Lawrence G. Blochman | Helen McCloy | Elizabeth Sanxay Holding | Karl W. Detzer | Allan Vaughan Elston | Earl Derr Biggers | Milton M. Propper | Clifford Knight | Richard Starnes | Charles B. Child | H.T. Alfon | Hughes Allison | A.Z.H. Carr | Harry Miner | Allen Richards | Pulp Inverted Stories | Frederic Arnold Kummer | C. William Harrison | Robert Arthur | David X Manners
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
"The Little Dry Sticks" (1930)
Police Sergeant Dan Murphy stories
Uncollected short stories
Murder by Mandate (1945) (written with Maurice Beam)
"Murder in the Movies" (1937)
The Great Insurance Murders (1937)
Death of a Big Shot (1951) (Chapters 1 - 5)
"The Affair at the Circle T" (1946)
"Corollary" (1948)
"Fourth Rule for Murderers" (1948)
The Sleuth of Baghdad: The Inspector Chafik Stories
The Other Body in Grant's Tomb (1951)
Bengal Fire (1937)
Red Snow at Darjeeling (1938) (Chapters 1 - 14)
O'Reilly Sahib stories
"Murder Walks in Marble Halls" (1942)
John Long stories
Finicky Flynn stories
Roderick Poplar / Abraxas Detective Agency stories
Rather Cool For Mayhem (1947 - 1948) (Chapters 1-7, 10, 18)
Diagnosis: Homicide
Clues For Dr. Coffee
Recipe For Homicide (1952)
Uncollected Dr. Coffee stories
The Dance of Death (1938) (Chapters 1 - 9)
The Goblin Market (1943)
The Singing Diamonds
Two-Thirds of a Ghost (1956)
The Sleepwalker (1974)
The Impostor (1977)
"The Kiskadee Bird"
"The Unbelievable Baroness" (1945)
"The Trial of John Nobody" (1950)
"A Case of Catnapping" (1954)
"Due Process" (1954)
To Market, To Market (1961) (Chapters 1 - 5)
"Ink's Jinx" (1934)
"Eye Witness" (1935)
"Death Debt" (1935)
"Killer's Keeper" (1940)
"Eight Bells" (1935)
"Cut Glass" (1937)
"Mrs. Belcourt Draws A Bier" (1948)
"Wish You Were Dead" (1945)
"Calling Dr. Death" (1949)
"Eye Witness" (1939)
The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966) (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 13, 14, 16)
One tends to think of the Realist school of Freeman, Crofts, Sayers and other writers as being centered in Britain in the 1920's. This is certainly true, but the school influenced several later American writers. Each of these American writers seems to have been influenced separately and individually by the realist tradition. These American writers do not form a "school" of American Realists. In other words, Blochman and McCloy are not closely aligned with each other; they merely show signs of being individually influenced by Freeman and his followers. There is also a realist influence visible on some American writers discussed in other articles, such as Lenore Glen Offord.
Where does Lawrence G. Blochman fit into mystery tradition? I would argue that he is an American representative of the "Realist" school founded by Freeman and Crofts. He shows a number of important similarities. His scientific detective, Dr. Coffee, seems in the tradition of that other medical detective, Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke. Also, Blochman's books seem constructed as "backgrounders" in the Crofts tradition, intended to provide a detailed, inside look at some country, industry or institution. Many of his early novels are set in India, where Blochman worked as a journalist, and are full of information about that country. The novella "Murder Walks in Marble Halls", takes us backstage at the New York City Public Library.
Blochman also shows signs of continuity with Arthur B. Reeve and the American Scientific School. Reeve's detective Craig Kennedy liked to travel in foreign countries, as in The Panama Plot (collected 1918). Blochman's detective Prike gathers the suspects together at the end of the tale for the revelation of the killer, just as in Reeve. Reeve typically wrote about the sort of industrial background later favored by Blochman. Both writers were fascinated by gems. The characters in both authors are often caught up in romantic tangles.
Blochman's fiction falls into two periods. From 1927 to 1940, Blochman mainly wrote tales of exotic adventure. These were often set in India, but he also wrote about Japan, Indonesia, Central America, and other places. These stories tend to mix mystery elements with spy, adventure and travel writing. From 1941 through the 1970's, Blochman's stories were largely mysteries set in the USA. They tend to be much closer to the paradigms of detective fiction, concentrating on a mystery solved by a detective. However, spy elements are still frequently present in this period. Blochman's two periods are the exact opposite of mystery trends of his era. During the 1920's and 1930's, many mystery writers stuck close to strict Golden Age traditions of mystery writing. After the 1940's, however, many mystery authors tried to bring other elements into mystery fiction, moving away from the pure detective story. This is completely different from Blochman's approach. High points of Blochman's first period include the Indian set novel Bengal Fire (1937); high points of his second, three books about pathologist detective Dr. Coffee.
"The Fifty-Carat Jinx" also shows signs of Blochman's later plotting technique:
Blochman's "A Perfect Target" (1932) is a little suspense thriller set in Japan. While it is not a mystery story, and is routine as a suspense plot, it shows that Blochman at this early stage has already developed his skills with backgrounds: the Japanese setting is richly described. Blochman is good at details of daily life. He especially takes us into his hero's home, and shows how he lives and eats. These same approaches will show up later in Bengal Fire. This story deals in stolen netsuke; Blochman also liked tales about rare books, jewelry, and other valuable objects.
Adventure specialized in tales set in exotic countries. Some of the stories it published were mysteries, many were not, but all catered to the thirst for adventure in foreign lands. "River Pick-Up" is a mystery, set against a back-stage look at banana plantations on the coast of Guatemala. Blochman would return to banana plantations for his novel Blow-Down (1939). "River Pick-Up" shows Blochman's skill at painting tropical backgrounds, complete with non-stereotyped diverse characters. Once again, a crime in the past plays a role in a murder in the present day. Blochman gives life histories for some of the suspects: also a Blochman tradition.
But "River Pick-Up" also has something new. It is a scientific detective story in which pathology helps solve the mystery: a kind of tale that will play a major role in Blochman's work. The science-based murder here is simple, hardly fair play, and not as developed as later Blochman. Still, it helps give the tale added interest.
Although most of the characters are either British or Indian, with a scattering of Europeans as well, Blochman's hero is a young American miner, prospecting in India for gems. Both his profession and his emotional generosity make him typical of Blochman's heroes in his later Indian books. Such American technical types having adventures around the globe remind one of Richard Harding Davis. Like most of Blochman's characters, he is a dynamic, high energy person, full of purposeful activity both in the pursuit of his profession, and his emotional life. Also scientific in orientation is Dr. Lenoir, a French doctor studying Indian snake poisons. Such medical types will play a major role in Blochman's later Dr. Coffee tales. In Blochman works, each character is marked out by his position in the social and technological network of the world of the story. He is more than that - each person also has both an individual personality, and often romantic relationships with the other characters. But usually each person also occupies an absolutely distinct position in the socio-technological matrix. This position tends to be linked to their job. It is also controlled by their politics. This position tends to be stable in the story: it rarely changes through the duration of the tale. People often tend to have a humorous self awareness of the arbitrariness of their position, a realization that others do not share their politics or beliefs. But they also tend to justify their actions and beliefs, and cling to them throughout the book.
Bombay Mail has a deductive finale, in which Prike one by one eliminates the suspects. This recalls the work of Ellery Queen. Prike's reasons are not always ironclad, unlike EQ's: he often merely establishes that a person's guilt is unlikely, not impossible the way EQ does.
Among Blochman's mystery stories set in India, Bengal Fire (1937) is a gem. It has very vivid descriptions of the city of Calcutta. The 1940's paperback of the novel has a road map of Calcutta on the back, with over fifteen locations mentioned in the book marked out. You can follow Blochman's characters up and down streets as they go about their business. Most of Blochman's India mysteries are set in and around Calcutta; Bengal was probably the region of India that Blochman knew best.
Red Snow at Darjeeling (1938) is not as good as its predecessor. There is too much emphasis on spy intrigue, which gets in the way of making a well constructed mystery plot. It is one of those hybrid works, such as Baynard Kendrick's The Odor of Violets (1940), which became popular in the days leading up to World War II, which attempt to combine the spy story and the fair play murder puzzle mystery. However, the first half is pretty readable, with some excellent depictions of first Calcutta, where the story opens, and then the train ride to Darjeeling. This is reminiscent of Blochman's first two Prike novels, with the Calcutta sections recalling Bengal Fire, and the train ride Bombay Mail. Red Snow at Darjeeling also displays Blochman's interest in botany, with his detective Inspector Prike showing his expertise on orchids, as part of the plot. Blochman's depictions of the Indian scene in his novels always pick up most pleasantly on plants, trees and vegetation as well. The hero's father in Recipe for Homicide was a botanist, and there is a great deal about his garden, too. Blochman always displays a reverence for knowledge in his works. For all his adventurousness, he had a deep belief in civilization, an attitude that is badly needed today.
Blochman's poorest novels are three non-series books that combine spy-fiction, murder mystery plots, Third World settings and anti-Axis propaganda: Midnight Sailing (1938), Blow-Down (1939) and Wives to Burn (1940). The mystery story sub-plots in these books are not unpleasant reading, especially during their initial murder investigations, but their solutions are poorly crafted. Blochman's anti-Axis beliefs do him credit. Unfortunately, all three of the books express stereotypes about inhabitants of Third World countries. This forms a blot on Blochman's otherwise commendably anti-racist record.
The best of the novels is Blow-Down, especially in its opening chapters (1 - 8). It is something of a breakthrough for him. It is his first novel to deal with food production, the subject of his later Recipe for Homicide (1952), and several of his best Dr. Coffee short stories. These opening chapters contain a detailed Background look at a Central American banana plantation. Blochman compares the whole operation to that of a modern factory, and there is an emphasis on all the mechanical and technological infrastructure supporting it. This section has a personal feel. Here, Blochman is writing about the things that matter most to him as an artist.
Blochman also continues his interest in botany. In addition to the banana plants themselves, we get a scientifically accurate look at some of the other trees in the region, such as ceiba and bactris palms. One odd note: Blochman depicts nipa palms as growing along the rivers. Nipa is very common in the Asian tropics, such as Indonesia, the setting of Blochman's "Red Wine", but I don't think it grows wild in the New World.
The discussions of gourmet cooking (Chapter 18) also recall the Dr. Coffee tales to come. Blochman's characters especially like fancy dishes made in casseroles.
During the early 1940's, the Good Neighbor policy encouraged Americans to look to Latin America for close ties. There was a huge outpouring of Hollywood films with Latin American settings, especially Argentina and Brazil. Mystery writers seemed to favor the Caribbean, instead. It was a place easily traveled to by ordinary Americans, and it was a place close to United States borders, making it a good setting for spy fiction. In addition to Blochman's Blow-Down, we get Richard Sale's "Cape Spectre" (1941), Helen McCloy's The Goblin Market (1943) and Charles G. Booth's Mr. Angel Comes Aboard (1944). Blochman and Booth were friends. There were also such mystery films as the Panama set Phantom Raiders (1940), directed by Jacques Tourneur, and based on a story by mystery writer Jonathan Latimer.
The Blochman books marking his transition from exotic adventure to American pure detection are among his least interesting works. Wives to Burn (1940) was his last novel set in India. Inspector Prike is not present. The novel shows a sense of disgust with the whole concept of exotic adventure, portraying it as a bunch of foolish romantic fantasies. This is Blochman's worst novel.
In later books such as Recipe for Homicide (1952), Blochman will write with brilliance and sympathy about business women, portraying them with a complete lack of sexism. Here the ideas about women in business are conventional.
See You at the Morgue shows continuity with Blochman's other fiction. It opens with a threat against the life of a character, a threat that is duly carried out after several chapters; in this it is like Bombay Mail. In both books, this threat stirs up the plot right away, prodding the characters into action. It also serves to introduce an element of mystery immediately, allowing Blochman to delay the actual murder for several chapters, while he introduces his characters and situations, without any loss of mystery emphasis to the book.
See You at the Morgue lacks fair play, in the sense that it would be hard for a reader to predict solutions based on clues in the tale. Instead, it eventually engulfs its characters in a maze of storytelling. The intricate patterns of plot that ensue give pleasure. This is similar to the form of construction Blochman used in Bengal Fire.
Blochman shows two apartments in the novel; one being the murder scene, and the other an unoccupied apartment next door. This rather oddly recalls the two household effects found in stories by writers of the pulp tradition, such as Raymond Chandler's "Goldfish" (1936) and Erle Stanley Gardner's The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939). (Please see the article on Gardner for a further discussion of this). Blochman's emphasis on his characters' motions around these locations recalls the intuitionist tradition, such writers as John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen.
Blochman typically adds to the intrigue and plotting of his books by having several of his characters engaged in illegal activity. In the Indian books, these schemes, while illegal, were not necessarily immoral. His Indian characters were often engaged in working towards Indian independence, something that was illegal under British rule, but hardly seen by Blochman as an immoral activity. And the European characters are often engaged in activities, such as prospecting for gems, that while essentially moral, causes them to go up against the red tape of British Government regulations. By contrast, in See You at the Morgue, when his characters engage in illegal schemes, they are just plain crooks, pure and simple. This makes See You at the Morgue far less ambiguous and less complex than the early Indian novels. In all of Blochman's works, these illegal activities are used to give characters motives for murder. They also greatly add to the mystery of the plot. Typically we learn early on that the character is involved in some scheme, but we don't learn what the scheme is. We get some interesting clues, but the actual scheme itself is left as an intriguing mystery to be solved later. This increase of mystery is something that is always desirable in a detective novel: typically, the more mystery, the better in a detective tale.
See You at the Morgue has a structure similar to Blochman's later "Calendar Girl" (1952), in that its first half suggests the crime springs from its characters' romantic entanglements, and its second half gradually reveals its characters' involvement in money-making criminal schemes instead, schemes which lead to the murder. This is not fair play, because there are few real clues to these activities.
Blochman tried to give plenty of New York City atmosphere to this work, just as he depicted Calcutta in his Indian books. While he often succeeds at scene painting - the description of New York City in the autumn in Chapter 3 is especially good - he does not succeed in the sort of sociological detail he achieves in his early India books, or in his portrait of the modern United States in Recipe For Homicide (1952). See You at the Morgue shows the technological side of New York, just as Bombay Mail does of India. The many scenes set on the New York Subway system are the equivalent of the train chapters in Blochman's Indian thrillers. The look at a New York City phone answering system, and mystery plot ideas that emerge from it, is the equivalent of the stress paid to telegraphing and messengers in the Indian books.
Recipe For Homicide (1952) includes a detailed look at a soup canning factory, and several short stories of its period also look at industrial food production. Blochman includes a mild early predecessor of this in See You at the Morgue, by having two characters work for a liquor company, one as a biochemist, the other as a public relations man (Chapter 2).
Blochman's detective in See You at the Morgue is a policeman, Kenneth Kilkenny. He is closely associated with a medical man, the Assistant Medical Examiner, Dr. Joseph Rosenkohl. This anticipates the later set-up of the Dr. Coffee stories, with scientist Dr. Coffee working with policeman Max Ritter. However, here it is the policeman who is the central character, whereas in the Dr. Coffee stories it is the scientist who is the chief sleuth. Like the later Dr. Coffee, Dr. Rosenkohl is a pathologist. However, the pathology sections are brief, and compared to the later Coffee novels, short on medical substance and relevance to the plot. Like the later team of Coffee and Ritter, the two men are close personal friends, with a common fondness for food and eating together. The fact that the sympathetic Dr. Rosenkohl is Jewish is clearly Blochman's comment on Hitler era Anti-Semitism. Blochman had long included characters of many races and nationalities in his tales. Max Ritter is the later Dr. Coffee stories is also Jewish.
It is set at the New York Public Library, and is one of the few Blochman stories in which the floor plan and architecture of the setting plays a crucial role: one can follow the movements of the characters all over the Library, and the architectural orientation gives pleasure in the way typical of Golden Age mysteries.
It is one of Blochman's few stories set among the intelligentsia, along with "The Swami of Northbank". The people in the story are all "knowledge workers": people who produce knowledge the way characters in other Blochman tales produce food or minerals. The characters in the story do not merely stand around and expound on their intellectual specialty. Each has a job, and each is busy producing something as part of it. This beehive of work is integrated into the mystery plot. Both the Library and the knowledge work are part out the main productive output of New York City, its work as an industrial center of the mind. The story continues Blochman's interest in the life of New York City started in See You at the Morgue. Blochman also views the Library as a window on the world: he emphasizes the Oriental Room, the Slavonic Room, and other centers of International scholarship in the Library. He also shows how the Library is the center of what we today call multi-media, including music, radio and dance. This makes the Library virtually the "brain center" of Blochman's universe, the central locale connecting up all of Blochman's interests.
Kenneth Kilkenny and Dr. Joseph Rosenkohl return in this story, and Blochman clearly hoped to make them series sleuths at this point of his career. However, the young hero and amateur sleuth who is the novella's Point of View character does most of the actual detection in the tale. As far as I know, this story marks the second and last appearance of Kilkenny and Rosenkohl in a Blochman tale.
The structure of the story has several Blochman trademarks:
The novel has a Background describing what the characters did before, during and after World War II. Such a "through the war" perspective is found in a number of World War I novels, such as Donald McGibeny's 32 Caliber (1920). One of the characters is a manufacturer, who grew rich from his factory making cotton shirts for GI uniforms. This focus on the intersection of manufacturing and politics will reoccur in the later Dr. Coffee stories. There Blochman will largely concentrate on food manufacturing plants.
One of the characters in the tale is a pathologist, and the story is noteworthy for apparently being one of the first Blochman tales to incorporate medical detail as part of its plot. Unlike the later tales of the heroic Dr. Coffee, the pathologist in the story is not a sympathetic character. The story suffers from a general lack of fair play - it is hard to see how anyone could deduce the outcome from the clues presented. The medical detail in parts of the story are divorced from the rest of the plot, and are not well integrated with anything else. Furthermore, they never form a part of any puzzle plot in the strict sense. This is unlike the later Dr. Coffee stories, in which the medical aspects usually form part of an ingenious mystery. Still the medical ideas are not uninteresting, and form a prelude to Blochman's important Dr. Coffee series.
The hero, an ex-newspaperman, has a smart aleck mouth and a lot of attitude. He is rough, tough and given to wisecracks and adroit phrases, many of which show verbal cleverness. This sort of smart guy patter is rather startling in Blochman, whose Dr. Coffee tales are narrated with a serious earnestness. Even here, his narrator's hard-boiled cracks show unusual literacy, with many twists on standard phrases. Blochman's fiction has a wide variety of tone. He occasionally wrote short stories whose heroes are very hard-boiled detectives. These include "Deadly Error" (1958), about tough as nails Detective-sergeant Pete Potrero of San Francisco Homicide. Potrero is of Yaqui Indian descent, and deals with underworld crooks. Although he is an interesting hero, the story is less successful. Its exageratedly hard-boiled plotting approaches self parody, and one wonders if Blochman was more comfortable with the more sensible, and common sensical, tone of the Dr. Coffee stories.
The novel has a good deal of idolization of the military ethos, with men in uniform being admired and civilians being regarded as second rate. This was a not uncommon attitude during World War II. It extends in the book to the detective, a state trooper named Captain Hugh McKay. McKay and his men are uniformed and very militaristic in their approach. McKay is tall, wears a tailored gray trooper's uniform and Stetson, and is ultra-tough and disciplined. He is always barking out commands and imposing his authority on the suspects. Everything he says is either a direct query demanding information, or an order. He also directs the flow of conversation among the suspects, controlling everything they say. He refuses to answer questions himself, and makes sure that everyone understands the flow of information will be strictly one way. The military will return in Recipe For Homicide (1952), and in some of Blochman's Dr. Coffee short stories of the 1960's. They will be treated in a progressively more skeptical manner by Blochman as the years go by. Even in the World War II Mayhem Blochman expresses concern about civilian war profiteers, although the armed forces are treated with reverence. As time goes by, Blochman's skepticism will extend to members of the armed forces themselves, in such Dr. Coffee stories as "The Wolf and The Wayward Wac" (1963).
Recipe does more. Blochman saw India as a dynamic place, seething with intrigue and competing political factions. Recipe offers a similar portrait of modern America. There are communists, capitalists, representatives of labor unions, government agents. Each is presented as is, with an attempt to offer a sophisticated, realistic portrayal, not a stereotype common to a thriller (e.g., the dreadful Mickey Spillane). Blochman's portrait of Communism is complex. He is definitely not a Communist sympathizer. Far from it. He shows US. Communists as a sinister group willing to sabotage the US military, a point of view that is perhaps extremely anti-Communist, but which gains reasonable credence in 1996 from all we know about the systematic willingness of Communist Party members in real life to engage in anti-US. espionage and anti-Trotskyist terrorism. Blochman also shows Communists as willing to murder their own members, also a realistic portrayal. But Blochman also shows how idealistic Americans got caught up in Communism because of a desire to treat areas of US society in genuine need of reform, such as the treatment of the poor and racial discrimination. The fate of these idealists is portrayed as genuinely tragic, as their ideals are eventually betrayed by Communist realities.
Blochman's portrayal of capitalism is equally complex. He shows how many factory owners are genuinely concerned about the safety and welfare of their employees. He also shows that the ranks of capitalists include crooks and schemers willing to go to any lengths to achieve their swindles. It is a balanced portrayal, which is probably unsatisfactory to ideological extremists of either left or right, but which certainly can be defended as "realistic" and non-superficial.
Blochman's greatest deviations from realism come from the demands and conventions of the mystery genre. In a mystery novel, you must have a murder, and a large cast of suspects who can reasonably suspected of the murder. Probably this is not realistic, in the strictest sense. Neither US Communists or capitalists have typically engaged in Agatha Christie style murder schemes to further their goals. Nor have most other people, of course. The types of murders portrayed in mystery stories are largely a literary convention, designed to create entertaining, ingenious plots. Political ideologues of all stripes can reasonably claim that Blochman has exaggerated the willingness of their side to engage in murderous activities. Of course he has - otherwise he wouldn't be able to write a mystery novel about them.
The conventions of the mystery story aside, Blochman has created one of the most realistic portraits of American society in this novel. It is also a portrayal that is quite different from that of many modern mystery writers. Mysteries often portray daily life in the US as humdrum, routine, and commonplace. Blochman shows US daily life as the operating ground of many powerful forces, technological, scientific, economic, political. It comes across as a very interesting, dynamic place.
Blochman's Dr. Coffee short stories break down into a number of categories:
There are other mystery aspects to some of these stories, aside from their core crime plot. Many of the tales involve Hidden Relationships ("But the Patient Died", "Catfish Story", "Rum for Dinner", "The Swami of Northbank", "The Square on the Hypotenuse", "The Half-Naked Truth").
Animals and their biology play a role in several stories, as a subplot ("Catfish Story", "Deadly Back-Fire", "But the Patient Died").
"But the Patient Died" (1947), is a straightforward Dr. Thorndyke imitation. The first tale in the Dr. Coffee series, it furnishes a good summary of both the daily hospital work and routine of Dr. Coffee, and of his and his police friend Max Ritter's personalities. It makes for pleasant reading, although quite mechanical in its approach to mystery. The best touches in the story deal with politics in Coffee's hometown of Northbank.
More creative, and with a better puzzle plot, is "Catfish Story". In "Catfish Story", Dr Coffee's medical deduction plays only a small part in the story. This lividity subplot is sound and clever. But most of the tale is taken up by two other complex plots. These are solved by policeman Max Ritter, who is the principal detective in the story. It is nice to see Ritter getting an outing. These two Ritter subplots do not involve medical mysteries - instead, they are well-done non-medical mysteries.
Similarly, in "Old Flame" (1959), Ritter is the one who actually solves howdunit, finds the criminal, and exposes the killer's motive. He does all this at the very end of the tale, and his detection takes up a smaller portion of the story than it does in "Catfish Story".
"Calendar Girl" is one of the less satisfying tales. Its main non-medical mystery uses an old plot idea, that previously appeared in such works as Dashiell Hammett's "One Hour" (1924) and Baynard Kendrick's Blood on Lake Louisa (1934).
"The Phantom Cry-Baby" concerns the heiress to the Barzac Cannery, later used as the setting of Recipe for Homicide. Its plot is alluded to in Chapter 6 of Recipe, and in some ways forms a prequel to that novel. The Cannery itself is hardly discussed in "Cry-Baby", however. It is one of the few Dr. Coffee stories to use mechanical, non-medical technology as part of the plot.
A locked room story is "Murder Behind Schedule". This is a very well done tale, brief but with a well constructed plot. It contains a gracious homage to John Dickson Carr. Carr in turn was a fan of Blochman's, and praised his stories in print. This is much shorter than Blochman's other Dr. Coffee tales, presumably because it appeared in This Week, a magazine that offered high prices for very short mystery stories - Ellery Queen's Q.B.I. also appeared there in the early 1950's. The characterization of Paul Monson in the story is interesting. It emphasizes his interior world, his attitudes and thoughts, as well as his talents. It also stresses the relationship between the character, and society, especially the sociology of modern life. Many of Blochman's characters seem to exist on such an interface. The plot of the tale, like many of Blochman's, interweaves a cat's cradle of relationships among the characters. The solution is also typical of Blochman, in that it involves the detective discovering new previously hidden relationships among the characters.
"Kiss of Kandahar" (1951) is set in the same world as Recipe for Homicide (1952), with its factories, its food processing, and its poisons. This tale, like its predecessor "The Swami of Northbank" (1950), is in the pure Freeman tradition of scientific detection. Both stories involve some interesting science.
The later "A Taste For Tea" (a.k.a. "The Man Who Lost His Taste") (1958) also recalls Recipe for Homicide, as such Blochman interests as botany, medical detection, and the world of industrial food preparation all intermix. Blochman's interest in industrial food preparation exposes a whole hidden side of modern American life. Despite the ubiquity of grocery stores and prepared food, most people have little consciousness of this. It underpins all of modern life on a daily basis. Blochman also enjoys the technology of gourmet cooking, and exotic foods. The Caribbean meal in "Rum For Dinner" is an example. I've seen the akee trees discussed in that story at Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami.
"Death by Drowning?" (1965) is also set in the world of industrial food preparation. Despite its brevity, Blochman has crowded many of his other themes into the tale, too: scientific detection, characters representing corruption in the business world and a cross section of business practices, irregular romantic liaisons, timetables, unexpected perspectives in the solution that transform earlier events in the tale. The story is an example of Blochman's ability to construct complex plots.
In addition to his industry set stories, Blochman also wrote tales set among the criminal element. "Stacked Deck" (1959) is especially Freeman like. Its dubious death is a major Freeman theme, and the blood analysis recalls such Freeman tales as "The Old Lag" (1909) and "The Pathologist to the Rescue". Blochman includes complete life histories for his characters. Blochman is an especially people oriented writer. He notices his characters, their beliefs, their relationships, their histories, their physical appearance, and their medical conditions: much of the science in Blochman's tales revolves around this latter.
Of the two last stories in Clues For Dr. Coffee, "The Wolf and The Wayward Wac" (1963) is not bad, with some interesting business detail about the Army, while "Wrong-Way Tosca" (1964) is unpleasant. "Wrong-Way Tosca" suffers from a stereotyped, negatively depicted gay character, one of the few examples of prejudice anywhere in Blochman's work.
Dr. Coffee also appeared in several later 1960's and 1970's stories published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, that have not yet been collected in book form. Most of the Dr. Coffee stories I've read from this period are fairly weak, however. Blochman will develop a much more objective look at gay people in "Missing: One Stage Struck Hippie" (1970). The medical model of homosexuality here is typical of Blochman's medical orientation, but it seems oddly old fashioned, and recalls the 19th Century, when writing about gay people was often done by medical experts. Neither tale shows any consciousness of gay people as an often discriminated against minority. But "Missing" does depict gay people as deeply integrated into the fabric of American society, and making a positive contribution to public life.
Blochman is on surer ground with his dark portrait of heterosexuals in "Dr. Coffee and the Pardell Case" (1972). The sinister central character gets a full life history at the start of the tale, emphasizing his sexual and professional misconduct. This is extended at the end of the tale, deepening the life history. The other characters in the tale are also involved with Pardell's life history, getting their own life stories. While some Blochman tales take characters "through a war", this one takes them through the life of class conflict experienced by Pardell, and his rise from poor kid to millionaire. This central transition from wealth and poverty has a before, during and after, just like a war, and we see how the characters' life situations change during these stages. Life histories are a technique used by Hugh Pentecost in his stories, although Pentecost does not usually center them around some transitional event such as a war or change in class status, the way Blochman does.
One of the best is "Dr. Coffee and the Whiz Kid" (1972). Blochman kept up with the times in his later work. This story has a "through the Vietnam War" perspective similar to the "through World War II" approach of Rather Cool For Mayhem. Blochman is interested in depicting not just a current event, but how the aftermath of the event will impinge on people's lives. It is a whole historical process that Blochman writes about. This tale also has the richest look at Max Ritter's family background in the Dr. Coffee saga. The tale also has a semi-satiric look at Ritter's relatives in academia. Blochman has captured the feel of 1970's American academia well, half pretentiousness, half genuine scholarship and learning. These are among the few academic people in all of Blochman; it is a side of modern life in which he had previously displayed little interest. The cab-driving academic in "Dr. Coffee and the Pardell Case" is also a vivid character, another attempt by Blochman to make a portrait of the hippie era.
Helen McCloy also has affinities with the Freeman-Crofts tradition. Her psychiatrist-detective Dr. Basil Willing is in the Dr. Thorndyke tradition. There is a great deal of science of all types in McCloy's tales. Dr. Willing is especially interested in human sensory perception, the mechanisms by which people see, hear and feel. These often play crucial roles in the stories. Although the designation of Willing as a psychiatrist might lead one to assume that Willing is a specialist in Freudian psychoanalysis, in actual fact he seems most interested in perception and thinking, what today we would call "cognitive psychology". There are also scientific backgrounds to many of the tales, such as the lab and truth serum in The Deadly Truth (1941), and the UFO investigation in "The Singing Diamonds" (1949).
Some of McCloy's best known works use approaches to mystery plot construction pioneered by earlier writers in the realist tradition. McCloy's Through a Glass, Darkly is in the tradition of realist writer Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Image in the Mirror". There is also an effort to focus on Croftsian timetables and alibis, in the early novel Cue For Murder.
A persistent theme of McCloy's work consists of characters who are alone in a private world, one limited and closed off by their perceptions, perceptions of reality that are different from other people's. Sometimes these "private" ways of perception emerge from the character's physical and mental states; in other stories the perceptions are imposed on them by other characters, often the villains of the story up to some nefarious plot. In some of her early stories, it is Dr. Willing who uses his expertise in cognitive psychology to explore and define the parameters of these private worlds. Later on, in a novel like The Sleepwalker (1974), these concerns are woven into the fabric of a suspense novel. I have to be a bit vague about the actual mechanisms and content of these private perceptual worlds; they usually form the basis of either the solution of McCloy's works, or major plot surprises that she throws out midway. An example, that can be mentioned here without spoiling anybody's fun, is the heroine of Through a Glass, Darkly, who keeps thinking that people are encountering her double.
McCloy's characters tend to have detailed life histories. These are often explored and probed over the course of a novel, with new aspects coming to light. An archetypal situation in McCloy is a vulnerable young woman, living in a building full of potentially menacing strangers. There is the poor cousin staying with her rich relatives in Dance of Death, the young traveler to New York staying in the sinister hotel in Do Not Disturb, the young art teacher Faustina Crayle in Through a Glass, Darkly staying at the forbidding girl's school, and the heroine of The Sleepwalker (1974) at her rooming house.
McCloy is a graceful, literate writer. There are descriptive passages of the rain and the ocean in The Deadly Truth, which are really beautiful. McCloy also has the "readability" of the best storytellers: you can read her books in a single sitting.
McCloy's early novel Cue For Murder (1942), for a long time was her most famous. It is nowhere as good, in my opinion, as her later works, those from "Through a Glass, Darkly" (1948) on. While most Golden Age writers did their best work before 1945, and declined thereafter, McCloy did exactly the opposite: except for her well crafted The Goblin Market (1943), her post World War II tales are generally better than those before 1945. The later McCloy works are really dazzling, and the reader should run, not walk, to get hold of copies of them.
The Goblin Market (1943) is one of several novels McCloy wrote with a spy background during World War II. Despite these elements of international intrigue, the book is constructed as a classic puzzle plot mystery. McCloy opens with a murder, and the rest of the novel shows her hero detecting the solution to the crime. Along the way, there are a whole series of subsidiary mysteries; the hero solves these one at a time, in a succession of chapters lasting throughout the book. In many of McCloy's novels, the biggest surprise is not at the finale, but comes half way through the book, usually in the form of a carefully planned plot revelation sprung on the reader. Here, however, there is a steady stream of ingenious twists and revelations throughout the entire story.
There is a tiny flaw in the logic of this otherwise ingenious mystery novel. McCloy does not close her circle of suspects. That is, later in the story McCloy shows that only one of the principal characters in the book could have committed the murder, and there are abundant, well planned clues demonstrating this. However, McCloy never establishes that no outsider could have committed the crime. It seems perfectly possible that some person we had never seen or heard of could have committed these crimes; there is no clue in the story indicating otherwise. Other than this small nit, the book shows an excellent sense of logic, with deduction used to reconstruct the crime, the circumstances leading up to the murder, and the killer.
There is only a little about cognitive psychology in this tale. Instead, this is one of several works McCloy wrote centering on codes and ciphers. In this novel, the "code" is cablese, the shorthand jargon newspaper correspondents use for sending journalistic cables to the home office. McCloy had been a newspaper correspondent herself, in Paris, so she was familiar with the profession from the inside. There is a whole Background in this book depicting the lives of foreign correspondents. It shows with a wealth of intriguing detail, most of which is used to develop ingenious mysteries in the puzzle plot.
"The Pleasant Assassin" (1970) is one of a series of late McCloy short stories that center around secret codes. These stories seem to begin with "Dead Man's Code" (1954). This piece is signed by McCloy's husband at the time, mystery writer Brett Halliday, and stars his series detective, private eye Mike Shayne. However, Halliday's 1955 introduction to the tale states that it was largely ghost written by McCloy while he was busy with a novel. These very short code stories - each is around 10 to 12 pages - are jammed with enough plot and background to furnish a whole novel. Their plotting tends to suffer from coincidence and improbability, but they can be fun to read, anyway. McCloy's novel Panic (1944) also contains a code, as does the story "Murder Ad Lib" (1964).
Chapter 8 of The Goblin Market, "Missing Answers", contains a clever self parody of psychiatry, and of McCloy's previous works with a psychiatrist-detective. It is good to see McCloy being able to poke fun of herself. It also might indicate a change in direction of her work: Willing would appear less frequently in McCloy's books from this point forward. The chapter also contains a reference, although not by name, to the "Trojan Horse" episode in McCloy's earlier Who's Calling? (1942). Warning: it gives away the only good plot twist in that dismal novel, probably McCloy's poorest.
Some elements in The Goblin Market (1943) anticipate McCloy's later novel, Through a Glass, Darkly. Both books explore the world of superstition, and use it as a background for some ingenious mystery plot twists. Both also use a 19th Century Victorian poem dealing with supernatural events to create atmosphere and add meaning to the tale. Both novels also look sympathetically at the world of demimondaines, with the feminist McCloy arguing that such women are often unjustly undervalued by society. However, there is little of the earlier book's political commentary in Glass. Instead, its place is taken structurally by much analysis of psychical research: to me a much less significant subject.
Do Not Disturb (1943) is a suspense tale set in New York City and environs. It is much less of a pure mystery than are McCloy's other early novels, and suffers for it; it seems to be the first of many novels of suspense that McCloy eventually wrote. The book has a spy background, like The Goblin Market (1943) and The One That Got Away (1945), and like both of those novels, it is full of political commentary and analysis. Here McCloy zeroes in first on police brutality, in her early chapters, then on right wing Fascist sympathizers in the US and their campaigns of hatred against racial minorities. As in The Goblin Market, there is more political commentary in the second half of the novel than in the first half; and in both stories, the solution has political significance as well.
In both Van Dine and Crofts school writers, the police are an over-arching source of social authority. They arrive and take charge of everything after a crime. All the different police units of a nation work together as a single large team. By contrast, the handling of the police is very different in McCloy. Each policeman tends to work as an individual agent. His work is largely hidden from the scrutiny of other police units, and he and his subordinates are a law unto themselves. Some of McCloy's policemen are sympathetic, and some are not, but they all tend to have their own personal agendas. Each policeman has his own character and personality, too. He is a functioning character in the tale, not an anonymous official. The police are so individualized that they seem more like suspects in the case, than detectives. The reader studies their motives, and often suspects them of actually committing the crime themselves.
McCloy tends to analyze and judge each policeman's agenda, by a set of criteria that includes whether the policeman's approach makes society more democratic or more dictator like. This is true whether the policeman is a New York City cop engaged in police brutality, or an officer in a third world dictatorship, like that of The Goblin Market.
The One That Got Away (1945) fails as a puzzle plot story. It does have some good descriptive writing about Scotland in it. It also has some very sophisticated writing about Fascism in it, which by 1945 was a subject of deep horror to the author. McCloy's take on Fascism is that it is rooted in woman hatred, and rejection of a mother's tender care of children. She cites the Hitler Youth as examples of how the Nazis wanted to replace the female headed home by public macho-oriented programs of child rearing. This political theme of the book is mirrored in the puzzle plot of the story, which is about a young man who keeps running away from home. In contrast to these Nazi ideas, McCloy includes two female headed households in her work: one run by a widowed Scots farm woman, the other a marriage of two writers where it is the wife who earns the big bucks, and is the financial support of the family. There is also much discussion of the Picts, an ancient Scottish ethnic group wherein descent and property passed matrilineally. I am not sure that this is a complete analysis of Fascism, but it is certainly an interesting set of ideas. McCloy's take on Fascism is oddly similar to Borges' in "Deutsches Requiem", wherein Borges sees the essence of Fascism in the celebration of brutality. McCloy completes Borges' analysis by showing how this brutality is going to be inculcated in children through the destruction of motherhood as an institution. Both McCloy and Borges are also deeply worried that although the Nazis have been defeated militarily, the ideas of Fascism will live on and be incorporated into Western Civilization. McCloy seems much more interested in current affairs than many of her mystery writing contemporaries, both here and in "The Singing Diamonds". However, the latter story succeeds brilliantly as a mystery tale, whereas One falls flat.
Much later McCloy would write a short look at the hippie era college scene, "The Pleasant Assassin" (1970), that is full of detailed observation. Read today, it seems like a time capsule of the period. Like all of McCloy's political writings, it contains disturbing undertones. Here a sinister behaviorist psychology professor is proposing a new society based on conditioning and drugs to control child rearing. Like the viscous Nazi apologist in The One That Got Away, he has surface respectability as he undermines the basic principles of Western society. As in the earlier novel, the story shows his devastating impact on impressionable young people.
The wife in The One That Got Away who writes popular fiction is a recurring kind of character in McCloy's books. Earlier, there was a somewhat similar although far less sympathetic woman author of lucrative but low brow popular novels in McCloy's Who's Calling? (1942). In that early book, McCloy seems to follow the standard literary party line, depicting popular fiction as worthless, formulaic pap. By the time of The One That Got Away (1945), McCloy is far more admiring of the skill it takes to write popular fiction. By Two-Thirds of a Ghost (1956), there is a spirited defense of mystery fiction, and a more skeptical look at standard "serious" literature. However, there is reason to believe that McCloy had positive feelings towards mystery fiction right from the start. The dust jacket of her first novel, The Dance of Death (1938), contains a quote from McCloy comparing the prejudices facing mystery fiction in the 1930's to those faced by the Novel itself in the 19th Century, and declaring her intention to write many more mysteries.
Elizabeth Sanxay Holding's World War II spy tales show the same tough minded analysis of Nazism as Helen McCloy's works. She roots Nazism in hatred of women ("The Kiskadee Bird") and racism ("The Blue Envelope", 1944). These stories appeared in slick magazines (Cosmopolitan and Colliers, respectively) that had large woman readerships. "The Kiskadee Bird" is especially powerful in its feminist concerns. Both authors also look at the mass disturbance of civilian life churned up by the Nazis. Holding later used the setting of "The Kiskadee Bird", the imaginary Caribbean island of Puerto Azul, for such EQMM stories as "People Do Fall Downstairs" (1947).
"The Unbelievable Baroness" (1945) is another spy story set on a Caribbean Island. It is a little lighter in tone and more escapist than "The Kiskadee Bird". It is a genuine mystery tale, and a good one. Instead of a single well defined event, such as murder that needs to be explained, the story focuses on a bewildering tangle of mysterious little events. None of these is as sinister as a murder, but they plunge the reader into a situation that is hard to understand or explain. Eventually, Holding comes up with logical explanations for everything. This approach of plunging the reader into a bewildering situation that reaches a satisfying explanation recalls Mary Roberts Rinehart. So do Holding's strong women characters.
Karl W. Detzer (1891-) was a prolific writer who seems largely forgotten today. Ellery Queen reprinted his "Murder in the Movies" (1937) in his anthology The Female of the Species (1943). This is a pleasant whodunit, set on a Hollywood sound stage. It perhaps has some affinities to the realist school: there is a detailed "background" of movie making, the detective uses her specialized technical training to solve the case, and the story focuses on alibis. According to the biography in David C. Cooke's Best Detective Stories of the Year -1949, Detzer had worked as both a scriptwriter and as an assistant director in Hollywood; the story is full of authentic looking detail about the movies. The story is not "fair play"; it does not cheat, but it does not give the reader all clues needed to solve the case. The reader just has to lie back and watch the detective solve the mystery - which she does very well. The republication of this tale in Queen's anthology seemed to trigger a mild boom in mystery stories located on Hollywood sets: see Ray Bradbury's excellent "Yesterday I Lived!" (1944), Dorothy Dunn's "It Had To Be-" (1944), and A. Boyd Correll's "Press Agent For Murder" (1945).
Detzer published a dozen stories in the pulps; all have very simple, low key titles. Most of his magazine pieces (over 500 according to Cooke!) apparently appeared in the slicks. His collection True Tales of the D.C.I. appeared in 1925. Cooke includes Detzer's "Calling all Cars!" (1948); this is a realistic police procedural story about a man hunt, with no mystery or puzzle plot; it is pretty mild and routine. One odd coincidence: a police character here is named Sgt. Dan Murphy, the same as Allan Vaughan Elston's series detective. Its most interesting feature is its inside look at the police's communication grid. In his youth Detzer worked as a reporter and a news photographer; in his later years he was a newspaper publisher; he was clearly a man interested in all media. I bet he would have loved today's multimedia computer networks. I also like its Michigan setting; I don't get to read many mysteries set in my home state. Detzer's "Bank Job" (1940) is a similar, mild but realistic tale of a manhunt conducted by the Michigan State Police. Detzer is good at describing teams of people, such as a movie crew or the police, each with their own special skill. There is a flow of information through the group; this flow is an engine that moves the plot along. People in his tales are always breaking up into small groups, then rejoining the large central crowd. Detzer tracks this regrouping geographically, as his characters move from point to point; this movement also contributes to his plots.
Detzer wrote other kinds of fiction, in addition to mystery stories. The title "character" of Detzer's non-mystery "The Water-Boy" is a fire fighting ship. This is a sort of "firefighter procedural", describing the ship's battle with a harbor fire. It contains Detzer's typical focus on a team of professionals.
Allan Vaughan Elston wrote quite a few mystery short stories, and one mystery novel.
Elston also wrote Western stories, some of which combine elements of crime and suspense. Elston wrote nearly 30 Western novels, from the 1940's to the 1960's. His Western short story "Triggers in Leash" shows his fondness for symmetry. This tale was dramatized on Alfred Hitchcock Presents on TV.
Allan Vaughan Elston's "Drawing Room B" (1930) was included by Carolyn Wells in her Best American Mystery Stories. It shows a startling symmetry in its plotting, with events ultimately finding their mirror images to each other. While not a puzzle plot in the strict sense, this sort of ingenious plotting is a hallmark of the Golden Age detective story. "Live Bait" builds up a similar kind of symmetry in its unusual plotting, as does "Eva? Caroline?" (1949). Elston was an engineer who wrote detective short stories on the side; his work is very hard to come by these days, although it used to be widely reprinted in 1940's anthologies. When "Eva? Caroline?" was reprinted in Ellery Queen's 1967 Anthology, EQ's introduction quotes Elston as saying he "plots stories from the logical, mathematical viewpoint of his ... professional ... background". The symmetry in several of Elston's tales does seem mathematical.
"Live Bait" and "Blackmail" also share plot imagery of people being pursued to the doors of their suburban homes. These two stories also share a similar plotting style, off trail, elegant variations on conventional detective formulae. One thing that is "off trail" about Elston's stories is that they tend not to follow the paradigm of murder, leading to investigation by a professional detective. Instead the protagonist tends to get involved with the crime in some unusual, unique way, then has to resolve the mystery. This detectival approach to solving the crime also tends to be something unusual dreamed up by Elston, which varies from story to story.
A minor but pleasant Elston tale is "The Bookshop Mystery"; its plot recalls Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop (1919).
The Dan Murphy tales are police detective stories that appeared in mainstream magazines around 1942. They include "The Unloaded Gun" and "The Blackout Murders". The Murphy tales are even more low key than the cop stories appearing in pulp magazines at the time. Their low key, evenly paced storytelling, their step by step investigation of a crime, with all facts and police theories continuously shared with the reader, and their emphasis on realism and plausibility, all point to an influence from Freeman Wills Crofts. So does the way in which the bad guy in "The Unloaded Gun" is identified fairly early on in, with the police spending the rest of the story trying to find ways of unraveling his plot and catching him.
Some of Elston's non-Murphy tales include settings that seem Croftsian: the use of trains in "Drawing Room B", the harbor and boat scenes in Murder by Mandate (1945).
In "The Unloaded Gun" Murphy is the viewpoint character; in "The Blackout Murders" he is not, the story being seen from the point of view of the main suspect; this switch is unusual in detective series, most of which establish a point of view, then stick with it consistently throughout.
A continuing "bad guy" in the Murphy series is the sensationalistic local newspaper editor, Clagle of the Daily Trumpet. A similar negative media presence haunts the non-Murphy tale "Live Bait"; this is apparently a persistent Elston theme. "Blackmail" also involves a newspaper of dubious ethics, the Clarion.
Murder by Mandate (1945) is Elston's only mystery novel. It was written with Maurice Beam, author of one other mystery novel, Murder in a Shell (1939), which Beam wrote in collaboration with Sumner Britton. Like Elston, Beam wrote short stories for the pulp magazines, nearly 40. The two men both published in Detective Fiction Weekly, among other pulp magazines, and one speculates that they met during their pulp days. Both men had stories in Detective Fiction Weekly for September 8, 1934, for example: Elston's "Three White Horses" and Beam's "Bird's Eye".
Murder by Mandate shows the Realist School's fondness for tropical settings during the W.W. II era. Unlike Lawrence Blochman and Helen McCloy, the book is set not in the Caribbean, but in an imaginary South Pacific island in French Polynesia. One can consider the island setting as a Background, but this is perhaps stretching it. Unlike Blochman, whose Blow Down (1939) offers a systematic look inside a banana plantation, Murder by Mandate does not attempt to offer a systematic depiction of any specific institutions of island life. Murder by Mandate does convey a vivid feel of island living however, and manages to look at a wide range of island denizens: planters, beach combers, harbor men, the police, government officials and the clergy.
Murder by Mandate is set very precisely in 1941, after France has been overrun by the Nazis, but before the United States has entered the war. Among other things, this allows the young American reporter hero to still be practicing his civilian profession. Had the book been set after America had entered the war, the hero would probably have been in uniform. Like many detective novels of the war era, the story combines pure mystery with current wartime events. These current events can seem more in the tradition of spy fiction, than of Golden Age mystery fiction. Right in the first chapter, the reader and the hero learn that some mysterious scheme is taking place on the island. This scheme might have something to do with current wartime events - or it might not. Throughout the rest of the book, more and more information is uncovered about the scheme. Figuring out the nature of the scheme is as much the subject of the puzzle plot as whodunit. Finally, at the end of the story, all details of both the scheme and who did the murder are fully disclosed. The authors stick to unearthing the truth about their dual mystery, the scheme and the murder. The book has the Golden Age focus on solving a mystery, even if the mystery has an unusual double nature. One recalls that some of Freeman Wills Crofts' books concentrate on elucidating mysterious enterprises, for example, The Box Office Murders (1929).
Murder by Mandate is a beautiful book. The island setting is evoked with lyrical grace. The authors include a great deal of realistic detail, that makes the setting vivid and believable at all times. The book has an effortless "you are there" quality, that suggests that at least one of the authors knew French Polynesia at first hand. Wherever the book goes, whether rowing out to an incoming ship in the harbor, to a island hotel, to driving along inland roads, it is full of specific detail. The detail is often very lyrical. The book treats Polynesia as a sort of paradise on Earth.
Murder by Mandate has a huge cast of characters. Around twenty people recur throughout the book. The entrances and exits of the characters are handled with gracefulness. It is like watching a beautifully executed dance.
"Mutiny on the Box Cross" (1940) is a Western novella by Elston. It is reprinted in the anthology A Western Bonanza (1969), edited by Todhunter Ballard. "Mutiny on the Box Cross" has elements of mystery. These involve not whodunit, but rather trying to figure out the mysterious details of a criminal scheme, taking place at the Box Cross ranch. This sort of mysterious scheme is right out of the Freeman Wills Crofts tradition. As in Crofts, the details of the scheme involve some technical issues. The novella is fair play: enough technical background about ranching, and enough clues, are provided so that the reader has a fair chance of figuring out the scheme.
The cowboy who serves as detective, Cimarron Steve Wilder, is an amateur, not a lawman. His motivation is to help a young cowboy friend in trouble, Benny Corbin. Corbin used to work for the hero, and the hero's fondness for him is why he is involved in the investigation. Corbin has a romance with a woman in the tale; the detective hero does not. Instead, the story emphasizes how physically attractive the hero thinks young Corbin is. It is hard to tell if the hero is helping a friend - or whether the hero should be seen as a gay character. In any case, the hero is highly likable.
The early chapters involve the hero impersonating Corbin, briefly. These sections have a bit of symmetry to them.
Also somewhat personal for Elston: the characters wind up under siege at their home, the Box Cross Ranch.
The first Charlie Chan novel of Earl Derr Biggers, The House Without a Key (1925), shows signs of the Realist school of detective fiction, especially Freeman Wills Crofts. It has a policeman as its detective hero. It has a well described Background of Hawaii. It also explores San Francisco in one section. The plot ultimately hinges on that Croftsian staple, the alibi, although there is no "breakdown of identity". And it follows realist tradition by sympathetically including a character of a minority race, the Chinese detective Charlie Chan. Chan is depicted in the book as a person of high intelligence, ability, and moral character, who is uniformly respected by everyone in the society around him. Biggers explicitly created his hero Chan as a reply to the racist Yellow Peril stories that were so popular in their era, with their Oriental villains scheming to take over the world. After years of cliched movie adaptations, Charlie Chan is now frequently considered a lamentable stereotype. I am certainly not defending some of the film versions of the character. But it seems inaccurate and unjust to judge the original books by later film versions. Biggers worked hard to shatter racist stereotypes and replace them by positive images of Chinese people. He deserves credit for this, not blame. Chan personally has to battle racial prejudice against Chinese in some of Biggers' books; a memorable example is found in Chapter 21 of The Chinese Parrot (1926).
Biggers commitment to the Realist approach varies from novel to novel. It is strongest in The House Without a Key, more moderate in Behind That Curtain, and Keeper of the Keys, and weakest in The Chinese Parrot. Behind That Curtain opens with an explicit disavowal of the uses of science in detection, so if Biggers was influenced by Crofts, he had no interest in the scientific approach of R. Austin Freeman. The same opening discussion in Curtain also suggests that detective fiction bears little resemblance to real life police work; Biggers takes the Croftsian position that real life detection is largely dependent on a mixture of hard work and luck. This sort of self referential discussion of The Detective Story within a detective story has a long tradition in mystery fiction. The Chinese Parrot also contains several witty allusions to detective story conventions.
Howard Haycraft justly complained about the "mechanical" nature of Biggers' plot construction. The House Without a Key contains numerous subplots, rather arbitrarily sewn together. The best parts of the book are not the mystery plot or investigation, but the events leading up to the murder (Chapters 1 - 7). Similarly, the best parts of The Chinese Parrot are the first three chapters. In both novels, these opening sections contain the most important parts of the Background, and well done elements of intrigue and adventure.
The murder victim in Behind That Curtain (1928) leaves behind a non-verbal, symbolic clue that serves as a Dying Message. This convention would soon be used by Ellery Queen in numerous stories. I have no idea whether Biggers was the first mystery writer to use this device.
The Strange Disappearance of Mary Young (1928-1929) is Milton M. Propper's debut mystery novel. It has a vivid opening, describing the finding of an unidentified body at a Philadelphia amusement park, and the police work to identify the corpse (Chapters 1 - 4). After this, the book turns into a mass of unconnected subplots, and is much less interesting. On the whole, this is not as good a Propper's best novels to come. The book has some strengths: it creates Propper's series sleuth, young Tommy Rankin of the Homicide Squad - who is seen at his best in those same four opening chapters. And the book comes up with a surprising killer. Other than the choice of murderer, there is not much of a real puzzle plot in the book, just a lot of routine investigation of what usually turn out to be red herrings.
Milton M. Propper's The Student Fraternity Murders (1932) was published the year before the rash of British University set mysteries, by Dermot Morrah and others. Unlike the British books, which concentrate on the faculty and administrators of various colleges, Propper's book deals with student life. It especially deals with what might be called the business aspect of student life: enrolling in school, paying bills for tuition, dormitories and expenses, joining a fraternity, living in a dorm, transferring from one school to another. These sorts of "business aspects of being a student" form a full Background, in the Croftsian sense. These details are carefully integrated with the mystery plot; in fact much of the detection consists of tracking down such information. They make surprisingly lively reading. Students of the 1930's seem to have paid more money and been richer than the students of the 1970's, when I went to school. They also seem to have been treated with much more personal respect than the students of today. We also go inside a University Chemistry lab, discussing the poisons in the case; this gives the novel a slight scientific flavor of the Realist school. Propper dedicated the book to both his past and his current fraternities. As he was 26 at the time, he presumably was either returning to college, or active as an adult in a frat. According to Francis M. Nevins' article on Propper in 1001 Midnights, Propper had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's law school three years earlier. This is the same University at which the novel is set. Like the work of other Croftsians, the Background of the book stems from Propper's own experiences. The details in the book have the feel of authenticity.
As a mystery, Propper's novel suffers from coincidence. It is full of disconnected subplots, each one centering about a character who is doing something suspicious. By chance, their actions just happen to be identical to that of the real murderer, thus causing Rankin to suspect them. For example, one student steals the same obscure poison used in the crime. He's not the criminal; its all just a coincidence. This makes for an unfairly plotted book. Earl Derr Biggers, another American Croftsian, also wrote mysteries that suffered from an excess of subplots. We do see everything that Propper's detective Rankin sees throughout the novel, and share his thoughts as the case progresses. This is typical of both Crofts, and such Crofts influenced writers as Dorothy L. Sayers.
The aspect of fraternity life that most intrigues Propper is the initiation. His first chapter describes one in great detail. Such an initiation represents acceptance into both society, and a circle of men, something Propper probably wanted more than anything else. His hero is poisoned just before he is admitted into the fraternity. It is Propper's situation too: he can never be quite accepted into society, no matter how close he comes. This is genuinely tragic. As an allegory of the plight of gay life, it is hard to surpass.
We also learn that Propper's series detective, policeman Tommy Rankin, was too poor to go to college himself, entering the police force after high school. This too has considerable pathos. The murder victim was an orphan, and none of the young men in the book has any visible support from a family. They all seem painfully on their own. Propper keeps stressing the need for confidentiality when dealing with their problems. There are a series of older, lower class women who seem to look after the students: the char woman at the dormitory, the farm wife who lets the victim make a telephone call. These sympathetic older ladies are the only sort of support any of the characters seem to receive.
The initiation is elaborately color coded, with different shades on the monk's robes worn by the participants. It is a full religious ritual, and probably seen by Propper as a genuinely sacred event. This is the only color in the novel, except for automobiles, which are also a subject of fascination to him, and a white ledge. Color is used by Propper as a way of underlining what is important to him. Daily life is seen in the book as colorless, or in black and white. While events that deeply appeal to Propper appear in full, bright primary color.
The frat brothers are mainly described sympathetically. Most are very good looking. Many of them seem to be in trouble. They all have a hard time maintaining the standards of decency to which society subjects them. Their plight also echoes the status of gay men of Propper's day. These are young men who can barely fit themselves into society's constraints, and Propper derives great pathos from this situation. The murder victim's personal life comes under double scrutiny. First, he suffers under a will, telling him he will not be able to inherit if his guardian finds any flaws in his character. His guardian interprets that to mean any sexual activity on his part. Secondly, after his death, the detective scrutinizes every aspect of his life, including his friends, his papers and possessions. The detective is increasingly dismayed that he cannot find any interest in women in the student's record. Such a minute spotlight put on a person seems almost totalitarian. Propper might well have undergone such a scrutiny in his own life, as a gay man.
One might note hazing has little interest for Propper. It is sometimes described in retrospect, and always with emphasis on how much fun it is for the already accepted brothers doing the hazing. But it is never described in detail, or made the subject of a flashback scene. Instead, the other aspect of fraternity life that most intrigues Propper is the ability to take women to one's room in the upper part of the fraternity, and make out. It is an image of sexual maturity and freedom. But just like the initiation itself, it is constantly being interrupted before it can be brought to a successful conclusion. Characters in general suffer from a lack of privacy. Nearly every wall in the book can be heard through, making one wonder about building practices in Philadelphia of the era.
Propper's One Murdered, Two Dead (1936) is a much weaker book. It lacks the readability of The Student Fraternity Murders.
The Great Insurance Murders (1937) is in the tradition of Propper's earlier The Student Fraternity Murders. Both books take place at concrete Philadelphia institutions. Both have a great deal of financial information in them. Both open with a murder during an elaborate public ceremony involving men: the initiation in Fraternity, a polo match in Insurance. Both groups of participants are in brightly color coded costumes: here the two teams of polo players are in blue or yellow. Even the colors recall the previous book. The elaborate movement of the players around the field recalls that of the pledges in the earlier tale. In both novels, there is a "box within a box" effect: the initiation takes place within a fraternity house, the polo match within a country club's grounds.
The heroine of Insurance seems like a ninny by today's standards. She is just idiotically trustful of her guardian's money management, despite all the intelligent protests of her fiancé. Perhaps upper crust people stuck together like this in the 1930's, no matter what.
The middle aged woman housekeeper in this book is very sympathetic. Propper clearly liked such women. They have a kindness and concern for others lacking in his exploitative upper class males. Propper keeps up his sympathy for outsiders to institutions. Here the young architect has neither the time or money to be part of the country club set; he is too busy working and building a career. Such outsiders were probably identified with by Propper. The architect is described in terms that parallel him with Propper's police detective Tommy Rankin. Rankin too is depicted as hard working and interested in building his career. We also learn about Rankin's ideal vacation here: going hiking in the mountains of Northern Pennsylvania. Such walking tours were very popular with British Realist school writers of the era, such as the Coles. We also learn that Rankin likes to eat exotic, ethnic food. Rankin seems to coming alive more as a character here than in some of the books.
If The Student Fraternity Murders looked at the problems of undergraduate life, The Great Insurance Murders examines the anxieties of grown up workers, such as the young architect and the factory worker. The people here seem as insecure and vulnerable here as Propper's younger characters. Propper is sympathetic to both middle class and working class people. Both seem to be frequently victimized by upper class crooks. These crooks operate with the full protection of the police and courts, in their exploitation of the less powerful. There is certainly a social message here, in the depths of the Depression. There is also a feeling of deep lack of confidence, the suggestion that society is against one, and that flourishing is difficult. Another key piece of social commentary: Propper includes a sympathetic Jewish character, a New York City police inspector who is Rankin's contact for Philadelphia-New York police cooperation (Chapter 15). It is good to see Propper is not a hater. Such a character was a rebuke to Hitler's ideology, then on the rise. Inspector Goldman is a continuing character in Propper's books, appearing before in The Election Booth Murders, as Propper points out in a footnote in the S. S. Van Dine manner.
I read The Great Insurance Murders in a 1943 Prize Mystery Novels paperback. I have no idea if it was abridged, but the story seems to move at a much faster pace than other Propper novels. The ending of this version leaves several threads dangling: it could use some further exposition. The terrific cover shows Death playing polo. Appropriately, he is depicted as riding a pale horse.
The Great Insurance Murders does not have a Background. It does have other features of the Crofts school: an interest in alibis and modes of transportation, such as trolleys and automobiles; an inner look at police investigation, "routine" and yet far from dull; and a look at physical trails of evidence left at crime scenes. Propper also likes detailed searches, a feature reminiscent not of Crofts, but of Ellery Queen.
The Great Insurance Murders has many subplots, in the Propper manner. However, the subplots all hang together better here. The book does not pile up coincidence as excessively as The Student Fraternity Murders. Each subplot seems to be a fairly complete mini-mystery in itself. Most of the subplots have a crime, a police investigation, interesting detective work, and some ingenious revelation. The whole book seems almost like a story sequence, or anthology of linked tales.
The third murder contains a dying message. This message is well handled, but very differently from those in Ellery Queen or other intuitionist writers. EQ tries to interpret dying messages with a flash of intellectual insight. Propper instead uses systematic police work to try to find the meaning of the message. There is no clever plot twist here, but there is an absorbing look at the exhaustive effort to interpret the message. Such an approach is consistent with Propper's heritage of the Crofts school, and its emphasis on police investigation.
Knight's "The Affair at the Circle T" (1946) has the sort of detailed Background common in his fiction, in this case, of a Nevada dude ranch. Most of his books' backgrounds are locations out West, or in the Pacific. The solution to the mystery, discovered by his series detective Professor Huntoon Rogers, turns on science. There is also a routine investigation of alibis in the tale. All in all, it shows signs of the Realist tradition.
Huntoon Rogers first appeared in The Affair of the Scarlet Crab (1937), a book set against a Background of a scientific expedition to the Galapagos Islands. Many of the characters in the book are University professors; University settings are frequent among Realist school writers. So are boats and shipping. Puzzle plot elements are skimpy in this not very inspired mystery. The best ideas involve the second murder, and follow Realist school traditions of alibis and the "breakdown of identity". The storytelling is also grim and depressing, and the book is not recommended.
This book does not seem like a pure example of the Realist school. It also shows signs of the Van Dine tradition. Rogers is a genius amateur detective; he is an English professor, not a scientist. And the characters seem like the sort of intelligentsia that often show up in Van Dine school books, although they are scientists, not the arts oriented scholars of Van Dine novels.
The Affair of the Scarlet Crab seems oddly anticipatory of Michelangelo Antonioni's film L'Avventura (1959 - 1960). This is discussed in the article on Antonioni.
After World War II, Knight abandoned Rogers to write about non-series detectives. Knight's Death of a Big Shot (1951) shows several similarities with Erle Stanley Gardner. The hero is a Rogue, who uses his skills to help an innocent working woman caught in a jam, like many Gardner heroes. The setting, a Southern California fruit ranch, recalls the agricultural communities of Gardner's Doug Selby books. Some of Knight's imagery also relates to the film noirs that were popular in his time. Hit men often showed up in films; Charles McGraw played them in Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946) and Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947). Highway Patrol barricades, and searches for fugitives show up in both the prose of Karl W. Dexter, and in such films as Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy (1949). One might also note that the opening chapters of Death of a Big Shot constitute a prototypical Road tale, several years before Beat writers made being On the Road (1957) fashionable in mainstream literature.
This does not mean that Knight's book is derivative. In fact, its opening chapters (1 - 5) are strikingly original. These sections are more thriller than mystery; they also contain a delicate love story, and lots of entertainment value. They are only marginally related to the mystery plot that follows, although Knight does return to their plot briefly with some interesting material at the end of Chapter 15. The later mystery sections of the novel disappoint. They also change the position of the hero in unpleasant ways. In the early sections, he is a powerful, clever rogue who does a lot to help the heroine. He, and the author, are also ingenious about both his hit man work, and his ways of aiding the heroine. In the later book, the world starts closing in on him, a much less fun thing to read about. One wishes Knight had stuck to his guns, and written a whole book about the protagonist in his opening pages.
The Other Body in Grant's Tomb (1951) is the third of three novels featuring Starnes' medical detective, Dr. St. George Peachy, and his Watson and narrator, news reporter Barney Forge. The book is a curious hybrid of the R. Austin Freeman tradition of medical detection, and the hard-boiled novel. The book has an elaborate, well crafted puzzle plot, whose solution shows formal features out of the Freeman tradition. The dock-side setting of the tale reminds one of the realist school's fondness for the sea and harbors, and shows an in-depth knowledge of such areas worthy of Freeman or Crofts.
The book also has some hard-boiled features, then at the peak of their popularity in American crime fiction. Starnes use of the hard-boiled tradition is selective, employing some of its characteristics, ignoring others. It takes place in the world of urban corruption familiar from Raymond Chandler. Starnes' dialogue and narration also employ the wisecracks and startling similes made de rigeur in hard-boiled fiction by Chandler. Starnes has a gift for creating well turned phrases, ones which cleverly sum up a situation. The book does not feature the relentless action familiar in many hard-boiled novels, however. There is a brief final shoot em up, and a few scenes of fighting, but most of the book stresses sleuthing, not violence. Nor are there any mobsters or gang figures, or private eyes. The newspaper hero of the story has no romances, and he and the doctor are brain workers, not figures of violence, and neither is especially tough. None of these men are alienated or loners; all are well integrated into the institutions of American society. They are all vastly more normal that the suspects they meet.
Starnes' book takes place at a seedy waterfront bar, and adjacent areas, such as a dockside mission. This setting can be considered as a Background showing life among the down and out, although it seems a little less concrete than many realist school Backgrounds, which often deal with a single institution. The bar is regularly visited not just by the poor, but by intellectuals and college students looking to experience the seedy side of life. The intellectuals are chess playing figures who sit around and discuss philosophy, and who look down there noses at "square" guys like the hero who wear suits and ties, and who are part of mainstream American life. We seem to be seeing a very early look at the Beat movement here, although this term is never used by Starnes. Starnes' narrator-hero Barney Forge is definitely not part of this crowd, and these intellectuals are only seen from outside: none ever becomes a major character in the book, although perhaps the piano player can be considered one of them. This was years before the Beats became at all known to mass America and the mass media. Starnes novel forms a drastic contrast with 1940's depictions of tough neighborhoods, such as the Skid Row shown in William Keighley's film, The Street With No Name (1948). The tough guy urban area in that film is the home of the poor, the tough, and the macho. There is nary an intellectual in sight. By contrast, most of the denizens of Starnes' waterfront district are there because they are alcoholics. Many of them have attitude problems and are severely maladjusted. Both the alcoholics and the intellectuals are people who are in revolt against the norms of mainstream American life. This gives Starnes' portrait an entirely different feel. It is one of the earliest depictions in American fiction of an alienated underworld of the disaffected. Starnes differs from the Beats in that he is not advocating such disaffection. His sympathies instead seem to lie with Forge, Dr. Peachy, and the other mainstream characters. Still, his book is both a satirical and a poetic and moody evocation of the world of the lost.
Starnes shows influences from other mystery traditions. Dr. Peachy has comic characteristics that recall John Dickson Carr's sleuth Sir Henry Merrivale, and Starnes flirts with locked room ideas in this novel.
The first two Dr. Peachy novels are much less interesting. Both And When She Was Bas She Was Murdered (1950) and Another Mug for the Bier (1950) have Washington DC settings, mixing politics with Washington society and high life. The general tone of both works is unpleasant, mixing snobbery, dubious social attitudes and what passed in 1950 for spiciness. The puzzle plots are nothing much, either, although they are complex in the tradition of the day.
Child's stories of Inspector Chafik J. Chafik of Baghdad's Criminal Investigation Department ran in Collier's from 1947 through 1956, simultaneously with Blochman's Dr. Coffee tales. And like Blochman's series, Ellery Queen had the authors continue their work in EQMM in the sixties, after they had lost their slick magzine markets. The Chafik tales have a detailed Background of the Iraq of their era. They focus on the realistic police work of the Inspector. "The Inspector Had a Habit" (1949) was flagged by Collier's editors as the best of the series, and was reprinted in David C. Cooke's Best Detective Stories of the Year -1950. Child was born in Britain, but was a US resident when these tales were published in an American magazine; he is included here as he has more in common with the later American realists than with the 1920's British realists such as the Coles.
The Chafik stories I have read emphasize adventure as much as mystery. Their general lack of rigorous, fair play puzzle plotting is frustrating to readers like me.
H.T. Alfon's "Fourth Rule for Murderers" (1948) is a police procedural set in Manila. It has a logical and well constructed plot; it also has a very vivid background of life and crime in the Philippines. Very little is known about its author, except that he or she was resident in the Philippines at the time of writing.
Hughes Allison's "Corollary" (1948) is an early entry into the police procedural tale that was so popular in post World War II America. These stories tried to present a realistic look at crime and police work. Allison's tale is much more intelligent than many of the cycle. Unlike many of its successors of the 1950's, it does not center on theories that today seem dubious. It does not push theories about the causes of crime, or that 1950's obsession, juvenile delinquency. Instead it just accepts that crime is, and shows the police trying to fight it. Not does it promote theories about how crime can be beat if ordinary citizens would just stand up to the mob. Also people in the story are characterized, not psychoanalyzed, a welcome relief from the realistic crime literature to come. Both Allison and his lead detective character are black, and there is a great deal of pithy detail about both black life of the era, and the troubled state of race relations in the period. The story is a ground breaking work of sociological realism in the mystery story.
The title "Corollary" is about how investigation of one crime can lead to clues about another. Such an interest in the theory and practice of detection is part of the Croftsian school.
A.Z.H. Carr's "The Trial of John Nobody" (1950) is oddly modern in its look at religion, tolerance, public values, and the media. It is one of few mysteries of its era to have much to say about religion, along with Borges' "Death and the Compass" (1944) and Ellery Queen's And on the Eight Day (1964). The storytelling is excellent. The story is in the 1950's tradition of civics lessons, debates about the proper organization of society. Carr's tales like to look at the public, civic institutions of whole small towns, for example, or Washington D.C., or an entire island. Carr was in public life himself, serving as an advisor to President Truman.
"Tyger! Tyger!" (1952) is a genuine detective story, solved by a high brow poet who spends a lot of time thinking about mysticism, the problems of evil, human nature, and The Bomb. We also see samples of his William Blake style poetry throughout the story; they are not bad, and make the poet a reasonably believable figure. Carr is also more competent than most writers in showing the poet's compositional processes. The poet is given an admiring poetry loving policeman Watson on the homicide squad. The friendship between the two men reminds one a little of that between Dr. Coffee and policeman Max Ritter. The mystery story plot is closely integrated with a Background of a Russian restaurant. Of Carr's other fiction, "Murder at City Hall" (1951) falls flat on its face. It is much less meaningful than "Trial", and with far less interesting characters or events.
The minister's investigative methods in "Nobody" are perhaps closest to Croftsian investigation, rather than intuitionist, Christie puzzle plotting. The minister observes clues, gradually puts together a profile of the man he is looking for, then uses Crofts style legwork to identify a locality for his suspect. It is very much classical detection in the Crofts mode. Similarly, the drug distribution network of "Tyger! Tyger!" recalls on a small scale such elaborate Croftsian (non-drug) networks as found in The Pit-Prop Syndicate and The Box Office Murders. Other realist school features include the rain making scientists in "Murder at City Hall" (1951), and the skeptical doctor in "Nobody". Still science plays a much smaller role in Carr's tales than in Freeman and such Freeman influenced writers as Blochman and McCloy. There are also some alibi features in "City Hall".
The light hearted "A Case of Catnapping" (1954) is pretty minor as a detective story, but it has good background detail, and is fun to read. It does show Carr's technique of developing a solution in layers. Carr's works involve the step by step unveiling of the truth. We see what his detective sees, and often times, through long sections of the story, we know what the detective knows. This is a Croftsian approach. However, Carr goes beyond this in his plot construction. His solutions come in layers, like a piece of puff pastry. First one layer is revealed, then another, and so on till all of the ideas making up the solution are exposed. This can be a very complex process, involving many different kinds of ideas. There are often lots of guilty parties taking part in the crime. They are all collaborating together, and know about each other's works, but they are doing different kinds of things. The revelation of each villain in turn, is also linked to the disclosure of what kind of criminal activity they have been up to. This allows the progressive peeling away of the solution that Carr favors.
The 1950's were a period when mystery writers were obsessed with civics lessons in their stories, giving their analysis of the problems and opportunities of American democracy. Such problems seemed overwhelmingly vital in the age of the just-defeated Hitler and the still active Stalin. In retrospect, the analyses of such Realist School writers as Blochman, McCloy, Allison, Childs and Carr seem much more intellectually sophisticated than those of their crime novel contemporaries. The writers of straightforward, non puzzle plot police fiction of the era seem narrowly focused on Crime, whether committed by juvenile delinquents or mobsters. Much of their analysis of the situation is full of low brow bromides on juvenile delinquents reforming, ordinary people standing up to the mob, etc. The crime novelists were focused on Crime, whereas the realist school was interested in Society.
Harry Miner's "Due Process" (1954) contains features reminiscent of both Crofts and Freeman. Like Crofts, there is a Background, in this case a beautifully realized portrait of rural Northern Wisconsin in winter. It has a policeman hero, as well. Like Freeman, it looks at the problem of the disposal of the body. There is also some basic science used in the detection. Like both writers, there is the examination of trails of evidence: here done with some pleasantly new ideas.
Miner's tale also falls into the "civics lesson" tradition that was popular in early 1950's American mystery stories, not just those of the Realist school. There is an election, politics, and a low key look at that early 50's favorite, mob justice versus the rule of law. See the article on Charlotte Armstrong for a discussion of this. Miner's tale also falls into some categories of mainstream literature. Rural fiction was still a big deal in the 1930's, when magazines like The Saturday Evening Post paid big bucks to writers like William Faulkner and MacKinlay Kantor to write short stories filled with local color. My impression is that by 1954 such rural portraits were considered less significant in American Literature, and that Miner's tale is a bit out of its time. Another tradition that Miner's work evokes is that of the tale about snow. Many writers, not only fiction authors, but also poets, have been fascinated by snow, and written about it vividly. Miner makes a contribution to this tradition.
To Market, To Market (1961) is the only mystery novel published by "Allen Richards" (pseudonym of Richard Rosenthal). It is set in 1959, so it might have taken a little time to get published. It deals with back stage intrigue among buyers for a large New York City department store. The first five chapters offer an entertaining look at both honest and crooked department store business practices of the era, as well as a satire on business culture of the time.
Mystery novels have traditionally been full of time tables, floor plans and other multimedia. This story actually includes business spreadsheets, an unusual multimedia feature. This was long before computerized spreadsheet software, too.
To Market, To Market does not fall easily into any category of the mystery novel. Its complete lack of hard-boiled features, and its setting among reasonably prosperous New Yorkers make it remote from most of the tough guy school. Its detailed, expert Background of department store business life, and the carefully worked out Criminal Scheme of the bad guys show distant echoes of the novels of Freeman Wills Crofts. The book also shows the general surface realism that was de rigeur in American mystery fiction after 1945. It sticks closely to actions and characters that would be plausible among real life New York City business people of the time.
Richard Rosenthal has recently published a satirical novel, The Dandelion War, under his real name. The book is a comic but serious look at seniors fighting back against bureaucracy.
Surprisingly I received e-mail from "Allen Richards" (Richard Rosenthal) in 2005, about his novel and more:
"What a pleasure to come on your review of To Market, To Market which I wrote nearly 50 years ago, under the pseudonym Allen Richards.
I especially enjoyed your noting my use of a spreadsheet as a vital clue in tracking down the killer. The book had good reviews by Anthony Boucher and Saturday Review, but this aspect wasn't noted. It reflected what I was trying to do which was to have a detective story in the midst of one's day-to-day working slob existence rather than in a British castle or urban cop/criminal underworld. I wrote while it I was working full time as a costume jewelry buyer for Abraham & Straus. It took a year and a half, I rarely slept more than 3 hours a night, and never felt better.
I did one other book, a self help work for people with hearing loss, which came out of my own experiences, a hearing loss from World War II. The Hearing Loss Handbook, St. Martins Press, 1976. And for 4 years I was a business and feature writer for Women's Wear Daily, but otherwise did not write much more than letters to the editor. That is until recently. From 1993 to 2003 I was employed as disabilities advocate for the Town of East Hampton NY.
After nearly 3 years at it am just about finished with a new satirical, suspense novel. I have written it purposely not thinking of a publisher. With To Market, To Market, I simply took it around the corner from where I was living in New York City and dropped it on the desk of the Macmillan mystery editor, confident it would be read. Six weeks later she called me with an offer. No agent. No précis.
After writing To Market, I learned that Lawrence Blochman was a second cousin of mine. I have actiually read little of him, but did meet him occasionally between 1965 and his death. A lovely man who would serve wonderful wine at dinner as he expanded on poisons that could be in the food and drink and put us away without the FBI, Hercules Poirot or Sherlock Holmes ever figuring it out.
My favorite writers are Updike and Chandler and if anyone influenced me it would be Chandler, if only in the sense that he made me want to write. I think there were 2 aspects to this that I was unaware of at the time -- that simply looking about you at the urban scene or any scene can be wonderful, that excitement and fascination are implicit in a mundane existence. I saw this first through Chandler. And how marvelously Updike shows it through Rabbit.
The second aspect re Chandler was my identification with Marlowe. Looking back I realize it was much more than good guy bad guy stuff. He was lonely & alienated in a big city. He played chess with himself. He rarely got laid -- remember this was the forties -- and could not be casual about sex, or anything else for that matter. Yet he never succumbed to his cynicism, which was as it turned out sharp and often hilarious.
He knew he wasn't the smartest man around, (the reader would always know he was going to be beaten up before he did) but instead of acquiescing to his dumb slob niche, he focused and triumphed and then told his cynical user-client to take their 5 C's and shove it. At the end there was always his integrity. Chandler made this stuff, perhaps clichés of their depression W.W.II time, rich and believable.
I also admire Graham Greene. I think he was 80 when he finished his last work, and though I forget the title, it was wonderful. And I've loved Anne Tyler's way of having taken-for-granted- housewives take off in the middle of their lives and start anew."
The pulp magazines were full of little inverted stories. These tales were different from the classic inverteds of Freeman, in that there is less emphasis on the detective at the end. Instead, there is usually a single clue which gives the murderer away. It becomes obvious at the end of the story, and upends the murderer's scheme. The entire tale is told from the point of view of the murderer, including the final arrest. The delightful anthology 100 Dastardly Little Detective Stories, edited by Robert E. Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg is full of such pieces, and I have listed some fine ones from that book above. (The article on Police Fiction also lists some gems from this collection.) These inverteds were usually by authors who were prolific contributors to the pulps, but whose work now languishes in total obscurity. It is therefore difficult to determine if these writers were specialists in the pulps' version of the inverted tale, or only occasional contributors to the genre. Pulp historians have been far more interested in series detective stories, and have completely ignored these little tales without continuing characters. They are as neglected as the anonymous motets of the Renaissance. It is also unclear if these authors were aware of their ties to R. Austin Freeman. A surprising number had clues that related to science or medicine. Perhaps this is a sign of a Freeman background; perhaps science is just a fertile field for murder clues. This genre continues today in mystery magazines; however, these pulp examples, recently reprinted, tend to have cleverer plots, and more ingenious final clues. (Although there are some good post pulp inverted detective stories; see "Sound Alibi" (1957) by Jack Ritchie, for example.) The pulp suspense writer Cornell Woolrich also wrote several inverted stories, often using experimental variations on the form. Short inverted tales were also popular in the slick magazines of the 1930's: see Samuel Hopkins Adams' "The Unreckonable Factor" (1938), for example. Isaac Asimov included several Freeman-like inverted detective stories, such as "The Singing Bell" (1954), in his collection Asimov's Mysteries. The title of this tale, and its successor "The Talking Stone" (1955), are clearly in homage to Freeman's classic collection of inverted tales, The Singing Bone (1912). And of course, as has often been pointed out, Freeman's inverted story pattern, in which we see the killer commit the crime first, and the detective track him down afterwards, forms the basic framework for the TV detective series Columbo.
Robert E. Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg are also the editors of two enormous anthologies of tales reprinted from the pulps, Hard-Boiled Detectives (1992), which reprints stories from the pulp magazine Dime Detective, and Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames (1993). Many stories from these collections are discussed in the articles on Pulp Adventure and Weird Menace fiction. The tales in these omnibuses are of surprisingly high quality; many combine well made puzzle plots with adventure elements. Mystery fans are greatly in these editors' debt, for their excavating so many lost gems of detective fiction.
Kummer's "Eight Bells" (1935) is an American Magazine novella. After the murder, the hero gradually uncovers the true story of the events of the night surrounding it. The uncovering is done in step by step fashion, gradually revealing another layer of events. Each step in the process is logically supported by clues and evidence. The story is not "fair play": the clues are not all shared ahead of time with the reader, so the reader can draw their own deductions. Still the whole uncovering of the truth is a pleasant process to read about. It has some structural relationship to the inverted tale, in which physical pieces of evidence also lead to the step by step uncovering of the truth. "Eight Bells" also has a pleasant background, dealing with the still timely subject of political chicanery in Washington D. C. The story's setting aboard of a luxury passenger cruiser recalls Roland Phillips' "Clews in the Wind" (1930). Kummer later expanded the story to the novel Death at Eight Bells (1937).
By contrast, The Scarecrow Murders (1936-1938) is mainly unpleasant, with unappetizing depictions of sexual harassment, and a general look at people at their worst. The subplot about the traveling salesman Hart has some modest merit, but the main mystery plot is not much. The scarecrow imagery of the title recalls Ellery Queen's The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932), and aspects of the novel also recall Mary Roberts Rinehart's The After House (1914) a bit. The detective, a wise elderly Judge in the Southern (Maryland) setting, is a bit in the tradition of Irwin S. Cobb and William Faulkner, although less colorful. The whole novel has a nightmarish quality, that makes for an unenjoyable reading experience. It certainly paints an negative picture of Depression era America, with spoiled rotten rich people who exploit everyone else, nasty local yokels in the sticks, a racist police chief, rampant sexual exploitation, and religious fanaticism.
The main long piece I have read by C. William Harrison is "Wish You Were Dead" (1945), from David C. Cooke's Best Detective Stories of the Year (1946). This story is not inverted; instead its plot is an imitation of the Cornell Woolrich mystery series that began with the excellent "You'll Never See Me Again" (1939). (It's in the Woolrich collection, Nightwebs.) Harrison's tale is notable for the way that strange evidence keeps turning up, indicating the hero's guilt, even though he is innocent. This evidence is so detailed, and so unlikely given what we know as facts, that the story is borderline-impossible crime. The evidence, and the way it shows up, has both a surreal and a paranoiac quality. The evidence almost seems to indicate a parallel world, a non material place where clues and evidence exist in Platonic archetypal form. It forms an alternative reality, a world which keeps shadowing our own, and forming a strange, idea oriented imitation of it.
There is a fair amount of interesting material on the technical aspects of photography in Harrison's story, and this is rather Freeman like. Harrison was a prolific pulp writer of the later 1940's. There are some common images between this tale and his inverted story "Calling Doctor Death" (1949): an emphasis on trails of the victim's blood; a use of bromides as sleeping pills; cameras; seeing menacing looks in people's eyes as they lay secret plots against people; unpleasant policemen who seek to entrap suspects; a sense of corruption among high livers and the socially prominent; killing off blackmailers; a sense that the night is devoted to menace, and the day to reason and thinking. While Harrison goes through the motions of Woolrichian suspense, there is never any actual sensation of horror or suspense built up in his work. Instead the actual tone of his work is calmly logical, even dry. He quietly marches through the plots of his tales, which are constructed logically and straightforwardly.
Robert Arthur's "Eye Witness" (1939) is a story somewhat in the tradition of the inverted tale. However, even though it appeared in the pulp Detective Fiction Weekly, it shows some differences in construction from typical pulp magazine inverted stories. R. Austin Freeman's original inverteds show first the crook committing the crime, then the detective tracking him down. Most pulp inverteds show only the criminal committing the crime, with a single flaw in his scheme tripping him up in the end. Many comic book inverteds also show this same pulp structure. By contrast, "Eye Witness" is narrated entirely from the point of view of the detectives. It begins with one detective synopsizing to another, the story of how the villain probably committed the murder. Then the rest of the story is their detective work, building up evidence against the criminal. The structure of "Eye Witness" is thus closer to Freeman's paradigm. The early synopsis of how the crook probably committed the crime is not too dissimilar to Freeman's initial accounts of the crook committing the murder, while the detective work in the rest of the story corresponds exactly to the detection which forms the second half of a Freeman inverted. As in all kinds of inverteds, we know the criminal right away here; the suspense, mystery and intellectual interest coming from how the detectives are going to prove his guilt.
Robert Arthur had a long and unusual career as a mystery short story writer. He began writing numerous stories for the pulps in the 1930's. Eventually he wrote both stories for such digests as EQMM, and finally juvenile tales about sleuths under Alfred Hitchcock's imprimatur.
Arthur wrote a series of juvenile novels, featuring the boy sleuths, the Three Investigators. The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966) shows a Golden Age inventiveness with landscape in its mystery plot. The landscape is set forth vividly in the first three chapters, "A Case for The Three Investigators", "An Unexpected Greeting" and "The Phantom is Seen", and further developed in the later chapters, "The Secret Cave" and "A Dangerous Predicament" (Chapters 13, 14). Finally, the mystery subplot these chapters set forth is solved towards the end of Chapter 16, "Jupiter Solves One Mystery". These chapters, which deal with a historical mystery, are much more imaginative than the modern day mystery which takes up much of the rest of the book.
David X Manners published over 65 stories in the pulp magazines, especially in Ten Detective Aces. His clever inverted detective stories "Eye Witness" (1935) and "Killer's Keeper" (1940) were also reprinted by Ellery Queen. The latter story has plot elements that were adapted to film with the Humphrey Bogart movie Conflict (1945), and have surfaced with numerous variations in movies and TV since. Another inverted story by Manners is "Death Debt", which appeared in Ten Detective Aces two months after "Eye Witness". You can tell it is by the same author as "Eye Witness" - the stories share a common approach. Both are "inverted" detective stories, both deal with mob killings in hotel rooms framed to look like aftermaths of robberies. But they have different characterizations, mystery plot twists and imagery. Readers can check out "Death Debt", accompanied by a picture of David X Manners, on line, at an external web site (out of this Guide).
Out of the blue I received e-mail from his son, Michael A. Manners, full of information on him, and his brother William Manners, who was also a mystery writer, as well as the founding editor of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Excerpts from Mr. Manners' very interesting letter of 12-30-1996 follow:
"My brother Tim alerted me today that by doing an Internet search for David X Manners, I would find that my father, David X Manners, and my uncle William Manners were included in a compilation of mystery writers. I thought you might be interested to know a little more about these two authors. They were both quite prolific and had several careers besides mystery writing.
"WILLIAM MANNERS wrote many mysteries, had a notable career as a professional boxer (52 pro bouts, 51 knock-outs), and wrote several non-fiction books that were very successful. Among them, FATHER AND THE ANGELS, an autobiographical account of growing up the son of a Rabbi, WAKE UP AND WRITE! - a quick and energized course in how to be a writer - T.R . AND WILL, the story of the stormy friendship between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt - LAGUARDIA, the story of Fiorella LaGuardia, the outspoken mayor of New York. He also was editor for Alfred Hitchcock magazine for a number of years. His wife, Ande Manners, wrote a self help hardcover of several hundred pages - A PARENTS GUIDE TO MUSIC LESSONS - and a very important book "POOR COUSINS" that was critically acclaimed and a New York Times Best Seller. It detailed the story of East European Jews and how they were treated by their already "landed" cousins when they reached America. Uncle William was a life long athlete and vegetarian - even during his years as a professional boxer. He and my mother Ruth Ann Manners wrote "The Quick and Easy Vegetarian Cookbook" together and it has enjoyed 24 years of multiple new printings and re-releases in more than 14 languages.
"DAVID X MANNERS, (there is no period after the "X", it's his full middle name) was born in Zanesville Ohio in 1912. The son of Rabbi Harris Rosenberg and his second wife Bertha. David wrote pulps, worked as an editor for some of the biggest publishing houses buying manuscripts and also was one of the pioneers of the whole "Do it yourself" publishing industry. Many would say he was the one who really created it. Among other odd accomplishments, he is generally credited with introducing the Sauna to America. He has written hundreds of books and magazine articles on subjects from "how to do your own concrete and masonry" to "How to fix your own Television". When Writers Digest put together a 75th anniversary hardcover book containing the best "How to be a writer" articles it had ever published, "The 10 Deadly Sins", written in 1940 by David X Manners, was in there alongside articles by Louis L'Amour, Erle Stanley Gardner, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov. The TEN DEADLY SINS he outlined in 1940 are still great advice, and might be a great addition to your site, as I suspect many visitors are would - be writers.
"David also designed and built his own house from scratch. Not just any house, but one that has been featured over and over again in magazines such as HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. David also founded The David X Manners Company, a public relations firm that today is run by his youngest son, Timothy, and now specializes in the field of marketing. His wife Ruth Ann has also published several do it yourself books, on subjects including sewing and kitchen design, in addition to the best-selling QUICK AND EASY VEGETARIAN COOKBOOK.
"My parents met as students at The Art Students League of New York City. I've found that creative people generally have more than one outlet for expression. I'm never surprised to hear that a well known musician, writer or actor also paints or sculpts.
"David wrote a TON of mysteries and westerns. He and my Uncle Bill also wrote and hosted a "solve the mystery" radio show in New York called ISN'T IT A CRIME with a chap named Ted Cott in the 1940's.
"William passed away in 1994 at the age of 86. David X Manners will turn 85 in February and we still can't keep him from climbing ladders to fix the roof. The man is made of bronze.