Fredric Brown : Night of the Jabberwock, 1951

Fredric Brown is famous for original and bizarre plots and unusual ends in his novels.
Now, it is clear that his plots are not conventional , even very original , reading his works : I would say that it was a normal thing too , since the author was a famous science fiction author , and therefore the fantastic futuristic was for him a way of looking at everyday things in a different light. However, beyond that he was or was not , essentially an author of science fiction borrowed to crime fiction or an author of crime fiction borrowed to the sci-fi or both together, Brown was always trying. Sometimes the surprise is related to the use of instruments or strange events that follow the science fiction (i.e. The case of a strange customer , the novel that we reviewed recently ), sometimes in very strange situations .
Night of the Jabberwock , is a novel of 1951.

It 's the story of a small publisher , who resides in a small town in Illinois , Carmel City, where nothing ever happens . This forces him to rage over what could have been if he had lived elsewhere, and unfortunately procure the strangest news in the ranks of those cheesy , that can happen in a country where nothing ever happens. So, just to say something, even he managed to stand against the local police, whose the sheriff did not forgive the attacks against him. In fact, Doc Stoeger would like a nice crime, not for the purposes for which Gervase Fen by Crispin wanted it, i.e. an intellectual challenge , but to have material for a nice article . In fact, the thing he would like to do , would be a last great number, in which he could write everything he ever wanted, and then close the magazine at least in beauty.
But nothing ever happens at Carmel City .

Doc has two real friends : Carl Trenholm , a lawyer , and the bartender Smiley Wheeler, and with them he spends most of his time with the first reflecting, with the second drink (which is alcoholic). A third is his acquaintance Al Grainger, a young man whose the revenues nobody knows which they are, but that in himself leads a carefree life , and that engages Doc in endless games of chess.

One day, it happens all that did not happen in too many years: a series of facts so out of the ordinary ( always with reference to the routine of life of Carmel City ) that even only one would have been enough to cover the hole in the layout of the first page.

In essence, he assists in what would seem a bank robbery , but penetrated through a window ( it is a provincial bank , in 1951 , not a modern bank, where if you also have a key on you, the metal detector at the entrance does not let you pass! ) stretches the bumbling thief , only to realize he is the teenage son of an acquaintance of his , the banker and master of bank, Clyde Andrews ; learns that the husband of her maid , had an accident in the Department of Roman Candles , a fireworks factory , burning one hand;  he realizes that at his small town turn the bad guys , two gangsters , one of which is wanted , famous for their ferocity , who almost did not swell with fists, just because he would not say which city was the one in which they had arrived by car, gangsters whom he subsequently will find by Smiley : Smiley also recognized them , and they will be saved from certain death just because Smiley will take advantage of a moment uncertainty of the two gangsters, shooting them with the gun whom Doc has in his pocket; a lunatic escapes from the asylum , and the police organizes roadblocks to catch him ; Ralph Bonney , rich industrial fireworks factory owner , and Miles Harrison , deputy sheriff , who is escorting him because of the wages of workers, from one bank to another city , they vanish into thin air; and finally one last amazing event happens before the eyes of the unbeliever Doc: he be gone before our eyes, after a little time . But the thing that most he can not believe is that , about any of these extraordinary things, he can write a piece , because for one reason or another, the people involved therein accepts that he write a piece about the fact or about themselves .
However, are all things that Doc did not properly lived , except the adventure along with Smiley against the two gangsters.

What it happens to him now rather it’s incredible.
In an interval between one thing and another, not his friend Grainger who entertains him with challenges chess but a strange little man  who shows up on his doorstepwith, who qualifies himself as Yehudi Smith: he entertains him about his knowledge of Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland: few people know that years before Doc wrote his own practice about this visionary and that is quite a scholar . Soon Doc focuses on the strange guy that is fascinating for him, as is evident , because of his knowledge of the work of Carroll, also of essays by Carroll, very little known about the math: so the two become comfortable and Doc  by Yehudi is invited to a meeting in an abandoned and haunted house, where there will be a true rite about the existence of the fantasy world of Alice, in another dimension.
They go together, enter into an attic , they find a little table with a small key and a small bottle with a label that says DRINK ME (as into Alice in Wonderland): Yehudi drinking from the bottle and he slumps ... poisoned and stiff .

Doc runs away from home , he goes to the police station where he denounces all to the sheriff who does not believe him , but sends his second deputy to the house , where there is nothing; but from the trunk of Doc’s car blood is dripping: with the Doc Yale key that he found on the little table in the attic, they open the trunk of the car and they find the industrialist and the deputy sheriff vanished, dead.
Doc must have been ! It’s clear: he is mad! All because of all the liquor that he gobbles up !

The sheriff Kates who hates him , is about to kill him when Doc manages to escape and hide in the bar of Smiley: in the fumes of alcohol, he seesYehudi sitting at a table and talking to him and answering his questions. There is nothing supernatural : Doc putts into the mouth of his extension of his subconscious the answers he seeks, and finally he understands how the whole thing could have happened , who might have done to organize the conspiracy against him, and why he killed three people. And with the information had from Smiley , about the phobia of which would suffer the alleged murderer , the pirofobia (fear of fire) , he manages to force him to make a full confession .
It happens more in this novel and the ending is whimsical , though without upheavals of the last line .First, the novel , like many others in the production of Brown, is a hybrid: it melees environments and situations hardboiled , with a deductive enigma . We could say that it is very close to the atmosphere of Jonathan Latimer and Craig Rice : gangster and punches , alcohol and guns , but also fantastic Carroll atmospheres, a poisoning , a corpse that disappears , and two corpses that appear in the trunk of the car, a key that would open a small door and instead opens a trunk, and a bizarre plan to accuse an innocent and at the same time inherit a fortune.
In essence we are dealing with a Pout -pourri , a soup of hilarious and ironic situations, bizarre and rambling , but also dramatic and tense and especially a series of circumstances absolutely paradoxical : a paradoxical situation , a paradoxical subject , paradoxical ambiance , a paradoxical poisoning , disappearance and reappearance of a paradoxical , and above all, a paradoxical murderer and a paradoxical motive . Almost we could say that if  Brown didn’t write the novel and he did not pack in such a way, falsely arranged but stylistically very popular , we could attribute it to the deranged fantasies of an alcoholic writer .
The fact is that motive and murderer , sticking out like a cabbage to snack: why just that person should be the murderer and why Doc can figure out what could be the motive? If anything, he imagines what could be , but ... without a shred of proof .
It almost seems that the drinks, cocktails , calls into motion his nerve cells. Doc is an alcoholic and like all alcoholics need to drink to be able to get better:  in our case he uses the drink to be able to understand how it was hatched the plan , why and by whom. And the delirium tremens gives him the solution by splitting his identity in two : he and Yehudi . Yehudi , now dead, appears as an alter ego of Doc, his subconscious . This interview absurd , dreamlike and unreal between the conscious part of Doc ( Doc himself) and his subconscious ( Yehudi ) does not embody nothing more than the pursuit of truth in himself, the Socratic dialogue: if Socrates found the truth through the dialogue (Method of philosophical inquiry otherwise known as “Socratic method” ), Doc , through dialogue with a part of himself that asks questions, takes the connection . In other words , Γνῶθι σεαυτόν .
The nice thing is that all this is embodied in Doc , a man who needs to drink to think.

But the "drink" in addition to being the spring to learn , makes Doc arrives at the truth in a very strange way : i.e. assuming , without evidence , on the basis of a theorem absurd, so if everything that happened in that night is absurd , also the truth must be.
Did Brown mean that the truth not ever can be reached with absolutely rational methods and that sometimes even the chance and luck are important in human affairs ? Or they may find “the truth” without evidence , basing on absurd mental constructs ?
Here then is the final by Brown, for me is the real punch in the stomach : on what evidence or even better, on the basis of what evidence, does Doc nail his enemy, the murderess ? Nothing .

The revelation occurs through the torture:  by placing before the threat of being burned, the murderer reveals everything Doc has already thought It could not have happened that the murderer was not the real one and that he admitted to be him only because victim of psychological torture (for him also real ) ?
Why don’t we think that Doc to save himself, invented an ending of convenience, creating an ideal culprit , which in turn be able to absolve himself?

Why don’t we think the ending by Brown accounted in his case  a “Je t'accuse” about the torture?
Therefore, for me, because it is a fascinating tribute to Alice in Wonderland ( each chapter is introduced by a verse of Carroll's book ), and for his hiddeen meanings, this is one of the best works, perhaps, by Fredric Brown.

Pietro De Palma

John Sladek : Black Aura, 1974

John Thomas Sladek

When John Sladek wrote Black Aura was 1974: up until then he had written only  science fiction novels .
The " conversion" to the Genre Mystery ,  it had occurred two years before, when The Times had announced a competition for the best unpublished mystery story , “The Times Detective Story Competition” - and bear witness to the high quality of selection conversely would have guaranteed the high quality of work winner , there was also the presence of Agatha Christie among the jurors:  He was awarded winner, with a flattering opinion by A.Christie .
The story was called By an Unknown Hand (in Italy it  is still unpublished): a locked room of extraordinary level, as the best by Carr or by Rawson. Sladek had a feature (he died 12 years ago of pulmonary fibrosis) , typical of science fiction novelists : his novels had some fantastic plots , verging on the bizarre and on the visionary ( like some by Fredric Brown ).

The plot and the staging of the impossible crime is one of the most exciting in the flow of crime fiction in general, and more specifically of the locked rooms, I 've ever read. Because, even if the substance would be impossible (the subject enters into a hotel room, and then when you enter into, he is strangled to death . And there was only the detective to guard the front door and he swears that no one came out of it. But someone has murdered a man , in a room from which no one left or entered from the outside) , but the solution is reduced to an orange chair and to an old trick as the world . The detective , Thackeray Phin , with the help of readings by Carr and by Chesterton,  finds the key to the problem and reveals very ingenious premeditated murder, by virtue of an unprecedented imaginative virtuosity (except Fell, Merrivale , Bencolin , Don Diavolo , Merlini , and a few others ) .

I mentioned the story, because Black Aura, the first between two novels , takes up a lot from the story : the first, Sladek entrusts the investigator part just to Phin , and he prepares an ingenious  plot.. Then , he disseminates a series of impossibilities  really impossible. In essence, what we can say to introduce the novel is that Sladek was an author so intelligent than a simple and straightforward reading is never enough to understand the mechanisms that conceal the plot : you often resume reading and go to re-read what you just read, to have a mindset and to be able to follow the author and his detective, in the labyrinths of the plot.
Black Aura is so. The birth of a visionary fantasy . But at the same time it is a clear-cut answer to own convictions . Sladek was a positivist and as such, a materialist subject : everything did not fall within the scope of demonstrable , it was discarded. For example the occultism . His intellectual conception , had already been released in his sci-fi works in the form of irreverent and sarcastic judgments .

Phin works within a community of spiritualists , conducted by a medium that prides to get in touch with many otherworldly entities , and so doing seems she ensnared some of her members; and he suspects that in this community there is not just plagiarism or circumvention of the weak and incompetent persons, but also real crimes . Therefore, he who does not believe to mediums and seances, pretends to want  join , although some of the followers of this cult know very well he is a detective.
To heterogeneous group , a company of the ethereal Mandala, part several persons: there is a reverend, a psychologist, a retired military officer , a pop singer , and, of course, the medium, and a scientific researcher . Everyone is there for a purpose : there’s who exploits the gullibility of others, who in order to avoid any interference of entities that are not beneficial, who really gets in touch with the ghosts by his dead . It’s the case of Lauderdale , who lost his son Dave . It is said that his ghost has appeared to the pop singer . Dave was a drug addict , who had come into possession of an authentic Egyptian talisman , which is said to bring bad luck, a cursed talisman in the form of a beetle .

He died for a drug overdose: this is the verdict by the police. But some is not convinced . The fact is that Phin begins to investigate . He knows nothing about Dave, but he wants go to the bottom of things and he starts asking questions . At one day , Lauderdale, in front of everyone , including Phin, goes to the bathroom : Steve Sonday , the pop singer and his friend , is out.  Some time elapses, but he does not come out . Eventually they decide to go to see if he felt bad, but they found the empty room, without he has been able to get out without the others could not see : vanished into thin air.

Phin is the most worried . And while others persons are scrambling to look in all the corners of the building , he is increasingly concerned , as the time passes and Sonday is not found : did Sonday dead? This fact becomes apparent when they found him in the shed , in a kind of vertical caisson , sitting and strangled .

Is not the only disturbing thing, though. Some time later, just Steve Sonday , the friend of Lauderdale, organizes an experiment in which he can prove to the group, even disbelief , that he can levitate in the air, in front of their eyes , to the height of the balcony. Too bad! He precipitates and he remains stuck in the gate . In short, too many criminal events . To which again it is associated the attempted poisoning of the medium, and the extraordinary disappearance of Reverend: he comes to pray in the mortuary chapel of the funeral company , although there are no other means by which he can come out, if not precisely the coffin, he mysteriously disappears , he vanishes into thin air , only to be found elsewhere, in a state of unconsciousness.
To Phin will be hard to find the key to the problem , and nailing a slippery and unpredictable murderer.

Again Sladek demonstrates a capacity to surprise, playing with the readers: by directing them in one direction and then making fun of them with pure conjuring tricks : for example, the disappearance of the reverend. How did he vanish into the chapel ? The two doors were guarded : the first  by  two pallbearers , the second by the other persons of the Company spiritualistic: someone obviously is not telling the truth. Or .. is it possible that the coffin might contain two bodies. The reality will be less gruesome than you might think, but the  possibility that in the coffin there could be two bodies, it drews The Greek Coffin Mystery by Ellery Queen ( and I'm sure that this remembrance Sladek  had in mind when he designed the situation ) .
The levitation that is an optical trick : which writer does it bring to our mind who put a famous optical trick at his very famous novel? J.D.Carr , at The Hollow Man, but also at a short story with Colonel March: The New Invisible Man .

The trick of the bathroom is a variation of a locked room he designed in the case of Invisible Green: in the first novel, Sladek devised a locked Room, making finding the victim locked in the bathroom; here, he invented a disappearance from a closed bathroom.

But the best thing about the novel is the literary quality , the suspended tone between the satirical and the ironic , with some good joke;  the rhythm is smooth and the style is flowing , very light. The inventions are wasted , and so the tension remains very high until the end .
But like any good final, at the manner by Fredric Brown, Sladek is astonishing : where Mrs. Webb was defended from the charge of stealing the ring from a dead , citing the fact that a martian entity Martian had given her it  , Phin fixes a spaceship : it will not be true that the Martians really exist ? , is as Sladek wants tell us .
Talking between us, if we must say, the two disappearances from the bathroom and from the chapel they are not much, because the astute reader directs his gaze in the right direction: it is the levitation levitation the real trick who leaves us completely astonished .
Then when he will explain the trick, someone will can say, of course, could not be otherwise.
Strange nobody has thought before, though.

Pietro De Palma

Pierre Boileau : Six crimes sans assassin

A few years ago it seemed that in Italy the crisis of the classic detective novel was irreversible: was created on the Blog by the Mondadori publishing house an acrimonious debate that sometimes transcended , at which soon I became the standard-bearer for those who wanted to read still kind of classic detective novels ( and not necessarily hard-boiled terrorist plots , mafia, espionage , etc. .. ) . After ups and downs , now in Italy we are experiencing a new golden age , but especially thanks also to the initiative of another publishing house, Polillo , who is publishing an amazing number of novels, never before published ( Parke , Berkeley, Betteridge, Wynne, Chambers, Morrah, Sprigg, Penny, Witting, Brady, Rhode, Connington, Adams, Kyd, Snow, Ferguson, etc. .. ) . In these days are published a novel by Paul Halter, never published before ( Le diable de Dartmoor ) and “idem” one by Peter Lovesey , and next month will be published  an unpublished novel , in Italy , by Berkeley, a novel by Charlotte Armstrong and one of Julian Symons . Last month instead was published an unpublished novel by Pierre Boileau, Six crimes sans assassin.  

Pierre Boileau is , to most readers, famous because with Narcejac Thomas , he formed one of the most innovative and supportive marriages literary detective genre , signing countless masterpieces , from Celle qui tait plus ne'e  to D' entre les morts , from L’ Ingenieur aimait trop les chiffres to Les louves and many others. If, however, the novels signed by him and by his friend , probed victims and perpetrators , focusing primarily on personality disorders , thereby generating an intensely psychological narrative and suspense , until he had published under his own signature, i.e.until  the meeting with Narcejac on the occasion of the award of the novel of the latter, La mort est du voyage at the Grand Prix du Roman d' Aventure in 1948 , his novels were just marvelous examples of classical Mystery.

He was born in Paris in 1889. After various jobs , he began to write and collaborate with some newspapers , signing for the newspaper " Lectures pour tous " his first detective story with André Brunel : Deux hommes sur une piste, 1932. Since that time, he wrote some novels all with this character : La Pierre qui  tremble , 1934; La Promenade de minuit 1934;  Le Repos de Bacchus 1938 (Grand Prix du Roman d' Aventure); Six crimes sans assassin, 1939; Les Trois clochards 1945. From 1936 to 1942 he published several short stories for the magazine Ric et Rac , and some of them were republished during the Second World War and the occupation of France , under the pseudonym Anicet.. After the war, Boileau published yet ; L'Assassin vient les mains vides , 1945;  La bete du bois sans nom ,1949; Les Rendez- vous de Passy , 1951. The last three novels signed by him individually , however, came after he had formed the association with Narcejac .

He died in 1989 at Beaulieu- sur- Mer.

Six crimes sans assassin , once again tells about a tragedy within a specific family group and about the biggest success by André Brunel investigator called , along with the narrator his friend, to locate an invisible killer.

A tragedy took place in an apartment building , a woman was seen calling for help , looking out a window, and a moment later, fall back , while a fight scene between two people is glimpsed behind her. People flock , and, primarily, the caretaker of the building which, however , reached behind the door , he realizes to have forgotten the pass- partout : when he comes back on, with the master key , and he opens the door, he  is located in front of a terrible scene : a man dead with two gunshot wounds , one woman dying , who can not hurt herself , the gun is missing, and the disappearance of a murderess…from a closed apartment : the murderer can not be passed to the front door because various other people and caretaker of the building are fumbling behind the door; none is found into the other rooms ; the windows are so high than they can’t have been used for the escape , and for the most they are guarded by many onlookers in the street and in neighboring buildings; the only door that opens on the scale of service, it is locked from the inside by a bolt. So where did  the murderer escape?

The question that arises after examining the crime scene , is this : she lacks the maid of the couple, Adèle Blanchot, whom was supposed to be there but there is not. Commissioner and the gatekeeper go to the sixth floor of the building , where are the servants' rooms , but in the room of Adéle they don’t find the woman and anything that serves to give a track. However, they leave a policeman on guard .

An hour later Brunel , the narrator and Charasse go to view the room of Adéle looking for rogue elements to the Commissioner, but Roland , the first to enter the room is faced with a terrible scene: Adéle dead on the bed. After an initial moment of dismay , the other two reach the companion and found the maid , killed by a gunshot to the heart.

The policeman on guard swears that he didn’t move even a moment from his seat and in the meantime , however, a corpse has materialized : obviously no trace of the murderer . Also in this case there is no output to the outside of the door .

You believe at this point that if the maid was killed , the same fate could happen to Julien Blanchot , the husband , the butler , who is at the villa of Vignaray . They phoned him and tell him to barricade himself in the house, not to open to anyone, as long as they will go to find him the day after. The next day Charasse does not show up : Brunel and the narrator, alarmed, go to look him and find him dying in his study, poisoned. So with a taxi Brunel , the narrator and the Special Brigade Brigadier Girard go to the villa but some warning signs put them in alarm : a telephone cable cut , scratch marks of the heavy door of the study. The door is closed inside ,  and also a heavy desk was pushed against the inside. No one is responding to their calls . When with great difficulty they manage to open the door , they are faced with another corpse:  on a couch the poor Julien lies. He was killed by a pistol shot , and there’s no trace of the murderer . And also in this case there are not outputs which may have allowed the escape.

Now we are faced with a catastrophe : the two domestic and Marcel Vignaray dead, Simone Vignaray in a coma with a bullet in the liver, and Roland Charasse poisoned. At the study of Vignaray they found traces of a possible blackmail: receipts of  many payments for substantial fees and an address, which you think be bt the mysterious blackmailer : his name is Alfred Rupart .

They place the house under surveillance , but just when there is no cop in the vicinity, the narrator-friend of Brunel assists , entered in the house of Rupart, thanks to the pass- partout provided by the concierge already been contacted by the police, listening at the door, to conversation between Rupart and a mysterious another individual, probably the murderer , whose Rupart must have known somehow the name : the two are going to meet in a villa on the outskirts of Paris.

The narrator tries to warn his friend and goes to the meeting place where he finds Brunel and a little time later , Charasse, recovered thanks to the care of doctors : the three men agree to keep the three outputs of the villa, but at some point he feel shoot: after entering , they find Rupart dead and the murderer again ... disappeared. It 's too Brunel ! He thought he had finally found a track and now it is in his hands a handful of flies . After yet another murder, Brunel will be able to give a name to the killer and to explain everything in the last few pages , thanks to his little gray cells .

The common wisdom that the critical reserve for this title is extremely flattering, especially on the part of critics of the French language. But I want to emphasize that if the virtuosity of the plot is very important ( especially for the time) , presenting no less than 5 Locked Rooms in the same novel and therefore a very high level of difficulty , we must also say that the 5 situations do not present the same degree of difficulty ( the first , the second and the third are considerable , the fourth and the fifth .. puerile ) . For more, among the top three , only the first Locked Room is really spectacular , while the third is very good and the second seems to me to have the defects found in the degree of difficulty, really high : in fact , the explanation would convince the reader that there was the time to make the illusion , but it is very little compared to the action to extract the body from the place where it is inserted , lift her up ( this is a 40 year old woman , not a girl! ) and then lay it on the bed, all in a matter of seconds. It seems to me that here Boileau climbs on mirrors , while the third explanation is quite convincing (somehow approaches the explanation by Carr in He Who Whispers ) . In addition, in the case of  poisoning , not describing the nature of the poison, but simply to say that " the coffee was poisoned " , it just means deliberately cheat the reader , removing clues concerning the poison , as the murderess procured it, and who sold it to him .

But all the plot is affected by a specific intent : to reject the British novel, and: the search for the excuse (because it is never mentioned in the novel) , the search for a person to which  was interested the death ( the so-called “Cui prodest” ) for a his profit, the search for a physical evidence , fingerprints, etc..

And all this because in the end, the search for the culprit is obtained only solving the puzzle : only understanding how the murderer managed to kill, Boileau says you will be able to nail the murderer. All against the backdrop of a Paris completely estranged from the contingencies of war, in an a-historical dimension , as if we wanted to take refuge in the dream to escape the grim reality of every day, and recognizing an absolute value to the figure of the murderer , revaluing him in moral terms , taking away all evil ambitions , and instead , assign the license of murderous necessity. It’s as if the survey were substantiated in a game of chess between the murderer and the detective, and the victims were nothing more than pieces sacrificed necessarily.
Moreover, since every murder is different and contributes to the capture of the murder only in terms of its resolution , the absence of any transition element , if not indeed the only murderess , the number of Locked Rooms is directly proportional to the length of the story: if there had been not five Locked Rooms  and related murders , the story would lasted not so many pages and would have been reduced to a long story. Magistral therefore more than anything else it seems to me the ability of Boileau to guide the reader through the journey that extends to the end.

However the intent of Boileau is distinctly reactionary: he eschews all the literature until it had been produced , branded English , referring specifically to the narrative strand - adventurous Leblanc , Allain & Souvestre , Ponson du Terrail , but perhaps in a manner even more closed : in fact, Leblanc , while presenting always - enigmatic narrative of the adventurous type , creates a great atmosphere lacking in this novel by Boileau . It 's like the French author had decided in 1939 to refuse to lock everything up to that point had been produced , recognizing only the absolute value of his myths . Moreover, even sometimes incidental phrases and interjections , hark back to a time much earlier than his own, and lack both psychological insights , both the suspense though present in other major French writers of the period ( Steeman , Aveline , Simenon ) . The thing that surprises me is that , reasoning in such a manner , Boileau, at Narcejac meeting , decided to radically change the style.

On the sidelines it seems interesting to finally see how the merit of Boileau is have reversed the sequence logic that anyone who is led to the establishment : by creating a logical trend opposite to that which had followed until then , Boileau through Brunel shows how his author of reference , even more than the writers mentioned previously , Jacques Futrelle : without the aid of anything outside of his own brain , the true investigator is able to solve the rid.

Pietro De Palma

In Whose Dim Shadow: A misunderstood Locked Room

J.J. Connington : In Whose Dim Shadow, 1935

Connington was an author who began writing detective novels , such as a recreation : there was a voice saying that in the 30s, several professors were reading mysteries for leisure  .. but it is also true that many illustrious minds wrote them: Dorothy Sayers , Nicholas Blake , Edmund Crispin , Thomas Kyd , and in fact J.J. Connington , whose name was in reality A.W.Stewart, who was a famous scientist and professor of chemistry .

In Whose Dim Shadow, is a novel of 1935 . That is the main feature by Connington , ie the atmosphere ( the full moon , dark, mysterious secret passages, for example . ) does not exist here . The novel in fact looks like a Whodunnit, characteristic of the mid-30s , a novel puzzle to as many of those years, though always fascinating and very well built (although, once again, the murderer is, for the expert reader, very easy to find : I found him at least 150 pages before the end ).

The fact is that Connington is always too respectful vs the reader, and often says too much about the suspects , flaunting the features , so ... at some point , who has an analytical memory of what he  read , and who knows that 2 +2 is always 4 , must understanding who is the murderer , also if  improbable ) .

In this case we have a police officer, William Danbury, who is eager to shine , but to do it, he would need something really interesting, that by sheer coincidence , it happens under his nose: while he is on patrol at night , Mr. Geddington who lives on the street Grove No. 5, begs him to intervene in a stable, because you heard a gunshot . Danbury who is not looking for it , finds a nice hot hot body in a vacant apartment , where is in progress a work to painting the walls : in the middle of a room is the body of a man , his face disfigured from a gunshot fired in face, in the midst of a can of paint spilled, blood stains on the floor and a handkerchief that was soaked by it , and into a can of paint , a gold cross in the shape of Tau. In addition, the corpse wearing gloves, rubber shoes and has a truncheon in his pocket, by very effective craft. The investigations have suffered very difficult .

There is apparently no real clue , so that even the clothes are free of riconoscitive plates , and none of the tenants of the building , at first sight recognize him. There is a free-lance journalist , intrusive and perpetual hunt for the scoop, Barbican , which was the first to rush and the first to help the agent Danbury and his colleague to isolate the crime scene ; there is the architect Barnard ; George Mitford 's former office clerk who lives very modestly with a small income , and who dreams of fairy-tale places of Japan; there is a couple who always invites people into their apartment , extraction of high social or at least wants to believe it; there is the lady Sternhall , of French origin that gives lessons of his original language in his house, and his brother , a kind but decided from the dodgy : the woman is alone, because her husband , is always away on business , and at the time of the discovery of the corpse, is far away. In short, a varied fauna . To these are added two other types , which together with some tenants, usually go home Sternhall to learn or improve French : Bracknell 's Ambrose , a young and handsome preacher of a Christian sect , and Miss Huntingdon , a girl who fells in love with him . The fact is that the body , reassembled , and especially his face, clean from the blood and made presentable , make sure that the body is recognized and associated with Mr. Sternhall that at the time of death should have be far away, and that instead he was very close to his home. You will find that he led a double life , because he had two wives, so he was a bigamist : he had fired a poor clerk and had haunted him , and he himself was persecuted in turn by a blackmailer who knew his secrets. You will find that  Bracknell was what had lost in the scuffle with the Sternhall the pendant in the shape of Tau , but he was not the murderer: to remove himself from the suspicions of the police he did not hesitate to put in the middle Miss Huntingdon who was infatuated : in short, a great villain ! The same  lady Sternhall didn’t tell many things to Sir Clinton Driffield, Chief of Police and the protagonist of the many novels of Connington .

The corpse will not be alone in the rest of the novel , but will be accompanied by a second , that of the employee ( he was the one who happened to be fired from Sternhall ) than eager to earn thousand dollars placed as pets for people for who would reveal to the police the details useful to catch the murderess , recklessly flaunting them by referring to a letter that he intends to send to attention of the Chief of Police : precisely this recklessness will cost him his death. The killer , that if someone had not already identified , we understand  now who he might be, kills him simulating a suicide in a Locked Room . The death will be recognized instead as murder when around the corpse will recognize two different types of blood. Sir Clinton in the last pages , with the help of his friend Wendover (a kind of Dr. Watson , but much more acute than the companion of Sherlock Holmes) , will nail the murderer ( in case you had not yet figured out who he could be ) and explain the obscure points of the drama: the last pages before the final revelation have only a summary of the summary , since the murderer comes already turned before that is twenty pages before he is stopped.

If the novel , in the succession of titles by Connington , it loses a lot in the atmosphere and buys in the creation of the riddle and its solution, a character is very recognizable , as it is a real brand of production by Connington : as we said J.J.Connington really was a great scientist , and in all his novels , Stewart introduced a few electronic devilry , or some invention or some gimmick that had contacts with physics or chemistry . In this novel , particularly interesting is the analysis of the blood vessels and organs of the body , and the comparison with the blood found on the floor , on the significant assumption that if it was the blood gushed from the wound , it would have coagulated all at the same time . And instead the fact that there is clotted blood and fresh blood reinforces the hypothesis of a tampering of the crime scene. Also there is the characteristic data of the absence of fingerprints , obtained using lycopodium powder .

The club moss ( Lycopodium ) is a genus of vascular plants belonging to the family Lycopodiaceae, fairly widespread throughout the world. Its spores , being highly flammable , are used for fireworks and even at the circus . However, in this novel, A.W.Stewart took advantage of the intrinsic property of lycopodium powder , to be refractory to the water , as it has large absorption properties , and because of this property , specifically used in the pharmaceutical industry : because the sweat is a percentage composed of a certain amount of water , covered the fingertips with lycopodium , they would not leave fingerprints. Another salient feature of the novel, is that it begins without an introduction (in use of other British novelists of the time: Christie , Marsh, Heyer ) at which it is  the early genesis of the crime: in this , the novel is very similar to the American novel .

Essentially , in fact, one of the differences in structure between American crime fiction and the Anglo-Saxon par excellence, is the absence of an introduction : the novel begins with the murder , and only then begin the investigation of which the reader participate: in other words the reader is treated to the detective. From this, the tendency will be originated , for example in Queen , to organize a duel between writer and reader, with the challenge to the reader. But in the British detective novel , before the murder , there is an introduction that introduces the reader to the environment in which the crime takes place , ie in other words, the reader is treated to the narrator . It seems to me a substantial difference,  because if at the British novel, the player has an advantage over the detective because he has witnessed the events whose the detective knows nothing , and so the final solution will be even more a defeat of the reader, because the detective knew nothing and instead managed to finish first,  in the U.S. , the reader is really on the same level of the detective , and then the duel took place with equal intensity by both parties and there is a real chance that the reader draws the detective's ability to solve the problem. In its essence, the novel would seem  an archetype of a procedural , in which, as in all Connington’s novels , investigations are carried out by the police:  to act is the Chief of Police, which behaves like a real investigator , however, supported from other law enforcement agencies . It is not a unique case : in fact, more or less in the same year, was born on the other side of the globe , from the pen of Anthony Abbot, another similar investigator: The Chief of Police, Commissioner Thatcher Colt.

The curiosity is that in this novel there is a Locked Room , not known to most. Written in the same year of The Hollow Man by Carr, in 1935 , it presents several individual characters that connect itself to this novel by Carr , and to another novel by Carr, The Gilded Man (published as Carter Dickson) with Sir Henry Merrivale , in 1942: for example, the owner of the house, found that comes in disguise, with rubber gloves and with rubber shoes , and a truncheon in his pocket; in The Gilded Man there is the master of the house who plays the role of a thief in his house , complete with gloves and shoes rubber and he is attacked : the only difference is that in that case he was seriously injured , but here he is killed. Even there (The Hollow Man) , as here , there is a Locked Room , but what interests me is to point out that once again , it would seem to me that was Carr to model Connington , and not the opposite. The dates of publication are in fact symbolic, but in its essence, the novel is very different from other most classic novels. Here the staging of the crime novel approaches to the very most celebrated Carr ( had already appeared several novels Carr, with their characteristics, before 1935 ) : there’s the typical tendency to act out a situation in which several elements appear bizarre and each of they in turn suggests that a sub-mystery must be explained. Interesting also appears to be the dual assertion of Sir Clinton about Locked Rooms : before he says to have thought at least six ways to use a trick to close a door from the inside,  as an intellectual exercise; after he recomes on the six ways to close a door from outside. Not only. He also explains that connecting the barrel of the gun to the barrel of the key and then the trigger on a string, you would be able to shoot the gun inside, pressing the string from the outside; or gripping and turning the stern of key and then using pliers from outside.

This is another example of “Conference of Fell” as that  in The Hollow Man by J.D.Carr. . For more, the trick used by Connington can be ascribed to the first group of examples cited by Carr for closing a door from the outside: a rod is inserted into the ring of the key so as to constitute a guide for two wires made ​​to pass under the door. In fact in The Hollow Man, we read : “…Chimneys, I regret to say," Dr. Fell pursued, his gusto returning as his abstraction left him, "chimneys, I regret to say, are not favoured as a means of escape in detective fiction--except, of course, for secret passages. There they are supreme. There is the hollow chimney with the secret room behind; the back of the fireplace opening like a curtain; the fireplace that swings out; even the room under the hearthstone. Moreover, all kinds of things can be dropped down chimneys, chiefly poisonous things. But the murderer who makes his escape by climbing up is very rare.

Besides being next to impossible, it is a much grimier business than monkeying with doors or windows. Of the two chief classifications, doors and windows, the door is by far the more popular, and we may list thus a few means of tampering with it so that it seems to be locked on the inside:

"1. Tampering with the key which is still in the lock. This was the favourite old-fashioned method, but its variations are too well known nowadays for anybody to use it seriously. The stem of the key can be gripped and turned with pliers from outside; we did this ourselves to open the door of Grimaud's study. One practical little mechanism consists of a thin metal bar about two inches long, towhich is attached a length of stout string. Before leaving the room, this bar is thrust into the hole at the head of the key, one end under and one end over, so that it acts as a lever; the string is dropped down and run under the door to the outside. The door is closed from outside. You have only to pull on the string, and the lever turns the lock; you then shake or pull out the loose bar by means of the string, and, when it drops, draw it under the door to you. There are various applications of this sameprinciple, all entailing the use of string (John Dickson Carr: The Hollow Man, London, Hamilton, 1935, Chapter XVII: The Locked-Room Lecture ) .

It would be interesting to see the dates of publication of Carr's novel, and the novel of Connington, both of 1935, to determine which of the two had been published before the other.

To the trick used by Connington to open a door from the inside, using a slash inserted into the ring of the key, will refer, however, Anthony Boucher, in his novel The Case of The Solid Key, 1941, without making the name of Connington: in this Boucher’s novel is introduced  a locked room, closed from inside by a Yale lock .

Pietro De Palma

P.S.

To compare other methods used in contemporary Locked Rooms or before of "The Hollow Man" by Carr, I point out the wonderful article by John Pugmire dedicated to "Locked Room Lecture" of Dr. Fell, to be read on his website LRI:

http://lockedroominternational.com/uploads/3/1/4/4/3144886/a_room_with_a_clue_cads_59.pdf

However, the trick of Connington, then reported by Boucher, to me does not seem appear.

Margery Allingham – More Work for the Undertaker ,1948

Margery Alligham is one of the most famous exponents of the Golden Age of the detective novel, forming together with Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers, the so-called "Crime Queen"

She was born in London in 1904, in a family where the daily bread was the literature: the parents were writers, an aunt possessed a literary magazine. During childhood, the family moved to Essex where she waited in the studies. Returning to London in 1920, she attended acting studies and met her future husband, who always helped her in her editorial work, designing many of the covers of his books.

Margery began her writing career in 1923 with  Blackkerchief Dick(a novel in which there were elements of occultism), without having a smashing success, and the same thing happened later, in 1928, when her first thriller was published in print serials, The White Cottage Mystery. However, the real success came when it said published her first novel, The Crime at Black Dudley, 1929 in which she introduced her recurring character, Albert Campion, a middle ground between the various characters of other authors: Lord Peter Wimsey by Sayers and Roderick Alleyn by Ngaio Marsh, and Philo Vance by Van Dine. Unravels the mysteries, but also lives adventures. Also, crafting the characters of Campion and Lugg, Allingham proves to have assimilated the basic idea, followed many times by the writers of the twenties and thirties: an investigator assisted by an aide. After Sherlock Holmes with his faithful Watson, the first writer to break the patterns was Chesterton who invented the priest-detective Father Brown as an assistant co-worker giving a former thief, Flambeau, who later became a detective. The Allingham seems to me that just draws from Chesterton and from this basic idea, to create the pair Campion-Lugg, not forgetting that Flambeau is  a derivation of Arsene Lupin, a thief and a detective (for his own purposes) at the same time.

Often, unlike other leaders, who make their characters act only within contexts fully seated high bourgeoisie (in which victims and killers are part of this organization), the Allingham did not disdain to combine elements of common crime in his stories, inheriting a cliché that it was the very first detective those '10s but also the beginning of the '20s (Meirs, Wallace, Holt, Rohmer, Farjeon, etc. ..). Just in response to this trend that it is seen most often expressed in her novels, that is to bring together a detection pure and kind of English hard-boiled, her stories are often unconventional and have remarkable points of surprise.

Exactly as in the novel More Work for the Undertaker, 1948), a work that is situated in the second half of her production (the first one that goes roughly until 1938, includes ten novels in nine years , in which the character of Campion is predominant in the story and has characters significantly of whodunnit, and the second running from 1941 to 1968 that includes 8 novels in 27 years, in which the main character tends to be dwarfed by other gradually present, and novels themselves are often much more structured than those of the early years), with its more than 200 pages, many characters, many subplots, and even elements of common crime that make the horizon of the novel even more varied and more rich than appear in the first pages of the novel.

In the background there is a family, the Palinode, once the centerpiece of an entire neighborhood, reduced to poverty, whose members, all brothers and sisters, behave, some as if time didn’t  passed, with exaggerated dignity of class, treating the environment as the nullity (Evadne and also Lawrence), others with dignity or almost entirely absent, behaving like a pauper of the highest species, living by their wits, eating and drinking things taken from the woods or using herbs, only in order to save money (Jessica), still others living strangely their situation.This family dwelling in his house, sold over time and which are now no longer the owners but only boarders, sharing their lives, along with other tenants, all a bit strange: the ex-actor Carrie and ex-soldier , Cap. Seaton. To direct the retiree is Renee, a friend of Campion.

Campion is reluctantly embroiled in the history of Palinode, also called on to deal by the brother of her butler and right arm Lugg, the undertaker Bowlers.

Is dead Ruth Palinode, and an anonymous letter accuses the doctor who drew up the death certificate, to have done it hastily: it is a poisonous letter, written by those who would have us believe, or it is really, little accustomed to write well. Ruth is exhumed and the remains of the organs analyzed, revealing an excessive amount of scopolamine, a poison taken from Henbane, a plant that grows in the city park. With this in mind, you also have the exhumation of the remains of the other brother, Edward, died presumably of stroke. But as the death certificate, he signed the same family doctor who had certified the cause of death by natural causes of Ruth, then discovery instead due to poisoning by scopolamine, you have the exhumation of the remains also of that brother , but it gives a negative result: he really died for cardiac issues.

Meanwhile, other events are tied to the main one: in a basement, the Bowlers manufacture coffins. What do they traffic via the coffins, that come out at night, from the cellar? Apparently father and son are “cleaned”, but Albert Campion does not see clearly.

However, this strange and macabre traffic coffins, which takes place at night, neither they were carrying people died by the plague, rotting corpses, makes the background of other events that overlap, such as criminal events that here and there appear and disappear; and in addition to that, also the pecuniary aspect of the story, since the Palinode have become poor even for the vicissitudes related to the disastrous financial speculations by Edward that squeezed the financial resources of family. So ultimately, why would anyone want kill the old Ruth, who belonged to an ancient family fallen, in poor financial condition? The fact is that Campion and the police discover that their financial conditions would not be such bad, because even if they themselves do not know it, some of the shares they hold and managed by the bank town, are linked to exploitation of certain mines in some vital national interests.

To aggravate the framework of the story, in itself chaotic, it must be added the attempted murder of the young Dunning, Clizia lover, rocked the skull from a blunt instrument, of which you do not understand the purpose, and the attempt to eliminate another of Palinode, Lawrence, during a party, by a decoction made from hemlock.

Campion will find the murderer, remembering the glasses of sherry in which they inserted fake flowers whom he had seen somewhere.

Unlike the first novels in which the path is straight and defined, and therefore more classically the reader has in his hand almost all the elements to be able to evaluate the whole story, here, to the reader often are silenced important elements that will lead to the solution. In this, the Allingham differs clearly from the 20 rules developed by Van Dine, who had been slavishly followed during the '30s.
Even the murderess comes as a bolt from the blue, because although surprising, perhaps he is too much, because he has never been emphasized in the course of the novel. If anything, it was the bank clerk, who, like the gravediggers, has dark and ghostly apparitions, mingling with the shadows: Con greve is the brother of a self-styled medium (lover of one of the boarders) who sent anonymous letters to various characters of the story , including a pharmacist, another of the victims of the massacre, who committed suicide with cyanide. But Congreve, knowing some details of the story, is not the murderer, but only a vulgar blackmailer: the murderer is impalpable in the course of the novel, until his eventual discovery: it would seem that the Allingham deliberately withheld him, so to increase his role in the finale.

There’re many good intentions in this novel, and traces inherited by other authors could mention: The Fall of the House of Usher by Poe or even The Greene Murder Case by Van Dine or even The Tragedy of Y by Ellery Queen, with respect to the number of more or less suspicious deaths of the Palinode. Beyond this…the novel is very hard to read, verbose, full of puns, references, citations: the novel isn’t certainly that a novice player should read to approach to gender. Moreover, many of the quotes and word games, end to  weight the story, already difficult to pin down. And to the end you get more out of inertia, and really to want figure out who hell is responsible and what are all these subplots, than for an actual voltage generated consciously from the style of the writer.

An extremely fascinating novel for the plot and characters surreal, but ill-suited to those who want to spend an afternoon to read: often, you have to re-read in order, to understand the connections.

A masterpiece (in English, the stylistic quality of the work is very high) adapted to readers who love the genre and very weaned.

Pietro De Palma