The Sister of Cain, by Mary Collins

 

97988866011296

Stark House Press, 2025

originally published 1943, Charles Scribner's Sons

196 pp

paperback

One of my greatest mystery-reading pleasures is discovering authors whose work has been around for a long time but who are new to me, especially women writers I've never heard of before.   I've found that joy here with The Sister of Cain, published by Stark House last month, by Mary Collins (1908 - 1979).

About this author I can find very little online, except for the brief blurb at the Stark House website, which tells me that she was born in St. Louis, MO, then moved along with her family to Berkeley at age three where later she would attend the University of California. She wrote "a few fiction stories" for a magazine called The Passing Show, eventually turning to mystery writing, with six novels written between 1941 and 1949: The Fog Comes, Dead Center, Only the Good (also reprinted by Stark House 2022),  The Sister of Cain, Death Warmed Over, and Dog Eat Dog.  It seems that she then "retired from writing" to give her time to her family.  There is also an archive of materials covering her mystery-writing years and a few years beyond, containing "correspondence, contracts, manuscripts, notes and scrapbooks, 1941-1953," for a scholarly someone who might want to delve further into her life.  

On to the novel now, which according to Curtis Evans in his introduction to this book, received a "rave review" from Dorothy B. Hughes and was also broadcast on radio in 1944 as part of  the Molle Mystery Theater Program  from NBC (I've just spent a couple of hours scanning that page and being completely awed at all the titles I know).   Hilda Moreau has arrived in San Francisco at the home of her husband David's family; more specifically, his six sisters Pauline, Sophie, Anne, Elise,  Marthe and Rose, varying in age from 51 to 20, Pauline being the eldest.  There was another sister, Berthe, but she had died fifteen years earlier.  David and Hilda had met while he was teaching and she, a teacher, had been attending a summer session where he worked.  They married just shortly after Pearl Harbor, and because of his Navy reserve commission, he had been called up for active duty, and the last time she'd seen him was a month earlier, in New York.   She has come to his family home while he was serving in the Atlantic because she had no family to speak of; the plan was that Hilda would find an apartment but still enjoy the security of being looked after by his sisters.  The Moreaus lived in "the oldest house still standing in San Francisco ... built in 1852," which Curtis Evans notes is based on a "real city mansion, built in 1852 and known locally as Humphrey's Circle." 

The Humphrey House, from Library of Congress

 Oh. And Hilda is pregnant, but neither she nor David have told anyone yet. 

 Original hardcover edition, from Abebooks

Instead of a warm and loving family, Hilda discovers the opposite.  Pauline, it seems, has complete control over the sisters, financially and otherwise, to the point where she will not allow any of the sisters to marry.  Hilda realizes early on how this woman has created an atmosphere of "fear and bitterness and hatred."  There is also a maid, Nanette, who has been with Pauline since she was born, who is as surly toward the sisters as can be.    Hilda quickly gets down to brass tacks with Pauline regarding her husband's portion of the family trust, but Pauline has other ideas.  It seems that the trust can only be broken by marriage, and since David is now married, all of the siblings should legally be able to come into their share.  Pauline refuses to speak to her about it, so Hilda tells her that she has no other choice but to use her power of attorney and to speak to a lawyer.  This situation doesn't sit well with Pauline, who has control over the trust.  Unfortunately, Hilda is pretty much stuck at the house for the time being, since housing is nearly impossible while the city was filled with "service people, shipyard workers, and government employees."  It isn't too long, however, until murder also finds its way into the house when Pauline is found dead, killed with a knife from the kitchen.  As one of the sisters says, "there's no grief in this house" over her death, since they'd all "wished her dead a thousand times."  But, as the detective says to Pauline, 

"The other people in this house have had their motives for a good many years, Mrs. Moreau. The fun didn't start until after you got here, did it?" 

While the police focus on Hilda as the possible murderer, and as long-buried secrets come cascading out that provide definite reasons for wanting Pauline dead,  Hilda does all that she can to find the real culprit in the house, but it won't be too long before there are more deaths and she finds herself in serious danger.

What a fun ride this novel is, and how incredibly hard it was to have to put this book down when I had to!  The gothic vibe is pretty strong here with Collins doing a great job establishing a dark, tension-filled atmosphere almost immediately.  While Pauline is a great villain for reasons I won't go into, it's really all eyes on Hilda here, who is an extremely strong woman, more than capable of taking care of herself and not averse to personal risk in her quest to clear her name and to bring the real murderer to justice.  I will say that it was rather cringeworthy to see her light up while pregnant, but ah, the things no one really knew back then.  The historian in me was also interested in her descriptions of wartime San Francisco which after all, she knew very well.  

I tried so hard to guess the killer's identity and absolutely couldn't, even as the number of people started dwindling, because there were just too many great suspects.    I consider that a true plus -- Collins really didn't make it easy.  I can certainly and highly recommend The Sister of Cain for vintage crime readers and for mystery lovers like myself who enjoy finding new and somewhat obscure writers from the past.  

As always, my many thanks to Stark House for my copy (these guys are so great), and I'm sure I'll be moseying over there to pick up a copy of another Mary Collins novel.  

One more thing: there is an amazing blogger by the name of Tim Welsh who has not only read this book, but has posted photos of the various locations described by the author.  Don't go there until you've read The Sister of Cain, but his blog, San Francisco Film Locations Then & Now: A Then and now Tour and History of San Francisco Through Films and Photography is well worth the visit when you've finished.  I bookmarked it so I'm sure I'll be spending time going through that rabbithole in the near future. 

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, by Kate Summerscale

 

... "everything in life is but a peep-show"

9781526660480

Bloomsbury Circus, 2024

300 pp

hardcover

Before I get started here, let me just say that the entire month of February was just horrible.  My very sweet spouse had three  surgeries during that time, one of which was unexpected and directly on the back of the second after his blood pressure dropped so low during recovery that I actually thought that this was it.  The good news is that it wasn't his time, apparently, and little by little as he's been regaining his physical strength, I've been working on getting back to some semblance of mental normalcy, not always an easy feat.   But here I am again after this sort of forced hiatus, ready to get on. 

Most of my reading was done via audiobooks for passing long, quiet hours, but I did manage to get my hands on a physical copy of Kate Summerscale's newest book, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place.  I bought mine at Blackwell's (postage to US included in price!) because the US release isn't until May 6th and I didn't want to wait.  I've read several of this author's books, including The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (which I loved), The Wicked Boy (which I didn't love) and The Haunting of Alma Fielding, and I think with The Peepshow she brings much less of the extraneous detail she usually brings to her books for the reader to wade through, and more of an opportunity to draw connections between that time and our own.  It is both a true crime sort of read and a social history and really, I believe it is her best work yet. 

You can look up 10 Rillington Place online if you've not heard of the crimes that occurred there, but in a nutshell, it was the address in the Notting Hill section of North London that was the home of John Christie, who lived there with his wife Ethel in the ground-floor flat.  In 1948, Timothy Evans and his wife Beryl arrived at this place and lived upstairs from the Christies, and in 1949, Beryl and their baby Geraldine were killed, with Timothy being charged with and tried for the baby's death.  John Christie served as a witness against Evans at his 1950 trial, and Evans was found guilty of and hanged for the crime.   Later, after Ethel had supposedly gone off without him, Christie eventually left the flat, another tenant who had permission from the landlord to use the Christie kitchen started cleaning and found a space to hang a shelf for his radio.  He discovered that the wall where he wanted to put his shelf was hollow, and there he discovered a hidden cupboard. When he used a light to look inside, he made the horrific discovery of what seemed to be the body of a naked woman. Eventually the police would find the bodies of several other women both inside and outside the Christie flat, along with evidence that would point to Christie as their killer.  Christie by this time was on the run, and would eventually be found, charged and tried for his crimes.  

In putting her book together, Summerscale tells of events through the eyes of  two reporters: Harry Procter, a successful and highly-driven tabloid journalist,  and author Fryn Tennyson Jesse, who approached events from a much different perspective, and whose analysis of the case would eventually appear in the volume of the Notable British Trials series featuring the trials of both Timothy Evans and John Christie in 1957.  

contemporary headlines, from Murderpedia

Procter, as she quotes another journalist here,  

"did not just report a story; 'he infiltrated it, embedded himself, then owned it, then manipulated its protagonists as puppeteer-in-chief so that everything fell into place, as, and when, and exactly how, he wished.' " 

In the book that had inspired him to become a reporter, The Street of Adventure, author Philip Gibbs wrote  that "everything in life is but a peep-show," and that reporters felt like "the only real people in the world."  When he got wind of the story at 10 Rillington Place after the first bodies had been discovered and Christie had gone on the run, Procter went to the scene only to realize, "with a shock," that he had been there before when he worked for The Daily Mail.  It was during the time when Tim Evans had been charged with murder, and Procter had interviewed Christie about his neighbor.  Christie had been polite and soft spoken, and at the time, Procter saw no reason at all to suspect that Christie might have had anything to do with the deaths.  Now though, he not only "cursed himself for not having questioned him more closely" at the time, since it was obvious that Christie must be behind the current murders, but as Summerscale writes, Procter considered it possible that Christie just might have framed Evans for something Christie himself had done, and may have helped to send an innocent man to the gallows.  His personal stakes were high in getting Christie's story, both in terms of somehow making Christie feel the need to confess to the murders of Beryl and her baby and of course, reporting the story that would completely make his career.   Fryn Tennyson Jesse, who had been "gripped" by the coverage of the murders, was, as the author notes, "part of a golden generation of female crime writers. One of her books, Murder and Its Motives focused on (as noted here) "Six spectacular murders of the past century," and she had also written a novel called A Pin to See the Peepshow, which author Sarah Waters described in a Guardian article as "an achingly human portrait;" a  "thinly fictionalised account of the life of ... Edith Thompson, one of the three main players in the 'Ilford murder' case of 1922. "  She had also written essays in the Notable British Trials series.  Summerscale states that Jesse, now sixty-five, was going blind, was "frail" and a morphine addict, and was "afraid that she was being forgotten," so she "hungered for a story that would restore her."  If she could do the write up of the Christie case for Notable British Trials, it would be just what she needed.    Neither Procter nor Jesse could fathom Christie's lack of moral responsibility for his deeds, another factor bringing the two strands of reporting together.  

 What stands out about Christie here is that he was a man who outwardly resembled any number of men his age of the time, looking respectably average in his suit and his spectacles, while speaking softly and serving in a number of respectable positions.  When he was being sought by the police, it seemed that people saw him everywhere because he seemed so ordinary.  Summerscale gets behind that veil of respectability to reveal  a virulent racist who couldn't stand the fact that West Indian people were living in his building, even blaming the horrific odors of decomposition on his upstairs neighbors, an idea that was readily accepted by people who came into his apartment.  He was also a complete misogynist who viewed himself as passive while the women he victimized were the aggressors, and even to the last he  refused to show any sort of remorse for what he'd done.   If this book were only about John Christie and his crimes it would still be very good, but the author goes deeper into the lives of the many victims (doing so with the great care that these women truly deserve) as well as the social, political and economic landscapes of the time, while also diving into the power/machinations of the press  and the readers who lapped up every word. The dustjacket blurb says that her mining of the archives "sheds fascinating light on the origins our fixation with true crime," and although there is no definitive answer behind the biggest question of them all (i.e. who really killed Beryl and Geraldine Evans),  the blurb  also notes that Summerscale does "suggest" a possibility. 

I can only begin to imagine how much research went into writing this book and it shows.  I absolutely did not want to put this book down while reading and when I had to do so, I couldn't get back to it fast enough.  I found it to be an enlightening piece of social history,  a book that I can highly recommend.  

The LIttle Sparrow Murders, by Seishi Yokomizo

 

9781782278870

Pushkin Vertigo, 2024

originally published as Akuma no temari uta (悪魔の手毬唄, serialized 1957-1959; published in book form in 1971, Kadakowa Shoten)

translated by Bryan Karetnyk

311 pp

paperback

read in December

It is no secret how much I have come to love these books. I'd had this one preordered for months once I learned it was going to be published; I already have the next Pushkin Vertigo translation, Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, due out in the fall of this year, on my radar and in my sights.   The Little Sparrow Murders is number 49 of 77  in  Yokomizo's Kosuke Kindaichi detective series and is the sixth of this author's books to have been published in translation by Pushkin Vertigo.  I was also lucky enough to have latched on to a dvd of the film made in 1977, which was not quite as good as the novel, but then again, I expected that.  

It's July, 1955 and Kindaichi Kosuke is taking a much-needed rest and decides that he should go Okayama Prefecture where he'd "developed a fondness for the local people and their ways" after spending time there during a few of his crime-solving adventures.  First he stops in to visit with an old friend, Inspector Isokawa in Okayama, who gives him the address of an inn in Onikobe Village, owned by a woman who Isokawa once knew. Evidently, she's had "her fair share of sorrow," since her husband had been murdered some twenty years earlier, and the crime had never been solved.   While Kindaichi insists he only wants to rest for a while, he agrees to listen to the inspector about this case, which seems to mean so very much to him.   Once in the village, Kindaichi holes up at the Turtle Spring Inn, where he "could quite happily give himself over to idleness without being disturbed by anybody." As he notes, he didn't "feel any particular sense of obligation" to the inspector, but at the same time, he kept his eyes and ears open while "lazing around idly like a cat."   Kindaichi's plans for R&R are interrupted, however, with the disappearance (and perhaps murder?) of the elderly Hoan Tatara,  a self-described "recluse" and local historian.  Not long before Tatara disappeared, Kindaichi  had gone to his home and had written a letter to a former ex-wife for him, asking her to come live with him now that they're both old, a proposal that had been accepted.  In fact,  Kindaichi had run into an elderly woman with a large furoshiki on her back who had introduced herself as O-Rin, this particular ex-wife of Tatara's, who was on her way to his place.   Now, however, there is no sign of either of them, and Isokawa, who has come to Onikobe, wonders if perhaps Tatara's disappearance might have something to do with the unsolved crime of twenty years earlier.  It seems though that Tatara's disappearance is not the only strange happening in the village; it isn't long until a young woman is discovered murdered, her body and the scene staged in a bizarre fashion.  She isn't the only one to die, however -- the guests at her wake will soon be attending another one.   Kindaichi must figure out what connects all of these occurrences in order to stop these murders, and  discovers a slender thread of a clue that just might tie them all together. 

ryokan in Onikobe Village, from Trip Advisor

While my favorite of the Kindaichi mysteries so far continues to be The Inugami Clan (it's bizarre beyond belief and firmly in my strange-reading wheelhouse), The Little Sparrow Murders follows closely in second place.    The novel is also much more reader friendly than the previous ones, and Bryan Karetnyk's translation made the story flow.  I will say that I flipped back and forth between the text and the map that is provided at the beginning of the book any number of times before I finally took a photo and kept it up on my iPad screen to refer to.    The provided list of characters soon becames vital as well,  because the family relationships are beyond critical to the story. 

The Little Sparrow Murders delivers a super murder mystery, while also examining how the past has a powerful impact on the present and delving into social divisions, ritual, customs and the importance of history in this village.  It is also  a solid puzzle that armchair detectives will appreciate, making for a particularly good whodunit, and I am most happy to admit that  I did not guess or even come close to guessing the who here.   High marks to this one, and definitely recommended to readers of Japanese crime fiction or to fans of Yokomizo's detective Kindaichi Kosuke.  Now I'm not so patiently waiting for the next book.  

film poster for 1977 film, Akuma no temari-uta. From IMDB

Akuma no temari-uta was directed by Kon Ichikawa, as were thirteen other films featuring our erstwhile and somewhat scruffy detective Kindaichi.   There are other films with different directors, but the Ichikawa films are by and large my favorites, and Kindaichi's adventures were also revisited on Japanese television and in manga.   The story changes just a bit in the movie based on this novel but the main thrust of the book carries through the film.   In the book you have the list of characters complete with family relationships to draw on, but here the introduction to these people happens within the first half hour or so, making it a big on the draggy side.  But after that, I was completely engaged in what was happening on screen, especially the murders, which were portrayed in a way that even horror-film watchers would have appreciated, yet still kept close to the descriptions in the novel.  One trademark of Ichikawa's work is that he is experimental in style -- in Akuma no temari-uta there are quick cuts, flashbacks that often are revealed in grainy black-and-white and other moves that definitely kept me on my movie-watching toes.   One of these involves a scene from the 1930 movie Morocco that is so eerie in the watching, yet necessary to the overall character study.   There's also a sprinkling of Kindaichi's dandruff I could have done without, but that same thing happens in all of the Ichikawa movies in some form.   The end comes with some pretty over-the-top dramatics, but then again, I'm a long-time watcher of Japanese films where emotional scenes tend to bring this sort of thing out in the actor.  I am lucky enough to understand the language but I'm sure there must be copies of this movie on dvd with English subtitles. As usual, the bottom line is this: film good, book much better.