Escape from the Tower

"In fact the way this was worked was so sublimely simple, when I tell you, you'll wonder why you didn't get it in five seconds flat."

- Jonathan Creek (Jonathan Creek Series 2, Episode 2: The Scented Room, 1998)

Several months ago, I reviewed an impossible crime novel, The Weight of Evidence (1978), written by the late Roger Ormerod and noted in my post that he had two other books listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991), but an inspection of his bibliography revealed two overlooked locked room titles - namely More Dead Than Alive (1980) and And Hope to Die (1995). The synopsis of the former immediately caught my attention, because the description of the plot struck me as a prototype of Jonathan Creek. I turned out to be correct.

More Dead Than Alive is the penultimate novel about David Mallin and George Coe, a pair of private investigators, who started out as separate series-characters, but formed a partnership after crossing paths in Too Late for the Funeral (1977). The Weight of Evidence was the inaugural case of their partnership and they would appear in that capacity in half a dozen books.

More Dead Than Alive is narrated by the wife of David Mallin, Elsa, who has been staying at a crumbling, drafty medieval stronghold, Kilvennan Castle, which is owned by the husband of an old school friend, Konrad Klein, known as "the greatest escapologist" since Harry Houdini – even celebrated as "one of the world's leading illusionists." But that was a long time ago. The modern world doesn't flock in droves to the theaters to see illusions anymore and magic on television lacks the prestige of the stage, because you can always assume it's "a trick of the camera." So the magician has been laboring diligently, up in his tower room, on dangerous new trick by combining elements of the Sword Box Illusion with the Bullet Catch Trick.

Konrad had constructed a special trick-cabinet, a heavy, carved wooden box on castors, in which his lovely assistant, Amaryllis Moore, had to take place and mere seconds after closing the door he would "fire a bullet through the cabinet at chest height" – from side to side! A very dangerous trick that could possibility revitalize his failing career, but the illusion refused to work and Amaryllis had begun to loose her nerve. The dummies that are being used to the test the cabinet are riddled with bullet holes and she simply refuses to enter the deadly contraption.

So it was not unusual to hear gunshots emanating from the work room, but, one day, a loud crash echoed down from the tower and when they went to investigate they found that the unlocked door would not butch as much as an inch. And the reason? It was blocked by the heavy trick-cabinet. When they finally wormed passed the blocked door, the only thing they found was an open window overlooking "the sea-slicked cliffs” and “the piled waves crashing into the cliff over peaks of rock." A sheer death-drop of several hundreds of feet!

Mrs. Clarice Klein asks Elsa to call in her husband, David Mallin, to advice her what to do about her missing, and now presumed dead, husband, because his life had been insured at the tune of 100,000 pounds. Konrad used to joke he was "worth more dead than alive," but the insurance policy came with a suicide-clause and is non-payable in case the magician took his own life. A fact that places a big question mark behind his disappearance act in the tower as suicide appears to be the only logical answer.

David Malling arrives with George Coe at the ancient castle and they begin to poke away at both the case and the trick-cabinet, which places them at odds with an agent of the insurance company, Martin Fisher – who can expect "a percentage commission" in case of suicide. This is, however, not the case. Once the two private-eyes learn the secret of the cabinet, they come up with a delightful (false) solution explaining how the mysterious disappearance could have been an unfortunate accident. And in that case, the double-indemnity clause is triggered and the insurance company has to cough up 200,000 pounds to the family.

Arguably the best aspect of More Dead Than Alive is all the theorizing and testing of potential solutions to the problem of the tower room, which is largely done by Coe, who emerges her as an enthusiastic, if crude, detective in the Roger Sheringham mold. Coe even credited Edgar Allan Poe's famous 1844 short story, "The Purloined Letter," with helping him find Konrad's hidden drawings and papers about all of his illusions. So there's a definite link with the great detective stories of the past in this 1980s mystery novel. Something that becomes even more pronounced when Konrad's body washes ashore with a bullet wound.

The fact that Konrad was shot to death makes his disappearance from the tower room a full-fledged impossible crime. One way or another, either he had left the room and was murdered elsewhere or his was killed there and his murdered had left the room, but either way they had to pass through a door that was blocked from the inside by a heavy cabinet – which proved to be practically impossible to move, or manipulate, from the outside. Something that was painfully demonstrated when Coe's hand got stuck in between the doorpost and blocked door during one of his tests.

Nevertheless, Coe comes up with a number of possible explanation for the blocked door problem.

One of them is rather practical and shows a method that could be used to leave the room blocked from the inside, while another false solution, based on sound and misdirection, was obviously based on Clayton Rawson's masterly "From Another World" (collected in The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective, 1979). However, while Coe was experimenting with various possibilities, Mallin was silently contemplating the case in the background and noticed the significance of the clues provided by the fatal bullet and a test dummy that was found lying beneath the window.

These clues yield an entirely different kind of solution that's not as easy to accept as the other proposed explanations, but, admittedly, it had been wonderfully foreshadowed in the early part of the book. And much simpler in nature than the other explanations. You just have to accept that nobody would notice what was going on right under their very own noses.

That being said, More Dead Than Alive is an imaginative locked room novel that reads like a predecessor of the Jonathan Creek TV-series. I can easily imagine how a slight rewrite, and replacing the detective-characters, could turn this book into a full-fledged Jonathan Creek TV-special. David Renwick would probably have some fun rewriting the final page of dialogue, between David and Elsa, which lends itself to his style of comedy.

So this probably piqued the interest of locked room readers and fans of the Jonathan Creek series, but the book also shares some of the weaknesses of the latter which may turn off some readers. The book is purely concerned with the how of the crime, which the who-and why hinges upon, while the characters populating the plot are (even by my standards) paper thin. You really have to take More Dead Than Alive purely as an impossible crime story, because, as a mystery novel, it's only a very minor work in the overall pantheon of detective-fiction. 

Still, as a locked room novel, it deserves to be better known for its multiple (original) solutions and somewhat daring final explanation to the central impossibility.

Fenced In

"This is no ordinary murder! This is an impossible crime!"

- Edogawa Rampo

The late Roger Ormerod, who hailed from Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England, worked a wide variety of jobs during his lifetime, such as postman, factory worker, country court officer and an executive officer in the Department of Social Security, but also moonlighted as a novelist with more than twenty crime-and detective novels under his belt – published over a quarter of a century between 1974 and 1999.

Honestly, I probably would've remained completely ignorant of Ormerod had it not been for the inclusion of three of his books in Robert Adey's invaluable Locked Room Murders (1991). And the descriptions of the impossibilities were original enough to attract my attention. One of these books in particular held my interest.

The Weight in Evidence (1978) appears to have brought two of Ormerod series-characters, David Mallin and George Coe, together in a partnership as private-investigators. Mallin seems to have been his main series-characters, debuting in Time to Kill (1974), while Coe only appeared sporadically in such books as A Spoonful of Luger (1975) and A Glimpse of Death (1976) – with the former being one of the three impossible crime novels listed by Adey. They seem to have crossed paths for the first time in Too Late for the Funeral (1977), when they approached the same case from opposite ends, each unaware of the other's interest, which ended with them becoming partners in crime.

However, the crossover aspect of the past entries in this series was not the primary reason for picking this particular title. Oh no. My reason was much more banal: Adey listed not one, but two, impossible situations for The Weight of Evidence. So, just like a kid in a candy store, I pounced on the bag of sweets which looked to me to be the fullest.

The Weight of Evidence tells of the first investigation of Mallin and Coe as official partners, which brings them to a fence-enclosed site "in the middle of an area obviously being systematically torn down" by a horde of construction workers. But one of the hard hats has gone missing under inexplicable circumstances.

On the previous day, they had erected a site-foreman's shed on the terrain by pouring an eleven by nine slab of concrete on the ground and lowering a floorless shed by crane on this foundation, which was then bolted down on the inside by one of the construction workers, Fred Wallach – who was not a popular member of the crew. So when the crane operator, Walter Dyke, noticed Wallach, who was giving directions in the center of the concrete patch, appeared to be unaware that the shed was coming down the wrong way round he kept his lips sealed. Because a chain-link fence now blocked the door and this trapped Wallach inside the shed.

Next thing they know, "the five o'clock hooter" went and they "packed it in," which left Wallach to spend "a cheerful night" trapped inside a bare shed. However, when they returned to the shed it appears to be inexplicably deserted and when the two private-investigators take a look inside they discover the nuts have been bolted down and tightened, which left Wallach with absolutely no room to escape. The chain-link face blocking the door was undisturbed and taking out the window proved to be an unlikely explanation.

So how could anyone vanish, like a burst soap-bubble, from a shed with its only exit blocked by a solid, undamaged chain-link fence? It's "a classical locked-room situation."

The trick for the impossible disappearance is pretty nifty and logical, splendidly using the bolted down, tightened nuts as red herrings, which did not prevent me from figuring out how Wallach escaped from the blocked shed. However, this was not due to my dazzling abilities as a brilliant armchair reasoner, but because certain elements of the setting and problem reminded me of another locked room novel. I would probably spoil too much by naming the book in question, because the method for the vanishing trick here hinges on exactly the same idea used in the other book to present a murder in a small, completely sealed environment – getting a different result with pretty much the same trick. And Ormerod looks to have been the originator of this locked room idea.

Anyway, the impossible disappearance is resolved by the end of the second chapter, but there's a legitimate and very clever reason offered for this early revelation of, what should've been, one of the focal points of the plot.

The solution to the first impossibility leads them to a long-forgotten room on the demolition site, bolted from the inside, which contains two bodies: one of them is the missing construction worker, shot through the heart, but the second body has been rotting away in that room for the past thirteen or fourteen years. As it turns out, the decayed skeleton belonged to Marty Coleman, a local, who disappeared after taking part in a bank robbery with the loot. A "bag of white fivers" that could not be spent. A second accomplish, Dutch Marks, got away empty handed and the third one, Karl Lubin, served time for shooting the bank manager. Now he lives in the neighborhood again!

So that makes for a nice, double-layered locked room problem, but the bolted door is not even the biggest obstacle facing Mallin, Coe and the police. Coleman and Wallach were shot with the same gun, thirteen years apart, but the missing hand of Coleman suggested the murder weapon had been wrenched from his grasp. But can a gun, "rusted to hell," fire a second, fatal shot after nearly fifteen years? What role does the bank robbery and bag of banknotes play in the case? Are any of the old robbers involved or did Wallach's murderer accidentally stumble across this nifty hiding place?

Admittedly, the whodunit angle is the weakest facet of the plot, because Ormerod gave the murderer's identity away when the robbery angle turned up. Mallin made a throwaway remark that contained the whole truth and could have flown under the radar had Ormerod handled this so-called clue with a bit more subtlety and sophistication. 

Regardless of this blunt handling of the killer's identity, the main attraction of the plot remains the locked rooms and the way in which they were interconnected. One simply could not exist without the other and the only other example I could think of with such a pair of linked impossibilities is John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man (1935).

Of course, The Weight of Evidence is not in the same league as that landmark impossible crime novel by the master himself, but the ambition was definitely there and the locked rooms were good, and original, enough for Adey to label the book as "the genuine article." Even though he was taken somewhat aback by the complexity of how both locked room tricks were stringed together. I fully admit the story would have benefited from some maps or diagrams, but the tricks are not impossible to imagine. You just have to read the explanations very carefully.

So, no, it would be unfair to compare The Weight of Evidence to some of the classics of the genre, but I think a comparison with the trio of locked room novels Bill Pronzini wrote during the 1980s is allowable. 

I know Pronzini is an American and Ormerod was English, but everything about this book, such as the tone, atmosphere and plot, felt not entirely dissimilar to Hoodwink (1981), Scattershot (1982) and Bones (1985). Particularly the last one felt similar in mood to this one as well as dealing with skeletal remains and an impossible crime. So you should expect something along the lines of a 1980s Nameless Detective novel when picking this one up.

As you can probably judge by this review, you have not heard the last of Ormerod on this blog and I'll not limit myself to his handful of locked room novels. Some of his "normal" detective stories also piqued my interest and found some of the negative commentary on his work by the critics very encouraging, which stated that his labyrinthine plots tend to have too many twists and turns. Ha! There's no such thing as too many twists and turns in a traditionally (styled) detective story.

So expect a quick return to this writer, but the next blog-post might be taking a look at a Dutch mystery novel with, what might be, a very unusual locked room problem.