The year 1939 saw two rival world’s fairs in the United States, one on each coast, and each provided the setting for a contemporary mystery novel. Just as both fairs were economic failures, so were the novels inspired by them, especially the one set on the East Coast. Murder at the New York World’s Fair was written under  the pseudonym Freeman Dana by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, the creator of  Asey Mayo, otherwise known as the Codfish Sherlock, and was commissioned by none other than Random House founder Bennett Cerf. Taylor struggled with the novel, missed a deadline or two, and finally turned in a product that she obviously didn’t have much of her heart in. She was paid $250, a fair advance for the time considering that only 900 copies were printed on its publication in 1938, as the final preparations for the opening of the fair were getting underway. The book would not be reprinted until 1987, by which point all of Taylor’s other mysteries, including the eight featuring Leonidas Witherall and published under the pseudonym Alice Tilton, had been reissued by Foul Play Press. Today a fine first edition in dust jacket of Murder at the New York World’s Fair fetches five times the money Taylor was paid to write it.

While Taylor had already achieved fame as a mystery writer, John Mersereau, the author of Murder Loves Company, set at the San Francisco World’s Fair, officially known as the Golden Gate Exposition, was a relatively unknown pulp magazine writer who had previously published two adventure novels, both of which had been made into silent movies. Murder Loves Company, published in 1940, was the first of only two full-length mystery novels he would publish before service in World War II interrupted his writing career. Whether Mersereau had read the Freeman Dana novel is unknown, but it’s unlikely, given its small print run and failure to attract a wide audience. The idea for Murder Loves Company was developed over the kitchen table when Robert Hyde, an old friend from Mersereau’s student days at Berkeley, showed up to pitch possible plots. Mersereau figured the fair, which was already under way, had definite commercial value as a background for a mystery. Later writers have also recognized the appeal of using a world’s fair as a setting for crime fiction, usually, however, choosing the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, no doubt because of the exploits there of serial killer H.H. Holmes. Robert Bloch first used this setting in his 1974 American Gothic, followed nearly thirty years later by Nancy Wikarski’s The Fall of White City and Alec Michod’s The White City. A nonfiction study of Holmes and the Columbian Exposition, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, won the Edgar for best fact/crime book for 2003.

The Golden Gate Exposition was held on the man-made Treasure Island, one of three major public works projects undertaken in the San Francisco Bay Area during the Great Depression, the other two being the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. The fair itself, of course, was only to be a temporary occupant of the 400-acre island, which was built as the site of a future airport. The long-term tenant was to be Pan American airlines which intended to operate its clipper service from there.

Construction of the island by the Army Corps of Engineers began in March 1936, before either the Bay Bridge or Golden Gate Bridge was finished. Some 287,000 tons of boulders were dumped off the Yerba Buena shoals, creating a lagoon a mile long and two-thirds of a mile wide. Dredges working 24 hours a day pumped up sand, mud, and fossils from the sea bottom to fill in the lagoon. A causeway was built connecting it to Yerba Buena Island, so that cars traveling to the exposition could get to the island via a future Bay Bridge exit. It was given the name Treasure Island because the silt washed into the bay by the Sacramento River contained enough gold that a hard-working miner could pan a dollar’s worth in a day.

Once there was ground to break, ground-breaking ceremonies took place, with the flags of various nations borne to the ceremony by members of the San Francisco Chinatown Boy Scout troop. Photos of the event prominently show the American flag sandwiched in between the flags of two nations, Japan and Nazi Germany, that we would soon be at war against. Organizers of the New York World’s Fair valiantly tried to derail the San Francisco effort, even appealing to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to intervene. Roosevelt refused, probably because he saw both fairs as an indication of the American spirit and proof that his New Deal was bringing the Depression to an end.

Fair organizers were so successful in cautioning the public that opening day, February 18, 1939, might bring long traffic delays that people stayed away in droves, with only about two-thirds of the 200,000 fairgoers expected showing up. Attendance never caught up to expectations and vendors beseeched fair organizers to lower admission charges or to rebate rents. However, Chicago fan dancer Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch, where a bevy of beauties dressed only in cowboy boots and G-strings pitched horseshoes, rode burros or played badminton behind plate glass windows for the edification of fair-goers, managed to attract 65,000 visitors willing to pay a quarter apiece during the first week alone, perhaps because ticket-sellers were notorious for their willingness to accept fake IDs. As an attraction, it certainly outdrew one holdover exhibit from San Francisco’s first world’s fair, held in 1915. Stella, a painting of a reclining nude with a machine-powered heaving bosom, had been a hit two and half decades earlier, but in 1939 she couldn’t compete with nude badminton.

Those attractions were off the Gayway, a carnival-like arcade where barkers pitched games and freak shows to passersby. Much of the action in Murder Loves Company takes place at or near the Gayway. If some of its concessions make the fair seem a bit tacky, they pale in comparison with the architectural style, or styles, chosen by the organizers. Time magazine called its Pacific Basin motif, with its odd mixture of Mayan, Cambodian, Indian and Burmese structures made of plywood and stucco that was tinted in hues of aqua, gold and beige, an “exotic chowchow of the ageless East and the American West.” The most prominent structure, a 400-foot tall campanile called the Tower of the Sun, was derided by one and all, but Ralph Stackpole’s Pacifica, a blocky, enigmatic 80-foot female figure, drew rave reviews, perhaps because, as fair historian Richard Reinhardt wrote, it bore  an “eerie likeness to an overgrown automobile ornament.” Stackpole was so enamored of his creation that he suggested—in vain—that a permanent version of her be built on Alactraz Island as a Pacific equivalent of the Statue of Liberty.

Very little of the actual fair remains today. The airport was never built and the island was turned over to the military not long after the fair closed its gates for the last time in the fall of 1940.

 Thousands of GIs passed through the gates on Treasure Island on their way to combat in the Pacific.

If the buildings were a bit gaudy, the flora were spectacular. Thousands of flowers and trees were planted on the island, including dozens of huge ancient olive trees that were the descendents of trees planted by the Spanish friars who tended the missions during California’s colonial period. To insure that the trees survived transplanting, each one was dug up with an enormous root ball weighing several tons. Those are the model for the trees that Professor James Yeats Biddle, the young University of California professor of horticulture, so vigorously attempts to protect in Murder Loves Company.

Although Murder Loves Company was one of the earliest mysteries with a horticultural background (Sergeant Cuff enjoyed his roses in The Moonstone, Hercule Poirot had a passion for vegetable marrows, and just about everyone knows that Nero Wolfe spent several hours each day with his orchids), Mersereau was not an expert gardener, according to his son John Mersereau, Jr., who added, with a barely suppressed chuckle in his voice, “unless you count the time he spent cutting down trees as a logger.”

Mersereau was born in 1898 in the northern Michigan peninsula town of Manistique, but his father’s ill health forced the family to move to California around 1907. Following graduation from Oakland High School, where he was editor of the school newspaper, the young Mersereau hiked the Oregon coast, worked as a mule-skinner, served as a fireman on Oakland’s last horse-drawn ladder rig, and then homesteaded near Mariposa in the Sierra foothills. He also began selling short stories to the pulp magazines. Three times he entered the University of California at Berkeley, remaining enrolled for two weeks, two months, and finally two years.

In 1927, he married Winona Beth Roberts, with whom he had “the two stalwart” sons, Charles and John, Jr., referred to in the short biography he included in the Lippincott edition of Murder Loves Company. Things began looking up for the Mersereaus. Two of John’s adventure novels, Whispering Canyon and The Checkered Flag, were bought for the movies and in 1925 he had inherited a large sum from his parents, although most of this was lost in the crash of 1929. In spite of this setback, Mersereau moved his family from Oakland to a new house he had built in the Berkeley hills in 1931. Although his son John said his father was happy about the move, he obviously had some reservations about the area, referring to “the antagonism of those cold, soulless hills” in Chapter Eight of Murder Loves Company. He called Berkeley the ideal setting for a college, since the hills drove people inside.  “Rigid and virgin, they kept aloof, conceding nothing. Student and teacher alike felt the withdrawal and buried themselves deeper into books.”

The Mersereaus spent their winters in Berkeley and their summers at “The Roost,” a house he had built in the Santa Cruz mountains near Los Gatos. It was here where he met another Las Gatos writer, Owen Atkinson, in 1933. The two collaborated on a number of pulp magazine thrillers under the pseudonym Richard Race Wallace. Atkinson turned one of these stories into a screenplay which was filmed as The Pool Where Horror Dwelt, starring Wallace Beery and Mickey Rooney. In 1938, the Mersereaus bought a rundown resort, which they rechristened “Garbled Gables,” not far from The Roost. It was here that Mersereau wrote Murder Loves Company as well as The Corpse Comes Ashore, published in 1941 and set in the Caribbean, featuring as its sleuth-hero the exotically if somewhat improbably named Captain Xenophon York.

After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Mersereau enlisted in the Navy at the age of 43 and was commissioned a lieutenant, serving as a speechwriter for the Twelfth Naval District. After the war, he was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he teamed up with Alan Bosworth (author of Run Silent, Run Deep) in editing a navy recruitment magazine. After he was discharged from the service, he sold Garbled Gables and moved to Santa Barbara, where he built a house with his own hands, as he had done in Los Gatos, although he had no training as a mechanic or a carpenter. It was there that he and his wife became close friends with Margaret Millar, already a very successful mystery writer, and her husband Kenneth, who was later to achieve literary stardom and best-seller status as Ross Macdonald. Mersereau continued to write, but his stories failed to find a market—the pulps were dying—and he was finally forced to take a job he hated as a dispatcher for the California Highway Patrol.

In the early 1960s, the Mersereaus visited Mexico, fell in love with the country, and eventually built a house on the shores of Lake Chapala, outside the village of Ajijic near Guadalajara, where they lived until 1972. They then moved to Forsythe, Missouri, where they lived until John died in 1989 and Winona in 1993.

Mersereau lived to 91 in spite of continuously smoking a pipe, the only habit he seems to share with James Biddle, the hero of Murder Loves Company, and consuming vast quantities of chocolate syrup, taken neat. He was a close friend in the 1930s to Haakon Chevalier, the University of California French professor who is said to have attended Communist Party meetings and later urged Robert Oppenheimer to give the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets, since they were our allies. (Chevalier said he was framed). Mersereau didn’t share Chevalier’s beliefs, taking what his son John referred to as a cynical approach to politics.

Both Mersereaus were far more interested in badminton than politics (one wonders if they had watched those badminton matches at Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch on Treasure Island), helping to organize clubs in Los Gatos and Santa Barbara.

The Mersereaus’ life had as many ups as it had downs, and certainly John’s writing career didn’t head in the direction he might have liked. But his son said that neither his father nor his  mother were ever bothered by having to endure somewhat straitened circumstances at times, as long as they were able to live life on their own terms.

No one would argue that Murder Loves Company is one of the great forgotten mysteries of the 1940s, although the book has its obvious charms, not the least of which is the appealing and innocent courtship of its two principal players. But it is its remarkable portrait of what life was like in Northern California before World War II, when one could jump into a car and get out into the country in no time, that begs a rereading after all these years. The landscape of that period is irretrievably lost to the bulldozers, as are the wonders of Treasure Island and its fabulous exposition, but they’ll live on forever in the pages of Murder Loves Company.

Tom & Enid Schantz
June 2004

We’re indebted to John Mersereau, Jr., for his willingness to share his memories of his father, as well as to Richard Reinhardt, whose Treasure Island: San Francisco’s Exposition Years (1973) is an engaging and poignant recollection of what it was like to visit the Golden Gate Exposition as a teenager.