Helen Eustis

• Born: December 31, 1916
• Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
• Died: January 11, 2015
• Place of death: New York City, New York

Type of Plot: Psychological

Contribution

Helen Eustis had a gift for portraying characters in various states of mental anxiety, ranging from the normal through the highly neurotic to the psychotic. In the post–World War II era, she helped introduce into crime fiction a new quality of realism and sophistication in the portrayal of both the villain and the victim—the guilty and the innocent—which foreshadowed the development of the psychological plot. Her stories show how people placed in threatening circumstances react in bizarre, often incriminating ways.

Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevski, to whom she alludes in The Horizontal Man (1946), Eustis added a note of clinical realism to the gothic terrors experienced by her characters by explaining their behavior in terms of the pathology of the criminally insane. In The Horizontal Man, Eustis combined knowledge of abnormal psychology with mastery of the genre’s least-likely-suspect convention to produce a tour de force rivaling Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).

Biography

Helen White Eustis was born December 31, 1916, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of Henry Claypoole Eustis. She spent her childhood in Cincinnati, where she received her early education at Hillside School. She later attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, from which she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1938. While she was at Smith, she won an award for creative writing. Eustis subsequently did graduate work at Columbia University in New York City but did not earn an advanced degree.

When Eustis was at Smith College, she met and was eventually married to a professor in the English Department, Alfred Young Fisher. They had one son, Adam Eustis Fisher. The marriage ended in divorce. Eustis was married a second time, to Martin Harris, a press photographer, but was also eventually divorced from him.

Although she studied literature as an undergraduate and a graduate student, Eustis did not opt for a teaching career. Her interest in literature had been manifested in exercising her own creative talents. She wrote novels, a number of short stories, and children’s literature. She also translated a number of works from French to English, including Georges Simenon’s Quand j’étais vieux (1970; When I Was Old, 1971).

Eustis’s literary reputation is based on her first book, The Horizontal Man, which was awarded the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for the best first novel in 1947. This novel attracted much attention and elicited much admiration from critics and aficionados of the genre. Nearly a decade later, she wrote a second novel, The Fool Killer (1954), which received less critical acclaim. However, it was adapted into a film in 1965. She seemed to have preferred the short-story format, for she wrote much short fiction over the years. Not all of her stories are mysteries, but all of them involve psychological suspense. Additionally, she contributed writing to a variety of publications, including the New Yorker. Eustis lived and worked in New York for many years.

Eustis had been living in her apartment in Manhattan until she took ill in early 2015 and had to be taken to a nearby hospital for hospice care. She died shortly after, on January 11, 2015, at the age of ninety-eight. She is survived by her son and three grandchildren.

Analysis

A critical assessment of Helen Eustis’s literary contributions to the genre of crime fiction must be based on her most famous novel, The Horizontal Man.

The Horizontal Man

The novel’s title is a phrase taken from a poem by W. H. Auden, “Shorts.” Eustis quotes only one of the two stanzas that constitute a middle portion of Auden’s poem. The entire section, which bears little relation to other parts, reads as follows:

Those who will not reasonPerish in the act:Those who will not actPerish for that reason.Let us honour if we canThe vertical man,Though we value noneBut the horizontal one.

As Richard Hoggart remarked about Auden’s early verse, “The epigrams usually enshrine memorable social and psychological observations.” Elsewhere, Hoggart claimed that Auden “surveys from a great height the interesting but muddled life of those below; he can see a possible order in the muddle which they do not see, and he would like to help it emerge. He is detached and slightly cynical.” The same could be said of Eustis’s comments about life and death and the human condition.

For example, one of her less inhibited characters, Freda Cramm, delivers the following remarks on crime and its punishment:

Violence that strikes in our midst shakes us in a strange way. . . . Personally, I think there are not enough murders. They feed us in some way. See how avidly we devour all accounts of crime, or detective stories! And after all, the responsibility of giving death is a small one which we regard so seriously in comparison to the responsibility of giving life, which we take so lightly:

There are two separate pleasures. . . . The pleasure of vicarious violence, and the pleasure at the detection and punishment of the crime of another. In the first we can enjoy the emotional outlet without undertaking the penalty, and in the second we can shiver deliciously with the knowledge that we cannot be found out, since our share in the business was secret, and of the mind.

Surprisingly enough, The Horizontal Man is a roman à clef. At the time it was written, acquaintances of the author were struck by the obvious similarities between the fictional New England women’s college it featured, Hollymount, and the author’s alma mater, Smith College. Parallels extended beyond the locale to include characters, many of whom were based on well-known campus figures. For example, the villain was rumored to be a composite portrait of two professors from Smith’s English department—a well-known modern critic (Newton Arvin) and a medievalist (Howard Rollin Patch). The victim closely resembled the author’s husband, Alfred Young Fisher, formerly her professor, whom she was divorcing at the time. According to one source, Eustis began writing The Horizontal Man on the advice of her therapist to exorcize some of her hostility toward her spouse.

Eustis’s knowledge of abnormal psychology and psychoanalytic theory is evident in the narrative and helps to create verisimilitude. Essentially a puzzle novel with gothic overtones, The Horizontal Man is a tour de force with an ingenious surprise ending. The spectacular climax exposes the criminal pathology of a schizophrenic killer and completes a complex psychological portrait. Although the clinical details are completely correct, Eustis does not settle for mere psychiatric accuracy. Instead, in the Russian manner, she goes much further to create a disturbing yet compassionate picture of a tortured soul whose tragic suffering is caused by what she calls “the poetry of unreason.” Eustis strives to represent mental illness realistically, not only through clinical detail but also through literary allusion:

But when . . . I’ve thought of madness, it seems most easily explained to me as poetry in action. A life of symbol rather than reality. On paper one may understand Gulliver, or Kafka, or Dante. But let a man go about behaving as if he were a giant or a midget, or caught in a cosmic plot directed at himself, or in heaven or hell, and we feel horror—we want to disavow him, to proclaim him as far removed as possible from ourselves.

The literary technique is sophisticated. Although the emphasis is placed on characterization, the narrative is as carefully plotted as a detective story must be. The characters are revealed as the investigation proceeds. The mental focus is reminiscent of Dostoevski’s Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1886), but unlike Dostoevski , Eustis avoids the inverted structure. Instead, she preserves the integrity of the puzzle by shifting the narrative viewpoint among several characters. Both plot and characterization profit from the use of this device, because several characters claim attention while the puzzle is being unraveled.

By skillful employment of the interior monologue, Eustis reveals character while simultaneously sustaining suspense by shifting from one figure to another. As the narrative develops, the reader gains greater insight into the personalities of the various suspects—primarily by means of internal monologue and secondarily through confrontational dialogue. Finally, in a dramatic climax, the killer’s identity is disclosed in a direct confession, which functions to solve the puzzle as well as to complete the revelation of character. Eustis’s genius lies in her realization that she could combine the conventions of the classic detective novel with her interest in psychological character development to produce an original work. She recognized that the tradition of presenting the murderer as the least likely suspect offered an opportunity to exercise her rare talents for psychological portraiture.

The Horizontal Man concerns the murder of a handsome and brilliant English professor, Kevin Boyle, who is found stretched out on the floor in front of his sitting-room fireplace with a crushed skull. One of the suspects is a young student, Molly Morrison, who is so infatuated with him that she is devastated by his death. She even entertains the delusion that she is responsible for his death because she did not foresee and prevent the attack. Her guilt is so intense that she signs a confession at the police station. Several colleagues also fall under suspicion: Freda Cramm, a local femme fatale who is known to have quarreled with Boyle; Leonard Marks, a gauche junior member of the English faculty who lives in the same apartment house and who was jealous of Boyle; and George Hungerford, a distinguished older scholar whose ability to write seemed to atrophy after his mother’s death but who served as friend and mentor to Boyle.

In addition to the suspects, each of whom tries to help solve the crime, several other amateur sleuths are involved in the investigation. The efforts of a homely but intelligent young student, Kate Innes, and an eager young newspaper reporter, Jack Donelly, serve to complicate matters. Although all these people uncover pertinent information, no one person actually solves the case. The culprit finally confesses to the college psychiatrist, who provides a full explanation for the president in the novel’s denouement.

In the course of the narrative, Eustis successfully depicts people in various states of anxiety ranging from the normal through the highly neurotic to the psychotic. Molly’s emotional reactions as well as her therapy seem authentic. The normal, if naïve, worldview of the other students accentuates the bizarre outlook of Molly. She, in turn, offers an important contrast to Hungerford and Marks because she is so much younger and simultaneously more vulnerable and more resilient. Because of their age and sex, both Hungerford and Marks seem less seriously disturbed. The plotting is extremely complex—the focus alternates among Molly, Hungerford, and Marks.

In his first appearance in the novel, Hungerford registers a strong death wish. The reader learns that he has attempted suicide and that he finds his life a painful burden: “I know who that is, said his mind. That is Death. That is the old Reaper, gumshoeing behind you. He thought he would turn and shake Death’s hand when Death came abreast of him. . . .” Hungerford’s subsequent hallucinations become more intense and clearly indicate the seriousness of his aberration: “He whirled about and faced the dark room, his hands against the window sill, like a criminal at bay, facing his tormentors. The furniture seemed to take on the appearance of people he knew.”

In contrast to Hungerford’s wild imaginings, Molly’s misinterpretations of reality are laced with rational doubts regarding her own sanity. She becomes objectively analytical and even questions Dr. Forstmann about the difference between hallucinations and delusions. (“Hallucinations, it must be. That’s when you really imagine direct sensation instead of just sort of distant things like persecution, isn’t it?”) Her conviction that she must be mad is followed by dizzy excitement when she discovers the scratch across her wrist that her own bitten fingernails never could have made and realizes that she had not imagined the dreadful attempt on her life. Ironic genius informs her joyous insight: “She was not crazy—except crazy with happiness—someone—some real person had actually tried to strangle her!”

Then there is the poignant moment when Molly, seeking reassurance that she is not insane, runs away from the infirmary and asks Hungerford to tell her what really happened during the interval when she thought she was being attacked—only to be told that he cannot remember, that he is suffering from amnesia. Yet the two compare notes and find comfort in shared feelings of paranoia.

Marks’s fears are projected onto harmless nature in a gothic episode in which he feels threatened by encroaching darkness in the woods and runs in panic from the menacing antagonism of Cramm:

In the woods darkness had already begun. Darkness collected like a mist around the boles of the trees, rose in a vapour from the dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor. . . . The strangeness was too much for him; he could not bear it; he found himself shaking and clutching the trunk of the tree. Then, without his intention, the words formed in his mind: I must get away from here . . .

He ran and ran, blindly stumbling in the ruts of the uneven road. He could see nothing, he only trusted the feel of the ground under him. The road through the wood stretched endlessly—it seemed the trees would never end.

Eustis demonstrates consummate control as her characters move gracefully from moments of panic-stricken fear to tender pathos and gentle humor. The Horizontal Man is an unusual detective story because it embodies the techniques and themes of mainstream literature as it follows the formula of the puzzle novel. It offers sophisticated insights into the human psyche and compassion for the human condition rare in a genre in which rigid conventions usually prevail.

The Fool Killer

Written nearly ten years later, Eustis’s second novel, The Fool Killer, is entirely different. Based on a rural American folk legend, it has been described as “a mystery novel for both children and adults, somewhat consciously imitative of Mark Twain.” In the mid-1960s, a film was made from the book starring Anthony Perkins, Edward Albert, and Salome Jens.

In The Fool Killer, the main character is a young boy named George Mellish, a twelve-year-old orphan rather like Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer who runs away from harsh foster parents and meets Dirty Jim Jelliman. Dirty Jim is a disreputable old man who tells him of the Fool Killer, a great tall fellow—eight feet or over—who carries a sharp ax and kills people. When George meets Milo Bogardus and becomes his traveling companion, he begins to wonder whether he has teamed up with the Fool Killer. Eustis demonstrates considerable craftsmanship in evoking the naïve mentality of the lad and in projecting his growing anxieties. As in The Horizontal Man, in The Fool Killer she reveals great gifts in creating and sustaining psychological suspense.

Bibliography

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. “Preface to The Horizontal Man.” In A Book of Prefaces to Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900–1950. Garland, 1976. Preface by two preeminent scholars of mystery and detective fiction, arguing for the novel’s place in the annals of the genre.

Nover, Peter, editor. The Great Good Place? A Collection of Essays on American and British College Mystery Novels. P. Lang, 1999. Compilation of essays focused on crime fiction set at college campuses or feature academic characters. A valuable source of contextualization for The Horizontal Man.

Peach, Linden. Masquerade, Crime, and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Extended study of the theme and portrayal of disguise (both literal and figurative) in mystery and detective fiction. Provides perspective for understanding Eustis’s work.

Piekarski, Vicki. Introduction to Westward the Women: An Anthology of Western Stories by Women, edited by Vicki Piekarski. U of New Mexico P, 1988. Includes discussion of Eustis’s contributions to genre fiction.

Slotnik, Daniel E. "Helen Eustis, Mystery Author and Translator, Dies at 98." The New York Times, 9 Feb. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/books/helen-eustis-mystery-author-and-translator-dies-at-98.html. Accessed 4 Aug. 2017.