June Thomson : A Question of Identity, 1977

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

 

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

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

Pietro De Palma

Anthony Berkeley : Top Storey Murder, 1931

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

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

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

WARNER : SPOILERS !!!

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

The end of spoilers

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

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

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

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

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

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

An excellent novel.

Pietro De Palma