Anthony and Peter Shaffer were twin
brothers, celebrated playwrights, screenwriters and novelists with
three revered, frustratingly rare and highly sought after detective
novels to their name that have gained an almost mythical reputation
over the decades – ensuring a small circulation among collectors.
Two of the three novels have vainly topped the wishlists of
impossible crime fans for nearly seven decades.
During those seven decades, The
Woman in the Wardrobe (1951) and Withered
Murder (1955) enchanted mystery readers with their oracular
reputation of unheralded, long-lost classics. Regrettably, the
Shaffers "resisted numerous offers to republish them" and
the hefty, triple-digit price tags (plus shipping) on the limited
number of secondhand copies kept them elusive collector's items. And
when a copy turns up, it's usually gone within a blink of an eye.
So you can imagine how much locked
room readers rejoiced when the British
Library announced they were reissuing The Woman in the
Wardrobe!
The Woman in the Wardrobe not
only lived up to its near-mythical reputation, but is guaranteed to
win this year's Reprint
of the Year Award. A comedic take on the classic detective story
that at first seemed to take the lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek
approach of Leo
Bruce, R.T.
Campbell and Edmund
Crispin, but the writing, characterization and even the plotting
have a biting, sardonic sense of humor – a tone you would expect
from a mean-spirited deconstruction rather than an homage. But it
worked! And the ending delivered "a brilliant new solution"
to the locked room problem.
Mr. Verity is an unflattering, acerbic
parody of the Great Detective and very likely modeled on John
Dickson Carr's famous detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry
Merrivale.
Verity is "an immense man"
with startling brilliant eyes, a chestnut Van Dyke and a winter cloak
who has been "a noted figure in the world of detection"
and enjoys the respect of the Yard, but he was "almost as much
respected as disliked." He was actually very much disliked,
because he was so often right and solved murders, "between tea
and supper," with "a mixed display of condescension and
incivility" towards the regular police – who were dead and
spent with fatigue. A loud, highly opinionated man with questionable
ethics (having "more archaeological thefts to his credit than
the governing body of any museum in Europe") and prone to
giving elaborate lunchtime lectures who annoying made himself
indispensable by always being right. And he knows it! Mr. Verity is
also abnormally curious and when he sees a man climbing furtively out
of a first-floor window, of the Charter Hotel, he decides to ask the
manager, Miss Framer, whether it's hotel custom to use windows as an
exit.
They're interrupted by one of the
guests, Mr. Paxton, flying down the stairs screaming blue murder.
Paxton found the body of another hotel guest, Mr. Maxwell, but when
they go up to investigate, they discover that the door of Maxwell's
room was now locked on the inside. And at that same moment, a police
constable enters the hotel with yet another guest, Mr. Cunningham,
who caught coming out of one of the first-floor windows.
So the door is forced open and
discovered a ransacked, blood-soaked room with Maxwell's body laying
among the debris on the floor and the hotel waitress, Alice Burton,
tied up in the wardrobe. A wonderfully intricate, neatly posed locked
room problem that was succinctly summarized as follow:
"A murder is committed in a room.
Two men are immediate suspects. Suspect A enters by the window and
leaves by the door. Suspect B enters by the door and leaves by the
window. Suspect A can lock the window but not the door. Suspect B can
lock the door but not the window. Neither can lock both—yet both
are locked: and from the inside. And all the while a body, which
medical evidence proves could not have done the locking itself before
it expired, leaks blood over the carpet of an empty room."
Detective Inspector Rambler enters the
fray and perhaps the only man who stands on equal footing with the
Great Detective. Only difference between them is that Verity has a
temper and a beard, while Rambler is a professional who could afford
neither, but Verity "respected the tamed logic in Rambler"
and "Rambler the explosive vision in Verity" – together
they pour over this pretty puzzle. They review possibility, suggest
solutions and pry clues from the various suspects and witnesses,
which include the amusing character of Richard Tudor. A pretender to
the throne of England who claims to be a direct descendant of King
Edward the Sixth, son of King Henry the Eighth, who died unmarried at
the age of fifteen.
There's not much else that can be said
about the plot, or investigation, because The Woman in the
Wardrobe is a very short, tautly written story with the
page-count padded out with some nice sketches of the main characters
by Nicolas Bentley (son of E.C.
Bentley). So it really had no right to be anything more than a
comedic curiosity, but the explanation to the locked room, in
combination with the identity to the murderer, turned it into an
unmitigated classic. A superb and truly original locked room mystery!
The Woman in the Wardrobe is
the novel Ulf Durling tried to write with Gammel
ost (Hard Cheese, 1971), which could have worked had
Durling not occupied himself with gutting the plot of everything that
made it a detective story. Shaffer succeeded in both sardonically
poking fun at the genre and doing a bit of deconstruction on the side
without comprising the essence of a detective story. Chuck in a
startling original solution and you have something special and
memorable that cemented a top spot on my list of favorite locked room
mysteries. Highly recommended!
