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Death of Jezebel

Page history last edited by Jon 12 years, 1 month ago

Brand, Christianna - Death of Jezebel (1948)

 

Impossible crime detective novel

 

One of the disheartening side effects of a book going out of print – especially if it is in demand – is the unsettling practice of booksellers charging exorbitant prices for copies that they may have luckily gotten their hands on.  These are often described in bookseller catalogues as "extremely scarce," "uncommon," and my favorite term that makes the book sound as if it were some kind of fleet wild game - "elusive."  One of these truly elusive books is Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand.  Although the book received editions on both sides of the Atlantic in 1948 and was reprinted in the UK in 1976 by Ian Henry Publications (meant mostly for libraries), copies of the book are few and far between.  Check the internet and you will discover the typical over-inflated prices for this hard to find book - even for audio cassette versions!

 

A few months ago I was lucky enough to come across a battered copy of Death of Jezebel in a Milwaukee used bookstore for an extremely affordable price and snapped it up.  When all I wanted to do was read the book I was happy to find a book in any condition.  I must say that the book proved to be one of those all too infrequent instances of an elusive title living up to all its hype.  This book is a borderline masterpiece of detective fiction.

 

Brand was one of the few women mystery writers who tried her hand at multiple versions of a detective fiction convention usually more successfully handled by male writers – the locked room or impossible crime.  In her small output of only 11 detective novels four of them qualify as impossible crime mysteries and I believe there are at least two short stories with impossible crime elements.  Two of those impossible crime mysteries have been noted by a few discerning critics as landmarks of this subgenre.  Death of Jezebel easily belongs in any Top 25 list of locked room and impossible detective novels.

 

The story is a surreal plot that begins with a murder committed in full view of an audience while a medieval pageant is being played out on a stage, eleven knights in armor mounted on horseback on stage below a single tower from which a woman plummets to her death (see illustration).  It appears to be a bizarre accident at first, but almost immediately it is discovered that she was strangled to death prior to the fall.  The victim, Isabel Drew, an arrogant actress who toyed with the men in her theatrical life, is nicknamed Jezebel by one of her admirers and her death suitably echoes the biblical death of her namesake:

 

"And she went up into the high tower," [Cockrill] recited. "And she painted her face and tired her head, and she looked out of the window…

Sergeant Bedd's eyes shone. "'And they threw her down – three eunuchs it was, sir, threw her down: and her blood was sprinkled upon the wall; and the horses trod on her…" (Chapter 6)

 

In addition to the crime being so brazenly accomplished the entire setting presents a double impossible crime:

 

A 'sealed room.' A single entrance, bolted on the one side, bolted and guarded on the other. […] A man missing who could not be the murderer since he had been sitting on his horse when the murder was done: and a frightened girl locked up, but unharmed, in a room.  And finally, eleven men in impenetrable disguise in full view of thousands of people….(Ch. 6)

 

And if you think that the men in armor is just thrown as a mere element of the bizarre - think again.  The entire murder plot is ingeniously thought out by Brand.  Not one detail is arbitrary.  All the clues as well - including the odd lengths of rope found buried underneath the skirts of the victim's costume - will all serve their devilish purpose.

 

As the story progresses something of a duel develops between two police inspectors – Brand's popular Cockrill and her lesser known Charlesworth.  Throughout the novel we are treated to verbal sparring from the two policemen.  Charlesworth delights in ribbing Cockrill about  how he "made such a muck of that hospital case down in Kent" (Green for Danger).  There is a competition of sorts going on in this book between the two policemen as Charlesworth attempts to fit the crime to his own theories while Cockrill puzzles through the evidence trying to make sense of it all.  The word impossible is repeatedly used to describe the crimes.  Yet even in their doggedness the two often treat the outrageousness of the two murders a bit more lightly than one would expect of upholders of the law.  In fact, the overall tone of the borders on parody – the style is arch, there is much bantering and black humor.  When a second murder occurs and the corpse is missing its head which later turns up gruesomely wrapped and delivered to a third intended victim of the vengeful murderer, the tone never becomes anything than half serious.  It doesn't help matters much that Brand has named one of the characters Brian Bryan and that nearly everyone refers to him by his cute nickname Brian Two-Times.  Cockrill repeatedly misremembers the nickname and will often call him Brian Twice or Brian Doubled or whatever comes to mind other than the real moniker invented.

 

Brand is all too aware of just how ludicrous her story becomes.  Towards the end the two policemen have an exchange about the differences between fictional crime and real crime.  When Charlesworth attempts to set a trap for the killer Cockrill bemoans the fact that Charlesworth keeps talking as if they were in a book (of course, they are!) and that writers don't know real police procedure at all. To which Charlesworth replies::

 

It would be so deadly dull if they did. […] I suppose they reckon that their job is to entertain and not to worry too much about what could or would or couldn't or wouldn't have happened. After all, their books are just fun to read – not treatises on the law. (Ch. 13)

 

And entertaining it is!  The book is one of a handful of detective novels in which the author manages to ingeniously concoct multiple solutions to the crime.  Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case comes first to mind, others include The Greek Coffin Mystery (Queen), The Case with Nine Solutions (Connington), A Case for Three Detectives (Leo Bruce) , Trent's Last Case, and Murder on the Orient Express.  But in addition to the multiple solutions (including three reconstructions of the tower murder) there are multiple confessions.  The book audaciously manages to find motives and opportunity for all of the suspects.  In the process of these solutions typical detective genre surprises are thrown into the works including one hilarious scene in which a nervous young man attempts to unmask a female character as a male in disguise.  At one point Charlesworth proposes that the two murders and one contemplated murder were committed by three people all in collusion with each taking a different victim and providing alibis for the other two.  Did I call this audacious?  Did I use the term head-spinning yet?  You may want to stand up and cheer at this marvel of a book by the time you reach the final page.

 

There are few books that deserve to be resurrected from the desolate limbo of Out-of Printdom.  Death of Jezebel is certainly one of them.  Clever, entertaining, bamboozling, head spinning -- it's a devilish little gem of a detective novel.  Hopefully, some enterprising reprint house will see the light and bring this book back out of Limbo and into the Land of Eager Readers.  They have all been waiting too long.

 

J. F. NORRIS

May 28, 2009

Chicago, IL

 

(This essay was originally published in the first issue of Crime Fiction Gazette - an internet fanzine that sadly ceased operation after only two issues.  I intended to write about books that deserved to be reissued in a regular column to be entitled "Reprint This - or Else!"  The essay was reprinted one year later in the Summer 2010 issue of Old Time Detection.)

 

See also http://at-scene-of-crime.blogspot.com/2011/04/queen-is-dead.html and http://deathcanread.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/christianna-brand-death-of-jezebel-1948.html

 

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