Anthony Abbot : The Creeps, 1939 (La soglia della paura. Italian Translator : Igor Longo. Mondadori, 2008) aka (Being a Full Statement About the ) Crimes at Buzzards Bay

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

 

William Willoughby Sharp : Murder of the Honest Broker, 1934 (Italian Edition: Morte di un broker onesto - translator: Marilena Caselli - Publishing House Polillo, 2024)

 

 

Willoughby Sharp... who could he be? one could say paraphrasing Alessandro Manzoni.
The great tomes of detective literature, dictionaries like the Maspléde do not report it, in GAD there is not a page that concerns it, in Mike Grost's analytical work on the internet, ditto. Yet he is an author of the golden age of the Golden Age of Detection, of the full Thirties.
What we know about the author we learn from the notes on the cover flap: William Willoughby Sharp born in 1900 and died in 1956, he was a New Yorker. Son of high society, he found work on the Wall Street Stock Exchange. After the crisis of 1929, and a much talked about marriage, he left W all Street and, together with his wife, moved to Bermuda, where he wrote his first novel, Murder in Bermuda, in 1933, followed by the second a year later, Murder of the Honest Broker. A third, The Mystery of the Multiplaying, 1935, should have followed after the founding of the company between Sharp and the New York publisher Kendall, but the project did not materialize, and the company soon dissolved. It is not known what the writer did from 1935 to his death. 

Warning: Spoilers !

The novel published by Polillo presents a double crime, which took place in the Stock Exchange Building on Wall Street. In essence, two brokers, Philip Torrent and Sandy Harrison, are killed by curere, absorbed in the case of the first through a cut on the right ear, while in the case of the second by scratches given to him on the left cheek by a woman, Torrent's former lover . It is not clear how the two could have been killed, and above all what motive they had in common, because it seems they have no connection. It would also seem that Philip Torrent was loved by everyone. Of course someone didn't love him if he killed him, but then, under the respectable hypocritical veil, we learn that Torrent had plenty of people who wanted him dead! Not only Jack McDonald, also a broker, lover of Torrent's wife, Mary; but also obviously his wife, Mary; Torrent's abandoned lover, Lucy Laverne; Chipo Martinelli and wife, owners of a clandestine bar set up with 70,000 Torrent dollars, not intending to return it to him; broker associate Temple Hastings, who defrauded him of approximately $300,000; his nephew Howard Torrent, debauched and without ever a dollar who leads an expensive life.
 

 

 

With a meticulous investigation, and with some ideas of genius, Bullock will be able to understand how the two victims were killed and why, and by whom, taking into account that at least Torrent was injured by someone using an improvised weapon, consisting of a pencil in which it was not inserted a graphite lead, but a tip of a phonograph blackened by the fire of a lighter, near its location at the New York Stock Exchange, and then killed in an ingenious way using Curare.
 

The End of Spoilers

The novel is stylistically a procedural, a precursor procedural if we want, seen under the guise of the activity of an inspector who is essentially an amateur detective: there is no usual basic police activity, such as for example. in Hillary Waugh's procedurals, which are real procedurals, but the investigative activity only of Inspector Bullock who, if anything, imitates his boss. In the novel, Inspector Bullock, who moves in the same New York in which Philo Vance, Drury Lane, and Thatcher Colt, deeply detested by him, move, if at first glance he differs from them, in reality he shares them. If anything, it is an attempt to increase visibility and general curiosity about one's hero.
Other details that indicate Bullock to us as a Vandinian hero could be: first of all, the Inspector Bullock (detective) / Mackay (Chief of Police) relationship seems to reiterate that of Philo Vance (detective) / Markham (District Attorney); and then, when Bullock goes to visit Torrent's wife, he appreciates two small Corots hanging near the fireplace, just as the embroidery of the Queen Anne style chairs (late Baroque: 1702-1714) arouses admiration in him: so it is certainly of an inspector with a medium-high cultural level, different from the masses. Furthermore, the weapon with which the murderer kills Philip Torrent reminds us of others from the Vandinian period: the mouthpiece of De Puyster - Rufus King's first detective, who seems to have even influenced Van Dine's Philo Vance - which in The Weapon That Didn't Exist he uses a Curare dart. In turn, the pencil on which, instead of a lead, was inserted the needle of a phonograph - metal - blackened with carbon black, reminds me of the cork on which the pins dipped in nicotine are inserted, from The Tragedy of  X  by Ellery Queen, all those fancy weapons, which are typical of the period. You should read Sharp's first to get a precise idea of the stylistic derivation, that is, whether he is a writer in his own right or whether he can be attributed to a stylistic current of fiction of the period. Mike doesn't mention it at all in his encyclopedic history of online detection, and after all the two novels were released in 2013, ignored or almost ignored.
I also notice in the novel the tendency, already noted in other witers, to humanize the characters of Abbot, Ellery Queen and Van Dine, that is, to decontextualize them and instead talk about them as if they were truly historical characters, not invented in the pages of a book. In this way the author in turn decontextualizes his character and gives him his own characterization. 

Pietro De Palma