Can you kill someone simply by cursing them?
On this blog, I have written a number of posts in the past about an impossible-crime locked-room mystery called Rim of the Pit, by Hake Talbot. Among mystery readers and critics who enjoy such mysteries, it is considered to be among the best of the best. Its author, Hake Talbot, wrote only two mystery novels, of which Rim of the Pit was the second. I have finally read Talbot's first novel, The Hangman's Handyman, written two years before Rim of the Pit, in 1942, and it is now available from Ramble House publishers and other sources. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
The Hangman's Handyman begins with gambler Rogan Kincaid arriving at a lonely house on a remote island off the Carolina coast known as the Kraken. He is one of the guests at what is supposed to be a dinner party at the home of a casual acquaintance, Jack Frant, who owns the island. Kincaid finds a young woman wandering in the front hall who apparently fainted during dinner and woke up to find herself alone in her room – with no idea what caused her to faint or the whereabouts of the other guests. Bit by bit, she recovers, as those guests begin to reappear, and she soon learns that she fainted out of sheer terror: their host, she says, is dead – killed quite literally by a curse, words spoken by the victim’s half-brother, an English lord in fact named Evan Tethryn. So Rogan hears the story of a family curse, and of how Jack Frant tormented his half-brother Evan, who believed that he, Evan, had the power to cast that curse. Then…well, here’s how another guest at this very peculiar party, Sue Makepeace, describes what happened, as Frant continued to torment his brother about the curse:
“He said…” Sue gulped. “’By God, you’ve asked for it and here it is. Od rot you, Jack! Od rot you!’”
The girl took a deep breath and shuddered. She was silent for so long that Rogan asked, “What happened then?”
“Mr. Frant died.”
Kincaid stared at her. “But surely there must have been something else?”
Evan laughed harshly. “There wasn’t anything else. My brother…'did thereupon fall down and was found to be dead.’”
Rogan had no answer for that. There was none.
And the victim's body - in the few hours since all this took place - apparently has almost completely decomposed. Od rot you indeed...
It's quite a story - not as sharp, perhaps, as Rim of the Pit, some loose ends and coincidences and such - but still very much worth reading, packed with atmosphere, with touches of genuine horror and some grim humor. Recommended for lovers of "impossible" crime, nightmarish scenarios, and some very powerful writing.
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