Hake Talbot : Rim of the Pit, 1944

Henning Nelms was born in Baltimore in 1900. He taught dramatic Literature at Middlebury College and Pennsylvania State University, and conducted several theaters. He did several jobs, including the profession of lawyer, a family profession, since his father had also been (as a shepherd of the Episcopal Church); But he had also done the sailor, the editor, the accountant, the director of an advertising agency, the prestigious. With his true name he signed books about theater, drawing, and a handbook of illusion and prestige.
Similar to Clayton Rawson, he wanted to try to write mystery novels in which he transfigured his illusionist knowledge, and with the pseudonym Hake Talbot he signed two great classics of the mystery: The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944); as well as two short stories: The Other Side (1940) and The High House (1948).
Rim of the Pit has always enjoyed a certain fame: it has been (and still it is today) praised or attacked. Talbot wrote a novel that had to astonish: it is understood from the beginning:
Dead of Winter

There are dead people who are mistaken for living beings.
– ELIPHAS LÉVI, Dogme de la Haute Magie

“I came up here to make a dead man change his mind.”

In short, a bumpy entry!

It begins with that “I came up here to make a dead man change his mind”, that expresses already a lot and already introduces one of the subjects of the work, the windigo, the evil spirit. In fact, in the phrase “ I came up here to make a dead man change his mind ” (expression recalled by Carr in his famous praise, which he formulated when Talbot’s novel came out in the types of Bentam: “From the first period: I came here to induce a A dead ghost comes back … or maybe he does not come back at all. A flying ghost drops apparently as he hits and goes to the attack. No angels, but demons and sorcerers seem to be dead. Dancing on the tip of this needle … The edge of the abyss is a magnificence “), the adverb” up “can be understood with reference to two things: referring to the place of the spiritual sitting, that is a cabin in the mountains , And / or referred to a place anyway higher than that in which it resides. Grimaud Désanat, if it is an evil spirit, he will dwell in hell. Moreover, his evil indole is also witnessed by the name Talbot furiously gives him: in fact, in Grimaud Désanat, the beginning of the word Grimaud, “Grim”, is the same as Grimorium (black magic book), and moreover the adjective “Grim” in English may mean “horrible”, “left”, “hateful”, “fierce”, “macabre”; while Désanat can be understood as a sciarada, formed by the union of two words: De and Sanat, then Satan’s anagram, Satan. So .. “Grimaud of Satan or Grimaud from Satan”. But … Grimaud is not quite a Talbotian name, but invented by Carr: it is the surname of that Charles that appears in Carr’s Hollow Man. Another connection with the great John?

Rogan Kincaid is a gambler with a lively and adventurous life behind him, who suddenly, when needed, is a detective. Landlord of vast mountains, covered with trees, Grimaud Désanat is dead. Luke Latham, a wealthy sawmill owner, would like to convince Grimaud’s widow to sell the forests, but she is reluctant to do so, interpreting the will of her husband who has left them. But Latham does not deny and obsessively tries the widow, as long as she agrees to initiate a spiritual session, in which she will play the part of the medium, having specific powers. Some people will be attending the session, including Rogan, Latham, Ogden, Latham’s partner, and a Czechoslovakian magician, Svetozar Vok, who should unveil the tricks of the medium.

The spiritual session begins, and at some point the voice of the medium changes, taking a different pitch from her and assuming a male timbre; then immediately after, happens the apparition of a malignant face suspended in the middle of the air, so malignant to horror the present: is Grimaud Désanat, who curses his wife for changing his wills.

Immediately afterwards, in the horror of the onlookers, the spectrum vanishes seeking refuge at the top floor. Meanwhile, the widow-medium faints and if anyone had some pretense or a supposition that it was a trick, he must recur as there is no trace on fresh snow that can prove the existence that someone not known else has arrived in the meantime, not seen, in the cabin. Meanwhile, however, Vok reveals some of the tricks practiced by charlatans and fake mediums.
At this point, the impossible happens: the medium is killed in her room by the windigo, the evil spirit in which Désanat has turned, and no trace is found on the snow covering the window sill. Subsequently, there will be a second murder, this time outside, without any traces found, and Ogden, Letham’s partner, will die. In the end Rogan Kincaid will solve the arcane, demonstrating the murder was not supernatural but human.

In America, the novel was originally published in paperback on the Pulp Magazine “Thrilling Mystery Novel” in the 40s, then in the Bantam Paperbacks in 1965 (as part of “The World’s Great Novels of Detection” series chosen by Anthony Boucher), and in the 80’s, always in paperback, by International Polygonics, Ltd. In recent times, also republished by Ramble House.

Certainly a lot of the fame, derived from the enthusiastic judgment expressed by Carr:

“From the very first sentence, I came up here to make a dead man change his mind, we are into the realm of nightmare: Miracles gather and explode. A dead man returns – or does not return. A flying ghost, apparently, swoops down and attacks. No angels, but goblins and wizards seem to dance on the point of this needle. But gently: have patience! Everything is explained on natural grounds, un a marvel of ingenuity; and all the clues are there…Rim of the Pit is a beauty. Don’t argue with it; read it”

Now, that Carr was convinced about the absolute goodness of the work, and with him those who embraced his argument, it is not in question; It may be to see if in fact the novel merited entirely the fame .
I’m somewhat disappointed (I think it was understood) maybe because I had been excited by Talbot’s other novel, written before this. Of course I’m aware that I’m so against all the series of enthusiastic judgments that you can read here and there, but I do not care to be an out of line opinion. So ..

First of all, nothing can be said about the aspirations of this novel: it tries the difficult way of the nystery novel that goes hand in hand with the supernatural one, as J.D.Carr had already done with superb results in The Burning Court and Melville Davisson Post in several stories. In fact, in the intentions of Talbot, until the last, one should not be understood whether the crimes were committed by supernatural beings or in flesh and bone; and even this is widespread everywhere in all websites.
I must say, in truth, that all that concerns illusionistic magic (phantom appearance, tricks, and anything else) is treated with mastery, and some peregrine thinking if and how the ghost may have appeared, peeps, I admit . And how the crime could have happened, given the restrictions imposed, typical of novels like this (intact snow, absence of footprints, etc.). So nothing to say about that.

I disagree about the axiom for which the Talbot novel was written by taking as an example Carr. It does not seem to me that Rim of the Pit can only remember Carr: at the same level of novelists, it seems to me that much more of Talbot’s carriageway, for example Alan Green. In spite of some aspects that actually exist in the novel, Hake Talbot seems to me much closer to Clayton Rawson, as more than anything else tries to focus on the quality of the enigma: a novel I would ideally associate with this could be No Coffin for the Corpse by Clayton Rawson, in which there is an impossible disappearance and an equally emblematic appearance. And as I say this, it would seem to me that another novel that could have been taken, for example, could have been the Winslow & Quirk Into Thin Air, reviewed in this space some years ago.

The fact is that it seems to me (where instead others don’t think this …) that this novel has an inadequate atmosphere: it is frosty, claustrophobic yes certainly like the environment in which it is placed (and some American critics rightly refer to The Plague Court Murders by Carter Dickson (also the one reviewed here), but it can not captivate in the manner we would think; this judgment I have compared to that of other friends who read it, and many among them think the same thing : it’s also a matter of style. In addition, and this in my opinion is a further limitation, if not even a wrong choice, Talbot inserted at the beginning of each chapter a quotation from magic books, treats, or anything else: this escamotage ends up removing any residue of supposed supernatural truth, since the continuous recurrence of something related to the atmosphere that one would like to create ends up to make sure that of supernatural there is nothing (the reader who buys the novel knows it is a human crime, but at least during the novel he would like to be carried on the wings of fantasy elsewhere; instead ..).

In addition, when Rogan Kincaid unmasks the assassin saying that the gun that had shot blancks to Windigo, and the silver bullet that had been found in Ogden’s deadly wound, had been Kinkaid to put it in the wound when he Had pretended to extract it, and that Ogden had not been killed by a bullet but by a stab and accuses X of having killed him, he doesn’t believe as Carr, to provide a clear and acceptable explanation of the crimes, that instead remains cumbersome and unresolved, to testify that not always, climbing on the mirrors, you can then climb them. In short what in a much more specialized environment than mine, others say: “The actual impossible murders (there are two) are well set up but less convincingly resolved, though they’re certainly original. In my opinion it’s very good, but not great.”
In this he differs even from Rawson, who, as is well-known, has never been too much praised for the style of writing or for the atmosphere, but essentially for the quality of the puzzles he was able to create, being able to explain them In the best possible way, despite some of them, for example Death from a Top Hat are remembered like some of the most complicated puzzles ever conceived, often very close to pure illusionism. Then, if someone looks for other things, like locked rooms, and the same mechanisms used by Carr to mislead the reader (in The Hollow Man), here he is going to observe them. Only the judgment expressed by so many critics and novelists, that is, in their list of the best Locked Rooms overall, this novel by Talbot was the second after The Hollow Man by Carr , it seems to me a bit unbalanced (and heavily influenced, from the positive opinion, expressed by Carr).

Pietro De Palma

Claude Aveline: La doppia morte dell’Ispettore Belot (La Double Mort de Frédéric Belot, 1932) – Translation: Cesare Giardini – Preface: Alberto Tedeschi – in appendix: Double note sur le roman policier en général et sur ​​cette “Suite”en particulier – Oscar Mondadori N. 1556 – August 1982

 

More the time passes, more I find references to a question that springs to mind every time, and so I can not answer: why in 1932 were born many masterpieces of crime fiction?

Why at that year? I do not know.

In 1932, they went out countless masterpieces: Peril at End House by Agatha Christie; Poison in Jest, by John Dickson Carr, The Greek Coffin Mystery, by Ellery Queen; Obelists at Sea, by Charles Daly King, Murder on the Yacht, by Rufus King, Sudden Death, by Freeman Wills Crofts, La Maison interdite, by Michel Herbert & Eugen Wyl, The Devil Drives, by Virgil Markham, The Wailing Rock Murders, by Clifford Orr, La Maison qui tue, by Noel Windry, etc etc etc.

Among others, the extraordinary La Double Mort de Frédéric Belot by Claude Aveline.

Born in 1901 and died in 1992, Claude Aveline was a great French intellectual, famous poet and critic, activist and partisan during the Petain government, a friend of Anatole France and Jean Vigo, character always on top until the last years of life.

In 1932 he wrote his masterpiece, as part of crime fiction, La Double Mort de Frédéric Belot, but until then, he had not written anything about detective fiction. One can therefore say without any fear of being wrong, that this coincided with his debut genre literature.

Extraordinary novel, it is said, but also a huge success for its time. The French public went wild for mystery novels, and you can tell a good reason that, in France, you want to parochialism, either by the tendency of the French to not recognize less than anyone else, soon many authors still speaking French or had tried to write stories of mystery, and had proven to be on par if not better than other Anglo-Saxon writers.

The novel had undergone many editions in France and was translated in a short time in thirteen different countries, including Italy, where the novel with a title quite faithful “The Double Death of the Inspector Belot,” was translated by Cesare Giardini and published in “I Libri Gialli Mondadori”, with the number 77, in 1933.

Why this novel was so successful at home? To various factors.

The first is due to the publisher:

Bernard Grasset, founded in 1907, “Les Nouvelles Editions” and from that moment, his publishing house was distinguished in the publication of works by major French writers and intellectuals, including for example Lourdines des Monsieur Alphonse de Chateaubriand, Filles de la pluie André Savignon, and also Du côté de chez Swan of Marcel Proust. But he had also published Diderot, Voltaire, Gide, Valéry. So, in 1932, editions of Bernard Grasset, who as then, they are still in the Rue des Saints Peres, 61 in Paris, were the spearhead of the French publishing and presenting works extremely serious.

The second factor is certainly due to the novelist:

Aveline was a big name in France, already at that time. He published several works of literary criticism, with its eponymous publishing house, and had already distinguished friendships, including especially that of Anatole France, who had become the most faithful follower; and the friendship of Jean Vigo, the director of “L’Atalante,” one of the most important movies of the last century

In short, the fact that the most important French publisher at the time and one of the leading French intellectuals of the time, together, they decided to focus on the launch of a work of detective fiction, had its immediate echo in the society of the time and contributed to the spread of the novel. Intention was intentional or unintentional? Aveline makes it clear when, in his ” Double note sur le roman policier” (as Mercurie edition at 1963), states that if “The Double Death” had belonged to a specialized collection, it would have gone unnoticed by critics, who insist to ignore crime fiction. A famous editor’s name on the cover of publisher, editor that had nothing to do, too, with this literature, caught their attention. Reading my preface, forced them all to take sides for or against .. I’ve had good allies and opponents rough. But I had reached my goal”.

You can say, however, Aveline, put much of his own, spending many weeks at the Prefecture of Paris, to take possession of a world that he gave in a wonderful way. The success was so resounding that Aveline, who in 1936 published his “The Prisoner”, he thought to write another. Unfortunately he had to die Belot the first time and even two times and thus introduced the adventures that had taken place before he could die. In fact, as he had this to say about his first novel … “The ennui que c’est mon j’avais Killed policier du premier coup, et même deux fois, je n’avais pas qu’il aurait prévu du service à reprendre . Heureusement, je ne fait pas mourir avais the trop jeune”. And so in 1937, he published his second work, “Voiture 15, place 7”, followed by Le Abonné de la ligne U and finally Le Jet d’eau. Since then, long before he regained writing detective stories in the last years of his life he wrote the last chapter of the Suite, L’Œil-de-chat.

However, his masterpiece is the first of his writings, so that later, during the re-publication of his complete works, in the form of  Suite policière (Mercurie, 1967), he wrote a Double note sur le roman policier and a Confession policière .

How Aveline wrote, the novel “is a story that begins at the end. If there is a book that lends itself to be re-read, this, contrary to general opinion, it  is the detective fiction. The reader has followed an investigation, putting himself in the shoes of the investigator. Well, now he can take it, not with the eyes of the author, but with those of the criminal. With the eyes, the heart, the guts of the criminal. The moves of the future conqueror, replacing the anguish of being hunted by the police, or by their remorse. In literary fiction ‘usual’, the reader can only dream during his first contact with the work … Here, however, he is able to evoke a new drama. Here he  can create.”

Aveline imagines that Simon Riviere, a police inspector and son, in turn, an inspector of police, the recount the most sensational, but also the ultimate, adventure of Frederic Belot, Head of the Special Brigade and his godfather. The fact that Belot, man always active, has accepted a position behind a desk, he did mention several of his acquaintances, the more so that he gave the green light to Picard, to become Director of the Judicial Police. But the surprises do not end here: in fact Belot, bachelor, announces the decision to marry Mrs. Déguisé. Then it happens that one evening Belot is expected by Picard, Belot did not turn up. Riviere was sent to look for him. It’s 4 November .

He goes home in which he dwells, in Rue de Crimée 26, and asks the doorkeeper of Belot, feeling to answer that his godfather did not come out. The front door is closed, and not having the keys, he need some tools that cops like him on their back and force. When he enters into the house “it’is pitch dark.”

Turns on the light in the hall, and he sees hung the coat and the hat, of Belot. Finding closed the office door, he opens it, and the study also illuminates the darkness. At the center of the room he sees Belot on the ground, gasping .. Turn on the chandelier and it is that is wounded in the head and also your body, and next to him it is his gun, a Browning. Is excited to call his superiors and ask for help and an ambulance when .. seen coming from under a heavy curtain that divides the living room from the studio, a clenched hand. Draws aside the curtain and he founds the body of another man, lying with his face to the ground, he dressed in gray and he with a Browning. He revolts him and .. “I saw that this man was Frederic Belot. But a Frederic Belot dead”.

From this discovery, starts off a story that is unbelievable, in which the “double” is the predominant element in which these truths are until you find something that will completely overturn, in which the events can be said to be one leading to another, as many Chinese boxes.

First you have who is the real Belot and who is the impostor. Because it is obvious (or seems so) that one killed the other. I emphasize “seems” because in this novel, more than any other, must be taken with the tongs and wary of everything that is taken for granted, because sooner or later take on a meaning different ways.

The bodies look the same, two copies, but then you turn out, the autopsy of the dead Belot wears a mustache hairpieces and the color of the face is given with a foundation. So he is the impostor. At this point, it turns out, however, the comparison of the weapon (gun Belot has the charger with two deep scars etched File) that the gun who shot and killed at the first it is that by Belot: why would he shoot at the first? This is the first question, which it is placed. But it will be one of many, when you know the rest. For example., near the fake Belot,it is found a box full of bullets open: what does it mean? What was reloading his weapon? And why not? If he really were introduced in the apartment, you would have to assume that he was armed ie with gun equipped with a full magazine, ie able to kill the true Belot. But his gun is unloaded. But it is also true that there are shells everywhere. But, coincidentally, also the weapon of Belot is low as if they had emptied the magazines against each other.

This alone could mean another question (hidden): how , a cop and a killer, a short distance from each other, firing wildly against each other, would have caused so few injuries ( even fatal) to one another? A shot in front of the dead, the other one to the body and another to the head. Mah.

At this point, another event which gives even less certainty to the matter: the false Belot has the card of the police officer with the fingerprint impression of his thumb. Why to do a false card when he could steal the real one? Even the real Belot has one with the photo dissimilar in a particular hair with the other but for the rest completely equal, and with a fingerprint different. Only when you want to compare the two to the archive, it turns out that it disappeared. Why?

A lot of questions, too many.

Belot is hospitalized in desperate conditions. Despite the injuries is still alive, and groaning phrases insane or at least seem so. Meanwhile, Riviere makes a discovery of the utmost importance: Belot’s apartment is split over two floors. The tragedy took place on the first floor, now he goes to see to find clues and raides also the second and he is confronted with something he did not know: the plan is divided into two parts according to the length, forming two apartments . In the back of the wall of the house of Belot, it is a panel with a safety lock, and behind the void: a secret door of communication between the two apartments? And why?

Who is the mysterious Belot’s tenant? The concierge, Madame Morin, who had previously told to police the photos of the dead could being familiar but she could not say who he was, has an epiphany: he is the mysterious tenant. At this point it is clear that the two knew each other. And why is it then that the latter had taken the shape of the first, who he knew? Thanks to the keys found in the pockets of the wounded, he is unable to open the panel and he goes in a small apartment anonymous though elegant, where there is nothing but an identity card, in a suit, which refers to the Jean Martin inhabitant 43ter of the Rue Arthur-Rozier, which is basically behind Rue de Crimée: a house with a floor divided into two, with a separate entrance from the main post office in a different way. Why? And why it is above the cabinets of the two houses contain exactly the same clothes of the same sizes and o colors?

Simon Riviére at this point makes a discovery of paramount importance to the succession of events, supported by another, made in the archives of the police: first, you turn that Jean Martin was never born, and the man in the picture he is not unknown. Simon learns from invalid mother of Belot  the man in the picture is his son. This achieves an absurdum: we believed impostor the real Belot, while the impostor is the other.

But at this point an absurdity more absurd comes forward: why Belot would have to shave his mustache and darkening of the skin to resemble a look-alike, who previously looked like him before? Why all this mess?

Picard, a friend of Belot and head of Riviere explains that was the same Belot to impose this solution, the day he met his counterpart, such Ferroux, wrongly accused of embezzlement, who looked like him as a drop of ‘water. At that moment he realized that doing impersonate Belot to his double what he would have done from that moment onwards, the head of a division that required him to office work, he, the true Belot, could play in disguise of delicate police investigations.

This explains the false Belot, thus explaining the disappearance of documents, and the creation of a false identity to police: it was all part of a plan. But why the false Belot killed the real one?

And why the false Belot, in the moments before death (because he died in the hospital) shouted: “Do not kill him! Do not kill him! “And not” Do not kill me! “?

And who has delivered a letter by the prefecture to Mrs Déguisé, who had an affair with Belot? At the Prefecture people deny. So there’s a third person who does everything to appear on the scene: an accomplice, a witness, or .. the murderer?

Because at this point, Riviére putting eye to this fact happened at the time of the discovery of the division of the second floor, and  thinking and thinking and especially returning to the scene of the crime and collecting shells and making them compare, he realizes they come from a single weapon, and especially to understand why there was “pitch dark” in the victim’s home when he found the two bodies: if indeed one of them had shot and killed the other while he was mortally wounded and more the head, how he could go and turn off the lamp and close the door, and why? If he really had all these forces, he have spent them trying to ask for help. But .. none of this.

The reason for all this, leads to a third person, “X”, who would have killed the two Belot, the true and the false, and then would have put the gun next to the fake Belot. But here a question arises naturally: how could the killer shoot with a gun order of the police? The gun was in the possession of the killer or he had come into possession of it?

The reason you will find it in a love story ended in error, and understanding of the dead will be only the result of non-screening by a false murderess in favor of a real one. The ending will be tragic and sad, and the final explanation, imaginative will rebuild the great puzzle by placing each piece to its rightful place..

First, we say that the Italian edition, in 1933,  made a colossal error of perspective in the title, naming the novel “The Double Death of the Inspector Belot,” attributed to him a degree that Belot no longer had. Belot in fact in this novel, which is the first, but also the least because he appears to be dead, is no longer Inspector but …Commissioner. And the rest is just his promotion to cause his death, you might say.

Claude Aveline, that Michel Lebrune called “véritable novateur du roman de Mystère, a humanistic et un grand humorist” and Pierre Boileau would have said that he had given the genre of the novel Crime “ses lettres de noblesse”, tried on several occasions salvage the detective story, taking the defenses:

“Il n’y pas de romans nobles appartenant aux Belles-Lettres (qui en décide?) et de romans moins nobles parmi lesquels on range selon l’arbitraire habituel romans populaires, d’aventure, romans policiers”.

He, however, despite being a man of learning, critical, he realized that would not be enough work only criticism of this kind of groped to salvage it, but it was necessary that he give a good example, writing a novel. It must be also proof that even a man of letters could write a detective novel, with taste, humor and inventing a problem so abstruse that only with an explanation beyond human comprehension it could be explained.

The learned scholar, a critic, the poet, the inventor of ironic aphorisms, such as “La mort d’autrui soumet le vivant, résigné, aux lois inévitables. La sienne, il la considère comme un assassinat” (= the death of others is an inevitable thing, their death is a murder), he invented a novel exciting, tense and vibrant, devious and machiavellian, but also deeply human, renewing the same way as other teachers (Very, Steeman, Boileau, Vindry, Lanteaume, Letailleur) declared the detective fiction. It unravels the veil of mystery with a rare virtuosity, resulting in a constant game of mirrors, where the investigation takes on the tone of almost psychoanalytic analysis and disconcerting but extremely vibrant psychological insight.

Aveline, even, also to involve more the reader in history, he humanizes the drama telling about the Inspector Riviére, the real detective story, Belot’s godchild, who learns that the man to whom he was very close in human terms, because a great friend of father and protector in Police, was brutally murdered in his home. It ‘s a well known fact (and accepted) that if the protagonist is himself embroiled in an investigation, the reader will follow with more passion for the evolution of the story.

Not only. To involve even more the reader, Aveline imagines himself involved in the action, since the writer is also the narrator of the story. In this Aveline comes very close to Van Dine: in fact S.S. Van Dine was the narrator of  Philo Vance plots.

Aveline, writing a detective story, with the best writing possible, evoking a history in the balance between the absurd and the improbable, and resolving it in a way that the solution is the only one capable of bringing the absurd and the unlikely to a possible dimension, and putting into, also a love story poignant and significant psychological implications, then creates a new type of novel, a “serious”detective story.

This seriousness of novel, puts him at odds with the serious crime literature of his time, which normally (without touching the vertices) gives maximum emphasis to the plot at the expense of the rest. Here, however, everything has got an own role, all figures need: All figures represented here have a soul.

Notice for example how he can make us extremely close, with fine psychology, the envy of the concierge sloppy and dirty, against Mrs. Lesueur, who with her, with a caretaker, doesn’t unburden herself her because she is superb, “as if do half service itwas not like being a servant”.

Furthermore, here, like a Greek tragedy, the story has not solution , hasn’t an ending that brings the calm after the storm. No. Here the calm will not reappear. Indeed ..

In fact, the solution is bitter beyond measure: a suicide attempt has turned into something else, and who had to be suicidal, he becomes, not wanting to, killer. Then, there is someone else who intervenes and changes the nature of the events. Just that .. he/she doesn’t understand the importance of light.

Has a small, insignificant detail all this matter? Perhaps even more, it also has a metaphorical: light of the apartment brings light on the case; without the light there was really a “pitch dark”.

In this novel all the characters in this absurd story ends up being the alter ego of the Homeric heroes prisoners of fate and prisoners of whims of the gods, forced to recite the parties and to live a tragedy that can not be avoided because they have unknowingly put their own the gears in motion. In a certain sense, the murderer is not really.

In the novels of the period, no one stops to contemplate death. It is only functional in the story, but in no way its tragedy is analyzed. But here it happens.

The story then loses the characteristics of game intelligence, to take those of analysis of the soul. In a sense, this makes the reading not easy, and the pace quite heavy.

Moreover, as evoked by the same title, here everything is double, one could say this is  the Aveline “triumph of the double” in crime fiction: real Belot is a double (what appears and what it is); Belot is double as an individual (the Belot true and false); the Picard truth is double: the untold truth and revealed truth; the house is a double: two floors, two separate entrances, and a plan is divided into two; the murderer is double: the true and the false; the gun is double; the collection of clothes is double; the same identity card is double; false Belot is double: his true identity hidden and the false assumed and demonstrated to other as true; the story of Mrs. Diguise is double because she believes to love Belot and instead she fells in love with Ferreux, false Belot.

The murderer is double, also: a false killer who pretends to be true, and then the true murderer. The same Mrs. Diguise is double because in real life has different surnames, and she is doubly double since last lines of the story it is clear that she is a friend in common (double friend) as the narrator (Aveline) as the detective ( Riviere) among their, friends.

I end with a think of Aveline, taken from the Double note on crime fiction in general and on this suite in particular:

“As for the novel, it raised – after a unanimous praise of writing that moved me and which I have not kept any account (this edition offers the reader a text completely redone) – the most contradictory comments. Realized and betrayed the promise of the preface. It broke with the old formulas and it didn’t bring the slightest news. It was “super-police”, algebraic, and sacrificed the interweaving to psychology. On two points, as I expected, he had to find “against” the majority of jury.

1° Despite my prior statement, I wanted to write a detective novel;

2° The theme of the double … it was incredible”.

Pietro De Palma

Peter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 1996

In the contemporary scene of the writers of detective novels , specializing in the classical genre , Peter Lovesey has a prominent place. Born in Whitton , in 1936 , Lovesey has spent many vicissitudes in 1944 his house was destroyed during a German bombing ; had a passion for sports and dabbled in athletics , but soon realized it was not his way ; attended the University where he met his current wife ; he devoted himself to teaching but then you chose the career of full-time writer . He lives near Chichester. He signed with his real name all his novels except three , signed instead with the name of Lear Petert . His son Phil writes detective novels .

His series are centered on characters such as Sergeant Cribb , the agent Thackeray , Bertie (ie Albert, Prince of Wales ) and Peter Diamond. His novels  earned many awards : in 1976 with Swing, Swing Together

He  won the Grand Prix de Litérature policière ; in 1978 he won the Silver Dagger Award for her novel Waxwork ( repeated in 1995 with The Summon , and in 1996 with Bloodhounds ) ; four years later he won the coveted Gold Dagger Award for her novel The False Inspector Dew . She also won the Prix du Roman d’ Aventures with the novel  A Case of Spirits, the Macavity Award with Bloodhounds ( repeated in 2004 with The House Sitter ) and with the same novel also the Barry Award . He also won the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award in 2004, and the Agatha Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008. In 1988 , his Rough Cider has been selected in the final five of ‘ MWA Edgar Award , and again in 1996, The Summons .

Bloodhounds , translated and published in Italy as Il Signore dell’Enigma (“The Lord of the Enigma “) , is dedicated to John Dickson Carr. [1] 

A group of loyal readers of thrillers , known as the The Hounds , come together in an underground chapel of the Church of SS. Michael and Paul, at Bath . They are : Milo Motion , Hilda Childmark , Jessica Shaw, Polly Wycherley , Rupert Darby, Sid Towers. At one day also , Shirley -Ann Miller joins to these. She made himself known for her versatility in the kind of knowledge and for her kindness . The Hounds occupe themselves principally about Mystery , while somehow they abhor the rest .

Inside, Shirley -Ann recognizes dynamics certainly not idyllic , that make well understand how , beyond the similar knowledges, the affiliates to the group are not all united by feelings of close friendship : she already sees the day when Rupert ports downstairs her dog , provoking the ires of someone, especially Hilda Chilmark, an old heir of an illustrious family fallen into disrepair, who not mindful about this, treats others as if they were a notch below her . The attitude of rejection towards Rupert and his dog , is accentuated at another occasion , during which both Sid Towers and Milo Motion ( both Carr fans) would have to bring along a copy of The Hollow Man , to discuss it into the group , and also read the Conference by Dr. Fell.

At this occasion, just the lady Chilmark has an attack of hyperventilation , and then recovers by the intervention of Jessica Show that after she eliminated a paper bag where Motion kept his copy of the Carr, she provides to Chilmark to restore her proper breathing. The fact is that the incident provides an opportunity to introduce into the copy of the novel by Carr , owned by Syd Tower, a rare stamp from 1 penny black , stolen a few days earlier from a city museum , theft which had been announced in advance by a message in the form of quatrain , and that he had alerted the city police : the same Peter Diamond , superintendent of police of Bath, and head of the homicide departments , had provided some of his men to Inspector Wigfull, including Inspector Julia Hargreves, to find the stolen stamp.

At the moment in which the stamp reappears, at the meeting of The Hounds, and after the attack of hyperventilation of Hilda Chilmark, the suspect (also in the reader ) that one of the hounds may have been the thief of the stamp, creeps.

Syd , after a confrontation with the other hounds , he decides to go to the Police Station and report the discovery in his book, which he swears he never left from the time when he took on board his boat where he lives . The fact is that Syd , after denouncing it in most interviews, and be able to demonstrate that he was not the theft of pennies, returns to the boat owned by him in the company of John Wigfull , and , after opening the lock with which he holds closed the cabin , he finds dead Milo Motion: the lock is of a special type , German, with only two keys that can open it , and one key of both fell in the water where the boat is anchored more a year before ; The cabin has no other openings , if not another door that is bolted from the inside , however, by a number of bolts ; Syd swears that the only key to open the lock was always in his hands , and at the same time professes her innocence . Further investigation will show that he is not the killer . How did Milo Motion to enter into the booth and why? How did someone kill him and be able not only to open a padlock Syd swears that it has closed , but also to close it, for the physical impossibility that the lock may have other key to open it? And above all, why was he killed ?

The most incredible thing is that the impossible murder appears to have been previously announced by another quatrain , whose meaning is incomprehensible before subsequently put in report to the novel by Carr. It ‘s clear at this point that if someone had previously suggested that the thief could be one of the Hounds, now there must be between them even a murderer , if the murderer is not also the thief.

Various hypotheses will make their way on the identity of the thief, also able to explain the murder , but the resolution will come only at the end of the novel, after we will admire two hypotheses about the solution of the Locked Room (at the second , Diamond will destroy the first by Wigfull , after the discovery by police divers of the first key of the padlock ) for brilliance and flair , after a second murder will throw more sand in the eyes of the investigators ( Rupert Darby will be killed , awkward and unpopular man to most people) ; and after that someone will begin to suspect a blackmail for the detriment of another member of the Hounds, uncomfortable for a pregnancy and the birth of a secret son , always gravitating in the group of The Hounds .

The novel has not a granted end, because two tight end are taking place: the first , with two culprits almost sure but announced too , and another , the true final, with a guilty not granted , not far from the action and at the same time never kept in mind of the investigation, and brought under the spotlight , only after the final reflection by Diamond.

Spectacular and beautiful novel , it presents an incredible variety of characters (and thus driving ) , even within a narrative structure , already consolidated and addressed in other novels by other writers: in fact, the so-called association of The Hounds , formed by readers and passionate lovers of thrillers , is only the last in order of time , among the many that have preceded it : suffice it to say that Blacks Widowers by Isaac Asimov , or The Seven Solvers in Invisible Green by John Sladek , or even the three friends mystery fans , who will face off in Gammal Ost by Ulf Durling .

It is necessary to recall that Lovesey , in the novel also introduces a vein decidedly humorous , and ironic ( just remember that The Hounds meet themselves in an underground chapel of a church , nor they were the followers of a sect , within collide rivalries , hatreds , and are committed thefts , blackmails and murders : a satanic cult , almost) : it is as if the author himself ironized about who takes terribly seriously the Mystery Genre.

Lovesey , however, impresses in this novel, his recognizable trademark : a tribute to John Dickson Carr, recalled from beginning to end , through allusions , quotations and conferences , which have as a reference, the most novel reminded by Carr : The Hollow Man (The Three Coffins). This giveaway is not only formal but also substantial because is processed a double Locked Room enigma : a murder in a cabin of a boat, hermetically sealed from the outside by a padlock thief-proof , and from the inside by another door closed by a bolt ; the appearance of a rare stamp , stolen from a museum, in a book that the owner swears he never deposited elsewhere ( and he is not the murderer ! ) .

Added to this is the mood light which permeates the novel, the humor always present , the tumult of the suspects , the true and false tracks , the crackling inventions that are never final , but always leave a second chance to reasoning.

Unlike by other authors who keep up rytm with the action , Lovesey fails to attract the reader’s attention (which doesn’t fool till the end ) only with the his ideas. Indeed , the fact that in twenty pages from the end, Lovesey indicates a possible suspect , it is not for me to be put in relation with the tendency of some writers of the old school to use the last few pages , as a kind of summary that explains the facts earlier; for me, instead, the author is launching another false bait, so that the ultimate truth is found elsewhere : it is the old assumption by Agatha Christie , whereby because the picture of the situation can be said to be solved at all, it is necessary that all pieces of the puzzle fall into place , not in any way forcing their inclusion.

The only thing that leaves here and there dumbfounded is the hidden explanation of a particular event,  not communicated to the reader immediately and instead only revealed at a later time (the splashes of white paint not only on the basque by Rupert but also on the coat of fur of his dog, which had not been brought by him to the inauguration of the painting exhibition ), even if you immediately understand its scope : it holds high the reader’s attention on the contextual assumption, until it is revealed the hidden detail , which it leads to a solution diametrically different, though not definitive as regards the discovery of the killer.

Lovesey ‘s attention about the personalities of the actors in the drama , most importantly , is not at all related , and this is demonstrated by the influence that all the characters have in the course of the narrative : even what would seem to be the only person not to can be inserted into the group of be suspected , because the only joined the group of The Hounds after, will play a very important function albeit indirect , and this person will enter by force in the final solution , although not personally .

So in the novel , the trend of action will see the beginning coincident with the end and vice versa.

Pietro De Palma 

[1] As Carr lost his home in World War II in an air raid, also Lovesey lost his home in 1944, destroyed by a V1 Flying Bomb.

Charles Daly King : Arrogant Alibi, 1938

Born in 1895 in New York, Charles Daly King was educated at Newark Academy, Yale and Columbia University. He graduated in psychology, and after having fought as an officer during the First World War, he became one of the biggest followers of Gurdjieff, interesting about the sleep and its components, since his thesis, publishing thick essays about psychology, including Beyond Behaviorism (1927) and The Psychology of Consciousness (1932). He was part of the group of AR Orage in New York and later headed the group in Orange in New Jersey. Besides the two texts quoted, he wrote a manuscript which circulated only in circles of fans, The Oragean Version. He died in Bermuda in 1963.

From 1932, he wrote seven novels, six of which are published, which represent the legacy of vandinian mystery school, perhaps of more than the highest expression.

Arrogant Alibi is characterized, like all the his other five novels (but we should say six, because you know for sure that Daly King finished a seventh novel whom he was waiting to be published after the Second World War, but that it was not more) from atmosphere heavy with suspicion, and a plot as usual complicated: here Michael Lord (police lieutenant), always accompanied by psychologist Rees Pons, is invited to Hartford, home of the rich Victoria Timothy wife of an Egyptologist (rather, predator of tombs) that has brought in America a large part of the things he had stolen in Egypt, constituting in a place, united to his home, a gifted museum. The name of this villa is Perkette.
That evening there will be a reception, during which they provided the musical entertainment, and will be attended Grant Worcester friend of Lord (is he who invited him) and his wife Garde; Charmion Dannish, girlfriend of Dr. Earley, young protege of the rich widow, who will sing, and the same Earley who should play something; the lawyer Gilbert Russell, office of the widow; and two Egyptologists, Ebenezer Quincey and Elisha Springer. However in the mid-evening, during the interval, Charmion having a bit of sore throat and remembering that in the bathroom next to the bedroom of the home mistress, on the first floor, there is a tube of aspirin, went there. She takes the aspirin, also she makes some gargle, then hears something in the neighboring room, and then not going across the door through which she entered, but from another through which the bathroom communicates with the dressing room adjoining the bedroom, she goes here.

A few minutes later, the Inspector Lord, downstairs, while the guests and his friend Pons are in the room where there will be a concert, hears the sound of a phone, but does not understand at first where it comes from; when he picks up the phone, he learns from Dr. Earley, left shortly before, called at the home of a patient who is very ill, that he would not return home to perform, because his patient is dead and he must also attend to bureaucratic chores: he pleases Lord to report the incident to the hostess excusing him. While he has laying the receiver, Lord is intrigued by a faint glow of light at the end of a corridor, where he knows that there are no lights, but while he is about to go and to see, first he hears a loud scream and then the same cry more attenuated, that comes from upstairs. Bouncing down the stairs, he hears a noise coming from the master bedroom, he enters, and he sees Charmion deathly pale that looking at a point she is going to faint. He supports her in time to see he too, a body lying on the floor near the bed: is the body of rich widow, with a dagger by the unusual shape, stuck in the throat, so that the handle baits parallel to the chin.

Michael Lord, immediately sees a phone and tries to call the police, but the line is silent because someone cut the wires: you will find that the scissors used are those which come from the basket of embroidery work of the mistress, placed elsewhere. Lord, puts Charmion on the bed and, after making sure himself about the death of Victoria Timothy, goes downstairs to ask the butler, Rath, when the hostess was uphill. Also turns to his friend Grant Worcester, asking him to call the police because there was a murder, even if that on the front does not believe him. Meanwhile, the attention of Lord is again drawn to the dark corridor from which comes out a dim light: he goes there and understand that ithrough it that the museum is connected to the house. Gone into, he finds at a huge room, lit by a dim light, two men, Springer and Quincey, self-styled Egyptologists, who are discussing about the dating of something that attracts the attention of Lord: it is the same dagger that a few minutes ago was stuck in throat of widow Timothy. Why is there, more of everything clean?

Presenting himself to two men and informing them about the death of the widow, Lord can know not only their names but also to understand that that dagger is the twin of the other used for the murder, and that both were in a showcase of the museum . When the three enter newly in the house, the cops are coming, under the command of Lieutenant Bergman of the police of Hartford.
 According to the times, the murder seems committed within about sixteen minutes, from 22:45 (time at which the hostess was seen rising, by the butler, who testifies) to 23.01 (the time of discovery of the body part Lord). Only that at this time all seem to be in a barrel of iron: the majority of the guests, including spouses Worcester, Dr. Pons, Russell, were at the hall where was the concert and were still there when it was given the news of the death of Victoria Timothy and nobody saw someone get away; the two Egyptologists were at the time of the cry, in their room of the museum to examine the other dagger, and, unless each covers the other, could not have been them (they also would never know about the existence of the telephone wire and the place where to find the scissors, or you?); Dr. Earley was even out of the house and the phone call came from outside testifies it. So what? Who ever did kill her?

At the hearing in front of the coroner, Lieutenant Bergman, gathered all the evidence, called Charmion and Lord to testify, rebuilt the discovery of the body, called Charmion later to explain why once finished gargle, she was not simply out of the bathroom to go down but had stretched the path entering the dressing room and from there into the chamber of the Mrs Timothy from which she would have to go out in the vestibule leading to the stairs, and not having been able to explain it, the head of the investigation incriminates as the killer, even in contrary to legal procedure of this.
At this point, Michael Lord, Dr. Earley and others agree to try to save the girl.
During the interrogation in front of Dr. Earley, that is the coroner in charge of defining the nature of the death of Mrs. Timothy, Grant Worcester, friend of Lord (is he who invited him to the party) accuses publicly such Kopstein, politician with disreputable friendships, to have made killing the woman, who opposed herself to his claims; and says he saw a man flee from the house. However, if these revelations are new , these are later denied by the revelation that no one came out of the house after Dr. Earley left: it is witnessed by a lot of persons.

However Kopstein is another point to be clarified. As well we learn that the two alleged Egyptologists, old friends of husband of Mrs Timothy killed, were not actually getting together in the museum to date the dagger, as revealed to the investigators, but in turn they went to the toilet and then leaving the showcase with the two daggers into at the disposal of the other, as long as was not the Egyptologist who said he would have gone to the toilet, to kill the rich widow.
In other words, if before the alibis were unassailable, now begin to see the stretch marks.
For more, you find that Quincey had a serious reason to kill her: he had a bill due of two thousand five hundred dollars that he would have to pay to the old woman at the day after the murder of her.

Dr. Earley calls on the phone and happily he says that after a series of tests, the position of Charmion has changed, because it has not disclosed any possible motive against her, as well as anyone, Bergman, had suggested that there could be.
Other strange things happen, however: by the maps of the various floors of the house, used in the renovation of the same house, is torn that about the first floor, where was murdered the old Timothy, a maze of corridors, dark corners, and rooms without a link, which can be accessed not only through the main staircase for which rose Charmion and Lord, but also through a secondary staircase. New questions.
Lord would re-query Quincey about the bill about which he didn’t speak, but he finds the door of the museum closed, boarded up from the inside and moreover he sees slide under the door some rivulets of a viscous liquid and dark red that is undoubtedly blood. He Shoots the door hinges, he manages to demolish it, without falling down to the poor Quincey lying on the ground, whom they find with the other twin dagger, stuck in the back: he, after to have mumbled words that are currently without sense, dies .

The room was locked from the inside. Bystanders frisk it: there is no door or window that may have been used to escape and moreover the sarcophagi are all sealed by pieces of scotch old and yellowed. How did the stabber to eclipse, a few minutes before all persons arrived, without they had seen someone escape?
After Lord will first deciphered the words murmured to his ear from dying Quincey, whom Springer will reveal to be a magic Egyptian formula: Quincey would murmured “sersew wah wah wah wah”, ie 6-1-1-1-1, because obsessed by the magic of Ser Wah, the murderer will be nailed in a spectacular final at which it will be clarified how a first crime was committed without no one could have done, and how could escape a murderer from a locked room, not before an unassailable alibi was shattered.

Extraordinary novel of Daly King, Arrogant Alibi is one of the best novels of the ’30s: fantastic setting, in a spooky house, full of hiding places and dark corridors, blends puzzle mystery (here we have the triumph of Whodunit: also an impossible crime and a crime in a locked room ) with psychological mystery to grind an airtight alibi (with the triumph of Howdunit), creating a superb staging in which the suspects and the persons suspected appear and disappear, mysterious clues overlap (the phone cord severed, two similar daggers, the time clock in the electrical room of the died widow forward over twenty minutes compared with precise, the mysterious number 6-1-1-1-1), in which even the seedlings of various plans at which the tragedy consumes contain puzzles (the torn page with the map of the first floor of Perkette).

An extraordinarily vandinian novel.

The thinking behind the crushing of an airtight alibi, and the capture of an evil murderer, is very complicated, son worthy of all this literature that from Van Dine originated: the extremely complicated thinking behind the solution of puzzle at The Bishop Murder Case, by S.S. Van Dine; The Greek Coffin Mystery, by Ellery Queen; or also About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress, by A. Abbot: it is as if Daly King had drawn from all other vandinian authors that before him had their debut as part of the novel, creating a super novel that had characteristics taken from various sources, but in the same time it was not a mere collage, but new original work that transcended its same original sources, creating and recreating all the problems of the enigma novel of the ’30s and bringing them to an unusual level of stylistic perfection.

Moreover, it is obvious that it’s a vandinian novel: first Michael Lord is accompanied by his friend the psychologist Pons, and thus form a pair, at which one of the two elements is an institutional figure: Ellery is related to his father who is a police inspector, Philo Vance is related to Markham which is a District Attorney, Abbot is linked to Thatcher Colt who is a Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Daly King perhaps had as model for his Michael Lord, Lieutenant of Police, the character created by Abbot, Thatcher Colt. There is also here a trick that calls another vandinian famous, Ellery Queen, at least in his novels of the ’30), ie the dying message: what else is precisely Sersew Wah Wah Wah Wah? And yet vandinian is another feature: the Egyptian setting. In fact, since the early 1900s when many tombs were discovered and important excavations were undertaken in Egtitto until 1922, the year of the discovery of the tomb of Tut-Ank-Hammon, there are many novels that show locations of Egypt, from R. Austin Freeman (The Eye of Osiris, 1911) to Dermot Morrah (The Mummy Case Mystery, 1933), Agatha Christie (Death on the Nile, 1937 and Death Comes as the End, 1944). But, in the novels of the so-called vandinian school, they rise to a real distinctive character.

In fact, from the novel by S.S. Van Dine, The Scarab Murder Case, 1929, all or most ,those who wanted to refer to Van Dine copying the elements of his narrative style, ended up creating a novel that had Egyptian setting or artifacts that were related to ancient Egypt or other exotic locations that could still arise from Van Dine: Ellery Queen (The Egyptian Cross Mystery, 1933); Rex Stout (Red Threads, 1939) in which the Egyptian setting becomes Indian setting ; Clyde B. Clason (The Man From Tibet, 1939) at which to the setting in Egypt is replaced a Tibetan setting; Richard Burke (Chinese Red, 1940) in which the exotic setting here becomes Chinese; and finally this novel Daly King.

The same trick that the murderer uses to get away with it, brings us to the second novel by Van Dine The Canary Murder Case, not because it is the same instrument, but because on an instrument of common use, ingeniously, the murderer builds his foreignness to the realization of the crime.

Finally the Locked Room: when the room is more closed than ever, and cannot be a suicide, and there was not something that has moved the time of the assassination, and there are not conditions such that the murderer could confuse himself with who had gone into the room, because it was dark or smoke, and there are not other outputs, the solution is only one: there’s some form of output… masked . This masked output then is found, but it is kept locked on the other side, by a nail whose head is rusty which leads to think that output has not been used for a long time. So what?

A new twist will change this solution into another.

But the guilty will flee, only he will not escape a terrible death, that will re-lead us to a previous novel by S.S. Van Dine, The Greene Murder Case.

After writing this article in Italian, I did read it to my friend Mauro Boncompagni and I asked him why the only cover of this novel, which is visible on the network (Collins Crime Club, 1938) was too explicit, revealing a lot of the novel. He told me that my remarks on the english cover of the novel by King were just, but also told me something I did not know: it seems that before me one of the greatest unrecognized and reviewers of mystery novels , Torquemada, in a review of the book, in fact, appeared in the Observer in 1938, had made the same my remarks.
He also told me that he was a great admirer of Carr (Mauro told me that, because we are both fans of John Dickson Carr), as well as a refined man of culture and translator (with his real name Edward Powys Mathers) and compiler crosswords, past to history (under the pseudonym Torquemada). It seems that Colin Dexter has recently reminded him.

Pietro De Palma

A very beautiful unknown Italian locked room of ’30s: Franco Vailati – Il Mistero dell’ Idrovolante (The Mystery of the Seaplane), 1935

His name was Leo Wollemborg Junior, and was the son of Leo Wollemborg, a rich German-born italian economist who had been Minister of Finance of the Government Zanardelli in 1901 and senator for life in 1914, and Alina Regina Fano, sister of the mathematician Gino Fano. He was born in Loreggia, in the province of Padua (but according to some sources, including international arbitration between the US and Italy, it seems that it could be born in Rome) in 1912, and in Padua he followed the studies, enrolling at the university and later becoming a journalist . In 1932 he wrote the novel Elena. A few years later he published his unique detective novel, the most beautiful italian locked room of ’30s, that Mondadori published in I Libri Gialli in 1935, entitled Il mistero dell’idrovolante (The Mystery of the Seaplane): for the occasion Wollemborg Leo J. used the pseudonym of Franco Vailati. Repaired in America in 1939, after the promulgation of racial laws in Italy, as jew, then he became a US citizen before and an American soldier after (he fought in World War II), he returned to Italy in the 50s, as a correspondent in Washington Post, dealing with Common Foreign and collaborating with Italian newspapers. He died in 2000 in New York. The “Columbia University” has instituted in his name a scholarship. He wrote essays, including Stars, Stripes And Italian Tricolor: The United States And Italy, 1946-1989.

The Mystery of the Seaplane, is a complex Locked Room that pays tribute to the deductive novel in vogue in the ’30s.
The Dornier WAL-134 is the largest of the latest generation of  moored seaplanes at the mouth of the Tiber, Ostia, and ” for breadth, comfort and technical perfection, could really rival the best models in service on lines foreign” (page 7 ): it is used on sea-Ostia Palermo, to bring 15 people on board (twelve passengers, two pilots and a mechanic who may require interventions of necessity and emergency).

On the 12th of July, WAL-134   is about to leave from Hydroport, when a man comes out of breath: he is the Rag. Larini. (1). He must arrive at very short time to target to treat a very important deal for the bank whose he employs, the Metropolitan Bank, but there is no place on the aircraft, as is often repeated by employees. Therefore he corrupts the mechanic on duty on DO -WAL 134, with a large sum, and he is agree to give him a seat in the cabin, on the side of the two pilots, while he will make the journey in the luggage room. The hydroplane is about to take flight but misses the last passenger who arrives out of breath:he is the banker Agliati, a guy with a mustache and a beautiful belly. He takes place in the aircraft and this leaves. Unremarkable: the passengers are beginning to take note, at least some of them. On board there is also a journalist Giorgio Vallesi, who is on the airplane to write on behalf of his newspaper, an article by color right on the crossing of this airplane, the pride of Italy. Subject of his looks interested is the beautiful Marcella Arteni, which seems to correspond; and then there is a strange lady who attracts his looks, such Vanna Sandrelli, for the fact that while elegantly dressed in red, she is carrying a bag strangely colored green, which conflicts greatly with the dress of Ventura: she’s strangely nervous. The other passengers are a couple, Mr and Mrs Martelli; Three Merchants country: Marchetti, Sabelli and Bertieri; three people of rank political: a big piece of the Foreign Ministry and his two secretaries.

One of the merchants, Sabelli, gets up and goes to the bathroom: it is a small room of one square meter of width and one meter seventy tall, a hole in substance, with a toilet, and has a small window on the ceiling to ventilate . After him, gets up Vallesi taking a walk up to the cockpit, separated by a glass door, and returned to his fellow travelers, he announces that on board there is an almost clandestine, the Rag. Larini, who travels with the two pilots, having bribed the mechanic, who is now in the trunk, for cede his place behind the two pilots, and adds jokingly that is quite fat, and his weight could affect the tonnage of plane. All do not notice: only the banker Agliati, which is also fat he looks worried: he gets up and goes to the bathroom. After a while ‘is seen out of the luggage compartment a man in overalls, the mechanic, who goes into the cockpit and soon returns carrying a bundle. Meanwhile, the other merchant Marchetti goes to the bathroom: he wait, then go back; then again, turning to his companions until he blurts out that the banker will be closed in the bathroom and did not come out despite having spent half an hour. Concerned Vallesi knocks but nobody answers, he tries to open the door but it is closed, and so should they tell the commander, who decides at the scheduled stopover in Naples, trying to bring help to the banker: but what is the surprise of all when, smashed the door, which happens to be locked from the inside by a bolt, found the room completely empty: where is the banker Agliati? Evaporated in the sky through the window, or pushed down into the clouds through the flush? And whatever it was his goal, his disappearance was due to what? A suicide, misfortune or murder?

At hydroport of Beverello, near Naples, to take care of the investigation is the Commissioner Boldrin, who doesn’t “hollow a spider from hole”: at the space and at what it seems, there are no hidden openings, and the only way out seems to be the window; however, the impossibility of the situation is the fact that the banker was rather fat and would never have passed through a window as small as that. So? Boldrin doesn’t know how to get.
His rescue comes the Vice-Questor Renzi, the Central Police Headquarters in Rome, the grandson of a big shot of the Ministry of the Interior: Renzi, read the news in a newspaper in Rome, asking to be sent to Naples as an observer, as are all Roman the passengers, and the seaplane is left from Rome; also it has read that among the passengers there is an old friend, the journalist Vallesi, companion sprees many years before.

The investigations are extremely complex: Boldrin eliminated as causes both the misfortune, the suicide, for the manifest impossibility that a fat as Agliati was able to pull himself out of a window much smaller than his circumference, or it could slip away, so more that the plane has not been overturned in flight and therefore would not be able to slip through the small opening in the roof. However, the only remaining possibility is inherently impossible to turn, because if he had been killed, at least one other person there should have been in that tiny bathroom, which is absolutely impossible to have happened given the lack of space for to retreat.

With Renzi, however, the investigation while not shedding light on the disappearance impossible, allow, through the interrogation of texts, to establish that: Mrs. Vanna Sandrelli, the lady in red, has provided false information; two of the three merchants, Sabelli and Marchetti, grain traders, knew each other, while the third, Bertieri is actually Pagelli, an old acquaintance of the police, and he’s not a trader but an envoy of the Bank of Italy and Argentina, which must conclude a particular deal in Tunis. Moreover Commissioner Boldrin makes a discovery: frisking passenger baggage, he realizes that in one of the suitcases of Sabelli, there’s on internal liner a sequence of numbers: it would seem a code, but then it is assumed (and is confirmed by subsequent investigations) that are multiple telephon numbers placed next to each other. While not seeming to have connection with the rest of the events, trying to give a paternity to those numbers and that’s one of the sequences strangely it leads to one of the Deputy Directors of the Bank of Italy and Argentina.

While you’re trying to deal with them, another criminal act disturbs public opinion: Marchetti that would have met with his friend Sabelli at Naples station to continue to Palermo (which would make other passengers of the seaplane, blocked for investigation in Naples) can not find it and then instructed previously, having the Sabelli bags, put them in the place of his friend, waiting the friend on the train to turn up. But by Sabelli no trace, until someone does not open them in the presence of Marchetti and in one of them they find in the midst of sawdust, the arms and Marchetti’s head. Marchetti is put in custody for murder, but did not know anything, so he says; and in the meantime, a few hours later it is discovered another couple of cases, the same as those of Sabelli in police custody, on the train Naples-Brindisi, in which are found the trunk, and the legs of Sabelli.

Has Sabelli’s death connection with Agliati’s death, always he’s dead?
Another strange thing happens: in Italy Corso, in Rome, an office was ransacked, but the strange thing is that nothing is missing. Renzi for a case is asked to deal with it, and in a room closed from the inside, finds the crates full of sawdust, while in another, Renzi locates next to a phone, a number that fits with the string of numbers found in suitcase of Sabelli, while have gone missing all the towels in the bathroom. Renzi assumes that is the place where Sabelli was killed and dismembered. Subsequent investigation will allow him to reconstruct the sequence of events that runs all around the Bank of Italy and Argentina, and relations with the banker Agliati, not before someone had tried to kill the wife and the daughter fourteeen of Agliati, near Villa Borghese.

Giorgio Vallesi offers his own solution to the mystery of the disappearance of Agliati: he was not really fat but only he would pretend to be it: but how? Once entered at the toilet, having got rid of the fake belly sending it flying away, through the window, he would be hoisted and walking on the outer fuselage seaplane (hypothesis mad) would be hacked in the luggage room, through the outer door which can be opened even by external; in there, he would have bought the silence of the mechanic, who would come out and returned with a package, which according to the Vallesi could have been a mechanic’s overalls; in that mechanic’s overalls, while the others were intent on knocking the door, he would come out from the plane. However, the solution of Vallesi has some obvious flaws: the Beverello pier was super guarded by police and no one among those present had come from the seaplane; is also confirmed by the testimony of the pilots, the mechanic had brought nothing with him in the store that a package, and it contained not a mechanic’s overalls but a loaf of bread, and fruit, as evidenced by the peach pits found in the luggage storage.

Starting from assumption by Vallesi, saving what he feels interesting and rejecting the rest, Renzi will be able to solve the mystery of the closed toilet, to find the true identity of Agliati, with a past of profiteer and swindler, to rebuild that of another his former become an important figure of finance, who feared the revelations of his former friend, and to arrest him, with other fellow gang members, in a field where they were hiding a coffin containing the corpse of the banker Agliati.

Lively Italian mystery, The Mystery of the Seaplane, is a tribute to the whodunit of 30s. Complex and also difficult in certain passages, for example that relating to reasoning about the two pairs of bags containing the human remains of Sabelli, according to which is discharged the most likely of the killers, Marchetti, who for more admitted that the suitcase containing the head was in his possession, the novel in my opinion, however, has two major flaws: no atmosphere and the murderer is not one of the passengers, that’s the actors in the drama.

It would have been a good novel, if it possessed an atmosphere, and instead seems to be rather a news story, unvarnished, a mere exercise in general, a divertissement, and as such it should be seen, with some rhythm and even suspence, and somehow carefree and light. Probably because it is a tribute to the fashion of whodunnit, without the author felt transport or passion about it, or perhaps the need, where the predominant part is performed by deductive reasoning that is so cold but also virtuoso in his ruminations and hypothesis. The author was a journalist, and the novel seems at times something more than a chronicle: what it lacks is the inspiration of the novelist who can, through their own innate vein or through the tricks of style, to create an atmosphere in which the player is bound. That is not here. On this level, the novel loses the competition with the more dysfunctional among the De Angelis novels (if it exists) or with Alessandro Varaldo that, with all the “if” and “but”, was a writer by trade and not a journalist lent to the narrative.

However, we said, another flaw, in my opinion is the fact that the murderer is not one of the passengers: I do not think I can say Wollemborg could have read Obelists Fly High by Daly King or vice versa ( and this would have been possible if the American author had known the Italian language), because both novels are of 1935, and the first edition of the masterpiece of Daly King appeared in Italian, in 1938. And same thing can not be said by Wollemborg / Vailati about the novel Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie, because this work appeared in the same year; if anything, we could reflect about the fact that three works of a crime in the sky, appeared in the same year, 1935.

But, as in the novels by King and Christie, the guilty should be sought among one of the passengers, in the novel by Vailati is not so: and then how was killed and transported away Agliati? Here, this is the pivot of the argument, which is in my view a real gem. And having imagined what the killer had used to simulate a belly that could be functional, idea that comes at a children’s articles And he imagined what he had used the murderess to simulate a belly that could be functional idea that comes at a toy store and children’s articles. Once again I must, however, think that the most beautiful locked rooms, at least the most spectacular, are the rooms that do not come by coincidence or by an unexpected or action only from the killer, but a sham operated with the aid more or less cooperative if not complicity of one or more persons, creating a true optical illusion.

From this point of view, the novel by Wollemborg / Vailati I can say it would be the envy of Christianna Brand, author of Tour de Force, novel a few years later, that resorts he same kind of staging. And more specifically, concerning the technique of impossible crime, it would envy to John Dickson Carr, author of The Crooked Hinge.

In fact with Dickson Carr, Wollemborg/Vailati shares a trick that is present with the same values in the two novels: in The Crooked Hinge, Carr uses something that would stretch the height of a person at will, in the novel by Vailati is instead something that can increase or less the abdominal circumference of a person at will. Two different things, but the same is the purpose: to cheat the present person and the reader. I do not know if Carr had read the novel by Vailati, but if it happened he would have to read it in Italian and I do not think he knew my language, so as to be able to read an entire book. What is certain is that Carr’s novel was published in 1938 while that by Vailati is from 1935.

(1) Where you find Rag. Larini, Rag(ioniere)  is in Italy the equivalent of “accountant” or “bookkeeper”  in England or US

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Pierre Boileau : L’ASSASSIN VIENT LES MAINS VIDES, 1945

Pierre Boileau, before he met Thomas Narcejac, wrote eight novels that gave him fame, and among them, too, “L’ ASSASSIN VIENT LES MAINS VIDES” (1945).Like other novels of Boileau, this begins without an introduction: Brunel and his companion, Pierre, who narrates the story, as usual, on the street, are almost run over by a former comrade of Pierre who then greets them warmly and invited them to best coffee on the Champs Elysees, where he will make know to the two cousin, Alex Fontaille. He, grandson of a landowner, Apolline Fontaille, who has grown up as a child, joined romantically with a note dancer of Parisian nightclubs, Monique Clerc. From the first moment, he doesn’t prove to be serene and yet insists that the two friends of his cousin, go with him to the estate of her aunt, Les Chaumes.
While they are in Paris, Brunel realizes that someone is keeping an eye on, and later recognize in this the personal home of the old Apollo, Simon.
The old, newly arrived, mistreats the other nephew, Georges, guilty of not having visited her in recent times, and welcomes newcomers with a lot of fuss.

Had the rooms, after dinner, Brunel, Pierre, Alex and his girlfriend, they decide to play bridge, after they smoked and drank, while Georges walks around outside in the garden. The old asks Alex to go to make an inspection and to close everything, that Alex does, and then returns by fellow: but while they are playing, they hear the loud voice, coming from the first floor, the room of the old: find her stabbed, in a pool of blood. While Alex is to watch over the corpse of her aunt, Brunel and Pierre share the tasks: each goes up and other goes down. Pierre determines that if anyone had entered from the out in the house, he would be in front of Gustave, who was putting in place the crockery and cutlery used for dinner, so the murderer may be gone just above the second floor, where there are none. From the second floor, dropped only Simon, the domestic staff of Apolline Fontaille, trustworthy, with bare feet in slippers and robe bedroom tucked haphazardly in the pants: unless both he and the murderer, this must have disappeared: in fact, even if the window was open, being summer, the assailant could not have fallen, because on ivy that clings on the outside walls, you do not notice anything that might indicate that hypothesis. The murderer, if he’s not Simon, has “vanished into thin air”. But why Simon would kill the old woman? He had no reason to do it, the more he perceived a very high salary, not commensurate with his duties: if at first you suspect blackmail, then learns that Simon was very dear to the old woman who had raised him since he was little , saving him from the clutches of unnatural parents who beat us mercilessly even at an early age, and he had always countered with dedication and affection the care of his mistress. So Simon is ruled out, but then where is the murderer? And what Simon was doing in Paris? It’s clear, however, that he must know something he doesn’t intend say, that can be put in connection with the murder of the old woman.

From examination of the body of the old woman, who is undoubtedly dead, we discover two very close wounds, signs of two stabs: the weapon is a sharp letter opener, found near the bedspread, with a handle inlaid, as to eliminate the possibility on it may be fingerprints.
While waiting for the next day the cops arrive, Pierre will watch, alternating with Brunel, the corpse of the old woman, in her room. But, Pierre falls asleep; at some point, however, he wakes, sweating from the tension, because he realizes that in the darkness of the room, there is someone else that moves: he would like to do something but does not have weapons and then thinks about what to do, while the other is taking the cards, which he hears the rustle of. Suddenly, he remembers the electric bell that the old woman had wanted in her room, to call Simon: he presses several times it, and shortly after he hears someone knocking at the door. After his invitation to come in, the light switch is pressed, the light shines in the room: Simon is on the door. But besides him, Pierre, in the room there is only the corpse of the old: unless it is a vampire, this time too the mysterious visitor has vanished.
Possible that is there a secret passage? Impossible. All deny it there is. So? How did the visitor to vanish? Brunel is doubtful, but Pierre insists. He also heard a rustle and a characteristic noise, like something that had been opened. Brunel has an epiphany: the secretaire. Open it, and there, from a drawer, see out a card: it is a holograph testament replacing another precedent: in it Georges Durbans is appointed sole heir. At this point, if you ever brought a growing possibility that he was the murderer (the rest he was in the garden, was the only one of the group, were not together at Brunel and Pierre) now he becomes more real, although Georges seems anything but a murderess. The strange thing is that the old woman had before prepared another testament that appointed Alex her heir: why that testament, then? Brunel curses for not having examined immediately after the discovery of the corpse, the secretaire, because now is the double possibility: it is a testament true or false? Why did the visitor open the bureau? The testament, penned with calligraphy seems shaky, as if the hand that had thrown down was not entirely sure: the old or the murderer who has imitated the handwriting?

Not even the handwriting expert appointed the next day to make a judgment, will lean much: the testament would seem to be from old woman, but then he is not entirely sure.
While you can not get away from a spider hole by the woman’s death, and Brunel concerns that something else could happen, here’s a second murder, to disturb the atmosphere: Alex is killed, he also stabbed in the heart with a letter opener, very similar to the first. Pierre sees a shadow that falls from the window, he throws himself on him, but that man avoids him, instead of killing him too: why did he risk being taken, if he killed a man before, and now he did not want to attack Pierre instead?
Brunel investigates and discovers that shadow was someone who had met with Alex, who was the first husband of Monique, a gentleman. If he was not he killer of Alex, who did kill him? Simon, Monique, Gustave, Brigitte, or Georges? Since it wasn’t possible that the force required to launch the stab was from a woman, suspects are three men: Gustave, Simon or Georges?

Moreover, Alex, before being found dead, he had closed twice the door and about this Pierre was sure, because he had distinctly heard the two shots: but then, after the discovery of the corpse of Alex, they found the door house no longer closed: it means that there is an accomplice as well as a murderer, who apparently does not know that the murderer escaped from the window, because obviously the plan assumed that he had to escape through the same exit, so surely will have to go back down to close the door and prevent you might think about him as an accomplice, unless he is not Simon, who as butler, also has the task of asking and open the door in the morning. They will agree to watch over the door so as to catch the accomplice or not, in which case it would be true the other hypothesis. No one will come down. Brunel, after a sleepless night, will be able to name the killer and to solve the riddle, discovering how the robe of the woman had not two but a single cut, which is not properly screened in the reconstruction of the crime. And he will be able also to fulfill from the charge of complicity in the murder of Alex, Simon.

Novel highly enjoyable, it is based on an Impossible Murder and on a Locked Room, which a thief was able to evaporate from.
At the base of the riddle is the result of reasoning by Brunel: “the facts are presented as well: the murderer comes to his enemies … without knowing exactly what he will do, and these terribly afraid that visit, but without power to predict how it will play . One does not have weapons to kill, others do not have weapons to defend themselves”. In fact, twice the murderer has used something that was in the house, and then, it was not premeditated he killed, otherwise he would have brought a weapon. Yet he must have an accomplice, to premeditate to go into the home.Why?

Boileau, as at other times, he climbs on the mirrors: he demonstrates an unmatched virtuosity (equaled only by Vindry and Lanteaume), in proposing a problem and its solution, when he has few ingredients, which, moreover, is a bit the typicality of French novels of the period: insist on the mystery, propose one or more problems, attractive enough, without however enlarge the rose of suspicion, because not from the juxtaposition of alibis and motives must exit the solution, but from the proposition of the problem in itself, because in essence it is based on the plot and its variations . In addition two other differences with the Anglo-Saxon novel occur: first there isn’t a real introduction, in which matures the crime, that is a typical feature of British detective novel instead (but not the US); and then, as a result, the French detective novel, and particularly that by Boileau, bases its plot on something that is done randomly, without that the reader has already seen or knows or at least images why a particular crime is consumed: it is a novel, we might say, police-type-adventurous, heir of the atmosphere from feuelliton, a dramatized feuelliton, by Leroux and Leblanc; second difference, I would say, is inherent in the fact that, while the British detective story, just to be different from that of the appendix, where if there was a crime, you had to look for the woman and the butler, tends to present among suspected all the characters with the possible exclusion of the domestics (and this essentially for a social classism, almost racist, presenting the domestics a step lower than the nobility or the upper class, the only one that could consume a perfect crime, which for intelligence can not belong to a lower social order), in the French detective novel, as a consequence of the fact that domestic, bosses, police, investigating judges, all as part of their duties are citizens of the republic, even the servants are to be suspected like the masters.

This broadens the rose of the suspects, that, as we reported earlier, it is always quite small. This of course would lead to a job easier for detectives, and then there is the need to turn and re- turn over the tangle, not only to lengthen the stock (in fact the French novels of the time are not as long as those English) but also not to attenuate the narrative tension which otherwise would weaken naturally.
In the case of this novel, the specific character and insist on the topics that we have just pointed out, reveal a very subtle reasoning, a true virtuosity of the deduction and of the sophistry, I would say by Byzantine kind: able to turn the problem, giving of each problem two or more possible solutions, from which we have many different solutions, which mainly concern here from: the will, true or false (it could be that the murderer had created a fake to create a perfect culprit, ie Georges; orit is false because posted by Georges, or is true, and then it was inserted long before by the old Fontaille); the thief invisible: how did he disappear; the problem of the lock of the front door and two turns, and about a possible accomplice; the problem of the existence of two wounds and that the robe presents a single cut; how did disappear the murderer; why Alex did try to defend himself with a piece of wood taken from the fireplace (this was found clutched in his hand); why there is not an accomplice; what the murderer or the thief took from the secretaire.

Doing so, Boileau manages to keep the tension very high, and if so far the reader has had a few suspicions and then essentially was taken to concentrate his attention on very few, because two, Alex and Monique are kept out from their own investigations because they played, together to Brunel and Pierre, bridge (a game that often appears in the novels of the time, by De Angelis to Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers to Stanislas-André Steeman), precisely during the solution, in which the suspence should cathartically fall, in this by Boileau, instead, it increases spasmodically because in a totally unexpected final, happens everything and its opposite. And everything is explained, as a murderer and a thief, different people, can vanish in an enclosed area without being detected, and as a murder in which there can not be an accomplice, he lacks; and finally as Simon, although not murderer, let alone the killer’s accomplice in the murder of Alex, he is in a sense an accomplice of another murderer, that of the old woman, although he can not in any way be involved in the murder of her.

Extraordinary!
Boileau really he is, because, and this is the biggest surprise, far from creating a novel based exclusively on clues, just in solution reveals a mechanism very cerebral, with a very pronounced psychological aspect, which concerns the way of shuffling the cards and turn the reader’s attention, creating the conditions because, on the basis of acts very obvious, he is led to believe one thing instead of think of another. To give a measure of the mechanism of the highest stylistic virtuosity, I emphasize two particular moments which for me are the measure of true creativity and power of reasoning by Boileau: the closing the front door, and the volatilization of the thief after Simon knocked three times on the door of the room where is the corpse by Mrs. Apolline, watched over by Pierre. It is the mechanism of sound illusion, explained in a famous story by Clayton Rawson, From Another World, about which I wrote an article that I have not yet translated into English, in which I wrote that for the first time I had read about a sound illusion, and this had left me speechless. I was wrong. I thought that this was the first time that had been used such an illusion, and instead already three years before a French had used it: Pierre Boileau.
This novel reveals a pattern common with another novel, Six Crimes Sans Assassin, for the way in which the murderer leaves the scene. In this, and we also noticed in the case of La Promenade de minuit and Six Crimes Sans Assassin, Pierre Boileau tends to reuse in later novels, gimmicks and escamotages that he has already used his other previous.
A very magnificent novel!

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John Dickson Carr : The Wrong Problem, 1936

The Wrong Problem, at the production of short stories by John Dickson Carr, is one of his peaks: it was written in 1936. From it Carr drew the subject for a radio play,”The Devil in the Summer House”, which aired in wartime, to the BBC, 14 October 1940, in an episode of an hour; after, the radio drama was reduced to half an hour, and presented at the radio series “Suspense”, but deprivated a character of Gideon Fell.

The place of the story is a summer house, at which takes place an impossible crime.

Both versions were later published as part of a collection of short stories by Carr, introduced by Ellery Queen: Dr.Fell, detective, and other stories (Mercury, New York, 1947). In addition to these two of his works, they were also: The proverbial murder, The locked room, The hangman will not wait, A guest in the house, Will you walk into my parlor ?, Strictly diplomatic.
Gideon Fell and the Chief Inspector of C.I.D. Hadley are walking, when they get near a lake which overlooks a villa, and in which, on a tiny island, there is a pergola of bamboo. Nearby is a little man dressed in black, his eyes slightly almond-shaped and a long white hair and a white cloth hat.

The little man, as soon as he sees them, asks if they see a swan on the water, a dead swan with its throat cut; but the two don’t see it. It’s the beginning of a story whom that man tells to two occasional guests, chanced in the properties whose owners are not present for a long time: the tragedy of a family formed by father Harvey Lessing, eye doctor and dentist, and his four children, of which three born from the first wife (died in 1899) and another acquired, already seventeen, with his second marriage in 1901, a family in which death was already facing twice before, with the death of two wives of the head of the family, yet.

The elder half-brother was called Brownrigg and was dentist, as the father had the physique of an athlete, always smiling and fond of nuts; the second brother’s name was Harvey Junior: he was dynamic, sociable, sympathetic; the third son’s name was Joseph, and he worked as a technician in optics in a large jewelry; finally, the fourth was a girl named Martha. Joseph and Martha were the same age and feelings in common, even though she was in love with such a Sommers of which Joseph was confidant, who was finishing his military service.
The fact is that after all that family was happy. But on August 15 of a certain summer, something happened that changed the atmosphere and harmony of the children: while the old Lessing, using a canoe, after lunch he went to make the nap under the pergola on the small island, someone killed him, violating the space of water without anyone seeing him, despite the surface of the water had remained flat, without anything or anyone plowed the waters: in the ear pointed a stuck object that pierced the inner membrane of the ear , piercing the brain and determining death.

The only two to suspicion were Joseph and brother Junior, while Brownrigg he claimed had been alone in the dining room and Martha had gone with a friend. Also the gardener swore that no one had pluwed the waters of the lake direct to islet. Junior knew steering a boat, and Joseph knew how to swim, but it seems that none of them could have been. The fact is that strangely was blamed one between the two, who exculpated and not to be accused by others, blackmailed them with the only weapon with which he could keep them under control: their mother had died mad, so … Besides that came to know this, the family would fall into disrepute and the career of the dentist would be cut short.

The days passed tired, in a sort of non-aggression, in an apparent calm until occurred the second impossible murder: Martha, was in his room, apathetic, straight out of an illness, when, at the same time the arrival of the lawyer’s family suddenly she went up in the tower that overlooked the house, such as being chased by someone or something invisible and locked herself in there: it was a square room, with no furniture, used to see in the distance, given its highest position of other windows in the house whose only openings were the barred window and the door. The maid runs after her, but remained outside. As soon as she entered the room, they heard a cry and creepy, entered the room, they found the girl dead, with an eye pierced by something that was not found that had reached the brain: a death similar but not the same as another. No murderer in the room, no chance for he to pass through the door, because it was guarded outside by the maid.

One of the three brothers was formally accused about the double murder and to save himself and to force the brothers to swear falsely, that the killer’s mother was crazy and not theirs: so he avoided the hanging.
After this telling, the little man, one of the brothers Lessing vows not know who has been to make the double murder. So?
Analyzing the clues, Fell will discover the truth and will give a name to the murderer. He is ….

The title of the story does not refer to a wrong deduction, but to a question that it is justified only in the sick mind of the killer: why is it possible that a mother crazy procreates healthy children and a healthy mother procreates a crazy son? That is why did he committ the double murder? Fell will explain the genius of the solutions adopted so that the crimes happen apparently by the hands of an unknown person and in seemingly impossible conditions. But also why was swan killed cutting its throat? In fact after the death of Martha, both Junior and Joseph while they are walking on the shore of the lake, in the back of the islet, they note among some rushes ashore a swan with its throat cut by something sharp, as if someone or something wanted to kill even the swan.

The story, which is one of the most famous by Carr, in the case of the second murder is derived from another previous story, Terror’s Dark Tower, that is of 1935.
It is memorable by the atmosphere that pervades it, and it is affected, as other works of the same period, by a certain underlying melancholy, which approaches to other works such for example to She Died a Lady. We note also the hint at a certain inevitability of evil (which is not noticed in other carrian works), to the underlying causes of evil and for which even those who commit it can steal his fate: as if to say that also the ‘ murderer is the puppet in a game that is much bigger than him.

However many hints, I think, convince Fell about the madness of killer, who: is not really aware of what he did; he can not even explain because he committed the two murders (the first for economic reasons perhaps: the will), the second for reasons of betrayed love (jealousy and rage). I think, however, that the first murder can also be configured as a revenge, because his son had seen anything confusing in the conduct of his stepfather at the death of his mother, perished in the tower room: he would not say that in fact she was dead “..in a special situation”

The fact that the little man swears, first, he’s not the murderer and then he reiterates this statement, when Gideon Fell already has accused him about it and also explained how he killed without others could see him commit the murders, and then soon after he admits to be the murderer, also demonstrates a duplicitous soul and mind, a split personality in two entities completely opposite, one innocent and one culprit, one conscious and the other unconscious, by the way of Mr. Hyde.

What he says in the last page of short stort is symptomatic of this state of alienated mind: “You do not understand. I never wanted to know who killed Dr. Lessing or poor Martha”. The speaker is the unconscious part of the murderer, who does not know (but supposes) if other his half killed or not. Then, a few lines later, the same character, his conscious part, will say: “..But that is not the point. That is not the problem. Their mother was mad, but they were harmless. I killed Dr. Lessing. I killed Martha. Yes I am quite sane. Why did I do it, all those years ago? Why? Is there no rational pattern in the scheme of things and no answer to the bedeviled of the earth? “. In other words one character but split into two characters, a personality split in two, one conscious and one unconscious.

Basically what you get is the dubt also the reader has if the murderer, when he committed the murders, was conscious or unconscious. Surely, however, the fact that he sees constantly even after, on the surface of the lake, the dead swan with its throat cut, which does not exist in reality, reveals a schizophrenic state, hallucinations, dissociation from reality; but also it reveals that in that man, with deep and blacks eyes, there is still consciousness that goes in that disturbed soul, the remorse that evil that is (was) inside him, it has let him to kill harmless people : the swan, symbol of purity and safety, for him is a haunting memory, in a strongly symbolic work as this, because refers Martha, in the disturbed mind by the killer, always dressed in white.

In my opinion, there’s also another indication that Carr puts in the story, a psychological clue: the little man is dressed in black buthe wears a white hat. In my opinion this is another indication of the psychological duplicity of the wearer: good and evil, consciousness and unconsciousness.
In some ways it is the work that most approaches Carr to his most famous heir, contemporary with us, Paul Halter, in whose novels the theme of madness often overlooks.

The story is still memorable for the atmosphere that pervades it, for the unsurpassed mastery, to be able to create a pathos with a few strokes. Before Carr describes the idyllic places, or almost: the villa in a small valley between the hills, the artificial lake overlooked, the summer house on a small artificial island in the middle of the lake, the rustling of leaves, the well trated green carpets. Then it introduces a note that is more sad, like a harmonic modulation in minor that portends something sad that you are gathering, “the last light showed that all the windows of the house..”: the dusk, during which the sun dies, and it gets the dark. In that moment “dusk had almost become darkness when two men came down over the crest of hill. One was large and lean. The other, who wore a shovel hat, was large and immensely stout, and he loomed even more vast against the sky line by reason of the great dark cloak billowing out behind him”. First they see a small man. Then he speaks about a dead swan that does not exist. Then he tells a story, and while he is talking, the sunset gives way to darkness: three men are sitting in an iron bench, and two feel the other to tell a story of murders and madness. And as the dark story winds until its end, the light of sunset is replaced by darkness, and the epilogue takes place almost in the darkness, illuminated by the light of a match: as attested by the end of the story, in which it was reported that “the match curled to a red ember, winked and went out”.

The final is unforgettable, because it ends not with a bang but with an implosion, which gives a strong melancholy emphasis to history: “Then….got up from the chair. The last they saw of him was his white hat bobbing and flickering across the lawn under the blowing tree” . Yet, it had been announced with another emphasis: “This murder was incredible. I don’t mean merely that it was incredible with regard to its physical circumstances, but also that there was Martha dead-on a holiday”.

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Martin Porlock (Philip MacDonald): Mystery at Friar’s Pardon (1931)

Philip MacDonald, as well as his real name, used various pseudonyms to publish his novels: Anthony Lawless, Oliver Fleming and Martin Porlock. With the latter sewed only three novels: Mystery at Friar’s Pardon (1931), Mystery at Kensington Gore (1932) and X Vs. Rex (1933). The first and third are justly considered masterpieces and were both translated in Italy, while the second isn’t.

Of those published in Italy, today we talk about the first.
Mystery at Friar’s Pardon, published in 1931, is one of the cornerstones of production Philip MacDonald, one of the greatest innovators of Crime Fiction.
It introduces the character of Charles Fox-Brown, and to do that MacDonald takes even a chapter to outline the smallest details: the son of a wealthy couple, remains orphan at the age of thirteen and he is entrusted to an uncle who does not want to deal with it. Soon he enlisted to participate at the First World War as a simple soldier and scale all grades becoming the first sergeant, then entering the official rank and ending the war as a major, highly decorated.
The next civilian life is a series of successes and failures: a series of successful entrepreneur and insights make him potentially wealthy, until a distant relative does not seek help (in cash) and so ten thousand pounds are given to her. However the woman, who does not use the money just to live, but to live well, dies in a hunting accident and ten thousand pounds (that was the heritage that Fox Brown had gained with his work) fade forever, so he has to start working again, becoming director of property. In this capacity he is employed by “Lioness,” Lester-Enid Greene, a successful writer, become very wealthy woman by virtue of her romance novels, to administer her property.

Together with her, he meets Norman Sandys, her secretary, and soon he is informed about what will be his duties. Charles, however, will have to live at the mansion that Enid has bought long before, spending a lot of money, to restructure it completely, and reopening the east wing, whom the previous owners had made inaccessible, muring the entry. In fact, Friar’s Pardon, this is the name of the mansion, was built in the late seventeenth century, and despite being a building of fine harmonies, soon had gained a sinister reputation that had maintained in the remaining two centuries: the owners were dead in the same room, drowned, though it had not been found even a drop of water in it, or they had worn wet clothes. It was so widespread belief that there were evil entities in the villa, and it was haunted. But Lester-Enid Greene does not believe in spirits and decides to go in disregard of beliefs to live there; indeed, she decides to restructure the damn room preceded by a sort of vestibule, combining two rooms into a huge studio, where she sleeps and writes her masterpieces.

Soon at the house, there are rumors of paranormal phenomena: voices, footsteps, hands that appear out of the windows, doors that suddenly close by themselves, vessels that break without which no one has touched them, as if they were the subject of Poltergeist. Many in that house have something to say: in addition to Norman, also Lady Maud Vassar student of occultism and noble, Claude Lester brother of Enid, Baron Trevor Ignatius Pursell, the niece Lesley Destrier, and much of the easement, reports to have seen some of these phenomena: only Enid and Charles Fox-Brown are skeptical about it.

Yet one evening, after a sumptuous dinner, after the same owner has retired at her study to work, by a phone call come from the studio she cries out for help, but after trying unsuccessfully to enter inside because the door is locked from the inside, Fox-Brown demonstrating contempt of danger, walking on the ledge outside, is unable to break the glass of the closed window and to enter the environment, finding Enid dead, with no signs of any kind indicating a struggle.
The policemen are called to the scene, and soon even the coroner, which recognizes unusually Fox-Brown: Dr. Riley, inform the Inspector Willis and the Chief of Police, Amblethorpe, how Fox-Brown, when he was Chief of a section of Counterintelligence during the war, had solved a case rather mangy. So, they rely on his detective skills.

Fox-Brown will be able to understand how the murderer has been able to get out of the room leaving it closed behind him, and how he did it to kill Enid and escape in a few minutes, without being seen. And in addition to this to show that it was not a supernatural event (as did think the deaths have occurred during the past centuries and all that taken place with the same causality), showing how it was possible that Enid died drowned in a room where there was not the minimum drop of water. And how was it possible that a person used the internal phone line, without others knowing it.
He will reveal the name of the killer, during a fake seance that he will organize, making use of the special participation of the coroner (former actor) in the role of a famous spiritualist.

Extraordinary novel, a true masterpiece, Mystery at Friar’s Pardon, has a unique atmosphere. Moreover MacDonald structures the plot in distinct sections, creating the basis for a genre that Carr will develop in large part: the first he sets the scene for the amateur detective can go live at a particular villa, then reserves an entire chapter to the figure of the same, then describes the mansion and the mysteries related to it, and finally goes on to describe the characters who move, giving long space phenomena that happen, thereby increasing the thrill until the catharsis comes with the impossible crime, a crime more impossible than it is not :a woman dies drowned, with all the signs of drowning, without her or her clothes are wet, and without even a drop of water is found in the room where she died, although there it should be a sea at the room. I say crime more than impossible, because in addition to this there is also a locked room, and even more a voice that is recognized as that by Enid, but that should not be her, asking for help when, as will establish Charles, she was already dead.

Both the locked room that the trick of the call fall into that series of tricks of Locked Room Mystery, already introduced from Carr in his famous Locked Room-Lecture and then called in the Locked Room-Lecture in Nine Times Nine by Anthony Boucher, when the locked rooms are restricted to a scheme according to whether they occurred before, during or after: in this case the death occurred before, and then it was a trick. Which? The same occurred at Carr’s Hag’s Nook, that is of 1933, while this novel is of 1931.
Charles still provides a clue to the careful reader, long before solve the mystery, when he looks at the watch and compares time.

The Locked Room even here – I repeat once again – is spectacular, perhaps one of the best and most fascinating ever invented, because it involves two people: one is in charge of impersonating Enid, the other to kill her and simulate with a spectacular staging, the intervention of supernatural powers. In some ways, the very impossibility of a similar crime, reminds me another novel to the memory, the first by Talbot, The Hangman’s Handyman: even there an evident impossibility occurs (a curse for which a corpse at few hours looks like it’s been dead for several days and presented a very strong putrefaction).

But in addition to the created impossibility, the novel is remarkable because, by virtue of a tension expertly administered, creates conditions so that the reader could almost believe to the poltergeist phenomena and at the same time asking how ever has managed to simulate a drowning without water. And also adds, to a story of mystery also a love story, more classical than ever, which somehow reminds us a previous, Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers (1930). Even there, the protagonist, Lord Peter Wimsey, in love with the detective writer Harriet Vane, must prevent she be accused about murder by poisoning and trying to save her finding the true killer, as is the case here, since Charles Fox-Brown, in love with Lesley Destrier, must avoid she is accused of murdering her aunt, after that inside the mantel of her fireplace were found a number of incriminating evidence, apparently put there from the killer to divert suspicion from himself; the rest here, as in the novel by Sayers appears a poison, only that in our case it is not used to kill but to stun.

If with the novel by Dorothy Sayers I note a community, and so the previous novel could have provided MacDonald idea for his novel, I must also observe that in my opinion, Mystery at Friar’s Pardon may have influenced Carr not only for the solution behind the impossible murder into The Hag’s Nook, but also for the series of novels by Henry Merrivale: there as here we have a detective who has been dealing with the Military Counterintelligence as an official (Merrivale is Head of Military Counterintelligence, Fox-Brown was Head of a section), and we are here as there phenomena evoking the paranormal, that would justify one or more crimes impossible, if the detective, skeptical and rational, does not oppose the truth of the facts, where paranormal gives way to a carefully premeditated murder, committed by men, not by spirits; in addition the same system to lock the door from outside, simulating a supernatural event because the suicide is impossible to have occurred, is located in the compiling by Fell, during his conference in The Hollow Man.

Pietro De Palma

Robert Adey has died

Bob Adey, a historical figure with regard to history, criticism and analysis of crime fiction about The Locked Rooms and the Crimes Impossible, has left us alone: he has died for an incurable disease.

British, was born in 1941. From an early age he had as passion the study of tales of impossible crimes. The fruit of his research had been his most important work: Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes, published in 1979, that is also today the bible for us.
In 1991 he published a second edition, revised and enlarged in the amount of collected material.
The first chapter of 99 Chambres Closes by Roland Lacourbe had been written by Adey as a  passionate historical introduction of the genre.
He also published several anthologies: Death Locked In (with Douglas Greene), Murder Impossible (with Jack Adrian), 20 défis à l’impossible (with Roland Lacourbe), one of which even in Japan: 18 Locked Room Puzzles (along with Idetoshi Mori).
P. D. P.

Paul Halter : The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993

You can say, without fail, the first production of Paul Halter has been the best. This does not mean that the novels of the 90s and the first decade of the twenty-first century have been a small thing (indeed, in some cases, the finished product was qualitatively very interesting!), but it is equally indubitable that the first 7-8 novels (except for La malediction de Barberousse, opera in my opinion still immature) were the best of his production: all, in a case or in another, have, without exception, great atmosphere and superb deductive problems. Moreover, with the exception of the very first novel already mentioned, set in France, all the others (at least the ones in the series with Dr. Twist) have locations in England.

Is no exception, Le demon de Dartmoor of 1993.
An evil presence is said to haunt the vicinity of the village of Stapleford in the wilderness of Dartmoor in Devon: someone thinks to have seen a headless horseman, riding a beheaded horse, gallop near the rock in the form of animal overlooking the river which flows through the village. The fact is that three girls, Eliza Gold, Constance Kent, and Annie Crook make a bad end: they climb the Wish Tor granite promontory, laughing as if they were dialoguing with someone (you can not see though!) and then they fall down in raging torrent as if they had been thrown: their bodies will be found (the first two, not the third, which is supposed to have done the same end) further downstream, trapped between the rocks, in the creek, massacred by the force of the current, that slammed the bodies several times causing multiple fractures and wounds.

For the period of 6 years, nothing happens, and you think nothing will happen; and life goes quiet on in the sleepy village. But one fine day, Nigel Manson, actor in sight, buys the Trentice castle, a manor in ruin restructuring completely, except for the left wing of the castle, where in the past there was a mysterious death.
Nigel’s wife, Helen, doesn’t want to go, because she suspects actress and colleague of her husband in the successful theatrical piece “The Invisible Man”, Nathalie Marvel, be her husband’s lover, and that her presence in their dwelling could coincide with the betrayal of Nigel.

If everything starts badly, ends worse then: in fact, Nigel, photography enthusiast and owner of various camera bodies, vain and lover of the poses more strange, would like to lay on the windowsill, in a pose very dangerous. The sill of the window is on the second floor, in the hall of the castle, overlooking the surrounding lawn: in the living room with him, are the wife Helen, close the fireplace, and Dr. Thomas Grant, doctor at Stapleford, sitting in armchair behind him. No one else. Too far away, or unable to have a part in what happens on the sill, at least to hear Franch Holloway, theatrical agent of Nathalie and her lover in the past, which enters in the hall a moment after Nigel falls from the window sill, his hands in forward, as if he had been pushed down, while Nathalie picks him up downstairs with the camera.

The invisible being who killed the three girls, did he kill also him? The fact is that other unexplainable things happen after: a red shadow that walks across the streets of the village, who manages to scare even Basil Hawkins, gardener, friend of Victor Sitwell, a professor of philosophy at the Lyceum of Tavistock; a photo that disappears from the inn where Frank Victor and other people go to get drunk one night, photo in which would be represented someone who would frighten Nigel, the night before he was killed (because Twist imagines there isn’t a spirit behind his death, but a wily murderer); the attempt to kill Victor, who owns another duplication of this photo. Someone even tells to have recognized in Nigel, one of two beautiful young people who years earlier had gone to bit interleaved parity in the inn, where they had drawn the interest of their three girls, then disappeared: possible that he was the lover of the girls, and someone thinks they were in love with him, and that for some obscure reason did he kill them? If he was their killer, the Nigel’s death could be not murder but almost capital justice: an executioner came from beyond? Or we are faced with a far-fetched hypothesis and Nigel was killed for other facts, maybe for what he would see in the disappear picture?

Alan Twist will be to put a face to the mysterious killer and to explain the impossible deaths of the three girls and of Nigel, all four occurred under the gaze of reliable witnesses, without anyone could see their murderer.

Once again Paul, in this novel, demonstrates his own love toward Carr: there are indeed many references to his favorite author.

First, the impossible crime in front of witnesses: Nigel who dies falling from the window of the hall of the castle, immediately brings to mind a famous novel by Carr, the shortest of his: The Case of the Constant Suicides, of 1941, in which a man falls from the window of a tower, whose door was bolted from the inside. According to me, the novel by Paul, it is a very fascinating variation; then, it brings to Carr when at the 16th chapter, he talks about “The man who explained miracles” so appealing Inspector Hurst (but The Man Who Explained Miracles is not only the other title of the story All In A Maze, of the 1956 signed by Carter Dickson, the latest adventure of Merrivale, but also the famous biography written by Douglas Greene about Carr. And finally, there are other little things that, in my opinion, that approach this novel to Carr.

First, a quote from Carr could be the final step of the 19th chapter: “The light in the window, which it watched for a moment, created yellow reflections in eyes which were clearly not those of a balanced and stable individual.”(Paul Halter : The Demon of Dartmoor – translation: John Pugmire). To me, this step has drawn immediately for mental association, the look of the killer, hidden among the rooftops, at Death-Watch (1935).

But this might just be my obsession. Instead, I believe that there is another quote more important from Carr, indeed by Carter Dickson, which immediately brings to mind, the fall from the promontory of the girls: in fact, it remembered to me “She Died A Lady”, of 1943 in which two lovers fall from a cliff in the underlying ocean (but despite the tracks are only their, it is a murder: one of the most beautiful locked rooms by Carr and one of his masterpieces). And yet .. “The Invisible Man”: the title of the comedy starring on stage by Nigel and Nathalie, recall as well as the science fiction novel of 1881 by Herbert George Wells, also a collection of short stories by Carr entitled The New invisible Man (with Colonel March).

However it would be wrong to say that Paul has created his novel starting from Carr:

No!

Instead, I believe Paul has somehow tapped something by Carr (perhaps even subconsciously), creating an original work, I would say one of his most fascinating.
First, the two novelists have a different idea of their stories: while Carr creates intense and dramatic stories, Halter creates fairy “black”tales, that have a great atmosphere, with false supernatural elements: the atmosphere is magical, because magical are the descriptions of the places (a similar process can be seen in L’arbre aux doigts tordus or La malediction de Barberousse), and there are supernatural references (an invisible man, a headless horseman, a deck of diabolical cards, a flying horse). Moreover Carr creates stories suited to adults, in which lack drastically almost very young subjects, because the story is told through the eyes of an adult, unlike Halter where instead these subjects are often present (La malédiction de Barberousse, Le diable de Dartmoor, Spiral) because the story is told through the eyes of a boy. I quote an important step of interview done by me to Paul, 1 year ago, and that had an echo quite significant, even abroad:

Le gros problème, pour un roman policier, est que la magie du mystère cesse d’opérer à la fin, lorsque tout est expliqué par le menu. Il faut donc trouver un truc pour que le charme opère toujours. Le meilleur exemple reste à mes yeux la fin de La Chambre ardente de Carr. Autrement dit, trouver un truc pour accréditer le fantastique après les explications finales. Comme définition du roman policier, Pierre Véry parlait de “conte de fées pour adultes” et je sourscris à cette affirmation sans la moindre réserve. Pour les petits enfants que nous étions, ces histoires de sorcières, de fées et de dragons étaient une véritable école de préparation au roman policier ! Et inconsciemment, je crois que j’essaye de retrouver ces premièrs frissons en écrivant mes histoires. Le thème du conte de fées est toujours au moins sous-jacent. Dand “L’homme qui aimait les nuages”, c’est même manifeste. L’héroine semble être une fée, tandis que le coupable est le “vent”. Pour ce qui est de l’atmosphère, je ne sais pas si c’est inné, en tout cas, ce me semble indispensable pour écrire une bonne histoire. Et tant que je ne la “sens” pas, pas question pour moi de commencer mon récit.    

( http://deathcanread.blogspot.it/2013/08/entretien-avec-paul-halter-interview.html ).

In addition, while in the case of Carr’s novels the culprit almost never is a victim of fate and almost always he is a being who killed maybe pushed by necessity, or for cold and calculated skill, but not for madness, in the novels of Halter (and also in Le diable de Dartmoor) peeps insistent the theme of madness:

Oui, j’aime le thème de la folie. Cela permet de présenter des mobiles variés et surprenants. Les problèmes psychologiques liés à l’enfance (en évitant le sacro-saint viol de l’oncle si possible !) sont également intéressants. Je dirais que mes criminels sont souvent “obsédés”, par une passion, une phobie, etc. Pour être plus précis, il faudrait que je détaille chacune des mes histoires, mais je laisserais au lecteur le soin de les découvrir par lui-même. 

( http://deathcanread.blogspot.it/2013/08/entretien-avec-paul-halter-interview.html ).

Another difference between Carr and Halter concerns the construction of the plot: while Carr reserves importance both to the “How” and “Who”, Halter is mainly concerned to explain how an event took place: not at random, except La quatriéme porte and Le brouillard rouge , and some other novel among the first issued, such as La mort vous invite or La lettre qui tue, it is not so difficult to frame the guilty, which instead doesn’t happen in the case of Carr. This because Halter inherits the tradition of the French enigma novel in which the enigma has prevalence respect to the identification of the culprit.

Other difference between the two relates to the details of the story: while in Carr, and generally in the case of Anglo-Saxon novelists of the 30s (E.Queen, Van Dine, CDKing, etc. ..), the details, the particular have a significant and are extremely complex in their explanation, and each contributes to the final solution, in Halter this is not always the case, as the microstructure of the novel does not care him far as the macrostructure: interests him the problem and not its outward expressions instead. If the difficulty in La Quatrième Porte has a very high level of complexity, almost pure virtuosity, in many of his novels, the difficulty is only apparent.

Not surprisingly, in a history of Halter, if you understand how he thinks, and what is his “modus agendi et procedendi” (which are often repeated in the novels), it is not difficult to spot the culprit, unlike in Carr. Carr, has the ability to explain in the minutest details the solution of a certain fact, even after you have stretched the plot of the novel. And in this it differs from other contemporary novelist: for example Talbot, that in Rim of the Pit creates a sum of impossible situations insomuch to fatigue then, in the final solution, to explain realistically them, climbing often on the mirrors. Hi because Halter, in my opinion, very intelligently, knowing he isn’t on the same level of Carr, does not try to emulate him failing in the attempt, but instead he creates very attractive narrative buildings, but easy to explain, because they have no real complexity (except in some of the early work): it is also reflected in the length of his novels, which often stands on 200 pages or less, unlike the carrian novels.

In the novel, however, there are also other interesting things, that relate to the quotes submitted. For example, the beginning of Chapter 8, presents us Frank, in a dingy hotel room, who caters to his lover Nathalie and says:
“Couvrez ce sein que je ne saurais voir”
The complete period would be: “Couvrez ce sein que je ne voir saurais voir. Par de pareils objets les âmes sont blessées, et cela fait venir de coupables pensées.”(Molière: Tartuffe, Act III, Scene II, verses 860-862). Nathalie and Frank are lovers and her nakedness, is the prologue to an embrace. However, he turns to her, mentioning a step away from Molière’s Tartuffe: Tartuffe wants to seduce Elmira, with his moralizing maxims, expressed in a manner that, not too subtly, she understands how he wants to possess her. In essence, the advances of Truffle / Frank is the soul of hypocrisy, duplicity, the dichotomy between being and appearance: in fact even Frank, like Tartuffe, is a hypocrite, which manifests ihimelf in a certain way to win the next , i.e. starlets and showgirls in search of success (as Nathalie).

Yet the pace, in my opinion, could be the soul of the whole novel, and it would not be entirely accidental that Paul had entered it: a novel about the duplicity and falsehood. In fact, if we analyze the behavior of the various characters in the novel, you will see that several of them, it is as if they recited a part, and so in essence they are the hypocrites: Nathalie is false, false is Frank, Nigel is false, false is Helen, Victor is false, false is Annie, and could also be false Basil also.

In conclusion, another very beautiful novel by Paul Halter.

Pietro De Palma