Nice People Don’t Kill – F. W. Bronson

First mystery novels can be fascinating. What does the writer want to try out as an entry point into the world of the whodunit? Will it be a locked room murder? A noirish private eye novel? An inverted crime novel where we follow the murderer through the planning stages to the finally flawed crime? F. W. Bronson was not a neophyte writer when he tackled his first murder mystery. He already had three mainstream novels under his belt, published between 1926 and 1933. I thought this debut as a mystery writer might be an academic mystery judging from his biography that has Yale all over it.  Or maybe an ex-pat novel due to his having lived in Italy and elsewhere abroad in his post-college days. Never would I have thought he would choose to emulate Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart, slightly satirizing the conventions of those Had I But Known mystery writers in his ironically titled Nice People Don’t Kill (1940).

The novel is narrated by Coraly Ames, widow living in an unnamed Connecticut town located on the shores of Long Island Sound. Greenacres is the name of the estate left to her by her husband and it's here she adds to her modest inheritance by renting out the separate beach house to summer tourists. In the opening chapter her husband’s best friend “Mac” suggests she rent to Schuyler Adams, a prominent Wall Street executive. We are quickly introduced to a variety of the locals in town and Coraly’s neighbors who will turn out not too coincidentally to be acquainted with Adams. But of course they are! And those relationships are tainted with secrets and criminal activity. All of which leads to the grotesque murder of Adams while he is sunbathing in what initially appears to be an impossible crime. Sadly that angle is quickly dispensed with as a mysterious man in a white bathing suit was seen by several people. A couple of nervous witnesses also lose their lives, one in a bloody hatchet murder (shades of Rinehart!), when they attempt blackmail or foolishly speak of what they know in cryptic brisk phone conversations and – of course – are overheard.

A plethora of Golden Age-style clues offer up mini-puzzles in addition the overarching mystery of the murderer’s identity. A volume of Keats’ poetry, a book Adams always carried on him, vanishes and reappears several times. Greenacres’ telephones operate on a party line offering several opportunities for eavesdropping when someone picks up an extension – even in the beach house, a ten minute walk away, or in the guest house to the south of the main house. Someone has been staying in the boat house as suggested by sandwiches remnants, paper bags and a makeshift bed found there the day after the murder. Is the person who was surreptitiously using that shed as their private motel also the killer? Could that be the man seen in the white bathing suit digging around in the sand a few feet from the murder scene?

 

Beautifully detailed map endpapers of the various scenes of the crimes
Nice People Don't Kill (Farrar & Rinehart, 1941)

 

Bronson's characters are all familiar types to anyone who has read a mystery novel by Rinehart or Eberhart or any GAD mystery novel for that matter.  In addition to Coraly and her dead husband's pal "Mac" the cast consists of a momma's boy with a respiratory condition and his overprotective jealous mother, a mystery woman with a secret past, gossipy nervous servants, the middle aged military man and his much younger wife, the skipper of Adams' yacht "Blackbird" and the yacht's steward who acts as Adams' valet and cook on land. No one really has any depth and because they are representative of mystery archetypes they are fairly predictable in their thoughts and behavior. Thankfully, Sheriff Davey Jones is an intelligent policeman and provides well needed gravitas, common sense and shrewd detective skills throughout the book. Though Coraly fancies herself an amatuer sleuth she's a bit inept and severely impaired by her obvious biases and favoritism. Only Susan Carlisle, a young woman who appears quite unexpectedly on the scene and ends up staying in the guest house on Greenacres' porperty, comes across as slightly complicated or at least ambiguous in her motivations. She definitely has a past and I was bothered that Coraly seemed to believe Susan’s every word and action. Unlike the easily duped heroine/narrator I suspected Susan was definitely up to no good. Similarly, a gaggle of servants at Greenacres may appear to be just inconsequential supporting characters but the reader should pay close attention to them for they will play major roles later in the novel as their own secrets are also revealed.

With our heroine constantly hinting at future events that the reader has yet to encounter it’s an obvious but often heavy-handed homage to that “feminine” subgenre that detective fiction maven Jacques Barzun enjoyed disparaging. The novel is littered with spins on typical HIBK writing style. I was getting a bit irritated with her too. Here’s a sampling of what occurs in every chapter until the middle of the book:

It's odd to realize now that instead of welcoming Schuyler Adams with practically open arms I should have thrown the money in his face and ordered him off the property.

It didn't seem terribly important at the time--but that bit of carelessness almost cost me my life.

He might have added that my [inquest] testimony -- though of course he didn't know at the time -- contained the most important clue in the whole baffling, nerve-racking case.

Francis Woolsey Bronson
(1901-1966)

More annoying is her firm belief that “nice people don’t kill” echoing a sentiment that Carolyn Wells highlighted in The Technique of the Mystery Story and often mentioned in her detective novels written 20 years before this book was published. Coraly further elaborates on her sadly stereotypical views of humanity by surmising that the culprit responsible for the savage murders can only be Captain Lipari, the evil looking, mustachioed, limping skipper of Blackbird moored in the nearby harbor. It took me awhile to realize that Bronson was sending up the narrow-minded, overly optimistic women who populate the typical HIBK novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Ultimately, the reveal of the crazed murderer in the final chapters is pleasantly surprising even if Bronson (in the voice of Coraly) decides to present us with a silly melodramatic fake climax fulfilling some of Coraly’s predictions that didn’t quite fool me. Even a HIBK narrator has a few tricks up her sleeve to keep her readers baffled.

F. W. Bronson Detective Novels
Nice People Don’t Kill (1940)
The Uncas Island Murders (1942)
The Bulldog Has The Key (1949)