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.
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
