Wed 12 May 2021
A Locked Room Mystery Review: JOHN RHODE & CARTER DICKSON – Fatal Descent.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[14] Comments
JOHN RHODE & CARTER DICKSON – Fatal Descent. Dr. Horatio Glass & Chief Inspector Hornbeam #1. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1939. Popular Library #87, paperback, 1946. Dover, US, paperback, 1987. Published first in the UK as Drop to His Death (William Heinemann, hardcover, 1939).
Carter Dickson is of course better known as John Dickson Carr, the most famous locked-room mystery writer of all time, and the locked room in this collaboration with John Rhode, author of many many Dr. Priestley novels, is a doozy. It’s an elevator, and to all practical purposes, a hermetically sealed elevator, into which a man steps in alone at the top floor of a five story office building. When it reaches the bottom floor, he is found dead, shot to death in the head.
As the elevator passes each floor on its way down, no one is able to stop the car either to get in or get off. Nor could have anyone been able to stand on the roof of the car. He was alone all the way down, but someone managed to kill him anyway. The question is how? And of course, secondarily, why?
This was the only pairing in print of the two authors and of the two detectives who handle the case. In this instance, it is the professional, Chief Inspector Hornbeam whose technique depends on interpreting facts, while Dr. Glass relies on people, psychology and motive. It is the latter, however, who comes up with more than possible solution, one of which (in my opinion) is as good as the real one, if not better.
But of course, which checked out, Dr. Glass’s solution does not fit the facts, and that is what finely detailed detective novels depend on. In that regard, this book delivers the goods one hundred percent. Unless uncommonly diligent, the reader will still be fooled every step of the way. My only regret is how complicated the murder plan was, even though the authors do a fine job in trying to explain why the killer had to do it the way he did. (UPDATE: For more on this, please see the comments that follow this review, especially #12.)
I do not know which author wrote what in this novel, or if one did all of the plotting and the other did the writing. I suspect it was Carr who did the bulk of the work. I recognize his style in detail and humor, but I may be swayed in this regard by having read much more of his work than I have of Rhode’s. Either way, this is a fine example of late 1930s detective fiction writing, and especially if you’re also a fan of locked room mysteries, you should not miss this one.
May 13th, 2021 at 8:57 am
Kinda tough to hazard a guess as to how the gun was fired, using 1930s elevator technology. I recall those elevators had a handle, like you find on a ship’s telegraph.
If it was a modern-day elevator, I would speculate that the killer rigged the control panel to make one of the buttons defective, so that the irritated victim would put his face up to it, pressing it repeatedly, and then one of the buttons would fire the gun from behind the circuit board.
But yea the question remains: why would anyone commit a sensational, inexplicable locked-room murder in the first place, knowing that sleuths devote themselves to solving such cases? A killer ordinarily wants his deed to go unnoticed.
Typically, I do badly at solving such puzzles. I had a good time with ‘The Four Just Men’ though. Good storytelling offset my frustration at not being able to guess that solution.
May 13th, 2021 at 12:31 pm
Your question about why anyone would commit a murder planning in advance to make it appear an impossible crime is a good one. I thought I remembered an explanation of why he/she did in this one, but I’ve gone back to read the last chapter again, and I couldn’t find the passage that I thought addressed it. (I’m sure it’s there. I can’t have imagined it???)
Even worse, the more I read it now, the shakier the explanation itself became. Reading it the first time, I accuse myself of reading too quickly. Reading more slowly, the weak points stood out more. My review still stands, but the more someone is not attuned to the ways and means of the traditional detective story, the less that someone is not going to care for this one.
May 13th, 2021 at 6:29 pm
If you start questioning the game aspect of the classical detective story most if not all of them tend to start falling apart. Asking realistic questions about method is bit like going to STAR WARS looking for actual science.
I remember thinking this was mostly written by Carr for the same reasons you list. I like Rhode, but I don’t recall ever thinking him terribly amusing in print.
May 13th, 2021 at 10:10 pm
Yea. Not taking anything away from the justly-deserved fame of the authors.
But if I was in the shoes of ‘the killer’ in this head-scratcher, the last place I would ever want to murder this wealthy target, is in an ‘impossible’ environment like a “hermetically -sealed private elevator” which would make any constable ponder.
I’d avoid any such place as that, especially if the cause of death is ‘gunshot’ to the head. Gunshots just don’t happen by chance, in elevators or otherwise.
Perhaps this is why Agatha Christie’s novels are so redolent. Always so common-sensical.
Thinking it over a little bit more: the only reason I can imagine to commit a deliberately locked-room crime is: the target can’t be gotten at in any other way.
At all other moments round the clock, he must be surrounded by vigilant guards, so therefore his strange insistence on a solitary elevator ride to and from his penthouse is the *only* place left, where I can assassinate him. By exterminating him there, I realize I am giving up any pretense that it was an accidental death. I also give up my right to be ‘affronted’ when I am questioned. There’s no patent, logical reason why gunfire would randomly break out in anyone’s private elevator.
May 14th, 2021 at 4:34 am
I hope you realize that you’re not saying anything I’ve not thought about many many times before. The only realistic way a killer would deliberately commit a locked room murder… Well, maybe there are several. The first is that he didn’t intend to; that strange things happened that he didn’t anticipate. Not the case here. Second, the one you propose, that there was no other way he could do it. Not the case here, either. The third is that the killer was balmy. This is the one that’s implied here. (See my brother’s observations in this regard in Comment #12.) Satisfactory? No, not if you’re looking for realism.
Which if that’s what you’re looking for in a locked room mystery, you’re looking in the wrong place. As David said, it’s like looking for science in a STAR WARS story. Or asking, as I did when I was a kid, why do comic book superheroes never need to go to the bathroom?
May 14th, 2021 at 11:33 am
Purely amateur musing on my part. Just trying to exercise my little grey cells…
May 14th, 2021 at 8:30 pm
And a very fine exercise it was. Everything you said makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, for those of us in love with the genre.
May 14th, 2021 at 9:18 pm
The questions raised here go very much to those raised by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but I always thought Hammett and Chandler particularly disingenuous since they were complaining about a genre that was never intended to be realistic and considering the amount of melodrama in their work disguised by realistic language.
Many of the most beloved classics in the genre are absurd at face value (“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Speckled Band,” “The Blue Cross”), about as far from realism as you can get, but I wouldn’t want to give them up because of that. For that matter when is the last time you read in the paper about a femme fatale murdering her partner in an alley while trying to recover a lost Templar treasure?
The amateur detective himself is a pretty absurd concept.
As you say, Steve it isn’t that all of us haven’t asked these questions in regard to why the killer didn’t just push the victim in front of a bus rather than construct an elaborate plan that should one piece go wrong points directly at the killer.
Lazy, where you are with this one is a point I think all of us who ever read Golden Age Detective Fiction struggled with and then rejected and moved on with a shrug.
And I would point out that in all honesty Hammett and Chandler are no more realistic than Agatha Christie with the violence and melodrama that tracks their world. Not many private detectives get hired to find ancient Templar treasures or paid by rich old men to cover up murders by their nymphomaniac daughters either.
Their language may be more realistic, their milieu, their cops, and their motives, but we are still in the world of dramatic exaggeration. Just saying it in a clipped hard boiled voice doesn’t make it realism.
When I want to read true crime I read true crime, but frankly when I want fiction I don’t really want the detective to spend years solving the case and then still have unanswered questions when I finish, THE PLEDGE is an interesting one off, but I wouldn’t want to make a steady diet of it.
Like Kabuki Theater the artificial nature of the genre is part of its charm, but in all honesty Philo Vance is no more artificial than Sam Spade, both fantasy projections of a kind of superman in their field, I never encountered anyone vaguely like either of them when I was a Pinkerton.
May 15th, 2021 at 12:36 pm
The two authors seem to be poles apart (from what I have read of them or more specifically about them). It’d be interesting to read this collaboration.
May 15th, 2021 at 1:33 pm
As I understand it, Rhode and Carr were friends, so that they got together on writing a book is not surprising, even though as you say, their styles were rather opposite. I still think Carr did most of the writing, but who is there now who can say for sure?
May 15th, 2021 at 8:43 pm
I learned some new things by reading this discussion, and I thank all of you.
May 16th, 2021 at 3:41 pm
Here are my brother’s thoughts on the crime and more specifically the culprit.
WARNING: Be careful here. Reading on will almost assuredly reveal who the killer is.
On (my) page 205 Hornbeam says, “Of course, if the fellow’s crazy or otherwise tied up with psychology, he might have done all this; but when could he have done it?â€
On page 209 he says, “He was so brainy as sin—that was plain even to a dense bloke like me—and a trick like this would be straight up his street,â€
On page 209 we hear that *** had been “owner and editor of a little popular-mechanics magazine.†Just the sort of guy who’d have come up with such a gadget.
On page 210 Hornbeam says, “And he got a great kick out of my saying that a gun couldn’t be fired with thin air,†meaning *** felt superior to everyone else.
On page 221 he says, “He must have been thinking of it so long, and planning it so long, and never deciding to do it.â€
“All in all this sounds to me like a clever man who would dream up such a clever mechanical method and toy with over time, thinking he could fool everyone with it.”
May 23rd, 2021 at 2:39 pm
This one rarely gets a mention as one of either writer’s greatest triumphs but I’ve always had a soft spot for it as it was the book that introduced me to JDC, starting a literary “love story” that has been lasting for more than thirty years now!My only complaint would be that Dr. Glass and Inspector Hornbeam never reappeared; they worked well together, had strong series potential and it’s obvious Carr had fun writing about them. Carr’s one-off detectives are often his most interesting (see Dermot Kinross, another doctor but the similarity ends there)
May 23rd, 2021 at 2:56 pm
Yes, I could have said a lot more about the team-up between Dr. Glass and Inspector Hornbeam in my review. They make for a fascinating pair. There is a constant reference to their different approaches to solving crimes and their previous cases together, and I would like to have read their later ones too. A missed potential there for sure!