The Catalyst Club by George Dyer
Review by Matt (BuffaloSavage)
In this curious American mystery released in 1936, six amateur detectives investigate the vicious killing of a young socialite. Author Dyer writes “Every city has strange little gatherings of men, pursuing curious ends in hidden corners of the sprawling chessboard of streets … San Francisco has her share of these associations, and none of them more extraordinary in its aims and achievements than the Catalyst Club.”
The six members bring different abilities in discussing the solutions to serious thefts and murders that puzzle the police. The police tolerate them because they avoid the public gaze and let the cops take all the credit. They detest publicity because they fear that celebrity will prevent them from maintaining their essential property: “The club is a catalyst in crime, resolving criminal problems without itself being altered, just as a literal catalyst in chemistry.”
Dyer clearly differentiates the six characters. Cyriak Brill-Jones, the Club’s official secretary, works at the aquarium and takes notes. Leonard Sloat, a retired criminal attorney, doesn’t like the club’s outside meeting place so he only rarely leaves his house. He keeps complex details straight for sake of club members and synthesizes previous information for us forgetful readers.
Persen “Buzz” Drake pounds the crime beat for a newspaper and acts as liaison between the club and the cops. Drake asserts truth is uncovered with old-fashioned police work and stool pigeons. Also chock full of street cred is Newton Bulger, a “rowdy, informally educated, ex-cowpuncher, ex-mechanic, with a genius for machinery … and an unequalled knowledge of the State of California.” He believes in employing horse-sense while evaluating crime-scene evidence.
Using the artistic insights of emotion, intuition, and sensation as well as the Greco-Roman classics is hard-headed Dr. Alexander MacCarden, a psychiatrist. Trusting the empiricism and the scientific method is Theodore Lempereur, a chemist who owns and operates a private lab.
The members bet that their path to truth is the one that will prevail as they probe the peculiar death of Brenda Chalis. The mutilated body of the pretty co-ed is found nude on the grounds of her wealthy father’s estate. Her own pair of West Highland terriers – a notoriously active and barky breed – are the first suspects. So are boyfriends from Stanford and a cousin. To uncover truth through cooperation and conflict, they share insights and dispute each other’s hypotheses.
According to a critic in the 1930s, Dyer’s theory was that complex modern crimes, especially the convoluted kind that turned up in thirties’ detective novels, were too much for one brain to fathom, so instead of the usual single sleuth, he invented a group of six amateur detectives. In fact, in the book, Leonard Sloat paraphrases this idea. Like Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Charlie Chan, Dyer describes landscape and interiors with a fine eye for detail. Similarly to John P. Marquand, famous for the Mr. Moto novels, Dyer writes highly literate prose and is powerful and convincing with motivation and emotion. Like both Marquand and Biggers, he has a low-key sense of humor and his stories move steadily if not briskly in some spots where the only action is talking in an office.
Early in his career, Dyer (born in 1903) was a journalist and put in a brief stint reporting for the San Francisco Examiner. It was during the 1930s when he wrote his mysteries. His novel The Five Fragments was made into films, albeit with significant changes: Fog Over Frisco (1934), starring Bette Davis, and a war movie, Spy Ship in 1942. During WWII, he served as Lt. Col. in U. S. Army Intelligence. After the war, he founded the Dyer Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, which was located on his Bucks County, PA farm. He taught subjects in military history and intelligence with his wife Dr. Charlotte Leavitt Dyer, also an expert on U. S. and foreign intelligence. One wonders if their students worked for an organization whose budget we are not given to know. When he passed away due to a heart attack in 1978, he was so prominent that the New York Times ran his obituary.
Bibliography
The Three-Cornered Wound (1931)
The Five Fragments (1932)
A Storm Is Rising (1934)
The Catalyst Club (1936)
The Long Death (1937)
Adriana (1939) aka The Mystery of Martha’s Vineyard
The People Ask Death (1940)
I don’t think that I’ve heard of that author, although I do know a lot about classic mysteries. I guess I’ll look him up in my mystery encyclopedias!