King, Rufus - The Deadly Dove (1945)

The Deadly Dove (1944 - 1945) shows signs of being adapted from a stage play. Most of the action occurs in one location that could easily be a stage set: the morning room of a large country house. Dialogue is featured heavily, as in a play, and much of it consists of fancy repartee that would have worked well on the Broadway stage of the 1940's. Either King adapted this novel from a stage play he wrote previously, or he wrote the novel with a future stage adaptation in mind. The Deadly Dove is the sort of middling work that is hard to evaluate. The book is well written, and full of dark humor. But it is nothing as a puzzle plot, and many of the characterizations are minor. I enjoyed reading it, but am afraid to recommend it because I'm not sure if anyone else would like it. It is definitely one of King's minor works.

The Deadly Dove is in roughly the same genre as The Bat (1920), Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood's adaptation of Rinehart's The Circular Staircase. Both works are set in the living room of a country mansion, both contain a diverse group of characters who are menaced by a mysterious professional criminal who wanders in and out of the spooky mansion. The hit man here, the Dove, even has the same sort of winged animal nickname as the criminal the Bat. Both works mix comedy and thrills. The owner of the mansion is a sixty year old woman, just as in The Bat, and her niece and the niece's boyfriend also play roles in the plot here, just as in the earlier play. King's novel even mentions Avery Hopwood by name, as the leading light of an earlier era of Broadway theater. One wonders if King had met Hopwood in gay circles earlier - Hopwood was certainly gay, and one strongly suspects that King was. Hopwood lived the sort of bon vivant life style on the Riviera often aspired to by King's characters.

The characters in The Deadly Dove are much nastier and more murderous than Rinehart and Hopwood's innocents. Also, the story has little of the earlier authors' gift for ingenious plotting.

Mike Grost