The Chocolate Cobweb (Book) (1948)

The Chocolate Cobweb, by Charlotte Armstrong

New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1948

List of main characters:

Kate Garth

Amanda (Mandy) Garth, Kate’s daughter, twenty-three years old

John Garth, Kate’s husband, deceased

Tobias (Toby) Garrison

Ione Garrison, Tobias’s wife

Tobias Thone Garrison, Tobias’s son

Gene Noyes, chemist at Callahan, Amanda’s boyfriend

Fanny Austin, actress

Belle Thorne, Tobias’s first wife

Lieutenant Ellis (El) Kelly, officer with the Pasadena Police

The image on the right is the front and spine dust cover of The Chocolate Cobweb, by Charlotte Armstrong, from the 1952 hardcover edition published by Peter Davies, London. Quotations provided in this blog post are from the 1948 edition published by Coward-McCann, Inc.

The Chocolate Cobweb reads more like a Nancy Drew novel in some ways. The ending seems a bit saccharine, and it is certainly saccharine compared to the film, Merci pour le chocolat, which is based on Charlotte Armstrong’s novel. It’s a satisfying read, in spite of its ending, and it’s always great to discover another source for noir that is written by a woman.

The Chocolate Cobweb opens in Los Angeles, with Amanda Garth and her mother Kate entertaining a cousin, Edna Garfield, who is visiting from New York. On the morning of her departure, the local newspaper has a feature on Tobias Garrison, a famous painter who is showing some of his work in a local gallery. Edna lets it slip in front of Amanda that there had been a mix-up at the hospital twenty-three years ago, when Amanda Garth was born. It seems Tobias Garrison thought she was his daughter when his wife had actually given birth to his son, Thone. Amanda is immediately curious about this bit of family lore and decides to visit the Peck Galleries, where she can find a showing of Tobias’s paintings.

At the Peck Galleries, Amanda sees Tobias’s most famous painting “Belle in the Doorway” and falls in love with it, so to speak. Mr. and Mrs. Garrison make a surprise visit to the galleries while Amanda is there, and their son Thone Garrison arrives soon after his parents. Amanda resolves to meet them all, but not at the Peck Galleries. Instead, she finds their phone number and home address and pays them a visit.

The novel then switches perspective: to Ione Garrison. She makes hot chocolate, sleeping pills in her left hand, and plots Thone’s “apparent suicide.” She tries to formulate a logical motive for him to commit suicide—something about a letter from a female friend or girlfriend. No one suspected Ione when she slipped pills into Belle Garrison’s drink, and she doubts anyone will suspect her now. Tobias Garrison uses chloral (its use as a sedative was more common in the late nineteenth century) to help him sleep, and Ione does the same with barbiturates, so everyone knows that the pills would be easy to come by.

Amanda uses art as an excuse to introduce herself to the Garrisons and to meet Thone. She paints and works as a designer, and she decides a little bit of artistic license will suit her needs:

She rehearsed again her little speech. It wasn’t a speech to be said over the telephone, nor could she make an appointment to say it. No, she must just go, just barge in. . . . [ellipses in original]

Take her courage in her hand. Courage? Crust, thought Amanda. Oh, well, blame it on Art. She wanted to paint, ergo, she was a little bit crazy. (page 29)

Amanda’s ruse works. And Tobias is curious about her when she reveals that they “met” twenty-three years ago, that is, when she and Thone might have been mixed up at birth:

. . . She said, “I am an art student, Mr. Garrison. And I haven’t quite as much n-nerve as I thought I had. I came because we’ve met before.”

                “Is that so?” Tobias’ voice was smoother than she would have expected it to be. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you. Perhaps you’ll remind me?”

                Something touched the backs of her legs. Thone had brought her an armless chair. Amanda sat down with quite successful steadiness. She kept her back straight and leaned forward. “It was a long time ago, sir.”

                His head cocked politely.

                She said. “Isn’t it true, Mr. Garrison, that when your son was born, the nurse showed you the wrong child?”

                He straightened, where he sat, with shock. “That’s so,” he said. His eyes held hers now and she was aware of nothing else.

                “I am the wrong child,” said Mandy. “So you see, we have met, although I don’t remember you, either.” (pages 31–32)

During this same visit, Ione Garrison takes Amanda to Thone’s room to see another portrait of Belle. Ione purposely knocks over a thermos of hot chocolate, the one that readers know also contains the sleeping pills. Amanda helps clean up the mess with an old handkerchief, and Ione demands to have it so that she can clean it for Amanda. Amanda makes a switch and gives her a new, monogrammed handkerchief because she is now suspicious of Ione Garrison’s motives. Another possible intrigue in the making occurs on Amanda’s way out of the Garrisons’ house: Thone accompanies Amanda and requests that she talk to Tobias only of art and painting, not of Belle. Amanda gives the soiled handkerchief to her boyfriend Gene to test at a friend’s lab, and he discovers that the handkerchief has what he calls “sleeping dope” on it. Amanda begins to wonder if someone means harm to Thone, and she wants to warn Thone.

Thone goes to the Garths to confront Amanda. She admits that she is trying to confuse Ione about the circumstances of her birth because she’s upset about what she thinks are Ione’s murderous intentions toward Thone. She and Thone argue because he doesn’t believe Amanda. Amanda tells Thone that she will accept his father’s and Ione’s invitation to return to their home and that she will prove Ione wants to murder anyone having something to do with Belle. Amanda will convince Ione that she thinks she is Belle’s daughter and thus tempt Ione to murder her. Thone finally agrees to Amanda’s plan because he sees that she cares about what happens to him.

From this point on in the novel, the plot concentrates on Amanda’s attempts to solve what she thinks is Ione Garrison’s murderous plot and to discover if it has any connection to the death of Thone’s mother, Belle Garrison.

(This blog post about the novel The Chocolate Cobweb contains spoilers.)

I first saw Merci pour le chocolat, the 2000 French film based on The Chocolate Cobweb, quite a while ago, and I decided that I had to read the book. I had already read Mischief, also by Charlotte Armstrong, which I found to be dark (and thoroughly noir) but almost demoralizing because the characters were so unpleasant. In fact, I found Mischief mercifully short and the film based on it, Don’t Bother to Knock, so much more enjoyable.

Click on each title in the list below to see my blog post about each:

◊ Don’t Bother to Knock (film based on the novel Mischief)

◊ Mischief

◊ Merci pour le chocolat (film based on The Chocolate Cobweb)

So imagine my surprise at the conclusion of The Chocolate Cobweb, which reads more like a Nancy Drew novel in some ways. Amanda solves the mystery and escapes harm, and the young lovers (I won’t give the names for this detail away) are engaged to be married at the end. Quite the surprise! The Chocolate Cobweb was published in 1948, three years before the publication of Mischief. Did life experience darken Armstrong’s views of life and romance in the interim? Her fiction was published during the McCarthy era, so maybe politics and political corruption played a part.

From everything that I have read about Charlotte Armstrong, most of it online, there seems to be little known about her personal life. I did discover that many of her stories were made into movies, both foreign and American. Here are some links for those who want to find more information (click on each website title):

◊ The Charlotte Armstrong website

◊ Wikipedia: Charlotte Armstrong

◊ The Full Wiki: Charlotte Armstrong

I enjoyed reading The Chocolate Cobweb more than Mischief, although the ending seems a bit saccharine, and it is certainly saccharine compared to the film. Isabelle Huppert gives a commanding performance in Merci pour le chocolat. Her character, based on Ione Garrison, is the focus of the film, and Huppert never lets viewers forget that shift in focus from Amanda Garth in the novel to Marie-Claire (aka Mika) Muller in the film, no matter who is on-screen. The plot in the book is easier to follow: Armstrong’s writing is very clear. The film is a neo-noir in which all the details matter, and I found that reading the book after seeing Merci pour le chocolat the first time helped a bit, especially for the opening sequences, when I saw the film a second time. Seeing the film again made me appreciate the story, in print and on film, that much more.

Mischief (Book) (1950)

Mischief, by Charlotte Armstrong

In Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s, edited by Sarah Weinman

New York, NY: The Library of America, 2015

Mischief originally published in 1950

List of main characters:

Peter O. Jones

Ruth O. Jones

Bunny O. Jones, the Jones’s daughter

Eddie Munro, elevator operator at the Hotel Majestic

Nell Munro, Eddie’s niece

Jed Towers, hotel guest

Lyn Lesley

This story is really a novella: It’s only 133 pages long in the collection in which I found it. Mischief is the basis for the film noir Don’t Bother to Knock. I saw the film first and had high hopes for reading the novel. It does happen every once in a great while, however, that the film version hits all the right spots and the novel version doesn’t hit as many.

In this case, the screenwriter, Daniel Taradash, for Don’t Bother to Knock made all the right decisions in the changes made to Charlotte Armstrong’s story. I suspect that these decisions didn’t begin with Taradash; I imagine Marilyn Monroe, cast as Nell Forbes in the film (the character is Nell Munro in the novel), meant that turning the attention on her character was the real reason behind it all. It led to a better story on film.

Click here for my blog post about Don’t Bother to Knock, which I wrote for the Classic Movie Blog Association’s 2019 Spring Blogathon: Femmes/Hommes Fatale of Film Noir. You can still read all the entries for the blogathon by clicking here.

(This blog post about the novel Mischief contains spoilers about the novel and the film Don’t Bother to Knock.)

◊ The narrative in the novel starts with the Jones family, not with Lyn Lesley, as in the film version. The stories of the Joneses (Peter, Ruth, and their daughter Bunny); Nell Munro, Bunny’s babysitter; and Nell’s uncle Eddie Munro are intertwined from the beginning. Jed Towers is introduced from the beginning, but he is only a guest in the same hotel at that point. Lyn Lesley is introduced later, when Jed meets her for their date. It’s not clear until the end of Chapter 4 and all of Chapter 5 that Jed Towers and Lyn Lesley are part of the Jones/Munro story, too.

◊ The film version presents Nell much more sympathetically. She gets to tell her story of loss and grief to Jed Towers, who begins to feel some compassion for her in the film. Nell suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of her boyfriend Philip, and she tells Jed about the night that her boyfriend Philip was given up for lost at sea.

◊ In the novel, Nell is responsible for the accidental death of her parents in a fire she supposedly set while sleepwalking. The implication is that she might have gotten away with their murder.

◊ Nell attacks Bunny in both the novel and the film, and Bunny’s mother, Ruth Jones, interrupts her and fights her until Jed shows up. In the novel, Jed drags Nell, by grabbing her hair, off Ruth; in the film, Jed intervenes just enough to keep the two women from fighting any further and really hurting one another.

◊ In the novel, Jed is shot by the hotel detective while Jed is still holding on to Nell because Eva Ballew, another hotel guest, believes Nell’s story that Jed attacked her. Nell concocts this story in the film, too. It leads to a very brief hunt for Jed, but nothing comes of it once he joins the search for Nell.

◊ Nell is taken away by the hotel detective Perrin in the novel, not by the police. In the film, Nell is allowed to leave the hotel when she is ready, followed by the police officers.

◊ The novel ends in the Jones’s two adjoining hotel rooms, not in the hotel lobby, as it does in the film. In the novel, the characters are left alone and disillusioned after Nell is taken away.

◊ The film ends with a focus on Nell, Lyn, and Jed in the hotel lobby and some hope for the future. In the film, Jed vows to stand by Nell and help her in her recovery. His decision restores Lyn’s faith in the future of her relationship with Jed.

The shifts in the narrative in the film version allows the story to focus on Nell as a troubled character and on Lyn and Jed’s relationship. Viewers of the film have several characters to relate to. I found the characters in the novel to be much more distant and unlikable. Armstrong’s novel is well written: I have no problem with the technical aspects of the writing and the narrative. It did occur to me, however, that the brevity of the narrative is a plus because it was so difficult to spend time with the characters!

I enjoyed the film version (Don’t Bother to Knock) so much more. Lyn Lesley is a stronger character in the film. She is in control of her emotions and knows what she wants. Her relationship with Jed is on much more of an equal footing. In the film, both Jed and Nell are also much more sympathetic. Jed undergoes a transformation in the film, and he finally sees what Lyn means to him and how he can give her what she needs. Nell has a more sympathetic back story and she gets to tell it herself to Jed. She is treated more fairly by Jed and others around her because they (and the viewers) get to see her as a human being deserving of help rather than as a person to be taken away and locked up.

I can recommend the film Don’t Bother to Knock wholeheartedly, the novel not quite as much. Still, I am very glad I read it because it is the basis of the film. I found it fascinating how the narrative could be reshaped into something that I enjoyed more on film.