The Moving House of Foscaldo (1925/26) by Charles Chadwick

Charles Chadwick was an American author, lawyer, sportsman and a former college athlete, a Yale strongman, who competed in the 1904 Summer Olympics and nearly won bronze in the men's hammer throw event – narrowly missing out on the medal by a few meters. Chadwick was a lawyer by trade who served as New York City's deputy assistant district attorney, worked as a sports writer for New York World and contributed short stories for publications like The Popular Magazine, The Ladies' Home Journal and Sport Story Magazine. Much more important than his public service and dalliance with sports is the fact Chadwick published two detective novels during the 1920s.

Robert Adey not only listed Chadwick's The Cactus (1925) and The Moving House of Foscaldo (1925/26) in Locked Room Murders (1991), but highlighted and praised them in the introduction ("both are well worth reading"). I mentioned Chadwick's two detective novels in 2022 blogpost "Curiosity is Killing the Cat: Detective Novels That Need to Be Reprinted," but their obscurity and not having been in print for a century appeared to be an obstacle to their speedy return to print, one way or another. So was pleased when I recently came across a fresh reprint of Chadwick's The Moving House of Foscaldo.

Last year, I reviewed a reprint of Joseph Gollomb's The Girl in the Fog (1923) from a small, independent publisher, Serling Lake, which specialized in reprinting obscure, out-of-print locked room mystery novels – under the banner "Impossible Crime Classics." That sounded better than it was at the time as the then modest selection consisting mostly of earlier, poorer works from the public domain. Gollomb's The Girl in the Fog is nothing less than third-rate tripe and the titles added over the past year weren't much better, at least until recently. G.E. Locke's The Scarlet Macaw (1923) and Elsa Barker's The Cobra Candlestick (1928) aren't the best locked room mysteries the twenties produced, but have come across much, much worse from that decade (e.g. Robert Brennan's The Toledo Dagger, 1927). J.M. Walsh's "atmospheric mystery" The Hairpin Mystery (1926) and Henry Leverage's "high-stakes thriller" The Purple Limited (1927) seem to have some potential. It's their brand new edition of The Moving House of Foscaldo that made me bite again.

Before delving into this long lost, long forgotten detective novel, I should mention the curious, short publication history of The Cactus and The Moving House of Foscaldo.

Adey's Locked Room Murders names lawyer Bob Ellis as the detective of The Cactus, solving a stabbing in a locked room, whom previously appeared in two short stories, "Pawn to Queen's Eighth" (1910) and "The Twist of the Screw" (1912), published in The Popular Magazine as by "Daniel Steele." I checked and they appear to be the same character, but no idea why the short stories were published under a penname and the novel under his own name. The Cactus only appeared in the US and begins with an impossible murder in Greenwich Village, New York, which leads Ellis to Mexico. The Moving House of Foscaldo, a standalone, was serialized in The Elks magazine from October 1925 to February 1926 and published as a book only in the UK. So this probably contributed to them not getting reprinted over the past hundred years, but it also didn't help Chadwick simply stopped writing novels and even abandoned short stories by the end of the twenties. A shame as he seems to have been one of the better writers of the pre-and early Golden Age mystery with a healthy interest in locked rooms and impossible crimes. The two-parter, "Ellis in Search of a Feather," published in the January 15 and February 1, 1913, issues of The Popular Magazine, looks to be a locked room mystery. Chadwick's short stories needs further investigation, but, for now, let's take a look at his second and last detective novel.

The setting here is a lonely, wooded and cliff-bound island near the French coast, Island of Foscaldo, which has an old, Dutch-style windmill tower perched on a cliff as its dominating landmark – known as la maison mouvante, the Moving House. It stands "dizzily on the cliff's very edge" held in place by "two chain stays whose huge rusted links fastened back into the rocks." Count Foscaldo built the windmill-like structure following his escape to the remote island during the Reign of Terror of Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. So the Island of Foscaldo is shrouded in obscure, forgotten history, mysterious structures and scenery that belongs on the canvas of a Romanticists painting. That's brought Peer Rackstrom, a landscape painter, to the island and becomes deeply entangled in a series of increasingly mysterious and dangerous adventures.

It begins innocently enough when Rackstrom finds an ancient, weathered brass key with a barely legible legend, "XETGAMAINFECI," engraved on it. A key belonging to the Royal locksmith, Gamain, who betrayed King Louis XVI? And, perhaps, linked to the armoire de fer, or iron box, which "had been taken from the walls of the King's chamber" to be stashed away on the island. So, of course, he loses the key. Next he catches a glimpse of a beautiful woman on a sailboat who looked at him in surprise, "like some wild creature," picked up anchor and sailed away. What really sets the ball rolling is the arrival on the island is several men from Paris. Firstly, there's Inspector Auguste Prontout, Prefecture of Police, who has come to the island with his subordinate, Dirmoir, to arrest one of the most dangerous man in the country, Gabas. Wanted for murder and robbery in the Marie Lafitte case. Inspector Prontout enlists Rackstrom's help, but ends up getting a front row seat to an inexplicable, seemingly impossible vanishing-act.

One night, Rackstrom observes Gabas going inside the windmill, closely followed by Dirmoir, but only Gabas comes back out muttering a strange goodbye ("Ha! Dirmoir! Adieu"). Rackstrom goes inside expecting to find a crime scene, but after searching the place, top to bottom, concludes "the place was empty of any soul" except himself. Gabas could not have concealed the body, anywhere, because of "the tower's simple, rude, unfinished mode of interior construction" – in which "planking, timbers and everything was exposed to view." So how did the policeman disappear when Rackstrom saw him following Gabas inside through the only entrance, and exit, to the windmill tower? And without a sign, or trace, of a struggle!That's not the last time someone vanishes from the windmill nor was it the first time it happened.

A promising and, above all, surprising beginning recalling, or rather anticipating, the French mystery writers from the 1930s. Writers like Stanislas-André Steeman, Gaston Boca, Noel Vindry, Pierre Véry, Herbert & Wyl, but the second-half suggests, if Chadwick was in influenced by French mystery writers at all, that influence likely came from Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc. Both parts surprised me. I expected tougher stuff from an All-American college athlete, who competed in the Olympics, like Hake Talbot's Rogan Kincaid in The Hangman's Handyman (1942). Not a novel of adventure and romance soaked in French romanticism living up to Véry's credo "what counts for an author" is "to save what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were" so "full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadow and mystery." That becomes particularly true around the second-half when every resemblance to a traditional detective, even by French standards, mostly comes to an end. Mostly.

The second-half finds Rackstrom and the woman on the sailboat exploring, and getting themselves trapped, inside a cavern system, but their subterranean adventure is not as cliché, dated or hackneyed as it sounds. It actually has a modern touch as their ordeal plays out like a video game in which they need to explore, solve puzzles and collect items to unlock new areas helped by a series of diagrams drawn to map the caverns. Yes, the pattern emerging from the diagrams and mapping attempts can be taken as a hint. And, eventually, reveals the solution to a century old mystery that has largely gone unnoticed by history. I also liked the scene in which Gabas explains his strange backstory to Rackstrom claiming royal blood and being haunted by his ancestors. Not haunted by their ghosts, but by "inherited memories." Like I said, The Moving House of Foscaldo might appear dated at a glance, but Chadwick didn't rely on them to fill the pages of a serial. He really tried to do something with the story and succeeded admirably, definitely by 1920s standards. That doubly goes for the impossible crime element.

That bizarre, crumbling cliff-bound structure dominates the story, especially during the story's opening and closing stages. I mentioned in a previous review how the 1920s was the decade when the 1930s, Golden Age detective story was beginning to take shape and solidify, but that came with growing pain and the overall quality being all over the place – until roughly 1927, 1928, when some real progress was being made. The solution to the impossible disappearances, past and present, is far above the average for the time and shows Chadwick liked to make work of his impossible crimes and locked room puzzles. A perfect fit for this kind of story and much more satisfying than my practical half-baked armchair solution. It all makes for a highly readable, absorbing and atmospheric tale of adventure, romance, mystery and history.

Chadwick's The Moving House of Foscaldo is undoubtedly a novel of adventure and romance with detective story elements rather than a detective novel with a dash of adventure and romance, but, if you're looking for something off the beaten track, it comes highly recommended! Fingers crossed The Cactus is next to be reprinted by Serling Lake. And, hopefully, a few more of the obscure, choosier items on my special locked room wishlist.

Note for the curious: my half-baked, completely wrong armchair solution "cleverly" hinged on a simple principle of magic tricks and illusions. Everything that should make the trick more difficult for the magician/culprit actually makes it easier. Rackstrom claims the body could not be concealed owning to the nature of the ramshackle windmill, but what if he simply didn't search good enough? The windmill has as to be expected sail arms that have long ceased to revolve and the canvas had torn and sagged over time. What if one of these torn, sagging sails created a fold, or pouch, in which a body can be tugged away. This pouch can be accessed from the inside the mill by moving some of the loose timber aside to create a small opening to worm a body through, before putting the timber or planks back in place. That way, you can search the place, top to bottom, all day long without ever finding a body.