Freeman, R Austin - The Penrose Mystery (1936)

Review by Nick Fuller

3/5

Penrose, a collector “possessed by an insatiable acquisitiveness” and a singular ignorance of his possessions, and whose exasperating facetious “conversation is a sort of everlasting crossword puzzle,” disappears after a hit-and-run accident, while his house is burgled and a cryptic note left. His cousin and executor, anxious to establish survivorship, calls in Dr. Thorndyke, whose understanding of the significance of a fragment of pottery leads to the excavation of a Kentish barrow and the discovery of Penrose therein, and whose discovery of a connexion between the Billington Jewel Robbery and Penrose leads to the discovery of his murderer. The reader hesitates between two suspects before Dr. Thorndyke solves the conundrum in a most satisfying manner. Less satisfying is his habit of repeating his effects, and Mrs. Pettigrew’s willingness to keep the secret when she mistrusted Deodatus Pettigrew.

The Penrose Mystery (1936) is best in its opening chapters 1-3, those narrated by the lawyer. These are not much similar to the trilogy of early novels. Instead their portrait of eccentric antiques collector Daniel Penrose recalls the curio business in Freeman's Danby Croker story, "The Brazen Serpent". Freeman clearly knew a lot about British antiquities, and his love shines through. Both this book and The Stoneware Monkey give an inside look at the British crafts movement of the 1930's, something that one rarely sees in fiction. This novel never builds up to a good puzzle plot mystery, unfortunately, although Freeman has one or two clever ideas up his sleeve.

Penrose displays similarities to the later The Jacob Street Mystery (1942). Both novels initially focus on a small group of friends, of which Polton is a member, and to which he contributes his skill as a technician and mechanic. Both also involve a mystery of attitude. In Penrose, the narrator cannot understand the attitude of Mr. Penrose to his collection; in Jacob, the narrator is baffled by Mrs. Schiller's attitude towards her art and her personal relationships. There is a sort of inconsistency to all this, a lack of typical behavior on Penrose's and Mrs. Schiller's part. These mysteries open the story, and introduce the first mystery into the tale. The characters in both stories are distinguished by what might be called "negative mental quantities". Penrose is completely illogical and disorganized in collecting and cataloguing, whereas Mrs. Schiller adheres to modern art. These are both mental traits that Freeman found particularly offensive. It was common in Golden Age mysteries to make the victim as loathsome as possible, greedy, corrupt and vicious. It is typical of the cerebrally oriented Freeman to make his central characters' most sinister qualities to be purely mental. It also shows Freeman's ongoing interest in cognitive psychology: how people think.

Next in both works comes a mysterious disappearance. In both stories, there is a trail, but it is full of equivocal and somewhat contradictory clues. The narrators' last view of the vanished, and then their last involvement with the mystery, in both cases are made a matter of considerable mise-en-scène.

The barrow scenes of the story are relicts of a prehistoric religion in Britain, and its funerary customs. In this, the book reminds one of The Eye of Osiris. H.C. Bailey also wrote about such ancient religions. His tale "The Long Barrow" has elements in common with Freeman's novel.

Except for the introductory three chapters, I am not especially fond of The Penrose Mystery. It moves slowly, and with little new substance in the tale. In Chapters 10 and 11, Thorndyke solves a secret code, enabling him to find the name and address of a crook, and connect him up with the plot. A similar deductive use of codes and Rogues is found in many of the stories Margery Allingham collected in Mr Campion and Others. Allingham's stories were published in magazines from 1936 to 1940, and perhaps show the influence of Freeman's novel.

Mike Grost

The Penrose Mystery is available from Gutenberg Australia.