As many know, John Dickson Carr, while studying at Halverfordian College
in Pennsylvania, wrote numerous short stories in the College magazine of which
he was editor, The Halfervordian. In the context of the magazine, the
stories are almost always exposed in the course of meetings between some
characters, of which the main ones will also appear later in novels: this is
the case, for example. by Bencolin and Sir John Landevorne. Among the stories
enunciated in the Haverfordian stories there are the 4 of
Bencolin collected later in The Door To Doom, but also other stories.
This is the case in particular of a story, starring another of the characters
who find themselves reunited by Sir John Landevorne, the freelance journalist
and writer Stoneman Wood.
This story was later taken up several times by Carr, to testify how he
probably intended to fully exploit the tragic and supernatural aura of the
story. However, we note how the three drafts differ, even considerably, in
relation to the use that the story had to be made of.
The first draft dates back to March 1927: in this case, part of the
Haverfordian's New Canterbury Tales is the short story "The Legend of
The Cane in the Dark". Given the unavailability of the story in
publications, I will specify its content.
WARNING : SPOILERS
!!!
Mr Stoneman Wood is a freelance writer and journalist. He and cousin
Stephen are the sole heirs of Uncle Stoneman's fortune. After a trip to Canada,
during which Wood was close to being killed by the guide who had mistaken him
for a moose, he returns home, just to read in a newspaper that he himself died
of a heart attack.
Once off the train, he sets off for home, but as he walks he hears the
sound of a stick behind him: he turns and sees a tall figure wrapped in a black
coat. And where he walks there is always this disturbing presence behind him
with a walking stick, until he can't stand it anymore and runs towards the
house, chased by the figure. He arrives in his room closes, but he smells a
disgusting sweet smell, and in the dark touches a series of flowers. When he
turns on the light again, the figure is there in front of the door asking him
why there is a dead person in his bed. Wood, pulls the sheet away and sees
someone who has been dead for some time who looks just like him.
Not understanding anything anymore, he throws himself out of the room in
search of cousin Stephen, and if any of his family members appear outside the
door of his room, for example. Aunt Miranda immediately closes it again in
terror because she sees a ghost in him. When he finally finds his cousin
Stephen, he takes the gun and points it at him, and he would also fire, if
something behind Wood did not terrify him, to the point of convincing him to
confess that he tried to have his cousin killed, to take possession of his
fortune. which they inherited from their uncle, who died some time before, who
always had a black coat and a cane with him.
After the cousin confessed - not only the attempt to kill his brother by
means of a false guide, but also to have killed the double by simulating a
heart attack, something certified by a doctor procured by Stephen himself (if
he is a doctor and not just an impostor), in the absence of a family doctor,
the otherworldly being - like Don Giovanni's Guest of Stone - leaves the scene,
proud of having accomplished his mission: to protect his nephew from the greedy
cousin he was looking for to kill him and have made sure that he confessed his
guilt: in fact you can hear his footsteps that go down the stairs and then the
shadow leaves the house.
THE END OF SPOILERS
When will Carr pick up the story and on what occasion? Eight years
later, in 1935, Carr had the opportunity to sell the story to one of the magazines
that published very strong stories, the Dime Mystery Magazine (which
published tales of terror from 1932 to 1950. Its founder and editor, Harry
Steeger, was deeply influenced by the Grand Guignol Theater in Paris, which
offered shows based on stories of terror). In the thirties there were several
American pulp magazines, which published stories with a very strong plot, which
were based on various genres, from Sci-Fi, to Fantasy, from Western to Crime
Fiction: they were magazines with sensationalist covers, with very bright
colors.
Carr, who in 1935 was already "a name" among the new writers,
thought it best to derive something from that story he had published eight
years earlier, and which lent itself very well to being dramatized, appearing
however under a pseudonym (John Dixon Carr ): a man who learns that he is dead,
is chased by a supernatural creature, who thinks it is a real threat to him and
who instead in the epilogue discovers that he was dead for others, who has
returned from the afterlife only to to prevent a real villain from killing him.
Thus was born The Man Who Was Dead, then later reunited with
other short stories, radio plays and essays by Carr in The Door To Doom.
Of the three versions of the same story, according to many (and for me too),
this is the best of the three: those who want to read it must get the volume The
Door To Doom.
SPOILERS
Nicholas Lessing is a writer who suddenly became very rich, having
inherited the fortune of an uncle he never met: he had previously fought in the
First World War where he had suffered serious damage to his lungs from
breathing asphyxiating gas. So the personal doctor had seriously advised him a
trip by ship to Africa, where he would have to stay some time, to breathe pure
air first while sailing and then on the African continent, so that he could
heal. When he returns, eager to hug his fiancée Judith again, he gets off the
steamer, takes the train to Waterloo station, and reads in the copy of the
newspaper he bought, that he, Nicholas Lessing, died on March 15, the day
before, for a chronic pleurisy, which would have been cured if instead of
remaining in London, he had gone on the journey that his doctor had advised
him, to breathe fresh air after a voyage at sea. How is it possible? He is
alive and well! He then hurries back home, but loses his taxi and is therefore
forced to use the subway, the one that his uncle from whom he had inherited,
had defined "the road in the middle of hell". And so already when he
makes the ticket, following the error of the conductor who made two, he begins
to suspect that behind him there is someone or something threatening. Something
that becomes more acute as he walks through the tunnels in search of the train,
and which reaches the climax when already inside the car, he feels something or
someone who, as if by scratching with his knuckles, tries to open the door of
the car, but in vain. When the subway train arrives at Charing Cross, Lessing
changes trains and is finally safe to be alone. Yet when the train enters a
tunnel, he hears a noise as if something has entered through a window, and a
strange smell. Then someone terrified enters his compartment who speaks of a
very high presence, of someone blind who inspired terror, and begs him to go
away with him.
Lessing returns home, which would later be the home of his uncle who
died a year earlier, Douglas Lessing, to hug his girlfriend, who he had read in
the article, had witnessed his death, along with his brother Stephen Lessing,
and aunt Ann Handerson. He comes back thinking about who is following him and
for what reason. When he enters his house, he smells of closed air, carpets and
curtains and a sickening smell of flowers. Then he enters his room in the dark,
and almost bumps into what he thinks is a table and which then realizes that it
is a coffin, which contains the corpse of him, of a Nicholas Lessing, just like
him. He runs away and goes to his aunt who sees him as a being from hell and
locks herself in his room. The only one who believes him is his Judith. But in
the meantime, the being who chases him has managed to climb the stairs: you can
hear the stick that he holds, which touches the steps. Nicholas goes to his
brother and finds him outside the door of his room, who looks at him with a mad
expression of fear, not so much for him as for being behind Nicholas, a being
from the Underworld for him, who throw on him. The two face off in the room
which is locked from the inside and then a shot. When Nicholas Lessing breaks
down the door, Stephen is dying from the bullet that shot himself in the chest
and punctured the lung. He will confess that ...
THE END OF SPOILERS
In this story the uncle is not called Stoneman but Lessing, Douglas
Lessing. He changes the name, but the story is always the same, so even here
and in the third version that we will reconstruct later, the spirit of the
Underworld is the Man of Stone. And in this story more than in the other days,
there are many allusions to the Underworld.
The story The Man Who Was Dead, which is an authentic masterpiece
of the supernatural, is structured in a very articulated way, so that the
supernatural origin of being, who is then the dead uncle, is remarked in an
obsessive way, by degrees. : first, Lessing thinks that something must have
happened to the conductor, if he issued two tickets, as if he and
"another" were together; and that this someone must have impressed
the conductor if he looked at him a certain way, although Nicholas isn't quite
sure of that. This state of doubt leaves room for a feeling of apprehension as
he ventures into the subway tunnels, which had been defined some time before by
his dead uncle, Douglas Lessing, "Halfway to Hell": it is as
if the encounter with the supernatural creature, it was realized just when
Nicholas enters and then ventures into the subway, a hellish way; and that same
noise that terrifies him so much, that is, of knuckles and nails scraping the
doors of the train as if trying to open them (don't the nails have demons?)
ceases only when the train leaves for its final destination, and exits from
underground. And when Nicholas hears a strange noise and perceives a strange
smell? When the train enters another tunnel, another hellish corridor. The
smell, which we can associate with a feeling of nauseating, sends us back to
death: and it is a further step, to testify of what nature it is the being that
follows it. Lessing will smell that sickening smell when he returns to his
house, which was later that of his tycoon uncle. The same smell that in the
third story will bind us to the olfactory sensation of moldy fur, that of the
overcoat of the dead uncle. When he enters the house, he finds a double of him
in a coffin. But in that figure so close to him, he finds the elements to
disagree with that false truth proclaimed: the fellow soldier he had met in the
war who looked like him like a drop of water.
Also in this second story, an important element that makes the story
haunting is the noise of something dragged on the ground: a stick, which we had
seen in the first story to be central. Here, the clothing is given by a
shapeless overcoat and a grungy hat, almost as if it were a scarecrow. The
greatcoat that was the black coat of the first story and the moldy fur coat of
the last.
Why does the conductor talk about a blind being, and then the terrified
passenger in the train adds to the dose, speaking of him as a very tall and
blind figure? Not because you don't see, but because you wear glasses that let
you glimpse that behind there are only two orbits you want: wasn't it death
represented by a being with a skull face and wearing either a hooded robe or
some ramshackle dress? Here in the orbits, when the being reveals itself to its
brother, mad with fear, there are cobwebs, and from them yellow-black spiders
fall. Death reveals what the task he is there for: she wants Stephen, she wants
to take him with her. Stephen is a damned. He is alive, and he will be dead.
And that he is damned, he fears it. Because? Because when Lessing walks into
the room and crushes a big black spider that testifies that death has passed
from there, his terrified brother begs him to reveal that that being is not the
demon he thinks, but only an actor paid to have him fall into. mistake and
betrayed himself. Because he fears meeting him again, in hell.
Once again, the noise of the stick brings the supernatural being back to
the center of the problem: he has not gone away, he is leaving, but he will not
go completely as long as Stephen is still alive. He leaves at dawn, because
then Stephen dies. Not by chance at dawn, when the light comes out. Death
returns in the darkness: a very tall figure is seen, carrying an old overcoat
and a rickety hat under his arm, walking towards where? The subway, a road that
according to old Douglas Lessing was the “Halfway to Hell”. When Stephen
dies, that is, evil is defeated, and death returns to the Underworld, good
triumphs: at that moment Nicholas embraces both Judith who had believed in him,
and who as her aunt, did not. recognized. And the contrast that is typical of a
Carrian supernatural story disappears: everyday life, opposed to an unreal
reality, the Natural opposed to the Supernatural. That is, we return to a
situation prior to the one in which the supernatural had peeped out.
But that it is a supernatural, fantastic story, the contrast that we
read at the beginning of the story also testifies, when Nicholas Lessing
recalls in the hushed rooms of his club, the Naughts-and-Crosses Club, how it
all began: he introduces a reasonable doubt that everything has happened, when
he mentions that everything manifested while he was tired from the journey, it
was raining and it was night, all elements that contrast with the light of day,
when we are rested and see things in the right light. But it is precisely the
contrast between the hushed and safe life of the Club and the future of things
that contrast with it, which produces the striking contrast that introduces
Carr's supernatural stories. Doglas G. Greene, who introduces the stories,
rightly states that the same places are where Carter Dickson will place the beginning
of The Plague Court Murders. After all, it is that perception of
something wrong, of astonishment, of doubt, which produces the fantastic, and
which Todorov rationalized in his famous essay.
We note that in the three stories, respectively in that of 1927, in this
one of 1935 and in that of 1939, the name of the protagonist is always
different: in the first it is Wood Stoneman, in the second Nicholas Lessing, in
the third Anthony Marvell, while a curious thing is the name of the villain, it
is always the same: Stephen; only the relationship of kinship changes: in the
first story he is a cousin, while in the second and third he is brother. The
uncle also changes: in the first he is Stoneman, in the second he is Douglas
Lessing, in the third he is the founder Jim Marvell. The other characters may
or may not be there. It is obvious that the figure of the bad relative, in the
second and third stories, is sharpened in wickedness: a brother who kills
another brother for reasons of greed makes more impression than a cousin.
Together with the name that changes and that represents the dead uncle,
the objects that represent him also change and that have a visual, olfactory
and sound importance: the stick that makes a characteristic noise in the first
story; the stick, which also makes noise, and the hat and coat in ramshackle as
they appear in the second; the fur that smells of rotten, in the third.
After having published the basic story changing its connotations and
name in 1935, Carr took it up once again, adapting it this time for the
magazine "Illustrated London News", on the occasion of Christmas 1939
and entitled it New Murders for Old ; however the story was reprinted on
another occasion under the title The One Real Horror. The first edition,
the English one, with the first title mentioned, New Murders for Old was
then reprinted in the "Department of Queer Complaints"
collection the following year, 1940.
SPOILERS
The story is that of the heir to a luxury hotel chain that went down the
drain, founded by the old Jim Marvell. Inherited from his nephew Anthony, a
young man devoted to a brilliant career as a mathematician and forced instead
by the last will of his uncle who loved him, to take care of his hotels, instead
of selling them and making as much as possible, as his brother Stephen, a
surgeon, would have done. is applied to it, "mind and body"
tirelessly, so that after two years of hard work and self-denial, risking
nervous exhaustion, he manages not only to save them from failure but even to
bring them to a sensational activity, to make them a destination for all the
rich people who want a luxurious vacation.
But the setbacks are nervous in nature. And so despite him, he agrees to
also give up the company of his girlfriend Judith Gates, a girl of humble
origins, and to take a cruise that will keep him away from home for six months.
However, as soon as he embarked, his misadventures began: entering the
cabin, he no longer found the baggage that he had left with his brother
Stephen. Having reported the matter to the Purser, he hears the reply that it
is he who gave the order just before unloading his luggage, directly, to the
Purser himself. Tony doesn't know what to do and begins to doubt himself, his
own mental clarity. He orders them to go get the bags, but then when he gets
back into the cabin, he finds a pistol with bullets in the magazine on the
mattress of the bed. He is increasingly confused, but instead of throwing it
away from the porthole into the sea, he takes it with him. He even doubts that
it is actually his. And he is increasingly convinced that he himself is the
cause of his troubles: a conscious part of him is haunted by an unconscious
one. Nothing happens once the ship has left port, except for one thing that
makes him question his mental abilities: he has the impression on more than one
occasion that old Uncle Jim is spying on him, tucked up in his old coat with an
old-fashioned fur collar: the fact is that Jim Marvell is dead and gone.
After about six months of absence, perfectly recovered and feeling full
of his mental faculties, he decides to return home. But here in the train that
is taking him back, in his compartment he finds a newspaper of the day before
that talks about his death by suicide. Recovering from his surprise, he
apprehensively discovers that it cannot be a fake: the article is too detailed,
the people are those of his family, the places are those of his ancestral home.
Tony doesn't know what to fish for, he even begins to doubt he's Tony Marvell.
Meanwhile, there is someone on the train who does not lose sight of him, a
person with an old-fashioned fur collar.
Tony tries to get into the cab, and here the guy is behind him. It's
snowing. The taxi would arrive at its destination and above all he would be
able to sow that unwanted visitor once and for all, but the taxi has an
accident having had to avoid at the last moment a man covered by a heavy coat
with a fur collar.
Tony gets out of the car and lo and behold, his unwanted companion is
behind him. He accelerates the pace and the same. Tony runs, but also the one
behind him. Tony has the house keys, he is about to open the door but they
escape him. When he succeeds, that vaguely familiar figure is behind him.
Seized by terror he tries to react by trying to grab the gun but it falls. He
takes refuge upstairs and enters his room. He turns on the lights and notices
that someone is lying in his bed, covered by a sheet. He conquers fear,
discovers the sheet and finds himself another Tony Marvell.
Shocked, he turns and sees his brother Stephen talking to him but while
this happens, the figure that haunted him is there. Stephen screams, screams,
one hand, that of being locks Tony in his room in the company of his double,
and then, after another cry for help from Stephen, after the housekeeper has
rushed in time to see the door of Stephen's room close, here is a gunshot: Stephen
is found killed with a gunshot to the head.
And the killer? Volatilized: the windows were bolted. No one was present
inside when they opened the door, and outside was the housekeeper who swears
that no one, absolutely no one has entered. To testify that there might be
someone there, just a faint smell of moldy fur.
The story ends as it began: the CID superintendent told Tony's story to
his girlfriend Judith. Tony is free from any suspicion and he owes it above all
to the fact that he has been locked in his room. Stephen is dead. Suicide, is
the final verdict. No one was in that room and no one could have left it. But
why would he ever kill himself? And who was Tony's double? But was he really
Tony, Tony Marvell?
THE END OF SPOILERS
Of the three versions of the same story, the second is the longest and
the most terrifying: it is normal for Carr to amend the most terrifying
passages, for a re-edition with another title, for a Christmas edition.
Already in the first lines you begin to sense the horror of the story:
Sir Heargraves, Superintendent of the CID, is telling a story to another person
and they are in a room: the identity of the person is unknown and will be
revealed only at the end, because if it were revealed immediately, it would
remove some suspense from the story. Plus Sir Hargraves alludes to a
"thing" that was there on the bed. Mind you: he is talking about a
"thing". Then Carr writes that the air had a faintly sweet smell.
Sweetish! When this meaning is used in a detective novel, a mystery, the
reference is always to the decomposition of a body: putrefaction gives rise to
nauseating and sweetish scents.
The way in which Carr introduces the story already has the touch of
genius in it: it's cold and snowing outside, but inside the atmosphere is
suffocating, and there is still a touch of sweetness. When he talks about
something about the bed, it reminds me of a Talbot novel. Surely this calling
the body on the bed "what" is a direct reference to that other
"thing", on the bed of another bedroom, in The Hangman's Handyman.
Hake Talbot's novel is from 1942. Talbot and Carr were friends: it is
well known. At least it seems strange to me, and I underline it, that
characters appearing in Talbot's novel are present in this story which is
earlier.
What Do I mean? That it could also be that Talbot took things from Carr,
from this Carr, despite the fact that he had claimed that his main inspiration
was the Melville Davisson Post of the stories of Uncle Abner: both texts speak
of an impossible murder, in in both cases a supernatural situation enters into
it (only that in Carr it could be true, in Talbot it is shown that it was not
in reality), in both cases there is a double that is a double (in Carr's story
it is true, in the novel of Talbot no), in both cases there is recourse to the
theme of the putrefaction of bodies post mortem (in Talbot it is the cause of
the problem: a curse aimed at making a body rot in a short time; in Carr the
effect: the double killed himself a few days earlier); in both cases we speak
of a "thing" lying on the bed and covered by the sheet (in Carr we
speak of thing, a term also used by Talbot; Talbot adds that it looked like a
"slug").
Also this time, the previous story of Le Fanu has its fundamental
importance, just as Jim Marvell is also here The Man of Stone from the first
story. If in Carr's tale, the narrow marking of the mysterious figure in an
old-fashioned fur-collared coat would seem to be an omen, or at least an
expression of an evil power (and the connection to Le Fanu is glaring), Carr
revolutionizes the whole, because if Tony fears that stalking because he thinks
he wants to somehow make an attempt on his life, in reality the figure just
wants to save him. Uncle Jim loved him and therefore would not have wanted him
dead even when he was dead. Instead, it is as if his suffocating presence were
the only move to guarantee Tony to stay alive: in fact, he was already the
victim, not knowing it, of an unsuccessful attempt at "perfect crime"
only because an unsuitable killer was chosen. to the role because unable to
kill.
It would have been a perfect murder if Tony Marvell had disappeared
after getting on the ship, and another Tony Marvell exactly like him had
materialized in his place, as it would have been a perfect crime if "The
Iron Mask" had replaced him. Louis XIV, condemning him in his place to an
ancestral imprisonment in the Bastille). And the connection to the second story
is immediate if we think of the double in charge of replacing him at his home.
Instead Stephen's perfect murder if you don't believe the suicide theory (why
would he scream and why would he lock Tony's bedroom door from the outside, why
surely the housekeeper didn't? ), it certainly is, but accomplished by a living
dead, by his uncle who woke up from eternal sleep.
Just Roberto Sonaglia (translator of the story into Italian), gives me
the opportunity to underline another character of this story that resides not
only in its having a supernatural double ending, but also in being a Gothic
story. In this regard, Sonaglia wrote an article on the Gothic in Carr,
published - as an appendix to G.M. 1821 of 1983, in which the unpublished Carr He
Wouldn't Kill Patience was published - together with two articles by
Boncompagni and one by Lippi. Here is a short extract that also applies to the
story in question:
“Carr does even more; proposing a particular dimension of the
mysterious, developed at the time by Gaston Leroux, he even plays on the
existence / nonexistence of the supernatural, an artifice much more suited to
our shrewd minds that ideally smile at ghosts and, however, do not yet know
whether to believe or less to a metaphysical reality. This elegant game, as in
the neo-gothic, presents all the symptoms of an aesthetic taste biophile,
retracing the path traced by the classic ghost story where the spirit, with its
incorporeality, already moves the index from the carnal to the impalpable, from
the horror to the mystery."
Roberto Sonaglia thought is clearly acceptable, and it is applicable -
also for what I have said - when for example it insinuates that the figure
hiding behind a plant on the ocean liner, is the old Jim Marvel, or rather his
ghost, indicated by one detail, the old-fashioned fur collar of the coat old
Jim used; or when this figure insinuates that he is present on the train, that
he follows Tony to the taxi that will take him home, that she is the one that
makes the taxi skid so that Tony arrives home not immediately so that he, the
undead can tail him , steal the gun and then kill.
However, the story in addition to the gothic and supernatural characters
that can happen are complementary (for example the old austere, dark house,
with noises and creaks, and a ghost or in any case a living dead, are two
clearly combinable subjects), also has the fantastic one. In fact, the way as
it leaves the reader, alternatively viable, the path of the impossible murder
carried out by a being who enters the room and then literally vanishes there
without a trace or that of suicide just as unlikely knowing the victim
(traceable for example in the two other stories cited and in the novel The
Burning Court), causes the reader to be interested in the kind of
estrangement Todorov talks about in his essay on the fantastic.
Reflecting at this point on all three stories, it can be said that the
first tells the bare facts, while the second and third enrich it with the
impossibility that was not foreseen in the one of 1937. In addition, the second
and third, markedly underline the supernatural character of the story, and
enrich it with elements not present if not hidden in the first: eg. the
tension. In the second and third, but especially in the second, the tension is
increased to spasmodic levels in the subway, in dark and not crowded places,
where tension is the consequence of the fear of being reached by something that
is not known, and that wants at all costs reach you. It is therefore a tension
created by also resorting to psychological expedients. Furthermore, Carr
creates here a story that has many points of contact with Horror, and if you
see well, beyond the editorial destination of the second story, the first
already possesses these stylistic features, which he shares with many other
works, contained in The Hafervordian and also in some novels with
Bencolin, such as It Walks By Night, Castle Skull and The Waxworks
Murder (aka The Corpse in the Waxworks).
Finally, the second and third versions of the story are much more
justicialist than the first version, as they focus on the condemnation that is
not only human but also and above all otherworldly of the offender, who when he
is killed by the supernatural creature or kills himself , it is as if he is
forever condemned to damnation.
PIETRO DE PALMA
