A little later the author tells us openly that there were three large picnic hampers — both the number and size are material clues. Still later we are informed, with almost disarming frankness, that Bill Sage took a black case out of the car. Did you connect this fact with the surgeon-fact and ask yourself why Bill Sage needed his “black case” on an ordinary picnic in the country? You should have — the fabric of deduction is now assuming a discernible pattern.
Next we are told that after eating the goodies provided by Fortnum & Mason, “the cloth was cleared, the furniture and hampers pushed indoors.” This places the three crucial, indispensable hampers (as H.M. himself says in the third from the last paragraph of the story) “inside the house where Sage could get at ’em.” The deductive clot thickens — all by the inconspicuous insertion of a simple, unsuspicious word like “indoors”!
The clues keep emerging, one by one, some brazenly, some stealthily — bits and pieces, all necessary to complete the final mosaic of irrefutable truth. Eve states that she is Vicky’s “only relative” — handing the reader the whole motive on a silver platter. Eve admits she is “terribly, terribly patient” — an essential facet of characterization, making credible the fact that “she was willing to wait seven years until a disappeared person can be presumed dead.” H.M. (and the reader) hears Eve’s “heels rap down the length of the small passage inside” — telling us skillfully and deceptively that it was Eve who could have locked and bolted the back door on the inside. “The bath-tap dripped monotonously” — the adverb artfully draws attention away from the revealing clue. “The large, square section of thin, waterproof oilskin, jagged at one corner” — what a daring giveaway, and yet how much did it give away?
The author s sense of timing is flawless. When H.M.’s mystification reaches its most profound state, along comes Chief Inspector Masters with a simple, all-inclusive solution — the revelation that one of the rooms in the cottage was equipped with a “trick window.” So that’s the answer to the impossible disappearance! — just another “gadget”! But the author is merely playing cat-and-mouse with his reader: instead of evoking the supernatural and then dispelling it (the usual procedure, and good enough for most practitioners), the author evokes the natural, only to dispel that and sink story even deeper in the supernatural. The “trick window” is a straw-man, set up to be promptly demolished. The reader is now convinced beyond all doubt that no obvious solution — therefore, no unsatisfying solution — will be palmed off on him, as a disappointing anticlimax after so meticulous and cumulative a build-up. That, dear reader, is dramatic timing.
And finally, the report that the cupboard contained “Plates? Cups that had been...” Here, admittedly, the author skated on thin ice. The words were picked with infinite care — they do not say too much, nor do they say too little. If you think it over, they tell exactly enough — the last little push, added to all the other evidence, to upset the apple-cart and place the reader in possession of all the facts necessary to the one and only correct solution...
How does it feel to look behind the scenes of creative detective-story writing? Do you realize now the enormous intricacies of dovetailing a tightly-knit plot, with no loose ends, and with the intellectual hallmark of the modern detective story, complete fairness-to-the-reader? Do you realize now the talent and integrity that go into the cutting of a truly fine detective-diamond? We hope so — detective-story writers are still held too lightly, especially by critics who have never tried to write one. But master craftsmen like John Dickson Carr, with the help of so many other unwept, unhonored, and unsung heroes of the genre, will ultimately raise the detective story to its just and proper position in literature, win for it the respect and honest admiration so long denied to one of the most difficult literary forms ever invented by the mind of man...
The Name on the Wrapper
by Margery Allingham
In the delicate balance between romance and reality, the detective story mirrors at least one-phenomenon of our present civilization. This is the Age of Specialization, and many private detectives in fiction, especially the amateurs and pure-in-heart, achieve some of their most brilliant deductions through the use of specialized knowledge. For example, Victor L. Whitechurch’s Thorpe Hazell is a wizard at solving railway crimes. Percival Wilde’s Bill Parmelee, a reformed card-sharp, is consultant par excellence in any kind of gambling mystery. Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, the first modern blind sleuth, has leaned more than once on his expert knowledge of numismatics to crack peculiarly difficult cases, and it is merely a matter of criminological record that Dorothy L. Sayers’s ineffable Lord Peter Wimsey owes some of his most glittering successes to his astonishing familiarity with rare boobs and rare wines. But perhaps the most unusual expert of all is Margery Allingham’s Mr. Albert Campion. He has a special bloodhound bailiwick all his own. As Superintendent Oates himself expressed it, Campion is Scotland Yard’s Society Expert, and in the case that follows (never previously published in the United States) Mr. Campion proves again that while the upperworld is far from being an immovable object, the underworld is equally far from being an irresistible force. The clash is never a detectival deadlock so long as Albert Campion, the talented toff’tec, remains Society Expert Extraordinary.
Mr. Albert Campion was one of those useful if at times exasperating people who remain interested in the world in general at three o’clock on a chilly winter’s morning. When he saw the overturned car, dark and unattended by the grass verge, therefore, he pulled up his own and climbed out on to the road.
His lean figure wrapped in a dark overcoat was rendered slightly top-heavy by the fact that he wore over it a small traveling-rug arranged as a cape. This sartorial anachronism was not of his own devising. His dinner hostess, old Mrs. Laverock, was notorious both for her strong will and her fear of throat infections, and when Mr. Campion had at last detached himself from her husband’s brandy and reminiscences she had appeared at the top of the Jacobean staircase, swaddled in pink velvet, with the rug.
“Either that young man wears this round his throat or he does not leave this house.”
The edict went forth with more authority than ever her husband had been able to dispense from the bench, and Mr. Campion had gone out into the night for a fifty-mile run back to Piccadilly wearing the rug, with his silk hat perched precariously above it.
Now its folds, which reached his nose, prevented him from seeing that part of the ground which lay directly at his feet, so that he kicked the ring and sent it wheeling down the moonlit road before he saw it. The colored flash in the pale light caught his attention and he went after it. It lay in his hand a few minutes later, as unattractive a piece of jewelery as ever he had been called upon to consider. It was a circle of different-colored stones mounted on heavy gold, and was certainly unusual, if not particularly beautiful or valuable. He thrust it absently into his coat pocket before he resumed his investigation of the abandoned car.