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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 13 |
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BOOK & FILM Latest in Ron Miller's series comparing classic mystery novels to the movies filmmakers made from them. |
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Release of 'Widow' DVD
prompts talk of its author
of TheColumnists.com
The current DVD release of the 1954 movie version of Patrick Quentin's mystery novel "Black Widow" is as good a reason as any to dredge up one of the most curious interludes in the long history of the mystery genre.
From the 1930s through the 1950s, European mystery lovers widely hailed Patrick Quentin as one of America's greatest mystery writers. In fact, British mystery novelist Francis Iles called Quentin "No. 1" among all American mystery writers. And that wasn't a shabby endorsement. Iles was among Britain's very best mystery writers, a pioneer of the "inverted" mystery genre who wrote two novels still acclaimed as masterpieces: "Malice Aforethought," twice dramatized on PBS' "Mystery!", and "Before the Fact," which Alfred Hitchcock turned into one of his greatest suspense films--"Suspicion" with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, who won the Academy Award for her 1941 performance.
But that loud cheer from Iles has to be one of the mystery world's great in-jokes. You see, Francis Iles was a make believe person--the pen name of author Anthony Berkeley. What's more, Patrick Quentin never really existed either. He was the pseudonym, at one time or another, of not one, not even two, but actually four different writers: Richard Wilson Webb, Hugh Wheeler, Martha Mott Kelly and Mary Louise White Aswell.
How did that weird melange of writing
talents come about? Well, it all began in 1931 when Webb, a British-born
pharmacist living in Philadelphia, PA, decided, just for fun,
to write a mystery novel called "Cottage Sinister"
and took Ms. Kelly as his collaborator. They wanted to use a
single pen name rather than write under both their names, so
they chose the surname "Patrick" by combining parts
of their nicknames--"Patsy" for Kelly and "Rick"
for Webb--and just adding the letter "Q" in place of
a first name.
Their mutual creation, Q. Patrick, published two mysteries--"Cottage
Sinister" in 1931 and "Murder at the Women's City Club"
in 1932. Then Kelly got married and gave up her half of the make
believe author. Webb wrote "Murder at the Varsity"
(1933) by himself, still using the Q. Patrick pen name, then
took Ms. Aswell, an editor at Harper's Bazaar, as his
new partner and published two more "Q. Patrick" mysteries
with her: "S.S. Nightmare" (1933) and "The Grindle
Nightmare" (1935).
Finally, though, Webb found his perfect partner in Hugh Wheeler and, in 1936, they wrote "Murder Gone To Earth," the first of nine "Dr. Westlake" mysteries, under a new pseudonym, Jonathan Stagge. Bristling with new ideas, that same year they also created the character who would become their most popular "detective," Broadway producer Peter Duluth, publishing his first adventure, "A Puzzle For Fools," under another new pen name made from the original one--Patrick Quentin.
Peter Duluth really isn't a detective, but, in the rich tradition of Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple, he keeps getting mixed up in crimes that require his clever, facile mind, usually to get himself out of some terrible pickle. As a mystery wri;ter, Webb came from the English tradition of "puzzle" mysteries, which accounts for the use of the word "puzzle" in the titles of so many of the early Peter Duluth mysteries. But once Wheeler came on board, the mysteries began to reflect his deep interest in psychology and police procedure.
The result was a stream of extremely credible mysteries that may have embraced the charming "cozy" style of Christie and Dorothy Sayers, but also hewed closely to the facts and seldom put Peter Duluth or their other characters into situations that were too fanciful. The Duluth mysteries give us a constant backstage view of the Broadway theater world, but also a comfortable notion of how modern police work functioned from the 1930s through the 1950s.
"Black Widow," first published in 1952, was the eighth of nine Peter Duluth mysteries and the last one both Webb and Wheeler worked on together. Webb's failing health finally caused him to bow out of the process and Wheeler went on without him to write many more Patrick Quentin mysteries, i;ncluding a final Peter Duluth case. "Black Widow" is still a very readable mystery. I read it first in 1954 after seeing the movie released that year. Then I read it again before writing this column. Many fans consider it the peak of the Duluth canon.
In the storyline, Duluth's wife, Iris, a famous stage and screen actress, leaves their New York apartment for Jamaica to be with her ailing mother for several weeks. Peter stays behind because he's in charge of a current hit Broadway show starring their upstairs neighbor and friend, Charlotte "Lottie" Marin, who's perhaps America's most popular stage star.
Shortly after Iris departs, Peter reluctantly goes to a party Lottie has given and meets a plain, rather drab young woman named "Nanny" Ordway, who tells him she wants to be a writer. He's bored with the party and so is she, so he invites her out to dinner and they become rather hasty friends. Peter really isn't anxious to two-time his beautiful wife--even though she has cheated on him at least once before--but he's drawn to Nanny Ordway mostly because she flatters him a great deal and appeal to his "fatherly" side.
Peter's great mistake, though, is offering Nanny the use of his apartment during the day as a place to do her serious writing. It's a large, luxurious Manhattan apartment while her own place is a shabby flat she shares with another girl.
The seriousness of his error finally becomes apparent when Iris returns from her long trip and together they find Nanny Ordway dead, her corpse hanging by the neck in the bathroom of their apartment, an apparent suicide.
It's a scandalous situation, of course, because everybody believes the girl was used and abused by Peter while his wife was out of town and, when she discovered she was pregnant, she killed herself where he'd find her hanging, her crude illustrated suicide note nearby.
But when the police determine Nanny was murdered and didn't hang herself, Peter is in the deepest doo-doo of his long career in mysteries. New York Police Detective Lt. Timothy Trant, a character in his own series of mysteries written by "Q. Patrick", is assigned to the case and naturally believes Peter is the prime suspect because he has the most obvious motive.
That means there isn't much effort being given to find out who the real killer was and Peter has to conduct his own investigation before he's hauled into court to face a murder charge. Not only is his marriage now on the rocks, but his future starts to look very grim indeed. It's a nifty situation for suspense.
There are several other suspects, of course, including the unknown older man who really fathered Nanny's expected child; the young brother of her roommate, who had proposed marriage to Nanny not long before she died, and an aging, not very successful Broadway actor Nanny apparently lived with for a time before moving in with the other girl. Peter attempts to find the truth from each of these characters before Lt. Trant catches up to him.
"Black Widow" has a rich assortment of characters, which made it an ideal prospect for becoming a feature film. Altogether, three of Patrick Quentin's Peter Duluth mysteries have been turned into movies, but, oddly, only the first of them used "Peter Duluth" as a character. That was "Homicide For Three," based on Quentin's 1944 novel "Puzzle For Puppets." It was filmed by Republic pictures in 1948 and starred Warren Douglas as Peter Duluth and Audrey Long as Iris.
"Black Widow" came next in 1954 and was one of the very first films by 20th Century-Fox to utilize the widescreen CinemaScope process. Peter Duluth is renamed Peter Denver and is played by veteran character actor Van Heflin, winner of a Supporting Actor Oscar for MGM's "Johnny Eager" in 1942. The third film, "Strange Awakening" (1958)--known as "Female Fiends" in the USA--was a European feature film based on Quentin's 1946 novel "Puzzle for Fiends." Lex Barker, who had most recently played Tarzan in several movies, played a character called Peter Chance.
Of the three films, "Black Widow" is the only one that got a big studio treatment. It was written and directed by Nunnally Johnson, one of the very best screenwriters in Hollywood history. He began writing for the movies in the early 1930s and among his credits were "The Grapes of Wrath," "Jesse James," "The Prisoner of Shark Island," "Tobacco Road," "The Pied Piper," "The Moon is Down," "Keys of the Kingdom," "Three Came Home," "Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid," "The Desert Fox," "How to Marry A Millionaire," "Flaming Star" (for Elvis Presley) and "The Dirty Dozen." He directed few films, but two are well-remembered: "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and "The Three Faces of Eve," for which Joanne Woodward won the Best Actress Oscar in 1957.
Why Johnson decided to change Duluth to Denver is anybody's guess. (He wasn't from either city.) He also made one other serious character switch: He removed Lt. Trant completely and replaced him with a much older character, Detective Lt. C.A. Bruce, played by veteran screen tough guy George Raft. Top-billed was Ginger Rogers, who played Peter's upstairs neighbor and troublesome star "Lottie" Marin. In the book, Lottie's husband, Brian, is a younger American character, but Johnson cast the much older, very British Reginald Gardiner as Brian, perhaps to go better with the aging Ginger Rogers.
The notorious "Nanny" Ordway was played by former child star Peggy Ann Garner and her roommate was played by Fox studio "starlet" Virginia Leith, a discovery of Stanley Kubrick who was pushed into several leading roles in the 1950s, but never really became a star. Gordon Ling, the older actor Nanny lived with earlier, was played by Otto Kruger. Peter's wife, Iris "Denver," was played by former leading lady Gene Tierney, whose career already was starting to fade badly, though she looks fine in "Black Widow." The young man who hoped to marry Nanny was played by frequent screen "bad guy" Skip Homeir, who, like Garner, had been a child star.
Though the current DVD release of "Black Widow" comes as part of a new Fox "film noir" set, it's really a stretch to put it in that category of dark, moody suspense films. Director Johnson was not very inventive in "opening up" the story and getting it out of the principal set--the apartment of Peter and Iris. With the CinemaScope wide screen, the result is a boring series of tableau-style scenes in which several characters are spread out across the living room set as if Johnson was trying to fill space. The script is also very talky, so the film often seems very static. The bright colors also work against thinking of "Black Widow" as a film noir. There's nary a shadow in the whole picture.
But the acting is of a pretty high order. Ginger Rogers chomps down on the grotesque Lottie character with gusto and Heflin was always very good at portraying genuine nice guys trying to get themselves out of trouble by being extra-earnest. Peggy Ann Garner is just right for Nanny and Tierney, Gardner and Kruger all seem just as their characters should be. However, George Raft seems a bit stiff in his role and you tend to hope he'll punch somebody out or get gut-shot by the killer while flipping a coin. No such luck.
But if the release of "Black Widow" on home video--it's never been on the market before--serves to stir up some interest in the Patrick Quentin novels about Peter Duluth, that will be wonderful. Duluth is a great character, who starts out as a recovering alcoholic, goes through marital hard times and has an awful lot of ups and downs. He's one of my favorite amateur "detectives" and is definitely due for a revival in the 21st century.
Duluth's co-creator, Richard Webb, did nothing significant in the mystery field after he wrote "Black Widow" with Hugh Wheeler in 1952, but Wheeler went on to make an even bigger mark for himself by writing the "book" (the dramatic storyline) for several Stephen Sondheim musicals, including Sondheim's most mystery-oriented show, "Sweeney Todd." His last pure mystery effort was writing the teleplay (with Leonard Stern) for the 1972 TV movie "The Snoop Sisters," with Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick playing elderly mystery writers who solve real crimes. It led to a short-lived NBC series of the same name.
I'm afraid the name Patrick Quentin doesn't
mean much to today's mystery readers, but it certainly ought
to since it represents one of the truly oddball combinations
of mystery talents in the history of the genre.
©2008 by Ron Miller. This column first posted March 31, 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.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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