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 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…”