Golden Age crime, contd: Death from a Top Hat

When I saw that Clayton Rawson’s 1938 novel Death from a Top Hat – one of the best-regarded locked-room mysteries of its time – was available online at a not terribly inflated price, I ordered it immediately. I knew I was taking a slight risk – a few of the reviews I had looked through, including on blogs run by Golden Age Crime Fiction experts, suggested that this book’s reputation was inflated, or that it didn’t hold up so well when read today. Or that it was a little convoluted or esoteric (which was plausible, given that the narrative is populated by professional and amateur magicians – including the main sleuth, The Great Merlini – and other specialists in the arcane arts).

Anyway, I finished it yesterday and am glad I bought it. Apart from its quality as a whodunit (and a howdunit), I knew within a few pages that I was going to enjoy it purely at the prose level. The narrator, a freelance writer named Harte, starts by mentioning an essay he is writing on the “modern detective story”, which we read excerpts of: with a listing of famous fictional sleuths – from Poe’s Auguste Dupin to the present day, i.e. the 1930s – as well as murder methods. But then he is interrupted by noises coming from the hallway outside, and discovers three strange people and one dead body. A man has been murdered in the opposite apartment… in a locked-room situation.

Much of the fun in the ensuing chapters comes from the banter between Merlini, brought in to investigate (it helps that he is professionally acquainted with some of the suspects), and the police chief Gavigan (who is no mug himself – definitely not the caricature of the over-confident cop who exists only to be a foil to the genius detective). Along with the narrator, they puzzle over alibis and motives – and, of course, methods, given the puzzling nature of the crime setting – but their speculations are soon complicated by a second murder. And so it goes.

Along the way there are snippets of information about conjurors, their tricks, and the history of the profession. There are amusing footnotes, not imperative to the plot. Gavigan rolls his eyes in despair whenever Merlini gets a little pedantic or goes into a mystical-sounding explanation. One chapter, a discussion of impossible-crime methods, specifically cites the "Locked-Room Lecture" from John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, which had been published just three years before this book.

There are some enjoyable chapter-ending cliff-hangers too (including funny ones), and a neat little mystery-within-the-larger-mystery, involving the disappearance of a man from a taxi after he had been seen getting in. And as for the final solution – I liked it a lot, and I thought Rawson had practised the fine art of misdirection well enough that it was rewarding to go back to the earlier chapters to see what one had missed the first time.

So this is well recommended, for the fluidity of the writing, and the humour, as well as for the mystery. (The second half of the book does sag a bit in places, but picks up quickly enough.) I’m told that Rawson’s short stories are very good too – I have a couple of them in anthologies, and will get around to them soon. 

(Another recent Golden Age crime post is here)

An unexpected book-movie connection: Cat People and John Dickson Carr

Most serious horror-film buffs will be familiar with the swimming-pool scene from the 1942 film Cat People – famous for its use of the power of suggestion, and a classic example of producer Val Lewton’s moody, abstract approach to horror (the scene has a woman being menaced by an unseen presence during a late-night swim, while we think we see something leopard-like amidst the dark shadows on the wall around the pool area). During my recent immersion in the work of John Dickson Carr, I realised that the Cat People scene may have been partly inspired by a creepy passage in Carr’s 1941 novel The Seat of the Scornful (also known as Death Turns the Tables).

The passage has a young woman named Jane who finds herself locked in the indoor-swimming-pool section of a hotel basement late at night… then the lights go out, and she thinks she is being stalked by someone or something in the darkness. The writing isn’t too elaborate, but there is something very vivid about the setting (a twilight zone located within an otherwise plush non-threatening space) and the imagery, with the water casting shadows on the wall and the unsettling acoustics.

As discussed here before, Carr was one of the giants of Golden Age crime fiction – nearly as popular as Agatha Christie at the time – and this book came out just a few months before Cat People went into production in early 1942. So it’s very plausible that Cat People screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen had read it. A couple of short excerpts are below.

(The book itself? Highly recommended as an example of one of Carr’s non-impossible-crime mysteries; in fact, it seems obvious almost from the start that only one person could have committed the murder in question – but of course things don’t turn out to be that straightforward. The swimming-pool scene isn't central to the narrative, by the way - it's a bit of a red herring, if you can expect a red herring in a hotel pool.)

(A post about Curse of the Cat People - a sequel that is very different from Lewton's other horror films - is here)

Murder and romance in a military hospital: on Green for Danger

Continuing with capsule reviews of Golden Age crime fiction. Yesterday I finished Christianna Brand’s 1944 military-hospital mystery Green for Danger (it was made into a popular film too, starring Trevor Howard and Alastair Sim among others). This is a solid, well-crafted whodunit – which is impressive when you consider that there are only six serious suspects, all doctors and nurses involved in a pre-surgery procedure that goes very wrong. (And that’s followed by a second death, which is much more clearly a murder.) So here is a small pool of characters, and some of the book’s humour comes from the way in which they sit around chatting with each other (often in the stiff-upper-lip British way) about which of them might be guilty.

I can see Green for Danger not working for some readers, especially crime-writing fans who want regular, fast-paced thrills. Much of this narrative, and especially the first 40-50 pages where the characters are being established, has a romantic-soap-opera-ish quality to it: being about the sometimes-complicated interrelationships between these men and women (two of whom are officially engaged to each other, but there’s much other flirtation going on) – and while some of this is important to the mystery, it can make the book meander in places.

But on the whole, I liked it very much. There are a couple of good, well-placed red herrings, and some fine sociological detailing of wartime England - about life in a time and place where flippant or hedonistic behaviour can become a way of dealing with unpredictable horrors. This isn’t quite a M*A*S*H* or Catch-22 as army-hospital dark comedies go, but it is irreverent in its way. And strangely moving at times. (Also you learn a decent amount about operating-theatre procedures of the era.)