Harry Carmichael

• Born: June 20, 1908
• Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• Died: April 12, 1979
• Place of death: Leeds, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; thriller; espionage

Principal Series: Glenn Bowman, 1951-1979; Piper and Quinn, 1952-1978; Philip Scott, 1964-1967

Contribution

Harry Carmichael’s thirty-odd novels featuring John Piper and his friend Quinn have been consistently underrated, although several authorities have pointed to the excellence of the series. Most impressive is the atmosphere of the books, seedy and grim though not depressing or despairing. Piper mourns his late wife, Ann, but he remarries in the course of the series; his essential aloneness and that of his generally hungover friend Quinn, who never marries, function as the psychological reality in which sordid criminal greed occurs. The plots are all puzzle mysteries, although the crimes are not of the impossible variety and the clues are all given fairly. In these and other respects, the series maintains its quality from beginning to end.

Biography

Harry Carmichael was born Leopold Horace Ognall in Montreal, Canada, on June 20, 1908. Educated in Scotland, he worked in his father’s business and then for various newspapers as reporter and editor, an important source of authoritativeness for his mysteries featuring the reporter Quinn. He also spent four years as an efficiency expert—the British say “engineer”—for the government; most of his life, however, was spent as a full-time freelance writer. Carmichael loved writing and said that he could not imagine a better way to live. Married in 1932, he had three children, two sons and one daughter, by his wife, Cecelia. One of his books, Department K (1964), was made into a film, Assignment K (1968), featuring Michael Redgrave. Carmichael continued to write up to his death on April 12, 1979, in Leeds.

Analysis

The more than three dozen novels by Harry Carmichael featuring the insurance assessor John Piper and the reporter Quinn (his first name is not used) are most significant for plots that generally keep the basic events hidden from the reader, who is misled (along with the police) by the wiles of the criminals.

Murder by Proxy

The characteristic elements of a Carmichael plot appear in one of the best of the series, Murder by Proxy (1967), in which Piper meets his second wife, Jane Heywood, and falls in love at first sight. In this novel, Richard Armstrong, sentenced to jail for over a year for fraud involving the theft of more than twenty-five thousand pounds, escapes from the police surveillance initiated after he has served his sentence. The novel deals extensively with Armstrong until near the end, when he dies in a fire, but the main criminal is his partner, who has coerced Armstrong’s wife into framing Armstrong. This plot has the wife and partner arranging an insurance fraud with Armstrong as the goat. The reader is brilliantly misdirected; even the money Armstrong is convicted of taking has never been taken.

Aspects of this plot are typical of the series. Armstrong is the victim and is eventually murdered, but he deludes himself (and the reader) that he is cheating, indeed ruining his partner. This complicity of the victim, who is at least as criminal or morally corrupt as the murderer, is Carmichael’s favorite pattern. It occurs in False Evidence (1976), with the self-righteous and vicious reaction of Dr. Ainsworth to his wife’s seducer, as well as in Stranglehold (1959), in which the victim has been plotting to kill the murderer. Again and again, the reader is misled. In Death Counts Three (1954), a mystery solved by Piper without Quinn, Walter Parr, who presumably runs off with his employer’s money, has been murdered and buried by his employer. Such ironic reversals keep the mysteries sufficiently involved so that the murderer’s identity is well hidden—even in the novels of the 1970’s, books in which Carmichael limits the field of suspects.

This reversal of the “truth” of the action is central to the mystery and detective genre, as the title of a work of criticism on mystery stories indicates: What Will Have Happened: A Philosophical and Technical Essay on Mystery Stories (1977), by Robert Champigny, analyzes what many critics have noted about such stories. Once the mystery is solved, past actions must be reinterpreted, sometimes necessitating long explanations by the detective, as in the Dr. Thorndyke series by R. Austin Freeman, where the concluding explanations are long and technical. The Carmichael stories, however, emphasize the “false” plot to an extraordinary degree, while arranging the endings in a way that makes long explanations unnecessary. The earlier stories often include a final meeting between criminal and detective in which the truth is revealed. Thus in the Piper story Justice Enough (1956), the truth comes out in the concluding visit by Piper to the hospital room of Mrs. Eastwood, who with her lover had planned the murder of her husband. As she had been almost killed herself in the disposal of the body, she appears to be a victim, not the instigator of the crime. The chapter gives a detailed explanation, although the dramatic nature of the scene makes it effective enough.

Naked to the Grave

More typical of Carmichael’s endings, especially in the later stories, is the lack of virtually any explanation, the story being laid out so clearly that the reader can apprehend the real situation. For example, Naked to the Grave (1972) has an entirely simple crime: A gardener, hearing of a woman’s gambling winnings, kills her for them and later kills a gossip who knows too much. This simple tale is covered by a complex story of marital infidelity and greed that has nothing to do with the crime. The final confrontation between Piper and Quinn—this case is more Piper’s—and the murderer is brief and sordidly pathetic. No explanation beyond a few simple facts is needed.

This superiority in constructing the mystery plot is combined with strong psychological portraits of Quinn and Piper, the police, and the suspects. In his famous preface to The Second Shot (1930), Anthony Berkeley predicted that psychological clues would become more important than clues of motive and opportunity. Although the Carmichael stories do deal with motive and opportunity, they all emphasize character psychology. All the major actors are analyzed in detail, not the least being Piper and Quinn themselves as a contrasting pair, though not in the Holmes-Watson mold. Each does appear alone, Quinn in a couple of stories, Piper in five. A good example of Quinn working by himself is Requiem for Charles (1960), a barroom mystery with a bartender as murderer and with the amusing Detective-Superintendent Mullett, who has a penchant for quoting William Shakespeare and William Congreve. The works in which Piper is featured tend to have strong thriller elements, as in the intricately plotted Justice Enough, which has Piper traveling around England and Spain, frequently encountering physical danger. In fact, recurrent physical involvement or danger is standard in the series, emphasized most strongly in the novels of the 1950’s and 1960’s. In Stranglehold, Quinn is in an automobile accident and is suspected of slaying his driver. The same book has Piper almost murdered in a car attack. In Vendetta (1963), mainly Piper’s case, Piper saves Quinn from a fiery death. In Put Out That Star (1957), one of the few stories to show Quinn on the verge of marriage, Quinn and Piper save each other’s lives.

Despite the physicality of some of the cases, however, the novels depend on thought and character. Piper is the dignified member of the pair. His first wife, Ann, died in an automobile accident while Piper was driving. His sad, guilty memory of her, the experience of his life without her, are brought up throughout the series, even after his second marriage. This successful, competent, action-oriented man of the world, handsome, well built, beautifully dressed, is always alone, plagued by his thoughts and feelings. Quinn, with his mocking, alcoholic, smoke-fogged view of the world, with his slight build and careless dress, suffers too. Yet Quinn has his strengths, and his writings on crime command the respect even of the police.

Although they differ so much, Quinn and Piper work in basically the same way. They interview suspects and then think again and again about what they have been told. This reporting of the sleuths’ thoughts is characteristic of the stories. Seemingly innocent conversations are remembered, repeated, analyzed, until they are reinterpreted. In Death Counts Three, a scream at the beginning is repeated through the book in Piper’s thoughts until it is tied in with a dying scream from the murderer, with whom Piper has fallen in love. In Put Out That Star, a few drops of blood on a suitcase are mulled over frequently, and in Naked to the Grave, Piper keeps rehearsing the sounds of a husband opening a door, about to find his murdered wife. These repeated analyses of one event or clue, almost cinematographic, recall Agatha Christie’s repeated use of a scene in some of her later books. As with Christie, understanding the scene leads to the solving of the puzzle, though the scene in Naked to the Grave does not: It functions, instead, as a red herring.

Of Unsound Mind and Too Late for Tears

The motives in the series are generally simple: sex and money. Rarely are more exotic motives found, though Of Unsound Mind (1962) has Piper and Quinn analyzing a series of seven apparently unconnected deaths, all labeled suicides by the coroner. This novel begins with Quinn, like Mr. Pinkerton in David Frome’s Mr. Pinkerton Goes to Scotland Yard (1934), betting that Scotland Yard never hears of many murders. Like Mr. Pinkerton, Quinn goes investigating and proves his point. Most of the tales, however, involve simple plots based on love triangles and financial greed. Too Late for Tears (1973) is based on a husband avenging a wife who had been seduced years before. The murderer is far more sympathetic than the victim; indeed, the second murder in this story seems to have little purpose except to give an adequate reason to have the murderer caught and sentenced without offending the readers’ sense of justice, a criticism that could be made also of The Motive (1974) and False Evidence.

The Piper and Quinn series is one of the best in detective fiction for plot and character. The atmosphere may seem grim to many, although the sordidness is not necessarily depressing. Indeed, much in the series is lightened by a comic spirit, especially Quinn’s exchanges with his solicitous landlady, Mrs. Buchanan, a woman with a thick Scottish accent that Quinn mimics with absurd effects, and Quinn’s frequent bar and hangover scenes. The police, too, are sometimes comic; most often mentioned is Inspector—later Superintendent—Hoyle of Scotland Yard, sarcastic toward but trusting of Piper and Quinn. In fact, Carmichael created a succession of well-realized police personalities of various pleasant and unpleasant types, from the literary Superintendent Mullett to Inspector Byram, who suspects Quinn of murder in Remote Control (1970). The police, though portrayed as “straight” characters, nevertheless tend to add to the comic effects of the stories and so lighten Carmichael’s cynical depictions of betrayal and greed.

Principal Series Characters:

• Glenn Bowman is the English equivalent of the American hard-boiled detective. The Bowman thrillers involve violence, sex, and intricate plotting.
• John Piper is an insurance assessor,
• Quinn a crime reporter; their professions personally involve them in the crimes they investigate. Piper is the major or sole investigator in more of the novels, though Quinn dominates some of the books, especially those published in the 1970’s. Generally, the two work together, the cynical humorist Quinn contrasting with the outwardly stable and competent Piper.
• Philip Scott is a fringe member of a British espionage group. The two Scott books involve the same sort of intricate plotting, sex, and violence found in the Bowman series.

Bibliography

Callendar, Newgate. Review of Remote Control, by Harry Carmichael. The New York Times Book Review 76 (April 11, 1971): 18. Callendar’s review emphasizes the work’s place within British and American detective fiction.

Chernaik, Warren. “Mean Streets and English Gardens.” In The Art of Detective Fiction, edited by Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales, and Robert Vilain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Chernaik’s contrast of America’s mean streets and genteel English gardens helps contextualize the distinctive nature of Carmichael’s seedy English settings.

Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920’s to the Present. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Detailed study of both the American and the British versions of the hard-boiled detective. Bibliographic references and index. Provides context for understanding Carmichael’s work.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Contains an essay on hard-boiled fiction that sheds light on Carmichael’s novels.