Adventure classics -- Writing mysteries: rules to follow, or not

Searching the Dallas Public Library’s catalogue Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Yellow Room, the mystery under discussion this month, I discovered another “yellow” detective novel, Gaston Leroux’s 1908 The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Really, two mysteries involving rooms of the same color?

The Dallas copy of Leroux’s story was part of a multivolume set of detective-mystery novels published by Scribner’s in 1928. It came with an additional bonus, a preface by S.S. Van Dine (pseudonym of American critic Willard Huntington Wright), in which he listed what he considered the most important detective novels of his time. In addition to Leroux, the writers were Arthur Conan Doyle, Israel Zangwill, R. Austin Freeman, A.E. W. Mason, Philip MacDonald and Freeman Wills Crofts.

image: wikimedia commons

I knew Doyle, of course. And Leroux I’d come across previously, as the author of the original Phantom of the Opera. For the rest, all I could wonder was, who are these people? Then I realized, none of them were women, although detective fiction’s golden age mysterians Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers had been scribbling for years before Van Dine wrote his preface. Possibly even stranger, all except Leroux were British, at least sort of British (Crofts was Anglo-Irish).

After unearthing Van Dine’s 20 famous rules for writing detective stories, I began to find clues to his inclusions and exclusions from the hallowed list. Published originally in 1928, the same year he wrote his preface to Scribner’s mystery series, his rules are now widely available online. I liked the updated version at www.mystericale.com but here’s the my brief version:

1.      State all clues

2.      Don’t trick the reader

3.      No love interest

4.      Don’t make the detective the murderer

5.      No accidental solutions

6.      There must be a detective

7.      There must be a corpse

8.      No supernatural solutions

9.      Only one detective

10.  Culprit must be a major player

11.  Culprit must be a worthwhile person

12.  Only one culprit

13.  No wholesale culpability

14.  Murder method and detection must be rational

15.  All clues must be provided

16.  No extraneous material

17.  No professional criminals

18.  No accidental deaths or suicides

19.  Motives must be personal

20.  Finally, Van Dine lists a number of too-frequently used devices to avoid, i.e., no nonbarking dogs, etc.

These aren't bad rules, but if followed too closely they’re strangling. Leroux, for example, breaks several. So does Doyle. Maybe Mr. Van D cut them some slack for having written prior to the issuance of his revelations. And no doubt, Van Dine detested the success of women writers such as Christie, who stomped rule number 4 to bits with 1926's Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and would break even more rules with Murder on the Orient Express in 1934.

Fortunately for fans of the genre, the most gilded decade of the Golden Age of detective fiction was still to come, often from non-British writers who didn’t always hew to Van Dine’s rules, writers such as Dashiell Hammett with The Maltese Falcon (1930), the first appearance of Georges Simenon (1931), and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939). RIP, Mr. Van Dine.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics looks at that other “yellow” mystery, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room.) 

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.