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.  

FIRST BOOKS: A Man Died Here - Gina Dessart

THE STORY:  Liz & Bob Macklin purchase an old home in Marshall, Massachusetts and begin an extensive rehab project transforming the gloomy, dark paneled, house into a bright, livable home. Liz is curious about the former owner, Seton Williams, who died in the house several years ago. Cancer she's told was the cause. A lonely old man dying alone, she thinks. But who was he? One day at the post office the gossipy Postmistress Mrs. Moore asks Liz, "Why did you buy the Williams house?  A house where that man killed himself?" Liz is shocked by this news. Why did the estate agent lie to her about Mr. Williams' death? She begins a subverted investigation making her way through the neighborhood ostensibly getting to know her neighbors when in fact she is slyly inserting questions about the house and the man who died there. Some townspeople offer up tidbits but clam up when Liz presses on with specific questions. Why is it no one wants to talk about Seton Williams, his death, or his family? Fighting common sense Liz and Bob keep digging and soon learn that perhaps the past is better left untouched.

THE CHARACTERS: A Man Died Here (1947) has an abundant cast of characters apart from the husband and wife amateur sleuths.  The novel is also written in the author omniscient voice allowing the reader to know the private thoughts of every character including the most minor characters like Jacob Kingman whose wife Harriet died by suicide years ago. As the novel progresses Dessart focuses on the Williams family and a handful of Marshall's residents including:

Miss Greeley - The high school principal who is beginning to lose her grip on reality as she spends much time dwelling on the lives of two of her favorite pupils, now grown adults. Her daydreaming and nostalgia lead her to spend too much time thinking about Seton Williams' death when Liz keeps asking prying questions.

Mrs. Moore - an inveterate gossip the local postmistress is responsible for re-opening the past with her casual but intrusive question to Liz about why she moved into the Williams house. Each time Liz runs into Mrs. Moore she gets more unusual info about the Williams family.

Prentiss Williams - the only member of the Williams family who left town for a successful life. Now a general practitioner with several patients in neighboring Colby, Prentiss is still troubled by what happened to his father. He and his brother seem to have a secret between them. When Liz uncovers a trove of letters hidden away in books left in the Williams’ library we learn that Prentiss had a violent argument with his father a few months before he died.

Henry Williams - youngest member of the Williams family and a rather sad man. He took over the family hardware store begrudgingly and never really seemed to get along with anyone let alone his father.  Luckily, he and his brother are close, but Henry can't understand why Prentiss was so antagonistic to the old man. He is sure Prentiss had something to do with their father's death.

Dr. Kilander - was at the Williams house to pronounce the old man dead.  One of the few witnesses to see exactly how the body was found he relates some crucial info to Bob & Liz when they hound him for details about the night Seton died. 

Mrs. Chmielewski, the Williams housekeeper; her daughter Agnes; and Blanche Milliman, a girl who died in a drowning accident also feature prominently in the plot.  Liz and Bob begin to wonder why so many young women who crossed paths with Seton Williams die violently. The more they uncover about this supposedly lonely old man they more they learn he was malevolent, licentious, cruel and cared little for anyone but himself.

INNOVATIONS: Dessart starts off her novel in a dreary outline of Liz and Bob house hunting, some pedestrian small town interactions almost as if the book will be a soap opera-like litany of mundane observations.  But it's a sly move because this seemingly prosaic beginning slowly gives way to the timeworn exploration of a town's populace haunted by violent death. The narrative voice Dessart adopts allows her to leak into the story, in a mixture of subtle and overt clues from a variety of character viewpoints, just exactly what took place the night Seton Williams died. Though the detective work is minimal and largely relegated to Q&A and the discovery of letters which are rendered in full into the narrative, there are a couple a notable scenes.

Liz decides to visit the local cemetery and almost by accident finds the gravestone of Blanche Milliman whose drowning death also seems to hold some of the townspeople under a spell. She spends much of this scene wondering if Seton Williams' grave is also in the cemetery. Eventually she finds it in a far corner of the yard in the dark shade of a hemlock tree. It's an eerily conceived scene and adds some much needed atmosphere to a novel that tends to skirt around the edges of mystery and violence.

Perhaps the highlight of the book (maybe the purpose that Dessart wrote the book) comes when Bob and Liz have a debate about whether they should continue with uncovering the truth about Williams' death which by this point they realize is a cleverly covered up murder. They have a dilemma: do they report what they've discovered? Do they leave it alone? Liz argues for a murder committed by a vigilante Good Samaritan and that perhaps the murder of Williams brought more good than bad. Let that person get away with it.  Bob tells her murder is murder no matter the motive. He cannot justify letting the culprit escape no matter if the end result was beneficial for many people.

By this penultimate chapter it becomes clear that Dessart has been exploring something resonant with our time of podcasts obsessed with true crime, the resurrection of cold cases and the desire to seek justice for unsolved crimes. Should a criminal be sought out after decades have passed? Is vengeance a moral solution? Where does forgiveness enter the picture? If a murder occurred that brought about good and happiness was the crime a just murder and was the killer a hero? All these idea float around the periphery of the story until Liz and Bob finally voice them in their at times heavy-handed conversation.

QUOTES:  Bob: "So--having detected to the extent of discovering the murder, I guess it's up to us to go on detecting until we find the murderer. Only God knows where we begin."

Liz: "But if Mr. X is a truly fine person, would you agree that it might be a special case, sort of?"

Bob: "...I thought it was all nicely set up with black is black and white is white. Damn it all, how can I tell at this stage of the game?"

THE AUTHOR: Georgine Belle Dessart (1912-1979) was born in Chicago but spent her youth in and around Long Island, Brooklyn, and Syracuse, NY as well as a brief stay in Germany. She attended Smith College but was compelled to end her studies after her second year.  She and Phillip Hildreth (soon to be her husband) borrowed $50 and went into business doing silkscreen printing and display advertising. They quit the business after about five years and moved to the Berkshires in Massachusetts. In the mid-1940s she began writing as a "retirement venture."

She credits becoming a mystery writer with the bizarre educational experience of learning French while in a German school while she was still mastering the German language. "Any child lost in three languages simultaneously is apt to be marked for life and end up as a mystery story writer," she wrote on her biographical sketch on the rear DJ panel of A Man Died Here.  

Dessart had a story published in Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine ("Counterpoint" in the Nov. 1965 issue) as well as other stories published in several noteworthy literary journals like The Virginia Quarterly and The Literary Review. Her three crime novels were written and published between 1947 and 1959. While her first, A Man Died Here, is heavily inspired by detective fiction the later works are more geared toward domestic suspense. Her third novel, Cry for the Lost (1959), takes place in a desert town called San Paulus no doubt based on Tucson, Arizona where she and her husband settled and where she was lecturer in English and a creative writing teacher at the University of Arizona in the mid-1970s.

FFB: Power on the Scent - Henrietta Clandon

THE STORY: William Power, lawyer, confides with his married novelist friends, Vincie and Penny Mercer, on an unusual murder involving what appears to be a poisoning by inhalation. Evidence suggests that a boutonniere found on the victim's lapel was dusted with cocaine.  The two writers are enlisted as unofficial detectives and together the three solve the murder with a very strange method of killing and even more odd motive.

THE CHARACTERS: William Power along with the Mercers appear in a brief series of detective novels by John Hazlette Vahey writing under the pseudonym Henrietta Clandon. Vahey is better known to readers of this blog as Vernon Loder whose mystery novels incorporate bizarre plots, strange murder methods and his trademark sense of offbeat humor.  Power on the Scent (1937) is the fourth book in the series of five, but only the third in which the three series characters appear together.  Powell appears alone in Good by Stealth (1937) while the Mercers go it alone in the final Clandon novel Fog over Weymouth (1938).

Penny and Vincie are novelists who specialize in crime fiction and detective stories. Penny's last work was released as This Delicate Murder, the previous novel in the Clandon series, and we find out that Penny writes as "Henrietta Clandon" adding an element of metafiction to this series. The previous case is alluded to several times and even footnoted in the text.

Penny comes up with a handful of good ideas as to how the cocaine was administered when an elaborate re-creation of a flower delivery fails to show that the rose used as a boutonniere could have held onto the powdered drug over the rough road the bicyclist travelled. When she learns that the victim had a fondness for the candy Turkish Delight she offers up the traditional coating of confectioner's powered sugar could easily have been doctored and not been noticed. That the victim is also a "snuffer" (translation for US readers: drug snorter) suggests that he may not have sensed the difference to an added sprinkling of coke on his candy. The detective work here is filled with interesting ideas and action like the flower delivery by bicycle re-enactment that Vincie performs for Power and the police.

The title of novel comes into play at various places. We get discussions of the scent of flowers, perfumes, and the apparently fading habit of people smelling flowers. When Power passes by a garden at night and smells the pungent odor of tobacco plants which he tells us release their scent at night he once again gets to thinking of botanical scents.  It turns out to be the detection climax of the book.

Overall, I would call Power on the Scent a didactic detective novel. The bulk of the detection is done via conversations at afternoon tea, restaurant meals and dinner parties. It's detection as a social gathering.  Almost all of it exclusively through dialogue as well. Late in the book is one excellent scene where Powell invites Dr. Terpis, forensic pathologist, to dinner at the Mercer home.  Dr. Terpis is perhaps the liveliest character in the entire book. He was certainly my favorite.

Terpis is described as "no more than thirty, fat, red-faced, with a perpetual smile and a hoarse laugh which broke out on the least provocation."  He is amateur puppeteer and entertains Penny's interest in the art form with tales of his puppet making and his work on writing plays for his gallery of puppets. He enjoys every course of the meal prepared for him ("It was as good as eating yourself to watch his gastronomic pleasure") and is a pleasant raconteur as well as an informative forensics expert.  When Terpis comes to discuss the case he presents fascinating details about the skull of a Great Dane that went over a cliff with one of the suspects, both perished. His findings, both macabre and pertinent to the case, will help clear up some ambiguities, decide the actual method of murder, and lead to the surprising solution to the various mysteries uncovered in the death of Montague Morgan, stockbroker and developer of a unique variety of Rennavy Rose.

INNOVATIONS: As "Henrietta Clandon" Vahey indulges in a self-consciously witty style, overflowing with puns, epigrams and arch humor.  It's a humor reminiscent of Restoration comedies of Wycherley and Etherege and seems utterly out of place in this detective story plot with its grave consequences involving murderous rage and drug abuse.  Other writers use this arch humor to great effect like Christianna Brand and Colin Watson without characters willfully drawing attention to their own cleverness.  I was bothered by how delighted Penny and Vince were with each other when they came up with yet another ridiculous pun.  Even Powell joins in on the game. The dialogue is loaded with the kind of epigrammatic sentences you find too often in the plays of Oscar Wilde. People don't talk this anywhere except in books, on stage and in cocktail comedies of 1930s American cinema. In a detective novel that does not start out as a farce the self-conscious humor sticks out like a sore thumb. This is not to say I didn't find some of it clever or amusing; some of it is (see QUOTES section). However, when the characters comment on their cleverness and practically pat each other on the back when some witticism is delivered I was rolling my eyes.

THINGS I LEARNED:  The victim's nephew Charles Sibbins has hired Powell to look into his uncle's suspicious death. He's a playboy and spendthrift who at the start of the book is hunting bongos in Afirca.  I always though a bongo was a type of drum. Guess again! Bongos are a type of striped antelope with distinctive curved horns indigenous to to Western Africa. (see photo)  Currently there are only 150 still living in the wild.  Luckily, their home is a preserve in the Kenyan mountains where hopefully they are safe from marauding poachers who seem to be solely responsible for the decimation of hundreds of animals species in that continent.

Penny refuses to use the hateful term macrocarpa to describe a hedge behind which Morgan was found. She says why say that when its easier and smarter to use cypress. A macrocarpa is, after all, a form of cypress -- the Monterey cypress, in fact. The very type of cypress clinging for life on the cliffs of Carmel, CA that has been photographed innumerable times and appears all over the internet.

On page 158 there is this sentence: "Noses, 'narks' as they used to be called, are very useful but rarely men with any moral sense." This is most likely the origin of the crime world slang term spelled as 'narc' in the US. I always thought narc was derived from the word narcotic. Nark and nose here are meant as slang for police informer. Nark first appeared in print in 1859 as the Merriam-Webster wizards of lexicography and etymology informed me. They suggest it derives from nak, Romani (the Gypsy language) for nose.

Another odd word on page 175 "Morgan...might be tempted to risk his money on a stumer..." sent me to the internet dictionaries once more. I learned that this is British slang for fraud or failure, especially a horse race that was rigged or fixed. It can also refer to the person who was victimized from such a rigged horse race.

And -- of course-- dog in the manger cropped up again! ("There was no suggestion of tender passages between them. He was either a dog-in-the-manger, or she was a superlative typist. They are, I hear, rare in the City.") For those who are counting that makes the third appearance of the phrase in two months for the books reviewed here. How have I never heard or read it until this year?

QUOTES: Summing up Charles Sibbins, an avid hunter, as a loudmouth coward Power says:
"You take it from me that if bongos went about with sub-machine guns Sibbins wouldn't collect many."

"You're spoiling the whole thing! You people full of commonsense are the death of all imagination!"

Impartiality is a gift of the gods and they are more sparing of it than anything else.

"The fact is that Withers has got the wind up, and I always find it pays to let the wind do its work," [Penny said]
"Very right," Vincie agreed, "practical and alliterative."

Vagueness is a virtue in a practicing policeman. He can always say that he didn't mean what you mean.

"I warned him against that dog several times. In fact, I hated the beast. It may seem unkind to say so, but over-kind and friendly people, and over-affectionate dogs are definitely dislikeable."

"Does it not occur to you that a man or woman tells the truth more often when he is rude, then when he is civil and polite?"
"Politeness is as much an enemy of the truth as oil is of friction."

EASY TO FIND? But of course! How's that for a welcome surprise. Four of the books written by Vahey using the Clandon pen name have been reissued by the prolific vintage crime novel reprint publisher Dean Street Press. In addition to Power on the Scent you can purchase a copy of Good By Stealth (already favorably reviewed here and here), Inquest and This Delicate Murder. All four were officially released on March 2 and are now available for sale in paperback and digital formats. The original UK editions of the Henrietta Clandon mystery novels are extremely scarce. None of them were published in the US during Vahey's lifetime. Some like Fog over Weymouth have not been available in the used book market in decades. There are a handful out there, but I suggest that you purchase the new editions as they include informative introductory material by Curt Evans who offers up his usual biographical tidbits and insights into the writer's work.