Edgar Box (Gore Vidal)

• Born: October 3, 1925
• Birthplace: West Point, New York
• Died: July 31, 2012
• Place of death: Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, CA

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: Peter Cutler Sargeant II, 1952-1954

Contribution

Gore Vidal is a historical and social novelist. His three detective novels, Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death Before Bedtime (1953), and Death Likes It Hot (1954), published under the pseudonym Edgar Box, were written early in his career and are not considered to be among his best work. Nevertheless, all three detective novels demonstrate his skill at social criticism and solid command of the murder mystery genre. Although not exactly a classic example of the hard-boiled detective, Peter Cutler Sargeant II is an objective, shrewd observer of humanity. Like other rationalistic detectives, he pays close attention not only to material evidence but also to human motivations. He likes to proceed by a process of elimination, examining the most obvious suspects before realizing that the case is far more complex than he had initially imagined. As is so often true in murder mysteries, Sargeant has a mind that is much more supple than that of the police officers and other fatuous characters who try to outwit him in his cases.

Biography

Gore Vidal (Edgar Box) was born Eugene Luther Vidal to Eugene Vidal and Nina Gore Vidal on October 3, 1925, at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Washington, D.C.—the setting of much of Vidal’s fiction—and lived with his maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma. Vidal’s parents were divorced when he was ten. His mother married Hugh D. Auchincloss, and Vidal lived at the Auchincloss estate in Virginia while attending St. Alban’s School in Washington.

By the time Vidal was graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1940, he had toured England and the United States and renamed himself Gore Vidal. He joined the army in 1943, studied engineering at the Virginia Military Institute for one term, and was appointed to the rank of maritime warrant officer on October 24, 1944. Williwaw, his novel about his war experiences, was published in 1946.

After the war, Vidal traveled widely in Europe, Central America, and the United States, making his living writing and lecturing. After completing his modestly successful detective series in 1954 as Edgar Box, he abandoned that name and became a highly successful television writer for two years, authoring such scripts as Barn Burning (televised August 17, 1954) and The Turn of the Screw (televised February 13, 1955). By 1956, he was also writing film scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His stage play, Visit to a Small Planet: A Comedy Akin to a Vaudeville, published in 1956, ran for 338 performances on Broadway in 1957. Even more successful was his play The Best Man: A Play About Politics, which ran for 520 performances in 1960.

A political commentator, drama critic for The Reporter, candidate for Congress (in 1960) and for the Senate (in 1982), Vidal has been a prolific writer and a provocative public personality. His best-known and most highly acclaimed novels are Julian (1964), Myra Breckinridge (1968), Burr (1973), and Lincoln (1984). He has achieved even greater reputation as an essayist. His principal collection of nonfictional prose is Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays, 1952-1972 (1972).

Analysis

Gore Vidal has admitted that he did not set out to write mystery novels to make a new contribution to the genre. He was a professional writer in need of an income. Just as he later turned to television and film writing for money, so detective novels represented an opportunity for him to support himself. Because he is an accomplished writer, however, Vidal’s three mystery novels as Edgar Box are not negligible achievements. They are distinguished by a strong sense of plot and a complicated array of interesting suspects. When he knows the milieu of his characters particularly well—as in the Long Island setting of Death Likes It Hot—he achieves a fascinating blend of social criticism and detection.

There are certain aspects of Vidal’s detective, Peter Cutler Sargeant II, that must be tolerated if his investigations are to be appreciated. Sargeant is a well-built male with a considerable appetite for young women. Although his romances figure significantly in all three novels, they are treated in a somewhat perfunctory fashion—as though Vidal feels obligated to give Sargeant a love interest but cannot summon much enthusiasm for the task. By modern standards, Sargeant would be considered something of a sexist—although his male chauvinism is not much different from the superior attitude he takes toward most human beings, who seem to him fatuous, manipulative, and sometimes downright silly. To a certain extent, he simply shares the characteristics of many fictional detectives, whose line of work encourages suspicion of motivations and professions of sincerity.

In none of the three novels is Sargeant hired as a detective. On the contrary, he is engaged by the head of a ballet company, a politician running for president, and an ambitious society matron to handle their public relations. It is only after a murder is committed that his curiosity is aroused. Usually, his employer enlists his aid in getting out of a jam occasioned by a murder and all the bad publicity such a crime entails. Even then, Sargeant reluctantly seeks out the murderer only after his own life is endangered. This would seem to be an effective novelistic stratagem because it enables Sargeant to remain objective (he has not been looking for work as a detective) but involved (he may be the next victim). The problem is that Vidal uses the same stratagem in each novel, so that as a series, his novels fail to sustain themselves; they seem too gimmicky. It is too much to suppose that a public relations man would become involved in so many murder cases.

Like many fictional detectives, Sargeant often discovers the identity of the murderer before he has evidence to present to the police. It is the chain of circumstances that he analyzes, the relationships he has had with the suspects, the stories they have told him, and some word or occurrence that suddenly provides the spark for his intuitive solution to a case. This reading of human nature, of clues that do not really exist except in the mind of the intellectually superior detective, distinguishes Sargeant from the plodding, unimaginative police detectives who are his adversaries.

Vidal is successful in creating empathy for Sargeant by having his detective freely admit his ignorance. Sargeant makes many mistakes. Often he takes leaps in the dark, asserting that he has information when he has none at all. A considerable amount of bluff goes into Sargeant’s interrogation of suspects. What finally makes him successful, however, is his willingness to wrestle with his own lack of evidence.

Death in the Fifth Position

A typical example of Sargeant’s self-questioning can be found in Death in the Fifth Position. A ballerina has fallen to her death during a performance. Someone has cut the cord that suspended her high above the stage. At first, her drug addict husband is suspected. Then he dies in his apartment—perhaps as a suicide but possibly as a victim of the real murderer. Sargeant has to recalculate a list of suspects. He sits worriedly at his employer’s desk for “several minutes.” Then “idly, with a pencil stub,” he writes the names of everyone in the company who could have committed the crime. He puts the name of his girlfriend, Jane, a dancer in the company who has received better roles since the death of the ballerina, at the bottom of the list and draws a box around it, as if to protect her. On the next page he writes “Why?” and “How?” Then he answers a series of questions about motive with what he knows about each of the suspects. He is able to cross his girlfriend off the list because she was not next in line to succeed the dead ballerina. The only lingering doubt about her is whether she might have had some other private motive—there has been talk that the dead ballerina was in love with Jane.

Thus, Sargeant moves slowly, almost excluding suspects but never entirely ruling anyone out, so that the mystery deepens. Eventually, the possible murderers are eliminated and Sargeant fastens onto the most probable guilty party. He ultimately solves his case by creating a situation in which he knows enough to trap the criminal into a confession or into behavior that reveals his or her guilt. In Death in the Fifth Position, his working out of the solution on paper is like the blocking out of a play; that is, Sargeant is a superb director of his actors, but he cannot completely envision the perpetrator of the murder until he gets the characters to move in certain directions.

Death in the Fifth Position is actually the weakest of the three novels, for Vidal’s command of the milieu of a dance company seems weak. It is not unusual to stock a detective novel with stereotypical characters, but Death in the Fifth Position seems particularly unimaginative in this respect. The Russian ballerina, Eglanova, for example, speaks in exactly the kind of bad Russian accent found in Hollywood B films, and Louis, the aggressively gay dancer who pursues Sargeant, is such a caricature that his behavior is not so much humorous as it is tiresome.

Death Before Bedtime

Vidal is on sounder ground with Death Before Bedtime, which is set in the political atmosphere of Washington, D.C. This is familiar territory for a novelist who creates interesting, devious characters: a political wife who might be hardened and cynical enough to have murdered her unfaithful husband, a senator aspiring to the presidency; the senator’s promiscuous daughter, whose careless love life is somehow connected to his death; the senator’s devious assistant, who is intimately tied to shady business dealings that may have led him to murder his boss; and a prominent businessman from the senator’s home state who is rumored to have faced ruin when he failed to get the politician’s support for an important government contract. The intricate cast of suspects and colorful personalities makes Death Before Bedtime a stimulating novel of mystery, intrigue, romance, and politics.

Death Likes It Hot

Even better and by far the most amusing novel in the series is Death Likes It Hot, set during a summer on Long Island at the mansion of an ambitious society matron, Mrs. Veering, who has hired Sargeant to manage publicity for a huge party she has planned for the fall. Here Sargeant’s personality and his feel for society are wonderfully congruent. Although he is in the business of inflating people’s reputations, Sargeant loves to poke holes in their pretensions, as in his description of the Ladyrock Yacht Club on Easthampton:

Members of the Club are well-to-do (but not wealthy), socially accepted (but not quite “prominent”), of good middle-class American stock (proud of their ancient lineage that goes back usually to some eighteenth century farmer).

It is almost possible to imagine Sargeant making these parenthetical remarks out of the side of his mouth. Vidal’s economical style—putting in a few sentences what this society thinks of itself, the words it uses for itself, and how little there is to justify its claims—is at its best in this novel.

One of the finest characters in the Sargeant series is Brexton, a well-known but enigmatic artist suspected of arranging his wealthy wife’s drowning. His behavior is not at all predictable, and his character is not summarized in the clichés that mar Vidal’s other mysteries. Perhaps this is the reason that Sargeant finds him such a sympathetic character. Brexton is shrewd and knows even better than Sargeant that people should not be taken at their word. A sample of the dialogue between these two characters—at a point when Mrs. Veering (also a suspect) has had what purports to be a heart attack—reveals the shrewd, understated interplay between detective and suspect. Notice how Brexton answers Sargeant’s questions by saying as little as possible:

“Has Mrs. Veering had heart attacks before? Like this?”

“Yes. This is the third one I know of. She just turns blue and they give her some medicine; then she’s perfectly all right in a matter of minutes.”

“Minutes? But she seemed really knocked out. The doctor said she’ll have to stay in bed a day or two.”

Brexton smiled. “Greaves said the doctor said she’d have to stay in bed.”

This sank in, bit by bit. “Then she . . . well, she’s all right now?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised.”

The reason dialogue like this is especially effective is that it shows Sargeant learning his job, taking his cues from a very sophisticated but guarded informant. Brexton will not make Sargeant’s job easy for him, but he is perfectly willing to prevent him from being misled.

Death Likes It Hot was about as far as Vidal could take his Sargeant series. With this last novel, he was able to rectify some of the series’ faults by putting his detective in an environment that could be much more carefully described and was more functional in terms of a mystery story plot. In other words, as Sargeant becomes knowledgeable about this particular society, he is better able to detect the murderer. This is not really the case in the other two novels. Almost nothing significant is learned about the ballet world in Death in the Fifth Position, and the world of politics figures importantly only in the first part of Death Before Bedtime, which really turns on the demented personality of one of the characters. It is difficult to see how Vidal could have continued the series without making it ridiculous. How could Sargeant have continued to become involved in murder cases without becoming a professional detective? If Vidal had turned him into a professional detective, Sargeant’s distinctive qualities—his aloofness from matters of crime until his personal safety is at stake, his reluctance to solve a murder case until circumstances force him to act—would have been destroyed. Death Likes It Hot fulfills the modest strengths of the Sargeant series; Vidal was wise not to continue writing in the mystery genre after this triumph.

Principal Series Character:

• Peter Cutler Sargeant II , a public relations agent and amateur sleuth. A young Harvard graduate with a background in journalism, he is a tough, unsentimental professional who gets involved in solving murder cases only when his curiosity is piqued and his own safety is at stake.

Bibliography

Altman, Dennis. Gore Vidal’s America. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005. Comprehensive look at every aspect of Vidal’s life that includes a chapter on his career as a writer, including the works written as Edgar Box. Bibliographic references and indexes.

Baker, Susan, and Curtis S. Gibson. Gore Vidal: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. A helpful book of criticism and interpretation of Vidal’s work. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Dick, Bernard F. The Apostate Angel: A Critical Study of Gore Vidal. New York: Random House, 1974. An entertaining and perceptive study, based on interviews with Vidal and on use of his papers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Dick focuses on Vidal’s work rather than on his biography. The book contains footnotes and a bibliography.

Harris, Stephen. The Fiction of Gore Vidal and E. L. Doctorow: Writing the Historical Self. New York: P. Lang, 2002. Discusses Vidal’s strong identification with history as reflected in his writing.

Joshi, S. T. Gore Vidal: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007. A comprehensive volume containing annotations of nearly every piece of writing by and about Vidal. Includes analysis of his fiction and summaries of the articles and essays he has written.

Kaplan, Fred. Gore Vidal: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1999. A comprehensive biography of the novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, essayist, and political activist who helped shape American letters during the second half of the twentieth century.

Kiernan, Robert F. Gore Vidal. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982. This study of Vidal’s major writings tries to assess his place in American literature and gives astute descriptions of the Vidalian style and manner. The book, which uses Vidal’s manuscript collection, contains a brief note and bibliography section.

Parini, Jay, ed. Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Vidal’s distaste for much of the academic study of modern fiction has been mirrored in a lack of academic study of his work. Jay Parini sought to redress the balance by compiling this work, which deals with both Vidal’s fiction and nonfiction.

Stanton, Robert J., and Gore Vidal, eds. Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal. Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1980. A compilation of interviews excerpted and arranged along themes. Vidal comments on his and other authors’ works, on sexuality, and on politics. Vidal edited the manuscript and made corrections, with changes noted in the text.

Vidal, Gore. Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Covers the years 1964 to 2006, detailing Vidal’s experiences and his reflections on writing (his own and others’), as well as culture generally.