Wobble to Death (1970) by Peter Lovesey

A year ago, I read the lively A Case of Spirits (1975) and the book was my formal introduction to Peter Lovesey's Victorian-era policemen, Sgt. Cribb and Constable Thackeray, who appeared in only eight historical mystery novels published during the 1970s – which began with Wobble to Death (1970) and ended with Waxwork (1978). I was recently reminded that the first book from this series was still precariously balanced, somewhere, at the top of the big pile. So decided to finally take it off.

John Dickson Carr reviewed Wobble to Death in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and praised Lovesey for his unvarnished depiction of Victorian England ("here are true Victorians, not pious frauds of legend") and described the book as "a first-rate story of sustained thrills," but Carr's endorsement was not the only reason why I wanted to make this one my next stop in the series.

Lovesey has set many of his Sgt. Cribb mysteries against the background of Victorian crazes and entertainment, like spiritualism, but Wobble to Death takes place during a six-day Go-As-You-Please contest – an endurance test for "Proven Pedestrians" also known as Wobbles.

Sir John Astley instituted the endurance contests in March, 1878 and the sport, which even had championship belts, became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1880s. George Littlewood set the record of 623.4 miles in Madison Square Gardens (New York) in 1888 and a physiologist described Littlewood's endurance feat in Advancement Science as "probably be about the maximum sustained output of which the human frame is capable." Littlewood's record still stands today.

These six-day endurance contests, or Wobbles, have become an obscure relic of history, but to use it as a backdrop for a historical detective novel had me intrigued.

Wobble to Death is set in 1879 and takes place at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, where promoter Solomon Herriott has organized a Six Day Pedestrian Contest. A footrace in which the competitors have to make "the best of his way on foot," by walking or running, and whoever covers "the greatest distance" in the specified time will be crowned Champion Pedestrian of the World – a title that comes with five-hundred pounds in prize money and a championship belt. This is Endurance Championship Walking (ECW! ECW!! ECW!!!).

There were two classes of competitors and two tracks. On the inner, one-eighth of a mile track moved the Main Eventers, Capt. Erskine Chadwick and Charles Darrell, who were in a two-men race within another race.

The outer, one-seventh of a mile track was reserved for fourteen lesser "heavenly bodies," but the (top) competitors in this second-class of walkers were determined to take a shot at the prize money and title. There's Feargus O'Flaherty, "Half-breed" Williams, Peter "The Scythebearer" Chalk and Billy Reid, but the outer track also has a dark horse. A puny physician, F.H. Mostyn-Smith, who had "the style of an expert in egg-and-spoon racing."

So the six day Go-As-You-Please begins and Lovesey takes his time to set up both the plot and backdrop of the story.

A six day endurance race, set in the late 1800s, is a fascinating and original setting for a detective novel, but Lovesey is not given to romanticizing or decrying the era the story is set in. He simply represents Victorian life as it was at the time. This is most notable in the squalor and even unhygienic living conditions of the lower-ranked pedestrians. The grand Agricultural Hall is filled with fog, gas fumes and the smell of cattle-dung and Herriott is grilled over these conditions by the press, but simply dismisses them by saying that he's not a hotelier and how some of the second-class pedestrians may find it “a pleasurable experience to have any sort of roof above them” – even wagering a bet they would die from "want of exercise" before any of his competitors "dies from taking too much."

On the second day, Darrell collapses on the track and passes away shortly after being taken to his hut. Initially, they believe Darrell, who had walked barefoot with blisters, had contracted tetanus, but a post-mortem reveals there was enough strychnine in his body "to put down a dray-horse." The death of Darrell is followed by that of his personal trainer, Sam Monk, who took his own life by gassing himself in their hut out of remorse. Or so it appears on the surface.

Enter Sgt. Cribb and Constable Thackeray. They conduct their investigation as the race continues and this results in a humorous scene when Thackeray is instructed by Cribb to question Chadwick as he strides along the track, which was greeted with "delighted hoots of derision" from the stands – someone in the crowd even knocked Thackeray's bowler of his head with a well-aimed apple. By this time, Herriott has also dissolved the separate tracks and Chadwick, gentleman pedestrian and champion walker of England, had to walk among the "toughened professionals" of the inner track, which resulted in elbows being buried in his ribs and damaged shins. The gentleman pedestrian began to resemble a battered warhorse.

Sgt. Cribb reasons the solution not from physical clues, inconsistencies in statements or the movement of suspects, but by simply eliminating everyone who could not have done the murders or lacked a motive to do them in. Technically, this can be considered fair play, because there's logic to his reasoning, but this approach made the plot feel rather thin in hindsight. But there was than enough to make up for that.

Regardless, I greatly enjoyed my (brief) time with Wobble to Death. Lovesey wrote a breezily paced, well written and characterized detective novel with an original setting and background that had never been explored before, but the reader is not beaten over the head with historical references to help them remind the story takes place in 1879. This makes the book all the more authentic, which is easier said than done, and demonstrates why the Sgt. Cribb series is so highly regarded in the sub-genre of historical detective fiction. What a pity Lovesey only wrote eight of them.

Passing Through

"We have nothing to fear from the dead, past or present. The spirits were not responsible for what took place here tonight. Not any of it."

- John Quincannon (Bill Pronzini's "Medium Rare," from Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services, 1998)

Peter Lovesey is an award-winning crime novelist of historical mysteries, police detectives and various short stories, but a significant portion of his work is gilded with the traditions of the genre's Golden Age and this was recognized by such luminaries as John Dickson Carr, Edmund Crispin and Lenore Glen Offord – who all praised his earliest work from the 1970s.

I primarily know Lovesey as the author of Bloodhounds (1996), a well-known locked room mystery, but he wrote another impossible crime novel that has been recommended to me in the past.

A Case of Spirits (1975) is the sixth entry in Lovesey's historical series of Victorian-era detective stories about Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray, which uses to the spiritualism craze of the late 1800s as a backdrop for a seemingly impossible murder. However, the story begins with the common, down-to-earth problem of housebreaking.

Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray are summoned to the Royal Academy of the Arts by their superior, Inspector Jowett, where they're introduced to an important member of the upper-crust of society, Dr. Probert – an eminent physiologist of the University of London. Dr. Probert has been the victim of a crude home burglary and the thief made away with a lurid painting. Something similar had happened to an acquaintance of his, Miss Crush, who came home one day to find a forced window, but she was missing a Royal Worcester vase in the Japanese style.

A simple case of housebreaking and thievery, but Cribb has a "relish for a burglary" and thinks of it as "a bit of a game." And immediately notices several commonalities between both thefts. The burglar was a crude, unrefined criminal who, in each case, passed on an easy opportunity to take something more valuable from the homes, but even more significant is that the burglaries occurred after the victims participated in a spiritualistic séance.

I've to take a moment here to point out that, at this point, the story really struck me as the British precursor of the Quincannon and Carpenter series by Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, which also takes place in the late 1800s, but the setting is California – when the Wild West had just settled down. Despite these differences in backdrop and characters, the series have a strangely similar feel to them. However, I only read this single title in the Cribb series and the impossible crime material of the book, relating to spiritualist angle, had a passing resemblance to the plot of the short story that provided this blog-post with an opening quote. So maybe that feeling is less, or even absent, in other Cribb novels.

Well, the spiritualist angle of A Case of Spirits empties out the whole bag of tricks of the table-tapping industry of the Victorian-era.

Peter Brand is "the most promising member of his profession since D.D. Home," who allegedly levitated out of window and floated back through another, but the phenomena Brand managed to produce was no less impressive. He was able to make furniture levitate and produce spirit writing from the Duke of Wellington, which has been verified by the foremost graphologist in London as authentic. It has made the young man "the talk of the metropolis." And the reader gets a front-row seat to one of his performances.

During one of his last demonstrations, Brand makes a ghostly, disembodied hand appear and disappear again. Dr. Probert's son-in-law, Captain William Nye, gets pelted with oranges by an invisible entity for being a hostile presence at the table, which all happened while everyone was linked together by holding hands. So even skeptics, such as Henry Strathmore, begin to believe they're dealing with the genuine article in Brand, but during the last experiment something goes horribly wrong and involves a deadly gizmo – an electric chair!

Dr. Probert has converted an oak chair into an electric chair, brass handles screwed to the armrests, attached with wires going to a black box with a thicker coil leading to the basement. There are four 104 volt batteries stored in the basement and the black box is a step-down transformer to "ensure that only a mild and even current passes through." Brand is to take place in the chair, holding the brass-handles, which allows observers, with the assistance of galvanometer, to monitor the medium when the curtains are drawn around him. The instrument would tell them if he broke contact for so much as a fraction of a second. But the step-down transformer failed and shot 400 volts into Brand. He did not recover from the shock.

I think this impossible situation is what lifted the plot above banality of the familiar, stock-in-trade trickery of the dead table-tapper, because the premise is genuinely original with an explanation relaying on both old-fashioned misdirection and technical hokey-pokey. However, I've no idea how sound the technical side of the trick actually is and whether the galvanometer could give such accurate reading throughout the experiment. The step-down transformer also struck me as a decidedly unsafe device, but then again, that's part of the point, isn't it?

After all, the story takes place during the dawn of the electrical age and these transformers were probably not of the same standard as those from the twentieth century.

The identity of the murderer and the excellent motive were also competently handled, which were fairly clued and even gave room to a false solution. It stretched the ending a bit longer than was strictly necessary, but a fairly minor and forgivable offense placed against the quality of the overall plot. I probably enjoyed A Case of Spirits even more since Andrew Greeley's Happy Are Those Who Mourn (1995) and Eric Brown's Murder at the Chase (2014) are still fresh in my mind, which are both disappointing examples of the contemporary locked room novel at their worst.

So, all in all, I really enjoyed my first meeting with Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray. A story with an impossible crime plot that recalled the works of Bill Pronzini and John Rhode, which is definitely an invitation to return to the series before too long. I think my next stop in the series is going to be first one, Wobble to Death (1970), because Carr praised it as "a first-rate story." And who are we to doubt the word of the master? But my next review will take a look at a locked room mystery from my own country. So stay tuned!

Sealed Rooms and Ghoulish Laughter: Tributes to John Dickson Carr

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

The man who explained miracles...

After perusing the article "C is for... John Dickson Carr," an unabashed piece of hero worship from fellow blogger Sergio, a germ of an idea began to fester and grow in my mind, but with it came a knock on the door and found a problem on my doorstep. The instrument I exert to trumpet his praise broke after beating a dead horse with it and more than enough people are already of the opinion that I should get a room for me and the ghost of John Dickson Carr. So I decided to adjust my focus for this post and take a look at some of the stories that he inspired others to write.

Well, I guess I have to start with the late William Brittain, a novelist and school teacher, who scattered the pages of The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine with an abundance of short stories – including "The Man Who Read" series. It's a series of stand-alone mysteries centering on readers of detective fiction that are put in a position where they have to apply the knowledge culled from the stories of their favorite mystery writer to solve a problem of their own... or to create one.

William Brittain (1930-2011)

"The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" is a young orphan, named Edgar Gault, who discovered the undisputed master of the locked room mystery at the impressionable age of fourteen, imbuing him with the conviction that, one day, he will bring his stories to life – preferably with his unpleasant uncle as the victim. The trick of the locked door is almost as good as the final sentence of the story, which is a real kicker, and it's just overall an amusing and a very rich story. It places the inverted mystery in the convinces of the locked room and even gives you, somewhat, of a character study of the protagonist, but, above all, it's just fun story to read. I wish the entire series, all ten of them, were gathered in one easily accessible volume. Messrs Crippen and Landru, are you taking notes? Until then, you can find this story in Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories (1998).

Norma Schier was another mystery writer who had her tongue firmly planted in her cheek when she began to pen a series of short stories for The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, in which she harlequinade her most famous predecessors – from Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh to Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr. Most of her stories perfectly captured the heart and soul of the originals and have the added bonus of being anagram puzzles. You can figure out whodunit and who's being spoofed by simply decoding the anagrams.

"Hocus-Pocus at Drumis Tree" (published under the byline Handon C. Jorricks) was her nod to John Dickson Carr, which takes place in a reputable restaurant where it's not the custom to spike a glass of champagne with poison and then pass it around, but that's exactly what happened. Enter Sir Marvin Rhyerlee! Who's miffed that he can't enjoy a quiet lunch without someone dying under impossible circumstances. Schier admitted that her little pastiche does little justice to Carr's plotting technique and knack for coming up with impossible situations, but the attempt that was made here is definitely being appreciated. You can find this story in the collection The Anagram Detectives (1979).

Alex Atkinson wrote another parody, "Chapter the Last: Merriman Explains," which is more a spoof on Carr's detectives than his plotting technique and someone on the JDCarr forum noted that the more Carr you've read the more you'll appreciate it. I agree. It's a brief, but fun, distraction and can be read in the anthology Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990). 

Another humorous excerpt, lampooning Dr. Gideon Fell, comes from the word processor of one of our very own, Barry Ergang, who was inspired to write "Dr. Gideon Fell, Hardboiled Sawbones" after a comment from Nick Fuller berating the atrocity that was The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries – a TV series that butchered a number of Gladys Mitchell's most enjoyable novels. Here is Nick's full-comment that can double as a synopsis for Barry's story: "It is like adapting Carr, and making Dr. Fell a cantankerous hard-drinking medico on the sleazy streets of London's East End who deals with professional crime of the hard-boiled variety and with an awful number of demented blondes, without an impossible crime in sight." The story can still be read by clicking here (GAD archive).

William Krohn's "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus" was written in a more serious and darker vein, when the author was only 18-years-old, and almost reads like a love letter to John Dickson Carr and the locked room mystery. Krohn's introduction to the genre came a few years previously, when he read The Three Coffins (1935) and the Cult of Carr welcomed another member in their midst. The story itself dribs with Carrian influences, involving the stabbing of a magician in closed and moving elevator, with a solution that does not rely on gizmos like a certain other story I could mention – and I can only imagine that Carr himself must have beamed with pride after finishing the story (it was published during his lifetime). Krohn penned a second story for the EQMM, but it was rejected as too complex and eventually moved away from detective fiction to become a film critic and expert on Alfred Hitchcock. I wonder if a copy of that story survived. Anyway, as Darrell from The Study Lamp remarked, the story has been deservedly reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2007).

By the same token, I should also mention Paul Halter's The Fourth Door (1987), whose Dr. Alan Twist is a "thinly" disguised version of Dr. Gideon Fell, and Jean-Paul Török's The Riddle of Monte Verita (2007), but I already discussed them in depth on this blog. However, Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1997) should be mentioned, even if it's more of a general wink at the genre than one specifically meant for Carr. The bloodhounds of the title are a group of fanatical mystery fans, ranging from locked room enthusiasts to hardboiled fanatics, who meet once a week to discuss detective stories – until one of them is murdered aboard a locked houseboat. A very clever, fun and eerily recognizable book that should belong on the shelves of everyone who's permanently under the weather with the sleuth flu. It's about us!

I probably missed a few and could probably find more, but I think this was more than enough hero worship for this Sunday. My next sermon will be on how Carr has fed our hungry brains and banished mediocrity from our bookshelves. Thank you Carr for unlocking doors and forgiving our sins, like you did with the murderers in so many of your books, past, present and future. In name of the Father (Edgar Allan Poe), the Son (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the Holy Spirit (G.K. Chesterton). Amen.