Thu 1 Dec 2016
A 1001 Midnights Review: NORMAN BERROW – The Footprints of Satan.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[8] Comments
by Bill Pronzini
NORMAN BERROW – The Footprints of Satan. Ward Lock, UK, hardcover, 1950. Ramble House, US, softcover, April 2005.
One morning the inhabitants of the English village of Winchingham awaken to find a single line of hoofprints that begin in the middle of the road, in a carpeting of virgin snow, and then lead through gardens, over walls and hedges, through a locked summerhouse and pavilion, across a steep roof inaccessible to humans, to finally end by an old tree from which a man is hanging by the neck.
Superstitious terror grips the village: Many believe the devil is responsible. (There is actual historical precedent for such a belief: On the night of February 8, 1855, a similar trail of cloven hoofprints appeared in and around a number of towns in the south of Devon, and no earthly explanation for them was ever discovered.)
The trail and the dead man are not the work of Satan, of course, but that of a very clever murderer. Berrow’s development and unraveling of the apparently inexplicable is likewise ingenious, and he builds considerable suspense before his series sleuth, Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith, finally solves the mystery.
Only one of Berrow’s twenty novels — a revised and updated version of the 1940 book The Ghost House (1979) — was published in the United States, perhaps because of their numerous flaws: talkiness and overwriting, colorless characters, and some dubious use of English slang (Berrow was a New Zealander). The Footprints of Satan, however, his best and most baffling novel, deserves to have been reprinted here — and still should be for the amusement of contemporary readers.
Other of his books worth reading include The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) and The Bishop’s Sword (1948), each of which contains no fewer than three neatly worked out “impossible crimes”; and It Howls at Night (1937), a non-series book set in Spain, which has a werewolf theme.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
UPDATE: Here is some good news, at least for fans of “impossible crime” mysteries. All twenty of Berrow’s mysteries have been reprinted by Ramble House, including this one.
December 1st, 2016 at 5:59 pm
Anecdote time…
About ten years ago I loaned Fender Tucker my copy of THE BISHOP’S SWORD and donated my copy of DON’T GO OUT AFTER DARK so he could reprint them. Those two books became the first Berrow books Ramble House reissued back in the days when Fender literally made the books himself using an OCR reader and a Commodore computer. I remember he bound the pages using glue and an electric iron! A few years afterward he discovered Lulu.com and turned over the printing of the popular and high selling Ramble House books to them. Now there’s Amazon’s CreateSpace platform that has made self-publishing utterly commonplace and allowed for the proliferation of indie publishing operations many of whom operate shadily without permission of author estates.
After the Norman Berrow project turned out to be so popular (much to my surprise) I told Gavin O’Keefe, the cover artist for Ramble House, about Max Afford. Afford was an Australian radio producer and playwright who also wrote murder mysteries similar in style to Berrow’s, and who also had only one of books published in the US. Gavin was still living in Australia then and managed to find all of Afford’s books in libraries or bought them cheap in used bookstores down there. All of his mysteries are also available from Ramble House now.
December 1st, 2016 at 7:33 pm
That’s a great, great story, John. Everyone reading this owes you a debt of thanks, including me!
December 1st, 2016 at 10:32 pm
Going to look this up.
The footsteps in the snow was notably used by Lord Charnwood in TRACKS IN THE SNOW.
December 1st, 2016 at 11:46 pm
Not a book I knew of before, so I went looking. First published in 1906, it appears to be easily available online, but I didn’t follow through on any of the websites I came across. Here’s a synopsis:
http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/6th-august-1927/23/tracks-in-the-snow-by-lord-charnwood-benn-7s-6dthi
December 2nd, 2016 at 7:52 am
I read this one years ago.
And of course this impossible crime.
December 2nd, 2016 at 10:28 am
The first was reviewed here some six years ago:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=2591
While the second is an absolute classic.
December 2nd, 2016 at 11:47 am
Art Scott is a big fan of NORMAN BERROW. Ramble House has published over a dozen of his books in affordable paperbacks.
December 3rd, 2016 at 8:26 pm
Quite a few of the Max Afford books are available at Project Gutenberg Australia.