Masks Off at Midnight, by Valentine Williams (1933)

Valentine Williams

A few years ago I happened to mention a Valentine Williams novel in the course of a piece on mysteries written by bridge players (found here).  Williams himself was not a bridge player but his co-author of Fog (1932), Dorothy Rice Sims, was a national champion. In the brief paragraph about that particular book I mentioned that it seemed likely that Williams did most of the heavy lifting with respect to writing that volume, a thriller that takes place on an ocean liner. At that time I noted Williams’s name for later investigation but since the peak of his career was in the 20s and 30s and he apparently had no long-lasting appeal or huge market, his volumes didn’t pass through my hands that often.

There’s been a couple of developments since my bridge-players article that have made Williams’s work more available. One is the general resurgence of interest in Golden Age material, and a concomitant republication of the well-aged backlist of many major publishers. The other is that, in my home in Canada, the date at which works pass into the public domain is more permissive than other jurisdictions and some very interesting authors are now available to me over the internet for no charge.

That second development is what led me to Masks Off at Midnight. The hard-working volunteers at Faded Page are currently doing an excellent job of bringing public-domain volumes back into readable electronic formats for Canadians. I hasten to echo their reminder that, if you live outside Canada, check your country’s copyright laws before downloading or accessing the files. Faded Page has made available sufficient of the works of Valentine Williams that I was able to flip through three or four of them before finding the present volume sufficiently interesting to investigate in more depth.

Please be warned that this essay concerns a work of detective fiction; part of its potential enjoyment is based on surprising the reader. If you read any further you will learn something about the titular novel and perhaps some others; I discuss elements of plot and construction and, although I do not lay out the answers, I did need to discuss the murder’s motive.  If you haven’t already read this novel, reading this essay means it will have lost its power to surprise you to greater or lesser extent, and that would be a shame. So please go and read this book before you spoil your own enjoyment. If you proceed past this point, you’re on your own. 

What is this book about?

Laurel, a “drowsy little country town” of 20,000 on Long Island, is undergoing upheaval. When the modern reader learns in the opening paragraphs that “New York was no more than an hour away by car,” we understand that real estate development is about to come to Laurel and not everyone is going to like it. In this case the upper classes are focusing their resentment of change upon “Brent Hordern, the millionaire” (the phrase is used as if there’s only one millionaire in the vicinity).

Brent Hordern drives a $15,000 Rolls and has a White Russian chauffeur (Ivan) in smart plum-coloured livery; before Hordern finally appears in the pages, we learn that nearly everyone in the book has reason to hate him on either a financial or emotional level. Financially, as one might expect, he is busily engaged in ruining the fortunes of many local landowners. Emotionally, he is entangled with two women, each of which has her own set of admirers. Constance Barrington is a “chic and attractive widow” recently arrived from Europe, who loves Hordern but is not reciprocated; she’s a “vamp.” Jenny Tallifer is “one of the outstanding members of the younger set of Laurel,” whom Hordern wishes to marry but whose suit is not encouraged. Jenny loves the poor but honest editor of the local newspaper, but must for social reasons marry into money; her entire family has a long aristocratic lineage and is broke.

The story moves quickly towards a large set-piece; a group of monied locals has amused itself for years by putting on first a grand masked ball, each year a different period, and at midnight having a thematic pageant. All the upper classes get dressed in costume and play along but, for various social and financial reasons, Hordern has been forbidden to attend; there are many guards and they’ve been instructed to be on the lookout. This year the theme is Versailles, and at midnight it’s designed that the “Sultan of Morocco” is to be presented to “the court of Louis XVII”. Wave after wave of locals parade past the “French court”, costumed either as Moroccan or French courtiers. The parade’s climax is the time for the Sultan to open the curtains of his sedan chair and step forward — but nothing happens. Eventually someone opens the curtains to reveal the corpse of Brent Hordern dressed in a burnous, shot with a .38. Chaos ensues.

In the crowd is a young detective from Scotland Yard, Trevor Dene. Yes, he’s from Scotland Yard, and yes, this is Long Island, New York, USA. He’s a Cambridge man, on some kind of vacation with his wife (who married him in an earlier book and who is from the area) and has been making himself agreeable to the locals sufficiently to be welcomed to the pageant. We get very little idea of what Mrs. Dene is like, but Dene is immediately allowed a free hand with respect to the murder, essentially having full police powers.

Dene, an untidy young man in flannels with sandy hair and large horn-rimmed spectacles, is completely in control of the entire case. He identifies each area of the investigation and pursues it to its end, whether it’s financial or personal, and identifies motives for everyone in town. I won’t give you too much more about the plot, since that from here on in is the principal interest of this book, but it moves quickly, has a lot of interesting false trails, and finally leads to a dramatic confrontation in which Dene faces the armed and murderous killer, who confesses in great detail and is then shot by the police. Curiously, Dene decides exactly where guilt is going to be apportioned and to whom, so as to enable various nasty social secrets to be kept hidden and true love to come to fruition.

Why is this book worth your time?

I do have the habit of asking that question and most often I can be quite emphatic about my answer — a book is or isn’t worth your time. Here, I have to be a little more nebulous — let’s say yes, this is worth your time, but with qualifications.

Recently I quoted Sophie Hannah, author of the two continuation novels of Hercule Poirot to which is imminently to be added a third, as having said something sharp and on the money.  I’ll repeat it again:

“I think the resurgence in the popularity of golden age crime fiction is partly down to the fact that we do, at some level, like to have that satisfaction of having a story told to us in a very overtly story-like way,” she says. “Inherent in golden age crime writing is the message: ‘This is a great story and you will have fun reading it’.”

And that’s why this book might well be worth your time. It is a story told to us in a very overtly story-like way; I don’t think we are actually meant to believe in the existence of the characters as real people and I don’t think we are actually meant to believe that the events of the plot might have happened. This story is a kind of sketch of a real, breathing story. But it’s meant to be fun and engaging and I think it succeeds, within its own self-imposed limits.

There’s a number of reasons why the story lacks that realistic quality; I truly do think that one of the reasons is that Valentine Williams was deliberately not trying to write realistically.  Looking over his publishing history, it seems as though his greatest successes were in the area of espionage/adventure fiction. He’d had some personal experience in that area and his stories about the evil genius “Clubfoot” fighting against the British Secret Service appear to have been by far his most popular work (judging solely by what I can find about him; everything seems to mention Clubfoot). I flipped through a couple of the Clubfoot books and they seem cast in an antique form; clean-limbed young Englishmen rescuing plucky young beauties from Sinister Foreigners. The Daily Telegraph called The Man with the Clubfoot “An extremely vivid story, full of thrilling incidents.” I think that’s accurate for as much of Williams’s work as I’ve seen.

That being the case, it’s reasonable to find, as I have, that this book is filled with lightly-sketched characters doing fairly silly things in the name of producing an exciting plot. So there’s “old coloured Mamie” who brings Jenny Tallifer her breakfast in bed, Ivan the White Russian dreaming of the vanished glories of the Tsar, and “one of Hordern’s farm-workers, a Polack …” because racial and social stereotypes are an easy way to populate an exciting story. I’m not as repelled by this casual stereotyping as I usually am because, frankly, all the upper-class WASPs are stereotypes too. (Particularly Constance Barrington, about whom more below.) The only characters who approach realism are the ones who take social position sufficiently importantly to commit murder to protect theirs — which is kind of why this mystery was not especially difficult to solve. The characters whom Williams troubles to motivate are the ones to keep your eye on.

Probably the main problem for the modern reader is that this book is not based in literary traditions that are fresh and familiar. Here, we have the storytelling techniques that Williams perfected in Secret Service adventures; this story mode is long gone, although shreds of it remain in the stories like the films about Jason Bourne and James Bond. As readers, we’ve learned that it’s more satisfying if Ivan the White Russian has a motive for the murder that’s individual and significant, not merely a longing for the ancien regime and a hatred of wealthy people on political grounds.

What do we learn about the social milieu?

There is one interesting idea within this novel that is likely to slide right on by the modern reader, because the “college widow” is so antique a meme that it may have completely lost its meaning today. Constance Barrington plays the role here … beautiful, wealthy, with “unassailable … social presentability”, and an outsider in local society. She is a widow, which means she’s sexually experienced and without the handicap of a husband for the local young Lotharios to overcome. “To all appearances she was not even very interested in men. For that, as every young wife in Laurel realized long before the men were aware of it, she was all the more dangerous.” Her type is related to the Theda Bara-esque vamp, but with the added overlay that in a college town she has a constant flow of new devotees.

There’s an excellent article on the college widow from the Paris Review here, which goes into more detail about why the audience of 1933 would be much more familiar with the idea. As the article notes, for the modern audience there’s only really one readily accessible point of exposure to this cliche, which was already somewhat past its prime; the Marx Brothers’ 1932 film Horse Feathers, in which the exquisite Thelma Todd is the college widow who tries to extract knowledge of the college’s secret football plays from Groucho using her sexual wiles. (The movie turns into a “football movie” in its final minutes, which is an antique form of B-movie about which I’ve written glancingly before.) Someone says that she’s the college widow, and everyone nods knowingly. Oh, THAT kind of girl.

Other than shedding some light on that antique meme, this volume doesn’t offer much in the way of social observation because it’s not really realistic. Laurel is the kind of town where everyone seems to have money, nobody really does, and nobody does anything except keep up social appearances. There is a lovely moment of description of Constance  Barrington that I thought might appeal to my blogfriend Moira, whose Clothes in Books is always an interesting lens through which to view older texts:

“The barrier lay rather in the woman herself. She did all the usual things. She played a little golf, gave small teas or dinners for bridge at her charming house, visited a little. But she encouraged no intimacies. She lived her own life. She steered clear of all cliques, moving in and out of Laurel society with her slow, enigmatic smile and strange, questioning regard which Jenny was very sure missed nothing. With her dead white skin, almond-shaped eyes as green as any cat’s, and reddish gold hair—the authenticity of its tint was the subject of inexhaustible surmise in Laurel drawing-rooms—and the rather picturesque style of dressing she affected, Constance Barrington would have stood out against any background. But at Laurel the women—at any rate, as far as the married set was concerned—bothered little about clothes and still less about their complexions. To be a Tallifer, a van Bossche, a Parton, or a Foxley was sufficient to secure recognition—to rely upon dressmaker or beauty specialist smacked of the plebeian. And so against the roughened skins and sensible tweeds of the Laurel matrons Mrs. Barrington’s vivid, exotic beauty, her floppy hats and trailing frocks, were by contrast as striking as a blackbird in a field of snow.”

The perennial conflict so often noted in British GAD fiction; the tweedy countrywomen are jealous of the elaborately gowned townswoman.

The idea of the White Russian who has come down in social rank is also part of a vanished milieu that we don’t really grasp any more; Inspector Alleyn actually started his career lumbered with a White Russian butler (in 1934’s A Man Lay Dead) but this gentleman was mercifully retconned out of existence by the second book, as I recall. I’m not sure what degree of sartorial excellence, or lack of excellence, is meant to be indicated by Ivan’s plum-coloured livery (where the standard is unrelieved black). That his employer is a show-off? Aspiring to the ton? Hard to say.

At first glance I was mystified by a reference within chapter 19 to chouette, literally “owl” or “owl-like”, which in my experience is … oh, you might describe a very cool jazz musician or a super-stylish teenage girl as chouette, at least in Quebec. But that can’t be what’s meant here:

“Ned Bentley had been in a crap game, while Leo, his brother, had whiled away the tedium of waiting with innumerable rounds of chouette with Rosalie Ashford (dancing-girl) and George Foxley (Sultan’s cup-bearer).”

From the context I figured out that what was meant was a kind of three-handed variant of backgammon, of which I’d never heard.

There’s one peculiarity that I cannot reconcile. Chapter 23 contains the information:

“where the Acropolis Restaurant, Proprietor Joe Ionides, announced by a notice in the window of its built-out verandah that ‘Wines & Liquors’ were on sale within.”

This book was published in 1933 (oddly, the copyright date on my copy is 1933 AND 1934) and Prohibition ended in December of 1933. So either there’s some flouting of the law going on here that wasn’t common, to my knowledge, or else Williams is anticipating what he knew was going to be the new reality; Franklin Roosevelt had been elected in 1932 promising to end Prohibition. I just don’t recall other volumes from precisely this time period making a point of having liquor for sale in stores. Or, by the copyright dates, he may have revised it in 1934 and added this little nod that his audience would have appreciated.

There’s a mention of a man in a Palm Beach suit, which I thought was white and double-breasted. Other people agree, but I found at least one differing definition: “The “Palm Beach Suit” is a term used to describe the combination of navy blazer, buttondown oxford cloth shirt, stone colored chino’s or khakis, and brown slip-on mocs like topsiders worn with no socks.” Again, perhaps a question more suited to Moira at Clothes in Books, but it interested me.

To sum up; I enjoyed this volume although it’s light and fast-moving and not very challenging. In fact perhaps I enjoyed it because it was those things; I might just have been in the mood for something less brain-cracking than John Dickson Carr or Anthony Berkeley. I’m encouraged to know that it’s in the public domain in Canada and easily available, see above, which bodes well for the rest of the world.

 

 

 

 

Cards on the fable: Mysteries written by bridge players

I’m a bridge player and a mystery reader, and to me it doesn’t seem odd that there should be a natural affinity between playing serious bridge and appreciating a well-written mystery. (And doing difficult crosswords, but that’s another article.) Both require similar skill sets; the ability to notice small clues, draw inferences from them and form a theory that leads to a conclusion. Yes, really, playing bridge is like that if you’ve done it a long time. “Hmm, my left-hand opponent didn’t even twitch when I played the queen of diamonds, so I deduce his partner has that particular king. Therefore Lefty is more likely to have the spade king, and I’m going to finesse him for it.” That’s the same kind of thought pattern that solves fictional mysteries. There’s a similar pleasure in both milieus; the “Aha!” response to solving a problem can be very enjoyable.

Contract bridge was in its infancy during the Golden Age of Detection, of course, since it was invented in 1929. But immediately upon its introduction into polite society, contract bridge became extremely popular among writers of detective fiction and hence among their characters. How often, for instance, do an ill-assorted set of houseguests in a country-house mystery stand up from quarrelling at the dinner table to play bridge for a few hours, with people taking their turn as dummy and wandering in and out of Sir Cedric’s library accompanied by an astonishing variety of weapons and motives? Agatha Christie was a good social bridge player, or at least to my mind she knew enough about it to know the vagaries of how different people keep score, and what happens when you bid and make a lucky grand slam. Cards on the Table is where she has most to say about bridge, but there are many other mentions.

In fact a number of fairly well known writers (both of mysteries and general fiction) were bridge players to greater or lesser degree, either known to us biographically or merely by things they say in their books. Somerset Maugham, for instance, was a bridge fiend and an excellent player; to a lesser degree, but apparently very highly skilled, was Edmund Crispin (Bruce Montgomery). Philip MacDonald is said to have been an enthusiastic player. Ian Fleming thought so much of bridge that he inserted a well-known bridge problem into one of his James Bond novels (the “Culbertson hand” in Moonraker, where one player has the majority of
face cards yet cannot take a single trick). A couple of mystery writers have set a book against a background of the game; Georgette Heyer‘s Duplicate Death (1951) (discussed in detail by me here) is better known than Anne Archer‘s 1931 Murder at Bridge but both take place at a large card party. And well-known Sherlockian pastiche writer Frank Thomas wrote two elementary (sorry) textbooks on contract bridge using Holmes and Watson as a bridge partnership. They’re actually good textbooks for a beginner.

Omar Sharif at the table

Writers as a category, though, have not produced any great bridge players, it seems. Politics (Dwight Eisenhower and Deng Xiaoping), business (Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) and cinema (Omar Sharif, a top-ranked player who has represented three countries in international competition, and Chico Marx) have all generated great bridge players. But although certainly there are good writers who are good bridge players, no one appears to have reached the top rank of bridge players after achieving success in writing.

The other way of going about it is to start as a bridge expert and write a great mystery. And believe me, folks, that’s never happened. I’m not sure why it is, but expert bridge players seem to have the writing equivalent of a tin ear when it comes to generating detective fiction or indeed any kind of fiction at all. Matthew Granovetter is a well-known American bridge player now living in Italy, and has written many interesting bridge texts and columns, but his three bridge mysteries have been ghastly. GHASTLY. I discuss his 1989 novel I Shot My Bridge Partner here; suffice it to say it made my list of “Mysteries to die before you read”.  There are many others equally awful, now that self-publishing is more common, even more of them, and I’m not sure why. Is it that bridge players think that mysteries are a kind of formula fiction, where you flesh out the activities of a game of Cluedo and meanwhile throw in a bunch of backstage information about bridge tournaments? I’ve seen that a number of times and it never works. I’ve talked before about how minority groups find it useful to use a mystery as a way of telling a story set in their particular milieu, in what I call the “information mystery” format. But those information mysteries have some “guts” to them because the minority stories are fresh and important and dramatic. The maximum stakes of winning or losing a bridge tournament were pretty much exhausted in that antique variety of film, the college football movie of the 1930s, and the two plot threads seem impossible to balance in intensity. Ah well.

Being as obsessive as I am about reading all the mysteries, of course over the years I’ve tracked down dozens of mysteries about bridge written by bridge players. Unfortunately there are no really good ones. In fact the more famous the bridge player the more horrible the mystery, it seems. Terrence Reese and Jeremy Flint are two very famous bridge players who both competed for England at the highest international level, but their 1979 bridge/mystery/thriller novel, Trick 13, is tooth-grindingly painful to read. Reese was well known to be incredibly focused at the bridge table (there’s a famous story about his friends hiring a woman to walk nude around the table while he was playing a hand, and he didn’t notice) and wrote dozens of bridge textbooks; this novel reads as though it was written by someone who had been told how humans tend to act but who had never actually met any. Except for the parts where a woman is spanked with a hairbrush, which are regrettably salacious and smack of someone’s personal knowledge. Ugh.

Don Von Elsner was a very good bridge player and it may well have been that he would have found success as a mystery writer if he’d found a way to focus on the puzzle mystery. He had most of what he needed; a sense of how to sprinkle humour through his plots, an understanding that you had to tell a story before you gave bridge lectures, and the ability to occasionally create a reasonably good character.  Unfortunately in the early 60s when he was writing, what publishers wanted was spy novels, so he wrote spy novels with a bridge background about the adventures of one Jake Winkman: bridge player, low-level spy, and enthusiastic heterosexual. He achieved publication in mass-market paperback by a major publisher, so someone was reading these back in the 60s, but they don’t stand up well. The books focus more on sex than violence and the spying is minimal. (One of his plots, about a Commie code being transmitted via the spot cards in newspaper bridge hands, is just ludicrous.)

Dorothy Rice Sims certainly stands out in the history of bridge, although unfortunately not especially for her contribution to mystery writing. Mrs. Sims may indeed have become famous to bridge players originally because of her marriage to a national bridge champion, P. Hal Sims, and their subsequent winning of the second national mixed-pair championship in the US (and then their shared participation in a very important public bridge competition). But her fascinating biography — read the bare bones of it here in Wikipedia — includes the invention of an entire area of bridge theory, that of the “psychic” bid. She played literally at the dawn of bridge when no one really knew what they were doing, but everyone was anxious to discern what the best “rules” for bidding and play were; except Mrs. Sims. Her philosophy was literally to make things up on the spur of the moment (she wrote a book called How to Live on a Hunch, or, the Art of Psychic Living) and her ground-breaking book, Psychic Bidding, was published after her multiple championships. The next year she collaborated on 1932’s Fog, a thriller taking place aboard an ocean liner, with experienced thriller writer Valentine Williams; I don’t think it’s going too far overboard to suggest that Mr. Williams did most of the heavy lifting. The book is interesting; I’m hampered by not having a copy at hand to refresh my memory, but I recall thinking it was at least competent and enjoyable reading.

This brings me finally to the most successful writer of mysteries and writer on bridge, S. K. (Skid) Simon. Skid Simon collaborated with Caryl Brahms, a newspaper writer and ballet columnist, on the first of eleven comic novels in 1937, A Bullet in the Ballet. This novel immediately catapulted them to the front rank of a writing style which they pioneered, the madcap mystery — Julian Symons would have categorized them as Farceurs. A murder takes place in the eccentric ranks of the ballet company of Vladimir Stroganoff, a zany Russian-born impresario, and Inspector Quill of Scotland Yard must untangle financial, political, and unusual sexual motives before solving the crime. The book was a best-seller in the UK in its year (partly because it was unusually frank about the sexual preferences of certain of the ballet dancers) and generated a career for the pair writing comedic takes on various historical situations before Simon’s untimely death at age 40. I’ve never cared for this particular four-volume series about Quill and Stroganoff, because they seem a little overwrought to me, but they certainly have their adherents.

Skid Simon, though, is much better known to the bridge world than the mystery one; he was one of a small group who created the British-born bridge bidding system known as Acol. I’m not sure how to describe the magnitude of this achievement; it was a revolutionary thing in its day and created the foundation for decades of competition at the highest levels of international play, including the foundations of the careers of Terence Reece and Jeremy Flint.  Simon also wrote a brilliant bridge textbook in 1945, Why You Lose At Bridge, that is still useful today; it focuses on the psychology of bridge players and how they learn what they know about bridge. And it does so in a very amusing way; Simon invents humans like the garrulous Mrs. Guggenheim to take the place of the faceless Easts and Norths that populate many bridge texts.  His text will last a long time; it even has utility for games other than bridge.

And I have to say, in terms of a mystery with bridge in it, the Brahms/Simon collaborations are not on the map; there’s literally no bridge at all. So if you’re looking for a murder mystery that is set against a background of duplicate bridge, I have nothing to offer that I think you’ll really enjoy, I’m sad to say. If you want to read a mystery that has bridge in it that isn’t by a professional player, I recommend the works of Susan Moody about bridge teacher Cassandra Swann; there is a nice balance between bridge and mystery, Susan Moody has a great sense of humour, and she can actually write — she knows how to structure a book to make it flow, without being predictable. Okay, it’s a bit hard to imagine why a bridge teacher keeps getting involved in murders but I personally have been able to suspend my disbelief; I wish she’d write a few more.

Please, please, do not write and tell me about your cousin’s former bridge partner in rural Wisconsin who self-published a bridge mystery. I’ve read a couple of those, perhaps even that specific one, and trust me — I am doing the authors a favour by not reviewing them. So far the field of self-published bridge mysteries has been marked by a uniform awfulness, in my experience, and the experience of shooting those particular fish in that small barrel is not one I relish. Yes, it is impressive to have mastered the strip squeeze; I haven’t managed it. The place for that sort of anecdote is half-time break at a tournament, not grinding the action of a murder mystery to a complete dead stop while you explain your brilliance for ten pages. And, generally speaking, if one wants to write a murder mystery it helps to have read a couple first. Don’t whip out the unreliable narrator gambit or the long-lost twin brother as if I’ve been living under a rock for fifty well-read years. I went through three or four of these no-hit wonders a few years back and until someone writes the breakout novel, you can safely avoid everything that’s not from a major publisher.

Similarly, I am absolutely not interested in any of the handful of cozy bridge mysteries in various series, some of which I’ve also read. On The Slam by Honor Hartman about the little old widow (#1 in a series!) who decides to learn bridge until an unpleasant neighbour is murdered at the table will stand for all of them, as far as I’m concerned. It might possibly be of use if you were having trouble understanding some of the most basic principles of bridge, since it handles them lightly and clearly and for the most part leaves them alone. The mystery itself might trouble a bright fourteen-year-old to solve before the police do; you will not be unduly strained. I gave this book to a dear friend who was very elderly at the time, and in roughly the same situation.  She returned it to me almost immediately with a withering glance, saying, “What PAP.” I have to agree. Generally, any book whose cover proclaims “Bridge tips included!” is suggesting a paucity of attention to the mystery in the process.  And all the Goodreads comments that suggest the positive virtue that you don’t actually have to know anything about bridge to read this book — are missing the point. That’s a bug, not a feature. The book should make you want to learn, not be pleased that you don’t know how.

If you are a bridge player who wants to read a mystery, I suggest that you either go with Susan Moody or avoid the topic of bridge entirely as a basis for a mystery. And if you want to know how to play a better game of bridge, I emphatically recommend S. J. Simon’s Why You Lose at Bridge.