Kathleen Moore Knight

• Born: c. 1890
• Birthplace: United States
• Died: 1984
• Place of death: United States

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: Elisha Macomber, 1935-1959; Margot Blair, 1940-1944

Contribution

Kathleen Moore Knight is of primary interest for her sixteen novels featuring Elisha Macomber. These stories combine two popular genres: the Golden Age novel of detection and the romantic crime novel. Knight’s puzzles are solved both by Macomber’s deductions and by unveiling the murderer to the narrator or other main characters. Combining detection with family and love plots, the novels—especially the fourteen Macomber novels, which are set in New England—are notable for their skillful evocation of place. All Knight’s novels feature clear and interesting plots in well-visualized settings. Her style is straightforward, not dated by use of perishable vocabulary, and her books cannot be said to reflect the style or approach of any one specific writer.

Biography

Kathleen Moore Knight was born in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Her home was on Martha’s Vineyard, the island that, with Cape Cod, furnished settings for her Elisha Macomber series. During her writing career, she showed considerable interest in the local color of this area, as she did in other areas of the world, most notably Panama and Mexico. Her published writings consist solely of crime novels, many of which appeared through the Detective Book Club, and all of which were widely reviewed, especially in The New York Times, whose reviewers praised her work. She died in 1984.

Analysis

The crime novels of Kathleen Moore Knight, who published works in no other genre, display individual characteristics while still exemplifying the influence of the Golden Age fiction of S. S. Van Dine and the romantic suspense fiction of Mary Roberts Rinehart. Knight uses regionalism not only for local color or embellishment but also for clues, making place essential to her fiction. Because she stresses clues—the crime puzzle—in all thirty-eight novels, they may be classed under that Golden Age term, “novel of detection.” She refers frequently to Van Dine’s character Philo Vance, even coining a verb for detection, “philovancing,” in Death Blew Out the Match (1935; the title refers, as do many of her titles, to a clue repeatedly analyzed in the story). The Rinehart influence on her basic plot, present to a greater or lesser extent in every book, is revealed in plot elements characteristic of what Ogden Nash called the Had-I-But-Known school.

As novels of detection, Knight’s books have three patterns, depending on the nature of the main detective (nearly all of her characters are involved in solving mysteries). In his series, Elisha Macomber, like other great detectives of the puzzle mystery, is involved only as an investigator. (Like many other main detectives, he is unattached to a family, although a wife, Hattie, is mentioned in Death Blew Out the Match; she never appears in the stories, and she is dead by Knight’s second book, The Clue of the Poor Man’s Shilling, 1936.) Macomber is never in real danger, although he is shot at for a warning in The Tainted Token (1938) and he uses himself as bait for the murderer in Acts of Black Night (1938). This absence of personal risk is necessary for the calm and stability of his role.

Margot Blair, Knight’s other series character, performs very differently, narrating her stories and dominating the action, causing events to occur. She threatens criminals and so is often in danger herself; she and her assistant from her public relations agency are sometimes injured. For example, Blair is shot in Rendezvous with the Past (1940).

Knight began using a third pattern during the World War II years: nonseries books with the usual basic family plot but with no one detective dominant. In these books, the lead character, who is always female and sometimes narrates, does much of the detecting; police work is usually involved as well.

In series and nonseries tales alike, the reader cannot predict whether the case will be resolved through the Van Dine method of analyzing clues or through the Rinehart method of events conspiring to expose the criminal; Knight draws from both patterns to end her stories, with the criminal dead, or trying to kill someone else, or trapped just as the detective or the police officer arrives and explains the mystery.

The Clue of the Poor Man’s Shilling and The Trouble at Turkey Hill

Knight’s pattern shows clearly in two of her best Macomber novels, The Clue of the Poor Man’s Shilling and The Trouble at Turkey Hill (1946). Both narratives are in the first person, a voice Knight always handles well. Luella Paige, narrator of The Clue of the Poor Man’s Shilling, is a fifty-four-year-old former schoolteacher who retired early, and Marcy Tracy of The Trouble at Turkey Hill is a retired teacher from the Penberthy School, currently the town librarian. She is also middle-aged. Both women are carefully kept out of the plots as suspects, and neither has any family. They are commentators, distanced from the action. Sympathetic, they enjoy helping others through detection. Because they are mature and uninvolved, they are often called on for help by others in the story, especially Elisha Macomber.

Typical of all Knight mysteries, both novels have young lovers of varying degrees of virtue. In The Clue of the Poor Man’s Shilling, Laura May Howland and Evan Rider are the “true lovers,” while the alcoholic seducer Julian Hollister, with whom Laura May is temporarily infatuated, represents the false. Hollister’s wife, of whom the reader learns after Hollister’s murder, and her lover are neutral, although as city dwellers they are naturally suspect in the determinedly rural Penberthy series. Relationships are more numerous and complex in The Trouble at Turkey Hill, as the lovers include both victims and murderer. One triangle of an unhappily married couple and a Portuguese girl includes two victims; another comprises a pair of childhood sweethearts and a local rich man. Candy Pierce is the “true lover,” but her love is the murderer, and the rich man who saves her at the end has some slight instability, which disqualifies a male for marriage to a true lover. Although a few other Knight books end without imminent wedding bells, The Trouble at Turkey Hill is unique among Knight stories: It ends by extolling single women. Knight finds variations in every story though she always follows the same kind of plot.

The setting for the Macomber series is Penberthy, a fictional island near Boston. Maps are provided in some of the earlier novels, but Penberthy is not precisely Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard. It is rural, old New England, a sparsely populated prototype, a setting that one might like to imagine once existed, completely Yankee and still upholding—despite the presence of mistrusted “off-islanders”—the old Puritan virtues.

The island supplies not only mood and color to the series but also motivation and clues. The boat trip along the coast taken by Luella Paige and the bicycle ride of Marcy Tracy, for example, both lead to informative (if ridiculous) happenings, events that are rooted in New England geography. In The Bass Derby Murder (1949), the murderer is betrayed by his misuse of the dialect in forging an islander’s letter. Throughout the series, localisms play an essential role: weather, plants, birds (they can discover corpses), tides, fields, dunes, hills, sea cliffs, even recipes.

In both The Clue of the Poor Man’s Shilling and The Trouble at Turkey Hill, Elisha Macomber is the character who (through detection and reason) solves the murder puzzle. Typical for Knight’s books, both novels end with a ratiocinative explanation by Macomber after the confession and death of the murderers. Persh is thrown off balance and falls to his death as he tries to kill the virtuous and beautiful Candy; George Howland, long-suffering father and husband, kills himself while tolling the bell to help others. Just after each death—Candy having been saved by her insufficient lover, Mrs. Howland having been saved at sea by the detective himself—Macomber enters, knowing all, and gives an explanation (his summaries may run as long as ten pages). Both novels show another common element of Knight’s stories: murderers who are basically decent people driven by intolerable suffering. Persh, for example, is a returning World War II veteran who lost a wife and child abroad; George Howland has had to endure much, for his son’s death ruined his wife’s health and spirit. As in some of Knight’s other stories, notably The Bass Derby Murder, suspicion is diverted from them because of their goodness, especially given the unpleasant nature of other characters. It is true that a few novels resort to minor characters, least likely suspects, as murderers: The early Macomber tale The Wheel That Turned (1936) and the late, nonseries Panic in Paradise (as Alan Amos; 1951) have minor characters as murderers so that the families are left scandal-free. Occasionally Knight can startle by showing an important member of the family guilty: At the end of Death Goes to a Reunion (1952), the grandmother is taken to jail for multiple murder.

Knight’s Plots

Knight’s books were praised by contemporary reviewers, especially Anthony Boucher in The New York Times, for the ability to hook readers with inventive plots, detection, and settings, although a few other critics found the stories wildly implausible with poorly drawn characters. Both views are reasonable. There are no great amateur detectives out in the actual world solving mysterious crimes. Elisha Macomber and Margot Blair, like most heroes in the mystery genre, cannot be said to be believable.

With the conventions of the genre, Knight’s tales are clear even when most implausible. The author uses point of view well, especially in her first-person narrations by a female (she seldom attempts male narrators). Her third-person narrations are successful when they remain centered on one character, such as Susan Brooks in one of Knight’s wildest plots, Invitation to Vengeance (1960), which works because of its calm, fair narration. When Knight switches consciousnesses, the results are often unsuccessful. The Wheel That Turned presents unfair glimpses into the murderer’s mind (a criticism often leveled against Christie); there is also the unnecessary, confusing movement from one mind to another in Panic in Paradise, where the shifts are arbitrary, and in Dying Echo (1949), where various consciousnesses are awkwardly invaded to keep important information from the reader. In the latter two novels, confused point of view leads to uncertain motivations and unclear relationships.

The process of detection is well developed in Knight’s novels. An early reviewer pointed out that having so many characters sleuthing and finding reasons to suspect one another augments the puzzle. Even the murderer frequently gets into the spirit of detection, one example being Felix in Terror by Twilight (1942), who pretends to help Margot Blair. The police are usually not helpful; the best officers show their intelligence by leaving the amateurs alone. Buck Edwards, police chief of Penberthy, follows Elisha Macomber’s orders, although Edwards is somewhat touchy about this situation by the last work of the series, Beauty Is a Beast (1959). The good sense of the captain of the Massachusetts State Police in Three of Diamonds (1953) is shown by his agreeing to stay away from the island so that Macomber can solve the crime, and both Sheriff Ben Crandall, the almost Macomber-like detective of The Silent Partner (1950), and the dignified Inspector Mena of Dying Echo assert control of their cases while letting the amateurs do the legwork. Like Macomber, Ben Crandall appears at the end, having solved the case with his knowledge of the locality, just as the murderer openly appears to the narrator.

Elisha Macomber

Elisha Macomber is the great detective of Knight’s fiction. Appearing in all of her pre-World War II stories, he was dropped for several years, during which Knight wrote Margot Blair and nonseries tales, then was picked up again after the war. With his quaint rural dialect—though he is a graduate of Harvard University—he is a center of stability, giving the final explanations, quieting characters’ fears, and arranging lovers’ affairs (the two Panama novels, The Tainted Token and Death Came Dancing, 1940, display him at his best as matchmaker). He begins the series as a weatherbeaten and middle-aged fisherman and chairman of the Board of Selectmen of Penberthy. In the 1946 Trouble at Turkey Hill he is sixty-five, while in the 1938 Acts of Black Night he is sixty; his age for the series could then run from fifty-four to eighty-one, which seems about right. Such calculations, however, are probably silly in fiction: Hercule Poirot, retired from the police before World War I, was still detecting in the 1970’s. The point is that Macomber is not a geriatric detective, for his role is avuncular, not grandfatherly. In the final novel of the series he suffers a concussion and broken rib in a car wreck, yet he breaks out of the hospital after one day to solve a murder and save a foolish heroine’s life. His age makes believable his wisdom, depth of local knowledge, exceptional stability, balance, and humor.

Although the dialect and setting of the Macomber novels are somewhat reminiscent of those in Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s Asey Mayo novels, Knight’s stories otherwise bear little resemblance to Taylor’s farcical tales. Elisha is stable, not hyperactive, and he represents the old order, not the new (Asey Mayo, on the other hand, is a car designer and builder of World War II tanks). The mood, structure, and characterization of the Knight and Taylor stories are dissimilar. Elisha Macomber has just as much resemblance to other Golden Age detectives: Like Philo Vance and Uncle Abner, Macomber has strength beneath his act, and like Vance, Macomber arranges endings to suit himself, as in Akin to Murder (1953), in which he orchestrates Sylvia’s suicide. After the 1930’s, as Philo Vance’s fame dwindled, Knight began to have her characters refer to Macomber as a Sherlock Holmes, although the similarities are not particularly compelling.

Despite Elisha Macomber’s success, characterization is generally a problem for Knight. Macomber and the middle-aged narrators are strong, as are a few others scattered throughout Knight’s books: Sheriff Crandall, Inspector Mena, and Dr. Sargent (Penberthy’s medical examiner, a major character only in Beauty Is a Beast). Most of her characters, however, are stereotypes: faithful or deceitful lovers, patriarchal and matriarchal tyrants, loyal and disloyal servants, bumbling police and detectives. At times, like other Golden Age authors, Knight is blatantly racist. Black servants roll the whites of their eyes and speak in corny illiteracies; Latin Americans are oily; Italians are highly emotional, Mafiosi, or both. The sympathetic treatment of ethnic characters in Intrigue for Empire (1944) and Dying Echo cannot atone for such prejudice. Knight’s gender-typing is obvious, even in the Margot Blair series; Blair is a full-time partner of a public relations agency, a co-owner, but virtually nothing of the work such a firm would do is shown. Instead, Blair spends her time as a guardian of young female nitwits, so that a role that at times seems almost feminist—career woman successfully detecting murder cases—collapses into romantic suspense.

Knight’s stories exemplify Golden Age puzzle mysteries, and their faults and virtues are characteristic of their type. Thriller elements are downplayed, as in the kidnappings of Acts of Black Night and Invitation to Vengeance. (In both novels, the children are stolen toward the end and are quickly rescued. The kidnapping in the latter novel is even comic, with the grandfather’s whipping of the villain.) Like Agatha Christie, Knight is interested primarily in the puzzle, such as the clue of the bits of pottery in The Blue Horse of Taxco (1947), but her ability to evoke place sets her apart. Nostalgia abounds in the colliding of present and past civilizations in old Italy, old Florida, old Massachusetts—all Golden Age settings for her romantic Golden Age puzzles.

Principal Series Characters:

• Elisha Macomber , chairman of the Penberthy Board of Selectmen, is married, then a widower. He ages from his mid-fifties to about eighty in the course of the series, but the effects of aging are not noticeable. Deeply moral and God-fearing, he is caring, humorous, and highly logical.
• Margot Blair , the co-owner of a public relations agency, in the course of her work finds it necessary to protect wealthy young women by solving various criminal cases involving murder. She is a strong-willed, sympathetic, and highly active investigator.

Bibliography

DuBose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Covers the lives and works of many Golden Age female authors, providing perspective on the works of Knight.

Jackson, Christine A. Myth and Ritual in Women’s Detective Fiction. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002. Study of the representation and reimagination of ancient elements in modern detective fiction written by women. Sheds light on Knight’s work.

Nehr, Ellen A. “Kathleen Moore Knight.” In Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Combined biography, bibliography, and criticism of Knight and her works.

Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Critical study consisting of fifteen overview essays devoted to specific genres or periods within crime fiction. Contains an essay on Golden Age authors, which provides insights into Knight’s work. Bibliographic references and index.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Contains information on Golden Age authors and how crime fiction has changed since this time. Helps readers place Knight within the greater context.