Death Has Deep Roots (1951) by Michael Gilbert

Last year, I reread one of my favorite detective novels, The Danger Within (1952) by Michael Gilbert, alternatively published as Death in Captivity, which is best described as a semi-autobiographic wartime detective-cum-thriller novel about British soldiers in an Italian POW camp – who find a body in one of their secreted tunnels. A brilliant novel reminiscent of The Great Escape (1963), but the book preceded the movie by more than a decade.

I ended my review with the promise to airlift more of Gilbert's novels from the snow-capped tops of Mt. To-Be-Read. However, this promise never materialized in 2017 and sounded incredibly hollow in 2018, but there was still time left. So, on the threshold of the new year, I decided to take Death Has Deep Roots (1951) down from my bookshelves. I really should have gotten to it sooner.

Death Has Deep Roots is a marvelous detective novel in the tradition of Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938) and Anthony Gilbert's The Clock in the Hatbox (1939).

Mademoiselle Victoria Lamartine was engaged in resistance work, in occupied France, where she came into contact with a British officer, Lieutenant Julian Wells, which resulted in a pregnancy, but she arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and had to give birth in a prison – a boy who died of malnutrition two years later. Wells was never seen or heard of again. So, when the war ended, Lamartine came to England to work at a residential hotel and used her spare time "pestering the War Office" for news of Well and a Major Eric Thoseby.

Major Thoseby is a tough, crafty and diligent investigator for the Tracing Staff, an international team tasked with finding victims of the war, but in 1943 he helped run the French resistance in Lamartine's district and has agreed to meet her at the hotel. However, Major Thoseby is stabbed to death shortly after he arrived at the hotel and Inspector Partridge arrests Lamartine for the murder.

Inspector Partridge believes Major Thoseby was the father of Lamartine's dead child and his hypothesis is strengthened when a kitchen-knife was found in the room with her fingerprints on it, but there's also "an element of what you might call" a sealed box mystery – because "the only means of access to Major Thoseby's room" is a flight of stairs closely commanded by the reception desk. The desk itself was under observation from the lounge and a map of the situation is included. So "the closed box" was sealed, "not by locks, and bars, and bolts," but by human observation. However, the sealed box has "a number of cracks or loopholes in it" and the solution practically disqualifies it as a locked room mystery. This was hardly enough to spoil an otherwise excellent detective story.

Only real weakness of the plot is the weak, circumstantial case of the prosecution. You have to wonder why Lamartine's defense wanted to plead guilty, under provocation, with "a strong plea for leniency of the court," but wisely refused and engaged another lawyer.

Noel Anthony Pontarlier "Nap" Rumbold, the junior partner in his father's firm of Markby, Wragg and Rumbold, Solicitors, of Coleman Street, decided to take the case and assembles a team of professional and amateurs detectives.

Mr. Hargest Macrea has argued law, in every kind of courtroom, for a quarter of a century and is hired to argue for the defense. Major Angus McCann is a publican and a friend of Nap, who helps with the legwork, but McCann and Nap got more than they bargained for when they followed a lead to a bad side of town. And these exciting, thriller-like scenes makes Death Has Deep Roots one of the more lively courtroom mysteries. There are even brief appearances from Chief Inspector Hazlerigg at the beginning and end of the story. This group of amateurs and professionals have two lines of attack: the people who were staying at the hotel and finding out what had happened to Lt. Wells in 1943.

On the England end, they have the hotelier, Honorifique Sainte, who came from the same Basse Loire province as Lamartine and had been aware of the story of her capture in occupied France. Ercolo Camino is the waiter, porter and general factotum of the hotel and was charge of the desk on the evening of the murder. The only two guests in the hotel at the time were Colonel Trevor Alwright, who was getting drunk in lounge and had a view of the receptionist desk, while Mrs. Roper turns out to have a double life – which plays out on "the fringe of the law." Across the channel, they have to piece together what happened to Lt. Wells after the Gestapo raided the farm where he was hiding and arrested Lamartine.

As, as usually with these channel-crossing mystery novels, there's a smuggling angle involved, e.g. Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935), Basil Thomson's The Milliner's Hat Mystery (1937) and John Bude's Death on the Riviera (1952).

The private investigation of McCann and Nap is interspersed with the cross-examination of police experts and witnesses in court, which slowly, but surely, unearth the deeply tangled roots of the case. These roots lead all the way from war-torn, occupied France to a quiet residential hotel in London. I think the plot fitted nicely together, notably the who and how of the crime, but the motive and the answer as to what happened to Lt. Wells could have been better clued. Or more strongly hinted at. Regardless, Death Has Deep Roots still stands as an excellent and strong example of the courtroom detective novel. And highly recommend it, if you like courtroom dramas and mysteries.

Lastly, I have some good news about Michael Gilbert. British Library Crime Classics is reprinting Smallbone Deceased (1950), Death Has Deep Roots and Death in Captivity in 2019! So more people get to read my personal favorite and gem of a classic, The Danger Within a.k.a. Death in Captivity. Yes, I used the BL cover of Death Has Deep Roots for this review. 

So I wish you all a Happy New Year and hope to see you back in 2019.

The Great Escape

"We have in effect put all our rotten eggs in one basket. And we intend to watch this basket carefully."

- Colonel Von Luger (The Great Escape, 1963)

Recently, Dan of "The Reader is Warned" compiled a two-part list, titled "5 Impossible Crime 'Thrillers' to Try” and "5 More Impossible 'Thrillers' to Try," which made a decent attempt at listing all the notable, high-paced thrillers with a locked room or impossible crime element, but both lists omitted the best specimen of this particular blend of crime-fiction – namely Michael Gilbert's outstanding Death in Captivity (1952). After littering Dan's comment-section with recommendations for the book, I decided to take down my copy from the shelves to see if it could stand re-reading. And it absolutely did!

Death in Captivity was reprinted in 2007 by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press, under its US title The Danger Within, which came with a foreword by Tom and Enid Schantz briefly going over Gilbert's personal experiences as a prisoner-of-war in Italy during World War II.

The foreword is titled "The Escapes of Michael Gilbert" and gives the modern reader an idea just how extraordinary this piece of detective-and thriller fiction truly is. Not only are the plot and setting practically unique within the genre, but many of the events in the book were inspired by Gilbert's first-hand experiences as both a POW and an escapee in enemy territory – which gave everything a chilling veneer of authenticity. Particular the depictions of everyday life at the prison camp, the secret tunneling activities in the various huts and the occasional pestering of the Italian prison guards ("a bit of sentry-baiting").

Another aspect that sets this book apart from other World War II mystery-and thriller novels is that it deals primarily with the Fascisti of Italy rather than the Nazis of Germany.

The Danger Within takes place in Campo 127, "easily the best camp" one of the prisoners had been in, but perhaps the most "comfortably lodged" group of prisoners are the six men held in Room 10 in Hut C. As a rule, the rooms were designed to hold eight men and usually overflowed with "ten or even twelve less fortunate prisoners." Captain Benucci had ordered the men, all of them notorious escapees, to occupy the same room. Reasoning that if he had "six dangerous criminals to watch, it was easier, on a whole, to have them together," but that only pooled all of their knowledge and experience in one place – resulting in "the oldest of existing undiscovered tunnels in the camp." A tunnel Colonnello Aletti, Commandant of Campo 127, claimed simply could not exist.

The entrance to this tunnel lay in the kitchen of Hut C and in the middle of this cookery, set in a six-foot slab of concrete let into the tiled floor, stood a stove. A huge cauldron, shaped like "a laundry copper," which hid a trapdoor to the tunnel and could only be revealed by the combined effort of four strong men with assistance of double pulleys – effectively evading discovery by being "too big to see." I thought this was a nice little Chestertonian touch to the all-important secret tunnel that will play a key role throughout the entirety of the story.

One day, the protagonist of the story, Captain Henry "Cuckoo" Goyles, crawls down to the tunnel to continue work, but discovers that during the night part of the roof had come down. Inexplicably, there's a body underneath the pile of fallen sand at the end of the tunnel. Something that should not be possible, because this person could not have gained access to the tunnel on his own nor could an outside group have entered the locked Hut C after nightfall. Even more troublesome is that the victim is identified as a Greek POW, Cyriakos Coutoules, who's suspected by everyone of being a stool-pigeon for the Italians or even a double-agent in the employ of the Nazis.

Two of the special detainees in Hut C, Captain Roger Byles and Captain Alex Overstrand, had previously uttered threats to lynch Coutoules. However, their immediate problem of Hut C and Colonel Baird, head of the Escape Committee, is how to tackle the problem of a dead man cluttering the best tunnel they had. So they decide to dump the body in a smaller tunnel, located in Hut A, that had been "allotted low priority by the Escape Committee" and stage a roof collapse there, but how they move the body from one hut to another, under the nose of the guards, is one of my favorite and funniest scenes of the entire story – something of a cross between 'Allo, 'Allo (war-time setting) and Fawlty Towers (the episode Kipper and the Corpse, 1979).

You occasionally get these brief burst of typical British humor. Such as when some of the prisoners are preparing a stage-play and they pick one in which one of the characters, rapturously, exclaims "Italy! Oh, it's hard to take in even the bare possibility of going there. My promised land, Doctor, which I never thought to see otherwise than in dreams." Needless to say, that line brought the house down.

But, on a whole, the story-telling tends to be serious in tone, because the myriad of (potential) problems facing the POWs of Campo 127 are no laughing matter.

The events at the POW camp take place against the backdrop of the impending invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland by Allies, eventually culminating in the disposal of Benito Mussolini, but the consequences of an Allied victory in Italy is a double-edged knife for both parties at the camp. On the one hand, the POWs fully realize the Germans aren't going to set free the sixty thousand prisoners in Italy and that, one day, they could simply find themselves being put on a train "to Krautland." On the other hand, the card-carrying members of the Fascist Party, such as Captain Benucci and the sinister Mordaci of the Carabinieri Reali, know they'll be put in front of a military tribunal when the Allies arrive – which would probably end with them having to face a firing squad.

So the inexplicable death of Coutoules and the accompanying cloud of suspicions does very little to improve the slightly strained situation at the camp, but the situation becomes rather serious when Captain Byles is charged by Benucci with the murder of the Greek POW and is placed in solitary confinement – condemned to die in several days time. Captain "Cuckoo" Goyles is asked by the Escape Committee to investigate who killed Coutoules, why and where. And, most importantly, how his body ended up in the tunnel.

In my opinion, the explanation for the impossible appearance of a body in a hermetically sealed, air-tight and blocked tunnel is as simplistic and logical as it's original. A one-of-a-kind impossibility in a completely unique crime novel that performed a perfect juggling act with its detective story elements, thriller components and spy material. Gilbert never allowed one of those elements to overshadow the other, but neither were they diluted. They worked in perfect harmony with one another. For example, the clues that will help you solve the detective story elements are provided by some of the more gruesome, thriller-ish aspects of the plot. You'll know what I mean when you get to it.

The Danger Within is an impressive and perfect latticework of differing genres, which is what makes it impossible to pigeonhole the book, but the climax of the story is a fine piece of wartime fiction as the inmates of Campo 127 prepare themselves to make "The Great Crawl." A fitting end to this semi-autobiographical wartime crime story. An ending that fitted like the final piece of the puzzle that completed the whole picture of this marvelously clever and exciting story. I simply can't recommend this one enough.

I'll end this review by saying that re-reading The Danger Within has inspired me to finally airlift my other Gilbert titled from the snow-capped tops of Mt. To-Be-Read. I'm not sure which titles actually reside there, but I believe they were Close Quarters (1947), Death Has Deep Roots (1951) and The Killing of Katie Steelstock (1980). So you can look forward to a review of one of those titles in the hopefully not so distant future.

Finally, Kate at Cross Examining Crime and Mike of Only Detect also reviewed the book (here and here), while Sergio of Tipping My Fedora reviewed the 1959 movie based on the book (here).