Edward Hale Bierstadt (1891–1970)

At first sight, I knew I had to have this book, so I acquired it and eventually got around to reading it. What could it be: a naughty little melodrama, a dirty little bit of 50’s porn, or a noirish thriller? Well, it is more of the latter than anything. It’s a murder thriller but it does seem like the blurbs on the cover and even occasionally the text itself are trying to be controversial, edgy.
What it is, is the story of a twisted man, defined as faithless and insane in a very 1930s pulp fiction way (the story was written in the 1930s, this book is a 1954 edition), who poisons his alcoholic mother, cheats on his wife, then poisons her, and almost immediately suffers instant retribution. All the medical diagnoses and psychiatric talk in the book reads like complete hooey and a little goofy.
In the first half of the book, there is a certain dark, suffocating atmosphere. Most of the story occurs within the family home, a multistory New York brownstone, and builds up nicely to Carroll Lindsey murdering his mother. That scene is sad, disgusting, and slightly disturbing. There are also a lot of dated references, especially a morbid passage referencing the smell of a tuberculosis victim’s bedroom. And similarly (while Carroll is talking with his mother):
The easy colloquial manner of speech, which would have passed unnoticed by a flapper, was inexpressibly vulgar coming from the puffy red face crowned with its white hair. [pg.61]
When I saw the classic midcentury painted cover, I expected some atmospheric, probably cheesy, and likely of-its-day prose, I was not totally disappointed. There are passages that I live for such as this one while our main character (?) rides the elevated train from Twenty-Third Street home:
Carroll looked with never ceasing interest. It was actually godlike to be sailing by through the air, independent of this sordidness and yet with a complete awareness of it. Past the row of heads he could see the crumpled, unmade beds on which the heads rested when it grew too dark to see. Omniscient, perhaps even omnipotent. That was it. Carroll wondered with vague zestfulness what it would be like to ascend one of the dark, narrow stairways to one of the pleasantly fetid rooms above it, and to lie down on one of the rumpled beds with the woman who lived there. Some of them were pretty, and nearly all gave an impression of animal vitality that was rousing to the male as a bitch in heat. [pg.53]
There was also:
The shadows were lapping forward imperceptibly, relentlessly, but the limp figure sprawled over the table lay under the full glare of the lamp as if it had instinctively sought the spotlight for its final scene. Life was composed of theatricalities, mused Carroll, and of them death was the most theatrical of all. [pg.64]
And:
Both men were under the spell of the evil necromancy that pervaded and polluted the house, unseen and odorless as carbon monoxide but much more deadly. [pg.89]
As for the main character, the murderer of the piece is one Carroll Lindsey, but he shares lead character status, judging by the focus of the text, with one Dr. Hoyt who almost serves as his foil. Hoyt wants to be the heroic savoir but screws it up through his own ineptness. Most of the novel is seen through Carroll’s eyes and especially felt through him but the story awkwardly switches to other characters never going into their heads. It’s as if the prose wants to have the conventions of a detective story putting the two characters on the fringes of the household, Dr. Hoyt who is courting Carroll’s sister and serving his mother as her personal physician, and Hoyt’s old professor, now the family butler, Simeon Gaunt, into the roles of master detective and his hapless but heroic Watson. This just confuses things, the prose never gets into their heads at all, their parts are dialogue heavy whereas Carroll’s perspective is very pensive.
Another problem I had with this book was that it tried to brick wall me before I even started. The very first chapter of the first part (the structure is a little messy IMHO) serves as a content warning and nothing more. Maybe it was a pulp sales tactic for those who would skim the first chapter. It begins:
THIS IS the story of a murderer.
It is not a mystery story, unless the mystery be that which is hidden in that twilit and nightmarish hinterland of the mind in which the fringes of the conscious and the subconscious overlap each other. [pg.5]
Those Twilight Zone-ish opening lines hooked me and then the rest of the opening, it goes on for a full page, turned into an Ed Wood morality rant without the misplaced sincerity. It almost stopped me dead. But I trudged on. It does have a few redeeming points as previously mentioned but the rickety structure of the story kicked me again, in fact, three more times. These are nightmare sequences that have their own chapters each. These concern the reiteration, in fictional form, of the crimes and long walk of three notorious killers, Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, and H.H. Crippen. The tone is even more that of horror with gothic overtones than the rest of the text creating a few rather steep speed bumps. These sequences occur when Carroll is reading books about these killers and in turn drifts into a dream where his sleepwalking exploits are told intermittently through italicized text. It doesn’t work and really just serves to pad out the text. The tortured sleepwalking killer reminded me heavily as of something from Poe but nowhere near as good here.
Frankly, only the first half of the book is any good, after Carroll kills his mother off the book just kind of keeps going and fits in another murder after an awkward time jump and then he suddenly dies in a sleepwalking nightmare after being brought by Simeon Gaunt, ex-philosophy professor turned butler, to his dying wife, whom he poisoned, and he cuts his own throat. It’s played off like Gaunt had planned this all along and the book ends with a needless “Postscriptum”. I really can’t recommend this one although there is some atmosphere and gruesomeness, especially when Carroll mutilates his mother’s corpse while sleepwalking dreaming of Jack the Ripper, and some pulp cheesiness and dated attitudes which I definitely look for in old pulp paperbacks but there’s nothing else here. If what I’ve talked about interests you, well, don’t go out of your way to obtain a copy but you won’t be completely disappointed either. The structure is bad, and the second half of the book doesn’t really have a new road to plow, so it goes out of its way to repeat before its unsatisfying sudden ending. It’s just okay with a couple of high points in the first half. However, it is mercifully short.
Favorite quote:
The long disused living room was opened, and as Simeon Gaunt arranged the flowers about the coffin he could not help reflecting that the room seemed peculiarly designed for its present purpose. It was, in fact, a room that really required a corpse to make it complete. [pg.90]… (mehr)