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Saturday, February 09, 2008
Hamlet, Revenge!
(There are spoilers in this post). Mysterylist summarises this, the second Inspector Appleby yarn [I add some extra exegesis in square brackets]:
Excellent murder story, of the Lord Chancellor no less, set in a huge Blenheim-Palace-like country house [Scamnum Court] during a grand [amateur] production of Hamlet in the great hall. [Lord Auldern, the Lord Chancellor, is playing Polonius; he is shot dead Act III scene 4, just as he is speaking the lines ‘help, help, ho!’ as per Shakespeare’s playtext. Since he is carrying a vital secret diplomatic document about his person, there’s a deal of Establishment anxiety about spies, assassination and so on. John Appleby comes down from London to solve the crime]. Giles Gott [Oxford Don, crime writer, Appleby’s pal] appears, as director of the play, and the cast has many upper-upper-crust characters. A spy element, but basically a good mystery. The Hamlet stuff is very good, as is Lady Elizabeth’s [the daughter of the house, romantically linked with Gott although in a fairly desultory way] method of hiding from the killer. The killer is also a fascinating study, and the misdirection by the author that also contains the solution. Gott, of course, comes up with a logically ingenious explanation that turns out to be completely wrong.
Years since I’d read a Michael Innes mystery, and I enjoyed reading this one, although it places various obstacles in the reader’s way ... I don’t mean ‘obstacles to solving the mystery’, because obviously that’s a mystery-writer’s job: but obstacles to the reader actually turning the next page and carrying on reading. It’s often prolix, and is fatally prone to stretched digressions. It is, moreover, a book that trades frequently on a ponderous university-academic English Literature wit and leaden levity that I, as a university academic in an English Literature department, found only intermittently entertaining, and which will presumably be as dull to non-specialist crime readers as jokes about academic molecular physics would be to those who don’t work in university departments of molecular physics. In other words, a fairly high proportion of the text is a kind of novelistic adipose tissue, in which one occasionally comes across chunks of gristle in the form of antiquated cultural attitudes to gender, class and race--the latter especially jarring, actually: a mixture of condescension, orientalism and plain ugly racism in respect of the Indian character Mr Bose (’the black man’ the characters call him, when they’re not calling him ‘the nigger’). The country house setting, the artificially isolated and thought-experimental nature of the crime, the cast of witty, charming and eccentric aristocratics, some with attendant old family retainers who speak wholly in caricature vernacular: it is all so overdone that it almost achieves a weird postmodern escape velocity to soar into the ether of revolutionary counter-text. ‘Are you a Jacobin, John?’ a character asks Appleby at one point, who replies: ‘I’m probably violently reactionary’ [139]. Isn’t that probably a nice touch?
Certainly Appleby gives Innes the opportunity to vent a variety of crusty-to-Blimpish, sentiments. For example: on the subject of the sightseers who assemble on the edge of the estate at Scamnum Court to rubberneck the scene of a sensational murder of a member of the aristocracy and Lord Chancellor to boot, Appleby is scathing:
It was quite a crowd now: idlers in the neighbouring towns, reading the stimulating news in their morning paper, had hurried to get out the car and motor over to see what they could. And soon there would be similar arrivals from London; people ‘running down for the day’. And portents these, thought Appleby, of a society running down in another sense: clogged by its own mass-production of individuals who, let loose from a day’s or a lifetime’s specialized routine, will neither think, nor read, nor practise any craft, but only gape. [201]
Of course we might prefer to describe these folk not as portents, but just people indulging a natural human curiosity. The opinion that ‘society [is] running down [because] clogged by its own mass-production of individuals’ reads, in a novel published in 1937, as rather more disturbing than Innes perhaps intended; for hindsight reveals how easily violent reactionaries, or for that matter violent revolutionaries, could enact as solution to this very problem the remedy exterminate a good percentage of the brutes. The treatment of murder as an elaborate game, and (indeed) dramatic performance, feeds into this too; as perhaps it inevitably will in a work of this genre. Innes occasionally, though, strikes a curiously modern note:
Gott hesitated, as if seeking some brief expression of what was in his mind. ‘All over the world today are we not facing a rising tide of ideological intolerance, and are not violence and terrorism more and more in men’s thoughts?’ [249]
Well, quite. Other moments, on the other hand, have aged less well (’"What magnificent Dorothy Perkins!” said Mrs Terborg’, 229).
The novel manages some attractively ingenious reveals, mind you; and the prosiness throughout works, intentionally or not, as a sort of defamiliarisation technique that lifts the book into a strange, mannered, rather striking realm of its own. ‘Scamnun’ is a good shammy name for the country house, too; and the Hamlet-scamming-playlet is neatly worked in.
The final solution lacks the necessary rubber-band snap-back of the best puzzle-crime writing, though. A moment’s thought reveals all sorts of problems with it. So: the murderer shot Auldearn from close range as the old man stood behind the stage. Now, our killer could have shot him from the anonymity of various backstage drapes and curtains; but chose not to do this, instead stepping up to shoot him at close range ... even though in doing so they revealed themselves to the beady eye of the prompter. The detective uncovers the reason for this aberrant behaviour: the shooter in question must be a woman, because a man would have shot Auldearn from a safe distance, but a woman can only hit a target from close range. (Our survey says: do what?) Exposing herself to the victim with a gun in her hand, and (we assume) a murderous glint in her eye, causes the victim to call out ‘help, help’ just as scripted in Shakespeare’s play; but how could she be sure he wouldn’t shout out ‘Madame Merkalova! Why are you pointing that pistol at me?’ The prompter--the aforementioned and saintly Mr Bose--witnesses the crime, but instead of telling the police he evades questioning and hurries back to his room to write a letter to his father in India asking him what the proper course of action should be. (He is himself murdered before he can post this letter). That’s a pretty crazy response; and, more to the point, it’s not something Merkalova could possibly have anticipated. Finally we discover that Merkalova and her accomplice, the actor Clay (the play’s lead) came to the amateur theatricals on the offchance that the Lord Chancellor would be carrying some or other vital secret state document about his person which they could murder him to steal. A pretty far-off offchance you might think; but when they discover that Auldearn had indeed arrived with just such a document they rapidly concoct the whole elaborate ‘let’s kill him during the play, then record a spoken version of the secret document onto the experimental recording equipment brought along by the American academic we probably didn’t even realise would be present at the performance, replace the document, and then spirit away the wax cylinder’ plot. Credulity, she is strained. Credulity, she is broken. Woe!
PS: Mysterylist says: “Lady Elizabeth’s method of hiding from the killer is very good.” And the method is? Well, at novel’s-end, Clay is chasing her across the grounds of Scamnum through a dark night intermittently illuminated by moonlight. In a dark interlude young Elizabeth is able to strip nude and clamber up to stand motionless on an empty plinth. The moon comes out again, and the killer, glancing about furiously, doesn’t notice her. Innes just about pulls this off; although I can’t be the only reader to have read this and thought to myself, ahem ... pubic hair?
Comments
Nothing a quick Brazilian couldn’t fix.
Damn! Luther stole my comment.
Chasing across the grounds of Scamnum through a dark night intermittently illuminated by moonlight, waxing as she goes? I want to see the movie.
She had her back turned and her head pointed coyly over her shoulder? But what about her HEAD hair, which would be darkly non-statuesque no matter what.
I love this old mystery stuff. Raymond Chandler of course did a nice job with A. A. Milne, but almost every golden age mystery story makes no sense if you look at it closely: that was Chandler’s point—but of course his stories make no sense at all, are just excuses for good dialog and atmosphere.
With Luther: I think we’ve learned something about Lady Elizabeth’s grooming habits.
James, when you say Chandler’s stories make no sense, what do you mean exactly? Because I think they make a very different kind of no sense from those in the Milne(-Innes) tradition that he was skewering.
to David Moles
I love Chandler and have reread his novels at least five times apiece, and I know that serious mystery buffs of a certain sort say the first four novels are well-plotted but that the last three from THE LITTLE SISTER on are sloppy. Chandler himself said “something has went wrong with the story” with regard to THE LITTLE SISTER.
Maybe they’re right, but Chandler also said in several letters that none of his plots particularly mattered except as an excuse for good scenes, and I have noted that Simenon, for example, has complex mystery plots of the traditional Golden Age sorts going on in the background (so to speak) of his early Maigrets, but gives up on their artificial complexities in his novels of the fifties and later.
Things like the two women who resemble one another in THE LADY AND THE LAKE, so that a floating corpse can be mistaken for the wrong woman, may be handled plausibly or implausibly by Golden Age standards, may even here and there happen in real life, but they are nonsense and irrelevant to a work’s value as far as I’m concerned, much like the female to male impersonations in Shakespeare that we just have to accept to get on with enjoying the dialogue and characterizations.
This is a slightly incoherent answer because I am not good even at remembering plots myself, but I hope it gives a rough idea of what I meant.