Philip Macdonald: The Wraith, 1931

 

 

 

The novels based on the character of Colonel Anthony Gethryn are twelve and The Wraith occupies seventh place:

The Rasp, 1924

The White Crow, 1928

The Noose, 1930

The Link, 1930

The Choice or The Polferry Mystery or The Polferry Riddle, 1931

The Crime Conductor, 1931

The Wraith, 1931

The Maze, 1932

Rope to Spare, 1932

Death on My Left, 1933

Warrant for X, 1938

The List of Adrian Messenger, 1959

However, even if it occupies seventh place, in reality the novel contains the beginning of the parable of Colonel Anthony Gethryn. In fact, as we read at the beginning of the novel, recalling the beginning, Gethryn reveals to his friend Toller and his wife that there is a case that no one knows about, which is essentially the first time in which he, a former military , found himself carrying out a police investigation in contact with the authorities.

It's a bit like what happens in the Ellery Queen novels, when we learn in the introduction by JJMcClure, that the fourth novel The Greek Coffin Mystery, actually from the list of Ellery's adventures, constitutes the beginning.

WARNING : SPOILERS !!!

The drama takes place in High Fen, a village of 300 souls, where the colonel intends to spend a holiday. He knows that in that village there is an inn called Il Buon Ristoro run by an ex-military acquaintance of his and his wife, who welcome him in the best possible way. Visiting nearby places, you come across Fridays, the home of the richest in the area, the scientist John Manx, who conducts unspecified experiments there. John lives together with his wife Joan Nealson, his sister Penelope Marsh Manx, the Butler Belby, John's assistant and secretary, Grimsdale, and occasionally Joan's brother, William Nealson and Joan and William's cousin also visit the house, Arthur.

 

While Gethryn is talking to people, here comes one of the main characters of the drama, a certain Alfred Georgius Host, a man crippled by the Boer War, with a leg to which he an orthopedic brace on his right hand (he always wears black gloves from which you can see two fingers standing at right angles to the palm), and on his skull where he is said to have a plate (in fact he always wears a black cap). He also has a noticeable scar on one cheek which he conceals with powder.

 

 

 

This character has an exaggerated love for cats, to the point of harboring a profound hatred towards John Manx himself, due to his experiments which, he says, seem to be aimed at dissecting cats. And in fact some carcass was found dissected, in front of Gethryn, this Host is almost hit by a Morris driven by two women, Penelope Marsh Manx and John's niece, Mary Manx.

The evening in which, as is done between neighbors, Gethryn from the Manxes is invited to Villa Fridays, the bad thing occurs: Belby, invited to call his master who is in his studio, located in a hut, a small low building isolated from the central body, at the Villa, to play bridge, he finds him dead, shot in the middle of the forehead by a gunshot. When Gethryn, William and Arthur Nealson and Grismsdale immediately go to look, they find Joan on the ground unconscious a few dozen meters from the cabin.

The investigations are coordinated by Inspector Ruddock, who knows Gethryn and takes advantage of her presence and sagacity: nothing seems to be missing from the hut, and everything seems to be in order in the house too. An investigation of the nearby places leads to the discovery of a pistol, which is the weapon used for the assassination, on the ground, near a tree. It is probably thought that the murderer, running away and tripping over the root of the tree, dropped it and did not pick it up.

The investigations seem to be directed in a specific direction: Holst. Add to this the fact that the strange individual's housekeeper saw him holding a gun and uttering meaningless sentences before the crime occurred. When they go to her house, she isn't there: she left the cats, and it seems she wants to kill herself and in fact she left a farewell note. Indeed, one of the guests of the villa saw him walking down the street gesticulating, and followed him to the swamp, where he found his clothes on the shore. Did he kill himself?

End of investigations. Ruddock found the culprit in him.

But Gethryn isn't. Gethryn suspects the other. In fact, on the basis of certain behavioral oddities of Host and the accusations that Penelope Marsh made to her sister-in-law, who according to her killed her brother to pocket the inheritance, a sister-in-law who apparently had had a lover during her marital interlude, elaborates her own theory that takes a very specific direction when he discovers, by writing all the names and surnames of the characters in the play, that the mysterious suicide is Alfreg Georgius Host, and that by combining first names and surnames together one obtains A G + HOST = A GHOST.

In essence, someone gifted with macabre irony and sarcasm perpetrated a conspiracy against Manx, creating a false character who does not exist in reality, impersonated by certain people from Manx's circle, so that he could be identified as the perfect culprit, freeing those from suspicion instead he killed Manx. It is clear at this point that whoever reported having followed Host to the quagmire must be an accomplice in the conspiracy, if not the murderer. And Gethryn, after a series of conjectures, which also involve the strange episode of the valet Forbes, who disappeared from home on the night of the murder and was then found mad with terror, locked up in the cellars of the villa, and we learn that he was hit by someone who was wandering around the villa at night. He identifies the accomplice and the murderer, who however flee, ending up with a motorboat on the rocks and dying.

THE END OF SPOILERS

It must be said that the novel is essentially a Black Comedy, in which a subtle, even macabre, irony pervades the crime scenes. There is not only the revealing charade, but also another detail, which is well suited to the atmosphere of Black Comedy: Manx is not only the surname of the landowner but also identifies a breed of cats which, typical of the island of Manx, are tailless. It can therefore be said that this novel, in which cats have a well-identified part of themselves, begins its own tragedy with them and ends with another cat without a tail, a Manx, who is a Man and therefore a man (animal which as we know has no tail).

Everything is evidently well thought out by Macdonald to create a beautiful, lively and not at all obvious novel in which everything falls into place (even if the desire to identify the perfect culprit immediately undermines the investigation and the well-accustomed reader understands that there is 'is something else).

It is certainly not a cornerstone of Macdonald's fiction, nor does it, like other novels, innovate the genre (just think of The Rasp, 1924, or Murder Gone Mad, 1931 or even X v. Rex, 1933, or The Maze, 1932). But it is almost an exercise in style, a joke that in some ways harks back to older novels, a mockery, which however has something new compared to many other novels of its time, almost a trademark: originality of the plot structure, which however yields to the goodness of the whodunnit.

the greatest originality of the novel consists in the character invented by the culprit, to be pointed out as the perfect culprit, a subject that recalls the invention in every way: a series of characteristics (the serious impairment in the left leg, the hand with index finger and ring fingers stiff compared to the other fingers, a cap always pulled down on the head) easily impersonable, so much so as to be recognized as the possessor of these very specific characteristics, which however are a mockery. In addition to the charade, even the impaired hand, if we observe its shape carefully, always brings us back to cats.

Lastly, I would like to point out the curiosity that it is not the only novel that talks about dead cats. In fact there is at least one other, that of Anita Blackmon, The Riddle of the Dead Cats, a 1938 novel. 

Pietro De Palma