Solange Fontaine is a Parisian, the
daughter of a French forensic scientist and an English mother, who “has been
gifted by nature with an extra spiritual sense that warned her of evil.”
Because of this sense and with her father’s scientific methods, she has become
a detective who is sought out by people or situations involving crime, and she
uses the resources her father can command, both technical and informational, to
help her with her cases.
“The Pedlar” is the first and
shortest of five stories in this collection. The title describes a man Solange
saw outside the English cottage she’s occupying for the summer, who awakened
her sense of evil. Later she sees the same face in the fiancé of a young woman
she’s just met. Her father, also vacationing in England, obtains the fiancé’s
real name and Solange traces him to a cottage he shut up after murdering his
wife and two children and ineffectually trying to bury them under the
hearthstone. The pedlar pleaded that she buy his Vaseline, “for Christ’s sake.”
The governor of an English prison she visits makes a remark about the Vaseline
treatment the rope gets between executions, and Solange is convinced of a
psychic connection between the two events.
Back in England at the invitation of
the cottage owner, Isabella Morton, who is now in residence, Solange is told
Isabella’s friend Colonel Evelyn, hopes that Solange can help avoid the
execution of his son Charles, only three days away. Charles has been condemned
for shooting his employer, Nigel Bennett, in a dispute over the gamekeeper’s
daughter, Janice Ames. In fact, Charles had no interest in Janice other than to
protect her from Nigel, who is a bounder. But Solange finds Janice a knowing
girl in little need of protection, and solves the case, at the risk of her
life, by investigating Janice’s current and former lovers. As she speeds toward
the prison to effect “The Reprieve,” she concentrates on Charles, and he has a
dream that the real murderer has confessed.
“The Canary” begins “It was a
favorite axiom with Solange that the best clues to a crime were in the
characters of the people connected with it, and were worth all the burnt
matches, footprints, or even fingerprints in the world.” Compare the attitude
of Philo Vance, Solange’s fictional contemporary: he was prepared to ignore
physical evidence, alibis, and even confessions in favor of the psychology of
the suspects. This axiom of Solange’s is repeated often in the stories, where
we are frequently reminded of Solange’s ability to sense evil, and of her
conviction that she would lose that gift were she to fall in love. Solange
returns in “The Canary” to the “strange, sordid, respectable, depressing world”
of London boarding houses, in which she and her family lived at the beginning
of her father’s scientific career when in England. Septimus Brownlie has died of an overdose of
the calming mixture his wife often injected to help him sleep, and she is the
main suspect. But the wife, younger than her husband, pretty, but as dim as the
bank clerk lover she has taken, seems incapable of the crime. Solange arranges
with the lodger who makes her living as a psychic—who revealed all her tricks
to the young Solange in the past—to have a fraudulent séance in which the wife
is vindicated and Septimus’s unpleasant sister is forced to confess what she
knows. But the real truth is revealed, first by the voice of Septimus speaking
through the psychic, and then by his diary the sister has been concealing.
Solange, a thoroughgoing skeptic as you would expect a French scientist to be, tries
to rationalize what just happened, but her explanation is not very convincing.
The penultimate story is “Lot’s
Wife,” about an ingeniously arranged impersonation, an accidental killing and
its imperfect concealment, and a couple of complicated characters who come
together in marriage.
The final story is “The Black Veil,”
and it takes place in the south of France, where, in the little seaport town of
St. Fructueux, Solange visits her friend Madame Dodinet, who is found
bludgeoned the next morning and her money chest emptied. The Commissaire of
police, finding no clues, enlists the aid of Solange, who goes on her hands and
knees with a magnifying glass, like Sherlock Holmes, and like him delivers a
pithy pronouncement: “The man you want is probably a sailor, and has just come
from Sicily. He is young, has red hair, a short clipped moustache, is
left-handed, and has a cut on that hand.” But we have seen the
observations—scrapings of a candle analyzed and the results sent to Solange’s
father to search out origins, the short red hair she finds next to the money
chest, the wound acquired in forcing the door that drips blood on one side, and so on. When the perpetrator is
found, he reveals a dream about a black veil and his execution. The veil, it
turns out, is used for parricides and matricides, which leads into a long
search of his history and that of Solange’s friend. A further dream reconciles
the miscreant to death; Solange thinks it was his guilty conscience speaking
through the dream, and the lawyer thinks it was the condemned man’s mother’s
message from beyond the grave. “Whichever way it was,” says Solange, “he found
peace, and that’s more than most of us find in this world. I know nothing of
any other.”
This tension between the
psychological and the metaphysical explanation of events occurs often in the
stories. Solange preserves her French scientist’s skepticism, but we have to
admit that there are goings on here, not only Solange’s sixth-sense feeling of
evil, but other events in the stories, that are clearly beyond the normal. This
places these stories in the realm of the occult. Like Mike Grost (https://mikegrost.com/literary.htm),
I’m not fond of detectives finding any help from beyond this world, but like
him also, I have to admit that in these stories “the psychic theme is handled
with delicacy and restraint.” The Solange Stories is listed in Ellery
Queen’s Queen’s Quorum of important short story collections in the
history of detective/mystery fiction.
