Six Dead Men (1930/31) by S.A. Steeman

Back in April, I reviewed a fairly dated Dutch-Flemish translation of La nuit du 12 au 13 (The Night of the 12th-13th, 1931) by Stanislas-André Steeman, a Franco-Belgian writer, who has been called the most important and brilliant names from the French Golden Age – "a master plotter and a relentless experimenter." Xavier Lechard agrees Steeman was "one of the greatest and most inventive plotters of all times" on par with Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr. The Night of the 12th-13th gives a glimpse of how Steeman influenced and helped shape the classically French detective story of the 1930s, but there's an odd little thing about the either storytelling, plot or translation. The locked room murder is never treated or even acknowledged as an impossible crime.

I was baffled why the locked room element was ignored and feared the problem could be a condensed translation, rather than a stylistic experiment, but Nick Fuller left an illuminating comment: "I read this in late 2022 and found it inscrutable. Native French speakers complain that the writing is not always comprehensible and the slang fatally archaic." Well, Steeman was a French-speaking Belgian from Walloon and suppose he muddled his writing with formal French and Belgian-French, but Nick's comment suggests the translations are an improvement on the original French texts. I read a rather dated Dutch-Flemish translation from 1935 and found it to be perfectly comprehensible. So, with that in mind, I poked around a bit and found an old Dutch translation of the novel that solidified Steeman as a leading light of the French Golden Age detective story.

Six hommes morts (Six Dead Men, 1930/31) netted the then 23-year-old Steeman the 1931 Grand Prix du Roman d'Aventures and a translation published the following year gave him a brief, fleeting presence in the English-speaking world, but disappeared as fast as he had appeared – likely due to a lack of new translations or fresh reprints. I noted in the review of The Night of the 12th-13th how scarce secondhand copies of the English edition of Six Dead Men have become and copies that are available tend to come with a hefty price-tag. Those who managed to snare a copy were unanimous in their praise. Curt Evans thought Six Dead Man is "a great novel to read alone in a 1930s apartment building at midnight" and Martin Edwards called it "a real landmark of the genre." So thank you to that rebellious Dutch province of Flanders for making Six Dead Men and The Night of the 12th-13th a little easier to get your hands on.

Six Dead Men concerns six young, poor friends, Henry Namotte, Marcel Gernicot, Nestor Gibbe, Hubert Tignol, Georges Senterre and Jean Perlonjour, who collectively agreed their current state of affairs is deplorable and things had to change. Drastically. So they agreed to break away from their old life, scatter to the four corners of the world and work hard towards making a fortune. They would reunite in exactly five years time to fulfill their agreed upon promise to "put together whatever they might have earned and won" and divide the pile equally among the six men. But there's a catch. The agreement can work like a tontine insurance policy ("each time one of us disappears, the share of the others grows in proportion"). What could possibly go wrong?

When the reunion date crawls nearer, the six men begin to journey back home and some of them earned a fortune, but not everyone has been as lucky or fortunate – not merely where the money is concerned. One of them dies on the home journey when he falls overboard, while another brings back a crazy story about a man with a red beard and dark glasses who condemned the six to death. And believes this mysterious man has followed him back home. This mysterious man makes an appearance almost on cue, fires a shot that leaves one of the men mortally wounded and promptly disappears. Next, the dying man is taken away, presumably kidnapped on account of the coded tattoo on his chest.

Inspector Wenceslas Vorobeitchick arrives on the scene to mark his first appearance and the first time I got to see him act as a proper detective from beginning to end. Vorobeitchick is seriously wounded in The Night of the 12th-13th and had to make an early exit as the examining magistrate with two inspectors carried on the investigation on his behalf. A highlight of Vorobeitchick's handling of the case comes when the third victim is stabbed under apparently impossible circumstances, while riding alone in an elevator to a second floor apartment. The Night of the 12th-13th never acknowledged its impossible crime element. So nice to see Steeman giving it some consideration in Six Dead Men, but Vorobeitchick needs only a single chapter to figure out the locked room-trick. A rather mundane one at that. There are better and more inspired takes on the inexplicable murders or disappearances from sealed elevators, but the trick served its purpose here as a small cog in the machine of the plot.

The ingenuity of Six Dead Men is found in the identity of its mysterious murderer and the attempt made to misdirect the reader, which is unlikely to work on many readers today, but undoubtedly did the trick back in the early 1930s – deserving the comparison to Agatha Christie. There are, however, some issues. Xavier warned that despite Steeman's "almost carrian devotion to fair-play," the storytelling and plots can often be "wild and hard to follow as they are." Something Nick's comment can attest to. Having now read Six Dead Men and The Night of the 12th-13th, Steeman strikes me as an idea man who had great and inventive core ideas, but lacked the writing skills to build something truly special from those designs as most of what surrounds those core ideas tends to get blurred or glossed over. For example, I'm still not entirely sure how the murderer intended to cash-in without getting caught. While the almost pulp-style storytelling camouflages some of those faults and certainly helped with the entertaining end phase of the story ("You!"), the discerning reader can't help but notice blurriness of the overall plot. However, that all comes with the caveat that the dated translation might really be the problem.

Whichever the case may be, Steeman is unquestionably a historically important mystery writer, locally anyway, whose importance seems to have been in sowing the seeds by showing what's possible rather than crafting genre defining classics himself. You only have to glimpse at the catalog of Locked Room International to get an idea how fast those seeds took root and reaped a harvest. So, historically, Steeman deserves new translations and fresh reprints, but fear the overall quality might not be sufficient enough for most publishers to justify the costs. Particularly when there are still so many better alternatives to translate or reprint like Pierre Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Killer, 1939) and René Reouven's Tobie or Not Tobie (1980).

A note for the curious: I have a good reason to belief one of the translators of the either the Dutch or English version made a mistake. The English translation makes no mystery about the setting of the story, Paris, France, but the Dutch-Flemish translation for some reason obscures the setting – referring to it as a European city. There was a hint early on in the story that it actually take place in France, but then the murders start to happen and one of the authority figures who turned up is referred to as the "substituut van de heer procureur des konings' (deputy of the crown prosecutor). I'm pretty sure France was on its Third or Fourth Republic in 1930. So that would make Brussels, Belgium, the location of Six Dead Men, but a passing mention to someone's rank is a really weird way to localize the story, if Paris was its original setting.

The Night of the 12th-13th (1931) by S.A. Steeman

Stanislas-André Steeman was a French-speaking Belgian illustrator, journalist and mystery novelist whom Xavier Lechard lionized as "one of the greatest mystery writers of all times." Steeman was an important, seminal figure of the early French Golden Age detective story whose work is "very representative" of French detective fiction of the 1930s that emphasizes originality, inventiveness and occasionally subverting the rules – while upholding the tenants of "rigour, fair play and cleverness" of his Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Only two of his celebrated novels were translated into English in the thirties and have never been reprinted since their original publication. So secondhand copies of the English translations tend to be as scarce as they're expensive with a copy of Six hommes morts (Six Dead Men, 1930/31) recently going on sale for $1250 plus shipping. Not all of his work is hopelessly out of reach.

Fortunately, the French-speaking Steeman had sense enough to be Belgian and therefore practically all of his mystery novels have appeared in Dutch/Flemish translations. Most of them published during the 1930s and '40s. And while copies turn up about as often as the English translations, the Dutch/Flemish editions seem to be much more reasonably priced, if they turn up. So immediately pounced on the Dutch/Flemish translations of Steeman's La nuit du 12 au 13 (The Night of the 12th-13th, 1931) when one finally headed my direction. I'd say it was influential on the French detective story of the thirties, like those published by John Pugmire's Locked Room International, but more on that in a moment. 

The Night of the 12th-13th is the second title in the Wenceslas "Wens" Vorobeitchik series and begins with setting up two separate, but obviously intertwined, plot-threads concerning a husband and wife.

Floriane Aboody is on her way to Confucius, "a shop of Chinese and Japanese goods and antiques," where she has an appointment with Van Hou Yen, but a shop assistant, Jean Heldinge, tells her he's currently absent – as is his partner, Ling Chu. However, the latter appears a few moments later to inform Floriane that Van Hou Yen will visit her home that evening. Which he does. The secretive meeting ends with Van Hou Yen handing a small parcel tied with a golden cord over to Floriane. Meanwhile, her husband, Herbert Aboody, has troubles of his own. Herbert Aboody is a co-director of an import-and export company, H. Aboody, J.B. Lawrence & Co, who has been receiving threatening letters over the past few weeks. The most recent letter informing the co-direction, "if you persevere and leave matters as they are, you will die on the night of the 12th and the 13th." Aboody's secretary, Stève Alcan, recommends him to consult a detective. This brings Wenceslas Vorobeitchik into the investigation who's not impressed with the case ("can you find something more banal than threatening letters") and critically underestimated the severity of the case. And not without consequences!

Wens proposes to spent the night of the 12th and the 13th together with Aboody in his (locked) office at the import-and export company, which he considers to be a secure location with a police detective patrolling the grounds outside. But what he fears mostly is that "this night will pass terribly calmly." Famous last words as the police detective outside hears the unmistakable sound of gunshots. Aboody was dead with a bullet in his head, while Wens had been critically injured as he was struck in the chest and leg with his body blocking the already locked office door. So that effectively takes Wens out of the case and story, which leaves the case in the hands of three other detectives. Namely the juge d'instruction, or examining magistrate, M. Plante, Inspector Aimé Malaise and Inspector Walter. Xavier Lechard did say Steeman both deeply respected the rule while "never afraid to subvert them" or "gently poking fun at them." The Night of the 12th-13th is a good example as it did not play out as an ordinary, 1930s detective novel!

There's an odd little thing about the locked room situation and I don't know if it was edited out of the translation or done on purpose, but the shooting of Aboody and Wens is never once acknowledged, treated or discussed as an impossible crime – which unnecessarily detracts from a cleverly-constructed and plotted (locked room) mystery. If it was done on purpose, it perhaps betrayed on undeserved lack of confidence in the strength of the plot and fearing to give away too much, too soon. If the translation is a condensed version, I feel slightly cheated out of my locked room fix.

Either way, you can clearly see Steeman's influence on other traditionally-minded French mystery writers of the period from even a possibly abridged translation of The Night of the 12th-13th. Noël Vindry, in particular, appears to have modeled his novels somewhat on Steeman and The Night of the 12th-13th. Vindry's series-detective is shot and wounded under impossible circumstances in La maison qui tu (The House That Kills, 1932) and the double shooting recalls the locked room problem from Le bête hurlante (The Howling Beast, 1934), while the case-for-three-detectives approach resembles Michel Herbert and Eugène Wyl's La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932). The distinctly, pulp-style trappings of the plot also begs a comparison with Alexis Gensoul and Charles Grenier's La mort vient de nulle part (Death Out of Nowhere, 1945) and Marcel Lanteaume's La 13e balle (The Thirteenth Bullet, 1948), but The Night of the 12th-13th comes with a thick dollop of yellow peril. You can probably place some blame on that element for the drought in reprints over the decades.

But, purely on its merits as a detective story, it definitely deserves to be reprinted as it more than delivered on its premise. And what looked like a routine investigation following the spectacular shooting inside the locked office. An investigation in which the increasingly frustrated detectives become entangled in a web of romantic relationships, embezzlement, faked alibis, missing suspects, sinister Chinese and a noticeably growing conspiracy of silence surrounding the mysterious events on the night of the 12th and the 13th. Steeman pulls everything tightly together in the last chapters with a satisfying and for the time original explanation to the whole perplexing case. I anticipated the correct solution, but not because of any of my own cleverness or delusions of being on par as an armchair detective with Mycroft Holmes. The solution has, thematically, something in common with a few other (locked room) mystery novels from this period (SPOILER/ROT13: Jnygre F. Znfgrezna'f Gur Jebat Yrggre naq Nyna Gubznf' Gur Qrngu bs Ynherapr Ivavat juvpu nyy unir cybgf fhoiregvat gur ebyrf bs gur qrgrpgvir va n qrgrpgvir fgbel qverpgyl yvaxrq gb gur ybpxrq ebbz-gevpx).

So it didn't take me too long to notice the pattern and it gave me a pretty good idea what really happened in the apparently unconnected prologue, but you can hardly hold that against an otherwise good, solid and at the time innovative detective story. I would like to read a fresh translation to see if anything was cut out of this Dutch/Flemish edition and think a LRI reprint would complement their other French Golden Age translations. But due to the locked room angle going unacknowledged, it might make more sense to reprint The Night of the 12th-13th together with Six Dead Men as a twofer volume. Just a completely unbiased, impartial recommendation from an independent and trustworthy party. :D