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The Clue of the Twisted Candle

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 8 months ago

Wallace, Edgar - The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1918)

 

Successful mystery writer John Lexman returns home to Beston Priory one evening during a frogstrangler of a storm. Only one of its walls originally belonged to the ecclesiastical building which provided its name, and while it's described as "little more than a cottage" it is a cosy, attractive dwelling built in Elizabethan fashion with latticed windows and high chimneys.

 

His wife Grace tells him they have a visitor, Remington Kara, an extremely rich Greek with something of a turbulent history. During his ensuing conversation with Lexman, Kara reveals at one point he had run afoul of inventive gents of ill will who almost did for him by tying him to a chair next to a barrel of gunpowder in which was set a lit candle. For years since then the miscreants had been sending him reminders, and he goes is in terror of his life.

 

Despite his literary success, Lexman is floundering somewhat financially and owes a fair amount to Mr Vassalaro, a moneylender. Strange to relate, Vassalaro had threatened to kill Lexman if he won't cough up what is due. Kara advises Lexman to carry an (unloaded) revolver to his next interviewwith Vassalaro and at the right psychological moment flourish it at him. Vassalaro, he says, is a devout coward.

 

It is at this point that the plot begins to thicken. A letter arrives from the moneylender, ordering Lexman to meet him at a local crossroads at ll pm that night, and further advising him if he wishes to remain alive he had better bring "a substantial instalment" of the money owed.

 

Lexman decides to meet Vassalaro rather than run the risk of his coming to the house and making a scene -- Lexman has mentioned his fiscal embarrassment to his wife, but not its extent. He tells her a white lie to the effect he is off to meet the last train to see if it has proofs of his book.

 

Grace Lexman has a secret too: she is afraid of Kara, who has deliberately scraped up a friendship with her unsuspecting husband. And she has reason for her fear. She first met Kara while visiting the Balkans with her father. Kara fell in love with Grace and wanted to marry her, but having been refused he was, she believes, behind an attempt to kidnap her in a "medieval attempt to gain a wife". Fortunately she was saved by the timely intervention of a bunch of passing British bluejackets, i.e. sailors. Her husband knows nothing about this episode, although Kara has been perfectly open with him about his wish to have married Grace.

 

Kara leaves but is up to no good within a very short time, for he meets a man by appointment and tells him to merely threaten an unnamed third party.

 

Assistant Commissioner of Police T. X. Meredith, a man of unorthodox though successful methods of detection and John's best friend now appears. Meredith has been investigating Kara, who has requested a private connection between his house in Cadogan Square and Scotland Yard for the reason mentioned above. In fact, such is his fear of being murdered his bedroom is described by T.X. as "practically a safe". It features burglar-proof walls, reinforced concrete roof and floor, an unreachable window, and its sole door has in addition to a lock "a sort of steel latch which he lets down when he retires for the night and which he opens himself personally in the morning". T.X. is describing this remarkable room to the Chief Commissioner when he receives a frantic call from Lexman, who asks him to come down to his home immediately. It transpires the moneylender threatened him with a revolver when they met and Lexman, following Kara's advice, responded in like fashion -- but the weapon had mysteriously been loaded and he has killed Vassalaro by accident.

 

T.X. suspects the hand of Kara in all this, but the latter denies it all and there is nothing to prove his involvement.

 

What's more, the moneylender's threatening letter, which Lexman had wisely locked in his safe, bursts into flames when he gets it out to show to T.X., and the envelope in which it arrived had been thrown on the fire. Between this lack of evidence to support his story of its content and the fact that the moneylender's weapon cannot be founded, Lexman is charged with murder. He escapes an appointment with the hangman but is sentenced to 15 years.

 

We leap forward six months and learn Lexman is in Dartmoor, Beston Priory has been sold, and Grace is now living a flat in London, while T.X. is still trying to prove Lexman is innocent. In a good example of that wise saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, he has apologised to, and is now friendly with, Kara.

 

A colleague of T.X.'s happens to overhear a conversation on a bus by which he learns the dead moneylender had two addresses, one of them hitherto unknown to the police. Naturally they immediately go there and find interesting items which in tandem with the recovery of the moneylender's weapon (handily it has his name engraved on it) lead to agreement a pardon will be issued to Lexman. Meantime, the latter is out on work release and is sprung by Kara by way of monoplane and yacht. His wife waits for him aboard the ship and they disappear, knowing nothing of the promised pardon.

 

Two years pass. Then in a run of startling events, Kara's secretary is found rifling his safe and subsequently disappears, he has an unusual visitor, his manservant runs away, and T.X. receives a letter from John Lexman, who is back in London and proposes to give himself up as an escapee, as he still believes himself to be. But this is not the limit of the excitement, for hardly have we learnt all this when Kara is found fatally stabbed although locked securely in his room, having vainly tried to summon aid via his direct telephone link to Scotland Yard. How was this murder accomplished and for that matter who killed the dog in the basement of Kara's house? Was it the men Kara feared or someone else, and if it was, who was it?

 

Answers to these interesting questions are not revealed until a gathering at the end of the book in which All Is Explained, including the method by which the challenge presented by the locked room was overcome.

 

On the negative side I felt there were perhaps one too many coincidences and the identity of the murderer was not as well hidden as it might have been. On the other hand, the locked room explanation is ingenious, the clues to how it was accomplished are revealed in a fair fashion in the narrative, and I confess I did not foresee one of the final twists. I would sum it up as a diverting, light read.

 

Etext at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/clotc10.txt

 

Mary R

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