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Mason, AEW

Page history last edited by Jon 12 years, 6 months ago

Alfred Edward Woodley Mason (1865-1948) was an English playwright and the inventor of the French detective Inspector Hanaud. He was born in Camberwell and studied at Oxford. He became an actor before starting his writing career, also serving for four years in the House of Commons (1906-1910). He was a keen traveller and cricket player, and during WWI served as civilian head of Naval Intelligence. Several of his books were adapted into plays and films.

Four of Mason's Hanaud mysteries, At the Villa Rose, The House of the Arrow, The Prisoner in the Opal and The House in Lordship Lane are now available as free downloads from Gutenberg Australia and Project Gutenberg.

Mike Grost on AEW Mason

Mason was a once famous mystery writer whose reputation seems problematic today. The author of a famous war story, The Four Feathers (1902), of no attraction to a pacifist like myself, Mason intermittently wrote tales about Inspector Hanaud in between his other, non-mystery fiction. The House of the Arrow (1924) takes place at a French country house. It is full of creepy atmosphere, and seems to be the origin and literary model for those John Dickson Carr tales featuring a totally evil woman who is up to Satanic villainy. There is a sense in all of these books, Mason's and Carr's, of a household full of emotionally disturbed people, a place where something is Really Wrong, and sick impulses dominate, having erupted into at least one murder already. These Carr novels, such as He Who Whispers, Below Suspicion, and The Burning Court, are much admired by some critics, but have always inspired in me an immense distaste. They are hardly especially ingenious as detective stories, being vastly simpler in plot than Carr's masterpieces, and I cannot understand critics' fascination with their central characters. It is all part of the cult of horror fiction to which I am so blind. In any case, I like Mason's original even less than Carr's work, which at least shows that master's excellent craftsmanship. The misogyny of The House of the Arrow is the flip side of the macho posturing of The Four Feathers. It shows a writer who was deep into the most mean spirited sexual stereotypes of his era. The idea that men would stand around and give white feathers to other men, branding them as cowards for refusing to fight in war, strikes me as utterly appalling. I admire today's Lithuanians infinitely more: 92% of them refused their induction notices in the Russian army, with the collaboration of virtually their entire society. They had no stomach for butchering innocent Moslems in Afghanistan, and other enemies of the Soviet state.

The House of the Arrow does not show great ingenuity as a mystery plot. Much better in this regard is the little short story, "The Ginger King" (1940). This tale seems especially Agatha Christie like, with a clever criminal scheme exposed by its detective, a well constructed plot, and a welcome vein of Christie like humor throughout the tale. It would perhaps have made a good anthology piece, with the exception of its big problem: lots of racist gibes against its Arab villain. Mason just can't help flogging his distasteful world view in his tales. Let's face it: this man was a mess.

Where does Mason fit into mystery history? Both Dorothy L. Sayers and S.S. Van Dine tagged him unhesitatingly as an intuitionist. His influence certainly was mainly felt in this world (the intuitionists); I think his influence on John Dickson Carr was unfortunate, but it was real. One suspects he also influenced Carr's Bencolin, and the sinister French crimes he investigated. Mason seems like a none too great intuitionist writer, allied to Christie and Carr. He published long before either: At The Villa Rose (1912) and the novella "The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel" (1917) follow Chesterton and Freeman, but predate Milne, Christie, Carr, Van Dine, Sayers and the rest of the Golden Age.