FORGOTTEN BOOK: A LITTLE LESS THAN KIND

 A Little Less Than Kind by Charlotte Armstrong  (1963)

Hob Cummingham was a large and powerful man:  well-liked, determined, successful, the sort of man who made the world conform to his wishes...married to a beautiful and sensitive woman who loved him, with a handsome and smart son going to Stamford, living in a luxurious mansion that he had designed himself, and the president of a large and very profitable company.  Then Cunningham came down with cancer.  He fought it as best he could, still making all the day-to-day decisions to run his company, but finally he decided to bring in his best friend since childhood, David Crown, a principled widower with adult children, to help him run the company.  As Hob grew weaker, he ceded more and more of the company's management to David, instructing him to run the company after his death in order to provide for his wife Abby, and to train his son Ladd to take over the company if he should want to; Hob wanted Ladd to make his own future and not be forced into running a company if he had other dreams.  Hob also told David, who had dated Abby back in the distant past, that he should marry Abby if that was what she wanted.  Then Hob died.

Although David and Abby both loved their original spouses, they found they still loved and needed each other.  Six months after Hob's death, the two married.  Hob's death had a profound effect on Ladd.  Uncertain whether he actually loved or hated his father, Ladd was resentful of the man who swept in and married his mother so soon after Hob's death.  Also uncertain whether he now loved or hated his mother, he viewed her marriage as a betrayal.  In this replay of Hamlet, Ladd became suspicious of David, who may or may not have engineered his father's early death.  Ladd became obsessed with the idea until one day he found one of his father's old date books, markd up with his father's old short hand notes.  One cryptic entry convinced Ladd that David had murdered Hob.  This compulsion pushed Ladd into unstable country as he became increasingly obsessed with the imagined thought of his fther's murder.  Ladd vowed to avenge his father.

Ladd's actions became more and more erractic as he worked to push David out of his and his mother's life.  David meanwhile was desperate to help his best friend's son and to protect Abby at all costs.  Ladd's single-minded obsession became paramount, closing his mind to the feelings of others. Ladd blithely accused a neightbor of molesting his teen-aged daughter agter she had tried to find out what was bothering him,  Finally, a frustrated Ladd decided that his only recourse was to kill David.  An attempot to purchase a gun failed, but Ladd was able to obtain a switchblade, setting the stge for a vilent showdown.

The paperback edition I read (with a semi-Gothicky cover painting that had nothing to do with the novel) proclaimed Charlotte Armstrong as the "Mistress of Romantic Suspense."  Armstrong, a best-selling author, was more the Queen of Domestic Suspense -- something that set her a bit apart from other top female suspense writers of the time, such as Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt.  Armstrong's writing was powerful and her ability to capture the day-to-day tension between her characters was top notch.  She had a razor-sharp ability to bring suspense into true focus without descending into bambastic overkill.  Armstrong was "One of the few authentic spell-casting witches of modern times," according to Anthony Boucher, a noted champion of her works.  And the New York Telegraph stated, "Charlotte Armstrong is the queen of suspense novelists."

Although she still has many fans, Charlotte Armstrong has become a forgotten writer to the general public since her early death in 1969.  A shame, really.  Her novels, stories, and plays still resonate with the same power and magic it always had.