The Rasp Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 12)

Green Penguin Music

Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is The Rasp by Philip MacDonald, Penguin 79.

This book was first published in 1924 and then joined the Penguin series in January 1937. It was MacDonald's first entry in the green crime series, but not his first Penguin overall. His novel Patrol was actually one of the first twenty Penguins ever to be published, appearing as number 13 in the orange livery of the fiction strand of the series.

The Rasp was Philip MacDonald's first solo novel. He had previously written two books with his father, which they had published in 1920 and 1923 under the collective pseudonym Oliver Fleming. The Rasp also marks the first appearance of Colonel Anthony Gethryn, an amateur detective about whom Philip would eventually write twelve books. Eleven of these appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, between the first and second world wars, and then he published one final Gethryn in 1959, The List of Adrian Messenger.

Being a writer was pretty much Philip MacDonald's only job — he seems to have been able to make it work professionally write from the get-go. Perhaps it helped that his father and grandfather were both writers too — the latter, George MacDonald, was a fantasy novelist and a friend of Lewis Carroll's. Philip's mother Constance was an actress, too, so presumably a creative career was encouraged, rather than forbidden, in the MacDonald household. Philip was born in 1900 in London — although the family was Scottish, from Aberdenshire, grandfather George had long since migrated south. Philip turned 18 a couple of months after the first world war broke out and enlisted in a cavalry regiment, in which capacity he served in the area of the Middle East then known as Mesopotamia. Upon his return to civilian life, he worked on those two novels with his father and then in 1924 struck out on his own into the realm of detective fiction.

By 1930 he had published three more novels starring Anthony Gethryn and a few standalones. He had also developed a deep interest in the film industry and screenwriting, and in 1931, he and his wife, the writer F. Ruth Howard, moved to Hollywood. This move is likely why MacDonald was never invited to join the Detection Club, despite the popularity of his 1920s crime fiction in Britain. He left for America just as the club was coming together. MacDonald found great success there, writing screenplays both for adaptations of his own crime fiction as well as lending his pen to franchises such as the Charlie Chan series and the Mr Moto films. After almost fifty happy years in America, MacDonald died in 1980 in Los Angeles.

The Rasp is a debut crime novel that shows the influence of writers like R. Austin Freeman, H.C. Bailey and E.C. Bentley. It follows ex-intelligence officer Anthony Gethryn as he investigates the brutal murder of a senior government minister with the titular rasp, a wordworking tool. Gethryn is an amateur who enters the case via his association with a Fleet Street magazine, and he works this case in amicable partnership with the police. Although in 1924 the so-called rules of detective fiction had yet to be codified, there are plenty of recognisable tropes in this book, from the seemingly locked room murder scene in a country house library to the work Gethryn does to break alibis and create a timeline of the crime. But this sleuth is no Inspector French, painstakingly poring over timetables and maps. Gethryn is an energetic, instinctive detective who loves making a leap of logic as much as he likes looking for tiny forensic fragments.

Joining me to discuss The Rasp is Sergio Angelini, a film and TV historian who hosts the Tipping My Fedora podcast about crime fiction and film noir. He's also a great fan of golden age detective fiction, so I'm delighted to have both his professional film expertise and his personal passion for MacDonald's work at our disposal today.

Before we get into the book, though, I'll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are "entering the spoiler zone", you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Sergio gives this one and why.

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Perhaps we can start at the beginning. What was your first encounter with Philip MacDonald and his writing?

Sergio: I started paradoxically, which is perfect for MacDonald, at the end with The List of Adrian Messenger. I can actually date, I can tell you the week I read it, not because I keep a diary, but because as I mentioned, I'm from Italy and in Rome, a lot of these books, when they do reprints, you will actually go and buy them at a newsagents. And they used to do these reprints of classic golden age mysteries, although they, their definition of golden age strayed a bit. I'd recently gone back to Italy after having lived in the UK for a few years, my father worked for an airline company, so we moved around a bit and I thought, no, I need to get back into reading Italian books.

And so I was 14. And I remember very clearly went up to the newsagent. I said, what's the latest one? And the first one was The Reader Is Warned by John Dickson Carr, as by Carter Dickson. Classic book. I totally have the Green Penguin for that one. I think the second one, fortnight later, was The List of Adrian Messenger.

My first ever Philip MacDonald. Loved it. I thought this is absolutely terrific. Then I looked it up. Then it turned out they'd made a movie of it. I'm a big movie person as well as a big book person, so that made it even better. And at that point I started obviously looking out for his name because it was a big market in secondhand books. And that was, as I say, in Italy on these yellow covers. And so you'd go to these various bookshops. I was going around the Trastevere area, which is just off the and looking out for Philip MacDonald books. So I got into his work, and about five years later I used to travel to San Francisco on a regular basis. My then girlfriend was studying at Berkeley in Northern California and there was this wonderful place, the Mysterious Bookstore on Upper 24th Street, late lamented. It's been gone for about 14 years now, and every time I went to see her, you know, it was wonderful to see her, but the other thing I would do was I'd be looking for mystery books. And I went up there and I found a number of fairly recent reprints of Philip MacDonald books, because they were still reprinting them well into the 1980s. And that's when I got The Rasp and The Polferry Riddle and older editions of some of the short story collections, which annoyingly have not been brought together and reprinted.

He was a fantastic short story writer, and doesn't get quite enough credit. He's got two Edgars and they're both for short stories, not for his novels. But in any event, that's when I finally got round to reading the first one published 35 years earlier , which was a fun experience. So I was that much older. I'd read lots of books by then in the genre. I've read lots of other Philip MacDonald books in the genre, so I came to it in a way with more open eyes. So in a way I'm quite glad because I still thought it was a great book even though I was more well versed. So I wasn't just going to be stunned by something that I'd never read before. Because I think when I read my first Philip MacDonald, I'd read probably four or five or six murder mysteries in my whole life by that point. So maybe it was easy to be stunned, but by this point, nah, not so much. So I remember it very clearly in my mind and it was a terrific experience. I loved reading that.

Caroline: Yes. revisiting it now, did you find that you had a different reaction or did you still feel the same?

Sergio: I think deep down I had the same reaction in the sense that I had the same reaction to Gethryn. One of the things about Gethryn is that he is not one of these big eccentric detectives. Big in the sense of Nero Wolfe or unusual in the sense of Poirot or Gideon Fell or these kinds of detectives, or is not even the kind of cozy Jane Marple style. And what I remember liking was the sense of humour, was the energy. It was a vim and vigour.

And that's part of Philip MacDonald, that's part of his writing. So in a way, he's this kind of super-idealised portrait of MacDonald himself. Least that's how I feel about it. When I think of what Gethryn looks like, he kind of looks like Philip MacDonald, maybe with a mustache. I can't remember if he has a mustache or not in the books, I don't think we ever get told.

That's the other thing, MacDonald didn't do a lot with physical description. Either of buildings or people. Again, this comes in very handy in The Rasp, which is a wonderful moment. So I think on the whole, my experience of it is that I remember liking it.

It felt very much like a 1920s book. I think that I'm quite a fan of 1920s fiction within the genre because golden age to most people ends up sort of meaning really the 1930s a lot of the time. The 1920s feels like it's a sort of moment of experimentation and development, but also consolidation and leading into the next decade. I love books like S.S. Van Dine, who's now very out of fashion. But again, I read them at an impressionable age, but I have reread some of those. And you know what, I think they hold up. So The Bishop Murder Case I would advertise to anybody, and while I don't necessarily feel the same way about The Rasp on a rereading because I think it's not my favourite MacDonald, it's not.

But it is a book that I think holds up. I think just to get that out of the way, surprisingly well. Which was a, you know, I'm so glad you asked me because it was nice to reread that thinking oh yeah, this is still great fun. Really enjoyed it. It's got a great sense of humour. I like that about Gethryn. I think the fact that obviously some is, it is now what we would refer to as being quite meta.

Caroline: Yes, it's very self-conscious, isn't it? That was something that really struck me because this was my first time reading a Philip MacDonald book full stop. And I knew this was his first, and I was really surprised to see that Gethryn almost seems to know he's in a detective novel. He just about stops short of that. But there's lots of references to, oh, if we were in a detective novel right now, this is what would happen, but actually it's like this. Or we need to approach it this way because that's what happens in the 'tec stories, et cetera, which I found really interesting.

Sergio: There is that bit quite early on in the book which I think sets the pattern, doesn't it? Where he says, oh, come on, you're kidding. He was killed in the study, and bashed on the head, come on. There's got to be more to it than that. That's just too much of a cliche. I'm thinking, it's 1924, it's already a cliche. How amazing is that?

Caroline: I know Christie hasn't even written Roger Ackroyd yet. Like we haven't even, I think, entered this phase of parody, so interesting. But then that made me think you you could make the case that Golden age detective fiction was parody first, serious later, of course, because of Trent's Last Case. And this is a book that feels quite connected to Trent's Last Case in the sense of the journalism context. Gethryn gets in onto this case through his connections in Fleet Street, and then he acts as this eccentric amateur in the household in the same way that Philip Trent does. And then the other book that it really brought to mind, which is again, feels pastiche-y, is The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne, which was 1922 I think. It has some similarities in the actual way the murder is revealed but also in the sense that book is absolutely full of a detective who keeps saying, oh, you know what Sherlock Holmes would do and you are my Watson, and making all of these structural meta references. So yeah, I found that really interesting that this is Anthony Gethryn's debut detective in MacDonald's first solo novel in 1924, and yet already feels like he's so self-consciously part of a tradition.

Sergio: And that's the thing, isn't it? I think that you are absolutely spot on about Trent. I think he's very much a bit like Lord Peter Wimsey. They feel like they are linear descendants. In this one he even meets the woman who will become the love of his life just like Trent does. Now, of course, Trent didn't have a particularly long literary career in that sense.

There aren't that many books, whereas Gethryn did appear in a dozen at least. But I think that there are a number of elements where you think, oh, okay. And they're the naturalistic idea, although Gethryn is also what, he's a painter and a poet. He speaks German like a local, he's in the phrase at the time, had a very good war. He was in intelligence for a year and a half embedded in Germany. He has this amazing set of credentials from Oxford. He literally studied for law, but decided not to become a barrister. Like you do.

It's all a little bit superhuman. But in actual fact, because it's fun, because of the sense of humour, you can get away with a lot. And also, we've got to remember, I think that there's just that slightly outrageous part of the MacDonald style. The one thing you've got to remember about him is that the first book he wrote with his dad, who of course was called Ronald MacDonald, he was 19 years old and it's got the best title of a book in the whole universe. It's called Ambrotox and Limping Dick. Just the best title ever. You can find that on the Gutenberg site. It's considered out of copyright. And it's an adventure book. Ambrotox is basically a kind of cocaine derivative. It's quite prescient in an interesting way. It's about how you can use that to cure maladies, but it might also cause intoxication. It is what it is as a book, but it's fascinating and I think that when you get this kind of fantastic high energy, that high spirit, that enjoyment of everything that you get with Gethryn in this book, I think it just elevates your spirits.

You feel great about it because although some people, I think, can get a bit put off by some of the lingo, it's over a hundred years old now. I think some of it can be a little bit like Wimsey can be a little bit tiresome. I prefer Gethryn to Wimsey in some respects.

Caroline: He's less mannered, isn't he? He's much less, dropping his aitches.

Sergio: Yeah, absolutely. You don't get the kind of P.G. Woodhouse types thing. I think that was not as big an influence as it was on Sayers. On the other hand, Sayers absolutely wrote the most lucid, perfect prose of the time. Nobody can take that away from her. MacDonald always had fantastic ideas and was so interested in trying to do fun things with the form. So that constant reference to other detectives in fiction, he talks about Austin Freeman and Thorndyke and Doyle and Holmes, obviously, and other people like that. So there's that awareness of the genealogy.

And I think that's tremendously entertaining when you are reading it so many years later. I think that really brings you in if you're a fan and you get a sense that the author's a fan and he's a young fan and he's good because he writes very well, some bits of it are also very funny, but some bits, there are some lovely bits where he says, and did I get this information? And, you know, next chapter, but it's like a joke beat, and the audience is getting the joke and I think, gosh, how confident is that? Respect, I was certainly impressed.

Caroline: Yes, I completely agree about the energy. It's really infectious and it carries through... Because there are bits where I think this is a bit sticky, or I'm not totally sure I buy that person would do this at this moment, but it doesn't matter. The energy just brings you through.

But I did feel like I came away from this book feeling like there are two wolves inside the Philip MacDonald that wrote this book, and they're fighting each other. One wolf wants to write an R. Austin Freeman very well plotted forensic, the fingerprints are on the thing, and then we're looking for the footprints under the windowsill and oh, is that a sandal? And all of that kind of stuff. And the other one wants to write a rollicking adventure story where women get swept off their feet and clasped to the bosom of a manly man and all this kind of thing, and he wants to do both, and he is trying to do both in this book. And if it were not for that tremendous, sometimes almost frenetic energy, I think I would've left this book feeling like I read some kind of Frankenstein's monster, but actually he smooths it all over rather well. What do you think about this? I found one critic said that "thriller elements keep breaking in and taking over from the puzzle plot". Would you agree with that? And do you think it's a good or a bad thing?

Sergio: I think it's a very legitimate thing to say about MacDonald in general. It's much more obvious in some of the other books he wrote. Some of his best books are absolutely like that. I don't think it's really an issue here. I think there are some aspects of this book that that make you want to read very fast.

It's maybe too many pages devoted to what all the servants were doing especially because to be rather a lot of servants. You get the impression that MacDonald is actually having a bit of fun here as well. Because although the bit about the servants is actually plot related as it turns out.

So I think that's very deft in its own way. It is actually several pages and it's quite nice though, they all get named as individuals. They all have a kind of identity. There's a lovely bit, and it's a throwaway line. There's a lovely, it says, oh no, I'm all for women's lib.

And then goes off and does something else. Gethryn says, I'm not going to discuss that with you. It moves on and it's interesting you thinking, no, yeah, this is a young person. This is part of that 1920s it's the kind of thing that Evelyn Waugh would've been writing about, it's the bright young things. So that's great.

I think that the thriller element of it is only really obvious, I feel, just because you've got the subplot about Lucia's brother. I suppose there's an element of that, although it's absolutely linked to the mystery and crucial the way it has involves some zigzagging.

It involves I've got to rush up to London, I've got to do this. There are a lot of books that will have sections where you've got car chases or somebody gets kidnapped or something, Edgar Wallace stuff, frankly, that's not really there.

At least not to me. It's absolutely there in a lot of his other books. I think when you read it, nah, this feels like a traditionally constructed mystery of the golden age, but one done with strong sense of humour.

And again, these kind of high energy, high spirits, high voltage almost, but it's not overdone. And it's only ever done when it matters. And I think that's cool. And that again, I think that's impressive because we get that for the climax. We'll get to that. Something we look forward to.

Spoiler zone begins

Caroline: It is well integrated. You're right. So even the fact that Gethryn's Freeman act, Thorndyke act leads him to this neighbour of the house where this murder has taken place. And there he finds Lucia who is this woman so beautiful that she strikes him dumb, and he immediately realizes that she's the woman for him. But at the same time, the two things are integrated because meeting her leads to her brother, who's previously been the secretary of the dead man, that then leads to a very important clue. So yes, it isn't like some books where you just take like a right turn into 50 pages of I don't know, limehouse kidnapping sequence and then turn left back onto the road that says puzzle plot. It isn't like that. The two things do make sense together, but I do think for some readers I can imagine the fact that all of the principle characters end up engaged to be married at the end might feel not quite the thing. And that sequence as well where Miss Warren, the tremendously efficient Fleet Street secretary, decides to try and play, amateur sleuth herself and help out by going to look for Lucia's brother because it sounded so urgent on the phone but Gethryn hasn't arrived and she gets really terrified. She gets really spooked because this man's really unwell and he's like living in a dark bedsit and that little chapter does feel a bit like we've strayed into a different novel for a minute, but then he pulls it back and I think the sense of humour about that carries it through.

Sergio: Partly, it's a character beat as well and in a way it's subverting expectations rather than just trying to guide the genre. It treads that fine line, as you say. This book is probably something like about a hundred thousand words, and you do wonder if a little bit, it's just about length. It doesn't feel long when you read it, but certain elements of the, like those episodes perhaps feel like they're little overextended. But in a way, to me it actually feels a bit cinematic because that little episode is something that in other books, you would've heard about, but you wouldn't have had to live it with her.

Caroline: I see what you mean, yes.

Sergio: And to me that's no, I'm now going to this scene and this is the sort of scene which in a movie, you would've been having a bit of dynamic sort of excitement because you would have the lighting and the camera angles and the kind of, 'Ooh, is she?,' and then it turns out, but like you say, because he deflates it, because actually it's not a bad guy and she's not some weak and feeble woman who can't cope or anything, they've made it quite clear that she's clearly the brains of the outfit. We know that from the first chapter, so I don't think there's any issue there. And so I think that's what makes it work. That's one of the things that on rereading it, I was so pleased because there are issues. I think you can be critical.

I think that the summing up is ginormously long. It works. It's something that happened in a lot of mysteries from that era. There's just no getting away from it. A lot of Ellery Queen books are like that. Thirty page long disquisitions on how you figured it out.

It wasn't unusual. They're not necessarily the most fun reading. It depends how you do it. In this case, it's okay and he did it in a few other of his early books as well. And you feel like you're just wrapping things up. You're explaining it all so you can get to the end and move on, and this is someone who is publishing a lot of books by that point.

I think here it's a little strange, but the fact is that you eventually realize that everything ties up and that's either on a character basis, which is crucial to the understanding of the crime or from just a purely plot mechanics sort of way.

You suddenly realize, no, I actually need all of this. Could you have said it more succinctly, perhaps, but it's all necessary actually. And I think that's partly why it was so well regarded in its day because it feels like it's going to be slap dash and it isn't. You suddenly realize that there's that tone, there's that style, but actually it's all there on the page. Nothing to do with whether it's fair or not. And we'll get into that in a minute, I'm sure.

Caroline: Yes. I'm interested to discuss that further actually because the investigation gives off this sense of the contrast between the professional and the amateur. We've got Inspector Boyd, who is very nice and very competent. It's made clear from the beginning, but he does arrest the wrong man. Although, as Gethryn says, he couldn't do anything else. The evidence is all pointing that way, particularly crucially, these fingerprints on the handle of the titular rasp, the weapon that's caused this really quite violent, actually for 1920s crime fiction, it's quite violent. Like overly described gory killing. This man's been set about with this woodworking tool until he is dead. But again, as you say, that comes to mean something that's not there for no reason. But no. So Boyd has to arrest the man's the murdered man's secretary. because how can he not? But Gethryn's angle on that is who is making him do this? Who is pulling these strings to make it so? That's where I'm really investigating. Which is an interesting level of secondary subtlety that you don't always get. Or indeed ever get in a kind of adventure, suspense based murder mystery, I think.

So that was interesting. I thought that was a big tick for MacDonald that he achieved that, that sort of, we're going into a second room now and it's more interesting in here. But then to come to the actual ending in the question of whether it plays fair and which I think is something that detective fiction readers are very interested in. We get almost two tropes at the same time. We get the forced confession via the dramatic reconstruct. Very well done. Again, as you say, very cinematic. You can absolutely see that scene being played out in front of you as you're reading it where Gethryn declares his solution to the crime, to his suspect, until the suspect gets so annoyed that he's like, no, it wasn't like that. I did it, it was this way. Of course there are, Scotland Yard men hiding in the curtains to take him away.

I think probably the novel could have ended there. Or very shortly afterwards, but instead we get quite a long document written by Gethryn going right back to the start, almost in the manner of a clue finder and telling you at every point, what was the criminal really doing? Like when we were looking at the clock that had fallen over, this is what he wanted you to get from that. This is why the servant said what they did, which again, this is why I feel like sometimes these instincts were at war with him. That feels very Thorndyke to me. Very precise and scientific in a way that doesn't, isn't immediately suggested by the dramatic scene that preceded it. How do you feel about that? Do you think it plays fair? Do you care?

Sergio: Do I care? Not in this instance. I think you're spot on by the way. I think you're right that there's an interesting push pull here, and you could just stop it there, but it wouldn't you wouldn't have any understanding of the motive.

Caroline: No, that, would be the ending of a John Buchan.

Sergio: Yeah. And so that creates its own issues. So it doesn't do that. I think MacDonald, he would later write a book, it's called The Maze, or Persons Unknown, which was supposed to be an attempt to create a 100% fair book. So it's one of those ones where everything is presented after the fact to Gethryn in document form. And so we read what Gethryn is reading and we only see what Gethryn sees. He knows nothing and we have the chance to reach the right conclusion or we don't. And MacDonald talked about how that he hated doing it. In the sense that he set himself this challenge, but he found that really hard.

Here in The Rasp, you get the same sort of thing, is that you're if you feel a little bit like it's somehow necessary as part of a convention. That you're fulfilling the requirements of a convention to be completely fair and show where you got your information from and how Gethryn reached the solutions that he did.

Because there are a couple of funny footnotes, partly one relating to Boyd who incidentally recurs in other books. And you get that sort of funny sense of play. It is not exactly Nabokov, it's not Pale Fire, but it falls within something that will become much more obvious in later MacDonald books and by later we're talking about a few years later where there is a strong kind of postmodern element as far as I'm concerned. So I think yes, in a way he's almost overdoing it as part of this kind of strategy of showing that, yes, I can do it.

I don't a hundred percent believe in it, but in actual fact I'm going to have some fun with it. So I'm going to go into enormous levels of detail. It's not necessarily dull because you feel that somehow you've had the surprise, you've had the emotional satisfaction of Aha, and and it is a clever ending, and so you're thinking.

The truth is, as a dramatic diminuendo, it's perhaps a little extended because you feel you know what? You could have cut that in half and I could have had a lot less detail and I'd have still believed you. I'd have still understood. On the other hand, it's all legit, but I wonder if it doesn't want to do the obvious thing again, it doesn't want to do the big dramatic finish. So it wants to do the kind of, okay, let's start, talk about it now and let's reflect so you can. Calm down after the enjoyment and just relax and, your heart rate can go down while you just start to rationalize and then you get the happy ending as it were, which as the coda. So in my head, I'm okay with it.

Now if we're talking about fairness, I think that while you've got something like The Maze, which is one that's supposed to have all the clues and it's structured. That's the whole point of the book. Okay. And you can, that book's easily accessible.

But in The Rasp, I think it ticks just as many boxes in the Yes, it's fair in the column and in the no column. So I've done a yes or no column for you, so I'm going to rush through I feel this is very MacDonald-ish, so I figured it would be fun. So look on the one hand, no, we don't have access to what is going on in our detective's mind, just as we don't, in the case of Miss Marple of Philo Vance. So therefore, we don't always know what the clues mean. And therefore we don't know what the interpretation is and therefore it's not entirely fair, just in practically every other golden age detective story. So I think that's reasonable. On the other hand, I think we are given enough clues to figure out important things like the fingerprint clue.

I think most readers will probably, hopefully, will feel that they've had their intelligence nicely stroked and flattered by the fact that they can probably figure how that it's a clever device. But I certainly reading it many years later, let's put it that way. I think perhaps it's more obvious to us how that was done.

Caroline: Same. I think the same is true of the entrance to the room. I think he gives you the nice little scene early on where they're like, oh, there's a creeper on this wall, isn't there?

Sergio: That's right. It's there, what you decide to do with it depends what you know about horticulture, and so on. So it's a bit, it's a bit like that. I honestly don't think we have enough information to figure out who is responsible on a kind of clue basis.

I think we definitely don't have enough information to figure out the motive. We absolutely don't have that

Caroline: No, that's all private.

Sergio: So we can't do that. So that's not fair, if you like. On the other hand, I think things like the geography of the building, which is important. I think things like the alibi, that is semi fair, but it relies on information you couldn't possibly know. And yet, it seems to me that the joy of it is that there's enough there to make you feel like you've enjoyed the experience, but it don't think it ever feels like, oh yeah, sure. I could have figured that out. No, I don't think so. I think you could have maybe figured it out based on conventions or based on reading other books maybe. But that's not figuring out, that's just guessing because you think you know what the writer's likely to do, which is not the same thing.

Caroline: Yes. No, absolutely that, that was how I feel, like I quote, solved it purely through the lack of other time spent on other characters.

Sergio: Yeah.

Caroline: Which is, that's a structural spoiler as opposed to a, actually I couldn't tell you why I thought it was that person. Just almost sometimes you can do, films and tv, it's the same thing. It's oh, the most famous actor, hey, I wonder what he's doing there.

Sergio: Sooner or later, you they'd wise up to that and they'll cast somebody really famous in a red herring roll. They never do it. It's so annoying.

Caroline: Yeah. So that was how I felt. The structure of this book points you in a particular direction, purely because Gethryn barely converses with anybody else. So it has to be Digby-Coates because it couldn't be anybody else.

Sergio: Absolutely. And in a way it is the whole thing, isn't it? It's the Thorndyke, Austin Freeman unbreakable alibi. You go for the guy with the unbreakable alibi. Guess what? There's one person with an unbreakable alibi. Do you have enough information to break the alibi? No, you don't.

But on the other hand, I love it when he pulls his wig off. It's brilliant. You know the fact that he has to have a spare wig for it to work is even better. But, and I wrote this down because I don't know, I love it. He refers to its annoying almost impossible tidiness.

I love that. The fact that he found it annoyingly tidy. I thought that's perfect because it's your hair looks too good. I'm envious. That made me suspect you or rather your hair, and I think, you know what? That's great.

Caroline: There's also a good little dig or maybe it's a bit of a preemptive explanation where he says, because Digby-Coates has done this very daring thing really in that he's set up a dummy of himself in full view of servants coming and going. He's left the door open deliberately so it'll be seen.

And then he climbs out the window, down the house in the window, kills his friend back up the same way back in the chair. Nothing to see here. And Gethryn in his explanation says something like this was really daring. Like this was almost simple school boyish in its absolute audacity. And perhaps that's the only reason why it worked is because no one would think anyone would do that or even fall for that old trick of the pillow under the bed clothes. It's essentially that with a wig on. So I think he's flagging that to the reader. He's saying I realize you probably think this is unlikely. I'm saying the unlikeliness is why it worked.

Sergio: Absolutely. And that ties in so well with the motive because again you can't know what that motive is because you just don't have enough information. You know that there's a personal attack on the murder victim, and that's flagged and investigated, but you don't get the information.

I think that's all right because it's done in a humorous way. It's when the private investigator says, and you'll pay me an extra 200 pounds when I tell you my information, and you don't know what he says, but MacDonald tells you he got is 200 pounds, which is a great moment. It's just very well done. It's an interesting and unusual motive, this idea that it's personal enmity based on a kind of life long sense of rivalry with someone who always comes first and you always come second and you just can't get any better than that and you're blaming them, not yourself.

And you think of course that sort of fits in with a school boyish sort of attitude. And in a way that's interesting because of course it reflects a little bit on the person who's mistakenly arrested, who has a school boy approach because he's so nice basically, and is one of those people who just can't think badly of anyone and would never do anything really bad to anyone.

Which is why Gethryn says it can never be him, of all the people here, he is the only one who could absolutely not have done it. Equally, the only person who psychologically if you knew enough about them would do it is this person who has personal vanity and who has this kind of intensity and who we later hear I didn't always enjoy being in his company. We get that from Lucia.

I think that works very nicely. So I think that logic is always there. The mechanics of these semi impossible mysteries always drive you a bit round the bend. Unless you're John Dickson Carr, it's very hard to really make them work. Because I don't know about you, but I can see myself going down on a rope, I can't see myself being able to go back up again. Also you get to the windowsill, but I wouldn't be able to pull myself up.

Caroline: And without leaving any trace, no shoe marks on the bricks or the stucco of the house.

Sergio: No, just a little bit on the vine as it were. Yeah. So I'm not convinced. Basically it would make a lot more sense if Lucia did it because she's the athlete. And that bit with the hair as well. Well, if you read any more MacDonald you'll see quite quickly that he's got a real interest in disguises.

Which is one of the things that then becomes very interesting in some of the film adaptations. So it's also fun to have that here early, if you like. It's not quite disguise, but this idea that you could manufacture a sort of simulacra of this person because you've got the hair and you can use the, the trousers and the shoes and nobody would go bother them is a very MacDonald, let's put it that way. But I think it's great. I think it's unusual. I can't think of too many books where, you know, a golden age detective story where that's the motive, that is intriguing.

Caroline: That is original and I also thought that it, I think he does give it some psychological grounding for all of that the motive is held out of the reader's reach. Once you are told about it and the way it's presented in these two columns, like all of these institutions that these men have progressed through, how they've had these parallel careers. It does work with the sense of arrested development because as they, say so often about rich, posh people these days is that they basically never really leave the boarding school. Like they go from boarding school to university, from university to the army. From the army to parliament.

They've never worked for themselves. Or in any way had what some people might consider like a real job in the private sector or something of where you actually have to account for yourself in a different way. So the fact that this man has nursed this sort of like teenage grudge all the way through all these places makes sense because in a way he's never had to stop being a teenager. He's never had to wash his own sheets or empty his own bin or anything like that because he's always been part of these big institutions that take care of everything for him. So I like that touch. I thought that worked that because sometimes it can be a bit frustrating when, a murderer is just declared at the end like, oh, he's mad. That's why he did it.

Sergio: Yeah.

Caroline: And that explains everything. Whereas this is mad in a very specific way that is consistent with the crime he committed.

Sergio: Yeah. In a weird way, he's a well hidden murderer because he is the kind of hail fellow well met sort of idea. He's chummy, he's friendly. We talk to him the whole time. We have no real reason to suspect him at all. So the classic, I would never suspect him kind of person.

On the other hand, as you say, there's nobody else there who it can reasonably be and have it work in a way that wouldn't annoy you. Because you would get annoyed. And I think that probably does in a way take us to this area of, the big revelation scene if you like, because I think that MacDonald does something actually really interesting there as well.

I love the way that when Gethryn says this is what really happened. So we're getting the classic scene and there's thunder, it's a dark night and so all the cliches are there or it's all happening and he starts telling you the story and the story is going in directions you absolutely don't expect.

We're thinking, where did this come from? Hang on. You never told me about this. I didn't know about a twin or a half brother that looked exactly. This is what, and what and Yeah, so you go, so on the one hand, you're getting quite animated as a reader. So thinking, hang on, this is not okay.

I'm not all right with this. How is this possible? On the one hand you've got all of that. On the other hand, it's quite compelling actually, because it's quite fun. So you want to read it, you want to see where the hell is Gethryn going. Because it does tie up some of the loose ends, shall we say.

So it's not completely mad or anything, but it's okay, this, we seem to have become very unlikely, oh dear, how disappointing. We're going to go with the whole doubles thing. Aren't there rules about that? But what I think is brilliant is that it sucks you in. Just like it's supposed to because it sucks in the guy he's really directing it at. What I think is so special about it, and which I suspect is why people loved the book, is because it's directed at him and it's directed at you, the reader, and you're both being suckered.

And you're both reading it long and you are getting to the point where you're saying, oh, come on. Oh, come on. This is not, you can't be going there. Don't let me down, Philip, what are you doing? And all of a sudden, the guy snaps and says, no, this is outrageous. I did it. You can't be this stupid. And then, three people come out from, you can get that great line afterwards where they talk about how, yes, it's very clever of me to orchestrate the weather to be all thunderous and dramatic, but I absolutely adore it. I think it's dramatic. It's beautifully engineered, but it's also utterly bananas.

But it's very sly. It is, again, playing with the conventions, but in a good way because it's not saying you're an idiot, it's saying a lot books would've tried this, but guess what? I'm going to give you something better. I'm going to something more plausible.

Caroline: That's so interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way. That in a way he's prefiguring, the kind of multiple solution mystery that, Anthony Berkeley would do at the end of the decade. Christiana Brand would do, take two extremes, all of this kind of thing. Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. That, yeah, he is, it is a sort of false solution in that regard, because you can imagine an early 1920s, detective novel would've explained everything away that way, oh, yes. He had his secret half brother who was identical to him, and actually that's who was killed. That is ultimately kind of the solution to the The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne. A book I really enjoy, but would not hold up as an exemplary, plotted mystery, so yeah, he's saying yeah, I could do this.

But I won't. I'll then give you my 30 page dossier explaining exactly what all of the fingerprints meant. Yeah, no, that I do really enjoy that. I want to come on to the cinema angle of this, because my understanding is this film was filmed, but we can no longer watch it. It's sadly lost, I believe. But MacDonald did go on to have several of his other books adapted and to work in Hollywood himself. Can you tell me a bit about his work there and why he was suited to it?

Sergio: Yes I can. And let me just say to you something that I probably hadn't bothered to mention before you are speaking to the right person. I wrote my master's thesis on the early films of Michael Powell, and a big section of it is about his films with Philip MacDonald.

But yes, that's right. There are five films that Michael Powell, who later become much more famous for films like Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, Matter of Life and Death, and a number of extraordinary films from the 1940s.

Caroline: A Canterbury Tale, which is my favourite film ever.

Sergio: Oh, what a wise person you are. It's such a great film.

I Know Where I'm Going, and of course Peeping Tom as well, which is a much more dangerous kind of film. But he started off doing what were known as quota quickies. Which were these films that were usually extremely short, usually about 45 to 50 minutes, sometimes even reaching an hour. And they were made as part of a quota system so that you had to make x number of British films to counterbalance imports usually from America.

So in this case they adapted one of MacDonald's finest books, I think, Rynox. Also known as The Rynox Murder. It's a fantastic book. I urge you to read it. So then MacDonald and Powell worked on films together and they did The Rasp. The Rasp is sadly lost. And in fact, of the five films they made together, only two survive. And the other one, and you can also get this on that Blu-Ray collection or rent it online at BFI player is called Hotel Splendide.

And it's a kind of comedy mystery. It's the sort of thing that you would later see with, a lot of comedians will turn up and it's this house and there's dirty dealings and eventually they find a secret villain in disguise. And it's great fun, but it, very much film of its time. Very typical of MacDonald.

So MacDonald had in fact started doing screenplays, anyway, so he did these five with Powell, did some others, and then he got an offer really to go to Hollywood and his first big credit was Charlie Chan in London. So it's classic. It goes all the way to Hollywood to write a film set in the UK stars British actors, including a young Ray Milland. And this is in incidentally, a film that's then referenced heavily as part of the plot in Gosford Park. So then he follows that up with Charlie Chan in Paris, which is probably one of the best plotted of the early Charlie Chan films.

He does lots of other films. And eventually works on quite big films like the early drafts of Rebecca, the Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel. And then also worked on a variety of films including the Mr Moto films. They're great fun as long as like the Charlie Chan films, you can get past the fact that you have a Caucasian actor playing an Asian role. So it's problematic. You have to put it in historical context. If you can do that, some of those films are tremendously entertaining. MacDonald went on to write all kinds of films and he was working right into the sixties as a screenwriter.

So his work as a novelist, as a writer of prose really shrank. So that nearly all of his writing, and he wrote a lot actually in a very condensed period by about the mid 1930s he is writing a lot less because he is working in Hollywood. Final novel comes out from the thirties called Warrant for X, which is also known as The Nursemaid Who Disappeared and that got filmed as Twenty-Three Paces to Baker Street in the mid 1950s, which is really good fun, worth seeing, although it's got very weird ideas about British geography. But shot in the UK. But it's one of those things. You turn left and all of a sudden you are 50 miles to the right, but very good adaptation. Very good whodunnit.

So he did lots of screenplays, but also quite a few of his books were adapted. And I would say if we're talking about his relationship in the cinema, we go back to where I came in, which is The List of Adrian Messenger that got filmed in 1962-63 by John Huston, the great American filmmaker, the guy who made the 1941 Bogart version of Maltese Falcon, a great filmmaker and it's this fascinating film that really manages to capture the spirit of the MacDonald book, which again, was his last novel. And it brings back Gethryn, although he is not in it that much. He's played by George C. Scott, the American actor, the amazing American actor.

But he's terrific, he's doing a really good British accent. Does a great job. But the selling point for the film is that the big stars in the film, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitcham, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis all appear in disguise and you have to see if you can figure out who they are under the makeup while you're watching the film, like I say, because MacDonald loved disguises. So they decided to really big it up for the film. And then you get to the end of the film and the story's resolved, the mystery is uncovered. And then you get Kirk Douglas, just as you get the end coming up. He says, wait, the mystery isn't quite over, at which point you get all the actors unmasking themselves to reveal who they played in the film.

What's really amusing about all of this is that in nearly all of those cases, with a big exception to Tony Curtis and Robert Mitcham, in most cases they were not there on the set during the filming and they only filmed the reveal bits. They had another actor wearing the makeup pretending to be them on location. It's mainly shot in Ireland and the UK. It's not them. Even Kirk Douglas, who is made by his company and he's the star of the film, although he is the, he's baddie, he's mostly not him. When he is in, when he is not playing himself as Kirk Douglas is usually a character actor called Jan Merlin.

And he is in fact playing because putting the makeup on was just a frigging nightmare. And Kirk Douglas didn't want to do it, quite reasonably, so he would go off and shoot his scenes and the bits with when he's supposed to be impersonating somebody else, he's pretending to be a priest who puts a extra bag on the plane that then explodes. Amazing stuff in that film. That's always Jan Merlin. Anyway, it's a fantastic film. It's enormously entertaining. So it's The List of Adrian Messenger, 1963, great music score by the wonderful Jerry Goldsmith. It's got its tongue in its cheek, but it's not a spoof. It's just having a very good time, which to me is the heart of Philip MacDonald's entertainments.

Caroline: I feel like you've brought it all back round perfectly that all of those seeds were planted in The Rasp. His love of disguise, his love of having fun with form and playing with the reader or the viewer and so on. But still underlining it with, no, actually I am quite clever and good at this as well.

That's all there in The Rasp as well. That's fantastic. So yeah, I've got about eight films I want to see now. Before we conclude, I must ask you the question that I ask all my guests in Green Penguin Book Club, which is How many green penguins out of five would you like to award The Rasp by Philip MacDonald?

Sergio: Are you allowed to do halves? I can't remember.

Caroline: You are permitted to do halves. You are also allowed to interpret the scale yourself. There's not some err interpretation. You can decide what five and one mean.

Sergio: Oh, that, that's too clever for me. It definitely deserves at least three and a half or three and three quarters, very near to four., it seems to me. MacDonald wrote better books. It's not my favourite MacDonald. I would pick Rynox or Murder Gone Mad or The Mystery of the Dead Police, which is also known as X vs Rex.

He loved things with letter X in them which are actually almost serial killer type stories. They're prototypes, of that type of story, but brilliantly done. Again because yeah, he was a Thriller fan and some of his best other books are much more thriller-ish, but very clever. Very atmospheric.

So yeah, it doesn't go at the full five. There are other books of his I would give a full five to this one. Not quite, but I do think it reads very well and stands up absolutely splendidly.

Caroline: Thank you so much Sergio, for joining me to consider this book. I've learned an enormous amount and I hope you've had a good time

Sergio: I've had a brilliant time. It's so great to be on your podcast. It's a great podcast. Congratulations and it's absolute honour to be here.

Music

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

Many thanks to my guest, Sergio Angelini. You can find his podcast, Tipping My Fedora, about all things crime fiction and film noir in all good podcast apps or at his website, bloodymurder.wordpress.com, which is also linked in the description of this episode.

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

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

Thanks for listening.