Kendrick, Baynard H - The Odor of Violets (1940)

Kendrick's The Odor of Violets (1940) is a combination spy thriller cum mystery, featuring Kendrick's blind private eye, Captain Duncan Maclain, now working for US intelligence in the early days of World War II. Kendrick is described in the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection as an outstanding creator of plots in the 1930's style. This statement can be defended, but it is misleading. My impression (before I had read Kendrick's novel) was this meant that Kendrick was Ellery Queen #2, spinning out Golden Age detective puzzle plots. This is not true at all, at least in this book. Kendrick's short fiction appeared in Black Mask, and Kendrick's plotting style has its roots in the pulp mystery fiction of its day. The plotting techniques reminded me of Kendrick's Black Mask colleagues Merle C. Constiner and Willis Todhunter Ballard; Kendrick's writing style is a lot smoother than Ballard's, although a lot grimmer and more downbeat than either. Anyone coming to Kendrick's book looking for an outstanding formal detective story in the Christie-Carr-Queen tradition will be disappointed.

There is a whodunit aspect to the book, with a series of murders, and the final unmasking of the chief Nazi spy behind the murders at the end. However, there are some major changes to the ground plan of the typical whodunit. Motive becomes a non-operative factor, because the villains' motives are simply that they are Nazis. More crucially, unknown to the reader a large number of characters in the book are leading double lives as spies. No less than three characters turn out to be US Government agents, while another three character are Nazi spies. Many of these characters are acting independently of each other - none of the US government agents seems to inform Maclain of anything, for example, even though he is working for G2 - and we have the familiar pulp plot construction approach of a large number of independent groups all playing a role in a mysterious situation. Ballard, Constiner and other pulp writers of the day used this "pulp style of plotting" approach a lot, and it allows the construction of some very ingenious plots. The style seems to go back to Carroll John Daly and his story "Three Gun Terry" (1923); it was also widely used at an early date by Erle Stanley Gardner. After its early use in the 1920's by Carroll John Daly and Erle Stanley Gardner in Black Mask, the "pulp style of plotting" is widely associated with the "second generation" of Black Mask writers, writers who appeared in the magazine in the early 1930's: Theodore Tinsley, Forrest Rosaire, Paul Cain, Todhunter Ballard, Baynard Kendrick, Merle C. Constiner, Frank Gruber, and Norbert Davis. Many of these writers wrote for other pulps, as well as Black Mask, and they seemed just as likely to use the "pulp style" in stories written for other pulp magazines as in Black Mask itself. Still, there is a common association of all of these writers with Black Mask.

More on the "pulp style of plotting": Everytime the reader thinks the story is moving in one direction, another group moves in out of left field with some surprising development. Oftentimes the significance of this plot development is a mystery to the reader, who only sees the surface manifestation of the group's action. This keeps up a steady stream of mysterious events, whose underlying causes are only gradually unraveled by the detective. The root causes of the events, even the groups perpetrating them, are often very different from what the reader first suspects. Characters that looked like bad guys turn out to be good guys, or at least not deeply villainous. The various groups of characters and their actions interlock in ingenious ways. The plot as a whole is like an elaborate, giant jigsaw puzzle, with many pieces contributing to the whole. If done well, and by a good storyteller, the whole plot can have an enormous forward momentum, which catches the reader up in the unfolding action.

Another feature of this technique is the naturalness with which it lends itself to surrealism. Because each new development can come as a complete surprise to the reader, the plot events can be made into a series of surrealistic set pieces, erupting into the book in the most logically unexpected manner possible. Surrealism has a long history in American mystery fiction: think of Futrelle, Queen, Craig Rice. Readers and writers of mystery fiction feel it has a natural place in the genre. Here is a technique that encourages it.

It helps in this approach to have a set of characters who are as diverse as possible, so that they are involved in radically different activities. Some of Kendrick's characters are out of the superhero pulp PI tradition, such as Maclain and his team, which includes a largely unstereotyped black chauffeur. This team can remind one of Doc Savage and his men, for example. On the other hand, the initial viewpoint character Norma, is a palpitatingly emotional woman right out of the Had-I-But-Known school, not so much of Rinehart as of such Rinehart imitators as Mignon G. Eberhart and Mabel Seeley. Norma is always seething with emotion about her family and romantic relationships, when she is not walking into dark and lonely rooms concealing the murderer and various corpses. I have never seen the combination of Pulp PIs and Had-I-But-Known-ism, before. It is not as much fun as it sounds, partly because Kendrick's tone is so grim that it precludes all sense of tongue-in-cheek fun, but somehow it all manages to work. What the Had-I-But-Known element does do, is allow Kendrick to talk seriously about relationships, particularly their negative and problem sides, such as divorce and date rape. This serious, realistic portrayal of relations has always been one of the strong sides of the Had-I-But-Known school, both here and elsewhere.

Kendrick's book is at the middle level of pulp plotting. It is not bad, but it is not as good as Constiner at his best, for example. Kendrick's book suffers from his grim tone, which even the author describes as one of "horror". This is not the standard Gothic trappings, but a full look at modern problems. The book includes borderline incest, date rape, a dog trained to kill, the death of dozens of men on a sabotaged submarine, Nazi torturers, and a decapitated woman. Yikes! This would be pretty strong stuff in the 1990's, and in 1940 it must have been startling. (Admittedly, most of this stuff happens "offstage", and is not directly portrayed, in deference to 1940's taboos. Still, all of these things form principal elements of the plot.) The novel's grim view of sex and romantic relationships is also prominent. In most cases in the book, sex and romance lead immediately to death. At least one person in many "romantic" relationships turns out to be a spy, interested in the other person only for espionage purposes. Men are always getting shot or stabbed in the back, with all of this method's disturbing symbolic overtones. This is a strange book. While its form has roots in the pulp tradition, its content is distinctly different.

Mike Grost