FIRST BOOKS: The Swan Island Murders - Victoria Lincoln

There is nothing more upsetting than falling for the hype on a book jacket. The Swan Island Murders (1930) with its striking Art Deco influenced illustration of a silhouetted damsel being threatened by claw-like hands and the promise of "mystery, horror and detection" was enough to lure me in. While there is plenty of mystery and a smattering of rudimentary detection on display there is little horror to thrill a 21st century reader.  This is a book of its age when its intended audience surely would've been thrilled by the exotic and bizarre plot elements but which led me to spend time on outside research as I found fault with the author's supposed arcane knowledge of Indian religion and mythology that dominates the story,

The story mostly involves the guests at an impromptu house party hosted by wealthy eccentric Nahum Gould, a collector of Indian esoterica and a variety of Southeast Asian artifacts. The rear of the book jacket leads one to believe that the poor souls stranded on Swan Island are at the mercy of a mad strangler. This is not the case. Two Portuguese immigrant workers are strangled over the course of the novel (so a partial truth) but none of them are major characters at the house party. Instead, the focused crime is that one of the guests is shot dead, a presumed suicide for much of the book. The editorial staff at Farrar & Rinehart seemed more intent on selling the book under false pretenses and playing up to the contemporary demand for sensational popular fiction.  Had they told the truth about the book they would've been "spoiling" the surprises. Of course, I think nothing of diving right and telling you that this book is really about abnormal psychology and monomania related to arcane Indian mythology and its effect on Indian criminal culture.

Connie Steel is our narrator very much modeled on a Mary Roberts Rinehart amateur female detective easily affected by eerie atmosphere and with a tendency to talk about madness far too often. Swan Island, as you might predict, is a fog enshrouded lonely place and Gould's mansion is an imposing and dreary, shadow-filled haven well suited for a reclusive eccentric obsessed with the Mysterious And Inscrutable East. Victoria Lincoln does an admirable job of laying on thick this atmosphere of dread signalling "horrible things to come" with typical HIBK prose like "...but that boat was to come and go again without carrying any one of us away from Swan Island." More typical are Lincoln's florid stylistic touches like this: "How dreadfully right I had been...when I had thought that all our proportions were chemically incorrect, and that some cataclysmic reaction was bound to take place."  This odd chemistry metaphor pops up two times later in the book. She heightens the mystery and terror when we learn that Nahum Gould is so fearful and paranoid he has turned the house into an impenetrable fortress. All the windows have steel frames, there is only a single key for every door lock in the place with no copies and only the butler Gomez or Gould's secretary Torres are allowed to keep these original keys. Gould himself keeps only the key to his bedroom which has a heavy oak and steel door, steel enmeshed windows and other security overkill enhancements making his bedroom more of a prison cell. He speaks in a hushed voice of keeping "It" out and is constantly on guard, especially at night .

Needless to say someone manages to kill the playwright John Parsons and as Connie and her fiance Edward Benedict soon discover the murderer can only be one of the four remaining guests, Gould, or one of his employees. Gomez has a son Joe with developmental delay who in true period fashion is referred to as "the idiot" throughout the novel. Though he is slow to comprehend anything asked of him Joe's father says the boy can have days when he is perfectly lucid. Joe is the first one suspected of being the mad strangler and also the shooter until the stunningly beautiful (she has to be, right?) Nana Moeller, a German actress about to appear in Parsons' latest play, insists that she knows John committed suicide. There is evidence to disprove this suicide theory and that the death is a cleverly covered up murder. Not the least of these clues is a blood stained book written in Urdu that has vanished from the library when Parsons was shot.

A blood stained book written in Urdu?!

This is the single most interesting facet of the novel. Not to mention Lincoln's most macabre and original touch. It will prove key to the solution of all that is baffling about the strangling murders as well as John Parsons' death. Unfortunately, the revelation in the final chapters is so far removed from a fair play traditional detective novel that it called to mind the most popular American detective of the era -- Philo Vance.  I'm sure Victoria Lincoln read her fair share of both Rinehart and Van Dine prior to writing her first mystery novel because apart from the Rinehart style narration, and the Rinehart-like emphasis on terror and madness infecting everyone, ultimately the book is an esoteric treatise much like a Philo Vance detective novel. Thankfully Lincoln spares us pedantic footnotes, but the final chapter is overloaded with arcane trivia about a criminal subculture that thrived in 19th century India. Sadly, the finale is also littered with misinformation and poorly Anglicized spellings of terms and mythological figures and haphazardly mixes fact and legend. I had to sort it all out in about 90 minutes of internet searches and reading up on the incarnations of Kali until I found Bhawani which is the modern spelling of what Lincoln renders in her novel as B'wannee. She also seems to believe that T'huggee (once again her odd spelling) is an actual religion rather than a criminal class.

Victoria Lincoln, age 26 (circa 1930)

THE AUTHOR: Victoria Lincoln (1904 - 1981) was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and claims (on her author bio on the DJ for this mystery novel) that as a child she managed to make the acquaintance of that town's most famous resident Lizzie Borden. She attended Radcliffe College and graduated in 1926. The same year she married her first husband Isaac Watkins who was a graduate student in fine art at Harvard. She had her first child, Penelope, with him. A few years after her first novel was published she divorced Watkins and in 1933 married Victor Lowe, professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.

Her New York Times obituary mentions only her mainstream novels and her non-fiction but not her debut novel, The Swan Island Murders, her first and only foray into mystery and thriller fiction. Among her other works are February Hill (1934) adapted for the stage by George Abbot under its new title The Primrose Path. In 1940 The Primrose Path was made into a movie starring Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea and Marjorie Rambeau who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as a mother who turns to prostitution to support her family. Lincoln's other fiction includes Grandmother & the Comet (1944), The Wind at My Back: Three Short Novels (1946), Celia Amberley (1949) and Out from Eden (1951). Notable among her non-fiction works are the Edgar Award winning biography/true crime work A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight (1967) and her last book on the life of St. Theresa of Avila. She lived with her husband Victor Lowe and her family in Baltimore until her death in 1981. 

FFB: Said with Flowers - Anne Nash

THE STORY: Doris Trent and Nell Witter are two middle-aged women who own The Flower Shop in Pinecrest, a northern California town not far from the San Francisco Bay area. It's a few days before Christmas and their only employee has slipped, fallen, broken both legs and is now recuperating in a hospital. How will they ever cope with the onslaught of last minute Christmas orders for people who say it with flowers? A fortuitous visit from a stranger who just happens to have a wealth of knowledge about plants and flowers and is charming to boot seems to be "a gift from God," as Nell puts it. His name? Barney Miller! But he's not a cop. They hire him on the spot. He works well with the customers and does a better job with choosing and carefully wrapping plants than poor Patrick in the hospital.  Can he be too good to be true? Is it too coincidental that he appeared so conveniently? When a woman is found dead in the alley behind the shop and it appears to be yet another victim of a serial killer who has been murdering beautiful young women Doris and Nell suspect Barney may have chosen their shop as a hideout while he continues a murder spree. Of course the mystery of why Barney is at the shop proves to be more complicated than that.

ATMOSPHERE: Said with Flowers (1943) was one of the many "specialty mysteries" that were cropping up in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s. Perhaps already the savvy editors at Doubleday Doran's esteemed Crime Club imprint who published Nash's book had recognized that murder mysteries set in florists, libraries, department stores and other unusual locales with women amateur sleuths terrorized by stalking murderers were just the gimmick to sell more books to insatiable readers craving new spins on the detective novel.

This was Anne Nash's first book. From the very first paragraph it is clear Nash is emulating the Mignon Eberhart school. As narrated by Doris, who prefers to go by the nickname Dodo, the story is littered with lines like this: "And it was I--unknowingly, innocently, but it was I nevertheless--who helped the murderer commit the crime." And throughout the novel Dodo wavers between trusting Barney as a good worker then disbelieving his presence is anything but sinister and a curse. Barney is made to be the obvious villain of the piece, but anyone who has read these kinds of books just knows that all his mysterious behavior will prove not to be villainous but purposeful, albeit for ulterior motives that are not fully revealed until the closing chapters. There is a burgeoning forbidden romance as well and the reader is meant to be rooting for the lovers to survive all the violence and terror, come out alive and well and headed for the wedding aisle.

The story is overly complicated by the subplot of the serial killer who inexplicably leaves drawings of fish on his victims. The search for this criminal, dubbed "The Karp Killer" by some cynical reporters, is almost completely unnecessary. There's never really any threat to anyone and the character exists only so that Barney can be suspected of being a charming psychopath on the lam. Despite an attempt to obfuscate and confuse the reader with weak red herrings it is clear that the murder of Rosalind Vance is merely a copycat killing because the crime doesn't fit the killer's M.O. Even though a fish drawing is pinned to her corpse she's too old, she was stabbed, and her body is found buried in a trash pile -- details that do not fit any of the circumstances of the previous nine victims' deaths. While all of this seems to be very modern for the 1940s remember that multiple murderer tales had been written by the scores throughout the 1930s, most of them by British writers, some even include the gimmick of copycat killing.

THE CHARACTERS: Dodo is a typical narrator of the Rinehart/Eberhart school. She's not really interesting and her indecision about Barney's guilt or innocence gets to be a bit wearisome. On the other hand her tart tongued partner Nell is more than welcome when she's on the page. Brash, forthright, opinionated and one helluva wiseacre Nell provides the much needed enlivening to all the HIBK claptrap that makes up much of the story. The suspects are types pulled from the Central Casting catalog of murder mystery characters. There is the embittered older sister, the devious husband, a ne'er do well creep who seems to be too interested in women half his age, an assortment of gossipy harridans haunting the florist shop with catty criticisms of wilted flowers and, of course, the young girl in peril who is the object of Barney's affection.

INNOVATIONS: There aren't many to be found here. The story is overloaded with plot devices pulled from the Victorian sensation novel trunk. There are many secrets in the characters' past including the old motif of a child born out of wedlock that shamed the family. Continuing in this vein Dodo has an unnaturally prudish reaction to Barney's penchant for heavy duty swearing. There are four separate references to one incident of Barney swearing up a storm of curse words and foul language that make him seem like the Devil incarnate. She talks about his speech being indicative of pure evil. It's all a bit laughable to most modern readers accustomed to salty and vulgar language.

I will mention an unusual use of a trained dog to literally sniff out clues. The minor policeman character Mark Tudor has a dog named Svea that helps find evidence. The dog comes in very handy at a climactic point late in the story.

Another notable aspect is the rare way with which Nash deals with grieving. Probably because the novel combines the backdrop of a florist's business with the irony of a murder taking place at Christmas time Nash takes advantage of the way people express their emotions through the purchase of flowers. The title of the book becomes a multi-layered metaphor. Grief is openly discussed in a way that made me notice how often that expression of emotion is so rarely brought up in detective novels of this era. When I came across this comment late in the novel I felt that my observation was even more justified: "What can we gain by learning anything more? [...] What good will it do to find out who killed Rosalind? It won't lessen our grief any." For her observations on the futility of crime solving in the face of inexplicable violence I give Nash several bonus points that more than make up for the shortcomings of her debut novel.

THE AUTHOR: Anne Nash wrote three books all of which feature Dodo and Nell and a couple which have Mark Tudor. Her fourth and last mystery novel is a stand alone with no series characters and is set in a California boarding house. The way Nash talks about Svea in Said with Flowers is indicative of a genuine love for dogs. She may have been involved in dog breeding or the care of dogs based on the descriptions of Svea and the dog's behavior in a way that only a true dog lover would write about the animals. In fact, her love of dogs plays a major role in her third novel, Cabbages and Crime, in which the two women travel to Death Valley to help run Dodo's cousin's dog boarding kennel and a murder once again involves them.

EASY TO FIND? Act now before midnight, as they say on TV infomercials. Said with Flowers was published in hardcover by the Crime Club in the US and Hammond in the UK. There is also a US paperback reprint by Bart House. All three editions pop up for sale every now and then with the paperback the easiest to find. Currently there are a handful of the Bart paperback copies being offered for sale online. As for the other mysteries by Nash your chances are much bleaker. I found very few copies of the third and fourth titles for sale and absolutely none of the second title Death by Design.

Ann Nash's Detective Novels
Said with Flowers (1943)
Death by Design (1944)
Cabbages and Crime (1945)
Unhappy Rendezvous (1946)

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.