Kirke Field
Mechem was a Kansan historian, poet and playwright who, during the
heydays of the genre, wrote an excellent detective novel in the
tradition of The Van Dine
School of Mystery Fiction, but The Strawstack Murder Case
(1936) was first published under a bland, meaningless "publisher-mandated" title – namely the awful A
Frame for Murder. A mistake that was corrected in 2013 when
Coachwhip Publications
republished the story under its original and intended book-title.
Curt
Evans provided this new edition with a lengthy, informative
introduction and mentioned that the publisher "didn't think
strawstacks would sell books." Ironically, just three years
later, Dorothy
Cameron Disney published "a very well received mystery,"
entitled The
Strawstack Murders (1939), but, in defense of the publisher,
there might have been a good reason for their decision. Nicholas
Blake had debuted the previous year with A
Question of Proof (1935), which also had a
body-in-the-haystack plot.
So, if you
take that into consideration, you can understand why the publisher
wanted a different title for the book, but not why they settled on
such a bad, uninspired and nonsensical title. Anyway...
Mechem joined
the "goodly company of traditional mystery authors" of The
Van Dine School with The Strawstack Murder Case, but Mechem
also stands out in this class for two reasons. Most of the Van Dinean
writers come from the East or West Coast, mainly New York or
California, but The Strawstack Murder Case is set in Witchita,
Kansas – smack in the middle of the Heartlands of the United
States. This gives the book a strong rural and regional flavor.
Secondly, Mechem had a better sense of humor than most writers of
this school with the exception of Stuart
Palmer and Craig
Rice. The best example of this can be found in the opening
chapter.
The detective
of the story is Steven Steele, the Philo Vance of the Great Plains,
who is ranting in the opening chapter to his chronicler, Bill, about "the kind of tabloid authorship" that are turning his
cases into sensational, tarted-up pulp-stories and particularly
dislikes their account of The Wade Packinghouse Murder Case –
re-titled in the fictionalized version to The Slaughterhouse
Mystery. Steven Steele has become Vincent Veale. A gun-toting
pulp hero without a hint of Steele's impressive reasoning and
deductive abilities. He sadly concludes that "readers nowadays
don't want reasoning mixed with their detection" and advises
them to "go out and get some gangster's reminiscences."
So I immediately warmed to both Mechem and Steele!
Regardless of
this trend in popular fiction, Steele get to test his deductive
abilities and reasoning skills when the news breaks that a prominent
Wichita oil operator, Ralph "Lucky" Loundon, has been brutally
murdered near his hunting lodge.
The body of
Loundon was found "buried in a strawstack" by two teenage
boys and this provides the plot with a quasi-impossible situation,
because the stack of straw is of an "extraordinary dimension"
and extended nearly fifty feet from east to west with steep sides –
making it practically "impossible to climb." So how did
the body end up at the top of the strawstack? A tree near the
strawstack has broken branches and the discovery of "a matted
bunch of coarse light-brown hairs" on the body suggests an ape!
Naturally, an ape-like creature has very little to do with the murder
and the explanation is far more ingenious than that the trick from
that famous Edgar Allan Poe story.
However, as
baffling as the physical evidence at the scene of the crime is the
personal circumstances of the victim and the cast of characters that
had surrounded him.
Lucky Loundon
is described as "an overgrown boy," with a good heart, who
had helped half "the oil men in the territory at one time or
another" and pioneered the Meridian oil field by raising “a
forest of greasy derricks” across the river from his lodge.
There are, however, still more than enough people with a potential
motive to murder Loundon.
Loundon used
to be married to Lola van Roth, daughter of radio pastor Reverend
Raymond Dwight van Roth, who also has a troublesome son, Jack, who
may, or may, not have gotten on the wrong side of the law. And there
motive is tied to a $50,000 life insurance policy that goes to Lola
upon Loundon's death. On a side note, Curt Evans observed in his 2012
review
that Mechem painted "a memorably withering satirical portrait"
of the pastor that he wondered if the pastor had been based on "a
specific Midwestern clerical radio personality," which would be
Charles Coughlin – commonly known as Father Coughlin. I have no
idea if this true, but the comparison is an interesting one. And, if
this was the case, Mechem properly disguised him. I would not have
thought of this comparison myself.
There are
more suspects Steele has to consider: a potential love-interest, Dora
Monest, whose uncle, Juan Monest, is an investor in Loundon's many
businesses. Fielding Garnett is Loundon's partner in his oil
operations and Charles Ripley is the vice-president, general manager
and chief engineer of Loundon's Dragonfly Aircraft Company. I like to
believe this company made the dragonfly seaplane from Palmer's The
Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934). Lastly, there's a surgeon,
Dr. Herbert Vernon. All of them are tied together, either financially
or with personal secrets, which makes for a knotty, delightful
detective story. But the story even gets better after the halfway
mark!
An oil well
explosion provides the backdrop of a second murder, disguised as
suicide, and the description of this fiery disaster was very well
done and fascinating to read. Coachwhip seems to have penchant for
republishing disaster-themed detective novels. Tyline Perry's The
Owner Lies Dead (1930) has a disastrous mine explosion, Allan
Bosworth's Full
Crash Dive (1942) has a handful of survivors aboard a sunken
submarine and Carolyn Thomas' Narrow
Gauge to Murder (1952) concerns a tragic narrow-gauge
railroad accident – here have an oil well erupting in deadly fire
killing three men and wounding numerous others. Coachwhip should
seriously consider reprinting Zelda Popkin's Dead
Man's Gift (1942) to add a deadly flood to the lineup. Two more and you have the Seven Plagues of Detective Fiction! :)
All things
considered, The Strawstack Murder Case was more than worthy of
being resurrected. The story is very well written, cleverly plotted
and properly characterized strengthened by the rarely used regional
backdrop of the American heartlands. I think the book will be greatly
enjoyed by readers who enjoy the traditional, puzzle-oriented
detective novels by the Van Dine-Queen School and especially to
readers who are fond of Clyde
B. Clason. From all the writers from this school, Mechem is stands closest to Clason. In any case, The Strawstack Murder Case comes highly recommended!
A note for
the curious: Mechem wrote a second detective novel with Steven Steele
at the helm, entitled Mind on Murder, but the manuscript was
rejected by the publisher, because it dealt with a touchy subject –
and, as a result, the book is now lost to history. One these days,
I'm going slap together a follow up to my post on lost
detective stories. Sadly, I learned of even more examples since
that post went up in 2016. Some of you will be surprised to learn how
many lost manuscripts John
Russell Fearn has under his belt!
Since pretty much all I know of Kansas is The Wizard of Oz, I'm trying to picture Philo Vance in the midst of the great gray Kansas prairies - and failing somewhat!
ReplyDeleteHey, that's why Mechem wrote the book. You should read it. It would be interesting to get your take on it.
DeleteThanks for the review. :) I approached this review with some trepidation, as I purchased the novel recently without knowing much about it. Glad it comes highly recommended! :D
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, Jonathan. Hope you enjoy it! :)
DeleteThanks for the review. I will have to buy a copy. You are right, mysteries that turn on some sort of technical or scientific theme or concept are very good; you can at least claim that it was not just empty entertainment and that you learned something. The pharmacological-themed mysteries of Douglas Clark stand out in that regard.
ReplyDelete