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Book Review: THE IVORY GRIN (1952) by Ross MacDonald

1/27/2021

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For anyone searching for a representative Lew Archer mystery from Ross MacDonald, for a title that showcases the author’s considerable literary merits and shows just how masterfully he could plot and write, one need look no further than 1952’s The Ivory Grin. Speaking personally, I find it a stronger and more intriguing book than the three novels preceding Grin, although they each have much to recommend. This one starts as so many do, with a woman who can’t (or shouldn’t) be trusted visiting Archer’s office and commissioning him to find somebody. In this case, the petitioner is a brassy nouveau riche who wants the private investigator to find a black maid who, she alleges, absconded with some jewelry. Archer sets out to tail Lucy Champion, an attractive young African-American with a nursing certification, and soon discovers that there is more to the story than missing bracelets. The detective finds Lucy in a motel room, dead on the floor, and the case soon takes on more suspects as Archer works to link the recent murder with the prior disappearance of Charles Singleton, a war veteran and heir to a considerable fortune.

MacDonald is known for his complicated narratives and wry humor, and both are to be found in abundance here. What I find admirable is that this tale’s plot is indeed complex, but just labyrinthine enough to keep the reader always attentive but never actually lost along the way. One scene propels the P.I. into his next encounter, which allows the story to unfold at a steady and carefully crafted clip. With Grin especially, the author achieves a highly satisfying symmetry by the plotline’s conclusion, with character actions and reactions creating a tragic inevitability. There’s also a triangle with a fourth character at its apex that gives the outcome a geometric neatness; to say more, or to identify who occupies which corner, would spoil the surprises in store.

But what elevates The Ivory Grin from its pulp origins into a more literary arena is MacDonald’s no-nonsense observations and descriptions that provide a very believable snapshot of American race relations in the early 1950s. There’s no preaching here, and no didactic moral, just dozens of details: the casually dismissive sheriff of a young black woman’s murder; Archer’s belief (via evidence and logic) that Lucy’s boyfriend Alex did not kill her, even though he fled from the scene; client Una's initial accusation of theft, meant to be taken without question by the upper-class accuser; and the cold truth that Lucy’s death is ultimately insignificant to the cast of wealthy white people who have larger, class-rooted secrets to conceal. The story may have been written by a white man and might feature a white protagonist (and ultimately tell a white story), but Ross MacDonald is intensely interested in exploring this culture of double standards. If he wasn’t, he would not have bothered to deliver consistently illuminating descriptions in his prose. Take this sketch of a "beautiful" city divided by race and class: 

The highway was a rough social equator bisecting the community into lighter and darker hemispheres. Above it in the northern hemisphere lived the whites who owned and operated the banks and churches, clothing and grocery and liquor stores. In the smaller section below it, cramped and broken up by ice plants, warehouses, laundries, lived the darker ones, the Mexicans and Negroes who did most of the manual work in Bella City and its hinterland.
And in the next paragraph, the author describes the denizens of East Hidalgo Street:
Housewives black, brown, and sallow were hugging parcels and pushing shopping carts on the sidewalk. Above them a ramshackle house, with paired front windows like eyes demented by earthquake memories, advertised Rooms for Transients on one side, Palm Reading on the other. A couple of Mexican children, boy and girl, strolled hand in hand in a timeless noon on their way to an early marriage.
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That last line is a sweet, poetic turn of phrase, made nicer because it allows a moment of happiness to visit a few souls from a population otherwise defined by toil and troubled living. Understand that The Ivory Grin isn’t a racial or sociocultural polemic; it is first and foremost an absorbing mystery, well worth finding and experiencing seventy years later. It shows a hard-boiled crime writer at the top of his game, and gives the always introspective but never opinionated Lew Archer a reason to be an anthropologist just as much as a gumshoe. It is Archer’s, and MacDonald’s, keen understanding of people and their often contrary, petty, and pitiable ways that allows him to solve the mystery while recognizing enough of humanity (in Lucy, in Alex) to not give up on the human race for good. Highly recommended.

Tracy K. has reviewed this title over at her great blog, Bitter Tea and Mystery.
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Book Review: COTTAGE SINISTER (1931) by Q. Patrick

1/23/2021

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The first mystery to be published under the pseudonym of Q. Patrick, 1931’s Cottage Sinister is a notable but uneven effort from Rickie Webb and his first co-author and partner in crime, Martha Mott Kelly. In the otherwise quiet English village of Crosby Stourton, a wave of poisonings has decimated the seemingly innocuous working-class Lubbock family. First to go is winsome Amy, visiting from London and poisoned at teatime. Soon her sister Isabel joins her, with more unfortunate deaths to come. Even the village’s feudal family is not immune to the tragedy, and when a locked-room poisoning occurs at Crosby Hall, suspicion turns to young Lucy Lubbock, a nurse who is rumored to have set her sights on Christopher Crosby, the young doctor and heir to the baronetcy.

With plenty of wheels in motion, Cottage Sinister nonetheless makes for a somewhat halting reading experience. For me, this has to do with elements that are energetic but not quite on-the-mark. The most obvious barrier is the tone of the prose itself, which means to be wryly comical but often feels both strained and false. More specifically, it is narration that calls attention to itself and its cleverness (in part through commentary on the genre), and as a result, this reader could never quite trust it or the story being told.

Curtis Evans, Golden Age of Detection scholar, is working on an ambitious biography and critical companion book of the round-robin authors and their mysteries published under Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge. Curtis has several excellent pieces already available on his website The Passing Tramp, including a look at Cottage Sinister, which he also categorizes as an underwhelming début. He laments the artificial tone struck by the two American-based writers (even as Webb was born and raised in England):

[F]or whatever reason the pair decided to make their England the deliberately artificial England of books, the England about which they thought the readers, whether in the US or the UK, wanted to read...  [M]aybe they succeeded in what they were trying to do, but I think trying to do it in the first place was an error of judgment.  It's just too twee really to be.
Added to that, the ostensible detective of the puzzle, Inspector Inge of Scotland Yard, is one whom the reader is never fully allowed to trust, and perhaps with good reason. Is he a parody of the genre type, or will his powers of observation allow him to gleam the correct solution? Part of this interpretive problem is that the authors choose to constantly refer to him as the Archdeacon in physical appearance; he is given that moniker far more than that of Inspector. But where G. K. Chesterton brilliantly uses the bland, unassuming figure of Father Brown as a manifestation of the man’s pragmatic, commonsense ideology, Inge’s likeness to a church figure is never activated and never pays off, either in character or in theme.

I have spent the first paragraphs talking about this story’s shortcomings; so what is there to recommend? While there was rarely much interest beyond the academic regarding plot or characterization, Cottage Sinister paradoxically finishes strong, with a clear-eyed dénouement that ties all of the book’s threads together. Webb and Kelly have also concocted an interesting poisoning method, and one that Curtis Evans convincingly argues was likely informed by Webb’s experience working for a pharmaceutical company. It also reminds me of a clever poisoning method in an even splashier début, when Agatha Christie had her Belgian detective investigate The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920).

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Finally, let me note that Webb and Kelly’s next mystery, Murder at the Women’s City Club, set in Philadelphia and published the following year, is a marked improvement. Tone, characterization, and plot work in harmony, and the group of suspects are vivacious and nicely delineated. It is also heartening to know that many of these rare Q. Patrick titles are available as eBooks in the U.S. from OpenRoad Media and MysteriousPress.com, while Crippen & Landru Publishers have been curating and reprinting short stories and novellas. With Curtis’s companion volume in the works, it’s a Q. Patrick/Patrick Quentin renaissance.

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Book Review: THIS UNDESIRABLE RESIDENCE (1942) by Miles Burton

1/9/2021

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The title is a gloss on an estate agent’s marketing phrase, which is fitting as this story begins in a realtor’s office. Mr. Simeon Apperley enters, concerned to learn that his secretary, Brinklow, has not visited the agent as expected and is now missing, along with Mr. Apperley’s automobile and some cases containing valuable postage stamps from his collection. Man, vehicle, and stamps are soon found, with Brinklow dead in the car parked outside Ash House, a property that had already acquired a slightly shadowy reputation. The victim had received a fatal blow from an iron plate, potentially dropped through the car’s open rooftop from a house window. While Brinklow was familiar with the town of Wraynesford from years past, motive for the man’s death is obscure, especially as the stamps were not taken from the car.

Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard is called in to assist local constable Prickett, and suspicion quickly settles on Isaac Napley, the leader of a group of itinerant gypsies. The uneducated laborer may have not recognized the value within the cases and Brinklow’s murder may have been merely a crime of opportunity. But then a second death occurs, with Apperley’s cousin involved in a fatal motor accident on the road leading to Ash House, and Arnold wonders if this is more than a coincidence. He eventually untangles the events, but he might have gotten there much sooner had he consulted his friend Desmond Merrion; this book is Merrion-free, and the reader is also likely ahead of the detective regarding the solution.

Over at Nick Fuller’s great GAD website, The Grandest Game in the World, Nick calls Residence “the most tedious Burton I’ve read so far” and complains, with justification, that “the solution is obvious by the end of Chapter 3.” I wouldn’t describe this book as tedious; it reminds me just how consistent Cecil John Charles Street is as a writer. His plotlines and prose never really mystify or dazzle (at least they don’t for me), but they are usually modestly engaging and keep the investigation reliably moving forward. (There is certainly no inner monologuing or overdescription of setting that other mystery writers might indulge in, and that is modestly admirable.)  The criticism of the puzzle being over-obvious is a fair one, and it is not exclusive to this Rhode/Burton title; if the reader has figured out the details, then we are waiting for the author to have his detective catch up, hence the tedium.

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I found a few items of interest at this Residence, including the author’s casual references to British wartime circumstances: meat is a scarce commodity, impacting Arnold’s beloved pub lunches; there are few young men around in the village other than Isaac Napley, the gypsy suspect. And it’s sociologically intriguing to hear Arnold and Prickett (via the author) assess the nomadic family, a group that can’t be trusted because it has an almost genetically criminal ethos. Prickett lists littering, disturbing the peace, and avoiding the police among the Napleys’ offenses; paradoxically, they are also the book’s only example of hardworking (and apparently honest and reliable) manual laborers. You can contrast this suspicion-of-the-outsider perspective with Gladys Mitchell’s more anthropological interest in rural gypsy customs in books like Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956).

This Undesirable Residence was published in the U.S. as Death at Ash House (Doubleday, Doran & Co., also 1942). I am grateful for a robust academic interlibrary loan system that lets me sample these desirable properties in a market that would otherwise be well out of my price range. 


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