I can't remember where I read this, or
who said it, but someone once posited that if the dead who had been
murdered and buried as tragic victims of accidents, suicides or
simply natural causes would rise from their graves to hold a candle –
every cemetery in the world would be brightly lit. Whoever said it,
the mystery writing husband-and-wife team of Edwin
and Mona Radford would have disagreed with him.
The Heel of Achilles (1950) is
the eight case of Dr. Harry Manson and, unlike the previous novels in
the series, the book is an inverted
detective story in the mold of R.
Austin Freeman. In their foreword, the Radfords wrote that they
hoped the story may act as "a warning to those people who may
think that they can commit a crime" and "get away with
it." Because they can't. The Heel of Achilles is a
demonstration why the logical, scientifically educated detective
invariably gets his man.
The Heel of Achilles takes the
classical approach to the inverted mystery with the first part
telling the story of the murderer and his victim-to-be, showing every
detail of "a cast-iron plot of murder" that "nothing
could detect as being other than an accident," while the second
part unmercifully lays bare all the mistakes the murderer made along
the way – ending the story on a somewhat depressing note. So the
book is really two novellas in one that can actually be read as two
separate, standalone tales of crime and detection.
In the first part, entitled "Story
of a Murder," the reader is introduced to Jack Edwins, a humble
garage mechanic, who became the unwitting accomplish in a scheme
hatched by a petty crook and racehorse gambler, James Sprogson. A
simple burglary to quickly snatch "thousands of pounds' worth of
stuff," but a police whistle interrupted them and Edwins was
left standing with his pockets stuffed with jewelry! Sprogson was the
only one who shot from the house into the waiting hands of the
policemen and this meant Edwins had an opportunity to silently make
his exit, which he did without being weigh down by the fortune
spilling from his pockets. A fortune he used to change his name,
marry the love of his life and a buy his own service station, but put
some of his hard earned money aside to anonymously repay the owner of
the stolen goods.
Sprogson, on the other hand, was
sentenced to three years penal servitude and, when he was released,
Edwins had vanished from the face of the earth and Jack Porter, of
the Green Service Station, had taken his place. Only a fluke brought
Sprogson, now James Canley, back to Porter. What he wants is his cut
of the money and then some. So he decided to kill Canley in order to
keep what he had built for the woman he loved so much.
Porter is "an omnivorous reader
of detective stories" and "modelled his plan on the
mistakes made by the lawbreakers in the novels he had read,"
which gave him the idea to stage an accidental death and meticulously
goes to work – presenting the local police with a decapitated
corpse lying on the track of a railway line. The local authorities
are willing to accept that it was nothing more than an unfortunate
railway accident, but the railway doctor insisted on calling in
Scotland Yard. Enter Dr. Harry Manson.
As an aside, if The Heel of
Achilles had been a regular detective story, the murder would
have come very close to being an impossible crime, with a single
track of footprints leading from the victim's cottage to the tracks,
had it not been for "the long grass verge that edged the track."
The second part of the story, "Cherchez L'Homme," brings Dr. Manson to the scene of the crime
and laboriously begins to poke holes in, what seemed to be, a
relatively watertight scheme. Dr. Manson patiently explains every
step of his investigation and reasoning, but, to do this properly,
the local police officers had to be little denser than usual ("very
trustworthy, you know, but no thinker").
However, the payoff is that you get to
see a painstaking destruction of a carefully laid plan with
apparently nothing linking the victim with his killer. A beautiful
combination logical reasoning and forensic detective work. On top of
that, Dr. Manson tells the story of two locked
room murders, over the course of his investigation, as a basic
exercises in logic and gives the story of Maria Lee, a.k.a. Black
Maria, as the
origin of the police van's name – a claim that has since been
disputed
by the internet. Still, it was a fun little story and coming across
these shreds of arcane history and knowledge is always a bonus you
get from these vintage detective novels.
Slowly, but surely, Dr. Manson proves
the accident was murder and treads closer to the murderer with every
passing chapter, which made realize that a truly scientific mystery
novel is playing the detective story in god mode. Where the more
intuitive or workman-like sleuths have to interpret nebulous clues or
pick apart alibis, the scientific investigator can pick up the trail
of nameless, faceless killer by studying cigar ash, dust and small
fibers. It's almost unfair to the hardworking, sympathetic murderer
and even Dr. Manson says at the end of the story that he never "concluded a case with less satisfaction." An ending
painfully showing that justice and restoration of order isn't always
what it's made out to be.
The Heel of Achilles is a well
written and carefully plotted inverted detective novel with the first
half focusing on the personal side of the murder and the second half
presenting the impersonal examination of the crime, in which Dr.
Manson demonstrates that every contact leaves a trace – wringing
the truth from the physical evidence the murderer so cleverly tried
to alter or destroy. More importantly, the hardest thing to do with
an inverted mystery is to keep the reader interested when they
already know all of the answers. I believe the Radfords succeeded
here by making it a challenge to the reader, of sorts, by serving
their readers with a seemingly airtight murder plot and than pointing
out the holes. So easily one of the most meticulously plotted
inverted detective stories, right up there with John Russell Fearn's
Pattern
of Murder (2006), and comes highly recommended!
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