Asking for Trouble, by “Joe Rayter,” aka Mary Fuller McChesney (Pocket, 1956). Cover illustration by James Meese.
Among the most rewarding results of exploring vintage crime and mystery fiction is that I discover authors about whom I've never heard or at least never known much. “Joe Rayter” certainly qualifies in said category. As it turns out, that byline was a pseudonym for a California sculptor and art historian of no small renown, a onetime National Endowment of the Arts fellow named Mary Fuller McChesney.
Born Mary Ellen Fuller in Wichita, Kansas, back in 1922, she moved with her family to Stockton, California, just two years later. The Fullers were not well off, but Mary eventually won a full scholarship to study philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her obituary in The New York Times says she left college after only three years, taking a job “at the sprawling Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, Calif., in the Bay Area,” and then “apprenticed herself to a ceramics company, where she proved so adept that she quickly had her own line of tableware, for sale at high-end San Francisco department stores.” Her interest in the art world led her to meet and marry Robert McChesney, an abstract expressionist painter and printmaker who had created murals for the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition, on Treasure Island in San Francisco. In 1951, “the height of the Red Scare,” Mary McChesney was teaching art classes in Point Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, when the state “ordered all public employees to sign an oath disavowing radical beliefs, in particular communism. She refused, and was fired.”
Along with other left-leaning Bay Area intellectuals, the McChesneys soon fled the United States, landing in their case in Guadalajara, Mexico, where they stayed for a year or so. It was there that Mary became fascinated with pre-Columbian art, as well as Aztec and Mayan mythology—all of which would influence her subsequent sculpting efforts. Following their Mexican sojourn, the McChesneys returned to Northern California and refocused on their art. Money was short at first, though, so Mary tried her hand at writing mystery novels. The Victim Was Important
saw print in 1954, and a year later Asking for Trouble rolled out in hardcover from publisher M.S. Mill (a subsidiary imprint of William Morrow). Both starred Johnny Powers, who’s touted on the paperback edition of Victim as “the best new private detective since Philip Marlowe.”(Right) Asking for Trouble’s back cover.
That was more than a modicum of overselling, but the San Francisco-based Powers was a hit with someone whose opinions on this matter count: Bill Pronzini, creator of the Nameless Detective series. He recalls, in an old Mystery*File piece, how Asking for Trouble was “one of the first adult mysteries I read in my formative years,” growing up in the Sonoma County town of Petaluma. Pronzini enjoyed the novel partly because it boasted “more than enough s*e*x to stir the hormones of a curious and incipiently horny teenager,” but also for its “convincing medium-boiled male detective” protagonist and compelling plot. “This one,” he explains, “starts with the apparent shotgun slaying of a ‘mildly crazy philosopher’ who owns a Tomales Bay oyster farm that doubles as a retreat for a strange assortment of homeless alcoholics. A messy divorce case involving money and ‘revolting practices,’ and such characters as an unscrupulous private eye, an ex-prizefighter turned Dada painter, a female ex-con, a ‘wild gypsy’ nympho with exotic sexual tastes, and a besotted former college professor, figure prominently in a complex plot that takes Powers all over the Bay Area and into Nevada.”
Mary McChesney would go on to produce only one additional mystery, Stab in the Dark (1995), a non-series work “about murder, infidelity, and dope-peddling among a group of oddball expatriate artists in Guadalajara,” according to Pronzini. Beyond that, however, she penned erotic novels under the nom de plume Melissa Franklin (including 1969’s titillatingly titled Murder in Her Thighs). She passed away at age 99, in 2022. While McChesney “never achieved widespread celebrity as an artist,” to quote the Times again, “her sculptures can be found across California today, in parks, private gardens and public plazas as well as outside San Francisco General Hospital and at the city’s zoo.” Her novels are somewhat harder to locate.
READ MORE: “Remembering Mary McChesney, Sculptor, Welder, Art Historian, Murder Mystery Writer,” by Jonah Raskin (Berkeleyside); “True Bohemians,” by Gretchen Giles (Metroactive).
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