Below suspicion by John Dickson Carr
published 1950
I’d read this one before but had no memory of how it panned
out, and that meant there were good surprises in it. I always say, a mid-level
book is better for re-reading to entertain you.
Below Suspicion combines Dr Gideon Fell (‘the presence of Dr Fell
in any room could have gone unnoticed only by someone wearing mental blinkers’) and
Patrick Butler, a character who is always on the verge of becoming annoying.
He’s a barrister, Irish, larger than life, and this is a typical exchange about
a married couple:
‘It’s true that they didn’t
get on very well.’
[Butler replies]: ‘That’s not
evidence. It’s merely a definition of marriage.’
His own private life we see through the eyes of his
housekeeper, who is distinguishing here between ladies and non-ladies:
Mrs Pasternack was far from
being a moralist. But those ladies whom she designated as persons, at this hour
of the morning, were more likely to be leaving Mr Butler’s house than calling
there.
Which I presume implies sex workers…
Anyway. There are two very respectable (maybe) women
involved here: Joyce, the quiet companion, has been accused of murdering her
employer while apparently they were alone together in the house overnight.
Patrick Butler is called on to get her acquitted.
Then, the dead woman’s nephew-by-marriage is poisoned in the same way, apparently by his wife Lucia – who stood to inherit the original victim’s money. She is much more of a go-er than Joyce, and Butler takes a fancy to her. She is first seen wearing a fur coat in court. Then, newly widowed and under suspicion, she receives the investigators wearing a heavy white lace negligee through which her underwear (‘a brassiere and a pair of step-ins’) is visible.
* I intended to link to blogposts explaining step-ins, and was reminded by Susan D in the comments below that I hadn't. So here is the link.
There is some discussion of garters: I am always interested in the history of legwear, and it is interesting to note here that Lucia says women no longer wear garters – ‘unless we can’t get a suspender belt. It hasn’t been done for some time.’ (book set in 1947) Red garters will prove to be important.
Amongst other adventures, Lucia takes Butler to The Love
Mask Club, a very disreputable place where the customers dress in masks –
always a good setting, and one that’s been interesting me recently in my researches
about fancy
dress in GA crime fiction. (This one is by no means a glamorous or
attractive place)
I believe opinions are split among Carr fans about this book, but I enjoyed it very much: it was classic entertainment. However I did think the underlying wrong-doing in the book was revealed far too late: there was no particular benefit to keeping it secret so long, and it came out of the blue, and then added greatly to the atmosphere in my view – I’d have liked more of it earlier, rather than people vaguely talking about bequests and money. Everyone does mention these aspects in their reviews and comments on the book, but I can be more scrupulous: using my #spoilernotspoiler system, one part is mentioned in the title of this book, another is featured in the works of this author. Both parts are used quite dramatically and splendidly here.
The last time I read this book I made the charming note
‘why wasn’t she sick?’ Mrs Taylor (the first victim) didn’t vomit before she
died. This is seen as impossible at the beginning of the book, everyone
searches for the, ah, evidence, it is seen as significant (of what? No idea). And
then it is never mentioned again. The subsequent victim, it is clear, vomited a
lot. Explanation anyone?
Fur coat from Clover
Vintage.
In the
Boudoir by Friedrich C. Frieseke
Respite from the Masked Ball by Toulouse Lautrec
I can see why this doesn't rank among your top Carrs, Moira. But in my opinion, a mid-level Carr is better than a lot of people's best. And now I'm wondering about red garters...
ReplyDeleteI think we are in total agreement, Margot - as with Christie and a very few others: their lesser works are still better than most.
DeleteAnd the red garters were a real surprise, I didn't know the significance of the colour in this context...
I don't think I've read any Carr since college when I found them in the stacks when I should have been writing about 16th century poets. However, when I started reading, I thought this would turn out to be where the quote, "I do not like thee, Dr. Fell, the reason why - I cannot tell." I am surprised to see it is just an apocryphal verse - but doubtless an inspiration to many.
ReplyDeleteI think the rhyme long precedes Carr - but I do think that's probably why he chose the name, maybe?
DeleteWiki says the rhyme referred to a 17th-century Oxford dean, John Fell.
DeleteOriginally in Latin, it was supposedly translated by a student of Fell's.
So it is anon? but, pinned down to a specific place and person, unlike most anon rhymes
DeleteI seriously doubt sex workers were implied. Merely liberated women, I think. Carr's heroes usually prefer amateur talent as one of the characters in a later book of his puts it.
ReplyDeleteCarr was from an Irish-American family, with strong nationalistic leanings. I thinks it makes his Irish characters slightly more interesting to consider. I also think its interesting that Butler exaggerates his Irish accent.
I just wondered about that severe distinction between ladies and non-ladies.
DeleteCarr, unusually amongst his male contemporaries, didn't think that only a non-lady would be an overnight companion. I think it's an odd report about the housekeeper's views...
I always admire the honesty of Dodie Smith, who said she and her friends were 'just hanging on to their amateur status' in their wild 20s...
Louise Brooks, meanwhile is very funny on the subject of never having realized that she could have got people to pay her, and it would have made life easier.
I didn't know that about his Irish connections - interesting indeed. Patrick Butler is also similar to the Irish barrister in Josephine Tey's Franchise Affair.
Perhaps the distinction had to do with class too.Maybe only women "of gentle birth" qualified as "ladies"?
ReplyDeleteI think that most of his contemporaries would take it for granted that anyone who stayed the night couldn't be a lady - but I don't think Carr felt like that.
DeleteLet's hope judging the women and not the men is long gone
...she receives the investigators wearing a heavy white lace negligee through which her underwear (‘a brassiere and a pair of step-ins’) is visible.
ReplyDeleteOh gosh. And here am I thinking step-ins are kind of comfy slippers, or easily slipped-into shoes. Okay, step-ins must be underpants (pants to the Brits, I think?) flimsy and loose enough to, uh, step into. Apparently loose drawers with elastic at the waist, but not around the legs.
https://alexisvintage.blogspot.com/2012/02/step-ins-tap-pants-underpants-panties.html
Clothes in Books....SO educational.
Full marks for research, go to the top of the class!
DeleteIn fact you could have found it on the blog, I meant to link to this earlier post in which I said:
The thing about step-ins is, ‘as opposed to what?’ What kind of underwear do you not step into? The description applied to ‘modern’ panties, with short wide legs, and was applied from the 1920s to the early 60s.
A commenter helped me out: as opposed to camiknickers, ‘which would have dropped over the head and buttoned between the legs.’ It’s obvious when it’s pointed out.
And yet more posts if you follow this link.... https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/search?q=step-ins
... and I have added the link in the post, crediting you!
DeleteSurely camiknickers - being shaped like a swimming costume - would be stepped into and pulled up over the body.
DeleteIt's interesting that ladies' (or women's) underwear made it into poetry in the 1930s:
" Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with head of bison."
- from Louis MacNeice's Bagpipe Music.
Possibly it would depend how fitted they were - all camiknickers seem to have a fastening between the legs but twenties styles would probably be loose enough to step into and pull up as an alternative; thirties and forties styles might not be.
DeleteSovay
I live in the Netherlands, so terminology may well have been different. But here a stepin in the 1950's was not something you would just step into. It was tight and heavily elasticated to hold your tummy in. You could also attach suspenders to it to hold your stockings up. Google refers me to the American wikipedia page for 'girdle'. That does indeed look like the stepins I remember. As a little girl I wore woollen tights, but when I grew out of them in the mid-sixties, I graduated to stockings, and my mother bought me a stepin with suspenders. These always showed with mini-skirts, but luckily tights for women came in soon after, and I thankfully gave up stepin and suspenders.
DeleteClare
Clare - your step-in sounds like what used to be known in Britain as a roll-on - very tight and uncomfortable, hard to get into and harder still to get out of!
DeleteSovay
Re: woollen stockings - I wore these in the late 1970s/early 1980s when living in East Anglia - it was freezing in the winter and I couldn't afford woollen tights which were significantly more expensive than the stockings. However tracking down practical (as opposed to decorative/seductive) suspender belts to keep them up was no easy matter by that time ...
DeleteSovay
I love this - I take a day off and when I come back the comments are full of detailed technical discussions of step-ins! What joy.
DeleteRoger: the term became more general, but camiknickers originally were loose, as Sovay says, usually silky, full body and buttoned between the legs, and would most definitely go over the head - none of the clinginess of a swimsuit. I once read in a book (and there is a reason why I won't say which book) that men think all clothes that cover the lower half come up from the feet, because that's what trousers do!
Sovay and Clare: yes I think names vary regionally. Step-ins I think were known as French knickers later. What Clare is describing was called (here) a roll-on or a girdle, and they were a vital piece of underwear, with suspenders attached.
DeleteI always meant to do a post on a US crime book where the female victim of an attack was not wearing a girdle, and this (to the best of my memory) showed that she was not respectable. I need to look it up.
(btw, I was just looking up that particular work of fiction, and could see half a sentence which was 'the judge was based on a real-life judge who was famous for dressing...' - as I waited to see the full sentence I wondered how on earth it could end, my mind was racing around. As it turned out, he was famous for 'dressing down McCarthy....')
DeleteStrait-laced = respectable! There was definitely an association; a woman who kept her body under control with corsets was assumed to have control over her appetites and emotions too, whereas a woman who let it all hang out …
DeleteThat was one of the reasons why the tea gown was a morally questionable garment in its early days - not just that it was diaphanous and decorative; you wore it WITHOUT a corset underneath.
Sovay
'... he was famous for 'dressing down McCarthy....
DeleteGood for him, though now I'm picturing him doing so whilst wearing a girdle.
Sovay
Yes indeed, Sovay, women's udnerwear so keyed to respectability.
DeleteAnd tee hee, I am going to be the same with the brave judge...
It is interesting reading GAD fiction from the 30s/40s with later perspectives. In one of JDC's classic locked room mysteries, he had a woman who posed for risque photographs being portrayed sympathetically. At least in the 1930s and 1940s novels, I can see that he was, by the standards of the time, broadminded and took the view that sauce for the gander was good for the goose (he dates better than Anthony Beverley Cox/Frances Iles in that respect). I would therefore agree with your comment, which suggested that even if not preaching he was hinting to the reader that a woman who stayed the night was not a bad person
ReplyDeleteGladys Mitchell frequently approved in her early books of the lower orders marrying when a child was on the way as proof that the couple could have children.
Georgette Heyer, was, of course, very tolerant of wealthy men sowing their oats.
There was another Carr classic which played well with the Midsommer Murders trope of multiple murders where the sympathetic murderer escapes to South America and says that although he could have got away with it if he had killed a witness. he was not prepared to kill an innocent man to protect himself,
I love thinking about the moral frameworks in these books, such an interesting sociological study. Your perceptions very interesting and helpful.
DeleteI've just been reading a 1950s book in which there is a most sympathetic and kindly character who many years before came home and found his wife with another man, and killed them both. It was decided he was insane so he spent some years in an asylum, but now is a reclusive character in the village. While having every sympathy with mental health problems, I felt there was a strong implication that the dead people had it coming, and I did object to that. 'he killed them both – pitched the man out of the window and strangled the woman.' And that was a woman author... Zero sympathy for the victims, a lot of sympathy for the killer...
Another interesting moral issue, and I can't remember the book details but I know it was published shortly after the Second World War - man discovers his wife is having an affair and responds by trying to kill their two young children - he does kill his baby daughter, his small son survives. He is imprisoned and on his release he and his wife get back together. This is in the past when the book opens - the couple have changed their name but one of the other characters finds out their history and considers the man's actions sad but understandable and forgivable ... as, apparently, does the son, with whom the man gets in touch in the curse of the story.
ReplyDeleteSovay
Blimey that sounds like a shocker - I know attitudes change, but still...
DeleteI remember a court case in the UK: a man had shot his wife and was imprisoned. The judge in the case decreed that the gun (some kind of special expensive shotgun) should be given to their son, as it was his inheritance. it did not seem to show any great empathy on the part of the judge. ('and apart from that Mrs Lincoln - how was the play?')
(in case not clear - the boy's mother died: his father murdered her and the boy's inheritance was the murder weapon)
DeleteAnother shocker - one can only hope that the son was too young to know what was going on and, if so, that his guardian was able to sell the gun and put the money into the estate for him.
DeleteIndeed. the thinking of the judge is incomprehensible
DeleteI think it was traditionally a French idea of the crime passionel excusing the murder of cheating spouses caught flagrante delicto. There was at least one example of a woman relying on the defence, although this related to killing the Editor of Le Figaro in 1914. Henriette Caillaux was the wife of a government minister who had been criticised, and a private letter of his had been printed to justify the accusations.
ReplyDeleteShe went to the offices of Le Figaro, waited an hour for the editor to see her and then shot him six times. He died six hours later. The police allowed her to be taken to the police station by her chauffeur. Her defence was that she was the victim of passions behind her control and, as a woman, was rendered irresponsible by powerful emotions.
Almost unbelievably, the jury agreed with her, and she was acquitted. The Trial started in July 1914, and apparently and (perhaps) understandably, the case got more column inches than the lead-up to the Great War. In some ways,
The past is indeed a foreign Country.
The crime passionel seems to have been recognised in England as well – in Patricia Wentworth’s “Latter End” one of the characters discovers his wife in a state of deshabillé, propositioning another man in his bedroom at midnight, and another character remarks that if he’d killed her there and then he’d probably have got a nominal sentence; as it is, she dies of poison a couple of days later and if it turns out to be the husband under those circumstance, he’s likely to be hanged.
DeleteSovay
In C.S. Forester's Randall and the River of Time (pub. 1951, but set in WWI and after) the hero is accused of killing his wife's lover and acquitted, though the events are debatable there.
DeleteAnd not only a long discussion of women's underwear, but also important passionate legal cases! This is brilliant.
DeleteAdrian: It was always an article of faith when I was growing up and reading dramatic books that those romantic French could get away with murder, so it is good to have some evidence that it was true.
Solvay: there are various cases in real life, I think, where judges and perhaps lawyers could see the men's side a lot more clearly than the women's. Apart from unfair decisions and resulting injustice, it always seems shocking that these 'very clever' men couldn't see that their views were very subjective. Let's hope times have changed, and that more women in place helps.
Roger: I read a couple of Forester's crime books, and have featured one on the blog. Do you recommend this one? I just looked him up - my goodness he wrote a lot. I thought it was Hornblower and a couple of others, but far from it.
Not exactly a nominal sentence but Caroline Crale in Christie’s “Five Little Pigs”, although convicted of poisoning her husband, is sentenced to life imprisonment rather than execution, presumably in recognition of the provocation she’d suffered and relative lack of premeditation. Maybe if she’d brained him with a paperweight as soon as the question of divorce came up …
Delete“Latter End” is relevant to legwear as well as crimes passionels – in 1947 one could evidently get stockings in different lengths according to one’s means. Gladys, who occupies an indeterminate position somewhere between lady’s maid and confidante to the mistress of the house, is being interviewed by the police and hoping to make an impression on the good-looking sergeant: “… She re-crossed her legs, hitching her skirt a little higher. A good thing she’d got those new long stockings. Mrs Latter hadn’t liked the colour and she’d passed them on”. Those who had to economise with shorter stockings were probably stuck with unfashionable garters too.
Sovay
Yes, is it spelled out Five Little Pigs why she wasn't hanged? It was changed for the (otherwise really excellent) TV version, just for drama I guess. I think Christie wouldn't have someone wrongly hanged - note also Ordeal by Innocence.
DeleteVery interesting about stocking lengths. Stretchiness helped in so many ways when the scientific improvements came!
I tracked down my copy of “Five Little Pigs” at last - Caroline Crale’s defending Counsel has this to say: “We did get it commuted to penal servitude. Provocation, you know. Lots of respectable wives and mothers got up a petition. There was a lot of sympathy for her … If she’d shot him, you know, or even knifed him – I’d have gone all out for manslaughter. But poison – no, you can’t play tricks with that.”
DeleteSovay
Oh thank you for checking it out, very interesting take on it.
DeleteRandall and the River of Time isn't a very good book. I wouldn't recommend it, but it was interesting because it gave a very different view of British generals in WWI to Forester's The General in the first part.
ReplyDeleteInteresting idea, but it probably saves me from trying to read it.
DeleteI had a quick look at Forester's son's biography (in two volumes!) of his father at Internet Archive. It's interesting because of the overwhelming hatred he felt for his father - petty faults and vanities harped on and turned into obsessions.
DeleteOh how sad - a disastrous family relationship, and then the need to make it obvious to everyone.
DeleteWilbur Smith in modern times - he never holds back in interviews on how much he dislikes his children and they're not getting anything from him,
I read this book ages ago and have a very battered copy somewhere. It sounds more interesting than I remember it.
ReplyDeleteMy mother sometimes used the term 'roll-on,' though she wore a 'busk front' affair as a corset, and once confided that she always wore her stockings inside out. Presumably the seams were more evident then.
Or less painful. I often used to wear my socks inside out, because that way the seam wouldn't press on my toes so much inside my shoes. These days I buy men's socks. Apparently men have far more delicate toes than women. Their socks have flat-linked toes.
DeleteAll these great details! I love all those bits of life that don't feature in the usual research. I think we are building up a valuable resource.
DeleteThere's a crime book where a woman comes in from a party, and before she sits down she undoes the back suspenders of her stockings, 'to save the nylons' - who would know that?
https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2012/11/dress-down-sunday-saving-your-stockings.html