Unfinished Business: "The Genesee Slough Murders" (1966) by John Holbrook Vance

In my previous posts, I reviewed the only two Sheriff Joe Bain novels John Holbrook Vance completed, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967), which were excellent, but this only left me with third, partially finished and unpolished manuscript of the third novel, "The Genesee Slough Murders" (1966) – a novella-length plot outline eventually published in The Work of Jack Vance (1994) and The Joe Bain Mysteries (2013). Photocopies of the typescript draft had circulated among collectors for many years.

I expected the manuscript to be similar to the outline of Ellery Queen's unfinished novel, collected in The Tragedy of Errors (1999), but "The Genesee Slough Murders" is not as detailed and much more of bare bones outline. But the whole plot is there. Frustratingly, if it had been finished, it would probably have been the best of three Sheriff Joe Bain novels!

The Fox Valley Murders was a detective story about the people of San Rodrigo County, while The Pleasant Grove Murders focuses on the suspects living along Madrone Way, but "The Genesee Slough Murders" would have dealt with literal, tree hugging hippies – descending on the county to protect the trees growing on the levees. A conflict that would have provided the backdrop for "The Genesee Slough Murders."

The line of division between land and water, "namely the levees," have become "a cause of bitter conflict." The trees growing on there weaken the levees with their roots and, in order to protect the waterways, they have begun to remove the trees, but protesters have gathered along Genesee Slough "to prevent any further stripping of the levees." Sheriff Bain is observing the protest in the second chapter, but takes a very hands-off approach when it comes to policing the protest. Very much to the annoyance of his long-time nemesis, Howard Griselda, who runs the local newspaper. Griselda would like to see nothing more than Bain getting replaced by a modern, efficient and progressive sheriff.

Vance fleshed out some parts, here and there, but mostly it's a rough outline of how the story is going to progress with its main plot-line, side stories and characters.

Bain deftly solves a home burglary and the way in which he resolved the issue showed Griselda had a point when he labeled the sheriff an ethical relativist in a previous novel. Not necessarily a bad thing when trying to resolve problems in a small, tight-knit community. There's also a hit-and-run accident, mysterious phone calls to his daughter and "a grisly discovery" is made when the low tide revealed a sunken car in the slough with two bodies inside – a young woman and a baby. Two days later, three people are gunned down in a single night with bullets fired from the same gun!

Vance gives a very brief, bare bone outline of the solution, but the idea behind the murders is really clever and you can see how well it would have worked had it been presented as a completed detective story. I have to stress that the motive for the three murders, more important here than normally, is so original that I know of only one other detective story that used it. One of the anime-and manga detective series used a nearly identical plot and motive for one its stories, but can't tell you any more than that without giving anything away.

Even if "The Genesee Slough Murders" is only a scantily dressed plot outline, I think it's still worth reading, if only to see how the sausage is made.

So, after having read two novels and an unfinished manuscript, I'm left wondering why Vance abandoned the series, because, had he continued writing mystery novels, he would have become one of the top-tier writers of the post-GAD era. And perhaps the one who could have lit the flame of a Silver Age. Luckily, I still have The Four Johns (1964) and The Madman Theory (1966) that he wrote as Ellery Queen on the big pile, but next up, is a return to the Golden Age with a truly obscure title. So stay tuned!

The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967) by John Holbrook Vance

Last time, I read the engaging, lively written and plotted The Fox Valley Murders (1966) by John Holbrook Vance, who's better known to fantasy and science-fiction readers as Jack Vance, which presented the traditional, Golden Age detective story as a thick slice of small-town Americana in the 1960s – sprinkled with a variety of impossible crimes. A sadly short-lived, unfinished series that ended when Vance abandoned the partially completed The Genesee Slough Murders. It would have been the third novel to have featured Vance's series-detective, Sheriff Joe Bain of San Rodrigo County, California.

I decided to read the two novels and the unclothed, skeleton manuscript of the third book back-to-back, because I'll probably appreciate the unpolished manuscript better with the two completed novels fresh in my mind. So today, I'll be looking at the second novel in the series, The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967).

There's a notable difference in approach to plotting and storytelling between The Fox Valley Murders and The Pleasant Grove Murders.

The Fox Valley Murders is a packed, constantly moving story in which a series of suspicious looking, seemingly impossible accidents and natural deaths coincide with the return of a convicted murderer to the community and an important election – which don't always link up in expected ways. The Pleasant Grove Murders is mostly focused on the first of three hammer murders and the suspects living on Madrone Way where the crime was committed. This made for a clearer, tighter and better clued detective story than The Fox Valley Murders!

An introduction of the primary players opens the story, covering numerous years, beginning with the destruction of a tree house as children to a failed marriage and an engagement.

Sam and Miriam Shortridge are "small-town aristocrats" and became the elite by being the proprietors of Pleasant Grove's largest department store, which is reflected in their children, Marsh and Starr, who have been described as "absolutely feudal." Starr was a haughty child who had "compared herself to the rank and file of humanity" and "humanity had come off second best," while her older brother simply is a prig. A very different child is the "extremely pretty girl of Starr's age," Alice, who lives next door with her parents, Guy and Grace Benjamin. And much lower on the social totem pole of Pleasant Grove are two boys, Ken Moody and Bill Whipple. One way, or another, they all have a role to play in a series of murders around the time Alice became engaged to Marsh.

Ken Mooney had become a mail deliveryman and, on an early June morning, he turned his mail van into Madrone Way, where he was murdered, but the body and van with undelivered mail vanished until the following morning – when all were found at the blind end of Madrone Way. Mooney had been killed with "just three good raps" from an ordinary carpenter's hammer and copy of Life magazine was lying under his head. Someone had torn off the address label. This was the only piece of undelivered mail that had been tampered with. So the postal authorities "relinquished the case to Sheriff Joe Bain."

There are two more murders, committed relatively late into the story, which makes the bludgeoning of Mooney the central problem and what happened during the twenty-four hours between the murder and discovery of the body is "a source of enormous puzzlement." A lot of time is spend in figuring out the movement of suspects, combing for a motive and checking alibis and checking magazine subscriptions. One central question, or problem, is was he killed "because he was the mailman or because he was Ken?" So the setting has less of a presence here than in the previous novel with the focus on just one neighborhood.

Nevertheless, there are still distinct traces of those small-town life, politics and some minor side plot-threads. Sheriff Bain has another tussle with the owner and editor of the Pleasant Grove Messenger, Howard Griselda, who wants "an up-to-date progressive law-enforcement system" and doesn't believe Bain is "the man for the job." Sometimes, the investigation is interrupted when the sheriff's office has to respond to a madman, armed with .22 rifle, who had climbed to the top of a silo and started "shooting at everything in sight" or visiting a woman, named Luna, who believes she came to Earth from a distant planet, Arthemisia – on a mission which has not yet been revealed to her. A very weird, unimportant plot-thread that felt out-of-place and thought it might be a reference, or even a crossover appearance, linked to Vance's science-fiction work. But apparently not.

One other side-thread worth mentioning is Bain's intention to buy a nearly 100-year-old roadhouse and turn it an old country hotel together with his daughter and mother. Vance was already thinking of retiring the character, but don't ask me why. This series is great!

The Pleasant Grove Murders is not chocking with impossible crime material, like The Fox Valley Murders, but what it lacked in quantity, it made it up with quality and the result is easily one of the best pure whodunits of the 1960s. A detective story with one of those delightfully constructed ladders of clues, logically fitting every piece of the story together, which is even more impressive when you consider most of the (important) clues were hidden in the personalities or actions of the characters – barely any physical and tangible clues. Funnily enough, the ending of the story acknowledged that "the entire case of the prosecution was circumstantial, indirect and hypothetical," but "judge instructed the jury that circumstantial evidence was as good as any" and "they were not required to invent improbable or fantastic alternate hypotheses."

Yet, the circumstantial clues and evidence are more than sufficient to work out this clever little detective story and loved the spot in the book when a tiny detail made everything click together in my head. Very satisfying! If there's anything to nitpick about, it's that Vance was overly generous with his reader by giving one of his clues a distinctly New England flavor. But if something is too good, you really have nothing to complain about.

The Pleasant Grove Murders was written during that dark, dreary decade when publishers had largely moved away from the traditional detective story, but the bright light of the Golden Age shimmered on in the Sheriff Joe Bain series. I don't know why Vance abandoned the series, but the lost is entirely ours.

A note for the curious: I drew some comparison in my review of The Fox Valley Murders with other American mystery writers who used small-town settings, but this series is perhaps closer to Kip Chase's Justine Carmichael series. Chase is a now long-forgotten writer who tried to bring the Golden Age mystery into the 1960s, but he never got past his third novel. Strangely enough, their novels are pleasing mirror images of each other. Chase's Where There's a Will (1961) is a whodunit with a closed-circle of suspects, while The Fox Valley Murders is an impossible crime novel, but Murder Most Ingenious (1962) is a locked room mystery and The Pleasant Grove Murders a whodunit. One has a former, big city homicide cap as detective and the other series a small-town sheriff. Even though their settings aren't that far apart, they obviously take place in different parts of California. Chase and Vance showed what could have been!

The Fox Valley Murders (1966) by John Holbrook Vance

So, after finishing Colin Robertson's Demons' Moon (1951), I intended to take a short break from the impossible crime story and was off to a good start with Moray Dalton's The Art School Murders (1943), but Hampton Stone's The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953) soiled my promise with the inclusion of a (minor) locked room problem – giving me a paper thin excuse to dip into one more impossible crime novel. A cross between Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) and Herbert Brean's Wilders Walks Away (1948) with no less than four impossibilities listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). How can you see no to that?

John Holbrook Vance is better known as Jack Vance, a well-known, celebrated fantasy and science-fiction author, who occasionally turned to the detective and thriller story. Vance even ghosted three of the late period Ellery Queen novels, The Four Johns (1964), A Room to Die In (1965) and The Madman Theory (1966).

During the same period, Vance wrote two mystery novels about Sheriff Joe Bain, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967), which take place in the old-world surroundings of San Rodrigo County, California. Vance had been working on a third novel, The Genesee Slough Murders, but left the book unfinished and photocopies of a typescript draft have "circulated among collectors for years" that outlined the entire story with some near complete chapters – lacking only "a final polish." The manuscript outline was published in The Joe Bain Mysteries (2013).

Joe Bain used to be "the tall hell-raising lad from Castle Mountain," a run-a-way kid who came to San Rodrigo County, "where he consorted with Mexicans and fruit tramps." An unlikely boy to eventually become sheriff, but a broken marriage left him with a daughter to support and used his G.I. benefits to attend classics at the Chapman Institute of Criminology, which landed him a job as deputy-sheriff under Sheriff Ernest Cucchinello.

The Fox Valley Murders opens two days after the untimely passing of Sheriff Cucchinello and Bain was appointed to serve out the last months of his term as Acting-Sheriff. Bain is planning to the challenge the odds-on favorite, Lee Gervase, who's "a vigorous and progressive young lawyer" predicted to "sweep unopposed into office" in the next election. This election is one of three, closely intertwined, plot-threads that run through the story. A plot-thread that sees Bain trying to drum up support in the community and cleaning out the office of any petty, small-town corruption.

The second plot-thread is the hostile response of the community to the return of one of its most notorious and hated inhabitants, Ausley Wyett. Sixteen years ago, Wyett had been found digging a hole "with close at hand the body of Tissie McAllister." A young schoolgirl who had been brutally abused and murdered. Wyett protested his innocence, but there were five witnesses whose testimonies showed only he could have killed the girl and was sentenced to life imprisonment – narrowly avoiding the death penalty. A month ago, Wyett was paroled out of San Quentin and returned to the home farm, which already unsettled the locals, but then he begins sending letters around. 

All of the witnesses receive a letter with the question, "how do you plan to make this up to me?" When the witnesses begin to die, one by one, Bain begins to fear he might soon find Wyett "swinging from a tree."

Finally, we come to the meat of the plot! A series of suspiciously-looking accidents and natural causes that befall the witnesses who testified against Wyett.

A former school bus driver, Bus Hacker, died in front of Bain when he had a heart attack on his front porch. Charly Blankenship, "a well-known mushroom fancier," inexplicably picked, cooked and consumed an easily recognizable, poisonous mushrooms. Willis Neff apparently died in a hunting accident in an open glade high in the Santa Lucia Mountains, of Monterey County, where a witness would turn the shooting accident in an open-air locked room mystery in case of murder. Oliver Viera was all alone when he fell sixty feet to his death from a ladder perched too close to a ravine. A bizarre string of suspicious accidents and deaths, but, as Bain remarked, "you feel a fool saying accident" and "you feel a fool claiming foul play."

I think the poisoning-trick and the hunting accident are more accurately described as borderline impossible crimes, but appreciated the variety and two of the murders showed some ingenuity.

The murder of Bus Hacker is a genuine impossible crime with a good solution, but you should be able to (roughly) work out how it was done and the explanation for the dish of poisoned mushrooms, while not strictly an impossibility, was something completely new – furnished the plot with an important clue. Technically, you can call the hunting accident an open-air locked room murder, but the trick should have been used in another story to give a murderer one of those hard-to-break alibis. The deadly fall from the ladder has, sadly, the most simplistic solution imaginable. But when you pull them together, you have a very satisfying and original take on the impossible crime and perfect murder tropes with a memorable, vividly-drawn backdrop and characters.

I've already compared The Fox Valley Murders to Christie's Murder is Easy and Brean's Wilders Walk Away, which is an accurate comparison when describing the bare bones of the plot, but the story is dressed in thick slices of small-town Americana. You have the small-town politics of Erle Stanley Gardner's Doug Selby series (c.f. The D.A. Draws a Circle, 1939), the hum of every day, small-town life that filled Theodore Roscoe's crime novelettes in The Argosy Library: Four Corner, vol. 1 (2015) and a populace that begins to feel deprived of justice. Although the threat of an old-fashioned lynching is not as imminent here as it was in Queen's The Glass Village (1954). A skillful, wonderfully done combination of characters, plot and setting that made The Fox Valley Murders a beautifully written and constructed detective story. And one of the better locked room mysteries from the 1960s era.

There is, however, a flaw in this little gem. A big, important chunk of the plot is driven by Wyett's illogical, mule-headed stubbornness and actions, which began when he found McAllister's body in his barn and tried to bury it. Something that is never satisfactory explained beyond that he lost his head when he found the body. What he did when he was paroled became convenient smokescreen for the murderer. Wyett acts as a plot-device to drive certain parts of the story and it stands out here, because everything else feels so natural. A second thing that kept nagging at me is Wyett continuously saying he was completely innocent when he didn't report a murder, destroyed the crime scene and tried to bury the body – three counts that, knowing Americans, probably adds up to a pretty stiff prison sentence. A small blemish on an otherwise excellent detective novel, but more of an annoyance than a serious drawback.

So, all in all, The Fox Valley Murders stands as a fascinating, well-written detective novel with a slightly unusual plot and beautifully evoked, pleasantly busy setting that brought the place alive in all its facets and complexities. Not everything is absolutely perfect, but, reading the book, you wouldn't think the genre's Golden Age had ended. You can expect one of my ramblings on The Pleasant Grove Murders and The Genesee Slough Murders before too long!