Joel Y. Dane was the pseudonym of Joseph Francis Delany (1905-1957) who seems to have lived his entire life in New York. He wrote five mysteries about Sergeant Cass Harty; the fourth one is The Christmas Tree Murders (Doubleday Doran for Crime Club, 1938; Coachwhip, 2020). Harty has been invited to Christmas dinner by wealthy distant relatives, whom he has not seen for nearly 20 years. He accepts more out of curiosity than familial feeling.
The Gaylord family is in a word dreadful. The patriarch Lincoln is an industrial kingpin, dealing with the potential of a labor union strike and deploring his employees’ ingratitude. The union has been picketing the Gaylord brownstone; even on Christmas Day a single man wearing a sandwich board protesting the unfairness of Gaylord’s business practices is pacing back and forth in front of the mansion. In addition to Gaylord and his wife Flora, the older son Homer and his social climber wife Isobel with their son Junior are in attendance, as well as the conniving younger son Lloyd and the politically ambitious daughter Elizabeth. Junior is a spoiled brat desperately in need of a wallop.
While the family makes conversation, a car disgorges a few thugs in front of the house. They proceed to administer a thorough beating to the sole picketer as Harty rushes to his aid. The police arrive quickly, followed by an ambulance. Harty hears later the striker is dead, stabbed somehow in front of him. The police learn that the picket was not sent by the union and that the murder weapon was an odd piece of machined metal that no one recognizes.
Harty plunges into the task of identifying both the victim and the murder weapon in a nicely convoluted plot. He’s pulled into a terrific car chase scene through New York, with a turn-by-turn description of city landmarks and street names. The story reflects contemporary attitudes about race, labor unions, law enforcement, business owners, private investigators, and local politics, making it worth reading from a social history perspective. Harty himself is a likable character, one reviewer compares him to a Dashiell Hammett character.
The New York Times was favorably inclined toward the Harty series, reviewing every title. The review for this one, written by Kay Irvin, appeared on 9 October 1938.
Anthony Boucher in his “Criminals at Large” column of 21 August 1960 recommended that a new line of reprints by Dolphin include the books of Dane and Hugh Austin, which clearly didn’t happen. How such well-regarded books vanished from sight and memory in such a short time is curious.
