There's an old English music hall song by Will E. Haines, made popular (I think) by the late Gracie Fields, called "He's Dead but He Won't Lie Down!" I came across a YouTube video of her singing the song in a 1932 movie called Looking on the Bright Side. It came to my mind the other day when I was looking for something to bring you all from the Classic Mysteries vault this week. It reminded me, in fact, of a very fine example of an impossible murder story called No Coffin for the Corpse, a 1942 book by stage magician (and co-founder of the Mystery Writers of America) Clayton Rawson. It's about...well, I suppose, someone who's dead but won't lie down. I did an audio review of it several years back on the Classic Mysteries podcast. Here's a transcript of what I had to say about it - as usual, some light editing has been done:
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Regular visitors to this podcast know that I really love a good impossible crime mystery. Give me a locked room, a situation where a murder couldn’t possibly have happened – yet did – and I’m pretty well hooked. So let me present another example of the impossible crime. Here’s a man, a would-be blackmailer, killed before witnesses – but the man who did the killing won’t call police. And because he is very rich and very powerful, the witnesses help the man bury his victim in a nearby cemetery. And that’s when the real fun starts: for it appears that the victim isn’t going to lie peacefully in his grave. Ghosts appear and disappear and even turn up in photographs. Witnesses can swear that they saw a ghost toss valuable vases around when nobody is near enough to touch them. And there is, ultimately, a murder, which – by all appearances – must have been committed by the ghost, who then, again according to witnesses, must have managed to get out of a locked and bolted room, perhaps by walking through walls. It certainly didn’t make the police officer in charge, Lieutenant Flint, very happy. So it was up to a professional magician – the Great Merlini – to figure out the truth about what happened – and, most importantly, how. And there in a nutshell you have No Coffin for the Corpse, by Clayton Rawson.
Rawson was one of the four founding members of the Mystery Writers of America. He was also a professional magician, an illusionist, and he put a lot of his knowledge about the tricks of the magic trade into his four novels about a magician named The Great Merlini. The last of those four – and arguably the best of them– was No Coffin for the Corpse, which was published in 1942. It has a delicious plot, with plenty of apparent impossibilities for the reader to figure out.
The story is told primarily through the eyes of Ross Harte, a young journalist who has written a series of newspaper articles about the apparent wrongdoing of Dudley Wolff, the hot-tempered owner of a munitions factory. This was hardly likely to make Wolff harbor friendly feelings towards the journalist. And when Ross Harte proceeded to fall in love with Wolff’s daughter, predictable fireworks erupted, which ended with Harte being quite firmly made unwelcome at the Wolff estate.
What Harte doesn’t know – and the reader is given an advantage over the narrator here – is that on the same night the journalist was kicked off the estate, someone appeared at Wolff’s mansion and tried to blackmail the industrialist. Quite predictably, Wolff punched the would be blackmailer – who fell to the floor, hitting his head. A doctor on the scene pronounced him dead.
But rather than calling the police – which would have meant publicity that Wolff felt he could ill afford – the magnate insisted on forcing his aides and associates to take the body of the would-be blackmailer to a nearby disused cemetery – and bury it there.
In the meantime, Ross Harte has dropped in on his old friend, the magician known as the Great Merlini, who is putting together a new show. I won’t try to follow all the twists in the plot at this point, but suffice to say that Merlini and Harte wind up out at the Wolff estate – where they find the industrialist clearly upset and frightened. He, and members of his family, have been seeing a ghost – a ghost whom Wolff recognizes as the man he killed – who has apparently been materializing in spite of the sophisticated alarm system in the heavily secured house. Wolff’s daughter, one of the witnesses, remembers it this way:
“It stood there looking down at us, watching very quietly as if it had been there for a long time. I cried out, I think, and Father, who had been examining the torn pages, dropped them. He stood in front of me and I saw his face as he turned. It was as if something had struck him a violent physical blow…
“And then, quickly, the figure moved. The upper hall, even in the daytime, is shadowy and dark. It seemed to melt back into it. And, just as it vanished, the doorbell rang.”
A terrifying image, to be sure. And that ghost appears to have the power to cause unexplainable phenomena – such as a vase tipping and falling and breaking when nobody is near it (and, no, nobody has used a black thread to tip it over). The ghost even shows up in a photo = with the background behind the ghost clearly visible through the image of the ghost itself.
And just when things become extremely complicated…there is a murder. And, for that matter, our narrator Ross Harte is nearly murdered. And the circumstances are such that it certainly appears a ghost must have been responsible, because it somehow managed to shoot its victim in front of witnesses and then disappear out of a locked room.
Still with me? It will get more complicated. As Harte tells us,
“What we all needed at that moment more than anything else was a week or two in bed in a quiet secluded sanitarium with no visitors allowed.”
The police, of course, having finally been called in to deal with the murder, are not at all happy when they learn about that earlier death. Poor Lieutenant Flint winds up suspecting just about everyone in turn. It is only when Merlini is able to explain who the ghost really is…and how it got in and out of those locked rooms…that the nightmare is resolved. And be advised that there are so many twists, plots and counter-plots that the reader is likely to reach the ending feeling somewhat dazed.
A good impossible crime story relies heavily on misdirection, just as the stage act of a great illusionist uses the same techniques. That’s one reason why I enjoy the character of Merlini and the writing of Rawson. Happily, the Mysterious Press is now offering all of Rawson’s books in ebook formats [Ed.Note: Still available as of 3/27/2020], so they are once again available to mystery lovers. I was certainly aware that I was being led down the wrong path several times in this book – but I still wound up being surprised by some of the final twists of the story. Clayton Rawson’s No Coffin for the Corpse is a very good, solid impossible crime mystery which will provide readers with some assurance that, in the end, nothing is impossible.
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You can listen to my complete audio review by clicking here.
Next: Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers.