The Crimson in the Purple by Holly Roth

The Crimson in the Purple by Holly Roth

published 1956 in US, 1957 in UK

 

I did a post on a Holly Roth book, Shadow of a Lady, nearly ten years ago, and it is interesting to note that at that time there was no Wikipedia entry for her, and very little mention online. That has definitely changed for the better, though she still hasn’t had the attention and reprints that other similar authors have. She wrote short sharp thrillers, often with an espionage plotline, though not in this case.

This was one of the books that I was lucky enough to receive in my Golden Age Secret Santa parcel, and it was a perfect treat to enjoy in the dog days after Christmas.

It is what the much-missed Noah Stewart would have called a brownstone mystery – see here for more on this – set in a big house in Manhattan. In the house live far too many members of a big-time theatrical family. Private eye Bill Farland has been called in to look at some strange incidents in the house – is young Catherine under threat? He takes the job partly because he is an aspiring playwright and likes the idea of making connections with theatrical top types.

There is a splendidly-appalling cocktail hour scenario, and a monumentally awful dinner party straight after: the reader and Bill rush straight into them – the opening pages give a series of wild conversations, along with descriptions of a rather gothic house and all kinds of concerning setups. Brother and sister Dominick and Terratta Hadden are hugely successful actors: the rest of the household revolves around them. Terratta is famously beautiful blah blah blah, but Bill, who has long admired her, is shocked to find that she is not a nice person at all. Terratta wears ‘a little black dress. Paris. And nothing else. That is – except diamond earrings.’

Catherine – the quiet, untheatrical one, in tweed or woollen dresses – is taken violently ill. She ‘finally broke the spell, and she did it with unexpected Hadden drama.’ Bill stays the night to help out, and there is some bedroom-swapping for convenience (always a concern in a house of doom), and sure enough by the morning there is a bloody corpse in one of the beds. But was this person the intended victim?

The investigation takes a strange course, jumping around a lot, and with the policeman taking the doctor and the private eye into his entourage. A lot of scandal is dug up, and some very risqué scenarios are brought to light.

Someone’s annual income is revealed to be $100,000 – where exactly did that place you in 1957, if you were running an enormous house in NY? It is not clear. Another character is very put out by unfairness: ‘Terratta had a mink coat, a mink stole, and a sable jacket. I don’t have any mink.’

And our protagonist, the private eye Bill, has this to say about  money & clothes: ‘I couldn’t estimate her financial position from her clothes, most of all because they weren’t my kind of clothes. Women’s tweeds can come from Fourteenth Street or from Paris – I can’t tell the difference and, basically, I don’t care. My girls usually fall into the ‘little-black-dress’ category, and I’m pretty good at pegging the little black dress. But there’s a simple formula for a male to go on in that field: If it fits as close as print to paper, but it doesn’t seem vulgar – then it’s Paris.’

I can’t say I was following every detail of the dramas in the house (they depended on us paying a lot of attention to the geography of the house, which I had abandoned early on) or trying to solve the crime via any means but ‘who is going to be left at the end’. When someone was finally arrested, I thought there was going to be a secondary solution because there were so many pages left, but that was to give space for a very very long exposition by the policeman about his thoughts and conclusions. But I always do quite enjoy that.

The main section of the book takes place over a very short period of time, and most of it in one place – that family house – and comes close to preserving the dramatic unities.

It was not the best crime story ever, but I did enjoy it very much, and it had the advantage of being short. Also, I always love  a theatrical family hamming it up and camping it up around dirty deeds: see also Daphne du Maurier’s The Parasites & GB Stern’s Ten Days of Christmas (neither actually a crime book) and Christianna Brand’s Suddenly at his Residence (tangentially theatrical – ballerina – but definitely a crime book, and most definitely everyone hamming it up).

People in evening dress from the Clover Vintage tumbler.