Locked Room Library #3: DEATH OF JEZEBEL (1948)

How terribly alone one was, among all one's friends...

Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand is widely regarded by anglophone mystery readers as a top-notch locked room mystery with a devious solution, but it was technically left off the actual Locked Room Library list due to the French translation changing the ending. That only made me more curious to know what all the fuss was about.

Some of the other entries are more properly "impossible crimes" than "sealed rooms", but this is one of the most thoroughly sealed rooms out there.

The Locked Room:

An actress in a medieval pageant is killed onstage: strangled by hand and her body apparently dropped over a balcony by the killer. But the set was locked on the stage side, and the only other exit is in full view of the audience. 

Of course, as Inspector Charlesworth points out, "in sealed room mysteries, the solution is never really anything to do with the room being sealed. The murderer has always gone into the room before it was sealed; and he gets away after it's unsealed." But is that a gauntlet thrown, or a hint?

The Story:

The "Jezebel" of the title is Isabel Drew, a sort of queen bee busybody who would probably be a self-appointed "mom friend" in the modern day. Disapproving of her younger friend Perpetua's loser boyfriend Johnny, she gets Perpetua drunk enough to make out with an older actor, Earl. Johnny sees this, and immediately kills himself, which might be a slight overreaction to dubiously-consensual lip-locking. Seven years later, the three all get involved in a medieval pageant, and all receive murder threats. Perpetua calls in every young woman's uncle, Inspector Cockrill, to keep them safe.

The story was solid (apart from one eye-rollingly silly transphobic plot point that annoyed me). Most of the characters are pretty awful, but Brand writes them with surprising pathos. You might expect Isabel to go onstage despite the threats and be punished for tempting fate, but she's actually quite scared, and simply doesn't feel like she has a choice. Perpetua is probably the most sympathetic, consumed by crushing guilt and depression. "Johnny is dead and at peace," she narrates, "and I am dead and not at peace. That's the only difference." You even feel a little sorry (very little) for Earl, the aging, washed-up rake who's being blackmailed for money he doesn't have.

Brand can also be wicked funny when she wants to be. For example, when Cockrill points out the similarity of the interrupted stage performance to the biblical death of Jezebel—er, almost:

'And of course the horse did not tread on her,' said Brian.

'No,' said Cockie. He thought about it. 'They say they never will.'

Sergeant Bedd's face fell a little.

'And there was no blood,' he acknowledged. And added reluctantly: 'And no dogs.'

'And no eunuchs,' said Charlesworth.

Much of the humour stems from the rivalry between Cockrill and Charlesworth, which begins in this book and continues on in later instalments. They wage war by trading theories, but it's a truly baffling problem, even for someone as full of himself as "Cockie". Much is made of the fact that there was a parade of knights on the stage whose faces were obscured, and whether there was any sort of Kansas City shuffle with who played who, but there's still the sticking point that they were all in full view of Cockrill at the time. Johnny also had a twin, and a family that was in British-occupied Malaysia at the time of the war, and various other cast members seem to have known Johnny in Malaysia. But none of these connections quite fit.

The suspicion ball really ping-pongs around, until, even if you do guess the correct person, you're left feeling completely uncertain of your theory. Not that you should be trying to solve it through culprit vibes. "That was the odd part—that I got the murderer first, and everything seemed to be working in round that," says Charlesworth at one point. "Always fatal," Cockie admonishes him.

By my count, the two detectives (and a few suspects) throw out a total of SEVEN false solutions which could each be passable novels. I'm always impressed when Brand pulls this off. And speaking of things she pulls off...

Solution Satisfaction Rating:

They weren't kidding. I began to see the shape of it around the same time Cockrill did, but there was one particular element of the murder where I hadn't quite made the connection, whose reveal surprised me so much that I shouted "Oh my god," and then had to explain to my wife the insanity I had just read. (ROT13: V chg gbtrgure gung gur juvgr xavtug, jubfr snpr jnf frra, pbhyq or n pregnva crefba, ohg abg dhvgr yvxr gung…) "That's actually pretty awesome," she said.

I'm surprised that the ending would have been mistranslated due to a misunderstanding, and have been trying to figure out what about the setup there is to misunderstand. Maybe, like me, they didn't follow gur cbfvgvbavat bs gur ubefr? Be creuncf gur checbfr bs gur gjb ebcrf tbg ybfg va gur fuhssyr? Given the number of false solutions, I suppose you could just throw up your hands. Then again, I wonder if it wasn't a lack of comprehension so much as finding the solution a bit outlandish.

Love that cover, by the way.