Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel

Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel A.B. EMRYS

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Emrys, A. B., 1946 – Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the evolution of the casebook novel / A. B. Emrys. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4786-2 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Collins, Wilkie, 1824 –1889 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Caspary, Vera, 1899 –1987 — Criticism and interpretation. 3. Detective and mystery stories, English — History and criticism. 4. Detective and mystery stories, American — History and criticism. 5. Psychological fiction, English — History and criticism. 6. Psychological fiction, American — History and criticism. 7. Sensationalism in literature. I. Title. PR4497.E47 2011 823'.8 — dc22 2011004688 BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

© 2011 A. B. Emrys. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover image David Sutherland/Getty Images Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

Acknowledgments My thanks are due to the University of Nebraska– Kearney for Research Services grants that supported the development of this book and to the Department of English for professional development leaves in 2000 and 2009, during which I began and completed this manuscript. Important support also came from the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University where I was a visiting fellow, the Mystery and Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association, where I presented material from the book in progress, from Clues, a Journal of Detection, which first published an earlier version of the chapter on Laura, from the Feminist Press, which reprinted Laura and Bedelia with my afterword, and to Crippen & Landru Press, who brought out The Murder in the Stork Club, a collection of Vera Caspary’s short fiction, with my introduction. A grant-in-aid from the Friends of the Library at the University of Wisconsin– Madison provided me with important research support, and the archivists at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which houses the Vera Caspary Papers as part of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, further aided my research. Finally, I am grateful to the Authors League Fund, which holds the copyright to most of Caspary’s works, for approving my use of her material in this book.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction

1

1. Framed: A Brief History of Documents as Narrative Frames

9

2. How He Wrote His Books: The Apprentice Years of Framing Testimony

20

3. The Woman in White: Collins Launches the Casebook Novel

35

4. Counterpoint Witnessing in No Name and Armadale

47

5. The Moonstone: Collins Eclipses His First Casebook

59

6. Framed Testimony in Collins’s Later Novels

72

7. The Casebook After Collins

83

8. Before Laura: Vera Caspary’s Early Career and Novels

99

9. Laura: A Noir Novel Deeply Rooted in Sensation

111

10. Laura and Bedelia: “New Woman” Noir

127

11. After Laura: Caspary’s Other Casebook Novels

140

12. Caspary Continues to Apply Multiple Focus

153

13. Reframed: Multiple Focus in Popular and Literary Texts

168

Conclusion

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Bibliography

199 199 199 201 203

Primary Collins Texts Primary Caspary Texts Other Primary Texts Secondary Texts

Index

207 vii

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Introduction Their careers matched to a surprising extent for novelists in different centuries: both Wilkie Collins and Vera Caspary were long-term professional writers who lived from their work; both wrote in multiple genres, including plays (and, in Caspary’s case, screenplays); both built wide audiences through magazine serialization; both wrote popular best-sellers; and both were respected and well known. Both wrote three novels in witnessing testimony, and both wrote novels partially in counterpointed documents as well. The latter two connections, however, are not coincidence but the result of Caspary’s deliberate use of “the Collins method,” an adaptation that links the structures as well as the themes of sensation and noir fiction, illustrating that crime fiction is a continuum rather than a literature of distinct epochs. That link is reason enough to examine the Caspary-Collins dialogue in form. Yet this examination also reconfirms Collins’s claim to have founded a new form of multiple focus, an aspect not yet fully explored in Collins scholarship, and one that also reassesses Collins’s relationship to mystery fiction in terms of his formalist contribution to crime narrative. This dual study underscores the complexity of form in Caspary’s fiction, which has been neglected critically in favor of her film connections, while also establishing her as chief inheritor of the casebook novel. In analyzing the Collins-Caspary dialogue in form, this study offers clarification of the various uses of documents in fiction, an area that has long been muddled by the lack of critical distinctions among framing applications. This study also surveys casebook novels by Fergus Hume, Bram Stoker, Dorothy L. Sayers, Michael Innes, Julian Symons, and Michael Cox as well as three by Vera Caspary.

Collins’s Novel of Testimony and Its Influence More than a dozen books on Wilkie Collins and his work have appeared over the last few decades, as well as hundreds of articles. Although some studies have a very particular focus, such as “A Land of Angels with ‘Stilettos’: Travel 1

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Experiences and Literary Representations of Italy in Wilkie Collins” (in The Collins Society Journal), most studies emphasize social issues, with titles such as “‘What Could I Do?’ Nineteenth Century Psychology and the Horrors of Masculinity in The Woman in White” (in Victorian Sensations). This outpouring of theme-focused critical appraisal may represent the canonization of a popular author or perhaps a counterbalance to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century criticism of Collins. Although some of Collins’s initial reviewers acceded to his claim of having invented a new form, he was also reviled as being too formintensive (as well as later for being too issue-oriented). Critical assessment has also been complicated by the separation of popular from literary fiction — a distinction that is not made here, as the novel of testimony structure is germane across a broad spectrum of fiction. The present study analyzes the heritage of the narrative structure of Collins’s novels, with an extended focus on Caspary’s novels of testimony and her adaptation of Collins’s plots and characters. Collins brought together available ingredients to develop a form so well suited to mystery that it has been adapted by other novelists for well over a century. Collins’s influence on mystery fiction through narrative structure is as significant, if not more so, as his influence via theme and character. Collins’s emphasis on monologic character voice, renewing the narrative force of the epistolary novel, not only helped to lay the groundwork for continued use of the casebook form as well strongly voiced documents as a counterpoint to unframed narrative but also contributed to the development of novels in multiple voices without document framing. Caspary’s extensive dialogue with Collins illustrates all three areas. After her adaptation of Collins’s approach for Laura, Caspary’s later fiction ranged among the possibilities for framed character narration, framing counterpointed with unframed text, and multiple focus without framing. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Caspary explored the structural possibilities of which Collins was a principal developer.

Collins’s Experiments in Form With the publication of The Woman in White (1860), Wilkie Collins claimed to have invented a new structure, a novel in documents that add up to the solution of a mystery. Further, he asserted that his fiction was character-driven rather than plot driven: he later summarized this as the effect of character on circumstance, not its opposite. Both assertions were accurate. What keeps Wilkie Collins’s novels enjoyable enough for continued reading and important enough for continued study surely includes the superb casebook structure he developed from epistolary fiction, trial reportage, police cases, the prose monologues of Edgar Allan Poe, and other sources to showcase and manipulate multiple focus in dramatic monologues that both conceal and reveal evidence. Yet

Introduction

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Collins’s novel of testimony has too often been casually classified as “epistolary” or “mediated” narration, as though it had existed previously and exerted no influence since. That Collins directly influenced other important casebook novels, particularly Dracula, is also known, but the structural relationship between his novels and other works has not been explored in any detail until the present study. I argue that Dracula overall was influenced by The Moonstone as well as The Woman in White, and that structural analysis illuminates such conundrums in Stoker’s novel as the effectiveness of Mina Harker’s seemingly distanced role as codetective and narrator. In addition to Dracula, I discuss below pre–Caspary casebook novels that include Fergus Hume’s A Marriage Mystery and other works by Hume that play off Collins’s structures and characters, making explicit references to underline the connection. I further consider Henry James’s use of frame to avoid testamentary accumulation in The Turn of the Screw and Dorothy L. Sayer’s homage to Collins in The Documents in the Case, as well as Michael Innes’s Lament for a Maker, also a full-dress novel in testimony. After Caspary’s own novels of testimony —Laura, Stranger Than Truth, and The Secret of Elizabeth— I also cite Julian Symons’s The Immaterial Murder Case, whose narrative structure closely follows Caspary’s alteration of the casebook form. Beyond Caspary, whose long dialogue with Collins is detailed in its own chapters, Collins’s influence has been threefold: recent novelists have adapted his characters, plots, and/or his casebook structure, either in direct emulation and homage or through the separate line of influence by Dracula; crime writers have utilized counterpointed character narration in the manner of Collins without directly referencing him; and major literary works illustrate the continuing importance of multiple focus in framed narration as well as in direct interior monologue, also in dialogue with Collins’s well-known experiments in form. The hidden-in-plain-sight status of Collins’s novels of testimony is due, in part, to the lack of attention paid to the use of documents in general in nineteenth-century and modern fiction. All such uses are frequently grouped together under blanket terms such as mediated narrative, dispersed narrative, or multiple focus as uniform function and any text with letters may be considered epistolary. The present study identifies five distinct areas of document usage: brief plot-forwarding document, whole-document frame, front and/or end frame, counterpointed documents (novel partly in regularly occurring framed narration), and the novel of testimony. The latter, Collins’s chief innovation, though hardly the limit of his experiments, exhibits clear characteristics that have continued to define its use in the work of Caspary and others into a third century. Collins very deliberately built his novel of testimony directly on the structure of the novel of letters and the use of other such document frames in fiction as diary excerpts, written histories of events, and confessions. He further adapted the nineteenth-century public interest in crime to give the novel of

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testimony a juridical slant recognizable to readers of trial transcripts in newspapers. In this merger he reversed the private nature of letters and diaries to make them part of a semipublic casebook of crime. The accounts of witnesses and participants become the documents in the casebook. Essential to this development was Collins’s increasing skill with natural and distinct character voice to narrate the documents. These voices are neither simply the responses of witnesses summoned into court nor flat accounts in brief expository documents but rather individual, intimate voices whose testimony, whether originally private or openly witnessing, is cross-grained, unreliable, and self-consciously partisan. Concealing as much as they reveal, confessing even while concealing, such testimonies revive the play of viewpoint of the novel of letters in a new application. Collins was not so much a pure originator of form as a genius at exploiting the possibilities of public documents and intimate voice in the service of Gothic detection. The following six chapters on Collins define recognizable characteristics of the novel of testimony in three novels by Collins, The Woman in White, The Moonstone, and The Legacy of Cain, his final completed novel. I analyze Collins’s sources and context for developing the structure, examining in detail the works in which he experimented with the formal ingredients that would make The Moonstone his finest achievement. These short works, framed collections, and parts of longer works show Collins raiding Poe and competing with him, overdoing framing devices yet often using them to successful effects, and rehearsing characters and plot that he later reprised more successfully, including detectives both male and female, professional and amateur. Collins played with front and end frames, exchanges of documents, confessions, first-person narration, document-framed exchanges in conclusions or sections, and elaborately layered framing. As with the novel of testimony, many of these works have been briefly noted by earlier commentators but without extensive enough examination of form in the body of early work to assess its relation to epistolary fiction, to Poe’s writing, to emerging mystery fiction, and to prose form. Close analysis of his work reveals the 1850s–1860s as Collins’s formalist period, with the constant experimentation that culminated in his best novels. His lack of such major focus on form and on detection after The Moonstone partially explains why his later novels seem so issue-oriented. Such categorization parallels reviewers who, pre–Moonstone, both praise and castigate Collins as a puzzle maker and post– Moonstone critique his work as too socially focused. An analysis of The Legacy of Cain, Collins’s final and unsuccessful novel of testimony, illustrates what made the earlier novels so dynamic. Beyond the full novel in testimony, Collins’s novels with counterpointed documents are discussed, with special focus on Armadale, No Name, and Poor Miss Finch. Collins’s narratives in document frames set within third-person narrative also have definable characteristics, which are manipulated against the

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unframed, third-person portions of the book. In the novel of testimony, the viewpoints not only complicate the plot with character mediation, withholding or distorting information, but also play against each other, contradicting or otherwise complicating the reader’s view of other framed narration. The effects of multiple testimony can be replicated to equally intense effect in novels with counterpointed documents; this impact is particularly important to Collins’s works after The Moonstone. It has not been my goal in these chapters to settle once and for all whether Collins was the first creator of a detective novel in English or any other such firsts. I have noted suggestions for these where I have seen them made and evaluated some as they bear on form, but it is my contention that Collins’s contribution to crime narrative is far greater than a single “first” or even multiple such items. Nor is it my goal to assess precisely what sources Collins drew on for particular novels. There have been so many candidates put forward, especially for The Woman in White and The Moonstone, that it seems abundantly clear Collins drew on multiple sources routinely. Again, I have noted these principally when they reference form, as it is my goal to define and discuss Collins’s development of the casebook novel and to trace major instances of its subsequent influence.

Caspary and “the Collins Method” Vera Caspary is known today, when she is known at all, almost entirely as “the author of Laura.” Until recently, Laura was the only one of her novels to be in print even intermittently since her death in 1987. Though Caspary did not write the script for Otto Preminger’s film based on the novel, the adaptation plus her own many screen stories, movie originals, and screenplay adaptations kept her reputation alive. Yet Caspary realized her dramatic skills successfully in fiction from the 1920s to the 1970s. Her film career and even her work as an author of plays was more collaborative, while her novels showcased her ability as an artist working alone. In her wry autobiography The Secrets of Grownups (1979), Caspary framed her own life as a plot she “wrote” by making herself independent enough to choose her own course. Critically, the view of her work has also been distorted by the prominence of Laura, yet without much analysis of the novel. The only book-length study of her work, Laura as Novel, Film, and Myth (1992), has a shifting focus from book to film to Gene Tierney, the actress who portrayed the title character. Otherwise, the 1980s saw brief entries on Caspary in encyclopedias of women and/or mystery writers and a few articles, principally in Clues: A Journal of Detection. One unpublished dissertation considers Caspary along with Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman as women playwrights in Hollywood.

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This meager attention reflects both misconceptions and misreadings of the career of a best-selling novelist whose works reflect seven decades of dramatic changes in norms, lifestyles, and opportunities for Caspary and her characters. The lack of scholarship is in sharp contrast to Caspary’s reception during her lifetime, when her books were widely reviewed and critically well received. The exclusive categorization of her as a woman mystery writer has kept some attention focused on her fiction but has also narrowed her continued reception. Caspary did write mysteries as well as family history, mainstream realism, psychological suspense, and social comedy. Her range is in many ways similar to Collins’s own. As in his fiction, the ingredients of mystery —crime, suspects, and detection — are in no way divorced from her plots which do not include murder. Seen as a whole, her novels are thematically unified by her championing of independence for both men and women, achieved primarily through emerging opportunities for careers. Crime and punishment operate as metaphors for the paramount importance of earning one’s way in all senses and as warnings about the disaster of manipulating others instead of making one’s own life. Although the majority of her protagonists are women, men too, in her books, run the risks of dependence and obsession as well as suffering from their relationships with women socialized to be clinging or controlling. Caspary’s mixture of social issue themes with crime plots echo sensation novels of the 1860s as well being at the core of the revival of crime and social sensation in the crime thrillers of the late twenties and the thirties, already familiar to Caspary as she wrote her first mystery novels. Her fiction is a direct, explicit link between sensation and noir through her close reading of the novels of Wilkie Collins, whose characters she found so compatible as to adapt them and whose polyphonic structure she applied in many of her works beyond Laura. It is because of her discovery of Collins’s novels of testimony that Laura became a breakthrough book for Caspary, widening her audience and elevating her status both in fiction and screenwriting. The multiple voices that add up to a casebook of character bridged Caspary’s plays, scripts, and novels, showcasing her own talent for point of view and dramatic characterization. She utilized witnessing statements and confessions across the same wide range as Collins, including narratives partially told in documents, most notably the false diary in The Man Who Loved His Wife and the lost and found confessional autobiography in Final Portrait. Caspary understood the possibilities of Collins’s form as perhaps only writers applying it can, and this understanding helped her to effectively structure her own twentieth-century casebooks of testimony filtered through character. Other novelists have played the documented voices of witnessing testimony against a more conventional main narrative to create a partial novel of testimony, but Caspary is one of the most successful. Her reading of Collins was explicitly acknowledged, and her understanding of Collins’s achievement is evident in

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her own successful use of similar techniques. The Mystery of Elizabeth (1979), one of her last novels, pays direct homage to Collins’s stature as “that grand old master.” She made further direct acknowledgment of Collins’s importance to Laura in her autobiography, published in the same year. Chapter 8 examines Caspary’s fiction in the twenties and thirties in contrast to her novels from the forties onward, after she adopted the Collins strategy. Chapter 9 focuses on Laura, including the film and play versions, while Chapter 10 assesses the Collins-Caspary sensation-noir dialogue in Laura and Bedelia. Chapter 11 addresses Stranger Than Truth and The Mystery of Elizabeth, her later novels of testimony, and Chapter 12 discusses how multiple focus with and without document framing became a permanent and flexible part of her repertory in the novels The Weeping and the Laughter, Evvie, The Man Who Loved His Wife, and Final Portrait as well as in screen adaptations and her own scripts. As with Collins, lack of familiarity with the larger body of Caspary’s work and limited critical approaches have obscured rather than illuminated Caspary’s writing. A consideration of her dialogue with Collins helps to rebalance both of their reputations as novelists serious and popular — as passionate dramatizers of social themes who playfully enjoyed form. Examining Collins’s and Caspary’s applications of counterpointed framed narrative as well as the novel of testimony structure places their works in structural dialogue with a variety of twentieth-century fiction both popular and literary, including William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and A.S. Byatt’s Possession as well as contemporary mysteries and crime thrillers such as Michael Gruber’s Tropic of Night and retrograde homages such as Michael Cox’s “postauthentic” Victorian novels.

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CHAPTER 1

Framed A Brief History of Documents as Narrative Frames Beyond specifically epistolary fiction, novels from the eighteenth century to the present day have been awash in documents. The forms and uses of these, however, were not uniform, nor was the full range of available applications exploited by the majority of novels even during the nineteenth century. Document frames still tend to be straightforward and limited unless the entire novel is written against (as in the novel of counterpointed documents) or through them (as in the novel of testimony). Because these usages have not been defined, they are generally lumped together, resulting in a confusing vagueness in narrative references to framed narration. I therefore take the time to define them here for the purposes of later discussion. There are five easily distinguishable types of document framing that have been utilized by novelists over the past two centuries exclusive of the novel of letters: the plot-forwarding document; the front and/or end frame; the whole-document frame; the novel in witnessing testimony; and an intermediate form, the novel partially presented in regularly occurring, well-developed documents counterpointed with other unframed parts of the narrative. The first three are the simplest and most widely exploited, but all are used in various combinations. Collins and Caspary used the whole gamut. The plot document is the most ubiquitous usage and has clear characteristics; it is short, contains fresh information, and generates further action and reaction from characters; hence, “plot document.” Such documents include discovered wills, newly received or recovered letters, brief diary entries (viewed by others or only the reader), newspaper articles, telegrams, scraps of paper with significant information, phone message recordings, tape and CD recordings, messages in code, and appointment book entries. Today these potentially include faxes, texting, and e-mail messages, even deleted ones recovered by technology. 9

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel

The plot document is used principally for exposition. In Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initial descriptions of the murders in all particulars as well as the testimony taken by police of numerous bystanders are set forth in two newspaper articles, read alike by Dupin and his narrating friend. In contemporary fiction, unless the narrative makes extensive use of documents, exposition will usually be handled by direct telling or by one or more internal monologues, often including flashbacks. This has reduced the use of plot documents for background. In A. S. Byatt’s Possession, a very deliberate evocation of nineteenth-century fiction is made as letters, diaries, and poems are used to piece together the chronology of a secret love affair; but direct narration and internal monologue also provide present-day exposition. (Possession is discussed further in Chapter 13 as a novel in counterpointed documents.) Plot documents are also used to bring in fresh information later in the story from a source outside the running cast of characters. When Christopher, the autistic narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, discovers the letters from his mother that his father has withheld, he realizes that she is not dead as he was told, and the focus of his quest shifts toward finding her, with dramatic results. An earlier, almost exact parallel are the letters from her sister that Celie finds in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Letters are often used this way, because they can arrive unexpectedly or be discovered. E-mails, perhaps because they are checked so frequently as well as deleted, have yet to replace letters as devices for introducing new information. A third usage comprises those plot documents generated by principal characters for the express purpose of furthering the action, such as advertisements run in newspapers, letters of inquiry, or the contents of wills or other legal documents. To return to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin tests his theory by placing a newspaper ad offering to return the orangutan to its owner. When the owner appears, Dupin is able to confirm his solution. The written confession, chiefly but not exclusively used in mystery fiction, is also of this type. Dr. Jekyll’s final explanation of his dual selves happens in two stages: his earlier letter to Dr. Lanyon hints at his situation and generates action on the part of Utterson, while his postsuicide letter confesses fully and concludes Stevenson’s novel. Plot documents are staples of mystery fiction but also have an active life in literary fiction, such as the daughter’s diary finally read in Rosellen Brown’s Civil Wars, which produces overdue plot action. Plot documents are frequently used in novels that are not otherwise structured around letters or other recordings, and writers exploiting them often make little use of character voice, since information rather than characterization is generally the point. If they do develop voice, it will most often be done when the document is written by a character who is already part of the narrative, as in Civil Wars. Distinguishing the plot-forwarding document from more elaborate framing devices and more lengthy character narration is crucial to understanding

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nineteenth-century fiction. At present, many novels are tagged as epistolary if they contain occasional plot documents. Yet the use of this largely expositional device is hardly epistolary. First, there is no exchange between writers. A plot document stands alone, to be read, discussed, or acted upon by characters. The dialogue of epistolary fiction is wholly missing. Second, few authors take time to develop the voice of the writer in plot documents. The flatness of the character who writes, telegraphs, or otherwise provides fresh background or information is also characteristic, emphasizing the unimportance of the character versus the information provided. The exception to this, as noted above, is when the plot document is made by a principal character. Finally, plot documents are generally brief and to the point. There are exceptions to this, but the longer the plot documents are, the more likely it is that the writer will also develop voice and apply frames in other ways as well, since longer documents invite both fuller characterization of the writer and a greater response from other characters. Without making this distinction, much of nineteenth-century fiction can be classed as epistolary, and yet patently most Victorian-era fiction is not based on the novel of letters. The situation becomes more confusing when plot documents are applied in novels that otherwise have character-narrated sections in full voice, as Collins often did. This confusion extends into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries also. Of the examples cited above, Poe’s story clearly is not epistolary, although it includes two vital plot documents. The Color Purple, which has regularly occurring “letters to God” and more than one letter from the lost sister, does qualify as a partially epistolary novel. The Curious Incident does not; the mother’s letters appear once and not again; thus the novel is structured as a first-person narration with crucial plot documents. The importance of plot documents—from confessions to poison pen letters— to mystery and detective fiction further confuses the issue. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing acknowledges this importance with a section entitled “Letters and Written Messages,” which categorizes such documents as letters, urgent messages, anonymous messages, and concluding confessions (cited as being often found in letters). Letters keep returning in this discussion because they can be used in such great variety and range. The examples cited under this heading, however, range without much distinction from the truly epistolary, as in Collins’s “The Biter Bit” and Dorothy L. Sayers’s dialogic The Documents in the Case, a novel of testimony discussed in Chapter 7, to instances of counterpointed documents or simply important plot documents, as in the “brief and enigmatic telegram” that begins the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of [the] Missing Three-Quarter” (266 –267). A telegram that generates action has a very different function and impact than either regularly occurring document frames or entire pieces in framed character narration. To even begin to profile epistolary mystery fiction, the brief plot document must be distinguished from overall frames as well as from character-mediated narration.

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel

Document frames for the whole text have been used nearly as widely as plot documents and similarly function as a shorthand way of making the entire text into a recorded confession, revelation, explanation, or record for posterity. Again, crime fiction has made major use of the confessional frame, which appears often in hard-boiled narratives from the 1930s, such as James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, in which the last chapter frames the preceding first-person narrative as “the statement” of the narrator’s crime (this novel also makes use of plot documents in the usual manner). Indeed, the voice-overs of film noir can be read as attempts to frame film sequences in the same way as in novels of testimony. The discussion of Laura in Chapter 10 as sensation and noir fiction considers this connection further in terms of film as well as written text. Whether or not a whole-document frame will be used depends a great deal on whether the story fits into a document category such as confession or another type of deliberate record. Twentieth-century fiction’s focus on the inner monologue, even to stream of consciousness, made frame support for revelatory narratives unnecessary; therefore, unless the document is especially appropriate to the narrative in question or the author is evoking nineteenth-century antecedents, later writers generally do not use it. An example of a frame that is both appropriate and evocative occurs in Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which is framed as a taped interview/confession both at the start and at the end, with regular references to the recording within the narrative. This recalls not only Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a novel of framed testimony but also Stoker’s use of contemporary media, such as the phonograph and telegraph, as document frames. Ann Rice did not, however, structure her novel on the casebook model used in Dracula; instead, she built a layered, confessional narrative with a whole-document frame on the model of the interlocking narratives of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel Rice has often said fascinated her. Front frames with or without end frames offer more sophisticated possibilities than do whole-document frames and were exploited to maximum effect by a wide variety of writers in the nineteenth century. In Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Green Tea,” an end frame is attached to the chilling narrative to explain its seemingly supernatural events in a rational way and reposition the manuscript as a case study from the files of “Dr. Hessellius,” who also functions as a framing character in other Le Fanu pieces. Such manipulations are discussed further in Chapter 7, on other writers’ applications of framed testimony, particularly in terms of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The novel entirely in testimonial documents, as developed by Wilkie Collins, exhibits recognizable characteristics that distinguish it from simpler applications for plot development and frame and from epistolary fiction as well. Writers of this form manipulate the monologic structure to emphasize both personal witnessing and community detection. The dramatic prose monologues that emerge within the testimonies are characteristic, as is the cumulative nature

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of the narratives, each testament of which contains an essential piece for conclusion. Novels of testimony also take advantage of brief plot documents, but their testaments are distinguished by wealth of detail and dramatic character voice. Similarly, rather than framing the whole narrative as a document, the testimonial novel uses documents throughout the text to frame the various characters’ testimony and juxtapose each statement with others. It is deliberately and productively dialogic, with each monologue not only a further puzzle piece of the whole but also an interactive addition. Furthermore, although the novel of testimony fully exploits the multiple voices of epistolary fiction, it reverses the violated privacy of letters in favor of witnessing statements designed to be read by others (as in the family casebook written by The Moonstone’s characters) or documents that begin as private papers but become testimonials which others must read in order to resolve the situation (such as Marian Halcombe’s diary in The Woman in White and Jonathan Harker’s diary in Dracula). As in the novel of letters, some witnessing statements comment on each other while others are deliberately juxtaposed, in this case by an editor/detective narrator. The novel of testimony preserved and exploited the varied yet intimate voices of epistolary fiction while changing its stance from personal confidence to public statement. Voice is a term used perhaps most in discussing poetry, but it is equally applicable to fiction narration. It refers to the distinct speech of characters that reflects their individuality and also adds tone and texture. Voice differs from dialect, which seeks to render primarily the sound of speech, while voice is a matter of word choice, syntax, inflection, what is hinted at but not said, whether the character is aware of what he or she is saying, and the effect these things add up to overall. Dialect speech that moves beyond sound alone to characterize its speaker may also have individual voice, but voice is not dependent on dialect and may even be difficult to achieve with heavily phonetic spelling. The central importance of voice to the best novels in testimony, by Collins and others, is the creation of prose monologues, both in direct narration and in reported speech. These voices are enjoyable for their own sake as well as a means of characterization and of a dialogic interplay of concealment for suspense and revelation of clues. This technique is analyzed in detail in later chapters of this study, especially those on The Woman in White and The Moonstone as well as the novels that deliberately adapt Collins’s works. A novel partially in documents is a less formal version of the fully framed text but otherwise also demands character-mediated narration that is monologic and dramatic and is played against unframed sections of the text. Earlier writers than Collins experimented with such possibilities. Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet has been dismissed as “ an epistolary false start” (quoted in Bray 119). Joe Bray cites various critical views of Scott’s novel as the death throes of the novel of letters still encroaching upon the third person novel. However, Bray argues correctly that the address of letters and the character voice extends into the first-

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel

person diary that follows the directly epistolary section for seven chapters (118 – 120). Redgauntlet is in fact an early attempt to make a novel partly epistolary while also exploiting third-person narration. The exchange of letters that opens the novel lasts for nearly 150 pages, making it an interesting partial novel of letters (the corresponding characters even mention Lovelace and Belford from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa). There follow alternating diaries between the two principal characters, with some plot letters and a note calling on any future reader to “apply to the nearest magistrate” to obtain the writer’s release from his false imprisonment. There is some character voice between the two male friends, but the style is largely flat narration. Perhaps the most interesting parts are those containing “narratives” of each character in lightly limited third person, alternating between them to follow each man’s adventures— an early example of what would become twentieth-century multiple focus without frame. The conclusion by “Doctor Dryasdust in a Letter to the Author of Waverly” retroactively positions this narrator as one who has collated the previous letters and diaries, filling in what he could discover in the gaps and recounting what he has been able to learn of subsequent events. Scott, whom Wilkie Collins revered, made in this novel an important antecedent for Collins’s casebook novels and counterpointed framing as well. The novel in partial testimony is an intermediate application of framing, in which character narration within document frames is set against third-person narration. This structure was used to effect by Hogg, with some direct statement by characters and some indirect narration, and to less effect by Charles Dickens in Bleak House, where Esther Summerton’s diary entries only occasionally rise to flashes of character voice, while in general she narrates her own life as though standing aside looking at it, without emphasis or interpretation created by her characterization to filter and color her information. This slight variation has been seen as a contrast to Dickens’s much more intense third-person narration, making Esther a “brake controlling the runaway tendency of Dickens’s imagination” (Harvey 964). Far from braking Collins, Lydia Gwilt’s diary in Armadale is one of Collins’s most intensely monologic voices while also serving to add confessional clues and testimony. Elizabeth Braddon similarly interposed diary entries in Birds of Prey, with a lack of characterizing voice parallel to Esther’s entries. Such flat character telling serves more to supply pacing and variety than as witnessing testimony, which occurs regularly and is set against the third-person narrative. Collins was more successful with counterpointed frames than his contemporaries were partly because he experimented with it more than other writers did and partly from his penchant for prose monologue, as character voice remains crucial. He also applied the counterpointing to effects that work well in crime novels. Lydia Gwilt’s diary provides suspense, since the reader then is privy to information the characters do not know. It influenced the opening narrative of Dracula with

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Jonathan Harker’s 50-page journal, which no other character sees until much later in the book. In both cases the later suspense comes from watching characters try to analyze dangerous puzzles that have already been partially solved for the reader. This counterpointed use of letters, diaries, or other document-framed character narration has become a permanent option in the writing of crime thrillers. A recent example is Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber, the first of a trilogy of noir crime novels, the first two of which use counterpointed framed narration. In Tropic, diary excerpts by anthropologist Jane Doe are interleaved with her first-person narrative and with third-person sections from the viewpoint of Miami police detective Jimmy Paz. The two eventually meet and — with the help of powers acquired in studying with a lost African tribe — resolve a series of gruesome crimes by Jane’s husband. The double narration by Jane, from both the present and multiple past times, layers her voices, which not only report different things but sound different in the various time periods. Her entire narration plays against the detective’s sections, while her diary entries from different parts of her past dialogue with each other and footnote her present narration. Paz later reads portions of the diaries to catch up on what the reader already knows or surmises. Here is just the sort of play with framing that Collins often devised, with the sort of referencing of the supernatural and Gothic detection he also preferred. Although it is not a direct connection or homage to Collins, Tropic applies the type of framed layers Collins developed and continues to reverse the privacy of diaries into case documents just as Collins did in his novels of testimony. I have chosen to distinguish these usages of document framing and characterizing narration in some detail because the lack of such distinction has muddied critical commentary on nineteenth-century structure and twentiethcentury extrapolations from it. Examples of the most common uses of document frames are too often confused in critical reference with novels wholly or largely in the form of documents, which are both much closer to and yet distinct from the novel of letters than are plot documents or whole-narrative frames. A novel wholly in documents may also exploit some of its pieces for exposition, surprise, or fresh information and may have overall frames as well, but its dynamic and effect differ quite sharply from narratives that only occasionally make use of documents for information or an action catalyst, as the following discussion illustrates. Lack of critical distinction has blurred these four categories into general groupings as epistolary, mediated, or framed narration. Yet a novel that exploits only a few plot-advancing letters, such as Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, is hardly epistolary in nature, while a whole-framed narrative as document such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) has little sense other than at the start or end of being a document at all and does not develop or exploit the multiple voices of the novel in letters or testimony.

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel

A particular critical example serves to illustrate the problem. Lyn Pykett certainly is correct in identifying Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) as an early sensation novel. Its plot turns on local gossip about the mysterious tenant’s son and the visits from a single man, particularly exciting the narrator’s jealousy (85). The tenant is revealed to have been fleeing a dissolute husband and the visitor is her brother, making the narrative to some extent a commentary on gossip. But Pykett is not accurate in asserting that Bronte’s novel “included many of the ingredients of the sensation novel, especially as later developed by Collins: a dispersed narrative (made up of letters, a journal, and an editorializing comment from its hero)” (91). (The remainder of her comment is an astute summary of sensation plot ingredients.) By no means all sensation novels have such an overall structure; Collins himself wrote only three novels entirely in documents with collating narrators. Recent scholarship has begun to make this distinction while still confusing the issue. Richard Nemesvari notes correctly the contrasts in form, but his analysis of Braddon’s novel is mystifying rather than useful. In purely formalist terms the three “seminal” texts of the genre [sensation] are more disparate than similar. The first-person, multi-narrative mosaic of detection in The Woman in White has relatively little in common with the third-person, linear domestic melodrama of East Lynne, while Lady Audley’s Secret’s combination of the two creates a hybrid effect which it itself unique [18].

Many sensation novels make use of plot documents for exposition and revelation, but Lady Audley’s Secret, does not have the “ingredients” named above by Pykett, nor does it combine the methods of first and third person. Braddon’s best-known novel is not framed as a document and no section of the novel is told by a character; in fact it is narrated in third person throughout the text with a very few plot documents to add information. These do not create an epistolary dialogue. Robert Audley is the book’s amateur detective, but he does not act as editor, since there are no documents to pull together. Some chapters track Robert but are not deeply in his viewpoint. The effect is omniscience rather than multiple focus. Neither is “a dispersed narrative (made up of letters, a journal, and an editorializing comment from its hero)” an accurate description of what Collins achieved in The Woman in White, with its double diary narration (one of the diaries annotated by the principal villain), witness statements formally taken from persons who lie and conceal evidence, and an overall juridical framework in which all the documents are made into a casebook for solution and record by the male hero. He, far from just commenting, collects and arranges testimony, tracks down the secret at the bottom of it all, and blackmails the villain into a confession. Neither does such critical generalization acknowledge the individual character voices in which each statement is made; these are so dynamic that even the speech of relatively minor characters functions as dra-

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matic monologue, which also is by no means common to all sensation novels or even to all those by Collins. Nor does the above elision accurately place Wildfell Hall in the continuum from the novel of letters to the novel of testimony. Anne Brontë’s novel is, on closer reading, an interesting step between the concentric narratives of Frankenstein (1818) and The Woman in White’s multiple focus through documents. Wildfell Hall is framed as a series of letters from the principal narrator to a friend, describing his romance with the mysterious tenant. Only the first letter is signed, none of the following portions are framed, and the friend being written to is acknowledged only a few times by the use of second person. Within the letter installments are excerpts from other letters and a diary, all written by Helen, the tenant, and given by her to the narrator to explain her circumstances. With no crime other than her social one of leaving her husband, there is no sense of a casebook to solution. The placement of Helen’s narratives within the installment letters by Markham perhaps was influenced by Frankenstein, in which Robert Walton recounts, in lengthy letter installments to his sister, the story that Victor Frankenstein tells him, while Victor, in turn, tells the story he has heard from his creature. But Wildfell Hall is a less developed layering than Mary Shelley’s earlier novel. And despite the later date of Wildfell Hall, the voices of Markham and Helen are not distinct but sound exactly alike in narrating their circumstances as dispassionately as any author-narrator. Nonetheless, Bronte’s use of Markham to include and manage the documents from Helen is a step toward the casebook, though one taken by other writers as well. Although experimentation with the narrative possibilities of documents certainly occurred between the waning of epistolary fiction and The Woman in White, critical failure to perceive distinct applications of document framing has obscured rather than clarified these developments. A more important and in structure an equally underread novel in this continuum is James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Hogg’s dual narration of the same story by an “editor” and the principal actor in the story, as well as the appending of a further editorial narrative of the discovery of the memoir in a grave (by Hogg himself ), has the complex interplay of viewpoint that Collins would later exploit further. It turns upon the sort of crime that interested Collins— one involving separated, inimical brothers estranged by their parents’ enmity and fanatical antinomianism yet closer to Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights in the temptation by Satan that drives its middle narrative. Collins exploited the multiple voices from complex epistolary fiction in combination with externalized documents made as records (such as Hogg’s editor makes); he also extended the range of documents to include diaries (as Wildfell Hall did) as well as explicit witness statements that evoke but do not

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel

echo newspaper reporting of trial testimony. His development of the novel of testimony in The Woman in White is discussed below; its influence as the model for multiple casebook novels in Collins’s lifetime up to the present is detailed in Chapters 7 and 13. Vera Caspary’s adaptation of the casebook for Laura and two later novels is the most long-term example among a continuing legacy by historical and contemporary novelists into the twenty-first century. Both popular and literary fiction (particularly that with a nineteenthcentury bent) continue to exploit novels partially in documents, as discussed in Chapter 13. Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook is a fascinating merger of counterpointed documents with the interiorized psychological viewpoints developed in twentieth-century fiction. The reflection of different self-viewpoints in different journals, as well as autobiographical fiction written by the character, constructs a rare dialogue between fiction in documents and fiction in multiple interior monologues. Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, effectively counterpoints expositional magazine articles, scholarly commentaries, and encyclopedic entries in a backward-facing timeline that merges on prom night with the forward-looking third-person narration, which also includes interior monologue. As with Dracula, a novel King knew well enough to deconstruct in his second book, ’Salem’s Lot (1975), the reader knows what is going to happen from the first, and the suspense is in watching the two timelines merge and conclude. Even the descriptive terms used —framed, mediated, dispersed, epistolary — are not fully interchangeable. A whole-document frame changes the meaning of the whole piece it encompasses by positioning the text as statement, confession, diary reflection, explanation, or even specifically testimony. Front and/or end frames offer many possibilities for manipulating narratives, positioning the text at the start or withholding the frame until the end for a more conclusive effect. A front frame without an end violates its own positioning by shifting to character mediation, an effect in The Turn of the Screw, discussed below. Mediation through character narration is a particular type of framing focused on the narrator(s). The stronger the editor-narrator of the novel of testimony in voice or role, the greater the sense of being filtered through a particular perspective, as in Mark McPherson’s control of the testimony in Laura, discussed at length below. Mediation can occur without document frames simply by switching point of view, in first-person or limited third-person narratives. Multiple focus and character mediation do not require document framing at all; the interplay of stream of consciousness passages— as in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury— are an extreme form of unframed mediated narration. Epistolary fiction is a particular kind of framing as an ostensible letter addressed to a person. As well as in letters read by others, the voyeuristic effect of seeing a private document can also be created in diaries read by others.

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Counterpointed diaries, such as Lydia Gwilt’s journal, that are revealed to the reader in violation of the journal’s privacy are more epistolary in nature than other types of document frames. Dispersed or fragmented as terms emphasize the separateness of multiple viewpoints, yet the novel of testimony places its emphasis the cohesiveness of all the framed parts, collated by a narrator who deliberately makes them into one set for solution. Nor does the term dispersed describe the counterpoint effect in novels that interweave framed sections with first- or third-person unframed narration. Calling document-framed, character-mediated fiction dispersed fails to address the dialogic nature of the more complex uses of documentary testimony. Close examination of the distinct documentary uses of the various framing devices from the nineteenth century onward offers closer readings of fiction and avoids misleading comparisons and generalizations. In particular, examination of the narrative strategies employed by Wilkie Collins not only adds structural achievement and influence to his celebrated plots and themes, but also assembles a base for analyzing writers like Vera Caspary related to Collins in time or by inclination.

CHAPTER 2

How He Wrote His Books The Apprentice Years of Framing Testimony Although Collins wrote only three novel wholly framed as testimony, he was a major nineteenth-century explorer of framing devices in general. Throughout almost all of his long career, and especially in the years that led up to The Woman in White and The Moonstone, from Basil in 1852 to Armadale in 1864, Collins experimented almost continuously with frames and narrating characters. The 1850s–1860s are his dialogic period. Of his books during that time, only two are written in standard third person (Hide-and-Seek and The Dead Secret). Basil and the novella A Rogue’s Life are written in first person. The story collections After Dark and The Queen of Hearts make heavy play with framing and character narration as well as overt rehearsal for characters and plot for his novels of testimony, while No Name is a carefully counterpointed novel and Armadale very nearly was another novel in testimony. In his developmental decades, Collins tried out such a wide gamut that he appears to have set himself the task of applying document-framed character narration in every possible usage and combination. It was this experimentation that enabled him to produce such polished and masterful casebooks as The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Collins’s level of success with frames depends on his characterizing the narrators sufficiently to mediate and therefore develop the story, both in what is and is not told, and on the play of narratives against each other. When neither plot nor characterization is rich enough to support the frame, as is seen in his last casebook, The Legacy of Cain, Collins’s structures creak, groan, and fail altogether. This not always successful balance has contributed to Collins’s reputation for being all action plot and no depth. Yet whenever structure becomes a vehicle for character mediation, we see Collins at the top of his form, even before The Woman in White. These earlier examples show Collins trying out the frames and character voices, sometimes even in a detection plot, that made his best work so fine. Basil (1852), Collins’s second novel, is structured in general on the Frankenstein 20

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model of overlapping accounts, though its manipulation of documents was more explicitly done than Shelley’s layering of reported narratives. The several layered voices of Walton, Frankenstein, and his creature, each quoted by another, add variety to an otherwise monologic narrative; Victor renders his creature’s tale, and Walton’s own bleak situation intrudes on Victor’s crisis. As Mary A. Favret discusses thoroughly in “The Letters of Frankenstein,” the way these voices interact and add up not only develops the story but is the story. She says of the narrative’s concentric stories: “They present themselves not as successors to one another, but as three versions of the same tale, one commenting upon and responding to the other two” (182). Furthermore, Walton reports that Victor has gone over Walton’s notes on Victor’s narrative and amended them (175), making him a prototypic editorial character. In comparison, Basil states at the start that he is writing the events of one year, but this manuscript frame is only lightly maintained during the novel by occasional references to his writing process or his “story.” The text reads chiefly as first-person narration. Basil’s explication of his own experiences and his inclusion of Manion’s “retrospect” of his own life, as well as his threats toward Basil, parallel Frankenstein’s recounting the creature’s tale (and anticipate Fosco’s self-justification). Basil’s and Manion’s voices are no more distinct that the voices of Walton, Frankenstein, and his creature, all of whom narrate in educated, somewhat distant, and undramatized speech. Basil’s final letter to his “editor,” the friend to whom he gives permission to publish his manuscript, in fact sounds much like Collins’s dedication letter at the front of the novel. Short letters and newspaper accounts further the plot, and as Basil pursues Manion, he acts as his own Walton and his narrative toward the end becomes a daily journal. In the brief concluding sections, Collins breaks into shorter frames. Basil ends with “Letters in Conclusion” from a miner and his wife, who nurse Basil and reunite him with Clara. Their two letters are, as they naturally would be, more informal than Basil’s narrative. Of particular note are Basil’s comments on how he appended them. In searching for an ending, he hit upon the happy thought of copying their letters, and though they beg him to edit the letters into more proper form, he copies them word for word. This is part of Basil’s claim to have written the “Truth,” and his appending of the exact letters (much as Walton has been shown letters that Frankenstein includes in his tale) anticipates Walter Hartright’s claims for his casebook in The Woman in White. Basil himself appends a final letter to his publisher to round off the work. In the same year, Collins published in Bentley’s Miscellany a never collected comic story with a crime subplot. This tale, “A Passage in the Life of Perugino Potts” is worth noting both for its comedy and its form. Collins’s satirizing of contemporary painting and its start is derived from William Collins’s journal as well as Charles Collins’s experiences (Thompson 21). Potts records his adventures in dated diary entries and with a dramatic voice that dominates the action as he tells of his encounters with a thief in Rome and Florence and the pursuit

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel

of his diminutive self by an oversized Marchesina. At the end of the story, a “Note by the Editor of the Foregoing Fragments” provides a humorous coda as Potts flings the manuscript at him and flees for the Hebrides, pursued by his nemesis from the tale, the Marchesina (Thompson 20 –33). Collins here plays lightly with document frames as well as with an editorial note and gives free rein to character-mediated narration. More directly important to the development of the novel of testimony is Collins’s story “A Stolen Letter,” which was first published in 1854 and collected in After Dark two years later. In the collection, the painter William, who collects tales from his subjects, adds a prologue about Mr. Boxsious, a solicitor who is a local celebrity, and breaks into distinct character voice even in the prologue and then narrates his own tale, “A Stolen Letter.” This prologue and tale are much closer to Collins’s achievements with framed character narration in The Woman in White and The Moonstone than any other piece in After Dark. Collins’s debt for the plot of this piece to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” has been noted, among other discussions, by R. V. Andrew, who said, “While we must accept that, in all likelihood, Collins was acquainted with Poe’s stories of detection, this story does not lose by the comparison.” The story was originally published in the Christmas issue of Household Words as “The Story of the Fourth Poor Traveller,” and Andrew correctly notes that this piece “is of especial interest to us because it evinces characteristics which mark it as a milestone on the way to The Moonstone.” He further identifies it as the first detective tale (a claim also noted by Julian Thompson in his edition of Collins’s short fiction) and the first appearance of an amateur detective from an English writer. Andrew assesses accurately that “in many ways it is far and away the best thing Collins has done” (57). The ways are well worth tracing in how they specifically bear on the novels of testimony. The first way is that the character of Boxsious is allowed to take over the narrative quite early in the prologue and to carry on into monologue before the tale even begins. He does not have to be persuaded to speak: “What do you mean, Mr. Artist, by ready directly? I’m ready now” (74 –75). He inspects the paints for quality in an offensive manner he acknowledges but makes no apologies for. Don’t color up, and don’t look as if you were going to quarrel with me! You can’t quarrel with me. If you were fifty times as irritable a man as you look, you couldn’t quarrel with me. I’m not young, and I’m not touchy — I’m Boxsious, the lawyer; the only man in the world who can’t be insulted, try it how you like!! [75].

He’s also a narrator who colors everything he says without perceiving all the results, exactly the type Collins would exploit so well in the novel of testimony’s prose monologues, which add up to the solution. Boxsious is well up to the weight of framing Collins has imposed upon him. Even more important as testimony rehearsal, he frames his own story as a “statement”: “What do you mean by talking about a story? I’m not going to

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tell you a story; I’m going to make a statement. A statement is a matter of fact, therefore the exact opposite of a story, which is a matter of fiction. What I am going to tell you really happened to me” (79). This echoes Basil’s insistence on the truth and anticipates Walter Hartright’s desire to discover the truth — as well as many of Collins’s later testifiers who claim to tell exactly what happened and nothing but while also telling us about themselves and passing judgment on other characters. Here William underscores the effect of this avid witness and reemphasizes his story as “true” by saying “His odd manners and language made such an impression of me at the time, that I think I can repeat his ‘statement’ now, almost word for word as he addressed it to me” (79). Furthermore, Collins applies Boxsious’s eager voice to narrating a crime that he prevents. When his friend comes to him on the eve of his marriage, reporting a blackmail attempt, the solicitor acts as a detective, following the blackmailer, and searching his clothes and his room. Boxsious finally uncovers where the blackmailer has hidden the letter (not in plain sight) and foils the crime. Here Collins puts prose monologue with strong character mediation specifically at the service of solving a mystery, illustrating how perfectly suited is the combination. The friend approaches Boxsious as a legal adviser as well as personal contact. In this position Boxsious anticipates the lawyers who narrate in Collins’s novels of testimony, especially Bruff in The Moonstone, who takes an active part in aiding Rachel to see Godfrey’s mercenary nature, aids Franklin in eliciting Rachel’s story, and helps track down Candy’s information. Boxsious describes himself as a skeptic and, in a comic version of Dupin’s methods, is able from his legal experience to deduce the problem of his friend and also the crime that his fiancée’s father has committed (forgery). He also, as Collins’s casts of witnesses will later do, describes other characters vividly. The about-to-be wife has “eyes that made me feel if I was under a pretty stiff cross-examination the moment she looked at me. Fine red, kissand-come-again sort of lips” (83). The blackmailer, Davager, is equally vivid. He had greasy white hair and a mottled face. He was low in the forehead, fat in the stomach, hoarse in the voice, and weak in the legs. Both his eyes were bloodshot, and one was fixed in his head. He smelled of spirits, and carried a toothpick in his mouth [93].

In case we don’t hate this villain sufficiently already, Boxsious also tells us he was lucky in enlisting the chambermaid as “Mr. Davager had drawn her attention rather too closely to his ugliness, by offering her a testimony of his regard in the shape of a kiss” (96). This sensitivity to other characters by a narrator is something Collins would exploit in The Woman in White, especially in Marian’s and the housekeeper’s views of Count Fosco, and to much more effect in The Moonstone in the narratives of Betteredge and Miss Clack. The detection in this story is more elaborate than in “The Purloined Letter,” as Boxsious persuades the maid to provide the man’s clothes to search,

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel

producing a cryptic memorandum of “5 Along, 4 Across.” The maid also lets him into Davager’s room, which Boxsious searches minutely, finally discovering the forged document concealed beneath a slit in the carpet. In aid of detection, he employs a local boy to follow Davager and report on his movements; the boy sees the letter given to him, so Boxsious knows that it is in his room. The tracking of who has what and puts it where anticipates the pawning and redeeming of the diamond in The Moonstone. Boxsious deciphers the code and finds the letter. As has been noted, he, like Dupin, left another message behind (Peterson 31). Boxsious is also a paid detective, making him a professional; he suggests to his friend that if he can recover the letter, he will receive the money the blackmailer demanded, and the friend agrees. Boxsious keeps control of the story to the very end, when he rails at the artist who has let him run on in order to get out of working hard. The narrator colors William’s final brief end note as well. This story has even been credited with helping establish Poe’s influence in England, Collins’s adaptation in “A Stolen Letter” having “brought Poe’s subtle idea back to the world of English lawyers and financial fraud” (Knight 29). These early experiments with framed character narration in crime stories are especially important in assessing Collins’s sources for the structure of the novel of testimony and in evaluating whether he made an original contribution with it. Several commentators have attributed Collins’s casebook structure to a single source, such as epistolary fiction. In reality, Collins’s sources for practically any aspect of his works were multiple and include his own previous writing. As a case in point, Maurizio Ascari has convincingly detailed how the plot for The Woman in White was adapted by Collins from Maurice Méjan’s Recueil des causes célebres, which Collins bought in Paris in 1856 (103), something R. V. Andrew and Sue Lonoff, as well as others, had earlier noted. However, Ascari’s contention that “Méjan’s emphasis on documents arguably was an inspiration to Collins’s polyphonic narrative technique” (103 –104) and Andrew’s earlier suggestion of the same (141) do not take into account sufficiently Collins’s other sources or his own earlier work. Before 1856, when Collins is known to have acquired the Méjan collection, he was already was experimenting with framing devices and already had moved beyond letters and diaries to more complex frames, some of them in the service of detection. After Dark, which reprinted “A Stolen Letter,” shows Collins making elaborate plays with framing as well as character narration. Méjan was first published in 1808, and he certainly might be a source of inspiration that Collins could have seen earlier. Collins acknowledged in his note to “Memoirs of an Adopted Son” and other “cases” collected in My Miscellanies (1863) that he had consulted accounts of French cases. Here Collins says the “Memoirs” and “The Poisoned Meal,” both of which blur fact and fiction, “are derived from the ‘Records of the French police of the period.’” “The Poisoned Meal” labels its sections in an evidentiary manner with such

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subheads as “The Arsenic” (Thompson 337). But Collins insisted that “the form in which the narrative is cast is of my own devising” (1). In this he was at least in general correct. Collins perused many examples of true crime, including the reporting of trial testimony, which he echoed at the start of The Woman in White; he even kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings for ideas (Lonoff 84). Many commentators have discussed famous trials that were widely reported as sources for Collins’s characters and plot. Yet it was the noncriminal models that ultimately determined his form. Collins’s casebook novels and earlier stories, unlike his “factions” in the Miscellanies, seldom read like trial testimony or police cases. As discussed in detail in the following chapters, Collins’s characterization and the mediation from character narration move away from trial models even in The Woman in White, and juridical framing is largely absent from The Moonstone. The multiple voices of trial reportage and testimony in police cases are likely most important to Collins in his inversion of intimate letters to public statement. But even as testimony, Collins’s narrators create a dialogue that is more epistolary than juridical. The witnesses’ narratives are elicited, but they hold forth as they choose without court limitations. Some readily exhibit bias while others reveal their limitations without realizing they do so, and still others confess frankly, and they discuss and report speech from other characters too. When their testimony is limited by the editorial character, such as being asked to tell the truth and not get ahead of what they knew at the time, the other narrators tell us this and sometimes complain about it or violate their instructions. Collins’s most important detection-relation antecedent for his multiple testaments is not Méjan or other trials and cases but Poe’s stories. The voices testifying in Collins’s novels of testimony owe a debt as great to Poe’s prose monologues as to their epistolary antecedents. Poe’s naive peripheral narrator, a protoeditorial character, testifies to Auguste Dupin’s detection prowess, while the monologic criminals confess crimes and relive ghastly experiences in passionate voices that begin with a whisper in the reader’s ear and often rise to a final shriek. These have rightly been called “confessional monologues” (Hoffman 299). The shift of monologue toward crime is central to Poe’s fiction as well as to Collins’s own. Ken Frieden discusses Poe’s antecedents in epistolary fiction, arguing that “Although Poe does respond to conventions of the Gothic novel, his revision of epistolary narrative and conversational poetry is more decisive” (154). He emphasizes the first-person narration of the novel of letters as a major influence, linking Poe’s tales of horror told by their perpetrators as applying “the epistolary and conversational modes developed by Richardson, Coleridge, and their followers” (160). Their perverse confessions shifted the monologic speaker to criminal voices who still manage to narrate a story, regardless of their degree of apparent madness (160 –161). In analyzing Poe’s authorial control and manipulation of his narrators,

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James W. Gargano argues that far from being controlled by mad or disordered minds, sometimes thought to reflect Poe’s own sensibility, “the structure of many of Poe’s stories clearly reveals an ironical and comprehensive intelligence critically and artistically ordering events so as to establish a vision of life and character which the narrator’s very inadequacies help to ‘prove.’” The ironies of statements comprehended by the reader but not by the character add up to more than “effusions.” Poe intends his readers to keep their powers of analysis and judgment ever alert; he does not require or desire complete surrender to the experience of the sensations being felt by his characters. The point of Poe’s technique, then, is not to enable us to lose ourselves in strange or outrageous emotions, but to see these emotions and those obsessed by them from a rich and thoughtful perspective. I do not mean to advocate that, while reading Poe, we should cease to feel; but feeling should be “simultaneous” with an analysis carried on with the composure and logic of Poe’s great detective, Dupin. For Poe is not merely a romanticist; he is also a chronicler of the consequences of the romantic excesses which lead to psychic disorder, pain, and disintegration [sic] [23].

This shift from sensibility to sensation —controlled and manipulated sensation — is very much the model Collins adapted. In an unsigned review of After Dark, George Eliot made the connection of the two writers, saying, “Edgar Poe’s tales were an effort of genius to reconcile the two tendencies— to appall the imagination yet satisfy the intellect, and Mr. Wilkie Collins in this respect often follows in Poe’s tracks” (quoted in Bowen 45). A related point has been made in contemporary discussion of Poe: Yet for all their differences, and the sense that Poe was innovating more than even he fully grasped, the stories have a collective importance. Primarily, they condense the idea of Gothic thrill and rational inquiry: where the classic gothic novel would make a character exhibit some rational courage in the face of overwhelming sensual and sensation excitement, here the order is reversed: these are stories that impose the mastery of a mind on the unusual and stimulating [Knight 28].

Collins took control of these desperate voices without lessening their intensity. His narrators are far less deranged than Poe’s, and they are more contained by the testimony frame and the editorial detective character than are Poe’s more directly monologic voices. But they are equally capable of the tortured logic that attempts to twist their statements toward self-justification. This is true even of Sharpin in “The Biter Bit” and will be even more true in the self-congratulatory confessions of Mrs. Catherick and Count Fosco in The Woman in White. This is not to say that Collins lifted narration from Poe, as he did plot. Even in plot, Collins elaborated on his borrowings and shifted them to different effect, and he did so still more with Poe’s character narration. Poe’s first-person narrators act as their own editorial characters. They are writing and/or telling their story; they provide background; they deny that they are delusional; and then they launch into the story proper, involving the reader and leading up to

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an intense climax. The most dramatic voice from the narrator is often at the start and/or at the end, since in the middle the character has the story to tell. A prime example is “The Cask of Amontillado,” whose first sentences ring with character and use second person to establish a sense of audience as well. Montresor then backs off his own reactions to narrate his revenge, with a brief flash of the opening voice in the last sentence. The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat [18]. “The nitre!” I said; “see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are below the river’s bed. The drops of moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go back ere it is too late. Your cough —“ “It is nothing,” he said; “let us go on. But first, another draught of the Medoc [21].” I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat! [24].

This story reads like a letter in an epistolary novel in that it introduces an episode, then recounts it, opening out into a scene with description and dialogue as letter writers do, but here barely leaving the scene at its end, since there is no letter frame to be completed. In some of Poe’s stories, this storytelling duty obliterates dramatic voice, as in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” whose action details are more interesting than the character recounting them. In rarer instances, when there is less action to describe, Poe maintains character voice throughout. This is especially true in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which is dramatic monologue from start to finish. It has a more extremely dramatic start and end, but almost any passage from the middle of the story shows emotional reactions and asides to the hearer from the character that color his narration of plot action: When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little — a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it — you cannot imagine how stealthily —until, at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye [5].

Character, revealed through voice, is the story here. For short stories meant to be read through at one sitting, this functions; but for novel-length fiction, Collins reconfigured Poe’s strategies. He displaced the editorial function from the narration of the main story. Even Walter lets others tell a good deal of it, and Franklin Blake will do so even more. This returns to the epistolary model, whose writer might narrate a scene that included the writer but might also provide a letter frame for it. It also harks back to the editorial characters of Hogg and Scott while giving the collator a more decisive and engaged role, as Poe did. Both Walter Hartright and Franklin Blake are intimately involved in crucial action, and both have love affairs that are at stake.

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Besides utilizing a separate editorial narrator while keeping him at risk, Collins adopted but refined Poe’s direction of dramatic voice toward recounting crime. Poe’s crimes are generally sensational to the point of horror, such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Horror often drives the drama of the narrating voice as well. In Collins’s short pieces, this can also be true, as in “The Terribly Strange Bed,” another of his Poe references. But Collins had also adapted the much more rational “The Purloined Letter,” and it is his combination of the two that manipulates testimony and confession so well in The Woman in White. For the most part, Collins’s narrators of crime are not the criminals but the peripheral observers and the detectives. When criminals do narrate, they do so briefly, as with Fosco, to provide a particular piece of information, or they do so at length, as would be the case with Lydia Gwilt, but for witness testimony and emotional suspense rather than to tell the central story. This separation of the editorial character from the criminal and the modulation of the criminal’s part in the narrative for suspense, while maintaining the drama and lively characterizing voice of witness testimony, are Collins’s contribution to prose monologues of crime. This basic structure, whose components he had tried out in his stories and the framed collections of them, allowed Collins to reconfigure the voices as well, so that the testifiers may do so reluctantly or eagerly, honestly or attempting to manipulate, aware of their knowledge or blind to it. The array of epistolary modulations becomes available to him, with a new twist added by the separate editor-narrator and the segmented frames that also can be manipulated from witness to witness. No narrator has to create frame, although some try. No narrator has to know the big picture of plot, although some know more than others. The layering of reported speech in Frankenstein has become a polyphonic dialogue of witnesses. The novel of testimony is an ideal medium for suspense and for the slow revelation of clues. And when done in the full Collins manner, the casebook novel can be simultaneously as thrilling as Poe’s horror and as intriguing as his detective stories. As a final, overarching influence, Lonoff ’s emphasis on Collins’s love of puzzles extends to a love of complex structures. She notes that Collins routinely subdivided his novels; two out of twenty-one have only chapter breaks. The others have as wide a variety of partitions as his framing devices. Lonoff also cites the serialization of his novels after the original three (127–129), which certainly produced segmentation. In fact, the serial breaks for The Moonstone never overlap a narrator. Some narrators continue for multiple issues, but the narrator always changes in the next installment, logically emphasizing the separate testimonies (Lonoff 232–233). This emphasis on the narrators had also been the case in the serialized version of The Woman in White, for which the sections were labeled by character name only, the later subheads of “The Story Begun” and so on being added for the book edition and the “Epochs” also added

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for the 1861 edition (Kendrick 76). Even in segmentation, Collins’s initial emphasis on was character monologue, not juridical form. His precasebook collections, After Dark and the later Queen of Hearts, both exhibit complex layering and framing of character narration that illustrate how Collins’s enjoyment of intricate framing could even run away with him; yet some individual pieces, including “A Stolen Letter” and the Queen story “The Biter Bit,” show Collins playing with character framing and mediation as brilliantly in miniature as at the length of the novel. After Dark has triple framing before we even get to the tales, with a preface by Collins that echoes the many later prefaces in which he attempts to mediate his novels by explaining his approaches and goals. Here he explains that the “Leaves from Leah’s Diary,” which act as front and end frame as well as sometimes providing notes at the ends of tales, are not just “as the frame-work” but “to give the reader one more glimpse at that artist-life,” which Collins has depicted in “Hide-and-Seek” (5). Leah is the wife of William Kerby, an itinerant painter who has been banned from painting for six months in order to save his eyesight. He passes the time by recounting curious stories that the subjects of his paintings have told him, and his wife hits on the idea of recording them to sell, as they have no other income. Leah describes how this comes about in a series of dated journal entries. This idea of a wife taking a husband’s dictation is perhaps reflected in Bram Stoker’s narrative, as Mina transcribes and types her husband’s dreadful journal and Dr. Seward’s phonograph speculations. William also dictates prologues to each story, some of which are tiny stories in themselves. He describes the subjects who sat for their portraits, painting them again in words, and then retells the story they told him, sometimes professing to narrate largely in the words of the subjects. He has learned to encourage the subjects to talk to him in order to get them to sit still, and some of them come out with bizarre and interesting tales. The first of these, “The Terribly Strange Bed” (first published in 1852), has the liveliest narrator and therefore stands up best to the massive introduction, making it a good choice for the first tale. Its narrator is the young, handsome, adventurous Mr. Faulkner, who may be sailing away for Brazil as soon as the wind shifts. He rambles on about his travels but then demands that he be drawn without idealization as a present for his mother. He proves a stiff subject, and the painter first loosens him up with his own sketches of Paris, one of which sparks his tale. As he story begins, his voice intensifies into distinct and passionate speech that sounds much like Poe’s narrators: “Look at this house in your drawing — the house with the waterpipe running down it from top to bottom. I once passed a night there — a night I shall never forget to the day of my death. I have had some awkward traveling adventures in my time; but that adventure —!” (44). His story follows in first person, maintaining the sense of character narration and mediation as the painter disappears from view. There follows the

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thrilling tale of a fabulous win at rouge et noir and a narrow escape from being shanghaied in a four-poster bed that the landlord cranks together in the night. Its slow descent riffs off Poe’s pendulum, and his escape down the drainpipe is preceded by a bout of intense listening that evokes the narrator of “The Telltale Heart” listening to the old man he murders. The story concludes, still in the voice of the character, and although William cannot resist appending a final paragraph, it is largely a last ironic quote from Mr. Faulkner, who laments that “I have altogether forgotten that I came here to sit for my portrait. for the last hour or more I must have been the worst model you ever had to draw from!” (71). William reassures him. Collins, though, cannot resist yet another afterword, a “Note by Mrs. Kerby,” explaining that her husband had recently told this story because of the remark of a young sailor on his fear of such smothering four-posters. As even Leah says, this is an awfully trivial footnote (72), an example of Collins’s framing becoming top-heavy. The other stories in After Dark lack the mediating characterization and monologic testimony of the first two. Worth noting perhaps is a tribunal trial of postrevolutionary France during “Sister Rose,” with formal questioning and testimony, and a lengthy plot document listing the evidence against the accused, both with some relation to detection. These have more direct relation to trial testimony than the monologic stories. Collins seems to have gone back and forth between character voice and testimony format until he was proficient enough at both to merge them. Collins begs off telling this piece in the character’s own words, apparently thinking that continually doing so questions authenticity, since William says this one was told to him “at different times, and in the most fragmentary and discursive manner” (117). William therefore narrates the story, to far less effect. The final tales are again framed by William. “The Lady of Glenwith Grange” is told in first person by a framing narrator, but without much characterization or voice. It turns upon stolen identity, this time by a criminal husband, which anticipates the stolen identity of The Woman in White. The fifth story, “Gabriel’s Marriage,” has the repeated refrain of “The White Women,” specters that presage drowning. The sixth story, “The Yellow Mask,” may draw part of its ballroom scene’s atmosphere from “The Mask of the Red Death”; it contains a curious summary of a lengthy confession about one Count Fabio. Although these stories have some relation to Collins’s later plots, they have little relation to his development of the novel of testimony. Collins’s use of letter exchanges developed more character voice than his first-person narratives again in The Queen of Hearts (1859), a set of tales with a framing romance. In it, two elderly brothers entertain the young woman that one brother’s son hopes to marry by telling her tales until the son’s return. The Saturday Review commentator took Collins to task for making his characters— regardless of age, gender, or other factors—have “a very great similarity of talking,

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thinking, and acting,” so that “the whole group of stories, therefore, seems worse than any one does when taken by itself ” (Page 76). This collection has less elaborate layers of narration, less developed character voice, and less emphasis on detection. In these stories Collins seems more interested in the Gothic atmosphere and plot twists that will color both his novels of testimony; but here again we can see him working toward the characters of The Woman in White, and even toward its form. Of special significance is “The Biter Bit,” a comic exchange of letters among three policemen, two on the scene of a theft and a chief inspector supervising both. In this story, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1858 (Thompson 311), the characters’ voices are developed by sarcastic comments from the supervisor and from Sharpin, the ambitious lawyer’s clerk on his trial run as a policeman. But their personalities are well enough developed that their accounts of the investigation provide a dialogue of character leading to solution; Sharpin, the ambitious policeman, is so distracted by the charms of the thief that he pursues the wrong suspect, while Sergeant Bulmer solves the case after reading Sharpin’s misguided account of his investigations, punctuated by Sharpin’s selfcongratulatory comments. Inspector Theakstone passes these along to Bulmer, who identifies the victim’s wife as the thief of the banknotes he had in a tin box under his pillow. Theakstone adds a final note on the consequences to Sharpin and to the thief. In assigning Sharpin, forwarding the reports, and adding the afterword, Theakstone acts as the editorial character, a device Collins would exploit to similar but more powerful effect in his novels of testimony. There is no need for their exchanges to be in the form of letters and reports other than for Collins’s experimentation with the possibilities for mystery, solution, and character through framed narration. By making Sharpin’s reports available in writing to another officer, Collins preserves Sharpin’s mistaken perspective while allowing Bulmer to reread the evidence as well as to factor in Sharpin’s viewpoint. By making Sharpin’s letters a report to his superior, however mockingly done, they transpose, as Collins would continue to explore doing, the private nature of letters into official documents of crime without sacrificing the dialogue of character common to epistolary fiction. Their plot turns on the effect of character on investigation, making the story a miniature trial run of the novel of testimony Collins would shortly launch. Along with “A Stolen Letter,” “The Biter Bit” is a dress rehearsal for the novels of testimony that would make Collins’s reputation. This story has also been cited as perhaps the first comic detective story as well as the first detective story in letters (Ashley quoted in Thompson 311); Collins’s “first” contributions to crime fiction came well ahead of The Moonstone in both content and technique. The story most important to Woman, which appeared the following year, is the tenth tale, “Anne Rodway.” It is the only one not told by one of the brothers, being a series of excerpts from her diary, presumably made by Owen, the brother who introduces it. Collins therefore sets up not merely a framing nar-

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rator, as in the other stories, but an editor who picks out for us the parts relevant to the story. Owen’s editing, like Leah’s transcription, further rehearses the editorial narrator Collins would create in Walter Hartright. Anne has often been noted as the earliest female detective in English. She is an interested party caught up in the murder of her friend Mary, a working girl like herself but even poorer. Mary uses laudanum and is a more defeatist character than the thrifty Anne, who hopes to one day to afford to marry Robert, her educated but poor fiancée, who at the story’s start is out of the country pursuing his fortune. When Mary dies after a blow to the head, Anne scrimps together the money to bury her and does not believe she died of a mere fall. Anne’s voice is not greatly distinctive, but she describes other characters and reports their speech vividly, a device Collins would use in The Woman in White, where Walter reports dramatic speech from Professor Pesca, Frederick Fairlie, and others, as well as attaching their testimony. Anne reports principally Mary’s brutish landlord: “I mean to have my rent; and, if somebody don’t pay it, I’ll have her body seized and sent to the workhouse!” (523). Anne also tells of the beadle she enlisted to stand off the landlord: “I’ll pull you up, sir. If you say another word to the young woman, I’ll pull you up before the authorities of this metropolitan parish” (525). Finally, Anne tells of Mrs. Horlick and her husband, “the idlest humpbacked pig in all London,” (534) who knows the identity of the murderer. These dramatic thumbnail sketches of minor characters are more similar to Dickens’s rendering of quixotic secondary characters than Collins’s testifiers would be at longer length. In expanding his narrated detection to novels, Collins made such sideline characters important speakers in their own right. Anne’s first clue is a piece of a cravat, “A very old, rotten, dingy strip of black silk, with thin lilac lines, all blurred and deadened with dirt, running across and across the stuff in a sort of trellis-work pattern” (514) found in Mary’s hand. Anne keeps this, and when she comes across the rest of it in a rag bin, she contrives to acquire it and learns that it belonged to Horlicks. By then she is set on the detective path: “A kind of fever got possession of me — a vehement yearning to go on from this first discovery and find out more, no matter what the risk might be” (533). This became the detective fever Betteredge identifies in The Moonstone. Anne does take risks and spends her precious coin, but she does not give up. Robert returns, still poor, but he becomes her partner in detection, pursuing information from Horlick and finding out that the murderer is ill in a nearby inn with “the drunken horrors.” Robert goes to the pub, finding the doctor in attendance, and also gets the man’s name out of the barman. Anne recognizes the name as that of the person who led Mary’s father into drink, introducing Providence. Robert consults a lawyer, who helps him interview the doctor and gives him temporary work. Together they bring Truscott, the killer, to trial for manslaughter and he is condemned to be transported. Now that he is in custody,

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though, the police trace other crimes to him. In a similar manner, Fosco dies not for Laura’s kidnapping but for his previous involvement in the brotherhood. Providence intervenes again as Mary’s brother arrives and, out of gratitude, finds employment for Robert, so that he and Anne can marry. The collaboration of Robert and Anne in successful detection, his rise in stature and his marriage as a result, along with the extracts made from Anne’s diary to tell the story heavily foreshadow Walter’s extracts from Marian’s diary, their collaboration in detection, and Walter’s marriage. Even Anne’s first name is carried over for Anne Catherick. A final story from Queen has been noted for its detective, the lawyer’s clerk Mr. Dark, who solves a multilayered crime of bigamy, framing for murder, and theft in “A Plot in Private Life.” This story is narrated by William, a family servant, who cares for his mistress. William’s voice is flatly expository until Mr. Dark comes on the scene. William’s recreation of his voice is another example of lively speech reported by a character in Collins’s fiction. Mr. Dark, who comes across as a jolly toper, actually has “head enough for two” (402). He treats William as a kind of Watson, explaining his method several times, and his reported voice is always alive, as when he instructs William in their disguises as they track the bigamous husband: You are a clerk in a bank, and I’m another. We have got our regular holiday, that comes, like Christmas, once a year, and we are taking a little tour in Scotland to see the curiosities, and to breathe the sea air, and to get some fishing whenever we can. I’m the fat cashier who digs holes in a drawerful of gold with a copper shovel, and you’re the arithmetical young man who sits on a perch behind me and keeps the books. Scotland’s a beautiful country, William. Can you make whisky-toddy? I can; and, what’s more, unlikely as the thing may seem to you, I can actually drink it into the bargain [407].

Disguise in the form of whiskers or no whiskers determines identifying the husband who has faked his death to incriminate his wife. The crucial disguise in a complex narrative of crime told by the family servant who occasionally performs the Watson role will all be used to greater effect in The Moonstone, as Betteredge recounts Cuff ’s investigation and Godfrey’s disguise is unmasked to reveal the thief. Wherever else Collins looked for plot, he also reprised much from this story as well as from his previous work, which had rehearsed the novel of testimony at length. The epistolary play of letters at the end of Basil, the editorial character framing of After Dark and The Queen of Hearts, the dramatic detective voices of Mr. Boxsious and Mr. Dark, the narrator mediation that both prevents and finds solution in “The Biter Bit,” the extracting of relevant entries in Anne’s diary, the telling of detection tales by mediating narrators, and the monologic voices of Poe’s stories, whose plots Collins had raided several times, as well as the dialogue of monologues in epistolary fiction all go into the making of The Woman in White and The Moonstone.

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Julian Thompson assesses Collins’s achievement similarly in speaking of Collins’s early stories: The variety is impressive but some of Collins’s early stories are (the standards of the time) also formidably inventive: almost singlehanded he effected the importation into England of the detective story on Poe’s model, but with an unassuming control of humour (for instance, in “The Biter Bit”) and character (the private investigator in “A Plot in Private Life”) that seems quite beyond the range of Poe. By the mid–1850s Collins had accumulated sufficient short stories to want to preserve some of them in book form, and his ability to produce page-turning copy (especially early in his career) is wonderfully illustrated by the framing-narratives he concocted to support this republication [viii–ix].

Robert Ashley, in his biography of Collins, connects the early stories directly to the coming casebook structure of The Woman in White, saying, “Once again, this represents nothing new in Collins, but rather the perfection of a method with which Collins had experimented before, most notably in Basil and ‘The Biter Bit’” (68). Developing monlogic character statements and experimenting with frames for them, sometimes juridical and sometimes otherwise, was a major focus of Collins’s writing well before the peak achievement of his testimonial structure in 1868. As Andrew noted of this earlier work, “Collins’s progress has been steady. Item by item he equips himself for the tour de force on which his fame is to rest” (49).

CHAPTER 3

The Woman in White Collins Launches the Casebook Novel Wilkie Collins’s two best novels, generally acknowledged to be The Woman in White and The Moonstone, are distinguished from the body of his work by their full reliance on witness statements, many of them in dramatic monologue. Their high level of achievement is due in large part to Collins’s development of the novel of testimony, which comes to fruition in these novels. It is the segmentation of character viewpoint that creates the books’ suspense, as critics as noted upon the publication of The Woman in White. Although some reviewers castigated Collins for such a complicated plot, many also praised his narrative strategy. The reception as well as the technique of Collins’s first casebook novel is instructive in evaluating both his success with testimony as a narrational mode and the place he deserves in the history of crime fiction. Many commentators have noted the influence of printed courtroom testimony, accounts of police cases, and the Newgate novel on Collins’s fiction; this influence inspired Collins to fuse documented witnessing with the vivid, dialogic voices of epistolary fiction and Poe’s stories into a freshly effective application of multiple focus. He did so by exploiting the interplay of individual voices, which he redirected toward solution of the books’ mystery plots, and by the deployment of an editorial narrator who pulls the whole text together. Dramatic voice, document frames, and the editorial character all are essential ingredients of Collins’s novel of testimony. By The Woman in White, Collins was applying his previous experiments with these ingredients to provide both complication and the solution of a fulllength mystery well suited to both serialization and book form. The evolution of individual testimony from private letters to public statement can be seen in his more elaborate application of this technique in Woman, giving the novel its more overtly juridical slant than would be the case in The Moonstone. The opening narrative by Walter Hartright draws attention to courtroom witness statements: “As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now.” He further positions the coming statements as testimony by declaring that they 35

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will be heard as if in court (1). Hartright views even his own statement as such: “Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first.” This legal framing shows how conscious Collins was of utilizing direct testimony. In the preface to the 1860 edition, he claims credit for this manner of storytelling, underlining it as a new discovery “which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction.” Furthermore, beyond not just the novelty of having the characters tell the story from “different positions along the chain of events,” Collins emphasizes that “the substance of the book, as well as the form, has profited by it,” citing momentum and expression as results (Woman 409). Contemporary reviewers of The Woman in White similarly noted Collins’s structure as based on the novel of letters, and some therefore disagreed with his assertion of having developed a new form. The Observer reminded readers of epistolary novels to refute Collins’s claim to making “the character of the book tell the story of the book” a fresh approach (Page 88), but the Morning Advertiser cited the character narration as “novelty” and found that “This feature is successfully carried out, the differences of style being not only natural but exceedingly well sustained” (Page 81). Some contemporary reviewers were quite accurate in analyzing what Collins had done with the casebook form and its effects. The Saturday Review, which found much to criticize in the novel and ranked Collins as an “admirable story-teller, though he is not a great novelist,” deconstructed his form at length toward the end of the review. Calling the way the novel is told “pleasing, novel, and ingenious,” the reviewer enumerated the benefits: preservation of the mystery, and “lifelike and spirited” description with greater immediacy. Two examples are given, the asterisk attached to a letter with Walter’s note that he has edited the contents, on which the reviewer remarks that “This, for a single moment, gives him the air of a veracious historian.” He also cites an example that he feels goes too far — Walter’s further footnote on withholding the name of Fosco’s clandestine society (Page 83 –86). The Times, in a later, lengthy review, also found Collins’s assertion of “an unprecedented method of telling his story, “to be “a just one.” After summarizing accurately how the “eyewitnesses and earwitnesses” report the story, the reviewer compares Collins’s work to epistolary fiction: The epistolary method was more natural, but it had the disadvantage of leading to many digressions and endless repetitions, and of spinning out novels, like those of Richardson, to a prodigious number of volumes. In the method of story-telling devised by Mr. Wilkie Collins the narrators are like the witnesses at a trial. Each one speaks according to his or her knowledge; the succeeding witness adds a few touches to the evidence of the previous one, and so the story moves forward bit by bit, until at last the mosaic of evidence is complete and every hole is filled up. The advantage of this new method is, that the story moves forward with interruptions and that the reader’s curiosity is continually teased by a sense of mystery [Page 98].

In short, contemporary reviews of Woman gave Collins almost as much credit for the form as he has been given in later criticism, even while denigrating

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his novel in content and sometimes form. Both Collins and the gamut of his contemporary reviewers were correct; he built a new elaboration on a familiar framework. Collins not only perceived the differences between his narrative and epistolary form but also understood that older form well. Collins’s comments in his “Preface to the Second Edition” highlight the emphasis placed on character by documents. He intended to tell a “story,” but “it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters.” The overwhelming success of The Woman in White he attributed to “the interest of character” and projected future work as trying “through the medium of new characters, to awaken their interest in another story” (501–502). A number of reviewers attacked Collins on the grounds of artifice, unrealistic character behavior, and overly elaborate plotting. The word puzzle appears frequently in a pejorative sense. Part of what the reviewers reacted to was that same contribution so often later praised: the amount of groundwork Collins laid for mystery fiction. The puzzle aspect is the development of the crime thriller’s ingredients, which later critics have noted appear in English for the first time or for the first full application in Collins’s novels. Unreality still is the charge laid again fiction that uses content formulas, while memorable characters and the addressing of social issues are still cited as redeeming virtues of mystery writing, and this was true in Collins’s initial reception. One review in the Spectator actually attacked other commentators on this score, praising Collins for his “mastery in the art of construction” and arguing that while the secret drives suspense, “Meanwhile there is other matter in hand sufficiently copious and exciting to keep the reader’s mind perpetually occupied with a flow of varying emotions” (Page 92). The puzzle-master appellation is a red herring in Collins scholarship; not only he but sensation fiction in general was attacked for its unreality, immorality, and emphasis on plot over character even while the attractions of sensation and outstanding examples of it were praised. In her analysis of sensation reviews in the Athenaeum, Ellen Miller Casey discusses at multiple points this “simultaneous indignation and seduction” (11). She summarizes the view as follows: “But while they did attack sensation as ‘highly seasoned garbage,’ they also praised more than one ‘highly flavoured dish’ and acknowledged the power of sensation’s transgressive subversion of Victorian artistic and moral conventions” (3). The plot-heavy accusations against Collins must be considered in this context. The conception of his novels as all plot and no character do not bear analysis, at least in most of his works, and certainly not in The Woman in White. Essential to the substance of the novel, and showcased by the document frames, are the dramatic voices and even monologues of many of the characters in The Woman in White. In this novel, which turns on confusion of identity between Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick, her near double, by Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, his sinister confederate, the emphasis on character through testament framing serves the plot well. The various characters’ contributions

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to the story and its solution are handled in two ways: some, including the illiterate cook and the Blackwater Park housekeeper, who will hear nothing against Count Fosco, are treated very frankly as witnesses. Their statements are solicited by Walter Hartright for the purpose of restoring Laura to her own identity after she has been kidnapped and substituted for the dead Anne. Walter’s own narrative is treated by himself in this way, and his record of some of his interviews with key witnesses is an exchange of questions and answers that evokes courtroom testimony. Many characters, including these witnesses, are voiced dramatically, their voices distinct, lively, and entertaining far beyond what is needed to advance the plot. Like Dickens, Collins here plays with dramatizing minor characters, sometimes for comic effect, as in the several pages of speech by Professor Pesca that launch Walter on his road to Limmeridge House. Other, more important narratives by Laura’s deplorable uncle and by the despicable Mrs. Catherick, however, are also vividly rendered, with ample, characterizing asides from each. Reported speech, as when Walter recounts what Marian had said or Marian records Count Fosco’s speech in her diary, also rises to dramatic voice, even in the case of brief minor characters such as the vestry clerk at Old Welmingham Church, late in the novel. “We might be tidier, mightn’t we, sir?” said the cheerful clerk; “but when you’re in a lost corner of a place like this, what are you to do? Why, look here now, just look at these packing-cases. There they’ve been, for a year or more, ready to go down to London — there they are, littering the place, and there they’ll stop as long as the nails hold them together. I’ll tell you what, sir, as I said before, this is not London. We are all asleep here. Bless you, we don’t march with the times!” [450].

The clerk’s “chattering,” as Walter calls it, is working up to the existence of a duplicate parish register, but it also adds lively texture and moves the scene along. Throughout the book, Collins interweaves the deliberate witness statements, with their emphasis on testimony and clues, with the dramatized voices that make character itself a driving force to obscure or reveal the crimes of Glyde and Fosco. The plot turns on issues of conduct by individuals. Sir Percival Glyde’s father has appeared to marry his mother, who, however, had a living husband. The greedy and shallow Glyde fakes the parish register to secure his own position, but the fact is known by the aggressive social climber Mrs. Catherick, who blackmails him into elevating her position. Her frail and mentally unstable daughter Anne knows that a secret exists but not what it is. Glyde locks her away, and it is her escape, wearing her characteristic white, that begins the novel’s action. Later, when Glyde proves unable to access Laura’s money and Anne dies, he and Fosco switch the two women, who look alike, locking up Lady Glyde and declaring her dead. The novel is full of self-justifying characters who reveal their guilt even as they deny it in much the ironic manner of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” or Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and it

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is the counterpointing of their evasions, equivocations, and denials against the determined detection of Walter and Marian that provides the book’s tension. At points, Collins is simply having fun with character voice, adding texture and interest to the book. The broken English of Pesca, Walter’s political refugee friend and benefactor who obtains for him the job at Limmeridge, is played for comic effect, yet it is so lively (and readable) that it adds considerably more interest that merely starting Walter on his way. Pesca is given a speech lengthy enough to feel monologic, working up to Walter’s new position: “Among the fine London Houses where I teach the language of my native country,” said the Professor, rushing into his long-deferred explanation without another word of preface, “there is one, mighty fine, in the big place called Portland. You all know where that is? Yes, yes—course-of-course.... Now mind! Imagine to yourselves that I am teaching the young Misses to-day, as usual. We are all four of us down together in the Hell of Dante. At the Seventh Circle — but no matter for that: all the Circles are alike to the three young Misses, fair and fat, — at the Seventh Circle, nevertheless, my pupils are sticking fast, and I, to set them going again, recite, explain, and blow myself up red-hot with useless enthusiasm, when — a creak of boots in the passage outside, and in comes the golden Papa, the mighty merchant with the naked head and the two chins.— Ha! my good dears, I am closer than you think for to the business, now. Have you been patient so far? Or have you said to yourselves, ‘Deuce-what-the-deuce! Pesca is long-winded tonight?’” [7–8].

This explication continues for several pages. It is not dialect speech that attempts to reproduce what an educated Italian immigrant would have said, but rather highly individual speech that contains its own dramatization of the teaching scene, as well as adding drama to Walter’s narrative. The Saturday Review praised Pesca as second only to Fosco, while still denigrating Collins’s characters in general (Page 85). Collins used a similar approach to minor characters throughout the book. A more notable dramatic voice is that of Frederick Fairlie, Laura’s uncle. His languid reluctance to do practically anything is dramatized both in his reported speech (by Walter) and later in the section he narrates. Frederick Fairlie, like several other minor characters, is called upon to testify as to what he has witnessed. At the same time, Fairlie, like other testifying characters, does not acknowledge his own guilt in the abduction of Laurie Fairlie and Anne Catherick as well as in Glyde’s scheme to get Laura’s money. In Fairlie’s case, he has played an essential role in refusing to insist on a reasonable marriage settlement for Laura, but such responsibility still does not occur to him even when asked to describe what happened. His plaint continues to be that “It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone.” In the narrative that he recounts, he continually, like Pesca, detours into trivialities while also bringing flat characters outside the action, as well as himself, vividly to life. When Marian sends Laura’s maid to see him, Fairlie’s chief concern via Louis, his valet, is whether her shoes creak. After the shoes and her tears have been dealt with, Fairlie summarizes her speech:

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel My idea is that she began by telling me (through Louis) that her master had dismissed her from her mistress’s serve. (Observe, throughout, the strange irrelevancy of the Young Person. Was it my fault that she had lost her place?) On her dismissal, she had gone to the inn to sleep. (I don’t keep the inn — why mention it to me?) Between six o’clock and seven Miss Halcombe had come to say goodbye, and had given her two letters, one for me, and one for a gentleman in London. (I am not a gentleman in London — hang the gentleman in London!) She had carefully put the two letters into her bosom (What have I to do with her bosom?) [307].

The exposition we need — the testimony he is asked to provide —comes in the form of prose monologue, filtering the information through character with copious asides. Collins was acutely aware of how important this dynamic was to his storytelling, citing in his preface to the second edition how the important characters— he names all the principals—“have made friends for me wherever they have made themselves known” (xiv). They did so through their dramatic voices. Collins’s framing of these monologues as testimony in the case is a crucial element that distinguishes the novel of testimony. Newspaper accounts of crime and trials were so popular and read so much in the spirit of crime fiction that they were at some points called “Newspaper Novels” (Hughes 18), and Collins’s further reading of French police cases has already been noted. Collins exploited this juridical interest through framing as testimony that gives the narratives a public, legalistic slant, yet the witnessing itself is made the medium of characterization as well as exposition, even more so in The Moonstone, as discussed in Chapter 5. Collins’s testimonial framing has three layers; in some cases originally private documents such as Marian’s diary are recast by Walter, the framing narrator, as testimony. In others, statements by witnesses to various aspects of the crime are solicited by Walter explicitly as testimony and then incorporated into the narrative by him. His framing therefore positions or reinforces the importance of the statements to solution. They are not just accounts of what happened but the documents in the casebook. Finally, Walter’s own narrative has been created as such for the purpose of revealing his own role and pulling together the other narratives. At some points he even acknowledges summarizing, as when he recounts what has happened to Marian and Laura not from Marian’s diary but in “the brief, plain studiously simple abstract which I committed to writing for my own guidance, and for the guidance of my legal adviser” (373). How the documents were created affects the speech of the characters, as discussed below. Collins did not allow the juridical framing that Walter gives to the material to run away with its character-based drama, as he sometimes indulgently did with the narrator’s frame in After Dark, for example. Despite Walter’s juridical framing at the start and in the course of the text, the majority of the statements do not sound like trial testimony. The speakers ramble, editorialize, and defend themselves in an uncourtlike manner, which Walter can shorten but not fully

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control. The witnesses to Glyde’s machinations are chiefly either peripheral or minor characters— the cook, the housekeeper, the lawyer, the uncle, and the mother of Anne, Laura’s double. The most out-of-control testaments are those that are most confessional, those by Mrs. Catherick and Count Fosco, both of whom admit their actions but deny blame. None of the most immediate principals speak — neither Laura, nor Anne, nor Glyde testify (something Caspary would change to effect in Laura). The principal narrators are the peripheral, the culpable, and the amateur detectives, Marian and Walter, whose narrational voices are the least dramatized. (In The Moonstone, Collins would emphasize the culpable sideline narrators considerably more and curtail the framing narrator as well.) Walter’s lack of control is particularly evident in the confession by Fosco, who is blackmailed into it by Walter. Confessions as written by Collins in this novel and in The Moonstone are not merely plot documents, nor are they merely another piece of evidence for solution. Both of the important confessions here are fully voiced and deeply colored by character. Neither of them solves the mystery except as to how character has enabled crime. Mrs. Catherick’s effrontery is as important in the case as her background information; without her driving ambitions and emotional coldness, Glyde would not have been able to get away with his forgery of his parents’ marriage certificate as long as he did, and he would have had no reason to confine Anne. By the time Fosco’s confession is added, Walter already knows what has occurred for Anne and Laura. Here the judicial purpose returns, as he needs Fosco’s testimony and also the letter he provides in order to restore Laura’s identity legally. Fosco is aware of this purpose, but it does not prevent him from making rapturous asides about Marian or, like Frederick Fairlie ruminating on matters in general, ranging from chemistry to the loyalty due from wives. At the close of his document, which he characterizes as “remarkable,” and after admitting he would have killed Anne had she not providentially died, Fosco assesses his own guilt: On a calm revision of all the circumstances— Is my conduct worthy of any serious blame? Most emphatically, No! Have I not carefully avoided exposing myself to the odium of committing unnecessary crime? With my vast resources in chemistry, I might have taken Lady Glyde’s life. At immense personal sacrifice I followed the dictates of my own ingenuity, my own humanity, my own caution, and took her identity instead. Judge me by what I might have done. How comparatively innocent! how indirectly virtuous I appear in what I really did! [556].

Montresor could hardly have put it more self-deceptively. Fosco here addresses not only Walter but also anyone who may see the document. He is aware that it will be used as evidence and manipulates it to protect himself as much as possible. He wants it to be read, to exonerate him of murder, and yet his grandiose self-defense condemns him all the more. In discussing these framed monologues as juridical documents, Adele Wills

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offers pertinent analysis of how the framed multiple testimony affects the reading of the texts. Addressing form and theme together, Wills argues that the narration by multiple voices who report still other voices “undermines the juridical process by occasionally placing the ‘truth’ in the mouths of marginalized characters of Otherness (like Anne Catherick)” (92). (Anne’s speech is reported by Marian in her diary and by Walter in his encounters with her.) The dialogic generated by the variety of characters and viewpoint, she contends, creates a temporary view beyond the social context of historicism, authorship, or reading. “The fact that any wholeness is only fleeting,” she notes, “avoids a universalising resolution into monologism” (93). Thus Walter, who solicits and records testimony, must rely on the imperfect and fragmented testimony he gathers, some of which, such as the housekeeper’s and Fairlie’s narratives, try to contradict his purpose while others add a perspective that he does not need or want but must take, since it is woven into the character’s statement. Walter’s sections are those that emphasize juridical form, and some of Walter’s frantic questioning of those who can perhaps help him restore Laura read as courtroom examinations. His interview with Mrs. Clements, who had taken care of Anne, includes thirteen questions that he puts to her as well as her answers (she asks him one or two things also). His subsequent interview with Mrs. Catherick occupies several pages of terse mutual examination that come closest to formal testimony of all the book’s sections. “Why?” I repeated. “Do you ask why I come here to tell you of your daughter’s death?” “Yes. What interest have you in me, or in her? How do you come to know anything about my daughter?” “In this way. I met her on the night when she escaped from the Asylum, and I assisted her in reaching a place of safety.” “You did very wrong.” “I am sorry to hear her mother say so.” “Her mother does say so. How do you know she is dead?” “I am not at liberty to say how I know it — but I do know it” [438].

These questioning passages, however, are reported exchanges within the narrative, not separate statements. The individual narrators who speak for themselves are not recorded as questions and answers and so can attempt to slip Collins’s control while ultimately serving his purpose. Yet even while Collins reframed his multiple narrators into witnesses, he retained the essence of the intimacy characteristic of the novel of letters. The dramatized witnessing voices are closest to epistolary fiction in their narrative structure, but epistolary fiction as reworked by Poe for crime-solving and further refined by Collins to make the framed statements more credible while still dramatic. Frieden cites examples of Poe stories as extreme as the epistolary parody in Henry Fielding’s Shamela, in which Poe’s criminal narrators “unsettle” the illusion that the narration takes place in the moment (155). Poe’s narrators,

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he says, are “menacingly present” yet also violate representation of consciousness by exhibiting madness while also telling a coherent story (160): The deviant narrators of “the Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “the Imp of the Perverse” in some ways extend into short fiction the epistolary and conversational modes developed by Richardson, Coleridge, and their followers. Yet Poe’s narrators often confront the representational illusion at the same time that they dispute the superficial claim that they are insane. In Poe’s texts, the scene of madness combines with a controlled scene of writing; at exactly this point, Poe destabilizes the genre he assumes; rhetorical forms both constitute and question a conversational pretense [160].

Part of this unsettling effect is the degree of self-consciousness that a character has about generating writing or making spoken statements that will be written down. In Collins, much of this awareness is displaced onto the editorial character who records testimony and creates the overall frame. Walter and later Franklin Blake are flatter characters partly because of this burden (some of which is transferred to Betteredge in The Moonstone). They do not have to write their testimony; Walter Hartright will record it or excerpt it, juxtapose it with others, and make up the casebook. The witnesses can be as conversational as they choose, including irrelevant asides, protests, confessions, and rationalizations. It is Walter who has to bridge scenes, explain how he got testimony, fill in items none of the others know, and arrange the whole. Both Poe’s stories and Collins’s framed character narratives offer support for Joe Bray’s thesis that epistolary narrative “oscillates between unity and disintegration of self ” or, as he references in other critics, between the teller and the actor (Bakhtin) or the hero and narrator (Stanzel) (Bray 17). These interactions between the two character positions both create and disturb the sense of the experiencing self as the narrating self intrudes and retreats. Such shifts are difficult to manage in first person when the teller is a central character and describes scenes in which he or she is a principal actor. The awkwardness of this is what Virginia Woolf noted in Jane Eyre, as Jane shifts from involvement in her own reactions on the battlements of Thornfield to the narrator voice that remarks on hearing Grace Poole laugh (Woolf 72). Collins’s adaptation of epistolary form rebalances these positions to exploit their tension to fresh effect. His narrators are more acutely tellers than letter writers, some because they have been asked for statements and, in the case of the editorial detective, because he has taken on the task of explaining what happened. There is less pretense that they are simply recounting to the addressee — the statement is more formal, more public, and more self-conscious on the part of each narrator. Even a private document such as a diary is recast by reframing and excerpting it to make it part of the semipublic casebook. The discrepancy between experiencing and telling voice is far less when the characters testify to another who will record it. Collins’s witnesses, of course, are fallible in describing the past, as witnesses notoriously are, as well as biased. That is why multiple

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witnesses and overall framing are called for in representing the casebook. Collins essentially made the author a character, exposing the writer’s manipulation of dialogic testimony while concurrently using it to conceal and delay the clues of the equally manipulative crime plot. The witnesses can be engaged both when they become reinvolved in past events and as they play against the constraints of their testimony in the present of giving it. Collins has retained much of formal epistolary structure, more so than Poe, while redirecting its effect toward crime solution, as Poe did, and making the editorial detective a mask for himself as author. This is parallel to epistolary fiction but closer to it than the tension between author and character Bray discusses in Jane Austen, in which Austen carries the narrational burden while the indirect free thought of the character and narrated monologues of the character’s speech allow the experiencing self to express itself. Collins has kept the epistolary framing and the full dialogics of multiple focus, while also displacing much of the writing and telling function onto the editorial character. In doing this, Collins does not have to sacrifice character voice but can allow the multiple voices to dramatize clues and red herrings alike. Collins only occasionally includes the testimony of criminals; most often he used minor characters mixed with principals. Yet even minor characters in Collins are so self-centered that they consider themselves principals, and they do not hesitate to emphasize experience over narrational duty. Some of their statements are closer to memorandum than memoir, but the speaking character colors what is said, bringing character vividly into play and putting character in tension with the amateur detective’s social purpose. How much the characters react to the events of the past or attempt to influence Walter’s investigation depends in part on how their testimony comes to be made. Marian’s diary entries were written close to the time she records and her reactions are about the immediate events and persons, as they naturally would be. She stays closer to the experiencing self of the events’ timeline. Marian’s early entries about Blackwater Park reflect a more direct reaction from her without the suspicions and defensiveness of other witnesses. After she has become a codetective, Walter narrates her rescue of Laura and continues to excerpt the Blackwater Park diary. Marian’s direct narration therefore remains in her diary, written not as evidence but as a record of her thoughts and reactions. Walter’s narration also is restrained by his subauthor role as the maker of the casebook. He rarely records emotional reactions from himself, while reporting a wide variety of reactions from others. Whereas Marian’s narration is more focused on experience, Walter’s sections focus heavily on narration, and he has a dialogue of editor to character with Marian’s testimony in particular. It is his hostile and/or self-centered witnesses who slough off their responsibilities as narrators whenever they can in favor of observation, self-justification, or sheer talk. One such example is the passage in which Fairlie recounts

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his interview with the maid, a prime Collins inversion from private to public form. If Laura’s uncle had possessed the energy to keep a diary or write personal letters, no doubt they would have read much the same in tone and self-focus. But here he speaks not to a particular person but to whomever might read the testament that Walter has pressed him to make. Fairlie’s experiencing self colors the past facts he has to include, as with his selfish asides on the information the maid gave him: “What have I do to with her bosom?” Fairlie lets himself off the hook as narrator as much as possible from the start: “I will endeavor to remember what I can (under protest), and to write what I can (also under protest), and what I can’t remember and can’t write, Louis must remember and write for me. He is an ass, and I am an invalid, and we are likely to make all sorts of mistakes between us. How humiliating!” (304). Fairlie has the stage, and he uses it for his own purposes, from defending himself to soapbox comments on life in general: Let me do the girl justice. Her shoes did not creak. But why do Young Persons in service all perspire at the hands? Why have they all got fat noses and hard cheeks? And why are their faces so sadly unfinished, especially about the corners of the eyelids? I am not strong enough to think deeply myself on any subject, but I appeal to professional men, who are. Why have we no variety in our breed of Young Persons? [306].

Fairlie breaks out continually from his narrative of the past to make interjections that reveal more than he realizes about his character. Similarly, but to much more sinister effect, the statement made voluntarily — apparently in order to have the last word — by Mrs. Catherick twists her confession of actions toward self-defense as surely as Fosco’s later statement. Earlier, Walter has questioned Mrs. Catherick closely about her past without getting much out of her. Now, left out of the loop, she tells all, but without signing the document. She also hand-delivers it, so that it cannot be traced, rendering it useless legally. She even disguises her handwriting. She too does not hear what she says, and in a passage as chilling as “ The Cask of Amontillado” shows how cold-heartedly culpable she has been about Glyde’s desire to shut Anne away in order to prevent her from hinting at his secret. Under these circumstances, I did my duty as a mother. “No pauper Asylum,” I said, “I won’t have her put in a pauper Asylum. A Private Establishment if you please. I have my feelings as a mother, and my character to preserve in the town, and I will submit to nothing but a Private Establishment, of the sort which my genteel neighbors would choose for afflicted relatives of their own.” Those were my words. It is gratifying to me to reflect that I did my duty. Though never overfond of my late daughter, I had a proper pride about her. No pauper stain — thanks to my firmness and resolution — ever rested on MY child [487].

Mrs. Catherick writes to a man she knows through both their involvements in a crime. She cannot resist justifying herself even to him, and Walter, to capture the information filled in by her letter and in the interests of truth, places her words in between sections of his own narrative.

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Present time is not as important an issue in these passage, since all of Collins’s witness testimony is made by the characters after the fact or redirected after the fact by Walter. The fragmentary contributions of individual characters need not be holistic; it is the collating detective who makes them holistic by assembling them. Collins’s novel of testimony thus resolves some narrative tension of the epistolary novel while deliberately exploiting other tensions in the service of mystery and its detection. With Mrs. Catherick’s letter, there are four layers of time: the past as narrated, the present in which it is narrated for a purpose with present comments by the narrator, the point at which Walter places it into the casebook, and the present in which it is read, twice removed from when it was written and quadruply removed from the occurrence. The tension is less between the narrating and experiencing self: the count is forced to narrate but uses it for his own purposes as far as he can. Fosco’s tension, as with Mrs. Catherick, is one of revealed character through the use that the narrator makes of the opportunity to testify. The most culpable and biased witnesses narrate self-consciously yet without fully hearing what they are saying, coloring their acknowledged recreation with reactions to both past and present circumstances. The removal in time facilitates this mixture as they speak about the events in question yet also make present reactions to the “then” of their narration as well as to the “now” of their testimony. Walter and the readers of the documents discover exactly how villainous were the characters driving this crime, from the careless uncle and heartless mother to the alternate reality in which Fosco is a hero of restraint for not having committed murder. As Collins claimed, it is his emphasis on character that drives the form, which yet can be read from a perspective broader and more dialogic than any character’s to create the fleeting interplay for solution. R. V. Andrew described well the assurance Collins had reached in his first casebook novel, building on and exceeding his previous works: We look for and find in The Woman in White many features employed in earlier work, yet in such work we find nothing which can remotely compare with this novel. It is the work of a man who has found himself. He knows his strength and his weakness; he has eliminated many of those weaknesses and has even made a virtue of some [140].

Yet Collins was not done with the development of document-framed character narration. Between The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Collins continued to experiment in No Name and Armadale, setting framed sections against third-person narration. The form and content of these works influenced his further refinement of the novel of testimony in The Moonstone.

CHAPTER 4

Counterpointed Witnessing in No Name and Armadale Often cited as the most important and successful of Collins’s novels written partly in framed witness statements is Armadale, and it is no accident that it lies between his two great casebook novels or that it was preceded by No Name, his first counterpointed novel. Both were experiments that helped Collins to reach the heights of The Moonstone, but the counterpointing of documentframed narration against third-person narrative was continued by Collins in other works after that peak as well. He remained interested in sensational crime and in framed character narration, though less in detection. No Name is as much the product of Collins’s reading and his experiments in framing as are his novels of testimony, but in it he produced instead a novel partially in framed character narrative interspersed regularly among sections in third person. The uses he made of framed dialogics between documents in No Name anticipate the less formal and less resolved framing of Armadale and later novels as well as rehearsing some plot and detail for The Moonstone. No Name is built on the lines of Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions and Scott’s Redgauntlet— that is, it comprises partly framed and sometimes voiced sections but is also written in the third person. Collins’s novel flows more smoothly than either antecedent because of the management of framing and character mediation he had learned in his previous works. In No Name, Collins made no attempt to create a casebook and no character acts as editor. Instead, Collins shifts from third-person to first-person documents without mediating the shift, as writers throughout the twentieth century would choose freely among narrative viewpoints. It is No Name and the other novels partially in documents that provided the model for Byatt’s Possession, for Michael Cox’s “post-authentic” Victorian thrillers, and other twentieth-century thrillers such as Gruber’s, rather than the novels of testimony. Thus Collins’s counterpointed multiple focus is a related but distinct area of his influence on form. The secrecy of No Name’s plot exploits its letters well, while its providential resolution concludes in the third person with plot-forwarding documents. The 47

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spirited Magdalen Vanstone schemes to rectify her and her sister’s situation. Their parents, who had lived together without being married because he already had a wife, made their relationship legal after that wife’s death. But since the sisters were born out of wedlock, they are left penniless and the fortune goes to Noel Vanstone, their cousin, whose father was at bitter odds with their father. Magdalen contrives to meet, fascinate, and marry Noel. But through the machinations of Mrs. Lecount, his housekeeper, as well as through the schemes of Captain Wragge, her relative, Noel finds out Magdalen’s real identity and leaves his fortune to his relative Admiral Bartram. The letters in No Name are separated into their own regularly recurring sections, each with the same title: “Between the Scenes— Progress of the Story Through the Post,” casting the third-person sections as “scenes.” Very few plot documents appear outside these sections in the third-person narrative; late in the book, one letter is even summarized rather than quoted (322); this reduction draws our attention to the sectioned letters. Magdalen’s written account of her schemes for Kirke, whose contents we already know, are mentioned but not quoted. The effect of secluding the letter exchanges is to emphasize them as sets that dialogue with each other as well as with the third-person narrative sections. Most of the letter sections function in this way. They are more than mere plot documents that tell us what is happening elsewhere, although they perform expository service as well. The “Scenes,” whose titles give the third-person narratives a theatrical cast, begin early in the book, with detailed descriptions of the settings indicated in the subheads, as in “The First Scene Combe-Raven, Somersetshire” (3). The length of the descriptive openings lessens as the book proceeds. The occasional plot documents include the murder confession that Magdalen reads in a newspaper, which pulls her back from the brink of crime, a direct reference to the juridical reporting Collins had read. As well as the letter sections modifying each other, they also affect action in the Scenes, such as Wragge’s deciding to help Magdalen entrap Noel Vanstone because Noel’s recompense for Wragge’s anonymous warning was insultingly small (279). The letter sets are dialogic within their sections as well as with the Scenes. The lowest level of their interaction is that they footnote each other with additional information or perspective. After the long opening scene, the first set of letters includes epistles by Norah Vanstone to Mr. Pendril, the lawyer, telling the story of their enforced departure after having been stripped of name, fortune, and home by the calamitous state of their parents’ marital status. Miss Garth then writes to Mr. Pendril, enlisting his aid to find Magdalen, who has disappeared. Magdalen’s farewell note to Norah follows; and Sergeant Bulmer informs Pendril on having traced Magdalen, while an anonymous letter arrives for Pendril (later shown to be from Wragge). All but the last of these developments move the story along by expanding upon or enriching the information of the previous one, as Miss Garth’s does with Norah’s letter. Magdalen’s note

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and the anonymous warning, however, play against the others. Neither narrates events but they add mysterious perspectives that, for the time, are left unexplained. After Captain’s Wragge’s “Despatch-Box” entries, which I discuss below, the second set of letters consists of Noel’s parsimonious reply to Wragge’s letter and Wragge’s letter to Magdalen; Nora writes to her and Miss Garth as well, and Francis Clare, her sweetheart, writes to Magdalen from China, a letter enclosed with a condemning note from Frank’s father. Mrs. Wragge writes hysterically to the captain with a doctor’s note, and Norah appeals to Magdalen to contact her. The footnoting here is obvious. Magdalen is even more silent than before, while all the others discuss and entreat her, outraging her sentiments in the bargain. Miss Grath blames Magdalen for Norah’s loss of her governess position, while Frank’s letter revives Magdalen’s feelings for him even as it dashes any hope that they can marry. Mrs. Wragge’s dramatic monologue describes Magdalen’s reaction. Magdalen, while obsessively the focus of others, remains silent, which heightens suspense about what she will do next. The other five sets of letter exchanges continue the same range. Some are brief plot documents whereas others are longer letters with more character voice and perspective. In set three, Magdalen writes to Norah, to Miss Gage, and to Wragge. She does not narrate events but includes the information, which the reader already knows, that Noel Vanstone has inherited and will not help her or Norah. There is a continuing lag between Magdalen’s actions and what Norah and the others know about them, generating further tension as the other characters find out and react, while the reader has anticipated their reactions. The third set also includes a long, dramatic letter from Wragge to Magdalen, who has asked him to lease a house near Noel for her. Wragge accedes to her plan and explains that he keeps a list of available identities, labeled “Skins to Jump Into” and will set up their aliases. Wragge operates throughout as a reverse-negative detective, deducing where to find Magdalen and weighing her schemes against his opportunities. He, Mrs. Lecount, and the various enquiry agents engaged by her and by Miss Garth and Norah perform the novel’s overt detection. The long fourth set of letters also contains the most plot documents, which simply add information or tell what is happening; but this set also includes a long missive from George Bartram to Noel, which in a relaxed voice narrates a meeting with Norah. At this point Norah does not know that the new Lady Vanstone is Magdalen. This set also includes a note from Loscombe, the solicitor for Vanstone, returning George’s letter as unseen. The inclusion of an unread letter for the reader, particularly in a book without an editing character to include it, is both a modern usage similar to Byatt’s letter plays in Possession and also a return to epistolary style, in which we are privy to the characters’ letters without any casebook framework. No Name also includes a letter from Mrs. Lecount to Noel Vanstone, which we read along with Magdalen and

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Wragge but never reaches its addressee. This is a type of play that writers of witnessing novels from to Stoker to Cox employ freely and that is exploited as well in epistolary fiction. The fifth set of correspondence again exhibits Norah’s and Miss Garth’s lack of knowledge and manipulates it as Mrs. Lecount interviews Norah and Miss Garth, who gives away Magdalen’s whereabouts. Loscombe’s letter to Magdalen gives a lengthy opinion on the possibilities for challenging the second will Vanstone made at Mrs. Lecount’s urging, and a second letter explains the probable existence of the “secret trust,” the document imposing conditions on the legacy. Magdalen’s reply to him hints at her next actions. More interesting in terms of dialogics are the last two sets. When Admiral Drake’s housekeeper tells him that she has hired a new maid, readers can guess her identity from previous information. The seventh and final set of letters are those by the housekeeper read as witness statements about the admiral’s sleepwalking. Magdalen’s landlady also writes an account of the widow’s reduced circumstances as a plea for help, but it is coldly rejected by Loscombe. No Name could have been a mystery if actual crimes had been committed and could easily have become a casebook novel; but because Collins planned to redeem Magdalen for a happy ending, he pulls her back from murder and makes her theft turn out to be benevolent. He would not do this for Lydia Gwilt in Armadale. The willful and passionate Magdalen foreshadows both Lydia Gwilt and Rachel Verinder in volatile temperament and the will to keep to her own course in the face of opposition. That Collins had No Name in mind in creating Armadale is indicated in two particular instances, one of them being the first appearance of Lydia’s surname. Pendril, the lawyer engaged by Norah and Miss Garth to trace Magdalen when she first disappears, is from the firm of Wyatt, Pendril, and Gwilt (151). The second instance is Collins’s insertion of Wragge’s more or less diary in a section of its own. Wragge, as Lydia will be also, is a con artist, the reverse side of the detection coin. His is the only “Between the Scenes” section that is not epistolary. Instead, this one is subtitled “Chronicle of Events: Preserved in Captain Wragge’s Despatch-Box” (190). As Lydia will do, Wragge sets down the details and progress of his and Magdalen’s ventures, including the information that he is cheating her of a good portion of the income from her performances (he even provides a chart of the real versus the apparent amounts (198). Some of his entries are revealing of himself, while others function more for plot advancement, as shown in the skipping to a subsequent month after a short entry. Wragge does not need the journal as much as Lydia will, and he sometimes just records significant events or his suspicions of Magdalen, acting as snapshots of his perceptions that move the story through time. However, Wragge’s ninth and final set of entries prefigure Lydia’s diary more closely. There are entries for both the 9th, the 22nd, the 25th, and the 29th of June,

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instead of just “June,” as in previous months, and the 29th further subdivides into 3-o’clock and 5-o’clock entries. Repeated entries on the same day will become characteristic of Lydia’s use of her diary for self-dialogue; here they recount Wragge’s collection of information about Noel Vanstone and Mrs. Lecount, his suspicion that Magdalen is about to launch her conspiracy and abandon himself, and his writing of an anonymous letter warning Noel Vanstone. This use of his record to put down surprising events is a forerunner of Lydia’s constant diary reflections. Wragge even talks to himself in his diary as she will do, noting on June 21 that Magdalen has sent a long letter. He says “Private memorandum, addressed to myself. Wait for the answer.” On the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th, he repeats: “Private memorandum continued. Wait for the answer” (204). Wragge’s section positions him closest to the role of casebook maker, but his entries appear only in this section, much as Lydia’s diary sections overbalance the last third of Armadale. Collins also ransacked No Name in creating The Moonstone. The scene in which Magdalen, posing as a housemaid, searches for the “secret trust” from her late husband’s final will at the home of Admiral Bartram, the heir, was so much a rehearsal for the theft scene in The Moonstone that, as Sue Lonoff notes, readers of No Name might have been able to guess who took the jewel and under what circumstances, or at least the ending would not have taken them entirely by surprise (183). As Magdalen searches in vain, she encounters the sleepwalking admiral. The sleepwalking in itself anticipates Franklin’s theft, but the language of this earlier scene enhances the parallel considerably. He passed her, and stopped in the middle of the room. Magdalen ventured near enough to him to be within reach of his voice, as he muttered to himself. She ventured nearer still, and heard the name of her dead husband fall distinctly from the sleep-walker’s lips. “Noel!’ he said, in the low monotonous tones of a dreamer talking in his sleep. ‘My good fellow, Noel, take it back again! It worries me day and night. I don’t know where it’s safe; I don’t know where to put it. Take it back, Noel — take it back!” [548].

“It” here is the document in which Noel Vanstone stipulated that the bequest was to go to George, the admiral’s nephew, on the condition of his marrying by a certain date under respectable conditions that eliminated Magdalen. Franklin’s language during the replay of his sleepwalking is strikingly similar as he first begins to sleepwalk under the influence of opium: “‘I wish I had never taken it out of the bank,’ he said to himself. ‘It was safe in the bank’” (476). He continues to talk to himself about whether the Indians could be in the house and whether the drawer of the cabinet is locked, repeating “How do I know?” several times more. He almost sleeps again but then gets up. “‘How the devil am I to sleep,’ he said, ‘with this on my mind?’” (477). He then reenacts the theft, which Rachel and the others witness, as Magdalen witnesses the admiral’s actions with the secret trust. The key words know and safe repeat in both

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novels, as does a sleepwalker who is disturbed about the safety of a valuable responsibility. In the earlier book, George even reveals— later in one of the epistolary sections— his uncle’s characteristic sleepwalking as an explanation of how the document vanished (570). In No Name the sleepwalking witnessed by Magdalen is narrated in third person in chapter four of the seventh scene. Collins reinvented it for The Moonstone by shifting the narration to that of Ezra Jennings as recorded in his journal. Since Jennings is careful to extract from his own journal only those portions pertaining to the mystery, he is one of the book’s least mediating narrators; the effect is therefore not greatly different from the description of Magdalen watching the admiral. No Name is a curtailed casebook, as neatly demarcated as the layered framing of After Dark and The Queen of Hearts. Its very neatness, especially in its overresolved providential ending, robs it of the sort of resolution its early suspense suggests. But Collins was not yet done with his experimentation. The far looser structure of Armadale allows mediated narrative nearly to run away with the plot, as sympathy shifts at some points toward its most dominant narrator, who is also its chief villain. If Fosco had been given much freer rein in The Woman in White, the effect would be similar to Lydia Gwilt’s impact on Collins’s tale of the two Allan Armadales. Armadale comes closer than No Name to being a second novel of testimony. Long portions of it are in letter exchanges, and much of the last quarter is a long series of often breathless diary entries by Lydia Gwilt, the scheming poisoner who still has a heart. It lacks only a collating narrator and a bit more framing to place its structure alongside the other two, and the similar effect of its intense character mediation is a major reason why it is often classed along with the full novels of testimony as Collins’s best work. This novel is even more interesting in some ways, however, in its present form than it would be as another novel entirely framed in witnessing documents. Collins here reaches back to those earlier experimenters in Gothic detection and multiple narrational techniques. Hogg, Emily Brontë, and Poe are also important to the extremely complex plot and form of Armadale. The narrational structure of the book is as complex as A. S. Byatt’s Possession, but Collins had not yet achieved the smooth flow of testimony he would create in The Moonstone. Armadale begins in third person, yet this section enfolds a lengthy confession by one of the two senior Armadales recounting his murder of the other, who, posing as himself, had deliberately wooed and married the woman whom the other Armadale had hoped to marry. Ozias Midwinter, his son (and also really named Allan Armadale), after receiving this document, makes his own monologic confession to Mr. Brock. the clergyman tutor of the overt Allan Armadale, his half-brother. The central section of the novel is epistolary — an exchange of letters between villains and between the villains’ targets; Lydia develops her plan with

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her coconspirator Mother Oldershaw (or Mother Jezebel, as Lydia names her), while the overt Mr. Armadale, his covert double, and Allan’s second father, the clergyman Mr. Brock, write to each other. As Lydia schemes to marry Allan, Midwinter continues to worry about the fulfillment of a prophetic dream Allan had in which the figure of a woman appears as well as two men. The dream has been dictated by Allan to Midwinter and makes a curious plot document. Midwinter lists the sequences of the dream in seventeen numbered sections, an analytical approach that also heightens the drama of this vision, which seems to both channel the dead and predict the future. The first hundred pages of the novel, in third person, turn on these two important documents, the senior Armadale’s confession and the dream dictation. Lydia is able to insinuate herself into the community as the governess to Miss Milroy, whom Allan is romancing, with Mother Oldershaw’s phony reference, but the young woman’s mother colludes with Allan to expose her as a fraud. Lydia has managed easily enough to fascinate Allan, but he shies off as her dishonesty emerges. In the meantime Lydia has met Midwinter and fascinated him as well as being powerfully drawn to him herself. After learning that his real name is the same as her quarry’s, Lydia determines to marry him in the name of Allan Armadale, contrive to remove the overt Allan (as she has already done with the heirs who stood in his way), and announce herself as his widow. She has not faced what she would need to do with Midwinter once he realizes that she is making such a claim. In all the third-person sections of the book plot documents abound while characters also hold forth in monlogic statements, especially Allan. These short letters and the character monologues that occasionally take over the narration give even the more distant third-person sections an epistolary atmosphere of documents and voices, although the two are largely separated. The layering at points becomes extreme, making Armadale even more narratively complex than After Dark. Monologues and longer letters are intercut with third-person narrative, just as they would be within another document frame, and are even layered this way in Lydia Gwilt’s diary. It is this layering that gives the book unity and makes the third-person sections read smoothly with the framed sections. Rather than separating the epistolary sections as in No Name, Collins here has flooded even the third-person sections with documents and character voice. The last third of the novel is the most fascinating, consisting of Lydia Gwilt’s diary entries before, during, and after her marriage to Midwinter, with whom she has fallen in love. These are not the dated entries told in a distant narrator’s tone of the type most often used in nineteenth-century fiction and which largely function as plot-forwarding documents. Lydia writes passionately, treating her diary as her only confidant, “this secret friend of my wretchedest and wickedest hours” (481). She writes multiple impetuous entries on the same day, some barely an hour apart. She “asks” her diary what she should do by using it as a mirror of herself and a reminder of her past actions. Bored in Italy

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with Midwinter and outraged by Allan’s oblivious prattle, Lydia rereads her own past deeds as if they were a novel. She also uses her diary in exactly the same way diaries are raided for information, clues, and narrative bridges by the editorial detectives in Collins’s novels of testimony and in those novels that he influenced. Lydia records in her diary not only what has occurred but also her current lies and stratagems so that she can keep them straight. “My miserable made-up story,” she says, “must be told over again here, while the incidents are fresh in my memory — or how am I to refer to it consistently on after-occasions when I may be obliged to speak of it again?” (436). Lydia refers to her own diary for information in the same way as Walter referred to Marian’s and Betteredge to his daughter’s record in The Moonstone. Lydia’s diary is also a confession, not only of crimes but also of her feelings, which conflict with her schemes. She confesses to her diary that she loves Midwinter and is in even more danger of succumbing to his love for her. She confesses her temptation to marry him and attempt to live as normal a life as possible. Lydia’s diary, even though it is kept by one person, is a layered narrative as complex as the other sections of the book. It is layered not only with her own conflicted emotions and reactions as well as her shifting schemes but also with the voices of other characters as she extracts portions of letters or even whole letters from others, some of which also enfold a third letter or report other speech. Lydia also reports scenes that she has spied upon while other scenes of her spying are also told in third person, and she reports her conversations with other characters, particularly Midwinter. Collins skewed sympathy away from his title characters, the overt and the covert Allan Armadales, and toward Miss Gwilt, his villain, by making the reader privy, as no other characters are, to her letters to her accomplice and to the journal in which she not only confesses her misdeeds and homicidal intentions but also tries to talk herself out of them. Miss Gwilt’s letters to Mother Oldershaw and her diary entries are written in an intensely emotional character voice far more compelling that of the Armadales’ speeches or letters. Midwinter, as befits a shadow double, is the least voiced of the characters. He says less and in a less characterizing way. The overt Allan has many speeches that reveal his naive and heedless character so thoroughly as to undercut his credibility. The opening plot with nemeses who double each other, set in the Caribbean, recalls the Jane Eyre/Bertha Mason doubling often analyzed and even staged as such in a recent play adaptation. Midwinter’s history is a mélange of Jane’s Eyre’s orphanage, to which she too was sent with a bad character, abusive situations from which Jane too extracted some benefit, and of Heathcliff ’s gypsy looks, hard-knocks history, and passionate spirit. Midwinter here is the shadow double as well as an alternate protagonist who complicates the plot at need by disappearing or reappearing and by his obsession with Allan’s dream.

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The Brontë parallels continue in Lydia’s history, exposed by the enquiry agent Bashwood the younger to his enamored old father. Not only do the senior double Armadales act out their revenges on each other in the Caribbean but Lydia’s husband, whom she is accused of poisoning, parallels both Rochester, Heathcliff, and the Brontë family: “He had a lonely old house of his own among the Yorkshire moors, and there he shut his wife and himself up from every living creature, except his servants and his dogs” (468). This positions Lydia as a Jane Eyre/Cathy figure, though she is more the imperious Cathy than the stoic Jane, increasing the sense of her as protagonist. Lydia at one point compares Miss Milroy to an schoolgirl “who ought to be perched on a form at school, and strapped to a back-board to straighten her crooked shoulders” (378)— another echo of Jane Eyre. There are two principally testimonial/confessional parts of the book. These are the senior Armadale’s written confession, which is quoted early in the novel; it is read later by Midwinter and lays the burden of past murder on the two descendants. The other important confession/testimony is that of Lydia’s diary. The force of testimony/confession in these documents unbalances the novel’s focus toward Miss Gwilt, the character it most condemns, by characterizing her not only as a past victim of various con artists but also as a character who can still love. We know her more intimately than any other character, and this knowledge creates at least pity if not sympathy. Allan in particular is as annoying as Lydia finds him, a “booby” who learns absolutely nothing from any of his experiences; he continues to trust anyone who furthers his own desires, never criticizes his own behavior, and sees nothing wrong with regaling Lydia, while she is attempting to be content as Midwinter’s wife, with the gifts he plans for his future wife (whom he seems to have forgotten at one time was Lydia). In tactlessness he rivals Miss Clack’s strictures on the damnation of Lady Verinder. The reader can hardly blame the much-tried Lydia for writing in her diary, “If some women bring such men as this into the world, ought other women to allow them to live?” (490). Collins’s exacting characterization of her by voice and private thoughts as well as by appearance and actions steals the reader’s attention from the comparatively colorless Allan and the intriguing but often distant Midwinter. The many overt character doubles in the novel also include the good/bad Lydia, revealed so intensely in her journal as to prefigure Jekyll and Hyde. The layers of documents within each other create some mirroring, but since the emphasis of the novel is not on documents for solution but documents for suspense alone, Collins does not double them as he did in Woman. Here the suspense comes not from gradual revelation but from concealment. We know what Lydia is capable of and what she intends far more than her victims ever do. Collins may have been aiming for this effect in the much later Legacy of Cain, discussed in the following chapter; he did not succeed there for the same reason Armadale is riveting — the complex plot and the complex, vivid, Lydia Gwilt. In Armadale,

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Lydia Gwilt is the editorial character, striving the make sense of her life and keep herself on some course, and whether or not she will succeed becomes the story. This highly Gothic plot, with its sins of the fathers and foreshadowing and controlling dream, makes Armadale seem utterly a sensation novel of its period. Its structure, however, has a quite modern mixture of third-person narrative that flows effortlessly with the character-mediated narration of the letters and diaries. The impact of having made such a departure from the highly structured Woman and No Name to the more experimental form of Armadale contributed to the effortless unfolding of The Moonstone. The framing of Betteredge’s account is done much more lightly than Walter’s insistent juridical framing of his own narrative, allowing the steward’s testimony to become a novella of the jewel theft, frame largely forgotten. And rather than the constant intercutting from statement to diary to letter to editorial overview as in Woman, Betteredge is the single narrator of the theft of the jewel, further allowing the reader to become immersed in the story. Too, just as Allan and Midwinter are given no interior-revealing diaries or even letters in Armadale, Franklin Blake is held back far more than Walter from taking on a narrational duty and tone. Instead, the peripheral characters mediate much of the story, thus also complicating it. Many differences can be cited as well, such as the lack of a forceful villain in The Moonstone, but what Collins absorbed from his narrative experiments in Armadale was far more important than plot. He freed himself from the restrictions of the casebook structure while still continuing to play with character narration and framing devices. This is why parts of The Moonstone read as though they were unframed, even though they are carefully structured as testimonials. Armadale helped make the smooth narration of The Moonstone possible, so that the frame no longer got in the way of Collins’s characters. What Collins had done here was to develop a counterpointing of document against something else. Documents against documents he had done amply in After Dark and Woman. In playing letters and Lydia’s diary against third-person narratives and letter exchanges in an intermingled way, Collins built on a foundation laid earlier in the century by Scott in Redgauntlet, Hogg’s Private Memoirs, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Hogg’s document frames, plot development through documents, and the dialogue among the first- and third-person viewpoints is a precursor to the mixed structure Collins used in Armadale, along with Scott’s even closer mélange of letter exchanges, diary excerpts, and third-person sections. In both earlier novels, Scott and Hogg are reaching for a mixed form, framed and unframed, that can make use of narrative voices and viewpoints while also being able to apply the distance and expanded scope of third person. The key to using this successfully is balance between the two, between charactermediated narration that offers dynamic viewpoints and more distant narration

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with greater liberty for plot advancement and authorial tone. If the two do not balance, one will dominate and the other will function less fully. In Bleak House, Dickens did not develop Esther as a character/narrator sufficiently to balance her documents against the third-person plot. Her diary functions chiefly to provide plot-forwarding entries that give the reader a break from the more intense main narrative. Elizabeth Braddon applied mixed viewpoints in Birds of Prey (1867), creating a diary for Valentine Hawkehurst, who also records his questioning of another character at length in a manner similar to that of Walter Hartright. Braddon apparently is imitating both the shady Magdalen and Lydia in her charlatan detective, whom she redeems as Collins did Magdalen. But although she also imitates Collins’s mixed narration in No Name and Armadale, she does not dramatize Hawkehurst’s voice, so that his diary becomes a monologic mediation. He speaks largely as a narrator, and when he becomes more emotional, his speech is stilted. How sweetly my Charlotte looked at me yesterday, when I told her I was going away! If I could have dared to kneel at her feet under those whispering elms, — unconscious of the children, unconscious of the nursemaids, — if I could have dared to cry aloud to her, “I am a penniless reprobate, but I love you; I am a disreputable pauper, but I adore you!” [31].

In contrast, Lydia records spying on Miss Milroy and Allan: Even Armadale, booby as he is, understood her. After bewildering himself in a labyrinth of words that led nowhere, he took her — one can hardly say round the waist, for she hasn’t got one — he took her round the last hook-and-eye of her dress, and, by way of offering her a refuge from the indignity of being sent to school at her age, made her a proposal of marriage in so many words [381].

Hawkehurst speaks even to himself as a narrator, while Lydia adds free indirect thoughts even to her private account. Hawkehurst’s diary excerpts have no other documents with which to dialogue other than a very few plotadvancing letters; therefore it does not create an epistolary effect and Hawkehurst remains isolated despite his diary rather than becoming the editor of a group casebook. It is otherwise in Armadale, where Lydia’s letters and diary reveal a hidden story that is largely unknown to the other characters but is driving the plot action. Her letters to Mother Oldershaw and her exhortations to herself in the diary are so vital to the plot and so dramatic in impact that at times they overbalance the third-person sections. Collins has restored some balance by the character monologues in the third-person sections, principally by Allan, by the repetition of the dream references in third person and by the reported speech of characters within third-person narration, all of which add drama to those sections. It is a more modern technique than Scott’s framing of his distant third-person sections as “narratives” of the characters or Hogg’s separated sections. Collins increased suspense and drama by making the reader privy, through

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documents, to so much that the other characters need to know but find out only slowly. Wuthering Heights is also an early novel with nonepistolary character mediation, and given the Brontë references in Armadale, is worth directly comparing. Emily Brontë’s novel is a layered narration in a less framed structure than Frankenstein. The framing character is the tenant to whom Nelly Dean relates at length the history of her families, but the whole is not framed as a document. The nurse/housekeeper may provide some modeling for Betteredge in The Moonstone as a family servant who can recount what has occurred. She is the narrator of the principal story that took place in the past (here a much further past); in telling it, she reveals her own culpability in carrying tales to her master and carrying messages between the volatile lovers, neither of whom she understands. Betteredge is more self-aware and more confessional than Nelly Dean, who justifies her own roles in the tale without apparently seeing the difficulties she sometimes causes. The tenant says at one later point that he is editing her narrative to us. “I’ll continue it in her own words, only a little condensed” (175), he says, making himself an editor/framing character who prefigures Walter Hartright and Franklin Blake more nearly than Scott’s end-frame editor in Redgauntlet or Mary Shelley’s explorer who reports Frankenstein’s exploits. Still, the layering is clumsy at times. Mr. Lockwood is a triggering character who is otherwise uninvolved, an excuse rather than a participant. Nelly Dean is an involved but uncomprehending narrator; we often read past what she reports to perceive more than she does, even about why she is relating this tale to a stranger. Collins would undercut his narrators as well, but they are generally more self-reflective — in defense, attack, or simple narcissism — than Nelly. Of more particular interest for Armadale are the brief segments from Cathy Earnshaw’s diary, written before she became Mrs. Linton, which the tenant reads just before he has a horrible dream and then wakes to see Cathy’s ghost. Cathy’s entries are angry and passionate and record what she can say to no one, much as Lydia’s do. “‘An awful Sunday!’ commenced the paragraph beneath. ‘I wish my father were back again. Hindley is a detestable substitute — his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious— H. and I are going to rebel — we took our initiatory step this evening’” (38). She then describes vividly, even resorting to dialect, a cold, rainy day of being preached at for three hours by Joseph, the servant, whose extreme religion is an excuse for abusing the children. When he thrusts religious books on them, Cathy reports, “I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book” (39). The scene ends with herself and Heathcliff stealing a cloak and running out into the moors. Cathy’s passionate speeches are reported by Nelly, but the casting of it here as a diary that is one of her outlets suggests a model for the journal of Lydia Gwilt, who, like Cathy, is torn between the dark man she loves and the tempting wealth and ease offered by his bland counterpart.

CHAPTER 5

The Moonstone Collins Eclipses His First Casebook In writing The Moonstone, Collins had reworded his emphasis on character; this is seen in the much-quoted statement that begins the “Preface to the First Edition”: “In some of my former novels, the object proposed has been to trace the influence of circumstances upon character. In the present story I have reversed the process. The attempt made, here, is to trace the influence of character on circumstances” (27). This summary of the essence of multiple focus expresses well the way epistolary fiction developed strong characterization in the novel, coloring the plot with characterizing viewpoint and applying character as dynamic causation. Collins’s rebalancing of the novel of letters’ dialogic narrators as testifiers to crime distinguished his work in these two novels, bringing to fruition his previous experiments with framing and character narration. The Moonstone is the culmination of Collins’s development of the novel of testimony, while his third and much later casebook novel, The Legacy of Cain, fails largely for lack of these dialogic voices. In The Moonstone, Collins shifted his approach to both frame and narration. As in The Woman in White, he used multiple sideline witnesses, and even his lovers remain so much in the dark as to be peripheral until near the conclusion. But their testimony is less overtly recorded as casebook than in The Woman in White, which displays its documented narratives blatantly as evidence. The opening pages of Walter’s initial narrative mention legality multiple times, as well as judge, evidence, and other juridical verbiage. He positions his own statement explicitly as testimony, focusing attention on the documents through their purpose. The Woman in White also uses many plot-furthering written items, including a falsified marriage register, Laura’s marriage settlement, the mysterious documents Glyde wants Laura to sign without reading, and even the date of Laura’s train ticket. In fact, most objects of interest, after the initial encounter with the fleeing woman dressed in white, are documents. 59

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Collins’s consistent focus on documents— even the tombstone is a “narrative”— has led to The Woman in White to be viewed more as Gothic fiction than as a detective novel despite its active and underscored detection. The massive sense of documentation foregrounds the novel’s bigamy, kidnapping, helpless yet courageous women, indifferent guardian, and sinister Blackwater Park. In The Moonstone, on the other hand, we are distracted from the jewel’s curse, the Indian psychic, and other Gothic trappings. The emphasis is not on detection itself, despite the presence of the former Sergeant Cuff. This change from Woman’s documentation is immediately apparent. Although The Moonstone begins with a plot document from the past, a statement from “family papers” about the theft of the Moonstone and its curse, attention is drawn away quickly from the document toward the central object of the stone itself. Other concrete objects of later interest include reappearances of the Moonstone, the painted door, the smeared nightgown, the objects Rosanna Spearman buys, the Shivering Sands, and Godfrey’s disguise. This use of concrete objects varies reader interest and makes juridical documentation less prominent. The Moonstone only rarely mentions juridical terms. The testimony in the epilogue is marked as “statements,” but the preceding testimony has been designated as Betteredge’s “First Period,” and as “Narratives.” Even the framing signifiers for crime writing are played down. Betteredge’s long narration eclipses the frame and largely turns into storytelling until more than a third of the way through the book. The Gothic history attaches to the stone itself and not to the characters— not despite but because of how Collins handles their interactions with the mysterious gem. In The Moonstone Collins also utilized a wide variety of written objects, including a sealed letter with the name of the culprit, the label identifying Franklin’s nightgown, Miss Clack’s pamphlets, a transcript of a dying man’s words, and — last but far from least — Betteredge’s Bible of choice, Robinson Crusoe, to whose powers of prophecy even Franklin finally assents. Those items whose written aspects are emphasized, such as Daniel Defoe’s novel and the pamphlets, draw attention to writing itself, as many commentators have noticed in Collins’s work (and mystery fiction in general), but they do not evoke courtrooms or in most cases have legal implications, and each of them reflects the character with which it is associated. The prologue document, “The Storming of Seringaptam,” thus is “Extracted from a Family Paper,” just as the whole casebook of testimony that follows becomes a family document that can, if necessary, explain past events but has no legal standing. The deemphasis on the juridical, plus the presence of Cuff and the reenactment of the theft, allows readers to focus attention on suspects and clues. The mystery in Woman was much more about exactly what was done to whom, while the villains were never in question. The Moonstone, while also chiefly a story of amateur detection, has a variety of suspects for the theft of

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the diamond, and its only murder occurs near the end, providing the final proof that Godfrey was the thief. Immediately after the family paper, which we learn Gabriel Betteredge has appended as a preface, Betteredge, the family steward, begins his lengthy tale of what occurred at the house from the stone’s arrival through its theft. Unlike The Woman in White, in which the main plot is narrated partly at the time and partly in later statements pieced together by Walter, in The Moonstone the whole initial story of the theft is narrated by the well-meaning but sometimes mistaken Betteredge, an approach Stoker applied in the opening diary narrative by Jonathan Harker in Dracula. We know that Franklin has asked Betteredge to give his account, but there is no emphasis on legality or courtroom proceedings. Instead, Franklin tells Betteredge they are making “a record of the facts to which those who come after us can appeal” (39). Betteredge proceeds to tell his own history first, positioning himself at the center of the tale. His daughter puts him back on track, but the story’s emphasis has been placed on character. Betteredge reinforces this by not only introducing the story’s principals through description but also commenting on their characters and reporting their comments on each other. Thus we learn what Rachel thought of Franklin as a child, we see Betteredge’s affection for him coupled with a lack of illusion about his feckless character (the “nice boy” still owes him borrowed money “the colour of which last I have not seen, and never expect to see again”) (47). Betteredge’s comments on the other servants, including his daughter, are even more developed, though not always accurately perceptive. Betteredge, who compliments himself on his reading and scholarship, not only tells us the background of Rosanna Spearman, the maid, but also describes her; thus Betteredge goes far beyond his charge to analyze her character and its effect on the other servants. His garrulous and self-satisfied tone lessens as he comments: I hardly know what the girl did to offend them. There was certainly no beauty about her to make the others envious; she was the plainest woman in the house, with [the] additional misfortune of having one shoulder bigger than the other. What the servants chiefly resented, I think, was her silent tongue and her solitary ways [54 –55].

Betteredge has for the moment forgotten himself and stands back from the narrative to make more authorial commentary. This is in sharp contrast to Frederick Fairlie’s rendering of the maid whose shoes might creak; Fairlie makes her presence vivid but is oblivious to her character. Betteredge’s narrative both introduces and analyzes character, although he fails to understand Rosanna’s behavior around Franklin. Betteredge also reveals his own character more than he intends to do. He not only testifies but also confesses to concealments based on his knowledge of the family members. That his actions are well-meaning does not lessen their

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effect on the investigation. The impact of character — and knowledge of others’ characters— on circumstances prevents Cuff from being able to solve the case. Rachel, whom many have pointed out is as silent as Laurie Fairlie, blunts the investigation with her refusal to testify, and for the same reason; although she has seen Franklin take the stone, she loves him and withholds her evidence. But silences in The Moonstone— both Rachel’s and Rosanna’s— are put to more dynamic use and do not flatten the characters who remains silent, as was the case with Laura Fairlie. Rosanna’s doubly framed confession is long and personal enough that it becomes monologic, and Rachel’s passionate outbursts are reported by other characters at length, so that the very restraint of the two women adds tension because it does not flow naturally from their characters. The most dramatic voices in The Woman in White were those of peripheral narrators, and in this second novel of testimony Collins made them the chief narrators. In this novel the very fact that Cuff is a narrator indicates that he is a minor character. The witnesses foreground their reactions to character and keep our attention on it. Since Franklin is the maker of the later family casebook, the reader can deduce fairly early on that he is cleared of the theft. The other suspects— the Indians, Rachel, Rosanna, and Godfrey Ablewhite — are largely eliminated, either by sympathy generated or by evidence, long before the book ends. The central mystery ultimately becomes how the theft was effected and why Franklin has been suspected, which is cleared up not with a written or spoken confession but a reenactment of the crime, a twist of the old device of sleepwalking with the new reconstruction of the crime for solution. The multiple testaments thus enhance both the characters’ motives and Collins’s intentions. We do not need either Robinson Crusoe itself or mention of Miss Clack’s extract “Satan Among the Sofa Cushions” to further the action. They are part enjoyable texture, part satire, and part a self-reflexive dialogue with the reader, who is also codetective, but each narrative that includes these texts involves us thoroughly in the associated characters. And Collins continued to raid Poe. Betteredge’s narrative of the theft is, in his interchanges with Sergeant Cuff, a parody of Dupin and his mystified chronicler. Betteredge is at pains to keep Cuff from suspecting Rosanna, and he observes Cuff questioning Mrs. Yolland about her. This scene directly evokes Dupin’s mystification of his friend and chronicler by following his train of unspoken thought. How he managed it is more than I could tell at the time, and more than I can tell now. But this is certain, he began with the Royal Family, the Primitive Methodists, and the price of fish; and he got from that (in his dismal, underground way) to the loss of the Moonstone, the spitefulness of our first housemaid, and the hard behavior of the women-servants generally towards Rosanna Spearman [163].

Cuff, having disarmed her, then asks his questions, but in the end it is Rachel that he suspects. Betteredge is, like Dupin’s friend, not detection-minded, but here Betteredge’s care for the family also blind him to an obvious suspect until

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Cuff springs it on him as elementary by saying of Lady Verinder that “But for her self-control, the mystery that puzzles you, Mr. Betteredge, would have been at an end to-night.” At those words, the truth rushed at last into my stupid old head. For the moment, I suppose I must have gone clean out of my senses. I seized the Sergeant by the collar of his coat, and pinned him against the wall. “Damn you!” I cried out, “there’s something wrong about Miss Rachel — and you have been hiding it from me all this time!” Sergeant Cuff looked up at me —flat against the wall — without stirring a hand, or moving a muscle of his melancholy face. “Ah,” he said, “you’ve guessed it at last” [172–173].

Betteredge’s acting as Cuff ’s noncomprehending assistant who records it all is both a reference to Poe and a direct bridge between Poe and Conan Doyle. Yet Betteredge’s voice is more important than Cuff ’s and more reactive than was Dupin’s friend to his ratiocination. The essential importance of the document frames can be seen in their mirroring of the character doubling common to Gothic fiction. This is more true in The Woman in White, with two pairs of young women, Laura and Marian, as well as Laura and her near literal double, Anne; Walter and Marian as detectives set against Glyde and Fosco as villains; Anne and her mother as women entangled in Glyde’s secret; and so on. Along with these character doubles go doubled documents that include Walter’s and Marian’s diaries, Fosco’s notes in Marian’s diary, and his and Mrs. Catherick’s self-serving confessions. The plot even turns upon duplicate parish registers. This second layer of doubling shows how fundamental the document framing is for the narrative’s plot and its detection. The Moonstone’s characters and relationships similarly offer many doubles: Godfrey and Franklin as suitors for Rachel; Candy and Jenkins as physicians; Godfrey’s two identities; Rosanna and Rachel silently in love with Franklin and both concealing evidence about him; Rosanna and Betteredge as household servant witnesses; the reenaction of what happened the night the gem was stolen; Rachel, Rosanna, Franklin, and Godfrey as suspects; and two detectives called to the case after the theft. Documents here also parallel each other, but in a less obtrusive way, as in the front frame from a family paper and the end frame of statements by Cuff, by the captain (at Cuff ’s request), and an excerpted letter from Mr. Murthwaite to Bruff, the lawyer. Several characters narrate twice — Franklin, Jennings, and Cuff. Franklin’s second narrative, in which he takes up the investigation, again parallels Cuff ’s initial investigation. Betteredge tells the first version of “The Loss of the Diamond,” but Rosanna retells the events and Franklin later replays his own role on the night of the theft. Miss Clack gives her account of the aftermath of Lady Verinder’s illness and death and of Rachel’s engagement to Godfrey and her breaking it off, while Bruff ’s narrative shows the same period from

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different angles. There are fewer explicitly doubled documents because there is much less emphasis on the documents themselves. Further, The Moonstone’s documents double those of Woman, each with lawyer statements, reluctant testifiers who protest and defend villains, and defensive confessions. These parallels follow on the character doubles between these two novels, each of which has heroines who suffer in silence, impecunious young lovers as editorial detectives, and lawyers who fill in pertinent information. Of particular interest are the antecedents from Woman for the redoubtable Miss Clack, whom Swinburne called “the evangelical hag” (Page 257). Miss Clack is a broader character even than Frederick Fairlie, but Collins’s treatment of her is a similar comic yet sinister take on a family member. She has Fairlie’s complete lack of self-awareness coupled with complete self-centeredness, resulting similarly in obstruction and complication of the investigation. Just as Fairlie’s refusal to take any interest in Laura’s marriage settlement (or in her marriage in general) exposes her to Glyde’s manipulations, Miss Clack’s inability to see through Godfrey and her twisted fundamentalism complicate certain scenes and offer misleading accounts of character as she mistakenly interprets the behavior of Rachel and her mother, inadvertently revealing what she misperceives to us. Her comments, like those of Betteredge, are directed toward important characters and not, like Fairlie’s, toward servants. Clack considers Rachel depraved, the lawyer an emissary of Satan, and even Lady Verinder, Rachel’s mother, as damned because she dies unsaved by Clack’s tenants. Clack, like Fairlie, is capable of cruelty, as when she tells Rachel that her mother is in hell for lack of Clack’s ministries. A less obvious but closer antecedent for Miss Clack is Eliza Michelson, the Blackwater housekeeper. Her circumstances anticipate Miss Clack’s genteel poverty. After stating that she has been asked, “in the interests of truth,” to recount Marian’s fever and how Lady Glyde left Blackwater, she says, “As the widow of a clergyman of the church of England (reduced by misfortune to the necessity of accepting a situation), I have been taught to place the claims of truth above all other considerations” (321). She continues to refer to religion during her narration, using it as an excuse for her own behavior. Though she claims “I advance no opinions— I offer facts only,” she judges everyone, from considering Laura useless at a sickbed to idolizing Count Fosco despite his foreignness: “He had the manners of a true nobleman — he was considerate towards every one.... It is in such little delicate attentions that the advantages of aristocratic birth always show themselves” (323 –324). She is aware, as Miss Clack is aware about Godfrey, that the count’s behavior is viewed as villainous, and she defends him openly, based largely on his politeness to herself. She even has a hint of a pamphlet: My endeavor through life is to judge not that I be not judged. One of my beloved husband’s finest sermons was on that text. I read it constantly — in my own copy of the edition printed by subscription, in the first days of my widowhood — and

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at every fresh perusal I derive an increase of spiritual benefit and edification [324].

She does not, however, force the sermon on anyone, and she is able to change her opinion of people (other than the count). By the end of her narrative she sympathizes with Laura rather than condemning her. Miss Clack’s prissy morals, reduced circumstances, blind idolatry of Godfrey, and criticism of a young woman whose circumstances she does not understand are all reprised from Mrs. Mitcheson but remixed with the comic tone of Fairlie’s reluctant testimony. The novel’s third narrator is Bruff, the lawyer. As with Gilmore in Woman, he provides some legal background and explanations, but he was also present in key scenes or heard about those that he reports on, such as the aftermath to Rachel’s breaking off her tentative engagement to Godfrey. Bruff is more effective than Gilmore, who could not stop Laura’s abusive marriage contract, and Bruff does not hesitate to interfere where he can. When he hears that someone has accessed Lady Verinder’s will directly after her death, he puts pressure on the lawyer whose clerk perused it, asking him to divulge the client. Bruff then reveals to Rachel that it was Godfrey, exposing his motive for courting her again and leading directly to her breaking off the engagement. Like Rachel’s silence, this is an effect of character on circumstance. He later becomes Franklin’s accomplice in seeing Rachel. In general , the minor narrators in this novel are given more key roles along, with their testimonies, than in Woman. The confessional letter of Rosanna Spearman, recovered and included by Franklin in his second narrative, is an inserted monologue that doubles the confessions of Mrs. Catherick and Count Fosco in Woman, the former unsolicited but unable to stop herself from telling, the latter forced but self-defending. Rosanna’s letter has been hidden and is recovered only from a note she left with Limping Lucy, her only friend, for Franklin. Collins could have written this only as a plot document that unfolds circumstances Franklin needs as clues, but the letter unfolds a great deal more than that. It is a confession of how Rosanna concealed the evidence of Franklin’s smeared nightgown and hid it in the Shivering Sands, but the letter is also a confession of love. It advances the plot not only through information but also through her character and observation. Like all the other narrators, Rosanna tells about herself as well as other characters, and she details her hopeless love for “the most adorable human creature I had ever seen” (362), along with her part in making the theft unsolvable. She even feels kinship with Franklin from believing he had stolen the stone to pay debts, and she would, she says, have helped him sell it. Her narrative is remarkably frank at points, as she admits that although she loves him in private, she fears him in person. Rosanna also has her say on the privilege of class, conjecturing that Rachel herself would not be as attractive without her class markers: “But it does stir one up to hear Miss Rachel called pretty, when one knows all the time that it’s her dress does it, and her confidence

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in herself ” (363). Franklin’s obliviousness to her feelings and indeed to her having feelings led her to kill herself, and the evidence has remained hidden. Her letter is so disturbing to Franklin, revealing his lack of perception and his role in her suicide, that he does not at the time finish it. Instead, Betteredge reads the end (and the reader along with him) and Franklin reads it only later. Even so, his final comment is that even though this part of the narrative is done, its effect on him is such that “even at this distance of time, I cannot revert without a pang of distress” (380). Rosanna has been allowed her say against the will of the framing narrator, who assembles the casebook. Rosanna’s confession also inverts those of Fosco and Mrs. Catherick; although she has done wrong, she fully acknowledges it, and her reasons (which double Rachel’s motives) are at heart positive, even though they end in tragedy. As several commentators have noted, Rosanna is in some ways a double of Marian Halcombe, as women considered ugly and without the embellishment that money could add to their confidence or appearance. She is Marian more extremely marginalized by the lack of wealth and looks, but like Marian, Rosanna is given an active role in the mystery. Adele Wills’s analysis of Collins’s character-focused form is relevant here. “It is Collins’s compassion,” she argues, “and patience with plurality, that are the heart of the novels’ effectiveness. He points out the inconsistencies and illogicalities in ordinary people, but does not allow us to be dismissive” (94). This is the effective difference between Collins’s novels in testimony (as well as in counterpointed documents) and other novels that make occasional use of document framing for plot furtherance, pacing, or as front or end frames. Such framing does not accomplish the dialogue of character through dramatic voices or the solution from contrary testimony, nor does it generate temporary plurality. Collins developed the novel of testimony as a vehicle for mystery fiction, and it functions superbly to both conceal and reveal evidence — distracting both the reader and characters while also advancing the plot — and to bring it all together from within a holistic solution. Yet Collins, an anagramist who explores reconfigurations of narrative structure in most of his novels, wrote only three full-scale novels of testimony, despite the form’s suitability for sensational mystery. As Peter Thoms explores in The Windings of the Labyrinth, personal detection of authentic identity underlies all Collins’s novels, yet even in Armadale, written between his two novels of testimony, Collins does not use the full testimonial document structure, which is an excellent vehicle for such quests. Perhaps it was simply Collins’s restless exploration that took him to the novel of testimony and then on to other experiments; still, the testament form is hardly one that any author would care to use exclusively. The novel of testimony is a tour de force of characterization whose cumulative plot must be assembled and dissembled through the filter of colorful yet relevant characters whose prose monologues are assembled into a casebook by a central character. Novels of testimony require not only an ensemble cast and a plot that lends itself to

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witness statements but must also have a good deal to say in order to satisfy the attention focused on its medium. A narrative exclamation point, the novel of testimony is a form to be used selectively, not routinely, by any writer. Collins returned to the novel of testimony only in 1888 for The Legacy of Cain, and his inability to meet the demands of the form for this novel underscores both its difficulty and Collins’s own difficulties late in his career. First, the novel’s content is too narrowly focused on the nature-versus-nurture debate. The Moonstone does not turn solely on the diamond’s curse or Godfrey’s greed. In it Collins takes a complex view of the Brahmins who chase the gem, parodies fundamentalist extremism, examines the handed-down sins in the Verinder family, creates unforgettable marginalized characters in Rosanna and Jenkins, and brings the book’s romance to completion. The Woman in White, similarly, is not only about marriage law or bigamy but also about the count’s and Mrs. Catherick’s schemes, an upwardly mobile romance, and a daring half-sister who acts as codetective. Peter K. Garrett’s discussion of the Victorian multiplot novel underscores the importance of subplot for the novel of testimony. Such novels, he argues, problematize their own choices of emphasis by being complex enough to suggest alternate focuses (5), an effect noted earlier by Wills in terms of Collins’s multiple voices. When multiple characters narrate a multiplot novel, the complexity is amplified. The characters embody the subplots and dramatize them through their testimonies and the contrasting play between monologues. Thus, in The Woman in White, the Anne Catherick plot line is dramatized by Walter’s and Marian’s reports of meeting with her and of Anne’s speech; this then crosses into the plot of Laura’s unhappy marriage when Anne comes to Blackwater Park. The background plot of Mrs. Catherick’s social ambitions and her blackmailing of Glyde via the secret of his forging the parish register parallels and complicates Walter’s blackmail of Fosco, using the side plot of Fosco’s involvement with the sinister agency Walter learns about through Pesca. The Indians in The Moonstone are reminders of the stolen jewel’s history and its cultural context; their subplot extends beyond the novel’s ending as the jewel presumably returns to its rightful home. The satire of Miss Clack’s fanaticism further emphasizes Godfrey’s hypocrisy, and Rosanna’s passionate declaration of love and deceit raises class issues about Rachel that are also echoed in Clack’s criticisms of her. The voices enhance the force of side plots by embodying them. In mystery and detection plots, side plots provide clues that become vital. In novels of testimony, any character can be concealing as well as revealing information or even providing incomplete testimony while intending to do otherwise — as Franklin Blake did, not knowing that he stole the Moonstone. Character mediates and complicates the multiplot complexity, and in the most fundamentally Gothic fashion, the characters, plots, and documents increase the hall-of-mirrors reverberations. The novel of testimony works best as a multiplot novel, with a rich array of characters to narrate the tale and a complex

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weave of theme for the characters to support or resist. Legacy fails because it is a single-plot novel that limits its characters too much in kind, characterization, and use for mediation. The lack of plot and theme complexity in Legacy robs its testimonial skeleton of a fully fleshed text. Its framing narrator to some extent is the governor of a prison who witnessed the events that set the child of a condemned murderer on her path. Her unrepentant mother offers to ask for religious forgiveness if the minister, a childless married man, will adopt her daughter. The governor, in his special knowledge and self-restraint, is similar to the lawyer/narrators of Woman and The Moonstone, and his characteristic restraint does not mediate his portions with the complexity that adds so much life to the narratives of Collins’s great novels of testimony, nor, until near the end, does his own character interfere in the story’s events. The colorlessness of his character, with little or no confessions of his own to relate, detracts considerably from the book. Legacy also lacks the interplay in Collins’s previous testimonial dialogues. This novel has only four narrators, as opposed to seven important narrators in Woman plus three minor ones (four if the tombstone’s “narrative” is counted). The Moonstone likewise has eight narrators of the events, some of whom speak more than once, plus four other narrators in the front- and end-frame statements. Legacy’s four are sufficient to tell the focused story, but a prison governor, two young girls kept in the dark, and a very brief statement by their resident cousin do not offer enough reactive mediation to provide the interactions of character that might otherwise complicate, delay, and ultimately produce the solution. Finally, Collins makes no juridical or detection use of the narrations, further divorcing them from mystery and testimony. The various documents never become a casebook read by all, and the principals, the two sisters, are not involved directly in resolving the situation, robbing the novel of the Gothic detection central to The Woman in White and The Moonstone. In fact, Collins is at pains throughout the novel, via the governor, to prevent the secret from being revealed, only giving it away to foil a spiteful minor character at the end. Legacy reads like one of Collins’s straightforwardly sensational novels told in documents rather than a mystery that is detected. It is more like earlier, heavily framed works such as The Queen of Hearts or After Dark, which use framing to manipulate the reader’s attention but not for dialogic solution. These missed opportunities by a master of the form lead R. V. Andrew to say “There is something sad about The Legacy of Cain” (307). He goes on to say, “The materials for a good novel are all there; but the clarity of mind and the old ingenuity are missing” (308). The secret, of course, is which girl is the daughter of a woman hanged for murder, a reprise of the same issue less explicitly dramatized in Armadale between Midwinter/Armadale, the son of a con man, and the other Armadale,

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descended from the con man’s murderer. These half-brothers, closely related yet worlds apart, examine some similar nature-versus-nurture questions, tainted in that case by the machinations of the murdering father’s confession and the schemes of a girl involved in the original plot. In Legacy, the two girls themselves do not even know who is the elder and celebrate their birthdays on the same day. The governor, who is unnamed otherwise, who met both the hanged mother and the minister’s late wife, as well as the “Medical Rubber” (masseuse) Mrs. Tenbruggen née Chance, who knew the condemned woman, figure it out but conceal it for their own purposes. In typical Collins fashion, it is the daughter of the heartless wife of the minister who goes wrong enough to poison, while the poisoner’s daughter, despite temptation by a ghostly “mock mother,” turns out to be the levelest head in the book. This premise, as though Rachel Verinder and Lydia Gwilt had been raised together, is the unrealized heart of the book. Both girls are somewhat willful. Eunice, the poisoner’s daughter, satirizes the worthy Staveleys with whom she stays and who introduce her to Philip, who becomes both Eunice’s and Helena’s fiancée. She finds the museum they take her to dull, and the oratorio of sacred music — the only kind her strict father would allow her to hear — to which Philip takes her unbearable. In a flash of the classic Collins satire of religious zeal, she writes in her diary about the performance: The unfortunate people employed are made to keep singing the same words, over and over and over again, till I find it a perfect misery to listen to them. The choruses were unendurable in the performance to night [sic]. This is one of them: “Here we are all alone in the wilderness— alone in the wilderness— in the wilderness alone, alone, alone — here we are in the wilderness— alone in the wilderness— all alone in the wilderness” [88].

Helena too breaks out into livelier voice on occasion, imitating Eunice’s style of writing in her own diary at one point (105). Such passages are what is needed in the book, but they are fleeting. Too much of the time the girls are merely narrators of events, and they are too young and too ignorant of their circumstances to effectively reveal clues— the result is more as though Laura Fairlie were burdened with the chief narration of The Woman in White. A contemporary reviewer noted the lack of “the author’s peculiar humour, which is always one of the most refreshing elements in his books,” and the lack of character appeal (Page 222). Legacy also has two minor characters who would have made interesting narrators, Miss Jillgall, the cousin who comes to live with them, and her former friend Mrs. Tenbruggen, who knew the criminal mother decades earlier. Their reported speech is distinct and lively, setting them up as prime Collins witnesses who can reveal more than they intend while defending their own interests. The interfering but well-meaning Miss Jillgall’s dialogue immediately springs to life:

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Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel “Here,” she declared, “is an opportunity of making myself useful! What is the cook’s name? Hannah? Take me downstairs, Hannah, and I’ll show you how to do the cauliflower in the foreign way. She seems to hesitate. Is it possible that she doesn’t believe me? Listen, Hannah, and judge for yourself if I am deceiving you. Have you boiled the cauliflower? Very well; this is what you must do next. Take four ounces of grated cheese, two ounces of best butter, the yolks of four eggs, a little bit of glaze, lemon-juice, nutmeg — dear, dear, how black she looks. What have I said to offend her?” [111].

The possibilities with this good-hearted meddler, who knows the sinister masseuse, are many, but she is given only brief narrational chores late in the novel, and the masseuse herself operates far in the background to little effect. The facts are not being mediated through characters who both reveal and conceal but through characters who either cannot reveal what they do not know or deliberately and entirely withhold it. In some ways Legacy is the obverse of The Moonstone, using testimony chiefly to conceal. In this sense Collins had hit upon the use of document framing in the way that Henry James uses in The Turn of the Screw, discussed in Chapter 7. In Legacy, most revelation comes by chance, not character, and most concealment is overt and well meant. Not only are the principal narrators ignorant but the collating character is flatter than Walter Hartright, the girls are limited, and the interesting minor characters are largely unused. It is interesting that Collins would even attempt to return to this complex and demanding form at this late date in his career. Health alone is not the explanation for his failure, however, since he was also quite ill while writing The Moonstone. It may be that his own accomplishment in that novel in raising the bar of achievement so high led Collins to so much less success in Legacy. He did have that pinnacle in mind, apparently, having commented during the writing of his last book that he had the concept for “another Moonstone” (Peters 425). He did not live to see Bram Stoker’s casebook of Gothic detection, Dracula, which applies all the effective casebook ingredients, as Collins was not able to do in Legacy. Had Collins exploited these further as confessional, witnessing statements, he might have achieved a third great novel in testimony. However, all the characteristic effects— public testimony, dialogic documents, dramatic monologues, and cumulative solution — are blunted here by the lack of interaction between documents and characters. As Andrew sums it up, “Collins uses the multiple-narrative technique, but his old skill has deserted him” (308). The two novels of Collins that are widely acknowledged to be his greatest achievements reached that level not accidentally as novels in framed testimony. The richness of plot in both The Woman in White and The Moonstone can well bear the elaborate framing of the first and the more subtle framing of the second as witnessing statements heavily mediated by the character of the narrators. The Legacy of Cain illustrates how important all these ingredients are — the involved framing narrator who edits the whole, the dramatic prose monologues by a variety of characters who all speak to different aspects of the case, and the

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multifaceted plot — to Collins’s success in his greatest books, both those in full casebook form and those in counterpointed documents. His final casebook shows also how perfectly suited this form is to detection. With the chief crimes of Legacy in the past, the casebook form has little to pursue to its conclusion. It was Collins’s brilliant application of the dialogic voices of epistolary fiction recast as witnessing statements and directed toward the resolution of a mystery that produced his finest work.

CHAPTER 6

Framed Testimony in Collins’s Later Novels Collins’s novels partially in counterpointed documents illustrate his continued interest in framing and character narration while also revealing his divergence from the development of the detective novel. Collins was focused on picaresque rogues far more than on their capture or punishment, especially by the law. His two great novels of testimony bring no one to trial, despite their juridical casebook form; Fosco is murdered by his criminal associates while Glyde dies by fire, and Ablewhite is killed by the Indians who recover the Moonstone. His one positive professional detective, the often-cited Cuff, fails at the case, and the enquiry agents who populate the novels in counterpoint range from neutrally minor to seedy. In his foiled policemen and successful private citizens, Collins generally anticipates the Sherlock Holmes adventures, which began only the year before his death. Conan Doyle apparently had read Collins. The layered narrative of The Hound of the Baskervilles has been connected with Collins’s multiplenarrator mediation in counterpointing Watson’s letters, then his diaries with his unframed narration (Cawelti 110). In this Holmes adventure, Watson has a triple narration as a peripheral narrator of the beginning of the case, in written reports to Holmes, and then in diary entries. He later also reports Holmes’s monlogic explanation of the solution. This short novel is an interesting peripheral casebook in which one characters reports from multiple standpoints. But in his letters to Holmes as well as the final reported speech by Holmes, Watson functions chiefly as sideline narrators generally do— to provide description with limited understanding. Although the introduction of a family document early on echoes The Moonstone, Watson’s narration in the “reports” offers little or no mediation as he tries to be factual and useful. In the diary entries he does allow himself to speak more personally, and these are closer to Collins’s testimonials, although the sense of diary fades away in favor of Watson’s usual narrational style. Madame Pratolungo in Poor Miss Finch, discussed below, illustrates the much more elaborate use Collins made of a peripheral narrator. 72

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The peripheral narrator/friend comes from Poe’s Dupin stories, but the framing of Watson’s narration partially in documents points to Collins, who continued to play with framing to the end of his career. Conan Doyle’s borrowing from the plot of The Moonstone for The Sign of Four has also been noted. As Knight points out, “Doyle remained a borrower: here he drew on Wilkie Collins for his story, making it another tale of the aftermath of an English theft of an Indian treasure.” Its effective handling of historical material he also attributed to “Collins’s guidance” (58). Collins created many a private investigation, but he never evolved a detective figure. After the eccentric and enigmatic Ezra Jennings helps solve The Moonstone, Collins broached few detectives as such, an exception being The Law and the Lady, discussed below. In most of his novels of the 1870s and 1880s, various characters find things out, but the focus is on the mysteries they approach (and sometimes generate) rather than the unraveling. Surely part of the reason Collins did not focus on detectives is that he wrote before the age of series characters. Although his policemen and lawyers could have been starred in further cases, Collins looked backward toward the serial novel, not the oncoming character-focused series. What Collins did continue from his previous work was his experimentation with framed character narration. The casebook form he developed served other detectives, as discussed in the next chapter, and Collins’s later structures are more interesting than his post–Moonstone novels in general. Poor Miss Finch (1872) is a continuation of the framing and character mediation Collins applied against third-person narration in Armadale. Here the narrator/editor is Madame Pratolungo, the French widow of an adventurous Republican, who, fallen on hard times, takes a post as musical companion to a young blind woman, Lucilla Finch. The fantastical plot of this novel turns on the blind Lucilla’s love for Oscar, who, after a blow to his head during a robbery, becomes epileptic. He is treated with silver nitrate, which turns his skin dark blue. Already engaged to Lucilla, Oscar now must decide whether to tell her, as she has a horror of dark colors and dark people. Oscar’s twin, Nugent, further complicates things by appearing on the scene and falling for Lucilla. After regaining her sight and being manipulated by Nugent posing as Oscar, Lucilla becomes blind again but recovers her lost love, whose complexion she now knows about but cannot see. Madame Pratolungo, our narrator, could easily have devolved into a comic character whose voice undercuts her, but the effect is more as if Madame Fosco had suddenly woken up and recounted what she knew. Pratolungo witnesses much of the courtship(s) of Lucilla and has her own interchanges with the brothers as she tries to find the best choices for her charge. She at first favors Nugent, worried that Oscar’s face will shock Lucilla when she can see it, but after Nugent impersonates his brother, she turns against him and eventually engineers Oscar’s return to Lucilla.

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During her narrative, Pratolungo reports monologic speech by others as well as her impressions of them, a technique Collins exploited in Armadale outside Lydia’s journals as well as within them. Here we have a mediating narrator who shows us the absurd household of Lucilla’s reverend father, his second wife, and his brood of children. In the continual pregnancies of the bland Mrs. Finch and the obsession of the Reverend Finch with performing the classics in his admittedly fine but undramatic voice, there may lie a thread of satire of Dickens’s marriage and his performances. At any rate, Pratolungo reports on Finch being “an accomplished master of that particular form of human persecution which is called reading aloud; and he inflicted his accomplishment on his family circle at every opportunity” (208). The performance she reports is attended by the narrator, the perpetually “damp” wife, the latest baby, and blind Lucilla, as the Reverend “opened his vocal fire” on this audience. “‘Hamlet’: Act the First; Scene the First. Elsinore. A Platform before the Castle. Francisco on his post” (Mr. Finch). “Enter to him Bernardo” (Mr. Finch). “Who’s there?” “Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.” (Mrs. Finch unfolds herself — she suckles the baby, and tries to look as if she was having an intellectual treat.) Francisco and Bernardo converse in bass— Boom-boom-boom. “Enter Horatio and Marcellus” (Mr. Finch and Mr. Finch). “Stand, ho! Who is There?” “Friends to this ground.” “And liegemen to the Dane.” (Madame Pratolungo begins to feel the elocutionary exposition of Shakespeare, where she always feels it, in her legs. She tries to sit still on her chair. Useless! She is suffering under the malady known to her, by bitter experience of Mr. Finch, as the Hamlet-Fidgets.)... Mr. Finch makes an awful pause. In the supernatural silence we can hear the baby sucking. Mrs. Finch enjoys her intellectual treat. Madame Pratolungo fidgets. Lucilla catches the infection, and fidgets too. Marcellus-Finch goes on. “Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio.” Bernardo-Finch backs him: “Looks it not like the King? Mark it, Horatio.” Lucilla-Finch inserts herself in the dialogue: “Papa, I am very sorry; I have had a nervous headache all day; please excuse me if I take a turn in the garden.” The rector makes another awful pause, and glares at his daughter. (Exit Lucilla) [210 –211].

This scene continues until Pratolungo’s legs grow so restless “that she longs for a skilled surgeon to take out his knife and deliver her from her own legs” (211). Her satiric comments inserted into the description of the scene prefigure her annotation of Lucilla’s journal excerpts later. Nugent enters at the end of the reading and both imitates and corrects Mr. Finch’s interpretation, which wins him Pratolungo’s immediate regard. Both Oscar and Nugent also have monlogic speeches reported by the narrator, as does Dr. Grosse, the German eye doctor who removes the cataracts from Lucilla’s eyes. The latter, in his dialect speech, broad humor, and radical erudition, could be one precursor of Abraham Van Helsing in Dracula. Unlike Nelly Dean, Pratolungo is analytical though sometimes wrong and is willing to correct herself. She is not, like the servant in Wuthering Heights or the framing narrator of Frankenstein, triggered by another character but takes it upon herself to tell the tale. She is very much an editor of the material involved,

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including not only her own account but letters she has copied or even pasted into the narrative and extracts from Lucilla’s journal of the period when Nugent urged her to elope with him, which Pratolungo did not witness. She not only edits but heavily annotates these extracts in the manner of Fosco writing in Marian’s journal. Of her choice to include excerpts rather than narrate after the fact herself Pratolungo says that “Variety freshness, and reality — I believe I shall secure them all three by following this plan” (501). Lucilla’s voice is somewhat lively, but the interest again is added by Pratolungo’s notes. At times she simply must break in, saying, “I shall burst with indignation, while I am copying the Journal, if I don’t relive my mind at certain places in it.” (516). When Lucilla complains of her snobbish aunt, Madame comments, “I really must break in here. Her aunt’s ‘grand manner’ makes me sick. It is nothing (between ourselves) but a hook-nose and a stiff pair of stays” (513). When Lucilla asks in her diary of Nugent, “And yet what else could his conduct mean?” (but jealousy), Madame immediately appends a note beginning, “It is for me to answer that question.” Again, she is not being undercut in these notes but is acting as a controlling editor. This might have lessened suspense but in fact adds to it as we wait to see Lucilla grasp what Madame has been telling us for some time. Madame stands in for the reader, who has more information and insight than the characters— as do all editorial narrators in Collins’s novels. Her comments also create several times a triple layering of Lucilla’s speculations or reactions, a letter from Nugent, and Madame’s comments on the letter, which Lucilla may or may not have already read. Early in Lucilla’s narrative she looks again “for the fiftieth time at least” (504) at a key letter she believes is from Oscar. Madame comments immediately: “I copy the letter. Other eyes than hers ought to see it in this place. It is Nugent, of course, who here writes in Oscar’s character and in Oscar’s name. You will observe that his good resolutions, when he left me, held out as far as Paris, and then gave way, as follows” (504 –505). We then see the letter, after which Madame appends her analysis of it: “It is quite needless for me to dwell here on the devilish cunning — I can use no other phrase — which inspired this abominable letter” (508). She directs us back to previously chapters to reference how her earlier irritable comment has been used by Nugent to set Lucilla against her. We then return to Lucilla’s narrative. Here the possibilities of manipulating epistolary narration are crossed with the additional possibilities an editing character can add. Poor Miss Finch is not a mystery novel let alone one of detection, yet it contains offstage hints of both. Pratolungo summarizes the trial for murder Oscar endured previous to their acquaintance, having been cleared by his brother’s efforts, a plot Collins returned to and developed in The Law and the Lady. Like Lydia Gwilt, Madame Pratolungo spies on her charge (for her own good) with mixed results. She also acts offstage from the main action as the

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detective in her own family, exposing a gold digger who had ensnared her father. The framing character, by making this explicitly written account in the manner of a detective making a casebook as well as by her actions, adds an air of mystery to a story that otherwise in focused on a bizarre deception — a mystery only to the blind Lucilla. Pratolungo’s character and narrative raises the interest level of Poor Miss Finch in the same way that poor Miss Gwilt stokes the intensity of Armadale.

Amateur Detection and the Lady Nothing is more indicative of Collins’s lack of interest in professional detectives than the plot of The Law and the Lady (1875). The entire plot of this novel is devoted to the reexamination of the evidence in a trial for poisoning that resulted in the ambiguous Scottish verdict of “Not Proven.” The instigator and ultimate detective is Valeria, the wife of the man not quite acquitted, who first ferrets out the secret that has caused her husband, Eustace Macallan, to marry her under a pseudonym and conceal his past. Separated from him by her knowledge, Valeria determines to prove him innocent. She is aided in this by various acquaintances and family members of her husband, but the only professional involved is Mr. Playmore, a lawyer. Valeria retells this story in writing at a later date, and she is, as she notes, unaided by diaries or any other document (541), making the written aspect a whole-text frame rather than a novel of framed testimony. She reports the speech of other characters, notably the highly voiced speech of the bizarre madman Miserrimus Dexter, who has precipitated the poisoning. Valeria interviews numerous people and analyzes new and old information. Eventually, with Playmore’s help, she proves that Eustace’s wife killed herself after reading his caustic diary comments about her, given to her by Dexter. Eustace is so “delicateminded” that he avoids the entire investigation, which Valeria directs. The final evidence turns not only on a diary whose excerpts are included but also a missing written confession, which we see in full and includes a moment-by-moment account of the first wife drinking poison and concealing it, though she does not intend that Eustace should be accused. The longest and most important document included is the transcript of the trial, which we also see fully, including its testimony. With such intense focus on detection through analysis and interviewing, which reads much like an early-twentieth-century puzzle mystery, and with such classic crime documents as a trial report and a confession, it is odd that Collins did not make use of his framing first-person narrator and turn Law into a casebook. Even monologic testimony is in place. But as with Collins’s other works of this period, detection and dialogic testimony do not function in the same novel.

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Robert Ashley has argued that Law has claims as serious as The Moonstone as an early detective novel since it centers, as later detective novels will, on murder, and its detective is also its main character (and first-person narrator), while multiple characters are suspected, as in The Moonstone. “If Sergeant Cuff is one of English fiction’s first detectives, Valeria Macallan is one of its first detectivettes. If The Moonstone is the first English detective novel, The Law and the Lady is the second” (122). These aspects, along with its focus on reanalysis of evidence, do make Law read as an early-twentieth-century whodunit, although the implausible Eustace remains a flaw. However, Law seems to have been deliberately unframed as testimony and did not become Collins’s third novel of testimony. During the 1870s Collins had been much engaged with theatrical writing, including the stage versions of The Woman in White and Armadale, retitled Miss Gwilt. For these he dismantled the framing he had so carefully constructed for both novels, just as film versions of the novel omit the frames and voices, focusing instead on the plot. This work may have influenced Collins against writing another casebook.

Jezebel’s Narrator In Jezebel’s Daughter (1880), Collins returned to an editorial character for another tale in which the crime is murky and the resolution exclusive of the legal system. As will be true in The Legacy of Cain, it shows both the waning of Collins’s powers and the importance of a rich variety of characters and subplots to the casebook novel, not least the detection plot. Like Legacy, Jezebel fails because it is not sufficiently a multiplot novel, and its narration is similarly curtailed. Here the editorial character is Mr. David Glenney, who tells the story partly from memory and partly as a reconstruction from statements made by other characters, some of which he introduces into the text while other documents are merely mentioned. The documents he does include are chiefly plot documents in the form of letters and often come from insignificant characters. In essence, then, the book is a first-person narration with elaborate use of plotforwarding documents. Jezebel is a convoluted tale of poisoning by the widow of a scientist and academic who has refined several deadly poisons and their antidotes. After his death, the widow uses them on her enemies, particularly those who stand in the way of her daughter’s advantageous marriage to the man she loves. Madame Fontaine remains a shadowy figure, and since we can guess early on that she is the poisoner and no active detection is going forward, little suspense develops. An unaddressed flaw is Glenney’s motivation for presenting this story. Characters who narrate such tales generally have direct involvement, which

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motivates their presentation. Glenney states at the start that he is “looking back through half a century” in writing his account (10). He explains that he was a boy employed by his uncle, whose widow retrieved a man confined in an asylum, who in his own past had been poisoned by accident and revived by the professor, and who later encountered the poisoning widow. Glenney’s position therefore is very peripheral. And as will be true in Legacy, his narration is not colored by his own reactions. His being the editing character therefore adds little to the story. Anonymous letters and newspapers extracts appear as plot documents, as do, curiously, extracts of letters printed in a newspaper with the names and places allegedly suppressed, although the name of Minna, the daughter, does appear. Abundant clues identify the writer as Madame Fontaine. Collins later threw in a “Between the Parts” set of letters whose frame recalls No Name but which is simply a group of plot documents. After this Glenney narrates again, using juridical terms as though he were the collator of an investigation, although we know that at the time of his writing many of the principals were long dead. For his narration, he says he is calling on “documentary evidence of other persons” to narrate events he did not witness, including letters to himself, statements made to him, and extracts from a diary (230). Collins added the casebook ingredients almost randomly, and they fail to shore up the novel. The diary is that of Madame Fontaine, and it recalls Lydia Gwilt’s diary in that she could not resist writing to herself about her crimes. Unlike Lydia, she intended to destroy the record, but having been poisoned herself, she was unable to do so. We see, however, only one extract from the diary: Sent Minna out of my room, and hurt my sensitive girl cruelly. I am afraid of her! This last crime seems to separate me from that pure creature — all the more, because it has been committed in her dearest interest, and for her sweet sake. Every time she looks at me, I am afraid she may see what I have done for her, in my face! Oh, how I long to take her in my arms, and devour her with kisses! I daren’t do it — I daren’t do it [413 –414].

This is a very Lydia-like self torture, but Collins was no longer able to create the complex characterization he here assumes. In the 1860s, when Collins reprised material from his earlier works, he exceeded his previous accomplishment. In the 1880s, his slight reprise of Lydia is a shadow of his former achievement.

Looking Backward in The Black Robe Collins’s very Gothic-toned novel The Black Robe (1881) revolves around the attempts of two priests, one of them in disguise, to convert a wealthy Englishman to Catholicism. Lewis Romayne’s family seat is Vange Abbey in north Yorkshire. It is “the most solitary countryhouse in England” and monastery

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ruins lie near it (32). This, along with the romantic lead’s name — Stella Eyrecourt — identifies a Brontë reference similar to those in Armadale. As the plot develops, Collins raids Jane Eyre for the pivotal subplot of Stella’s previous marriage. She had been courted by Winterfield (an echo of Thornfield and Midwinter), whose first wife, an alcoholic, had disappeared. He believes her dead but she reappears at the church door to invalidate his marriage to Stella. Romayne, in France, kills a young man in a duel forced on him by the boy’s father, whom he had caught cheating at cards. Romayne becomes haunted by a voice that calls him an assassin. Romayne is already overwrought by his solitary work on a book on religions and seems headed for a breakdown. When he meets Stella Eyrecourt, however, her sympathetic response calms his nerves, and Stella falls frankly in love. The book’s villains are those who wear the black robes of priesthood, especially the scheming Jesuit priest Father Benwell, who intends to convert Romayne to Catholicism and persuade him to return the abbey to the church. Catholic plotting is a subject that continues to resurface in fiction — witness The Da Vinci Code— but the blatant distrust of the church in this novel, set in 1859, feels Gothic in tone. Stella’s family have already suffered from the conversion of her sister, now a nun. Father Benwell stops at little in his quest, planting a priest as Romayne’s secretary, introducing him to Winterfield, and intercepting and copying a letter for Winterfield in which his wife, now actually dying, asks for his forgiveness and provides proof of her death. The priest springs this document on Romayne, who is still highly nervous and angry at his wife for interfering with his secretary’s attempts to convert him as well as for disrupting his growing friendship with Winterfield. Although he is shocked by the secret of her previous “marriage” to Winterfield, the priest argues with considerable sophistry that Winterfield’s first marriage was not recognized by the church whereas his second one was. Therefore Stella committed bigamy and Romayne’s marriage to her is invalid. Romayne abandons Stella, who he does not know is pregnant, and becomes a priest and preacher in Italy. Winterfield befriends Stella, her child, and her mother, helping them to become reestablished in France. The secretary, who had been sent on a dangerous mission to the Americas for failing to convert Romayne, is heard of again through Mr. Murthwaite, the adventurer whose notes close out The Moonstone. With Murthwaite’s information, Winterfield, in the matter of a page or two, sails his yacht to California and treks overland to Arizona, where he recovers Penrose, the secretary, from the Apaches. Romayne’s extreme religiosity causes his health to fail, and at the last moment he allows his toddler son to burn the will in favor of the church. At the same time, Winterfield is in a position to marry Stella again. This preposterous plot benefits somewhat from the multiple focus Collins employs, but despite help from Jane Eyre and The Moonstone, it is one of his weakest works. The beginning of the novel is narrated by a Major Hynd, a casual friend

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of Romayne, who witnessed the events leading to the duel and its aftermath. This section has considerable voice that colors the narration, especially in the first pages. When Romayne complains about his bad luck at having to go to France to bring back his dying aunt, Hynd’s comments for the reader’s eyes are sharply personal. He reflects to himself and the reader that Romayne is wealthy, landed, and handsome, while “I am, myself, a retired army officer, with a wretched income, a disagreeable wife, four ugly children, and a burden of fifty years on my back” (4). Hynd dryly comments aloud that “It’s only a matter of two days” and suggests that Romayne sample the oysters in Boulogne (5). But when Romayne invites him as a guest to go along, he accepts. He reveals all that he has personally witnessed, including seeing Father Benwell, the priest, at the Yorkshire estate. At the close he includes a “had-I-but-known” statement in his own voice: “If I had known then, what I know now, I might have dreamed, let us say, of throwing that priest into the lake at Vange, and might have reckoned the circumstance among the wisely-improved opportunities of my life.” Instead, he has made a written record from “a due sense of responsibility” and swears that it is true (50). Hynd’s private sarcasm is a pleasure in this section and would have been welcome at other stages of the novel, but he does not return as a narrator, although he appears as a character described by others. Throughout the book there are sections of letters from or to the priest; these are headed “Father Benwell’s Correspondence.” They are the most effective applications of framing for suspense, as the priest speaks openly to his colleagues and superiors about his plans and engages an inquiry agent to find out Stella’s connection to Winterfield. Thus the reader knows that the suspicions of Stella and her mother are correct and that both Romayne and Winterfield are being far too trusting. The voice of the priest, however, is a flat, narrational voice that sometimes rants in a generic way. There is an echo of Miss Clack in the way both Penrose and Benwell press religious materials on Romayne to help achieve his conversion, as when Benwell says that he anticipates “gratifying results” from giving Romayne “Wiseman’s Recollections of the Popes.” His claim that “I look to that essentially readable book to excite Romayne’s imagination, by vivid descriptions of the splendors of the Church, and the vast influence and power of the higher priesthood” is quite Clack-like (303), but the priest is a far flatter and less dynamic character than that spinster. The final narrator of the book is Winterfield, in an overelaborate frame that also is not shored up by characterization. He sounds in his diary exactly as he does in every other scene — like a colorless character who does not live up to his antecedents. Winterfield writes to a cousin who has slandered him, enclosing a lengthy series of diary excerpts that tell his history and the last developments of the story in a condensed series of snapshots. These have none of the confessional intimacy of diaries but simply function as plot documents, with a final appended note about wedding dresses in Stella’s hand that indicates the outcome.

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With a potential editorial character who has a dynamic voice and viewpoint, the novel instead descends into sheer plot summary. The other dramatically voiced character of the book is Stella’s mother. Mrs. Eyrecourt has several lengthy speeches throughout the book showing that Collins could still manage lively character voice on occasion. Here, in the first of them, the individuality of her burbling speech is vintage Collins: Stella, I will not be interrupted, when I am speaking to you for your own good. I don’t know a more provoking person, Lady Loring, than my daughter — on certain occasions. And yet I love her. I would go through fire and water for my beautiful child. Only last week I was at a wedding, and I thought of Stella. The church was crammed to the doors! A hundred at the wedding breakfast! Ten bridesmaids, in blue and silver. Reminded me of the ten virgins. Only the proportion of foolish ones, this time, was certainly more than five. However, they looked well. The Archbishop proposed the health of the bride and bridegroom; so sweetly pathetic. Some of us cried. I thought of my daughter. Oh, if I could live to see Stella the central attraction, so to speak, of such a wedding as that [175 –176].

As in other later novels, Collins’s characters flash occasionally into full dimension that only shows up the flatness around them. He could still bring a character’s voice to life, but he could no longer sustain this throughout the novel for an editorial narrator or even for principal characters. The loss of character depth, conveyed as importantly through voice as through actions or details, is a principal flaw of Collins’s later novels partly in documents. He always advertised his interest in character, and its importance in his best work is underscored by the lack of it in his weakest. The narrators of The Woman in White, Armadale, and The Moonstone, as well as in shorter works, add not only life and texture but also characterizations of others through their reported voices, thus generating the plot from the tensions within and between characters. At the same time, none of these novels narrated partially in counterpointed documents is a novel of detection, although some investigation goes on in each; the tracking down of Magdalen and the investigation of Lydia are done by enquiry agents who are either neutral minor characters or negative portraits, like young Bashwood in Armadale. That novel involves the most crime, including murder and attempted murder, but the dual Allans do not unravel or resolve the crimes that surround them. Instead, the guilty Lydia takes matters into her own hands to obtain justice. Throughout his career, Collins seemed determined to try every variety of framing device, manipulation of multiple focus, and application of narrator monologues that he could conceive. From Basil through The Moonstone and beyond, he experimented with layers of framing, witnessing statements, firstperson accounts, confessions, testimony that conceals, and testimony that informs the readers past the characters, framing characters and editing detectives. His experimentation exceeds any one source he drew on for framing or narration, and his body of testimonial mediation exceeds that of any contem-

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porary. Indeed, it is difficult to match overall in his own work or that of others to the present day. Yet these novels— partially in documents and/or narrated by an editorial character — along with The Legacy of Cain, highlight how well suited the casebook novel is to detection and how little suited to less richly developed crime fiction without detection. After The Moonstone, Collins did not continue making and solving the detective puzzles he was known for creating. He seems to have had little interest throughout his career in police or enquiry agents as characters; neither did he exploit possibilities for amateur detection in later novels. Instead, he created some of his most bizarre plots, which might have functioned more effectively in the direction Bram Stoker would take the casebook novel — as supernatural horror. Collins reached back toward Gothic fiction and the century’s earlier examples of narration, such as Jane Eyre, rather than continuing in the new detection vein. Sue Lonoff has posited that Collins’s work is weaker after Dickens’s death because Collins lost the editorial restraint of Dickens’s opinions. Certainly his plots become more unrestrained after Dickens’s death. A concurrent and perhaps more significant loss, however, was Collins’s departure from mystery. Detection of crime combined with the constraints of casebook or even partial framed witnessing also contained his imagination and led to his greatest successes by channeling his intellectual side, fleshing out characters through voice and perspective, and forcing him to develop more integrated clues and solutions. An additional loss, as noted above, is that Collins rarely sustained character monologues after The Moonstone, something Dickens disliked in Collins’s fiction and would not have encouraged him to continue doing. It is perhaps because Collins could no longer sustain monlogic testimony that The Law and the Lady is not a casebook novel. Although Collins continued with framing and character narration, the loss of the detection plot and the weakening of the voices that tell the stories left a gap that Collins attempted to fill with sheer sensation.

CHAPTER 7

The Casebook After Collins By the end of the century Wilkie Collins’s casebook of witnessing as well as his novels in counterpointed documents had been imitated in form, but without Collins’s verve, in The Notting Hill Mystery. It had also been applied for supernatural detection by Bram Stoker, parodied and adapted by the prolific Fergus Hume, and deconstructed for concealment by Henry James. Early in the twentieth century, an admiring Dorothy Sayers would write a testimonial mystery, The Documents in the Case, as an homage to Collins’s novels of testimony. Hume and Sayers underscored the deliberateness of their adaptations from Collins by referencing him directly, as later writers have also done. Stoker’s casebook so obviously reflects Collins’s influence that a direct reference would have been superfluous; Stoker also wrote at a time when previous adaptation had been made publicly. James, rather than adapting, reversed the effects of multiple testimony by limiting framing and mediation. These examples offer a start toward more comprehensive analysis of Collins’s early formalist influence on Gothic detection. Later writers continued to be drawn to Collins’s multiple focus and dramatic monologues. Caspary’s playwright friend had heard about or read the casebook novels; even at the remove of the 1940s, writers valued what Caspary called “the Collins method.” This attitude toward Collins has continued in noir thrillers in the later twentieth century, not only in Caspary’s 1979 final adaptation of the casebook form but also in reprise of characters, in novels of counterpointed testimony that apply a now well-established form, and in twentieth-century casebook novels set in Collins’s era. Some of these reference his novels directly, while others that build on Stoker’s adaptation of the casebook. Of these, the most successful are those that, like Collin’s best novels, develop intense voice and therefore viewpoint to color the unfolding of clues through testimony. These recent examples are discussed in Chapter 13 as continuation after Caspary of the adaptations and homages begun in Collins’s own lifetime. Only two years after The Woman in White appeared, The Notting Hill Mystery was serialized in Once a Week, the journal title itself a parody of Dickens’s 83

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All the Year Round. This anonymously published novel has been noted many times as using the casebook structure. It consists of solicited statements and a lesser number of diary and letter extracts, the whole put together by an inquiry agent retained by a group of insurance companies to investigate possible fraud by Baron R — , who took out multiple policies on his wife, whose death seems suspicious. The casebook form is pure Collins, but the novel lacks the charm of character, voice, humor, and overall texture that can be found even in Collins’s later and lesser work. The novel seems to have been created from one of the reviews accusing Collins of being a mere puzzle maker and without reading what Collins had said in the preface to Woman about the essential importance of character. A contemporary review agreed: “In his anxiety to reproduce some of the mannerisms of The Woman in White, Mr. Felix has lost sight of his master’s finer artistic qualities” (quoted in Casey 3 –4). The company’s insurance agent has no personal involvement in the case, and beyond his determined investigation is not characterized. His voice is coolly intellectual and adds no dimension to the large number of facts he assembles. The letters and diaries as well as a suicide note have little character voice or emotional tone. Most of the witness statements read flatly as recitations of facts in unnatural voices that occasionally break clumsily into something resembling speech. Here, for comparison, is the beginning of testimony by a minor character from Notting in contrast with parallel testimony in Woman. I am a dancer, and my name is Julia Clark: I have performed under the name of Julie, and other names. I am at present called Miss Montgomery. I knew the girl called Rosalie. We were for several years together in Signor Leopoldo’s company. I forget how many. She did the tight-rope business, and had ten shillings a week and her keep. In our company she was called “the Little Wonder.” Her real name was Charlotte Brown. She was about ten years old when I joined the company. I do not know her history. She did not know it herself. She often told me so [493]. I am sorry to say that I have never learnt to read or write. I have been a hardworking woman all my life, and have kept a good character. I know that it is a sin and wickedness to say the thing which is not, and I will truly beware of doing so on this occasion. All that I know I will tell, and I humbly beg the gentleman who takes this down to put my language right as he goes on, and to make allowances for my being no scholar [360].

The first speaker is an information machine, and nothing of her character or viewpoint comes across. The second is speaking from her character and even about herself, as Collins’s witnesses typically do. It is the voice that makes the testimony monologic even in an unimportant character such as Fosco’s cook, above. Collins’s characters tell not only what they know but also what they think they know and are mistaken about as well as confessing their testimonial transgressions. Notting lacks this dimension completely. I take the time to discuss Notting because the claim is made that it rivals The Moonstone as the first detective novel. Julian Symons discussed this, noting its imitation of The Woman in White and its failure to reach Collins’s level of

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achievement. Yet he still cites it as “a true detective novel, and the first of its kind,” because its detective is a professional, an insurance investigator; the novel also contains a map and a “facsimile of a marriage certificate” as well as a letter fragment, all of which would later become staples of detective fiction. Finally, Notting Hill appeared before The Moonstone (52). There are several problems with this analysis. The Moonstone is considered the first detective novel only through overemphasis on its containing a professional, the retired Sergeant Cuff, who does not even solve the case. Such a definition reflects the narrow focus on detection by a professional. Even Symons distinguished between detective and crime fiction, as discussed at length in Chapter 10. Even so, Collins had already created both policemen and professionals who detect, such as the lawyer Boxsious and the policemen who rein in Sharpin in “The Biter Bit,” Sergeant Bulmer and Chief Inspector Theakstone. All three appeared even before Woman, and “Biter” contains two professionals and one would-be policeman in proto-casebook form. Furthermore, The Woman in White is certainly a novel of detection performed by amateurs, as important a strand of mystery as the investigations of professionals. Finally, Woman is manifestly the first novel of testimony, whose form Notting Hill blatantly and rather poorly imitates. By century’s end, authors of both detective and horror novels were aware enough of the novel of testimony to apply its techniques and even to use it for satire. An example of this is A Marriage Mystery: Told in Three Viewpoints (1896), by the Australian Fergus Hume, best known for The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1887). Hume attributed his start in detective fiction to reading Gaboriau (“Biographical Note”1) and later commentators repeat this, but it is clear from his texts that Hume also called on Collins for structure and content. Hume signaled his homage to Collins by having a character in The Miser’s Will (1903) ask another if he had read Armadale to point up Hume’s reprise of Lydia Gwilt, while a narrator in Marriage paraphrases Walter’s juridical language, an identification of the structural reference. A notice from The Whitehall Review reprinted in the frontispiece of A Marriage Mystery compares the suspense in another Hume novel, The Masquerade Mystery, with The Moonstone. A Marriage Mystery has a breezy tone that indicates its parodic nature, not only of murder mysteries in general — Hume’s characters talk about nothing but clues and suspects and their critics— but specifically of Collins’s testimonial framing, as the book’s subtitle indicates. Marriage is narrated first by the doctor called to the crime scene, second by a barrister who is the doctor’s chief suspect, and finally by a minister who is suspected by both the doctor and the barrister. None of the three is in fact the criminal, making all their detection mistaken. The murderer also is not the deceased’s first wife, now a dancer, nor a suspected servant, but the enquiry agent called in to solve the crime, who also turns out to be the brother, using a different name, of the murdered man’s wife. This negative portrait of detection echoes Collins’s portrayal of private

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investigators in the mercenary Bashwood the younger in Armadale, whom Collins called “the Spy” and roundly condemned for his profession as well as his character. No eye for reading character, but such an eye as belongs to one person, perhaps, in ten thousand, could have penetrated the smoothly deceptive surface of this man, and have seen him for what he really was— the vile creature whom the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There he sat — the confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat — the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilization; a man who was in this instance at least, the legitimate and intelligible product of the vocation that employed him; a man professionally ready on there merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors; a man who would have been useless to his employers if he could have felt a touch of human sympathy in his father’s presence; and who would have deservedly forfeited his situation, if, under any circumstances whatever, he had been personally accessible to a sense of pity or a sense of shame [460].

It is his being willing to investigate anything for pay, as well as his cold manipulation of his gullible father, that Collins rejects. The private detective had not yet been redeemed from crass commercialism. Hume describes Lemuel Varry, his famous thief taker, as “a lean melancholylooking creature of the Don Quixote type, as delineated by Dore; and possessed [of ] as wicked a pair of black eyes as I wished to see” (47). Varry says of himself, when revealed as a relation whose real name is Seabarn, “When I visit my friends I appear as a simple gentleman, without occupation; when I am employed thief-catching, and murder-hunting, I go as Varry, the detective. A simple necessity, my dear sir, a simple necessity” (136). Dr. Luke calls him “a grey wolf ” (136). Varry/Seabarn’s guilt is revealed in a lengthy confessional letter sent after he has fled the country, which is written to clear a servant who is suspected. The crime is thus revealed as having been committed in self-defense, and the writer taunts the other investigators by saying, “I think that everyone was suspected of committing the crime but me, yet, you see, I am guilty after all” (269). This nebulous resolution — no one even knows what further becomes of Varry/Seabarn — is the stimulus for telling the story. Even so, the characters and place names are protectively changed, while “the story itself as told by doctor, lawyer, and clergyman, is true” (271). The three narrators have little developed voice or characterization and therefore provide little mediation of the story other than suggesting the wrong people as being guilty of the crime. Hume uses them principally to satirize detective novels in general as well as people who deprecate the fad for such novels. The minister agrees to make this distasteful statement about the case (he abhors crime literature) only to clear the names of others and himself:

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That the crime is mysterious I know well enough, and I know also that the public take a morbid interest in such criminal problems. Candidly speaking, I do not care for them myself, and I consider it unwise that the national taste should be vitiated by the publication of such pernicious literature. I refer more especially to what is called the detective novel [183].

Hume exploits all three of his narrators for tongue-in-cheek humor as well as detection. Hume occasionally uses document framing or elaborate plot documents in other novels. Even The Mystery of a Hansom Cab begins with three chapters in documents, a newspaper report of the crime (a later such article appears also), a transcript of the inquest, and the text of a published reward notice. The ruminations of Gorby, the detective, though in third person, are couched as an interior monologue at times, including Chapter IV. The book ends with a written confession that occupies its own chapter. In The Miser’s Will, Hume not only exploited framing as inventively as Collins but referenced him specifically to acknowledge his adaptation of Lydia Gwilt. In this poisoning mystery, a barrister has been asked by a writer friend to find him material. He offers, in a letter, the case of a runaway wife who, on her husband’s accusation, is arrested for theft. She is convicted but testifies in her own defense, making a grand statement that sways many of the audience. The lawyer includes a sympathetic newspaper editorial that has been censored for its excessive sympathy. After a newspaper account of the testimony is given, the lawyer comments further, first making it clear that he does not think her innocent. Having introduced the poison idea, he goes on to connect her recognizably with Lydia Gwilt: Not that Mrs. Horner will remain in gaol for six months. She can play to the gallery, I tell you, and will make use of meekness, religion, of her beautiful face, and clever wits to win free. Depend upon it, Arkell, she will be at liberty in a short time. Even now people who think she has been badly treated are talking of a petition [18].

Readers of Armadale might recognize Lydia here, but Hume’s character makes it explicit: “Have you ever read Wilkie Collins’s clever novel Armadale? I declare that Mrs. Horner reminds me of Miss Gwilt — red hair, suave manner, infernal beauty, and all the rest of it” (18). The novel consists of two more reports by the lawyer on repercussions from this case over time, one the poisoning of the husband years later and the arrest of his grown daughter, and still later the poisoning of the man with whom Mrs. Horner had run away. At last a final epilogue reveals the real culprits. In between are dramatized third-person narratives of most of the characters, as though a novel had been written about them using their real names, or that we have dropped into their lives to observe. The effect is reminiscent of Collins’s novels in counterpointed testimony, including Armadale, from which Hume modeled the convicted yet sympathetic woman on Lydia Gwilt.

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Hume’s adaptations, more successful than those in The Notting Hill Mystery, continue the novel of testimony’s narrative shift toward the public as audience as well as its positioning of other characters as recipients of the documents, even those that were originally private, such as diaries. Both aspects are crucial to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Betteredge’s recreation of events from two years later and Jonathan Harker’s on-the-spot account of his sojourn chez Dracula both are opening testimonies of essential facts colored by personal reaction. Such comparisons illustrate that Stoker referenced both The Woman in White and The Moonstone for his structure. Although the overt documentation in Dracula looks at first glance most similar to Woman, the many documents in Dracula are not juridical in nature. They consist largely of diaries and letters interleaved with newspaper clippings and short plot documents such as telegrams. There are no interviews with witnesses or solicited statements as such. Dracula’s testimony, even in the second half, when the diarists are consciously keeping a record, is more informal than Walter Hartright’s legalistic framing. This is not to say that Stoker did not have Woman in mind; the use of edited diary accounts written close to the action to assemble a casebook is very much modeled on Collins’s first novel of testimony, The Moonstone casebook having been created later from solicited accounts as a quasi-public family record. In particular, Jonathan’s diary begins as a personal document that later becomes public for detection purposes, as is true of all the other documents in this supernatural detective novel. In this they reference Woman primarily. Jonathan begins with notes on Carpathian customs. But his increasingly strange circumstances lead him to make this a narrative account which he must see as surviving him, even if some of what he records, such as the temptation by the three vampire women, will give Mina, his fiancée, pain in reading it. His diary does “survive” him in that he has withdrawn, after a nervous breakdown, into normality. It is Mina’s transcription of his shorthand diary that first identifies the vampire to the hunters assembled by Dr. Van Helsing after Lucy Westenra’s double death. Mina also transcribes Dr. Seward’s phonograph diary, which, though immediately private, contains literal case notes. Both, plus other diaries and letters including Lucy’s deathbed note, are made into a casebook (along the lines of Walter’s and Marian’s gathering of evidence), read first by Mina as she transcribes them and eventually by the entire group. This making of originally private documents and recordings into a casebook for others is more similar to Walter’s excerpting of Marian’s diary for the casebook that he and she put together to restore Laura’s identity than it is to the statements Franklin solicited after the fact. Stoker did not, however, use the framed and mediated narrations to conceal information or to misdirect the reader, as Collins often did. His suspense instead comes from the reader having seen Jonathan’s diary and the initial letter

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exchanges, as well as Seward’s diary, long before the other characters have done so, and therefore being ahead of their deductions for some time. This is a different effect than that which Collins created in his novels of testimony. Stoker’s manipulation of the documents into a casebook bears productively on a conundrum often cited in regard to Dracula. As observed in William Veeder’s foreword to Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, we hear a good deal about what happened to Mina, but “we never find out what Mina felt” (xv). Stoker’s decision not to make Mina a narrator of her own events parallels Collins’s avoidance of narration by Laura Fairlie and Rachel Verinder. However, Collins did so to conceal clues for suspense, while Stoker did not use his avoidance of Mina’s viewpoint in this way, since we have a full account of Dracula’s forcing her to drink his blood from Seward’s description as well as Mina’s own reported version of events. Keeping Mina’s experiences in reported speech rather than direct narration at first appears to parallel the men’s misguided attempts to keep Mina in the dark about the search. The distance from Mina, as in the men’s leaving her at home alone, seems to serve Victorian morality and plot line and consequently is seen as weakening the overall effect. However, Mina’s role, examined in terms of the overall form, is otherwise. It is not only Mina whose awareness of Jonathan’s journal leads to her transcription, but it is Mina who conceives the idea of making a casebook of documents. In Chapter 17, though reeling from Lucy’s death, Mina asks Seward to set up his phonograph diary so she can transcribe it as well to include with Jonathan’s journal for Van Helsing to read when he arrives. Mina has previously made newspaper cuttings in Whitby that proved helpful, and she also borrows Seward’s back issues of papers to look for other information. Mina, in short, is the editorial character of Dracula who puts together the casebook, the parallel to Walter Hartright and Franklin Blake. Once the men make their wrong-headed plan to leave her out of deliberations, Mina continues to keep her own journal as a record — the one thing she is allowed to do— and it temporarily becomes a naive record, like Lucy’s. Even as a reflection of the Victorian mind frame, this action and the accompanying reversion to ignorance on Mina’s part do seem dated and clumsy plot choices, which Stoker made blatantly to set up Dracula’s repeated attacks on Mina. But she does not report for a twofold reason: first because she has been shifted to victim object in parallel to Lucy rather than to a menaced narrator, as Jonathan had been at the start. The second reason, however, is that she is the editing character who, like Franklin rather than Walter, is deeply involved as both victim and potential villain. As Collins did with Franklin, Stoker moved her a little away from the narration. Collins did not use a female editorial character in any of his casebooks. Marian is codetective in Woman, but she does not assemble the casebook. Madame Pratolungo is very much the female editor of Poor Miss Finch, but the story does not revolve around solving a mystery; rather, it is meant to expose Nugent’s romantic machinations. Mina is the first and —

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among the novels in testimony I have found — the only female editorial character until Michael Cox’s novel The Glass of Time (2008). Stoker produced less result from distancing his editorial character than Collins did, but Mina does continue her work as collator of the casebook. In Chapter 22, Mina argues successfully to be included again. As she logically says, “And besides there is nothing in all the world that can give me more pain than I have already endured — than I suffer now!” (Stoker 388). After her avowal that she will kill herself if she changes too much, they can hardly attempt to shelter her again. Jonathan reports this scene in his diary. I told her that she was to have all the papers in the safe, and all the papers or diaries and phonographs we might hereafter use; and was to keep the record as she had done before. She was pleased with the prospect of anything to do— if “pleased” could be used in connection with so grim an interest [Stoker 388 –389].

These are the papers Jonathan cites in his epilogue as making up the narrative that has gone before. The entire book, therefore, is collected and ordered by Mina, who also narrates the final scene of Dracula’s death, as an editor/character might well do. The doubling both of characters and the documents they create, as already noted in Woman and to a lesser extent in The Moonstone, exists also in Dracula, in which the first ignorant and later informed diary surmises of Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, and Mina double each other, as well as the letters of Lucy and Mina. The later self-conscious reports of the detective team in Dracula parallel each other in the same manner as The Moonstone’s “Second Period” documents, adding viewpoints, expanding relationships, and offering new deductions and clues. Each of these works exhibits even more strongly what William Patrick Day has said of Frankenstein, that “Each narrative is a mirror, a double, of the others, and the actions of the stories are subordinate to larger patterns that derive from the act of telling stories” (47). This doubling of confessions and testimonies along with characters again emphasizes how deeply embedded and vital the documents are in this narrative, as in Collins’s casebooks. Confession and testimony can be overlapping categories, but one is principally emphasized over the other. Harker’s diary account, a principal piece of evidence in the mystery of Lucy’s death and Renfield’s madness, switches to testimony later in the book. Indeed, every piece of correspondence, reporting, or personal musing in Dracula becomes testimony about the situation in the course of the book — an approach more similar to that of Woman than of The Moonstone, whose accounts were written after the fact at Franklin’s request. The details Jonathan had set down confirm Van Helsing’s suspicions and explain to Mina what has happened to her husband and to her late friend. But the voice is also intimate and confessional as we first read it, as Marian’s diary and Betteredge’s account were also. Jonathan admits to his pages (and ourselves) the role of his naive trust in creating his predicament.

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In the passage recounting his observations of his host crawling down the castle wall, another about his encounter with the three vampire women, and one about finding Dracula in his coffin, Jonathan’s entries burst into monologues as dramatic as, say, the end of “Berenice” or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” but from the wholly sympathetic stance of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” This intimate revelation, too, becomes a more public statement, one of the documents in the case, but none of the testimonies that follow Jonathan’s diary are as confessional, and none have the same intimacy in their direct narration. Rather, the monologic speeches we hear later are reported of one character by another. The shorter narrations that follow Jonathan’s are a mixture of mere plotforwarding documents and narration by involved characters. This juxtaposition of plot documents and testimonial documents is of particular importance in the middle section of Dracula, where they facilitate the general shift to more overt testimony. These chapters are so layered by Stoker that the seeming fragmentation eventually calls into question the full divulgence by the detectives, once they know that their testimony will be read by others within their group. David Seed, in “The Narrative Method of Dracula,” notes accurately that “the gaps between the narrating documents become as important as the sections of narrative proper” (200), while later in the novel the characters cease to record their own feelings but instead act as witnesses to each other (203 –204). Veeder goes further in discussing the narrative result, suggesting that “Since everything in Dracula is eventually made public [and] the diarists soon know that the group will read their words, how intimate will anyone risk being?” (xv). Collins had sidestepped this effect by having most of his characters’ accounts either recorded at the time and collated later or recorded in full later, when they could confess their omissions at the time. This flattening of the narrative in Dracula, as in The Woman in White, is also effected by the barrage of documents, which emphasize detection and lessen the immediate personal drama of characters’ statements. There are, in fact, two levels of shift toward more distant and formal narration. In the first, characters introduce each other and report the experiences of other characters, acting as witnesses to events still not understood. Following Jonathan’s diary narrative, the exchange of letters in Chapter V between Mina and Lucy, the first excerpt from Seward’s diary, and an exchange between Quincy and Arthur serve to introduce new characters in relation to each other as well as to advance the story. In the next several chapters, however, both Mina and Seward become important witnesses, respectively to Lucy’s sleepwalking and to Renfield’s behavior. Both occasionally rise to dramatic voice in reporting these. Chapter VII is largely taken up by a newspaper feature, including the captain’s log of the wreck. This piece has the atmospheric description and horrific monologue typical of a Poe tale. In all these documents, the monologic passages are reported by someone

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other than the person experiencing events most directly, including Seward’s account of Van Helsing’s examination of Lucy. These witness statements are punctuated with shorter plot document letters and telegraphs that develop the action. A good example of this structure is Chapter XII, which includes Seward’s diary entries on finding Lucy near death and of her supposed death later, intercut with unopened letters from Mina to Lucy for plot purposes. That the letters remain unopened by Lucy heightens the sense that all these items are becoming the documents in the case. The second shift occurs after Lucy’s death and Mina’s transcription of Jonathan’s journal. Once they have all read the casebook she puts together, all now consciously record to aid detection and therefore lose personal intensity. The shift from personal witness to quasi-public testimony is accompanied by a corresponding distance in the voices, which is natural to the circumstances. Each now records overtly for solution, knowing that others will read their record, and the voices are more self-conscious of their responsibility. By the time this is occurring, Stoker also has ceased to cue the reader ahead of the characters, and readers along with characters watch the detection of Dracula’s coffins and the tracking of him back toward the castle, equally unsure of what will occur. Not only the intimacy of the voices but also the trajectory of the suspense have changed. The self-conscious detective voices are less exciting to read, however, and the loss of inside information for the reader requires a considerable readjustment of momentum that is not entirely successful. Stephen King avoided a similar flattening of later text in Carrie. Since this first novel was followed by ’Salem’s Lot, which virtually retells Dracula, and since King knows horror classics well indeed, it is likely that he had in mind the structure Stoker redirected in his own novel of testimony. King intercut the backward-looking plot documents that tell us what happened at “the black prom” with forward-moving narrative sections in third person (with flashes of interior monologue). The two time frames merge and complete only on prom night, keeping at maximum pitch the Dracula-like suspense of waiting for the characters to discover what the reader already knows, with only the action finale yet to come. It is an improvement on Stoker’s approach. The document frames include personal accounts as well as information, so that there is no general shift to more distant voices and reporting rather than witnessing, as in Dracula. The contrasting titles perhaps indicate the difference in focus. King continues to close in on Carrie, the title character, who is victim first and monster later, while in Stoker’s novel, the focus after Lucy’s death is on tracking and destroying the always evil vampire; all the others, even Mina, his new victim, then become secondary. In Dracula, the self-conscious reportage leads to even more narration of one character’s experience by another. This also bears on the narration of the attack on Mina, which is interrupted by the men. Neither of the accounts we have of this records the teller’s own reactions but instead details the scene and

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Mina’s own comments later, much as Jonathan described events at Dracula’s castle, but without personal coloration. In this overt reporting, it would be difficult for Mina, new woman though she is, to describe her own experiences and reactions as candidly as Seward reports them for a casebook that all the men will read. Even Jonathan was self-conscious in his private shorthand diary. Viewed overall, in Dracula, Stoker reapplied the constant documentation of Woman to different effect, but he based his novel on The Moonstone as well. As in the latter, he utilizes a long opening story by one character; its narrators are either detectives (the majority), victims, or both; they introduce and describe each other, including reporting extensive speech by other characters; and the editorial character who assembles the documents is deeply involved both as victim and potential villain and therefore kept at a somewhat greater distance, as was Franklin Blake. A recent discussion of Dracula as the seed work for the current vogue in vampires gave much attention to the casebook structure of Stoker’s novel as one reason for to the continued effectiveness of that text. The article accurately describes the complex structure of narratives in this lengthy book and praises the way “This multiplicity of voices gives the book a wonderful liveliness” (103). Joan Acocella notes the experience of Dracula’s page-turning suspense but analyzes the effect of the structure even further: “The alternation of voices also lends texture. It’s as if we were turning an interesting object around in our hands, looking at it from this angle, then that. And since the story is reported by so many different witnesses, we are more likely to believe it” (103). Noting the pleasures of the puzzle created, she connects its immediacy to Samuel Richardson’s epistolary fiction (though not to Collins) and further comments on how this “tight receptacle” of form “is filtered through minds wedded to rationalism,” therefore delaying their acceptance and solution — a classic Collins effect (103 –104). As discussed with examples in Chapter 13, the casebook has an influence of its own via Dracula.

Limited Testimony for Ultimate Suspense A year after Dracula appeared, Henry James demonstrated acute awareness of the power of documented witness by taking pains to break the form at the start of The Turn of the Screw. Much of this novella’s tension is generated from a situation about which the framing characters and readers greatly want to know the truth, but James used only a single testimony to blunt its ability to resolve the many questions it raises. Susan J. Navarette argues convincingly for the pairing of Dracula and James’s novella as Gothic tales, citing “the striking topical and thematic similarities existing between these two fin de siècle Gothics” (126). She even compares the governess to a detective (132). James’s deconstruction of the cumulative and dialogic power of testimony by his manipulation

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of its components to reverse effect makes them a contrasting pair in the application of framing. As previous commentators have noted, this undercutting is heightened by the front frame of the piece and the lack of an end frame. In the framing of The Turn of the Screw, unlike that in Carmilla, we are not encouraged by the front frame to accept the ensuing narrative. Le Fanu enlists Dr. Hesselius to reassure readers of the authenticity and credibility of the vampire tale that follows. James did the opposite. The presentation of the governess’s manuscript in the context of telling spooky stories undermines the credibility of her story rather than establishing it. In the first sentence, James introduced the idea of a “gruesome” and “strange tale” about a “visitation,” positioning his introduction of the governess’s tale in the next paragraph as the same kind but going one better: “It’s not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect of another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children?” (1). Despite Douglas’s assurance that his tale is “too horrible,” untouchable for sheer “dreadfulness,” and “for general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain,” this only eggs on the group, who exclaim “Oh how delicious!” Even the framing narrator urges him to “just sit right down and begin” (2). This bantering between protestations of horror and delight in it continue as Douglas fills in the background of how the governess came to take the post and its conditions. The interjections remind the reader of the kind of tale being told and its limitations, even while the “facts” are being set up. Douglas’s youthful infatuation with the governess, as well as hers with the children’s uncle, further taints the narrative as subjective. As Elizabeth MacAndrew notes, the “triple mediation” via the governess, Douglas, and his companions makes the narrative a triply closed world for whose unraveling we depend solely on the governess’s account (231). In the frame, the tale’s “antique” status, the highly colored feelings of both narrators, and James’s placement of the story among questionable tales of horror all undermine the credibility of the single testimony that follows. While being admonished that the tale “won’t tell,” we are encouraged to want exactly that. If we simply began in the narrative, readers would be more inclined to accept her story than after the front-frame exchanges. Furthermore, many aspects of the story remain a mystery to our only narrator of it. The governess herself has no “mediating narrative” to explain what happened to Miss Jessel or Quint — only hints from the inarticulate Mrs. Grose (MacAndrew 233). She cannot, like Poe’s confessional monologists, tell us the whole story. Here too, the governess, like Collins’s Miss Clack and Count Fosco, undercuts her own testimony without being aware of the gaps and doubts she creates. Finally, with an end frame, as both MacAndrew and William R. Goetz have surmised, the fictional audience’s reactions could provide closure, but “both Douglas and the governess are inaccessible” for further comment (Goetz 73). Still more, if we had Mrs. Grose’s statement, the uncle’s, or even Flora’s to compare, the situation would provide more clues for the reader and greatly

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lessen the governess’s burden of proof. James reversed the dialogic and cumulative effects of testimony exploited by Collins and Stoker to curtail its revelations and create permanent mystery. Considering The Turn of the Screw as a deconstruction of the novel of testimony recontextualizes James’s often-quoted comparison of Collins and Braddon in his 1865 review on Braddon in The Nation. This review is frequently excerpted to support a wide variety of interpretations about sensation fiction, Braddon, and Collins. Yet James’s edged analysis, which sounds very much like other contemporary reviews in its sneering praise, does offer an acknowledgment of the form Collins had developed. James surely is commenting on Collins’s form as epistolary in nature and Braddon’s form as otherwise. To point out that The Woman in White “with its diaries and letters and its general ponderosity, was a kind of nineteenth century version of Clarissa Harlowe” (James 593) is to highlight the novel’s multiple witnesses in contrast to Braddon’s third-person narration. James further emphasized Collins’s form in the midst of discussing Braddon, designating her as the founder of sensation fiction, while “Mr. Collins’s productions deserve a more respectable name. “ He goes on to point up Collins’s structure again: They are massive and elaborate constructions— monuments of mosaic work, for the proper mastery of which it would seem, at first, that an index and notebook were required. They are not so much works of art as works of science. To read “The Woman in White” requires very much the same intellectual effort as to read Motley or Froude. We may say, there, that Mr. Collins being to Miss Braddon what Richardson is to Miss Austen, we date the novel of domestic mystery from the former lady, for the same reason that we date the novel of domestic tranquility from the latter” [593].

Amid his denigration of both Austen and Braddon as well as his uneasy recognition of what would become the intellectual justification for detective fiction, James clearly recognized Collin’s evolution of form from epistolary fiction as a major accomplishment, setting it above merely founding sensation fiction. James put this analysis to use in writing The Turn of the Screw, though to much different effect by cutting off the communal testimony the governess needs for any level of solution.

Sayers’s Documented Case Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1930 novel of testimony, The Documents in the Case, written with Robert Eustace, demonstrates how closely she too had read Collins and how well she understood the form he developed, both in Woman and The Moonstone. Sayers’s admiration for Collins is well known and frequently quoted, and multiple commentators note this novel as deliberately in the Collins tradition.

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The Documents in the Case, though a successfully contemporized novel of testimony, does not fully take up the challenge of the form. Sayers applied the casebook structure, including the key elements of an involved amateur detective who also assembles a casebook and lively narration by peripheral characters whose mediation obscures clues from readers and detectives alike. Yet the result is more satirical and lighter in tone than Collins, partly because the plot lacks complexity and partly because her editor/narrator is so little characterized. The plot focuses on whether Harrison, the older, conservative husband of a flighty younger wife, has killed himself, had an accident, or been deliberately fed poisonous mushrooms. Because he was an expert on fungi and suicide was out of character, his grown son from a previous marriage sets out to find the killer. This tight focus is too straightforward for a novel of testimony. The complex multiplot richness of Woman and The Moonstone have been discussed above, and Caspary would later enrich her own adaptation with social issues and characterization. Sayers settled for satire of artsy people and philosophical discussion, and both feel like asides rather than part of the mystery. The son’s possible suspects are the wife, her dotty companion, and two young male boarders, one a writer and the other a painter. The writer, Jack Munting, is the most fully characterized and voiced narrator. There is also a comic spinster in the Clack tradition, who complicates the early story but also disappears fairly early. The son, Paul Harrison, is developed largely as a detective. His loyalty to his father is assumed more than depicted, and his generic businessman’s attitude (we do not even know exactly what Paul does or why he has been in Africa) does not further characterize him. The casebook he constructs is divided into two parts: “Synthesis” and “Analysis.” The first part begins with two one-sided correspondences, one from Jack to his fiancée “Bungie,” or Elizabeth Drake, and the other from Agatha Milsom, the companion of Mrs. Harrison, to her friend. Both babble about all sorts of things, revealing themselves and distracting our attention from their comments about the Harrisons. An occasional attached note begins to make clear that the letters have been edited. Letters from the victim to his son also are included eventually. About a quarter into the book notes by Paul Harrison position the letters as documents he has assembled. He also interleaves a formal statement from Jack and letters from Mrs. Harrison to a lover, who turns out to be the painter. How Paul came by them is explained in his notes. In the “Analysis” section, Paul also includes a lengthy newspaper account of the inquest on his father’s death as well as his own statement of what he has done and a list of “Points to Be Investigated.” Jack, who has reluctantly become embroiled in the case, offers what other information comes his way; although he feels that he is betraying his friend, he is also angry about the friend’s use of him. When Lathom, the painter, comes over to establish an alibi via Jack, the latter does not hesitate to inform Paul. Paul is the parallel to Sergeant Cuff, and Sayers enables him to see past the

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irrelevancies of the letters to find a crucial clue to establish not only motive and opportunity but also means for Lathom. At this point the word “laboratories” struck a chord in my mind. Had there not been something in the Munting correspondence about a laboratory? I had not paid much attention to the passage when I first read it, because my mind had been taken up with the idea of Lathom’s having gathered the fungus on the spot. And indeed, the facts had been so buried in a lot of vague twaddle about the origin of life and other futile Muntingesque speculations that I had skimmed the pages over in disgust, but when I turned back to the letter I cursed myself for not having given it fuller consideration before [199].

Paul’s disgust and curses do not color his narration or his detection, which disappointingly always has the same responsible tone, but he betters Cuff by sorting out what is buried by narrator mediation. As do many adapters of Collins’s casebook novels, eventually even including Vera Caspary, Sayers made the connection explicit by mentioning the novel she chiefly adapts: “At present I feel rather like the good lady in The Moonstone who wanted to know when the explosion would take place” (223). This adaptation also competes with Laura as the most contemporary casebook, in contrast to others written in the period and later novels set in the period, discussed in Chapter 12. Sayers here not only paid serious homage but also updated characterization, voice, and even plot, since the final evidence turns on a chemical analysis that reveals the poison to be synthetic. Yet further development of the editorial character — as well as the addition of complexity through voices of minor characters (here the information from peripheral witnesses is summarized by Paul) and integration of the theological and scientific discussions deeper into the plot — is needed to move the novel into the class of The Moonstone. The more writers choose multiple testimony, the more they create a communal witnessing that lends itself to detection and adds up to solution; when they use single testimony, even with multiple-focus framing or layering, they tend to emphasize the confessional aspect of witnessing. Private documents made public serve this well, whether by Betteredge, Harker, or Watson. Documents may be transformed into contemporary media — telegrams, recordings, newspaper accounts— but it is the individual journals and statements that most vividly unfold plot through character. Such novels in documented testimony have a symmetrical, holistic narrative effect. Rather than stressing the linear process of detection, they highlight the context of character and totality of plot. The inherently dialogic structure of multiple witnesses also stresses the group over a chief detective. Even an organizing sleuth needs informative testimony from other perspectives to see the whole, or will fail from the lack, as James’s novella deliberately fails. A consideration of this body of novels in narrative testimony argues against the trend of grouping and regrouping works for thematic reading alone, without

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regard for their varieties of narrative structure. Caleb Williams and Franklin Blake may both pursue a similar personal quest in detecting their own lives, but structurally Caleb has more connection to Basil than to The Moonstone. Lady Audley’s Secret may reply in plot to The Woman in White, but it is not, like that work, a novel written in confessional witnessing. Gothic horror is said not only to have made superb use of the detective but also to have called this figure into being as a dispassionate unraveler of its underworld (Day 52–53). Similarly, Collins developed the novel of testimony to display and resolve his multiple narratives, and other writers subsequently have found it a congenial form, especially for Gothic-tinged detection (from which Sayers, however, departed). Enough casebook novels exist to constitute a subcategory for further integrative study of form and theme interactions.

CHAPTER 8

Before Laura Vera Caspary’s Early Career and Novels Vera Caspary was, as she liked to say, “born in the nineteenth century by accident” in November of 1899, only eleven years after Wilkie Collins’s death. Her mother was in her forties, and Vera was eighteen years younger than her oldest sibling. She grew up on the south side of Chicago in a family of Portuguese-descended Jews, the simultaneously spoiled and intimidated baby. Writing was always her ambition. In her 1979 autobiography The Secrets of Grown-ups, she recalled making miniature books as a small child, “pinning together tiny folded sheets and lettering unevenly on the cover A STORY BY VERA LOUISE CASPARY” (Secrets 7). Her father, who was a buyer in women’s hats, wanted his daughter to attend the University of Chicago, but Caspary opted for business school instead, a choice that determined the setting for much of her writing (Secrets 37, 39). Eager to write and to be independent, Caspary got her foot in the door as a stenographer in a shellac business, a job suggested by the mother of a friend, a writer who had inspired her as a girl. Caspary moved from one job to another, trying to get closer to writing and publishing. She pestered her bosses for writing assignments and answered job openings for writers with her initials, only to be turned down when she appeared in person (Secrets 39 –40, 44). At the start of the 1920s she still lived with her parents, taking advantage of their evenings out to neck with boyfriends on the sofa and inventing outof-town interviews for jobs in order to lose her virginity. The year American women got the vote, Caspary got her start writing ads—“Rat Bites Sleeping Child” for an exterminator was her first headline. In the later twenties she left full-time copywriting to freelance and begin her first novel draft (71–74). Her writing and editing projects during these years are stories in themselves. They included the Rodent Extermination League’s copy for a live rat-killing virus, produced during the war, which, however, died in the mail; a correspondence course to learn ballet, whose impresario, as well as his lessons, played a role in Vera’s first fiction; an ad campaign for a book on sex and love; and another 99

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mail-order course on playwriting whose lessons Caspary absorbed as she wrote her first plays. Caspary called these her “fraudulent years” (Secrets 68). Some particular oddities of these years are portrayed in Stranger Than Truth, her second novel of testimony, discussed in Chapter 11. This was a turbulent time, particularly 1924, during which her father died on the same day Bobbie Franks vanished. Vera observed the infamously coldblooded murder of the boy by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from inside her community. The glasses frames of Leopold, a major clue to identifying the killers, had been prescribed by the husband of one of Vera’s friends, while Vera herself spent weekends with her lovers at the Loeb’s cottage in return for handling its rental while the family avoided public contact (Secrets 81–88). Vera had already left full-time advertising to freelance and begin writing fiction. Later in 1924 she moved to New York to edit Dance Magazine, achieving her goal of living a bohemian life in Greenwich village as she had on Chicago’s Near North Side. As she put it, life as a “flaming thing” meant that “Sexual inhibition was to be avoided like pregnancy and a repressed libido shunned like a dose of clap” (Secrets 96). Caspary’s chief fictional portrait of her twenty-something self at work and in love was Evvie (1960), for which she merged Chicago and New York settings. In Evvie, Louise, who works for her living, tries to shore up her lovely roommate, Evvie, who lives on an annuity from her stepfather and pursues an obsessive love affair that leads to her murder. The novel is more an account of the era than a murder mystery, however, and its frank references to abortion and free love, as well as a scene in which, as Caspary put it, “two naked girls discuss sex” was shocking enough to be banned in Ireland (Secrets, 265; “Correspondence 1957–1958”). The climactic wild party in Evvie was modeled on a birthday celebration given for Caspary in 1926 by her pal Connie Moran at her Rush Street studio in Chicago, which “smelled of paint and cats, spicy foods and French perfumes.” Caspary described vividly in the 1970s draft of Secrets how, at the real-life celebration, the “bootlegger came with a gallon of pure alcohol which we mixed with distilled water,” the Dartmouth football team crashed the party, an admirer threw Vera into Connie’s china cabinet, and Caspary learned that another good friend had taken up with her own former lover (“Working Draft” 42, 134). All these details were applied in Evvie to illustrate the mix of liberty and vulnerability of women coming of age in the 1920s. Caspary’s first two novels, both published in 1929, exhibit the themes she would take into her mystery fiction and some elements that descend from Gothic fiction through sensation as well. The White Girl, the first novel published though the second accepted, is the most sensational in its content, very much focused on secrets and lies, and the publisher’s requests for such treatment increased the sensational effect. Ladies & Gents, the first accepted but whose publication was delayed, is a more light-hearted but fantastical tale with the

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sort of providential intervention at its romantic conclusion that Collins had been criticized for using. Ladies & Gents, which Caspary wrote first as a serial for Dance Magazine (Secrets 110), tells the story of Rosina Monticelli, the child of circus performers, who is left for several years at a Catholic school to acquire some education. On her return, she becomes afraid of the circus training. Her mother’s answer to Rosina’s fear of rope-walking is to turn her into a tattooed lady for the side show. Rosina runs away from the tattoo artist and is rescued by vaudeville performers, who help her develop a dance act. Rosina later marries Morty, their associate, who is a buck dancer, and they do a buck-and-wing routine together. When he develops tuberculosis, Rosina cares for him with the money raised at a benefit organized by Eugene Woodman, a theatrical manager who is secretly in love with her. After Morty writes a suicide letter, publicity again catapults Rosina into great success dancing as a “shimmy shaker.” Meanwhile, Eugene writes poems about Rosina, as a medieval maiden. Now Rosemarie Mont, she socializes with a wide variety of people, from royal Hawaiians who costar with her — one of whom wants to marry her, to an English nobleman who courts her. Her mother and some past circus acquaintances show up, along with a kind of swami who preaches the goodness of round shapes. Just as Rosina is about to marry the nobleman, Morty arrives, not having killed himself after all, to prevent her from committing bigamy. Eugene, however, discovers that she was not legally married to Morty, allowing him and Rosina finally to unite. Ladies & Gents includes some plot documents as well as broad dialect speech by Rosina’s parents and a few others. The strongest voice in the omniscient third-person narration is Morty’s, who delivers a monologue explanation of several pages as he is quizzed by reporters about why he stayed “dead” and then returned to stop the wedding. “See here, Abe,” I says, “you’re a lawyer and I want some dope.” “Shoot,” says Abe, “what you aimin’ at, divorce?” Truer words was never spoken in jest more than that, eh? Well, I asked Krauss, I asked him what happens when a lady’s married to one guy and marries another. Krauss says a lady wouldn’t. He’s a card, that guy, and often we stand kiddin’ for a whole evenin’. But this time I says, “No kiddin’, Krauss; what happens?” So Krauss opens up on a spiel about a guy that wrote a big poem about that same thing, Shakespeare, I think. Some big-timer. Anyway, “I’m not aimin at litrachure,” I says, “I want the law.” And so Krauss tells me how it’s criminal for a lady to marry when she’s got another husband livin’. I thought about that ... and I thought I didn’t want Rose to be no criminal [274 –275].

The vividness of minor characters contrasts with the flatness of Rosina, whom the reader never really gets to know, a problem that Collins had also encountered in his early (as well as his last) fiction. Earlier there is also a lengthy description of the sort of raucous party Caspary had attended in Chicago and New York, a mix of artists and high class, “full of people who secretly wished they were other people” (173). Caspary

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would return to capturing the wild life in later works such as Evvie, “The Murder in the Stork Club,” and The Dreamers; such social mixtures also form the backdrop for Waldo Lydecker’s acidic comments in Laura. The conundrum of young working women who crave excitement and romance but have little protection at parties or even in the workplace is at the heart of much of Caspary’s fiction, but in her second novel it is complicated by another issue Vera knew about at first hand: prejudice. In her autobiography, Caspary talks frankly about the anti–Semitism she experienced, her father’s championing of civil rights for black citizens, and her own unreasonable fear of black people in childhood, something she mastered only as an adult. In The White Girl, a novel Caspary felt compelled to write, this mélange of sexism and racism heightens tension chapter by chapter. In contrast to Ladies & Gents, The White Girl turns not on plot incidents and providence but on a Collins-esque focus on character. The White Girl feels more like Caspary’s mature work than any other piece before Laura, in which she returned to character-driven tensions set against women at work. The ironically titled second novel is the story of light-skinned Solaria Cox, the child of a gentle, hard-working father and a crude yet ambitious mother. Solaria works as a stock girl at a dressmaking firm not unlike the millinery firms that employed Caspary’s father. Like him, her boss is a Jew, and so are many of the customers. Unlike him, they are lecherous, making passes at the models, who defend themselves emotionally by making racist comments among themselves. When Mr. Winkleberg, the owner, fires a model for insulting a customer who made a pass at her, the aftermath depicts a complex dramatization of prejudice hierarchy, showing the model’s use of anti–Semitism as a weapon against the male customer who thinks that she is for sale along with the dress. Solaria is separated from the other women by her racial categorization even though she is pale-skinned, but she dreams of romance in an upper-class world that seems to belong only to white people. She turns down the proposals of a black musician on his way up and a middle-aged black businessman her brother and mother urge her to marry for his money. Her rejection of Eggers Benedict, the musician, reflects her own internalized racism, as she prefers him to play classical music rather than his own disturbing blues and explicitly tells him “I’m not going to marry any black man” (21). He calls her a “white man’s wench” (22) while her mother later says she’s a “white-faced fool” (48). After she has filled in for the fired model (and also has had to be defended by the owner from the attentions of the customer), she asks if she can model again. Winkleberg refuses, explicitly because of her race. She suggests that she might pass, foreshadowing the direction of the novel, but he is not willing to take the chance. Later an older black woman in Solaria’s neighborhood half seriously suggests that she go to New York and pass as white, as others have done. After Winkleberg suddenly kisses her at work, Solaria does just that. The Chicago scenes are intense and complex, and the voices of the models,

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the high-toned private secretary, and the customers are natural and vivid, with less broad dialect than in Ladies & Gents. Even minor characters jump to life through speech and action, as in the scene just before Solaria leaves, when the racist secretary, temporarily in charge, harasses Solaria. One of the models, who hates the secretary for her own reasons, slaps her and the two actually come to blows. These scenes, rather than seeming contrived as much of Caspary’s first novel does, drive the action with far more force than appearing or disappearing husbands and an odd collection of suitors. Most importantly, the novel centers on Solaria’s feelings and actions. She is part Caspary herself, being turned down for the writing jobs she wanted because of who she was and part shrewd observation of the divisions between south-side and north-side Chicago that Caspary knew well. Given her fear of black men while she was growing up, the sympathetic portraits of minor characters are remarkable, including some merger of her own hard-working but sometimes insolvent father into Solaria’s and the complex pathos of Solaria’s abilities and ambitions versus her opportunities. With its basis in secrets and lies and its scandalous actions, The White Girl is very much an early-twentieth-century sensation novel. It generated rumors at the time that it was written by a black woman who passed as white (Secrets 116). The shock value of its plot lies not only in Solaria’s passing as white but also in its condemnation of sexual harassment within and without the workplace. When Solaria first goes to New York she boards with an old lady whose married son woos her even while he gets his wife pregnant. Solaria’s modeling career goes well, but the men she meets, from the married Oscar to college boys, seem to want only sex, not love or marriage. Trapped between Oscar’s advances and threat that the doorman, who she suspects knows her secret and may use it to blackmail her (it is never completely clear if this is correct or exist only in her imagination), Solaria voices her frustration over how white girls also are treated: “I hate men. I’m going to be an old maid and die without touching a man. You’re all alike. There’s only thing you care about in a woman...” (107). In her autobiography, Caspary discussed her own unmarried sex life ironically, from describing passionate petting with the junior partner in a Chicago conference room to mentioning sexual acts in New York taxicabs (56, 107). But from her fiction it is clear that she experienced and/or heard about the unwanted pressure to give in and the condemnation awaiting those who did so. After leaving her first lodging, Solaria lives with two roommates, one of whom is a heroin addict; the other is addicted to a cheating lover. When Solaria reveals his cheating, the woman claims to know that Solaria is part black. Again, the women use prejudice to hit back at anyone who wounds them (160 –161). Solaria herself revealed that the boyfriend had slept with the roommate for the sake of revenge, and she ignores the pleas of her brother for financial help even while indulging herself in expensive clothes. Just as her life falls apart, she meets the white man of her dreams, one who

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respects and courts her, and they become engaged. Solaria continues to worry that the roommates may reveal her secret, especially since lies are anathema to David, her fiancée; but it is Solaria who gives herself away out of her constant fears. When David tells her that he does not want to have children and that she knows why, she leaps to the conclusion that he knows her secret and still plans to marry her. Meanwhile, her second brother, now a nightclub owner in Paris, comes to New York and looks her up on the same night that her former roommate, her health failing, goes back to both heroin and the lover who abandoned her. Solaria has not yet seen the letter of explanation David has sent her, and when she encounters David just before her brother arrives, she reveals the relationship. David recoils in shock from her dark-skinned brother, and Solaria, too late, reads the letter, in which he reveals that he fears passing on his embezzler father’s taint. David’s secret past crosses with hers (272–273, 283 –292). The implied suicide at the end of the book was not in Caspary’s original manuscript. In Caspary’s version, Solaria picks up the pieces of her life and gets on with it. The publisher suggested the patly sensational end, and the unpublished author agreed (Secrets 116). Her original ending would, in fact, have been even more sensational, whether Solaria merely survived or became less self-hating and chose to be seen as black again. Either would have been the kind of ending that sometimes outraged Collins’s reviewers— the failure to condemn a transgressing woman. Caspary accepted the change in order to break into print, but her own ending is not duller; it is in fact far more sensational. A woman can pass, be found out, and still make a life. Its radical departure from novels of women’s destruction or sacrifice was suppressed (and as the original manuscript no longer exists, it cannot be restored). But Caspary learned her lesson from that experience. The other endings of her novels consistently reward independent women and harrow those who succumb to stereotype, along with the men who desire them.

Between the Hammer and the Sickle: Caspary in the 1930s Caspary’s writing career became more multifaceted in the 1930s, as she began both to write plays and to develop movie “originals” or screen stories, summaries of action and character from which scripts could be written by others. This work, which did not fully engage the process of writing fiction, may partly explain why Caspary’s next two novels are more mainstream realism than her first two. Additional reasons include further autobiographical fiction writing and her growing desire to say something socially meaningful during a time when many suffered from the economic crash. These were also the years during which Caspary joined radical groups and supported their causes, including the Communist Party. By the late 1930s, Caspary had begun to part company with Communism, returning to her theme of independent women at work.

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This had been the theme of her third novel, Music in the Street (1930), and also figured in her somewhat autobiographical family saga, Thicker Than Water (1932). Both are far less sensational than Ladies & Gents and The White Girl but are linked with them by Caspary’s focus on young women’s attempts to support themselves while also having emotional lives. As with the previous pair of novels, these two have contrasting approaches. In Music in the Street, Caspary writes in omniscient third person that never comes very close to her protagonist. This flattens the characters somewhat and emphasizes plot, an approach that later dissatisfied Caspary and led to her perusal of Collins’s dramatic witnesses. Thicker Than Water, on the other hand, is written in a series of dramatized scenes, so that point of view shifts to a variety of characters in turn. The two novels seem to represent a divide for Caspary between character viewpoint and authorial stance that was not resolved until Laura. Music in the Street tells the story of Mae Thorpe, a girl from a family viewed locally as shiftless. Mae supports herself and sets out also to be good, but she is tempted multiple times by men who offer her the security and status she cannot obtain for herself. In the first case, a well-to-do local boy courts her and she believes he’s serious until his father, assuming an affair that has not happened, tells her off. Later, having moved to Chicago, she loses her virginity to Boyd, an ambitious man who uses class in his argument. Boyd presses the lonely Mae, who enjoys her entree into higher society with him, by using her own status and morals against her. Her refusal to have sex is “poor working girl stuff,” a sign that she’s not “modern.” Boyd says, “I’m talking about college women and girls— well, girls in society. They don’t pull this old-fashioned stuff. They’re frank and honest and not afraid to be kind to the men they love” (95). Once Mae gives in, Boyd marries a rich girl and Mae drifts into an affair with his bohemian friend Joe. At the same time Mae’s boss, Mr. Moses, a middle-aged Jewish pharmacist, becomes attracted to Mae. After her younger, wilder sister becomes pregnant and dies in childbirth, Mae is particularly tempted by the security Moses offers, and they become engaged until Boyd shows up again, unhappy in his marriage. Mae breaks her engagement and goes with Boyd, but their affair again has no future. Pregnant, Mae seeks an abortion, but the man she pays does not perform it while still taking her money. Mae marries Moses, only to find that Boyd’s wife has died and he wants her to run away with him. Instead, she tells Moses the truth, and after some difficulties, becomes committed to the marriage. Among the most effective parts of the novel are Caspary’s omniscient descriptions of the world of working women, as in the lengthy overview of the Chicago Loop at morning rush hour. In the crowd that passes under the Wrigley clock, “filling the streets with shifting color and a human odor and the sound of impatient feet” are Caspary’s characters. There are girls with avid, searching eyes and girls dull with the discontent of long office days ahead, girls rebellious because they have only impersonal business hours

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to contemplate, and girls eager because an office with its men and its activities is a livelier place than a kitchen. There are girls tired because they have been awakened by raucous-voiced alarm clocks after insufficient sleep; girls hungry because they rose too late for coffee and breakfast food; girls worrying because the long hand of the Wrigley clock races too swiftly toward the moment of nine; girls loitering complacently because they are assured a few moments’ tardiness will not endanger their jobs; girls self-confident and impressed with a sense of their importance to the day; and timid girls wondering if they shall have to suffer this morning for yesterday’s errors [151–152].

Working women in general, however, are more alive in this novel that Mae and her friends, to whom we come no closer than to the crowd on its way to work. One reason may be that it was working women as a group that Caspary really had in mind. She had researched material by going literally undercover in a working girls’ boarding house, not only for plot but also to get the speech of the girls accurately in mind (Secrets 121). Caspary first turned that research into a play with a theme and plot very similar to Music, of lonely girls yearning for romance and better lives. The play, Beautiful Evening, took place among girls like the ones Caspary had observed at the boarding house, one of whom has to choose between a safe marriage and a risky but beautiful affair. A different version of the play became Blind Mice. Mae still is a principal character, but Mr. Moses is eliminated and the setting is a boarding house for young women on their own (“Blind Mice” 1). Anne Watkins, an agent, brought it to the attention of producer and publisher Horace Liveright. Helen Hayes wanted to play what she called “the Juliet of the working girl,” and Winifred Lenihan was set to direct. Caspary credited the latter with teaching her to generate suspenseful flow (Secrets 123 –125). Hayes’s pregnancy and the stock market panic intervened; in 1930, rehearsals finally began, but with so many revisions that no one could keep them straight. A final set of alterations turned Caspary’s realistic portrait of self-supporting women into “a patronizing comedy with bawdy lines and leering suggestiveness” that embarrassed both Caspary and Lenihan. Fortunately, the play closed after two weeks in New York (Secrets 133 –134). Blind Mice was also adapted and filmed as Working Girls (1931), directed by Dorothy Arzner, but Caspary did not write the screenplay. Music was daring for the period in having Mae rescued by her older Jewish boss, whom she ultimately chooses over her former lover. It also critiques the pressures and dangers of sex for unmarried women so frankly that Caspary’s brother-in-law had considered the novel a scandal because Mae has sex outside marriage; he even told her nephew that Vera “was a prostitute” (Secrets 175). Writing so candidly, however, did not also mean an innovative style. This novel, perhaps partly because of its social issues or because Caspary was also playwriting, is mainstream third person, and we are never are deeply in Mae’s viewpoint. Some sections read much like the screen summaries Caspary began writing

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shortly afterward, which were her first mystery fiction. Her first scenario,” Suburb,” Caspary called “ a murder story without a murder” (Secrets 142), a label that could be applied to some of her fiction from the 1950s and 1960s. She recycled it several times, notably into The Night of June 13th (1932), a film made from her original (146). Between the two novels Caspary had traveled to Europe, where she visited her aunt in Paris, an independent woman who had helped open a millinery department in a London store. Her visit to the aunt, who had seen no family in twenty years, sparked Thicker Than Water and one of its characters, who similarly leaves home for London. This multigenerational novel of Portuguese Jews who have little left to be snobby about except their ancestry is one that immersed Caspary more than her working girls story. She planned the novel in detail, writing character sketches and even drawing the women, several of whom exhibit the “parrot nose” that Caspary herself sometimes bemoaned having inherited. Caspary had grown up seeing herself as clever but unattractive. She quoted her somewhat competitive mother as having frequently said, “You wouldn’t be so bad looking if it weren’t for your nose.” Vera herself called this the “harsh Caspary bone structure.” Although she turned out to be a striking woman, it was a revelation to her when “The compliments of accountants and macaroni salesmen assured me that I had feminine power” (27, 44). In many ways, Thicker portrays lives Caspary feared, of women trapped in unfulfilling marriages, dependent and unable to exercise their talents. The extended family members cannot allow each other artistic lives, although the granddaughter’s independent marriage to a painter signals a shift toward validating creativity. As well as drawing characters, Caspary drew their generations too, although the family tree does not appear in the novel. She tagged her drawings with such descriptions as “Sallow old Rosalia Piera with the dusty shadows below her eyes,” noting her marriage in 1886, as well as her granddaughter, “Little Rosalia whose dark fringed lids seemed too heavy for her eyes (“Notes and Family Tree”). In Thicker she dramatized her heritage, family members, and the changing opportunities for women. Jane S. Bakerman discussed at length the lives of Caspary’s working girls in Chicago rent districts, offices, and speakeasy settings. She noted of Caspary’s characters that “Much of their frustration arises from the duality of their concept of the American dream, for while struggling to establish identities for themselves as wage earners, they believe, simultaneously, that they will have no identity at all unless they are indispensably desirable to the man” (83). Caspary similarly recalled the heady mix of wage earning and flirting she experienced. “Working among men,” she said candidly, “I had discovered that a girl need not be beautiful, not even particularly pretty. She had only to be a girl” (Secrets 44). How close Caspary was to this novel is evident in its dramatized scenes and point-of-view closeness to multiple characters, which may have increased

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her later receptivity to Collins’s narrating characters. The contrast in styles between Music and Thicker can be easily seen in their opening paragraphs. The woman entered timidly, her feet moving softly over the white and black linoleum. Behind the counter stood Mae Thorpe. Light laughter floated from her lips. When she saw the woman she stopped laughing. The soda clerk’s jokes were not to be shared with middle-aged, female customers [3].

Here, as in the stage-setting descriptions for a play or script, we have a scene and Mae at some distance within it. Thicker begins already inside a scene and inside the emotions of a major character: In the morning there had been rain; in the afternoon snow fell. At four o’clock Aunt Becka’s coachman came with a note. Rosalia crumpled the stiff, cream-tinted paper between her slender cold fingers. Anger burned deep within her, brought out the sweat on her cold palms, flamed hot in her chest. She opened the felt-lined shelf of the secretary desk, drew pen and ink from behind the glass doors. While her hands were occupied with the familiar movements, the flame of her anger dwindled. On gray paper ornamented with two doves bearing a scroll that carried her initials, she wrote, answering with gracious affirmative Aunt Becka’s request [3].

This family saga traces the fortunes of multiple generations of the Piera family and their descendants. As Caspary did in The White Girl, she here again examines prejudice, this time within the Jewish community, where the Portuguese Pieras and their circle rank Jews according to how eastern their extractions are, with Russians at the bottom. They even call Polish and Russian Jews kikes, practicing racism within their religion-defined community, against whom prejudice is practiced in turn. Several women characters in the book suffer from having strong intellects that they cannot apply and which their husbands reject. As decades pass, the women more and more take matters into their own hands; Beatrice, Rosalia’s niece, is so infuriated at her car manufacturer husband’s treatment of her that she has an abortion and leaves him to make her own fortune. The novel ends as her daughter, “little Rosie,” marries a penniless painter she loves and refuses all family aid. This novel is an historical treatment of the themes Caspary would return to in Laura. Thicker Than Water is a book of secrets, all considered scandalous by at least some generations, about parentage, mistresses, repressed desires, abortion, intergroup racism, and schemes set in motion. None of these are exploited for suspense and none are detected; they are revealed by omniscient delving into the consciousnesses of multiple characters. Josh Lambert, in his study American Jewish Fiction (2009), praises the novel for its many symbolic objects— even in the last scene, Rosalia gives Rosie a silver bowl that is a family heirloom, and the novel is divided into two books, subtitled “Prejudices” and “Possessions.” He also cites the way in which “Caspary focuses on the effects of world events on her characters’ relationships” (Lambert 41). Caspary uses cultural details to show the passage of time both in

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general and for this community. Here Rosalia’s brother Saul has lunch with his business partners: The old restaurant had changed drastically since the war. The heavy German dishes were not so numerous now, the portions not so generous and the menus groaned with the names of frivolous pastries and salads. No one turned and stared when a woman came into the place, for women were everywhere and the air that had rung with talk of prices and overhead costs was filled with chatter of dresses and dances. Hamburger was called Salisbury steak and sauerkraut had become Victory cabbage. And when Edward’s sons, Grover and Ben Jesurun, came to eat with them, they spoke less of the affairs of their law office than of their golf scores and gin parties [282–283].

This focus on character will lead her eventually to read The Woman in White and to become a mystery novelist as well as a screenwriter of mysteries. Like her British contemporary Mary Renault, Caspary’s early novels are more realist and traditional than her later, better-known murder books. Renault too addressed sexuality frankly and depicted the working lives of nurses, then shifted to historical novels in mythical and classical Greece that also focus on characters outside the sexual mainstream. Caspary’s career has a similar divide in that with Laura she began to write a different kind of book, yet without leaving her major themes and previous achievement behind. Caspary’s various degrees of involvement with Communism during the 1930s were made during and sometimes in contrast to her first years in Hollywood. Women were admitted easily into screenwriting during this period because writers were not highly valued or highly paid, whether male or female (Warren 9). During the same period, Caspary met many Communists, some of whom introduced her to socialist politics. Her mentor and early drama collaborator Sam Ornitz explained the apple sellers Caspary had seen in New York to her as capitalist victims.(Secrets 170) Even while selling screen stories, having a house built in Connecticut, writing radio dramas for a few months in New Orleans, and bringing her mother triumphantly to Hollywood shortly before her death, Caspary secretly joined the party, attended “cell” meetings, and helped to raise money for organizations associated with Communism (Secrets 172–181). In the 1950s Caspary was “graylisted” and provided technically truthful but unrevealing testimony in response to California investigations of un– American activities (Secrets 19). In 1968 she wrote The Rosecrest Cell, a novel based on this period in her life, admitting that “The skeleton in my closet carries a hammer and sickle” (Secrets 169). Her involvement was sincere if ultimately limited. In 1939 Caspary, in the money from an “original” sale, journeyed to Russia to view Communism at first hand. Caspary derailed her trip in Paris for weeks in order to marry an anti–Nazi Communist spy whose sister had put them in touch. Although she detested the man, who talked only of American movie stars, Caspary had promised to save him. Eventually she had to either use or lose her own visa for Russia,

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and as his own papers had not yet come through, Caspary left with relief. She later heard that he did succeed in reaching America. Her travels in Russia impressed her most with personal encounters, while she was chilled by “the sense of constant surveillance” and tension she found among the Russians she met (Secrets 182–187). She coauthored a screenplay outline on immigrants, “The Exiles,” with antiwar playwright George Sklar, who later would cowrite the stage version of Laura and tried repeatedly to write a serious political novel, which, however, remained unfinished. Politics may have been attractive to Caspary as a new vehicle for frank discussion of women’s lives. In Secrets she mentions a play she wrote in the thirties with Samuel Ornitz in which a desperate woman has sex with bill collectors in lieu of payment. The play was turned down by a producer who had backed a salacious play set in a brothel. He saw the play as “dirty” and the protagonist “a bad woman” (160 –161). Caspary argued with him, as she later would argue that Laura was not a bad woman either, but to no avail. However Caspary, who supported herself all her adult life, had no desire to live a proletarian life. When the Hollywood contract and several screen sales came through, Caspary gave away all her clothes and bought a completely new wardrobe and a car (Secrets 162–163). She wrote more scripts and screen stories under contract in Hollywood, where she met Isidore Goldsmith. Her affair with Igee lasted nearly a decade, until Vera finally furnished the money Igee’s wife required to grant a divorce (“Autobiography Outlines 1949”). From all this background Caspary had developed the ingredients she would use to different effects: the theme of the paramount importance of independence, especially for women but for men too; the ability to write natural character voice and experience with dramatized speech; and portraits of working women as imperiled protagonists. Material from her life would continue to inform her fiction, sometimes as closely as in The White Girl and Thicker Than Water. Caspary seemed to feel an obligation to testify from her own life and observations about the changing social patterns from the 1920s to the 1970s. She was less blatantly thematic in this than Collins. Yet reading Collins would be crucial to Caspary’s full development of the character voice and multiple focus that would make Laura her signature novel as well as still the finest adaptation of Collins’ casebook form and of The Woman in White.

CHAPTER 9

Laura A Noir Novel Deeply Rooted in Sensation Vera Caspary published no novel for ten years after Thicker Than Water, until Laura followed. In drafting The Secrets of Grownups in the mid–1970s, Caspary discussed at length how she wrote and rewrote a never-published novel during the thirties, which became a sounding board for her evolving politics and her eventual dissatisfaction with them. In the much-reworked and finally abandoned political manuscript, she recalled that “Four hundred pages, or five hundred or six, were not enough to contain my rage.” Part of what she was unable to express was “the pie in the sky hopes instilled by the Cinderella legend,” which Caspary, having just read Marx during her involvement with the Communist Party in the 1930s, saw as “the opiate of the bourgeois woman” (“Working Draft” 255 –257). Caspary felt that she ought to write a “proletarian novel”; in real life, however, “In bed, wearing a lace-trimmed jacket and eating breakfast off a tray, I read New Masses and Daily Worker.” But sexual politics ultimately was more her theme than socialist doctrine; in the end it was “Poor hapless Cinderella — special target of my rage” and “the illusory prince” who became her focus (Secrets 170 –171). To escape politics and war news, Caspary in the early forties began the novel manuscript of Laura, a “mystery and a love story.” The original idea had come from reading about a girl killed in a gas blowup that destroyed her face, after which she was wrongly identified (“Working Draft” 428). Laura first existed as an unfinished play and then as a movie original, a scenario summarizing the plot, neither of which Caspary was able to sell (“Laura —1941” 1). This time she would change her narrative strategy, finish the novel to her satisfaction, and become forever after “the author of Laura.” The springboard for this success was her introduction to Wilkie Collins. It was what Caspary called “the Collins method” that would enable her in Laura to hit her stride as a novelist by letting the characters speak directly. The effectiveness of their witnessing monologues influenced the narration of many of Caspary’s later works— novels and screenplays alike. 111

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Caspary’s acknowledgment of Collins was made briefly as she recounted the history of Laura in her autobiography. The novel started life as a play, never finished. She then rewrote the plot as a twenty-two-page screen-treatment “movie original,” but it generated no production interest. This screen scenario displays the same characters and general plot line as the finished novel but is written in a distant third person that emphasizes plot. At that point, Caspary said, her playwright friend Ellis St. Joseph* suggested that she “try the Wilkie Collins method of having each character tell his or her own version, revealing or concealing information according to his or her own interests.” She and her friend later discussed the characters as she developed them, and Caspary enjoyed creating a distinct style for each (194 –195). Laura was a highly suitable project for such treatment. As in The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Laura turns on an incorrect interpretation of events and confusion of identity. Everyone believes Laura to have been killed in her apartment by a shotgun blast. The body wears her clothes, and although the face is obliterated, Laura’s maid does not hesitate to identify her. It is assumed by all the characters that she returned early from her country cottage, and no one thinks to check fingerprints or otherwise confirm identity. As Mark McPherson, the detective, investigates the murder, he is both aided and harassed by Waldo Lydecker, Laura’s mentor. While Mark searches for clues in her apartment, Laura’s portrait and her possessions conjure an elegant presence that attracts him, until one evening Laura herself walks in. Having isolated herself in the country, she is unaware that she is presumed dead. Instead, the victim turns out to be a model Laura knew who looks generally like herself and to whom she had loaned the apartment. Suspects for the murder include Laura’s boyfriend, with whom the model apparently had an affair, and Laura herself, which complicates Mark’s feelings for her. The novel concludes with a replay of the original circumstances: Laura herself answers the door to the real murderer, who turns out to be the possessive Waldo. Mark manages to save Laura, and Waldo shoots himself. To display Laura and her suitors, Caspary applied Collins’s strategy of multiple narrators, each of whom tells us about the others as well as revealing him- or herself. Waldo Lydecker, Mark, and Laura herself are all writers, in their own ways, of a newspaper column, police reports, and advertising copy. After St. Joseph drew her attention to Collins’s novels in dramatic monologues, Caspary allowed Laura, Mark, and especially Waldo to tell their own accounts. Waldo even allows himself to narrate scenes in which he was not present, assuming an authorial role, although he is not the editorial character who pulls *Ellis St. Joseph was a screenwriter as well as the author of plays and stories. In 1940 John Huston staged his A Passenger to Bali for four performances and his script for Joan of Paris, a war film about the French Resistance, was released in 1942. He later wrote the script for a film based on the memoirs of François Vidocq. The memoirs of Vidocq are considered one of the earliest detective narratives (“Movie Database”).

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together the casebook. Caspary based her fastidious, fascinating, and fat villain on Collins’s Count Fosco in The Woman in White (which Caspary outlined to study its structure), though lean Clifton Webb, who played the movie role, is the image that now comes to mind for Waldo Lydecker. Collier’s, the weekly magazine that serialized the novel as Ring Twice for Laura before it appeared as a book, complained that Waldo talked entirely too much (they also questioned Laura’s train times for going to and returning from her house) (Littauer). Mark, the second narrator, who admits that he assembled his and the others’ written statements into this informal account later, dryly recounts Laura’s return and the unfolding investigation, in which she is now a suspect. Shelby’s viewpoint appears briefly in a short interrogation section by Mark, but the novel’s third written testimony is by Laura herself as she reaches conclusions about the obsessed Waldo, who loves her too much; the cheating Shelby, who does not love her enough; and the detective whose independence she trusts as a reflection of her own. Mark then recounts the conclusion. The lively voices of these three narrators, including the contrasts between them and each character’s assessment of the others, are important ingredients of Caspary’s bestknown novel. When the book appeared, reviews consistently cited this structure as fresh and enjoyable. The plot, according to Caspary, preexisted her reading of Collins, and she had written mystery originals earlier as well. But she applied his narrative strategies to successfully rework her action line for Laura and, in doing so, launched her work in a new direction she had not considered for future novels. Caspary noted that “Mysteries had never been my favorite reading” because the murderer, “the most interesting character,” could not be revealed; she also felt that mysteries did not offer novelistic scope for character development (Secrets 194). What Caspary found in Collins— as had Hume, Stoker, and Sayers— was his highly adaptable structure of witnessing documents by biased characters, some of whom deliberately lie or give partial information and whose testimonies are arranged for solution by the editorial detective to solve the case. This narrative strategy allows Caspary’s richly nuanced villain to be a principal narrator, while the multiple viewpoints develop suspense by filtering clues through character mediation, just as they did for Collins. Caspary did a good deal more than glance at Collins’s technique. Among her archived papers is her handwritten outline of the structure and plot of The Woman in White, with notations on how many pages each scene occupies. The summaries of plot action become slightly sketchier toward the end, suggesting that Caspary had seen what she needed. Some outline comments toward the beginning indicate that what she noticed may have been characterization as well as multiple viewpoints. Caspary notes of the heroine, for instance, that there is “some mysterious quality about her [Laura Fairlie’s] innocence” (“The Woman in White”). These notes parallel the character studies she made for

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Thicker Than Water, but this time it was primarily form she analyzed, absorbed, and applied. In such context, other similarities between Laura and Collins’s best-known works are likely to be deliberate reworkings as well. These similarities include an obese and sophisticated villain, a romance across class lines, the image of Laura as a woman in white, testimony by both well-to-do principals and servants, the Collins theme of a man’s attempt to possess a woman, and Collins’s explicit emphasis on character focus in his novels of testimony. Accepting Caspary’s chronology, mistaken identity is not a direct influence, since it preexisted her study of Collins in the movie original and was indeed by the 1940s fairly common in mystery plots. Similarly, although Collins’s heroine in The Woman in White was also named Laura, Caspary’s chronology would discount the name having been borrowed from Collins, and I have found no evidence to the contrary. In the screen treatment dated 1941, which is in the Caspary archives, the character was already named Laura, although Mark’s name did change for the novel. Here, exactly as in Collins’s two novels, the speakers are intimately involved but know only the part of the story they recount (except for Mark, who explains that he wrote his own account after having seen the others). Mark is naturally the collating detective who organizes the testimony, yet some of what he collects, as with Walter Hartright’s and Franklin Blake’s accounts, is about himself. Waldo’s acidic style for his columns and essays colors his narration deeply and determines what he dwells upon or downplays; police detective Mark, used to writing up case reports, struggles to be objective here; and copywriter Laura, who compares making a statement to working up an advertising campaign, writes from the standpoint of both suspect and intended victim. Each of them is asked, like Collins’s characters in The Woman in White and The Moonstone, to make a testament. In this case the request comes from the police, but part of the Gothic touch of this detection novel is that the policeman occupies a Collins-esque role as one of the principal characters. Having fallen in love with the victim while believing her dead, Mark McPherson is thoroughly enmeshed, even though he is not a suspect. This type of plot exploits multiple testaments to the maximum as each brings an individual mixture of accurate and mistaken information forward. The first part of Laura, which details the initial investigation, is narrated by the columnist, a finicky, corpulent esthete who despises the lean, hardboiled cop but nonetheless adopts him as audience and coinvestigator. Much of Waldo Lydecker’s testimony focuses on Mark McPherson, the detective, and his outof-character feelings for the dead woman. Both Waldo’s and Mark’s sections recount periods of time Mark spends in Laura’s apartment, handling her things, reading her diary, drinking her liquor, and gazing at the painting of her, which comes to haunt him. The detective’s classic immersion in the victim’s life turns into a Gothic romance with the dead.

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Each character in the book, in fact, tells about the others, one of whom (except for Mark) likely is the murderer. This observation and commentary on others is a hallmark of Collins’s novels of testimony, and the cross-character commentary is a direct influence on Caspary’s development of the movie original into a novel. In Laura, just as in Collins’s two best-known works, each narrator tells explicitly what other narrators reveal without realizing it, as Waldo does with Mark’s attachment to Laura. No such separate viewpoints existed in the screen treatment that Caspary wrote before she wrote the novel, and the ordering of characters’ first appearances is changed to advantage after Caspary’s perusal of Collins’s casebook structure. The screen treatment had more viewpoint focus on Shelby Carpenter, Laura’s charming but unreliable fiancé, than Caspary retained for the novel (“Laura —1941”). The scheming Shelby has much in common with Collins’s villains Sir Percival Glyde and Godfrey Ablewhite, who are not characterized greatly beyond their unprincipled greed. Laura had obtained Shelby’s job for him and he has accepted expensive gifts and cash from her, a financial link as clear as that of Collins’s villains. The decision Caspary made to exclude Shelby as a viewpoint character in her novel parallels Collins’s handling of his weak villains. We do not hear the story as told by either Glyde, only by the more intelligent and sinister Fosco, on whom Caspary modeled Waldo, who begins the narration of Laura. The contrast between the bon vivant and the lowbrow cop who once gave a dame a fox fur brings in a class contrast similar to the unsuitability of the penniless drawing master and the artistic and feckless cousin who are the heroes of Collins’s two novels of testimony in the 1860s. Servants also play roles that complicate the plot, just as in Collins. Bessie, Laura’s maid, confesses to Mark that she tampered with evidence, which offers the first clue. Bessie cleared away the signs of late-night drinking and cheap liquor, therefore removing fingerprints as well, to protect Laura. When Mark asks “Why, Bessie? She’s dead.” she replies, “Her reputation ain’t” (44). Laura herself later lies to shield Shelby, her fiancée, even though she has more or less broken off their engagement. This mistaken concealment, a staple of detective novels, owes much to Collins’s well-meaning but ill-considered characters’ choices in The Woman in White and even more so in The Moonstone. In the latter, well-intentioned lies by Betteredge (the steward), Rachel Verinder, and Dr. Candy prevent Sergeant Cuff from being able to solve the crime. The chief servant in Laura, of course, is the public servant Mark, who is entitled to question everyone, in parallel to Collins’s steward, who knows everything that happens in the house. In addition to the statements of the principal narrators, Caspary included Part III, a tape-recorded statement made by Shelby, revealing finally that he was with Diane, the victim, heard the shot, and said nothing, supposedly to keep Laura from being suspected though obviously to protect himself. This

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“transcribed” document is the portion of Laura nearest to the formally taken statements of minor characters in The Woman in White. Otherwise, its narrative structure is much more similar to the multiple voices of The Moonstone, in whose statements the sense of documentation drops away into dramatic monologue. Caspary did not identify which of Collins’s novels she read, but given the much closer narrative structure of Laura to The Moonstone’s less overt casebook, it seems obvious that she read the latter novel as well. Both The Woman in White and The Moonstone, however, influenced the development of Laura in complex ways. Beyond the multiple-narrator dynamic, Caspary also adapted the character of Fosco for Waldo, heightened Laura and Mark, tweaked her plot, and not only adopted but also paraphrased Collins’s emphasis on character through documented monologues. In The Woman in White, for instance, the idea of creating a corpulent villain had occurred to Collins as an “afterthought” (“How I Write” 513). The whipcord-thin cinematic presence of Clifton Webb has now obscured the fact that in Laura, Lydecker is as fat as Collins’s Count Fosco. Waldo describes himself as the willing but unlikely hero of this “love story.” My proportions are, if anything, too heroic. While I measure three inches above six feet, the magnificence of my skeleton is hidden by the weight of my flesh.... At certain times in history, flesh was considered a sign of good disposition, but we live in a tiresome era wherein exercise is held sacred and heroes are always slender [16].

In The Woman in White, Collins had Marian Halcombe describe Count Fosco’s fascinating bulk in her diary thus: For example, he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained that the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size and excessive good-humor as inseparable allies was equivalent to declaring, either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly favorable influence over the disposition of the person on whose body they accumulate [219].

In outlining this section, Caspary’s notes say “Long description of his character, appearance [sic] contradictions” (“The Woman in White”). Since Caspary outlined these chapters, the double reference to girth and good humor, even the repeated “disposition,” indicates that she borrowed not only Waldo’s bulk but further attributes directly from Fosco. Both the count and Waldo Lydecker share the contradiction of a nervous repulsion from acts of overt violence. Marian also records that Count Fosco, who loves his pet white mice and animals in general, “is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us.... He winced and shuddered yesterday, when Sir Percival beat one of the spaniels...” (194). Waldo Lydecker confesses of himself in an aside to the reader that he has quite similar sensibilities. I was never a child to torture butterflies. The death agonies of small fish have never been a sight that I witnessed with pleasure. I remember blanching with terror and scurrying across the lane when, during an ill-advised visit to a farm, I was forced

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to watch a decapitated chicken running around and around its astonished head. Even on stage I prefer death to follow a swift, clean stroke of a sharp blade [53].

These comments support his decision to “spare Mark’s blushes” about his having bought Laura’s portrait. Given Caspary’s detailed knowledge of The Woman in White, Waldo’s villainous sensitivities and this prolonged aside are indebted to Count Fosco’s own distaste for direct violence, important both in Collins’s plot and in Caspary’s. Waldo is turning attention away from himself as a potential murderer and inadvertently revealing why he did not stop to make sure he had killed Laura with his first attempt. Just as Laura Fairlie survives partly because of Fosco’s distaste for violence, Laura Hunt’s mistaken double goes unidentified as Waldo fires and flees. Mark may also have gained as a character from Caspary’s perusal of Collins’s novels. In Caspary’s novel, the Scots detective’s position is similar to that of Laura Fairlie’s drawing master, who betrays a trust by falling in love. Caspary’s study of this amateur detective’s characterization may have influenced Mark’s softening in the novel into a wounded hero who can appreciate Laura Hunt. In the screen original, “Marc Haydon” has been assigned to the job, away from his usual investigations of stock fraud and union trials. He draws this duty because he is the only one available and “his chief pressed him into emergency service” (“Laura —1941” 4). In the novel, he becomes a former hero who was badly wounded by a gangster’s machinegun and transferred to cases posing less personal danger. As Waldo puts it, “a silver shinbone, the legacy of a dying desperado! There is romance in the very anatomy of the man” (17). This shift helped Caspary develop Mark’s sensitivities toward Laura Hunt, both presumed dead and alive. He becomes more parallel to Collins’s romantic amateur detective who rescues and marries Laura Fairlie across the distance of class divisions. Laura herself appears to have been highlighted a bit more toward Collins’s “white woman” image for the novel. In the early movie treatment, the murder victim is a bright flash in darkness and the body lies in its coffin in white satin. These are retained in the novel, but at the end, Laura, instead of the movie treatment’s “old negligee,” appears in the dark at her door in a white bathrobe, a heightening of her image as another endangered woman in white. This “woman in” usage is underlined in Caspary’s story, “Murder in the Stork Club,” published in 1945. Like Laura, this story features a working-class detective, Joe Collins, newly returned from two years in the army. He has previously dropped out of New York University for the broader education of working for a detective agency. He is married to Sara Haworth, a writer of radio mysteries, who belongs in the Stork Club cafe society. The two met when Sarah consulted him for her scripts. Although Joe had fallen for Sara’s charm, Sarah’s work is cut out for her as she strives “to relax his stubborn pride with a female who made so much money” (110). Sara demonstrates her domestic skills and subtly convinces Joe

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that their two-story flat is a bargain. She is less successful in justifying her mink coat, on which turn many clues in “Stork Club,” that Sara has bought herself and that she wears on the fatal evening at the club. Witnesses primarily remember her coat, and she is referred to as “the lady in mink” and variants of this phrase several times. In 1945 Caspary was writing Stranger Than Truth, a second full-dress Collins-esque novel of testimony in multiple voices closely structured on The Woman in White and The Moonstone, discussed at further length below. Stranger also makes use of a similar phrase, “the lady in plaid.” Giving Joe this last name cannot have been an accident. Sara’s last name reinforces it — her name is explained as “like Haworth Parsonage, where the Brontës lived” (149). Other plot parallels made this dialogue in form and character workable. Both Collins’s casebook plots pivot on the desire for money and status by relatively impoverished and greedy members of the upper middle classes. Sir Percival Glyde and Godfrey Ablewhite will stop at nothing to salvage their social positions. It is the less elevated heroes who become detectives of their financially motivated crimes. Caspary made the class differences rather than money the center of her drama. At issue is not the inheritance of the heroine but the character of the new woman herself. Waldo Lydecker is Laura’s mentor, a Pygmalion who cannot release his creation to a more “manly” but less intellectual or cultured suitor. Caspary heightened the class differences of Lydecker and McPherson in the novel, principally through Lydecker’s venomous descriptions of the working-class detective, which go considerably beyond the screen treatment. There is a distinct sensation-novel aura to Waldo’s desire to possess Laura like one of his art objects. When he offers to defend her with his pen against a murder charge and finally directly makes loves to her, Caspary, post–Collins, had Laura address the parallel directly in her narrative: “It was unreal; it was a scene from a Victorian novel. I sat with my hand locked in his hands, a frail creature, possessed, like a gentle, fading, troubled woman of long ago. And he, by contrast, had become strong and masterful, the protector” (160). As nothing of this passage appears in the earlier screen treatment, the novel’s reference points up Caspary’s knowledge of Collins’s sensational Victorian fiction. However, Caspary was in no way bound by her reading of Collins, and Laura is not merely an adaptation. Like Collins, Caspary pushed the narrative boundary for her female characters, and she pushed it for Laura beyond Collins’s choices. As many commentators have noticed, neither Laura Fairlie nor Rachel Verinder narrate any portion of the stories that revolve around them. This silence has been seen as a kind of narrative coverture, in which Rachel’s silence not only serves the mystery but preserves her, despite her passionate outbursts reported by others, within the legal framework of a protected woman for whom male characters make decisions about the diamond and about how to tell her story (Swartz 163 –165). Caspary’s heroine is, very much like herself, a working woman who makes a living with her pen. She has her own apartment and can afford a house in the

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country. This independent lifestyle is the setting, via Laura’s apartment, for much of the novel and film. Mark’s handling of her personal possessions, which violates her privacy in a manner that can be read as sexual violation (an interpretation also given to Franklin’s taking of Rachel’s diamond in The Moonstone), is done as part of his job when he believes her to be dead, not out of an intention to protect her. The soft-boiled Mark has no clues except Laura’s discarded possessions, including her painted image, all symbols of her self-reliance. There are no photographs of family or lovers in Laura’s apartment, only her own portrait, a startling illustration of the individual as social unit. Caspary made it clear that she intended Laura to be sexually active and equally independent in her personal life. In the text Laura is not shocked by Shelby’s affair with Diane, only coldly angry. She has not had many illusions about Shelby, but the surprise of his having given Diane the cigarette case Laura had given him ends her sympathy for him and her response to his charm. Quoting her mother, Laura says, “at last I’m desperate” (144), apparently indicating that she can now end the relationship. Her decision to think things over in the country and her combination of pretense and generosity in lending Diane her apartment ironically save her life. Her relationship with her mentor is platonic. Seeing Laura as a traditional femme fatale stems largely from the Preminger film of the novel, which appeared in 1944. The film having always been classified as noir enhanced the association of Laura with deadly females. Laura, in fact, was one of four films discussed with the first recorded usage of film noir as a term in Ercan français in 1946 (Jackson 94). Certainly Preminger’s film — with its rainy urban nights, black-and-white contrasts, and Waldo’s voice-over — often seems unmistakably part of the noir canon of harshly lit urban crime. But in other ways, particularly those most faithful to Caspary’s characters, the adaptation does not fit noir parameters for cynical, tough loners driven to crime by earthy fatal women. In Laura, the chief criminal and its most world-weary character is a highbrow esthete, its setting is upper-middle-class apartments and upscale restaurants, the romantic lead is a policeman, and the heroine holds down a good job and rooms of her own. If there is a femme fatale in Laura, it is surely the model, Diane Redfern, who entangles Shelby, pawns the expensive cigarette case he gave her, and is killed as Laura’s stand-in. This doubling is obscured further in the film by the portrait of Laura that dominates her apartment and appears in the most crucial scenes. The glamorous “portrait,” actually a photo of Gene Tierney touched up to look like a painting (Preminger 76), embodies the male gaze of the infatuated artist rather than the living woman. In Caspary’s novel, the portrait is far otherwise. As Waldo describes it, Laura sits “perched on the arm of a chair, a pair of yellow gloves in one hand, a green hunter’s hat in the other.” Even so, Waldo finds it too “studied, too much Jacoby and not enough Laura” (34). The same can be said of the film, and of commentaries focused on the ethereal and seductive picture of Laura posed in an evening gown. Only once do we see Tierney dressed in an

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evening gown, and she never poses like the painting but most often appears in a suit or casual clothes. The contrast between painting and woman illustrates the gap between Caspary’s Laura Hunt and Preminger’s revision of her character. Caspary saw Laura as a thirtyish, successful woman who had lovers as well as colleagues and friends, not as the young temptress of the portrait. In her synopsis of the novel, which made the rounds of film producers, Caspary stated plainly that “He [Mark] finds the living Laura more fascinating than the image of the dead woman” (“Laura —1942” 2). Preminger showed Caspary the screenplay for the film. Caspary recalled in a 1971 article, “My ‘Laura’ and Otto’s,” written just before the film’s thirtieth anniversary, that she argued with him about Waldo’s symbolic gun and Laura’s character. She was more successful about the character than the weapon. In her autobiography, Caspary warmly praised the film for its nuanced direction, which created the world she had in mind for Laura, with its “gossip and phony charm.” But she was appalled by the Laura of Preminger’s script as a “the Hollywood version of a cute career girl.” She quoted Preminger as saying that Laura was “ a nothing, a nonentity,” and that Laura “has no sex. She has to keep a gigolo.” His conclusions caused Caspary to “rage like a shrew” in defense of her strong yet feminine protagonist (Secrets 209). Her reply to Preminger, first stated in The Saturday Review article a few years before she began writing her life story, defends her character’s romantic heart. Caspary demanded, “Do you mean she never got money out of men for mink or diamonds? That doesn’t mean a girl’s sexy, Mr. Preminger, it just means she’s shrewd. Laura’s just the opposite. She gives everything with her love” (“My ‘Laura’” 27). Caspary lost the battle to retain Waldo’s walking stick, which conceals a gun; even though she had researched its feasibility, Preminger used a shotgun hidden in a clock instead. But Caspary became convinced that Laura’s “romantic short-sightedness” comes across as well as it does in the film because she had “shouted” about it. She still thought Laura “would have been an even greater picture if the melodrama in the end had been equal to the mood of the beginning” (“My ‘Laura’” 27). After the film appeared, Caspary was paid by Good Housekeeping to research “The Murder in the Stork Club” on location in New York. One evening Preminger appeared at the next table. Caspary still felt strongly enough about the film to get into another shouting match with him over whether or not she had influenced the script. “I accused him of a faulty memory”; Caspary recalled, “he retorted that I was telling lies” (Secrets 211). What Caspary had wanted for the film was the intersection of class, crime, and sexual politics, which she had created in the novel. Laura, as an independent career woman, behaves romantically as an individual. Personal attraction and shared interests are her criteria; she does not need a man to support her or to be a lifelong Pygmalion, and she has outgrown mothering her babyish lovers

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who, like Waldo, pretend to take care of her while actually leaning on her. She can even reject the aristocratic Shelby for the policeman. It is Laura’s freedom to choose that Waldo obliquely critiques and ultimately tries to obliterate. Preminger’s gigolo reference may have come from overreading Laura’s narration in the novel, in which she pictures Shelby, like a rebellious kept man, giving Diane the cigarette case that Laura had bought for him because “he hated himself for clinging to me, and hated me because I let him cling” (Laura 143). He is emotionally a gigolo, though not literally. Laura has decided not to marry Shelby, seeing that their marriage would have been “shoddy and deceitful, taut emotion woven with slack threads of pretense.” Some of that pretense would have been hers, as she faults herself for “wearing” Shelby to show off having a man. She says that she bought him the cigarette case “as a man might buy his wife an orchid or a diamond to expiate infidelity” (Laura, 146). There are several references to gigolos in the novel, but with one exception they are negative comparisons. Shelby is too genteel to actually be a kept man, although not too genteel to accept favors and trade on his status as an impoverished southern gentleman. He both accepts and gives away the cigarette case. Laura’s independence makes her vulnerable to being pitied for not having a husband at almost thirty and free enough to play some of the same relationship games men play, using objects in place of feeling. However, Laura imagines Shelby feeling like a gigolo not only because of their financial differences but also because of his heritage, in which men both support and dominate women (Laura 145 –147). Her analysis in these passages is more complex than Preminger’s conclusion, criticizing herself for taking care of Shelby and him for taking advantage of her care. Like Caspary herself, Laura was neither the most promiscuous nor the most chaste of women. In her drafts of “My ‘Laura,’” Caspary emphasized that Laura “knew how to love,” “had enjoyed more than one lover,” and had “enjoyed her lovers lustily” (“Draft Article” 9). She considered being this explicit almost thirty years later in order to rebut Preminger’s misinterpretation of Laura’s sex life.

Laura on Stage The play version of Laura that Caspary wrote with George Sklar in 1945 revolves more centrally around Laura’s relationships than either previous version. Waldo appears more clearly as a suspect than in the novel or film, not only because of additional scenes with Mark McPherson but also because of the added characters of the Dorgans, Laura’s landlady and her son. Laura’s point of view is preserved in the play by her speeches summing up her past affairs. Laura also has additional scenes alone with Waldo that bring their past relationship to life. After Laura tells Waldo to “Stop pretending you’re in love with me,” we learn that at one point in the past Waldo apparently made a pass at

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Laura and felt painfully rejected, although her version of that evening is that “You called me wanton. You said I was throwing myself at you. You stood in the hall and shouted at me to get out” (62–63). The addition of Mrs. Dorgan, the immigrant janitor’s wife, and Danny, her jazz-mad son, who also is in love with Laura, may be due in part to Caspary’s collaboration with George Sklar. Mrs. Dorgan highlights immigrant and working-class issues when she upbraids Laura for influencing her son, for whom she has given up her own life (38). But because she has also revealed herself as the sort of controlling wife and mother Caspary had written about in Thicker Than Water and would later address at length in Thelma, Mrs. Dorgan is also Caspary’s creation. Mrs. Dorgan even threatens to evict Laura to control her son further. In the play, she functions principally as a parallel to Waldo’s possessiveness of Laura, positioning Waldo himself as a male version of Caspary’s controlling female villains who seek to manipulate their nearest and dearest. Caspary’s contemporary casebook is remarkable in its own right but also for its transposition of Collins’s witnessing testaments and one of his best villains into the 1940s. Her achievement in adapting form and even character into a modern setting succeeds even better than Sayers’s The Documents in the Case in its rebalancing of the casebook for a contemporary novel. This can be seen most clearly in comparison with two other casebooks written much nearer in time, Michael Innes’s Lament for a Maker (1938) and Julian Symons’s The Immaterial Murder Case (1945). Both are full-scale casebooks with editorial characters and multiple narrators, but neither resets its testimony as modern; rather, both look backward to earlier models, respectively for atmosphere (Lament) and satire (Immaterial). Symons’s novel, however, was apparently influenced in its restructuring of the casebook by Laura. Innes’s novel, despite its date, is so highly Gothic and sensational that it reads as a nineteenth-century work. Like some previous novels of testimony in imitation of Collins, it neglects character and character voice, as well as playing a trick on the reader by having the editorial character deliberately withhold crucial information until the end, a betrayal of fair play for the reader which Collins never perpetrated. Told by five narrators in seven narratives, Innes’s plot is as bizarre as Collins’s most fantastic works, as it turns on two blood feuds from the past that determine present action. The plot takes place in a remote Highland castle where Ranald Guthrie, the laird, lives in seclusion with Christine Mathers, his young ward. She loves Neil Lindsay, a local man, who wants to marry her, but Guthrie opposes the match because of a long-standing feud between Lindsay’s family and his, stemming from a long-ago murder. When the two attempt to elope, Neil apparently kills Guthrie by throwing him from the battlements. As matters unfold, however, it becomes clear that Guthrie had been framing Neil for his own death. Later the doctor, a guest at the castle, reveals that he is Ian Guthrie, the elder brother and rightful heir, whom Ranald had left for dead in

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Australia, where he had then established a new life under another name. The final unraveling tells us that Ranald had in fact been planning to murder his brother in such a way as to cast suspicion on Neil and prevent the marriage. This plot is narrated by five persons, several of whom have apparently not been on the scene during the events, while the one who directly witnessed actions understands them not at all. The editorial character, who narrates at the start and end of the book, is Ewan Bell, the shoemaker of the nearby town. Other narrators include Noel Glyby, an educated upper-class man who is stranded at the castle by a snowstorm; Aljo Wedderburn, a lawyer who suggest to Bell that he record the history of the deaths; an apparent doctor, who offers a testament; and John Appleby, also a double narrator and a detective-inspector from Scotland Yard, who investigates after Ranald dies. Like Cuff, he is handicapped by the evasions of the locals, especially, as it turns out, by Bell, who in his epilog reveals that he was in fact on the scene, saw Guthrie with the axe and the body, and shoved Guthrie off the parapet himself in self-defense as well as to prevent a murder. He then hid Ian Guthrie until he could turn up again as the doctor. Collins’s witnesses either reveal in private documents that later become testimony or write after the fact when they can reveal their own transgressions. His criminals justify their actions even while admitting them. Walter Hartright, his first casebook editor, manipulates the testimonies as relentlessly as he investigated Laura’s loss of identity, while Franklin Blake is as much in the dark as others until the last quarter of the novel. Bell, who puts together the record here, conceals his own part until the last few pages, robbing the official detective and the reader of vital information. When the editorial character is concealing, the casebook itself is suspect and wholly subject to that character, who mediates to the point of manipulation. It is as though Betteredge saw Godfrey pocket the Moonstone but said nothing until after Godfrey’s death to avoid scandal and upset in the family. Bell’s concealment may be a reference to Rachel Verinder’s silence about seeing Franklin take the stone, but it is less well motivated. Bell says that he was willing to report the death but that the brothers persuaded him not to, and he agrees so that Ian can resume his other life. Rachel, in contrast, is protecting Franklin, whom she loves. She suffers both estrangement from him and being a suspect herself. Collins played much more fairly than Innes, and so did Caspary, who made a major contemporizing revision in the casebook by making the police detective the editorial character as well as the sleuth. Innes further paid little attention to the voices of two of his narrators, Wedderburn and Appleby, who principally recite the facts as they know them in an unemotional style. Bell narrates in broad Scots for the first sixty-eight pages, in a tediously garrulous voice that obscures as much as it reveals. After the epilog, readers can deduce his divergences as deliberate obfuscation, but at the start Bell’s burying of the facts in a mass of other information makes a difficult beginning. Betteredge, in contrast, reveals himself and his limitations

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through such items as his devotion to Robinson Crusoe, and he is not the controlling editor of the casebook. Of the other two voices, Glyby is a glib narrator who recalls Sayers’s Munting, with similarly facetious asides. The doctor’s narrative is the most arresting of the book. It opens without preamble in a vivid account of his own abandonment by his brother much earlier and then summarizes his own past life and finally the events at the castle. Of the seven narrations, his is closest to Collins in its immediacy and intimacy, while the others are emotionally distant or deliberately bury information in asides. Caspary, who had also gone to the master, felt free to streamline the casebook structure. She shortened the number of narrators to three, as already noted let the policeman make the casebook, and let the endangered woman have her own say — all radical changes that made the multiple-focus narrations feel contemporary in their directness and appropriateness. Her chief setting is a modern apartment belonging to a self-supporting businesswoman that has turned to crime scene. All these changes helped to make Laura read as a contemporary novel and not a formal retro–Gothic like Innes’s book. It is the streamlining of the narration that apparently influenced Symons. Symons’s work appeared in the same year as Caspary’s Bedelia and three years after Laura. Symons demonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of crime fiction by writing this satire of Golden Age puzzle plots. In it, Symons, like Caspary, reduces the number of narrators and makes them central characters. The narrational structure suggests that he adopted this from Caspary’s novel. In Laura, Waldo, Laura, and Mark each narrate, with Mark having three sections, one of which is his interview with Shelby. Immaterial has the same three narrators in five sections, one of whom narrates three times. Symons certainly was familiar with Laura; in Bloody Murder he noted that the book “is done with unusual wit and style, particularly in the sections written by the aesthetic criminologist Waldo Lydecker, a figure based on Alexander Woolcott” (205) (by way of Fosco). The segments of testimony in Immaterial are by “The Innocent American,” John Wilson; the “The Amateur Detective,” whose comic name gives away the tone, Teak Woode; and “The Professional Detective,” Detective-Inspector Bland, whose name is both accurate and misleading. The plot turns on a bizarre murder at an avant-garde art exhibit whose pretensions are themselves satirized. Multiple people had motives, chiefly jealousy. The amateur detective declares early on that he has solved the case, but he picks the next victim. Bland, after a lengthy summing up to the assembled suspects, accuses Wilson as a ploy to flush out the real killer. Wilson is an amiable character, but he resists Woode’s attempts to call him “Watson” and use him as such. His voice is lightly dramatized and the most natural of the narrations, while Bland’s is rather like his name. The most enjoyable voice is also the one that betrays itself most, as in Collins. Woode namedrops Hercule Poirot, Philo Vance, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Sherlock Holmes,

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claiming “I have met most of these great men” (35). But his ego keeps him unable to solve the case. Despite the artistic context, itself a subject of satire, the focus of all the characters is chiefly on clues, and there is little depth of characterization. Immaterial is reminiscent of The Documents in the Case, since Sayers’s detective novel of manners is the type of book being satirized; but its intense focus on suspects, its elaborate timetables and mistaken detection also recall The Notting Hill Mystery and A Marriage Mystery and are closer to both than to Collins. While using Caspary’s restructuring, Symons did not set out, like her, to write a contemporary, fully characterized novel of testimony but a backward-looking parody. Writing not for satire but in a modern transposition, Caspary absorbed from the master of testimony the lesson of character voice. Each of her narrators not only is voiced distinctly and naturally but the voices are used as Collins used them, to reveal and conceal through character mediation. Waldo’s manipulations, unlike Bell’s, filter through a character constantly revealing itself as duplicitous and vindictive while also reporting the vulnerabilities of Mark and Laura that neither would choose to reveal directly. His voice introduces both Mark and Laura as well as commenting on other characters, and he dramatizes the basic scenario summarized in the movie original. Exposition is filtered through Waldo’s biting tones: But what had young McPherson to do with the murder? His triumphs were concerned with political rather than civil crime. In the case of The People of New York vs. Associated Dairymen his findings had been responsible — or so the editorial writers said —for bringing down the price of milk a penny a quart [1].

Waldo’s voice is not only functional for exposition and moving the plot but also dramatically alive without discrediting himself other than as a cynic. Conversely, Mark and Laura also reveal Waldo further while both overtly and inadvertently adding to our understanding of them as well. This is far from Teake Woode’s inadvertent undercutting of his own detection as a spoof. Woode talks about himself and detective fiction more than the case and principally reveals his own idiocy, although his constant criticism of other characters though it lacks his incisive precision, perhaps owes something to Waldo. One of the things I find intolerable about Bland is his rudeness. His first remark was posed in the form of a question: he asked me what I was doing there! As though it was not obvious what a criminal investigator would be doing on the scene of a crime. Bland endeavours to be something out of the common run of policemen. He dresses, or tries to dress, in a way less slovenly than that adopted by most plain-clothes members of the force; but in this laudable attempt to flout tradition — an attempt made, I am sure, in emulation of me — Bland fails to a point of absurdity. There will always be two or three pieces of cotton adhering to the back of his quite nicely-cut suit; or his tie will be glaringly in contrast with his shirt; or he will wear tan shoes with a navy suit. In everything he does and says Bland has this unhappy trick of just, somehow, striking a wrong note. The fact is that he is jealous of me [41].

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Woode here reveals more about himself than Bland, while Waldo reveals both himself and McPherson in an analysis that is both conceited and devastatingly accurate. Collins did not use character just as mouthpiece for evidence or for satire of other crime writing, and he did not need to deliberately obscure information; it is his characterizations that mediate their and our understanding. Caspary’s characters function as fully as Collins’s own while testifying from modernized roles. In Mark’s last statement, using the word confess, he reveals not concealment of evidence but his emotional involvement, inappropriate for a policeman. He justifies his making of the casebook of statements, some of which must have been taken from Waldo’s papers after his death — another police transgression — and some solicited, by saying, much as Walter Hartright and Franklin Blake did, “This story deserves more human treatment than the police records allow” (179). Caspary clearly absorbed the usages of the novel of testimony and mastered the characteristic Collins structure for the development and solution of a mystery narrated through confessional witness statements. Caspary was able to do this through her grasp of the importance of character to the form, something Collins stressed heavily in his prefaces to The Woman in White editions of 1860 and 1861. In the first of these, Collins touted his inventive structure, but in the second he dwelt upon the importance of character to story, concluding that story “is never disconnected from the interest of character” (502). By Collins’s preface to The Moonstone, this had become the much-quoted summary of “the influence of character on circumstances” (3). Caspary followed the “Collins method” of showcasing character through individual testimony in tracing the “conduct pursued, under a sudden emergency” of Laura Hunt (Moonstone 3). But she also rephrased Collins’s assertion of the fundamental importance of character in mystery. As McPherson puts it, “Clues to character are the only clues that add up to the solution of any but the crudest crime” (180). Collins hardly said it better.

CHAPTER 10

Laura and Bedelia “New Woman” Noir Narratives of and by female criminals date back at least to the picaresque novel, but they come of age in sensation literature with the inclusion of middleclass women as bigamists, thieves, and murderers. Caspary turned this history to her own particular use in writing noir thrillers whose female protagonists are most likely to be criminal when they also are the most stereotypically feminine and whose self-sufficient women characters are still able to love the men worthy of their attention. Reading Laura as a sensation novel and as noir fiction emphasizes the connection of these two categories as crime thrillers and distinguishes Caspary’s novel from female Gothic or romantic suspense novels with romantic solutions that focus on imperiled women characters. This discussion further reveals Caspary as a crime novelist who adopted murder as a vehicle to explore the options of twentieth-century women. After having adapted Collins’s form and some characterization for Laura, Caspary continued to write murder mysteries. She followed Laura with Bedelia, a novel that is more squarely sensation fiction in its scandalous secret, and more noir fiction as well in its fatal woman and shocking conclusion. Bedelia does not use framed testimony but is told in multiple third person viewpoints. Thus, before returning to the casebook novel in Stranger Than Truth, Caspary further explored crime fiction in both older (she set Bedelia in 1913) and contemporary scenarios. Perhaps Caspary wanted to see if she could write a shocker that would, like The White Girl, also address real-life issues in a larger-than-life way. Most of her novels that were yet to come are in this vein. The reinvention of Gothic curses and hauntings as crimes concealed beneath Victorian respectability created a new nexus that Collins examined throughout his career and for which he developed both the casebook novel and counterpointed framed narration, both strategies for concealment and revelation. This evolution of sensation novels from a mélange of Gothic fiction, melodrama, Newgate Novels and trial reportage, French crime fiction, and the real life exploits of inquiry agents and police is widely acknowledged. 127

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A parallel history led to the development of American hard-boiled and noir fiction. These novels represented a different direction than the many intellectual, clue-focused detective stories of solving crime among the upper classes that was a hallmark of the British Golden Age novel. The latter books were much more the sheer puzzle-novels Collins was accused of having written. Their intense emphasis on mind over crime has been one of the justifications for crime writing in general; it may be formulaic, but it is cerebral. Dorothy L. Sayers, who certainly admired Collins, turned away from the sheer puzzle toward “non-mystery material” and the detective novel of manners (Knight 100), but even this negative designation points back to the puzzle novel definition of mystery fiction. While British whodunits devoted attention to unraveling clues, American crime fiction shifted direction with the hard-boiled novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, whose protagonists were hardly agents of upper class stability. Also, as John Skaggs points out, “In contrast [to Golden Age,] no romantic resolution is offered in hard-boiled fiction” (47). Skaggs also discusses the importance of suppressed pasts returning to destabilize the present in these novels and further analyzes the importance of gangster fiction and reportage on organized crime during Prohibition and to the emergence of tough-guy private eyes and eventually noir thrillers (57, 66). He makes the sensation/noir parallel more direct by comparing the renewed fascination with criminals to the Newgate Calendar stories, which also fed the eventual development of sensation fiction (108). In the born-again sensation of noir thrillers, Caspary would find her way beyond the misogyny of the femme fatale and the tough male characters she detested to create an antithesis, the self-sufficient woman who does not live by feminine wiles, and her counterpart, the clinging little woman who kills. Caspary’s negative view of mystery fiction had prevented her from writing Laura as a novel. Along with many others, she saw murder mysteries as largely puzzle stories. In her autobiography, Caspary noted that while “Most of my originals had been murder stories, but I never thought of them in the same class as a novel. The novel demands a full development of each character” (Secrets 194). Caspary did not worry about “detective-story stereotypes” in her movie scenarios, but in a book she wanted to keep her characters “alive and contradictory” (195). In response to a fan who sent her a list of questions (and who was teaching her fiction), Caspary reiterated that “I don’t like most mysteries, seldom read them. I enjoy most of the good suspense stories which develop character and background and have logical reason for the murders. I could more easily name the mystery writers I don’t like.” She did mention Francis Iles’s Before the Fact, a tour de force in which a woman connives at her own coming murder; the novels of Cornell Woolrich; and, as someone she liked personally, Dorothy B. Hughes (“Correspondence from Readers” 195). The hard-boiled detectives of the twenties and thirties did not help her to

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shift from the anti–Cinderella novel to a whodunit. Caspary reiterated a number of times how much she disliked these characters. Caspary felt strongly enough about this to build it into Laura, in which not only the title character but also her would-be murderer dislike detectives and mysteries. Waldo notes that once he found out that the president was a mystery fan, he voted Republican. He goes on to say, “I still consider the conventional mystery story an excess of sound and fury, signifying, far worse than nothing, a barbaric need for violence and revenge in that timid horde known as the reading public” (15). He calls Laura “a love story” more than one of detection, but that is Waldo’s view. Caspary’s was more complex. Since Collins’s own era, a general confusion of detective-focused fiction and crime novels has existed, a confusion Caspary also experienced. In divorcing her work and Mark McPherson from the hard-boiled school she was correct; Laura and Caspary’s fiction afterwards largely belong in the crime thriller category, what reviewers of her work called “psycho-thrillers.” As defined by Julian Symons in his influential study Bloody Murder (1972), the crime novel, in contrast to the detective story/police novel (he uses both terms interchangeably), is character-driven, with a plot founded on the characters’ psychology. The focus of police novels is on the character of the detective, whereas the crime novel may not even have a detective. Settings in crime novels are “often important to the tone and style of the story, and frequently an integral part of the crime itself, i.e., the pressures involved in a particular way of life lead to this especial crime.” The crime novel’s social attitude is more often than not critical of social institutions (163). So far, all these items apply to Laura (and equally well to The Woman in White). The attempted murder of Laura Hunt is motivated by Waldo’s obsession with his protégée and fueled by her having outgrown him and asserted her independence in her love life. It is narrated and mediated by characters. Laura does have a detective, but he is hardly an objective Holmes and cannot exercise hard-boiled techniques in the setting of Laura’s sophisticated circles. The social attitude of Laura is complex: the title character simply tries to live her life; she has her own home as well as a country house, where she comes and goes as she pleases. The mistaken identity of the murder victim hinges on this independence. Laura has left earlier for the country than she had planned, lending Diane her apartment for the night, while Waldo assumes that it is Laura who answers the door. Laura’s painting was done by an admirer with whom she may have had an affair, and she has chosen to become engaged to a man who is not her equal financially or personally. This is a mistake that she is coming to recognize, but when she is attracted to Mark, also lower in status but more developed as a human being, it is the last straw for her possessive mentor. Laura’s social comments are oblique and are partly asserted by the apartment setting that visually embodies her income and the freedom based on it. When Mark gazes at her painting, believing her dead, he falls in love (in the

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novel, at least) with a modern career woman above his social station through the self-image she owns, her possessions, and the apartment where she lives alone. The new woman is deeply embedded in the setting and atmosphere of Laura and is valorized throughout, including being saved from murder for an old-fashioned motive. Even Laura’s “man’s job” is valorized; it is Diane, the model, who works in a traditionally feminine job and who is killed. Diane is impersonating Laura by using her apartment, but she plays a traditional badwoman role by using it to meet Shelby. Diane is the negative double, pointing up how much Laura is distinctly a new-woman thriller in its setting, atmosphere, characters, and even plot. This was also distinctly true, however, of The Woman in White. Marian Halcombe is often cited as a prototype of the amateur woman detective. Walter (and Collins) specifically critique the marriage laws that make women financially dependent. The plot turns on a struggle to obtain Laura Fairlie’s money as well as to conceal Glyde’s illegitimacy. Ironically, it is Laura Fairlie, the heiress, who cannot control the money or her life, while the penniless Marian is free to act. Psychology in Collins’s novel is also complex, from the languid uncle to the coldly calculating mother to the defensive villain. Settings, from Limmeridge to Blackwater Park and London addresses, are also vividly realized and used. It is no wonder that Caspary found Collins’s novel so congenial, since their works belong in the same continuum of crime novels from sensation to noir. Yet while both Collins and Caspary are clearly crime writers, their work also in some ways falls into the detective story/police novel category of Symons, a feature that has confused commentary on both writers. Woman features amateur detectives, while Laura has a professional who yet is emotionally involved. The crime in both novels is ingenious and a bit bizarre. Even in Laura, Waldo’s cane, which conceals a gun, the mistaken identification, and Mark’s falling in love with an apparently dead woman all add unusual, even Gothic touches. Both novels also pursue clues. In the case of Woman, Walter pursues witnesses who can establish the abduction and switched identities he knows were made. In Laura, Mark, too, questions Shelby, Laura’s aunt, Waldo, Bessie the maid, and Laura herself to detect the meaning of the cheap whisky and expose Shelby’s lies. Both Collins and Caspary have one foot in detection, while otherwise their work descends from Gothic fiction to sensation and the crime thriller, or the noir thriller, as Scaggs calls it in his concise history. Symons noted this conflict as typical: “The crime novelist is most often a fictionally split personality. Half of him wants to write a novel about people afflicted by crime, but the other half yearns to produce a baffling mystery” (164). Collins was certainly so afflicted throughout his work, and this split went a long way to unify his work, even in the 1880s. Caspary’s work after Laura too sometimes straddles categories. However, Laura is not part of “the women’s novel,” a category Symons used for books written and read chiefly by women (192), which descend from

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the imperiled woman of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century novels into what is now commonly called romantic suspense. Discussing Bedelia along with Laura as sensation and as noir fiction also illuminates the way Caspary’s fiction has been obscured as “women’s mystery fiction,” a category that includes what Symons defined as “Gothic novels with a mild mystery element” (236). Caspary wrote some stories that are closer to female Gothic —“Stranger in the House” (1943) and “Ruth” (1968) both are tales of endangered wives— but she always provided a twist. In” Stranger,” the main villain is a Nazi spy who controls her weak husband, and Caspary used the story to analyze both sexism and racism, supporting her heroine’s black maid against both her husband and his handler. In “Ruth,” the villain is not Ruth’s gangster husband but rather his obsessive housekeeper, who wants him for herself. Furthermore, despite a better choice of man conveniently in the background, Caspary’s protagonists in both stories figure out their situations themselves. At her most Gothic, even with traditional woman characters, Caspary’s work does not fit perfectly into the category of women’s thrillers. Caspary wrote crime fiction as squarely as did Collins, and this focus sets her work apart from romantic suspense novels, such as those Mary Stewart began to publish in the 1950s. Romantic suspense uses the “meet dangerous” to bring together potential lovers who must solve and perhaps survive crime before they can be together. However, what makes them female Gothic rather than crime thrillers is not only the emphasis on a romantic ending but the lack of direct involvement of the major characters in crime. This lack becomes apparent in their conventional social attitude. Contemporary issues may be exploited for plot but are not part of character dynamics. An example that shows the contrast with Caspary is Stewart’s Madame, Will You Talk? (1955). This novel is narrated by Charity, a young widow, who, while on holiday with a woman friend in France, stumbles across an unhappy young boy traveling with his glamorous stepmother. Later she also meets his father, who is briefly suspected as a murderer but quickly exonerated by Charity, who falls in love with the Byronic older man. The plot encompasses a wartime murder done by a German, now in the antiques’ trade, as is the boy’s father. Having crossed paths, the German now has entangled the father with the stepmother, actually his agent, who has engineered the death of the father’s friend and framed him for it to keep him away from the business and possible recognition of himself. Applying Symons’s criteria for a crime novel to romantic suspense highlights where the categories overlap and diverge. There is a professional agent in the book, but he is a minor character who comes in only to wrap up the criminals. It is the amateurs plunged into crime who resolve the mystery. The past murder itself is not unusual or bizarre in the war context, nor are the criminal’s machinations to frame the father. Most telling is the social attitude. The novel is not actually about anti–Semitism but about a “meet dangerous.” The

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antiques-dealer father is threatened not because he is pro–Israel or anti–Nazi but because he was a chance witness. Charity likewise is involved entirely by chance, not by action or choice. She is not endangered by being a new woman; in fact, she’s saved from a dull life like her teacher friend’s by a wealthy new husband. In one of the last scenes of the novel, her friend jokes that Charity’s penchant for “dictatorial” men is why she keeps getting married while the friend does not (178). On the scale of Laura and Bedelia, Charity is a nearer Caspary’s serial bride. On the other hand, the romantic and literary atmosphere of the book’s Provençal locale is very important, constituting a character in itself. Intense settings with literary connections highlighted by quotations are a staple of Stewart’s work. Again, however, the setting is not that of the female protagonist but is part of the meet dangerous. Despite its rich atmosphere, Madame, Will You Talk? is structured as suspense in the service of romance, not as a crime novel. Laura Hunt continues the new woman, a concept coined for the emergence of women with practical skills beyond the home. Mina Harker in Dracula is a prototypical new woman and even uses the term (225). She can take and translate shorthand, although she applies it only for the use of her husband and the other male vampire hunters in the novel. Laura earns her independence; she is described obtaining an endorsement from Waldo to boost her career, even though he is a daunting subject. Women in her world are far more likely to be the models in the ads and the audience for them than the writer that Laura is. Caspary does not turn her into a domestic goddess when Mark joins the scene, since he notes, “we went into the kitchen and opened some cans” (78). The novel ends not with Laura shouting down Waldo’s attempts to undermine her attraction to Mark but with Laura grieving for Waldo, without any indication of what will happen with Mark — Laura, in fact, thinks he is still going to arrest her. One of the noir touches of the novel is its lack of a neat romantic ending, something Caspary would employ in other novels for a final shock, in a considerable departure from Collins’s sometimes overly neat endings. It is the merger of this new-woman character, imperiled by her assertiveness in a man’s world, that reconstructs the female Gothic and the sensational new woman into a modern setting with fresh dynamics. Like Collins, Caspary is using the detective and his clues in the service of rereading social mores in a plot driven by complex characters. The Gothic connection is still important in understanding both Collins and Caspary. Scaggs notes the long-term distinction of the more bizarre crime thriller from the novel of detection, and he traces the crime thriller’s heritage from Gothic fiction through Dickens to sensation fiction and specifically The Woman in White, from which he says the twentieth-century crime thriller evolved “its sensational, and often shockingly frank. depictions of sex and violent death” (106 –107). There is, then, a direct line through Collins’s novel to Caspary’s recasting of the crime thriller’s motivation for murder in the life of a self-supporting woman character.

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It is this connection that qualifies Laura as noir. Scaggs identifies noir novels with the thriller rather than with police novels, since they focus on an outlaw protagonist. He quotes James M. Cain to the effect that whether the criminal is arrested is “the least interesting angle” (109), an opinion that Caspary, as noted in the previous chapter, echoed in discussing how she got started writing mystery novels. The central focus of Laura is not on the title character but on her alleged murder, and its first commentator is Waldo, the murderer. The importance of his narration positions Waldo close to Franklin, who finds out he is the thief, like the killer-narrators of Cain and other noir writers. But even the character of Laura herself has a noir tone in her social transgression by failing to play a traditionally female role. The deliberateness of this in the plot is underscored by the examples of Caspary’s later novels, as discussed in the following two chapters. Laura’s life, as Waldo views it and as society still viewed it in the 1940s, is almost as much a crime against society as Lady Audley’s bigamy. That Preminger could see Laura as a cold woman who keeps a gigolo demonstrates the general social attitude: if she lives like a man, she doesn’t have a woman’s feelings. Caspary very clearly viewed the character of Laura otherwise. New-woman noir offers a protagonist who is not the fatal woman but the woman for whom independence can be fatal, who is targeted for working outside the home. Caspary focused on women who are successfully upwardly mobile through careers, not marriage. When they do marry for traditional reasons and play stereotypical roles, they constitute a different part of new-woman noir as villains. This is especially true of Bedelia, the next novel Caspary wrote. Bedelia in many ways is a prequel to Laura, set in 1913, the era in which Caspary grew up and a time closer to Victorian mores than the following decades of her working life. Bedelia was written during the last years of Caspary’s affair with the still-married Igee, which may have fueled her already developed anger at the Cinderella role offered to women. She discussed the novel with Igee and dedicated the book to him; he produced the British film of the novel in 1946. Although Caspary consulted on the script, she was exasperated by Igee’s decision to reset the plot as contemporary, which she felt missed the point that Bedelia had fewer options for independence than did women in later decades. Caspary felt so strongly about this that she later wrote a screenplay of Bedelia, hoping for an American production* (Secrets 225 –226). The plot of Bedelia has the surface simplicity and hidden complications of many sensation novels as well as crime thrillers. Charlie Horst, after knowing her only a short time, has married a woman he met at a resort. He accepts at face value the life story she has told him of being married before to a penniless but talented painter, widowed unexpectedly, and struggling to make her way. *I have seen the American script and read Ann Warren’s comments on the British script. Unlike the book, in both movie scripts Bedelia is not pregnant and takes poison left for her but not actually pressed upon her by Charlie.

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Charlie finds Bedelia an irresistible combination of good/bad woman. As a widow, she is sexually experienced and seductive, but she is also as passive, dependent, and childlike as he could wish. The novel opens at a Christmas party at the Horst home about a year later. Present at the party is Ben Chaney, a painter who has rented a neighboring house, and other friends who will reappear. Through his pointed comments to Bedelia and his later confession to Charlie, we learn that Ben is a private investigator hired by insurance companies to trace a woman who has repeatedly been the widow of men with large policies, all of whom died in plausible yet unexpected ways. Ben’s leading remarks to Bedelia provoke responses from the first, and when he announces the name of a friend coming for a visit — the brother of one of the deceased husbands— Bedelia pleads with Charlie to go away. Charlie ignores her arguments and tries to ignore his own repeated gastric attacks until one is so severe that Ben colludes with Charlie’s doctor in hiring a nurse to oversee his food and drink. Ben finally levels with Charlie, who then begins to suspect his wife, whose desire to leave and unnecessary lies are inexplicable. To complicate matters further, the doctor confirms that Bedelia is pregnant. After forcing Bedelia to admit at least some of her past, Charlie mixes a drink with the powder he has found among Bedelia’s things and urges her to drink it. She invites him to join her and professes her love for him. Finally he leaves her with it; she drinks the poison, apparently to prove her love, and dies. In the novel, Charlie’s most horrifying revelation is not even that his wife may be trying to poison him but that his sexy yet submissive perfect wife is a deliberately played role. Having scorned Bedelia’s favorite reading, novels of women’s adventures in love, Charlie now finds himself living in one. He is aghast to perceive that from her striking name to her tragic past and cloying present, Bedelia’s script enables her to manipulate men’s expectations of women with deadly efficiency. Bedelia is a complex killer protagonist; instead of driving men to crime and destruction she is a hard-boiled murderer herself, though stewed in women’s fiction rather than crime novels. As a female criminal who seeks to elevate her position, she evokes comment on the ways open to women to get ahead. Bedelia may be, as an early book jacket says, “The Wickedest Woman Who Ever Loved,” yet money cannot be her primary motivation, since in her renewed wifely roles she cannot use her legacies openly. It is the ritual of being chosen, of exercising the power granted to females, that Bedelia seeks again and again as a serial bride. Charlie resists learning the truth, but once he begins to suspect Bedelia of trying to poison him and is therefore forced to accept that the perfect wife is an act, Charlie turns so completely against her that he ultimately presses her to drink the poison he fears was intended for him, even though this murders his child as well. Bedelia’s character inherits her deadly illusions from several villainous

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female protagonists in earlier novels, including the title characters of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1863). Like them, Bedelia comes across as perversely sympathetic, partly because the men in her drama are not exactly heroes and partly because she embodies the dilemma of women who want to live well and have few opportunities beyond marriage to do so. Jane Bakerman accurately called Bedelia “a professional wife” (Clues 48). Emma Bovary marries for security, but her romantic dissatisfaction with the life of a provincial doctor’s wife leads her to lies, adultery, and bankruptcy. Lady Audley, deserted by her husband, abandons her child, takes on a new identity as a governess, and marries into status. When her legal husband returns, she throws him into a well and is exposed by Robert Audley, nephew of her second husband and friend to her first.* Bedelia too is a narrative of unmasking. Bedelia resists having her portrait made yet clings to the black pearl ring she took from one of her many late husbands as fatally as Lady Audley preserves her child’s shoe. Because of Caspary’s explicit interest in Collins’s novels, Bedelia may also be cousin to Lydia Gwilt, Collins’s poisoner, whose revenge drives the plot of Armadale. Lydia, on her own in a sexist and class-ridden England, murders her abusive first husband and manages to escape legal punishment by manipulating the pity of men. Unlike Bedelia, Lydia’s viewpoint comes across vividly in her diary and letters, but the two women both ultimately drink their own poison, undone by fatal husbands whom they can neither reject nor dispatch. Other than Caspary’s outline of The Woman in White, she left no indication of which of Collins’s novels she had read. But she would have recognized Lydia as a type from her own lifetime. Caspary wrote several stinging portraits of women who marry for security and live for illusion — with disastrous results— notably Thelma (1952), narrated by a Caspary-like friend of the title character who has more to occupy her than love affairs. As Caspary put it in drafting her autobiography, “My protagonist is always a career girl unless, as in Thelma, she is the anti-heroine who believes that a woman achieves success only as the wife of a man who supports her in style.” She went on to identify Thelma as a composite of Caspary’s fault-finding and eventually mentally ill sister and another relation who “lamented the failure of her daughter happily married to an artist who hadn’t a lot of money.” Caspary admitted that she understood this type from the inside as a woman she could have been (“Discards,” 576). Thelma marries a man she does not love in order to be given material wealth and security, although she remains romantically attached to a footloose former lover. In the end, Thelma’s long-suffering husband and daughter turn on her rather than falling victim to her machinations permanently. From her *Braddon, perhaps to add sympathy for her title character, included, toward the end, an afterthought plot twist in which George made it out of the well but was so traumatized that he again left England. Lady Audley believed she had killed him and had confessed the murder to Robert.

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close observation of the lives of working women, as reflected in her first four novels, Caspary evolved both a heroine — Laura Hunt, who maintains her independence choices— and a female villain — Bedelia, whose choices are the ones scripted for women. Murder raised the stakes high enough for Caspary to highlight the difference between them. The option of being self-supporting is explored in Bedelia through the character of Ellen, who works at the local newspaper, but the risk she runs of being stigmatized as a mannish old maid is clearly pointed out by Caspary. The novel’s omniscient narrator notes that in another era Ellen would have been considered attractive, but “fashions in women change as drastically as in clothes” so that “nowadays Ellen’s face was considered too long, her head too narrow, the pale brown coronet of braids absurdly out of style” (7). Ellen thinks of herself as “the Tailored Girl and enjoyed wearing suits and shirtwaists,” at her job, but she suffers the candor of Abbie, her stylish friend, who tells her “There’s nothing so abhorrent to the masculine eye as a plaid silk shirtwaist. It simply shrieks old maid” (14). Abbie is the middle-ground character between Ellen and Bedelia, the single woman who is not worried about her status and who may have as full a life as she wishes outside society’s rules. Caspary’s fictional pivot is the trade-offs women face. Ellen, though pitied by Abbie and unloved by Charlie, dresses as she pleases and smokes defiantly. Bedelia gets the man Ellen wants, but she must play the expected role, at least until she kills her latest husband. It is Bedelia who is bitter, who sees men as “rotten” and “beasts” (93), not the disappointed Ellen, who still has a life because she has a job. As Charlie tells her (while Bedelia dies upstairs), “You’re an independent woman because you go out and earn your living.” Ellen retorts, while smoking a cigarette, that she enjoys her life, and comments pointedly, “But men don’t like a girl to be too independent, do they?” Charlie, who is engineering his discovery of his charmingly dependent wife’s body, does not respond (184). In Bedelia Caspary manipulated point of view far differently than in Laura, yet to equally suspenseful effect. Whereas Laura’s narrators reveal their information, much of it incorrect, in Bedelia the sometimes omniscient third-person narration reveals the thoughts of Charlie, Ellen, and later of Ben Chaney, but not of Bedelia. Like Charlie and the others, we never know exactly what Bedelia thinks or feels, only what she chooses or can be pressured to reveal. While this limits the portrait of her, Caspary’s strategy generates much of the novel’s suspense, as we wonder how Bedelia will respond, in the end, to the growing charges against her. But whether she is trying to flee from exposure, attempting to seduce Charlie into believing her, or taking poison at his command, the mask rarely slips, and then only for the briefest of moments, giving us a glimpse of the anger and fear beneath it. Similarly, Ben’s disguise as a painter stays in place until he reveals himself. The plot of Bedelia at first glance seems soundly noir, with a literally fatal

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woman at the center of its crime focus. But Bedelia’s roots are also as deeply planted in sensation fiction as are the origins of Laura. The lack of Bedelia’s viewpoint contrasts with many crime novels of the thirties and forties, in which criminals narrate or we are at least in their viewpoint in third person. Bedelia’s ultimately unknown thoughts echo a similar lack in Lady Audley, keeping both women mysterious. Bedelia’s active crime feels passive because of her deranged addiction to the bride role — a reaction that both embraces the script prescribed for women and at the same time acts violently against it. Caspary herself was as complex as any of her characters. She was moved by ideals affecting workers and women but much more inclined to start a social group than to recruit, organize, or protest. In the thirties she created “the Conversation Club, “ a group of Communist wives who put on social events (Secrets 181). Caspary was aware that she was not going to portray “Rosie the riveters” of World War II but her own sort of professional woman. Yet she remained conscious of working women in all contexts. In her seventies, Caspary for years visited prisoners in the New York Women’s House of Detention, also teaching writing workshops there. When she proposed a nonfiction book based on the lives of those inmates, she typically also proposed to portray the lives of the staff and administration (Women in Crime 17–18). Kathi Maio, in her review of The Secrets of Grown-Ups for Sojourner, called Caspary a “Rebel With a Cause” and accurately assessed her “mild-mannered radicalism.” As she put it, “Caspary is not primarily a feminist. But, rather, a natural and unabashed female rebel” whose stances therefore can be “contradictory” (12). Perhaps it is more precise to say Caspary’s rebellious spirit enabled her to fully enjoy her professional and private lives. An example of this spirit is Caspary’s choice early on to break into business writing for support while beginning to write fiction. In 1910, a generation of Jewish women educated in the United States began to enter colleges and the business world. Caspary might have done either. Her choice of stenography placed her in the business category chosen by about fifteen percent of Jewish women her age (Schloff 97). It was a perfectly acceptable one to her family. Another way to categorize Caspary is that her rebel spirit enabled her to live the life feminism idealizes, of personal choice and independence. It is worth keeping in mind that Gail Collins’s study When Everything Changed (2009), a chronicle of the shift toward a majority of women working outside the home and of a corresponding gradual removal of the barriers against women at work, set its starter date in 1960, eighteen years after the publication of Laura. Caspary’s own choices had already been made and her most ground-breaking novels already written. The historical study’s subtext is the glorification of marriage as a career for women, something Caspary transformed as a theme both sensational and noir, into a murderous feminine mystique. Its counterbalance is the world of working women, who, though not yet the majority, throughout her lifetime constituted an active group. For her books she developed more

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sensitive detectives in Mark McPherson, Joe Collins, and even Ben Chaney, the investigator of Bedelia Horst, who can understand the complexities of new women (or twisted traditional ones) entangled with murder. Laura herself rejected the hard-drinking tough guys and the purely intellectual detectives alike. Mark was neither. In a chapter she was asked to write about him for Otto Penzler’s The Great Detectives (1978), Caspary said, “He is ambivalent, therefore human.... In several editions of the book, the blurb calls him ‘the toughest detective in town.’ This is sales talk. Mark is tough-minded but warm-hearted. Toughness is required in his job but he is too imaginative, too intelligent to play the roughneck” (145). Caspary’s detective and murder target alike descend from Collins’s deeply involved amateur detectives and his passionate heroines who are equally connected to crime whether as sleuth, concealing witness, or criminal. Her settings modernize the workplaces and homes of sensation fiction. Crime thrillers are historically the dark side of mystery fiction, the side that continued to involve the supernatural or at least to evoke it, the side that continued to focus more on generating sensation than in resolving crime in a good-citizen fashion, and that continued to emphasize emotion over reason. Down these strange streets go protagonists who may be terrified amateurs, like the characters of Cornell Woolrich that Caspary admired, or who have crossed the line irrevocably, like Bedelia. The 1944 film of Laura is not a noir revision with a femme fatale, as it has often been billed. The film was one of the first designated noir because of the degree to which Caspary’s treatment of the material was retained. Waldo’s voice-over, which generates the effective character narration of the novel, is one of its most effective devices. His voice is the first we hear, and he speaks for about a minute as the camera explores his luxurious apartment, filled with art objects, finally revealing Mark McPherson looking bemusedly at them. Waldo’s narration voice is used again later as Waldo dines with Mark at Laura’s favorite restaurant and tells her how they met. His voice-over bridges into a flashback scene, then returns again to narrate for about ten minutes during scenes of his jealousy of Laura’s suitor, the painter, and Waldo’s revenge on him — an extended bridge into a scene of his attempt to convince Laura to give up Shelby. Waldo’s voice in the film derives from his narration in the novel, and a similar connection can be made between voice-over in other noir films. Skaggs makes this relationship explicit. Finally, and not exhaustively, the voice-over technique that characterizes much film noir is a direct cinematic adaptation of the first-person narrative voice of the majority of hard-boiled texts, and both techniques emphasize the alienated individual and his or her position in a threatening urban environment [69 –70].

It is not only the renewed focus on crime and criminals that has nineteenthcentury origins; the confessional framing and first-person narrators of noir fiction also recalls Collins. Just as Collins was a significant bridge between Poe

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and Conan Doyle in the development of the detective novel, Caspary’s adaptation of Collins into a modern thriller further injects character-mediated narration derived from Collins’s sensation novels into noir fiction and into film through Preminger’s adaptation of her novel. Through Laura’s form and its influence on the film’s narration, Collins touches film noir as well as noir novels, while Caspary’s adaptation of Collins, as discussed in Chapter 12, led her to other scripts in multiple focus with character-triggered flashbacks. Writing itself is brought into the film by Mark’s omnipresent notebook, which he both adds to and consults. Waldo’s voice returns again in the final scene as we hear the end of his radio broadcast. There are no voice-overs from Mark or Laura, losing the parallel of their narration in the novel.* Laura was also filmed for television in 1955 for the 20th Century–Fox Hour, a version currently unavailable for viewing. As it is described as a “TV adaptation of the 1944 film,” the handling of viewpoint may have been similar. Since it was titled “A Portrait for Murder,” the picture must have played a role, as in the film (“20th Century” 1). Although the screen version of Laura was considered noir at the time of its release, it is not routinely discussed or often even mentioned in critical studies of film noir, perhaps because the title character does not fit well with hardboiled dames or fatal women. An exception is The Dark Page, an illustrated guide subtitled “Books That Inspired American Film Noir 1940 –1949.” This compendium not only includes Caspary’s novel but acknowledges the dialogue Caspary developed with Collins as well. Although Caspary had a long film career, the connection was chiefly through her screen stories, adaptations, and scripts, only a few of which were based on her own novels. Additionally, the British film of Bedelia that Goldsmith produced has long been unavailable. Caspary’s updated novel of testimony in theme and setting is as great a transformation of the casebook as Dracula had been. Her adaptation of Fosco is more deeply integrated than the much later reprise of the same character in Brimstone, discussed in Chapter 13. Waldo seems perfectly a man of the 1940s, not the 1860s, and requires no identification to be enjoyed as a cunning villain. Laura and Mark are contemporary characters as well, even as they continue the class divisions and social tensions Collins explored eight decades earlier. It is Caspary’s dialogue with Collins, both reflecting and contributing to the sensation/noir parallels, that makes Laura’s new-woman noir significant. Caspary wove together sensation theme and character into a police-assembled casebook of a middle-class environment that manages to develop noir elements with a fresh twist. This is an achievement few other novelists have succeeded in making. It is neither simply an adaptation nor simply a casebook novel of the Collins type but both, adding up to a successfully contemporary crime thriller. *In a script not used, both Mark and Laura had voice-over narrations, in parallel with Waldo’s voice that still introduces the film (Preminger 77).

CHAPTER 11

After Laura Caspary’s Other Casebook Novels Vera Caspary’s writing of Laura as a casebook novel in witnessing documents had a permanent effect on her own mysteries. Caspary not only adapted Collins’s multiple focus framed as statements, as addressed in the preceding pages, but by continuing to adapt Collins and by expanding her use of multiple focus, she became an important writer of testimonial mysteries in her own right as well as an example of the range of multiple focus in midcentury. Like Collins, she produced three novels written entirely in documents; also in parallel to his work, she wrote novels with counterpointed sections in documents. This chapter focuses on Stranger Than Truth (1946), written entirely in witnessing documents, and her much later novel The Secret of Elizabeth (1979), which again built on framed multiple focus and paid explicit homage to Collins. This pattern, of two novels of testimony written in the same decade and one written at the end of her career, is strongly reminiscent of Collins’s own three novels of testimony, two published eight years apart in the 1860s and one in 1888. Given Caspary’s continued referencing of Collins, this parallel looks deliberate rather than coincidental. If so, the pattern suggests that Caspary had an overview of Collins’s career. As in Laura, Caspary adapted plot and characterization as well as the casebook structure from Collins to shape material from her own life for Stranger. A consideration of these novels in detail alongside Laura further details how Caspary adapted Collins’s structure by continuing to simplify the number and kinds of narrators and making women characters narrators as well as victims. Finally, these novels deliberately underscore Caspary’s preference for the character-driven mystery, particularly Collins’s novel of Gothic detection, The Woman in White, which she explicitly adapted three times, and The Moonstone, which she also referenced for character and structure. In Stranger Than Truth, Caspary again used her own career in advertising and magazine editing for material, as she had done in Laura. Like her protagonist and his colleagues in Truth, Caspary in the 1920s wrote correspondence 140

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courses, including the one for learning ballet through the mail noted earlier. Truth was written not only as satire of her advertising jobs but was also a story Caspary had long wanted to tell in retribution. Bryne MacFadden was Caspary’s assistant when she edited Dance Magazine, published by Bernarr McFadden, Bryne’s father, a man much odder than fiction. As a health fetishist who promoted his lifestyle in his publishing, MacFadden allowed no deviations from his routines. He forced his daughter to exercise vigorously to strengthen her heart and because her illness could damage his lucrative business in “cures,” discouraged her from seeking medical treatment for a chronic cough that turned out to be tuberculosis. When Bryne grew weaker and at last began to hemorrhage, she asked Caspary to tell her father. He responded by cutting off Bryne’s income so that she could not pay for a doctor. He did not attend her funeral, and her sisters could not forgive him (Secrets 97–103). Caspary made one direct reference to McFadden in the book, comparing Noble Barclay’s publications to his. Barclay describes how he deliberately set out to compete with McFadden and undersold him. On the whole, however, the McFadden references now need explication, leaving the book more generally a satire of magazines and advertising, subjects Caspary addressed at length in writing The Secrets of Grownups. The acidic comments of Lola Manfred, one of the editors, sound a good deal like Caspary’s when she wrote about her early day jobs. In Stranger Than Truth the MacFadden story merged with the form and some aspects of characterization from The Woman in White. McFadden was transformed into the plagiarist publisher of a series of “True” magazines—True Crime, True Romance, and so on, who has made his reputation with a purloined self-help book, ironically titled My Life Is Truth. The publisher, Noble Barclay, connives even at murder to keep both his empire and his persona intact. He dominates Eleanor, his daughter, who accurately suspects him of unknown crimes. Comic relief is provided by a fanatically devoted secretary’s testimonial, and the father’s secret is revealed by an alcoholic Greenwich Village poet, also an editor, who has the best lines in the book. The comic secretary recalls Eliza Michelson from Woman, who defended Fosco against all evidence, and Drusilla Clack, her more comic successor, similarly besotted with Godfrey Ablewhite in The Moonstone. The Truth offices described in the novel draw their details directly from the McFadden offices that Caspary knew well. Lola, the former poet, has a bottle painted to look as if it were full of milk instead of gin; its original was stashed in the office where Caspary worked, where even staff members’ glasses were derided as “eye crutches” (Secrets 91–92). Caspary shifted away from Bryne’s illness but kept the father as principal villain, who has tried to marry off his repressed daughter to his henchman and even tries to blame her for murder. Stranger Than Truth is told in seven parts, three of them by John Miles Ansell, the protagonist, a magazine writer in love with the publisher’s daughter.

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The other parts are narrated by the hostile witness Grace Eccles, secretary to Nobel Barclay; by Eleanor, Barclay’s daughter; and by Lola Manfred, the editor and former poet who knows literally where the bodies are buried. The seventh part is told in letters between John and Eleanor, a type of ending Collins had used as early as Basil. Caspary follows Collins in having no narration by the villains but again departs from Collins in giving the endangered woman her say and making the narrators writers of varying sorts. Truth adapts character dynamics of both Collins’ two great novels of testimony. John, employed by the father of the woman he loves, and whose secret he has stumbled across, is in much the same position as Walter Hartright, the drawing master in love with his upper-class pupil in The Woman in White. Each woman is enmeshed with a man whose secret is worth killing for — with Laura Fairlie, it is her titled husband’s illegitimacy; for Eleanor Barclay, it is her father’s secret plagiarism and the murder he has engineered. Both plots turned on switched identities, which Caspary here has elaborately recast. Homer Peck, the real author of Barclay’s best-selling self-help book, uses the name Warren G. Wilson, a pseudonym he created for a mail-order course, to blackmail Barclay and socialize with Eleanor, while Barclay, who is anything but noble, has falsely published Peck’s book as his own and built his empire on his own reputation for truth. Sorting out who really wrote the books and identifying Peck as Wilson involves much of the book’s detection. Eleanor’s father has attempted to marry her to a cad, just as Laura Fairlie’s uncle does not protect her from her husband’s machinations and Rachel Verinder becomes engaged to the two-faced Ablewhite. Eleanor, like Rachel, has made and broken off an engagement. Collins had pulled back from having Glyde and Fosco actually kill Anne Catherick; instead, she dies fortuitously. Caspary, however, did not hesitate. Both Peck and Lola are murdered by Ed Munn, Barclay’s assistant, to cover up past crimes. Particular Collins parallels in Truth also unfold around the character of Grace Eccles, Barclay’s worshipful secretary. After adapting Fosco into Waldo, Caspary here adapted Collins’s comic spinster in all her ludicrousness, transposing her at the same time from the Victorian world of women’s charities and religious extremism into Caspary’s familiar territory of women at work. As with Fosco/Waldo, she made the names— Clack/Eccles— sound somewhat alike. The statement of Miss Eccles has been solicited by John, as was the case with minor characters’ statements in both The Woman in White (by Walter Hartright) and The Moonstone (by Franklin Blake). Truth’s statements are closer to Collins’s creation of the exchange between Franklin and Miss Clack in the latter novel, further confirmation, as is the character, that Caspary had read The Moonstone equally closely. Franklin has to assure Drusilla Clack that nothing will be changed in her statement and has to fend off many extracts from religious tracts (such as “Satan under the Tea Table”) that she wishes to attach to her testimony. Collins appended footnotes in which Blake explains this (235 –

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236). In Truth, John also attaches a footnote explaining that “Miss Eccles’ confession was written at my request. I had to flatter her extensively to get her to do it, and I have not yet told her why I wanted her version of the story” (63). Grace Eccles, like Drusilla Clack, is a comic spinster who sees more than she understands and, in defending her idol and employer, unwittingly provides evidence against him. Although Caspary did not adapt the details of Drusilla’s testimony, she recast the character with contemporary actions but kept the tenor of her speech very similar. Grace, like Drusilla, interacts with a young woman who has secrets and tries in vain to persuade her to reveal them. Here, however, instead of Drusilla pressing tracts on Lady Verinder and Rachel, Grace locks herself in the women’s room with Eleanor and initiates a truth-telling session of the sort she learned from the duplicitous Barclay. But although Grace confesses to knowing about Warren G. Wilson, Eleanor will not tell what she knows about the murdered man. Like Drusilla Clack, Grace Eccles’s speech is full of self-justifying and selfcongratulatory comments that have nothing to do with the plot except to further demonstrate her blindness to what is actually happening. Here are two such parallel examples. In the first, Drusilla explains how she has brought herself to accept money from Franklin Blake for writing this account. In the second, Grace twists her suspicions of Barclay and Eleanor into self-criticism: I am to feel myself compensated by a new laceration, in the shape of Mr [sic] Blake’s cheque. My nature is weak. It cost me a hard struggle, before Christian humility conquered sinful pride, and self-denial accepted the cheque [235]. My mind was riddled with questions that had no right to enter that holy ground. Doubtless I was at fault. Somewhere in my sly psyche was buried an untruth which I had not the courage to force out and boldly face [83].

Both women are equally ridiculous, and their excessive admiration signals the villainous character of the men they defend. Drusilla’s involvement in the “Mother’s Benevolent Society,” which hastens to make over trousers for sons so that drunken fathers cannot pawn them again to buy liquor, is surely equaled by Grace’s confession that Barclay’s truth-sharing cured of her “the tortures of constipation” (64), while her first truth-sharing session is listening to a blind girl’s confession of illicit sex with a married man (the girl recovers her sight and finds a husband of her own) (66). Finally, neither Drusilla nor Grace realize what they know, blinded as they are by their worship of the villain. Grace, who takes care of Barclay’s personal checkbook, admires him for the private charity he shows in giving away two thousand dollars in cash each month. We can deduce along with Miles that this is blackmail money, especially when it stops after Wilson’s murder, but Grace praises his “secret philanthropies” (69). Caspary interspersed shorter plot documents within the characters’ narration, much as Collins did. The more important of these are an unsolved crime article by Miles whose rejection by Barclay is the first clue. Lola’s later written

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account, “A Short History of Homer Peck,” is her own testimony about the background to the present situation and reads formally as a narrative with its own brief plot letters within the section. Shorter, typical plot documents include standards such as telegrams, newspaper headlines, and office memos. Caspary also tagged the “nervous lady” who had visited the murdered Peck, or Wilson, in his hotel room as “the lady in plaid” (25), since witnesses on the scene cannot agree on anything about her except her plaid coat. The phrase is repeated to establish it, just Collins did in the opening chapters of The Woman in White (Truth 36) and as Caspary had done in “The Murder in the Stork Club” with “the lady in mink.” The character of Noble Barclay partakes to some degree of the villains of both The Woman in White and The Moonstone, but again, it is Collins’s first novel of testimony that Caspary adapts most closely. Like Godfrey Ablewhite in The Moonstone, Barclay shows a pious and devout public face, which he uses to conceal private misdeeds. Barclay constantly quotes his own book to advantage. When John challenges the suppression of his story about Wilson’s murder for Truth in Crime Magazine, Barclay presses John to tell the “truth”— that his small stature makes his jealous of big men. Humiliated, John backs off. Barclay’s crippled state at the end of the novel and Eleanor’s pity for him perhaps recall Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre, but the circumstances also prefigure The Man Who Loved His Wife, Caspary’s later novel, discussed in the following chapter, in which a woman deals with a disabled man who is difficult to the point of danger. But ultimately Barclay is closer to Sir Percival Glyde in The Woman in White. Like him, Barclay has a henchman who is worse than himself, the repulsive Ed Munn, who expects to be rewarded not only with cash but with Eleanor for committing Barclay’s crimes. Like Glyde, Barclay’s secret would ruin him, and he similarly tries to keep his hands clean even while colluding in murder. His social status, like Glyde’s, is as crucial a motive as money. Caspary interwove both of Collins’s best novels of testimony, taking characterization and structure from both. Yet just as in Laura, Caspary also created characters that do not fit into Collins’s universe. Both the involved and attractive policeman and the independent advertising woman were witnesses from Caspary’s world. In Stranger, while still reprising Drusilla Clack and playing off plot from Woman and The Moonstone, Caspary also created a breezy hero in John Miles Ansell and a tough dame in Lola Manfred, neither of whom are Collins-esque but who make productive narrators. Johnny’s light tone, as well as Lola’s sarcasm, gives the novel a less noir atmosphere than in Laura. As the detective and the editorial character, his voice opens the book and his letter to Eleanor closes it. He is closer in character to Joe Collins in “The Murder in the Stork Club” than to the professional cop Mark McPherson in his insouciant response to his own attempted murder and

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the final revelation that Eleanor’s father was behind two deaths. Johnny is a man of both action and words. He kisses his middle-aged secretary, saying “Kaufman, old girl, you’re tops” (9); describes Grace Eccles’s hair as looking like “carved mahogany” (50); and calls Barclay’s Truth articles “fakes perpetrated in his name” (317). Like Caspary and Laura Hunt, he does not care much for detective novels because of their quick explanations of motive. Even if I believed that seven million dollars had been hidden in the hollow leg of an antique chair or that the Siamese emeralds were worth twelve deaths, I’d want to know more about the things that went on in the murderer’s mind when he dipped the arrow into that rare East Indian poison [252].

Caspary used Johnny to restate her focus, in the Collins tradition, on characterdriven mysteries. Lola, also an editor and a former bohemian “poetess,” is heard in reported conversations with John and Eleanor and is the author of the chapter on Homer Peck, whose sweetheart she had been. She has some of the book’s best oneliners, with the dry sarcasm and self-deprecation typical of Caspary’s writing about herself. Lola, once a slim Greenwich Village writer, is now an overweight alcoholic. She has no illusions about her state and describes her own face as looking like “Very, very old Gorgonzola made from the milk of scrofulous goats” (103). At lunch with John at the Algonquin she comments, “When I started coming here skirts were so short that if a breeze blew your bra showed.” A stream of former lovers come by their table and Lola savages them as soon as they leave. Lola is the classic mystery novel character who knows too much and becomes a victim, but she is there not only to perform a role but also to deliver some of the book’s most memorable comments. In John and Lola as well as Laura and Mark, Caspary created characters from her own time and milieu to testify in the form Collins had refined more than eight decades before. That she did so while also adapting character and plot from his novels set her apart from most others who have reprised Collins’s form, plots, and characters. Of those I have found who deliberately follow the Collins method, only Dorothy Sayers reset Collins’s form so completely in her own time, with much less reworking of material from Collins’s novels. Caspary also borrowed from both Woman and The Moonstone for both novels. She would be the premier adapter of Collins even without having written the third novel. In 1948 Caspary wrote a script version of Stranger Than Truth, which was never produced. She of course dropped the written casebook frame, as Collins had done in the scripts from his novels of testimony. Yet Caspary had become as playful with form and frames as Collins had been, even in film. She suggested medium and long shots of the Truth office that “frame” various scenes. She retained Grace Eccles, a bold choice given that films of The Moonstone generally cut most of Drusilla Clack’s material or remove her altogether. Caspary’s handling of the conclusion is particularly interesting in terms of frame. A series of cinema vignettes show the various characters n their offices.

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A voice-over begins, which turns out to be Johnny on a microphone speaking into the intercom. At first he speaks omnisciently about secrets, then personally to Eleanor. The camera picks out characters listening, as well as their titles on their plate glass door windows, “ELEANOR BARCLAY, Editor, TRUTH AND LOVE” (Screenplay 153). A series of camera dissolves also show poor people on a bench in the Reception Room, presumably waiting for help from the master, a newsstand selling the magazines, the proud display of My Life Is Truth in reception with a spotlight on the number of copies sold, circulation charts in an office, foreign circulation figures in the back of the magazine, and an expose of Barclay’s consulting doctor. Some of these reprise earlier scenes (153 –155). These largely written pieces of evidence lead to the reemergence of Lola’s manuscript, which Eleanor pulls out of a drawer and gives to John in the last shot (156). Caspary had merged the multiple-focus technique she mastered from reading Collins with the handling of her novel for Laura and her other play and screen experience to play with framing in film herself, as she would do in other projects.

Elizabeth X and The Grand Old Master In 1979, after publishing more than a dozen other novels as well as writing film scripts and adaptations, many of them utilizing multiple viewpoints and layered narration, Caspary returned toward the end of her career to her affection for Collins, particularly The Woman in White, which she adapted for a third time into a contemporary mystery. In The Secret of Elizabeth (also sometimes titled Elizabeth X or The Mystery of Elizabeth), she again told a novel in multiple first-person narrations that make up a casebook for solution. Five narrators in nine narratives tell what they know or surmise, and typically, most are principal characters whose correct and incorrect surmises prolong suspense. The plot of Collins’s first novel of testimony here receives its closest adaptation by Caspary. Elizabeth appeared the same year as Caspary’s autobiography, in which Caspary for the first time directly acknowledged in print her use of the casebook form for Laura. Elizabeth, as well as the autobiography, were vehicles for Caspary to separate herself again from the mainstream of twentieth-century detective novels. It is clear in both texts that Caspary still prefers Collins’s emphasis on character to plot-heavy puzzle narratives, and in both books she places herself in Collins’s company rather than among her nearer contemporaries. She used two of the novel’s narrators to dramatize this distinction, its casebook editor and his rival for Elizabeth. The editorial narrator of Elizabeth is Chauncey Greenleaf, the child of a mystery-writing mother whose detective, “McDonald Wolfe,” (149), starred in such titles as “The Grecian Urn Mystery” (29) and “The Chinese Tea Mystery” (30). Chauncey has become a professor

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of literature whose dissertation was on The Significance of Mystery in the Literature of the XIXth Century, a subject of his further monographs (9). This background makes him well acquainted with Wilkie Collins, whom he mentions in the second paragraph of the book, as he first hears about the mysterious Elizabeth from a friend while on a commuter train: Long before we reached Grand Central Station, I sensed the impending excitement of a true mystery, and have since seen it develop into a drama as remarkable and as convoluted as the tales of that grand old master, Wilkie Collins. What a stew he would have concocted of its ingredients: how his fantasy would have larded the dish with juicy morsels of suspense — spiced it with savory hints and conjectures, added the luscious fruits of hope and the acid taste of horror [10].

The detailed references to The Woman in White that follow are highly recognizable, but Caspary clearly wanted to make her third referencing of this text unmistakable. Chauncey has tried to write contemporary mysteries but has failed, as Caspary felt she was failing before discovering Collins. In her autobiography, Caspary had described how Collins’ character-centered structure gave her the key she needed to write her breakthrough book, Laura (Secrets 195). Chauncey too decides to “retreat happily to my XIXth century mentors” (10). Caspary changed Chauncey Greenleaf ’s surname from Howell (“Elizabeth Drafts” 54), which made a half-anagram of Wilkie Collins. Chauncey is a complex reprise of Count Fosco via Waldo Lydecker. Chauncey is thin, like Clifton Webb, who played Waldo on screen. Like Fosco/Waldo, he is the oldest principal character and the most educated and worldly. Chauncey tells us that he grew up in artistic circles and both he and his ex-wife had sexual experience before they married (23). Like Waldo, he appreciates art and esthetics. The elision of Fosco/Waldo/Chauncey is emphasized in Caspary’s outline notes. She says “E is Chauncey’s Laura” (Folder 18). Marian Halcombe has been revised into Kate, as a mother figure and codetective, so it is Elizabeth/Laura that Chauncey/ Waldo/Fosco admires, loves, protects, and finally, for one night, beds. Caspary also embodied her own rejection of hard-boiled detectives through the character of Richard Shannon, who identifies with Marlowe, Spade, and Bond (and incongruously, Poirot) (132). Caspary originally included Sherlock Holmes in his list but changed him for Philip Marlowe (Elizabeth Drafts 139). Rick proves an overly hard-boiled hero who romances Elizabeth aggressively in order to scoop her story. When she discovers his motives, he promises not to write about her, but the story is too good to resist and he finally files it. As any reader of Caspary might expect, tough guy Richard does not get the girl. He is the novel’s detective, however, and uncovers Elizabeth’s real identity as Gloria Dixon, the daughter of a conservative congressman from Topeka, as well as exposing a subplot involving her governess, a light-skinned black woman whose needy family kept her from pursuing an academic career (a partial parallel to Solaria Cox in The White Girl). Miss Price was Elizabeth’s governess, a position

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Caspary has Richard associate with “a Brontë sister or Daphne du Maurier” (137). Miss Price is now the secret mistress of Elizabeth/Gloria’s hypocritical father. Of Caspary’s editorial characters, Chauncey is the most controlling. He prefaces each section other than Elizabeth’s notebook entries with his own comments on how he came to solicit or obtain the following information except when he withholds information for suspense. Chapter 5, “The Waldorf Letters,” is an epistolary chapter consisting of letters by Abraham Abel to his wife. This whole chapter is part of a red-herring subplot in which Elizabeth has been claimed as the fiancée of Hildebrandt, a wealthy and more than slightly deranged man, who abducts her and keeps her prisoner in a luxury suite. She escapes with the help of Abel, his assistant, who recounts the episode to his wife. At the end of the chapter Chauncey reveals that the wife gave him the letters after Abel’s suspicious death. This use of a set of letters discovered by the editorial character is reminiscent of Sayers’s The Documents in the Case, which Caspary certainly could have seen. The letters chapter is not the only instance of Chauncey stringing out his material for suspense. He recounts the finding of Elizabeth to us in two installments, first as he heard it and later as he presents Elizabeth’s recall of her life in two parts, as she expressed it, one in her written statement and one in recounted speech. Early in the book Chauncey makes a Waldo-like confession that he has not only solicited and put together the casebook — some of which was told to him by the Royces, some of which he witnessed — but also dramatized some of it. Much of it Kate told me afterwards; some was observed and certain details, I confess, were born of my imagination and knowledge of the persons involved, but no more than is needed in order to give character to their actions and speech and to add a bit of sauce to the bare bones of reality [18].

He also, like his predecessors John Ansell and Mark McPherson as well as Franklin Blake and Walter Hartright, has to deal with witnesses whose testimony goes against the grain. He regrets having asked Rick Shannon to write an account but claims that “Although I fear that he took my advice too literally, I have not changed, deleted nor added so much as a comma, and do not take responsibility for what follows” (113). Some of Caspary’s draft section titles for the book were more similar to Collins’s subheads than to the more streamlined section heads that appear in the book. These included “I — The Mystery Introduced by Chauncey Greenleaf,” now simplified to “The Mystery.” Other were streamlined by setting the narrator’s name below the subhead in an authorial manner, and several sections were also added (Elizabeth Drafts 1). Caspary also outlined the book in narrator sections much as she had originally outlined The Woman in White nearly four decades earlier (Elizabeth Drafts). Elizabeth, the title character, is first encountered in a direct and deliberate

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parallel to the appearance of Collins’s doppelganger character, Anne Catherick, in his first novel of testimony. As Kate and Allan Royce, Chauncey’s neighbors, drive home on a “a chill and windy night at the dark of the moon” (11), they catch a glimpse of a white figure. “Among the dense foliage a white shape moved like a spectre, indistinct at first, then clearly seen, hidden again by thick brush. After the car had rounded a curve, the headlights picked out a girl in a white dress” (12). The deliberately Gothic language evokes Collins’s novel as well as the isolated setting, although the details are modern (her repeatedly described white dress, for instance, turns out to be a linen Cardin model) (50). The couple debate what to do with the exhausted, shivering girl. Kate, whose baby (named Elizabeth) has recently died, adopts the girl and takes her home as a surrogate daughter. The young woman in white suffers from amnesia, which blocks out her past entirely. As the Royces seek her identity through local police, three different claimants eventually arrive: the Riordans, who identify her as their daughter; the owner of a private asylum, Dr. Hyde, who claims her as a runaway patient; and Hildebrandt, the millionaire, who declares that she is his kidnapped fiancée. Two of these are red herrings that Elizabeth — with the help of Kate, Chauncey, and Rick, the reporter who courts her — must sort out. They finally learn that Elizabeth is the daughter of a fanatically prudish politician who has killed the cousin Elizabeth was about to have sex with and then locked her up in a sanitarium to keep her from testifying against him. Elizabeth’s narratives at first consist of a notebook she has been asked to keep by a psychiatrist the Royces find for her, recording whatever fragments she remembers. Her notebook entries, which in themselves mean little to her but help her to sort out the identities offered to her, verge on stream of consciousness, creating a mix of the modern interior monologues that largely replaced framed testimony with the more overtly framed narratives modeled on Collins’s novels in documents. Chauncey and Kate also testify, and the plot letters from Abel shed distracting light on Hildebrandt’s motives, while Rick, pursuing Elizabeth personally and professionally, also contributes to the statements. As in Laura and Stranger Than Truth, some narrators are professional writers or at least have writing experience. In parallel to Laura Hunt, Elizabeth is a thoroughly updated woman in white. Her new friends’ conjectures about what has triggered her amnesia include rape and revolutionary violence. Elizabeth swears, gets angry enough to throw things, and makes out with Richard Shannon, the reporter, who then optimistically buys condoms. She finally remembers having been about to make love with her cousin just before her father discovered them together. Her past turns out to be as sensational as Collins’s tale of asylum imprisonment and secret brotherhoods. Elizabeth’s rigid father had condemned her free-living mother for not having been a virgin, and Elizabeth has been raised on an antisex campaign by him. This has been balanced by time spent with her mother in

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Europe where “casual sex relationships were commonplace, expected, often a topic for gossip” (174), as though Elizabeth has one foot in the nineteenth century and one in the twentieth. The role of mental illness is similarly doubled. While the sinister threat of asylum confinement is repeated for Elizabeth, Caspary also introduces the female psychiatrist, Dr. Tisch, who helps Elizabeth recover her memories. Elizabeth, like Anne Catherick, appears, disappears, and reappears several times. At first she is abducted by the abusive man who claims she is his lost fiancée, then she escapes him and reappears at Chauncey’s house. As her memories return, she recalls being incarcerated in an asylum by her father, who intends to send her back there to cover his crime. She thus has been kidnapped twice and escaped twice. Caspary has combined both the privileged Laura Fairlie and the fey Anne Catherick into the same character while not only doubling the doctors but calling one “Hyde,” which leads the rest of the characters immediately to dub him Dr. Jekyll. Elizabeth’s escape from the sanitarium where her father had locked her up and injected her with mind-altering drugs is so close a parallel that Caspary must have reread Collins’s novel. In Woman, Walter narrates how Marian bribed a nurse at the asylum to release Laura/Anne to her. The nurse was engaged and she and her future husband were saving to open a business. Marian paid her four hundred pounds to compensate her for the loss of employment that would likely result from Laura’s escape. Elizabeth had to rescue herself by making friends with a nurse’s aid, also about to be married and working to pay for her trousseau. Elizabeth/Gloria (checked in under the name Grace Dearborn) has no money to bribe the woman, but she does have the designer clothes she had packed to take to Europe when she was abducted instead. She offers the woman her clothing in exchange for drugging the guard, smuggling out Elizabeth, and driving her to a bus stop. At that point her escape breaks down for lack of help, and she is rescued by Kate and her husband. The repeated details of the caretaker being engaged and being given what she was otherwise saving for makes the parallel deliberate. Again, however, Caspary updated the details to fit her own novel. The asylum plot, as well as Elizabeth’s abduction by the millionaire, adapted the Anne Catherick/Laura Fairlie incarcerations. In the asylum Elizabeth is given hallucinogenic drugs that distort her perception, in parallel to Laurie Fairlie’s becoming childlike and passive from her imprisonment. While characters are combined in Elizabeth, the villains remain doubled. Hildebrandt and Elizabeth’s two-faced father evoke both Percival Glyde and Godfrey Ablewhite, both outwardly spotless but inwardly corrupt. Both of them, further paralleling the team of Glyde and Fosco, kidnap her and lock her up. Like Waldo, Hildebrandt has to have whatever he covets. When Kate will not sell him the pre–Columbian figure that he admires, he steals it and leaves a check behind.

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As Elizabeth’s new friends speculate on what has caused her traumatic amnesia, much is made of whether Laura is a virgin, which turns out still to be the case. At some points it seems she will lose her virginity with Rick, but Elizabeth takes after her liberated mother. The middle-aged Chauncey has been in love with Elizabeth from the first. When she is pursued by the asylum director, Chauncey offers to marry her to protect her. Chauncey is the only man in the present who is not trying to use her — and she sleeps with him before disappearing for a third and final time back into her mother’s cosmopolitan world. Caspary’s third novel in witnessing testimony is more successful than Collins’s The Legacy of Cain, partly because of Caspary’s having both simplified and updated The Woman in White into a contemporary mystery. There is a central secret, which is detected in a quirky way by the reporter turned sleuth who also wants to bed Elizabeth, and the editorial narrator is thoroughly involved, as he was in Collins’s first casebook novels and in Caspary’s first two as well. The novel is thinnest in the voice of Chauncey, who never comes as fully to life as those editors of her previous novels of testimony, and again the importance of this character to the casebook form is illustrated. Other voices in the novel, especially Elizabeth/Gloria’s dramatic passages and Rick Shannon’s self-justifications, are much more realized in character voice and therefore mediate more, as their statements both characterize them and color what they include and leave out. Caspary’s close adherence to Collins’s novel, though it gives her plot and character to play with, also confines her in a way her other two novels of testimony did not. Laura, for all its reprise of Fosco and an endangered woman loved by a man out of her class, stands entirely on its own. Stranger Than Truth adapted as much material from Caspary’s working life as from Collins, borrowing, as for Laura, chiefly the form, along with one character. Elizabeth, which intends to directly pay homage to Collins, is overcomplicated by the elaborate reprise of character and situation, with combined, doubled, and redoubled characters. Ultimately, Caspary makes the book her own by trimming and reshaping the form as she had done before, but Elizabeth is not as smooth a novel simply because it is a closer adaptation of The Woman in White in content as well as in form. Caspary included more narrators and narratives and adapted major scenes and ingredients from Woman, such as the finding of the woman in white, the asylum escape, switched identities, and multiple villains. The intricate plot came less naturally to Caspary than her streamlined versions had previously done. Caspary’s two later novels in testimonial documents, taken with Laura, reveal her method in adapting Collins’s structure. One major change in structure is that Caspary, even in Elizabeth, simplified both the number and kinds of narrators and shifted narration to the main characters. The Woman in White has ten narratives by seven narrators. Three are principals— Walter, Marian, and Fosco. The other four are peripheral characters— the cook, the housekeeper,

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Laura’s uncle, and Anne Catherick’s mother. The Moonstone is told in thirteen sections by ten narrators (eleven if Rosanna Spearman’s long letter is counted as a section). Again, the majority, nine, are minor characters in the plot, although their testimony is pivotal. Here peripheral characters describe the actions of the principals, only two of whom relate their own stories, in the unsigned family document concerning the theft of the Moonstone and in two narratives by Franklin Blake. Caspary began her adaptation of Collins by creating only four sections by three narrators in Laura, all of whom are principal characters. In Stranger Than Truth, she expanded this to seven narratives by four characters. Only one is peripheral, while three are principals in the action. For The Secret of Elizabeth, she used nine sections by five narrators, only two of whom can be said to be peripheral. Caspary reduced both the number of overall sections and narrators chiefly by focusing more on the main characters to tell the story. In all three of her novels in testimony, she included characters who were professional writers, from copywriter Laura Hunt to magazine writers Eleanor and John to academic writer Chauncey. All of her editorial narrators— Mark, John, and Chauncey — write professionally. A second major narrational alteration Caspary made in her first Collins adaptation also appears in all three. In Caspary’s novels, the woman who is victimized testifies directly. Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick, the doubles who are menaced in The Woman in White, are not narrators. Rachel Verinder, whose withheld evidence complicates The Moonstone, does not narrate any section of it (though Rosanna is allowed her say). But Laura Hunt, Eleanor Barclay, and Elizabeth/Gloria Dixon do testify to their own experiences, as well as being described and quoted by other characters. It is entirely typical of Caspary, in whose books murder became a metaphor for the abuse women experienced in the workplace and home, to make the most directly threatened women narrators. Finally, these two novels, along with Laura, highlight Caspary’s lasting fascination with The Woman in White, Collins’s most juridical and overly structured novel of testimony. Internal evidence, especially the character of Grace Eccles, indicates that Caspary read The Moonstone closely as well, but it is to the plot, character, and theme of The Woman in White that she returned again and again. Certainly that novel’s issues of control of money, marriage, and identity resonate with Caspary’s own themes. Although many critics have preferred the smoother, more modern-feeling monologues of The Moonstone, Caspary harked back to the first and most overt novel of testimony, drawing our attention back as well to the achievement of that “grand old master,” Wilkie Collins.

CHAPTER 12

Caspary Continues to Apply Multiple Focus Between Laura and Stranger Than Truth, Caspary had written a more typically twentieth-century narrative in multiple third-person viewpoints in Bedelia. That novel moves from the minds of Ben, the insurance detective, to Ellen, the working woman who loves Charlie, and to Charlie, the husband of the black widow. Though typical of much midcentury fictional technique, this use of three third-person viewpoints was a more streamlined approach for Caspary. In her first two novels she had tracked with the female protagonists in third person, and in Thicker Than Water she used an omniscient view of a large cast of characters. After Stranger, the character viewpoints Caspary created continue to show the lasting effects of her casebook novels. She mostly frequently used some variant of multiple focus, in third or first person, and applied peripheral framing narrators who also act as editorial characters; she wrote two novels with counterpointed documents— the diary entries that reverse the usual effect of revealing secrets in The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966) and the recovered stolen “Confession” manuscript and tape recording in Final Portrait (1971). What Caspary adopted permanently from Collins’s novels of testimony was the interplay of character viewpoints, which she applied both with and without framing. Her use of peripheral narrators whose viewpoints contrast with the principal characters is an extension of this interplay. Caspary also explored conflicting multiple narratives in her film work for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Les Girls (1957). The novel that followed Stranger Than Truth, The Weeping and the Laughter (1950), is an intermediate step toward her further narrative framing yet illustrates her continued interest in multiple focus. Weeping uses third person to dip into the viewpoints of a variety of characters. But the novel is sectioned, and each segment focuses around either the character of Nat Volck, a young doctor who is having a hard time adjusting to postwar life in California, and several characters associated with him, or around Emmy Arkwright, a clothing 153

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designer who supports her brother, sister-in-law, and mother in the style to which they are accustomed. Third-person narrative from their viewpoints clusters around her, just as it does around Nat. Emmy may have tried to kill herself, although she claims that someone tried to kill her. Nat treats her and later has something of a flirtation with her. At the beginning of the novel the sectioning has the effect of multiple focus, even though we are lightly informed of the viewpoints of many characters and Emmy herself is unconscious during several sections. The shift in focus is not between Nat and Emmy’s viewpoints but between their worlds. Emmy is entangled with demanding relatives who live off her work and feel free to criticize her as well as her business partner and erstwhile fiancée. Nat’s circle is much smaller but no less entangling, as he constantly compares himself to the ambitious doctors he has met, especially his friend and partner and the friend’s wife, Louise, who perceives Nat’s unhappiness more than anyone else. As their lives intertwine, with Nat first treating and then to an extent befriending and romancing Emmy, Nat appears in sections that are chiefly focused on Emmy and her circle and occasionally vice-versa, although the novel remains centered on Emmy. Scenes between Nat and Emmy alternate their viewpoints within the scene. Emmy continues, after Laura Hunt, in the vein of the Caspary protagonists who are distinctly upper-class working women. Emmy’s family no longer has money and she supports the whole group by designing leisure wear, but she feels both creatively unsatisfied and guilty at not being womanly by virtue of her work. The plot reads as though Caspary considered turning it into a murder mystery but changed her mind and made it a psychological novel instead. One reason may be that it explores some unfinished ground from previous novels. Like Solaria Cox, Emmy has grand dreams and a muddled present, including being romantically unhappy. Although Emmy claims that someone has tried to kill her and likely suspects exist, here Caspary rejects the sensational ending her publisher imposed on The White Girl in favor of a realistic one for Emmy and Nat. Emmy’s problems are not solved by romance or by uncovering a murderer. Although her friendship with Nat helps both of them to clarify their goals, Nat makes a more definite decision in choosing to leave his upscale practice for a humbler position in an Arkansas hospital. Emmy, though she is able to admit that she had tried to kill herself, has only begun to sort out her life and perceives that a romance with Nat would unbalance it even further. In the novel’s last scene they enjoy each other’s company, both knowing that their diverging paths will end their relationship. Weeping has the overtones of a thriller, but its theme and plot are ultimately more like those of Thelma, the novel that followed it, and the novel adaptation Caspary wrote for A Letter to Three Wives. All of these share a direct return to drama centered in the illusions and realities of romance and marriage. The

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John Klempner novel Caspary adapted turns on a local vamp, Addie Ross, who sends a letter to five rather than three women claiming that she has run off with the husband of one of them. In the movie, in three flashbacks, we see each of the women at an early stage of her marriage, much more vulnerable than they are in the present. One has married above her class, one is more successful than her husband, and one believes that her husband has married her only because she would not sleep with him otherwise. Rita finds her husband at home; Debbie thinks that she has lost hers until Laura Mae’s husband confesses that he left with Addie but changed his mind. Although Addie never appears on screen, her voice frames the start and end of the film; she operates within it as an editorial character, introducing the other characters and the letter. Addie even gets the last ghostly word. After the three marriages are happily resolved, a cocktail glass falls over on a table and Addie’s voice says, “Heigh-ho. Goodnight, everybody.” Nothing of this framing exists in Letter to Five Wives, Klempner’s novel. His omniscient narration moves among the thoughts of the wives and occasionally their husbands, but Addie never appears or speaks in the novel, and its ending resolves only which one has left his wife — and comes back. Their marriages are more troubled in the novel than in the film, and there is a great deal more blaming of the wives by their husbands, one for trying to launch a singing career, another for spoiling her son, one for wanting to adopt a child, a fourth for not letting her husband play Pygmalion, and the fifth for nagging her husband to be less sloppy. The three wives of the film are much less criticized as well as being more active, and their marital problems are more resolved at the end. This shift is the kind Caspary would have made, and the voice-over frame, which recalls Waldo’s narration in the film of Laura, apparently was Caspary’s creation. Her adaptation of the novel, from which the Oscar-winning screenplay was written, includes Addie’s voice-over, designated as “The Voice,” whose tone is described as a “rich feminine voice” that “purrs slightly” (8). The voice introduces the other characters and makes comments during scenes. Its “bitter laughter” is heard at the end (115), but Addie’s last word and the overturned glass apparently were added later. The following year Goldsmith produced Three Husbands, which Caspary coscripted from her own story. Caspary clearly spun this from her adaptation. In this case flashback narrates the story of three letters left in a will for the husbands of three women with whom the deceased had affairs. Her screenplay for it includes a male voice-over in parallel to A Letter to Three Wives. These films, and Caspary’s later multiple-viewpoint film Les Girls, show Caspary applying her mastery of character-mediated narrative to her movie work. Les Girls (1957), the most lavishly produced of the three films, has been called “a musical Rashomon” (Movie Database), whose songs were by Cole Porter. The plot reveals quickly that one of three showgirls has written a tell-all

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autobiography with the same title as the film. When Angele sues Sybil, now Lady Wren, for libel, they and their costar, Joy, are called as witnesses. As each testifies, a brief voice-over takes us into flashbacks that reconfigure their relationships as well as showcasing dance numbers. Their accounts vary widely; in Sybil’s, she is the caretaker of the other two young women; while in Angele’s version, Sybil is a secret alcoholic. Barry, their manager and romantic object, testifies last. He is now married to Joy, and it is in his interest to resolve things. By filling in information they each did not know about, Barry makes all their versions plausible enough that the suit is withdrawn. Newspaper headlines are used to introduce courtroom scenes in the present, and a placard asking “What Is Truth?” appears several times, including at the end. In Three Wives and Les Girls (Three Husbands is not currently available for viewing), flashback is introduced by brief voice-overs that bridge from present to past and back again, as well as having the last comment in Three Wives. But although Caspary had moved away from murder plots, she remained interested in narrative means for multiple focus in the service of her continued valorization of independence. The essential importance of this for men as well as women is also emphasized. Weeping even has a more resolved plot about Nat’s quest for a life of his own choosing than about Emmy’s difficulties. In that novel and in Thelma, Caspary again dramatizes, and at the end of Thelma says directly, that the Cinderella dream is the opium delusion creating only unhappiness. The cure again is investment in self-supporting work. To some extent these two novels make more explicit the themes of Caspary’s 1940s thrillers. Thelma reads as though Laura Hunt were telling Bedelia’s story. The framing narrator of this novel is very much an editorial character who reports what she has been told and has observed and also dramatizes scenes she did not witness. Although she is peripheral, she is freely judgmental and seems to be revealing the story of Thelma as a cautionary tale. She is fascinated with the life of the title character, in many ways her own opposite. Thelma, who— like Bedelia — dreams of living a life of protected luxury, settles for a middle-class marriage to a good-enough man. The unnamed narrator, who has grown up with Thelma, meanwhile goes to college and gets a job. She marries only later in life, after making her own way, while Thelma’s romantic dreams continue to attach to a man she desired but rejected because he did not offer marriage. Thelma can neither sleep with her old flame Lyle nor entirely get him out of her fantasies, but he makes her so dissatisfied with her own lot that she first attempts to live her daydreams through her daughter’s fairy-tale marriage, which Thelma promotes. When the daughter leaves her impotent husband for her own first love, Thelma’s schemes to preserve her romantic illusions finally drive her long-suffering husband to divorce her and her daughter to become more distant. The novel’s attitude toward love and marriage is complex. Thelma’s daugh-

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ter Constance divorces her rich but strangely sexed husband, and she does marry the man she had loved before the war. But her life is not portrayed as especially happy. At the novel’s close she is pregnant with her second child and struggling to live on her husband’s teaching salary. Complicating the theme further are the parallels with Caspary’s own life, underlined by the jacket’s biographical blurb. The back cover of the Sears Readers Club edition (1952) quotes Caspary herself summarizing her marriage to Goldsmith. She also states that they live on a “hilltop in Beverly Hills” and that she both sells screen stories and writes scripts. Toward the end of the novel the narrator mentions her “new husband” and his son (315) (Goldsmith also had a son from his previous marriage). She also writes movie scripts and puts them aside to tell Thelma’s story (330). The narrator’s earlier characterization as a sophisticated “Chicago girl” who had sampled culture and “sensation” (65) and the information that she moved to New York to work on a “theatrical magazine” (98) are also from Caspary’s resume. Further reinforcing the parallel, Chapter 11 reads at first as though Caspary were speaking directly as author, but it ends in a scene in which the narrator and Thelma both break the novel frame and restore it again. Caspary did acknowledge how thoroughly autobiographical Thelma was and how deliberately the title character was based on Irma, her much older sister, of whom Caspary said, much as she had of Thelma, that her sister had “shackled herself with snobbery and outworn attitudes.” Caspary noted that her sister was so effectively overbearing that she herself “went on defying her in every book I wrote” (Secrets 154). She did so most directly in Thelma, which may also recycle material from the unfinished political novel Caspary wrote during the 1930s, before Laura. I have found no material from that novel in the Caspary archives, but her description of it is very close to her closing comments in Thelma, even to mentioning the same fairy-tale figure: The real villain of the tale is Cinderella, with her absurd persistence in maintaining the legend that unless we are richly kept, we are failures as women. Richly kept, mind you, not merely loved, not cherished as a man’s delight, his friend, his partner, his mate, but a golden creature heaped about with costly and useless things that prove a woman has captured a man and he is willing to give his life to her adornment. This was the heritage handed down, not only to rich girls, but to the daughters of Polish chambermaids and bluestockings and gun-toting pioneer women. They still give it to us, every day, on celluloid and airwaves and coated paper [331].

Both Thelma and Laura reference the mystique of Cinderella that Caspary wanted to explode. She had addressed it obliquely in Laura and Stranger and more directly in Bedelia, though with the distraction of murder, and the feminine myth of succeeding as cherished helpmate also affects Emmy Arkwright. Thelma, however, is as directly a victim of the richly-ever-after delusion as was Bedelia. Evvie (1960) returns to the material Caspary examined in Weeping and

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Thelma to write a closely autobiographical portrait of her own life as a single self-supporting woman in Chicago in the 1920s. The studio where Evvie and her narrating roommate Louise live is a portrait of Caspary’s friend Connie Moran’s studio. The climactic birthday part for Louise is built on a real one given for Caspary when she visited from New York, including the bathtub gin, gate crashers, and Caspary herself getting thrown into the china cabinet. The novel’s subplot of finding out that her roommate is involved with the man Louise loves is also taken from Caspary’s life, although she cared a good deal less than Louise (“Incomplete Drafts” 42–44). Louise, like Caspary, is Jewish, and gets her start writing advertising copy. Caspary even gave Louise her own first headline, cited in her autobiography: “Rat Bites Sleeping Child” (Secrets 51, Evvie 39). Caspary indicated that the book’s frank sexuality is also a portrait of her own free-wheeling love life, saying in her autobiography, “Evvie is a picture of the lives of girls in the twenties, drawn quite honestly from my own experiences” (265). The book characterizes Louise and Evvie as sexually active (they even have a liberal policy on married men), knowledgeable about birth control and other alternatives (Louise sells a first edition she owns to pay for Evvie’s abortion), and unabashed (they discuss relationships while both are naked). Evvie’s mother tells them to be if not good, at least careful, but others in the novel condemn them as whores, including the sister of Evvie’s lover, the man Louise also loves, who wants to marry her, but her past stands in the way. Evvie is another semi-murder mystery. Louise’s winsome roommate is murdered about three-quarters of the way through the book, and Louise, along with the police, search for the identity of the mysterious and jealous lover who apparently was with Evvie the night of her death. However, the book is far more a portrait of a time, place, and lifestyle more than a detective story, even though suspects and clues are plentiful. Rather, the book uses the tone of murder mysteries as part of its atmosphere. Evvie, who calls herself a “pushover,” has flirted in a restaurant with a gangster, and stories she later tells Louise imply that he might be her secret lover, whose identity she will not reveal even to her best friend. She also has a long-standing relationship with Earl, who wants to marry her, and who is another suspect in her murder with a blunt instrument on a night when she was waiting for a reconciliation with her secret flame. But it turns out that Carl, the ad man Louise works with and loves, emerges as her secret romance and the chief suspect. Evvie has told Louise lies and fantasies to keep her from realizing that it is Carl, and when Carl confesses to Louise alone in a darkened office, she is momentarily afraid. As it turns out, however, the murderer was not the volatile Carl but a neighborhood boy Emmy had befriended whose limited understanding misinterpreted her intentions. This deflection of the suspense that has been built up shows Caspary again moving away from crime even while using its details.

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Caspary also later adapted a character from Evvie in her novella Ruth (1968). The mobster Evvie flirts with is lame, and Louise accuses Evvie of having a perverse fascination with people who are impaired, including her actual killer, who suffers from an extreme case of acne. Evvie’s blushing reaction to Louise’s accusation appears to be a clue to her lover’s identity, but it turns out to be false. In the later story, a Byronic husband with a limp turns out to be a crook. Ruth suspects her husband of trying to kill her when she refuses to sign unread documents or lie under oath, and she divorces him. There too the would-be killer turns out to be not the ex-husband but his housekeeper. Ruth, along with “The Murder in the Stork Club,” is one of Caspary’s stories connected to The Woman in White. Ruth initially signs documents without understanding their contents but later becomes suspicious and refuses to go on doing so (Murder 215 –216). Her refusal recalls Glyde’s attempts to raise money on his wife’s inheritance. His violent demands that Laura sign, while Marian supports her refusal, are settled by Fosco’s interference. As a narrator, Louise Goodman is far less peripheral than the framing character of Thelma. She and Evvie have been friends since childhood, they live together, go out together, and know many of the same people; they have few secrets from each other. Louise’s conclusions about Evvie’s lover are the sort of wrong deductions Collins’s characters make that prolong suspense. Louise’s own emotional response colors her reactions and deductions throughout the novel and leads her to conceal her suspicions about Evvie’s lover (incorrect) to the police, to steal and peruse Evvie’s diary rather than showing the police where it was hidden, and to conceal Carl’s confession as well. Fairly lengthy excerpts from the diary are included toward the end of the book, in Evvie’s misspelled writing. With more of these, Caspary might have made a counterpoint to Louise’s narration, but Evvie’s written voice as a principal narrator, while dramatic, would make somewhat difficult reading. Her diary acts as plot document, and her nonstandard English parallels that of Pesca and other reported voices as used by Collins. This novel may have been a rehearsal for Caspary; Emmy’s diary foreshadows the perverse diary entries in The Man Who Loved His Wife and the pages of transcript that point toward the murderer in Final Portrait. In a final touch of end frame, Louise recalls Evvie when a woman’s perfume sets off her memories while she is at a party with famous guests. Louise closes by saying, “Before I went to bed that night I wrote all of their glorious names in my diary” (317). Evvie reads as memorial rather than casebook, yet it is clear that Louise has created this account of her friend’s death at a later date to explain what happened. She even uses a scrapbook of newspapers clippings her mother had made at the time to prompt her memory and fill in details. Louise admits that “I cannot promise that every scene is precisely remembered or every dialogue true” (285). She also includes brief plot documents such as the scandalous tell-all article written by an acquaintance who uses Evvie’s death to get a writing job. Although

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memory triggers her story, Louise is very much an editorial character who pieces together the suspects, clues, and final solution. However, what Caspary had learned from Thelma is evident in the much more subtle and far more characterized Louise. Saxe Commins, Caspary’s editor at Random House, thought Thelma a contrived character and, in a letter to Caspary in 1948, said he could not “believe” in the character of Thelma. He told Caspary in detail why, such as Thelma’s relationship to her husband being a “setup” (Commins 1). To a large extent he was right. Thelma is a dramatized foil to the shadowy narrator, who exercises an authorial omniscience about her life. Although the narrator claims that “I followed her life, watching the changes and mistakes, and waiting, as with a serial story, for the next chapter” (16), the narrator is unaffected by Thelma’s life while constantly judgmental about it. That Caspary had her older sister and other women she had observed in mind does not lessen the effect. At the end, the narrator admits that “In Thelma’s story my artifices failed; perhaps I was too close to it in life to employ successfully the crisis and explosion method demanded by the sleek form of the novel” (330). Caspary goes to identify the character as her shadow self, “the Thelma I cannot kill in myself ” (331). Marriage had been much on Caspary’s mind in the 1940s as she met, fell in love with, lived with, and eventually married I. G. Goldsmith. In draft material not included in her autobiography, she discussed tensions during their affair, and at some points during their marriage, Caspary was the principal breadwinner. Caspary seemed to feel the need to assert her own distance from the kept-wife status of Thelma, and the editorial character as undifferentiated from the author overbalances the book. This is not so with Louise Goodman, who is as thoroughly involved as any Collins character and as much in the middle as Mark McPherson. Louise is the real protagonist of Evvie, rather than the shadowy title character whose fantasies color her reality, yet Louise’s involvement with Evvie involves risk and consequences. Louise loses her lifelong friend as well as the man she herself loves and ends up quitting her job and leaving Chicago. Here the impact of Evvie on the narrating character, as well as on numerous other characters in the book, creates the tension. By dramatizing and involving her narrator, Caspary here makes Louise a confessional witness whose testimony is richly complex. In two later novels Caspary made much more extensive use of document framing, counterpointed against multiple-focus third-person narration in one case and, in the other, double first-person narration. Both these novels show her continuing to apply the usages of framing and mediation that she had adapted so successfully in Laura. The first of these, The Man Who Loved His Wife, is a psychological thriller which, along with The Husband, her novel in multiple third-person viewpoints, compares interestingly with the suspense thrillers of Patricia Highsmith and Margaret Millar. Its controlled but perverse documents are among Caspary’s most dynamic applications of framing. The

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second, Final Portrait, uses more elaborately framed material, including a tape recording (both in transcript and played aloud), a manuscript “Confession,” and a father’s last letter to his son. In the ironically titled The Man Who Loved His Wife, Fletcher Strode is a physically dominant man whose recent surgery for cancer of the larynx has robbed him of his powerful voice and, he feels, of his masculinity. Although Fletcher can speak, he is appalled by the change in himself and makes few attempts to regain speech. He responds by isolating himself and his wife, who adapts herself to his demands. Elaine is his second and much younger wife and has rather spoiled her somewhat parental husband. His voice silenced, Fletcher begins to keep a diary, which is described on the first page of the book. Diaries in suspense novels are often used to reveal to the reader things that are concealed from other characters, as in Lydia Gwilt’s confessions or Jonathan Harker’s discoveries at Castle Dracula. They may also be used to divulge information about past events, as Walter uses Marian’s diary in The Woman in White. Here, however, Caspary adds a new twist on the usual applications. Fletcher deliberately creates a false diary that records his growing suspicions that his wife has a lover and wants to kill him. Even his first entry says of Elaine, who has given him the leather-bound book, “She is getting to despise me and I do not blame her for it. I would not blame her for anything she might do” (4). Ten diary excerpts chart the progress of Fletcher’s bitter fantasy. Each of these is less than a page long and, handled otherwise, might have operated as plot documents. But because they regularly counterpoint the rest of the narrative’s flow, they operate similarly to Collins’s interleaving of letters sections in No Name. Fletcher intends that the diary will become evidence in the event of his death. He has at some points indicated that he wanted to kill himself, so he may intend for Elaine to be blamed. But keeping the diary is also a kind of revenge by Fletcher on the life that seems to have betrayed him and the wife he cannot believe still loves him. Two subplots develop, one involving a doctor’s attraction to Elaine, to which she responds, and the other involving Fletcher’s daughter, Cindy, and her shiftless husband, Don. Dr. Julian grew up in the house the Fletchers now live in, and he meets Elaine when he stops to see the place again. He becomes her doctor, and they both succumb to mutual attraction. When Fletcher asks Elaine whether she has had a lover, she confesses but does not name the doctor. Fletcher writes about this in his diary, suggesting that Elaine is trying to drive him to suicide. Cindy and Don, a lawyer with an unimportant job he has abandoned, live beyond their income; when they ask Fletcher for the down payment on a house, he refuses, partly because he is angry at Elaine. Both Elaine and her son in law have reasons to wish Fletcher removed, so when he is found dead, they are suspects. As the police investigate, they find that he had not died of an overdose of sleeping pills as was first suspected.

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During the investigation, the diary continues to play an important role as testimony. Cindy confesses, first to Don and then to the police, that when she found her father dead, she removed a plastic bag from the incision in his throat through which he breathed. The police then confirm that he died of suffocation. Don, who wants Cindy rather than Elaine, to inherit, draws Detective Knight’s attention to the diary, which Don has read; he knows that it accuses Elaine. Once Knight questions her more closely, Elaine, who has agreed to their taking of the diary, now demands to read it, while Knight refuses. Don tries to coyly point suspicion by asking the police if Fletcher had written about suicide. However, Knight does quote from the diary, not only Fletcher’s accusation of Elaine but also his characterization of Don as someone who would stop at nothing to get what he wants. Don’s persistence also reveals that he had previously read the diary and is not, in fact, supporting Elaine as he has pretended to do. Ralph Julian, when asked by Knight for his opinion of the diary, says, “Objectively and scientifically, I think the diary from beginning to end is plain bull shit” (225). He is the only one who sees the diary as the vindictive fiction it is. This novel has the most dramatic concluding pages of any Caspary novel since Laura, as Elaine, about to be taken to the station for more questioning with her own lawyer present, confesses to Ralph that she did in fact kill Fletcher, and “perhaps” it was a mercy killing (244). She seems defeated by the diary, which she still has not read. “No, I didn’t know he thought I wanted to kill him. But the diary, you said it yourself, was an invitation to death. It must have been in both of us, down deep, hidden, for all that time. Oh, God!” (242). This ending is the antithesis of Bedelia’s, in which she dies of poison Charlie presses on her after he becomes horrified by her past murders and fears that she means to kill him as well. Here Elaine has played the adoring wife sincerely, but after abuse and alienation by Fletcher and after watching his suffering, she kills him. The sinister role played by the false diary, which not only incriminates two suspects but whose continued presence pressures Elaine to confess, feels quite similar in dynamics to the perverse crime novels of Patricia Highsmith. In Highsmith, the innocent are often pulled across the line into criminality by someone they know who already has crossed that line. The diary’s impact here has that effect; Fletcher takes pleasure in falsely accusing his wife in order to relieve his own stress and self-doubt, but she does in fact kill him, believing that he wants to die. I have found no evidence of whether Caspary or Highsmith read each other’s work, but since both were widely reviewed and famous films were made from their work, they could hardly have failed to be aware of each other’s existence. At one point in Thelma, which Caspary was writing shortly after the appearance of Strangers on a Train in 1950, the narrator calls herself and Thelma “strangers on a streetcar” (28), but this is scant evidence. Highsmith’s novel Edith’s Diary, in which a woman keeps a journal of an alternate life that she

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comes to believe in, appeared in 1974, six years after The Man Who Loved His Wife. Highsmith did read Collins, citing The Moonstone in particular as “a good, classic, beautiful prose thriller” (Wilson 88) and mentioning Collins again in a cahier as she wrote an essay on suspense in 1964 (Wilson 258). Whether or not they read each other, Caspary and Highsmith worked in similar territory for crime thrillers and with subversive themes in the continuum from Collins’s sensation crime novels to Caspary’s and Highsmith’s noir thrillers.* Fletcher’s diary is another example of Caspary applying what she adapted from Collins in the service of contemporary fiction. False letters, either in the sense of deliberately inaccurate content or as in false signatures, are as old as epistolary fiction. But Caspary did what Collins had also done with epistolary form, turning it from private deception to public evidence in a criminal case. The case is unlike Collins in its involvement of all the characters. One contemporary reviewer complained that no one in the book was likeable (Books 1), while another praised them, saying, “Her characters are all rounded, colorful personalities with a working psyche” (“He Plotted”). Other reviewers admired the surprise twist of Elaine’s confession. Collins, who stretched his plot beyond the breaking point to keep Magdalen Vanstone from criminality, would not have written such an explicitly criminalizing ending. Even Lydia Gwilt, his most transgressive female character, was protected by suicide from the consequences of her act, while Elaine is on her way to the police station at the end of Caspary’s novel. Because Caspary used the counterpointed diary in contained, short passages integrated into the narrative, she did not have to set these sections apart. Yet the diary is far from simply a plot document. By the end of the novel, it feels like another character whose malicious persona affects the others as dramatically as Lydia’s diary rereads her character. The same is true in Final Portrait of the “confession” written by an artist who believes he has sold out — and has been murdered. Here again a victim speaks after his death and accuses others. As with Man Who, the document in question, a book being written by the murdered painter, is introduced early on. Both point of view and the use of the document are more complex than in Man Who. Final Portrait is narrated for about half the book by Michael Leveret, the actor son of Henry Leveret, the painter. The book opens as Mike arrives at his father’s funeral. In the second half, narration alternates between Mike and Janet, Henry’s assistant, who has lied and concealed evidence she then reveals. Both *An interesting current false-diary novel is Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, in which an obsessively codependent couple can neither make up nor divorce. The wife for a time keeps a false diary, which she knows her husband reads, in which she writes about men she claims were actually the fathers of her children. He figures out what she has done, and she then pretends to be shocked that he is reading her diary. The truth and/or falsehood of historical writing as well as the validity of the husband’s many portraits of his wife parallel the diaries. This novel is also comparable to Caspary’s Final Portrait, with its use of both a painting and written documents as well as tape recordings.

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her narrative and Mike’s are confessional. He had been estranged from his father for eight years and had done nothing to make it up. For the past two years Henry has ceased to paint his famous and expensive abstract “concentrics.” He has taken a downtown studio where he has begun again to paint realistically and to write a “confession,” a manifesto that condemns his abstract work as cheap tricks done because they were easy to execute and fashionable. In doing so he also condemns his wife, a luxury-loving, selfappointed art expert, and his dealer, who has been sleeping with his wife. Suspects in his death include Janet, who may have had an affair with him; his wife and his dealer, who stand to gain; and an art critic writing a book about Leveret’s work, who would be discredited by the manuscript. Both an original copy and a carbon have disappeared. Mike is the only cleared character, having been in California when Leveret was killed. Mike turns down the role of Hamlet in a workshop production that would be good for his career in order to play the son of a murdered father and suspect mother and “uncle” in real life. There is also Fogarty, a police detective, who enlists Mike to interview Janet and others for further information. Caspary uses their exchanges to again position her work as separate from mainstream investigative fiction. Mike notes that Fogarty is too homely to be cast as a movie detective and confesses that he himself was turned down for such a part for not being “suave” enough (16). When Fogarty asks him to spy on the suspects, Mike thinks that he has lost the detective part because “I had shown no taste for the role. I loathe spies and spying” (19). Mike later tells the reader of his account that “This is not a proper detective story.” Even though it has a corpse and an investigator, there’s only one murder, and he warns that although the plot tension is explosive, the story will not end in violence. He himself has worked to find the killer so as “to deny an intolerable suspicion” and not to see justice done (44). His remarks emphasize the novel as having been put together by an involved editorial character, making this a near casebook that does not adapt Collins. Mike’s statements also reveal that Caspary still considers “proper” mysteries to be violent action narratives with multiple murders and suave detectives. Caspary had written False Face, which is closer to hard-boiled detective fiction, in 1954. In this novel, Nina, a woman who reports having sighted a gangster, becomes the object of threats. Nina turns the gangster in because he had corrupted Nick, the man she had earlier loved. Throughout the novel a lawyer harangues Nina about Nick, whom he considers just another criminal. As all three hide out, a witless deliveryman is killed by Nick, and a gun battle ensues in which Nick is killed. Once Nina has finally gotten over Nick, she also feels responsible for the deliveryman’s death, “Because I couldn’t give up my schoolgirl dream, because I had to be the heroine of a seedy romance.” Even here Caspary turned the plot toward a woman’s experience of outgrowing the

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sentimental role set up for her, and no new romance develops. At the very end, Nina plays on the fact that she had literally been missing in order to have the last word: “‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Nina’s been found and I want to thank you for helping me find her’” (221). This unveiling also operates in Final Portrait, for which False Face would also have worked as a title. The intercut narratives and documents of Final Portrait, like Caspary’s casebooks, are full of doubles beyond the Hamlet parallels of murdered man, suspect “uncle,” involved wife, and son with suspicions. Janet and Mrs. Leveret double each other as women involved with the murdered man. Mike and his father double each other as skeptics about his abstract paintings, and Janet is attracted to Mike because he reminds her strongly of his father. Mrs. Leveret and “Uncle” Chan, the art dealer, double each other as prime suspects, while Mike and Bruno, the art critic, double each other as suitors for Janet. The doubling recalls Collins’s own Gothic layering of characters and the depth it creates in a multiplot novel. Here the plot strata include the Hamlet scenario, the Leverets’ own complex set of family and sexual relationships, the identity of the murderer and the motive, and not least a debate over what constitutes fine art or artistic achievement. It is the art issue that Caspary built into the missing confession, which, as it is recovered in pieces and discussed by the various characters, becomes as central a focus in the latter half of the book, as Fletcher’s diary is throughout Man Who. Janet’s narrative reveals that she has the last tape recording she transcribed for Henry and also knows that a carbon existed. She lied about both to the police because she wanted Mike to hear the tape first (she had not yet played it herself ) and if possible to see the manuscript before it became more public. Once she plays the tape for him, he realizes how much it implicates his mother and how much she too has lied. The novel’s framing includes major plot documents common to Collins’s own usage, such as the letter Henry has left for his son, and also contemporary usages such as the television interview with Mike’s mother that he and friends of his father watch and which he reports in such detail that it functions as a framed item. Another odd “document” is a large painting in Henry’s new studio, in the style of Bosch, that depicts recognizable figures in telling caricatures reflecting his attitude toward them. Anita, his wife, is shown naked except for a tiara and a fur wrap. Its principal items, however, are far beyond plot documents and are quoted extensively. The final tape that Janet plays for Mike is a masterly example of how framed voice can be manipulated. The tape itself has three layers: Henry’s comments to Janet in regard to transcription, which are informal and affectionate; Henry’s dictation for the confession manuscript, which have a different, more serious tone and voice; and an unexpected bonus. Henry had left the tape after a surprise visitor arrived, and the dialogue between him and his wife is also transcribed into the novel, presumably by Mike. Examples of each a layer show Caspary’s manipulation of voice.

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Janet, damn you, sweet wench, you’ve given me the very devil of a time with these revisions. Here they are and I hope you’re satisfied [103]. A confession like this is death and resurrection. I’m not too sure of the resurrection, but I intend to tell the truth if I die for it. I was never a happy success [103]. ANITA : I ... I just dropped in to see you. HENRY: A likely excuse. With a key. What’s the idea? ANITA : Now, darling, I know I’ve been forbidden [to visit] these sacred premises, but even Bluebeard’s wife couldn’t hold out forever. You’re not Bluebeard, are you? HENRY: Don’t be so damn coy. What are you doing here, anyway? [129].

These reported layers of the tape-framed voices, which we hear directly, are interrupted by both Mike’s and Janet’s reactions to them, so that their voices are intermingled and a sense of their dual narration continues. The tape reveals clues that ultimately lead to the killer, as well as placing Mike’s mother beyond Thelma in a continuum of manipulative women and making both Anita and Henry’s dealer, her lover, main suspects. Playing the tape is also interrupted by Earl, Chandler’s assistant at the gallery, and resumed after he leaves. This complex intercutting reads smoothly and works well at generating suspense and setting up the coming action. It does so not only by Caspary’s management but also because her voices are lively and dramatic. Mike later plays portions of the last part of the tape, the dialogue between his parents, for his mother and Chandler, in an effort to threaten them and try to forestall further violence. Janet, who confesses in her later narration that she had mentioned the manuscript to Chandler, the dealer, expiates her guilt by searching the gallery for the carbon copy stolen from her apartment as well as still existing tapes she had not erased. She reads aloud portions of the transcript, which we see/hear in Henry’s dictation voice. Janet is nearly killed by Earl, who has killed Henry, most likely on Chandler’s instructions. Henry’s painting of the art reception helps Janet make the final connection. As Mike has warned, the plot does not play out as a “proper” murder mystery. Mike blackmails his mother and her lover with the tape to prevent them from profiting further from his father’s despised abstract paintings and Earl gets away. Mike and Janet conceal the evidence of his mother’s complicity. Final Portrait, like Armadale, is a near novel of testimony; it expands into such near the end, just as Collins’s novel does, by the intrusion of a new mass of manuscript that has earlier been mentioned. Whether Caspary read Armadale is unknown, but if not, she made very similar experiments in counterpointed document frames both in The Man Who Loved His Wife and Final Portrait. Her third casebook, The Secret of Elizabeth, followed Final Portrait as her last novel, and Collins was much on her mind then, although it was The Woman in White she focused on. Henry’s confession does not, like Lydia’s diary, incriminate him but accuses others of the greedy manipulation of art for profit. It inadvertently provides clues, such as Anita’s presence at the studio, a recent fight with Chandler, and the presence of a neighbor’s handicapped child with a toy gun. These eventually

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help Mike and Janet sort out the situation. Both Janet and Mike’s narratives are confessional, however, in revealing their own concealments and evasions, especially from the police. Final Portrait parallels Collins’s casebook novels in the way the matter is solved by involved characters and ultimately kept in the family, yet the means Caspary gave her very private detectives, such as blackmail with the tape, are distinctly modern, as is Mike’s last word. The confession has been published, and yet many critics and art lovers continue to idolize Henry’s abstract paintings. Mike’s response is quite un–Hamletlike: “Chacun à son goût” (188). Final Portrait shows Caspary as actively engaged in counterpointed framing for character narration as Collins was in the 1870s. Through exploring the casebook and adapting Collins, Caspary acquired a thorough working knowledge of mediated narration and framed dialogues, which she applied in film scripts and later novels before finally adapting one last woman in white surrounded by testimony.

CHAPTER 13

Reframed Multiple Focus in Popular and Literary Texts Multiple focus is as much a staple of twentieth-century literary fiction as in that of the previous hundred years, but it was most often achieved without any frames whatsoever. Flowing from renewed emphasis on the interior life of the characters, which developed in tandem with the emergence of fresh psychological emphasis from the writings of Sigmund Freud, authors freely created interior monologues even more intense and confessional than the documented outpourings within nineteenth-century diary and letter frames. At the same time, writers continued to utilize plot documents, whole-document frames, front and end frames, and even framed multiple focus as they saw fit. Writers in the popular categories of mystery, horror, and the broader category of the thriller continued more than literary writers to use frames, perhaps because these categories are also more likely to directly reference or pay homage to major nineteenth-century texts, as do historical novels set wholly or partially in the Victorian era. Twentieth-century writers realized the potential of mediated narration in a way Collins never tried by using multiple focus in two or more viewpoints without framing devices. This departure from nineteenth-century framing, because of its ease, has become the dominant form of multiple focus. Sections can be in first person or third person (or even second person) with varying depths in the viewpoints of characters. Unframed multiple focus can operate much as did framed focus, playing the viewpoints against each other for suspense, pathos, or other effects, while interior monologues or detailed thoughts can provide a strong sense of character, even to the point of monlogic voice. Mystery fiction as well as literary fiction makes use of unframed viewpoint narration. Caspary too exploited this technique, as previously discussed. Collins himself had helped found the move away from framing through his novels partly in document-framed statements and partly in third-person viewpoint. 168

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On the other hand, the novel in regularly occurring document-framed narration counterpointed with third person also continues to be applied as Collins used it. The novel of testimony continues to be a rare case and is written most often in homage to Victorian fiction and specifically to Collins’s works. Similarly, reprises of the casebook form in reference to Dracula also apply Collins’s technique at one remove. Occasionally a writer will, as Caspary did, borrow from Collins for a contemporary novel. Examples of all these approaches— twentieth-century counterpointing, Victorian-era referencing, Dracula-connected reprises, and use of Collins’s material in contemporary fiction — make up the following discussion. These examples illustrate how deeply embedded the use of framed, character-narrated sections is in popular fiction as well in as in literary works and how important Collins’s strategies continue to be to the crime thriller in particular and to narratology in general. They further highlight Caspary’s achievement in so deeply adapting Collins, especially the character of Fosco, and in updating the casebook novel as a contemporary form. Most examples of the various types of adaptations of Collins do neither. Innovation in multiple focus during the first half of the twentieth century in the use of character narration and mediation without frames has become so familiar that it is taken rather for granted now. However, two examples laid alongside nineteenth-century framing devices for multiple character narration make this fresh departure a clear contrast. William Faulkner’s use of sectioned streams of consciousness in The Sound and the Fury (1929) is perhaps the quintessential example of unframed multiple focus. In recreating the flow of thoughts by four characters, three of whom retell the story. Faulkner achieves an ultimate intimacy that could not be recorded in any medium. Characters’ unexpressed consciousnesses are the frame. Such an intensely limited focus moves beyond the traditionally omniscient narration to blend the immediacy of first-person narration with extreme omniscience. And just as in epistolary fiction and Collins’s casebook novels, the sections play against each other, rebalancing perceptions of other characters and recounting overlapping material from another perspective. Faulkner, who both read and wrote fiction in the mystery category, was adroit at playing separated portions against each other. The novel ends with a fourth section in third person, adding a more distanced view of the characters and situation. The setting of third against monologic first person parallels Collins’s counterpointed novels yet goes further in making the character rather than an externalized written document the frame. Faulkner also used both retrospective framing and character as document. In Absalom! Absalom! (1936), his ninth novel, he applied an elaborate mixture of spoken narratives, largely remembered rather than recorded, with some portions of letters, the whole filtered through “the two Quentins,” younger and older. It is Quentin Compson’s perspective that acts as an editorial character whose consciousness displays the “document” of testimony and memory he both frames and pulls together. Quentin’s inner monologue mediates what he

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has heard and retold at different points in time as he and the reader struggle to come to grips with the Gothic history of the Sutpens and symbolically of the entire South. Faulkner used the complications of character testimony within an array of framed and unframed voices centered not in writing but in his character’s mind. Here even consciousness becomes mediated testimony. Doris Lessing’s multiple focus emanating from one character in The Golden Notebook (1962) is in general an outgrowth of narrative experiments, such as Faulkner’s, earlier in the century, while also utilizing document framing. Narratively speaking, Lessing explores Anna Wulf ’s mind through the various notebooks she keeps— black, red, yellow, blue, and the golden one — each of which expresses a part of her thinking that the others do not. This approach is also seen in the short novel Free Women, which is interspersed through the notebooks. By fragmenting one character’s point of view into multiple framed narratives, Lessing reinforces the sense of consciousness as the framing entity, even though here the accounts are written. Lessing stretched diary possibilities to their limits as Anna writes a fictionalized version of her life (she is a published novelist) that justifies the lengthy dramatic scenes often recorded by letter and journal writers and otherwise in a pastiche of diary, commonplace book, and writer’s cahier. The “entries” include lists, fragments, comments, headings, dated entries, reviews of her novel, lightly fictionalized scenes, a satire of what passes for good writing, and ideas for unwritten stories. The red and black notebooks from 1956 to 1957 are filled with newspaper cuttings chiefly of violent events in which Anna has underlined “freedom,” the narrator tells us, 679 times (525). In her 1971 preface to the novel, Lessing said that she wrote the segments in order while “keeping the plan of it in my head” (x). The fragmented sections were therefore constructed to add up in a manner similar to the way in which the clues of a crime novel are planted in order to be discovered. The last notebook, the golden one, is begun by Anna, but Saul Green also writes in it, and Lessing deliberately confused whose notebook it becomes. The two even give each other prompts for their next writing, as Saul offers the first line of Free Women while Anna offers a line about an Algerian solider, which is extended into a synopsis for Saul’s novel, apparently written by him. A note reveals that the novel was later published and “did rather well” (643). The doubling of writers and documents echoes the Gothic doubling of parts of the self, which Collins also explored structurally, although here the exploration of self is done openly. In her discussion of modern fiction that applies epistolary technique, Linda S. Kauffman addresses Lessing’s novel at length, and her conclusions reinforce the parallels between Lessing’s very deliberately dispersed novel and the construction of a mystery casebook. Kauffman points out the way Anna functions as an editorial character, although she arranges the material to avoid what Anna calls “analysis after the event,” which is the realist imposition of pattern onto

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past events (170 –171). Lessing’s novel calls that reality into question by using Anna as an editor who fragments the material. “Anna periodically rereads what she has written, makes marginal emendations, modifies earlier insights, criticizes her prose, and thus acts as both writer and addressee as she makes ‘correspondences’ between earlier and later selves, ideas, styles” (170). This being, as Kauffman puts it, both inside and outside the text, functions similarly, though to different effect, as the casebook editor who arranges the evidence of crime. The unfolding of clues “as they happened” by restricting some characters (including the editor) to tell only what they knew at the time and juxtaposing their testimony with statements by characters who know only a little also exposes the authorial art of arranging narrative pattern. Casebook novels of testimony are literally and explicitly analyses after the events, offering readers the opportunity to make deductions from unfolding evidence. The puzzle aspect of mysteries is built into the structure of Collins casebook form but delivered through the murky medium of character, which can include the editorial narrator. The effect parallels the impact Kauffman ascribes to modern epistolary-derived fiction, in which she concludes that “the epistolary editor problematizes the dichotomies between fiction/reality, inside/ outside, lies/truth, character/author, past/present, self/other.” When the editorial character is unreliable, as in Michael Innes’s Lament for a Maker, the effect is very near Anna’s deliberate unassembling of Lessing’s novel; the reader is tricked out of the expected form. Even in a casebook with an apparently reliable narrator, an awareness of the assembling process develops from the editorial character’s notes and remarks. Collins’s casebook creation was, in terms of the overtly editorial character whose position can be manipulated, a very forward-looking narrative strategy. In his novels mingling framed and unframed third person in revealing a crime, he moved even closer to the play of epistolary technique without the overall framing. Lydia Gwilt’s diary entries would function as well as interior monologue, without the diary frame. Many of the contemporary adapters of the casebook form, however, have returned to earlier periods for the full casebook technique. It is because twentieth-century fiction relocated its nexus within consciousness that several later reprises of the novel of testimony’s techniques are set in the period that developed the casebook — a period in which Collins applied numerous combinations and layering of character narration. This comprised the period of the 1860s sensation novel and the following decades of the nineteenth century. However, other later twentieth-century and twenty-first-century writers have continued to adapt Collins, in content and/or form, into contemporary fiction.

Back to Sensation Collins himself appears as the protagonist of Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009), a portrait of the writer as a hallucinating opium addict who believes that the

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mesmeric, bizarre Drood has installed a beetle in his brain to control his thoughts and who is jealous of Dickens to the point of paranoia. Oddly, though Collins narrates the book, he does so in fairly flat narrator speech except for the most purple passages; no framing devices are used. Plot documents include real letters or portions of them written by Collins. It is tempting to imagine what Collins would have made of this story; surely we would see confessional narratives in dramatic voice by himself (as collating character), Dickens, and a variety of other characters whose viewpoint would both color and drive the story. Instead, Drood is another novel in which the Victorians themselves are the subject of sensation fiction. In reviewing it, Louis Bayard — himself the author of novels in Victorian settings that recount the later history of Tiny Tim (Mr. Timothy) and the detective adventures of Vidcoq (The Black Tower)— paid affectionate tribute to Collins, particularly citing the “multiple narrators” of The Moonstone while calling much of Drood “little more than warmed-over biography,” full of facts (1–2). James Wilson’s 1991 novel The Dark Clue goes considerably further in building on Wilkie Collins’s novels of testimony. Not only do Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe reappear to sleuth information for a biography of the enigmatic and sometimes bizarre painter J. M. Turner but they do so again in a casebook novel entirely framed in letters, memorandums, notebook entries, and diaries. As in The Woman in White, Walter’s voice is more flatly narrational than Marian’s. Laura also stands aside again, only contributing brief letters from the country, where she and their children remain offstage. The mystery here, as in Woman, lies buried in the past, but neither Walter nor Marian is directly involved with it. They lack, therefore, the motivation of Collins’s novel. However, as their interviews progress, Walter becomes so deeply psychologically engaged with Turner that he commits uncharacteristic acts that horrify him, including sleeping with a prostitute and almost raping Marian. Marian is at first more deeply engaged out of concern for Walter and then out of her own shock and guilt at having had sex with him, something she had half-fantasized. As with many twentieth-century novels that reveal what Victorian fiction suppressed, The Dark Clue raises its level of intensity with Gothic revelations of madness and illicit sexuality. In this it is plot-driven, or at least the character who drives the action is the mysterious Turner rather than Walter or Marian. In addition, only Marian and Walter narrate, punctuated by letters from others that are chiefly plot documents. This robs the book of the richness Collins achieved with the absurdities of Frederick Fairlie, the confessions of Mrs. Catherick and Fosco, and even the strongly voiced statements by minor witnesses. Two exceptions to this dual narration in The Dark Clue show how important it is to have a variety of voices to play against each other in a novel of testimony. The first is the journal of Haste, a failed painter, who knew the young Turner. From it, Marian copies extracts that mention the painter. There are eight pages

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largely from Haste’s journal, annotated by Marian along the way. Second, Marian also makes extracts from a series of letters and from a satirical play. These provide relief from the continued narration of Marian and Walter as well as providing clues to them and to readers. Yet for all the detection in this novel, there is little crime involved; instead, as already noted, it is the unraveling of the Victorian past that is at stake. This robs the novel of suspense until Walter becomes consumed with Turner’s life, and as the biographical inquiry is broken off unresolved, the ending feels rather too postmodern for these characters. It is neither as enigmatic as the first-person narration of witnessed events in The Turn of the Screw nor a full-scale resolution as in Collins’s novels of testimony. Its effect is more similar to that of Armadale, in which the intensity of both the supernatural and of Lydia’s psychology reverberate beyond the wrapping-up of events. Here the lack of overt crime blocks detection and the limited number of dramatic narrators limits complexity, just as it did in Collins’s later works. The most recent reprises of both plot and character from Collins in a Victorian setting as well as the casebook form are also the most successful. Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006) and The Glass of Time (2008), apply sensational plots full of Gothic doubling, secrets, and lies framed in confessional and/or witnessing statements. Like Hume, Sayers, and Caspary, Cox has characters mention Collins’s works to underline both his most direct references and the general connection. He emphasized this connection also in an online interview, citing his love of mid–Victorian fiction and as his “original favourites”: Dickens, J. S. Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and “Wilkie Collins (all, but especially The Woman in White, The Moonstone, and Armadale” [and] “The Meaning of Night”). The first novel, subtitled A Confession, overflows with doubles, hidden or stolen documents, a concealed heir to a great house, and vicious villains including the narrator, who begins the narrative by describing how he killed a man at random to be sure he could do it as a rehearsal for his murder of his nemesis at the book’s close. Night is less directly Collins-esque than the second novel, being influenced by a broad range of nineteenth-century fiction. The framing of the narrator for theft of a book while at school recalls perhaps William Godwin’s 1794 novel Caleb Williams, and multiple scenes echo Dickens’s fiction, including David Copperfield (1850), which is mentioned by Edward. This earlier influence positions Night as an early-nineteenth-century novel, with The Glass of Time, its sequel as a later-century one. Night is closest to the Collins novels Cox cited in its switched identities and its opium-smoking, amoral narrator. Edward, who tells the story, has a variety of last names and is never able to claim his rightful one. His lady mother, furious at her husband for not paying the debts of her father, upon whom her husband forecloses, robs him of an heir by traveling to France early in her pregnancy, remaining there until her son is born, and giving him away to the friend

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traveling with her. She never completely recovers from this step and later has a second son. He is eventually killed in a riding accident, after which she declines and dies. She leaves behind clues and hidden documents that Edward slowly uncovers, which identify him as the rightful heir. Meanwhile, Edward’s father, desperate for an heir, chooses the very man who framed Edward and got him expelled from school, the poet Phoebus Daunt, whom Edward will finally kill. The games played with identity and heirs echo the Laurie Fairlie/Anne Catherick confusions, along with Glyde’s forgery of his parents’ marriage. When Lord Duport’s secretary, in writing a history of the family, comes across evidence of a missing heir, Daunt has him waylaid and murdered by the thief who takes the documents, though that was not Daunt’s intention. The tangled and murderous history of Allan Armadale and Ozias Midwinter as complicated by Lydia Gwilt are also recast, with Edward in the Gwilt role. There is also a reprise of Lydia in the character of Emily Carteret, who loves both men and betrays Edward to Daunt. Edward, if he cannot gain acknowledgment as the legitimate son, will spoil at least the adoption of Daunt. Cox does not draw back from playing out this scenario; Edward has no qualms, after his betrayal by Emily, whom he loves, in killing Daunt to prevent his marrying her and becoming the Duport heir. Not only the plot parallels mark the connection of Edward and Armadale but a footnoted explanation of laudanum goes on to specifically reference Collins and Lydia: “The novelist Wilkie Collins became virtually dependent on it and confessed that much of The Moonstone (1868) had been written under its influence. ‘Who is the man who invented laudanum?’ asks Lydia Gwilt in Collins’s Armadale (1866). ‘I thank him from the bottom of my heart’” (425). This note is appended by the overarching editor, whose name, J. J. Antrobus, appears on the title page. Antrobus is identified as “Professor of Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction, University of Cambridge” (Antrobus also was the name of Collins’s first employer) (Pykett 6 2003). In the “Editor’s Preface,” Antrobus provides a front frame positioning the ensuing narrative as among the “lost curiosities of nineteenth-century literature.” Subtitling it and discussing it as a brutal confession also recalls Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, whose title also fits Edward’s tale well. Antrobus recounts failed attempts to verify Edward’s existence while claiming that his nemesis has been verified. Antrobus’s notes on transcribing the text “from the unique holograph manuscript,” a bequest of Duport family materials, and “bound in dark-red morocco,” further play with scholarship but are also reminiscent of the front frame to The Turn of the Screw. James, as discussed previously, used the frame to position the text as a ghost story, although we have only the governess’s word for the haunting. Here Cox uses the editor’s preface, much as Collins used such layering, to both remind us that the narrative is “postauthentic” and simultaneously to give it an air of authenticity. Antrobus

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annotates the text throughout to maintain the fiction of an editor’s role, in the style of Collins’s framing characters in After Dark. Pretending to find such a manuscript or appending notes on it was also a trope in Victorian fiction, recalling Dr. Hessellius’s comments that open Carmilla. It is one that has been continued in mystery fiction, as in Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell series, in which the author poses as the editor of trunkfuls of manuscript sent to her anonymously, or Elizabeth Peters’s earlier Amelia Peabody series of historical mysteries, discussed below for their referencing of Collins’s content and form. In King’s first book of the series, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994), the “Editor’s Preface” begins, “The first thing I want the reader to know is that I had nothing to do with this book you have in your hand” (xiii). Although Cox uses a similar front frame, it is Edward who emerges as the editorial character of the novel rather than Antrobus, as he pieces together the diaries, letters, poems, and other documentary evidence, along with his description of his own investigation of his origins. Written in subtitled parts with an “Intermezzo,” the whole text is framed as Edward’s confessional casebook of his detection and his resultant crimes. Within this framed first-person narrative are copious plot documents that grow in importance as the story progresses. These include prose and poetry fragments by Phoebus Daunt; extracts from Edward’s supposed mother’s diary; a lengthy deposition by Carteret on Lady Tansor, Edward’s real mother; a note appended to the deposition; a letter from Edward’s lawyer benefactor revealing that he has always known who Edward was; a letter to her son that Lady Tansor had concealed along with proofs; and two quasi-literary fragments pasted into the bound manuscript that may have been written by Edward. The emphasis on legal documentation in the novel recalls Collins, and the layers of framing distinctly evoke the novel of testimony, even though Edward is the only direct character/narrator. Like Walter, Edward sees himself as the author/editor of these matters, and he interviews others about his real family’s history. Like Lydia, he spies on conversations and then writes them out directly afterward. He compares himself to “a scholar working on fragments of some ancient text” as he attempts to prove first to himself his own origin (390). The only appendix is a list of Daunt’s published works, apparently and ironically made by Antrobus. Cox’s second postauthentic Victorian novel, The Glass of Time, adapts Collins’s fiction even more directly, pointing to the connection by charactermade references. In this novel Alice Esperanza Gorst, a young woman, has been sent to spy on the former Emily Carteret, now herself the adopted heir Lady Tansor. Alice/Esperanza, who narrates the story, does not know why she has been sent to obtain first a position as a lady’s maid and then as a companion to Lady Tansor. The mysterious Madame de l’Orme, her guardian, and Mr. Thornhaugh, her tutor, have trained her for this role and she obeys them

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without hesitation while waiting also for madame’s occasional letters of further instruction and information. Her false position as maid directly references Magdalen Vanstone in No Name, as do her circumstances as a penniless orphan of dubious parentage, made poor by the machinations of others. To underline this connection further, Alice/Esperanza lists Collins among her favorite authors in response to Lady Tansor’s inquiry, along with Dickens and Braddon (26). She later identifies her current reading as No Name itself. As further insider humor, Lady Tansor “in her most preposterously pompous manner” declares that she dos not know Collins’s novels and dismisses them as “trivial stuff ” (214 –215). As in Night, Cox revises Collins’s characters and plot, making several reversals of No Name content. Though the ultimate motives— recovery of family status and wealth — are similar, Alice is not acting out of her own plan, as Magdalen did, but out of the plans of others. As the novel progresses, we learn — as Alice learns— that she is part of a revenge plot against her employer to expose her secrets. Later Alice is told that she must contrive to marry Lady Tansor’s eldest son and heir, whom she already loves. Finally, it is revealed to her that her tutor is in fact Edward, the permanently missing heir, and she his daughter, whom he wants to see married into the succession of the great house and the heritage that should have been his. Alice, like Magdalen, has mixed feelings in several directions. At times she pities and admires Lady Tansor, though at others she distrusts and dislikes her. The attentions of Phoebus, the elder son, worry her until she is told to accept them. A subplot that robs him of the succession while his younger brother is found to be secretly married to the housekeeper delays the happy ending by a plot twist as tortured as anything in No Name, recalling the marriage of Magdalen’s younger sister to the nephew of the recipient of their family’s money as well as Magdalen’s previous successful scheme to marry the original inheritor of what should have been hers. Edward, in the first novel, also owes a debt to Magdalen’s always-foiled attempts to regain her family’s money. Antrobus, the postauthentic professor, again appears, but much less intrusively, and there are fewer footnotes in the text. The introduction is brief and the epilogue is by Esperanza herself. Again there is a whole-text frame — the subtitle here is “The Secret Life of Miss Esperanza Gorst Narrated by Herself.” Esperanza’s observations of the Duports in the prologue are subtitled, “Observed by Miss Gorst, 8th November 1876.” These lightly frame her narrative as a record, but Esperanza also writes her observations, including detailed conversations and character sketches, in her “Book of Secrets” as reports for Madame de l’Orme, and this frames many sections of her narrative as witness testimony. Her thumbnail portraits of the residents at Evenwood, written for her guardian, appear numerous times. JONAH BARRINGTON

Footman. Tall and wiry, straight-backed, military bearing, hollow-cheeked,

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doleful of aspect, full head of still grey hair. Large ears with peeping tufts of white, like caterpillars. Fifty years of age? Small pursed mouth giving the impression that he exists in a state of surprised disapproval of the world in which he unaccountably finds himself, although I have a sense that he is a kindly soul at heart. An unobtrusive but watchful air about him [39].

Such entries emphasize Alice/Esperanza as a detective, although she does not yet know what mystery she is expected to solve. Similarly, she records conversations, some in which she takes part and some of which she overhears, in the manner of a sleuth. The voice of Esperanza (the name she uses other than with Lady Tansor) is colored by emotion and reaction far more than the voice of Esther Summerson in Bleak House. Even in recording in her book her “Conversation with Lady T,” Esperanza begins dramatically by describing in detail the scene and mocking her own deceptive part in it. I sit down beside her and take up her left hand. She smiles weakly, gives a little cough, and says that she has something to tell me: we must return to England, sooner than expected. To my surprise, she admits that a crisis has occurred in her affairs, but will not say more. I show her, with a brief downwards glance, that I have seen the letter she holds in her other hand, and boldly ask who it is from. Lady T: It is from Mr. Vyse. You will remember Mr. Roderick Shillito, who came to Evenwood with Mr. Vyse as a guest at Christmas. I regret to say that Mr. Vyse informs me that he is dead. I naturally affect shock at this terrible news. Was he taken ill? I ask [431].

Esperanza thus makes herself into a character in her reports, emphasizing herself as the editor/character of this novel. Nothing that she does or experiences is separate from her role as undercover detective. Esperanza also makes detectivelike summaries of what she has learned from letters she uncovers and later from the confessionals Madame eventually writes to her. Three other voices appear at intervals. The most developed one is that of Madame de l’Orme, whose long letters slowly dispense information to Esperanza about the “Great Work” she is commanded to perform. Notes also appear several times from Mr. Thornhaugh, Esperanza’s tutor, later revealed to be Edward Duport, her father. Third is the diary of Marguerite Blantyre Gorst, her mother, which is given to her by Thornhaugh. Both extracts from the journal and Esperanza’s dramatization of the diary’s events, “Drawn From The Journal of Marguerite Gorst” (319), are intercut with the ongoing narrative for several chapters in the second half of the book. As in Collins’s casebooks, these expose evidence slowly and maintain suspense. Glass is more squarely a casebook than Night through its more developed document framing and the dialogic interaction among the character narratives. Cox’s novels are, as he said, “postauthentic” in returning to the sensation era to draw on Collins and other Victorian authors. Recent popular fiction writers have used historical context in a similar way, though not necessarily in Collins’s own time. An unusually extended Collins homage occurs in Elizabeth

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Peters’s series of lightly comic mysteries about the Emerson family, who detect crimes while excavating archeological sites in Egypt from the late nineteenth century through the first World War. Peters’s series does not begin with either document framing or Collins references, although the entire series is framed as the fiction-style journals of Amelia Peabody Emerson, discovered and edited by the author, a conceit used less for credibility than for the pleasure of emphasizing the text. Peters references many popular writers in the series; her first Collins citation occurs in the fifth book of the series, The Last Camel Died at Noon (1991), which primarily draws on H. Rider Haggard’s 1887 novel She (Last Camel is set in 1898). After the title disaster, Amelia, her husband, and Ramses, her precocious son, end up at a lost oasis whose rulership is in question. They must decide whom to trust, and Amelia sorts this out at one point according to which of the rivals has read The Moonstone, which Emerson, who has not read it, refers to as reflecting her “trashy taste in literature” (328 –329). There are other jokes in the novel about Amelia and her son reading thrillers. What makes this reference worth noting is the subsequent development of regularly occurring documents in the series, along with other citations of Collins’s works. The documents are at first minor. In the sixth book, The Snake, the Crocodile & the Dog (1992), Amelia’s journals are noted in the editor’s note as The Collected Works of Amelia Peabody Emerson, from the Oxford Press, now in an eighth edition. In the book’s second half, a series of letters from Ramses, then eleven years old and determined to join his parents in Egypt, adds regularly occurring documents that narrate his detection. As Ramses helps uncover a spy in the household of his aunt and uncle, he is aided by none other than Sergeant Cuff, whom Ramses has called on the telephone and asked to take a hand. Cuff agrees to come out of retirement and Ramses concludes, “I believe he is bored with roses” (166). The spy in the household turns out to be a maid who is at one point discovered in the library. Both circumstances recall Magdalen Vanstone’s undercover episode in No Name. After they catch a burglar, Cuff takes him to London. Peters knows The Moonstone well, for once they deduce the spy as the maid, Ramses again calls Cuff. “He pretended not to be surprised. In fact he claimed he had been suspicious of Ellis all along, and that one of the reasons why he had gone to London was to investigate her antecedents” (373). Cuff arranges to have her followed, but his being out of the loop of discovery parallels The Moonstone, while the maid recalls not only Magdalen but also Rosanna Spearman, who was one of Cuff ’s suspects in The Moonstone. Here again Cuff does not solve the case. In the next two books, Seeing a Large Cat (1997) and The Ape Who Guards the Balance (1998), Peters both launches into more elaborate document framing and again references Collins. Seeing introduces a new set of Emerson papers, “Manuscript H,” apparently written by Ramses, which are interleaved with

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Amelia’s narrative explicitly in order to provide another character’s perspective on events. The second of these eight sections is introduced as “Ramses had not told his mother everything, as the following excerpt from Manuscript H demonstrates” (108). Ape continues Ramses’s account in Manuscript H installments and adds an additional series of letters by Nefret Forth, the girl they rescued and adopted in Last Camel, as “Letter Collection B,” for a total of sixteen document-framed interjections that now add two perspectives to the main narrative, all of them unseen by the other writers. This might be the general influence of Collins’s formalism on mystery except for a very minor character named Miss Verinder, through whom Peters indicates her source for the multiple focus on family detection. This dialogue of narrators reaches its high-water mark in The Falcon at the Portal (1999) with Amelia’s narrative intercut with Manuscript H, Letter B, and excerpts from a pulp novel written by Percy, Amelia’s nephew, who develops as a new villain in the next several novels. After Falcon, the dialogue tapers off somewhat, though “Letter Collection C” is added in Guardian of the Horizon (2004). Peters’s extended application of framed counterpointing while referencing Collins exceeds even Fergus Hume’s plays on the form and content.

Fosco Becomes Contemporary Again Besides Collins’s structural influence in the work of others, his characters too have continued to reappear occasionally. Lydia Gwilt has made numerous appearances, Magdalen Vanstone has been adapted several times, and even Cuff has been borrowed. But Fosco may be the Collins character most reprised. Not only did Caspary adapt him twice as Waldo and Chauncey, but in Brimstone, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Count Fosco reappears as himself to act as a twentieth-century villain. He’s still Italian and now has a family seat, Castle Fosco, in Florence. He still has sinister connections, but now his villainy is directed toward frightening the owner of a lost, priceless violin into returning it to his family. He does so by using microwave technology to kill the owner’s past associates in a way that suggests visitation by the devil. Preston and Child frequently pay homage to other great writers of thrilling horror, including Michael Crichton (in Relic), H. P. Lovecraft (in The Cabinet of Curiosities), and Stephen King (in Still Life with Crows). In Brimstone they also replay the death of Montresor from Poe’s story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” as Special Agent Pendergast, one of their major series characters, is bricked up alive by Fosco. They borrow from “The Purloined Letter” as well. They have previously reprised Stephen King’s Carrie as Corrie, a supporting character in Still Life with Crows, this time saving her from a constricted life and a demented killer. However, other than Crichton’s typical opening structure of action snapshots in Relic and its direct sequel, Reliquary, they do not reprise form, nor do

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they tend to use framing devices or monologic speech; this is true of Brimstone as well. In case readers do not recognize Fosco’s origins, Preston and Child added an afterword, as they typically do, that identifies him. After correctly saying they have “done something quite unusual” in the novel, they confess to having “brazenly lifted the character of Count Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco from the pages of The Woman in White, the great novel by the Victorian author Wilkie Collins, and inserted him bodily into Brimstone” (727). Although they go on to cite Collins’s invention of the detective novel in The Moonstone, they rate Woman as his “greatest novel” and state that Collins is “one of our favorite writers, who has certainly influenced our own fiction.” They close by directing to any dissenting critics the line from Tosca that Fosco earlier sings in rebuttal to Special Agent Pendergast and Sergeant D’Gosta, their own detectives: “Braveggia, urla! T-affretta a parlesarmi il fondo dell’alma ria!” (728). Pendergast rendered this earlier into English: “‘Shout, braggart,” he translated. ‘What a rush you’re in the show me the last dregs of your vile soul!’” (64). The count’s rebuff to Pendergast with the operatic line, as well as in other comments, reconstructs his “managing” style in Woman, in which he turns his chiding of Glyde and other characters into polite or even complimentary statements that mask his control of them. Thus when Pendergast characterizes the count’s beloved opera as “vulgar and infantile,” the count replies, “Well, well, I see you are a gentleman with firm opinions” and goes on to sing the line from Tosca quoted above, forcing Pendergast to demonstrate his knowledge of opera in translating it. His voice as well as the dynamics of his speech are similar to those in Woman. His appearance is carefully recreated as well; he appears for the first time in Brimstone much as Marian Halcombe first described him, in a dove gray suit with a waistcoat, immensely fat yet light on his feet as well as nimble in wit. No other characters from Woman appear, so the count does not have a tamed wife or a lesser villain in tow. His animals have been preserved, yet with a bizarre touch of Phillip K. Dick’s fiction, the cockatoo and mice are now mechanical and made by the count himself, while the canaries are real. Preston and Child have adapted at length the scene in which Walter Hartright confronts Fosco in a desperate bid to restore Laura’s identity. When Walter goes to the opera with Professor Pesca, the count stares at Pesca. Later Pesca confesses to Walter that a secret society of assassins exists, into which one is initiated with a special red mark burned into the upper arm, thus marking a member forever. Both he and Fosco are members, and Fosco knows him by sight. Walter uses this knowledge to blackmail Fosco. He has left with a reliable friend, he tells the count, a letter telling all, and if he does not return for it by nine the next morning, the information will be acted upon. The count insists that Walter remain with him while he writes the confession whose information Walter requires to reestablish Laura’s legal status after Fosco and Glyde have exchanged

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her identity with the dead Anne Catherick. He demands that Walter then send a letter retrieving the information he has left behind for Fosco’s agent to retrieve. Afterwards, Fosco will have a half-hour’s grace period to depart, after which he will demand satisfaction at a later date. We learn at the end of the novel that Fosco has been killed in Paris, left marked with a “T,” apparently for “traitor.” In Brimstone, the opera scene is used earlier, when Pendergast and Fosco attend a performance, although Pendergast claims to detest opera. Pendergast has caught a glimpse of the society’s mark, here a black spot tattooed over the heart, and from his own vast store of knowledge (in the tradition of Dupin and Holmes) connects this to the secret society membership, here in the medieval Comitatus Decimus, or Company of Ten. He uses this to defend himself and D’Agosta when they are locked into the count’s castle. Like Walter, they refuse to eat or drink while there for fear of poison. The count justifies his murders of his despicable acquaintances by having foiled a plot to destroy the priceless violin in order to aid Chinese missile accuracy, just as the original Fosco complimented himself on not having actually murdered Anne Catherick or Laura Fairlie. Pendergast has also left a missive, this time with one Prince Maffei, to be opened if they do not return. But the count outsmarts them by the deduction from Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” He tells the prince that the society’s documents are in danger. The prince escorts Fosco to his most secure repository, which, as Fosco expected, is where he had put Pendergast’s letter. Fosco spots it as the only new envelope among the old papers and takes it. D’Agosta escapes, but Pendergast is bricked up in a deep cellar in the second Poe adaptation in the novel. Later, believing that Fosco has killed Pendergast, D’Agosta kills the count with a microwave device similar to his own. Collins’s influence on the thrillers by Preston and Child may well extend beyond their borrowing Fosco, as they imply. Brimstone introduces Diogenes, Pendergast’s brother, a psychotic mastermind whose revenge on Pendergast occupies their next two novels as well, making a trilogy within the series. Diogenes embodies the worst of Pendergast’s fabulously wealthy and frequently mad family. From torturing animals to keeping a journal so horrible that one page of it was all Pendergast could stand, Diogenes is the negative double of the FBI agent who investigates bizarre crimes in an effort to curtail the horrors his family members have visited on the world. This doubling, along with Diogenes’s having eyes of different colors and being unable himself to see color, is the sort of Gothic extravagance that Collins, as well as other writers of sensation and Gothic detection, frequently employed. Their being brothers recalls the two Alan Armadales, and an episode in their past so terrible that Pendergast has completely repressed the memory also evokes the murder of the father that shadows Alan and Midwinter. The combination of such sensational elements with detection, along with their afterword comments, points most strongly to Collins as their chief influence on Brimstone. Even their raiding of Poe’s plots is a Collins trope.

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Dracula’s Disciples Stoker’s application of the casebook form in Dracula remains one of the most famous such uses and is so important that writers of related works, either sequels or adaptations of Dracula, also often recreate the framed witnessing of that novel, whether or not they know Collins’s works. Contemporary writers have not considered the casebook for an imperative in adapting Stoker’s text. Barbara Hambly’s Renfield, Slave of Dracula (2006) turns it instead to a novel in counterpointed documents, with sections in third person, while also using letters from the text of Dracula. The Historian (2005), by Elizabeth Kostova, also uses counterpointed documents as well as historical plot documents in several regularly occurring sets within a first-person narrative. Neither book attempts the full casebook form, but both are interesting for their use of framed documents. The very recent sequel Dracula the Undead (2009), by Stoker’s greatgrandnephew Dacre Stoker and screenwriter Ian Holt, uses only one plot document, a prefacing letter from Mina to her son Quincey. The letter recaps the plot of Dracula and hints that it is not over. Their story is told in unframed multiple third-person viewpoints that are fairly distant from the characters, reporting information and major reactions but not recreating highly personal consciousness. In an interesting afterword that discusses in detail what the authors have chosen to use or not use from decades of Dracula lore, the original book’s form is mentioned only once in passing. Dacre Stoker says that because of the framing devices, Bram “was limited in his ability to fully explore his famous characters’ backstories” (413), which he and Holt wish to do. He implies that they have abandoned the frames for greater ease. In contradiction, when Quincey Harker reads Dracula in this sequel, he responds to the “first-person narrative, journal entries, and letter correspondence,” calling them “unique” (91). Curiously, in the text they perhaps make an oblique reference to Collins by repeatedly dubbing a group of female vampire acolytes “Women in White” (14) and their leader, the Countess Bathory, as the “Woman in White” (40). That later writers do continue to use the demanding casebook and counterpointed forms shows both the effectiveness of framed mediation and how much it is associated with Stoker’s novel. Dracula thus has become a particular disseminator of the lasting influence of Collins’s form. ’Salem’s Lot, Stephen King’s second novel, is a compendium of all things Dracula as well as a contemporary vampire novel. King reworks content from Stoker’s text both elaborately, as in reprising the death of Lucy in Susan’s death near the end of the book, and in the vampire’s human associate’s name. Straker evokes both Stoker and “stake her.” At the same time he crosses content and form with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), a text he has referenced many times and had done so to a larger extent in Carrie. Here the

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vampire lives in a house of evil repute, and the chief vampire slayer is a survivor of a childhood encounter with that evil. King has developed his own style for framing devices. Carrie’s counterpointed, regularly occurring documents, all of which look back to the night of the “black prom,” with a forward-moving third-person narrative punctuated by italicized interior reactions, was discussed in Chapter 7. Even though King gives away the general plot early on, the effect is a sophisticated use of framing with a touch of stream-of-consciousness intensity to build suspense as readers wait to see the anticipated horror unfold. It is similar, in fact, to Stoker’s use of Jonathan Harker’s diary opening to inform readers about what the characters then must gradually learn. Readers carry the burden of the suspense by knowing what is about to happen to Lucy and Mina, although the characters remain puzzled. In ’Salem’s Lot, King again used traditional devices in his own design. The prologue contains a lengthy newspaper account of the town of Jerusalem’s Lot for standard expository purposes, while the epilogue includes a series of newspaper clippings and two stanzas of poetry. But the main narrative of the book is treated nontraditionally. Some of the structure comes from Hill House, whose sectioned narratives are recreated in the numbered sequences within narrative sections and whose quick flashes of response from deep within a character’s consciousness lent themselves to Carrie as well as ’Salem’s Lot. But King also plays with the concept of multiple focus from Dracula while exploiting both limited third-person narration and extreme omniscience. The book as a whole is divided into three titled sections, framed with a prologue from the future and an epilogue that sets it up. The three central sections are chapters assigned to each character and numbered, as in “Ben (I).” These numberings accrue, with chapters for Ben, Susan, and Matt (who are the principal adult vampire hunters), and for The Lot itself, which is treated as a collective character. These sections are in third-person viewpoint that stays fairly close to the characters except for The Lot sections. The first Lot section consists of snapshots of characters within the town in short sections with time numbering from four in the morning to eleven fifty-nine at night. These closeups build the sense of the town as a grouping of multiple focuses, some of them benign, some horrible even before the vampires arrive. The second Lot section opens with an omniscient passage and then continues with character focuses, while the third Lot section has an even more omniscient opening passage which treats the town as a unity that subsumes the characters the chapter moves on to observe. King has used the segmented form of Hill House to evoke but not recreate the charactermediated narration of Dracula, all of it containing, as Clive Barker’s introduction notes, “virtually an encyclopedia of vampiric scenes and effects” (x). This elaborate structure does not always work. As in Collins’s novels, the layers of structure can be too heavy for the content, yet it is one of the most interesting

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plays on Dracula’s casebook form in that it adapts the form itself rather than reprising it.

A Dossier on Stoker’s Novel One recent novel that also successfully adapts the casebook rather than simply reusing it is The Dracula Dossier, by James Reese (2008). This novel uses Bram Stoker himself, in the context of his position as theatrical manager for Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theater, as narrator and editorial character and crosses the atmosphere and structure of Dracula with the Ripper murders (also done in the Dacre/Holt novel) via the Society of the Golden Dawn, whose ceremonies have caused the American Dr. Tumblety to become possessed by Set, with an additional riff from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) [which a footnote points out had been performed at the Lyceum (257)]. The novel has an especially elaborate “discovered manuscript” front frame from one “Comte de Ville,” who has sent the dossier to the senior editor at William Morrow, who in fact edited the novel. He traces provenance for her, from a Sotheby auction in 1913 to their separation from the rest of the material acquired in 1970 by the Rosenbach Museum and Library. The comte inherited the rest, some of which he sold, retaining pages in cipher by Stoker. Included are newspaper clippings on Jack the Ripper’s crimes, also annotated by Stoker. The comte has translated the encryptions, which are the text of the novel. Copious footnotes in the text are from the comte’s research. The notes are also historically functional; as Reese points out in his “Author’s Note” at the end, he has followed the rule Umberto Eco laid down for “swashbuckling fiction” that involves fictional characters in real-life events and with historical figures: the author said that “nearly nothing” in this novel deviates from recorded fact. As he puts it, “This could have happened as written” (345). The main text consists of extracts from Stoker’s journal, letters by him to Hall Caine, memorandums by Stoker, and interspersed plot documents such as telegrams, letters, newspaper clippings (some of which report witness statements), and reports from the Metropolitan Police Files copied in another handwriting and pasted in by Stoker. Collins is referenced once the text and once in a footnote, in both cases focusing on form. In the text, Reese, like many other writers of noir thrillers, cannot resist making a play on “The Woman in White,” here making an explicit connection of the Dossier to Collins. After Stoker calls a ghost “The Woman in Black,” the comte’s footnote explains the reference and the connection in form. “Stoker indulges here in something of an inside joke. The Woman in White was an absurdly popular novel amongst the Victorians, and one to which Stoker turned often, borrowing its structure for both Dracula and this its precursor, the Dossier” (52). Reese manages to acknowledge his

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own use of the form as well as Stoker’s debt to Collins while still maintaining his own frame. Later, in another footnote, Reese interweaves again his own text, Stoker’s novel, and Collins. After noting that Stoker seemed to having added a particular memorandum later as explanation, the comte’s note discusses the importance of it. “He would not have done this lightly, for in both the Dossier and later in Dracula, Stoker stands committed to the narrative device first tried by Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White....” He goes on to quote from Collins’s 1860 preface his description of his “experiment” in having the characters tell the story. Reese/comte then suggests a comparison of this description to Stoker’s prefacing remarks to Dracula, in which Collins’s remarks are redirected toward credibility by Stoker (81). “There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them” (81). This is very close reading of Collins, indicating that Reese studied the form both in Woman and in Dracula before recreating it in this “precursor” dossier. The Dossier is similar to Cox’s novels in being set in Victorian times while reworking Victorian texts. At the same time it is not only a reworking of text but a fresh, somewhat plausible version of history in which Stoker played a decisive part both in creating and stopping Jack the Ripper, giving himself new antecedents for Dracula, although its form remains an explicitly acknowledged descendant of The Woman in White.

Collins’s Broad Influence Both literary and popular novels, whether historical, contemporary, or a bit of both, continue to play with framed, character-mediated narration in the exact manner of Wilkie Collins. Even when their texts do not identify Collins as a direct reference, his influence on mediated dialogics is manifest in the use of framing, the play of viewpoints against each other, and the dramatic, monologic voices, all used in the interest of suspense and eventual resolution. A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) is a compendium of the ways Collins has influenced the dialogics of Gothic thrillers and also of the ways narratology has gone beyond his formal experiments. It is can be read as study in narrative devices and character mediation over two centuries. Byatt’s blend of history, mystery, and literary novel is successful because, as one of Byatt’s characters notes, “Literary critics make natural detectives” (259). In such a case, documents are utterly integral to the story as well as natural vehicles for the characters. The book is thus entitled realistically to lean on documentary evidence in the same way that Gothic detection posed testimony.

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The principal documents here include long-lost letters between two poets, male and female, respectively famous and obscure, as well as the diary of Ellen Ashe, wife of the male poet, the journal and later suicide note of the Christabel LaMotte’s companion, and a diary kept by a young relative and aspiring writer with whose family the pregnant LaMotte sheltered, as well as poems or poem extracts short and long by both the poets, fables by LaMotte, and extracts from biographies of Ashe and from poststructural articles about LaMotte, who has been rediscovered by feminist critics. Each document tells only a fragment of the story, happened upon at first by chance by an unsuccessful scholar and later pursued by himself and a woman scholar descended from the family of LaMotte. The story told in documents resides in the past, along with the origins of the form. The ostensibly living present, the narrative present of an autobiographer or a letter writer, is told in limited third person among several major characters, generally but not exclusively the two researchers. Because they are obsessed with or possessed by the documents which both overshadow and feed their own lives, the emphasis remains on documented testimony for much of the book; in fact, they are documenting the testaments they discover. Furthermore, because Byatt dipped into the points of view of minor characters, they too “testify” through their perspectives. Although none of the documents are anything other than personal ones, not made for public consumption, the letters were already the self-conscious correspondence of writers, one already famous and thus conscious of the value of his letters and the other an aspiring writer who hopes that her work will survive. Because of this context, there is a sense in Possession that the letters and other documents from and about the past are also written to the present characters as scholars and lovers of literature (and, in Maud Bailey’s case, as a descendant). However, Byatt further manipulates multiple viewpoint beyond the bounds of either framed documents or present third-person narrative. Near the end of the book the various scholars who have become involved in the search for the child of the two poets gather, read the final document, an unreceived letter still sealed, and debrief each other in a detection parallel which Byatt acknowledges directly. One character says “This feels like the ending of a Shakespearean comedy...” and continues, “Or like the unmasking at the end of a detective story” (524). Byatt had already overstepped both the documented past and the ongoing present in order to keep the reader further ahead of the manuscript detectives. The reader already knows what will be found in the casket that has been unearthed in a scene of Gothic tempest, having been privy to a scene dramatized from the past in which we read a letter later burned and see what was buried with Ash, thus eclipsing both frames and relying on the consciousness of characters in the past. In an epilogue to the debriefing, at which the characters erroneously conclude that Ash never knew he had a daughter, we again return to a flashback

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scene from his lifetime in which he encountered and recognized his daughter, sending by her a message to her “aunt,” which she never delivered. Even at the end of the manuscript, the involved detectives mistakenly interpret their evidence because, like Cuff in The Moonstone, they do not have key pieces. Here, however, by the sort of literary ventriloquism Byatt practiced though her Victorian characters, Byatt “solves” the story for the reader alone. Possession is both a Victorian-era novel and a contemporary one, the former largely but not exclusively in letter and diary frames, as are Cox’s postauthentic Victorian-set tributes to Collins and others. Byatt deliberately evokes both Tennyson and Browning in Randolph Ashe, her “ventriloquist” poet, who frequently writes dramatic monologues of famous and bizarre characters, while at the same time applying the layered and counterpointed mediation of which Collins was a master. Her impressive synthesis of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury formalist strategies illustrates that the framed narration so characteristic of Collins has informed fiction beyond direct homages, adaptations, and casebook novels written by others. The possibilities for multiple narration and character mediation have only expanded throughout the twentieth century, and framing devices have in no way been left behind in that expansion. Instead, the variety of framed narration continues to interest contemporary fiction writers in both popular and literary texts.

Conclusion Wilkie Collins has been widely celebrated since his own era for his contribution to mystery fiction. He is frequently cited as having written the first detective novel, which is often said to be The Moonstone rather than The Woman in White, since the latter contains Sergeant Cuff, the professional detective he is also credited with drawing. In the past few decades, Collins has also been written about as a social critic who stood outside the mainstream personally as well as authorially, and as chief founder of sensation fiction. His work is noteworthy for these reasons, yet his contribution to mystery fiction is greater and broader than has been acknowledged. Collins’s relation to crime fiction deserves thorough reexamination. He was not the first to experiment with layered narratives, to mix third-person narration with first-person accounts, or to apply document framing for character narration; but it was Collins who combined epistolary technique with Poe’s monologic confessions to transform the privacy of letters and diaries into a casebook of witness testimony that functioned significantly differently from either the novel of letters or trial and police reports. The complex influence of this form within and without mystery fiction reaches from Collins’s day to the present. John Cawelti cites this influence in his analysis of detective formula ingredients, placing Collins’s casebook as a major narrative pattern within the category: “There is another important narrative tradition within the classical detective story that derives less from Poe than from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). In this tradition, the story is told by a number of narrators, each of whom moves a step closer to the solution of the crime” (84). Given Collins’s popularity during his lifetime, it is not surprising that other writers began to adopt the casebook form almost immediately. Yet long after Collins’s death, crime writers have continued to pay homage not only by writing novels of testimony but also by mentioning Collins and/or his works to identify their model. I have by no means exhausted this heritage but have collected here ten examples I found cited or discovered from research, from the 1860s to the twenty-first century. Beyond homage to Collins and his works, the life of the casebook novel 188

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extends a general contribution to narratology. Because the multiple-focus testimony works so well to create suspense and delay solution with false witness and mistaken interpretations, it has preserved epistolary dialogue in a particular application for crime fiction. Not only full casebooks, but, as was done many times by Collins, counterpointed character narration in sets of letters, long diary entries, or other mediation continue to be used by mystery authors. A late-twentieth-century example is the series by Sarah Cauldwell, set in contemporary legal chambers, in which amateur detection is pursued by a group of barristers and Oxford tutor Hillary Tamar, their mentor. In each novel, Tamar narrates in a dryly humorous and deliberately stately voice that equals Collins at his comic best, while absent characters complicate the plot with regular correspondence or, in one case, faxes of incredible length. As a final touch, it is impossible to deduce Tamar’s gender. What might have been merely plot document is turned into counterpointed testimony by its regular occurrence, dramatic character voice, and dialogue with the narration, in which Tamar, as editor/narrator, analyzes the communications of the others to solve the case. The separation of the characters, the delay in receipt of correspondence, and the misinterpretation of exchanged information all are utilized to the same end for which Collins applied framed testimony. In essence, these novels are full-length versions of the dialogics from “The Biter Bit.” This series is not a direct celebration of Collins but evidence of his lasting general influence on framed character narration in crime fiction. Form is interesting to writers, who read widely and raid just as widely for ideas and technique. The ongoing mystery vogue in all things Victorian seems not yet to have peaked, and this has also directed contemporary writers such as Michael Cox, who also edited collections of Victorian stories, to specifically adapt Collins’s form and works. But as Caspary shows, the casebook influence extends well beyond historical fiction. Collins was and remains a source from his day to the present. His importance to other writers extends even to being an iconic touchstone. Isabel Zuber’s 2002 novel Salt is written in a lyrical style that bears little resemblance to Collins’s work. Yet Collins and his novels act as a symbol for one of the principal characters, a correlative of her never-satisfied pleasure in reading and in particular of her desire to live a creative life she is denied by her class and context. Anna finds inspiration and hope for a time in the heroines of his novels, especially Magdalen Vanstone. She connects to two men partly through shared delight in Collins. The first, a homosexual store owner, is run out of town after being warned by Anna’s husband, who then burns the Collins novels the man gave him for Anna, along with the store. The second is a poet she meets on a train when going to nurse her dying sister. She impulsively sleeps with him after they talk about Collins. As Louis Bayard put it, Collins is “still the man.” We know and love you still. Has any thriller ever boasted a better opening sequence that your Woman in White? Has any detective story employed multiple

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narrators more artfully than your Moonstone? Has anyone produced so many sinfully entertaining books while maintaining an opium habit that made Thomas de Quincey look like a dabbler?

He goes on to praise Collins as “more modern than the Victorian aesthetes who thumbed their noses at you” (1). This far-reaching influence, especially given the overwhelming popularity and critical celebration of The Woman in White and The Moonstone, has ramifications beyond mystery fiction as well. At the very least, Collins was one of the major Victorian writers who, by experimenting with framed and unframed multiple focus and character monologues, laid the groundwork for twentiethcentury unframed multiple focus and interior monologues as well as the continued use of framing devices. Collins was the bridging figure between Poe and Conan Doyle, but not because of Sergeant Cuff. Not only did Collins reprise plot from Poe multiple times but the influence of Poe’s prose monologues is a key factor in Collins’s successful development of the casebook form. The vivid voices of The Woman in White and The Moonstone are central to the continued popularity of these novels and their being ranked as Collins’s best works, and their dramatic monologues are built on those of Poe’s criminals. In these prose monologues, Collins rebalanced character speech from epistolary fiction in terms of the narrating versus the experiencing speaker. His witnesses are asked to testify about past events. In doing so, they relive the events to a degree that is individual. Some even resist reliving events, and many editorialize as they recount the happenings in question. Collins’s casebook utilizes their direct narration, some of which is false or distorted, for suspense and delay of solution. At the same time, the witnesses’ emotional reactions to the past color their testimony, resulting in complex revelations of experience in past and present testimony. What begins as witness statement exposes the narrator’s both conscious and unconscious biases and stratagems. Testifying makes the characters self-conscious about the events but not necessarily about themselves. There are endless modulations available, and Collins applied many of them. Betteredge narrates shrewdly about the family and deliberately exposes some of his own stratagems, now that the mystery is solved. But at other points he reveals his credulity in candid asides and reactions, such his consultation of Robinson Crusoe, that are not part of the narrative of the theft but are part of Betteredge’s consciousness. We thus see a layering of direct discourse and indirect thought and reaction. With the reported speeches of others as part of character narration, the possibilities become rich for bridging the narrating/experiencing gap. Even with diaries written as private documents, such as Marian’s journal, the editorial character recontextualizes the private consciousness as casebook discourse, having it both ways. This rebalancing and redirecting of direct and indirect speech is central to Collins’s development of the novel of testimony, and his principal source was not Dickens, who can rarely

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suspend omniscience long enough for character monologues, but Poe’s characteristic confessors. Viewing Collins as an heir of Poe clarifies the body of his work, and it is not necessary to exclude every work of Collins that lacks a detective to see the relationship. Like Poe, Collins wrote a range of content, all of it with strange characters, events, and tones. Some of this work fits well into the development of mystery and detective fiction. Some of it is borderline detection about characters involved in crime in which the plot does not follow clues to a solution but concludes by providential occurrences or other interventions, as in No Name. Poe modeled such a range for Collins. The bizarre atmosphere of “The Gold Bug,” with its riddling clues, and “The Imp of the Perverse,” with its opening analysis of human self-destructiveness, maintain the weird overtones of Gothic literature while also focusing on crime. Collins made his own combination of the Gothic and the investigative. It is the monologic criminals of Poe, such as Montresor and the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who reappear in Collins’s novels of testimony as villains, eccentrics, and deeply involved protagonists. Poe’s narrators are a source for the guilty tinge Collins gave even to Walter Hartright, who loves above his station; Marian Halcombe, whose very appearance is transgressive; and the unstable Franklin Blake, whose failure to grow up and settle down makes him suspect even before Rachel’s accusation. Collins’s redirection of Poe’s prose monologues into dramatized testimony is as brilliant a reconfiguration as his inversion of letters and diaries into casebook documents. Collins retained Poe’s character filter for crime but redirected the monologues toward witnessing by partisan narrators who confess and conceal even as they bear witness. Collins, along with Poe, Browning, and Tennyson, was one of the great Victorian ventriloquists who spoke through dramatic character voices that color and yet ultimately do not control what they convey. He is closest in this regard not only to Poe’s compulsively confessional speakers but also to Browning’s sly yet inadvertently revealing voices in dramatic monologues. Browning’s The Ring and the Book, which has been called “almost a versified sensation novel” (Bratlinger 42), was published in the same year as The Moonstone. It is quite conceivable that Browning was influenced in choosing multiple narration for his poem by The Woman in White, a connection previously suggested along with a parallel theme in “the rescue of an innocent woman who has been victimized by an evil man” (Peterson 48). If there is a converse influence, it most likely was Browning’s dramatic monologues as further reinforcement of the power of character voice. Collins was the premier prose monologist who followed Poe, the heir who continued to refine the combination of dramatic voice and crime. In this fusion, he also preserved the widely acknowledged Gothic roots of sensation fiction, building them into a dialogic whose mystery extends beyond resolution. The casebook form, described, sounds like sheer detection, but its effect is also

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Gothic. Its testimony is about a past of whose secrets each witness knows only a part, the rest being hidden from character and sometimes reader. Narrators reveal more than they intend or realize. At other points the reader becomes witness to things hidden from characters. The casebook itself, made to recount all that has been uncovered, still cannot contain all the secrets. Laura Fairlie bears the memory of her abusive marriage and imprisonment, the moonstone returns to India for an unknown future, and readers understand why Lydia poisoned herself better than Allan or Midwinter do. It is this continued reverberation beyond the ending that is the character motive for creating a casebook, to document these strange experiences in one more attempt to explain and contain them. Collins incorporated the troubling doppelgangers of Gothic fiction into not only his narrators but his frames themselves, so that letters, diaries, and witness accounts— whether experienced or observed and reported — mirror each other with as troubling an effect as character doubles produce. His building blocks— the editorial character, the layering of narration with reported speech, and document frames that call attention to writing — have been identified as symbolic structures applied in Gothic fiction for psychological effect. “Such complex structures show how these works are to be read. They are variations of a technique for establishing the sense of a fiction that cannot be taken at face value, so that the reader will indeed apprehend the closed world as the isolated world of the self ” (McAndrew 119). This comment references the form of such works as Wuthering Heights, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and The Turn of the Screw, the former two influences on Collins, the latter, I have argued, influenced by him. Collins’s casebook novels offer superlative examples of Gothic elements reinforced by the partial and deeply mediated narration of multiple witnesses. The charge of his contemporary and some later reviewers that Collins neglected character in favor of puzzles stems partly from the Gothic foundation of his work, which Collins prized above detection. Collins’s most memorable characters tend to be satiric, villainous, or just plain strange. Consider such examples as Fosco, Mrs. Catherick and her daughter, Betteredge, Miss Clack, Lydia Gwilt, or Madame Pratolungo. They are all drawn in considerable depth and characterized fully by distinctive character voice, telling actions, and individual appearance; the resulting detailed personalities mediate their narration. But none of them except Lydia is a principal actor, and none is the designated protagonist. Their oddity is enhanced because Collins’s heroes do not provide much counterbalance to the quirky characters. They are considerably more wooden, from Walter Hartright to the two Allan Armadales, who are treated largely as marionettes. Even Franklin Blake is flatter than his conarrators. Collins’s most fully developed characters are his least comfortable, and their realism unbalances his books to the degree that his protagonists are flat. Since these are often also his strangest characters, these narrators push the novels

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toward crime thrillers, with their Gothic supernaturalism, rather than rational detection. It is because of his Gothicism, deeply embedded in form as well as content, that Collins fits best among crime novelists rather than creators of detective fiction. Collins created several lawyers and their clerks as detectives or codetectives; perhaps he accepted them because he himself had qualified as such. But he seems not to have accepted the emerging character of the private inquiry agent, as his negative portrait of the scheming younger Bashwood in Armadale indicates, and he created few police detectives. Weird secrets and hidden crimes interested Collins more than the figure of the detective, and his works reflect this. Despite Cuff, social issues not withstanding, Collins remained a writer of sensational crime thrillers, a category of mystery still being written today. This focus divorced Collins from the justification of mystery as an essentially realistic type of popular fiction. Mystery fiction is the most acceptable of the popular formulas and has been made so by the same justification used in some Collins scholarship: social issues and, hence, realism. Obviously, however, one does not need a detective plot to address social issues. Crime fiction is both romantic in philosophy — there is no more romantic statement than Raymond Chandler’s “Down these means streets must go a man who is not himself mean”— and sensational in content. But real-life detectives juggle multiple cases, come in a wide variety of personalities, and may not ever get to the bottom of quixotic cases if they even have such cases. The pace and intensity of crime fiction is part of its formula, as is its ultimate resolution, and none of these ingredients are especially realist. The body of Collins’s fiction uses social issues, however seriously Collins took them, as springboards for Gothic sensation. In his study of Collins’s blend of emerging science with Gothic tropes, Laurence Talariach-Vielmas makes the point that each new development “could provide brand new plot devices for novelists and readers in search of more sensational thrills.” This is the case of Wilkie Collins, who, just like Edgar Allan Poe, hinged his plots on unstable mental states and psychological morbidity. Throughout his literary career, Collins endlessly adapted later eighteenth-century Gothic motifs and plotpatterns to Victorian modernity. His novels and short stories made bountiful use of usurped identities, superstitious and ghost-haunted characters or resurrected protagonists, and their fragmented narratives, using multiple narrators and embedding letters and manuscripts, shared a lot with those of their literary forefather [2–3].

It is because Collins’s novels are such thrillers that they have continued to be widely read and imitated, but the same popularity has excluded his work from discussions where they naturally fit. The importance of his novels as lively and apt examples of epistolary-derived fiction, prose dramatic monologue, and dialogic narrative whose polyphonics intensify multiplot novels has been obscured by the exclusion of popular fiction in general and Collins in particular

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from such analysis. I have attempted here to take initial steps to involve his works in such appropriate narrative discussions.

Caspary and the Casebook As one publisher I spoke with put it, Vera Caspary is “not studied.” This was a fairly accurate statement, although the reality deserves to change. Despite a few articles shortly after her death and her inclusion in a number of encyclopedias of mystery writers and women writers, critical attention has largely bypassed Caspary’s body of work in plays, screenwriting, stories, and novels. Why this should be so is somewhat puzzling. Her association with film, which began long before Laura and continued long after, in itself seems a likely subject; yet beyond filmographies and an unpublished dissertation, no assessment of Caspary’s screenwriting has been made, and it is outside the scope of the present study. I have touched on it only in terms of multiple focus. Although the play version of Laura is still produced, nothing has been written on Caspary as a playwright. What criticism has previously existed has focused on her as a mystery writer, a categorization that has been both somewhat misleading and also too narrow to encompass all of Caspary’s work. One block may simply be that Caspary’s having written successfully in three genres— play, screen, and fiction — has made her difficult to classify and therefore to analyze. This is complicated by some of her screenwriting and some of the films made from her books fitting very well into the noir thriller category, while others, such as A Letter to Three Wives and Les Girls, are quite otherwise. The same is true of her novels. Although all her fiction can be grouped thematically and much of it can be grouped structurally, as I have demonstrated here, some of her novels are mainstream realism, written at a time when mainstream was a positive descriptor; others are psychological novels with overtones of mystery fiction, and still others are frankly murder thrillers. Not only is this range difficult to position but mainstream fiction and mystery thrillers are now grouped and critiqued quite separately, a divide that has also muddled the reputation of Collins. Mystery is a general umbrella term that always needs further categorization to understand any writer working within its broad scope. Although she was undoubtedly a woman, Caspary did not write the sort of mystery fiction often classified as by and for women. Her novels rarely end in romance, let alone marriage, and her critique of the married state is consistently stringent. Caspary and her protagonists alike respect and admire women who think for themselves and make their choices based on criteria beyond stereotyped roles. Even her thrillers belong in the continuum from gothic to sensation to noir rather than to the female Gothic focused around the perils of choosing the right husband. An additional reason for her being little studied is that some of her con-

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temporaries— such as Patricia Highsmith or Mary Renault in her early novels— who examined related themes from a variety of genre angles are also difficult to categorize. They too are not studied in their complexity. Renault’s work has been subsumed in queer studies and historicism without an overview of her body of work. Similarly, although two recent biographies have addressed Highsmith’s life, there is as yet no comprehensive study of her writing. The context that is needed for a critical examination of Caspary has not been developed in general, perhaps owing to the neglect of women writers and overly rigid genre/literary separation. As I noted earlier, this is why I conceived a dual study, to develop not only connection but context illuminating the work of both Collins and Caspary. The final reason Caspary is not studied is that crime fiction as a subgenre pays attention primarily to those writers who wrote exclusively in that area and particularly to those who were innovative in characters or content. Furthermore, crime fiction criticism, like narrative criticism in general, rarely addresses structural topics; when it does so, it often blurs the distinction between formalist terms. Thus Stephen Knight notes that Dashiell Hammett’s closely limited third person in effect mediates (116), but he does not consider the structured mediation of framed or interiorized character narration even in writers he discusses, such as Dorothy L. Sayers. Point of view is discussed briefly in surveys of detective and crime novels, but not systematically or comparatively. Too, the casebook form and even counterpointed documents may be considered old-fashioned forms (as indeed they are) and left unexamined for modern content and applications. Caspary herself saw no such difficulties with her novels. She considered herself a mainstream writer of a variety of plots and genres, all focused on her central theme of the saving grace of being self-supporting and therefore independent. Fiction was her overarching category for expressing this theme. Caspary clearly expected to be studied, and her papers were solicited by more than one repository, as letters in her archive indicate. She chose the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and in two deposits created a wealth of material, including unproduced film scripts, a collection of reviews, much collateral material such as her outline of The Woman in White, and draft manuscripts from Evvie onward, including a good deal of draft unused in her autobiography. Over the past decade I have been instrumental in the reprinting of three books of Caspary’s work —Laura, Bedelia, and the collection of her stories, titled The Murder in the Stork Club. But much as I would like to see Caspary read more, it is not entirely lack of access that blocks her from being studied, since copies of her work are obtainable online, and she is collected in university libraries as well. For critical assessment, target aspects of her work need to be identified. I have studied Caspary here as a preeminent adapter of Collins in terms

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of content and of the casebook novel form. Her preeminence lies not only in her having made three novels of witness testimony, something no other writer I have found has done since Collins, but because she did not, like Cox and others, return to the Victorian era to do so, treating the form itself as historical. Caspary used character mediation for plots set in her own time, from the forties to the seventies, yet in dialogue with sensation novels and noir texts. Once she discovered framed mediation from Collins, Caspary too never ceased to be interested in its varieties. It may be that character monologues allowed her to merge her plays and scripts more closely with her fiction. Certainly she experimented with multiple focus in film as well in novels, using voice-over, establishing camera shots, and using flashbacks and other devices to obtain a sense of character viewpoints. Caspary began the fifth and final decade of her published writing with a mystery story that ran in the Canadian Star Weekly in 1969. “I’ve Met a Man, Mother,” has an epistolary frame of an interrupted letter at start and finish. Rosalie, the protagonist, leaves a letter to her mother with the title announcement unfinished as she gets involved with a witness who does not realize what she has seen. Nearly thirty years after Laura, Caspary created another working woman, this one a liberal arts graduate as she herself might have been, who nonetheless has to deal with the roving hands of her employer. When she instead takes a companion position too good to be true, the mystery plot ensues. The story demonstrates Caspary’s familiarity with mystery devices— there’s an animal death that reveals poisoned food, for instance — but even in this slight story, Caspary again takes issues with the mainstream of detective characters and fiction. The only detectives Rosalie knows about are from movies and TV, “suave and attractive” and tough (4), but also “heroes who fought evil and caused virtue to triumph” (6). This image does not prepare her to deal with the one she meets, and Caspary takes advantage of the clichés to make a character twist for her villain. The unfinished letter is finally completed as an end frame. Caspary’s body of framed and character-mediated work is important for its own sake, as her achievement, but it is also important in several other ways. In general, her work illustrates that framing devices continued to be highly usable choices, even in film. Her contemporary applications of multiple focus illustrate its continued relevance as well as the wider range of narrative options for multiple narration in twentieth-century fiction. Second, her casebook novels show how usable the form Collins developed continued to be for suspense, characterization, and holistic solution. All her casebooks are crime novels, as are all her counterpointed books. Despite the aversion to detectives she shared with Collins, Caspary identified the form with crime thriller content in a stronger connection than Collins’s own application of it. From her vantage point in the 1940s and onward, she could choose among viewpoints and approaches not yet available in Collins’s time, such as making

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a police detective also the romantic hero, or the domestic little woman a serial killer, as well as allowing both victim and villain to narrate. Caspary’s casebook and counterpointed novels reaffirm these forms by adapting them to modern crime fiction. But Caspary deserves study in other regards as well. Her reputation, like Collins’s own, suffered from being relegated to limited categories. Like him, she might be discussed by concentrating on the social issues she dramatized. But her social focus on independent/dependent women in the twentieth century considered alone would leave out her contribution to noir thrillers, much as intensive focus on Collins’s themes has truncated his place in mystery fiction, and much of her screen career as well. Caspary is a writer who bridges genres and critical categories, as indeed Collins was also. She overlaps the categories of social and psychological realism, crime thrillers, satire and comedy, and fiction about women now become historical. To study such writers is to question and ultimately to reenvision existing categories, and there is much yet to be done in this regard on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction alike. Such a writer can productively be studied from particular angles, as I have done here with Caspary, and there are certainly other angles from which her work can be approached, including autobiographical writing; her thematic treatment of marriage, race, and religion; and in comparison to her contemporaries both in mainstream fiction, playwriting, crime fiction, and film scripts (in various periods, since she published from 1929 to 1979). Of her earliest novels, both The White Girl and Thicker Than Water made complex and unflinching studies of race and religious prejudice deeply embedded in the characters. The latter, and to some extent the former, are family sagas of outsiders pursuing the American dream of upward mobility. Her portrait of naive Communists in The Rosecrest Cell offers related material, as does A Chosen Sparrow (1964), which chronicles the sensational life of a Jewish singer who escapes the Nazi regime only to marry a wealthy Prussian with a secret life. I have by no means exhausted what can be said about Laura and Bedelia, two of her best-realized novels. The satiric Stranger Than Truth and the somewhat satiric The Secret of Elizabeth are interesting alongside her comic film scripts. As period thrillers, both The Husband and The Man Who Loved His Wife invite comparison to the psychological crime novels of the 1950s and 1960s, and the influence of Margaret Millar and Francis Iles on her work is also important. Finally, alongside Laura and Bedelia, I suggest placing Evvie and Final Portrait as crime novels with historical edge that will bear multiple interpretations. Caspary’s detailed evocation of roaring girls in the twenties, like Laura, functions both as murder book and a closeup of a particular time and milieu. Final Portrait makes a stinging condemnation of glib art criticism that perhaps masks parallel rejection of shallow literary criticism while also pursuing a murder plot that adapts Hamlet into a near casebook. Finally, application of the various schematics of crime fiction, such as

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Knight’s Detection, Death, and Diversity, will further define her place as a crime writer. Caspary’s work certainly fit into the “Death” category, as all her crime novels revolved around murder, but she also anticipated diversity in both crime and mainstream novels in her focus on female, Jewish, and black characters. It is no accident that all of the four novels I suggest as among her best — Laura, Bedelia, Evvie, and Final Portrait— utilize framing devices and/or multiple focus. The Collins method not only led that grand old master to his own outstanding works but also provided a dynamic legacy to other crime writers. Just as Collins’s own adaptions of Poe were one source of the casebook novel, Caspary’s adaptations of Collins opened the door to her own decades of structural play after Laura. Of those inheritors of Wilkie Collins I have found who took up the challenging novel of testimony, none have succeeded as thoroughly as Vera Caspary in adapting Collins’s structure and text into contemporary casebooks.

Bibliography Primary Collins Texts Collins, Wilkie. After Dark. 1900. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Print. (Vol. 19 of The Works of Wilkie Collins. 30 vols. 1970.) _____. Armadale. Toronto: Dover, 1977. Print. _____. Basil. Toronto: Dover, 1980. Print. _____. The Black Robe. 1900. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Print. (Vol. 23 of The Works of Wilkie Collins. 30 vols. 1970.) _____. “How I Write My Books.” In: The Woman in White, Appendix C. Ed. Kathleen Tillotson and Anthea Trodd. Riverside Editions. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Print. _____. Jezebel’s Daughter. 1900. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Print. (Vol. 27 of The Works of Wilkie Collins. 30 vols. 1970.) _____. The Legacy of Cain. 1900. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Print. (Vol. 26 of The Works of Wilkie Collins. 30 vols. 1970.) _____. The Law and the Lady. 1900. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Print. (Vol. 5 of The Works of Wilkie Collins. 30 vols. 1970.) _____. The Moonstone. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print. _____. My Miscellanies. 1900. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Print. (Vol. 20 of The Works of Wilkie Collins. 30 vols. 1970.) _____. No Name. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print. _____. Poor Miss Finch. 1900. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Print. (Vol. 15 of The Works of Wilkie Collins. 30 vols. 1970.) _____. The Queen of Hearts. 1900. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Print. (Vol. 14 of The Works of Wilkie Collins. 30 vols. 1970.) _____. Wilkie Collins: The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Julian Thompson. New York: Carroll, 1995. Print. _____. The Woman in White. Modern Library Classics. New York: Random House, 2002. Print.

Primary Caspary Texts Caspary, Vera. “Autobiography, Outline and Notes.” The Vera Caspary Papers. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Film and Manuscripts Archive. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. _____. Bedelia. New York: Feminist Press, 2005. Print. _____. “Bedelia Screenplay.” n.d. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. 199

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_____. “My ‘Laura’ and Otto’s.” Saturday Review. June 26, 1971: 36 –37. Print. _____. The Murder in the Stork Club and Other Mysteries. Ed. A. B. Emrys. Lost Classics Series. Vol. 29. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru, 2009. Print. _____. Music in the Streets. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1930. Print. _____. “Notes and Family Tree, Thicker Than Water.” n.d. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. _____. Recorded interview [later used in The Boston Herald] by Dudley Fraser for Little, Brown, 15 July, 1950. _____. The Rosecrest Cell. New York: Putnam, 1967. Print. _____. The Secret of Elizabeth. New York: Pocket Books, 1979. Print. _____. The Secrets of Grownups. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979. Print. _____. Screenplay, Stranger Than Truth. 1948. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. _____. Stranger Than Truth. New York: Random House, 1945. Print. _____. Thelma. Chicago: Sears Book Club, 1952. _____. Thicker Than Water. New York: Liveright, 1932. Print. _____. The Weeping and the Laughter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1950. Print. _____. The White Girl. New York: Sears, 1929. Print. _____. “The Woman in White.” The Vera Caspary Papers. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Film and Manuscripts Archive. State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. _____. “Women in Crime.” The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. _____. “Working Draft 1927–1954.” The Secrets of Grownups. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

Other Primary Texts Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Birds of Prey. Full Text Free Book. Prod. J. Ingram, G. Smith, T. Rilkonen. n.d. Web. 6/17/09. _____. Lady Audley’s Secret. World’s Classics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. World’s Classics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: Random, 1943. Print. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Dodd Mead, 1942. Print. Brown, Rosellen. Civil Wars. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Print. Byatt, A. S. Possession. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print. Cain, James. M. Double Indemnity. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print. Cauldwell, Sarah. The Shortest Way to Hades. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Print. _____. The Sibyl in Her Grave. New York: Dell, 2000. Print. _____. The Sirens Sang of Murder. New York: Dell, 1989. Print. _____. Thus Was Adonis Murdered. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Print. Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Hound of the Baskervilles. New York: Berkeley, 1987. Print. Cox, Michael. The Glass of Time. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. _____. The Meaning of Night. New York: Norton, 2006. Print. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Eds. George Ford and Sylvére Monod. New York: Norton, 1977. Print. Erdrich, Louise. Shadow Tag. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Print.

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Faulkner, William. Absalom! Absalom! New York: Vintage, 1972. Print. _____. The Sound and the Fury. 2nd ed. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1993. Print. Felix, Charles. The Notting Hill Mystery. Novels of Mystery from the Victorian Age. Ed. Maurice Richardson. London: Pilot, 1945. Print. Gruber, Michael. Tropic of Night. New York: HarperTorch, 2003. Print. Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. New York: Vintage, 2004. Print. Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. World’s Classics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print. Hume, Fergus. A Marriage Mystery Told From Three Points of View, 3rd. ed. London: Digby Long, 1896. Print. _____. The Masquerade Mystery. London: Digby Long, 1899. Print. _____. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. Chicago: Donohue, n.d. Print. Innes, Michael. Lament for a Maker. New York: Collier, 1961. Print. James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. King, Laurie R. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. New York: Bantam, 2002. Print. King, Stephen. Carrie. New York: Signet, 1975. Print. _____. ’Salem’s Lot. Collector’s Edition. New York: Plume, 1991. Print. Klempner, John. Letter to Five Wives. New York: Scribner’s, 1946. Print. Laura. Dir. Otto Preminger. Perf. Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, Dana Andrews, Vincent Price. 1944. Twentieth Century–Fox, 2004. Le Fanu, Sheridan. Carmilla. Three Vampire Tales. Ed. Anne Williams. New Riverside Editions. New York: Houghton, 2003. Print. _____. “Green Tea.” Popular Fiction. ed. Gary Hoppenstand. New York: Longman, 1998. Print. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. New York: Bantam, 1981. Print. A Letter to Three Wives. Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Perf. Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, Ann Sothern, Kirk Douglas. Twentieth Century–Fox, 1949. Fox Classics, 2004. Peters, Elizabeth. The Ape Who Guards the Balance. New York: Avon, 1999. Print. _____. The Falcon at the Portal. New York: Avon, 2000. Print. _____. Guardian of the Horizon. New York: Avon, 2005. Print. _____. He Shall Thunder in the Sky. New York: Avon, 2001. Print. _____. The Last Camel Died at Noon. New York: Warner, 1992. Print. _____. Lord of the Silent. New York: Avon, 2002. Print. _____. Seeing a Large Cat. New York: Warner, 1997. Print. _____. The Snake, the Crocodile & the Dog. New York: Warner, 1992. Print. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings. New York: Bantam Classic, 1982. Print. Preston, Douglas, and Lincoln Child. Brimstone. New York: Warner, 2005. Print. Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976. Print. Reese, James. The Dracula Dossier. New York: William Morrow, 2008. Print. Sayers, Dorothy. with Robert Eustace. The Documents in the Case. New York: Perennial Books, 1987. Print. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Bedford Books, 1992. Print. Simmons, Dan. Drood. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. Print. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Introduction by Stephen King. New York: Signet Classic, 1978. Print. Stewart, Mary. Madame, Will You Talk? New York: William Morrow, 1955. Print. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Three Vampire Tales. ed. Anne Williams. New Riverside Editions. Houghton: New York, 2003. Print. Stoker, Dacre, and Ian Holt. Dracula the Un-dead. New York: Dutton, 2009. Print.

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Symons, Julian. The Immaterial Murder Case. London: Gollancz, 1945. Print. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt, 1982. Print. Wilson, James. The Dark Clue. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001. Print. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 1989. Print.

Secondary Texts Acocella, Joan. “In the Blood.” A Critic At Large. The New Yorker. March 16, 2009: 101– 107. Print. Andrew, R. V. Wilkie Collins: A Critical Survey of His Prose Fiction with a Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1979. Print. Ascari, Maurizio. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Print. Ashley, Robert. Wilkie Collins. London: Barker, 1974. Print. Babener, Liahna. “De-feminizing Laura.” It’s a Print!: Detective Fiction from Page to Screen. Ed. William Reynolds and Elizabeth Trembley. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1994. Print. Bakerman, Jane S. “Vera Caspary’s Chicago, Symbol and Setting.” MidAmerica XI: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. Ed. David D. Anderson. East Lansing, MI: Midwestern Press, 1984. Print. _____. “Vera Caspary’s Fascinating Females: Laura, Evvie and Bedelia.” Clues. Jan. 1 1980: 46 –52. Print. Bayard, Louis. “A Long-Winded Rival to Dickens.” The Washington Post. Feb. 10, 2009. Dec. 24, 2009. “Biographical Note.” Fergus Hume. EBooks@Adelaide. U of Adelaide, Australia. n.d. August 8, 2009. “Blind Mice.” Internet Broadway Database. The Broadway League. n.d. June 2, 2010. “Books This Week.” Newsday. Feb. 19, 1966. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Bowen, John. “Collins’s Shorter Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print. Brantlinger, Patrick. “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Wilkie Collins. Ed. Lyn Pykett. New Casebooks. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Print. Bray, Joe. The Epistolary Novel: Representation of Consciousness. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Casey, Ellen Miller. “‘Highly Flavoured Dishes’ and ‘Highly Seasoned Garbage’: Sensation in the Atheneum.” Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ed. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Print. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Print. Collins, Gail. When Everything Changed. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. Print. Commins, Saxe. Letter to Vera Caspary. April 12, 1948. Correspondence 1942–1963. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Cox, Michael. “Q & A with Michael Cox.” The Meaning of Night.com. n.d. October 26, 2009. Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Print. “Ellis St. Joseph.” Internet Movie DataBase. n.d. June 6, 2003. Emrys, A. B. “Laura, Vera and Wilkie: Deep Sensation Roots of a Noir Novel.” Clues. March 23, 2005: 5 –13. Print.

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Favret, Mary A. “The Letters of Frankenstein.” Romantic Correspondence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Print. Frieden, Ken. Genius and Monologue. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print. Gargano, James W. “The Question of Poe’s Narrators.” Essays on Poe’s Satiric Hoaxing. Ed. Dennis W. Eddings. Port Washington, NY: Associated Faculty Press, 1983. Print. Garrett, Peter K. The Victorian Multiplot Novel: Studies in Dialogical Form. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980. Print. Gasson, Andrew, Ed. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. “Les Girls.” Internet Movie Database. n.d. July 6, 2004. Goetz, William R. “The ‘Frame’ of The Turn of the Screw: Framing the Reader In.” Studies in Short Fiction. Jan. 18, 1981: 71–74. Print. Greiner, Donald J. “Narrative Technique in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.” Victorian Institute Journal. Mar. 1974: 1–20. Print. Harrison, Kimberly, and Richard Fantina, eds. Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Print. Harvey, W. J. “The Double Narrative of Bleak House.” Bleak House. Charles Dickens. A Norton Critical Edition. Eds. George Ford and Sylvere Monod. New York: Norton, 1977. Print. Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. New York: Appleton, 1943. Print. “He Plotted His ‘Murder.’” Baltimore Sunday Star. Feb. 20, 1966. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Herbert, Rosemary, ed. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. New York: Paragon Books, 1990. Print. Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Print. Jackson, Kevin. “Film noir.” The Language of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998. James, Henry. “Miss Braddon.” The Nation. November 9, 1865: 593 –595. Print. Johnson, Kevin. The Dark Page: Books That Inspired American Film Noir. New Castle, DE.: Oaknoll, 2008. Print. Kauffman, Linda S. Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction. Foreword by Catherine R. Stimpson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Print. Kendrick, Walter M. “The Sensationalism of The Woman in White.” Wilkie Collins. Ed. Lyn Pykett. New Casebooks. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Print. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800 –2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Print. Lambert, Josh. American Jewish Fiction. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2009. Print. “Les Girls.” Internet Movie Database. n.d. July 6, 2004. Littauer, Kenneth. Letter to Edith Haggard. February 17, 1942. “Correspondence 1942– 1963.” Box 1. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Lonoff, Sue. Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers. Studies in the Nineteenth Century 21. New York: AMS, 1982. Print. Maio, Kathi. “Rebel with a Cause.” Rev. of The Secrets of Grownups by Vera Caspary. Sojouner. Jan. 12. 1980: 12. McAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Print.

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McNamara, Eugene. “Laura” as Novel, Film and Myth. New York: Mellen, 1992. Print. _____. “Preminger’s Laura and the Fatal Woman Tradition.” Clues. Feb. 2, 1982: 24 –29. Print. Navarette, Susan J. The Shape of Fear. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Print. Nemesvari, Richard. “Judged by a Purely Literary Standard”: Sensation Fiction, Horizons of Expectation, and the Generic Construction of Victorian Realism.” Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ed. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Print. Page, Norman. Ed. Wilkie Collins: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Print. Penzler, Otto. Ed. The Great Detectives. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Print. Peters, Catherine. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991. Print. Peterson, Audrey. Victorian Masters of Mystery From Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle. New York: Ungar, 1984. Print. Preminger, Otto. Preminger. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Print. Priestman, Martin. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Pykett, Lyn. Wilkie Collins. Authors in Context. World’s Classics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print. _____, ed. Wilkie Collins. New Casebooks. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Print. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York, Routledge, 2005. Print. Schloff, Linda Mack. “We Dug More Rocks”: Women and Work.” American Jewish Women’s History: A Reader Ed. Pamela S. Nadell. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Print. Seed, David. “The Narrative Method of Dracula.” Dracula: the Vampire and the Critics. Ed. Margaret L. Carter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Print. Swartz, Jennifer A. “Personal Property at Her Disposal”: Inheritance Law, the Single Woman, and The Moonstone.” Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Eds. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Print. Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder. New York: Viking, 1985. Print. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2009. Print. Thompson, Julian. “Introduction.” Wilkie Collins: The Complete Shorter Fiction. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995. Thoms, Peter. The Windings of the Labyrinth: Quest and Structure in the Major Novels of Wilkie Collins. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992. Print. Veeder, William. “Foreword.” Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics. Ed. Margaret L. Carter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Print. Warren, Ann L. “Word Play: The Lives and Work of Four Women Writers in Hollywood’s Golden Age.” Dissertation. University of Southern California Press, 1988. Print. Wills, Adele. “Witnesses and Truth; Juridical Narratives and Dialogism in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and The Woman in White.” New Formations. 3. 1997: 91–98. Print. Wilson, Andrew. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print.

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Index Collins, Wilkie 1–5, 6 –7, 20, 24 –28, 100, 111, 169, 182, 188 –94 “the Collins method” 1, 83, 111 Conan Doyle, Arthur 72, 190; “The Adventure of [the] Missing ThreeQuarter” 11; The Hound of the Baskervilles 72; The Sign of Four 73 counterpointed documents 47–58, 66, 72–82, 195, 197 Cox, Michael: The Glass of Time 90, 173, 175 –177, 189; The Meaning of Night 173 – 176 crime thrillers 128 –133, 138 –139, 193

After Dark (Collins) 20, 22, 28, 30, 40, 52, 68, 175 “Anne Rodway” (Collins) 31–33 Armadale (Collins) 14, 47, 52, 56, 58, 73 – 74, 76 –77, 79, 85 –87, 135, 166, 173 –174 Arzner, Dorothy 106 Basil (Collins) 20 –21, 98, 142 Beautiful Evening (Caspary) 106 Bedelia (Caspary) 124, 127, 133 –139, 153, 156, 197–198 “Berenice” (Poe) 92 “The Biter Bit” (Collins) 11, 31, 34, 85, 189 The Black Robe (Collins) 78 –81 Blind Mice 106 Braddon, Elizabeth 95; Birds of Prey 57; Lady Audley’s Secret 98, 135, 137 Brontë, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 16 –17 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre 43, 54 –55, 79, 144 Brontë, Emily 52; Wuthering Heights 56, 58, 74, 192 Brown, Rosellen: Civil Wars 10 Browning, Robert 38; The Ring and the Book 191 Byatt, A.S.: Possession 10, 14, 47, 185 –187

Dance Magazine 100 The Dead Secret 20 Dickens, Charles 14, 38, 172, 190; Bleak House 57; David Copperfield 173 doubles 63 –74, 119 dramatic monologue 17, 83, 112 The Dreamers (Caspary) 102 Eliot, George 26 Ellis St. Joseph 112 end frame 63, 66, 94 epistolary fiction 9, 18, 26 –27, 31, 35, 42– 44, 46, 163 Erdrich, Louise: Shadow Tag 163 Evvie (Caspary) 100, 156 –160, 195, 197– 198 The Exiles (Caspary and George Sklar) 110

Cain, James M. 133 “The Cask of Amontillado” (Poe) 27, 179 Caspary, Vera 1–2, 5 –7, 83, 97, 107, 111, 194 –198; and advertising 99 –100; and Communist Party 104, 109 –110 111, 137; see also The Rosecrest Cell Cauldwell, Sarah 189 Chandler, Raymond 128 character narration 11, 13, 20, 36 Child, Lincoln: Brimstone 139, 179 –181; The Cabinet of Curiosities 179; Relic 179; Reliquary 179; Still Life with Crows 179 A Chosen Sparrow (Caspary) 197

“The Fall of the House of Usher” (Poe) 91, 192 False Face (Caspary) 164 –165 Faulkner, William 14, 18, 169 –170; Absalom! Absalom! 169; The Sound and the Fury 169 Felix, Charles: The Notting Hill Mystery 83 –85, 88 female Gothic 130 –132, 194

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femme fatale 119, 128, 138 film noir 119, 138 –139 Final Portrait (Caspary) 153, 159, 161, 163 – 167, 197–198 Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary 135 Franks, Bobby murder case 100 front frame 63, 66, 94 “Gabriel’s Marriage” (Collins) 30 Les Girls (Caspary) 155 –156, 194 Godwin, William: Caleb Williams 98, 173 “The Gold Bug” (Poe) 191 Goldsmith, Isidore 110 Gothic detection 9, 15, 52, 68, 83, 98, 181, 185 Gruber, Michael 15 Haddon, Mark: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time 10 –11 Hambly, Barbara: Renfield, Slave of Dracula 182 Hammett, Dashiell 128, 195 hard-boiled fiction 128 –129, 137–138 Hayes, Helen 106 Hide-and-Seek (Collins) 20 Highsmith, Patricia 160 –163, 195: Edith’s Diary 162; Strangers on a Train 162 Hogg, James 14, 52; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 17, 47, 56, 174 Holt, Ian: Dracula the Undead 182 Hughes, Dorothy B. 128 Hume, Fergus 173; A Marriage Mystery 85 –87; The Masquerade Mystery 85; The Miser’s Will 85, 87; The Mystery of a Hansom Cab 85, 87 The Husband (Caspary) 160, 197 Iles, Francis 128, 197 “The Imp of the Perverse” (Poe) 191 Innes, Michael: Lament for a Maker 122– 124, 171 “I’ve Met a Man, Mother” 196 Jackson, Shirley: The Haunting of Hill House 182–183 James, Henry 83; The Turn of the Screw 12, 18, 70, 93 –95, 173 –174, 192 Jezebel’s Daughter 77–78 juridical framing 25, 40, 42 King, Laurie R.: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice 175 King, Stephen 18; Carrie 92, 179, 183; ’Salem’s Lot 92, 182–183 Klempner, John: Letter to Five Wives 155 Kostova, Elizabeth: The Historian 182

Ladies & Gents (Caspary) 100 –102 “The Lady of Glenwith Grange” (Collins) 30 Laura (Caspary) 105, 108, 110, 111–121 127–133, 136 –139, 140, 144, 146, 149, 152, 153 –154, 156, 194, 196 –198; as stage play 121–122; on screen 199 –121 The Law and the Lady (Collins) 73, 75 –77 Le Fanu, Sheridan: Carmilla 94, 175; “Green Tea” 12 The Legacy of Cain (Collins) 20, 55, 59, 66 –71, 77, 151 Lenihan, Winifred 106 Les Girls (Caspary) 155 –156, 194 Lessing, Doris: The Golden Notebook 14, 170 –171 A Letter to Three Wives (Caspary) 153 – 154, 194 The Man Who Loved His Wife (Caspary) 144, 153, 159 –163, 165 –166, 197 “The Mask of the Red Death” (Poe) 30 Méjan, Maurice: Recueil des causes célebres 24 Millar, Margaret 160, 197 The Moonstone (Collins) 13, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31, 32, 35, 41, 43, 47, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59 –66, 68, 72–73, 77, 79, 81, 85, 88, 90, 92, 95, 97–98, 112, 114 –116, 118, 126, 140 –145, 152, 163, 172, 174, 178, 180, 187–188, 190 –191 multiple focus 3, 16, 83, 139, 196 multiplot novel 67–68, 193 “The Murder in the Stork Club” (Caspary) 117–118, 144, 159, 195 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Poe) 10, 28 Music in the Street (Caspary) 104 –106, 108 My Miscellanies (Collins) 24 –25 new woman noir 127–139 No Name (Collins) 46 –52, 56, 78, 176, 178, 191 noir thrillers 83, 127–128, 163 novel of letters 9, 15; see also epistolary fiction “A Passage in the Life of Perugino Potts” (Collins) 21–22 Penzler, Otto: The Great Detectives 138 Peters, Elizabeth: The Ape Who Guards the Balance 178; The Falcon at the Portal 179; Guardian of the Horizon 179; The Last Camel Died at Noon 178 –179; Seeing a Large Cat 178; The Snake, the Crocodile & the Dog 178 “The Pit and the Pendulum” (Poe) 27, 91

Index plot document 9 –11, 15, 49, 60 “A Plot in Private Life” (Collins) 33 –34 Poe, Edgar Allan 11, 25, 26, 34, 52, 62, 73, 94, 188, 190 –191, 198 Poor Miss Finch (Collins) 72–76 Preminger, Otto 119 –121 Preston, Douglas: Brimstone 139, 179 –181; The Cabinet of Curiosities 179; Relic 179; Reliquary 179; Still Life with Crows 179 prose monologue 14, 23, 28, 40, 190 “The Purloined Letter” (Poe) 28, 179, 181 The Queen of Hearts (Collins) 20, 28, 30, 52, 68 Reese, James: The Dracula Dossier 184 – 185 Renault, Mary 195 Rice, Anne: Interview with the Vampire 12 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa 14 A Rogue’s Life (Collins) 20 The Rosecrest Cell (Caspary) 109, 197 Ruth (Caspary) 131, 159 Sayers, Dorothy L. 128, 145, 173; The Documents in the Case 93 –98, 148 Scott, Sir Walter: Redgauntlet 13, 14, 47, 56, 58 The Secret of Elizabeth (Caspary) 140, 146 –151, 166, 197 sensation novels 16, 26, 95, 118, 127, 181, 188, 191, 194, 196 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein 17, 20 –21, 58, 74, 90 Simmons, Dan: Drood 171–172 “Sister Rose” (Collins) 30 Sklar, George 110, 121–122 Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 10, 55, 184 Stewart, Mary: Madame, Will You Talk? 131–132 Stoker, Bram 29, 83; Dracula 12 13, 61, 74, 88 –89, 92–93, 132, 139, 182–185

209

Stoker, Dacre: Dracula the Undead 182 “A Stolen Letter” (Collins) 22–24 “Stranger in the House” (Caspary) 131 Stranger Than Truth (Caspary) 118, 127, 140 –146, 149, 152, 153, 197 Symons, Julian: The Immaterial Murder Case 122, 124 –126 “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe) 27, 30, 38, 191 “The Terribly Strange Bed” (Collins) 28 – 29 Thelma (Caspary) 122, 135, 154, 156 –159, 162 Thicker Than Water (Caspary) 105, 107– 109, 111, 153, 197 Three Husbands (Caspary) 155 voice 13, 27, 30, 44 voice-over 12, 119, 138 –139, 146, 155 –56, 196 Walker, Alice: The Color Purple 10, 11 The Weeping and the Laughter (Caspary) 153, 156 –157 The White Girl (Caspary) 100, 102–104, 108, 127, 147, 154, 197 Wilson, James: The Dark Clue 172–173 The Woman in White (Collins) 13, 17–18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 28, 35 –46, 56, 59 –61, 63 –65, 67–69, 77, 81, 83 –85, 88, 90 –92, 95, 98, 109, 112, 114 –118, 126, 129 –130, 132, 135 –136, 141–141, 144 –149, 151–152, 159, 161, 166, 172, 178, 184 –185, 188, 190 –191, 195 Woolf, Virginia 43 Woolrich, Cornell 128, 138 “The Yellow Mask” (Collins) 30 Zuber, Isabel 189