The Tragedy of Y

"Well, murder or no murder, all I can say is--thank God for the Mad Hatters!"

That's a reporter who's just been berating Inspector Thumm.

A couple of days before a trawler had fished up York Hatter's body in the New York Harbor. He'd disappeared from his house on Washington Square six weeks before, and from the condition of the corpse--fingers too battered for a fingerprint, face cut up beyond recognition--it seemed he'd been in the water the whole time. The identification was made from the clothes--and a suicide note on the body, in York Hatter's handwriting.

At this point, the dedicated mystery reader (and one anonymous New York reporter) will go, hunh, sure.

Still Thumm, one of New York's finest, unhappily lets it go as suicide until there's a clear murder attempt a month later at the Hatter household. Then he calls in Drury Lane, retired actor and amateur detective who had solved the earlier Tragedy of X. 

There are two more murders to come and one attempted before Drury Lane unwillingly reveals the culprit.

This has the clever conceit that there's a witness, Laura Campion, in the room when the first murder is committed, only she's blind, deaf, and dumb. What could she have perceived? How can she communicate it? 

I enjoyed this, and it shows up on lists of best mysteries, but it isn't as good as The Tragedy of X. I knew from Laura Campion's clue who had done it, and so the final explanation went on too long for me. Still fun! It's recently been reissued (with the cover shown) by Penzler Publishing as an American Mystery Classic.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1932). Spooky House. 

Douglas Dunn (#poetry)

 

Chateau d'If

Her photographs of white embrasures glow

Against impossible blue, the sea and sky

Contemptuous of how men fortify

The State's iniquity. I do not know

Exactly all we talked about or did.

I was wearing my blue jacket, my off-white

French slacks. She posed me as a blue vignette--

"Lean on these battlements, then turn your head."

I can't remember, but I can't forget

Our outing to the Chateau d'If, kept now

In these rectangles of a printed light,

Other than that she liked the day, and how

She said she'd read that book of martyrdom.

"Let's stay a while, then take the last boat home."

 

-Douglas Dunn

 

Douglas Dunn was a Scottish poet who died last Friday at the age of 83. I've featured him once before on the blog. This is from his book Elegies, which came out in 1985 and won the Whitbread Prize. The elegies were for his first wife Lesley Balfour Dunn, who died of cancer at the age of 37. She was an artist (not just photography--"infallible in art//That pleased her--water, oil, or lithograph" says another poem.)

 

Looking at an old photograph led Dunn to write this sonnet about a moment in their past. There are a number of other sonnets in the volume, though not all. Still most use some formal structure.

 

Chateau d'If is, of course, the prison/fortress in Marseilles' bay, where Edmond Dantes is sent early in The Count of Monte Cristo. Like Alcatraz, you can take a boat out to visit. 

 

 

 

It's only at the Chateau d'If moment that The Count of Monte Cristo is a book of martyrdom, but that suits the mood and the moment of the poem.

Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World (#1949Club)

"...this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering..."

Ti Noël is a slave on a plantation in Haiti twenty years before the Haitian Revolution. Due to his expertise in horses, he goes with his master to the town to select a new breeding stallion for the farm. There he sees wax heads in a barber shop representing the king and other nobility in a barber shop; next door he sees similarly garlanded wax heads of pigs at the butcher's shop. They look the same to him.

In the next chapter Ti Noël is leading the horse at the mill and his fellow slave Macandal is feeding in the sugar cane when Macandal's arm is caught between the millstones. Ti Noël stops the horse at once and cuts the traces, allowing him turn the stones back, but it's too late: there's nothing to be done but amputate.

But the symbolic violence of the first chapter and the accidental violence of the second are only precursors to real deliberate violence. Macandal leads an early and unsuccessful revolt; he is burned at the stake in 1758. Ti Noél later meets Bouckman, who brings news of the French Revolution, and who helps start what will be the successful Haitian revolution, though Bouckman himself is killed by French troops in 1791.

Alejo Carpentier was born in 1904 in Switzerland to a French father and a Russian mother, but the family moved to Cuba shortly after his birth where he was mostly raised. In 1927 he escaped Cuba after protesting the dicatorial government of the time, and settled in France. In 1939 he returned to Cuba. In 1943 he made a trip to Haiti where he saw the sites described in his novel. Again after the war he felt it safer to leave Cuba and settled in Venezuela until the Cuban Revolution when he returned once again. In 1966 Castro appointed him ambassador to France. In 1977 he won the Cervantes prize; he died in 1980.

During Carpentier's trip to Haiti, he saw what he named 'lo real maravilloso', the 'marvelous real' in the world, and encorporated it in this, his second novel. It's often considered a precursor to magical realism, and it does seem clear to me that Garcia Marquez was in fact reading Carpentier. One aspect of the marvelous real for Carpentier is voudou: we as readers don't doubt (mostly) that Macandal was burned at the stake, but we're teased, at least for a bit, with the thought that he transformed himself into something that could fly away, and this was widely believed at the time.

The Haitian Revolution was successful, resulting in the second independent country in the New World, but still maybe it was not a success. 

Ti Noël's owner flees the revolution for Cuba, but once there falls apart financially and psychologically and loses Ti Noël while gambling. Ti Noël eventually wins his freedom and decides to return to Haiti, where he is immediately re-enslaved by Henri Christophe, the black king of half of Haiti. Now an old man, Ti Noël is forced to carry bricks to a mountain top to build the Citadel Laferrière: 

 

The kingdom of Henri Christophe does not last and finally Ti Noël is free, but he does not live long himself to enjoy that freedom.

Macandal, Bouckman, Henri Christophe (I used the spellings given by Carpentier--spelling as you can imagine for the time, was not well-defined) are all historical figures. I had not realized that Pauline Bonaparte (Napoleon's younger sister) was in Haiti during their Revolution, but at the time (1802) she was the wife of Leclerc, the French general who was tasked by Napoleon with re-enslaving the Haitians. She and her husband both appear. 

The Kingdom of this World is novella lengath, and lyrically written, though still easy to read--I read it in a day in a translation by Harriet de Onís. There is apparently another later translation. The edition I read includes a useful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, the Haitian novelist and memoirist. I've read one other novel by Carpentier, The Chase, which I enjoyed, but this I thought a masterpiece. 

"In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasumch as there is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World."

It's the week of the 1949 Club! Hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. I have hopes of reading a second before the end of the week. If I'm very ambitious, I might reread one of (both great!) Nelson Algren's The Man With The Golden Arm or Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails.