Miss Rachel Murdock loves movies.
The septuagenarian sleuth in this novel by Dolores Hitchens, writing as D.B. Olsen, is keeping an eye on a “bandy-legged man,” who in turn is keeping watch on the Sutter Street, Los Angeles, house next door. Miss Rachel immediately tells her ladylike older sister and reluctant Watson, Miss Jennifer, that Rachel would cast the “odd sort of man” as a cowboy: “A range cowboy who’d lost his mirror.”
The films in Hollywood’s Golden Age spanned the years 1930–1948 and America flocked to them. Miss Rachel thinks in cinematic terms and it’s fun to view Cat’s Claw, published in 1943, through that lens. When Miss Rachel experiences a feeling of dread she flashes back to “a remarkably good movie,” Hands of Darkness, vividly picturing a moment when “a gorilla’s paw slid through the curtain to hover over the innocent head of the heroine.”
Cat’s Claw draws on the horror movie genre that began in 1931 in the US with Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff’s first appearance together in The Black Cat, a 1934 adaptation of Poe’s short story. Hitchens may have been familiar with the short story as Poe’s black cat, like the Murdock sisters’ cat Samantha, contributes crucial plot devices. Samantha is an early feline sleuth. From 1939 to 1956, Hitchens published thirteen Rachel Murdock titles. She was a precursor to the trend of cat mysteries by cozy writers that began primarily in the late 1980s, notably by Lilian Jackson Braun, Carole Nelson Douglas, and Rita Mae Brown.
The other movie genre in these pages is of course the Western, given the case’s locale: the San Cayetano Mountain, sixty miles south of Los Angeles. It’s a very scenic backdrop, also called “Bear Heaven” because of the local belief that grizzlies still inhabit its summits. Dolores Hitchens personifies San Cayetano as rising from the Aldershot lands “with the abruptness of a humped monster.” It’s a terrain the author, who spent most of her life in Southern California, knew well. By page three, we have an abundance of cinematic ploys: “a million-legged horror” that awaits, “elements of murder,” a widespread valuable property, and people in the case as memorable as the mountain itself. “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby” is the soundtrack.
Although this imagined film would have been shot in black-and-white, Dolores Hitchens makes a point of describing the characters in color. Miss Rachel has a “snowy head” and Miss Jennifer’s locks are “neat white ruffles.” The two wear voluminous pale taffeta skirts over layers of starched white petticoats— “two little Dresden figures.”
The dysfunctional Aldershot family is a version of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Robert is the oldest of the three children, suffering from a heart condition while wearing a costly “heavy purple robe and white silk pajamas.” Harley at eighteen is the youngest with Monica in the middle. A Carole Lombard? Monica drives a blue coupé fast, has “sulky eyes,” “lips painted frosty red,” and a “haughty” demeanor. Her outfits, like the “ivory-colored sharkskin slacks,” could have been designed by Edith Head. Spoiled rich girl Monica’s bedroom ceiling is decorated in gold leaf.
The other femme fatale is Florence, first spied by the Murdock sisters in the Sutter Street back yard before she reappears in San Cayetano. She’s slim with “sleek” dark hair and Miss Jennifer looks askance at her blue sun suit, but it’s the tartan suit Florence later wears that’s distinctive. The Aldershots have an uncle, Reuben Carder, living with them and he’s in a wheelchair. An older man with a passion for avians and arachnids, he sports a “tiny mustache like a line drawn with chalk.”
And there must be a romantic leading man. It’s Tommy Hale, angrily working on the land his family once owned—a tall “dark young man” clad in denim.
Other characters play minor roles, including teen “brown-haired and freckled” Johnny—Mickey Rooney?—who drives a local delivery truck that Miss Rachel commandeers to investigate. He’s a movie-lover as well and doesn’t hesitate to join in the drama of a clandestine pre-dawn trip to the mountain’s slate pit. LAPD’s Lieutenant Mayhew makes a repeat appearance in this third Rachel Murdock book, his attempts to get her to stay out of the investigation fruitless. The cameras roll and the book’s action, occurring over only a few days, is realistically compressed with a terror-filled roller coaster ride of an ending.
Cat’s Claw is a variant of the “Had-I-But-Known” mystery, made famous by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958). If Miss Rachel had known what spying on the bandy-legged man and going to San Cayetano would have resulted in, her “appetite for adventure” would have taken her anyway. What the book does have in common with the foreshadowing type genre are teasers of what’s to come starting on page two: “Tucked away in the ball of the future . . . were all the elements of murder, and personal, immediate, terrifying was the part she was to play in it.” Hitchens often gives us Miss Rachel’s thoughts in parentheses: “(How little she knew then!)” Others in italics: “Or had it been . . . an accident at all?” These asides, amuse-bouches, whet our appetites for what is to come and interject soupçons of suspense. Hitchens never lets them interrupt the plot. If some of the phrases are clichés in crime fiction now, they aren’t here at an origin.
Cat’s Claw is a fair-play mystery and Dolores Hitchens, while providing the clues, doesn’t make the solution easy. It wasn’t until a rereading that I spotted an early one that as a practitioner of the craft I should have noticed right away. She was a deft and ingenious writer with a gift for creating characters and striking descriptions of place that don’t sound like a guidebook. Her sense of humor is obvious and despite the era, the book is not dated. From 1938 until her death in 1973, Julia Clara Catherine Maria Dolores Robins Norton Olsen Hitchens, to give her her full name, wrote prolifically, publishing as D.B. Olsen, Dolan Birkley, Noel Burke, and as Dolores Hitchens with her husband Bert—forty-six books and a play in total.
Why did Dolores Hitchens, who was in her early thirties and married, choose to write a mystery with a seventy-something sleuth and her sister, both spinsters? Was she inspired by some real-life Murdocks, deciding to make them visible, contradicting Miss Rachel’s recollection about reading that “the elderly are almost invisible to the young”? Whatever the reason, Miss Rachel and Miss Jennifer were among a stellar company of spinster sleuths in the United States and Britain at this time. Surely a book on these indominable and independent women is overdue. Each would agree with Rachel’s comeback after her sister speaks wistfully of “when we were girls”: “I’ve had more fun since I’ve been older.”
Miss Maud Silver, retired governess, opens a detective agency in London in Grey Mask (1928), the first in Patricia Wentworth’s thirty-two book series. Sixtyish spinster sisters Amanda and Lutie Beagle move from upstate New York to take over their late brother’s NYC detective agency in two books by Marjorie Torrey writing as Torrey Chanslor—Our First Murder (1941) and Our Second Murder (1942).
Stuart Palmer’s former schoolteacher turned amateur sleuth, Hildegarde Withers, first appears in 1931. Hilda Adams would have been termed a spinster at age thirty in 1914 when Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first Miss Pinkerton mystery was published. Her profession as a nurse provides Hilda with cover through four volumes.
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple appeared in 1930 and falls into the unmarried elderly amateur sleuth category as does Charlotte Murray Russell’s Jane Amanda Edwards. Edwards is described as a “busy body spinster” training her eagle eye and wits on Rockford, Illinois, inhabitants in twenty cases from 1935–1953. Like the Murdocks and the Beagles, she has a sister, Annie, who shares Miss Jennifer’s views on how a lady should behave. The amateur sleuths in this group have a convenient actual police detective to outsmart.
What all these women have in common is behaving against type. They may be “old maids” but they don’t act like them. Miss Rachel and even timid Miss Jennifer think nothing of venturing up a twisting mountain path at ten o’clock at night to investigate in the dark.
Miss Jennifer, however, does balk at times protesting her sister’s “habit of expecting people to kill each other as soon as you see them” and “dragging other people into trouble with them.” Miss Rachel is not overly “ruffed” since Jennifer has been saying the same kind of thing since she was seven and Rachel, age five, egged her sister into putting a frog in the church’s collection basket.
Rachel Murdock may cause her sister some embarrassment, but she also expresses what all the other spinster sleuths represent in a variety of ways—the imperative to fight against evil. Rachel’s words are classic: “There aren’t any rules, any ethics, in murder . . . Do you think whoever killed him is carefully going over the moral aspects of the situation, crossing out things he mustn’t do because they wouldn’t be nice?”
The United States had entered the war by the time Dolores Hitchens was writing Cat’s Claw but there is little mention of it in the book. Jennifer is knitting khaki yarn and there is war news on the radio. There’s a scarcity of workers for the citrus groves. Johnny wants to be an aviation mechanic and see some action. That’s about it. The big city, Los Angeles, now teeming with a massive migration of wartime workers and cars adding to the already problematic smog, blackouts, and drills is worlds away.
In essence, Cat’s Claw is a compelling mystery. Certain scenes and several characters linger long after the book is closed. Pour a finger or two of the Aldershot’s good Scotch in a teacup as Miss Rachel does and sink into the long shadows cast by the craggy mountain.
Katherine Hall Page
July 2024
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