Jonathan Stagge : The Scarlet Circle, 1943

 

 

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

Anthony Berkeley : The Piccadilly Murder, 1929

The Piccadilly Murder is a novel with an impossible crime, the second masterpiece of 1929, when the first, I remember, was the very famous The Poisoned Chocolates Case. And with the latter, The Piccadilly Murder, it shares characters and methods of committing the crime, and therefore it can be considered that the two novels form an inseparable pair. The characters are: Ambrose Chitterwick, one of the six members of the Crime Club, an imaginary club, but not so much, that seems to echo The Detection Club, founded by Berkeley in 1928, which concludes with its hypothesis, the series of six that form the basis of the novel, identifying the murderer (who would seem to be just an insignificant character) and Chief Inspector Moresby of Scotland Yard; while the method of committing the murder, in both, is the administration of poison (in the first nitrobenzene, here prussic acid). In essence, The Piccadilly Murder, gives the leading role, and the spotlight throughout the novel, to Sherringham's friend, the mild and awkward Chitterwick, who had been able to solve The Case of the Poisoned Chocolates. And the demonstration of his ingenuity is precisely this novel (and Trial and Error): it is as if Berkeley, not wanting to overinflate the figure of Sherringham, had wanted to replace it with that of Chitterwick, recognizing its importance and value.

Ambrose Chitterwick, is in the lounge of the Piccadilly Palace Hotel (one of the most luxurious hotels in London), and is intent on sipping a coffee, when his attention is fixed on an elderly lady, and on her guest, a guy with red hair, who responds to Chitterwick's interest with malicious glances. Among other things, he seems to be fiddling with a cup of coffee. At a certain point Chitterwick is contacted by a waitress because of a phone call for him, which turns out to be false. When he returns to his place, the man has disappeared, and the woman is asleep. As if guided by a sixth sense, Chitterwick goes to see if she feels ill, realizing that instead she is dead, and from the fact that a smell of bitter almonds hovers, he hypothesizes a poisoning with hydrocyanic acid. He insistently asks for the director, and orders him to contact the police, or rather Scotland Yard, and since they would like to call the Metropolitan Police thinking of a suicide, given that on the table there is only his cup of coffee, he calls Moresby, Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard who he had already met in The Poisoned Chocolates Case. Obviously Moresby also remembers him, Roger Sherringham's friend. And so Ambrose expresses his doubts, about the presence of a man at the lady's table and a missing coffee cup. Furthermore, a vial was found in the victim's hand, but not tightly but lying down, as if it had been placed after death. Who is the mysterious man? From a letter found in the purse, through reasoning one is led to think that it is Lynn Sinclair, granddaughter of Miss Sinclair, the victim, a woman who had inherited a considerable fortune, whose only heir is Lynn. 

Lynn is arrested in the room: he is the red-haired companion. Following a whole series of evidence, the testimonial one of Chitterwick, and then of four other witnesses who swear they did not see other people approach the table, and the factual one (the very clear fingerprints of the man on the vial containing remains of prussic acid). Lynn is arrested and charged with premeditated murder. The witness for the prosecution is Chitterwick. At a certain point, however, unexpectedly, after being invited to the house of a Duchess, Lady Milborne, who lures him by falsely saying that she was the companion of Ambrose's aunt, he meets her brother, called Pulcino, who is a very close friend of Judy Sinclair, and Lynn's wife. Cornered, and implored by both Lord Milborne and Lady Milborne and Pulcino and obviously by Judy, Chitterwick, even knowing that he will have to testify to what he saw, begins an investigation, aided by Judy and Pulcino (Pulcino is in love with Judy and would do anything to make her happy, even save her husband's life), to demonstrate Lynn's innocence, in a strenuous battle against windmills.

He soon manages to discover from the testimony of a maid, that a small glass of liquor had also been seen on the table, which then disappeared; that Miss Groole, Miss Sinclair's lady-in-waiting, uses a pair of false glasses without optical lenses; that coffee had not been the means used to kill, because otherwise the lady would have died before his eyes in the presence of the man, the poison being in such quantity as to cause death in a very rapid time; that the maid who had come to call him, did not exist; that someone must have taken a room in the hotel to disguise themselves.

There are therefore two people who contributed to the murder. One would seem clear, and also the other at a certain point. But after the only nephew besides Lynn of the victim returned from America, with the aim of defending his cousin, Chitterwick, first thinks of one person, and then backtracks and identifies the diabolical mind who killed Miss Synclair, and who probably if she had not been stopped would have killed again, until reaching his ultimate goal.

The novel is one of Berkeley's best novels ever. It is immediately noticeable that among Berkeley's inspiring readings, there was a story by Chesterton (The Invisible Man). Why? The story is based on an impossible crime, and the explanation of The Invisible Man is then at the basis of Chitterwick's reasoning, which demolishes the testimony of four witnesses found by Moresby in the Piccadilly room, who swear that no one approached the victim's table after the man who was with her left. Precisely because whoever approached was part of the context of the room and therefore it is as if he had been invisible to the eyes of the witnesses, who claimed that no one (other than the staff that they did not consider) had approached the table. The problem is however: who is the waitress in disguise who brought the liquor to the table? And who then took it away?

 

Chitterwick's character is nicely outlined, in his clumsiness and in the dimension of an ordinary man, who has only one hobby: being an amateur detective, with a personal collection of data from the most famous murder cases and murderers, also to escape the grayness of a life spent with a pestiferous aunt. As long as he lives this hobby, he is mocked by his aunt, but when he begins his reconstruction of the events in order to save the alleged murderer from the gallows, for the sole fact that he was welcomed by the nobility, he is revalued by his aunt, and lives his greatest moment of glory, when he actually saves Lynn. Stylistically, Ambrose is the antithesis of Roger Sherringham: where Sherringham is the amateur detective à la page, a famous writer in the beau monde, but who with Berkeley's pen is described as a detective who is not at all infallible, Chitterwick in turn, who is the caricature of a bachelor of the wealthy bourgeoisie, clumsy and awkward, in the reality of the police investigation, proves to be a character of great caliber. It is a bit of a revenge, of the gentle man, who lives in the anonymity of a life that is always the same, but who at a certain moment knows how to show off the hidden part of himself, which qualifies him as a Superman.

The novel is divided into two distinct parts: a first part, very substantial, corresponding to 4/5 of the plot, dominated by Chitterwick's investigation and the deductions he makes based on the clues he has collected about how the crime must have been conceived, and a second part, much more streamlined, in which the suppositions concern the culprits. In essence, it would seem until the beginning of the second part that the novel is not a whodunnit, but a howdunnit, since in the case that the murderer is not Judy's husband, it is clear (but it is not said) that the most likely person to have killed Miss Sinclair to inherit (the famous Cui Prodest), is the other cousin, the one who verbally rejects the inheritance because he wants to save Lynn. And so, we conjecture and hypothesize what the modus operandi of the murderer might have been, reconstructing a crime that seemed impossible: how could he have died only after Chitterwick had been removed from the room under some pretext, if the poison, as Ambrose himself said and the police maintain, had been put in the coffee? In this case, death would have been almost instantaneous, and instead, until Ambrose had left, the lady was sipping her coffee without showing signs of feeling ill. So how was it possible? And who had put the vial of the now dead lady? And where had the phantom glass of liqueur ended up?
Only then, in the last pages, we understand that the murderer is not him at all.

The novel is the apotheosis of misdirection and multiple solutions.
Ultimately, it is the same procedure adopted by Berkeley for the first of the 1929 novels: in both, multiple solutions are contemplated. A bit like what will be said for Christianna Brand, much later: the queen of novels with multiple solutions. It is no coincidence that I mention Brand, because many do not know that she tries, as a member of the Detection Club (and therefore in fantasy of the Crime Club), to give a seventh deduction in relation to The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which was anticipated by the story The Avenging Chance (which however curiously was published after the novel), whose plot was the same as the novel but whose solution was based only on Sherringham's deduction (the seventh deduction by Christiana Brand and an eighth one in which Martin Edwards himself, who signs the Introduction to the novel, tried his hand at it, are contained as attachments to the British Library Crime Classics edition of The Poisoned Chocolates Case). With a style that mixes irony, lightness and superfine acumen, Berkeley manages to bring the reader to the end, surprising him with a solution, which identifies not one, not two but three characters involved in the staging, who act in two different ways and times, in which one of the three constitutes a sort of hinge between the other two: he is essentially a double agent who transforms a certain representation into another, but without his knowledge.

A masterpiece of inventiveness.

Pietro De Palma

 

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