CLASON, Clyde B(urt) 1903-1987

PERSONAL: Born 1903, in Denver, CO; died 1987.

CAREER: Author. Also worked as an advertising copywriter and trade paper editor in Chicago, IL.

WRITINGS:

"THEOCRITUS LUCIUS WESTBOROUGH" SERIES; CRIME NOVELS

The Fifth Tumbler, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1936.

The Death Angel, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1936.

Blind Drifts, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1937.

The Purple Parrot, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1937.

The Man from Tibet, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1938.

The Whispering Ear, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1938.

Murder Gone Minoan, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1939, published as Clue to the Labyrinth, Heinemann (London, England), 1939.

Dragon's Cave, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1939.

Poison Jasmine, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1940.

Green Shiver, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1941.

OTHER

The Story of Period Furniture, Nutshell (Chicago, IL), 1925.

Ark of Venus (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1955.

Exploring the Distant Stars: Thrilling Adventures in Our Galaxy and Beyond, Putnam (New York, NY), 1959.

Men, Planets, and Stars (for children), Putnam (New York, NY), 1959.

I Am Lucifer: Confessions of the Devil (novel), Muhlenberg Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1960.

This Rock Exists, Davies (London, England), 1962.

The Delights of the Slide Rule, Crowell (London, England), 1964.

Also author of Evolution of Architecture and How to Write Stories That Sell, both for Nutshell (Chicago, IL).

SIDELIGHTS: Clyde B. Clason was in many ways a typical figure among traditional American detective novelists of the 1930s. The puzzle is very much the center of his novels, with most characters sketched just fully enough to be told apart. Beginning with his first novel, The Fifth Tumbler, he displayed an enthusiasm for the locked rooms and impossible crimes featured in the works of John Dickson Carr and Clayton S. Rawson. Clason's novels are often illustrated with maps of the murder scene. Like many American puzzle-makers of the 1930s, he was heavily influenced by the intellectual and informational content of S. S. Van Dine's "Philo Vance" novels, ahd thus offers a display of erudition on various arcane subjects relevant to the mystery at hand. Though Clason generally shunned footnotes, except to plug his earlier books, he went Van Dine's apparatus one better by including a three-page bibliography at the beginning of The Man from Tibet.

Clason's continuing sleuth, initially a Chicago resident but later pursuing crime in California, is elderly Roman Empire scholar Theocritus Lucius Westborough. The sleuth's police friend, Lieutenant John Mack, is notably rude when dealing with suspects, while Westborough is mild and likeable, a far cry from the abrasive intellect of Philo Vance or the irascible personalities of scholar-sleuths like John Rhode's Dr. Priestley or Jacques Futrelle's Thinking Machine. Speaking in an ornate and pedantic fashion when discussing crimes, despite his age Westborough is no armchair detective; he does not shun strenuous physical activity in the pursuit of truth.

Westborough solves his first case, The Fifth Tumbler, when impossible murder strikes among the inhabitants of the residential hotel where he lives. The novel's complicated plot is worked out in a way that plays fair with the reader. The same can be said for the subsequent Chicago case, The Purple Parrot, concerning a nutty will in which the only bequest to the decedent's granddaughter is the vanished bird of the title. In The Man from Tibet and Dragon's Cave Westborough is given the opportunity to display his erudition on Tibetan art and religion in the former and on puzzling out a cryptogram in the latter. With these stories, and many more, Clason became known for the elaborate puzzles in his plots, which often had to be solved with the dazzling ratiocinative powers of his sleuth, Westborough.*