The convolution I hate is that he lets them get away with it!
MOtOE was my first exposure to Poirot, and to find this brilliant detective, who can’t even have an unbalanced pair of eggs but is willing to let 12 murderers get away, is stunning. Why am I wasting time with someone who is the greatest detective if he has such a moral flexibility on his (to me) first case?
My first was CURTAIN, where the great detective concludes that huh, it seems like I can’t prove you did it, so I’ll kill you.
I probably shouldn’t have started there.
Upon reflection, I thought the reason Poirot let the 12 get away with it wasn’t because he realized they were all wronged, and the the victim needed killing (not acceptable), or that it would be impossible to convict any of them (true), but that he was sure they would all kill him if he didn’t (cowardly). Saying (paraphrased) “I know you will all live with the guilt and never murder again” is something like what Miss Shields would say in A Christmas Story. Didn’t work there, either.
The Preston & Child murder mystery series starring iconoclastic F.B.I. agent Aloysius Pendergast is known for weird, covoluted and fantastical plots (such as ones featuring a murderous beast prowling the remote corridors of the Museum of Natural History). A favorite for bizarre improbability is The Wheel of Darkness, where Pendergast travels from a Tibetan monastery through parts of Europe, tracking a killer who’s stolen an ancient artifact which holds the key to the destruction of humanity, eventually following the killer/thief on the maiden voyage of the most luxurious ocean liner ever built, as it speeds across the north Atlantic on its way to what seems like certain destruction. Featuring wild promiscuity, overeating, and drinking into stuporousness.*
Fun stuff though.
*not unlike Florida’s “The Villages”.
Another convoluted “how catch 'em” murder plat.
he 1986 TV Movie Vanishing Act, written by Levinson and Link (hmmm, I sense a pattern!) where married man Mike Farrell pulls into a Colorado town with his new wife, and the next day she has vanished! The police take him seriously, but there’s really no evidence she was there. Two days later Margot Kidder shows up and claims to be his wife. The police and local priest believe her, but Farrell does not. He knows his own wife! But the locals think he’s nuts, and Margot is all “why don’t you remember me, honey?”
To spare you all the 90 minutes of the film, it turns out Farrell murdered his wife and the police found the body right away, so the locals set up this elaborate con to get him to confess (hmmm, I sense a pattern.) But seriously! Of all the people involved, including us viewers, Farrell KNOWS where his wife is, he knows Kidder is not her. What do they think he is going to do? Get confused.“maybe I am nuts?”
More important, Kidder was the wife of the police Lt investigating. How far was she willing to go? “Now honey, my wife, you know that everyday you like to smear your naked body with Nutella, put on a rubber ducky floaty, and dance in front of the window before we have sex. Right? If you were my wife you would do that!”
Not to mention, by their thinking, she is pretending to be the wife of a guy they suspect killed his actual wife. What if he just decided, “eh, in for a penny, in for a pound!” and kills her, too. She had no backup.
What if he turned the game on them? “OK I remember she is my wife. We’re going home. Come along honey! And don’t forget the Nutella!”
This “brilliant plan” would never work, except in a Columbo-lite show.
John Dickson Carr was famous for his locked-room mysteries, in which the m.o. of the murder is also a puzzle.
In The Problem of the Wire Cage a man is strangled in the middle of a tennis court but the only footprints on the court are those of the victim.
I’m not sure I need to avoid spoiling a book that was published in 1939, but here is the ridiculous solution:
The murderer was a friend of the victim. He was standing next to the tennis court with a long rope. He teased the victim and suggested he wrap the rope around his neck just for fun. Then he pulled on the rope.
In the usual bizarre way the world works, last night I read a Golden Age story from 1926 that out-improbabled even the examples I gave above.
An American psychologist who was a series character is visiting Trinidad, at that time a British possession that had a large Hindu community. The talk of the town is an arranged wedding featuring the nephew of the wealthy and elderly leader of the Hindu community to a 13-year-old girl. A few hours later the girl is found decapitated, apparently a Hindu-style of murder. But the American is suspicious. He is the type of American who likes to mingle with the lower classes, to the horror of the racist British, and after seeing the elaborate ceremony in the temple decides to return that night and sleep with the homeless that are given food and a mat through the generosity of the leader. The girl’s body is found in the temple shortly after he leaves. The husband appears to be the only suspect. The racist English insist that all Hindu spouse murders are done by husbands for no reason whatsoever.
The leader asks the psychologist to investigate. He had commanded the unusual marriage because a life outside India has left him without a family of his own in his old age, and doesn’t believe the nephew, who was 30 and should already have started his own family, is guilty. Immediately, though, all the evidence starts to point to the psychologist. First, he is eccentric enough to do experiments like the temple visit. Second, this is only two years after the Leopold-Loeb murders, the “crime of the century,” in which two teens commit murder to experiment intellectually with what it feels like and everybody on Trinidad down to carriage drives assumes that all Americans would do something similar. Third, the gold stolen off the girl’s bridal dress is found in his trunk. He is arrested.
Given uninterrupted time to think, he realizes that he has been framed by the leader. He and others in the temple had been drugged to provide suspects but no witnesses. A white man was conspicuous and had no good reason for being there. The leader could easily have arranged everything from the murder to the gold. It’s all true. The leader confessed and was hanged, the British police told him in his cell, they knew all about it. In fact, he had willed the psychologist to go to the temple to become the scapegoat. The leader couldn’t commit suicide because that meant he would be reincarnated as beast. Being killed offered him a new life in India.
But if the police knew all this, why was he put in jail? Because, the jailer said, it wasn’t until one month and ten days after the psychologist was himself hanged for murder that the confession happened. “And the lamp went out.” is the last line.
The story is famous and totally obscure, i.e. famous only to anthologists who dig through old magazines and trot it out every decade or so. The series continued with dozens more stories about the psychologist detective for another 30 years. Nobody can explain the ending. The author never said a word. I’ve put the name in a spoiler, because I’ve been willed to.
The story is “A Passage to Benares,” by T. S. Stribling. I read it in Golden Age Whodunits, edited by Otto Penzler. The famous A Passage to India appeared in 1924, also about a horrible crime and British racism, so the title had obvious contemporary reference.
Hang on , have I parsed this correctly?
The psychologist was hanged for murder? Then one month and ten days later the leader confessed. And then they visited the psychologist in his cell and told him they knew all about it. And then there were many more stories about the psychologist, who had already been hanged?
Yeah, I can’t explain the ending either.
Can’t remember any of the plot details – I read eight of them recently, one right after the other, so the plots are all mixed together in my mind – but the ‘Wrexford and Sloane’ mysteries by Andrea Penrose have some nicely convoluted plots.
You got it right. Up until the ending it’s a standard whodunit. Then, blam!