Paul Halter : La Mort derrière les rideaux, 1989

 

 

La Mort derrière les rideaux (Death Behind the Curtains) is Paul Halter’s fifth novel (previously unpublished in English).

It was published in 1989, following La malédiction de Barberousse (1986), La quatrième porte (1987), La mort vous invite (1988), and Le brouillard rouge (1988). As Roland Lacourbe notes regarding this novel: Après trois brillants exercices de style qui sont autant de réussites exceptionnelles et de tentatives expérimentales, un jeune auteur fait ses gammes… Si La Mort vous invite était une exploitation virtuose du thème cher à son coeur du problème de la chambre close, avec La Mort derrière les rideaux, Paul Halter se livre aux joies les plus orthodoxes du pur « whodunit »

WARNING : SPOILERS 

The novel opens in a peculiar fashion: an elderly lady, Violet Garfield, presents herself to Inspector Hurst at Scotland Yard to reveal that, simply by observing a certain person's gaze, she has intuited that he is about to commit a murder. In essence, Hurst doesn't believe her.

After this highly unusual prologue, which comprises the first chapter, the action shifts to the streets of London. There, Marjorie Conway is busy fending off the advances of a suitor she thoroughly dislikes—Peter Schuyler—going so far as to slap him before running off. While on the street, she spots a man engaged in a very intimate encounter with a woman: he leans over her as if about to have sexual intercourse, then makes a movement she cannot interpret and tosses something onto the steps of a house, leaving the woman lying on the ground. Shortly after the discovery of the body and the object that had been thrown, a terrifying scream rings out; Marjorie flees toward the boarding house where she lives, only to realize that the man responsible is heading in her direction. He enters the same boarding house, and while she cowers on the stairs, he makes his way to the bathroom, leaving a trace of blood on a towel; the killer lives in the same building, yet, paralyzed by fear, she fails to see which room he retreats into.

The next day, the young woman goes to Scotland Yard to give her statement to Inspector Hurst and her friend Twist; she reveals that she lives in a boarding house at 48 Hoxton Street and, when pressed by the two men, briefly describes the boarders—mostly men—noting that Violet Garfield also lives there. The two men are not yet convinced that she actually saw the killer (who had also scalped the victim), but they become fully persuaded when the elderly lady is stabbed to death in the boarding house’s entrance hall—an area screened off by two red curtains. No one saw the killer, and escape from the house seemed impossible, as the only footprints in the snow were the victim’s own, leading toward the building.

An intensive investigation follows, focusing primarily on three boarders: Mr. Graham Street, who always dresses in black and claims to walk the streets of London at night seeking inspiration for his new book (he is a writer); Mr. Alfred Leane, a bald pianist who wears toupees; and Peter Schuyler, whom William Scott—a journalist in love with Marjorie—suspects might be the killer. Peter is one of two witnesses present at the scene who claim to have seen nothing (the other being Mr. Jerry Hudson, the proprietor); while denying they witnessed Miss Garfield’s murder, they also vouch for their fellow boarder. Furthermore, a woman who found the dying Miss Garfield on the other side of the curtains—and was standing right by the opening—insists she saw no one behind them. To his friend's annoyance, Alan Twist will dub this case the "Crime of the Flying Dagger."

Among the boarders, there is Cornelia Drake, a blind hairdresser; Dr. Stafford, who is drowning his grief over the loss of his wife and daughter—killed during the bombing of London—in alcohol; and the Hudsons, a married couple who run the establishment. They are both heirs (being cousins) to Colonel Hudson, whose wife had been killed in the early 1900s in the exact same manner: stabbed with a dagger taken from a wall-mounted display—the very same dagger used to scalp the victim on the street and, subsequently, Miss Garfield.

While Cornelia was a hairdresser and Leaman wears a toupee, Graham Smith also has a connection to hair; in his youth, as an act of revenge, he had shaved the head of a neighbor, Mrs. Cranshaw. To escape public scorn, he, his mother (whose scalp had been ruined by a product used by Mrs. Cranshaw), and his sister fled one night and boarded a ship that later sank—leaving him the sole survivor.

It is later revealed that Leaman is also connected, being Mrs. Cranshaw’s nephew. In short, there is a great deal going on.

 

 

Twist and Hurst must navigate numerous obstacles to unravel the mystery, a process that unfolds following a second scalping-murder on the streets of London. The resolution will solve Violet’s impossible murder, the killing that took place in the same house years earlier, and the two street murders, ultimately bringing a diabolical killer—or rather, two—to justice: one responsible for the three present-day crimes, and the other for a crime committed long ago.

THE END OF SPOILERS 

The narrative unfolds along a line of mounting tension, punctuated by intermezzos that strategically slow the pace before ramping it up again to heighten the impact; the reader is thus swept into a whirlwind of red herrings leading up to the revelatory finale—or rather, the *double* revelatory finale. It is worth noting that the victims are not the intended targets of the murders; rather, they are mere pawns—instruments the killer uses to achieve his ultimate goal: framing a specific individual—identified by the alias Steeman assigns the killer: "Mr. Smith."

Thus, the novel features a main plot (a killer targeting three women) alongside various subplots that, while linked to the central narrative, are irrelevant to the solution and serve primarily as distractions (such as the scalping motif, alluding to hair loss—Leaman, Smith, Cranshaw, Smith’s mother, Cornelia Drake the hairdresser—and Cranshaw’s shaved head; or the street killings of the two women because they were Smith’s lovers).

To goad the police into arresting Smith (who had previously shaved a female neighbor’s head), the killer does not hesitate to scalp and murder two women, nor to kill a female lodger—out of sheer jealousy—after she instinctively uncovers his murderous schemes. Meanwhile, the reader—skillfully misled by Halter—focuses on irrelevant details and characters before finally grasping the culprit's identity in the first of the two finales.

In this instance, the "locked-room" scenario is not the plot’s pivot or the novel’s foundation—as it is in *La quatrième porte* or *La mort vous invite*—but merely one element, albeit an impossible one; instead, as Roland Lacourbe observes, the book is a pure, straightforward whodunnit. Like all the novels of the early period, it employs macabre references; here, it is the double ending—truly extraordinary, I must say—that calls to mind something from the past.

One would call it a masterpiece, were it not for two narrative choices by the author that disrupt the novel’s fabric: 1) the delay with which Twist and Hurst attend to Violet Garfield—she has already voiced her suspicions to Hurst, who disbelieved her; Marjorie has witnessed a murder and reported what she saw—including the location, the building the killer entered, and the fact that Violet Garfield was among the boarders. An ordinary inspector would have gone to see Garfield immediately, yet that does not happen here until after she has been killed. 2) During the course of the story, Hurst comes to suspect the killer, but Twist dismisses his partner’s theory, arguing that the individual in question could not possibly be a suspect—only to ultimately identify him as the culprit.

The rich, evocative writing invites the reader not only to hunt for the killer but also to track down the references Halter scatters throughout the novel—nods to past writers whom the French author pays tribute to in the dedication following the title: "To J.D. Carr, Agatha Christie, S.A. Steeman, and all the others

Indeed, these authors are referenced—sometimes directly, sometimes cryptically—in many parts of the novel.

Steeman, first and foremost: the killer living in a boarding house calls to mind the Belgian writer’s masterpiece, L’assassin habite au 21 (1939). Steeman’s killer is referred to simply as "Mr. Smith," and—coincidentally—there is a Mr. Smith in Halter’s novel who falls under suspicion. Then Carr: there are various references in the novel—direct ones (mention is made of  The Red Widow [1935] and The Three Coffins [1935] during a sort of aesthetic judgment on the detective story that Marjorie voices to William, leading directly to Thomas De Quincey’s about Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts): “..." “— Le crime est une chose fascinante, déclara-t-il au bout d’un moment.— Pardon ? — Une chose fascinante, c’est bien ce que j’ai dit. Je ne parle pas de ces règlements de comptes entre gangsters ou de ces voyous qui sortent leur couteau pour un oui ou un non. Je pense aux crimes parfaits, qui sont le fruit d’un plan mûrement réfléchi, longuement médité, où chaque éventualité est envisagée, analysée, où rien n’est laissé au hasard. Ces meurtres-là sont des chefs-d’oeuvre, conçus par de véritables artistes, pour ne pas dire des génies”.

The references to Carr—less obvious but ever-present in the work—concern the following: Marjorie Conway, who is also the main character in Carr’s The Black Spectacles (1939) (appearing there as Marjorie Wills, née Conway); Chapter 15 mentions  —a clear reference to Arabian Nights Murder (1936). In Chapter 16, William Scott, in love with Marjorie, embraces her and sings "Oh by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go…," a line that brings to mind a famous Carr novel, The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941). (1)  After shaving his neighbor’s head, Smith leaves with his mother and sister and boards the “White Star”, which is subsequently wrecked; one cannot help but link this scenario to the “Titanic shipwreck” featured in The Crooked Hinge (1938). Roland is convinced of this connection, too: Mais l’ombre de Carr plane également sur cette histoire en la personne de Graham, le beau ténébreux qui, tout comme un certain Naufragé du Titanic, s’embarqua jadis avec sa famille sur le White Star à destination des États-Unis et fut le seul survivant d’un tragique naufrage…

 

 

 

Finally, the story of Dr. Stafford—who lost his home, as well as his wife and daughter, in a Luftwaffe bombing raid on London—could easily be an allusion to Carr’s own personal experience; he lost his home, destroyed by a German bomb, while he and his family were in London.

Yet, while there are numerous references to J.D. Carr, there are just as many to Agatha Christie—a true object of cult-like admiration for Halter. First of all, alongside the two Carr novels, *Death in the Clouds* (1935) is cited. Then there is... Violet Garfield.

Many people have mistakenly identified her with Miss Marple—including someone I know. However, in a review on Anobii, this person—despite the mistaken identification—raised a crucial question: “It is evident that the character of Violet Garfield is modeled on Miss Marple (I wonder why she turns out to be the victim?).” The answer is simple: because she isn’t modeled on Miss Marple, but rather on one of the many characters Christie included in her novels. In Murder Is Easy (1939), Luke Fitzwilliam, a retired police officer, meets an elderly woman named Lavinia Pinkerton on a train; she tells him about deaths in her village of Wychwood-under-Ashe that were mistaken for accidents but which she suspects were actually murders. Luke does not believe her at first, but upon learning that Lavinia has been killed in a strange traffic accident, he begins to investigate.

Peter Schuyler, on the other hand, bears a strong resemblance to another Christie character: Marie Van Schuyler from Death on the Nile (1937). Meanwhile, the name might perhaps allude to Peter Ustinov, who played Poirot in the film adaptation of that same title. Harvey Stafford, too, appears to be a composite of two different references: Sir Stafford Nye is the protagonist of the 1970 spy novel Passenger to Frankfurt, while Captain Harvey is a British intelligence officer who appears in the 1927 Poirot novel The Big Four. The same applies to Cornelia Drake, who may be the result of combining two other Christie characters: "Cornelia" points to Cornelia Robson from The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), while Drake refers to Rowena Drake, a key figure in Hallowe'en Party (1969).

Lacourbe writes the novel’s heroine, Marjorie—who exposes herself to various dangers during her investigation, even risking her life—clearly evokes the protagonist of Ethel Lina White’s 1933 masterpiece Some Must Watch, in which a fearless young woman confronts perilous situations and risks her own life: How could one not agree with him?

Ultimately, this is an excellent novel—one of the very best—thanks in no small part to the magnificent double ending, which showcases Halter's brilliant gift for creating atmosphere. The solution to the locked-room mystery is astonishing, even though, as is often the case, it hinges on a sleight-of-hand trick executed in the blink of an eye—a trick that might otherwise have been exposed, had…

Pietro De Palma 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] If you want to hear the Scottish song, see my article on the novel in question on my blog. https://deathcanread.blogspot.com/2018/01/john-dickson-carr-case-of-constant.html 

 

 

Paul Halter : La Chambre du fou, 1990 . ItalianTranslation: Igor Longo ( La Camera del pazzo, Mondadori, 2004). English Translation: John Pugmire (The Madman's Room, L.R.I., 2018)

 

Published in 1990, Le Chambre du fou is officially the fourth in the Alan Twist series, but in reality it is the fifth: the reason lies in the fact that the first novel, La malédiction de Barberousse, was published by Halter at his own expense in 1986, but without having the success he would have expected and going unnoticed (and was published by Le Masque only in 1995). Thus, in the official chronology, the second Twist novel, The Fourth Door, published by Le Masque in 1987, appears first. This is followed by La mort vous invite, which should have been the third, becoming the second. The fourth, however, becomes the third, La mort derrière les rideaux, published by Le Masque in 1989.

Detective Alan Twist doesn't appear immediately in this story, which follows somewhat the same pattern as Carr's first novel with Merrivale, The Plague Court Murders: Twist is consulted by his friend Archibald Hurst only after the first murder, just as Merrivale, the head of the Secret Service, is consulted by lawyer Ken Blake, a former intelligence operative during the First World War, after the murder of the medium Darworth in a room sealed from the inside.

Harris and Brian Thorne are two brothers, heirs to a Scottish family and to an industry that has made them rich. They live at Hatton Manor, their country house surrounded by a park, perched high above the village. Their home, as in all Scottish legends, is said to be haunted by the ghost of their great-uncle Harvey, a lonely and misanthropic man, highly erudite in obscure works, who had written a sinister work, which his relatives had opposed, until one of them decided to burn it. Harvey, devastated, died on the threshold of his bedroom, suffering a heart attack, but not before cursing his family, predicting their death by fire, which indeed came true. In the bedroom, the carpet was found wet. His chamber, from which he had cast the curse and in which a hellish work had been conceived, had been sealed.

 

 

Years later, Harris, who has married Sarah Hilton, decides, against the wishes of his brother Brian, whom many consider a fortune teller, having predicted things that later came true, to reopen Harvey's room. A series of events will occur, until, after yet more arguments between the two spouses, partly due to Harris's jealousy, who suspects that Dr. Meadow, Bessie Blount's fiancé, is coveting his wife, Harris is found dead under the bedroom window, and the carpet is once again wet. What links the carpet to the deaths?

After Harris's death, Twist appears on the scene. He ponders the movements of the people involved, who don't seem to have a clear path. Let's see who these people are, because some of them give rise to a dance of couples that underlies the events:

Sarah Hilton is married to Harris Thorne. Sarah is the sister of Francis, who in turn is married to Paula. Paula is a friend of Patrick Nolan. Then there's Bessie Blount, a local girl who lives on a property bordering Hatton Manor and is engaged to Dr. Meadow. Brian is single.

After Harris's death, Meadow pursues Sarah, having left Bessie. Bessie has rekindled her relationship with Patrick Nolan, who has always been secretly infatuated with Paula.

A year passes, and Sarah Hilton begins an affair with Meadow. At this point, strange events begin to occur: Sarah becomes increasingly tense, Paula and Patrick meet to clarify their situation, and one evening Patrick witnesses something in the woods between the Blounts' property and Hatton Manor that leaves him utterly astonished and makes him ponder how to deal with it. That very evening, Sarah dies of a heart attack on the threshold of what Twist dubs "The Madman's Room," after staring at something on the floor that terrified her. But when they enter the room and help her, they find it empty and the carpet wet.

His will leaves half of his estate to his two parents and Francis, strangely half to Brian, and nothing to Meadow.

Brian disappears. Everyone searches for him as the culprit until he nearly succumbs to the fire at the Blount cabin where he had taken refuge. At this point, after an inspection of the Thorne family's crypt, where Harris's body is found not in the condition it should have been in a year after his death, but rather in the condition it had been in a week—that is, since his wife's death—which has led to suspicions of supernatural events linked to Harris, Twist arrives at the solution to a Machiavellian and diabolical plan.

 

It's essentially a whodunnit, very atmospheric, but in which Halter doesn't resort to any of his trademarks: impossible murders, locked rooms, bilocations. The novel appears to be divided into two parts, but in reality there are more: the first, which ends with the first murder, consists of an introduction in which the various characters enter the scene, the locations are illustrated, and the circumstances that supposedly underlie certain consequences are discussed, as well as the circumstances that lead to Harris's death; the second part continues a year after the murder, including Sarah's death, which, caused by a heart attack, was diabolically planned and provoked by a whole series of events and therefore can be considered a crime; it then includes a third attempted murder, that of Brian, and concludes with Twist's explanation. And Patrick, allies. Then comes the epilogue, in which couples are formed, because others fall apart.

In the novel, locations are important, and there are numerous set pieces and unsaid details involving Sarah, Francis, Patrick, Bessie, and Brian.

The discovery of Harris's body, very little decomposed when it should have been much more decomposed, is explained by reference to the preservation processes that Halter would revisit years later in Le Voyageur du passé. This emphasis on macabre events, present here, which is a hallmark of Paul's work (along with "Madness" and the children, elements absent here), is present in his early works: The Curse of Barberousse, The Fourth Door, The Red Brouillard, The Death You Invite, A 139 Pas de la Mort, and The Image of Guai. And it most likely derives from Carr. But while Carr's macabre is something he resorts to only for alternative food hypotheses (as in The Burning Court or The Sleeping Sphinx) or to create specific atmospheres, as in It Walks by Night, Castle Skull, and The Waxworks Murder, Halter lingers on it, almost with morbid pleasure: it's an extreme take on Carrian macabre, which, while present in much of his early works, also permeates some of his later works, such as The Bloody Allumette.

Analyzing this work, as well as others, we note how Halter often repeats his ideas in various works: we have seen how the preservation of a corpse, explained in exactly the same way, recurs in The Chamber of Fools and The Voyageur du passé; how death by heart attack recurs in The Chamber of Fools and The White Lady; how the idea behind the murder in the snow in The Wolf's Night is subtly varied but remains the same in A 139 pas de la mort, when a decomposed corpse is found in an armchair with no traces of anyone's passage on the floor.

Here and there, we notice points of contact with Carr. For example, the exhumation in the crypt reminds me of another exhumation, the one in The Burning Court. However, while Carr also explains the supernatural in detail, and nothing escapes his analysis, in Halter there are elements that escape him. But then he bends the explanation to his reasoning, and sometimes he climbs up the walls to do so, while Carr never does. Carr is always rational, Halter... often.

 

 

 

While I recognize that the novel is one of Halter's best for the way the plot is orchestrated and then analyzed in detail, relying on elements that are announced but not explained until the final resolution (Bessie's grandfather's illness, the wet carpet, the cup full of water in the Madman's Room, the use of an apparently undecomposed corpse, the fake Harris who appears to several people in various episodes after Sarah's death), I note that the characters are not fully explored, focusing less on their psychological characterization than on their actions within the overall narrative. Essentially, Halter is interested in explaining the tapestry in its totality of color, but he is not interested in the colors attributed to the subjects depicted. For example, he doesn't explain why the killer kills Sarah, because economic motives alone cannot be the sole driving force behind such a brutal and diabolically planned murder, almost as if the motives were other but left unexplained. And this is a serious flaw, one that hasn't been sufficiently examined by those who have already reviewed the novel: that is, if we accept the explanation given for the preservation of the corpse, it begins with Harris's death and is essentially discovered a year after Harris's death, after the death of his wife. Upon analysis of the facts, it turns out that Harris's death was an accident, but Sarah's was premeditated and apparently occurred because Sarah learned she might marry Meadow, and therefore another person would be included among her heirs in the event of her death. If Sarah hadn't accepted Dr. Meadow's advances, it seems her death could have been delayed. So how much other material would have had to be used to freeze Harris's corpse? This explanation hasn't been explored enough. Furthermore, Patrick says he saw the killer buying the material long before Harris's death, which, however, occurred by accident. Something doesn't add up. Are we to assume that Sarah's killer would have wanted to kill Harris as well? But Twist explains the underlying motive of money, but never explains why the killer would have killed Sarah. Perhaps there were other motives as well?

In other words, Halter's characters lack psychological characterization, focusing instead on the spectacularization of the crime. It's a type of novelization, after all, rooted in a French detective novel like Boileau's, for example—the Boileau of his youth, not the one of his encounter with Narcejac, which instead focuses on the psychological characterization of characters and situations.

Pietro De Palma 

Anthony Abbot : About the Murder of the Night Club Lady,1931

Abbot's third novel was About the Murder of the Night Club Lady (1931), or The Night Club Lady, or The Murder of the Night Club Lady, depending on the edition.

WARNING: SPOILERS !!!

This time, Thatcher Colt is approached by prosecutor Merle Dougherty to investigate the affairs of one Lola Carewe, widow of the cotton king, who, however, has left her little inheritance. However, she loves living in luxury and pomp, which is not a good fit for someone who, in her past, was a starlet and dancer but nothing more. Dougherty hypothesizes, based on the fact that she has been seen on several occasions with notorious fences, that she is the head of a ring of burglars. Colt agrees, and they go together to a nightclub, where the widow is supposed to arrive. Their astonishment is greatest when she calls for police intervention, faced with a threatening letter announcing her imminent end, at a certain time that night. Her apprehension is also tangible because her dog and parrot are dead, and the letter mentions their deaths, a first glimpse of Lola's. They would therefore have been killed, but there's no proof.
Colt, Carewe, Dougherty, and several police officers, along with Abbot, go to Carewe's house during a terrible snowfall on New Year's Eve: a penthouse apartment where her mother and a friend of Lola's, Christine Quires, who is about to inherit a million dollars, also live. After searching the apartment and making sure there are no other people present and that nothing can be done that night, the bystanders try to stay with Lola, to prevent the threat from coming true and to demonstrate that she is in no danger. What a surprise when, around three o'clock, Lola is found lifeless and dying in her room!
Dr. Baldwin, who lives in the same building and is her doctor, is called; He administers an injection of atropine to try to revive her, but to no avail. Lola is dead, and no sign is found on her body that would suggest she was murdered: Baldwin, in fact, believes it was a heart attack. Colt suspects poison and therefore calls in Dr. Multooler.
There are some strange facts that give cause for concern: first, the robe Lola was wearing had been buttoned in a men's fashion, not a women's, and then Lola's friend is nowhere to be found, despite Abbot himself having learned from a hotel employee that she would return before their arrival. However, her body is later found in the house, despite there apparently being no place to hide it; and, what's more, it's wet. She's also dead, but for a longer time. And she appears to have been strangled after death. And some of her hair is found under a window. And her body also apparently shows no signs of damage, except for one on her earlobe. This body, too, is handed over to Multooler.
Thatcher Colt calls upon the genius of Professor Luckner, a renowned scientist whose expertise he uses for forensic investigations: he is sent the garbage and dust from the attic, sucked up by two powerful vacuum cleaners that have combed the entire apartment, in case he finds anything there. The surprise comes when Luckner announces that among the many filths vacuumed up, he has found two almost invisible stalks of an animal he identifies as a lethal Mexican scorpion, whose bite causes rapid death that can also be confused with a heart attack. The autopsy confirms the discovery.
Another discovery: Lola was not a fence but a blackmailer: countless documents proving her activity are found.
A third death soon follows, that of Dr. Baldwin himself, blackmailed by Carewe, who had procured two scorpions for her, to kill more people.
But the doctor isn't the killer; rather, he's the victim's accomplice. The killer is at large. He'll be apprehended and commit suicide after Colt connects Lola to the photo of her only French love, Basile, and to a long-standing vendetta rooted in Basile's suicide.

THE END OF SPOILERS 

After two astonishing novels, this one marks a step back, if anything, from Abbot. The novel isn't bad: the fact is, it doesn't deliver on all the promises made in the first part!

At the beginning, it's a true tour de force of impossibilities: a threat that becomes reality, a death that occurs more or less at the same time as predicted; a death whose origin is unclear, other than apparently natural, but obviously irreconcilable with the deaths of the dog and the parrot; another very strange death, occurring in the same manner, that of Christine, whose body disappeared and then reappeared in an apartment where police were stationed at the same time. And, what's more, there are some bizarre details: a strange buttoning on her robe, a small box found smashed, twenty-three floors below the window, with cotton inside.

But after this whirlwind of situations and emotions, the narrative slows down and we almost wearily reach the ending, in which Colt says he has understood and can resolve the matter, and explains it to those present (and to the reader, without having previously provided any clarification): a revenge that comes from afar, in time and space, and which he receives information about from his French colleague Dupont, via dispatches. Frankly, after all the fuss that had occurred at the beginning of the novel, one would have expected more! Furthermore, the detail of the strange buttoning mentioned at the beginning is not given any satisfaction in the explanation, as if the fabric of the novel had contained two or more developments: as if, to be clear, at the beginning of the novel Abbot had had a murderer in mind, and then later changed his target, choosing another, but without eliminating the traces of the old idea. For the rest, we find details that reveal the lineage by Van Dine: it is a series of crimes that unfold in a family, and here the legacy is from Greene: after all, Queen's Tragedy of Y also harks back to Greene, as does Bishop's Death in the Dark. Here, in addition to the duo formed by a police officer friend of the Chief of Police, and by the Chief himself (Philo Vance-Van Dine, Lord-Pons, Queen Ellery-Queen Richard), there is also the presence of the prosecutor Merle, who recalls Markham in Van Dine. Furthermore, Lola's profession (actress and dancer) brings to mind that of a famous Vandinian victim: the Canary.
The bizarre details (the buttoning of the dressing gown, Christine's body having disappeared and then reappeared wet, the time of her death preceding that of Lola and therefore hidden where no one would ever have seen it, considering that the police had also searched the penthouse terrace during the snowfall after learning that Christine Quires had disappeared from the apartment, that she had entered but no one had seen her) and also the Chinese butler (who is actually a spy) lead us more towards a Queenian than Vandinian positioning, as if after the exploit of Queen in 1929 and the repeated success in 1930, Abbot had also absorbed Queen's influence (the Chinese butler reminds us of Queen's Filipino butler). If we want, he may have influenced Queen and others: I'll just say that in The Egyptian Cross Mystery there's the same vengeance that comes from afar, both in time and space (even if it's a pretext there), which is also found in Rhode and further back in time in De Angelis, and which derives from Conan Doyle; Christine Quires, murdered and hidden where no one would ever see, who then reappears and is found to have died before Lola, recalls Hake Talbot's first novel ( which however dates back to 1942 and therefore having been written and published later, could have taken from this novel by Abbot the idea then developed in his) also in the location where the body was hidden, outside the window: there in an architectural recess, where no one would ever look, here attached by the throat, with a belt, to the hotel's flagpole. The foretold time of death also derives from Wallace's The Four Just Men, reprised in Daly King in 1935. And much more.
For example, the death in the skyscraper, which can only be explained by going back in time, brings to mind Earl Derr Biggers and his Charlie Chan: in particular, Behind That Curtain, the 1928 novel set in a skyscraper and whose story can only be explained in the past. And if Dr. Multooler might remind us of Queenie's Dr. Prouty and Vandini's Dr. Doremus, George Luckner, precisely because of the way Colt portrays him, reminds me of a scientist rather than a coroner, Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke, the scientist whose encyclopedic knowledge, thanks to his scientific methods, allows him to solve the most intricate cases: who on earth would have been able to identify, based on two microscopic stalks found in the dust of Lola's room, a Centruroides exilicauda? 

 

Except that Abbot, attracted by the scorpion's high-sounding name, didn't do any research, as other contemporary writers did: the Centruroides Exilicauda, ​​while poisonous, is never fatal (unless there are other concomitant conditions that make the poison's action more dangerous. But nothing is said here about Lola and Christine's previous physical conditions. So...).
In short, a novel that takes many cues and hints, very enjoyable in parts, but which doesn't stand out for the originality and explosive force of the previous novels.


Pietro De Palma

Saburo Koga: The Spider ( 蜘蛛, 1930) - Translated: Ho-Ling Wong, Adapted: John Pugmire. On EQMM 2015, December and on "Foreign Bodies" (British Library Crime Classics), 2018

 

Saburo Koga is an unknown name among the people of the West .

Some might argue that many Japanese authors are, and that in general, before their works began to be translated in the West, even the most well-known authors, such as Keigo Higashino, Shimada Soji, and Yokomizo Seishi, were also unknown. Absolutely true! However, it's undeniable that some authors are more well-known than others. And Saburo Koga is one of them.

 

 

 

His real name was Haruta Yoshitame (1893–1945). He was a contemporary of the other great Japanese writer known as Edogawa Rampo (a pseudonym created after Edgar Allan Poe), whose real name was Taro Hirai, who published his first major novel in 1923: "The Two-Sen Copper Coin." Taking Rampo as a starting point, Saburo Koga also began writing stories, including the one presented here, which is very popular in Japan.

Koga Saburo's main achievement, however, is having coined the term Honkaku, meaning "orthodox," to refer to stories from the Japanese Golden Age, the same year Berkeley founded the Detection Club in London. It is no coincidence that the Honkaku Mystery Writers of Japan, modeled after the London-based Honkaku Mystery Writers Club in 1970, continues to exist and produce fiction.

"The Spider" dates back to 1930 and is no ordinary "whodunit," but rather a delightful fusion of elements from macabre fiction and the classic detective puzzle. The translation presented here was undertaken by Ho-Ling Wong and edited by John Pugmire.

Professor Tsujikawa was a renowned physical chemist, widely admired for his science. His decision to leave his university professorship to devote himself to researching spiders caused a stir and a stir. To do so, he had a bizarre laboratory built for himself, perched on a nine-meter-high pillar. It was shaped like a cylinder, approximately 4.5 meters wide and 2.7 meters high, with a round ceiling and windows, all the same size, spaced at regular intervals.

He then searched for a large number of spiders of all species, including venomous ones, sealed them in numerous containers, and began studying them.

About six months had passed, and the world had forgotten about Professor Tsujikawa and his strange laboratory; but the death of a friend of the professor, Professor Shiomi, seemed to rekindle the media's interest.

The narrator of the story is the one who was present that day: he is a zoology student, very knowledgeable in the study and classification of arthropods. It was therefore natural that Professor Tsujikawa would turn to him for clarification; He, too, was very curious about the scientist's reasons for abandoning his successful branch of research to study spiders, and I had asked him, but to no avail.

It was said that both Professor Shiomi and Professor Tsujikawa were on bad terms, due to constant gossip and even caustic jokes uttered by Shiomi. But when the narrator, an assistant in the zoology lab, goes to Professor Tsujikawa's lab, he realizes from the tone of the comments and jokes, and from the conversational tone between the two, that it's all a joke: as soon as he opens the door, he finds Professor Tsujikawa sitting at the desk facing the door, while Shiomi is also sitting across from him, with his back to the door.

A conversation develops between the three, although at a certain point it's he and Shiomi who are conversing, while Professor Tsujikawa begins to chat. Tragedy strikes shortly thereafter: a trapdoor spider, whose colors could easily be mistaken for a poisonous spider, approaches Shiomi's shoes. Terrified, he leaps toward the door to escape, but slips on the small landing and falls down the steep concrete staircase, dying.

The young man tries to help him, but Professor Tsujikawa, heartbroken by what has happened, stops him instantly, warning the young man that the steep staircase, in the excitement of the moment, could cause another accident: better to stop for a while and let the excitement cool down. Anyway... Shiomi is dead.

The news of his death brings the laboratory back into the spotlight, prompting a police investigation and general curiosity. But the investigation can only confirm Professor Tsujikawa's complete innocence, especially since an eyewitness testifies to it. So, an accident.

Time passes, and the professor becomes increasingly occupied with his studies on spiders. One fine day, something happens that brings the lab back into the spotlight: the Professor is bitten by a poisonous spider, and after an uncertain hospital stay... he dies.

What remains is the lab and its spiders.

The professor's family, also for reasons of public safety, accepts the young man's proposal to take care of him, especially since some of the containers, not properly sealed, have allowed their guests to escape and build webs on the ceiling.

The young man thus encounters spiders of a wide variety of species. "I had visited the place several times when the professor was alive, and I was also a student of zoology, especially arthropods, so I should have been quite used to the sight; nevertheless it still gave me the shivers and I was rooted for a moment to the spot. Inside hundreds of bottles lining the walls, eight-legged monsters were running around and spinning their webs. Big Oni-gumo and Jorō spiders, yellow with blue stripes; Harvestmen with legs ten times longer than theirs bodies; Cellar spiders with yellow spots on their backs. The grotesque Kimura spider and trapdoor spiders, Ji-gumo, Ha-gumo, Hirata-gumo, Kogane-gumo: all these different kinds of spiders had not been fed for about a month and, having lost most of their flesh, were looking around with shiny, hungry eyes for food of the ghastly creatures were crawling around on the walls and ceiling."

However, no poisonous spider has escaped. So the one that bit the Professor must be dead. However, while searching for it, the young man makes a strange discovery: behind the desk, on one of the back legs of the piece of furniture, he finds a switch. Except that when he turns it on, the lights don't go off, nor do any others come on. Minutes pass, he smokes I don't know how many cigarettes, and meanwhile he remembers that pleasant discussion that ended in drama. He decides to leave, opens the door (which opens inward) and just has time to grab onto the door frame, to avoid falling down and suffering the same fate as Shiomi: someone has destroyed the ladder, which is no longer there.

He will be able to get out of it and understand who or what could have killed him as it had killed Shiomi, after he finds a little book in which the killer conceived his criminal plan.

And the killer? In the meantime, he too will be dead.

A small masterpiece of impossible crime, Koga Saburo's story betrays its origins: the murder of the murderous room. And therefore, essentially, Phillpotts. But the trick is truly original: I haven't mentioned a single detail so as not to deprive the reader of the pleasure of imagining it. And to think it was 1930: the Japanese truly have boundless imaginations!

There are two stories reminiscent of this one, but both are from after 1930: Carr's The Door to Doom (1935) and Woolrich's Murder in Room 913 (1937).

Saburo (in the premeditation of the crime, written in a book that the narrator later discovers) alludes to a story from which he drew inspiration, which instead unfolds across various floors of a building, a solution that recalls and anticipates Sladek, Innes, and Carr; A story that, if it actually existed, would have been prior to 1930 and completely unknown. Preceding Carr's work in two absolutely identical settings is Leblanc's novel, which was likely the basis for Ellery Queen and Carr: The Mysterious House. But we're still talking about two identical but distant settings, not something set in the same building. Unless he made it all up (and then he would be the first to have thought of such a solution), or he borrowed from a story written by another Japanese writer, and then...

However, it's strangely noteworthy how both Carr and Saburo, in their two stories, besides inventing a simply perfect solution to Impossible Crime, introduce supernatural elements: even in the Japanese story, in fact, there's a ghost, which in our case is Shiomi, who has taken control of a spider.

In the construction of this impossible crime, the chairs play a particularly important role: because if Shiomi had been facing the door, he certainly wouldn't have died. He dies, his back to the door, and therefore to the windows, because he didn't notice that... the staircase is no longer there but elsewhere. How is this possible?

It's only possible if you consider a possibility that's somewhat opposite to what any of us would think of: that it's the answer to the impossible task of moving and repositioning a reinforced concrete staircase.

Pietro De Palma 

V.C. Clinton-Baddeley : To Study a Long Silence, 1970

 

 

 

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