Halloween Transcript

Caroline: A good murder mystery has a lot in common with a good magic trick. Both art forms combine an emphasis on transparency with their audience while simultaneously trying their best to deceive. The writer of a fair play mystery has an obligation not to conceal clues from their reader, just as a magician might perform with their sleeves rolled up to show that no cards can be hidden there. At the same time, both are doing their best to redirect attention away from the true workings of their plot or trick, so that the reveal at the end is still a surprise. The fun lies in the fact that the reader or watcher could have worked out what was really happening earlier. The information was technically all there.

One cunning way to achieve this in a detective novel is to raise the possibility of the supernatural. The classic puzzle mystery is all about logical deduction and empirical evidence. But what if it wasn't, this time? What if, for once, there isn't a practical explanation for the impossible crime? What if that shiver down the spine was justified? By inserting this doubt into a reader's mind and causing them to jump at every shadow, the writer has a greater chance of pulling off their real plot. For a genre supposedly rooted in exposing the tangible crimes of this world, detective fiction is quite interested in the uncanny and the unexplained.

So join me, won't you, for this Halloween look at all things ghostly, witchy and weird.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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For all that golden age detective fiction loved to flirt with a little spookiness, there aren't actually that many novels that make use of Halloween itself. That said, Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie feels like a natural starting point. It is a much later book, from 1969, so not of the "golden age", but connected of course because of the incredible work its author did during the interwar years. For many readers, including me, the most memorable thing about this book is the Halloween party of the title, which Christie's mystery novelist sleuth Ariadne Oliver is helping a friend to organise. There are pumpkins with candles inside them — a recently imported tradition from America — along with more classically British seasonal entertainments like apple bobbing, broom decoration, a game of snapdragon, the flour game, and mirror scrying, as well as a visit by a local woman with a naturally hooked nose and chin costumed as a witch. The party ends in the worst way possible, though, when one of the teenage attendees is discovered drowned in the apple bobbing tub. This is one of the rare occasions when Christie has a young person as a murder victim and it is all the more striking for that. Mrs Oliver brings Poirot into the case, and he investigates poor young Joyce's death.

The part of the book that I had not remembered until I revisited for this episode, though, was the deeper connection to English folklore and ritual traditions that Christie introduces. Beyond the child-friendly Halloween party games, there is a scene at an ancient site of worship, by a standing stone, that can send chills down the spine if read while one is in the right mood. And the plot rests a couple of times on someone being able to tell that they are being watched, even though there is no watcher in sight. I'm sure we all know that sensation, of feeling sure that there are eyes on us. Christie makes no suggestion that this knowledge is derived from a supernatural power. It's just that evolutionary remnant that makes humans good at unconsciously sensing the presence unseen predators, but she makes it really creepy in this context.

The mirror game that Christie mentioned also crops up in another crime novel from the 1960s with Halloween in the title: The Halloween Murders by John Newton Chance. This game is a twist on the fortune-telling technique of scrying and involves the player — usually a young girl, but not necessarily so — sitting before a mirror on All Hallows Eve in order to see their future love standing behind him in their reflection. Except John Newton Chance has a young girl see not her husband, but a future murder victim. A great spooky twist on a party game.

Christie was not the only crime writer to open a mystery with a Halloween party. Another later novel by a golden age stalwart does the same thing. 1978's Wraiths and Changelings by Gladys Mitchell begins on the 31st October, but in this case the children have just been packed off to bed, thrilled with their apple bobbing and spider-decorated crackers. The remaining adults have gathered around the fire to tell ghost stories, which escalates eventually into a series of ghost-hunts around the Norfolk broads. Two members of the ghost-hunting group are murdered and Mitchell's sleuth Mrs Bradley swoops in late-on to deliver the solution. Again, the best creepy effects are not from the Halloween reference, but from the chills experienced while waiting alone in ancient and haunted places, waiting for the ghosts to show themselves.

Mrs Goodbody, the woman who dresses up as a witch for Christie's Halloween party, is very clearly just that — someone in a costume to amuse children. But there are other mystery novels where the suggestion of witchcraft is more ambiguous and the fear that it evokes is used to manipulate characters and readers alike.

Surfeit of Lampreys by Ngaio Marsh from 1941 springs to mind. Like many of Marsh's novels it has a theatrical element to its murder scenario, although in this case it's an amateur rather than a professional production. The happy-go-lucky Lamprey family, minor aristocrats who are down on the luck financially, perform a version of the biblical story of Jael and Sisera for their rich uncle, in the hope that he will be moved enough to loosen the purse strings. This story from the Book of Judges is about a heroine who gives shelter in her tent to an enemy military commander and then, when he is asleep, kills him by driving a tent peg through his head. The Lampreys reenact this with a kitchen skewer. This same skewer is later found as a murder weapon, driven through the eye of their rich uncle. And it gets creepier still: their uncle's wife, called "Violet" because her tetchy husband can't be bothered to learn her original Hungarian name is considered to be a witch. She belongs to a black magic club, participates in the black mass, and has some very upsetting ideas about what she wants to do with her murdered husband's body. Her nephews and nieces consider her to be a toad in human form. There is a sequence towards the end of the book where several characters, including Violet, are sneaking around a pitch-dark townhouse that contains more than one corpse that is scary enough to convince anyone that witchcraft is to explain for the mysterious deaths. Except this is detective fiction, not a Gothic horror novel. Or is it?

John Dickson Carr turns witchcraft to good effect as a tool for whipping up fear in his 1938 novel The Crooked Hinge. This is a wonderful example from his Gideon Fell series looking at impossible crimes; there are several just in this book, including the disappearance of an archaic instrument for taking fingerprints from a locked library. An antique automaton seems to move on its own, touching a maid who almost dies from the shock. And the story is also a take on the real-life Tichbourne Claimant story from the nineteenth century, about an heir and an imposter and a fortune. One section of the book is titled "the rise of a witch" and the fear that there are witches meeting in the woods for nefarious purposes is warping the perceptions of those who live in this small Kentish village. Dr Fell insists that just one very calculating mind is at work, but he has his work cut out for him convincing people terrified of witches that this is really the case. This book has more jumpscares in it than your average horror film and I would highly recommend it to those who enjoy that sort of thing.

Agatha Christie also experimented with the use of witches to instil fear and cloud judgement in The Pale Horse. Once again this is a later Christie, from 1961. Although, as we'll see, Christie did make use of supernatural suggestion in her work from the interwar years, she seems to have enjoyed evoking more of a genuinely spooky atmosphere later in her writing career. The Pale Horse is partly told through first-person narrative from a historian named Mark Easterbrook and it is through his perspective that the reader attends a ritual at the old Pale Horse pub, conducted by the three peculiar women who now live there. Mark suspects that these women are something to do with a paid assassination racket and, to find out the truth, he poses as a customer. Mark wants passionately to believe that these women are not witches and that there is a scientific explanation for their apparently ability to kill to order without ever coming in contact with their victims. And yet he finds himself being drawn into the climate of fear they create and it impairs his ability to analyse events systematically. It's such clever psychological writing.

In The Pale Horse Christie turned genuine science into a supernatural-seeming mystery plot. She'd already done it decades before in Dumb Witness from 1937, which revolves not around witches but around spirits and seances. Wealthy spinster Emily Arundell takes part in a seance on what turns out to be the day of her death. Emily isn't a fully signed up believer in spiritualism, but her companions claim to have seen a mysterious luminous haze gathering around her as they sat together, which after her subsequent death from apparently natural causes, they interpret to be a foreshadowing of what was to come. A posthumous letter from Emily to Poirot reveals that she suspected there had been an attempt on her life and he takes the case, leading to a re-evaluation of this prophetic seance. The superstition around Emily's death obscures the truth for much of the book, to the true murderer's advantage.

Seances are quite common in golden age detective fiction because the interwar years saw an explosion in the popularity of spiritualism. I won't go fully into that history here as there's already a Shedunnit episode about it titled "Knock Knock" from 2019, which I would recommend seeking out if you are interested in more on this subject. But in the context of the supernatural element of speaking to spirits being used to further a mystery plot, I wanted to highlight two other books. The first is The Spirit Murder Mystery by Robin Forsythe, in which a seance forms the inciting incident. An ardent spiritualist persuades her reluctant uncle to sit with her and the resulting seance produces ghostly organ music. That night, her uncle disappears and is found dead, along with another corpse in a field the following day. The blurb asks whether these two people were "victims of supernatural vengeance, a fatal duel... or base murder?". Once again, the death being preceded by apparent contact with the spirit world profoundly influences the investigation.

Rim of the Pit by Hake Talbot from 1944 might take the prize as the most intensely paranormal yet rule-abiding puzzle mystery every to be written. In many ways, this book appears to conform to golden age stereotypes: it involves a group of relatives and friends, gathered in the depths of winter at a remote cabin in New England during a blizzard. Among them is a medium, who organises a seance so that they can contact her deceased husband in order to, get this, ask him if she may sell off some timber plantations around the cabin. But something goes awry, the spirit seems to possess one of those present, who then goes on to commit a murder.

In his introduction to the recent American Mystery Classics reprint, Rupert Holmes writes that "rarely has the supernatural been accommodated so credibly and articulately in a mystery, to such an extent that you may find yourself agreeing with the characters that a deceased person might qualify as an ongoing suspect". Rim of the Pit is an extraordinary book, because in addition to this suspected "murder while possessed" plot, it contains multiple other impossible crimes, including a locked room murder and some inexplicable footprints in the snow. Best of all, there's a second supernatural force apparently at play in this book: a Wendigo, a flesh-eating mythological monster drawn from Native American folklore. It should come as no surprise, I think, that the author, real name Henning Nelms, was a professional stage magician. Who else could pull off tricks of this calibre?

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Monsters play a far bigger role in detective fiction than the supposedly rational nature of the genre might indicate at first glance. Arthur Conan Doyle set this in motion with 1902's The Hound of the Baskervilles, which features a generational family curse and legendary demonic hounds. Holmes is initially sceptical of the danger to present-day members of the family, but agrees to go to Dartmoor with Watson to act as bodyguard to the new heir. The previous one, of course, has been found dead of a heart attack with a terrified expression on his face. Throughout the book, people roam the moor in the dark and the fog, imagining they can hear the heavy tread of a haunted hound behind them and catching glimpses of its luminous jaws. By the time the story reaches its climax, nobody involved is feeling very rational.

John Dickson Carr enthusiastically picked up where Conan Doyle left off. A confessed admirer of Rim of the Pit, he experimented with crimes for which the only explanation seems to be the presence of supernatural creatures. In The Unicorn Murders from 1935, published under his Carter Dickson pseudonym, Carr presents a sequence of murders that, yes, appear to have been committed by an invisible unicorn. First a man falls out of a plane, having been stabbed to death between the eyes by a long, straight, horn-like weapon. Then a second person is killed the same way, in front of witnesses. It's all baffling and peculiar, but Sir Henry Merrivale sorts it all out in the end, without having to care for any mythical livestock. Carr returned to the supernatural fauna, though, in He Who Whispers from 1946, which concerns a locked room murder in the tower of a burned out French chateau that, it is believed, must have been committed by levitating vampires. A similar suggestion is raised in Carr's 1935 novel The Hollow Man (also known as The Three Coffins) but the fear factor is so much more powerful in He Who Whispers. Indeed, Carr fans frequently put this book in their top five, which given that the great man published over 70 novels during his lifetime, is high praise for these spooky vampires indeed.

For those who prefer their murderous beasts a little more frosty, detective fiction can still provide. In A Corpse at Camp Two from 1955, Glyn Carr explores the possibilities of a murder mystery set on a mountaineering expedition in the Himalayas. As might be expected for this type of book, by the time the group reaches a dangerous glacier, personal tensions are already running high. Then one of the expedition members is found dead and it's no accident. They have been deliberately suffocated in their sleeping bag. Big footprints are found in the snow nearby and the survivors begin to fear that they are being stalked by a yeti. Was the abominable snowman responsible for the crime, or someone a bit more human? The paranoia develops quickly in this isolated and dangerous scenario, and although the true detective fiction fan suspects that the yeti will ultimately turn out to be a red (white?) herring, its presence certainly deepens the emotional power of the mystery.

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Away from the high peaks, it's still possible for a mystery writer to put the frighteners on their characters in a more domestic setting. Haunted houses abound in detective fiction. The suggestion that there is someone other than the inhabitants loose in a house is a great device for heightening tension and suspicion, and when this strays into the realm of the supernatural, it works even better. Georgette Heyer's first detective novel Footsteps in the Dark runs on this premise, with the fresh occupiers of a newly-inherited country house plagued by the aforementioned ghostly footsteps, as well as skulls that unexpectedly fall out of priest holes and apparitions in the garden. The tone of Heyer's book is mostly light and comic, but as the characters gradually exhaust the practical explanations for the disturbances, a note of unease creeps in that cuts the otherwise lively atmosphere nicely. This is still far from being a creepy book, but the haunting is well done.

Things take a rather more tragic turn in The Ghost It Was by Richard Hull from 1937. This is another country house haunting, but with the addition of an interesting inheritance plot. James Warrenton, owner of Amberhurst Place and a keen spiritualist, summons all of his nephews to join him for dinner and a possible viewing of the resident Tudor ghosts. The nephews, who constitute the line of succession to rich Uncle James, are not exactly a friendly bunch. One of them is found dead at the bottom of the supposedly haunted tower, dressed up like the description of one of the ghosts. What was he up to, the novel asks, and who murderously outsmarted him? This novel does a good job of showing how haunting can be a useful technique for the unscrupulous to prey on the credulous.

Interwar detective fiction is often preoccupied with inheritance and family, so the supernaturally-inclined author can find ample inspiration there. Look to the Lady by Margery Allingham concerns a family curse. The Gyrth family have spent generations protecting a thousand-year-old chalice, which legend has it must never be exhibited or seen in public. It is kept in a room at the top of a tower, with the window only illuminated on the heir's birthday. According to rumour, anyone looking in will see something so fearsome that they will instantly perish. There are many shenanigans in this book of the type typical of an Albert Campion novel — horseback chases, handy criminal gangs, mistaken identities and so forth. But the climactic scene where a burglar climbs up to the lighted window, only to be so frightened that they fall to their death, is quite arresting. The episode of the 1989 television series based on this story makes a guess at what was seen there, but like many of the best supernatural effects, I think it works best when left to the reader's imagination.

Agatha Christie experimented with curses, in a rather different sense, in her 1923 short story “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb”. In an echo of the story of a curse that followed the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb by Howard Carter in 1922, Christie has Poirot investigate the unexplained death of a famous Egyptologist and his financial backer, both of whom have died recently amid much press speculation. The actual plot of this story is less notable to me than the attitude Christie expresses through Poirot about superstition. He surprises his faithful companion Hastings by taking the case, saying that he believes in the forces of superstition, although perhaps not in the way everyone assumes. He calls it "one of the greatest forces the world has ever known" because of the way it can make people act — if they believe it, there is no knowing what actions they might take as a result, even if a sceptical person can offer proof that there is no cause for alarm. It suspends rationality in the most terrifying and complete way.

Agatha Christie's most famous novel of all, And Then There Were None, takes this suggestion to the extreme. The ten people brought to the island under mysterious circumstances are already a little alarmed upon arrival when they find that the invitations they received were, in fact, fake. As people begin to die, their intensifying fear for their lives affects their actions. How can a murderer be hiding on an island with no hiding places? The impossibility of it leads to a degree of delusion that is its own kind of punishment. In the absence of a natural explanation, only the supernatural remains. Until the true explanation of the mystery is ultimately revealed and the world becomes sensible and comprehensible again. But wasn't the story all the better for the reader because of the moments where we entertained the possibility that there was no such explanation?

So, as you are carving your pumpkin or donning your costume this Halloween, maybe allow yourself, just for a few moments, to get properly caught up in the spookiness of it all. It's that frisson of supernatural potential, no matter how faint, that can make us truly appreciate the mundane, logical, practical nature of real life all the more.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

You can find links to all the books and sources we referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/theservantproblem. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

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Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.