Hat Paint, Agatha Christie, and the Lockridges

Death of an Angel by Richard and Frances Lockridge

published 1955

 

Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie

published 1939

 

Coincidences ahoy.

After Christmas, the BBC showed a new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy. Without my even trying, several thousand people apparently looked up my blogpost on the book, a post from 2015.

So I feel everyone should be given the opportunity to see it again!

It is here:

Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie (clothesinbooks.blogspot.com)

A large part of my post looks at the role of hat paint in this book and its apparent absence in most other circumstances. I jovially have suggested from time to time that as a murder method, it occurs only in Christie. The whole question featured in my talk at the Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay in September. 

And then – happy chance – my Golden Age Secret Santa sent me a book called Death of an Angel by Richard & Frances Lockridge. And to my great surprise, someone is murdered via oxalic acid, aka hat paint.

All this has aroused some responses from a few expert friends. The question seems to lie with the difference between hat cleaning and hat painting. Oxalic acid is extremely toxic, and can be used for cleaning, specifically bleaching, hats. It is often used with straw hats. This does sound like a different matter from re-painting it, but the same substance is clearly given both names by Christie.

In the Lockridge book, the oxalic acid is added to tomato juice along with Tabasco, offered as a hangover cure. (In the Christie it is supposed to have been mistaken for cough linctus.) One character comes under suspicion because he wears an old-fashioned straw hat which could be cleaned…

The Lockridges and their sleuths Jerry and Pamela North  are stalwarts of the US Golden Age detection scene, with 26 novels written from 1940 onwards, and versions on film, stage, radio and TV. I think this is the first of their books I have read, which is surprising, don’t know how I missed them.

I enjoyed the book, as I do almost any crime novel set in that era in Manhattan – and this one has a theatrical setting, even better. All the main characters are involved in a very successful Broadway production – writer, producer, investor, stars. The leading lady, a key element of the show’s success, announces her engagement to a very wealthy man, and says she will retire from the stage. Consternation all round. How far will someone go to make sure this doesn’t happen?

There are theatrical parties, and a lot of lounging around smoking and drinking, and eating out in fancy places such as the Algonquin Hotel. Jerry and Pamela are a married couple, and always on the verge of being extremely annoying. Pamela’s shtick is to make vague strange-sounding pronouncements which turn out to be more sensible than they at first appear. I suspect this could get old very quickly, but in small doses is OK. There’s a lot about cat allergy (I suffer myself so was sympathetic), and male/female differences, and some quite sharp observations about life and relationships.

I am still puzzling over the ‘very small house’ in Manhattan with a living-room that is 40 foot by 20 foot.

The writing style is arch and self-conscious – eg several pages of three people at the cinema each hating the film but assuming the others are liking it, completely irrelevant and unnecessary.

In terms of detection, several characters were not sufficiently defined, and the clues were somewhat vague. But I’ve read a lot worse. The atmosphere of raffish theatrical types colliding with the very rich was nicely done. I  would certainly chance my arm with another book in the series.

There’s a Helen McCloy mystery, He Never Came Back, where a young man invites a woman to dinner with these words: ‘I know a cosy place at Madison and 34^th where Martinis are really dry and steaks just warm in the middle.’

My reaction in my blogpost was ‘As long as I have breath in my body, a sentence like that will make me long to be in New York (though probably I want to be there in the 1950s, hard to organize).’ 

This book had a similar effect on me…

The star actress wears a white dinner dress that clings. Others wear expensive black dresses and housecoats. Not much description, but an awareness of the importance of clothes. “How interested women always were in material, and in what they called ‘detail’…. He thought this black dress had been chosen with care, and without regard for cost.”

If anyone has any recommendations for another book in this series I would love to hear them in the comments.