The locked-room mystery was a favorite subcategory of detective stories in the early 20th century. By 1941, it seemed all possible variations on getting a murderer into or out of a room locked, sealed, barred, closely observed, or otherwise inaccessible, without resort to supernatural agencies, had been discovered, and Howard Haycraft, in his definitive history Murder for Pleasure, was warning newcomers not to attempt it: “Only a genius can invest it with novelty or interest to-day.”
Despite such discouragement, the device lives on in the 21st century, amid some confusion about what constitutes an example. Some erroneously call novels like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None—in which 10 unconnected people are invited to a remote island by an anonymous host—”locked-room” novels when they mean “closed circle,” in which possible culprits are limited to a set group of characters. The term “locked-room mystery” is confined to crimes that, to all appearances, could not have happened. The broader related terms “impossible crime” and “miracle problem” include non-door-related problems, e.g., no footprints in fresh snow apart from those of the victim.
From around 1930 to the early 1970s, the consensus master of this sort of thing was John Dickson Carr, also known under the transparent pseudo-nym Carter Dickson, whose novels and short stories almost invariably presented their detectives with apparent impossibilities to explain. Oscar de Muriel, a new writer in his early thirties, parallels Carr in interesting ways, beyond the obvious fact that both delight in creating a seemingly supernatural milieu before rationally dispelling its mysteries.
Both writers are North American Anglo-philes. Carr, a native of Union-town, Pennsylvania, set most of his books in Britain and lived there for a time, including the dangerous days of World War II, until his disgust with the postwar Labour government caused him to return to the United States. The author of The Strings of Murder is a Mexican who went to Britain to complete his doctorate in chemistry and stayed there, now living in Lancashire.
Carr was among the pioneers of historical detective fiction, with many of his later novels set in past times, mostly in England. Oscar de Muriel chooses, as a background, Edinburgh in the 1880s. Both writers are notable for effective action scenes, broad humor, brightly drawn characters, and a commitment to fair-play detection, in which clues are provided for the reader to work out the solution.
The first-person narrator here is Scotland Yard detective inspector Ian Frey, introduced as he is called to St. Paul’s Cathedral in November 1888 by Sir Charles Warren, who, in the midst of Jack the Ripper’s series of murders, has recently resigned under pressure as commissioner. Frey, who studied medicine at Oxford and law at Cambridge (completing neither) is not an entirely likable character, though he gains reader sympathy as the story goes on. Somewhat fussy, snobbish, and egotistical, he sees himself in the Great Detective mode. He has a volatile temper and a knack for colorful insults: An inept police photographer is a “stinking piece of rancid mutton.”
The beginning of the novel finds Frey at a low ebb. The ouster of Warren, a friend of his late mother’s family with whom he has been closely connected, leads to his firing by the new commissioner. Frey attends a dinner party where he will deliver the unhappy news to his wealthy family, consisting of an overbearing father who disapproves of his choice of career, a passive-aggressive stepmother, a full brother he has never gotten along with, and two half-brothers, the elder a lethargic slacker, the younger (and the only one he likes) a talented violinist.
The family constantly snipe at one another in a broadly cartoonish way. And after leaving this unpleasant company, Frey learns that his fiancée has broken off their engagement.
Then Frey receives a surprising assignment from Warren and the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, to go to Edinburgh to investigate the murder of violin virtuoso Guilleum Fontaine, who, though not a denizen of the East End, nor female, nor a prostitute, has had his throat cut and body mutilated in the style of Jack the Ripper. Could the Whitechapel killer be expanding his territory? Frey, whose real role in Edinburgh will be a secret, is officially seconded to Inspector Adolphus “Nine-Nails” McGray, whose police subdivision bears a title that would have delighted John Dickson Carr: “Commission for the Elucidation of Unsolved Cases Presumably Related to the Odd and Ghostly.”
McGray’s interest in the occult springs from a family tragedy that is introduced in a prologue and further explained in the course of the novel. The working-class Scot is earthier and more plainspoken than the upper-crust Englishman assigned to work with him. When Frey refers to his Protestant ancestors who were “close acquaintances of Martin Luther himself,” McGray replies: “Och, shush! Ye sound like Queen Vicky talking about the family trees o’ her hunting hounds.” Gradually attaining grudging mutual respect, Frey and McGray form a fresh variant of the odd-couple detecting team.
The murdered violinist habitually locked himself in his upstairs room to practice, and it was there that he was found. Since the victim’s internal organs were removed, Ripper-style, the problem is not only how the killer escaped the locked room but how the bloody organs were removed without leaving a trace.
The novel stakes a lot on the quality of its solution. In the ideal locked-room mystery, the answer should be as striking as the problem. This one is, offering just the right combination of drama, outlandishness, and believability. The action climax is way over the top, with a touch of the Grand Guignol, but viscerally satisfying.
Whether the author grew up bilingual or is writing in an acquired second language is uncertain; but his English prose and dialogue, including Scottish regionalisms, are faultless. He has an eye for enlightening historical details, such as the window tax imposed on Scotland in 1696. Rather than pay it, the Scots walled up their windows in protest.
And as Frey walks through the city in the 1880s, though the tax is long repealed, many windows remain “blocked out with the most disgraceful red brick.”
Oscar de Muriel has the combination of unfettered enthusiasm, wide knowledge of various disciplines, an ear for language, irrepressible humor, narrative flair, and a structural understanding that makes for irresistible entertainment. Frey and McGray’s second case, A Fever of the Blood, not yet published in the United States, has even stronger supernatural overtones, centered on apparent witchcraft. And though not quite up to the demanding standard of The Strings of Murder, its solution is, again, well-worked-out, with an author’s note to defend its plausibility. If de Muriel continues on course, he could be a major figure in detective fiction, a classicist for the 21st century.
Jon L. Breen is the author, most recently, of
The Threat of Nostalgia and Other Stories.
