The Scarlet Letters & The Glass Village, by Ellery Queen
In my notice of (not really) reaching the “500 Books Read” milestone, I mentioned briefly the book we’re looking at today, which consists of two previously published mysteries slammed together in one volume by Signet in an effort to cash in on the seemingly bottomless wallets of mystery readers. The two books thus combined were The Scarlet Letters (published originally in 1953) and The Glass Village (1954) by the writing team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee—better known to most as Ellery Queen. Under this pseudonym the two cousins produced a long string of books, of varying quality, and through those mysteries as well as many anthologies and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (edited by Dannay) they cast a very long shadow over the field of American mystery. Most, though not all, of their mystery stories featured the detective Ellery Queen. And they were also among the first to franchise their popular name, allowing other authors to ghostwrite novels under the ‘Ellery Queen’ imprimatur based on plots provided by Dannay, though none of those ghostwritten books featured their eponymous detective. (The noted science fiction author Jack Vance even wrote a couple of these novels.)
I first became interested in the specific titles in this 2 novels volume—well, one of them, at least—through my perusal of Mike Grost’s interesting mystery Web pages, “A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection“, and (of course) specifically his page about Ellery Queen. If you are interested in older stories in the mystery genre, Mr. Grost provides many recommendations and some excellent background and history for tales from the earlier days of this strongest of all genres. He can be a tad frustrating, though, to me at least, through his fervent analytical approach, breaking apart each author and each book as if its essence could be captured thusly; I doubt, for example, that I shall follow his recommendations as to which specific chapters to read for some novels he mentions on his site, as I do insist on reading all the intervening chapters between ‘Chapters 1-10’ and ‘Chapters 21, 24, 30’ (not just for mystery novels, though it does seem especially important for those). Still, I have found good suggestions from his pages, and his tastes seem to dovetail quite often with my own—Melville Davisson Post deserves to be read by every American, in my opinion—and so when he placed The Scarlet Letters 4th among his list of the top novels of Ellery Queen, I had no hesitation in grabbing a copy, which happened to be contained in the 2-in-1 paperback pictured above.
I hated it. No, that’s two strong. I hate only one thing, and never books or music. I can say, rather, that I did not like it, and did not like it very strongly. Indeed, The Scarlet Letters has some interesting points, and there is a persuasive build-up to the final denouement which comes as a nice bit of writerly legerdemain, but ….
The Scarlet Letters finds our author cum amateur detective Ellery Queen and his personal secretary Nikki Porter becoming involved in the lives of a married millionaire couple, Dirk and Martha Lawrence. (This is back when being a millionaire meant something, and in 1953, it meant quite a lot.) This power couple has the perfect marriage, until they don’t, and they begin to show the strain in public, at which point Martha reaches out to Ellery for help. Turns out that Dirk is insanely jealous of Martha, although Martha is a loving, devoted wife worthy of Caesar himself. Dirk has taken to drinking heavily, suffering from severe writer’s block (he and Ellery first met at Mystery Writers of America gatherings), and Martha is at her wit’s end. The solution to this contretemps, or at least Ellery Queen’s solution, is to introduce his own secretary, Nikki, into this stressed and stressful house so that close tabs may be kept upon the situation. So Nikki—who also happens to be Martha’s best friend—goes to live with the Lawrences as a writer’s secretary for Dirk. And then things get worse. And then worse still. And even worse. There is screaming, crying, drunken rages, violence, and what is generally named ‘abuse’ in today’s world, though in 1953 they obviously had a different word for it, if they named it at all. At the end of a long, very long time and seemingly longer novel, there is a big blow-up, some plot twists, and lives are shattered. There is also a crazy ending, made a little more palatable by the fact that our amateur detective learns a little about the law that he really might have known if he had been keeping up on the subject, say by reading Perry Mason mysteries.
Now I’m not going to give too much away, not only because mystery books should be a surprise to the reader, but also because I believe that the less you know about a book at first approach the more its power can take you whither it will. Too much knowledge or hype can ruin your experience, just as the old joke talking about steak points out. If you come to see Citizen Kane for the first time focused solely upon the nickname for Marion Davis’s clitoris, you miss pretty much the entire movie. (Afterwards, sure, go nuts, delve into every detail, nuance, allusion; though you still won’t watch it as often as The Fifth Element.) But I spent perhaps half of this novel ready to scream “Get out!” at the characters. I wanted to tell both Ellery Queen and Nikki Porter to leave what was obviously a bad situation. I particularly blamed Mr. Queen (the character, though obviously the writer shares the blame) for allowing Nikki to remain in a home where the tension was obviously racing towards the breaking point, and not entirely because of the bad husband’s actions. The story also took far too long to develop, and relied upon some fairly silly plot devices (though they did manage to provide the title). I found myself all too distracted, though you may very well have a different experience (as Mr. Grost obviously had), by the menace of encroaching domestic violence and the problem of unbearable marital tension which cannot be solved as easily as one solves a mystery in fiction. And then, after enduring an interminable set of maddening situations to which the only correct response would be, I repeat, “Get out!”, the book ended with tragedy and farce which could not repair the damage to my reader’s soul done by the previous pages.
But hey, that’s just my opinion. At least one other disagrees quite strongly.
In addition, had I not gone out of my way to get this novel, I likely would not have read The Glass Village, which I loved, loved, loved. So just like the old canard about the Chinese old man, I cannot be sure what is bad and what is good.
This story is a very different animal than the tale of privileged power couples among the New York City smart set just discussed, though it also combines tragedy and farce, and our Mr. Ellery Queen (the fictional detective, not the pseudonymous author) does not appear at all. In fact, The Glass Village is the very first novel under the Ellery Queen pseudonym to eschew the eponymous amateur detective. The reasons for this writerly choice are both obvious and intriguing, for the story is set in a (very) small town in New England into which it would have been very difficult to introduce the oh-so-urbane author and sometime sleuth (although this difficulty did not stop Dannay and Lee from grafting Ellery Queen onto a Sherlock Holmes story a dozen years later). The smallness of the town is crucial to the plot, both in terms of the town’s size as well as its mindset. This is not, however, a mere tale of prejudiced yokels, but is a much deeper recounting of a tightly bound community carrying not only the weight of decades of prejudice against outsiders, but also the burden of some of the weightiest ideals which gave birth to the United States of America.
Briefly told, The Glass Village tells of an almost incestuously small village in which a terrible murder is committed, the culprit is apprehended, and the entire town rushes to punish the brutal crime. In a feat of creative brilliance, the novel foists upon the reader a plot founded upon an almost unbelievable notion, that of a kangaroo court condoned by the larger state government for the purpose of quelling possible rebellion and likely further bloodshed. Though the bucolic staging of the small town life seems slow and almost ponderous at the very beginning of the novel, and this reader at least feared that I was reading another story as disengaging as The Scarlet Letters, every pastoral step through the bovine village in the opening chapters turned out to be both necessary and efficient at crafting the perfect setting for the jewel of a story to follow. Without giving too much away—heck, I’m hardly going to talk about the actual story at all—the slow pace of the first pages turns out to tell us everything we need to know and to make credible the incredible events which are to follow.
The book was originally published in 1954, and it is no accident that it came out in the same year as the Army hearings which finally began to unravel to maddening grip of Joseph McCarthy upon the very neck of democracy in the USA. The Glass Village is a jeremiad against that insensate rage and rush to judgment which forms all too large a part of the American history of Red Scares, anti-immigrant laws and movements, and—to our eternal shame—lynchings. But somehow Dannay and Lee have crafted in this novel a tale which does not wallow in ungainly allegory, does not hit the reader over the head with the hammer of Truth. Instead, their story reveals a deeper strain of high morality, and shows the very real passions which propel men and women into both the highest and the lowest actions which are both called by the name ‘patriotism’. The characters in The Glass Village are not so easily distinguished as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as those of, say, The Crucible, though some take similar unjustifiable actions. Instead, they are shown as very human, in the worst but also the best sense of the word.
But this is also a mystery story, and a darn good one at that (though I confess I spotted the key point early on). Where The Scarlet Letters had an all-too-believable plot ruined by unbelievable actions on the part of some of the main characters, The Glass Village has an altogether ridiculous plot—tragedy as farce, and comedy as terror—which somehow works on every level. It is a worthy successor to the best of the Uncle Abner stories. The main protagonist, a world-weary major recently returned from his second war (in Korea) who had lived in Shinn Corners (the titular village) as a child, is almost a prototypical outsider, but one who has a claim to belong. Strangely touched by his brief encounter with the true beauty residing in this fragile town, his cynicism will be forever changed, transmuted into something not entirely free of skepticism, but no longer resistant to those stirrings of the human heart which we moderns expend so much effort trying to suppress.