Many people who have reviewed this novel before me have said that it is best to read it without having read any reviews beforehand, because said reviews would spoil part of the joy of watching the narrative unfold. I would have to agree; it is best to go into The Red Right Hand while knowing as little as possible about the plot or how it’s written, as I did. So I will say upfront that I found this an absolutely stellar novel, and one unlike any I have read in my GAD experience. Those of you who like mysteries (probably all of you,) pulp/noir, suspense, or even modernist writing techniques (think Faulkner or Woolf) should read this novel. Go! Read it! Heed the advice of others and read it in one sitting, to let the madness of the narrative wash over you (something I regret not doing). And it would be best not to read below…
Continuing with the review proper, let’s attempt a summary. Dr. Henry Riddle, returning from a private operation in Vermont, runs into a young woman, Elinor Darrie. Darrie asks Riddle for help, claiming that while driving up through Connecticut with her fiancé Inis St. Erme in order to get married in Vermont, they picked up a deranged-looking but knowledgeable hitchhiker who then attacked them during a dinner picnic at “Dead Bridegroom’s Pond”, assaulted and possibly killed St. Erme, and drove away maniacally. By all available evidence, Riddle should have seen the car speeding down, with the tramp “Corkscrew” behind the wheel and St. Erme dangling out the passenger window, while he was stopped at an intersection the fated car was approaching. Several people on the road saw that Cadillac, and how Corkscrew ran down a dog and a man with it. But Riddle didn’t. Is there a logical answer to these crazy events? Or is Riddle just going crazy? It will take a criminal psychologist, lots of police, and a healthy dose of dread to figure it out.
The general plot, while it sounds like a doozy, seems linear enough. However, the story is presented as a long narrative from Dr. Riddle, without chapter breaks, and the events of the story move between (recent) past and present several times as Riddle pieces together his memory, witness testimony, and physical evidence in order to solve the mystery and outwit Corkscrew. The novel starts as Riddle is hiding out in Professor Adam MacComerou’s summer house, with the police hunting for Corkscrew, and MacComerou apparently slain. But then it jumps back to explain how Inis and Elinor met and left to their fateful drive, how Riddle got stuck in Connecticut, and how he met a very alive MacComerou, (among other events,) all while switching back to the present. It’s a dizzying feat of nonlinear plotting—structured not unlike Citizen Kane, but much more manic in pace and tone—meant to confuse the reader as they attempt to piece together the series of events while Riddle rambles on, just as Riddle’s memory itself is slowly unraveling.
Complementing this nonlinearity is a modernistic, stream-of-consciousness approach to narration. For 230 pages, Dr. Riddle jumps from one thought to the next, snatching the narrative out of a flashback with a side note, and patching together the facts and events with long, tumbling sentences that seem to run on. It’s crafted carefully, however; all of Riddle’s asides and rambles serve a purpose, whether it be to give emphasis to a certain clue, or to fill in a detail of his own character. Reading this style of narration, I was reminded of my adoration for modernist literature with similar methods of narration – Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, and the like. Dr. Henry Riddle is no Molly Bloom or Quentin Compson, for sure, but reading his narration still requires an increased effort to fully understand as it jumps around. As Riddle grapples with his own sanity, Rogers rattles the narrative to make it less clear about Riddle’s reliability, and about the events themselves.
The descriptions of places, people, and mood mesh together into one satisfying whole as the story rushes along. Simultaneously Rogers gives a beautiful description of the craggy Connecticut landscape and its winding roads (a description that still holds up almost 80 years later…) and paints a portrait of such a character as Inis St. Erme, rich and ignorant but seemingly ready to seize the day for the first woman he’s ever been interested in. Sometimes, though, Rogers throws in more of a stock character like the surreal artist Unistaire, who serves a definite purpose but is much less fleshed out. Location helps mood—the dark night in the rocky Connecticut hills entails a sense of a looming dread, an approaching doom—but the events themselves and how they are described serve to further the emotional temperature too. Not just fear, such as the fear of Corkscrew or the fear of not knowing your own sanity, but also the solemnity of a true love shattered, future events blocked, and decisions left unmade:
Her joking remark about the old man had cast a shadow on the moment, and the bright day seemed darker, and the sound of the purling water mill beneath their feet like the sound of rain on graves or like a weeping. There had come a dark invisible shadow between them at the table; and she had known that she, too, would someday be old; and that before that day came, even, she would be without Inis. Though how soon, she did not know.
The Red Right Hand, pg. 55
This is a plot that is bloody and bombastic. In just one night on an abandoned road in Connecticut, there will be several gruesome murders, and a smattering of confusion, chases, questions, characters, and nauseating spirals into madness. Through it all, there is a concrete mystery. Where is Corkscrew? Who is he? Is he really the one behind this series of events; and if not, then who? What is the significance of St. Erme’s right hand, severed postmortem? And how did Riddle not see Corkscrew speeding the car past him when it had nowhere else to go? There seems to be no possible answer that can satisfy everything that’s happened prior, and Riddle himself is becoming less sure of his own actions and accountability just the same as the reader is. But the last 40 pages are a revelation on a near-Biblical scale. Slowly, Riddle makes realizations and peels back layers of the solution, revealing one level of the baroque murder plot after the other, and slowly coming to learn who the dastardly villain is. It’s one of the most beautiful solutions I’ve read, because every clue big and small fits in while the image of the series of crimes as a whole is flipped on its head. Even if some of Riddle’s breakthroughs are based on flimsy, jumpy logic, it’s still a joy to see it come to fruition. There is a well-hidden villain, and the answer to the car impossibility is simple but has been shrouded by assumption, as all great impossibilities in crime fiction are. The same goes for the truth behind the titular severed right hand. Somehow, it seems to me like a hellish flipside to the solution of Carr’s The Hollow Man.
The ending is perhaps a bit rushed. There is a quick fight between Riddle and the murderer, which ends in a hilarious manner that is rather inappropriate for the heightened fear the entire novel has built up. The resolution is open-ended, leaving little said as to matters of justice or how the characters will move on. But, as Riddle himself says, the whole thing is one long nightmare, and nightmares rarely end cohesively. I can’t blame Rogers for not leaving things off concretely.
There is a reason this novel has been reprinted so many times, most recently as an American Mystery Classic, and there is a reason it is regarded as a masterpiece of the whodunnit and noir fiction. No other GAD mystery is like it, straddling so many subgenres and techniques, and blurring the line between reality and insanity exactly like a mystery novel (ostensibly) shouldn’t, to great success. This is the rare GAD mystery that is not only a masterpiece of the genre and era, but possibly a highlight of modern literature in general. Both the GAD/mystery nerd and the hoity-toity literary dilettante in me are immensely pleased. I wonder if Rogers’ few other novels and plethora of short stories and novellas reach this level, especially since this is the only work he is really still remembered for, but I have a hunch that his whole oeuvre contains a similar quality.
New Horizons Challenge: 6 works out of 25
Author: Joel Townsley Rogers
The Challenge Requirements so far:
1/3 works translated into English
3/3 works written in English after 1970
1/2 works that are hardboiled or noir (I think the novel’s style and Rogers’ history in pulp qualify if for this category.)
1/2 works written by an American minority author
0/2 works with a musical setting
Other Reviews:
A Crime is Afoot, crossexaminingcrime, The Green Capsule, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Invisible Event, James Scott Byrnside, Mysteries Ahoy!, Past Offences, Pulp Serenade, Tipping My Fedora, The View from the Blue House