In Reference to Murder

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Thinking Machine

Today's Friday's "Forgotten" Books post comes by way of guest contributor, Charles Lawson:

 

“Nothing is impossible!”

So declares The Thinking Machine, aka Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, M.D., Ph.D, LL.D., F.R.S., M.D.S, etc.  (And if you don’t know what all those letters stand for, just let them be a reminder that “Dr. Dr.” Van Dusen is a lot smarter than you are…or anyone else for that matter!)  The Boston-based crime consultant is the creation of American writer Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912) and, as a protagonist, he is often compared to his English contemporary, Sherlock Holmes.  Let me be blunt, though: Van Dusen is no Sherlock Holmes.

I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way.  Both sleuths use their considerable intellects to solve thorny, seemingly impossible crimes beyond the understanding of ordinary mortals, but Holmes fans will likely appreciate the more nuanced and fleshed-out character drawn by Arthur Conan Doyle via his literary surrogate, Dr. John Watson.  Holmes, after all, is a skilled musician with a theatrical flair and ability to assume another character in his quest for a case’s solution.  Van Dusen, in contrast, strikes one as even more clinically, relentlessly cold and aloof than Holmes is sometimes described.  In the interest of full disclosure, though, I must admit that I have read only a small subset of Futrelle’s more than forty Van Dusen stories―those contained within this collection released in 2023 by the Library of Congress in conjunction with Poisoned Pen Press: The Thinking Machine (based on the 1907 first edition held by the LoC).  It is quite possible that you will get a much more detailed character portrait by delving into the complete oeuvre.  However, as painted in these stories, Van Dusen is the very opposite of “affable” and is clearly incapable of suffering fools gladly.

The notable first story in this collection, “The Problem of Cell 13,” has been reprinted in numerous anthologies over the decades with many authors and editors praising its challenging premise: Van Dusen’s promise to escape from an “inescapable” prison cell.  The story was first serialized in The Boston American late in 1905 as part of a contest for readers.  The best guess for a solution submitted prior to publication of the sixth and final installment won a prize of $50!  (That’s equivalent to more than $1700 in 2023 according to Web-based calculators.  [Note to publishers: revive this practice and, perhaps, revive your industry!])  I fretted for quite some time trying to figure out precisely how The Thinking Machine (as Futrelle frequently refers to Van Dusen) was accomplishing the seemingly inexplicable acts he was performing while incarcerated, and I was pleasantly surprised by his ingenuity when finally fully revealed.  Harlan Ellison, in the introduction to a previous Futrelle collection, called this particular work a “once-in-a-career jackpot of a story.”  While I did manage to suss out certain aspects of the solution, I don’t think I would have won the $50 jackpot in 1905.  Perhaps you will fare better.  I encourage you to try, bearing in mind Van Dusen’s maxim, “Nothing is impossible!”

The other stories in this collection vary somewhat in quality and complexity.  I found myself a little ahead of The Thinking Machine on a couple of occasions yet briefly baffled on a few others.  One character aspect I found puzzling is how rarely the string of letters after Van Dusen’s name actually gets pressed into scientific service.  For someone with that much academic training, he is not called upon to use it extensively…at least in these particular stories.  Van Dusen’s approach, like Holmes’s, is nearly entirely intellectual…yet Holmes was an expert in chemistry and his training served him well when considering physical evidence.  I often found myself wishing that The Thinking Machine would draw more hard science into his investigations.  If Jacques Futrelle were alive and writing stories today, he might have a great deal more fun incorporating the scientific revelations from the last hundred years or so.

It’s a great misfortune that Futrelle’s life was cut short by his ill-fated voyage aboard the Titanic.  Could the rumors be true that Futrelle’s luggage, still aboard that doomed ship, contains many more stories featuring his most famous creation?  Alas, that is one mystery that will probably never be solved.

But nothing is impossible.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - A Thief in the Night

Ernest William Hornung (1866–1921) was an English poet and author who also happened to be the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle. He also worked as a journalist in England, France, and Australia, and centered many of his stories around Aussie settings and culture. He's perhaps best known for his series featuring gentleman thief, A. J. Raffles, who first appeared in a story in Cassell's Magazine in 1898.

Raffles may have been one of the earliest anti-heroes in crime fiction, spending his days playing cricket and his nights carrying out ingenious burglaries, aided by his sidekick Harry "Bunny" Manders, a man he once saved from suicide and disgrace. Raffles the "Amateur Cracksman" appears in several stories that divide into two periods, one before he was unmasked while plying his trade on board a cruise ship and presumably jumped overboard and drowned, and the other following his return where he and Manders continue their thieving ways in disguise.

The stories were collected into several volumes, including A Thief in the Night, published in 1905. They include "The Criminologists," about a society of crime experts who invite Raffles and Manders to discuss crime in sport, but have more nefarious purposes in mind, beliving him to be the notorious gentleman thief; "A Trap to Catch a Cracksman," in which Raffles attempts to rob American heavyweight boxing champion Barney Maguire, only to have it backfire on him; and "The Raffles Relics," where Ruffles—now in hiding—hears about an exhibit dedicated to his "work" at Scotland Yard's Black Room, and decides to steal back his trophies.

Raffles is a cynical character, whose philosophy is "we can't all be moralists, and the distribution of wealth is all wrong anyway." Still, he has his own code of honor, once stealing money from a miserly man to make a donation to their former school and volunteering for the Boer War, where he dies in battle after exposing an enemy spy. The stories in A Thief in the Night are actually told from Bunny's point of view, a la Watson and his accounts of Holmes, as Bunny reflects back on their adventures prior to the master thief's demise.

Several of Hornung's stories were later adapted for the theater, television, and film, including protrayals by John Barrymore, David Niven, and as recently as 2001, a production starring Nigel Havers (Dangerfield, Coronation Street, Downton Abbey).

FFB: Exeunt Murderers

Author, editor, and reviewer Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) seemed headed into the sciences until he was bitten by the literature bug, selling his first story when he was 15, "Ye Goode Olde Ghoste Storie," published in Weird Tales in January 1927. He would later add that in retrospect the story was so bad, the editor must have had a "sadistic grudge against the readers."

After his college career, he turned his hand to detective fiction in 1937, with a standalone followed by one series with amateur criminologist Fergus O'Breen and the other Sister Ursula of the Order of Martha of Bethany (published under the pen name H.H. Holmes). Although a moderate success as a novelist, he found his true calling when he started reviewing mysteries and science fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle (another node of connection with this year's conference), followed by editing anthologies and translating other books. He landed a job as the regular mystery fiction critic for the New York Times in 1951, a job he held for close to 17 years.

His contributions to the genre didn't end there—he was a founding member of the Mystery Writers of America, a charter member of the Baker Street Irregulars in San Francisco and wrote scripts for Sherlock Holmes and Ellery Queen radio programs, co-edited the True Crime Detective magazine, wrote a monthly review column for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and created a regular mystery-review show for the public radio station KPFA.

His dozens of short stories reflect his multi-faceted interests outside literature, with one of the editors to the Boucher collection Exeunt Murderers, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., adding that Boucher wrote mysteries delving into "religion, opera, football, politics, movies, true crime, record collecting and an abundance of good food and wine along with clues and puzzles and detection." (Nevin's co-editor for this collection was the prolific Martin H. Greenberg.)

Many Boucher stories pivot around talented and brilliant amateur sleuths, although the first third of Exeunt consists of nine stories featuring former police Lieutenant Nick Noble, once a rising star in the force until he took the rap for a bad cop. The second part is a series of Sister Ursula stories grouped under the title "Conundrums for the Cloister." Although technically an amateur, Sister Ursula is the daughter of a police chief who'd once planned on entering the field herself until poor health changed her plans. These stories mirror Boucher's own life in two ways—he was a devout Catholic who also struggled with poor health his entire life, ultimately dying of lung cancer at the age of 57. Part Three of Exunt is "Jeux de Meurtre," narrated by both cops and amateurs, and in one case, the murderer.

These are thoroughly enjoyable stories, and it's almost a shame that he spent so much of his time on other projects (in a poll in 1981, Boucher's novel Nine Times Nine was voted in the top ten "best locked room mysteries" of all time). But it is that very legacy of support to the crime fiction community that his namesake annual Bouchercon convention celebrates, and so we'll just have to be content with the body of work we have from someone who managed to pack more into a half-century than most people do with decades more.

FFB: The Yellow Turban

Charlotte Jay was the pen name of Australian mystery author Geraldine Halls (1919-1996). Her marriage to Albert Halls of UNESCO enabled her to travel the world to exotic locations like Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, England, Lebanon, India, Papua New Guinea, and the Trobriand Islands, many of which she used in her books. Jay penned nine standalone crime fiction novels (as well as other works under her married name), and although largely forgotten today, she was in fact the very first winner of the Mystery Writers' Association of America's Edgar Award of the for Best Novel of the Year, Beat Not the Bones, in 1954. Another of her books, The Fugitive Eye, was adapted for television in 1961 as an episode starring Charlton Heston of the also largely-forgotten TV series Alcoa Premiere, hosted by Fred Astaire with music by John Williams.

Jay was something of a late bloomer as a writer, working as a shorthand typist in Australia and England and then as a court stenographer in New Guinea, before turning her hand to novels. Her first was published in 1951, when Jay was in her early 30s. She wrote crime novels until around 1970, when she switched to writing romantic suspense and mainstream novels, for reasons which aren't very clear.

Jay uses a first-person male narrative for The Yellow Turban, something not all that common for women authors when the book was written in 1955. The central character is William Brooke, a vagabond Englishman who is lulled by a high fee (only a third of which is paid in advance) to find and retrieve an old friend, Roy Finlay, from Karachi and bring him back to England. Brooke's instructions include cryptic warnings about "secrecy" and "trouble," which Brooke largely ignores as he checks in at a seedy hotel and starts to work.

When Brooke tries to find Finlay, who has disappeared, he begins to realize his missing friend's job wasn't exactly what Brooke had thought, while every step of his investigation is dogged by a sinister man in a yellow turban. Misgivings and confusion turn to outright terror when he climbs into bed one night and finds a blood-drenched corpse. He ends up on the run from the police, who think he's the murderer, and shadowy men who want to kill him for reasons unknown to Brooke, in a journey that takes him to the Kurat mountains and into the heart of Pakistan.

The 1950s Pakistani settings of The Yellow Turban are particularly relevant to current events of our day, and it's fascinating to catch a glimpse of the country's culture that Jay would surely have witnessed first-hand on her own travels. No doubt, some of the villages and cultures have changed little during the intervening half-century, with insights into corruption, a disintegrating civilization and the relentless misery of just trying to surive from one day to the next. But there are also glimpses of the Pakistani people, of various faiths, political views, classes and backgrounds, that Jay manages to convey through her descriptive writing:

On a kong seat covered by red plastic, a thin, dirty young man, wearing baggy white trousers and a buttoned-up gray coat, lay curled up with his eyes closed and his naked toes twiching like a dreaming dog.

Conversation in Pakistan, I was to learn, was frequently only a means of self-expression. The idea of communication between man and man gets lost somehow.

I suppose you can get used to bribing people. Maybe you get an exaggerated idea in your had that money will corupt anyone, and maybe, after you've lived in the East ong enough, it will. Customs are like diseaases, you can breathe them in from the air, soak them through your skin. 

And still the great crowd merged on, a white boiling mass speckled with black dots like grains of dust blown onto a bowl of foam. The flagellants moved on and a group of drummers approached, heralding a tower made from green and crimson tinsel paper. It stopped directly in front of us, the crowd formed a circle around it and a group of ragged little boys danced forward, each with a knife in his hand.

This landscape was disordered, certainly, but without force or intension, like a disordered room when clothes are left lying around. The objects on it appeared to have some prescribed place to stand or go, some sense of prupose and direction, and had just dropped in their tracks out of lassitude of frustration before they took up their positions.

Ultimately, the plot and setting of The Yellow Turban end up merging age-old themes of man's war with himself and others into the insanity mankind has created with 20th (and 21st) century technological evils. The novel's denoument near a crumbling monastery proves to be a fitting symbol for the crumbling worlds of William Brooke, Roy Finlay, and perhaps even the people of Pakistan.

FFB: Through a Glass Darkly

Helen McCloy (1904-1994) was the pseudonym of American Golden Age author Helen Clarkson, born in New York City. Her mother was writer Helen Worrell McCloy and her father, William McCloy, longtime managing editor of the New York Evening Sun. She was educated at a Quaker school before heading off to France in 1923 to study at the Sorbonne, then finally working in journalism for Hearst's Universal News Service and as a freelancer and art critic.

McCloy began to write mysteries in the 1930s, with her first novel, Dance of Death, published in 1938. In 1946 she married Davis Dresser, famous for his Mike Shayne novels written under the pseudonym Brett Halliday. The couple founded the Torquil Publishing Company and the literary agency Halliday and McCloy prior to their divorce in 1961. In 1950 she became the first woman to serve as president of Mystery Writers of America, and her contributions to the genre are recognized today by the annual Helen McCloy/MWA Scholarship for Mystery Writing.

Her most famous series character, Dr. Basil Willing debuted in Dance of Death and appeared in 12 novels and several short stories. Willing became interested in psychiatry upon seeing the shell-shocked soldiers during his World War I service, then studied psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, followed by Paris and Vienna, where he acquired his knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis and his belief that "every criminal leaves psychic fingerprints, and he can't wear gloves to hide them."

Willing's actual literary debut was in the short story "Through a Glass Darkly," published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in September 1948 and later expanded into the 1950 novel by the same title. It's a quasi-locked-room a la John Dickson Carr, with a seemingly supernatural twist involving a Doppelganger in which art teacher Faustina Crayle is fired from Brereton School for Girls mid-term but not given a reason why. Faustina's friend and fellow teacher, Gisela von Weber, also happens to be the fiancée of Basil Willing, who draws him into the case, fearing an injustice has been done.

Willing soon learns that students have seen Faustina appear in places she couldn't have been and when the drama catch has a fatal accident, Faustina is suspected—before Willing discovers that she was the only woman who could never have an alibi.

Author, editor and columnist Nicholas Fuller feels that Through a Glass Darkly, is among the top twenty best detective stories ever written, "both for the way in which its horror arises almost entirely from Jamesian understatement (suggestion and the incongruous presence of the normal create the feeling of something terribly wrong) and for the ambiguous solution."

McCloy spins the Doppleganger theme effectively through her characterizations and prose:

"You enter a room, a street, a country road. You see a figure ahead of you, solid, three-dimensional, brightly coloured. Moving and obeying all the laws of optics. Its clothing and posture is vaguely familiar. You hurry toward the figure for a closer view. It turns its head and - you are looking at yourself. Or rather a perfect mirror-image of yourself only - there is no mirror. So, you know it is your double. And that frightens you, for tradition tells you that he who sees his own double is about to die . . ."

In 1959, writer John Hopkins adapted the story into a teleplay as part of the Saturday Playhouse series that aired on the BBC from 1958 to 1961.

FFB: Death on Remand

John Michael Evelyn (1916-1992) was born in Britain and privately educated before going to Oxford University. He was called to the Bar in 1939, but immediately joined the Army where he served during WWII until 1946, attaining the rank of Major. From there, he did go on to a career in law with the Department of Public Prosecutions, serving for some thirty years.

Adopting the pseudonym of Michael Underwood, he published his first mystery novel, Murder on Trial in 1954, which introduced one of his main protagonists, Inspector Simon Manton. The Inspector was featured in a dozen novels that stretched into the 1960s and included Lawful Pursuit, The Case Against Phillip Quest and The Crime of Colin Wise.

Underwood also supported his fellow crime authors as chairman of the Crime Writers Association in 1964-65 and was elected a member of the Detection Club in 1959. This was during the presidency of Dame Agatha Christie, who had agreed to take the position as a successor to Dorothy L. Sayers, but only on the condition she didn't have to speak at public meetings. Michael Underwood essentially served in her stead for that purpose during Christie's tenure.

Underwood frequently drew on his legal expertise in his plots, as you might imagine, although as in the case of novels like Death on Remand, the courtroom scenes are kept to a minimum and more in a Perry Mason style—with the investigation happening during the bulk of the book until the suspect is apprehended, followed by the final courtroom finale, sometimes with a twist.

Death on Remand starts off with the attempted car bombing of a small-time crook, Julian Prentice, who has just been released from prison for a car theft. The investigation falls upon the desk of Detective-Inspector Playford of the Wenley Borough Police C.I.D., who is as perplexed as other people in the community that Prentice had been defended by the father of the young woman whose car was stolen, the man known as "The Shady Solicitor," Augustus Jason. When the chief suspect in the bombing, Prentice's former boss, also meets with violence and Prentice himself disappears from the hospital, Playford is more than happy to let Scotland Yard step in, led by the efforts of Detective Superintendent Manton. Manton faces seemingly fool-proof alibis for everyone connected to the victims as well as general antagonism from the locals, but in his own quietly plodding, tenacious way, he manages to uncover the truth.

The central gist of the plot probably had more of an impact back in 1956 than it does now. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that cultural mores and accepted standards have changed quite a bit in 54 years, although the basic human vices of lust, pride and greed probably haven't changed much in millennia. Criminal investigation methods have changed a bit since 1956, but in the book as is the case today, it's good old-fashioned legwork and evidence collection that saves the day As Inspector Manton observes after the suspect has been arrested, "Tactics play as important a part in forensic contests and their menoeuvres as in military battles."

Like most third-person omniscient narratives that hop back and forth between characters, it's a little difficult to develop characters fully. In this particular case, there really aren't any truly sympathetic characters to root for other than the detectives, but as legal/police procedurals go, Death on Remand is a fairly quick read and a pleasant enough way to spend a hour or two.

FFB: Picture Miss Seeton

Author Heron Carvic was a study in contrasts. Born Geoffrey Richard William Harris in 1917, his public persona took him into very visible roles as an actor, and yet he was such a private person that very little is known about him. He did reveal that he was a great-grandson of Sir Richard Mayne, one of the two original Commissioners of Police; an old Etonian; and happily married to Phyllis Neilson-Terry of the famous British theatrical family (including her parents and her cousin, John Gielgud).

Carvic's acting roles were mostly dramatic and often included crime or science fiction. One of his early parts was in The Bat, a stage adaptation of Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase, and later roles included Gandalf in a radio version of The Hobbit, Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace, and guest roles in the TV shows Police Surgeon, The Avengers, and Dr. Who.

Thus, it's curious that he chose to write a comedic mystery series featuring the slightly barmy English spinster, Miss Seeton. But it was a success from the start with the first book, Picture Miss Seeton, a finalist for the Edgar Award in 1969.

Cavic had first used Miss Emily Seeton in a short story, and fifteen years later said that "Miss Seeton upped and demanded a book," with Carvic deciding that if "she wanted to satirize detective novels in general and elderly lady detectives in particular, he would let her have her lead." Later, Carvic contributed a chapter to the book Murder Ink, edited by Dilys Winn, titled "Little Old Ladies."

Carver said at one point that the character of Miss Seeton was inspired by his friendship with an artist who turned in a commission for a mother-child portrait and then destroyed her canvas of the mother's face rather than use it again. Years later, the now-adult son from the painting was sent to the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital after cutting his mother to ribbons with a kitchen knife. The author had no logical explanation for her destruction of the canvas, but "clearly she must have somehow have seen rather more than she knew."

Emily Seeton is a recently-retired art teacher in the process of moving to the country town of Plummergen, population five hundred and one, but her plans get waylaid when, after a night at the opera, she sees what she thinks is a man insulting a young woman. In fact, what she actually witnessed was a notorious drug dealer knifing a prostitute. (Which brings up a typical Seeton-esque line when she learns from the police about the young woman's "profession":  "Oh, dear. A very hard life; such late hours—and then, of course, the weather. And so unrewarding one would imagine."). Aghast at the drug dealer's "bad manners," she pokes him in the back with her brolly (umbrella, to Yanks), which later makes her a darling of  the newspapers, which dub her "The Battling Brolly."

When she's questioned by Superintendent Delphick and Detective-Sergeant Ranger of Scotland Yard, they ask her to sketch her impressions of the crime. Even though it was dark, she's able to draw enough details, particularly an element that she only sees in her subconscious, that it helps the police track down the killer. Miss Seeton, as it turns out, is an "anti-psychic." She has a knack for innocently drawing clues (sometimes foretelling events, sometimes revealing important character traits) into her sketches that she's is totally unaware of, a talent that becomes invaluable to the police. Her innocence becomes one of the series' central devices, as she continues to attract crime and criminals even as she accidentally helps to foil them.

If your taste in mysteries runs toward the whimsical, then you'll be entertained by Miss Seeton, her brolly, her attempts at yoga, and snippets such as this one, about two denizens of Plummergen:

They were dedicated vegetarians, known collectively as The Nuts. Miss Nuttel, tall, angular, with the face of a dark horse, was generally referred to as Nutcracker. Mrs. Blaine, whose dumpy geniality was belied by the little blackcurrant eyes, was called by everyone Hot Cross Bun; this derived largely from Miss Nuttel's pet name for her of Bunny, but it may have been also a tacit acceptance of the shrewish temper which flared through the placid surface when she was thwarted. Their house, Lilikot, a modern innovation with large plate-glass windows screened by nylon net, was inevitably The Nut House.

Sadly, Carvic only completed five novels in the series before being killed in a car accident in 1980. The Miss Seeton series didn't die, however, continued under two other pseudonyms, Hampton Charles, the pen name of Roy Peter Martin, who wrote three novels all released in 1990, and Sarah J. Mason, writing under the name of Hamilton Crane, who took up the series after that point, writing 16 installments so far, the latest in February of 2019.

FFB: The Habit of Fear

Dorothy Salisbury Davis (1916-2014) was born in Chicago and raised as a Roman Catholic but left the church when she married her husband, the late actor Harry Davis. Now considered one of the Grand Dames of crime fiction, she didn't start out as a writer, working first in advertising and as a librarian, publishing her first novel in 1949 with the encouragement of her husband. Her 20 novels and numerous short stories went on to receive seven Edgar Award nominations, and her novel Broken Vows was also made into a 1987 TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones.

She's had a clear influence on the crime fiction community, serving as Mystery Writers of America grandmaster in 1985 and on the initial steering committee for the formation of Sisters in Crime (along with Charlotte MacLeod, Kate Mattes, Betty Francis, Sara Paretsky, Nancy Pickard and Susan Dunlap). She was Guest of Honor at Malice Domestic VI, quoting Hilaire Belloc, that "It will not matter if my sins are scarlet, if only my books are read."  
          
By her own account, Davis is an "odd fit" in crime fiction, unhappy with her perceived inability to create a memorable series character and uncomfortable with violence and murder. But she's very happy creating villains, and has often commented that villains are much more fun to write about than heroes. Her themes trend more toward psychology than out-and-out detection and religious tensions are often found in her work, not surprising considering her own background.

That religious undercurrent can be found in The Habit of Fear, the fourth and last in her series featuring Julie Hayes, a former actress and fortuneteller-turned New York City tabloid reporter, but the religious theme is only a small part of the deftly-knit threads of the plot that begin with her husband Jeff telling her he wants a divorce. Angry and hurt, she storms out of their apartment where she's tricked into a nightmare scenario of rape and sodomy by two mysterious men. Although she's reluctant to help the police, preferring to try and put as much emotional distance between her and the events as possible, she's drawn into the case, as well as a search for the Irish father she never knew, a journey that eventually takes her to the land of her beloved Yeats.

But her troubles only follow her, as a strange "Gray Man" seems to be stalking her, there's an appearance by her two attackers who escaped New York on bail, and she finds herself in the middle of tensions involving the Irish Republican Army and a splinter group. Underlying it all is a NYC gangster who watches over Julie as a protective, yet violent, avenging guardian angel. The plot threads ultimately do tie together into a hopeful but bittersweet conclusion.

Salisbury once contributed the chapter "Background and Atmosphere" to the Writer's Digest Mystery Writer's Handbook in 1975, and she is certainly adept with creating atmosphere in The Habit of Fear, first in the seedy side streets, police precincts and courts of New York and then in the bucolic but war-torn landscapes of Dublin, Wicklow, Ballina and Sligo:

Julie climbed the narrow street to where the village came to an abrupt end at a gate to the ruins. The wind gusted fiercely. The river became rapids alongside the ruins and rushed noisily down the hillside. Looking down, she could see boats at anchor, heaving in the heavy waters. Beyond the inlet was the Atlantic, blue and white-capped and dappled with dark patches where the clouds threw their shadows. As she went on, she could see the coast road with an occasional cottage and bits of color where the stacked turf was tucked around with plastic tarps.

 

Her characterizations are also rich and multi-layered, with no character completely evil or saintly. In an interview with Don Swaim on the CBS Radio studio show "Wired for Books," she talked about this novel and how she created the character of Julie Hayes during a period when the author herself was in therapy. She made Hayes a defender of street people due to Davis's own walking through city areas frequented by prostitutes, where she said she was accepted as "this little old lady with white hair in a raincoat," talking to various people from all walks of life.

FFB: The Port of London Murders

Josephine Bell, the pen name of  Doris Collier Ball, was born in Manchester in 1897, educated at Cambridge, and became a University College Hospital of London physician. She married a fellow physician who died at a young age in 1936, which is when Bell turned her hand to writing, even as she maintained her medical practice.

She was a co-founder of the Crime Writers' Association, serving as its chair in 1959, and also became a member of the Detection Club. She eventually closed her medical practice at age 57 but continued to write full time until she was 85, creating numerous sleuths in her more than 40 crime novels (at the rate of two a year), such as AmyTupper, Dr. David Wintingham, Dr. Henry Frost, and Scotland Yard Inspector Steven Mitchell.

Not surprisingly, her novels often feature a strong medical component, not the least of which were two of her doctor-protagonists. She also featured poison and other unusual methods of murder prominently in her plots. Bell and her family were experienced sailors, and the author drew upon this knowledge, too, using many vivid passages in her books that relate to the water and to various nautical details.

Water is certainly at the heart of the setting in Bell's novel The Port of London Murders from 1938, specifically as the title suggests, the port area of London's River Thames. It's a tough neighborhood, but the death of one Mary Holland is still a bit of a shock, even though it appears at first to be a suicide by Lysol poisoning. Tell-tale needle marks on the victim's arm lead Detective Sergeant Chandler to suspect murder tied into a drug ring—which seems even more chillingly apparent when Chandler disappears shortly after he starts to investigate, right before he's due to testify at the inquest. It's up to Inspector Mitchell of Scotland Yard to unravel the layers of deception and addiction that are exploiting rich and poor alike in a way that hasn't changed much in the seventy years since the book was written.

Bell is particularly good with settings, even the squalid ones that pop up in the novel, no doubt witnessed first-hand in her role as a physician who saw people from every walk of life. Her take on the state of medicine in her day was often somewhat bleak, as in this passage from the book—again, as true today as it was in 1938:

For the great majority of these cases, too poor to have a doctor of their own, there was little he could do...Dr. Freeman could encourage them with a bottle of medicine and help them with a pint of milk a day, but it was not in his power nor that of anyone else to effect a lasting cure of their complaints. There were others, too, not old, but equally hopeless, who attended the dispensary as regular visitors; those struck down in youth or middle age by tuberculosis, rheumatism, heart trouble, and a number of more rare diseases. They had come to the end of their resources, their insurances, and their capacity for earning. The hospitals could do nothing more for them, but they still lived, in the worse possible surroundings, and the Public Assistance saw to it that they did not die too soon.

FFB: A Private Inquiry

Jessica Mann (1937-2018) originally earned degrees in archaeology, Anglo-Saxon, and law and worked in various fields in the UK, including as a Planning Inspector. She later turned her hand to writing crime fiction, and her novel, A Charitable End, was published in 1971, with some 20 novels published up to 2013. She was also a well-known and respected radio and television broadcast, particularly her radio program, "Women of Mystery," and authored a treatise on women crime writers entitled Deadlier than the Male.

She wrote reviews for The Literary Review, and once published an essay that she would no longer review certain types of crime fiction due to the misogyny and violence against women, saying, "Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me."

A Private Inquiry dates from 1996 and was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger that year. It's set mainly in St. Ives, in Cornwall, near where Mann herself has lived for several years. At its heart, the novel is a tale of psychological suspense involving four women whose disparate lives intersect in a twisted scheme of blackmail, missing persons, double identity, a perverse game of victim and oppressor, a child's death, and ultimately, murder.

Mann deftly weaves complex psychological characterizations into the mix, such as the following comment from one of the main characters, a child psychologist:

Men showed themselves as they really were in bed. No doubt women did too, but Fidelis had been strictly heterosexual. Children, however, she could understand while keeping a proper and professional distance from them, observing and interacting across a desk, on the playing mat, at the zoo. But to know an adult, she had always needed intimacy. Fidelis's sexual life was over now and she was afraid she might have become a bad judge of character as a result.

The adroitly twisted plot provides plenty of social commentary and an intriguing look into how the losses and sins of youth shape the dysfunctional adults we become.