Crime Writer Margot Kinberg

A recent post from Moira at Clothes in Books has got me thinking about hats. It used to be the custom to wear hats for just about any occasion, and millinery was an important occupation. Hats took all sorts of forms, too, depending on one’s social class, the event, even the time of day. Today, hats are far less common unless the weather is very cold (I’m excepting those who wear head coverings for religious reasons or as part of a sport team uniform). Still, people do wear hats at times. Hats can tell us a lot about a person, too (e.g. team loyalty or preferred style of dress), so it’s little wonder they play a role in crime fiction. Here are just a few examples. I know you’ll think of more.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of The Blue Carbuncle begins as Dr. Watson pays a visit to Sherlock Holmes. When he arrives, Holmes is examining a hat that a local commissionaire has brought to him. Watson sees little of interest about the hat, but Holmes says this: 

     “It is perhaps less suggestive than it might have been,” he remarked, “and yet there are a few inferences which are very distinct, and a few others which represent at least a strong balance of probability. That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.”
     “My dear Holmes!”
     “He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect,” he continued, disregarding my remonstrance. “He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days, and which he anoints with lime-cream. These are the more patent facts which are to be deduced from his hat. Also, by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he has gas laid on in his house.”

The commissionaire also brought Holmes a goose which he found near the hat. From those two pieces of evidence, Holmes is able to trace a valuable jewel.

In Ellery Queen’s The Roman Hat Mystery, Queen and his father, Inspector Richard Queen, investigate the murder of Monte Field. The victim was a blackmailer, so there’s no shortage of suspects. And as it happens, several of them were at the same performance as Field. The challenge here is to work out how Field was killed. At the time of the murder, he was at the theatre, but the seats around him were empty, so it’s hard to see how anyone could have gotten close enough to kill him. What’s more, the silk top hat that Field wore to the theatre is missing. It turns out that the hat, and its location, are crucial to solving the mystery.

Hats play a role in several Agatha Christie stories. For instance, in Evil Under the Sun, Hercule Poirot is taking a holiday at the Jolly Roger, a high-quality hotel on Leathercombe Bay, off the Devon coast. Also staying there is famous actress Arlena Stuart Marshall. When she is murdered one day, Poirot works with the local police to find out who committed the crime. As a part of this investigation, Poirot looks through Arlena’s clothes, and notices a large selection of hats. His reaction is an indulgent ‘Les femmes!’ It’s not spoiling the story to say that his attention to details like Arlena’s possessions comes in very useful. Christie fans can also tell you about her fictional detective novelist, Ariadne Oliver, sitting on her hat during a visit to the village of Broadhinny in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead.

Steve Hamilton’s Ice Run features former Detroit cop Alex McNight, who was injured in the line of duty, and now lives on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. One night, he makes plans to meet his current love interest, Natalie Reynaud, a cop with the Ontario Provincial Police. When McKnight gets to the hotel, he meets an eccentric old man wearing a homburg hat. Later, when McKnight and Reynaud go up to the hotel room they’ve reserved, they find the same homburg hat filled with snow. There’s a note on it, too, that says I know who you are. What’s especially eerie is that the old man is later found frozen to death. McKnight and Reynaud are drawn into the case, and work to find out who the dead man was, how he died, and what the cryptic message and hat filled with snow mean.

And then there’s D.S. Nelson’s Blake Heatherington. When we meet him in Hats Off to Murder, he’s a London milliner who proudly continues his family’s business. He has a knack for creating just the right hat to reflect the owner’s personality. Later, he retires, and moves to the village of Tuesbury. Council rules forbid him to have an official business from his home, but he gets around that. He has a shed on his property that he uses to store his materials and equipment, and he does bespoke orders for clients. He gets a lot of fulfilment from creating hats, and his eye for detail turns out to be very useful.

There are a lot of other crime novels where hats play a role. And that makes sense when you consider what a long history hat-wearing has. And there are so many different sorts of hats, too. Thanks, Moira, for the inspiration. Now, please treat yourselves and visit Moira’s excellent blog. There you’ll find fine reviews, interesting articles, and all sorts of discussions of clothes and popular culture in fiction, and what it all says about us.

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Phil Collins’ Wear My Hat.