"You say you've known magicians and escape artists. Can you think of any trick that would explain how it was done?"- Superintendent Hadley (John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man, 1935)
Several
years ago, I posted a review of Gauntlet
of Fear (2012) by David Cargill, which was self-published and
came with the kind of flaws one expects from such a venture, but the
book is part of a short and very intriguing series – namely a
locked room trilogy! So, not surprisingly, I always intended to
return to this series of impossible crime novels and give it an
opportunity to redeem itself. But first things first.
Cargill
is a retired school teacher from Dumfries, Scotland, who's in his
eighties and began to translate his "lifelong interest in stage
magic and the writings of John Dickson Carr" in 2010. According
to this
author's comment, left as a response to a negative review, Cargill
revealed he hoped his writing aspirations might produce enough
proceeds to repay the Alzheimer nurses who looked after his wife
until her death in 2010. So this drove Cargill to write three locked
room novels: The Statue of Three Lies (2011), Gauntlet of
Fear and The Cinderella Murders (2015), but what fueled
their plots was his obvious love for stage magic and detective
stories.
The
Statue of Three Lies is dedicated to the memory of the undisputed
master of the locked room mystery, Carr, whose work was "the
inspiration that triggered this piece of fiction" woven "around
an incident of fact" - which, in "Notes for Curious Minds,"
is shown to have been a "spooky" anecdote from chapter 2.
A domestic incident of the unexplained that should have been narrated
by Warwick Moss on an episode of The Extraordinary. Anyhow...
Cargill
showed with The Statue of Three Lies that he's closely aligned
with two of Carr's modern-day followers, Paul
Halter and David
Renwick. The book really could have been plotted and written by
those two.
The
Statue of Three Lies takes place in 1966, making this a
historical mystery, but the seemingly impossible murder, which is the
central problem of the plot, happened fourteen years previously –
during the early 1950s in a large, sprawling place called Maskelyne
Hall. Jack Ramsden was "a craftsman," who loved cabinet
making and magic as an art form, using "all of his ingenuity in
the production of props for stage illusionists." Ramsden even
began to perform as an amateur magician, but tragically died in a
shooting accident when he was setting the stage for an elaborate
trick in the library of his home on the eve of his wife's birthday.
Every
year, on the 31th October, which is both the night of Isabella
Ramsden's birthday and the anniversary of the death of Harry Houdini,
Ramsden "entertained the household with his latest version of an
old illusion." Jack worked tirelessly to improve upon the ideas
of the great masters of illusions, past and present, such as a famous
levitation act, but the last trick was supposed to be a recreation of "the Bullet Catching Trick of Chung Ling Soo" - using a
different kind of rifle. However, when he returned from a trip to the
United States, where he attended a convention for magicians, he had
become wildly enthusiastic about an illusion he witnessed there. He
compared it with The Substitution Trunk and wanted to recreate
it with the entire library acting as the trunk. The trick would
include "a transformation scene of earth shattering dimension"
using R.L. Stevenson's characters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but an
invisible intruder turned this amateur performance into an impossible
murder.
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| David Cargill |
Ramsden
insisted that every inch of the library was searched, to show nobody
was being hidden, while the windows were being locked and the
curtains drawn. The lodge-keeper, groom and gardener, Old George
Gardner, was outside guarding to windows to make sure "there was
no jiggery pokery." The large fire place was blocked and
entirely filled by a solid steel, built-in safe. A room that was, for
all intents and purposes, a sealed one!
So,
finally, he was locked inside the empty library and the sole key was
in constant possession of his wife, which set the stage for the
bizarre sequence of events that happened next – such as a series of
strange sentences of a one-sided conversation emanating from the
library.
They
heard him say "leave that alone," "put your mask on"
and "no, no... don't touch that," which is followed by the
report of a gunshot, but, when they enter the room, they only find a
dying man. The shot apparently came from the mounted rifle on the
stand. Since nobody was in the room, or could have entered it, the
death was filed away as an accident.
So,
here you have, what could be, the premise of Halter novel: a
seemingly impossible murder that has occurred in the past and the
resembled the premise of the locked room murder from Le
brouillard rouge (The Crimson Fog, 1988), which also
occurred on the makeshift stage made for the performance of magic
tricks. However, the subsequent investigation resembled a
(later-period) episode of Renwick's Jonathan
Creek.
After
fourteen years, Ramsden's daughter, Laura, contacts Professor Giles
Dawson, who specialized himself in the history of stage illusions and
is a member of The Magic Circle, but also stayed at Maskelyne Hall as
a child. Dawson credited Ramsden's stories about Houdini's exploits
as the root cause of his fascination with stage magic. Well, Laura
wrote a letter to Dawson telling him that she has began to believe
that her father's death was meant to happen and how "the past is
closing in" on the family. So she wants him to attend her
mother's seventieth birthday party and help prove that her father's
fatal accident was murder.
What
follows is largely a type of sedentary investigation, which I call "Mainly Conversation," since a considerable amount of time is
spend sitting around and talking. And not always about subjects that
are immediately relevant to the problem at hand. However, some of
these conversations were interesting and covered a whole gamut of
topics: such as the story of the brief, but impossible, disappearance
of a diver from his old-fashioned diving suit, which is given a
rather gruesome explanation. There's a talk about the scientific
nature of coincidences and several famous events are brought up,
which include the coincidences surrounding the Titanic
disaster and two Presidential assassination. Ghosts are also brought
up, followed by a rather useless séance,
as is the locked room mystery itself. Of course, the Dr. Gideon
Fell's famous and often cited Locked Room Lecture is discussed. So
these parts are not entirely without interest, but neither are they
of integral importance to the overall plot.
However,
Dawson does some actual detective work. One of the first things he
does, upon his arrival at Maskelyne Hall, is solving a Jonathan
Creek-style riddle that gave him to the combination to the safe in
the fireplace. The safe contains a clue that eventually brings him to
Boston, in America, where learns of the illusion, witnessed by
Ramsden, of "the disappearance of an individual" from "a
room that was locked and had no windows" - a locked room filled
with magicians as an audience! Dawson also gets an idea or two from
the titular statue, which is a statue of John Harvard that earned its
nickname for the many inconsistencies surrounding it. So he does not
just sit around discussing esoteric subjects or ride his hobbyhorse.
My
explanation for the locked room murder of Jack Ramsden was very, very
close to the one provided by Cargill. I think my solution can be
regarded as a simplified version of the actual explanation, but
Cargill's overdressing of the trick prevented from it being a
disappointment. Cargill took a similar approach to the impossible
crime angle as Ramsden took to stage illusions: trying to improve on
the old masters and taking a shot at adding "a new dimension to
a classic." And he thoroughly refurbished one of the oldest
tricks in the book.
Honestly,
I appreciate the work Cargill put in reinvigorating this trick. It
definitely was more inspired than the whodunit angle or the second
murder this eventually provided.
So,
The Statue of Three Lies has its fair share of problems, two
of the most ones are the obvious absence of an editor and an annoying
overuse of exclamation marks, but the book is rather grandfatherly in
nature. It's as if your grandfather is telling you a story about
bloody murder, family secrets and locked rooms, but the problem is
that its told at an old man's pace with a liberal amount of side
distractions and irrelevant stories. But there's something kind and
benevolent about the whole book. Cargill's love for John Dickson
Carr, impossible crime fiction and magic tricks is also very evident,
which makes some of its flaws forgivable to a Carrian reader.
However,
if you decide to give The Statue of Three Lies a shot, you
should keep in mind that this is a self-published novel that missed
out on some much needed editing and came with the expected flaws of a
debuting novelist. So readers, purely looking for a brilliant locked
room novel that can rival Carr's The Three Coffins (1935) or
John Sladek's Black Aura (1974), should probably look
elsewhere. I, on the other hand, will take a look at the third and
final entry in this series purely for the sake of completion. So you
have a review of The Cinderella Murders to look forward to
somewhere in the not so distant future.
