Frederick Irving Anderson | Vincent Starrett | Helen Reilly

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

Frederick Irving Anderson

The Notorious Sophie Lang (collected 1925)

• The Signed Masterpiece (1921)
• The Jorgensen Plates (1922)

Book of Murder (collected 1930)

• Beyond All Conjecture (1928)
• The Japanese Parasol (1926)
• The Magician (1925)
• A Start in Life (1926)
• The Recoil (1929)
• Gulf Stream Green (1929)
• The Door Key (1929)

Uncollected Deputy Parr stories

• The Half-Way House (1922)
• The House of Many Mansions (1926?)
• Madame the Cat (1930)
• The Man from the Death House (circa 1947)

Vincent Starrett

"The Eleventh Juror" (1927)

"The Man in the Cask" (1927)

The Blue Door (collected 1930)

• The Blue Door

Sally Cardiff Stories

• Murder at the Opera (1934)

Jimmie Lavender Stories

• The Body in the Ostrich Cage (1934)

Helen Reilly

McKee of Centre Street (1933)

The Line-Up (1934)

Mr. Smith's Hat (1936) (Chapters 1 - 4)

All Concerned Notified (1939) (Chapters 1-16)

Not Me, Inspector (1959) (Chapters 1 - 6, 15)

Follow Me (1960)

Frederick Irving Anderson

Influences

Frederick Irving Anderson was a prolific contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, most of whose work has never been published in book form. Anderson began publishing before World War I, and was still at it in 1946. He can be seen as a member of the Arthur B. Reeve school, but with some personal twists. Like Reeve, he often focuses on both crimes committed by scientific means, and on the detection of those crimes by the police using scientific criminology. But the tone of Anderson's work is very different from the heroic scientists and dramatic storytelling of Reeve. Anderson clearly aspired to the irony, sophistication, and wit, of such writers as Saki and Oscar Wilde. His picture of endlessly fertile police spreading an infinitely wide and ingenious net to catch criminals, complete with every sort of scheme, impersonation and high tech tracking device, seems more in the classic whimsy tradition of Lewis Carroll or W.S. Gilbert, rather than anything remotely approaching realism. Like Carroll, there is both an obsessive and a surreal tone to Anderson's comedy.

While there are sometimes puzzle plot aspects to Anderson's work, the main emphasis is on detection, especially his extravagant version of police work. There is an important element of complex plotting, as well, with many surprising twists and turns - Anderson is always trying to sneak up on the reader out of left field - so his fiction will probably interest readers who are interested in plot technique.

The Unknown Man

Ellery Queen reprinted Anderson's first mystery tale in EQMM. "The Unknown Man" (1911) is an inverted detective story, focusing on a medical murder committed by a surgeon. The killer is tracked down not by the police, as in Anderson's later stories, but by the Press. The depiction of the Press' complex machinery of crime reporting and detection is presented with some satirical paradoxes. It forms a small, rough sketch of the immense police detective apparatus of Anderson's later fiction. The story is clearly in the Reeve tradition of scientific crime popular in its era. It also mentions Gaboriau. Gaboriau's police detectives often used disguises and multiple identities; this would clearly appeal to Anderson, whose police heroes do much undercover work.

It is unusual to see an inverted detective story at such an early date. Most histories of detective fiction state that the form was created by R. Austin Freeman, with "The Case of Oscar Brodski" (published in magazines in 1910), which was first reprinted in book form along with Freeman's subsequent inverted stories in 1912, in The Singing Bone. But Anderson's tale looks fairly close to the inverted form. The story is seen from the point of view of the killer, a surgeon, and we watch along with him as the Press gradually closes in. Unlike Freeman, we do not actually see the crime being committed in the first half; and unlike Freeman, the point of view does not actually shift to the detectives in the second half. But we certainly do see the reporter detective's evidence collected against the killer in the final sections of the story. The story is less "fair play" than Freeman's work; the reader does not see all the evidence in advance, but must simply sit back and watch as the reporter cracks the case. I have no idea if Anderson hit on the inverted format independently of Freeman; or if he read Freeman's work in magazines in 1910; or if there are other early prototypical inverted stories that influenced both writers.

The Notorious Sophie Lang: ties to Rogue Fiction

Anderson also has links to the Rogue school. Some of his early fiction deals with clever thieves. However, Anderson's fiction does not have the light, romp-like tone and anti-authoritarian zest of regular rogue fiction. His work is largely sui generis, and he should be viewed as a unique, very individual author.

"The Jorgensen Plates" (1922) is from Anderson's hard to find collection, The Notorious Sophie Lang (collected in book form in 1925; in magazines 1921 - 1924). Lang is a clever lady jewel thief, and her exploits certainly have elements of the Rogue tradition. More important, however, is the ambiguity of Anderson's plot presentation: one cannot tell till the end of the tale, exactly what any of the characters are up to, although there are clues along the way. This gives the tale aspects of the mystery or riddle story. The story has a musical quality, a harmonious progression of plot ideas, that is quite pleasing. There is also a sustained note of satire and irony. Anderson scaldingly satirizes Britishers that are condescending to Americans. This is a sore point with US writers - see also Ellery Queen's "The Dead Cat" (1946). It was written just before the first tales in Book of Murder, but is less ambitious than most of those stories, which benefit from even more complex plots and more sympathetic characters than the scoundrels and monstrous aristocrats of the Lang tale. I have only read excerpts from this collection in anthologies; it has apparently never been published in America, only Britain. It was made into a series of films in the 1930's, starring Gertrude Michael, who was dating hard-boiled writer Paul Cain at the time.

"The Signed Masterpiece" (1921) is the first story in The Notorious Sophie Lang. Much of it deals not with Sophie herself, but with Anderson's ongoing series sleuth, the policeman Deputy Parr. Parr will return, without Sophie, in Anderson's next collection, Book of Murder (1930), and will be the star figure in many of those stories. "The Signed Masterpiece" is clearly designed to introduce Parr to Anderson's readers. Its first half gives an enormously in-depth look at Parr's flamboyant police methods, showing his huge network of undercover operatives spread out over New York City. However, neither of Parr's skilled assistants, Morel or Pelts, makes an appearance in this story. In fact, the tale instead satirically stresses the uniformity and interchangability of Parr's young police assistants. These early sections dealing with the police are great fun. The second half of the story, dealing with Sophie's criminal schemes, is a distinct let down.

"The Signed Masterpiece" shows the same interest in social class as other Rogue stories. Sophie appears in the tale impersonating a sophisticated upper class widow, whereas Parr's police all are undercover in lower class roles: stable keepers, garage mechanics, building inspectors, and the like. This allows Sophie to manipulate them, using upper class privilege. The real life police in these roles seem to be unsophisticated men of lower class origins themselves. Later, in Book of Murder, when Parr becomes the genuine detective hero of the stories, and not merely the foil to Sophie, this will all be changed. Parr and his men will become just at home undercover in upper crust situations as any other, and will no longer display working class mannerisms.

The numerous police going undercover in "The Signed Masterpiece" in various roles have a predecessor in the first Sherlock Holmes short story, "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891). Holmes employs a similar huge number of disguised operatives for his schemes there. "A Scandal in Bohemia" also resembles the Sophie Lang tales, in that it is about a male detective with numerous allies trying to catch a clever female crook, who plays a much more isolated hand. Sophie Lang's resourcefulness and cleverness recall Irene Adler in Conan Doyle's story.

Imagination and Reality

"The Signed Masterpiece" also hooks up Parr with Oliver Armiston, the "extinct author". In an earlier story, "The Infallible Godahl" (circa 1914), a crook used one of Armiston's mystery stories as the blueprint for a real life crime. In "The Signed Masterpiece", we see the sequel to this event: appalled by this, Armiston has stopped publishing his stories. Now, he writes only for the police: when Parr is stuck on an unsolved mystery, Armiston whips up a crime story based on the real life situation, one whose solution often turns out to be the actual solution of the real life mystery. This sort of complex interplay between fiction and reality is one of the hallmarks of Anderson's work.

Much of Anderson's fiction turns on virtual persons. When Armiston creates a fictional master thief in "The Infallible Godahl", a real life crook brings him to life. In "The Signed Masterpiece", Sophie Lang starts out purely as a hypothetical construct of the police: whenever Parr and his associates find traces of a perfect, unsolvable crime, they ascribe it to a master criminal they call "Sophie Lang". "Sophie" is nothing more than a police fiction, a dumping ground for perfect crimes. Eventually, the reader learns that the police, perhaps fortuitously, have been correct: most of these crimes are in fact the work of a single brilliant woman. The story continues to call her "Sophie Lang", but that is not actually a name she has ever used. The whole process is one of watching a mental construct come to life, and assume a flesh and blood identity. A classic story about a virtual person is "Putois" by Anatole France.

This interest in imagination becoming reality persists through Anderson's late work. Another virtual person plays a role in "The Phantom Guest" (1941). In Anderson's final story, "The Man from the Death House", a premeditated crime is brought to life.

The inverted detective story construction of "The Unknown Man" can perhaps be linked to the "imagination becomes reality" theme in Anderson's fiction. Here at the start of the story the surgeon anticipates that his crime might be discovered and traced to him by the Press; the rest of the tale consists of watching such a process unfold.

Book of Murder

It is unfortunate that so much of Anderson's work is uncollected. Anderson seemed to get better, not worse, as a writer as the years went by. Ellery Queen thought that his best story collection was his third, and last, Book of Murder (1930), which collects some tales published in magazines during 1923-1929.

The descriptions of Anderson's books in standard reference works does not at all gibe with the actual texts. In "The Infallible Godahl", Godahl is not a character in the tale. The work focuses on Oliver Armiston, an author who writes a series of stories about a thief called Godahl. But reference books seem to imply that Godahl is an actual character in the tale. Maybe later stories in the collection, which I have not read, somehow do this. (By the way, I do not like this early tale at all.) Similarly, many reference works describe Book of Murder (there is no "The" in its title) as being about Deputy Parr and his friend Oliver Armiston. Actually six of the ten tales focus on Parr and Armiston. Three others center on the New England backwoods characters of Jason Selfridge and constable Orlo Sage.

The Door Key

In the tenth and last story, "The Door Key" (1929), both Parr and Selfridge join forces in a single story, by way of a finale to the collection. The date indicates that Anderson did indeed write this story last, or nearly last, as a way of tying together his two series of detectives. Ellery Queen was clearly aware of the collection's pattern; he described Book of Murder as being "principally" about Parr in Queen's Quorum; but many subsequent writers are not. One suspects that they have not actually read Anderson's book.

In "The Door Key", the collaboration between the two sets of detectives is clearly the central interest of the tale. Elegantly symmetric, the first two thirds takes place in the country world; the last third in the city. In the first third, the amateurs Selfridge and Armiston predominate, investigating what is apparently eccentric behavior; in the middle third, the professionals Sage and Parr look at what is now clearly a crime. Parr begins to take over the investigation roughly half way through the middle section, which is also the halfway point of the entire story, marking the beginning of the transition from "country" to "city" in focus. The emphasis on tracking by the country detectives is balanced by the fingerprints and Bertillion measurements of the city ones. The villain also shares a duality of interest between city and country - but I don't want to give away too much of the plot. The topic of antiques in the opening section deals with the economic and cultural relations between country and city, and adds to the thematic interest. Even the fishing trip of the detectives up north in New England in the first half of the story, is balanced by the Southern journeys of the rich and the crooks who prey on them in the later sections. The story has much more impact when read as the finale of the collection, watching well understood detectives at work, than it does as a stand alone piece in anthologies. Anderson later choose this piece as his favorite for a Howard Haycraft anthology; I am not sure I would fully agree, but it is a well done "group portrait" of his detective world, with beautiful formal patterns. It reminds one of the promotional art Elzie Segar once did, just a few years later, for his comic strip "Thimble Theater", where he assembled the entire cast of his strip for several years, on stage to take a bow.

The New England Tales

Oddly enough, in their three country outings, Selfridge and Sage don't do a great deal of detecting. In "Dead End" (1923), the crime sort of unravels itself; in "The Magician" (1925), a stranger assumes the role of detective; and in "A Start in Life" (1926), there is no actual mystery, although there is a tale of murder and politics. Of the three, "The Magician" is the only "real mystery story", with a mysterious crime detected to a solution. "A Start in Life" looks at a mass impersonation done by someone other than the police, so it has a formal relation to the Parr tales. "Dead End" gets off to a good start, but it falls apart in the middle.

The first two pieces, "Dead End" and "The Magician", are especially rich in descriptions of New England country life. Anderson is particularly interested in water, and its exploitability to form electric power. He also likes building, stonework, and every sort of construction and civil engineering project. One can see that Anderson was a contemporary of the Tennessee Valley Authority. His description of farm life includes economic factors, treating farms as a business enterprise, rather than simply rural nostalgia.

Bad Relations

Anderson clearly felt that there was something perverse about sexuality. In several of his tales, personal relations are milked for their maximum horror. "Big Time" (1927) is especially hair raising in this regard, although here, as elsewhere, Anderson never loses his tone of perversely elegant comedy. Other tales in this vein include "The Wedding Gift" (1929), which anticipates James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, and "The Phantom Guest" (1941) (not included in Book of Murder). These tales also include finales where the police, represented by Deputy Parr and his assistants, elegantly torture suspects though staged scenes in order to get them to confess. These tales represent a personal vision of Anderson's, and are hardly devoid of artistic merit, with many felicitous touches in their storytelling and writing. All the same, I like them a lot less than Anderson's more high tech crime tales.

Politics and People

Anderson's favorite people are clearly young men who are working for a living. Whether detectives or technologists or farmers, they are always presented with a great deal of glamour. Andersen also went out of his way to indicate sympathy with immigrants, Jews and Black people. By contrast, he was clearly very troubled by rich people who didn't work, at least not honestly, and these tend to be the villains in his tales.

The Later Stories

My favorite, so far, of all of Anderson's work is "Madame the Cat" (1930), written too late to appear in any of Anderson's books, and one suspects that there might be some especially good tales from the 1930's that are uncollected. "Madame the Cat" appeared in The Saturday Evening Post just three months after the publication there of the last story in the collection, "The Door Key" (1929). It stars the same characters as Book of Murder, and can be read as a coda to that collection.

Anderson continued to write tales about Parr and his coworkers right up to the time of his death in 1947. His final story, "The Man from the Death House", shows no diminution of his charm and sophistication, with Parr's man Morel conducting a polished investigation of a murder at an upper crust musical soiree. Morel is my favorite among Anderson's series characters; one suspects he was Anderson's favorite, too. The opening of the tale discusses changes in a New York City neighborhood over time; a similar account formed a scene setting opening in "The Signed Masterpiece" (1921). The plot is full of clever, paradoxical turns. It has a Borges like feel, in its account of a premeditated crime coming to life. It also maintains a faithfulness to the Reeve tradition of scientifically based crime.

Vincent Starrett

Sally Cardiff, the detective heroine of what is one of Starrett's best pieces, "Murder at the Opera", seems to be a Chicago sleuth. Other Starrett sleuths such as Jimmie Lavender and George Washington Troxell are based in Chicago, as was Starrett himself. (Troxell's bookstore is in Dearborn Street, near the bridge.) Their work often involves routine sleuthing and tracking of characters; often these characters are members of the underworld, in the pulp style. In the 1920's Starrett often appeared in Real Detective Tales, the same Chicago pulp that featured the early work of MacKinlay Kantor.

Starrett also wrote what might be called horror fiction. These are not supernatural tales. These are murderous stories, which show that violence has unpleasant effects on people. "The Man in the Cask" (1927) is the most reprinted of these tales.

Influences on Starrett

Starrett's fiction also shows an influence from Doyle, not surprising in the editor of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and other Holmes scholarship. Sleuth Jimmie Lavender sees clients in his sitting room, like Holmes, and has a Watson-like friend and narrator. And several of Starrett's detectives perform well done deduction from physical evidence. However, Starrett's stories do not have a Doyle like feel to their plotting, unlike, say, George R. Sims or Valentine Williams. They use some of Doyle's detective techniques, but are quite different as works of storytelling.

Starrett was a big admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, and his New Arabian Nights stories (1878). Starrett's "The Blue Door" seems to be a deliberate imitation of Stevenson's work, featuring two young men who get involved in a mystery adventure on Chicago's North side. As in other of Starrett's tales, the detective work in the story is richer than the final solution of the puzzle plot. We are used to seeing 1920's Chicago treated in snappy gangster films; there is a jolt of cognitive dissonance in seeing the Chicago of gangsters, speakeasies, and public corruption used as the background of a Stevensonian adventure, or one of Jimmie Lavender's mock Sherlock Holmes pastiches. It is a very odd effect. The amateur detective in "The Blue Door" is a mystery writer, and one that seems to be modeled on Starrett himself. Soon, both Ellery Queen and Mignon G. Eberhart's Susan Dare will become mystery-writer sleuths, not to mention the mystery writer sleuth in G.D.H. Cole's The Brooklyn Murders (1923). The novella "The Blue Door" is one of Starrett's Real Detective Tales pieces, but it is uncertain what year it was published - probably the later 1920's.

An ancestor of Nero Wolfe?

The very fat Troxell, who rarely leaves his shop, or even his large chair, and the dynamic young police reporter Dellabough, who executes Troxell's ideas, and traipses all over Chicago, also seem like possible prototypes for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Stout also wrote a series of Wolfe works with "Too Many" in the title: Too Many Cooks (1938), Too Many Women (1947), "Too Many Detectives" (1956), Too Many Clients (1960). Troxell is sometimes insulting to Dellabough, who shrugs it off, just like Goodwin. Dellabough is also physically active, and sometimes gets involved in fist fights, also like Goodwin. Like Goodwin, he also gets good sleuthing ideas on his own, as well. In later years, the 1940's and after, Starrett and Stout became personal friends, with Starrett becoming one of Stout's most vociferous critical champions.

Helen Reilly

Reilly and Crofts

Helen Reilly was a prolific author of mystery novels, whose career stretched from 1930 to 1962. Her books feature New York City police Inspector Christopher McKee. They were among the first American novels to stress police procedure.

To what school do Helen Reilly's novels belong? This is not an easy question. Howard Haycraft in 1941 emphasized that she was not an HIBK writer. This was true at the time; but later, she often included young society women in her tales, who were in jeopardy - a sign of HIBK influence on her later work. However such HIBK-like Reilly novels as The Opening Door (1944) and The Silver Leopard (1946) seem to me to be among Reilly's poorest works.

There is an discussion of Reilly in Jon L. Breen's excellent article on the history of the police procedural, in The Fine Art of Murder (1993). Breen argues that Reilly comes out of the Van Dine school, and suggests that she is similar to Van Dine school writer Anthony Abbot, who also wrote about a New York City policeman, Thatcher Colt.

From 1920 Freeman Wills Crofts wrote novels that described the realistic, routine sleuthing of British policeman. They were immensely influential, both in Britain and abroad. Reilly's works emphasize police procedure. Yet she seems not to be a Crofts-influenced writer. Reilly's police procedurals do not fall into easy categories. They seem very different from the police stories of Freeman Wills Crofts. They focus in turn on the operations of many different members of the police team, for example, and intermix scenes where the police have the point of view with those in which the POV is owned by civilians mixed up in the crime. This is very different from the Croftsian tales in which the viewpoint focuses steadily on Inspector French. Nor is Reilly especially interested in such Croftsian features as ingeniously faked alibis, detailed Backgrounds, the "breakdown of identity", clever criminal money making schemes involving smuggling or forgery, or mosaic like investigations of past crimes.

Reilly does resemble Crofts in the purity of her approach. Her McKee of Centre Street (1933) sticks to pure police procedure throughout its length with the same single-mindedness Crofts displayed in such books as The Box Office Murders (1929). Also Crofts-like: the way we share all of McKee's thoughts and discoveries throughout the book, instead of waiting till the end of the novel to get the detective's ideas. Reilly also shares Crofts' internationalism: McKee of Centre Street has frequent flashbacks to Columbia in South America, in the same way that Crofts liked to explore continental Europe. The boat and ocean finale of McKee of Centre Street also recalls Crofts.

Reilly does use scientific detection. She analyses physical clues, and uses scientific techniques to identify material found at crime scenes, using the results to reconstruct the crime. The effect is closer to R. Austin Freeman than it is to Crofts, although Crofts did his own tour de force of this type at the opening of The Sea Mystery (1928). We also know that Reilly used the great real life German criminologist Hans Gross as a source, and perhaps the scientific detection in her books derives far more from such real life examples than it does from detective writers such as Freeman and Crofts. Reilly's interest in science and technology is consistent with her background in the American School, such as Frederick Irving Anderson and William MacHarg. These mystery writers either were directly involved in the Scientific Detective Story of the era, or were allied, in the sense that their work often reflected the approaches of the Scientific school.

One of the best uses of scientific detection in Reilly occurs in the opening of Mr. Smith's Hat. As in McKee of Centre Street, the science here is botany: McKee follows up clues involving plant fragments. Similar botany oriented detection occurred in Anthony Abbot's About the Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress (1931). Reilly does indeed share with Abbot an interest in New York City police procedure, and scientific detective techniques. However, the tone and technique of Reilly seem very different from those of Abbot and the other Van Dine school writers. McKee is not a social aristocrat, unlike the Van School's sleuths, and aside from his criminological expertise on botanical evidence, he has little of the Van Dine sleuth's intellectual knowledge. Reilly also sticks closely to pure police procedure in a fashion that seems utterly different from the Van Dine writers' more eclectic sleuthing techniques.

Reilly and Frederick Irving Anderson

Reilly seems closer to American writers of police detective tales, such as Frederick Irving Anderson and William MacHarg. Both of these authors wrote short stories that appeared in slick magazines, such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. Anderson's tales flourished in the prosperous 1920's, and were full of extravagant fantasies of elaborate police investigations. MacHarg's tales were mainly published during the 1930's and early 1940's Depression era, and featured a plain realism in their settings among New Yorkers of all classes. Reilly's seem closer to Anderson's, but without the whimsy. Both Anderson and Reilly show a large team of police that perform a remarkable variety of tasks, including shadowing suspects, doing background checks, impersonation and undercover work, crime scene investigation and lab work. Both Reilly and Anderson highly relish the diverse personalities, skill sets and social backgrounds of their varied cops. Both authors' police manage to spread a very wide net around the villainy under investigation, and both have enormous initiative and get up and go. Inspector McKee has the role of chief in Reilly's world, just as Deputy Parr in Anderson's.

Lonely city apartments in run down neighborhoods tend to be sites of violence in Reilly's world. Reilly's stories are like MacHarg's and Cornell Woolrich's in that they sometimes are set among poor people. These writers all use police detectives. Their poor people are not mobsters, unlike the hard-boiled writers of the pulps. Instead they are ordinary people who live in tenements and slums, have menial jobs, and cope with the Depression.

McKee of Centre Street

McKee of Centre Street (1933) is Reilly's breakthrough novel, emphasizing police procedure. The Centre Street of the title is the famed headquarters of the New York City Police. The tale opens with a description of the radio room there. It is written in Reilly's most visionary style. There are descriptions of light on walls, colors, sounds, the whole thing building to abstract geometrical patterns of light and sound. Such 3D abstractions remind one of the visionary novels of William Hope Hodgson.

Radio itself was a fairly new technology in 1934, and the chapter is also an expression of a universe created by high technology. The room contains maps showing the location of every police car in New York City; in many ways, it is a symbolic or virtual re-creation of the City itself. It seems like an early expression of Virtual Reality. It is also the brain center of police operations, and the chapter can be read as metaphors for the operation of the nervous system.

Reilly emphasizes the efficiency of the police. This was a virtue highly prized in the 1930's, where it was associated with Modernism, science, and the Future. It also recalls Taylorism, the science of running factories efficiently according to mathematical and statistical methods. Reilly includes a document analyzing crime statistics for 1932 and 1931. Such a statistical approach also invokes Taylorist ideas. The police here are seen as a modern, factory like operation, using machines, mathematics and efficient organization to run their enterprise. It has been discussed whether Reilly's books are ancestors of the modern police procedural novel. They certainly try to describe police procedure accurately and in detail. So in this sense, they certainly qualify. However, many modern police procedurals stress the ordinary, human nature of the police, while Reilly tries to convey the extraordinary nature of the police.

The following chapters of the book depict a speakeasy where a murder has occurred. The speakeasy is also depicted in technological and organizational terms. The descriptions of its lighting effects, and the role they play in the murder, are almost as much a "sound and light show" as the opening police chapter. The electrician in charge of the lighting becomes a key player in the story. I cannot recall any other of the countless underworld nightclub tales of the 1930's that include an electrician character. So this is a unique point of view of Reilly.

There is an odd contrast in imagery between the male and female characters. The women have often lost consciousness: the murdered woman looks as if she has simply passed out on the dance floor, suspect Judith Pierce is found fainted in the phone booth, and the janitor's wife is asleep. By contrast, Reilly keeps emphasizing how alert the (male) police officers are. However, one of the male characters in the book will eventually lose consciousness, in a spectacularly written passage (Chapter 15). Throughout the book, Reilly's extraordinarily vivid writing style will add an almost surrealistic clarity to her descriptions of typical daily life and New York City locations. Everything has a more real than real vividness that recalls the bright light in such painters as Dali and Magritte.

McKee of Centre Street sticks to its police procedure paradigm throughout its entire length. The book is extremely pure in its approach. Nearly everything in the book consists of the police examining a crime scene, finding some physical clue, and then using it to reconstruct the actions of the suspects and the victim. The police also use the eye witness testimony of innocent bystanders, and the facilities of a huge police operation. They also do much trailing of the suspects, and even go so far to spy on them on occasion. The suspects all stone wall and lie to the police at every opportunity, so the suspects' testimony plays only a small role in this book, as compared to, say, a typical Van Dine school novel. Although the suspects' movements and actions are endlessly traced, they are on stage for only a small fraction of the time they would be in a conventional Golden Age novel, and do not really come alive as characters. Throughout there is vivid descriptive writing, especially of the buildings in which the suspects move, and of New York City lighting and atmosphere. There is a an attempt to create a portrait of New York City.

This purity of approach has both strengths and weaknesses. It can be monotonous, and lack variety. But it does allow Reilly to explore her innovative techniques at length.

There are two large manhunts in the second half of this novel. the first across New York City, the second in the Connecticut countryside. I tend to prefer the city one. It is written with all of Reilly's visionary style of description. The countryside one is a bit of a shaggy dog story. It takes place in all the back ways and little used roads of a country area catering to tourists. It focuses on the locals who support the tourist industry, and their homes, camps and little known back paths. In this it is similar to an even longer and more elaborate country chase in Mr. Smith's Hat.

One does not want to oversell Reilly's work. McKee of Centre Street lacks a clever plot solution. The end of the book takes only around five pages, and shows no ingenuity whatsoever. Sure enough, one of the characters did it. Reilly might as well have thrown a dart to pick this character, for it could have been any of the suspects. It is an anticlimactic end to a novel, all of whose merit has been its detection, not its puzzle plot. Reilly's emphasis on typical scenes of daily life also deprive her books of the fabulous eccentricity that graces so many Golden Age novels.

The Line-Up

Police procedure in The Line-Up concentrates on medical investigation, and trailing suspects. There is also a brief but interesting manhunt, which results in the title line-up. The police procedure is less intensively displayed here than in the book's predecessor McKee of Centre Street. The police also do a good deal of Rinehart-style snooping. The rich people have a lot of secrets, and the police ferret them out, in ways that suggest that the middle class police are spying on the rich. We are in the depths of the Depression here, and the contrast between the book's working class characters and the rich is pointed and extreme. The sheer greed of the well-to-do and their hangers-on is a sinister theme throughout.

We do get some of Reilly's best characterization of the various policemen on Inspector McKee's staff. And Reilly takes us to McKee's austere home. McKee has virtually no personal life - he is even shown working on Christmas Day, a huge anomaly in American life. One sentence reveals that McKee has a cat.

In general, both characterization and Reilly's trademark vivid descriptive writing, are among the book's strengths. They also make the book a slow read: one has to linger over the details of setting and atmosphere to get Reilly's full effect. Reilly tends to write in a way that engages all the senses, with sights, sounds and even smells all evoked.

Altered states of consciousness play a role again, as in McKee of Centre Street. In The Line-Up, there is a creepy sleep walking scene. And the first victim, a well-to-do society woman, gets poisoned by an overdose of an illegal prescription pain-killer to which she has become addicted. This out-of-control modern day problem was already present in 1934! The Line-Up shows us a society soaked in alcohol and dubious medications. It is not a pretty picture. Combined with Reilly's portrait of the money-hungry rich, it shows a country sinking into darkness.

The Line-Up has several different subplots, all boiling away. There is a continuous series of plot revelations throughout the book. These show some ingenuity. They are not at a masterpiece level, but they genuinely surprise - at least, they fooled me! The various subplots are not as well connected with each other as they should be. The identity of the killer is well-hidden. But it is not especially fairly clued, and the core murder mystery is not the best plotted part of the novel.

The best subplot follows a Mysterious Stranger who once showed up at the family home. Such strangers and their obscure errands are a frequent gambit in Mary Roberts Rinehart novels. In both Rinehart and The Line-Up, they serve the welcome function of adding an outsider and outside scenes, to the otherwise enclosed world of the family home. They also add to the amount of mystery in the tale. One has not just the murder, but the whole background and motives of the stranger to puzzle over. The "stranger subplot" in The Line-Up develops into a plot of Golden Age complexity, managing to dovetail together many seemingly unrelated clues and incidents, in a way beloved by true mystery fans.

All Concerned Notified

Intermixed with this, are the suspects, who live in a decaying mansion in New York City's Greenwich Village. The spooky mansion is one of the architectural gems that are found in Golden Age mystery fiction. Reilly takes us on a tour of the mansion, going from the grounds and lowest floor, up to the distant attic. Such bottom-to-top architectural trips are also found in other Reilly novels, such as Murder in the Mews and Follow Me.

This section of the book climaxes, with a discovery that explains some of the key mysteries of the book - although not whodunit. These explanations are logical and to the point.

It is a good thing, because after this, the book collapses. The last third is a complex account of the characters' history, and who did what during the crime. The characters' back-story seems like a re-hash of the premise in Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1907).

And the solution involves no less than three unconnected groups of people wandering around, doing all the sinister, mysterious things at night we have seen throughout the novel. Other subplots emerge out of nowhere here, too, further gumming up the book's logical unity. Making things worse: there are no clues that let us identify the killer - so the mystery is not "fair play". (Bad Reasoning Department: Inspector McKee concludes that one rich woman is innocent, because she "wouldn't have killed her own maid." This is one of the more absurd pieces of ratiocination in the Golden Age.)

The first two-thirds of the novel have merit, and are highly readable, given some good plot ideas, police work, the architectural setting, and Reilly's skill with description. But the solution of the mystery is a real mess.

Staircase 4

The Canvas Dagger

Reilly's books always showed skepticism about the upper classes. The Canvas Dagger pushes this to an extreme. Like The Line-Up, there is a portrait of the well-to-do willing to do anything at all behind the scenes. We eventually get a portrait of some really ugly human beings. The Canvas Dagger develops into an extremely nightmarish portrait of life in 1956. It reflects some of the acute anxieties felt by people in this era. Reading it is a painful, disconcerting experience.

The heroine of The Canvas Dagger is the granddaughter of a US Army general, something not commented on, except to establish the heroine's impeccable upper crust social credentials. But The Canvas Dagger turns out to reflect other realities of a militarized country. Eventually, everyone in the book seems to be standing near a huge Black Hole, pulling in all aspects of life into one big horrible nightmare. Unlike many mystery novels, The Canvas Dagger does not re-establish any sense of normalcy at its finale. Instead, things seem to be much, much worse than we imagined. Not even Inspector McKee can set things right.

Not Me, Inspector

Not Me, Inspector (1959) returns to the basic situations of The Line-Up (1934), written 25 years before. Both books have a wealthy extended family, the killing of the elderly head who controlled the purse-strings, and a mysterious, perhaps forged check. Both novels take place in cold New York City winters. Both novels include nurse-sleuth Lucy Sturm among their supporting character detectives. Both even have similar villains revealed at the end. But Reilly works new approaches on this material.

Follow Me: Reilly and the Pulp Style of Plotting

Follow Me (1960) is a short, vividly written mystery novel, almost a novella. Some aspects of it remind one of the pulp story. It seems to show a version of the "pulp style of plotting", with many disparate characters in the book engaged in criminal schemes. When any one thing bad happens, it is hard to tell which group of characters has done it. Please see the article on hard-boiled fiction for an in-depth discussion of this style of plotting, which was widely used by Black Mask authors of the 1920's and 1930's.

At the end of Reilly's book, there turn out to be no less than three groups of villains. And two of the groups have multiple bad guys in them, instead of solitary criminals. Reilly uses such all surrounding villainy to generate a sense of paranoia. This paranoia is also found in the pulps. It is interesting how gender plays a role in how this paranoia is perceived. When a tough detective is up against criminals at every turn, readers sometimes interpret this as a piece of serious social criticism. When Reilly's sleuth, a pleasant, chic young New York house wife, encounters universal villainy, one can treat it as a "woman in danger" story. Actually the feel of paranoia is similar and intense in both Reilly and the hard-boiled's. The paranoia is an entire world view, and similar in both kinds of writers. Reilly's heroine does not carry a gun, or beat people up, but she is remarkably similar in spirit to the tough guy detectives of the pulps.

Other aspects of the story recall the hard-boiled pulps of the Black Mask school. The heroine gets roughed up when she explores a dangerous criminal lair toward the beginning of the book. This is very close to what happens to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe or other tough p.i.'s when they explore some dangerous locale. Her serious injuries seem far removed from the genteel threats sometimes inflicted on HIBK heroines. There are also private detective characters who play a major role in the book. Another scene that recalls the hard-boiled school: the canyon in Chapter 8, and what the heroine finds there. This discovery is not the fixed aftermath of a crime scene - no, the heroine-sleuth is plunged into a complex series of events involving a crime in progress. When the dust clears, she is left with a series of ambiguous clues about the events. The whole thing is pure hard-boiled, and could have come right out of 1930's Black Mask. Raymond Chandler loved to include scenes set in mysterious lonely canyons, and so did Forrest Rosaire in "The Devil Suit" (1932).

Reilly had some contact with pulp magazines. Her second McKee novel, Murder in the Mews (1931), was serialized in Street and Smith's Detective Story Magazine, and she published a handful of short stories in other pulps. However, the novel serialization could easily have been arranged by an agent or a publisher, and Reilly's degree of contact with the world of pulp writing seems restricted. The murder victim in Mr. Smith's Hat (1936) was grinding out Western stories for a fictitious magazine called Cowboy, which seems to be a pulp. One recalls that Craig Rice's protagonist in Murder Through the Looking Glass (1943) wrote for the science fiction pulps, that Lenore Glen Offord's series sleuth Todd McKinnon earned his living writing pulp detective stories, and that Dorothy L. Sayers' Unnatural Death (1928) refers to Black Mask. All of these references to pulp by Golden Age writers seem to be by women authors. Perhaps this is just a meaningless coincidence. Or perhaps, male writers were more conscious of the low career status assigned to pulps, and avoided referring to them in their tales - career success is a traditional part of masculine self image.

Reilly's Techniques

Reilly has a personal interest in architecture, that wonderful staple of Golden Age novels. Late in Follow Me, the heroine is held captive in a pink adobe house. Eventually, the roof of the building plays a role in the story. Similarly, in her early novel Murder in the Mews (1931), the roof of a building figures prominently. The characters in both books start out at the bottom, and eventually make their way to the top of the house.

This early novel is extremely stilted. Reilly would become a vastly more lively writer as the years progressed. She had the gift of unrolling an ever more complicated plot, with each section providing some new, startling revelation about her characters. Her books, although they generate suspense, are true detective stories. The heroine of Follow Me, while she gets in jeopardy, is a real sleuth, and constantly both attempts to solve the mystery, and succeeds at uncovering more and more of the hidden truth.

On rereading, one can dip anywhere into Follow Me, and come up with a section that recalls itself vividly to memory.

Reilly likes ambiguity. Many of the relationships in Follow Me can be interpreted in more than one way. So can most of the twists of the crime story. This adds to the paranoia of the plot. These different interpretations go off in numerous directions, so that suspicion is cast over everyone in the novel. A key scene in Chapter 11 has the heroine looking at two walls. One looks bluish, the other green, but it is an effect of light on identically colored walls. This is a metaphor for the entire book. The everyday background of events in Follow Me should not disguise the quality of imagination in it. It is very difficult to come up with such relentless sustained ambiguity, one encompassing so many scenes and patterns.

Color is often used when the heroine is about to have some revelation. For example, what she sees in the shop window in Chapter 7. These revelations have a visionary quality, as if they were illuminations of concealed truth, almost a mystic revelation. They often suggest hidden connections that were obscure before. This is a paranoiac world view - that everything is concealing some truth that could speak. It is also the sign of a real detective. Reilly's heroine is a genuine detective, always motivated above all by the desire to learn the truth, and always uncovering more and more of it.

The opening scientific detection in Mr. Smith's Hat turns into a full fledged "revelation" of the kind found in her later work. The revelation involves color and form. It is one of the best pieces of imagery in her work.

Reilly's Characters

Reilly is interested in formerly well to do New Yorkers who are downwardly mobile. Sometimes these people are very open about their sea change. One thinks of the victim in Mr. Smith's Hat (1936), who has abandoned his snooty relatives to life a life of drinking and bohemianism, or the penniless young society woman in The Opening Door (1944) who leaves home and starts a book store and glove shop to support herself, over her snobbish family's fierce objection - they think she should have tried to marry for money instead. This young woman is clearly admirable, while the drunk is probably reprehensible. However, one has a distinct suspicion that Reilly is highly sympathetic to both. The treatment of the young woman has a feminist strand - her going to work is seen as admirable by the author, despite society's objection. Similarly, the young widow in Follow Me plans to get a job, despite her friend's protests. All of these open characters tend to be non-suspects. They are either victims, like the drunk, or viewpoint characters, like the heroine of The Opening Door and the young widow in Follow Me. They are marked "innocent" in the mystery puzzle plot, and morally sympathetic in the author's world view.

A second kind of downwardly mobile character in Reilly is far less open about it. These are suspects who keep up a big front, and who live the lives of upper class New Yorkers, but who are actually quite strapped for money. These characters tend to be suspects in Reilly's books. At first glance, they seem to be quite polished. They tend to be men, well dressed, sophisticated, and with upper middle class jobs. However, they are spending way above any income they have, and the reader discovers that these initially upper crust looking people will do anything for money. These characters include the father and the brother in The Opening Door, and most of the heroine's circle of "friends" in Follow Me. Reilly's treatment of these people as suspects in the puzzle plot is also mirrored in her negative moral and social view of them. They are always introduced in the plot as "typical" upper middle class people, and only later do we learn their flaws. This tends to suggest that most upper middle class people are essentially fakes. Polished on the surface with their upper class clothes and status symbols, but far less solid underneath.

All the downwardly mobile characters fit in with Reilly's themes of ambiguity and hidden truth. They look one way socially, but in fact their real lives and status could be quite different. They have a double role. They are as ambiguous as are both the relationships and the mystery plot developments in Reilly's work.

Reilly's Last Novel: The Day She Died

The Day She Died (1962) is Reilly's last novel. It returns to the New Mexico locations of Follow Me (1960). Reilly lived in New Mexico in her later years, and these two books are clearly based on personal observation.

The Day She Died avoids HIBK mannerisms. It is a tale of pure detection, and its point of view characters are almost entirely two detectives. But it is one of Reilly's works most closely following Mary Roberts Rinehart traditions. It takes place in an isolated country house, one that is full of sinister events, much like Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1907). Many aspects of the characters' personal lives are ones that are familiar to us from Rinehart's fiction.

Its format also follows that of J.B. Priestley's The Old Dark House (1927): a group of strangers take shelter in a crumbling old country house from a terrible rain storm. In this case, the old house is an ancient adobe ranch, a relic of New Mexico's earliest days. Reilly describes the storm, the New Mexico landscape, and the ancient house with tremendous vividness. These scenes have the visionary quality found in Reilly's best writing. Later chapters take us into modern New Mexico cities, a pleasing contrast.