Forgotten Book - Family Skeletons

Patrick Quentin, in various incarnations, is an American crime author I've enjoyed reading for many years. The name (and the names Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge) conceals a complex set of collaborations, but in the 1950s the brand adorned a final run of books by Hugh Wheeler, writing solo. The last of the books, Family Skeletons, has eluded me until now, but when I had the chance to acquire Dorothy B. Hughes' review copy, I snapped it up.

Hughes was, like me, a Patrick Quentin fan, but I think she probably enjoyed the book rather more than I did. I sense that, by the time this title appeared in 1965, Wheeler was tiring of the game. He'd become established in the world of musical theatre, where great success still awaited him. This story has, as Hughes said, the touch of a professional - especially in the way that suspicion shifts around a pool of possible suspects. But there is something perfunctory about the whole exercise, as if Wheeler's heart wasn't really in it.

The problem is that Lewis Denham, the protagonist, is a rather irritating figure. He's a member of a rich (and even more irritating) family and when he marries in secret, he pretends, for no reason that I could find credible or remotely sensible, that he is not married. Then, when he and his new wife come across a body and realise that she might be a prime suspect, they make matters much worse for themselves by stupidly taking away the corpse and pretending that nothing has happened. 

Overall, I felt that this was a story where the characters behaved in the way that they did mainly in order to build the suspense. Yes, contrivance is permissible in a crime story, but it needs to have a touch of believability and we usually need to empathise with at least one of the characters. Wheeler was a talented writer, and he could characterise rather more effectively than he does here. He was also adept at plotting, but I'm sorry to say that, some time before the end, I lost interest in the whodunit twists. This isn't a bad book, but there are certainly a good many better Quentin books than this one. Why was it the last? Probably because Wheeler was smart enough to realise that he'd lost his touch.

Black Widow - 1954 film review

Black Widow is a popular title for crime films. The one I'm discussing today showed up recently on the wonderful Talking Pictures TV channel. I've made many fascinating discoveries thanks to Talking Pictures. As with forgotten books, there are some forgotten movies that really ought to be left in peace. But Black Widow, I was delighted to find, is based on the book of the same name by Patrick Quentin. I've read quite a lot of Quentin books (and novels by the PQ alter ego, Q. Patrick) and they are invariably well-plotted. Black Widow is no exception.

The film was made in Cinemascope, and the bright colours slightly distract from the darkness of the storyline. It's almost a film noir in mood, if not in look. The cast is very strong, with Van Heflin, a dependable performer, playing the hero, Peter Denver (in the books, Peter Duluth - was that surname deemed "too difficult" for audiences of the time?) At the start of the film, Peter is waving goodbye to his beloved wife Iris (Gene Tierney) at the airport. She's off to look after her sick mother, and she urges him to show his face at a party thrown by an actress who is starring in Peter's current show, and who lives in the same block as the Denvers.

The actress is "Lottie" Marin, played by Ginger Rogers (who doesn't dance in this story.) She's a famously unkind woman with a huge ego and a sharp tongue. Her husband Brian (Reginald Gardiner) is a weak character who allows her to bully him. At the party, Peter meets a young woman, Nancy (Peggy Ann Garner) and they become friends. Their relationship is platonic, but Peter invites her to stay in his apartment while Iris is away, and on the day of her return, Nancy is found there, dead. It appears to be a case of suicide, but soon questions arise. Is it possible that Peter has killed her?

The plot is pleasingly convoluted, although I found Nancy's psychology slightly baffling. Peter, naturally, tries to find out what is going on, but the official detective work is undertaken by a cop played by George Raft, whom one associates more with gangster roles. Even as a detective, he is pretty menacing. The film wasn't a huge box office hit, but it's worn pretty well, mainly because of the cast and the strength of the plot twists. Overall, definitely worth watching.

Patrick Quentin and The Follower - guest blog by Christopher Greaves

One of the joys of blogging is that it brings you into contact with many people you wouldn't otherwise get to know. I was contacted a while ago by Christopher Greaves, who shares my enthusiasm for Patrick Quentin, and the outcome of our email correspondence is that he's written a guest blog post which I'm happy to include today. Christopher is also the author of The Past is Never Closed

"It’s good to see the Patrick Quentin/Q. Patrick/Jonathan Stagge team receiving more attention.  On the whole, it seems to be the earlier, more Golden Age books that are being read and reviewed, but for my money it’s the later Patrick Quentins - the ones written solely by Hugh Wheeler - that are really something special.  The earlier books tend to be more fanciful, less plausible; the later ones marry the most wonderfully skilful plotting with a greater realism. 

The shift from the earlier to the later style is clearly shown in one of the last of the Hugh Wheeler - Richard Webb collaborations, Jonathan Stagge’s The Three Fears (1949).  The feud which runs throughout the book between the two leading actresses, Daphne Winters and Lucy Milliken, is described with a good deal of sophisticated wit and almost amounts to a comedy of manners (the theme of the diva would be taken up again in Wheeler’s Suspicious Circumstances), but the idea that someone as tough as the ‘Divine Daphne’ would be haunted by ‘three fears’ - of death by poison, claustrophobia and fire - just doesn’t make sense, it belongs to an altogether more quirky, melodramatic way of writing, as does the casual, rather cynical handling of the murder of one of Daphne’s acolytes.  In other words, the book suffers by falling between two stools.

Patrick Quentin’s The Follower from the following year (1950) is a much better book and paves the way for Hugh Wheeler’s solo efforts, written after Richard Webb had dropped out of the partnership.  Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if The Follower wasn’t a Wheeler-only book: we see here the same ability to reveal character through dialogue and the same interest in the protagonist’s emotional life that we find in the later volumes, almost all of which have in common the fact that there is an emotional problem as well as a murder mystery to be solved.  Where it differs from Fatal Woman, The Man with Two Wives, and the rest of them, is that it is a thriller rather than a whodunit.

The set-up is especially good.  Mark Liddon, a young, just-married engineer, returns to New York from a spell of work in Venezuela in order to be back with his wife Ellie in time for Christmas.  But ditzy, poor-little-rich-girl Ellie isn’t there.  Instead, Mark finds the dead body of one of her former admirers, shot through the heart.  He doesn’t know how it happened but his one inclination is to find and protect his wife, so he hides the body and manages, by a clever piece of detective work, to get a lead as to where she might have gone.  The action now shifts to Mexico - as with two slightly earlier Quentins, Puzzle for Pilgrims and Run to Death.  Mark learns that his wife has bought a ticket for a bullfight - yet when he gets to the stadium, the woman who shows up using his wife’s name isn’t Ellie at all but a complete stranger.  Having just read Helen McCloy’s The Impostor, I can report that the imposture theme is handled in a much more interesting, suspenseful way by Quentin here.  Mark does find Ellie, only to lose her again…until the denouement, when everything is finally explained.  It’s quite a long explanation, but Quentin sustains our interest by leaving a key element of the emotional part of the problem unresolved until the penultimate page.  Perhaps the showdown scene lacks real menace and it’s arguable that too much information is held back until the end, but the gripping narrative, touches of humour, occasional splashes of local colour, and elements of romance and mystery combine to make The Follower a fine thriller with a satisfying conclusion."

Thanks. Christopher!

 

Forgotten Book - Suspicous Circumstances

My Forgotten Book for today is one of the last novels to appear under the famous pen-name of Patrick Quentin. Suspicious Circumstances, written by Hugh Wheeler, was published in 1957. At this time, I suspect Wheeler was pursuing his keen interest in showbiz which eventually led to his writing with the legendary Stephen Sondheim - Wheeler wrote the book of that wonderful musical "A Little Night Music", for instance, and was involved with "Cabaret", although sources differ as to the extent of that involvement.

So Wheeler certainly loved the showbiz world, and this shines through in the novel. The story is told by Nickie, a 19 year old young man who is devoted to his mother, once a famous actress. While he is away in France, enjoying himself with a woman called Monique, he receives an urgent summons from her to return home. Is this connected with the recent death of his mother's rival, Norma Delanay, by any chance? The answer proves to be yes.

It seems that Norma died accidentally, but Nickie is not so sure, and neither are the police. His mother, along with a number of other people in her circle, may have been at or close to the place where the accident happened. Suspicion switches around from one person to another. Whom can Nickie trust? This question of trust, suspicion and betrayal is eternally fascinating and it formed the core of my own second novel, Suspicious Minds.

Unfortunately, despite the potential of the showbiz setting, I found myself unable to warm to Nickie, his mother or anyone else in the book, and unable to care how Norma met her end. It seems to me that Wheeler was losing interest in the crime novel when he wrote this book. It has a perfunctory feel, very different from the energy that drives most of his fiction. I'm sorry to say so, but this is by far the worst Quentin I've read. But everyone has an off-day, and the other Quentins I've read are pacy and enjoyable. Please don't let my disappointment with one particular book put you off Quentin"

Forgotten Book - The Green-Eyed Monster

Patrick Quentin was one of the best American detective novelists of the 20th century. The name conceals a complex web of identities - two men, two women, and a wide range of books published across more than 30 years. I believe Quentin was the favourite American writer of Anthony Berkeley, who was no mean judge, and at one time his books were very popular. The Green-Eyed Monster, written by Hugh Wheeler alone, and published in 1960, was one of the very last Quentins, and it's my Forgotten Book for today.

The story is told by Andrew Johnson, who is haunted by the fact that his beautiful wife Maureen may be being unfaithful to him. His fears are heightened by anonymous letters which suggest he is the only one in New York who does not know what she is like When she is found murdered, Andrew is one of the suspects. To prove his innocence, he has to find who really did kill Maureen, and why.

There are plenty of possible culprits. His younger brother Ned is charming but unreliable. And what about his mother's latest husband, Lem? The list of candidates keeps growing as the plot twists and twists again. Amusingly, the possible killers include a Mrs Margaret Thatcher...As with all books by Quentin, its brevity and pace are assets, and the solution is hard to predict.

Having said all of that, I wouldn't rate this book as a classic. "Highly competent" is closer to the mark. You can tell that Wheeler is an accomplished wordsmith, and he does pay attention to characterisation. But the snag, for me,was that I found most of the characters rather irksome, and Andrew's weakness (as I saw it) somewhat annoying. As a result, I didn't care as much as I should have done about the mystery, or about the fate of the odious Maureen. A good piece of craftsmanship, this one, but there are better Quentins out there.

Forgotten Book - Puzzle for Fiends

Patrick Quentin was one of the Forgotten Authors featured at  Crimefest last week, and Quentin, alias Q. Patrick, alias Jonathan Stagge, is one of the most interesting of all pseudonymous American crime writers, not least because, in total, those names concealed not just one identity, but four. The most notable were Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler. They started a series under the Quentin name featuring Peter Duluth, and my Forgotten Book for today, Puzzle for Fiends, a Duluth story.

The premise is super. After a brief prologue in which Peter waves off his new wife Iris at an airfield, the picture transforms when he wakes up after an accident, suffering from amnesia. He is surrounded by people who claim to be family members or associates and who say that he is the wealthy Gordon Renton Friend the Third. Whilst it's some consolation that his newly found wife, mother and sister are all very beautiful, he finds himself trapped in a nightmarish situation, from which escape seems impossible.

Of course, variations on this theme have often been used in mysteries - the Liam Neeson film Unknown is an excellent recent example. But Quentin handles it well, and it's no surprise that this book has been highly regarded, not least by Julian Symons. There are plenty of plot twists along the way - you can always rely on the PQ (or QP) franchise for tantalising mysteries.

And yet. I felt there were some unsatisfactory features of the second half of the story which meant that I wouldn't regard it as a classic, much as it entertained me. There is a puritanical cult called the Aurora League which features heavily in the plot, and although it is satirically and wittily described, I felt that its sheer absurdity militated against suspense. As Cornell Woolrich showed in nightmare-scenario books like Phantom Lady, the way to handle a story like this is to maintain tension throughout, and Puzzle for Fiends didn't quite manage this. All the same, it remains a lively and efficient thriller, still worth reading.

Forgotten Book - Murder at Cambridge

Murder at the 'Varsity, written by Q. Patrick, and first published in 1933, is also known as Murder at Cambridge. And it has recently been republished under that latter title by that splendid small press, Ostara, in its attractively produced Cambridge Crime series. It's a very welcome reissue, but the fact that the story is set in Cambridge, England, might raise an eyebrow. For was not Q. Patrick (later, Patrick Quentin) an American writer?

The answer is no, not in this particular case. The Patrick/Quentin names concealed, over the years, the identities of no fewer than four different writers, two men and two women. As I understand it, this particular book is the only one that was written by Richard Webb alone. And Webb was an Englishman, and was an undergraduate at Cambridge before moving to the US. It is clear from reading the book that he had a close understanding of Cambridge university life - there is a whiff of authenticity that does not suggest research from a distance.

The story is a pretty good one, too. The narrator, Hilary Fenton, is a native of Philadelphia (where Webb worked after emigrating) and a fellow student who is murdered comes from South Africa (where Webb had worked before moving to the US.) Fenton's attempts to get involved in the sleuthing are compromised by the fact that he has fallen in love with a pretty student who was lurking around the murder scene. Rather foolishly, he does not tell the police all he knows about the victim, and complications ensue.

I thought I'd solved the puzzle, but no - the author had a neat twist up his sleeve. The culprit was genuinely unexpected, and overall I thought Webb got away rather well with some rather unlikely plot manoeuvres. He was a clever writer, as was the better known Hugh Wheeler,with whom he soon began to collaborate. This solo effort does, however, show that Webb was an accomplished detective novelist in his own right. This is an entertaining Golden Age story, on a par with the better known books set in Oxford during the same era.

Forgotten Book - The Wife of Ronald Sheldon

Another book by Patrick Quentin for today's Forgotten Book. This time, it's The Wife of Ronald Sheldon, also known as My Son, the Murderer - an inferior title for at least two reasons.) It was first published in 1954, by which time Quentin had ceased to be a collaboration - this one was written by Hugh Wheeler alone. There is an interesting discussion about the Quentin/ Q Patrick/Jonathan Stagge writers (over the years, there were four of them) on the Golden Age Detection forum. Apparently Wheeler, and perhaps the others, were gay, and although I'm not sure it's a gay sub-text, the relationship between the narrator, Jake Duluth and his business partner Ronnie Sheldon is central to this story.

Jake and Ronnie are, however, portrayed as resolutely heterosexual, and as it turns out, that is the key to past events which have an impact on the storyline. They run a publishing firm, and Ronnie has a knack of spotting literary geniuses. Ronnie is a rich dilettante, Jake was recently widowed when his wife inexplicably committed suicide, leaving him to bring up Bill, a moody and resentful young man who is also highly impetuous (and rather irritating, I felt.)

Ronnie causes a sensation when he returns from Europe to the States with a new, 19 year old wife, Jean, and her father Basil, his wife Norah, and his admirer, Lady Phyllis Brent. Wheeler was English by birth, but he is merciless in his portrayal of the Lacey mob. Other than Norah, they are quite appalling in various ways. And things go from bad to worse when Jean and Bill fall for each other. When Ronnie is found murdered, Bill is the prime suspect of Lieutenant Barnes (who seems indistinguishable from Quentin's usual cop, Lieutenant Trant.)

Jake tries to find the truth, assisted by brother Peter and his wife Iris, who appeared n several of the earlier Quentin books. The plot is soundly constructed, although I found the solution rather anti-climactic. I'm a great admirer of Quentin, but I felt this wasn't one of his best, in part because most of the characters are so annoying.Nor was I entirely convinced by the way Ronnie's character was developed. All in all, a decent story idea, competently executed, but lacking brilliance.

Forgotten Book - The Man in the Net

I’ve covered a couple of enjoyable Forgotten Books published under the name of Q.Patrick, aka Quentin Patrick– a collaboration which later adopted a slightly varied pen-name, Patrick Quentin. Over the years I’ve read quite a few novels under both names, written from the early 30s to the late 50s, and I have to say I haven’t read a poor one yet. No wonder critics such as Julian Symons and Francis Iles rated them so highly.

The Man in the Net is a relatively late effort, dating from 1956, and it is a high quality thriller, with strong elements of psychological suspense coupled with a good whodunit plot. All the action is seen from the point of view of a struggling artist, John Hamilton, who lives in a stifling New England community, and an even more stifling marriage.

Linda Hamilton is a secret drinker, attractive yet unreliable and dishonest. She presents a charming image to outsiders, while making Hamilton’s life increasingly stressful. Hamilton, though a bit weak in some respects, is portrayed as a good and kind man, who gets on well with a group of children (who ultimately play an important part in the story-line). And no, there is never a hint of child abuse, which features in so many modern books.

Linda goes missing, and the evidence suggests she is dead and that John killed her. Pursued by the angry locals, John goes into hiding, and tries to work out how to save himself, and discover what happened to Linda. This is a short book by modern standards, and gripping from start to finish. It was turned into a film – no surprise, because it is such a vivid story. And there’s even a theory that “The Net”, a song by John Ashley on the recently released CD “Long Ago Last Summer”, a compilation of obscure, and sometimes eccentric, early Bacharach songs, was inspired by the film. Whatever the truth of that, this is a book that undoubtedly deserves to be remembered.

Forgotten Book - The Grindle Nightmare

My Forgotten Book today is The Grindle Nightmare, by Quentin Patrick, and I have to thank John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books for not only calling it to my attention, but also supplying me with a copy. Very kind of him, and, I must say, typical of the kindness which, I have found, abounds among crime bloggers and fans.

The book was first published in 1935, and was one of two books which Richard Wilson Webb, an Englishman born (like Robert Barnard) in the Essex town of Burnham, and an American journalist, Mary Louise Aswell, wrote under the pseudonym (used almost interchangeably with the name Q.Patrick – the name Patrick Quentin was used extensively in later years). Webb had earlier written with another woman, Martha Mott Kelley, but his major collaborator was Hugh Wheeler, another Englishman who eventually became famous for writing the book of musicals such as A Little Night Music.

The setting is a rather remote New England valley called Grindle, and a helpful map is supplied in true Golden Age tradition. But Grindle isn’t St Mary Mead, but a place where dark and disturbing things are happening. Animals are being mistreated, and then a young girl disappears. The narrator is a young scientist, Dr Doug Swanson, who shares his home with a fellow doctor; their work involves vivisection. Suffice to say that nobody in their right mind would call this book “cosy”. It is very dark by any standards, but especially for the time when it was written. Not one for the faint-hearted, that’s for sure.

The plot is complicated, and a genuine whodunit puzzle is supplied. Mention is made of a very famous real life American murder case, which may have been a source of some inspiration for the device at the heart of the narrative. But this is a book unlike any others of its period that I have read – and it really is memorable. Short, snappy, chilling and clever, it deserves to be much better known.