The Footprints of Satan (1950) by Norman Berrow

Last year, I reviewed the last two of Norman Berrow's locked room mystery novels, The Bishop's Sword (1948) and The Spaniard's Thumb (1949), featuring Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith of the Winchingham police – a small, rural community plagued by strange, seemingly impossible crimes. The Bishop's Sword ambitiously tried to string together numerous miraculous incidents and The Spaniard's Thumb centered on the legend of a giant, disembodied thumb angrily stamping around a sealed cellar in a homicidal rage. Regrettably, the locked room-tricks were prosaic at best and hackneyed at worst, which detracted from their other qualities as wildly imaginative Golden Age detective stories. If they had have been penned by a writer and storyteller of lesser talent and capabilities, they would have been extremely disappointing.

That being said, Berrow's was not inept when it came to handling locked room mysteries and produced two often overlooked classics of the form.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) is a crime caper in which respectively a man, a whole room and finally an entire street simply vanish as if they were wiped out of existence. The Footprints of Satan (1950) is his crowning achievement with one of the most enterprising treatments of the impossible footprints-in-the-snow. Both can stand comparisons with other locked room classics, but, until recently, you rarely heard or came across them on the many best-of and must-read lists – neither receiving a spot on the 1981 nor 2007 ranking (see John Pugmire's "A Locked Room Library"). Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) is an exception as it singled out The Footprints of Satan as "one of the surprisingly few stories to make use of the devil's-hoofprints case of early-nineteenth century Devon" and "probably Berrow's best effort." In 2005, Ramble House began to bring Berrow's back into print and The Footprints of Satan has since garnered some favorable reviews. And, finally, appeared on one or two best-of lists. So high time to revisit this old favorite.

The opening chapter suggests a conventional, typically British village mystery as the young, recently widowed Gregory Cushing arriving in Steeple Thelming, Winchingham, to stay with his uncle, Jake Popplewell – who's considered by some a character and by other "a blot on the town's escutcheon." An independently minded drunk who sneers at moderation ("the curse of the cultured classes") and women. Stating to his nephew that "never the breath nor the shrill complainin' voice of a woman shall poison the atmosphere" of "Jake Poplewell's castle." The castle being a small cottage stands at the foot of a small hill on the outskirts of Winchingham known as The Rise. On the other side of the road, up the Rise, stand the homes of well-to-do, mostly retired gentlefolk of the rural community. Old Jake shows his nephew around the neighborhood and who lives where. From the poor, bedridden Jacques who lives opposite of Jake, Farmer Silver and the Croxley's to the fancy homes of Lionel Maltravers and old Mrs. Pendlebury. And the later lives there together with her sister, Miss Emmy Forbes, who previously appeared in The Bishop's Sword. She hasn't changed a bit ("an old maid with funny ideas"). Lastly, there's a small county house where Montague Mason, a London business of ill-repute, occasionally stays.

So, like I said, The Footprints of Satan begins ordinarily enough and could have been the beginning of a Christopher Bush mystery (e.g. The Case of the Curious Client, 1947). One morning, after a night of heavy snowfall, the inhabitants awaken to discover a trail of hoof-marks that defies a natural explanation. All the evidence suggests the Devil, "or one of his imps," came down to Winchingham ("specifically to The Base and Steeple Thelming...") and it walked by night!

According to the physical evidence, a hoofed entity that "walked upright on two legs in a fashion unlike any creature known to man" landed at the foot of The Rise ("like a bird from flight"), casually walked up The Rise and entered various private gardens – always "turning away from the front doors of those people's houses." But it gets even weirder as the hoof-prints are found in physically inaccessible places. They are found on top of flimsy privet hedge, "which would not have supported a newly-born kitten" and across the top of a six-foot wall. Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith is called to investigate and follow the trail to its end, which become increasingly more impossible as it nears its end. Bafflingly, the creature apparently can walk through solid matter as it passed through Maltraver's garden pavilion and Pendlebury's boarded-up summerhouse, towards the Steeple Inn and Montague Mason's house. There the situation really begins to look otherworldly. Mason's house has a steep roof, "far too steep for almost anything other than a fly to retain a footing on it," but nobody present fails to notice that on that steep, snowy roof was "a ring of marks where something that had hooved had walked round and round in a wide circle." Another ring of hoof-marks circle the house, as if it was trying to enter the house, and a pair of prints are found on a window sill. The trail that began at the bottom of The Rise came to an end in the middle of a bare, empty paddock underneath a dead tree. Montague Mason was hanging from the lowest branch of the dead tree and the only traces where his bootprints going from the house into the paddock!

What an amazing and fantastic premise for an impossible crime story of the no-footprints variety. Surprisingly, like Adey said, perhaps the only detective novel to make use of the real-life, unexplained 1855 incident of the Devon hoof-marks. That case gets discussed complete with excerpts from The Times and the Illustrated London News, but also the 1840 report of similar hoof-marks on Kerguelen Island and the foot-marks found around the famously haunted Borley Rectory at Christmastime 1938. Miss Emmy Forbes who stimulates the discussion of alternative explanations for the strange hoof-marks in the snow. I enjoyed how Berrow's depicted the discovery of the hoof-marks with the yawning, sleepy-eyed people leaving their warm beds to study the line of prints, rampantly speculate and even taking some pictures. That small touch of simple humanity made those strange prints standout even more as something that intruded upon reality and left its traces.

However, Smith has more on his plate than just a dodgy suicide and a trail of footprints that appear to have cleared an obstacle course from hell without breaking a sweat.

The barren, empty paddock with the dead tree has a ghost story, the ghost of a reputed witch called the Blue Woman, who had been hanged in paddock centuries ago and now her ghost walks Steeple Thelming on certain nights, but the only one whoever sees her is Jake – always when he returns home drunk. Whoever, or whatever, left those impossible hoof-marks returns. This time, the hoofed creature left behind another dead body inside a circle of hoof-prints. Just like the first time, "the hoof-prints began from nowhere, ended in nothing." So not the usual questions of motive and opportunity, checking the soundness of alibis or even trying to solve a normal locked room-puzzle dominate the story, but trying to find a rational, down-to-earth explanation for the hoof-marks. Smith simply has to find an answer rather than admit "the phenomena transcended the bounds of physical interpretation" that would hurl them "back a thousand years to days of misty medieval thought and fearful belief in black magic and witchcraft."

Smith has been called a drab, colorless character. I would call him homely rather than colorless and, artistically, some might want to see a character like Dr. Gideon Fell or Rogan Kincaid the case of the devil's hoof-marks. There is, however, something to be said about having a normal, level-headed and logical detective on a case as extraordinary as this one. Smith explained it himself as follow: "I've got a simple mind! I don't make mysteries—only the complicated minds do that—I unravel them, or try to. My mind is too simple to believe what my eyes seem to tell me, so I look for the simple truth." Smith simply does not believe a demonic presence came down to Winchingham and methodically begins to examine every inch of the trail. Uncovering small inconsistencies along the way. And, inch by inch, print by print, Smith begins to slay his goblins and uncovering pieces of the puzzle. Pieces that slowly start to fall into their place with satisfying clicks.

The solution to the titular footprints is worthy of its ambitious premise. It would have been easy to simply say the murderer created the prints by walking on long stilts that allowed to reach the high places to make imprints by hands, but most of us would have tossed the book angry across the room had that been solution. Berrow's put some work into setting up and then explaining away this hellish obstacle course in the snow. Some stretches of the journey are better and more convincing than other parts, but, on a whole, admirably done and particular liked the tricks for apparently passing through the boarded-up summerhouse and the circle of prints on the steep roof. If the plot comes up short anywhere, it's all the attention and focus going into the impossible hoof-prints that allowed a small, really tiny flaw to be overlooked (ROT13: rira nsgre n phefbel rknzvangvba, gur qbpgbe fubhyq unir orra noyr gb gryy gung Znfba qvqa'g qvr va n unatvat cbfvgvba naq jnf abg unatrq hagvy frireny ubhef nsgre uvf qrngu onfrq ba gur yvibe zbegvf. Nsgre qrngu oybbq frggyrf va gur ybjre cbegvba bs gur obql, juvpu, jura unatrq, jbhyq unir orra uvf yrtf).

Other than that, The Footprints of Satan is a one-of-a-kind impossible crime novel that does something very special and out of the ordinary with the ever tricky problem of the miraculous footprints. I consider the impossible footprints to be the most difficult of all impossible crime scenarios to pull-off convincingly and satisfactory, which is why there are so few classics of it. So always admire any mystery writer who can do one, or two, successfully without relying on one of the basic tricks. Berrow's turned the impossible footprints-in-the-snow into an Olympic winter sport. Something that can only be compared in scope and originality to Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), James Scott Byrnside's The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) and maybe Kaito KID's mid-air walk from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 44. I hope John Dickson Carr got to read The Footprints of Satan as it's the kind of pick-me-up he sorely needed in 1950. So highly recommended to everyone hopelessly addicted to impossible crime fiction and Golden Age detectives in general.