FFB: Murder Comes Back - Harriette Ashbrook

THE STORY: Moira Ballinger, widow of department store millionaire, is found dead in her bedroom shot through the head, apparently self-inflicted. Twenty years earlier her husband supposedly committed suicide in the same manner using the very same monogrammed revolver found in her limp hand. Is it merely a case of eerie déjà vu? Or is it a murder disguised?

CHARACTERS: Initially Murder Comes Back (1940) seems like it will be a run-of-the mill story of greedy relatives clinging tightly to secrets and too easily motivated to kill a vile relative in order to gain their inheritance. Money seems the obvious motive for all those implicated.  But Ashbrook is too clever to resort to tiresome conventions and cliche plot ideas. There are plenty of secrets in the Ballinger household a veritable avalanche of skeletons come tumbling out of multiple closets once Spike Tracy and Inspector Herschman begin questioning the relatives.

The murder investigation gets under way almost immediately with the intrusive presence of Dr. Horatio Pennypacker, a suspicious outspoken family physician who has taken it upon himself to imprison the person he thinks is the obvious murderer. He entrusts the key to a bedroom where he has locked up James Wort, the Ballinger family lawyer. Then Pennypacker enumerates several points about Prentice Ballinger's death and the outrageous coincidences that match up with his wife's recent supposed suicide, the most compelling being that each bedroom was wiped clean of all fingerprints except for those found on the revolver near the hand of each victim. Murder seems a proven fact with that detail in the open. Tracy then adds one more observation to the list of coincidences -- that Dr. Pennypacker was the first person on the scene at each death. That seems to put Pennypacker in his place leaving him quietly seething and shutting his supercilious mouth for the remainder of the chapter.

Tracy will face off with his Irene Adler in this murder case. She is Patsy,  the youngest Ballinger and the only child not even born when her father was killed two decades ago. Patsy seems to be digging through the past and finding bits of evidence that she refuses to share with Tracy.  He curses her in every other chapter calling her all sorts of names but at the same time marveling at her wily intellect and admiring her ability to outwit every policeman sent to keep an eye on her in her lower Manhattan apartment building.

The rest of the family are featured in small vignettes but are almost relegated to the background for the bulk of the novel. Sidney, the older brother, is eager to get an investment partner to renew a promissory note for $100,000 lest his business fall into bankruptcy. His money problems make him a prime suspect. David, the other son,  and his wife Paula live in near squalor thanks to Moira's selfishness. He too needs money and could use the Ballinger millions denied him by his haughty disdainful mother. And then there' s Olivia, affectionately called Ollie by Patsy, who lives in lonely spinsterhood in her isolated third floor apartment in the family mansion. Her only friends seem to be the female servants with whom she frequently goes to the movies. Is she harboring a secret that requires money too? Though the Ballinger sons may not feature prominently and Ollie seems to be present only for window dressing all of them play important parts in the solution of the Ballinger murders.

INNOVATIONS: Ashbrook has constructed a complex plot in which an overlooked crime in the past has led to a swath of violence in the present. Prentice Ballinger’s suicide is clearly a murder as is Moira’s death and both seem to be the work of a single person. But several other murders follow in quick succession, one of them rather shocking. Inspector Herschman and Tracy follow the clues believing that one greedy soul is the culprit. In a brave departure from the conventions of traditional detective fiction Ashbrook has allowed her love of violent murder movies to influence the outcome of her gripping story of violence, blackmail and revenge. There are multiple villains in the piece, few people escape guilt for one reason or another, surprise witnesses appear who don’t know they are witnesses, an intricate cover-up is slowly revealed and a genuine surprise in the final pages of who killed Moira and what happens to that criminal. Ashbrook has broken several time honored rules in Murder Comes Back and I enjoyed it immensely as a subversive murder mystery published well before similarly transgressive crime novels would flood the shelves in the post-WW2 era.

QUOTES: The only kind of big game he’s interested in wears lace step-ins.

I’m the only one who has an ironclad alibi for both cases. […] Twenty years ago when old [Prentice] was popped off, I was in what the poets call the 'primordial darkness of the womb.'

And so Spike told him. All. That was one of Pug’s chief virtues. Telling him All was as safe as pouring it down the kitchen sink.

Her artless, foolish, and malicious chatter had lightened one of the most obscure spots in the case -- the spot between four-thirty and six o’clock on a certain afternoon in the life of the late Moira Ballinger.

A female who figures in a murder investigation, even in a minor capacity, should be a ravishing blonde or a flashing brunette. She should be sinister or of touching innocence. She should be an intriguing vixen or an adorable angel. In the light of these requirements Miss Lillian Gillespie was a bust.

EASY TO FIND?  You can buy an eBook version of Murder Comes Back from an outfit called Black Heath Editions who sell their reissued vintage crime novels via amazon. I've been informed that it is available in the UK, EU and USA as well as India. Good news for a digital edition for a change! Even more exciting news is that Black Heath has remarkably reissued all of Harriette Ashbrook's mystery novels. If you like this one, you can read them all! Luckily for those who prefer original and vintage editions there are still a handful of copies of Murder Comes Back in both hardcover and paperback offered via the usual internet bookselling sites outside of amazon. Only one is priced in the collector’s range. Act now!

TomCat who blogs at Beneath the Stains of Time is reviewing many more of Ashbrook's novels over the next couple of weeks. You can find them all by clicking here.  I'll be reviewing at least one more, The Purple Onion Mystery, the final book in the Spike Tracy series.

FFB: Lady in Danger - Susannah Shane

THE STORY: "The Countess de Pontarlieu requests the pleasure of your company at supper, Sunday evening, June 4th, on the yacht Aguila, South Shore Anchorage, Long Island." So reads the invitation sent to ten guests of a motley group ranging from a stage actress to a gag shop owner keen on practical jokes. Someone wants them dead. After a failed attempt at poisoning the entire dinner party with crepes Suzette laced with rat poison, the killer stages a series of fatal accidents. One by one the group is being killed off. But why? What on earth do a Broadway actress, a gas station attendant, a playwright, a lawyer, a farmer, and the five others who barely know one another have in common that would mean they all need to die? Christopher Saxe, urbane playboy and amateur sleuth, digs into their past and discovers a secret pact dating back twenty years and missing $100,000 stolen from a train that someone wants all to himself.

Cartoon of Harriette Ashbrook
(orig source & artist unknown)

THE CHARACTERS: Lady in Danger (1942) marks the debut of Susannah Shane's series character Christopher Saxe. Similar to Spike Tracy, another amateur detective the same writer created under her own name, Saxe is yet another independently wealthy man-about-town who discovers he has a knack for solving crimes. We get his entire history of his previous cases, his relationship with the Manhattan police, and the origins of his friendship with his best buddy Buzz Batterson. Saxe is a likeable, astute young man with a strong sense of righting wrongs and unmasking criminals. Batterson is the typical wisecracking comic relief sidekick you find in many of these mystery novels of the period.

Because of the large cast of characters and the high body count we don't get to know many of the cast very well until after their deaths. Mark Priestley, the writer and playwright, is one of the first victims and we catch him at work with his loyal secretary in only one scene. His file of story ideas both published and unpublished along with the manuscript for the new play he is writing became crucial to Saxe's understanding of why the dinner party took place and why the killer is targeting the guests. Seems that Mark has a penchant for basing his stories and plays on real life events and he is not good at disguising the sources.

The lady of the title at first appears to be actress Juliet Brinig whose latest starring vehicle is bringing her attention and accolades in the Broadway community. Her role as a willful septuagenarian who marries late in life is the talk of the town and people are comparing her work to Helen Hayes as Queen Victoria. Juliet is only in her 40s but she is completely convincing as the title character in The Matriarch Marries. A subplot which eventually ties into the main story concerns Juliet's true identity and her mysterious rise seemingly out of nowhere as a leading lady in theater. But there is another woman who just as easily might fit the role of Lady in Danger. She is Miss Tuttle, Priestley's secretary, who Saxe will discover had another role as record keeper for a investment scheme involving all those present at the dinner party on the yacht.

The characters are all well defined, each has a pointed moment in the spotlight, and all of their actions contribute to the solution of the multiple murders. Shane maintains a good level of suspense as each character's many secrets are uncovered further revealing the closely guarded connections that tie them together. Saxe will uncover them all using a combination of street smarts, intuition, and solid detective work. The story is both a crime novel and a literary detective story of sorts as there is a metafiction element involved with Priestley's stories and plays being based on true crimes.

Lady in Danger (UK ed., 1948)

INNOVATIONS: I enjoyed the use of Priestley's stories as the primary clues that lead Saxe to the truth of what brought the ten people together. There are two stories within the novel's story that the reader is privy to and which align with later plot features. It's a clever use of fiction about fiction and it works very well in the context of this novel. Intriguing clues are plentiful as well including a set of golden cigarette cases all engraved with the same cryptic message that keep turning up in the victims' personal effects, Miss Tuttle's unusual coded filing system that relies on ambiguous initials, and Dennis Neville's odd side trip to a Colorado cemetery with Saxe hot on his trail to find out what Neville is up to. Most of this is done in the tradition of a fair play detective novel, but the clues (especially the events related in Priestley's stories) are more like signals of what's to come leading the reader to anticipate the revelation of the not too surprising murder motive. Saxe makes some cryptic remarks like "I had to look up a word in the dictionary" that are also clues to the solution. The word in question is probably one unfamiliar to many contemporary readers and I imagine they too would find themselves drawn to a dictionary for clarification. But we never really know what that word is until Saxe is good and ready to tell us -- in the second to last chapter to be precise.

Surprises, too, are teeming over the course of this rather intricate and complexly plotted mystery. As much as I thought I knew where Shane was headed with her main plot thread she managed to pull the ultimate unexpected punch when it came to revealing the identity of the murderer. The clues were all there and subtly laid out while the more blatant evidence was discussed and mulled over at length. I'm not sure if this was truly ingenious or just a side effect of having such a complicated plot with so many layers and secrets to keep track of. Still, I was impressed and she wins extra points for fooling me.

THE AUTHOR: "Susannah Shane" was the pseudonym and second life for Harriette Ashbrook's detective and crime fiction career. After realizing that her own name was not among the most respected mystery writers (she enjoyed making fun of a handful of middling book reviews) and that she was not a bestselling writer she invented an alter ego. Start from scratch, so to speak. Her first novel as Shane -- Lady in Lilac, a suspense thriller in the style of Cornell Woolrich -- was a huge success winning her the coveted Red Badge Mystery Novel Prize of $1000 and a book contract with Dodd Mead. Lady in Lilac was reprinted in massive quantities by Books, Inc. as part of their "Midnite Mysteries" imprint and to this day is the easiest of the Susannah Shane books to find in the used book market. It was recently reprinted by Coachwhip Press. Why they haven't picked up any of Ashbrook's other well plotted and entertaining books or the remaining Shane novels mystifies me.

Prior to her mystery novelist career Ashbrook was a freelance newspaper writer whose work regularly appeared in The New York Times, New York Tribune and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle throughout the 1920s. She also apparently contributed to the Kiddie Klub Korner as children's advice giver Aunt Jean. This was a column that appeared in the Evening World, another New York paper, also during the 1920s.

Her writing career was cut short when she died in 1947 at the relatively young age of 50. Had she lived longer we might have seen more of Christopher Saxe or even some other series character. For more on Ashbrook see my post on the Spike Tracy detective novels.

EASY TO FIND? Of her six detective novels written as Shane Lady in Danger is the second most common after Lady in Lilac. I found about ten copies for sale in both US and UK editions. Unlike the last few books under her own name none of the Shane books were reprinted in paperback. One of the other titles was included in a 3-in-1 omnibus as part of the Detective Book Club. If you live in the US you might be lucky enough to find one of the Susannah Shane books in your local library or get it through interlibrary loan. I'd like to see all of Ashbrook's books reprinted. While they may not be stellar examples of the genre they are hugely entertaining. When she was cooking up an intricate plot with neatly planted clues as in the case of Lady in Danger she really did a bang up job with her mystery books.

Christopher Saxe Detective novels
Lady in Danger (1942)
Lady in a Wedding Dress (1943)
Lady in a Million (1943)
The Baby in the Ash Can (1944)
Diamonds in the Dumplings (1946)

FFB: The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook

If it hadn't been for an unmentionable book by a writer known only by his initials Harriette Ashbrook might never have become a mystery writer. Just as Agatha Christie was inspired to pen her first novel by reading a poorly written detective novel Ashbrook in a newspaper interview done in 1933 confessed, "I owe it all to T.S. Fine literary style is discouraging to the beginner. It's better to read a terrible piece of tripe and get encouraged." Whatever that book and whoever T.S. might be we have to thank him for the creation of Ashbrook's ne'er-do-well amateur detective Philip "Spike" Tracy.

We first meet Spike Tracy in The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930) and he's a near twin of Philo Vance, who at the time had only appeared in five books. Tracy has got a playboy's philosophy of life, appears to be utterly hedonistic, has no job, and thinks becoming an amateur sleuth might be rather fun. The main difference between Ashbrook's detective and her obvious inspiration is while Vance loves to lecture ostentatiously on esoteric topics like Chinese pottery and ancient Egyptian burial rites Tracy is more down to earth, keenly observant but also a smart aleck. Tracy notices things the police overlook and enjoys pointing out their faults without ever appearing snobbish or patronizing as Vance often is.

Tracy has a brother who is the Manhattan District Attorney. R. Montgomery Tracy is his professional name as it is painted on his New York office door. The R stands for Richard and thankfully he doesn't go by Dick. As Vance has Markham and Sgt. Healy and Ellery Queen deals with a D.A. and his policeman father Tracy is paired with his brother and Inspector Henschmann.  For good measure Ashbrook supplies a medical examiner bored with his job who displays the requisite black humor when examining the many corpses that turn up in the series.

...Cecily Thane is fairly traditional compared to Ashbrooks' later novels featuring Spike Tracy. The victim is the unliked young wife of an older man who allowed her to go out regularly with a "dancer" named Tommy Spencer. Mrs. Thane is found shot in her bedroom with a safe open and robbed of jewels. Turns out another woman was robbed and killed earlier and she too was seen in the company of a dancing gigolo named William Preston. Is there a criminal gang of male escorts turned thieves and murderers?

There are some unusual aspects to the criminal investigation like the search for the murder weapon which was disposed of in an odd manner and turns up in a most unlikely place. Also, a blotting paper clue is reproduced in the book and allows the reader to hold it up to a mirror in order to read the message thus getting a feeling of joining Tracy in his sleuthing. But the cleverest part is that the entire crime hinges on an altered timepiece. Ashbrook's insightful observations about the difference between actual time and perceived time make for one of the more modern features of the story.

The Murder of Steven Kester, UK edition (1933)

She followed her debut with The Murder of Steven Kester (1931) which fans of obscure B movies may know in its cinematic adaptation known as Green Eyes. The movie turns up all over the internet these days as it was released by one of the bargain basement video outfits that churned out hundreds of DVD cheapies of movies now in the public domain. A murder takes place during a masquerade party held at the Long Island mansion of the title character. Kester is dressed as Bottom (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) complete with donkey's head. Tracy comes as a gladiator in an abbreviated costume consisting only of a tiger skin loincloth. When he goes in search of a safety pin in order to prevent an accidental charge of public indecency he stumbles upon the corpse. Ashbrook's offbeat sense of humor and her tendency to be a bit risqué is on flamboyant display in this book. Like many scenes added for comic effect in her books seemingly insignificant minutiae will take on greater importance when the crime is fully explained.

Her plotting is original but her execution is sometimes faulty. There are some great clues like the evidence of something having been destroyed in the furnace of the Kester home, a suspect's past life as an actress, and a pair of dice that turn up during a scene involving an ostensibly extraneous crap game -- yet another "big clue" disguised in a scene of minutiae that helps Tracy solve the murder. But while the reader is presented with all of this Tracy still withholds some important data. Too much offstage action in this story for my tastes, too many scenes when Tracy goes away and we have no idea what he does until pages later in the denouement.

Ashbrook starts to experiment with unusual themes in her next two books. In one book she touches on abnormal psychology and uses some groundbreaking research in a rather daring surprise reveal while the other gives her a chance to discuss the lonely life of World War 1 veterans, their often tortured lives, and the private demons they must learn to deal with back home far from the brutality of the front.

The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) shows considerable improvement from her first two detective novels. Tracy is on his own in this outing which takes him to the backcountry of Vermont. Ashbrook does an excellent job with misdirection and even manages to include an impossible disappearance. For the 1930s this was probably an astonishing mystery with a gasp inducing, surprise ending. It deals with twin sisters -- Mary, a bedridden invalid, and Jill, an extroverted, highly sexual young woman. Jill believes there is a plot to kill her. She enlists Tracy's aid to prevent her impending murder at the hands of her oppressive and odious guardian and his nurse, but the old man turns up dead first. And Jill is discovered standing over his body with the bloody weapon in her hand.

Though it may all become rather obvious to the 21st century reader Ashbrook must be commended for handling a topic rarely used in detective fiction of the 1930s. A rural Vermont sheriff mentions a well known Victorian novel in the final pages, perhaps the only familiar reference on the topic to a reader of Ashbrook's time. She handles the topic fairly well for a device that is now an overused trick in thriller and mystery fiction. I like ...Sigurd Sharon for its daring invention and its subversive depiction of a sexually free female character.

The theft of a valuable stamp collection, several murders and a handful of attempted murders are at the core of the elaborately constructed A Most Immoral Murder (1935). Tracy is back in Manhattan with the usual supporting characters from the police and D.A.'s office. He also makes frequent trips to New Jersey, notably the fictitious town of West Albion where a secret in the past is revealed to have a connection to the murders and the stamp collection theft. Ashbrook uses a murder investigation to draw comparison between wartime killing and murder in civilian life and has some very strong opinions about each and the effect killing has on soldiers. I found it to be her most mature work even if the plot gets a bit creaky with some old fashioned tropes involving adopted children that seem borrowed from Victorian sensation novels. The unfolding of events, however, is impressively done. The large cast of well drawn characters holds the reader's interest with the stamp expert being the most memorable of the lot.

Harriette Ashbrook wrote only seven novels using her real name then handful more under the pseudonym "Susannah Shane." The Shane novels are a blend of Mignon Eberhart style "women in peril" thrillers and all-out farcical comic crime novels like the work of Phoebe Atwood Taylor and Craig Rice. I prefer her work under her own name.

These days Spike Tracy is utterly forgotten. Sadly, so too is Harriette Ashbrook. I'd recommend tracking down any of her books -- they're entertaining, sometimes devious, and often very original for the time they were written. Spike Tracy was one of the better Vance impersonators but a lot more likable. As Ashbrook says of her own creation, "He's the kind of man I wish I could meet in real life."

Philip "Spike" Tracy Detective Novels
The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930)
The Murder of Stephen Kester (1931)
The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933)
A Most Immoral Murder (1935)
Murder Makes Murder (1937)
Murder Comes Back (1940)
The Purple Onion Mystery (1941) (AKA Murder on Friday)