DEATH'S OLD SWEET SONG: A Doctor Westlake Story, in the production signed by Jonathan Stagge, this is the penultimate novel (the last was The Three Fears, from 1951, in which however the deus ex machina of the series, that is, the twelve-year-old daughter of Westlake, Dawn, does not appear) to have been published, in 1946. It is set in Skipton, a phantom town in the Berkshires, (the hills of Massachusetts, where Webb and Wheeler actually lived for several years, places that therefore they knew well). Doctor Westlake and his daughter Dawn, are spending their holidays in Skipton in a small hill town in Massachusetts, where the rich heiress Ernesta Brady lives, the most talked about subject of the place for her opulence and generosity. Ernesta is not alone: her daughter Lorie and her sister Phoebe Stone, with their son Caleb, also live in Skipton. The two have always loved each other, but they are burdened by the difficult legacy of their maternal grandmother, who was interned in a psychiatric hospital for having attempted to kill her husband, during repeated fits of madness. For this reason, Ernesta does not want her daughter to marry Caleb, because this family defect could be highlighted both in Lorie and in her children. Furthermore, Caleb is a former marine, who after the Battle of Okinawa was dismissed from the service and sent home, due to a psychosis that developed in him: essentially he has a mad fear of the dark. Ernesta went to New York for a few days, and told her daughter that the reason is linked to a splendid jade necklace that she received as a gift, which she wants to have re-tied. She actually went for a gynecological exam, because she discovered she was pregnant: a few months earlier, unbeknownst to anyone, she had married Renton Forbes, and is waiting to make her marriage public.
Renton in turn has a reputation as a womanizer, and before he married Ernesta, he had collected adventures with several women, the last of which is a certain Mabel Raynor, pseudonym Avril Lane, a famous crime writer. Mabel actually still thinks she is in Renton's thoughts and does everything to make her devoted husband, George, jealous. To complete the fresco, there is also Love Drummond, organist of the church where Hilary Jessup is Pastor: Love has agreed to keep two mischievous nephews for the summer, who have broken her china and continually teased her cat.
One fine day, while Ernesta is away in New York, a nice picnic is organized which however is held in another place chosen by Lorie: near an old sawmill, in the woods, a picturesque place. All the subjects mentioned participate in the picnic. And while this is happening, and even before, Westlake's daughter obsessively repeats an old ballad, which she has adapted in her own way, including the two pests. It happens after the picnic that the two pests are missing, after one of the two, has given a red marble to her girlfriend, Dawn. The search begins that involves everyone. Some even go to the sawmill that was the last place where the two little brothers were seen. But they are not found. Until Westlake finds them by chance, in the pond mentioned in the ballad: someone hit them violently on the back of the head, threw them into the water and there they died by drowning.
The death of the two brothers will be followed by others: that of George Raynor, shot in the back of the head and left to die of gas asphyxiation in the kitchen of his house, while his wife was up in the attic writing her latest mystery; that of the priest, stabbed in church, and that of Love Drummond, suffocated in her home.
Westlake and Cobb, his faithful inspector friend, will find themselves in trouble, suspecting that it is a maniac who kills following the verses of the ballad, before observing that the knife that was used to kill the reverend, comes from the Brady house, and therefore if anything it is someone from the circle of intimates who is killing certain people following the ballad. The motive is not clear, until before he kills Dawn too, the Westlake-Cobb couple will manage to get to the bottom of it, examining the case from a different perspective and understanding that it all started at the sawmill, even before the two brothers killed like dogs ended up there. Everything had happened to prevent the truth about what happened at the sawmill from being known. And what had unleashed the murderous fury, not of a maniac but of a diabolical murderer? Something that is not what was thought to be. The murderer will be introduced in the last pages, and it will be a shock (but I had already figured it out).
The novel is remarkable.
Apart from the fact that it is wonderfully written (it was Wheeler who wrote), the novel has a tension that does not diminish, from beginning to end.
It is a novel based on a series of crimes, one could say seven, in which a serial killer kills his victims based on an old popular ballad. The theme of the serial killer, the basis of the greatest bestseller in the history of mystery, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939), and others: Murder Gone Mad, by Philip MacDonald (1931), The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie (1936), The Invisible Host by Bristow & Manning (1930), could represent an intriguing subject, capable of capturing the interest of the public. If to this could be added that of a ballad (similar to a nursery rhyme), success would have been assured. And so it was. Wheeler, who moved to the USA in 1942 while Richard Webb, also British by birth, was already working there, must have known Agatha Christie well. In 1946, when they decided to publish this novel, several works by Agatha Christie, and also by Ellery Queen, who was also an American author and therefore more directly appealing to an American reader, had been based on nursery rhymes. If in the case of the English writer it is rather acclaimed (just remember And Then There Were None, based on Ten Little Indians; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, on which the succession of chapters is marked (in the Anglo-Saxon world it is a little song used to teach children how to count) of Poirot Does Not Mistake (1940); This Little Piggy, used to count on the fingers, is remembered by Poirot in the novel The Portrait of Elsa Greer; Little Boy Blue, a nursery rhyme communicated in a séance in the novel Adrift; There Was a Crooked Man, is used to give the title to a novel, The Crooked House (It's a problem); in the novel Dust in my eyes, the nursery rhyme cited is Sing a Song of Sixpence, etc..), Ellery Queen also uses it: how can we forget Double, Double (1949) in which Ellery Queen investigates a series of murders based on the nursery rhyme Tinker, Tailor? But above all, a novel published before theirs, There Was an Old Woman, 1943, in which at least two nursery rhymes are cited: Five Little Pigs and One Two Buckle My Shoe?
The nursery
rhyme, used in the novel, is essentially an English folk ballad, which is
hummed and partly adapted by Dawn, Westlake's daughter, while she is at the
picnic. It is, as Curtis Evans discovered,Green Grow the Rushes-O ( http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2018/07/murder-by-numbers-deaths-old-sweet-song.html).
It is an old English folk song "Green Grow the Rushes, O" also known as "The Twelve Prophets", "The Carol of the Twelve Numbers", "The Teaching Song", "The Dilly Song" or "The Ten Commandments":
I'll sing you twelve, O
Green grow the rushes, O
What are your twelve, O?
Twelve for the twelve Apostles
Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven,
Ten for the ten commandments,
Nine for the nine bright shiners,
Eight for the April Rainers.
Seven for the seven stars in the sky,
Six for the six proud walkers,
Five for the symbols at your door,
Four for the Gospel makers,
Three, three, the rivals,
Two, two, the lily-white boys,
Clothed all in green, O
One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be so.
The first chapter of the English edition opens with the verse
Two, two the lily-white boys,
Clothed all in green-O.
One is one
And all alone
And ever more shall be-O.
The first to be killed are the lily-white boys, clothed all in green who would therefore find their reference in the stanza. However, what Westlake strangely does not dwell on in the novel (and which is understood at the end of the novel) is the first tercet of verses
One is one
And all alone
And ever more shall be-O.
Why doesn't Westlake think about these three lines? If there is a succession of deaths, based on the lines of the stanzas, then he should have started from these and asked himself: why are the two boys who are mentioned later the first to be killed, and no account is given to the lines hummed before? In fact, if you look at the numbering, it goes from bottom to top: each stanza is built on the previous one and added to this one. You'll see why at the end. A small bug in the plot that made me think.
As far as technique is concerned, the novel is devoured, because it has the merit of continually varying the state of the facts, and the situations that occur: we can distinguish a well-defined plot on which various subplots act, almost all of which are false or in any case have the task of distracting the reader from the only path that should be taken to reach the truth. The deceptive subplots are;
the ballad hummed by Dawn and then commented on by Westlake; the homicidal maniac who, coming from outside, heard the ballad being spoken and followed it faithfully; the succession of deaths; what is said about the affairs that take place in the town; the psychotic disorders inherited from the Bradys and those acquired in the war.
The characters are not only sketched, but vividly described, in the various facets of their figures: Renton, the womanizer who has settled down by marrying Ernesta; George, the faithful husband to Mabel, who goes as far as acting as a scullery boy on the condition that his wife's genius triumphs; Ernesta, who has given magnificent gifts to the community in which she lives (including the Hammond organ for the church), but the locals gossip about her real purposes; Westlake who is not so much the widowed doctor (father of little Dawn, the true deus ex machina of the story), but the real detective, beyond the skills of his friend Cobb, with his illuminating abductions; Lorie, a shy girl who has lived in her mother's shadow, who becomes someone else when she sees her mother in a different light; and Caleb, I would say the most analyzed subject, especially for his escape from the guard at the church that costs the death of Reverend Jessup, which reveals his serious psychotic problems. The figure of Caleb, traces in his figure and in his post-war traumatic problems, a specific subject, borrowed by many authors, in novels written after the first and second world wars, not only by Webb-Wheeler, but also by others, first of all Ellery Queen: how can we forget The Murderer is a Fox, whose protagonist Capt. Davy Fox returns from the war with the urge to kill? Or The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy Sayers in which Shell-Shock is discussed in relation to certain attitudes of Lord Peter Wimsey; or even A Test of Wills by Charles Todd, in which the PSTD problems of Inspector Ian Rutledge are discussed?
As you can see, there are plenty of false leads. And as always among so many deceptive clues, the only one that would have led to the truth is well hidden, because it is not carried out in its simplicity, even if it is present from the beginning: if it were taken in the right light at the beginning, one would ask: but if it is really what it seems to be, it means that a certain person is not where one thinks he is. One might think at this point: the only subject who is absent from the beginning of the novel is Ernesta Brady. Who has inherited her mother's tare disease and is afraid that it might reveal itself in her daughter, and therefore what better murderer could be someone who from the beginning of the novel is stated to be in New York? A bit like what happens in Ten Little Indians, or in The Invisible Assassin. No, I'll say it here, and it's what anyone reading the novel will know: Ernesta is not the murderer, even if at a certain point it seems that she is.
So what?
All that remains is to read this beautiful novel, to understand how certain things, analyzed in the right light, reveal stories that are not what they were thought to be.
Pietro De Palma