A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

know that the seventeenth of March is not Saint Patrick’s birthday?”

“What d’ya know?” the bartender murmured politely.

“Nope. It’s the day he died,” said Mitch. “I write, see? So I read.

Bits of information like that stick in my mind. I’ve got no memory for figures and yet…Know the year Saint Patrick died? It was the year 461.”

“That so?” said the bartender.

“You take four sixty-one twice and put the decimal in the right place. Of course that’s not very believable,” Mitch said, “although it really happened — on Saint Patrick’s Day in the morning. How come I knew — me a person who doesn’t always read the newspaper — the year Saint Patrick died? Well, a fellow doesn’t want to be made a fool of, does he? And probable is probable and improbable is improbable — but it’s all we’ve got to go on sometimes. But I’ll tell you something,” Mitch pounded the bar. “Money couldn’t have bought it.”

The bartender said soothingly, “I guess not, Mac.”

The Purple Is Everything DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

Dorothy Salisbury Davis (b. 1916), born in Chicago and a graduate of Barat College, is clearly a person for the long haul. Her marriage to actor Harry Davis lasted from 1946 until his death in 1993, and she continues to contribute to a field of writing she entered more than half a century ago with the novel The Judas Cat (1949), most recently with a new story in the anthology Murder Among Friends (2000). Davis is, by her own account, an odd fit in the crime-fiction genre. She has bemoaned her inability to create a memorable series character, though Julie Hayes of her last few novels makes the grade, and she has a distaste for violence and murder. (One of the anthologies she edited for the Mystery Writers of America is called Crime Without Murder [1970].) However, her expressed enthusiasm for villains over heroes helps to explain her success in the field. Among her best-known books are the regional classic The Clay Hand (1950), the Roman Catholic-themed A Gentle Murderer (1951), and the 1969 bestseller Where the Dark Streets Go.

In introducing her collection Tales for a Stormy Night (1984), Davis credits her late friend and fellow mystery writer Margaret Manners with giving her the method for stealing a painting used in the Edgar-nominated “The Purple Is Everything.” “I even remember the spot,”

Davis wrote, “Sixth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, a few paces, in those days, from Guffanti’s Restaurant.” Though it is unquestion-ably a crime story, it has its author’s moral concerns at its heart and it is of a quality that might as well have been published in The New Yorker as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

You are likely to say, reading about Mary Gardner, that you knew her, or that you once knew someone like her. And well you may have, for while her kind is not legion it endures and sometimes against great popular odds.

You will see Mary Gardner — or someone like her — at the sym-phony, in the art galleries, at the theatre, always well-dressed if not quite fashionable, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other women all of whom have an aura, not of sameness, but of mutuality. Each of them has made — well, if not a good life for herself, at least the best possible life it was in her power to make.

Mary Gardner was living at the time in a large East Coast city. In her late thirties, she was a tall lean woman, unmarried, quietly feminine, gentle, even a little hesitant in manner but definite in her tastes. Mary was a designer in a well-known wallpaper house. Her salary allowed her to buy good clothes, to live alone in a pleasant apartment within walking distance of her work, and to go regularly to the theater and the Philharmonic. As often as she went to the successful plays, she attended little theater and the experimental stage. She was not among those who believed that a play had to say something. She was interested in “the submerged values.” This taste prevailed also in her approach to the visual arts — a boon surely in the wallpaper business whose customers for the most part prefer their walls to be seen but not heard.

In those days Mary was in the habit of going during her lunch hour — or sometimes when she needed to get away from the drawing board — to the Institute of Modern Art which was less than a city block from her office. She had fallen in love with a small, early Monet titled Trees Near L’Havre, and when in love Mary was a person of searching devotion. Almost daily she discovered new voices in the woodland scene, trees and sky reflected in a shimmering pool — with more depths in the sky, she felt, than in the water.

The more she thought about this observation the more convinced she became that the gallery had hung the picture upside down. She evolved a theory about the signature: it was hastily done by the artist, she decided, long after he had finished the painting and perhaps at a time when the light of day was fading. She would have spoken to a museum authority about it — if she had known a museum authority.

Mary received permission from the Institute to sketch within its halls and often stood before the Monet for an hour, sketch-book in hand. By putting a few strokes on paper she felt herself conspicuously inconspicuous among the transient viewers and the guards.

She would not for anything have presumed to copy the painting and she was fiercely resentful of the occasional art student who did.

So deep was Mary in her contemplation of Claude Monet’s wooded scene that on the morning of the famous museum fire, when she first smelled the smoke, she thought it came from inside the picture itself. She was instantly furious, and by an old association she indicted a whole genre of people — the careless American tourist in a foreign land. She was not so far away from reality, however, that she did not realize almost at once there was actually a fire in the building.

Voices cried out alarms in the corridors and men suddenly were running. Guards dragged limp hoses along the floor and dropped them — where they lay like great withered snakes over which people leaped as in some tribal rite. Blue smoke layered the ceiling and then began to fall in angled swatches — like theatrical scrims gone awry.

In the far distance fire sirens wailed.

Mary Gardner watched, rooted and muted, as men and women, visitors like herself, hastened past bearing framed pictures in their arms; and in one case two men carried between them a huge Chagall night scene in which the little creatures seemed to be jumping on and off the canvas, having an uproarious time in transit. A woman took the Rouault from the wall beside the Monet and hurried with it after the bearers of the Chagall.

Still Mary hesitated. That duty should compel her to touch where conscience had so long forbidden it — this conflict increased her confusion. Another thrust of smoke into the room made the issue plainly the picture’s survival, if not indeed her own. In desperate haste she tried to lift the Monet from the wall, but it would not yield.

She strove, pulling with her full strength — such strength that when the wire broke, she was catapulted backward and fell over the viewer’s bench, crashing her head into the painting. Since the canvas was mounted on board, the only misfortune — aside from her bruised head which mattered not at all — was that the picture had jarred loose from its frame. By then Mary cared little for the frame. She caught up the painting, hugged it to her, and groped her way to the gallery door.

She reached the smoke-bogged corridor at the instant the water pressure brought the hoses violently to life. Jets of water spurted from every connection. Mary shielded the picture with her body until she could edge it within the raincoat she had worn against the morning drizzle.

She hurried along the corridor, the last apparently of the volunteer rescuers. The guards were sealing off the wing of the building, closing the fire prevention door. They showed little patience with her protests, shunting her down the stairs. By the time she reached the lobby the police had cordoned off civilians. Imperious as well as impervious, a policeman escorted her into the crowd, and in the crowd, having no use of her arms — they were still locked around the picture — she was shoved and jostled toward the door and there pitilessly jettisoned into the street. On the sidewalk she had no hope at all finding anyone in that surging, gaping mob on whom she could safely