This
is Friday and that means Friday’s Forgotten Books. Patrick Ohl returns today
and the rest of the suggestions can be found over at Patti’s blog.
Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet were British
authors who sometimes worked together but sometimes worked separately. I really
can’t say much more about them. Teilhet is known among Golden Age enthusiasts
as the author of The Talking Sparrow
Murders (which I’ve yet to read). Although written in 1934, it had a strong
and unrepentant anti-Nazi stance, at a time when the Nazis’ rise to power
didn’t seem like an extraordinary issue. After all, Germany had been so
unstable it seemed like Hitler was just the latest in a long string of leaders.
But when 1940 rolled along, times obviously
changed— in September of 1939, Hitler precipitated World War II by invading
Poland, and before you knew it, all of Europe was engaged in warfare. And it
was in 1940 that Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet released The Broken Face Murders, being the fourth adventure of the Baron Franz
von Kaz, a comic detective in the tradition of John Dickson Carr’s Sir Henry
Merrivale.
Only the Baron’s adventure is hardly a
comic one. Perhaps it was just in this book, but this is a dark and sombre
tale, with plenty of greed, corruption, and racism. The Baron von Kaz gets
married to Caryl Miquet (a presumably recurring character), to kick the book
off with a bang. They then get in a car and head to Los Corrales, where they’ve
signed a lease for two years on a lovely “dream home”, complete with ten acres
of land. And it’s unbelievably cheap, too— the Baron managed to get it from the
owner, Mr. Gulthwort, for a mere $100 a month.
Now, I know there’s been a lot of inflation
since the 1940s, but even for that time, $100 monthly for such a property is a
staggeringly small amount. And the Baron von Kaz finds out that there is indeed
a catch when Mr. Gulthwort stumbles in on him and Caryl as they prepared to
spend the night together. Gulthwort gets talking to the Baron alone, and starts
to babble about how he’s got the baron in a corner, that the baron simply must
help him now, and that his enemies will never find out from him what the
“broken face” is.
Caryl, meanwhile, is not happy at being
left alone upstairs. She calls the Baron upstairs and demands that he force their
late-night visitor to leave. So the Baron, full of resolve, comes lumbering
downstairs. But a grisly sight awaits him—Mr. Gulthwort is lying slumped in his
chair, a hole in his head caused by impalement on a paper file. Suddenly, a gun
is jammed in the Baron’s back, and the assailant demands to know the location
of the broken face. He seems disinclined to believe the Baron’s protestations
that he really doesn’t know where the broken face is…
Enter Caryl Miquet, who has grabbed her
husband’s gun and come downstairs. She fires two shots, and by sheer mischance,
one of them manages to lodge itself in the dead man’s head, obliterating the
traces of the paper file. When the cops arrive, they decide that Caryl shot Mr.
Gulthwort and the Baron made up a fairy story to cover it all up. They take her
away… and that’s just the first two chapters.
The rest of the story is an extremely
complex one but with simple ideas at heart. Basically, this is an investigation
in the Phillip Marlowe routine— there’s a lot of emphasis placed on corruption
in politics, in the police force, and anti-Semitism. The Baron gets in a few
fights that Phillip Marlowe would have been proud to partake in, but it seems
somewhat odd to see him in the melee. It seems that the mayor of Los Corrales
and the head of police are somehow in cahoots with one another. They seem
anxious to cover up the crimes, and all this seems to tie up with the death of
the previous mayor, supposedly by accident.
The tale is dark and unrelenting— in one of
the opening chapters, the murderer even kills a dog that may have recognized
him. It’s a chilling moment. Other moments, such as a confrontation in the
mayor’s house full of veiled threats, are equally disturbing. So when the comic
relief comes, it feels like a desperately needed source of relief. These scenes
of comic relief are often rather brief, but quite funny. One of the best is
when the Baron gets information out of an uncooperative shopkeeper by
threatening property damage. Another very funny moment is when the Baron
eagerly destroys a priceless painting looking for a hidden message, and decides
that his “altered” version is undoubtedly a major improvement.
And yet, as appreciated as these moments
are, they do seem somewhat out of place in this story. Its dark and unrelenting
nature does not make it an unequivocally fun read, and at 300 pages, it
sometimes feels quite padded. There are also uncomfortable parallels with
Hitler’s rise to power, as we see the mayor is head of a very similar
organization that absolutely hates Jews. The Baron, who is sympathetic to the
Jewish cause under Nazi oppression, is not an entirely welcome guest as a
result.
The “broken face” is a clever plot device,
and its ultimate location has a perverse sort of simplicity behind it. However,
it succeeds only in making the Baron von Kaz and the police officers look like
complete morons for having overlooked it, and it seems like an unnecessary
moment. Even the Baron seems to consider it a futile discovery, for reasons he
analyzes in the finale. Nevertheless, the ending is excellent, with a very
suspenseful and skilfully-written shootout followed by a memorable scene
between the Baron and... oh, maybe I’d better not say who.
Despite some reservations, I’d recommend The Broken Face Murders. It isn’t an
unheralded classic in the genre, but it is undoubtedly worth a look for its
scathing portrait of anti-Semitism and, in some ways, American society.
Patrick Ohl ©2011, 2013
The
nineteen-year-old Patrick Ohl writes reviews of the books he reads on his
blog, At the Scene of the Crime.
In his spare time he plots a takeover of the world, being careful to factor
everything except for Bruce Willis into his equations.
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