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truepennyThis post is me laying bare the gears of an early and somewhat unsuccessful Ellery Queen novel. In excruciating detail.
Of Ellery Queen's first three novels--The Roman Hat Mystery, The French Powder Mystery, and The Dutch Shoe Mystery--The French Powder Mystery is probably the weakest. I find Roman Hat incredibly off-putting, both because of the underlying racism that motivates both blackmailer and murderer and because Ellery-Queen-the-author (henceforward referred to as EQ, to distinguish them (i.e., the authors Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) from Ellery-Queen-the-character, whom I shall call Ellery) hasn't yet figured out how to write characters, so people I become genuinely fond of in later books--Inspector Queen, Sergeant Velie, Ellery himself--are horrible, grating caricatures of themselves. (I also can't quite forgive, in the early EQ books, alleged bibliophile Ellery's habit of scribbling notes to himself about the case in his valuable first editions. Dude, if you're that bibliophilic, CARRY A NOTEBOOK.) But as a mystery, Roman Hat hangs together relatively well. Dutch Shoe has better characterization on all sides, and the mystery, while complicated in what will become the trademark EQ style, is well under its authors' control.
French Powder, on the other hand, is kind of a mess.
The characterization is settling down: Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie are becoming recognizable as themselves, and while Ellery is still irritatingly arch and supercilious ("By the Seven Virgins of Theophilus!" he exclaims on meeting an old school friend over a murder victim's corpse.), EQ spends less time lovingly detailing his quirks and mannerisms and silver eyes and more time letting him be a detective. The secondary characters are somewhat perfunctorily drawn, but realistic enough. Could be better, could be worse. What I actually want to dissect here is the plot.
We begin with the corpse of Winifred Marchbanks French, second wife of Cyrus French, department store magnate and chairman of the Anti-Vice Society.
Well, actually, no we don't. We begin (after the inevitable irritant, this being an early EQ book, of the foreword by "J. J. McC." earnestly assuring us of the superior quality of both Ellery's writing and detecting skills) with a pair of awkward expository scenes, the first establishing:
and the second establishing, EVEN MORE AWKWARDLY:
Really, words cannot express how clumsy and awkward this scene is. It even eclipses the mistaken attempt at "humor" in the first scene.
NOW we get to the body, which has been cunningly concealed in a window display of avant-garde furniture. There's a bed that folds into the wall, and every day at 12:15, the girl whose job it is to demonstrate the wonders of the furniture pushes the button that deploys the bed.
And, in this case, also deploys the body.
Screams, rioting, pandemonium. (I worry about the child trampled underfoot, but it's never mentioned again, so presumably it did not die.) We see either too much or not enough of Paul Lavery, the French designer of the avant-garde furniture. He's neither a red herring nor a secondary character, but there's too much of him for a simple cameo. We also meet the murderer (and drug-ring organizer), Crouther the store detective, who plays the part of the loud-mouthed, glory-hungry rent-a-cop perfectly; we never really see what's behind it, except in Ellery's reconstructions of what the murderer did, until the reveal at the end. And even then, he gets himself shot rather than saying anything as his real self.
The police arrive with miraculous speed and elicit certain salient facts from the body, the window display, and the witnesses (including Mr. French, who has gone comprehensively to pieces and will play almost no role in the rest of the book):
These last two points are problematic. The scarf annoys the bejesus out of me, because they go to great lengths to establish that it is Marion's scarf, that she thinks she left it in the apartment, and that Winifred never wore Marion's clothes . . . and then they forget to do anything about it. As a red herring, it makes no sense, because no murderer would put her monogrammed scarf around her victim's neck and it does nothing whatsoever to prove that Marion was on the scene when the murder took place, and if it's supposed to point to something about Crouther, they entirely forget to tell us what it is. It seems to exist mostly to cause anxiety about Marion and to make Westley Weaver behave like a complete and total nincompoop (which, to be fair, is most of his function in the novel), but as a plot thread, it is left dangling unattended in the breeze. (This is one of the things I mean when I say this novel is so complicated the author can't keep track of it.)
The lipstick also bothers me. EQ have a fondness for murder victims interrupted in the middle of something (see, for example, The Egyptian Cross Mystery, where Ellery proves that one of the victims died in the middle of a game of checkers), but the argument eventually put forward is that Winifred was in the apartment, at her vanity, doing her lips, when Crouther (not having a key to the damn spring-locked door) knocked for a pre-arranged appointment. She left her lipstick unblended on her mouth, got up, went and let him in, took him into the study, went behind her husband's desk, had a confrontation with Crouther which resulted in her murder . . . all with her lipstick still in three discrete dabs on her lips. If he'd shot her while she was doing her make-up, that would be one thing, but the idea that any woman who would be doing her make-up in preparation for a secret midnight confrontation with the man who hooked her daughter on heroin, would then answer the door WITHOUT taking that split-second further to finish her damn lipstick--well, it doesn't wash.
We also establish various other things, like the fact that the murderer must have snuck into the department store through the freight entrance between 11 and 11:30, but could not possibly have gotten out that way, since the freight door was closed and locked fifteen minutes before Mrs. French even arrived, and the fact that by hiding the body in the window display, the one thing the murderer achieved was delaying its discovery until 12:15.
Then Ellery and Westley go up to the apartment, where we hit another pair of cracktastic implausibilities. The first is the pair of onyx bookends, new as of three months previously, one of which has had its base felt replaced. The greens don't quite match, and Crouther has left grains of fingerprint powder in the not-quite-dry glue. (This will later be declared to be an essential clue as to the murderer's identity, since he has to be someone who would think of fingerprint powder when cleaning up after a crime.) Ellery deduces that the original felt was stained with blood, meaning that Mrs. French was murdered in such a way that she bled all over the desk. But consider! This is a glass-topped desk, absolutely bare except for the book-ends, the five books between them, and the Incredibly Awkward Memorandum, and a telephone. The more I think about it, the less I can explain how, if she's bleeding all over the shop, the blood targeted ONLY the felt of one book-end. Not the books, not the memorandum. Just the felt.
And then there's the books. Bless their little wood-pulp hearts. The five books on Mr. French's desk are An Outline of Paleontology by John Morrison, Fourteenth Century Trade and Commerce by Stani Wedjowski, A Child's History of Music by Ramon Freyburg, New Developments in Philately by Hugo Salisbury, Nonsense Anthology by A. L. Throckmorton. It will transpire that these books are part of a code used by the heroin pushers, who are using French's as an information kiosk--substitute in your knowledge of Murder Must Advertise (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1933) and the similar drug ring's similar use of Pym's, because this is essentially the same thing, only much less clever--and I'll be coming back to them in a bit, because their presence on the desk is the crowning piece in the book's dazzling tiara of implausibility.
Ellery also discovers in the apartment the remains of a Russian banque game (a game played, Westley tells him, only by Mrs. French and Bernice), complete with stubs of the cigarettes Bernice smokes (although not, as we will learn, smoked in Bernice's idiosyncratic method); the hat and shoes Bernice had been wearing the day before (and there's a genuinely clever bit with the French housekeeper and Bernice's maid, demonstrating that the person who put the hat into the hat box and the shoes into the shoe-bag was not Bernice Carmody, nor indeed a woman at all; and the absence of the razor blade Westley knows perfectly well he left in the bathroom the night before. (I'm on the fence about the detail of the razor blade, which Ellery deduces the murderer shaved with and broke. Because, okay, that's plausible enough I suppose, but would he really? It's all part of establishing that the murderer was trapped in the department store until after it opened, but I'm not sure it's necessary, and it makes me spend too much time wondering whether the murderer wouldn't have been better off just telling his flunkies he overslept or something. Because, after all, despite Ellery's clever hand-waving apologia that people are more likely to notice something changed than something missing altogether, Westley does notice, and I wouldn't think you'd want to count on somebody not.) He also discovers that the lipstick found in Mrs. French's bag, the one that wasn't hers, belonged to Bernice. And it contains ... heroin! (This book is also like Murder Must Advertise in its rather quaintly middle-class drug dealers and users.)
(I'm not even going to talk about Ellery's pocket detective kit, except to say that, as with Lord Peter's more ridiculous accessories, I'm very glad to see it softly and silently vanish away within a couple more books.)
I mentioned in talking about Cat of Many Tails, that book's awareness of the cost of fictional human lives that make up a murder mystery. This book, twenty years earlier in EQ's career, does not have that awareness. The two murder victims, Winifred French and Bernice Carmody, are mourned by exactly one person each: Winifred by her husband and Bernice by her father (who is himself strange and off-putting and another clumsy not-quite-red-herring). Nobody else cares particularly; none of the characters we're encouraged to sympathize with liked them; there's no sense of upheaval associated with their sudden, violent deaths. Bernice in particular seems to have been the ugly duckling of the French family; she and Marion didn't get on from the beginning, Marion tells Ellery, and the narrative conditions us to think that anyone who doesn't like Marion must be pretty close to a waste of skin. And then there's the whole heroin addiction and lying to everyone and bringing in more users for her dealer . . . Bernice is off-stage for the whole book, her death happens at some undisclosed point, possibly before the book starts, and they don't even bother confirming that her body has been found. Bernice only exists to be murdered and framed for her mother's murder. And there's even less of Winifred. It's true that the victim in Golden Age detective fiction mostly does exist for there to be a mystery about their murder, but I like EQ better when they've realized that's a sign of how artificial and hermetic Golden Age detective fiction is.
En avant, as early Ellery would say (and probably does). We establish that everyone who looked at Bernice over the past six months noticed she was a drug addict . . . except her mother and stepfather. Crouther cleverly pretends to detect the frame-up of Bernice which he himself deployed. There's a very weird interview with the French housekeeper, in which we learn that someone called the day before pretending to be Bernice in order to get a key to the apartment, and even though Bernice had just told the housekeeper she thought she'd lost her key, and even though the person pretending to be Bernice behaved very oddly, the housekeeper didn't realize she thought maybe it wasn't Bernice until Ellery suggests it. (Leading the witness, yo.) There is an interview with Cyrus French, in which we learn that the books that are supposed to be on his desk (Jack London, Richard Harding Davis, etc.) are not the books that are there. Ellery figures out the books are part of a code system. Crouther pretends to have found Bernice's trail.
And then there's the explanation of the books, which is a prime example of what happens when an author forgets that all the characters have to have equal subjectivity, even if nothing is ever written from their viewpoint. (This is particularly egregious for EQ, as they favor a kind of low-key omni.) Because the explanation goes like this: James Springer, the head of the Book Department has come under suspicion of fiddling his accounts. Mr. French assigns to investigate, not one of the store detectives, nor one of its accountants, but his personal secretary, Westley Weaver. Westley has to do his investigating after hours, because this is all supposed to be absolutely secret, so he's poking around in the Book Department after the store is closed, and therefore by a neatly arranged coincidence happens to observe Springer behaving oddly: marking books and putting them on a particular shelf. Westley can't imagine what's going on, but he makes a note of the address Springer wrote in the back of the book. Then he sees it happen again and then again and finally decides he needs to add it to his investigation.
So what does he do? After Springer has gone, he gets a copy of the book, writes the date in the endpapers, makes a private note of the address, and takes his duplicate book up to the apartment to study. He repeats this activity four more times. (N.b., it isn't going to do him a particle of good, since the only relevant feature of the books is that the first two letters of their authors' names correspond with days of the week.) The sixth time, he takes the audacious step of taking the original book. But please note: he then says, "I duplicated the markings in another book exactly and placed it where Springer had left the original, which I took away with me" (190). And then he explains the original mystery: the presence of those five ill-assorted books on Cyrus French's desk, where Jack London and his cohorts are supposed to be:
The fact is, EQ need those books to be on French's desk so that Crouther can see them when he's dealing with the (improbable) blood-stained book-end and realize that his drug-ring's communications method has been discovered (although, of course, in actuality it hasn't--Westley has not the faintest idea of what the rodomontade with the books is about), so that therefore it will be necessary for him to leave the department store in the morning and therefore necessary to hide the body where it won't be discovered until 12:15 and therefore bring us back around to the elaborate puzzle we're presented with to start. In other words, Westley deals with the books in this elaborately peculiar and slow-witted way because his authors need him to, not because his behavior has any internal consistency or even a lick of sense.
What's worse, EQ will forget that Westley says explicitly that he made a duplicate of the book he took away, and left it in the correct place. In later parts of The French Powder Mystery, we will be told that Crouther figured out the game was up when he discovered that sixth book was not in its proper place on the shelf in the Book Department (e.g., from Ellery's reconstruction of the crime: "on his way back [to the apartment] he stopped at the Book Department on the main floor and confirmed his suspicion that the sixth book was also missing" (252)). This is the sort of thing that happens when you build wildly elaborate plots; mostly somebody catches them before publication, but not always.
We detour for a drug raid on the address in the sixth book, which of course has already been abandoned. Crouther betrays himself by warning Springer the jig is up (although, of course, nobody but Ellery can figure out the cause and effect sequence). We have a clumsy red herring with Marion, who went out on the night of her stepmother's murder to confront the member of the Board with whom Winifred was on the verge of having an affair, and his exceedingly unpleasant wife. Most of the Board of Red Herrings--I mean, Directors--and Bernice's father prove to have unsubstantiatable and rather ridiculous alibis, about which nothing is ever done.
And then we hit the Challenge to the Reader and the denouement, in which some but not all of the elements of the mystery are explained. In later EQ books, they use this brilliantly: in Ten Days' Wonder, Ellery "solves" the case, but leaves out one plot thread that he really should have remembered and it comes back and bites him on the ass--which, sadly, does not happen here. The scarf is forgotten. We never find out who made that phone call pretending to be Bernice. Crouther commits suicide by cop, which is taken as proof of his guilt. (Something else they will explode as a fallacy in Ten Days' Wonder.) Such complete proof is it that the book ends on the reveal with a general smug feeling of nothing more needing to be said.
Dannay and Lee are teaching themselves to write detective fiction, and it's actually kind of cool to get a chance to watch--except for the part where it makes The French Powder Mystery rather frustrating to read after the second or third time. (Possibly not a problem very many people have.)
Ther are two principal problems: (1) the secondary characters' actions only make sense from the front, so to speak. If you walk around behind them, they're nothing but cardboard cut-outs in service of murderer and detective. And (2) follow-through. Chekhov's gun (or Marion's scarf) is on the mantelpiece in Act One, but is not fired in Act Three. And they fall over their own feet in the matter of the books.
We learn from this (since part of my reason for writing this incredibly long post is that I think my brain is trying to figure out something about plot and structure) (1) that keeping notes is not just for wimps. If you want to write an elaborate, intricate plot, you need to find ways to be sure you don't wrong-foot yourself or lose track of one or more elements as you go. And (2) that the more elaborate a series of actions, the more you need to be certain that they make sense from the character's side as well as from the author's. Occam's Razor does make a useful guide.
And now I'm going to take a bath and read some more Ellery Queen.
Of Ellery Queen's first three novels--The Roman Hat Mystery, The French Powder Mystery, and The Dutch Shoe Mystery--The French Powder Mystery is probably the weakest. I find Roman Hat incredibly off-putting, both because of the underlying racism that motivates both blackmailer and murderer and because Ellery-Queen-the-author (henceforward referred to as EQ, to distinguish them (i.e., the authors Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) from Ellery-Queen-the-character, whom I shall call Ellery) hasn't yet figured out how to write characters, so people I become genuinely fond of in later books--Inspector Queen, Sergeant Velie, Ellery himself--are horrible, grating caricatures of themselves. (I also can't quite forgive, in the early EQ books, alleged bibliophile Ellery's habit of scribbling notes to himself about the case in his valuable first editions. Dude, if you're that bibliophilic, CARRY A NOTEBOOK.) But as a mystery, Roman Hat hangs together relatively well. Dutch Shoe has better characterization on all sides, and the mystery, while complicated in what will become the trademark EQ style, is well under its authors' control.
French Powder, on the other hand, is kind of a mess.
The characterization is settling down: Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie are becoming recognizable as themselves, and while Ellery is still irritatingly arch and supercilious ("By the Seven Virgins of Theophilus!" he exclaims on meeting an old school friend over a murder victim's corpse.), EQ spends less time lovingly detailing his quirks and mannerisms and silver eyes and more time letting him be a detective. The secondary characters are somewhat perfunctorily drawn, but realistic enough. Could be better, could be worse. What I actually want to dissect here is the plot.
We begin with the corpse of Winifred Marchbanks French, second wife of Cyrus French, department store magnate and chairman of the Anti-Vice Society.
Well, actually, no we don't. We begin (after the inevitable irritant, this being an early EQ book, of the foreword by "J. J. McC." earnestly assuring us of the superior quality of both Ellery's writing and detecting skills) with a pair of awkward expository scenes, the first establishing:
- the new Police Commissioner is getting right up Inspector Queen's nose
- the head of the NYPD Narcotics Squad is a burly Italian named Salvatore Fiorelli
- a number of other largely irrelevant details, mostly about Ellery's detective prowess and the staff of the D.A.'s office
and the second establishing, EVEN MORE AWKWARDLY:
- first, that Cyrus French has an apartment on the top floor of his department store building
- which he uses mostly for business
- and which has a spring-lock door which can only be opened from the outside if you have a key
- second, that a memorandum explaining that there will be a meeting in the apartment at 11:00 a.m. (and, as we discover later when we get the full text of this INCREDIBLY AWKWARD memo, Mr. French and his personal secretary will be meeting at 9 a.m in the apartment) on the day the book begins
- third, descriptions of a school of red herrings--pardon me, I mean the French Department Store Board of Directors
- fourth, that neither Mrs. French nor her daughter by her first marriage, Bernice Carmody, slept at home the night before
- and fifth, that Mr. French's personal secretary, Westley Weaver, is in love with Marion French, Mr. French's daughter by his first marriage
- there's also a store detective put on duty at the door (that no one can open from outside without a key), but he's a fairly empty red herring. No one tries to get in while he's on duty, and the murderer would have had no reason to anyway.
Really, words cannot express how clumsy and awkward this scene is. It even eclipses the mistaken attempt at "humor" in the first scene.
NOW we get to the body, which has been cunningly concealed in a window display of avant-garde furniture. There's a bed that folds into the wall, and every day at 12:15, the girl whose job it is to demonstrate the wonders of the furniture pushes the button that deploys the bed.
And, in this case, also deploys the body.
Screams, rioting, pandemonium. (I worry about the child trampled underfoot, but it's never mentioned again, so presumably it did not die.) We see either too much or not enough of Paul Lavery, the French designer of the avant-garde furniture. He's neither a red herring nor a secondary character, but there's too much of him for a simple cameo. We also meet the murderer (and drug-ring organizer), Crouther the store detective, who plays the part of the loud-mouthed, glory-hungry rent-a-cop perfectly; we never really see what's behind it, except in Ellery's reconstructions of what the murderer did, until the reveal at the end. And even then, he gets himself shot rather than saying anything as his real self.
The police arrive with miraculous speed and elicit certain salient facts from the body, the window display, and the witnesses (including Mr. French, who has gone comprehensively to pieces and will play almost no role in the rest of the book):
- The corpse is Winifred French.
- She was shot twice, once in the heart and once just below the heart, and there is not enough blood in the bed for her to have been shot there (the M.E. goes on interminably about this, which is a mistake EQ will learn not to make in later books).
- Her purse contains a lipstick that does not match her lips
- and does not contain her key to the apartment.
- She died with her lips only partly made up.
- She is wearing her stepdaughter Marion's scarf.
These last two points are problematic. The scarf annoys the bejesus out of me, because they go to great lengths to establish that it is Marion's scarf, that she thinks she left it in the apartment, and that Winifred never wore Marion's clothes . . . and then they forget to do anything about it. As a red herring, it makes no sense, because no murderer would put her monogrammed scarf around her victim's neck and it does nothing whatsoever to prove that Marion was on the scene when the murder took place, and if it's supposed to point to something about Crouther, they entirely forget to tell us what it is. It seems to exist mostly to cause anxiety about Marion and to make Westley Weaver behave like a complete and total nincompoop (which, to be fair, is most of his function in the novel), but as a plot thread, it is left dangling unattended in the breeze. (This is one of the things I mean when I say this novel is so complicated the author can't keep track of it.)
The lipstick also bothers me. EQ have a fondness for murder victims interrupted in the middle of something (see, for example, The Egyptian Cross Mystery, where Ellery proves that one of the victims died in the middle of a game of checkers), but the argument eventually put forward is that Winifred was in the apartment, at her vanity, doing her lips, when Crouther (not having a key to the damn spring-locked door) knocked for a pre-arranged appointment. She left her lipstick unblended on her mouth, got up, went and let him in, took him into the study, went behind her husband's desk, had a confrontation with Crouther which resulted in her murder . . . all with her lipstick still in three discrete dabs on her lips. If he'd shot her while she was doing her make-up, that would be one thing, but the idea that any woman who would be doing her make-up in preparation for a secret midnight confrontation with the man who hooked her daughter on heroin, would then answer the door WITHOUT taking that split-second further to finish her damn lipstick--well, it doesn't wash.
We also establish various other things, like the fact that the murderer must have snuck into the department store through the freight entrance between 11 and 11:30, but could not possibly have gotten out that way, since the freight door was closed and locked fifteen minutes before Mrs. French even arrived, and the fact that by hiding the body in the window display, the one thing the murderer achieved was delaying its discovery until 12:15.
Then Ellery and Westley go up to the apartment, where we hit another pair of cracktastic implausibilities. The first is the pair of onyx bookends, new as of three months previously, one of which has had its base felt replaced. The greens don't quite match, and Crouther has left grains of fingerprint powder in the not-quite-dry glue. (This will later be declared to be an essential clue as to the murderer's identity, since he has to be someone who would think of fingerprint powder when cleaning up after a crime.) Ellery deduces that the original felt was stained with blood, meaning that Mrs. French was murdered in such a way that she bled all over the desk. But consider! This is a glass-topped desk, absolutely bare except for the book-ends, the five books between them, and the Incredibly Awkward Memorandum, and a telephone. The more I think about it, the less I can explain how, if she's bleeding all over the shop, the blood targeted ONLY the felt of one book-end. Not the books, not the memorandum. Just the felt.
And then there's the books. Bless their little wood-pulp hearts. The five books on Mr. French's desk are An Outline of Paleontology by John Morrison, Fourteenth Century Trade and Commerce by Stani Wedjowski, A Child's History of Music by Ramon Freyburg, New Developments in Philately by Hugo Salisbury, Nonsense Anthology by A. L. Throckmorton. It will transpire that these books are part of a code used by the heroin pushers, who are using French's as an information kiosk--substitute in your knowledge of Murder Must Advertise (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1933) and the similar drug ring's similar use of Pym's, because this is essentially the same thing, only much less clever--and I'll be coming back to them in a bit, because their presence on the desk is the crowning piece in the book's dazzling tiara of implausibility.
Ellery also discovers in the apartment the remains of a Russian banque game (a game played, Westley tells him, only by Mrs. French and Bernice), complete with stubs of the cigarettes Bernice smokes (although not, as we will learn, smoked in Bernice's idiosyncratic method); the hat and shoes Bernice had been wearing the day before (and there's a genuinely clever bit with the French housekeeper and Bernice's maid, demonstrating that the person who put the hat into the hat box and the shoes into the shoe-bag was not Bernice Carmody, nor indeed a woman at all; and the absence of the razor blade Westley knows perfectly well he left in the bathroom the night before. (I'm on the fence about the detail of the razor blade, which Ellery deduces the murderer shaved with and broke. Because, okay, that's plausible enough I suppose, but would he really? It's all part of establishing that the murderer was trapped in the department store until after it opened, but I'm not sure it's necessary, and it makes me spend too much time wondering whether the murderer wouldn't have been better off just telling his flunkies he overslept or something. Because, after all, despite Ellery's clever hand-waving apologia that people are more likely to notice something changed than something missing altogether, Westley does notice, and I wouldn't think you'd want to count on somebody not.) He also discovers that the lipstick found in Mrs. French's bag, the one that wasn't hers, belonged to Bernice. And it contains ... heroin! (This book is also like Murder Must Advertise in its rather quaintly middle-class drug dealers and users.)
(I'm not even going to talk about Ellery's pocket detective kit, except to say that, as with Lord Peter's more ridiculous accessories, I'm very glad to see it softly and silently vanish away within a couple more books.)
I mentioned in talking about Cat of Many Tails, that book's awareness of the cost of fictional human lives that make up a murder mystery. This book, twenty years earlier in EQ's career, does not have that awareness. The two murder victims, Winifred French and Bernice Carmody, are mourned by exactly one person each: Winifred by her husband and Bernice by her father (who is himself strange and off-putting and another clumsy not-quite-red-herring). Nobody else cares particularly; none of the characters we're encouraged to sympathize with liked them; there's no sense of upheaval associated with their sudden, violent deaths. Bernice in particular seems to have been the ugly duckling of the French family; she and Marion didn't get on from the beginning, Marion tells Ellery, and the narrative conditions us to think that anyone who doesn't like Marion must be pretty close to a waste of skin. And then there's the whole heroin addiction and lying to everyone and bringing in more users for her dealer . . . Bernice is off-stage for the whole book, her death happens at some undisclosed point, possibly before the book starts, and they don't even bother confirming that her body has been found. Bernice only exists to be murdered and framed for her mother's murder. And there's even less of Winifred. It's true that the victim in Golden Age detective fiction mostly does exist for there to be a mystery about their murder, but I like EQ better when they've realized that's a sign of how artificial and hermetic Golden Age detective fiction is.
En avant, as early Ellery would say (and probably does). We establish that everyone who looked at Bernice over the past six months noticed she was a drug addict . . . except her mother and stepfather. Crouther cleverly pretends to detect the frame-up of Bernice which he himself deployed. There's a very weird interview with the French housekeeper, in which we learn that someone called the day before pretending to be Bernice in order to get a key to the apartment, and even though Bernice had just told the housekeeper she thought she'd lost her key, and even though the person pretending to be Bernice behaved very oddly, the housekeeper didn't realize she thought maybe it wasn't Bernice until Ellery suggests it. (Leading the witness, yo.) There is an interview with Cyrus French, in which we learn that the books that are supposed to be on his desk (Jack London, Richard Harding Davis, etc.) are not the books that are there. Ellery figures out the books are part of a code system. Crouther pretends to have found Bernice's trail.
And then there's the explanation of the books, which is a prime example of what happens when an author forgets that all the characters have to have equal subjectivity, even if nothing is ever written from their viewpoint. (This is particularly egregious for EQ, as they favor a kind of low-key omni.) Because the explanation goes like this: James Springer, the head of the Book Department has come under suspicion of fiddling his accounts. Mr. French assigns to investigate, not one of the store detectives, nor one of its accountants, but his personal secretary, Westley Weaver. Westley has to do his investigating after hours, because this is all supposed to be absolutely secret, so he's poking around in the Book Department after the store is closed, and therefore by a neatly arranged coincidence happens to observe Springer behaving oddly: marking books and putting them on a particular shelf. Westley can't imagine what's going on, but he makes a note of the address Springer wrote in the back of the book. Then he sees it happen again and then again and finally decides he needs to add it to his investigation.
So what does he do? After Springer has gone, he gets a copy of the book, writes the date in the endpapers, makes a private note of the address, and takes his duplicate book up to the apartment to study. He repeats this activity four more times. (N.b., it isn't going to do him a particle of good, since the only relevant feature of the books is that the first two letters of their authors' names correspond with days of the week.) The sixth time, he takes the audacious step of taking the original book. But please note: he then says, "I duplicated the markings in another book exactly and placed it where Springer had left the original, which I took away with me" (190). And then he explains the original mystery: the presence of those five ill-assorted books on Cyrus French's desk, where Jack London and his cohorts are supposed to be:
the reason I kept them at the store was that I was studying them at odd moments and wanted them handy. I didn't want to bother the Old Man [Cyrus French] about them and the whole business [...] So I merely slipped each book, as I got it, between the book ends on the Old Man's desk. I also took away one of the Old Man's books to keep the count similar, and merely hid them in the bookcase, behind odd volumes there. I meant to explain if the Old Man noticed the new volumes on his desk, but he didn't, so I didn't bother.
(190-191)
The fact is, EQ need those books to be on French's desk so that Crouther can see them when he's dealing with the (improbable) blood-stained book-end and realize that his drug-ring's communications method has been discovered (although, of course, in actuality it hasn't--Westley has not the faintest idea of what the rodomontade with the books is about), so that therefore it will be necessary for him to leave the department store in the morning and therefore necessary to hide the body where it won't be discovered until 12:15 and therefore bring us back around to the elaborate puzzle we're presented with to start. In other words, Westley deals with the books in this elaborately peculiar and slow-witted way because his authors need him to, not because his behavior has any internal consistency or even a lick of sense.
What's worse, EQ will forget that Westley says explicitly that he made a duplicate of the book he took away, and left it in the correct place. In later parts of The French Powder Mystery, we will be told that Crouther figured out the game was up when he discovered that sixth book was not in its proper place on the shelf in the Book Department (e.g., from Ellery's reconstruction of the crime: "on his way back [to the apartment] he stopped at the Book Department on the main floor and confirmed his suspicion that the sixth book was also missing" (252)). This is the sort of thing that happens when you build wildly elaborate plots; mostly somebody catches them before publication, but not always.
We detour for a drug raid on the address in the sixth book, which of course has already been abandoned. Crouther betrays himself by warning Springer the jig is up (although, of course, nobody but Ellery can figure out the cause and effect sequence). We have a clumsy red herring with Marion, who went out on the night of her stepmother's murder to confront the member of the Board with whom Winifred was on the verge of having an affair, and his exceedingly unpleasant wife. Most of the Board of Red Herrings--I mean, Directors--and Bernice's father prove to have unsubstantiatable and rather ridiculous alibis, about which nothing is ever done.
And then we hit the Challenge to the Reader and the denouement, in which some but not all of the elements of the mystery are explained. In later EQ books, they use this brilliantly: in Ten Days' Wonder, Ellery "solves" the case, but leaves out one plot thread that he really should have remembered and it comes back and bites him on the ass--which, sadly, does not happen here. The scarf is forgotten. We never find out who made that phone call pretending to be Bernice. Crouther commits suicide by cop, which is taken as proof of his guilt. (Something else they will explode as a fallacy in Ten Days' Wonder.) Such complete proof is it that the book ends on the reveal with a general smug feeling of nothing more needing to be said.
Dannay and Lee are teaching themselves to write detective fiction, and it's actually kind of cool to get a chance to watch--except for the part where it makes The French Powder Mystery rather frustrating to read after the second or third time. (Possibly not a problem very many people have.)
Ther are two principal problems: (1) the secondary characters' actions only make sense from the front, so to speak. If you walk around behind them, they're nothing but cardboard cut-outs in service of murderer and detective. And (2) follow-through. Chekhov's gun (or Marion's scarf) is on the mantelpiece in Act One, but is not fired in Act Three. And they fall over their own feet in the matter of the books.
We learn from this (since part of my reason for writing this incredibly long post is that I think my brain is trying to figure out something about plot and structure) (1) that keeping notes is not just for wimps. If you want to write an elaborate, intricate plot, you need to find ways to be sure you don't wrong-foot yourself or lose track of one or more elements as you go. And (2) that the more elaborate a series of actions, the more you need to be certain that they make sense from the character's side as well as from the author's. Occam's Razor does make a useful guide.
And now I'm going to take a bath and read some more Ellery Queen.
