Mr. Diabolo (1960) by Anthony Lejeune

Edward Anthony Thompson, better known during his lifetime as "Anthony Lejeune," was a British political writer, syndicated columnist, editor, reporter, reviewer and radio broadcaster – whose weekly show, London Letter, ran for thirty years in South Africa. Lejeune also had some interesting connections, real and fictitious, to the world of crime.

Lejeune was a close friend of the bestselling thriller writer Dennis Wheatley and, reportedly, through Ian Fleming got the job as the crime correspondent for The Sunday Times. In 1953, Lejeune began reviewing detective novels in the Catholic newspaper The Tablet and began to dabble in crime-and detective fiction before the end of that decade. Between 1959 and 1988, he wrote nine detective novels of various stripes beginning with a spy-thriller, Crowded and Dangerous (1959). So, going on those scant few pieces of background information, you wouldn't expect Lejeune to turn up on this blog, but he wrote more than just thrillers or spy-fiction. Lejeune actually had a traditional bend with two of his novels, Mr. Diabolo (1960) and Key Without a Door (1988), being included in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). The former elicited some interesting and contrasting comments and opinions.

Adey briefly mentioned Mr. Diabolo in his introduction ("imaginative") and added the following comment under the solution at the back of the book, "almost a classic and would have been had the detective been a little more interesting and the book rather longer." John, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed Mr. Diabolo back in 2012 and concluded it “aspires to true greatness and promises to dazzle the reader,” but “only manages to raise a faint glow of surprise” of what "might have been a real classic in locked room mysteries." Jim, of The Invisible Event, thought it was "written like it's five times as clever as it actually turns out to be" and struggled to find something to say, while admittedly being "amazed that this sort of book was published in the 1960s" – even though the whole thing ultimately left him cold. Adey's problem appears to have been the colorless detective and short length of the story rather than the plot. John thought the ending did not measure up to the premise of the strange legend and the vanishing, ghost-like killer. Jim couldn't possible care less about either. That only inflamed my curiosity even more. So it got tossed on the special locked room wishlist.

Having now read it, I can say Lejeune's Mr. Diabolo, purely as a locked room mystery, can be filed under the "Curiosities & Oddities" of the genre. However, it's also an earnest, well intended homage to John Dickson Carr and has neatly posed, multiple miraculous disappearances and a locked room murder. You can hardly miss which novel in particular inspired him (The Arabian Nights Murder, 1936), which comes with a light sprinkling of Clayton Rawson (Death from a Top Hat, 1938), but largely failed to deliver on its promising and fantastic premise. I think the book is best compared in that regard to Hugh Holman's Up This Crooked Way (1946) and Herbert Brean's Wilders Walk Away (1948), but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Mr. Diabolo takes place during the Annual Conference of the Anglo-American Literary and Political Society, "known to its friends as The Alps," at the College of Western Studies. Alistair Burke, of the Foreign Office, narrates the story and represented his office at this transatlantic gathering, but, when he meet the academic Barbara Tracey at the meeting, he began to devote himself "to the task with a zeal far beyond and above the line of duty" – providing the story with the obligatory romantic subplot. During dinner in the Senior Common Room, the old college legend of the alleyway running behind the college called Devil's Lane.

College of Western Studies was founded in the early 1600s by the disciples of John Dee, "an Elizabethan occultist," which was "to promote all forms of good learning" like "alchemy, astrology and the use of crystals." But by the end the 18th century, the college had gone to seed and catered to the bullheaded sons of the local squirearchy. One particularly “wild creature” was young Lord Farrant who "raised what hell he could." There were secret, midnight parties in his rooms and whispers of him indulging in the black arts. It all ended when Lord Farrant was found dead, behind the locked door of his room, lying in the middle of a pentacle that had been drawn on the floor. This discovery was preceded by a sighting of a figure wearing a tall hat and cloak with a pointed board and no eyes ("just blackness, like the eye-sockets of a skull") on the track running along the edge of the meadows behind the college. A spot currently known as Devil's Lane. That figure is the same whispered to have been present at the midnight parties and listens to the name Mr Diabolo.

So a thoroughly pleasant dinner conversation followed by a brief discussion on traditional ("nowadays it's all psychology and sordidness. Social realism is the curse of our age") and modern ("I like the new-style mysteries. Philo Vance used to bore me stiff") detective fiction. But when the meeting breaks up, the members and assorted guests get hurled into a detective story of their own.

When the party steps out into the Great Quad, they spot a bizarrely dressed, devilish-looking man wearing a tall, stovepipe hat and a cloak thrown back from his shoulders to reveal "a bottle-green cut-away coat, a red waistcoat and tightly fitting trousers of some cream-coloured material" – nothing where his eyes should have been. An illusion quickly dispelled when they notice the empty eye-sockets is caused by a pair of dark glasses. So they're determined to catch whoever is playing Mr. Diabolo and chase him down Devil's Lane. A police constable and a young man, Bill Frazer, saw the rush past him down the lane, but the watchman at the Warden's Garden on the other swears nobody came out of Devil's Lane. Mr. Diabolo had  "simply appeared and disappeared" like a puff of smoke.

Alistair Burke calls on an old friend from the War Office, Arthur Blaise, who's suitably intrigued by the seemingly impossible disappearance in Devil's Lane to start poking around the college grounds. Blaise particularly wants to talk to Frazer and the watchman ("I suspect you may not have asked them the right questions though"), but Frazer is murdered before he gets a chance. Strangled to death in his room with the door locked on the inside and one of two keys in his pocket. The second key is a duplicate used by the porter to unlock the door, but the key is "so rusty they don't think it can have been touched for quite a while." Not before it opened the door. I thought that was an interesting touch. So while the police carry out the official investigation in the background, Blaise and Burke play amateur detective with the womanizing, blackmailing providing enough motives to go around. But the only thing that really matters is the impossible disappearance and locked room murder.

Firstly, I agree with Jim that the book is presented to the reader five times as clever as actually turns out to be. The opening chapters gives the impression you have something akin to Derek Smith's Whistle Up the Devil (1954) in your hands, but everything turned out to be as childishly simplistic as it appeared. I think most seasoned mystery readers will be immediately suspicious about something in the setup to the disappearance in Devil's Lane and should, in turn, reveal the right question they didn't ask the watchman. What somewhat saved it from being completely disappointing and unimpressive is that it turned out to be a two-part trick with the answer to the first part uncovering a second impossibility (SPOILER/ROT13: “fb jung lbh'er fnlvat vf gung gur qvfnccrnenapr bs Ze. Qvnobyb'f pybgurf vf nf vzcbffvoyr—be, ng yrnfg, nf zhpu bs n ceboyrz—nf gur qvfnccrnenapr bs Ze. Qvnobyb?”). While the second part of the trick put some much needed shine on the plot, even the story itself admitted it hardly broke any new ground. John Dickson Carr used the trick as an anecdote in one of his celebrated novels, which is probably where Lejeune first heard of it. Regrettably, the locked room murder manages to be even more obvious with one of the oldest, lackluster and routine locked room-tricks on the book. And, in both cases, the obvious or suspicious aspects of the presented impossibilities pointed straight to the culprit. You have to go out of your way to miss it.

A truly great locked room mystery, aspiring to be a classic, would have used the two-part vanishing-act to greater effect nor have dared to present the locked room-trick as anything other than a false-solution. But what the reader got is the equivalent of "Kiddies First Locked Room Mystery." If only Lejeune had penned Mr. Diabolo as a juvenile mystery, it would have actually been a classic of its sort alongside Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950), Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953) and Nicholas Wilde's Death Knell (1990). But as a mystery written for grown up kids, like myself, who love detective story this one is all bark and no bite. I can only really recommended it to fanatical locked room fans and completists. 

Addendum: I proofread casually skimmed over the review and noticed I became a little more negative towards the end than originally intended. Even with my expectations dialed back to expect something a whole lot less ambitious than a genre classic, I still ended up disappointed and letdown. But the book was not a struggle to get through nor did it overstay its welcome. And not anywhere near as bad as some of the worst locked room mysteries encountered over the years. Such as the recently reviewed Robert Brennan's The Toledo Dagger (1927) or Joseph Bowen's bungling in The Man Without a Head (1933). Not to the mention the underside of the bottom of the barrel represented by David L. Marsh's Dead Box (2004). So, if you come across a copy, you don't have to avoid like the plague, but neither do you have to lose any sleep over never coming across a copy.