The Wife of Ronald Sheldon by Patrick Quentin

The Wife of Ronald Sheldon by Patrick Quentin

 

published 1954

 

 

 

Sylvia Rymer was wearing slacks and a sweater and harlequin shell-rimmed glasses – more or less like any other girl in the Village who was clever and had written a novel in verse…

 

Whenever I mention Patrick Quentin I end up saying something like this:

The whole Quentin/Patrick pot-pourri is beyond explanation: I touched on it in this entry, but you really need to look it up on Wikipedia to get the full lowdown on these authors

That’s to do with authors, co-authors and pen names. This time there is another complication in that there are different versions of this book with different titles and some changes in character names. There is some explanation of all this in a post by my friend Curt Evans over at The Passing Tramp: he is looking at it under its US publication title My Son the Murderer.

My copy came from my good friend Chrissie Poulson, who rightly guessed I would enjoy it, and she was particularly keen on the idea of looking at the young woman in it who wears ‘harlequin glasses’ – what you would probably think of as cat’s-eye-shaped frames.

Luckily I was able to find a splendid website, Ed and Sarna’s Vintage Eyewear which gives a history of these (among other) designs, and is the source of the splendid picture below: THAT, my dear friends, is Altina Schinasi, the woman who invented them…  'Vogue and Life magazines credited Schinasi with revolutionizing the eyewear industry and aesthetic.'

And Schinasi was obviously a fascinating person with a most interesting life – do look at the webpage.

‘Inspired by the lack of interesting frames for women available in opticians in New York, Altina designed the first prototypes of a more glamorous silhouette. Her original shape designs were cut away from the romantic and whimsical harlequin masks worn at ballroom dances at the time and it is from this mask that the cat eye shape got its first name "Harlequin".’ 

By happy chance another friend, Wendy, mentioned to me separately that she had a glamorous aunt whose cat’s-eye glasses had interchangeable wings in different colours, including diamante ones for evening wear.

Now to the book itself, which has a complicated plot and is splendidly overwrought. It is set in 1950s New York, and narrated by publisher Jake Duluth (brother of Quentin series character Peter), whose family has been torn apart by the suicide of his wife Felicia a few years earlier.

His business partner, Ronald Sheldon, comes back from a trip with a new wife: very young, and the daughter of an author Sheldon feels is a genius. The whole family have come along, difficult people living in an adjoining apartment. Jake’s estranged Bohemian son Bill falls instantly in love with the young girl Jean. Someone ends up dead, and (see US title so not really a spoiler) it looks obvious that Bill must have done it.

Everyone is very passionate and shouts a lot, and meanwhile alibis are checked.

It’s a claustrophobic setting, and Jake is finding out more than he really wants to know about people he trusted – it is not at all one of those NY crime books where everyone trades wisecracks over martinis, not taking anything too seriously (see eg the Lockridges), but I found it very readable, even compulsive.

And – it has almost a complete Royal Flush of clothes-in-books of the era: the young girl who starts off dressed as a schoolgirl (tweeds and pudding bowl hat, Clover Vintage) and moves through a pink chiffon ballgown to a smart black dress. The Greenwich Village Bohemian girl mentioned above.

 Iris Duluth, who wears slacks but doesn’t go out in them. A young man in a sports jacket when everyone else has ‘dressed’. Even a bedjacket.

Chrissie sent me the book with the picture card above – it could be the New Yorkers in the book out on the razz  - or it could be Chrissie and me in a roadhouse…

Bohemian woman in black is the artist Helen Frankenthaler, from NYPL.

Martin Edwards reviewed this book here.

*** when this blog was very new, I managed to link up WG Sebald and Miss Read (author of the Fairacre Village series) – via a film about herrings. See this startling juxtaposition here.

And now I prove that I can link Miss Read with almost anything  - in her late entry, Summer at Fairacre (1984) we find this – the village teacher is contemplating getting spectacles:

Several ladies in the village favour upswept shapes, and Mrs Finch-Edwards, a somewhat flamboyant lady who acted as a supply teacher here, actually had a pair shaped rather like butterflies, with a flashing jewel in the upper wing tip. Frankly, I could not imagine myself in such dashing numbers.

(I don’t think the 30  years between publication dates really represents how long it takes fashions to spread to a village in Oxfordshire – Miss Read’s books take place in an alternate time scheme, where some things move on, and others stay the same, and the series started in 1955, so spot on for the Quentin book)

 Incidentally, the Miss Read book has a splendid scene set at a jumble sale, a feature of UK life that I should be collecting instances of. Such a regular, all-pervading item, surely there  must be more book descriptions?