Frances Crane, "a small town girl who became a sophisticated world traveler," was an American mystery novelist who wrote thirty detective novels, published between 1941 and 1968, all but four featuring the lighthearted, globetrotting crime solving couple, Pat and Jean Abbott – contemporaries of the Troys and the Norths. The Abbotts appeared in twenty-six novels, no short stories, often taking place in localities as colorful as the varicolored book titles that earned Crane the label "the travelog mystery writer." So they were a perfect fit for Tom and Enid Schantz's Rue Morgue Press.
The good news is that Crane is returning to print once again courtesy of the MysteriousPress/OpenRoad combination (ebooks) and Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics (print). The bad news is that The Rap Sheet reported last July that Tom Schantz had "died on June 6 at 79 years of age." The story of the Rue Morgue Press has a special place in the history of the genre as Tom and Enid Schantz were among the first to setup shop on the internet, which not only helped pave the way for today's reprint renaissance, but opened the door to a possible Second Golden Age – sometime in the hopefully not so distant future. A reprint renaissance would likely have happened regardless, but it would developed a lot slower rate without the Rue Morgue Press pushing it ahead a good 10-15 years. Without them, I think we would be today where we roughly were around the late 2000s. And who knows how that would have affected our beloved translation wave. So if you feel spoiled for choice or overwhelmed by the relentless, unceasing stream of reprints and translations, you can thank the Schantz for your luxurious little problem.
When I learned of Tom Schantz's passing, I dug the Rue Morgue Press edition of Frances Crane's The Golden Box (1942) from the bottom of the to-be-read pile and moved it near the top. After all, Crane wrote the type of mysteries Tom and Enid enjoyed. The type of mystery novel showing the only acceptable place in a civilized world to commit murder is the printed page.
The Golden Box is the second novel in the series and takes place mere weeks after The Turquoise Shop, which introduced mystery readers to the San Francisco private eye Patrick "Pat" Abbott and his future wife, Jean Holly. At the time, the last days of November, 1941, the United States populace was occupied with Roosevelt's presidential proclamation to move Thanksgiving ("...cash registers play jingle bells an extra week") or listening to radio broadcasts on developing tension with Japan ("the Japanese emissaries were in Washington"). Just a little over a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Jean, only 26-years-old, is wondering whether Pat is the man for her and what to do with her shop in Santa Maria shop ("...a pain in the neck because I couldn't make it pay...") when she receives a telegram from her cousin. Peg McCrea invites Jean to come back and visit her old hometown, Elm Hill, which she left behind eight years ago when her parents died in a car crash, but very little has changed in the small, old-world town – lorded over by the matriarchal tyrant of Fabian House. Mrs. Claribel Fabian Lake is a domineering, mean-spirited old woman who leverages her wealth to control everyone and everything from her own relatives to the church committee. Woe onto those who dare cross or defy her wishes.
Mrs. Claribel Fabian Lake has three daughters, Emma, Claire and Valerie, one of whom she wishes to see married to her dear cousin, Ernest Fabian. Ernest is "the very last Fabian" and Mrs. Lake "was going to endow him heavily when he married Emma," but she eloped with a high school chemistry teacher, Carl Green. They had several children one of whom got hit by a car and needs expensive medical care or risks losing a leg, but Mrs. Lake refuses to give as much as a penny for treatment ("bitchy Mrs. Lake reminded Emma that if she had married Ernest Fabian things might have been nicer, meaning they'd've had money"). So the next in line to marry Ernest is the second, distantly-minded daughter, Claire, who agreed to become engaged to Ernest ("...just a sort of business arrangement, you see"). However, this does not mean the third and youngest daughter can marry whomever she wants. Valerie has fallen in love with a young pilot, Tommy Ross, but Mrs. Lake is "fighting the match" and "Val spends most of her time in hysterics." That's not all. Mrs. Lake is furious at the whole church as the congregation voted against her sappy candidate preacher and gets back at them by canceling the annual Christmas party. If the committee insists on having a Christmas party regardless, she'll stop her yearly three-thousand dollar donation. A donation that practically pays for everything the church does for the community.
Ernest had the body taken to St. Louis for embalming and the coffin returned to Fabian House, "under a blanket of orchids and gardenias," but was not opened and the funeral was to be private, which is considered a snub in the community – "funerals are rather communal in Elm Hill." There's another story doing the rounds about her supposed death. Mrs. Lake's young black maid, Ida Raymonds, told her sister she found her mistress "lying on the bed with a bashed-in face" and "a golden box clutched in one dead hand." Is that why Ernest wanted the body cremated? But then her body is discovered hanging from a length of clothesline in the so-called bird room crammed with stuffed animals. So, when Pat comes to Elm Hill, there's plenty of suspicion and motives to go around, but the imminent treat of war has doused any interest in a potential double murder in Elm Hill ("I suppose murder on a mass scale rubs out little double murders like that"). And nobody wants "to bother seriously because it's only Ida Raymond." Which is not necessarily a handicap for a detective like Pat Abbott. Or, as Jean described it, "you size up your case and set your little trap and they talk themselves into it."
The Thrilling Detective Website described the Pat and Jean Abbott novels as "definitely on the cozier side of the P.I. genre." Frances Crane can be called the female counterpart to Rex Stout as both wrote mysteries most read for the main characters rather than trying to pick apart a tricky, intricately-constructed puzzle plot. That is very much true for The Golden Box. Crane does put in some work to make the obvious murderer somewhat less obvious and not always in the fairest of ways, but the only way you can miss the murderer is (SPOILER/ROT13: vs lbh nffhzr gur zbfg-yvxryl-fhfcrpg vf gbb boivbhf n pubvpr sbe zheqrere) and expect a bit of ingenuity or cleverness waiting for you in the last couple of chapters. Crane simply was not an Agatha Christie or Helen McCloy. Funnily enough, Tom and Enid Schantz tried to help on this occasion to make the murderer less obvious by editing out a racial slur. Not "because of concerns about political correctness but because it might actually give away the killer's identity" as "in 1942, readers might not have assigned guilt at its mere utterance," but "but in 2005 we could easily see a reader exclaiming, 'Aha, here's our killer'." Stressing that Crane was "a champion of the underdog who abhorred prejudice" and "was expelled from Nazi Germany as a journalist for defending Jews." It barely helped.
However, The Golden Box is a highly readable, but not particular challenging, detective novel giving a snapshot of a period when the United States held it breaths in anticipation war while trying to fuss over little things like Thanksgiving getting moved a week. So if you like these comfy, more character-oriented mysteries with a dash of romance and a pinch of Had-I-But-Known, Frances Crane and The Golden Box comes highly recommended. But if you want something a little more challenging, you should look somewhere else.
A note for the curious: I nostalgically poked around the now sadly long gone Rue Morgue Press website on the Wayback Machine and came across the following on the about section what collecting vintage mysteries in the 1970s was like: "in those days, used mystery books from the Golden Age were plentiful and cheap and not in wide demand, except by thrifty readers. Booksellers kept first editions in dusty back rooms and rejoiced when we came to town looking for them. Book sales had tables full of them, priced at a quarter apiece regardless of edition or condition. We would come back from buying trips with our Volvo station wagon crammed with boxes of old mysteries... remember, a book from 1935 had been out of print for only 35 years at that time, about the same length of time that books being published in 1970 have been out of print today. And there were very few real mystery fiction collectors back then." One of those early collectors was Bill Pronzini. No wonder he got his hands on all those rare, long out-of-print locked room mysteries! But it's interesting to note how the fandom has grown and expanded since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Almost like RMP actually had a hand in it! ;)
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