"One man's flower is another man's weed."- Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout's Over My Dead Body, 1940)
Frederick "Fred" M. White was a multifaceted author who reputedly was a pioneering
presence in the espionage genre and an early practitioner of disaster fiction
(e.g. The
Doom of London, 1903), but also labored in the field of detective
fiction when the genre was between two epochs – transitioning from the Gaslight
Era into the Golden Age. Regardless, these achievements have not resulted in
ever-lasting name recognition and I would not have been aware of White if it
weren't for a special mention in Locked Room Murders (1991).
Robert Adey mentioned in his
introduction, when discussion The Victorians (1890-1901), "a strange sense
of precognition" about White's Who Killed James Trent? (1901),
serialized in Pearson's Weekly, which has a rising young novelist as its
protagonist – named Jasper Carr! A wonderful coincidence and "an unconscious
pointer to an author
yet to come," but copies of this locked room tale are hard to come by. So I
decided to take a gander at his other impossible crime novel.
The Cardinal Moth (1905) originally appeared in a London evening newspaper, The
Star, which ran the story as a serial from December 1903 to January 1904. A
year later, the story was republished in book form, under the same title, but
was given a subtitle, The Accused Orchid, which is redundant as both
titles refer to the same thing. Namely a very rare, legendary and absolutely
unique flower. One that has come to be closely associated with death.
The legendary orchid, known as the
Cardinal or Crimson Moth, is described as "a flower on a flower" with "a
large cluster of whitey-pink blossoms with little red blooms hovering over like
a cloud of scarlet moths." Once upon a time, the flower guarded the roof of
the Temple of Ghan, situated in the fictional Kingdom of Koordstan, but the
shrine was also used as an execution place for (political) criminals. All of
those who were condemned were given the Herculean task of climbing to the roof
and pick a flower from the Moth, which they had to after being locked inside
the temple and when the priests outside finished their prayer the door was
opened – only to find the condemned man on the floor with "the marks of
great hairy hands about him."
Sometimes it was the neck that was broken
or they had died from strangulation, but there were also cases of men who had
their chest crushed in "as if a great giant had done it." It sounds like
the premise of a Paul
Doherty novel or the back story for one of Paul
Halter's fanciful plots! And the flower seems to have lost nothing of its
power when a specimen of the long-lost flower turns up in England.
Sir Clement Frobisher was "that rare
bird amongst high-born species," a man who made his own fortune, but was
reputedly booted out of the diplomatic service after being involved in an
affair concerning Turkish Bonds. Simply put, Sir Clement was a bit of a rogue.
A rogue who knew how to be charming and appreciate a good opponent, but a rogue
nonetheless and one who sees his love for flowers as "the only weakness that
Providence had vouchsafed to him" – which resulted in a hundred-thousand
pound investment in a treasure filled orchid-house.
The glass house is a small paradise of
bright, vivid colors and a sea of floral fragrances, located smack dab in the
middle of Piccadilly, but one evening, a genuine treasure is practically given
to Sir Clement.
Paul Lopez is a high-class a scoundrel, "a
star of the first magnitude," who Sir Clement deems worthy enough to be his
rival and Lopez brings him the coveted Cardinal Moth. A flower assumed to be
extinct and consigned to the myths of a far-away land, but Lopez brought the
orchid collector a living specimen. And what does the scoundrel want in return?
He merely wants an alibi. So, a very small price in exchange for such a rare
specimen, but his Armenian servant, Hafid, implores his master to “take it
and burn it at once.”
Of course, The Cardinal Moth delivers
on its reputation when a dead man is found in the orchid-house, "strangled by
a coarse cloth twisted about his throat," but nobody seems to have been
able to commit the murder. The house was securely locked from the inside and
everyone who was present could be accounted for. It makes for a tantalizing
situation, but one that's shoved to the background in favor of a second
plot-thread that involves a royal gemstone.
The Shan is the Westernized monarch of
Koordstan, home of the fabled flower, but the Kingdom also has the Blue Stone
of Ghan: a precious ruby and "a talisman that every Shan of Koordstan is
never supposed to be without," because one side of the stone is engraved
and used as for sealing state documents. But the most importantly is that the
stone is a symbol of the Shan’s claim to the throne to the tribes of his land.
There is, however, one problem: the Shan is prone to the vices of the West and is
generally hard up. So he pledged the stone to a notorious money-lender, Aaron Benstein,
who allows his wife, Isa Benstein, to wear the jewels polite society pawned with
him to social gatherings.
Well, the work done by various
characters, most of them tied "the orchid mystery," to ensure the Shan
can produce the royal stone and safeguard his throne makes for an unusual
alliance, but also makes The Cardinal Moth hard to pigeonhole. You can
hardly describe the book as a traditionally-structured detective story. Even by
the standards of the early 1900s, but neither can it be described as a thriller
or an espionage story. I guess the final chapters can be described as courtroom
fiction, when the orchid-deaths are explained during an inquest on the bodies,
but the plot is largely about two problems that a number of people try to
resolve – without conforming to any of the patterns or sub-categories of
crime-and detective fiction. It almost sounds dull, but the cast of colorful
characters and exotic plot ingredients took care of that. So, yeah, a very
unusual, but interesting, read that fans of early twentieth century popular
fiction will probably enjoy the most.
Finally, I should mention the locked room
elements: White showed he possessed a fertile imagination and this was
reflected in the impossible situations, which moved away from the secret
passages, unknown poisons and deadly animals that had dominated such impossible
crime stories during the nineteenth century. A path that was abandoned by L.T.
Meade and Robert Eustace in A
Master of Mysteries (1898), which contains one or two short stories
that can be considered literary relatives of The Cardinal Moth.
My sole
complaint is that I don’t find it believable that the method would work
(successfully) more than once. Let alone having a success rate dating back more
than a thousand years.
