Little known novel, if not
unknown, The Witch of The Low Tide,
it's indeed one of the most fascinating novels by Carr.
Published in 1961 , ie in the
same year of The Demoniacs, it would seem for the time collocation , a
historical mystery. However, to place a novel 50 years before his time , in
1903, doesn't seem to me to write a historical novel; if anything is a clever
attempt to move back the time and to be able to describe in detail the company
, not only the customs, but also the clothing , architecture , discoveries,
cars, the first supplies of electricity for the home . Descriptions so minute
and so accurate to leave open-mouthed and at the same time able to bring down
the reader into the atmosphere of the facts narrated .
The story also hides various
impossible situations.
The Locked Room ( because that's what it is ) highlights
several possibilities:
1 ) David Garth lied ( we would have the case in which
Carr copies Agatha Christie )
2 ) David Garth told the truth.
In this case we would have :
1 ) Marion lied saying that the bomber fled from there
2 ) Marion lied saying that there was a second person who
tried to kill Lady Montague
3 ) the alleged strangler vanished into thin air , being
able to get out from a cellar where the windows are boarded up from the inside
and also is blocked the only exit to the outside.
At first insoluble enigma – gone out from the barred
cellar from the inside by two heavy locks and windows locked from the inside -
followed a second equally difficult enigma to be deciphered by the means of the
intellect : Betty Calder, after arguing very publicly with her sister Glynis
that she reached her in her cottage cloese the sea, and after moving away by
Cycling, when she arrives to appointment she gave to Garth at 18 o'clock, she
finds him already in the pavilion that overlooks the beach .
Garth , however, meanwhile made a terrible discovery , after he was accompanied to villa and to pavilion
beside the sea, by his nephew in the car : he found Glynis, strangled , her
body still warm , and the tea , packed in a boiling still pot. The reason would
want the murderer was still present at the crime scene , because the only
footprints in the sand are only those produced by Garth, when he approached the
pavilion by the sea, footprints left also by Betty when she reached him . Garth
has determined the body to be the sister of Beth , because he is kneeling
before and he turned, and after he put things on purpose and then without a
will he resulted the broken of a china cup. How did the murderer to strangle
her there, if there are no fingerprints , and if the only person who has been
seen straying towards the pavilion was the same Glynis wearing a swimsuit of
Betty , origin of another quarrel between the two sisters ?
Despite having checked the reliability of statements by
Betty about the identity of the sister, and having them confirmed, the police
men are not sure that the Glynis murderer has not been made by Betty , perhaps with the abetment by Garth.
Abbot Cullingford , deputy head of the CID , proposes to
Garth, his acquaintance, that in return for accepting the proposed versions ,
he reveals everything he knows about the attempted strangulation of the
Marion's governess and why he does not believe to her version . But Garth is an
upstanding doctor , who, having been treating Marion, does not want to reveal
anything that might damage her , as well as friendship . But the rejection by
Garth, causes resentment of Cullingford which removes his support and leaves
him in the hands of the Inspector Twigg , who can not stomach hi .
David thinks he knows
who is the murderer, he knows Betty is not the murderess, and she imagines that
the story told by Marion about the attempted strangulation , has flaws ;
nevertheless he is willing to hold off judgment both Marion and Betty , and
fatigue becomes unlikely , because Marion , trusting his word, tries in every
way to accuse Betty , since the two women are incompatible : David in a
dramatic face to face in which come to light unspecified sexual habits of
Marion with an unspecified man, in Paris, he forces her to admit things, heared
not only by him but also by someone that was eaves dropping at the door.
At this point, Garth looks for Abbot, and in the name of their
friendship , he asks him to give him 24 hours, so that he can set a trap the
killer and bring him to the police, asking in return as the two women are
exempt to testimony and to reveal "scandalous" facts of their past.
Meanwhile, it is found that the young Fielding knew Glynis, and how he escaped
an attack in the Grotto , i.e. the billiards room , put in the basement of a
famous hotel .
In a tight final ,
the murderer will prove to be just this after the Garth will make understand
him to have gotten the truth , but the Inspector Twigg will be to guess how
Glynis Stukeley was killed and how and who confused the events so to imply that
the crime had been committed in the pavilion , leaving no footprints in the
sand .
First of all, The
Withch of The Low Tide is one of the greatest novels of Carr : it is
a true masterpiece ! Divinely written (the descriptions , as I mentioned
before, are magnificent : see the hotel, or even the clothing of the persons
involved or even passers-by , and even descriptions of the cars! Carr, who you
know was quite fussy , when it was to evoke atmospheres that did not belong
him, documenting about periods and events , made an intensive study, no doubt
about it ! On more than one occasion that he almost seems to had experienced
that atmosphere, that he was found to live those experiences: almost a case of
reincarnation that could excite Paul Halter (as long as he did not think of ) .
I noticed one thing ,
of which I had never noticed before : another stylistic particular by Carr.
When Carr wants hit with emphasis a special pareticular , a name or a certain
attitude , he makes a caesura: he refers to what he wants to say , then stops
and usually describes something ( such as a fireplace with photographs by Betty
and parents by David , or a statue or a candelabra with flickering flames or
more ) and immediately picks up where he left off, saying with more emphasis
that thing he said. In a sense it is always part of that so-called augmentative
mechanism , which is present in some of the novels of the first period , for
example It Walks By Night : to increase tension, it says something, then
you stop and then when you resume dialogue , something happens and what he had
said before, it is magnified , because maybe you changed the tone ( for
example, the fountain that once seemed so crystal clear laugh, now it seems to
do it or a sinister grin, etc. ..
I like to emphasize another detail , or rather two :
at the first, the locked room is once again the result of an act. Here it
relates to a given spatial and one temporal together : you remember the
exemplification of the Conference by Dr. Fell about Locked Rooms at The
Hollow Man and what Leona says at Nine Times Nine by Anthony Boucher
about it: it refers to spatial elements (such as a room may be closed ) and
temporal (when the murder was committed before, during or after the room had
been closed). Well, in this novel the two elements are combined to make a truly
spectacular trick: Carr in this novel tries in every way to put in the mouth by
Twigg and by Garth, Le Mystère de la chambre jaune by Gaston Leroux. But
.. there are also other interesting things:
Firstly, the detective who solves
the mystery is Garth that is a neurologist who has read Freud's theories about
psychoanalysis ( and here Freud gots to do a lot! ), and he is also an author
by mystery novels , at one of which he imagines that is going to happen right
here: it is as, called upon to solve the case, were an extension by Carr
himself, as if he for once had said “Behold, I will solve the case!",
constructing a building very complex;
Secondly, if there's a novel it can be taken as an
example (not in the case of Locked Room but in the case of the impossible crime
) is Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie , which I think is very
relevant also in the case of the used place, a beach;
Thirdly , the motive:
it is the blackmail, for some unconfessable secret. Here we have to do with
psychoanalysis, and in fact anything that comes from a certain type of sex
drive : you could almost say that this is the most current novel by Carr, and
one of the most unusual : it is very rare to find in the novels by Carr ,
allusions to sexual motives (whereas it is much more frequent in the novels by
Ellery Queen) . But John Dickson Carr when he wrote this novel, he had gone out
from England , the nation of respectability. However, the subject matter is
very despicable : pedophilia. An adult who engages sexual intercourse with a
teenager.
It's interesting to
see how Carr , a man, a conservative man, noticed this disturbance of
psychological and sexual nature, not from usual prospective for us , men of the
twenty-first century, that's as an adult violence against the child, but from
the typical glimpse of that time, i.e. always a disturbance of psychosexual
origin who cared a child and an adult, but where the child manifested at a
later time, a certain power on the adult , a sort of parallelism that other
despicable attitude for which the executioner becomes a prisoner of his own
victim, according to a mechanism already unveiled by Proust in his Recherche .
We have to remember that Nabokov's Lolita was written in 1955: Carr may have
been well impressed by this work!
The fourth particular
I point out, it's like again, John Dickson Carr in the years ahead, while
crafting a problem absolutly magnificent (the crime in the pavilion), when
incorporates a double problem ( the locked room in the basement ) ends up
focusing on just one, immediately giving of the other problem the easiest
possible solution. In a similar situation , perhaps in a more youthful novel ,
or if Paul Halter had written it , once proposed the problem , it would be done
so to give an explanation in line with the difficulty of the problem .
Pietro De Palma
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