This Necessary Read

This Necessary Murder
Frances Shelley Wees
London: Jenkins, 1957
191 pages

When buying this book I chose to ignore several significant clues: This Necessary Murder is the only Frances Shelley Wees novel that did not attract a North American publisher. The Jenkins edition was limited to a single printing. There has never been a paperback.

It begins:

Jane Merrill (our young Jyne, as Patch the gardener called her), ran joyfully down the broad polished stairs her brother Jonathan's ancient Toronto house and flung open the door. The birds were out of their minds with excitement over the fat worms hastily digging themselves underground on the dewy lawn, and the great variety of perfectly wonderful spots for new one-room homes. The air was heavy with flowers, budding leaves, new grass...

My heart sank.

Before reading those words, I'd hoped This Necessary Murder might make it as a Ricochet Book, the Véhicule Press imprint for which I serve as series editor.

And why not?

I'd liked the author's previous mystery, The Keys of My Prison, going to far as to liken it to the domestic suspense and psychological dramas of the great Margaret Millar. Ten months after reading the novel, The Keys of My Prison was back in print as a Ricochet Book.

This Necessary Murder isn't nearly so strong a work, but it's also not quite as awful as its publishing history and opening scene suggest.

Our young Jyne or Jane (we never do encounter Patch the gardener) is twenty-four years old. A single woman of indeterminate means, she lives with and dotes on her much older bachelor brother, renowned specialist in criminal psychology Doctor Jonathan Merrill. Dutiful Police Constable Henry Lake, “Jonathan’s extra right arm,” also lives in the ancient Toronto house, though this is a temporary arrangement.

Read nothing into Jonathan’s bachelorhood.

Backstory informs that the doctor has recently put his skills to use in taking down the notorious Barnes Gang, and was shot through the shoulder for his efforts. Now, with leader Jed Barnes and the rest of his gang locked away in the Don Jail, the threat posed to the small Merrill household appears over. Henry Lake stays on only to care for Jonathan as he recovers from his shoulder wound.

You know, instead of a nurse or Jane or Patch the gardener.

The morning of the fat worms brings a letter from Allie March, wife of Jonathan’s old college friend Danny:

We need Jon in Tressady just now. We have an odd little problem… an emotional business, nothing more. I wish Jon could come but I don’t dare write him. It’s only a small storm in a Wedgwood teacup, but there are possibilities of the sort of unpleasant gossip and long-term suspicions that are bad for a small town.

Justice being swift in This Necessary Murder, Jon isn’t able to help because he has to stay in Toronto to testify at the Barnes Gang trial. He suggests Jane go in his place:

“Me? In your place? Are you out of your mind?”
     “Quite sane. You have often acted as an observer for me before now. You could see what is troubling Allie… send me reports… get out of the city as you wish to do, and as soon as I am free I will come.”
     “How long will that be?”
     “Not long, I think,” Jonathan said quietly.

Again, justice is swift in This Necessary Murder; investigation, on the other hand, moves at the pace of a particularly fat worm.

But is there really anything to investigate?

The small storm in a Wedgwood teacup is being caused by Bill Edwards, the fiancé of Ann Elliott, small town dress-designer and heiress to a family fortune built on the lumber industry. It is assumed that the two would’ve wed by now had it not been for the recent deaths of Ann’s mother and sister. The old lady – well, she was in her fifties – died of heart failure. The sister, Myra, followed a few months later during a Toronto shopping spree. A vain asthmatic with an allergy to just about everything, she was discovered dead in her car smelling of a perfume she'd been advised to avoid. At the time, no one thought anything suspicious about either death, but Bill has begun to suggest that both women were murdered.

Before Jane has the chance to do much investigating, the body of a real estate agent named Marina Thorpe is found just outside the gates of the Elliott estate. Jonathan and Henry Lake fly in from Toronto and things get strange.

Jonathan holds sway over the investigation... but why? Sure, he's worked with law enforcement in the past (see: Barnes, Jeb), but the doctor isn't in the employ of any law enforcement agency. As a Toronto Police constable, Henry Lake is well outside his jurisdiction. And yet, the Ontario Provincial Police allow both free rein. Meanwhile, Jane steals what she believes to be evidence from an innocent woman, and then accompanies Jonathan as he removes articles from murder victim Marina Thorpe's hotel room. In doing so, the doctor learns that the OPP sergeant standing guard has a pass key, and so asks him to keep watch as he goes through a room belonging to a man is known to have spoken to the murdered woman:

The sergeant looked at him sharply. “I got no orders, Dr. Merrill.”
     “Nor have I. We are definitely out of bounds. But I think that under the circumstances we could be allowed the latitude.
     “Well you wouldn’t do no harm,” the sergeant agreed.

Idiots!

"What right have you big-shot snooping outsiders got to come here and show up the regular officers?"   says the murderer, when caught. "A smart-alecky girl... an armchair thinker with his arm in a fancy black sling, a tin-horned cop with a notebook... and how do you think our Provincial men are going to look, going into court with all the credit going to you?"

Good questions. Of course, Jane, Jonathan, and Henry have no right at all. The Provincial men won't look at all good. What's more I'm betting that the evidence Jane and Jonathan collected will be thrown out of court.

And so, This Necessary Murder joins Wees's Where is Jenny Now? in being considered and rejected as a Ricochet Book.

Next up: M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty.

Here's hoping it's better than its title.

Most boring sentence:

The day moved on.

Most boring passage:

Bill Edwards, Allie and Danny had gone to Ann Elliott's. Jonathan had called Henry Lake to give him the news of Jed Barnes, and Henry had said at once that he would like to come in and see Jonathan, if suitable replacements could be found for him. There had been two more reporters, he said, and in any case Miss Elliott had been shut up in her room most of the day, alone, and it might be that she would soon waken and wish for company. There had been a special note in his voice that Jonathan recognized. So Allie and Danny had been encouraged to go out there, and Bill had insisted on going too.  

Trivia: Though Jane is the main character in This Necessary Murder, her name isn't so much as mentioned in jacket copy.

More trivia: Ottawa is spelled "Ottowa." I blame the British editor.

Still more trivia: The Herbert Clarence Burleigh fonds at Queen's University features a good amount of writing on Wees, including "MURDER IN MUSKOKA," a piece on This Necessary Murder clipped from the Toronto Telegram. Sadly, the fonds do not record the date, nor the writer, nor the artist who contributed this illustration:

The anonymous hand behind "MURDER IN MUSKOKA" writes that "This Necessary Murder starts out in Toronto and moves to Muskoka" (the novel places Tressady as being north of Toronto, but gives no specific location). Jonathan Merrill is described as a psychologist who lectures at the University of Toronto (something not mentioned in the novel). According to this same anonymous hand, Wees has confirmed that the Boyd Gang inspired the Barnes Gang (which plays a role only in the backstory). She reveals that Jonathan Merrill is modelled on a "Toronto public relations man (who is in on the secret)."

Object and Access: A compact hardcover in pristine dust jacket. The rear flap features an advert for The Keys of My Prison. I purchased my copy of This Necessary Murder from bookseller Stephen Temple this past summer. He was kind enough to knock off a few dollars from the asking price.

As of this writing one – one – copy is listed for sale online. Jacket-less and ex-library, it's being offered at $17.50 by a Chatham bookseller. It may well be worth the price.

Library and Archives Canada, the University of Calgary, and the University of Victoria have copies. C'est tout.

Despite disinterest from the Americans and paperback houses on both sides of the pond, the novel was published in German translation: Der Duft von Permaveilchen (Munich: Goldmann, 1962).

Related posts:

A Rival for Margaret Millar?

The Return of Frances Shelley Wees

Where is Jenny Now?

Romance and the Psychopath's Daughter

The Adventures of a Globe-Trotting Girton Girl

Miss Cayley's Adventures
Grant Allen
Richmond, VA: Valancourt, 2016
230 pages

Men come off particularly poorly in this novel. The first mentioned is Jack Watts-Morgan. He married Captain Cayley's widow, used her small fortune to pay off his gambling debts, and then carried her off to Burma. The poor woman is dead now, as is Watts-Morgan. The brief account of the widow's ill-advised second marriage is backstory, explaining how it is that Miss Lois Cayley, Captain and Mrs Cayley's only child, finds herself with nothing more than twopence in her pocket.

Miss Cayley's Adventures was first published between March 1888 and February 1899 in the pages of The Strand. Its heroine and narrator, Lois Cayley bears great similarity to Juliet Appleton, heroine and narrator of Allen's 1897 novel The Type-Writer Girl.* Both recent graduates of Girton College, Cambridge, each finds herself suddenly orphaned and next to penniless. Of the two, Lois Cayley is the more adventurous. Where Miss Appleton first thought is to seek office work, the high-spirited Miss Cayley finds liberation in her new, impoverished state, and determines to set out on a voyage that will take her around the globe. "I submit myself to fate," she tells her friend Elsie Petheridge. "I shall stroll out this morning, as soon as I've 'cleaned myself,' and embrace the first stray enterprise that offers. Our Bagdad teems with enchanted carpets. Let one but float my way, and, hi, presto, I seize it."

Lois's Bagdad being London, she soon finds herself in Kensington Gardens, where she happens to overhear two elderly grand dames in conversation. The "eldest and ugliest" complains that she has had to dismiss Célestine, her lady's maid, an action that jeopardizes her approaching trip to Schlangenbad. Lois dares approach the crusty old old woman – Lady Georgina Fawley – suggesting that she might take Célestine's place.

Titled "The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady," the opening chapter is followed by "The Adventure of the Supercilious Attache," in which our heroine, now en route to Schlangenbad as the cantankerous old lady's companion thwarts a jewel thief. Ten more adventures follow. Lois does make her way around the world – slowly at first, sprinting in the final stretch. Along the way she wins a bicycle race, exposes a quack doctor, scales down a mountain, rescues a kidnapped woman, kills a tiger, and draws the adoration of Harold Tillington, Lady Georgina Fawley's nephew.

Lois Cayley is frequently cited by academics as an early female detective. I don't quite agree. Like Harold Tillington, I was smitten by Miss Cayley, but am not so blinded by love to give her too much credit. The thwarted jewel thief (M le Comte de Laroche-sur-Loiret) and the charlatan doctor (Dr Fortescue-Langley) are one in the same. Anticipating Lemony Snicket's Count Olaf, he shows up again and again, under various guises. What is meant to be his greatest coup, is again thwarted by Lois, but she does this not through deduction but "intuition."

I hesitate in describing the man pretending to be M le Comte de Laroche-sur-Loiret and Dr Fortescue-Langley – his real name is Higginson – as a cardboard character because the others are so very well realized. Lady Georgina Fawley, the cantankerous old lady, was a favourite. Such are her ample dimensions that the reader readily accepts Lois's growing love for the grand dame. It may say something about the Lady Georgina's family that my second favourite is Viscount Southminster. Another nephew, Southminster is after the fortune of her brother Marmaduke Ashurst:

"Marmy's doing very well, thank yah ; as well as could be expected. In fact, bettah. Habakkuk on the brain: it's carrying him off at last. He has Bright's disease very bad – drank port, don't yah know – and won't trouble this wicked world much longah with his presence. It will be a happy release – especially for his nephews."

Like Lois, I saw though Southminster, though I did enjoy his "baronial drawl" and talk of Newmarket, Ascot, and music halls. A simpleton, in his effort to secure Marmy's fortune, he follows a brilliant plot that was put together by Higginson.

At the end of the novel, Southminster is exiled, while the mastermind is sentenced to fourteen years. Given a choice, I would have preferred the reverse. Of the two, Southminster is the more dangerous. As evidence, I present this exchange between Miss Cayley and Viscount Southmister that took place in India, where both had ben guests of the generous and loyal Maharajah of Moozuffernugger:

" So you've managed to get away? " I exclaimed, as he dawdled up to me at the hot and dusty station.
     "Yaas," he drawled, fixing his eye-glass, and lighting a cigarette. "I've –  p'f – managed to get away. Maharaj seems to have thought – p'f – it would be cheepah in the end to pay me out than to keep me."
     "You don't mean to say he offered to lend you money? " I cried.
     "No; not exactly that: I offahed to borrow it."
     "From the man you call a nigger?"
     His smile spread broader over his face than ever.
"Well, we borrow from the Jews, yah know," he said pleasantly, "so why the jooce shouldn't we borrow from the heathen also? Spoiling the Egyptians, don't yah see? – the same as we used to read about in the Scripchah when we were innocent kiddies. Like marriage, quite. You borrow in haste – and repay at leisure."

That the country Southminster is exiled to is South Africa only lends to the injustice.

* I'm indebted to my friend wollamshram for this observation. As he notes, bicycles and typewriters are key to the plots of both novels. No pun intended.

Trivia: Miss Cayley's Adventures is the second Allen novel I've read in which Canada figures as a setting. Blink and you'll miss it:

I cannot describe to you that journey across a continent I had never before seen. It was endless and hopeless. I only know that we crawled up the Rocky Mountains and the Selkirk Range, over spider-like viaducts, with interminable effort, and that the prairies were just the broad Pacific over again. They rolled on for ever. But we did reach Quebec – in time we reached it; and we caught by an hour the first liner to Liverpool.

Object and Access: A trade-size paperback on bright white paper with introduction by Elizabeth Foxwell. My copy follows the 2008 as the second Valancourt edition. The cover draws on the 1900 Putnam edition.

The true first edition (right) was published in 1899 London by Grant Richards. Both it and the Putnam edition feature eighty – eighty – illustrations by George Brown. I see three copies of the Richards first listed for sale online; priced from US$250 to US$675, condition is a factor. The Putnam edition is nowhere in sight. Both edition can be read online here thanks to the University of Alberta and the Internet Archive.

Library and Archives Canada and just ten of our university libraries hold copies. It is one of the gaps in the Kitchener Frontenac Public Library's Grant Allen collection.

Miss Cayley's Adventures holds the distinction of being Allen's more translated novel: Danish (Frk. Cayleys Eventyr), Dutch (Met een dubbeltje de wereld door), German (Miss Cayleys Abenteuer), French (Les Aventures de Miss Cayley), Indonesian (Mengembara dengan oeang sepoeloeh), and Sudanese (Ngalalana mekel saketip). The novel appears to have done particularly well amongst the Dutch; I count at least three different editions.

Related posts:

Grant Allen Dons a Woman's Blouse

Starting in on Grant Allen: A Top Ten

A Conceited, Entirely Likeable Private Detective

The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont
Robert Barr
Harpenden, Herts: Gaslight Crime, 2015
303 pages

Eugène Valmont is Robert Barr's most enduring character. As evidence, I point to the fact that the volume bearing his name stands as the lone Barr book – he wrote twenty-three – currently in print. Valmont's adventures were first published in 1904 and 1905 numbers of Pearson's and Windsor Magazine; Americans enjoyed them through The Saturday Evening Post. This gathering of Valmont stories – eight in total – was first published in 1906 by Collins (London) and Appleton (New York). Other editions by Hurst & Blackett (London, 1912), Remploy (London, 1978), Dover (New York, 1985), and Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1997) followed. In this way, The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont has done far better than any other Barr book, including his 1900 travelogue The Unchanging East and the remarkable 1896  Revenge!, which made last year's list of three out-of-print books I felt most deserved reviving.

It's now nearing the end of October. As temperatures head into a tailspin, thoughts turn to year's end. This may explain why it is that I finished The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont thinking it just may end up as my most enjoyable read of 2018. Valmont has everything to do with this opinion. Once "chief detective to the Government of France," he now lives in self-exile, working as a private investigator from his London flat. How this came to be so, is detailed in "The Mystery of the Five Hundred Diamonds," the first short story in this collection:

I may admit from the outset that I have no grievances to air. The French Government considered itself justified in dismissing me, and it did so. In this action it was quite within its right, and I should be the last to dispute that right; but, on the other hand, I consider myself justified in publishing the following account of what actually occurred, especially as so many false rumours have been put abroad concerning the case.

With no Watson, it is left to Valmont to recount his own adventures. He does so with sophistication, charm, elegant turns of phrase, and exactitude. I never once suspected the French detective of being an unreliable narrator, but will understand why others might. "The Mystery of the Five Hundred Diamonds" can be read as an attempt to defend the actions in the case that brought about his dismissal by the French government. And yet, so many of his other adventures are likewise tales of failure.

This is the beginning of "The Absent-Minded Coterie," the most anthologized Valmont story:

Some years ago I enjoyed the unique experience of pursuing a man for one crime, and getting evidence against him of another. He was innocent of the misdemeanour, the proof of which I sought, but was guilty of another most serious offense, yet he and his confederates escaped scot-free in circumstances which I now purpose to relate.

Valmont's triumphs are few, though significant: the recovery of a lost inheritance, the rescue of an imprisoned man, and the thwarting of an anarchist bombing. In "The Clue of the Silver Spoons," the private detective achieves his client's objective, the return of stolen bank notes, but only with the help of the man he'd wrongly believed guilty of the theft. My favourite story in the collection, in the telling Valmont reveals that he very nearly didn't take the case:

The name of Bentham Gibbes is familiar to everyone, connected as it is with the much-advertised pickles, whose glaring announcements in crude crimson and green strike the eye throughout Great Britain, and shock the artistic sense wherever seen. Me! I have never tasted them, and shall not so long as a French restaurant remains open in London. But I doubt not they are as pronounced to the palate as their advertisement is distressing to the eye. If, then, this gross pickle manufacturer expected me to track down those who were infringing upon the recipes for making his so-called sauces, chutneys, and the like, he would find himself mistaken, for I was now in a position to pick and choose my cases, and a case of pickles did not allure me. "Beware of imitations," said the advertisement; "none genuine without a facsimile of the signature of Bentham Gibbes." Ah, well, not for me were either the pickles or the tracking of imitators. A forged check! yes, if you like, but the forged signature of Mr. Gibbes on a pickle bottle was out of my line.

Valmont is one of Canadian literature's greatest snobs (though, I remind, he is not Canadian). He disdains much about the land that has afforded him refuge. English justice and methods of policing are targets of his most biting most criticism. "I have had my failures, of course," he acknowledges in "Lady Alicia's Emeralds":

Did I ever pretend to be otherwise than human? But what has been the cause of these failures? They have arisen through the conservatism of the English. When there is a mystery to be solved, the average Englishman almost invariably places it in the hands of the regular police. When these good people are utterly baffled; when their big boots have crushed out all evidences that the grounds may have had to offer to a discerning mind; when their clumsy hands have obliterated the clews which are everywhere around them, I am at last called in, and if I fail, they say:
     "What could you expect; he is a Frenchman."

The last Eugène Valmont story, I consider "Lady Alicia's Emeralds" the detective's most humiliating failure. Does Valmont? This reader came away convinced of his abilities and delighting in his humour:

Many Englishmen, if you speak to them of me, indulge themselves in a detraction that I hope they will not mind my saying is rarely graced by the delicacy of innuendo with which some of my own countrymen attempt to diminish whatever merit I possess. Mr. Spenser Hale, of Scotland Yard, whose lack of imagination I have so often endeavoured to amend, alas! without perceptible success, was good enough to say, after I had begun these reminiscences, which he read with affected scorn, that I was wise in setting down my successes, because the life of Methuselah himself would not be long enough to chronicle my failures, and the man to whom this was said replied that it was only my artfulness, a word of which these people are very fond; that I intended to use my successes as bait, issue a small pamphlet filled with them, and then record my failures in a thousand volumes, after the plan of a Chinese encyclopaedia, selling these to the public on the instalment plan.

Would that there were more Valmont stories; I would happily spend more time with the man. As it is, I'm left looking for another Barr character with whom to pass my evenings. This young lady looks most promising:

Trivia: In 1973, the BBC aired "The Absent-Minded Coterie" as an episode The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. Screenwriter Alexander Baron – known for his adaptations of Austen, Sicken, Thackeray and, yes, Doyle – took some liberties. Charles Gray played Valmont.* Suzanne Neve played Miss Mackail, a character that does not feature in the original story.

Object: A trade-size paperback with two introductions – to Gaslight Crime and the novel itself – both by Gaslight Crime series editor Nick Rennison. The final page features an advert for the two other Gaslight Crime books: Israel Zwangwill's The Big Bow Mystery and The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes.

This edition also features two stories not found in the original: "The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs" and "The Adventure of the Second Swag." First published in the May 1892 number of The Idler, the former is an early Sherlock Holmes parody. The second will appeal primarily to readers familiar with Arthur Conan Doyle's life and the magazines of late-Victorian London.

I found them both brilliant.

Access: Library and Archives Canada aside, The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont isn't to be found in our public libraries. This is a disgrace. I expect the librarians of Windsor Public Library, which serves the city in which Barr was raised, to hang their heads in shame.

Having lapsed into public domain in 1963, the book has long been at the mercy of print on demand vultures. Since beginning this blog, I've come under attack from these filthy scavengers (See: Tutis Classics), but have always been ready to provide a perch. Dodo ain't all that bad.

Need I provide more evidence that the vultures should be ignored? If so, here 'tis:

Buy the Gaslight Crime edition.

Those with deeper pockets will be discouraged to find that editions from Barr's own time aren't cheap. A Yankee bookseller tops the list of online offerings by asking US$750 for the 1912 Hurst & Blackett. The Appleton first American edition goes for US$475.

The 1906 Collins, which I believe to be the true first, is nowhere in sight.

Again, buy the Gaslight Crime edition.

As may be expected expected, The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont has been translated into the French: Eugène Valmont – L'Intégrale. I trust Jean-Daniel Brèque's translation is better than the cover. No Chinese characters feature in the novel, nor does Valmont visit any area that might be described as "Chinatown." Other translations include: Italian (I Trionfi Di Eugène Valmont), Portuguese (Os Triunfos de Eugène Valmont), Korean (위풍당당 명탐정 외젠 발몽), and Japanese (ウジェーヌ・ヴァルモンの勝利).

* Coincidentally, Gray also played Mycroft Holmes, a character created by Barr's friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1988), and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994).

Related posts:

Through the Unchanging East With Robert Barr

Women of the Unchanging East

The Unexpected Robert Barr (w/two queries)

The Year's Best Books in Review – A.D. 2017;

Featuring Three Books Deserving Resurrection

No Picnic

Murder's No Picnic

E.L. Cushing

London: Wright & Brown, 1956

188 pages

My latest Dusty Bookcase review, of E.L. Cushing's Murder's No Picnic, is now available gratis at the Canadian Notes & Queries website:

A House Full of Orphans

I wish I could say I liked the novel. I didn't. Given its cover, I was at the very least expecting a fun read. It wasn't. Regular readers may remember my enjoyment of Murder Without Regret. Now that was fun!

I don't know that I'll read anything more by Cushing. Her books aren't at all common and tend to be quite expensive. My warped copy of Murder's No Picnic was purchased earlier this year £16.00 from an English bookseller located somewhere in Devon. With shipping added, the thing set me back well over fifty dollars. The true first edition was published in 1953 by New York's Arcadia House. There has never been a Canadian edition. I don't expect we'll ever see one.

Not a Ricochet Books candidate.

Related post:
Bewitched, Bothered, but Not Bewildered

Familiar to Hundreds (including Mike Myers?)

Doors of the Night
Frank L. Packard
Toronto: Copp Clark, 1922
297 pages

The hero of this novel is a young man named Billy Kane. Raised a son of wealth – or so he thought – on the death of his father Billy learns that the family fortune has been long since spent. Happily, he secures a position as personal secretary to David Ellsworth, a known collector of rubies and one of Manhattan's richest men. Billy enjoys his work, but is concerned about his employer's generosity toward the less fortunate. It isn't that Billy doesn't believe in charity, rather that he's suspicious about those to whom Ellsworth gives money. Antonio Lavarto is a case in point:

The man was a pitiful looking object enough – one of those mendicants commonly designated in the vernacular as a "flopper." His legs were twisted under him in contorted angles at the knees, and his means of locomotion consisted in lifting himself up on the palms of his hands and swaying himself painfully along a foot or so at a time.

Despite his best efforts, Billy hasn't been able to get anything on Laverto... that is, until the night Ellsworth asks him to deliver a gift of $2000 to the flopper's flat. Billy finds evidence that Laverto is indeed a fraud, but doesn't feel all that good about it; Ellsworth likes to think the best of people, and there's no pleasure to be found in proving the old man wrong.

Billy never has an opportunity to tell his employer about Lavarto. He returns from his errand to find Ellsworth has been murdered, the

ruby collection gone, and that he, Billy Kane, has been framed. Billy manages to elude the awaiting lawmen, but is shot in his escape. On the run, losing blood, he's mistaken for Bundy Morgan, alias the Rat, a kingpin of the criminal underworld. He regains his strength, then sets the Rat's gang off in search of the missing rubies. Billy's thinking is that in solving the Ellsworth murder and the mystery of the missing gems he will be able to clear his name. However, his plan is complicated by the appearance of a mysterious "Woman in Black," who seems to have something over the Rat. This means Billy must bend to her will.

What does she want?

She wants him to fight crime, of course.

Readers of Packard will find much of this familiar. Let's begin with Billy Kane, a name that bears some similarity to Jimmie Dale, alias the Gray Seal, the author's greatest hero. Like Billy, Jimmie was raised in comfort. Both take on the personas of disreputable men. Billy becomes a crimefighter because he's blackmailed by a mysterious woman, as is Jimmie.  Even the flopper, a minor character, is familiar.

The first flopper I've ever encountered was in Packard's 1911 novel The Miracle Man. Like Lavarto, he's a fraud who only pretends to be "crippled." Played by Lon Cheney in the film adaptation, this earlier flopper is so great a character that he's mentioned on the cover of the Hodder & Stoughton paper edition:

H&S used the "Good it's a PACKARD [sic]" tag on several of its reissues. And why not? Packard was remarkably consistent. The bulk of his literary output has New York as a setting. It's a city with an underworld the Montrealer knew well, thanks in part to the NYPD, who allowed him to accompany them on raids. Manhattan is invariably divided into luxurious mansions of men like poor David Ellsworth and the squalor of rag shops, opium dens, dive bars, and cramped tenements in which members of the criminal class reign. In Doors of the Night they have names like Gypsy Joe, Red Vallon, Shaky Liz, the Cadger, and Whitey Jack.

"Good it's a PACKARD."

Doors of the Night is as good a place as any other to start reading Packard. This alone speaks to his talent.

Trivia: The most clever of all criminal schemes involves a character known as the Cherub, who spends two weeks pretending to be the grandson of a Shaky Liz. On the evening when the crime is to be committed, he has this to say:

I'd thought that diss originated with Wayne's World. Apparently not.

Trivia II: The quote on the cover of the the H&S paper edition of The Miracle Man doesn't appear in the novel, though something very similar is said by Helena to "gentleman crook and high- class, polished con-man" Doc Madison:

"Doc," she said, "it – it isn’t fair. It’s a shame – he can’t fight back."

Object and Access: A 297-page hardcover, mine is a copy of the first (and only) Canadian edition. It was purchased six years ago at London's Attic Books. Price: $10. Like Copp Clark's, the first American edition (Doran) and first British edition (Hodder & Stoughton) were also published in 1922. A cheap A.L. Burt edition followed. The last Doors of the Night saw print in the US was in 1931 as one of the Gray Seal editions (above) published by Doubleday Doran. The Hodder & Stoughton paper edition appears to date from about the same time.

Doors of the Night first appeared as a serial in The Popular Magazine (20 September - 7 December 1918).

The novel is held in one edition or another by Library and Archives Canada and twenty-two of our academic libraries.

Fifteen copies are listed for sale online, ranging from US$5.23 (a Fair A.L. Burt copy w/o jacket) to US$110.00 (a Very Good Doran 1st).

Related posts:

Whatever Happened to Jimmie Dale?

Images from a Lost Film of a Forgotten Novel

Good, it's a Packard

Mary Astor, Margaret Millar, and Celuloid Hell

At the end of my review of Margaret Millar's Rose's Last Summer, I put it that the title character, Rose French, had seen her Hollywood career done in by age. It's wrong to blame her downfall on drink, though I do understand the presumption. "Rose was on the skids again," begins the novel. "Everyone in the boarding house knew it." The 1960 Thriller adaptation opens with a drunken Rose being thrown out of a bar.

But to suggest that Rose's career was ruined by alcohol is to ignore the fact that she always drank, and likely drank even more when her star was high. I'll add that her social worker, psychologist Frank Clyde, doesn't consider Rose an alcoholic. Who am I to disagree? Frank is the most sober, level-headed character in the novel, and I'm no social worker. I'm no psychologist either, though I do see something in this early passage:

She changed into her best silk print, combed her short hair carefully, and put on some makeup. Surveying the results of this effort in the mirror, she decided that she looked pretty good considering that she had fifty-two years of assorted living behind her.

Fifty-two. She decided that she looked pretty good considering. In fact, Rose French is sixty-five years old.

Rose's self-examination comes after finding "reassurance" on the walls of her boarding house room:

They were covered, from floor to ceiling, with photographs of herself, smiling, sultry, coy, gay; in period costumes and bathing suits; stills and action shots; Rose being kissed, strangled, rescued, fed to the lions, lighting a cigarette, toasting a lover, dancing a polka.

In the television adaptation, the camera gives a glimpse of one of those walls, as Thriller host Boris Karloff narrates:

Rose French. In the blur of memory the face grows dim, but do you remember the name? Twenty years ago... Rose French, the remarkable Rose French, as a servant girl or as a princess she was a quicksilver star in a celluloid heaven.

Cut to an old issue True Confessions, atop a pile of magazines.

Fans of old films – I'm one – will recognized that all those stills feature Mary Astor. That old issue of True Confessions (April 1932), has the actress on its cover. Mary Astor plays Rose French in Rose's Last Summer, and makes her co-stars look weak. Lin McCarthy, who plays Frank Clyde, comes off like a slow-moving automaton.

Reviewing Rose's Last Summer I cut off discussion of the plot so as to avoid spoilers. I'll be going a bit further here.

The forty-nine minute Thriller episode is nowhere near as nuanced as Miller's 245-page novel (Random House first edition), but the basic story is the same: Rose French is an unstable faded film star who lives in a boarding house north of Hollywood. Frank Clyde is a social worker who goes above and beyond in trying to help. Unexpectedly, and improbably, Rose announces that she's taken a job somewhere. The following day, her death makes the front pages.

Bette Davis turned down Millar's The Iron Gates because her character, Lucille Morrow, would've died just past the half-way mark. Reports of Rose's death come nine minutes into this drama... but she isn't really dead. Karloff does his best to deceive by introducing "our principal players" as "Miss Mary Astor, Mr Lin McCarthy, and Miss Helen Quintal."

"Miss Helen Quintal" is actually Mary Astor. Rose has been hired by to pass herself off as the matriarch of the wealthy Goodfield family in the event that Mrs Goodfield dies before her childrens' inheritances are secure. In the novel, avoiding estate tax is the issue. In the Thriller adaptation, the crisis is caused by a will left by eccentric patriarch Horace G. Goodfield.

Mrs Goodfield dies too early. The novel sees son Willett and daughter-in-law Ethel look to transport her body far from the house. It proves too stiff and unwieldily, so they end up dumping it, face down, beside their lily pond. Rose's purse is placed beneath the dead woman. In the Thriller adaptation, the dead body is found slumped over on a stone bench in the Goodfield's garden.

And so, Astor plays a former film star who takes on the role of a dead woman because Hollywood has nothing for her.

Rose's Last Summer isn't the best television, and doesn't seem much when compared to films like Convention City (1933), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), The Great Lie (1941) and The Maltese Falcon (1941), but I can't help but think that Astor saw Rose French as something more than just another role. Astor herself wrote that she began abusing alcohol in the 'thirties. In 1951, following a suicide attempt, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous, converted to Roman Catholicism, and by all accounts turned her life around. And yet, despite her newfound stability, her career declined with age. She became frustrated by the bland roles –  more often than not mothers – offered her.

Where Rose turned to the Goodfields, Astor turned to television. From 1954 through 1963, she took on in forty-seven roles for the small screen, but appeared in only seven movies. Her last performance was as Jewel Mayhew in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), a role she described as "a little old lady, waiting to die."

Mary Astor was fifty-eight when she shot those scenes. She was fifty-four when she did Rose's Last Summer... in which she played a woman of sixty-five.

The hell that is Hollywood.

I wonder who supplied Thriller with all that Mary Astor memorabilia.

Related posts:

A Margaret Millar Mystery Spoiled
Margaret Millar's Great Toronto Murder Mystery

A Margaret Millar Mystery Spoiled

The Lively Corpse [Rose's Last Summer]
Margaret Millar
New York: Dell, [1956]
224 pages

Margaret Millar's The Iron Gates was sold to Warner Brothers. Barbara Stanwyck was signed to play the lead. The film never happened, but I haven't give up hope. David Cronenberg, if you're reading this, The Iron Gates is for you.

One of the odd things about Millar's career is that she was courted by Hollywood, and worked for Hollywood, yet nothing came of it. The only adaptations of her twenty-five novels appeared on the small screen. Beast in View, which was moulded into a 1964 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, is the best. A later adaptation of the same novel, shot as part of the series' 1980s reboot, can't be considered an adaptation at all.

Anyone who has read the novel will agree.

I wrote here about Beast in View on television six years ago. Right after I did, I made the mistake of watching the 1960 Thriller broadcast of Rose's Last Summer, the only other Millar novel to have been adapted. It's not so memorable as either Alfred Hitchcock Presents Beast in View, but it did stay with me... and, as a result, it ruined my enjoyment in reading the book. I place Rose's Last Summer near the bottom of the Millars I've read, but can't say whether I'm being fair. That this mystery held no mystery is probably explained by the fact I'd watched that old Thriller adaptation.

Random House sold the 1952 first edition as "A MYSTERY TOLD WITH MURDEROUS WIT." It's an accurate description, though I would argue that "MURDEROUS" is intended to deceive. Rose's Last Summer is lighter than than Do Evil in Return (1950) and Vanish in an Instant (1952), the two novels that come before and after.

Much of the wit is supplied by its main character, Rose French, a once wealthy former film star, who now lives in a rooming house many miles north of Hollywood.

Rose is given to drink, though Frank Clyde, her greatest champion doesn't think she's "true alcoholic," nor does he consider her a "mental case." A social worker, Frank has all sorts of time for Rose, and is in every way her greatest defender and champion. He knows the actress better than anyone – all five ex-husband's included – and so is surprised when Rose calls him to say that she's taken a job as a housekeeper in San Francisco.

The next day, news of Rose's death makes the afternoon papers.

Reports have it that she was found face down beside a lily pond on the grounds of a large house rented by Willett and Ethel Goodfield. Their gardener, Ortega, made the discovery. Willett dealt with it in an practical manner:

"A dead woman you say? Well." Willett cleared his throat. "Well, I'll tend to the matter immediately."

One of three heirs to the Horace M. Goldfield Doll Corporation, makers of the Sweetheart doll,  Willett Goodfield appears to have more pressing concerns, one of which is the health of his ailing mother, who rests in a bedroom overlooking the lily pond.

The Thriller adaptation spoiled things for me. I'm assuming you haven't seen it. Even if you have, I recommend the novel. See if you don't agree with me on this point: Rose's Hollywood career wasn't destroyed by drink, but by age.

Margaret Millar knew Hollywood.

Dedication:

"TO THE MEMORY OF M.M. MUSSELMAN"

A humorist and minor Hollywood screenwriter, Morris McNeil Musselman (1899-1952) is best remembered for the 1939 version of The Three Musketeers, starring the Ritz Brothers. A friend of Margaret and Kenneth Millar, he was the author of a half-dozen  of books, including Wheels in His Head (1945), a biography his inventor father. M.M. Musselman died of pancreatic cancer seven months before Rose's Last Summer was published.

Object: A squat mass market paperback, this edition marks the only time the novel appeared under the title The Lively Corpse. The cover painting is by the brilliant  Victor Kalin, a man who I most associate with John Coltrane. I purchased my copy three years ago from a New York bookseller. Price: US$4.50.

Access: Held in one edition or another by Kitchener Public Library, four academic libraries, and Library and Archives Canada.

Rose's Last Summer returned to print last year as one of the six novels included in Volume Two of the Collected Millar. It was last published on its own in 1993 by Allison & Busby (again, no relation). As far as I've been able to determine that edition marked the first and only UK edition.

Lancer published the novel 1965, followed by International Polygonics Ltd in 1985. Unlike most IPL Millars, the cover (left), ain't half bad (though, like the Random House first, the cover caption misleads).

Used copies of the novel are easily found online with prices ranging from US$3.15 (a Very Good IPL) to US$250 (a Near Fine first edition).

A French translation, Son dernier rôle, was published in 1961 and 1986 by Librairie des Champs-Elysées.

Related posts:

Telephone Always Rings
Desperately Seeking Violet
Margaret Millar Saturday Matinée Spoilers
Margaret Millar's Great Toronto Murder Mystery
Margaret Millar's Michigan Murder Mystery

Margaret Millar Makes Something of Herself

The Invisible Worm
Collected Millar: The First Detectives
Margaret Millar
New York: Syndicate, 2017

We had a very Canadian eagerness to make something of ourselves.

— Kenneth Millar, 1971

The cover of this most recent volume in Syndicate Books' Collected Millar suggests that Paul Prye was the author's first detective, when the distinction really belongs to William Bailey. The novel opens with his sister, Amanda, being awoken in the wee hours by a disturbing phone call. A woman named Eve Hays has found a dead man in her stairwell – heart failure, she thinks. An indignant Miss Bailey suggests that a call an undertaker, and not the Inspector of the Mertonville, Illinois, police department, would've been more appropriate. A few minutes later, Miss Hays phones back to apologize for her little joke, confessing that she'd had too much to drink.

Then a body turns up in the lake behind the local country club.

Because Mertonville hasn't seen a murder in many a year, Bailey recognizes that the call is no coincidence, and heads over to the Hays residence. The house is never described, but we know it's very large because it serves as residence to no less than fifteen people, including a butler, a cook, a housekeeper, a maid, and a chauffeur. Eve, the girl who made the call, is the daughter of George and Barbara Hays, who own the digs. Christopher Wells, Eve's fiancé, is a frequent houseguest, and stayed over on the night of the murder. Richard Vanstone, second cousin to Barbara, is firmly installed, as is a woman named Angela Breton, who looks to be making a play for Simon, Eve's nineteen-year-old brother. George Hays' junior partner Peter Morgan and his newly wed wife Sally nearly complete the household census, but there is one more: psychologist Paul Prye, who George has been brought in to diagnose his somewhat unstable wife.

I found Prye irritating from beginning to end. This exchange with Bailey comes at that beginning:

"You are a physician?"
     "Well, more or – Yes, I am. But my practice for the last ten years has been in the field of mental abnormalities: neurology, psychoneurology, abnormal psychology, psychoanalysis. I'd rather be called a quack, however. It puts people at ease."
     "But you have a medical license?"
     "A medical license, a dog license, a driver's license. I even bought a marriage –.
     "You are whimsical, I see," the inspector said dryly.
     "Yes, indeed. 

            "The angel that provided o'er my birth
            Said, 'Little creature formed of joy and mirth...' 

      So you see how I stand."

I like Blake as much as the next guy – perhaps more – but Prye's habit of quoting the great man irritated. The humour, lighter and less sophisticated than in Millar's other novels, infects the dialogue, as in this interview between Bailey and the Hays family butler:

"Name, please," he said sternly.
     "Joseph Butler."
     "Joseph Butler?"
     "Joseph Butler," Joseph repeated firmly.
     "Sure, it's possible, Chief," Sergeant Abbott said eagerly. "I knew a broad once who was called Broad!"
     "A most striking analogy, Sergeant, but this is hardly the time for amorous reminiscences." Bailey turned to Joseph. "Now, Joseph, I'd like to point out to you that it is your duty to lay whatever information you may have before the police, even though it may seem to be damaging to your employers. I appreciate your loyalty but I must have truth."

An upstanding man with little time for nonsense, Bailey initially seems the very model of what one would want in a detective. However, as things progress, we come to recognize serious lapses in judgement, the most obvious being his acceptance of Prye's intrusion in the investigation. Bailey's biggest mistake is to place those living in the Hays' residence under something resembling house arrest. Ignoring the legality of the edict – Millar does – this doesn't prove in the least bit effective; in fact, the body count increases as a result. One character collapses from a poisoned digestif, while another is found dead in the kitchen pantry.

Bon Appétit!

The Invisible Worm was Margaret Millar's debut, but it's not the place for the uninitiated to begin – that would be An Air That Kills (1957). I can't quite bring myself recommend this novel, putting me at odds with the reviewers of its day, but there's enough of the writer Millar would become to make it worthwhile to her admirers.

For example, I saw something of future Millar characters in Amanda Bailey, the inspector's sister. Like the aptly-named Prye, she interferes in the investigation, but only with the best intentions. Amanda is certain that a woman will confide in another woman before any man, and so sets out to visit the victim's widow. She plans to present herself as "a representative of the ladies of the Presbyterian congregation," blind to the fact that the widow, Dolly, is an adulterous former burlesque performer.

I was sorry that Millar didn't do more with Angela Breton, Simon's love interest. At thirty-four, the houseguest does all she can to appear younger by dying her hair and hiding the fact that she holds a degree in medicine from the University of Toronto. For reasons that aren't fleshed out, Angela (née Anna) also hides the fact that she is French Canadian.

The Invisible Worm has some workhorse passages – more than any I've encountered in a Millar novel – but there is also wonderful writing, like these opening sentences:

Mr. Thomas Philips smiled happily. Not every man can afford to retire at the age of forty-five; in fact, not every man in Mr. Philips's business lived to that age, The mortality rate in certain professions tends to be high, and Mr, Philips was planning an extended trip to South America.
     There was nothing of malice in his smile. He intended to retire gracefully. Old grudges were forgotten, and the past was a lucrative, even a pleasant, memory.
     He made an excited little gesture with his hands. He was going away and he was never coming back, and it was rather nice to be saying good-by to someone. Tomorrow, Mr. Philips explained, he and Dolly would be on their way, perhaps on the water by this time. It was very late, and he was tired. He scarcely felt the pinprick on his neck, and by the time the hand closed over his mouth it was too late to do anything about it.
     The pinprick and the hand... South America.... Dolly... and Mr. Philips's heart stopped beating.

Before The Invisible Worm, the earliest Millar I'd read was Wall of Eyes (1943). A remarkable novel, written with a sure hand, it could have been included in the Collected Millar volume that Syndicate titled The Master at Her Zenith.

It's that good.

To think that Wall of Eyes, her fourth, was published just two years after The Invisible Worm. Recognizing this, I'm looking forward to reading Millar's second and third novels – The Weak-Eyed Bat (1942) and The Devil Loves Me (1942) – even if the publisher describes them as "The Paul Prye Mysteries."

Trivia I: The Invisible Worm was written in response to a challenge from husband Kenneth; it was he who came up with the basic idea. The Doubleday, Doran contract lists the couple as co-authors.

Trivia II: In establishing Bailey's character, Millar writes that the detective was irritated by his sister's gift of a book titled Keeping Fit at Fifty for his forty-seventh birthday. No such book exists, though a much-referenced and much-reprinted Samuel G. Blythe article with that title was published in the January 15, 1921 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

Object and Access: A bulky, 541-page tome printed on substandard paper. The type is small, as are the margins, and yet I'm happy to own a copy. I'd wanted to read The Invisible Worm for years, but it was inaccessible. The  first edition, published in 1941 by Doubleday, Doran, enjoyed just one printing. Unlike most Millars, there has never been a mass market paperback. Apart from the Doubleday Doran, the only other time it appeared in the United States was as a Chivers large print edition.

The first and only UK edition, published in 1943 by John Long, misspells Millar's surname on the dust jacket (but not in the book itself). Uncommon, an Australian bookseller is offering a copy (left) at US$650.

Well worth the price, I say! Librarians, particularly those involved in rare books, are asked to take note of the seller's card. Strike now, before it disappears!

Library patrons will find The Invisible Worm difficult to access; Library and Archives Canada and the University of Toronto have copies of the Doubleday, Doran first, but that's it. I can't find one listing for Collected Millar: The First Detectives in a Canadian library – including that serving Kitchener, Ontario, Margaret Millar's hometown.

L'invisible ver, a French translation by Laurence Kiefé, was published in 1996 by Librairie des Champs-Elysées. Its cover is nowhere near as interesting as the attractive, if inept, 1943 John Lang edition.

Related posts:

Damaged, Dysfunctional and Decadent Toronto
Margaret Millar and the Air Up North