Enter the Murderer

Set in the world of the theatre, Derek Smith’s Come to Paddington Fair brings back Algy Lawrence as well as his policeman sidekick, Chief Inspector Steve Castle, from Whistle up the Devil. Their involvement in the story begins innocuously enough, as Castle has received a pair of tickets to the theatre. But included with the tickets was a mysterious message that simply reads: “Come to Paddington Fair.” The meaning of the message is not immediately apparent, but its sinister undertones become quite clear when the play’s leading lady is killed onstage, during a climactic scene in which her character was shot.

Fortunately, with two detectives in the audience, the investigation is poised to begin on the right foot, and indeed, a suspect is apprehended almost immediately! But, as the investigation proceeds, suspect after suspect is cleared, and it slowly begins to appear impossible for anyone to have committed the crime! Thus, Come to Paddington Fair establishes itself firmly as a sort of spiritual sequel to Whistle up the Devil. Instead of a conventional locked room mystery, Smith gives his readers an impossible crime in the vein of “nobody could have committed the murder… and yet it happened!”

Devil Take the Hindmost

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

— The Ghost, Hamlet (Act I, scene v)

When I recently read Roland Lacourbe’s book on John Dickson Carr, Scribe du miracle, I was particularly interested by a section of the book devoted to various John Dickson Carr homages, parodies, etc. One of these was described in particularly glowing terms: Whistle up the Devil by Derek Smith. I had heard of this book and was intrigued, and Lacourbe’s brief comment was the one that finally sold me on the book. Since brevity is the soul of wit, I will be brief: Whistle up the Devil has got to be one of the most fiendishly ingenious impossible crime novels ever written, period.

It starts off with the best trappings of a fine John Dickson Carr novel. Our protagonist is one Algy Lawrence, a young, good-natured, and somewhat naïve young man. “He could never hope to handle routine work with the quiet excellence which is the hallmark of the professional; but he could tackle the bizarre and the fantastic with expert skill.” One morning, he gets a call from his good friend, Chief Inspector Steve Castle. Steve has got a tantalising problem for him— no, nobody has been killed yet… but it just might happen…