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mystery

Stanton Forbes

Photo of Stanton Forbes from 1970 and a selection of her books

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:

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.

Cover of Welcome, My Dear, to Belfry House
Cover of Welcome, My Dear, to Belfry House

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.

Cover of Some Poisoned by Their Wives
Cover of Some Poisoned by Their Wives

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.

Cover of If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End
Cover of If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End

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.

Cover of Grieve for the Past
Cover of Grieve for the Past.

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.”

Cover of She Was Only the Sheriff's Daughter
Cover of She Was Only the Sheriff’s Daughter.

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.

Stanton Forbes in 2003. Photo by Dennis Wall, Orlando Sentinel
Stanton Forbes in 2003. Photo by Dennis Wall, Orlando Sentinel.

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.

Loneliest Girl in the World, by Kenneth Fearing (1951)

Cover of first US edition of Loneliest Girl in the World

Loneliest Girl in the World was the first novel in history about losing something in your computer. Which was a neat trick given that personal computers wouldn’t even have a name, let alone be commonplace, for another thirty-some years.

The computer in this case isn’t really a computer. Rather, it’s a large audio recording, transcription, and storage device using stainless steel wire as its medium, combined with some kind of indexed reference system controlled by a dial. It’s intended to store everything from business meetings, musical performances, and radio shows to novelties called “audiobooks.” He envisions it as part of a continental network,

… offering instantaneous information to anyone, on any subject, but also a general repository for all the data a businessman might need in the daily conduct of his affairs. His correspondence, his estimates, inventories, invoices, receipts, bills paid and due, all memoranda, everything he now committed to paper and placed in his cumbersome and bulky individual files, not recoverable a good part of the time, could go on deposit with us, on tape or wire, quickly available at all times.

Its inventor, Adrian Vaughn, keeps his most advanced model in his Manhattan penthouse apartment, having recently devised a voice-activated mechanism and some kind of processor that allows recordings to be requested and played on demand. Known as “Mikki,” this system becomes the focus of intrigue after Vaughn and his son Oliver fall to their deaths through an accident involving keys and an open penthouse window.

“The Loneliest Girl in the World” is the name the tabloids give Vaughn’s daughter Ellen when she inherits the penthouse apartment. Despite her apparent wealth, her situation is closer to that of Prometheus, staked to a mountain peak so birds of prey can attack and eat his liver. When she returns after the funeral, in fact, she finds two men in Mikki’s room. “We think there’s a recording of an oral agreement your father made between Vaughn Electronics and another company about an exchange of rights for mass production and sale,” they tell her.

What they don’t say is that other things are hidden there, too, such as the disposition of most of Adrian Vaughn’s fortune. To avoid going bankrupt and being tossed onto the street, Ellen must find answers: “There is a secret here somewhere in this storehouse of living sound, this pool of memory.” The problem is that the system contains over 463,000 hours of recordings or enough to take 50 years to work through. And, as she quickly figures out, with her father, brother, and others using Mikki, the chances of something being misfiled increase dramatically: “Between the lot of us, everyone using the collection for a different purpose, anything not in the right place can be written off as lost forever.”

Anyone who shares a home computer is familiar with this.

Fearing was neither Luddite nor doomster when it came to technology. He’s not particularly interested in the implications of a system like Mikki. As he once admitted, movie scenes “depicting a hell of a lot of fantastic machinery as built and operated by the science of the future, laboratory thunderbolts leaping from a positive steel electrode to a negative Wassermann have always found me a ready sucker.” He’s impressed by Mikki’s inherent superiority to the fallible humans it serves:

I never forget. Unlike you, I have no limit of life, my memory is total and accurate, this thread of thought never wanders with the weakness of age, and I am always able to receive the new and strange, nor am I intrusive, stubborn. I do not evade issues, or lie. I do not know how to lie.

But if Loneliest Girl in the World isn’t science fiction, neither is it much in the way of suspense. In Fearing’s previous novel and the one for which he’s remembered, The Big Clock, the tension increases with each page as time and space run out for its hero, a man falsely accused of murder. Here, however, as Ralph Partridge aptly put it in his New Statesman review, Fearing “duly keeps the reader gasping for the first half of the book … and then — after halfway, the excitement fizzles out, the forceful characters go dim, the machine obligingly croaks out the most boring possible answers to the questions, and the book drops from listless fingers.” “A crushing disappointment,” Partridge concluded, adding, “You have been warned.”

The Sound of Murder: Mercury Mystery No. 173
The Sound of Murder, Mercury Mystery No. 173 (1953).

Even John Brooks, The New York Times’ reviewer, was pressed to have many good things to say about Loneliest Girl after warming up his enthusiasm for its predecessor. Brooks praised the book’s “readability, humor, sound characterization and firm but understated dramatic significance,” whatever that last phrase means. The book was reissued in magazine form as The Sound of Murder in the Mercury Mystery series two years later, but it’s been forgotten ever since. And, aside from its value as footnote material, it probably deserves this fate.

Loneliest Girl in the World, by Kenneth Fearing
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951

Loneliest Girl in the World

Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, Lunatics of Genius

Cover of first UK edition of You Were There
Cover of first UK edition of You Were There (1948).

This is a guest post by David Quantick

And so they sat and talked and drank and even sang a little. And the Puppa came beaming up with fresh supplies, and the Mumma sat at the desk and scolded the Puppa roundly because he hadn’t done anything wrong.

And at a table in the corner a pair of palooka writers looked on fascinated and invented fantastic names for them, and imagined their life stories.
The palooka man had a shock of black hair like a Japanese doll without a fringe, a moon-shaped, moon-coloured face that looked like a moon that needed shaving, and ash all over him. His name was S.J. Simon.

The girl palooka looked like a Semitic sparrow. She was Caryl Brahms.

And they didn’t know what the future was to hold for them either.

But you could bet your monomark there’d be a lot of laughter in it.

From You Were There.

I didn’t know what a monomark was when I first read this (an ancestor of the postcode, apparently) but the rest made complete sense to me. It is the final paragraph of the last novel written by Brahms and Simon, completed by Caryl Brahms after S. J. Simon’s death in 1948 and, entirely appropriately, it is the story of their first meeting. Even now I find it moving, because for me it is one of the best farewells of all time. It’s a tribute to a novel-writing partnership that lasted only eleven years but in that time produced eleven books, several short stories and a host of films, stage plays, radio broadcasts and television adaptations. They were called “lunatics of genius” by the press; they invented at least one genre between them, and while only one of their joint novels is currently in print, they remain my favourite writers of all time.

Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon
Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, from Too Dirty for the Windmill, by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin (1986).

Caryl Brahms was born Doris Abrahams in Surrey in 1901. S.J. Simon – real name Simon Jacobovitch Skidelsky – was born in Ekaterinoslav in 1906, the son of Russian Jews who emigrated to France after the revolution. The two first met when they were fellow lodgers at a house on Finchley Road, and they first worked together on contributing subjects for the Evening Standard cartoonist David Low; forming an instant rapport, they soon decided to collaborate on a novel. They had known success in other areas – Brahms had written a very A.A. Milne-esque slim volume of verse called The Moon On My Left, while Simon (as noted elsewhere on this site) was one of the best bridge players of all time – but the decision to become a novel-writing duo was a brilliant one.

Cover of first UK edition of A Bullet in the Ballet
Cover of first UK edition of A Bullet in the Ballet (1937).

The first Brahms and Simon novel, A Bullet In The Ballet, was an instant hit. The first of several comic murder mysteries set in the world of dance, A Bullet In The Ballet combined expert knowledge (Brahms was a balletomane and brilliant theatre critic), superb character writing (the member of the Ballet Stroganoff company are fantastical creatures, rendered just the right side of caricature), and a new way of writing crime fiction, that of introducing a long-suffering detective (Inspector Adam Quill) into a closed world of people whose self-obsession, egotism and devotion to their craft would make, frankly, anyone want to murder them.

Cover of first UK edition of Six Curtains for Stroganova
Cover of first UK edition of Six Curtains for Stroganova (1945).

But mostly it was the humour that made A Bullet In The Ballet so good. Characters as disparate as modernist choreographer Nicholas Nevajno, always trying to cash a bad cheque, and the prima donna Stroganova, always hoping for six curtain calls, were depicted in a prose style that combined, unexpectedly, the floriate excess of the ballet world with a new kind of bone-dry wit. One of the great joys of reading Brahms and Simon is their unique way of turning a sentence, the way they can convey changing moods in a sentence, one minute mocking the foolishness of human beings and the next bringing out unexpected sympathies. For lunatics of genius who could write at the same pace as their beloved Marx Brothers, Brahms and Simon were also full of heart and love for their creations. Almost, to use one of their favourite turns of phrase, they might be sentimental writers.

Cover of first UK edition of No Bed for Bacon
Cover of first UK edition of No Bed for Bacon (1941).

A Bullet In The Ballet was the first in a long series of Stroganoff novels, but Brahms and Simon were unable to restrict themselves to ballet mysteries: their other great achievement – many would say greater – was to, essentially, invent the historical comedy. Most people would say that the best Brahms and Simon novel is 1941’s No Bed For Bacon, and it would be insane to argue against this notion (although I will try soon). No Bed For Bacon, written during the London Blitz when both writers were air defense wardens, is not just a magnificent imagining of the London of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, it is possibly the greatest comic novel of all time. Part romance – it tells the story of Shakespeare’s affair with the lady-in-waiting-turned-boy-actress Viola, it’s also part history lesson (a scene where old seadogs recall the victory over the Armada, written at the last minute to up the word count, is poignant and moving) and it is entirely, outrageously funny. Only a stone carving or a genuinely bad person could not love it.

Shakespeare sprang to his feet. ‘Master Bacon,’ he demanded passionately, ‘do I write my plays or do you?’ Bacon looked at him. He shrugged.
From No Bed for Bacon

Cover of first UK edition of Don't, Mr. Disraeli
Cover of first UK edition of Don’t, Mr. Disraeli (1940).

And great though No Bed For Bacon is, it is possibly not as great as the duo’s other notable historical novel, the epically glorious Don’t Mr. Disraeli, which is nothing more and nothing less than a comic tribute to the entire 19th century (its authors said that it was “not a novel set in the Victorian age but a novel set in its literature”). Based around a Victorian reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, with Capulets and Montagues replaced by Clutterwicks and Shuttleforths, Don’t, Mr. Disraeli is also infected with the spirit, marvelously, of J. W. Dunne’s long-neglected but at the time hugely-influential An Experiment With Time, which proposed that time was not linear at all but rather simultaneously occurring everywhere, a viewpoint adopted by J. B. Priestley in An Inspector Calls and other plays. Brahms and Simon use Dunne’s notion to present a Victorian era where anyone can appear in the book so long as they lived or died in the 19th century: thus the Marx Brothers and the Duke of Wellington exist side by side, while Victoria herself appears many times at every stage of her life, from dowager widow to young bride. Stuffed with vignettes, running gags (even the title of the book is a catchphrase) and moments of great power (a montage concerning the poor of London is worthy of its roots in Henry Mayhew), Don’t, Mr. Disraeli may sometimes lack the lightness of No Bed For Bacon, but it is an extraordinary achievement.

Cover of first UK edition of Trottie True
Cover of first UK edition of Trottie True (1946).

Brahms and Simon have always been immensely popular with other writers: Don’t, Mr. Disraeli was admired by Evelyn Waugh, who namechecked it in his Sword Of Honour trilogy, while No Bed For Bacon is one of Neil Gaiman’s favourite books. Their work has been adapted for stage, radio, television and cinema: particularly worth watching are the film versions of Trottie True and No Nightingales. They wrote superb short stories for Lilliput magazine, some of which were collected in To Hell with Hedda. And when Simon died suddenly in 1948, Caryl Brahms found a new collaborator in Ned Sherrin, with whom she worked until her death in 1982. Not enough of their work is currently in print, aside from No Bed For Bacon, which enjoyed a brief flurry of new recognition when people flagged up its accidental and coincidental similarity to the Tom Stoppard-scripted movie Shakespeare In Love. Now it is the 21st century and it has been three quarters of a century since the “Semitic sparrow” and the man with the moon-shaped face wrote together, but they will always be my favourite writers, and those of many other people. Much of their work is out of print, but copies of their books are easy to find online, and other readers will be drawn to them as I was.

And if I had one, I’d bet my monomark on it.

David QuantickDavid Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.

S-s-s-sh, by Kathleen Mary Carmel (1948)

Cover of S-s-s-sh by Kathleen Mary Carmel

This is a guest post by the writer David Quantick.

“You didn’t have time to think about the dangers of a raid in the cipher room of the secret service sabotage organisation. You were too bloody annoyed.”

There are many mysteries about this book: they start before the book has even begun, in the authorial blurb, and they continue even after the book has ended.

In the endpapers of the dust jacket, an anonymous writer says of S-s-s-sh that “readers of her Contract for a Corpse should find this, her latest book, even more satisfying”. There is, in actual fact, no evidence of that a book called Contract for a Corpse ever existed, while the only other novel published under Kathleen Mary Carmel’s name – Secret Service – turns out to be a French translation of S-s-s-sh. “Kathleen Mary Carmel” is itself a pen name, made out of the author’s real names, and S-s-s-sh, while a small classic of genre fiction, is not what the writer is most famous for.

Kathleen Withers and S. J. Simon
Kathleen Withers and S. J. Simon, courtesy of their family.

Kathleen Mary Carmel was best known as Carmel Withers. Nicknamed, inevitably, Caramel, she was a brilliant and highly respected bridge player, and it was through that game she met her future husband S. J. “Skid” Simon. They both represented their country at bridge and even appeared on TV television programmes playing bridge before World War Two.

Skid was a household name, a brilliant analyst and a formidable player who was not only the author of the influential Why You Lose At Bridge (a book that is immensely readable even if you know nothing about bridge) but also, with Caryl Brahms, one of the most popular writers of the 1930s and 40s. (I shan’t write about Brahms and Simon here, except to say it was as a lifelong fan of their work that I came to Kathleen Mary Carmel and S-s-s-sh: despite their own reduction in fame, Brahms and Simon’s work, which ranged from historical comedies to ballet-related detective novels, has had many fans, from the late Ned Sherrin, who wrote with Caryl Brahms and completed her autobiography, Too Dirty For The Windmill, and Neil Gaiman, who ranks Brahms and Simon’s No Bed For Bacon very highly indeed.)

When I came across mention of Kathleen Withers in Too Dirty For The Windmill, I wanted to find out more about her, but there was very little information out there. I managed to acquire a copy of S-s-s-sh (as well as its French translation) and spent a while trying to find the elusive Contract for a Corpse without any luck. All I knew was that she had a file in the National Archives related to her real-life work in ciphers during the Second World War, that she was a champion bridge player, and that she had been married to SJ Simon, who predeceased her by only a year.

S-s-s-sh is an excellent book. From its dedication – FOR THE CIPHER ROOM MICHAEL HOUSE – via its unsentimental tone, appropriate for a murder mystery set during the carnage of a world war, to its satisfactory conclusion, this is a novel that’s entirely convincing in its milieu and entirely chilling in the way it follows its murders and the reason for those murders. Along the way, we are engrossed in the minutiae of life in a wartime cipher department – the flirtations between male officers and female staff, the triumph at cadging an extra piece of toast and marmalade, the sheer exhaustion of working in near-impossible conditions to save the lives of countless men and women – and we are caught up in a bigger picture: this killer’s agenda is, unsurprisingly, entirely connected to the greater drama of worldwide conflict.

It is also a funny book, a suspenseful book and at times a chilling book. The scene where the narrator reports that she has found a woman’s body stuffed into a cupboard plays out with humour at her superior’s bureaucratic bluster but also with casual horror – “I was tired, the smell was sickening and now into the bargain I was getting bored”. And, as befits a story set in the small, cramped world of a cipher unit, where everything is a secret and everyone lives in each other’s pocket, throughout there is a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia quite at odds with the increasingly cosy way that current WW2 novels portray Britain at war, all country lanes and boffins cycling off to Bletchley. S-s-s-sh is a book that’s full of the mundanity of war and all that it implies.

By the sound of it, this dry, half-humorous, half-serious tone was entirely typical of the author, whose death in 1948 (it was reported as suicide) was deeply mourned by her fellow bridge players. “It is at this moment at once a pride and a tragedy of remembrance that the writer of this brief memorial recalls that he was for long her partner and her friend,” wrote one of her obituarists, Guy Ramsey. Friends and fellow players recalled her wit and intelligence, and it is clear that she was more than a match for her anarchic, chaotic and popular husband (who died of a heart attack after a television appearance).

Kathleen Mary Carmel Skidelsky, née Withers, deserves to be remembered for more than one excellent novel (I am hopeful that one day S-s-s-sh will be reprinted), and it looks likely that she will be: while researching this piece, I came across the work of Shireen Mohandes, a writer and expert on bridge history. Ms Mohandes has been researching Kathleen’s life in some detail, and brought several important facts to my attention: you can read her work at www.mrbridge.co.uk/library (she was also kind enough to source the accompanying photograph and to ask permission from Kathleen’s family to reproduce it).

For now, however, it’s enough to read S-s-s-sh for its lucid, convincing depiction of a novel world of terror, and to remember Kathleen Mary Carmel as both a writer and a person of distinction.

[Editor’s note: When S. J. Simon died in July 1948, just hours after appearing on television with Terence Reese, it was front-page news on most British papers, even though the Times incorrectly identified Caryl Brahms as his wife. His death devastated his wife, who suffered from severe depression thereafter and took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates just days short of its first anniversary. S-s-s-sh is so rare that the only copy listed in Worldcat.org is at the British Library.]

Headlines of Kathleen Withers' death
Stories on Kathleen Withers’ death from the Daily Mail and The Times.

David QuantickDavid Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.

The Second Curtain, by Roy Fuller (1953)

Cover of 1956 US edition of The Second Curtain
Cover of 1956 US edition of The Second Curtain

“Life was simply not like a detective novel: motives were not clear, events had not a single cause, things did not wholly explain themselves,” Roy Fuller writes in The Second Curtain (1953), one of the three books in which he played an elegant series of changes on the conventions of the mystery novel.

In The Second Curtain, a second-rate writer, George Garner, divorced, living alone in London, and scrabbling along on the diminishing reputation of a decent first novel published a decade ago, is recruited into the role of amateur sleuth by the sister of a long-ago school chum with whom he’s kept up an intermittent correspondence. Widgery, the chum, head of a small factory in Lancashire that produces some sort of electrical components (Garner is never too clear about the details of the lives of the people he encounters), has disappeared. His sister thinks it may have something–a homosexual crush?–to do with a young man who came to work at the factory and then left suddenly just before Widgery’s own disappearance, and thinks the trails lead to London.

Within days, Widgery’s body is dragged from the Thames. Kershaw, a fellow manager from the factory also following up on the disappearance, is run down by a lorry in a London street. The police question Garner. He himself is at a loss to put the pieces together. He consoles himself in his ability to suppress these strange events into the routines in which he is more comfortable: “… whatever happens to oneself, however extraordinary or painful, becomes eventually commonplace and bearable.The empire of self constantly added to itself new wild tracts of territory which it was able to drain, plough, populate, and thus become once again an ordered, homogeneous entity.”

Cover of Penguin paperback edition of The Second Curtain
Cover of 1962 Penguin paperback edition of The Second Curtain
In keeping with the patterns of a conventional mystery, the odd events surrounding these deaths begin to intersect with other coincidences. Garner develops a crush on the secretary of the magnate offering to fund a new literary journal he wants Garner to edit. The secretary turns out to be living with Widgery’s young man–who himself turns out to have worked at the factory under an assumed name. The magnate appears to have, among his many business interests, some kind of speculation into a new line of electrical equipment.

Yet Garner fails to weave the threads into the answers that become apparent to the reader. “I’m very much afraid you haven’t got the right story,” he says at one point, only to have Fuller write, “Garner’s mind worked furiously: what was the right story?” Ironically, many of his thoughts about the explanations behind Widgery’s death dwell on the question of how he should approach things as a writer–and it also becomes apparent to the reader that Garner lacks the imagination to be much of a writer:

How could one get, if one wanted to, all this into a novel? The power behind the luxury, the figures and men and machines behind the power? Perrott’s desk had been empty, even of a pen. Perhaps he never wrote: a file was merely opened and put before him, and he then nodded or shook his head. Somewhere in other rooms of the building ingenious men sat in front of books on company law, ledger sheets, reports on technical processes, with trade-union leaders, secretaries of trade associations, spoke on the telephone to members of parliament for industrial divisions, factories on bypasses and coalfields, stockbrokers, authors of economic classics, bankers–but for Perrott everything was rendered down to the naked bones of a question. Shall we do this? And the cigar made its indication.

This passage illustrates just the sort of meta-fictional tricks that Fuller plays throughout The Second Curtain. Fuller, who had a successful career as a London solicitor and was involved with substantial commercial matters, knows very well what goes on behind Perrott’s clean desk, while to Garner it is just something of a blur. And he manages to convey this to the reader in a few strokes while leaving Garner in his muddled reality.

In the end, Garner can only write to Widgery’s sister that, “The more I think about the whole affair, the more I feel that it all lies in the realm of accident and coincidence.” And he himself can only sense that “The alien machine into which he had accidentally dropped from his own harmless world had thrown him out again, broken, with scarcely any damage or interruption to its purposive wheels.” Yet Fuller also makes it clear that Widgery and Kershaw’s deaths are quite directly and deliberately linked to a ruthless and objective calculation of gain and loss made by the magnate, Perrot.

The Second Curtain was the second of three meta-mysteries Roy Fuller wrote. With My Little Eye (1948) puts a magistrate’s son in the role of the ad-hoc detective and plays a somewhat less elegant set of changes on what Fuller calls “the fantasy of conspiracy and crime.” Julian Symons included it on his 1957 list of the 100 best crime and mystery novels. Fantasy and Fugue (1956) is Fuller’s most cerebral mystery, taking place in the head of a man who wakes up one morning convinced that he has committed a murder. The three books were collected by Carcanet Press in 1988 in Crime Omnibus and deserve a place on the shelf alongside Graham Greene’s “entertainments” such as Our Man in Havana.

The Second Curtain, by Roy Fuller
London: Derek Verschoyle, 1953