Today we return to the author couple Webb & Wheeler, who signed all the great Patrick Quentis from 1934 until 1953, and all the Jonathan Stagges. And today we will talk about a novel from this series, perhaps the best of the entire series, a recognized masterpiece, with Carrian atmospheres: The Scarlet Circle, 1943.
Let's start
by saying right away that there are two slightly different editions of this
work, and this is already strange: normally, in fact, the text of a novel is
the same, proposed in the editions foreseen in the various States. But as
strange as it may seem, it is so: in fact, the second edition, the British one that has a different title (Light From a Lantern,
1944) is slightly different (it means that there are some extra things that are not
in the original American edition): for example, it is said that Westlake and his wife Paula, before she died and he became a widower, had already been there fifteen years earlier, on their honeymoon, particular that doesn't exist in the US edition.
WARNING: SPOILERS !
Cape Talisman is a seaside place, where sea fishing is practiced, but which has a beautiful beach that favors tourism: but it also has a promontory, and a little inside the old cemetery that underlies an ancient church.
Westlake is there with his daughter Dawn, resting at the local Hotel, owned by Mitchell, when during a walk, they see the pink light of a lantern that comes from the old cemetery. Weslake ventures there and finds a freshly dug grave at the bottom of which the surface of an old coffin can be seen. The atmosphere is gloomy, and is enriched by spectral echoes when the doctor thinks he sees a shadow that vanishes behind the trees. Shortly thereafter the pink light of another lantern is found near the body of Nellie Wood, a very beautiful girl who poses as a model for the painter Virgil Fanshawe, also working for him and his wife Marion as a nanny for their little son Bobby: Nellie was strangled with a thin cord, and placed in a praying position with her arms folded, near a rock. But the most horrible thing is that the killer drew a red circle with lipstick around a mole that the victim has on one cheek. The autopsy performed by Dr. Gilchrist, a local doctor as well as the doctor of the nearby women's prison, does not reveal anything new. Gilchrist's revelation that one of his patients who had died in childbirth years before, Mrs. Casey, had a large mole on her face, leads everyone present to think of the actions of a madman, of someone who wants to somehow connect the crime to that death far away in time. Mrs. Casey's coffin also rests in the old cemetery. Dr. Gilchrist, being the doctor of all the local people, has a map on the basis of which he can recognize whose grave was dug first: Casey's! And then nearby the graves of old De Silva, Fanshawe and then Mitchell's father. It is the beginning of a series of murders, in which the victims (three) will be outraged after being strangled, with a circle around a mole: the second victim is one of the Hotel's waitresses, Maggie Hillman, in love with the Hotel's swimming instructor, Buck Valentine. Strange that Nellie also seems to have been in Buck's range. And what's more, she was found in the swimming instructor's white dinghy, lit by a pink lantern: the mole this time is on a leg, just above the knee, in a very intimate part of the leg. A sign that the killer must have had a very private relationship with the victim. But it's the third victim that leaves you speechless: this time the victim is Miss Heywood, a cocaine dealer, who supplied the painter's wife with white powder. Heywood is found next to a pink lantern, in the old cemetery, in a freshly dug grave, to bring old Mitchell's coffin back to light: strangled, her arms crossed on her chest, and a sketch of a red circle on her shoulder but around nothing, no mole this time. All this after Westlake had found her the day before next to Buck Valentine digging near Mitchell's grave. Why? What is hidden in the old cemetery?
To figure out who the killer might be, Westlake will have to start a 360° investigation involving Mitchell's daughter, Cora, a jewel thief and wife of a thief and murderer who ended up in the electric chair, a huge black diamond, a cellmate of Cora's who had changed her name and features, a child who strangely resembled someone, Cora's son; Cora's arrest by Officer Barnes, who had allowed her to kiss the face of her father who died two days earlier; what and if Usher, the undertaker, who wanders among the graves, and who has supervised all the funerals in the area, has to do with it. Who could have known that Maggie had a mole on a portion of her leg that was not visible (considering that Mitchell absolutely did not want his female staff to show off their legs) and who could have known that on Heywood's shoulder there was originally a mole, later removed?
Westlake will find the killer but the decisive proof that he is the killer will be provided by his daughter Dawn, who was missing along with Bobby.
END OF SPOILERS
The book is an absolute masterpiece, imbued from beginning to end with an oppressive and macabre atmosphere, which culminates in a heart-stopping finale, in which Westlake and Fanshawe find the missing children in the old church of the cemetery, reduced to a swamp, by a violent hurricane that has redrawn the promontory and torn the coffins of the old inhabitants from the graves, which are floating on the sea.
The novel has a unique atmosphere, which beyond the thick veil on the series of murders, makes use of the location: a village in ruins, an old almost abandoned cemetery, someone digging to unearth old coffins. A tribute to many great contemporary authors and not, of its two authors: first of all Carr (and how can we forget The Three Coffins or The Sleeping Sphinx), while the series of murders is based on A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie, which old Wheeler knew very well along with many other novels by the British writer: after all A.B.C. Murders in turn was based on The Silk Stocking Murders by Anthony Berkeley Cox. To what famous text from the past can old Usher, the undertaker and undertaker, allude if not to The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe? And then a very specific reference to one of the very first novels by Ellery Queen, The Greek Coffin Mystery: we do not say what, so that the reader who has not read the book yet, does not lose the pleasure of discovering or guessing it.
As for the structure of the novel, one can notice how next to the plot on which the novel is based, there is another, which I would not risk defining as they say, a subplot, because the excavation in the old cemetery and the unearthing of the coffins buried there, constitutes a plot motif I would say of equal if not greater importance: the quid around which everything revolves, is based on what happens in the old cemetery and if anything the chain of murders, serves if not to distract, at least to help those responsible, to continue to do so, aided by the sacred terror of the inhabitants of the place, for that place full of sinister echoes, in which it is said that a gray ghost wanders (which we will see later, is in flesh and blood). And the same corpses when they are discovered, refer, if you look carefully, to the corpses when they are buried: with their arms folded on their chests. And the dinghy with Maggie’s body inside, isn’t that a coffin for her, floating on the sea, like the coffins in the old cemetery float on the sea once the hurricane has swept it away? It’s as if everything, even unconsciously, refers to the old cemetery, it’s as if the killer’s unconscious also indicates that place as the key to the mystery.
But there are not only references to novels by previous or contemporary authors; there is also what seems to me to be a reference to a famous Broadway theatrical success, later adapted to the cinema by Frank Capra: Arsenic and Old Lace, when Westlake visits Ruth Mallory, a murderer sentenced to life for uxoricide with poison, in the women’s prison, a confidant years before of Cora Lansky Mitchell and Lena Darnell (original name of another character who moves in the novel with a fictitious name). Ruth and her cellmate Doris are two very sweet old ladies, like those in Capra's film, who don't seem like the murderers they turned out to be.
Wonderful.
Pietro De Palma