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Vidal at 23, photographed by
Carl Van Vechten in 1948
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When Gore Vidal died in July at age 86, I belatedly
discovered that he had written three mystery novels in the early 1950s, under
the penname Edgar Box. An inveterate mystery reader, I take particular delight
in discovering mystery novels written by persons best known for other pursuits.
(A favorite example is striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, who penned two
mysteries in the early 1940s, the first titled, appropriately, The G-String Murders.)
Gore Vidal, aka Edgar Box, cranked out three mysteries in
quick succession: Death in the Fifth
Position (1952), Death Before Bedtime
(1953), and Death Likes It Hot (1954).
They were reissued in a single volume, titled Three By Box, in 1978. All three feature a reporter-cum-p.r. man,
Peter Sargeant, as the amateur detective. Sargeant is a suave, if sometimes
bumbling, sexual swordsman, almost a comic James Bond without the trappings of
spydom. (Fleming’s 007, however, did not debut until Casino Royale in 1953.)
Despite its heterosexual hero, the first of Vidal/Box’s trio
is an unabashedly gay—in both old and new senses of that word—romp along the
lines of Oscar Wilde meets Raymond Chandler. The novel is a delicious
foreshadowing of later flamboyant works, such as the outrageous Myra Breckinridge (1968), the movie
version of which provided a final screen vehicle for the inimitable but often
imitated Mae West, and the surreal and irreverent Live From Golgotha (1992).
Death in the Fifth
Position is a surprising novel for the early Fifties for its frank, often
gay, sexuality. But the treatment is not so surprising for Vidal, who had
published The City and the Pillar in
1948. That novel offered a coming-of-age story about a young man coming to
terms, healthily, with his homosexuality. Thus it flouted convention, which at
the time regarded gay as synonymous
with immoral, and so caused a
scandal. The City and the Pillar was
only Vidal’s third novel, and one can imagine an editor, on receiving the
manuscript of Death in the Fifth Position
a couple of years later, counseling the author to adopt a pseudonym for the
latter book’s publication. I don’t know whether that happened, but I wouldn’t
be surprised if it did. Of course, it could equally be the case of a “serious”
writer not wanting to be associated with something as déclassé as a mystery
novel.
By contrast, the second of the trio, Death Before Bedtime, is sadly pedestrian. It is a serviceable
mystery but lacks punch and pizzazz. The third, Death Likes It Hot, regains some sparkle, rather like a second wind
along about midnight after an evening of hard partying. But it doesn’t measure
up to the first mystery either, and I’m inclined to think that Vidal must have
felt as though, after this third effort, he had gotten mystery writing out of
his system. Box was laid to rest.
Still, the three novels are entertaining and, as mysteries
go, intriguing. They are worth taking up, though no one could be faulted for
stopping after the first one.
