Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

Patrick Quentin was a pseudonym for the writing team of two Harvard-educated Englishmen, Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb. And their “Puzzle” mysteries featuring dapper, ex-alcoholic theater producer Peter Deluth is one of the most evocative series of the late 1930s to early 1940s. It was by no means hard-boiled, and it wasn’t just a collection of isolated novels; Deluth’s character truly developed over the course of six novels — by turns tragically and comically. Quentin seemed to delight in bringing to life the dark side of otherwise lighthearted characters. This is especially true in the first of the Deluth novels, Puzzle for Fools (1936), set in a small but exclusive sanitarium for the drunk and the deranged. Darker still are the Quentin novels Hugh Wheeler published after the death of his collaborator, beginning in the early 1950s. Judging from reprints, Quentin’s later writings attracted a smaller readership. If you can find them, two are quite good: The Man with Two Wives (Dell, 1955) and The Black Widow, which Nunnally Johnson adapted for the screen in 1954. Reprinted here for the first time in more than forty years is “The Last of Mrs. Maybrick.” A masterfully written story which appeared while the partnership was still going strong, Quentin leaves little doubt with whom his sympathies lie.

The Last of Mrs. Maybrick

On October 23, 1941, in a small, woodland shack between Gaylordsville and South Kent, Connecticut, a little old woman died. It was the lonely, inconspicuous death of an obscure eighty-year-old recluse, and her body might have lain undiscovered had it not been for a kindly neighbor whose habit it was to supply her with the milk that she needed to feed her innumerable cats.

The neighbor, peering through the fly-spotted window pane, saw the crumpled little body lying dead amidst the filth and disarray with which, in life, she had chosen to surround herself. A cat or two, perhaps, nosing at one of the many grimy, milkless saucers, might have felt that life had changed for the worse. There was nothing or no one else to mourn the passing of this forlorn and eccentric character whom Gaylordsville and South Kent had known as Mrs. Florence Chandler.

“Mrs. Chandler,” after a residence of twenty years, had become a familiar if somewhat shy figure in those parts, especially on the campus of the South Kent School where she was often seen, a dowdy, meagre little figure with a face wrinkled as a walnut, carrying over her spare shoulder a gunny sack stuffed with newspapers salvaged from academic ash cans. These newspapers comprised almost her only form of reading matter. Once she had written a book herself, but that was long ago and South Kent School knew nothing of her as a woman of letters. Now, too poor to buy books, she was too proud to borrow them. As intellectual nourishment for her, therefore, there was nothing but old copies of The New York Times and an occasional Bridgeport Sunday Post.

“Mrs. Chandler’s” gunny sack served another less literary purpose. On outgoing journeys it would often be filled with indeterminate scraps of food which were dumped at strategic points, usually on the school campus, for the delectation of the neighborhood cats. “Mrs. Chandler” had definite views on the care of cats. It was her belief that the summer folk went junketing off with the first fall of autumn leaves, leaving their cats to starve. Hence the amateur filling stations for orphaned pets.

This humanitarian impulse of “Mrs. Chandler’s” was, on the whole, detrimental to the high seriousness of the South Kent students and a headache to certain members of the staff.

Headache! The word is pregnant. For when the kind neighbor discovered the pathetic body of “Mrs. Chandler” in the desolate New England shack, he had no idea that he was looking at all that remained of one of the world’s greatest headaches. That tiny, dishevelled creature had, in her day, caused more headaches possibly than any woman since Helen of Troy. She had been a headache to several American Presidents; to Secretaries of State; to their wives; to many famous journalists; and to a vast army of organized American women. She had been more than a headache to one celebrated English judge, in that she is reputed to have pushed him off the teetering brink of his sanity. Indeed, she had been a fifteen-year migraine to no less august a personage than the Queen-Empress Victoria.

And the name of that headache was Mrs. Florence Maybrick.

Mrs. Maybrick. To those in their carefree twenties, the name may ring a distant bell. To those in their thirties, it may conjure up dim memories of a murderess, an adulteress — or something interesting. To those over forty-five, Mrs. Maybrick will be remembered for what she actually was — an international incident.

She was born Florence Chandler in Mobile, Alabama, in 1862, and came from what is usually referred to as “good American stock,” boasting among her forbears, direct and collateral, a Secretary of the Treasury, a Chief Justice, a bishop and two Episcopal rectors, co-authors of a work entitled: “Why We Believe the Bible.” As an appendix to this illustrious list of ancestors, her mother had married, a second time, the Baron Adolph von Roques, a distinguished German officer of the Eighth Cuirassier Regiment. Little Florence was educated, partly in America, partly abroad, by a succession of the most impeccable “masters and governesses.” Nothing had been overlooked that might insure for her a cultivated and ladylike future.

As it happened, however, these fair beginnings did not help her much, for, from an early period, Florence Chandler was dogged by bad luck. At the age of eighteen, when the other Mobile maidens of her generation were fluttering toward good clean American romance, it is reliably reported that Florence, during a rough Atlantic crossing, stumbled on the sundeck of the liner carrying her to Europe. She stumbled and fell — literally and catastrophically — into the arms of a Cad, an English cad, at that. And, after all, the English invented the word.

The Cad was James Maybrick; he was old enough to be her father; and he married her. Probably it was the least caddish thing he ever did. But it was an ill day for Florence.

The April-October romantics lived for a while in Norfolk, Virginia. But Florence’s dark angel soon put a stop to that and, through difficulties concerning James Maybrick’s business, shuttled them off to a suburb of Liverpool, England, a city where almost anything unpleasant is liable to happen.

The unpleasantness soon set in. James, reverting to caddishness, started going merrily to hell with the belles and race horses of Liverpool. And Florence, a young mother though still quite “unawakened,” started herself to toy with the idea of the Primrose Path or, as the Victorians called it, “going her own way.” It is even reported that she went her own way into a London hotel bedroom with an anonymous gentleman, but at this far date it would be rancorous to cast stones — particularly when one remembers James.

For James was going from bad to worse and from worse to worst. Eventually he reached a peak of Victorian depravity from which there was no going back and little going forward. He took to drugs. Not exclusively, however, to the conventional cocaine or the hackneyed hashish. James was too exotic for that. He favored the heavy metals. And his pet pick-me-up was arsenic. With increasing frequency he began to patronize the Liverpool chemist shop of a Mr. James Heaton where he would replenish his stock of liquor arsenicalis — an arsenic solution which he imbibed sometimes as often as five times a day. He found it just the thing for that morning-after queasiness.

Oddly enough, while Mr. Maybrick was guzzling arsenic to repair the ravages of his dissipations, Florence had decided that arsenic was just what she needed as a skin lotion to repair the facial ravages caused by her unhappy married life. To obtain this unusual cosmetic, she is reputed to have soaked arsenic out of flypapers (the old-fashioned sort), a rather messy procedure at which she was unfortunately observed by one of the maids, a certain Alice Yapp, who eventually became as loquacious on the subject as her name might indicate. Why Mrs. Maybrick needed to endure the sufferings of soaking flypapers pour être belle (to make herself beautiful) is a mystery since, at a later date, enough professionally prepared arsenic was found in the house to poison a whole Panzer Division.

The Maybricks were distinctly an arsenic-conscious family.

In May, 1889, James, a gay dog to the end, went to the Wirrall Races, got wet and returned home next morning feeling very sick to the stomach. For religious reasons and for the sake of the two young children, the Maybricks had manfully tried to gloss over the shortcomings of their marriage and were still living in technical harmony. James was put to bed, visited by a doctor and, in due course, provided with a day nurse and a night nurse, Nurse Gore and Nurse Callery. Florence, however, guided by a stern sense of duty, was not willing to leave her ailing husband to the care of strangers. She herself was a frequent visitor to the sick room. According to the nurses, she was too frequent a visitor. While James went on feeling sicker and sicker to the stomach, she would try to tempt him with little delicacies of her own contriving, much to the disgust of the dietetic Nurse Callery. Also she developed a nervous habit of shuffling bottles and medicaments around on the patient’s bedtable. Her sick room manner was later described as “both suspicious and surreptitious.” And she does seem to have behaved in a rather silly fashion. One of the silliest things she seemed to have done was to bring together a bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice and a punch of some white powder, believed by many to have been arsenic.

It is hardly startling that, in spite of the ministration of Nurse Gore and Nurse Callery, in spite of his wife’s tender solitude, James Maybrick did not improve. On May 11, 1889, he finally passed away.

Since he had shown symptoms suggesting irritant poisoning, officious busybodies insisted upon an autopsy, and arsenic was found — not surprisingly, perhaps — in his body. Actually, the amount discovered was merely one tenth of a grain, a dose not sufficient to kill a normal respectable citizen, let alone James. But people feeling the way they do about arsenic in stomachs, Mrs. Maybrick was arrested and charged with the murder of her husband. Immediately all the silly things she had done around the bedside came to light. Alice Yapp remembered the flypapers. And, before long, the anonymous gentleman and the London hotel bedrooms were dusted off too.

To make matters worse — a sorry fact due perhaps less to bad luck than bad management — Mrs. Maybrick began to discover that nobody liked her. Her husband’s two brothers had never been able to abide her. Now they acted in a most highhanded and spiteful manner, whisking off her children and branding her even before she was accused. Also, Alice Yapp, her fellow servant, Mrs. Briggs, Nurse Gore and Nurse Callery showed the most unfriendly symptoms. They had nothing to say in Mrs. Maybrick’s favor and seemed to take savage delight in bringing out evidence to her discredit.

Later, when she was brought to trial, the English public didn’t like her either. There was something about her.

Perhaps her American blood had a little to do with it. In the Golden Jubilee years of Victoria, American women were frowned upon in England. Perhaps they dressed better, looked smarter and managed to be more amusing than their stolider English sisters. Even the most impeccable Victorian male was not above rolling an appreciative eye at them, so long as they stayed out of trouble. But once they were in the soup, the men were as ready as the women to trace the scarlet A blazing forth beneath the chic American camisoles.

As if this weren’t bad luck enough, Mrs. Maybrick had bad luck with her jury and terrible luck with one aspect of her defense.

The jury, consisting mostly of simple-natured men, were not the type accustomed to think for themselves on nice points of law. Their professions, perhaps, speak for them. There were three plumbers (three of them!), two farmers, one miller, one wood-turner, one provision dealer, one grocer, one iron-monger, one house-painter, and one baker.

In preparing her defense against this literal-minded group of her peers, Mrs. Maybrick was advised not to bring forward any evidence as to the true character, the immortality, the dissipation, the general caddishness of her husband. Sentimentalists have held this as a virtue in Florence Maybrick that she adhered so rigidly to the principles of de mortuis nil nisi bonum (say nothing bad about the dead). Actually, it was the smart, but not smart enough, idea of her solicitors that the less James was discredited, the less apparent motive there would seem for his wife’s having wanted to murder him.

In consequence of this blunder in psychology, Mrs. Maybrick faced trial as an American hussy who had mistreated and deceived a perfectly good English husband, a man, as far as the jury knew, without a blemish on his character. To add to her troubles, her star witness, Mr. James Heaton, the chemist from whom Mr. Maybrick had so constantly purchased his swig of liquor arsenicalis, was so sick when he came to court that his vital evidence was all but inaudible. Even the brilliant rhetoric of her attorney, Charles Russell, later Lord Chief Justice Russell, could not soar above these obstacles.

And, as a final disaster, Mrs. Maybrick was not merely facing trial, she was facing Mr. Justice Stephen on the bench. In the light of his future career, which ended one year later in the madhouse, Mr. Justice Stephen was a little more than even the most callous of murderesses deserved. This one illustrious personage was already losing grip on his sanity before the trial started; all he needed to complete the process was Florence Maybrick. From the beginning he liked her no better than anyone else had. As the trial limped along with no one exactly knowing who did what, his dislike for her swelled within him until it reached almost psychopathic proportions. This manifested itself finally, in his summing up, as a two-day harangue of impassioned malignity and misogyny. In one of the most biased speeches ever to come from the English bench, he referred to poor Mrs. Maybrick as “that horrible woman” and branded her as the epitome of all that was vile. Startling even the prosecution, he vindictively maneuvered the Valentine’s Meat Juice and a certain bottle of glycerine around until he left no loophole for the unlucky woman’s innocence.

As obedient Britons, the jury did not hesitate in following the guidance of a Social Superior. As a man, the three plumbers, the two farmers, the milliner, the wood-turner, the grocer, the iron-monger, the house-painter and the baker brought in a verdict of guilty. Judge Stephen — with a certain rather lunatic satisfaction, perhaps? — donned the black cap and pronounced that Florence Maybrick should be hanged by the neck until she was dead.

A short time later he was himself pronounced insane.

The verdict, coming after a trial in which nothing seemed to have been proved one way or the other, staggered England. It staggered the world. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people had signed petitions for Mrs. Maybrick’s reprieve. Public opinion, in the face of what seemed like gross injustice, swung round to her side. Florence was popular at last.

For two or three weeks she lived (to use her own ill phrase) “in the shadow of the gallows.” Finally, a little intimidated perhaps by the general clamor, Mr. Matthews, the Home Secretary — for there was no Supreme Court of Criminal Appeal at that time — retired the case in camera and commuted Mrs. Maybrick’s sentence to one of penal servitude for life. His reasons for this clemency were that:

In other words, Mr. Matthews was of the opinion that Mrs. Maybrick had been guilty of attempting to kill her husband with arsenic although it wasn’t certain that he had died from arsenical poisoning. This charge was something Mrs. Maybrick had not even been tried for during a court procedure at which nothing had been proved beyond the fact that James was dead — a sad eventuality which had been common knowledge before ever the slow-moving wheels of the law had got under way. If that wasn’t bad luck — what is?

Whether or not Mrs. Maybrick was guilty, and how much, is no longer calculable. That she was grievously wronged is beyond doubt. The English bench has never been noted for its chivalry or its leniency toward women accused of murder, particularly where there is also a whiff of adultery. Mrs. Thompson, of the haunting love letters, and other sisters in misfortune reached the gallows as adulteresses rather than murderesses. Mrs. Rattenbury alone, that poor darling with her fatal attachment to the boy chauffeur, had a fair deal in this respect. But prudish public opinion soon snuffed her out as efficiently as the hangman’s rope.

If Mrs. Maybrick learned one thing from her dismal experience, it was that virtue pays dividends when a lady happens to get mixed up in an English murder trial.

That London hotel bedroom turned out to be very expensive.

Mrs. Maybrick proceeded from one squalid penal institution to another, suffering all the hardships of an habitual and vicious criminal. But though her memory had been rinsed off the disdainful hands of British justice, she was not forgotten. Soon a tornado broke from the other side of the Atlantic. American Woman was just beginning to realize herself as a Cosmic Force in 1890. And American public opinion was beginning to mean something.

Petitions thick as fleas started to pester various, successive Home Secretaries. In England, Lord Russell himself was active on her behalf, stalwartly proclaiming her innocence. From his side, Presidents, ambassadors and their wives, notables in all walks of life signed formidable statements, one of which, penned by no less a figure than the Honorable James G. Blaine, is worthy of quotation since, with magnificent daring, it snatches the garland of “snobisme” from its traditional resting place on the coroneted British head and hurls it back like a boomerang across the Atlantic. Mrs. Maybrick, writes James G. Blaine, was guilty of no crime other than that

This blast at the Maybricks’ social position was paralleled in the North American Review by the famous American newspaperwoman “Gail Hamilton” who addressed an open letter to Queen Victoria protesting Mrs. Maybrick’s innocence, inveighing against her unfair treatment and begging for her release. But Gail Hamilton and the Honorable James G. Blaine received like treatment. The Queen was neither amused nor interested. Finally, however, one Home Secretary, Lord Salisbury, goaded beyond endurance by these transatlantic stabs at British justice, parried with a nettled and emphatic statement which might have been penned by the Queen herself. It read in part:

The women of America continued their losing battle with the stubborn little women who ruled England. Mrs. Maybrick’s mother, the Baroness de Roques, is reputed to have spent a fortune in an attempt to have her daughter freed.

All to no purpose, however, Florence served out her sentence, penal servitude for life usually being taken to mean twenty years with three months off a year for good behavior.

She was finally released in July, 1904. On August 23, shaking the dust of England off her skirts forever, she arrived in New York.

Life held little for her. Both her children, whom she had not seen since the day of her husband’s death, had died themselves. Her mother died penniless shortly afterwards. In sore need of money Florence Maybrick wrote a book, Mrs. Maybricks Own Story, published by Funk and Wagnalls in 1905. In this she sang a dismal ballad of atrocities in English gaols and amassed formidable evidence of her own innocence. It is a lugubrious work, filled with lamentable clichés and poignantly trying to arouse interest in something which once had been a headache but was now only a bore. People read it for its possible sensationalism. They were no longer interested in Mrs. Maybrick’s misfortunes per se. For a while she tried to lecture, largely about conditions in English prisons, but it did not go so well. After a while she began to realize (as Lizzie Borden, settled with her squirrels at “Maplecroft,” had already realized for many years) that people do not take kindly to women who have faced a capital charge, even if they have been shockingly wronged.

Poor Florence. They were back not liking her again.

For several years, in Florida and Highland Park, Illinois, she stubbornly retained her married and now infamous name. But about twenty years before her death, she gave up an unequal struggle. Destroying all records of her past and reverting to her maiden name of Florence Chandler, she withdrew to a life of virtual solitude in the tiny three-room shack she had built for herself in the Berkshire foothills.

There, unknown to her neighbors, she lived on, accepted by the community and, with the years, acquiring from successive generations of South Kent boys the harmless nicknames of “Lady Florence” and “The Cat Woman.”

South Kent and Gaylordsville have none but kindly memories of her. There were rumors, at times, of course, as there must be about any lonely little old lady who lives a secluded life, rumors that someone had left her a vast fortune; that a lawyer in a limousine with a liveried chauffeur appeared at regular intervals to bring her checks. But these were rumors without malice and, unhappily, without foundation in fact, for she died penniless save for an old-age pension finally wooed out of the government.

South Kent and Gaylordsville remember her as the little scurrying woman with the walnut face, the gunny sack and one loyal and indestructible brown straw hat. To them, she was eccentric, yes. It was eccentric in her that she would let no one enter her house; that, at night, there was always a single light twinkling from her window till morning — to exorcise what demons? — and that with age she had let slip in her squalid little home the niceties of hygiene. But to her neighbors, Mrs. Chandler’s eccentricities bore no sinister stamp. It was cute rather than grotesque when, fighting against the loss of one of her few remaining teeth, she tied it to its nearest partner with a piece of string. She did no harm, except perhaps to leave a little too many scraps in the wrong places for the campus cats. The South Kent boys liked her.

And they knew, until the day she died, that the woman they were liking was that most magnificently unliked of women — Mrs. Florence Maybrick.

Which leads to the only really comforting feature of this long and uncomfortable life. There in the little villages of South Kent and Gaylordsville, Mrs. Florence Maybrick found good luck at last — good luck of so sensational a nature that in a way perhaps it neutralized all the tough breaks she had endured earlier.

Mrs. Maybrick was able to spend the last twenty years of her life unpersecuted. And yet, had things gone other than the way they did, this lengthy stretch of tranquility might never have been granted her.

Shortly after her arrival, a neighbor, a Mrs. Austin, was kind to Mrs. Maybrick and, to show her gratitude, Mrs. Maybrick gave her a dress which was trimmed with really good lace. It was undoubtedly the dress in the famous “wedding” photograph and to the cynical will perhaps give further proof that there is a real affinity between old lace and arsenic.

When Mrs. Austin shook the padding which stuffed the shoulders of this dress, there dropped out a cleaner’s card reading: Mrs. Florence Maybrick, Highland Park, Ill. The name struck a chord in Mrs. Austin’s memory. She consulted a sister who in turn consulted a female probation officer in the district. Before long these three women and the two married ladies’ husbands knew all the unhappy tale of Mrs. Florence Maybrick. A family council was called; the evidence was weighed; and it was decided that she had suffered more than enough already. The Austins and their in-laws thereupon made a vow never to show by word or hint that they knew the real identity of the new arrival.

And so, from the start, “Mrs. Chandler’s” future was in the hands of this small group of people. Miraculously, those people kept their vows for twenty years. Never once, at church socials, at whist drives or quilting parties or at the grocery store, did one of those three ladies succumb to the almost irresistible temptation of launching the juiciest piece of gossip in ten counties.

This was the astounding piece of good luck which came at last and enabled Mrs. Maybrick to reach the grave, unwept, perhaps, unhonored, but at least — unstoned.

On Sunday, October 25, 1941, “Mrs. Chandler” was soberly buried on the South Kent Campus. It had been her own request. Five of the students, boys of “good stock” — shades of Florence’s own beginnings! — were her pallbearers. These boys, whom a local newspaper with misprinted enthusiasm termed “Socialists from the swank South Kent School,” carried her to her last resting place. And there, as if a final hand from the grave beckoned her back to respectability, her coffin lies next to that of Miss Doylan, an old friend and beloved South Kent Housemother.

R.I.P. Mrs. Florence Chandler Maybrick.

And good luck to you — wherever you are!