The Devil and the Dark Water (2020) - Stuart Turton

"'Know that my master... sails aboard the Saardam. He is the lord of hidden things; all desperate and dark things. He offers this warning in accordance with the old laws. The Saardam's cargo is sin and all who board her will be brought to merciless ruin. She will not reach Amsterdam.'"

Stu Turton first came onto my radar back in March, when I learned about The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. I was a couple hours into the audiobook, which I would listen to during my work commute, when Covid hit and I was made to work from home. I found it hard to continue with such a long, complexly plotted audiobook during that initial period, when I had to make special time to listen to it, so I let it lapse until a more opportune time. At some point during the summer I came upon Stu's Twitter, where he was promoting his upcoming 2nd novel, a historical mystery with an "impossible murder" on the high seas, and a "demon who may or may not exist". The ensuing days were gloomy, marked off one by one on the wall of my dank enclosure in black tally marks with a chunk of coal, until that glorious day in mid-October when the audiobook finally became available through my library. Over the past few weeks, I've had the pleasure of extending my nightly walks to follow the ill-omened voyage of the Saardam in its course toward ruin, and I've enjoyed every second of it.

The plot summary, as brief as I can make it, is this: It is 1634, and the Saardam along with a fleet of seven other "Indiamen" sets off from Batavia for Amsterdam. The main objective, besides the transportation of spices and other goods, is to bring Governor General Jan Haan back to Europe where he hopes to be inducted into a shadowy group of proto-Globalists, the Gentlemen 17. Also on board is a mysterious device called "The Folly", which he hopes to present them with in order to further win their favor. In addition to about a dozen other important passengers, the famous detective Samuel Pipps is on board, along with his friend, assistant and general bodyguard Arent Hayes. Pipps, however, has had the misfortune of being accused of some kind of serious crime, and is brought aboard the Saardam a prisoner, confined to a dark chamber in the belly of the ship for the entire eight-month voyage until he can be brought before the Gentlemen 17 and tried in the European courts. His imprisonment may prove to be to the detriment of all, however, as it becomes apparent before the ship has even set sail from Batavia that something evil has worked its way on board: a leper climbs a stack of crates to announce the doom of the voyage before bursting into flames, and before long, the mark of "Old Tom", a large eye with a tail, is found drawn in ash on the mainsail. More strange, seemingly supernatural things occur, along with an impossible theft and an impossible murder (in a watched and guarded room, with a weapon that could not have been in the room previously). 

"In their worst hour, when their hope was exhausted, something calling itself Old Tom had whispered to them in the darkness, offering to fulfill their heart's desire in return for a favor."

The book features a sizeable cast of characters, and there are so many major and minor mysteries in this book that it would be easy to devolve into merely listing a series of intriguing events. Even so, the plot is complex without being convoluted, and the character dynamics are well-done; there is never the sense that these are just wooden pieces shuffled around on a chessboard, and Turton seems concerned more with telling a rollicking tale than splicing together a series of puzzles. There are so many adventuresome happenings that with one catastrophe somewhat late in the book, I found myself anxiously wondering how much this might delay the eventual unraveling of the mystery. Ultimately, that event turned out to be a critical element moving the plot toward its ultimate resolution, where everything is (of course) explained in what I found to be a thoroughly satisfying fashion, along with a twist that is... well... a very fine twist indeed.

"'What's the dark water?' 'It's what the old sailors call the soul... They reckon our sins lie beneath it like wrecks on the ocean bed. Dark water is our soul, and Old Tom is swimming within it.'"

I heartily recommend this work as a great example of a book that hearkens back to the Golden Age while also being a fine historical adventure tale. In an interview with Fantastic Planet, Stu cites his major mystery influences as Doyle and Christie, and readers will easily spot certain allusions to the works of both writers, in terms of both cluing and plotting. I found the audiobook version wonderfully read, however I would recommend readers purchase the hardback, both because it is beautifully designed, and because it has a diagram of the Saardam which makes it infinitely easier for those of us unfamiliar with the physical layout of a 17th century Indiaman to envision the proceedings. Finally, I've been pleased to read that Stu has signed a deal with his publisher for two more novels currently in the works. I am hopeful that a particular alliance made in this book becomes the basis for future investigations. In the meantime, now plainly assured Turton is worth the time, I will have to return to Evelyn Hardcastle and her numerous deaths...

Short Cuts - "The Hanging Rope" (1946) - Joel Townsley Rogers

"It is, in all ways, a genuine tour de force... Pulp writing of the very highest order, it careers along at a breakneck pace and ends with an awe-inspiring twist. In a phrase, sheer class." Jack Adrian

It's no secret to anyone who's read the inaugural post of the blog that I regard Joel Townsley Rogers' novel The Red Right Hand as one of my all-time favorite books in any genre, containing as it does a finely-balanced mix of things I find most compelling in literary art: a puzzling mystery, a well-wrought atmosphere of foreboding and dread, nuanced and evocative prose, elements of the surreal and the absurd, and experimentation with form (specifically, narrative). After re-reading it this past October, I found it inexplicable that I had never sought out any of Rogers' other work, when I remembered that I actually not only had a copy of his story "The Hanging Rope" (in Adrian & Adey's Murder Impossible anthology), but I had read it several years ago and retained a positive, if vague, impression of it. Eventually I got to digging back into it, and man is it a good one. 

"He had found the switch... The blackness in the bedroom of death seemed to split apart in shadows that leaped and rushed in headlong frantic race, like a flock of shadowy greyhounds, like wild horses rushing darkly."

Someone has murdered old Dan McCue and an unknown girl just after midnight at the Royal Arms apartment house in Chicago. There is "nothing complicated about the killings," which are "classics of crime simplicity," save for the fact that the apartment is found with doors and windows locked and the killer is nowhere to be found, a figure "as invisible as smoke or mist... As thin and sharp as the steel he used on that girl's warm throat" just seconds before the police arrived at the door. The murder is discovered by Tuxedo Johnny Blythe, former "Tuxedo cop" and ex-son-in-law of McCue as he drops by for an unexpected visit. Blythe quickly begins his own investigation with the help of a suspicious patrolman, Slipsky. Meanwhile, across the alley in a rented room in a run-down tenement, the deaf playwright Kerry Ott works with complete absorption on his latest play, seemingly completely unconnected to the gruesome events... or is he?

"He liked to work in small, closed places, with a draftless stillness all about him and by artificial light - as remote as the silent center of the earth, lit by the flare of the never-setting sun, which burns pallidly and forever at the core of

things, and where no wind blows."

The early parts of the narrative detail the crime, and follow the movements of old Dan's final two visitors of the night, the last people known to have seen him alive - the "Beanpole", Paul Bean, another ex-son-in-law of Dan's who is also his lawyer, and the "Cat man", Father Finley, a strange little man with an affinity for stray cats who may not even be a priest. As shown by the appellations given these two men, Rogers tends to sow a kind of mysterious aura around his characters by certain odd choices of name and description: Big Bat O'Brien of Homicide, "the murder man"; Kerry Ott, "the big deaf maker of plays"; the "pan-faced elevator man";  the "black-eyed girl"; the "dumb-eyed man", the "gnome janitor", and so on. Following a brief imagining of how Dan's murder might have occurred, we follow Tuxedo Johnny as he obsessively catalogs his impressions and all details surrounding the crime, trying to make things fit, trying above all to figure out how any killer could have escaped amid an atmosphere of ever-increasing urgency and suspense. 

"'The spiderweb... octagonal, geometric, flawless, with four rays of laddered silk. A work of time. A work of highest art.'"

Throughout the story, references to spiders-- as above, with their insidious web-weaving and "life of hidden, sticky murder"-- and the crafting of plays hints at the presence of some unseen design at work. The solution makes use of a gambit tough to pull off, because it requires a fine delicacy of narrative construction to do it fairly and effectively, and the culprit is convincingly shown to be the only logical choice. There is a high re-read value here, not only for the depth of Rogers' prose but also for how deftly he slips important clues past the reader, with certain descriptions and statements taking on a new reading once the whole truth is known (something that is, of course, integral to all first-rate fair-play puzzlers). 

"He lay with eyes open. The molecular corpuscles of the darkness swam before his eyes like the eyes of deep sea fishes. All the darkness was filled with nothing. With dark grey eyes of nothingness, which floated, and drifted, and paused to stare, and swam on by... Against the dingy shadow of the pane, he saw the spider, moving and weaving. No living thing visible in all the darkness except her, Arachne, shuttling her laddered silk all through the night."

This story was first published in New Detective Magazine in September 1946 and has been reprinted in the Ramble House collection Night of Horror & Other Stories, as well as the Murder Impossible anthology referenced above. It's rather astounding to me that Rogers has become so obscure, given the impressive quality of his most accomplished works. I've yet to acquire the aforementioned collection, but I can also recommend the tales in Killing Time and Other Stories. Two of these stories feature impossible crimes: the satisfying "The Hiding Horror", concerning the murder of an actress in a locked-up house with no feasible means of egress for the murderer, and the unfortunately preposterous and predictable "The Crimson Vampire", involving a massive bat terrorizing a family. The best story there, in my opinion, is the masterfully-paced tale of psychological suspense "My Friend Death," in which a mild-mannered bank teller may have inadvertently picked up a parcel containing a severed head, and cannot find a way to get rid of it... The denouement features an element which to me is now characteristic of Rogers, but it is very well-executed. Highly recommended!