Dark Waters

"You have chosen, mademoiselle, the dangerous course... As we here in this boat have embarked on a journey, so you too have embarked on your own private journey – a journey on a swift moving river, between dangerous rocks, and heading for who knows what currents of disaster..."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, 1937)

As a personal, unwritten rule, I always try to avoid posting back-to-back reviews of the same author, but I was compelled to make a rare exception for the subject of my previous blog-post, Elizabeth Gill.

Gill was a woman who died at the early age of 32, following complications from surgery, which tragically cut her career as a mystery novelist short. She only finished three detective novels during her short live time. All three of them were helmed by her series-character, Benvenuto Brown, who's a painter with an interest in criminology and, as a layman in that field, he successfully applied his knowledge of crime and human nature – acquiring a reputation as an amateur meddler in the process. A reputation that begins to precede him when he first appeared on the grand stage in The Crime Coast (1931).

There are two reasons why I broke my no back-to-back reviews rule: one of them is that Gill's debut looked promising and the fact that her last one was a maritime mystery with a luxurious ocean-liner as its setting. I love seafaring vessels as a backdrop for a good detective story!

Crime de Luxe (1933) was the last of three novels about Benvenuto Brown and takes place aboard a transatlantic ocean-liner bound for New York, which Curt Evans, who penned the introduction for these new editions, called the book one of his favorite shipboard mysteries. So my interest was sufficiently piqued to make an exception and immediately removed it from the big pile. But enough of this palaver...

Brown boards a luxury ocean-liner, called the Atalanta, on his way "to New York to be present at his first exhibition in America," but the crossing is a five-day voyage and the painter is determined to fully enjoy those days – devoting him to nothing more than such leisure activity as wandering around the deck and reading magazines. However, he also has a hobby closely related to both his profession as a painter and his hobby as an amateur reasoner of some celebrity: observing people and imagine their back-story. It's a game he has played in the cafés of Paris, Vienna, Berlin and the sea-ports of the South.

Well, the passenger list of the Atalanta can be considered a buffet for "his painter's eye and his restless imagination."

There are Samuel and Margaret Pindlebury, an elderly couple from England, who quickly become ship-deck friends of the painter and he prefers to socialize with them, but this does not prevent Brown from suspecting one of them of having blood on their hands – resulting in a rather pleasing false solution in the Berkeley-Queen mold. Brown's artistic eye also captures the figure of Ann Stewart, a young widow, who remained, somewhat, incomprehensible to the artist, but the tragedies ahead would "incidentally entail making the further acquaintance" with her. Lord Stoke, "the newest ornament to the British peerage," is making the crossing with his wife, Lady Stoke, who has "one boy friend on board," Rutland King, known as "the greatest lover on the screen," but she keeps her husband in the dark about their friendship. Lord Stoke also seems to be on odds with two other passengers about a revolutionary new fertilizer: one of them is a zealous communist, named Roger Morton-Blount, while the other, Leonard Gowling, has a personal dislike for Lord Stoke.

But the most intriguing character (IMO) was the short-lived, old-fashioned presence of "the fusty black figure of Miss Smith."

Brown described Miss Smith as "a figure of darkness." A woman who could be either forty or sixty, clad in black, antiquated clothes, with black, frizzy hair streaked with gray, but the pitiful, thin-lipped droop on her pale face made her a tragic rather than a sinister figure – one who inspired pity. She only spoke to Brown during her short stay aboard the ship. A painful fact when an unknown person hurls her into the cold, dark waters of the ocean and Brown has to paw through her suitcase for answers, which showed she lives for the better part of two decades "in some obscure backwater of life." A sordid, isolated existence bare of any real luxury or comfort.

However, the contents of the suitcase also indicates Miss Smith was able to escape from her confines and began "an exciting pilgrimage into the world," but one of her fellow passengers "cheated her of her brave new world." So that made for an interesting, half-finished character portrait of a drab woman and the other half of her story was somewhere on the ship. But here's also where the sole problem of the book rears its ugly head.

Crime de Luxe is sparsely equipped with genuine (physical) clues. There's the content of Miss Smith's suitcase and a smattering of threatening letters that hint at a blackmail angle, but, by and large, this is a character-driven novel of manners. A novel that hinges on the personalities and convictions of the characters as well as providing the reader with a window into the world of the early 1930s, which is definitely interesting for anyone with an interest in history. One of them is the clash between proponents of Capitalism and Communism. A theme that is very prevalent in the overall story, but also found Brown's trip to the ship's gymnasium interesting, because the place, "bristling with every modern contrivance," easily impressed modern readers as a bit science-fiction – since you don't associate the 1930s with "an electric back-slapper" with "brisk mechanical fingers" that gave back massages.

So, I can see how the book could end up on someone's personal list of favorites, but, as a shipboard mystery, it's not in the same league as Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937) and Carter Dickson's Nine-and Death Makes Ten (1940). As a matter of fact, I think Crime de Luxe can best be described as a sophisticated crime novel rather than as a pure detective story, because I'm still not entirely sure how Brown reached his conclusions. He admitted it involved a lot of luck, chance, some bluff and a last-minute telegram from the police, but how this definitively pointed out the murderer remains a bit vague. Let's just say that the path of logic, that lead to the solution, was a bit overgrown in this instance.

So, all in all, I would say Crime de Luxe was a better written and characterized novel than her maiden effort, but The Crime Coast was a superior detective story. I wish this review was a positive as the previous one, but Crime de Luxe simply was not as strong as a (pure) detective story as I had hoped. Still a good and readable crime novel (particularly if you like maritime fiction), but, based on her debut, not what I expected and hoped for.

On a final note, I have several blog-posts focusing on some equally obscure shipboard mysteries, which you might be interested in: W. Shepard Pleasants' The Stingaree Murders (1932), Robin Forsythe's The Pleasure Cruise Mystery (1933), P. Walker Taylor's Murder in the Suez Canal (1937), Frances & Richard Lockridge's Voyage into Violence (1956), Herbert Brean's Traces of Merrilee (1966), K.K. Beck's Death in a Deck Chair (1984), Max Allan Collins' The Titanic Murders (1999) and The Lusitania Murders (2002).

Detective's Holiday

"A woman's chief weapon is her tongue and she never lets it rust! Apt, eh? Devilish apt!"

- Colonel Malloy (John Bude's Death on the Riviera, 1952)

Elizabeth Gill was born into a literary, artistically-inclined family that had already produced illustrators, water-colorists, novelists and journalists, but Gill would go on to climb to the loftiest heights of the literary world by penning a trio of mystery novels – all of them featuring an eccentric painter/detective named Benvenuto Brown. Yes, I seriously consider detective stories to be the purest and highest form of literature.

According to our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, Gill could have become a marquee name in the genre, but we were "cruelly deprived" of "a rapidly rising talent in the mystery fiction field" when she passed away at the age of 32. A tragic fate she shared with another promising talent, Dorothy Bowers, whose untimely passing left the world with only five (obscure) detective novels (e.g. the excellent Postscript to Poison, 1938).

In both cases, their work became victims of obscurity and they never got to challenge Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh or Josephine Tey for their comfy spots as (secondary) Crime Queens.

During the mid-2000s, Bowers was briefly revived by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press, but Gill had to wait an additional decade to be resurrected. But her time for a comeback has finally arrived: Dean Street Press is reissuing her entire, but humble, body of work, which consists of The Crime Coast (1931), What Dread Hand? (1932) and Crime de Luxe (1933) – all of them introduced by the usual suspect, Curt Evans. Evans wrote a general introduction, concerning the short-lived of the author and her family, as well as a short piece on each novel.

The Crime Coast is the first one of the lot and was originally published in the UK as Strange Holiday, which falls in the category of mystery novels that can be described as "Channel Crossers." A category in which English detectives cross the Channel to have a (holiday) adventure in France. Some early and well-known examples are Freeman Wills Crofts' The Cask (1920) and Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Links (1923), but, lately, some lesser-known "Channel Crossers" were reprinted: Basil Thomson's The Case of the Noami Clynes (1934) and The Milliner's Hat Mystery (1937), E.R. Punshon's Murder Abroad (1939) and John Bude's Death on the Riviera (1952).

You can also place Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935) and John Rowland's Calamity in Kent (1950) in this category, but that has more to do with the smuggling sub-plot that tends to hover in the background of these kind of crime novels.

In any case, The Crime Coast has more in common with these latter examples than with those by Crofts and Christie. But let's begin at the beginning.

 

The Crime Coast opens with a report from a morning newspaper about a double crime perpetrated in a London hotel: a rich Argentinian woman, Luela de Costa, was found in her suite, "wrapped in an eiderdown," almost entirely naked except for one thing – she was clad in "a number of magnificent jewels." Only half an hour later, the Countess of Trelorne discovered that her room had been ransacked and the thief had taken her famous collections of jewels, which included a famous rope of pearls. So two, apparently unconnected, crimes that might be closely linked on account of the close proximity in place and time.

After this short chapter, the story switches to a young Oxonian, Paul Ashby, who had planned a holiday abroad with two of his friends, but one of them secured a job in the colonies and the other one got engaged – dooming him to explore the cities and the French countryside by himself. Fortuitously, a chance encounter at his flat with an ill man, Major Kent, sends him on his trip with a purpose. A stranger's quest to satisfy "a craving for adventure which existed somewhere in the secret places of his soul."

Major Kent is a frail, sick old man who wants to make amends with his son, Adrian, who's a painter smitten by the charms of a much older woman, which lead to one hell of a row between father and son. Adrian had been commissioned to paint a portrait of the woman in question and had fallen in love during his work, but his father recognized in her likeness "the chief character in a particularly unsavory divorce case." One that had ended with a suicide. So naturally he was not pleased that his son intended to marry this woman and their argument ended with Adrian running out of the house, which was the last his father had seen of him, but he wants to see his son again before his groggy heart stops. And he has good reason to believe he's in the south of France.

So the lonely holiday becomes an investigation, as Ashby sets out to search for Adrian, which brings him into contact with a small, but interesting, cast of characters – consisting of both (new) friends and potential foes. There's the villainous brother of the murder victim from the London hotel, Hernandez de Najera, who's known to possess a false alibi for the day of the murder. But why? Ashby also meets a friend of Adrian, one Adelaide Moon, who's a young artist herself. A policeman from England, Detective-Inspector Leech of Scotland Yard, crosses their path as he chases a noted jewel thief, "The Slosher." An unsavory individual known to Ashby as Herbert Dawkins. Finally, we have Gill's series-detective, Benvenuto Brown.

Brown is an interesting character who could've easily grown into one of those recognizable amateur sleuths of the genre, which makes me all the more curious to see how he's used in the other two novels. As noted before, Brown is a painter with a healthy interest in criminology, but his interest is not entirely that of an amateur dilettante. There are snippets strewn throughout the book about his past and he apparently cut his teeth in the Secret Service. Brown was a decorated officer and was offered "a marvelous job in the Foreign Office after the war," but he picked up painting instead and wandered the world while indulging in his "passion for elucidating mysteries" - slowly becoming "the most brilliant detective outside fiction."

I also loved his homely anecdote how his artistic mother tried to forget that "she brought someone into the world who has turned out to be an exponent of cubism." It should also be noted that Brown mentioned he painted at his best when he had a problem to work out. Brown has this common with a classically-styled detective-character from the second half of the previous century, namely Niccolo Benedetti, who also appeared in only three mystery novels before his creator, William L. DeAndrea, passed away prematurely. Patterns!

All of this makes for a good, solid and tight detective story, but the small cast of characters also turned out to be sole flaw of the book, because the murderer has practically nowhere to hide. A seasoned armchair detective will easily point out the guilty party, but, to be fair, there's an additional challenge here that's almost as important as identifying the murderer and consists of piecing together the right sequence of events – i.e. who entered the hotel room and did what before leaving.

The Crime Coast is a solid effort by a debuting novelist, one that's pregnant with promise, which is also a very worthy additional to the pile of "Channel Crossers" that have recently reappeared back in print. I'll definitely return to Gill sooner, rather than later, because Crime de Luxe is (reportedly) one of the better ocean-liner mysteries from the Golden Age. Who doesn't love a good mystery set aboard an ocean-liner?