Suspects – Nine by ER Punshon
The Cat Saw Murder by Dolores Hitchens
both published 1939
Once you start noticing…hats everywhere. I did a piece on ‘matron hats’ recently, and then found more excitement in two of the next books I read…
Blogfriend Johan, in
the comments on the matron hats post, said:
E.R. Punshon
equipped his detective with a hat-maker for a girlfriend. In Suspects - Nine
a hat indeed plays an important role. No description is given, with the excuse
that no description could do the hat justice.
So obviously I had to read the book, and it promised
extremely well in the opening chapters.
Series detective Bobby Owen goes to visit his fiancée, Olivia,
who has a fancy hatshop. There is some discussion of the finances of the trade
– much of it is familiar from the other books of the era, and can be summed up as
‘posh & titled ladies buy hats on credit and don’t pay their bills’.
There is then a splendid scene where one woman, Lady Alice, runs off with a hat which has been specially made for another woman, Flora - the two women can’t bear each other. Flora, a chic elegant type, a society beauty, was due to wear the hat to a Royal Garden party. Lady Alice, the thief, is an intrepid traveller and has ‘very harsh, prominent features, a nose like the beak of a bird of prey, hair clipped close to the head’, and it is claimed that she will wear this very hat to that Garden Party, looking ridiculous in it. Well! Quite the setup. But not enough comes of this – the party disappears from the story, the hat is apparently never worn, Flora says ‘oh well’ and gets another hat. Very disappointing indeed.
There is then a murder, and talk of blackmail and all kinds
of goings on, though not truly connected with the hatshop.
The book contains the classic line “People don’t murder
their butlers, do they?” - see also this
Georgette
Heyer book.
The book has its moments: "they want a hat just like Norma Shearer wears in the new film…”
I can do you nicely, modom:
Flora Tamar came in. She was
dressed as smartly as ever in an afternoon gown of one of the new floral silks
and she was made up with all the care she always bestowed on that operation.
Dreary Bobby has a predictable aversion to bright lipstick:
Horrid kissing a mouth all
smeared over with stuff like that. Like kissing a paint-box that had broken
loose!
Bobby dresses up in a fancy manner at one point, and the young women in the hatshop mock his appearance, but it is not clear to me exactly what is wrong with it, nor is it clear why he has this new and different outfit.
And there is this detail:
"Roger Renfield occupied what used to be called a ‘bed-sit’ but is now generally known as a “divan flatlet’" - it’s obvious which of those two phrases has survived.
Confusingly, two of the main characters are called Ernie and Judy, but Ernie is a young woman and Judy a young man – strange choices.
The insufferable Bobby breaks into someone’s house in company with a criminal and is then outraged when the owner of the house, not knowing that it is the pride of the Met, knocks him out. It seemed very reasonable to me, in addition to Bobby’s initial breakin being completely indefensible.
I found most of the book rather dull, and a great wasted opportunity for a hatshop setting.
In The Cat Saw Murder by Dolores Hitchens (1939), the heroine, Miss
Rachel, an older woman, never uses the word matron, but:
She abhorred the hats that
most elderly women affected—the pill boxes and poke bonnets and turbans too
high on their scant hair—so that she herself wore something entirely different.
Her hats were of no particular style. They sat well down on her ears; they were
snug; and their brims flared narrowly just above the hairline to frame her
face. She wore taffeta a great deal because she liked its rich rustle and not
because it was considered proper for old ladies.
The story involves her visiting a squalid seaside boarding house at Breakers Beach on the California coast: her niece is obviously in some kind of trouble. She brings the titular cat with her. Someone is murdered, and Rachel has no faith in the police. Towards the end, a woman has been abducted, and Miss Rachel has her point to make about why she should be included in the chase:
She stood by the door, watching him in chill displeasure… “You’ll miss her. You haven’t any eye for hats.” Mayhew was stung as usual by the unexpectedness of her words.
“Hats?” he echoed, still angry.
“Hats,” she repeated, and went on in the manner of a schoolteacher lecturing her most stupid and unruly pupil. “Don’t you know that the best chance we have of catching them is by recognizing her hat through the rear window?” She stopped to put her chin out at him. “In case you don’t know,” she went on carefully, “She has three hats, and I’d recognize any of them.” He took her arm very quietly.
“You win. Come on.”
Nice try at hat detection, but it doesn’t quite convince.
The importance of the hat doesn't really come off, any more than the importance of the cat.
There is another book by Dolores Hitchens on the blog,
Sleep
with Slander, which I loved – this wasn’t anything like as
good. There is an intro by Joyce Carol Oates in my edition of this one, which
nicely fillets the good and the bad in the book.
I found such excellent hats while doing this post, I am going to just add some more in here:
I’m sure more will turn up soon and there will be another post, once you start noticing they are all over the place…
Hats from: Parisian fashion catalogue of 1938,Vogue, cigarette card, my files.
Lady with the flowers is a magazine cover from State Library of Queensland.
I do wonder how they managed to keep some of these hats on their head, especially that Chanel. You wouldn't want to wear it on a windy day. I have found E R Puncheon rather underwhelming when I have tried him, Dolores Hitchens is definitely a better bet. Chrissie
ReplyDeleteThose deadly hatpins I suppose...
DeleteI'm glad we agree - I go into Punshon books with high hopes - they have good setups - but have not been that impressed by them. I'd go with Hitchens again, but I feel the whole seris of Miss Rachel/cats books won't be pulling me in.
Having done some experimenting lately, I feel I can answer this question - not, perhaps, regarding this particular Chanel hat, but generally when it comes to hats that seem to defy the laws of gravity.
DeleteFirstly: most hats had narrow elastic bands, which did not go under your chin but under the hair at the back of your neck. They were available in a range of colours resembling hair colours, so were basically invisible.
Secondly: a narrow comb could be attached to the band at the inside of the hat and make it easier to attach the hat to the hair.
Thirdly: Hat pins, obviously. They are quite efficient, though not as efficient as my final item, namely...
Fourthly: half a dozen or so of ordinary hair pins, the kind that looks like a long, narrow U with wavy legs, if you know what I mean. You push the hair pin through the hat and into the hair, and once it's come through about a centimetre or so, you turn it around so that the legs cross (the U having now become a kind of elongated X) and then keep pushing as close to the scalp as possible without actually penetrating it, until only the very small base of the U is left on the outside of the hat. By now it will be practically invisible on the outside but keeping a firm grip on your hair. Repeat four or five times in strategic places, and there you are.
By using a combination of methods #1, #3 and #4 I was able to wear a hat, which of itself would not have stayed put for a moment, a whole day in a brisk breeze without so much as a flutter. The key is to see a hat not as an article of clothing to wear but as a decoration to be attached.
This is brilliant Birgitta, thank you so much: it started to feel like origami instructions in the original Japanese at one point, but I concetrated hard, started again, and totally get what you are saying! I will bear this in mind if I get the opportunity to wear a fancy hat....
DeleteSomewhere in Joyce Dennys's "Henrietta's War" or its sequel, the impending disappearance of hat elastic casts a pall of gloom over Henrietta and Lady B - though it rapidly pales into insignificance in the face of the even worse prospect that Lady B won't be able to get new corsets.
DeleteSovay
I love those details, which you don't get anywhere else - unexpected side-effects of war!
DeleteWell, I'm sorry to hear the book didn't tick all of the boxes for you, Moira. And you're right - the hat shop is an excellent place for the plot of a story to unfold. There really are a lot possibilities there. It's a whole part of society that we just don't see anymore, and I'd love it explored in a story.
ReplyDeleteYes! They were such a feature of life, and had their own very distinctive style - the way the hats were displayed, the almost-empty windows, the hats kept in the back for special customers. So much going on!
DeleteI was watching an old movie (30's or 40's) and noticed a hat which had a very high crown, almost like a sugarloaf but broader at the top. It was worn by a "woman of a certain age" so of course I wondered if it was a matron's hat!
ReplyDeleteIt's compelling once you start noticing the all, isn't it? Do you think Miss Rachel above would have worn that one?
DeleteAccording to Open Library, Hitchens wrote two books with hard-boiled detective Sader. The other one was "Sleep With Strangers" AKA "Blue Murder" and it's also in Open Library.
ReplyDeleteI would definitely read another in that series - thanks for the tip-off
DeleteNot only do people seldom murder their butlers; their butlers seldom murder them, despite the "butler did it" cliché. I've tried a couple of ER Punshons but like my fellow Anon above I was underwhelmed - and took a serious dislike to dreary Bobby Owen who seems to feature in everything Punshon ever wrote.
ReplyDeleteMiss Rachel's hat of "no particular style" sounds just like a mid-late 1920s cloche! Great hat pictures as always - I wonder if Norma Shearer's hat was really that rather sickly shade of mint green? Black-and-white women in between the Punshon and Hitchens sections looks rather pleased with her hat, as well she might.
Sovay
There is a book where the butler is sort of guilty - but of course I can't spoiler it. But as you say, very unusual.
DeleteI thought Miss Rachel might like that hat....
I can think of one instance when the butler did it (with the dagger in the study) and another where the ‘butler’ did it, but on the whole the servants are surprisingly unmurderous, considering what they often have to put up with.
DeleteSovay
On the whole servants are there so the nobs can try to put the blame on them.
DeleteYes, you couldn't blame some of them for turning murderous...
Or else the servants weren't considered as suspects at all, the assumption being (I suppose) that they weren't smart or sophisticated enough to pull off a devilishly clever crime. In one of the Vanderbilt homes the servants had to face the wall if one of their "betters" came along, maybe in other households as well. Being treated like nobodies might cause some homicidal thoughts.
DeleteI know I've read a GA mystery in which one of the characters, talking to the investigating policeman, actually TELLS him not to bother suspecting the servants of the murder because they're all too dim to come up with such a cunning plan.
DeleteEnglish country houses tend to be rife with hidden doors and back stairs so that the servants could disappear if their "betters" were in the offing.
Sovay
Marty: if I was on the jury I'd probably find them not guilty. And of course the servants always knew what was going on, all the gossip, whatever their 'betters' thought about secrecy and 'pas devant les domestiques'
DeleteSovay: was it a Georgette Heyer? She was the most snobbish, classist person ever, but she is hilarious about the servants in her mysteries. My favourite is where the lady of the house is furious because the servants are saying they are devasted by the death 'when everyone knows they all hated him.' And the nobs don't try to accuse the servants in her books.
It wasn’t Georgette Heyer – the back of my mind says AA Milne or EC Bentley but I couldn’t swear it was either of them. It was definitely one of those light-hearted 1920s mysteries – not quite a flapper thriller but heading that way.
DeleteSovay
Then there's the trope of the maid who wants to get her name and picture in the papers, giving a highly colored "personal" account--or maybe testifying at the inquest! Or it's someone who wants to collect money offered by reporters for a story. Upstairs want everything hushed up ("think of the Scandal!!), but Downstairs are all too happy to spill some beans.
DeleteAgatha Christie has servants who are killers or crooks… The maid and the secretary in The Mystery of the Blue Train spring to mind… And lots of maids are victims of ruthless killers (A Pocket Full of Rye, A Caribbean Mystery, The Moving Finger).
DeleteA Pocket Full of Rye has both a victim and a crook among the servants.
DeleteSovay
Thank you all for these splendid examples. I am working on a post on what a maid would have worn back in the day, but haven't really considered whether or not they are going to get involved in murder!
DeleteThere's a classic example of the publicity-seeking maid in Patricia Wentworth's "Latter End" - spills all the beans about the row between the murder victim and her husband (which the gentry didn't consider worth mentioning to the police) and is then full of plans to take centre stage at the inquest, appear in all the papers and attract advantageous proposals of marriage (though she'll have to ditch her current husband first). Like so many GA maids she's a Gladys - the only respect in which she resembles the unfortunate maid in "A Pocket Full of Rye".
DeleteSovay
Excellent catch on Latter End.
DeleteI've always wondered about the name Gladys, if we could get a correlation going. It is so often the maid's name, and usually an unlucky one or a victim or seen as particularly unintelligent.
What a missed opportunity! A hat shop is a fabulous setting for a novel. I have just started reading Margery Sharp and Julia, an actress of sorts in The Nutmeg Tree, buys a Matron's Model hat to meet her estranged daughter and her fiancé because 'you could always tell a lady by her clothes' . It doesn't provide the camouflage she hoped...
ReplyDeleteThis is circular! It was in The Nutmeg Tree that I first came across matron hats, back in 2013/14, and I did a post on it then.... https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-nutmeg-tree-by-margery-sharp.html
DeleteI feel sure we’ve mentioned this but I can’t find it now. In D E Stevenson’s The Blue Sapphire (1963)—not a mystery—the young protagonist Julia gets a job in a hat shop in London. Some wonderful scenes about making and selling hats and dealing with the customers.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I have heard or, or, thus, discussed that - but I'm going to have to find it straightaway! Thanks.
Delete“The Blue Sapphire” looks very promising - a hat shop AND a boarding house!
DeleteSovay
It does - I have downloaded it already
DeleteIIRC, one of the Miss Rachel & Cat series has the cat actually change color (from tiger to black, I think). I guess whoever edited that one might have fallen asleep, maybe from boredom?
ReplyDeleteThere's a very odd strand in this one where it's thought the cat might be an impostor, and might have been dyed. I had kind of lost interest by then, and it didn't come to much. I am not a cat lover, but I would have thought a keen cat caretaker would know instantly if it was their own cat or not? But this did not seem to be the case.
DeleteI should think any investigator worth their salt would be able to identify the cat-dyer by the extensive claw-and-teeth marks, assuming the cat was alive and conscious during the dyeing process.
DeleteSovay
Sovay, that sounds like the Voice of Experience speaking! The Hitchens book I remembered was "The Alarm of the Black Cat" in which cat/heiress Samantha is described as a "marmalade" cat.
DeleteHow funny - you would think an author would only embark on such a series if she was a dedicated cat lover, cat owner, cat expert, but even I (a dedicated cat hater) can see that she doesn't seem to know much about it....
DeletePerhaps she thought "Many people seem to like cats - I shall increase the popularity of my books by putting cats in them" without fully thinking it through. Or perhaps she's familiar with dogs - you'd have a much better chance of dying a dog without incurring serious injury - and assumed that cats would behave the same. I'm fairly neutral on the cat question myself but my mum used to have one, hence my familiarity with the claws and teeth.
DeleteSovay
You do wonder about the motives don't you? I thought cat-related mysteries were a recent invention until I came across these.
DeleteI did not love the book either, sorry to see that hat mentions did not save it for you.
ReplyDeleteI did enjoy those bits - and am still grateful for the tipoff!
DeleteThis is the second mention of a poke bonnet in a 1930s/40s book that I’ve read recently. What would this look like? I imagine poke bonnets as Victorian.
ReplyDeleteFrom Nerys
Now you're sending me off down another rabbit-hole to try to find out!
DeleteI would have thought Victorian as well. Laura Ingalls Wilder was married wearing a poke bonnet - sage green with a blue shirred silk lining that matched her eyes. (The dress and hat descriptions in Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years, when she's a teenager, are incredibly detailed).
DeleteHow nice! It was very much a Victorian thing, but perhaps older ladies carried on wearing the style, or even their actual ancient hats!
Delete"no description could do the hat justice"
ReplyDeleteThe Golux, in The 13 Clocks, also has an indescribable hat. Thurber was blind when he wrote it, so he made its illustrator keep describing his drawings of the hat until he could no longer do so.
A fancy hat shop and its economics plays an important part in Roy Horniman's Bellamy the Magnificent
Unnerving story about Thurber: I found a picture online that might be the hat.
DeleteI think you have recommended Bellamy before, but I don't think I've read it
The 13 Clocks has at least two wonderful sets of illustrations, by Marc Simont and Ronald Searle.
DeleteI recommend Horniman everywhere I can!
Marc Simont was the one I saw. I will get to Horniman and Bellamy sooner or later...
DeleteMay have mentioned this before, but there is an excellent Elizabeth Bowen short story, 'Ann Lee's,' set in a hat shop. 'In the window there were just two hats; one on a stand, one lying on a cushion, and a black curtain with a violet border hung behind to make a background for the hats.' Chrissie
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere once 'the two emptiest spaces ever are the lion's cage when the lion is not in it, and a hat shop window...'
DeleteI was reminded of Elizabeth Bowen by your Rosamond Lehmann posts - another female writer whose reputation has faded, and probably for the same reason you suggest for RL - more serious than we're comfortable with these days ...
DeleteSovay
Yes - she's one of those writers I haven't featured much on the blog, because I read her books before starting blogging. I must re-visit. The Heat of the Day is a big favourite of mine - and it featured in my Lehmann reading, because Lehmann was present and involved in the whole situation which inspired it, Bowen was yet another person Lehmann knew well.
DeleteLehmann seems to have taken herself more seriously than Bowen did, Sovay. A modern reader immediately assumes that means an unreliable narrator!
DeleteBowen seems to be another writer whose personality and private life have become of more interest than her books to readers lately. There've been biographical studies and selected letters.
- Roger
Thanks Roger, yes. There was someone she wrote to continuously wasn't there, a sort of failed love affair maybe? I can see myself being sucked into another programme of re-reading novels and then biogs etc, a la Lehmann.
DeleteI'm trying to remember: Bowen was friendly with Olivia Manning, and they were going out somewhere and Manning was nervous because the event would be 'full of the nobs'. and Bowen said briskly 'we are the nobs too, we're fine'.
But this story could easily be the other way round, or involve two other writers.
And, nobs plainly means posh people, but on *hearing* it, certainly now you might think it was a rude remark, as knobheads.
Nothing I've read about Elizabeth Bowen suggests that she would have any doubt about being "one of the nobs"! “The “Heat of the Day” and “The House in Paris” are my favourites of hers; also many of her short stories, especially the wartime collection in “The Demon Lover”.
DeleteSovay
Bowen - like Iris Murdoch - was Anglo-Irish, so assumed that wherever she was she was one of the nobs.
DeleteYes, I suppose unlikely to have any social doubts. Bowen Court obviously featured hugely in her personal mythology.
DeleteI enjoyed the post. What struck me were the wonderful illustrations. They make the hats come alive far more than the photographs.
ReplyDeleteMysteries set in hat shops sent me thinking of Smithbilt Hats in Calgary. They make thousands of cowboy hats every year for the Stampede. At the same time they have some fascinators and lovely women's hats. The building is in the design of a prairie grain elevator and is located a few blocks from my older son's home.
I knew you'd like this post Bill! And I agree - those illustrations are lovely aren't they? I wonder if fashion illustration is a lost art. I'm very happy with the three i grouped together at the end...
DeleteHow fascinating about the Calgary shop, thanks for sharing that.
The green hat worn by Moira Shearer is very similar to one worn by a contestant in last night’s Sewing Bee! It looked very odd indeed, especially as it was worn inside (obviously), and I kept hoping it would fall off while she was bent over her sewing machine - which would have livened things up considerably. Possibly she might have got along better had she paid more attention to her stitching and less to her headgear.
ReplyDeleteI saw it too! It did look very odd. And feel you know perfectly well that it is Norma Shearer. Moira Shearer is a later actress who was first and foremost a ballet dancer - The Red Shoes! I have special interest in Moiras...
DeleteFat finger syndrome! Sorry! Should check my copy before posting. But the Red Shoes is a wonderful film. Scope there for shoes in books I think!
DeleteI know, exactly the kind of mistake I make as my brain jumps around. Sometimes I wake up in the night and think 'Did I misname XX in that post?' or whatever similar error, and then I happily go back to sleep thinking 'I'll check in the morning.'
DeleteApropos of none of these books, I thought immediately of Greta Garbo's hat in Ninotchka. A a silly and costly Paris confection that symbolizes her liberation from Soviet drab. (I think when she first sees it in a window she tendentiously says to Melvyn Douglas that it would pay for a year's worth of milk for schoolchildren. Or something similarly depressing.) Top photo at https://alisonkerr.wordpress.com/tag/ninotchka/. Lots of other bonus hats too! -- Your blogfriend, Trollopian
ReplyDeleteThat looks like a cousin of the home-made hourglass hat that appeared in an earlier Matron Hats post ( https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2025/08/more-hats-for-matrons-and-garden-parties.html .
DeleteSovay
Copied the wrong link ... it's https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2025/06/have-i-got-hats-for-you-matrons-and.html !
DeleteSovay
Trollopian: I'd forgotten the Ninotchka hat, how splendid. And as you say, plenty more hats to gawp at on that page.
DeleteSovay: Now we can all make our own Garbo hats.... never mind Norma Shearer.
I haven't entirely given up the idea of trying out the hourglass hat, though I was disappointed, on getting to grips with the pattern, to find that the top section is a flat wedge rather than a cone (so the hat would only look like an hourglass from certain angles). I do have a pattern for something very like the Norma Shearer/Novello from Sewing Bee hat ...
DeleteSovay
I think we're going to expect pictures Sovay! And yes, that's disappoining news about the eggtimer hat.
DeleteThe lipstick comment: there's something similar in Barbara Vine's The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, and I think it's a girl's father asking if she's been kissing a fire engine. A better/worse one occurs in The Death of the Heart; the young man who lives with his family in the bungalow named Waikiki has a comment he always uses, pretending to think that the lipstick has come off on the patterned tea cup (haven't explained that well, but he is wonderfully frightful). It must have been a thing that some men disliked bright lipstick, or perhaps an easy putdown.
ReplyDeleteGreat hats! There's a flower pot hat somewhere in Malcolm Bradbury (Eating People Is Wrong, perhaps).
There's always so much in your posts, Moira.
There's so often a moral undertone - the suggestion that women who wear makeup are "no better than they should be".
DeleteNot just women: "Inside every Romanian private's knapsack is a Romanian officer's lipstick."
DeleteChristine: thanks for kind words. And it's definitely an easy putdown I think. I would find it hard to warm to a man who said those things.
DeleteAnd yes - the moral undertone is definitely there.
I have never heard the Romanian quote!
It comes from one of Larkin's intros to his juvenilia - Jill, or The North Ship, I think.
ReplyDelete- Roger
Aha - I must have read it then without remembering. His intros are a lot more interesting than those two books, in my important view.
Delete