The Belt of Suspicion (1936) by H. Russell Wakefield

H. Russell Wakefield was a British civil servant, publisher and writer best remembered today for his short story collections of supernatural fiction, but Wakefield also took an interest in the world of crime – both real and fictitious. Wakefield published a pair of true crime books, The Green Bicycle Case (1930) and Landru: The French Bluebeard (1936), topped by three, apparently vastly different detective novels. Hearken to the Evidence (1933) seems to be a courtroom drama, while Hostess of Death (1938) apparently mixes a murder mystery with gangsters from the pulps. Wakefield's second novel, The Belt of Suspicion (1936), struck me as potentially his most conventional mystery. Something along the lines of Christianna Brand's Death in High Heels (1941).

I don't know if The Belt of Suspicion is the most conventional of the three, but this genre curiosity is not anywhere close to even an average Brand mystery. Although the comparison with Death in High Heels still stands, sort of. More on that in a moment.

The epicenter of The Belt of Suspicion is Stephen Gallin's Glovfit's Products, specialized in producing luxury garments like belts, corsets and brassières, whose combination of creativity and commercial acumen made his garment company a success. Recently, Gallin hired his young, financially independent niece, Miss Lucy Bault, to do secretary work and some modeling – which didn't sit well with everyone. Miss Rosalie Caligne, head demonstrator, had "set her heart on being the chief's secretary" ("...she loathes me a bit more each day"). A much more serious problem is Lucy's brother, Arthur, who's developed into an alcoholic after the death of their father ("Arthur was a sip of the old bottle"). Dr. Reynolds tries to prevent Arthur from drinking himself to death by engaging a dance hostess, Peggy, to put medicine in his drink, whenever they visit the Pink Nightie Club.

Despite the attempts to make him drink less, Arthur's "heart was steadily losing its battle with the bottle," but even Dr. Reynolds suspected it would "surrender so soon." His death coincides with the first of several acute and severe attacks of gastritis nearly taking out Lucy. The first attack was dismissed as a simple, if unfortunate, case of food poisoning, but the second attack makes her fiance, Bob Carshall, suspicious on top of being worried. Suspicious enough to consult a friend and brilliant diagnostician, Anthony Faraday.

This short summary covers about half of the book and left out some details and characters, because they don't really matter to the overall story. Same holds true for roughly half of what has already been described of the plot, story and characters. So it's at this halfway mark that the plot begins to teeter and eventually fall apart. Only redeeming quality, plot-wise, is the method used to slowly poison Lucy, "there have been a few cases, but none to my knowledge criminal," which should have been the focal point of the second-half – because the who-and why are obvious at that point. An inverted, how-did-he-do-it-style mystery would have given the tight focus this messily-constructed, patently unfair mystery sorely needed during its second-half.

So, plot-wise, The Belt of Suspicion barely has anything to recommend, but its brash writing and characters have some noteworthy aspects. Moments when it almost feels like reading a crime novel from the post-WWII era of the genre. Not a supposedly sophisticated, 1930s British whodunit. For example, the Pink Nightie Club not only bribes policemen to sell drinks after hours, but is notorious for "harbouring prostitutes." Miss Lampson, an employee of Glovfit, is desperately in love with Miss Caligne and her crush is well-known around the office ("...it's the office joke"). So, in that regard, You can see the comparison to Brand's Death in High Heels. However, that same brash, casual attitude also works the other way round with certain references and remarks that are not taken as casually today as they were back in 1936. Peggy referred to a fight over politics at the night club as "a Yid scrap" at the other table and Arthur has a black cat with a Lovecraftian pet name.

I imagine scenes and lines like those have more to do why three crime novels from a fairly well-known author of ghost stories and supernatural fiction dried up after World War II than the failings of their plots.

So, in closing, Wakefield's The Belt of Suspicion is a curiosity and only of interest to genre historians or those with an acquired taste for obscure, out-of-print and necessarily good genre fiction. I'll try to pick something good for the next ramble. Maybe revisit an old favorite/classic.