One of my little pet peeves with
Robert Adey and Brian Skupin's locked room bibliographies is the
inclusion of novels and short stories that were either erroneous
advertised or mistakenly perceived as impossible crime stories, but
have since been identified as non-impossibilities – receiving a "not impossible" comment with their entries. I think these
entries are a waste of page space and could have been easily fixed by
listing them at the back of the book with the comment that they
aren't locked room mysteries.
A particular egregious example is
Elizabeth George's 800-page tome, A Traitor to Memory (2001),
which apparently is one of those psychological, character-driven
crime novels listed by Skupin in Locked Room Murders: Supplement
(2019) as a non-impossible crime. Strangely enough, this entry came
to mind when I finished reading the latest offering from John
Pugmire's treasured Locked
Room International.
La mort vient de nulle part
(Death Out of Nowhere, 1945) by Alexis Gensoul and Charles
Grenier is more of a novella than a novel, scarcely a 100 pages long,
but jam-packed with phantom shootings inside locked or watched rooms.
The complete opposite of A Traitor to Memory!
Death Out of Nowhere presents
the reader with a classic, well-worn premise when four "inseparable
friends" gathered for their annual gathering at the small lodge
of Breule Manor where, each year, Baron Pierre de Malèves "offered
them a peaceful and economical vacation." A group of friends
comprising of a celebrated mystery novelist, Jules Dublard, a
newspaper reporter for L'Informateur, Lucien Darlay, a school
supervisor, Louis Beaurieux, and a registration clerk, Yves Le Bellec
– who begin the story with a discussion of one of Dublard's locked
room puzzles. When left alone, Le Bellec asks Dublard if wants an
opportunity to display his talents.
An opportunity to match wits "a
master who has taken every precaution not to leave the slightest
trace" of his "beautiful crime." Only thing Dublard
has to do is fix the time of the crime and show how it was done.
Dublard picked up the gauntlet.
Le Bellec theatrically placed a
handkerchief on his head, took out a pack of playing cards and threw
the king of spades to the floor while shouting, "the Emperor of
China be damned." A silly looking, but soon to be ominous,
ritual that would be repeated several times throughout the story and
always with the same result. A gunshot, somewhere in the direction of
the manor, shattering the peace.
The first victim is the elderly
great-uncle of the Baron, Antoine de Malèves, whose body is found in
his room with a bullet in his back, but the door was bolted and the
closed window was covered with metal shutters – no weapon was found
inside the room! Commissaire Machaux with the baffling, seemingly
impossible, shooting of an inoffensive, seventy-year-old butterfly
collector. But the best, most amusing part of this still very
traditional portion of the story is Dublard "constructing
extravagant hypotheses" showing how different people could have
achieved the seemingly impossible. I loved it when he started firing
off false-solutions like a vintage Gatling gun!
However, the traditional manor house
mystery soon veers into pulp territory when a second murder is
committed under nearly identical circumstances and a third person is
wounded in a salon with both doors under observation. These phantom
shootings are followed by yet another impossible murder! As you
probably can expect, not every locked room-trick employed in a
multi-impossible crime story is going to be first-rate. The third
shooting uses a very slight variation on a familiar, well-worn trick,
creaking with age, while the fourth shooting was simply
disappointing, but I can see why the first and second murder earned
it a place on Roland Lacourbe's Locked
Room Library – a list of essential novels which should be
included in "any respectable (French) locked room lover's
collection." A "truly original method of causing death"
and "a machine for creating an alibi."
Don't get me wrong, the solution is
pure, unfiltered pulp and not to everyone's taste, but I've developed
a taste for pulp-style impossible crime stories. So probably liked it
a little more than most readers.
It's very tempting to compare Death
Out of Nowhere to the (translated) detective novels by Gaston
Boca, Pierre
Véry and Noël
Vindry, but I commented on JJ's review
that everything about the story struck me as the French equivalent of
John
Russell Fearn and Gerald
Verner. My observation turned out to be spot on! As the story
progressed, Death Out of Nowhere began to remind me more, and
more, of those two pulp writers. I can even name you a novel by Fearn
that uses the same principle, as the first murder here, to create a
locked room puzzle with only difference being is how exactly death
was delivered to the victim.
Unfortunately, the story also shares
one of the shortcomings of the pulps: a lack of proper clueing. Death
Out of Nowhere gives the armchair detective no opportunity to
work out any part of the plot and even the map given early on the
story withholds a detail that's shown in a map in the last chapter.
And that last chapter shows that a lot more was withhold from the
reader over the course of the investigation. So this is story you
simply have to read and enjoy, instead of trying to participate as
the silent detective, but this short, tightly written and well-paced
story is perfect to do exactly that. You're just along for the ride.
So, all in all, Death Out of
Nowhere is a curiosity of the locked room genre, but a
tremendously enjoyable one, overflowing with lively and fanciful
terrors, but the short length ensures this unusual, pulp-style
detective story doesn't overstay its welcome – which helped balance
out its strengths and weaknesses. Once again, not everyone's going to
love it, but, if your taste runs in the direction of the pulps, you
have Death Out of Nowhere a shot.
