11/8/22

Money for Old Rope: "The Other Hangman" (1935) by John Dickson Carr

Previously, I reviewed an anthology, Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022), which sounded promising when it was announced over a year ago, but most of the stories had appeared in other, often well-known locked room-themed anthologies and there's a frustrating repetitiveness to the selection – compounded by an overall quality rarely peaking above average. Even more damning, some of the better stories were only minor locked room mysteries as the impossible crimes were either a small part of the plot (Mignon G. Eberhart's "The Calico Dog," 1934) or (Erle Stanley Gardner's "The Exact Opposite," 1941) pushed into the background. 

So my review ended up having a distinct, salty undertone and what I needed was a palette cleanser. Why not turn to one of John Dickson Carr's half dozen novels and a handful of short stories that somehow never left the big pile. 

"The Other Hangman" was originally published in A Century of Detective Stories (1935) and collected, as by "Carter Dickson," in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), but later paperback editions scrapped several stories from the original line-up – like my copy of the Dell mapback edition. Strangely enough, "The Other Hangman" is one of the stories that was cut as Carr reportedly thought it's the best short story he wrote. I can understand why he was so proud of it. "The Other Hangman" together with "Blind Man's Hood" (1937), "Persons or Things Unknown" (1938) and the novel-length The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) foreshadowed his move towards historical mysteries in the 1950s and '60s. And it has a fiendish plot that does not hinge on a locked room or some other apparent impossibility. 

"The Other Hangman" is a non-series historical mystery set in Carr's native Pennsylvania during the early 1890s and the locality is a small, but "mighty proud," town of 3500 souls. They had good reason to be proud as they bragged about housing the best hotel in the county, their old county families, their legal batteries and at the time the story takes place they put the first telephone in the courthouse ("...you could talk as far as Pittsburgh except when the wires blew down"). So things were looking bright for the town as a new century crept nearer, but the town had two noticeable blemishes.

Fred Joliffe is "the worst and nastiest customer" the town ever had with "the possible exception of Randall Fraser." Joliffe is a slick, but nasty, gossip who didn't care what he said about people, because "he relied on the fact that he was too small to be thrashed." Not something that always worked and caused plenty of trouble in the small, tight-knit community. Fraser runs a harness-and-saddle store in Market Street and "buttery polite," while being "mean as sin" who thought "a dirty trick or a swindle was the funniest joke he ever heard." And he liked women. Joliffe and Fraser did a lot of drinking together, like cronies, but then murder turned the petty, small town problems into something far more serious.

It was an early October morning in '92 or '93, when the town constable found the door of Fraser's shop standing wide open and stumbled across his bloodied and battered body in the backroom. Joliffe was found "drunk and asleep in the flour mill" with "blood on his hands and an empty bottle of Randall Fraser's whisky in his pocket." The lawyer-narrator who defended Joliffe at the trial said earlier in the story, "now if it had been anybody else but Fred Joliffe who killed him, naturally we wouldn't have convicted," because you don't take your neighbor "out in the cold light of day and string him up by the neck until he's dead" – which is not-done in a little community. But with Fred Joliffe it was different. And he was sentenced to hang on the twelfth of November.

So the story begins to get the death house jitters as "there hadn't been a hanging since any of that crowd had been in office" and "nobody knew how to go about it exactly." The slow-moving, tipsy Ed Nabors was appointed hangman, the local carpenter "knocked together a big, shaky-looking contraption in the jail yard" and there was some fools talk about that fellow John Lee in England. When the morning of the execution dawned, it does not go as planned. What exactly happened and why, is something you have to find out for yourself.

Needless to say, the ending, while legally dubious, is perfectly executed as Carr masterfully gave the hangman's knot a final twist as the noose tightened even further. A small gem and one of Carr's best (non-impossible) short stories demonstrating the locked room mystery was not a gimmicky crutch he needed to lean on. More importantly, it's a case in point why the acknowledged maestro of miracles also deserves to be appreciated as a pioneer of the historical detective story, which was not nearly as popular in his time as it's today. "The Other Hangman" is a finely written and plotted, early historical detective short story from one of the genre's most gifted storytellers that comes highly recommended! 

A note for the curious: one of those unread short stories on my list is Carr's "The Diamond Pentacle" (1939; collected in Merrivale, March and Murder, 1991), which is virtually unknown and rarely gets mentioned, but apparently is quite good. Christian, of Mysteries, Short and Sweet, called "The Diamonds Pentacle" in his 2018 review "a fairly slight thing," but "the solution to the impossibility is actually pretty great, because Carr bamboozles us all with a twist that is superb in all its simplicity." Pietro, of Death Can Read, dedicated an entire, spoiler-filled blog-post to the short story, which I skipped except for the first line saying it's "among Carr's best short stories ever." So there's another suggestion for a future, locked room-themed anthology.

21 comments:

  1. According to Carr's biography, Chesterton was going to write the intro to the 1935 anthology, so Carr wrote this story to try and dazzle him. But Chesterton passed away the same year and probably didn't read it. Carr is said to regret it later because he believes he should've saved the plot in this story for a novel

    I always found this a funny anecdote. That even someone we consider a master is also a fanboy who wants to impress his idol. Ayukawa is similar in that "The Five Clocks" was commissioned by Edogawa Ranpo himself, and that story with its pile of tricks does have the vibe of a fanboy eager to please!

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    1. I agree. "The Other Hangman" would have made a great premise for a historical mystery novel and guess he was fond enough of it to not touch it during his later years, when he began to rework old short stories and radio-plays into novels.

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  2. Sounds great! But I can't find this story in any format or collection that isn't outrageously expensive, nor could I find it in any of the, ah... more affordable avenues. There really is no reason Carr's short fiction should be this assed difficult to read!

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    1. Crippen & Landru recently published two new Carr collections, The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries and The Kindling Spark: Early Tales of Mystery, Horror and Adventure, which appeared within a year of each other. And that's probably not a coincidence. What better time to publish collections of his less accessible short stories and radio-plays than when several publishers are reprinting his novels. So maybe they plan on doing more collections of his short stories and radio-plays over the next two, three years like a new and complete edition of The Department of Queer Complaints.

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    2. @TomCat: This sounds like a really excellent story (even by Carr's standards), so I hope you're right that Crippen & Landru are gearing up for more collections. However, for me, the really pressing question is: if there's another collection of Carr's stories out, how the dickens have I not heard of it?! Has no one been talking about this, or did I just miss it? Either way, this is great news and I'll have to get my hands on a copy ASAP.

      (Also, and completely unrelatedly, there's a newly translated Awasaka Tsumao story in EQMM. Haven't read it yet, but it looks interesting.)

      @l. Stump: What happened to your post about hybrid mysteries? It was there this morning. I was going to comment, but I'm getting a 404 error.

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    3. @Kacey: I deleted it, to be reuploaded at a future date. The post was superficial, poorly organized, and uninformative. Worse yet, it used exclusively Japanese examples of hybrid mysteries to illustrate my points, making the examples wholly useless to 99% of the people who read my blog. Most of the posts on my blog are very bad, but I was frankly ashamed of just how poorly written this one was and I couldn't let it stay up until it's been properly revised.

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    4. Also, Awasaka Tsumao is one of my "Favorite Japanese Authors I Haven't Read Yet", along with Houjou Kie, Kobayashi Yasumi, and Aoyogi Aito, so thank you for bringing this story to our attention. Awasaka's A Aiichirou series seems particularly interesting to me as a Japanese writer who iterates on the style of G. K. Chesterton, without all of the baggage that comes with G. K. Chesterton... But the story in EQMM is not from A Aiichirou and is instead from the magician-detective series. This particular series, though not the chosen story, has my favorite set-up for ANY impossible crime in the entire history of the genre, bar none.

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    6. @l. Stump: I would venture to disagree with the idea that most of the posts on your blog are very bad. But I look forward to seeing the examples of Western hybrid mysteries you look at.

      EQMM actually ran the first A Aiichirou story last year. It wasn't quite properly clued in my opinion, but it was a very well written story. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to get ahold of, though I forget which issue it ran in. This current one has a focus on magic tricks, which were one of Awasaka's trademarks, so I'm excited to see how they're used.

      (Note: This comment deleted and reposted because sometimes I just can't proofread well.)

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    7. That's the problem! There are almost no western examples I can use to make my point. The post was ill-fated from the start. I'm starting to feel like I should've just shut up and not written the damn thing to begin with, honestly...

      I'll look into the A Aiichirou story. I'm aware of the story that you mentioned, and Ho-Ling considers most of the "what the hell?" stories like it to be more on the unfair side by sheer merit of the nature of the crimes themselves. Thanks for mentioning it to me.

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    8. Hybrid mysteries have been on my mind lately and a curious thing about western hybrids, some of the best known ones anyway, is that they appear to exist in the peripheral of established genre writers. For example, you have science-fiction writers, like Isaac Asimov, who like detective stories and try to blend them together (e.g. The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun). Another example is a longtime resident of my wishlist, William Colt MacDonald, whose Westerns reportedly often carry detective-style plot, but you also have Jerry Coleman's "The Super-Key to Fort Superman." On the other hand, you have mystery writers who mixed the detective story with an outside interest. John Dickson Carr's historical fiction infused with his own brand of detective fiction is a good example. Same goes for Pronzini and Muller's Carpenter and Quincannon series. It could be an explanation why the hybrid mystery is practically virgin, untouched soil here in the West.

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  3. I agree with Isaac. Indeed a check of the usual sources show that. "The Department of Queer Complaints" is prohibitively expensive.

    Good to know though that the Dell mapback doesn't have this story so I am not wrongly chasing a copy of that. I did confirm that the Pan softcover reprint does include, "The Other Hangman", so will look for a reasonably priced version of that as I want to read this based on your positive review.

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    1. Sorry, wanted to know I don't go by "Isaac" anymore! Just "L." is fine, please!

      Yeah, it's very frustrating how prohibitively expensive a lot of Carr's short fiction is for such a prolific writer. If you find an affordable version of the story, please.let us know!

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    2. @Scott: I hope you find an affordable copy and I'm positive you'll like the story. It's Carr! Not some second-stringer. :)

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  4. @TomCat - Thanks for the highlighting the latest Carr release by Crippen & Landru, "The Kindling Spark: Early Tales ...".

    I ordered it straight away look forward to reading this Carr collection as I enjoyed the, "The Island of Coffins" - it was excellent to read his radio plays.

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  6. TomCat, I mentioned my "Up Adey's Shorts" project on your most recent review. You'll be happy (I hope) to know I found a copy of this in one of the EQMM magazines I had access to... I can finally read this superb mystery story!

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    1. Enjoy this historical masterpiece and hope you'll review it on your blog.

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  7. Great story, this! A comparison I'm surprised you didn't make is to G. K. Chesterton. This story reminds me a lot of those intuitive reasoning stories, where the nature of what the Hell the mystery is isn't even clear until the end of the story. But of course performed in the most singularly Carrian manner...

    I really enjoyed it!

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    1. Glad you enjoyed it! You're right about that comparison, however, you can compare practically everything Carr wrote to Chesterton. Have you read The Three Coffins? If you want another Chestertonian impossible crime story performed in the most singularly Carrian manner for your Adey post, I highly recommend "The Silver Curtain."

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    2. I have read THE THREE COFFINS, actually! In general, you can assume I'm more well-read into the big-name authors than my blog would suggest. I just don't like discussing the big-name authors on my blog. I don't have anything worthwhile or original to add to the discussion on Carr or Queen or Christie. If I have a dissenting opinion, people get upset. If I have the common opinion, what's the point in being the fifty-billionth person to say I think Christie's a really good mystery author?

      I made the decision that I want my blog to be a reflection of me and the unique voice I can bring to the mystery blog-o-sphere, which is why I made the conscious decision to focus on television shows, video games, Ace Attorney, manga, podcasts, hybrid mysteries, etc. more than the names we all know and love, is all.

      ...That was a LOT to say very little of worth. What I meant to say was "Thanks for the recommendation, TomCat, I'll read that story!"

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