Patrick Quentin

• Born: March 19, 1912
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: July 27, 1987
• Place of death: Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; police procedural

Principal Series: Peter Duluth, 1936-1954; Lieutenant Timothy Trant, 1937-1959

Contribution

The authors who used the pseudonyms Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick, and Jonathan Stagge moved the fair-play, challenge-to-the-reader tradition away from the chess-problem story. In many of their novels, the focal character is not a detective solving the crime for intellectual or professional satisfaction but rather someone caught in the mesh of circumstance who must discover the guilty party to save himself or someone he loves. In some of the stories, especially those of the middle and later 1930’s, the challenge is to discover not only who committed the crime but also who will eventually solve it. Few other authors dared to try a “least-likely detective” gambit.

Biography

Unfortunately, little is known of the life of one of the authors who contributed to the books published under the pseudonym Patrick Quentin. The main figure in the early books of the collaboration was Richard Wilson Webb, who had been born in England in 1901. He later moved to the United States and became an executive in a pharmaceutical company. In 1931, with Martha Mott Kelley, he wrote a mystery novel titled Cottage Sinister. They choose the nom de plume Q. Patrick because, Webb explained, Q is “the most intriguing letter of the alphabet” and “Patrick” combined their nicknames, “Patsy” and “Rickie.” After the next book, Kelley left the collaboration, and Webb used the Q. Patrick name himself for Murder at Cambridge. Webb then found a new collaborator in Mary Louise Aswell. Aswell worked with Webb on two succeeding Q. Patrick detective novels.

In 1936, Webb found a third coauthor in Hugh Callingham Wheeler. Born in London in 1912, Wheeler had been educated at Clayesmere in Dorset, and in 1932 he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of London. Together, Webb and Wheeler produced a detective novel with a public-school background, Death Goes to School (1936). Although continuing to write as Q. Patrick, they began to write books under two additional pseudonyms, Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge.

Around 1952, Webb retired from the collaboration because of ill health, and Wheeler retained the Patrick Quentin name. In 1961, he began a new career as a dramatist. After 1965, when his final mystery novel was published, he concentrated solely on his stage work, often in association with Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince, and with his Tony-winning scripts for such musical successes as A Little Night Music (pr. 1973), Candide (pr. 1973), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (pr., pb. 1979), he became one of the most successful figures in the American theater. He died on July 27, 1987, at the age of seventy-five.

Analysis

The first five Q. Patrick novels, written by Richard Webb either alone or with Martha Mott Kelley or Mary Louise Aswell, are typical Golden Age mysteries of the 1930’s, with intricate plots and fair-play clueing. Nevertheless, some of the Q. Patrick books—most notably, the first Webb-Wheeler collaboration, Death Goes to School—feature a gimmick that had been rarely used by earlier writers. Not only do the books unmask the least likely suspect, but also they frequently are constructed around trying to identify the least likely detective. In the usual detective novel, the reader knows quite early which character is the detective, whether amateur or professional. In a Q. Patrick story of this period, and in some of the early Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge tales as well, the sleuth can turn out to be almost anybody. At times, the reader is fooled when the person who seems to be investigating the crime is identified at the end of the story as the guilty person; occasionally, the chief suspect turns out to be the detective. Indeed, because Webb and his coauthors so frequently hid the genuine roles of their characters, readers familiar with these works almost automatically distrust anyone who seems to be a detective or is helping the narrator unravel the mystery.

A Puzzle for Fools

With the publication of A Puzzle for Fools in 1936 under the new pseudonym of Patrick Quentin, Webb and Wheeler began their most important and popular series of detective novels. Eventually, the series protagonist, theatrical producer Peter Duluth, would be featured in nine novels and one short story, and two of the novels would be adapted as feature-length films. The first Duluth book is notable for its imaginative setting, an asylum for wealthy patients suffering from relatively minor mental disorders. When murder occurs, however, it seems obvious that one of the patients has a problem that is not so minor. Peter Duluth, who has lost his wife in a fire, is in the sanatorium recovering from alcoholism. Questions of what is real and what is imagined, of who is sane and who is mad, make this novel a memorable opening for the Duluth series.

For both A Puzzle for Fools and its notable successor, Puzzle for Players, published two years later, Quentin borrowed a technique from the hard-boiled private-eye writers: The story is told in breezy, colloquial prose by the narrator-detective, and the events are sordid. Unlike such detectives as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, however, Duluth cannot remain a detached investigator. In almost all the Duluth novels, Peter has to stay one step ahead of the police to save himself or someone he loves. Clear examples of Quentin’s approach to the mystery novel can be found in Puzzle for Players.

Puzzle for Players

Puzzle for Players is a carefully constructed murder mystery aimed at fooling both neophyte mystery fans and jaded readers who believe that they can always identify the murderer. Quentin provides clues (involving brothers and plastic surgery) that allow expert mystery fans to identify, wrongly, an unlikely suspect as the killer. The real murderer is an even less likely suspect. Duluth, who narrates the story, looks on the murders not as crimes to be solved but as threats to his happiness. After the events in A Puzzle for Fools, Duluth has begun to revive his career by producing a new play, Troubled Waters. He is in love with Iris Pattison, one of the characters in the earlier book, who is beginning her career as an actress in Duluth’s play. His psychoanalyst, Dr. Lenz, has forbidden him to wed her until he has proved for six months that he has regained his emotional stability. Thus, when a series of strange events occur at the Dagonet Theater, they threaten Duluth’s comeback as well as his marriage plans.

The Dagonet is a decrepit, rat-filled theater, watched over by an ancient caretaker whose wife hanged herself in a dressing room there almost forty years earlier. One of the actors in Duluth’s play claims to see a ghost, and another actor dies of a heart attack after announcing that the same ghost walked out of a mirror toward him. Though Duluth suspects foul play, he refuses to call in the police because he does not want the opening of the play to be delayed. The cast is dominated by emotional crosscurrents. The playwright is being blackmailed by his own uncle. An aging character actress is in love with the leading man, an Austrian refugee, but he does not notice her. To make matters worse, the leading lady hates the Austrian. Meanwhile, the leading lady’s former husband, whom she has divorced because he abused her, blackmails Duluth into allowing him to join the cast by threatening to tell the police about the strange events at the Dagonet.

Even when one of the actors is murdered inside a coffin that is an important prop in the play, Duluth’s sole concern is to make the play a success. He tortures himself by making a list of “REASONS WHY TROUBLED WATERS CAN’T CONCEIVABLY SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.” When the police arrive on the scene, he does his best to convince Inspector Clarke that the murder is merely an accidental death. The cast generally supports Duluth; one of the characters complains that the play is not getting a “very even break. . . . How about the policeman, Clarke? I didn’t trust him. He’s too bright. He suspects something, doesn’t he?” Two-thirds of the way through the book, the production is near collapse, and Duluth laments, “I’m not directing a Broadway production. I’m directing the Sino-Japanese war.” Finally, he succumbs to the temptation he has been fighting through most of the novel: He goes out and gets drunk. He is dragged back to the show just in time for the denouement. Iris, meanwhile, has taken advantage of his condition to trick him into a marriage ceremony, and his psychoanalyst, Dr. Lenz, kindly assures him that one drunken episode is acceptable. Even at the conclusion, Duluth is more interested in the success of Troubled Waters than in the mundane problem of whodunit. Indeed, he has to be reminded that it makes a difference “which member of your company is going to be arrested.”

The plot elements given above are typical of the Peter Duluth series. Quentin usually tries to create an unusual or self-contained world, such as that of the theater, as the milieu for the murder. Whatever the setting, Peter Duluth is normally faced with threats to his happiness. Almost never does he have the same goals as the police, and often he is engaged in outright obstruction of justice. Occasionally, the reader may sympathize with the official police: “Of course I see your point,” Inspector Clarke says to Duluth in exasperation. “You’re scared we’ll close the show if we find out too much. Even so, are you sure you’re being smart? You’d look pretty funny if you had a third accidental death around here, wouldn’t you?”

Puzzle for Puppets and Puzzle for Wantons

The contrast between the manner of telling and the grimness of the events, which plays a part in Puzzle for Players, is even more obvious in Duluth’s next adventures, Puzzle for Puppets (1944) and Puzzle for Wantons (1945). Reviewers praised the novels for their wacky comedy and witty dialogue, yet the stories themselves involve such unamusing matters as serial murder. The relationship between Peter and Iris Duluth was clearly influenced by the Mr. and Mrs. North novels by Richard Lockridge and Frances Lockridge, although Iris is not a scatterbrain like Pamela North (Gracie Allen played Mrs. North in a 1941 motion picture). In these books and all the later Quentin novels, there is a strong undercurrent of sexual tension, not only between Peter and Iris but also among many of the other characters. It is this tension that, despite Quentin’s wisecracking style, gives the books their drive.

Puzzle for Fiends

In the succeeding Quentin books, Duluth is faced with crises in his relationships with Iris and other women. In Puzzle for Fiends (1946), he suffers from amnesia and is attracted to one of the female characters—but in spite of his mental state, he is still able to tell the story in the first person. In Puzzle for Pilgrims (1947) and Run to Death (1948)—the latter probably the best of the later novels in the series with its combination of hunter-and-hunted with fair-play clueing—the Duluths try to deal with their collapsing marriage.

Black Widow and My Son, the Murderer

Quentin let Duluth catch his breath for four years before having him face another crisis in Black Widow (1952); in that novel, Peter becomes the chief suspect when the body of a pregnant woman is found in his apartment. Fortunately, Lieutenant Timothy Trant, who has solved cases in earlier books published under the pseudonym Q. Patrick, helps Duluth extricate himself from the situation. In the final novel of the series, My Son, the Murderer (1954), written by Wheeler alone, the protagonist is Peter’s brother, Jake, who faces a crisis typical of the Duluth family: He tries to prove that, in spite of all appearances, his son is innocent of murder. To do so, he must outwit Lieutenant Trant.

This outline of the Duluth novels makes the series sound like a soap opera, and when the books are read in quick succession, it does seem difficult to believe that one family could have been faced with so many disasters connected with so many murders. This may be the reason that Wheeler’s later books, also published under the Quentin pseudonym, do not have a series character as the protagonist, although three of the novels enlist Lieutenant Trant to help solve the mystery. Nevertheless, all these books continue the Duluth tradition in which the main character struggles to free himself from a web of circumstances. Sometimes, as in The Man with Two Wives (1955), the hero—if he can be called that—helps to create the situation by his own actions. At other times, in an almost Hardyesque way, the gods of chance seem to have decided capriciously to lay traps for the main characters.

Principal Series Characters:

• Peter Duluth is a theatrical producer who solves crimes to straighten out his own life. In the first book of the series, he is in an asylum because of alcoholism brought on by the death of his first wife. He meets his future wife at the asylum and investigates a murder there.
• Lieutenant Timothy Trant , on two occasions involved in cases with Duluth, is an elegantly dressed police detective. The son of a physicist, he was graduated from Princeton University and became a lawyer. He abandoned that profession to become a detective because “murderers, while fascinating at any stage of their careers, were particularly fascinating while they were still at large.”

Bibliography

Endrebe, Maurice. “Patrick Quentin.” Enigmatika 19 (June, 1981): 47-49. Brief profile of the pseudonymous collective author and “his” works.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Comprehensive overview of the development of crime fiction in the twentieth century helps place the nature and importance of Quentin’s contributions.

Shibuk, Charles. Review of Puzzle for Fiends. The Armchair Detective 13 (Winter, 1980): 75. Review of a Peter Duluth book in which the main character has amnesia. This look back at an earlier work allows for an examination of its staying power.

Shibuk, Charles. Review of Puzzle for Pilgrims. The Armchair Detective 13 (Spring, 1980): 135. A review of a Peter Duluth series book in which the Duluths struggle in their marriage. Shibuk assesses the work’s ability to withstand the “test of time” and its enjoyability for later audiences.