Death on Allhallowe'en is, as I recollect, the best of the four.
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| Though long dead, notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley plays a role in Leo Bruce's Death on Allhallowe'en. |
Death on Allhallowe'en--I'm going to write DOA from here on out because I'm already tired of writing "Allhallowe'en"--is the last of the Carolus Deene tales where the gentlemanly amateur detective is employed as history master at Queen's School, Newminster (he has retired and moved by Death by the Lake); but only the first chapter and a bit of the second take place there, as Carolus conducts an interview at his home with his old friend Reverend John Stainer. Carolus' friend is the Anglican minister of the village of Clibburn on the Isle of Guys (Geese?), which Stainer compares to the isles of Sheppey and Grain in the Thames Estuary in Kent. Explains Stainer:
"They're peninsulas really. Guys consists of about ten square miles of grazing country, one large village, two groups of cottages, one church, two pubs and a population of about a thousand people....Guys is one of those tracts of country, of which there are more in Great Britain than you imagine, which almost nobody visits and in which absolutely nobody would choose to live. It is flat and dreary with rain and mists coming in from the estuary and mudflats instead of a beach. Obviously it has the usual amenities--television, radio, electricity, mains water--but only one road connects it with the Kentish mainland and that is sometimes flooded."
"A perfect setting for the goings-on you describe," observes Carolus dryly. Stainer has just told him that he thinks a witch cult is operating in Clibburn and has asked his friend to investigate the queer matters there. A boy in the village who apparently observed overnight satanic rites performed there died from pneumonia, before he could tell just what ghastly things he observed.
Carolus, a Roman Catholic like the author (who despite his irreverent past and homosexuality came to take religion petty seriously in his later years), announces:
I do believe in the devil. Yes, Satan, Prince of Darkness. I believe he is at work in the world of today, seeking whom he may devour.
So he agrees to visit Clibburn to see what he can see. And when he gets there he doesn't like what he sees.
Bruce eventually introduces over a score of village characters into his tale, including Xavier Matchlow, a witchcraft afficionado who, we are told, used to run about in his heyday with notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley. Bruce himself knew Crowley's younger lover and closest disciple, Victor Neuburg, a small publisher who published Bruce's first work, a book of poms, in 1922. So Bruce knew pretty well of that which (or should I say witch) he wrote.
Over halfway through the book, at the stroke of midnight at a dance on Halloween (or Allhallowe'en as Bruce would have it), there is finally an actual murder, surprisingly a shooting of the old-fashioned--"corny," Carolus' perpetual student Rupert Priggley would say--John Dickson Carr "impossible" variety; and Carolus at that point has really to get down to work. As was his wont in his later books Bruce introduces some professional criminals into the proceedings, but this is still a pretty "classic" mystery and an entertaining one.
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| Victor Neuburg in the haystacks |
Beginning with Crack of Doom in 1963 Bruce got ever more serious in his crime fiction, though his quondam wit and humor could not stay repressed. Even in DOA, which is pretty dark and serious, some humorous bits pop up, with mixed success. Margaret Lark, Reverend Stainer's housekeeper is insanely addicted to abbreviations in her speech, saying things like "The Rec's in the stud with Charl Slo," which just gets more silly than funny, not to mention challenging to decipher.
John Moore, Carolus' Scotland Yard inspector friend, pops up late in the story, but
Carolus' headmaster, Mr. Gorringer, surprisingly doesn't appear at all, the only occasion I can recall when he doesn't. However, Carolus' servants the Sticks appear briefly and humorously at the seaside resort of Margate, where they vacation while Carolus is sleuthing at Clibburn. ("Stick does love a bit of shrimping," Mrs. Stick observes of her husband.)
Bruce takes time to defend the vanishing servant class, which is out of fashion in what he deemed the invertedly snobbish Seventies. The funniest character in the story, however, is the wife of the murder victim, who is much more concerned about the fate of her mink coat then she is with who killed her husband.
All in all this is a fine Leo Bruce story, not too spooky, but certainly more so than Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party, published the previous year, where the Halloween trimmings are all surface decoration. Satanism was rather in the air at the time in Britain and the United States, with supernatural films like Hammer Studio's The Devil Rides Out and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, both from 1968. But it had definitely been a faddish thing too back in the Twenties, when authors like Christie and Bruce were young. Evil is as old as the hills.
I had hoped to do some more Halloween posting tonight but looks like I'm not going to make it on time, but check out what The Passing Tramp has for you tomorrow.
