Patrick Ohl is back this week for Friday Forgotten
Books hosted by Patti Abbott. This week he is reviewing The Toll House Murder by Anthony Wynne.
“Anthony Wynne” was the pseudonym of physician
Robert McNair Wilson, who seems to have obsessed himself with impossible crimes
of all sorts, though he never achieved the status of authors like John Dickson
Carr or Clayton Rawson. And his book The
Toll House Murder shows all too clearly why that is so.
The
Toll House Murder begins promisingly, as
we learn of the murder of Sir Andrew Burke, the wealthy man in charge of a
famous shipping company. The circumstances are bizarre— Sir Andrew walks into a
toll house to ask the man in charge to let him through. He re-enters his car
and passes through the toll, but after a couple of hundred yards, the car
swerves and tips over. As a result, the doors jam and have to be forced open. Sir
Andrew is lying inside, stabbed through the heart— but there is no knife in the
car, no other passenger, and no footprints anywhere in the snow around the car!
While this initial situation is
intriguing, the interest is sucked out of the story pretty rapidly as we meet
our cast of characters. And such a memorable bunch they are! I particularly
remember… um… actually, I don’t remember anyone at all. This isn’t a joke- I
literally don’t remember any of the characters. I don’t even remember the
murderer’s name! I just remember what function some faceless cut-outs played in
the plot. They have all the personality and charm of cardboard (though, on
second thought, that would be an insult to a useful packaging material). I just
finished reading the book not 10 minutes ago. That’s a bad sign.
And thus we get another problem with
this book: while the plot may be interesting, it is so poorly paced that any
interest is quickly removed. After the initial murder, we get about 70 pages
where nothing happens. After this, we get a murder, and a few pages later an
attempted murder. Nothing happens for another 70 pages or so, after which we
get another murder, and, a few pages later, another murder. Nothing much
happens for 30 pages or so until the detective, Dr. Hailey, pulls a new plot
thread out of his hat for no reason at all and goes to explore it, thus proving
his omniscience once and for all. By the end, I wasn’t even interested in the
plot. I was just frustrated and trying to get through a tiresome work.
“Tiresome” describes the writing well.
Wynne’s writing style is a real chore to struggle through, and I’m just happy
to be alive right now. At best, his characters behave like second-rate actors
performing a second-rate Victorian melodrama, and they have a tendency to
monologue about nothing in particular. For instance, after Dr. Hailey brings up
a new plot thread out of nowhere, we are treated to this lovely monologue from
the wife of a dead man:
"He
died for us!" she exclaimed in a voice in which ecstasy and revenge were
mingled. "He laid down his life for us. Oh, sir, he was a good man and a
fine one. Listen, the night before he died he talked a long while with our boy.
John told him to go straight and tell the truth and love his mother. There were
tears in his eyes, believe me, sir. Oh, sir, I didn't know then that the
medicine was beginning to take effect on him. 'You're tired, John,' I said. But
he wouldn't have it. He got up, after the boy went to bed, and walked about the
room. Like he used to walk on his bridge. 'It's been a hard fight," he
said, 'but I've won. And I want you to know that, my girl. I'm a happy man this
night and I haven't known happiness for years.'”
That monologue treats us to much of the
flaws in this book: melodramatic monologues no living human would ever spout,
tiresome clichés at every corner, and (worst of all) a complete lack of any
sense of humour whatsoever. More than that: there’s no individuality or
personality in this work. It feels like a robot wrote this, or perhaps it was
all recycled from other works. Either way, the writing is coldly impersonal and
unpleasant—you don’t get any sense of the author’s personality at all. Reading
more than one Wynne per month is most likely hazardous to your health.
Incidentally, there is more than one
impossible crime involved—there are two. The second is pretty quickly
explained, though, and very obvious from the start. A policeman is randomly
murdered out of nowhere in front of Dr. Hailey’s eyes. He went outside to see
if it was snowing and had the back of his skull crushed in by a heavy
instrument— the blow was so heavy that it glanced off his skull and smashed
into the wall, destroying the brickwork. But there were no footprints
whatsoever in the snow. The melodrama is
milked to the extreme:
He
came to the room. At the sight of the body on the floor he drew back with a cry
of dismay.
“Poor
old George.”
He
bent down and looked at the shattered head. When he rose again the blood was
pale in his face.
“If
I have to spend the rest of my life doing it, sir,” he exclaimed, “I’ll find
the swine who has done this. One of the best lads in the force.” He added:
“This time, anyhow, the snow will tell us something.”
Whoah, someone recovered from his shock
quickly! You might as well have replaced that last sentence with “What’s for
dinner?” It’s not just melodramatic, it’s inconsistent as well! Oh, and by the
way, you never found out what the dead police officer’s name was until he was
killed. Gotta love that character development. The explanation for the impossible
crime, as I said, is obvious, but it also doesn’t seem to make sense. I can’t
go into details here, but even though physics and I are notorious enemies, my
knowledge of it is enough to make me seriously question the mechanics of the
murder. Wynne’s explanation was unclear about a point or else his killer just
got extremely lucky. Possibly both.
Which brings me full circle to the first
murder— of all the cheek! This killer is the luckiest son-of-a-gun since the
culprit in Seeing is Believing! The
solution is technically fair, and yet I don’t whatsoever recall the key piece
of evidence that clinches the method. In fact, a far simpler variation is
proposed just pages before, and is rejected by the detective. Why? I’ll
reconstruct the reason with some dialogue:
Inspector: "Blimey, if Bob didn't
have the third onion at the time... it can only mean the butler was the
killer!"
Detective: "Impossible! Absurd! The
butler could never be the killer!"
Inspector: "Why not?"
Detective: "Because I said
so."
Inspector: "Good point. I never
thought about it that way."
Oh, come on! How lazy can you get? Give us an actual reason! I’m sick of
detectives who can pick and choose their deductions at will—if you’re going to
reject an alternative hypothesis, give us a reason! (This, by the way, is a
major strength of R. Austin Freeman’s The
Eye of Osiris— Dr. Thorndyke never just says “Because I said so”, he
explains all his deductions thoroughly. Though sometimes they might get
long-winded, it’s overall far more satisfying an approach that this one.)
To sum up, The Toll House Murder is a chore to get through. The author has no
discernible sense of humour or personality, and the writing style is just
atrocious. The impossible crimes have their points of interest, but are overall
major disappointments, making this book a certain entry in the Hall of Shame of
books I’ve read this year. By the end, it got overbearingly tiresome. Why
didn’t Wynne achieve the popularity of Carr? This book is a textbook
illustration. It really says a lot about an author’s writing style when I can
honestly say it left me pining for some Freeman Wills Crofts. Crofts’ writing,
at the very least, was entertaining.
Patrick Ohl ©2014
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