The Golden Box (1942) by Frances Crane

Frances Crane, "a small town girl who became a sophisticated world traveler," was an American mystery novelist who wrote thirty detective novels, published between 1941 and 1968, all but four featuring the lighthearted, globetrotting crime solving couple, Pat and Jean Abbott – contemporaries of the Troys and the Norths. The Abbotts appeared in twenty-six novels, no short stories, often taking place in localities as colorful as the varicolored book titles that earned Crane the label "the travelog mystery writer." So they were a perfect fit for Tom and Enid Schantz's Rue Morgue Press.

In 2004, RMP reprinted the first title in the Pat and Jean Abbott series, The Turquoise Shop (1941), which was followed by a half dozen more reissues before closing down around 2015. Enid passed away in 2011 and Tom suffered a combination of flood problems, health issues and financial difficulties forcing him to permanently shutter RMP. One of their last reprints to be published was, in fact, Crane's The Cinnamon Murder (1946). Crane and the Abbotts enjoyed a small revival of their popularity during those years, but retreated somewhat back into obscurity following the closure of RMP. Something that happened to a lot of once obscure mystery writers who make up RMP's catalog like Delano Ames, Glyn Carr, Clyde B. Clason and Kelley Roos. Crane recently came back to my attention, but in a good news-bad news way.

The good news is that Crane is returning to print once again courtesy of the MysteriousPress/OpenRoad combination (ebooks) and Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics (print). The bad news is that The Rap Sheet reported last July that Tom Schantz had "died on June 6 at 79 years of age." The story of the Rue Morgue Press has a special place in the history of the genre as Tom and Enid Schantz were among the first to setup shop on the internet, which not only helped pave the way for today's reprint renaissance, but opened the door to a possible Second Golden Age – sometime in the hopefully not so distant future. A reprint renaissance would likely have happened regardless, but it would developed a lot slower rate without the Rue Morgue Press pushing it ahead a good 10-15 years. Without them, I think we would be today where we roughly were around the late 2000s. And who knows how that would have affected our beloved translation wave. So if you feel spoiled for choice or overwhelmed by the relentless, unceasing stream of reprints and translations, you can thank the Schantz for your luxurious little problem.

When I learned of Tom Schantz's passing, I dug the Rue Morgue Press edition of Frances Crane's The Golden Box (1942) from the bottom of the to-be-read pile and moved it near the top. After all, Crane wrote the type of mysteries Tom and Enid enjoyed. The type of mystery novel showing the only acceptable place in a civilized world to commit murder is the printed page.

The Golden Box is the second novel in the series and takes place mere weeks after The Turquoise Shop, which introduced mystery readers to the San Francisco private eye Patrick "Pat" Abbott and his future wife, Jean Holly. At the time, the last days of November, 1941, the United States populace was occupied with Roosevelt's presidential proclamation to move Thanksgiving ("...cash registers play jingle bells an extra week") or listening to radio broadcasts on developing tension with Japan ("the Japanese emissaries were in Washington"). Just a little over a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Jean, only 26-years-old, is wondering whether Pat is the man for her and what to do with her shop in Santa Maria shop ("...a pain in the neck because I couldn't make it pay...") when she receives a telegram from her cousin. Peg McCrea invites Jean to come back and visit her old hometown, Elm Hill, which she left behind eight years ago when her parents died in a car crash, but very little has changed in the small, old-world town – lorded over by the matriarchal tyrant of Fabian House. Mrs. Claribel Fabian Lake is a domineering, mean-spirited old woman who leverages her wealth to control everyone and everything from her own relatives to the church committee. Woe onto those who dare cross or defy her wishes.

Mrs. Claribel Fabian Lake has three daughters, Emma, Claire and Valerie, one of whom she wishes to see married to her dear cousin, Ernest Fabian. Ernest is "the very last Fabian" and Mrs. Lake "was going to endow him heavily when he married Emma," but she eloped with a high school chemistry teacher, Carl Green. They had several children one of whom got hit by a car and needs expensive medical care or risks losing a leg, but Mrs. Lake refuses to give as much as a penny for treatment ("bitchy Mrs. Lake reminded Emma that if she had married Ernest Fabian things might have been nicer, meaning they'd've had money"). So the next in line to marry Ernest is the second, distantly-minded daughter, Claire, who agreed to become engaged to Ernest ("...just a sort of business arrangement, you see"). However, this does not mean the third and youngest daughter can marry whomever she wants. Valerie has fallen in love with a young pilot, Tommy Ross, but Mrs. Lake is "fighting the match" and "Val spends most of her time in hysterics." That's not all. Mrs. Lake is furious at the whole church as the congregation voted against her sappy candidate preacher and gets back at them by canceling the annual Christmas party. If the committee insists on having a Christmas party regardless, she'll stop her yearly three-thousand dollar donation. A donation that practically pays for everything the church does for the community.

This is going down as Jean returned to her hometown and writes a letter to Pat that there are some "funny doings next door" which "might interest a good detective." Pat wired back three days later, but, by that time, Mrs. Lake "had been stowed in the Fabian vault in the Elm Hill cemetery." The circumstances surrounding her death got the town talking. For a while anyway.

Ernest had the body taken to St. Louis for embalming and the coffin returned to Fabian House, "under a blanket of orchids and gardenias," but was not opened and the funeral was to be private, which is considered a snub in the community – "funerals are rather communal in Elm Hill." There's another story doing the rounds about her supposed death. Mrs. Lake's young black maid, Ida Raymonds, told her sister she found her mistress "lying on the bed with a bashed-in face" and "a golden box clutched in one dead hand." Is that why Ernest wanted the body cremated? But then her body is discovered hanging from a length of clothesline in the so-called bird room crammed with stuffed animals. So, when Pat comes to Elm Hill, there's plenty of suspicion and motives to go around, but the imminent treat of war has doused any interest in a potential double murder in Elm Hill ("I suppose murder on a mass scale rubs out little double murders like that"). And nobody wants "to bother seriously because it's only Ida Raymond." Which is not necessarily a handicap for a detective like Pat Abbott. Or, as Jean described it, "you size up your case and set your little trap and they talk themselves into it."

The Thrilling Detective Website described the Pat and Jean Abbott novels as "definitely on the cozier side of the P.I. genre." Frances Crane can be called the female counterpart to Rex Stout as both wrote mysteries most read for the main characters rather than trying to pick apart a tricky, intricately-constructed puzzle plot. That is very much true for The Golden Box. Crane does put in some work to make the obvious murderer somewhat less obvious and not always in the fairest of ways, but the only way you can miss the murderer is (SPOILER/ROT13: vs lbh nffhzr gur zbfg-yvxryl-fhfcrpg vf gbb boivbhf n pubvpr sbe zheqrere) and expect a bit of ingenuity or cleverness waiting for you in the last couple of chapters. Crane simply was not an Agatha Christie or Helen McCloy. Funnily enough, Tom and Enid Schantz tried to help on this occasion to make the murderer less obvious by editing out a racial slur. Not "because of concerns about political correctness but because it might actually give away the killer's identity" as "in 1942, readers might not have assigned guilt at its mere utterance," but "but in 2005 we could easily see a reader exclaiming, 'Aha, here's our killer'." Stressing that Crane was "a champion of the underdog who abhorred prejudice" and "was expelled from Nazi Germany as a journalist for defending Jews." It barely helped.

However, The Golden Box is a highly readable, but not particular challenging, detective novel giving a snapshot of a period when the United States held it breaths in anticipation war while trying to fuss over little things like Thanksgiving getting moved a week. So if you like these comfy, more character-oriented mysteries with a dash of romance and a pinch of Had-I-But-Known, Frances Crane and The Golden Box comes highly recommended. But if you want something a little more challenging, you should look somewhere else.

A note for the curious: I nostalgically poked around the now sadly long gone Rue Morgue Press website on the Wayback Machine and came across the following on the about section what collecting vintage mysteries in the 1970s was like: "in those days, used mystery books from the Golden Age were plentiful and cheap and not in wide demand, except by thrifty readers. Booksellers kept first editions in dusty back rooms and rejoiced when we came to town looking for them. Book sales had tables full of them, priced at a quarter apiece regardless of edition or condition. We would come back from buying trips with our Volvo station wagon crammed with boxes of old mysteries... remember, a book from 1935 had been out of print for only 35 years at that time, about the same length of time that books being published in 1970 have been out of print today. And there were very few real mystery fiction collectors back then." One of those early collectors was Bill Pronzini. No wonder he got his hands on all those rare, long out-of-print locked room mysteries! But it's interesting to note how the fandom has grown and expanded since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Almost like RMP actually had a hand in it! ;)

Maid to Kill

"This world would be in darkness without a sense of duty."
- Fuu (Samurai Champloo)

I struck up an acquaintance with Frances Crane a few months ago, when the inestimable Rue Morgue Press reissued The Pink Umbrella (1943), but I didn't exactly fell head-over-heels with the book. The detectives, Pat and Jean Abbott, the quintessential mystery solving husband-and-wife team that were all the rage back in the 1940s, were fun enough and the fluid, carelessly loose style of story telling had its attractions – but as an exercise in logical deductions and spotting fair-play clues the plot left a lot to be desired. But everyone has their off-days and I set my sights on the next title in the series, The Applegreen Cat (1943), which was slated to be release anytime soon – and received praise from Anthony Boucher!

The Pink Umbrella was the first story in which the Abbott's came onstage as a married couple, but with Pat enlisting in the marines and ready to be shipped off to war in a matter of days their separation is imminent – and the limited time they had together was interrupted by a one or two inconvenient murders. This would lead you to expect that the succeeding book entails a solo case for Jean Abbott, while her husband is overseas fighting the good cause, but they've worked out a clever scheme to be together during these trying days as they are now both stationed in wartime Brittain – Pat as a military intelligence author with the U.S. marines and Jean as a secretary with the Land-Lease Program.

Upon their arrival, Jean diligently toiled at weaving a social network around them and landed herself an invitation for two at the home of Stephen and Cynthia Heyward, fellow compatriots with their own business in London, who are throwing a weekend house party at their estate for family and friends.

Great move, Mrs. Abbott! A self-confessed murder magnate sets foot on English soil and her first course of action is obtaining an invitation to a sleep-over party at an old Tudor mansion – filled to the roof with people who harbor their fair share of secrets and hidden motives. So, of course, it's ludicrous to presume that under these circumstances a mere murder would interrupt a quiet country weekend with tea and tennis on the lawn. Not one murder, anyway. They're in England, after all, and murder in triplicate is the usual recipe over there. Ask Tom Barnaby.

The body of the first person to spoil a perfectly fine weekend is turns up when the Heyward's son, Kip, who's a R.A.F. Squadron leader home on leave, takes his punt for a midnight row on the lake when he bumps into another boat near the waterside – and its gruesome cargo comprises of the cooled-off remains of a murdered woman and a dart, jammed between her shoulder blades, that was purloined from the mansions play room, whose wooden handle is adorned with a penciled image of the titular applegreen cat. At first, it's presumed that the victim is Lorna Erickson, an alluring brunette with a tendency to capture the eyes of men and a knack for antagonizing their women, since she is the most likely candidate of the party to get her neck wrung, but the body turns out to be that the housemaid. The murderer appears to have dispatched the wrong victim to the great hereafter, however, before long the head maid takes a swig from a morphine-laced drink and succumbs to one heck of a hangover – which leaves the Heyward household in a tight spot: where do you find competent replacements with the servant problem what it is?

Yeah, this is not a detective story that takes itself too seriously, in defiance of the fact that events in this book have a dark undercurrent, leaving an entire stack of cadaver's before reaching the final page, but instead tends to be chatty with scenes that make the book somewhat of a comedy of manners. There's a clash of cultures, taking place in the background of the story, between the American inhabitants of the old mansion and the local police inspector – who's a bit nonplussed by the care-free attitude of his suspects in the face of a murder investigation (canceling their tennis matches never crossed their minds for even a single moment), while he receives disapproving frowns for his classism. 

These bits-and-pieces of satirical social commentary are clearly remnants of the ambitions she once had for her literary career, but had to settle on penning detective stories instead and I can't help but think if her style wasn't better suited for the type of novels she wanted to write. But as I pointed out in my previous review, we won from the lost suffered by mainstream literature and even though she wasn't one of the neatest plotters in the game – her books have a joyful exuberance about them that is very infectious.  

In conclusion, The Applegreen Cat is a fairly minor story, but also an out-and-out improvement on the preceding novel, The Pink Umbrella, with tighter writing, a firmer grasp on the plot and some clever touches that I felt was lacking in their previous investigation. Pat and Jean Abbott still have a long way to go before they're on equal footing with Jeff and Haila Troy or Jane and Dagobert Brown, but they're off to a good restart with this book.

Oh, and my sincere apologies for the awful punning title!

Frances Crane, the Many Colored Death

The motley-colored titles that Frances Crane gave to her detective novels always conjured up a mental image of a careless and cheerful woman, who wrote jovial and lighthearted whodunits, but that picture was a bit disturbed after reading a short summary of her life. I somewhat fell in love with her when I read how she was thrown out of Germany for openly mocking and criticizing the new Nazi regime, but was also a bit saddened to learn of the tragedies that plagued her family and that she had more lofty ambitions in mind with her literary career. On a brighter sight, the mystery genre gained from the lost suffered by mainstream literature – selfish though that thought might be.

The Pink Umbrella (1943) is my first encounter with Pat and Jean Abbott, a husband and wife sleuthing team that were all the rage at the time, and was the fourth book in the series but the first one in which they were married. Unfortunately, their honeymoon leaves a lot to be desired. Pat had just enlisted in the Marines and will be shipped off to war within a few days, which doesn't leave much time at all to enjoy each other's company in a blacked-out New York City, where they don't know a soul. Or at least, that's what they thought.

They bump into an old acquaintance of Pat's, Ellen Bland, now living in America, with her archetypical dysfunctional family and assorted cohorts, after fleeing occupied Europe. Murder ensues! But contrary to time-honored tradition, it's not one of her family members, like her nasty, controlling ex-husband Louise or their 16-year-old son, Dick, who already knows how to hit the bottle, who meets a sticky end, but their sour-faced and ill-mannered housekeeper. It's an understatement to say that the old crone had an unattractive personality, however, caving her head in seems like a drastic measure to terminate her employment when a pink slip would've sufficed. Pat and Jean lend their invaluable help to New York's finest in uncovering a ruthless murderer.

Crane wrote a fluid story, almost in a careless manner and a loose style, that gives the story a touch of gaiety that's very becoming of this particular type of mysteries, but the plot left me under whelmed. The clues are not liberally thrown about and the motive for the second murders borders on cheating – making it very difficult for the reader to have an equal shot at arriving at the same conclusion as Pat did. His explanation also relayed too much on shaky amateur psychology (saying that this person was the only one with the personality of a cold blooded murderer). I really wanted to like this book, and did like some of it, but as a detective story it left me frigid.

However, if you're one of those detective fans who enjoy reading mysteries for their characters, without paying too much attention to the clues and plot, you'll probably enjoy tagging along with Pat and Jean. Otherwise, I recommend taking a look at the books by Kelley Roos and Delano Ames.

Oh, and kudos to anyone who spots the (obvious) reference to my favorite book. Here's a hint: it's not a mystery. Good luck!