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  GO, LOVELY ROSE

  They find Mrs. Henshaw at the bottom of the cellar stairs with her neck broken. Everyone assumes she has fallen. But when Rose’s sister appears on the scene, she immediately begins to cry murder. And she’s right! Young Hartley is the obvious suspect. Mrs. Henshaw had been his and his sister Rachel’s housekeeper for many years, and there was no love lost between any of them. In fact, no one in town really liked Rose Henshaw. Her ex-husband, Francie, certainly knew how evil she could be—she ruined his life. The rest of them were simply afraid of her: young Dr. Craig, the newcomer in town; and Bix, Hartley’s teenage girlfriend; her father, Hugh Bovard, editor of the local paper; and his shattered wife, Althea, still mourning the loss of her son. They all hated Rose Henshaw for one reason or another—but who hated her enough to push her down the stairs?

  THE EVIL WISH

  Ever since Marcia and Lucy were little girls, they would hide in the basement of their brownstone and listen in on their father’s conversations. But now they are in their 30s, still living with their domineering father, and one day they eavesdrop on a very portentous revelation. Their widowed father intends to marry his secretary, give her all his money, and let her kick his daughters out of their house. In their anger and outrage, Marcia and Lucy hatch a plot to murder him. When their father and his secretary are involved in a fatal car crash, their plans prove unnecessary. But what are they to do with their murder scheme and the residual guilt—particularly when the aborted plot develops a life of its own?

  GO, LOVELY ROSE / THE EVIL WISH

  Published by Stark House Press

  1315 H Street

  Eureka, CA 95501, USA

  [email protected]

  www.starkhousepress.com

  GO, LOVELY ROSE

  Originally published and copyright © 1954 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York; reprinted in paperback by Berkley Medallion Books, New York, 1961. Copyright © renewed January 11, 1982 by Jean Potts.

  THE EVIL WISH

  Originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, and copyright © 1962 by Jean Potts; reprinted in paperback by Ace Books, New York, 1964. Copyright © renewed January 29, 1990 by Jean Potts.

  Reprinted by permission of the Jean Potts estate. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  “Jean Potts” copyright © 2019 by J. F. Norris.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-944520-65-6

  Book design by Mark Shepard, shepgraphics.com

  Cover Art by James Heimer

  Proofreading by Bill Kelly

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

  First Stark House Press Edition: February 2019

  Jean Potts

  by J. F. Norris

  The seeds of Jean Potts’ fascination with uncontrollable imagination and the dire effects of unrestrained dreaming can be seen in one of her earliest short stories. “The Other Woman” was published in the August 24 issue of Collier’s in 1946 and tells the story of Roxy who is having an affair with married man Keith and her obsession with his wife Mae. Keith makes the daring move of bringing Roxy to his apartment when Mae is out and that changes everything. Setting foot in the wife’s home, seeing how it was decorated, seeing her clothes (“frilly fussy dresses… little high heeled slippers, the foolish hats with veils and feathers, all told their obvious story.”), these observations are permanently ingrained in Roxy’s mind. Mae, previously merely a name, suddenly becomes a living woman and the images and thoughts won’t leave Roxy.

  So one day at a local bar not far from Keith’s apartment—when Roxy is busy ruminating on what Mae is like, discussing with the bartender her fanciful detective work based on her observations, and then dreaming up what Mae does when Keith is away—in walks a flighty, nervous young woman. She sidles up to Roxy and begins to spout forth her unhappiness and the discovery that her husband is having an affair. Roxy’s imagination gets the better of her and she is convinced that she is talking to Mae. The conversation is revealing and confessional. Much of what Keith has said about his wife is echoed in this woman’s own story. An immediate intimate friendship is created in this brief encounter as Roxy marvels at coincidences and listens raptly, ironically becoming more and more sympathetic to the troubled wife’s story. The woman leaves her calling card with Roxy. She feels that they have bonded and she invites Roxy to visit her or call her in the future. When Roxy finally gets up the nerve to turn over the card and read the words printed there she is convinced she will see Mae’s name and address. But of course—it’s not there. The name and address are unrecognizable; the woman is a complete stranger.

  That one meeting has forever changed the way the Roxy views herself in relationship to Keith and Mae. The adventure of being the other woman is destroyed, all thanks to her wild imagination and her unexpected understanding of how an abandoned wife feels. As Potts so devastatingly states the transformation:

  “Nothing could restore the flawless portrait of Keith; the plunge that had landed her firmly on her feet, herself again, had shattered it forever.”

  So many of Potts’ hallmarks in her crime fiction are seen in this early short story: her mastery at everyday conversation, her predilection for ridicule, but most of all her insight into the dark recesses of human imagination and its powerful hold. Thoughts imprison her characters. Take for example the ever grieving mother Althea Bovard in Go, Lovely Rose, the first novel in this volume you are holding. Her mind cannot let go of her dead son Ronnie, whose memory haunts the Bovard household like a ghost. His name is never far from his mother’s lips. No conversation is free from some memory or wisp of Ronnie’s short difficult life. And no wonder she cannot let him go—Ronnie was developmentally delayed and severely disabled. Born with Down’s syndrome, a normal life would never be his, in Althea’s mind. Althea cannot forgive herself for not allowing him a longer life, for failing to find ways for him to adapt. Her grief—an extension of her inexhaustible imagination, her constant wishing how things might have been—is her punishment.

  As an examination of a horrible woman’s vindictive lifestyle and its effect on not just two families, but an entire town, Go, Lovely Rose is easily one of the most arresting and perceptive crime novels of the 1950s. Potts succeeds in finding the balance between attack and compassion in her critique of the small-minded and malicious Rose and the long lasting wounds she has caused. The murder investigation, as is the case in many of these domestic suspense novels, is both a revelation and healing for all. But the restitution of well-being and equanimity for all families involved always comes at a costly price.

  In The Evil Wish (1963) as in her magazine short story, Potts explored the theme of powerful imaginative ideas that cannot be dismissed or repressed and must be contended with. As Roxy comes to the realization that her newly formed vision of Keith cannot be replaced with her fantasy lover, so too do sisters Marcia and Lucy learn to confront their failed murder plot. The sisters in The Evil Wish not only feel cheated when their father dies in an accident, robbing them of the chance to kill him, they become victims of their own imaginations as well. The murder plot may have been thwarted but the ideas have t
ainted their minds. They find the plot must be carried through, especially when they are victimized by an opportunistic blackmailer who has evidence of the failed murder plot. “Taint” is a perfect word to describe the way thoughts and ideas alter and poison the mind of her characters. In fact Potts uses a similar word in “The Other Woman” that encapsulates her favorite motif: “…nothing was quite the same that weekend. Her Thoughts didn’t taste the same; it was as if Mae had somehow tinged her whole mind.”

  In The Evil Wish, perhaps the most original novel of her entire career, Potts’ ingenuity lies in the exploration of evil deeds not carried out and the festering remains of criminality that never come to fruition. To say that the novel is merely about the guilty consciences of two sisters is to underestimate its complexity. Look at this scene where Marcia kills a bug:

  “Absently she scuffed some crumbs of dirt over the caterpillar. One of God’s creatures. All right; but so were roses, and you had to make a choice. You had to accept the fact that some of God’s creatures were no good. The law of rose-preservation, as basic as the law of self-preservation.”

  The ease with which Marcia so callously and brutally severs the bug in two with a garden trowel is mentioned repeatedly after this scene. Potts has created that resounding image as a reminder of how that evil wish has corrupted Marcia, how the ability to perpetrate a violent act has not only become much easier for her, but almost a compelling necessity.

  Not surprisingly both of these novels were recognized by the Mystery Writers of America. Go, Lovely Rose won Potts an Edgar in 1955 for Best First Mystery Novel (an award reserved for debut novelists) while eight years later The Evil Wish was nominated for Best Mystery Novel of the Year.

  Time and again Potts will revisit these motifs in her novels:

  Lightning Strikes Twice (1958) features Harriet, a teenage girl, who will not allow the violent death of her Uncle Winthrop to remain labeled a suicide. Her imaginative mind is often her undoing. Like Althea she too clings to memories of loved one long gone—her father whose presence is everywhere in the house (“[the house was] so steeped in Daddy’s personality that again she could almost believe there was magic word to bring him back”).

  The Little Lie (1968) presents us with Dee, who has a habit of telling little lies and truly believing in them, depending on them to construct her own personal reality, to protect her preciously cultivated status in town. One little lie leads to more lies. A fib becomes a grand deceit and soon Dee finds herself desperately trying to reconstruct the truth without ever being found out. She can’t admit to the lie, she is incapable of admitting to mistakes. And that’s her fatal flaw. Potts shows a warped imagination like Dee’s has even more power to change, often to destroy, than one that contains only the faintest of obsessive thoughts.

  Potts helped forge the way for more women writers of “domestic suspense”—a sub-genre that focuses on married life and familiar strife, suburban communities rather than urban living—and uncovers the criminality that can arise when the pursuit of the American Dream gives in to darker impulses of greed, jealousy, adultery, and betrayal. Now decades after her novels first appeared, Jean Potts is deservedly being recognized again for her contributions to crime fiction in this fine double volume. Enjoy these two novels that often surpass in originality the work of her writer colleagues who also specialized in “domestic suspense” like Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong and Celia Fremlin. Delve deep into this suburban landscape populated with deceit and grief, where wild imaginations are not as freeing as they are imprisoning, where Jean Potts showed no mercy for her troubled, complex and ultimately fascinating characters.

  —November 2018

  Chicago, Illinois

  J. F. Norris has always been interested in neglected and unappreciated writers of crime, supernatural and adventure fiction. His blog Pretty Sinister Books is a seven year long labor of love that celebrates the work of authors whose books have been mostly forgotten yet are well worth reading. His writing has often led to the reissue of long out of print books like Desert Town by Ramona Stewart, The Cook by Harry Kressing, and the horror novels of John Blackburn. Most recently his essays on crime fiction have appeared in Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats, Valancourt Books’ reissue of The Other Passenger by John Keir Cross and Murder in the Closet, the Edgar nominated non-fiction anthology on forgotten gay and lesbian mystery writers and LGBTQ motifs in Golden Age detective fiction. He lives in Chicago surrounded by shelves filled with hundreds of books still waiting to be read.

  Go, Lovely Rose

  by Jean Potts

  To My Favorite Sister

  I

  “Dead as they come,” said the old doctor zestfully. “Don’t know as I ever saw a deader woman. That’s the only kind of patients I get any more, is the dead ones. Now that I’m retired, they don’t trust me with anybody’s still kicking.” He cackled at his own joke.

  “Who?” repeated young Dr. Craig. “You haven’t told me who yet.” He didn’t like to push the old man (nearly eighty, and spry as a cricket, though names were apt to slip his mind) but at the same time, he felt, it would be nice to know the essential facts. He had come back from a confinement case in the country to find the old doctor waiting for him, all agog with his news. It had clearly been an exciting afternoon; as the old man said, he was seldom called out any more, except in emergencies.

  “I haven’t? Why yes, it was—” The quavery voice faltered to a stop. “Oh rats. Right on the tip of my tongue. Know it as well as I know my own. Why, yes, Mrs.—you know, she’s been keeping house for the Buckmasters for years—”

  “Oh,” said Dr. Craig. “Mrs. Henshaw.”

  They smiled at each other in relief.

  “Henshaw. Of course. There she was, at the foot of the cellar stairs, where they’d found her, with her neck broken. When they couldn’t get you they called me. Yes sir, the old back number comes in handy once in a while. Plain case of accident, but I told them to get the sheriff up there, and the coroner. Make it official. They agreed with me.” The old doctor clasped his hands in front of his round little stomach and nodded with satisfaction.

  “It’s all settled, then,” said Dr. Craig. “Fine.” He stretched out his long legs and prepared, good-humoredly, to listen to the story all over again. Tough luck for Mrs. Henshaw. But one thing about it, it had brightened the old doctor’s afternoon; it would keep him in conversation for weeks to come.

  II

  “She’s dead, Rachel. Dead as a mackerel. Fell down the cellar steps and broke her neck.”

  The words seemed to leap at her out of the telephone. Her brother’s voice—blurred at first on account of the poor connection; the long-distance operator couldn’t understand it—was all at once abnormally loud and clear.

  “Dead, Hartley? Dead?” Rachel latched on to the word as if it were a brand-new one, never heard before. It would be a good idea, she decided, to sit down.

  She didn’t ask who. No need to. Mrs. Henshaw, she thought. Mrs. Henshaw. Dead as a mackerel. How many times, throughout their blighted childhood, had she and Hartley prayed for this? Please, God, make Mrs. Henshaw die. Make Papa get a new housekeeper. Please, God.

  It had come true at last. Rachel’s mind sped off like an arrow released. She and Hartley could sell the house in Coreyville now; it would pay for Hartley’s college; and with her share she could— In split-second vision she saw herself in mink, or maybe sables, in something filmy and impossibly expensive, floating down a staircase on the arm of Greg Larrimore, while an audience composed exclusively of glossy blondes watched and yearned.... Childish. But she couldn’t help it; it was so dismal to feel outclassed the way she did at the parties Greg sometimes took her to, and it distorted her judgment about Greg himself, and—

  “It was an accident. That’s what they decided. An accident,” Hartley was saying, and the old taint of frightened stealth in his voice did something queer to Rachel. It jerked her back to another place, another self. For a moment she stop
ped being the independent young secretary with an apartment of her own in Chicago and became instead that other Rachel, that long-legged, wistful-eyed child who hadn’t escaped from Mrs. Henshaw.

  Nonsense. There was her own pleasant living room right in front of her, real as anything. Certainly she had escaped. So had Papa, by his own death. Hartley—But even Hartley was free now, with Mrs. Henshaw dead.

  “When did it happen, Hartley? How did it happen?”

  The line went blurry again. Hartley’s voice took on the forlorn quality of a scratchy phonograph record. He was singing: “‘Who knows how or when?’”

  “Hartley,” said Rachel sharply. She remembered what Myra Graves had written in her faithful Christmas letter: You might as well know it. I’m worried about that boy, the way he’s been drinking lately. “Hartley, are you drunk?”

  “Not me. Never more sober in my life.”

  “Well, then, tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t know. That’s just it, Rachel. I can’t remember—” He broke off, and the pause seemed endless. Then he went on quite matter-of-factly. “Myra Graves and I found her. At the bottom of the cellar steps. She’d been there quite a while, I guess. Myra wanted to borrow a cup of sugar. That’s why she came over.”

  “I see,” said Rachel. She felt curiously out of breath. “Look, Hartley, why don’t I hop on a train and come down tomorrow—”

  “Don’t be silly. Why should you? Don’t be silly. You weren’t even here when it happened. You couldn’t—” Again the breaking off, the endless pause. “That’s not why I called you. There’s nothing you can do. It’s all been done. No reason for you to get mixed up in it.”