Adventure classics -- Fleeing the scene sans ration card

The Yellow Room

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

***

In last Friday’s Adventure classics installment of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1945 mystery, The Yellow Room, war hero Greg Spencer looked like the most likely suspect in the murder of his unwanted wife. Desperate to prove her brother’s innocence, Greg’s sister Carol found herself hampered constantly by, of all things, the chronic shortages of World War II civilian life.

Opening the once-wealthy Spencer’s family’s vacation home, a crumbling mansion on the coast of Maine, Carol finds the body of an unknown young woman stashed in the linen closet. But the local police don't have so much as camera to take pictures of fingerprints, or any film even if they could find a camera. And anybody without gas coupons is beyond suspicion. Or is he? (Or she?) Rinehart used wartime rationing to turn a sleepy little village into the equivalent of a locked room mystery.

A writer worthy of her war-rationed typewriter, Rinehart, found red herrings (luckily, not yet rationed) at every turn. And the reddest of the herrings were those in the military. Who better to take advantage of wartime chaos by disappearing among the thousands of travelling soldiers? Or to have a second life, even a second family at a base far from home? Or even to bump civilians off a transcontinental airline in order to flee the scene of the crime?

Wait, could Greg Spencer have pulled off that last trick? Or was it the work of his best friend, Terry Ward, supposedly still stationed on the other side of the continent?

Of course, the only person who couldn’t possibly have killed the woman Greg Spencer married after a drunken one-night stand is his other best friend, Don Richardson. Richardson was engaged to Spencer’s sister Carol shortly before he left for training as a fighter pilot, but his plane was shot down in the South Pacific more than a year ago. 

Don’s brokenhearted father, retired Colonel Richardson,  clings to the pathetic hope that his son is still alive. Carol, however, has finally taken Don’s engagement ring off her finger, a move that has not gone unnoticed by Major Dane, another mysterious soldier allegedly at the little summer resort to recuperate from wounds received in action.

Will Dane be able to clear the brother of the woman he loves? Will Dane and Carol find a wartime romance of their own?

Among the most famous of Rinehart’s mysteries, The Yellow Room is still widely available. I even found it on podcast at www.classicmysteries.net.backlist-of-classic-mysteries-podcasts.htm/. What wouldn’t Carol Spencer have given for the aid of electronic media to clear her brother of murder? And for anyone fascinated by how to turn something that seems as handicapping as rationing into the stuff of suspense, I found an intriguing blog on the subject of rationing at www.sarahsundin.com/.

(Next Friday, what made a handful of well-brought-up women like Rinehart invent their very own mystery genre?)

Adventure classics -- When the good guys are behaving badly

The Yellow Room

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

***

It’s a week after the June 6, 1944, and the news everywhere is about the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Everywhere, that is, except in the tiny Maine resort town where the rich and beautiful “summer people” expect the arrival of Medal of Honor recipient and debonair bachelor, Gregory Spencer. But when Spencer’s sister arrives to ready the family mansion, Crestview, for her brother’s return, she finds the housekeeper hospitalized after a bizarre accident and the half-burned body of a murdered young woman stashed in a linen closet.

And that’s just the start of the happenings in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1945 mystery, The Yellow Room.

It’s enough make Spencer’s younger sister Carol give up the whole idea of a summer vacation. Except she’s under orders from the local police not to leave, and as she turns up more details, including the overnight stay of the murdered woman in the mansion’s guest room, the one hung with yellow wallpaper.

The yellow room is a very pretty room, with pastel furniture and curtains and its own bathroom. But why did the Spencer’s resident housekeeper let the young woman stay there? And once there, why did she walk out the door to meet her murderer?

Strangest of all, the chief—make that only—suspect in the death is Greg Spencer, who, it turns out is the murdered woman’s husband, married to her secretly following a night of drunken partying. Is that why the housekeeper won’t explain her actions? Oh, no, now the housekeeper is dead too, lying cold on the floor of her hospital room despite round the clock guards.

It’s no surprise that Mary Roberts Rinehart, the creator of all this mayhem and mystery, was dubbed the American Agatha Christie, except that title couldn’t be used for more than a decade after Rinehart started publishing in 1908. Christie’s first mystery wouldn’t appear until 1920. Perhaps it’s she who should be known as Britain’s Mary Rinehart.

As Rinehart writes it, Greg Spencer isn’t the only soldier behaving strangely. What’s up with Colonel Richardson, hero of an earlier war, who insists his pilot son is still alive more than a year after his plane was shot down in the South Pacific? And why hasn’t the airman grandson of old Mr. and Mrs. Ward visited them during his recent leave? And who is the mysterious man calling himself Major Dane, and who claims to be recuperating from wounds received in action, except that there’s no record of any Major Dane in Army records?

A story about war heroes gone wrong may have seemed like a tough sell in 1945, but Rinehart’s take struck home with the millions of Americans who found their brothers, sons, husbands and sweethearts returning from war strangely changed. Post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t found its name yet, but Major Dane could plead with Carol understand and find compassion for soldiers driven to desperation by their wartime experiences.

But do understanding and compassion mean overlooking murder? Or can the year-round residents of the little resort town avoid feeling strangely gleeful at the fall of one of the summer people who’ve lorded it over them so long? Rinehart’s village isn’t the comfortable hierarchy of Christie’s stories.

So did Greg Spencer kill his wife? Was he in Washington, D.C., receiving his medal when his wife met her death? Or wasn’t he? It’s going to take more than one post to unravel the twists of The Yellow Room.

Adventure classics -- The robbery that wasn't quite

The Great Taos Bank Robbery

by Tony Hillerman

#

“The basic and all-important skill of being a journalist (as opposed to being a writer),” Tony Hillerman wrote in his 2001 memoir, Seldom Disappointed, “is information collection. . . It’s not just a matter of knowing who has the information, it’s knowing who will share it with you.”

It was that knowledge of who was willing to share information that would give Hillerman’s mystery novels their aura of deep rootedness in the landscapes and people of New Mexico and Arizona. Because Hillerman, like so many famous writers about the Southwest, was a transplant, an Oklahoman who made an almost-instant decision to accept a job transfer that would change his life.

It would take Hillerman nearly twenty years of working as a reporter and editor in New Mexico to begin writing the mystery novels, starting with 1970’s The Blessing Way, that would win him widespread fame. His name is so deeply associated with fiction that I was surprised, after finding a copy of The Great Taos Bank Robbery in a used book store, to see that it was a volume of journalism essays.

Beginning with the title story about a great bank robbery that wasn’t great and wasn’t in fact even a robbery, through the final chapter of political chicanery whose perpetrator’s quarrel with the accounts was a wish that Hillerman had used his real name instead of an alias, the essays are early explorations of themes that would find their way through book after book of Hillerman’s more famous works--the unforgiving grandeur of the Four Corners landscape, the tragic history of its inhabitants, and a spit in the eye humor at misguided humans and institutions.

The book opens with the announcement that “the newsroom of (the Santa Fe newspaper) The New Mexican first got word of the incident about ten minutes after nine the morning of November 12, 1957. Mrs. Ruth Fish, who had served for many years as manager of the Taos Chamber of Commerce and almost as many as Taos correspondent for the Santa Fe newspaper, called collect and asked for the city editor. . . The city editor asked how Mrs. Fish knew the bank was to be robbed. . . Because, Mrs. Fish explained with patience, the two bank robbers were standing in line at this very moment waiting their turn at the teller's cage. This presumption seemed safe, Mrs. Fish said, because one of the two men was disguised as a woman and because he was holding a pistol under his purse.”

What follows is an almost-crime story that leaves the reader sympathizing with the would-be bandits, one of whom barely escapes because of his difficulty in running while wearing high heels. And a sly dig at the ineptitude of law enforcement agencies, which search unavailingly for the fugitives while the same fugitives return to downtown Taos to beg residents for money to escape the town. (Tellingly, only one townsperson bothers to notify authorities, and then only after treating the discouraged fugitives to supper.)

Hillerman fans will have as much fun as I did tracing other themes, such as the periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague among the area’s varied species of rodents and archeological excavations which may serve as cover for other operations.

My biggest regret in reading this book, available on Amazon and of course, in used book stores, was not finding a reference in Hillerman’s later work to the hero of “Othello in Union County,” “the book-reading, violin-playing Negro, a ranch foreman who carried a telescope in his saddle boot” and who may (or may not) have been named George McJunkin. In the early twentieth century, McJunkin tried to interest East Coast scientists in a discovery of Stone Age fossils that would rewrite the time frame for human settlement in the Americas. He would die nearly a decade before the significance of his find could be validated.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics concludes a June of stories about Texas and the Southwest with Tom Lea’s The Brave Bulls.)