Born in 1900 in Devon, England, according to Allen J. Hubin's "Revised Crime Fiction IV," his original name was V(ictor Vaughan Reynolds Geraint) C(linton) Clinton-Baddeley, later shortened to V.C. Clinton-Baddeley. He earned a doctorate in history and contributed to the modern history section of the Encyclopædia Britannica before becoming an author of operettas, pantomimes, plays, and even television. Among these, The Billiard Room Mystery, in which he both wrote and acted, was his work.
A gentle author and a great expert on art and theater, he preferred to set his detective novels—he wrote five in all—in the world he knew so well. In this, he is similar to other crime writers far more renowned than himself, such as Edmund Crispin or Ngaio Marsh, in leveraging his more well-known professional activity to create the most suitable settings and scenarios for his novels. His recurring character, as if by design, is an experienced university professor and theater enthusiast, Dr. R.V. Davie, who enjoys playing detective and who stumbles, always by chance, into strange events that end in murder.
Baddeley, although at times a spectacular author, is not complacent and prefers silence to clamor. Nevertheless, his creations are always effective and reflect a British atmosphere. Furthermore, despite being a writer traditionally linked to classical detective fiction, he loves to vary the plots of his novels, which almost never feature static characterizations; quite the opposite, in fact: Dr. Davie often attends parties, classical music festivals, and theater performances. However, in my opinion, Clinton Baddeley, among the writers of the last half of the twentieth century, is one of those who most treasured the great tradition of British mystery, recreating a new detective who, like the Belgian detective Poirot, the old spinster Miss Marple, and the former teacher Miss Silver, manages to make sense of the darkest things, simply by talking to those interested and uninterested in the city's crime scenes. Everyone will be won over by his humble, peaceful, and good-natured demeanor and will confide what they would never have admitted to knowing if the question had been asked by a police officer.
Clinton Baddeley betrays in all his novels a desire to discuss art and history: the digressions and the opportunities for the dialogue to be interrupted on the issues surrounding the crime are numerous; nevertheless, one would never be tempted to comment that this weighs down the novel, because everything flows as if the crime were nothing more than another event in a typical day. Indeed, while in other novels by other writers, when the crime occurs, the atmosphere shifts, as does the pace and sequence of events, like a trauma that inevitably alters a situation that would otherwise have unfolded differently, in Clinton Baddeley's novels everything continues as if nothing had happened: city life goes on, and so does Dr. Davie's life, and even his afternoon nap is undisturbed.
We are witnessing a different and interesting approach to a detective novel: whereas in the most famous British novels, when the crime occurs, the atmosphere and the novelist's camera lens typically shift, rather than capturing the surrounding reality like a wide-angle lens, including the scene in which the crime occurs (and in which it may even be a negligible detail), it immediately zooms in and examines in detail the crime scene and the characters within it, and then cuts away the scene; In Baddeley's scenarios, however, even after the crime has occurred, everything continues to flow as if nothing new (or almost nothing) had happened: whether it's a theatrical performance of a Commedia dell'Arte work, as in "To Study a Long Silence," or the King's Lacy Festival, as in "Only a Matter of Time."
Among his novels, one that I particularly enjoyed was "To Study a Long Silence."
Yes, before an audience. And this recalls another great novel, Death of Jezebel, by Christianna Brand, but also The Roman Hat Mystery, by Ellery Queen, in which a crime occurs before the eyes of the audience, during a theatrical performance. However, the settings, as we said before, are not the same: the more rarefied and dramatic atmospheres of Brand and Ellery Queen, which it must be said are two true masterpieces, are not present here; nevertheless, the crime is there and it is spectacular: during a play, Pantalone, Harlequin and Colombina, Captain Spaventa and Pedrolino, and many other secondary characters, move, impersonating roles according to a script—not a basic text, but similar to many others from The Barber of Seville to Don Pasquale—which provokes laughter from the audience; At one point in the play, Captain Spaventa tries in every way to kill Pantalone, unsuccessfully, but Pantalone dies from a nasty fall into a wheelbarrow, caused by the movement of his wife's fan. The Clown carries his body in a wheelbarrow, amidst jokes and laughter: no one suspects that the actor playing Pantalone is actually dead, murdered.
As can be seen, Baddeley's scenic invention is remarkable, betraying his verve as a playwright. Unlike Brand's novel, here we are not faced with a Locked Room, simply because a door, through which the murderer could have escaped from the stage, is simply closed rather than hermetically sealed and therefore could be opened at any time. Linking the disappearance of a prop ring to the murder is a trivial matter for Dr. Davie, after a second murder suddenly triggers the plot. However, the murderer is not arrested because he dies in a car accident, torn apart by twisted metal and shattered glass while fleeing from police cars.
The solution to the case concludes the novel and explains the sequence of events, how the first murder, which is the soul of the novel, could have been committed in such a short time, and why Pantalone, of all the actors, was the only one not to show up for the applause.
"Simple," some would say, "he was dead."
Clinton Baddeley
No. Not so simple. In fact, not at all simple. I can say, without revealing anything substantial, that the mystery here is in some ways the opposite of that of Christie's "Bodies in the Sun." Revealing it will be a surprise to anyone who reads this beautiful novel, the last of Clinton Baddeley's five detective novels to be published (it was left unfinished due to the author's death in 1970, and completed by his nephew, Mark Goullet).
Thus, we might well imagine how Dr. Davie's falling asleep, overcome by sleep in the novel's final line, could be seen as a metaphor for the novelist who, shortly thereafter, would be overcome by eternal rest.
Pietro De Palma
