9/19/20

The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951) by Peter Shaffer

Anthony and Peter Shaffer were twin brothers, celebrated playwrights, screenwriters and novelists with three revered, frustratingly rare and highly sought after detective novels to their name that have gained an almost mythical reputation over the decades – ensuring a small circulation among collectors. Two of the three novels have vainly topped the wishlists of impossible crime fans for nearly seven decades.

During those seven decades, The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951) and Withered Murder (1955) enchanted mystery readers with their oracular reputation of unheralded, long-lost classics. Regrettably, the Shaffers "resisted numerous offers to republish them" and the hefty, triple-digit price tags (plus shipping) on the limited number of secondhand copies kept them elusive collector's items. And when a copy turns up, it's usually gone within a blink of an eye.

So you can imagine how much locked room readers rejoiced when the British Library announced they were reissuing The Woman in the Wardrobe!

The Woman in the Wardrobe not only lived up to its near-mythical reputation, but is guaranteed to win this year's Reprint of the Year Award. A comedic take on the classic detective story that at first seemed to take the lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek approach of Leo Bruce, R.T. Campbell and Edmund Crispin, but the writing, characterization and even the plotting have a biting, sardonic sense of humor – a tone you would expect from a mean-spirited deconstruction rather than an homage. But it worked! And the ending delivered "a brilliant new solution" to the locked room problem.

Mr. Verity is an unflattering, acerbic parody of the Great Detective and very likely modeled on John Dickson Carr's famous detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale.

Verity is "an immense man" with startling brilliant eyes, a chestnut Van Dyke and a winter cloak who has been "a noted figure in the world of detection" and enjoys the respect of the Yard, but he was "almost as much respected as disliked." He was actually very much disliked, because he was so often right and solved murders, "between tea and supper," with "a mixed display of condescension and incivility" towards the regular police – who were dead and spent with fatigue. A loud, highly opinionated man with questionable ethics (having "more archaeological thefts to his credit than the governing body of any museum in Europe") and prone to giving elaborate lunchtime lectures who annoying made himself indispensable by always being right. And he knows it! Mr. Verity is also abnormally curious and when he sees a man climbing furtively out of a first-floor window, of the Charter Hotel, he decides to ask the manager, Miss Framer, whether it's hotel custom to use windows as an exit.

They're interrupted by one of the guests, Mr. Paxton, flying down the stairs screaming blue murder. Paxton found the body of another hotel guest, Mr. Maxwell, but when they go up to investigate, they discover that the door of Maxwell's room was now locked on the inside. And at that same moment, a police constable enters the hotel with yet another guest, Mr. Cunningham, who caught coming out of one of the first-floor windows.

So the door is forced open and discovered a ransacked, blood-soaked room with Maxwell's body laying among the debris on the floor and the hotel waitress, Alice Burton, tied up in the wardrobe. A wonderfully intricate, neatly posed locked room problem that was succinctly summarized as follow:

"A murder is committed in a room. Two men are immediate suspects. Suspect A enters by the window and leaves by the door. Suspect B enters by the door and leaves by the window. Suspect A can lock the window but not the door. Suspect B can lock the door but not the window. Neither can lock both—yet both are locked: and from the inside. And all the while a body, which medical evidence proves could not have done the locking itself before it expired, leaks blood over the carpet of an empty room."

Detective Inspector Rambler enters the fray and perhaps the only man who stands on equal footing with the Great Detective. Only difference between them is that Verity has a temper and a beard, while Rambler is a professional who could afford neither, but Verity "respected the tamed logic in Rambler" and "Rambler the explosive vision in Verity" – together they pour over this pretty puzzle. They review possibility, suggest solutions and pry clues from the various suspects and witnesses, which include the amusing character of Richard Tudor. A pretender to the throne of England who claims to be a direct descendant of King Edward the Sixth, son of King Henry the Eighth, who died unmarried at the age of fifteen.

There's not much else that can be said about the plot, or investigation, because The Woman in the Wardrobe is a very short, tautly written story with the page-count padded out with some nice sketches of the main characters by Nicolas Bentley (son of E.C. Bentley). So it really had no right to be anything more than a comedic curiosity, but the explanation to the locked room, in combination with the identity to the murderer, turned it into an unmitigated classic. A superb and truly original locked room mystery!

The Woman in the Wardrobe is the novel Ulf Durling tried to write with Gammel ost (Hard Cheese, 1971), which could have worked had Durling not occupied himself with gutting the plot of everything that made it a detective story. Shaffer succeeded in both sardonically poking fun at the genre and doing a bit of deconstruction on the side without comprising the essence of a detective story. Chuck in a startling original solution and you have something special and memorable that cemented a top spot on my list of favorite locked room mysteries. Highly recommended!

19 comments:

  1. And Withered Murder is even (much) better!

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  2. "the Shaffers "resisted numerous offers to republish them""

    Why?
    My own theory is that they had a large cache of copies which they sold at intervals for three figure sums and made much more money that way than they ever would have out of the royalties on re-issues, but I have a suspicious mind.

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    1. Sales numbers must have been appalling, if they had a cache of copies, but there's a plot for a detective story in your idea.

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  3. Yes if there was going to be a book for who will win the Reprint of the Year, I don't think you would get long odds for this title. Very strong contender indeed!

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    1. I'm not against The Woman in the Wardrobe taking the prize, but taking into account that's 2020, you'll probably have to grit your teeth as you raise Freeman Wills Crofts' arm in victory.

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  4. I also happened to have written my review of this novel this week, but it won't be published until somewhere next year. I'm always working too many weeks ahead :P

    I love the core idea of how the murder was committed and it fits the tone of the tale too, but while this is already a very short novel, I felt it would've worked better as an actual short story: a lot of the confusion/middle part of the story ultimately revolves around A LOT of coincidence of people being at the 'right' place at the 'right' time just to create the confusing situation, but I think the core idea could've easily carried a short story on its own merits, without coincidence having to do overtime to pile things on top of that core idea.

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    1. Oh, and to drop titles that might sound interesting to you: I also finished writing a review of a book called John Dickson Carr's Last Theorem this week ;)

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    2. "I also finished writing a review of a book called John Dickson Carr's Last Theorem this week ;)"

      Tell me you're working on a translation on the side? You can't just drop that in my lap without a scrap of hope! I need to know more! What's it about? Is it any good? Is LRI going to publish a translations?

      "but I think the core idea could've easily carried a short story on its own merits "

      You're probably right that it would work much better as a short story and a pile up of coincidences is always a slippery tightrope, but it was written as a tongue-in-cheek detective story. And that should allow for some leeway with the plot.

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    3. I don't have to tell you, but in case somebody else might get the wrong idea: I never drop hints about planned translations/being worked be it from LRI or elsewhere, or anything like that, so don't bother trying to read more into my posts ^_~

      It's about a book on real, unsolved mysteries once owned by Carr, who'd scribble hints in the margins whenever he thought he solved them. It turns out he did solve a few of them correctly (some of them were solved during his life, some after). These cases are publicly known, but there is still one case which Carr said he solved, but it's never been officially solved by the police and nobody knows what the hints in the margins mean. Like Fermat's Last Theorem, people do hope dat JDC's Last Theorem will be solved one day. In 2006, the book is set to appear at a Japanese Carr event for his centenery, but a few students are allowed to study the book before the exhibition. They first try to solve a few of the cases themselves before they tackle the Last Theorem case, but then one of them is killed too under impossible circumstances.

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    4. I got you. *wink* *wink*

      But the story does sound like something John Pugmire would love to publish.

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    5. Interesting! Do you know if the book really exists in real life, or at least if some of Carr's solutions really turned out to be correct? Or is that something made up for the story?

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    6. I'm pretty the whole backstory is made up for the story.

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  5. I read it and it was really amazing!The solution is outstanding, really imaginative, one of those that makes you say:"Damn, the murder method was in plain sight!". A very original approach to the abused theme of locked room. I noted also that this is the locked room most opened I've ever read: whilst in normal locked rooms it's difficult to establish who was the last person to enter, here we have too many people that wander in it. One enters through the door and exit through the window;another the other way around. That seems the most penetrable locked room of all time!

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    1. "I noted also that this is the locked room most opened I've ever read... That seems the most penetrable locked room of all time!"

      If you're interested in the concept of locked rooms that aren't locked at all, I recommend Roman McDougald's The Blushing Monkey (sadly out-of-print) and Pierre Véry's short story "The Mystery of the Green Room" (collected in Martin Edwards' anthology Foreign Bodies). They both turned the locked room mystery into an open room puzzle with the question being why wasn't the room locked.

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  6. This is out in Europe?! It won't be out in the US until May 11 of next year! Curse the infernal slowness of the American publishing system! And I'd just maneged to stop counting the days. :[

    I am glad it's as good as it's cracked up to be (and I'm really excited about that locked room). I guese I'll just have to go back to counting the days. *sigh* 234,233,232...

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    1. Just buy a copy from overseas. ;D

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    2. You've no clue how tempting that idea is... But all the copies I've seen have been upwards of 25 dollars. For that much more, I could buy an extra novel! (Or, considering that I'm already halfway through the first one, volume 2 of Case Closed.) And really, if I wasn't so keen on owning a copy, I could just use interlibrary loan. You can find just about anything that way. Oh well. 233,232,231...

      Incidentaly, John Dickson Carr's Last Theorem definitly sounds like a book that needs a translation.

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  7. I've read over the years that Peter and Anthony Shaffer had a very twinlike affinity for the mystery genre: i.e., they shared the workload on their projects in the field, although only one brother was credited at a time.
    Sleuth the stage play appeared under Anthony's byline.
    As with the novel covered here, the Great Detective in Sleuth's mystery-within-a-mystery, "St.John Lord Merridew", is very much a John Dickson Carr-type figure, right down to the physical description that Andrew Wyke gives him.
    So if it happened that the Shaffer brothers "collaborated" on either or both of these works - so what?

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