"Because we're in a detective story, and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not."- Dr. Gideon Fell (The Hollow Man, 1935)
T.H. White carved himself a legacy in
English literature with The Once and Future King (1958), a composition
of older and some new work forming an epic Arthurian fantasy, but like so many
of White’s contemporaries, he was an avid mystery reader in his earlier years –
and wound up with an excellent, but mostly unacknowledged, detective novel to
his name.
In many ways, White’s Darkness at
Pemberley (1932) echoes the one-offs from other literary/academic visitors
such as Morris Bishop (The Widening Stain, 1942) and A.A. Milne (The
Red House Mystery, 1922). They're intelligently written stories filled with
literate characters, but they're also witty and a lighthearted touch makes them
fun to read. Where White distinct himself from his colleagues, however, is that
Darkness at Pemberley emphatically proved itself to be a superior example
from this sub-category and the structure of the plot was (for me anyway) an
interesting composite of two eras – turn of the 20th century mystery fiction and Golden Age Detectives.
The first part of the book, roughly
90-pages in the Dover edition, is a classic Golden Age mystery and has
everything you want from that period, from a multitude of maps and floor plans
to a genuine locked room problem. Yay!
St. Bernard's College is the setting for
the first act and opens when Mr. Beedon, a history don, fails to meet his
colleague, Mauleverrer, and a student for an appointment, but when their knocks
is answered with music from a gramophone being turned on, they take their leave – only to hear the next
morning that Beedon has died. The history don was found locked inside his room, dead of
an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, with a gun lying at his
feet that's quickly tied to the shooting of an undergraduate earlier that
evening. A close and shut case of murder/suicide, or so it appears, but chance,
forensics and Inspector Buller's determination throws a monkey-wrench in the
carefully planned plot of the killer.
It's a knotty little affair involving a crafty
alibi, invisible ink, cocaine addiction and a twist on an old trick to create
the effect of the locked room. The trick itself shows that White has read
impossible crime stories from a different era, they're crude in principle, but
White found another way to apply one of them and the overall result was pleasing.
Before the halfway mark, Buller has figured out the identity of the murderer
and how the trick was done, but legally, he has not a leg to stand on and after
his adversary kills a third person, after bragging about the crimes in a
private conversation, Buller quits the force.
Here's a crook in the logic of the book that
I can't get over: Buller's motive for giving up his job is obviously hurt pride over
his failure to put a homicidal maniac behind bars, but notes that his superiors
are also unhappy with him for putting an unsolvable case on the shelves when
they had a perfectly good explanation – Beedon shot himself after killing the
undergraduate student. But they would've had that case sitting on shelf
unsolved because forensics proved it wasn't a murder/suicide and then there's
the third murder to consider. It would've required looking into before ending up (officially) as unsolved anyway. Petty nitpicking, I know.
After Buller's early retirement from the
force, the book takes a rapid departure from the traditional detective story as
the former inspector visits his friend Sir Charles Darcy and his sister
Elizabeth – with whom he's secretly in love but doesn't dare to dream due to
class difference. Ah, that silly interwar period with their Victorian morals. Anyway,
Buller explains to them why he left the police and the somewhat eccentric Sir
Charles decides to pop-in on the murderer for a challenge which he almost
immediately backs away from, but as Buller predicted, they find themselves beleaguered
by a madman who can slip in and out of a guarded house and locked rooms unseen!
Leaving a prop skeleton or chalking skulls on a mirror before disappearing
again like a puff of smoke. This changes not only the pace of the story, but
also goes from an intellectual game of Clue to a deadly variation on Where
in the World is Carmen Sandiego? confined to a tightly secured mansion
under siege.
This splitting of a novel in two
different parts is recalls Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The
Valley of Fear (1915), but here the two separate sections form one coherent narrative
instead of two separate novelettes and the events/tone of the second
portion recalled French mystery writers like Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc. In
fact, the situation Buller and the Darcy household finds themselves in reminded
me a lot of Rouletabille's predicament in Leroux's Le parfum de la dame en noir
(The Perfume of the Lady in Black, 1908), in which a group of people locked
up in a fortified castle are fighting off a single man endowed with the same
cunning as the killer in Darkness at Pemberley. By the way, the killer
in this book struck me as a distorted, villainous mirror image of Sherlock Holmes (e.g.
the cocaine habit).
All in all, a highly entertaining novel
that stitched together Doyle's era of detective stories with those from the
author's own time and the great tragedy of Darkness at Pemberley is that
it was White's only contribution to the genre. I think Buller in the capacity of
an amateur detective, alongside the methods he employed in the second act, would've
made him an interesting addition to the genre. Recommended to fans
of classic mysteries and old-fashioned thrillers.
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