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everything flows as if the crime were nothing more than another event in a typical day indeed while in other novels by other writers when the crime occurs the atmosphere shifts as does the pace and sequence of events like a trauma that inevitably alters a situation that would otherwise have unfolded differently in clinton baddeley s novels everything continues as if nothing had happened city life goes on and so does dr davie s life and even his afternoon nap is undisturbed we are witnessing a different and interesting approach to a detective novel whereas in the most famous british novels when the crime occurs the atmosphere and the novelist s camera lens typically shift rather than capturing the surrounding reality like a wide angle lens including the scene in which the crime occurs and in which it may even be a negligible detail it immediately zooms in and examines in detail the crime scene and the characters within it and then cuts away the scene in baddeley s scenarios however even after the crime has occurred everything continues to flow as if nothing new or almost nothing had happened whether it s a theatrical performance of a commedia dell arte work as in to study a long silence or the king s lacy festival as in only a matter of time among his novels one that i particularly enjoyed was to study a long silence yes before an audience and this recalls another great novel death of jezebel by christianna brand but also the roman hat mystery by ellery queen in which a crime occurs before the eyes of the audience during a theatrical performance however the settings as we said before are not the same the more rarefied and dramatic atmospheres of brand and ellery queen which it must be said are two true masterpieces are not present here nevertheless the crime is there and it is spectacular during a play pantalone harlequin and colombina captain spaventa and pedrolino and many other secondary characters move impersonating roles according to a script not a basic text but similar to many others from the barber of seville to don pasquale which provokes laughter from the audience at one point in the play captain spaventa tries in every way to kill pantalone unsuccessfully but pantalone dies from a nasty fall into a wheelbarrow caused by the movement of his wife s fan the clown carries his body in a wheelbarrow amidst jokes and laughter no one suspects that the actor playing pantalone is actually dead murdered as can be seen baddeley s scenic invention is remarkable betraying his verve as a playwright unlike brand s novel here we are not faced with a locked room simply because a door through which the murderer could have escaped from the stage is simply closed rather than hermetically sealed and therefore could be opened at any time linking the disappearance of a prop ring to the murder is a trivial matter for dr davie after a second murder suddenly triggers the plot however the murderer is not arrested because he dies in a car accident torn apart by twisted metal and shattered glass while fleeing from police cars the solution to the case concludes the novel and explains the sequence of events how the first murder which is the soul of the novel could have been committed in such a short time and why pantalone of all the actors was the only one not to show up for the applause simple some would say he was dead clinton baddeley no not so simple in fact not at all simple i can say without revealing anything substantial that the mystery here is in some ways the opposite of that of christie s bodies in the sun revealing it will be a surprise to anyone who reads this beautiful novel the last of clinton baddeley s five detective novels to be published it was left unfinished due to the author s death in 1970 and completed by his nephew mark goullet thus we might well imagine how dr davie s falling asleep overcome by sleep in the novel s final line could be seen as a metaphor for the novelist who shortly thereafter would be overcome by eternal rest pietro de palma posted by pietro de palma at 23 58 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday april 16 2026 anthony abbot about the murder of the clergyman s mistress 1931 about the murder of the clergyman s mistress is anthony abbot s second novel it was written a year after his first about the murder of geraldine foster and as we will see it repeats and expands on some of the characteristics noted in the first while highlighting others like the first we find ourselves in the antechamber of hell warning spoilers at the beginning of a sultry summer a boat is found adrift it contains two bodies a woman killed with a gunshot to the heart but then almost decapitated and a man with a meek face whose clothing indicates he is the wealthy pastor of an episcopal church with a bullet hole in his forehead from which blood has dripped matted his brown hair in the boat which still smells of brand new paint there is also a crumpled piece of paper a letter clearly sent from a man to a woman about love could it have been written by the man and addressed to the woman both of whom were killed and there s also a cat a witness to the killing since its paws are covered in blood it must have stepped on a lot if it got them dirty but strangely there s no blood in the boat evidently they weren t killed there but elsewhere and then transported dead to the boat evidently to be dismembered and then sunk in the water where is the place of the killing and whose bodies are the bodies they are quickly identified pastor timothy beazeley and his secretary evelyn saunders the pastor comes from the parish of st michael and all angels but where was he killed evidently it must have been somewhere near the river otherwise he would have been seen and the boat would have been discovered immediately which no one knows about no one would know how to do it but colt thatcher commissioner of the new york metropolitan police knows possessing an encyclopedic knowledge he even knows all the varieties of leaves on new york s trees and the leaf found on the boat according to him comes from a sumac tree how many sumac trees are there in new york but william lederer director general of the tree division whom he consulted contradicts him it is a leaf from a tree of heaven they manage to trace the property and they also know that a cat resembling the one found on the boat belongs to mrs warthon an elderly woman who has an apartment that no one uses having entered the house thanks to the caretaker kraus they find strange edible algae paint stains in a large living room with enormous windows overlooking the internal garden an earring under a sofa similar to the one missing from the dead woman s ears strange fingerprints inside a built in closet and a very sharp clean knife hanging from a hook meanwhile timothy s husband is identified the very wealthy elizabeth beazeley formerly of curtainwood her two brothers paddington and gerard live with her the latter is a mentally handicapped man who enjoyed dissecting animals with razor sharp knives from the very first moment of the investigation after the bodies of the two lovers along with the boat were sent to the morgue for an autopsy it becomes clear that many unanswered questions surround the beazeleys home everyone seems highly suspicious and above all very reticent furthermore by chance it is learned that a package containing a piece of clothing has been sent to distant relatives to be washed and cleaned of any stains through a complex procedure the air police credited with inventing it to thatcher colt himself they manage to obtain possession of the item which turns out to be a fur trimmed overcoat belonging to elizabeth stained with blood is it all over did they find the killer did they find the accomplices no because other characters enter the picture the churchwarden chadwick and the powell family lawyer both in love with the widow who would have had more than one motive for killing the pastor to inherit his position and his money and then there are the pastor s two other secretaries one of whom was a former one bessie struber and emma hicks both seem to support the theory that the pastor was anything but a serious man vying to become a bishop of the episcopal church but instead a vain flirt who fell in love with anyone who made his skirts dance before his eyes in short they both had motives too envy jealousy resentment towards evelyn this time but the pastor would they have killed him it must be said that there are many suspicions of course there s also evelyn s husband william saunders a night watchman who indignantly rejects the suggestion that his wife might have cheated on him with the pastor but then demonstrates with his actions that he repeatedly suspected her of cheating on him furthermore there s a mysterious blackmailer who threatened evelyn with death and who even sent a telegram to have the watchman of the villas removed including the one where the double homicide took place the interesting thing is that this person is identified as the same person who had purchased cedar planking and carpentry tools the latter found in the river along with a large roll of linoleum and the gun so he could build the boat himself so the crime was carefully premeditated especially since they were found in the mysterious villa which later turns out to have been secretly purchased through intermediaries by a mysterious owner unknown to anyone these dumbbells suggest that the killer after dismembering the victim intended to weight down the remains in the river after figuring out who the blackmailer might have been as well as the buyer of the raft who secretly built the boat colt will figure out who the killer or killers might have been the end of spoilers abbot s second novel lives up to expectations remaining in the vein of the first if anything it deepens it it is therefore still in case you hadn t understood a van dine novel maintaining all the valid connections with the archetype the detective and his institutional sidekick here is the prosecutor dougherty as in van dine there is markha while the detective here is a police commissioner the detective and his mentor as van dine is to vance so here abbot is to colt who is also identified with the writer himself a way like any other to accredit the truthfulness of the concocted stories here too the characteristics of the van dine detective are intact super deduction super culture colt here is even said to know every species of tree in new york although later he too gets it wrong super versatility in all sciences but at the same time some differences are explored the novels are true procedurals ante litteram the crimes do not only occur in the upper classes of new york and the victims are not only high class there is a much higher level of violence here in abbot than in van dine s stories finally also as a result of this at times abbot s stories can almost be defined as horror splatter stories in the first novel there is a corpse immersed in tannic acid to slow decomposition and blood everywhere here there is a killer who was unable to dismember his victim because he was interrupted by something furthermore this superabundance of blood contrasts with the anemia of van dine s murders in some ways the only novel by a van dine follower that in any way comes close to this one by abbot is the egyptian cross mystery by ellery queen with a strong splatter component another difference which tends to channel abbot s vandinism into a vandinism that isn t slavish but seeks its own path is the tendency not to favor the static action of the detective investigation philo vance always operates in static environments in villas palaces houses pavilions never leaving except to go home nero wolfe is like this never leaving his home and so is ellery queen who intervenes in the crime that occurred in a specific place never moving his investigative action elsewhere if anything returning to his own home however fueling the headwinds is the way of archie goodwin the detective s factotum and sidekick who nevertheless represents the detective s legs with him rex stout s detective story loses its immovability in the detective s crime scenes also because goodwin himself is a detective however if what happens in nero wolfe s novels is true it should also be said that the first novels in which there is a certain shift in direction and a loss of investigative immovability are precisely abbot s novels a certain shift in action had already been seen in about the murder of geraldine foster but it is precisely in this second novel that the van dine novel as it was conceived by van dine a crime in a high class environment with all high class subjects or in any case connected to high finance and an investigation limited to the crime scene loses its static nature even if sporadically in some classic van dine novels there is sometimes a shift in location for example in the canary murder case the canary s lover is found in her hideout where he was killed from the canary s murderer whom he attempted to blackmail after all about the murder of the clergyman s mistress is from 1931 while fer de lance is from 1934 however he is not the only van dine author who varies the action of the novel not expressly static because another free spirited author with absolutely unconventional crime scenes is rufus king the genre remains that of the classic whodunnit even if echoes of the hard boiled can sometimes be heard in abbot s stories with an investigative action that begins with clues yet sublimates into a purely psychological one in which the ending has a very important cathartic conclusion in the case of this second novel however we find a certain variation in narrative technique if in fact in van dine novels par excellence there is a scheme of this kind prologue which coincides with the introduction crime investigation finale and sometimes an apologue here keeping the internal scheme introduction crime investigation finale unchanged epilogue and prologue are identified changing the action of the novel from one characterised by becoming and therefore the succession of events one from the other to one in which there is a cyclical nature of the action in the prologue what will be understood only in the epilogue is announced that is why the case contemplated in this second novel for which no one was arrested and therefore the electric chair remained inoperative had been archived the particular quality of the whodunnit in abbot lies in the non univocal interpretation of the clues if in conan doyle sherlock holmes analysis of a clue led to a certain consequence in abbot more than in van dine a clue can be interpreted in different ways this different perspective here is entrusted not only to colt thatcher s abduction but also to that of attorney powell the presence of a certain watch missing from the dead man s in a certain piece of furniture in the blazeney h...
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