María Angélica Bosco was an Argentinian novelist, essayist, translator and mystery writer who won the Emecé prize for her first detective novel, La muerte baja en al ascensor (Death Takes the Elevator, 1954) – translated by Pushkin Vertigo in 2016 as Death Going Down. Apparently, Bosco was known in her time as the "Argentinian Agatha Christie" and the original cover of the English translation trumpeted her as the Agatha Christie of Buenos Aires. This is as so many comparisons of female mystery writers to the Queen of Crime not wholly factual.
The story opens on a cold, misty August night when a drunk resident, Francisco Soler, stumbles into one of the plush apartment blocks on Calle Santa Fe, Buenos Aires, but the opening elevator offers a sobering sight – a dead woman, "bundled up in a dark fur coat," lying against the back panel. A whiff of bitter almonds clings to the body ("...must have been potassium cyanide"). The woman is identified as Frida Eidinger, but she was not a resident of the apartment building. So why is there a key to the main door on her key ring? The police turn their attention to the other residents of the building. Firstly, there's the Iñarra household comprising of the seriously ill, bedridden Agustín Iñarra, his wife, Gabriela de Iñarra, and their "haughty and independent" (step) daughter, Beatriz "Betty" Iñarra. Boris Czerbó is a Bulgarian immigrant who was a photographer in Hamburg until 1944 and came to Argentina in 1946. A year later, Boris was joined by his sister, Rita Czerbó, who is pitied by her neighbors as she's "subject to her brother's despotism and miserliness." Dr. Adolfo Luchter, "hard-working and meticulous," is a naturalized Argentinian who has set up his surgery in the apartment building. Lastly, the caretaker and wife, Andrés and Aurora Torres, while the victim's husband, Gustavo Eidinger, hovers discreetly in the background.
Superintendent Inspector Santiago Ericourt and his assistant, Ferruccio Blasi, get tasked with ferreting the truth from this small pool of suspects. Bosco tried to give Santiago Ericourt a glimmer of the "Great Detectives" from yesteryear. A corpulent man who hid a permanent alertness, fearsome patience and an inquisitive drive under his "outward appearance of lethargy," like "an elephant scanning the ground with its trunk for the piece of food it has dropped," but never developed into an interesting detective – remaining a rather colorless character who mostly stays in the background. Blasi showed more promise as a character as his method is stepping on people's toes on purpose with impertinent remarks ("Don't kid yourself. The loyalty of girls like her shifts like a weathervane") or observations ("At that age a woman has a past") to see what comes out of their mouth. Blasi brought some liveliness to the plodding investigation and slow pace, which despite running for a svelte 150 pages felt double its size. However, Death Going Down has a different problem than pacing or a plodding plot.
Bosco apparently didn't like romanticism or sensationalism very much. Every time an element or hint of it turned up, it was taken behind the shed, shot and an apology issued for its presence to the reader. For example, Blasi is ordered to slip down a rope into an apartment following the discovery of the third body and he had temerity to be briefly excited at the prospect of a small adventure, before the reader is quickly assured that the motives for sliding down that rope "were dishearteningly run-of-the-mill" ("reality is in fact far more frightening and bothersome than it is heroic"). Ericourt half-apologetically explaining his theatrical trickery to trap the murderer, "sensationalist is the gentlest adjective that has been applied to me. I must admit that I like a bit of sensation. My aesthetic instruction dates from the first decade of the century." Something only to be expected from a writer aligned with the previously mentioned Realists, but Bosco extended it by going for the most obvious, least inspired solution imaginable. A solution that only works, technically speaking, because the exact method of poisoning is left unclear until the last possible moment. Although most readers can probably make a pretty decent guess, which is why the choice of murderer is not particularly inspired or surprising. And had the method been divulged earlier, the only real mystery that would have been left is why Frida Eidinger was in the apartment building and how her body ended up in the elevator.
Now what the murdered tried to do and how it turned out would have been perfect plot material for a first-class, moody inverted mystery. Something halfway between Columbo and Derrick. Regrettably, Bosco went for the whodunit, dressed up as a police novel, which failed to impress in the end. Massively so. A shame as I really enjoy poking around these non-English vintage detective novels published outside the Anglosphere. Death Going Down unfortunately proved to be one of the weakest I've come across and can't really recommend to the mystery reader who expects some meat on their detective plots.
That being said, Death Going Down merely represents Bosco's first stab at the detective story and first novels deserve a little bit of leniency, because she appears to have improved over time. I poked around what has been written about her currently untranslated novels and Muerte en la costa del rio (Death on the River Bank, 1979) sounds like it would have been better pick to translate. So, hopefully, Bosco gets another opportunity to show non-Spanish speaking mystery fans what she can do with the detective story.
Not to be confused with The Wind Blows Death.
ReplyDeleteHow could anyone confuse it with a Cyril Hare novel?
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