Over the course of the night, Merlini, Harte, and the readers come across an excessively suspicious cast of characters, there’s gunfire, a jungle chase and all the boats are scuttled to prevent the escape of any character.
Once they land, they come across the corpse of the heiress of the island, Linda Skelton, in an old, decrepit building, followed by an attempt on their own lives when said building is set on fire.
#Mystery house 1938 full#
But, before they can even get to the island, Harte is ambushed (“Something that might easily have been the Chrysler building hit me on the top of the head, and was followed immediately by an elegant display of shooting stars in full Technicolor.”) and there is a switcheroo involving suitcases and counterfeit guinea coins. Within the first few chapters, you have an ad for a haunted house that leads the detective, Merlini, and his journalist friend, Ross Harte, heading to Skelton Island. The scale and the complexity of the plot also require a breakneck pace to be employed early on in Rawson’s work, which makes for a pulpish and thriller-like read. The device of “covering up for another” can also be seen in a novel such as Seishi Yokomizo’s The Inugami Curse, but there, it has a more direct bearing on the main plot than this one and unfolds in a far less confounding manner than here. Whether they intend to or not, the sequence of events has the domino effect of covering up not only for their own selves but also for the murderer in their midst. The novel, however, has many more moving parts and character agendas compared to Death From a Top Hat, which is a more focused read and deals with perhaps only two or three well-defined set pieces.Ĭonsequentially, the minor mysteries in Death From a Top Hat take on a more superficial, showboating nature than in The Footprints on The Ceiling, where the lesser mysteries add to the excessively (and perhaps, irritatingly so) tangential nature of the narrative, yet stay integral to it because the culprit’s actions can only be understood in relation to the individual actions and mutually negating deception of the rest of the other criminal characters surrounding the culprit. The Footprints on the Ceiling is replete, top to bottom, with a host of tricks and stagecraft that give Rawson an excuse to describe some engrossing magical secrets for the readers. The first of these was The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) by Clayton Rawson, an author I was acquainted with having read his previous work, Death From a Top Hat (1938).Ī magician by profession, Rawson populated the pages of both novels with magical chicanery of all kinds, but the execution is fundamentally different in the two novels. It may not have been intentional but this year I have had the fortune to read three titles of relatively good acclaim that treat this theme to varying degrees of success. Blind spots and disappearancesīuilding on these fundamentals, more sophisticated variants of the “disappearing criminal and/or the transported corpse” theme would be plotted over the next few decades. It is a grounded, back-to-the-roots kind of approach that simply sticks to the fundamentals. What the story does do well, without resorting to any complicated trickery, is the portrayal of the “blind spot” in people’s vision and perceptions, and how context and circumstance determine our observation of and reaction to a particular situation. “The Invisible Man” doesn’t exactly dazzle with its plot – it is a rather linear, simple story with a slightly creepy sub-plot featuring headless cleaning robots/machines, the spirit of which would reemerge, later, with the automaton in John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge (1938). It is a theme that is fairly prevalent in crime fiction, but one that may be difficult to execute, especially because the limits of “suspension of disbelief” are often stretched to unrealistic extents due to the dictates of the plot and to lend the “wow” factor to it.
#Mystery house 1938 series#
This climactic observation in the Father Brown series is the culmination of one of the first short stories I ever read that took on the theme of the vanishing corpse and the criminal. “Nobody ever notices postmen somehow.yet they have passions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily.” - Father Brown in ‘The Invisible Man’
0 kommentar(er)
