This
year marks the 30th anniversary of Douglas G. Green's founding of
Crippen &
Landru, a small publishing firm specialized in short story
collections, whose first publication was John
Dickson Carr's Speak
of the Devil
(1994) – a BBC radio serial originally written and broadcast in
1941. C&L was decades ahead of the curb and gave mystery fans a
taste of the coming reprint renaissance with their "Lost Classic"
series. A series of short story collections comprising of such early
gems as Stuart
Palmer's Hildegarde
Withers: Uncollected Riddles
(2002), Craig
Rice's Murder,
Mystery and Malone
(2002), Helen McCloy's The
Pleasant Assassin
(2003), Joseph
Commings' Banner
Deadlines
(2004) and Ellery
Queen's The
Adventure of the Murdered Moths
(2005). Not to mention Queen's previously unpublished novel collected
in The Tragedy
of Errors and Others
(1999).
There
are fortunately no signs C&L is slowing down or stopping anytime
soon as Jeffrey Marks, "the
award-winning author of biographies of Craig Rice and Anthony
Boucher,"
took over from Douglas Greene as publisher in 2018.
In
March, I reviewed one of their latest publications, Pierre Véry's
Les
veillées de la Tour Pointue
(The
Secret of the Pointed Tower,
1937). A collection of imaginative short mystery stories, translated
from French by Tom
Mead,
published in 2023, but was unaware of the C&L's 30th anniversary
and neglected to mention it when I wrote the review. It was not until
a review of Edward
D. Hoch's
The
Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories
(2023) appeared on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel that I was
reminded of C&L's 30th anniversary. So a good excuse to finally
move those Anthony
Berkeley,
William
Brittain
and Hoch collections to the top of the pile, but not before
revisiting one of my favorite C&L collections from my all-time
favorite mystery writer.13
to the Gallows
(2008) is a collection of four, never before published manuscripts of
stage plays John Dickson Carr wrote during the early 1940s and
collaborated on two of the plays with his friend and then Director of
Drama at the BBC, Val
Gielgud
– who had a "shared
interest in detective stories and fencing."
Gielgud wrote detective novels himself and you would think the name
of a British broadcast legend on the covers of Death
at Broadcasting House
(1934), Death
as an Extra
(1935) and The
First Television Murder
(1940) is a guarantee to keep them in circulation, but they have all
been out-of-print for ages. This collection of stage plays is the
first time his name appeared on a piece of detective fiction in over
thirty years. What a way to make a comeback!
Just
one more thing before delving into these plays. 13
to the Gallows
is edited and introduced by Tony Medawar, a researcher and genre
archaeologist, who also littered it with Van Dinean footnotes and
even included "Notes for the Curious." Medawar's detailed
introduction should give you an appreciation of the time and work
that went into the making of this volume of "Lost Classics." One
of the many fascinating background details is that it was "the
late Derek
Smith
who first conceived of this collection."
So with that out of the way, let's raise the curtain on this
collection of stage plays from a once forgotten period of Carr's
writing career.
The
three-act play "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" (1942) is the first of two collaborations between Carr and Gielgud,
which is also the first of two plays that take place in a BBC radio
studio. In this case, it's the cellar below a country house on the
outskirts of a provincial town that was taken over by the BBC as an
emergency security set of studios. When the story begins, they're
rehearing the first episode of a true crime program called Murderer's
Row starring ex-Chief Inspector Silence
to talk about the Kovar case. It was his first big case ("I
hanged the criminal") in which Thomas
Kovar shot his wife's lover. A part of the program is a dramatic
reenactment of the shooting, but the producer, Anthony Barran, made
the unfortunate call to cast Elliott Vandeleur and Lanyon Kelsey as
the murderer and victim – because Kelsey is rumored to be involved
with Vandeleur's wife, Jennifer Sloane. So all the ingredients for
murder all there, cooped in a small radio studio, while an air-raid
goes on over their heads outside.
One
of them gets fatally shot during the on-air performance, but who
pulled the trigger and perhaps more importantly how was it done?
Silence is on hand to handle the case, until the police arrives,
collects two .22s from the studio, but one "has
never been fired" ("...barrel's
unfouled") and "the
other was full of blanks." So what
happened to the murder gun? Silence turns the studio inside out and
has everybody searched without finding as much as a shell casing.
Nobody could have drawn or ditched a gun without being seen, but
somebody, somehow, managed to pull it off. The impossibility of a
shooting in a closed spaced by an apparently invisible killer and the
puzzle of the vanishing gun are perfectly played out, which both have
simple, elegant and yet satisfying solutions that simply works on
stage. These impossibilities are dressed with the personal and
backstage drama of the characters mirroring the old murder case and
the running joke of Silence being frightened of microphones. Simply
the kind of story fans of Carr and impossible crimes in general.
However, "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" is not even the best
play in this volume.
A
note for the curious: Medawar noted in
the afterword to the play that the impossible murder recalls one of
Carr's short stories, "although the
details of the mystery are entirely different,"
but I think Max Afford's The
Dead Are Blind (1937) warrants a
mention here. A locked room mystery staged inside a radio studio. You
can also find similar impossible shootings with vastly different
solutions in Stacey Bishop's Death
in the Dark (1930) and Christopher
Bush's The
Case of the Chinese Gong (1935).
The
second, three-act Carr-Gielgud collaboration, "Thirteen to the
Gallows" (1944), is set this time in a Midlands school converted
into a wartime emergency studio for the BBC. The program being
produced is a spin-off episode, of sorts, of In Town Tonight
entitled Out of Town – a series of special items split up
between three towns in Britain. Barran from "Inspector Silence
Takes the Air" returns to produce Barchester part of the program,
but, during the rehearsals, slowly sees the whole thing
disintegrating in front of his eyes. Even having to entertain the
idea of interviewing a man who trains and imitates sea lions.
Fortunately, the town has something of a notorious local celebrity,
Wallace Hatfield.
Hatfield
is a builder who had converted the school into a radio studio and,
several years before, was tried for the murder of his wife, Lucy. Not
only was he acquitted, but the death dismissed as a tragic accident
as the prosecution couldn't even prove it was murder. Lucy had fallen
from the belfry, "seventy or eighty feet," scattered round
the body were flowers with Hatfield being the only person near the
tower. What saved his neck is that the police found only Lucy's
footprints in the dust up in the belfry. So nobody could have pushed
her. Hatfield still believes she murdered and agrees to be
interviewed, which initially was supposed to be conducted by an
ex-Scotland Yard inspector. Program director, Sir John Burnside,
insists on his old OC, Colonel Sir Henry Bryce, former head of the
Indian Police. Sir John gushing over his old OC is another strain for
the harassed producer culminating with Barran calling the old OC "son
of a cock-eyed half-caste Indian constable" right when Colonel
Sir Henry Bryce his entree. Just in time for history to repeat itself
as an invisible killer throws another person from the belfry.
Medawar
notes in the introduction "Carr clearly contributed to the
mystery and Gielgud the authentic details of broadcasting" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" very clearly has Carr's fingerprints
all over the plot and storytelling. From the comedy and clueing to
the impossible crime reworked from his Suspense radio-play "The Man
Without a Body" (1943). Only smudge is that the murderer is an
absolute idiot, but other than that, as good and solid a mystery as
its predecessor. A vintage Carr. A pity he never considered reworking "The Man Without a Body" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" into a
Sir Henry Merrivale mystery. I gladly would have traded one of the
final three Merrivale novels for The New Invisible Man.
The
last two plays were solo projects, "a version for the stage of
his famous BBC series Appointment with Death," beginning with
the short play "Intruding Shadow" (1945), which is
tightly-plotted little story of domestic murder – staged at the
home of a well-known mystery writer. Richard Marlowe is the author of
such celebrated detective novels as Death in the Summer-House,
Murder at Whispering Lodge and The Nine Black Clues,
but the story finds him dabbling in true crime of the fictitious
kind. Marlowe wants to scare the pants of Bruce Renfield, a West End
blackmailer, to make him back off from one of his victims and hand
over the blackmail material. In order to achieve his goal, Marlowe is
going to make both of them believe he's about to murder Renfield.
After all, this is Golden Age mysteries in which a blackmailer is the
type of person "who deserves to die" or "to be scared
within an inch of his life." A plan that spectacularly
backfires when Marlowe finds a dying Renfield on his doorstep shortly
followed by Inspector Sowerby.
Apparently, "Intruding Shadow" was met with some reserved praise from the
critics, but on paper, it's easily the best of the four plays Carr
wrote during the war years. A short, pure undiluted detective story
recalling that small gem "Who
Killed Matthew Corbin?" (1939/40). Both stories are essentially
Carr successfully pulling an Agatha
Christie-style whodunit without any locked rooms or other
impossible crimes. There is, however, a typical, Carrian Grand
Guignol scene involving the corpse. So a great detective tale all
around!
The
fourth and last (short) play, "She Slept Lightly" (1945), belongs
together with The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) and the
previously mentioned radio-play, Speak of the Devil, to Carr's
earliest experiments in mixing the detective story with historical
fiction, which he kind of pioneered starting with plays and short
stories – e.g. "The
Other Hangman" (1935) and "Blind
Man's Hood" (1937). After the 1940s, Carr began to write fully
fledged historical mystery novels decades before the historical
mystery became a subgenre of its own. Regrettably, Carr's historical
(locked room) mysteries and thrillers either criminally underrated or
outright ignored. A real shame as some of the Carr's best work from
the 1950s and '60s can be found among his historical novels. Captain
Cut-Throat (1955) is one of the best historical
mystery-thrillers ever written and one of Carr's finest novels from
the post-war period.
Just
like Captain Cut-Throat, "She Slept Lightly" is a
mystery-thriller set in Napoleonic France and brings several
characters together in the home of Belgian miller while the Battle of
Waterloo rages on in the background. Firstly, there's the elderly
Lady Stanhope, "her enemies might call her a little mad,"
whose carriage overturned and needs the miller to guide her through
the French lines. The second arrival is a wounded British soldier,
Captain Thomas Thorpe, who's looking for the young girl in Lady
Stanhope's company. She, however, denies the existence of the girl.
Major von Steinau, a Prussian Hussar, is another one who's interested
in this apparently non-existent woman and not without reason. He
hanged her only a year ago for spying ("I saw the rope choke out
your life"). So how could she be alive and walking around?
Like
I said, this is more of a historical mystery-thriller than detective
story with the apparent impossibility of a woman who was hanged and
lived to tell about it as a small side-puzzle, but I can see why this
historical melodrama is not going to excite everyone. I enjoyed it.
However, I'm also very, very partial to the type of historical
mystery as envisioned by Carr, Robert
van Gulik and Paul
Doherty. So feel free to disagree on this one.
So
the quality of the plays, purely as detective and thriller stories,
is uniformly excellent, but, more importantly, 13 to the Gallows
plugged another fascinating, once completely forgotten gap in Carr's
body of work – similar to the obscure radio-plays collected in The
Island of Coffins (2021). That's the greatest contribution
C&L had made in helping to restore Carr back to print. A highly
recommendable, must-have volume for the true JDC aficionado and might
pick up The Kindling Spark: Early Tales of Mystery, Horror and
Adventure (2022) before tackling the Brittain and Hoch
collections.