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):
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).
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).
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.
RSS Feed