Gwen Bristow was born in Marion, South Carolina in 1903. After the college, Gwen pursued journalism with excellent results, landing a permanent job at a New Orleans newspaper, and at the same time writing. In 1926, she published a collection of poems. She later met Bruce Manning, a journalist working for another New Orleans newspaper, and the two fell in love. In 1929, the couple married, and the following year they published the first of four mystery novels. They later sold the film rights to the first one, and wrote the screenplay for the subsequent film. Thus began a successful career for the two as screenwriters, and for Bruce as director. Meanwhile, she continued to write historical novels, which soon earned her acclaim among the general public, so much so that she was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Bristow smoked heavily and drank heavily. All we know is that her husband died in the 1960s after illness and depression, while she was diagnosed with cancer, which led to her death in 1980.
The four mystery novels, in order, are:
The Invisible Host, 1930
The Gutenberg Murders, 1931
The Mardi Gras Murders, 1932
Two and Two Make Twenty-two, 1932
WARNING: SPOILERS !
In a New Orleans apartment on the 22nd floor of a skyscraper, eight people arrive one by one, all representing the city's elite to varying degrees. Awaiting them is not the host, as should be the case, but the servants. As they arrive, the guests question the meaning of this, suspecting that the host is one of them and at the same time wondering why such behavior was so meaningful. When the last guest arrives, a voice coming from the radio announces that the eight will be the protagonists of an exciting game, the likes of which have never been seen before in their city. The initial excitement is followed by a sense of bewilderment and terror when they learn that the game is nothing more than a match between the host and one of their number, taking turns, with the prize being their life: the chosen one must outsmart the host or die.
But why are the eight guests staying there? Because the host has preemptively equipped the apartment with every kind of devilish device to prevent them from leaving or altering the course of events: in case they wanted to destroy the source of the killer's speech, there are four gas cylinders connected to the radio, ready to explode; in case they wanted to escape, the metal doors have been connected to high voltage; even the access route to the roof garden, also located on the 22nd floor, has been sealed off. Presuming that the eight guests might think of climbing down from the roof garden to the floor below, the stems of the climbing plants have been tied to high voltage wires; Furthermore, the hanging garden itself is too high compared to the other hanging garden below, a full 15 meters, to even consider jumping. Finally, in case they wanted to start a fire, each room is equipped with a device that, instead of spraying water, would release poisonous gas into the air, capable of killing anyone.
However, before the games begin, since the guests are not all convinced of the host's hostile intentions, he convinces them to open a closet, from which a dead body, already quite cold, falls into the room. With a dead body already in the room, the others, terrified, don't know what to do: so they are convinced to place the body in one of the eight black coffins with silver decorations, which are ready to receive their contents, there in the hanging garden, in the shade of the palm trees (brr...).
From then on, in the blink of an eye, a veritable massacre takes place, and each death is announced by the killer with a proclamation on the radio, preceded in turn by a gong.
In the end, three remain to fight the relentless killer: Joan Trent, actress; Peter Daly, writer; Henry (Hank) Abbott, painter. But it's also possible that one of these three is the killer. Which is very possible, as Max Reid previously pointed out in an insightful psychological analysis. After all, if the killer weren't one of those present, where could he have hidden? The butler, the cook, and another servant lie asleep in the kitchen; there's no one in the bathroom, nor in the hanging garden, except for the eight coffins, which, when opened, contain nothing except, in one, the ninth guest, previously brought there from the dining room.
So one of the three is the killer. To find out how it ends, you have to read the novel.
END OF SPOILERS
The Invisible Host was said to have influenced Agatha Christie, as it bears obvious similarities to her later novel, And Then There Were None, written in 1939.
SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES WITH CHRISTIE'S NOVEL
In Christie's novel, first called Ten Little Niggers, then And Then There Were None, and finally Ten Little Indians, the idea is that of a gathering of strangers in a mansion on an island. Once there, summoned by telegram, they are greeted not by the master of the house but by the servants. The mysterious host will announce himself through records played on the gramophone, and they will soon realize that the purpose of the gathering is... to kill them, avenging the deaths of those they themselves caused. Until no one remains except the murderer, one of the guests previously believed dead.
The similarities are immediately apparent: the guests are invited by telegram; they are gathered in a closed environment (the apartment in the first novel, the island in the second); in both novels, there are servants who do not know the master of the house but were hired through third parties; In both novels, it's not the host who welcomes them; in both, the host introduces himself via audio (the radio in the first, connected to gramophones; the gramophone in the second). The differences, however, are notable: in the number of guests (eight in the first, ten in the second); in their mutual knowledge (in the first, the guests know each other, in the second, they don't); the motive (in the first, it's only clear at the end that the motive is typical of someone who wants to become master of the world, accumulate as much power and wealth as possible; in the second, it's revenge, but in a certain noble sense: to replace the Final Judge and inflict a punishment no judge has assigned to each of the ten); finally, there's one difference more substantial than all of them: in the first novel, two guests are saved because they manage to defeat the murderer in the game with death; in the second, no one is saved. And it was precisely the fact that no one was saved that sealed the success of A. Christie's work, which has continued to be repeated over the years.
Thus, Christie ultimately prevails over the former thanks to her greater creativity, her qualitative focus on the guests' greater psychological depth (the first novel's is barely nuanced), and her greater breadth of vision, also expanding the possibility that the same victims might be struck in different places, thus making the possibility of catching the killer less likely. Agatha Christie's masterful way of revolving the story around an innocent nursery rhyme, which in the first novel, however, is nonexistent, is also remarkable. It's worth noting that both novels are very tense.
The first can rightly be considered a mix of thriller and mystery: the story unfolds claustrophobically in a flat from which the guests cannot escape due to deadly contraptions placed here and there. In this, the novel follows the influences of previous authors and also the period (the 1920s: the novel was published in 1930 but written the year before!): Connington, Crofts, Freeman, and even Abbott had inserted electrical and mechanical devices into their novels. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the flat, from which there is no escape, heightens the tension of the characters (and the reader), and pushes them to an opposite action, which, however, is impossible to carry out without imaginable consequences (which happens to Sylvia Inglesby, because she was pushed to do so by her host). However, where the novel appears to have its strengths, it also highlights its shortcomings: all that electrical and mechanical gimmickry strikes me as filler, as well as a sign that the novel was a novel of the 1920s rather than the 1930s. Precisely the lack of devices designed to cause death means that, in Christie's work, the killer springs into action directly and thus, challenging the detective's action, automatically provides the other party with the clues needed to stop him. In other words, in the 1930s novel, in some ways, the crime and the detective's action are equally opposed: killer and detective fight on equal terms. This is why, in action and psychology, Christie's novel is superior to that of Bristow & Manning.
ORIGIN OF THE IDEA: STEEMAN.
However, as we have said, the main difference between the two lies in the fact that in the first novel, the killer is discovered; In the second, no, because it is essentially believed that he was killed: he made others think he was dead, to mislead them and therefore to be free (in death) to kill others. But this, which is the difference in Christie's favor, was not developed by her. In fact, as we know, Agatha Christie never disdained using ideas taken from other authors, but what some say is not entirely true, namely that Agatha Christie took the idea for her 1939 work only from The Invisible Host: undoubtedly she was familiar with the work (the original one by the two spouses precedes Christie's relative by nine years), but if she had only taken the basic idea from Bristol & Manning, Agatha Christie's work would not have had the incredible success it did. Indeed, if we really want to talk about it, the phenomenal success was due to the other basic idea, the one taken from Six hommes morts by Stanislas-André Steeman, a 1931 novel.
In Steeman's novel (a Belgian author now completely forgotten but very well known to the general public until the 1960s), six friends, having no luck, decide to each set off for a different shore, vowing that if one of them were to make a fortune, he would have to share it with the others. Up to this point, the plot is similar to many other novels. Steeman's originality, however, lay in predicting that the friends would die one by one, once the promise made before their separation had been fulfilled, and that then no one would be left alive. And that it would then be discovered that one of those believed to be dead was actually not, and had thus been able to kill the others. This is the real difference between the two novels, the one by Bristow & Manning, and the one by Christie (copied by Steeman).
Another difference between Bristow & Manning's novels and Christie's is that while Christie's, as we've said, is broad in its action and the psychological depth of the characters and therefore has greater breadth and depth of drama, the 1930 novel is nothing more than a divertissement, a game of murder, a pure and simple whodunnit, even rather sparse, though, as we've said, tense. The edge is lost at the end, because the murderer is discovered too quickly, while the tension in Christie's novel reaches right to the very last lines with a spasmodic effect. Even the idea of the pen cap filled with prussic acid is an old-fashioned expedient; Besides, it's unclear why the murderer would accept a quick death for the chance to stay there with the other two until the servants woke up the next morning: faced with an inquisitorial action, they would have been evenly matched. Neither side could have been more fortunate than the other. Because when the two lucky ones manage to render the murderer helpless and he tells them everything about the devilry contained in the house, and we know that the servants didn't know the owner, who could have ever said that the murderer was xxx instead of yyy or zzz? No, something doesn't add up. There's a fundamental naivety in taking everything for granted.
Even the murderer's reaction: when he's neutralized, why does he reveal his weapons? He could have said nothing and exploited them in a thousand ways to eliminate the two, even while tied up. It's a divertissement, no doubt, but also rather naive. Its divertissement nature is also linked to its genesis: in my opinion, it was a way to have a laugh, by having some characters connected to the world of detective stories die at a party. It's something no one ever noticed.
THE VAN DINE SCHOOL
Whose school did the two of them learn from? Well, this doubt only came to me while rereading the novel. At the time, the greatest American exponent of the detective novel was S.S. Van Dine: is it possible that the two were from Van Dine School? Apparently not. For example, there is no detective who resembles Philo Vance, and here he is practically absent. And there is not even a Philo Vance sidekick, who is present in all or almost all excellent Vandinians. However... however, there is a psychological introspection worthy of Van Dine: the analysis carried out by university professor Max Chambers Reid is worthy of Philo Vance; furthermore, while there is no encyclopedic detective, here there is an encyclopedic killer, who knows all the manias of his adversaries, who has studied them and found the way to ensure that they are the ones that lead the various characters to their deaths. And then…so many little details: the messages broadcast on the radio actually originate from four gramophones placed in various corners of the apartment, and in a Van Dine novel, The Canary Murder Case, there's the trick of the gramophone; the murder of Reid, killed in the armchair, reminds me of that of Major Benson (and also the trajectory of the gunshot) in The Benson Murder Case; Osgood's murder-suicide is a variation on the perpetrator's death at the end of The Bishop Murder Case: just as in The Bishop Murder Case, the perpetrator prepares a glass of poisoned liquor for another suspect and instead dies in his place, so in The Invisible Host, the first victim, to eliminate her potential killer, poisons the drinks of all the other suspects with prussic acid, but then fails in her attempt because the killer himself reveals him and at the same time declares his death, having poisoned himself without his knowledge, since by squeezing the cap of the bottle containing the poison between his fingers, the microtips of the same bottle, soaked in the same acid, caused his death. Sylvia's death, caused by nervous tension, which makes her careless and leads to her death by electrocution, is similar to that of the murderer in The Greene Murder Case, who dies due to carelessness in a car accident; And finally, the death of Tim Slamon, who "commits suicide" because the killer knows of a tic in his and puts him in a position to kill himself without his knowledge, is similar to the ploy used to kill Rex Greene in The Greene Murder Case: the killer knows a secret drawer that also knows the victim and sets a murderous trap that is triggered when the victim is unknowingly put in a position to cause his own suicide by the killer.
So, while I haven't definitively called the two authors Van Dine-like, I can certainly say that they borrowed heavily from S.S. Van Dine. Almost a retaliatory punishment for those who claimed that Christie's novel had been copied from theirs.
Speaking of Christie, I'd say that the original text had been accused of racism, and for this reason the original title, Ten Little Niggers, was changed to And Then There Were None. However, Bristow & Manning's novel also contains elements of far greater racism, a class hatred, and a racism directed at representatives of the lower classes that is astonishing and appreciated when the host/murderer, to explain the fact that the servants have been drugged and narcotized and are sleeping in the kitchen, argues that it is not class-conscious to duel with the servants rather than with...
Moreover, the couple's novel contains moderate but interesting hints of social criticism, which Christie's novel does not.
Finally, I'd like to comment on an aspect that hasn't been fully identified so far.
Bristow & Manning's novel has been described as a divertissement, and this is undoubtedly true. Beyond the novel—pure, cerebral entertainment, with no pretensions of any other kind—the couple, in my opinion, probably wanted to create a double divertissement: the reader's divertissement and their own divertissement, writing a novel in which the main characters of the drama, who were supposed to die in a thousand atrocious ways, were characters, fictional or real, of their times:
Margaret Gaylord Chisholm: there is a Dudley Chisholm, a character from Le-Queux's novel, in Under-Secretary, 1902;
Sylvia Inglesby: in this case, Inglesby could be a reference to Appleby, Innes's main character.
Joan Trent: There's a Philip Trent, in Trent's Last Case by Edmund C. Bentley (1913); but also a Joan Bennett, an actress already famous in Bulldog Drummond and Disraeli, two films from 1929.
Max Chambers Reid: Is he referring to Reed McKinley Chambers, a pioneer of the aeronautical industry and hero of the First World War?
Peter Daly, writer: If we change the final y to i, we get Dali or even Dalì: Salvador Dalì, a painter already famous in those years.
Henry (Hank) Abbott, painter: Is he Anthony Abbott, a Van Dine-esque writer?
Jason Osgood: John C. Osgood was one of the great American industrialists and capitalists of the early twentieth century. In America, he is considered by some to be a Baron Robber.
In the case of these last two characters, we can observe a singular characteristic: surnames and professions are inverted to form a chiasmus, an X:
Abbott painter
x
Daly writer.
Abbot ... Writer , Daly.. Painter
In this case, the X, placed between the two, is as if it had already indicated, to a reader who looked beyond the simple reading, who X could be, that is, The Invisible Host, the murderer: Abbott, or Daly, according to a procedure Queen would later use, where in "The Siamese Twin Mystery" they would insert clues into the names of some characters: Carreau for Diamonds, and especially the 6 of spades to indicate that the murderer was linked to thefts because in French, Spades = Pique, and Piquer = to steal, just as Pique is very close in sound to Pica. And Pica Pica is the scientific name for Magpie, a great stealer.”
Furthermore, even if the names hadn't been listed one after the other at the beginning of the novel, the two characters would still have been similar, as they are perhaps the two characters whose names are best known. Moreover, among the many, they are the only male characters who remain until the end.
Pietro De Palma
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