Money for Old Rope: "The Other Hangman" (1935) by John Dickson Carr

Previously, I reviewed an anthology, Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022), which sounded promising when it was announced over a year ago, but most of the stories had appeared in other, often well-known locked room-themed anthologies and there's a frustrating repetitiveness to the selection – compounded by an overall quality rarely peaking above average. Even more damning, some of the better stories were only minor locked room mysteries as the impossible crimes were either a small part of the plot (Mignon G. Eberhart's "The Calico Dog," 1934) or (Erle Stanley Gardner's "The Exact Opposite," 1941) pushed into the background. 

So my review ended up having a distinct, salty undertone and what I needed was a palette cleanser. Why not turn to one of John Dickson Carr's half dozen novels and a handful of short stories that somehow never left the big pile. 

"The Other Hangman" was originally published in A Century of Detective Stories (1935) and collected, as by "Carter Dickson," in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), but later paperback editions scrapped several stories from the original line-up – like my copy of the Dell mapback edition. Strangely enough, "The Other Hangman" is one of the stories that was cut as Carr reportedly thought it's the best short story he wrote. I can understand why he was so proud of it. "The Other Hangman" together with "Blind Man's Hood" (1937), "Persons or Things Unknown" (1938) and the novel-length The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) foreshadowed his move towards historical mysteries in the 1950s and '60s. And it has a fiendish plot that does not hinge on a locked room or some other apparent impossibility. 

"The Other Hangman" is a non-series historical mystery set in Carr's native Pennsylvania during the early 1890s and the locality is a small, but "mighty proud," town of 3500 souls. They had good reason to be proud as they bragged about housing the best hotel in the county, their old county families, their legal batteries and at the time the story takes place they put the first telephone in the courthouse ("...you could talk as far as Pittsburgh except when the wires blew down"). So things were looking bright for the town as a new century crept nearer, but the town had two noticeable blemishes.

Fred Joliffe is "the worst and nastiest customer" the town ever had with "the possible exception of Randall Fraser." Joliffe is a slick, but nasty, gossip who didn't care what he said about people, because "he relied on the fact that he was too small to be thrashed." Not something that always worked and caused plenty of trouble in the small, tight-knit community. Fraser runs a harness-and-saddle store in Market Street and "buttery polite," while being "mean as sin" who thought "a dirty trick or a swindle was the funniest joke he ever heard." And he liked women. Joliffe and Fraser did a lot of drinking together, like cronies, but then murder turned the petty, small town problems into something far more serious.

It was an early October morning in '92 or '93, when the town constable found the door of Fraser's shop standing wide open and stumbled across his bloodied and battered body in the backroom. Joliffe was found "drunk and asleep in the flour mill" with "blood on his hands and an empty bottle of Randall Fraser's whisky in his pocket." The lawyer-narrator who defended Joliffe at the trial said earlier in the story, "now if it had been anybody else but Fred Joliffe who killed him, naturally we wouldn't have convicted," because you don't take your neighbor "out in the cold light of day and string him up by the neck until he's dead" – which is not-done in a little community. But with Fred Joliffe it was different. And he was sentenced to hang on the twelfth of November.

So the story begins to get the death house jitters as "there hadn't been a hanging since any of that crowd had been in office" and "nobody knew how to go about it exactly." The slow-moving, tipsy Ed Nabors was appointed hangman, the local carpenter "knocked together a big, shaky-looking contraption in the jail yard" and there was some fools talk about that fellow John Lee in England. When the morning of the execution dawned, it does not go as planned. What exactly happened and why, is something you have to find out for yourself.

Needless to say, the ending, while legally dubious, is perfectly executed as Carr masterfully gave the hangman's knot a final twist as the noose tightened even further. A small gem and one of Carr's best (non-impossible) short stories demonstrating the locked room mystery was not a gimmicky crutch he needed to lean on. More importantly, it's a case in point why the acknowledged maestro of miracles also deserves to be appreciated as a pioneer of the historical detective story, which was not nearly as popular in his time as it's today. "The Other Hangman" is a finely written and plotted, early historical detective short story from one of the genre's most gifted storytellers that comes highly recommended! 

A note for the curious: one of those unread short stories on my list is Carr's "The Diamond Pentacle" (1939; collected in Merrivale, March and Murder, 1991), which is virtually unknown and rarely gets mentioned, but apparently is quite good. Christian, of Mysteries, Short and Sweet, called "The Diamonds Pentacle" in his 2018 review "a fairly slight thing," but "the solution to the impossibility is actually pretty great, because Carr bamboozles us all with a twist that is superb in all its simplicity." Pietro, of Death Can Read, dedicated an entire, spoiler-filled blog-post to the short story, which I skipped except for the first line saying it's "among Carr's best short stories ever." So there's another suggestion for a future, locked room-themed anthology.