Mysteries Ahoy!

At the very start of 2018, Kate at CrossExaminingCrime wrote a review of Curtis Evans’ Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing. The book sounded fascinating and I duly ordered a copy but one of the things I appreciated most about Kate’s review was that she pulled out books that Evans liked as suggested reading for some of her fellow bloggers.

Kate’s reasoning for suggesting this book for me was quite simple: it is an inverted mystery and I make little secret of my love of this sub-genre. In what is something of a first for me, I was taken aback when right before the final chapter I was commanded to stop reading and decide how the murderer will be caught. Yes, there is a challenge to the reader in an inverted mystery!

The story is told from the perspective of Eyliffe Trent Van Maarden, a man born into a notable family who has managed through poor fortune and judgment to go from a comfortable existence to becoming heavily indebted to a lawyer he went to college with who loaned him money. He has lost his investments, his family home and now lives as a tenant of that lawyer, paying him monthly installments that barely touch the principal of the loan.

One possible way out would be through marriage to a childhood sweetheart who has become a wealthy widow. Eyliffe has been biding his time before making romantic overtures to her to try to make sure of his feelings. Unfortunately for him, while he has been thinking about making his move that same lawyer friend has been actively wooing her and Eyliffe is sure that it will just be a matter of time before they get married. Unless something were to happen to him first…

As with many of the strongest inverted mysteries, the book is essentially a character study of a criminal that forces the reader to assess that character and determine how and why they have made the choice to take a life. You might argue that Eyliffe is made by circumstance, his actions borne out of a sense of hopelessness. Alternatively, his sense that he is a victim and his paranoia may be skewing his perception of events. I would suggest that here it is the second of those options and I think this view is only reinforced by events that occur in the immediate aftermath of that murder.

Eyliffe is, as we have established, living on extremely reduced means and in humiliating circumstances. While we are told that he has realized that he loves Madeline, we might equally well think that he has decided that she could be his saving and his way to retain face and status. Given those circumstances, he seems a credible candidate to morph into a killer.

While Downing’s short review will try to sell you on the idea that he has committed a seemingly perfect crime, I think that is an exaggeration. The crime, while efficient, is hardly ingenious in its creation or execution. Certainly it seems unlikely that anyone might track him down based on the initial evidence but it is not particularly hard to figure out how they might trace the crime back to him. The journey to that point is entertaining though and I think there are some excellent false leads and developments dropped in along the way.

What I think makes this story interesting and what I think gives it a rather different tone are the ways in which we see Eyliffe’s crimes affecting his mood and behavior as the novel goes on. The tone is sometimes haunting, sometimes a little melodramatic, but I think it is effective and helps explain why he makes some of his choices, particularly in the final third of the novel.

With so much of the focus falling on Eyliffe and his actions, it will likely not be surprising that few other characters get much attention. Of those that do feature, Madeline is probably granted the most space but I did not feel we really got to know her. She is less important as a character in her own right than she is as an influence on our murderer and indeed she is written out of much of the second half of the novel.

One character who does make a big impression is the young law clerk Veede who lives in the same building as Eyliffe and has decided that he will study criminology in the hopes of finding his boss’ killer. Keep in mind that while a police investigation does take place in this novel, in fact featuring Wallis’ series detective, almost all of that sleuthing takes place in the background. This makes Veede the most visible threat to Eyliffe’s safety and because we have little idea what information he has been able to confirm or what he has deduced from it, we cannot know for sure how far along the case against him has become.

When Eyliffe is undone, as all criminals in inverted mysteries inevitably are, it happens quickly. I appreciated the opportunity to pause to consider the evidence and I liked the solution of how he would get caught a lot, feeling that it was tidy, simple and well explained. I also appreciated that there are some aspects of this story that give the book a strong sense of place and time, such as the suggestion that a scientific test might be applied to this case to identify the killer or establish a suspect’s guilty.

Overall, I felt that The Servant of Death was one of the stronger examples of the inverted mystery form I’ve read yet. Wallis creates a memorable killer and I think his reasoning for that person’s actions throughout the novel make sense, even if we might view some of those choices as being bizarrely risky or foolish. It sadly is not in print so if the concept of this one interests you, do keep in mind that it may be tricky or slow to track down. I do think it is worth it however for those that do.