three Ashton-Kirk novels were filmed as a series in 1915. All three starred Arnold Daly as the detective; Daly was fresh from playing Arthur B. Reeve's sleuth Craig Kennedy in The Exploits of Elaine movie serials. Daly was a Broadway star, who had previously acted in McIntyre's play Steve (1912) on-stage.
The Detective. As a detective, Ashton-Kirk in some ways looks back to the past. As many commentators from S.S. Van Dine on have reported, Ashton-Kirk is in the Sherlock Holmes tradition. Like Holmes, he is a consulting-detective, to whom people in trouble come to with mysteries they need to solve. Like Holmes, Ashton-Kirk is a genius, with a broad command of specialized knowledge he can bring to bear on any case. Ashton-Kirk shares with Holmes and many other early detectives a skill with disguise, as well as being the possessor of a chemical lab in his living quarters (something he doesn't use in this novel).
But in other ways. Ashton-Kirk looks forward to the future of the mystery, in ways that seem bold for 1910. Unlike the staunchly middle-class Holmes, Ashton-Kirk is a wealthy social aristocrat who solves crimes for the sheer pleasure. He appeared over a decade before two other upper crust sleuths he resembles: Lord Peter Wimsey (who Dorothy L. Sayers created in 1923) and Philo Vance (who S.S. Van Dine would first write about in 1926). Like both of these sleuths, Ashton-Kirk has friendly contacts on the police force, who give him their full cooperation. Ashton-Kirk is thus the "genius amateur who works with the police" that would play such a major role in the Golden Age to come.
We learn right away, that although Ashton-Kirk is young, handsome, a star athlete in full training, wealthy, and from an old family, that everyone expects he will never marry. Like so many other great detectives of pre-1945 mystery fiction, Ashton-Kirk stands outside the world of romance.
Also interesting - and perhaps pioneering - are the detective assistants that Ashton-Kirk employs, such as Fuller and Burgess (none of these men have any first names, just like Ashton-Kirk himself). These expert operatives remind one of Nero Wolfe's team of detective employees to come, such as Saul Panzer. Fuller is sometimes misleadingly referred to by critics as a "Watson". He is not - he does not narrate the stories, and he is a professional detective, not a friend.
The Setting. Ashton-Kirk collects books, like Wimsey to come. And Ashton-Kirk: Investigator is set against the shop of a murdered numismatist (coin collector), filled with antiquities of every sort. Such collectors will form a major subject in the novels of Van Dine, Ellery Queen and other Golden Age writers of the Van Dine school.
The Mystery. Ashton-Kirk: Investigator splits into two almost equal halves. The first half (Chapters 1-13) is a pure mystery tale. The second half is mainly a thriller, with characters chasing each other around the countryside, suspenseful stakeouts, and other mild thriller material. I think that the book's mystery oriented first half is much better. Anyone can read the first half (Chapters 1-13), then some concluding sections of the second, in which some mystery riddles are explained (Chapters 24-25), and get the full plot of the novel.
Much of the mystery in the first half centers on reconstructing the murder, based on evidence left behind at the crime scene. This is an ancient tradition in mystery fiction, going back to Gaboriau in the 1860's.
The crime also takes place at night, in an elaborate and out-of-the-way building, with interesting architecture. Such a locale recalls Anna Katherine Green, another widely influential mystery author of the time. Green's later novels would be serialized in the same pulp which first published Ashton-Kirk: Investigator as a magazine serial, The Popular Magazine.
Sociology. The opening of Ashton-Kirk: Investigator leads one to expect the worst. Ashton-Kirk's family mansion is located in a now run down section of town, which has become a tenement full of East European immigrants. The disdainful narrator describes these slum dwellers unflatteringly, and one fears one is in for a racist diatribe.
But instead, when individual immigrant characters appear later on, they are treated with great sympathy. They become a major leitmotiv throughout the book. One suspects that the poor immigrants are reality, and upscale Ashton-Kirk is the fantasy.
John T. McIntyre was himself the desperately poor child of Irish immigrants, growing up in a slum worse than any in Ashton-Kirk: Investigator. And one suspects that the readers of the novel were not exactly rich, either. The Popular Magazine was a peculiar hybrid of a magazine. It was an imitation of the "family magazines" aimed at the middle classes, such as The Saturday Evening Post. Yet it was also a pulp, printed on the same cheap pulp paper as other pulps, and affordable by working class readers, like the other pulps. Readers of the magazine could see Ashton-Kirk, living in his glamorous mansion, and also read a tale full of working class immigrants like themselves.
The Holmes Legacy. Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent starts out promisingly enough, with a household under siege from mysterious incidents of persecution. The whole thing is a direct imitation of the many Sherlock Holmes in which a “man with a past” settles down, only to have all sorts of frightening events constantly plague the family. Doyle loved stories about a household under siege, with mysterious events and warnings occurring in the house over a period of weeks, and many of the members of the household working at cross purposes to each other in the melodrama that envelops the home. We see similar mystery set-ups in Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent. Such tales involve an active struggle, not a simple passive mysterious situation that needs elucidating, although that eventually comes too.
Ashton-Kirk is consulted about the case, just like Holmes. A strange diagram is the center of attention, as in some Holmes tales. Various approaches are used to try to interpret it. At one point (Chapter 11), Ashton-Kirk borrows some books on religious history and symbolism, from a friendly local priest. Ashton-Kirk’s detective assistant Fuller, his “Polton”, remarks humorously:
McIntyre puts especial emphasis on long chains of circumstance that make a suspect look guilty, but which are in fact capable of another, more innocent interpretation, as is eventually revealed. This sort of sustained ambiguity of situation recalls the work of Fergus Hume, another pioneer who contributed to the rise of the modern intuitionist detective novel. Ambiguity in Hume is often grounded in ambiguous personal relationships. By contrast, in McIntyre the ambiguity is more typically centered on activities that look specifically criminal, but which in fact are not.
The initial chapters in Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent often seem especially Doyle like, as they concentrate on his Holmes-like sleuth and a Doyle-like plot situation. But as the novel progresses, it becomes more and more similar to a Golden Age intuitionist whodunit, with these aspects of the plot coming to the fore. The transition especially takes place with the murder and its subsequent mystery itself, which seem very close to those in Golden Age books.
Spies. However, McIntyre does not sustain the pure mystery elements. Soon, we are engulfed in a routine spy novel, imitative of William Le Queux. A key character is the household’s next door neighbor, a Japanese spy named Okiu. The sophisticated Okiu employs a whole houseful of spies, including a butler who is a gigantic Sumo wrestler - no well-appointed establishment should be without one! Here things really go bad. Sometimes Okiu is an interesting character - but McIntyre also mixes cheap anti-Asian stereotypes into the story. This turns a story that starts out as a not-bad historical curiosity, into a book that cannot be recommended to anyone.
Okiu oddly mirrors Ashton-Kirk himself. Ashton-Kirk also employs a large staff, who assists him in his detective work. Both men are cultivated intellectuals, who love to read. Both men live in large houses, and have entree into upper crust social circles.
The first novel about sleuth Ashton-Kirk, Ashton-Kirk: Investigator, tells us to watch out for a sequel, called "Ashton-Kirk and the Scarlet Scapular." This is undoubtedly the same book as Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent - the scapular plays a major role in Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent. But somewhere along the way, the book has undergone a name change.
In addition to the unpleasant anti-semitism, the writing is lifeless, and the events seem remote from any sort of reality. The writing lacks the "hard-boiled" tone so often found in the Black Mask school, being bland and straightforward in style.
The garment business is portrayed as full of characters who have close ties to mobsters. Although the businessmen try to use the mobsters on small errands, the mob types get of of control, and start wrecking havoc on their own. It is an unusual setup, and one that could have served as the premise of a novel better than Mooney Moves Around.
The Detectives. This is the first book about private eye Jerry Mooney. He comes across as a generic shamus, with a small office and long suffering secretary Mickey, who he has promised to marry, as soon as he settles down, makes some money and stops playing the horses. The author mentions that "Mooney was about thirty-five, and quite big. He'd been a wrestler; he'd been a policeman; he'd been a top sergeant in the Marines." But little is done with this interesting background in the rest of the book.
Mooney's police contact is Captain Pash, a twenty-eight year veteran of the force. Pash is "a smart cop, though eccentric and hard to keep up with. He was small, and gray, and thin; his uniform always looked too large on him."
Rufus Gillmore published three early mystery novels during 1912 to 1914, long before Van Dine. When he returned to mystery novel writing in the 1930's with The Ebony Bed Murder (1932), he adapted his work to the popular Van Dine approach of that era.
Both novels are narrated by a stuffy family lawyer. Gillmore's near-parody pushes this character to extremes. While Green's lawyer was highly competent, Gillmore's young narrator is a near idiot, comically outclassed by everyone around him. Totally smitten by one of the heiresses, he believes any lie told him. Gillmore's narrator spends much of the book being humiliated, dominated and controlled by everyone in the case, including the tough, brainy detective Trask. It is quite an odd piece of comic fantasy. The book as a whole is an odd combination of nightmarish thriller events, and the narrator's comic encounters. It gives The Alster Case a unique tone of dark comedy.
While Green's mystery is solved by a New York City police detective, Gillmore's sleuth is a private detective. Trask is an energetic hawkshaw, always one step beyond everyone else, in spying on everyone around him. His character is both darkly comic, and a bit intimidating, even frightening. Trask reflects ideas of what a keen-eyed, intense manhunter was like, in those pre Black Mask days.
Trask embodies a robber-baron-era ideal of masculinity, ferocious, domineering and hard charging. So do several businessmen characters in the novel. One can see a similar idolization of captains of industry in Jacques Futrelle.
Adding to the near burlesque of The Leavenworth Case, is a subplot involving the servants. In The Leavenworth Case, a maid goes missing on the night of the killing; in The Alster Case, the butler disappears. Did the Butler Do It? He is certainly a prime suspect. This butler is young, sexy and sinister, and may or may not be involved with one of the heiresses. Other features echoing Green's novel: a floor plan; an inquest held in the victim's mansion; a missing key; and the immediate presence of the detective on the murder scene, even before the narrator arrives.
The Alster Case takes place entirely in Manhattan. While the early sections are pure mystery, set at the family mansion where the murder takes place, a long later section of the book is a thriller, set in a deserted building. This thriller section shows both originality, and ingenuity. It has the architectural interest in unusual buildings, of the Golden Age to come. Elements resemble the 1910's novels of Carolyn Wells.
The Alster Case is surprisingly readable, even gripping. But it hardly has a puzzle plot. There is plenty of mystery surrounding the handful of suspects, all of whom have deep dark secrets, and who are concealing their behavior on the night of the murder. But the unraveling of said secrets mainly comes from the suspects Telling All at the end of the book, rather from any real detective work. The secrets are mainly anti-climactic, and show little plot ingenuity. The solution is thus likely to come as a disappointment. Still, the solution also has some oddball features that impress.
The Alster Case was made into a silent film in 1915, by the now forgotten director J. Charles Haydon. The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company that made the movie was Chicago based, and they transferred the action to Chicago from the book's New York City. Matinee-idol-in-training Rod La Rocque played the novel's young inventor, one of the suspects.
The other sleuths in Gillmore's book have diminished in their cloning as well. The DA is the detective's friend, and brings him in as an amateur consultant to solve the murder, just as in Van Dine. But he seems less noble, intelligent and flexible than the idealistic, dedicated DA in Van Dine. And the police Sergeant Mullens is just plain obnoxious, always trying to pin the crime on a young woman in the case. Van Dine's Sgt. Heath may be low brow, and often mistaken in his ideas compared with Vance, but he is also generous, decent, open minded, genuinely concerned with truth, and filled with great respect for Vance.
Griffin Scott's secret den at the beginning is full of high tech gizmos, and there is an interesting look at tear gas later on. Such a secret den recalls the heroes of the pulp magazines, more than the Van Dine school. Scott also performs some not bad medical detection in the opening chapters. In general, there is a small atmosphere of scientific detection to the book, reminiscent of such Van Dine school writers as Abbot and C. Daly King. The mechanical but never lazy plotting recalls that of 1930's film whodunits, with suspects always moving around. The second murder in the story is especially startling, and also resembles in its choice of victims King.
Despite a general lack of inspiration in this minor novel, it somehow remains likable. There is no sense of malice in Gillmore. Racial minorities are not belittled, although in fact they hardly show up at all, nor are the servants caricatured. The murdered women's numerous husbands are chronicled with some storytelling verve, so are her mercenary relatives. She resembles to a degree the much married woman in Earl Derr Biggers' Keeper of the Keys (1932), although she is far more mercenary. The story also resembles Biggers' novel in involving a shooting, and in tracking the movements of the characters at the time of the murder.
Also pleasant: the author's sympathetic treatment of the Chinese characters. He is clearly trying to inform readers about the true nature of the Chinese community in New York City, and to kill off old negative stereotypes. There are only three Chinese characters in the story, however; most of the suspects are various white customers at the restaurant.
Burke's puzzle plot is easily guessed. The mystery plot, while fairly elaborate, is not especially creative. Also, the killer is easy to spot right away. The best part of the book mainly consists of Burke's building. The architecture is featured most heavily in Chapters 2-5, 7 and 19. Burke's building is fully three dimensional, with characters moving up and down through elevators and stairs, as well as around individual floors. This 3D quality recalls Mary Roberts Rinehart's buildings in The Album (1933).
Chinese Red stars Burke's series detective Quinny Hite. Burke's hero is a former policeman, now working as a private eye. However, his sleuth is not very hard-boiled. Instead, the book seems to come out of the Van Dine school tradition. As in Van Dine writers, the sleuth is a brainy guy who works closely with friends on the police force, just as Burke's hero does with his old police inspector boss here. The detective work is also in the straightforward Van Dine tradition, with the police and hero making an in-depth investigation of all aspects of the crime, immediately after it takes place. Also Van Dine like: the New York City setting, the upper crust suspects, the exotic background, here a Chinese restaurant, the sympathetic treatment of racial minorities, the show business and entertainment background of some of the characters, the elaborate building in which the crime is set, and the emphasis on the movement of the characters around the crime scene at the time of the murder. As in many Van Dine school books, much of the detection involves reconstructing the movements of the characters. The book also has the cheery, sometimes comic tone of many Van Dine school books, and set pieces and tableaux that verge on the surrealistic. Surrealism is an important strategy in such Van Dine school writers as Ellery Queen and Craig Rice, and is a running theme throughout the Van Dine school.
On the other hand, Burke's sleuth is clearly not a social aristocrat, unlike Van Dine's sleuth Philo Vance. Instead, he is a somewhat raffish low life, whose home base is Times Square, and whose background is strictly working class. Quinny Hite is also a somewhat comic character. In addition to its upper class suspects, the book also includes some bums, as well as some colorful characters from Times Square. Such low lifes appeared in films of the period, such as Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1942), and mystery novels, such as Robert Reeves' Cellini Smith: Detective (1943).
In the fictitious American town Crescent City, competition is fierce between two Society women who are patronesses of the arts. Oil heiress Miss Serena Fulenwider has devoted her life to funding the local symphony, while glamorous, elegant sophisticate Mrs. Clara Kenworthy has just blown in from several years in Paris, and has decided to start a rival Bach Festival. Jockeying for conducting positions in these institutions among local classical male musicians is also fierce. Causing further problems is the presence of Tony Farnum, handsome young composer, cad, and sexy rotter who has broken the heart of most of the women in the story, as well as arousing the jealousy of the men. Three guesses as to who gets bumped off.
The Bach Festival Murders is a good natured but minor mystery novel. As a portrait of the classical music scene, it has a weakness in that it focuses more on Society patrons of the arts, rather than actual classical music making itself. This look at Society was undoubtedly what many readers wanted in 1942, but it makes the characters blander and less interesting than they might have been. Occasionally there are interesting glimpses of classical technique. The author points out that orchestral conductors have a common, universally understood language of hand gestures, while choral conductors each have a private, personal repertoire of signals. Bloch was a professional classical musician, and undoubtedly knew much more about classical music, than she manages to incorporate in this novel. All the music references do seem accurate. The heroine strikes up a friendship with another woman musician, who suggests they play piano duets together. In real life, Bloch was friends with the famed poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the two liked to play duets at Millay's home.
The Bach Festival Murders lacks a strong puzzle plot:
The Bach Festival Murders also lacks a strong detective figure. The crimes are finally figured out by Sally Carrier, the musician wife of the young classical conductor of the local symphony. But Sally does not do a whole lot of detecting during the course of the novel. Sally becomes platonic friends with the policeman Inspector Wilkins who investigates the case. Wilkins is genial but under-characterized, and we learn little about him or his men.
Where does The Bach Festival Murders fit into detective fiction history? It is hard to say. The book is clearly slanted towards woman readers, with a female detective figure and prominent female characters. But it is not a Had I But Known novel in the Rinehart tradition. There is (deliberately) little suspense; the detective heroine is happily married throughout, and not the subject of a romance, and the tone is light, not melodramatic. The Bach Festival Murders exploits the Society setting favored by Rinehart and her followers, and the female protagonists, without turning into "woman's suspense".
The Bach Festival Murders also bears some distinct resemblances to the Van Dine School, without being a full fledged member. Its background among intellectuals; its amateur sleuth with friendly relations with the police; its team of policemen; its howdunit aspects all seem Van Dinean. However, the book lacks the vigorous, straightforward murder investigation found in Van Dine and his followers. What detection that transpires is wishy washy and frequently barely there. And Sally is hardly a genius in the Philo Vance or Ellery Queen tradition.
Oddly, the genteel, soothing The Bach Festival Murders is more relaxing than it has any right to be, given its limitations as a detective novel. It ends with a tribute to the story's most interesting character, Miss Serena Fulenwider, and her idealistic love of classical music.