Dead Wrong by Stewart Sterling

Dead Wrong by Stewart Sterling

published 1947

 

Her hat, a ridiculous bonnet, resembled an apple dumpling on a plate

'She wore a grey and dull-pink tweed that was either English tailored or carefully copied to fit as badly as British clothes'

comments: Oh the joy of this book, another gift from my Secret Santa! I have a list of preferred settings for crime stories: theatres, schools, convents, department stores. This book, with the tagline

Plain murder and fancy thrills in an expensive hotel…

has added a new destination. And it’s a Mapback.

It is set in a fancy NY hotel, the Park Royal and – better still – our narrator and hero is Gilbert Vine, the house detective. I have often idly wondered about this role: does it still exist, did they ever exist in the UK? I presume they were a real thing though obviously I have only seen them in books. (See below for details of another job opportunity that has disappeared with time).

Gil is concerned about a young woman guest who is being very secretive and may have problems. He tries to help her: she is a rich widow who has recently remarried, and there are all kinds of ins and outs of her recent past.

Eventually someone dies and Gil goes stubbornly on investigating, even when told to stop by those who might be embarrassed by what he finds out.

The scenes in the hotel are wonderful:

There must have been a couple of hundred people milling around the lobby when we got down; the before-dinner crowd drifting in and out of the men’s tap room and the cocktail lounge, wandering down from the mezzanine and clustering around the ticket agency and the cashier’s windows. There were maybe a dozen around the ledge where the house phones were located.

I lost track of some of the plot towards the end,  and a trip to the Virginia stud farm was under-used, but I still enjoyed the whole thing very much. There were thriller-ish fight scenes that I didn’t really need myself – more interested with distinctive hats and Spring Song outfits on the young women – but I am OK with that.

And I love the way Gil talks:

“Somebody’s playing foxy,” I said. “Keep after it my passion flower.”

And there was a heavy – ‘pig-iron wouldn’t have melted in the man’s mouth’.

There were also a good few new words for me to look up and learn: some slang, some just recondite.

Benny = overcoat

Seidel = beer glass

Replevin = specific form of repossession of goods

Usucaption = ‘the acquisition of a title or right to property by uninterrupted and undisputed possession for a prescribed term.’

More job opportunities – one woman says

“I’m a dancing teacher. An instructress if you prefer. At Stefan Dresden’s Studios of Dance Moderne.”

Dresden’s was the outfit which had parlayed the idea that dancing with seductive sals was a tonic for the tired executive. “Over on 46^th?”

She shook her head. “those are the regular studios for the hubba bubba boys who don’t care who sees them wandering into a dance emporium. I work at the Salon Prive, up on on 57^th. None but the bluest of blood for clients.”

He does go to visit her there – “the inside looked like those magazine illustrations of how everybody is going to live in the futurist future. All chrome and polished aluminum and shiny plywood. And girls.” But sadly, they quickly move on: I felt I could happily have had a whole other book based round the dance salon.

There was also ‘stew-femme’ which I cannot track, it seems to appear like that nowhere else in the world, but is from context an insulting description of a woman.

And then there is ‘the starter’.

Gil visits a big office building and tries to talk to ‘the starter’ in the lobby to try to track down one of the tenants. No meaning to fit this is listed in the usual places, but I did a little research, and if you burrow hard you can find references to it. The starter was the person to whom the elevator-boys reported: and this is from a history of elevators:

The starter’s job was exactly as his title implied, he was in charge of directing passengers to the proper [elevator] cars and ensuring that the cars started on their way in the appropriate manner. His station was on the ground or entrance floor of a building, and he was viewed as an important figure within a building’s operation, as the starter was typically the first point of contact for tenants and visitors. Occasionally, if they were employed in important buildings, these men became well known among the members of the local business community.

Well! I do find this intriguing  - a whole job and life and a word that doesn’t mean that anymore. It must turn up on records and censuses, there must be people whose grandfathers had that job, but I’m betting most people wouldn’t have a clue that the job existed, let alone that that’s what he was called, and that it was a post of some importance…  All gone when automatic and self-operated lifts came in.

I discovered that the Pacific Electric Building in LA – an office block considered the first skyscraper in the city and for a long time the biggest building – had 7 passenger elevators in 1950, one Starter, and an assistant starter, and 13 elevator operators. These facilities handled 14,000 passengers a day. By now I was disappearing down a rabbit-hole – this info came from a report on a long-lost employment tribunal case, concerning an elevator operator who was accused of ‘airing private company business to passengers on elevators’ and ‘has been known to shut elevator down leaving passengers on upper floors because relief didn’t arrive on time’. I thought for a moment this meant he left them trapped in the lift, but I think the claim is that he just forced them to use the stairs. And in fairness to long-ago Mr Stanley Gronek I should say that he vigorously denied these charges. (‘How could he know any company business’ to air to passengers?). The complaints were being given as reasons why he was not able to move up from being an elevator operator (a job he had done since 1928) to an Assistant Starter. Sadly, his claim was denied.

Back to clothes: a  woman is wearing ‘something green and yellow that went well with her hair’, later described as a Spring Song outfit. This is in the lobby of the hotel: the detective can conclude that she is resident in the hotel because she does not have a hat with her. (Always a subject of great interest to the readers and writers of this blog… we study social mores). When in her suite later she changes into a ‘hostess gown or whatever you call those getups with the long swishy skirt. This one was fireman red with gold beads on it; the beads & the silk rustled when she walked.’

Joy from beginning to end. Thank you Secret Santa!

The hat is worn by Gypsy Rose Lee

NY costume institute   Bergdorf Goodman sketches : Molyneux 1940-1949 - Costume Institute - Digital Collections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (oclc.org)

Young woman in the chair is filmstar Olivia de Havilland.