It
took my sister, Susan, to remind me that although my mystery-thriller, The McHenry Inheritance, carries an
inscription that it is written “In the spirit of Dornford Yates,” I have yet to
write about him. Susan wanted to know who he was, so here goes.
The
literary critic Cyril Connolly once wrote, “Sometimes, at great garden parties,
literary luncheons, or in the quiet of an exclusive gunroom, a laugh rings out.
The sad, formal faces for a moment relax and a smaller group is formed within
the larger. They are the admirers of Dornford Yates, who have found out each
other. We are badly organized, we know little about ourselves and next to
nothing about our hero, but we appreciate fine writing when we come across it,
and a wit that is ageless, united to a courtesy that is extinct.”
Dornford
Yates was the pen name of Cecil William Mercer (1885-1960), a British lawyer,
who took it from the birth surnames of his two grandmothers. In his twenties
and thirties he wrote a series of high-society romance-comedies that were well
received. After two decades of that, his writing took an abrupt turn.
Taking a Nap in the Wrong Place
In
1927 he wrote his first thriller, Blind
Corner. It begins with young Richard Chandos, headed back to England after
a stay in Biarritz, pulling off the road for lunch, taking a nap, and waking up
to witness a murder. The dying man asks Chandos to take his Alsatian dog, and
in the dog’s collar is the secret to a treasure concealed near an Austrian
castle.
Chandos,
along with his friends George Hanbury and Jonah Mansel, decide to follow the
lead from the dog collar. In doing so, after considerable running about in the
Austrian countryside, they encounter the murderer of the dog’s owner and a
vicious gang, led by a man with an unusual name, intent on claiming the
treasure for itself. As the book’s dust jacket says, “What started out as a
high-spirited jaunt (turns) into a desperate battle for survival.”
I
dedicated my book to the spirit of Yates because it features a well-heeled
young man on a holiday who stumbles across a murder, encounters a menacing
gang, led by a man with an unusual name, and does a considerable amount of
running around in the High Sierra countryside. I wouldn’t push the similarity
any farther than that, other than to say that there is a literary tradition
within the mystery/suspense genre on which my book draws.
She Fell Among Thieves
My
discovery of Yates occurred at a bookstore in London in March 1990. At the time
he was out of print in America, but Perennial Books subsequently reissued a few
of his titles here. His thrillers, as well as some of his comedy-romances are
available on Amazon and Kindle.
If
you’re inclined to give him a try, my recommendation would be to start with She Fell Among Thieves. It has his best
villain, a diabolical woman named Vanity Fair, a great story, and lush
descriptions of the French Pyrenees (where Yates lived for a number of years)
that will make you want to whip out your iPhone and book a flight.
A
word of caution if you go that route (reading Yates, not traveling to the
Pyrenees): His politics are a bit, how shall we say this, reactionary, and some
of the social attitudes are cringingly out of date. Those things are a small
part of his books and, in my view, a small price to pay for the good stories
and good writing they deliver.
