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CORNELIA PENFIELD - After the Deacon Was Murdered

G. P. Putnam’s Sons; hardcover, 1933.

    After the Deacon Was Murdered is the first of two mysteries written by this little known Connecticut author, and as such, is it (you may be wondering) forgotten gem?  An honest answer has to be, “Almost, but not quite.”   Forgotten, it is true, but while it has some weaknesses (and one near-fatal one), there are some very good moments to be found as well, simply by plunging right in.
    Finding the murder victim, Jarius Hanford, in the small town of Deptford Center (near New Haven) is Geoffrey Hamilton, who is not vacationing there, but rather recovering from a nervous breakdown suffered the previous fall.
    Dashing down to the town center to report his discovery, the only person in the Town Hall is Jane Trimble, a genealogist by profession, working over some old records.  The dead man is her uncle, but she receives the news with a surprising lack of distress.  From page 7:  “I’m not the least bit hysterical and I live among too many vital statistics to be easily upset by one more or less.”
    Nor is Miss Trimble the only interesting person in town.  There is Grandpa Banks: “...eighty-five my next birthday, but sound as a dollar.  Yessir!”  As well as Judge Whitaker: “.. without whom no one, it seemed, could take any initiative in the village, Hamilton despairs to himself, amidst the general footlessness of the whole conduct of the case!”  And then Jane’s negro butler, Cæsar, who when asked if had heard of the deacon's death, replies: “Yas’m.  No’m.  Why, the po’ old man.  Howcome yo’ ask me about it, Miss Janey?”
    The investigation expands beyond the townspeople and the village folk, however.  There is a gang of organized criminals working in the area – one of them is Big Slim Blivinsky – plus a fugitive from a mental institution, and a misguided newspaper reporter named Parsons who gets Hamilton even more involved than he’d intended.
    This is the sort of detective story, very popular at one time, in which an assortment of ever stranger things just keeps growing and growing, until you think that the author has no way out.  But she does, more credit to her, and with more than a gentle hint that she’s gently spoofing some of the various conventions of the genre in several different way – including a last page refutation of Jane Trimble’s statement that “this has been one murder mystery with no love interest, thank Heaven!”
    Let’s back up a little.  On page 137, Hamilton is talking to Dr. Newcomb about his health:


    There is also a map, and it’s important to the solution of the case, as well as a good timetable and the establishment of alibis – or not.  All in all, there’s an abundance of good stuff, but there’s a key aspect thats missing, and that’s a strange unreasonable lack of  curiosity at the proper time.  Curious things happen, and no one – including (or maybe especially) Hamilton – asks the overtly obvious question, what’s going on?
    One case in point – and I hope I’ve made this interesting enough that you’re still with me – on page 78 Hamilton is going to bed after an exhausting day, and he finds fresh blood on his shoe.  “It was stained and wet – wet with clotted blood, still fresh enough to show color on his finger.”  And ... he gets under the sheets and goes to sleep.
    The middle, then, is somewhat of a muddle, as you undoubtedly have gathered.  It’s worth persevering, though, since the ending shows flashes of brilliance – and I have the strongest feeling that if you were to start over, from beginning to end, the whole accumulation of small hidden mysteries would all fit into place and make perfect sense after all.
    But the solution was agreeable enough, and the characters engaging enough, that after thinking about for a while, I finally decided discretion might be the wisest thing to hang on to here, and that the proverbial bird in the hand is not worth looking out for trouble when you needn’t.
    In other words, trying to be as clear as I can, if you can forgive the spots where the going is the weakest, you may find yourself enjoying this as much as I did.
    Maybe it’s because the whole affair takes place locally, a mere 70 years ago, and that always helps.  But if you read only private eye and noirish pulp fiction, the chances are 80-20 that you should not even begin to take me up on this as a recommendation, no matter how well-meaning I intend it to be.

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CORNELIA PENFIELD - After the Widow Changed Her Mind

G. P. Putnam’s Sons; hardcover, 1933.

    Two mysteries published in one year, and then nothing more.  And the unknown story behind this fact looms nearly as large as the one that’s presented in this, the second of the author's efforts in the realm of detective fiction.
    Although she’s not the detective of record in either volume, Miss Jane Trimble of the previous book makes a return appearance in this one.  (Since she was not designated as a Series Character in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, I immediately relayed this information on to him, which was gracefully accepted, as always.)
    Two other minor characters have equally minor (but nonetheless significant) roles in this one as well, Judge Whitaker and the unsavory reporter named Parsons.  But with the lack of any other detective by designation in this one, Miss Trimble seems to share the role as sleuth with her co-worker on the dead man’s proposed biography, a young college graduate and presently out-of-work advertising copywriter, Anne Exeter.
    It is Mrs. Prelton’s idea for the biography, coming five years after her husband’s mysterious death, but who has put her up to it, no one knows.  Everyone who was at the gathering at Skyetower that evening then has been invited back, and no one dares refuse the widow’s change of heart – she had closed the mansion and had all but never mentioned her husband’s name again.
    The backgrounds of all of the guests – many of whom have fallen on hard times in the meantime – are interwoven and tangled together in intricate fashion, and much of the delightful first half of the book is spent in unravelling the various threads of their lives.  It is a Christie novel that the author is attempting, but with a homespun and not-so-prim New England sense of humor mixed abundantly in.
    A stuffed dog with a collar studded with diamonds also figures prominently in the early going – it seems to have been the basis for a smuggling scheme that the some of the people in the widow’s life (including a European prince from some small outpost overseas) have been involved in.
    From page 109:


    The dead man, as it not very surprisingly turns out to be the case, did not have many friends, no matter how many guests were on hand during the fateful evening, and one gets one’s hopes up that this will really be a jewel of a mystery, or at least I did.  But the ending is disappointing, wrapped up in much too quick fashion, with yards and yards of explanation to go with it, and yet not enough to explain why Jane’s drive over the mountain to look up some records on page 276 was exactly the right place for her to go, and at the right time, to get to the bottom of the mystery. 
    Then again, a genealogist has to go where the records are, and if coincidentally it all connects with the matter of Mr. Prelton’s fatal fall from a window, then why not accept good fortune when it comes along?
    As in her first book, Cornelia Penfield also continues to play with the conventions of the general novel as well as the detective story itself.  For the latter, read the last page.  For the former, I’ll leave you with this from page 258, where Anne is talking to a young man she happens to be fond of:

   
PostScript.  Cornelia Penfield Lathrop was born in 1892 and died in 1938, five years after the two detective novels she wrote came out.  From google.com I discovered that she was the producer of a Broadway play in 1923, and that she was very much someone who was interested in local Connecticut history, if not genealogy herself.  In 1930, for example, she was the author of work of non-fiction entitled Black Rock, the Seaport of Old Fairfield, Connecticut, 1644-1870.  No copies are available on abebooks.com, but most every library of a certain size in the state seems to have a copy.
    But what’s most intriguing is the statement that appears opposite the title page of this second mystery, to the effect that In Preparation was her third, After What the Doctor Said.  If your brain doesn’t start tingling like mine did, then maybe you’re reading the wrong magazine.  You have to wonder how far along the unpublished manuscript got, why it never got finished, or if finished, then why it was never published.  Your assignment for Monday, then, if you accept it, is to investigate, find out more, and report back with everything you learn.
   
                       

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CORNELIA PENFIELD - After the Town Clerk Died

Typed manuscript with corrections made by hand.  No date.  Unpublished.

    The Internet is wonderful.  It’s terrific.  It took only a few days to trace down the family of Mrs. Cornelia Penfield Lathrop.  She died in 1938, and a son Robert died several years ago, but Marilyn Lathrop, Cornelia’s daughter-in-law, is still alive and well.  She lives two towns over to the east of me, and I’m not sure exactly what she thought when she opened the letter I wrote her, asking if she indeed was who I thought she was.  (No, I have that wrong.  I wrote the letter to Robert Lathrop, as the telephone is in his name, and I wasn’t sure if it were Robert the son, still living, or perhaps Robert, a grandson.)
    In any case, she wrote back, saying yes, Cornelia was her mother-in law, and yes, she’d welcome a chance to talk to me on the phone.  I called not too late the following evening, hoping to set up a time when we could talk longer.  What happened instead was a conversation about Cornelia Penfield that lasted at least 30 minutes.  I no longer remember whether I received the answer in the initial letter that she wrote me or in that conversation, but the question that I was simply itching to ask, given the first suitable opportunity, was “Do you know why the third book was never published?”
    What I didn’t expect, whenever it was that the question was asked, or at least not realistically, was the reply that manuscript still existed, and would I be interested in seeing it sometime?  I think my mind went blank right about then, but you know what my reply had to have been.
    I went to see it, had a chance to have another lengthy conversation with Marilyn Lathrop and (which I never really anticipated) I was allowed to borrow it.  I have kept it far too long.  There were some extenuating circumstances, including a number of unexpected events that intervened and kept me from starting to read it, but I think the real reason I put off reading it for so long was that for me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and I was simply relishing the anticipation much longer than I should have.
    As to the answer to the question as to why the book was rejected – and this is the family’s version of what happened – is that the publisher said it “wasn’t seamy enough.”  When we get to the review proper, I’ll go into that, but later on Marilyn partially reconsidered, saying that perhaps “seamy” wasn’t the word that was used, but even if it wasn’t, it was close.
    What I didn’t realize right away, though, is that the title of the manuscript I have is NOT the title of the third book that was promised, and there is nothing in the story itself to suggest the title was changed, there being no doctor in the tale that I have. 
    So there is a fourth novel, and it is still missing, and unless someone in the Lathrop family remembers something – a box or trunk never opened – we shall reluctantly have to assume that it no longer exists. 
    It also seems possible that After the Town Clerk Died is a novel that was never sent to Putnam’s.  It may have been that After What the Doctor Said was the one that was rejected, with the aforesaid comment attached, and that Town Clerk was abandoned before completion, almost but never quite finished.
    It is, I am sure, no longer possible to say.  It is remarkable that the typed pages still exist.  As a mystery, it needs some work.  I’ve never tried to write a full-fledged detective novel, or even an unfledged one.  Reading this, in what I’m going to continue to think of as being in the form of a  rough first or second draft, gave me quite a bit of insight into the physical problems of doing so.  Being sure that an event mentioned on page 233 (say) as having happened earlier on page 165, really occurred, for example, and that a clue discussed on page 198 (say) was mentioned and pointed out back on page 53.
    That’s what still needs some fixing, not a lot, and editors of detective story fiction deserve all the praise we can give them.  (There are still a few of them, but not as many as before.)
    Jane Trimble, the semi-elderly genealogist who appeared in the two published books, also appears in this one, her primary focus being that of keeping her friend Gordon Burr from becoming a suspect in the death of a man in a suspicious fire.   Burr is a writer who is not only having problems completing his latest book, but who is also having domestic troubles with his wife, and Jane cherishes them both.
    I don’t imagine retelling the plot in detail makes a lot of sense, as when is anyone else ever going to be able to read this as a work of detective fiction?  I’ll retract a good deal of what I was going to say, and start painting things with a wider brush.
    But what I started to say still applies.  Jane was hardly the detective of record in the first book at all, and it was something of a surprise to find that she appeared in the second.  In the second one, Widow, she shared sleuthing duty with another character, but in this one, she is the primary detective, even to the extent that she is the one with a watchful eye out for trouble even before there is trouble to be had.
    And here lies a problem.  It takes nearly 150 pages before the body of the dead man is discovered, and it takes a fairly talented mystery writer to keep the reader’s interest that long, with little or no “action” taking place.  There are a lot of characters to identify, a lot of refined conversation to listen in on – this is suburban Connecticut, after all, and even in (say) 1935, the level or refinement was greater than many another part of the world.
    Once Jane’s detective activities begin in earnest, it is quite a complicated state of affairs the mystery finds itself in, and – here’s another problem – many of the clues happened or were discovered back in the earlier portion of the book when no one (but Jane) even suspected that they were clues.   An alert reader might get glimpses of the essentials of the  plot in its early going, but as the manuscript now stands, some strong rewriting seems to be very much necessary.
    There is a great to-do about who was where and saw what when, and even more about beards, false beards, who had one and who shaved one off and who hired someone to impersonate them who did or did not have a beard when he needed one.  I may not have implied what I wanted to in that sentence.  It is all very fascinating.
    Penfield’s great talent was in miniature characterization, burbling good humor, dialogue, and in the end, a kindly heart.  The mystery, as in Widow, turns out to have been a minor affair, complicated by a myriad of factors, related and unrelated, but once again – with a sense of forgiveness for loose ends – it’s a charming affair that I’m glad to have had the pleasure to read.  (By the way, the Town Clerk’s death is involved, but he died of natural causes, and his involvement comes only in a clever way, one that could have been known only by someone intimately involved with the problems of genealogical research, and as such, it may be a First.  The entire series, in other words, and this one in particular, may be “One for the Books.”)

Postscript:  I debated for a while whether I should do this, and once again, since you’re reading this, you will know that the better argument won.  Here’s a longish quote from pages 245-246, getting within a hundred pages from the end.  It will give you a sense, I think, of Cornelia Penfield’s knowledge of the conventions of the mystery field, and how, as I’ve mentioned in the two previous reviews, how she liked to play around with them.


    I’ve decided that if I’m going to do long quotes from the text, I ought to do it right.  Here’s an earlier passage, from pages 35-38, in which Jane meets Don Wyckoff, a local attorney, who may or may not be representing either artist Jack Collins or his wife Julia in their upcoming divorce proceedings.  As part of their conversation, some more light is shed on Jane’s detective proclivities:


    One more quote.  I hope I’m not overdoing this, but I’d like to demonstrate what I mentioned earlier about Cornelia Penfield’s knack for dialogue.  Jane is talking to Mrs. Turner, the cook in the Burrs’ household.  Her husband Jim is the Burr’s handyman, and Beulah is their daughter, whom they’ve been concerned about.  Either I’m right, or I’m hopelessly wrong, but I think this is the way people actually talk, instead of in neat diagrammable sentences.  From pages 76-77:


In conclusion:  Thanks again to Marilyn Lathrop for allowing me the use of the manuscript, and for the conversations we have had concerning her husband’s mother.  Since Marilyn never knew her mother-in-law, her own knowledge is based on what Robert and other members of the family have told her over the years.   Cornelia’s daughter Helen Harriet Petty is still living.  She is in her late 80s, and the memories she has of her mother have been conveyed to me through Marilyn.  A nephew, Fred Lathrop, is also still alive, and he has assisted me in proofreading the reviews and commentary above.  He remembers her only as a young boy, recalling for the most part the years toward her death, when she was often bedridden with tuberculosis. 
    My impression of Cornelia Lathrop, through these conversations, was that she was a very progressive woman, ahead of her time in many ways.  Similar in nature, I believe, to Eleanor Roosevelt, a lady whom Cornelia is said to have met.  Not many women in the 1920s, for example, would take her three children to live in France for well over a year without her husband, who stayed home working.
        She was always interested in the arts.  Besides her brief involvement with Broadway, previously mentioned, in the mid-30s she also wrote several articles for Stage Magazine, including five in a 1936 series on famous Hollywood directors.

    The photo you see is a publicity shot taken by her mystery publisher, G. P. Putnam.  It’s nice to be able to display it again.