Darwin L. Teilhet

• Born: May 20, 1904
• Birthplace: Wyanette, Illinois
• Died: April 18, 1964
• Place of death: Palo Alto, California

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; espionage; thriller

Principal Series: St. Amand, 1931; Baron von Kaz, 1935-1940

Contribution

Darwin L. Teilhet used the classical, fair-play form of the detective story in ways that had rarely been successful with earlier authors. Like some later writers, he based his first books on current events and issues, and thereby produced The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), the greatest detective novel (and one of the most powerful novels in any genre) about the Nazi takeover of Germany. Unlike most mystery writers of the 1930’s, who were political and social conservatives, Teilhet throughout his life was a liberal, a fact that adds a special flavor to his books, especially those about Baron von Kaz. In these novels, he includes acute criticisms of overzealous patriotism in the United States as well as attacks on anti-Semitism. The baron, moreover, is probably the most convincing of all humorous detectives. His constant pride lands him in difficulties, but the reader sympathizes with him. The reader understands why he acts as he does, and his foibles are amusing because, though exaggerated, they are human.

Biography

Darwin LeOra Teilhet was born on May 20, 1904, in Wyanette, Illinois, of French Catholic stock. While a teenager, he visited the Correze section of France and worked as a juggler in a French circus. He also worked briefly on the Paris edition of The New York Herald Tribune. He was educated at Drake University, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Stanford University, where he met Hildegarde Tolman. They were married on October 28, 1927. His first two books, Murder in the Air and Death Flies High, had good reviews and good sales, but Teilhet was unsure of his path as a writer. He took a job with the N. W. Ayers Company as a copywriter, and for the next three years he concentrated on writing magazine articles and reviews. In 1934, however, he completed his best book, The Talking Sparrow Murders. The same year, James Poling of the Crime Club (Doubleday’s mystery imprint) asked Teilhet to write detective novels with a memorable protagonist. The result was Baron von Kaz. Around 1936, Teilhet became executive assistant to the president of Dole Pineapple in Hawaii; the second Baron von Kaz novel, The Feather Cloak Murders (1936), has a Hawaiian setting and lists as its authors Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet. Later Teilhet books might be attributed to either or both Teilhets, but with one or two exceptions they were collaborative efforts.

During World War II, Teilhet was an intelligence officer in Great Britain and the United States. Meanwhile, under his own name he wrote adventure stories, two of which were serialized by The Saturday Evening Post. Under Hildegarde’s name, the Teilhets wrote espionage thrillers. For a short while in the 1940’s, Teilhet taught a journalism course at Stanford and he was a consultant for various film producers. One of his nonmystery novels, My True Love (1945), was filmed by Universal in 1952 as No Room for the Groom. During the 1950’s, he concentrated on historical novels; The Mission of Jeffery Tolamy (1951) is a historical espionage story. Teilhet’s final book, completed shortly before his death in 1964, was The Big Runaround, a thriller based on industrial spying.

Analysis

When Darwin L. Teilhet’s first book, Murder in the Air, was published, The New York Herald Tribune recommended the book “for fans who like their news stories done into fiction.” The novel was based on the 1928 disappearance of the Belgian financier Alfred Lowenstein from a small airplane over the English Channel. Though eventually Lowenstein’s body was discovered in the channel, Teilhet developed a far more elaborate plot involving the impossible vanishing of a man from a locked plane in midair.

The Talking Sparrow Murders

This interest in current events as sources of fiction led to Teilhet’s most important novel, The Talking Sparrow Murders, published in 1934. At a time when most novelists, whether writers of mysteries or mainline fiction, looked on Adolf Hitler as merely a German nationalist bent on redressing the inequities of the Treaty of Versailles, Teilhet was almost alone in understanding the terror that the Nazis were creating. He had spent 1928 and 1929 in Heidelberg, and his impressions of what was happening have all the vividness of a young man’s views. What he felt was not only the terror of the times but also the sadness of the loss of a great past. Later, in explaining why he introduced controversial themes into his stories, Teilhet said that a writer must “have something deep in [himself] and . . . the need to express it. They say that applies to the important novels, to the big serious efforts and it may be true, too, I wouldn’t know. Perhaps it can apply to anything a man feels he has to write. . . .” Teilhet believed that he had to write about the rape of the Germany he loved, and he did it in a formal detective story.

The Talking Sparrow Murders, which takes place in Heidelberg, begins with an extraordinary mystery. How can a sparrow talk, and why is the man who reported the loquacious bird immediately murdered? Mystery follows mystery, not only of sudden death but also of the man who solemnly bows to a pine tree. Yet, unlike writers who used bizarre events primarily to create interest on the part of the reader, Teilhet writes of talking sparrows and other strange phenomena to introduce the theme of the story: that Heidelberg is a part of a world going mad. The Nazis are consolidating their power, and the left wing responds with equally irrational violence. How can rational detection, indeed how can humane people, exist in such a situation? Herr Polizeidirector Kresch attempts to unravel the mysteries, but one of the major suspects is the head of the local branch of the Nazi Party. Teilhet’s point is that people must remain human even if ultimately they cannot control what is happening. Teilhet did not look on fictional murder as merely providing an intellectual puzzle. Witness the opening to the chapter titled “The Live Cat and the Dead Jew,” which must be quoted in order to understand the depth of Teilhet’s anger:

It was a dead Jew, all right. . . . Most of the man’s body was a pulp of cloth and blood with a great gaping place where the cat had been at him after the Nazis finished. . . . They had thoughtfully burned the swastika sign on the Jew’s forehead before finishing with him and tossing him out in the Friedrichsallee as one of their amusing little signs of the cultural revival of Germany.

Except for the mark on the forehead and a bruise below the right eye, the Jew’s face had not been touched; it was strong and intelligent, with a sensitive nose and a firm mouth flicked up at the corner by a final frozen grimace of agony or, perhaps, the last physical indication of a refusal to be either humiliated or frightened by torture. . . . From somewhere in the distance a clock struck out mellowly and with a curiously haunting sadness, as if it were a relic of a long forgotten past, two hours in the morning.

Such passages were strong stuff in the detective novel of the 1930’s; indeed, they would be strong stuff in novels of any time—not merely because of the repressed brutality of the language but also because, by setting the Nazi murder against a Heidelberg symbolized by the bells of an ancient clock, Teilhet shows that Nazism and fascism are modern evils, evils of propaganda and technology and hatred directed by party and state.

It is remarkable that Teilhet uses such elements to develop the plot of a fair-play detective novel. The incident of the dead Jew foreshadows a later episode in which the narrator reads a newspaper that reports three other murders. Two of the victims are named Rosenkrantz and Jacobson: “You can tell by their names what happened to them. . . . Jews attacked by the righteous Nazis.” The third victim however, has the good German name Schmitz, and because he was killed near the site of the talking sparrow, his death proves to be connected with the mystery.

Teilhet’s narrative style in The Talking Sparrow Murders is unusual. Occasionally the colorfulness of his prose becomes what Bill Pronzini, in reference to a later Teilhet book, calls “overripe,” but generally it is vivid and precise. The narrative viewpoint is often unexpected. The book is told in the first person by William Tatson, an American engineer living in Germany. In one scene, Tatson contrasts the unreal gaiety of a nightclub with violence of the Nazi takeover—something that would be done later in the film Cabaret (1972). Tatson is attacked by Willi, a homosexual Brownshirt. Playing up to Willi’s sexual interest in him, Tatson lures him to an empty room and knocks him out. Instead of describing these events directly, Tatson suddenly tells the reader that he is back in the hall remembering what has happened. No mention is made of the precise occurrences. The result is a feeling of surrealism that contributes to the sense of irrationality of the events.

The Talking Sparrow Murders was a great popular success in 1934. Dorothy L. Sayers described it as having “a queerness and fancifulness which slightly suggest the work of another American mystery writer, John Dickson Carr.” Still, the very immediacy of the book meant that its vogue would not last, and it was only in the 1980’s, with the interest in the events leading to the Holocaust, that the book had its first paperback printing.

The Ticking Terror Murders

Teilhet’s next mystery novel, The Ticking Terror Murders (1935), features Baron Frank Maximilian Karagoz und von Kaz, one of the few successful humorous detectives in fiction. Creating a comic sleuth is not easy, for it is difficult to maintain the balance between the amusing eccentricities of the sleuth and the fundamental seriousness of the detection. Baron von Kaz is different because the reader comes to understand why he acts as he does. The baron is imperfect; he is frequently laughable; but he has the reader’s sympathy and, by the final book in the series, the reader’s respect and affection.

The baron is not one of the infallible detectives who dominated mystery fiction of the 1930’s. His pride in his ancient Habsburg ancestry contrasts with his impecunious situation. He has had to leave Austria after involvement in a failed monarchist coup, and now he has to make a living by his wits in what he considers the uncivilized United States. He tries to impress the unsophisticated Americans by quoting Latin tags, which he has memorized for the occasion. His pride constantly gets him into difficulties, and it is only his imagination—which he distrusts—that helps him solve crimes.

The Feather Cloak Murders

It took Teilhet a while to develop the baron’s character. In the first book of the series, the baron is too bumbling to be acceptable as someone who can actually solve crimes. The second book, The Feather Cloak Murders, which Teilhet wrote in collaboration with his wife, Hildegarde, is much more successful. The setting, Hawaii in the 1930’s, is carefully realized, and the baron is a much more sympathetic character. His love affair with Caryl Miquet makes the reader sympathize with him, and though he still has the foibles and foolish pride of the earlier book, he has become a character with unsuspected depths. For example, when young Billy McKay is badly injured by the murderer, the baron does not try to preserve clues or interview the boy. Instead, he tenderly carries him to the house while soothing him with an old German prayer. Unfortunately, the solution to the mystery is not entirely satisfying. It depends on a suspect’s acting in an unconvincing way and on some tiny points of evidence that even the most attentive reader will miss.

The Crimson Hair Murders

The next novel about the baron, The Crimson Hair Murders (1936), does not further develop the baron’s character, though judged purely as a fair-play detective novel, it is an extraordinary performance. It is full of traps for experienced readers of detective fiction, as Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet carefully lead them to identify, wrongly, a least likely person as the culprit. The book begins on a ship off the coast of Mexico and ends with a chase across the newly constructed Golden Gate Bridge, two unexpected plot twists, and the baron’s fingering the murderer from a hospital bed.

The Broken Face Murders

For a book that in many ways summarizes Teilhet’s contributions to the detective novel, the final Baron von Kaz novel, The Broken Face Murders (1940), should be examined. The story harks back to the theme of The Talking Sparrow Murders. The baron has been in Vienna but was too late to prevent the Nazi takeover of his country or the execution of his friend Solomon Gruenstein, who has been killed “for no other reasons than that his nose was hooked and he worshiped as his ancestors had in the Jewish faith.” When the baron returns to America to marry Caryl Miquet, he finds that the town where he plans to spend his honeymoon is dominated by an occult society called the Atlanticians, which is a front for an American anti-Semitic movement. This organization of “real Americans” does not “have much hankering for foreigners. Mostly they’re against Jews and Communists.” The sheriff warns the baron that “it’d break my heart . . . if some of those fellers got the idea you were a subversive influence or had a lot of Jewish blood in you. You were over there fighting for some of those Jews, I hear.” Once again, Teilhet has stretched the usual limits of the fair-play detective novel to include controversial ideas.

Teilhet sugarcoats his message by keeping the comedy in the foreground. Many of the scenes are hilarious, especially when the baron’s plans for his wedding night are continually interrupted. Yet, although he is still amusing, the baron has grown as a character. In contrast to the earlier personality, who depends on his self-protecting pride, the baron is no longer sure of himself. To his utter mortification, one of the suspects calls him “Baron von Kazy-Wazy,” and a character named Bunny comes to understand the baron better than he does himself. Baron Franz Maximilian Karagoz und von Kaz is, Bunny realizes, “a Harlequin of jests and moods and mercurial changes. . . . This brave baron, this man of steel and sawdust, generous yet cruel, with some wisdom, and overmuch fanfarades, was born out of his time.” Thus Bunny and the reader gain “a better comprehension of this man . . . touched more with sympathy and affection than amusement.”

Teilhet wrote many books from 1940 until his death in 1964, including romances, spy thrillers, historical novels, and sardonic studies of modern life, and he received all the attention of a successful writer—paperback reprints, book-club editions, film adaptations, and serials in popular magazines. But his major contributions to the detective and mystery story had been made during the 1930’s. In Baron von Kaz, he created the only humorous detective whose character has depth and complexity, and he used the fair-play, formal detective novel as a vehicle to protest against what the fascists—both in Germany and in America—were bringing to the world. No other mystery writer had the combination of storytelling ability and political sensitivity to do as well.

Principal Series Characters:

• George Talmont Maria St. Amand of the Sûreté, the detective in Teilhet’s first book, Murder in the Air (1931), is demoniacal in intelligence and appearance. He is tall and has a yellow, cadaverous face with drooping eyelids and a fierce mustache, like cat’s whiskers. In Death Flies High (1931), St. Amand’s given names are changed to Jean Henri, but otherwise he remains the same Satanic investigator.
• Baron Franz Maximilian Karagoz und von Kaz , Teilhet’s second series detective, once headed the Vienna police department, but because of a failed attempt to restore the Austrian monarchy, he has come to America to make a living as a detective. He is proud of his Habsburg von Kaz heritage and denies the influence of the Gypsy imagination contributed by his Karagoz ancestors. His only weapon is a green umbrella that has a sword concealed in its handle and that is weighted so that the baron can throw it like a club.
• Caryl Miquet , a member of a wealthy family in Hawaii, is a major suspect in the first Baron von Kaz book. The remaining books in the series chronicle the baron’s courtship of and eventual marriage to Caryl.

Bibliography

Greene, Douglas G. “The Demoniacal St. Amand and the Brave Baron von Kaz.” The Armchair Detective 15 (Summer, 1982): 219-233. Profiles Teilhet’s two most memorable sleuths, comparing them to each other as well as to other famous fictional detectives.

Greene, Douglas G. Introduction to Teilhet’s The Talking Sparrow Murders. New York: International Polygonics, 1985. Introduction to a reprint edition of Teilhet’s mystery set in Nazi Germany discusses its relationship to history and topical fiction, as well as to the mystery and detective genre.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Very useful overview of the history and parameters of the crime-fiction genre; helps place Teilhet’s work within that genre.

Teilhet, Darwin L. “How Some Adventure Stories Are and Are Not Written.” The Writer 57 (June, 1944): 167-169. Brief piece by Teilhet that provides insight into his writing process and his thoughts about the craft of fiction.