The “southern lady”—in her upcoming essay collection, Helen Ellis defines that phrase as “a technique by which, if you don’t have something nice to say, you say something not so nice in a nice way.” That’s why phrases like “bless your heart” drip with so much venom: those not in the know might think it’s a compliment, but those in the know—as in, those who grew up below the Mason-Dixon line—understand it for the mic-drop insult it truly is.
Ellis’s collection, had it existed at the time, might have entertained and amused a midcentury Southern Lady writer named Nedra Tyre. I first learned of Tyre (1912-1990) while looking for material for Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, the anthology I edited of short stories by women crime writers of the 1940s through the 1970s. Tyre’s name kept popping up again and again in the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and when I started reading her stories, I fell in love with her wicked wit, devilish sense of plot, and larger sense of social injustice.
I included “A Nice Place To Stay,” originally published by EQMM in 1970, in Troubled Daughters because it encompassed everything a mystery story should: The unnamed narrator has a rich and convincing backstory of poverty and strife, and all she longed for was a place to keep herself warm, clothed, and fed—no matter the cost. Tyre demonstrates, with all of the storytelling tools in her arsenal, exactly what that “nice place” can mean, and what the narrator is willing to do to get it.
Like so much of Tyre’s best work, “A Nice Place to Stay” embraces the Southern Lady Code ethos and, in the nicest possible way, conveys the most murderous of desires. Figuring out what made Tyre write as she did has occupied my time, off and on, since Troubled Daughters was published. I am not fully there yet. But this column gets me much closer to a woman who marched to no one’s drumbeat but her own.
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“Social work can be emotionally exhausting,” Nedra Tyre noted in a 1954 interview, one of the few she granted during her life. “But as background for murder, it was just what I needed.” Tyre gravitated to social work because it allowed her to meet people, from every possible walk of life she might not otherwise meet.
Born in Offerman, Georgia in 1912 to Henry Tyre and the former Frances Hull, the petite, Titian-haired Tyre was educated at the University System of Georgia Evening School of Commerce, Emory University (where she received a master’s degree), and the Richmond (VA) School of Social Work. Whether Tyre originally intended to transform her day job work into writing isn’t clear, but intent became reality with the publication of Red Wine First in 1947.
The book, a collection of lightly fictionalized case histories, struck a deep chord among reviewers at the time, many of whom didn’t quite know what to make of it. Was it a novel? Was it an essay collection? Was it something else entirely? Now, readers are more accustomed to hybrid forms that blur the lines between fiction and poetry and nonfiction and reportage. Seventy years ago, however, Red Wine First was an apparent anomaly. It would also stay that way for Tyre herself, as a few years later, she found another, longer-lasting creative outlet for her imagination: crime fiction.
Tyre took that social work background, as well as other means of employment as a sociology and literature teacher (for the Richmond Professional Institute), librarian, bookseller, advertising copywriter—none of which, as she wrote decades later in her Contemporary Authors entry, ever made her minimum wage—and mined it for her fiction. She also drew overt influence from her deep genre reading: Mouse In Eternity (1952), Tyre’s first crime novel, is as much a mystery as it is a loving tribute to the crime fiction of the day. One scene references no fewer than twenty mystery novels (as well as Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw) demonstrating how much Tyre loved the form, and why she would try it herself.
Tyre’s next book, Death of An Intruder (1953), which like Mouse of Eternity was published by Knopf, is perhaps my favorite. (A few years ago, I advocated strongly for Hall of Death, published seven years later, but I’d not read Intruder at the time, so I’ve changed my mind.) While I agree with Anthony Boucher that the mystery plotting in Intruder isn’t as strong as Mouse In Eternity, the level of suspense is still stellar, thanks to a passive-aggressive battle of wills between a shy spinster and the interloper who shows up at her house one day, refuses to leave, and usurps it—and the spinster’s life—in what amounts to a bloodless coup.
It’s all there in the opening lines of Death of An Intruder, which rank among the best crime novel openings I’ve ever read:
Miss Allison looked across the dining-table at Miss Withers, whom she was to murder at eight forty-five that night, and said: “Won’t you have some salt?”
“No, thank you,” said Miss Withers. “I don’t need any. The food is seasoned exactly right for my taste.”
“Then I’ll have some, if you please.”
Miss Withers handed Allison the salt.
Such a mundane thing, passing the salt. And yet Tyre conveys so much about Miss Allison’s despair, and Miss Withers’ sweetly delivered condescension. The latter woman is, well, so nice. Everyone thinks so. They just can’t understand why Miss Allison is so churlish about her new friend. Never mind this so-called friend has wormed her way into everything good about Miss Allison’s life. And that plan to murder her archenemy? That, too, will be upended, in a way that is equal parts ingenious and infuriating.
The next year, Knopf published Tyre’s third novel, Journey To Nowhere. It’s a travelogue of Paris and London, building off of Tyre’s multiple trips to both cites, tinged with espionage, a Southern Lady Code version of a Helen MacInnes novel. Tyre also drew from her teaching experiences, “down to the last bone and scrap of meat” as she told an interviewer not long after the novel’s publication. The novel was also optioned by Fritz Lang, though nothing came of that prospect.
Thereafter, Tyre’s publication history became more sporadic. It wasn’t for lack of output; Celestine Sibley, the longtime Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist, once noted that Tyre “had five or six unpublished manuscripts” for every published book, with one purportedly drawing upon Tyre’s travels to Mexico. But Tyre, apparently dropped by Knopf, published only three more novels, each with a new publisher: Hall of Death (Simon & Schuster, 1960), an outstanding look at a girls’ reformatory school and the nature of female friendships under extreme circumstances; Everyone Suspect (Macmillan, 1964); and Twice So Fair (Random House, 1971)
Tyre had more success placing short stories with mystery magazines, and her work was often better suited to the short form. “Murder at the Poe Shrine,” published in 1954, was a prize winner in the annual Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine writing contest. The magazine would end up publishing more than forty of Tyre’s stories over the following thirty-three years. Tyre, though, did not limit herself to EQMM, as other mystery magazines clamored for her work, too.
“Killed By Kindness”, first published by AHMM in 1963 (and reprinted in the magazine in 2014, with my own introduction) is a prime example of Tyre at her greatest. The story’s opening paragraph is a show-stopper: “John Johnson knew that he must murder his wife. He had to. It was the only decent thing he could do. He owed her that much consideration.” What, pray tell, is decent about murder? When the aforementioned wife, Mary, appears in the story, the answer becomes clearer. At least until Tyre’s next narrative move in the literary chess game she’s created for this husband and wife battling their respective ways out of a marriage so toxic that kindness is the greatest weapon of all.
After Twice So Fair came and went, without a publisher for her novels, Nedra Tyre stopped writing them altogether. She continued to work on short stories, the quality still very high, and the last of them the diptych “The Teddy Bear Crimes,” both parts of which appeared in EQMM in the fall of 1987. But health problems, including diminished eyesight and total deafness, plagued Tyre. Writing became a more laborious endeavor. She continued, however, to work for a children’s foundation in Richmond called Children, Inc.
Her old friend Celestine Sibley served as the last word on Tyre. Back in 1952, she had looked into local gossip about Tyre’s apparent shyness, concluding that on “the occasions when I’ve met [her] I’ve been so charmed by her wit, her gaiety, her small-girl good looks that I’ve forgotten to find out if she is shy and retiring.” Tyre and Sibley had fallen out of touch, but thanks to mutual friends, the columnist (who died in 1999) reported on a “bone-breaking fall” Tyre suffered in February 1989 that landed the author in hospital, robbed her of the ability to live alone, and forced her to move to the Camelot Hall Nursing Home.
A little more than a year later, on July 20, 1990, Sibley’s column contained sadder news: Tyre, now seventy-seven, had passed away nine days earlier. According to Tyre’s former co-worker Marian Cummins, Tyre “was tired and ready to die.” (The actual listed cause of death was heart disease.) There would be no funeral in accordance with Tyre’s wishes: “My funeral service was when my mother died. I want no other.” Her ashes were spread upon her mother’s grave.
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One last Tyre quote, also from that Contemporary Authors biography, resonates with me: “Life is real and life is earnest, but most of all, it’s ridiculous.” Tyre was speaking about herself, but she could also have spoken about her work. A passive-aggressive battle between two spinsters is ridiculous. So are murders featuring teddy bears or poisonings owing to desiccated marriages. But Tyre’s premises could not work if she did not believe in them, did not understand the reality, the humanity, and convey them with utmost seriousness, punctuated as they are with sly mischief.
I think, too, of the final lines of Helen Ellis’s Southern Lady Code, since they apply to Tyre so well: “I am the kind of woman…who is more interesting because of what she doesn’t do; who does not appreciate being told what kind of woman she is.” No one could tell a woman who refused to eat in restaurants lacking in cloth napkins, who preferred to spend her money on international travel and otherwise survive in penury, who stored her books in the oven, and who posed for pictures with Teddy Bears, what to do. Nedra Tyre’s crime fiction reflects the Southern Lady ethos even as it also stands apart from it—and from much of the genre altogether.
