JASON HALF : writer
  • Home
  • Full-length Plays
    • The Community Play
    • Kate and Comet
    • Sundial
    • Tulip Brothers
  • Short Plays
    • Among the Oats
    • Holly and Mr. Ivy
    • Locked Room Misery
  • Screenplays
    • The Ballad of Faith Divine
    • My Advice
    • Finders
  • Fiction
  • Blog

Book Review: MURDER AT THE 'VARSITY (1933) by Q. Patrick

2/21/2022

3 Comments

 
Picture
Perhaps better known by its American title Murder at Cambridge, 1933’s Murder at the ‘Varsity is the third mystery novel to be published under the Q. Patrick name. It is a breezy and enjoyable fair-play affair, even as its central puzzle – who shot exaggeratedly Teutonic student Julius Baumann in his room and made it look like suicide? – is not especially confounding. Curtis Evans at The Passing Tramp has sorted out the authorship of the many books written as Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge and marks ‘Varsity as a solo effort by Rickie Webb when he was between writing partners. (Webb wrote the first two with Martha Mott Kelley and would write the next entry, S.S. Murder, with Mary Louise White [Aswell].)

So it seems fitting that this story is narrated by Hilary Fenton, an American male who observes the British college environment with an outsider’s delight akin to an anthropologist. I suspect that Webb was more at home in England than his protagonist here: while the author was born in Somerset and moved to the United States when he was twenty-five, the fictional Fenton is a Yankee abroad. The book boasts a four-page glossary that defines “some of the local colloquialisms and other quasi-technical terms” to bring the uninitiated up to speed. A gyp, we learn from this addendum (although it is also clear in context), is “a male college servant assigned to take care of a certain set of rooms or the rooms on one particular staircase”. And in this story, there is a lot going on in those rooms and on those staircases.

But it is in an ordinary lecture hall that young Fenton first spots his romantic ideal, Camilla Lathrop. He spends the early chapters learning her identity and stage managing another encounter. Fenton also spots her – or thinks he spots her – on the landing outside Baumann’s room on the stormy night of the murder, and it is from a muddled sense of chivalry that Fenton hides evidence that might point to her at the crime scene. He launches his own amateur investigation, all in the name of clearing Camilla, and a second murder at the college builds to a tea party with the Don where one cup is laced with strychnine.



Picture
I found the style and pacing of Murder at the ‘Varsity agreeable, although other readers might describe Hilary Fenton’s conversational, even chatty narration and the wooing of his inamorata as elements that detract in a mystery tale. The story is decently paced, and if the college setting (despite its definitions) is not quite as engagingly built as the ant’s-nest world found in the previous year’s Murder at the Women’s City Club, it is a more cohesive experience than the Q. Patrick debut title, Cottage Sinister.

The glossary also informs me that ‘Varsity is “simply an abbreviation of the word University” that has “no athletic or other sinister significance”. This is useful to know, especially when reading a book with an uncertain word in the very title, such as Obelists or Furlong. 

Picture
Creating greater cognitive dissonance for a reader, perhaps, are the sometimes surprising illustrations of characters that might accompany a Golden Age mystery story. I discovered that the U.S. edition by Farrar & Rinehart features this tableau of its cast, an artist’s rendering that was at odds with the characters as I had imagined them. In quarter profile, the exuberant Hilary Fenton looks like a middle-aged village doctor, while rugged athlete Stuart Somerville reminds me of a young Brian Dennehy. To credit the tableau, I will add that there is an implicit clue to the killer in the caricatures, if only you know where to look. 

Murder at Cambridge ('rah 'rah 'Varsity) is available in the UK through Ostara Publishing and available as an eBook in the U.S. through Mysterious Press/Open Road Media.
3 Comments

Book Review: COTTAGE SINISTER (1931) by Q. Patrick

1/23/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
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).

Picture

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.

0 Comments

Book Review: MURDER AT THE WOMEN'S CITY CLUB (1932) by Q. Patrick

9/16/2018

2 Comments

 
PictureCover of Murder at the Women's City Club. Image from PRETTY SINISTER BOOKS website.
Thanks to the scholarly efforts of Curtis Evans over at his great GAD blog site The Passing Tramp, the mysteries published collaboratively under the names Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge are being discovered anew. And they're worth discovering, as my reading a few years ago of 1935's The Grindle Nightmare proved to me. As further cause for celebration, Mysterious Press/Open Road publishers have recently released eBook editions in the U.S. of some of the rare Q. Patrick titles, including the début novel Cottage Sinister (1931), as well as Murder at Cambridge and S.S. Murder (both 1933).

On his site, Curt has provided author information for these books, which is useful since four different writers contributed to the series at different times. Most famously – if that's the right word – the Patrick/Quentin/Stagge novels were either solo or collaborative projects between Q. Patrick creator Richard "Rickie" Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler.

Transitioning from prose writer to playwright, Wheeler would later work with composer Stephen Sondheim on the musicals A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. For some of the earliest Q. Patrick mysteries, however, Rickie Webb partnered with one of two female co-writers, Martha "Patsy" Mott Kelley and Mary Lou White. White contributed to S.S. Murder, but it was Patsy Kelley who was Webb's initial collaborator, first on Cottage Sinister (which I have yet to read) and then on 1932's lively Murder at the Women's City Club.

Indeed, the entire story of Club takes place over a weekend at a women-only apartment building, and the cast of characters is quirky and colorful. The club's president, Mabel Mulvaney, returns to the metropolitan town of Desborough, New York and is anxious to talk to Dr. Diana Saffron, an invalided resident and very successful specialist in her medical field. The two meet, but very shortly both women have died, asphyxiated by the gas that runs in each room. The sudden deaths bring the boorish police detective Manfred Boot into the women's club, a man whose masculine authority makes him blind to more nuanced details of the case.

To be fair, Detective Boot has to contend with some trying suspects. Freda Carter, the deceased Dr. Saffron's young protégé, is a doctor-in-training whose clinical observations have the cool air of judgment; friendly Deborah Entwhistle, with her ironic-yet-honest approach to life, also unnerves the no-nonsense Boot; Millicent Trimmer, club secretary, has a penchant for fainting just when she needs to be interviewed; Amy Riddle has her own suspicions, and they revolve around "colored" club staff members Rudy and Cornelia; and then there's Constance Hoplinger, the resident mystery novelist, who takes a little too much pleasure in the current situation and theorizes about how her own detective would handle the case.

As a mostly forgotten and unsung American entry of mystery fiction's Golden Age, I found Murder at the Women's City Club remarkably satisfying, spirited, and enjoyable. The authors – and this might be Patsy Kelley's prose contribution – use humorous third-person omniscient perspective to freely comment on characters and provide observations during introductions and scenes. Mystery readers might be frustrated by this narrative approach, as the details effectively define and develop the characters but might also feel like unneeded description. To me, the opinionated third-person perspective is a delight and is used well; take this example of observational lines that brings Mabel Mulvaney into focus:    

Mrs. Mulvaney was not a prepossessing person. Her smile was acetic, her expression ascetic and her figure, while not exactly athletic, was built for speed and activity rather than for beauty. But what she lacked in embonpoint and personal charm, she made up for in efficiency. She was a Managing Woman, born to command rather than to comfort. She belonged to every committee to which she could commit herself and she made an excellent president for the Women's City Club.
The plot and puzzle at the center of the story are both solid, and the pacing feels instinctively right. There were a few very pleasant surprises, including a unique spin on the amateur detective: as Inspector Boot seems to be drawing the wrong conclusions, it's up to one of the women living in the building to step forward, make sense of the deaths, and identify a killer; this role-casting occurs organically rather than archetypically, which is very interesting. There's also a surprisingly gruesome final murder involving an unreliable elevator, and knowing the grimness to come in The Grindle Nightmare, it was likely a Rickie Webb contribution:
Suddenly, a scream rang out. It was Miss Hoplinger. Gasping for breath, she fell back against the wall and pointed with a trembling finger at a thin, red stream that came trickling aimlessly down one of the glass doors in front of them, out of the upper region of the shaft.

"Blood!" she exclaimed, and then again, louder, "I tell you, it's blood."

Finally, I must note how much I admire the solution of this story, which isn't groundbreaking in concept but it is logical, cleanly presented, and highly satisfying. John at Pretty Sinister Books – check out his smart review – finds the plot "a bit convoluted", but for me it was one of the most straightforward murder mystery reveals I've encountered, in a good way. I was a little ahead of the story when it came to revealing the murderer, but that person's identity is teased out very effectively, and the plot was scrupulously fair play.
Picture
While the characterizations of the African-American maid and handyman couple Rudy and Cornelia are products of their time – as is the racial prejudice that fuels one tenant's suspicion of them – it is balanced somewhat by the likeable Deborah Entwhistle's more progressive view of, and friendship with, the pair. I hope Mysterious Press/Open Road will be able to introduce this solid Q. Patrick whodunit to a new group of readers.


UPDATE: Curt at The Passing Tramp blog has provided some fantastic history and analysis of this title, as well as great information about the writers behind the Q. Patrick pseudonym. You can read these articles here and here.


2 Comments

SHADOW OF GUILT (1959) by Patrick Quentin

6/17/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
As can be inferred by its title, Shadow of Guilt plants itself firmly in noir territory. Narrator George Hadley is restless, trapped in his marriage to Consuelo "Connie" Corliss, whose family fortune and crisply ordered ways have made him feel like a kept man. His attentions turn to his sympathetic secretary, Eve, and there is much talk about running away together to Tobago. But a smooth-talking cad named Don Saxby uncovers their secret, and shortly thereafter he is found dead in his apartment, with two bullet holes added for good measure.

Naturally, George becomes a suspect of the amiable but dangerous Lieutenant Trant, but then the police have a range of people to choose from. The popular favorite is Chuck Ryson, fiancé to Connie's daughter, Ala.


Ala, it quickly becomes known, has had her own fling with Saxby, and the Ryson family revolver proves to be the murder weapon. George finds Ala in the dead man's apartment immediately after the murder, and his actions – at least according to his own confidences to the reader – are meant to shield the girl from more trouble. But Ala could very well be guilty, as she is that most Freudian of noir characters, a nubile teen girl who nevertheless exudes knowing sexuality…and who subtextually strands her stepfather in that shadowy area between paternal innocence and forbidden lust.

Shadow of Guilt, written by Hugh Wheeler under the shared pseudonym Patrick Quentin, feels like one of those genre stories where the social and psychological trappings carry more interest for the contemporary reader than the somewhat contrived plot. The question of who killed the blackmailing, philandering Saxby is interesting but incidental, since the focus stays fully with narrator George Hadley. Through his point of view, we learn about his contempt for efficient wife Connie and his (rather misguided) concern for irritating stepdaughter Ala. As a late '50s example of cocktails-and-board meetings, upper-middle class suburban living, it's simultaneously intriguing and artificial. And with so much scorn confided to us about his wife, Connie Corliss becomes (perhaps unintentionally) the most sympathetic character in the book. That she too should be considered a potential murderer gives the story a satisfying edge.

The polite but deferential Lieutenant Trant, whose smiling presence gives George so much discomfort, struck me as a precursor to Levinson and Link's iconic Lieutenant Columbo, a character who would make his stage début nearly a decade later. Ultimately, Shadow of Guilt strains under the weight of a few too many twists and coincidences, but for a while it delivers an effective noir about an ordinary man who finds himself under extraordinary criminal pressure.

0 Comments
<<Previous

    BLOG

    Lots of book reviews and discussion of classic and contemporary mystery fiction. I welcome comments and continuing conversation.

    Subscribe below to receive updates!

    Subscribe

    Categories

    All
    19th Century Novels
    Andrew Garve
    Anne Morice
    Anthologies
    Anthony Boucher
    Appalachian Authors
    Bill James
    Book Review
    Catherine Dilts
    C. Daly King
    Craig Rice
    David Goodis
    E.C.R. Lorac / Carol Carnac
    Erle Stanley Gardner
    E.R. Punshon
    Freeman Wills Crofts
    French Authors
    George Bellairs
    George Milner
    Gladys Mitchell
    Golden Age Mystery
    Gregory McDonald
    Hardboiled Detectives
    Helen McCloy
    Helen Simpson
    Henry Wade
    Herbert Adams
    Hugh Austin
    James Corbett
    J. Jefferson Farjeon
    John Bude
    John Rhode/Miles Burton
    Leo Bruce
    Maj Sjowall / Per Wahloo
    Margery Allingham
    Martin Edwards
    Michael Gilbert
    Michael Innes
    Mignon G. Eberhart
    Milward Kennedy
    Mitchell Mystery Reading Group
    New Fiction
    New Mystery
    Nicholas Blake
    Nicolas Freeling
    Noir
    Philip MacDonald
    Play Review
    Q. Patrick / Patrick Quentin
    Rex Stout
    Richard Hull
    Ross MacDonald
    Russian Authors
    Science Fiction
    Vernon Loder
    Vladimir Nabokov
    William L. DeAndrea
    Winifred Blazey
    Writing

    Mystery Fiction Sites
    -- all recommended ! --
    Ahsweetmysteryblog
    The Art of Words
    Beneath the Stains of Time
    Bitter Tea and Mystery
    Catherine Dilts - author
    Countdown John's Christie Journal
    Classic Mysteries
    Clothes in Books
    ​A Crime is Afoot
    Crossexaminingcrime
    Gladys Mitchell Tribute
    Grandest Game in the World
    Happiness Is a Book
    In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel
    The Invisible Event
    Martin Edwards' Crime Writing Blog
    Murder at the Manse
    Mysteries Ahoy!
    Noirish
    The Passing Tramp
    Past Offences
    Pretty Sinister Books
    Tipping My Fedora
    To the Manor Born
    Witness to the Crime
    

    Archives

    December 2024
    November 2024
    September 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    January 2024
    August 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    RSS Feed

Unless otherwise stated, all text content on this site is
​copyright Jason Half, 2024.