“Whistle Up the Devil” by Derek Smith

There are some books that you hear so much about over time — so much praise, so much discussion, and occasionally, so much critique — that in saving this book to read at some distant point in the future, its many possibilities and outcomes fester and linger in your mind. You hear that a book like Death of Jezebel, or in this case Whistle Up the Devil, has a fiendishly clever plot, one of the most audacious solutions to an impossible crime within the subgenre, and a well-rounded cast mixed in with a sinister atmosphere. Since both these books were out of print and ridiculously hard to obtain a copy of for so long, the discussion around them was for a long time one of wonder and theorizing, only to change after its re-publication to one of celebration and sharing. Thankfully for me, Whistle Up the Devil had been back in print thanks to the efforts of John Pugmire at Locked Room International long before I really got back into the GAD game. So, I went into the novel with more than a little trepidation — what if it just didn’t live up to the expectations I had built up around it, such as the chutzpah shown in how the second murder was achieved? Well, worry not, dear reader. Perhaps Whistle Up the Devil was not exactly the novel I had thought it would be, and outside of the mystery aspect it’s far from perfect, but it’s one of the smartest impossible crime novels I’ve ever read, and one of the best – up there with DoJ, The Hollow Man, and Invisible Green.

Now one of the less flattering things I had read about Smith’s writing is that his plot is essentially a vehicle through which the locked room murders can be dissected, waved around, and eventually explained. That the setup draws on a series of detective story tropes certainly helps this viewpoint. We begin with Algy Lawrence, a young man who, living comfortably off of an inheritance, can help the police solve baffling crimes at ease, answering a call from his friend Chief Inspector Steve Castle of Scotland Yard. Castle has concerns about his friend Roger Querrin, who lives in a recently refurbished family house just outside of London. Querrin, against the wishes of his fiancé and brother, has decided to keep with family tradition and as the eldest son learn the family secret in a secluded room at midnight one month before his wedding. Slight problem: the last person who actually knew the secret died dozens of years ago, after he stabbed his own son instead of telling him the secret. Roger’s brother Peter is especially worried that Roger may fall victim to some supernatural forces, and with Castle and the local policeman Sergeant Hardinge has made arrangements to guard the “Room in the Passage” during Roger’s vigil. Unfortunately, Castle has been called back to London, and after some finagling from him and Peter Querrin, Algy agrees to go down to Bristley and keep watch.

This is only the first chapter, and already Smith has lumped into his book the family curse/secret, the room that kills, and a village abuzz with gossip (the residents aren’t convinced that nobody has died since Tom Querrin stabbed his son Martin). Later on, we’ll be able to add that old favorite, the bumbling local police force. This amount of familiar material may give the sense that the plot as a whole is somewhat artificial, but I would disagree. Despite the well-worn tropes popping up left and right, Smith still does a good job of keeping the entire premise believable — for a murder mystery, of course — and, more importantly, enjoyable. From the first line, Smith keeps up a fast pace, and envelops the story in more layers of mystery and suspense, such that even the slower parts felt exciting.

Algy arrives at the Querrin House – all this prelude happening the morning before Roger’s vigil — and meets two more people involved with the situation. One is Audrey Craig, Roger’s fiancé, and Algy is immediately taken in by her beauty, sensitivity, and generosity. You see, Algy is a desperate romantic, and is constantly looking for that special lady to settle down with. Smith makes it clear that this is a very important facet of Algy’s personality, although it only ever comes into play when he’s interacting with Audrey, or with the, er, voluptuous maid Susan York. Besides this trait, which makes most of the female characters as seen through the lens of how much Algy fancies them, and his lazy demeanor which hides a constantly working brain, Algy unfortunately doesn’t get much more character development as the main detective – I feel like he had a lot more potential to be a memorable guy! The last person in the household is Russell Craig, Audrey’s uncle whose purpose in life is apparently to be an “old rogue” and drool over women way out of his age range. Peter Querrin, that man of many worries, is anxious about one outsider: Simon Turner, former caretaker of Querrin House, who notably cursed Roger with Tom Querrin’s ghost after he was fired. I can’t argue that these characters come off as flat. Most of them only have one big personality trait: Peter is a scaredy-cat, Russell is an “old rogue” (the only term he ever seems to be referred to by,) Audrey is very pretty, etc., etc. Despite that, though, I still found them to be overall likeable and entertaining – without the burden of character development, Smith lets these caricature-like characters breathe in the space of the plot. In their interactions with Algy and the police, and to a lesser extent with one another, their slim personalities still find moments of brilliance, and even if not, their functional purposes allow the novel to trundle along smoothly.

As evening dawns, Algy finds himself attacked outside by a mysterious lurker (gee, I wonder if it’s the sinister caretaker…) and begins wondering if the threat against Roger is not supernatural but rather human, yet he remains adamant that he will see his duty out. And so, as midnight nears, the characters take their places. Audrey, Russell, and the help all go to bed. Roger enters the room, with Algy double-checking for any possible hiding spots or the like. There are two, and only two, entrances to the room – the door that joins the passage and the room, and a pair of French windows. Algy has locked the windows from the inside, and Roger locks the door from the inside with the sole key – it’s a brand-new lock. There is a window in the passage, which Algy and Peter secure. Those two take guard outside the passage (Roger refuses to have them any closer,) and Sergeant Hardinge stands outside the windows. It’s 11:30 pm, and he’ll have to stand in the rain for another ten minutes, after which the strip of dirt between the windows and the pathway around the house will be free of any prior footprints. It’s as airtight as you can get, but this is a locked room mystery, so it’s no surprise what happens right at the stroke of midnight.

Once Roger is dispatched of in his hermetically sealed environment is when Smith really begins to play his cards. As an aficionado of the impossible crime, Smith is well aware of all the possible ways the classic locked room problem could be, and has been, resolved, along with the ways said solutions have been catalogued in various novels prior to his own. It’s no surprise then that Algy and Castle have a nearly chapter-long discussion going over the various types of locked room solutions, according to The Great Merlini’s Locked Room Lecture in Death from a Top Hat, itself based on the more famous one from The Hollow Man. I think Smith tried to make an attempt at some kind of MCU for impossible crimes, because Lawrence mentions that (in his universe at least) Merlini and his cases are real, and that he and Ross Harte wrote them with “Clayton Rawson” as a pseudonym. Dr. Fell, however, is still but a mythical power from a fictional land.  It’s Smith’s ability to completely nerd out in passages like these that makes the book feel alive, like the passion project that it was:

Castle said:

“I have a feeling I’m not going to enjoy this discussion. I can’t remember one of those crimes which was solved by an official representative of the police.”

“Oh, come now,” chided Lawrence. “You’ve forgotten Edward Beale and Joseph French. They were both Inspectors.”

Whistle Up the Devil, Chapter 5

These kinds of esoteric references, like Rupert Penny’s series detective or the Hamilton Cleek books, references to authors and works that are still lesser known than they deserve to be among GAD fans, shows that this is an author who is writing purely for the joy of the Grandest Game in the World and who wants to let other impossible crime enthusiasts join in the geeky fun.

Even if the writing style takes second place to the plotting here, Smith still writes well enough to do his ideas justice. My only big critique here is that he has a penchant for one-sentence paragraphs, which does get rather jarring after a while. But to his favor the prose does convey the sense of dread pervading over Querrin House, and the fear of the supernatural building up alongside the impenetrability of the locked room mystery:

Lawrence walked through the open windows.

Then he stopped on the threshold, his mouth taut and unsmiling.

Perhaps it was the pinched look of fear on the girl’s face as she went before him; perhaps it was the sight of Peter Querrin, standing uneasily in the shadows. Perhaps it was only the tyranny of his own imagination.

But he seemed to pass from the freedom and sanity of an outside world into the shade of a monstrous evil.

Whistle Up the Devil, Chapter 2

At moments Smith meets the atmospheric levels of the likes of Carr and Halter, but he was at this point but a fledgling writer. To me this may be the biggest part of the travesty that he only wrote one novel besides this, unable to find a permanent publisher: with his first novel he wrote an impossible crime mystery plot that truly rivaled the best that had been written up to that point. With more time and experience, he could have continued to create astounding scenarios with dazzling solutions, and further hone the prosaic side of the craft.

I won’t go into the plot itself much more, except for two things. One: there is a second murder in impossible circumstances and by no means is it a secondary murder. The setup to it is fantastic, and Smith makes sure to include a discussion of possible solutions and their problems, just like with Querrin’s murder. Two: the penultimate chapter details Algy’s plot to catch the murderer, and in terms of page length it’s just about as long as Algy’s actual explanation of the crimes afterward. I’ve seen some comments that this scene is too long and withholds the murderer’s identity too long as well, but honestly, I thought this was one of the best-written parts of the novel. Smith’s hiding the killer’s identity as “the other” for the bulk of the chapter is done really well, thanks to some especially clever turns of phrase and the possibility that the passage may make an astute reader who has glommed onto the correct choice of killer to second-guess themselves.

This leaves the solution to the two locked room murders. The whodunnit aspect wasn’t the most surprising to me, but then again, I’ve read so many murder mysteries that I can see through most of the more “popular” surprises. Smith only includes a few viable suspects beforehand, because clearly, he wants to bulk of the surprise to lie in how the murders were actualy achieved. That being said, I was surprised by one aspect of the “who” (ROT-13): gung gurer jrer gjb crbcyr va pnubbgf engure guna n fvatyr xvyyre. Nor does the motive hold any grand twist, although again there was one thing connected to the motive that caught me off guard and which I rather liked (ROT-13 again): gung gur zbgvir jnf Crgre’f, ohg Uneqvatr gbbx pbageby bs cynaavat gur zheqre naq xarj ur pbhyq trg gur zbarl sebz Crgre orpnhfr bs uvf jrnx grzcrenzrag.

But the solutions to the two locked room problems… my God, they’re beautiful. The solution to Roger’s death is a bit convoluted and technical, but it’s easy to visualize and does contain some forehead-slap-worthy moments. Nuzzled in between the solutions to the two murders is Algy’s explanation of how he deduced the murderer’s identity. This is based on a few different observations, a mix of physical evidence and psychological clues, and it’s quite astute. Even though I ended up having suspected the right person, I had never considered the points Algy brought up, even though they felt so, so obvious in hindsight. Really, what more can you ask for?

The solution to the second death, that’s what. It’s absolutely brilliant. It’s one of those solutions that makes you completely rethink how you saw the circumstances of the crime. I won’t say anything more lest my praise causes the possible outcomes to linger in the minds of any prospective readers like it did in mine. Thankfully, I didn’t get close to how this one turned out. I think I actually teared up a bit realizing how awesome Smith’s resolution is to what would be, for many other authors, a secondary death that didn’t have to be impossible in the first place! But thankfully it is. I won’t claim it’s the best solution to an impossible crime I’ve ever read, but it’s definitely in the top five.

One thing that I don’t see mentioned often about this book is the final couple of pages. Maybe for other readers it wasn’t notable, but I thought that the very end had a haunting sense to it, the way so many of Carr’s finishes were. I’ll put this in ROT-13 as well even though it has nothing to do with the solution: Onfrq ba Nytl’f crefbanyvgl, naq ba ubj rirel qrgrpgvir fgbel jvgu n fvqr ebznapr raqf, V jnf cyrnfnagyl fhecevfrq gung Fzvgu xrcg Nytl naq Nhqerl ncneg, naq gung gur ernfbaf sbe vg sryg fb pbaivapvat. Rira vs V sryg n ovg fnq sbe obgu bs gurz, vg jnf pbzcyrgryl whfgvsvrq.

Hopefully my chiding some of the guessable plot points early on and the unrefined characters and prose style doesn’t cause anyone to disregard Whistle Up the Devil. On those points it’s not amazing, but they’re such minor points compared to what this novel is really about: two locked room murders that are taunted in front of us, discussed to the point of absolute impossibility, and then resolved with gusto and finesse. Derek Smith clearly loved detective fiction (and specifically impossible crime puzzles) to his core, and even if he didn’t have the opportunity to write much more in the genre besides the other Algy Lawrence novel Come to Paddington Fair and the Sexton Blake novella Model for Murder due to publishers preferring more “realistic” crime fiction, I’m glad that what little he was able to get in has had such a lasting impact in the community of GAD readers, between its original printing and its reprint from LRI.

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New Horizons Challenge: 12 works out of 25

Author: Derek Smith

The Challenge Requirements so far:

1/3 works translated into English

4/3 works written in English after 1970

1/2 works that are hardboiled or noir

2/2 works written by an American minority author

0/2 works with a musical setting

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Other Reviews:

At the Scene of the Crime (feat. some great biographical info on Derek Smith), Beneath the Stains of Time, Classic Mystery Hunt, Clothes in Books, Countdown John’s Christie Journal, A Crime is Afoot, Death Can Read, ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’, gadetection (J. F. Norris), The Green Capsule, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Locked Room, Mysteries Ahoy!, Only Detect, A Reading Life