Taken on its own terms, the Gothic melodrama of the late 19th and early 20th centuries can be an enjoyable genre when sampled today. For me, the challenge for both writer and reader lies in finding something more in the text to raise it above the trappings of its trade. Because the literary Gothic formula functions on tonal excess – rooms are relentlessly dark and shadowy, the weather stormy and inhospitable, the characters orbiting around the emotionally honest protagonist secretive and suspicious – the work can only rise above cliché and develop depth if this tone is put to some original use.
If a greater philosophical theme or social or cultural commentary emerges from this melodramatic foundation, then the results often become exponentially more interesting. Marie Belloc Lowndes' classic 1913 suspense story The Lodger, which presents the tale of a landlady who suspects that her tenant might be a Ripper-esque serial killer, neatly uses its plot to explore the alarmingly knife-thin line between public, societal respectability and private, destructive criminal deviance.
If a greater philosophical theme or social or cultural commentary emerges from this melodramatic foundation, then the results often become exponentially more interesting. Marie Belloc Lowndes' classic 1913 suspense story The Lodger, which presents the tale of a landlady who suspects that her tenant might be a Ripper-esque serial killer, neatly uses its plot to explore the alarmingly knife-thin line between public, societal respectability and private, destructive criminal deviance.
Mary Roberts Rinehart, a pioneering turn-of-the-century writer whose stories mixed crime and melodrama in entertaining fashion, brings Gothic elements to The Case of Jenny Brice (also 1913). This novel features a headstrong Pittsburgh working woman whose house sits on the bank of the Allegheny River and who must contend with a dead body that gets washed into her basement by the seasonal flood waters. The more sensationalistic genre elements are tempered by brilliantly observed (and historically interesting) details that showcase the personalities, geography, and daily living of the author's carefully chosen and drawn subjects.
And when there is not an added element to allow Gothic melodrama to transcend its genre and work on higher levels, you are left with an offering like While the Patient Slept by Mignon G. Eberhart. In her second published novel, appearing in 1930, the stoic traveling nurse Sarah Keate – whose name would almost certainly be modified to Para Keet if the book were important or original enough to justify a Holmesian pastiche – accepts a post at the perpetually gloomy and cavernous mansion of old Jonah Federie, who is in a coma. He is also surrounded, vulture-like, by his immediate family, including suave Eustace and sympathetic March, Jonah's offspring, and slimy uncle Adolph and mysterious wife Isobel, the latter burning with an inner fire. Shadowy business acquaintances Deke Lonergan and Elihu Dimuck are also near at hand, unusually anxious to be present in case the sleeping Jonah should ever awake, and tight-lipped cook Kema and curiously tough butler Grondal are also slinking silently around the house. On a dark and stormy night (naturally), Sarah Keate hears a gunshot and discovers Adolph Federie sprawled on the staircase. A jade elephant figurine lies below him.
Police detective Lance O'Leary arrives on the scene and, through the course of a second murder and the repeated purloining and recovery of the jade elephant, manages to spend a remarkable amount of time on the spooky Federie property. Eberhart dresses her haunted house with dusty, heavy curtains that partition most of the rooms (unless one needs to be locked to further the plot) and no electricity, allowing oil lanterns to regularly grow dim and fill the rooms with oppressive shadows and darkness.
The book's sturm und drang genre tone is so determinedly consistent that its author doesn't really have anywhere else to go. When every scene is fraught with potential menace and suspicion, only moments of action and occurrence can offer a true effect, such as an attack on the heroine or the discovery of a body. The pitch of melodrama is usually notoriously high, and as such is often hard to sustain effectively. The simple act of looking out a window now calls for prose at once atmospheric and needlessly hyperbolic:
Police detective Lance O'Leary arrives on the scene and, through the course of a second murder and the repeated purloining and recovery of the jade elephant, manages to spend a remarkable amount of time on the spooky Federie property. Eberhart dresses her haunted house with dusty, heavy curtains that partition most of the rooms (unless one needs to be locked to further the plot) and no electricity, allowing oil lanterns to regularly grow dim and fill the rooms with oppressive shadows and darkness.
The book's sturm und drang genre tone is so determinedly consistent that its author doesn't really have anywhere else to go. When every scene is fraught with potential menace and suspicion, only moments of action and occurrence can offer a true effect, such as an attack on the heroine or the discovery of a body. The pitch of melodrama is usually notoriously high, and as such is often hard to sustain effectively. The simple act of looking out a window now calls for prose at once atmospheric and needlessly hyperbolic:
From the window in the hall, beyond the wet path and dreary iron gate, I caught a glimpse of an ambulance. It loomed coldly white through the dismal, gray dawn. The sleet was turning again to heavy fog. The shrubbery, bare and brown and dripping, mingled indistinctly with the shadows of the fog. Toward the north of the house the dense thickets of evergreens made black blotches. And all about the place reared that solid wall, hemming in the evergreens and the shadows and the lifeless garden and the grim old house in which I stood, where murder had walked that night.
For this reader at least, the deliberately melodramatic style is too constant (and too thickly applied) to be organic and emotionally effective. But let us move from prose to puzzle plotting, which is an even more unsatisfying aspect of While the Patient Slept. Here we have an exemplary holdover of the early thriller style seen in crime fiction from the early 1900s, when the genre was gradually but inevitably transforming from suspense and women-in-jeopardy stories to the fair-play puzzles we recognize as classic Golden Age Detection today. Simply put, Patient's essential puzzle clues are not provided to the reader (and often not to the detective or narrator) until the book's final chapter. For example, if you had only been aware, dear reader, that the killer's motive was anchored in an agreement created between two people years before the events of the plot, you would have had a reasonable opportunity to connect the dots and identify the murderer. But as we are given this information only in the book's last pages, no fair-play armchair sleuthing can occur.
This is not the only frustrating transgression to be found within Eberhart's plot: the final-chapter reveal that a character owned an unknown duplicate set of house keys renders the earlier mystery of access to locked rooms irrelevant; and, amusingly, we learn only at the very end that two characters possess similar sounding voices, and that an early conversation heard by the observant Sarah Keate is actually now attributed to a different individual than she had claimed. How any reader is supposed to get ahead of this bit of transcribed aural trickery is beyond me.
If a contemporary puzzle fan has not yet launched the book across the room in frustration, he or she is treated to this stratagem from the handsome Lance O'Leary. After the murderer repeatedly rebuffs the detective's accusations by saying "You can't prove anything," O'Leary lays this cunning trap (the dual pronoun use to avoid revealing the villain's gender in the excerpt is my own addition):
This is not the only frustrating transgression to be found within Eberhart's plot: the final-chapter reveal that a character owned an unknown duplicate set of house keys renders the earlier mystery of access to locked rooms irrelevant; and, amusingly, we learn only at the very end that two characters possess similar sounding voices, and that an early conversation heard by the observant Sarah Keate is actually now attributed to a different individual than she had claimed. How any reader is supposed to get ahead of this bit of transcribed aural trickery is beyond me.
If a contemporary puzzle fan has not yet launched the book across the room in frustration, he or she is treated to this stratagem from the handsome Lance O'Leary. After the murderer repeatedly rebuffs the detective's accusations by saying "You can't prove anything," O'Leary lays this cunning trap (the dual pronoun use to avoid revealing the villain's gender in the excerpt is my own addition):
"There is only one thing I am curious about," said O'Leary quietly. "How did you get that revolver over in the corner of the vacant bedroom upstairs without entering the room yourself?"
[The murderer] smiled; it was an ugly smile.
"I threw it!" [he/she] said with a grisly touch of triumph in [his/her] voice. "Had you there, didn't I! I simply opened the door, rubbed the fingerprints off the revolver, and threw it." A look of terror came into [his/her] face. "No, I didn't! No, I didn’t! You can't prove anything."
"You've confessed, you fool," said O'Leary in a tone as near savagery as I've ever known him to use.
And a witness to this exchange actually manages to comment, "You're a smart man, O'Leary."
With the Gothic atmosphere creating a tonal plateau and the book not delivering anything beyond a busy and far from fair-play crime plot, While the Patient Slept should only be resuscitated by those readers seeking out this style of melodrama.
An interesting and equally unbelievable postscript: according to the image at right, this title received the Scotland Yard Prize for best detective story of the year, ostensibly beating out several other titles in the running for 1930.
This review was inspired by the Crimes of the Century year-by-year reading challenge, which can be found on Rich's great mystery fiction community website Past Offences.
An interesting and equally unbelievable postscript: according to the image at right, this title received the Scotland Yard Prize for best detective story of the year, ostensibly beating out several other titles in the running for 1930.
This review was inspired by the Crimes of the Century year-by-year reading challenge, which can be found on Rich's great mystery fiction community website Past Offences.
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