"The real secret of magic lies in the performance."- David Copperfield
The 1933 September issue of Pearson's
Magazine printed a story by Vincent Cornier, entitled "The Stone Ear," which interposed Barnabas Hildreth (a.k.a. "The Black Monk") of the British
Secret Services into the Grandest Game in the world, where they would've
languished in literary obscurity – until a certain editor of Ellery Queen's
Mystery Magazine began to republish the series in 1946.
One half of the Ellery Queen penname,
Frederic Dannay, called Barnabas Hildreth "one of the great series of modern
detective stories," and while I don't agree entirely, I can understand
where Dannay was coming from and there's definitely appeal in the feral
imagination of the author. Cornier's elaborate, almost baroque, writing style
in itself adds a layer of mystique to plots that were cloaked in an air of
mystery to begin with. The Black Monk's case-book is filled with astonishing
problems reminiscent of those faced by John Bell (L.T. Meade and R. Eustace's A Master of Mysteries, 1898), but the scientific approach to clear up some of
the impossibilities also called Arthur Porges' The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009) to mind and Cornier may have influenced Porges.
However, Cornier's explanations are often
steeped in arcane knowledge of (pseudo) science or strand in a twilight area
between mystery and science-fiction, which is where I disagree with Dannay. You
have to be a polymath in order to solve the stories that are actually solvable!
That being said, if you want something out of the ordinary in your crime
fiction, you can hardly go wrong with The Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary
Cases of Barnabas Hildreth (2011) – another "Lost Classic" from Crippen and
Landru.
The opening story, "The Stone Ear," was a
nice introductory to the characters as Ingram relates his first brush with
murder alongside Barnabas Hildreth, who looks into the sudden death of a
relative, Sir Roger Amistead. After his retirement from the bench, Sir Roger
wrote his unpublished memoirs and there's a chilling tale for a final chapter
when dies of an apparent heart attack at the exact moment that precious goblet
of glass vanished from his hand. A well-written story with an intriguing
premise, but with the kind of explanation that leaves fans like me very
dissatisfied.
"The Brother of Heaven" is a member of
the Chinese tong, who turns up dead inside an abandoned warehouse at the
Thames, stabbed to death, with an unsettling lack of guilty footprints
surrounding the body. The only clues are a peaceful expression on the victims
face and orchids. One of the more conventional stories in this collection and
not all that bad with exception for the no-footprints situation, which is an
answer that usually laughed away in other stories when it’s suggested.
A Doylean treasure hunt is at the heart
of "The Silver Quarrel," in which Pagan imagery carved in an elephantine-sized
table in a priory room holds the key to finding the hiding place of a family
treasure that belonged to a now extinct noble bloodline. Hildreth helps a
physician locating the treasure and I tended to like this one. The next story, "The Throat of Green Jasper," also deals with treasures, looted this time from
an Egyptian burial chamber that lay undisturbed in the sands for ages, until it
was plundered and a curse swept the continents – purging everyone from the
Anglo-American expedition that violated the tomb. This could've easily been the
best of the Egyptian curse mysteries from the 1930s, if it had not wandered
from that terrain.
"The Duel of Shadows" is a pure scientific
detective story with a wonderfully imaginative premise: a man settles down in
an easy chair, in front of a cozy and crackling fire place, when he's struck by
a bullet that was discharged once before and that was more than 200 years ago
in a duel – making it slowest bullet on record. But the most rewarding part of
this story, is that you don't need Hildreth's arcane knowledge to figure the general idea behind the shooting. "The Catastrophe in Clay" opened equally promising, reporting the
discovery of a what appeared to be the body of a gold encrusted creature that
some mistook for the remains of a God, but degenerated into a story with an
authentic super villain and a secret weapon.
In "The Mantle That Laughed," an old sea
captain is trying to sell an item he procured during an expedition of the
uncharted regions of Mexico, a golden cloak that’s a thousand years old and has
the power to laugh, but does it also has the power to kill? A similar problem
faces Hildreth in "The Tabasheeran Pearls," which are the deadly inheritance of
a Japanese pearl merchant who westernized hara kiri when he shot
himself, however, neither of them left a lasting impression on me despite their
interesting subject matter. I guess I missed the game element that are usually
present in these type of impossible mysteries and that the explanations often
feel dated and/or hokey doesn’t help either. "The Gilt Lily," first published
in 1938, is a great example of this. There's a leakage of information at
Whitehall and relays on the same device used in C.N. and A.M. Williamson's "The
Adventure of the Jacobean House," a short story from 1907!
Luckily, there was improvement in the
final two from this collection. "The Monster" is tale of two twins, a small
village, animal mutilations and something the law can't touch – even if it
maims and kills. It even has a twist on a twist that you were expecting and one
that was reworked by Ellery Queen in one of their novels.
"Oh Time, In Your Flight" is the shortest
of the lot, but also one of the better stories, plot-wise, in which Hildreth
has to break an alibi to solve the murder of a friend and it has been suggested
that Frederic Dannay, who collected volumes of poetry, gave this story its
title – because Cornier was known for his affinity with the great poets of
yore. The personal connection between the victim and Hildreth, like was the
case in the opening story, also makes it nice story to round out this volume.
Verdict: I liked most of them as stories,
but not as detective stories. So, for me, The Duel of Shadows was a
mixed bag of tricks.
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