For reasons beyond finding Puzzle for Fools (1936) merely okay, I’ve never quite been able to summon much enthusiasm for investigating the work of Jonathan Stagge/Patrick Quentin/Q. Patrick/etc. Maybe it’s all the pseudonyms, maybe it’s the fact that the names seem to hide an army of collaborators, maybe it’s their general unavailability…maybe it’s a combination of all of that. But The Scarlet Circle (1943) came recommended by someone (apologies, I get a lot of book recommendations) and, being newly minted in the American Mystery Classics range, there was no reason not to check it out. And, having read it, I’m still unenthusiastic about these guys, just now with more evidence.

On a fishing holiday in a New England town, “one of those spots against which the elements seemed to have a perpetual grudge”, Dr. Hugh Westlake and his young daughter Dawn are drawn first into the mysterious appearance of a Chinese lantern by a grave someone is busy disinterring, and then the death of a local woman, found strangled on the beach with a circle drawn in red lipstick around a mole on her cheek. Then a second woman is discovered murdered, a circle similarly drawn around a mole on her leg…and alongside each dead body was found yet another Chinese lantern.

That lantern…threw me into the mood for horror.

To the book’s credit, the setting feels windswept and interesting, with the various denizens of the town and the inn where Westlake is staying well-drawn and neatly imbricated in each other’s lives. The artist Virgil Fanshawe is using buxom Nellie Wood as a model for his scenes from Dante’s Inferno while his beautiful, timorous wife looks on, suspecting that more exists between them. And in this mistrust the Fanshawes neglect their five-year-old son Bobby, who is looked after by Daisy and lifeguard Buck Valentine, also modelling for Fanshawe and perhaps involved with Nellie. The way resentment laps against the edges of these relationships feels natural, though the constant references to and considerations regarding childcare do get in the way somewhat.

Westlake’s dealings with the locals — Dr. Gilchrist who brings him into proceedings, and local policeman Barnes, who “as a source of local information had to be firmly blue-penciled” — are nicely-realised, even if, as background characters, these and others feel more like names spouting dialogue than actual people. They seem to be there mainly to spout possible complications to the seemingly reasonless crimes, and to push their caps back on their heads and look flustered as oddnesses add up and no answer seems in sight, c.f. Gilchrist speculating on the possible psychological makeup of our killer — obviously wrong, but there as an addendum of sorts to the plot to give it heft.

In the debit column, then, we have that the book doesn’t really seem to get going until about three-quarters of the way through, with a visit to Chekov’s Penetentiary following much trudge, trudge, trudging through lots of interviews and lots of speculations (“No-one could call you boring,” Westlake is told in the final summary, and, hmmmm). Indeed, were this less well-written…

His neat face was disorganized by shock; his hands, below the immaculate white shirt cuffs, scurried back and forth like flustered mice.

…I’m not sure I would have persevered with it as I did, because the mystery is singularly uncompelling, and for all Otto Penzler touting its “impeccable use of clues and fair play ending” in his introduction, this might be the most scantily-clued book I’ve read since two weeks ago. There are maybe one-and-a-half clues in the whole thing, one of which is so egregiously lumpy in its dropping, and existing only to easily point the finger at the guilty party, that I’d probably find it hard to tolerate even if it wasn’t the killer themself who introduced it. And when you realise why so much attention has been given over to the kids and their playing throughout…yeuch. It’s one thing adding a human angle to proceedings, and quite another to drop in moppets purely to be the deus ex machina that saves the day in the final confrontation.

Under whatever name Stagge/Patrick/etc. published anything else, I remain somewhat lukewarm about reading further, especially with this vaunted in the introduction as the best of the Westlake series — I mean (rot13) gur guveq ivpgvz unq ab bgure zbyrf ba ure obql? Abar ng nyy? Abar?!? — and apparently worthy of reprinting ahead of seemingly so much else put out by this collective. It would be harsh indeed to dismiss an author after a mere two books, but at present I can see me trying a lot of other people before dipping a toe in these waters again.