FRIGHT FEST #1: The Death Fire - Lilian Bennet-Thompson & George Hubbard

This month I'll be reviewing a small batch of supernatural mysteries and thrillers in honor of the Halloween season. Usually I do one single post tagged Halloween Special (sometimes two) but I pulled a bunch of books to sell, read them prior to listing them, and coincidentally they all had Halloween themes of sorts. To start this Fright Fest off I've chosen what I think is the epitome of the weird menace mystery novel.

"Was there to be no end to the fantastic horror of this thing? Like those of some giant octopus, the tentacles of mystery kept whipping out first in one direction, then in another, clinging and tightening their hold with every effort that was made to loosen them!" - from Chapter 24,"The Fiend"

The Death Fire (1929) not only is the earliest of this small batch of thrillers it also exemplifies a type of story that became a staple of pulp magazines in the 1930s. In fact, there were a slew of magazines that specialized in the "weird menace" story like Dime Detective, Ten Detective Aces and Strange Detective Stories. Weird menace stories deal with ostensibly supernatural events and bizarre crimes that may or may not also feature supernatural creatures and legends. Excessive violence and scenes of torture often were also conventions of these stories. Almost always the supernatural events and creatures will turn out to be rationalized. Many of these stories can be likened to the ghostbusting tales and novels about occult detectives who do battle with otherworldly phenomena and creatures who often have a knowledge of arcane lore. I guess you might also draw analogies to the popular Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? cartoons of the 1970s in which the ghosts and weird creatures always turn out to be elaborate fakes with mechanical ingenuity accompanying the supposed hauntings. Real estate greed or fraud almost always turned out to be the motive of the haunting in the Scooby-Doo cartoons.

Bennet & Thompson, a writing duo who mostly specialized in westerns and western romances, wrote three weird menace detective serials (The Beak of Death and The Golden Ball are the other two) for Detective Story Magazine in the late 1920s which eventually were all published as books by Chelsea House, the book publishing arm of Street & Smith magazines. The Death Fire, originally serialized in 1927, became a book in 1929. It's the grandest of Grand Guignol novels they wrote and features a house haunted by a ghostly presence known as The Lady of the Mist.  She appears on the grounds of a cliffside home near the eastern coast of New York and her manifestations occur just after the appearance of an eerie blue light emanating from the foggy coastline.  Jimmy Clyde, a detective, and his friend Dr. Meredith travel to Cragwood to investigate. Cragwood is the mansion built by David Courtney, a psychic researcher who spent his lifetime investigating real and fraudulent supernatural events. No w long dead Courtney's influence and fascination with psychic phenomena have infected the household. Even the butler has become a true believer for he has seen things he cannot explain.

At the start of the novel Courtney's son Douglas is bedridden with a strange ulcer on his throat. Dr. Meredith has been consulted as he has an expertise in cancers, though everyone hopes that Douglas' wound is not so serious. Douglas refuses to leave his bedroom or the estate as he is fearful for his life and that of his sister Alice, who he bears a close resemblance to. Alice has also grown fearful of the weird events surrounding their home. Her fiance Tony was distracted by the vision of the Lady of the Mist one evening weeks ago and ended up driving his car off the cliff and died in a fiery crash. So already there is one death ascribed to the haunting.

The book is filled with incidents, they pile up on one another quickly until Clyde and Meredith are practically swimming in strange and eerie events. All of the dogs kept in a kennel for hunting have mysteriously died, a swarm of rats invaded Douglas' bedroom (the possible cause of his throat injury), a pool of blood weirdly manifests itself on the floor at the base of the grand staircase though no one seems to have been anywhere around, a black cat that was harassing Alice is poisoned but suddenly reappears after it was killed and buried, and finally Alice has been attacked in her sleep. Two puncture marks are found on her throat. Uh oh...  Everyone knows what that means.

The sheer number of manifestations and weird phenomena is to be marveled at.  Clyde and Meredith are may be initially be puzzled, but each of them is determined to discover what human agency is responsible for the haunting of Cragwood.  Meredith with his medical science background learns that Douglas' wound despite routine treatment with antibiotics and careful dressing is getting worse and seems to be a horrible skin cancer not the result of a animal attack.  Clyde refuses to accept ghosts and manifestations and suspects only human hands at work.  That is, until one night when the peculiar secretary Varlam, a Russian immigrant known to wander the grounds at night even during a thunderstorm, is discovered in a tomb with an apparently sleepwalking Douglas.  The two of them are armed with a pickaxe, wooden mallets and a sharpened stake, even a gun with silver tipped bullets. Clyde tells Meredith that the two truly believed that a vampire was after Alice. The word nosferatu is tossed around puzzling everyone but Clyde. He has all sorts of knowledge about Eastern European legends which I'm sure he learned by going to the silent cinema. Or at least the authors must have been silent movie fans. No coincidence that Murnau's movie with its English translated intertitles was popular in theaters around the time this story was first published. 

Eventually all is explained in a very lengthy revelation scene. It should come as no surprise that Cragwood is riddled with secret passages. After all, the owner and builder David Courtney needed special hidden rooms in which to spy on the mediums he invited to his home in order to unmask them as frauds.  After discovering a secret panel the detective team follow some labyrinthine corridors into the basement of Cragwood where they discover all the machinery and equipment that created each and every manifestation.  At this point I got a major Scooby-Doo vibe. Still, this was the template for weird menace decades before that cartoon was even a figment in the animators' minds. Bennet-Thomspon and Hubbard get gold stars for their elaborately designed ghostly machinery. 

For its time The Death Fire with its abundance of incident dominated by freakishly weird events make for a helluva read. Clearly inspired by 19th century sensation fiction and Gothic masterpieces of the same era Bennet-Thompson and Hubbard have left us with the quintessential weird menace thriller of the 20th century.  It's definitely worth seeking out. For if you read this novel as an example of weird menace, then I guarantee that you've read them all.

Anyone interested in savoring this phantasmagorical pulp novel can buy my copy which is listed here.  Three other copies are for sale at other online bookselling sites and all of them are extremely affordable ranging in price from $15 - $25. 

FIRST BOOKS: Madam Will Not Dine Tonight - Hillary Waugh

THE STORY: Valerie King is having a dinner party. She's invited eight guests, among them Sheridan Keith Wesley, a private detective. Included in Wesley's invitation is a $100 retainer.  He's being hired to attend the party...and do what, he wonders?  When he arrives he discovers a motley group of people none of whom claim to know one another.  But although all the guests showed up, their hostess did not.  Wesley and his wife Diane decide to do a tour of the grounds and they find Valerie's naked body in a remote forested area, her clothing torn and shredded all around her. She has been brutally stabbed and is very dead.

THE CHARACTERS: Madam Will Not Dine Tonight (1947) ultimately is the story of a blackmailer.  This is no real spoiler for it's discovered rather quickly that Valerie King gathered all her guests at the dinner party to reveal all their secrets. Shortly after the discovery of Valerie's body Wesley and the police open up a safe in her study and find all sorts of thing one wouldn't ordinarily stow away in a locked safe. Among the items are a framed photograph of two young men dating back to the late 1920s, a pile of letters, and a marriage license. Wesley figures that he was hired to make sure Valerie was protected from harm at the party. But someone caught onto to her plans much more quickly than she had thought out.

The suspects are quite a bunch of oddballs with some of them rather reprehensible.  The guests at the party eventually become the prime suspects and include: James Godfrey, a criminal lawyer who loves to talk about classic painters and their work; Gloria Van Ryne, a contemptible young woman living in the fast lane with a rap sheet for public drunkenness and illegal gambling who thinks she's above everyone else in the world; Charley Cromwell,  described as a "22 year -old playboy and heir to millions"; Jimmy Burns, a gossip columnist with zero journalistic ethics who stops at nothing to get the story he wants; the Webbs, husband & wife servants, who claim to know nothing of their employer Valerie King; the Webb’s suicidal son in love with Valerie; and a middle-aged couple, the Hammits — the husband in "big steel",  the wife a complacent theater fan recently having seen Harvey — seem to be completely innocuous until Wesley finds an incriminating photo that uncovers deep dark secrets

Wesley and his wife are a likeable duo and it's clear they are yet another married couple in a long line of cocktail loving, smart aleck husband & wife teams all of whom descend from the movie versions of Nick and Nora Charles.  I couldn't get Myrna Loy out of my head every time Diana was in a scene with her husband. Her obsession with mixing drinks and cracking wise only underscored the Nora Charles analogy. Thankfully, by the midpoint all this nonsense disappears. It's fun and light-hearted to be sure, and Waugh's sense of humor is often bitingly witty, but it's hardly original. By the mid-1940s nearly every husband and wife sleuthing team from Pam and Jerry North to Jeff and Haila Troy to the suburban dullards created by Theodora DuBois (can't even remember their names) were all like this. It was only the final chapter during which Sheridan Wesley shows his intensely creative and thoroughly underhanded ingenuity that rescued this novel from being only mildly entertaining with a handful of interesting scenes.

INNOVATIONS: The most exciting part of this mystery novel can't be discussed in a review. Well, not in too much detail. Waugh inserted one of his most obvious clues early in the novel, but never returns to it until the final chapter.  He drops this clue in a casual manner but the action described is so obvious to any diehard mystery fan that it sticks out blatantly. This casual action of Sheridan Wesley's while he is examining the murdered woman's study clearly signifies an oft-used mystery novel plot motif.  I made a note of it immediately and kept waiting for the bomb to drop.  It never does until the final chapter.

The plot motif was already a cliche by the time Waugh's novel was published having turned up multiple times throughout the 1920s and 1930s in now classic mystery novels by such people as Ellery Queen (several times in both novels and stories), John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh.  I'm sure there are dozens of books by obscure writers that employed this plot gimmick, too. What makes Waugh's usage of such a cliche so innovative is the sly manner in which he has Wesley broach the topic while he is questioning all the suspects. Without ever once mentioning this aspect (basically a personality trait) he manages to eliminate all but one person as the culprit based on his simple action which telegraphs to any astute reader a tell-tale trait. In the final chapter Wesley explains how he managed to bring up the topic and do it uniquely and subtly in each of his shared interrogations with Captain Slocum.  I was flabbergasted at how this accomplished using the "fair play" technique and yet I was completely unaware that Wesley was very busy rooting out the one person with this trait who had visited Valerie's study. Waugh deserves a standing ovation for this aspect of the novel alone.  For a writer's first detective novel it was truly a stunning example of clever detective work.

THE AUTHOR:  Hillary Waugh (1920-2008) was born in Connecticut where he lived for most of his life. He graduated from Yale with a degree in art and upon graduation served in the Naval Air Corps during the final three years of WW2. While in the Navy he wrote and published Madam Will Not Dine Tonight. He went on to write two more private eye mystery novels featuring Sheridan Wesley then slowly moved away from standard P.I. mystery novels to suspense and police procedurals usually set in the suburbs of Connecticut, New York and other East Coast states. All of his books employ fair play techniques and some are stunningly plotted. His other best known series detective is Fred Fellows, a chief of police in a mythical Connecticut town, who appeared in eleven mystery novels. Waugh’s stand-alone detective novel Last Seen Wearing is considered a cornerstone in 20th century detective fiction.  It has been named as #12 of the best police procedurals ever written by the Crime Writer's Association and #6 in best police procedurals by the Mystery Writers of America (MWA). Last Seen Wearing was recently reprinted in the Library of Congress Crime Classics imprint series. While his fiction was never once nominated for an Edgar nevertheless Waugh received an Edgar nomination for non-fiction writing in 1991 for his textbook Hillary Waugh's Guide to Mysteries and Mystery Writing. He won the Grand Master Award from the MWA in 1989. Waugh was also the President of the MWA during 1969. And from 1971-1973 he served as First Selectman in his chosen hometown of Guilford, CT.