T. S. Stribling | Hulbert Footner | Samuel Spewack | Percival Wilde | Lillian de la Torre | Fred C. Levon | James Yaffe | Lawyer Stories | Clarence Budington Kelland | Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post | Frederick Skerry
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist
Best Dr. Poggioli Detective Stories
Rogues in Clover (c1929)
P. Moran, Operative
Murder in the Gilded Cage (1929)
Madame Rosika Storey tales
The Key Man (1951)
Randy Hyde stories
Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector
The Detections of Dr. Sam: Johnson
The Return of Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector
The Exploits of Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector
Uncollected Dr. Sam: Johnson stories
"(untitled)" (1955)
"Hurry, Hurry, Hurry!" (1956)
My Mother, the Detective
Uncollected Mom stories
Mom among the Liars (1992) (Chapters 1,2)
"The Most Dangerous Game" (1924)
"Brother Orchid" (1938)
"Man Afraid" (1930)
"Atchison Always Wins!" (1930)
"The Twenty-Fourth Hour" (1930)
"Halloween Assassin" (1942)
T.S. Stribling is a mainstream writer who has made a small but interesting contribution to detective fiction. Stribling's detective short stories (he wrote no mystery novels) fall into three chronological groups, and are just a small percentage of a writing career mainly devoted to mainstream literary fiction. Stribling's work suffers from unevenness. His earliest and most famous mystery book, Clues of the Caribbees (1925-1926), is his weakest, offering little more than some interesting travel writing and a final story ("A Passage to Benares") with a startling finale. These early stories first appeared in Adventure, a pulp magazine specializing in tales set round the globe; some of what it published were mystery stories, many were not. Each story in Adventure had its usually exotic location listed right in the table of contents. Stribling was a regular contributor to the magazine during the mid 1920's. Its contents had little similarity in tone or style to the hard-boiled fiction then appearing in Black Mask. Stribling's autobiography Laughing Stock (1982) describes his entertaining encounters with the editorial staff of Adventure. It also records his friendship with mystery writers J.S. Fletcher, and Harry Stephen Keeler, the two last people I would ever have expected him to know.
Much better than Clues of the Caribbees are the tales he wrote in the early 1930's, now collected in Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist, and the final, larger group of stories written after 1945, partly collected in Best Dr. Poggioli Detective Stories. These last tales appeared when the elderly Stribling had lost all markets for his writing except Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and a few other mystery magazines. (There are apparently several unpublished mainstream novels dating from this period.) Even these later works are by no means uniform in quality.
A common theme of Stribling's work is the intrusion of politics, in the broad sense, into strange schemes of murder or fraud. Many of the characters in his stories seem ready to engage in activities that at first seem nonsensical, but which gradually reveal a hidden logic. These enterprises often involve small town politics, the racial divisions of the Deep South of Stribling's era, or big business. These schemes allow Stribling to achieve two ends. One is the creation of paradoxical mystery plots. The other is social satire of contemporary institutions. Social satire was in fact the main goal of much of Stribling's mainstream fiction.
These paradoxical schemes are not found in any other mystery writer, and help make Stribling's stories unique. Stribling's work falls within the tradition of the fair play mystery puzzle plot, but is otherwise hard to place. He does not seem to be closely aligned with any other writer. Although his lead character, Dr. Poggioli, is a psychologist, psychology per se does not seem to play a major role in his work, and he certainly has little in common with say, Helen McCloy and her psychologist detective Basil Willing. Nor does Stribling embrace the plotlessness that is considered chic among some mainstream writers. His detective fiction, at least, is highly plotted. And, although Stribling's tone is continuously tongue in cheek, humorous and satirical, he has nothing in common with the Atwood Taylor-Edmund Crispin-Craig Rice school of detective farceurs.
Stribling's work has similarities to Agatha Christie. Their detectives Henry Poggioli and Hercule Poirot have similar names: both have unusual last names, and both follow the pattern He- Po-. Poirot emphasizes "psychology" in his stories as a basis for his insights, and Poggioli is a psychologist. The relationship of friendly rivalry between Poirot and Captain Hastings is matched by that of Poggioli and his narrator. A Poirot tale like "The Adventure of 'The Western Star'" (from Poirot Investigates) seems quite similar to a typical Poggioli story. The first half of the tale consists of deductions, first by Poirot, then by Hastings; a typical Poggioli story involves relentless logical deductions by his detective. The style of the dialogues in Christie's story anticipates that of Stribling's fiction. A sense of satire pervades Christie's writings, which are filled with humor; these are also prominent characteristics of Stribling's work.
Stribling's use of clues is unusual, too. He liberally and carefully laces his work with clues to the strange schemes lurking behind the scenes, clues that are recalled and explained by his detective at the finale. But I have often found these clues to be wholly inadequate to actually deduce the hidden schemes of the story. They are interesting, and add to the reader's pleasure, but do not quite add up to fully fair play. All the same, the explanations of the clues often adds to the paradoxical nature of the stories, making everything seem even stranger than it already is. Stribling clearly relished the paradoxical and the strange.
In addition, Poggioli's character, techniques and even level of skill as a detective seem to change from story to story. He is one of the least consistently characterized of all detectives in fiction. What this loses in giving the reader a consistent base with which to approach Stribling's fiction, it gains by allowing a multitude of experimental techniques. The story "The Shadow" (1934) is especially odd in this way.
While Stribling's stories are almost entirely pure mysteries, where Poggioli solves mysterious situations, their mysteries are not all about murder. In "The Cablegram" (1932) and "The Man in the Shade" (1957) Poggioli takes on smuggling mysteries. These tales are full of bizarre comedy, as are many of Stribling's stories. The highly complex plots and intricate chains of deductions in Stribling's later tales make them seem quite long, whereas they are actually only around 15 pages or less.
One of the most admirable aspects of Stribling's work, both mainstream and mysterious, is his treatment of black life. Long before the Civil Rights movement got underway, Stribling was turning his satirical scalpel on prejudice and the obstacles faced by blacks. "Bullets" (1932) is outstanding in this regard.
"Bullets" seems to be Stribling's first really good detective story, his breakthrough work. The earlier tales in Clues of the Caribbees are long and meandering; they lack the intricate plotting, concise writing and sparkling paradoxes of Stribling's work following "Bullets". The same is true of the long and not very interesting paranormal story "Shadowed" (1930).
In the 1920's Stribling also contributed to early science fiction pulps. "A Passage to Benares" has elements of the fantastic, as does a strange non-mystery story Stribling contributed to Adventure shortly after "Benares" called "Christ in Chicago" (1926), a tale which attacks the then rising eugenics movement. As one character in the tale puts it, "A civilization can be measured by how many of the poor and the weak it can support". Since eugenics played a major role in the rise of Nazism during this era, Stribling's tale can be seen to have been prophetic.
Hulbert Footner's tales of Madame Rosika Storey have a period charm. They tend not to be overwhelmingly brilliant as puzzle plots. Footner's tales, from the 1920's and 30's seem oddly old-fashioned for their era. His detective technique would have seemed familiar to Émile Gaboriau in the 1860's: footprints, rooms searched for hidden clues, an obvious suspect and a hidden suspect, mild sorts of financial skullduggery lurking in the background. Footner was good at describing every sort of romantic attraction. He was alert to the emotional feelings of his characters. His characters are oddly, rawly sexual for their eras: one is especially startled by the gigolos in "Wolves of Monte Carlo", but Footner liked to include really handsome, seductive young men in many of his tales. Footner is perhaps a bit influenced by the Jazz Age tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and its emphasis on both romance and sexuality. Madame Rosika is somewhat unusual as a great detective of the era who happens to be a woman. She works as a paid professional, uses her brains, is universally respected for her skill, and basically plays the same role in her world that Hercule Poirot does in his. It is a very non-sexist portrait. Footner's stories are not much reprinted today: they have mainly shown up in anthologies devoted to female detectives, such as Ellery Queen's and Michelle Slung's. Footner's career is a bit hard to place: Madame Storey seems to have been accepted as a Golden Age detective, with her work collected in books, but her cases also appeared in pulp magazines throughout the Depression: maybe other markets were tighter then. Footner suggests that the usual rigid dichotomy between pulp fiction/Golden Age detective stories was in fact something of a semipermeable membrane.
Footner's other series detective is Amos Lee Mappin, a successful, middle aged mystery writer whose crimes tend to occur in New York's cafe society. Mappin is unusual in that his Watson (at least in some of his tales) is a young woman, his secretary Fanny Parran. She is one of the few female Watsons in fiction, an example of how female oriented Footner's fiction is. Mappin stars in The Murder That Had Everything (1939), which is something of a guilty pleasure. This good naturedly trashy tale of wealthy society women and the young male fortune hunters who prey on them is a lot more entertaining than it has a right to be. Its early sections are its best (Chapters 1 - 7); the trip to Chicago (Chapter 11 and the start of Chapter 12) is also fun. Unfortunately, the fizz of the early sections is not sustained, and one certainly does not want to paint it as any more than a curiosity. Much of the detection here is in the Gaboriau tradition, of discovering clues left at a crime scene, and using them to reconstruct the events of the murder. There is a good deal of architectural interest in the apartment occupied by the victim in The Murder That Had Everything (Chapters 5 - 6); creative buildings were a Golden Age specialty. Also architectural:. there is also a nice piece of detection (end of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5), where the hero tracks down the location of the victim's apartment.
The book shows affinities with the Van Dine school, at least superficially, in its genius amateur detective, its New York City upper crust setting, and its detailed Golden Age style storytelling of a murder investigation. Mappin made his first appearance in The Mystery of the Folded Paper (1930), at the height of S.S. Van Dine's popularity. Footner had already been publishing for over a decade then. Footner was born in 1879, long before Van Dine or most of his followers, and there are signs that Footner was perhaps an established author adapting to new currents in detective fiction.
The House With the Blue Door (1942) is another fairly entertaining Mappin mystery. Once again, we have a wealthy society woman, who gets involved with a good looking young man, an ex-convict, who like many such Footner hunks, was involved in con games and swindles. The description of the con games in Chapter 1 is especially lively. It also drops the other shoe, in showing the impact of such good looking men on other men. This story has more low life characters than The Murder That Had Everything, with many of the ex-con's former criminal associates prominent in the plot. The tone is also darker, and more tragic.
Christopher Morley was a friend of Footner's, and wrote an evocative reminiscence of him as an introduction to his last mystery, Orchids to Murder (1945). Both Morley and Footner are hard to classify authors in the history of mystery fiction.
Samuel Spewack's Murder in the Gilded Cage (1929) is an entertainingly written mystery story. It is clearly an intuitionist detective novel, with a genius detective who solves the crime. Boris Sergeivitch Perutkin has features that remind one of Agatha Christie's sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Like Poirot, he is a flamboyant, good natured, slightly comical sleuth who admires his own "genius". The last names of the two sleuths are somewhat similar, containing the letters p-r-t in sequence. Like Poirot, he was originally a police officer from a foreign country, in this case Russia, but who left his native land as a refugee during the upheavals of World War I, and who has now settled permanently in an English speaking country. While Christie had no personal connection to Belgium, Spewack was born in the Ukraine and immigrated to the United States, rather like his detective hero, who was from Riga (the capital of Latvia). Christie introduced Poirot and created his background in her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), and Murder in the Gilded Cage has other features that remind one of that book. Both novels are about wealthy middle aged women who take up with younger men over the objections of her family. Like Christie, Spewack laces his book with humor and good-natured social satire.
Spewack is an absorbing storyteller. Spewack is good at characterization. His book is at a medium level of plot complexity. It has some nice twists, but it is nowhere near as complex as many Golden Age detective stories. Its puzzle plot ideas are nice, but not especially original. However, they fooled me.
Spewack's subject matter also reminds one of Hulbert Footner. Rich society women and their gigolo hangers on were a Footner specialty. Spewack's gigolo here is much less knowing and predatory than Footner's expert fortune hunters. Footner's tend to have the get up and go of a Roaring Twenties business type, while Spewack's is much more pathetic.
Spewack's ex-newspaperman narrator reminds one of the anonymous narrator of S.S. Van Dine's novels. He starts out as a full character in the story, but gradually becomes a mere recorder of events. In general, Spewack is a people centered writer. He is chiefly interested in his characters, their often flamboyantly exhibitionist personalities, and their relationships with each other. His characters often demand attention for their ideas or actions. They often surprise the reader by having more to say than one might expect.
Samuel Spewack dedicated this book to his wife Bella. Together they wrote a Broadway play that is still remembered for its spoof of a Hollywood studio, Boy Meets Girl. Spewack also wrote screenplays in 1930's Hollywood.
Percival Wilde's Rogues in Clover (collected 1929) is a set of mystery tales in which former card sharp Bill Parmelee exposes crooked gamblers and their schemes. The tales I have read so far do not involve murder or other crimes - the tales stick strictly to gambling swindles. On the other hand, the tales are set up as full, fair play mystery stories. We see the mysterious situation, we are given clues to how it might be done, at the end of the tale Bill shows us the crooks' methods. These stories are probably one of the most sustained looks in 20th century mystery fiction at fair play mysteries that do not involve murder. The stories originally appeared in a pulp, Street & Smith's The Popular Magazine, around 1924-1925. This was a general purpose pulp, not one that specialized in mystery fiction. It is sometimes referred to as a "family pulp", because it published non hard-boiled fiction suitable for a family readership, in imitation of such slick magazines as The Saturday Evening Post.
Behind these tales stands the Rogue tradition, stories of clever rogues and their ingenious crimes. Like such British Rogue-influenced detective story writers as J.S. Fletcher and E.C. Bentley, Wilde combines this with the detective story proper. The tales are told from a detective's point of view, not the criminal's, and treated as a mystery for the detective to solve. Formally, his tales have much in common with theirs. However, thematically, there are substantial differences. Fletcher and Bentley, like other British Rogue writers, are interested in tweaking the nose of the British class system. Many of their tales involve lower class people who assume the clothes and power of the upper classes. The American writer Wilde seems to have no interest in this at all. Instead he is best compared to the other American magazine writers of his day, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the entries in Carolyn Wells' Best American Mystery Stories of 1930. Wilde, like them, is interested in the bright, well to do young men of the Jazz Age. These men combine virtue and vice in strange and fascinating ways, at least to the readers of their era. The young men attempt to exude an aura of vice, vague licentiousness and general naughtiness. Clearly they are breaking taboos in ways that are titillating to their readers, in ways that involve both romance (Fitzgerald) and high stakes gambling (Wilde). At the same time, they are incredibly clean cut, at least by modern standards. They are all basically wholesome, clean cut young men from the most proper families. All have plenty of money, and are ultimately very marriageable.
Wilde, like other American magazine writers of the era, also shows signs of continuity with the Early American scientific school of Rinehart, Reeve, Futrelle, Moffett, etc. His interest in a specialized subject area, games of chance, can be seen as his equivalent to the scientific knowledge that plays such an important role in their stories. Like Reeve, his stories take place in the arena of public life, not private relationships. And like Reeve, he often deals with corrupt high livers, big time crooks and swindlers from the upper reaches of society.
Parmelee goes "undercover" with an assumed identity in some of these tales. This is a persistent plot gambit in Wilde, whose characters are always assuming new identities.
Wilde wrote four mystery novels in 1938-1942. Inquest (1940) is a Golden Age mystery story with a fairly elaborate, but not very good, puzzle plot. An agent gets killed in a summer house during a garden party, in a setup that recalls Chesterton's "The Oracle of the Dog" (1923). The solution of the book has some similarities with the plot of the movie Sunset Boulevard (1950). Wilde experiments with multiple narrators in this story, in a way that recalls Wilkie Collins. The best feature of this otherwise ho-hum novel is one of these narrators, town handyman Ben Willett. The first 6 sections of his "The Tale of the Grim Reaper" offer some good characterization and observations on life, and show Wilde's skill at writing mainstream fiction. Both here and with P. Moran, Wilde shows his sympathy with working class characters. I also liked the parts of "The Diary of a Public Character" (another section of Inquest) that deal with an author's rise to success. Wilde liked to write about characters' money making schemes. These schemes seem somewhat implausible to me sometimes, but they are clearly pleasant wish fulfillment daydream fantasies for both Wilde and his readers.
Design for Murder (1941) pays tribute to Poe, Gaboriau, Doyle, Chesterton, Christie and Van Dine. Aside from Gaboriau, these are all writers in the intuitionist detective tradition. Such references to earlier mystery writers are a perennial feature of detective fiction. However, it is difficult to fit this book into the intuitionist tradition. For one thing, there is no actual detective. The crime is "solved" at the end by letting us into the killer's thoughts. No one actually solves the case. This contrasts with the genius sleuths of the intuitionist school.
One can see some personal Wilde approaches here. The book is set in his home stomping grounds of Connecticut. The story involves a "Murder" game at a wealthy country estate. The atmosphere of game playing among high powered but somewhat child like people recalls all the high stakes card games of Rogues in Clover. There is much criticism of rich people here, especially those born to wealth. One of the few truly admirable characters is a self-made business man, Jim, who shows Wilde's success fantasies. Wilde was a playwright, and he compares the novel to a play in his preface. It certainly is staged like a play, with a continuous action in two adjoining rooms, just like a stage set, and much bright dialogue. The book also continues his experiments with multiple narrators, this time people who are recording their observations in bursts as the action progresses, something Wilde handles nicely. The story is in five parts, each with its own narrator. The first three sections are quite well written, with lively storytelling. However, the solution seems to me to be a let down, and the book is mainly just a curiosity.
Wilde's P. Moran, Operative spoofs from the 1940's are good natured satires in which his moronic correspondence school detective attempts to track down crooks. The stories are partly narrated by P. Moran himself, and partly by others, recalling Wilde's experiments with multiple narrators in Inquest. Moran has a wonderfully individualistic voice, as do the various narrators in Wilde's novels. They are also set in the New York-Connecticut border region of that novel, and show considerable local color. "P. Moran, Shadow" (1943) is laugh out loud funny. The story deals with mobsters and the underworld, not with the genteel upper crust murders of the Golden Age. Even here, these crooks are very small beer, compared to the macho supermen of crime stalking through the pages of the pulps. P. Moran would be a perfect character for Jim Carrey to play, in his full Dumb and Dumber mode. A lot of 40's writers attempted to bring humor to mystery fiction: one thinks of Craig Rice, Merle Constiner, Ken Crossen. Wilde seems closest in these tales to the tradition of the professional American humorist: the stories are like the result if George S. Kaufman or Jean Kerr or Patrick Dennis had attempted spoofs of pulp crime tales. Like Kaufman and Kerr, Wilde had been a professional playwright.
A humorous story like "Beginner's Luck" (1924) from Rogues in Clover recapitulates many of Wilde's traditional themes: 1) The story opens in Bill Parmelee's farm in West Woods, Connecticut; Western Connecticut locations recur in Inquest and P. Moran. 2) Parmelee's devotion to and fascination with farming recalls the Grim Reaper's absorption with his grass cutting job in Inquest. 3) Parmelee's friend Tony goes undercover to help him; impersonation is a major Wilde plot device. This impersonation is the cleverest part of the story. 4) Tony's naiveté in his job, played for laughs, anticipates the even less competent P. Moran. 5) The successful businessmen Tony meets as suspects recall Wilde's interest in business success fantasies.
Lillian de la Torre's short stories about Dr. Sam Johnson are the ancestors of much of today's historical mystery fiction. Real life personages and events are often woven into these stories, and there is a great deal of historical atmosphere and dialogue. Unusual aspects of 18th Century law enforcement are often worked into the tales. The cleverest puzzle plot in the series is "The Stroke of Thirteen" (1953). This tale has affinities to the impossible crime school. It does not deal with a locked room or other physical impossibility; instead it deals with events which seem to be absurd, and gives them an ultimately logical explanation. The elaborate complexity of the plot in this tale recalls Ellery Queen, who published de la Torre's stories in EQMM.
The fine first story in the series, "The Great Seal of England" (1943), also shows signs of affinity with EQ and his traditions: it has a deductive finale, where logic is used to deduce the identity of the culprit. It also uses that favorite EQ plot, the search for a missing, ingeniously hidden object. So do other tales in the series, such as "Prince Charlie's Ruby". Many of the mysteries in the Johnson tales involve the concealment of an object or a person. As is often in de la Torre, the characters' motives for their schemes is to protect some person in trouble. The story also shows de la Torre's fondness for highwaymen, those 18th Century robbers now seen as colorful quasi-heroes.
Lillian de la Torre shows other features linking her to the Van Dine school as a whole, of which EQ was a member. Her detective is a genius amateur who occasionally works closely with the police of the era. Many of the characters in the tales are intellectuals, involved in science or the arts; her detective is an authority on the arts. Several are collectors, looking for missing priceless objects around which the mysteries swirl. Theatrical settings are common. There is the persistent Van Dine school concern with racial minorities, notably in the anti-slavery tale "The Blackamoor Unchain'd" (1974). There is the detailed rich storytelling valued by the Van Dine writers.
But there are influences here outside of the Van Dine school, notably from John Dickson Carr. Carr's biographer Douglas G. Green, in his John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995), quotes de la Torre as saying she was inspired by Carr's The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) to create her historical detective stories. Carr's book is a factual, non-fiction account of a real life murder case. But it is written much like a novel. Carr's book, like de la Torre's stories, takes place in England of a few hundred years ago. Carr is not a member of the Van Dine school. Carr and the Van Dine writers are in turn members of a larger group, the intuitionist detective writers. So de la Torre definitely is oriented towards the intuitionist approach.
Some of the Sam Johnson tales involve de la Torre's recreations of famous unsolved true crimes. Usually these have new solutions suggested by her. These solutions tend to scrupulously stick to the facts of the case, and yet try to suggest a surprising guilty party and explanation of the crime. Her non-Johnson play Goodbye, Miss Lizzie Borden (1947) is also in this tradition. This whole approach is exactly that of Carr in The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey. I am of two minds about these fictionalized true crime tales. I respect the ingenuity the author shows in them, working within the strict historical limits of the cases. But I do not enjoy any of them as much as the cases de la Torre has made up out of her own head. These purely fictitious tales show much more imagination and mystery puzzle plot ingenuity than the true crimes.
The whole first collection, Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector, is especially charming as a historical work. The tales' events are often extremely colorful, and de la Torre is a superb prose stylist with a grasp of the possibilities of 18th Century English usage. In some ways, it might be best just to recommend the whole collection. Still the tales are very different from each other, and vary in their success as mystery and historical works. In addition to "The Great Seal of England", my favorites are "The Flying Highwayman" (1946) and "The Manifestations in Mincing Lane". These two works have an abundance of mystery. In neither are the mysteries hard to fathom, and readers should not expect overwhelming ingenuity on the order of Agatha Christie here. Yet the mysteries in these stories are beautifully wrought, considered as pieces of storytelling. The plots have the right "shape": they are enjoyable to think about, and savor mentally. "Prince Charlie's Ruby" (1944) also has a mystery to it, in fact two different sets of mysteries in the first and second halves of the story. Yet it is mainly a historical work. Like that other EQMM contributor, James Yaffe, de la Torre believed in giving readers a large quantity of mystery plot, with clues, sub plots, and series of ingenuities along the way. "The Monboddo Ape Boy" (1945) is nicely done as a historical tale, but it only has a thin mystery. "The Wax-Work Cadaver" (1945) has the opposite problem. It has some real ingenuity, with a role reversal plot in the tradition of Doyle. But the story is the sort of macabre tale I've never enjoyed.
"The Banquo Trap" (1959) is ordinary as a mystery, but its recreation of being backstage in the 18th Century theater is outstanding. The first half of the story is especially rich in detail. One feels as if one were actually there.
"The Bedlam Bam", like some other tales in The Return, is less a mystery than an adventure story of crime defeated. It combines the "social victim rescued" motif of "The Blackamoor Unchain'd" (1974) and the coffin and burial story of "The Resurrection Men" (1972).
"The Virtuosi Venus" (1973) is unusual as a story in that it is actually solved three times. It is in the tradition of such multiple solution Golden Age novels as EQ's The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932). That de la Torre does this all in the space of a short story shows her commitment to bringing the reader a full mead of mystery.
"The Westcombe Witch" (1973) is a story of a coven, reminiscent of John Rhode's The Secret of High Eldersham (1931). This is just a little anecdote, hardly a full fledged puzzle plot mystery, but it is charming. There is a pattern in some of de la Torre's work in the 1970's. She will start out with a work that is exceptionally well crafted both as historical fiction and as a puzzle plot story: in 1973, "The Virtuosi Venus", in 1976, "The Aerostatick Globe". She will then write a second tale, less fully crafted and with hardly any puzzle plot, but with some charm: "The Westcombe Witch" (1973) and "The Spirit of the '76" (1976), respectively. Many of these 1970's stories involve foreigners in England, either Italians or Americans.
"The Aerostatick Globe" (1976) is the best work in the Exploits collection, both as historical fiction, and as a mystery. Its unusual, gentle mystery subject reminds us that de la Torre is typically far more interested in robbery than in murder. The somewhat unusual subject matter allows innovation in the plot construction. I think authors should experiment more with off trail subjects for mystery. Murder has been done to death - some less extreme crimes offer some real plot possibilities.
"The Aerostatick Globe" was followed by another story about scientists, "The Spirit of the '76" (1976). In this case Johnson meets Ben Franklin. The story was clearly written to celebrate the Bicentennial of the United States, held in 1976. The Dr. Johnson tales sometimes reflected 20th Century events of the time they were written; for example, "Coronation Story" (1953), which depicts the coronation of King George III in 1761, was written in the same year (1953) as the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The Dr. Johnson tales often include a narrative process. Examples include plays, trials, historical accounts, launching a balloon, and rituals like coronations and funerals. This process includes a strong beginning, middle and end. It adds a well defined structure to the story, and a framework for the reader's expectations. These processes also function as stories, and grip the reader's interest. There is a great deal of visual pageantry in these stories, such as the gorgeous costumes worn and other visual effects. There is also much emphasis on the scientific and technological methods that underlay these processes.
De la Torre differs from many historical mystery writers of today in that she is more interested in civilization than primitiveness. Dr. Johnson was an advanced thinker of his time, in one of the most intellectual cities of the Enlightenment. He represents a peak of civilization. Many of the stories are about advanced science of their time ("The Aerostatick Globe", "The Monboddo Ape Boy") or art ("The Banquo Trap", "The Virtuosi Venus"). By contrast, many of today's historical mysteries want to explore the most barbaric activities of their times. The stories of de la Torre are also much happier and more cheerful than many contemporary historical tales. Their happy atmosphere resembles that of fairy tales.
During the 1950's the classical paradigms of the detective story started breaking down. Usually, I think this was a loss, but sometimes it encouraged the use of non-standard approaches. Fred C. Levon's (untitled) of 1955 is one such tale. This short story is hard to classify, but fun to read. It reminds one a bit of those Erle Stanley Gardner tales, where the hero interferes in the schemes of a bad guy, thus protecting the innocent. Agatha Christie also experimented with the prevent a crime approach, in such 1929 stories as "Wasp's Nest" and "SOS". Levon's story has no title; it is merely marked (untitled), a unique approach in fiction.
Yaffe began publishing his stories as a 15 year old in EQMM, his first was "Department of Impossible Crimes" (1943), the start of a series about impossible crimes specialist Paul Dawn. In 1952, he published "Mom Knows Best" (1951), the first of a new series about Mom, his main series detective. There were 5 short stories about Mom in 1952 - 1955, and three more from October 1966 to January 1968. In 1988, Yaffe began publishing novels about Mom. Many years later, the short tales were collected as My Mother, the Detective. This is one of the most important contemporary collections of mystery short stories: the plots are as good as those in classical writers, such as Agatha Christie. My Mother, the Detective is available from its publisher Crippen & Landru. (I am not associated with Crippen & Landru, and have no financial ties with them whatsoever.) In the new millennium, Yaffe has returned to writing Mom short stories, with the entertaining "Mom Lights a Candle" (2002). One hopes this is the start of a new Mom series.
The restaurant setting of "Mom Makes a Bet" (1953) returns in the banquet opening of Mom Among the Liars (1992). Yaffe likes settings involving food and drink. The Mom short stories are all set at Mom's dinner table. Yaffe also makes the crimes echo some personal interest of Mom's: in "Mom in the Spring" (1954), both Mom and the elderly lady victim are interested in dating; in "Mom Sings an Aria" (1966), Mom and the other characters are big opera fans. This makes the stories as a whole somehow portraits of Mom's character.
Many of the suspects in Yaffe's work are given to lying, fantasizing and delusional behavior. Employees and servants often indulge in small hidden schemes they keep secret from their employers. Both types of lying play a role in his puzzle plots.
Yaffe's fiction is filled with careful deductive work. Each story has a series of questions asked by Mom, wherein she uses her growing understanding of the crime to make guesses about the crime's circumstances. These passages are virtuosic. The end of the story shows Mom going over clues embedded in the tale. Yaffe shows an inventiveness in coming up with these. It is a full measure of puzzle plot mystery.
Yaffe's Mom stories are armchair detective tales: Mom solves cases brought to her by her policeman son over dinner. This tradition was invented by Baroness Orczy in her Old Man in the Corner tales (1901-1902), and employed by Agatha Christie in her Tuesday Night Club Murders (1928 - 1930) and some of her The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1926 - 1927). Contemporary writers using the same approach include Isaac Asimov, in his Black Widowers stories, and Donald J. Sobol, in some of his Encyclopedia Brown tales. One suspects that Sobol's stories were directly influenced by Yaffe's Mom tales; Encyclopedia often solves cases given to him by his policeman Dad over dinner.
Ellery Queen especially encouraged the publication of armchair detective stories in his Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In addition to Yaffe's and Asimov's, he also published Anthony Boucher's Nick Noble stories in the 1940's, and the first of Harry Kemelman's Nicky Welt tales, "The Nine-Mile Walk" (1947), is also an armchair detective tale. Many of these EQMM armchair detective tales continue the S. S. Van Dine - Ellery Queen tradition of a genius amateur detective who works with the police: Boucher's Nick Noble solves problems brought him by a policeman, Kemelman's Nicky Welt by his friend the District Attorney, and Yaffe's Mom by her policeman son. Ellery Queen also occasionally wrote armchair detective stories himself, notably his Puzzle Club stories.
Most of the EQMM authors wrote very pure armchair detective tales. One or more people would bring a problem to the detective character, who would then ask a few questions, then immediately solve the case. There would be no lapse of time, and the detective would not send the other characters out to do further sleuthing. Furthermore, the solution would be very carefully based on reasoning about the crime. Deduction would reign supreme. This is in contrast to another approach, earlier employed before 1940 by such writers as Vincent Starrett and Rex Stout. Starrett's George Washington Troxell and Stout's Nero Wolfe would sit at home, directing investigations carried out by their legmen, Fred Dellabough and Archie Goodwin. Because of this, both sleuths are related to the tradition of armchair detection. However, they are very different in approach to most of the writers discussed above.
All of the above writers are in the intuitionist school of detective fiction. Intuitionists emphasized genius amateur detectives who solved mysteries through pure reasoning. Such an approach is closely related to the armchair paradigm. It is not much of a leap from a genius who solves crimes through deductive reasoning (the intuitionist approach) to a genius who solves mysteries through pure thinking without ever visiting the scene of the crime (the armchair detective).
It is not really clear to me that the armchair detective writers form a school of detective fiction. Rather, it seems more likely that intuitionist writers form a school, and that armchair detection is one approach that is sometimes employed by intuitionist authors. The word "school" refers to a group of writers who all share a common approach to mystery fiction, and whose techniques and approaches have more in common with each other than they do with anyone outside of the school. In other words, it is not true that such armchair detective writers as Isaac Asimov and James Yaffe are closely linked in all the techniques they use in their mystery plots. Rather, both Asimov and Yaffe are in the intuitionist tradition, and both just happen to be employing the armchair approach.
Aside from Ellery Queen himself, it is notable that most of the post-1945 writers of armchair detection were not really full members of the professional, book writing, adult-oriented, mystery fiction establishment of their day. Sobol is a children's book writer, who published much mystery fiction for children, but little for adults. Most of the other writers' mystery publications were largely confined to EQMM. Asimov was a science fiction writer, and rarely published pure mystery novels. Although Kemelman would go on to write the best selling Rabbi Small mysteries after 1964, for the first twenty years of his career his published mystery output was restricted to a handful of stories in EQMM. Similarly, Yaffe was mainly a mainstream, non-mystery writer who only published a handful of mystery short stories in EQMM, before his branching out into mystery novels in 1988. There is something oppositional, almost defiant about all these writers. The received wisdom of the mystery publishing industry of the 1945 - 1980 era was that puzzle plot mysteries were old fashioned and passé. Many editors of the time had an intense hatred for the traditional mystery: see Joan Kahn's remarks on the subject, for instance. The armchair detective stories in EQMM were published in the teeth of this opposition, in deliberate contrast to this anti-puzzle plot belief of the mystery establishment.
The other notable fact about the post-1945 armchair detective writers is that many of them are Jewish. It is very problematic to assert that there is any connection between a writer's ethnic or religious background, and their fiction. It is tempting to suggest that there might be a correlation between the armchair detective's emphasis on pure thinking, and the reverence in which thinking, scholarship and intellectuality were held by many American Jews of the post-1945 era. However, I cannot really prove such an assertion.
Yaffe published his fair play, puzzle plot detective stories in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; because of this, he is sometimes said to be a writer in the tradition of Ellery Queen. There are EQ like features occasionally found in Yaffe's stories: there are three suspects who go in and out of a building containing a murder victim in "Mom Knows Best" (1952), a common EQ plot set up; and Mom Meets her Maker (1990) contains a dying message, treated in an EQ like fashion, with multiple solutions.
While EQ deserves much credit for bringing us Yaffe's excellent work, Yaffe's stories are actually much closer to a tradition that includes Baroness Orczy, G.K. Chesterton, and above all, Agatha Christie. Yaffe's fiction seems especially close to Agatha Christie. The give and take of his characters over the dinner table while discussing the case recalls the free flowing dialogues in Christie's The Tuesday Night Club Murders, and not the more formal approach of Orczy. So does the way in which Mom relates each crime to something homey in her experience, just like Christie's sleuth Miss Marple. Yaffe likes tales of impossible poisonings, such as "Mom Makes a Bet" (1953), "Mom Sings an Aria" (1966), and other works. These recall Christie's interest in the same subject in such works as Sad Cypress, "How Does Your Garden Grow". He uses the same approach as Christie: there is apparently exactly one suspect who could have done the crime, and it seems impossible for anyone else to have committed it. Yaffe's interest in impossible crimes also recalls Chesterton and Carr.
Such Yaffe tales as "Mom Makes a Wish" (1955) and "Mom and the Haunted Mink" (1967) share common formal patterns. In each, we see a series of events that look one way. At the end of the story, Mom reveals that the events can be given a completely different interpretation. This approach is guaranteed to warm the heart of any true mystery fan; Yaffe pursues it with considerable ingenuity. One can see such stories as far back as the American Renaissance: for example Herman Melville's great "Benito Cereno" (1855). It became a systematic technique in the hands of Fergus Hume, and then in writers Hume influenced, such as Baroness Orczy. It was employed regularly by Chesterton: see, for example, his "The Vampire of the Village". The Orczy and Chesterton influenced Christie used it repeatedly in her work as well.
Three years before Perry Mason's debut, many of the conventions of lawyer and trial fiction were in full swing in America's mass circulation fiction magazines. Carolyn Wells included three 1930 lawyer stories from Collier's in her Best American Mystery Stories. While none of these stories are real puzzle plot tales, all three are very entertaining pieces of storytelling. Two of them are full of ingenious lawyer's courtroom tricks. She also included a similar courtroom tale by Melville Davisson Post, who had previously created the granddad of all clever lawyers in Randolph Mason, in the 1890's. William Faulkner also created his lawyer detective Gavin Stevens in 1930, for slick magazine publication. Shortly before, Frances Noyes Hart's The Bellamy Trial (1927) was a best seller. I thought this book was very dull, but it showed an appetite among the American public for this sort of fiction. Hart set her story among the professional people of the upper middle class, the sort of people that Mary Roberts Rinehart was always writing about, but her work moves at a snail's pace compared to Rinehart's. It also seems far more remote from the Perry Mason tradition of courtroom pyrotechnics than are the three Collier's stories, or the Post piece.
The three Collier's pieces are by four authors who are completely obscure today, some of the least known writers in Wells' collection: Mrs. Wilson Woodrow, C.C. Waddell, Jerome Beatty, and Hugh MacNair Kahler ("Fair and Stormy"). I had never heard of any of these writers, and knew nothing about them. (Some research on Kahler appears in the article about him.) By contrast, the authors she included from the Saturday Evening Post, while not necessarily famous names in mystery fiction, have at least made more of an impact on popular culture, including general publishing and Hollywood screenwriting. Maybe the Post was a much greater platform to launch a literary career.
While reprint collections from the pulps are fairly common, reprints from the slick magazines are unfortunately very rare. One of the few is American Murders (1986), edited by Jon L. Breen and Rita A. Breen. This reprints 11 of the mystery novellas that appeared in the slick American Magazine nearly every month between 1934 to 1956, and contains an annotated bibliography of the American novellas. These novellas began in March 1934 with Mrs. Wilson Woodrow's "Eyes at the Window". I have no idea what relation, if any, she was to President Woodrow Wilson.
Clarence Budington Kelland's "Ramikin Rubies" (1930), is a pleasant piece of escapism about a millionaire amateur detective, and his involvement with fighting a gang of jewel thieves. People often talk about amateur detectives, nosy, gutsy individuals who solve crimes entirely on their own, but surprisingly few of them actually show up in mystery history, except for such Spinster Sleuths as Amelia Butterworth, Rachel Innes, and Jane Marple, who actually seem to form a detective category all their own. (These sleuths were created by Green, Rinehart, and Christie, respectively.) Instead, most amateur detectives work as consultants or collaborators with the police, like Lord Peter Wimsey or Philo Vance. Kelland's tone rather resembles Agatha Christie's in "The Manhood of Edward Robinson" (1924), and her Tommy and Tuppence tales (1924), as well as Why Didn't They Ask Evans, but Kelland includes more actual comedy in his tale. Kelland was a popular writer for the Saturday Evening Post, and wove in and out of the margins of the mystery field throughout his career.
Kelland's tale does not actually include any actual elements of mystery; it is not a puzzle plot story, by any means. It is loaded with plot threads, including several that are not wrapped up by the story's conclusion. Kelland clearly planned it as the start of a series, and possibly such a series actually exists (I read this tale in an anthology.) The Post strongly encouraged series stories, just as the pulp magazines did. One interesting plot angle is that the millionaire has hired a double to stand in for him at boring social events; this anticipates John Dickson Carr's "William Wilson's Racket" (1941), and might have influenced him.
Similarly, Kelland's novel The Key Man (1951) is not really a puzzle plot mystery, either. There is a mysterious murder to begin with, but the bad guys in the tale are clearly marked out from the start. The story concerns a television variety show whose members are menaced by a gang of crooks. The young director of the show serves as an amateur detective, with the show's comedienne serving as his detective partner and love interest. Kelland does a very good job with his description of early live television. There is a tone of wholesome gentility to the proceedings, a look inside a glamorous profession served up as escapism for middle class readers. While the story is not a whodunit, it has the feel of a 1940's or 50's mystery story, such as the Lockridges' Mr. and Mrs. North books. There is the initial murder, the hero and the heroine keep turning up new facts, a buried series of past sinister events gradually come to light, and the crooks become more and more threatening. The feel of the book is much closer to a true mystery novel than of what we today think of as a "thriller" or suspense story. Towards the end of the tale, a non-stereotyped black character turns up among the good guys, a welcome surprise.
Kelland's most famous character was a crusty old Vermont deputy called Scattergood Baines. In "An Ounce of Curiosity" (1932), the rural characters click, but the mystery plot's solution depends on facts that are withheld from the reader till the end - that is, it lacks "fair play". While his good characters are wholesome, his bad guys are really vicious, rather surprisingly so for this kind of family entertainment. The hick background reminds one of both Phoebe Atwood Taylor's Asey Maso stories, and T.S. Stribling's detective tales set in the rural South. Kelland's tales preceded both of these writers, the Baines series already having commenced by the early 1920's. The series seems to have started after Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner tales however, and was perhaps influenced by it.
Kelland's work was the source of numerous motion pictures. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Thirty Day Princess, and Valley of the Sun all derive from his work. His non-mystery novel Top Hat was made into a delightful and original Hollywood comedy called Stand-In (1937), directed by Tay Garnett.
The rise of hard-boiled literature in the 1920's is usually described as almost entirely the product of a single magazine, Black Mask. This is very misleading. It ignores films such as Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), and Thunderbolt (1929). It neglects plays, such as George Abbott and Philip Dunning's Broadway (1926), which is one of the first literary depictions of gangsterdom. The article on Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939) contains a discussion of Broadway. (Ellery Queen's The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) takes place in a Broadway theater showing a fictitious gangland drama called "Gunplay".) And it ignores what is apparently a great quantity of material in general circulation slick magazines, such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post.
In the early 1920's the Post was already publishing Octavus Roy Cohen's stories about private detective Jim Hanvey. Hanvey, who was described as the "terror of crooks from coast to coast", dealt with a variety of swindlers, thieves and other crooks, not quite as grim as the characters encountered by the Continental Op and other Black Mask detectives, but still definitely not murder in an upper class drawing room. His first collection, Jim Hanvey, Detective (1923), appeared in book form in the same year that Carroll John Daly's Terry Mack and Race Williams, and Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op debuted in Black Mask. Private detectives such as Nick Carter, had been big in dime novels and adventure magazines since before the turn of the century. Still, their appearance in the Post was something special, at least in terms of sociological acceptance of crime fiction. The Post was aimed squarely at America's middle class. During this era, one out of every ten Americans read the Saturday Evening Post. The Post was also publishing Secret Service tales by Melville Davisson Post by 1919.
This is in contrast to Black Mask, a pulp magazine whose circulation peaked in 1930 at 103, 000, and which was often significantly less (often around 60, 000). Admittedly, Black Mask authors such as Dashiell Hammett, Raoul Whitfield, and Carroll John Daly saw their Mask work reprinted in hard covers, where it acquired a whole new influence. Even so, it is clear that accounts of detective history that concentrate on only one magazine are lop sided and distorted.
In 1931, editor Carolyn Wells put out Best American Mystery Stories, the first of an annual anthology series (it only lasted one more year, unfortunately). This anthology shows the deep interest American magazines, and their numerous readers, had in tales of gangsters. From the Saturday Evening Post, she reprinted such stories (all from 1930 or 1929) as Ben Ames Williams "Man Afraid", which deals a drug store clerk who is kidnapped by bank robbers; Clarence Budington Kelland's "Ramikin Rubies", in which an amateur detective deals with professional gunmen; James Warner Bellah's "Mr. Picarelli Takes a Bath", a murder mystery dealing with Mafia dons, and solved by an English ship's steward; and Frederick Irving Anderson's "Madame the Cat", in which police detectives lay a trap for a big time bootlegger. These stories all form a pattern. A respectable, wholesome, normal person must fight the denizens of the underworld. The normal person is described almost sentimentally, and is the sort of person the average reader of the magazine could identify with. By contrast, the criminals step right out of gangdom, and are full representatives of mob violence and lawlessness at its worst. There is a "worlds - in -collision" effect in these tales, as the wholesome world of the heroes' comes up against the sinister underworld of the bad guys. The Post's rival Collier's was pushing a similar pattern. In Hugh MacNair Kahler's "Fair and Stormy", an honest country prosecutor must outwit a bank robber from the big city, and his slick big city defense attorney. Howard McLellan's "The Moll-Trap" shows a young policeman (whose wife is expecting their first child) who must take on some hired killers.
All of the heroes of these tales show great gumption and courage. But none of them are as ostentatiously "tough" and hard-boiled as the typical Black Mask hero. Instead, they are the sort of wholesome, clean cut people, who appealed to the middle class readers of the day. They do represent all sociological ranks of society, from the handsome young millionaire amateur detective of Kelland's "Ramikin Rubies", who seems to have stepped out of one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's romances, which were also appearing in the Post during that era, to the poverty stricken young drug store clerk and steward.
Most of these tales are not mystery stories, strictly speaking. There are no mysterious events that have to be explained, no puzzle to be solved. The exceptions are what is certainly the best of the tales, Anderson's "Madame the Cat", which does contain some puzzle elements, worked into a thriller background, and the worst of the tales, Bellah's, which comes complete with lead paced storytelling and stereotyped Italian mobsters, although it has a fairly ingenious puzzle. However, many of the tales are highly plotted, and show some ingenuity in construction, so they should appeal to fans of the classic mystery tale. I enjoyed most of these works, in ways I did not at all anticipate.
The plot situations of these works seem remarkably similar to those of many later movies and novels. Who hasn't seen tales about a stakeout, ("The Moll-Trap") or a courtroom drama ("Fair and Stormy")? Here are many conventions of the crime thriller, all at a fairly early date.
One can see differences in tone between Collier's and the Post. Collier's also published several stories included in this collection (not mentioned here) whose protagonists were thieves. It also got "down and dirty" in its underworld portrait in "The Moll-Trap" in a way that the Saturday Evening Post never did. By contrast, the Post emphasized "class". There is an attempt at elegance in the Post writers' storytelling, and a concern that its authors show as much sophistication as possible.
"Halloween Assassin" (1942) is a little mystery published in Collier's. It combines an intuitionist puzzle plot with lawyer heroes and courtroom drama. It is closest in feel to a mystery by Agatha Christie, or one of the less spooky tales by John Dickson Carr. Like several of Christie's stories, it features an ingenious poisoning. Such poisoning stories, both here and in Christie, are linked to the technique of the impossible crime. Also like Christie: it picks up on a nice, if unusual feature of daily life, working it into its puzzle plot. It also includes the Golden Age interest in architecture. Skerry was a Boston born architect who lost his business during the Depression, and turned to writing instead. Skerry apparently never published a detective novel. He published a single tale in the detective pulps: "Chance Observer" in the May 1944 Street and Smith's Detective Story Magazine.