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Roos, Kelley

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 7 months ago
William Roos (1911-1987) and Audrey Kelley Roos (1912-1982) were a married couple who wrote about a a married couple; their series detectives were Jeff and Haila Troy, aided by NY Lieutenant George Hankins. Roos also wrote some non-series mysteries.

 

William Roos was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and brought up by his German-born grandparents. He attended Allegheny College but transferred to Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh to study drama. He began writing light, comic plays.

 

Audrey Kelley was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but moved to Pennsylvania in her teens. She met William Roos at Carnegie Tech.

 

They were married in November 1936 and moved to New York City. The idea to write mysteries came from Audrey after the birth of her daughter Carol. Their first book, Made Up To Kill, was published in 1940 by Dodd, Mead to favorable reviews and went on to a paperback edition.

 

William continued to write plays. His second play, January Thaw, became a high school staple. He and Audrey collaborated on a mystery play, Speaking of Murder, which ran for a month in New York but did better in London.

 

The Rooses moved to Connecticut in 1948 and to Martha's Vineyard in the 1960s.

 

A detailed evaluation of their work can be found at Rue Morgue Press, which has also reissued the Roos's first two books.

 

Mike Grost on Kelley Roos

 

Kelley Roos is among the intuitionist writers who emerged in America around 1940. These include Craig Rice, Lillian de la Torre, the Lockridges, James Yaffee and Anthony Boucher. All of these writers seem to have adopted the intuitionist paradigm for detective fiction almost as a matter of course - it is clearly part of their basic view of what a detective story should be. Like the Lockridges, the couple behind the "Kelley Roos" pseudonym were a husband and wife writing team, Audrey Kelley and William Roos. Also like the Lockridges, they wrote about a husband and wife team of amateur detectives, as did Craig Rice, as well. Both couples' detectives live not just in New York City, but in Greenwich Village, then a haven for intellectuals and the chic.

 

The Novels

 

Roos often conceals clues around rooms. We see a character's rooms and all their belongings; later the detective deduces a hidden significance from some object in the room. There is a nice dovetailing quality to Roos' plots. If there is an odd, unexplained detail, or some strange aspect to someone's behavior, it is bound to link up with some other aspect of the mystery plot later on in some unexpected way. This sort of dovetailing always gives pleasure to the true mystery fan. Roos loves clues, and sprinkles them liberally throughout the books.

 

There is an evolutionary quality to Roos' puzzle plots. First we have a surprising revelation of part of the truth. Later, we will have a second revelation that builds on the first, and so on. Oftentimes, this twists the original idea into some new shape. These ideas can involve a series of characters: we will find a character in the series of people that is behaving in an anomalous way, different from the others, that is not sharing in their common behavior or structural position in the plot. This character looks at first glance as if they were just another member of the series, but they are not. Among Roos' fiction, The Frightened Stiff matches up in mystery plot technique with "Murder Among Ladies" (1950), being tales about series of people.

 

The Shorter Works

 

"Two Over Par" (1949) is a short story about the Troys that shows several features of Kelly Roos' writing. There are multiple murders, even in a story as short as this one. There is great ambiguity though most of the story about the basic direction of those murders. In "Two Over Par", the detectives investigate if the first person was the intended victim, and the second person was killed as a witness to the first crime, or vice versa. The detectives and the reader are kept guessing about the basic pattern or structure underlying the killings, right up till the end of the tale. This sort of ambiguity is fairly open-ended: in "Murder Among Ladies", numerous different basic patterns for the story are discussed and evaluated throughout the tale. In longer works like Sailor, Take Warning!, not just the central crimes, but several other episodes in the story are capable of ambiguous interpretation. This sort of ambiguity recalls Ellery Queen.

 

Another kind of ambiguity is also found in Kelly Roos' fiction. This is an incident, watched by outside observers, that looks one way on the surface, but whose truth is very different. These incidents form little mini-mysteries in the text. Often times they are quite ingenious. This sort of ambiguity recalls G.K. Chesterton, and writers in the Chesterton tradition, such as Agatha Christie. These events do not appear to be ambiguous; they look straightforward. But eventually a surprise interpretation of them is sprung on the reader.

 

"Murder Among Ladies" (1950) shows the influence of the two greatest intuitionist authors, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. The plot pleasantly recalls in general terms such Christie stories of multiple murders as The ABC Murders (1936) and And Then There Were None (1939). Also Christie like: the search through backgrounds of the characters for clues to the present crimes. Ellery Queen like features include the box of curios delivered to one of the suspects, the gathering of the women and the plot changes rung therein, and the way much of the plot turns on the possession of knowledge: what different people knew when. There is always a search for hidden meaning in striking but obscure events: what do these curios mean? what is the significance of Mady's resistance to meeting the Troys? The gathering of women is full of an EQ technique: small but significant changes are explored in a pattern, always reaching for meaningful but hard to see variations in what at first looks like a fixed pattern. "Murder Among Ladies" is one of the numerous novellas Roos wrote for American Magazine. It is reprinted in American Murders (1986), edited by Jon L. Breen and Rita A. Breen, which also contains a detailed bibliography of Roos' work for the magazine.

 

The last of their American Magazine novellas to feature the Troys was "Final Performance" (1951). This was later expanded into the book Requiem for a Blonde (1958) also known as Murder, Noon and Night. The original novella title is something of a pun. The story is about a reunion of actresses, and does indeed involve a character's final performance. It is also the farewell appearance of the Troys, until their return in One False Move (1966). This tale is quite conventional in its plotting.

 

The remaining four novellas Roos wrote for the American Magazine have non-series characters. "Deadly Detour" (1952) and "One Victim Too Many" (1953) are relatively minor works. They get Roos out of their familiar New York City territory, into small towns and rural areas. Both take place during festive events, "Deadly Detour" during an antique car rally, "One Victim Too Many" during the Centennial celebration of an Ohio town. Both stories show Roos' fidelity to the puzzle plot mystery, with finales that bring disparate facts together into a unified pattern. "Deadly Detour" also includes an antique car museum. It reflects the interest of the Van Dine school in collectors. "One Victim Too Many" includes the staging of a historical pageant. This too recalls the show business and theater background of previous Roos books, as well as the Van Dine school as a whole. The pageant also recalls the tableaux staged by advertising photographer Jeff Troy in If the Shroud Fits.

 

"The Case of the Hanging Gardens" (1954) is the last of the novellas Kelley Roos wrote for the American Magazine. It shows terrific storytelling, with a well realized setting of underground caves. The story recalls in its basic approach "Deadly Detour" (1952). Both take place at an intellectually appealing tourist attraction in the countryside, a car museum and caverns, respectively. Both tales weave the history and development of the attraction into their puzzle plot; this is similar to the historical look at institutions in Roos novels. Both have suspense scenes in the dark at the attraction. Both contain clues to the mystery that develop from the attraction. In both, the people who own the attraction play a major role, as do their neighbors, and their complex personal and business relationships are one of the mainsprings of the plot. Both stories have romance subplots, with the heroine/point of view character attracted to a man in the story, one of the suspects who may or may not be attracted to her. Both stories have a bittersweet look at marriage and its problems. In both the heroine finds key clues, but their interpretation is done by a relatively colorless local policeman, who serves as the story's official sleuth. Both stories have a lot of subplots, that gradually emerge in the course of the tale. Both stories have an appealingly romantic feel, with a sense of adventure at an interesting place and romance in store for the heroine. The tales cast a romantic glow over everything. They have a sustained mood.

 

Audrey Kelley and William Roos and were a married couple, and their stories show events equally from the point of view of male and female characters. This multiple consciousness is sometimes embedded right in the structure of the story. In "The Case of the Hanging Gardens", a series of events in the caverns happens first to a male character in the tale, and is vividly narrated by him; later, a series of nearly identical events happens to the heroine of the story. This replay is the key event in the puzzle plot; it allows the mystery to be solved. The fact that events are seen both by a male and a female consciousness is most absorbing and unusual. The events seem deeply similar to both characters, and one is seeing the triumph of mental activity over gender. Also notable: the early narration by the man is made to be part of a rebuttal by him to another man's challenge to his masculinity. So the story is linked to gender identity, right from the start. It eventually comes to seem more important than any conventional ideas on gender.

 

Similarly, in the Troy novels there is a parity between Jeff Troy's profession as an advertising photographer, and Haila Troy's work as an actress. Both are careers in the New York arts. Neither is essentially different from the other.

 

One can find other doubles in "The Case of the Hanging Gardens". The two sisters, one married and the other single, both experience difficulties with their romantic careers. These events seem to echo each other. Similarly, in "Final Performance", the lives and loves of the six chorus girls who make up the main suspects all have subtle echoes and contrasts with each other.

 

The caverns in "The Case of the Hanging Gardens" contain many chambers and passageways. In this, they are somewhat similar to the many roomed buildings that show up in the novels, such as the apartment houses in The Frightened Stiff and There Was a Crooked Man, and the school buildings in Murder in Any Language and The Blonde Died Dancing. Oddly, none of these stories contain a floor plan, and the details of architecture that are so popular in other Golden Age writers do not show up in Roos. Still, such interest in large buildings with many diverse occupants is part of the Van Dine School tradition. "The Case of the Hanging Gardens" shows an interest in phone calls; these also played a role in the second murder subplot in If the Shroud Fits, which was the cleverest part of that novel. The ambiguity of phone calls - who made them, where do they come from, what might be said on them unheard - is typical of Roos' puzzle plot interest in ambiguous situations.

 

The tour guide at the caverns is named Walt Carr; this is perhaps a little homage to mystery writer John Dickson Carr. Carr was originally from Pennsylvania, and "The Case of the Hanging Gardens" is set in that state. Kelley Roos also worked as scriptwriters, and the Roos team would go on to win an Edgar in 1960 for their TV version of Carr's The Burning Court (1937).

 

Bibliography

 

Made Up To Kill (1940) aka Made Up For Murder

If the Shroud Fits (1951) aka Dangerous Blondes

The Frightened Stiff (1942)

Sailor, Take Warning! (1944)

There Was a Crooked Man (1945)

Ghost of a Chance (1947)

Murder in Any Language (1948)

Triple Threat (1949)

Beauty Marks the Spot (1951)

The Blonde Died Dancing (1956) aka She Died Dancing

Requiem for a Blonde (1958) aka Murder Noon and Night

Scent of Mystery (1959)

Grave Danger (1965)

Necessary Evil (1965)

A Few Days in Madrid (1965) as Audrey and William Roos

Cry in the Night (1966)

One False Move (1966)

Who Saw Maggie Brown? (1967)

To Save His Life (1968)

Suddenly One Night (1970)

What Did Hattie See? (1970)

Bad Trip (1971)

Murder at Martha's Vineyard (1981)

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