DETOUR (1953) by Helen Nielsen

Danny Ross is 18 years old and heading south, anxious to start a new life. A few hundred miles from the Mexico border his car packs up but is offered a lift by old Doc Gaynor, who is heading to Cooperton. They stop at a roadside cafe in nearby Mountain View, where talk is focused on the death the night before of town lush, Francy. When Danny goes back to the car to rejoin the Doc, he finds the old man bludgeoned to death and is promptly accused of killing him and maybe Francy too. It’s not long before he is on the run …

I submit this review for Bev’s Golden Age Vintage Mystery Challenge bingo; and Patti Abbott’s Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at her fab Pattinase blog.

“Danny wasn’t running away from life; he was running towards it”

Danny, who is very scared indeed, is thrown into jail by Virgil Keep, the violent and choleric sheriff, who tries to beat a confession out of him without much success. Danny is found with just over $200 in his possession, the same amount the Doc had just collected at the diner shortly before being killed. This was seen by several witnesses including the excitable cafe proprietor Viola and her husband as well as one of the sheriff’s men, the hyena-like Jim Rice.  The beating is interrupted by news that Trace Cooper, the last member of the family who founded the town, has once again got drunk and smashed up the local tavern. Trace gets hauled in and thrown into the cell next door to Danny until he sobers up – but it turns out this is a ruse. Trace, who once upon a time was going to be a lawyer, has in fact been asked by Laurent, the once prominent but now retired attorney who bought Cooper’s debt-ridden property, to see if Danny is guilty as the whole town seems to think or is being railroaded, not least out of affection for the old Doc. Though maybe he has another motive …

“It was like finding a key only to realize that the door was still missing”

In her introduction to the Black Lizard edition, Marcia Muller sings Nielsen’s praises for her focus on the psychology and emotion of the characters and this certainly is a major factor here. The basic setup is of course a time-tested one: an innocent is accused of murder and has to go on the run to prove their innocence, dodging both the authorities and of course the real killer. But one what takes away from reading this mystery is the depiction of the callow youth at its centre and the supporting cast of characters. Along with Keep’s strange and downtrodden wife Ada and loudmouthed Viola, our main interest is in a peculiar triangle with Trace at its pinnacle. It emerges that he and Francy were old friends and that when she got ‘in trouble’ Trace was named as the father, which broke up his relationship with Joyce Gaynor, the Doc’s daughter. It is Trace who rather grudgingly assumes the role of investigator in the story as he very quickly comes to realise that Danny must be innocent, despite his stubbornness and tendency to get into trouble much too easily. Indeed, this is as much a bildungsroman as a detective story. Which is both a blessing and a bit of a problem here …

“The curse of blood seemed to be following Danny Ross …”

Nielsen does a great job of depicting the small and claustrophobic Cooperton community in which everyone listens to everybody else’s phone calls and gossip is the only viable currency left in a once prosperous town now slowly dwindling to nothing. The townfolk quickly decides that Danny must have killed the Doc and maybe Francy too, even though initially her roadside death was thought accidental. But it emerges that the Doc spent some time with her at the hospital before she died – what if she was attacked and left for dead but had the time to reveal the identity of the killer only to the Doc – would that provide motive to kill the old man too? A viable alternative suspect emerges and Trace and Danny, now on the run, track the man down independently only to arrive to find his murdered body. This points to the highly contrived nature of the story (the killer, Trace and Danny all manage to track down a man on the run on the flimsiest of clues), which began with Danny having almost the exact amount of money that the Doc had. With its naturalistic characterisation and plausible scene-setting, this kind of unconvincing, coincidence-laden plotting stands out as rather mechanical. It doesn’t hurt the book too badly, but it might have been better if Nielsen had made it less of a mystery and more of a thriller as the attempts to misdirect the reader are too contrived to convince (I zeroed in on the murderer right away frankly). None the less, there is plenty going on here, the characters are compelling and the slow reveal of the various secrets, including one relating to Danny on the last page, are very nicely dovetailed. Nielsen doesn’t even rate a mention in many of the standard reference works in the genre (including Murphy, Herbert, Symons and Ashley) but I look forward to reading much more of her work in the near future. To start, you couldn’t do much better than check out Curtis’ blog, The Passing Tramp and John F. Norris’ magisterial, Pretty Sinister Books.

I submit this review for Bev’s 2014 Golden Age Vintage Mystery Challenge bingo in the ‘multiple title’ category as it was also published as Detour to Death:

***** (3.5 fedora tips out of 5)

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