Death of a Doll by Hilda Lawrence

 

Death of a Doll by Hilda Lawrence

published 1947

It’s a shame Hilda Lawrence didn’t write more crime books – they appeared over a short period of time in the 1940s, and then stopped. I have re-read all of them over the past couple of years, and this one was the best.

Death of a Doll is set in a hostel for young working women in Manhattan, Hope House: an inspired choice. (though afterwards I wondered just how many women lived there – there are at least eight floors of rooms, while only a handful of guests are ever mentioned). We start to follow Ruth Miller, who works in an upmarket department store - another favourite setting of mine – and who is looking forward to a happier life in the hostel: she will be much more comfortable and better off when living there (‘all the hot water you want’…). But when she walks into the busy reception area on her first evening, something happens, and her attitude changes completely. She has obviously seen someone who frightens her.

She dithers around, trying to decide what to do next, how to get out of this situation. A day or two later there is an absolutely extraordinary social event at the Hope House, where every young woman is dressed as a rag doll with a mask on, all the costumes close to identical. By the end of the evening someone is dead. All alibis, timings, last sightings etc worthless because everyone looks the same. In all my experience of reading crime novels, few setups have been quite so ridiculous yet somehow disturbing and memorable and very very creepy.

At the sight of the smiling mask she dropped the bag. “Is that what they wore?”

“It’s ugly isn’t it? Pretty, but ugly. Think of a whole houseful, running up and downstairs, peeping at you out of doors…”

The girls dance together in their costumes: one of them has her mask on backwards:

‘I think I scared her… Cut new eyes and a place for my nose. Nobody thinks of things like that but me. I clowned for the crowd… then I ran into X and we did a two-woman conga.’

(HOW has nobody ever made a film of this most disconcerting scene? The image of unrecognizable women dancing, one with her head on backwards, one maybe a murderer, someone maybe impersonating another, victims, culprits, innocents … If your blood doesn’t run cold at this description, you are dead inside.)

Enter Mark East, series detectives in several of Lawrence’s books, and his associates Miss Bessy and Miss Beulah – not as annoying and tiresome as in A Time to Die, I actually found them amusing here. They have been called in by Roberta, a wealthy young society matron who was a character in A Time to Die, and is now married with a child. The investigation – who was the dead girl, where did she come from, what happened that night? – is quite slow-moving to be honest, I thought, could’ve been tightened up a bit. But I enjoyed the look a life in the era, the details of the running of the hostel, the (assumed) gay relationship between the two women running it, and the search for the motive for the crime. 

Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means looks at a similar hostel in post-War London – interesting to compare details (windows are important in both books) although I am always surprised all over again to remember that, unlike Lawrence, Spark was not writing contemporaneously: the 1940s May of Teck Hostel appeared in print in 1963. The shared Schiaparelli evening dress, such a feature of top floor life there, was on my original list of inspirations for the blog – the owner lends it out for small bribes – but there is nothing like that among the NY girls.

But there is a blue suit:

The blue was a suit that every woman in New York was trying to wear that fall. It was a bright, electric blue that dulled the eyes and hair of all but the very young, and consequently drew the middle-aged and sallow like a magnet.

Seventy five dollars in stores like Blackman’s, sixteen fifty on Fourteenth Street.

Discovering its fate is important, though it is sad that it turns out not to be well-made… From Vivat.

Some years ago I wrote an article for the Guardian about girls in shared accommodation in literature, but unaccountably failed to mention this book.

You can find more Hilda Lawrence by clicking on the label below. 

Top picture is a costume design for rag dolls in a musical, probably more attractive and more indivicual than the book version, costumes for a musical called Happy Days. The Gay Rag Dolls-4 - NYPL Digital Collections