A Frame of Mind

"Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken words, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew." 

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Back in 2012, I positively reviewed The Moon Rock (1922) by Arthur J. Rees and John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, suggested in the comment-section I take a look at Rees' The Shrieking Pit (1919) next, which he described as "one of the best detective novels written prior to 1920." 

Well, that was enough to secure it a spot on my elephantine TBR-pile, but then this long-forgotten mystery novelist began to slip from my mind and had not really given him a second thought until one of my fellow bloggers, "D for Doom," reviewed the book over at his excellent blog – called Vintage Pop Fiction. So I decided to finally excavate the book from the big pile and see what all the fuss is about.

The Shrieking Pit is set in Norfolk, England, in 1916, when the European continent was in the middle of the First World War and this global skirmish has a prominent presence in the story. In the first chapter, there are references to young army officers, war widows and a nearby zeppelin air-raid that had nearly emptied out the Grand Hotel. Something that may have affected the peculiar young man in the public room of the Grand Hotel.

David (or Grant) Colwyn is an American-born Englishman and a private-investigator of some celebrity, who is supposed to be taking a well deserved holiday, but he can't help observing the troubled man sitting in an alcove and assumes the poor soul is shell-shocked – until another guest takes a seat at his table. The man is Sir Henry Durwood, a Harley Street specialist, who recognizes the signs of furor epilepticus and asks Colwyn to help him intervene when the attack comes. Sure enough, they find themselves carrying a now unconscious man, who registered as James Ronald, to his room, but refuses any additional help once he regained consciousness. And that same day, he leaves the hotel without paying his bill of thirty pounds.

However, the memory of this incident comes back the following day when news reaches the hotel that a murder has been committed in a neighboring village and it looks as if the author of that crime is James Ronald!

The scene of the crime, called Flegne-next-sea, is a dying seaside village surrounded by "swamps and stagnant dykes." A place of outstretched marshlands, which encroached on the roads, dotted with often abandoned stone cottages, ruins of a priory and "a crumbling fragment of a Norman tower" - remnants of a long, sustained struggle against the hostile elements of the place. It was "a poor place at the best of times," but the war had made everything worse and everyone a whole lot poorer. So the arrival of an archaeologist to the village was seen as a godsend, because of the work and money this brought to the locals.

Roger Glenthorpe was an elderly archaeologist, who lodged at the Golden Anchor, which he used as the home base for his extensive research into the fossil remains that are common to that part of Norfolk. Unfortunately, for the archaeologist, the locals of this remote spot are scientifically illiterate. So he welcomed the arrival of Ronald at the inn, because the young man was obviously educated and knew a thing or two about science and history.

However, Ronald leaves the inn in the wee hours of the morning and Glenthorpe's bedroom is found empty, but the key is, uncharacteristically, sticking in the lock on the outside of the door. A track of boot-prints lead from the inn to the mouth of a pit, which is a part of "a number of so-called hut circles" that were "prehistoric shelters of the early Britons," where a workman was lowered into by rope and finds the murdered remains of Glenthorpe – stabbed in the chest. A sum of 300 pounds and a table-knife, used by Ronald at dinner, are missing. So things don't look very good for the missing Ronald.

One thing pointed out by "D" in his review is the fascinating treatment of circumstantial evidence and how this evidence can be interpreted, which runs like a red thread through the plot. According to Colwyn, there are two kinds of circumstantial evidence: in one of them the presumption of guilt depends on "a series of links forming a chain," while in the other "the circumstances are woven together like the strands of a rope." Colwyn thinks the latter is the strongest kind of circumstantial evidence of the two, but believes the case against Ronald hinges on the former and believes the strongest link in the chain of evidence are the boot-prints. And take that away and the evidence "snapped in the most vital link."

However, Colwyn's professional opinion does not prevent a devastating loss in the courtroom. The courtroom scenes were one of the highlights of the book. They were very well written and characterized, which makes you almost wish the entirety of the story had been penned as an old-fashioned courtroom drama. One of the very few genuine weaknesses of the plot is the repetition of the all facts and this would've been less of a problem in a courtroom setting, because the reiterations could be done by the lawyers, prosecution and a final summing up by the judge – as well as by witnesses on the stand. Nevertheless, I think plot-oriented readers can cope with some of the repetition here.

I suppose this sounds a bit weird, following that minor complaint, but The Shrieking Pit struck me as a predecessor of E.R. Punshon's work. There's more than a passing resemblance between Rees' The Shrieking Pit and Punshon's The Conqueror Inn (1943).

Rees also had a similar verbose, ornamental writing-style as Punshon, with a keen eye for historical detail, which might be off-putting to some readers, but, personally, I love this approach when it's wrapped around a strong, intelligently constructed and well imagined plot – which was definitely the case here. A story gets so much better when there's a strong sense of place, time and history.

The ghosts of past centuries, even millenniums, appear throughout the book, which range from the prehistoric, stone-age dwellings and the bullet tinted wall of the inn telling of a long-ago battle between a gang of smugglers and the King's troops to the sporting magazines from the 1860s at the inn's fireside bookshelf – all of them alluding to a different and sometimes better, more prosperous time. They make the impoverished state of the small, dying village even more tragic. If that's not gloomy enough, there's the encroaching marshlands, the dank swamps and the ghost of a cursed woman in white who haunts the region. But there are also whispers among the locals of a ghostly dog, "Ol Black Shuck," roaming the dense woods. So the book also has a touch of Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).

So, the atmospheric and historically rich backdrop, alongside the role of the First World War, undoubtedly counts as the book's strong point, but the very involved plot also proved to be noteworthy.

Granted, the explanation revealed that the crime-scene resembled a busy train-station, with characters popping in-and out of the bedroom, which caused many of the plot complexities, but Rees held a firm grasp on all of the plot-threads – which resulted in a pleasing, clear-cut explanation of all the events. You'd want to kick some of the characters for being so bone-headed, however, it made for a nice, complex and involved detective story. One that appeared, on the surface, to be a straightforward case for the police, but Corwyn uncovered many complications and contradictory evidence. All of which he managed to explain away by revealing that there was a simplistic, even sordid, truth behind the crime.

So, yes, The Shrieking Pit is a well-written, competently plotted and interesting detective novel from the transitional period between the Doylean Era and the Golden Age. As such, I can particularly recommend it to readers whose personal taste veer towards the Victoria-style of mystery writing or to fans of Punshon's Golden Age mysteries.

Well, so far my hasty, sloppily written review and my next one will probably be of another archaeological-themed mystery novel, but I've not yet made up my mind. So we'll see.

P.S: see comment-section for an explanation on the confusing first name of the detective. 

Vicissitudes of Families

"Every tick that I do give
Cuts short the time you have to live.
Praise thy Maker, mend thy ways,
Till Death, the thief, shall steal thy days."

- Inscription on a clock.

Perched on the summit of a windswept Cornish cliff, Flint House glances down to the pallid and legendary face of the Moon Rock, more than 200 feet down, where the ghostly moaning of the gray sea and the ghosts of drowned lovers resonate against the cliff walls – imbuing me with the conviction that the sole purpose of its construction was to accommodate family skeletons and restless spirits.

And every now and then, the rustic wailing of the Cornish coast and its ghosts are disturbed when the living settle down with their problems, like that one time when Robert Turold, an embittered, selfishly cruel and solitary man who amassed a fortune abroad for the upkeep of his hobbyhorse, showed up with his dysfunctional relatives in tow. These dire forebodings and its aftermath were recorded by Arthur J. Rees in The Moon Rock (1922).

Robert Turold's concern, or rather his idée fixe, is with proving that the Turolds sprang from the youngest brother of the last Lord Turrald and staking his claim for a Baronial title in abeyance for over four hundred years, which eventually brought him to Cornwall.

The last scraps of proof are buried in Cornwall's history and Turold turned to Dr. Ravenshaw, a local authority on antique and archeology, to help him find them. It's a collaboration that yields results, convinced and satisfied that they have valid case to bring to the House of Lords, but than Turold's wife does a startling death bed confession: she's a bigamist! Some skeletons are best left in the closet, however, Turold's obsession with obtaining the vacant family title, Lord Turrald of Missender, that he now wants the title, once it's his, to descend to his brother, Austin, and then to his brother's son, Charles – sacrificing and publicly disgracing his daughter in the process.

MILD SPOILERS, highlight to read: very few laughs and chuckles are shared in this story, and nearly every good and remotely likeable character is overshadowed by Turold’s evil and very little good is restored by the end of their trial.

Not long after these events, on a bleak, Cornish evening, when the wind howls around Flint House, locked and barred for the night, Turold is shot in his study and it looks like suicide. The door was secured from the inside and only a window offered escape from the room. That is, if you're suicidal. It's a 200 feet death drop on the spiky Moon Rock. Unfortunately, Rees barely gives any consideration to this aspect of the plot and the explanation was easy enough, nonetheless, I did not entirely dislike it.

SPOILERS, highlight to read: I rather enjoyed the idea of a "journeying key" before it ends up back on the scene of the crime and creating a locked room problem along the way.

The real attraction of this story is the story itself. I loved the old-fashioned, impressionable writing style that brought the somberness of the Cornish coast to life ("like a ghost from the grave," said the hack reviewer) and harked back to the days of a previous generation of mystery writers. The Moon Rock reminded me in parts of Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) and J.E. Preston-Muddock's Dick Donovan: The Glasgow Detective (collected in 2005). Like Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Rees' The Moon Rock unfolds itself despite several investigative characters prowling around. We see the official investigators, like Detective Barrant of Scotland Yard, a less official enquiry by Mr. Brimsdown, Turold's trusty lawyer, and Charles Turold fleeing to London to search for the missing Sicily like a lovelorn puppy, becoming a fugitive in the process, but it's a chance discovery and a confession from the murderer that clears up all the loose ends. Rees also drew from Conan Doyle's Sign of Four (1890) to give an account of the dark secret, buried in the distant past, that Turold lugged around for many frightful years.

When I began writing this review, I looked up Rees and learned that he was born and grew up in Australia, before moving to England as an adult, so Hume may have actually influenced Rees' writing.  

All in all, The Moon Rock is perhaps a relic that belonged to an even earlier era, but therefore not any less interesting or readable (if you don't expect a GAD-style crafted and plotted gem), and as I said before, I liked the evocative writing and gloomy, windswept Cornish setting of the story. Perhaps more could've done with the legend of the drowned lovers haunting the Moon Rock and the importance of the clock (and the clock lore attached to it) could've been played up more for effect.

Connoisseurs of late 19th/early 20th century crime fiction will most likely be the ones who will enjoy this book the most... unless they deplore bleak and dreary endings. In that case, you might regard it as an over padded suicide note that the publisher was too afraid to reject. 

Edit: you can read the book as etext on Project Gutenberg.