{"id":21534,"date":"2026-01-14T19:41:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T00:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21534"},"modified":"2026-01-14T19:41:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T00:41:25","slug":"the-key-to-nicholas-street-by-stanley-ellin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21534","title":{"rendered":"‘The Key to Nicholas Street,’ by Stanley Ellin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u201cThe fact is that Kate is bigger than anything she owns. It\u2019s a subtle point, but if you strain you\u2019ll begin to get it. She\u2019s bigger than her furs, or her car, or her pretty house on Nicholas Street, or anything else she holds title to. She herself <\/em>is the big thing. She\u2019s an accepted artist who\u2019s doing good and will do better, and she can say, \u2018I\u2019m big, and therefore I have these things,\u2019 not, \u2018I have these things, and therefore I\u2019m big.\u2019 It\u2019s only little people without any real meat to them who have to say, \u2018Don\u2019t look at me, look at what I own.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve enjoyed Stanley Ellin\u2019s novels<\/strong> recently, but I wasn\u2019t really prepared for The Key to Nicholas Street<\/a><\/em> (set in 1951). Dorothy Sayers called Gaudy Night<\/em> \u201ca love story with detective interruptions,\u201d and Nicholas Street<\/em> is a sort of domestic drama with detective interruptions. It\u2019s also kind of a Rashomon story, where we observe events from various points of view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story is set in a fictional, wealthy neighborhood in one of those communities where professionals commute to New York City. We see it first through the (pretty superficial) eyes of the housemaid, who sees everything in movie and magazine terms. She\u2019s the one who discovers the body of the neighbor \u2013 a successful, beautiful commercial artist \u2013 at the bottom of the cellar steps in her home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then we get the perspective of her employer, an autocratic matron who\u2019s been disappointed by the business failures of the rich man she married. She is a judgmental woman, obsessed with social status. She strongly disapproved of the late neighbor, and makes a plausible murder suspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But everybody\u2019s a plausible suspect. There\u2019s the matron’s husband, a man without much character, who\u2019s having an affair. Her daughter, who\u2019s dating a man her mother doesn\u2019t approve of, a man who has been involved with the victim and might have been jealous. Also the son, going through an awkward adolescence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought at one point that this was the kind of book that justifies adultery, but it\u2019s more complicated than that. In the end, we find a surprising hero and a strong affirmation of moral truths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have to say I figured out whodunnit, but only for authorial structural reasons, not because I deduced it from the clues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Key to Nicholas Street <\/em>wasn\u2019t exactly my kind of book, but it was pretty good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe fact is that Kate is bigger than anything she owns. It\u2019s a subtle point, but if you strain you\u2019ll begin to get it. She\u2019s bigger than her furs, or her car, or her pretty house on Nicholas Street, or anything else she holds title to. She herself is the big thing. She\u2019s an accepted … Continue reading ‘The Key to Nicholas Street,’ by Stanley Ellin<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[5629,5828],"class_list":["post-21534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-stanley-ellin","tag-the-key-to-nicholas-street"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21534"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21537,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21534\/revisions\/21537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}