This year marks the 30th anniversary of Douglas G. Green's founding of Crippen & Landru, a small publishing firm specialized in short story collections, whose first publication was John Dickson Carr's Speak of the Devil (1994) – a BBC radio serial originally written and broadcast in 1941. C&L was decades ahead of the curb and gave mystery fans a taste of the coming reprint renaissance with their "Lost Classic" series. A series of short story collections comprising of such early gems as Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), Craig Rice's Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002), Helen McCloy's The Pleasant Assassin (2003), Joseph Commings' Banner Deadlines (2004) and Ellery Queen's The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (2005). Not to mention Queen's previously unpublished novel collected in The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999).
There are fortunately no signs C&L is slowing down or stopping anytime soon as Jeffrey Marks, "the award-winning author of biographies of Craig Rice and Anthony Boucher," took over from Douglas Greene as publisher in 2018.
13 to the Gallows (2008) is a collection of four, never before published manuscripts of stage plays John Dickson Carr wrote during the early 1940s and collaborated on two of the plays with his friend and then Director of Drama at the BBC, Val Gielgud – who had a "shared interest in detective stories and fencing." Gielgud wrote detective novels himself and you would think the name of a British broadcast legend on the covers of Death at Broadcasting House (1934), Death as an Extra (1935) and The First Television Murder (1940) is a guarantee to keep them in circulation, but they have all been out-of-print for ages. This collection of stage plays is the first time his name appeared on a piece of detective fiction in over thirty years. What a way to make a comeback!
Just one more thing before delving into these plays. 13 to the Gallows is edited and introduced by Tony Medawar, a researcher and genre archaeologist, who also littered it with Van Dinean footnotes and even included "Notes for the Curious." Medawar's detailed introduction should give you an appreciation of the time and work that went into the making of this volume of "Lost Classics." One of the many fascinating background details is that it was "the late Derek Smith who first conceived of this collection." So with that out of the way, let's raise the curtain on this collection of stage plays from a once forgotten period of Carr's writing career.
The three-act play "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" (1942) is the first of two collaborations between Carr and Gielgud, which is also the first of two plays that take place in a BBC radio studio. In this case, it's the cellar below a country house on the outskirts of a provincial town that was taken over by the BBC as an emergency security set of studios. When the story begins, they're rehearing the first episode of a true crime program called Murderer's Row starring ex-Chief Inspector Silence to talk about the Kovar case. It was his first big case ("I hanged the criminal") in which Thomas Kovar shot his wife's lover. A part of the program is a dramatic reenactment of the shooting, but the producer, Anthony Barran, made the unfortunate call to cast Elliott Vandeleur and Lanyon Kelsey as the murderer and victim – because Kelsey is rumored to be involved with Vandeleur's wife, Jennifer Sloane. So all the ingredients for murder all there, cooped in a small radio studio, while an air-raid goes on over their heads outside.
One of them gets fatally shot during the on-air performance, but who pulled the trigger and perhaps more importantly how was it done? Silence is on hand to handle the case, until the police arrives, collects two .22s from the studio, but one "has never been fired" ("...barrel's unfouled") and "the other was full of blanks." So what happened to the murder gun? Silence turns the studio inside out and has everybody searched without finding as much as a shell casing. Nobody could have drawn or ditched a gun without being seen, but somebody, somehow, managed to pull it off. The impossibility of a shooting in a closed spaced by an apparently invisible killer and the puzzle of the vanishing gun are perfectly played out, which both have simple, elegant and yet satisfying solutions that simply works on stage. These impossibilities are dressed with the personal and backstage drama of the characters mirroring the old murder case and the running joke of Silence being frightened of microphones. Simply the kind of story fans of Carr and impossible crimes in general. However, "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" is not even the best play in this volume.
A note for the curious: Medawar noted in the afterword to the play that the impossible murder recalls one of Carr's short stories, "although the details of the mystery are entirely different," but I think Max Afford's The Dead Are Blind (1937) warrants a mention here. A locked room mystery staged inside a radio studio. You can also find similar impossible shootings with vastly different solutions in Stacey Bishop's Death in the Dark (1930) and Christopher Bush's The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935).
The second, three-act Carr-Gielgud collaboration, "Thirteen to the Gallows" (1944), is set this time in a Midlands school converted into a wartime emergency studio for the BBC. The program being produced is a spin-off episode, of sorts, of In Town Tonight entitled Out of Town – a series of special items split up between three towns in Britain. Barran from "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" returns to produce Barchester part of the program, but, during the rehearsals, slowly sees the whole thing disintegrating in front of his eyes. Even having to entertain the idea of interviewing a man who trains and imitates sea lions. Fortunately, the town has something of a notorious local celebrity, Wallace Hatfield.
Hatfield is a builder who had converted the school into a radio studio and, several years before, was tried for the murder of his wife, Lucy. Not only was he acquitted, but the death dismissed as a tragic accident as the prosecution couldn't even prove it was murder. Lucy had fallen from the belfry, "seventy or eighty feet," scattered round the body were flowers with Hatfield being the only person near the tower. What saved his neck is that the police found only Lucy's footprints in the dust up in the belfry. So nobody could have pushed her. Hatfield still believes she murdered and agrees to be interviewed, which initially was supposed to be conducted by an ex-Scotland Yard inspector. Program director, Sir John Burnside, insists on his old OC, Colonel Sir Henry Bryce, former head of the Indian Police. Sir John gushing over his old OC is another strain for the harassed producer culminating with Barran calling the old OC "son of a cock-eyed half-caste Indian constable" right when Colonel Sir Henry Bryce his entree. Just in time for history to repeat itself as an invisible killer throws another person from the belfry.
Medawar notes in the introduction "Carr clearly contributed to the mystery and Gielgud the authentic details of broadcasting" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" very clearly has Carr's fingerprints all over the plot and storytelling. From the comedy and clueing to the impossible crime reworked from his Suspense radio-play "The Man Without a Body" (1943). Only smudge is that the murderer is an absolute idiot, but other than that, as good and solid a mystery as its predecessor. A vintage Carr. A pity he never considered reworking "The Man Without a Body" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" into a Sir Henry Merrivale mystery. I gladly would have traded one of the final three Merrivale novels for The New Invisible Man.
The last two plays were solo projects, "a version for the stage of his famous BBC series Appointment with Death," beginning with the short play "Intruding Shadow" (1945), which is tightly-plotted little story of domestic murder – staged at the home of a well-known mystery writer. Richard Marlowe is the author of such celebrated detective novels as Death in the Summer-House, Murder at Whispering Lodge and The Nine Black Clues, but the story finds him dabbling in true crime of the fictitious kind. Marlowe wants to scare the pants of Bruce Renfield, a West End blackmailer, to make him back off from one of his victims and hand over the blackmail material. In order to achieve his goal, Marlowe is going to make both of them believe he's about to murder Renfield. After all, this is Golden Age mysteries in which a blackmailer is the type of person "who deserves to die" or "to be scared within an inch of his life." A plan that spectacularly backfires when Marlowe finds a dying Renfield on his doorstep shortly followed by Inspector Sowerby.
Apparently, "Intruding Shadow" was met with some reserved praise from the critics, but on paper, it's easily the best of the four plays Carr wrote during the war years. A short, pure undiluted detective story recalling that small gem "Who Killed Matthew Corbin?" (1939/40). Both stories are essentially Carr successfully pulling an Agatha Christie-style whodunit without any locked rooms or other impossible crimes. There is, however, a typical, Carrian Grand Guignol scene involving the corpse. So a great detective tale all around!
The fourth and last (short) play, "She Slept Lightly" (1945), belongs together with The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) and the previously mentioned radio-play, Speak of the Devil, to Carr's earliest experiments in mixing the detective story with historical fiction, which he kind of pioneered starting with plays and short stories – e.g. "The Other Hangman" (1935) and "Blind Man's Hood" (1937). After the 1940s, Carr began to write fully fledged historical mystery novels decades before the historical mystery became a subgenre of its own. Regrettably, Carr's historical (locked room) mysteries and thrillers either criminally underrated or outright ignored. A real shame as some of the Carr's best work from the 1950s and '60s can be found among his historical novels. Captain Cut-Throat (1955) is one of the best historical mystery-thrillers ever written and one of Carr's finest novels from the post-war period.
Just like Captain Cut-Throat, "She Slept Lightly" is a mystery-thriller set in Napoleonic France and brings several characters together in the home of Belgian miller while the Battle of Waterloo rages on in the background. Firstly, there's the elderly Lady Stanhope, "her enemies might call her a little mad," whose carriage overturned and needs the miller to guide her through the French lines. The second arrival is a wounded British soldier, Captain Thomas Thorpe, who's looking for the young girl in Lady Stanhope's company. She, however, denies the existence of the girl. Major von Steinau, a Prussian Hussar, is another one who's interested in this apparently non-existent woman and not without reason. He hanged her only a year ago for spying ("I saw the rope choke out your life"). So how could she be alive and walking around?
Like I said, this is more of a historical mystery-thriller than detective story with the apparent impossibility of a woman who was hanged and lived to tell about it as a small side-puzzle, but I can see why this historical melodrama is not going to excite everyone. I enjoyed it. However, I'm also very, very partial to the type of historical mystery as envisioned by Carr, Robert van Gulik and Paul Doherty. So feel free to disagree on this one.
So the quality of the plays, purely as detective and thriller stories, is uniformly excellent, but, more importantly, 13 to the Gallows plugged another fascinating, once completely forgotten gap in Carr's body of work – similar to the obscure radio-plays collected in The Island of Coffins (2021). That's the greatest contribution C&L had made in helping to restore Carr back to print. A highly recommendable, must-have volume for the true JDC aficionado and might pick up The Kindling Spark: Early Tales of Mystery, Horror and Adventure (2022) before tackling the Brittain and Hoch collections.
I am a tremendous fan of this collection - and indeed of the amazing gathering of radio plays that Crippen and Landru have managed so far. The Island of Coffins is a must-have, of course, but if you can tear yourself away from your precious impossible crimes for a minute and find impossible-to-find copies of THE CASE OF THE MURDERED MOTHS (Ellery Queen) and THE CASEBOOK OF GREGORY HOOD (Anthony Boucher), you will be a happier man for it! Mystery was a much beloved genre in radio, and to have had men like Carr, Queen and Boucher writing classic puzzle mysteries in less than a half hour is a fabulous gift, marred only by the fact that so much of this is lost. Okay, now I have to schedule a re-read of 13 TO THE GALLOWS!!
ReplyDeleteI already have The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and The Casebook of Gregory Hood. So don't have to tear myself away from my precious impossible crimes, but you're right, they're both great collections deserving of a follow up. I would also love C&L collection with the best radio-plays from Suspense like "The Dead Sleep Lightly" and "The Too-Perfect Alibi."
Delete"...and to have had men like Carr, Queen and Boucher writing classic puzzle mysteries in less than a half hour is a fabulous gift, marred only by the fact that so much of this is lost."
Australia appears to be a lost goldmine of forgotten and lost detective radio-plays. Max Afford wrote a lot of radio-plays including the hour long play "The Case of the Talking Fingers" about a murder seen by a deaf man and heard by a blind man, but the recording and script appear to be lost. Only a handful of Afford's radio and stage plays have been collected, so far, in the 1974 collection Mischief in the Air. So that one is probably of interest to you.