"When you follow two separate chains of thoughts, Watson, you will find some point of intersection which should approximate to the truth."- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur C. Doyle's "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax," from His Last Bow: Some Later Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, 1917)
Lenore
Glen Offord wrote only eight mystery novels during her lifetime, but amassed
a bulky body of work as a critic and served as a reviewer on the staff of the San
Francisco Chronicler for over thirty years – a gig which landed her an
Edgar Award for Outstanding Criticism in 1952. Nonetheless, it would be a
capital mistake to overlook Offord as a mystery novelist.
The Glass Mask (1944) successfully employed a "perfect murder" ploy and refused to
fall back on a cop-out for a happy ending, which firmly anchored the book on my
list
of all-time favorite detective stories. It's also one of the better village
mysteries I have read. My True Love Lies (1947) revealed it self as a
wonderful, artistically themed standalone novel with an equally wondrous,
double-twisted ending and provided a clever answer as to why a murderer would
hide a body inside a clay model.
So I was glad to learn Felony & Mayhem had reissued Skeleton
Key (1943), which offered an avenue for further exploration of her work and
introduced her series-characters – Georgine Wyeth and pulp-writer Todd
McKinnon. Georgine Wyeth was introduced to the reader as a strikingly modern
character: a workingwoman and widowed mother of a seven-year-old girl, which
left her barely with any time for a personal life. It's during one of her
ungrateful jobs that the reader catches a first glimpse of her.
Georgine is roaming a cul-de-sac
in Berkeley, California, called Grettry Road, carrying a miniature briefcase
full of magazine-subscriptions, but they so far remained blank. Nobody seemed
interested and there even appeared to be "a sudden wave of sales resistance,"
which lead to the reflection that she couldn't "sell water to a desert tank
corpse," but an opportunity presents itself when a case of mistaken
identity gains her entrance to the home of an eccentric professor – who,
according to "the consensus of the neighborhood," is perfecting "a
Death Ray" in his laboratory!
In actuality, the suspiciously minded
scientist, Alexis Paev, is looking for a scientific-illiterate typist to
convert his large collection of notes into typescript. It's a job worth a
hundred bucks. Luckily, Georgine is fabulously ignorant of such subjects as
chemistry, physics and bacteriology. So why not paunch on the opportunity to
earn some extra money?
However, the job requires her to be a
temporary resident of the dead-end street, because the professor is adamant
that not a single page is carried off the premise.
As a new resident, Georgine "noted
with amusement" how much Grettry Road "resembled a village," in its
semi-isolation, but without the public knowledge of everyone’s private affairs
and the inhabitants viewed her as "a fresh mind on which everyone was eager
to stamp his own impressions" – which positioned her in the role of social
observer. It's in this position that she involuntarily amasses an astonishing
amount of knowledge about the locals.
A wealth of information that proved its worth
when the local air-raid warden, Roy Hollister, is killed during a blackout in
what appears to have been a freak accident, which occurred when "a
driverless car plunged downhill" and "struck him as he was going on his
rounds." Georgine had noticed during a block meeting Hollister "wardened
harder" than anyone she ever saw and how "he had sort of impact on
people" that she "couldn’t define or explain." Obviously, there are
one or two potential motives hidden just beneath the surface.
The semi-isolation, village-esque quality
of Grettry Road begs for a comparison with the English village mysteries of Agatha
Christie, but what truly gave the book a British twang was the blackout
angle. It's a part of World War II that's seldom played up in American
mysteries from the period and therefore became closely associated with English
mysteries, which was used by practically every writer active at the time. But
the only other American mystery novel I can think of (from the top of my head) using/mentioning
blackouts was Frances Crane's The
Pink Umbrella (1943).
A well-drawn backdrop, affected by
America's entry into the war, coupled with an interesting, somewhat original
motive lifted the plot slightly above average, which was a nice result since
the book was evidently a vehicle to introduce and establish the new
series-characters – by bringing Georgine and Todd together. The only
part of the book I found truly disappointing was how the disappearance of one of the
characters was presented as an impossible problem, someone was heard running up a flight
of stairs and "at the top had vanished into thin air," but the magic was quickly dispelled and revealed as merely a misundertood situation on the part of Georgine. Oh well.
All in all, it was still a nicely written mixture of plot and
characters that resulted in a good, but not outstanding, detective novel with an interesting WWII background.
Well, that's the best I could do with
this review and I'm not if I can squeeze in another review before the end of
the year, but there will be a best-of/worst-of list. I just haven't decided yet
if they're going to be separate lists or simply merge them into one long,
rambling blog-post. So stay tuned.
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