"Would you rid the world of a dangerous snake? Of course you would."
"It's all so senseless! These things happening! Unreasonable! Good Lord, man, it's like a bad mixture of [MR] James and Edgar Wallace...."
--cryptic and meta observations in Rope to Spare (1932), by Philip MacDonald
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| American first (and to date only) edition |
Like Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, Philip MacDonald's super sleuth Anthony Gethryn can never enjoy a little bit og R&R in the country without its turning into a snooper's holiday, as it were. Case in point: Rope to Spare, the ninth--the seventh in three years!--of the dozen Anthony Gethryn detective opuses.
When the novel opens Gethryn is recuperating at an inn quaintly called the Spanish Guardsman at the rustic hamlet of Ford-under-Stapleton. In this one he has his manservant, his former Great War batman Alexander White, along for the ride with him and he plays a substantial part in much of the novel, rather like mystery writer Margery Allingham's Lugg, the conspicuously cockney manservant to her super sleuth Albert Campion. It seems that Gethryn sadly acquired life-threatening septicemia during that recent "horrid business of the lunatic taxidermist" which the press dubbed "The Voodoo Murder." (Some modern-day pastichist should write up this officially unrecorded case.)
Soon our Anthony is having his peaceful rural idyll interrupted by the receipt of anonymous letters penned on pink note paper with green ink, warning him cryptically not to get involved in a local affair concerning a woman whom the vengeful letter writer evidently has marked for retributive unnatural death. "Would you rid the world of a dangerous snake?" this person asks Gethryn rhetorically. "Of course you would."
This strange business reminded my of Margery Allingham's brilliant little novella, frequently republished as a novel, The Case of the Late Pig, which followed the Rope to Spare into print by five years.
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| A manx badge on a wood pigeon's breast? |
Naturally, these pink letters have the opposite impact on Gethryn, who immediately wonders just who is the woman in the vicinity of Ford-under-Stapleton who is under imminent threat of with death. Yes he's been "roped in" to yet another weird mystery.
After some protracted wandering around the village, Gethryn with White by night encounter a fleeing village natural, a gypsy poacher named Lemuel Farra, who was badly "frit" by an encounter at the old haunted mill. (Every village has one, don't you know.) Farra tells them, in his highly idiomatic gypsy natural way, that at the mill there was a rope swinging from a beam which brushed his neck!
When Gethryn and White investigate they find as well a dead wood pigeon, with "an almost perfect replica of the Manx badge on its breast."
MacDonald strives to build up a sort of haunted village atmosphere like you find in John Dickson Carr's debut Dr. Fell detective novel Hag's Nook (1933). Did this novel influence Carr? We know he was a MacDonald reader. But Carr does it better. In many of his novels, MacDonald has a tendency to ramble, and his narratives are too discursive for my taste. I know for a fact that at least several of the Gethryns run to 100,000 words, which in my opinion is too long for most mystery novels. MacDonald wrote mainstream novels as well, and one gets the feeling that he was a frustrated "serious novelist" at heart. Personally I think that his serious intentions found better expression in his psychologically acute and economical short stories.
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| old mill at Lower Slaughter |
But to get back to my main narrative, eventually Gethryn--with the help of his friend, the local padre Reverend Charles Aloysius Grafton Bellew (MacDonald has a preference for long handles for his elite characters)--locates the mystery woman of the letters. This discovery takes him to the country house Corners, tenanted by ancient Egypt expert Adrian Conway, "perhaps the greatest living archaeologist."
Conway lives at Corners with his embittered brother Ferris, who lost both his legs in the war, crudely described variously as a "cripple" and "half a man" (those were the days); his secretary George Delafield, a powerful, headstrong fellow who greatly resembles the country house secretary in The Rasp; his loyal manservant and butler Ling; and his drop-dead gorgeous blonde wife, Rosemary Conway. This is over seventy pages into the novel, and that's where it really begins.
Close to page 100 there is a suitably horrific murder, of Adrian's butler Ling, and by page 107 the county's chief constable, Brigadier General Sir Francis Spooner Withington, an utter idiot martinent, has arrived on the scene to investigate. Don't feel cheated of mystery, however, there's still over 200 pages to go.
In classic dumb cop fashion General Withington tags another local gypsy--what are we supposed to say now, Romany?--as the murderer. But another murder follows and then a suicide--or is it a murder too? Police arrest someone else for the third death, but Anthony knows they have it all wrong. He knows who the real culprit is, but he needs someone else's help to prove it and save the innocent person from the gallows. Can he force this reluctant one's hand?
The fast-moving final forty pages of this novel are somewhat reminiscent of MacDonald's earlier can-Gethryn-exonerate-the-wrongly-imprisoned-man novel The Noose. Indeed the whole country house and village setup recalls both the earlier Gethryn novel The Wraith (1931) and the nonseries Mystery at Friar's Pardon (1932), written under the pseudonym Martin Porlock. Given his prolificity, MacDonald was only to be expected to recycle some of his materials.
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| more abstract British first (and to date only) edition |
Along with its immediate successor, Death on My Left, Rope to Spare has never been reprinted and consequently it is one of the least well-known Gethryn detective novels today. Here, by the way, is a list of all the Gethryn adventures, if you are interested, with the reprinted Gethryns starred (most recently reprinted two stars):
**The Rasp 1924
*The White Crow 1928
**The Noose 1930
*The Link 1930
**The Choice 1931
*The Wraith 1931
*The Crime Conductor 1932
**The Maze 1932
Rope to Spare 1932
Death on My Left 1933
**Warrant for X (The Nursemaid Who Disappeared) 1938
The-Wood-for-the-Trees (short story, second place finish in Queen's Awards) 1947
**The List of Adrian Messenger 1959
The fact that the two last installments of Gethryn's great run of novels published between 1930 and 1933 were the ones that were never reprinted suggests to me that the bloom had come off Gethryn's rose a bit by this time. The fact is, MacDonald was simply writing too much too fast. Some more editing of his prolix narratives would have been good for him.
Rope to Spare, subtitled in the States "An Anthony Gethryn Detective Story," probably represented Gethryn's plateau of popularity. For the American edition MacDonald was asked to provide a prefatory note, "About Anthony Ruthven Gethryn." In the note we significantly informed that "in Anthony's opinion the present case is the most unusual and interesting of his career to date, involving, as it does, not only violence and danger, but a psychological aspect which is truly terrifying."
For the most part I actually agree with Anthony assessment of his latest case. My own favorite of Anthony early cases is that experiment in pure detection, The Maze, where the author's exuberance is suitably tamed; but I certainly preferred Rope to The Rasp, The White Crow, The Noose and The Link, none of which are superlative in my opinion, despite being better known than Rope. Once the novel truly gets started, about 100 pages in, it's an interesting case turning on the personalities of three men and the striking, enigmatic woman with whom they are all infatuated.
The county's chief constable being an absolute dunderhead, Anthony has to get down to brass tacks, investigating the case himself and installing his man White as the slain Ling's replacement at Corners. The murders themselves are mechanically rather interesting, if baroquely outrageous, the kind of thing that both Carr and his mystery writer colleague and drinking buddy John Rhode indulged in. In fact the method of one of the murders reminded me of a specific later Carr novel, I won't say which. And the psychology behind it all is acute and intriguing. Rosemary Conway's East Asian background story reminded me of something right out of the melodramatic pages of Somerset Maugham.
In the end Anthony has to secure the help of his old pal, going back to Rasp days, Asst. Commissioner Sir Egbert Lucas, the big wheels at Scotland Yard being far more smitten with Gethryn's insouciant amateur detecting ways than is our stiff General Withington. There's a nice ironic epilogue too, entirely resonant with our era of modern social media.
Recommended for patient vintage mystery readers!
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