As my grandfather used to say, “When you fall off the horse, get back on the horse”.  And that’s why he lost his job as a stuntman in Western movies. But the fact remains that lately I’ve had some disheartening reading experiences with favoured authors — John Dickson Carr, J.J. Connington, Freeman Wills Crofts, A.A. Fair, Craig Rice, Cornell Woolrich, J.J. Connington again — and so the tempting thing is to leave them alone for a while, wait for that memory to fade, and then return. But, no, I’m not doing that, I’m reading Rice again now, because why not? That’s what the horse is here. It was a literary horse all along.

Alas, by clambering back onto my horse with Yesterday’s Murder, a.k.a. Telefair (1942), I’ve fallen from the playful, gambolling Shetland pony of Rice’s typical métier and reseated myself atop a brooding, dangerous, and frankly intimidating shire horse of something approaching a more Gothic novel of gloom and suspense. And while I didn’t completely revel in the experience of reading this, I’m reluctant to call it a bad book, because I suspect it’s an excellent example of the type…it’s just not the type I’m really ever going to be looking for.

Having lost his parents at an early age, David Telefair has had everything in his life paid for by an uncle who he has never met. But then, out of the blue, a summons comes from Philip Telefair, requesting the twenty-year-old David’s presence at the isolated family pile, also called Telefair, on an island in the Chespeake region…the island also being called Telefair. And, look, there’s something you have to acknowledge about this book: the world “Telefair” appears in it a lot — over 700 times by my estimate — and it firstly gets annoying, then it becomes kind of hilarious, then it starts to sort of lull you into the hypnotic rhythm of the story. Because David Telefair’s visit to Philip Telefair at Telefair on Telefair clearly has something ominous in back of it.

“I don’t know why he sent for you. I don’t know why he wants you here. But you ought never to have come. You must go away at once, if you can.”

There aren’t a huge number of people in or on or at Telefair, but seemingly every one of them has some reticence about David’s presence, or seems to have some expiation at the core of their involvement with old Philip Telefair (“I do this to wipe away the great wrong I have done,” becomes a repeated refrain). And, look, for most of the book, that’s it: people act suspiciously, Philip Telefair is friendly to David but apparently mistrusted by some or hated by others (a servant turning a look of “incarnadine fury” upon his back is a real jolt), and David wanders around as if to allow Rice the opportunity to stretch her stylistic muscles…which she does magnificently.

Again he had a sudden fancy that Telefair was not a real house, built solidly of wood and stone and brick, but a creation of light and mist, vaporous, unreal, ready to evaporate before his eyes at so much as a breath. The pale curtains of fog that covered the windows had become part of the house itself; he felt that it would be impossible to tell now where the house ended and the mist began.

Rice really is pouring something out here, with her setting at once magnificent (“[H]e saw new and unsuspected beauty everywhere, beauty and the bright promise of days to come.”) and sinister (“The very grass was lush, tropical, and curiously evil.”), bringing to my mind much more the work of Shirley Jackson than the occasional buffoonery of my previous encounters with Rice. And what’s most impressive is how she keeps up this air of gloomy oppression without either deviation or swamping the reader into somnolence. It’s fascinating, although slow going and light on actual plot.

Living, as he did, always in camps or schools, it seemed to him in those early days that he must have come into the world without father or mother, without anyone of his own, as some elf child might have strayed into this other country from a lost land of twilight and mysteries. 

The plot, when it eventually, almost reluctantly, rears its head, isn’t hard to anticipate, but also by that point Rice has sunk you so deep into the fever dream of Telefair (house, island, family, or novel — take your pick) that it’s difficult to know how to explain it. I’m honestly not even sure what happened in the closing stages, how much of it is real and how much merely the diseased perceptions of a perspective character who has become the very thing he sought to escape from. And yet, that’s kind of wonderful, even if not narratively satisfying for my plot-hungry brain.

Perhaps the frustrated result of an author who feared becoming typecast, or maybe simply an experiment to prove to herself that she could if she chose to, dammit, Yesterday’s Murder fascinates in its steady layering of unspoken eldritch fears as a way of rendering the world we know increasingly abstract and foreign. In a way, it’s as much a separation from the quotidian as Rice’s more energetic, plot-dense novels featuring John J. Malone, just balancing out on the sombre side of the scale, and evincing a talent I would never have imagined but am delighted to have experienced. I’ll never reread it, and would no doubt recommend many other Rices before this, but I can’t say I altogether regret the time spent in its coils.

Featuring Melville Fairr [a.p.a. by Michael Venning]:

Featuring Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak:

Standalone: