Back from hiatus and moving right along. Dead Center, by Mary Collins

 

978888011708

Stark House, 2025

202 pp

paperback

It's been a long and very busy summer, filled with busy hours in  preparation for selling our house and moving out of state.  We're leaving the tropics and heading to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where for part of the year anyway I can be happiest in my winter clothes.   And, while I've not stopped reading completely, the frequency has dwindled over the last few months while we've been more than a bit on the stressed side.  Things are finally starting to get rolling now so we can relax, and that means attacking the stack of books I've been stockpiling over the summer.   Since Stark House has been so incredibly generous, I'll start with their upcoming November release, Dead Center, by Mary Collins from 1942.   Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reading her Sisters of Cain (1943) which was her fourth novel.  Dead Center, according to gadetection , is her second.  

Janet Keith is a well-known San Francisco socialite — the daughter of a wealthy family living in the  “Victorian monstrosity” she calls home on Pacific. But despite the charm of her well-appointed home, Janet much prefers the cramped, slightly shabby office she rents at 706 Montgomery Street, where she’s trying to make her mark as a writer — “one novelette and four quite good short stories” to her name.  The building itself has character to spare. A laundry occupies the first floor, while upstairs a handful of tenants — mostly artists, with two exceptions — work away in their own small studios. Janet’s office in this “dank old tenement” somehow feels more alive to her than her elegant house ever could.  By the end of Chapter Three, we’ve met all of Janet’s fellow tenants, and the author has skillfully planted the seeds of tension among them — rivalries, resentments, jealousies — the kind of atmosphere where a spark could easily set something off. And it does. One of their number, Anne Ehman, a woman known to “stir up trouble everywhere she goes,” turns up dead in the tenants’ shared workroom. Unfortunately for Janet, she’s the one who finds the body the next day while searching for a hammer to hang a picture, in grim fulfillment of her earlier joke that 706 Montgomery “was a perfect setting for murder.” The police think they’ve got their killer, but Janet isn’t so sure. She’s convinced they’ve made a mistake — and she’s determined to prove it.

1942 first edition cover, from Bibliophile.com

While I have to admit I enjoyed Sisters of Cain a bit more, Dead Center was still a thoroughly entertaining read — the kind that sweeps you back to 1940s San Francisco, both in atmosphere and in its sharp social and political observations. As always, I turned to one of my favorite resources, San Francisco Film Locations Then and Now to visually trace Janet’s path through the city. Following her through those streets  makes the book feel that much more alive.  She is an interesting figure: raised in privilege but drawn toward the bohemian world of struggling artists who share her building. As Ashley Lawson notes in her introduction, Janet “moves back and forth between both worlds," but she is never quite fully accepted by her fellow tenants and her family tends to see her as "something of a black sheep."   After the murders (yes, there are more than one)  things get worse on both fronts, with her father insisting on hiring a bodyguard for her, while her friends' distrust is heightened when she offers the police her help.   As she learns more about the other residents of the office block, and as the police seem to be going down the wrong road, she decides that she will have to step up and play detective to find the real answer to the crimes. 

A staple of vintage crime novels: map of 706 Montgomery Street offices; my photo, from the book

I wouldn’t exactly call Janet a “plucky heroine,” but she’s certainly entertaining to watch in action. What’s amusing is that she’s not a particularly skilled detective — the police are usually a step or two ahead of her — yet that’s part of her charm. Her back-and-forth with Spike provides some genuinely funny moments, the kind that lighten the tension just when it’s needed. As for Fitz, her fiancé… well, I have to confess I couldn’t stand him — though that's likely a personal bias.  Overall, Dead Center is a pretty good mystery (I never guessed) and an interesting look at the time period as well as the divisions existing between Janet's two worlds.  

Definitely recommended for readers of American vintage crime as well as for those who have enjoyed Mary Collins' work.  My many thanks to Stark House for my copy of this book and the others I'll be diving into here shortly.