The Noonday Devil Ursula Curtiss

The Noonday Devil Ursula Curtiss

published 1953

 

…Sarah was wearing something the cool colour of lilacs… [she was] very cool and poised in the wide-skirted lilac dress.

 

Megan was dressed as though for a journey: pale lemon suit nearly the colour of her hair, an enormous leghorn hat, white gloves and bag…

 

Last time I covered an Ursula Curtiss book, I introduced her in words that still might seem helpful

There were a number of American women writing great domestic thrillers in the second half of the 20^th century, and it can be hard to keep them straight, particularly as many of them were related to each other: Ursula Curtiss was a sister of Mary McMullen, and the daughter of Helen Reilly. (Curtis Evans has a great article on the family over at his blog The Passing Tramp.)

That was Letter of Intent, an absolute banger. I very much enjoyed this one too.

It has a great setup – Andrew Sentry in a random bar in Manhattan encounters a stranger who knew his brother Nick in a prisoner-of-war camp in the Far East. And he reveals information about Nick’s death there: was a fellow-prisoner, another American, implicated in this?

Andrew immediately goes into overdrive to investigate this, and it becomes apparent that in their group of well-off friends with holiday homes and NY apartments and parties, there is someone with something to hide.

The dead man Nick had a fiancée Sarah, whom Andrew has (he thinks) reason to dislike. There are some missing letters and postcards from the camp – might they contain a clue as to who was the acquaintance with a motive? (It is very satisfactorily explained that anyone could take any name or assumed past in the camp, so he can’t be tracked down that way).

Andrew investigates: he comes up with an event that happened just before Nick shipped out. Could Nick have had information to solve a crime…? Did the guilty party turn up in the camp and fear exposure?

By now everyone has moved up to the weekend cottages on the Massachusetts coast, and events whirl by with a lot of searching of rooms, people being knocked on the head, & memories being uncovered, before eventually the guilty party is identified.

It is short and sharp (as I have mentioned before, she ‘could teach some modern authors a thing or two about brevity’) and full of momentum, with a clever construction. The only problem – and it is intrinsic in the plot – is that the person in the camp can only be a man of a certain age who was in the forces. She sets up nicely that there are a number of suitable suspects, but you can’t really expect to be hugely surprised. The men are similar, verging on indistinguishable, but she still does make the final villain quite awful, although the reader’s chances of picking him out in advance are quite slim. The book relies on keeping up the jeopardy and excitement, the creepy feeling that the bad man has just left shortly before, if you only knew who he was, without much in the way of clues.

But overall – thoroughly enjoyable, with a clever balance between the prison camp, the privileged modern-day life, and a noirish undercurrent.

Kate has also reviewed this book over on her Cross-Examining Crime blog.

Michael Gilbert’s Death in Captivity also deals with dirty deeds in a POW camp – no blog entry, when I re-read it recently I found the details of life fascinating, the plot less so.

 

The leghorn hat: this phrase comes up in historical novels, much worn by Georgian and Victorian women. When I was younger I vaguely assumed it was the style of hat, and had a picture in my mind of one. But ‘leghorn’ (there are also, confusingly, leghorn chickens) means a certain kind of plaited straw, originally from Italy – leghorn is the anglicized form of the place-name Livorno – so just means a straw hat. But of course over time it became associated with large hats for rich women (male rural yokels might easily have a leghorn hat, but that’s not what anyone is picturing). They were usually much-decorated, and fashions came and went. (I went down the rabbit-hole on this one, reading about changes in tariffs on their import in the early days of the 20^th century).

There is a memorable description in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (the author is one of my favourites, and much featured round here, though this book, probably his best-known, has not appeared on the blog):

I seem to remember that, with that dress, she wore an immensely broad Leghorn hat — like the Chapeau de Paille of Rubens, only very white. The hat would be tied with a lightly knotted scarf of the same stuff as her dress. She knew how to give value to her blue eyes… For whose benefit did she do it?...I don’t know. Anyhow, it can’t have been for me, for never, in all the years of her life, never on any possible occasion, or in any other place, did she so smile to me, mockingly, invitingly.

[Is this just me? Those sentences make me want to read the book immediately, and would always do so, whether I’d read it before or not. He is a magical writer]

Wide dress from clover vintage.

Suit and hat, also clover

Small leghorn from NYPL , 1910s.

Picture of a leghorn hat from LOC.