The First Time He Died by Ethel Lina White

published 1935

Ethel Lina White – a frequent flyer on the blog - wrote crime stories which were quite different from those of her contemporaries: with a more routine plot, it can be hard to explain what was unusual about her. But this one gives full rein to her quirkiness, and it is what’s technically known as a hoot and a half.

It is not quite an inverted mystery, but on those lines. The basic setup could be a spoiler, though really it is spoilered in the title… and is revealed very early in the book.

Charlie Baxter, a popular and friendly chap, has died in the cottage he shared with his wife and friend in a small village. This is his wife Vera:

There was no hint of the distracted widow in her appearance. She looked smart as paint in a very becoming black frock, which was not mourning, since she had been wearing it all the winter. It suited her fair colouring remarkably well. Her lips were tinted coral, and exactly matched her cigarette-holder.

 

Charlie was kind to people, and one of the people he pulled in that way is a schoolgirl who fancies herself in love with him (this element featured in my recent post on The Constant Nymph in popular culture):

The burden of her sorrow was too great for her to bear… she dropped on her knees…“God, give him back to me. Let him be alive now. Don’t let him be dead.” It is said that faith will remove mountains. Yet this schoolgirl—without a scrap of faith—apparently achieved the impossible, and worked a major miracle. Even as she sobbed out her petition, Charlie Baxter was sitting in the kitchen at Jasmine Cottage, smoking his pipe.

The schoolgirl is never named, and disappears from the book not long after this, her job done. Though of course it isn’t her miracle – Charlie and friends are involved in an insurance fraud.

The book then follows the progress of the fraud in the usual way, so you end up on the side of the defrauders – there is tension, there are near misses. You know that surely they are not going to succeed, but where and when and how will it go wrong?

Charlie is a wonderful character – he is an endearing idiot, forever making unforced errors, and with his own weird take on the world. ‘He was not too proud to turn his hand to anything, and when he lacked a shilling to buy fags, would enter the Children’s Competition in the newspapers.’ This is a continuing and hilarious theme (though not strictly relevant)

“I’ve nothing to reproach myself with… I was the only one who played fair. When I signed a declaration saying that it was my unaided work, I told the truth. But the children committed perjury, because they were helped by their parents.”

“How d’you know that?”

“They must have been or they couldn’t have done the Competitions. Some of those buried names were very tricky and nearly stumped me.”

And he nearly gives away this minor fraud by not remembering that crosswords were a relatively recent invention, so he can’t have done them as a child…

A sympathetic barmaid asks about his mother:

“She died before I was born,” he replied sadly, and neither of them noticed his slip.

He causes a fire in a hotel room very reminiscent of a scene in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim.

Later:

Vera was frank in her admiration. “I can’t take my eyes off you,” she declared. He could understand that, for he had the same difficulty with his reflection in the mirror.

He should be infuriating, and he just isn’t…

Vera is also intriguing. She is ‘a pretty blonde, who made what might truthfully be described as “a personal appearance”—at some Vanities.’ Charlie marries her, but ‘the Baxters, who were snobs, could not accept her as a member of a family which wore rather more than the average quantity of clothing.’

She is actually described as an ‘Oppenheim adventuress’, a type we looked at here and here, although she is also ‘a sensible moral little person’ (apart from insurance fraud).

Later, a male friend is encouraging her to go swimming, and Vera feels sure that

he was looking forward to a close-up of her in a swimming-suit.

“The fat fool doesn’t know that he could have seen me, wearing a string only, for a bob,” she reflected cynically. “What a waste for him.

 

And she swans around in high ‘Spanish’ heels. But as things start to go wrong….

She was both a blonde and an undignified widow, in her flapper dress, with an Alice comb in her long fair mop of hair. She was also unconventional in her behaviour to tradespeople, and rather too expert at back-chat.

I loved moments like this:

In a flash, Vera powdered her nose and tilted her Cossack cap, to reveal honey-gold waves of hair. Without a word to Charlie—still prostrate under the bed, like a lover in a French farce—she went out of the room…. She wore a long coat which looked like black Persian lamb, and a cap of the same material.

 

And this, when Charlie comes across a young woman he knew long ago, who says

‘I first began to like you, because my sisters said you were fast and went about with common girls.’

There’s lots more interesting detail, apart from the crossword debacle. The fraudsters plan to stop any of Charlie’s family from coming to the funeral, but they are foiled by his elderly sister who when asked ‘but how did you get here so soon’ replies, very surprisingly ‘I flew – most of the way’. A policeman expects a half-crown bribe to keep an eye on the cottage.

Charlie becomes a professional dancing partner at one point, with a very real-sounding and rather depressing description of the system. He is given advice by the most successful dancer, and is very put out but: ‘he got even later with the star-partner, for he lay awake on purpose to insult him.’ [ie in his head]

The book is a little gem: a real black comedy with splendid characters, and many twists and turns. As in her other books, there is a picaresque quality, with side events and players who are quickly dropped, but if you can take that (and not knowing the ultimate fate of some people – she’s not good on trying up loose ends) then this is a highly enjoyable read.

Kate @ Cross-Examining Crime and Curt @ Passing Tramp both really enjoyed this book too.

And great picture opportunities.

Top picture is of a 1920s Ziegfeld girl Helen Lee Worthing and is from the Library of Congress collection.

1930s Fashion drawings from NYPL collection.

Second showgirl picture from Wikimedia, she is called Hazel Forbes, the photographer was Alfred Cheney Johnston.