Death Can Read

About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress is Anthony Abbot's second novel.
It was written a year after his first, About the Murder of Geraldine Foster, and as we will see, it repeats and expands on some of the characteristics noted in the first, while highlighting others.
Like the first, we find ourselves in the antechamber of hell.

WARNING: SPOILERS !!! 

At the beginning of a sultry summer, a boat is found adrift: it contains two bodies. A woman killed with a gunshot to the heart, but then almost decapitated; and a man, with a meek face, whose clothing indicates he is the wealthy pastor of an Episcopal church, with a bullet hole in his forehead, from which blood has dripped, matted his brown hair. In the boat, which still smells of brand-new paint, there is also a crumpled piece of paper: a letter, clearly sent from a man to a woman, about love. Could it have been written by the man and addressed to the woman, both of whom were killed? And there's also a cat, a witness to the killing, since its paws are covered in blood. It must have stepped on a lot, if it got them dirty. But, strangely, there's no blood in the boat.
Evidently they weren't killed there, but elsewhere, and then transported dead to the boat, evidently to be dismembered and then sunk in the water. Where is the place of the killing and whose bodies are the bodies? They are quickly identified: Pastor Timothy Beazeley and his secretary, Evelyn Saunders. The pastor comes from the Parish of "St. Michael and All Angels." But where was he killed? Evidently it must have been somewhere near the river, otherwise he would have been seen, and the boat would have been discovered immediately, which no one knows about. No one would know how to do it, but Colt Thatcher, Commissioner of the New York Metropolitan Police, knows: possessing an encyclopedic knowledge, he even knows all the varieties of leaves on New York's trees, and the leaf found on the boat, according to him, comes from a sumac tree. How many sumac trees are there in New York? But William Lederer, Director General of the Tree Division, whom he consulted, contradicts him: it is a leaf from a Tree of Heaven. They manage to trace the property, and they also know that a cat resembling the one found on the boat belongs to Mrs. Warthon, an elderly woman who has an apartment that no one uses. Having entered the house, thanks to the caretaker Kraus, they find strange edible algae, paint stains in a large living room with enormous windows overlooking the internal garden, an earring under a sofa, similar to the one missing from the dead woman's ears, strange fingerprints inside a built-in closet, and a very sharp, clean knife hanging from a hook.

Meanwhile, Timothy's husband is identified: the very wealthy Elizabeth Beazeley, formerly of Curtainwood. Her two brothers, Paddington and Gerard, live with her; the latter is a mentally handicapped man who enjoyed dissecting animals with razor-sharp knives.
From the very first moment of the investigation, after the bodies of the two lovers, along with the boat, were sent to the morgue for an autopsy, it becomes clear that many unanswered questions surround the Beazeleys' home: everyone seems highly suspicious and, above all, very reticent. Furthermore, by chance, it is learned that a package containing a piece of clothing has been sent to distant relatives to be washed and cleaned of any stains. Through a complex procedure (the air police, credited with inventing it to Thatcher Colt himself), they manage to obtain possession of the item, which turns out to be a fur-trimmed overcoat belonging to Elizabeth, stained with blood.
Is it all over? Did they find the killer? Did they find the accomplices ? No. Because other characters enter the picture: the churchwarden Chadwick and the Powell family lawyer, both in love with the widow, who would have had more than one motive for killing the Pastor (to inherit his position, and his money). And then there are the Pastor's two other secretaries, one of whom was a former one: Bessie Struber and Emma Hicks. Both seem to support the theory that the Pastor was anything but a serious man, vying to become a Bishop (of the Episcopal Church), but instead a vain flirt, who fell in love with anyone who made his skirts dance before his eyes. In short, they both had motives too: envy, jealousy, resentment towards Evelyn this time; but...the Pastor? Would they have killed him? It must be said that there are many suspicions. Of course, there's also Evelyn's husband, William Saunders, a night watchman, who indignantly rejects the suggestion that his wife might have cheated on him with the pastor, but then demonstrates with his actions that he repeatedly suspected her of cheating on him. Furthermore, there's a mysterious blackmailer who threatened Evelyn with death, and who even sent a telegram to have the watchman of the villas removed, including the one where the double homicide took place. The interesting thing is that this person is identified as the same person who had purchased cedar planking and carpentry tools (the latter found in the river along with a large roll of linoleum and the gun) so he could build the boat himself. So the crime was carefully premeditated. Especially since they were found in the mysterious villa, which later turns out to have been secretly purchased through intermediaries by a mysterious owner, unknown to anyone. These dumbbells suggest that the killer, after dismembering the victim, intended to weight down the remains in the river.
After figuring out who the blackmailer might have been, as well as the buyer of the raft who secretly built the boat, Colt will figure out who the killer, or... killers, might have been.

THE END OF SPOILERS

Abbot's second novel lives up to expectations, remaining in the vein of the first; if anything, it deepens it. It is therefore still, in case you hadn't understood, a Van Dine novel, maintaining all the valid connections with the archetype: the detective and his institutional sidekick (here is the prosecutor Dougherty, as in Van Dine there is Markha while the detective here is a Police Commissioner), the detective and his mentor (as Van Dine is to Vance, so here Abbot is to Colt) who is also identified with the writer himself, a way like any other to accredit the truthfulness of the concocted stories. Here too, the characteristics of the Van Dine detective are intact: super deduction, super culture (Colt here is even said to know every species of tree in New York: although later, he too... gets it wrong), super versatility in all sciences.

But at the same time, some differences are explored: the novels are true procedurals ante litteram; the crimes do not only occur in the upper classes of New York and the victims are not only high-class; there is a much higher level of violence here, in Abbot, than in Van Dine's stories; finally, also as a result of this, at times Abbot's stories can almost be defined as Horror-Splatter stories: in the first novel there is a corpse immersed in tannic acid to slow decomposition and blood everywhere, here there is a killer who was unable to dismember his victim because he was interrupted by something. Furthermore, this superabundance of blood contrasts with the anemia of Van Dine's murders: in some ways, the only novel by a Van Dine follower that in any way comes close to this one by Abbot is The Egyptian Cross Mystery by Ellery Queen, with a strong splatter component. Another difference, which tends to channel Abbot's Vandinism into a Vandinism that isn't slavish but seeks its own path, is the tendency not to favor the static action of the detective investigation: Philo Vance always operates in static environments, in villas, palaces, houses, pavilions, never leaving except to go home; Nero Wolfe is like this, never leaving his home; and so is Ellery Queen, who intervenes in the crime that occurred in a specific place, never moving his investigative action elsewhere, if anything returning to his own home. However, fueling the headwinds is the way of Archie Goodwin, the detective's factotum and sidekick, who nevertheless represents the detective's legs: with him, Rex Stout's detective story loses its immovability in the detective's crime scenes (also because Goodwin himself is a detective). However, if what happens in Nero Wolfe's novels is true, it should also be said that the first novels in which there is a certain shift in direction and a loss of investigative immovability are precisely Abbot's novels: a certain shift in action had already been seen in About the Murder of Geraldine Foster, but it is precisely in this second novel that the Van Dine novel as it was conceived by Van Dine (a crime in a high-class environment, with all high-class subjects or in any case connected to high finance and an investigation limited to the crime scene) loses its static nature (even if sporadically in some classic Van Dine novels there is sometimes a shift in location: for example in The Canary Murder Case, the Canary's lover is found in her hideout, where he was killed from the Canary's murderer whom he attempted to blackmail). After all, About the Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress is from 1931, while Fer-de-Lance is from 1934. However, he is not the only Van Dine Author who varies the action of the novel, not expressly static, because another free-spirited author, with absolutely unconventional crime scenes, is Rufus King.
 

The genre remains that of the classic Whodunnit (even if echoes of the Hard-Boiled can sometimes be heard in Abbot's stories), with an investigative action that begins with clues, yet sublimates into a purely psychological one, in which the ending has a very important cathartic conclusion: in the case of this second novel, however, we find a certain variation in narrative technique. If in fact, in Van Dine novels par excellence there is a scheme of this kind: Prologue (which coincides with the Introduction)—- Crime—- Investigation—- Finale (and sometimes an Apologue), here, keeping the internal scheme Introduction—- Crime —- Investigation —- Finale unchanged, Epilogue and Prologue are identified, changing the action of the novel from one characterised by becoming and therefore the succession of events one from the other, to one in which there is a cyclical nature of the action: in the Prologue what will be understood only in the Epilogue is announced, that is, why the case contemplated in this second novel, for which no one was arrested and therefore the electric chair remained inoperative, had been archived.

The particular quality of the whodunnit in Abbot lies in the non-univocal interpretation of the clues: if in Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes' analysis of a clue led to a certain consequence, in Abbot, more than in Van Dine, a clue can be interpreted in different ways. This different perspective here is entrusted not only to Colt Thatcher's abduction but also to that of Attorney Powell: the presence of a certain watch, missing from the dead man's, in a certain piece of furniture in the Blazeney house, would have led one to think that after the Pastor's death, if the murderer had been someone in his family or perhaps even his wife, that someone would have stolen and hidden it; but as Powell observes, that watch found is a completely new one, which could never have been on anyone's wrist, and which was a gift from the wife to her husband for his yet-to-be-completed birthday; Just as Colt himself will demonstrate that the presence of blood on a garment is no indication of absolute certainty of participation in a criminal act.
The absolutely spectacular ending overturns all verbal logic, framing a criminal act in which the demonic soul is underlined without preamble: the murderer is a great adversary of the detective (here on a purely virtual level), highly intelligent, and a ruthless being who kills because he has evil within him, when he kills only out of calculation.

Pietro De Palma  

After a long time, we return to review a novel by Anthony Abbot. In this case of the eight novels he published, this is the penultimate.

The Creeps, original title, written in 1938, was published in 1939. It is a novel with a great atmosphere, which seems to be different from the other six first novels.

WARNING: SPOILERS !!!

Thatcher Colt is no longer Chief of the NYPD. He retired to private life and got married. His wife Florence thinks that he is bored without being able to dedicate himself to solving some good case, and so she does everything to get them to agree to go to his relatives in Denmouth. Fortescue Baxter's son, Terry, is to get married the following Sunday to his father's secretary, Evelyn Drew, and so the two Colts plan to have fun and have fun: Thatcher is above all attracted by the idea of meeting the famous Swiss parapsychologist, Doctor Adolf W. De Selles, who will be present to whom Fortescue Baxter, former friend of Thatcher, intends to leave a million dollars for his studies. Thatcher and his wife will be accompanied by their friends, Abbot and his wife Betty.

And it is precisely in the train carriage that is taking them to Denmouth that Thatcher and Anthony and their wives meet De Selles. When they arrive, the landscape is covered in snow. Randall, the Baxter's driver, should be waiting for them to take them to their destination, but there is no trace of him. So, a guy with an old grinder agrees to take them to their destination and they go up towards the property which is on the cliff, under which the sea boils. Everything is covered in snow. In the garden, De Selles looks at someone who seems to be staring at him from a tree, and mutters about something he says is wrong with that house.

Guests are introduced to the host, son and relatives. We immediately notice how most of them are hostile to the old man giving up a substantial part of the inheritance to someone who according to them is an old charlatan: there is Fortecue's sister, Eunice; the future bride; Margaret Dixon, black journalist, acquaintance of Thatcher; Charlie Adams, another cousin, a famous explorer, has just returned after many years spent in Siam and his wife Ursula, who by chance (but nothing is by chance) is also joined by Terry's ex-girlfriend, Mary Stevens.

It is the eve of Thanksgiving Day, November 23rd. The evening passes peacefully or almost as Adams and Eunice and then Margaret who seemed to have gotten lost in the snowstorm and who instead appears, ask that De Selles show his peculiarities, that is, prove that he is a parapsychologist: How? With a séance. De Selles reluctantly accepts: the medium will be Drew who, with De Selles, reveals to have a certain predisposition for these practices. During the session, Drew is possessed by the spirit of Baxter's ex-wife, Gertrude, who accuses someone of having killed her and of having hidden her bones in that house without giving her a Christian burial.

Forterscue Baxter leaves destroyed by the revelation, which would seem to accuse him. Terry looks at his father in horror, and the germ of fear and suspicion creeps into the house. during the night, the girl Evelyn who fell into a trance is found dead in Charlie Adams' bed. What appears to have been an affair that ended badly ends up being seen with a different eye: the girl was chloroformed to death by someone and then the dying girl, looking for help, looked for it in Adams who was snoring on his own for the drunk in the evening, dying in his bed.

After Gertrude's bones and Randall's body are found, the driver who was supposed to take Thatcher Colt and Anthony Abbot and their wives to his estate, Colt assisted by Abbot, called to investigate by the local sheriff in the Baxter estate isolated by the snow, she will pin the diabolical murderer to his responsibilities.

THE END OF THE SPOILERS

A beautiful novel by Abbot, it stands out for its somewhat convoluted style, compared to the previous six, and for a great atmosphere. Some critics overseas (John M. Nevins, the major critic of Ellery Queen, and my acquaintance Mike Grost, author of a history of online detection that would have deserved some recognition) are inclined towards attributing the novel to a ghost writer, instead that to Abbot, due to the slightly different style from the other previous ones, and also due to the abandonment of the identical construction of the title (About + the Murder + Subject) which is characteristic of Van Dine's period since, despite some differences, they use it both Van Dine what a Queen. However, several factors are not taken into account:

first of all, that the previous ones were all anchored, plus the first ones and gradually the rest, to a detection very close to van Dine's style from which they derive; Bear in mind that Abbot's last Vandinian novel, About the Murder of a Man Afraid of Women, dates back to 1937, and Van Dine was still making novels then (The Kidnap Murder Case was written in 1936) but shortly thereafter he would write his last two that show clear signs of weakness and involution (The Gracie Allen Murder Case of 1938 and The Winter Murder Case of 1939). Again in the 1937 novel, Abbot dwells on a series of scientific police and ballistics findings, which are also found in Van Dine's novels, for example The Benson Murder Case. But from The Creeps, everything changes: it is true that Thatcher Colt is no longer a member of the police and therefore in the investigation, an illustration of police procedural techniques would be out of place, and therefore the characteristic of the six previous novels no longer exists which all have a combination of Van Dine detection and Procedural, but it is also true that Abbot, precisely due to the involution of van Dine's stories and his loss of popularity and the affirmation of other novelists, tends to try new paths, rather than refer to Van Dine. Now Thatcher Colt is a well-rounded detective, and with The Creeps, the references in Abbot are to other novelists of his time, first and foremost Ellery Queen. In fact, I detect marked similarities between this novel by Abbot and one by Queen, The Twin Syamese Mystery: there is a house perched on a hill, like here; Ellery replaces the police in carrying out the investigations, and Thatcher Colt does the same thing here, despite no longer having any position in the police; there the house is isolated from the rest of the world by fire, while here it is isolated by snow; there crimes occur within a family, as here: and here as in that case, a scientist is present.

Saying that the novel can be ascribed to a ghost writer, just because you can't find the same way of writing and illustrating the facts as in other works, is a bit risky for me, if you don't take into account a series of other factors. Furthermore, Abbot's tendency to lead a crusade against the boasters and charlatans of the paranormal recurs in this novel: here he is aimed at revealing the false nature of De Selles, revealing the falsity of the construction of the séance; in About the Murder of a Startled Lady (1935), the medium's trance implant is exposed, with a hidden radio implant connected to the medium's apartment being found in the next room. And moreover Fulton Oursler in 1930, under the pseudonym of Samri Frikell, had written the book Spirit Mediums Exposed, in which he declared “I am the foe of fakery, of charlatanism, of hoodwinkers, of wonder-mongers, of miracle pretenders — of BUNK. And of all the low-down creatures in the world, the religious faker, the scoundrel that pretends to trusting and ignorant people that he can bring them face to face and voice to voice with their beloved dead, is the most contemptible.”

His Autobiography, begun in 1949 and published posthumously in the sixties by his son Ousler Jr., also reiterates Fulton Oursler's paternity of his works, which clearly says (page 361 of Behold this Dreamer!): At the same time Fulton kept up his parallel careers. Between 1938 and 1941 he completed two more Anthony Abbot novels (The Creeps and The Shudders) and one short story, “About the Perfect Crime of Mr. Digberry,” which was published in the first issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and later made into to movie.

There are many other references to previous novels in the novel: for example. the note on the elegance of Thatcher Colt. In this regard, in Fulton Ousler's biography, we read (page 256): The hero of these detective tales, incidentally, was one Thatcher Colt, the police commissioner of the City of New York. In my mind he was a combination of two men: Grover Whalen and Theodore Roosevelt — the one an impeccable dresser, the other blessed with real brains.

However, although there are very original ideas in the solution of the three crimes, the murderer, despite being present in the story from the beginning, is identified on the basis of clues that appear clear only to Colt, but of which the reader is not precisely informed . Furthermore, as Curtis Evans insinuates, how does the son know where his mother was buried? There are some passages that are not very polished, weak. In the fake message from the mother's spirit, it says more or less "you must bury me Christianly.. it is not right that she is buried like this.. here, my bones are in this house..". Now, if the message had been true, the continuation of the actions, especially the discovery of the bones by his son Terry, would have made sense. But if the message is false, that is, it does not come from Gertrude's spirit, but is the result of a plot carried out by two people, and the words are invented, how does Terry find his mother's bones right in the house? It is a pure coincidence, because the body could have been buried elsewhere, taking into account that when the crime occurred, there was no one in the house except the victim and the murderer, and the estate was one hundred and twenty hectares in size.

This means that the story, despite being original, even if influenced by Ellery Queen and perhaps also by Anthony Berkeley (Murder in the Basement, 1932) or rather by another Vandinian like Stuart Palmer (Murder on the Blackboard, 1932), is more weak in the plot of the other previous novels by Anthony Abbot, even if it has a great atmosphere, and even if the reading is very pleasant and the solution manages to convince. Perhaps this is why Abbot, in retrospect, having ended his period as a writer of detective novels in 1941 with The Shudders, recognized only the six previous novels as public successes, despite having published the other two, again with Macfadden Publications (with whom he published continuously from 1921 to 1941). Moreover, we also have other examples of authors who, very original and appreciated by the public in their first novels - I am thinking for example of Rufus King - over the years, and the loss of their own examples (Van Dine), looking for references in other writers (e.g. Rex Stout) lost their originality and their impact on the public.

Pietro De Palma