Roger Scarlett : The Beacon Hill Murders, 1930

 

 

Roger Scarlett is a pseudonym behind which there were two writers, a 4-handed couple like Ellery Queen. The writers were called Dorothy Blair (1903-1975) and Evelyn Page (1902-1976). They had not grown up together as one might easily guess, but in two quite different places. In fact, the first, originally from Montana, even though her parents came from Massachussets, had graduated from the State of New York; the second came from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The two girls met by the same publisher “Houghton Mifflin, based in Boston's Back Bay, where the two women met. The couple left Houghton, Mifflin in 1929 ”to create their own character and business name Roger Scarlett. After some time spent writing their 5 novels together, the couple retired to a remote farm in Abington, Connecticut, where they lived together for 50 years (they were a lesbian couple, like Curtis confirmed to me).

The 5 novels in question, written and published from 1930 to 1933 are:

The Beacon Hill Murders (1930)

The Back Bay Murders (1930)

Cat's Paw (1931)

Murder Among the Angells (1932)

In the First Degree (1933)

 

Warning : Spoilers

 

Inspector Norton Kane of the Boston Police Department is dealing with a double murder that has taken place at the Sutton house.

He is advised by his friend Underwood, an indirect witness to the murder of Alfred Sutton, to go to the victim's house. And this is where the whole investigation unfolds.

In essence, Alfred Sutton, the patriarch of the family, an unscrupulous man who has created a solid position in the city's jet set from nothing and who has the reputation of being a rich parvenu, is killed in his living room, while he is conversing amiably with the beautiful and well-connected in the city's living rooms, Mrs. Anceney, a rich widow, with whom he seems to have fallen in love. For the occasion of the dinner at his house, he gave her a pendant with a unique piece of Chinese jade, engraved. While they are talking, Sutton is killed by a gunshot to the heart, fired by someone who is reasonably supposed, based on the trajectory of the bullet, to be where Anceney was, who is therefore suspected of the murder. A relatively short time passes, and Mrs. Anceney is killed, her throat slit with a razor in her bedroom,

The problem is that it is not clear how this happened. Because a guard of the beautiful Mrs. Anceney, suspected of the first murder, is placed by an agent, who watches the door. Who left his post of guard only when he brought wine to her room (but the victim was alive), when he went to the bathroom for a moment (a minute) and when he went to open the door: but still very short times, in which the murderer should have killed the victim, left the razor in full view and escaped without anyone seeing him. It should be added that in both the first and second murders, the windows were hermetically closed. And that the second murder is a direct consequence of the first: perhaps that the victim of the second had seen something he shouldn't have seen? But then again, how is it possible that Sutton had been killed, if it wasn't Anceney who killed him? Ballistics dictates that the killer had been where Anceney was, because the trajectory of the bullet had such an angle that the shot had necessarily been fired near the left corner of the fireplace.

And where do the disappearance of the jade pendant and the chance discovery by Kane of a piece of bloody cloth in the folds of the curtain of Anceney's bedroom window lead?

And in addition to the ambiguous movements of the relatives (Sutton's wife, his daughter Katherine who loved her father very much, his son James who couldn't wait to become heir, his brother-in-law Walton, a little touched, who complained about the little condescension with which Sutton treated him), we must consider the ambiguous presence of Sutton's friend, Gilroy, who seems to have interests in the affair: he had forged checks with his friend's signature, and was hoping to regain possession of a note in which he accused himself of the affair, kept in a small wall safe. Gilroy was later discovered to be the brother of the second victim. They were all together on the evening in which Underwood, Kane's friend, had also been invited. And it is Underwood, together with Moran, detective sergeant, assisted in the investigations Kane, who after finding the jade pendant in a secret drawer of a desk, and a piece of lead removable from one of the windows, will elaborate a theory, and also using a reconstruction of the second murder, will nail the murderer to his responsibilities.

The end of the spoilers

This first debut, should have been with a bang, as they say, because the two co-authors had thought of a story that unfolded having as two key points, two crimes that occurred in impossible circumstances. And in fact a good part of the novel, the one that supports the murder of the two victims, until Kane begins to elaborate his theories, is constructed in a spectacular way, even using three maps: one of the bedroom plan, one of the room where Sutton was killed and one of the bedroom of the Anceney. The problem of this first novel, however, is in the abundance of meat on the fire: there is too much of it. Too many clues, and what's more some are found or thought of without being explained (the bloodstained cloth hidden by the window curtains: why it was there will be understood, but why a bloodstained cloth, and where it came from, is not explained).

But then also the gun and razor that are found in the bedrooms, and whose presence is explained as a sleight of hand, but without their presence being immediately felt: they appear, as if fallen from the sky), can be explained as the desire to create a spectacular plot, but the two co-authors do not yet have the literary experience to be able to explain everything they put in. It is in other words, a wonderful immature work, which sets in motion two spectacular crimes, which have points of contact with other previous and subsequent works.

Surely, the ballistics that comes into play to explain the modus operandi of the first crime, is a consequence of Van Dine's debut, in The Benson Murder Case: there too, ballistics plays an important role in explaining the dynamics of the murder. But also the explanation of the second murder, has points of contact with other novels: for example, the explanation of a novel from a few decades ago by Paul Halter, A 139 pas de la mort, comes to mind.

As I said when reviewing Roger Scarlett's second work, Norton Kane is certainly a Vandinian hero, but one who does not have all the encyclopedic culture of Philo Vance. He is more of a hybrid detective, a Holmesian Vandinian, I would say very close to Abbot's Thatcher Colt, or Daly King's Michael Lord. Other data that affirm the Vandinian paternity of the work is the Kane-Underwood couple, which recalls the Colt-Abbot or Vance-Van Dine couple, in which the lawyer Underwood, in our case present at the Sutton house as the executor of the victim's will, narrates in the first person, as he also does in his Van Dine novels. While Moran plays Van Dine's Sergeant Heath. And The Greene Murder Case, from 1928, is too close in time not to affirm the filiation of Beacon Hill from Van Dine's novel, which also has another very evident point of contact with its parent, which concerns the murderer. And always with van Dine's novel, this one by Scarlett also shares the existence of secret drawers: there was one that hid the gun, here one in the desk that contains the jade pendant.

The style that the two co-authors impress makes the narration flow, despite the many situations narrated, but it is certainly not the sumptuous style of S.S. Van Dine. I must say in all honesty, that about 80 pages before the revelation, I guessed who the murderer could be and the motive (which is not easy to imagine), based on an abstraction for what is said at the beginning of the novel. Is it possible that...? Yes, that's exactly how it is. While the modus of the first and second are a stroke of genius by the writer of the novel (even if the second seems a bit far-fetched to me: if this was really the case, one would have had to think that people are normally blind and deaf, or very impressionable as happens in the case of the gun and razor that magically appear where they were not there before). In short, it is expected that things go this way because they have to go that way.

However, even if it is an immature work, it manages to outline the characters in the round, from the treacherous Gilroy, to the malevolent and ridiculous Walton, from the passionate Katherine, to the submissive Mrs. Sutton, from the self-important landlord, to his flame, Mrs. Anceney who risks her virtues to help her stinking brother. And it also manages to give a well-defined image of both Underwwod, the first-person narrator, even too little of a lion to stand next to the great Norton Kane, who instead manages to give the right light to events that, taken in themselves, would not say much.

A good novel, but not a masterpiece.

Pietro De Palma

Jonathan Stagge : The Scarlet Circle, 1943

 

 

Today we return to the author couple Webb & Wheeler, who signed all the great Patrick Quentis from 1934 until 1953, and all the Jonathan Stagges. And today we will talk about a novel from this series, perhaps the best of the entire series, a recognized masterpiece, with Carrian atmospheres: The Scarlet Circle, 1943.

Let's start by saying right away that there are two slightly different editions of this work, and this is already strange: normally, in fact, the text of a novel is the same, proposed in the editions foreseen in the various States. But as strange as it may seem, it is so: in fact, the second edition, the British one that has a different title (Light From a Lantern, 1944) is slightly different (it means that there are some extra things that are not in the original American edition): for example, it is said that Westlake and his wife Paula, before she died and he became a widower, had already been there fifteen years earlier, on their honeymoon, particular that doesn't exist in the US edition.

WARNING: SPOILERS !

Cape Talisman is a seaside place, where sea fishing is practiced, but which has a beautiful beach that favors tourism: but it also has a promontory, and a little inside the old cemetery that underlies an ancient church.

Westlake is there with his daughter Dawn, resting at the local Hotel, owned by Mitchell, when during a walk, they see the pink light of a lantern that comes from the old cemetery. Weslake ventures there and finds a freshly dug grave at the bottom of which the surface of an old coffin can be seen. The atmosphere is gloomy, and is enriched by spectral echoes when the doctor thinks he sees a shadow that vanishes behind the trees. Shortly thereafter the pink light of another lantern is found near the body of Nellie Wood, a very beautiful girl who poses as a model for the painter Virgil Fanshawe, also working for him and his wife Marion as a nanny for their little son Bobby: Nellie was strangled with a thin cord, and placed in a praying position with her arms folded, near a rock. But the most horrible thing is that the killer drew a red circle with lipstick around a mole that the victim has on one cheek. The autopsy performed by Dr. Gilchrist, a local doctor as well as the doctor of the nearby women's prison, does not reveal anything new. Gilchrist's revelation that one of his patients who had died in childbirth years before, Mrs. Casey, had a large mole on her face, leads everyone present to think of the actions of a madman, of someone who wants to somehow connect the crime to that death far away in time. Mrs. Casey's coffin also rests in the old cemetery. Dr. Gilchrist, being the doctor of all the local people, has a map on the basis of which he can recognize whose grave was dug first: Casey's! And then nearby the graves of old De Silva, Fanshawe and then Mitchell's father. It is the beginning of a series of murders, in which the victims (three) will be outraged after being strangled, with a circle around a mole: the second victim is one of the Hotel's waitresses, Maggie Hillman, in love with the Hotel's swimming instructor, Buck Valentine. Strange that Nellie also seems to have been in Buck's range. And what's more, she was found in the swimming instructor's white dinghy, lit by a pink lantern: the mole this time is on a leg, just above the knee, in a very intimate part of the leg. A sign that the killer must have had a very private relationship with the victim. But it's the third victim that leaves you speechless: this time the victim is Miss Heywood, a cocaine dealer, who supplied the painter's wife with white powder. Heywood is found next to a pink lantern, in the old cemetery, in a freshly dug grave, to bring old Mitchell's coffin back to light: strangled, her arms crossed on her chest, and a sketch of a red circle on her shoulder but around nothing, no mole this time. All this after Westlake had found her the day before next to Buck Valentine digging near Mitchell's grave. Why? What is hidden in the old cemetery?

To figure out who the killer might be, Westlake will have to start a 360° investigation involving Mitchell's daughter, Cora, a jewel thief and wife of a thief and murderer who ended up in the electric chair, a huge black diamond, a cellmate of Cora's who had changed her name and features, a child who strangely resembled someone, Cora's son; Cora's arrest by Officer Barnes, who had allowed her to kiss the face of her father who died two days earlier; what and if Usher, the undertaker, who wanders among the graves, and who has supervised all the funerals in the area, has to do with it. Who could have known that Maggie had a mole on a portion of her leg that was not visible (considering that Mitchell absolutely did not want his female staff to show off their legs) and who could have known that on Heywood's shoulder there was originally a mole, later removed?

Westlake will find the killer but the decisive proof that he is the killer will be provided by his daughter Dawn, who was missing along with Bobby.

END OF SPOILERS

The book is an absolute masterpiece, imbued from beginning to end with an oppressive and macabre atmosphere, which culminates in a heart-stopping finale, in which Westlake and Fanshawe find the missing children in the old church of the cemetery, reduced to a swamp, by a violent hurricane that has redrawn the promontory and torn the coffins of the old inhabitants from the graves, which are floating on the sea.

 

 

 

The novel has a unique atmosphere, which beyond the thick veil on the series of murders, makes use of the location: a village in ruins, an old almost abandoned cemetery, someone digging to unearth old coffins. A tribute to many great contemporary authors and not, of its two authors: first of all Carr (and how can we forget The Three Coffins or The Sleeping Sphinx), while the series of murders is based on A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie, which old Wheeler knew very well along with many other novels by the British writer: after all A.B.C. Murders in turn was based on The Silk Stocking Murders by Anthony Berkeley Cox. To what famous text from the past can old Usher, the undertaker and undertaker, allude if not to The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe? And then a very specific reference to one of the very first novels by Ellery Queen, The Greek Coffin Mystery: we do not say what, so that the reader who has not read the book yet, does not lose the pleasure of discovering or guessing it.

As for the structure of the novel, one can notice how next to the plot on which the novel is based, there is another, which I would not risk defining as they say, a subplot, because the excavation in the old cemetery and the unearthing of the coffins buried there, constitutes a plot motif I would say of equal if not greater importance: the quid around which everything revolves, is based on what happens in the old cemetery and if anything the chain of murders, serves if not to distract, at least to help those responsible, to continue to do so, aided by the sacred terror of the inhabitants of the place, for that place full of sinister echoes, in which it is said that a gray ghost wanders (which we will see later, is in flesh and blood). And the same corpses when they are discovered, refer, if you look carefully, to the corpses when they are buried: with their arms folded on their chests. And the dinghy with Maggie’s body inside, isn’t that a coffin for her, floating on the sea, like the coffins in the old cemetery float on the sea once the hurricane has swept it away? It’s as if everything, even unconsciously, refers to the old cemetery, it’s as if the killer’s unconscious also indicates that place as the key to the mystery.

But there are not only references to novels by previous or contemporary authors; there is also what seems to me to be a reference to a famous Broadway theatrical success, later adapted to the cinema by Frank Capra: Arsenic and Old Lace, when Westlake visits Ruth Mallory, a murderer sentenced to life for uxoricide with poison, in the women’s prison, a confidant years before of Cora Lansky Mitchell and Lena Darnell (original name of another character who moves in the novel with a fictitious name). Ruth and her cellmate Doris are two very sweet old ladies, like those in Capra's film, who don't seem like the murderers they turned out to be.

Wonderful.

 

Pietro De Palma

Anthony Berkeley : The Piccadilly Murder, 1929

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

A masterpiece of inventiveness.

Pietro De Palma