OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS

  THE TULE MARSH MURDER

  NANCY BARR MAVITY (1890–1959) was a legendary newspaper reporter and feature writer for the Oakland Tribune for more than a quarter of a century and the literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. She wrote numerous newspaper and magazine articles on various subjects in addition to producing fiction and nonfiction books, most notably her series of mystery novels featuring crime reporter James Aloysius “Peter” Piper: The Tule Marsh Murder, The Body on the Floor, The Other Bullet, The Case of the Missing Sandals, The Man Who Didn’t Mind Hanging, and The Fate of Jane McKenzie.

  RANDAL S. BRANDT is a librarian at the Bancroft Library, the primary special collections library at the University of California, Berkeley. He catalogs rare books and has been dubbed “UC Berkeley’s Crime Librarian” for his role as curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection.

  THE TULE MARSH

  MURDER

  NANCY BARR

  MAVITY

  Introduction by

  RANDAL S.

  BRANDT

  AMERICAN

  MYSTERY

  CLASSICS

  TO

  STANLEY NORTON CITY EDITOR

  “I learned about murder from ’im”

  INTRODUCTION

  ON APRIL 23, 1959, the Oakland Tribune carried the announcement “Nancy Barr Mavity, Book Editor, Dies” and informed readers that Mavity had suffered a heart attack that morning and passed away in her Piedmont, California home “without warning when apparently in good health” at the age of sixty-eight.

  She had been at her desk at the Tribune the day before—the same as every day of the previous thirty-four years. An accompanying article declared that “in the years to come stories about her will be legendary” and highlighted her career and exploits as a journalist, concluding that she “always will be Mrs. Page One.”

  Refusing to be confined to a single role, Nancy Barr Mavity led three distinctive lives as a wife and mother, a successful crime and mystery novelist, and a well-respected newspaper journalist. So respected, in fact, that the Oakland Tribune literally stopped the presses and printed her obituary and career retrospective on the very day she died and in her usual spot—Page One.

  Nann Clark Barr was born in Bridgeport, Illinois, on October 22, 1890, to Dr. Granville Walter Barr, who, in a move that would later influence his daughter, traded a career in medicine for journalism, and Annabelle Applegate Barr. While Nannie (as she was called) was still a young girl, the family moved to Keokuk, Iowa, where her father became City Editor of the local newspaper, The Gate City.

  At the age of eighteen she earned an A.B. degree from her mother’s alma mater, Western College for Women, in Oxford, Ohio. She then went to Cornell University where she was awarded one of the prestigious Susan Linn Sage Graduate Scholarships and earned both a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Philosophy. With her new doctorate in hand, she obtained a position teaching philosophy at Connecticut College. Her academic career was short-lived, however, coming to an end after she resigned in protest when male colleagues with inferior academic credentials, teaching experience, and publication history were promoted above her.

  After leaving academia, she moved to New York City to join a publishing firm and began contributing essays and poetry to a variety of literary magazines. On Christmas Day 1917, she married Arthur Benton Mavity, fifteen years her senior, who worked as a salesman for Henry Holt & Company, and changed her name to Nancy (“Nann C.”) Barr Mavity. In March 1919, barely a month after the birth of their first child, a daughter also named Nancy, Arthur was promoted to the position of Pacific Coast Manager and transferred to Holt’s San Francisco office. The move was not a welcome one to Nancy, as she had a promising career in progress in New York, but she quickly adapted to her new life in California.

  The Mavitys settled in Oakland and in 1920 Nancy went to work for the San Francisco Chronicle writing book reviews and literary essays. In 1924, she accepted an assignment from Sunset Magazine for a series of articles written while traveling on her own for six months in Japan, China, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand. This was a truly remarkable undertaking, as she had to leave her husband at home alone with two young children—their son John Barr had been born in 1921—in order to pursue this opportunity. Remarkable, yes, but simply a matter of course in the Mavity household.

  In 1926, Nancy wrote a highly personal article on “The Wife, the Home, and the Job” for Harper’s Magazine in which she extolled the virtues of the working wife and mother and fiercely advocated for a woman’s right to choose her work and share parenting and housekeeping responsibilities with her husband. (She revisited this theme in a 1951 issue of Harper’s with a follow-up article, “The Two-Income Family,” reflecting on a quarter-century of working outside the home.)

  In the meantime, she began writing books—all types of books. Nancy’s first effort, Responsible Citizenship, a textbook on American politics co-written with her husband, appeared in 1923. This was soon followed by a volume of poetry dedicated to her daughter called A Dinner of Herbs and her first novel, Hazard, a largely autobiographical roman à clef. She also published a history of newspaper journalism, The Modern Newspaper, and a best-selling biography of celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson, Sister Aimee.

  It was when she went to work for the Oakland Tribune in 1925, however, that she found her true calling. In the retrospective published at her death, she is quoted as saying, “I went into newspaper work to enlarge my experience of people as an aid to fiction writing, then I stayed in it for its own sake.”

  Did she ever.

  For the next three decades, the byline “By Nancy Barr Mavity” appeared regularly in the pages of the Tribune. She wrote colorfully and authoritatively on a myriad of topics—from crime reporting to social reform, from literary criticism to local interest stories—and “won scratches, bruises, scars and accolades as a reporter who let no man beat her on a big story.” She covered a solar eclipse, labor strikes, and the Bay Area literary scene; she reported on the 1945 United Nations Conference in San Francisco; and she interviewed physicist Ernest O. Lawrence “when the University of California Cyclotron was but a gleam in his eye.”

  Nancy Barr Mavity’s first mystery novel, The Tule Marsh Murder, made the scene in 1929 and introduced ace crime reporter James Aloysius Piper, “commonly called Peter,” who is fiercely devoted to his paper, the Herald, and succeeds at his job by being relentless in his pursuit of a story, frequently conducting his own investigations without bothering to let the police in on the action. From 1929 to 1933, Peter Piper appeared in five additional novels; Mavity’s last mystery, The State Versus Elna Jepson, is a 1937 stand-alone courtroom drama about an obstinately independent young woman accused of murdering the wife of the man she loves.

  All of Mavity’s mysteries were serialized in the pages of the Oakland Tribune prior to hardcover publication and are notable for their portrayal of the role of science in the detection of crime. Psychology and forensics frequently provide key clues to the solutions of the crimes. However, it is usually Peter Piper, not the police detectives, who advocates for modern criminological methods.

  Over the course of the novels, Peter champions the uses of ballistics and chemistry (The Other Bullet), fingerprint analysis (The Case of the Missing Sandals), and blood spatter trajectories (The Body on the Floor) in uncovering murderers. Newspaper advertisements and book reviews frequently claimed that Mavity’s fictions were based on actual criminal cases and true circumstances, and the striking resemblance of the murder victim in The Case of the Missing Sandals to Aimee Semple MacPherson did not go unnoticed in the press.

  Undoubtedly, The Tule Marsh Murder was inspired by a real case that had captivated the San Francisco Bay Area public a few years earlier. In the summer of 1925, a human ear, with bits of scalp and hair attached, was discovered in the saltwater tule marshes of El Cerrito, an East Bay town just north of Berkeley. The subsequent homicide investigation was led by Berkeley’s renowned chief of police August Vollmer and was aided by pioneering forensic criminalist Edward Oscar Heinrich, who by this time had earned a reputation as “America’s Sherlock Holmes.”

  In 1910, Heinrich opened the nation’s first private crime lab and solved numerous cases using a wide variety of scientific techniques—many unknown or unused before Heinrich employed them. In 1916, Vollmer recruited Heinrich to design America’s first “cop college” and the School for Police was launched the following year at the University of California in Berkeley.

  With the ear found in the tule marsh as a starting point, Heinrich was quickly able to determine that it belonged to a woman, probably in her twenties, whose natural blonde hair had hints of red and brown dyes. He also correctly determined other East Bay locations where additional body parts were likely to be found, including a pair of jawbones that, through dental analysis, identified her as thirty-one-year-old Bessie Ferguson, an Oakland woman who had gone missing shortly before the ear was discovered.

  A few years later, Nancy Barr Mavity interviewed Heinrich and they corresponded for a time afterwards. When The Tule Marsh Murder was published, she sent him a copy of the book and promised to base a character on him in a later novel.

  In a lengthy dedication included in her fifth mystery, The Man Who Didn’t Mind Hanging, Mavity addresses the use of real crimes in her novels. While admitting to incorporating elements of actual events into some of her plots, she downplays the conn
ection between the Bessie Ferguson case and The Tule Marsh Murder, stating that “except for the title, there is nothing to suggest that crime.”

  No, Nancy, not quite nothing …

  In Mavity’s story, Dr. Cavanaugh, a clinical psychologist (who insists “I am not a criminologist”), is drawn into the mystery of a body burned beyond recognition that had been found just above the tule marsh on the slope of El Cerrito hill. A small patch of scalp with a few hairs still attached has escaped the flames, however, and from this Dr. Cavanaugh is able to deduce the following:

  “That body belonged to a woman about forty years of age. She patronized an expensive beauty parlour, and had recently had what I believe is a marcel.… She was fair of skin, with the brown eyes and vivid colour that accompany this particular pigmentation. Her hair, naturally red, was darkened to auburn by the use of henna, and was worn long.…”

  Clearly, Dr. Cavanaugh learned a thing or two from E.O. Heinrich. With these physical facts as a starting point, the murdered woman is quickly identified as Sheila O’Shay, an infamous singer recently married to publicity-shy millionaire Don Ellsworth, whose disappearance had been headline fodder for several days, and Peter Piper, who has managed to ingratiate himself into Cavanaugh’s confidence, is off and running.

  Mavity’s fellow journalists praised her mystery novels for being particularly accurate in their portrayal of newshounds and newsrooms—not surprising considering that, as a crime reporter, she covered many of Northern California’s most notorious criminal cases. She managed to get an exclusive interview with child murderer William Edward Hickman, scooping all the other papers, after she sneaked onto the train transporting him from Oregon to Los Angeles when it stopped in Oakland. She also provided her readers with extensive coverage of the trials of David Lamson, the advertising manager of Stanford University Press who was accused, convicted, retried twice, and eventually acquitted of murdering his wife, Allene (another of Heinrich’s celebrated cases).

  She became the first woman ever to spend a night behind the walls of Folsom Prison when she was assigned to report on the pardon hearing of Warren K. Billings who had been convicted, along with Tom Mooney, of the 1916 Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco.

  Although many of Peter Piper’s news-gathering antics would never be tolerated by today’s law enforcers, anecdotes from Mavity’s own career bear notable similarities to those of her fictional hero. During one trial she was covering, she used a ladder to climb through the window of a vacated deliberation room, after the jury had been dismissed for the day, in order to gather up the contents of the wastebasket, writing a story for the next morning’s edition on exactly how many ballots had been taken and what the votes were. In another, she risked facial burns by keeping her head next to a furnace pipe so that she could eavesdrop on a jury, and for three days fed the newspaper direct quotes from the deliberations.

  Nancy was widowed when Arthur passed away in 1931, leaving her as a working single mother. As challenging as that must have been, she was certainly not going to let her new circumstance hold her back. In addition to continuing her full-time job at the Tribune, she also wrote her last three novels before her second marriage in 1938 to photographer Edward Almon “Doc” Rogers, who also worked for the Tribune and had photographed the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. It is unknown why she gave up writing fiction, but she certainly did not give up her association with the Bay Area’s literary community.

  In 1945, Mystery Writers of America (MWA) was formed to promote the genre and help ensure sufficient pay for mystery authors. But MWA was headquartered in New York, a very long way from the flourishing cadre of mystery writers on the West Coast. So, in 1947, the first regional branch of MWA was established in Northern California.

  Its first meeting was held in San Francisco, with critic and writer Anthony Boucher elected chair, Lenore Glen Offord designated secretary, and Alfred Meyers as treasurer. Other Bay Area mystery writers in attendance were Robert Finnegan, Cary Lucas, Mary Collins, Miriam Allen de Ford, Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet, Dana Lyon, Dora Richards Shattuck (aka “Richard Shattuck”), Eunice May Boyd, and Virginia Rath.

  We know all of this because Nancy Barr Mavity was there, too. On March 2, 1947, the Oakland Tribune ran a lengthy article with the familiar by-line “By Nancy Barr Mavity,” accompanied by the photographs of Doc Rogers, that described the festivities in her characteristic light-hearted prose:

  “Crime Incorporated, with murder and mayhem, slow or sudden death and assorted dirty work at the crossroads, has invaded the Bay Area. Its practitioners have banded together to ‘hold up’ the public, demanding, in two words, more kudos and more kale. Two dozen lively promoters of death met conspiratorially, at the gunpoint of Anthony Boucher … to form a Western ‘cell’ of Mystery Writers of America, Inc., with the flourishing slogan, ‘Crime does not pay—enough.’ Over dinner and drinks (with or without cyanide) at a San Francisco restaurant, with the butt end of a .44 for gavel, officers were elected and arrangements made for monthly meetings, alternately in San Francisco and the Eastbay.”

  Many of those subsequent meetings were also documented in the pages of the Tribune by Nancy Barr Mavity. In her role as a reporter, she not only highlighted a fascinating aspect of the local social scene, she also legitimized mystery writers as an integral part of the San Francisco literary milieu. Following her death, the Northern California chapter of MWA lauded her contributions in a letter to the editor, “She was not only an outstanding practitioner of our trade … she was also one of our most helpful and valued friends, both in her official capacity as chief of your book section, and as an individual whom most of us knew and were proud to know.”

  Nancy Barr Mavity—as the author of widely-praised stories that stand the test of time, as a groundbreaking (and glass-ceiling shattering) crime reporter, and as a promoter and champion of her fellow purveyors of the detective novel—has certainly earned her place among the classics of the American mystery.

  RANDAL S. BRANDT

  Berkeley, California

  Bibliographical note: The life and career of E.O. Heinrich has been brilliantly documented by Kate Winkler Dawson in her 2020 book, American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI. The correspondence between Heinrich and Mavity can be found in the Edward Oscar Heinrich Papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  Chapter I

  THE DISAPPEARANCE of Mrs. Don Ellsworth (“Sheila O’Shay”)—it was always printed in this fashion, usually with the addendum that Miss O’Shay’s song and dance hit, “Burn ’Em Up,” had made half a million dollars in royalties for its composer—had already been front-page stuff for three days.

  To be sure, on the third day as on the first, there was no information beyond the stark fact that the ever-spectacular Sheila had spectacularly disappeared. But an essential factor in a big news story is continuity; the city editor’s abhorrence of a vacuum far exceeds nature’s. Therefore, in pursuance of tactics technically known as “nursing the story along,” the newsboys were unintelligibly shouting “Huckstry!” to announce that the Ellsworth mystery still deserved the name.

  One of them, at the moment, was roaming the street under Dr. Cavanaugh’s window, hoarsely reiterating, “All about the Ellsworth mystery! Latest news of the missing actress! Her-ALD! Her-ALD!”

  Dr. Cavanaugh, reclining on the chaise longue with a smoking stand nicely adjusted at his elbow and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology propped with its lower edge resting on the curve of his rotund middle, glanced fleetingly from the page before him to the window. He even let the Journal flatten itself out on his waistcoated arc for a moment, while he wondered at a human nature which rushes out to buy a paper, in order to find out that there are no further incidents to relate about people in whom the buyers have no reason to be interested.

  As he reached to pick up the magazine, the telephone on the flat-topped mahogany desk across the room set up a series of intermittent summonses, insistent as an alarm clock.

  “M-m. I thought so. About time,” Dr. Cavanaugh grunted, heaving his large bulk from the chaise longue. Before picking up the receiver, however, he drew a nickel out of his trousers pocket and laid it on the smoking stand. It was a habit of Dr. Cavanaugh’s to bet with himself on his own judgment. When he lost, the coin was deposited in a small elephant-shaped box on the desk—but the coins in the box were few.