In my recent post about the problematic new series, Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, I asked a simple question: why can’t TV producers leave Tommy and Tuppence alone? There are plenty of other romantic couples filling the GAD landscape! Why not give us a series based on the exploits of Craig Rice’s Helene and Jake Justice? Or Delano Ames’ Jane and Dagobert Brown? Or the Lockridge’s Jeff and Pam North? Or Frances Crane’s Pat and Jean Abbott. There are plenty of attractive pairs who like to trade quips, solve crimes and guzzle booze – not necessarily in that order! Can’t we give the Beresfords a rest?
Another question, this of a more personal nature: Why have I been quietly collecting the cases of these abovementioned pairs . . . and not reading them?!? Well, my infatuated friends, that ends today! Thanks to this month’s selection from my Book Club, I’m starting what I imagine will be a semi-irregular series that I call Cocktails for Two, referring to the fact that most of the aforementioned lovebirds drank like fish!
We begin with Kelley Roos’ Jeff and Haila Troy, who are actually no strangers to adaptation: perhaps the most famous is a 1942 screwball mystery called Remember the Night, starring Loretta Young and Brian Aherne. It’s based on the Roos’ third novel about the couple, The Frightened Stiff, and it sadly changes Haila’s name to Nancy. The film was successful enough to inspire a sequel the following year called Dangerous Blondes, which is based on the second novel If the Shroud Fits, but which changes the couple’s names again to Jane and Barry Craig. Evidently, they couldn’t lure Aherne and Young back, and they ended up with Allyn Joslyn and Evelyn Keyes.
There’s also a 1959 French film starring Brigitte Bardot called Voulez-vous danser avec moi? and a 1960 movie called Scent of Mystery, which was the first film to utilize Smell-O-Vision. The more you know!
Seriously, it’s time to consider a series based on the Troys because everybody loves them! My pal JJ at The Invisible Event is head over heels for Roos, praising the humor that is “just on the right side of distasteful,” while TomCat at Beneath the Stains of Time is equally enamored, saying the Roos’ work “towers over its screwball contemporaries of the murder-can-be-fun school.” Even Kate over at Cross-Examining Crime, who has traveled a slightly bumpier road reading the Rooses, says that, at their best, “they are a pleasure to read with Roos pitching the comedy of their relationship at just the right level and both characters contribut(ing) significantly to the solving of the mystery.”
Here’s where I tell you about William Roos and Audrey Kelley, the real-life screwball couple who created the Troys, but there’s not much information to tell. Roos wanted to be an actor and took a speech class in New York to develop his skills. There he met Audrey who was doing the same thing. They both played small roles on New York stages; they even performed together on a showboat along the Ohio River shore. When they decided in 1940 to break into crime fiction, it made sense that they would create a snappy, stylish version of themselves and set their first case in the theatre world.
When Made Up to Kill begins, Jeff Troy is a photographer for an ad agency who really wants to be a detective, and Haila Rogers is a young Broadway starlet who really wants Jeff to settle down and marry her. Yes, they insult each other a lot and Jeff threatens to sock or slap Haila, (it is 1940), but the first time he does slap her, she gives him a sock to the solar plexus that doubles him over (it is screwball). Haila has landed a role in a promising new comedy called Green Apples, and opening night is a smash – until one of the actresses, who also happens to be Haila’s roommate, is poisoned onstage. She survives, and the police, with Jeff’s help, make sure she is well-guarded the following evening. Of course, this doesn’t prevent another actor from being stabbed to death the first curtain comes down!
Who is the murderous worm in this Green Apple, and why are they committing mayhem at the Colony Theatre? The answers to these questions are, I regret to say, pretty ordinary as theatre mysteries go, but I’m willing to cut the Rooses some slack. This is a first novel, after all, and you can sense that William and Audrey were feeling their way, particularly in the plotting department. You can also feel the prose gathering steam as the book moves forward, with Jeff and Haila emerging more clearly as a couple and as investigators. Yes, Haila, being the girl, is the impetuous one, but it’s refreshing to find that she’s less gung ho about detection than, say, Tuppence Beresford. And yes, Jeff, as the guy, is more surefooted and confident, but he’s also a bit of a goof and sometimes gets things wrong enough to put his beloved in danger. Unlike, say, Tommy What’s-His-Name!
The Rooses are wise to make Haila the narrator because she is most charming at storytelling: “If only for an hour, I wanted to creep back into my little world where all these things were inflections in an actor’s voice and frightened faces came off with cold cream and Kleenex.” The dialogue is brisk and moves the story along, but at one point it becomes something even better:
- Jeff: You smoke too much.
- Haila: It keeps me busy. I don’t have a husband and a home and children to keep me occupied like other girls.
- Jeff: If you stopped smoking you might. Nicotine’s a drug.
- Haila: You smoke.
- Jeff: It’s all right for me. I’m a drug addict.
- Haila: If you’d hurry up and solve the murder we could get married and I’d have a home and children. And a husband, too. Then I’d give up smoking.
- Jeff: I’m solving the murder.
- Haila: Oh, are you?
- Jeff: I’m getting along fine.
- Haila: I’ll say! You know that the murderer must be either a man or a woman.
- Jeff: Never occurred to me. Wipe the egg off your chin . . . The other one.
- Haila: The other what?
- Jeff: Chin.
I loves me some good screwball romance and – spoiler/not spoiler – it won’t surprise you to learn that the novel ends with Jeff and Haila deciding to get married. Between 1941 and 1948, their marriage would encompass six more novels and a number of novellas and evidently become as turbulent as that of Patrick Quentin’s Peter and Iris Duluth. In fact, the Troys would divorce in 1948, and then in 1966 the Roos’ produced a final novel, One False Move, in which Jeff and Haila reunite for one more murder investigation and a reigniting of romantic bliss. I know they’re only a fictional couple, but I’m always rooting for a happy ending.
It’s my intention to read the Troy Chronicles in order of publication. To that end, I have a two of the four titles published by Rue Morgue Press and several dog-eared copies of other titles I’ve found in used bookstores. Fortunately, Digital Parchment Press is releasing new editions of the books, and while the covers are so-so, they include the original Dell Mapback Murder Maps, plus Dell’s lists of characters and clues. After all these years, I may have become a bit jaded as to romance, but maybe this new “Cocktails for Two” series will warm my cold, cold heart. For now, I raise my glass and offer a toast:
Here’s to crime!
