June Thomson : A Question of Identity, 1977

June Thomson, a British writer, is remembered in the very recent The Life of Crime by Martin Edwards, only because at a certain point in her career she devoted herself to Sherlock Holmes, preparing her own anthology of Sherlockian apocrypha, also writing essays, an original one of which on Doctor Watson in his relationship with S.H. Holmes and Watson: A Study in Friendship (1995) and also publishing an apocryphal novel, Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black (2015). In reality, Thomson was already quite famous at home and abroad, for having created an acclaimed series of Mysteries with Chief Inspector Finch.
Born in 1930 and died in 2022, Thomson, after a life dedicated to teaching, began her successful series with Finch in 1971 with Not One of Us, which has a peculiarity compared to the rest of the production published in another edition, in the US: in the first title, Inspector Finch remains cited with his name, while from the second, Death Cap, it changes and we have Inspector Ruud while Sergeant Boyle is always his assistant. Why this? It's soon said. To avoid confusion with another Inspector Finch, who was the protagonist of Margaret Erskine's novels. In A Question of Identity, the fifth of the novels she wrote with Inspector Finch (in our case Ruud: the Italian edition is translated from the American one) the plot revolves around the discovery of a very decomposed corpse, in an abandoned field, where only cows graze, which one day finds itself being excavated for archaeological research. The almost skeletonized corpse has no way of being attributed to anyone in particular, because the fingertips have lost the ability to provide a fingerprint, due to the extreme decomposition, and the lack of teeth does not allow to trace a dental imprint. Furthermore, the body is covered with shreds of clothing, which do not allow to spread characteristics that can be recognized. The corpse is discovered to have been buried about two years before. The only strange thing is a chain, however, too deteriorated, found near the body. Furthermore, the body was buried with hands and arms crossed, and wrapped in a blanket as if it were a shroud. The land is owned by a certain Stebbing, who however purchased it relatively recently, after the presumed death of the unidentified individual. The attention of Inspector Ruud, in charge of the case, is therefore focused on the neighbor, the owner of the nearby farm, Geoff Lovell, who appears distrustful and reticent. Also living on the farm is a woman Betty Lovell, Geoff's sister-in-law, and her brother Charlie, a poor idiot, who would like to talk so much, but who is always put in a position not to communicate with the inspector.
So if the suspect n.1 is Lovell, we must still understand who the body could be. and so Ruud, digging into the Lovells' past, learns that Betty is the wife of the second brother, Ron. When he investigates this man, Ruud finds no photographs of him. Nobody knows what he looked like: he disappeared fifteen years ago, he couldn't stand his brother and his wife who was too Catholic, and he took up a wandering life, made up of petty crimes, women, and creating a reputation for himself as a petty criminal, violent. Ruud will eventually manage to contact a colleague of his who is looking for this Ron for attempted murder, and then an ex-flame of his Nancy, who will provide him with some photos, which will be crucial to understand, based on anthropometry, that the buried body is not Ron. Ruud will then start over again, returning to the place where he was found, and to the details already mentioned, and reflecting on the number of pillowcases he had seen Betty lay out, he will be able to solve the case. Reflecting in hindsight, precisely because of the investigation that starts from an unidentified corpse, I was struck by the closeness of this author to the novels of Hillary Waugh (Sleep Long, My Love, 1959 or Last Seen Wearing, 1952). In essence it is a quasi procedural: a close police investigation, with the help of scientific police components, and parallel investigations on possible attributions to some identity of the corpse, starting from a body so decomposed that it cannot be attributed, without error, to anyone in particular.

 

The extremely limited range of suspects would make one wonder whether the novel is predictable, which it is not: on the contrary, the characterization, which is intentionally one-sided, but which is then subverted with a twist, overturning all the acquired certainties, presents us with a story which, in some sense, rather than being a true mystery, is one of those novels called "Black", a dark story of crime and violence, which is not exactly a hard boiled. but not even a classic mystery, and it is placed in a halfway territory: violence is part of the novel, violence and oppression, but the investigation conducted by the policeman, if it is related to a police investigation tout court, is also a meticulous investigation in which ingenuity and psychology are not second: I was surprised by the reasoning on the pillowcases hanging out in the sun, which go unnoticed, until Ruud reflecting on it, understands why the farm is isolated, the dog is growling and always barks, Charlie wants to talk but is not given the chance, Ron's photos have almost all been destroyed, and a double-barreled shotgun is present in the places where characters live.

June Thomson is an author who deserves to be rediscovered: the psychological characterizations of secluded places, insert her "in a well-placed context: she digs into the respectability of society, to the roots of evil". The places where Finch acts are not in metropolises, but in the countryside (a very British characteristic), in the provinces, in isolated places. Mary Groff said years ago that "June Thomson's world is a world of solitude, of suspicions and victims who live in a mutual pact of rejection of society". The places of investigation are isolated, solitary almost to the point of misanthropy are the subjects of Finch's investigations, who in turn is a quiet and in a certain sense solitary policeman, living alone with a sister and a dog. The characterizations move in isolated places, where the communities that reside there are in a certain way the custodians, or believe themselves to be such, of ways of behaving that have their roots in time. Precisely in these communities the apparent composure hides instead a tangle of snakes (a characteristic that is found many times in British novels by Christie, Marsh, Allingham). In this Thomson inherits a way of writing that is typically mystery, even if with a more contemporary style.

Pietro De Palma

Anthony Berkeley : Top Storey Murder, 1931

Great author of the Golden Age, both under his own name and under the pseudonym Francis Iles, founder of the Detection Club, gave rise to a great series, with Roger Sherringham (amateur detective and writer). Recently, a novel published by Mondadori Publishin House in the 90s, was republished by Polillo, completely translated again:Top Storey Murder, 1931.

This is a very interesting novel for various reasons, which is completely revalued by a finally integral translation.

Roger Sherringham is involved in a crime that seems to be the result of a robbery gone wrong. someone at Monmouth Mansions has killed old Miss Barnett, strangling her with a rosary.

WARNER : SPOILERS !!!

The police find the old woman in her bedroom on the ground floor, strangled, without dentures, half dressed: the bed is unmade, a mess everywhere, broken vases, a kitchen moved, a long rope ending with a string hanging from the kitchen window, of the apartment on the top floor. The box that the old woman, miserly, kept under the bed, full of banknotes, pounds and shillings, has been cleaned. Death is not attributed to a certain temporal location by the doctor who performs the autopsy, who instead announces a rather broad one, of about 24 hours. Therefore, a certain time of her death will be given, only after the couple who live below the apartment of the Barmett, will declare that at night, at about half past one, they had heard loud noises coming from the apartment on the floor above. Therefore the police had assumed that the old woman had gone to sleep at 11 pm, taking a raisin donut to bed, as she usually did, on the testimony of her friend, Mrs. Pilchard, who was also a neighbor.

And on the basis of the modus operandi, the police pointed the finger at three subjects: Red Mack, Bertie Manolesta and Camberwell Kid, then thinning the group by exclusion and focusing the investigation on the third person mentioned.

Sherringham instead, precisely because of the blatant nature of certain evidence, not interpreted by the police as he would have done (if someone had hung from the rope secured to the gas stove, it would not have moved a little but would probably have been pulled towards the window perhaps tipping over, which did not happen, while the kitchen table was found tipped over, an act without logic) thinks of a premeditated crime, to be charged to one of the residents of the building. So he begins his own investigations, trying to find evidence against one of the four male tenants: Augustus Weller, Francis Kincross, John B. Braybrook, Lionel Ennismore Smith. However, as he gets to know them, he realizes that none of them could have been, and so by crossing them out, or rather, only after having crossed them out, he realizes that he must necessarily investigate the 4 wives of these people and Miss Pilchard.

To put his ideas in order, Sherringham decides to hire as his secretary, one of the people who logically should have been the main suspect, that is, Miss Barnett's niece, Stella, who has always had a bad relationship with her aunt, because of her relationship with her father, and who has publicly stated that she does not want even a shilling of the old woman's inheritance.

As the story unfolds, various hypotheses are postulated and then set aside, the police seem to focus their investigation more and more on Kid, while accepting certain conclusions of Sherringham (the rope was not used to lower oneself, but to allow someone to pull it from the outside making a lot of noise in the middle of the night, and therefore the time of death is different, from which a series of other hypotheses), while Sherringham is sure that a certain person could have been among the women framed, namely Mannie B. Braybrook, a lucid and calculating woman, who comes from a large family and is the daughter of a general, but who, together with her husband, fell into financial straits (probably a financial setback) so much so that she started working in a large warehouse as a Sales Manager. And the husband could perhaps have staged the theft, climbing over the perimeter wall of the property: in fact, a man was seen by a chauffeur, climbing over the wall carrying a bundle with him. But then this hypothesis undergoes a variation because each condominium owner knows that in the wall there was a gate that anyone in the condominium would have opened.

 

Furthermore, the relationship between Stella Barnett and Roger is enriched by bickering, confrontations and between the two, especially the first towards her, and something is born: Roger tries in every way to scratch the girl's wall, proposing bets that have as compensation various complete dresses, hats, gloves, shoes and high-quality underwear. And he tries in every way to impress with his amateur detective psychological techniques, without much success. Until in the end, in a spectacular ending, which is in fact a double ending, Roger will think with his regret, which is also betrayed self-esteem, how stupid he was, before realizing that he was stupid twice, when the police make the final arrest.

The end of spoilers

The novel is a small masterpiece. John Dickson Carr mentions it together with a few other Berkeley novels, in his essay The Grandest Game in the World (the best according to Carr was The Poisoned Chocolates Case, cited in his list of the ten best novels of all time: A. Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear, Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room, A. E. W. Mason's At the Villa Rose, Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, Ellery Queen's The Lamp of God, Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case, S. S. Van Dine’s The Greene Murder Case, Philip MacDonald’s Murder Gone Mad, Rex Stout’s The League of Frightened Men, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, four of which were changed 17 years later: It may be that for four of the authors I should choose a different novel, for instance, might better be represented by The House of the Arrow; MacDonald by The Rasp; Ellery Queen by The Chinese Orange Mystery; and Dorothy L. Sayers by Strong Poison.) : the plot is virtuosic and the unraveling of ever new clues that vary the approach to the case from time to time, direct attention now to one subject now to another.

The interest of the novel also transcends the investigation itself, as a fundamental element of interest concerns the representative character of the series: Roger Sherringham. Who is not treated by Berkeley as for example, across the ocean, S.S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen, did with their characters, Philo Vance and Ellery Queen. If those are treated as super-detectives, Berkeley instead treats his character, tempering the arrogance and super-omniscience of the amateur detective interpreter of the Mystery from the late Twenties and mid-Thirties, in a caricatural way.

Here this position is very evident, in the superficiality of certain assertions that today would make people laugh, and which already then meant that Sherringham belonged to an antiquated way of thinking: in fact, when the police converge their suspicions on three burglars, he does not investigate all the characters who live in the building, but only initially on the men: and why not the women? Couldn't a woman kill an old lady? This revelation only becomes apparent to him at a later time. His is a profoundly chauvinistic conception. Moreover, Berkeley adopts Sherringham's way of looking at women not only here, but also in other novels, e.g. The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926). And here we can also make a comparison with Sayers' Lord Wimsey, another member of the Detection Club: while Lord Wimsey is in love with Harriet Vane and his approach to the woman is sincere, Roger Sherringham approaches Stella Barnett as an object of conquest, who if not conquered, would ruin the male ego, showing his cynical side, when after knowing that she is engaged, suddenly on the basis of what she and her he have said, he formulates a further hypothesis.

The greatest caricature of Sherringham, however, lies in his unshakeable self-confidence, which makes him lose even the smallest and elementary prudence: what caricature of a detective would ever remove from the list of suspects the very person who, based on the basic motive, that of pecuniary interest (Cui Prodest?), would be the most involved and therefore the most suspect? But in this, the caricature of a detective is not only typical of Sherringham but also of Inspector Moresby. He too does not take Stella Barnett into consideration as a murderer, only because he personally refused any inheritance from the dead woman. And instead he focuses on the three burglars.

Berkeley essentially creates an anti-hero, an anti-detective, brilliant but also a pest, cynical but also superficial, in a period in which the most unbridled vandinism was in force.But if Sherringham is what we have indicated, the plot created by Berkeley is lush, and the developments of the investigation, with their infinite references, subtleties and unexpected events, give it a considerable depth of its own, which captures the reader. There is also something else that captures the interest, which is part of Berkeley's style: giving the writing, at times, an evanescence that in the most critical moments tones it down, takes away its excessive drama, almost bringing it to an operetta situation, not a tragedy: Sherringham, after having risked his last hypothesis, the one he never wanted to do, sees himself exposed as a liar by the police, who, taking a lot of what they have discovered during the investigation, destroy his alleged murderer, creating another one on the basis of the same reasoning. It is another variation of the same reasoning by hypotheses that are gradually abandoned until one that summarizes all the characteristics of the previous ones, which we found in The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929). And Sherringham who should fall into the dust because he has clamorously mistaken his reasoning, ends up being praised even by the Deputy Chief of Police for his decisive contribution to the investigation.

And so the last lines of the novel seem like lines from a Beckettian drama, a drama based on the absurd and disillusionment.

An excellent novel.

Pietro De Palma

Paul Halter: The White Lady (LE MYSTERE DE LA DAME BLANCHE) - trad. John Pugmire. - Locked Room International , August 2020

 

 

 

The novel in question is the latest in the series dedicated to the second of Paul Halter's characters: in fact it was published in 2020. The strange thing is that the novel was first published in  US by Locked Room International in August 2020, and then only secondly in France in December 2020.
The complete series consists of 8 novels:
1 - Le Roi du désordre (1994)
2 - Les 7 merveilles du crime (1997)
3 - Les 12 crimes d'Hercule (2001)
4 - La Ruelle fantôme (2005)
5 - The Chambre d'Horus (2007)
6 - Le Masque du Vampire (2014)
7 - La Montre en or (2019)
8 - Le Mystère de la Dame Blanche (2020)
Just as Alan Twist is assisted by Archibald Hurst, Inspector of Scotland Yard, so here the couple is more Holmesian, more classic: detective Owen Burns and his assistant friend Achilles Stock.
When Paul invented Owen Burns, he borrowed the physiognomy and appearance of Oscar Wilde, the English dandy. In fact, on his French site, Paul introduces his character like this:

Calqué sur le brillant et immortel Oscar Wilde, le dandy détective Owen Burns cultive l’excentricité avec un soin jaloux. Il passe son temps à épater la galerie, irrite à profusion et provoque à plaisir. Critique d’art de son état, il met ses exceptionnelles facultés de déduction au service de Scotland Yard, mais il ne s’occupe que d’affaires hors du commun. Son seul souci étant la recherche du Beau, il exige des adversaires à la hauteur de son talent. Digne successeur de Thomas De Quincey, il professe que le crime parfait est une œuvre d’art, et son auteur, un artiste. Empreintes de mythologie, ses aventures baignent souvent dans une atmosphère fantastique.

After an introduction, which talks about those figures to which the meaning of bringing misfortune or even death is traditionally linked, and which serves to prepare the reader for the nightmarish atmosphere in which he will live, immersing himself in reading the book, here the first scene.

WARNING : SPOILERS

It is September 13, 1924, and we are on a train and in the compartment, two women and a man sit. The man and a woman form a couple: they are John Peel and his wife Margot Richards, and then there is another. After a silence in which they study each other, the two women begin to talk: the first to speak is Margot, who reveals to the other the reason why they took that train from Paddington to Buckworth: her sister Ann called her to help her , as there is a difficult atmosphere in the family: their father Matthew Richards, a widower, has decided to remarry and has done so with his attractive secretary, hired a few weeks earlier, Vivian Marsh. Seventy years old for him, thirty for her, a forty year difference seems to mean nothing to them. But for the other heirs yes. For this reason, Ann and Peter Corsham, her husband, called her to join forces. This is what she tells the other traveller, in addition to personal vicissitudes linked to the presumed death of her husband and a new union that seemed ready to give happy results, when John Peel, presumed dead, reappeared after years of presumed death. And so Margot had to welcome back her husband, who however lacked a lot of memory and memories of her.
The other traveler instead tells a story immersed in black Africa, of a suitcase full of riches, which her deceased African husband carried with him before being killed. And the traveler brings a suitcase with her. Will it be that one? No, because she reveals to the stunned Margor that everything she told her is just bullshit, and that she, herself, is the Vivian Marsh who ensnared old Matthew.
One surprise after another.
The story moves and frames three boys in a forest: Harry, Bill and Jack. They are deciding how to profit from the poached prey that poachers capture with traps and whose skin they sell, when amidst general disbelief they see a ghostly figure advancing, white, dressed in a shroud, The White Lady. That she is said to have visited the village other times in the past, and that she brings death. Harry, who is the boldest and most braggart of the three, has chewed some hemlock leaves, not caring about the advice of the other two, and feels unwell; but when the lady approaches and touches him on the forehead, he falls dead. The boys escape and ask for help, spreading the myth of the return of the White Lady, who was previously seen at the Richards manor, by Peter Corsham, near the fountain.
In the village there is also a fortune teller and a medium, Lethia Seagrave, who in the village has a reputation as a witch or almost and who lives with a dog, three cats, a rabbit, and a crow, and who knows Matthew Richards very well who it is used for chart consultations. However, some insinuate that she also had carnal relations with the old Richards, as did the young Vivian. She in turn is consulted by Peter Corsham on the White Lady.
The apparitions of the ghostly figure continue unabated at the manor: if at first they seem harmless, then they later instill fear. So much so that at a certain point Owen Burns becomes interested, arriving with his trusty Stock and begins to investigate. 

About what?

First of all on the last apparition, which took place at the castle, in the face of which all those present would be excluded from having any role in the affair, and which ended with nothing. But after Matthew and Viviana go to bed, her apparition reappears in the bedroom, but Vivian keeps her at bay by holding the candlestick that she holds in front of Matthew's face as if to defend him. Subsequently, Matthew collapses out of fear, from which he is saved. But it doesn't last long, because some time later, one evening after dinner, after Matthew has gone out for his usual walk in the garden, his absence goes on too long that a distraught Vivian goes out slamming the door violently and after a while he comes back announcing that he found Matthew dead... of fear. The only strange thing: Burns finds a strange powder in the dead man's hair.
From here the investigation branches out and involves everyone present, even the housekeeper Esther. Burns, making use of the help of Inspector Lewis of Scotland Yard and that of Superintendent Wedekind, after also reading Rchards' will, which leaves half the estate to his wife Vivian, and to his daughters, Burns:
he discovers a diabolical conspiracy involving two unsuspecting subjects, linked by homicidal passion;
he explains the apparitions and how a subject could be in two different places at the same time, during the apparition in the castle; 

he also explains that the person who killed Harry was another person, who besides the two impersonated The White Lady;
and explains how Matthew was killed not by fear itself, but by those who took advantage of the critical condition of the elderly landowner, to make him die by causing him to collapse from fear, using two different guns, and how the shooting of one of the two, although it was not loud, it was not heard.
It also explains what the disappearance of a book from Matthew Richards' bedside table has to do with it, what a crow's feather has to do with it, and whether one of the sons of Samuel Ziegler, Richards' former partner who was then kicked out by him, could have slipped under a fictitious identity to take revenge on the seventy-year-old Richards responsible for the death of his father, the suicide of his mother, and the ruin of his two children. And what does an inn in central London with the evocative name The Peacock Feathers (Carter Dickson is the reference) have to do with the deal?

THE END OF THE SPOILERS

The novel was a surprise, a very positive one. It is Paul's most recent novel which testifies beyond all perspective that the French author, despite his sixty-eight-odd years, and the 45 novels written, and despite the fact that he says he is at the end of his career, is extremely lucid and capable to create complex and fascinating plots. Here there is no Locked Room tout court and not even an impossible murder, as long as a shot that cannot be heard is not considered such, and not because a silencer is used, but a problem of dislocation. It is a problem included in the list of impossible situations. From John Dickson Carr (The Black Spectacles) to Clayton Rawson (Death from a Top Hat), from Pierre Siniac (Bilocation) to Noel Vindry (Le double alibi), from Anthony Boucher (Nine Times Nine) to Helen McCloy (Through a Glass , Darkly!), from Paul Halter (La quatrième porte) to Christianna Brand (Death of Jezebel), all the elite of impossible detective literature, tried with different but appreciable results. Halter tries again, as in his past, and achieves an excellent result: here, the dislocation is not entrusted to gullibility, but is a well-implemented expedient in cahoots with an unsuspecting accomplice (then in what follows we will understand why of this collaboration).
Beyond the problem, the novel is a riot of situations that fascinate and sometimes disorientate the reader: from the return of the heir, to the double White Lady played by two different people who are not complicit with each other, from the hidden union between two lovers (as adulterous) to the strange one between two people so different in age (real between Vivian/Matthew, presumed between Matthew/Leitha who then surprises with its developments), from the existent/non-existent shot to Harry's death so close to that of Agatha's Arlena Christie, up to the recurring presence of boys in Halter's novels (e.g. see La malediction de Barberousse).
And what's more, the atmosphere, one of Halter's most characteristic stylistic traits, is at his best here.
The culprits are difficult to identify as they hide under different roles: nominally they are framed in a certain way, but in reality they are in a different way. They conceive a diabolical plan, but they don't understand that someone has anticipated them and just as he escapes their attempt to blame him, so he uses his charisma to make them discover by providing the police with the right elements at the right moment. While Lewis is too direct to notice, Owens ultimately puts this person against the wall while recognizing that his deductions are not supported by evidence but only by intuitions, albeit correct ones.
In short, a magnificent novel, to be enjoyed.

Pietro De Palma

 

 

 

Philip Macdonald: The Wraith, 1931

 

 

 

The novels based on the character of Colonel Anthony Gethryn are twelve and The Wraith occupies seventh place:

The Rasp, 1924

The White Crow, 1928

The Noose, 1930

The Link, 1930

The Choice or The Polferry Mystery or The Polferry Riddle, 1931

The Crime Conductor, 1931

The Wraith, 1931

The Maze, 1932

Rope to Spare, 1932

Death on My Left, 1933

Warrant for X, 1938

The List of Adrian Messenger, 1959

However, even if it occupies seventh place, in reality the novel contains the beginning of the parable of Colonel Anthony Gethryn. In fact, as we read at the beginning of the novel, recalling the beginning, Gethryn reveals to his friend Toller and his wife that there is a case that no one knows about, which is essentially the first time in which he, a former military , found himself carrying out a police investigation in contact with the authorities.

It's a bit like what happens in the Ellery Queen novels, when we learn in the introduction by JJMcClure, that the fourth novel The Greek Coffin Mystery, actually from the list of Ellery's adventures, constitutes the beginning.

WARNING : SPOILERS !!!

The drama takes place in High Fen, a village of 300 souls, where the colonel intends to spend a holiday. He knows that in that village there is an inn called Il Buon Ristoro run by an ex-military acquaintance of his and his wife, who welcome him in the best possible way. Visiting nearby places, you come across Fridays, the home of the richest in the area, the scientist John Manx, who conducts unspecified experiments there. John lives together with his wife Joan Nealson, his sister Penelope Marsh Manx, the Butler Belby, John's assistant and secretary, Grimsdale, and occasionally Joan's brother, William Nealson and Joan and William's cousin also visit the house, Arthur.

 

While Gethryn is talking to people, here comes one of the main characters of the drama, a certain Alfred Georgius Host, a man crippled by the Boer War, with a leg to which he an orthopedic brace on his right hand (he always wears black gloves from which you can see two fingers standing at right angles to the palm), and on his skull where he is said to have a plate (in fact he always wears a black cap). He also has a noticeable scar on one cheek which he conceals with powder.

 

 

 

This character has an exaggerated love for cats, to the point of harboring a profound hatred towards John Manx himself, due to his experiments which, he says, seem to be aimed at dissecting cats. And in fact some carcass was found dissected, in front of Gethryn, this Host is almost hit by a Morris driven by two women, Penelope Marsh Manx and John's niece, Mary Manx.

The evening in which, as is done between neighbors, Gethryn from the Manxes is invited to Villa Fridays, the bad thing occurs: Belby, invited to call his master who is in his studio, located in a hut, a small low building isolated from the central body, at the Villa, to play bridge, he finds him dead, shot in the middle of the forehead by a gunshot. When Gethryn, William and Arthur Nealson and Grismsdale immediately go to look, they find Joan on the ground unconscious a few dozen meters from the cabin.

The investigations are coordinated by Inspector Ruddock, who knows Gethryn and takes advantage of her presence and sagacity: nothing seems to be missing from the hut, and everything seems to be in order in the house too. An investigation of the nearby places leads to the discovery of a pistol, which is the weapon used for the assassination, on the ground, near a tree. It is probably thought that the murderer, running away and tripping over the root of the tree, dropped it and did not pick it up.

The investigations seem to be directed in a specific direction: Holst. Add to this the fact that the strange individual's housekeeper saw him holding a gun and uttering meaningless sentences before the crime occurred. When they go to her house, she isn't there: she left the cats, and it seems she wants to kill herself and in fact she left a farewell note. Indeed, one of the guests of the villa saw him walking down the street gesticulating, and followed him to the swamp, where he found his clothes on the shore. Did he kill himself?

End of investigations. Ruddock found the culprit in him.

But Gethryn isn't. Gethryn suspects the other. In fact, on the basis of certain behavioral oddities of Host and the accusations that Penelope Marsh made to her sister-in-law, who according to her killed her brother to pocket the inheritance, a sister-in-law who apparently had had a lover during her marital interlude, elaborates her own theory that takes a very specific direction when he discovers, by writing all the names and surnames of the characters in the play, that the mysterious suicide is Alfreg Georgius Host, and that by combining first names and surnames together one obtains A G + HOST = A GHOST.

In essence, someone gifted with macabre irony and sarcasm perpetrated a conspiracy against Manx, creating a false character who does not exist in reality, impersonated by certain people from Manx's circle, so that he could be identified as the perfect culprit, freeing those from suspicion instead he killed Manx. It is clear at this point that whoever reported having followed Host to the quagmire must be an accomplice in the conspiracy, if not the murderer. And Gethryn, after a series of conjectures, which also involve the strange episode of the valet Forbes, who disappeared from home on the night of the murder and was then found mad with terror, locked up in the cellars of the villa, and we learn that he was hit by someone who was wandering around the villa at night. He identifies the accomplice and the murderer, who however flee, ending up with a motorboat on the rocks and dying.

THE END OF SPOILERS

It must be said that the novel is essentially a Black Comedy, in which a subtle, even macabre, irony pervades the crime scenes. There is not only the revealing charade, but also another detail, which is well suited to the atmosphere of Black Comedy: Manx is not only the surname of the landowner but also identifies a breed of cats which, typical of the island of Manx, are tailless. It can therefore be said that this novel, in which cats have a well-identified part of themselves, begins its own tragedy with them and ends with another cat without a tail, a Manx, who is a Man and therefore a man (animal which as we know has no tail).

Everything is evidently well thought out by Macdonald to create a beautiful, lively and not at all obvious novel in which everything falls into place (even if the desire to identify the perfect culprit immediately undermines the investigation and the well-accustomed reader understands that there is 'is something else).

It is certainly not a cornerstone of Macdonald's fiction, nor does it, like other novels, innovate the genre (just think of The Rasp, 1924, or Murder Gone Mad, 1931 or even X v. Rex, 1933, or The Maze, 1932). But it is almost an exercise in style, a joke that in some ways harks back to older novels, a mockery, which however has something new compared to many other novels of its time, almost a trademark: originality of the plot structure, which however yields to the goodness of the whodunnit.

the greatest originality of the novel consists in the character invented by the culprit, to be pointed out as the perfect culprit, a subject that recalls the invention in every way: a series of characteristics (the serious impairment in the left leg, the hand with index finger and ring fingers stiff compared to the other fingers, a cap always pulled down on the head) easily impersonable, so much so as to be recognized as the possessor of these very specific characteristics, which however are a mockery. In addition to the charade, even the impaired hand, if we observe its shape carefully, always brings us back to cats.

Lastly, I would like to point out the curiosity that it is not the only novel that talks about dead cats. In fact there is at least one other, that of Anita Blackmon, The Riddle of the Dead Cats, a 1938 novel. 

Pietro De Palma

John Dickson Carr : All in A Maze ( in "The Men Who Explained Miracles", 1963)

 

 

 

Before going further, I believe, for reasons of accuracy, to explain why this story has two titles (it would also have a third: Ministry of Miracles). The story itself, known by its most common meaning (which was later used by Douglas D. Greene to title one of his essays of fundamental importance on Carr) was published under the pseudonym Carter Dickson in E.Q.M.M. of March 1956. Subsequently, when in 1963 (curiously the year of my birth) Carr decided to publish an  anthology of stories referring to Gideon Fell, H. Merrivale and Colonel March, he changed the title of the story to All in A Maze, for a simple and at the same time captivating reason: he used the original title of the story as the title of the collection, varying it however, because if in the original meaning The Man Who Explained Miracles is obviously Merrivale, in the anthology there is no only him, but there are also the other two subjects; and then the title was changed to The Men Who Explained Miracles.

Warning: Spoilers !!!

It all begins when Tom Lockwood sees a terrified girl going down the stairs in St. Paul's, running the risk of breaking her neck. The innate instinct of a knight takes over and so he introduces himself to the girl, who is otherwise quite pretty. Her name is Jenny Linden, and she is also English. But from what she says, she seems to have a French background. And she is terrified: someone had tried to kill her the previous night, and moments before, in the sound tunnel of St. Paul, she heard someone utter a death threat addressed to her, in her ear, even though there was no one who could do it, except the sacristan and a farmer who was eating a sandwich, but too far away for them to have been able to whisper anything in her ear.

Tom, who qualifies as a journalist, offers her tea in a nearby room and so she tells him her story: she is English, the daughter of rich English parents who had moved to France years earlier, where her mother died during the war and his father shortly after. She was entrusted to an old friend of her father, General De Senneville, who acted as her guardian and administered her considerable assets. Now, the girl, who is twenty-five years old, must marry the general's son, Armand de Senneville, an entrepreneur, even if she does not love him, for a sort of arranged marriage, with which Armand will acquire the girl's rich dowry. She has come to England to visit her monuments and visit her relatives and is hosted in their house: the old and sour Aunt Hester, her cousin Margot, and Uncle Fred. Armand didn't want the girl to go to England because he is afraid of losing her, that is, he is afraid that she will seriously fall in love with someone else, but he had to put on a brave face and agree that she should go where expected. But something went wrong. First she found a note on the napkin announcing her imminent death, and then, the following night, someone actually tried to kill her, entering her room, despite the door being blocked by a heavy bolt and the windows being closed by the inside, and opening the stove's gas tap, to make it suffocate to death. Only by a miracle was she saved the next morning.

Aunt Hester, who is watching over the girl, having seen her in the company of someone she knows, rushes into the tea room and there apostrophizes the young man, making a scene. Meanwhile, Jenny has run away through a back door, and when Tom catches up with her, he meets a guy who calls himself an Oeil journalist, who tells him that he sent the girl to Sir Henry Merrivale, and then tells him the story of the attempted assassination. of Jenny, because he, yes he, Steve Lamoreux, a French-Canadian, saved the girl by turning off the gas tap: he is indeed a journalist, but he is also a sleuth, a kind of private investigator who works for Armand de Senneville, who hired him to prevent the girl from meeting English guys. In that capacity he resides at the home of the young woman's old uncles. However, he is unable to fully impersonate the part of the bastard, and for this reason he is trying to prevent the girl from suffering. He offers to help Tom. Since the girl might recognize Steve, only Tom goes to Sir Henry Merrivale who after the war was accused of having made undue expenses, and of having too many current accounts spread across half of Europe, and so was put in the position of having to agree to take care of of the Central Office Eight of the Metropolitan Police, established only by him, the so-called Ministry of Miracles. All the most bizarre cases that only he can solve end up there. And it is no coincidence that Jenny Linden's is. From Merrivale he finds the girl who, when questioned, tells her story of her night of horror and the accident in the acoustic tunnel of St. Paul.

Merrivale listens to yet another reconstruction of the facts and then lights up. Then he makes a phone call, asking to speak to a certain Sam who he saved from trouble once he was found with sixteen girls all naked and asks him if there are twenty around...

The boys believe they are ventilators. But what about fans? NO. Merrivale asked his acquaintance if there were any ventriloquists in the London square, and he among others gave him the name of a certain Charley Johnson, and gave him the address. Just enough time to get to him, to ring the bell, and then the girl finds herself in front of the farmer she had seen in the acoustic tunnel, throwing open the door, holding a sandwich and a glass of whiskey, wearing a bright dressing gown, and down the steps, lying there in the street, with a knife stuck in his back. All over again?

Merrivale, despite having offered to host the girl, turns around and sends her back to her aunt and uncle's house, where she says she will be safe: her aim is instead to keep an eye on Tom, who in reality is not a penniless journalist, but a scion with an annual income of twelve thousand pounds, son of the London Police Commissioner, as he fears that the mysterious murderer may make an attempt on his life: but... why?

The fact is that he, Tom, and Steve decide to keep an eye on the girl by entering her uncle's estate, in time to see Jenny, escorted by her relatives, walking along the avenues. They should have remained silent but as usual the Great Old Man with his histrionic manner makes those under surveillance become aware of their presence. Jenny declares her reciprocated love for Tom, and in the meantime Armand de Senneville himself, in Merrivale's opinion, is lurking somewhere ready to strike: he is not in Paris at all, but there in London, and he absolutely does not want the rich dowry escapes him. But why on earth would he then try to kill the girl?

Jenny wants to enter the labyrinth of her uncles' park against their uncles' advice. Tom follows her, and in the tangle of branches and bushes, someone tries to stab him, until after a furious melee Tom gets the upper hand. In time for him to rush to Merrivale and unmask the murderer.

The End of the Spoilers

The Man Who Explained Miracles, also known by its other title All in A Maze, is the only story Carr wrote about the figure of Merrivale, other than The House in Goblin Wood.

The story presents a series of interesting characteristics: first of all the Locked Room, resolved very brilliantly (I had some inkling of it anyway). The gas gimmick is brilliant. Even more so that of the whispering spirit in the acoustic tunnel: Carr once again resorts to ventriloquism, which he had resorted to several times previously. Mentions of ventriloquism can be found in various novels, from Four False Weapons to Death-Watch, from The Red Widow Murders to The Mad Hatter Mystery, to The Ends of Justice. The tunnel trick reminded me of another time Carr talks about an event that happens in a tunnel, which is when in Fire, Burn! he writes about a tunnel in which a man dies from a bullet that was not fired by any person (at least it would seem so).

 But there are also other references: it's as if Carr has inserted the best of his work as a writer in terms of tricks here. For example, there is a split person, that is, a person who has two identities, one real and one fictitious. This is also a reminder of the young Carr who had written It Walks By Night: in fact there Laurent and Saligny are two identities of the same person. The attack in the labyrinth at night reminded me a lot of the atmosphere of J.J. Connington (who Carr knew well and who he had included in his novels, first of all It Walks By Night), and also a novel by him in which a crime is perpetrated in a labyrinth: Murder in the Maze, 1927.

Furthermore, when Carr talks about the Office headed by Merrivale, the Central Office Eight of the Metropolitan Police, i.e. the so-called Ministry of Miracles, he could also have mentioned another character of his, that Colonel March who is put in charge, in stories about him, of a so-called “Department of Queer Complaints”. On the other hand, in the same collection that contains All in A Maze, there are also two stories with Colonel March: William Wilson's Racket and The Empty Flat.

The story, however, is not notable only for the quotes and the solution (even if of Merrivale's two stories, I always liked the other, an absolute masterpiece, The House in Goblin Wood, for the series of pitfalls and for the solution Grand Guignol, which in that case once again recalls It Walks By Night), but also for a characteristic which is not dwelt upon enough, that is, the humor in Carr: very often Carr in order not to excessively weigh down the atmosphere, which already in itself it is very heavy, full of horrifying details (ghosts, disappearances, rotting or walled-up corpses), dramas and crimes, it often inserts jokes that poison the various scenes. This insertion of jokes, often hilarious, is not so present in the novels and stories with Fell (where everything gives way to salacious comments and pompous self-celebrations, or to the usual exclamations (Archons of Athens, etc..), but in those with Merrivale where the figure of the detective, sketched on that of Churchill, is instead the bad copy, an awkward, ridiculous copy, completely missing instead in those with March and Bencolin where the atmospheres are the darkest that Carr has absolutely invented.

There are numerous jokes and sketches: I report some (almost all) :

“Ah, yes!” said Tom. “It was in New York, wasn’t it, that you wrecked the subway at Grand Central Station and nabbed the right murderer on the wrong evidence?” “Oh, son! I dunno what you’re talkin’ about,” said H.M., giving him an austere look. “And in Tangier, I think, you blew up a ship and let the real criminal escape just because you happened to like him?” “Y’see how they treat me?” H.M. demanded, his powerful voice rising as he addressed Jenny. “They’ve got no respect for me, not a bit.” (page 128)

“It seems I spent more money than I should have, or burn me, than I can account for. It also seems—would you believe it?—I shouldn’t have had banking accounts in New York, Paris, Tangier, and Milan.” “You didn’t know, of course, you weren’t allowed to have those banking accounts?” “Me?” (page 128-129)

They hoicked me up on the carpet before an old friend of mine. I won’t say who this louse is, except to tell you he’s the Attorney-General.” “No,” said Tom. “By all means don’t breathe a word.” “‘Henry,’ he says to me, ‘I’ve got you over a barrel.’” “Did the Attorney-General actually use those words?” “Well…now!” said the great man, making a broad gesture and giving Tom a withering look. “I’m tellin’ you the gist of it, that’s all. ‘Henry,’ he says, ‘on the evidence I have here, I could have you fined a hundred thousand pounds or stuck in jail for practically a century.’” Here H.M. broke off and appealed to Jenny. “Was this just?” he demanded. “Of course it wasn’t!” cried Jenny. “‘However,’ he says, ‘you pay up in full, with a fine, and we’ll forget it. Provided,’ he says—” “Provided what?” “I’m to go back to my own office here, d’ye see? It used to be part of the War Office, before they messed everything about in the war. And I’m to be in charge of Central Office Eight of the Metropolitan Police.” “Please,” said Jenny in her soft voice, “but what is Central Office Eight?” “It’s me,” (page 129)

 Can you explain miracles?” “No. But I know a man who can. Did you ever hear of Sir Henry

Merrivale?” “Sir Henry Merrivale?” “Yes!” “But he is awful!” cried Jenny. “He is fat and bald, and he swear and carry on and throw people out of windows.” “He is not, perhaps,” Tom admitted, “quite the ladies’ man he thinks he is. But he can explain miracles, Jenny (page 115)“And I was so, so wrong about your H.M.!” “Oh?” enquired Tom. “Yes, yes! He does not swear or carry on or throw people out of windows. He is what you call a poppet.” “Hem!” said the great man modestly. “Frankly,” said Tom, eyeing the stuffed owl across the desk, “I shouldn’t call it a well-chosen word to apply to him. You’ll find out. However! When I’d chucked out Aunt Hester, with the aid of two counter-girls and a friendly cop, I thought I’d never get here. I was afraid some infernal thing or other had happened to you, and I might never see you again.” “You may see me,” said Jenny, and stretched out her hands, “whenever you wish.” “Oi!” interposed a thunderous voice. The alleged poppet was now glaring at them with a malignancy which raised Jenny’s hair. (page 130-131)

“Well,” glowered H.M., scratching the back of his neck, “I’ve got a house, and a wife, and two daughters, and two good-for-nothing sons- in-law I’ve had to support for eighteen years. So I expect you’d better move in too.” “You mean this?” cried Jenny, and sprang to her feet. “You would really want me?” she asked incredulously. “Bah,” said H.M. “Sir H.M.! How to thank you I do not know…!” “Shut up,” said the great man austerely. (page 131-132). In essence H.M. he attributes the crazy expenses mentioned previously to the family situation, to the fact of having to provide for many people dependent on him.

“Then there’s your clothes,” he mused. “That’s a very fetchin’ outfit you’ve got on now, and I expect you brought a whole trunkful?” “Yes, my clothes! I forget!” “Don’t worry,” said H.M. with a suggestion of ghoulish mirth. “I’ll send a police-officer to fetch ‘em. (page 132)

“Looky here, my wench. I want to speak to Sam….Oh, yes, I can! This is the old man. You just tell him I squared it when he was givin’ a beautiful party for sixteen beautiful gals without any clothes on, and the silly-ass coppers broke in. Yes, the old man!…” (page 138)

“That you, Sam? How are you…? Never better, Sam! There’s a question I want to ask you….Thank’ee, Sam. How many vents are working now?…” Tom Lockwood looked up wildly at the air-ventilator humming and whacking above his head. He looked at an equally bewildered Jenny. “Only three? You’re sure of that? Right, Sam. Gimme their names and descriptions. Yes, I said descriptions! Uh-huh….No, the first one’s no good. Try the second….Lord love a duck, that sounds like the one we want! But try the third, just for luck….No, he’s no good either. It’s Charley Johnson. Gimme the address. It’s nearly six o’clock—he’s bound to be at home now….Thanks a million, Sam. And try to keep to one woman next time, hey? All right, all right!” (page 139)

“Sir!” protested Tom. ‘What in the name of sense is all this business of air-vents, and how can it help us?” “You wanted a miracle explained, didn’t you?” demanded the great man. “All right. Are you comin’ with me, or not?” (page 139)… “For the last time,” said the desperate Tom, “will you tell what an air-vent—” H.M. pulled down the brim of his hat even harder. “Who said anything about an air-vent?” he howled. “I didn’t. I said ‘vent.’ That’s the theatrical and professional term for a ventriloquist. Didn’t you ever hear a ventriloquist?” (page 140)

Burn me,” and H.M.‘s voice rose up passionately, “people are always sayin’, ‘What an old cloth-head he is; stick him upside down in the dustbin.’ Then they see what I mean. And they yell. Why, Henry; pull him out and dust him off; we should never have guessed it.’ And of course they wouldn’t have guessed it, the star-gazin’ goops! Only—” (page 143)

The role of guide caught Sir Henry Merrivale’s fancy at once. “Hem!” he said, tapping himself on the chest. “Me.” Lamoreux looked doubtful. “Okay, Pop, you’re the boss. But are you sure you know enough about the history of this joint?” “Me?” said the outraged H.M. “The palace of Hampton Court,” he bellowed, “begun by Cardinal Wolsey in the year 1515, was in 1526 pinched from this worthy prelate by that howlin’ old ram King Henry the Eighth, whose wives I shall now proceed to—” “Pop! Quiet!” “Am I a guide,” H.M. asked loftily, “or ain’t I?” (page 146)

Sir Henry Merrivale, in his most maddening mood, sat on an upended wheelbarrow, in one of the few remaining Tudor quadrangles: of dark red brick, with its white stone lions uprearing from the walls beside sly little windows. H.M. was again smoking his black pipe, and looked up at Tom without favour. (page 142)… From under the archway to a second quadrangle the sound of “S-s- t!” hissed at them in a way which made H.M. leap up from the overturned wheelbarrow (page 145). Here we even have a rhetorical figure: an oxymoron = paradoxical union of two antithetical terms. Note how for one of the few times in the passage Hernry Merrivale is referred to by the noble title Sir. The thing was invented by Carr precisely to achieve a result that opposes nobility to sitting on a wheelbarrow, which is something ridiculous.

Furthermore, Carr never loses his tendency to show off knowledge, dates, names and historical references. We see it in the brief but amusing altercation centered on William the Third, in which Sir Henry Merrivale cannot stand having his historical culture held against him : “On our right,” it thundered, “we got the famous Hampton Court gardens, forty-four acres of elegant spinach, first laid out by King William the Third and completed in 1734.” “For God’s sake, be careful,” whispered Tom. “William the Third died in 1702.” H.M. swung round, fists on hips. “And d’ye think I don’t know that?” he bellowed. “I didn’t say the old sour-puss finished ‘em, did I? I just said he laid ‘em out—which is what I’m goin’ to do to you, young man, if you don’t shut up and stop interruptin my lecture.” “Pop! The soft pedal! Give it the old soft pedal! Holy cats, they’ll hear you as far as Thames Ditton!” (page 147).

Overall, a gorgeous novelette.

Pietro De Palma