Bodies from the Library 4, page 31
Happily, those feelings of sympathy which rise up suddenly for this person or that die away just as suddenly, and you are set free from the kindness of your heart. So, as the mornings passed, and new editions of the Times dropped on our stoop, I became interested in the sanitarium scandal which was just reaching its full swing. Gebhardt, a reporter I knew, was reporting it, and he made such a foul disgrace out of it that I enjoyed it very much along with everybody else.
On this particular morning, I read two columns on the sanitarium on the front page and then turned to page eight to get the rest. I finished his story, and was thinking of how well Gebhardt was doing when my eye fell on a small single paragraph headed Woman Smoker Burns Self to Death with Cigarette in Bed.
I almost didn’t read it; it’s the sort of thing that happens over and over. I am sure none of them think they will drop off to sleep when they light their cigarettes in bed, but apparently many of them do. I was about to glance away, in search of something more entertaining, when I saw the name Mrs Iris Sumner.
I had a feeling as if something had slid loose in my chest. The paragraph told that she had come in late from a cocktail party; she and her husband had gone to bed in separate rooms. Some time later, Mark Sumner, her husband, smelled smoke. He traced it to his wife’s room and found her asphyxiated in a smouldering bed. Mrs Sumner left two sisters—Mrs Anna Wilkes of Los Angeles, California, and Miss Nellie Loughram of Canton, Ohio. Funeral services would be held at the Hibiscus Avenue Episcopal Church, the Rev. J. Des-Liger Smith officiating.
As I read this, my strange feeling of oppression and grief returned to me. I took the paper in, silently, and handed it to Poggioli, showing him the paragraph. Underneath my feeling for the woman herself, I had a vague hope that Poggioli would be able, through Iris’s death, to unravel the mystery of Cyril Owens’ murder, but he was not. This was clearly an accident—a very unusual accident. It happens mainly in hotels, where people are lonely; they lie and smoke in bed until they fall asleep, and set fire to their covers.
After a day or two, this also passed out of my thoughts. It was helped along by Gebhardt’s story of a Dr Drummond, who had turned up as the chief actor in the sanitarium scandal. Poggioli and I finally became so interested in Dr Drummond that we went down to the City Hall to see for ourselves exactly what the Police Department had found out.
We were in the street-level lobby, waiting for our lift in the elevator bank, when I heard a man ask Information on what floor he would find the marriage-licence bureau.
I turned at the request, because—after all—anybody looks to see who is to be the next man married. I didn’t know him, of course. He was a serious—almost taciturn-looking fellow. I couldn’t believe he would make any woman very happy—unless, of course, she herself was a serious melancholy sort of woman.
The next moment, I saw the bride-to-be standing a little way from the window. She took my breath; I had never seen such a change come over any woman. Of course she was not happy; it was impossible even to imagine Maria Owens as happy. But she evidently was filled with a kind of solemn joy that was natural to her madonna face and figure. It just struck me that this would be the way the persecuted and harassed saints would look when they first entered heaven. Just then, she saw us; she caught the man’s arm and drew him towards us.
‘Mark,’ she said, ‘I’ve told you so often about this wonderful, good man, Mr Poggioli. When my heart was at its lowest point I telephoned him. He came to me and told me I was in no danger; that everything would work out for my happiness: and for me to just trust in providence and walk forwards in faith. And Dr Poggioli, look at us now!’
She compressed her lips to restrain her own feelings. We, of course, were very happy in her happiness. Then her elevator came down and took her and Mr Sumner away.
When they were gone. I said to Poggioli, ‘Did you tell her all that?’ Poggioli said he didn’t much think he did; it was probably an illusion …
He left off talking, in the middle of his sentence; as we got into our elevator, he suddenly reached his hand into his pocket and drew out two slips of paper. Instead of going up to the Police Department on the eleventh floor, we got off at the Internal Revenue offices on the third.
Naturally Poggioli was known here, for he had been a consultant in several revenue cases. He went to one of the cages and handed his two sheets of paper in to a Mr Bill Butlin. He asked Bill would he do him the favour to take these two typewriter samples and compare them with the letter of the man who sent in some information that broke the Anzetti Income Tax prosecution.
‘How do you know anybody sent in any information?’ asked Butlin.
‘I don’t, but someone easily could have. I want to know whether it came from the man who wrote this sample or this one.’
‘You understand that the case is closed,’ reminded Mr Butlin; ‘you can’t bring in new evidence …’
‘This is for my own personal information.’
‘O.K.’ Butlin took the two sheets and went away.
I stood trying to fabricate some sort of explanation for what my friend was doing. I had a feeling that I was about to get a story, and in the same breath I had a fear that Mrs Maria Owens’ heavenly happiness would pay for my solution. I was torn between my flair as an author, and my loyalty as I friend: it is a point of imbalance where writers often stand.
Mr Butlin reappeared at the window. ‘It’s this one,’ he said, delivering a sample marked with a blue pencil, then he handed back the other. ‘I spoke to the old man about this and told him who handed these in. He said to tell you that the case would be closed to anybody else; but if you had anything new it could be reviewed.’
‘Thanks; I appreciate that very much, Mr Butlin.’ And we walked back out to the elevator bank.
I had the most uncomfortable hot-cold sensations run over me. When we reached the street floor, and could talk in the crowd, Poggioli said, ‘It was Mark Sumner’s letter to the department.’
‘Yes, I gathered that much. What did he write to the revenue men?’
‘He gave them details of the Anzetti mob which he picked up at the Cyril Owens home … enough to identity Owens as the leak. When the F.B.I. closed in and showed their proof, they thought, of course, that Owens had squealed. So the rest of it happened.’
‘Why did he deliberately get Owens into trouble? Was that after Owens’ familiarity with Iris?’
‘No, it was before; it was what led to his coldness towards Mrs Sumner, and her desertion of him later. And still later than that—after Cyril was assassinated—it led to his cremation of his wife in her bed while she was drunk.’
‘What led to it? My Heavens, man …’
‘Why, Mark Sumner’s passion for Maria Owens, and Maria’s love for him—which made a religious recluse of her …’
‘Well, does she know …?’
‘Certainly, certainly not; she thinks a kindly providence marked her tears and relieved her of the great sin of not loving her husband, and of deeply loving a man who was not her husband.’
We were out of City Hall now, and Poggioli tore up his two typewriting samples and loosed their shreds in the windy street.
‘But … Poggioli,’ I objected. ‘Are you going to let it rest at that? Sumner is morally guilty of one murder, even though the law could never touch him for the death of Owens. But there’s no doubt about his guilt in Iris’s case.’
Poggioli nodded. ‘In our minds, perhaps. We have discovered this through psychological deduction, not through evidence that would stand up in court. Only a confession would make his conviction possible.’
I thought of what this situation would do to my story; how could I conclude it satisfactorily if a known murderer were permitted to escape Scot-free? ‘Surely,’ I mumbled, ‘we could play upon his guilt in some way and bring out the evidence.’
There was a faint smile on Poggioli’s face. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘that might be possible. You want to see justice done, my friend?’
‘Why … yes,’ I answered quickly.
‘And, of course, once justice is complete, you will have a story … Well, I’m afraid you may have to wait awhile, but I promise you that you will see justice—unless Mark Sumner suffers a fatal accident, or illness, beforehand. I predict that he will come forward and confess within a year—and there will be enough substantiating evidence for a conviction.’
I pondered a moment, trying to puzzle out my friend’s reasoning. ‘You—you think Maria will find out and persuade him to confess?’
‘She will persuade him, whether she knows or not. There are some men who could commit the “perfect” crime and never worry about it afterwards. Mark Sumner is not that kind of man—his is the psychological type that should avoid murder.’
I smiled at Poggioli’s delightfully abstract reasoning; yet, it did make sense, if you wanted to look at homicide strictly on the basis of calculated risk. Then the smile left me as I thought of Sumner’s new wife. ‘Poor Maria,’ I said; ‘her happiness won’t last long.’
‘No … it will be short-lived, as any kind of happiness of this world. But she will be comforted in her own way, feeling sure that his soul has been saved through repentance and suffering. And she will still have the past …’
We stopped at a news-stand to pick up the latest editions of the papers. ‘Do you think you will have your story, now?’
‘I’ll wait,’ I replied.
And Poggioli was right; I marked the date on my calendar, and it was a little over ten months later when the papers were filled with stories of Mark Sumner’s amazing confession, trial, and conviction.
T. S. STRIBLING
The American novelist known as T. S. Stribling (1881–1965) was born in Clifton, a small town on the bend of the state river in Wayne County, Tennessee. His mother, Amelia Annie Waits, was a teacher and keen equestrian, while his spectacularly named father, Christopher Columbus Stribling, edited the local newspaper and as a younger man had fought in the Northern Federal Army at the infamous battle of Shiloh. Tom Stribling’s birth name was in fact Thomas Hughes Stribling, the name taken from one of his father’s friends, a local dignitary, with whose daughter Tom would later ‘walk out’. However, after an incident in which Tom threw rocks at her parents’ home, Miss Hughes abandoned Tom, who chose in retaliation to adopt a new middle name, Sigismund, and consequently new initials.
Tom Stribling always wanted to be a writer, and his first published work, which came out when he was only twelve years old, was a ghost story entitled ‘The House of Haunted Shadows’. As a child he spent summers with his aunt, Martha Waits, whose black servant, George, was to prove a strong influence on Stribling’s literary life. Stribling attended State Normal School in Florence, his Alabaman mother’s home town, from which he graduated in June 1903 with the additional honour of a medal for the best graduating essay, ‘Climatic Influence on Southern Verse’. That same year he gained a teaching certificate, possibly intending to follow in his mother’s footsteps, but he found teaching difficult and abandoned the profession after only a term.
He returned to study, and in 1904 graduated from the University of Alabama with a law degree. Stribling practised law in Florence and for a year in the office of Governor Emmet O’Neal, before abandoning the legal profession and moving to Nashville, where he secured a job as assistant to the editor of the Taylor-Trotwood Magazine, which also published some of his adventure stories, for example ‘The Thrall of the Green’ in July 1907. Other stories, like ‘The Loot of the Dog Star’ (1909) were published in newspapers. Stribling also produced many ‘moral’ stories for Sunday school magazines, characterized by more or less overt warnings about the evils of alcohol and cigarettes. Finally, frustrated by the limitations of the shorter format, he decided to expand one of his short stories into a novel and the result, The Cruise of the Dry Dock was published in 1917, the same year that he joined the staff of The Chattanooga News.
Stribling’s first book, though jejune, was sufficiently well-received for him to consider writing a novel for adults and, in parallel with his newspaper work, he began work on one while turning out the odd poem and countless short stories. Stribling once claimed, jokingly, that by this stage of his career he had written more than 10,000. Many were rejected but others sold to journals like Southern Women’s Magazine.
In 1921, Birthright, Stribling’s first novel for adults, was published after serialization in The Century Magazine. The story concerns a young black graduate of Harvard who travels south with the aim of founding a school only to find prejudice and discrimination at every turn. Although the book was widely praised, others slated the author for suggesting that the post-bellum South was a less than perfect place, a criticism that would echo throughout Stribling’s career. Astonishingly, some newspapers even sought to ‘explain’ the author’s evident sympathies for the Southern poor by altering photographs to give him the appearance of African heritage.
Stribling’s next two books were less controversial. Fombombo (1922) is an adventure story featuring an American arms dealer in Venezuela, a country that the author had visited and which also provided the setting for Red Sand (1923). Other novels followed and in 1930, by now a successful and nationally celebrated author, Stribling married Louella Kloss, an accomplished violinist and music teacher. During the 1920s he also wrote a series of short detective stories about Dr Henry Poggioli, a professor of psychology. These were collected in Clues of the Caribbees (1929) and more Poggioli stories appeared in the early 1930s but were not collected until Doctor Poggioli: Criminologist (2004).
1931 saw the publication of The Forge, the first volume of a trilogy centred on Colonel Miltiades Vaiden, a fortune-hunting blackmailer, rapist and member of the Ku Klux Klan. Stribling’s intention, as Stribling later made clear, was to provide ‘a survey, more or less, of the foibles and amusing social kinks of the whole South from Civil War times to the present’, some of those ‘foibles’ being, as he well knew, utterly abhorrent. While many praised his vivid, if not florid, writing, he was condemned for setting his fictional novel in Florence, Alabama, and for incorporating some events from the town’s history. But if The Forge aroused annoyance, the following year’s second volume—The Store—would arouse fury. Stribling found himself the focus of sharp criticism, often deeply grounded in racism and prejudice against anyone daring to suggest that the South was built on shame. One reviewer criticized Stribling for suggesting that lynching had ever been used other than as a reasonable weapon of law enforcement, while one local man threatened to sue Stribling for libel, a suit that the author offered to support on condition that it was brought ‘while the offending book is still on sale at the bookstores’; like many of the anecdotes told about Stribling, this might even be true. Parochial criticisms aside, and despite sales that were to a degree depressed by the state of the American economy, The Store was widely praised, winning the prestigious $1,000 Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for the year’s best American novel. The title of the final volume in the trilogy gave Stribling some difficulty and he mused on ‘The Study’ and ‘The Temple’ before settling on Unfinished Cathedral (1933). This book was also set in Florence to which, with authorial licence, he transplanted from Scottsboro the trial—on a charge of rape—of nine black teenagers, considered by many to be the most egregious miscarriage of justice in American history.
In 1934, Stribling wrote a radio series for Columbia about the rivalry in Tennessee between ships and railroads. He then went on to write two more novels, The Sound Wagon (1935) and These Bars of Flesh (1938), political satires that have some similarities with Birthright and which also draw on aspects of Stribling’s life, including his time teaching at Columbia in New York in the 1930s. While Stribling published no more novels, he resurrected Dr Poggioli in the 1940s and ’50s for a series of stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. These were written during the winters the Striblings spent in Florida, and were collected as The Best of Dr Poggioli (1975). He also wrote his autobiography, revising and extending it over the next twenty-five years; edited by Randy K. Cross and John T. McMillan, it was eventually published in 1982.
In 1959, Tom and Louella Stribling returned to Clifton, but his health began to decline and he died in a retirement home in 1965, shortly after moving back to Florence. While his novels have to an extent not dated well, T. S. Stribling did perhaps more than any other writer to highlight the fundamental immorality of racism and the toxic legacy of the Civil War.
One of a handful of uncollected Dr Poggioli stories, ‘Figures Don’t Die’ was published in Famous Detective Stories in February 1953.
PASSENGERS
Ethel Lina White
Just before the blow fell Edna felt unusually well and happy. Her holiday was over, her bill at the hotel was paid, and her suitcase lay on the station platform. For over an hour she had sat—the sun beating down on her uncovered head—feasting her eyes on the scenery.
Before her was a grass-green lake, sparkling with diamond reflections and backed with white spiked mountains.
She had just spent a glorious three weeks rambling the mountains in congenial Anglo-American society, and it seemed strangely civilized to be wearing a skirt and silk stockings again after shorts and nailed boots. The rest of the crowd had returned yesterday, but she had chosen to stay one day longer, alone.
She was sorry to be leaving, partly because she was not going home, but merely ‘back’. At these times she felt she paid a heavy price for her freedom as an attractive orphan of twenty-two with no relatives, clumps of friends, and a private income.
Suddenly the sun struck her. Owing to the altitude, the air was cool and bracing so that she had not realized the fierceness of its rays. She felt a violent pain at the back of her neck, followed by a rush of sick dizziness. As the white-capped mountains darkened and rocked she had a ghastly moment of panic.
