More Hats - for matrons and garden parties

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.

Chanel hat from Vogue, 1939

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:

Norma Shearer

Flora, the femme fatale, never gets as interesting as she should be.

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.