FIRST BOOKS: A Man Died Here - Gina Dessart

THE STORY:  Liz & Bob Macklin purchase an old home in Marshall, Massachusetts and begin an extensive rehab project transforming the gloomy, dark paneled, house into a bright, livable home. Liz is curious about the former owner, Seton Williams, who died in the house several years ago. Cancer she's told was the cause. A lonely old man dying alone, she thinks. But who was he? One day at the post office the gossipy Postmistress Mrs. Moore asks Liz, "Why did you buy the Williams house?  A house where that man killed himself?" Liz is shocked by this news. Why did the estate aent lie to her about Mr. Williams' death? She begins a subverted investigation making her way through the neighborhood ostensibly getting to know her neighbors when in fact she is slyly inserting questions about the house and the man who died there. Some townspeople offer up tidbits but clam up when Liz presses on with specific questions. Why is it no one wants to talk about Seton Williams, his death, or his family? Fighting common sense Liz and Bob keep digging and soon learn that perhaps the past is better left untouched.

THE CHARACTERS: A Man Died Here (1947) has an abundant cast of characters apart form the husband and wife amateur sleuths.  The novel is also written in the author omniscient voice allowing the reader to know the private thoughts of every character including the most of minor characters like Jacob Kingman whose wife Harriet died by suicide years ago. As the novel progresses Dessart focusses on the Williams family and a handful of Marshall's residents including:

Miss Greeley - The high school principal who is beginning to lose her grip on reality as she spends much time dwelling on the lives of two of her favorite pupils, now grown adults.  Her daydreaming and nostalgia lead to her spend too much time thinking about Seton Williams' death when Liz keeps visiting her and asking prying questions.

Mrs. Moore - an inveterate gossip the local postmistress is responsible for re-opening the past with her causal but intrusive question to Liz about why she moved into the Williams house. Each time Liz runs into Mrs. Moore she gets more unusual info about the Williams family.

Prentiss Williams - the only member of the Williams family who left town fro a successful life. Now a general practitioner with several families as his patients in neighboring Colby, Prentiss is still troubled by what happened to his father. He and his brother seem to have a secret between them. Late in the novel when Liz uncovers a trove of letters hidden away in books left in the Williqm's library we learn that Prentiss had a violent argument with his father a few months before he died.

Henry Williams - youngest member of the Williams family and a rather sad man. He took over the family hardware store begrudgingly and never really seemed to get along with anyone let alone his father.  Luckily, he and his brother are close, but Henry can't understand why Prentiss was so antagonist to the old man. He is sure Prentiss had something to do with their father's death.

Dr. Kilander - was at he Williams house to pronounce the old man dead.  One of the few witnesses to see exactly how the body was found he relates some crucial info to Bob & Liz when they hound him for details about the night Seton died. 

Mrs. Chmielewski, the Williams housekeeper; her daughter Agnes; and Blanche Milliman, a girl who died in a drowning accident also feature prominently in the plot.  Liz and Bob begin to wonder why so many young women die violently who happened to cross the path of Seton Williams. The more they uncover about this supposedly lonely old man they more they learn he was a malevolent, licentious and cruel man who cared little for anyone but himself.

INNOVATIONS: Dessart starts off her novel in a dreary outline of Liz and Bob house hunting, some pedestrian small town interactions almost as if the book will be a soap opera-like litany of mundane observations.  But it's a sly move because this seemingly prosaic beginning slowly gives way to the timeworn exploration of a town's populace haunted by violent death. The narrative voice Dessart adopts allows her to leak into the story, in a mixture of extremely subtle clues and some rather overt ones and from a variety of character viewpoints, just exactly happened the night Seton Williams died. Though the detective work is minimal and largely relegated to Q&A and the discovery of letters which are rendered in full into the narrative, there are a couple a notable scenes.

Liz decides to visit the local cemetery and almost by accident finds the gravestone of Blanche Milliman whose drowning death also seems to hold some of the townspeople under a spell. She spends much of this scene wondering if Seton Williams' grave is also in the cemetery. Eventually she finds it in a far corner of the yard in the dark shade of a hemlock tree. It's an eerily conceived scene and adds some much needed atmosphere to a novel that tends to skirt around the edges of mystery and violence.

Perhaps the highlight of the book (maybe the purpose that Dessart wrote the book) comes when Bob and Liz have a debate about whether they should continue with uncovering the truth about Williams' death which by this point they realize is a cleverly covered up murder. They have a dilemma: do they report what they've discovered? Do they leave it alone? Liz argues for a murder committed by a vigilante Good Samaritan and that perhaps the murder of Williams brought more good than bad. Let that person get away with it.  Bob tells her murder is murder no matter the motive. He cannot justify letting the culprit escpae no matter if the end result was beneficial for many people.

By this penultimate chapter it becomes clear that Dessart has been exploring something resonant in this time of podcasts obsessed with true crime, the resurrection of cold cases and the desire to seek justice for unsolved crimes. Should a criminal be sought out after decades have passed? Is vengeance a moral solution? Where does forgiveness enter the picture? If a murder occurred that brought about good and happiness was the crime a just murder and was the killer a hero? All these idea float aroudn the periphery of the story until Liz and Bob finally voice them in their at times heavy handed conversation.

QUOTES:  Bob: "So--having detected to the extent of discovering the murder, I guess it's up to us to go on detecting until we find the murderer. Only God knows where we begin."

Liz: "But if Mr. X is a truly fine person, would you agree that it might be a special case, sort of?"

Bob: "...I thought it was all nicely set up with black is black and white is white. Damn it all, how can I tell at this stage of the game?"

THE AUTHOR: Georgine Belle Dessart (1912-1979) was born in Chicago but spent her youth in and around Long Island, Brooklyn, and Syracuse, NY as well as a brief stay in Germany. She attended Smith College but was compelled to end her studies after her second year.  She and Phillip Hildreth (soon to be her husband) borrowed $50 and went into business doing silkscreen printing and display advertising. They quit the business after about five years and moved to the Berkshires in Massachusetts. In the mid-1940s she began writing as a "retirement venture."

She credits becoming a mystery writer with the bizarre educational experience of learning French while in a German school while she was still mastering the German language. "Any child lost in three languages simultaneously is apt to be marked for life and end up as a mystery story writer," she wrote on her biographical sketch on the rear DJ panel of A Man Died Here.  

Dessart had a story published in Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine ("Counterpoint" in the Nov. 1965 issue) as well as other stories published in several noteworthy literary journals like The Virginia Quarterly and The Literary Review. Her three crime novels were written and published between 1947 and 1959. While her first, A Man Died Here, is heavily inspired by detective fiction the later works are more geared toward domestic suspense. Her third novel, Cry for the Lost (1959), takes place in a desert town called San Paulus no doubt based on Tucson, Arizona where she and her husband settled and where she was lecturer in English and a creative writing teacher at the University of Arizona in the mid-1970s.

LEFT INSIDE: Another Bookshop Receipt

This bookshop receipt was Left Inside a copy of The Wallet of Kai Lung that I purchased many moons ago from John Chandler's long-lived but sadly now defunct bookstore Bookman's Corner on Broadway and Wellington in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago.  I've mentioned this mess of a bookstore that I dearly loved visiting a couple of times on this blog. I bought both books listed on this receipt as they were shelved one right next to each other in John's store.  Amazing that the receipt dated Dec 19, 1955 stayed inside that book for over 50 years. And that both books and the ancient receipt traveled from Seattle to San Francisco, then to a warehouse in Chicago, and finally transferred from John's warehouse to his book crammed store sometime in 2007 where a few weeks later I bought both of those books by Ernest Bramah. Click on the photo to enlarge. Those who can read cursive will be able to read the book titles Wallet of Kai Ling and Kai Lung's Golden Hours as well as the customer’s name and address. He paid a total of $5.20 for two used reprint editions that were published in 1929 and 1932. The book I found the receipt inside is shown below. 

The customer's name is Tony Marks who lived in the Geary-Taylor Apartments in San Francisco in 1955. I did a search on that building and real estate sites list the address as on Geary Street, but Google Maps has the current address as 501 Taylor St and shows the awning with a painted 501 as the entrance on that street. The Geary side has no entrance that I could discern from the Google photos. The entire building, built in 1920, is listed for sale at Zillow for a cool $15 million. Looks like it's completely vacant and intense rehabbing was going on at one time. Have no idea if it ever was completed.

But the bookstore is much more interesting.  Shorey Book Store was at one time "The Northwest's Largest" and I have feeling it was probably the oldest when it ended business in 2000. Established in 1890 it came into life first as a magazine and cigar store. Original address was 701 Third Ave near Cherry Street.  According to a brief history I found online the store moved several times in its 110 year existence. The address on the receipt states 815 Third Ave (its third location) which is now the Flamingo Terrace Apartments. The bookstore's final location in 1995 was on Fremont.  It closed five years later.

There are several photographs of the store that pop up all over the internet. The earliest, taken circa 1895, can be found at the MOHAI photo archive site.  I found one rather good one (at left) on the Seattle Public Library Digital Collections. Seems to around the same time as the date on the receipt. Not only are there many photographs at various stages in the store's life, but there are several newspaper articles and Facebook posts devoted to the store.  It was clearly a beloved store.  One article details how a customer's want list item submitted in 1971 was fulfilled in 1990. That's dedication! Such devotion to customers simply does not exist in our world anymore.