Frederick Irving Anderson (1877-1947) was an American journalist and short story writer, born in Illinois. He wrote many short stories for magazines. He married Helen de Zouche, and retired after her death in 1937 to Vermont. He published two books on farming and only three works of fiction during his lifetime, leaving most of his stories uncollected in magazines. His character the Infallible Godahl is a self-proclaimed master criminal whose Watson is the writer Oliver Armiston. Both Godahl and the female jewel thief Sophie Lang manage to outwit the New York detective Deputy Parr.

 

Mike Grost on Frederick Irving Anderson

 

Influences

 

Frederick Irving Anderson was a prolific contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, most of whose work has never been published in book form. Anderson began publishing before World War I, and was still at it in 1946. He can be seen as a member of the Arthur B. Reeve school, but with some personal twists. Like Reeve, he often focuses on both crimes committed by scientific means, and on the detection of those crimes by the police using scientific criminology. But the tone of Anderson's work is very different from the heroic scientists and dramatic storytelling of Reeve. Anderson clearly aspired to the irony, sophistication, and wit, of such writers as Saki and Oscar Wilde. His picture of endlessly fertile police spreading an infinitely wide and ingenious net to catch criminals, complete with every sort of scheme, impersonation and high tech tracking device, seems more in the classic whimsy tradition of Lewis Carroll or W.S. Gilbert, rather than anything remotely approaching realism. Like Carroll, there is both an obsessive and a surreal tone to Anderson's comedy.

 

While there are sometimes puzzle plot aspects to Anderson's work, the main emphasis is on detection, especially his extravagant version of police work. There is an important element of complex plotting, as well, with many surprising twists and turns - Anderson is always trying to sneak up on the reader out of left field - so his fiction will probably interest readers who are interested in plot technique.

The Unknown Man

 

Ellery Queen reprinted Anderson's first mystery tale in EQMM. "The Unknown Man" (1911) is an inverted detective story, focusing on a medical murder committed by a surgeon. The killer is tracked down not by the police, as in Anderson's later stories, but by the Press. The depiction of the Press' complex machinery of crime reporting and detection is presented with some satirical paradoxes. It forms a small, rough sketch of the immense police detective apparatus of Anderson's later fiction. The story is clearly in the Reeve tradition of scientific crime popular in its era. It also mentions Gaboriau. Gaboriau's police detectives often used disguises and multiple identities; this would clearly appeal to Anderson, whose police heroes do much undercover work.

 

It is unusual to see an inverted detective story at such an early date. Most histories of detective fiction state that the form was created by R. Austin Freeman, with "The Case of Oscar Brodski" (published in magazines in 1910), which was first reprinted in book form along with Freeman's subsequent inverted stories in 1912, in The Singing Bone. But Anderson's tale looks fairly close to the inverted form. The story is seen from the point of view of the killer, a surgeon, and we watch along with him as the Press gradually closes in. Unlike Freeman, we do not actually see the crime being committed in the first half; and unlike Freeman, the point of view does not actually shift to the detectives in the second half. But we certainly do see the reporter detective's evidence collected against the killer in the final sections of the story. The story is less "fair play" than Freeman's work; the reader does not see all the evidence in advance, but must simply sit back and watch as the reporter cracks the case. I have no idea if Anderson hit on the inverted format independently of Freeman; or if he read Freeman's work in magazines in 1910; or if there are other early prototypical inverted stories that influenced both writers.

 

The Rogue Fiction

 

Anderson also has links to the Rogue school. Some of his early fiction deals with clever thieves. However, Anderson's fiction does not have the light, romp-like tone and anti-authoritarian zest of regular rogue fiction. His work is largely sui generis, and he should be viewed as a unique, very individual author.

 

"The Jorgensen Plates" (1922) is from Anderson's hard to find collection, The Notorious Sophie Lang (1925). Lang is a clever lady jewel thief, and her exploits certainly have elements of the Rogue tradition. More important, however, is the ambiguity of Anderson's plot presentation: one cannot tell till the end of the tale, exactly what any of the characters are up to, although there are clues along the way. This gives the tale aspects of the mystery or riddle story. The story has a musical quality, a harmonious progression of plot ideas, that is quite pleasing. There is also a sustained note of satire and irony. Anderson scaldingly satirizes Britishers that are condescending to Americans. This is a sore point with US writers - see also Ellery Queen's "The Dead Cat" (1946). It was written just before the first tales in Book of Murder, but is less ambitious than most of those stories, which benefit from even more complex plots and more sympathetic characters than the scoundrels and monstrous aristocrats of the Lang tale. I have only read excerpts from this collection in anthologies; it has apparently never been published in America, only Britain. It was made into a series of films in the 1930's, starring Gertrude Michael, who was dating hard-boiled writer Paul Cain at the time.

 

"The Signed Masterpiece" (1921) is the first story in The Notorious Sophie Lang. Much of it deals not with Sophie herself, but with Anderson's ongoing series sleuth, the policeman Deputy Parr. Parr will return, without Sophie, in Anderson's next collection, Book of Murder (1930), and will be the star figure in many of those stories. "The Signed Masterpiece" is clearly designed to introduce Parr to Anderson's readers. Its first half gives an enormously in-depth look at Parr's flamboyant police methods, showing his huge network of undercover operatives spread out over New York City. However, neither of Parr's skilled assistants, Morel or Pelts, makes an appearance in this story. In fact, the tale instead satirically stresses the uniformity and interchangability of Parr's young police assistants. These early sections dealing with the police are great fun. The second half of the story, dealing with Sophie's criminal schemes, is a distinct let down.

 

"The Signed Masterpiece" shows the same interest in social class as other Rogue stories. Sophie appears in the tale impersonating a sophisticated upper class widow, whereas Parr's police all are undercover in lower class roles: stable keepers, garage mechanics, building inspectors, and the like. This allows Sophie to manipulate them, using upper class privilege. The real life police in these roles seem to be unsophisticated men of lower class origins themselves. Later, in Book of Murder, when Parr becomes the genuine detective hero of the stories, and not merely the foil to Sophie, this will all be changed. Parr and his men will become just at home undercover in upper crust situations as any other, and will no longer display working class mannerisms.

 

The numerous police going undercover in "The Signed Masterpiece" in various roles have a predecessor in the first Sherlock Holmes short story, "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891). Holmes employs a similar huge number of disguised operatives for his schemes there. "A Scandal in Bohemia" also resembles the Sophie Lang tales, in that it is about a male detective with numerous allies trying to catch a clever female crook, who plays a much more isolated hand. Sophie Lang's resourcefulness and cleverness recall Irene Adler in Conan Doyle's story.

Imagination and Reality

 

"The Signed Masterpiece" also hooks up Parr with Oliver Armiston, the "extinct author". In an earlier story, "The Infallible Godahl" (circa 1914), a crook used one of Armiston's mystery stories as the blueprint for a real life crime. In "The Signed Masterpiece", we see the sequel to this event: appalled by this, Armiston has stopped publishing his stories. Now, he writes only for the police: when Parr is stuck on an unsolved mystery, Armiston whips up a crime story based on the real life situation, one whose solution often turns out to be the actual solution of the real life mystery. This sort of complex interplay between fiction and reality is one of the hallmarks of Anderson's work.

 

Much of Anderson's fiction turns on virtual persons. When Armiston creates a fictional master thief in "The Infallible Godahl", a real life crook brings him to life. In "The Signed Masterpiece", Sophie Lang starts out purely as a hypothetical construct of the police: whenever Parr and his associates find traces of a perfect, unsolvable crime, they ascribe it to a master criminal they call "Sophie Lang". "Sophie" is nothing more than a police fiction, a dumping ground for perfect crimes. Eventually, the reader learns that the police, perhaps fortuitously, have been correct: most of these crimes are in fact the work of a single brilliant woman. The story continues to call her "Sophie Lang", but that is not actually a name she has ever used. The whole process is one of watching a mental construct come to life, and assume a flesh and blood identity. A classic story about a virtual person is "Putois" by Anatole France.

 

This interest in imagination becoming reality persists through Anderson's late work. Another virtual person plays a role in "The Phantom Guest" (1941). In Anderson's final story, "The Man from the Death House", a premeditated crime is brought to life.

 

The inverted detective story construction of "The Unknown Man" can perhaps be linked to the "imagination becomes reality" theme in Anderson's fiction. Here at the start of the story the surgeon anticipates that his crime might be discovered and traced to him by the Press; the rest of the tale consists of watching such a process unfold.

Book of Murder

 

It is unfortunate that so much of Anderson's work is uncollected. Anderson seemed to get better, not worse, as a writer as the years went by. Ellery Queen thought that his best story collection was his third, and last, Book of Murder (1930), which collects some tales of the 1920's. These stories seem to have been written during 1923-1929; there is some evidence that the book collects them in the same order as their original magazine publication.

 

The descriptions of Anderson's books in standard reference works does not at all gibe with the actual texts. In "The Infallible Godahl", Godahl is not a character in the tale. The work focuses on Oliver Armiston, an author who writes a series of stories about a thief called Godahl. But reference books seem to imply that Godahl is an actual character in the tale. Maybe later stories in the collection, which I have not read, somehow do this. (By the way, I do not like this early tale at all.) Similarly, many reference works describe Book of Murder (there is no "The" in its title) as being about Deputy Parr and his friend Oliver Armiston. Actually six of the ten tales focus on Parr and Armiston. Three others center on the New England backwoods characters of Jason Selfridge and constable Orlo Sage.

 

The Door Key

 

In the tenth and last story, "The Door Key" (1929), both Parr and Selfridge join forces in a single story, by way of a finale to the collection. The date indicates that Anderson did indeed write this story last, or nearly last, as a way of tying together his two series of detectives. Ellery Queen was clearly aware of the collection's pattern; he described Book of Murder as being "principally" about Parr in Queen's Quorum; but many subsequent writers are not. One suspects that they have not actually read Anderson's book.

 

In "The Door Key", the collaboration between the two sets of detectives is clearly the central interest of the tale. Elegantly symmetric, the first two thirds takes place in the country world; the last third in the city. In the first third, the amateurs Selfridge and Armiston predominate, investigating what is apparently eccentric behavior; in the middle third, the professionals Sage and Parr look at what is now clearly a crime. Parr begins to take over the investigation roughly half way through the middle section, which is also the halfway point of the entire story, marking the beginning of the transition from "country" to "city" in focus. The emphasis on tracking by the country detectives is balanced by the fingerprints and Bertillion measurements of the city ones. The villain also shares a duality of interest between city and country - but I don't want to give away too much of the plot. The topic of antiques in the opening section deals with the economic and cultural relations between country and city, and adds to the thematic interest. Even the fishing trip of the detectives up north in New England in the first half of the story, is balanced by the Southern journeys of the rich and the crooks who prey on them in the later sections.

 

The story has much more impact when read as the finale of the collection, watching well understood detectives at work, than it does as a stand alone piece in anthologies. Anderson later choose this piece as his favorite for a Howard Haycraft anthology; I am not sure I would fully agree, but it is a well done "group portrait" of his detective world, with beautiful formal patterns. It reminds one of the promotional art Elzie Segar once did, just a few years later, for his comic strip "Thimble Theater", where he assembled the entire cast of his strip for several years, on stage to take a bow.

The New England Tales

 

Oddly enough, in their three country outings, Selfridge and Sage don't do a great deal of detecting. In "Dead End", the crime sort of unravels itself; in "The Magician", a stranger assumes the role of detective; and in "A Start in Life", there is no actual mystery, although there is a tale of murder and politics. Of the three, "The Magician" is the only "real mystery story", with a mysterious crime detected to a solution. "A Start in Life" looks at a mass impersonation done by someone other than the police, so it has a formal relation to the Parr tales. "Dead End" gets off to a good start, but it falls apart in the middle.

 

The first two pieces, "Dead End" and "The Magician", are especially rich in descriptions of New England country life. Anderson is particularly interested in water, and its exploitability to form electric power. He also likes building, stonework, and every sort of construction and civil engineering project. One can see that Anderson was a contemporary of the Tennessee Valley Authority. His description of farm life includes economic factors, treating farms as a business enterprise, rather than simply rural nostalgia.

Bad Relations

 

Anderson clearly felt that there was something perverse about sexuality. In several of his tales, personal relations are milked for their maximum horror. "Big Time" (1927) is especially hair raising in this regard, although here, as elsewhere, Anderson never loses his tone of perversely elegant comedy. Other tales in this vein include "The Wedding Gift" (1929), which anticipates James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, and "The Phantom Guest" (1941) (not included in Book of Murder). These tales also include finales where the police, represented by Deputy Parr and his assistants, elegantly torture suspects though staged scenes in order to get them to confess. These tales represent a personal vision of Anderson's, and are hardly devoid of artistic merit, with many felicitous touches in their storytelling and writing. All the same, I like them a lot less than Anderson's more high tech crime tales.

 

Politics and People

 

Anderson's favorite people are clearly young men who are working for a living. Whether detectives or technologists or farmers, they are always presented with a great deal of glamour. Andersen also went out of his way to indicate sympathy with immigrants, Jews and Black people. By contrast, he was clearly very troubled by rich people who didn't work, at least not honestly, and these tend to be the villains in his tales.

Madame the Cat

 

My favorite, so far, of all of Anderson's work is "Madame the Cat" (1930), written too late to appear in any of Anderson's books. "Madame the Cat" appeared in The Saturday Evening Post just three months after the publication there of the last story in the Book of Murder collection, "The Door Key" (1929). It stars the same characters as Book of Murder, and can be read as a coda to that collection. "Madame the Cat" was reprinted by Carolyn Wells in her anthology Best American Mystery Stories (1931).

 

Anderson elegantly divides the story into two parts. The first half introduces the characters, the second half develops the mystery story. As in "The Jorgensen Plates", we do not learn till well into the story, what the various characters are up to. This adds most pleasantly to the plot complexities of the story. One is always wondering what the characters will do, and how they will fit into the story.

 

When the plot turns to a mystery puzzle at the very end, it is the mysterious disappearance of an object, almost an impossibility. Such disappearing objects will soon become a specialty of Ellery Queen and Stuart Palmer. Unlike Queen to come, Anderson's treatment is short and brief, and he does not include an intensive search in the story. "Madame the Cat" also includes police surveillance: they are watching during the disappearance, but apparently do not see it. Such "watched impossibilities" will become a specialty of John Dickson Carr.

 

"Madame the Cat" also anticipates Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers stories, several of which involve either disappearing objects or surveillances. The restaurant setting of "Madame the Cat" will also become an Asimov favorite. The New York City restaurant of "Madame the Cat", like those of Asimov to come, is fairly small and unpretentious, but also a home of gourmet cooking.

 

The Last Story

 

Anderson continued to write tales about Parr and his coworkers right up to the time of his death in 1947. One suspects that there might be some especially good tales from the 1930's that are uncollected.

 

His final story, "The Man from the Death House", shows no diminution of his charm and sophistication, with Parr's man Morel conducting a polished investigation of a murder at an upper crust musical soiree. Morel is my favorite among Anderson's series characters; one suspects he was Anderson's favorite, too. The opening of the tale discusses changes in a New York City neighborhood over time; a similar account formed a scene setting opening in "The Signed Masterpiece" (1921). The plot is full of clever, paradoxical turns. It has a Borges like feel, in its account of a premeditated crime coming to life. It also maintains a faithfulness to the Reeve tradition of scientifically based crime.

Bibliography

 

The Adventures of the Infallible Godahl (1914)

 

The Notorious Sophie Lang (1925)

• The Signed Masterpiece (1921)
• The Jorgensen Plates (1922)

 

Book of Murder {short stories} (1930)

• Beyond All Conjecture (1928)
• The Japanese Parasol (1926)
• The Magician (1925)
• A Start in Life (1926)
• The Recoil (1929)
• Gulf Stream Green (1929)
• The Door Key (1929)

 

Uncollected Deputy Parr stories

 

• The Half-Way House (1922)
• The House of Many Mansions (1926?)
• Madame the Cat (1930)
• The Man from the Death House (circa 1947)