I love a really well-done "impossible crime" mystery - the kind that John Dickson Carr in particular wrote over the course of his career. The kind of mystery that doesn't seem to have any possible solution that doesn't involve the supernatural. But in the best of them, the terrifying atmosphere and seemingly impossible mysteries will ultimately be resolved, and you'll find that the author has quite neatly pulled the rug out from under you and your expectations. While Carr was the acknowledged master of the locked room/impossible crime genre, there is one other book by one other author that deserves comparison with Carr at his best. The book is Rim of the Pit, a 1944 classic by Hake Talbot, and it's still available. Here's a text version of the audio review I did of Rim of the Pit on the Classic Mysteries podcast several years ago - somewhat edited for clarity:
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“I came up here to make a dead man change his mind.”
That’s the first line of a pretty amazing book – an impossible crime story by an author I had never read before. It’s a story that veers right along the edge between the supernatural and the stage illusion, the kind of tension at the heart of some of the very best locked room mysteries. The book is Rim of the Pit, by Hake Talbot.
Hake Talbot was the pen name of a stage magician named Henning Nelms. He only wrote two mysteries, one of which, Rim of the Pit, is absolutely dazzling. Perhaps it was because of Talbot’s background as a magician that he is so well able to force his audience to suspend disbelief. The reader is going to be swamped with impossibilities – with situations which, it would seem, could only have been the result of supernatural forces. But this is a mystery, not a ghost story.
The central character, and detective figure, is a man named Rogan Kincaid, who has been invited to a lonely lodge somewhere in the wilderness of northern New England, close to the Canadian border. The man who invited him there, Luke Latham, is the man who makes that initial statement which I found so startling: "I came up here to make a dead man change his mind." He means that literally. Latham and his business partner, Frank Ogden, own a logging company. For reasons too complex to explain here, they believe that the only way they will be able to stay in business is by holding a séance to get permission from a long-dead partner to expand their logging interests. Both men, obviously, are believers in spiritualism, and there will be eerie scenes of séances adding to the general atmosphere of brooding and terror.
Because what happens – or appears to happen – at that séance is that they are successful in bringing back their dead partner, only to discover that he has become an evil and utterly malevolent spirit. From that point on, we are treated to apparent cases of possession, the appearance of a flying monster known as a wendego, and a couple of bloody murders. Add in a blinding snowstorm that – naturally – isolates the small group of characters and you have the elements of a fine thriller.
But I assure you that this is not necessarily a ghost story. It is, instead, an ingenious plot in which there are impossibilities galore: there are trails of footprints that appear to start and end in the middle of fields of unbroken snow. There are ancient curses, escapes from locked rooms, that terrifying flying…thing.
But can there be a non-supernatural explanation? The atmosphere of terror, of ghosts and evil spirits, of things that appear to be totally impossible – that atmosphere is created and maintained in this book as well as I have ever seen it done. In atmosphere, it rivals the very best of John Dickson Carr. As a matter of fact, there are enough similarities at some points to make it appear that Talbot must have been paying some homage to Carr. In Carr’s The Three Coffins, for example, a central character is named Professor Grimaud. In Rim of the Pit, the long-dead partner is named Grimaud as well. Coincidence? Possibly. But just as Carr, in his best books, could create that atmosphere of being caught up in the supernatural…while providing the reader with fair clues about what really happened…so we see very much the same kind of thing in Talbot’s book. For there will be clues. Spiritualism, mediums and séances were very popular, both in England and in the United States, for a very long time, and the reader will be shown some of the ways in which those events could be manipulated. One of the characters in Rim of the Pit is a man who has been a stage magician, and – without giving away any real secrets – he is instrumental in helping the reader (and, of course, the other characters) figure out what is really going on, providing some insight into the ways in which stage magicians are able to trick their audiences. For behind all the supernatural trappings, there may be a human hand at work.
I’m trying to avoid giving too much away, for this wonderful book is filled with mystery and surprises, and the atmosphere of horror plays a significant part in misleading the reader and pointing away from the eventual solution.
One other note: according to Wikipedia, a poll of mystery experts taken in 1981 listed John Dickson Carr’s The Three Coffins – also known as The Hollow Man – as the best locked room mystery ever written. I have frequently said that I agree with that judgment. But the same poll of experts found Hake Talbot’s Rim of the Pit was number two on their list – and I think that could very well be true. Yes, it’s that good. Ramble House has reissued Rim of the Pit, complete with a back-cover map (taken from the old Dell Mapbook version of the book) that illustrates the scene of the crime and some of the impossible footprint trails and other puzzles. If you enjoy impossible crimes with fascinating characters and terrifying atmospherics, by all means you must read this book. Frankly, I couldn’t put it down.
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To listen to the original version of this review, you can click here.
Next: Three Witnesses, three Nero Wolfe novellas by Rex Stout.
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