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!

The Honjin Murders (1946; 2019) - Seishi Yokomizo

"... a blood-curdling scream rang out, followed by the eerie strains of a koto being plucked with wild abandon."

A three-fingered man... the wild twang of koto strings... a katana thrust in the snow... in the annex-house of the former Ichiyanagi honjin, a pair of newlyweds lie dead in a pool of blood, with locked rain-shutters sealing the room, and nary a footprint to be found in the snow to mark the murderer's exit...

So plays out the central crime in Seishi Yokomizo's The Honjin Murders (Japanese title: 本陣殺人事件; Honjin Satsujin Jiken), newly translated by Louise Heal Kawai. The book is a veritable love-letter to the impossible crime genre, narrated by an unnamed writer of detective fiction from his own research on the case which occurred about a decade earlier (1937). He spends some time in the opening section contemplating which fictional works this "real-life" crime most evokes-- among them Van Dine's The Canary Murder Case and "the great" Carr's The Plague Court Murders-- before deciding that Leroux's Mystery of the Yellow Room "bears the closest resemblance, at least as regards setting and atmosphere: less so, the facts of the case." 

"A locked-room murder, a red-ochre-painted room, and the sound of the koto... all of these elements are so perfect-- too perfect-- like drugs that work a little too well."

Of course, The Honjin Murders is neither a pastiche nor a formulaic copy of any of the aforementioned works, offering a problem whose solution is, in many ways, distinctly Japanese in how it ultimately unfolds. The story concerns the Ichiyanagi family, possessive of a certain nobility owing to their ancestors having been the proprietors of a honjin, a kind of lodging-house reserved for officials and other elite personages to stay on their way to and from the capital. The eldest son, Kenzo, is engaged to be married to Katsuko Kubo, a women of more modest background, for which reason the union is disapproved of strongly by his mother, Itoko; sister, Taeko, away from the action in Shanghai; and cousin, Ryosuke. Kenzo's brothers Ryuji, a doctor living in Osaka, and Saburo, a lounge-about himself obsessed with detective fiction, as well as his youngest sister Suzuko, are less resistant to Kenzo's choice. The bride's uncle, Ginzo Kubo, travels to the Ichiyanagi household for the wedding ceremony. But the night before the ceremony, another stranger turns up in the area, a shady, run-down looking man wearing a face mask, with a scar visible across his scruffy cheek, and only three fingers on his right hand, asking the way to the Ichiyanagi residence...

"This wasn't the kind of person one would expect to visit the Ichiyanagi family."

The next day, as preparations for the wedding are underway, this same man appears at the kitchen entrance of the residence and hands the cook a page torn from a diary to give to Kenzo. The latter man, upon reading it, appears disturbed, tearing the letter to shreds and stuffing it in the sleeve of his kimono. The ceremony proceeds as expected, with a koto being brought to the annex-house, where sister Suzuko as well as the new bride each perform a song on the instrument. Kenzo and Katsuko stay up late, as is the custom, serving drinks to the villagers in attendance, before finally retiring in the annex-house sometime after 2 AM. Not quite two hours later, screams can be heard coming from the annex in the main residence, along with erratic plucking of koto strings. Ginzo and Ryosuke are the first to reach the annex-house, finding a katana thrust in the snow outside, and the structure completely locked all around by the sealed rain shutters. The men use an axe to break a hole in the wall, with Ryosuke reaching in to unlock the shutters. Upon entering, they discover a grisly scene:

"Kenzo and Katsuko lay slashed and soaked in blood... What had happened to the heavenly dream that was supposed to be their wedding night? All that was left was a tableau from hell."

The couple, it turns out, were both killed by the katana that had been found plunged in the snow. Bloody fingerprints are found on a folding screen, which upon closer inspection show only three fingers, distorted by having had koto picks attached to them. A string on the koto has been snapped, and one of the bridges is missing. By all appearances, this mysterious three-fingered man, an apparent enemy from Kenzo's past, had lied in wait in a lavatory before emerging to commit the brutal crime when the newlyweds fell asleep. But, provided it was this man, how had he escaped so quickly from the locked house, without leaving any footprints behind?

The local police begin a capable investigation, but are quickly stymied by the strange details of the case. Why was a koto bridge removed, later to be found lying in a pile of leaves outside the house? Why was a sickle embedded high up in an adjacent camphor tree? Who tampered with Kenzo's diaries, removing and burning pages from years prior? It is the uncle of the bride, Ginzo, who summons the renowned young investigator Kosuke Kindaichi, whom he had supported through university in the US, and who just happened to be staying at his house in Okayama for a visit. A rather eccentrically-dressed man with a stammer, Kindaichi prides himself on his ability to use logic to piece together the elements of a crime and deduce the proper series of events giving rise to them, using "his head, instead of tape measures and magnifying glasses." He soon begins to draw attention to interesting (and confounding) details overlooked by the police, and sends them around to acquire information to confirm his hypotheses, before finally laying bare all the shocking details of the case.

I enjoyed this book for a number of reasons, not least the copious name-dropping of various mystery writers both famous and less so, as well as a number of Japanese writers hitherto unknown to me, as Kindaichi examines Saburo's library, which seems to contain "every book of mystery fiction ever published in Japan, both domestic and foreign." One book that wasn't mentioned-- and one wonders whether Yokomizo could possibly have been familiar with it, it having been published in the US only one year prior to this book, in 1945-- is Joel Townsley Rogers's The Red Right Hand. Certain key details in this book seemed to echo that work, even if the actual substance of the crimes and solutions are very different. The atmosphere here is wonderfully eerie, and there are many disparate details uncovered by Kindaichi that play a surprising role in the ultimate explanation of the events. An especially effective cliffhanger ends one chapter two-thirds into the book, where Kindaichi reveals to Ginzo (but not to the reader - yet) the horrible way in which Suzuko's recently-deceased kitten fits into the events, whereupon "all at once, the ground seemed to sway under his feet. In all his years on this earth, he never had and never would again experience a shock like this one." 

The solution to the impossible crime is workable, if a bit intricate. Luckily a floor plan of the annex and its surroundings is provided, which is especially useful given the likely unfamiliarity to most readers of the Japanese architectural elements involved. At the same time, I feel this plan is lacking in at least one important feature, which becomes clear once the solution is explained. Reading over certain passages in retrospect, I'm struck by the clever way in which Yokomizo has his narrator parade certain key details in plain sight, as well as having him justify certain choices of phrasing in retrospect. I'm unsure exactly how I feel about the motive, in the end, though a good deal of time is spent in justifying it; perhaps I am just a bit too removed from the cultural milieu to be fully convinced. I did notice one inconsistency with regard to method - we are told that the murderer got a particular idea from a particular situation, even though it is clear that the idea was already had prior to that situation (amusingly vague, I know, but I'm trying to avoid spoilers here). In any case, this is a small matter, and any shortcomings are totally overruled by the quality of the whole. 

It goes without saying that this book is required reading for any impossible crime enthusiast. Apparently, Yokomizo has featured Kindaichi in a total of 77 novels and short stories, this being one of only two currently translated into English (the other has previously appeared as The Inugami Clan, and is to appear in a new edition by Pushkin Vertigo next year as The Inugami Curse). Translations of a couple more titles exist in French and Spanish. Incidentally, I have in my library a copy of the Spanish translation of this novel (Asesinato en el Honjin y Otros Relatos), which contains two rather lengthy Kindaichi stories not available in English. Hopefully I can find the time shortly to read these and provide some more information about them here. 

Speaking of translations - I'd like to encourage readers of this new English edition to avoid reading the chapter titles up front, as one of them contains what I feel to be a semi-spoiler that is not present in the Spanish translation of that same chapter title (though I'm not sure which is more faithful to the original Japanese). 

PS. To the one or two readers who may be wondering, I do apologize that Ruination Street has become a veritable derelict alley over the past year. I started out with full intentions to make at least one post a month, but various job and family distractions, along with my inconsistent reading patterns and focus on non-genre works in foreign languages, have resulted in no posts for the last 11 months. I really do admire you bloggers who keep to a regular schedule. But I love this genre and hope to continue posting semi-regularly, as well as to continue the Carr Broken Down series (which may have to go on out of order, as opposed to the initial chronological plan - but we shall see). 

Carr Broken Down #1 - It Walks by Night (1930)

“There must be sanity to the play somewhere; if there is no meaning in any of these incidents, there is no meaning in all the world…” 

In a glowing 1968 review of the generally lambasted late Carr novel Papa Lá-Bas, Allen J. Hubin hearkens back to the first offering of the master thirty-eight years earlier: "How many reviewers in that year, having read It Walks by Night, consulted their crystal balls and saw even a measure of the heights John Dickson Carr would climb in succeeding decades?" I would imagine there to have been more than a few, as this is really a fine debut blending creativity and tautness of plotting with a strong impossibility and at times dreamlike sensibility, all rendered in a lurid Grand Guignol style. 

If I had acquired the book on the basis of its first edition covers, I might have been a bit disappointed. The title and hairy-hand image, along with a fictional preface referring to "a misshapen beast with blood-bedabbled claws" suggest the presence of a werewolf or supernatural monster, while the real suspect is rather a refined and stealthy human killer who boasts that he has "ways of getting into houses" that no one knows of but himself. Still cool, but not appropriately indicated by these things. 

“‘That night I tapped on the windowpane and beckoned to this woman, but she refused to come out; I think she was frightened by the blood on my mouth.’”

The plot concerns the murder of the Duc Raoul de Saligny, a famous athlete found beheaded in the card room of Paris gaming house Fenelli's with an ornamental sword. Witnesses stationed at both exits swear that no person left the room during the ten minutes between when Raoul was seen to enter and a waiter discovered the body, but no killer can be found. The partially-open window in the room is found to have undisturbed dust on the outer sill, and to offer no means of maneuvering up or down the exterior wall. So, how did the killer escape? 

It is assumed from the start that the murderer is Alexandre Laurent, ex-husband of Madame Louise de Saligny whose wedding to Raoul had taken place that very day. A Poe-obsessed aesthete and sociopath with a lust for blood, he had been committed to an asylum the year prior after attacking his then-wife with a razor, but managed to escape and eventually return to Paris. Just prior to the wedding date he had sent a note threatening Raoul not to go through with the marriage, and had, according to Madame Louise, appeared before her in a washroom where he cryptically dropped a trowel on the floor before vanishing. Finding Laurent is no simple matter, however, since besides escaping the crime scene with virtually no trace (his fingerprints are later confirmed to be found on the window), he underwent plastic surgery to alter his face prior to leaving Vienna, and ensured the surgeon's eternal silence with a sharp blade and a cranium-sized jar of alcohol...

“Ambergris for passion; bright star-points for romance, and downstairs a severed head grinning at the dark…”

The Mephistophelian juge d'instruction Henri Bencolin leads the investigation, eventually managing to draw out both method and culprit simply by way of the details at hand, though forensic evidence is appealed to in order to solidify a case. His approach to investigation is unadorned and coldly professional. He views his role as to logically work out the truth of the situation, as well as collect forensic evidence to help prove it in court. He does not sleep when working on a case, instead moving about collecting information and aided by his talents of stealthy observation and eavesdropping. He also pays heed to the psychological aspects of crime, in this case even being attended by the Viennese alienist Grafenstein, who had once studied Laurente himself. There is really no humor whatsoever in Bencolin ("'...I usually find that the ridiculous is not very far removed from black fear'"), and he gives off quite a different feel than his successors Fell and Merrivale. 

“The light over him turned his face to a devilish and inhuman mask. The black eyebrows slanted and hooked down over gleaming eyes; the thin, cruel lines going down from shadowed cheek-bones past small moustache and pointed beard, the parted hair twirled up like horns…”

Jeff Marle, our narrator, is only loosely associated with the actual investigation, and in fact is rather incompetent as a sleuth himself, repeatedly overlooking or forgetting what turn out to be pertinent clues (and getting chided by Bencolin for it). Part of this owes to his distracting attraction to Sharon Gray, a young American woman of questionable repute who frequents the seedier third floor of Fenelli's. There is a sensuality and sort of opium-induced haze surrounding Sharon which draws Marle in, adding a dimension of sensual bewilderment which is in stark contrast to the cold rationality of detection. Marle’s ostensible attempts to "question" her lead him further into a sort of anti-deductive bewilderment, the effect of awkward romantic attraction that precludes investigative speech: “We spoke in commonplaces; in fact, I do not remember what we spoke about at all. Conversation was halting, in that groping, that sense of a barrier never referred to, which could be broken in an instant, but was not broken by either.” Indeed, it is suggested that Marle's susceptibility to these influences accounts for his ratiocinative shortcomings, such as where he describes his final impression of her upon leaving after their first meeting, when “stars and orchid light, dark-gold hair and amber eyes poised in motionless fragile beauty, were shut back into the night by the closing door. I realized, wryly, that I should never make a detective.”

“‘But—did you ever have a premonition—like—the fear of death—hollowing out the inside of your heart—with a cold hook?’”

Carr draws a fine balance here between the fantastic and irrational, and the razor's edge of reason as the entirety of the events are explained by Bencolin across some 40 pages. Even though this is his first novel, there is nothing of the amateur here; Carr's writing is brisk and self-assured, delving by turns into lurid grotesquerie and impassioned reverie. The solution is fairly clued, workable (though of course with a heavy dose of improbability), and involves a fine bit of misdirection as well as a bit of ingenious detail involving the reason Saligny was kneeling when he was killed. If Carr had written no further novels after this one (quelle horreur!), I think this would still be lauded as a mystery-horror classic. In the context of his overall body of work, however, it may be easily overshadowed by perhaps a dozen greater titles, if not more. Still an accomplished work, and worth reading for anyone interested in mystery novels with a darker tinge. 

Rating: 3.7/5

If you've read this book, have a look at my solution breakdown below!

Click here to show the solution breakdown. Full spoilers ahead.

Warning to mobile users! The following section contains spoilers. If you have not read It Walks by Night, read no further!

The first component of the solution is that the person we believe to be the murdered Saligny is actually Laurent, the person presumed to have murdered him. This accounts for Laurent’s fingerprints having been on the window of the room. Bencolin explains that Laurent, having undergone plastic surgery to make his features match Saligny’s, then killed Saligny sometime in Vienna with a blow to the back of the head, transported his body back to France in the man’s own luggage, and then bricked him up in the wine cellar of his own house à la “Cask of Amontillado.”

So, let us examine the cluing behind this aspect. A curious thing that stood out to me was the discrepancy in accounts of Saligny’s English ability. Vautrelle, a close friend, scoffs at the idea that the man knows more than a few words of English, but the non-francophone Sid Golton has clearly conversed with Saligny in English, and Sharon Grey mentions Saligny quoting poetry to her. Unless we take Vautrelle to be lying, we must feel that there is some impersonation trickery going on. "The Cask of Amontillado" is itself referenced earlier in the novel, as is Laurent’s fondness for Poe, Laurent-as-Saligny’s uncharacteristically covetous handling of the wine cellar key, and we have of course Madame Louise’s account of Laurent’s sinister dropping of the trowel in the bathroom. It is not uncommon in this genre for some kind of impersonation to factor in to a solution, but the situation here stretches credibility to the extreme, requiring a loosening of any standards of verisimilitude. Although, Carr tries to support this element in several ways to make it more palatable. For example, Saligny’s falling from a horse could account for changes in behavior and even taste, if we accept a mild brain injury. Likewise, Saligny's close friend Vautrelle rather quickly sees through the façade, though he doesn’t let on to it (Per Bencolin, “‘He [Laurent] fancies that he can deceive one of Raoul’s friends, which, you will admit, is a ridiculous idea.’”); Laurent hires a new valet, who has never known the old Saligny; and he generally attempts to hide from any former acquaintances. He is able to deceive the estimable old M. Kilard, because that man was primarily a friend of his father and did not known the younger Saligny very well. We are also told that Laurent is a gifted mimic.

But overall, the idea of a man like Laurent, a non-athlete who presumably would have a different gait, body type, and voice than Saligny, same eye and hair color notwithstanding, being able to pass during any interaction for the latter man is indeed preposterous, especially when it comes to that man’s fiancée. Carr has Bencolin engage in a rather unconvincing disquisition about how we tend to recognize our friends more by their mannerisms, and that Madame Louise was attracted to Saligny because he somewhat resembled Laurent, and that when Laurent-as-Saligny appeared, she was so used to ‘seeing’ Laurent in Saligny that, “Paradoxically, the only one who might have found him out was the only one who could not possibly do so [e.g. Madame herself].” These details are not wholly satisfying, but must be taken for what they are. Ultimately it seems to have been Vautrelle who drew Madame’s attention to the impersonation.

Let us address motive. Laurent’s reason for killing Saligny appears to be a mixture of jealousy over his marrying Madame Louise, Laurent’s ex-wife, and Laurent’s deranged affinity for murderous behavior. Bencolin determines that Laurent had planned to dramatically unveil Saligny’s body to Madame Louise, kill her as well, and then abscond with the million francs he withdrew for their honeymoon. Madame Louise is easily induced to kill Laurent-as-Saligny, for numerous reasons: he has harmed her in the past, he has (presumably, as she couldn’t have known this) killed her fiancé, and she has fallen in love with Vautrelle. She then kills Vautrelle later because he was an accessory to her murder of Laurent-as-Saligny, and he had gotten her addicted to drugs and then profited financially from it, and lastly, he had been using this money to seduce Sharon Gray. His ultimate goal was to marry Madame Louise after the death of her “husband,” so that he could have access to her money. Madame Louise also serves as an early example of Carr’s fascination with the theme of a lust for murder lying dormant, or perhaps concealed, within the heart of a woman: as Marle listens to her describe how, instead of splitting his face in two as she had planned, she rather cut his head clean off, he thinks “of those women of the renaissance, who derive a part of their very fascination from the poisoned cruelty of their beauty, and their moist lips whose charm blots out the dagger behind the back.”

The actual murderer is, of course, a real shock, even though there are few other persons it could have been. This is because of the misdirection whereby we believe Madame Louise to be with Bencolin et. al. when Saligny (or whoever it could be) enters the card room. The glaring clue that hints at the murder time being earlier than 11:30 is given in the timetable, which shows that Laurent-as-Saligny’s movements could not be accounted for for a whopping thirty-five minutes. This caught my attention while reading, and I came to suspect some jiggery-pokery regarding the time of the murder. A very fine clue, and one that I found very intriguing during my first reading, was the fact that Laurent-as-Saligny had been down on one knee when he was decapitated. It is obviously unthinkable that an athletic sportsman (assuming as we do at first that Saligny was the victim) would humbly submit himself to the blade in this fashion, but it is eminently reasonable to suppose he might assume that position in some gesture of respect to a woman. Of course, the truth is that he was buckling Madame Louise’s shoe, a wonderfully ingenious explanation for this bit, as I noted in my review above. I really like when small discrepancies like this have neat explanation; I am reminded, for example, of reviews I’ve read of Paul Halter’s The Madman’s Room, in which mysterious puddles of water factor in. I have not yet read it, but I am enticed by how that may be accounted for.

A peculiar challenge of any impossible crime narrative is to justify the often elaborate lengths taken by the murderer(s) in order to conceal the means or method of the crime. Here, Carr handles it by making Vautrelle an aspiring playwright interested in crime, who has applied his artistry in the orchestration of an actual murder, while also being fueled by mixed motives of revenge and desire for financial gain.

After killing Laurent, Madame Louise exits through the hall door, then goes back into the roulette room to join Bencolin, Marle and Grafenstein. Vautrelle enters the card-room via the roulette room, having a profile similar to Laurent-Saligny, and Madame’s assertion that he is Raoul is sufficient to make it appear so. He then rings the bell (explaining that point, which had previously served to emphasize the fact that the killer had to have been in the room at 11:30) and, taking twelve seconds total, walks straight out through the hall door and directly into “the projection of the smoking room.” Things become a bit muddy here, and a floor plan is necessary. My 1941 Pocket Books edition lacks one, but I must thank the proprietor of the TYKIWDBI blog for posting one from his edition here. I reproduce it below:

From here, we can tell that Vautrelle exits the card room into the hall and immediately turns left and enters the smoking room, then veers right and exits from the alternate door into the hall, directly where François is standing. The latter’s initial position, of course, prevented him from seeing anyone exit the card room, though this seems a rather glaring blind-spot. Nonetheless, Vautrelle’s alibi is established by his asking François the time nearly exactly when Saligny supposedly would have first entered the card room.

Sticking points:

• Why would Madame Louise make up the detail about Laurent dropping a trowel on the floor when he appears in the bathroom? There is no suggestion that she knew Saligny’s body had been bricked into the wall.

• How could Laurent reasonably ship a decomposing body from Vienna to France without anyone detecting a stench, even if he had Saligny’s immunity from luggage searches?
• Related to the above: we are told that Laurent left plastic surgeon Dr. Rothswold’s house in Vienna “carrying two valises,” after which police found that man’s head in a jar of alcohol, “but there was no trace of his body.” What happened to it then? Are we to assume it was also in the valises? This point, though tangential, is never explained.
• How would no one in this busy gaming house happen to venture into the card-room, even just for a smoke or some idle talk, for approximately forty minutes while the murder was committed and the corpse lying there? Especially considering it is an easy shortcut between the parlor and the smoking room?

I welcome any comments discussing the sticking points or any other aspects I may have omitted from consideration. Of course, please mark any comments discussing the solution with a spoiler warning.

The Red Right Hand (1945) - Joel Townsley Rogers

“‘This is definitely a surrealistic murder. It is the murder of a genius. It has symbolism. […] You, Dr. Riddle, are too pragmatic and unimaginative to understand it. What you need is to believe with all your soul in phantasms which cannot possibly exist.’”

Joel Townsley Rogers was a prolific short story writer beginning in the 1920s, writing adventure and weird menace stories. He wrote four novels but this one, his second, is undoubtedly his most successful.

That is because this book is fantastic (in every sense of the term)!

The New York Times blurb for this book when it was released on May 11, 1945 read simply: "A Detective Story." But this really isn't one. Rather, it is a relentlessly dark horror-noir-puzzler with moments of absurd humor, whose resolution comes about from the narrator, a doctor, reasoning his way through the events. Two days later a review by Isaac Anderson aptly concludes: "It is a strange and terrifying story, and the solution to the mystery, while perfectly logical, is not at all what one is led to suspect."

The plot involves the murder of the young bridegroom Inis St. Irme, who is heading to the house of an acquaintance from New York City to Vermont in order to marry his girlfriend. Along the way, they pick up a thoroughly repulsive and oddly-dressed vagrant, referred to as Corkscrew or Doc, who ambushes them after stopping at a nearby lake, chases Inis and then, after wounding or killing him, speeds off in his car on a mad tear through the countryside. He races down a local road, hitting and killing a dog as well as another man. Then he turns down the Swamp Road, abandons the car, and disappears along with Inis.

At the same time as this is going on, our narrator, Dr. Harry Riddle, Jr., is motoring back to New York City from Vermont when he breaks down on the Swamp Road near the entrance, partially blocking the street. Despite being at the car for about an hour, exactly during the time Corkscrew would have roared directly past him, he could reliably swear that he did not hear or see any car pass by. And herein lies the first impossibility: how could the killer’s car have passed Dr. Riddle without his noticing it?

Various local people along with a police lieutenant become aware of what happened and try to locate Corkscrew and St. Irme. A search party eventually fans out in the countryside and finds the latter’s body crammed into the swamp. His face has been nearly defleshed, and his right hand is missing. But Corkscrew remains elusive. A second impossible aspect emerges later when it appears that the man Corkscrew hits and kills with his car had been seen by Dr. Riddle walking further down along the road, after the time he was supposedly hit.

“The problem is not of the phantasm of a man I saw who did not exist, however. The problem is of a murder car I did not see, which did.”

Now, all this makes the novel sound interesting enough. But there is another, less tangible aspect that adds another dimension to the narrative, something we might consider a third impossibility. It wouldn’t exactly be a spoiler to recount it here, as it is something any reader would pick up on, but the narrative has a subtle way of revealing it so that some may grasp it earlier than others. Dr. Riddle himself conveys it, though he is not aware of it. Rather than being a particular event or orchestration, it involves the suggestion of a particular relationship between two characters, and leads the reader to suspect a particular outcome that, given the facts, seems impossible. Another dimension is added to the reading as you begin to look for clues and small details further validating the connection.

Besides the intricate and intensely imaginative plot, the book is rather experimental in form, with the narrative proceeding non-linearly from Dr. Riddle's reflections about the scenario as Corkscrew still remains to be found. As a rational man of medicine, he feels himself caught up in a nightmare but nonetheless cannot stop trying to make sense of it, and so he alternates among discussing what happened, what might have happened and what is currently happening. This has a disorienting effect on the reader, leading to cases where, for example, people who are suggested to have been dead are talking and doing things in subsequent sections (there are no chapter breaks, just occasional paragraph breaks). Adding to the unease are recurrent motifs related to death, decay and madness, and certain expert moments of tension which take on a new reading once the full details are known. 

I consider this book not just a great mystery, but a beautifully grim and dark piece of literature. 

The solution is, so far as I can tell, fairly clued, and most of the plot elements accounted for. The plot is so nuanced and convoluted that one almost expects any explanation to be inadequate - but one would be wrong. There do remain certain coincidences and one or two other situations that, while not critical components of the central mystery, might have benefited from some kind of cursory rationalization. However, I am willing to admit the novel certain pockets of open-endedness, since I burned through this book fairly quickly and could have missed something, and (this being the paramount reason) the story intentionally proceeds according to a sort of nightmare logic that perhaps cannot, by design, wholly be reasoned away. One day I hope to re-read this book and discuss the solution!

“A nightmare road. I might have dreamed it, from the time that I had turned off onto it at sunset, and with a splitting head. Phantasms and eyeless houses and a red-eyed rattlesnake and a crazy hat of mine; and old Adam MacComerou staring at me through the garden dusk as I appeared, as if he couldn’t believe that I was real; and then a dead man in the ditch…”