Roger Scarlett : The Beacon Hill Murders, 1930

 

 

Roger Scarlett is a pseudonym behind which there were two writers, a 4-handed couple like Ellery Queen. The writers were called Dorothy Blair (1903-1975) and Evelyn Page (1902-1976). They had not grown up together as one might easily guess, but in two quite different places. In fact, the first, originally from Montana, even though her parents came from Massachussets, had graduated from the State of New York; the second came from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The two girls met by the same publisher “Houghton Mifflin, based in Boston's Back Bay, where the two women met. The couple left Houghton, Mifflin in 1929 ”to create their own character and business name Roger Scarlett. After some time spent writing their 5 novels together, the couple retired to a remote farm in Abington, Connecticut, where they lived together for 50 years (they were a lesbian couple, like Curtis confirmed to me).

The 5 novels in question, written and published from 1930 to 1933 are:

The Beacon Hill Murders (1930)

The Back Bay Murders (1930)

Cat's Paw (1931)

Murder Among the Angells (1932)

In the First Degree (1933)

 

Warning : Spoilers

 

Inspector Norton Kane of the Boston Police Department is dealing with a double murder that has taken place at the Sutton house.

He is advised by his friend Underwood, an indirect witness to the murder of Alfred Sutton, to go to the victim's house. And this is where the whole investigation unfolds.

In essence, Alfred Sutton, the patriarch of the family, an unscrupulous man who has created a solid position in the city's jet set from nothing and who has the reputation of being a rich parvenu, is killed in his living room, while he is conversing amiably with the beautiful and well-connected in the city's living rooms, Mrs. Anceney, a rich widow, with whom he seems to have fallen in love. For the occasion of the dinner at his house, he gave her a pendant with a unique piece of Chinese jade, engraved. While they are talking, Sutton is killed by a gunshot to the heart, fired by someone who is reasonably supposed, based on the trajectory of the bullet, to be where Anceney was, who is therefore suspected of the murder. A relatively short time passes, and Mrs. Anceney is killed, her throat slit with a razor in her bedroom,

The problem is that it is not clear how this happened. Because a guard of the beautiful Mrs. Anceney, suspected of the first murder, is placed by an agent, who watches the door. Who left his post of guard only when he brought wine to her room (but the victim was alive), when he went to the bathroom for a moment (a minute) and when he went to open the door: but still very short times, in which the murderer should have killed the victim, left the razor in full view and escaped without anyone seeing him. It should be added that in both the first and second murders, the windows were hermetically closed. And that the second murder is a direct consequence of the first: perhaps that the victim of the second had seen something he shouldn't have seen? But then again, how is it possible that Sutton had been killed, if it wasn't Anceney who killed him? Ballistics dictates that the killer had been where Anceney was, because the trajectory of the bullet had such an angle that the shot had necessarily been fired near the left corner of the fireplace.

And where do the disappearance of the jade pendant and the chance discovery by Kane of a piece of bloody cloth in the folds of the curtain of Anceney's bedroom window lead?

And in addition to the ambiguous movements of the relatives (Sutton's wife, his daughter Katherine who loved her father very much, his son James who couldn't wait to become heir, his brother-in-law Walton, a little touched, who complained about the little condescension with which Sutton treated him), we must consider the ambiguous presence of Sutton's friend, Gilroy, who seems to have interests in the affair: he had forged checks with his friend's signature, and was hoping to regain possession of a note in which he accused himself of the affair, kept in a small wall safe. Gilroy was later discovered to be the brother of the second victim. They were all together on the evening in which Underwood, Kane's friend, had also been invited. And it is Underwood, together with Moran, detective sergeant, assisted in the investigations Kane, who after finding the jade pendant in a secret drawer of a desk, and a piece of lead removable from one of the windows, will elaborate a theory, and also using a reconstruction of the second murder, will nail the murderer to his responsibilities.

The end of the spoilers

This first debut, should have been with a bang, as they say, because the two co-authors had thought of a story that unfolded having as two key points, two crimes that occurred in impossible circumstances. And in fact a good part of the novel, the one that supports the murder of the two victims, until Kane begins to elaborate his theories, is constructed in a spectacular way, even using three maps: one of the bedroom plan, one of the room where Sutton was killed and one of the bedroom of the Anceney. The problem of this first novel, however, is in the abundance of meat on the fire: there is too much of it. Too many clues, and what's more some are found or thought of without being explained (the bloodstained cloth hidden by the window curtains: why it was there will be understood, but why a bloodstained cloth, and where it came from, is not explained).

But then also the gun and razor that are found in the bedrooms, and whose presence is explained as a sleight of hand, but without their presence being immediately felt: they appear, as if fallen from the sky), can be explained as the desire to create a spectacular plot, but the two co-authors do not yet have the literary experience to be able to explain everything they put in. It is in other words, a wonderful immature work, which sets in motion two spectacular crimes, which have points of contact with other previous and subsequent works.

Surely, the ballistics that comes into play to explain the modus operandi of the first crime, is a consequence of Van Dine's debut, in The Benson Murder Case: there too, ballistics plays an important role in explaining the dynamics of the murder. But also the explanation of the second murder, has points of contact with other novels: for example, the explanation of a novel from a few decades ago by Paul Halter, A 139 pas de la mort, comes to mind.

As I said when reviewing Roger Scarlett's second work, Norton Kane is certainly a Vandinian hero, but one who does not have all the encyclopedic culture of Philo Vance. He is more of a hybrid detective, a Holmesian Vandinian, I would say very close to Abbot's Thatcher Colt, or Daly King's Michael Lord. Other data that affirm the Vandinian paternity of the work is the Kane-Underwood couple, which recalls the Colt-Abbot or Vance-Van Dine couple, in which the lawyer Underwood, in our case present at the Sutton house as the executor of the victim's will, narrates in the first person, as he also does in his Van Dine novels. While Moran plays Van Dine's Sergeant Heath. And The Greene Murder Case, from 1928, is too close in time not to affirm the filiation of Beacon Hill from Van Dine's novel, which also has another very evident point of contact with its parent, which concerns the murderer. And always with van Dine's novel, this one by Scarlett also shares the existence of secret drawers: there was one that hid the gun, here one in the desk that contains the jade pendant.

The style that the two co-authors impress makes the narration flow, despite the many situations narrated, but it is certainly not the sumptuous style of S.S. Van Dine. I must say in all honesty, that about 80 pages before the revelation, I guessed who the murderer could be and the motive (which is not easy to imagine), based on an abstraction for what is said at the beginning of the novel. Is it possible that...? Yes, that's exactly how it is. While the modus of the first and second are a stroke of genius by the writer of the novel (even if the second seems a bit far-fetched to me: if this was really the case, one would have had to think that people are normally blind and deaf, or very impressionable as happens in the case of the gun and razor that magically appear where they were not there before). In short, it is expected that things go this way because they have to go that way.

However, even if it is an immature work, it manages to outline the characters in the round, from the treacherous Gilroy, to the malevolent and ridiculous Walton, from the passionate Katherine, to the submissive Mrs. Sutton, from the self-important landlord, to his flame, Mrs. Anceney who risks her virtues to help her stinking brother. And it also manages to give a well-defined image of both Underwwod, the first-person narrator, even too little of a lion to stand next to the great Norton Kane, who instead manages to give the right light to events that, taken in themselves, would not say much.

A good novel, but not a masterpiece.

Pietro De Palma