THE BELLAMY
TRIAL
FRANCES NOYES
HART
Introduction by
HANK PHILLIPPI
RYAN
AMERICAN
MYSTERY
CLASSICS
Penzler Publishers
New York
OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS
THE BELLAMY TRIAL
FRANCES NOYES HART (1890-1943) was an American writer whose stories were published in Scribner’s, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post, where The Bellamy Trial was first serialized. The daughter of Frank Brett Noyes, one of the founders of the Associated Press, Hart was educated in American, Italian, and French schools before serving in WWI as a canteen worker for the YMCA and as a translator for the Naval Intelligence Bureau. After returning home, she wrote six novels, numerous short stories, and a non-fiction memoir about the war.
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN is the bestselling author of eleven novels, including four in the Charlotte McNally series. A one-time president of Sisters in Crime, Ryan’s suspense fiction has won the Mary Higgins Clark Award, four Agatha Awards, and numerous other accolades. Alongside her work as an author, Ryan also has a successful career as an investigative reporter at Boston’s WHDH-TV, where her ground-breaking journalism has been celebrated with thirty-four Emmy Awards and fourteen Edward R. Murrow Awards.
THE BELLAMY TRIAL
The Judge
Anthony Bristed Carver
The Prosecutor Counsel for the Defense
Daniel Farr Dudley Lambert
The Defendants
Susan Ives
Stephen Bellamy
FIRST DAY
Opening speech for the prosecution
SECOND DAY
Mr. Herbert Conroy, real estate agent
Dr. Paul Stanley, physician
Miss Kathleen Page, governess
THIRD DAY
Mr. Douglas Thorne, Susan Ives’s brother
Miss Flora Biggs, Mimi Bellamy’s schoolmate
Mrs. Daniel Ives, Susan Ives’s mother-in-law
Mr. Elliot Farwell, Mimi Bellamy’s ex-fiancé
Mr. George Dallas, Mr. Farwell’s friend
FOURTH DAY
Miss Melanie Cordier, waitress
Miss Laura Roberts, lady’s maid
Mr. Luigi Orsini, handy man
Mr. Joseph Turner, bus driver
Sergeant Hendrick Johnson, state trooper
FIFTH DAY
Opening speech for defense
Mrs. Adolph Platz, wife of chauffeur
Mrs. Timothy Shea, landlady
Mr. Stephen Bellamy
Dr. Gabriel Barretti, finger-print expert
SIXTH DAY
Mr. Leo Fox, mechanician
Mr. Patrick Ives, Susan Ives’s husband
Susan Ives
SEVENTH DAY
Susan Ives—conclusion
Stephen Bellamy—recalled
Closing speech for the defense
Closing speech for the prosecution
EIGHTH DAY
Mr. Randolph Phipps, high-school principal
Miss Sally Dunne, high-school pupil
The judge’s charge
The verdict
INTRODUCTION
How do we decide which is the crime of the century? In our culture of non-stop trial coverage and devotion to true crime, there always seems to be a new candidate for the headline: O.J. Simpson. Casey Anthony. Ted Bundy. We can name them, debate them, and recite every element of those real life stories.
In 1922, the crime of the century was a particularly scandalous murder case in Somerset, New Jersey. In what became known as the Hall-Mills murders, an episcopal minister and an attractive member of his church choir—each of whom were married to others—were found shot dead under a crab apple tree, their bodies suggestively positioned in death, and torn-up love letters placed beneath their corpses.
The press attention was relentless—Damon Runyan covered it, as did Mary Roberts Rinehart. Apparently readers couldn’t get enough inside scoop about the machinations of two high-status families, nor of the pivotal (and ever-changing) evidence provided by livestock-farmer witness Jane Gibson, dubbed “the pig woman,” who had discovered their bodies. Reportedly, only the Lindbergh case booted Hall-Mills from the headlines.
Frances Noyes Hart, daughter of a newspaperman, had already written short stories published in The Saturday Evening Post, but she took the bones of the scandal and, with a wry and witty style echoing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, wove her own mystery about east coast infidelity and notoriety, calling it The Bellamy Trial.
In fact, Fitzgerald had written The Great Gatsby just three years before Hart’s novel was published, and the ending of Gatsby, at least one historian speculates, was also partly based on the Hall-Mills murders. Had Hart read that book? Or perhaps both novels were timely peeks into the duplicity underlying the veneer of polite society.
In her endearingly dated (but instantly riveting) courtroom drama, one of the characters—a cynical veteran reporter—comments on the trial that’s underway, with words that many of us have spoken close to one hundred years later:
“And in case you’d like to know what it’s all about,” he explains to a novice trial watcher, “it’s the greatest murder trial of the century—about every two years another one of them comes along.”
Why are we so riveted with true crime? And why has the true-crime-turned-fiction become such a beloved reading staple?
Another character asks essentially the same question—and gets an answer that’s equally applicable today.
“A murder trial,” said the red-headed girl softly. “Well, I should think that ought to be about the most tremendous thing in the world . . . The only story that you’re going to be able to interest every human being in, from the president of the United States to the gentleman who takes away the ashes, is a good murder story. . . . The old lady from Dubuque will be at it the first thing in the morning, and the young lady from Park Avenue will be at it the last thing at night. And if it’s a love story too, you’re lucky, because then you’ve got the combination that every really great writer that ever lived has picked out to wring hearts, and freeze the marrow in posterity’s bones.”
A murder mystery, and a love story, maybe several. That’s what we get in The Bellamy Trial, too. The charming and engaging novel portrays essentially what reporters now call “wall-to-wall coverage” of a trial—but in these pages it’s presented from a curious point of view: not quite omniscient but not quite . . . not. It’s as if we were watching the trial with an experienced narrator, one who is not quite telling us what to think, but not quite . . . not. It’s arch and knowing, and carries a personal verdict in every phrase.
For instance: is this person a suspect? “Flora Biggs might have been a pretty girl ten years ago, before that fatal heaviness had crept from sleazy silk ankles to the round chin above the imitation pearls. Everything about Miss Biggs was imitation . . .”
Is this person a good guy? “Not a pleasant voice at all, Mr. Farwell’s; a heavy, sullen voice, thickened and coarsened with some disreputable alchemy.”
And during each witness’s testimony, we are treated to the Nick and Nora commentary of “the red-headed girl” (a fledging reporter from Philadelphia on her first story) and the cynical experienced newshound from New York.
It’s difficult not to imagine Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, or William Powell and Myrna Loy, in these roles, and their dialogue, spunky and cinematic, makes the reader long for the movie version. (Which, as it turns out, was made by MGM in 1929, alt
hough not with much success. The movie of The Bellamy Trial is lost to history—apparently only reels seven and eight exist. But do, if you will, look up the actress Betty Bronson who was cast as the “red-headed girl.” She is quite perfect and, after reading the book, you can easily imagine her in the role. )
Fifty-eight years before Presumed Innocent, about thirty years before Anatomy of a Murder and Twelve Angry Men, and six years before The Case of the Velvet Claws, the first Perry Mason mystery, The Bellamy Trial is surely one of the very first legal thrillers ever written. (Agatha Christie’s seminal Witness for the Prosecution, then a short story called Traitor’s Hands, was published two years before Bellamy, in 1925. Had Frances Noyes Hart read it? Even heard of it? We will never know.)
But Hart brilliantly brings her fictional murder of the century to life in a groundbreakingly avant garde structure: Set in a fictional courtroom in the fictional town of “Redfield, county seat of Bellechester, twenty-five miles from the metropolis of New York,” the reader is taken step-by-step, word by word, legal argument by legal argument, through a scandalous and riveting murder trial set in the affluent suburbs of Rosemont and Lakedale. It is only after the verdict that the reader is taken into a different setting—and even that is still simply another room in the courthouse. Every other element of the tale is as described on the stand, and in a tour de force of point of view, through the memories and motivations of the witnesses.
Savvy readers, even non-lawyers, will recognize the legal anachronisms and writer’s conveniences: a jury comprised of only men, one that gets impaneled with nary a question from the judge or attorneys, where future witnesses sit in the courtroom to hear the testimony of those who take the stand before them, where the same lawyer represents both defendants, witnesses are allowed to relate entire episodes, and hearsay seems to be a randomly applied violation. But we forgive the technical imperfections—the story is a page-turner, subtle and careful and knowing and intricately plotted, with the truth tucked in along the way.
Hart is such a clever writer, and that makes this charming novel—which was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post—far more than a trial transcript.
With Whartonesque overtones and trenchant social commentary, the world of the scandalous crime emerges: silver dancing shoes, silver flasks, country clubs, cocktail parties, maids, nannies, and families with day and night nurseries; and the reader understands the milieu Hart is allowing us to grasp: the attendant wealth and lack of it, the undercurrent (usually under) of class struggles, and the battle for acceptance in social circles. Passionate love and broken promises, parental manipulation, the deceit and gaslighting that can only come from love and money and greed and control.
And lest we miss any crucial points, our red-headed girl and the cynical reporter provide a Greek chorus to the testimony—never missing a news deadline, of course—but filling in the blanks for us as necessary, with bits of juicy gossip, or backstory, or their personal guesses about whodunnit.
Like a murder mystery without a detective, The Bellamy Trial puts the reader in the position of juror, weighing, essentially, only the testimony from the witness stand, and forces us to rely on that to come up with a fair verdict. And then of course, to discern the truth of what really happened that night in the gardener’s cottage. A truth which is not, as we well know, always revealed when the final gavel falls.
“Truth, oh, what you’re going to learn before you get out of here, the hunt for truth, is it?” the reporter says to the red-headed girl. “Well, now, you get this straight—if that’s what you’re expecting to find here, you’ll save yourself a whole lotta bad minutes by taking the next train back to Philadelphia.”
But in the end—in a reader’s moment of “we should have figured that out!”—Hart does reveal the truth. And we know what really happened.
(As for what will happen to the reporter and the red-headed girl? Their banter and blossoming relationship may create another love story, one that (adorably) takes place in the margins, but serves as another way to bring this mystery to life.)
The author was the daughter of Frank Noyes, a well-regarded publisher of the Washington Star and honorary president of the Associated Press. After attending Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut, Frances studied at the Sorbonne and Columbia University. In World War I, according to her New York Times obituary, she worked with the Naval Intelligence Bureau and also served overseas doing “canteen work for the YMCA.”
It’s a tender thought, isn’t it? Frances Noyes Hart writing this, in 1927. Reading it, we all know what was about to happen in the world. The financial ruin around the corner, and another devastating war to follow. But she could have had no idea how lives would change.
In 1927, when this book was published, Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry was number one on The New York Times bestseller list (with Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death and Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey not far behind). Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, and work began on Mount Rushmore.
In 1927, Mary Higgins Clark was born. And with the publication of The Bellamy Trial, so, it seems, was the legal thriller.
—HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN
CHAPTER I
THE red-headed girl sank into the seat in the middle of the first row with a gasp of relief. Sixth seat from the aisle—yes, that was right; the label on the arm of the golden-oak chair stared up at her reassuringly. Row A, seat 15, Philadelphia Planet. The ones on either side of her were empty. Well, it was a relief to know that there were four feet of space left unoccupied in Redfield, even if only temporarily. She was still shaken into breathless stupor by the pandemonium in the corridors outside—the rattling of regiments of typewriters, of armies of tickers, the shouts of infuriated denizens of telephone booths, the hurrying, frantic faces of officials, the scurrying and scampering of dozens of rusty-haired freckled-faced insubordinate small boys, whose olive-drab messenger uniforms alone saved them from extermination; the newspaper men—you could spot them at once, looking exhausted and alert and elaborately bored; the newspaper women, keen and purposeful and diverted; and above and around and below all these licensed inhabitants, the crowd—a vast, jostling, lunging beast, with one supreme motive galvanizing it to action—an immense, a devouring curiosity that sent it surging time and time again against the closed glass doors with their blue-coated guardians, fragile barriers between it and the consummation of its desire. For just beyond those doors lay the arena where the beast might slake its hunger at will, and it was not taking its frustration of that privilege amiably.
The red-headed girl set her little black-feathered hat straight with unsteady fingers. She wasn’t going to forget that crowd in a hurry. It had growled at her—actually growled—when she’d fought her way through it, armed with the magic of the little blue ticket that spelled open sesame as well as press section. Who could have believed that even curiosity would turn nice old gray-headed ladies and mild-looking gentlemen with brown moustaches and fat matrons with leather bags and thin flappers with batik scarfs into one huge ravenous beast? She panted again, reminiscently, at the thought of the way they’d shoved and squashed and kneaded—and then settled down to gratified inspection.
So this was a courtroom!
Not a very large or very impressive room, looked at from any angle. It might hold three hundred people at a pinch, and there were, conservatively, about three thousand crowding the corridors and walking the streets of Redfield in their efforts to expand its limits. Fan-shaped, with nine rows of the golden-oak seats packed with grimly triumphant humanity, the first three neatly tagged with the little white labels that metamorphosed them into the press section. Golden-oak panelling halfway up the walls, and then whitewashed plaster—rather dingy, smoky plaster, its defects relentlessly revealed by the pale autumnal sunshine flooding in through the great windows and the dome of many-colored glass, lavish and heartening enough to compensate for much of the grimness and the grime.
Near enough for the red-headed girl to touch was
a low rail, and beyond that rail a little empty space, like a stage—empty of actors, but cluttered with chairs and tables. At the back was a small platform with a great high-backed black leather chair, and a still smaller platform on a slightly lower level, with a rail about it and a much more uncomfortable-looking chair. The judge’s seat, the witness box—she gave a little sigh of pure uncontrollable excitement, and a voice next to her said affably:
“Hi! Greetings, stranger, or hail, friend, as the case may be. Can I get by you into the next seat without damaging you and those feet of yours materially?”
The red-headed girl scrambled guiltily to the offending feet, unobtrusive enough in themselves, but most obtrusively extended across the narrow passage, and turned a flushed and anxious countenance on her cheerful critic, now engaged in folding himself competently into the exiguous space provided by the golden-oak chair. A tall lanky young man, with a straight nose, mouse-colored hair, shrewd gray eyes, and an expression that was intended to be that of a hard-boiled cynic, and that worked all right unless he grinned. He wore a shabby tweed suit, a polka-dotted tie, had three very sharp pencils, and a good-sized stack of telegraph blanks clasped to his heart. Obviously a reporter—a real reporter. The red-headed girl attempted to conceal her gold pencil and leather-bound notebook, smiling tentatively and ingratiatingly.
“Covering it for a New York paper?” inquired the Olympian one graciously.
“No,” said the red-headed girl humbly; “a Philadelphia one—the Philadelphia Planet. Is yours New York?”
“M’m—h’m—Sphere. Doing color stuff?”
“Oh, I hope so,” replied the red-headed girl so fervently that the reporter looked somewhat startled. “You see, I don’t know whether it will have color or not. I’m not exactly a regular reporter.”
“Oh, you aren’t, aren’t you? Well, if it’s no secret, just exactly what are you? A finger-print expert?”
“I’m a—a writer,” said the red-headed girl, looking unusually small and dignified. “This is my first as—assignment.” It was frightful to stammer just when you particularly wanted not to.
The Bellamy Trial (American Mystery Classics) Page 1