Not As It Seems: Peter Anthony's "Before and After" (1953) & Peter Shaffer's "Suffer a Witch" (1954)

Back in 2020, the British Library Crime Classics reprinted The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951), originally published as by "Peter Anthony," which is the shared penname of two brothers, Anthony and Peter Shaffer – who garnered fame as playwrights, screenwriters and novelists. The Woman in the Wardrobe was together with How Doth the Little Crocodile? (1952) and Withered Murder (1955) three of their long out-of-print, nigh impossible to find (locked room) mysteries that attained near-mythical status among fans. So, when the British Library republished The Woman in the Wardrobe, I kept my fingers crossed for 2021 reprint of Withered Murder. As of this writing, no further reprints have materialized. I decided to take a look at two of their short stories instead, which were a lot easier to track down. 

Peter Anthony's "Before and After" originally appeared in The London Mystery Magazine (No. 16) in 1953 and is the only short story to feature their series-detective, Mr. Verity. This story has a reference to The Woman in the Wardrobe, "Oh lord! Not another locked room. My last locked-room case was a shattering business... all centering round some dreadful woman in a wardrobe." The impossible murder in "Before and After" concerns the mysterious death of a wheelchair-bound woman.

Mrs. Carmichael had been paralyzed from the waist down for the past fifteen years and "now a tiny hole, drilled neatly through her right temple, had made the top half of her body as immobile as the lower half." At the time of the murder, the whole family comprising of the victim's husband, daughter, brother and one of her nurses were having dinner and playing bridge at Colonel Longford's house – an hours drive away from the Carmichael home. So nobody could have taken "an unnoticed hour off" to drive back to commit a murder. Besides, "the excellent Nurse Wimple was on duty in the passage outside Mrs Carmichael's room the whole night" and nobody went in, or out, of the room until the murder was discovered.

Inspector Swallow is advised to take a certain Mr. Verity, who happened to be in the neighborhood, along to the crime scene. Mr. Verity is a Great Detective likely modeled on John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, but as tactless as Leo Bruce's Sgt. Beef and as fallible as Anthony Berkeley's Roger Sheringham. So "really a remarkable man" whose services Inspector Swallow can't neglect to use, but Mr. Verity has "an infuriating habit of tendering them unasked" anyway. Mr. Verity constructs a pretty decent solution to the seemingly impossible murder around a burn mark on Mrs. Carmichael's right, nicotine stained finger and a photograph of her in the morning's copy of the Daily Grind ("Before and After Taking Toneup, the wonderful restorative for Invalids..."). Not as original a locked room-trick as the one that can be found in The Woman in the Wardrobe, but a very well done, classically-styled piece of locked room shenanigans. No problem with it, whatsoever, but The London Mystery Magazine published a short addendum to the story, "Part II: Mr Verity's Investigation," in the next issue credited to "J.M. Caffyn." This addendum takes a sledgehammer to the locked room, the solution and Mr. Verity's status as a Great Detective.

I was tempted to describe "Before and After" and "Part II: Mr Verity's Investigation" as a two-act variation on Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936), but the deconstruction in Part II is so thoroughly it can only be compared to Ulf Durling's Gammal ost (Hard Cheese, 1971). So definitely prefer Mr. Verity's solution.

Peter Shaffer's "Suffer a Witch" was published in The London Mystery Magazine (No. 20) in 1954 and had no idea what to expect as it could be everything from a modern, gritty crime story, a simple whodunit or a little-known locked room mystery – having escaped the roving eyes of Robert Adey and Brian Skupin. However, I didn't expect to find a delightful and curious mix of malice and mischief with a dash of witchcraft. Miss Annie Ames lives in "a little conical house on a hill" with "only a tomcat for company" and "a grandmother, at fifteen removes, who had been burned to cinders in a market place" as a witch. That makes Miss Ames a figure of fun in the nearby village. So, one day, Miss Ames takes her revenge and together with her cat, Jonah, begins to dabble in the black arts of her ancestor ("Jonah darling, shall we make them afraid?"). Miss Ames "feverishly began making little images of all the people in the village who had ever tormented or made fun of her." She even appeared in the village to buy a broomstick, but that broomstick provides the story with a curious, sadly premature, ending to the story.

The ending strongly suggests "Suffer a Witch" is a witches tale of the supernatural and unexplained, but, to me, it read like a fascinating prologue to a potentially great, never finished impossible crime novel. I mean, the ending poses a never-seen before impossible situation (ROT13: n sylvat jvgpu jub znxrf n sngny penfu ynaqvat ba ure oebbzfgvpx). It should be grist on the mills of locked room specialists like James Scott Byrnside and Paul Halter! So a pretty good, fun and entertaining story that could perhaps have been the premise of a fantastic, novel-length locked room and impossible crime mystery.

Speaking of locked rooms and impossible crimes, there's an extremely obscure one coming up next that has been out-of-print and sought after for nearly a century!

The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951) by Peter Shaffer

Anthony and Peter Shaffer were twin brothers, celebrated playwrights, screenwriters and novelists with three revered, frustratingly rare and highly sought after detective novels to their name that have gained an almost mythical reputation over the decades – ensuring a small circulation among collectors. Two of the three novels have vainly topped the wishlists of impossible crime fans for nearly seven decades.

During those seven decades, The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951) and Withered Murder (1955) enchanted mystery readers with their oracular reputation of unheralded, long-lost classics. Regrettably, the Shaffers "resisted numerous offers to republish them" and the hefty, triple-digit price tags (plus shipping) on the limited number of secondhand copies kept them elusive collector's items. And when a copy turns up, it's usually gone within a blink of an eye.

So you can imagine how much locked room readers rejoiced when the British Library announced they were reissuing The Woman in the Wardrobe!

The Woman in the Wardrobe not only lived up to its near-mythical reputation, but is guaranteed to win this year's Reprint of the Year Award. A comedic take on the classic detective story that at first seemed to take the lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek approach of Leo Bruce, R.T. Campbell and Edmund Crispin, but the writing, characterization and even the plotting have a biting, sardonic sense of humor – a tone you would expect from a mean-spirited deconstruction rather than an homage. But it worked! And the ending delivered "a brilliant new solution" to the locked room problem.

Mr. Verity is an unflattering, acerbic parody of the Great Detective and very likely modeled on John Dickson Carr's famous detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale.

Verity is "an immense man" with startling brilliant eyes, a chestnut Van Dyke and a winter cloak who has been "a noted figure in the world of detection" and enjoys the respect of the Yard, but he was "almost as much respected as disliked." He was actually very much disliked, because he was so often right and solved murders, "between tea and supper," with "a mixed display of condescension and incivility" towards the regular police – who were dead and spent with fatigue. A loud, highly opinionated man with questionable ethics (having "more archaeological thefts to his credit than the governing body of any museum in Europe") and prone to giving elaborate lunchtime lectures who annoying made himself indispensable by always being right. And he knows it! Mr. Verity is also abnormally curious and when he sees a man climbing furtively out of a first-floor window, of the Charter Hotel, he decides to ask the manager, Miss Framer, whether it's hotel custom to use windows as an exit.

They're interrupted by one of the guests, Mr. Paxton, flying down the stairs screaming blue murder. Paxton found the body of another hotel guest, Mr. Maxwell, but when they go up to investigate, they discover that the door of Maxwell's room was now locked on the inside. And at that same moment, a police constable enters the hotel with yet another guest, Mr. Cunningham, who caught coming out of one of the first-floor windows.

So the door is forced open and discovered a ransacked, blood-soaked room with Maxwell's body laying among the debris on the floor and the hotel waitress, Alice Burton, tied up in the wardrobe. A wonderfully intricate, neatly posed locked room problem that was succinctly summarized as follow:

"A murder is committed in a room. Two men are immediate suspects. Suspect A enters by the window and leaves by the door. Suspect B enters by the door and leaves by the window. Suspect A can lock the window but not the door. Suspect B can lock the door but not the window. Neither can lock both—yet both are locked: and from the inside. And all the while a body, which medical evidence proves could not have done the locking itself before it expired, leaks blood over the carpet of an empty room."

Detective Inspector Rambler enters the fray and perhaps the only man who stands on equal footing with the Great Detective. Only difference between them is that Verity has a temper and a beard, while Rambler is a professional who could afford neither, but Verity "respected the tamed logic in Rambler" and "Rambler the explosive vision in Verity" – together they pour over this pretty puzzle. They review possibility, suggest solutions and pry clues from the various suspects and witnesses, which include the amusing character of Richard Tudor. A pretender to the throne of England who claims to be a direct descendant of King Edward the Sixth, son of King Henry the Eighth, who died unmarried at the age of fifteen.

There's not much else that can be said about the plot, or investigation, because The Woman in the Wardrobe is a very short, tautly written story with the page-count padded out with some nice sketches of the main characters by Nicolas Bentley (son of E.C. Bentley). So it really had no right to be anything more than a comedic curiosity, but the explanation to the locked room, in combination with the identity to the murderer, turned it into an unmitigated classic. A superb and truly original locked room mystery!

The Woman in the Wardrobe is the novel Ulf Durling tried to write with Gammel ost (Hard Cheese, 1971), which could have worked had Durling not occupied himself with gutting the plot of everything that made it a detective story. Shaffer succeeded in both sardonically poking fun at the genre and doing a bit of deconstruction on the side without comprising the essence of a detective story. Chuck in a startling original solution and you have something special and memorable that cemented a top spot on my list of favorite locked room mysteries. Highly recommended!