Locked Room Library #5: THROUGH THE WALLS (1937)

As I mentioned in the masterpost for this blogging endeavour, French mystery authors are a bit of a lacuna in my mystery knowledge. Noël Vindry is one such author, a mystery novelist who wrote a string of meticulously fair-play "puzzle novels" in the 30s and 40s before quitting the genre, and is apparently almost as forgotten in French as he is in English. Thankfully, I don't have to lean on my shoddy French skills, as John Pugmire translated several of his best works into English through Locked Room International, including Through the Walls.

The Locked Room: 

A family is menaced by a mysterious intruder who leaves the house's upstairs without having entered, can kill in locked bedrooms and in broad daylight while facing the victim, and vanish in plain sight.

The Story:

Through the Walls leans towards the far extreme of the puzzle plot, which is to say, there's vastly more puzzle than plot.

Petty bureaucrat Sertat comes to Police Commissaire Maubritaine looking for help with a nighttime intruder, who he suggests might be from a smuggling gang, looking to psychologically terrorize him into disclosing rival gang secrets he's not at liberty to reveal. Maubritaine helps him stake out the upper floor of the house, and even lays eyes on the intruder, only for him to elude them during a Scooby Doo-style chase sequence through the connecting bedrooms and bathrooms. Following this, each member of the family is attacked, either in a room no one could enter, or that no one could enter or leave without being seen.

What makes all of this even more baffling is that, while Maubritaine is able to make some sensible logical deductions about who would have the means or motive to do any one of the murders, none of the involved parties has the motive to do all of them--that, or they're already dead or otherwise out-of-commission by the time more incidents take place. "I-I'm the murderer... it could only be me..." Maubritaine finally declares, unable to find a solution. At the end of his wits, he comes to M. Allou, Vindry's magistrate-detective, to attempt to make sense of the sequence of events.

The action is entirely recounted events that Maubritaine is conveying after the fact to M. Allou, which had the effect of making it feel rather removed. I don't think I ever got over the feeling that "this is a flashback", when that flashback comprises 90% or more of the book. Allou's methodology is to find "a theory which fits all the facts, then investigating anew, until the theory is proved or disproved." But despite being a magistrate he doesn't end up investigating at all, and finds the solution speedily in the final chapter through a series of logical deductions.

The LRI translation of this book is accompanied by some essays/interviews by Vindry, and those were quite interesting. Vindry shares my long-held theory that detective fiction doesn't tend towards murder because its focus is police, or crime, or the human heart, or any of that. Rather, the murder provides the stakes and drama to carry a highly technical, rational puzzle. "Action dazzles the reader," Vindry says. In fact, the real focus of the detective novel (or "puzzle novel") is "the discovery of the criminal," or even the act of "discovery" itself:

Its essence is a mysterious fact that has to be explained naturally; the criminal hides his activities and the detective tries to discover them; their conflicts provide convenient situations: the "givens" of the problem. That's it.

I found it equally interesting that the reason Vindry eventually stopped writing mysteries--that "since [switching genres], I no longer play with my characters, I collaborate with them and I live with them." The contrast of "playing" with characters rather than writing them as living people is definitely on display here. The cast members are the bare minimum necessary for conveying stakes and making the solution operable, but they are primarily parts in a mechanism. One of the central players (the daughter) never has any lines or physically appears in the story, embedded or otherwise.

Solution Satisfaction Rating:

Through the Walls strongly reminded me of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, and not just due to a shared literary heritage. The solution to the central mystery is certainly "natural" but not all that interesting. It's a fair solution, simple, and psychologically sound, but in the broad strokes, it's also one that could apply to a great many mysteries, and there's a reason it isn't often done. Detective stories are similar to magic shows, except that they have the unenviable task of making the real solution seem equally astonishing. Here, it has that slightly deflating "oh... really?" quality of an explained trick. It's all very tight, but a bit of a damp squib.

I was going to propose that I'd like to see an alternate solution to the same setup, but realized that in fact, there already is one, at least for the chase sequence: "The Dashing Joker" by Taku Ashibe (tl. Yuko Shimada in EQMM September/October 2020).