Anyway, Curley Guy is dead. When his plane crashed into the sea, the story of the murder on board the schooner Carma was effectively ended. Long before that, however, the fifteen Argonauts had left for home — most of them hitchhiking. But they had had their hour, their little crowded hour. One of them, Lord Edward Montagu, the noblest born of the little group, returned to England by invitation of the American immigration authorities, and he was heard of only a few years later when he was reportedly hauled into magistrate’s court on the charge of trying to peddle American hot-dogs outside the gates of his father’s palatial, 400-acre estate. Later, so I have heard, he came into the title and now is presumably sitting in the House of Lords and voting Conservative.
For some time after the trial the fair Aloha haunted the Hollywood casting offices, offering her talents and late husband’s film (River of Death); both commodities had a very limited appeal. After a few weeks she disappeared — perhaps she retired to that incredible French convent where only English is spoken. But it is certain that the newspapermen, the judge, lawyers, police and court attendants who came into contact with Aloha will long remember her tall icy loveliness.
As for the schooner Carma, a few weeks after the end of the Wanderwell trial she was officially condemned as hopelessly unseaworthy and was towed out to sea and sunk. Her secrets are now and for all time secure in Davy Jones’s locker.
Patrick Quentin
Patrick Quentin was a pseudonym for the writing team of two Harvard-educated Englishmen, Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb. And their “Puzzle” mysteries featuring dapper, ex-alcoholic theater producer Peter Deluth is one of the most evocative series of the late 1930s to early 1940s. It was by no means hard-boiled, and it wasn’t just a collection of isolated novels; Deluth’s character truly developed over the course of six novels — by turns tragically and comically. Quentin seemed to delight in bringing to life the dark side of otherwise lighthearted characters. This is especially true in the first of the Deluth novels, Puzzle for Fools (1936), set in a small but exclusive sanitarium for the drunk and the deranged. Darker still are the Quentin novels Hugh Wheeler published after the death of his collaborator, beginning in the early 1950s. Judging from reprints, Quentin’s later writings attracted a smaller readership. If you can find them, two are quite good: The Man with Two Wives (Dell, 1955) and The Black Widow, which Nunnally Johnson adapted for the screen in 1954. Reprinted here for the first time in more than forty years is “The Last of Mrs. Maybrick.” A masterfully written story which appeared while the partnership was still going strong, Quentin leaves little doubt with whom his sympathies lie.
The Last of Mrs. Maybrick
On October 23, 1941, in a small, woodland shack between Gaylordsville and South Kent, Connecticut, a little old woman died. It was the lonely, inconspicuous death of an obscure eighty-year-old recluse, and her body might have lain undiscovered had it not been for a kindly neighbor whose habit it was to supply her with the milk that she needed to feed her innumerable cats.
The neighbor, peering through the fly-spotted window pane, saw the crumpled little body lying dead amidst the filth and disarray with which, in life, she had chosen to surround herself. A cat or two, perhaps, nosing at one of the many grimy, milkless saucers, might have felt that life had changed for the worse. There was nothing or no one else to mourn the passing of this forlorn and eccentric character whom Gaylordsville and South Kent had known as Mrs. Florence Chandler.
“Mrs. Chandler,” after a residence of twenty years, had become a familiar if somewhat shy figure in those parts, especially on the campus of the South Kent School where she was often seen, a dowdy, meagre little figure with a face wrinkled as a walnut, carrying over her spare shoulder a gunny sack stuffed with newspapers salvaged from academic ash cans. These newspapers comprised almost her only form of reading matter. Once she had written a book herself, but that was long ago and South Kent School knew nothing of her as a woman of letters. Now, too poor to buy books, she was too proud to borrow them. As intellectual nourishment for her, therefore, there was nothing but old copies of The New York Times and an occasional Bridgeport Sunday Post.
“Mrs. Chandler’s” gunny sack served another less literary purpose. On outgoing journeys it would often be filled with indeterminate scraps of food which were dumped at strategic points, usually on the school campus, for the delectation of the neighborhood cats. “Mrs. Chandler” had definite views on the care of cats. It was her belief that the summer folk went junketing off with the first fall of autumn leaves, leaving their cats to starve. Hence the amateur filling stations for orphaned pets.
This humanitarian impulse of “Mrs. Chandler’s” was, on the whole, detrimental to the high seriousness of the South Kent students and a headache to certain members of the staff.
Headache! The word is pregnant. For when the kind neighbor discovered the pathetic body of “Mrs. Chandler” in the desolate New England shack, he had no idea that he was looking at all that remained of one of the world’s greatest headaches. That tiny, dishevelled creature had, in her day, caused more headaches possibly than any woman since Helen of Troy. She had been a headache to several American Presidents; to Secretaries of State; to their wives; to many famous journalists; and to a vast army of organized American women. She had been more than a headache to one celebrated English judge, in that she is reputed to have pushed him off the teetering brink of his sanity. Indeed, she had been a fifteen-year migraine to no less august a personage than the Queen-Empress Victoria.
And the name of that headache was Mrs. Florence Maybrick.
Mrs. Maybrick. To those in their carefree twenties, the name may ring a distant bell. To those in their thirties, it may conjure up dim memories of a murderess, an adulteress — or something interesting. To those over forty-five, Mrs. Maybrick will be remembered for what she actually was — an international incident.
She was born Florence Chandler in Mobile, Alabama, in 1862, and came from what is usually referred to as “good American stock,” boasting among her forbears, direct and collateral, a Secretary of the Treasury, a Chief Justice, a bishop and two Episcopal rectors, co-authors of a work entitled: “Why We Believe the Bible.” As an appendix to this illustrious list of ancestors, her mother had married, a second time, the Baron Adolph von Roques, a distinguished German officer of the Eighth Cuirassier Regiment. Little Florence was educated, partly in America, partly abroad, by a succession of the most impeccable “masters and governesses.” Nothing had been overlooked that might insure for her a cultivated and ladylike future.
As it happened, however, these fair beginnings did not help her much, for, from an early period, Florence Chandler was dogged by bad luck. At the age of eighteen, when the other Mobile maidens of her generation were fluttering toward good clean American romance, it is reliably reported that Florence, during a rough Atlantic crossing, stumbled on the sundeck of the liner carrying her to Europe. She stumbled and fell — literally and catastrophically — into the arms of a Cad, an English cad, at that. And, after all, the English invented the word.
The Cad was James Maybrick; he was old enough to be her father; and he married her. Probably it was the least caddish thing he ever did. But it was an ill day for Florence.