"Scene of the crime—well, what's wrong with the good old library? Nothing like it for atmosphere. As for the weapon—well, it might be a curiously twisted dagger—or some blunt instrument—a carved stone idol..."- Captain Arthur Hastings (Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders, 1936)
Last month, I reviewed The Scarlet Macaw (1923) by Gladys E. Locke and the absence of as much as a profile
page from the hive mind of the modern mystery reader, Golden Age of Detection Wiki, attests that your name on a book cover isn't always an inked guarantee of
its immortality.
Locke's second, exasperatingly titled
mystery, The Red Cavalier, Or, the Twin Turrets Mystery (1922), was
reported as one of the better mysteries of the year, but, what struck the
critics' fancy at the time, it sure as hell wasn't innovation. If you could
spread out the plot material, of The Red Cavalier, like the content
you'd likely find in a suitcase from the era, it would be as plain and familiar
as a straight razor, a bank book and black-and-white photographs.
The backdrop is a castle in the country
side of Yorkshire, dating back to the Wars of the Roses, which comes with a
ghost garbed in the costume of the days of the Merry Monarch and the unresolved
death of the previous owner, Sir Roger Grainer – stabbed in the library with a
poison smeared, Hindu dagger. Sir Roger had stocks in the ruby mines in
Burma and applied this wealth to fill Twin Turrets with a collection of Hindu
curios and idols. Statues of foreign deities line the hallways and the
neighborhood has recently been plagued with burglaries reputedly done by the
spectral cavalier of the castle, wrestled free from the gibbet cage to plunder
once again.
Twin Turrets can be regarded as a problem
on the market and not a property that can be easily foisted on a proper,
English lady. However, it's Miss Egerton who snatches the lease from under the
noose of Prince Kassim Bardai and even matched the outrageous sum he was
willing to pay for it. Miss Egerton wants the place for the summer to couple
her nephew, Maxwell "Max" Egerton, but he has plans of his own and they involve
another woman. And, somehow, Max is acquainted with Bardai, who never stopped
pressuring his aunt to hand over the lease, but manages to secure an invitation
for the prince.
Meanwhile, at Twin Turrets, statues of
Eastern idols are toppled from their base in the dark of the night and a friend
of the Egertons, Lord Reginald Borrowdean, watches how the events and
cross-relationships culminates in another murder committed in the library –
while a fancy dress party was in progress. On the surface, the motive of the
murder appears to have been the possession of the Azra-El-Kab ruby, a ball of
fiery red fire, which was stolen from the body and the red cavalier had been
seen at the scene of the crime, but they also discovered a piece of spangled
dress clasped in the hand of the victim. There's much to do about who locked
and unlocked the library door, and when, and who was possession of a spare key,
but there's hardly any ingenuity about it and painfully lays bare how
overwritten the story and outdrawn the plot are. The chapters covering the inquest
and the explanation seemed to never come to an end. I still feel like I haven't
quite got there yet.
The Red Cavalier didn't profit elsewhere, either, because the setting with its homegrown
legend furbishes the story with the same amount of ghostly, suspenseful atmosphere
as a science lecture hall and Locke also failed to capitalize in the characters
department. There was an interesting contrast between the English and East
Indian characters, and their views on their inter/national "ties," but it never
went beyond mere racism. Locke might as well have gone all the way and called
the book Dark Are the Moors. It fits the setting, color-theme titles
and, you know, the racism.
By the time (well into the story)
Borrowdean calls in a private detective from London, a "young woman
professionally known as Mercedes Quero" who build herself a "reputation as
a solver of unsolvable mysteries," it's too late to safe the book. Quero
showing-off her cleverness and dexterity with a tiny pocket revolver falls
horribly flat and the overdrawn explanation, euphemistically entitled "Gathering
Up the Thread," didn't do much help either. Nor did surprise twist. Long story short, the premise was better than the end product.
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