Clyde B. Clason’s career as a mystery writer took up only five of
 his 84 years, but in the short span between 1936 and 1941 he produced ten long and very complicated detective novels, all published by the prestigious Doubleday, Doran Crime Club, featuring the elderly historian Professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough.

Born in Denver in 1903, Clason spent many years in Chicago, the setting for several of his novels, including The Man from Tibet, before moving to York, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1987. During his early years in Chicago Clason worked as an advertising copywriter and a trade magazine editor, producing books on architecture, period furniture and one book on writing, How To Write Stories that Sell. For some reason, Clason stopped selling mysteries on the eve of World War II, although he published several other books, including Ark of Venus (1955), a science fiction novel, and I am Lucifer (1960), the confessions of the devil as told to Clason. He also produced several nonfiction works dealing with astronomy as well as The Delights of the Slide Rule (1964), his last published book-length work.

Why Clason left the crime fiction genre, never to return, remains a mystery today, although he later told critics that his kind of book had gone out of fashion with the emphasis on blood-and-guts hardboiled fiction during the post-World War II period. Long after they went out of print his books remained popular with readers and have always fetched premium prices in the antiquarian book trade. And modern critics, though taking the occasional potshot at his sometimes florid prose, still commend him on his research and ability to construct convincing locked room puzzles.

Indeed, seven of Clason’s ten Westborough mysteries feature locked rooms or impossible crimes. Along with John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson, Clason was a leading exponent of this very popular subgenre, with locked room mystery connoisseur Robert C.S. Adey referring to the Westborough canon as being among “the more memorable” entries in this narrow field. Adey had special praise for The Man from Tibet, calling it a “well-written... above average golden-age novel” that was “genuinely interesting, and well researched,” and citing its “highly original and practical locked-room murder method.”

Other contemporary critics also looked upon this short-lived series with approval. Howard Haycraft, the genre’s first major historian, predicted that Clason was on the brink of becoming a mainstay of readers, while two-time Edgar-winning critic James Sandoe listed The Man from Tibet in his Readers’ Guide to Crime, a 1946 compilation of required titles for libraries, noting that this, as well as other Westborough titles, appeared frequently on the lists submitted to him by other critics for inclusion in his guide. Modern critics like Bill Pronzini and Jon L. Breen have also offered kind retrospective reviews of Clason’s work, although they disagreed on the merits of at least one of his books, with Pronzini praising Blind Drifts (1937) for its “particularly neat and satisfying variation on (the locked-room) theme,” while Breen said “the plot is farfetched and overelaborate, and the killer stands out rather obviously.” Both critics, however, were impressed with Clason’s research in this book in describing the operation of a Colorado gold mine. Breen was far more enthusiastic about The Man from Tibet, listing it as one of the 25 best amateur detective books in Max Allan Collins’ 2000 History of Mystery.

Research was obviously a passion with Clason, who certainly felt the need to provide his readers with an accurate portrait of Tibet, a country whose borders were closed to foreigners and whose religion, a form of Buddhism, was then little-known in this country. Purists might have objected to the amount of space Clason devoted to educating his readers but they can’t fault the skill with which he works the fruits of his research into the narrative. Such scholarship is evident in other titles as well, including Murder Gone Minoan (1939), in which Clason recreates an ancient civilization on an island off the California coast, or Green Shiver (1941), his last mystery, in which the reader learns a great deal about Chinese jade.

Murder Gone Minoan also showcases the author’s love of literary quotations. Westborough (and others) throw a bit from Shakespeare or Browning or Homer into their conversations whenever given the chance. Yet, these lines are far from mere window dressing and the reader would be well advised not to ignore this seemingly inconsequential banter. Very little of what Clason incorporates into his books is without motive. This was the age of “fair play” detection and Clason was a master of the form, planting clues and hints for the reader on practically every page.

Clason’s narrative skills were not inconsiderable, although modern readers might wish that his characters could deliver their lines with more “he saids” or “she askeds” than with such Tom Swifty’s as “he choked” or “he opined.” On the other hand, it’s somewhat refreshing to read a mystery in which ejaculations refer only to exclamations of speech.

Like other mystery writers of the day, Clason was not above inserting a little romance into his stories. In the crime novels of that era—Georgette Heyer’s mysteries spring immediately to mind—such romantic entanglements were actually useful in helping the reader sort out potential murder suspects. If you could figure out which two young people would eventually find their star-crossed way to each other, you could automatically eliminate two suspects from your list. A wise reader of Murder Gone Minoan would do well to sort out such relationships. On the other hand, Westborough, like many other central characters of the period, seems if not asexual, at least beyond or above such temptations.

Unlike many other mystery novels of the time, Clason’s books are remarkably free of racial prejudice, at least on the part of the ever-rational Westborough, who on more than one occasion gently rebukes his companions for expressing racist sentiments. In The Man from Tibet he even manages to find a kind word or two (their foreign policy notwithstanding) to say about the Japanese, who were at the time plundering most of their neighbors in a dress rehearsal for World War II. Clason recognized that anti-Japanese sentiment was rampant among most Americans of the late 1930s. Westborough’s best friend, Lt. Mack, has little use for “Japs” and when the two visit a Chicago Japanese restaurant for lunch, Clason subtly mentions that the place is nearly empty. Westborough unfailingly treats the Tibetan characters with understanding and respect, going out of his way to explain to all the linguistic differences that account for their difficulties with the English language.

Too often modern critics excuse writers of the 1930s, like Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers, for fostering racial prejudice or anti-Semitic views, by jokingly dismissing complaints about such lapses as runaway political correctness. What these apologists forget is that while it may be acceptable and even necessary for an author to show that such views were commonplace at the time (as Clason does), the authorial expression of such views is never acceptable. Take for example, Bruce Hamilton’s 1930 English mystery, To Be Hanged (much praised by those two great snobs of crime fiction, Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor) in which a very minor—and very disagreeable—character is offhandedly described in the narrative as a “little Jew.” It is to Clason’s great credit that he was able, in the words of Ruth Rendell, to fulfill “the duty of the artist in rising above the petty prejudices of the day.”

Like other fair-play mysteries of the day, Clason’s books tend to end very abruptly once the murderer is revealed. Yet, even some of his biggest fans, like Pronzini, suggest that his books could have been improved by some judicious editing to cut their length from 80,000 words to 65,000. On the other hand, 80,000 or more words was the rule rather than the exception in the mysteries of Clason’s era. It was not until World War II, when paper restrictions prompted publishers to use lighter paper and to cram more words on a page, that the length of a typical mystery was reduced to 60,000 words. This will fill 192 pages, the number needed to make up six 32-page signatures, a very economical size book to produce. This has remained the standard until quite recently, and it wasn’t so long ago that Dodd, Mead cut—without explanation or editing to make sense—a major character from a Wendy Hornsby mystery just to ensure that the book did not exceed 192 pages.

Today, however, publishers are once again looking for bigger books, especially with “breakout” or bestselling authors, and a number of books in the crime fiction field have suffered from this verbal bloating. P.D. James, for example, started out writing tightly crafted gems, but all of her books after An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) bog down in endless details about the contents of suitcases or in long pieces of melancholy  introspection by her leading characters.

Clyde B. Clason, at least, stayed away from such pretentious drivel. Indeed, it’s his asides into Tibetan culture, or Chinese jade, or the working of a gold mine, as well as his unobtrusive social commentary, that make his books as appealing to today’s readers as they were to those of the pre-World War II era, even if his plots and characters are decidedly old-fashioned. Why he did not make the transition into the modern era will probably never be known, but we can’t help but wonder if he was unable or unwilling to produce the shorter, more streamlined mysteries the Crime Club insisted upon after the country went to war.  Whatever the reason, it’s our loss, but he still left behind a remarkable body of work considering the brief portion of his life he devoted to the writing of mystery fiction. 

Tom & Enid Schantz