The Horizontal Man (1946)

This somewhat awkwardly written suspense novel by Helen Eustis was slow going for me, but it had some interesting ideas. It’s a standard murder mystery in many ways. The murder occurs on the first page without revealing the killer and then a number of likely suspects start showing up. In the end, we learn who did it. All’s fair. The setting is an upscale college for women. The victim is a philandering poetry professor. The novel flashes across points of view in the short sections advancing the investigation. Two characters probably qualify as the main characters—a young journalist and a student who edits the college paper, Kate Innes. Kate is overweight, or big, and there is an untoward amount of fat-shaming here, one of the most obvious ways this novel is dated but not the only one. The journalist thinks of Kate as “Fatty” although at least he keeps that to himself. His strategy with her is shaming her when they eat. These two fall in love. The journalist is given as more or less normal and otherwise without malice. At least two other professors have strong potential to be gay (and no, it’s not a good thing) while a woman professor is considered over the hill and a slut. She’s 42. So lots of problems here, forgivable enough maybe “for the times,” but that’s compounded with a sluggish and overly busy plotline and a leaden style of writing. The action is pitched at hysterical levels but even so I was often bored with it and/or losing the thread from all the POV jumping around. It does have a surprise or twist ending that I did not see coming, a bizarre explanation that fits with the general pseudo-Freudian air here—hysteria, mental institutions, various transparent emotional complexes. This one’s got it all, or too much, which is to say it’s inevitably flawed. I think I could handle even the psychological mumbo jumbo at the end if the whole thing had a stronger through line. It’s a first novel for Eustis and won an Edgar in the first-novel category. Lots of people seem to like it a lot. I like the supercharged atmosphere, but it often bogs down even as a very short novel. It comes at a strange juncture for feminism. By 1946 women had won the vote and shown they could shoulder the labor of a nation during war. But this novel focuses on continuing preoccupations with femininity and marriage with men. Freda Cramm, the 42-year-old oversexed crone, is recognizably a feminist but her life is quite evidently unenviable even with her independence and self-reliance. Does Eustis the author buy into these views? That’s hard to say. She doesn’t seem to care much for any of her characters, male or female. As a sendup of life at a women’s college, The Horizontal Man might be pretty good, but unfortunately women’s colleges are more a thing of the past now too.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)