Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) was an English playwright, a contemporary of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. The name was also the pseudonym of Alfred Bennett Harbage (1901-1976), a U.S. Shakespearean scholar. Harbage was born in Philadelphia and educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He had a distinguished career as an academic in English studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Harvard University. Harbage was the general editor of the Pelican Books edition of the works of Shakespeare, and he wrote a number of books on the Shakespearean oeuvre.
Using the name of an Elizabethan dramatist as a pen name would be reasonable for a scholar like Harbage. He wrote four detective novels under that name, the first three with Philadelphia police officer Sam Phelan, and he published short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The four novels were published in the last half of the 1940s:
- Blood is a Beggar (1946)
- Blood of Vintage (1947)
- Blood on the Bosom Devine (1948)
- Cover His Face (1949)
Blood on the Bosom Devine (J. B. Lippincott, 1948) was selected as part of The Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction 1900-1950 series, edited by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor. Each volume has a preface written by Barzun and Taylor that briefly sets the context of the book and mentions some of its best features. See the entire list here: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/84989.50_Classics_of_Crime_Fiction_1900_1950.
J. Roth Newbold, the local district attorney, is unhappy about the seedy burlesque show that has taken over the rundown Betterton Theatre. He is also displeased with the attention ex-boxer and police sergeant Sam Phelan has received recently from two well-publicized murder cases. He sees an opportunity to rid his city of the first and put the second in his place by issuing orders for Phelan to close down the show and escort the participants out of town. He is well pleased with the idea of assigning this sleazy task to Phelan until he realizes that Phelan welcomes the opportunity. Phelan, Newbold discovers, is a puritan at heart. Naïve Phelan does not realize he is being punished for showing up Newbold and is raring to go to work.
Once in the audience at the Betterton, however, Phelan and the two assistant district attorneys who accompany him cannot see any way the law is being violated. The owner has been quite careful to stay within legal limits. To ensure the ladies cannot be accused of performing a strip tease, they appear unclothed with hands strategically placed and stand perfectly still on a revolving pedestal that moves in and out of a spotlight.
When the star of the show Lilith Devine rotates back into the spotlight, she is clutching an arrow plunged into her chest. The crux of the mystery is that, despite all the people in the building, no one was near the place where the arrow must have come from.
Phelan is blunt and focused on the job. His interviews with some of the vague witnesses are exasperating to him and entertaining for the reader. In particular Dr. Surtees, an elderly academic I have to assume Harbage based on people he knew, is a source of deep frustration. The good professor tends to focus on the philosophical, lose track of his thoughts, and fall asleep mid-sentence, all of which drive the task-oriented Phelan to distraction.
Phelan is a down-to-earth protagonist, unlike the upper-class gentleman detective from earlier in the century, a forerunner of the later police procedurals. His thought processes tend to become so complicated that he trips himself up more than once, which he comes to realize. He figures it out and arrests the killer in a dramatic display at the scene of the murder, incurring Newbold’s ire once again.
Of course Harbage knew all about the back stage areas of a theatre and incorporates arcane details such as lighting arrangements into the plot smoothly. Fans of mysteries set in theatres will definitely want to add this book to their reading lists.
An analysis by Robert P. Ellis offers insight into all three Sam Phelan books, although the biographical data given is clearly wrong. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/drama-and-theater-arts/thomas-kyd#blood-on-the-bosom-devine