---the murderer remaining in the room hidden, then mingling with the incoming crowd, was used by John Dickson Carr in one of his earliest short stories The Shadow of the Goat (1928), although it was not the first such appearance in the literature.
---it was Carr also, writing as Carter Dickson, who wrote of a slender murderess disguising herself as a boy (although not a bellboy) in The Plague Court Murders (1934)
---the idea of a murderer being psychologically invisible originated in G.K. Chesterton’s The Invisible Man (1911)
Like Carter Dickson’s detective Sir Henry Merrivale in She Died a Lady (1943), the elderly protagonist of The Riddle of Monte Verita deflects suspicion from the true murderer, who is allowed to escape.
The ill-fated Solange Garnier is in good company among Carr’s persecuted leading ladies: Marie Stevens in The Burning Court, Fay Seton in He Who Whispers (1946) and, above all, Lesley Grant in Till Death Do Us Part (1944).
Indeed, the evil Hoenig behaves very much like the victim Gilman in that last Carr novel: he fabricates the story of a diabolical murderess perpetrating impossible crimes, and he puts the same choice to the hero of confronting the alleged villainess or not.
The Author’s Note
In his Author’s Note, M.Török declares his intention to write an impossible crime novel that obeys the rules of what is often called Golden Age fiction; to write it in a manner faithful to the French language usage of the time; and to end the story with the last sentence of La Chambre ardente, the French translation of Carr’s The Burning Court (1937), the words of which had made an everlasting impression on him. Thus the last line of The Riddle of Monte Verita reads: “Her face became the face of a pretty wife, and she ran out to meet her husband.”
Alas, M.Török was not to know that the French translator of The Burning Court (Maurice-André Endrèbe, himself a writer of locked room fiction) had taken liberties with the narrative flow of Carr’s epilogue, with the result that several of the paragraphs at the end of the French version had had their order changed from the English original.
Essentially, there are two threads running through the epilogue: (i) rational explanations of the murders as reported in newspaper articles (ii) musings by Marie Stephens, one of the principal murder suspects, to the effect that she perpetrated the crimes by using her black magic skills.
In the original English version, Marie’s musings and her rush to greet her husband precede the quotes from the newspaper, so the epilogue closes on a prosaic and decidedly unromantic note.
In the French version, the newspaper stories come first and the last thing we read is Marie’s thoughts as she prepares to run out to meet her husband, with the result that the French version leans more towards the supernatural.
When Carr learned of Endrèbe’s changes, he liked them so much he contemplated modifying his own work to incorporate them.
For the record, the last sentence of The Burning Court is: “At this point there was some commotion, and Judge David R. Anderson said that, if any more laughter were heard in a court of justice, he would order the court to be cleared.”
Readers can decide for themselves which is the more memorable ending.
None of the foregoing notes and observations should be taken as a criticism of M.Török’s elegant, intelligent and ingenious work. Indeed, in the translator’s humble opinion, he has succeeded admirably in his stated goal.
John Pugmire
March 2012
The Riddle of Monte Verita Page 23