Adventure classics -- When the good guys are behaving badly

The Yellow Room

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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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 -- Case of the little white hat

Madame Maigret’s Own Case

by Georges Simenon

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I’m embarrassed to admit I only knew Georges Simenon from his Inspector Maigret stories. With more than eighty stories about the gruff, pipe-smoking Maigret to his credit, Simenon might have excused my ignorance of the rest of his work. And with many of his earliest novels published under pseudonyms, “no one seems to know precisely how many book-length titles he published,“ Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to what was to have been this week’s book, the non-Maigret Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, “but the estimate of four hundred-plus seems plausible.”

It’s a body of work that impresses even Oates, no writing slouch herself, with more than forty novels, some of them also written under pseudonyms, as well as dozens of volumes of short stories and essays.

“Universal to Simenon’s work,” Oates continues, “is a concentration on behavior that might be considered obsessive.”

And Simenon knew obsessive. Besides his stupendous literary output, he estimated he had had sexual relations with 10,000 women, including his two wives. For most of us, keeping track of the sex would be a fulltime job, but for Simenon, writing always came first. He was said to have broken off one of his most famous affairs, with African-American dancer Josephine Baker, because he thought she distracted him from work -- he only wrote twelve novels the year he and Baker were together. (Lest I sound too gossipy, realize that Simenon dished out twenty-seven volumes of autobiography.)

So back to Maigret, who by comparison with his creator seems incredibly normal -- one job and one wife, who got a single chance to shine in today’s Adventure classic selection, Madame Maigret’s Own Case. (Reissued under the title The Friend of Madame Maigret.)

As far as I can determine, although I’m willing to be corrected, this is the only volume in which Maigret’s wife plays a part more significant than keeping her police inspector husband properly fed. In a nod to her usual role, it opens with its own succulent recipe -- “The chicken was on the stove, with a fine red carrot, a big onion, and a bunch of parsley with the stems sticking out.”

Then Madame Maigret is off to a dental appointment near Place d’Anvers, chatting with a “nice” foreign woman who has a little boy and a chic spring hat, and who just may be involved in a theft-kidnapping-murder ring. Madame Maigret provides the vital bit of information with charming insouciance, tracking a criminal by tracking down her hat.

“I knew it wasn’t a hat from a really first-class milliner,” Madame Maigret tells her husband after a day of sleuthing. “I did all the little shops, especially around Place d’Anvers -- or not too far away. I saw at least a hundred white hats.”

Some may argue that Maigret would have solved the case he started with -- a bookbinder accused of burning a body in his furnace -- without his wife’s help. Hoping not to spoil too much for those who haven’t already read it, I’ll just ask -- without Madame Maigret, would he ever have learned about Countess Panetti and her no-good son-in-law? Or connected the countess’s death with the hypothetical body in the bookbinder’s ash heap?

I think not. And all because of a little white hat, which would have been my choice for a title. Although perhaps a subtitle should add, “with a tiny veil, three or four fingers wide, that came down just over the eyes.”

The Maigret novels are the most widely-available of Simenon’s books in English translation, at Amazon and other sites. For more about Maigret and his wife, the Strand Magazine article “The Great Detectives: Maigret” provides a quick overview, including first names, the physical descriptions Simenon’s works are notably short on, and of course, fashion sense. See
www.strandmag.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues an April of mysteries with one of Arthur Upfield’s best Australian Aborigine mysteries, The Bone is Pointed.)