Mon 27 Jul 2009
GEOFFREY HOLIDAY HALL – The End Is Known. Simon & Schuster/Inner Sanctum Mystery, hardcover; 1st printing, February 1949. Condensed version appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine, December 1950, as “Who Saw the Man Die.” Pocket #776, paperback; 1st printing, February 1951.
Not a book nor an author I was familiar with when I was recently attracted to it by its cover, and for good reason, I think you might say. Geoffrey Hall wrote only one other mystery, that being The Watcher at the Door (Simon & Schuster, 1954), a spy thriller set in Vienna which got a short notice in Catalogue of Crime by Barzun and Taylor.
In my opinion, though, I think The End Is Known should be far better known than it is. Far from being a spy novel, it’s a mystery that’s strongly in the Cornell Woolrich vein, as darkishly noir as you might want, and in some regards the writing is better than Woolrich’s. Full of strong imagery in the telling, there’s also more than a hint of humor, more than I remember in Woolrich’s.
Of course it’s also time for me to go back and re-read all of Woolrich’s work. It’s been far too long, but in the meantime this singular book by Geoffrey Hall will more than do. I’ve also just discovered that, unknown to Al Hubin, a film has been made from The End Is Known, as an Italian-French co-production called La fine è nota (1993). One comment has been left, so a viewable copy must exist somewhere, and I’d love to be able to see it, wishing as I say that that I also understood Italian.
The title comes from Julius Caesar (the play), in which Brutus at one point says “O, that a man might know / The end of this day’s business ere it come! / But it sufficeth the day will end / And then the end is known.”
Here’s the set-up: As department store vice-president Bayard Paulton makes his way home from work one evening, he is nearly hit by a man falling to his death from an upper story window. The apartment the man came from was his own, remarkably enough, and even more remarkably, Paulton does not know the man.
According to Mrs. Paulton, the man, also unknown to her, came to see her husband, who was delayed and not yet home, and after a few minutes of pacing while he waited, before she realized his intentions, he opened a window and leaped out.
From page 13: “All that occurred to him in that moment, all that he could rember with certainty afterward, was a sentence he had read years before in a novel he had since fogotten. ‘The body fell crazily, and landed askew, like a rag doll.’ And he thought, watching what happened, that was exactly how it looked.”
Thus the other reason for the title. The man’s end is known. Bayard’s mind is quickly taken over by the mystery? Who was he? Why did he tell his wife “Your husband is the only man who can help me?” But then why didn’t he wait for Bayard Paulton to arrive home?
What follows is Bayard’s attempt to trace the man’s life backward and then forward again to learn the answers to these questions and others.
The police, in the form of Lt. Wilson, are interested, but after the body is claimed by an eccentric woman from Montana, who tells them that she only knew him for a few months herself while he was working for her in her diner, they (the police) have other more important things they need to be doing.
The bulk of the book is therefore both fascinating and very talky. Bayard takes out newspaper ads to find people who may have known the dead man, and remarkably enough, he gets responses.
He learns a lot, but not enough to answer his questions. On page 143, he is back in his apartment, alone in his thoughts:
If only, Bayard Paulton thought, I had come home five minutes earlier…
On page 173, as Paulton gets closer to the truth, if you don’t mind reading so many quotes, but I do want you to know why I call this a minor unknown classic of noir fiction:
Bayard Paulton did not speak. He did not, even, stir in his uncomfortable chair. Because Jesse Dermond’s features, her whole body, were too markedly revealing. They showed pain and sorrow and an incomprehension of the things that life could do to you.
Any novel which begins at the ending, with a death that was inevitable, the final straw in a life of dreams, and the futility of those dreams, has to be noir. For this reason, among those I have already mentioned, as well as still others that I am respectfully refraining from passing along to you, I recommend this book highly.
July 28th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
That Pocket Books paperback cover is probably more famous than the book, though it sounds like one to go on the must read list.
As for books that start at the end, C. Daly King/s Obelists Fly High opens with the Epilogue and ends with the Prologue.
Still, the gimmick is only good when it works as it seems to have here.
July 28th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
The cover art is by Paul Kresse, and it’s an eye-catcher, all right.
Kresse also did the cover for Richard Ellington’s IT’S A CRIME, which I reviewed here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=666
It’s also remarkably violent. In the 1950s, Pocket was no longer sticking to the dignified “literary” covers they’d used through most of the 40s.
Here’s another one he did, this one of Raymond Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY.
I’ve seen his work now and again, but otherwise I don’t know anything else about him.
January 26th, 2014 at 1:12 pm
Dear Mr. Lewis. Congratulations. First-rate review.
In my humble opinion this book is a minor masterpiece, a forgotten masterpiece, a highly commendable tour de force.
Who was Geoffrey Holiday Hall?
The french Wikipedia : An american journalist, painter and decorator, born in 1913, in Santa Cruz, New Mexico. He died in 1981.
That’s all.
“The End is Known” won a well deserved award: Le Grand Prix de Littéraure Policière (foreign) in 1953 and was nominated for The Best First Novel Edgar in 1950.
As you said, Geoffrey Holiday Hall wrote another book (a good spy Thriller): “The Watcher at the Door” (1954).
And then…he simply disappeared. Life is very strange, isn’t it Mr.Lewis?
I am from Brazil (sorry about my english)and a translation of this book was published in Portugal, in 1955. I have a copy of this great book.
The cover of the portuguese edition (link):
http://images01.olx.pt/ui/25/28/03/Fotos-de-O-homem-de-algures-g-holiday-hall-coleccao-xis_439812503_1.jpg?x=1389616830
Last but not least: Mystery File is a wonderful and unique blog. Congratulations again and please keep up the good work, Mr.Lewis.
Best wishes,
Cassio.
February 5th, 2014 at 2:44 pm
Mr. Geoffrey Holiday Hall (photo) with biodata (in french):
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3668/9487304628_b1ff1ddff6_z.jpg
February 5th, 2014 at 3:55 pm
Thanks, Cassio!
February 6th, 2014 at 6:43 pm
You are welcome, Mr. Lewis.
All the best,
Cassio.
July 9th, 2020 at 4:26 am
The book was dedicated, as I recall “To Anne, that naggart.” The woman in question was my grandmother, Anne Latrobe New Timmerman, who worked in publishing and for the Girl Scouts of America (late 1930’s – early 1950’s) in NYC in 1930’s onward. They traveled in the same circles in NYC; they were friends only. She told me that “Hall” was remarkable for working hard at his writing every morning for four or five hours and then spent the day in cafes or out with friends with seemingly nothing to do. He had everyone thinking he was a man of complete leisure, but he had already done his stint of writing for the day. A poet and assistant editor at, as I recall Pictorial Review and Cosmopolitan Magazine, she saw the writer in him and urged him to keep writing. She told me that he was an alcoholic who died young. She had lost touch with him and didn’t know what had happened to him after the time he was actively writing and publishing.
March 22nd, 2021 at 1:31 pm
Deboah: I’m looking at the dedication now: It’s “To Anne, a naggart.” Thank you so much for your post, which adds a bit of information to the history of this novel.