Charlotte Armstrong

• Born: May 2, 1905
• Birthplace: Vulcan, Michigan
• Died: July 18, 1969
• Place of death: Glendale, California

Types of Plot: Thriller; psychological; amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: MacDougal Duff, 1942-1945

Contribution

The majority of Charlotte Armstrong’s suspense works detail the perilous voyage of an innocent person who, often by chance, is drawn into an underground world of intrigue and terror. Her stories revolve around whether something will be found or found out before a time limit is reached. Interest is centered on whether something will be done in time rather than on how a problem will be solved. In an innovative manner, she generally traces the progress of both the heroes and the villains as they work to obtain the same goal. Thematically, her fiction brings up a debate between a hard-boiled postwar cynicism and a sentimental idealism; it chronicles the mental distress of a major character who has to forge his own philosophy based on a synthesis of these two attitudes. Her prose also represents a synthesis of these strands, and though generally terse and tense, it is relieved with touches of humor.

Armstrong blends elements from Cornell Woolrich, in the way she reveals a violent underside to the everyday world, and Shirley Jackson, in the way she carefully constructs a dark atmosphere and in her expert character portraiture. Her strong female characters prefigure the independent female characters who were to emerge more fully later in the century, and her frequent use of occult themes anticipated the penchant for the supernatural in popular fiction that was to emerge in the 1970’s.

Biography

Charlotte Armstrong was born on May 2, 1905, in Vulcan, Michigan, to Frank Hall Armstrong and Clara Pascoe Armstrong. Her mother was Cornish. Her father was of Yankee stock, an engineer at an iron mine. In her autobiographical novel The Trouble in Thor (1953), the character based on her father, the engineer Henry Duncane, is a kind of amateur detective. In exploring a problem in the mine, Duncane

never seemed to fumble. If he did not at once perceive the source of trouble and its remedy, he at once began to look for it. And Duncane’s groping was so full of purpose; he hunted for cause with such order and clarity, that he was totally reassuring.

Armstrong attended high school in her hometown and went on to the University of Wisconsin, completing her bachelor of arts degree at Barnard College in 1925. She became a career woman in New York City. Her first job was selling classified advertisements over the telephone at The New York Times. She also worked as a fashion reporter and a secretary in an accounting firm. On January 21, 1928, she married Jack Lewi, an advertising man.

Armstrong retired to private life and eventually to the rearing of three children, managing to write in her spare moments. She began with poems and then moved to plays. Her tragedy, The Happiest Days (pr. 1939), and her comedy, Ring Around Elizabeth (pr. 1941), were both produced on Broadway. Neither did well at the box office, but while the second was in rehearsal, she sold her first mystery, Lay on, Mac Duff! (1942).

This and her next two novels were of the amateur investigator type and were moderately well received, but she seemed to find her métier with The Unsuspected (1946), which was a work of suspense. This work was filmed in 1947, and she relocated to Hollywood with her family from New Rochelle, New York, to supervise the screenplay.

The family remained in California, living in Glendale, and Armstrong continued writing. Her novel Mischief (1950) was adapted for film as Don’t Bother to Knock (1952). In 1957, she received the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for her novel A Dram of Poison (1956). Armstrong died after an illness on July 18, 1969, at Memorial Hospital in Glendale, California.

Analysis

Marilyn Monroe brutally strikes her uncle from behind with an ashtray. A dead look is in her eyes. This is one nightmarish scene from the film Don’t Bother to Knock. Charlotte Armstrong’s works were particularly suitable for film treatment because of her tight plotting, her skill at cutting back and forth between the actions of different characters as the work builds toward a climax, and her use of visually striking images. Furthermore, her themes were those that were found in film noir of the 1940’s and 1950’s. She often described how an innocent character was drawn into a web of intrigue and murder, or she described the machinations of a manipulative, controlling, and murdering father figure.

To illustrate how easily an average person could be led astray, Armstrong often opened with some trivial event that became the first in a series of events that led inexorably into a troubling underworld. Even in her early, amateur detective works—Lay on, Mac Duff!, The Case of the Weird Sisters (1943), and The Innocent Flower (1945)—she had the sleuth, MacDougal Duff, become accidentally involved in the crime he would have to solve. Yet these novels, which make up the MacDougal Duff series, were not characteristic of her mature work, in which she focused on how an average person had to call up his own resources to escape or solve a crime.

The Witch’s House

Typical of these works in which the opening emphasized the way an average citizen can be caught in an undertow is The Witch’s House (1963). Professor O’Shea is leaving his office and notices a colleague slipping something into his pocket. It looks like a stolen microscope part. Unable to question or even stop the observed professor in a mob of passing students, O’Shea ends up chasing him in his automobile. The chase leads him into a plot involving blackmail, incest, and murder.

A Dram of Poison

Another, even more original strategy Armstrong used to ground a suspense plot might be called the nonopening. A Dram of Poison uses this technique. The novel describes the bachelor life of Professor Gibson, chronicles his courtship and marriage to Rosemary James, and finally tells of his disillusionment with his wife. More than half of the novel has passed before the suspense plot proper—in which a disguised bottle of poison is mislaid—begins. All the materials and human predispositions that will lead to a harrowing tale of suspense are rooted in a simple, undramatic tale of a May-December romance.

Armstrong noted that she was not interested in puzzling her readers with a mystery, but in creating suspense. She distinguished between the genres by bringing up the hackneyed scene of a heroine tied to the railroad tracks. According to Armstrong, “If we were to come upon the scene after the train has been by, we will be involved in a whodunit.” If the work is suspense, the girl has not yet been run over: “It has not happened yet. We, as readers, don’t want to see it happen. We fear that it may.”

In The Witch’s House, for example, O’Shea is badly hurt and taken in and concealed by a senile old woman. All the necessary clues are plain to the reader, but the question remains: Will he be located by the people who are searching for him before he dies of his wounds? It is the pressure of time, then, that turns the screws of suspense. Armstrong pointed out that an “ordeal is converted to suspense with the addition of a time limit.”

The Dream Walker

Not only did Armstrong give her heroes a small and rapidly dwindling amount of time to achieve their object, but she gave equal time to the villains as well. In keeping with her ideas about the transparency of suspense, Armstrong did not hide the villains’ attempts to carry out their plots; she made them an integral part of the story line. In The Dream Walker (1955), for example, much of the suspense and fascination of the tale arise from watching how the mastermind of a plot to discredit an elder statesman works to cover his own tracks and tries to outguess both those battling him and his own henchmen. It is not only the observation of the heroes’ reactions, but also the back-and-forth reactions of each side in a deadly game that create an engrossing text.

In Armstrong’s novels, tremendous stress is placed on the Everyman who is put in a desperate situation. Not only is the protagonist faced with a crime, but also he or she is often forced to look at the world in a new way. The result is a synthesis of realism and idealism, with those starting too far in either direction learning to be either more caring or less sentimentally dependent.

Mischief

Jed Towers in Mischief begins as a cynic. He is introduced while in the act of breaking up with his girlfriend because she wanted to show charity to a panhandler. By the end of the novel, he has grown enough to return to the hotel room where he had left an innocent child with an unbalanced babysitter, telling himself, “Mind your own business. Take care of yourself, because you can be damn sure nobody else will.” Knowing his involvement may hurt his career, he nevertheless discards his unconcerned worldview and acts like a man.

The Unsuspected

In The Unsuspected, Mathilda Frazier must make a change in the opposite direction. Her overly trusting, blind dependence on her guardian has to be abandoned, and she must face the evil in the world. In an ending in which Armstrong matches psychological change to symbolic image, Mathilda rejects her mentor by diving into a pit of garbage to rescue someone whom the mentor has trapped there. (This ending is in opposition to that of Mischief, where Jed must run upstairs to save the menaced child.)

Characterization

Armstrong’s concern with characters who grow is clear. She has said, “The most fascinating characters are those who change under the pressure of happenings.” Her fiction centers on such characters and involves finely shaded character drawings. Her picture of Professor Gibson in A Dram of Poison is a masterly example. With consummate delicacy, she details Gibson’s gradual disillusionment with his wife and himself, spurred by the acerbic comments of his sister.

Armstrong is equally adept at portraying women. She often developed heroines who were strong, outspoken, and forthright. Anabel O’Shea, who appears in The Witch’s House, is a model of this type. When her husband disappears, she assesses the lackadaisical, or at least bored, attitude of the police, who view the missing person as a straying husband, and determines that she must find him on her own. She proves herself wily, resourceful, and persevering in the search; dogged in following leads; and undaunted by the interfering do-gooders or villains who appear in her path. Anabel O’Shea is an example of the independent female character whom Armstrong was already developing in the 1940’s (in The Unsuspected’s Aunt Jane, for example). She created a pattern for the type of self-assured woman that would play a large part in popular literature of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

It might be added that one of Anabel O’Shea’s most charming characteristics is her ability to see some humor in her situation, and it is one of Armstrong’s trademarks to inject comedy into even her most unsettling works. In The Witch’s House, comic relief is provided by the characters of Parsons and Vee Adams. Both humorously romanticize and misinterpret the disappearances. Parsons, the university gossip, ascribes the whole situation to a Russian plot, while Vee, the daughter of one of the missing men, depicts herself as a tragic heroine, dreaming of graveyards and headstones. These characters’ comic misapprehensions introduce a strain of comedy into the generally distressing story.

This novel also brings up another major Armstrong theme, that of the fallen or partially fallen father figure. Vee Adams’s father, in this novel, though a respected academic, has been secretly corrupted and betrayed by his young wife. More characteristically, Armstrong’s plots involve a paternal character who has fallen one degree and may fall further.

The Gift Shop

In The Gift Shop (1967), the father’s earlier peccadillo may bring down his son, a state governor. The father, Paul Fairchild, had a brief liaison that produced a daughter who is now to be kidnapped to force the father’s eldest son, the governor, to pardon the murderer, Kurtz. Further extending the thematic richness of this story, Armstrong has Kurtz’s daughter be the one trying to kidnap Fairchild’s little girl, so that the plot breaks down into a battle between a daughter and a son—Fairchild’s youngest son tries to find and protect the missing girl—to preserve their fathers’ tarnished reputations.

It might be said that many of Armstrong’s concerns and stylistic decisions emerge from the chastened worldview that arose in the United States during and after World War II. The involvement of the United States in this war ended a period of isolation and, more important, involved the common people in the armed forces and on the home front in a common struggle. It was a war that called on everyone. These historical conditions must have played a part in Armstrong’s deep interest in how an ordinary person reacts when plunged into unusual and trying situations. Furthermore, the returning veterans brought back with them a serious, realistic, unsentimental attitude toward the world and world politics. Such an attitude is visible in Armstrong’s disdain for corny emotionalism and her unflinchingly honest appraisal of authority figures. Her works lack the squeamishness associated with many earlier female writers and employ sparing but open, dispassionate descriptions of physical violence and torture.

Paradoxically, it is also these attitudes that shape Armstrong’s outlook on the occult. Armstrong constantly uses supernatural components in her writings, thus becoming one of the first to use in suspense works an element that would become prominent in American popular writing in the 1970’s; still, as may be guessed, she brings in this element only to debunk it. The Dream Walker, for example, concerns the small-time actress Cora Steffani, who begins to achieve notoriety by her supernatural excursions. She falls asleep for a few minutes and awakens to recall vividly a meeting with a famous person in another part of the country. It is learned that at exactly the same time in that other part of the country Cora, or a woman closely resembling her, has met the famous person under the same circumstances of which Cora has dreamed. Clearly, there are actually two women, and they are involved in an ingenious, subterranean subterfuge, but all the trappings of a supernatural story are present.

Realism

Finally, it should be pointed out that Armstrong’s style embodies the same stance of detached but caring realism that her best characters are led to adopt. Chiefly concerned with human psychology, she spends little space on the description of setting or milieu but concentrates on conversation, action, and character portrayal. She is always precise and concise, writing simple, unadorned sentences that prove perfect at conveying her no-nonsense point of view. Take this thumbnail sketch from The Dream Walker, which describes how a rich, idle young man has been led into bad company:

So there he was. Shut out. With the income, to be sure, but understanding nothing about its sources. Raymond’s education, I can guess, was the most superficial gloss. He seemed to have nothing to do but spend money he never made.

He got to spending his money in a strange place.

In this passage Armstrong conveys a complex mixture of psychological and social circumstances in the humblest language and caps and condenses the whole downward progress of Raymond with her final, evocative, but still simple sentence. Each word is chosen with thoughtfulness and with the construction of the entire text in mind.

Lemon in the Basket

Although she seldom departed from this reserved style, at climactic points in her story she could use simple but effective strategies to convey the excitement of the moment. In Lemon in the Basket (1967), the heroine is running up the stairs to save the little Arabian prince just as the assassin is about to enter his room. Armstrong builds to the moment of truth with a series of disconnected clauses:

As Inga went into the boy’s bathroom to fetch him a glass of water . . .

As the door to that east guest room, that had been standing on a slant, began to swing inward, opening . . .

As the boy sat absolutely still, staring into the eyes of the sudden man . . .

By the lightning-like juxtaposition of several simultaneous scenes, she is able to create a harrowing moment without departing from her use of simple, undramatic description.

After all, it is a world of suspense and terror, the one of which Charlotte Armstrong wrote and in which she lived during the long aftermath of World War II. Not only was she brilliant at creating stories that registered some of the angst of this situation but also, in the philosophies her major characters developed, she offered a coherent way of facing this unfriendly world.

Principal Series Character:

• MacDougal Duff is a retired history teacher who has become an amateur detective. He is Scottish, unmarried, and middle-aged, with the reputation of “being able to see through a stone wall,” although his main instrument for finding solutions is common sense.

Bibliography

Cromie, Alice. Preface to The Charlotte Armstrong Reader. New York: Coward-McCann, 1970. Overview of Armstrong’s most important and distinctive work.

Dellacava, Frances A. Sleuths in Skirts: Analysis and Bibliography of Serialized Female Sleuths. New York: Routledge, 2002. Good for contextualizing Armstrong’s gothic mysteries. Bibliographic references and index.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains an essay on Armstrong detailing her life and works.

Knight, Stephen Thomas. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Broad overview of the important trends and developments in two centuries of detective fiction. Places Armstrong in her greater historical context.

The New Yorker. Review of The Case of the Weird Sisters. 18 (January 30, 1943): 64. Brief but useful review of one of Armstrong’s most famous works, the second in her MacDougal Duff series.