Last
year, I reviewed the short story "Le
mystére de la chambre verte" ("The Mystery of the Green
Room," 1936) by Pierre Véry, "novelist of adventure, novelist
of the fantastic," who believed in saving "what has been
able to remain in us as the child that we were" ("...full
of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadow and mystery") –
essentially wrote fairy tales for grown-ups. One of his few works to
be translated into English is L'assassinat
du Pére Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934)
and is a fine example of Véry's home blend of the formal, 1930s
detective story with his brand of gentle surrealism.
I
mentioned in the review that the few translations like the previously
mentioned seasonal mystery novel and the now even rarer English
edition of Le thé des vieilles dames (The Old Ladies' Tea
Party, 1937) have since gone out-of-print. There seemed to be no
plans or rumors swirling around at the time to translate Véry's
other celebrated novels such as Le testament de Basil Crookes
(The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930) and Les quatre
vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934). Little did I know that
Crippen &
Landru was putting the finishing touches to a brand new
translation that was published back in December.
Renaissance
man and author of Death
and the Conjuror (2022), The
Murder Wheel (2023) and the upcoming Cabaret Macabre
(2024), Tom
Mead, translated Véry's famous collection of short stories, Les
veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower,
1937) – which at the time caught the attention of Ellery
Queen. This first English edition opens with a photocopy of a
handwritten letter from Frederic Dannay to Véry thanking him for
sending a copy of Les veillées de la Tour Pointue and hoped
to see some of the short stories published in Ellery Queen's
Mystery Magazine. Something that would not happen until "The
Mystery of the Green Room" appeared in the August, 2011, issue of
EQMM. More than sixty years after Dannay wrote the letter and
now we have the whole collection.In
addition to translating this collection, Tom Mead penned insightful
introduction that presented Pierre Véry as a writer who a "unique
path" through the Golden Age of the French detective story. A
mystery writer enjoying "the distinction of being both an
exponent and a critic of the Golden Age" whose tales of mystery
and imagination "often existed outside of the strict parameters
of the conventional whodunit." Véry's mystery output consists
of everything ranging from everything subversive reimaginings and
parodies to the traditional locked room mystery, but always
distinguishable by their "often-eccentric blending of genres"
and his "taste for the surreal or fantastical."
Before
diving into this collection of short stories, I should note that the
Crippen & Landru edition neglected to list the original French
titles and publication dates. I found the original French titles, but
have no idea when, or where, they first published. So, lacking the
publication information, this one is going to be slightly less
autistic pedantic than most short story collection
reviews that can be found on this blog.
The
Secret of the Pointed Tower begins with a short chapter, "A
Message to the Reader," in which Pierre Véry himself is roaming
the streets of nighttime Paris in search of somewhere, anywhere, to
hang a man ("such is the morbid fate of mystery writers...")
when he accidentally discovered a secret passage – revealing a
dark, narrow passage. A passage leading to a hidden attic room in the
pointed tower of the police headquarters, on the Quai des Orfevres,
where he finds a pile of handwritten reports on "all kinds of
crimes, burglaries, mysteries, enigmas." But written down as
dry, clinical reports. These are full-fledged stories that Véry
immediately began to copy to present to his audience under the title
The Secret of the Pointed Tower. A near, simple little framing
device to tie these vastly different stories together.
"Le
menton d'Urbin" ("Urbin's Chin") is the first of these short
stories following a so-called book-taker, "specialist in the
theft of rare tomes," named Simonet. A bibliophile book-taker
with designs on "a renowned collection of literary rarities"
tucked away in the private library of a collector, Urbin. Simonet's
carefully prepared burglary goes entirely wrong when coming across
the bloodied, curled up remains of Urbin inside a crate, which is how
the gardener finds him and the police believe him guilty. Simonet
uses his imprisonment to work out whom of the potentially five
suspects killed Urbin ("...by keeping quiet I might just be able
to turn a decent profit out of this"). This is a fun little
mystery caper and solid opening story that reads like a direct
ancestor of the Bernie Rhodenbarr series by Lawrence
Block. Loved it!
"Police
technique" (no translation needed) concerns the murder of Yvette
Lemoine and the
problem her death poses the police. Only person who
appears to have had the opportunity to deliver the fatal blows is her
cousin, Marcel, but he claims to be innocent and has no motive. Then
the police are called the bedside of Yvette who says with her dying
breath, "my uncles," but both men have "indisputable
alibis." Another possible interpretation of those dying words
implicates her fiancé, which again leads the police into a dead end.
It's not until Véry's lawyer and sometimes detective, Prosper
Lepicq, appears to confront the murderer that the case gets solved,
but not in the way Lepicq had hoped. I think this story is more
interesting for the style than the plot as it pulls a potential
locked room mystery, dying message, unbreakable alibis and even some
forensic shenanigans from the old bag of tricks – before ending as
a dark, psychological crime story. Lepicq actions at the end echoes
some of the practices of his American counterparts like Perry Mason
and John J. Malone.
The
next story "Le disparition of d'Emmeline Poke" ("The
Disappearance of Emmeline Poke") is about the disappearance Miss
Emmeline Poke. She was last seen by two witnesses walking home
through the woods, in the company of her brother, but she never
arrived home. Her brothers were both arrested, the ground around
their shed dug up and the woods comb through. Not a trace of the
body. A problem arises when one of the investigators points out that
one of the witnesses is hard of hearing, while the other is extremely
long-sighted. So what did they really see in the woods? And what
happened to the body, if there's a body? This could have been a good
story, but the actions of one of the characters killed it for me. I
suppose the moral of the story is (ROT13)
qba'g unir nppbzcyvprf jura pbzzvggvat zheqre, rfcrpvnyyl jura
gurl'er fghcvq."Police
montée," translated here as "The Tale of a Tartlet," is one of
my favorite stories from this collection. A charming, playful and
excellent take on both the classical whodunit and inverted mysteries.
Léon Petitquartier is the seventeen year old son of a pastry chef
and an arachnid collector who had been given the unpleasant task of
euthanizing the old family dog, Vega ("...the animal was quite
literally dying on its feet"). Léon poisoned a honey tartlet
with cyanide as a final meal for Vega, but, while being distracted
for a few minutes, the poisoned tartlet disappears from the kitchen
table. So now Léon has to wait nervously for the news to break that
someone has been mysteriously poisoned, but the events doesn't quite
play out like the teenager expected. This story really benefited from
being longest story in the collection and particularly liked how the
village community reacted to the news or simply the simple, but
excellent, explanation to the whole mystery.
"La
multiplication des négres," re-titled for this collection as "The
Salvation of Maxim Zapyrov," tails a penniless Russian in Paris, "stumbling from weariness and weeping with hunger, desperate and
begging," who believes a black policeman is hunting for him –
which has to do with a "detestable thing" that happened in
a dark, narrow street. Maxim Zapyrov tells his unusual story to a M.
Paul. A crime story with a predictable twist and not really my
poison, but not bad for what it is.
"Le
prisonnier espagnol" ("The Spanish Prisoner") is modeled on the
classic and titular confidence trick, which is still around today,
but changed and adapted along with the times. You might know it as
the Nigerian Prince email scam. In this story, the poor Celestin
Lainé who surprisingly receives a letter from someone imprisoned in
Spain and needs help to collect a trunk containing nearly two million
francs. However, Lainé has four very rich friends and they decide to
respond to the letter with somewhat predictable results. The key word
there's somewhat, because the devil is always in the details and the
end result is a good, solid and fun scam story. I love good scam
story and the next one is even better.
"Les
700,000 radis roses" ("The 700,000 Pink Radishes") is not a
locked room mystery or impossible crime, of any kind, but this story
has a delightful, utterly bizarre plot and premise that will be
appreciated by fans of John
Dickson Carr and Paul
Halter. The great Parisian publisher M. Hippolyte Gour keeps
receiving a baffling, one-sided correspondence about the purchase of
700,000 pink radishes ("they are guaranteed fresh and free of
worm bites") and an equal amount of radish leaves ("these
will be dispatched to your personal address"). And, before
long, his personal secretaries either get attacked or kidnapped. The
case kicked up so much dust that it attracted "the attention of
a band of popular mystery novelists" who "were trying to
apply the method of their fictional detectives," but the
problem of the 700,000 pink radishes seriously tasked their wits.
Until they had their storybook moment, "where the police failed,
the amateur sleuths succeeded," which comes with a small,
delightful twist at the end. More importantly, this is one of those
few detective story that manages to do something meaningful with a
kidnapping plot (of sorts).
The
next short story is "La soupe du pape" ("Soupe du Pape") and
reads like Véry tried to recapture the magic of "Les 700,000 radis
roses" without much success. A policeman finds a dozen pearls while
shelling peas. So has to figure out where the pearls came from, how
they ended up in his bag of peas and who stole them. This story did
nothing for me.The
next two short stories are the previously mentioned "The Mystery of
the Green Room" and "L'assassin" ("The Killer"), but have
already reviewed the former (see link above) and the latter is a
short-short barely covering two full pages. Fortunately, The Secret
of the Pointed Tower concludes with an absolute banger!
"Cours
d'instruction criminelle" ("A Lesson in Crime") is not really a
mystery short story, but a science-fiction musing on the distant
future, somewhere around the year 2500, where crime fiction
"gradually took precedence over all other forms of literature"
– until they all "fell into disrepute and then obscurity."
In those future years, the great mystery writers of the early
twentieth century have become the classics school children study from
seventh grade onward. The study and history of the traditional
detective story is central in every classroom ("if locked-room Y
is shaped like an isosceles triangle ABC and locked-room Z is a
hexagon MNOPQR, calculate...") and children ask their mothers
how they would poison their dad or quiz their father on how he would
snuff out his mistress! The ending is both humorous and very
perceptive as it's something I can see happening under those
circumstances, but Véry's vision of the year twenty-five hundred
nonetheless feels like home. But I'm stuck with you lot. What can you
do?
The
Secret of the Pointed Tower ends with a parting message to the
reader from Véry, "when I have more stories, you will be the
first to know," but no idea if a second collection ever
materialized. Tom Mead also included several pages of explanatory
notes, which I always enjoy to find in translated mystery novels or
collections.
So,
all in all, the short stories collected in The Secret of the
Pointed Tower perfectly demonstrates why Véry considered the
detective story to be "the brother of the fairy tale."
When blended with Véry's home brewed brand of surrealism, you don't
always get the most orthodox or traditionally-styled detective
stories. You can hardly call any of the short stories traditional,
Golden Age-style mysteries, but that doesn't mean the quality isn't
there. "The Tale of the Tartlet," "The 700,000 Pink Radishes," "The Mystery of the Green Room" and "A Lesson in Crime" are
all first-rate for variously different reasons. "Urbin's Chin"
and "The Spanish Prisoner" are simply good, solid stories. "Police Technique" is not quite as good, or solid, but
interesting in how it played with different styles and tropes. Only "The Disappearance of Emmeline Poke," "The Salvation of Maxim
Zapyrov" and "Soupe du Pape" were off the mark. Not much can be
said about the two-page short-short. That's not a bad return for a
collection as varied as The Secret of the Pointed Tower. More
importantly, the fact that it was translated by Tom Mead is very
hopeful for the future. John Pugmire is no longer alone in bringing
these French-language novels and short stories to an international
audience and the changes of getting a translation of Véry's
legendary locked room mystery novel The Four Vipers sooner
rather than later has gone up! In short, The Secret of the Pointed
Tower is indeed something of a lost classic and comes highly
recommended to fans of the short crime fiction.