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Armstrong, Charlotte

Page history last edited by Jon 11 years, 6 months ago

Charlotte ArmstrongCharlotte Armstrong Lewi (b. 1905-05-02 Vulcan, Michigan, d. 1969-07-18 Glendale, California) was an American author. Under the names Charlotte Armstrong and Jo Valentine she wrote over 28 novels, as well as working for the New York Times advertising department, as a fashion reporter for Breath of the Avenue (a buyer's guide), and in an accounting firm. 

 

Armstrong Lewi attended the University of Wisconsin and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1925. She had a daughter and two sons with her husband, Jack Lewi.

 

In 1957 Armstrong Lewi received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for her novel A Dram of Poison. Two other mysteries were nominated for Edgars, both in 1967: The Gift Shop, and Lemon in the Basket. Her series character was MacDougal Duff.

 

Mike Grost on Charlotte Armstrong

 

Charlotte Armstrong's "The Hedge Between" (1953) displays a Rashomon-like complexity in its reconstruction of a past crime. Although Armstrong has a reputation as a pure suspense writer, here she delivers a tale of real mystery. It shows similarity with her "The Enemy" (1951). Both are detective stories in which the detection is performed, in part, by children. Both take place in the yards of a typical middle class neighborhood. Both have the format of sifting through a large number of subtly contradictory stories, searching for the truth. There is an iterative quality to the detective work, as the characters get gradually closer to the truth. "The Enemy" (1951) reminds me a little bit of Ellery Queen's "The Gettysburg Bugle" (1951). Both have a tragic tone, a public setting involving many townspeople, deal with poisoning, and have somewhat similar characters in the two daughters of the respective tales. A later Armstrong story with a teenager as detective is "The Cool Ones" (1967). This story, like the earlier "The Ring in the Fish", centers on codes and ciphers.

 

"The Enemy" is also one a large number of 1950's American crime stories that are constructed to double as political allegories. Plays like Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" (1953) and "A View From the Bridge" (1955), William Carlos Williams' "Tituba's Children", films like Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront (1954), and mystery fiction like Ellery Queen's The Glass Village (1954) and Charlotte Armstrong's "The Enemy" (1951) were all part of this trend. These stories were commentaries on McCarthyism. Most of these works tend to show people operating as communities, often degenerating into mobs. Often the truth gets trampled in these works, as the mob makes up its mind who is guilty, and ignores all contrary evidence. The characters tend to be explicitly middle and working class, representing Average People. It is unclear where this terrible fear of mob hysteria comes from: McCarthyism, fear of the rise of a Hitler-like tyranny here, Communism, or what. One can also see certain elements in common among the authors of such tales. Aside from Ellery Queen (EQ), most are not puzzle plot genre specialists. Instead they tend to have "mainstream" labels. Despite this, most of these works have distinct elements of crime fiction about them, even if it is disguised by a setting in the old West, or Colonial America. At least some of these authors were acquainted with each other's works; Arthur Miller was EQ's neighbor in Connecticut, and EQ was the publisher of Armstrong's short stories.

 

Earlier than most of these McCarthyism stories are such works about lynching as Cornell Woolrich's "I'll Take You Home Kathleen" (1940) and "One Night in Barcelona" (1947), MacKinlay Kantor's "That Greek Dog" (1941), William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust (1948), and movies including Fritz Lang's Fury (1936), William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Clarence Brown's film version of Intruder in the Dust (1949), and Joseph Losey's The Lawless (1950). These works have much in common with the later McCarthyism stories, in their depiction of mob violence and the collapse of reason in searching for the real killer once the mob has settled on its victim. But they are not political allegories, in which the plot is a veiled portrait of some other topic. Instead, they are about their surface subject: lynching. The pre -1945 tales have white men as their victims, but after this date, their creators gather up their courage and show racial minorities as the victims, as was common in real life. These works seem to have an ancestral relationship to the 1950's McCarthy political tales. Armstrong's "The Enemy" can also be seen as being in this tradition; indeed, when EQ published it he added an afterword suggesting the story was about racial and religious tolerance. A mainstream tale, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948), is also relevant here; its meanings are obscure and much debated, but it is clearly related to both the lynching stories and the McCarthy tales of mob rule. Alan Dwan's The Woman They Almost Lynched (1953) is a film that is less political than many of the above works; it probably served as a model for Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), which was made by the same studio one year later. One might also examine the remarkable film, The Phoenix City Story (Phil Karlson, 1955), which does not fit easily into any of the categories we have been discussing.

 

Parallel to the McCarthy works is a film Western tradition, which includes Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952), Alan Dwan's Silver Lode (1954), Joseph H. Lewis' A Lawless Street (1955), and Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959). Like the McCarthy tales, these works were political allegories. But they were not specifically about McCarthyism; instead, they were constructed more as general purpose civics lessons. They tended to focus on the rights and responsibilities of individuals to the community. We know from interviews with Hawks that Rio Bravo was explicitly constructed as a response and reply to High Noon, and the Dwan and Lewis films also seem like films that build on that earlier, much discussed work. Political allegory was by no means confined to America - France had Camus' The Plague (1947), Anouilh's "Antigone" (1944), and Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" (1959), but most of these works do not involve mob rule in the American style.

 

A biography of Armstrong by Rick Cypert was published in 2008.

 

Bibliography

 

Lay On, MacDuff! (1942)

The Case of the Weird Sisters (1943)

The Innocent Flower aka Death Filled the Glass (1945)

The Unsuspected (1946)

The Chocolate Cobweb (1948)

Mischief (1950)

The Black-Eyed Stranger (1951)

Catch-As-Catch-Can aka Walk Out on Death (1952)

The Better to Eat You aka Murder's Nest (1954)

The Dream Walker aka Alibi for Murder (1955)

A Dram of Poison (1956)

The Albatross (short stories) (1957)

Duo (2 novelets) (1959)

The Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci (1959)

Something Blue (1962)

Then Came Two Women (1962)

A Little Less Than Kind (1963)

The Mark of the Hand (1963)

The One-Faced Girl (1963)

Who's Been Sitting in My Chair? (1963)

The Witch's House (1963)

The Turret Room (1965)

Dream of Fair Woman (1966)

I See You {short stories} (1966)

The Gift Shop (1967)

Lemon in the Basket (1967)

The Balloon Man (1968)

Seven Seats to the Moon (1969)

The Protege (1970)

 

As Jo Valentine

The Trouble in Thor aka And Sometimes Death (1953)

 

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