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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 41 |
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TO BE 'BORN AGAIN'
Three noir-style mystery novels rarely read today that really deserve to be revived for today's readers to enjoy, from left: Dana Lyon's "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead" (1942); A.P. Herbert's "The House by the River" (1921) and C.S. Forester's "Payment Deferred" (1926). The latter two novels were turned into fine movies, but are still neglected by readers today. |
Enjoy the rediscovery of
these 'lost classics' today
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
A few years ago, during a question period in one of my "History of Mystery" classes, a student asked me where I thought her grandmother, Dana Lyon, fit into the chronology of the genre. It was an embarrassing moment because I'd never heard of Dana Lyon. I had no choice but to openly admit I didn't have a clue.
After class, I asked the student to name some of the mysteries Dana Lyon had written. As she reeled off a few titles, I kept drawing a blank--until she mentioned that one of them, "The Frightened Child," had been made into a movie called "The House on Telegraph Hill." Bingo! I remembered the movie, which was a classic film noir, so I didn't feel like a total dunce. The following day I tried to find some of her grandmother's novels in several of the large used book stores in Bellingham, WA. No such luck. I went online and found they were all out of print.
Then I was inspired to look through some old mystery collections I had stored in a closet and finally hit paydirt. In a battered old copy of "The Fourth Mystery Book," a collection of short novels published by Farrar and Rinehart in the early 1940s, I found Dana Lyon's novel "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead" (1942). I sat down and quickly read it, feeling like I'd just been washed ashore on a rich and beautiful undiscovered island.
Not long afterward, another student of mine asked me why I didn't include Freeman Wills Crofts in my history of mystery. Again, I had no idea why I should. I'd heard the name before, but had never come across one of his novels, which had fallen out of vogue years ago. This student saved me from my ignorance at my very next class, bringing me several old paperback editions of Crofts and even giving me one she had painstakingly reproduced on a copier and bound together with rubber bands.
I began with "The Cask," his first novel, and was immediately hooked on Crofts. That's about when I learned many mystery scholars considered the 1920 publication of "The Cask," along with the appearance of Agatha Christie's first Hercule Poirot novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," to be the start of The Golden Age of Mystery.
Again, this teacher had learned from his student.
I suppose most mystery fans have had similar experiences. Someone tells us about a "classic" that somehow has slipped away over the years and fallen out of favor, if not completely out of print. Without that one person's discovery, we might never have stumbled upon another gem to add to our rich treasury of favorite mysteries.
New generations of mystery readers love to dredge up overlooked or forgotten authors. The rescue from obscurity of such masters as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich has enriched the genre many times over. Once I started reading her, I couldn't believe that the great Patricia Highsmith had to be "born again" in the mystery world in order for all her marvelous books to come back into print, some for the first time in the U.S. Happily, many of the authors I've cited now seem even more appropriate for today's noir-hungry readers than they were for readers in their own time.
But there still are scores of really significant writers in need of rediscovery. Unless a new demand for them is created, their books may continue to be extremely hard to find except at high prices in antiquarian book shops. The internet has made searches of mystery book stores reasonably convenient and there now are even companies that will publish out-of-print titles on demand, usually at inflated prices in unappealing editions made by optically scanning library copies of the original books. (I had to pay around $30 for such an effort--an ugly duckling copy of A.E.W. Mason's "The House of the Arrow," printed in a format so large that it won't fit in any of my bookcases.)
I'm not a book collector per se, but a project I've been working on in recent years--a TV documentary on the history of the genre--has inspired me to read hundreds of mysteries I'd probably never have found if I hadn't turned them up in my research. The process has deeply enhanced my understanding of this rich literary legacy.
Consequently, I've decided to give you a short list of several mysteries that I've turned up, all of them desperately in need of rediscovery.
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by Freeman Wills Crofts |
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Crofts' fast-paced novel starts when four wine casks are accidentally dropped while being unloaded from the hold of a ship in England. One of them leaks sawdust instead of wine, along with some gold coins. Looking closer, inspectors also see the fingers of a human hand dangling out of the shattered cask. Once Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard turns up and begins his probe, we learn that the cask contains the strangled corpse of a young woman. That sets off a major investigation that leads detectives back to France, where the cask originally was loaded onto the cargo ship. This is a fast-paced thriller that in no way feels archaic. Read it and get hooked!
2. THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER
(1921) by A. J. Herbert
You can get some pretty good arguments going about where the
noir school of mystery began, but this 1921 novel pre-dates
the earliest "inverted" mysteries, in which the reader
knows who did the crime from the start and the suspense comes,
"Columbo"-style," from watching the police track
him down. It also pre-dates the pessimistic tales of James M.
Cain, Cornell Woolrich and all the rest of the noir kingpins.
I found this one while researching the literary source of Fritz
Lang's classic 1950 film noir of the same name. English
author A. P. Herbert’s very dark novel is an inverted mystery
in which noted poet Stephen Byrne murders Emily Gaunt, the sexy
young housemaid who rejects his advances, then involves his best
friend in covering up the crime while eventually shifting suspicion
onto the innocent man. Still an absorbing read.
3. PAYMENT DEFERRED (1926) by C. S. Forester
Cecil Scott Forester isn't exactly a neglected author since his Horatio Hornblower nautical novels are all still in print and some of his other more famous works, such as "The African Queen," continue to attract readers. But his first crime novel, written at the start of his career, is a genuine inverted mystery that pre-dates Francis Iles' "Malice Aforethought" by several years. It's about an unlikely killer who murders his nephew for money, covers up the crime, then twists in the wind as his guilt weighs on his soul. The book was filmed in 1932 with Charles Laughton as the killer, but the film, too, is sadly neglected today. A second Forester crime novel, Plain Murder (1930), is also an inverted mystery that helps nail down Forester's place in the annals of mystery.
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by Ethel Lina White |
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Perhaps the most unjustly neglected of all the Golden Age mystery writers, White was a specialist in suspense, usually with a woman in dire jeopardy. She is best remembered for "The Wheel Spins" (1936), which Alfred Hitchcock filmed as "The Lady Vanishes" in 1937, making his usual radical changes in the storyline. (In that case, the film version added cricket fans Charters and Caldicott, two characters not in the book, who went on to appear in other films, a radio series and, eventually, a TV series.) In "Some Must Watch," an introverted maid in an isolated country manor is menaced by a deranged strangler, who may be living in the household where she works. When the book was filmed as "The Spiral Staircase" in 1946 by film noir master Robert Siodmak, the heroine was given a handicap not in White's novel--a severe psychological phobia that made her mute and kept her from calling for help. However, White's original novel generates so much suspense that the mute gimmick wasn't necessary.
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 The 1942 movie version |
I discovered this nifty little detective novel while researching mysteries that featured blind detectives in the movies and on TV. MGM filmed the book in 1941 as "Eyes in the Night," starring Edward Arnold as Kendrick's Capt. Duncan Maclain, a World War I veteran who was blinded in a poison gas attack and turns to detective work in civilian life. Maclain discovers the vicious killing of a fading stage star is somehow connected to a Nazi sabotage plot about to roll into action in America. His most valuable clue: The lingering scent of violets at the murder scene. Author Kendrick, seldom read much today, was the first president of the Mystery Writers of America and the Capt. Maclain novels he wrote between 1937-52 all need to be rediscovered my modern mystery fans.
6. I'LL BE GLAD WHEN YOU'RE DEAD (1942) by (Mabel) Dana Lyon
My student's grandmother turned out to be a fine writer once I tracked down this short novel about the murder of a female blackmailer in Bakersfield, CA. The novel is part inverted mystery because the narrator is a scoundrel named Jake Malone who testifies in court that he saw defendant Ray Tremaine fleeing from the murder scene. We know he's lying in order to help convict a man he's envied--and hated--since their boyhood days. This has several credible twists and never lets up as it goes about the business of letting us find out who really killed the blackmailer--and why.
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Though Dorothy B. Hughes was proclaimed a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1978 and had won an Edgar Award for criticism in 1950, her extraordinary mystery novels are not as well-read today as they ought to be considering her relevance to the sub-genre of noir. Her later novels "In A Lonely Place"and "Ride the Pink Horse," both were turned into well-received movies now considered landmark films noir, but this earlier work is every bit as compelling. It's about a Spanish Civil War vet who returns to the States during World War 2, bent on revenge for his best friend's murder in Spain--and finds he's being stalked by Nazis and a sadistic killer he calls The Wobblefoot. This was filmed in 1943 with John Garfield as the hero, but the film is rarely shown today.
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by Charlotte Armstrong |
 The 1947 movie version |
Charlotte Armstrong was once a regular on best-seller lists,
but little attention has been paid her since her death in 1969.
She was a master of suspense--which is probably why Alfred Hitchcock
had her writing scripts for his TV show in the latter years of
her career. "The Unsuspected" was her first real suspense
novel and it's still a gem despite some plot contrivances that
don't wear so well. It's about a radio mystery specialist who
follows police investigations, but has a murderous side himself,
which puts his own niece into jeopardy for her life. The 1947
film by Michael Curtiz ("Adventures of Robin Hood,"
"Casablanca") starred Claude Rains as the deceptively
charming radio man, but it, too, is rarely seen today.
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by Patrick Quentin |
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This may be the best of the witty, cleverly-plotted novels about Peter Duluth, a theater producer who can't stay off the bottle and keeps getting involved in puzzling murder cases. Duluth first was introduced in the 1936 novel "A Puzzle For Fools" by Q. Patrick alias Patrick Quentin, who really was a couple of other people: writers Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Wheeler. In this novel, Duluth becomes the prime suspect in a murder committed in his own Manhattan apartment--and much of the book takes place there as police query a host of suspects. This was filmed in 1954 as one of the first productions in the widescreen CinemaScope process. Oscar winner Van Heflin (Best Supporting Actor for Johnny Eager, 1942) played Duluth and the cast included Ginger Rogers, Gene Tierney, George Raft and Peggy Ann Garner. The film has just been reissued on DVD.
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by Victor Canning |
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Victor Canning's suspenseful blend of mystery and espionage made his novels steady sellers throughout his lifetime, but interest seems to have dropped off dramatically in the two decades since his death in 1986. If you haven't read him before, I think this is a good place to start--with a troubled nun, who may be pregnant, stripping down to her underwear and walking into the perilous surf off Portugal, bent on ending it all. She's hauled out of the water by an enigmatic fisherman, who helps her get her life back on track, but gets caught up in the legacy of international intrigue even she didn't know she had.
©2007 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Oct. 15, 2007.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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