I’m not a great reader of mystery novels. I have nothing against the genre, but even its most loyal fans will have to admit that it has a healthy share of workmanlike prose, two-dimensional characters, and predictable plots. And let me be clear from the start that Stanton Forbes (one of several pennames used by Deloris Stanton in the course of her 40-year career) wrote plenty of the first two. Having read a half-dozen of her novels and sampled a dozen more, however, I can say with some authority that her books almost never come out the way you’d expect.
What overcame my usual resistance to reading mysteries when it came to Stanton Forbes, though, was the one aspect in which I’d argue she has no equal in the field: her titles. Here is a sample of just a few:
- The Name’s Death, Remember Me? (1969)
- She Was Only the Sheriff’s Daughter (1970)
- All for One and One for Death (1971)
- But I Wouldn’t Want to Die There (1972)
- Some Poisoned by Their Wives (1974)
- Bury Me in Gold Lamé (1974)
and my favorite, If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End (1970).
If the contents of these books doesn’t always live up to the quirky charm of their titles, they’re usually not half bad. Forbes published over 20 novels as Forbes in the space of about 25 years while also producing nearly as many under the pseudonym of Tobias Wells in the same period, so it would be a bit much to expect brilliance and originality throughout. But I got the sense that Forbes never took what she was doing too seriously.
Forbes usually starts with one of the most frequently-used situations in all fiction: collect a half-dozen or more mismatched characters in some artificial situation (yes, a grand country house is a favorite setting), toss in a corpse or two, shake vigorously, and let human nature do the rest. She also draws upon some of the signature motifs of Alexandre Dumas père: switched infants, the high-born in low places, and the low-born in high places. But she never seems to have gotten too hung up about plausibility.
In Welcome, My Dear, to the Belfry House (1973), for example, there is no good reason why the grand actress Deirdre Dunn would be holed up in a grand Gothic mansion on an isolated, windswept beach with a house full of former vaudevillians and circus performers. She is, after all, THE Deirdre Dunn:
Deirdre Dunn as Catherine the Great, Deirdre Dunn as Mary, Queen of Scots, Deirdre Dunn in plays by O’Neill, Ibsen, Shake¬ speare, Moliere, in adaptations of novels by Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Hara. “Deirdre Dunn dances . . . Deirdre Dunn sings . . . Deirdre Dunn laughs.” Deirdre Dunn as Sarah Bernhardt, Deirdre Dunn in a new Hitchcock thriller, Deirdre Dunn in everything!
Nor are we really expected to believe that a handsome young chiropterologist would just happen to arrive at the house at the same time as the sweet young orphan who has just learned that Deirdre Dunn is her grandmother. Or that he would be coming to study a rare species of bats that nest in the … you guessed it … belfry.
In All for One and One for Death, the cast is a set of female quintuplets and five matching male celebrities: a baseball player, an artist, a movie actor, a pop singer, and a nuclear scientist. Forbes has the girls tell their side of the story, followed by the boys, with her small town sheriff taking center stage in Act III to solve the puzzle.
The whole point, after all, is see how Forbes can pull off another feat of legerdemain. Will the rightful heir be the chauffeur or will the plain, self-effacing housekeeper turn out to be a vicious she-wolf from Hell? In fact, after the first few of her books, I learned to keep an eye out for her MacGuffins. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Forbes was fond of throwing her readers off the scent.
She often sets her reader up to be tricked by starting out with a suspicious death or two already having occurred. “Did one Alvaro Rojas, gardener by profession, and one Cecilia Jenks, housemaid, die by accidental drowning off Belfry House within eighteen months of each other?” she asks early in Welcome, My Dear, to the Belfry House. Did the millionaire Harrington Hartford Lake really die of a heart attack, causing all his potential heirs to gather at the start of Bury Me in Gold Lamé? Or was he poisoned by his twenty-something fourth wife and former stripper — sorry, artistic dancer — Kohinoor Diamond Lake? Or is he even dead in the first place?
In Go to Thy Death Bed, which takes place among the members of a vaudeville troupe in 1890s Philadelphia, the preceding murders are the unsolved hatchetings of Marguerite’s mother and grandmother — naturally begging the question, is she our fictional Lizzie Borden? If she is, and I can’t honestly say, having only skimmed this one, it certainly won’t be for any of the reasons we’ll have been led to believe for at least the first 150 pages.
When Forbes executes her trick well, she manages to squeeze more than one turn of the table into her last twenty-some pages. Some Poisoned by Their Wives appears for most of the book to be a hunt for an elusive black widow who’s bumped off several innocent G.I.s stationed around El Paso, Texas during World War Two to gain access to their death benefits. Except that whole plot turns out to have itself been a grand MacGuffin orchestrated to kill off a character barely even visible on the radar. And then, just because she can, Forbes flips the table again and tosses in a final Verbal Klnt/Keyzer Söze twist to make us wonder just what was going on all along.
Sometimes, however, Forbes has to resort to the same sort of drawn-out mechanical explanations of the crime that make the last chapters of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels so tiresome. It defeats the point of a superb feat of magic to have someone come on stage afterward and explain in detail how it was done.
And there are times when the ridiculousness of the situation overwhelms Forbes’s ability to pull of the trick. As much as I love the title of If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End, it’s not a particularly good murder mystery. We are expected to believe that once a year, the drama students at a local college all dress up and run around town playing pranks. OK, that’s not so bad. But this year in particular, there are thirteen pairs dressed up as Laurel and Hardy running about, and one of them managed to race into the office of the CEO of the town’s biggest company and murder him. Or are there more than thirteen pairs? Or was that just a coincidence? Or was it someone completely different, someone wanting to steal his company or his prototype computer (BABY)? I finished the thing and can tell you the correct answer is none of the above. But save yourself the trouble and skip the book in the first place.
Not all of Forbes’s novels involve such far-fetched premises. In fact, her first book as Stanton Forbes, Grieve for the Past (1963) is closely rooted to her own upbringing and probably her best book overall. Born in Kansas City in 1923, Forbes was raised in Wichita, Kansas during the Great Depression, and this is the book’s setting. In it, Ramona Shaw, a bookish fifteen-year-old girl likely not that different in interests and personality from Forbes herself, begins to question why a devout elderly couple in her neighborhood were murdered. Her parents, neighbors, and the police are all convinced it’s the work of one of the many jobless, homeless drifters who pass through the town.
You can tell that Forbes was at home not just in her setting but in Ramona’s voice. She has yet to experience much beyond her own neighborhood, let alone town: “Next to the Farmers was the Bragdon house and then the Webster grocery store. That was my world — except from school, of course. That was my world — in that time.” She already understands the subtleties of Midwest values: “Caroline was prettier. Not pretty. Just prettier.” She fantasizes that some wealthy benefactor will learn of her detective work and decide, “Now there is a girl I should send to college.” But she also knows that her aspirations are seen as futile:
This was the way everybody treated me. As if they were saying inside, Isn’t that nice? The child has ambition. She’ll learn, of course. She’ll find out. She’ll find out that wanting is not getting.
Ramona turns out to be shrewd but not ingenious. She does figure out the likely murderer, but she’s unable to do anything about it in the end. Which she finds maddening. “I mean — crime doesn’t pay. You can’t let someone kill and get away with it,” she complains to her grandfather, a former lawman. “That’s a fine theory,” he replies, “only it doesn’t always work out. I wish it did. I wish we could mark a neat little SP after every crime, S for solved, P for punished.” “There’s many a murderer loose in this world, Ramona,” he cautions her. “And that’s the truth.”
A similar sense of groundedness pervades other novels set in small towns. Although She Was Only the Sheriff’s Daughter takes place in Texas, Forbes’s Yarrowville is as believable a small Texas town as the Thalia of The Last Picture Show. Anthony Boucher, the New York Times’s long-standing crime fiction critic, distinguished between Forbes’s naturalistic novels and those he called “tailored-to-order.” The characters in the latter, he argued, never came close to the credibility of the ones in the realistic novels, and Grieve for the Past certainly supports his case. But I wonder whether she ever intended for the two to be compared.
Perhaps the answer can be found in the novels she published as Tobias Wells. These all feature Knute Seversen, first as a Boston homicide detective and later as chief of the Wellesley, Massachusetts police. While not quite so unflappable as Inspector Maigret, Seversen can usually be relied upon to keep his head when all around are losing theirs. And he seemed to allow Forbes/Wells to work in a middle ground between grounded realism and near-farcical flights of fantasy. So, the victims, the circumstances of their deaths, and the cast of suspects tended to be unusual, they still had to retain some amount of plausibility. No quintuplet/celebrity matchups allowed anywhere near Plymouth Rock.
Counting her first four novels, which she co-wrote with Helen Rydell as Forbes Rydell, Stanton Forbes published over 45 mysteries by the time she died at the age of ninety in 2013. And if the unpublished manuscripts listed in the finding aid for her papers at Boston University are any clue, she came nowhere near running out of terrific titles: Mother Goose Was Stuffed, Mother Goose Was Cooked; The Hippie-Yippie Murder; Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed; When the Hearse Goes By, Jack and Jill Hill Kill, Fall of the House of Snodgrass, Mary a Pickle Makes a Mickle….
A fine selection of books by Stanton Forbes and Tobias Wells can be borrowed online from the Internet Archive.