Here Crane is sent undercover to upstate town Marchton with his boss's niece, Ann who is also a detective, to pose as a married couple. Crane has allegedly been hired as a copywriter with furniture magnet and patriarch Simeon March. March's son and nephew have both had fatal carbon monoxide accidents within the last year and he suspect's his nephew's wife the super-hot Carmel March (who always wears perfume that smells of Gardenias). There are two broad narratives that run through this book: the mystery itself and the attraction/conflict between Bill Crane and Ann, who clearly have feelings for one another.
The mystery is fun, though gets a bit confusing. I was almost tempted to write out all the characters with a relationship chart, but I eventually got it mostly figured out in my detail-averse brain. As well as the various members of the March family (two recent widows who hate each other, the remaining brother and cousin) we also get hangers-on, nightclub performers and even local gangsters with names like Lefty, Frenchy and Slats. There is a lot of action, too. Right from the get-go, the posing couple awaken to a burglar in the house they are staying in. We get a car chase, attempted assassination during a duck hunt, cat fight in the tennis club, a hospital shoot-out. It's not boring! Latimer has a clipped, straight-ahead style that seems to elide how crazy the actual happenings are but in a weird way it makes them more exciting. Oh shit, these women are really going at it, she just bit her to the bone! The revelation is held out to almost the very last page, which kept me up way past my bedtime.
I don't know yet how many William Crane books there are nor if they have an ongoing and developing storyline, but here Latimer seems to be introducing a longer-term relationship with Ann. What I appreciated about her other than that she is competent and courageous and quite witty is that she is constantly giving Crane shit about his alcoholism. In the other books, everybody is drinking with him all day and it seems almost insane. Here we finally see that there are people who don't drink constantly and are aware that it may actually be harmful. Crane himself even grudgingly admits it. It is helpful for the reader. I'm not anti-alchohol, actually somewhat of a fan, but the drinking in the other books was so constant and extreme that it didn't even seem real. Here, we are more grounded and as I said above now that I get that his drinking is a thing, it makes the behaviour easier to pursue.
This is a sexist and racist era. Most of the racism is in erasure (except the band of course), but there are also some really awful vocabulary that was just the norm for the time. The sexism is more interesting as though the women's roles within the world are clearly defined, there is an equality in how they are used as characters that is refreshing. Ann is fully independent and goes off on her own, fairly regularily one-upping Crane in her detection results. She does end up getting captured and "rescued", but it feels almost perfunctory like she is just one of the guys. Also, there is weed-smoking and it is simply noted just in passing as a thing the band does behind the country club. This book was written in 1939 and it's a reminder that a lot of the anti-drug hysteria and puritanism in America was ramped up after WWII and not something always at such insane levels in our culture.
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Well, there were a lot of "digest-sized" books such as this in 1939 (and only so many mass-market-sized paperbacks, as we tend to think of them now, as Pocket Books and Bantam moved into the market in North America)...Mercury Press and other publishers of digest-sized paperbacks, even more than Pocket and competitors, sold their paperbacks as magazines--the Mercury Press was already publishing AMERICAN MERCURY, the political/cultural magazine with some fiction content, originally edited by H. L. Mencken, when they started helping keep AM going with moving into mystery digest paperbacks...and in 1941, started publishing ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, and in 1949, after some delays, added THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY (with AND SCIENCE FICTION tagged onto the title with the second issue). They tried one issue of a humor magazine in the '50s, and basically turned MERCURY MYSTERY into MM BOOK-MAGAZINE by the mid '50s, and BESTSELLER MYSTERY likewise into a magazine, one which they kept publishing in the '60s, and a few years of VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION...all of these edited in their late runs (or VENTURE's entire first run) by Robert P. Mills...Mercury Press sold EQMM to B. G. Davis, who was leaving Ziff-Davis to found Davis Publications, and, while they launched other magazines afterward, including a revived VENTURE, mostly published F&SF till long-term editor/publisher Edward Ferman sold that one to then-editor Gordon Van Gelder, who still publishes it under the Spilogale banner (his father was a mammologist who had some particularly interest in skunks).
While digest-sized paperbacks never went away altogether (Scholastic Book Services kept publishing hundreds of titles for young readers in that format, as Dell in their Yearling program, and other publishers imitating them, for example, such as the Harper Trophy line), and the move toward "quality paperbacks" meant a resurgence of them by the '80s, they were far thinner on the racks than "mm pbs" in the '50s-'80s...
"Jonathan Press Mystery" was the third line of Mercury's digest cf magabooks, after the aforementioned Mercury Mystery and Bestseller Mystery...
And, not to tip over the blog with my comments, but the shorter paperback format that Pocket, particularly, but also Dell and many other favored in the '40s, with wartime paper restrictions and the like, mostly gave way in the '50s to the taller paperbacks we mostly grew up with (Scholastic, again, was kind of slow adapter...publishing short paperbacks mostly into the '60s and even the early '70s in their teen-oriented book-lines, and then in the '70s finally mostly publishing the taller mm pbs in the format we usually think of...even given a certain tendency toward taller pbs with the same width in the last couple of decades, and mm pbs lost a large share of the market, but the racks were still up in supermarkets and the like).
Great stuff, thanks for that detailed history. I'm going to go back over it with a bit more attention later. This is all important history so I appreciate you sharing it with me here.
Now if only it was written more coherently! Must stop commenting while exhausted.
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