# Has anyone read the Isabel Briggs Myers' novel, 'Murder Yet To Come'?



## eppy (Jul 28, 2014)

I've ordered a copy for myself, I was just wondering if anyone else had read it? 

(I'm already very curious about it, but please: No spoilers! Thank you!)

:happy:


----------



## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

No, but I've heard about it. She wrote two detective stories, in fact, both of which were well received. _Murder Yet to Come_ won a detective story competition, beating Ellery Queen's _Roman Hat Mystery_.

If you're interested, I can dig out the (British) _Observer_ review for the second book. I should have it somewhere.


----------



## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

@_eppy_:

I've just bought _Murder Yet to Come_, and the second book, _Give Me Death__. _I'll critique these when they arrive.

Reviews of the two books:
Pretty Sinister Books: FFB: Murder Yet To Come - Isabel Briggs Myers
The Passing Tramp: Greenacres is the Place to Flee: Give Me Death (1934), by Isabel Briggs Myers

But favorably comparing them to S.S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen... :shocked::happy:


----------



## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

@_eppy_, @_EmpireConquered_:

I’ve read _Murder Yet to Come_ (1929), and finished _Give Me Death_ (1934) this morning. The best that can be said about them is that they are profoundly average; the worst is that it’s fairly obvious why at least one of the books hasn’t been reprinted in eighty years.

Brief summary: _Murder Yet to Come_ is about a millionaire murdered in his locked library; the crime looks like accident, but the amateur detective Jerningham proves that it was murder. _Give Me Death_ is about a banker shot in his study; the death looks like suicide, but the victim’s son wants Jerningham to prove that it was murder.

*Detection
*
As mystery thrillers, they’re acceptable: melodramatic, with a tendency to purple prose, but fast moving. As detective stories, they’re weak. _Murder _famously won Stokes (publishers) and _McClure’s Magazine_’s $7500 Detective-Mystery Novel Contest—or, rather, it didn’t. The competition was originally won by Ellery Queen’s _Roman Hat Mystery_; _McClure’s _was sold, and became _Smart Set; _and the new owners awarded the prize to Briggs Myers. Queen’s book is clearly the better of the two. 

Briggs Myers is old fashioned; the elements of her story (the Wrath of Kali jewel, Indian priest who has followed the stolen jewel, hypnotism, morphine) hark back to Wilkie Collins’s _Moonstone _(1868), and her melodramatic storytelling, air of genteel horror, need to protect the heroine (rather than discover the truth), and detectival technique come from turn of the century writers like A.K. Green and Carolyn Wells. Queen is modern and innovative; his model is S.S. Van Dine (the great American detective writer of the 1920s), who reconceptualized the detective story as both ‘a kind of intellectual game [and] a sporting event’, played between the writer and the reader. Van Dine’s formula—an emphasis on mystery and fair play; a genius detective whose workings are not shared with the reader until the end, but who (unlike Sherlock Holmes) reaches them on clues provided to the reader; a closed circle of suspects, with suspicion moving rapidly from one character to another; an emphasis on character clues, with physical clues used to support conclusions—is the modern, ‘puzzle plot’ detective story, which would be brought to fruition in the 1930s by Queen, Agatha Christie (after 1934), and John Dickson Carr. Queen expands upon Van Dine’s technique, with both the introduction of the formal Challenge to the Reader, and the greater emphasis on reason. Conversely, Briggs Myers’s books in many ways do not function as fair play detective stories. There is little sense of the detective story as a game; there is no elaborate problem or puzzle plot; _Murder_ has only four suspects (so the murderer is easy to spot), while in _Death_ 
* *




from halfway on, it’s evident that the deaths are suicides; this turns out not to be the case, but there is little attempt to treat the people in the case as suspects, and build cases against them, considering their motive, opportunity, movements and evidence


. They also lack the close reasoning of Queen or Carr; EQ’s chains of deductive reasoning in particular are some of the most impressive demonstrations of pure _thinking_ in the genre. In fact, Briggs Myers’s stories come close to being anti-detective stories. In most detective stories, the detective is interested in the truth; once the truth is known, even if only to him, then a decision can be made on what to do with that information. Here, the investigators don’t see the deaths as a problem to be solved; they are less concerned with finding the truth than with protecting people; and tamper with evidence (e.g. destroy ashes) in an attempt not only to keep the truth from coming out, but to keep themselves from learning the truth. This is arguably because the orthodox detective story is predominantly an NT genre, whereas Briggs Myers was an INFP.

*Psychology
*
Surprisingly, there is not much interest in psychology. Although _Murder_ is often thought of as using typological ideas, they are rudimentary. The three main characters are identifiable as what would become an xNTP (Jerningham), ISFJ (Mac) and ISTJ (Nilsson):

* *





[Jerningham to Mac] ‘We’ve got to give ’em every last, least detail, or they won’t believe us. And that’s your specialty. You have a most extraordinary faculty for remembering the irrelevant and the trivial, as I may perhaps have mentioned before…’
‘Yes! You’ve mentioned it every time in the last three years that I’ve had to remind you of a fitting at your tailor’s or a luncheon engagement that you didn’t want to keep!’
‘Quite so! I’ve always regarded a memory for details as a frightful waste of gray matter. But I here and now apologize. Your memory saved the day for us at Cairnstone House. And it’s going to save the day for me now.’
‘Thanks,’ I said dryly. ‘But you’ve got a memory yourself, you know.’
‘Not a photographic one like yours, with every detail of the background neatly filed for reference. I only remember the most important figures, silhouetted against whatever I was thinking at the time. When I try to put in details, half of ’em are pure invention.’
I laughed in spite of myself.
‘I must admit,’ I said, ‘that your recollection of anything is always better than the truth.’ (13)

Jerningham is six feet one, with the lean and lazy grace that comes from beautiful muscular coördination, and the keen gray eyes and mobile face that suit his eager spirit and eternally questing mind. Nilsson is one of the Vikings, a superbly built blond giant, broad in the shoulders and lean in the waist, blue-eyed and square of chin, slow of movement except in emergencies, slow of speech except in wrath, slow of thought as compared with Jerningham, but moving steadily forward from one solid conclusion to another—and impossible to halt unless by the force of logic better than his own. Nilsson admires tremendously, without admitting it, Jerningham’s quickness of insight that is forever running rings around his own plodding mental processes. Jerningham pays reluctant tribute to the smashingly effective action which follows inevitably on Nilsson’s solid, slow decisions. (16)

‘It stands to reason,’ [Nilsson] argued, ‘that it’s better sport to solve a real murder on the front page, than to sit over a typewriter and invent stuff that never gets beyond the theatre section no matter how exciting you make it.’
Jerningham chuckled.
‘Nilsson,’ [Jerningham] chuckled, ‘you don’t know how much satisfaction a man can get from working things out in his brain—provided, of course, he has one.’
‘Meaning,’ boomed Nilsson, ‘that the police don’t have any? Well, sometimes we don’t use what we’ve got. And sometimes we do, and it doesn’t show in the results. But we’re dealing with facts in our business. When we get stuck we can’t just step back into the first act and change things around to suit our convenience. It’s no job at all for _you_ to work things out!’ (17)




Psychology plays only a small part in the detection; Mac's Si is used to to remember the placement of the arrows (Ch. XII), and Freud, Jung and Adler are referred to in a discussion of hypnotism (Ch. XIV). This is in contrast to the psychological approach of Van Dine (to whom Briggs Myers refers in passing in Ch. VIII). Philo Vance, Van Dine’s Nietzschean sleuth, solves crimes by understanding how people think; he maintains, as he explains in _The Benson Murder Case_, that the dominant clue is the mind of the murderer:‘The truth can be learned only by an analysis of the psychological factors of a crime and an application of them to the individual. The only real clues are psychological, not material.’ (_The Benson Murder Case_, 1926)​Van Dine was influenced by Freud and Jung, and his novels are depictions of archetypal psychological maladies that afflict individuals and modern society alike. Psychological dysfunction—the superiority complex in _Benson_, sexual guilt and repression of the murderer in _The ‘Canary’ Murder Case_ (1927), solipsism in _The Bishop Murder Case_ (1929)—are recurring motifs. The family in _The Greene Murder Case _(1928), an in-bred and psychologically warped clan under the dominion of their hysterical, crippled mother, is rightly compared to the Julio-Claudians; the work is a study in moral degeneration and corruption. Similarly, psychology is integral to the works of Gladys Mitchell and Helen McCloy, both of whose detectives were psychologists, and whose works involved Freud (Mitchell) and Jung and cognitive psychology (McCloy).

*Themes
*
_Give Me Death_ has not been reprinted for eighty years, for good reasons, and the book is, to a modern reader, problematic. 
* *




The motive in _Death_ and Queen’s _Roman Hat Mystery_ is the same: to conceal the murderer's mixed race ("***** blood"). However, how the two books handle this is different. 

In _Death_, ‘a strain of ***** blood’ (how much, and how far back?) suddenly stops someone from being white and turns them into a *****: an object of horror and self-disgust, who can’t marry ‘across the line’, and can’t associate with whites on an equal level. Having a mixed-race grandparent is considered sufficient reason for an ‘honourable’ suicide. (That’s a reason for suicide? Is everyone in this book fuck-witted?) However, all ends happily. It turns out that the admirable family (or what’s left of it, two of them having been murdered, and the other having shot himself when he thought that he had a touch of the tarbrush) don’t have ***** blood; it was really the murderer, whose shameful race was a bar to marrying the wealthy white girl—who then hands him a pistol, and tells him to use it. 

Now, let’s be fair; I don’t know enough about Briggs Myers’s views. It would be possible to make the case that Briggs Myers is sending up racist views. The completely OTT histrionic responses border on the camp (it takes _less than a page _for Stephen to find out that he supposedly has black blood before shooting himself). But this assumes a subtlety and a sense of irony that I’m not sure she had.


* *





‘That letter was the end. Of everything. Everything that had belonged to the Stephen Darneil who was—white. And Cicely…’ (222)

‘You’re being logical,’ [Grant] told me, bitterly. ‘There’s no logic in this. It’s an instinctive, physical thing. A shrinking of the flesh.—[Cicely] loved Stephen. When she knows, the bare memory of having loved him will shame her forever in her own eyes.’ (222–23)

‘Even you who were his friends—you think it’s better for him to be dead than—married to Cicely.’
‘Not that,’ Jerningham said painfully. ‘But—it’s an impossible thing.’
‘That’s your feeling,’ Grant said. ‘I won’t argue it with you, because argument can’t touch it. it’s a taboo you submit to, unquestioning. Stephen did. Andrea will. That’s why…’
He drew a long breath.
‘That’s why I beg you to be content with Stephen’s death—and promise me that Andrea shall not be told.’
There was a little silence.
‘Andrea has a right to be told,’ said Jerningham.
‘Andrea has her life before her,’ Grant said. ‘ Unless you wipe it out—for the sake of something that happened a hundred years ago.’
‘I wonder,’ Jerningham said. ‘I wonder just what she has before her.’
He considered Grant with a grave scrutiny.
‘Because even if she doesn’t know—you do.’
‘I can forget,’ Grant said steadily.
Jerningham shook his head.
‘It’s not something one forgets. It goes too deep. I think you know how deep it goes. You told us—quite clearly—when you spoke of Cicely.’
‘I wasn’t speaking for myself,’ Grant said.
Jerningham was silent.
‘Cicely is from the South,’ Grant said. ‘I’m not.’
‘Neither are we,’ said Jerningham.
He stopped there. Grant went on.
‘Neither are you,’ he repeated slowly. ‘But all the same, you can’t stand up against it.’
The evenness of his speech was somehow worse than accusation.
‘You read a few words on a sheet of paper. And all your friendship, all your concern for her happiness, goes into the discard…’ (223–24)

‘I think of only one thing,’ [Grant] said. ‘That I love Andrea Darneil.’
A strange look crossed her face.
‘There was a girl yesterday—named Andrea Darneil.’
Her hands moved faintly.
‘She’s dead.’
The proud dark head turned from us, in sudden unbearable humility.
‘She could look people in the eyes without flinching. I can’t. I never can again.’ (227)

‘I sat with Cicely, till Dr. Yerkes gave her something to make her sleep. She clung to me. Asking over and over if it was her fault. Do you know what I was thinking?’
He shook his head.
‘Not how to comfort her, but only—that if she knew, she’d never touch my hands again.’
Before she realized, Grant prisoned her slender fingers in his own, and carried them to his lips.
With a little gasp, she wrenched them free.
‘I think that’s worse,’ she said, unsteadily.
*Grant went quite white.* _[Grant's the murderer.]_
‘My loving you—is worse?’
‘If you call it that!’
The gray eyes blazed with a smoky fire.
‘Can’t you see?’ she demanded. ‘Can’t you see what it means—now—when you talk of…’
With a supreme effort she bit back the thing she would have said.
‘Grant—let me go.’
‘Andrea,’ he said, ‘will you do me the honor—to marry me?’
The blaze died in her eyes. The last stain of color died in her lips.
‘Marriage—is for—equals,’ she said.
Her voice was merciless.
‘It wouldn’t be marriage,’ she said. ‘It would be only—that you stooped to me for your pleasure, as…’
For a bare moment she hesitated.
‘…as your race has stooped to—mine.’ (228)




In Queen’s novel, the murderer kills a blackmailer in order to marry a wealthy white girl. Whereas _Death_ is seen very much from the perspective of the white family and their circle, and the attitude is ‘My great-grandfather was black? What a ghastly thing; I’ll blow my brains out at once!’, _Roman Hat _is seen from the perspective of Ellery and his father. There is little reason why they should sympathise with the snooty old money family; the two cousins who wrote the Ellery Queen series were Jewish, not Gentile. Francis M. Nevins (_Royal Bloodline_, 1974) describes their attitude here as ‘detached, intellectualized, unprejudiced but not outraged or even upset by the racism of the society, stoically accepting as unalterable (in Richard’s words to Ellery) that ‘there’s little justice and certainly no mercy in this world’’ (20–21). Frankie Y. Bailey (_Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime & Detective Fiction_, 1991) suggests that the Queens were sympathetic to the murderer, and gives a couple of examples of a liberal sensibility ridiculing racism in the early books. Moreover, Queen’s later books (post-Period I) are anti-racist; notably _Cat of Many Tails_ and _The Glass Village_ 
* *




(c.f. Ellery Queen - by Michael E. Grost)


. In fact, the American detective story (as opposed to the hard-boiled genre) has a strong liberal sensibility, because it is a rational genre. 
* *




Examples include Rex Stout (notably _Too Many Cooks _and _The Right to Die_), Helen McCloy, and Anthony Boucher. C.f. Visitors From Science Fiction - by Michael E. Grost.


----------



## EmpireConquered (Feb 14, 2012)

Lol, you've succeeded in making me lose complete interest in reading her books. But it will save a lot of time. lol. I can read more Mitchell and Carr this way.


----------

