"I could murder that woman... she treats us like muck."
- Amy Ford (Harriet Rutland's Knock, Murderer, Knock, 1938)
Alfred
Meyers was, like Anthony
Boucher, "a great opera buff" and snatched at any
opportunity to sing "in every chorus that would use his
talents," while working off and on in his father's bank, but
Meyers also achieved modest success as a writer – publishing short
stories, a stage play and a detective novel.
Murder
Ends the Song (1941) was Meyers' sole contribution to the genre,
but, despite his scanty resume, he was elected the first Treasurer of
the Northern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. A
chapter of which Lenore
Glen Offord was Secretary and Boucher was its Vice President.
Meyers would go on to write only a single chapter for an anthology of
true crime stories, San Francisco Murders (1947), before
fading from the public-eye and his work was hurled into obscurity.
Murder
Ends the Song is told in the first person and the narrative voice
is that of a promising young tenor, Anthony "Tony" Graine, who's
a most amusing character and this is particularly shown in the
opening chapter – when his business manager, "Nero," insistently rings his phone until he drags himself out of bed. The
subsequent conversation was rife with verbal abuse, with one of them
threatening to ram a telephone "down his yapping managerial
gullet" and the other evoking "the curse of the Witch of
Endor," but the manager won in the end. Graine collected
himself and met with him ten minutes later to go to the airport to
join the entourage of "La Grazie."
Marina
Grazie was a star of the operatic stage, but, while her star had
dimmed, her fame had not entirely faded. She was heard on the radio
often and could still gather a crowd of newspaper reporters. However,
to her dismay, she has been unable to set a toe on the big stage
after prematurely retiring, hoping the famous managers would track
her down with "a contract as fat as she was," which never
happened – eventually giving and making a guest appearance on a
radio program. Grazie wants more and joined the "one-horse
outfit" of Nero in the hopes of making a West Coast comeback.
So,
a typical spoiled diva with a high opinion of herself and was knocked
down a peg, or two, by the world around her. However, the subsequent
story "The Great Grazie" to be a truly villainous piece of
work. A woman who has been described as "a grasping,
egotistical, demanding slave-driver" and not adverse to abuse
her authoritative position to physically assault the people around
her. Graine quickly became aware that Grazie has "a gift for
inspiring impulses to violence" and hears several references to
her murder long before stumbling across her body. Someone even wrote
a message in blood on her mirror! So someone has it out for her.
The
entourage of the opera diva consists of the following people: Miss
Elena Grazie (her niece), Miss Ambrosia Swisshome
(companian-secretary), Dr. Beale Thorndyke (personal physician), Mr.
Julian Porter (accompanist) and Mr. James Paris (chauffeur and
pilot). They find themselves stranded, together with their tormentor,
inside a grim, half-finished castle, called Lucifer's Pride, which
was constructed by Grazie's dead fiance, Lucifer Bollman – an
elderly Wheat King who, reputedly, died of a broken heart and now
haunts the place.
Lucifer's
Pride is "perched on a bluff some three hundred feet"
above the Columbia River Gorge and a violent storm cuts the party off
from the mainland for a full twenty-four hours, which is enough for
the killer among them to dispatch a few people to Great Beyond. And
this person begins with Marina Grazie.
After
a confrontation between Grazie and her rebellious entourage, she
takes possession of the library and repeatedly sings her favorite
aria, Caro Nome, but when Graine goes to check on her he finds
that the singing came from a phonograph in the corner – playing a
ten-year-old recording. Grazie was slumped over the keys of the
piano, her head resting in her arms, where she slumped to the floor
when Graine touched her shoulders. A steel knitting needle protruded
from the base of her skull!
| Alfred Meyers |
So
there you have it: the premise of a classically-styled mystery novel
with a closed-circle of suspects, cut-off from the outside world,
which is a clichéd situation often associated with detective stories
from this period. However, Murder Ends the Song is everything
but cliché or an unoriginal imitation of Agatha
Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). Meyers allowed
his character to perform a different kind of detective story on this
stage and this resulted in some very well imagined set pieces.
One
of them is how nobody, except for Graine, is really concerned about
the murder and they find it more important to search the library and
padding down the corpse(s). What are they looking? Graine suspects it
is Lucifer diamond. After all, Grazie's jewelry box has been looted,
but, obviously, the party is searching for something completely
different. There was also a very bizarre musical scene, in which
everyone had gathered in the library and was singing Shall We
Gather At the River at the piano, while the body of Grazie was
laying on the couch and tucked around with an Indian robe. It ended
with the question whether it would have pleased the old bird. I was
reminded of a similar and equally bizarre singing-scene from
Boucher's The Case of the Seven Sneezes (1942). So the writing
and story-telling were as inspired as the plot.
A
plot further complicated with addition of two bodies. One of them
belonging to an unknown man who broke his neck in a rather unpleasant
fall and the third victim perished in a muddled shooting incident,
but the main attraction of the story is the murder of Marina Grazie
and the person responsible for her death.
Meyers
did an exemplary job in plotting and writing a genuine whodunit. I
was pleasantly surprised when it became apparent this person was the
killer, because I had not seriously considered this option and
experienced one of those rare, but pleasant, jolts of surprise that
attracts readers to detective stories, but (admittedly) become rarer
once you become well read in the genre. But this one did it. I also
found the motive to be interesting and very original for the time. It
may very well have been the first example of its kind.
So
that aspect of the plot was definitely satisfying, but, like a
tiresome nitpicker, I have to point out a strange, anomalous flaw in
the solution. Meyers may have done too good a job at hiding the
murderer, because the (main) clues do not, necessarily, point this
person out as the only possible candidate to have committed the
murders – which makes them more indicators than tell-tale clues.
Well, there's the clue of the bottle, but that one veered closely to
the territory of Dagmar Doubledick's tie. However, I guess the bottle
clue can be seen as the connecting puzzle piece to the aforementioned
indicators and together point towards the murderer.
I
should also point out that the caretakers, Mr. and Mrs. Tait,
withheld a key piece of information until the end. Granted, it was
established early on in the story that they didn't always show the
back of their tongue or "forgot" things, but still, it should
have been divulged a whole lot sooner.
Anyhow,
you should not allow this technical nitpicking to deter you from
trying Murder Ends the Song, because it is a genuine and
pleasantly surprising whodunit with an original background placed in
a familiar setting. And it is a notable entry in the Van Dine-Queen
School of Detection. I just found the effect of the clues on the
overall plot to be a bit weird. But, again, that's just me nitpicking
the finer details of a clever and enjoyable mystery novel.