LEFT INSIDE: A Cry for Help

This is the perhaps the strangest bit of writing I've ever found inside a book. I recently bought an old paperback edition of The Balcony by Dorothy Cameron Disney and in flipping through the pages (as I always do looking for something hidden inside) I discovered the last blank page was filled with bizarre writing.

I thought it especially ironic that something this desperate and fearful would appear in a book that has a fair amount of "Had I But Known" type narrative. At first I thought it may have something to so with Disney's story, but there are no characters in the book with any of the names in this scrawled message.

Transcription for those who have difficulty with script writing:

Why did Lynn call me to ask how are you doing[?] very odd
Why Linda not call or talk to me[?] its Sunday
Why did Ralph call me[?] very strange and it seems as if my time & Ebbys here is running out
I feel very scared
They get me a nice place he said
I am so sad never been so scared if only Don were here
Eban is very restless for the past 3 days too
I pray to join Don every night

FFB: The House Next Door - Lionel White

Best known for his novel Clean Break which became the stunning noir caper movie The Killing directed by Stanley Kubrick and with the crackerjack cast of Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Vince Edwards and Elisha Cook Jr (among others) Lionel White is the last writer you may think of comparing to Charlotte Armstrong, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding or Dorothy Cameron Disney. But while reading The House Next Door (1956) those are the three writers who came immediately to mind. White's seventh novel is a true departure - an exposé of what happens to the homeowners in a suburban housing development when murder literally lands on someone's front lawn.

The novel opens with a near perfect crime that goes terribly wrong. Gerald Tomlinson and his partner Danny Arbuckle are planning to rob Angelo Bertolli who makes a nightly deposit from a racetrack bookie joint in an after hours bank depository slot. All Tomlinson needs to do is wait for the mark, knock him unconscious, grab the money and run. Simple, clean, easy. What he doesn't plan on is Mrs. Manheimer, a little old lady news agent, who is headed to make her own deposit at the precise minute the bookie's agent is at the bank. When she sees Tomlinson raise his hand clenching a gun and striking Bertolli on the head she lets out a piercing scream. In the confused chaos that follows Bertolli produces a gun he always carries with him and fires two shots as the robbers drive off. Danny, the driver, has been shot and he needs a doctor's attention. Tomlinson has a lot to deal with now that his perfect plan has blown up in his face.

Meanwhile, Len Nielsen has been celebrating his recent job promotion. He's not much of a drinker but to placate his boss he keeps accepting drink after drink. Drinks at dinner lead to a celebratory champagne toast with two friends and later more drinks at an after dinner bar crawl. Len is sloshed by the time he heads home. He climbs into a cab and directs the driver to Fairlawn, a suburban development with a maze of streets where all the homes look exactly alike. The cabbie is left to his own devices when Len barely coherent can't tell him the precise location of his house. As Len leaves the cab he manages to lose his hat and his glasses and isn't sure where he's walking. His key doesn't seem to fit the front door so he has to climb in a side window. But when he gets inside his wife Allie, who has been expecting him for hours, isn't anywhere in sight. She isn't even in the bedroom when he stumbles in noisily bumping into furniture that he doesn't recognize. Then he notices the garish purple wallpaper with mauve roses. He's in the wrong house. And on the bed is a dead man with a bullet in the center of his forehead.

The two plotlines - the botched bank robbery and Len's unintentional discovery of a dead body - will eventually meld together. But not before the brutally beaten body of a teenage babysitter is found on a neighbor's yard and Len is arrested for suspicion of murder. Unlike White's previous three books published by Gold Medal and the two hardcovers for Guilt Edged Mysteries The House Next Door is not so much a study of how criminals turn on one another but rather how crime affects everyday people. Fairlawn's families range from the McNallys, an embittered married couple dealing with infidelities and dissatisfaction, to the staid Kitteridges, British expatriates who hold their neighbors in slight contempt all the while wearing plastered smiles on their faces. As the story progresses the carefully constructed facades of neighborliness crumble to reveal the ugliness at root in these households.

U.K. 1st edition (T.V. Boardman, 1957)

The crimes will also transform some of Fairlawn's inhabitants, notably Allie Nielsen who is compelled to prove her husband's innocence when Lt. Giddeon refuses to accept her protestations. Allie turns snoop like a younger American version of Jane Marple in order to get at the truth of the babysitter's murder. As she goes door to door asking questions, once adopting a false identity, the final third of the book turns into a neat pastiche of an amateur sleuth detective novel.

There is an element of HIBK in this book, too, which was rather alarming for a writer who is better known for tough-edged noirish thrillers. Reading sentences like "if it hadn't been first for Mrs. Manheimer, and then later for that certain fifteen-year-old girl, Tomlinson's plans would have been without flaw" call to mind the work of Dorothy Cameron Disney and Mary Roberts Rinehart.  Jarring to say the least.  It's a recurrent stylistic choice, but not without effect. White's unusual method of creating suspense definitely had me turning the pages more quickly.

White juggles the multiple storylines, the large cast of characters and the plot machinations with the ease of any carnival entertainer.  It's an invigorating, insightful, and incisive read. Amid all the domestic squabbles, the brutality and violence, The House Next Door is not without its compassionate moments.  There are several touching portraits on display to offset the nastiness. White rarely made of use of the balance of light and dark moods in his later career. That he dedicated this book to his wife noting his deep love for her may be the most telling point of all.

The Strawstack Murders - Dorothy Cameron Disney

Promises, promises. I try my best to live up to them.  Here's my slightly overdue follow-up to TomCat's review several weeks ago on the impressive early work of Dorothy Cameron Disney.

Disney's second novel is practically a text book example of the Rinehart school.  The very first page contains a sentence that encapsulates the HIBK subgenre:

For it seems to me now...that I could have prevented the dreadful series of crimes which so hideously involved us all.

The line is spoken by Margaret Tilbury who will tell us the story of those dreadful crimes and reveal a tale of duplicity and treachery set in motion by a villainess who rivals the actions of Lydia Gwilt or any other  from Victorian sensation fiction. The opening of the book is subtle in its background details and exposition. There seems to be an overload of information and Margaret comes off as a babbling spinster obsessed with her health and her odd relation with her sister and brother-in-law. It is almost as if the story will become a family saga or a domestic soap opera.  But such details as Margaret's being treated for typhoid fever, an overheard phone conversation, and a servant's loss of a milk can are hardly extraneous. Nothing can be taken for granted. Nothing is ever mentioned offhand. Even the most ordinary and mundane activities will take on a sinister aspect.

It is the character of the duplicitous nurse Dorothy Fithian and her bizarre death that will involve the Tilbury household in a conspiracy to protect their own. Dorothy was far from likable. Yet no one no matter how off putting deserves to be strangled, shoved into a strawstack and left to suffocate, and then set aflame. But someone hated Dorothy enough to do that and more. When a member of the household is implicated Margaret and the family lawyer tamper with evidence in order to divert suspicion from one of their own. They replace a pair of gardening shears into a toolbox that they believe only one person could have moved. The family name is far more important to preserve than finding Dorothy 's killer.

Margaret and her relatives all seem to be playing amateur detective. Even the servants get involved. There is an attack on one of the family members (she apparently is struck on the head with a typewriter and survives!), there is the disappearance of some milk cans, a missing typewritten note and several other minor mysteries that follow the death of Dorothy. Margaret is puzzled by them all and wants to solve them before the police do. But Inspector Chant is way ahead of all of them. He confronts Margaret about her evidence tampering. She remains close mouthed about her involvement, Chant warns her that he will get at the truth one way or another and her refusal to cooperate will do more harm than good.

As if her fiddling with a pair of garden shears wasn't enough Margaret will attempt to figure out why a typewriter was placed beneath a bed and what happened to the note that was supposedly left inside. In doing so she endangers herself.  It is the fate of these HIBK heroines to snoop and then suffer strangling, mugging, blows to the heads and other violent attacks when they get "too close to the truth." Margaret will not escape completely unscathed.

As formulaic and drawn out as this novel seems it does keep the reader engaged. Margaret's narrative can sometimes get a bit irritating in its HIBK allusions to what has yet to happen for the reader but has already happened to her, however Disney does her best to keep these intrusions to a minimum. The detective novel aspects of the story are rather well done. It does have a fair play atmosphere. A truly astute reader could, in fact, unmask the killer. Yet Disney so cleverly hides the two crucial clues in the narrative that I am sure it will come as a stunning surprise when the murderer is pointed out by a surprise guest called in at the eleventh hour.