American mystery writer (1888-1964) who was educated at Brown University, Albany Law School and Defiance Theological Seminary. Among his many professions he counted clergyman, newspaper columnist and novelist. He contributed fiction to numerous U.S. and British magazines. After living much of his life in New England (where many of his books are set) he later settled in Des Moines, Iowa around 1930 where he lived out his remaining years as a minister for the First Unitarian Church while frequently contributing articles to Reader's Digest.
His two primary contributions to the genre were the detective characters of John Bartley and Professor Harley Manners. Bartley appears in nine novels and Manners in six. The book which introduces Harley Manners (Streaked with Crimson) is also the last book to feature John Bartley. In this novel we learn that Manners is a protege of Bartley.
Duttons' books suffer from the serial writer's tell-tale trap - repetition and reiteration. Nearly all of the early books published in the 1920s are littered with paragraphs that repeat information already discussed in earlier chapters. It is rather obvious that this was necessary for readers who were receiving the story piecemeal over a period of weeks or months in magazine installments, but a book editor should've excised the huge chunks of "the story thus far" that occur in the book versions of Dutton's novels.
Surprisingly, his books deal with subjects that are still topical and for the era were far ahead of the his fellow detective novel writers. Most interesting is Dutton's fascination with the psychopathology of killers. Perhaps to a jaded modern reader who has devoured shelves full of serial killer novels these stories may seem tried or even cliche. However, I have always read Golden Age novels keeping in mind the time in which they were written. One book in particular (The Crooked Cross) deals with Christian Fundamentalism and its inherent rejection of evolutionary theory and teachings. These topics are crucial to the plot and the motivations of the murderer. Granted the book was also written at the time of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" when the teaching of evolutionary theory was big in the headlines, but it is telling that Dutton would take advantage of this and use it in the context of a detective novel. Few American writers of popular fiction were that topical in his day.
Dutton also has a fascination with old books, ancient history, and the mythology and folklore of foreign countries. He uses this unusual knowledge in many of his novels often adding an element of the bizarre as in Poison Unknown with its eventual discovery of a toxin used by Papuan New Guinea natives and the ancient French torture books found in Streaked with Crimson.
J. F. Norris
Detective Novels with John Bartley
The Underwood Mystery (1921)
Out of the Darkness (1922)
The Shadow on the Glass (1923)
The House by the Road (1924)
The Second Bullet (1925)
The Crooked Cross (1926)
Flying Clues (1927)
The Clutching Hand (1928)
*Streaked with Crimson (1929)
Detective Novels with Professor Harley Manners
*Streaked with Crimson (1929)
The Shadow of Evil (1930)
Murder in a Library (1931)
Poison Unknown (1932)
The Circle of Death (1933)
Black Fog (1934)
Non-series Detective Novels
Murder in the Dark (1929)
*Streaked with Crimson is the only novel to feature both series characters.
Comments (2)
Jon said
at 5:28 pm on Feb 23, 2011
I have mixed feelings about Dutton. Although I tend to go a little overboard in my praise for him because I think he truly was an American innovator of the serial killer detective novel - a subgenre that didn't really didn't reach mass appeal until the early 1970s - he was also a pulp magazine serial writer. The book versions of his stories reveal those serial origins in a rather annoying way. His story telling tends to be overly melodramatic and his writing can be irritatingly repetitive.
Whereas other writers who wrote serials skillfully managed to incorporate sly updates of the "our story so far" type of writing into their novels and did so succinctly, Dutton had a lazy habit of just rewriting huge chunks of the story and lamely passing them off as the detective's organization mode. In the Harley Manners books there is always a section where Manners sits at a desk and writes out all his thoughts, his ideas about the suspects, and delineates puzzling questions about the crime. While this was necessary for readers who read the story piecemeal from issue to issue or even readers who might stumble across the story midstream after missing the first few episodes, someone reading the book will certainly be bothered by this as they already know the detective's thoughts - maybe as early as the previous chapter. I think a book editor should've taken the time to excise those repetitive portions of the story and streamline the whole novel. Chelsea House books, which were book versions of Street & Smith pulp stories, do not blatantly bear traces of their serial magazine origins, so why did a publisher of such stature as Dodd Mead allow Dutton's books to be presented so sloppily? In the case of STREAKED WITH CRIMSON there are whole paragraphs on the same page that are nothing but reiteration.
prettysinister
Jon said
at 5:29 pm on Feb 23, 2011
For this reason I think Charles Dutton will always be relegated to the lower echelon of early 20th century American mystery writers. The writing seems sloppy and lazy. But I am willing to give him a nod and think people should read at one of his books featuring John Bartley as detective (OUT OF THE DARKNESS and THE CROOKED CROSS are two of the best) because I think Dutton's insights into the deviant criminal mind were unusually prescient for the late 1920s. Although criminal profiling didn't come into existence until decades after Dutton's books were published, he seemed to have an innate understanding that it would eventually play a major part in detective work.
prettysinister
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