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
No comments:
Post a Comment