A Chimerical Impossibility

"One of the most extraordinary cases Ellery has ever investigated. The newspaper called it "The Case of the Wounded Tyrolean;" more specific identification may not be given here. It is one of the few problems, to my knowledge, which stalemated Ellery; and it is still an unsolved crime."

- J. McC. (Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery, 1935)

Last month, I wrote a blog-post, headed "The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist," that used a line from an essay by Donald A. Yates, titled "The Locked Room: An Ancient Device of the Story-Teller, But Not Dead Yet," which attracted the attention of our resident archivist, Mike Gray – who can be found blogging at Ontos. This resulted in a compilation post with links to the essay, articles, blog-posts, a short video-clip and a short story by Yates.

Yates' short story, "The Wounded Tyrolean," began as a Watsonian reference in Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935), which was meant as a nod and a wink at the unrecorded cases noted by Dr. Watson in the official Sherlock Holmes canon. As Ellery Queen observed, Dr. Watson's allusions have "sent Sherlockians screaming into the night hunting for the reference source and finding only a ghostly chuckle," but the consequence of these tantalizing allusions is that people began to write their own Sherlock Holmes stories – which has grown into a sub-genre of its own. The mountain of Holmesian pastiches, parodies and semi-official sequels dwarfs the number of original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

So it was only to be expected that Ellery Queen's oblique reference to "The Case of the Wounded Tyrolean" would result in at least one write-up.

According to this blog-post, Yates wrote "The Wounded Tyrolean" during the early fifties and at the time he was "trying repeatedly to write a story" that "he [Fred Dannay] would accept for EQMM." One of the editors, Mildred Falk, suggested writing a story that could carry the title "The Wounded Tyrolean" and "be so perplexing that even Ellery himself had not been able to solve it." Yates picked up the gauntlet and decided to turn his hand to the classic locked room mystery, determined "to come up with a new solution that had never been devised before," but the fruit of his labor was rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and only a Spanish translation of the story made into print – appearing in the Argentine magazine Leoplán in July of 1955. Fifty-seven years after being published in Argentina, the story appeared in English in the Fall 2012 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, published in Ann Arbor, the "very setting where the action of the baffling locked-room murder had been situated." So, let's take a look at the story.

The Austrian-born Professor Behring of the Middleton University physics department is "The Wounded Tyrolean," whose "characteristic limp was the consequence of a leg wound he had suffered in the First World War," but the "indelible figure" of the old professor was cruelly snatched away from the campus-town – stabbed to death in his study. There was a sense of the unreal clinging to the circumstances of the crime, because, from all perceivable angles, it seems like an impossible murder.

Donald A. Yates

Professor Behring had scheduled an appointment with Dr. Gaines and Wenley, the College President, but nobody appeared to be home and when they entered the premise found that only the study door was locked. Dr. Gained and Wenley forced open the door and discovered the body of the professor in the middle of the room, "the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from his back," but they found nobody else inside the windowless room, which had walls lined with bookshelves. The only door was locked from the inside and the modest furnishings, a desk and some chairs, offered no hiding place for the killer.

The rundown of these facts showed a missed opportunity for a false solution and one that would have been as classic as the locked room problem itself, which would have been very similar to such short stories as Agatha Christie's "The Idol House of Astarte" (The Thirteen Problems, 1932) and Peter Godfrey's "The Flung-Back Lit" (The Newtonian Egg, 2002). Essentially, it would have been a play on the "replacement of space-and time" illusion and this trick would have fitted the given facts, but Yates deserves some points for trying to come up with an explanation that was a little bit different.

A bright senior and editor of the student newspaper, John Rossiter, eventually stumbled to the truth "through a feat of inspired logic," but "never revealed the solution to a soul." I think the best part of the plot is explaining how someone like Ellery Queen could have failed to reach the correct answer. I can easily imagine Queen would've read about the case and came to the campus-town to investigate it himself, but by that time, Rossiter had already swept the whole affair under the rug and the tell-tale clues expunged – which makes it very difficult for even the best logicians to reach a sensible and rational conclusion.

With that being said, the locked room facet of the plot under-performed to the who-and why, which were far better imagined and linked than how the trick was pulled off. The locked room was pretty incidental to the whole thing. Not to mention borderline insane and extremely risky. If it weren't for the high concentration of spoilers, I would probably slap together a re-imagining of this plot, because I see an alternative explanation for the locked room that would've served the purpose of the guilty party a whole lot better.

Regardless, "The Wounded Tyrolean" is a good and laudable attempt at an original locked room story by a then still young and ardent mystery enthusiast, which, arguably, required some polishing. But you can read and judge the story for yourself by clicking here.

The Sealed Room: A Literal Stronghold

"The lofty ceiling is not high enough,

The walls contain no consummated breath;

And hanging there, the orison of time.

Ticks and ticks and ticks its way to death."

- Hospital Waiting Room (Sister Mary Vista, R.S.M.)

The marginalizing of the detective story has been a recurring subject of discussion and banter on the GADetection Group, which probably began (again) when a gritty, "ultra-modern" private-eye novel, Where the Dead Men Go (2013) by Liam Mcllvanney, with a jaded protagonist won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel.

We could literarily feel the foundation of the genre tremble and transcend beneath our feet as we read about the winner's prose-powered, page turning storytelling powers and the books uncanny ability to linger in the mind beyond the final page. It sounded exactly like the kind of bleak, dime-a-dozen, Serious Grime (sic) novels that have come and gone for decades, but critics and scholars have always been favorably disposed to them for "Transcending the Genre" with character-driven narratives – while ignoring such tripe as sound plots and props (i.e. locked rooms and dying messages).

The mystery-sphere's correspondent in France, Xavier Lechard, noted in this ongoing, scattered discussion that as far as the really important "mystery" awards are concerned, "not only traditional mysteries need no apply, but standard crime fiction don't either," favoring novels only marginally affiliated to the genre. 'Cause genre fiction, any type of genre fiction, can be fun-inducing and having fun is dangerously irresponsible – even if it's just from an armchair. Personally, I find it hilarious how the "Respectable Wing" of the genre are distancing themselves from the label "genre fiction" and enclosing themselves in their padded hugbox. I wouldn't have dragged the discussion on to the blog, but I happened to stumble across an old essay from decades ago, more or less, addressing this issue from the perspective of the much maligned locked room sub-genre. The author had written down, what I thought, better than I ever could. I'm a hack reviewer, you see.

"The Locked Room: An Ancient Device of the Story-Teller, but Not Dead Yet" by Donald A. Yates, Professor of Spanish-American Literature and book collector, was published in the 1956 autumn issue of The Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review and begins with outlining the critique leveled at literature in general at the time – which boiled down to the "classical concept of structure" and "form-for-the-sake-of-form." Obviously, the detective story (and the locked room prop) is guilty as judged, but, as Yates points out, it's a form of literature that actually thrives on those limitations. It has thrived and proven to be fertile grounds for creative writing for over a century, but has often, unsuccessfully, been declared dead and buried.

Yates' response to the critics, scholars and contemporary crime novelists eagerly signing their name on the death certificate of the detective story should be committed to memory, "I should like to show that even when its death papers are signed and delivered, a genre is capable of lively revolt" and "that it may throw these papers up in server's face and suddenly reveal that it has acquired a new life and new direction—merely through the stimulation of imagination lent to it by a new individual who has dedicated himself to a fresh treatment of its themes and traditions," because it has happened since this piece was written. Many times!

Herbert Resnicow brought four decades of experience in engineering and construction to the game in the 1980s, which is reflected in the unique way Resnicow approached the problem of the sealed room (e.g. The Gold Deadline, 1984 and The Dead Room, 1987). The neo-orthodox movement in Japan has pioneered, what could be called, "Corpse Puzzles," in which writers fool around with dismembered body parts to create identity problems, alibis and seemingly impossible crimes (e.g. Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). Just two examples.

It continues with a (spoiler laden!) historical overview of the locked room device, from Edgar Allan Poe, Melville Davisson Post and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Gaston Leroux, Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, which covers the middle portion of the essay, before, prophetically, speculating on its future. Yates states that "the limitations of the locked-room puzzle offer to such writers a challenge which is really rather difficult to resist" and "it seems that in hand of every new advance in the field of human knowledge there comes a new way to polish off someone inside that wonderfully appealing locked room." After all, "Poe had no vacuum cleaner, and we have no penetrating death-ray gun, but it might be next." Last year, M.P.O. Books published Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013), in which crime-scene hermitically locked, fortress-like villa guarded with cameras and motion-sensory detectors, but Books found a way for his murderer to by pass those security measures. And the penetrating death-ray gun... I remember a relatively obscure story (from the 2000s) that had the murderer ignite an incendiary device inside a locked apartment with the assistance of a simple laser pen.

I’ll be citing the last lines of the essay in full for prosperity sakes and to close this rambling post: "No, indeed, the last nail has not yet been driven into the restless coffin of the locked-room tale. On the contrary, its critics probably have had their obituaries interpreted more often as a challenge than as a public notice. So with this toast, I would like to hail the mystery authors of years yet to come who will be rallying to the call—Here's to the second hundred years!"

Hear, hear! And many thanks to Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller, William DeAndrea, Paul Halter, Louise Penny, M.P.O. Books, P.J. Bergman, Paul Doherty, Richard Forrest, Edward D. Hoch, Martin Méroy, Fredric Neuman, John Sladek, Japan and any other writer who picked up the challenge in the post-GAD era. I'll catch up to you sooner or later!

 

P.S.: I think the actual truth behind the locked room mystery's refusal to die lies in the soft, muffled thumping coming from the tell-tale heart hidden beneath its floorboards. What else did you expect Edgar Allan Poe put in there when he gave life to the detective story? We got a spare heart from the horror genre and now we're immortal! You can bury us. You can wall us up. You can declare us dead, but, like "The Black Cat," we'll always come back. Always!