FFB: The Haunted River - Charlotte Riddell

THE STORY: Margaret and Georgie Vernam are sisters who have grown tired of living in London. They've spent much of the summer house hunting for a quaint cottage they can afford in the countryside. When they come across a bargain priced house near a dilapidated mill they feel they have found their dream hone. But the house and the mill have a dreaded past and their landlord begins acting rather suspiciously once they move in. By Christmas Day Margaret will witness mysterious events, confront possible apparitions and solve a horrid crime that almost goes unpunished.

THE CHARACTERS: The Haunted River (1877) is narrated by Margaret Vernam whose full name we do not until well into this novella. Prior to this we know her only as Peg, a nickname her sister has given her and one Margaret loathes but endures because she cannot but help but love her darling sister. Like many Victorian heroines of this late period she is a strong-willed, plain looking and sensible woman striving to be self-employed as a painter and sketch artist following in the footsteps of her much more successful painter father now deceased.

Her sister Georgie is typically the opposite of Margaret -- drop dead gorgeous, vivacious and gregarious, liked by everyone she meets, equipped with a disarming personality that even ruffians and nasty spirited children can be tamed by her gentle approach. A bit dreamy and flighty Georgie is the one who convinces Margaret to keep looking for their country dream house. It is Georgie who finds the advertisement for the bargain cottage near the mill, a remarkably spacious home with an expansive grounds, offered at a rent of only £50 a year.

The bulk of the story is devoted to the business of house hunting, wheeling and dealing with unctuous Mr. Lauston who claims he is acting as an agent for an unnamed third party. Lauston is a contradiction. He finds himself attracted to Margaret's business acumen and enjoys negotiating with her, but he almost immediately reneges on many of their agreements. As the story progresses Margaret will discover he has ulterior motives and -- like any true unctuous Victorian character -- he guards a secret in his past.

Scattered through the the narrative characters relate the past of the haunted mill, the horrible events that happened by the river banks and the legends that keep the locals away from the property. Only Margaret will be witness to events related to those stories of the past. in one of the earliest scenes she creates a painting with a strange man standing by an oak tree. When her servant looks at it she is aghast that Margaret has painted an exact likeness of Mr. Dingley, the former mill owner, who died several years ago. More surprising is that the reader knows that Margaret painted the man from life as she saw him standing by the tree while she was painting at her easel outdoors in the bright sunshine of a summer afternoon.

In the final third of the novel the sisters encounter a poor old woman being taunted by cruel children. Georgie manages to stop the rock throwing and foul language and the two of them take the woman into their home. She tells them yet another story about Mr. Lauston's niece Clara. Filled with the typical trappings of Victorian sensation fiction -- a child born in secret, shame and guilt ridden characters, child abduction, and incarceration in an asylum -- it is a truly horrible tale she tells. Margaret is appalled. Clara we learn is the victim of a Collins-like conspiracy reminiscent of the fate of Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White. It will fall to Margaret to set all things right late one night in the house when a strange woman, dripping wet and barefoot guides Margaret to a secret location in the house where some all important documents have been hidden.

Ultimately The Haunted River is indeed a ghost story as well as a sort of occult detective tale with Margaret acting as an accidental detective and her Watson turning out to be a ghost. Or was she real? The final 30 pages of the story are rife with thrilling set pieces, heightened emotions and evocative writing. Best of all the final ghostly apparition actually appears on Christmas Day in true Victorian tradition.

INNOVATIONS: Unlike the conventional Victorian ghost story writers who confined their hauntings to indoor settings with creaking staircases, darkened corridors and shadow filled homes Charlotte Riddel dared to write of ghosts and apparitions appearing in broad daylight. And not only broad daylight but in the wildness of outdoors. She would specialize in what S. M. Ellis called "open air" ghosts and enjoyed writing stories about haunted farms, forests and in the case of this novella a river.

QUOTES: At all events, whenever the evening was fairly fine, I paced the garden path slowly, watching and thinking as the evening closed and the darker shadows stole on.

Even in the daytime one could scarcely distinguish where the ivy began and the laurels ended; where the barberries had their roots and the rhododendrons fought with clustering briony and the fatal convolvulus for life; but when twilight came the whole corner of the bridge resolved itself into one dark mass of dense foliage.

Two or three times on the evening after Anne told me of Miss Lauston's story, I fancied I heard a stir and movement amongst this greenery, that when I stopped to listen I felt something more animate than the leaves was moving in the cover.

Each time I passed I gave the boughs a shake, so strong was the fancy upon me, and at last I parted the branches, and thrust my arm amongst the tangled creepers.

As I did so, something rushed out, so swiftly, so suddenly, that I started back affrighted. Something soft and cold touched my cheek. Something brushed my dress. Something lithe and shadowy flitted between me and the imperfect twilight in the open garden beyond, and then was gone.

THE AUTHOR: Charlotte Riddell (1832 - 1906), published under her married name as Mrs. J. H. Riddell, was one of the most prolific writers of short stories and novels in the mid to late Victorian era. She was the first women to write about the City and business life as Arthur Waugh recalls in One Mans' Road. He reminds us that nearly all of her income from her various publishers was lost by her "hopeless husband" a civil engineer who spent her money "on patenting impracticable stoves" among other foolish ideas. She wrote in a variety of genres including romance, domestic melodrama and sensation fiction. But she is perhaps best known for her supernatural fiction, both in long and short form. There is much written about her life on the internet and in long out of print biographies. The best info on Charlotte Riddell is found in Richard Dalby's introduction to the Sarob Press reissue of The Haunted River which draws from an essay by S. M. Ellis in his biographical work Wilkie Collins, LeFanu and Others (Constable, 1931). Ellis had a remarkable correspondence with Charlotte Riddell in the the last months of her life related to tracking down a copy of The Haunted River.

EASY TO FIND? According to Richard Dalby The Haunted River was for decades the most difficult of Mrs. Riddell's Christmas ghost stories to obtain in an original edition. Despite the efforts of E. F. Bleiler uncovering copies of The Uninhabited House and reprinting that novella and issuing an entire volume of her short stories with supernatural content The Haunted River languished in the "Limbo of Out of Printdom" until the 21st century. It was first printed in a limited edition of 300 copies by Sarob Press in 2001 which quickly sold out. Only a few copies of that edition are currently offered by online used booksellers but are all now priced in the "collector's market" range. Luckily, by 2012 all of Riddell's supernatural fiction had been uncovered and reprinted. Leonaur Ltd. took on the monumental task of publishing a three volume set of Charlotte Riddell's entire output of supernatural fiction. The Haunted River can be found in Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Mrs. J. H. Riddell: Volume 1 (2012). All three volumes are still in print and available from the usual mega-retail websites who deal in books.

FFB: Three Men Out - Rex Stout

We're saluting Rex Stout today in a web-wide reading of his books for the Friday's Forgotten Book meme hosted by Patti Abbott though most of his books, I think, are hardly forgotten. I chose to continue my reading of the Nero Wolfe canon with Three Men Out (1954). This volume includes three novellas all of which were published under different titles in The American Magazine between September 1952 and December 1953. All of them were subsequently reprinted one or more times in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. As with most of the Nero Wolfe books the US paperbacks were first printed by Bantam and remained in print from the 1950s throughout the 1980s. I liked all of these long short stories for various reasons, but the first one seemed the weakest of the lot.

"Invitation to Murder" was originally published as "Will to Murder". The first title is uttered by Herman Lewent as part of his introductory dialogue. Lewent is both client and victim in the story. As the second (original) title may suggest to a wily Wolfe reader the novella is about a large inheritance, the money and estate that Lewent feels he's been cheated out of. He seeks out Archie and Wolfe to help him find out what happened to his share of his father's estate which was inherited by his sister. She died suspiciously of ptomaine poisoning after eating a plateful of artichoke appetizers at a party and Lewent thinks that someone in her husband's household killed her. Reluctantly, Wolfe takes on the case and Archie is sent to the home of Theodore Huck, the wheelchair bound husband, in a somewhat undercover capacity to smoke out the killer...if in fact there is one. When Lewent dies Archie is tasked with finding a real murderer. He and Wolfe try to prove that Lewent was murdered because of his knowledge of Mrs. Huck's suspicious and conveniently timed death.

The suspect list is small in this story and therefore the sniffing out of the culprit is not at all difficult. Besides the invalid husband who is the most fleshed out of the characters, there is his nephew Paul Thayre, an aspiring composer of "modern music" and Huck's three female employees: a housekeeper, a secretary, and a nurse. None of these women is really s given any full treatment as a character. They're sort of ciphers. Archie of course is attracted to a few of them, notably Mrs. O'Shea, the buxom, hip swinging, widowed housekeeper who he thinks is Huck's secret paramour. But when Lewent's murder by bludgeoning is examined closely there really can be only one possible killer. The only surprise here is how the body was moved from the actual murder site to where Archie literally stumbled over it. Not much of a mystery tale and though Wolfe solves it with his usually aplomb anyone could figure out this one.

A better mystery and better tale is "The Zero Clue" which resembles the work of Ellery Queen. It's no wonder that the story was reprinted four times in EQMM between 1963 and 1976. The Wolfe novella includes a rather puzzling dying clue, a plot device practically invented by the Queen writing team.

This is also one of the few times we learn that Wolfe had a rival in the private detective business, though this detective is of a most unusual sort. Leo Heller is what one might call a probability detective. As an ex-professor of mathematics Heller made a name for himself by using the laws of probability in determining the outcomes of anything from a horse race to a political election. He then turned to becoming a private detective of sorts using his various calculations and formulae in helping people with everything from completing business deals to locating missing persons. Archie says the rumor has it Heller was so successful that he was pulling a six figure income. Heller crossed paths with Wolfe in one case where they had the same client but Wolfe was fired when the client thought he was moving too slowly. Heller then delivered for the client but he used much of the data and info gathered by Wolfe's operatives which led to Wolfe's negative opinion of Heller as a man of ethics in the private detective world.

The dying clue in "The Zero Clue"

Now Heller wants to hire Wolfe to verify his suspicions of a client who may be a criminal. Wolfe is still steamed about the past and his anger is only intensified when Archie tries to get permission to take the case because Wolfe and Theodore are in the midst of dealing with a thrip invasion in the orchid greenhouse. Archie goes to Heller's office anyway and finds him dead with Cramer and other police already investigating. On the desk in Heller's office the police find eight pencils and one eraser arranged to form what appears to be the initials NW. Cramer is convinced that the rivalry between the two got the better of Nero Wolfe and he had Archie take out Heller like a hitman. Wolfe, however, sees through the meaning of the dying clue almost immediately and asks the police to pay close attention to anything involving the number six.

The suspects include all of the prospective clients who were in the waiting room or who had recently paid a visit to Heller's office. Among them are a nurse who wanted Heller to help her uncover the identity of the person who firebombed her hospital; a society dame with a cache of anonymous letters that hint at blackmail; an egotistical inventor with a temper who sought out Heller to provide him with the missing formula to make his latest invention workable; and Karl Busch noted as a man of "NVMS" (no visible means of support) on the police notes Archie spies. Busch seems to be the criminal of the bunch for he wanted Heller's help in winning a horse race. Heller provides him with the name of the horse to bet on but with a name like Zero Busch was too superstitious to accept it as the real winner.

Wolfe listens to all their stories and sees that not only was his first thought about the dying clue wrong, but that Heller's mathematics background is actually the key to the entire case. And armed with some arcane knowledge he gathers from a textbook about the history of mathematics he not only solves Heller's murder but discovers the person who blew up the hospital where Susan Maturo, the nurse, worked. The story is not exactly fair play since it requires that the reader also have that arcane knowledge, but it's nevertheless a superior mystery story with some of the best plotting for a story set in a single room I've read in a long time. This could easily be adapted for the stage and it should be!

The last story of the bunch "This Won't Kill You" is equally good, but because it deals with baseball I tended to waver in and out of it. In fact, I skipped entire pages at the start of the story that described the baseball game that Archie, Wolfe and a visiting chef from Paris are attending. There are some funny moments with Wolfe indignant about the chairs in the stands that obviously will not accommodate his mammoth size. (Wolfe's need to find suitably large furniture to sit in is a running joke in all three stories.) There is all sorts of 1950s name dropping of baseball players that went right over my head, too.

The story is about the drugging of four baseball players on the New York Giants and the murder of a fifth player suspected of drugging them. The large cast of characters includes a showgirl wife who is the object of many a player's roving eyes and who supplies the story with a subplot that goes on a bit too long. The real mystery is so tied up with the game of baseball that for me it didn't mean much. The mystery was well told but sports fans would appreciate it a lot more than someone like me who doesn't give a damn about professional athletics. For me the biggest mystery was the decision of the Viking editors to change the verb in the original title "This Will Kill You" to a negative.

Overall, a good collection with the second and third novellas the best of the trio. But for me "The Zero Clue" is absolutely top notch. It also appears to be the unanimous appraisal for that novella. "The Zero Clue" turns up in the top five (some rank it as #2) of all 39 novellas in numerous "Best of Nero Wolfe" lists all over the internet and in several reference books.

Mrs. Warrender's Profession - G. D. H. & M. Cole

I ran across this little known volume of novellas at the main branch of the Chicago Public Library (though it may not be there anymore). The book details the accidental sleuthing adventures of Mrs. Elizabeth Warrender, the elderly mother of private detective James Warrender. She is the only other series character created by G.D.H. and Margaret Cole who are better known for their novels and stories about Superintendent Henry Wilson. Mrs. Warrender helps her son and sometimes outright investigates herself using her basic understanding of human nature. She gets to know people through casual but attentive conversation, she learns their habits and manners, most of all she listens to what people say unlike her son who she accuses of being unobservant. He focuses on the criminal behavior which she believes blinds him to true observations and completely overlooks people as they really are. This is all outlined in a brief "biographical" introduction titled "The Detective's Mother" that serves as a prelude to the four novellas. Overall, the collection is a mixed bag of the ordinary, the convoluted, and the intriguing. Apart from the supposed human observation theme running through the stories they also have in common a pronounced fascination with unusual murder methods.

Death in the Sun - Jeremy Haydon, handsome ballroom dancer, loves to work on his tan when he's not whirling women around the dance floor at the Grand Hotel in Madeira. Mrs. Warrender (and everyone else) loves to look at him whether dancing or swimming or just laying in the sun.  She senses something is wrong when she notices several flies on his body are not being swatted during one of his many sun worshiping sessions. Surely if he had fallen asleep so many flies would've disturbed him. She asks Dr. Lang to check on Jeremy who discovers the body is cold to touch even in the blazing sun. Jeremy is dead. A hypodermic needle is nearby and foul play is suspected. The detection here is not fair play, many clues are withheld from the reader and announced later by Mrs. Warrender who alone was privy to them. This is atypical of what little I've read of the Coles.  Maybe I'm wrong and this turns out to be their M.O. for the bulk of their work, but it annoyed me nonetheless. The biggest clue is one of the lousiest examples of a contrived coincidence that even Dickens would never have resorted to. Not one of the best in this collection.

In Peril of His Life – A confusing and convoluted story about the murder of Lady Robinson, wealthy philanthropist and primary supporter of the New Money League, a financial advisory agency disseminating propaganda about an alternative economical system for Britain. Her lawyer, whom she confronted in the past of attempting to kill her with altered food, a trip wire across the stairs, and other wild accusations, is charged with her strangulation murder. Sprinkled throughout the story are interesting allusions to R. Austin Freeman's The Red Thumb Mark and the borrowing from that novel the use of forged fingerprints to frame an innocent party. Mrs. Warrender is less concerned with who killed Lady Robinson and instead focuses on the disappearance of Lady Robinson's nephew. She is convinced he will turn up dead somewhere while her son and the police think he just fled the country. For me this story was tediously drawn out. The ending is anticlimactic and anyone who is familiar with Christie's Peril at End House will probably have figured it all out as I did.

Fatal Beauty – Jean Dawson, an employee from the Rose Salon, travels to the home of wealthy Mrs. Mortimer to give her facial massages and skin treatments with a specially concocted cream made by Madame Rose, the owner of the salon. Mrs. Mortimer soon dies of poison but the police and authorities are stumped as to how it was administered. Her nephew is suspected and a jealous housemaid implicates him further when she mentions he tried to get his aunt to use a homemade complexion wash made from flypaper soaked in rose water. Jean warned Mrs. Mortimer to avoid using it because of the dangers of arsenic in the flypaper. Mrs. Warrender appears in the final third and solves the crime through sheer luck. When she visits the Rose Salon she recognizes from a past encounter the culprit among the employees. It's a pretty neat tale with another of those revenge crazed killers who takes months to plan an insidious crime so often found in Golden Age detective story plots. However, the method, the culprit, and the frame-up are easy to uncover and nothing is very surprising. The story also is overly long. It could easily have been told without all the introductory background of the salon employees' relationships which takes up the first third of the story. The whole thing has a tiresome domestic air about which is a kind way of saying there was a lot of girlish chit chat about nothing of real consequence or importance to the main plot.

Toys of Death – Easily the best of the lot. A true detective story and the second tale in which Mrs. Warrender is present at the scene of the crime. She also does the only real detective work here (discovering pieces of blue glass for instance) rather than doing her kind of inductive guesswork based on her "observations of real people."

Crampton Pleydell is found dead in his locked study. His death appears to be a suicide from cyanide poisoning. As the story progresses we learn that Pleydell has a strange hobby – replicating Renaissance Italian glass. His specialty was designing duplicates of Vetturi's poison toys – glass ornaments and glass jewelry filled with poisons that were used by the Medicis to commit assassination. This is something that seems to be more up John Dickson Carr's alley than the Coles. That aspect of the story held my interest and make it the most original and intriguing of the bunch. The motive for the crimes (there are other deaths) makes the most sense out of all the stories and the characters are the most interesting. No shop girls, beauty parlor employees, gorgeous dancers or office gossips on hand in this one which was a relief.

After the book Mrs. Warrender's Profession (1938) went out of print in the UK two small publishers decided to reprint each of the stories separately. They were printed in hardcover format and treated like mini novels complete with very attractive artwork on the dust wrappers. Some of these booklets (it's hard for me to call a 65 page work a book) went through multiple printings, amazingly enough, but were only released in the UK. A similar reissue process was also done with the other Mrs. Warrender stories (and two Superintendent Wilson novellas) found in the ultra rare book A Lesson in Crime (1933). Scans of the covers from those individually published volumes are used to illustrate this post.

Q Patrick & the Pseudonym Enigma

The young and rugged Hugh Wheeler

The Q. Patrick pseudonym is one of those puzzling oddities of the mystery writing realm that has nothing to do with a fictional murder. For still unknown reasons it underwent multiple changes of writing partners. When Richard Webb first started writing detective novels he had as his partner Martha Mott Kelley. Together the duo wrote Cottage Sinister (1931) and Murder at the Women's City Club (1932). In 1933 Webb decided to go it alone as a mystery novelist. His solo effort as Q. Patrick was Murder at Cambridge. Then out of the blue it seemed Webb teamed up with another woman, Mary Louise Aswell, and with her wrote S.S. Murder (1933), The Grindle Nightmare (1935). Sometime in 1936 he found Hugh Wheeler. It is with Wheeler he continued the Q. Patrick pseudonym as a writing partnership until Webb quit writing in 1950. The two men also created another pseudonym - Patrick Quentin - and the marvelous husband & wife detective team of the theater, Peter & Iris Duluth.

Webb and Wheeler wrote quite a few remarkable novels together under both pseudonyms. But I'm wondering if the Q. Patrick novellas I have read in the pages of The American Magazine were the work of Webb alone. These two novellas are markedly different in tone, fairly formulaic in plot, excessively melodramatic with some preposterous ideas, and have some excruciatingly rendered dialog. They don't have the Wheeler-Webb flair. For me it was not so important to learn whodunit in these two novellas as it was to discover who actually wrote the stories. They seem like Q. Patrick impostor works.

"Exit Before Midnight" appeared in the October 1937 issue. It's a fairly routine story employing one of the most overused of detective story tropes - a group of characters in a setting cut off from the outside world who are systematically killed. That they are trapped in a locked office building with a power failure and that a board meeting of shareholders has brought them together did not help to enliven the proceedings for me. I find nothing at all exciting about big business having worked in offices all my life. Even if a corporate merger seems timely in this day and age, one that took place in 1937 between a fictional chemical processing company and a dye manufacturer seemed utterly dreary to me. The stock characters didn't help matters either.

Prior to the shareholder meeting a secretary discovers a threatening note naming seven of the primary shareholders in Leland & Rowley as potential murder victims. The anonymous note writer warns that the vote to merge the two companies must not be passed. If it does, he will begin killing those named in the note and will continue doing so until they change their voting results by midnight. Sound like a 1930 B movie programmer? It is. It does not improve any either.

There are sheets ripped from a desk calendar left on each victim. The remaining characters tremble in fear as they watch the calendar change from December 31 to January 1 then suddenly jumping ahead to January 4. One victim is found, but they know that two more are planned.  Exclamations marks are used in abundance in the dialog. Who is the killer? Who will survive? Does it matter?

It's all handled perfunctorily with wretched dialog, paranoid characters accusing each other histrionically or acting and talking so cool and sarcastic as to be unreal. There is a also a requisite "romance" between the secretary and two of her male suitors that is inserted at a point in the story that slows down the action. It all reminded me of dozens of movies I'd seen before and that were done far better. Although this predates And Then There Were None by about three years, the action in the story for me was too familiar and not at all handled in any original manner. Detection is at a bare minimum and limited to the observations of the secretary who the reader follows from start to finish although she is not the narrator.

The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing is the only "trapped in an office building" mystery story that holds any excitement for me. It's far superior to this yeoman effort by Q. Patrick. No surprise that "Exit Before Midnight" has never been reprinted outside of the magazine. At least not according to my reference books and research.

The better of the two novellas (but not by much) is "The Jack of Diamonds." It was the lead work of fiction in the November 1936 issue. It is also --as far as my research tells me-- the first time a Q. Patrick story was published in The American Magazine.

Once again we have a small cast of characters who are cut off from the rest of the world. In this case we have an invited group of guests who are to attend a skating party at the home of Theo Vanderloon. Only a few hours into the weekend there is a snowstorm that makes the roads impassable and the intense wind knocks out the electricity and presumably the telephone. (Another power failure! Didn't Wheeler and Webb have better ideas than these cliches?) The butler must act as maid, cook and footman since the host has sent the other servants away for the weekend. He's the best character in the story. I watched him closely as he was clearly intended to be someone that was to be taken for granted yet it was obvious that the authors (author?) would make him a key player in the denouement.

It's sort of a subversive story since it tells the tale of a group of blackmail victims conspiring to murder their tormentor. They will lure him to the sabotaged lake which has a pre-cut hole in the ice, cause him to fall through the ice and leave him to drown in the freezing water, thereby making his death look accidental. Nice people. That they will be skating at night seems to raise no questions of suspicion among any of them. But I'm sure the police would remark on that immediately. However, the plot backfires. It has to otherwise there would be no real story. And what follows is at least somewhat more interesting and even a bit exciting than what happens in "Exit Before Midnight."

The title refers to a playing card dealt out to one of the characters who is elected to dispatch the nasty blackmailer when their targeted victim fails to fall through the ice as planned. At least it wasn't called "Ace of Spades." That was one bit of novelty in this improvement over the other story.

There is yet another routine romance (love at first sight no less), even more melodramatic dialog, and a bunch of stock characters including an opera singer who bursts into snippets of arias at the most ridiculous and inappropriate times and a young ingenue with the unfortunate name of Carmelite who actually says to her besotted lover "Take me away from all of this!" That was only one of the many examples of hackneyed speech that sent me into fits of eyeball rolling, head shaking and groaning. But this time the story works. And there is actually a bit of suspense. Although I easily managed to figure out one of the tricks in the story there was a final twist in the last few paragraphs that, although not truly surprising, did manage to elude me.

The sappy love at first sight scene in "Jack of Diamonds"

Out of curiosity I went in search of other Q. Patrick stories or novellas that were published in The American Magazine.  At the Fiction Magazine database I found four more, one of which is a story featuring Peter & Iris Duluth and published under the Q. Patrick pseudonym rather than Patrick Quentin. I'll be searching the internet and elsewhere to see if anyone is offering these issues for sale. If affordable, I'll be purchasing some of them.  I'm curious to see if they get any better.  I certainly hope so. 

The involved merry-go-round of Q. Patrick partner changes (both writing and otherwise) is detailed in a series of comments at the Golden Age of Detection website page for Patrick Quentin. You can read about Webb, Aswell and Wheeler at length (little is known about Kelley, sadly) by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and read the comments section for interesting tidbits about the three writers and intimations on Webb and Wheeler's personal life.