Close to Death полностью

There’s a very specific subgenre in the murder mystery/crime arena that has its own rules and effectively presents the reader with a seemingly impossible puzzle. It’s not enough for the characters to be isolated (The Mousetrap, Orient Express). Everything has to be so fiendishly arranged that the detective has no chance of solving the puzzle . . . until he or she does.

The first and still the most famous locked-room mystery is said to be The Murders in the Rue Morgue, written in 1841 by Edgar Allan Poe, the man who inspired Sherlock Holmes. Here, a mother and a daughter are brutally murdered in their flat, the daughter stuffed up a chimney, but the door and the shutters are securely fastened from inside and the flat is four floors up from the street, with no way to climb in. The story has a great ending, but one that doesn’t really play fair. I’m not sure a modern writer would get away with it.

The real problem of the locked-room mystery is that the mechanics are often so complicated and even contorted that it’s hard to believe the murderer could go to so much trouble, and the emotions of the story can disappear in a Heath Robinson construction of cogs and wheels, mirrors, sliding doors and body doubles. As much as you may admire the solution, you are forced to suspend disbelief. The killers are so clever that they seem positively inhuman, literally so in Poe’s story. It’s difficult to avoid a sense of contrivance.

Try reading The Hollow Man, written by the ‘king of crime’, John Dickson Carr, in 1935. It’s unquestionably brilliant, often cited as the best locked-room mystery ever written. Here a man is seen entering a professor’s study, a shot rings out and the professor is found dead. There is a window, but the ground outside is covered in snow, there are no footprints and the killer has disappeared. The explanation is interminable and eventually blots out the actual reason for the murder – another crime committed long ago, blackmail and betrayal. The solution relies on chance and coincidence. The clock had broken. The snow wasn’t forecast. It left me cold.

It’s my belief that, these days, the best locked-room mysteries come from Japan. Try Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada, or The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, a true master of the art and the author of almost eighty books. They are both fiendish and elegant. In the first, the entire setting becomes an accomplice to the crime. As for the second, the gurgle of the waterwheel and the music played on the koto (a sort of zither), both integral to the plot, will always stay with me. Sheer genius. But far removed from real life.

I only mention all this to explain why my immediate reaction to the last batch of material I had received had been one of dismay. Hawthorne was insisting that Roderick Browne had not committed suicide and all the ingredients of the locked-room mystery were set out in front of me. Nobody could have got into the garage. There was only one key fob, which Roderick must have used to lock the car doors after he got inside. He couldn’t have been carried there. And he had written a suicide note! It was always possible that Hawthorne was wrong. After all, he had said that the case hadn’t worked out the way he wanted and Alastair Morton, the CEO of Fenchurch International, had also warned me that I shouldn’t write the book because it would show Hawthorne in a bad light.

Of course, that would be even worse. It would mean that Morton was right and that the story wasn’t worth writing. Hawthorne hadn’t solved anything and the killer had simply confessed. The end.

I’d been depressed enough when I left the offices of Fenchurch International. Morton had ruined everything for me by revealing the solution . . . which I’m sure was exactly what he’d intended. And so far, he’d been spot on. Khan had said the case was closed. Roderick Browne had been named as the killer and he had then taken his own life. Where did that leave me? With a very short book, for a start, more a novella than a novel. And I couldn’t see my editor jumping up and down with excitement when the manuscript was delivered.

So, on reflection, I realised that a locked-room mystery might be exactly what I needed. If it turned out that Roderick Browne’s entire garage swivelled round to reveal a hidden staircase which had allowed someone to gain access through an underground passage that connected with the medieval well, I’d just have to grit my teeth and get on with it. At least it would mean that Roderick Browne hadn’t committed suicide after all and that someone had indeed murdered him; presumably the same person who had shot Giles Kenworthy.

But who?