Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

year to enlist the aid of enough friendly bartenders who would call me as soon as he came in.

The Depression caught me full in 1932 and I was laid off with twenty other administrative office workers a week before Christmas—facing a world that seemed utterly jobless. I determined at that moment that I’d never work for a corporation again and I’d succeed at writing or starve to death trying. I rented an apartment for $25 a month in a basement in Astoria and started my first full-length book—a Florida mystery called Blood on Lake Louisa. Paul moved in with me two months later and on and off for a year we existed on what short unsigned pieces I could sell to The New Yorker and Liberty. I established a moderate credit rating at a nearby friendly Italian grocery and ate so much spaghetti that I finally broke out with a wheat rash. During this time, I sought out a great deal of material regarding famous blind people and read about them to Paul. I hoped that some of their accomplishments would inspire him, but I eventually realized that Paul had slipped into his own private paranoiac world—identifying with Max Carrados, using liquor to bolster confidence that he could duplicate the impossible feats of Ernest Bramah’s overdrawn character. Paul would also challenge the accomplishments of blind persons with a negative approach that defied argument, such as claiming that John Milton “was educated at Cambridge, besides being an established poet before he went blind at forty-four.”

By 1932 I had reached the point of utter desperation with Paul and made an attempt to convince him that someone with even more severe handicaps than his could do something productive. I finally succeeded, through my agent, in getting in touch with Mr. John A. Macy, whose wife was the famous Anne Mansfield Sullivan who had trained Helen Keller. Mr. Macy was quite ill and died several months later, in August 1932, but the lengthy letter I wrote his wife interested her enough to furnish me with a list of famous blind people—and in reply to my complaints about Max Carrados, she wrote me: “You’re a mystery writer . . . so why not draw on the knowledge that you’ve accumulated and create a blind detective of your own—one who would be the antithesis of Max Carrados, who would never perform any feat in his detection or deduction that couldn’t be duplicated by someone totally blind—presuming they had the necessary brains and willpower to train themselves to try it.”

Thus the idea of Captain Duncan Maclain was born. It was in 1937 that the Crime Club published the first of the books about him, The Last Express. For forty years he has served me well—in serialization, syndication, movies, and foreign editions. He’s responsible for the organization of the Mystery Writers of America, Inc., and for the Blinded Veterans Association—formed at Avon Old Farms Army Schools of the Blind at Avon, Connecticut, in 1945, in which I hold honorary life membership Card No. 1. Even today, if you sit up late enough and watch the third repeat of Longstreet on ABC, you can see that the series is based on “Characters Created by Baynard Kendrick.”

Speaking to the B.V.A. on the occasion of their twenty-first annual convention at the Deauville Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida, on August 20, 1966, I was asked by one of the members if I happened to remember the name of that young blind soldier in St. Dunstan’s Home in London who through his perspicacity had quite unwittingly been the progenitor of the B.V.A. I was forced to say no—I hadn’t forgotten his name for I never knew it; he was merely one of a number of blinded British Tommies ensconced for the time being in St. Dunstan’s.

I intended to call this piece “The Birth of a Blind Detective” because, to me, Captain Duncan Maclain was really born—and I hope will live forever—showing to sighted people that although the blind of the world may have lost their eyes, their brains and their work live on.

—BAYNARD KENDRICK

THE ODOR

OF VIOLETS

CHAPTER I

THE CRAGS was built high up on an eminence above the little town of Tredwill Village, west of Hartford, in the Connecticut hills. Ordinarily, the tall buildings of the city could be seen from the Tredwill home. Now, even the few scattered houses in the village below were hidden from view.

Norma Tredwill (Mrs. Thaddeus Tredwill, number four) sat down at the top of the stairs on a broad window seat and looked out through the mullioned panes. Her warm red lips, always ready to part in humor or sympathy, were pensively set. She stared through the frost-marked glass at the swirling snow, oblivious of the storm.

She was thinking of Paul Gerente. Ten years before, she had put him out of her life completely, determined to forget a year of marriage to him which had been nothing more than a short, unhappy episode in her career.

A step sounded down the hall. Norma stood up just as her stepdaughter, Barbara, came out of her room. Babs was wearing a trim tailor-made suit and carrying a mink coat over her arm. She was the only one of the Tredwill family who had never quite accepted Norma into the Tredwill home. For three years, Norma had vainly tried to break down the barrier between them, a barrier which was never apparent on the surface, but which Babs, in a thousand small ways, managed to make smartingly real.

“You’re up early, darling,” Babs said with a smile.

The politeness was always there, deference even, but it came through too readily to be genuine. Babs’s tenderness was as apt as some adroit line of an author’s spotted in a play.

Norma said: —

“You’re up early yourself, Babs.”

“The weather, probably. Are you coming down? It’s a filthy day.”

“I certainly agree.” Norma looked at the coat on Babs’s arm. “Don’t tell me you’re planning on going out! The wind will blow you