The Real Lightbulb Moment of THE LAMP OF GOD (1935)

Originally posted May 10, 2024.

I’ve long maintained that the enduring popularity of murder mysteries has far less to do with the murder than it does with the mystery. To me, at least as far as fair-play detection is concerned, a mystery holds the same appeal as a magic trick (in fact, there have been quite a few detectives, several culprits, and a couple authors who are stage magicians or magic designers, if not actual wizards). Although, that isn’t an exact analogy: with stage magic, audiences want to be baffled, and the cliche is that finding out how a trick was done, in a way that is both mundane and audaciously complicated, invariably leads to disappointment. With a fair-play mystery, on the other hand, it’s desirable for the solution to a baffling trick to be audaciously simple: not “I never saw that coming,” but “I’m kicking myself for not having seen it.” Which brings me to Ellery Queen’s The Lamp of God, which John Dickson Carr included in his list of the ten best detective novels.

Sylvester Mayhew, a paranoid miser, lives alone in a fire-charred eyesore of a Victorian mansion known as the Black House. This is also where he is rumoured to have hidden his money, a fortune in gold. When Mayhew dies while finalizing a new will that leaves everything to his estranged daughter Alice, his solicitor suspects foul play from his in-laws, who live in a smaller house on the property. Ellery is contacted urgently by the solicitor to meet him in picking up the young British heiress and escorting her to the family estate so that nothing untoward can happen either to the girl or the gold before she has a chance to inherit. Staying with the creepy in-laws, Ellery and companions note a number of strange goings-on, including finding that the locks on their doors have been destroyed.

Based on this setup, it seems like the mystery will be determining the location of the missing gold, but Ellery soon discovers a different and even more baffling problem: when the household wakes up, the Black House next door has vanished completely, leaving behind nothing but unblemished snow. It’s a pretty good impossible crime, both in terms of sheer scale (how the hell do you hide a whole house?) and the misdirection leading up to it.

Ellery Queen stories being the fairest of fair play, for better or worse, there is a subtle clue early on which, if you notice it, tells you not only how the house disappeared, but who must have spirited it away. The Lamp of God has been variously published as a short story (originally ‘The House of Haunts’, a rather misleading title), and as a standalone novella. My brick-sized omnibus splits the difference, including it as a novella after Adventures. And some of that length feels a little padded. Sure, it’s impossible, but I don’t think it should have been as impossible for Ellery as he finds it for the length of the bloated third chapter. As I said, there is a clue given early on, and a lot of the back half of the story is just dithering as Ellery fails to recall evidence that he observed with his own eyes. (Incidentally, an episode of Jonathan Creek uses the same premise for an exactly inverse problem.)

But luckily there are a couple of other reveals added into the mix, including what has happened to the gold, and a misdirection about the killer which completely bowled me over when I first read it in high school. Here, I would like to point out why JDC included The Lamp of God on his list of best detective novels, because the house disappearance trick is secondary to the Ellery Queen books’ skill at obscuring the culprit’s identity [1]:

Where Agatha Christie is the Artful Dodger, Ellery Queen is the Confidence Man. He preys on human nature. His trick consists in smoothly getting you to accept some character—in reality the criminal—as a necessary, if humble part of the mechanism. This character must not be dragged in; he must have a right to be where he is.

And that principle is on full display here, in a story with a very limited cast. Misdirection, as I said, what Carr calls “a form of hypnotism”. Even if you identify the impossible crime here, I think that magic trick comes off.

[1] ‘The Grandest Game in the World.’ In Greene, Douglas G. (ed.). The Door to Doom (2nd ed.) pp. 335-336.