Nieves Mathews was a
Scottish-Spanish author who wrote the 606-page volume Francis
Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination (1996) and worked
at the Food & Agriculture Organization, of the United Nations,
for twenty years, but during her early years, she wrote detective
novel – a now extremely obscure and hard-to-get novel. A novel that
also happened to be included in Robert Adey's bibliographic work,
Locked Room Murders (1991).
So, without anymore
salient details to divulge about either the author or the book
itself, let's dig right in!
She Died Without Light
(1956) begins with clippings of newspaper articles, gossip columns
and fragments of letters reporting, or speculating, about the strange
death of "the invalid owner" of the Pension des Eaux
Calmes, Madame Sophie Rousseau. A tattered, rundown boarding house in
Geneva, Switzerland, whose only charm was the personality of its
owner. Madame Rousseau was the grand-daughter of a world famous
explorer, a one-time member of the Conservatoire and "universally beloved" by "her boarders, her staff" and "by half Geneva." So the press and public where all
over the case when the news broke that she had died under
circumstances that proved hard to explain.
On a late September
morning, the milkman heard "a most extraordinary sound"
coming from the boarding house. A wailing, piteous cry that came from
Madame Rousseau's car, Coralie, who's caught in a broken window-pane
and was struggling to get out.
Through the glass, the
milkman saw the body of Madame Rousseau, "contorted into an
incredible position," with her hand stretched out towards a
tumbler of water, but everyone else in the house was sound asleep –
presumably under "the influence of a drug." Some witnesses
have commented on the unusual fact that "the old villa had all
its lights on throughout Tuesday evening." However, the
authorities appoint a juge d'instruction when a postmortem
revealed the presence of a large quantity of arsenic in the body, but
not "a single bottle or vessel" is found in the victim's
bedroom containing the slightest trace of the poison. A room that had
its door and windows securely bolted on the inside!
After this opening, the
story back-tracks a few days to the arrival of a British boarder, Dr.
Hal Phillips, who has come "the cleanest, tidiest country in
Europe" for a much-needed rest. But what he found was
everything but that.
Dr. Hal Phillips becoming
a guest at the rundown boardinghouse and interacting with the strange
people who dwell there has all the surrealistic quality of Ellery
Queen's Ellery-in-Wonderland tales (e.g. There
Was an Old Woman, 1943) and the works
of Craig
Rice, but with an oddly Galic flavor to the plot and characters.
I was somewhat reminded of Gaston
Boca, Pierre
Véry and Noël
Vindry.
Pension des Eaux Calmes
was "not quite what he had expected" and, before he even
crossed its threshold, Dr. Phillips spots two eyes peeping at him
over the edge of the veranda roof, which were "yellow and full
hatred." The eyes belong not to Madame Rousseau's cat, but to
her only son, Jean Jacques. Another man, clad in black with a green
tie, is crouching, like "a wild animals," on the lowest
branch of a walnut tree and jumped on a stench bench – after which
he run away without saying a word. A mother of two young children,
who are allowed to run amok and vandalize the place, completely
ignores his existence and another, bony-looking woman shut a door in
his face without giving him a second look. Welcome to Pension des
Eaux Calmes!
Portuguese edition
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Everyone at the boarding
house, except for Madame Rousseau, received Dr. Phillips with the
same look of "fear and dislike" or even abject,
animal-like terror. Obviously, something was not quite what it seemed
and, more than once, Dr. Phillips asks the people why they continue
to hang on there. And becomes determined to find out what's at the
bottom of all of it.
A problem that will take
up the entire mid-section of the book and concludes with the murder
reported in the first chapter, but, before reaching that point, Dr.
Phillips has to contend with ghostly noises, theft, tea cups,
carelessly strewn bottles of medicine or tins of rat poison and a
hungry electricity meter – which keeps gobbling up coins. Not to
mention two attempted murders. This approach can be compared to Cyril
Hare's contentious masterpiece, Tragedy
at Law (1942), with the murder being committed at the end of
the book and the story showing everything that happened leading up to
it. However, as previously stated, She Died Without Light has
a distinctly French flavor. Characters, set-pieces and story-telling
take precedence over the puzzle and plot-mechanics that are central
to the Anglo-Saxon detective story.
This is not to say the
plot is bad or even weakly handled. On the contrary! While the plot
is a little loose in its joints, the whole structure fits together
logically, but it's the mad logic of a dream. So not everyone is
going to appreciate the solution, because the identity of the
murderer was lifted from a well-known detective novel and the locked
room-trick, which is closely tied to the murderer and personality of
the victim, is a little underwhelming. Personally, I thought the
solution to the murder was well-done and believe Mathews succeeded in
what Ulf Durling attempted to do in Gammal
ost (Hard Cheese, 1971), but I can also see why some
readers might be let down by it. After all, you have to read to the
end to get back to the point where you started, but with a better
understanding what was going on at the boardinghouse. And some
readers expect a bigger payoff than they'll get.
So, yeah, this is a
difficult book to recommend, but I rather enjoyed reading this
unconventional detective story that began as a tragicomedy with some
surrealistic touches and slowly morphed into a bad dream ending in
murder. There are, as to be expected from a first-timer, some
imperfections, but the fact that this was Mathews' sole contributions
to the genre is one of my two only complaints. My other gripe is that
the cat in the broken window-pane has no relevance, whatsoever, on
the locked room-trick. Somehow, the idea of a murder in a locked room
with the only gap plugged with an angry, hissing cat is a very
appealing idea.
She Died Without Light
is not going to be everyone's favorite locked room mystery, but I
think its rarity and well-done, if oddball, plot makes it deserving
of a long overdue reprint. So maybe Dean
Street Press or Locked
Room International want to adopt this one?
I guess a simple idea for a cat blocking the sole entrance is the following:
ReplyDeleteThe killer makes inserts poisonous gas to the room via the hole, and the cat trying to get out of the house, gets stuck half-in in the hole.
That's actually a pretty good explanation why the cat was stuck in the broken window, but, purely as a locked room, it would hardly pose a challenge.
Deletelol I'm very impressed by the rate at which you read and review mysteries. You're either a super fast reader or you're retired and have no other obligations
ReplyDeleteAppearances can be deceiving. I'm just a fast reader and a quick, sloppy hack writer who's far ahead on his blogging schedule. :)
Delete