The Encluesiast

This is my final post on the stories in Edmund Crispin’s Fen Country. My previous two posts may be found here and here.
In this post, I will review the ten remaining stories in the collection: five puzzle-plot stories that do not belong to any of the four categories I listed in my first post on Fen Country and five stories that have no puzzle element.

PUZZLES

The five puzzle-plot stories are: “Gladstone’s Candlestick,” “A Country to Sell,” “Death Behind Bars,” “Shot in the Dark,” and “The Undraped Torso.” They evade the four categories because they are really howdunits or whydunits (provided that one understands “whydunit” to mean “why did the person behave this way”). One could, however, dispute that they are fair play in quite the same way that the whodunit stories are. After all, in each of these cases, Crispin is challenging you to figure out how or why something has been done. This is not the same thing as providing you with a concrete clue that allows you to spot a lie. This is a distinction between the competing definitions of “fair play” in different subgenres of mystery—a distinction we will further explore in later posts on this blog. For now, I will simply re-affirm that these five stories are squarely in the puzzle-plot mold and are indeed potentially solvable by the reader.

SPOILERS BEGIN HERE

“Gladstone’s Candlestick” is one of two stories in this collection in which a thief spreads fake dust in a room to fool investigators into thinking a theft occurred at a different time. (The other is “Dog in the Night-Time,” which I addressed in my previous post.) If the trick reduced to simply spreading the dust, then this story would be rather poor. Luckily, Crispin adds one more element: The dust imprint of the missing candlestick needed to be improvised hastily, when the candlestick was no longer in the room. How could that be managed? Here is where it is crucial that Crispin made the candlestick one of a pair, so that the still present candlestick can be temporarily removed from its imprint to create a new one. This is clever, thus elevating the story. (Although, it is perhaps a little too contrived for the purpose: Who steals only one of a pair of items? Especially when the items aren’t very large.)

In a post on the blog Beneath the Stains of Time, mystery blogger TomCat (whose work in advocating for Japanese mysteries I’ll highlight in future posts) suggests “there’s a bit of cheating on the author’s side – which is a pity.” I’m not sure what he means. Perhaps that the proof doesn’t come until we have the dust analyzed? Because otherwise, this doesn’t strike me as any less fair than your average “howdunit”—a device has been used to accomplish the objective, and it’s up to the reader to guess what device that might be.

The principle at work in “A Country to Sell” is quite clever and is reminiscent of a technique used in locked room mysteries in which a locked room is confirmed to be absolutely secure, completely immune to any sort of trickery. And thus the solution has to be that that wasn’t the room that was actually used; there was some sort of switcheroo! (Different variants of this can be found in solution types 14, 17, and 20 in this excellent list of 50 from the Solving the Mystery of Murder blog, which I will reference in my future analyses of locked-room mysteries.) This story also incorporates another common trope from mystery fiction: an impersonation scheme. But what makes this a particularly interesting one is that the culprit, Mr. Darling, needs to perform two impersonations. First, he must impersonate Christopher on the phone with Washington; then, he must impersonate Washington when on the phone with Christopher. Both parties believe they have spoken to each other when each has spoken to only Mr. Darling.

“Death Behind Bars”: The premise here is rather simple. And as Crispin notes with reference to “satch letters,” the principle does not originate with him. But the story is quite compellingly told. This gimmick might not have sustained a longer story. But it is of perfect weight for a story of this brief length. And Crispin tells it well. It is framed as a letter, rather than having an omniscient narrator, which is a departure from Crispin’s usual practice. The drug addiction is neatly folded into the plot (as it was the cause of the medical negligence that the victim, Wynter, committed, which landed him in jail in the first place). Crispin’s pair of single-sentence paragraphs announcing Wynter’s death are yet another example of his effective use of this device:

In the ordinary way of things—taking into account remissions for good conduct—Wynter would have been released in October of this year.

On 23 April, he died in his cell.

The red herring is that the poisoning was done with nicotine, which seems to indicate that Gellian, and not Mrs. Wynter, is the murderer. After all, she has no reason to frame him. But as it turns out, Crispin has made her a particularly cold-blooded murderer, who has no problem with letting her lover take the blame if it will keep her out of prison. Crispin writes:

Mrs. Wynter took a further precaution: she used a poison which could be traced to Gellian, arguing that even if he were to be implicated, arrested and convicted, her hold over him was such that she could persuade him at least to make arrangements for keeping her in comfort during the period of his imprisonment; there might even, she thought, be a fair chance of marrying him before the warrant for his arrest was implemented.

A nice testament to both her charms and her ruthlessness.

“Shot in the Dark”: This is another howdunit. And, like “After Evensong,” it is one in which people with differing motives collude to create an alibi.

If there is any flaw in Crispin’s telling of this story, it is that the problem has insufficient time to percolate in the reader’s mind before the solution is delivered. Two sentences after Humbleby has finished describing the situation, Fen delivers the answer. And he doesn’t merely indicate that he knows the answer, he says the key part of the solution immediately. This is thus one of those rare times when, rather than being annoyed that Fen keeps the answer to himself to draw things out (as I sometimes am), I wish that he would do so, to create some breathing room.

Here’s Humbleby’s final summary of the problem. He says:

And so that, as they say, was that. Penge certainly shot Joshua. But he didn’t do it between eight-thirty and nine. And unless Cicely was lying in order to help him—which is inconceivable—he didn’t do it between seven and eight, either.

That last sentence is what’s doing the work. The reader is supposed to take Humbleby’s declaration (that Cicely wasn’t lying on Penge’s behalf) at face value. Perhaps it’s best that Crispin doesn’t linger on the problem for too long, as the solution is really a matter of poking at that crucial sentence, to say it should really read, “Unless Cicely was lying, he didn’t do it between seven and eight, either; and it’s inconceivable that she was lying on Penge’s behalf.” Then we’d realize that the solution must be that she’s lying for other reasons. 

The other crucial sentence earlier in the story is when Humbleby says, “Bolsover was able to put his most important questions to Cicely before telling her his reason for asking them.” That sentence does double-duty: it is what convinces us that Cicely cannot be lying on Penge’s behalf; but unbeknownst to us, it is why Cicely lies on her brother’s behalf.

Fen’s conclusion is one we’ll address again in the next post: “A marriage based on mistrust and evasion will be a worse punishment, in the long run, than anything the Old Bailey could do.”

“The Undraped Torso”: This is a whydunit, rather than a howdunit. Fen himself sums up the puzzle rather neatly:

“So what it boils down to is that here we have a man who doesn’t mind having his face seen and photographed; and who doesn’t mind having his body (on which there are absolutely no identifying marks) seen, but was frightened enough to break an expensive camera when someone takes a picture of it.”

Whether one thinks this framing is fair play or not depends on how one interprets the phrase “there are absolutely no identifying marks.” If one were being strictly accurate, there are “absolutely no identifying marks to the naked eye.” It turns out that there are marks that are brought out in black-and-white photographs. This whydunit therefore overlaps with Category 1, as one must possess some technical knowledge in order to solve this.

NON-PUZZLES

The remaining five are “The Pencil,” “We Know You’re Busy Writing, But We Thought You Wouldn’t Mind If We Just Dropped In For A Minute,” “Cash on Delivery,” “Merry-Go-Round,” and “After Evensong.”

The first two of these are reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s macabre adult short stories. “The Pencil” is an excellent twist on an old principle: being blindfolded and led back to one’s own house to commit a crime without recognizing it. (The most famous instance of this is probably not a piece of crime fiction, but rather Verdi’s opera Rigoletto!) Its final lines show the impact of choices of sentence- and paragraph-breaks. The last three sentences could have formed a one-sentence paragraph. But instead Crispin breaks it into four sentences and two paragraphs:

Panic flooded him. He ran. From the bedside to the door was a distance of no more than three paces.

But the explosion had caught and killed him before his fingers even touched the knob.

“We Know You’re Busy Writing, But We Thought You Wouldn’t Mind If We Just Dropped In For A Minute” is possibly my favorite short story about being a writer. I have a feeling that if it were better known, many other writers with no attachment to the mystery genre would rank it among their favorites too. The way the protagonist keeps accidentally introducing fragments of the sentences he’s working on into conversation is a particularly well-executed joke. (Speaking of jokes, is the self-declared “private joke” that Daphne has in which she calls Clarence Oates “Stanislas” a reference to fellow mystery writer Margery Allingham’s character Stanislaus Oates?)

I do wish Crispin had written more stories in this vein to bring him into greater renown.

I’m not particularly fond of “Cash on Delivery” (I consider it the worst story in the collection), and have nothing interesting to say about it. I also have little to say about “Merry-Go-Round”—not, however, because I dislike it. All I can say is that it is an amusing little revenge tale.

This leaves “After Evensong,” which is actually an inverted mystery. But the reader does not know this until partway through, which is a nice touch from Crispin and is executed with deft handling of perspective. Here are the opening lines:

They were standing at opposite ends of the living-room, studiously ignoring one another. A little too studiously, the inspector reflected, as, with a sergeant in tow for witness, he stepped inside and closed the door behind him: that elaborate disinterest was as revealing as any demonstrativeness could have been.

A lovely transition from the narrator’s perspective to the inspector’s. The use of this narrative technique in those opening sentences prepares us for the more consequential shift from the narrator’s perspective to Masters’s, as we discover midway through the story that he was the murderer and learn what his scheme was.

It involves a premise that Crispin used in other stories, including “Shot in the Dark”: the idea that a lie used to establish an alibi actually ends up covering multiple people who have different motives for maintaining the lie.

In this case, Masters and Colonel Rackstraw each want the other’s testimony that their encounter was at half past eight; this would clear them of their respective crimes—murder for the former and burglary for the latter. Once Colonel Rackstraw’s alibi is busted, Masters then makes a category-4 mistake: he claims that he told the lie to gain an alibi, but then the inspector points out that he couldn’t have known that the lie would give him an alibi unless he knew when the murder occurred. Checkmate.

We conclude with one of the best ending lines in the collection:

And to that, Oliver Masters had no answer, either then or afterwards. None.

COMING SOON…

Crispin’s other collection Beware of the Trains is worthy of analysis, and I may eventually feature it in this blog. But the rest of this summer will be devoted to novels (next up is creating a cluefinder for Carter Dickson’s The White Priory Murders, with page numbers of the new British Library Crime Classics reissue). However, next month, I have a post on Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s blog Something Is Going to Happen; it will be on selected stories from G.K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown. So, stay tuned for that!