Dress Down Sunday: Exit a Star by Kathleen Moore Knight


published 1941


LOOKING AT WHAT GOES ON UNDER THE CLOTHES



Exit a Star



[The female narrator is looking round the murdered woman’s room, in the company of the police chief]

I stooped and picked up a filmy stocking. ‘Did you notice whether she was wearing stockings?’

‘No she wasn’t.’ He was belligerent. ‘She wasn’t wearing a thing but her dress and slippers and a pair of – well, some pink satin thingumbabobs. But that doesn’t mean a thing. My wife says a lot of women don’t wear any more than that – ‘

‘That’s quite true. But I’d stake my reputation that she didn’t wear that gown without a girdle. And these garter marks on the top of her stocking’ – I pointed – ‘prove it.’

I whisked open the middle dresser drawer and took out a girdle of lace and French elastic. ‘there it is. She’d already taken it off. It would be practically impossible for the murdered to put it back on after she was deqad,’ I instructed him. ‘But he could put on the dress easily enough.’


commentary: Last week’s ‘woman at a dressing-table’ entry was nicely popular, so here’s another such lady, also getting ready to be murdered. That was John Dickson Carr’s 1937 Four False Weapons, and the trope has turned up in the past on the blog in books by some very varied authors, including Pushkin, Virginia Woolf, and Enid Bagnold.

But there is a definite similarity with the JDC book – not at all suggesting plagiarism, but the excellent idea that by looking at what a woman does as she gets ready for bed you can detect exactly at what point she was interrupted. In this case the issue is also where she was murdered, and what she was wearing when she met her unfortunate end. (I do wonder if the girdle was actually French lace and elastic, whether the adjective became misapplied. Reminded me of Zola's shopping list and ruffles in another recent entry.)

I read another book by this author, Death Goes to a Reunion, last year, and enjoyed it very much: then Kate at Cross-Examining-Crime featured this one, so I tracked it down, and it was equally good, and with more clothes in it.

The narrator/heroine Margot Blair is a publicity agent in NY, who has taken on a new client. Susan is a young socialite who wants to boost her career as an actress by becoming The Best-Dressed Woman in America. Could this setup BE more Clothes in Books

Susan has a small role in an upcoming play, and after a fancy party in NY, the action shifts to tryouts in a small town on Long Island, everyone staying at the same guesthouse. There is an older leading lady who is apparently very wary of the rising star… so of course there is going to be trouble, the wrong sort of publicity, and murder.

The early troubles consist of a great favourite of mine: the duplicate dress. The two actresses turn up at a fancy party in the same exclusive designer gown. Before the party, Margot says: I was slightly apprehensive about Susan’s gown. And frankly I felt rather the same – because:
From Susan’s description I had a hazy impression that [the dress] played upon the cactus motif, in silvery green with accents of watermelon pink. I should have known the gown would be right. When Susan came across the dance floor a stir of admiration ran around the ringside tables. The material was diaphanous, with the luscious spongy depth and silver sheen of the cactus, and by some magic of design Denise had given its outline a hint of grotesquerie without losing any of its grace. It sounds outlandish but it wasn’t.
It doesn’t sound at all nice, and two of them would be even worse. This is the best I can do:

Exit a Star 3


Once could be just unlucky – but then the same thing starts happening with their costumes for the play. What is going on here?
Susan’s dress was a floating cloud of rosy lace; her eyes had the unclouded blue of the sea, and a diamond clip sparkled in her hair. She had a gay, vibrant quality about her that night, and her feet in their fragile silver slippers fairly skimmed over the ground.
Exit a Star 2

- this may sound unique, but, yes, there is going to be another dress. Unusually, this is not going to lead to any mistaken identity, or Wrong Victim trope – it is just a sign of the problems going on at the theatre company. (and, btw, I do recommend my friend Noah Stewart's recent post on certain gambits in crime books...  he calls this one - as it usually plays out - The Distinctive Garment Gambit.)

I enjoyed the book very much, though finding it sagged just a little around the half-way mark, and I felt it could have been trimmed somewhat. (This is rather ironic, because when Kate read it she found herself with an abridged version, which meant that some aspects didn’t make sense – I had been careful to get the full edition after her warning.)

Kathleen Moore Knight may be almost forgotten now, but she wrote a lot of books, and I would certainly try more of them.

The theme of the social event ruined by duplicate dresses has turned up in a few books – here on the blog there’s PD James’s Cover Her Face, & Margery Allingham’s The Fashion in Shrouds - I was particularly proud of this picture for that one:


Exit a Star 4


And Murder a la Mode by Eleanore Kelly Sellars.

This woman at her dressing table is by Frederick Frieseke, from the Athenaeum website.

Woman in lace evening dress is from Kristine’s photostream.

Cactus dress (mmmm….) also from Kristine.






























Comments

  1. I haven't read Knight's work, Moira, but this one does sound enjoyable. And it's interesting that there's that same question of a woman being interrupted during her night-time routine. Oddly enough, I just watched a TV mystery that focused on that some thing. A woman is interrupted as she'd doing her nails, and that proves to be a clue to her murder. I may have to do a post on that sometime...

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    1. Oh, sounds like a great topic for you Margot, I'll look out for it. And I think you would like this author if you tried her.

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  2. haha seems a little like Goldilocks and the porridge, my copy was too short and yours too long - perhaps there should be an edition which has a smaller amount of abridgement! Glad there was lots of fashion related themes. Really need to try more of this series by Moore. Didn't enjoy her other one as much.

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    1. Yes, it really made me laugh when I realized, and, indeed, Goldilocks!
      I am certainly up for reading more by her - there were some tempting-sounding titles, though hard to find out anything about them.

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  3. I think another example of this theme would be phoebe Atwood Taylor
    In OUT OF ORDER.
    A woman was found presumably washing her hair wearing a
    Channel model!
    Chris Wallace

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    1. Oh thank you Chris, that sounds just the kind of thing I would like. And a different Phoebe AT book featured a discussion of whether a woman would be in a fur coat. I will try to get hold of the one you mention.

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  4. That dress sounds vile! And the bedtime routine . . . I always love it when a woman spots something about another woman that a man wouldn't notice (as in that splendid Susan Glaspell story, 'A Jury of her Peers.') I feel a short story of my own coming on!

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    1. Yes, those moments are tremendously satisfying aren't they? and you should definitely write a story! I think there are a lot of possibilities.

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    2. Is it on Noah's list? (Legally Blonde)

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    3. I don't think it is - we must put it to him. Legally Blonde is a great indicator!

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  5. I've only read TERROR AT TWILIGHT in the brief Margot Blair sereis, but liked it. Maybe a bit too HIBK for my tastes, but Margot is sharp as a tack and one of the better American woman detective characters from this era. She stands aside Liz Parrot (created by Manning Long) and Mary Carner (created by Zelda Popkin) as the three most well developed of American woman detectives in the 1940s. you should look for the Liz Parrot books by Manning Long. Liz is a former fashion model so the clothes are sure to be featured. I rarely notice this kind of stuff unless the clothes become important clues.

    Knight wrote a lot of mysteries and she was an original plotter. As one of the unsung heroes of Doubleday Crime Club, the publisher with whom she remained for her entire writing career, she was one of their biggest sellers but unfortunately her fame didn't carry over primarily due to not remaining in print and having too many of her books ending up with forgettable digest publishers when they got reprinted in paperback. She's another one who I think should've been part of the Dell Mapback series because her books innovative and engaging and frankly better than some of the minor writers they insisted on reprinting. Her detective Elisha Macomber, a New England First Selectman (sort of like a mayor but for a very small town) is more interesting than irritating Asey Mayo who he resembles and whose books ended up in the Dell mapback imprint. She also wrote a lot of thrillers set in Central and South America with Mexico and Panama turning most frequently in the settings. I've reviewed several of her books on my site and hope to start in on her "Alan Amos" books, a brief series of adventure thrillers she wrote under her only male pseudonym.

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    1. She seems to have been popular in France, at least according to an online used book vendor I visited - lots of copies of her books in translation. I may spring for this one.

      https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Kathleen+Moore+Knight&bsi=0&sortby=17&prevpage=2

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    2. Thanks John, I guessed you would know all about her. I read and enjoyed a Zelda Popkin (was it you who reco'ed it I wonder) but don't know Manning Long so will check that out. Yes, the other Knight book I have read featured the Selectman, who did remind me of Asey Mayo. Margot Blair definitely more fun from a Clothes in Books POV!


      Shay: There's a lot of Manning Long books in French too. And some very expensive books out there. But might have found one to try...

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    3. Just checked my blog about Liz Parrot. She was a former artist's model, not a fashion model. Darn it! I have a slew of her books and hope to get to them again. Next time I'll tune into the clothes descriptions to see if I was right about that. I vaguely remember one of the books dealingn with some garment clue at the very least.

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    4. Near miss, and there's probably something in there anywhere. There is one where Liz joins her partner's family Christmas and there is murder - nothing I like better! But it was horrifically expensive. Have found another in the series more reasonably price.

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  6. It's a different genre entirely, but E.F. Benson's Miss Mapp (part of the masterful Mapp and Lucia collection) has, not one, but two scenes in which Miss Mapp and her social rival wear the same drop-dead dress to a party. In the narrow social world of Tilling, a provincial English town and a thin disguise for Rye (where Benson lived in the house that Henry James occupied before him), this is catastrophic. And hilarious.

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    1. Oh thank you for reminding me, I had forgotten that, and I LOVE Mapp and Lucia.

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  7. It is so long ago that I'll never be able to find it now -- but when I was still in school there was a poster of a young woman wearing a dress made of cactus leaves (one can only hope the spines had been singed off on the inside) with the caption "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear cactus."

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    1. OMG. Luckily imagination is probably enough to visualize that. Pity I couldn't've used it for the entry though.

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  8. Definitely one I can live without

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    1. What - you mean a plot line about identical designer dresses doesn't appeal? I am shocked, shocked...

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