Charles Ardai, The Good-Neighbor Policy: A Double-Cross in Double Dactyls (Midsummer Night’s Press 2007)

 

            The plot owes a little to Rear Window, the Hitchcock movie based on a Cornell Woolrich short story, with an invalid, Perseus Algernon, who watches his neighbors’ window through binoculars. But here the invalid sees a shooting. Three men, apparently gangsters, are sent to kill a couple who are in the Federal Witness Protection Program. The three gangsters and the husband are killed, but the wife survives. Is she telling the truth about how it happened? Adrian Hennessy, the Deputy Coroner, takes advantage of the fact that his chief, Captain Mahoney, is off fishing. Hennessy investigates the case himself. The plot thickens when Algernon, the only witness, dies.

            It’s no accident that the names Perseus Algernon and Adrian Hennessy as well as phrases such as “Deputy Coroner” and “witness protection plan,” have the same metrical beat, because The Good-Neighbor Policy, as the subtitle says, is a mystery written in the poetic form of the double dactyl. A dactyl is a three syllable poetic unit with the emphasis on the first syllable, like the name Anthony or the word homicide. The double dactyl poem, invented by the two American poets Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, consists of eight lines, starting with a nonsense word composed of two dactyls, like pocketa-pocketa or higgledy-piggledy. It also contains a name which is a double dactyl, and at least one line that is a single, double-dactyl word. Its fourth and eighth lines, which are shortened to one dactyl and a single additional syllable, rhyme.

Ardai does not follow the form strictly. Here is one of his double dactyls:

Melanie Gregg is a

Beautiful specimen;

When they moved in she caught

Algernon’s eye.

Infatuatedly,

Algernon’s ogled her,

Watching his neighbor’s sweet

Wife on the sly.

Naturally, Ardai can’t keep generating these complicated verses forever, and The Good-Neighbor Policy is only about thirty pages long.  But at whatever length, it is the only murder mystery I know of that’s in verse.

            Charles Ardai has written other mysteries, though this is the first one in poetic verse. He used the pen name Richard Aleas for his first two mystery novels, Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence.  He won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for a short story he published in 2007. Ardai’s specialty is a genre that might best be called retro noir, an imitation of the hardboiled pulp fiction of the fifties, sometimes even set in the fifties. You can find other examples by looking up the publishing house he founded, Hard Case Crime, which has also published books by Lawrence Block, Stephen King, and Donald Westlake.