FFB: The Crippled Muse - Hugh Wheeler

“Merape is a charming woman and distinguished poet. […] She is also a beautiful ruin. Ruins have gaping cracks in their battlements, rats in their armouries, jackdaws in their bell towers. And this, too, is true of Merape. You must beware, my dear sir…”

-- Professor Fishbourne-Grant in The Crippled Muse

Merape Sloane is a mysterious reclusive poet with a mystical aura and a coterie of protective sycophants. Horace Beddoes has traveled to the Isle of Capri where Merape lives in a sort of exile of retirement where he hopes to meet her, gain an interview and propose that he write her definitive biography. He happens to be an expert on Merape’s poetry having completed his Ph.D. thesis on her work which he titled "The Last Flowering of the Romantic Age". But when he meets Mike McDermott, a hack writer of sleazy potboilers, Horace is appalled to learn that McDermott has beaten him to the punch. Somehow McDermott managed to convince Merape Sloane that he would be the perfect man to write her biography and he has already a collection of notebooks with spicy gossip.

McDermott has also decided to title his book The Crippled Muse, alluding to Merape Sloane’s lifelong battle with illness that left her lame. This further upsets Horace because not only is it a near duplicate of his own planned title (The Crippled Corinna), the change of single word makes it a much better title in his estimation. Horace finds himself festering in jealousy and anger, struggling to keep from exploding with rage. A sex writer in charge of the life story of the genius Merape Sloane! What a cruel irony it all is.

Horace proceeds to drown his sorrows and sublimate his furor by getting blissfully drunk at a party where Merape is the guest of honor. In his besotted state he makes a fool of himself by introducing himself to Merape and groveling in her presence while slurring his drunken praise and admiration for her work. Shortly thereafter while stumbling home he comes across a bloody champagne bottle. Simultaneously he learns that Mike McDermott has disappeared from the party and not returned to his lodging. The next morning McDermott’s battered body is found at the foot of a cliff. It is thought that he too got carried with away with drinking, slipped and fell to his death. But the bloody bottle leads Horace to suspect foul play.

Soon Horace finds himself inextricably implicated in McDermott's death. He was seen holding the bottle by at least one person the previous night who then witnessed him throwing the bottle into the ocean. How will he prevent himself from being named McDermott’s murderer? But the novel is not simply another riff on the oft used wrong man theme. The crime plot serves only as background to Hugh Wheeler’s highly literate, allusion filled, languorous novel which touches on so many themes: love vs. desire, the importance of art in one’s life, the transcendent nature of lyrical poetry, the need to belong, the importance of finding home. The story defies categorization. It's a mixture of a literary detective novel, murder mystery and metaphysical exploration of attraction between all the sexes; a triple play mystery novel incorporating all connotations of the word mystery.

It's difficult not to find similarities in this book with some of Tennessee Williams' more recognizable plays about the sexual tension between a virile young Adonis and an artistic grand dame (Sweet Bird of Youth, Orpheus Descending, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore) until you realize that Wheeler's novel predates all of those plays, the earliest by seven years. Did Williams perhaps read this book and pick up on its theme either consciously or subconsciously? More likely is that Wheeler knew his Williams and either borrowed or was influenced by the playwright's trademarks.

The similarities in this one book to Williams favorite motifs are amazing -- the erotic temptations of Girlie and Loretta; the Duchessa who has a keen insight into the closeted homosexuality of McDermott and her sad resignation to being attracted to men who prefer men; Horace's repellent attitude towards the menacing pansexual Latvian gigolo Askold who attempts to blackmail Horace with sexual favors; Horace's admiration (attraction?) and envy for the brawny physiques of the Swedish masseurs who remind me of the athletic German couple and their overt sexuality in Williams' Night of the Iguana. The book is drowning with Williamsian desires whether they are forbidden, fantasized, or unrequited. Horace not only has the mystery of Merape's life to solve and clear his name of McDermott's murder he must confront the mystery of human sexuality in all its varied and nuanced guises. Horace's feverish confusion of sexual desire and love culminate in this lament:

Was this the way love operated--like a staphylococcus, one moment drowsing latent in the bloodstream, the next moment flaring up with renewed violence? [...] I'm a man and I don't know whether or not I'm in love--or with whom.

Isle of Capri by Jasper Francis Crospey (1893)

More than any of the Patrick Quentin or Jonathan Stagge books The Crippled Muse shows off Wheeler's gift for dramatic monologue. The sections with Clara Pott, Horace's landlady with a closetful of secrets, in particular foreshadow Wheeler's later success as an award winning playwright. There is a classic moment when Clara delivers a lengthy monologue detailing how Merape robbed her of her husband and her comfortable her life in Ohio. Her words are polite and contradictory to her actions. As she speaks Horace notices a flower in her hand that she continues to twist and crumple.  "No, I didn't dislike Merape," she says tossing the utterly destroyed flower to the ground. The book is replete with dazzling moments like that.

The Crippled Muse (1952) is Wheeler’s only novel published under his real name and it appears to have been a very personal work for him. He dedicates the book to Rickie – no doubt Richard Webb, his collaborator on dozens of detective novels using their pseudonyms Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge. Webb had retired from writing in 1951 and Wheeler continued writing the mystery novels under those pen names alone. Unlike his mystery novels, as good as they are, in The Crippled Muse we discover another side of Hugh Wheeler. He gives us another gripping and suspenseful crime plot, but there is also a greater display of Wheeler's love of literature, his love/hate affair with American culture and Americans, his fascination with exotic locales and even more exotic people. Perhaps, too, if we read a little deeper into the story of Horace's self-discovery we find a  revelation of the enigmatic writer himself.

FFB: The Eighth Square - Herbert Lieberman

Getting lost in the woods.  Anyone who has experienced that sensation -- no matter if for a few minutes or a couple of hours -- knows that it can unleash some of your repressed fears. From Hansel and Gretel realizing the folly of leaving bread crumbs as a trail to find their way back home to the videotaped confessions of the terrified campers in The Blair Witch Project being lost in the woods is a motif repeatedly exploited to elicit thrills in fiction and movies. The Eighth Square (1973), Herbert Lieberman's fourth novel, is a story of getting lost in the woods, too. It's also subtitled on the dust jacket as "A Diabolical Novel" which leads one to believe that the Devil has a role in the plot. Lieberman spins a tale of facing one's fears, revisiting past traumas, testing the bonds of friendship and marriage, finding courage and hope and eventually surrendering to Fate. Where is the Devil in all this? Hidden deep within nearly every character.

The plot is relatively simple. A group of adults led by a surveyor with near supernatural powers are walking the boundaries of an estate in the countryside of a small New England town. While en route their leader suffers a stroke and is rendered speechless. Now left to their own devices -- and none of them are very good at reading a compass let alone the lay of the land -- they try to find their way out of the forest and back home. But as the story unfolds the novel departs from a tale of survival to become a complex multi-layered phantasmagoria. It blends realistic drama (sometimes stepping over into soap opera melodramatics) with scenes of the surreal and hallucinatory as we get to know each character through both spoken monologue and interior monologue. Eventually it is revealed that all of the characters have known each other since childhood and they find themselves reverting to their relationships from days long past.

Lieberman's language is an example of what I like to call simile madness. Sometimes they are uninspired ("they were all silent, like shipwrecks on a spit of beach in the midst of a vast, unending sea") but often they are clever and offbeat ("as they wound their way like a weary snail in fits and starts up a gentle acclivity"). As their panic increases and tempers and fists fly Lieberman finds himself drawn to animal metaphors in describing his forest castaways. One character is described as a "slumberous bull", another as a heron making its way gracefully through the forest. Here are some other examples:

She darted like a bat swooping through the narrow circle of light.

...he swiped at her with the huge, ponderous, impatient motion of a bear agitated by a field mouse.

...the others swarmed all around the surveyor in deadly earnest, like wolves pouncing on a wounded stag.

Even the forest itself begins to take on a life of its own when Gladys, the one person who from the start never wanted to take part in the grueling hike, refers to the landscape that has swallowed them up into a threatening menacing beast. "[D]on't you feel it breathing? Growing" she says. "It doesn't care we're here." When John Bayles, the cynic of the crowd, says "Well, now it appears the forest owns us" the novel begins its journey into the land of nightmares. No matter how much existential talk and positive thoughts the hikers indulge in there is a lurking menace among them. In an eerie and brilliant touch their stroke suffering surveyor begins babbling quotations from the Book of Revelation confounding and spooking the lost hikers. Soon there is mutiny among the crew as they choose sides. Fights erupt, violence intrudes. The day passes into night and then another day passes, and another night. Will they ever get home? Are they trapped in a Sartre-like purgatory with menacing elements and a labyrinth of trees and rocks replacing a room with no exit? Is it truly the end of the world? Or only the end of this period of their lives?

Herbert Lieberman is probably best known as the author of Crawlspace (1971), a creepy tale of a retired man and his wife and the young man they want to make their son. In his time he received plenty of rave reviews for his unusual books but never found the long lasting fame he deserved. He also seems to have been prophetic in pointing publishers to popular trends in crime fiction.

City of the Dead (1976), one of his most compelling novels, followed then the popular formula of a police procedural but substituted the usual cop character in the lead role with a medical examiner. Quincy M.E. was just about to debut on television at the time the novel appeared and fourteen years later Patricia Cornwell  would publish Postmortem that essentially gave birth to the forensic pathology subgenre. He also dabbled in the serial killer subgenre in his gruesome thriller Nightbloom (1984) a few years before Thomas Harris gave us Hannibal Lecter.

Several of Lieberman's books have been reissued as eBooks by Open Road Media. All of his books can be found in the used book market for relatively cheap prices. I urge you to discover this neglected, talented writer.  He had a unique vision and an uncanny gift for predicting popular trends in the future of crime fiction.