Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920–1961

310 Pages·2012·16.776 MB·English

by  Curt Evans

Masters of the
“Humdrum” Mystery
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Masters of the
“Humdrum” Mystery
Cecil John Charles Street,
Freeman Wills Crofts,
Alfred Walter Stewart and the
British Detective Novel, 1920–1961
CURTIS EVANS
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Evans, Curtis J., ¡965–
Masters of the “humdrum” mystery : Cecil John Charles Street,
Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British
detective novel, 1920–1961/ Curtis Evans.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7864-7024-2
softcover : acid free paper
¡. Detective and mystery stories, English—History and criticism. 2. Street, Cecil J.C. (Cecil John
Charles), 1884–1964—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Crofts, Freeman Wills, 1879–1957—
Criticism and interpretation. 4. Connington, J.J., 1880–1947—Criticism and interpretation.
5. Science in literature. 6. Detective and mystery stories, English—Appreciation. I. Title.
II. Title: British detective novel, 1920–1961.
PR830.D4E93 2012
823'.087209091—dc23 2012014497
BRITISHLIBRARYCATALOGUINGDATAAREAVAILABLE
© 2012 Curtis Evans. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i ncluding photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without p ermission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover images: © 2012 Shutterstock
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
This book is dedicated to
Jacques Barzun, who catalogued crime;
Douglas Greene, who explained miracles; and
Bill Pronzini, who kept gun in cheek.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Introduction: Mere Puzzles? 5
CHAPTER ONE
“The Masters”: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, and
Alfred Walter Stewart 15
CHAPTER TWO
Cecil John Charles Street (John Rhode/Miles Burton) (1884–1964):
Public Brain Tester No. 1 45
CHAPTER THREE
Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957): The Greatest Puritan of Them All 146
CHAPTER FOUR
Alfred Walter Stewart (J.J. Connington) (1880–1947): Survival of the Fittest 193
Appendix I: Notable Criminous Works by Cecil John Charles Street 247
Appendix II: Notable Criminous Works by Freeman Wills Crofts 250
Appendix III: Round Robin Writer: Freeman Wills Crofts’ Contributions to
The Floating Admiral (1931) and Double Death (1939) 252
Appendix IV: Notable Genre Works by Alfred Walter Stewart 255
Chapter Notes 257
Bibliography 281
Index 291
vii
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Preface
MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS AGO, in the spring of 1989, Chinese students protested
tyranny in Tiananmen Square and I encountered John Dickson Carr in the mystery
section of a basement Chicago bookstore. The event in which I was concerned obviously
was a much less important one, yet it resulted in the book you are reading today. I encoun-
tered three paperback reprint John Dickson Carr novels, to be precise—two with prefaces
from the dean of American mystery genre scholars and future Carr biographer Douglas
G. Greene—tales with the evocative titles Hag’s Nook, The Burning Courtand The Judas
Window. Suddenly in my early twenties I realized there was more to classical fair play puzzle
detective fiction than the myriad Agatha Christie novels I had read in the late 1970s and
early 1980s as an adolescent, more even than the novels I had read in the mid–’80s by
Christie’s sister “Crime Queens,” Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.
By the time I entered graduate school the next year, I had discovered both Bill Pronzini’s
and Marcia Muller’s mammoth 1001 Midnightsand Jacques Barzun’s and Wendell Hertig
Taylor’s gargantuan A Catalogue of Crime, and with them additional highly praised fair
play detective novelists: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, J.J. Connington,
Henry Wade. Searching the used bookstores of Baton Rouge—Caliban’s was a particularly
rich repository—I was able to find no Conningtons at all but I did happen on some Wade
titles reprinted in an enterprising Harper & Row series (Harper Perennials), a couple Street
books (also Harper Perennials) and some Crofts novels in old Penguin editions from the
1960s. Yet my appetite was scarcely satiated. Cecil (I would later learn he went by John)
Street, for example, had written something like 140 novels, mostly true tales of detection.
What in the world had happened to them all? Why had they been swept from the book-
shelves—swept, indeed, from the shelves of mystery genre history?
I had other things to concern me in the 1990s (for example, getting a Ph.D. in Amer-
ican history), but by the late 1990s I had found that the internet afforded wonderful oppor -
tunities for locating books by undeservedly forgotten “Golden Age” mystery authors. Such
sites as AbeBooks and the online auction site eBay were then gold mines for even the most
demanding and discriminating fans of classical mystery fiction. As I amassed my personal
collection of Streets, Crofts, Conningtons, Wades and other writers (and beganbook deal -
ing myself), I realized how much of the history of the detective fiction of the Golden Age
was lost in genre studies focusing so determinedly and relentlessly on contrasting four
Briti sh Crime Queens (Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh) with the male h ard-b oiled
authors of the United States (most famously Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler).
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