Suffer a Witch (1958) by Nigel FitzGerald

Last year, I reviewed Nigel FitzGerald's last mystery novel, Affairs of Death (1967), which struck me at the time as a cross between a character-driven drama and a modernized whodunit with a dash of comedy – mashing them together made for an unevenly-plotted, unsatisfying story and conclusion. Nick Fuller popped up in the comments to condemn it as "a second-rate Nicholas Blake imitation." So not exactly a glowing endorsement or particularly encouraging, but I didn't want to write off his earlier work solely based on a less than stellar final outing. There are two of those early detective novels that have been camping out on my wishlist for over a decade now. 

Robert Adey listed FitzGerald's The Student Body (1958) and Suffer a Witch (1958) in Locked Room Murders (1991) with intriguing descriptions of their impossible crimes. The Student Body concerns a stabbing in a locked room and the talcum powder, which had been sprinkled outside as an extra precaution, lay undisturbed. Suffer a Witch deals with a schoolgirl miraculously vanishing from a post office under constant observation. Curt Evans, of The Passing Tramp, praised the impossible disappearance in his 2014 review as "a genuine Carrian/Queenian miracle problem" and "impressive ratiocination concerning the identity of the murderer." So let's take a look at that one.

FitzGerald's Suffer a Witch takes place in Dun Moher, Ireland, which is a small, coastal town with wind-scarred hills or bogs as an inland backdrop and not much arable land. So for ages, the locals had to live off the Atlantic, which brought life and death to the inhabitants of Dun Moher as "in the last century three liners were driven up on the rocks" and "smashed to pieces" – bodies "washed up on their own doorsteps." So "almost every rock and cliff and inlet" is "named after a disaster." Recently, Dun Moher became a summer holiday resort, but reverts back to being a desolate outpost during the winter months. Dun Moher is also one of the few places that has a history with witchcraft. A novelist by the name of Benedict Carey came to Dun Moher to reconstruct and write about something terrible that had happened there years ago, "a suicide, so called, that was probably murder with a background of treachery and witchcraft," known as the Castlebawn Case.

Upon arriving in Dun Moher, Carey gets lost in the mist along the treacherous, serrated cliff above a rock formation locally referred to as the "Devil's Teeth" when overhearing scraps of a disembodied conversation, "you can't get rid of a man just by pushing him over a cliff." Another, distinctly different voice answered, "what you mean is, you can't get rid of the Devil." When the voices go quiet, Carey sees "a strange, vivid picture" that "he would not forget." A schoolgirl of about fifteen sitting in her school uniform on a stone bench next to her Great Dane, Hamlet. Her name is Vanessa Gale and alludes to Carey to probably being a witch. She even calls Hamlet her familiar. You can sum up the opening of Suffer a Witch as a bundle of allusions and innuendos. Everything raised in the opening chapters, from the Castlebawn Case and Vanessa muttering being a witch to the smutty photograph that "had been dropped either by a priest or by a schoolgirl," has to wait to take a tour of the setting. And meet some of the inhabitants and visitors. 

Suffer a Witch is a leisurely paced, unhurried and thrill-free detective story. Curt Evans wrote in his review Suffer a Witch is somewhat of a transitional novel "between the more anodyne detective fiction associated with the Golden Age" and "the more gloomy (i.e. realistic) stuff of P.D. James," which is true, but, based on this novel, FitzGerald can also be qualified as a regionalist mystery writer. Just like the works of S.H. Courtier, Elspeth Huxley and Arthur W. Upfield, Suffer a Witch is strong on local color and the dark crimes at the heart of the plot feel indigenous to the locality. A hallmark of the regional mystery novel. Some urgency returns to the story when Vanessa simply vanishes from the Post Office where there's no way out other than the main door or the gate, which were both under observation. And her dog had been standing guard at the main door. Vanessa impossibly could have slipped away without being spotted by someone, "unless she flew away on a broomstick." A short time later, Vanessa's body is discover under bizarre circumstances at the local haunted house Carey was planning to write about. Vanessa's body was found naked, on her knees and head bowed to the ground like "one prostrating herself to a deity" – a wire had been tightly fastened around her throat. FitzGerald's series-detective, Superintendent Duffy, is summoned to Dun Moher to hunt down a particular conniving, opportunistic killer.

This is where a small, but not unimportant smudge, on the overall story has to be pointed out. Suffer a Witch is a short story expanded to novel-length as only the impossible disappearance and murder of Vanessa Gale is relevant and everything else turns out to be irrelevant to the plot or simply glossed over. Such as the voices in the mist and the old Castlebawn Case. So credit to FitzGerald that the story barely feels padded. Well, not until you learn how much was actually padding once you reach the ending. That being said, the impossible disappearance and murder were both handled very well.

Firstly, the impossible disappearance has been likened to similar stories by John Dickson Carr and even Ellery Queen, but I found it to be more reminiscent of the vanishing tales by Edward D. Hoch. It's the kind baffling, but ultimately simplistic, disappearance-act that features in such Hoch short stories like "The Problem of the Bootlegger's Car" (1982), "The Problem of the Blue Bicycle" (1991) and "The Problem of the Vanishing Salesman' (1992). FitzGerald placed a very slippery, perhaps unintended red herring right on the doorstep of the Post Office that briefly put me on the wrong track. You see, (ROT13) gur punenpgre jub vzcbffvoyl inavfu bsgra pbyynobengr va gurve bja qvfnccrnenapr naq, evtug orsber Pnerl ragref gur Cbfg Bssvpr, gur qbbe vf “bcrarq sbe uvz naq fuhg oruvaq uvz ol n gryrtencu zrffratre.” V sbhaq vg rkgerzryl fhfcvpvbhf SvgmTrenyq hfrq “gryrtencu zrffratre” vafgrnq bs gur zber pbzzbayl hfrq gryrtencu obl be gryrtenz qryvirel obl. Pnerl unq abgrq ba gurve svefg zrrgvat Inarffn'f guva naq senvy obql. Fb pbhyq n guva, senvyyl ohvyq 15-lrne-byq fpubbytvey cnff nf n lbhat gryrtencu obl ba n cnffvat tynapr? Jryy, jul abg? V svtherq Inarffn unq hfrq bar bs gur gryrcubar obkrf gb punapr sebz bar havsbez vagb nabgure naq gur ernfba jul fur jnf sbhaq anxrq, orpnhfr vg jbhyq unir orra rnfvre gb erzbir gryrtencu havsbez guna gb erqerff ure. It made sense except for one small detail (Unzyrg jnvgvat bhgfvqr gur Cbfg Bssvpr) and the possibility was never even considered. But trying to piece together a coherent solution that fits the given information is half the fun, even if you have to eventually give up on it or gets proven wrong by the end. Secondly, the who-and why were superbly handled and agree with Curt that "there is impressive ratiocinating concerning the identity of the murderer" by Superintendent Duffy. It's another piece recalling some of Hoch's best and pure detective stories.

If you put the impossible disappearance and subsequent, closely-linked murder together, you would have an excellent short story, but some of that uneasy excellence got lost in a novel that needed to be trimmed down to have been truly effective. Nonetheless, Suffer a Witch is a marked improvement over Affairs of Death in every way imaginable and the ending still packs a punch as most readers will sympathize with Duffy "when he heard sentence of death being passed" and "realised that for the first time in his life he was listening to it without revulsion of feeling." A murderer who not only took a life, but tried to destroy a soul and deserved the kind of justice only a rope can deliver. So you can expect a review of The Student Body one of these days!