Tag: Grand dames of crime

Review: The Complete Ripley Radio Mysteries by Patricia Highsmith

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A couple of weeks ago I went to see the documentary Loving Highsmith about American author Patricia Highsmith. The content for the doco was drawn from her unpublished diaries and notebooks, and the personal accounts of her lovers, friends and family.

But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.

Strangers on a Train

Highsmith was best known for her psychological thrillers (Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley) and for being part of the Modernist movement. Most of her novels were adapted to the big screen, notably with little need to be changed for the screen.

The partly autobiographical The Price of Salt written in the 1950s and published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan was also adapted for film in 2015 as Carol. Due to the social morals of the time, Highsmith led a double life, hiding her love affairs with women from the public and her family, but reflecting on them in her personal writings. Carol was the first lesbian story with a happy ending published in the USA.

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.

Carol

The documentary was fascinating and led me to seek out the audio series, Ripley Radio Mysteries that dramatises her five Ripley novels. The character of Ripley was inspired by a man Highsmith saw from a hotel room in Italy after she moved to Europe. Ripley is not a nice man, though he only kills when absolutely necessary (I mean who doesn’t?). Highsmith wrote him empathetically so as a reader I both liked and loathed him – it’s creepy.

He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence.

The Talented Mr Ripley

Protagonist Tom Ripley is materialistic, though not in the usual way. He has an unstable sense of identity and possessions give him a feeling of safety and stability. It is this that leads him to his first kill. He befriended Dickie but felt uncertain about their relationship and killing reduced his friend to a collection of possession of clothes, rings and cash – much more predictable.

The series is tense, atmospheric and twisted. Perfect for a thriller!

Dames of Crime: Dorothy B. Hughes

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Dorothy B. Hughes (1904-1993) was a journalist, crime fiction reviewer and crime writer of fourteen novels in the hardboiled and noir style.

She carried her head like a lady and her body like a snake.

Dread Journey

Hughes first published book was Dark Certainty (1931) a volume of poetry, followed by Pueblo On the Mesa (1939), a history of the first fifty years of the University of New Mexico. She worked as a journalist in Missouri, New York and New Mexico and Married Levi Allan Hughes Jr. in 1932. They had two children.

By 1940 she had turned to crime with her first novel The So Blue Marble (1940), an Art Deco suspense set in the glamour and luxury of New York’s elite. Hughes then went on to write eleven novels in seven years. All bar one, Johnnie (1944) were crime novels. Influenced by writers such as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and William Faulkner she wrote tight suspenseful plots centred around outsiders, haunted loners, or upper-class characters involved in evil intrigues.

Once he’d had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver. There was the heat of tears suddenly in his eyes and he shook his head angrily. He would not think about it, he would never think of that again. It was long ago in an ancient past. To hell with happiness. More important was excitement and power and the hot stir of lust. Those made you forget. They made happiness a pink marshmallow.

In a Lonely Place

Three of her crime novels for which she is best known were adapted for Hollywood films – The Fallen Sparrow (1943), Ride the Pink Horse (1947) and In A Lonely Place (1950) about toxic masculinity with a feminist resolution.

Hughes became a professional crime fiction reviewer around 1940 and moved to Los Angeles in 1944. She wrote for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Herald Tribune and the Albuquerque Tribune.

She was afraid. It wasn’t a tremble of fear. It was a dark hood hanging over her head. She was meant to die. That was why she was on the Chief speeding eastward. This was her bier.

Dread Journey

Her last novel, The Expendable Man was published in 1963. She continued to publish short stories and won an Edgar Award for best critical/biographical work for Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason (1978)

Being a poet before she began writing crime, Hughes books were known for their ominous and mournful quality of mood, infused with dread and intrigue. On their surface they had a middle class normalcy, but scratch the facade and her characters lives were full of danger, desperation and despair that unsettles the reader.

He drove until emotional exhaustion left him empty as a gourd. Until no tears, no rage, no pity had meaning for him.

In a Lonely Place

Published Books

  • Dark Certainty (1931) – poetry
  • Pueblo on the Mesa: The First Fifty Years of the University of New Mexico (1939) – non-fiction
  • The So Blue Marble (1940) – first novel
  • The Cross-Eyed Bear (1940)
  • The Bamboo Blonde (1941)
  • The Fallen Sparrow (1942) – filmed in 1943
  • The Blackbirder (1943)
  • The Delicate Ape (1944)
  • Johnnie (1944)
  • Dread Journey (1945)
  • Ride the Pink Horse (1946) – filmed in 1947
  • The Scarlet Imperial (1946)
  • In a Lonely Place (1947) – filmed in 1950
  • The Big Barbecue (1949)
  • The Candy Kid (1950)
  • The Davidian Report (1952)
  • The Expendable Man (1963)
  • Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason (1978) – critical biography

Dames of Crime: Maj Sjöwall

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Who doesn’t love a bit of Nordic Noir? Long dark winter days, chilling temperatures and vast bleak wildernesses make for perfect dramatic plots and the dark narratives of grim crime fiction.

Maj Sjöwall was widely regarded as the godmother of modern Nordic Noir, or Scandi crime as it is also known. She co-authored 10 police procedurals featuring dour, middle aged Martin Beck with her third partner, Per Wahlöö whom she met whilst both worked as magazine journalists in 1962. Their influence can be seen in subsequent Scani noir such as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Jo Nesbo’s Blake mystery The Man on the Balcony.

“that you have three of the most important virtues a policeman can have,” he thought. “You are stubborn and logical, and completely calm.”

Roseanna

The two conceived a project to write a series of ten books together, each writing alternate chapters in the evenings after work. The first book, Roseanna about the strangling death of a young tourist, was published in 1965. Their pared back, terse, fast-moving style of detective story was fresh and new and received rave reviews when they started to be published in translation in 1968.

January 7 arrived and looked like January 7. The streets were full of gray, frozen people without money.

Roseanna

The Laughing Policeman won the Edward Award in 1971 for best mystery novel and was made into a film in 1973. The tenth and final novel The Terrorists was published in 1975 shortly before Wahlöö died. The entire work can be read as a Marxist critique of the failings of Swedish society and is meticulously researched to include authentic details.

Recently—no; for as long as I can remember, large and powerful nations within the capitalist bloc have been ruled by people who according to accepted legal norms are simply criminals, who from a lust for power and financial gain have led their peoples into an abyss of egoism, self-indulgence and a view of life based entirely on materialism and ruthlessness toward their fellow human beings. Only in very few cases are such politicians punished, but the punishments are token and the guilty persons’ successors are guided by the same motives.

The Terrorists

Sjöwall was born 25th September 1935 in Stockholm and grew up in one of the hotels manager by her father, complete with round the clock room service. She was a single mother at twenty-one, then married and divorced two older men before meeting Wahlöö, a left-wing journalist and novelist. The two fell in love over crime fiction. They were together thirteen years until Wahlöö’s death in 1975. After Wahlöö’s death Sjöwall returned to a bohemian life writing for magazines and co-authoring a number of books and translating the American crime novels of Robert B Parker into Swedish. She died in April 2020.

The consumer society and its harassed citizens had other things to think of. Although it was a month to Christmas, the advertising orgy had begun and the buying hysteria spread as swiftly and ruthlessly as the Black Death along the festooned shopping streets. The epidemic swept all before it and there was no escape. It ate its way into homes and apartments, poisoning and braking down everything and everyone in its path.

The Laughing Policeman

Martin Beck Series

  • Roseanna
  • The Man Who Went Up in Smoke
  • The Man on the Balcony
  • The Laughing Policeman
  • The Fire Engine that Disappeared
  • Murder at the Savoy
  • The Abominable Man
  • The Locked Room
  • Cop Killer
  • The Terrorists

Dames of Crime: Ursula Torday

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It’s been a while since I’ve written a Dames of Crime blog, so I thought it was time I shone a light on another great woman of mystery – Ursula Torday.

You’d be forgiven for never having heard of writer of mysteries, gothic and historical romance fiction Ursula Torday (1912-1997) because she only wrote three novels under that name. She did write many under pseudonyms, including Paula Allardyce (29 novels), Charity Blackstock (27 novels), Lee Blackstock (2 novels) and Charlotte Keppel (6 novels).

The only child born to a Scottish mother, and a father who was a Hungarian anthropologist, Torday had polio as a child which afflicted her gait throughout her life. She was educated in London at Oxford University and published her first three romance novels in the 1930s under her true name then stopped writing aged 26. She did not publish again until 1954. Over the next three years she published six books and continued to be prolific until the ’80s.

Torday’s dual interests of romance and mysteries meant that emotions and passion were important in her novels and often given precedence over death and motive in her mysteries. Sardonic humour, passion, hate, fear and loathing reverberate through her loathsome mystery characters to create tension and brooding romance.

Torday was said to be her own woman – cultured, sophisticated, opinionated, with wide interests and a zest for life. During World War II she worked as a probation officer for the Citizen’s Advice Bureau then ran a refugee scheme for Jewish children following the war. Her war time work inspired two novels written under the pseudonym Charity Blackstock (The Briar Patch, 1960 and The Children, 1966). Later she worked as a typist at the National Central Library in London which inspired body in the library mystery Dewey Death written under the same name. Dewey Death was set in the Inter-Libraries Despatch Association and includes themes of adultery, drug trafficking, romance and murder. Torday also worked for Naim Attallah’s publishing house (Quartet Books, The Women’s Press) for a period and sat at a desk opposite Quentin Crisp exchanging tips on the latest nail varnishes.

The Woman in the Woods, a mystery-suspense written as Charity Blackstock, in which two schoolboys stumble across a skeleton in the woods and soon the whole village is caught up in the death was nominated to win the 1959 Edgar Award for best novel.

Mystery novels

  • After the Lady (1954) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • The Doctor’s Daughter (1955) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • A Game of Hazard (1955) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Adam and Evelina (1956) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • The Man of Wrath (1956) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • The Lady and the Pirate (1957) aka Vixen’s Revenge (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Southarn Folly (1957) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Beloved Enemy (1958) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • My Dear Miss Emma (1958) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Death My Lover (1959) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • A Marriage Has Been Arranged (1959) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Johnny Danger (1960) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • The Gentle Highwayman (1961) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Adam’s Rib (1963) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Respectable Miss Tarkington-Smith (1964) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Dewey Death (1956) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • Miss Fenny (1957) aka The Woman in the Woods (as Charity Blackstock) 
  • All Men Are Murderers (1958)  aka The Shadow of Murder (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Foggy, Foggy Dew (1958) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Bitter Conquest (1959) (as by Charity Blackstock)
  • The Briar Patch (1960) aka Young Lucifer (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Exorcism (1961) aka A House Possessed (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Gallant (1962) (as by Charity Blackstock)
  • Mr. Christopoulos (1963) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Factor’s Wife (1964)  aka The English Wife (as Charity Blackstock)
  • When the Sun Goes Down (1965)  aka Monkey On a Chain (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Children (1966) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Knock at Midnight (1966) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • Party in Dolly Creek (1967)  aka The Widow (as Charity Blackstock)
  • Wednesday’s Children (1967) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Melon in the Cornfield (1969)   aka The Lemmings (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Encounter (1971) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • I Met Murder on the Way (1977) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Shadow of Murder (1964) (as Charity Blackstock/Lee Blackstock)
  • Madam, You Must Die (1974) aka Loving Sands, Deadly Sands (as Charlotte Keppel)
  • When I Say Goodbye, I’m Clary Brown (1976) aka My Name Is Clary Brown (as Charlotte Keppel)

Other novels – gothic, historical, romance

  • The Ballad-Maker of Paris (1935) (as Ursula Torday)
  • No Peace for the Wicked (1937) (as Ursula Torday)
  • The Mirror of the Sun (1938) (as Ursula Torday)
  • The Rogue’s Lady (1961) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Witches’ Sabbath (1961) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Paradise Row (1964) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Octavia (1965) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Emily (1966) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • The Moonlighters (1966) aka Gentleman Rouge (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Six Passengers for the Sweet Bird (1967) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Waiting At the Church (1968) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • The Ghost of Archie Gilroy (1970) aka Shadowed Love (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Miss Jonas’s Boy (1972) aka Eilza as Paula Allardyce)
  • The Gentle Sex (1974) as Paula Allardyce)
  • Legacy of Pride (1975) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • The Carradine Affair (1976) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • Miss Philadelphia Smith (1977) (as Paula Allardyce)
  • The Daughter (1970) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Jungle (1972) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • Haunting Me (1978) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • Miss Charley (1979) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • With Fondest Thoughts (1980) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Lonely Strangers (1972) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • People in Glass Houses (1975) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • Ghost Town (1976) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • Dream Towers (1981) (as Charity Blackstock)
  • The Woman in the Woods (1959) (as Charity Blackstock/Lee Blackstock)
  • The Villains (1980) (as Charlotte Keppel)
  • I Could Be Good to You (1980) (as Charlotte Keppel)
  • The Ghosts Of Fontenoy (1981) (as Charlotte Keppel)
  • The Flag Captain (1982) (as Charlotte Keppel)

Grand Dames of Crime: Patricia Wentworth

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Patricia Wentworth wrote 66 books. 32 of them featured Miss Maud Silver, a former governess turned private investigator who liked to quote Tennyson and the Bible, and had a keen eye for understanding human frailties. Wentworth was born Dora Amy Elles in India in 1877 and educated in London.

I told you she had an inconsequent mind. That’s putting it much too mildly. When it comes to anything like evidence, she hasn’t really got a mind at all – she just dives into a sort of lumber-room and brings out odds and ends.

The Case of William Smith

Wentworth married young in 1906 and had a daughter, then whilst she was still in her twenties her husband died and she moved to Surrey and lived there till her own death in 1961. Her first book was published under the pseudonym Patricia Wentworth in 1910, a historical fiction romance novel called A Marriage Under the Terror, a tale of love blossoming in the ashes of betrayal that won the Melrose Prize for best first novel. She wrote fifteen more romance novels and a book of verse for children, but her true talent lay in cosy mysteries.

‘I think it is right that you should know I am here in the capacity of a private enquiry agent.’
If she had announced that she was there in the capacity of a Fairy Godmother or of First Murderer, she could hardly have surprised him more. In fact, the Fairy Godmother would have seemed quite appropriate by comparison.

The Silent Pool

She met her second husband, George Oliver Turnbull, and remarried in 1920, producing another daughter. George became her scribe, writing Wentworth’s stories as she dictated them.

Fancy going out into the world under the impression that you can always have your own way! Would anything be more likely to lead to disaster?

Death at the Deep End

Miss Maud Silver’s first appearance was in 1928 in a whodunit called Grey Mask. In this novel Charles turns to Miss Silver for help after he is jilted at the alter and discovers his fiancé was mixed up in a kidnapping plot with a shadowy figure in a grey mask. Miss Silver went on many adventures in the subsequent 31 novels, working with Scotland Yard, knitting garments for her nieces and nephews, scribbling in her notebooks – a new one for each case.

Obstinacy is an impediment to the free exercise of thought. It paralyses the intelligence. Conclusions based upon preconceived ideas are valueless

Latter End

Along with the Miss Silver Series, Wentworth wrote three more series. Frank Garrett (a two book series) is the official face of the Foreign Office. Benbow Smith (a four book series) is the behind the scenes man, a spymaster with the British Foreign Office, a kind of James Bond. The series focusses on political intrigue and industrial espionage. Ernest Lamb (a three book series) is a Scotland Yard Inspector who investigates the most perplexing crimes, those embroiled in dark family histories.

The best thing that can happen to anyone who is doing wrong is to be found out. If he is not found out he will do more wrong and earn a heavier punishment.

Lonesome Road

Biliography:

Miss Silver series
• Grey Mask, 1928
• The Case Is Closed, 1937
• Lonesome Road, 1939
• Danger Point (USA: In the Balance), 1941
• The Chinese Shawl, 1943
• Miss Silver Intervenes (USA: Miss Silver Deals with Death), 1943
• The Clock Strikes Twelve, 1944
• The Key, 1944
• The Traveller Returns (USA: She Came Back), 1945
• Pilgrim’s Rest (or: Dark Threat), 1946
• Latter End, 1947
• Spotlight (USA: Wicked Uncle), 1947
• The Case of William Smith, 1948
• Eternity Ring, 1948
• The Catherine Wheel, 1949
• Miss Silver Comes to Stay, 1949
• The Brading Collection (or: Mr Brading’s Collection), 1950
• The Ivory Dagger, 1951
• Through the Wall, 1950
• Anna, Where Are You? (or: Death At Deep End), 1951
• The Watersplash, 1951
• Ladies’ Bane, 1952
• Out of the Past, 1953
• The Silent Pool, 1954
• Vanishing Point, 1953
• The Benevent Treasure, 1953
• The Gazebo (or: The Summerhouse), 1955
• The Listening Eye, 1955
• Poison in the Pen, 1955
• The Fingerprint, 1956
• The Alington Inheritance, 1958
• The Girl in the Cellar, 1961
Frank Garrett series
• Dead or Alive, 1936
• Rolling Stone, 1940
Ernest Lamb series
• The Blind Side, 1939
• Who Pays the Piper? (USA: Account Rendered), 1940
• Pursuit of a Parcel, 1942
Benbow Smith
• Fool Errant, 1929
• Danger Calling, 1931
• Walk with Care, 1933
• Down Under, 1937
Standalone
• A Marriage under the Terror, 1910
• A Child’s Rhyme Book, 1910
• A Little More Than Kin (or: More Than Kin), 1911
• The Devil’s Wind, 1912
• The Fire Within, 1913
• Simon Heriot, 1914
• Queen Anne Is Dead, 1915
• Earl or Chieftain?, 1919
• The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith, 1923. Serialised, Baltimore Evening Sun, 1925
• The Red Lacquer Case, 1924. Serialised, Leicester Mail, 1926
• The Annam Jewel, 1924
• The Black Cabinet, 1925
• The Dower House Mystery, 1925
• The Amazing Chance, 1926. Serialised, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 1927
• Hue and Cry, 1927
• Anne Belinda, 1927
• Will-o’-the-Wisp, 1928
• Beggar’s Choice, 1930
• The Coldstone, 1930
• Kingdom Lost, 1931
• Nothing Venture, 1932. Serialised, Dundee Courier, 1932
• What Became of Anne, 1926. Serialised, Dundee Courier, 1932
• Red Danger (USA: Red Shadow), 1932
• Seven Green Stones (USA: Outrageous Fortune), 1933
• Devil-in-the-Dark (USA: Touch And Go), 1934
• Fear by Night, 1934
• Red Stefan, 1935
• Blindfold, 1935
• Hole and Corner, 1936
• Mr Zero, 1938
• Afraid to Love, 1938. Serialised, Dundee Courier, 1932
• Run!, 1938
• Unlawful Occasions (USA: Weekend with Death), 1941
• Beneath the Hunter’s Moon, 1945
• Silence in Court, 1947
• The Pool of Dreams: Poems, 1953

Grand Dames of Crime: Dorothy L Sayers

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One of the greats of British crime fiction Dorothy L Sayers (13 June 1893 – 17 December 1957) wrote numerous crime fiction novels including eleven featuring the character Lord Peter Wimsey. The character Harriet Vane, a Wimsey love interest, also appeared in four of them and shone a light on Sayers strong views on equality. 

Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.

Her work also touches on other issues of the day including generational and class divides, the effects of war, Depression-era loansharking, financial scandals of the late 1920’s, fear of Fascism, the Chinese civil war and more. The themes provided background to ingenious mystery puzzles and full characters conveyed with humour, grace and flair.

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

Sayers worked in advertising for a period and was responsible for among other things the Guiness advertising campaign featuring zoo animals, some of which still make an appearance. She was also responsible for Colman’s Mustard 1920 guerrilla marketing campaign The Mustard Club.

Writing poetry and advertising copy didn’t earn enough, and the need to make a living is what motivated her to start writing crime fiction. The character Lord Peter Wimsey gave her an opportunity to spend money she didn’t have herself. She published Whose Body? at age 30 and never looked back, becoming a member and president of the Detection Club alongside writers such as Agatha Christie. Sayers strong principles of fair play were codified in the oaths required of prospective members of the Detection Club.

Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on, nor making use of, Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?

Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and forever forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?

Sayers crime novels were published between 1923 and 1937 along with dozens of short stories. During the same period she edited the three volumes of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928, 1931, 1934), its sequel Tale of Detection (1936), and reviewed more than 350 detective novels for the Sunday Times.

Some people’s blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.

In the late 1930s Sayers stopped writing crime fiction, although some unpublished works were released after her death. The cessation was partly due to the war and feeling there was enough death and violence in the world without putting it in books. In addition, now she had the financial resources to follow her passion for poetry and religion. She translated Danete’s Inferno, The Divine Comedy, Hell, Purgatory and was working on Paradise when she died in 1957. She also produced a raft of religious literature and radio plays.

Four of Sayers crime novels appeared in the UK Crime Writers Association 1990 list of the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time and five in the Mystery Writers of America’s 1995 list of 100 novels.

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

Limited Bibliography

Crime-Mystery Books

Whose Body? (1923)

Clouds of Witness (1926)

Unnatural Death (1926)

The Unpleasantness of the Bellona Club (1928)

The Documents in the Case (1930)

Strong Poison (1930)

The Five Red Herrings (1931)

Have his Carcase (1932)

Murder must Advertise (1933)

The Nine Tailors (1934)

Gaudy Night (1935)

Busman’s Honeymoon (1937)

Short Story Collections

Lord Peter Views the Body (1928)

Hangman’s Holiday (1933)

In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939)

Lord Peter (1972)

Striding Folly (1972)

With the Members of the Detection Club

The Floating Admiral (1931)

Ask a Policeman (1933)

Double Death (1939)

The Scoop (1983)

No Flowers by Request (1984)

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

image of novels by Margaret Millar

Grand dames of crime: Margaret Millar

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I’m delving into the history of women crime writers again this week and celebrating Canadian born literary suspense author Margaret ‘Maggie’ Millar (1915-94). Millar explored complex inner lives, female characters battling frustrated ambition, existential isolation, class issues and changing cultural values. She was known for the depth of characterisation and surprise endings to her novels.

Millar’s writing career began writing in 1941 with The Invisible Worm featuring Paul Prye a cynical psychiatrist detective fond of quoting William Blake. She then turned to writing more conventional mystery novels, though a psychiatric bent remained. Millar’s sixth novel, psychological suspense The Iron Gates featuring Inspector Sands, was bought by Warner Bros for film. Millar worked as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers in Hollywood in the mid-’40s.

Margaret Millar

Millar wrote four non-mystery novels beginning with Experiment in Springtime (1947), a critique of a post-war family. The story features a wife who is miserably married to a man who is psychotically paranoid about her fidelity.

Millar returned to crime fiction with Beast in View, a psychological thriller about spinster Miss Clarvee later adapted for a television episode for Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The novel also won the Edgar Award in 1956. Following the Edgar win, Millar served as president of the Mystery Writers of America 1957-58. In 1982 she was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America and also received a Derrick Murdoch Award in 1986, a special achievement award for contributions to the crime genre.

Millar, a passionate bird watcher, was active in the Californian conservation movement in the 1960s. Her observations on wildlife near her home were collected in The Birds and the Beasts Were There (1968). She was named a Woman of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in 1965 for her service in organisations like the National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club. The same year The Fiend was nominated for but did not win a second Edgar. In this creepy, dark novel, a nine year old hungers for affection from her divorced, man-hating, self-pitying mother.

Margaret Millar with daughter Linda and Husband Ken

Millar’s personal life included a tumultuous marriage to fellow mystery author Ken Millar who went by the pen name Ross Macdonald. They had a daughter Linda whose life was tragically short. Linda killed a pedestrian in a drink driving hit and run incident when she was sixteen and was plagued by mental health issues before dying in her sleep of an embolism at age thirty-one.

Margaret Millar did not publish any work for six years following her daughters death in 1970. Her next novel Ask for Me Tomorrow (1976) was about a Hispanic lawyer called Tom Aragon on the trial of a wealthy women’s missing first husband, who disappeared with a Mexican girl.

Over her lifetime the prolific author produced more than 25 psychological mystery novels. She died at her home in Santa Barbara aged 79.


Bibliography:

The Invisible Worm, 1941
The Devils Loves Me, 1942
The Weak-Eyed Bat, 1942
Wall of Eyes, 1943
Fire Will Freeze, 1944
The Iron Gates, 1945
Experiment in Springtime, 1947
It’s All in the Family, 1948
The Cannibal Heart, 1949
Do Evil in Return, 1950
Rose’s Last Summer, 1952
Vanish in an Instant, 1952
Wives and Lovers, 1954
Beast in View, 1955
An Air That Kills, 1957
The Listening Walls, 1959
A Stranger in My Grave, 1960
How Like an Angel, 1962
The Fiend, 1964,
Los Angeles Times, 1965
The Birds and the Beasts Were There, 1967
Beyond This Point Are Monsters, 1970
Ask For Me Tomorrow, 1976
The Murder of Miranda, 1979
Mermaid, 1982
Banshee, 1983
Spider Webs, 1986

Photos from the web

Grand Dames of Crime: Georgette Heyer

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English novelist Georgette Heyer (1902-1974) was best known for her Regency romances but she also wrote crime novels. Heyer was not as prolific in the crime genre as her better knows grand dames of crime contemporaries like Dorothy Sayers, Ggnaio Marsh and Agatha Christie, but twelve of the fifty-seven books she wrote over more than fifty years were country house mysteries produced between 1932 and 1953.

“I can’t imagine what possessed you to propose to me.”
“Well, that will give you something to puzzle over any time you can’t sleep.”

Behold, Here’s Poison

Heyer’s country house mysteries contained women who drank (cocktails), smoked, swore, wore makeup and drove fast cars. They also included characters more in keeping with her Regency romances who were droll and witty: The withdrawn, solitary, Aspergerish man; the heroine governess; the alpha male; the gold digger and so on. She liked to play up the haughty, self-entitled scoundrels of the upper class and her exceptional awereness of human nature meant her mysteries were brimming with complex characters and elaborate family dynamics.

If you set aside the racism, sexism and class consciousness of the era, most of Heyer’s novels have clever plots, good pace, and settings akin to books written by Dorothy Sayers. Heyer employed both amateur incidental detectives and eccentric professional policemen to solve her crimes novels which are excellent for an indulgent and frivolous afternoon read with tea and biscuits.

Two of her best mystery novels (many of which are still available) are Death in the Stocks (1935) and Envious Casca (1941).

Death in the Stocks (1935) is an English manor mystery and black comedy in which a gentleman in evening dress is discovered slumped dead in the stocks on the village green beneath a sinister moon hanging in a sky the colour of sapphires. The book is brimming with superb and complex dialogue and eccentric murder suspects in the self absorbed Vereker family.

People who start a sentence with personally (and they’re always women) ought to be thrown to the lions. It’s a repulsive habit.

Death in the Stocks

In Envious Casca, there are three Herriard brothers. Nathaniel spends his time accumulating money and self-riteous indignation . William got married, had two children then died, and Joseph ran away from his legal career to join the theatre and marry Maud from the chorus. The couple eventually return from overseas to sponge off Nathaniel. The family all come together in the family manor for christmas, which is where the story begins, and Nathaniel is found dead in his locked study.

It was Joseph who had been inspired to organize the house-party that was looming over Nathaniel’s unwilling head this chill December. Joseph, having lived for so many years abroad, hankered wistfully after a real English Christmas. Nathaniel, regarding him with a contemptuous eye, said that a real English Christmas meant, in his experience, a series of quarrels between inimical person bound to on another only by the accident of relationship, and thrown together by a worn-out convention which decreed that at Christmas families should forgather.

Envious Casca

Heyer was intensely private. She did not give interviews or make appearances and even shunned fans. When asked about her private life her pat response was ‘You will find me in my work.’ That being said, she was also understood (according to two biographies written about her) to be a formidable character with strong views that she was less shy about expressing in correspondence.

Georgette Heyer Mysteries:

Footsteps in the Dark, 1932
Why Shoot a Butler?, 1933
The Unfinished Clue, 1934
Death in the Stocks (Merely Murder), 1935
Behold, Here’s Poison, 1936
They Found Him Dead, 1937
A Blunt Instrument, 1938
No Wind of Blame, 1939
Envious Casca, 1941
Penhallow, 1942
Duplicate Death, 1951
Detective Unlimited, 1953

Grand Dames of Crime: Ethel Lina White

On By rlsmithwritingIn Reviews1 Comment

Largely forgotten today, Welsh crime writer Ethel Lina White (1876-1944) wrote 17 novels. In her day she was as well known as writers like Agatha Christie. White started out writing short stories and working at the Ministry of Pensions but left her job to scratch out a living as a writer after an offer of ten-pounds for a short story.

Lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for

Ethel Lina White

White wrote three non-crime novels between 1927 and 1930 before turning to crime. Her first crime novel Put Out the Light was published in 1931 when she was fifty-five. Her work often featured lonely but strong heroines in dark country houses as metaphors for repression. She became known for writing suspense that set your heart racing, as well as her colloquial conversation style in dialogue. Some of these skills were probably picked up while indulging her favourite downtime activity of watching films.

Her novel Some Must Watch (1933) was made into a Hollywood Movie called The Spiral Staircase (1946). The Wheel Spins (1936) was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as The Lady Vanishes (1938). Midnight House (1942) was also filmed as The Unseen with Raymond Chandler as one of the script writers.

Bibliography

The Wish-Bone (1927)
Twill Soon Be Dark (1929)
The Eternal Journey (1930)
Put Out the Light (1931) aka Sinister Light
Fear Stalks the Village (1932)
Some Must Watch (1933) aka The Spiral Staircase
Wax (1935)
The First Time He Died (1935)
The Wheel Spins (1936) aka The Lady Vanishes
The Third Eye (1937)
The Elephant Never Forgets (1937)
Step in the Dark (1938)
While She Sleeps (1940)
She Faded Into Air (1941)
Midnight House (1942) aka Her Heart in Her Throat, The Unseen
The Man Who Loved Lions (1943) aka The Man Who Was Not There
They See in Darkness (1944)

Grand Dames of Crime: Josephine Tey

On By rlsmithwritingIn Reviews2 Comments

It’s a while since I’ve written a dames or crime post. This one is about the mysterious Scottish author and playwright Elizabeth Mackintosh (1987-1952) also known as Gordon Daviot and Josephine Tey.

The period between the First and Second World Wars was the golden-age of crime fiction, when the Detection Club, a dining society for mystery writers was frequented by authors such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio March and Dorothy L. Sayers. Rules emerged for mystery writing that were later codified into the ‘Ten Commandments’ by British writer Ronald Knox. They included beginning with a body and ending with a reveal of the killer.

It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it.

The Daughter of Time

Tey was never a member of the Detection Club and she was a breaker of rules when it came to writing mysteries. Her characters did not conform to the usual profiles of the day. Five of Tey’s mystery novels star Alan Grant, a Scotland Yard Inspector and one of the first police protagonists to appear in crime fiction, an ordinary hard working fallible man. The Daughter of Time was voted the greatest mystery of all in 1990 by The British Crime Writers’ Association. In this novel, from a hospital bed, Grant solves the mystery of whether King Richard III of England murdered his nephews.

Tey was interested in exploring the psychology of her characters and the dark side of humanity, she wrote eight mystery novels and showed a fascination for identities and how a persons public face can contradict their true natures. Herself a lone wolf, Tey was said to have three distinct personas to accompany her three names. She did not give interviews, there are few photographs of her in existence, and she never married. The absence of information has led many to examine her novels for insight into the author.

‘She wasn’t fond of being interviewed. And she used to tell a different story each time. When someone pointed out that that wasn’t what she had said last time, she said: “But that’s so dull! I’ve thought of a much better one.” No one ever knew where they were with her. Temperament, they called it, of course.

A Shilling for Candles

Tey’s early and later life was spent in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, with a stint as a physical education teacher in England in between, an occupation that provided fodder for her 1946 novel Miss Pym Disposes. As a playwright she went by the name of Gordon Daviot, producing a dozen one-act plays and the same number of full length plays. Richard of Bordeaux (1932) had some success in London’s West End running for 14 months and starring John Gielgud.

Someone had said that if you thought about the unthinkable long enough it became quite reasonable.

Brat Farrar

Author Nicola Upson, who initially planned to write a briography of Tey, eventually decided that the intensely private, elusive author was more suited to fiction and made Tey the amateur detective in her 2008 novel An Expert in Murder, as well as in subsequent books in the series. It was not until 2015 that a biography, Josephine Tey: A Life, was written by Jennifer Morag Henderson.

Bibliography

Inspector Grant Novels

  • The Man in the Queue (1929)
  • A Shilling for Candles (1936)
  • The Franchise Affair (1948)
  • To Love and Be Wise (1950)
  • The Daughter of Time (1951)
  • The Singing Sands (1952)

Standalone novels

  • Kif: An Unvarnished History 1929
  • The Expensive Halo 1931
  • Miss Pym Disposes 1946
  • Brat Farrar 1949
  • The Privateer 1952

Biography

  • Claverhouse (1937)

Plays

  • Richard of Bordeaux (1932)
  • The Laughing Woman (1934)
  • Queen of Scots (1934)
  • The Stars Bow Down (1939)
  • Cornelia (1946)
  • The Little Dry Thorn (1946)
  • Rahab (1947)
  • Leith Sands (1947)
  • Valerius (1948)
  • The Balwhinnie Bomb (1949)
  • Sara (1951)
  • Barnharrow (1954, One-act)
  • Dickon (1955)