Scientific Detectives | Scientific Detection Today | Early Scientific Detection | Enlarging Photographs | L.T. Meade and Clifford Halifax | L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace | C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne | Rafael Sabatini | P. G. Wodehouse | Victor L. Whitechurch | Stacy Aumonier | Nigel Morland | Brander Matthews | Samuel Hopkins Adams | Cleveland L. Moffett | William MacHarg & Edwin Balmer | Arthur B. Reeve | Francis Lynde | J. Lenivers Carew | Arnold Andrews | Clinton H. Stagg | Eustace Hale Ball | Ernest M. Poate | Harvey Wickham | Rebecca N. Porter | Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk | Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning | George Dyer | Cromwell Gibbons | Rhoda Truax | James G. Edwards | Sue MacVeigh | Zelda Popkin | Herman Petersen | Ruth Sawtell Wallis | Helen Wells
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
"The Mysterious Card" (1896) (available on-line at http://www.everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=1915233)
The Silent Bullet (1911) (available on-line at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2454)
While all these writers included aspects of science in their works, it was still a leap to create the first detective stories totally centered on science. A number of important individual tales using scientific detection were written from 1865 on. Scientific detection began to flourish, according to Dorothy L. Sayers, with L.T. Meade and Halifax's Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1894). L.T. Meade is the first known writer to create a large number of stories whose solutions were fundamentally based on technology and science. After her came the science-based O'Malley tales of C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne, which were apparently never collected in book form, but which are turning up in anthologies, and the much longer lasting series of Dr. Thorndyke tales by R. Austin Freeman (no relation to Mary). Next came Futrelle, and the American school of scientific detection. The American writer Samuel Hopkins Adams' tales followed the traditions of Meade & Eustace. Adams' stories, like those of Meade & Eustace and other early writers in this school, tend to be horror-filled in tone.
A more purely American school will be born with the Luther Trant stories (1909 - 1910) of MacHarg and Balmer, which emphasize high technology. Instead of the horror-based writing of earlier authors, these American writers will stress the pleasure and thrills of high technology. Cleveland Moffett's Through the Wall (1909) also contains a pioneering American look at scientific crime fighting, one that has much in common with MacHarg and Balmer. They are followed by Arthur B. Reeve, whose works form the climax of the American school. As Sam Moskowitz pointed out, Reeve's book The Silent Bullet (1911) was directly inspired by the works of MacHarg and Balmer. I think also that Reeves' story of "The Diamond Maker" might draw upon Futrelle's "The Diamond Master" (1909).
Mary Roberts Rinehart's first two Miss Pinkerton stories (1914), were also in this tradition, with a nurse detective and science based mysteries. The two Miss Pinkerton novels, much later (1932, 1942) were not especially science oriented, but the final Miss Pinkerton novella, "The Secret" (1950), reverts to the scientific detection paradigm, over thirty years after it was abandoned by nearly everyone but Freeman! Rinehart's connection with the science tradition is not generally pointed out by commentators, who insist on tagging her with the Had I But Known label, but it is abundantly clear to anyone who reads the stories. Rinehart's detective Miss Pinkerton is a nurse, one of the few science/medicine professions generally open to women in those days. Rinehart was a nurse herself. This was not unusual; Doyle, Chekhov and Freeman were all doctors.
Some Golden Age (1920 - 1950, roughly) mystery writers continued the scientific detection genre: Nigel Morland, Philip Wylie, Theodora Du Bois, Helen Reilly, Lawrence G. Blochman, Helen McCloy. None of their detective books is really well known today, unfortunately. One can also see elements of scientific detection in some of the Golden Age followers of Mary Roberts Rinehart, such as Dorothy Cameron Disney, and Mignon G. Eberhart.
Hugo Gernsback was the editor of the first science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories (1926 - ). Gernsback published many scientific detective tales from 1920 on in the magazines he edited, such as Electrical Experimenter, Science and Invention, Radio News and Amazing Stories. A detailed account can be found in the article Scientific Detectives by science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz, in The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976), edited by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler. Moskowitz discusses many scientific detective writers, both in and outside the Gernsback magazines, whose works are not widely available today.
Gernsback also created a pulp magazine that specialized in high tech sleuthing, Scientific Detective Monthly. It only lasted for ten issues in 1930. It reprinted tales by MacHarg & Balmer, and Arthur B. Reeve, as well as publishing new tales by science fiction pulp writers like Edmond Hamilton and Clark Ashton Smith. Gernsback's writers' guidelines are available on-line. They give an unusually clear and detailed contemporary view of the Scientific Detective subgenre.
The disappearance of science from much of the non-pulp mystery story during the Golden Age is perhaps echoed by other literary phenomena. In particular, science fiction was ghettoized from a subject of general purpose fiction suitable for all readers and the greatest writers, into the pulps and comic strips. In general, sf was not even published in the form of books during this era. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, Sinclair Lewis Arrowsmith, and Henry Ford served as a villain in Dos Passos' USA, but in general, science and progress were completely ignored in modernist literature. "Serious" writers promoted Fascism and Communism, not science and progress, as a solution to human problems. How wrong they were! Others, like Lawrence, Joyce and Fitzgerald, concentrated on the 1920's sexual revolution. Few writers for grownups during 1916-1945 treated science as worth discussing.
In the previous generation, characters in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs sailed, gathered herbs, ran farms and explored the Arctic. All were proud of their technical skills. This whole attitude had changed later.
This article looks at early scientific detection, in both Britain and the United States. People interested in the subject might want to explore other articles on scientific sleuths in this Guide:
But since then, people tend to regard them as a bunch of separate narrow fields:
Today, mystery fans love to read about forensic detectives, and TV shows about scientific crime investigation are hugely popular. But the ancestors of these contemporary scientific detectives seem little remembered. There is some very good reading here!
LeRoy Lad Panek and Mary M. Bendel-Simso's anthology Early American Detective Stories (2008) includes:
"Straightway Mr. Furbush made a prize of the operator; and procuring, through channels always open to him, the strongest glasses and most accurate instruments, had the one chosen window in the picture magnified and photographed, remagnified and rephotographed, till under their powerful, careful, prolonged, and patient labor, a speck came into sight that would perhaps well reward them. Mr. Furbush strained his eyes over it; to him it was a spot of greater possibilities than the nebula in Orion. This little white unresolved cloud, again and again they subjected to the same process, and once more, as if a ghost had made apparition, it opened itself into an outline - into a substance - and they saw the fingers of a hand, a white hand, doubled, but pliant, strong, and shapely; a left hand, on its third finger wearing rings, one of which seemed at first a mere blot of light, but, gradually, as the rest, answering the spell of the camera, showed itself a central stone set with five points, each point consisting of smaller stones: the color of course could not be told; the form was that of a star."
My First Patient. "My First Patient" (1893) is the first tale in the series. It's a minor work. Both the husband's action, and the tale's endorsement of it, are certain to offend contemporary readers.
The doctor in "My First Patient" is not yet functioning as a detective. He does good medical work - but he does nothing to figure out the mystery or crime elements. These just sort-of solve themselves, gradually revealing the truth.
Very Far West. "Very Far West" (1893) is a thriller, rather than a mystery. In other words, there is no mystery plot for the reader to solve. It does have crime elements.
"Very Far West" is basically a masochistic fantasy, in which the doctor hero is lured into dangerous events. As such a fantasy, it is not bad. The doctor is as dressed up as possible, in white tie and tails, and sporting a valuable ring. His antagonists are a beautiful woman, and a remarkably macho older man. The man's mixture of upper class clothes and physical power anticipates the Rogue tradition to come. Alfred Pearse's illustrations do a good job showing both this man and the hero.
SPOILERS. The sinister woman and man eventually best not just the doctor himself, but the British police force as well.
Strangely, "Very Far West" was first published in the same issue of The Strand Magazine (September 1893) as the Sherlock Holmes tale "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter", by Doyle. And both tales have a sinister scientific plot element in common in their finales.
The Horror of Studley Grange. "The Horror of Studley Grange" (1894) is an example of that staple, an apparently impossible crime that looks supernatural, ultimately exposed by the detective as due to natural causes.
I thought this mystery was mainly easy to figure out. Especially the identity of the guilty party. On the positive side, the impossible crime has a decent solution. And the storytelling keeps one reading.
The mystery plot is based in architecture: a popular approach in classic mystery tales.
The solution draws on a technique used by a real-life stage show of the era. Later, Dorothy L Sayers in the 1920's and John Dickson Carr in the 1930's will be inspired by the Maskelyne shows, real-life magic shows.
BIG SPOILERS. At the end, the guilty party says they brought the detective into the case, to avoid being suspected. This idea has been used constantly in later mystery stories and TV shows. Here it is in 1894. The guilty party also has some other reasons for bringing in the detective, too.
Without Witnesses. "Without Witnesses" (1894) has some of the best storytelling in Stories from the Diary of a Doctor. In sweeps one along, both in its characters and its medical events.
"Without Witnesses" is not actually a mystery tale, strictly speaking. Little happens that is deeply mysterious. Both the doctor-detective and the reader usually know what is going on, at least in broad terms, with the medical aspects of the story. However, the doctor does struggle to get evidence that will convince other people: part of the technique of the detective story.
The events in the second half of "Without Witnesses" are closely tied to a landscape: the cliff and ocean at its base. Other key Meade tales such as "The Mystery of the Felwyn Tunnel", "The Secret of Emu Plain" are landscape-based.
The Florence Cusack stories open with "Mr. Bovey's Unexpected Will" (1899). This tale's plot, in its comic mode, shows signs of being a dry run for the more sinister "The Man Who Disappeared". If Meade's grimmer stories invoke magic, this light hearted one recalls fairy tales. It also begins with the detective Miss Cusack announcing that she is suffering from nervous problems, a plot thread that is dropped. Sympathetic characters who suffer from mental illness run through the Meade tales.
"The Tea Leaf", Eustace's late (1925) collaboration with Edgar Jepson, finds him pursuing many of the same themes, some 20 years after his collaboration with Meade ended. There is the same interest in freezing, the same impossible crimes explained through chemistry, the same interest in the geometry of rooms and buildings, the same obsessive characters, and the same brilliant female scientists: here one serves as the detective. The plot of this story has been re-used and summarized so many times it has passed into the folklore of the detective story, so this tale has lost some of the punch it must have originally had. But it is still a very well done story.
Meade and Eustace's "The Man Who Disappeared" (1901) contains imagery that will find echoes in Freeman's "A Silent Witness" (1914): there is the well described Hampstead Heath, the use of sinister basements, and the similar use of chemistry as well. Also, the desire for an autopsy in Meade & Halifax's "Without Witnesses" anticipates attitudes of Freeman, as does the doctor detective of the series. However, Freeman's work in general seems much less related to what I have read of these authors.
A Master of Mysteries was called (by Douglas G. Greene and Robert Adey in Death Locked In) the first collection of impossible crime tales. Like many alleged "firsts" in mystery history, this claim is hard to prove or disprove. It is certainly the earliest impossible crime collection known to me, or mentioned in standard reference works. This landmark status can lead to inflated expectations. The stories in A Master of Mysteries are pretty mild, and sometimes mediocre.
The explanation of all the impossibilities centers on technological devices or scientific situations. The stories thus are part of both the impossible crime and Scientific Detection traditions.
Meade and Eustace's sense of magic is strong. Like many impossible crime writers, the apparently impossible framework's of their tales are set forth with a magical atmosphere. I use the word magic, and not the word supernatural, because unlike John Dickson Carr, Meade and Eustace's work has little invocation of traditional supernatural events, such as ghosts, witches, etc. Instead it has an overwhelming effect of magic breaking through into people's lives. Their "The Secret of Emu Plain", a story of apparently magical events in the Australian Outback, is a definitive look at the eerie properties of that region, anticipating the great Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Some of the stories turn on rooms with pure geometric shapes:
To Prove an Alibi. The last story in the collection "To Prove an Alibi" (1897) is more of a thriller than a mystery. It is the story in the collection farthest removed from the "impossible crime". This tale is not bad. It involves:
"The Tragedy of a Third Smoker" (1898) deals with a death on a railroad, that is hard to ascribe to anyone other than a single suspect, who was the only one with access to the dead man. The suspect's legal team showed how it actually occurred, clearing their client. Freeman used a similar basic pattern for his story "The Blue Sequin" (1908).
"The Banknote Forger" (1899) deals with forgery and uses photography, both key elements on Freeman's work in later years - see, for example, The Red Thumb Mark.
Another similarity to the Thorndyke tales is the use of a legal team as detectives. A whole series of four persons on the team serve as continuing characters in Hyne's stories.
"The Evidence of the Sword" (1900) might be a precursor to the "inverted crime" tales later pioneered by R. Austin Freeman. It does not have the full paradigm of "inverted" tales developed by Freeman. But there are some similarities. In the first half of "The Evidence of the Sword" we get a full account of a crime, and see a bad guy develop a frame-up of the innocent hero. In the second half, the hero, serving as a detective, points out physical evidence that clears himself. The basic structure of a Freeman inverted, a two part construction of first seeing the crime in detail, then watching a detective find hidden evidence implicit in the first half that elucidates the crime, is present in "The Evidence of the Sword". Differences from the Freeman paradigm: the first half is seen from the Point of View of the innocent hero, rather than the perpetrator of the crime, as in Freeman's inverteds. The detective work in the second half is real and solid. But it involves a single clue, set forth briefly, rather than a full, detailed investigation as in Freeman. "The Evidence of the Sword" also has more romance and historical adventure, and less pure crime and detection, than a typical Freeman inverted. Still, it contains the core architecture of the "inverted tale" in rudimentary form.
"The Evidence of the Sword" is historical fiction. Sabatini also set some stories in modern-day Britain, where he lived. "Shrinkage" (1914) is a tale of scams and counter-scams, set against a background of the shipping industry. The plot has a simple scientific base, involving the shrinkage of the title, although the plot mainly concerns business rather than science. Similarly, the clue in "The Evidence of the Sword" is mildly technological in nature. Scams and counter-scams will later play a role in some of the pulp stories of Erle Stanley Gardner. As in Gardner, Sabatini's hero takes advantage of a crook's swindle, to launch a counter-swindle of his own that turns the tables on the crook.
"The Dream" (1912) is a none-too-good thriller about a sinister hypnotist gaining control of a woman, in the tradition of George Du Marier's Trilby (1894) and Somerset Maugham's The Magician (1908). Its villain is an "evil intellectual", showing that negative depictions of thinkers were already established in this era.
Hazell is a wealthy amateur, vegetarian, and health nut, who studies railways as a hobby. Hazell's vegetarian diet was intended by his author to be both humorous and grotesque, and I took it so when I first read these tales years ago; but today many people are moving toward a vegetarian diet for health and/or environmental reasons, and what Hazell eats in the stories seems more and more normal all the time.
Whitechurch's early fiction is hard to classify. It mixes railroad technology with spy, mystery and adventure elements, and seems designed to please railroad enthusiasts as much as mystery fans. It also oscillates between impossible crime and technology based fiction, with stops along the way for just plain mystery writing. The tone is far removed from Meade and Eustace, or Arthur B. Reeve, and one hesitates to include it in the "scientific detection" tradition. Whitechurch's tone is light. There is a sense of "artificiality" about his plot elements, such as the mystery, crime, or espionage stories. They seem to be constructed as a support element for his ingenious railroading ideas. Despite this, they are often very good pieces of storytelling in their own right.
Several of the best Hazell tales deal with thefts from the railways. These include "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture" (1905), "The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box" (1905), and "The Stolen Necklace" (1906). These stories are often impossible crime tales, or border on them. There is a family resemblance between the techniques used to pull off the thefts in "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture" and "The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box". And both involve duplicate copies of the objects to be stolen. These two stories have been reprinted in anthologies, and are much better known than anything else Whitechurch wrote. They are the works that have kept Whitechurch's reputation alive, for over a century.
There is also a good natured adventure story among the Hazell tales, "How the Bishop Kept His Appointment" (1906). A non-mystery, it is linked to the often humorous "clerical" fiction that Whitechurch also wrote.
The 6 non-Hazell stories are a mixed bag. Mostly they are best classified as "ingenious tales about railroads", not mystery fiction, strictly speaking (they largely do not contain puzzles or mysterious situations to be solved). Yet their clever plotting, and crime or spy backgrounds, will commend them to mystery fans:
Similarly, Ivan Koravitch was collected in book form in 1925, but some Koravitch stories appeared in The Railway Magazine in 1897.
This means Whitechurch's stories appeared early in the Impossible Crimes movement, and very early in the Technological Detective movement too. Both genres had already been piloted by L.T. Meade in this era, but just barely: the medical stories in "The Diary of a Doctor" appearing in 1894, and the impossible crimes of A Master of Mysteries in book form in 1898. The spy elements in Whitechurch's tale were also fairly brand new in this era. Whitechurch may not have been the originator of these movements, but he was an early contributor, someone who helped turn them into actual flourishing literary trends. It also helps explain a certain casualness or tentativeness in his approach. Hazell is presented as an expert on railways. But he is not depicted as the Most Advanced Scientific Genius of Our Time, the way Dr. Thorndyke or Craig Kennedy are. (OK, so I'm exaggerating a little!) Similarly, the frequently impossible nature of Whitechurch's crimes is not underlined by fake supernatural atmosphere, or an elaborately surrealistic mise-en-scène.
And while brief, the layout of the landscape around the parsonage is carefully described, both the part close to the house, and the surrounding countryside.
Other Whitechurch subjects make brief appearances: a timetable of local trains; a valuable art object that has been stolen.
One of the villains is of mixed race. This negative portrait of a mixed-race man is repeated in more than one chapter. It's racist.
The Crime at Diana's Pool has been critically touted for being a country house mystery. This is factually correct: the murder takes place on the grounds of an English country house. However, the house and its activities get the simplest, most minimal description. Readers hoping for an in-depth look at a country house in the tradition of Downton Abbey are going to be badly disappointed.
The architecture of the house has little interest. A bit better is the landscape with the title pool. This water landscape anticipates the river in The Floating Admiral.
The Crime at Diana's Pool benefits from two good solutions to mystery puzzles:
It's hard to know what sort of audience this uneven book might have today, if any. Much of it is routine. But some sections have comic charm, and an evocation of another time and place: the introduction of the aristocrat and the thieves (Chapter 2), the first look at the American relatives (Chapters 5-8).
And the thieves' plans for the robbery are well thought through, and would do credit to a detective story (Chapter 9). They include a simple but effective faked alibi, something that recalls Freeman Wills Crofts. When the actual robbery does take place, it follows the plan pretty closely, and the account does not add much to the crime plot. But the details do have charm.
Whitechurch is often observant about men's clothes:
The best aspects of the tale, as a mystery puzzle plot, involve interpreting two pieces of text. This is a kind of mystery that runs through Whitechurch:
The motive for the actual killing is similar to the one in Murder at the College. It is part of a richer structure in that latter book.
The victims in the two novels turn out to have similar professions and activities.
Both Murder at the Pageant and Murder at the College have subplots, in which a suspect is made to seem guilty, through a long train of circumstantial evidence. Then the suspect will be cleared, by new revelations, that show he was innocent after all. Both the original trail, and the story that clears them, tend to be long, event-filled accounts of what the suspect might have been doing, or actually was doing, during the time surrounding the murder. Whitechurch shows ingenuity in constructing these trails.
The Pageant description (Chapter 1), the most colorful part of the book, displays the interest in antiquarianism often found in R. Austin Freeman. However, Whitechurch is more interested in clothes, while Freeman loves antiques. The clothes relate to Whitechurch's interest in disguise, which throughout his work centers around people dressing up in costumes. Whitechurch's clerical romance The Canon in Residence also opens with his hero getting into new clothes, which lead to a new attitude and comical misadventures.
Murder at the College is far from being a great detective novel: much of it depends on some unfortunate coincidences, the part of the mystery involving a criminal scheme lacks fair play clues that would allow the reader to deduce it in advance of the solution, and the ingenuity of the solution, while pleasant, is fairly mild and simple. Still, it is surprisingly readable throughout, due to its wealth of precisely imagined detail.
The rest of this discussion might contain SPOILERS.
Murder at the College is in some ways a police procedural in the Freeman Wills Crofts tradition, as was Murder at the Pageant (1930):
The many clergymen characters remind us that Whitechurch wrote clerical romances earlier in his career, as well as mysteries. Whitechurch also does a good job with the working class characters in the story, recalling "A Case of Signaling", with its lower class heroes.
A subplot in Murder at the College is directly in the tradition of "The Murder on the Okehampton Line" (1903), one of Whitechurch's series of short tales about railway detective Godfrey Page, the "railway maniac" or "railwayac", as Whitechurch humorously dubbed him for short. In both works, the sleuths find cryptic notes left behind by the victim, which mainly consist of a string of letters and numbers. In both they have to interpret the notes. Both interpretations have some common features involving architecture, in the broad sense of the term. And in both, it leads the sleuths to a key piece of the puzzle, the MacGuffin behind the story. Godfrey Page is an amateur detective; by profession he is an architect, like many of the characters in Murder at the College.
Murder at the College shows the Golden Age interest in architecture, with the crime scene a precisely described locale in the college buildings. The architecture plays a role throughout the mystery and its solution. In some ways, the architecture has the same central role as trains did in earlier Whitechurch stories, forming a locale in which the crime is carried out. The biggest mystery in Murder at the College, how the killer left the crime scene without being seen by the numerous witnesses, links Murder at the College to the impossible crime tale. This recalls the several borderline impossible crimes in Stories of the Railway. SPOILERS. The impossible exit of the killer in Murder at the College is as linked to the architecture, as the impossible thefts in Stories of the Railway are linked to the set-up of the trains.
A pleasant theme throughout Murder at the College are the many characters who engage in detection. At a number of points, we see the story through fresh eyes, while these sleuths investigate some aspect of the mystery. There is something almost Pirandellian about this, a mildly avant-garde feature. None of these characters ever meet each other. Instead, they share their ideas in interviews with the tale's chief sleuth, policeman Sgt. Ambrose.
"The Murder on the Okehampton Line" and Murder at the Pageant also had a profusion of sleuth characters. The Thorpe Hazell tales in Stories of the Railway also contain a number of characters whose amateur sleuthing aids the hero. Both Ambrose and Hazell also have Scotland Yard contacts, who can be employed to answer questions that require serious police assistance.
The victim in Murder at the College is an amateur sleuth, who bears some resemblance to Thorpe Hazell. At the end of the novel, we learn he refused to cover up his findings - which is why the murderer killed him. This is the exact opposite of Hazell, who conceals his discoveries at the end of "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture", because the culprit is an aristocrat, and Hazell wants to prevent scandal. This is incredibly snobbish - but one feels Whitechurch has some sympathy with Hazell, and the murderer in the novel.
There are other similarities between Murder at the College and "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture": both involve complex rings of thieves, who are stealing priceless art objects for unscrupulous collectors.
The disguise used by the villain in Murder at the College was previously used by Hazell in "The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box".
Lamb is in the mode of earlier young upper crust policemen:
Even during this period Morland was self-educating himself in forensic science, and in later years would edit scientific journals and publish textbooks in this area.
The Case of the Rusted Room (1937) gets the Johnny Lamb series off with a bang. It contains a vivid telling of a murder both committed and detected by scientific means. The story is at its best in the first half (Chapters 1-14). After this, it runs out of inventiveness, and there is nothing interesting in the arbitrary choice of villain at the end. The story shows the Golden Age interest in architecture.
Morland also has a good grasp of commercial life in 1930's England, with convincing looks at engineering businesses and shady financial transactions. Such a flair for business Backgrounds recalls the Realist School of British detection, which grew out of the Scientific School via the works of Freeman Wills Crofts. Lamb's policeman boss Cross is depicted as a methodical, plodding officer, recalling Crofts' sleuth Inspector French, and other policeman heroes of the Realist school writers. Both Cross' presence, and the attention Morland devotes to in-depth looks at business enterprises, represent the incorporation of Realist School approaches as a subsidiary element in his story. Morland has fun contrasting the plodding Cross with his lightning-fast assistant Lamb, the two men also standing for two different schools of detective fiction.
"The Twinkling of an Eye" is most notable for its charming behind-the-scenes look at what a 1895 business manufacturing office is like. The description forms a Background, somewhat similar to those in scientific detection stories of the 1910's to come by MacHarg, Balmer and Reeve. The young hero's education, set forth in detail, is also interesting.
In a small way, "The Twinkling of an Eye" anticipates "The Problem of Cell 13" (1905) by Jacques Futrelle. In both stories, the actions of the hero produce mysteries, startling events that will only be explained at the end of the tale. This makes them different from conventional mysteries, in which only the villain's crimes are mysterious. These hero-created mysteries are far more numerous and hard-to-explain in Futrelle.
"The Twinkling of an Eye" is also a tale in which "secret business information mysteriously escapes an office". Futrelle would write his own such tale, in "The Silver Box" (1907). Meade and Eustace also produced a puzzle of this kind, "The Arrest of Captain Vandaleur" (1899). Both the tales of Meade and Eustace, and that of Futrelle, are more ingenious and impossible crime oriented in this "information escapes" aspect than "The Twinkling of an Eye".
"The Twinkling of an Eye" was a forgotten tale, till LeRoy Lad Panek and Mary M. Bendel-Simso included it in their anthology Early American Detective Stories (2008).
Adams' breezy prose style, with its cheerful cynicism about public institutions, and humorous asides, is a big plus. Adams' prose is gracefully literate, with many cleverly turned phrases and gentle wordplays based on literary allusions.
If Adams' tales derive commercially from MacHarg and Balmer, artistically they seem closest to those founders of the scientific school, Meade and Eustace. Several of the plots involve chemistry, others poisonous animals; both are Meade and Eustace trademarks. Just as in M&E, there is often more emphasis on the villain's schemes than on the hero's detection. Adams' villains are more sympathetic than M&E's, however; often they are attacking bad guys who really deserve it, whereas M&E's villains tend to go after innocent victims and nice people.
Getting Information. Average Jones often uses ads to get information from the public, or from selected subgroups of the public. This is oddly modern. It anticipates "citizen science" and the collective "wisdom of crowds".
The witty way that the Cosmic Club is full of experts of all kinds, is also original. The tales are very pro-expert: the experts usually come through with knowledge when Average Jones queries them.
The Mercy Sign. There is often an atmosphere of horror in Adams's stories, like those of Meade and Eustace. Adams' "The Mercy Sign" (1910) has the best horror mise-en-scène of any story since Meade and Eustace's "Madame Sara" (1902).
"The Mercy Sign" is the best story in the collection. It also has the strongest elements of mystery, as opposed to the thriller. It builds up a deep sense of mystery. Strange event follows strange event, all unexplained (till the finale), and all adding to the puzzle. An eerie atmosphere builds up, the sense that that the reader is journeying to the heart of something strange and sinister.
"The Mercy Sign" is in two distinct parts, each with its own characters and setting:
The One Best Bet. The tales in the first half of Adams' book tend to have more mystery than those in the second half, the latter being closer to pure thrillers - and less interesting for it. The least likable tale is "The One Best Bet" (1911). I read Adams' book twice, many years apart, and both times this story gave me the creeps. However, a third reading was enjoyable, highlighting the story's rich detail.
"The One Best Bet" is set against an elaborate cityscape. Every part of the plot is set in a precisely placed locale in the cityscape. The cityscape has a 3-dimensional quality, with height as well as length and depth playing a role. The cityscape is varied:
"The One Best Bet" mixes humor in with its otherwise serious material. The tale has many changes of tone. Its inclusion of politics and battles against civic corruption also give the tale a rich interest. The story also briefly notes police corruption.
"The One Best Bet" is set in a suburb. The suburb seems modestly middle class, maybe even working class. In this it contrasts with the suburb for a rich elite in "The Purple Flame" (1912) by Frederick Irving Anderson. The cityscape in "The One Best Bet" anticipates a bit the landscape in Anderson's "The Recoil" (1929). Both Adams and Frederick Irving Anderson were American mystery story writers of wit and sophistication.
"The One Best Bet" has a messenger boy as a likable if briefly seen character. Another will be in The Secret of Lonesome Cove (Chapter 2). One wonders if detective fiction of the era had many boy readers, and if messenger boys were a practical way to get a boy character into a tale for them.
The Man Who Spoke Latin. "The Man Who Spoke Latin" is one of Adams' most comic tales. Like his non-series story "The Flying Death", it involves the bizarre eruption into the present of something from the distant past.
The story is set among the intelligentsia and collectors, the same terrain that will be explored so well by S. S. Van Dine and his successors, starting in the 1920's. The story was reprinted by Ellery Queen, who often specialized in such settings.
"The Man Who Spoke Latin" is notable for the exuberance and invention of its undercover roles, something adopted by both villains and heroes in the story. One finds a more serious, or at least more solemn, treatment of undercover work, in MacHarg and Balmer's "The Man Higher Up" (1909). Adams shows good plotting, with the careful elaboration of the undercover identities. There is also much careful detective work, with each new discovery by the hero being justified by a clue he has unearthed through sleuthing. This detective work is inventive, too.
Average Jones keeps a room of mementoes of his detective cases. This is described in the opening of the tale. It anticipates trophy or souvenir rooms kept by later comic book heroes like Batman, Superman and Jimmy Olsen.
Big Print. "Big Print" is a tale that cannot be recommended. Its making fun of an unintelligent character is now seen as offensive.
Much of the plot is labored. But it has good points:
Blue Fires. "Blue Fires" opens with Average Jones doing Sherlock Holmes style deductions on his prospective client.
Both the client and all the other characters turn out to be sympathetic characters, something which benefits the story.
The bulk of the tale has Jones steadily doing detective work, trying to solve the mystery. This is absorbing reading, rich in detail and plot inventiveness.
J. S. Fletcher's short story "Room 53" was included in his collection The Secret of the Barbican (collected 1924). It has features that suggest its plot might be influenced by "Blue Fires". Both:
"Blue Fires", like "Big Print", depicts the fringes of show business in that era. In both tales, Jones comes up with the idea of tracking down show biz people who might be involved.
The chains in "Blue Fires" return in The Secret of Lonesome Cove (Chapter 1). Both works include valuable necklaces that have gone missing.
Already, around 1910, people were talking about "old-fashioned hotels". These places tend to be genteel, respectable, but not ostentatious or patronized by fast company.
The B-Flat Trombone. "The B-Flat Trombone" (1910) is the first Average Jones tale. Its first half contains a full account of how Jones set up in his business and became a detective. It is what in comic books is called an "origin story". Similarly, Adams' The Secret of Lonesome Cove (Chapter 2) has a detailed origin story for its detective Chester Kent.
The crime method in "The B-Flat Trombone" involves technology. This brings it into the realm do Scientific Detection.
The Million-Dollar Dog. "The Million-Dollar Dog" (1911) creates a romance for the hero. The romance parts of the tale are mildly pleasant. But the crime elements are mainly mediocre.
The villain does not use science for his crime. But hero Jones uses science in his detection. This brief scene is the most substantial part of the tale's crime plot.
"The Million-Dollar Dog" was not the last Jones tale to be published in magazines. But in the book, the tale has been bumped to the final spot. One suspects that this is so the hero can conclude the book with a happy romance. Similarly in Francis Lynde's Scientific Sprague, the last tale in the collection gives the hero a romance.
The hero and heroine speak French briefly in "The Million-Dollar Dog". This recalls the Latin passages in "Pin-Pricks" and "The Man Who Spoke Latin".
"The Million-Dollar Dog" shows that Jones has special, unusual fighting skills. He learned them playing college football. Similarly sleuth Chester Kent in The Secret of Lonesome Cove (Chapter 2) has even more unusual combat capabilities.
At one point Jones goes undercover as a tradesman. His manner becomes a mosaic of lower class and upper class attitudes. Similarly, the mystery woman has a mosaic of different class attitudes in The Secret of Lonesome Cove (Chapter 2).
Red Dot. "Red Dot" (1910) has features that recall other Average Jones tales. SPOILERS.:
SPOILERS. Sinister experiments involve the scientific breeding of animals. These recall the even more ominous breeding in H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). What the animals are being bred for, is different in the two works.
Publication Order. Currently, magazine appearances are known for seven of the stories:
"The Man Who Spoke Latin" refers to characters from "Pin-Pricks" (J. Alden Honeywell) and "The Mercy Sign" (Telfik Bey). The events of "The Man Who Spoke Latin" begin near the end of the events of "The Mercy Sign". So perhaps "The Man Who Spoke Latin" was written right after "The Mercy Sign", and had its mementoes section added or updated later.
It has three detective characters, each scientifically skilled in different ways. Together, they make up a team. Male bonding runs through the Average Jones stories, as well. A story like "The Mercy Sign" also eventually builds up a team of sleuths.
"The Flying Death" is told with multiple narrators, each producing documents that narrate their part of the case. Such document narration was common in 19th Century authors like Wilkie Collins. It is less frequently seen in 20th Century authors. Such documents show up in Adams' The Secret of Lonesome Cove (Chapter 3), although they are far from dominating the novel.
"The Flying Death" has less actual detection than the Average Jones stories, which often feature complex deductions by their sleuths. Instead, it simply states a baffling impossible crime problem, then provides a solution at the end.
It is set at Montauk Point, on the far Eastern tip of Long Island in New York. In Adams' era, this locale was nearly devoid of human settlement; today it is the populous summer home of America's snootiest millionaires, and is known as "the Hamptons". More importantly, abstract painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning lived there.
A character in the story is named Colton, anticipating Clinton H. Stagg's detective, Thornley Colton.
Adams expanded the short story "The Flying Death" into a novel, also called The Flying Death (1908). The novel is less of a pure mystery than the short story, mixing in science fiction elements.
The light hearted little "Aunt Minnie and the Accessory After the Fact" (1945) continues Adams' interest in the forces of nature, over 30 years after his Average Jones stories.
Moffett's novel is set in 1907 Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent, and is rich in period atmosphere. It is long (400 pages) and leisurely, and filled with humor, melodrama, Great Detectives and master villains, and everything else one can think of. It is also a genuine detective story, with a complex, admirable plot. There is less emphasis on "playing fair" with the reader, and on deduction in obtaining the solution, than in Freeman or later Golden Age writers, however. Moffett does excel, however, at the gradual uncovering and unveiling of the truth behind the mysterious situation through detective work, a skill he could have learned from Anna Katherine Green, or other early writers. His detective is named Paul Coquenil, recalling émile Gaboriau's Parisian detective Lecoq. The villain in Moffett's book and the plot intrigues which surround this villain, bear a family resemblance to those in Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1868).
The sheer size of Wall, together with the complexity and tremendous variety of the scope of the plot, gives one an "oceanic" feeling, of being involved in a large world where anything can happen. Wall changes its "scale of focus" many times, in a way different from most Golden Age detective novels. It contains everything from the minute examination of physical clues, to complex struggles of political intrigue, from personal attacks on its detective hero, to puzzle plots and scientific detection. At the end one feels that one has lived through a complex experience, one that involves many pauses for reflection, and several gradually dawning new perspectives and points of view.
Toward the end, Moffett makes a sudden detour into "scientific detection", and introduces an early version of both the lie detector and the word association test. He does this with his usual vivid storytelling, and eye for almost surrealistic detail. Both of these devices are used by MacHarg & Balmer. Did he influence MacHarg & Balmer - or vice versa? It would be interesting to find out. I have seen references to non-fiction articles of the period on such devices; perhaps both independently drew on such non-fiction accounts.
Through the Wall makes an interesting contrast with Crofts' The Cask (1920); it shows the romantic's Paris, while The Cask shows the businessman's Paris. Oddly enough, there is plenty of excitement and even romance, too, in The Cask; the two books are complimentary.
There are thematic links between the Card stories and Through the Wall, although they cannot be discussed without giving away their plots.
While "The Mysterious Card Unveiled" involves the paranormal, the events in the much better first story, "The Mysterious Card", are completely naturalistic. Looking at "The Mysterious Card" just by itself, without reference to the sequel, the plot elements form a mystery without a solution. In theory, this mystery could be given a naturalistic solution, although Moffett does not do so. I have always believed that the events in "The Mysterious Card" are so extreme, that it is hard to imagine any solution being created for them. However, the modern writer Edward D. Hoch came up with a reasonably plausible explanation of them in his "The Spy and the Mysterious Card" (EQMM, October 1975), an imaginative feat.
The Man Higher Up. My favorite short story in the collection is "The Man Higher Up" (1909). This tale has brilliant mise-en-scène, where it generates higher and higher excitement as the detectives get closer and closer to nailing the title villain. The story also shows a great deal of realism, taking the reader back stage at the docks, a place and time now preserved forever in their fiction. Arthur B. Reeve, who wrote many scientific detective stories in the 1910's following MacHarg and Balmer, also regularly employed such detailed background portraits of a business or institution in his fiction. One wonders if the "background" in this story and Reeve's work influenced the Freeman-Crofts school's interests in backgrounds, which began with Freeman Wills Crofts' detailed portrait of the shipping industry in The Cask (1920).
"The Man Higher Up" (1909), along with Cleveland L. Moffett's Through the Wall of the same year, marks the first use of the lie detector in fiction.
"The Man Higher Up" is perhaps the most ferocious work of liberal social criticism in detective fiction history. Its attack on corporate corruption seems even more relevant today. The story has an odd sidelight: the heroine of this tale drives an electric car, which were common in 1909, but which Americans cannot buy for love or money in 2006. The oil industry, which considers Americans its slaves, won't let them.
"The Man Higher Up" has a mystery plot, but one which focuses more on understanding a complex, mysterious situation, and less on who done it. The mystery plot is both baffling, and fairly clued. Such an approach will also often be followed by Arthur B. Reeve, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Rinehart's tales will often focus on a Big Secret shared by some of the characters. Finding the secret will be a more central part of the mystery, than identifying the murderer.
The Axton Letters. "The Axton Letters" (1910) is apparently the first of all mystery tales wherein the detective deduces psychological or sociological facts about a bad guy, based on clues he inadvertently included in a letter he wrote. MacHarg and Balmer here deserve credit here as pioneers, but I confess that I have always had considerable skepticism about both this story, and the genre as a whole. Detectives in stories are always noticing that a letter writer spelled a date English style, and rushing out to arrest the Duke of York, the only Englishman among the suspects. But couldn't such a thing be a personal affectation of an American crook? Couldn't the writer have just received a note from a British cousin, and subconsciously imitated his dating style? Suppose it were just a typo? Or what if it were done on purpose, to mislead? Or suppose that the writer's first grade teacher was from England, and taught our crook the English way of doing things. Detectives in stories never seem to encounter any of these glitches. In any case, the storytelling here is nowhere as good as "The Man Higher Up".
The other Trant story in anthologies, "The Private Bank Puzzle", just seems mediocre.
Most of the cases have realistic New York City backgrounds, ranging from the poor in tenement halls to rich people hanging out in night clubs. They probably served as a model for Ellery Queen's later series of short mysteries with realistic New York settings, Q.B.I. (1949-1954). Very few of the cases have mob or underworld settings. The stories are full of a tough, low key realism, but are not especially hard-boiled or in any Hammett derived pulp tradition. Whether rich, poor, working or middle class, the characters in the story are depicted as "typical New Yorkers".
The brief tales are heavily plot oriented. Some of them have mystery puzzle plots, in others the killer's identity is simply found through police work.
O'Malley puts great emphasis on coming up with ingenious ideas to make the killer confess, or make a damaging admission of guilt; the stories contain numerous gimmicks of this type. These stories form a subcategory of the inverted stories of Freeman; here it is not so much how the police are going to discover the killer's identity that is important, as how they are going to trick him into confessing. One sees a similar emphasis on tricking the killer into confession in some of the inverted stories Cornell Woolrich wrote in the early 1940's, and one wonders if Woolrich used the O'Malley tales as a model. The O'Malley stories appeared in slick magazines, such as Colliers, in the 1930's, and some of the police schemes in stories like "No Evidence" remind one of Frederick Irving Anderson's 1920's Book of Murder, which also appeared in the slick Saturday Evening Post. Erle Stanley Gardner's The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939) also contains a look at psychological pressure on a criminal to get him to confess. Clearly this idea was "in the air" around 1940. (Gardner's novel also resembles the O'Malley tale "Too Many Miles" in that both deal with mileage on automobiles.)
The science in the early Luther Trant tales tended to be based on psychology, such as the lie detector, or what the killer's words revealed about his mental makeup. The emphasis was on getting the criminal to reveal his mental secrets. This is related to the later approach of the O'Malley tales, with their emphasis on triggering criminal confession. What science there is in the O'Malley stories tends to invoke altered states of consciousness, in which killers might talk, such as "The Sleeptalker" (1931), or the anesthetic based dentistry of "The Man on the Truck". The O'Malley stories also include episodes in which the detective gets small children ("The Sleeptalker", "The Key Man"), naive adolescents ("Too Bad") or animals ("The Scotty Dog", "Dumb Witness") to reveal what they know. In each case, O'Malley has to coax the knowledge out of a brain that is different from an adult's, finding ways of interpreting the non-standard psychology of the witness.
Another persistent theme in the tales concerns O'Malley's ingeniously tracking down suspects, by following up often meager clues. One suspect often leads to another suspect, who in turn leads to a third, until ultimately the actual killer is traced. In general, the O'Malley tales emphasize the ideas of the detective, whether they consist of novel ways to get a killer to confess, or finding ways to track down suspects from the slenderest of clues. Almost none of them glamorize the "routine police work" beloved of the Freeman Wills Crofts school of police procedurals. O'Malley does a good deal of routine investigation, and more frequently delegates this to other cops, but the knowledge gained therefrom is more often treated as the raw material for O'Malley's clever ideas, not as an ultimate end in itself.
Several of the cases involve a tangle of personal relationships, with jealous love triangles and rival lovers. The pattern of interrelationships can get complex, and forms a major part of the plot.
"Written in Dust" and "The Widow's Share" (1937) deal with payroll robberies, a subject that would later be popular in books and films. As in "The Man Higher Up", these stories take one back stage at a business. So, in its own way, does "The Locked Door", a tale that shows some interesting geographical patterns.
The story "Man Missing" (1935) suggests that MacHarg had been reading Freeman Wills Crofts' The Cask (1920). "The Right Gun" (1939) recalls Ellery Queen, with its boxing arena setting, and search for a missing gun. Also Queen like is this stories' sympathetic black character.
The cover of the 1951 paperback of The Affairs of O'Malley (1940) (retitled Smart Guy) shows a vivid illustration taken from the story "A Little More Evidence". I don't know the name of the artist.
The short stories in The Silent Bullet star Craig Kennedy, a brainy young professor at New York City's Columbia University, who uses science to solve a series of mysteries. The Silent Bullet is the first of many short story collections Reeve would write about Craig Kennedy.
S.S. Van Dine started a tradition, followed by Ellery Queen and other later commentators, of slamming Reeve's work, and suggesting that it is less "realistic" than R. Austin Freeman's. This is a complex issue. Freeman's work tends to deal with detection using small, scientifically accurate facts. In this sense there is probably more accuracy in Freeman's work. Freeman's cases tend to be ordinary crimes, and only the detection draws on scientific methods. These detective methods are presented with meticulous, accurate care. They form a realistic picture of the best aspects of scientific lab work used in crime detection of their era.
Reeve tends to deal with sweeping advances in technology, and use these as the center of his mystery plots. Reeve undoubtedly oversteps the bounds of accuracy on several occasions. But his work is inspiring in the way Freeman's is not. In Reeve one gets the sense of massive waves of technological advance breaking on humanity's shores. These advances will change the way in which people live. It is easy to understand why The Silent Bullet caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1910's. It paints an electrifying picture of the march of science. Sam Moskowitz has aptly linked Reeve's popularity, to the eventual rise of Hugo Gernsback and the first American science fiction magazines. His work certainly seems ancestral to the sense of wonder found in 1930's and 1940's sf.
In the first two volumes of Kennedy tales, the detective gathers all the suspects together at the end of the story, then reveals the identity of the killer to them during his final speech solving the crime. This is a plot device that will be greatly reused by later writers. Reeve is the first writer known to me systematically to adopt this approach.
Scientist Craig Kennedy is assisted in all the tales by his "Watson", newspaper reporter Walter Jameson. These professions recall Jacques Futrelle's scientist-detective, the Thinking Machine, and the newsman Hutchinson Hatch who assists him. While some of the Thinking Machine stories center on science, the series as a whole is not systematically science oriented, the way the Craig Kennedy stories are. Both Craig Kennedy and the Thinking Machine frequently send their aides out on mysterious errands, connected with the case. Walter Jameson recalls Watson in Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales, in that he narrates the stories, is frequently baffled by the sleuth's detective work, is deeply loyal to the detective, and rooms with the sleuth in modestly middle class lodgings.
Reeve's tales are far less puzzle plot oriented than Futrelle's, and many other mystery writers; there are few impossible crime tales among Reeve's huge output, unlike Futrelle, who specialized in such works.
Paradoxically, while there are many vividly described locales in Reeve's work, there are few maps, and the actual geometric layout of a room or building is rarely relevant to Reeve's plots. The same can be said of the scientific detection school as a whole: the locale and architecture are important, the geometric layout is not, and I cannot recall ever seeing a map or floor plan diagram in any scientific detective work.
"Spontaneous Combustion" and "The Death Tube" have a similar structure. In both, events are seemingly caused by one set of technological circumstances, but the detective proves that they are actually produced by different technological causes. Both possible explanations are given interestingly detailed expositions. We are also shown Craig Kennedy using science and technology to gather evidence for the different solution. All of this material is fascinating. Who committed the crimes lis less emphasized. At the tales' end, we learn who-done-it, after Kennedy gathers scientific evidence against them, but there are few clues before this to the identity of the guilty party. In other words, the who-done-it aspects lack "fair play". The choice of criminal and their motive is plausible, though, and especially detailed in "The Death Tube". Both motives involve financial gain in wealthy families, exploiting or ripping-off other members' money. Both tales have looks at sympathetic servants.
"The Death Tube" has some of the "light show" qualities one associates with William Hope Hodgson. The tales have other sidelights not closely related to their mystery plots: "Spontaneous Combustion" looks at how news was gathered by papers, and travel to a remote resort area in the Adirondacks. "The Death Tube" shows the somewhat "fast" lifestyles of the wealthy, anticipating the deeper look at pre-Jazz Age mores in The Social Gangster.
"The Black Hand" is a thriller or suspense tale without mystery. Kennedy works to rescue a kidnapped child, of a famous Italian tenor. "The Black Hand" gives an exceptionally detailed look at Italian-American life of the era, bringing in all sorts of unexpected sidelights. It is one of Reeve's interesting sociological portraits, a picture of contemporary life. Reeve also trains his sights briefly on candy, talking about the sociological and manufacturing background of the candy the poor Italian children eat. The story is the work of a man genuinely curious about society, and eager to share what he knows with readers.
"The Black Hand" shows the maze-like architecture of the urban Italian neighborhoods. The ability to approach areas from back entrances and obscure paths is emphasized in both the restaurant and crime scene buildings. The path followed by the wires, and by Kennedy when he installs them, is dramatic and interestingly oblique.
Both the restaurant and the candy show the Italian districts as centers of food production and distribution.
Technology in "The Black Hand" involves listening devices. Reeve's finale shows how such devices can intervene in a split-second rescue and negotiation with crooks. This idea is simple but effective. It shows Reeve's technology affecting a thriller situation, rather than being used for detection as in his other tales. Still, the technology is used to gain information about a crime, making it borderline-detection, too.
The Poisoned Pen. The short stories in Reeve's second collection The Poisoned Pen are a direct continuation of the Craig Kennedy series in The Silent Bullet. Although not quite as intense, they too are often outstanding works of detective literature.
"The Campaign Grafter" in The Poisoned Pen takes us backstage at a political campaign, showing us its operation in detail. Many of Reeve's stories give a detailed, systematic exposition of some institution of public life. The campaign here is run on organized principles, with the aid of both technology and modern methods of business organization: also typical of the institutions or businesses Reeve shows us. Such backgrounds were present in Reeve's fiction, many years before Freeman Wills Crofts introduced the Background as part of British Realist School's approach, in The Cask (1920). Reeve's work could easily have been influenced by the background in MacHarg and Balmer's "The Man Higher Up" (1909).
Hugh Greene, in his introduction to The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1976), noted all the social criticism in this and other American detective stories of the period. The characters in "The Campaign Grafter" are explicitly involved in liberal politics. Samuel Hopkins Adams was a liberal crusader outside of his fiction work, and there are liberal political orientations in MacHarg and Balmer, and Francis Lynde, as well. One can see strong liberal social criticism in Mary Roberts Rinehart's scientific detective novella, "The Curve of the Catenary" (1915). Such liberalism seems to be common in American scientific detective school writers. So far, I have seen little sign of it in their British scientific detective fiction predecessors.
"The Campaign Grafter" looks at scientific aspects of interpreting photographs, and at the use of sound communication technology. Both image and sound technology will run through Reeve's fiction, in some of his best stories.
The sheer amount of mystery in "The Campaign Grafter" is startling. It contains many separate mysteries for the reader to attempt to solve. SPOILERS:
"The Firebug" is rich in depictions of how firefighters work. It emphasizes their technological aspects. It also looks at "scientific management" of the firefighting enterprise. "The Campaign Grafter" looked at how a modern political campaign was managed.
The Dream Doctor. Reeve's third Craig Kennedy collection, The Dream Doctor (collected 1914), continues the scientific detection of the first two. Especially interesting in it are "The Phantom Circuit" and "The Green Curse". These inventive stories show the possibilities of technological variations on the telephone, utilized both for crime and detection. Both stories differ from most earlier Kennedy tales in that they have suspense-oriented climaxes, instead of the pick-the-killer finales of earlier Reeve stories. The finale of "The Green Curse" is especially well done. Both stories also have criminals from outside of the characters depicted in the story; Reeve experiments here with sinister European radical groups as villains. "The Kleptomaniac" (1912) is another story in the same telephone-oriented approach, but it is not quite as inventive. It includes an early description of a wire recorder, later a much used device in real life.
"The Vampire" (1913) is a rich story. Part of it shows us the world of industrial research, a subject that will return in later scientific detective authors, such as Lawrence G. Blochman's "A Taste for Tea" (1958). Part of it also explores the world of microbiology, a subject that had recently been written about by R. Austin Freeman, in "A Message From the Deep Sea" and "A Wastrel's Romance". Reeve extends this study of the very small to the medium of motion pictures, an imaginative idea for 1913. The finale of the tale shows many different clues dovetailing together to reveal a coherent solution: always an exciting experience for mystery fans.
"The Ghouls" also deals with innovative motion picture bio-photography, the best part of a more minor story.
The scientific aspects of "The Death House" seem dubious, especially the idea that other scientists would overlook the discoveries made so easily by Craig Kennedy in the tale. The story does contain a touching account of a widow's attempt to help her husband, who is in Sing Sing Prison. Director Maurice Tourneur would soon make a film on location at this famous US prison in Ossining, New York, Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915). This delightful crime movie was released on video from the US Library of Congress. Among prose writers, Jacques Futrelle's famous "The Problem of Cell 13" (1905) had also dealt with a prison, and Jack Boyle would soon write about prison life in Boston Blackie.
The War Terror. Reeve's fourth Craig Kennedy collection, The War Terror (collected 1915), opens with a politically remarkable story, "The War Terror" (1914), which appeared shortly after the start of the war in Europe in August 1914. Reeve indicates sympathy with the anti-war goals of the villains, but is opposed to their violent methods.
"The Air Pirate" is one of Reeve's most lyrical stories. It creates an elaborate land-and-waterscape, centering on a bay in Long Island, and populates it with different kinds of light. It has the visionary qualities one associates with William Hope Hodgson, but in a gentler and more joyous spirit. Its setting among rich socialites enjoying themselves anticipates Reeve's "The Social Gangster" in his next collection. Its water and boats subject matter anticipates "The Sixth Sense" in that same upcoming collection.
The Social Gangster. Reeve's fifth Craig Kennedy collection, The Social Gangster (collected 1916), is set at a turning point in American history. It is the period just before the Jazz Age. There are clear signs here that Americans want to party, and live wilder and more bon vivant life styles than before. The two opening tales in the collection, "The Social Gangster" (1915) and "The Tango Thief" (1915), offer vivid and frank looks at this new attitude. (These tales seem to be known as "To Save Gloria" and "The Dancing Blackmailer" in the British edition.)
"The Social Gangster" depicts nightclubs as places where women can hire "a new class of men", gigolos or lounge lizards who quietly sell their romantic services to women. Here it is men who have become the sex objects, dressing up in fashionable clothes, and having elaborate manners. But the story also shows that mainstream men are part of the same movement, with the wealthy husband showing off his social status by dressing up as the Master of the Fox Hunt at the Hunt Club where he is president. This is a place where nouveau riche Americans can pretend to be part of ancient English traditions. It's a "swagger organization", Reeve points out. It's all an elaborate pretense: there is no actual fox in the hunt, which is simply following trails of scent. This is both humane, and an expression of the swagger of the characters in creating social rituals. A decade later, Jazz Age chronicler F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby (1925) will have his hero dressed to the teeth in the male finery used by Reeve's lounge lizards, and his rich villain in the hunt costume used by the wealthy man in Reeve's story. Reeve's tale is a vivid look at these new possibilities for men. Reeve locates all of this as part of New York City culture, as Fitzgerald later will, with the rich Society types in both hanging out on Long Island. In both Reeve and Fitzgerald, women find these kind of men irresistible, something that both the men and the women seem to enjoy, despite all of Reeve's narrator's moralistic clucking. Coincidentally or not, Reeve and Fitzgerald both attended Princeton University, very much a home in that era of this sort of high life.
The other best detective tale in The Social Gangster, "The Sixth Sense" (1915), deals with a whole host of new communication devices. Like the best stories in The Dream Doctor, these are creative versions of the telephone. "The Social Gangster" also has a subplot, dealing with a different sort of extension of another communications medium, radio. Both tales also have Italian characters, probably reflecting the fact that Marconi, the famous inventor of radio, was Italian. Among the most vivid images in "The Sixth Sense" are the sparks in the stable. This image is echoed by the iodine at the end of "The Evil Eye", another tale in the collection.
"The Evil Eye" (1915) is an entertaining tale, involving strange chemicals, as well as some non-stereotyped sidelights on race relations circa 1915. Its basic plot has similarities to Agatha Christie's "The Cretan Bull" in The Labors of Hercules (1939 - 1940). One of the chemicals in "The Evil Eye", pilocarpine, also turns up in Christie's "The Thumb Mark of St. Peter" (1928) in The Thirteen Problems. Reeve's nightclub in "The Social Gangster" with its irresistible gigolo finds an echo in a similar club in Christie's "The Capture of Cerberus" in The Labors of Hercules. Reeve's constant use of romantic subplots playing both a role in the mystery, and a love interest strand for readers who like love stories, is also a feature of much of Christie's fiction.
The Panama Plot. Reeve's seventh Craig Kennedy collection, The Panama Plot (collected 1918), starts out with six tales set in Latin America, followed by four US laid tales. The Latin American stories have some common features:
The tales are somewhat on the middle level of Reeve's achievement. They all tend to be weak as mystery stories, with the exception of "The Black Diamond". The identity of the criminal in them is often arbitrary. However, the knowledge makes a good reading experience.
The Narrator. The Craig Kennedy stories are typically narrated by Kennedy's friend Walter Jameson, a reporter for the Star, a New York City newspaper. Walter Jameson is a "Watson": an admiring friend of the sleuth who narrates the sleuth's cases. Like most Watsons, Jameson is not very good at detection. His ideas about the mystery turn out to be dead wrong in "The Campaign Grafter", for example. However, Jameson is more intelligent in his remarks than many other Watsons. He also seems to be a good newspaper reporter - which after all is his job.
The Dope Fiends. "The Dope Fiends" (1914) depicts cocaine usage, and is a fiercely anti-drug tale. It is a full early map to how both drug addiction and drug use are portrayed in literature. There are the lying addicts, willing to do anything for a fix; the sleazy low level dealers, cheaply hip, who could have stepped right out of Miami Vice; the crooked pharmacist; the Dr. Feelgoods; and the man higher up behind it all, the one the detectives really want to catch. There is also a complete portrait of the economics of the trade. The emphasis on top criminals probably came from Reeve's fictional role model, MacHarg and Balmer's Luther Trant stories (1909 - 1910), which include the classic "The Man Higher Up" (not a story about drugs).
Reeve's depiction of cocaine is also strikingly modern: the temporary exhilaration, the association with the popular performing arts, in this case exotic dancing, and the delusory sense of unlimited potential for success. There is also the dependency on ever greater doses of the drug, and the negative reactions from repeated use. It is hard to see anything in subsequent literature that extends this portrait: Reeve was doing first in the 1910's what most subsequent authors will simply repeat. One wonders where Reeve got his information. Another story in the Constance Dunlap series, "The Clairvoyants", is a pioneer depiction of Freud's ideas in literature, and perhaps Reeve started with Freud on cocaine, and went on to other sources, such as the police. Reeve describes cocaine as being only recently outlawed in this story, so perhaps it was much on the public mind. Here as elsewhere Reeve is completely modern in tone. Drugs, such as mescal, make prominent appearances in some of the Craig Kennedy stories.
Later, in the 1930's, both Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie will include the dope trade in their stories, with a singular lack of realism: both make it sound like a Satanic cult participated in mainly by rich members of Cafe society, and sold by ingenious if implausible drug supply networks whose literary source seems to be cheap spy thrillers. The sorts of spy rings prominent in English fiction, with secret warehouses, ingenious means of transporting secret documents, members with aliases, and odd communication schemes have simply been adapted by 1930's British writers to form a portrait of drug cartels. Reeve is far more realistic, and leaves behind a grim portrait of some of the human wreckage caused by the drug traffic.
The drugstores in "The Dope Fiends" and in Morley's The Haunted Bookshop (1919) are so sinister that one wonders what ordinary people thought about them in the teens. Later in the 30's Mary Roberts Rinehart will depict them mainly as well lit places that are open all night and where one can make a telephone call. This suggests urban alienation and the sort of loneliness shown in Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks (1942).
Reeve's work in these tales is more cynical than his Craig Kennedy stories. Those tales often depicted the well to do as corrupt, and had plenty of social commentary. But they usually showed the police as honest. Here there is Drummond, a crooked detective, who makes deals with and shakes down the drug dealers. Constance Dunlap herself is a reformed thief, and her friends are deep in vice and drug use. It is a very dark portrait, and definitive in its condemnation of drug use. I liked the world of the heroic, idealistic Kennedy better, but have to admit that this one has compelling qualities, too.
The Clairvoyants. "The Clairvoyants" (1914) has become famous for its mention of Freud, very early in the history of detective fiction, and perhaps of literature of any kind. The tale explores Freud's theories of dream interpretation. Two of a woman's dreams are given interpretations, first by a crooked psychic, then using Freud's ideas by heroine Constance Dunlap. Dunlap's interpretations focus on sexuality, which she says Freud views as the basis of dreams.
The dreams, as interpreted by Dunlap, focus on the feelings the woman has for two rival men in her life. They show the men as attractive, and sources of sexuality. Like Reeve's later Kennedy tales "The Social Gangster" and "The Tango Thief", "The Clairvoyants" shows male sexuality and its attractive display, this time in dreams.
The crooked psychic is billed as a "dream doctor". This echoes the title of one of Reeve's Kennedy stories, "The Dream Doctor". "The Dream Doctor" is also Freud-based, and is close in its ideas to "The Clairvoyants". Both stories show:
"The Clairvoyants" is barely any sort of mystery story. The reader and Dunlap suspect right away that the psychic is a phony, and there is otherwise no mystery puzzle in the plot. SPOILER. Dunlap does do a nice piece of detective work, in deducing that the woman has worked with a stockbroker before. This is based on Dunlap's conviction that dreams reflect the past.
Peter Haining, in the excellent anthology Murder on the Railways (1996), says the first Sprague stories appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1911. A bibliography of Scribner's Magazine does NOT confirm this.
Railroad Mysteries. The short stories differ from Victor L. Whitechurch's railway mysteries in that Lynde often shows us railroads and tunnels being constructed by crews of engineers and workmen, while Whitechurch confines himself to long established railways in Britain. Lynde's stories deal not just with railway lore, but a whole world of engineering, technical and building detail. This detail is often heavily grounded in science and technology. It relates Lynde's work not just to "railway" fiction, but to the broader world of scientific detection as practiced in England and the United States. Lynde's detective, Calvin Sprague, is in fact of chemist, not a railroad man, sent out West by the US Government to study soil samples. Sprague's vast array of scientific knowledge of all types gives him the ability to penetrate and counteract a wide variety of criminal schemes.
The emphasis on public and industrial life in Lynde, and the fighting of villains composed of wealthy, robber baron era plutocratic forces, links Lynde's tales to other American scientific detective writers of the era, such as MacHarg and Balmer. Lynde in fact uses "the man higher up" to refer to such big time corporate crooks, just as MacHarg and Balmer did in their Luther Trant mystery short story, "The Man Higher Up" (1909). This was included in MacHarg and Balmer's collection The Achievements of Luther Trant, in book form in 1910. From the dates, one suspects that MacHarg and Balmer used this phrase before Lynde.
Lynde's characters are largely engineers and railway men. They have a uniform characterization: most are handsome, virile young men, out to build great railways across the vast continent. This can lead to a story in which the twenty main characters all have nearly the same personality and characterization. Tales about such daring young engineers, building great projects in remote locations, were standard in the adventure fiction of the time, often having no mystery elements. Lynde's work, with its rich engineering and railroad detail, and skimpy mystery aspects, can often seem to be essentially part of this non-mystery adventure genre. Lynde's characters have almost no private lives; the romantic intrigues prevalent in most mystery fiction are simply absent here, and the stories tend to have all-male casts.
Mystery Plot. A limitation of Lynde's work is its simplicity as a mystery. The mystery plot of "The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three" will be easily guessed by most readers. The unfolding "mystery" is so obvious, in fact, that the story seems more like a non-mystery oriented thriller, rather than a true work of mystery and detection.
Detective Work. At each tale's end, Sprague sometimes explains the detective work that caused him to unravel the mystery. This detective work is usually sound and logical. In some of the tales, such as "The Mystery of the Black Blight", it is admirably inventive and detailed. Good detective work, like this, is usually considered a positive accomplishment in mystery fiction.
On the negative side, the facts Sprague uses to do his detection, are NOT shared with the reader throughout the course of the tale. They are only revealed by Sprague at the end. In other words, the tales lack "fair play", to use the standard term. A lack of fair play is usually considered a flaw in a mystery work. A lack of fair play prevents readers from solving the mystery themselves - because they lack the facts.
Landscapes with Technology. Lynde's emphasis on complex, constructed landscapes can recall the works of Arthur Morrison. The tunnel and surrounding railroad lines in "The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three" are described in vivid detail. As in Morrison, this landscape is full of technology, and its operation is explained in terms of scientific principles.
Another large scale landscape filled with technology is in Lynde's "The Cloud-Bursters". This landscape has a linear quality: it follows the course of a river, step-by-step.
Male Bonding. Detective Calvin Sprague male-bonds with other men:
The last story in Scientific Sprague, "The High Kibosh" gets Sprague involved in heterosexual romance. This has not been part of Sprague's characterization up to that point. Sprague falls for the daughter of a wealthy man. This recalls J. Montague Smith in Lynde's The Real Man.
The Wire Devil. "The Wire Devil" (1912) shows the wide variety of people who can operate a telegraph in that era. This is of both technical and sociological interest. The telegraph is the main fast communication device in the world of the story. We also get a look at how telegraphy communication can be subverted by the bad guy. This story is as much about the telegraph, as it is about railroads.
All of these telegraph operators are male. But Lynde's "In Christmas Cañon" (1913), apparently stars a heroic woman operator. This was filmed as Across the Burning Trestle (Richard Ridgely, 1914).
Like many detectives before or since, Sprague in "The Wire Devil" is interested in psychology - although that term is not used. Sprague can just look at people and discern their thoughts, based on their expression and gestures. He does this twice. I find this hard to believe.
"The Wire Devil" keeps emphasizing how big, strong and good-looking Sprague is. He is what would today be called a "hunk". He is also an expert on both science and detection.
Sprague gets results in a hurry, after he shows up and starts investigating.
High Finance in Cromarty Gulch. "High Finance in Cromarty Gulch" brings back many of the characters from the first tale, "The Wire Devil". So will later tales in the series. The stories also reference businesses in more than one tale, such as the local newspaper, and the Topaz Hotel. Towns also recur. All these are examples of "world-building".
Both "The Wire Devil" and "High Finance in Cromarty Gulch" emphasize that Sprague is an "amateur detective" - a phrase used in the stories. He's not paid for his detective work. Sprague earns his living as a federal government chemist, and does his detection as an unpaid hobby or avocation. In both "The Wire Devil" and "High Finance in Cromarty Gulch", he gets involved because he's a college friend of the local railroad superintendent Maxwell.
Learning skills is important for the characters. Detective Tarbell wants to learn from Sprague. Maxwell learns about railroads from his employer Ford. This reminds us that the 1910's saw an explosive rise on how-to books that taught various professions and their skills.
Maxwell is shown doodling on his blotter at one point - although the term doodling is not used.
The road house anticipates the road house in "The Frame-Up" (1915) by Richard Harding Davis. Lynde attributes the rise of road houses to the coming of the automobile.
The grounds of the road house are described. They form a landscape: something that will be popular in Golden Age mystery fiction.
There is also a short story "The Terror in the Timanyoni" (1919), set in the same region as the Sprague tales.
Lynde's novel The Real Man (1915 in book form) has J. Montague Smith as the hero. It tells the story of the building of the dam. It also includes characters that reappear in "The Cloud-Bursters": Williams, good guy lawyer Bob Stillings, Dick Maxwell, his brother-in-law William Starbuck, Colonel Baldwin. It does not include Calvin Sprague, or railway detective Arch Tarbell.
"The Reincarnation of Montague Smith" is a novella that appeared in The Popular Magazine (November 1, 1911). This was seven months before the first Calvin Sprague tale "The Wire Devil" was in the same magazine. I have not read or seen a copy of "The Reincarnation of Montague Smith". But will make a guess: it might be the original version of The Real Man. If so, we would have a chronology:
Lynde's output is large. There might be other tales connected to the above works.
Titles. The title of The Real Man likely suggests to modern readers the idea that some male is especially masculine, a "real man". But: that is not how it is used in the story. Instead, it refers to a man (J. Montague Smith) raised in civilization, who has to come out to the remote Western locale of the tale. There his inner, actual self begins to emerge, away from the influence of civilization. In other words, the real being inside of him gets to flourish. This is what he is really like as a man - that is, the "real man".
Speculation: the word "Reincarnation" in "The Reincarnation of Montague Smith" refers to roughly the same thing. A new version of the hero emerges away from civilization; this version is a "Reincarnation" of the hero.
Alice Gerstenberg wrote a one-act play Overtones (1913). Each of the women in the play is represented by two different actresses. One plays their woman's "primitive self", the other plays the woman's "educated woman". This is a somewhat similar contrast to what we find in The Real Man. The "primitive self" is the authentic person, with their gut instincts and desires. The "educated woman" is the polite but deceptive face they have learned to put on for the world.
Country Club. The opening of The Real Man praises belonging to a small town country club as the zenith of human joy. Similarly early sections of "The High Kibosh" in Scientific Sprague are enthusiastic about the local country club in this remote Western outpost. Francis Lynde does not convey any sort of irony about this. Country clubs were an ideal, period. F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise (1920) would soon praise Princeton University as "the pleasantest country club in America".
Prose Style. I do like the name of the club in Scientific Sprague: it's the Town and Country Club. This is an example of Lynde riffing on a standard phrase, offering a clever variation on it. He does this throughout the book.
Film Version. Actor Maurice "Lefty" Flynn played J. Montague Smith in the silent film Bucking the Line (directed by Carl Harbaugh, 1921), based on an unnamed novel by Lynde. I've never seen seen it. One suspects Bucking the Line is a somewhat rewritten film version of The Real Man. Plot descriptions have both similarities to and differences from the story of The Real Man. In addition to J. Montague Smith, Colonel Baldwin is also a character in both book and film.
Publicity material shows the rugged Flynn in glamorized versions of the era's outdoor working gear: flared breeches and boots. This is a visual correlative of the glamorized builders in Lynde's tales.
Along with the science fiction, comes a University setting in the opening (Chapters 1, first part of 2). Such a college locale is also not found in any of the Sprague universe tales I've read yet. Lynde clearly regards technical and engineering colleges with admiration. He depicts them as full of cutting-edge equipment.
SPOILERS. The high-tech science fiction experiment that starts the mystery (Chapter 1) includes a gleaming "cone of bluish-green light". This combines color, geometry and a light show.
The text of "The Vanishing Point" can be found at Roy Glashan's Library.
It stars a young doctor who goes out on an ambulance call. This medical background causes me to tentatively classify it as being a Scientific tale.
For most of its length "The Vanishing Ambulance" is more a thriller than a "mystery to be solved". But at the end, the doctor figures out the mystery of who is behind the events. This allows the tale to be classified as a detective story.
An excellent film thriller about ambulances: Emergency Call (Edward L. Cahn, 1933).
"In the Shadow of the Pines" takes place in a North Woods logging camp, apparently in Canada. A logging camp is a technological locale, and the story is tentatively placed among Scientific Detection. Such a locale recalls a bit the railroad construction camps in Francis Lynde's Scientific Sprague. However, Andrews seems less detailedly technological than Lynde, and "In the Shadow of the Pines" lacks a technologist sleuth-hero comparable to Lynde's.
The North Wood background also recalls Hesketh Prichard's November Joe: Detective of the Woods (1913).
SPOILER. "In the Shadow of the Pines" has "how-done-it" aspects: there is a mystery about the means used to commit the murder.
And the story takes place in the public realm familiar to us from Arthur B. Reeve. Stagg uses the same sort of embezzlement from a bank situation that another scientifically oriented detective writer, Mary Roberts Rinehart, used in The Circular Staircase (1907). While Rinehart set her story in a country house in the days following the embezzlement, Stagg set his tale in the bank itself, right at the time of the robbery.
Stagg's story also reminds one more than a little of Stagg's other American contemporaries Jacques Futrelle and Thomas Hanshew, both of whom fall among the impossible crime specialists of their time. The story does not promote itself as an impossible crime tale, but it is indeed darned hard to figure out how this crime could have been committed. Futrelle also wrote a classic involving bank embezzlement: "The Man Who Was Lost". "The Fee", the New York City working class kid who assists Colton, recalls a similar boy Dollops, who works with Hanshew's detective Hamilton Cleek.
Stagg's tale is more a full fledged puzzle plot detective story than are the works of S.H. Adams, for instance. Indeed, S.S. Van Dine clearly tagged Stagg as an intuitionist writer. Stagg was one of the authors burlesqued by Agatha Christie in Partners in Crime (1929); and this story in particular seems to be the subject of Christie's spoof. So for all its obscurity today, Stagg's work was fully known to some of the major intuitionist writers of the Golden Age, Van Dine and Christie. Van Dine also felt the compensating powers given to Colton by his creator were unbelievable, and that he suffered in realism compared with Bramah's blind sleuth Max Carrados. Christie's parody also hints at a lack of realism in Colton's treatment. I would extend these remarks to a broader criticism, that not only the treatment of blindness, but many aspects of Stagg's writing, suffer from implausibility. Still, even if implausible, it is joyously inventive, and I am looking forward to more of Stagg's fiction.
It is hard to know who the first blind detective in fiction was. The other early blind sleuth, Ernest Bramah's detective Max Carrados, also appeared at roughly the same time. At least some of the short stories in Bramah's first collection about Max Carrados were first published in late 1913 in the periodical News of the World. The collection, entitled Max Carrados, then appeared in book form in 1914. Until there is a full bibliography of periodical appearances for each writer, it will be hard to establish priority. Warning to readers: the common assertions by several mystery historians that Max Carrados is the "first blind detective in literature" cannot be firmly backed up by what we know today about the subject. Thornley Colton could well be the first blind detective of fiction.
Isabel Ostrander created the blind sleuth Damon Gaunt, who appeared in the pleasant-enough but fairly ordinary mystery novel At One-Thirty (1915); he seems just a bit later than Thornley Colton and Max Carrados. One suspects that At One-Thirty is the same work as the magazine serial Eyes that Saw Not, which appeared in The Cavalier starting in February 14, 1914. There is a vivid portrait of what seems to be Damon Gaunt on the cover of this issue.
MacHarg and Balmer produced a mystery novel with a blind hero, The Blind Man's Eyes (serialized in The Blue Book Magazine in 1915, in book form 1916).
Later, in the 1930's, Baynard Kendrick will create famed blind detective Captain Duncan Maclain.
The novel contains a preface, in which Stagg tries to justify some of Colton's amazing abilities, by linking them to accomplishments of real-life blind people of the era, including a blind doctor. The novel itself opens in a fancy restaurant, just like the opening of "The Keyboard of Silence". Such sections seem like overtures, or curtain raisers, to the main acts of Stagg's tales.
Silver Sandals is an inoffensive novel, but uneven in its quality. It has a startling opening scene, the best thing in the book. But the macabre scene is eventually "explained" in an arbitrary fashion, that never links the opening events to any motive that is part of the real world, or to anything that is logical or consistent. This non-explanation is bound to disappoint any fan of Golden Age mystery fiction, who expects a logically constructed puzzle. Stagg sometimes wrote excellent puzzle plot mysteries, such as "The Keyboard of Silence" - but not here.
The actual murder mystery does get fully solved: this book is a real detective novel, not a thriller.
The subplot about the missing waiter is inventive, in a pure mystery sense. It comes to an impressive solution in Chapter 9, halfway through the book.
Silver Sandals has a quality of sinister mystery hanging over the characters, the sense they are all trapped in some dark, secret events. This quality is quite powerful in some early American detective novels, such as Cleveland Moffett's Through the Wall (1909), and the works of Anna Katherine Green. As in such Green books as The Chief Legatee (1906), we eventually discover that many of the characters have been involved in sinister subcultures, that stretch back over decades of their lives.
Also somewhat Green-like, is the way that partial explanations of the mysterious plot keep dribbling out, chapter after chapter, with a sense that the darkness of the mystery is slowly being penetrated. Stagg manages to make most of these revelations fairly interesting. They are not fair play: the reader cannot logically anticipate them through the use of clues. But they do form logical extensions of preceding events. The revelations come at a fairly slow pace: Stagg is trying to fill up 300 pages. But they do have a relentless, implacable quality.
Stagg has more Green-like features, in which Colton looks over the crime scene, gathering clues that help him reconstruct the crime (Chapter 11). Such reconstructions were Green specialties, something she inherited from Gaboriau. Colton's version is also logically designed, to show off his blind detective's special skills.
Should you read Silver Sandals? Only if you have a special interest in this sort of Edwardian melodrama kind of detective fiction. The book is best in its first half (Chapters 1 - 11), which has atmosphere and storytelling. The book would make a good movie, especially if the action concentrates on the first half of Stagg's novel.
Ball's tone is a good deal livelier and more slangy than Reeve's, however. Ball tries to give a satiric account of fast living in New York City.
The book is strongest in the first eight chapters. After this, the invention flags, the science mainly disappears, and we get more of a routine thriller. Detection disappears too: in Chapter 9, the sleuth figures out who the villain is just by looking at him! There are few mystery or detection elements after this point.
Ball's knowledge of motion picture technology seems sophisticated. Ball was the author of a how-to-write-screenplays guide The Art of the Photoplay (1913), whose title page gives a long resume of Ball's employement in the film industry. Its dedication is to the members of the "Screen Club of New York". Ball also wrote Photoplay Scenarios: How to Write and Sell Them (1915).
Shirley differs from many other sleuths of his era, in that he is unequivocally heterosexual. He has a full scale romance with a heroine who aids him in his work in this novel. The author repeatedly shows Shirley's sexual passion for the heroine.
Shirley also differs from many other sleuths in that he is an ex-jock, having been a star football player at college.
While Shirley has the scientific skills of other detectives of the era, he also gets involved in violence, in a way that does not resemble most members of the Scientific School. He regularly has to battle gangsters and hitmen, and gets involved with shoot-outs. The level of violence anticipates hard-boiled pulp private eyes of the 1920's. Shirley is very much a private detective for hire, and he works with a tough ex-cop who runs a private detective agency.
Shirley has also studied "jiu-jitsu" under a Japanese teacher (Chapter 3). As far back as 1915, white US detectives were mastering the mysterious arts of the East, to aid them in their work! Ball has his terminology right, even in this era: his sleuth now understands the ways of "samurais".
The upper crust villain also loves the arts. He has a large art collection, which anticipates Philo Vance's art collection, seen in Vance's debut in The Benson Murder Case (1926). However, the villain's art collection in The Voice on the Wire is not as intellectually sophisticated as Vance's, or as reflective of world art. The villain seems especially proud of his etchings by Whistler - linking the villain to the Aesthetic Movement (Chapter 16). The villain also has a crayon sketch by Franz von Lenbach, the Bavarian portrait painter who is best known for painting Richard Wagner, and his over 100 portraits of German military leader Otto von Bismarck. There is perhaps a political undertone here. Ball also makes an interesting observation on the paradox of the villain's love of art and his sinister lack of morals: "That such a connoisseur of art objects could harbor in so broad and cultured a mind the machinations of such infamy seemed almost incredible. The riddle was not new with Reginald Warren's case: for morals and "culture" have shown their sociological, economic and even diplomatic independence of each other from the time when the memory of man runneth not!"
Among the philosophers the villain admires are Tolstoi and Kropotkin. But Ball shows little interest in or understanding of the anarchism these writers preached.
The villain is one of the young men who like to hang around tango dance halls. Ball describes such young men in terms similar to Arthur B. Reeve: "that peculiarly Manhattanse type of hanger-on — well-groomed, happy-go-hellward youths who danced, laughed and drank well" (Chapter 4); "The newcomers were garbed in that debonair and "cultured" modishness so dear to the hearts of magazine illustrators" (Chapter 9). However, these young men seem to be richer than Reeve's polished gigolos - the men in Ball seem to have ties to Wall Street. Still, in both Reeve and Ball there is something transgressive about these polished young men. They seem to be upsetting the social and sexual order. Naturally, in the real world outside of fiction, this characterization and look seems to be making a big hit with the public! By the time of Dashiell Hammett's "The Scorched Face" (1925), such polished clothes and appearance have spread to lower middle class young salesmen in San Francisco. Hammett also sees such young men as ominous and distinctly sinister.
Ball notes that the food at a typical tango tea-room consists of "indigestible pastries". Ball's tone is satiric: he is giving an inside look about everything that is second-rate in the fashionable world. Such an observation would never appear in Arthur B. Reeve. In Reeve, the reader is always seeing what Reeve considers "the best" or "most advanced": the latest and greatest in society, science and life. Reeve might consider tango tea-rooms as evil, but there is nothing second rate about them! At least in Reeve's depiction. Ball's sly skepticism pervades his slangy, humorous comments on the city scene throughout The Voice on the Wire.
The Voice on the Wire is full of what the author calls "gangsters". These violent, sinister members of criminal gangs are not quite what most people think of as gangsters today. In 1915, a "gangster" was a lower class member of a two-bit street corner gang, a violent, unscrupulous brute who engaged in murder, theft and other violent crimes. Only in the mid-1920's did big-time gangsters involved with illegal booze like Al Capone emerge - the modern image of the "gangster". The depiction of the gangster in The Voice on the Wire recalls movies of the era, such as D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), and Raoul Walsh's Regeneration (1915). A theatrical manager says that "the public... [is] just crazy about gangster melodrama. They're paying opera prices for the old time ten-twent-and-thirt-melodrama, right on Broadway" (Chapter 12), an interesting observation about which I would like to know more.
In general, Ball seems observant of social trends. His ideas are probably superficial. Still, one of the selling points of his book was undoubtedly that it gave readers an inside look at all sorts of glamorous or fascinating activities in New York City.
Some ancestors of Poate's psychological tales:
A. E. W. Mason's interest, by contrast, is in the depiction of monstrously abnormal killers. These characters are rooted in horror fiction. While clearly depicted by Mason as mentally aberrant, they are mainly used to give the reader chills.
Van Dine's approach is very different from either of these writers. It is based in what we would today call cognitive psychology. Philo Vance believes that all people have characteristic mental patterns, and that by studying the patterns of a crime and its suspects, one can identify the author of a crime. It is similar to the way an art historian can identify the authorship of an anonymous painting, by comparing its visual style to those of known painters. This is an interesting idea, and one that would appeal to an art connoisseur like Van Dine, but one which he never really applies in much depth to his detective novels.
Rufus King also has his detective interested in psychology. In King's case, this is mainly the aberrant psychology of criminals, but King's own popularized brand of the same. Valcour mainly encounters beautiful but evil seductresses, weaving their webs of crime, and his female characters often encounter handsome, suave crooks whose appeal masks heaven knows what deviltry. "Psychology" in King is often limited to an exploration of what these sexy villainesses and villains are up to.
But all of this is embedded in a Carolina based tale, which also makes it very different in feel from Bentiron. Poate has loaded his story with traditional Southern atmosphere, including white columned mansions for the town's leading citizens, shrewd, homespun country sheriffs, small town politics and bootleggers in the hills who are afraid of revenuers. Think of a cross between Gone With the Wind and The Dukes of Hazzard, and you will get the idea.
Poate has some good descriptive writing: see the scrub oak country visit (start of Chapter 21).
Mainly this book is a minor curiosity. Its leisurely paced storytelling is sometimes fun to read, but anyone should be able to figure out the mystery. The solution involves one of the mystery clichés Craig Rice later said she would love to spoof: see the introduction to Rice's People Vs Withers and Malone. I've always wondered about the origin of this cliché: maybe this book is it!
A biographical sketch. The sketch says that Wickham wrote articles in strong support of Italian fascist dictator Mussolini. This support is really offensive.
The sketch says Harvey Wickham wrote a short story "The Spider-Man" (1908).
Atmosphere and Architecture. The Clue of the Primrose Petal is best in its thriller-like opening (Chapters 1-4, start of 5). This is rich in atmosphere and setting: the book's main artistic strengths. These passages are strongly rooted in architecture.
Aspects of the opening's milieu are surreal. Surrealism is an important strategy in much classic American detective fiction.
The edition of The Clue of the Primrose Petal I read, does not contain a map or floor plan. Normally, I would lament that absence. But perhaps this lack makes the book even more surreal, with the heroes moving through a house that neither they nor the reader understand very well.
Some later passages share such atmospheric/architectural strengths:
Mystery Plot. At the end of the opening section, a murder occurs. The rest of the book is a who-done-it murder mystery. This mystery shows mild professional competence, but not much inspiration.
Scientific Detection. The Clue of the Primrose Petal (1921) has features that place it in Scientific Detection:
Influence from Green?. The Clue of the Primrose Petal perhaps shows mild influence from Anna Katherine Green:
Racism. The later parts of the book include racist stereotypes, in depicting a character. This major flaw sinks the book.
Sexism. The opening shows an admirable heroine, a professional working woman with aspirations to do detective work. But later sections have her mainly interested in looking attractive and snagging her man. This is a step down for her, and for the book's depiction of women's potential in general.
I learned about Rebecca N. Porter and The Rest Hollow Mystery from Ontos. Thank you!
The puzzling situation at the start, involves the hero's experiences in a strange house. Similarly, the opening of The Clue of the Primrose Petal (1921) by Harvey Wickham puts the hero and heroine into puzzling experiences in a strange house. (Please see the previous entry in this article, for an account of Harvey Wickham.) Both houses are large and in the country. The Clue of the Primrose Petal soon explains what is going on, at least in part (start of Chapter 2). But the mysterious events at the start of The Rest Hollow Mystery stay mysterious through much of the book.
The Rest Hollow Mystery has a lot of story and plot. Events keep happening, which holds the reader's interest. But The Rest Hollow Mystery has little action, if by "action" we mean violence or fighting. It thus differs from a lot of later crime fiction in pulp magazines, which are often action-packed.
California. The Rest Hollow Mystery is set in various locales in California, from big cities to small towns. Porter was a Californian, and the book occasionally has what one suspects is authentic local color. What was it like to go to a restaurant in San Francisco in 1922? The book has interesting details I would not have guessed. The restaurant seems cosmopolitan in its cuisine.
The novel reflects many features of the American Scientific school of its day:
There are three different sets of impossible crimes in the story:
Into Thin Air contains a number of experimental features, offering variations on the typical detective story construction. Such experimentation derives not from the Scientific School, but from an eclectic series of general purpose detective novels.
An unknown person invites eight guests to a party at a swank penthouse apartment. No one knows who the host is. But the guests discover that they are locked in. And the radio tells them that their host is going to kill them, one by one. This is largely the same setup Agatha Christie used eight years later in And Then There Were None. Christie undoubtedly knew this book, and built upon its ideas. However, Christie's version is also much more entertaining. While both authors eventually provide a fair play solution to the mystery, Christie's is different - and vastly more imaginative.
Another key difference in the two works: The Invisible Host is steeped in technology. The authors have come up with endless high tech devices to keep the guests trapped in the penthouse. For example, doors that will electrocute anyone who touches them. In many ways, this is a scientific detective story. They also make a big deal about the radio that speaks with messages from their sinister host all night. Christie has none of this. Christie instead isolates her guests by the simple device of having them all stranded on an island. Low tech, but effective. There is also no equivalent of the radio in Christie's novel.
The Invisible Host is pretty grim. It is full of despairing meditations by the guests about approaching death. This might be realistic, but it is not what most people want to read after a hard day's work. Nor are the endless sadistic technological traps set by the bad guy really much fun. The book is a disappointing curiosity of detective fiction history.
Commentary on George Dyer:
How Done It?. The Catalyst Club has two chief merits. One is a "howdunit" mystery plot. It is not clear how the murder was committed: what physical methods were used. The Catalyst Club develops four different solutions to this puzzle, each a fairly plausible explanation of how the crime was committed.
The first solution is offered right away (Chapter 2). The other three possible answers emerge in stages throughout the novel. Because at least one solution is set forth at the book's start, the killing never remotely looks like an "impossible crime". The killing always looks totally possible, even if its actual method of execution is a riddle. This makes the killing in The Catalyst Club different from the howdunits of many other authors, which often look impossible and which make their plots "impossible crime" puzzles.
Forensics. The other chief merit of The Catalyst Club, is the result of the first forensic investigation of the corpse and crime scene (Chapter 4). This is one of the most detailed forensic examinations in a Golden Age era mystery.
Who Done It?. The Catalyst Club also has many limitations. The identity of the murderer is easily figured out. SPOILER. This is mainly because the killer is linked to a phony alibi of a kind that is utterly standard and common. As soon as I read this alibi, I knew who the killer was. Also, the killer is a standard sociological type, whose profession and attitudes were often the sign of a crazed killer in old mysteries.
Only the last of the four explanations of the "howdunit" gives us any clue to the murderer: they are mainly methods that could be used by anyone.
The best clue to the murderer involves the unusual hammer found at the crime scene. The hammer has a strange shape, one I've never seen - and which the book's characters had never seen either. The book includes a drawing of the hammer: one of the multi-media features that sometimes occur in old detective fiction. This makes the shape clear. Both the hammer's shape, and forensic details, provide well-done clues to the killer's identity.
Group Detection. Detection in The Catalyst Club is unusual, in that it is performed by a whole team of sleuths, the Catalyst Club of the title, rather than by a single detective. The book makes a big deal of this approach. At one point, the author declares that good detective work requires a whole team, and that the individual genius sleuth should be discarded as an approach.
I am less impressed with this idea as some sort of great innovation, than the author himself is. Most mystery novels draw on the local police force as an investigating team. Whether the lead is a cop himself, or an amateur or private eye, usually there are police in the background to do leg work, forensics, manhunts and other team-requiring business. And if the sleuth needs scientific expertise or skill in a foreign language, there is usually a friendly professor with whom he consults. Thus, most mystery novels draw on a whole "team" of detectives, while maintaining one sleuth in the lead role as chief investigator in the book.
Characters. The Catalyst Club is mainly populated with "types", rather than genuinely characterized individuals: another limitation. We get a generic young crime reporter, a standard chemistry-lab head who does forensic work, a rich businessman robber baron, a typical wealthy nephew, a spoiled rich girl and so on. They all seem like types we've met before.
The energetic crime reporter Persen "Buzz" Drake is convincing in his job performance. George Dyer had worked as a newspaperman in San Francisco, and there is a lot of detail about a reporter's life. However, none of this detail seems especially original.
The most original character in The Catalyst Club is Newton Bulger, one of the sleuths. He is a middle-aged man of apparently working class origin, who is an expert on every sort of machinery (Chapter 1). He is currently working as an industrial machinery salesman: a white collar job, but still a sort of "working stiff" profession. Bulger applies his skill at machinery and the mechanical to analyzing crime scenes. As a character, he resembles a bit Polton in R. Austin Freeman's books and Archibald Hobson in Clifford Witting's Measure for Murder (1941). All of these men serve as reminders that the working class is rich in both intelligence and skills. Their mechanical expertise is of great use to everyone.
Violence and Misogyny. The crime in The Catalyst Club is grislier than most Golden Age mysteries: hardly a virtue from my point of view. We gets lots of gory detail. There was a subgenere of luridly violent pulp magazine short stories in the 1930's, but few "respectable" mysteries published as books that were this gruesome.
As in many of today's serial killer stories, the violence is against women: something many people today argue is offensive and misogynist. I agree. Also, the victim is a "woman being punished for sexual activity": one of the most misogynist cliches of today's horror films.
Racism. Two of the characters go out of their way, to use an ugly term to describe the elderly Chinese servant. This is highly objectionable.
Mystery Traditions. The Catalyst Club has link to the British Realist School. It resembles R. Austin Freeman of the Realist School in:
Landscape Architecture. The grounds of the murder mansion are depicted in detail, complete with map. Such an interest in landscape architecture was popular in many schools of mystery fiction, not just followers of Freeman Wills Crofts. For example, aspects of the grounds in The Catalyst Club recall The Dragon Murder Case (1933) by S.S. Van Dine.
Cyriak Brill-Jones' investigation of the murder grounds is especially good (Chapters 13, 14). It turns many features of the grounds into subjects for study and investigation.
The team's meeting place in a park (Chapter 1) is also original and imaginative, considered as a place mixing landscape and architecture. This meeting place combines aspects of "indoors" and "outdoors".
Much of The Catalyst Club takes place outside, but in outdoor locations that are also highly "architectural". In addition to the elaborately built-up mansion grounds and the team's meeting place in the park, there are also views of the San Francisco docks.
Murder in Hollywood combines this scientific detection with thriller elements out of old time melodramas and tales of master criminals and their gangs. The best of this material involves the architecture of the spooky murder mansion. The book's first seven chapters contain this intriguing setting, along with the book's most interesting science: the discovery of the bizarre murder method.
Chapter 16 also contains a bit of both scientific detection (radio broadcasts) and unusual setting (a criminal hideout is disguised as an exclusive club, a gambit which recalls the Rogue school).
The solution completely lacks fair play: no clues have been shared with the reader, that would allow the reader to figure out who the killer is.
Another flaw: despite a cast of Hollywood movie people, we get few backstage looks into the movie industry. The discussion chiefly centers on how gossip in the press affects the movie business. Rex Huxford's researches into color film, however, do give a brief glimpse into a fascinating topic (start of Chapter 6).
Accident Ward. The "Accident Ward" is like today's Emergency Ward in a hospital, only it deals exclusively with all kinds of accident, as opposed to diseases. The early sections do indeed paint a picture of a typical night in the Ward (Chapters 2, 3; see also second half of Chapter 13). This material is a bit gruesome and downbeat. But it preserves a record of what such a Ward was like.
The young doctor hero casually drafts a visiting friend, who is not a medical worker, to help move patients and set up equipment (start of Chapter 2). Today hospitals would be terrified of the lawsuits that might result from having amateurs handling patients.
Architecture and Alibi. We get an atmospheric tour of the other sections of the hospital late at night (Chapter 11). This points out interesting architectural features of the hospital. Unusual architecture is a Golden Age mystery tradition. Unfortunately, unlike many other authors' detective stories, this architecture plays little role in the mystery plot.
More relevant to the mystery plot is an alley leading into the hospital. The hospital was built around it (two discussions of the alley are in the middle of Chapter 4). This unusual architecture anticipates alleys or tunnels leading into buildings in Rex Stout's "Bitter End" (1940) and Clifford Witting's Measure for Murder (1941).
SPOILERS. The hospital-alley architecture is tied to the suspect Forbes' alibi (middle of Chapter 4, end of Chapter 16). This is one of the novel's few good mystery puzzle plot ideas.
Mystery Plot: The Main Murder. The solution to who committed the murder is disappointing:
Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the way it was brought home to a likable character. (Admittedly, my desire to see good characters reach happy endings is perhaps more a personal preference than an axiom of literature!)
Mystery Plot: Secrets. Two of the characters have secrets, that are eventually revealed. SPOILERS:
However it is the young doctor hero Alan Spaulding who does most of the book's detective work, including figuring out who-done-it at the end. He also investigates Forbes' alibi.
Race. Early sections makes some positive points on race:
Rhoda Truax belonged to the far-left League of American Writers, accordion to its Wikipedia article.
Edwards' mysteries were published by the prestigious imprint The Crime Club. In the late 1930's Universal filmed eight Crime Club novels as a series of B-movies: an unusual concept for a movie series based on a publisher, rather than a star detective like the Saint. One of Edwards' medical mysteries was selected, filmed as Mystery of the White Room (1939). Please see this article on the Crime Club films.
The author was billed as "James G. Edwards, M.D." This was the pseudonym of James William MacQueen. Under the pseudonym Jay McHugh he also published a racy comic novel about an aphrodisiac, Sex Is Such Fun (1937).
We learn surprisingly little about how mental patients in the 1930's were actually treated by doctors. People hoping for an inside look at the medical world are going to be disappointed. Much of the focus is not on "normal" medicine of the era, but on a controversial doctor with new and bizarre ideas on treating the mentally ill. Mainly, he thinks tormenting them will distract from their mental problems. The normal hospital staff and the book's hero characters are appalled and want him fired: rightly so, in my opinion. A consequence of concentrating on this jerk is that we actually see very little of the normal medical operations of the clinic.
Attention is also paid to the internal politics of the clinic: fights between the noble and evil doctor for control, and the intervention of the sanitarium's board, known as the Staff Committee. This is also depicted on the most conventional level. These internal power struggles in a private sanitarium oddly anticipate The Cobweb (1955), a powerful film directed by Vincente Minnelli.
William F. Deeck has a list of crime fiction set in asylums at Mystery*File. The commenters extend this list with further books and stories.
I found Streamlined Murder hard to understand. Details never seemed quite in focus:
The Title. Streamlining was big in the 1930's. It was applied to trains to make them faster. It was also used to design everything from teacups to gas stations. The title Streamlined Murder cleverly evokes the subject.
Commentary on Zelda Popkin:
Mystery Plot. There is not much puzzle plot to Time Off for Murder as a whole.
Most interesting part of Mary Carner's detective technique: She is good at connecting new facts, to odd bits of apparent trivia learned in passing some chapters previously. The connections often surprised me. This technique is not profound: often times the connections are fairly obvious, once pointed out. But they are sound detection, being based strictly in facts and logic. They also have an element of surprise.
Racism. SPOILER. Time Off for Murder suffers from racism, in its Chinese villain. Its depiction of a black building caretaker also borders on stereotype, although this character is at least honest. These problems, combined with the book's lack of distinction as a mystery puzzle, ruin the work.
The Rich and their Clothes. An odd scene in Zelda Popkin's Time Off for Murder (1940) has a group of journalists oohing and ah-ing over the luxurious lifestyle of a wealthy New York City playboy. He gives them a tour of his fancy apartment. The reporters are especially impressed with his large wardrobe. It is unclear whether this scene is satire, making fun of materialism, or whether it is simply a realistic portrayal. The way these lower middle class reporters idolize a rich man and his possessions anticipates the boot-licking way many of today's middle class conservatives worship the rich.
Attitudes towards clothes and fashion are complex. I was fascinated by a somewhat similar scene of a rich man's extensive wardrobe in The King Is Dead (1952) by Ellery Queen. I also like looking at the fabulous clothes in the movies. "The Dead Man's Tale" (1943) by Hugh Pentecost describes a well-to-do man's glamorous Hollywood-style wardrobe, and the mixed feelings it engenders. The 1940's was an era when Americans strove to be well-dressed. The clothes shown in movies can be enjoyed by all: they are democratic, in that anyone who can see a film can enjoy its costumes. By contrast, the clothes in Popkin and Queen's novels are firmly linked to very wealthy men.
Early 1940's American mysteries looked at men with fancy wardrobes:
See also my lists of Characters in White Tie and Tails and Tuxedos.
Most of Dead Man's Gift is grim and uninspired.
Scientific Detection. The best parts of Dead Man's Gift:
The descriptions of the flood also can be seen as part of the world of Science.
Feminism. Mary Carver's defiance of her department store boss and husband, to take the case (Chapter 2), has feminist dimensions. It also helps characterize her.
Social Class. Many of the characters in the opening (Chapters 1, 2) are sympathetic working people. In addition to Mary Carver, these include department store saleswoman Veronica Carmichael, her subway motorman father, her milkman boyfriend Jimmy O'Neill (Chapter 1). Plus the taxi driver (Chapter 2).
A nice bit of writing has each apartment in the working class building characterized by the dinner food smells coming out of it (Chapter 1). The meals are all working class food. The opening sections have a strong class consciousness. The form a contrast to the book's nasty rich man and his entourage.
The rich man's will is plain vicious (Chapter 4). It is not fun to read about.
Journalists. Dead Man's Gift opens with newspaper people covering the start of the case (start of Chapter 1). The depiction of their work is detailed. As it in fact has nothing to do with the mystery, the detail about newspaper work might be considered unnecessary. Still, it can be interesting to read about.
Time Off for Murder also contained journalists.
Mystery Writers. Dead Man's Gift (start of Chapter 12) refers to other mystery writers: Sax Rohmer, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie. Such "references to mystery writers within mystery fiction" have a long tradition.
Scientific Detection. Its detective is young Navy doctor Sam Tate. The mystery has medical aspects - which are among its best features. So Much Blood can be considered as a Scientific Detective novel. Its best parts deal with medicine, manufacturing and business; its worst with the personal lives of some of the characters. So Much Blood is dedicated to "Captain Bernard S. Kahn, Army Medical Corps, With Thanks". One wonders if he helped with the medical details.
The doctor was injured during the war, and permanently wears a leg brace. He is an unusual example of a Golden Age detective with a disability (other than blindness, which regularly appeared in mystery fiction).
A medical aspect recalls a plot gambit in Death Dines Out (1939) by Theodora Du Bois. However, Zelda Popkin uses this in a different way in her mystery plot.
Obnoxious psychoanalyst Lorenz Tibor is introduced with statements that Psychoanalysis in general is wonderful, truthful and a great branch of medicine, but fakes like Tibor are a menace to the public (Chapter 1). Freud is mentioned with respect. This partial skepticism about Psychoanalysis is a mild contrast to the reverent way it is often depicted in 1940's books and films.
Characters. So Much Blood is slow moving. The murder doesn't take place until after the book's midpoint. Much of it seems like a mainstream novel about the characters. The various adulterous lovers are a big bore. So are the local police and District Attorney. They fill out the book with a good deal of padding. Worse, most of these characters are designed to be obnoxious, and reading about them is positively grating.
Mrs. Xenia Tibor discusses advanced art, and is quite intelligent and informed. She talks of painters Dali and Morris Hirschfield (Chapter 1), and quotes surreal statements from Gertrude Stein's libretto for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1927-1928) (Chapter 4). Xenia's and the author's interest in surrealism and Modernism in the arts recalls The Body Goes Round and Round (1942) by Theodora Du Bois.
Xenia's history story about Cambyses and Smerdis is unexpectedly enjoyable (Chapter 5), although it turns out to have nothing to do with the mystery plot or the rest of the book. Smerdis is also referenced in the classic "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940) by Jorge Luis Borges, as the Wikipedia entry on Bardiya points out.
The Rich and their Possessions. The Long Island local color, including a look at real town Easthampton, just isn't that colorful (Chapter 1). The narrator is agog over the valuable New England style antiques in the millionaire's home - but this all seems bland to me. This recalls the enthusiasm over the millionaire's apartment in Time Off for Murder.
Books like So Much Blood and The Farmhouse (1947) by Helen Reilly glamorized the cozy-chic lifestyle of rich people in converted farmhouses in semi-rural areas. So did Hollywood films of the era. One wonders if they helped trigger the middle class move to suburbia, that got underway in 1947.
Mystery Plot. The solution is simple but clever. It takes up only a few pages of the last two chapters (the end of Chapter 13). The finale offers a nicely-done thriller and piece of story telling (Chapter 14).
So Much Blood has an interesting, hard-to-pull-off kind of mystery puzzle. For most of the book, the mysterious events just do not seem to make sense. They seem to require actions that are implausible, and which violate what we know about the characters. Then, at the end, the solution explains what is going on, and everything becomes part of a logical pattern. This sort of plot structure was sometimes used by Baroness Orczy. BIG SPOILERS. Examples of such apparent implausibilities: Why would anyone kill this victim? Why would psychoanalyst Lorenz Tibor be carrying around poison? Obnoxious as Tibor is, it is hard to think of this non-political man as a secret Nazi spy who is using poison to advance Nazi sabotage. And if Tibor is the source of the poison, how could the intelligent Tibor be so careless with it? None of this makes much sense. It just does not add up. Only at the end does this author introduce new perspectives, which give a logical explanation.
The subplot about the thrown siphon (Chapter 5) comes to an interesting solution (end of Chapter 13). I'm not sure if this solution is fairly clued. But it is logical and explains things in an unexpected way. This subplot is unrelated to the main mystery plot, except that it involves the same killer. The subplot also has medical aspects.
Racism. So Much Blood suffers from relentless racism. The obnoxious servants in the country house are two Montauk Indians from Western Long Island. They are the subject of countless putdowns and negative stereotyped portrayals. We also learn that they are part black, which seems to be a historically accurate fact about many of the Montauks, so all the negative comments seem like slurs on black people too. It is very, very hard to sympathize with these rich people's servant problem!
Left Wing Social Commentary. SPOILERS. So Much Blood offers a very negative portrait of an American industrialist. This steel magnate refuses to contribute steel to the US war effort, but is willing to sell it to "neutral" countries that are Nazi fronts, where his steel will wind up in Nazi hands. He lectures people on how the US should conclude a peace treaty with Nazi Germany. He also is explicitly anti-Communist, denouncing the Soviet Union and claiming its war victories are propaganda lies (Chapter 2, start of Chapter 5). He regards himself as a champion of free enterprise. The hero regards this industrialist as a traitor. This is a portrait of American conservative businessmen as Nazi sympathizers and collaborators.
The hero's well-to-do brother also gets a scathingly negative portrayal as a businessman (end of Chapter 5). The brother is a loyal American, unlike the steel magnate, but that is about all the good one can say about him. A failed war profiteer and crook, he paints a nasty portrait of corruption in the upper classes. Between the industrialist and the brother, So Much Blood is scathing about the rich and right wing.
An American who is revealed to be a secret Nazi spy, turns out to have been an isolationist before World War II (Chapter 14). The unspoken implication is that many or perhaps most isolationists were actually Nazi sympathizers.
The evil right wing businessman is contrasted with a good industrialist, the book's shipbuilder hero. This man is a key part of the American war effort. So Much Blood repeatedly disclaims any resemblance between this character and real-life ship builder Henry J. Kaiser. Popkin and her publisher clearly did not want to get sued! Still, while one suspects that the character's personality and family are fictional, his ship building and war role are likely inspired by the famed Kaiser.
The FBI is idealized. They are cited as representatives of the US Government, something the hero loves (Chapter 14). This patriotic point of view makes a dramatic contrast with today's government-hating radical right wing libertarians.
Commentary on Herman Petersen:
Sleuths: Teenagers. Detection in The D.A.'s Daughter is done by the title character: the teenage daughter Lydia Bannock of the District Attorney, in a rural area in upstate New York (near Utica). She works with her teenage boyfriend Hank Wilbur, who functions as co-sleuth. Hank has just graduated high school, and soon will be off to college.
While the sleuths are teenagers, the suspects are all adults. One suspects that this reflects the era's strict ideas on good taste: it was fine for a pair of wholesome teens to work as amateur detectives - but it would not be appropriate for teenagers to be sordid suspects in a murder.
We know from polls that in the 1940's Hollywood's audience was predominantly young people: teenagers and the under-26 crowd. It is unclear what age groups were reading mystery novels. But The D.A.'s Daughter looks like one of a number of 1940's mysteries that look like they might have been trying to appeal to the youth audience.
Sleuths: Links to Nancy Drew Films. Lydia and Hank remind one of Nancy Drew and her boyfriend. Not so much the Nancy of the novels, but of the heroine of the series of four Nancy Drew movies from the late 1930's, such as Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (William Clemens, 1939). These films starred gifted actress Bonita Granville. Similarities:
Landscape. The D.A.'s Daughter repeatedly shows the Golden Age interest in landscape. Petersen especially likes water landscapes:
By contrast, there is little interest in architecture in The D.A.'s Daughter.
Small Town Life: Typical Americans. The D.A.'s Daughter is set in and near a small rural village. But its residents are portrayed as typical Americans - the sort of people you might meet in Chicago or Kalamazoo. The characters are NOT portrayed as hicks or bumpkins.
And there is little regional "local color". Unlike, say, Phoebe Atwood Taylor's Cape Cod mysteries, which are full of a thick New England atmosphere, the small town in The D.A.'s Daughter could be anywhere in the USA.
The characters are portrayed neither as virtuous country folk, nor as evil small-town hypocrites out of Peyton Place. Instead, the characters are on the same moral level as the typical residents of Chicago or Kalamazoo.
At least some other American mysteries of the era depicted rural areas as filled with ordinary people, too. George Harmon Coxe had remote areas filled with "typical Americans" in mysteries set in Connecticut like Alias the Dead (1943), upstate New York like The Groom Lay Dead (1944)
Commentary on Ruth Sawtell Wallis:
Mystery Traditions: Scientific Detection. Too Many Bones takes place at a private museum of anthropology. The heroine is an anthropologist specializing in studying human bones and skeletons. We learn something about anthropology work: but only a little (Chapters 2, 3, 6, 19). We also learn about job hunting in the anthropology world.
There is a section that involves Scientific Detection (Chapter 21-22): but this is just a fairly short episode. This is supposed to be the book's Big Surprise. But it seemed to me to be an obvious plot gambit right from the start.
SPOILER. The episode is linked to that R. Austin Freeman concern, "disposing of the body". We are in a plot not too different from Freeman's The Eye of Osiris (1911). The author's next book No Bones About It has a biographical note, telling how Wallis had experience in a Harvard lab with such techniques, This is credited with giving her ideas about body disposal.
The heroine's educational background is like that of Ruth Sawtell Wallis herself. The heroine has a degree in anthropology from a fictitious Ivy League woman's college with ties to a top university for men. In real life Wallis had a similar degree in anthropology from Radcliffe, the woman's university closely connected to Harvard.
Mystery Plot. The mystery plot is otherwise simple. It is in fact painfully simple. Several people had motives to kill the victim. At the end, sure enough we learn that one of them did it. That's all. There is no clever puzzle plot. And few clues to the killer's identity, which is not revealed through detective work, but through the killer's confession. Also, there is no mystery at all till nearly half-way through the novel, when the first crime elements enter.
I've been resisting jokes, saying that the plot is "skeletal". Or that it is a "bare bones" of a plot.
The plot suffers from a major coincidence, that approaches a failure of fair mystery plotting. SPOILER. The material about Randy Bill turns out to be a coincidence, something that just accidentally took place on the night of the crime.
Small Town Life. Somewhat unexpectedly, the museum is in a really small and decaying town, somewhere in the Middle West. The story is soaked in small town atmosphere. It is not "cozy": Too Many Bones is part of a literary tradition that takes a skeptical look at small town life. In mainstream fiction, there are the 1920's novels of Sinclair Lewis. In mystery fiction, we have a better book than Too Many Bones about a small town in the Middle West, Trial by Fury (1941) by Craig Rice. Both Too Many Bones and Trial by Fury look at women expressing their sexuality in a small town.
No one in this town is especially good, or filled with positive values. Even the morally innocent "good" town characters seem mainly to be small-minded gossips. Too Many Bones takes a negative view of human nature, especially in the provinces.
Minorities. Too Many Bones is notable for a positive, progressive view of some minorities. The book's two black servants are depicted with dignity. They have big roles in the story. Too Many Bones also breaks Civil Rights ground, by showing a scene of racial integration (Chapter 18): a black woman joins a previously all-white church group.
1943 was a year in which the Civil Rights struggle took off. Hollywood films began showing a more positive image of African-Americans, following negotiations with Civil Rights groups. An example is Cabin in the Sky (1943), directed by Vincente Minnelli. One wonders if Too Many Bones is part of this same trend.
Also interesting: the heroine's difficulties getting hired for a job, in a male-dominated profession (Chapters 2, 4). One would like there to be more of this. The book backs off from looking deep into gender discrimination as an institution. Instead, it depicts the heroine's job difficulties as stemming from a jealous older woman! This is a cop-out. Still the way the book raises the issue in the first place, is notable.
Too Many Bones also takes a negative look at both men and marriage, as an option for the heroine. The book's so-called hero, the heroine's handsome young scientist boss, is full of negative traits. The book also takes a skeptical look at young women abandoning their professional dreams (Chapters 19, 25). The heroine is strongly urged not to do this.
There are less likable aspects of the book's look at discriminated groups. There is a gratuitous anti-gay slur (Chapter 19). Prejudice against gays was likely at its peak in the 1940's in the USA.
The book also takes a long look at the DAR: the Daughters of the American Revolution. The DAR was a woman's organization, limited to women whose ancestors took part in the American Revolution in the late 1700's. On the surface, this was a patriotic theme, celebrating American traditions. In practice, it was a way for WASPs to have a snobbish social organization that excluded "white ethnic" people whose ancestors arrived in the USA as immigrants after 1800. Most of the white ethnics I've known, including my parents, cheerfully loathed the DAR. One has to mention, in fairness, that the modern-day DAR has tried to go in for service and charitable activities.
The depiction of the DAR in Too Many Bones is largely but not entirely positive. The heroine joins, and we get a look at her genealogy and the way she is a member in good standing in America's WASP elite. The DAR members are shown as mainly fairly positive people.
By contrast, the one woman who is barred in membership from the DAR, coming originally from one of those dubious "poor white" families, is depicted in a negative way. The DAR members show good breeding and "family values". The rejected lower class white woman is a sexual predator with no morals. Too Many Bones seems to imply that non-WASP women are sluts without family values.
The DAR was critiqued in this era, by Grant Wood in his painting Daughters of Revolution (1932), and by Sinclair Lewis in his novel It Can't Happen Here (1935). Too Many Bones mentions Grant Wood (Chapter ).
HIBK. Instead, No Bones About It is a Had I But Known (HIBK) novel. It seems derivative of the HIBK school's founder Mary Roberts Rinehart:
Minorities. There are no black, Jewish or gay characters in No Bones About It or references to them. But "white ethnic" characters and prejudices against them play a major role in the novel. No Bones About It thoroughly condemns such prejudices, and regards such prejudice as a serious social issue.
The wealthy WASPs in No Bones About It are relentless in spewing hatred and prejudice against the working class white ethnics. They form an ugly picture of the prejudices ethnics had to face from elites.
Both white ethnics and the white working class as a whole would soon be the major beneficiaries of the GI Bill (1944). This US Government program provided a huge financial lift to a whole generation of white US veterans. It was one of the most successful of all US Government financial aid programs. Among many other things, the GI Bill helped break the back of the class barriers that kept white working people under the heel of WASP elites. So did the strong labor unions of the era.
The heroine has been hired to create an International Festival, celebrating all the ethnic groups and races in the city (Chapters 3, 5, 6). The heroine and the author are clearly proud of this. It stands as a rebuke to the prejudice shown against ethnic groups. Unfortunately, we never see the Festival itself, just some of the heroine's plans. And while the Festival is explicitly mentioned as including all "races" (Chapter 3), we see only some white people involved with the Festival. Still, the mention itself is enough for No Bones About It to be regarded as a pro-Civil Rights book in 1944.
The family lives in the fictitious small manufacturing city of Watson, Massachusetts. They regard New England WASPs as superior to everyone else in America. As an industrial city run by WASP's in 1940's New England, Watson recalls a bit Wrightsville in the mystery novels of Ellery Queen. Only rarely does No Bones About It get out of its deliberately claustrophobic setting of the three mansions, and get into the rest of the town of Watson (Chapter 19). The pleasant Italian restaurant is in accordance with the book's positive look at white ethnics.
Family. Too Many Bones offered a negative view of marriage, as an option for the heroine. No Bones About It offers a negative portrait of the family as an institution. The heroine's extended family spends a good deal of time actively trying to hurt her. The heroine is unable to escape these extended family members, due to pressure from her mother, who is a strong supporter of "family pride" (middle of Chapter 7). The book depicts both the mother and the heroine herself as having been brainwashed into accepting this family pride and loyalty as a value (end of Chapter 11). Instead, No Bones About It suggests that the heroine would have been much better off if she had avoided her family entirely.
The post World War II era (1945-1970) saw a major trend away from extended families, towards small nuclear families of husband, wife and kids living by themselves, often in suburbs. The ferocious negative feelings towards the extended family in No Bones About It seems consistent with this trend.
Economics. The heroine praises cooperatives as superior to regular stores, and more willing to warn consumers about dangers from products. Cooperatives were popular in her native Minnesota (middle of Chapter 7). A well-to-do WASP immediately criticizes this as socialism. Cooperatives are rarely mentioned in mystery fiction: please see my list of works about Cooperatives and Worker-owned Businesses. One plays a role in The Case of the Solid Key (1941) by left-wing author Anthony Boucher. Wallis lived in Minnesota herself at this time, according to the biographical note attached to the novel.
The evil old lady is criticized for letting her chauffeur go, in the depth of the Depression when jobs are impossible to get (end of Chapter 2). No Bones About It is set in 1932, when the Depression is the worst. It affects most of the characters in the novel.
Mystery Plot. The murder mystery shows little creativity. The crime itself is decently staged, showing some dramatic interest. But its puzzle features are barely present. The choice of killer seems arbitrary and unclued.
There are actually two Big Secrets about the past. SPOILERS:
The opening chapter shows us Cherry Ames' family and the local doctor who inspired her. Then the first three-quarters of the novel shows student life at the nursing school. This sticks rigorously to her medical training. These hard-working students are emphatically not party animals. These sections contain a good deal of hospital medical work. They show the interest readers in this era had in books that dealt with medicine, science or technology.
Mystery Thriller. Three-quarters through the novel, a mysterious situation at the hospital is introduced. The final quarter of the novel shows Cherry dealing with this situation (Chapters 10-12). This section gives Cherry Ames, Student Nurse a categorization of a "thriller". While the situation is initially mysterious, the mysteries are soon resolved, with Cherry Ames and the reader understanding everything going on. The section starts out as a "mystery", but it soon should be categorized more as a thriller, or even a suspenseful medical drama.
I thought the thriller section was pleasant, but awfully simple. It is remote from being any sort of whodunit or mystery puzzle.
Cherry Ames encounters mystery while being the nurse on night duty in a hospital ward. Such a premise recalls the once-famous hospital mysteries of Mignon G. Eberhart such as From This Dark Stairway (1931). It would not surprise me if Helen Wells took inspiration from Eberhart. Despite this, one is reluctant to classify Wells as a follower of Eberhart and Rinehart. Wells' realistic look at life in a teaching hospital lacks the romance and soap opera often found in Eberhart and other Rinehart followers. Wells' "tone" is quite different from Eberhart and Rinehart.
Architecture. The thriller section has a clever idea about the hospital room where the mystery takes place. This shows the Golden Age interest in architecture.
Economics and the Government. Cherry Ames comes from a prosperous middle class family, leading a cozy secure life in a small city. Her father seems to be a real estate broker (Chapter 1). Her parents are apparently paying for her education, as well as her twin brother's college degree. But we meet students at the nursing school who are from an economically disadvantaged background. There is much commentary by the author, about socially accepting and encouraging such people from poor backgrounds.
Also the novel is enthused that many poor students are going to nursing schools on Government scholarships (Chapter 11). World War II is on, and there is a desperate shortage of nurses. The novel thinks that government scholarships are a great idea. One can see the attitudes that will lead to the vast government-provided college scholarship program of the GI Bill (1944), a year later. Cherry Ames, Student Nurse is a strongly pro-Government, pro-Government Program book.
On the negative side, the one poor student whose life is explored in depth, comes from a family whose poverty is caused by a drunkard father and a home full of fights (Chapter 6). At the tail end of the Depression, the novel cannot conceive or admit that there are millions of poor people either without jobs or paid starvation wages. This point of view is very right wing.
The implicit logic of Cherry Ames, Student Nurse is that "America desperately needs nurses. Therefore, using tax dollars to pay for nurses' training is a good thing that will benefit the country." Such views were widespread in the 1940's. People didn't worry about whether or not the nurses came from a good family that "deserved" assistance. The poor nursing student in Cherry Ames, Student Nurse comes from a rotten family. But the book thinks it is terrific that she is studying to be a nurse - because the nation needs nurses.
The Chinese. A Chinese nursing student is seen highly positively. The Chinese were US allies during the war. Liberal opinion was strongly pro-Chinese, and often seized the opportunity to put pro-Chinese messages into entertainment.
Feminism?. Both the nurses who teach and the student nurses are treated with great respect. Any book whose main characters are highly qualified women is perhaps feminist by definition. The novel stresses Cherry Ames' hard work, and her adult commitment to productive goals. Cherry Ames' nursing work is shown as far more important to her, than the chaste romance she has with a male intern.
SPOILER. At the end, Cherry Ames has to stand up for what she believes in, and has to defy the all-powerful male Head Resident Surgeon doctor, Dr. Wylie. This certainly teaches a moral and social lesson, and perhaps is feminist too.
But there are no signs of explicit feminist thought in the novel. There are no women doctors, and few signs that women should try to enter professions other than nursing. The book's limitless enthusiasm for women becoming nurses, and thereby making a contribution to the world, does not extend in any other direction.
Quality. Did I like Cherry Ames, Student Nurse? In part. Would I recommend Cherry Ames, Student Nurse to other people? Likely not.
On the positive side, I found the book surprisingly readable. It was full of information about studying for being a nurse. Also, it gave sidelights on how high school students celebrated Halloween in 1943 (Chapter 1), and other looks at a different way of life.
On the negative side, the book's constant glorification of the war effort is not my cup of tea. Do we really want to recommend that young people read a book that is so pro-war?
Some of the game instructions on cards quoted in the Wikipedia, seem directly based on events in the first novel Cherry Ames, Student Nurse. I remembered from my childhood how prominent the Broom Closet was in the board game. I was startled to see it also important in the novel, when I recently read Cherry Ames, Student Nurse.