Jean Stubbs

• Born: October 23, 1926
• Birthplace: Denton, Lancashire, England
• Died: October 19, 2012
• Place of death: Cornwall, England

Types of Plot: Historical; private investigator; thriller

Principal Series: Inspector John Lintott

Contribution

Midway in her writing career, Jean Stubbs wrote a series of historical thrillers; in each of them, retired Scotland Yard inspector John Lintott is persuaded to undertake a private investigation. Although she then left the detective story genre to write a historical saga, Stubbs remains notable for her unique mixture of genres in novels that are variously called historical romantic mysteries, historical thrillers, and historical mystery stories. The Inspector Lintott books are also memorable in that by placing the conservative, down-to-earth inspector in exotic surroundings, Stubbs uses the private investigator format for ironic social commentary in the tradition of the naïve fictitious foreign observer.

Biography

Jean Stubbs was born on October 23, 1926, in Denton, Lancashire, England. She was educated at the Manchester High School for Girls and later at the Manchester School of Art, which she attended from 1944 to 1947. A marriage, which ended in divorce, produced two children: a son, Robin, and a daughter, Gretel Sally. Aside from her love of writing, Stubbs also enjoyed art, spending time with her family, and cooking.

Before settling on a career as a writer, Stubbs was an artist, an actress, and a concert pianist. She published several short stories, reviews, and articles in various periodicals before her career as a novelist. She received the Society of Authors’ Tom Gallon Award in 1964 for her short story "A Child’s Four Seasons." Stubbs did not gain real literary recognition until the publication of her first novel, The Rose-Grower (1962), the first in her historical romance series, the Howarth Chronicles, which she later claimed had been written on the subway. By 1973 she had turned to the mystery format in Dear Laura, which was followed by The Painted Face in 1974 and The Golden Crucible in 1976. She then abandoned the mystery genre for a successful historical family-saga series.

Stubbs continued writing novels in a variety of genres, including several volumes in the Brief Chronicles historical series and many standalone works. Stubbs also delved into nonfiction in the 1980s, and her short stories have been anthologized in several collections. She published works into the twenty-first century, although in general her later works did not receive the attention of her early historical mystery novels. Among her later novels were A Lasting Spring (1987), Like We Used to Be (1989), the well-reviewed Light in Summer (1991), Kelly Park (1992), The Witching Time (1998), and I'm a Stranger Here Myself (2004).

Stubbs died on October 19, 2012.

Analysis

During the years between the publication of her first novel and the publication of Dear Laura in 1973, Stubbs developed the interests that in retrospect seem naturally to have led her to the genre of the historical mystery thriller. After three realistic works and a utopian novel, she ventured into a combination of history and crime with My Grand Enemy (1967), which tells the story of Mary Blandy, who was hanged in 1752 for poisoning her father and who may well have been merely the tool of the man she loved. Although critics considered that the book had fallen short of high drama, it was praised for its factual accuracy and for its re-creation of the period in which it was set. Although not a conventional mystery and crime writer, Stubbs adjusted the genre to suit her particular interests. Her works earned wide acclaim for their meticulous historical detail and their imaginative and suspenseful plots.

The Case of Kitty Ogilvie

After a biographical novel about Eleanora Duse, Stubbs ventured into the history of crime with The Case of Kitty Ogilvie (1970). In this historical novel, Stubbs proves that Ogilvie was indeed cleverly framed, as the supposed murderess had insisted. Stubbs’s interpretation is supported by Ogilvie’s mysterious escape from prison, which may well have been made possible by respectable friends who knew that she had been wronged but could not prove it. The poignant prison scene in which Ogilvie must bid farewell to her baby, who she senses will not live long in the care of a hired nurse, is one of the most effective pieces of writing that Stubbs has produced. Because by that point in the book she had convinced her readers of Ogilvie’s innocence, it is also clear that here, as perhaps in the Blandy story, Stubbs was beginning to explore her concern with feminine vulnerability.

Dear Laura

The theme of vulnerability emerged again in the gothic novel Dear Laura (1973) set in the nineteenth century. Although the wife in the novel is foolish, she does not deserve a husband so tyrannical or a life so grim. With this work, Stubbs once again proved that she had learned how to handle intense emotion and to maintain suspense until the last page. These skills were to stand her in good stead as she continued her historical mystery series starring Inspector John Joseph Lintott in The Painted Face and The Golden Crucible.

The Painted Face and The Golden Crucible

Although it is generally agreed that The Painted Face lacks the depth of The Golden Crucible, the two books share a number of characteristics. In both cases, the setting is the early twentieth century: The Painted Face takes place in 1902, The Golden Crucible in 1906. Furthermore, in both novels the down-to-earth, meat-and-potatoes Inspector Lintott is removed from his normal surroundings and forced to solve a mystery in an alien, exotic place. To him, the Paris of The Painted Face is just as exotic as the San Francisco of the Barbary Coast period to which he travels in The Golden Crucible.

Although both books begin with a riddle, only in the first has there been a death, and that is not suspected to have been murder. Twenty years after a railway accident in France, in which his half sister was supposedly killed, a well-to-do English artist wishes to learn more about her fate. The second novel begins with the question of a wealthy American’s motivations in attempting to hire the inspector to trick the famous magician Felix Salvador, but the crucial mystery is the disappearance of the magician’s sister, Alicia, which occurs almost two weeks later. The injury of Bessie Lintott, which follows, is only briefly a mystery; when the inspector is boldly told that it was designed to intimidate him into dropping his inquiries into Alicia’s kidnapping, he acquires a personal reason to follow those responsible—to San Francisco or to the ends of the earth. In both novels, the fact that the victims have been vulnerable females both motivates Lintott to leave his comfortable fireside to take the case and, as far as the structure of the book is concerned, intensifies the suspense inherent in the chase.

If feminine vulnerability is important to the plot, it is also an important theme in both books. The characters can be divided into three groups. First, there are those who are worldly, sophisticated, and corrupt. It is from this group and from their hirelings that the bullies and criminals are drawn. Their antagonist is Inspector Lintott, who has the help both of the person who hired him and of other well-intentioned people who become his friends. The purpose of his efforts is the protection of the third kind of character, the innocent women who are so easily victimized in the male-dominated society of which Stubbs wrote.

Stubbs, however, makes her categories somewhat more complex by presenting Lintott himself as a proponent of the ancient pattern of male domination. His argument is clearly stated: because of the superior physical power of men, women must be protected; that is why they have fathers, brothers, and husbands. In his own case, the system works well; evidently Lintott’s wife, Bessie, considers the right to vote far less important than the power she holds in the family, power that arises partly from her husband’s respect and concern for her as a woman. Lintott’s daughter, however, who appears in both novels, is another matter. Because she has been jailed as a suffragette, her decent but old-fashioned husband has booted her out until she agrees to mend her ways; she has returned to her parents’ home, where she is argumentative and unhappy. Although at first Lintott sympathizes in principle with his son-in-law, by the end of The Golden Crucible he has seen enough unhappy marriages and tyrannical husbands to be open-minded about his daughter’s complaints; finally, he realizes that her rebellion arose from real mistreatment.

If Inspector Lintott is an embodiment of middle-class conservatism, at least he exemplifies the best of his class. Although he is unsophisticated, he is not stupid; although he is restrained and respectful in demeanor, he is not cowardly. It is satisfying to watch as the pretentious and wealthy who have consistently mocked and underrated him at last come to respect him and even to fear him.

The title of Stubbs’s second mystery, The Golden Crucible, is appropriate both to its plot and theme. It is taken from a poem in which America is called a golden crucible, a melting pot, but because most of the action of this story takes place in San Francisco, a city at least partially built by gold, and because the story ends with the fire and earthquake, in which the character of the city’s residents is cruelly tested, the title has a very specific application. In personal terms, San Francisco is also the testing place of Inspector Lintott and his daughter, who must pit their virtue against the evil schemes of Bela Barak, whose wealth and power have enabled him to have Bessie Lintott run down, to terrify his own wife, and to kidnap the fragile Alicia, transport her from England to San Francisco, and there hold her hostage.

Despite the luxury that might have tempted another man on the long trip to San Francisco, Lintott holds to his values. He packs cheap linen and stout boots, nothing for show, and on the boat he takes an economy ticket. Although sometimes his dogged frugality is comic, it is this steadfastness that enables him to resist the temptations of Barak, who could buy a lesser man.

Lintott’s success lies in finding Alicia and exposing the villains; his daughter’s is subtler but not less real. Separated from her stingy husband, she is exposed to the world of finery and first-class hotels. For a time, she fancies herself in love with her employer, the magician Felix Salvador, who has introduced her to high life so that as his supposed assistant she can more effectively help her father. By the end of the novel, she has her own reward, and it is not dependent on the love of Felix or anyone else. Resisting the temptations of riches, adventure, and passion, she has found that she is as brave and strong as any man, and with that discovery, she has banished her querulous, quarrelsome, and secretly uncertain former self forever.

The themes that Stubbs had touched on in the earlier books, such as the supposed vulnerability of women in a male-dominated world, are fully realized in The Golden Crucible. The theme of justice is important in both of Stubbs's best known works, and particularly so because there was a strong possibility that the central character had been wrongly condemned. In The Painted Face, once it is obvious that the painter’s half sister might still be alive, both the painter and the inspector fear that her loss of identity might have condemned her unjustly to a life of ignorance or even to a loss of virtue. In this book, however, there is no real villain; instead, the sister is the victim of understandable human frailties, combined with the element of chance that is a part of every life. In The Golden Crucible, the lines of good and evil are clearly drawn. The question is whether the villains will be subject to private revenge, as Salvador would wish, or to the system of public justice to which Lintott has devoted his life. In the end, although Lintott discovers the truth, it is divine retribution, in the form of the earthquake and fire, which destroys the forces of evil, while at the same time it kills the innocent.

Stubbs has been justly praised for her success in evoking the San Francisco of the early twentieth century in The Golden Crucible, particularly in her account of the 1906 earthquake and fire at the conclusion of the book. Here she abandons the sometimes baroque descriptions and the appropriately formal dialogue of her earlier passages for a slangy, staccato style—full of expostulations, shouts, and warnings—that masterfully captures the atmosphere of the moment.

Principal Series Character:

• Inspector John Lintott , retired after forty years at Scotland Yard, now an occasional private investigator. Wherever he travels, Lintott carries with him the values of his humble origins, including a belief in marital fidelity, a dislike of pretension, and a loathing for those who bully the weak and helpless.

Bibliography

Heilburn, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. This volume describes how writers and biographers artificially reduced the lives of the women about whom they wrote to a narrow, conventional view. Heilburn deals with the struggles of women writers and touches on Stubbs.

"Jean Stubbs." Fantastic Fiction, 2017, www.fantasticfiction.com/s/jean-stubbs/. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains an entry on Stubbs that examines her life and works.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York, Routledge, 2005. Contains a chapter on historical crime fiction that sheds light on Stubbs’s work.

Stubbs, Jean. Interview. Books and Bookmen 18 (April, 1973): 39. A brief interview that includes biographical details about the author and a discussion of themes in her works.

Vasudevan, Aruna, ed. Twentieth-century Romance and Historical Writers. 3d ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Provides an in-depth profile of Stubbs and discussions of her major works, specifically her historical romances.