Andy & Sue MacVeigh

Created by Sue MacVeigh
Pseudonym of Elizabeth Custer Nearing
(1898-1960)

“Last October Andy… solved the murder of Winthrop Mason in Slocum, New York, almost single-handed. Because I’m Andy’s wife and was in on the kill I got a small slice of the credit.”
— Sue in Grand Central Murder

What hath Nick and Nora wrought?

Add  ANDY and SUE MacVEIGH to the growing list of detective couples that sprang up in the wake of the success of Hammett’s The Thin Man, both in print and on the screen.

Andy is a railroad detective,  the “headquarters man” for the New York, Chicago and Western Railroad, although his actual duties do seem to vary from book to book. But it’s pretty clear what Sue’s duties are: she’s to be the devoted (and infinitely curious) spouse who insists helping out hubby on his investigations.

Together they appeared in four novels, doing their best Nick and Nora, with Sue also tasked with being their author and narrator, starting with Murder Under Construction in 1939.

It deals kicks off with Andy’s investigation of several suspicious incidents surrounding the construction of a railway bridge in Slocum, New York. Sue tags along, and the two go undercover, hoping to discover whether the “accidents” are  actually something else.

And so it goes, with the couple’s next two adventures, not surprisingly, involving trains in one way or another, while the final book, The Corpse and the Three Ex-Husbands (1941), is a bit of an outlier. It has Andy shipped off overseas to serve in World War II, and Sue flying solo, off visiting distant relatives in upper Michigan, only to discover a family of nut jobs, all chasing after an inheritance. And that’s before a series of disasters (Thunder! Lightning! Snow! Flood! Fire!) leaves them all cut off from civilization in the family manor. The story is related in a series of letters to Andy — a sign, perhaps, that the author may have already been chomping at the bit, trying to escape formula.

Too bad, then, that this was her last published novel.

What makes the books work is that Andy and Sue are actually one of the better married detecting couples of the era. Their banter is clever and credible, and they obviously love and respect each other.  Andy is no puffed up macho cardboard non-entity, and refreshingly, Sue is no screwball ditz. Both are intelligent grown-ups, and the books boast some surprisingly sharp observations of the era, and plenty of like fair-play clues — clues that are often discovered not by Andy, but Sue, who is portrayed not just as a wife, but a real and equal partner.

Like I said, refreshing.

Which makes it all the more infuriating that these books have rarely been reprinted, and certainly not since than 1950s.

They’re almost completely forgotten, except for the second in the series, 1939’s Grand Central Murder, which served as the loosey-goosey  inspiration for the 1942 film of the same name, which was adapted by hard-boiled Black Masker Paul Cain, and transferred into a quite enjoyable semi-screwball B-yarn — a decided shift from the tone of the novel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sue MacVeigh was the pen name of author and journalist Elizabeth Custer Nearing, who was born in Philadelphia in 1898.  She later went to work for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and later became the managing editor of the Clifton Times in New Jersey and a feature writer for the New York Telegram. She wrote four mystery novels featuring Andy and Sue MacVeigh. Custer, by the way, was her maiden name — she was a  direct descendant of the infamous General George Armstrong Custer.

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