Perhaps this has something to do with my more chronic book slump that’s been afflicting me since around November, but for the first time since I actually started to explore John Dickson Carr’s novels, I’ve been unenthusiastic to start one. This one, to be specific. I’ve searched within my soul to try and figure out what about The Lost Gallows failed to spark the excitement I’ve felt over every other Carr right before I begin them. It’s probably a combination of a few different things:
a.) I was under the impression that I’d spoiled this for myself while looking through Don D’Ammassa’s Carr reviews (I hadn’t,)
b.) I was making myself read this because I wanted to read the Bencolin series in order instead of jumping straight to the more lauded titles like The Corpse in the Waxworks and The Four False Weapons, and
c.) I had not-so-fond memories of It Walks By Night with its melodramatic plotting and Victorian-style garrulousness.
And so I began The Lost Gallows with a certain amount of begrudged indifference, as if only reading this to add it to my list of read Carrs. Thankfully, this dispirited mood quickly subsided, because I found Bencolin’s second tale to be much more exciting and perplexing than his first, and while The Lost Gallows will, someday, probably end up on the lower side in my ultimate Carr ranking, it’s still a marked improvement over Carr’s debut.
Carr is sure to start the action almost immediately, as the novel begins with Bencolin, Jeff Marle, and their friend, retired Scotland Yard official Sir John Landervorne (not present in It Walks but previously seen in Carr’s original Bencolin short stories) conferring in the disreputable Brimstone Club. While biding the time before the posthumous premiere of Edouard Vautrelle’s play – a callback to the French detective’s previous adventure – the trio find a miniature gallows made of paper laying on a table. This begins a brand-new mystery, which quickly involves the seemingly paranoid actions of another Brimstone guest, the Egyptian Nezam El Moulk, who seems convinced that somebody is plotting a grand scheme against him, and the story of a young man named Dallings, who claims to have wandered down a nonexistent road one night where he saw the silhouette of a man’s hanging. Things quickly come to a heed when our trio returns from the theatre, as they see El Moulk’s limousine speed down the streets of London. They chase it down back to the Brimstone, whereupon they find the gored corpse of El Moulk’s chauffeur, a Black man named Richard Smail, but only traces of El Moulk himself. The ensuing investigation brings to light the sordid history of the Brimstone Club, El Moulk’s relations with a woman named Collette Laverne, their involvement in a murder-suicide that happened ten years ago in France, and the machinations of a shadowy figure bent on revenge, who is only known as Jack Ketch.
It seems as if Carr was going for a pervading sense of dread in most of his earlier novels, whereas his more mature works managed to combine this with a more intellectual intrigue over the mystery itself. What I will say is that this tone is laid down very successfully in The Lost Gallows, especially in the novel’s final act. The looming tragedy of the deaths of Pierre de Lavateur and J. L. Keane in France ten years before the start of events, combined with the plethora of impossibilities, El Moulk’s vanishing, and the anonymous peril of Jack Ketch, set up an atmosphere which feels like it can only end in tragedy or hellfire. This is a London with no safe places, nowhere to hide, and death and vengeance looming around every corner. Of all the characters, it is Bencolin himself who adds the most to this tone, with his Mephistophelean appearance and demeanor. Although I found his devilish mannerisms to be a bit more muted here than in It Walks by Night, the last two or so pages reinforced his ambiguousness.
Another factor in the increase of successful atmospheric writing is that Carr here shows a willingness to write more complex prose than we have seen before from him, and in general than in mystery fiction at the time. In the harrowing final third of the novel, as Bencolin and Marle lay a trap for Jack Ketch, Carr allows us to see deeper into Marle’s mindset as his narration briefly switches into a kind of sleep-deprived stream-of-consciousness passage:
The vigil had begun. Too late I wished for a sweater or some warm coat; the silk dressing-gown was infernally cold. I settled into a comfortable position and resigned myself to wait. . . .
No noise penetrated from St. James’s Street except the occasional whir of a cab. The little pulse of my watch beat steadily. Sometimes Graffin would mumble and stir; I could see his head shine beyond the green lamp. Marble floor in squares of black and white. Dark green carpet. Black marble mantelpiece at my left; four blue vases, and the tinted “Judgment of the Soul.” Lofty shelves. Gilded cabinets. Three windows—how the snow was piling up, little by little, on their ledges!—with the faintest reflection of the room in them. Tick-tick, tick-tick—that was my watch. Tick-tick, tick-tick. Darkness beyond the windows. Pilgrim. Was Pilgrim awake? Did he know what was going on in his marionette-theatre? Pilgrim, Colette Laverne. A flashlight showing her ripped body. Cut it! Dallings, Mount Street, Sharon. Sharon, the Mediterranean, Sharon’s arms, a slow warm bath of sleep. Sleep, Macbeth shall Murder. . . . Murder. El Moulk.
Round and round my thoughts ran, like a squirrel in a cage. Murder—El Mouk, El Moulk—Murder, or like the slow swing of a pendulum which lulls one to . . . sleep no more; Macbeth hath murdered . . . tick-tick, tick-tick.
The Lost Gallows, Chapter XVI: “At the Turning of the Knob…”
It’s a shame that Carr did not write more sections of his books like this. I could see it really paying off in some of his later, more atmospheric titles like He Who Whispers. Added onto the sense of terror felt by just about every character, whether or not they are an intended victim of Jack Ketch, is the time and place; the descriptions of snow-clad London add a sense of dreariness to the darkness of the plot, and the Brimstone Club, portrayed as a disreputable location full of sordid history, adds to the sense of the past coming back to haunt the present, especially with its labyrinthine floors and corridors (which become important to the plot itself.)
Unfortunately The Lost Gallows does not show much of an improvement in character development over its predecessor. Once again each suspect does not hold much value beyond the purpose they serve within the plot, how much we are supposed to suspect them and how they affect the investigation. Some characters are, as often seen, reduced to a single characteristic, like El Moulk’s secretary Lt. Graffin who is only memorable for his perpetual drunkenness, or Collette Laverne for her shrewish and mysterious countenance. Two characters – Smail and one Sgt. Bronson – are only seen after they are murdered (interesting that the two people Ketch ends up murdering are not his/her two main victims but rather two random other people who just kinda got in the way.) Worse than this is that some of the characters are reduced to their own race or ethnicity. El Moulk’s only main concern outside of his imminent death from revenge seems to be with ancient Egyptian myths and the superstition that some old curse is going to be bestowed onto him. The hotel janitor Teddy is only shown as someone who has been physically and mentally stunted by the effects of the war Smail is often referred to by several outdated slurs including the n-word. With all the understanding that Carr was writing in a different time, it does become more than irritating at a certain point.
(I hear that the recent BLCC reprint of this one omits both the slurs used towards Smail and some more benign references to his race. Not sure how to feel about that without having read the specific edition. Also the reason why I haven’t reviewed the extra short story that comes with the reprint. The Berkeley edition you see at the top is the one I own.)
The main attraction as always is the mystery itself and while this one is certainly not perfect, it’s really quite impressive for Carr’s second long work. I would hypothesize that Carr thought more deeply and critically about the role of the mystery not only in his own works but in the world as a whole while writing The Lost Gallows, especially considering this metafictional diatribe from Bencolin himself:
“Like most people,” [Bencolin] interrupted, yawning, “I am most unutterably bored. Hence The Murders at Whispering House. It is Theo only sort of fiction to which I can safely turn. War stories, in which I used to delight, are now devoted to demonstrating how much the French loved the Germans, and the Germans loved the French, and by what a narrow margin cruel rich men prevented everybody from dancing round a May pole to No Man’s Land. Stories of fleshly lust and love (which I likewise enjoy immoderately) have now become solemn, ponderous tracts designed to prove that a man and his mistress may do anything they like, provided that they do not presume to enjoy it. And our ‘vital,’ ‘important,’ ‘significant’ books—ah, God! Their authors all try to write like a bad translation from another language. . . . . . . . here at Whispering House I am not deceived. My fine nightmare is not bounded by any dull probability, not yet by the discouraging fact that it really happened. The detective never errs, which is exactly what I want. I could never understand why writers wanted to make their detectives human beings, patient workers, liable to error, but through sheer doggedness—bah! The reason of course, is that they have not the wit to create a really clever character, and so they must try to bulldoze us with makeshifts . . .”
The Lost Gallows, Chapter VII: “A Hand Knocks by Night”
It’s interesting to see Carr’s views (through Bencolin) on the purpose of the mystery genre within literature as a whole, especially as many of the other kinds of books Bencolin has lambasted reached their intellectual and artistic apexes (think Lady Chatterley’s Lover for romance, All Quiet on the Western Front for war, Ulysses and To the Lighthouse and The Sound and the Fury for “serious” literature.) For him the detective story is a place for consistency and without any undue surprise or hardship, what we would think of today as a “comfort read,” which for many people detective stories probably still are. Clearly Carr did not renege on his views on the detective character, as Bencolin is as far from the kind of “human being” character he himself criticizes. With his devilish appearance, Bencolin does not err or show weakness, but instead takes delight in the chase, in his own knowledge, and in bringing the criminal to a poetic justice. I wonder what Carr and Bencolin would make of the kinds of imperfect, more developed detective characters of the past 70 or so years, such as Inspectors Wexford and Morse.
I was impressed with how well Carr handled this puzzle plot given how much he willingly gives away. For starters, the motive is never in question: Jack Ketch is getting his/her revenge on El Moulk and Laverne (and as it turns out, a third target who hid the truth for the intervening 10 years) for the death of Keane. Carr would later play with how open he was with the motive; I can think of one of his later novels where the motive is very apparent for the whole investigation until the solution reveals it to be something entirely different. This is not the game that is played here – there is simply too much happening with Ketch that it would be cumbersome for there to be another hidden motive. Furthermore the impossibilities that Carr presents – the self-driving car containing Smail’s corpse, and the appearances of both a nonexistent street in London and a series of small objects in El Moulk’s rooms – are really not that difficult to solve, or have rather trivial solutions. The appearances of Ruination Street, for instance, are explained by a very simple device compared to the baroque yet brilliant machinations in Halter’s The Phantom Passage. On top of this, I found the identity of the murderer rather easy to spot for Carr, due to some information given straight to the reader in the first act of the book. On top of THIS, Carr breaks one of Knox’s Ten Commandments (and one that he will break again, albeit in a way that’s actually pretty fair.) It should be a complete mess, and I should hate it. But for some reason it just works for me. Something about the complete scope of the murderer’s plot, as well as the brilliance behind a couple of the psychological clues (i.e. ROT-13 Grqql’f cnenabvq bhgohefgf) make the solution rather good for me. Add on top of this how well-paced the whole book is – the introductory chapters leading directly into the murder, the initial investigations and interrogations, the reveal of what happened with De Lavateur and Keane, more intrigue, and a final third act that simply oozes with dread and suspense until the highly satisfying reveal and capture of Jack Ketch in his/her true identity, complete with explanation from Bencolin and an early example of a classic haunting Carr ending.
(Some more discussion of the murderer’s identity in ROT-13: Jung fgevxrf zr nobhg Pnee’f pubvpr bs Ynaqreibear nf Xrgpu, orfvqrf uvf snvyher gb uvqr vg jryy ol n.) zragvbavat uvf qrnq fba va gur svefg cntrf naq o.) uvf harkcynvarq qvfnccrnenapr sebz orsber Oebafba’f zheqre gb gur erirny, vf uvf ebyr va naq bhg bs gur abiry. Lrf, ur npgf nf bar bs Orapbyva’f urycref va gur vairfgvtngvba, nf jryy nf n fbeg bs vairfgvtngvir eviny qhr gb gurve org, ohg ur freirf guvf ebyr nf jryy va gur svefg bevtvany Orapbyva fgbevrf! Abj V jbhyq rkcrpg gur pubvpr bs n erpheevat punenpgre nf zheqrere va fbzrguvat cer-TNQ be cbfg-TNQ, ohg ng guvf cbvag va qrgrpgvir fgbel uvfgbel, vg’f n irel fubpxvat qrpvfvba gb zr. Creuncf Pnee qvq abg pbafvqre guvf natyr orpnhfr ur xarj gung irel srj crbcyr jbhyq unir ernq gubfr svefg srj fgbevrf sebz Uniresbeq naq orlbaq pbzcnerq gb uvf nhqvrapr sbe guvf abiry.)
Maybe what really impressed me about The Lost Gallows was the juxtaposition of atmosphere and plotting, compared to the mystery itself. No matter though – despite its flaws, I do believe that this is very much Carr’s first truly successful novel, and one that clearly delineates the kind of ideas that would very soon bring Carr to write his first masterpieces. No wonder that a novel which contains the kindling of many of Carr’s hallmarks also contains premature references to Lord Rayle, the Red Widow, and the Hungry Goblin! What a joy too, to be able to read part of this during a cold February flurry (I am writing this review very, very late.) Hopefully my excitement from reading this will be the catalyst for me to really dig back into Carr and into reading more consistently in general.
Other Reviews:
The Grandest Game in the World
Tangled Yarns 