Stark House kindly sent me an advance copy of their new reprint of two books by Edna Sherry (1885–1967), to be released in October. After writing serials and short stories for pulp magazines and collaborating on a play, Sherry turned to novels. Her first book Sudden Fear (1948) was adapted for the screen. The movie starred Hollywood heavy hitters Joan Crawford, Jack Palance, and Gloria Grahame and was nominated for multiple Academy Awards. Her following books were not as successful.
The Defense Does Not Rest (Dodd, Mead, 1959; Stark House, 2022) is her fifth book. A stand-alone, it is, as Curtis Evans points out in his introduction, an inverted mystery. It has an unusual structure. It opens with Stephen Hargrave and his father, famed criminal attorney Edward Hargrave, discussing the defense, or lack thereof, for Steve’s lifelong friend Maxwell Gray, who has been arrested for murder. Both Hargraves know Gray is not guilty but it seems he is the only person who could have committed the crime. (This is also a locked-room mystery.)
The next chapters flash back to five years earlier in Korea when Gray encountered Larry Bellair, a talented engineer and a petty thief. Gray impulsively decided to shield Bellair from the consequences of his theft and the two become friends. Their friendship was sealed when Bellair saved Gray’s life one cold night on patrol.
The two are separated after being discharged. During that time Gray fell for a pretty young woman named Carol. In no time he married her and took her home to New York. Gray devoted himself to the aircraft engineering firm that his father had founded. Bellair surfaced again, and both of the Grays were delighted to put his expertise to work for them. Carol’s inability to fit into the upper-class life of the Grays became increasingly apparent. Gray decided divorce was the only option but Carol refused to agree. When she died suddenly, Gray was the only one with an obvious motive and he found himself in a jail cell with the Hargraves trying frantically to find a way out for him.
Gray has the personality of a rescuer, scooping up those less fortunate or in trouble and solving their problems for them. Those people are kind and generous but they can also be astonishingly naïve, as was obvious soon after reading a bit about him.
I am not a fan of flashbacks but this long look back to the beginning of the problem works here. At first much of it seems extraneous and then the pieces begin to fall into place. What seemed like meandering turned out to be essential to the plot.
There are so few characters in this story that I wondered if Carol committed suicide to set Gray up out of spite, because I couldn’t see the culprit until the big reveal. (I can offer a well-written example of the suicide for revenge mystery if anyone is interested.)
The detailed snapshot of daily life in another time is always fascinating to me. I am looking forward to reading the other Sherry story, written 10 years earlier, to compare them.