A. A. Milne | Ngaio Marsh | Georgette Heyer | Valentine Williams | Glyn E. Daniel / Dilwyn Rees | Nicholas Blake | Eden Phillpotts | A.E.W. Mason | Marten Cumberland | Will Scott | Valentine
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
The Red House Mystery (1922)
Peacock House and Other Mysteries (collected 1927)
"Prince Charlie's Dirk" (1926)
"Clues" (1929)
Death in the Stocks (1935)
The Talisman Ring (1936)
Envious Casca (1941)
The Knife Behind the Curtain (collected 1930)
The Curiosity of Mr. Treadgold (collected 1937)
Enter A Murderer (1935) (Chapters 1 - 10)
Death in a White Tie (1938)
Death of a Peer (1940)
Colour Scheme (1943) (Chapters 1, 4, 8, 9, 14, 15)
Death of a Fool (1956) (Chapters 1 - 4)
False Scent (1959)
Hand in Glove (1962) (Chapters 1 - 3)
Alleyn and Others
"A Study in White" (1949)
The Adjusters stories
A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922) is an outstandingly plotted novel of the Golden Age of mystery. Milne would be an author whose prestige would have equaled that of Christie, Queen and Carr if he written more mystery novels, but unfortunately this was his only novel in the detective form. Milne instead had several other literary careers, being successively famous as a humorist, a playwright, and a children's book author (Winnie the Pooh). Milne falls squarely into the "intuitionist" tradition of these authors, as was pointed out by S.S. Van Dine. It is hard to know who, if anyone, influenced Milne as a writer: at his early date there are very few famous detective novels. I have tended to associate him with Bentley and Chesterton as an Early Golden Age writer, but this might not be accurate.
Raymond Chandler once criticized Milne's book for a lack of criminological realism. Specifically, Chandler pointed out that modern, scientific police techniques could probably have solved the novel's murder, in ways that were different and perhaps faster than the sleuthing, investigation, and deduction used by the book's amateur detective hero. I agree with Chandler's analysis, but wonder how relevant it is to anything. Certainly police technology today is very powerful, and can make for interesting fiction. (I always enjoyed watching the TV show UNSUB, which detailed such high tech police work.) Chandler's criticism logically applies not to just The Red House, but probably to just about all mystery fiction, from Golden Age to hard-boiled, some of R. Austin Freeman and his followers excepted. But we read detective fiction not usually to see realistic lab work, but to experience imaginative plots, and to see the great spectacle of the human mind in action. No subject in fiction is more fascinating than this. Human reason is a great subject for fiction. The Chandler-Milne debate is discussed in greater detail in the article on Realist fiction.
Of Milne's now largely forgotten plays, my favorite is The Romantic Age. It deals with people who want to lead more romantic lives, than is conventional in society. It eventually compromises its convictions and wimps out at the end, but it is still a delightful work. Leslie Howard played the lead in this in London, 17 years before Gone With the Wind (1939), and he should have been very good in the role of the romantic hero.
Ngaio Marsh is an anomalous figure in the history of detection. Her books tend to follow a common pattern. There is an opening section, which introduces the characters and sets up the background of the crime. This section is quite elaborate, lasting roughly four chapters or 70 pages. It climaxes with the actual murder. At this point, Police Inspector Roderick Alleyn enters, and spends the next 150 pages investigating the crime. Finally, he solves it, and the book ends.
The opening and post murder sections of a Marsh novel seem like two different books. The opening chapters seem like a sparkling novel of manners, with sophisticated characters and comedy, an interesting cultural background, often centering on either the theater or the arts, and a great deal of gracefully written prose. They form an excellent novella, and are the part of Marsh' books I like best. They are modern equivalents of such writers as Oscar Wilde or Saki. And the cultural background is often quite insightful. For example, Death of a Fool (1956) centers memorably on traditional English morris dancing, and has a surprising amount to say about gender roles and sexual discrimination. Other examples of Marsh books whose opening sections are better than their rest include The Nursing Home Murder (Chapters 1 - 6), A Wreath For Rivera (Chapters 1 - 5) and Hand in Glove (Chapters 1 - 3).
The murder investigation sections tend to be dull and dreary. And her solutions, while they can be admirably bizarre, elaborately plotted, and uninhibited, do not at all reach the level of a Christie or a Carr. We are always reading in mystery criticism about writers who are allegedly full of literary talent, but whose skill with mystery plotting is not as good. I tend to be skeptical of this - just about everyone who is "hard-boiled" is described as being full of literary greatness - but in Marsh's case this is a good description of her work. The early novella openings of her best books really do show literary talent. Marsh is not at all like many writers who attempt to bring literary values to the crime novel. Her books are not mainstream novels given a thin coating of mystery. On the contrary, the elaborate but boring murder investigations waste far too much time in Marsh's fiction. The books fall proudly and clearly into the paradigm of the Golden Age detective story. Marsh was not at all ashamed of being a mystery writer. She just wasn't very good at it. At least much of the time.
The best Marsh book I have read, from the standpoint of a mystery novel, is False Scent (1959). It combines a well constructed, intricate plot with a delightful look at theater people. I would love to find more works of this quality in Marsh's oeuvre. Among her earlier novels, the huge Death in a White Tie (1938) is also outstanding for its storytelling and plot construction, large cast of characters - 16 well rounded people in addition to her regulars - and its fine writing.
Marsh's novels understandably wowed Howard Haycraft, and other critics who were trying to bring more literary merit to the detective novel. Above all, Marsh had a profound grasp on what "civilization" meant. Her characters are witty, cultured, kind hearted, and wonderfully flamboyant. I feel that I am a better person for having read her.
Ngaio Marsh's viewpoint character tends to be a young woman. This woman is young, naive, respectable, normal and middle class, and the people she observes tend to the exact opposite: older, outrageously eccentric and upper crust. She represents a person who has few social ties; they are people who are deeply committed to some social program, such as the theater, English folk culture (Death of a Fool), or an unusual family. She is potential, as yet unrealized; they are experience, what happens when humans commit to a life and start living it. She is usually quietly virginal, and looking for a respectable romance; they are usually deep in various relationships. They are her future, and she is their past. They are often a magic mirror of her dreams and aspirations, exaggerating them, transforming them, and mocking her hopes for romance or theatrical success in strange, bizarre ways. She is often a New Zealander, from that most democratic and middle class of all nations; they are British, and exist within a painfully stratified culture. She is an outsider, they are involved in society, often too much so. In her own quiet way she is a rebuke to them and their follies; but they are also a rebuke to her isolation and lack of human living. They need her intelligence, balance and good sense, but she needs their eccentricity, personality, and realized character. In many ways, she seems to be a portrait of Ngaio Marsh herself as a young girl, a young woman come from New Zealand to take part in British cultural life. She and the rest of the characters form a comic balance, one of the main structural supports in Marsh's comedy of manners. Oddly enough, for all her quietness and self effacing qualities, she is often the catalyst that stirs up the action, and who triggers the events among the other characters, who, however bizarre, were previous to her arrival in some sort of dramatic balance with each other.
Marsh's portrait of an eccentric family in Death of a Peer (1940) is one of her most sympathetic creations. Like Craig Rice's equally eccentric family in Home Sweet Homicide (1944), it is one of the most authentic and emotionally involving families in detective fiction. Only families this eccentric and this individual seem real.
Some of Ngaio Marsh's 1930's stories deal with murder traps. In Overture to Death (1939), this is mechanical. In Artists in Crime (1938), this is partly mechanical, partly just a physical death trap. Mechanical traps recall such Realist school writers as the Coles, and to a lesser degree Vincent Cornier. Marsh' treatment differs from the Coles in that in the Coles, the death trap mechanism is revealed only at the end, and treated as part of the puzzle plot of the mystery story, whereas Marsh tends to reveal it soon after the murder, and feature it as just another plot component of an intuitionist detective tale. Marsh' traps rarely involve any scientific or medical knowledge, unlike those of the Bailey school. They tend to be purely physical, almost Rube Goldberg devices. They tend to express aggressiveness, one person zapping another. The emphasis on the Freudian abnormality of the repressed in Overture recalls Allingham's Police at the Funeral (1931).
If her first mystery A Man Lay Dead (1934) is strained, her second Enter A Murderer (1935) is extremely readable. The opening murder and investigation (Chapters 1 - 10) shows Marsh's storytelling at its most effective. We have the complex interplay of characters in a single building, with characters moving around according to a precise schedule - here involved with the staging of a play. A similar progression through space and time will mark Death in a White Tie (1938) and False Scent (1959). As often in Marsh, the murder method is complex, and its preparation and physical components play an important role in the unfolding plot. These components often survive to serve as clues for the detectives: here they are a gun, two sets of bullets, a desk and some gloves. Watching them weave in and out of the story adds to the complexity of the plot. Marsh shows a great sense of proportion in the construction of her story. Different time segments are well marked out by events in the theater, such as intermission, setting up the stage, a blackout, and lights going on in the theater. The various temporal zones are often culminate in climaxes. The whole thing gives a pattern reminiscent of the forms in classical music, where different movements give rise to climaxes, then are followed by new sections of the work.
Marsh's 1930's novels include homages. Inspector Alleyn pays tribute to R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke in Enter A Murderer. There are jokes about Edgar Wallace in Chapter 2 of that novel, and references to G.K. Chesterton in Chapter 1 of Death in a White Tie. There is also a family named Carrados in this book, just like Ernest Bramah's sleuth Max Carrados, and a brief discussion of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in Chapter 26. E. Phillips Oppenheim is referred to in Chapter 6 of The Nursing Home Murder (1936), although the actual plot of the book, with a right wing minister threatened by radicals for introducing a bill in Parliament, derives from Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men (1905).
Marsh tends to use echoes among her groups of characters. There are three mature women in Death in a White Tie, each with a young woman they are "bringing out" as a debutante. Two of the women have imposing older husbands with whom they have difficulty. There also is an uncle and a young man, who simply mirror the women pairs with a gender reversal. Similarly, there are three love triangles in Enter A Murderer, each with the unpleasant murder victim at their center. There are two brother-sister pairs in Hand in Glove, something that winds up playing a role in the plot.
Marsh's work has a visionary quality. There are several scenes of altered states of consciousness in Death in a White Tie, usually involving dreams. Even when awake, her characters often feel as if they are dreaming. It is usually the "good" characters who get these states, especially the detective, and her central protagonists. There are also several key scenes in Death in a White Tie where gender identity breaks down, and the line between male and female gets temporarily blurred. The sympathetic Bunchy combines male and female characteristics. Such androgyny recurs with full force in the Morris dancing of Death of a Fool. Dancing always has a visionary and allegorical quality in Marsh's writing. In general, despite their surface realism, Marsh's stories have a great deal of surrealistic spirit.
Marsh's hero and heroine emphasize traits that often are considered by society to belong to the other gender. Roderick Alleyn has social sophistication and good looks, whereas Troy has creative spirit - she is a great painter - and fierce independence. Alleyn can get along with anybody, and has remarkable verbal skills he can use to make contact with different people's world views, establishing harmony with them. He is a maintainer of the social balance, and often intervenes to help other people's social relations. Such a maintenance is often considered a female task, just as Troy's making of great art a male one.
We often see a scene in Marsh, then later on a witness to that scene will add some details we did not get as readers during the scene. For example, the footman adds info in Chapter 10 about the blackmail scene in Chapter 1 of Enter A Murderer. Similarly, Bunchy adds insight in Chapter 2 to the scene in the previous chapter with Lady Carrados in Death in a White Tie. The scene in the dressing room in Chapter 2 of Enter A Murderer is discussed and "extended" throughout the novel - the reader is always getting new information about it. The various events at the ball in Death in a White Tie are revisited again and again with a Resnais like fervor. When avant-garde directors like Alain Resnais chop up temporal logic and show their scenes in non-temporal sequence, it is ascribed to their interest in Modernist technique. But Marsh does the same thing within the framework of a detective story, and does it with great complexity and skill.
Is Ngaio Marsh in the school of Van Dine? This is a difficult question. Certainly her books are not direct imitations, the way early Ellery Queen novels are. Also, Marsh is perceived to be part of the British Golden Age, and all Van Dineans allegedly are American, so Marsh is automatically excluded. Nor is Inspector Alleyn an arrogant genius in the Philo Vance tradition. Yet, one can cite several features:
Secondly, the New Zealand flowering tree known as "Ngaio" in Maori, is scientifically called Myoporum. It is the type genus of the small family Myoporaceae. Myoporums are also found in Australia, where they are known as sugarwoods: they exude a sweet substance which is chemically closely allied to sugars, although technically not quite a sugar, strictly speaking. (Similar substances used to be put into many "sugarless" gums, although these chemicals were just as sweet, fattening, and teeth rotting as real sugars.) Myoporums have clusters of little white flowers. They are closely related to the Australian shrubs known as Poverty Bushes (Eremophila), which have brightly colored and more conspicuous flowers. I've seen Poverty Bushes in real life, in Santa Barbara's Francesci Park, but have only seen Myoporums in photographs. Studies on the chloroplast gene ndhF suggest that Myoporums and Poverty Bushes are in turn closely related to butterfly bushes, the Buddlejaceae.
There are two Marsh films I especially liked. One is a New Zealand version of Colour Scheme, made circa 1978 for New Zealand television by director Peter Sharp. The opening scene, where most of the characters are sitting around one large dining room table in a Northern New Zealand hot springs resort, conjures up the entire democratic milieu of New Zealand in a marvelous fashion. It seems profoundly symbolic. This film is full of excellent location photography of both the hot springs, and Maori sites. It is very well done on all levels, but has apparently never been shown in America (I saw it on Canadian TV, which we get here on the border in Detroit.) The same team made a film of Died in the Wool, Marsh' other New Zealand story, which I have never been able to see. My other favorite Marsh adaptation is one of the recent British TV movies, Hand in Glove, well acted by a cast that includes Sir John Gielgud.
Colour Scheme (1943) is a frustratingly uneven work in Marsh' oeuvre. The best parts of the book, Chapters 1, 4, 8, 9, 14 and 15, show real imagination. Virtually all of the actual mystery plot is contained in these chapters. Unlike some of Marsh' fiction, these chapters include a well constructed puzzle plot. The rest of the book is the least interesting part of the story: the endless "mainstream" novelistic material swarming around the hostel and its denizens. Inside this huge novel is a good crime short story trying to come out.
These mystery sections are also the chapters that concern that spectacular New Zealand landscape feature, the thermal pools. Everything dealing with the landscape of the boiling mud pools is original. They also contain the frightening encounter with the train in Chapter 4; its railway cutting setting is also part of the New Zealand landscape. The pools are part of a tradition in British Commonwealth fiction, one that encompasses E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1912 - 1924) and Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), the latter being made into a superb film by Peter Weir in 1975. In these books, people visit a remarkable, eerie and sinister geological formation somewhere in the corners of the Commonwealth, one that has religious significance to a group of people living near by. Mystical encounters ensue. Both Forster's caves and Marsh' pools can be seen as woman symbols, depictions of Earth as a woman and a mother. There is a sense in all of these works of the landscape being alive. They all have a disturbing quality. The underground cavern mystery novella by Kelley Roos, "The Case of the Hanging Gardens" (1954), also has a little of this same feel.
Marsh is less overtly mystical than Forster or Lindsay, however. Instead, there is a sense that Marsh is trying to produce a picture of home. New Zealand, after all, is where she was born and often lived. Marsh stresses the sheer instability of the Earth in these geological eruptions. The characters have no firm foundation underneath them. Similarly, the characters are constantly threatened in the book's plot by the financial takeover of their hostel, the only home most of the family has ever known. Their home is under siege, and threatens to collapse financially at any moment. The characters are also lacking in any fixed routine. The running of the hostel seems to be improvised from moment to moment, with no set business or cooking or maintenance processes in place. This too adds to the novel's picture of total instability. So does the wartime setting of the story, and the conviction that spies are on the loose in or nearby the hostel. Death of a Peer (1940) is another Marsh book about a loving family besieged by instability. Both families are comically but frighteningly incompetent to deal in the smallest ways with practical affairs, and lurch from crisis to crisis.
Also admirable is the non-stereotyped depiction of the Maori people in the book. This is in the anti-racist tradition of the Van Dine school, and continues Marsh' attack on racism in Death in a White Tie (1938). Unfortunately, the Maori culture never really comes alive. The Maori stage show has a good song about death and the pools, but little else that is really interesting. This is a failure of technique or ideas, not of sympathy. Formally, this scene anticipates the look at English folk culture and its performance traditions in Death of a Fool (1956). Marsh's stage shows tend to focus around murders and killings, whether it is the mystery play of Enter a Murderer, the murder game of A Man Lay Dead, or the folk performances of Colour Scheme and Death of a Fool.
Heyer was most famous for her historical romances, but she also wrote several mystery novels.
Why Shoot A Butler?. Why Shoot A Butler? (1933) is rather more a thriller than a pure detective story in the Golden Age definition. It is a very dull book. Its chief merit is its amateur detective, the abrasive Frank Amberley.
Death in the Stocks. Many of Heyer's regular mysteries lack good puzzle plots. Death in the Stocks (1935) is undistinguished as a puzzle plot, to put it mildly, but it has much clever black comedy in the Vereker family, a group of outrageously eccentric murder suspects. All of the Verekers are completely self absorbed, care nothing about the deceased or the social amenities, and say whatever selfish things they think. They are a bunch of monsters, but ones given superb dialogue by Heyer. The sparkling dialogue recalls stage comedies by Noël Coward, and the over the top families in Coward plays such as Hay Fever (1925). Heyer's dialogue is both subtle and intellectually complex, showing considerable logic; at the end of Chapter 11 she compares it to a stage play by Chekhov. It is also remarkably sustained over the whole novel.
The ability of several members of the Vereker family to justify themselves, no matter how venal or corrupt their actions, recalls Uncle William in Allingham's Police at the Funeral (1931). So does the tone of Heyer's comic dialogue for these characters, which blends whiny self-justification with a sort of parody of petit-bourgeois earnestness and conventionality. The use of long missing relatives in Stocks also recalls Allingham's novel.
Heyer's book in turn looks forward to Ngaio Marsh, and her comedies of manners mysteries. Indeed, Heyer's social comedy seems like Marsh's nearest ancestor in the mystery field. Marsh would create her own family of eccentrics in Death of a Peer (1940).
It would be a mistake to call Heyer's book a satire: the Verekers do not seem to represent any social class or profession, or even a standard human personality type. Instead they are a bunch of unique individuals unlike any other. They keep only to their self interest, and have no concern for murder, the tragedies of others, or anyone's feelings. They are pure self interest coming straight up from the id. This gives a child like quality to the Verekers: they seem like a bunch of 5 year olds who are only concerned with their own wants.
Heyer, like Marsh, is an intuitionist writer. Like other intuitionists, she often favors amateur detectives. Although Death in the Stocks introduces her continuing policeman character Superintendent Hannasyde, much of the actual sleuthing is done by solicitor Giles Carrington. He is a relatively nice and normal person in a book full of the outrageous Verekers. The opposite pattern is found in the earlier Why Shoot A Butler? (1933), where the abrasive barrister Frank Amberley serves as amateur detective among a cast of nice people. The deliberately rude, rather witty Amberley can be seen as a very rough sketch for the later Verekers; like them, he is given to saying the unexpected, and to shattering social conventions of politeness. Also like the Verekers, he disdains sharing information with the police, and enjoys puncturing clichés of good form during a murder investigation - see especially in Chapter 5. The Verekers' ingenuity and lack of social inhibition in suspecting themselves and each other of the crime also breaks down mystery conventions. Heyer's work here forms a sort of logical analysis of the mystery genre itself, a kind of logical debunking of received ideas. Allingham also wrote several stories that involve a logical parody or satire on mystery ideas.
When Giles goes off sleuthing at the end of Death in the Stocks, his first step is to dress in evening clothes. This is not surprising in an author whose historical novels stressed fashion: see Powder and Patch (1923).
Behold, Here's Poison!. Less successful is Heyer's immediate follow-up to Stocks, Behold, Here's Poison! (1936). While the Verekers are self absorbed and unconventional, the family in Poison is just plain nasty to each other. There is some clever dialogue, especially in the first four chapters, but mainly these people are unpleasant. They anticipate such Ngaio Marsh books, also lesser works, in which a bunch of bitchy characters spend time savaging each other to alleged comic effect: Death and the Dancing Footman (1941) and Colour Scheme (1943).
They Found Him Dead. They Found Him Dead (1937) also has some good comic characters, in the tradition of Death in the Stocks. They are more normal and less monstrous than the Verekers, but they are impressively complex just the same. Heyer's satiric scalpel is especially good with Rosemary, the wife obsessed with her feelings. The most successful parts of this book are the opening Chapters (1 - 5) before Scotland Yard begins its investigation.
The book also shows Heyer's skills at constructing motives. These motives are part of the intricate network of relationships existing among her characters. Their logical design forms an interesting and beautiful part of the plot. The system of inheritance among the characters, and the motives deriving from it, resemble those in Death in the Stocks.
The viewpoint characters in They Found Him Dead tend to be social outsiders, people who in real life have no power - old women, a penniless young female companion, a teenage boy. In the world of the novel, they have a firm place in the family structure, and considerable social clout. Heyer’s novel perhaps functions as a piece of wish fulfillment, a taking of powerless characters and enabling them with social standing. Heyer’s characters in general almost entirely long for social standing, to the exclusion of all else. They want to make friends and be included in society. Personal interests pursued by characters often actually root in a desire for social prestige. The hero of Powder and Patch’s desire for nice clothes relates to his wish to be a "gentleman" and a social leader. The enthusiasms of her Regency bucks have for driving vehicles, and that of the hero of They Found Him Dead for sports cars, seems to come more from a need to engage in activities admired by other men, than from any deep personal interest. Even the teenage boy’s desire to do detective work seems to have more to do with his taking part of the world of men, than to gratify any intellectual impulse. These activities also serve as part of “gender identity”, a desire to do manly things.
A Blunt Instrument. The overpraised A Blunt Instrument (1938) has a cute final gimmick, and some related good work about timetables for the crime, but little more.
No Wind of Blame. No Wind of Blame (1939) is closer in tone to Heyer’s romance novels, than are her acerbic earlier mysteries. While their plots tended to turn on inheritance, here it is romance that drives most of the characters. The characters are gentler, and far less monstrous and outrageous than those in her earlier mysteries. They are still completely comic in tone, but it is more the social comedy of her romance books.
Heyer is still referring to Chekhov here, who comes in for quite a discussion in Chapter 2. The tributes of her enthusiastic characters seems sincere. But there is also a new note of satire, a spoof of Chekhov’s relentless gloom. These discussions are hilariously funny. But there is no sign that Heyer still regards Chekhov as the role model for her fiction, as Death in the Stocks seemed to imply.
Young Vicky is another humorous, say-anything Heyer character, somewhat in the tradition of the Verekers. She gets involved in an amusing burlesque on detective story traditions, in the Heyer manner.
Envious Casca. The Heyer novel whose plot I liked best was Envious Casca (1941). Its mystery plot is above the standard of her other mysteries.
Heyer's novels show some signs of Realist school influence, especially Freeman Wills Crofts:
Heyer's masterpiece of mystery is not one of her official mystery books, but one of her historical novels. The Talisman Ring (1936) tells the story of a group of people attempting to bring a crime of murder home to its perpetrator. The book is a delightful combination of detection, comedy, romance and historical fiction.
The group attempting to solve the crime figures out fairly early on who the killer is, sharing this information with the reader. Most of their effort in the rest of the book is in proving it. In this it is like G.D.H. Cole's The Brooklyn Murders (1923), which has a similar basic plan. The characters who serve as amateur detectives are a very likable and sympathetic group, and their warm interactions serve as the beating heart of the novel. The many twists and turns of the plot recall Beaumarchais or Sheridan. In fact the harmoniousness of the patterns of plot and character recall not so much Beaumarchais, but Beaumarchais as set to music by Mozart. To borrow a phrase from E. H. Gombrich, The Talisman Ring shows "harmony achieved".
Heyer's best historical novels also include Faro's Daughter (1941).
Williams shows tremendous enthusiasm for all things American in the book, including American idioms and speech patterns. He seems to welcome America as an admirable alternative to modern Britain. Williams also seems genuinely internationalist in scope, with sympathy for people of all nations.
Williams' stories show a great variety of approaches. There are intuitionist puzzle plots suggesting Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes style deduction from physical clues, and even a scientific crime scheme out of Freeman or the Coles ("The Singing Kettle"). Williams also occasionally mixes spy material with his country house plot matter, as well. Although all of his Treadgold tales have mystery plots, some of them come close to degenerating into pure thrillers. This eclecticism makes him hard to classify, but I think he belongs most closely with the intuitionists. Although he was praised by Howard Haycraft and has an entry in the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, the most important writer who seems to have noticed Williams is Agatha Christie, who burlesqued his Okewood Brothers spy tales in Partners in Crime (1928). The names "Okewood" and "Treadgold" have a certain similarity; each has two syllables, both heavily stressed, and with a d sound at the end, and plenty of o vowel sounds in the names. He also had a series character named "Clubfoot", which continues the pattern.
Williams seems more like a follower than a leader. Many British detective writers of the era seem to be straining to be innovators, to create a New Type of Detective Story, one with their own personal stamp on it. Sometimes, as in Bentley's or Freeman's case, this is admirable; sometimes, in Berkeley's case, it is merely pretentious. Williams seems more content to grind out stories in established modes. Even at his best, there tends to be a somewhat labored quality to Williams' work. He doesn't seem to be a "natural", the way Christie was. Yet his best tales contain some real merit. If he was laboring, at least his work sometimes achieved results.
"The Strange Disappearance of Miss Edith Marless" (1937) is a tale in the same genre as Van Dine's excellent The Kidnap Murder Case (1936). Disappearance tales are loaded with an interesting ambiguity. Has a person run off? been kidnapped? murdered? Williams does himself proud in a genuinely puzzling mystery. This story and "The Blue Ushabti" (1937) suggest a writer in the puzzle plot Christie tradition, although there is a strong Doyle feeling to them as well. Such a direct Doyle influence is rare is authors of the 1930's.
"The Case of the Black 'F'" (1937) and "The Man With The Two Left Feet" do not have puzzle plots, but they do have a well-handled mix of detective work and international intrigue. Both tales show good storytelling. If other Williams tales recall Christie, these seem rather Sherlock Holmes like. The latter story has a treatment of contemporary 1930's politics that still seems relevant and gripping.
Williams' lesser stories recycle material from his better ones. "Donna Laura's Diamond" is another woman's disappearance story, but with much less of a puzzle plot than "The Strange Disappearance". Similarly, "The Dot-and-Carry Case" (1937) and "The Murder of Blanche Medloe" are lesser stories in the tradition of "The Case of the Black 'F'". All three involve two men from different classes whose identities are confused, and the last two deductions about appearances from clothes. "Dot", "Medloe" and "Donna Laura" also contain portraits of underworld types, flashy young crooks who Williams shudderingly regards as Hopelessly Vulgar. One can see why the underworld story never caught on in Britain as it did in America. The same crooks that Americans regarded as glamorous, the British despised as totally non-U. One has to admit that there is a certain element of realism to the British viewpoint. I suspect most real life crooks were just plain sleazy. Americans' fictional glamorous crooks were basically just fantasies. In each case, Williams contrasts his crooks with allegedly admirable men from the upper middle classes, all of whom show much more good taste. However, Williams' portrait contains ambiguities; in each case, it is Mr. Flashy Vulgar Crook who gets the girl. Williams clearly harbors uncomfortable suspicions that the life style of upper class Good Breeding is terminally dull.
Williams went on to read widely in the Sensation novelists of the 1860's, and Gaboriau. He is the author of a much quoted article about Gaboriau.
The scenes in which Mr. Treadgold examines various victims' clothes for clues recall similar ones in Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886).
Williams' autobiography also makes clear that Williams regarded himself much more as an author of "shockers" (spy stories, thrillers, and related works), than of mystery fiction proper, although much of Treadgold falls in the latter category. No less a figure than John Buchan helped get Williams' first novel through wartime censorship, and Williams later became friends with E. Phillips Oppenheim on the Riviera. These are the major names in British spy fiction of the era. Williams also quotes with justifiable pride Kipling's praise of his writing. By contrast, Williams seems personally unacquainted with any of the Golden Age mystery authors.
Also, one might note that when Golden Age intuitionist writers brought the full machinery of the country house mystery into short fiction, they tended to make it a novella (short novel), and not a short story proper. Example include Phillpotts' "Prince Charlie's Dirk", Christie's "Dead Man's Mirror", Carr's "The Third Bullet", and C. Daly King's "The Vanishing Harp". Perhaps they believed that only a novella could accommodate all of the features of a full Golden Age plot. Or, conversely, perhaps they were commissioned to write a longer piece of fiction, and felt that readers would expect them to provide a "novel in miniature".
Williams' spy story, "The Pigeon Man" (1927), presents us with a character whose motivations are as obscure as any in modernist literature. Why is the hero doing what he is doing? Why, for that matter, are the other characters? Williams never says explicitly, leaving readers to puzzle this out for themselves. In addition, the story presents a fable as strange as any in Kafka or Hawthorne. The Pigeon Man is perhaps an upper class English gentleman who has completely managed to de-class himself, turning himself into a Belgian peasant tramp. Or maybe not. Such a motivation is consistent with Williams' concerns about class in the Mr. Treadgold stories. But the Pigeon Man ultimately goes far beyond this, achieving a complete obscurity. His life reminds one of Hawthorne characters who erase all worldly ties, as in Hawthorne's stories about the Shakers, or "Earth's Holocaust" (1844). He also recalls the devious antagonist in Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1868), who conceals his aristocratic lineage behind a convincing lower class facade, and which he proceeds to live out for a long period of time. The intelligence officer grilling the Pigeon Man recalls Lecoq interrogating the disguised suspect in that novel.
These allegorical rumblings only emerge slowly from a realistic mise-en-scène. Williams was a foreign correspondent, and the story prides itself on giving the reader an inside look at the German Army of World War I. Its moral failings are detailed with considerable finesse, and are redolent of the pacifist feeling after World War I, and a disgust with how the war had been conducted. The careful observations on class and sexism within the German Officer Corps also are examples of Williams' interest in this subject. They parallel works by American writers on class and the Army, discussed in the article on Donald McGibeny.
The Mata Hari like opening character, and intrigue over conveying information on troop movements to the enemy, come from a spy fiction tradition established at least as early as Richard Harding Davis' "Somewhere in France" (1915), and one that would give rise to such films as Josef von Sternberg's Dishonored (1931) and Curtis Harrington's Mata Hari (1985).
"The Pigeon Man" is a short story. It is included in Williams' collection The Knife Behind the Curtain, and in a number of anthologies, such as The Oxford Book of Spy Stories (1996), edited by Michael Cox.
At several point Williams actually mentions the Depression. This is atypical of British writers, whose upper crust characters were not supposed to notice such things. Many of the characters in this book come from professional classes, such as doctors or lawyers, but most are just getting by. No one is especially wealthy. In fact the prosperous tailor Mr. Treadgold seems as affluent as anyone in the novel.
The progress shown by the Lord of the Manor involves nearly as much stripping away of class privilege as the Pigeon Man. First he loses his wealth, then his home, then moves to another country and gets a very middle class job, and finally he sneaks back into his old home to die, living like a tramp in it, during his final days.
The crime scene elements in the book show the influence of Gaboriau. There are footprints, bloodstains and the evidence of candles and lights. The characters do some shrewd work in reconstructing the crime based on these clues, in the manner of Gaboriau.
Real life Cambridge archaeologist don Glyn E. Daniel wrote two mysteries about fictional Cambridge archaeologist don sleuth Sir Richard Cherrington, The Cambridge Murders (1945) and Welcome Death (1954). The first of these books was actually published under his pseudonym Dilwyn Rees, which he also used to review mysteries.
As in Van Dine school writers, a genius amateur sleuth works closely with the police to solve the crime. Pure thinking is emphasized in all quarters, plus lots of investigative work. The story also shows what Van Dinean Ellery Queen called the "straightforward" approach. The sleuths start in detecting immediately after the crime, and do so continuously throughout the story, with no novelistic digressions to distract attention or pad out the tale.
Among the weaknesses of The Cambridge Murders is the fact that it lacks a clever solution. There are no big plot surprises, and no ingenuity in the choice of criminal. While the unfolding of the plot throughout the story is pleasant, there is nothing left over for the finale. However, throughout the tale, Daniel has thoroughly explored scenarios showing how different suspects could have committed the crime. These false solutions can be quite detailed, and partly make up for the lack of invention at the end.
Unlike the grim University novels of the early 1930's, Daniel keeps his tone light hearted. He also is more interested in the personal lives of his characters and their amours, than in their academic research.
As a critic, Blake was especially enthusiastic about Agatha Christie, writing numerous rave reviews of her works during the 1930's. His stories tend to be in the intuitionist mode. He has that intuitionist mainstay, the genius amateur detective, and plots based on ingenious clues and clever twists rather than detectival routine.
The short story "A Study in White" (1949), and Blake's novel The Widow's Cruise (1959), both recall Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (1941). The Blake works have a background of travel, like Christie's novel: "A Study in White" takes place on a train, a favorite Golden Age setting. And the solutions of both Blake works resemble Christie's novel in approach. All involve the complex movements of characters across the countryside. In all, timetables and alibis are important. And all use a similar gimmick to help establish alibis. "A Study in White" is more original and inventive; the poorer The Widow's Cruise is more imitative and derivative from Christie's novel - and suffers from anti-gay stereotypes as well.
A story like "A Study in White" is notable for the number of mysterious situations it contains - at least four - all of which are used to provide both puzzle plots, and clues to the identity of the killer. Blake's skill at constructing a complex narrative, and embedding clues therein, remind one of John Dickson Carr. So do the multiple mysteries in his tales, another Carr tradition. Blake's stories tend not to be impossible crimes, but they do echo the pure detectival technique of Carr's and Christie's narratives. Nor does Blake have the quasi-supernatural atmosphere of Carr. Instead, Blake's stories take place against a setting of daily life. There is often some sharp sociological detail in Blake's work, which takes place more in the everyday reality of Britain, than in any sort of fantasy escapist world.
Eden Phillpotts is a writer difficult to classify today. The best work I have read by him is "The Iron Pineapple", a little story of an irrationally obsessed man who commits murder. Full of irony and bizarre humor, this story comes off remarkably well. Unlike much of his fiction, this is not a mystery story.
"Prince Charlie's Dirk" (1926), although it moves s-l-o-w-l-y, is a not badly told novella of a murder investigation at a dismal country house. Many of Phillpotts' books seem to be country house murder mysteries of a pure Golden Age style, much closer in approach to Agatha Christie than to R. Austin Freeman, although Phillpotts could not plot anywhere as well as either. In fact, it is unclear that Phillpotts' writings even have a "plot" in the sense of a unified, logically meaningful entity, as opposed to a mere succession of events. Phillpotts was Christie's neighbor in Devon, and is today well remembered for encouraging her literary ambitions. His work doesn't seem to have much in common with Bailey and his followers, either, and Phillpotts should probably be labeled as a minor intuitionist.
The wanderings through the half closed off mansion in "Prince Charlie's Dirk", and the antiquarian museum contained in the building which the detective views from above, reminded me somewhat of later passages in the early John Dickson Carr, such as The Bowstring Murders (1933). Phillpotts' The Grey Room (1921) also shows subject matter similarities with Carr's The Red Widow Murders (1935). Neither of these books is in the top level of Carr's achievement, and Phillpotts can hardly be considered a major influence on him. Still Phillpotts, like A.E.W. Mason, combined the whodunit with a grim, sinister atmosphere, unlike the realistic police school or the cheery country houses of A.A. Milne, thus anticipating the tone of Carr's stories.
Phillpotts' chief critical champion was the intuitionist writer S.S. Van Dine, so this completes the circle of intuitionist associations of this author: Carr, Christie, Van Dine. Phillpotts' The Red Redmaynes (1922) deals with the murder of an entire family, like Van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1928), and Van Dine also sometimes had private museums in his tales as well: see The Winter Murder Case (1939). All of these potential influences deal with subject matter, not with detectival technique. I'm not sure Phillpotts had any detectival technique.
A.E.W. Mason was a once famous mystery writer whose reputation seems problematic today. The author of a famous war story, The Four Feathers (1902), of no attraction to a pacifist like myself, Mason intermittently wrote tales about French policeman Inspector Hanaud in between his other, non-mystery fiction.
Where does Mason fit into mystery history? Both Dorothy L. Sayers and S.S. Van Dine tagged him unhesitatingly as an intuitionist. His influence certainly was mainly felt in this world (the intuitionists); I think his influence on John Dickson Carr was unfortunate, but it was real. One suspects he also influenced Carr's Bencolin, and the sinister French crimes he investigated. Mason seems like a none too great intuitionist writer, allied to Christie and Carr. He published long before either: At the Villa Rose (1910) and the novella "The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel" (1917?) follow Chesterton and Freeman, but predate Milne, Christie, Carr, Van Dine, Sayers and the rest of the Golden Age.
At the Villa Rose. At the Villa Rose and "The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel" share plot elements in common. Both contain a well-to-do middle aged woman, not English, who is murdered and robbed of her jewels. Both contain a young woman who gets mixed up in or suspected of the robbery. Both contain a handsome young English hero who tries to come to the young woman's aid. Both star Inspector Hanaud and his Watson, Mr. Ricardo. Both have glamorous settings, among entertainment venues for Society.
The chief merit of At the Villa Rose as a mystery puzzle, is the surprising choice of killer. Otherwise, it is a complex tale, whose solution is hardly fair play. The subplot about the cold cream has some modest merits. All in all, it is a minor but readable work.
The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel. "The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel" is included in Mason's story collection, The Four Corners of the World (1917). One can easily find on-line copies of this book. The tale is notable for its vividly described settings. First a masquerade ball, then the opera in London, come across with painterly vigor. Both are backgrounds that will reappear in Agatha Christie. The plot contains two twists, part way through, that mark it as a "logical satire" on detective fiction - ideas that seem to subvert basic concepts of the detective tale. Then Mason rejects both ideas, and keeps exploring the mystery.
Mason instead develops the story as a study in psychology. These psychological ideas are not "fair play": the reader cannot deduce them ahead of the solution through clues. But the psychological detection is moderately interesting. It links "The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel" to the Scientific detective story, as practiced by Arthur B. Reeve and others. A metaphor that appears in both At the Villa Rose and "The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel": comparing a mental image, to a developing photograph.
The House of the Arrow. The House of the Arrow (1924) takes place at a French country house. It is full of creepy atmosphere, and seems to be the origin and literary model for those John Dickson Carr tales featuring a totally evil woman who is up to Satanic villainy. There is a sense in all of these books, Mason's and Carr's, of a household full of emotionally disturbed people, a place where something is Really Wrong, and sick impulses dominate, having erupted into at least one murder already. These Carr novels, such as He Who Whispers, Below Suspicion, and The Burning Court, are much admired by some critics, but have always inspired in me an immense distaste. They are hardly especially ingenious as detective stories, being vastly simpler in plot than Carr's masterpieces, and I cannot understand critics' fascination with their central characters. It is all part of the cult of horror fiction to which I am so blind. In any case, I like Mason's original even less than Carr's work, which at least shows that master's excellent craftsmanship.
The Four Feathers. The misogyny of The House of the Arrow is the flip side of the macho posturing of The Four Feathers. It shows a writer who was deep into the most mean spirited sexual stereotypes of his era. The idea that men would stand around and give white feathers to other men, branding them as cowards for refusing to fight in war, strikes me as utterly appalling. I admire today's Lithuanians infinitely more: 92% of them refused their induction notices in the Russian army, with the collaboration of virtually their entire society. They had no stomach for butchering innocent Moslems in Afghanistan, and other enemies of the Soviet state.
The Ginger King. The House of the Arrow does not show great ingenuity as a mystery plot. Much better in this regard is the little short story, "The Ginger King" (1940). This tale seems especially Agatha Christie like, with a clever criminal scheme exposed by its detective, a well constructed plot, and a welcome vein of Christie like humor throughout the tale. It would perhaps have made a good anthology piece, with the exception of its big problem: lots of racist gibes against its Arab villain. Mason just can't help flogging his distasteful world view in his tales. Let's face it: this man was a mess.
Marten Cumberland's "Mate in Three Moves" (1929) is a short story in the style of such intuitionist authors as Agatha Christie or A.A. Milne. It shows signs of being an apprentice effort, and is nowhere as cleverly plotted as these writers. The tale is pleasantly written, and one hopes the author went on to greater things. Some problems with this story: there is only one obvious suspect, so the solution lacks an element of surprise. Also, the detective's deductions depend on a chess game which the reader never sees, so the story lacks a "fair play" presentation of clues to the reader.
Best feature of the story: the amateur detective, Argentine pianist and bon vivant Loreto Santos. Santos believes in preventing crimes before they happen. He is opposed to both prison sentences and capital punishment. In that same year (1929), Hercule Poirot would also flirt with the idea of crime prevention in "Wasp's Nest", and Miss Marple would do the same in one of The Tuesday Night Club Murders in 1930. See also Christie's story "S.O.S." (1929). So something was in the air. This is a good idea that has never really been explored in depth in crime fiction. It could combine liberal politics with some real ingenuity. (One might point out that Hildegarde Withers is always talking about this too, and often starts snooping around on cases before anything has happened, in the name of crime prevention. However, she is none too successful, because the corpses always start piling up!)
Will Scott's "Clues" (1929). A gem. A real puzzle plot mystery, with a clever solution. It is especially hard to see where Scott's short story is going; it is full of classic misdirection. The "Clues" of the title are pieces of physical evidence, of the kind much beloved by R. Austin Freeman. However, the plotting style of the story seems much closer to Agatha Christie and the other intuitionist writers. I will have to read a lot more Scott to find out where he falls.
Scott's Giglamps tales (collected 1924) are highly recommended by Douglas G. Greene, and his three 1920's novels featuring the detective Disher are also prestigious.
Valentine's "An Exploit of The Adjusters: The Man Who Scared The Bank" (1929) deals with a group of anonymous amateurs who fight crime. The Adjusters were born long after Edgar Wallace's Four Just Men (1905). They bear a family resemblance, as a multi-talented team who solve crimes and capture criminals that cannot be touched by the police, but seem to be far less political than Wallace's heroes. Valentine's characters are all well bred, upper class Englishmen, too, unlike the more cosmopolitan Wallace's foreigners. This Wallace-Valentine tradition of lively teams of amateur crime fighters would last in Britain at least into the 1960's, with The Avengers, one of my favorite TV shows as a kid (I watched them when they first came out). The Adjusters mix detective work with adventure. This mix of genres, and their fun, upbeat approach, seems similar to Agatha Christie in such light hearted works as the Tommy and Tuppence stories, and Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
The Adjusters use their diverse talents to launch complex schemes that trick criminals into trapping themselves. Their approach also seems similar to another 60's TV show, Mission Impossible. However, the ingenious scheme of The Adjusters in "The Man Who Scared The Bank" is closer to the puzzle plot tradition than are the gambits of the IMF Force. Their device to trap the criminal involves a "logical analysis" of his crime itself, and an attempt to counteract this. It shows a Borges like cleverness, and functions almost as a critical commentary on the criminal's actions.
Valentine is a pseudonym. He later changed his pen name to the more macho sounding "Mark Cross", publishing a large series of books about The Adjusters. He is not to be confused with Valentine Williams, who was one of the writers spoofed by Christie in Partners in Crime. Valentine Williams had created the Okewood Brothers, two young men who work for the Secret Service, and it is these tales that Christie affectionately burlesques. Nor should Valentine be confused with Valentine Davies, the author of the story on which the film classic Miracle on 34th Street was based. Nor with the Hungarian Renaissance composer Valentine Bakfark, whose harpsichord music is delightful. Nor with silent screen idol Rudolph Valentino. Be my Valentine...