Through the Walls (1936) by Noël Vindry

Noël Vindry was a French World War I veteran, deputy juge d'instruction (examining magistrate) and a celebrated mystery novelist who wrote a dozen locked room mysteries in the 1930s of "a quality and quantity to rival his contemporary," John Dickson Carr – which is why he was hailed at the time as the master of the roman probleme (puzzle novel). Vindry is "largely forgotten by the French-speaking world and almost completely unknown in the English-speaking" until John Pugmire's Locked Room International published the first English edition of La maison qui tu (The House That Kills, 1932) in 2015. That release was followed by translations of the absolutely fantastical La bête hurlante (The Howling Beast, 1934) and Le double alibi (The Double Alibi, 1934) over the next three years. But nothing new until 2021. 

Last December, Pugmire finally returned to Vindry with the publication of A travers les murailles (Through the Walls, 1936) with no less than half-a-dozen seemingly impossible situations and locked room murders. 

Through the Walls has M. Allou, "considered the best examining magistrate in Marseille," bogged down in boring office and paperwork. Several months had gone by without being "called upon to tackle an important case" to test his famed deductive skills, which he based on La Science et l'Hypothèse, "consists of finding a theory which fits all the facts" and "then investigating anew" – until "the theory is proved or disproved." Only case of apparent interest is "the man who walks through walls" and left the police powerless as "the massacre continues." M. Allou has heard of the case everywhere and glimpsed the newspaper headlines, but the murders took place outside of his jurisdiction and therefore didn't tempt himself by reading the papers. There was nothing he could do. Luckily, the powers governing the universe has him covered.

One evening, Allou is visited by Commissaire Maubritane, of the Police Mobile, who confesses to Allou he had abandoned his post as a defeated man. Maubritane had inserted himself in, what appeared to have been a simple and straightforward affair, but had quickly devolved into an incomprehensible, bloody murder case that had dominated the headlines. Even half-suspecting he had gone crazy and committed the (attempted) murders. Allou sits him down to tell him the whole story from beginning to end. It should be noted here Allou appears only in the opening and closing chapters, which is a similar approach Vindry employed in The Howling Beast and perhaps influenced by G.K. Chesterton (c.f. "The Dagger with Wings," 1924).

Four days before he appealed to Allou, Commissaire Maubritane received a plea for help himself. Pierre Sertat, a retired Customs official, who remembered Maubritane from a case he handled in the region to come to aid of him and his family. Saying they are "faced with a terrible menace" putting all of their lives in grave danger and asks Maubritane to meet him, at ten o'clock at night, in rue Van Gogh. Because the house is under observation. Sertat tells Maubritane someone has been coming into the house at night, where he lives with his wife, daughter and two servants, but the nightly intruder only moves objects around and makes noise when goes up, or down, the creaky staircase – only question is how he entered and exited the house. All of the windows shutters "were firmly locked on the inside" and the bolts on the front door were shot in place. But even to Maubritane, Sertat remains cautious and secretive with what, exactly, is behind this mysterious threat to his family.

Maubritane has to do some unorthodox detective work to discover Sertat's past is not entirely spotless and has a good reason to keep his lips sealed, but my favorite part of the first-half is Maubritane's initial chain of reasoning about the nightly intrusions. I really liked how he tried to bring a bit of sanity to an utterly insane situations with a series of reasonable and logical possibilities, which mostly hinged on an accomplish inside the house. But also appreciated the answer how you can go up, or down, a creaky staircase without a sound. They eventually setup a trap, or sorts, but, when the intruder threatens to escape, Maubritane fires a warning shot. The intruder returns fire, seriously wounding Sertat, before disappearing from the tightly locked house. This is when things really begin to take off.

One of the household members is stabbed in a locked bedroom with the key in Maubritane's pocket, while another is shot and wounded in a dark, empty street surrounded by high walls. The victim swears nobody else was in the street. A third person was killed when "a man suddenly appeared" between the victim and an eyewitness, plunged a dagger in the victim and vanished within a blink of an eye. Finally, a fourth victim is stabbed and wounded in a hospital room with Maubritane sitting in front of the door. This is the point where the plagued policeman throws up his hands in despair and abandoned the scene of the crime "to ask M. Allou's advice."

Unfortunately, this happens to be very close to the point where a lot of readers will throw the book across the room in disgust. While the story is saturated with impossible crime material, the solutions are without exception a let down. Some will even consider the solutions to be outright cheats, but, in Vindry's defense, he didn't intend Through the Walls to be a detective novel of tricks and ideas. The last chapter makes it clear it was supposed to be a demonstration of Allou's "system of philosophy" as he effortlessly, and logically, explains the whole series of utterly baffling, seemingly impossible crimes that baffled Maubritane for the better part of a week – all within a single chapter. But you, the reader, only learns about this in the last chapter. And that's too late to prevent most readers from closing the book disappointed. An impressive piece of armchair detection, to be sure, but, purely as a locked room mystery, Through the Walls is the weakest title to come out of LRI. That includes Ulf Durling's Gammel ost (Hard Cheese, 1971) and Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1996).

However, I can easily forgive a dub coming hot on the heels of several absolute bangers of translated locked room mysteries: Michel Herbert and Eugène Wyl's La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932), Paul Halter's La toile de Pénélope (Penelope's Web, 2001), Tokuya Higashigawa's Misshitsu no kagi kashimasu (Lending the Key to the Locked Room, 2002) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017). The overall solution made me crack a smile when I flipped back to read the introduction, "Noël Vindry and the Puzzle Novel," which mentioned the rumblings of French critics and writers about the plot-oriented, puzzle-driven detective novel. I wonder what Vindry's critics thought of Allou's deconstructionists solution to the fantastical series of events that were described to him. Something I imagine critics of the simon-pure, jigsaw-puzzle detective story would be able to appreciate more than when the impossibilities were accomplished with diabolical, minutely-timed tricks. No matter how clever or original they might have been. So, to cut this rambling post short, I can only recommend Through the Walls to fanatical locked room fans who have been given up by society or to readers with a special interest in armchair detective fiction.

The Double Alibi (1934) by Noël Vindry

As you probably gauged from my previous blog-posts, I found my recent excursions into the distant and recent past of the genre sorely lacking in the plotting department. So I decided to smother this potential streak of letdowns in its infancy and turned to the latest title in the catalog of Locked Room International, Le double alibi (The Double Alibi, 1934) by Noël Vindry, which "JJ" gave a four-star rating and described the book as "the most twisty yet translated into English" by John Pugmire – which is quite a claim as Pugmire also translates the work of his beloved Paul Halter. But, hey, when have we ever disagreed on the merits of an impossible crime novel?

Noël Vindry was a juge d'instruction (examining magistrate) and the author of no less than twelve locked room novels, published between 1932 and 1937, which are of a quality and quantity "to rival his contemporary," John Dickson Carr, who was the acknowledged master of the impossible crime story.

Roland Lacourbe, the noted locked room expert and anthologist, even called him the French Carr, but Vindry is "largely forgotten by the French-speaking world" and "almost completely unknown in the English-speaking." A state of affairs Pugmire probably found intolerable.

Back in 2015, LRI published the first English edition of Vindry's debut novel, La maison que tui (The House That Kills, 1932), which had a plot that strung together three seemingly impossible murders, but the story-telling and plotting were stilted and contrived – resulting in a very tepid reception. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, concluded that the book was "as cold and empty as a locked and sealed room." Gratefully, the second title to be translated, Le bête hurlante (The Howling Beast, 1934), proved to be an excellent detective novel that's best described as a novel-length treatment of the conversational detective story (c.f. G.K. Chesterton's "The Dagger with Wings" from The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926) with an miraculous shooting at a 14th century castle. Absolutely brilliant!

The Double Alibi is Vindry's third novel to be translated into English and has an intriguing premise concerning a petty, two-bit criminal with too many alibis.

The story opens with the introduction of a pair of spinster sisters, Hortense and Gertrude Levalois, who live a quiet, respectable existence in the village of Limonest and are highly thought of by the village peasants for taking in a elderly, penniless relative, Aunt Dorothée – who may, one day, inherit a sum of money from a brother who lives as a miser in Lyon. So their charitable act is not entirely selfless, but there's an annoyance buzzing in the background that poses a potential threat to their respectable front.

Aunt Dorothée dotes on her good for nothing nephew, Gustave Allevaire, who is a small time, two-bit criminal with a record that includes such offenses as petty theft, breach of trust and swindling. And, equally shocking to the Levalois sisters, a "disdain for moral laws." Allevaire is one conviction removed from being sent to Guyane, a prison for habitual offenders, which did not deter him from burglarizing the home of Hortense and Gertrude. Apparently, he took five thousand francs from a desk and Aunt Dorothée's silverware, but he left behind a silver spoon with a "perfectly placed" fingerprint as evidence of his presence.

However, at exactly the same time Hortense, Gertrude and Dorothée were frightened and huddled together, while they were being burgled, Allevaire was apparently in two other places at exactly the same time!

Firstly, Allevaire appears to have attempted to burglarize the home of M. Clermon, a wine merchant living in Bordeaux, but his secretary, Serge Madras, caught him in the act and recognized his face in the light of the electric torch – before he bolted like a started rabbit. Secondly, there's an abandoned place in the small town of Aubagne, near Marseille, known locally as the "Black House." The derelict house has a reputation of being haunted and, on certain nights, "a glimmer of light" could been seen through the slits of the shutters. A blood-curling scream coming from this house leads to the discovery of a murdered man and paperwork found on the body suggests that the victim is Allevaire. Or is it? And then there's the problem of distances between the three places.

Aubagne is 300 kilometers from Limonest, while Bordeaux is 500 kilometers away, but all of evidence appear to suggest Allevaire was in all three places at exactly the same time!

Regardless of appearances, Vindry's series-detective, M. Allou, cautions against blindly trusting physical clues and material evidence, because "nothing is easier to fabricate" despite their "rigorous appearance." Allou places his trust in logic and nothing else. So the alibi-problem here does not really count as an impossibility, because the whole illusion hinges on (easily) falsifiable evidence like fingerprints, documents and the statement of witnesses. As I pointed out previously, an alibi-trick can only be considered an impossible problem when the perpetrator appears to have been physically incapable, or unable, to have a committed a crime or been present at a certain place.

The TV-series Monk has several good examples of the impossible alibi such as Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect (2003) and Mr. Monk and the Astronaut (2006).

There is, however, a (minor) locked room conundrum tucked away at the end of the story and happens when an intruder miraculously appears inside a house, properly locked and shuttered from the inside, which also had been under constant police observation. A simple, but nicely done, impossibility with a basic solution, but applying it to make a person appear, instead of disappear, put a new ripple on an old trick – which is always a pleasant surprise. Simple as the trick may be.

Sadly, I have to report that the best portions of The Double Alibi are found in its opening and closing chapters, which lay the groundwork for the plot and tied everything together, but the middle section was disappointingly dull and largely uninteresting. Even Allou became bored with the whole case! Evidently, Vindry had a pretty good idea for a ticklish, intricate detective story and knew how he was going to explain it all, which is probably why the opening and ending completely outshined everything in between. I don't think Vindry had as clear an idea as to how he was going to fill the chapters bridging those two points and mainly had his detectives chasing after the elusive Allevaire. Unfortunately, this slightly affected the overall quality and fair play aspect of the plot resulting in a solution that was not as neat or tight as it could have been. JJ pointed out some of the imperfections in his own review, which really are a shame, because Vindry clearly tried to play as fair as possible.

Personally, I think these shortcomings could have been solved had The Double Alibi been shortened to a novella or simply a short story. This short story or novella could have been to Vindry's body of work what "All in a Maze" (collected in The Men Who Explained Miracles, 1963) was to Carr's locked room output (i.e. a solid detective tale with a good, if minor, impossibility).

Anyway, I would place The Double Alibi above The House That Kills, but far below the excellent The Howling Beast and can only really recommend it to ardent locked room readers who want to explore every nook and cranny of the impossible crime story. So, once again, I have to disagree with JJ, because The Double Alibi is not the most twisty detective novel Pugmire peddled across the language barrier.

Well, I didn't get the excellently plotted, original and solidly clued detective story I was looking for, which tempted me to pick up a Christopher Bush mystery for my next read, but decided to re-read a classic instead. One that'll probably surprise some of you. But before that, I might make a stopover in the wonderful world in Detective Conan. So don't you dare to touch that dial!

Castle of the Damned

"...it was impossible for the murderer to make his escape either naturally or supernaturally."

- Joseph Rouletabille (Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907)

Back in early 2015, John Pugmire's Locked Room International published an English translation of La maison qui tue (The House That Kills, 1932), which was written by a real-life juge d'instruction (examining magistrate), Noel Vindry. The book was the opening salvo in his celebrated M. Allou series, all of them published during the thirties of the previous century, but this long anticipated translation proved to be a dud and got a tepid reception – some reviews were quite harsh in their condemnation of the book.

So, not a very auspicious beginning of Vindry's first excursion into the English-speaking world. Regardless of his initial reception, Pugmire was evidently not prepared to give up on Vindry and published a translation of La bête hurlante (The Howling Beast, 1934) in 2016, which seems to have redeemed Vindry to the mystery readers outside of the Francosphere. As a matter of fact, The Howling Beast is rapidly securing a reputation for itself as a recently unearthed classic from the genre's Golden Era and this praise is as valid as the criticism that was leveled against The House That Kills.

One other common theme, emerging from the commentary, is how difficult the book (apparently) is to review, because it has an unusual structure and an important sequence of events takes place in the final leg of the story – which consists of no less than two impossible murders. However, I don't see a problem where reviewing the story is concerned. It can be done without giving any vital plot-points away.

The overarching structure of The Howling Beast is very similar to G.K. Chesterton's "The Dagger with Wings," from The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), which (largely) consists of a conversation in which a series of inexplicable events are related to Father Brown. Vindry took a similar approach when his series-character, M. Allou, meets a very peculiar individual on a holiday: a tall, bony-faced man with a broken nose who makes eye-contact with the magistrate and says the damndest thing, "I haven't eaten for three days, monsieur."

Curiosity aroused, Allou takes the man to a small restaurant and there he learns that the man, who's named Pierre Herry, is on the run from the police. Herry is the suspected perpetrator of a double murder committed in an ancient, desolate castle situated on the outskirts of Versailles.

Allou had "experiences with tricksters in the past" and knew there was only way to catch them out: oblige them to betray themselves by having them "describe everything in minute detail." So he encourages Herry to relate the whole story to him and the events surrounding the eventual murders covers a long period of several years, but the most important thing to note here is that his story can be divided in two parts. The first two-thirds is very reminiscent of one of Conan Doyle's fancies, while the final quarter (including the impossibilities) could have been dreamed up by John Dickson Carr.

Herry tells Allou about his friendship with Comte de Saint-Luce, a big-game hunter, who owes his life to Herry's interference when a wounded tiger turned on him. So, naturally, this inspired friendly feelings, but several years passed and when Herry happened to be in the neighborhood he decided to pay a visit to the castle of his old hunting buddy – only to get a very cold welcome. Obviously, he was an unwanted guest. An intruder even. Saint-Luce turned about and insisted he stayed the night, which hurled him into a string of strange events. One of the house guests, a Serbian engineer named Carlovitch, vanishes from the premise and left behind his wife, Sonia. A night-time attack is made on Herry and he hears the titular howling coming from outside of the castle walls.

French edition

So his first stay at the fourteenth century castle was very eventful, but nothing compared to his second visitation, which took place after spending four years in India and found a strange situation upon his return – one of them is that Sonia took up residence at the castle. But there were also threatening letters. Saint-Luce has the statuette of a sacred Buddha in his library and boosted how he had taken its "from one of the temples in a particularly barbaric fashion," but now there a demands for its return. One note states, "when the beast howls for a third time, you will die."

So, as noted before, the first two-thirds of the plot really feels like a Conan Doyle story and in particular three of his four full-length Sherlock Holmes novels, which are The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and The Valley of Fear (1914). You can say this part of the story is a throwback to the Victorian-era sensationalist novel and does not, necessarily, present a genuine mystery to the reader. However, this portion of the novel is littered with hints and clues that will come into effect once the murders have occurred.

Here's where the review becomes somewhat tricky: the murders occur very late in the book, when gunshots are exchanged in close quarters, which looks very dire for Herry, because nobody else seems to have been in a positions to fire the fatal shots. The rooms in question were either locked, bolted or guarded and the castle, as established in earlier chapters, is a completely sealed environment – precluding any outside interference. So Herry found himself the favored suspect of the local police.

Luckily, for him, Allou reasoned an alternative explanation from his account and given evidence, which is very Carrian in nature. However, it anticipates some of his most famous locked room novels, but the germ of this idea might have originated from Georges Simenon's "The Little House at Croix-Rousse," a short story from the late 1920s, which can be found in the locked room anthology All But Impossible! (1981). This would be funny since The Howling Beast opened with an introduction, entitled "Noel Vindry and the Puzzle Novel," pointing out how much Simenon "disdained the puzzle novel," because it was too rigid and "too much under the influence of Anglo-Saxon writers."

 

So, to make a long story short, The Howling Beast was an excellent detective novel to start the new year with and an early candidate for the pile of best detective stories read in 2017. It definitely made up for the sub-par The House That Kills.

On a final note, I surely hope Pugmire will consider Pierre Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Murderer, 1939) for translation.

Home Intruders

"There are so many possibilities, and yet all of them seem wild and improbable."

- Tommy Beresford (Agatha Christie's "The House of Lurking Death," from Partners in Crime, 1929)  

As you may have noticed, I've been abandoning the trail of obscurity to focus on the profusion of reprints, translations and even neo-orthodox mystery novels that are currently flooding our wish lists – hence why nearly every review over the past month was tagged as "Foreign Mysteries"and "Post-GAD."

Well, for reasons even I can't fathom, I neglected the publications from Locked Room International as well, which is an independent publisher of English translations of mainly French impossible crime novels. The owner and translator of Locked Room International, John Pugmire, has introduced many, interesting locked room mysteries to a non-French speaking audience and is currently still in the process of translating Paul Halter's work – one of the two biggest fanboys of John Dickson Carr on the European continent.

One of LRI's latest offerings is La Maison qui tue (The House That Kills, 1932) and was written by a former juge d'instruction (examining magistrate), Noel Vindry, who penned a dozen locked room mysteries between 1932 and 1937 – which all began with this book.

The House That Kills introduces Vindry's detective, Monsieur Allou, an examining magistrate "who could work without giving that impression," but goes on a holiday on page one and puts a younger colleague in charge. And it doesn't take long for a problem to present itself.

Pierre Louret shot and killed a knife-wielding vagrant in self-defense and a large sum of money found on the tramp's body suggests he may have been hired, instead of crazy, but the frightened Louret family is unwilling to show the police the skeletons in their cupboards – preferring to barricade themselves in their fortress-like home. The windows are barred or shuttered and the bedroom doors have a pair of heavy bolts, but even when the police are crawling around the premise they are unable to keep the menacing force out of the door.

A menace that may be bloody inheritance from the days of Pierre's father in the United States, which called to mind Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear (1914) and Joseph Bowen's The Man Without a Head (1933).

The results are two, seemingly impossible crimes and twice as many murders! The first victim is Pierre's sister, Germaine, who's found dead in her bedroom – clutching a smoking gun and a toppled chair with a knife-handle sticking out of her chest. As to be expected, the windows were secured from the insight and the bolts were drawn. The second impossibility occurs when another member of the family gets snuffed out when apparently nobody was around him.

At roughly the halfway mark, Monsieur Allou returns early from his holiday to take over the reigns of the investigation and brings the case to a close by fingering the obvious suspect, but it was also the point where I began to lose faith in the plot.

The House That Kills has received some lukewarm reviews upon its release, but I can forgive wooden, human-shaped chess pieces or the lack of atmosphere in a (locked room) mystery... if the plot is any good or original. That's what was severely lacking in the first half.  

The murder in the locked bedroom was an audacious redressing of one of the oldest tricks in the book, but to pull it off as it was presented in this book would require a supernatural amount of luck and foresight – and only worked because the plot required it to work. Amazingly, I pictured the exact solution in my mind for the second impossibility and rejected it immediately, because it seemed silly. I think it would've been more convincing if it had been presented as a crime of opportunity, done in the spur of the moment, because the murderer seemed to be well versed in the Xanatos Gambit.

However, the second half has some points of interest that shows the promise worthy of the praise French mystery scholars give him. Firstly, Allou played god over life and death to collar the murderer in the act and that has consequences in the second half, which isn't a theme that's often explored in Golden Age mystery series – let alone in a debut novel. Of course, there's Speedy Death (1929) by Gladys Mitchell, but that's another story all together.

Secondly, there's a third, seemingly impossible crime in this portion and the solution to the nearly fatal shooting of Allou in his locked and watched apartment is original. I figured out how it was done, but only because it's very similar to favorite short story of mine from the late 1930s. However, Vindry seems to have been the originator and it's unlikely the other author was even aware of this novel.

So, the plot of The House That Kills isn't erected on the soundest of foundations, but I never want to be too harsh on debut novels. After all, John Dickson Carr's legacy began with It Walks by Night (1930) and who am I to judge. If I wrote a locked room mystery, the result would be exactly the same. Who gives about in-depth, character exploration? There's probably a body behind that locked door and certainly one in that field of unbroken snow outside!

I really wish I could be glowingly enthusiastic about this one, especially because of the time and effort Pugmire has put into translating these novels, but this just isn't a top-tier locked room mystery.

On a final note, I'll contain to knock off some of these recent releases, but I'll return to the Golden Age regularly with the like E.R. Punshon and Stuart Palmer