UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Peter Dickinson, The Yellow Room Conspiracy (1994)

            When I was twenty years old, I briefly met Mandy Rice-Davies, who was performing a quite chaste act in an Istanbul night club. Between sets I introduced myself and we chatted for a couple of minutes. I didn’t mention the Profumo affair of the previous year—that would have been too gauche even for me and even at that age. The books and the movie about the Profumo scandal made over the next decades were trash that failed in capturing any real interest in the story. But in 1994, Peter Dickinson wrote a book called The Yellow Room Conspiracy which transcended—even though it was obviously inspired by—the sordid British government scandal of the Foreign Office secretary John Profumo sharing a mistress with a Russian military attaché, call girls hired to service rich businessmen and politicians, the shady Dr. Stephen Ward and his stable of girls for hire, and so on. 

            Peter Dickinson is an author whose books are often mentioned as among the top mysteries of the twentieth century, especially The Poison Oracle and The Glass-sided Ants’ Nest. But his fifty books are in a variety of genres, including children’s stories, and he doesn’t repeat himself. The Yellow Room Conspiracy is another unique production.  Dickinson recognizes that the interest of the story is not with the principals, and so he concentrates on the foreign secretary’s beautiful wife, whom he calls Lucy, and a man—he calls him Paul—who was at the very fringes of the scandal. Paul has loved Lucy since he first met her (and her four sisters) at their huge, ramshackle country house. The sisters’ attachment to the house, called Blatchards, and their bond with each other become active characters in the book.

            Paul and Lucy tell the story in alternating chapters.  Both are old and near death, and each thinks, until they urge one another to get the story down on tape and paper, that the other had something to do with the death of the man who first brought them together. This man, who was married to another of the sisters, died at Blatchards of gas poisoning just before the explosion that destroyed the house.

            The death at Blatchards is only one small part of the mystery surrounding these characters, a mystery that goes back to spy activities during the war and includes, over the decades, not only the five sisters but also nine men who were husbands or lovers of the five. The death at Blatchards, though it’s not definitively solved by the combined accounts of Paul and Lucy, is illuminated enough to let readers confirm their own guesses—or to decide they’ve been wrong. This slight open-endedness is one of many features making The Yellow Room Conspiracy unique.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903)

           Childers’s is the most important literary voice in the movement to wake up England’s sleeping military preparedness around the turn of the century, well before the First World War.

            Carruthers the narrator, fashionable, successful and complacent, has missed the fall shooting season and out of boredom accepts the invitation of his old college friend Davies to join him in a yachting and duck-shooting expedition in the Baltic. Carruthers meets Davies in Flensburg and before long Davies reveals that he really wants to cruise the Frisian Islands in the North Sea because he is convinced the Germans are up to something among the little sand channels there. What convinces him is that when he spends some time with Dolman, a supposed German, and his pretty daughter, he begins to suspect that the German is really an Englishman and a spy for the Germans, which is confirmed for him when Dolman tries to kill him by leading him into a labyrinth of sand channels in a storm off Kiel.

            Davies is smitten by Dolman’s daughter and convinced she is innocent of her father’s espionage. Davies and Carruthers find that the Germans are concealing their activities with a supposed treasure salvage operation. Carruthers eavesdrops at the site of the salvage operation and hears enough of the Germans’ coded information to work out later a network of sandy channels emanating from seven Frisian and German ports, which have a semicircle of rail lines feeding to them on the mainland. Carruthers returns briefly to England to find out more about Dolman. Coming back, he gets on board a tug as it runs a test invasion with a coal lighter instead of a troop carrier in tow.

            Carruthers and Davies confront Dolman with their knowledge and promise him immunity in England. He and Clara, the daughter, go with Carruthers and Davies, but on the way, Dolman jumps overboard when no one is looking; he is apparently the author of the German invasion plan.

            The book makes it onto many lists of important crime novels and mysteries of historical significance. Occasionally the technicalities of sailing a small ocean-going boat and navigating the channels in the sands while keeping track of the tides dulls the suspense, but the book is still very readable.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

           The book with the most legitimate claim to being called the first English murder mystery novel is Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It also has a good claim to being called the greatest mystery, because we don’t know how it turned out, and we never will. Dickens wrote only half of it, and died just before completing the sixth monthly installment. Yet the book, incomplete as it is, still is read with interest today.

            Briefly, the plot is as follows. John Jasper, the choirmaster at Cloisterham Cathedral, is an opium addict. He seems to love his young nephew, Edwin Drood, but in fact plots to kill him because Jasper loves Drood’s fiancée Rosa. Jasper’s plan is to lay the blame at the door of an orphan pupil of one of the Cathedral’s priests, a young man who has shown that he has a hot temper and also an interest in Drood’s fiancée. On Christmas Eve, after dining with his uncle and the young man just mentioned, Drood disappears. There is no arrest but much suspicion in Cloisterham. A stranger, obviously a detective, begins to poke around the town. He finds some important clues, and there the action ends.  The mystery rests not only in the incompleteness of the text, but in its indeterminateness. Did Jasper indeed do away with Drood, as the reader suspects and as Dickens’s publisher said was the author’s intention; or did the author decide to go in another direction with, perhaps, Drood’s surprise reappearance later? And is the detective, as many readers have suspected, in disguise and a character earlier introduced in the book—perhaps a principal such as the suspected young man or even Drood himself?       

            When we speak of mysteries as a genre of popular fiction, we are talking about books in which the mystery is solved. With Drood we have a true mystery, and many readers have enjoyed the challenge of attempting to fathom the mind of the dead author. Of course, the book also has the usual variety of Dickensian types and eccentrics. There is also what I would call an uncommon point of view about the nature of crime. Dickens does not believe, as, for example,  Dostoyevsky does, that the criminal mind is interesting because it is so like our own—in fact is our own, if circumstances are right.  He thinks it is a "horrible wonder apart" from our own.  What could an innocent person “know of the criminal intellect," Dickens writes, "which its own professed students perpetually misread, because they persist in trying to reconcile it with the average intellect of average men, instead of identifying it as a horrible wonder apart?"