Disney, Dorothy Cameron -  The Golden Swan Murder (1939)

Disney's The Golden Swan Murder (1939) is her third mystery novel, published after Strawstack. It starts out in true Rinehart fashion, narrated by a starchy spinster aunt of a young niece in trouble. However, the locale of the book soon switches to Hollywood, and there is a real fish out of water effect: a Rinehartian spinster sleuth Vs the denizens of La La Land. The Los Angeles atmosphere is etched with poisonous splendor, and stands comparison with Raymond Chandler, who was also publishing his first novel that year, The Big Sleep (1939).

Disney's book was published two years before Stuart Palmer sent his own spinster sleuth Hildegarde Withers to Hollywood in The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941). Withers later returned there in Palmer's Cold Poison (1954), and one of the characters in that book has similarities to one of Disney's: a young composer of dubious background, who is romancing the heroine while trying to get a musical job at one of the studios. The heroine in both novels has a film industry connection, and helps the young man to get a job. Both stories also have a movie producer, and a scene in a studio projection room, although both of these settings are probably de rigeur for mysteries with a film background.

Plot Structure

Disney's book is well written, especially in its first half, which contains the murder and an attempted murder. Too much time is spent in its second half with the police and district attorney, who are much less interesting as characters than the Hollywood types. Disney succeeds with her storytelling. However, there is much less puzzle plot imagination here than in Strawstack. This is unfortunate.

The first half of Disney's novel is a variant on the "inverted detective" story. In the classical inverted tale, invented by R. Austin Freeman, we see the criminal commit the crime, then try to cover up his traces. Then the detective tries to track him down. In Disney's variant of the form, it is not the killer who covers up the crime, but some innocent person who conceals the murder. This person is usually someone who loves one of the suspects, and tries to protect them. This person goes through all of the plot developments of the traditional inverted tale, destroying evidence, concealing the corpse, but is not actually the guilty party, of course. This variant on the inverted story became popular in the 1940's. One thinks of Erle Stanley Gardner's "Clue of the Runaway Blonde" (1945), Rufus King's The Case of the Dowager's Etchings (1943), Cornell Woolrich's "Death Between Dances" (1947), many of Gardner's and Craig Rice's stories where the lawyers Perry Mason and John J. Malone conceal the murder for their clients.

Social Commentary

Disney shows a corrosive skepticism about the police in these books. They are shown as honest, and not corrupt, but also as self seeking and determined to railroad suspects into prison. They can be quite vicious about hounding suspects. They are thoroughly unpleasant and unlikable people. Her point of view is very unusual for HIBK writers, most of whom seem to have an upper middle class comfort with the police. The police interrogation methods in Golden Swan seem more like the brainwashing sessions done by secret police in totalitarian states, than anything one commonly encounters in most mystery novels. I've seen Communist interrogators tormenting captured freedom fighters in spy novels who have exactly the same approach as the police in Golden Swan. The cop Timothy Dwight in Explosion is also loathsome.

Disney's point of view in Golden Swan is both similar and different from Chandler. Her depiction of Hollywood does not quite reach the sordid extremes of The Big Sleep. While Chandler deals with gangsters and the pornography business, Disney looks at the film industry. While Chandler's book explores drug addiction, Disney looks at gambling. Disney's relative restraint here perhaps reflects the taste standards of the women's magazines for which she and the other HIBKers wrote. However, both writers are surprisingly alike in point of view. Disney's film industry insiders may not be actual gangsters, but they have been thoroughly corrupted by their milieu. Disney paints them as people with every sort of spiritual decay. Her portrait of wide spread social corruption caused by a vicious economic institution is as least as grim and pointed as Chandler's. Both authors are equally convinced that they are in a society that has reached a moral nadir. Similarly, Chandler's treatment of drug addiction and Disney's of gambling have a similar point of view. Both are sinister portrayals of addictive behavior taking over and utterly ruining people's lives. Both authors are utterly condemnatory of these activities, and the human wreckage they leave behind them.

Disney's spinster sleuth narrator does not partake of the corruption around her. It is not so much that she is saintly. Rather, she is a starchy representative of a traditional Code of Conduct. She always performs in obeisance to this code, that of Philadelphia's Main Line, and avoids the social decay around her. Her constant comparison of Hollywood to Philadelphia at first seems funny, and is milked for comic relief. But as the book goes forward it seems like a fence keeping her out of the abyss.

Mike Grost