Jean Potts

• Born: November 17, 1910
• Birthplace: St. Paul, Nebraska
• Died: November 10, 1999
• Place of death: New York, New York

Type of Plot: Psychological

Contribution

Between 1943 and 1975, Jean Potts published fifteen novels, fourteen of which are within the realm of mystery and detective fiction. Few of them even remotely resemble the classic whodunit. Potts started writing crime novels at a time when the general style of the genre was undergoing a transformation toward a more realistic approach. Instead of dealing with police procedure, courtroom trials, or private investigators, Potts found her brand of realism by focusing on a close-knit band of characters face to face with a murder—real, imaginary, or impending.

Curiously, the physical act of the crime itself and how it is committed is incidental to almost all the plots. More than one “mystery” unfolds without a murdered victim. Vital to the plots, on the other hand, is the psychology of the characters and their interactions. There is no omniscient narrator, no one point of view, no hero or villain. Several points of view, each one justifiable, are presented simultaneously. The denouement is almost a studied anticlimax. Any of the characters may end up guilty without eliciting the reader’s surprise. In Potts’s novels, both judgment and punishment come from within the guilty; the judicial system is given no role.

Biography

Jean Catherine Potts spent most of her early life in her home state, completing her education at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, then starting her career as a journalist in Nebraska. The lure of freelance writing took her to New York, where she made her home. Little of her private life is known.

Potts’s first novel was Someone to Remember, published by Westminster Press in Philadelphia in 1943. It was eleven years before her second novel, Go, Lovely Rose (1954), was published. A crime novel, Go, Lovely Rose won for her the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1955. After 1954 she published a novel every year until 1958. Her mystery-writing career of twenty-one years yielded fourteen novels and three short stories published in magazines.

In June, 1988, admitting that her literary career “seems to have run out of steam,” Potts said that her only output after 1975 was two stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—“In the Absence of Proof” in July, 1985, and “Two on the Isle” in January, 1987. An English firm, Chivers Press, accepted two of her books, Go, Lovely Rose and Home Is the Prisoner (1960), for reprinting in 1988. Potts died in New York in 1999.

Analysis

Go, Lovely Rose started Jean Potts’s career as a mystery writer with an Edgar Allan Poe Award. It is, perhaps, the only novel in her corpus that has all the ingredients of a conventional whodunit. A murder begins the plot, a range of suspects are introduced and brought together, and a police officer and detective are on the chase, taking statements, asking questions, and “going by the book of police procedure.” Still, even in this first effort, almost all the ideas and innovations that made her contribution to the genre so distinctive are present in embryonic form.

The Diehard

Straying more than slightly from the rules in that first crime novel, Potts achieved that special voice writers strive for surprisingly early in her career. By the time her third crime novel, The Diehard (1956)—a murder mystery without an actual murder—was published, she had discarded even the pretense of following the prescribed rules that made a mystery novel in the eyes of purist readers and writers. The question in The Diehard is not who did it but who could have done it—and nobody does it. Thus, The Diehard constitutes an outworking of one of Potts’s theories on her genre: that the thought is the crime and that a murder committed in the mind alone often has consequences as serious as those of an actual killing. The intention or even the desire to do away with someone makes a character as culpable as the hand that fires a gun.

Like The Diehard, Home Is the Prisoner pursues another angle of the idea of a mystery without a murder to precipitate it. The Man with the Cane (1957) differs from the concept in a minor way: The victim is almost a total stranger who is introduced to most of the characters only after his murder. The Evil Wish (1962), another variation on the same theme, develops a concept that was casually introduced in Go, Lovely Rose and The Diehard—what Potts christened a “left-over murder.”

Other devices and motifs link the novels written between 1965 and 1975. Career connections replace the lifelong small-town bonds of the earlier plots. Anonymous parts of New York City or a strange resort environment become the backdrop, replacing the familiarity of a suburban hamlet where everybody knows everybody else. A faceless, impersonal voice of an unnamed detective replaces the identifiable “friendly neighborhood policeman,” though these official characters are equally unimportant to the real working of the plot. There is murder committed toward the beginning of these later novels, and the murderer is almost invariably a woman with an obsessive, irrational love for her husband (The Footsteps on the Stairs, 1966, and An Affair of the Heart, 1970) or her son (The Only Good Secretary, 1965, and The Troublemaker, 1972).

All fourteen novels have some things in common. There is always a small community of people, with each individual inextricably tied to the crime in one way or another, each contributing to and being affected by the psychological anguish caused by the crime (regardless of whether it has been committed), each having to shoulder his or her share of the total guilt even as collectively they piece together fragmentary clues and pronounce judgment on the actual act. In itself, the act is not important, and neither is justice by law. Suicide, insanity, and a total indifference to any punishment the legal system can impose on them are the only way Potts’s criminals can react to the crimes they commit, because justice does not come down on them impersonally: It originates in the crime itself and in the very motive behind it.

Psychologically, the novels become progressively more complicated and introspective in both characterization and action. The private worlds within the minds of the people Potts creates become the real focus of the novels. It is the internal world of a character that causes the normally mundane external world of a community to disintegrate. Shorn of this psychological complexity, her plots would seem bare and inadequate. Home Is the Prisoner, for example, is the story of an ex-convict who returns home to avid speculation on the part of the people who have known him all of his life, while in The Man with the Cane the corpse of a stranger triggers the curiosity of a normally apathetic community. All physical acts of aggression are either catalyst or solution and fade into inconsequence. Physical violence, if there is any, is restricted to the crime, its gruesome details glossed, and sometimes a suicide in the end (also underplayed and generally out of sight), or as in several novels, a small fistfight at some point.

The Evil Wish

Mental violence, on the other hand, abounds, kept a malicious, malevolent secret under the gentlest or the most sensible exterior. Potts points out, time and again, that even ordinary people with the most uneventful existences are capable of heinous crimes. Doll-like, docile women who chatter away inconsequentially throughout their sheltered lives—Lucy Knapp in The Evil Wish, Barbara in The Man with the Cane, Thelma Holm in The Footsteps on the Stairs—are found to possess hidden reserves of the most uncompromising determination and capacity for cruelty. Lovable, responsible men, pillars of small-town goodness, are driven to murder because of emotional pressure. Everybody, Potts seems to say, every face in the world, can harbor a criminal. Her novels’ action and drama stem from the psychological complexities of the minds of her characters, all very human, very flawed, and totally credible. In one of her most intriguing psychological studies, The Evil Wish, two sisters wish their father dead and plan his murder meticulously, only to have their plans thwarted but their wish fulfilled when their father, Dr. Knapp, obligingly dies in an accident. The consciences of the sisters are then burdened with a “left-over murder,” their guilt growing while the desire to see their plan through is left unsatisfied. They are killers without a crime to justify the guilt they feel, and the mental state resulting from this turmoil destroys their lives and eventually forces them to become each other’s murderer.

Although her characters are trapped into facing the consequences they bring on themselves, Potts is not beyond playing occasional psychological games with her readers. Readers of The Diehard, for example, find themselves waiting almost impatiently for the unnatural death of Lew Morgan to occur, for they are privy to the information that all but one of the major characters are out to kill him. In the end, Lew dies in an accident caused, ironically, by the only person who wished him alive, and the reader is left burdened with the uncomfortable weight of an impossibly ambiguous truth: No one in the novel kills Lew Morgan, yet everyone does.

This kind of mental realism, this internalized action and characterization, became Potts’s hallmark and is perhaps the most important factor in the literary success of her novels, lending them a several-layered, multifaceted psychological depth that is rare in crime fiction. Potts has the brilliant talent of revealing both appearance and reality with simple, economical strokes. There are no extensive descriptions, explanations, or justifications, only the characters revealed through their own thought processes. There are no “good” or “bad” characters; rather, Potts’s protagonists are fully fleshed-out human beings with weaknesses and strengths. Marcia Knapp in The Evil Wish, an otherwise intelligent and pragmatic woman, has a tendency toward alcoholism; Judge McVey (Home Is the Prisoner), an upright, honest man, is revealed to be a coward; Fern Villard (The Only Good Secretary), efficient and charming, is driven by pathological avarice.

Potts’s characters indulge in trivial eccentricities, petty secrets and obsessions, gossiping, blackmailing, pathetic attempts to seem younger, lying—behavior that shows them to be less than wholesome but makes them wholly credible. Her novels are full of people who are simultaneously attractive and repulsive. The reader cannot help but understand them, think their thoughts with them, pity and forgive them; nevertheless, an emotional distance is always maintained between reader and character. There is never any question of self-identification or empathy with a Potts character on the part of the reader. Potts achieves this distance simply by presenting several points of view, with different characters picking up the telling of the tale at irregular intervals, sharing their personal points of view, introspections, and interactions. Each character has firm convictions and an individual set of questions and answers. The reader is thus involved with several different opinions and people and is forced to change his own mind several times. Eventually, a process of elimination leaves only two or three central characters whose accounts can be tentatively accepted—a far cry from a consistent, omniscient narrative voice presenting a single, authoritative version of an event.

Though each character in a Jean Potts novel is undeniably an individual, there is a limited range of types to which most of them conform. Her women fall for the most part under three categories. There is the matter-of-fact, likable, do-gooder type with a sensible head on her shoulders—Mary Walsh in An Affair of the Heart, Rachel Buckmaster or Myra Graves in Go, Lovely Rose, Margaret Robinson in The Troublemaker, and “Hen” in The Man with the Cane. Then there are Barbara (The Man with the Cane), Lucy Knapp (The Evil Wish), and Thelma Holm (The Footsteps on the Stairs)—fragile, nervous, sheltered escapists who refuse to face reality and prefer to drown all ugliness in bright chatter. Finally, Potts creates worldlywise career women who can absorb and accept all aspects of life with the indifference that comes with jaded knowledge. Marcia in The Evil Wish, Fern in The Only Good Secretary, and Enid Baxter in The Footsteps on the Stairs can outdrink and outphilander any man.

The men, similarly, could be divided into three classifications, starting with responsible, upright, honest men such as Hugh in Go, Lovely Rose, “Mack” in Home Is the Prisoner, and Val Bryant in The Man with the Cane. Another type would be the charming, arrogant, superficial character who remains likable despite his blatant flaws—Gordon Llewellyn in The Evil Wish, Dr. Craig in Go, Lovely Rose, Kirk Banning in An Affair of the Heart, and Lew Morgan in The Diehard. Finally, there is the man who is a failure, despite unusual intelligence, because of a lack of motivation or a fondness for alcohol: Archie O’Brien in The Only Good Secretary and Martin Shipley and Vic Holm in The Footsteps on the Stairs.

Apart from these identifiable types, Potts liberally peppered her novels with colorful eccentrics such as Gladys Popejoy (The Only Good Secretary), who is sure that germs that spread “Diseases” are waiting to catch her unprepared in a bus or at the office, or the homosexual Teddy (An Affair of the Heart), who flutters around nervously and cannot resist malicious digs at others, even his friends.

Any one of these characters might be the victim and anyone the killer. They are all suspects and sleuths by turn. Their interactions make for remarkably lifelike unlikelihoods. Friendship and hostility between Potts’s characters are marked by the strange complexity of reality. Antagonists in a Potts novel often cannot help liking each other. Martin Shipley and Vic Holm understand each other instinctively, just as Marcia Knapp and Chuck Llewellyn do. Each can see the other’s unsavory side and identify with it. Suspicion and trust go hand in hand where these pairs are concerned, because though a bond of affection and concern ties them together they can never give up the individual convictions that created the original antagonism.

The narrow, humdrum existences of Potts’s characters are inevitably and irreparably distorted by crimes of emotion, misdeeds motivated by an obsessive, misguided love for father, spouse, or child. Potts always focused on the elemental emotion of love, which, in her opinion, is more treacherous than any hatred or selfish need could be.

Potts’s awareness of love’s pitfalls creates a distinctive kind of crime fiction. In her novels, life does not simply return to normal after the crime is solved and justice served. The reason for that lies in the motivation for the crime and the deep emotions it stirs in each of the characters. Those who had wanted to kill but could not are racked by guilt. Even the relatively innocent will forever carry painful memories. As for the murderers, once they have accomplished the deed to which their tortured desires drove them, the only thing left to desire is death.

Bibliography

Boucher, Anthony. Review of The Footsteps on the Stairs, by Jean Potts. The New York Times Book Review 71 (July 25, 1966): 20. A famous detective-fiction author and critic reviews one of Potts’s novels.

Boucher, Anthony. Review of The Trash Stealer, by Jean Potts. The New York Times Book Review 73 (February 4, 1968): 43. A celebrated detective-fiction author and critic reviews Potts’s novels about an attempt to atone for an accidental killing.

“Jean Potts, Eighty-eight, Author of Prize-Winning Mystery.” The New York Times, November 17, 1999, p. C29. Obituary of Potts looks at her life and career, noting that her strong point was characterization.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995. Study of female detective writers, fictional sleuths, and consumers of detective fiction provides perspective on Potts’s fiction.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routlege, 2005. Study of the cultural import of crime fiction and its conventions; helps elucidate the significance of unconventional approaches such as Potts’s.