Jonathan Stagge: DEATH'S OLD SWEET SONG: A Doctor Westlake Story, 1946

 

 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

Leo Bruce: Case With Ropes and Rings, 1940

 

Leo Bruce, pen name of Rupert Croft-Cooke, was a British writer of detective novels

He was born in Edenbridge, Kent in 1903. He studied at Wellington College and then at Bouenos Aires. During the Second World War he joined the intelligence corps and was sent to Bombay. After the war, he was a literary critic for the magazine The Sketch. In addition to being a novelist, he was also a poet, and author of comedies, radio plays and essays. In 1953 he was the protagonist of a famous trial brought against him for homosexuality and solicitation and for this he was sentenced to six months in prison. Rightly believing that he had been unjustly tried and convicted (the trial was a way to give visibility to his accusers in public opinion) in 1954 he left England and went to live in Tangier, Morocco. He subsequently wandered through other countries, including Tunisia, Cyprus, Germany and Ireland. He returned to England in 1970, dying in 1979 in Liverpool.

His most famous characters are William Beef and Carolus Deene. They belong, one might say, to the two periods of Rupert Croft-Cooke's activity: the first, before the trial, includes the novels featuring Sergeant Beef; the second, essentially those with Carolus Deene

William Beef is a country policeman who makes his first appearance in the novel "Case for Three Detectives", where he ridicules three famous detectives, Lord Simon Plimsoll, Monsieur Amer Picon and Monsignor Smith, clearly recognizable as Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and Father Brown, solving a famous Locked Room case, opposing the three detectives' solutions with his own. From the second novel onwards, Beef leaves the police force, to the astonishment of his Watson, Lionel Townsend, and becomes a private detective.

Carolus Deene, on the other hand, is a very rich history teacher, a widower. He works as a detective for fun during his holidays.

Case With Ropes and Rings, is a whodunnit, very funny and brilliant, that deals with two very similar murders, but of two subjects, in the environment of the ring, who for life, economic and cultural conditions, are completely different, and are faced and solved with genius by Beef.

After A Case for Three Detectives, Beef gained popularity thanks to the books that his friend and companion Lionel Townsend wrote, making him and his fictionalized deeds, their protagonist. For which he resigned from the police, gradually carrying out activities as a private investigator.

It is in this role that he is hired by Lord Edenbridge, to remove the shame that the suicide of his son Alan Foulkes has poured on him and on the exclusive College of Penshurst that he attended, and of which the pastor Horatius Knox is the headmaster. In essence, Beef must investigate and clarify whether it was really suicide, as concluded by the Coroner and Police verdict, or something else, which would therefore restore honor to the deceased, to his father and to the College of which he was a member. In order to investigate without arousing suspicion, gaining the sympathy of the boys, Beef gets hired for the vacation period of the College's effective doorman, in his place. And by skillfully questioning the boys, also through unorthodox practices that his friend Townsend, very fussy and loyal to order and rules, does not understand, such as for example dart tournaments in the town's pubs, and also in his guardhouse (even during class hours), he manages to gather useful clues to unravel the tangle. In essence, Alan Foulkes, the nobleman's second son, a nice, dynamic young man who was very good at sports, was found hanged in the college gym, in boxing gear, with shorts, wearing one boot and another not, with an overturned chair, and the gym door closed. Beef interrogates the boys and the gym custodian, and also Prof. Herbert Jones, the director of the boarding school and professor of literature, with ambiguous attitudes, who was rumoured to have a strong antipathy towards the boy.

The investigations continue without apparently producing useful results, according to Townsend, who complains about the rough and brusque manners of his friend, a great frequenter of pubs and squalid dives, especially when he has to find Alan's girlfriend, Freda, who works in one of these pubs.

At a certain point, attention is drawn to a second murder, apparently occurring in very similar circumstances: Stan Beecher, a rising pugliese, a former brawler, is found hanged inside the gym where he trained, closed. In this case, two wires are also found, one red and one yellow near the body, which are thought to refer to Spanish nationalist circles.

The testimony of Jones' housekeeper who speaks of blackmail against her master, that of Lord Edenbridge's firstborn and Alan's brother, Lord Hadlow who for his gambling debts had been the victim of loan sharks, later reported by his father and who on the evening of his brother's murder had received from him the assurance of pocketing money to repay the gambling debts, reshuffle the cards on the table and support the possibility that Alan was blackmailing his professor Jones for something, and that therefore he is a possible suspect, together with his brother, who with Alan's death would have inherited all of his father's property, without other heirs. To these is added a third suspect, a certain Abe Greenbough, Beecher's manager, who the investigations connect to Beecher's death. In addition, in the pocket of Herbert Jones' jacket a gym key is found: Herbert Jones is discovered to have had many licentious relationships, with different women, behind the back of his wife, a severe woman, when he was away from home. Beef will succeed in finding the person responsible, or rather those responsible for the two murders, rejecting the charge of murder in favor of Jones, who Inspector Stute, prompted by the uningenious Townsend, had hastily arrested for the murder of Alan Foulkes.

In this sparkling novel, Bruce seemed to me very close to Crispin in The Moving Toyshop (1946), a novel that also takes place in a College, and which also carries out investigations in pubs, moved by the same vein of caricature. The brilliant tone is based on the dualism that mimics S.H. and Watson, between Sergeant Beef, who is the antithesis and caricature of the most accredited detectives (which had already been evident in his debut novel), and his companion, the writer Lionel Townsend, who despite the brilliance of his writing, does not possess the brilliance of Beef's wit and ability to abstract and go beyond what the mere clue would suggest. And so the two, grotesquely, are always opposed, even if in the end they reconcile, especially since Townsend recognizes his friend's wit. In a certain sense, they are very close to Poirot and his romantic, very dutiful and not very brilliant friend, Captain Hastings.

 

 In essence, the whodunnit is made up of two separate plots, cleverly combined, with all the subplots that surround them: loan sharking, boxing matches, international politics, frequent visits to women, blackmail. The clues are there, but they are so cleverly concealed, that it is very difficult, indeed not at all, to understand the reasoning of the investigator, before he can formulate his accusatory theses and identify the culprit(s). Indeed, I would say that it seems that Bruce makes the reader identify with the person of Townsend who interprets the clues in the most elementary and obvious way, as opposed to Beef who is the detective, an element of originality that characterizes this and Beef's other cases, because it goes outside the more usual path that sees the reader identify with a detective as opposed to the paper one, made up of the main protagonist and his companions.

It is not a locked room as it would seem at first, but the affirmation of the thesis of crime as opposed to that of suicide, finds its main hinge always in the key: if it had been a canonical Chamber, the modus agendi of the murderer would have had to be demonstrated, having managed to eclipse himself by leaving the key inside the lock; since it is not, we must start from the suicide hypothesis, rejecting it (Beef rejects it, not the police) precisely because the key cannot be found, and the door of the gym was closed, and the caretaker found nothing, sweeping outside, nor did Beef find anything inside, and the windows were all impossible to open. In this case, Beef's genius, as opposed to the obvious reasoning of his companion (who is also that of the police, since Townsend and Stute are in fact allies in the campaign to ridicule Beef's investigation (who then ridicules them), lies in reversing both the crimes and the possible murderers and establishing both the similarity and points of contact between the two crimes, and the fact that the victims enter into relationships with environments different from their own, peculiar to the other crime: so that in this X-structure (chiasmus), until the very end, interconnections and differences in approach are not understood.

Also from a social point of view, Bruce's novels with Beef (more than those with Carolus Deene) show noteworthy peculiarities. First of all, Beef is not an expression of the aristocracy or the middle and upper middle class, but of the lower middle class and the urban proletariat: it is no coincidence that he drinks excessively and makes crude jokes. The characters in the novels with Beef, provide always the same structure: Beef versus Townsend, and accessory, corollary characters, such as Inspector Stute (who never understands anything or almost nothing) and Beef's wife, whose name is not even known, who has a constant but impalpable presence. And like the wife, the other minor characters are also impalpable when only just sketched: not very intelligent parish priests, stupid policemen, elements of the urban sub-proletariat when not very low-ranking criminals, rigid military men, etc.

Regarding Bruce's work, the very subtle American critic, Earl F. Bargainnier, among other things one of the first scholars to have put the corpus of Agatha Christie's works under the microscope in The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie, wrote in “The Self-Conscious Sergeant Beef Novels of Leo Bruce,  The Armchair Detective 18 (Spring, 1985)”: “Leo Bruce’s two detective series have important characteristics in common. Bruce’s novels are conventional stories of the type known variously as traditional British, Golden Age detective story, whodunit, or even puzzle mystery. As examples of a classic form familiar to aficionados of crime and mystery fiction, the Sergeant Beef and Carolus Deene books display Bruce’s adept handling of genre conventions: the basically comic universe, the presence of a great detective, locked rooms and perfect alibis, the closed circle of suspects from which the murderer (the crime in question is always murder) is eventually identified, clues—obvious and otherwise—and misdirections, a believable solution that somehow restores order to a society turned topsy-turvy, and the great detective’s summing up of the facts of the case. Even Bruce’s settings are familiar: little English villages with quaint hyphenated names located on or near bodies of water or distinct geological formations, proper seaside resorts, picturesque cottages and stately country homes, and respectable London suburbs. Although the murders are violent, Bruce rarely if ever provides explicit details of either method or aftermath; his treatment of crime has the delicacy and understatement of the traditional detective novels rather than the gritty realism of the newer, American crime novel. Bruce’s characters belong to the world of the Golden Age: His detectives carry no weapons and rely solely on the interview and the reenactment for results; minor characters are succinctly sketched character types—respectable citizens, eccentrics, obsequious tradespeople, loyal or disgruntled domestics, dotty parsons.”.

All theses that are easy to share, if you read Leo Bruce's novels carefully. However, in the novels with Beef as the protagonist, a characteristic emerges forcefully that is typical of Bruce and that apparently finds bridges with other fellow writers, contemporary to him: the ability to weave ingenious plots, with often impossible crimes (that would drive any possible policeman crazy), always or almost always crimes (and therefore finding himself in the most classic track that can be), without ever delving too deep, maintaining that typically British detachment from blood (which would instead characterize hardboiled), but concentrating those energies that others, like Townsend ridicule, because they could never expect a plebeian like Beef to succeed where a character of more cultured extraction cannot. In this, Bruce's novel takes on connotations of social and revolutionary criticism.

Not only that.

The novels with Beef bring out another clear contrast: while they criticize the detective genre with a parodic style, whose main elements are the commoner Beef and his snobbish shadow Townsend, they are nevertheless among its greatest examples, as they are built on intricate and ingenious plots, resolved in an impeccable way. Moreover, this contrast between parody of the detective genre and its maximum affirmation is clearly present in all the plots (even in that of the novel I presented).

Bargainnier adds: “In the Sergeant Beef novels, certainly, and to a slightly lesser extent in the Carolus Deene series, the principal characters seem not only aware of their fictional existence but also inclined to use that recognition to remark on their counterparts in other detective stories, on the plots devised by other crime writers, and on the genre as a whole. For the well-read connoisseur of detective fiction, this artifice, which would be a disaster from the pen of a less gifted writer, invests Bruce’s fiction with a double significance: The novels are intricate puzzles that tantalize and fascinate and most of all entertain, and they are also theoretical works in that they provide analytical commentary on the literary form they represent. Thus, Bruce manages, in this most popular of fiction genres, to obey that age-old dictum that literature must both delight and instruct.”

In other words, Bruce, like any sophisticated and cultured writer who respects himself and is expected (comparisons can be for example Boucher, or Carr or Crispin) tends not only to make self-irony, but also to parody and criticize the characters and plots present in novels by other writers, and at the same time follow the most orthodox dictates of the deductive novel (van Dine's rules are well present) to rise to unusual heights. Thus in the novels especially with Beef (but also in those with Carolus Deene)     : . . “The novels are intricate puzzles that tantalize and fascinate and most of all entertain, and they are also theoretical works in that they provide analytical commentary on the literary form they represent. Thus, Bruce manages, in this most popular of fiction genres, to obey that age-old dictum that literature must both delight and instruct.”

 

Pietro De Palma