The Piccadilly Murder is a novel with an impossible crime, the second masterpiece of 1929, when the first, I remember, was the very famous The Poisoned Chocolates Case. And with the latter, The Piccadilly Murder, it shares characters and methods of committing the crime, and therefore it can be considered that the two novels form an inseparable pair. The characters are: Ambrose Chitterwick, one of the six members of the Crime Club, an imaginary club, but not so much, that seems to echo The Detection Club, founded by Berkeley in 1928, which concludes with its hypothesis, the series of six that form the basis of the novel, identifying the murderer (who would seem to be just an insignificant character) and Chief Inspector Moresby of Scotland Yard; while the method of committing the murder, in both, is the administration of poison (in the first nitrobenzene, here prussic acid). In essence, The Piccadilly Murder, gives the leading role, and the spotlight throughout the novel, to Sherringham's friend, the mild and awkward Chitterwick, who had been able to solve The Case of the Poisoned Chocolates. And the demonstration of his ingenuity is precisely this novel (and Trial and Error): it is as if Berkeley, not wanting to overinflate the figure of Sherringham, had wanted to replace it with that of Chitterwick, recognizing its importance and value.
Ambrose Chitterwick, is in the lounge of the Piccadilly Palace Hotel (one of the most luxurious hotels in London), and is intent on sipping a coffee, when his attention is fixed on an elderly lady, and on her guest, a guy with red hair, who responds to Chitterwick's interest with malicious glances. Among other things, he seems to be fiddling with a cup of coffee. At a certain point Chitterwick is contacted by a waitress because of a phone call for him, which turns out to be false. When he returns to his place, the man has disappeared, and the woman is asleep. As if guided by a sixth sense, Chitterwick goes to see if she feels ill, realizing that instead she is dead, and from the fact that a smell of bitter almonds hovers, he hypothesizes a poisoning with hydrocyanic acid. He insistently asks for the director, and orders him to contact the police, or rather Scotland Yard, and since they would like to call the Metropolitan Police thinking of a suicide, given that on the table there is only his cup of coffee, he calls Moresby, Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard who he had already met in The Poisoned Chocolates Case. Obviously Moresby also remembers him, Roger Sherringham's friend. And so Ambrose expresses his doubts, about the presence of a man at the lady's table and a missing coffee cup. Furthermore, a vial was found in the victim's hand, but not tightly but lying down, as if it had been placed after death. Who is the mysterious man? From a letter found in the purse, through reasoning one is led to think that it is Lynn Sinclair, granddaughter of Miss Sinclair, the victim, a woman who had inherited a considerable fortune, whose only heir is Lynn.
Lynn is arrested in the room: he is the red-haired companion. Following a whole series of evidence, the testimonial one of Chitterwick, and then of four other witnesses who swear they did not see other people approach the table, and the factual one (the very clear fingerprints of the man on the vial containing remains of prussic acid). Lynn is arrested and charged with premeditated murder. The witness for the prosecution is Chitterwick. At a certain point, however, unexpectedly, after being invited to the house of a Duchess, Lady Milborne, who lures him by falsely saying that she was the companion of Ambrose's aunt, he meets her brother, called Pulcino, who is a very close friend of Judy Sinclair, and Lynn's wife. Cornered, and implored by both Lord Milborne and Lady Milborne and Pulcino and obviously by Judy, Chitterwick, even knowing that he will have to testify to what he saw, begins an investigation, aided by Judy and Pulcino (Pulcino is in love with Judy and would do anything to make her happy, even save her husband's life), to demonstrate Lynn's innocence, in a strenuous battle against windmills.
He soon manages to discover from the testimony of a maid, that a small glass of liquor had also been seen on the table, which then disappeared; that Miss Groole, Miss Sinclair's lady-in-waiting, uses a pair of false glasses without optical lenses; that coffee had not been the means used to kill, because otherwise the lady would have died before his eyes in the presence of the man, the poison being in such quantity as to cause death in a very rapid time; that the maid who had come to call him, did not exist; that someone must have taken a room in the hotel to disguise themselves.
There are therefore two people who contributed to the murder. One would seem clear, and also the other at a certain point. But after the only nephew besides Lynn of the victim returned from America, with the aim of defending his cousin, Chitterwick, first thinks of one person, and then backtracks and identifies the diabolical mind who killed Miss Synclair, and who probably if she had not been stopped would have killed again, until reaching his ultimate goal.
The novel is one of Berkeley's best novels ever. It is immediately noticeable that among Berkeley's inspiring readings, there was a story by Chesterton (The Invisible Man). Why? The story is based on an impossible crime, and the explanation of The Invisible Man is then at the basis of Chitterwick's reasoning, which demolishes the testimony of four witnesses found by Moresby in the Piccadilly room, who swear that no one approached the victim's table after the man who was with her left. Precisely because whoever approached was part of the context of the room and therefore it is as if he had been invisible to the eyes of the witnesses, who claimed that no one (other than the staff that they did not consider) had approached the table. The problem is however: who is the waitress in disguise who brought the liquor to the table? And who then took it away?
Chitterwick's character is nicely outlined, in his clumsiness and in the dimension of an ordinary man, who has only one hobby: being an amateur detective, with a personal collection of data from the most famous murder cases and murderers, also to escape the grayness of a life spent with a pestiferous aunt. As long as he lives this hobby, he is mocked by his aunt, but when he begins his reconstruction of the events in order to save the alleged murderer from the gallows, for the sole fact that he was welcomed by the nobility, he is revalued by his aunt, and lives his greatest moment of glory, when he actually saves Lynn. Stylistically, Ambrose is the antithesis of Roger Sherringham: where Sherringham is the amateur detective à la page, a famous writer in the beau monde, but who with Berkeley's pen is described as a detective who is not at all infallible, Chitterwick in turn, who is the caricature of a bachelor of the wealthy bourgeoisie, clumsy and awkward, in the reality of the police investigation, proves to be a character of great caliber. It is a bit of a revenge, of the gentle man, who lives in the anonymity of a life that is always the same, but who at a certain moment knows how to show off the hidden part of himself, which qualifies him as a Superman.
The novel is divided into two distinct parts: a first part, very substantial, corresponding to 4/5 of the plot, dominated by Chitterwick's investigation and the deductions he makes based on the clues he has collected about how the crime must have been conceived, and a second part, much more streamlined, in which the suppositions concern the culprits. In essence, it would seem until the beginning of the second part that the novel is not a whodunnit, but a howdunnit, since in the case that the murderer is not Judy's husband, it is clear (but it is not said) that the most likely person to have killed Miss Sinclair to inherit (the famous Cui Prodest), is the other cousin, the one who verbally rejects the inheritance because he wants to save Lynn. And so, we conjecture and hypothesize what the modus operandi of the murderer might have been, reconstructing a crime that seemed impossible: how could he have died only after Chitterwick had been removed from the room under some pretext, if the poison, as Ambrose himself said and the police maintain, had been put in the coffee? In this case, death would have been almost instantaneous, and instead, until Ambrose had left, the lady was sipping her coffee without showing signs of feeling ill. So how was it possible? And who had put the vial of the now dead lady? And where had the phantom glass of liqueur ended up?
Only then, in the last pages, we understand that the murderer is not him at all.
The novel is the apotheosis of misdirection and multiple solutions.
Ultimately, it is the same procedure adopted by Berkeley for the first of the 1929 novels: in both, multiple solutions are contemplated. A bit like what will be said for Christianna Brand, much later: the queen of novels with multiple solutions. It is no coincidence that I mention Brand, because many do not know that she tries, as a member of the Detection Club (and therefore in fantasy of the Crime Club), to give a seventh deduction in relation to The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which was anticipated by the story The Avenging Chance (which however curiously was published after the novel), whose plot was the same as the novel but whose solution was based only on Sherringham's deduction (the seventh deduction by Christiana Brand and an eighth one in which Martin Edwards himself, who signs the Introduction to the novel, tried his hand at it, are contained as attachments to the British Library Crime Classics edition of The Poisoned Chocolates Case). With a style that mixes irony, lightness and superfine acumen, Berkeley manages to bring the reader to the end, surprising him with a solution, which identifies not one, not two but three characters involved in the staging, who act in two different ways and times, in which one of the three constitutes a sort of hinge between the other two: he is essentially a double agent who transforms a certain representation into another, but without his knowledge.
A masterpiece of inventiveness.
Pietro De Palma
No comments:
Post a Comment