Forgotten Book - Murder of a Man Afraid of Women

Anthony Abbot was a pen-name adopted by Fulton Oursler (1893-1952), who is best remembered as the author, under his own name, of The Greatest Story Ever Told; he told it some years after giving up on detective fiction. During the Thirties, though, he was one of the leading American writers of Golden Age mysteries. His books aren't easy to come by now, but on a recent visit to Hay I snaffled a copy of Murder of a Man Afraid of Women (1937). The US edition of this book, as with the five earlier books in the series, added the words 'About the' to the title, presumably to secure some sort of alphabetical primacy.

Abbot's detective was Thatcher Colt, head of the New York police. Colt is an interesting variant on the Philo Vance/Ellery Queen type of character. He's a police professional, with a keen understanding of the importance of technological advances in the fight against crime. But like Van Dine and Queen, he has the brilliance of the great detective, as well as an admiring narrator - his secretary, who goes by the name Anthony Abbot...

This novel was clearly inspired by a fascinating real life murder case in the US - the unsolved killing of the actor and director William Desmond Taylor. The true crime is an amazing story, and Oursler clearly used his imagination to think of a possible interpretation of the real life events, while adding plenty of invention to the mix. It's not a bad method at all.

It's not a bad book, either. I felt it began well and ended fairly well, but there was quite a bit of sagging in the middle of the story. I dreamed up my own solution, but it was way off beam, predictably so since it wouldn't have been acceptable given the moral climate in the 30s. There's an attempt to create a race against time, since Colt is trying to solve the case before his imminent wedding, but I didn't find this element of the story believable. There are some very interesting ingredients in the mix, but I wasn't entirely convinced by the overall handling of them, and in particular not by the all-important psychology of the main character, Peter Slade (who stands in Taylor's shoes in the story). There is too much contrivance. But of course that can be said of many Golden Age novels, can't it?

The Ourslers

Much as I like crime novels that explore character and matters of social significance, one of my guilty pleasures continues to be those detective stories which are, in essence, games between the writer and the reader – to see if the reader can pick up the clues to solve the mystery in good time before the truth is revealed.

The ‘game’ aspects of the detective story were highlighted when Father Ronal Knox devised, with tongue in cheek, his ‘ten commandments’ for the genre, and when the Detection Club devised its first ‘ritual’ to be observed at the induction of new members. Books started to appear that did more than just include a ‘challenge to the reader’ in the style of Ellery Queen – they were wholly devoted to mystery puzzles. The Baffle Book is an example, and in the late 1930s, Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links took things a stage further with their Crime Dossiers, starting with Murder off Miami.

I’ve written about the Crime Dossiers on my website, and I’m also interested in similar dossiers devised by those who followed in the footsteps of Wheatley and Links. Jamie Sturgeon recently supplied me with an example from 1950, Murder Meo to the Commissioner: The Carl Houston Case.

This dossier is written (or compiled) by Will Oursler and, though I haven’t yet studied it, I’ve done a bit of research on Oursler, whose work was unfamiliar to me. It turns out that he wrote a number of murder mysteries, along with various books about religion, a book about boy scouts, and a biography of the founder of Boys’ Town (who was famously portrayed on screen by Spencer Tracy).

The latter book was co-written with Will’s father, Fulton Oursler, and it turns out that Fulton also wrote about religion, and produced mysteries of his own, under the name Anthony Abbott. There are quite a few examples over the years of children following in their parents’ footsteps as mystery writers, but (although they evidently enjoyed considerable reputations in their day) the Ourslers were new names to me, though I had heard of Abbott, who I gather was fairly popular inhis day.

I shall report on Will’s crime dossier in due course…..