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1. Merlda Mace (psd. of Madeleine McCoy)
Motto for Murder (1943) was one of a trio of murder mysteries written by Merlda Mace during the 1940’s. The detective she deploys in this story is Timothy J. O’Neil better known as Tip to his friends. He is a 26 year old “special investigator” for Barnes and Gleason, a New York City investment firm. How he got this job is one of the big mysteries of this book since he readily admits that he is not much of an investigator and his performance during the story bears this out.
This is, in essence, a country house mystery. The house is an isolated mansion located in the mountains of northern New York State near Lake Placid. The controlling and quite unpleasant matriarch of a wealthy family has gathered her extended family to tell them that she has screwed them out of their inheritances. A snowstorm descends on the region and several murders occur during a long Christmas weekend.
This seems to me like a combination of a mediocre Mignon G. Eberhart mystery and a bad Ellery Queen mystery. The author can put words and sentences and paragraphs together in a coherent manner but the book, on the whole, is a disappointment. The physical and character clues are not first rate and the author employs a HIBK technique that serves no valid storytelling purpose. Since the characters insisted on wandering around in the dark, leaving their bedrooms unlocked at night and napping in vulnerable spots, the killer did not have too much trouble carrying out the murders. The “mottos” from the title of the story refer to fortune-cookie type candies wrapped in little papers containing sayings which play a small part in the solution.
Apparently, “Tip” O’Neil is not a series character. Mace/McCoy’s other two mysteries seem to utilize a female sleuth called Christine Anderson although I have not been able to verify this information.
(Posted to the GAD site 09/2009)
2. Marco Page (psd. of Harry Kurnitz, 1909-1968)
Page/Kurnitz wrote or co-wrote 33 screenplays for Hollywood movies between 1938 and 1966. He wrote or adapted 4 plays for the stage between 1954 and 1963. More importantly for the purposes of this review, he wrote 4 mystery/detective novels between 1938 and 1955. Fast Company (1938) was the first of these. Of his screen work, Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) and The Thin Man Goes Home (1945) are the most telling of his style because Page’s detecting couple in Fast Company is obviously based upon Nick and Nora Charles from Hammett’s novel The Thin Man (1934).
The plot of Fast Company revolves around some dirty business going on in New York’s rare book trade. A frame-up and an elaborate scheme for stealing, altering and re-selling valuable books are the main plot-drivers in this fast-paced mystery. Rare book dealer Joel Glass (with help from his wife, Garda) discovers that working for insurance companies recovering valuable stolen books is more remunerative than depression-era book selling. The characters make prodigious amounts of wisecracks and drink prodigious amounts of liquor before the story is concluded. One would not think that so much gun play, knife-throwing, fist-fighting, kidnapping, head-conking, pistol-whipping, book stealing and fem-fataling was going on in the 1930’s New York rare book milieu.
The best way to describe Page’s writing recipe is as follows: Combine one part Hammett’s Nick and Nora with one part screwball comedy with one part thriller-ish action and then add a tiny dash of fair-play clueing.
One plot point that really annoyed me was that, one day after a character is shot in the shoulder, he manages to free himself from being tied up, beats up a crook and jumps out of a second story window. It’s almost as if Page forgot that the character had been shot.
To be fair to Page, the general consensus of COC and Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers is that Fast Company is probably the weakest of his four mystery novels. Still, it was good enough to win Dodd Mead’s Red Badge Prize and it got him to Hollywood where three movies were made based on the lead characters of Fast Company.
A very good review of Fast Company written on 05/09/08 by “prettysinister” on the LibraryThing website indicates that it was one of the earliest American bibliomystery novels.
Posted to the GAD site 07/2009
3. F(rederick) Britten Austin (1885-1941)
British writer Austin was a prolific author of various types of short fiction (adventure, military, supernatural, mystery, detective, etc.) in the early decades of the 20th Century. He wrote a series of six stories about PI Quentin Quayne that appeared in the Strand and the Red Book magazines in late 1924 and early 1925:
“The Vanished Duke” ss The Red Book Magazine 09/1924
“The Fourth Degree” ss 10/1924
“The One-Eyed Moor” ss 11/1924
“A Paris Frock” ss 12/1924
“The Great Mallett Case” ss 01/1925
“Diamond Cut Diamond” ss 02/1925
“The Fourth Degree” was reprinted in Thwing’s The World’s Best 100 Detective Stories (1929). “Diamond Cut Diamond” was reprinted in Sayers Omnibus of Crime (1929).
Quayne owns a detective agency in Piccadilly Circus (the Q. Q. Agency). Mr. Creighton is his assistant. Quayne is usually called “Chief” by his employees and “QQ” by his friends. The two stories I read (Fourth Degree and Diamond) were mediocre but the series had potential. I wonder if anyone has read all six of the Quayne stories? Most interestingly, I found a Quentin Quayne parody published in a Canadian boys private school/college magazine sometime in the late 1920’s. It was quite amusing and the chap who wrote it poked some good-natured fun at Austin’s characters and writing style. I may post it here at a later date.
From St. Andrews College Review by MacRae, Form 1, Lower School:
“The Mysterious S.O.S.”
(With Apologies to the author of Quentin Quayne stories.)
Foreward.—This story has nothing to do with an S.O.S, but as it was a good title, sounded mysterious, and as I could think of none better, I used it. Now for the story.
Quentin Quayne was sitting at his large desk in his private office when, of a sudden, calling Crayton, his secretary, to him, he said, “This man is in my outer office”, at the same time holding up a picture for Crayton to see. “When he leaves I wish you to trail him, as I think (and my fortune teller tells me) that he is implicated in this recent murder about which the papers are getting out special editions. Here is 20 pounds and an automatic. Follow him to the ends of the earth if necessary.” Crayton answered, “Yes, sir” and turned to go out (to be continued)
4. Lawrence L. Lynch
psd. of Emma Murdock Van Deventer (1853-1914)
aka Emily Murdock, aka Emily Medora Murdock, aka Emma Murdock, aka Emily Lynch, aka Emily Van Deventer, aka E. M. Van Deventer
Lynch wrote 24 novels between 1879 and 1912. They seem to range from mysteries to detective stories to adventure tales to romances…and a combination of all four types. Her works appear to have been popular at one time both in the US and England. Nobody reads her now but here are my thoughts on one of her books featuring an early female detective: Madeline Payne, the Detective’s Daughter (1884).
Madeline Payne is a young woman of 17 or 18 when the story opens. Her father was Lionel Payne, a celebrated detective nicknamed “The Expert” for his ability to unravel complicated mysteries. Lionel was shot and killed by a criminal when Madeline was an infant. Her mother remarried a few years later, then soon after, died of heart disease. Her mother made a poor choice for her second marriage because Madeline’s stepfather proved to be both cruel and greedy.
Madeline, recently graduated from a convent boarding school, returns home (home being a country house in a small town a two hour train ride outside of New York City) for the first time in several years. Her stepfather wants nothing to do with her and, in fact, has concocted a scheme to marry Madeline off to an old geezer acquaintance to satisfy a gambling debt. In the short time Madeline has been home, her youthful good looks have captured the interest of a handsome stranger who suggests an elopement to NYC. The naive Madeline agrees to the elopement. Just before departing, Madeline discovers that she, not her stepfather, is the true heir to the country house and small fortune left by her mother. Madeline vows vengeance on the man who made her mother’s last years a hardship and kept her inheritance a secret.
Madeline’s fiance turns out to be a rogue and gambler who had no intention of marrying her. Madeline engineers an escape from the bounder but the excitement of her daring flight causes Madeline to fall ill (possibly a weak heart like her mother?). She is rescued by two benefactors, met by chance, and is nursed back to health. Once recovered, Madeline vows vengeance on her ex-fiance for taking advantage of her innocence.
The above events take up the first quarter of this 125,000 word Victorian melodrama. The balance of the story narrates Madeline’s successful transformation into an undercover detective (using disguises, of course) as she unravels the schemes of no less than three fortune hunters (one being her ex-fiance). The unlikely coincidence that these three fortune hunters have separately or together harmed the lives of her benefactors or their families is quite unbelievable. Madeline pieces together the mysterious events that have tied these seven or eight people together and winds up freeing a falsely imprisoned man, brings harsh justice to the three fortune hunters, saves a young woman from a rogue, saves a middle-aged woman from the same rogue and expels her stepfather from her mother’s house after rescuing him from a murder plot. Madeline is, naturally, exhausted by these efforts so at the end of the book she decides to travel to Europe for rest and a change of scene.
Madeline and some other characters from this book return for a sequel seven years later in Moina; or Against the Mighty, A Detective Story (1891). Continue reading below for more on Moina.
A publisher’s blurb in 1884 describes Madeline Payne as “One of the most fascinating of modern novels. It combines the excitement that ever attends the intricate and hazardous schemes of a detective, together with as cunningly elaborated a plot as the best of Willkie Collins’ or Charles Reade’s.”
Lynch/Van Deventer’s writing style is a cross between Anna Katherine Greene and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Lynch’s plotting and inventiveness is not as good as Greene’s and her subject matter is not quite as sordid as Braddon’s. Like many of her Victorian contemporaries, Lynch is overly wordy and is prone to allowing her characters to make long, tedious, melodramatic, self-righteous speeches.
I eventually began looking forward to the sections featuring the criminals because those characters exhibited a bit more complexity and depth compared to the “good/noble” characters with whom the author seems more enchanted. The criminals tended not to make long speeches and, quite frankly, their conversations were more interesting than those of the “good” characters.
Lynch came from a prominent Chicago area family and apparently spent most of her life in the Chicago vicinity. Because of that fact, I found it surprising that she set this novel in and around New York City and the city of Baltimore because her descriptions of the local geography, buildings, streets neighborhoods, cities and small towns were so generic that the settings could have been in almost any large or mid-size American city. It almost seemed that Lynch had never been to the East Coast and was using maps and travel brochures to help her visualize her locations. The Chicago publishing firm of Laird & Lee originally published all of Lynch/Deventer’s 24 novels. She was also published in a few European markets. William Henry Lee (1863-1913) eventually bought out his partner Frederick C. Laird in 1894 and was the sole owner of the publishing concern until his death in 1913. Laird & Lee mainly published dime novels and dictionaries according to Wikipedia. Laird & Lee took out a promotional ad in the 2/16/1899 edition of the literary journal The Dial and described Lynch’s novels as being “Thrilling, High-Class Detective Stories.” It was rumored that Lee was of partial African-American heritage. The copyright entry in Lynch/Deventer’s final book A Blind Lead (1912) lists William H. Lee (not Lynch/Deventer) as the copyright holder.
I have come across a fascinating article about Lynch/Van Deventer on an online blog by Roger Matile who is quite informed about the history of the Fox River area of Illinois (the westernmost suburbs of Chicago). There seems to be quite a mystery concerning Murdock/Lynch/Van Deventer’s first husband, Lawrence L. Lynch. Apparently she married him when she was 25 in 1877. She was then either divorced or widowed around 1886 and then married Dr. Abraham Van Deventer (himself a widower) in 1887. There may have been some scandal about her first marriage to Lynch, a theatrical agent who traveled a lot. Click HERE to read the full article.
Lynch falls into the common trope that Kathleen Gregory Klein writes extensively about in her book The Woman Detective:Gender & Genre (1988). Like many female PI’s of the late 19th and early 20th Century, Madeline solves the “mystery plot” but fails to solve the “marriage plot” successfully for herself.
I came across a digital version of Lynch/Deventer’s second Madeline Payne book, Moina, or Against the Mighty (1891) and finally finished this, as Mike Grost would say, brontosaurus of a novel (130k+ words, 530+ pages). Madeline Payne was Lynch/Deventer’s 3rd published novel. Moina was her 8th and she showed some improvement in her writing skills. She seems to have left behind much of her Mary Elizabeth Braddon “Sensation” effects and even partially abandoned some of her Anna Katherine Green influence. Moina seems to have been heavily influenced by the American Realist school especially William Dean Howells’ books Annie Kilburn (1888) & A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). Social justice for workers, union activities both good and bad, capitalists vs. anarchists, foreign agitators, bombings, assassination of capitalists, class conflict, labor disputes, foreign intrigue, etc. dominate the book. Lynch/Deventer’s pacing has improved from a snail’s pace in Madeline Payne to a tortoise’s pace in Moina. She is still way too wordy and often loses track of characters for many chapters and then re-introduces them without describing what they were up to for several weeks. Also, I count 6 characters (5 female) whose first name starts with the letter M, making difficult to keep the cast of characters straight without making a chart. Madeline Payne takes a back seat to another detective in this book. In fact, she barely escapes being a secondary character whereas in her first case she was not only the title character but dominated most of the book. Madeline is now a mature and thoughtful woman in her mid-twenties in Moina rather than a naive and impetuous teenager as she was in Madeline Payne. Lynch/Deventer has not improved her knowledge of NYC in the seven years since she completed her first Madeline Payne mystery. She only faithfully describes Central Park and Fifth Avenue. All her other descriptions of the streets, neighborhoods, parks, and buildings of NYC are either completely fabricated or inaccurate. Near the end of the book Lynch/Deventer finally has some of the characters travel to Chicago and partake in the real life Haymarket Square Riot/Bombing (1886). She writes compellingly of the Chicago location and events in great contrast to her generic descriptions of NYC and the overly melodramatic events taking place there. One senses that the lifelong Chicagoland resident was deeply affected by the bombing and these feelings managed to creep into her writing at this point of the novel. Too bad Lynch/Deventer could not sustain this heart-felt emotion throughout the book. Lynch/Deventer speedily winds up the story in the final thirty or so pages…all the bad guys are killed or jailed, most of the good guys/gals are saved and a near triple wedding ends the novel. Madeline has finally solved the marriage plot which eluded her in her first case. I wish the author had speeded-up the action of the first 500 pages as much as she did in the final 30 pages. I hope some scholar would make a deep study of this author who created the first American female detective character. I do not have the stamina to struggle my way through Lynch/Deventer’s other 22 books in order to make a proper determination as to her place in American detective fiction.
Here is the content an ad taken out by Lynch/Deventer’s British publisher, Ward, Lock & Co. in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art (1 September, 1900 edition, page 284) concerning one of her later books:
Under Fate’s Wheel. 3s. 6d.
by Lawrence L. Lynch
Author of “Shadowed by Three,” &c.
In all the world there is no writer of detective stories who has so huge a public as Lawrence L. Lynch. Not even the creator of “Sherlock Holmes” can boast of so immense a circulation, for more than three million copies of Lawrence L. Lynch’s books have been sold. No other writer of the mystery story can arrest the reader’s attention in the very first chapter—often in the very first paragraph—quite so quickly, and certainly no other writer can sustain the interest so well to the end.
What hyperbole to dare compare Lynch/Deventer to A. C. Doyle but Ward, Lock paid for the ad so they could say whatever they wanted—I suppose.
Here is Lynch/Deventer’s bibliography as I can gather from various sources on the Internet (especially from Steve at Mystery*File):
| Year | Title(s) | Lead characters/detectives/setting, etc. |
| 1879 | Shadowed by Three (A Woman’s Crime) | Neil Bathurst, Rob Jocelyn, Frank Ferrars, Lenore Armyn (Chicago) |
| 1884 | The Diamond Coterie | Neil Bathurst |
| 1884 | Madeline Payne (The Detectives’s Daughter) | Madeline Payne (NYC & Baltimore) |
| 1885 | Dangerous Ground (The Rival Detectives) | Van Vernet |
| 1885 | Out of a Labyrinth | Neil Bathurst |
| 1886 | A Mountain Mystery (The Outlaws of the Rockies) | Van Vernet (Western US) |
| 1890 | The Lost Witness (The Mystery of Leah Paget) | ? |
| 1891 | Moina or Against the Mighty | Madeline Payne & others (NYC & Chicago) |
| 1891 | A Slender Clue (The Mystery of the Mardi Gras) | (New Orleans) |
| 1892 | The Romance of a Bomb Thrower | ? |
| 1893 | A Dead Man’s Step | ? |
| 1894 | Against Odds (A Romance of the Midway Plaisance) | (Chicago World’s Fair) |
| 1895 | No Proof | Frank Ferrars (Illinois) |
| 1896 | The Last Stroke | ? |
| 1898 | The Unseen Hand | ? |
| 1899 | High Stakes | ? |
| 1901 | Under Fate’s Wheel (A Story of Mystery, Love & the Bicycle) | ? |
| 1902 | The Woman Who Dared | ? |
| 1903 | The Danger Line | (NYC) |
| 1904 | A Woman’s Tragedy (The Detective’s Task) | Carl Masters (Wyoming) |
| 1906 | The Doverfields’ Diamonds (The Great Gem Mystery) | ? |
| 1908 | Man and Master | Carl Masters |
| 1910 | A Sealed Verdict (The Sealed Verdict) | (Chicago) |
| 1912 | A Blind Lead | (this book was copyrighted by the publisher, William H. Lee, not Lynch/Deventer) |
5. Marcus Magill
Pseudonym of:
(Leonard) Brian Hill (1896-1979) & Joanna “Jay” Elder O’Halloran Giles (1893-1952)
Writing under the pseud. of Marcus Magill, these two British subjects wrote, among other works, at least six murder mysteries between 1929 and 1933. They did not seem to use a consistent series character but the one book I read, Murder Out of Tune (1931), was a fairly-clued Golden Age detective story featuring Lady “Ermie” Wassell-Jowett who is described as “a massive lady with auburn hair and a handsome profile carrying with her an air of inexhaustible energy.” Later in the story she is described, with more ill-will than accuracy, as bossy, fat, old, silly and soft in the head. Lady Wassell-Jowett (along with some younger friends) acts as an amateur sleuth in order to solve the murder of her niece. Although she does manage to gather some real clues, her questionable deductions and frenzied running about Greater London and SE England prove to be more of a hindrance than a help to the police (who eventually solve the crime with slow and steady detective work). Lady Wassell-Jowett is meant to be something of a comic figure along the lines of the characters Margaret Dumont played in the Marx Brothers films. She is a well-meaning wealthy woman with an overly inflated sense of her own intelligence and importance who is often taken advantage of by numerous relatives, friends, strangers and servants (note that the first two Marx brothers films came out prior to 1931 so it is possible that Magill saw Dumont in her dotty dowager comic foil roles). Magill’s writing style is a something of mash up of P. G. Wodehouse’s Wooster/Jeeves stories published from 1919 onward, Basil Thompson’s Mr. Pepper stories (Mr. Pepper, Investigator published in 1925)* and Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence stories (especially Partners in Crime published in 1929). It took me a while to realize that Murder Out of Tune was meant to be a humorous/satiric/comic murder mystery. Once I caught on to the fact that this was not a “straight’ mystery I was able to accept the book on its own terms and enjoy the efforts of these two forgotten authors. The surprisingly witty and ironic final chapter was the highlight of this book. This epilogue was reminiscent of “the Fliitcraft parable” from The Maltese Falcon which was published a year or so before Murder Out of Tune. I wonder if Magill had read Hammett’s work and created a kind of variation on Flitcraft? I will now have to be on the lookout for more of Magill’s books in the hope that the author repeated his/her cleverness.
The 1989 edition of Barzun and Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime does not credit Joanna Giles as the writing partner of Brian Hill behind the Marcus Magill pseudonym. The COC’s slightly favorable entry does mention that Magill used at least one other series detective besides Lady Wassell-Jowett.**
Brian Hill published some poetry and worked as an accountant prior to writing this series of murder mysteries. He also complied anthologies and translated works from French and Latin to English. Later In the 1930s he reviewed mysteries for The Bookman (UK) under the Marcus Magill name.
Joanna E. Giles was from a wealthy and influential South Australian family. She published two books of poetry in Australia before moving to England around 1920. Apparently Hill and Giles met in London in the 1920’s when they both belonged to a bohemian-type social circle called “The Launderers” who wrote and performed amateur theatricals and generally engaged in various artistic and scandalous behaviors. In 1930 Giles earned a pilot’s license and was one of only a few women in England at that time who owned and flew her own airplane. It is worth noting that their next to last book involves airplanes.
Books that Hill and Giles wrote as Marcus Magill (that I am aware of):
- Who Shall Hang? (1929)
- Death In the Box (1929)
- I Like a Good Murder (1930)
- Murder Out of Tune (1931)
- Murder in Full Flight (1933)
- Hide and I’ll Find You! (1933)
Although mostly forgotten today, Marcus Magill must have enjoyed some popularity back in the 1930s because the novels were published both in the US and the UK and at least one of the books went through multiple printings.
* Regarding Basil Thompson’s Mr. Pepper stories: Magill named one of the characters Basil Goldfinch and another Ronald Pepper.
** My editions of Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure and Reilly’s Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers has no mention of Marcus Magill or Brian Hill or Joanna E. Giles.
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