FFB: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives - Sarah Weinman, editor

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Lives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense
edited and introduced by Sarah Weinman
Penguin Books
ISBN-13: 978-0143122548
384 pages $16.00
Publication date: August 2013

Yes, it's a brand new book and it's my choice for Friday's Forgotten Book. I guess this is a cheat of sorts. Since many of these women writers are utterly forgotten (but not by me -- I've written about many of their novels here) and this review is months overdue (I finished this book back in August) it's time to get it up on the blog.

Sarah Weinman has gathered together an impressive array of woman mystery writers who were instrumental in the development of a subgenre she likes to call domestic suspense. The anthology brings together pioneers in crime fiction like Margaret Millar, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Charlotte Armstrong with stalwarts like Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, and Dorothy B. Hughes. Rounding out the group are the modern and all too often forgotten writers like Nedra Tyre and Celia Fremlin, and wonderful new finds like Joyce Harrington and Barbara Callahan. There are a total of fourteen women represented with a variety of stories that run the gamut from creepy and atmospheric to outright nasty. There is even a surprise happy ending delivered in "Everybody Needs a Mink", an atypically lighthearted story from Hughes normally known for her novels of paranoia and dread.

I would’ve liked a better story from Margaret Millar than her oft anthologized "The People Across the Canyon", a story even if you have never read it before will seem very familiar as it recycles an idea used too frequently in crime fiction. The story from Shirley Jackson, a master of both the novel and short story, is unfortunately the weakest and least satisfying in the collection. There has to be a better example from her pen than "Louisa, Please Come Home" which lacked bite and pizazz compared with the quality of the others selected. But the rest of the stories each have something to recommend them. Below are highlights from half the collection.

"A Nice Place to Stay" by Nedra Tyre
Tyre was a regular contributor to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine where she published over forty short stories. In this tale she captures the voice of a loner woman whose only desire is a comfortable life, good food and a nice place to stay. An opportunistic lawyer jumps on her case and turns her into tool to advance his career. But the narrator has a surprise in store for all his hard work.

"Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree" by Helen Nielsen
I am a big fan of Nielsen’s novels and also her TV scripts for shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In this story she takes the old trope of the anonymous phone caller and gives it a Nielsen triple twist. The story is notable for her narrative trick of weaving back and forth between the past and present in order to build suspense.

"Lavender Lady" by Barbara Callahan
An example of the creepy domestic suspense story and very well done. The story tells the origins of a popular folk tune as narrated by a singer/songwriter. Slowly we learn how her muse has affected her creative life. The repetition of the song lyrics are like the chants and doggerel of doom so often found in fairy tales.

"Lost Generation" by Dorothy Salisbury Davis
The most experimental and mature of the lot. As in The Judas Cat and The Clay Hand, both early novels about how violence uncovers the corruption of small town’s population, Davis does in miniature and with an economy of words another story of rural life and crime. The narrative structure is layered with ambiguity and requires assiduous reading to glean all the subtleties. The relationships are revealed through bare bones dialogue and minimal description. It’s almost like a radio drama. Quite an impressive feat, loaded with sharp details and yet it’s the one of the shortest pieces.

"The Heroine" by Patricia Highsmith
As I was reading this one I couldn’t help but think of “The Turn of the Screw” and movies like The Nanny. Another one of those stories about a possibly mentally ill woman left in charge of children. Lucille has an obsessive need to prove herself and suffers from a few delusions. You know something is odd about her but you keep hoping that she isn’t a crazed lunatic. The ending is a shocker.

Joyce Harrington (a former actress) confesses
she writes by the Stanislavski method

"Mortmain" by Miriam Allen DeFord
Probably the nastiest story in the collection. Reminiscent of the kind of macabre irony Roald Dahl perfected in his short fiction. DeFord tells the story of a greedy nurse taking care of an ailing deputy sheriff and how her scheme to steal money from his safe goes horribly wrong. Has a gasp inducing ending proving this story to be the only true noir tale in the collection.

For me the gem of the book is "The Purple Shroud" by Joyce Harrington, a writer whose work I knew nothing about until I read this tale. It’s a little masterpiece. Each carefully chosen word rings true. The brilliant use of weaving imagery from the work on the loom to the spider spinning its web, the language used to evoke the serenity of Mrs. Moon’s state of mind as she plots revenge on her womanizing husband –- it’s all perfect. Here is the epitome of what Weinman talks about in her informative introduction defining the aspects of domestic suspense. If I were you I’d save it for the very last and savor it like a fine wine. It’s really that good.

Juliet Dies Twice - Lange Lewis

I had such hopes for Juliet Dies Twice (1943), Lange Lewis' second detective novel after having so enjoyed her debut Murder Among Friends. But when I encountered three bugaboos of mystery fiction I thought "Uh oh" and the red flags went off for a trip into the land of cliche and run-of-the-mill plotting. It looked like Juliet Dies Twice was going to be a sophomore slump of a novel. And those three bugaboos? An escaped lunatic, an amateur theatrical company, and a trunkful of Freudian psychological "insight".

The amateur theater business is tolerable for its lack of verisimilitude because Lewis has circumvented the actual structure and process of a theater by making this company a combination student/faculty group on the campus of small university. The building itself is unusual even for an academic theater and it allows the writer to create some unheard of and cumbersome rules like the fact that a prop room is located in a basement far away from the stage and is accessible only by two doors (one inside and the other leading outside the building). The key to the inside door is in the hands of a secretary in a different building and must be asked for in order to access. That's right the theater department doesn't even have control over a key to their prop room. You get the idea how convoluted and contrived the plot is with that business alone. Add to that an escaped lunatic, the abundance of Freud love and completely outdated views of mental illness and it's enough to drive anyone to the analyst's couch screaming for a healthy dose of common sense.

Lewis also seems to have reinvented Lt. Richard Tuck, her very smart and capable police detective for this second outing. Gone are his capacity for compassion and his use of imagination to get inside the head of a murderer. Instead Tuck has been reshaped into one of many cookie cutter detectives in the genre, a wisecracking jaded cop. He shares the crime solving stage with a smart alecky know-it-all amateur sleuth -- the often irritating Eudora York, a psychology and theater major at the college. Together they investigate the murder of a student actress who was to play Juliet in Shakespeare's tragedy and offer up odd theories about the personality of the "fiend" who did the deed.

But the story is redeemed by Lewis' crisp writing and her cast of supporting players. Each of the student actors and actresses has some quirk or idiosyncrasy that makes them stand out from the rest of the cast. They range from five foot five Paul Ober, the best actor of the lot frustrated by his being typecast because of his height to Ames Hanna, Eudora's wealthy playboy of a boyfriend whose sick sense of humor has Eudora worried that he may be a lunatic himself.

Every now and then Lewis also surprises with a scene of poignancy or jolts the readers out of the dream world of play acting and Shakespeare's star crossed lovers into the reality of a country on the verge of war. Midway through the story one of the most superficial actresses – Meg Fife, a graduate student in the theater program – does an about face and allows us a glimpse into who she really is. She laments that the world is changing around her, that the stage once provided for her an escape but now she is afraid. "I've tried to tell myself that I'm seeing the slow crumbling of a philosophy of life which I and all my generation believed to be the only one. There’s khaki everywhere now, you hear soldiers marching past your window early in the morning[...] Everywhere the individual and his aims and plans are growing less and less important. I try to tell myself that's what frightens me." It was the most moving and real scene in the entire book, especially since it has an eerie resonance for our modern times when war and violence seem inescapable.

There are a few twists that call to mind some of the best from Agatha Christie’s cabinet of magic tricks. I was reminded of an overused detective novel trope that crops up most obviously in Peril at End House, but Lewis manages to find a new way to pull off that trick. She fooled me at least. The lunatic will end up playing a large role in the denouement and his appearance helps to explain some of the creakier elements of the contrived business surrounding the baffling murder of Ann Laird. The revelation of the murderer, however, is anticlimactic. With a motive firmly rooted in a reality of ennui and nonchalance the final chapter may have resonance for a 21st century reader. For me I was craving a more satisfying, fantastical solution that merited all the clever puzzles that had held my interest for the majority of the book.

IN BRIEF: The Santa Klaus Murder - Mavis Doriel Hay

Chances are you have no idea who Mavis Doriel Hay is. She wrote only three detective novels in her brief career and none of them were published outside her native England. But obscure or not and regardless of her brief output the British Library has decided to revive an interest in this forgotten woman by reprinting all three of her books. Fittingly, as we approach the holiday season, her third mystery The Santa Klaus Murder (1936) is the first to be released with others to follow in June 2014.

The plot is classic for the era. Set in the home of Sir Osmond Melbury wealthy patriarch who is rumored to be writing a new will in favor of his very officious and very young secretary The Santa Klaus Murder is practically a textbook version of the English country house mystery novel. During the Christmas morning celebrations Sir Osmond is shot dead in what appears to be his locked and shuttered study. The suspects include his son and three daughters, their spouses and a handful of servants and houseguests. Yet only one person – a guest dressed as Santa who also discovered the body – appears to have had the opportunity to have committed the crime. And he is without a motive for doing so. The story has all the makings of an impossible crime for those who had real motives have perfect alibis at the time of the murder.

The detection is top notch and there are multiple mysteries the police inspector must solve in addition to the baffling murder. As with many mystery novels of the day seemingly airtight alibis may be completely fabricated as many of the suspects lie and collude in order to protect one another. The book also includes such familiar components as a map of the crime scene and a list of characters and their relationships to one another. The well drawn map of the first floor detailing the unusual architecture of the Melbury estate serves as the frontispiece. The reader will find himself referring to it frequently in order to understand the complex arrangement of where each suspect was at the time of the murder.

Well placed clues are easy to spot and lend themselves to a nicely done competition between the reader and Colonel Halstock, chief constable who serves as one of the several narrators. A surprise element that comes as a late discovery to the characters will seem rather obvious to well-read detective novel readers. For the highly astute it is indeed possible to solve the complicated plot as this is a rather well done example of a fair play detective novel with all clues and evidence provided to the reader and nothing withheld or produced at the eleventh hour. In fact there is a "Postscript" explaining all the clues that reminded me of the notebook pages of Mrs. Bradley in Gladys Mitchell’s mystery novels. Let this be a warning to those who like to peek: the last chapter mentions the name of the murderer many times over in an enumerated list detailing motive, means and opportunity.

For those not as entranced with the puzzle elements of the plot The Santa Klaus Murder also has much to offer in intriguing characters. Hay has a few words to say on the misery of a shell shocked World War 1 veteran (ironically named Evershot) and the effects he has on his wife and relatives. Edith, Sir David Evershot’s haunted and conflicted wife, is probably the most interesting and complex of the women characters and her role adds a much needed gravitas to the sometimes lighthearted proceedings. As in most detective novels there is the recurring motif of role playing compounded by a literal masquerade in the use of the Santa Klaus costume that the murderer uses ingeniously in order to confuse everyone’s notion of time and location.

Hay’s other mystery novels Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell will be released in new editions by The British Library in the early summer of 2014. Curt Evans has already given us a taste of Hay’s earlier work in his review of Murder Underground, though it does not sound as engaging or clever as this last book.

FFB: Desert Town - Ramona Stewart

Based solely on the plot blurb on the rear cover of the Pocket Books edition any reader would think that Desert Town (1946) by Ramona Stewart is an early sleaze novel about a trampy, rebellious daughter and her domineering mother. "You little slut," her mother said. is the bold headline intended to grab the attention of a prospective reader. As usual the publisher is teasing and misleading by appealing to a taste for melodrama and raunchy language. A thorough reading of the book itself reveals so much more than vulgarity and a mother and daughter at odds with one another. Desert Town is a very strange exploration of love in all its forms and the pursuit of one’s desires. But not specifically sexual desire.

At the heart of the novel is one of the oddest love triangles in pulp fiction. Paula Haller – Eddie Benedict—Johnny Ryan. And it’s not the men vying for the woman as one would think in one of these triangles. Instead we find Johnny and Paula competing for the affection of Eddie. Yet there isn’t a hint of homoerotic lust between the two men. Theirs is a very intense devotion that defies brotherly male bonding with obedience and need taking the place of sexual attraction. While Paula is drawn to Eddie’s strong personality, his toughness, his brooding good looks Johnny wants Eddie because he needs him to achieve his status in the world of racketeers. But for the bulk of the book Johnny is depicted as a jealous lover constantly trying to get rid of Paula. He threatens her as would a woman who feels she is losing her man to a younger, sexier rival. He belittles her in front of Eddie similar to a women who is slighted.

Incredibly strange to read these exchanges coming from the mouth of a man who intimidates Paula with his eyes "the shade of redwood bark," his "animal warmth" she feels when she shakes his hand upon first meeting him and how he seems to demand of her "recognition of his slow moving, powerful aliveness." Stewart has a quirky way with her prose. She can be spot on in a descriptive passage about the desert landscape then like a beginner driver shifting gears too quickly she slips up and allows her tendency towards purple prose to sputter across the page with awkward word choices and indulgent metaphors. It's slightly forgivable for a first time novelist and the weirdness of these odd slips in writing adds another level of the surreal to an already strange story of attraction and repulsion among the three main characters.

The rivalry between Paula and Johnny is further complicated by the fact that Paula is a dead ringer for Eddie’s recently deceased wife Angela. There’s an element of Rebecca in the way Paula uses this similarity to her advantage and it’s all the more creepy when you recall she is a seventeen year-old not yet graduated from high school and Eddie is at least ten years older, perhaps even older, though his age is never stated outright. Fritzi is always reminding her daughter of the inappropriateness of the relationship as well as warning Paula that Eddie is just plain no good.

The mixed signals are intentional on Stewart’s part. She develops the kind of misdirection found in a detective novel by allowing the reader to view Johnny Ryan only through Paula's eyes. This allows Stewart a narrative coup de grace delivered by Johnny Ryan like a boxer's knockout blow in the penultimate chapter.  His revelation crushes both Paula and Eddie as it was intended and he comes out like a champion.

Stewart’s other strength is in her creation of the supporting players who surround the trio and the frustrated scheming Fritzi. There is Lena Raines, the wife of the town undertaker, who trades in a promising career in biochemistry at a local university for a life of domesticity only to discover she has trapped herself in a marriage as barren as the desert town she thought would be a blissful escape. She turns to alcohol and racing her husband's car recklessly in a sort of dance with death. But she's always rescued and prevented from hurting herself or anyone by policeman Luke Sheldon to whom she is attracted and secretly desires. Sheldon turns out to be the savior figure of the book and the only decent and ethical cop in Chuckawalla.

The other policemen are Pat Johnson and Tom Hansen, another male duo in a near co-dependent relationship that borders on the perverse. Hansen is a former rodeo champion who had to give up his chosen life due to permanent injuries sustained while bronco busting. We learn he is a sadistic thug and Johnson, his only real friend, tolerates and sometimes encourages Hansen’s hobby of doling out regular beatings to the jail’s prisoners. At a poker game where the two cops are joined by Doc Waley and Jim Raines (Lena’s husband) the men discuss the death of a drunk who died in the jail. All know (as does the reader) that Hansen beat the drunk to death. But the conversation circumvents that reality and they spend the night dismissing the poor old drunk who died an accidental death. The casual nature of the talk perfectly captures how inured the town has become to violence and corruption. How they are willing to allow murder to go unpunished in order to preserve and maintain their twisted status quo. Even Fritzi Haller's assortment of brothels and her casino The Purple Sage are allowed to flourish in Chuckawalla thanks largely to her frequent bribing of the police while all other officials conveniently look the other way.

In addition to exploring the dark side of male friendships Desert Town is also a coming of age tale for Paula Haller. She wades through this crooked, deviant world trying to find a path to happiness and womanhood. Paula constantly complains of being treated as a child and wants to grow up quickly. She finds herself testing her limits, pursuing dream men and dream jobs, falling in and out of love as quickly as the desert winds change and the rainstorms come and go. And she encounters dangers and perils as she comes to see how her mother has changed and how the hedonistic businesses she runs are far from fun diversions and that the men she deals with are far from gentlemen.

Ramona Stewart, age 25, as she appears
on the rear DJ cover of the 1st ed.

Stewart's story originally appeared as a serial in Collier's magazine and was purchased by Hollywood prior to its being published in book form. The movie adaptation was retitled Desert Fury and came out in 1947, the same year the book was released. The movie stars Lizabeth Scott and Mary Astor as Paula and Fritzi; John Hodiak and Wendell Corey as Eddie and Johnny; and Burt Lancaster as an amalgam of the good Luke Sheldon and the evil Tom Hansen with good winning out over evil in the blending of the characters (even if he did end up with the bad cop's name). Amazingly, Robert Rossen who adapted the story retained nearly 80% of Ramona Stewart's original dialogue and scenes -- a testament to her dramatic skill.

Finally, here is some good news: Desert Town is the sophomore offering from Raven's Head Press. The book is in the final stages of production and will be offered for sale, if luck is on our side, by the end of this month. The new edition will include a killer cover design and a foreword by me on the unusual writing career of Ramona Stewart. She began with stories for the "slicks" and ended up writing occult thrillers of which The Possession of Joel Delaney, made into a very disturbing movie with Shirley MacLaine and Perry King, is her most well known. An announcement will be posted here when our edition of Desert Town is officially released. Stay tuned!

NEW STUFF: Rustication - Charles Palliser

Rustication by Charles Palliser
W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 978-0-393-08872-4
336 pp. $25.95
Publication date: November 4, 2013

Back in 1990 Charles Palliser wowed the literary world with his debut novel The Quincunx, a historical pastiche of startling imagination and literary skill that paid homage to Mrs. Henry Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and other British writers who primarily wrote sensation novels in the Victorian era. Palliser’s work has often been compared to Gothic literature but this is a an error on the part of many critics who know little of the difference between a sensation novel and a Gothic novel. The Gothic novel grew out of the romantic novel and builds on fictional tropes that have their roots in fanciful imaginative writing. The sensation novel was an attempt to turn away from romantic fiction and return to the realism of the 18th century novel while at the same time revealing the dark side of human nature. Unlike a Gothic novel which flirts with supernatural and surreal events, whether genuine or rationalized, the sensation novel is rooted in reality. The emphasis is on everyday characters in domestic settings and circumstances not foreign and exotic locales. Crumbling abbeys with corrupt monks and maniacal nuns or haunted castles owned by amoral barons are not to be found in a sensation novel. Nor do ghosts or vampires have any role in creating a feeling of dread and horror. It is base human nature that will make the reader shudder and gasp. Ultimately the sensation novel dares to reveal the seediness beneath a seemingly mundane reality with heroes and villains recognizable from anyone’s life.

In Rustication Palliser returns to the world of the sensation novel and this time far surpasses what he did in The Quincunx and does so in half the length of that book and with a much smaller cast of characters. Deceit and duplicity, betrayal and sacrifice, heartbreak and redemption all play out in the 280 pages of Richard Shenstone’s journal and the scatological poison pen letters that are interspersed within the pages.

Though set in 1863-1864 this heart wrenching story of misplaced devotion, skewed priorities and base self-interest will appeal to many modern devotees of crime fiction. The story has a contemporary ring of truth in its three leads –- mother , daughter and son of the Shenstone family. Mrs. Shenstone, self-deluding and over protective of her children, finds herself more and more caught up in an attempt to regain her rightful and respected place in society all the while blind to the consequences of her short sighted aspirations. Euphemia, her daughter, succumbs to avaricious temptation and is willing to sacrifice her own brother in her attempt to secure a place of wealth and position. Richard, disgraced after being thrown out of college and carrying more than a few secrets of his own, escapes into a world of drug induced sleep and furtive sexual encounters. As the story progresses we learn the true reason of Richard’s expulsion (or as the college euphemistically terms it his “rustication”), the secret of his recently deceased clergyman father’s fall from grace, and the secret designs of his mother and sister in a complicated scheme that finds Richard feeling a hangman’s noose round his neck at every passing hour.

While Richard is trying to figure out what happened to his father he finds himself suspected of being the author of several obscene anonymous letters targeting the women of Thurchester. He turns detective in order to clear his name and find the true author behind the poison pen.

But every woman he encounters seems to be a nasty gossip of the worst sort. Whether tart tongued and vicious in their insinuations or outright shocking in their frank accusations the women of the story come across as a gaggle of Gorgons ranging from an supercilious 14 year-old to a septuagenarian busybody. The men fare no better and in the case of a brutal dandy who engages in illegal dog fighting and a barkeep who reserves a dark corner of his pub for male-on-male assignations they seem far worse.

Richard is no purely good hero either with his opium pipe and his seduction of the simple minded maid, but amid this assortment of nasty characters we long for him to redeem himself and provide us with a protagonist of goodness and heroism. In this amoral world of physical and mental cruelty and salacious obsessions there must be some relief in the form of simple human decency. In the end Richard will prove himself to be such a hero but not without making his own terrible sacrifices.

Fans of modern noir will find many of the tropes of that genre in Rustication and may learn a thing or two about the origin of the stories of Gil Brewer, Day Keene and Vin Packer. Contrary to popular belief the basest and darkest impulses of noir fiction really have their roots in Victorian sensation fiction. Adultery, bigamy, sexual addiction, drug addiction, greed, desire for status and power, and brutal murder were not inventions of the pulp fictioneers or paperback original writers, they are all elements of the sensation novel. As Palliser reminds us the basest of human motives are universal and timeless and are always the best ingredients for gripping, page-turning book.

FFB: Master of the Macabre - Russell Thorndike

In the tradition of works like Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors and R. Austin Freeman's The Uttermost Farthing: A Savant's Vendetta (which this book markedly resembles) The Master of the Macabre (1947) is another collection of supernatural and macabre tales that take the form of a quasi-novel. Taylor Kent, writer of thrillers, is travelling by car to deliver a package to Charles Hogarth. En route he encounters a raging snowstorm, loses control of his car and crashes not far from Hogarth's home. Kent now injured with a broken ankle is rescued by Hogarth's servant Hoadley and taken to the house where he soon becomes both guest and invalid. While recuperating Hogarth shows Kent his collection of macabre objects and relics he has amassed over several decades. Each one has its own peculiar story and over the coming nights Hogarth proceeds to relate several stories.

The book has an amazingly similar structure and skeletal plot to The Savant's Vendetta in which a sinister collector of human skulls also tells a variety of stories to a house guest. Each novel has an underlying connecting story that recurs throughout the narrative resulting in a surprise climax. In the case of Thorndike's book the climax has to do with the ghost of the corrupt Abbott Porfirio who haunts Hogarth's home and who appears in a series of apparitions which Kent first attributes to nightmares.

An aspect of the novel I found most interesting is Thorndike's take on the haunted house as a living entity. This idea had previously been explored by Bulwer-Lytton in the late nineteenth century in "The House and the Brain" and to much greater effect in the mid 1920s in Cold Harbour by Francis Brett Young. The topic would continue to be explored by generations of supernatural fiction writers and would reach its apotheosis in 1959 with The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and continue to be reworked by Richard Matheson (Hell House) and Robert Marasco (Burnt Offerings) in the 1970s. In Thorndike's book prior to the serial narration of the stories of the objects both Hoadley and Hogarth discuss the weird influence the house has on its occupants. The house is described as being "susceptible," exhibiting "the strangest properties", displaying "powerful and insidious" effects. There is talk of the Spanish Chamber being the "most active" room in the house with weird examples of what goes on there. Thorndike carries this discussion to the objects themselves when Hogarth says to Kent:

"Come over to the tapestries and I promise you they will treat you entirely sympathetically. You may think me childish, but I have always hugged the belief that every so-called inanimate object in this world, whether beautiful or ugly according to our standards, has a being--an entity of its own. When you are fond of a thing -- your typewriter, for instance -- why shouldn't that thing be fond of you? I almost think that things can think."

Russell Thorndike in costume as Dr. Syn

The "insidious influence" becomes a running theme throughout the book as each relic in Hogarth's collection has its story told. Yet this theme is rarely mentioned in any reviews or criticism of Thorndike's book. That Thorndike was an early proponent of this popular motif in haunted house literature cannot be denied. It is unfortunate that his obvious fascination with the idea of objects that are alive and a house with influence has been overlooked by supernatural fiction critics.

Instead Thorndike is usually discussed for his other obsession -- graves, decaying corpses and the grisly aspects of death. Building upon an already rich library of supernatural and weird fiction tropes Thorndike is clearly paying homage to the grotesque penchants of Poe, Machen, James and Blackwood in these stories. Pickled maggots, graveyard ghouls, live burial and other assorted often repulsive set pieces all make their appearances.

Of the stories I enjoyed the most are his very Poe-like tale of a man fleeing execution by hanging  during a breakout of plague and his bizarre idea to disguise himself as one of the victims of the disease. When is thrown into a mass grave his harrowing, nightmarish escape recalls some of the more grisly sequences in the tales of the American master of the macabre. There is also a very well done and brief story of a 20th century Ahab named Captain Dawson and his obsessive pursuit of a man-eating shark known as "Great Crafty."  It's both a nod to Moby Dick and an eerie prediction of Peter Benchley's massive bestseller Jaws.  There are other tales as well which make up quite a mixed bag (many of them go on far too long)  including a very strange one about the origins of a shovel with a horseshoe welded to its handle and a protracted tale about the scarlet lining of an Indian soldier's coat that has several sequels throughout the book.

The Master of the Macabre was released earlier this year in a new trade paperback edition from Valancourt Books. It includes a biographical introduction about Russell Thorndike by supernatural fiction authority, avid book collector and writer Mark Valentine. The book is available through Valancourt Books and amazon.com in both tangible and digital editions. I'm very happy to see The Master of the Macabre back in print as it has so much to recommend it as both a turning point in haunted house literature and the development of the supernatural short story.

The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern - Nicholas Olde

Who was Nicholas Olde? No one seems to know. In addition to this collection of clever and often quite funny mystery short stories, Olde apparently was also the author of two slim volumes of poetry published in pamphlet form in the early 1930s. It is generally thought that Olde was a pseudonym and attempts to uncover any biographical data on him have yielded nothing. Whoever he was he certainly read a lot of G. K. Chesterton. The plots and dialogue are rife with the kind of paradox that Chesterton imbued his mystery stories—not only with Father Brown but also in the Gilbert Pond stories and the tales found in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Another Chestertonian aspect of some of the stories is an element of the supernatural and the impossible crime, or more often an impossible problem. Chesterton employed these often in the Father Brown stories. Readers will surely find analogies between many stories. “The Windmill” by Olde and “The Invisible Man” by Chesterton share similar solutions to their crimes, for instance. “The Monstrous Laugh” tells of a town haunted by phantom laughter and a local superstition that is similar to the seemingly supernatural aspects of “The Ghost of Gideon Wise,” “The Dagger with Wings” and several other Father Brown tales.

Robert Adey in his excellent bibliography of impossible crime stories and novels, Locked Room Murders, makes a side comment about Olde’s book having been undeservedly passed up for Queen’s Quorum status. Had it been listed in that Hall of Fame listing of seminal short story collections in the detective fiction genre, Olde would perhaps not have been condemned to obscurity and the book might not have descended into the limbo of forgotten and neglected works. In the countless anthologies devoted to crime and detective fiction published since the 1930s, only three publications have ever included a Rowland Hern story: “The Windmill” in Twelve Murder Tales, one of Jack Adrian’s anthologies for Oxford University Press (1988); “The Accidental Disembowelment of John Kensington" and “The Invisible Weapon” both in Japanese translation, the first in Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine (#468, 1995) and the other in a 1990s locked room story anthology, the title of which is Japanese (I cannot reproduce it here). It’s a shame this has happened because The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern contains some of the most ingenious and funny detective stories of the 1920s.

Like most detective fiction fans I had never heard of Nicholas Olde or Rowland Hern. No surprise given the fact that Olde and the quirky Rowland Hern have both been overlooked (or shunned) by nearly all of the crime fiction historians and critics. Through sheer serendipity -- that miracle that usually leads me to a treasure of a book -- I was lucky enough to obtain a copy through the internet in the spring of 2005. Lucky, because as I later discovered, it is among one of the rarer books in mysterydom and sought after by collectors of impossible crime stories. Later research revealed that the copy I stumbled upon was the only copy being offered via the internet and has been the only one for several years. An attempt to locate other copies, even in academic libraries or public libraries, showed less than ten copies held in the US and UK. There may be other copies in private collections, but I’ve been unable to verify the existence of even one. All of this made me think that someone ought to reissue this book. And the sooner the better.

As I delved into its pages I discovered the book to be filled with the bizarre, the surreal and the outrageous. Throughout the fifteen stories in the volume the reader is treated to several wicked clergymen, a devious physicist, a vengeful botanist, and many murderous lords, earls and other titled gentry. The plots involve a secret code in a lost language, a murder committed with an invisible weapon, a tell-tale beard, a near disembowelment, a village where no one laughs, and a killer whose motive is linked to a literal battle of wits.

The more I read the more I thought Olde cannot really intend these to be taken seriously. They must be detective fiction parodies. As such they are perhaps some of the earliest examples. I can think of only Philo Gubb, the correspondence school sleuth created by the American humorist Ellis Parker Butler, as the earliest of intentional detective fiction parodies in short story form. The first clue that Olde’s mood is far from somber in ...Rowland Hern are the characters’ decidedly British and often alliterative monikers. Here’s a brief line-up of these unusual suspects: Pounceby Brisket, K.C., Sir Chudleigh Chalfont, Mrs. Tregaskin Simpson, Hercules Herklot, Sir Pendragon Higginbotham and Porteous Pemberton- Drysdale. And the names give only a hint of the oddities that the reader will encounter.

In “Potter”, one of my favorites in the collection, Hern and his nameless sidekick head off to a boutique that specializes in the sale of exotic animals. Why? Because Hern is in need of an armadillo and the emporium has several sizes to choose from. Their advertisement is certainly enticing to anyone in search of exotic animals: “Potter & Hara, Wild Beast Merchants. Tigers from £85, certified Man-eaters 5s extra. Snakes and crocodiles a specialty. Free burglary insurance policy presented to each customer.” How can one go wrong with those promises? Exactly why Hern needs that desert beast is never explained. And must we really know? The mere fact that he needs an armadillo is surreal enough. How many fictional detectives have ever required an armadillo to solve a case? Or for anything!

Olde’s sense of humor reaches its pinnacle in “The Mysterious Wig-Box.” For a story written in 1920s it displays a truly contemporary black humor presenting us with legal professionals who make light of killing and death during a sensational murder trial. Their lively repartee receives hearty laughter and applause from the irreverent courtroom attendees. The trial ends in a surprising acquittal of the serial killer thought to be obviously guilty. Later the defense attorney (one of the punning wits of the courtroom) is found decapitated in his home and his head decorated with his barrister’s wig is found in a wig-box in a railway station. Hern sees in this bizarre crime a particularly nasty sense of humor. The victim lost his head, after all, along with his ears and nose. What appears to be a wanton and insane act is in fact a purposeful and vengeful crime. When Hern reveals the killer’s identity his cohort is astonished. He says, “Apparently [they] were on the best of terms. […] They were even joking with one another during the trial.” Hern replies, in his characteristic Chestertonian paradoxical manner, “Yes, and that was the trouble.” It was their sense of humor which led to the crime. The first time I know of in crime fiction that the telling of jokes served as a motive for murder.

For decades The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern was one of the legendary and unattainable books of the genre. Thankfully, that is a thing of the past.  Mystery fans now have an affordable edition to enjoy available from Ramble House. Nicholas Olde’s original sleuth need no longer be imprisoned in that limbo of forgotten and neglected fictional creations. I suggest you acquaint yourself with him soon.

(This is an abridged, slightly altered version of my introduction to the Ramble House edition of The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern first reissued in 2005.)