In the 1930s, most women in mystery novels were either menopausal spinsters, deadly sirens, admiring wives or airheaded girlfriends brought along for the ride. Not so Emma Marsh, the thoroughly modern 26-year-old Boston antiques clerk in Elizabeth Dean’s three detective novels.  Although her publisher, the venerable Doubleday, Doran Crime Club, insisted on the dust jacket copy that the detecting chores were shared by the trio of Emma, her boss Jeff Graham, and her wealthy criminologist boyfriend Hank Fairbanks, Dean said she deliberately set out to make Emma the major player. The books all revolve around her. Maybe she isn’t much at spelling or geography and perhaps she butchers the odd literary quotation or two, but Emma is a keen judge of character with awesome powers of observation, more than able to hold her own when it comes to selling antiques or solving murders.

Much of the fun in this short-lived series lies in Dean’s description of what it was like to be a young woman on her own in Boston toward the end of the Great Depression. Lesser women might rankle at the barbs directed her way by Hank; Emma, instead, either ignores them (knowing they aren’t really true or meant to hurt) or gives back as good as she gets—or maybe a little better. After being pursued by one dark beauty, the newly rich Hank smiles and complacently asks, “ ‘What do women see in me?’  ‘It must be your looks,’ said Emma, dripping irony. ‘It couldn’t be your money.’ ”  And though Hank may look at other women, Emma is more amused than upset by this—and does a little dating on the side herself. What’s more, Emma always does the intelligent thing—if she stumbles into a dangerous situation, she turns and runs. And though it’s Hank who sets out to be a detective, even he has to admit that it’s Emma who really cracks the case.

Equally refreshing is the banter among Emma, Hank, Jeff and various policemen and reporters as they pour scotch and sit around the shop talking murder. These exchanges bring to mind similar repartee in the novels of Craig Rice or in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, prompting a New Yorker reviewer to call Murder is a Collector’s Item “fast and funny,” although a New York Times critic, in an otherwise complimentary review, did suggest that Emma “drinks more than a nice girl should.”

When asked what made her books stand out from the pack, Dean would always cite their spontaneity. She refused to work from either an outline or a synopsis, knowing only the setting, the pivotal incident that sets the plot in movement, and the identity of the murderer. To know more, she said, would take the fun out of writing—and reading—her novels. Her work habits were simple. “I sit down at the typewriter (positioned on a mid-1700 walnut slant desk) and stare at that blank paper until I write something just to relieve the monotony.”

Written on a dare, Murder is a Collector’s Item was published in the spring of 1939. Liz (as her friends called her) wasn’t thinking about writing a mystery when she met one day with a group of friends in her Council Bluffs, Iowa, home. One of them suggested as a lark that they each see if they could write 20,000 words of fiction in a month’s time. Only Liz met the deadline, at which point her friends challenged her to enlarge it into an 80,000-word novel. A year later it was done and accepted by the prestigious Doubleday, Doran Crime Club, whose editors proclaimed it “one of the best stories in the spring... list.”

For the background of the mystery she drew upon her own experiences. After graduating from Pembroke College (now part of Brown University) and obtaining a masters degree from Radcliffe, Liz worked in the famous Boston antiques shop owned by George McMahon, who provided the model for the irascible but tender-hearted Jeff Graham. Much of the enjoyment of Murder is a Collector’s Item lies in Dean’s obviously authentic portrait of the day-to-day operations of an antiques shop. Watch her as she maneuvers a difficult customer into a purchase or tries to explain the financial aspects of the business to wide-eyed cops who can’t believe a dealer would pay a thousand dollars for an old desk and then turn around and sell it for four times that amount.

She followed up that maiden effort with two more novels featuring Emma, Murder is a Serious Business (1940), written at the encouragement of her editors at the Saturday Evening Post and once again set in Boston, and Murder a Mile High (1944), set in Colorado, where Liz and Abbott, her ophthalmologist husband, maintained a summer home on a ranch near Evergreen because of Liz’s severe hay fever. She used the royalties from her first book to furnish her historic Council Bluffs home with antiques, all purchased in New England except for one table which had been transported by pioneers by oxcart to Boulder, Colorado. The rest of her royalties went to buying purebred Aberdeen Angus cattle to stock the ranch she called Buckshot. Liz approached the cattle business with the same enthusiasm she had tackled other projects and in 1951 she finished first in the Jefferson County (Colorado) Angus field trials,  with her entry scoring 193 out of a possible 200 points.

Her third and final mystery was published while she was living in Warrington, Florida, near Pensacola, where her husband was stationed during World War II. Her son William said the change in scenery disrupted her writing and though she continued to sell stories and articles to well-paying slick magazines like Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post, she was never able to recapture the spirit needed to create her Emma Marsh mysteries.

Upon her return to Council Bluffs at the end of the war, Dean threw herself into the activities of the local historical society, spearheading a drive to save the historic Squirrel Cage Jail with its revolving cylindrical cellblock. Born in New York City in 1901, she died in Council Bluffs in 1985 at the age of 84. Her career as a mystery writer was a short one, but in Murder is a Collector’s Item she produced one of the most entertaining detective novels of the 1930s and in Emma Marsh she gave us a truly original character, a precursor of the independent women sleuths who finally came into their own in the last two decades of the century.

Tom & Enid Schantz
April 1998