The Van Dine School

The Van Dine School

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

Anthony Abbot

About the Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930)

About the Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress (1931) (Chapters 1 - 4)

About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932)

About the Murder of a Startled Lady (1935) (Book One: Chapters 1 -3, Book Two: Chapter 4)

Thatcher Colt stories

About the Disappearance of Agatha King (1932)
About the Perfect Crime of Mr. Digberry (1940)

C. Daly King

The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant

The Episode of the Tangible Illusion (1935)
The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem (1935)
The Episode of the Little Girl Who Wasn't There (1944)
The Episode of the Absent Fish
The Episode of the Perilous Talisman (1951)

Rex Stout

The Red Box (1936 - 1937) (Chapters 1 - 8)

Too Many Cooks (1938) (Chapters 1, 3, 10, 11, 16, 17)

Some Buried Caesar (1938-1939)

Champagne for One (1958) (Chapters 1 - 6, 15 - 17)

Plot It Yourself (1959) (Chapters 1 - 4, 16, 19)

A Right to Die (1964)

Target Practice

Jonathan Stannard's Secret Vice (1915)

Black Orchids

Black Orchids (1941) (Chapters 1 - 7)
Cordially Invited to Meet Death (1942)

Not Quite Dead Enough

Not Quite Dead Enough (1942)
Booby Trap (1944)

Trouble in Triplicate

Before I Die (1947)

Triple Jeopardy

The Cop-Killer (1951)

Three Men Out

This Won't Kill You (1952)
Invitation to Murder (1953)
The Zero Clue (1953)

Three Witnesses

Die Like A Dog (1954)
The Next Witness (1955)

Three For the Chair

A Window For Death (1956)
Too Many Detectives (1956)

And Four To Go

Easter Parade (1957)

Homicide Trinity

Eeny Meeny Murder Mo (1962)

Trio For Blunt Instruments

Kill Now - Pay Later (1961)
Blood Will Tell (1963)

"Santa Claus Beat" (1953)

Alphabet Hicks stories

Curtain Line (1955)

Dorothy Stockbridge Tillett (wrote as John Stephen Strange)

The Strangler Fig (1930) (Chapters 1 - 3, 14)

Rufus King

Murder Masks Miami (1939)

The Case of the Dowager's Etchings (1943)

Reginald De Puyster stories

The Weapon That Didn't Exist (1926)

Diagnosis: Murder (1939 - 1941)

The Case of the Three Baleful Brothers
The Case of the Prodigal Bridegroom
The Case of the Sudden Shot
The Case of the Imperious Invalid
The Case of the Buttoned Collar

Uncollected Dr. Colin Starr stories

The Case of the Fragile Flower (1942)
The Case of the Peculiar Precautions

Malice in Wonderland

Malice in Wonderland (1957)

Uncollected Stuff Driscoll Stories

The Seeds of Murder (1959)

The Faces of Danger

The Faces of Danger (1960)

John T. McIntyre

Ashton-Kirk, Investigator (1910) (Chapters 1-13, 24, 25)

Richard Burke

Chinese Red (1942) (Chapters 1-5, 7, 19)

Quinny Hite stories

The Corpse in Grandpa's Bed (1946)

Rink Creussen

"The Silver Dollar" (1948)

Anthony Abbot

Anthony Abbot is one of the most important of the "little known" mystery writers. Like Ellery Queen an early follower of S.S. Van Dine, Abbot's books are distinguished by a wonderful plot complexity. Abbot is good at misdirection. The reader is encouraged to view subplots as having a certain significance, when in reality they point in an entirely different direction, one that is only revealed at the end of the story. This is perhaps related to the plotting technique of pulp writers, in which so many actors are doing so many things that the reader is constantly misled about the real origins of every startling, new plot twist. (This "pulp technique of plotting" is discussed in the Gardner article.)

Abbot seems to have a natural liking for the complex plot. Even when he does a tongue-in-cheek short story that consciously combines humor and mystery, such as "About the Perfect Crime of Mr. Digberry", there is a delightful, well constructed mystery plot full of unexpected turns and complexity. Abbot's work also has the quality of "readability": they carry one along, and one can enjoy one of his books in a single sitting.

Abbot's interest in misdirection can lead to vivid evocations of the difference between illusion and reality. Although Abbot does not conspicuously underline any philosophical implications of this theme, the strong plots cause this theme to emerge anyway. Abbot's fiction has a haunting quality. Both humans' ability to understand reality, and human life itself, seem frail and fragile. There is a note of pathos in his work, that seems autumnal, in contrast with Ellery Queen's springtime vigor. There is a sense of a last look at things, before they disappear into the mist.

Another contributor to this effect is Abbot's emphasis on the investigation of murder scenes. Described gently, and with delicate but powerful mise-en-scène, Abbot's vivid descriptions of houses, rooms, streets and yards show an architectural imagination at work.

If Abbot's work looks forward to the pulp techniques of the 1930's and 1940's, it looks backward to the scientific detectives of 1905-1914. About the Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930) digresses from its main mystery to offer a full portrait of "high tech" police techniques. These seem oddly similar to those of Cleveland S. Moffet and Arthur B. Reeve of twenty years earlier.

Abbot's detectival setup offers an intriguing variation on Van Dine's formula. In Van Dine, and in Ellery Queen as well, a genius amateur detective works closely with the New York Police as an unofficial, but highly respected, consultant. Each has a personal connection with officialdom: Van Dine's Philo Vance is a personal friend of the DA, and Ellery Queen is Police Inspector Richard Queen's son. In Abbot's books, the genius detective Thatcher Colt is himself the Police Commissioner, and his connection with the New York Police come about naturally as the head of police. There is still a bit of "amateur detective" status about Colt: like Philo Vance, he is from a higher social stratum than most of the police, and the Police Commissioner's job is usually considered administrative and political, so Colt's involvement in solving actual cases is unusual, and the result of his rare personal abilities. Just as Vance is an art expert and connoisseur, Colt is an expert on literature, collecting rare books and writing poetry in his spare time.

Abbott wrote four Thatcher Colt detective novels in 1930 - 1932. They are especially Van Dine like in their tone, and in their detectival approach. He then paused for three years, without publishing any more Colts. During 1935 - 1943, he published four more Colt novels, at long intervals. These later novels are much less Van Dine like in tone, perhaps not surprising, in that Van Dine was no longer anywhere near as popular as in the early 1930's. They also contain much more about an Abbot enthusiasm of those years, psychic phenomena.

Abbot was deep into what might be called "WASP Macho". There is tremendous emphasis on Colt's power and prestige as head of the police. He is also big on intimidating criminals. Abbot has really bought into ideas about leadership of social institutions equaling manhood and masculinity. Of course, this leadership was a privilege reserved in his day to WASPs, and one that they valued very highly. While there is no sign of prejudice against immigrants or other ethnic groups in Abbot, it is clear that he was deep into the social ideals of his own ethnic group, and felt that his hero should be a leader of men. Colt is the literary equivalent of the sympathetic, jut-jawed, well tailored men seated at big desks in big offices that showed up in so many 1930's movies (think of Walter Huston as the factory owner in Dodsworth).

Paradoxically, while Abbot idolized men in leadership positions, his fiction is more rooted in middle class life than are most other authors of the Golden Age. This is especially true of the non-police characters in his tales. The investigation into the death of Geraldine Foster reveals a poignant look at the stresses and strains in the life of a young, middle class woman of the period. Similarly, "ordinary man" Mr. Digberry's survival and even triumph suggests an allegory of the survival and triumph of the middle classes.

About the Murder of the Circus Queen

About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932) shows good storytelling and detail throughout its length, but its solution is routine. It is a minor but interesting book, most notable for its elaborate Golden Age style description of the characters and their circus milieu, two bizarre murders, and the detailed investigation that follows, one that keeps bringing to light more and more clues, and more and more interrelationships among the characters' past lives. This fan of Golden Age fiction enjoyed reading it, but was disconcerted by its lack of a clever finale. The investigation forms an infinitely detailed design that is beautiful in its unfolding patterns. Circus is remarkably rich in visual imagery. It is almost as if Abbot had planned it as a movie; it was in fact made into one in the next year. Color is especially used to describe men's clothes and circus makeup. Abbot is much better at picking up on men's clothes, than on women's. Many of the men in the story also have brilliantly colored hair, such as the DA's red, and the scientist's yellow.

Although it is not pointed out in the story, further reflection suggests that the novel's characters exist in doubles. The hero and heroine, a pair of married aerialists, employ a second couple of aerialists to assist them; they have even had this second couple change their stage names to match the husband's. Another pair of similar characters includes the circus' manager, and the circus' millionaire backer; both are older businessmen. The heroine employs both a personal maid, and a male assistant to help her with her act. Both the hero and heroine had a previous spouse. The District Attorney, a none too intelligent blunderer who is always wrong in the story, is accompanied by his two nephews, who seem to be miniature copies of himself.

Perhaps the most striking pair of doubles in the book includes Thatcher Colt, and the witch doctor Keblia. Keblia is the leader of a tribe of Ubangis that have been imported to form an exhibit at the circus. Both Keblia and the Ubangis are sympathetic characters in the story. Just like Colt, Keblia plays the role of detective in the story. With the aid of his tribe, Keblia tracks down the real killer, and tries to intervene to protect the heroine. In fact, he finds the real killer long before Colt. Just as Colt is assisted by his "tribe" of policemen, Keblia is assisted by the tribe of Ubangis - another set of doubles in the story. Keblia is dressed in a fashionable suit in the story - a costume that in other Abbot works is strongly associated with the elegant Colt. The sophisticated Colt treats the Ubangis with the greatest respect. One striking scene shows a pact between Colt and the Ubangis to share information about clues to the mystery. Abbot's novel contrasts the respect with which his hero Colt treats the tribe, with the racist dismissal they are given by the low brow District Attorney in the book. The book's narrator falls somewhere between these two extremes in his attitude. While not sharing in the DA's contempt, he finds the Ubangis to be eerie and frightening. He clearly finds the strange and exotic to be threatening. The narrator is not supposed to be as intelligent and knowledgeable as Colt.

The treatment of the African Ubangis is progressive, especially for its day. They are depicted as both intelligent and kind hearted. Their religious ceremonies are depicted with dignity, although they are also milked for maximum eerie effect, like all the other events of the novel. The books portrayal of the Ubangis' social organization is in the "tribal" tradition, one that has roots in Jack London, and other turn of the century authors. Just as in London, the tribe is shown to be dominated by a witch doctor, and devoted to a set of superstitious rituals and beliefs. This portrayal of tribal life was very popular from 1900 through the 1940's. Today it seems old fashioned and out dated, having been replaced by more sophisticated anthropological ideas about tribal culture. Still, it seems to be the "best" model of tribal life available to literary authors of its day. Also dated today is the constant emphasis on how "eerie" the narrator finds the Ubangis. Despite this dated portrait of tribal life, Abbot's treatment of the Ubangis is clearly in the anti-racist tradition of Van Dine and other authors of his school; see the article on Anthony Boucher for a discussion of this.

The Ubangis are associated in the story with enclosed spaces: trunks and underground chambers. They are chthonic, and associated with the earth. The aerialists, by contrast, have there domain high in the air, on their trapeze wires, and in a high apartment. They have glittering clothing, and are associated with powder and greasepaint and gasses. The aerialists have a circle, a circus ring, under their domain, whereas both the Ubangis and Colt seem associated with rectilinear geometry. Colt keeps discovering boxes associated with the murder, the trunk and the box like room of the flood light chamber. Colt also seems to have a special affinity with Madison Square Garden itself, a building considered in the book as the last word in progressive modern accomplishment. It is made of concrete over a steel frame, and such hard construction seems symbolic of Colt. The trunk and the bunker like flood light chamber also seem rock hard constructions. Colt also owns Police Headquarters and his apartment. Colt's association with both modern buildings and modern organizations such as the police department and science are seen as emblems of a splendid masculinity.

Colt never actually climbs into the aerialists' trapeze area, whereas he has no trouble penetrating to the Ubangis' regions. He is the opener and discoverer of the Ubangis; he is always opening up their domains. He also brings in the professor who understands their language and customs, and serves as the professor's sponsor throughout the story.

Unlike buildings, guns, bullets and shooting are associated not with the police in the novel, but with the older male authority figures of the circus: the animal trainer, the millionaire backer, and the circus owner. Such guns are seen only negatively as emblems of destruction, never of accomplishment. Colt instead works to outlaw guns; he is an enthusiastic advocate of gun control, as part of his role as Police Commissioner, and chief preventer of crime in New York City. The Ubangis also have the role of protectors of people and preventers of trouble, another affinity between Colt and the Ubangis.

Instead of fighting, Colt's ability to see and perceive everything is emphasized. He is unusually good at sight, hearing, smell and the other senses. Colt is the one who hears the changes in the drum beat, for example. His senses are almost as heightened as the hero of the TV series, the Sentinel. He also has the brain power to interpret what he sees as clues. Colt also has a magnificent physique, as do the aerialists in the story.

Unlike private eyes, Colt is rarely stonewalled by witnesses in the story. P I's are always spending hours grilling witnesses who refuse to talk, or who lie to them. By contrast, Colt, like the other detectives of the Van Dine school, has little trouble acquiring mountains of information. The Van Dine school sleuths have a number of techniques: they use the exhaustive search of both victims' rooms and crime scenes; they query disinterested passerby who have tons of information to share; and they institute resourceful police inquiries for information. Because of this, they are always purposively filling in their picture of the crime. It is only the murder itself that is an obstacle to the Van Dine school detective: it is always "a carefully planned crime" perpetrated by "one of the most fiendish brains that it has ever been the misfortune of" the narrator to encounter. Despite this satire, the Van Dine school's approach is plainly a lot more fun to read. Their detectives go right in and detect, and this is the way it should be.

The Shudders

Abbot's The Shudders (1943) seems more like a horror novel than a mystery book. It has some plot twists, but they are not imaginative enough to make the book fascinate the average mystery fan. The book does show plot complexity. Many of the scenes display considerable mise-en-scène as well. Images of ruination recur throughout the novel, including malaria on a tropical expedition, and a visit to the fleabags of 42nd Street. Most remarkable is the ruined greenhouse at the end of Chapter 3 and in Chapter 4.

The Shudders repeats imagery from Abbot's About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932). There is the death that results from a drop from a high place. There are the explorers who travel in the tropics, looking for rare chemical knowledge: here it is New Guinea, in Circus, Equatorial Africa. Both encounter an extremely colorful group of aboriginal people: the Dyaks in Shudders, the Ubangi in Circus. Both books deal with the possibility of killing someone at a distance, without leaving any traces. Both contain home movies, that are projected in a private dwelling. Both have scenes of men dressed up in white tie and tails. Both open on a rainy night of Friday the Thirteenth, and both contain much horror imagery. Both describe Colt's army of police recurring characters in detail, making them part of the plot. These recurring police characters are part of the Van Dine tradition. Both contain life histories of the suspects, exploring their professional and romantic lives in great detail. Both have a background of the chemical industry. Both contain references to Germany's involvement with the same. Both contain an apartment, which people enter and leave through a high window. Both contain a romantic triangle of sorts, with a younger couple, and an older man of considerable wealth, and dubious morals. Images of death are often linked to those of rebirth, both in the body in the trunk in the opening of Chapter 10 of Circus, and in the solution of Shudders. Many of the male characters seem to be in trouble in Abbot's books; this emotional mood probably subconsciously reflects the real life general vulnerability of men during the Depression, who were often unemployed and lacking in prospects.

One villain in The Shudders is a Uriah Heep type. He worms his way into a position as confidential secretary to a millionaire banker, takes over his life, and promptly murders him for his money. Although the author does not point this out, this seems to exaggerate and parody the relationship between Thatcher Colt and his secretary, the Watson-like narrator of the Colt novels. The narrator is a born number two, who owes his entire existence to being Colt's secretary.

Why does Abbot include scenes of home movies in his books? This is hard to say. He is certainly not sneaking clues into the stories with them, as John Dickson Carr would be. One reason is that Abbot is a writer interested in high technology and scientific detection, and during the 1930's such movies partook of high tech. Also, it allows him to show highlights of his characters' past lives, always an Abbot interest. Most importantly, however, is the structural role these scenes play in Abbot's architecture. Abbot's books are marked off into distinct episodes, like movements in a piece of classical music. Introducing an episode narrated in a distinct fashion, through film, allows Abbot to build a fence around one part of the narrative. Each episode plays its own unique role in the design of the book. They add to the beauty of the overall pattern. Similarly, in Circus, there is a stretch in Chapter 16 in which Colt reports on the results of his officer Inspector Flynn's investigations into the characters' backgrounds. This forms a deeply satisfying extension of the book's plot to date, offering a formal conclusion to several plot threads in the book. Its position in the story seems like a sort of coda in music, or other part of a formal pattern.

About the Murder of the Night Club Lady

About the Murder of the Night Club Lady (1931) has an original impossible crime. This impossibility is the best part of this work. The impossible crime has aspects of the "howdunit": it asks the detective and reader to figure out a method by which a seemingly impossible murder occurred. Such howdunits were also a staple in Van Dine and Stuart Palmer. The howdunit crime is another example of "killing someone at a distance, without leaving any traces": an Abbot tradition. This is also found in About the Murder of the Circus Queen and The Shudders, two Abbot novels that share much imagery with Night Club Lady, and which are often close to it in approach.

The impossible crime is framed within a situation derived from Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men (1905) - a ploy that has been much used in films and comics ever since Wallace invented it. Abbot's explanation of the impossible crime is different from Wallace's, however. There is also little in Abbot of anything political, while Wallace's book is soaked in social commentary.

Abbot's howdunit solution brings the novel into the realm of the Scientific detective story. So do some other aspects of police lab work. Several of Abbot's tales involve such scientific and technological details - it is a running strand throughout his fiction.

Impossible crime aside, the novel shows less colorful storytelling, and less imagination its plotting, characters and setting, than the best of Abbot's writing. It's night-club opening scene, and the Night Club Lady's penthouse apartment where most of the action occurs, while well described, are hardly novel settings for crime fiction. Both seem like female settings, elaborate ornate boxes that contain entire lives of the heroine and her female relatives and friends. These womb symbols are constantly contrasted with the male police officers and their masculine and phallic symbols, with Thatcher Colt in top hat and tails, uniformed officers on motorcycles, a policeman undercover in doorman's uniform, etc. The women are in white, with occasional flashes of red, while the men are in dark colors such as Colt's black tail coat or blue police uniforms. White tie and tails are a tradition in Abbot books. The glittering night-club is full of mirrors, crystals and jewels, and is underground; the penthouse is high in the sky: two extremes that will re-appear in About the Murder of the Circus Queen. The penthouse has a high window playing a role in the plot, not unlike other Abbot books. The two young women in the story have plot-lines that move in parallel: they are perhaps examples of the doubling characters that will appear more systematically in About the Murder of the Circus Queen.

Abbot once more features life histories of the characters, that play a role in the solution. While other Abbot books such as About the Murder of the Circus Queen and The Shudders, open on Friday the Thirteenth in a rain storm, this one is set on New Year's Eve in a snow storm. The male characters are once again in deep trouble. While those books refer to the chemical industry, and have ties to Germany, this one is set against the medical supply business, and refers to the characters' past lives in France.

The final quarter of the book, after the explanation of the howdunit three quarters way through (Chapter 13), is also anticlimactic, and not as successful as the previous three quarters of the novel. Its plot elements are less interesting than those that went before.

About the Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress

About the Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress (1931) is perhaps a bit over praised among Abbot's work. The book is readable throughout. It is at its vivid best in its opening chapters, in which Colt identifies the unknown corpses, and reconstructs the murder events at the crime scenes. These sections show good detective work, much of it based in scientific detection by the police. They also display Abbot's gift for architectural writing, and his command of atmosphere and mise-en-scène. The later stages of the novel do show Abbot's ability to handle a complex plot, and the final revelations about the crime do surprise.

Abbot will return to the setting of this novel, the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in New York, for his fine short story, "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932).

About the Murder of a Startled Lady

About the Murder of a Startled Lady (1935) shows relationships with Abbot's earlier novels, especially About the Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress (1931). Both books begin with the discovery of an unidentified corpse under mysterious circumstances. Several chapters of virtuosic detective work follow, during which Colt and nearly the entire New York City police force identify the victim. In both of these novels the opening chapters are sinister, even spooky in tone, with a macabre feel. The macabre quality is pushed to an extreme in Startled Lady. The opening chapters of that book are full of people with a show business background: the sort of cheap entertainers that might hang around carnivals or fair grounds. There are the medium and her husband in the first chapter, then the artist with a waxworks and amusement park life history in Chapter 3. These people's colorful life stories recall the circus performers in Circus Queen (1932). The professor in Chapter 1 of Startled Lady also recalls the savant Colt meets in Circus Queen. Abbot likes to include a whole "life history" for the characters in his novels. While it is not likely in real life that the police would have thumb nail biographies for everyone they meet, one tends to accept this as a bit of poetic license. It does add to the storytelling charm of the book, as well as making the characters more rounded.

After these excellent opening sections in Clergyman's Mistress and Startled Lady, virtually a whole new novel begins. For the first time we meet the characters of the mystery story. Up till that time we had been dealing with a discovered body, vividly described murder locations, and the police. Now we are introduced to the suspects, and a whole, conventional murder mystery ensues, with most of the focus on the motives of the suspects and their personal relationships with the victim. These later chapters in both novels are far more routine. There is much less actual detection, and what revelations ensue tend to be the result of routine police inquiries: realistic, but not very imaginative. Towards the end of both stories Colt builds a straw case against each of the characters in turn. Both books also come to a similar kind of solution to their puzzle plot, although to say more about this would spoil the reader's interest in the mystery.

The best section in the later novel is Book Two: Chapter 4. This resolves the medium subplot of the opening chapter. Abbot shows a flair for one type of impossible crime, the apparent supernatural event. Abbot does not describe the kind of physical impossibility we associate with G.K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr and their successors. Instead, this tale is in the same genre as Craig Rice's "Beyond the Shadow of a Dream" (1956), a case of apparently supernatural knowledge that eventually is explained in realistic terms.

Unfortunately, after its early sections, Startled Lady declines into a far more ordinary novel. Most of the suspects in the book are unpleasant, even psychologically abnormal. Much of the book is taken up with descriptions of their emotionally disturbed personalities. There is also a consistent tone of sordidness struck throughout, something that is not typical of Abbot, and not consistent with the personality shown in his other works.

About the Murder of a Man Afraid of Women

About the Murder of a Man Afraid of Women (1937) is Abbot's least known Thatcher Colt book, rarely reprinted. And with good reason. The plot is largely reworked from a well-known tale by Doyle. And the book relentlessly flaunts racial stereotypes, in a way that is thankfully absent from Abbot's other books, which usually present positive pictures of racial minorities. This unsuccessful book does have some good features, with its portraits of police organization in New York City being well-done, and extending the depictions in previous Colt novels. The readable storytelling is also a plus, with Abbot's pleasing profusion of detail, and the subplot about Tad Wing is not bad. Abbot has tried to add a little raciness to the novel. The narrator-Watson of the book, Thatcher's male confidential secretary, is repeatedly accused of being jealous of Colt's new fiancee. This leads to the encounter in Chapter 9, Section 2, one of the more deliriously baroque in the popular fiction of the era.

The Creeps

The Creeps (1939) seems written in a different style from several of Abbot's earlier books, and critic Francis M. Nevins has speculated that it may have been ghost written by a different author. That may be true. However, it has a "supernatural" scene where a medium claims to be in contact with a dead person. The ghostly message is very similar in content to the one in About the Murder of a Startled Lady, a book that everyone has always considered as Abbot's own. The two novels share a similar fascination with psychical research as well. The tone of both novels mix skepticism with enthusiasm. Abbot considers many practitioners of such studies frauds, yet seems enthused about the long term prospect of honest researchers in these fields. I cannot agree with him. I think the evidence sixty years later suggests that this is all a bunch of hooey. Be that as it may, this material suggests a continuity of authorship. The book also has some sordid imagery, which recalls the also sleazy Startled Lady.

The Creeps lacks all ingenuity. The explanation of the medium's message shows none of the cleverness of the earlier novel. None of the murders in the books show any cleverness either. The story is labored and dull.

C. Daly King

C. Daly King's work is clearly aligned to the S.S. Van Dine school. He published six novels and a story collection from 1932 - 1940. After World War II, he published two new stories in EQMM; in the intro to one of them, Ellery Queen mentioned that a new King novel had been finished and would soon be appearing. This book was never published; it is another evidence of the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers. Mary Roberts Rinehart could not get her detective tales published in the Saturday Evening Post, nor could T.S. Stribling; Milton M. Propper could not get his books published, and eventually wound up in an insane asylum; Hake Talbot's third novel was not published, apparently leading him to write no more; Norbert Davis had publishing difficulties; Dorothy Sayers and Anthony Boucher largely chose not to write any more detective stories; John Dickson Carr turned to a series of anemic historical novels. Recently, in Twentieth Century Mystery Writers, Helen McCloy regretted that she had written fewer mystery novels and more suspense novels after World War II.

The Curious Mr. Tarrant

The Curious Mr. Tarrant is a collection of stories, most of which deal with impossible crimes. They star detective Trevis Tarrant, who appeared mainly in King's short stories; Michael Lord was the series detective in many King novels. Tarrant would later appear in The Episode of the Demoiselle D'Ys (1946), the above mentioned unpublished novel. I have no idea if the manuscript survives; the manuscript of Hake Talbot's third book seems permanently lost, for example.

King's work is full of horror. He likes to depict bizarre religious rituals as part of his horror atmosphere. These rituals often seem to involve cycles of time: the Aztec cycles in "The Codex' Curse", the repetitions of the Requiem in "The Nail and the Requiem", the nightly events on the highway in "The Headless Horrors". Light and darkness, and their alteration are also important elements in King's storytelling, adding both drama, and contributions to the puzzle plots. There is also a theme of "policemen in jeopardy", that seems to involve their uniforms. King seemed to have a special sympathy for these "hard young men", as he put it, and their lives seem to be in danger in his tales. One of the best locked room tales in The Curious Mr. Tarrant, "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem" (1935), oddly anticipates The Silence of the Lambs, of all things. The mad killer's escape from the box-like penthouse in King, seems oddly similar to Hannibal's escape from his box-like cage toward the end of the movie (I've never read the book). King's tale, in turn, bears a family resemblance to MacKinlay Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock" (1930). Other possible influences on King's fiction are discussed in the articles on Stuart Palmer and Sax Rohmer.

King's impossible crime technique seems to focus on hidden places and hidden spaces. Although presided over by images of women, never living women, men seem to emerge from these spaces, or be swallowed up by them. The images of women are naked, and emphasize their sexuality. Perhaps these hidden spaces are womb symbols. They also seem to have a magic or ritual quality to them.

King's horror motif contrasts oddly with the country club, fun young couples background of his Watson, Jerry Phelan. Phelan, his girlfriend, and his sister, who winds up dating detective Tarrant, seem right out of the world later to be occupied by such Bright Young Couples as seen in the works of Q. Patrick, or The Norths, by the Lockridges. "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" (1935) does much to characterize Phelan and his family, and has some pleasant romance. It is set in a small town in New Jersey; King himself lived in Summit, New Jersey, and frequently set his works either in that state, or in nearby New York City. Another set of perennial characters in King are the mild mannered, ineffectual authority figures of various institutions where the horror is taking place, who have clearly lost control of their turf. These include the museum director in "Codex", the apartment manager in "Nail", and the police chief in "Headless Horrors".

Not all of King is horror based. "The Episode of the Vanishing Harp" is a country house, Golden Age style mystery, complete with a wealthy couple, the family secretary, the family banker, and the family physician. It is a pleasant enough piece of storytelling, but its locked room problem's solution, while fair and believable, is easily guessed.

King is far from being my favorite author. Just as in Clayton Rawson, there is something distasteful about King. King's strongest suit is his ability to create suspense. His better tales sweep one along as a reader, and show some real excitement, as well as some creepiness in the horror department. But they often turn upon clichés, including the disagreeable ethnic stereotypes of their era. And their mystery plots tend to be obvious, and easily figured out. There is often only one real suspect, and sure enough, at the end he did it - not much of a use of the whodunit potential of the mystery tale. "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem", however, succeeds as a puzzle plot tale - it is a significant contribution to the locked room story. By contrast, King's version of the Mary Celeste, "Torment IV", is ridiculous, one of the all time dumb mystery tales. Caveat lector! (Which could mean either "Let the reader beware"; or "Beware of Hannibal Lector" - not bad advice either way. This is my first Latin pun.)

The Later Trevis Tarrant tales

After 1944, King began a second series of Tarrant tales, three of which eventually appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Crippen & Landru has republished the Tarrant stories, together with four additional tales not in the first collection, as The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003). Three of these later tales add considerably to the mystery value of the series as a whole.

"The Episode of the Little Girl Who Wasn't There" (1944) is a locked room story. It is full of ingenious ideas. It keeps proposing different solutions to its central riddle, in the tradition of Anthony Berkley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), and other Golden Age multi-solutioned tales. The story is hard to read, and lacks gracefulness. It is perhaps more intriguing than fun. But still, it shows lots of thinking. Aspects hearken back to "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem", and can be considered as a development of the ideas in that tale.

"The Episode of the Sinister Invention" (1946) is a minor pastiche of Sherlock Holmes. Aside from the zany inventions mentioned in the tale, the main interest here is some of Tarrant's use of deductive reasoning. Both this tale and the previous one show Tarrant functioning as an armchair detective. The hall where the murder takes place is another of King's rooms. King here deduces some architectural features of the hall from the story told him about the killing there by his policeman friend. Once again, King shows an interest in the engineering and construction of a room. And here, these features are made the center of logical deduction, an interesting extension of King's ideas.

"The Episode of the Perilous Talisman" (1951) is a combination fantasy and mystery story. Such hybrid works are fairly common in the sf world. This tale is nicely done, with some clever ideas, and King's patented ability to create suspense. Although the plot deals with a small box, the ideas in the story seem oddly architectural. The box is of the oblong dimensions favored by King for his locked rooms, and is a similar complex engineering construction. The box also has features that recall "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" (1935). King's interest in light and dark is also present here. This seems to be King's final work of fiction published during his lifetime. King's interest in optical devices recalls R. Austin Freeman. In general, King's concern with engineering and mechanical constructs is in the tradition of scientific detection.

The Egyptian box here is "a foot long by about eight inches wide". This means the box is roughly in the Golden Ratio. There is much discussion today if ancient Egyptian architects consciously used the Golden Ratio in their work.

"The Episode of the Absent Fish" was not published till long after King's death (EQMM April 1979). It is an imaginative story, in the tradition of "The Nail and the Requiem". Like that earlier story, it is a locked room problem, which takes place in an architecturally complex penthouse apartment. King's "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" is also architectural in subject. King was fascinated with architecture, and many of his most creative works deal with it. Even when it plays little role in the mystery plot, such as the New Jersey highway landscapes in "The Headless Horrors" and Obelists Fly High, it is a fascinating part of the tale. King likes the engineering aspects of architecture, such as the infrastructure of the buildings, machinery in them, such as elevators or gas stations, and their industrial construction. King's creative use of architecture is part of Golden Age mystery tradition, while his interest in their engineering aspects is relatively personal and unique.

Obelists Fly High

Obelists Fly High (1935) is the most admired of King's six published mystery novels. It has a clever impossible crime plot, and surprises in its murder mystery that completely fooled me. So maybe I should be recommending it - or at least its plot. However, the book has some real problems. The storytelling drags interminably, especially in the second half where King explores an all too obvious alibi subplot. The characters are nasty. There is endless propagandizing for King's controversial views on psychology, religion and science. It continues King's vicious stereotyping of minority groups, this time of homosexuals. It is not a pleasant reading experience at all. King has been overpraised by mystery critics. While his works have too much plot creativity to ignore, they have too many other problems to be actually good. One might also point out that Obelists Fly High lacks the fabulous plot complexity of Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr. Its story could be compressed to novella length without any harm.

Obelists Fly High has some common imagery with other King works. Much of it takes place in an enclosed area, the airplane. This is similar to the penthouse of "Nail", the museum room of "Harp" and the basement room of "Codex". Most of these areas seem to mechanical constructs. They are not the simple rooms of much Golden Age fiction. Instead the story emphasizes their constructed nature, the materials and the properties of the walls, their slightly irregular geometry. These areas tend to be over twice as long as they are wide. They tend to be associated with wealth and property: the 1935 airplane is the domain of the wealthy, as are the museums in the short stories.

The early sections (pp. 33 - 70) of Obelists Fly High depict Newark Airport. This is embedded in a New Jersey landscape similar to "The Headless Horrors". Both landscapes feature, not nature or traditional vistas, but modern highways centered around technological buildings: the gas station of "Horrors" and the hangars of Obelists. The vivid background description of airports and air travel Way Back When is one of the most appealing features of the novel. There was much interest in stories set on planes during this period: see Stuart Palmer's The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933), Philip Wylie's "Death Flies East" (1934) and Agatha Christie's Death in the Air (1935). The vivid illustration that accompanies Wylie's story, showing the interior of the plane's cabin, would make an excellent cover for King's book as well. It helped me visualize the setting of King's novel. The illustration emphasizes that pilots of the era were armed, a fact made much of by King. Ostensibly, this was because they carried mail, and hence were officials of the US Government. But in reality, it seems to be contrived to make them authority figures during flight, and for the sake of image, along with their uniforms.

Obelists Fly High also has the fanatic ideologues of King's short stories. These extremely creepy characters generate horror from their participation in monstrous rituals and activities. But whereas the characters in Mr. Tarrant are members of fringe cults, those in Obelists Fly High are supporters of mainstream American belief systems: scientists. This gives the novel much more topicality and social punch, as well as controversy.

Michael Lord, King's series sleuth in his novels, has some features in common with other Van Dine school detectives. Like them he is New York City based. In many ways, he is related to the "genius amateur with personal connection to the police" of Van Dine's Philo Vance and EQ's Ellery Queen. He is a young policeman, not an amateur, but he owes his association with the police to his friendship with the Police Commissioner, just as Vance has a friendship with the DA, and Ellery is the son of Inspector Richard Queen. He is a wealthy, sophisticated young man whose father was the Commissioner's best friend. The Commissioner made him a Lieutenant, but his genius detective skills made him rise rapidly to the rank of Captain. He is a Special Officer attached to the staff of the Police Commissioner. As a social sophisticate attached to the police, he resembles Abbot's Thatcher Colt. Like Abbot, he is concerned with his leadership position. Lord's "I am in charge here" routine on the airplane in Obelists Fly High would make Al Haig blush. The Commissioner in King also resembles Colt in his insistence on saluting and other forms of discipline. However, like other authority figures in King, Lord manages to completely lose control of his turf. The novel opens with an Epilogue, showing how Lord has botched his case, and lost control of the airplane to an armed criminal. In fact his performance here is one of the least effective of all Golden Age detectives. Abbott has presumably been reading E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1912): in addition to the ineffectiveness of his detective hero, Lord manages to fall in love with his chief suspect, just like Trent, and his author explores multiple solutions, in the tradition of Bentley's novel. Lord's physical vulnerability is also related to the fact that he is a policeman: young men in uniform are always in the greatest danger in King's works. The young Army pilot in the novel also collapses.

Dorothy Stockbridge Tillett

The Man Who Killed Fortescue (1928). The early chapters (1-5) set up an intriguing and complex crime situation, set in the upper class world we are familiar with in S.S. Van Dine. The writing in the early chapters is delicate, and combines the Van Dine approach with romantic writing out of the "woman's fiction" tradition. The early chapters are, in fact, emotionally involving. Tillett is especially concerned with women and their fortune hunting boyfriends. At this point one is hoping that one has discovered a woman member of the Van Dine school, which as currently constituted seems to be all too much of a boy's club (Van Dine, Queen, Abbot, Palmer, King, Stout, to name them in their order of appearance), but it is not to be. Everything declines into dullness: the romance, the plot, the detection. At this stage of her career, the author had little detectival technique. The solution to the novel (Chapter 29), while fair, has fewer plot fireworks than just about any Golden Age detective novel one could name. However, this was her first book, and perhaps she developed a lot more later. To be continued ...

The Strangler Fig (1930) shows the same structure as The Man Who Killed Fortescue (1928). There is a crime in the past, one that is still mysterious and unsolved, and it triggers related crimes in the present. (The later Look Your Last (1943) has a similar two crime construction.) All events in the book are carefully dated. Bolivar Brown, the new sleuth of Fig, is a brilliant amateur. A lawyer, he likes to solve puzzles and problems. He is especially good at thinking. These are all traits of intuitionist school detectives.

Tillett's descriptive powers have grown. The early scenes (Chapters 1 - 3) presenting the island are a vivid piece of writing. Fig also shows Tillett's interest in rooms which are the scenes of crimes. They tend to be studies, and full of the personal and professional effects of the victims, and clues to their murder. People in Tillett's books like to look out upper story windows. They see large panoramas and vistas. They also watch processes develop from beginning to end. Unfortunately, after its opening The Strangler Fig also largely degenerates into a mechanically worked out story. Brown does little actual detection. Tillett does have an interest in social corruption, especially how large money interests do things that hurt society. Here it leads to the interesting discussion of the Neptune (Chapter 14).

Look Your Last (1943) is a combination spy and mystery novel, the sort that was popular during World War II. Its villains are members of Big Oil, and features a long historical look back to events in the 1930's, as well as the book's "present" of 1941. This sounds a lot more interesting than it is - the book is not very good. Its biggest problem: it seems to be a work of Communist propaganda. One character even rationalizes Stalin's purges of the 1930's as Stalin just cleaning out a few traitors and Nazi sympathizers! (Chapter 12.) The whole book is a similar bunch of hooey. The book also denies the reality of the Armenian massacres (Chapter 6) and suggests that every anti-Communist Russian and Ukrainian is a Nazi tool or worse (Chapter 8); both of these assertions would be challenged as nonsense by any disinterested historian. The book also denounces freedom of speech (Chapter 14), because it allows people to speak against Communism. Contemporary Marxists keep promoting the idea that much was lost when American Communist art of the 1930's and 1940's was banned in the 1950's. Well, here is an example of such art, and it is really trashy.

Rex Stout

Rex Stout's novels have a common basic pattern. There is some fairly upper class business, such as cooking, cattle breeding, or radio, in which most of the characters are employed. The characters are involved in a complex dispute, which leads to much negotiation and deal making. The deals are often changed and renegotiated, often with the help of detective Nero Wolfe. Interspersed with all of this is a mystery. The mystery plot has some simple trick solution, hopefully fairly clever. Starting in 1940, Stout also became a prolific author of mystery novellas, most of which were published in the slick American Magazine, or, after 1956, in the Saturday Evening Post.

Stout's strongest feature as a writer is his superb dialogue. This dialogue shows the influence of that in the S.S. Van Dine books. Both authors indulged in complex, point-counter-point dialogues. Behind both authors is the stichomythia in Greek drama - the ingenious line by line counterpointing dialog that is so brilliant in Aeschylus and other writers. Stout's storytelling can also be superb. Like Van Dine, he knows how to make a really interesting tale unfold.

Stout's weakest feature is his puzzle plotting. His novellas are often well plotted, but his novels seem much weaker. The best Wolfe novel I have yet read with a good mystery plot is Some Buried Caesar. This book also has some of Stout's best humor and characterization, as well as some of Stout's most resonant symbolism, as discussed above. It is universally admired as one of its author's finest works. So we can all agree on something... Stout's fiction has been much praised by top critics of the 1940's (Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr), and the 90's (Jon L. Breen, William L. DeAndrea). The recent paperback release of Stout contains glowing introductory tributes from dozens of mystery writers. So why can't I enjoy much of it? Stout's bad plotting drives me crazy. I work my way through many of his novels, and get nothing in return. The Tecumseh Fox novel, Double For Death (1939), is especially disappointing in this regard, as is And Be a Villain (1948). So far, the Stout novel I have most actively enjoyed on all levels, puzzle plot and storytelling, is Some Buried Caesar.

Also, there are some more idiosyncratic factors at work. All the fierce, unfriendly deal making in Stout's books is a big turn-off to me. I dislike purchasing something in an antique shop, or being involved in any situation where I have to negotiate a price with an antagonist out to get me. I just don't like adversarial situations. I never play combat-based computer games either. Adversarial negotiations have little to do with today's business world. Corporations are looking for people who are good at working with and supporting others on their team. Business negotiations center on trying to move toward win-win situations, coming up with creative ideas that benefit all parties. Antagonism is out, problem solving is in.

Two of the Wolfe novels are interesting for their look at racial integration. This is a subject of substance, and one of great personal interest to Stout. Too Many Cooks (1938) has a memorable encounter in Chapters 10 and 11, in which Nero Wolfe interrogates a group of black waiters. These chapters are an early expression of Civil Rights idealism in mystery fiction. Stout also wrote a sequel of sorts, many years later, in which one of the characters from the earlier book returns. A Right to Die (1964) is a lively look at the Civil Rights era, and shows good storytelling. But its puzzle plot is weak. A Right to Die develops an interesting pattern of personal relationships among its characters, that interacts with the political ideas and issues of the era. The pattern is creative, and helps make the book one of the most enjoyable of Stout's novels. Each character in the story has their own relationship to the murder victim, and their own political beliefs about Civil Rights; the political beliefs and the relationship are often connected. While many Stout novels focus on a business, this one centers on a Civil Rights organization, playing the same structural role in the novel as a business typically does in a Wolfe book. Please click here for a discussion of Civil Rights in Van Dine School Writers.

The Doorbell Rang (1965) is shorter than many of Stout's novels, and its technique seems more similar to his novellas than to that of his novels. The book is best in its first third (Chapters 1 - 5), when Wolfe is taking on the FBI. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the book is taken up by a poorly constructed murder mystery. Wolfe resumes his encounter with the FBI in the second half of Chapter 11 and Chapter 12, leading to some mildly ingenious comic fun.

Stout and the Van Dine School

Stout's basic paradigm is fairly similar to that of S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance books. One difference is that Wolfe and Archie are private detectives, whereas most Van Dine school sleuths are either genius amateurs who work with the police as unofficial consultants, or genius amateurs who have gone to work for the police. Wolfe is certainly an eccentric genius, in the full Van Dine tradition, but he is not an amateur. And his relations with the police, while close and sometimes collaborative, are also much less friendly than most Van Dine school detectives.

Van Dine often included collectors and enthusiasts in his tales. Examples are the dog lovers in The Kennel Murder Case (1932), the tropical fish lovers of The Dragon Murder Case (1933), the Egyptologists of The Scarab Murder Case (1929). Ellery Queen followed suit with the rare book lovers of many of his tales, and the stamp collectors of The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934). Stuart Palmer had the museum setting of "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933), and the dog show setting of "The Riddle of the Blueblood Murders" (1934). Rex Stout followed this Van Dine School tradition by using an orchid grower and/or flower show background for several of his works, including Some Buried Caesar (1938-1939), "Black Orchids" (1941), and "Easter Parade" (1957). There are also the expert chefs and gourmets of Too Many Cooks (1938) and "Poison à la Carte" (1958), and the fishing expedition of "Immune to Murder" (1955).

Van Dine often included bizarre, ingenious murder methods in his work. These occur frequently in Stout as well. The opening sections of a Stout mystery often depict a mystery against a colorful background. How the crime was committed is completely unclear. Eventually, Nero and Archie figure out the details of the bizarre murder method used. The solution to this problem is revealed almost at once, often around half way through the story, or even earlier. Throughout the rest of the tale, the focus is figuring out whodunit, the actual killer. This is revealed at the end of the story. This two part construction, figuring out the method of the murder in the first half, the identity of the killer in the second, occurs in such works as Some Buried Caesar (1938-1939), "Black Orchids" (1941), "Cordially Invited to Meet Death" (1942) and "Poison à la Carte" (1958). Stout often put his greatest creativity into the first half of these tales. Both the colorful background, and the mystery puzzle surrounding the hidden method of murder, are often brilliantly done. By contrast, the actual whodunit section in the second half tends to be much less ingenious. There is a different sort of two part construction in The Red Box (1936 - 1937). Stout solves one, preliminary mystery (Chapters 1 - 8), which immediately leads to a second mystery taking up the rest of the book (Chapters 8 - 20). Stout's writing in the first section is quite lively.

Van Dine's work emphasized the individual psychology of the characters; their diverse psychological profiles served as identifications of the killer. Some of Stout's novels focus especially on individual attributes, especially tastes and preferences. In the first half of The Red Box (1936 - 1937), the varying tastes of the individuals for different kinds of candy serves Wolfe as a window into the crime's mechanism. In And Be a Villain (1948), Wolfe looks at approaches to soft drinks.

It has become a truism of criticism that Stout's work is halfway between Golden Age writers like Van Dine, and hard-boiled writers like Hammett. According to this view, Wolfe is in the Van Dine tradition, whereas Archie is a hard-boiled detective like Sam Spade. I cannot agree with this point of view at all, however, and find little to support it. The social setting of Stout's fiction is consistently among the upper middle classes, as in the Van Dine school. We rarely if ever see the mobsters and toughs of the hard-boiled writers, nor are there underworld-run settings of nightclubs or casinos. There are few scenes of violence or brutality in Stout's fiction, although Archie on rare occasions indulges in fisticuffs (see "Bitter End", for instance, or "Death of a Demon"), and "This Won't Kill You" (1952) and The Golden Spiders (1953) have some genuine rough stuff, unlike most of Stout's work. In fact, it is the gratuitous middle section containing distasteful, gross violence that harms "This Won't Kill You", which otherwise has some well done plotting and clues. "This Won't Kill You" (1952) is the last novella Stout published, before the great run of his outstanding 1950's short works begins in 1953.

Stout's prose also has little in common with the hard-boiled writers. It has few metaphors or wisecracks, although Archie lets off some startling similes in "Black Orchids" (1941). Nor does Stout indulge in the ornate descriptive passages of the hard-boileds. One might also point out that Stout was not an alumnus of Black Mask magazine, unlike many hard-boiled authors. His Wolfe stories appeared in books and slick magazines right from the start. One can also question whether Archie really relates to the hard-boiled dicks of his era. He talks in a direct way, and has few pretensions as an All-American kind of guy. But he also seems much fresher and less cynical and hard-bitten than Sam Spade, for instance.

Stout's Antecedents

In the 1920's Vincent Starrett wrote a series about bookstore owner and armchair detective George Washington Troxell, who solves problems brought to him by police reporter Frederick "Fred" Dellabough. The article on Starrett describes how these tales might have served as a prototype for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Another possible precursor is R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke detective series, especially in its depiction of the quarters shared by Thorndyke, Jarvis and Polton. While Wolfe and Godwin are very different from Freeman's characters, Thorndyke's establishment is one of the largest in detective fiction before Wolfe's brownstone. Both are private detectives whose clients come to call, both do a lot of realistic negotiation with their clients, and Polton is almost as good at cooking as Wolfe's Fritz Brenner.

Stout had an early writing career in the 1910's, long before Nero Wolfe debuted in 1934. Recently the collection Target Practice (1998) reprinted his short fiction from All-Story, a pioneer pulp magazine. A few of these are crime stories. "Secrets" (1914), which the book's back cover describes as Stout's first crime short story, deals with a lawyer. The crime in the tale is embezzlement from a bank. This is a favorite subject of the early American Scientific school: it occurs in Jacques Futrelle's "The Man Who Was Lost" (circa 1906), Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1907), and Clinton H. Stagg's "The Keyboard of Silence" (collected in book form in 1915). The use of a painter as a character also recalls Futrelle. Stout's work has some similarities to the American Scientific School. His detective Nero Wolfe is a genius, like Futrelle's detective the Thinking Machine and Arthur B. Reeve's scientist-sleuth Craig Kennedy. Wolfe has some interest in science, as an orchid grower, and science sometimes plays a role in the Wolfe stories, especially animals and mathematics. The use of individual psychology in Stout's novels recalls the word association tests favored by the Scientific school. Wolfe works as a private detective on a consulting basis, just like the Thinking Machine, Craig Kennedy, Thornley Colton, and other of the school's detectives. He tends to deal with crimes that center around business, and less around the personal lives of his characters. The characters represent the upper levels of finance, industry, and public life, just as in Arthur B. Reeve and the others. Stout's technique of having Archie gather all the suspects together for the big finale also derives from Arthur B. Reeve, who is the earliest writer known to me using this device: it is regularly used in Reeve's first collection of Craig Kennedy tales, The Silent Bullet (1911). Other Stout features recalling Reeve: the way Wolfe listens in on conversations, reminding one of Reeve tales with listening devices. An episode in Fer-de-lance (1934), the first Nero Wolfe novel, recalls the plot of Reeve's "The Black Diamond".

One does not want to carry this relation between the Scientific School and Stout too far. The other main mystery work in Target Practice, the novella "Justice Ends at Home" (1915), has as its amateur detective not a scientist, but middle aged lawyer Simon Leg and his 20 year old office boy Dan Culp. The back of the book also points out that these could be rough sketches for Wolfe and Archie. Leg is as lazy as Wolfe: having inherited money he wants to sit around all day reading adventure stories, just as Wolfe loves orchids and food. However, he is a lot more good natured than Wolfe, and far less brainy. The real detective genius of the pair is Dan Culp. This likable young man does a lot of energetic leg work, just like Archie, and it is this vigorous detective work that is the stories' focus. There are some good ideas about a cinema in Chapter 6. The novella is very readable, but the puzzle plot is obvious, and the story can only be recommended to people curious about Stout's evolution as a writer. Among the tale's other merits: a look at corruption and "influence" being brought to bear on the police authorities of the era - such frank looks at civic corruption being part of the American Scientific School's traditions.

Ritual Sacrifice

A persistent theme in Rex Stout's stories is the ritualistic sacrifice. This ritual has associations with ancient fertility rites such as the Dionysius cult. For example, Some Buried Caesar (1938-1939) opens with the bull Caesar about to undergo the equivalent of being ritually sacrificed, and eaten. In "Help Wanted, Male", Nero Wolfe himself is to be assassinated, and he hires a double, no less, to stand in for him, as the target of assassination attempts. The story makes a good deal of macabre comedy out of the situation. But it still involves someone who is deliberately chosen to be the target of a sacrificial death. In "Curtain Line", an actor playing a famous detective is killed. He is in fact being murdered in an attempt to symbolically kill the fictional detective he portrays. The novel Prisoner's Base (1952) also deals disturbingly in a public attempt to kill someone. The League of Frightened Men (1935) involves a student injured during a fraternity hazing ritual - another example of the invocation of ritual in these killings.

There is another element in many of these stories of ritual sacrifice. It is an emphasis on the large number of people who will participate. In Caesar, the bull's flesh will be fed to the masses at a chain of cheap eateries, with the experience amplified by all that modern publicity can do. "Curtain Line" stresses that the fictional detective has 40 million fans. In And Be A Villain (1948), the victim is killed in front of a nationwide radio audience. As in the Dionysius story, and other ancient myths, the sacrifice is participated in, and benefits, the entire nation. The people as a whole take part in it.

Champagne for One (1958) also has elements of a public murder. Even before that, the opening scenes depict a party with many aspects of a fertility ritual. This formal society dinner party embodies all the rituals of that strangely elaborate social protocol. These are combined with an unusual asymmetry between the men and women guests. In many ways, the men are on display here as potential romantic partners to the women, and vice versa. This gives an odd and interesting effect to all the ritual. The institution with the women recalls the female factory in "Bitter End" (1940), and its comparison to a maternity ward. The romantic exhibition of the men, including Archie, who are their most polished and suave here, also recalls tales such as "A Window For Death" (1956), and Archie's friendship with Arrow. Archie clearly enjoys taking part in this refined ritual exhibition. The novel demonstrates Stout's abilities to create unique situations, ones loaded with symbolic resonance. The book also has a creative puzzle plot, one with aspects of the impossible crime. Once again, Stout shows ingenuity is showing how an inexplicable crime was actually done. The dinner party and the women's institution recall a bit Hulbert Footner's The House With the Blue Door (1942), while the actual murder is somewhat in the tradition of Ellery Queen's Calamity Town (1942). The book's subject matter, an ingenious poisoning, with a dinner party set-up, also resembles Stout's novella "Poison à la Carte" (1958) written immediately after Champagne for One, although the two works' puzzle plots are quite different..

Stout's Short Fiction of the Early 1940's

Stout's first Nero Wolfe novella was "Bitter End" (1940). This was an adaptation of the Tecumseh Fox novel, Bad For Business (1940), with Nero and Archie substituted as detectives. While the puzzle plot is ordinary, the story is oddly compelling reading. The family relationships that are set up seem genuinely bizarre and strange. The horrifying relationships of the family in the tale even penetrate to the all male refuge of Wolfe's brownstone in the novella's opening, as family problems invade Wolfe's retreat.

The opening of the story echoes Some Buried Caesar (1939) in dealing with the mass production of food. The manufacture of the food, in an antiquated factory run entirely by women, is compared to a maternity ward by Stout. This bizarre production of food-as-children in the first half of the story is echoed by the real and even more bizarre child raising practices in the second half. The deliberate spoiling of the food seems rather analogous to the sacrifice of the bull in Caesar. It also anticipates the rejection of the child in the second part of the story. The architecture of the factory also seems interesting, with tunnels for trucks leading in and out representing the female body. The idea of a female factory symbolizing the reproductive process recalls Herman Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids" (1855), which describes a paper factory. There are important differences between Melville and Stout as well, however: Stout seems to deal more with the actual creation and raising of children, whereas Melville's imagery reflects sexuality. Melville's tale tends to depersonalize the people caught in it, whereas Stout's work heightens his characters' unique personalities.

"Not Quite Dead Enough" (1942) includes one of Stout's best puzzle plots. He returned to the mood of this story in two novellas he wrote in early 1959, "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo" and "Counterfeit for Murder". "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo" has another fine puzzle plot in the tradition of "Not Quite Dead Enough". It also shows good storytelling throughout. "Counterfeit for Murder" is weak in the puzzle plot department, but its characters have charm. Both "Counterfeit" and "Not Quite Dead Enough" have a similar setting, a cheap but respectable rooming house run by a crusty old landlady. The denizens of these houses are among the few financially strapped groups of suspects in Stout's work; he tended to write about upper middle class New Yorkers, in the Van Dine tradition. Even here, however, in "Counterfeit for Murder", the characters are all theatrical types, and preserve the intellectual character of the Van Dine school.

I'm not sure whether to recommend "Booby Trap" (1944) or not. The central puzzle plot is completely ordinary. It is one of those tales in which Wolfe finds the killer, not through logical deduction from clues, but by setting a trap for the killer. This sort of thing violates fair play; logically, the killer could have been any one of the six suspects in the tale, and there is nothing to suggest one over the other. However, the subsidiary mysteries in "Booby Trap" are all quite clever. Stout derives many paradoxes from the military setting; this is one of the few works of his that has such a background.

Stout was an ardent patriot, who spent the war years doing public service on the war effort. Yet he is quite skeptical about the military. He depicts it as an institution riddled with both politics and corruption. This is the point of view that will be found later in Lawrence G. Blochman's service tales. Stout's point of view seems to stem from a suspicion of the rich and powerful in all areas. Since such people tend toward corruption, he logically deduces that they will be equally corrupt when put in charge of the Armed Forces. Stout's politics can be described as liberal, but definitely not radical. After the war, in the late 1940's, Stout will be just as savagely critical of the Communist far left as he was of fascists and appeasers during the war. This anti-Communist stance also anticipates Blochman, and his work of the 1950's.

If Stout was critical of high level Army officials, he was fascinated by the way the Army was run. He clearly loved the uniforms, the saluting, and all the military and Intelligence ethos. His attitude echoed that of the 1940's American public, who regarded such things with similar enthusiasm, almost as a new toy. By the 1960's, such things will be unfashionable with the general public, and much ridiculed. Stout was plainly thrilled to put Archie in uniform, and give him an officer's rank. This is the closest Archie gets to an independent life in any of the tales. It is also the most recognition Archie gets from society as a person of ability. There will be a little of the same effect again, when Archie goes out on a solo social outing at the start of Champagne for One (1958), and gets involved in a murder mystery. The tuxedo that Archie and the other men wear is referred to metaphorically as a uniform.

Many of the transitional novellas Stout wrote in the late 1940's and early 1950's are not that good. But "The Cop-Killer" (1951) is a solid work, with a well hidden plot idea in its solution. Like "Too Many Detectives" (1956), the plot focuses on the "economy of knowledge", showing how information is passed around. Several of Stout's puzzle plots involve such an intricate dance of knowledge. The milieu, a barbershop, is far more working class than much of Stout's fiction.

The Mid 1950's Novellas

Stout had a period of excellent short story writing in the mid 50's, starting in 1953. The puzzle plots of his novellas grew stronger. Even a minor but pleasant piece like "A Window For Death" (1956) has a decent if easily guessable plot; it also has a good character in Johnny Arrow. The friendship that develops between Arrow and Archie is a welcome addition to Archie's world. This story, like "Die Like a Dog" and "Too Many Detectives", also shows Stout becoming sensitized to women's issues.

The sheer amount of mystery in a novella like "Invitation to Murder" (1953) is notable. It starts out with a mystery being proposed to Wolfe to solve: which one of three women is having an affair with a millionaire? It moves on to add a murder mystery. Then a third mystery question is introduced. Finally, during Wolfe's solution, his chain of deductions results in a fourth mystery being briefly dangled before the reader. This plethora of mysterious situations in very satisfying. The story also shows Stout's flair for buildings which are more than homes, and also have elements of an institution. Wolfe's brownstone is one such establishment, and the Huck home in this novella is another, one than echoes Wolfe's in subtle ways: both have elevators, both have elaborate arrangements about kitchens and food, both have studies in which Wolfe propounds his solutions.

Stout brought back some of his prewar non-Wolfe detectives, such as his woman private eye Doll Bonner, and Alphabet Hicks, including the former in his Nero Wolfe series. "Too Many Detectives" (1956), with Bonner, has an Ellery Queen like approach to its puzzle plotting, complete with such EQ traits as: a deductive finale; the solution subtly emerges from an in-depth investigation of circumstances; it focuses on what people knew and could not have known, just like EQ's The French Powder Mystery (1930); and a plot whose pattern comes with many surrealist echoes and repetitions. Even the choice of villain is in a Queen tradition. But the style and storytelling of this tale is sweetly Stout's own.

If "Too Many Detectives" is Stout's Ellery Queen tale, then "The Next Witness" (1955) is his Erle Stanley Gardner and Perry Mason story. While the puzzle plot is easily guessed, the storytelling has charm, and one likes the courtroom background of part of the tale. It is very unusual for a courtroom story not to have a lawyer for a protagonist, but Stout pulls it off. Stout's interest in legal ideas is continued in the next two tales, "Immune to Murder" and "Too Many Detectives". The opening of "Detectives" also builds upon some plot ideas in the opening of "The Next Witness".

When Ellery Queen reprinted "Die Like A Dog" (1954), he retitled it "A Dog in the Daytime". This is a clever allusion to "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time", a quote from "Silver Blaze" (1892), my favorite Sherlock Holmes story. The story has often been reprinted under this title, but it does not seem to be Stout's official name for the story. "Dog" shows Stout's fondness for animals. It also has some very good plotting, with a complex mystery situation becoming gradually unveiled, in the Anna Katherine Green style. Along with Some Buried Caesar, it is Stout's best mystery work. It seems significant that both of these outstanding pieces have animal backgrounds. Stout is also good with stories that deal with Wolfe's beloved orchids, such as "Easter Parade" (1957). This latter story reminds us that S. S. Van Dine liked to experiment with unusual murder methods; Stout's version of the same sometimes involves mechanical contraptions. Such strange devices show up here and in the first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-lance (1934).

Some of the other stories in And Four To Go have merits, and almost made the list of recommended stories above. "Christmas Party" (1957) has some good ideas in its opening sections, especially dealing with Archie and Wolfe's relationship, but its later mystery elements become routine. "Murder Is No Joke" (1957) is pleasant reading. The weakest of the tales is the uninspired "Fourth of July Picnic" (1957).

The opening of Plot It Yourself (1959) (Chapters 1 - 4) is essentially a short story, which contains a nice mystery about a crime not involving murder. After this, the book becomes much less inventive. With its series of crimes, and a search for hidden structure, the opening resembles an Ellery Queen style plot.

Stout, Math and Processes

"The Zero Clue" (1953) doesn't fully click as a mystery, but many of its plot ideas show imagination. It is one of Stout's few "dying message" mysteries. Everything in this tale is based on mathematics. The story's ideas about using probability to uncover knowledge are beginning to come true in real life, with such modern computer techniques as neural networks and database mining. The story is ahead of its time: almost a piece of science fiction. Another mathematical story is "Poison à la Carte" (1958), the first three chapters of which involve permutation theory. Chapter 5 of the novella goes into a more vivid illustration of the mathematics involved. These chapters describe an interesting investigation into a murder mystery. Unfortunately, here murder leaves off and misogyny takes over, with the latter sections of the novella showing little real detection.

Despite all the talk about food in the Wolfe stories, there is little actual description of eating, or of food as a sensuous experience. Stout is much more oriented to the act of preparing the meal: setting the menu, getting the ingredients, cooking, and serving the food. It is this whole preparation process that intrigues Stout. Food descriptions in Stout tend to focus on the ingredients. We read about mango ice cream, or steamed fish with a sauce made of mussels and mushrooms. These descriptions are more recipes, descriptions of how the food is made, than they are of what the food tastes like.

Stout in general is a process oriented writer. His stories are full of processes, from methods of detection, to Archie's repeated challenge of gathering together the suspects, which is always described in detail. In The Black Mountain (1954), the most enjoyable part of the story is the process of getting Nero and Archie from the US to Montenegro (Chapters 4 - 6). In "Poison", the whole crime and the events surrounding it turn out to be one large process. They are integrated together in one single pattern. By process, I mean a step by step series of events that take place in time; this is similar to what the artificial intelligence researcher Roger Schank calls a script.

Dol Bonner

Stout wrote stories about detectives other than Nero Wolfe. These include a single novel about a woman private detective, Dol Bonner. Dol Bonnor is not hard-boiled; she solves crimes among the upper middle classes, just like Wolfe, and in many ways is his female counterpart.

The Hand in the Glove (1937) is an unpleasant book. This is due to the relationships of the characters, who are both full of guilty secrets, and given to lying to each other about their romantic relationships. Because of this, a nightmarish anxiety hangs over the work. Few people ever speak up and are honest with each other, and when they do the results are so traumatic they are not to be born. The character of the servant De Roche recalls Stout's early story "Sanétomo" (1915), but without the intelligently sympathetic presentation of that tale.

All of this does not do justice to Stout's detective heroine Dol Bonner, who is far and away the most interesting character in the story. She is an exemplary feminist, battling male authority figures for her right to be a detective. Stout makes clear all the opposition she has to face from men in the book, and her intelligence, courage and principled resistance to their oppression in struggling to perform as a detective. Dol does not wimp out. She consistently shows intelligence in solving the crime, and successfully performs all the detection in the book, with little help from either the police or men associates. Dol Bonner is shown at her best in Chapters 4 - 10. These are the sections describing the initial investigation of the crime. These are also the best mystery plot chapters of the book. Like many Stout works, we see how the crime was committed in the first half of the book, and then, often anticlimatically, who did it in the second half. The Hand in the Glove adheres to this pattern. Chapters 4 - 10 set forth the "how dun it" of the crime. This material is nowhere as clever as such later Stout howdunits as "Black Orchids" or Some Buried Caesar, but it still makes interesting reading. Unfortunately Stout never brought Dol back for a second case, although she makes cameo appearances in some Nero Wolfe stories. She remains a good character in what is largely a bad book.

Dol Bonner's office, like Wolfe's, is full of brightly colored furniture. We are also informed of the materials from which it is made. It is as if Stout is appealing to all the senses to make this place real.

Rufus King

The other King was a prolific novelist, playwright, and short story writer in the Van Dine school, whose career stretched from the 1920's to the 1960's. I have only read a little of his work so far. Some of it seems to be fair play, puzzle plot detective stories.

King had a vivid writing style, with colorful characters, events, and images. He was clearly a born writer. "The Weapon That Didn't Exist" (1926) shows a special exuberance in its allusion filled prose. It also has a nice puzzle plot. The star of this tale is King's series detective Reginald De Puyster, who is clearly related to Philo Vance. It is hard to tell at this date, who came first, Vance or De Puyster. The first Vance book appeared in 1926, the same year as De Puyster apparently appeared in short stories in magazines. Both men are verbally witty sophisticates. King's later series detective, Lt. Valcour, is much more down to earth, but similar sophisticates appear as suspects in some of the Valcour novels, such as Dumarque in Murder by Latitude (1930). The clever, arch repartee ascribed to Dumarque seems especially Philo Vance like. De Puyster was spoofed by Isaac Asimov, no less, in his story "Author! Author!" (1943), a fantasy which focuses on a mystery writer whose fictional detective Reginald de Meister comes to life. Asimov's basic situation has been much imitated by later writers and filmmakers.

The Fatal Kiss Mystery (1924, 1928) is a misleading title. The story is not a mystery at all; it is a whimsical science fiction novel about a young scientist who transports people to another dimension. There is much romance involving Bright Young Things in the 1920's sophisticated style. The whole book seems paper thin and largely uninspired. Chapter 2 has an interesting introduction of his hero.

Lieutenant Valcour

After De Puyster, King created New York police Lieutenant Valcour, and starred him in a series of 11 novels from 1928 to 1939. King was formed as a mystery writer before Van Dine, unlike most of the Van Dine school, so he is less close to Van Dine than are such younger writers who followed in Van Dine's footsteps such as Anthony Abbot, Ellery Queen, and so on. In addition to characters who recall Philo Vance, other similarities of King's Valcour novels to Van Dine include unusual, hard to detect murder methods, a setting among New York's upper crust, elaborate, novel length storytelling, a tragic tone, complex literary style and well constructed dialogue. Differences include less of an interest in pure detection: Valcour seems less relentlessly focused on detective investigations than are Philo Vance, Thatcher Colt or Ellery Queen. There is considerable emphasis on the emotional life of King's suspects, often at the expense of the mystery plot. The overwrought emotionalism of the opening chapters of Valcour Meets Murder (1932) even recalls the Had I But Known school. Some of King's stories show a tendency to degenerate from mystery tales into thrillers, for example, Murder by the Clock (1928-1929).

Valcour Meets Murder (1932) opens with a "biography" of King's series sleuth, Lt. Valcour. Valcour is French Canadian, and the son of an émigré French police officer. The biography states that Valcour was trained in the "brilliantly" intuitive methods of the French police. It explicitly contrasts these with the "plodding detailed routine" of British police officers. I have no idea if there is the slightest real life accuracy to these images, but they certainly do reflect the intuitionist / realist divide in 1930's mystery fiction. King is allied with the Van Dine school, and hence is a confirmed intuitionist. Here he is explicitly disassociating himself from the plodding approach of the British Realist School, then immensely prestigious. King has gone so far as to make his detective of French ancestry, to suggest an intuitionist affiliation for his hero. Similarly, such intuitionist detectives as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin, and T.S. Stribling's Henry Poggioli, were made non-WASPs. Christie was directly inspired by Gaston Leroux's French novel Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907) when she created Hercule Poirot, and there clearly was an association in the minds of intuitionist school writers between French culture and intuitionist methods. Carr's first novel, It Walks by Night (1930) also mentions Leroux. At the end of Chapter 11 of It Walks By Night, Bencolin also explicitly denounces the routinely plodding investigator. He says that this is a terrible ideal. Here he is speaking as the (fictional) head of the Paris police. He also satirizes the tough guy world of American civic corruption. Bencolin does not mention nationalities when discussing the plodding investigator, but he views the French approach as different from these.

The Valcour Novels

Murder by the Clock (1928-1929) is best in its well written first half (Chapters 1 - 13). The first chapter, in which wealthy and beautiful Mrs. Endicott summons Valcour to her home, mix flirtation and mystery with the sort of double meanings at which King excelled. This is one of many passages in King, written from a woman's point of view, in which she thinks about romance. Some later passages are almost science fictional. They are not believable, but they aren't dull, either. King's apprenticeship as an sf writer shows here.

After its vividly written opening, this book declines in interest. This is one of several Valcour novels which largely deal with the denizens of a single house, most of whom are decidedly odd. Valcour spends a lot of time interviewing them, and trying to understand their abnormal psychology. I confess I do not enjoy such characters, and find this sort of King novel generally dull.

Murder by Latitude (1930) is a whodunit, but it is not especially fair play: there is not a single clue that would let the reader identify the killer. It is well written, however, and there is a small surprise twist in the solution. The book has a sustained atmosphere, and is interesting reading throughout. This shipboard novel lacks the high spirits one might associate with cruises. Instead it is mournful and elegiac in tone. It has a tragic quality, and reminds one of Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Much of the novel involves mourning for the first victim, a member of the ship's crew. Especially close to him was a sailor on the ship. Also, a woman among the passengers was touched as well. These elegiac passages are written in King's most lyrical style. They alternate with descriptions of the sea and sailing, also written with poetic vividness. This mixture of descriptions of the sea with more philosophical material seems especially Melville like. Also like Melville, King had been a sailor in real life: The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection says that he was a ship's radio operator circa 1920, just like the first victim in Latitude. Presumably that book's portrait of ship board life is based on King's personal experience.

King's early Valcour novels are full of water imagery: the sea and the wet fogs in Murder by Latitude, and the rain, dew and flooded rivers and bogs in Valcour Meets Murder. Liquids are often referred to by him as well: ink, tap water, creams, drinks, wax. King's novels are full of abstract imagery, used to describe mental processes or emotions, and this imagery is full of references to fluids, too: tears, lakes, rain, protoplasm, jelly, and words like "floating" or "drenching".

Murder by Latitude seems to show a gay sensibility. The first murder victim, and his close sailor friend, seem to be a loving couple in the Melville sense. Dumarque notices other men's looks. And the women in the novel who are attracted to men are perhaps surrogates for men with gay feelings.

Murder on the Yacht (1932) collapses after a promising beginning. It tries to repeat the success of Murder by Latitude, with a ship-board setting and an important role once again played by the radio operators of the ship. However, the plot and the writing both become less interesting as the novel progresses. Also, one of the characters is racially stereotyped. This is a rare lapse for King, whose books are usually free from prejudice. By contrast, Murder by the Clock ridicules racial prejudice, with Valcour distancing himself in disgust from racial "jokes" popular then. There are also brief spoofs of the "foreign" villains so popular in cheap crime stories of the day.

The Lesser Antilles Murder Case (1934) is another shipboard mystery. It is a pure puzzle plot tale, with a fairly elaborate solution in the Golden Age style. Unfortunately, the solution manages to be both easily guessed and preposterous. The writing is much thinner and less stylish than Murder by Latitude, and the characters are not likable either. It is one of King's least enjoyable books. The plot does anticipate some of John Dickson Carr's books. The diving sequence here anticipates a better and more elaborate one in King's Holiday Homicide (1940). In both books, the diving is both exciting in its own right, and woven into the mystery or detection plot.

The victim here seems to be one of a middle aged gay couple, although we see very little of their relationship. Such gay characters recur throughout King's writing. They are rarely if ever explicitly labeled as gay, but they are often elaborately characterized, and easily recognized today.

The Case of the Constant God (1937) is one of King's hybrid suspense and mystery novels. It is unusually downbeat, and is not much fun to read.

Murder Masks Miami (1939) is the last Valcour novel. It is a genuine who done it, not a thriller, and is exceptionally readable. Murder Masks Miami is just plain fun. When mystery fans say they would like to read a Golden Age mystery novel, this is the sort of book they are talking about. This book is a formal detective novel, like King's next novel, Holiday Homicide (1940). Why a writer who so often strayed away from Golden Age norms should suddenly adhere so closely to the formal mystery is not clear. Still, I think it has made for one of King's most entertaining novels. King has mastered the mystery art of telling a story backwards. Each scene unearths some new hidden facts about the characters and the plot, and the book gradually reveals the whole story of their relationships, and what took place during the crimes. The ultimate solution does not contain any great ingenuity, although it does have a small twist. It is plausible and emotionally satisfying, however. The book takes place in a vacation area near Miami, and is pleasantly escapist. King writes with tremendous verve, and is in his more upbeat mode. There is a great deal of romance and soap opera about the characters' loves, all of which is closely integrated into the mystery plot, so it is not a digression from the main detective work. Once again, the heroine's longing for the good looking life guard can be seen as an expression of gay feeling. The ambiguity surrounding the life guard - he is a suspect in the story, along with everyone else, and could be the killer - seems like a referendum on the validity of such longings. The book keeps one in suspense till the end about how this affair will turn out. Valcour himself invites a young male security guard to breakfast, thus dropping some broad clues about his own sexual orientation. There is a definite party like aspect to this scene. If Murder by Latitude was King's tragic gay novel, Murder Masks Miami is his comic one. By the way, the title of the story is never explained in the book. The title has plenty of alliterative punch, and is very suggestive in its imagery. But what is being masked, or how murder does it, is not made clear.

Holiday Homicide

King's Holiday Homicide (1940) introduces two new sleuths, high priced private detective Cotton Moon, and his secretary-assistant-narrator, Bert Stanley. The two are direct clones of Nero Wolfe and Archie Godwin, and the novel as a whole is a pastiche of Rex Stout. Moon is a pleasant character; instead of raising orchids, like Wolfe, he collects rare nuts. The novel might be best read with a copy of Edwin A. Menninger's Edible Nuts of the World (1977) on hand: a fun book, by the way. This zany hobby is typical of the book's tongue in cheek approach: nothing is ever completely serious here. King's pastiche of Archie Godwin is especially good. King has caught Archie's bemused, intelligent, slightly smart alecky tone of narration very closely. He has combined this tone with his own vivid writing style, to make a very interesting synthesis. These descriptions include King's interest in rich concoctions, such as food, perfumes, and fluids. King also uses his examination of conventional story telling ideas here, constantly turning over stock phrases and situations, commenting on them all the while - this is an early use of a technique that will reach its apogee in King's "The Faces of Danger" (1960). Since Archie is also a somewhat sardonic observer of the human scene King can fuse his own meta-narrative approach with Archie's common man take on the well to do world about him. Bert is a bit more bitchy than Archie usually is, in keeping with the campier tone of King's fiction.

While Holiday Homicide is well written, it has problems as a puzzle plot. There is no fair play: Moon identifies the killer because he discovers the killer's fingerprints at a crime scene. This clue is not shared with the reader, and there is no logical way for the reader to deduce who the killer is. Nor is the mystery's solution especially clever. It does succeed in making a logical story out of the book's scramble of events and clues, and this shows a bit of ingenuity. Holiday Homicide has a similar status as Murder by Latitude in King's career. Both books are 1) genuine whodunits, not suspense novels; 2) lack fair play in their solutions; 3) are well written, with special gifts of prose style and verbal adroitness; 4) show good storytelling.

The Medical Mysteries: Dr. Colin Starr

While King was reaching new heights with the traditional formal mystery tale, he also created another new sleuth, Dr. Colin Starr. Starr appeared only in short stories, not novels, and mainly solved mysteries with medical clues. This links him to a long series of medical sleuths, notably R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke, Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton, Theodora Du Bois' Dr. Jeffrey McNeill, George Harmon Coxe's Dr. Paul Standish, and Lawrence G. Blochman's Dr. Coffee. The earliest cases were collected in Diagnosis: Murder (1939 - 1941); there are also later, uncollected tales, some of which were reprinted in EQMM and The Saint Mystery Magazine. Many of the medical mystery ideas show ingenuity. However, they are not always fair play; King does not always share clues with the reader. However, the tales make interesting reading anyway. The titles of the tales use Perry Mason conventions: they tend to begin with "The Case of", then have an alliterative adjective and noun.

The Starr tales take place among the country club set of a small Ohio town. These rich people are mainly dedicated to l'amour. King perfects the tone here he will later use in his South Florida short stories, of love affairs wryly narrated, and set among the luxurious homes and clubs of the well to do. The stories are rich in color, and a sensuous feel. The third person narrator maintains a tone of sly cynicism in describing these affairs. This Ohio town is near many rivers, and the presence of water also anticipates the Florida Gold Coast setting of the later short stories.

Diagnosis: Murder also contains the less interesting "The Case of the Lonely Ladies". This fairly long novella is written in a different style from the rest of the Starr tales, grim and not much fun.

The Later Suspense Novels

Design in Evil. Design in Evil (1942) is the first of King's non-series thrillers, after he abandoned the formal detective novel with Holiday Homicide (1940).

The early chapters (1 - 13) are well written, with King showing in detail the trap that confronts his heroine. These chapters show King's feel for sailing material, taking place on a sea going yacht. Unfortunately, the book as a whole is flat. Design in Evil is in the tradition of the "innocent young woman forced into a new identity" school. It follows such pioneering works as Helen McCloy's The Dance of Death (1938), and Anthony Gilbert's The Woman in Red (1941), the latter being made into a superb film directed by Joseph H. Lewis, My Name is Julia Ross (1945). The story is never plausible, unless everyone is in on this bizarre plot; yet King wants only one person to be guilty, and everyone else to be an innocent dupe.

The later sections of the book contain a murder mystery. However, there are only two serious suspects, and the mystery is never developed into an interesting or even very elaborate plot.

King indicates that Joseph Conrad is one of his hero's favorite authors (Chapter 15). It certainly makes sense that King admires Conrad: both were sailors in real life, and wrote frequently about the sea, and both men wrote rich descriptive prose.

King is of two minds about psychiatry, then becoming unfortunately fashionable in the media. Psychiatry is treated as a serious science, and yet the older psychiatrist is the book is shown as a completely mistaken dupe. This is at least more skeptical than the religious reverence with which psychiatry was usually held in this era.

The Case of the Dowager's Etchings. During the 1940's, King published a number of mystery and suspense novels without continuing series characters. One of the better of these is The Case of the Dowager's Etchings (1943). This is a light hearted escapade, mainly notable for the charm of its storytelling and its vivid writing. It does not have a great puzzle plot, but it is fun to read. Dowager shows signs of influence from Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1907), which also deals with a well to do elderly woman sleuth's slightly comic but thrilling adventures with murder and detection in her mansion, mainly nocturnal. King's novel also has a thriller finale in the top floor of the mansion, just like Rinehart's book. Just as Rinehart's spinster has to help out her niece, who is involved with the case and covering up what she knows, so does King's sleuth have to aid her grandson. King's stories do not partake of the characteristics of the later HIBK novels of the Rinehart school, however - they do not seriously look at personal relationships, for example, or maintain a solemn tone. One suspects that King might have been familiar with Rinehart's plot in the form of its stage adaptation, The Bat (1920): his next book, The Deadly Dove, also shows signs of influence from The Bat.

Among King's works, The Case of the Dowager's Etchings (1943) and "The Faces of Danger" (1960) are the same kind of story. Both are an unusual combination of the thriller and the mystery story. Many mystery stories have elements of suspense or adventure; this is not the sort of combination we are talking about here. Instead, it is a question of knowledge, and when it is revealed to the reader. In these King tales, several of the villains and their schemes are identified right away, and shown to the reader. The reader knows these people are up to no good, and knows that they are menacing the good characters in the story. However, the reader does not know all the details of their schemes - these aspects will be hidden, and only emerge much later, at or near the solution. In addition, there is a murder in the story, treated as a full puzzle plot mystery. The reader is not told who did the murder, or why. There is also a detective in the tale, as well as amateur detection by the good characters; at the end of the story, these detectives will solve the murder, reveal the killer, and reveal all about the villains' schemes. The whole tale is a combination of two types of story. The villains and how they menace the innocent characters are right out of a non -puzzle plot thriller, a melodrama where all is known to the reader as the story goes along, and where there is an exciting confrontation between good and evil. Combined with this is a classical murder mystery.

In addition to their unusual, shared form, both stories have similarity of approach. Both have well to do female protagonists who live in a large mansion. Both stories have a tone of escapist adventure - many of the melodramatic elements of the tale form an exciting adventure story for their protagonists. Both stories have much comedy, and are light hearted in feel, despite all the melodrama they contain. Both contain elements of international intrigue - not surprising in a work like Dowager written and set during World War II.

King's works of the 1940's show an interest in art. The Dr. Starr tales refer to paintings of the Hudson River School, while Dowager refers to Bougereau. These are realist painters of the 19th Century, artists who preceded the modernist movement, and took absolutely no part in it. One might contrast King's taste with Stuart Palmer - his Cold Poison (1954) refers to such modernist painters as Klee, Picasso and Dali. King's references in both cases are designed to illustrate the contents of old mansions, buildings whose art was acquired a long time ago by their occupants' ancestors. Under these circumstances, fairly old movements in art are most appropriate. King's comments show considerable sophistication about art.

Dowager also contains some self referential comments on the mystery field. His protagonist is thinking of Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (1844), and is not sure whether it was written by Poe or Gaboriau. Once again, this is a very 19th Century sort of reference.

The Deadly Dove. The Deadly Dove (1944 - 1945) shows signs of being adapted from a stage play. Most of the action occurs in one location that could easily be a stage set: the morning room of a large country house. Dialogue is featured heavily, as in a play, and much of it consists of fancy repartee that would have worked well on the Broadway stage of the 1940's. One guesses that either King adapted this novel from a stage play he wrote previously, or he wrote the novel with a future stage adaptation in mind.

The Deadly Dove is the sort of middling work that is hard to evaluate. The book is well written, and full of dark humor. But it is nothing as a puzzle plot, and many of the characterizations are minor. I enjoyed reading it, but am afraid to recommend it because I'm not sure if anyone else would like it. It is definitely one of King's minor works.

The Deadly Dove is in roughly the same genre as The Bat (1920), Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood's adaptation of Rinehart's The Circular Staircase. Both works are set in the living room of a country mansion, both contain a diverse group of characters who are menaced by a mysterious professional criminal who wanders in and out of the spooky mansion. The hit man here, the Dove, even has the same sort of winged animal nickname as the criminal the Bat. Both works mix comedy and thrills. The owner of the mansion is a sixty year old woman, just as in The Bat, and her niece and the niece's boyfriend also play roles in the plot here, just as in the earlier play. King's novel even mentions Avery Hopwood by name, as the leading light of an earlier era of Broadway theater. One wonders if King had met Hopwood in gay circles earlier - Hopwood was certainly gay, and one strongly suspects that King was. Hopwood lived the sort of bon vivant life style on the Riviera often aspired to by King's characters.

The characters in The Deadly Dove are much nastier and more murderous than Rinehart and Hopwood's innocents. Also, the story has little of the earlier authors' gift for ingenious plotting.

Museum Piece No 13. King's "biography" of Valcour also associates the French school with an interest in psychology; the article on Ernest M. Poate discusses this further. King's work sometimes dealt with characters who suffered psychological abnormalities. These were not the foaming at the mouth serial killers of today; instead they were troubled by the Freudian oriented psychodramas of 1940's noir. One of the best film noir thrillers of the 40's, Fritz Lang's Secret Behind the Door (1948), was based on King's novel Museum Piece No 13 (1946). A woman marries in haste, only to discover that her husband has this psychological problem... The problem is G rated, but boy is it a doozie. (This is the sort of over the top 1940's psychoanalysis that was spoofed by Steve Martin and Carl Reiner in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.) While our hero's traumas are never believable, the film is extremely entertaining and gripping, with first rate storytelling, direction and photography.

I found the novel Museum Piece No 13 disappointing. It does contain the key ideas and characters that later would populate Lang's film version. But the storytelling runs out of steam after the first few chapters, which contain all of King's creative ideas.

King's Florida Short Stories

King's last works were a series of short stories set among the rich in Miami and its environs; many of them were published by Ellery Queen in EQMM. Although King's use of Miami has been compared to John D. MacDonald, it also recalls the Florida stories of Philip Wylie. In addition to setting, other Wylie like features include an emphasis on botany and Florida plant life, amateur detectives who discover sinister conspiracies, and the use of international intrigue.

"Malice in Wonderland" (1957) contains some of King's most magical atmosphere and mise-en-scène. The tale is written as a sort of sinister fairy tale, full of events that can be given a supernatural interpretation. King used rich and brilliant color in these Miami stories, especially in his descriptions of deserts. In "Malice", we see exotic ice cream dishes that are described in full color. By the way, "Malice in Wonderland" was originally the title of a 1940 novel by Nicholas Blake. When Ellery Queen first published King's short story in EQMM, he thought the phrase would make a good title for the story, and he used it, with the permission of both Blake and King.

"The Seeds of Murder" (1959) is an impossible crime tale. There are clues that allow one to deduce who the killer is, at least after you have figured out how the crime was done. This is the paradigmatic detective situation in such Ellery Queen works as The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935). This story seems even closer to Queen than to Van Dine. It focuses on the sort of rich, eccentric, multi-talented extended family of adults that often pops up in Queen tales.

"The Faces of Danger" (1960) is written in a partly summarized style. This style recalls, to a degree, that used by Ellery Queen in his Q.B.I. stories and parts of his Calendar of Crime. However, King's approach is less condensed than Queen's. Queen used it to tell a whole story in less than ten pages, while King's novella sprawls over forty. Both writers like to use the approach to invoke, and partially lampoon, the clichés of storytelling. In both, there is a certain sophistication of tone, a suggestion of sophisticated satire on conventional plotting. There is the feeling in both writers in which a game is being played by the author. In this game, the author tries to come up with the "best" response by the characters to each new situation. For example, a body might be discovered, and the next step in the story is tell what the characters are going to do. Sometimes this response is original, sometimes conventional. The more conventional responses are presented to the reader with irony, using a summarized statement to invoke the chief elements of the familiar situation. Less familiar responses are sometimes contrasted with the clichés of fiction, to underline the originality of the situation. So a description will contain both its true content, and its opposite.

The whole effect is of a game the author is playing with the reader, challenging them to guess how the characters will behave in any new situation, suggesting a duel of wits between the writer and the reader over the most original response to any event in the plot. This is in keeping with, but further extends, the basic active reading approach of most mystery fiction. In most mystery tales, the reader is not supposed to sit back, and just let the events of the tale wash passively over them. Instead, the reader is challenged to deduce the true solution of the mystery at every turn. The reader, in turn, constantly monitors the author's plot for logical consistency, and surprise. This sort of active readership is applied to every event in the mystery plot. In Queen and King, this approach is extended not just to the mystery puzzle plot itself, but every fictional development in the story: the characters' attitudes, responses to events, social conditions and backgrounds, police procedure, the romance subplot, details of the social milieu such as butlers and mansions, in short, every aspect of the story. This allows active readership as a universal response to the tale.

King always likes verbal fireworks in his tales; such an approach gives him many opportunities in that direction. It allows for an exuberant writing style, one filled with elaborate turns of phrase and much wit.

Clyde B. Clason

Clyde B. Clason is a writer in the S. S. Van Dine tradition, as Jon L. Breen pointed out in his article on Clason is Twentieth Century Mystery Writers. One can point out some of the similarities between Clason and Van Dine in detail. Clason's ten mystery novels center on intellectual, cultivated sleuth Theocritus Lucius Westborough. Westborough is a historian, and like Van Dine's detective Philo Vance, has a fabulous knowledge of world art and culture. Westborough is an amateur sleuth who often collaborates with the police to solve crimes, just like Vance. As in the Vance books, the police are honest, good natured but low brow, and their common man argot is used for some comedy. As in Van Dine, both the amateur sleuth and the police are full of gusto, vigorously investigating every aspect of the crime. Clason's crimes, like Van Dine's, often take place among collectors and connoisseurs, and the homes of the suspects are often filled with private museums. Clason, like Van Dine and many other writers of his school, was sympathetic to racial minorities, and his books contain protests against racism. In both writers, the anti-racist theme is linked to a respectful, knowledgeable treatment of world art, with equal admiration being given to art created by all races.

There are formal similarities between Clason's novels, and Van Dine's, as well. As in Van Dine, the story develops into an elaborate, complex pattern, every nook and cranny of which is packed with detail. It is this over all storytelling which is the richest element in the books. There are elaborate floor plans in both writers, and much emphasis on the movements of characters around crime scenes. These movements are worked into the over-all pattern of the plot. There is also a great deal about the backgrounds of the characters, and their current romantic liaisons. Clason, like Van Dine, is a literate writer, with an elaborate, sometimes ornate prose style.

Some of Clason's novels are available as reprints from Rue Morgue Press.

The Man from Tibet

The Man from Tibet (1938) contains a locked room mystery. While the basic idea is simple, the impossible crime here shows imagination in its storytelling trappings. It is not related to the Zangwill-Chesterton tradition of rearrangements in space and time. Instead, it recalls the impossible crimes in S. S. Van Dine and Edgar Wallace, in its simpler technical approach, and the colorful storytelling woven around it.

The basic construction of the book comes from Van Dine's The Scarab Murder Case (1929). That novel dealt with murder in a private museum of Egyptology, a museum located in a private mansion, and whose suspects were mainly specialists in Egyptian art. This book uses a similar approach, with Tibet substituted for Egypt.

There are several limitations of characterization in the book. The lama is never convincing, with his child like personality. The rich son is constantly condemned for a lack of masculinity. This was a popular theme in the Depression, but measuring a man against standards of machismo seems inaccurate and cruel. Many of the other characters seem like stick figures. The non-impossible crime elements of the mystery are also fairly simple and uninventive.

All this said, The Man from Tibet is surprisingly entertaining. Clason has researched his subject in remarkable depth, and builds an appealingly intellectual novel out of it. The opening chapter of The Man from Tibet is pretty good. It is mainly a flashback to an adventure in Tibet, not a mystery story. Clason was interested in other Asian cultures, too. The sequence in the Japanese restaurant is delightful (Part Thirteen).

The Man from Tibet shows Clason's series sleuth, Roman historian Theocritus Lucius Westborough, working on a soon-to-be published book, Heliogabalus: Rome's Most Degenerate Emperor. The book is mentioned again in a later novel, Murder Gone Minoan, as already published, and selling well. Since Heliogabalus is mainly known for extreme homosexual behavior, this perhaps offers some clues to Westborough as well, who has no heterosexual love life in the novels. It might be a hint that Westborough is gay, too.

Murder Gone Minoan

Murder Gone Minoan (1939) shows excellent storytelling in its first half (up till around Part Four, Chapter IV). These chapters include both a detailed look at California's Channel Islands, and their Native American prehistory, and also the ancient Minoan culture of Crete. The story's twelve suspects are also vividly characterized, often in their own words - much of the book is constructed out of documents and letters, in the manner of Wilkie Collins. Sympathetic portraits of a poor artist, and a well-to-do, gentle young archaeologist, are among the highlights. Both men are contrasted favorably to a macho but obnoxious athlete - Clason has been having welcome second thoughts about the primacy of machismo. These characterizations go some way towards making up for the attitudes expressed in The Man from Tibet.

The book's second half adds little to what has gone before, and its emphasis on romantic triangles and intrigues lacks appeal.

The mystery elements here are weaker than in Clason's best books. There is no impossible crime, in the strict sense. The book's mystery plot is extremely simple, with a solution that contains only one idea, and a not particularly creative one, at that. Also, the choice of killer seems implausible. The book is best read for its lively first half.

Green Shiver

Green Shiver (1941) involves collectors of Chinese jade. Every part of the book dealing with Chinese art, culture and philosophy is well done, and makes good reading. Unfortunately, the mystery elements of this book are routine, if elaborate. To his credit, Clason manages to avoid the coincidentally occurring subplots that afflict many lesser Golden Age novels. Instead, his solution manages to link up and explain all the disparate elements of the story as parts of a unified, connected common plot. Towards the end of his novel, Clason introduces what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin. Clason uses this to motivate the actions of many of the characters. It is not quite clear if a MacGuffin, introduced towards the end of a book, is quite fair play or not. But it is interesting the way Clason uses it to give hidden meanings and significance to the actions of many of the characters in the book. At the end, we see their behavior in a new light, and this is moderately ingenious.

Green Shiver has a similar structure to the earlier The Man from Tibet (1938). In many ways, this second novel is an extension or variation of the first. Both center around the culture of a particular foreign country: China and Tibet, respectively. Both deal with wealthy American collectors who have a private museum of Asian art in the geometric center of their homes. Both collections contain a valuable stolen cultural object from Asia around which intrigue swirls, and both novels have a distinguished visitor from Asia. Both have frequent flashbacks to turbulent adventure in Asia. Green Shiver is much less linear than The Man from Tibet, and this is a good thing. The reader is often hard pressed t