Trading Places

"Eh bien, Mademoiselle, all through my life I have observed one thing--'All one wants one gets!' Who knows... you may get more than you bargain for."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928) 

Last year, I reviewed A Most Immoral Murder (1935) by Harriete Ashbrook, who also wrote suspense fiction under the name of "Susannah Shane," which tend to be smart, lively and well-plotted detective-and thriller novels, but most book reviewers at the time gave her a short shrift – resulting in paperback publishers largely ignoring her work. So she has rarely been reprinted and this condemned her to almost complete obscurity. And the keyword there is almost.

One of the usual suspects, John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books, wrote a positive blog-post about her work, The Detective Novels of Harriete Ashbrook, drawing comparisons with S.S. van Dine, Ellery Queen, Mignon G. Eberhart and Craig Rice. That was enough to place Ashbrook on my radar and we ended up agreeing that she got the short, grubby end of the stick in life (as she also died at the age of 48).

After finishing A Most Immoral Murder, I really hoped some of Ashbrook's other detective novels would make it back into print and (sort of) got my wish.

Recently, one of Ashbrook's dames-in-danger suspense novels was reissued by Coachwhip and the book in question, Lady in Lilac (1941), was originally selected as "a $1,000 Red Badge Prize Mystery" – representing one of her scarce triumphs as a published authors.

Lady in Lilac has been called a Woolrichian suspense novel on account of a plot-device apparently closely associated with the Father of Noir, which involves two strangers exchanging their identities. An impulsive decision that will place two women in mortal peril.

Helen Varney is an aspiring actress, who moved to New York, but in the five weeks she has been in the Big City she "tried to see every manager in town" without result and is down to half a dollar. And she's already two weeks behind on her rent. So Helen is forced to put her dreams on hold and take a job as a waitress, but fate appears to intervene when she saves the life of a woman, named Joanna Starr, who attempted to end her own life in the adjacent apartment – which has far-reaching consequences. Helen tells Joanna about her dreams and how she, one day, will get hold of a famous manager, like Hugo Steinmark, and get her chance to prove herself.

Coincidentally, Joanna has an appointment with Steinmark, but also longs to escape from the complications of her own life. So she offers Helen her identity in exchange for a quiet, uncomplicated existence as a simple, unknown waitress in a New York Diner. In return, Helen receives an audience with Steinmark and an opportunity to experience untold luxury.

There's a lavish hotel room at the Waldorf in Joanna's name and she traded a fat roll of five-hundred dollar bills for the last fifty cents in Helen's pockets, which Joanna assured could be spend as she pleased. So their personal situations were completely reversed overnight and Helen experienced what it is like to shop for clothes without "the constraints of a budget," but she also learned that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

During her long-awaited meeting with the theatrical manager, Steinmark is fatally shot and the unseen murderer threw the pistol into Helen's lap. This has the unfortunate result that she was seen standing over the body with a gun in hand and she immediately high-tailed it out of there. However, everyone is now looking for the enigmatic woman in the lilac dress and bloodstained slippers. A woman who appears to have two identities!

The confusing caused by having assumed Joanna's identity is what allowed Helen to move through the city without being recognized by the public at large, but one of the people who knew Joanna intimately has catched up with her – a man named Paul Saniel and really wants to know what she has done to Joanna. Helen is not entirely convinced of Paul's good intentions and refuses to tell him the full story, which only complicated her personal predicament even further. And there are other stumbling blocks entering the picture in the background: a case of bigamy, an unsolved kidnapping/murder case obviously based on the Lindbergh affair, a suitcase with a secret and an Austrian actress who suddenly turned up in the United States.

There are two things I really appreciated about Lady in Lilac: one of them is the surprising complexity of the plot, full of twists and turns, which neatly tied all of its plot-threads together by the final chapter. You should not expect a plot à la Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr, but it was more than what I hoped to find between the covers of a woman-in-peril thriller. So that was a pleasant surprise. Secondly, I liked the use of newspaper headlines and excerpts that keeps both the reader and the characters in the story abreast of the latest developments in the case on the official end of the investigation.

It showed how the case captured the public imagination, but also explained to the reader why Helen continued to be unrecognized even when the police learned she was involved in the case under Joanna's name. Additionally, the story includes excerpts of an article penned by Lance Sheriton, an "ace detective story writer," who had been hired by the Gazette to write an exclusive reconstruction of the case with a final summation penned by the official sob sister of the paper. I liked how newspaper excerpts were used to tell parts of the story.

My sole complaint about the book is the sugary ending that was far too sweet. Ashbrook probably wrote the ending with a possible movie deal in mind, but she allowed a character to live who had been riddled by bullets. She should have allowed that character to be embraced by death, because it would have strengthened the sweet part of the ending. Granted, it would have made it a bitter sweet ending, but now it was one of those having your cake and eating it too endings.

Otherwise, Lady in Lilac is an excellent, fast-paced suspense novels and really hope more of her books reappear in print in the years ahead. Both her detective and suspense novels.

Stamping Out Crime

"Philately... is a curious hobby. It seems to afflict its victims with a species of mania. I don't doubt these stamp-collecting fellows would murder each other for one of the things."

- Ellery Queen (Ellery Queen's "The Adventure of the One-Penny Black," collected in The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1933-34) 

Harriette Ashbrook, who also wrote under the penname of "Susannah Shane," was an American mystery novelist from the genre's Golden Era, but one who was, reportedly, overlooked, forgotten and overshadowed when she was still plying her trade – which makes her output one of the more neglected nooks in the genre. It must have been a glumly, unprofitable honor for Ashbrook, but we get to explore an author a large swath of mystery readers in the 1930s missed out on. That's one of the perks of ferociously consuming detective fiction in the 21st century.

Anyhow, the page for Ashbrook on the Golden Age of Detection Wiki says she "was never taken seriously in the mystery arena." She never garnered any of favorably reviews, which led to her being ignored by leading paperback houses, but there's been one modern critic who spoke kindly about her work in the field – John Norris from Pretty Sinister Books. Well, that's a good enough endorsement for me!

John notes in her Wiki article how her early books "show an obvious love for the genre" with lively characters, realistic detection, insight into forensic police work and a smart-aleck playboy detective "who is much more interesting and funny than Philo Vance." Her later books, which were published under the name of "Susannah Shane," warranted a "comparison with Alice Tilton and Craig Rice," but the plots "often surpass the story mechanics of those two better known writers." You can find a closer examination of some of those plots in an insightful blog-post, The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook, which had some encouraging words for A Most Immoral Murder (1935) and again mentions how the detective was "one of the better Vance impersonators" – something I have to agree with.

A Most Immoral Murder was originally published as He Killed a Thousand Men in the July 1935 issue of Mystery Magazine, which was a periodical that was exclusively sold in Woolworth stores. Later in that same year, it was published as a proper book and began its long, undeserved descend into obscurity.

We find the detective of this forgotten series, Philip "Spike" Tracy, in a similar mood as Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," collected in His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (1917), which is in a state of complete and utter boredom. Spike has engaged the services of a battered prize-fighter to act as a Wodehousean butler and combat the tediousness of everyday life, but the monotonous spell is only broken when Pug Beasley answers the door to find drenched, wild and haggardly looking woman on the doorstep – who promptly collapses and is put to bed immediately.

The woman turns out to be Linda Crossley and the police are very interested in her whereabouts, because she has been missing ever since her grandfather was found hunched over a desk in his private library. A dark stain on his back proved to be blood from a deep stab wound.

Prentice Crossley was an avaricious collector of rare and desirable stamps, whose collection was worth a queen’s ransom, but were they worth enough to someone to kill over? Apparently, that appears to be the case, because "more than $85,000 worth of stamps are missing" from the collection. Amazingly, that prize-tag represents the combined value of only a handful of stamps! There's also a string of interesting snippets of background material on stamp collecting and the history of stamps, such as "howlers," which are "stamps with crazy mistakes in them" like "ships with their flag blowing against the wind." So I probably learned something from this book.

However, it's not just the philatelic element and the presence of collectors that firmly plants the book in the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection, but also the fact that Spike Tracy is the younger brother of the District Attorney – which provides him with access to the crime-scene and detailed information on the case. You can compare this to the father-and-son team of Ellery Queen and Inspector Richard Queen or a similar combination of siblings from Amelia Reynolds Long's Death Has a Will (1944), in which a lawyer, by the name of Stephen Carter, assists his brother, Jeff Carter, who's a District Attorney.

It's the combination of Spike, his brother and Inspector Herschman, "head of the homicide squad," who take a closer look at the small group of people who surrounded the victim in life, which includes his lawyer, John Fairleigh, a dealer, named Kurt Koenig, Jason Fream of the Acme Stamp Company and Homer Watson – who was "known in philatelic circles as a keen rival of Crossley." But another element is introduced to the story when the murderer strikes a second time.

An elderly woman, Mrs. Deborah Ealing, is found stabbed to death in her apartment. The weapon is a bayonet and identified by her daughter, Maysie Ealing, as a war souvenir from her long-lost brother, who never returned from the war, but what tied both crimes together is a rare stamp in the dead woman's hand. However, this new element has to do with the long shadow cast by the events in the First World War and how it affected those who fought in its trenches, but, in combination with the stamp business, it provided a surprisingly original and interesting motive for a double murder. I could not think of a similarly motivated detective novel from the Golden Age.

The only problem is that, while you can figure out the identity of the murderer, gauging this characters original piece of motivation is a lot harder, but I find that a forgivable offense – in this particular case anyway. I had a much bigger problem with the colossal and cosmic coincidence that, from all the houses, Linda Crossley accidentally stumbled into the humble abode of Spike Tracy. Or how Spike covered up the murders. I can understand the sympathy one might feel towards this murderer and understand this persons motivation, but is it really an excuse to plunge a bayonet in the back of an old lady?

Anyway, I was still impressed how Ashbrook linked the horrifying ordeals suffered in the trenches to such an innocent hobby as stamp collecting, an old photograph, a newspaper advertisement and a family secret, which made for an interesting and original mystery. I have mentioned in the past how detective stories closely tied to the World Wars hold my interest, but tales in which the Great War has a strong presence are very sparse in comparison to the World War II era mysteries. The only other example I can think of, in which the First World War has such a presence as in A Most Immoral Murder, is Was it Murder? (1931) by James Hilton.  

Guess I'll end this review here and recommend A Most Immoral Murder to fans of S.S. van Dine, Ellery Queen and Clyde Clason. If you enjoyed those writers, you'll enjoy Ashbrook. And if any of her books were like this one, she definitely got the short end of the stick in her lifetime.