Pierre Boileau : La pierre qui tremble, 1934

 "Reader Beware: SPOILERS"

La Pierre qui tremble (The Stone Trembling) is the first of Boileau novels: it is a novel that narratively speaking is closer to 20s than 30s. Begins with André Brunel (the character that will animate all or almost all of Boileau novels) which appears here for the first time, that in the train that is taking him on holiday, he realizesthat a suspect is opening one after the other, the compartments wagon where he is, to look inside. Watching him and watching him discreetly but closely enough

to thwart probably deadly assault against a young girl, Denise Servières. The young, early twenties, is on his way to Britain where after a week will be her
marriage with Lord Jacques de Kervarech, at his castle called "The Stone trembling", by virtue of the stone that is the keystone of the arch
leading into the castle, which seems to fall, trembles, but does not fall.

Brunel understands that the attacker came from Brest, having collected the ticket he had fallen in the struggle: that is, he had organized things to leave from Rennes and return to Brest after having possibly killed the girl. He droops because that's where he is on holiday, the sea, the attacker started to kill the girl. Who knows if it will succeed again in his attempt .. For that, Brunel promises as soon as possible, after having rested a few days, to reach the young girl to the castle. When it will happen, he will be in time to foil another attempt to murder the girl, this time perpetrated in the woods that surrounding the castle.

At this point, he promises to her and her boyfriend to settle at the castle until she will bemarried to Jacques: even knows Dr. Nicol, the doctor of the Count, and the Count same Kervarech, Jacques guardian.
The mysteries do not cease: while Denise, Jacques, Count and Brunel are in the lounge where Denise is playing the piano, Brunel seeing toward the door, the first light through the keyhole of the door and then darkness, someone realizes that, at the beyond the half-open door, he turned off the light and it is there lurking: do you understand that they must act. He gives instructions to others present there and then with a leap opens the door in time to see a shadow that flees at the first floor of the new castle. Having no other way out, locks himself in the bathroom. The bathroom has two entrances: one in the hallway and one in Jacques' room. But while both of overseeing and two outputs, and according to the count outside armed (who shot when the fugitive appeared at the window), the intruder, after opening the bath taps, flees. From where? Through the gutter?  When they barge into the room, they do not find anyone. And the other exit is still closed inside. The Count is always there in the garden, he shot the first time and scrutinizes the windows, so when they tell him that the fugitive is gone, he does not believe his ears. Brunel can not understand how it could escape. But it is not the only thing I can not understand.
Denise then Brunel tells how a few nights ago, finding sleep and remembering the bad experience lived by train, she had wanted to breathe a bit the air of the night, and in the park she had found Jacques dressed all who moved stealthily and from him she has known about a threatening secret of which he could not to warn the girlfriend.

Brunel wants to understand what  Jacques was doing in the park at that time and therefore he decides to watch him at night, discovering that at night goes away in the direction of the old tower, the only remnant of the ancient castle, which accompanies the new building where the family lives. Managed to climb himself, he witnesses a strange scene: Jacques in the tower met with the Count and there repeats a series of phrases, absolutely identical to those he utters his interlocutor. Then everything is resolved with a big laugh and a final toast.
Brunel is increasingly astonished: he does not understand anything of what is happening around him.

Things at this point tangle: a home disappears, the valet Jacques, Yvon. And Annette, his girlfriend, another maid, to raise the alarm. They find him lying in serious condition, on the cliffs, stabbed. Yvon is dying, but nevertheless sets the castle and at one point her let us and shrinks in terror: he saw Jacques standing at the window: he fears that he might kill him. A flash and Brunel, fearing the worst, rushes towards the house: Jacques is no longer there. There are no other exits than that through which Brunel is going up on the first floor, and yet no sign of Jacques. Since in his room there and the bathroom door was locked this time on the side of the room, he decides to go in the hallway that leads to the other bathroom door, but even here there is Jacques. Go back to not understanding where it can be released. Find then down, poor Jacques with the skull shattered by a blow but still alive. However he does not understand how he can be got there, he had come on to the house in less than no time and certainly had not seen leaving the young, nor her attacker from where he had entered.

Then .. The affair of the letter. Was sent a letter, which arrived addressed to Brunel. Annette saw it, the count also, but letter disappeared. The mysterious assailant ghost must have taken it. Why ? It was important? However who wrote it, Mrs. Marie Calvez, had had the foresight to send another one, same as the first, to Dr. Nicol. So the two men come to know that the woman may know something that could explain everything.  She has seen the birth of Jacques. She promises to tell all. But before it happens, someone, always he, the mysterious ghost, tries to kill her. But not before she proves something to Brunel. Now Brunel is able to begin rebuilding the arcane, but once again the enemy is lurking in the shadows: just driving the car with Brunel comes to the castle, "La pierre qui tremble" that has endured for hundreds of years to gravity, undermined by crime and placed into balance, as soon as the machine is rumbling beneathit, it falls heavily, hereafter with the other stones of the portal on Brunel machine, that for a  miracle is only wounded :.
There will still be an attempted attack on Jacques wounded, before the culprit is identified and put in a condition he can not harm: he will attempt the impossible, then falling on the rocks. Before he falls on the cliff, they see his face ravaged by the fury: He’s Jacques.

Jacques?
Brunel will reconstruct the story of a terrible secret, and an infamous machinations.

Novel full of tension, half could tell between a thriller, so much anguish pervades the pages, and a mystery, for the questions, really tasty that places (a Locked Room in the bathroom and on the contrary, when Jacques disappears from home to be found then hurt downstairs to the house for a blow to the skull:  on the contrary because to determine the impossibility is not a locked door in a room but a locked door outside the room, which therefore can not have been used to enter in the bath and then out into the corridor), it is interesting for the question that arises, which then is the basis of the solution.
However I think I can safely say that here, although there are a typical environment of Belle Epoque (tender love, defenseless women, naive, incapable of abominable acts, always men murderers, shameful and greedy) and a plot that shows the times that were, and that never will, and issues that now are disappearing (honor, scandal), and although there are also a writing style that denotes the dating, for example the frequent invocations, which in contemporary writing are entirely or almost entirely disappeared, and colorful commentary –Ah! The monster! Or All no! A part ... Ah! It's amazing! Or yet Ah! The dirty (not for lustful acts but for hurting Brunel in hand during the scuffle in the train) or Ah! Do not ask me why, it's horrible! O Ah! Understand, understand ... or even on! Now it is all over! …Oh! It's horrible! ... Awful? What will then say when he will know everything? ... Speak my good friend, talk. I became crazy! – this novel is much nice.

Of these expressions invocative, the dialogues are full. They testify the novel is dated, the style is even more dated (frequent affectation, like two people greet each other lovingly and then embrace, or rather opposite acts, as if the one who looks good could not hear malevolent feelings, or that he that is evil could not even feed good feelings) and a certain psychological simplicity applied to people: women always helpless, men always arrogant or cruel. So, in such a setting, it has a considerable gnashing the fact the novel presents than others of the same period – characterized by mysteries that relate almost exclusively to the material nature of the impossibility (almost they all are howdunnits) – a psychological high component: here the double mystery of the locked room (remarkable the sound of taps and the murderer fading, or a locked room in reverse, due to the bathroom door in the room Jacques not closed from the inside – as in the closed chamber previously mentioned – but from the outside, which prevents to think the aggressor could have come from there), it is explained not with mechanistic or empirical gimmicks, but resorting to the psychological nature of people: it is the incoherent dialogue between the Count and Jacques (which raises doubts into the reader about what he is reading), joined to the strange nocturnal encounter in the park between Denise and Jacques, and the revelation of Marie Calvez, to solve everything, even the locked rooms.

An history of stained honor, dishonor, a single mother, a son not recognized, money to throw, a heritage of which he enjoyed and which it has since been removed, and which also the killer would want again resorting to murder.

However, the kernel of the solution is in the ambivalent nature of a character such as Jacques that is capable of everything, and to the contrary, which is located where he can not be and that is not located where it should be, and his double. The famous theme of the double, here treated superbly.
So something is explained. The rest not, because just reading the novel and the explanation you understand everything. The solution is one of those that satisfy you, no doubt about it! Boileau has this peculiarity: it creates the foundations of buildings that would not be able to withstand a cabin, however, creates a foundation so strong as to defy gravity. Especially because he creates around a system of clues and facts that find perfectly their explanation at the end, when everything is explained. Before it was not possible to explain it.

I'd like to think Boileau has taken anything from two wonderful cousins ​​Queen, to think he was inspired by The Siamese Twin Mystery, which is of 1933 and then published a year before was published this first novel by Boileau, but in reality is just as possible that Boileau had been inspired by a narrative typically French, previous to his: how not to remember two novels by Alexandre Dumas as Le Vicomte de Bragelonne or Les freres corses, where there is the dilemma of two monozygotic twin brothers? Or another story by Alexandre Dumas, Les deux étudiants de Bologne? But if we think about Queen, undoubtedly the topic of replacing a brother with the other, which is not present in The Siamese Twin Mystery, we find, in a story that is affected in a certain way of setting by Boileau, in The Finishing Stroke byEllery Queen, a true masterpiece, little read and remembered.
The beautiful scene where the villain of the two is going to stab the other, previously from him struck but not killed, I also need to think about another aspect of the novel: how not to think that the elimination of the other, it’s also the reappropriation of the uniqueness of a split identity in two? Because if you kill that, you kill you too, or rather a part that is in you. And you become one!

Moreover, in hindsight, everything would have a value only if no one would notice the change. So the element that undermines all, the killer and his accomplice plan (because without the accomplice, the disappearance in the bathroom could not have been explained!) ecomes the non-replacement. And who has once again of considerable importance in a French detective novel? A servant! As in La maison interdite by Herbert & Wyl!

We think about this fact: no one servant in the British crime fiction of the Golden Age of detection has had greats roles! The servants are only an appendix, because they belong to a subordinate class. This is a concept that it’s possible think about an aristocratic society. But in the American society, at which the dream of Self-made man gives the possibility to each person to become important, also the servant is a person like any other. If we wants the french society is closer to american than english. In none british mystery novel, the servant have an important role in the story, except at a Heyer’s novel: “Why Shoot a Butler?”. The novel is of 1933, while the french novel is of 1934.

The killing of Yvon, the faithful servant, has a fundamental importance, more important than it seems and that it appears: Yvon saw the alter of Jacques, and he must die! If he had not noticed that there was a double, the evil double would be replaced the good double, appropriately killed previously and hidden, he would have  married the girl, it would have acquired the inheritance and Brunel would have thought about the impossibility of a disappearance from the bathroom. You see now what is the legacy of the Viscomte de Bragelonne about this novel?
If Yvon had not noticed the double, if the double had not killed him, if Yvon had not survived because they had not noticed his absence, if he had not indicated the room of Jacques and Jacques himself, all would be like in the killer and his accomplice plan. Instead ...
The good triumphs. For a series of facts absolutely random.

The greatness of Boileau.

Pietro De Palma

Pierre Boileau : L'ASSASSIN VIENT LES MAINS VIDES, 1945

"Reader Beware: SPOILERS"

Pierre Boileau, before he met Thomas Narcejac, wrote eight novels that gave him fame, and among them, too, "L' ASSASSIN VIENT LES MAINS VIDES" (1945).
Like other novels of Boileau, this begins without an introduction: Brunel and his companion, Pierre, who narrates the story, as usual, on the street, are almost run over by a former comrade of Pierre who then greets them warmly and invited them to best coffee on the Champs Elysees, where he will make know to the two cousin, Alex Fontaille. He, grandson of a landowner, Apolline Fontaille, who has grown up as a child, joined romantically with a note dancer of Parisian nightclubs, Monique Clerc. From the first moment, he doesn’t prove to be serene and yet insists that the two friends of his cousin, go with him to the estate of her aunt, Les Chaumes.
While they are in Paris, Brunel realizes that someone is keeping an eye on, and later recognize in this the personal home of the old Apollo, Simon.
The old, newly arrived, mistreats the other nephew, Georges, guilty of not having visited her in recent times, and welcomes newcomers with a lot of fuss.

Had the rooms, after dinner, Brunel, Pierre, Alex and his girlfriend, they decide to play bridge, after they smoked and drank, while Georges walks around outside in the garden. The old asks Alex to go to make an inspection and to close everything, that Alex does, and then returns by fellow: but while they are playing, they hear the loud voice, coming from the first floor, the room of the old:  find her stabbed, in a pool of blood. While Alex is to watch over the corpse of her aunt, Brunel and Pierre share the tasks: each goes up and other goes down. Pierre determines that if anyone had entered from the out in the house, he would be in front of Gustave, who was putting in place the crockery and cutlery used for dinner, so the murderer may be gone just above the second floor, where there are none. From the second floor, dropped only Simon, the domestic staff of Apolline Fontaille, trustworthy, with bare feet in slippers and robe bedroom tucked haphazardly in the pants: unless both he and the murderer, this must have disappeared: in fact, even if the window was open, being summer, the assailant could not have fallen, because on ivy that clings on the outside walls, you do not notice anything that might indicate that hypothesis. The murderer, if he’s not Simon, has “vanished into thin air”. But why Simon would kill the old woman? He had no reason to do it, the more he perceived a very high salary, not commensurate with his duties: if at first you suspect blackmail, then learns that Simon was very dear to the old woman who had raised him since he was little , saving him from the clutches of unnatural parents who beat us mercilessly even at an early age, and he had always countered with dedication and affection the care of his mistress. So Simon is ruled out, but then where is the murderer? And what Simon was doing in Paris? It’s clear, however, that he must know something he  doesn’t intend say, that can be put in connection with the murder of the old woman.

From examination of the body of the old woman, who is undoubtedly dead, we discover two very close wounds, signs of two stabs: the weapon is a sharp letter opener, found near the bedspread, with a handle inlaid, as to eliminate the possibility on it may be fingerprints.
While waiting for the next day the cops arrive, Pierre will watch, alternating with Brunel, the corpse of the old woman, in her room. But, Pierre falls asleep; at some point, however, he wakes, sweating from the tension, because he realizes that in the darkness of the room, there is someone else that moves: he would like to do something but does not have weapons and then thinks about what to do, while the other is taking the cards, which he hears the rustle of. Suddenly, he remembers the electric bell that the old woman had wanted in her room, to call Simon: he presses several times it, and shortly after he hears someone knocking at the door. After his invitation to come in, the light switch is pressed, the light shines in the room: Simon is on the door. But besides him, Pierre, in the room there is only the corpse of the old: unless it is a vampire, this time too the mysterious visitor has vanished.
Possible that is there a secret passage? Impossible. All deny it there is. So? How did the visitor to vanish? Brunel is doubtful, but Pierre insists. He also heard a rustle and a characteristic noise, like something that had been opened. Brunel has an epiphany: the secretaire. Open it, and there, from a drawer, see out a card: it is a holograph testament replacing another precedent: in it Georges Durbans is appointed sole heir. At this point, if you ever brought a growing possibility that he was the murderer (the rest he was in the garden, was the only one of the group, were not together at Brunel and Pierre) now he becomes more real, although Georges seems anything but a murderess. The strange thing is that the old woman had before prepared another testament that appointed Alex her heir: why that testament, then? Brunel curses for not  having examined immediately after the discovery of the corpse, the secretaire, because now is the double possibility: it is a testament true or false? Why did the visitor open the bureau? The testament, penned with calligraphy seems shaky, as if the hand that had thrown down was not entirely sure: the old or the murderer who has imitated the handwriting?

Not even the handwriting expert appointed the next day to make a judgment, will lean much: the testament would seem to be from old woman, but then he is not entirely sure.
While you can not get away from a spider hole by the woman's death, and Brunel concerns that something else could happen, here's a second murder, to disturb the atmosphere: Alex is killed, he also stabbed in the heart with a letter opener, very similar to the first. Pierre sees a shadow that falls from the window, he throws himself on him, but that man avoids him, instead of killing him too: why did he risk being taken, if he killed a man before, and now he did not want to attack Pierre instead?
Brunel investigates and discovers that shadow was someone who had met with Alex, who was the first husband of Monique, a gentleman. If he was not he killer of Alex, who did kill him? Simon, Monique, Gustave, Brigitte, or Georges? Since it wasn’t possible that the force required to launch the stab was from a woman, suspects are three men: Gustave, Simon or Georges?

Moreover, Alex, before being found dead, he had closed twice the door and about this Pierre was sure, because he had distinctly heard the two shots: but then, after the discovery of the corpse of Alex, they found the door house no longer closed: it means that there is an accomplice as well as a murderer, who apparently does not know that the murderer escaped from the window, because obviously the plan assumed that he had to escape through the same exit, so surely will have to go back down to close the door and prevent you might think about him as an accomplice, unless he is not Simon, who as butler, also has the task of asking and open the door in the morning. They will agree to watch over the door so as to catch the accomplice or not, in which case it would be true the other hypothesis. No one will come down. Brunel, after a sleepless night, will be able to name the killer and to solve the riddle, discovering how the robe of the woman had not two but a single cut, which is not properly screened in the reconstruction of the crime. And he will be able also to fulfill from the charge of complicity in the murder of Alex, Simon.

Novel highly enjoyable, it is based on an Impossible Murder and on a Locked Room, which a thief was able to evaporate from.
At the base of the riddle is the result of reasoning by Brunel: "the facts are presented as well: the murderer comes to his enemies ... without knowing exactly what he will do, and these terribly afraid that visit, but without power to predict how it will play . One does not have weapons to kill, others do not have weapons to defend themselves". In fact, twice the murderer has used something that was in the house, and then, it was not premeditated he killed, otherwise he would have brought a weapon. Yet he must have an accomplice, to premeditate to go into the home.Why?

Boileau, as at other times, he climbs on the mirrors: he demonstrates an unmatched virtuosity (equaled only by Vindry and Lanteaume), in proposing a problem and its solution, when he has few ingredients, which, moreover, is a bit the typicality of French novels of the period: insist on the mystery, propose one or more problems, attractive enough, without however enlarge the rose of suspicion, because not from the juxtaposition of alibis and motives must exit the solution, but from the proposition of the problem in itself, because in essence it is based on  the plot and its variations . In addition two other differences with the Anglo-Saxon novel occur: first there isn’t a real introduction, in which matures the crime, that is a typical feature of British detective novel instead (but not the US); and then, as a result, the French detective novel, and particularly that by Boileau, bases its plot on something that is done randomly, without that the reader has already seen or knows or at least images why a particular crime  is consumed: it is a novel, we might say, police-type-adventurous, heir of the atmosphere from feuelliton, a dramatized feuelliton, by Leroux and Leblanc; second difference, I would say, is inherent in the fact that, while the British detective story, just to be different from that of the appendix, where if there was a crime, you had to look for the woman and the butler, tends to present among suspected all the characters with the possible exclusion of the domestics (and this essentially for a social classism, almost racist, presenting the domestics a step lower than the nobility or the upper class, the only one that could consume a perfect crime, which for intelligence can not belong to a lower social order), in the French detective novel, as a consequence of the fact that domestic, bosses, police, investigating judges, all as part of their duties are citizens of the republic, even the servants are to be suspected like the masters.

This broadens the rose of the suspects, that, as we reported earlier, it is always quite small. This of course would lead to a job easier for detectives, and then there is the need to turn and re- turn over the tangle, not only to lengthen the stock (in fact the French novels of the time are not as long as those English) but also not to attenuate the narrative tension which otherwise would weaken naturally.
In the case of this novel, the specific character and insist on the topics that we have just pointed out, reveal a very subtle reasoning, a true virtuosity of the deduction and of the sophistry, I would say by Byzantine kind:  able to turn the problem, giving of each problem two or more possible solutions, from which we have many different solutions, which mainly concern here from: the will, true or false (it could be that the murderer had created a fake to create a perfect culprit, ie Georges; orit is false because posted by Georges, or is true, and then it was inserted long before by the old Fontaille); the thief invisible: how did he disappear; the problem of the lock of the front door and two turns, and about a possible accomplice; the problem of the existence of two wounds and that the robe presents a single cut; how did  disappear the murderer; why Alex did try to defend himself with a piece of wood taken from the fireplace (this was found clutched in his hand); why there is not an accomplice; what the murderer or the thief took from the secretaire.

Doing so, Boileau manages to keep the tension very high, and if so far the reader has had a few suspicions and then essentially was taken to concentrate his attention on very few, because two, Alex and Monique are kept out from their own investigations because they played, together to Brunel and Pierre,  bridge (a game that often appears in the novels of the time, by De Angelis to Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers to Stanislas-André Steeman), precisely during the solution, in which the suspence should cathartically fall, in this by Boileau, instead, it increases spasmodically because in a totally unexpected final, happens everything and its opposite. And everything is explained, as a murderer and a thief, different people, can vanish in an enclosed area without being detected, and as a murder in which there can not be an accomplice, he lacks; and finally as Simon, although not  murderer, let alone the killer's accomplice in the murder of Alex, he is in a sense an accomplice of another murderer, that of the old woman, although he can not in any way be involved in the murder of her.

Extraordinary!
Boileau really he is, because, and this is the biggest surprise, far from creating a novel based exclusively on clues, just in solution reveals a mechanism very cerebral, with a very pronounced psychological aspect, which concerns the way of shuffling the cards and turn the reader's attention, creating the conditions because, on the basis of acts very obvious, he is led to believe one thing instead of think of another. To give a measure of the mechanism of the highest stylistic virtuosity, I emphasize two particular moments which for me are the measure of true creativity and power of reasoning by Boileau: the closing the front door, and the volatilization of the thief after Simon knocked three times on the door of the room where is the corpse by Mrs. Apolline,  watched over by Pierre. It is the mechanism of sound illusion, explained in a famous story by Clayton Rawson, From Another World, about which I wrote an article that I have not yet translated into English, in which I wrote that for the first time I had read about a sound illusion, and this had left me speechless. I was wrong. I thought that this was the first time that had been used such an illusion, and instead already three years before a French had used it: Pierre Boileau.
This novel reveals a pattern common with another novel, Six Crimes Sans Assassin, for the way in which the murderer leaves the scene. In this, and we also noticed in the case of La Promenade de minuit and Six Crimes Sans Assassin, Pierre Boileau tends to reuse in later novels, gimmicks and escamotages that he has already used his other previous.

A very magnificent novel!

Pietro De Palma