Clothes-Shaming: The Sleeping Cat by Isabel Ostrander

 The Sleeping Cat by Isabel Ostrander

 

published 1926

A tall slender woman with a delicate piquant face and flame-coloured hair beneath a small Parisian turban

Gloria, in a gown of shimmering silver cloth and lace with a single strand of pearls about her long white throat, was turning towards the door….

 

No, this is most certainly not the woman who is being clothes-shamed.

This was my first encounter with the crime author Isabel Ostrander (I think – she had many pseudonyms): a gift from my Golden Age Secret Santa last Christmas. The books I received were very carefully chosen, and I can absolutely see why this one turned up: the clothes, the clothes.

The setting is a small town in upstate New York, amongst the country club set. Olivia Mercer is comfortably married with two children, and has invited a former schoolfriend, Gloria Warrender, to stay. They haven’t seen each other since school, and while Olivia’s path in life is clear, it’s not known what Gloria has been up to.

There’s some socializing and country-clubbing, and the opening chapters are rather like a straight novel. Gloria is beautiful, has fabulous clothes from Paris, and is sporty. Olivia is very different. Stan, her husband, loves to go riding and playing golf or tennis with the houseguest.

Olive has a great friend – a woman inexplicably called Jim – who warns her that Gloria might be a problem. So Olive tries to update her wardrobe.

Olive presented a figure which would have been comic were it not for her grim determination. Her sports clothes were a trifle too sporty, her evening gowns might better have graced the girlish lines of the Olive of ten years ago, and the riding habit was a dire failure in itself…. A striped tennis suit that aggravated her stoutness…

 

Olivia Mercer tries to recapture her husband’s affections, but chooses the wrong clothes….  She is clothes-shamed  picture NYPL

There is gossip, and tensions rise. But there are also many questions about Gloria’s past, and why does she always wear that strange, distinctive opal ring? There are a number of former soldiers around – this is not long after the end of the First World War – and some of them think they might have known Gloria in the past.

So everything is nicely placed, and 50 pages in, someone is murdered.

Various people investigate, rushing round, finding clues, searching the servants’ bedrooms very thoroughly. There are a wide variety of subplots which are slowly cleared away, and there is another death. The final solution – well, anyone interested in this kind of book is not going to be very surprised by it. But I still really enjoyed many aspects of the book. The treatment of the servants, and the very annoying phonetic transcription of foreigners’ and children’s talk, I could have done without. And at times the manner of writing was overwrought. The eventual explanation of what Gloria was doing in France during the War would definitely qualify the book to join the ranks of my Tosh collection.

The Prohibition era is underway, but when there is a ‘discreet libation in the locker room’ of the country club, a very senior policeman joins in in a matter-of-fact way. Later, there is a question of whether they can put pressure on a young man in a not-too-serious way – the answer is yes, because, the local police chief says, ‘he’s got lots of stop-over tourist friends that come from Canada. I ain’t interfered because that’s Fed’ral business.’  ie the young man has a side-hustle as a bootlegger.

Other details – one character says ‘By Godfrey’ and ‘By Topher’ frequently which I presume is to avoid saying ‘By God’ or ‘By Christ’. There is a reminder of what a scourge TB was in those years. And there is an ill child (not TB) whose mother is not allowed into the sickroom: ‘Don’t you know that the family is always excluded when a crisis is impending in a patient’s condition? No doctor would allow a mother to be present, of all people.’ I would have guessed this ban was for plot purposes, but it has come up in other books too.

No surprises in the plot, but a good read. Naturally it was a pleasure to find Gloria's clothes. For golf she 'wore a pale grey felt hat, audaciously tilted [NB not matron’s, see post] and a grey silk sweater coat over her white satin sports skirt….'

But I was strangely defensive of Olivia who was so bad at choosing her clothes, the author seemed unnecessarily harsh. The collection I chose for her (4th pic down) is at least high fashion.

The combination of golf, Tosh, and a female author being very harsh about a woman character's appearance - all this reminded me of a splendid book, Florence L Barclay’s The Rosary, published 1909. In the post I mention one of my all-time favourite clothes-related jokes, which could be the Official Joke of the Blog:

[golf discussion] What did you go round in?

My ordinary clothes

I have now tracked down a print of the original joke from Punch. And I'm calling it - it suits a woman speaker better.

Isabel Ostrander is, I think, mostly forgotten now (certainly in the UK) but was one of those very productive busy people who wrote a lot of crime stories and books over a ten-year period. She died in 1924, and this book was found among her papers and published posthumously.

She created a number of series: she  had a ‘blind detective’ – they were quite the thing for a time there, and some people think she invented the concept. Her McCarty and Riordan (not blind) are amongst those parodied by Agatha Christie in Partners in Crime. In that book, Tommy and Tuppence solve a series of crimes: in each short story they take on the persona of a famous fictional detective. In Finessing the King/ The Gentleman Dressed in Newspaper they are McCarty and Riordan. This particular story is one I have featured a couple of times – because it features fancy dress and the Three Arts Ball, and Tuppence has a go at boring husbands – so I have read it many times and still most certainly could not have told you which detectives they were being.

Woman in turban is Lady Hazel Lavery, as painted by her husband Sir John Lavery, Wikimedia Commons.

Silver evening gown  LOC

Tennis   LOC

1919 tennis skirt NYPL – made of English cricket cloth (!) rather than white satin

Golf clothes NYPL

Riding clothes NYPL