The Horizontal Man

There’s something irresistible about a crime story set in a school or college. Like the classic snowbound country house setting, it offers the intrigue of a closed, insular community rife with underlying tensions, repressed emotions, and intellectual rivalries.  There may be illicit liaisons, secret societies, cultist rituals, unrequited lust, and simmering passions. Academia promises a cast of eccentric characters full of thwarted ambitions and petty jealousies. 

The blurbs on the book jackets often promise a hothouse atmosphere or an institutional hotbed of repression, salacious revelations, and scholarly skulduggery. There’s always the guarantee of educated and intelligent people making spectacularly irrational, neurotic decisions and behaving like petty-minded toddlers. 

We all went to school. We know first hand that most teachers are bonkers.

No wonder crime writers love academic settings. 

Kaggsy’s Booking Ramblings review of “Lessons in Crime” (ed. Martin Edwards) from the British Library Crime Classics reminded me of the list I had started of crime novels with an academic setting. It also reminded me I need to complete this post started after reading a gem of the genre – Helen Eustis’s 1946 Edgar Award-winning novel

The Horizontal Man  

The setting is Hollymount, a women’s college in Connecticut, perhaps rather like Smith, where Eustis was a student.  It’s a psychological thriller with an edge of academic satire.

After a brutal murder, it dives headfirst into the absurdities and Freudian drama of campus life. It’s part Psycho (Robert Bloch 1959) and part The Groves of Academe (Mary McCarthy1952) both of which it predated. 

It is a whodunit and a send-up of college life. 

“Let us honor if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.”
– W.H. Auden

The title is from W. H. Auden as befits the murder victim. The “horizontal man” is Kevin Boyle, a rakish English professor known for his philandering ways who meets his end by way of a poker to the skull on page two.  

The opening scene sets the tone with an act of frenzied violence. Boyle is confronted by his unnamed killer and the dialogue is chilling:

“I say,” he said, almost tenderly, “you’re not well, you know. Do let me take you home.”

The response to Boyle is unhinged:

“No! I’m not sick! At last I am well, at last I can tell you, Kevin! My God, do you know that is like water running down my throat to say that I love you?”

Moments later, Boyle is dead.

His murder sets off a campus-wide uproar, with a rollicking cast of suspects and characters. 

The Characters

Molly Morrison, an unbalanced,  poorly-parented student who was obsessively infatuated with Boyle confesses to the murder. Leonard Marks, a snowflake wannabe colleague who idolized Boyle; George Hungerford, a haunted genius who suspects he’s being stalked by a female intruder; and self-assured, independently wealthy Freda Cramm who may have had an affair with Boyle. When Cramm looks Marks directly in the eye he staggers back under the force of her gaze and he concludes she must be mad.

There’s also the college president Bainbridge who is preoccupied with appearances  and is more concerned with the college’s reputation and bad publicity than solving the crime. His secretary is Miss Seltzer and when the story appears in the newspaper she “ was pacing up and down the room, her face scarlet. It was one of her numerous (always well performed) duties to get angry for Mr Bainbridge. ‘It’s — it’s unconscionable!’ she spluttered. ‘It’s yellow journalism! Why, Mr Bainbridge, it isn’t even a Hearst paper!’”

There’s a lot of it (madness) about, so of course there has to be a psychiatrist, who appears – in a fictional surprise – to be quite sensible.  When Forstmann manages a guilt ridden and distraught nurse at the infirmary by giving her something to do,  Bainbridge is impressed by the management technique: “All morning she wept on my shoulder. You present her with a titbit of occupational therapy and she’s off as happily as a beagle after a rabbit. It’s as my wife used to say when the children were in nursery school — child psychology doesn’t work for parents.”

Chief Flaherty of the local police is conveniently useless so this leaves the sleuthing to the amateurs – a cub reporter – Jack Donnelly – hungry for a story, and a sharp but self deprecating undergrad, Kate Innes. Jack first meets Kate when she is sitting with her Southern Belle friend – Honey Sacheveral (a tomato as per Jack) in the back room of a bar. Honey has  a taste for brandy Alexanders and the prodigious student alcohol consumption suggest Connecticut’s drinking laws were clearly more lax in 1946.

Trigger warning: Dated cultural attitudes and language, sexism, and coded clothing in the offing. Some may be offended.

He could have passed for a college boy, with his crew cut and his horn-rimmed glasses, his sloppy tweeds. He sat down discreetly, not giving the girls any kind of obvious eye. One of them was quite a tomato — what is referred to as a long-stemmed American beauty. This was going to be what you call mixing business with pleasure. The other was on the dumpy side, with a frowsy feather cut and horn-rimmed glasses like the young man’s own. She was wearing dungarees and a sweatshirt; the first had on a pale-pink sweater and skirt – good enough to eat

Wisecracking Jack and plucky, super-smart Kate set out to solve the mystery in spite of his relentless chauvinism and personal remarks about her clothing and body shape, all of which jar modern ears. 

Dark Moments

As well as the humor, The Horizontal Man has its dark moments. It delves into the  psychological unraveling of its characters and explores themes of madness and desire with bad parenting and hysteria as side dressing. The psychiatrist, Dr. Forstmann reflects on the “poetry of unreason,” a philosophical undercurrent that gives the book  a depth that sets it apart from its contemporary and more straightforward mysteries.

Queers and Quirks

The Horizontal Man provides a quirky insight into another time. It’s a psychological mystery steeped in  mid-C20th Freudianism and the cultural references are interesting. Eustis said that she wrote the novel because she knew so many people in college she’d like to murder. She has a keen eye for absurdity. 

When our heroine Kate and Honey are trying to recall a key detail, there’s an exchange that reveals casual prejudices and misconceptions. They are trying to remember what happened when in an incident crucial to the plot. Honey mentions her riding teacher Miss Hoogle:

‘Now let me see,’ said Honey. ‘On Mondays — yeah, I ride. That’s it. When it’s rainin’, Miss Hoogle comes and picks us up on the corner by The Coffee Shoppe.’
‘You mean,’ said Kate, momentarily distracted, ‘you actually know a character named Hoogle?’
‘Oh, honey, she’s real sweet — she comes from Atlanta.’
‘Not Miss Scarlett O’Hoogle?’
‘Uh-uh,’ said Honey seriously. ‘I think her first name is Mary Margaret. She teaches riding, you know.’
Kate groaned, but Honey went on undeterred.
‘Honey, I can’t help that’s what her name is. And you know what? I think she’s queer.’
‘How do you mean, queer?’
‘Oh, you know. Regular sort of queer. I mean, she has such a deep voice, and she goes around in pants all the time.’
‘So do I,’ said Kate morosely.
‘Oh, but honey, you’re like my mama says—full busted.’
Kate threw her hands in the air and collapsed against the back of the sofa, closing her eyes. In a moment she might have been seen to open one of them a trifle to view her own contours as they were spread before her. Meanwhile, Honey went on placidly.

Whatever!

As well as a mystery the novel is a kaleidoscopic exploration of the people who knew the dead man. It’s told  through multiple points of view without traditional chapters and as a set of colliding and overlapping scenes giving it a distinctly modernist feel. Literary references to Kafka, T.S.Eliot et al abound.

The novel is replete with broad brush humor and period detail – references to the New Deal, depression era Post Office murals, Freudian theory, hepcat, jitterbug and an “ancient professor emeritus of Greek who ate health foods and would, if you allowed him, discourse for hours on the benefits of eurhythmics and Dalcroze.” 

The Horizontal Man offers some sharp commentary and Eustis spares no-one. I enjoyed it.

Featured image: Detail “Effigies of Crusaders in Round Temple Church, London : after damage enemy action” It shows a stone effigies of of a knight set in the floor surrounded by dust and rubble. Norma Bull,  Imperial War Museum 1940-1944