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Offord, Lenore Glen

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 4 months ago

Source: Facsimile Dust Jackets

Lenore Glen Offord (1905-1991) was an American reviewer who wrote mysteries set in and around San Francisco. She was born in Spokane Washington and educated at Mills College Oakland California. She married Harold R Offord in 1929. Her series detectives are Bill and Coco Hastings and Todd McKinnon, a mystery writer. She was mystery book critic to the San Francisco Chronicle for over thirty years, after standing in during WW2 for Anthony Boucher when he was unavailable.


Mike Grost on Lenore Glen Offord

 

Lenore G. Offord's Skeleton Key (1943) is the first mystery novel to feature her continuing characters. It introduces her amateur sleuth Todd McKinnon, and marries him off to her heroine, Georgine Wyeth. Its central puzzle plot is pretty ordinary; far better is a subplot about what looks like a grave. Offord introduces this plot at the end of chapter 1; she concludes it with the interview at the professor's house at the end of chapter 8 and in chapter 9, halfway through the novel. The subject of graves seems to trigger off something in Offord's creative imagination; it is central to her later classic, Walking Shadow. Offord, like other HIBK writers, does a very good job of describing the physical setting, buildings, and geography of her tale. The isolated road, its houses and the canyon are all imagined in interesting ways. Offord's HIBK mannerisms are very mild. There is a lot of sensitive human interest in her tale, but the undertones of hyper sensitive emotional hysteria sometimes found in HIBK are thankfully absent in her work. Her heroine is sensible, and gainfully employed. Offord instead stresses the puzzle plot elements of her tale, and her work is close to the intuitionist writers of the Golden Age.

 

There is a mildly interesting typology of murderers in Chapter 10. Perhaps this classification, which has more to do with murderers in mystery fiction than in real life, shows Offord's budding interest in mystery criticism: she would go on to be a prolific mystery reviewer for San Francisco papers. One hopes that someday her reviews, and the Edgar winning criticism of Helen McCloy, will be collected and made available. The typology is given by McKinnon, who is a writer of pulp detective stories in the tale. Offord never contributed to the pulps, at least not under her own name, and there is no pulp atmosphere whatsoever to her tale. Instead McKinnon seems like the generic "writer of mystery novels" so often encountered as a character in Golden Age mystery fiction: see Ellery Queen, or Christie's Ariadne Oliver, or Eberhart's Susan Dare.

 

I have been disappointed in some of the Offord novels. Clues to Burn (1942) is a routine mystery set at an overcrowded country cottage. The Glass Mask (1944) starts out not badly, with an interesting old house in a remote California small town, but events in it become distasteful. I did not enjoy the countryside setting of either book.

 

Offord's My True Love Lies (1947) is a non-series mystery, set in San Francisco's art world. This is a far more cultured San Francisco than we are used to seeing in say, private eye novels. This is a minor book. The mystery and the main characters involved in it are none too interesting. Far better is the heroine, and some of the detective work. The best parts of the book are Chapter 1, which introduces the heroine, and both her romance and thriller involvement, and Chapters 4 - 6, in which the heroine sleuths along with her police bodyguard, a likable lug who combines comic elements with some shrewd detection. My True Love Lies has many thriller elements. These are vividly atmospheric, and put the heroine in considerable jeopardy. Despite this, the book never degenerates into a thriller, unlike so many 1940's novels. It remains a pure whodunit. How does Offord accomplish this? For one thing, the book is filled with mystery. There seem to be at least four mysterious situations going, each in need of explanation. In addition, the reader is hard pressed to see how there can be a connection between the plots at all, which seem at first glance to be restricted to different spheres of characters. Because of this, the story seems to be getting deeper and deeper into mystery all the time. The heroine is menaced by unknown pursuers for unknown reason. Unlike many novels, in which it is clear that the heroine is being chased because she has the McGuffin in her purse, neither the reader nor the heroine can understand why she is being pursued. Every fresh new incident adds to the sheer mystery of this part of the book. Offord gradually builds up a miasma like effect, in which the characters seem to be getting deeper and deeper into a mysterious darkness. The sheer variety of the events in the book also add to its effect. On the one hand, things seem more life like and believable. The characters are not restricted to a few events, but seen in a wide variety of life time situations. On the other hand, the variety of events make the book seem more surreal. It is if the characters are trapped in a large, hermetically sealed world, one in which shadows stretch out in many strange and unexpected directions.

 

Offord's characters spend a great deal of time reconstructing past crime situations, adding many new details and making them seem more real. This is rather similar to what Rinehart does in Miss Pinkerton (1932), building up a visionary view of the key crime events.

 

Offord also has affinities with the Realist tradition. Her classic Walking Shadow (1959) contains a mysterious corpse, with the mystery turning on "the breakdown of identity" so popular in the Realist tradition. The book also has a "background", a loving depiction of a real life Oregon Shakespeare festival. Offord's book is the last novel known to me that displays the Realist tradition in full force, although Blochman continued writing short stories into the 1970's, and these also qualify as representatives of the same school. Earlier Offord books like Skeleton Key also contain science and scientists as part of the plot, another Realist characteristic.

 

Bibliography

 

Murder on Russian Hill (1938) aka Murder Before Breakfast

The 9 Dark Hours (1941)

Clues to Burn (1942)

Skeleton Key (1943)

The Glass Mask (1944)

My True Love Lies (1947) aka And Turned To Clay

Smiling Tiger (1949)

The Marble Forest (1951) aka The Big Fear (with others)

Walking Shadow (1959)

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