Friday, April 29, 2011

Friday's Forgotten Books, April 29, 2011


Please check out Rick Robinson's blog right here for the links




Ed Gorman is the author of TICKET TO RIDE and edited ON DANGEROUS GROUND. You can find him here.

MISCHIEF, THE UNSUSPECTED by Charlotte Armstrong

I believe it was Anthony Boucher who once described Charlotte Armstrong as a mixture of Cornell Woolrich and Shirley Jackson. I'm not sure I quite agree with that but it's headed in the right direction anyway.

Armstrong was pure 100% white bread. Well-bred, middle class if not upper middle class, traditional in virtually every respect, her forte was gently undermining the kind of women's fiction you found in the slicks of the 1940s and 1950s. (I've always remembered how she challenged the masculinty of a girl friend's lover. "He's the sort of man who's interested in women's hats." An her own lover says: "Lord." She was also good at spoofing the Martha Stewarts of her day. You could tell what she thought of a woman just by how she set her table. Too fancy was deadly.)

Her fiction is...odd. Nearly everybody in her stories is neurotic and overmuch. My favorite Armstrong is Mischief, a short novel that made a much-denigrated film called Don't Bother To Knock, which features a chilling performance by a young Marilyn Monroe as a mentally unbalanced babsyitter. It's a flawed movie but for me an entertaining one.

Her greatest success was with her novel The Unsuspected which became a smash hit with Claude Raines. The problem with the film is that running time doesn't permit all the really slick plot twists Armstrong brought to the novel. It's ominous undertone about how media monsters are created is extremely relevant to today.

She died way too young, at sixty-four, at the h eighth of her popularity. Her stories were regularly adapted for TV. She won the Edgar for her novel A Dram of Poison which again struck me as an...odd book. A clever book, a well written book, but one that always left me cold.

You see her at her best, I think, in her short stories, many of which are stunning. And you have to applaud the slick magazine editors of the time for publishing some of them. She published two collections during her lifetime and you won't find a bad one in the bunch. And a few of them are stunning, dark as noir but played out against middle class setting and situations. Even most of her cozier material has an edge (with one goofy exception,that being A Dram of Poison).

I don't think she was nearly as good as Margaret Millar, whom she resembles in some ways, nor Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, whom she also resembles, but she is certainly worth sampling from used stores or the internet.


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6 comments:

Jerry House said...

Charlotte Armstrong hit the mark nearly every time out. She deserves a rediscovering.

Cullen Gallagher said...

Ed must be reading my mind (or else I'm reading his). MISCHIEF just arrived a few days ago, and I've been on the look out for a copy of THE UNSUSPECTED.

Anonymous said...

Patti - What a great choice!! Thanks for reminding me of Charlotte Armstrong.

Kevin R. Tipple said...

There are just too many good books. Barry Ergang did NO CHANCE IN HELL TODAY over on my blog and now this here.

And I had never heard of either.

Anonymous said...

I've only read three of Charlotte Armstrong's books but Ed hit all of them. I did like A DRAM OF POISON more than he did, but I admit the goofiness is not typical, or for everyone.

She started out with a short series, three books about MacDougal Duff (Lay On, MacDuff! was, perhaps inevitably, the first). She also wrote one book (The Trouble in Thor) as by Jo Valentine.

I'll have to look for those short story collections.

Jeff M.

Kitty said...

Several years I discovered Harold Adams, who set his Carl Wilcox mystery series in depression-era South Dakota.

A friend described his books perfectly: Wilcox is a former convict and itinerant sign painter who travels around small towns in 1930s South Dakota trying to sell his services and, inevitably, getting involved in murders. The books are spare, almost terse, and that's a good thing. With a couple of words, Adams brings to life a lost world of farmers on the brink of despair, of steamy nights at dance halls and frigid South Dakota winters.