The Spaniard's Thumb (1949) by Norman Berrow

I joked in the past that Edgar Allan Poe created the detective story, or rather gifted it a heartbeat, when secreting a spare heart from the horror genre under one of the floorboards of the locked room mystery and perhaps gave the traditional detective story its immortal quality – given how many times critics tried to sign its death certificate. So the detective story has, fittingly enough, unnatural blood and organ ties to the horror genre. You can spot the family resemblance every time the detective story evokes the supernatural or other worldly creatures. From the hell-beast roaming the foggy moors in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and the windigo from Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) that stalks it human prey from the sky to the living dead of Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017). Simply having a good, old haunted house or a cursed room that kills as a backdrop for murder. 

Norman Berrow's The Spaniard's Thumb (1949) takes the cake with its giant, disembodied centenarian thumb haunting a disused cellar and crushing anyone who dares to enter!

The empty, disused cellar is located underneath the old, original stone part of Falloway Hall and has an iron door with a barred opening at eye-level that has been locked for over half a century. And the key has been lost for years. What lurks behind the iron door is the proverbial skeleton in the closet of the Falloways. A 100 years ago, the third Sir Jeremy was the master of Falloway Hall who had imprisoned his wife's Spanish inamorato in the dark cellar where he taunted the gaunt, ragged prisoner for three long years – reminding him constantly he was completely under his thumb. When the prisoner was on death's doorstep, he told Sir Jeremy with his dying breath that "for hereafter and to all eternity, you will be under my thumb" and "you and your heirs and descendants shall live under it and die under it." So the family curse was born and several Falloways died under bizarre circumstances in the cellar. This went on until the last male Falloway passed away mysteriously and the estate passed onto the female line as the thing in the cellar quieted down.

Decades later, Mrs. Lavinia Falloway-Fairfax died childless and left the entire estate to her very surprised grandniece by marriage, Cherry Fairfax. She's accompanied to her new home by Aunt Margaret, "that good lady who had taken charge of Cherry when she had been orphaned," and the family lawyer, Mr. Champion, to show them around the place. Only smudge on the place appears to be general post-war malaise of rationing and shortages of everything from food and petrol to labor. So everything appeared to be peachy, a dream come true, until a week passed and some unnerving, midnight noises ("thud-thud-thud-thud-thud") began to emanate from the locked cellar ("it wasn't Jarvis, by any chance, doing some nocturnal carpentering?").

Aunt Margaret suggests to call upon Quentin Veil, "an investigator of psychic disturbances," while their next door neighbor, Stephen Kevin, fabricates a skeleton key from another period key. So the cellar can now be entered and properly investigated. Veil intends to catch whatever is making the disturbing sounds on photograph and rigs up an infrared camera, but things go horribly wrong during a second attempt to capture the source of that peculiar, rhythmic drumming. Veil and Kevin are brutally attacked when they go into the cellar. Kevin is struck with such force that "he was hurled out of the cellar and across the passage outside" to "split his skull open on the opposite wall," while Veil got "stamped or smashed" to death – simply squashed flat. Kevin caught a glimpse of what attacked them and described it as looking like "an enormous human thumb" that squashed Veil "like you'd squash an insect."

Falloway Hall stands in the small town of Winchingham and so the investigation falls onto Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith, who has dealt before with phantom rooms, psychic bodies, apparitions and vanishings, but "there was an element of comedy" to those capers – not something with "shades of Bram Stoker." John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, suggests The Spaniard's Thumb is parody of Horace Walpole's 18th century Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), in which a giant helmet crushes its victims to death. But that as an aside. The Spaniard's Thumb is a Golden Age detective novel and Smith has a dark, complicated intrigue to untangle as the victim poses an even bigger mystery than the circumstances under which he died. Why was the harmless ghost hunter murdered? Veil only entered the picture after the noises in the cellar had started. If the murderer is flesh-and-blood, why did the photograph Veil took only shows a long stretch of wall with a human murderer or an over-sized, aggressively territorial human thumb? And can the solution to "The Case of the Spaniard's Thumb" in a handwritten account titled The Secret History of Falloway Hall? Not before a second body is found in the locked cellar with "the only known key to it in the inspector's pocket."

However, I decided against using the "locked room mysteries" and "impossible crimes" tags on this review. Technically, the thumping sounds coming from behind a locked door and the second murder qualify as locked room mysteries, but found them to be marginal, disappointing in their resolution and detracting from everything else the story did right. It has been said that Berrow was better at stating his mysteries than explaining them, but he was a great storyteller who "found a way to eke out the uncunny in the everyday" that makes everything leading up to the conclusion so incredibly captivating and entertaining to read. Even if you can trim 20 or 30 pages from nearly all of his novels. The Spaniard's Thumb is a fine example of Berrow's talent and skills when it comes to characterization and telling a story.

The central conceit might evoke an 18th century Gothic novel, The Spaniard's Thumb takes place under a warm, lazy summer sun that casts Falloway Hall in a bright light. So it takes some time until not even the sunshine streaming in through the open windows or the singing of birds can not keep out the "fear and foreboding" that "enveloped Falloway Hall in an invisible pall." I can see how having two dead, mutilated bodies dragged from your supposedly haunted cellar can kill the mood around the dinner table, but a very well-done piece of storytelling as the frightening experiences keep getting dispelled by sunny mornings and long summer afternoons. This building to the point where the fear becomes palpable in the daylight is so much more effective than immediately going for thunderstorms or a white winter shroud to set the mood. Berrow also made more work than usually of the who-and why, which was neither too obvious nor too evasive, but could have been clued a bit stronger. The Spaniard's Thumb has a small cast of characters. So everyone who enters the picture is eyed suspiciously, but, this time, it took while for it to become apparent as important connecting clue is not given until the second-half of the story. One aspect of the misdirection regrettably demonstrated where Berrow comes up short as a plotter (ROT13: “...grfgvzbal bs jung unccrarq gura vf n snoevpngvba”).

And, yet, despite its shortcomings and Berrow rarely delivering on his wildly imaginative premises, I find it impossible to dislike The Spaniard's Thumb. I believe its link to the locked room mystery, albeit a very tenuous and disappointing one, overshadowed the fact The Spaniard's Thumb is an extremely well-written, decently plotted Golden Age detective yarn. And were it not for those minor, disappointing locked room elements, it might be better remembered today. If only for the imagery of giant, disembodied thumb squashing people like bugs.

So never let it be said I only care about tricks with no eye for atmosphere, characters and storytelling, but would like to know why Berrow decided to specialize in locked rooms and impossible crimes. Berrow had enough genre awareness to understand most of his solutions do not measure up their splendid premises. You can call them at best prosaic and at worst hackneyed. Only two exceptions to date are The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) and The Footprints of Satan (1950). So was it stylistic choice to pair fresh, original and out-of-this-world impossibilities with the simplest, down-to-earth answers or simply had no idea how to explain them? Either way, you'll most likely enjoy Berrow's work not expecting something that could have been plotted by John Dickson Carr or Paul Halter. I recommend to approach The Spaniard's Thumb as a non-impossible room that kills story like Carr's radio-play "The Devil's Saint" (1943) and Halter's La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990). 

A note for the curious: it has been a while since I tacked on one of my alternative, armchair solutions to a locked room problem. A possibility occurred to me how the cellar and the thing could be used for a legitimate locked room-trick, a trick as cockamamie as the idea of a murderous thumb angrily stamping around a cellar in the dead of night, but you have to complete alter the story and plot to make it work – like a turn-of-the-century style treasure hunt mystery. So hear me out. A long, long time ago, a treasure was buried or secreted somewhere in or around Falloway Hall. The then owner who buried the treasure also hid a clue to its location in the cellar, but had the iron door locked, sealed and the key destroyed. And decreed the cellar a time capsule not to be opened until a 100 or 150 years has passed (tasking the ghost of the giant thumb with protecting the secret). So how can the treasure hunter and murderer bypass the iron door to examine the room? Forcing it open would make too much noise. And looking through the opening only shows an empty, dusty cellar. Suggesting the clue is probably buried under the stone floor, carved in the walls right next to the door or maybe a hidden passage to the clue. The culprit has to take a gamble by having the door opened by some with a reason and authority to break open the door... like the police.

Lets suppose this person begins going down the cellar in the middle of the night to loosen the bars, one by one, on the eye-level opening until they can all be taken out and simply placed back in (source of the ghostly noises). Now suppose this treasure hunter had someone on hand who needed disposing anyway, bludgeons that person and tightly wraps the body inside a blanket or piece of tarp. He then places something long, thick and sturdy over the body (legless table top or plank?) and drives a car or small tractor over it to break all of the bones. It also makes it look as the victim was rubbed out by a giant thumb. This broken, mangled mess of a body and pulverized bones can be much more easily squashed through the opening, minus bars, of the iron door and shoved into the middle of the room with a pole. Yes, it would leave a trail in the dust, but adds to the illusion of someone getting rubbed out of existence by a giant, disembodied thumb. Only thing the murderer is super glue the bars back into place, wait for an opportune moment to discover the body and be one hand when the room is opened. The big, jokey twist (of course) would be that the clue to the treasure was always accessible as the stone floor is laid out like a map of the estate with a round stone, or something, marking the burial place. The iron door with the slightly bigger barred opening (a clue) was merely a psychological obstacle to mislead treasure hunters with gold fever who peeked through it hoping to get a glimmer of what kind of clue could be hidden in there. And completely missing the bigger picture right in front of their eyes.

So this little nugget of pulpy insanity bubbled up in my brain, while pondering the impossible possibilities of The Spaniard's Thumb and thought some of you might appreciate it. I know I'm not the only locked room loon around here.