Six Dead Men (1930/31) by S.A. Steeman

Back in April, I reviewed a fairly dated Dutch-Flemish translation of La nuit du 12 au 13 (The Night of the 12th-13th, 1931) by Stanislas-André Steeman, a Franco-Belgian writer, who has been called the most important and brilliant names from the French Golden Age – "a master plotter and a relentless experimenter." Xavier Lechard agrees Steeman was "one of the greatest and most inventive plotters of all times" on par with Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr. The Night of the 12th-13th gives a glimpse of how Steeman influenced and helped shape the classically French detective story of the 1930s, but there's an odd little thing about the either storytelling, plot or translation. The locked room murder is never treated or even acknowledged as an impossible crime.

I was baffled why the locked room element was ignored and feared the problem could be a condensed translation, rather than a stylistic experiment, but Nick Fuller left an illuminating comment: "I read this in late 2022 and found it inscrutable. Native French speakers complain that the writing is not always comprehensible and the slang fatally archaic." Well, Steeman was a French-speaking Belgian from Walloon and suppose he muddled his writing with formal French and Belgian-French, but Nick's comment suggests the translations are an improvement on the original French texts. I read a rather dated Dutch-Flemish translation from 1935 and found it to be perfectly comprehensible. So, with that in mind, I poked around a bit and found an old Dutch translation of the novel that solidified Steeman as a leading light of the French Golden Age detective story.

Six hommes morts (Six Dead Men, 1930/31) netted the then 23-year-old Steeman the 1931 Grand Prix du Roman d'Aventures and a translation published the following year gave him a brief, fleeting presence in the English-speaking world, but disappeared as fast as he had appeared – likely due to a lack of new translations or fresh reprints. I noted in the review of The Night of the 12th-13th how scarce secondhand copies of the English edition of Six Dead Men have become and copies that are available tend to come with a hefty price-tag. Those who managed to snare a copy were unanimous in their praise. Curt Evans thought Six Dead Man is "a great novel to read alone in a 1930s apartment building at midnight" and Martin Edwards called it "a real landmark of the genre." So thank you to that rebellious Dutch province of Flanders for making Six Dead Men and The Night of the 12th-13th a little easier to get your hands on.

Six Dead Men concerns six young, poor friends, Henry Namotte, Marcel Gernicot, Nestor Gibbe, Hubert Tignol, Georges Senterre and Jean Perlonjour, who collectively agreed their current state of affairs is deplorable and things had to change. Drastically. So they agreed to break away from their old life, scatter to the four corners of the world and work hard towards making a fortune. They would reunite in exactly five years time to fulfill their agreed upon promise to "put together whatever they might have earned and won" and divide the pile equally among the six men. But there's a catch. The agreement can work like a tontine insurance policy ("each time one of us disappears, the share of the others grows in proportion"). What could possibly go wrong?

When the reunion date crawls nearer, the six men begin to journey back home and some of them earned a fortune, but not everyone has been as lucky or fortunate – not merely where the money is concerned. One of them dies on the home journey when he falls overboard, while another brings back a crazy story about a man with a red beard and dark glasses who condemned the six to death. And believes this mysterious man has followed him back home. This mysterious man makes an appearance almost on cue, fires a shot that leaves one of the men mortally wounded and promptly disappears. Next, the dying man is taken away, presumably kidnapped on account of the coded tattoo on his chest.

Inspector Wenceslas Vorobeitchick arrives on the scene to mark his first appearance and the first time I got to see him act as a proper detective from beginning to end. Vorobeitchick is seriously wounded in The Night of the 12th-13th and had to make an early exit as the examining magistrate with two inspectors carried on the investigation on his behalf. A highlight of Vorobeitchick's handling of the case comes when the third victim is stabbed under apparently impossible circumstances, while riding alone in an elevator to a second floor apartment. The Night of the 12th-13th never acknowledged its impossible crime element. So nice to see Steeman giving it some consideration in Six Dead Men, but Vorobeitchick needs only a single chapter to figure out the locked room-trick. A rather mundane one at that. There are better and more inspired takes on the inexplicable murders or disappearances from sealed elevators, but the trick served its purpose here as a small cog in the machine of the plot.

The ingenuity of Six Dead Men is found in the identity of its mysterious murderer and the attempt made to misdirect the reader, which is unlikely to work on many readers today, but undoubtedly did the trick back in the early 1930s – deserving the comparison to Agatha Christie. There are, however, some issues. Xavier warned that despite Steeman's "almost carrian devotion to fair-play," the storytelling and plots can often be "wild and hard to follow as they are." Something Nick's comment can attest to. Having now read Six Dead Men and The Night of the 12th-13th, Steeman strikes me as an idea man who had great and inventive core ideas, but lacked the writing skills to build something truly special from those designs as most of what surrounds those core ideas tends to get blurred or glossed over. For example, I'm still not entirely sure how the murderer intended to cash-in without getting caught. While the almost pulp-style storytelling camouflages some of those faults and certainly helped with the entertaining end phase of the story ("You!"), the discerning reader can't help but notice blurriness of the overall plot. However, that all comes with the caveat that the dated translation might really be the problem.

Whichever the case may be, Steeman is unquestionably a historically important mystery writer, locally anyway, whose importance seems to have been in sowing the seeds by showing what's possible rather than crafting genre defining classics himself. You only have to glimpse at the catalog of Locked Room International to get an idea how fast those seeds took root and reaped a harvest. So, historically, Steeman deserves new translations and fresh reprints, but fear the overall quality might not be sufficient enough for most publishers to justify the costs. Particularly when there are still so many better alternatives to translate or reprint like Pierre Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Killer, 1939) and René Reouven's Tobie or Not Tobie (1980).

A note for the curious: I have a good reason to belief one of the translators of the either the Dutch or English version made a mistake. The English translation makes no mystery about the setting of the story, Paris, France, but the Dutch-Flemish translation for some reason obscures the setting – referring to it as a European city. There was a hint early on in the story that it actually take place in France, but then the murders start to happen and one of the authority figures who turned up is referred to as the "substituut van de heer procureur des konings' (deputy of the crown prosecutor). I'm pretty sure France was on its Third or Fourth Republic in 1930. So that would make Brussels, Belgium, the location of Six Dead Men, but a passing mention to someone's rank is a really weird way to localize the story, if Paris was its original setting.