Derleth, August - The Narracong Riddle (1940)

Judge Ephraim Peck detective novel. 6th books in series.

Another Gothic imbued household with a wealthy family, a mysterious death, a strange legacy in the dead man's will and a few family secrets. The setting is Madison, Wisconsin this time and Judge Ephraim Peck is called to visit on the day before the funeral of Gisela Narrocong's brother. Seems she discovered something that makes his death not one from natural causes but an obvious murder. She shows this to Judge Peck – a steel rod protruding from the back of her brother's skull.  And so he is hired to find out who might have done the deed.  Along the way we will encounter a sleepwalking butler, a paperback mystery novel with the cryptic phrase "the strawberry mark" written inside, an odd man with a beard, and a fern that reeks of vodka.

At times it seemed to be a rewrite of The Man on All Fours (rooftop climax, investigation of a locked room with footprints in the dust, the weird inhabitants of a wealthy family).  I think that the Judge Peck books are fairly formulaic like this. Derleth has admitted that he rushed these books off in a matter of days; a formula probably made it easier to get them done faster.  But the book suffers at this slap dash method.  Clues are planted rather obviously and the mystery is easily figured out.

Derleth has a very odd old-fashioned syntax he indulges in.  I think this is something he developed in his pulp writing days in an effort to emulate all the writers he so admired – especially Lovecraft.  But often it's just jarring especially in this case - a book written in the 1940s when most writers (even popular novelists and genre writers) were moving towards a more modern, streamlined style of writing free of heavily constructed sentences bulging with archaic word choices that Derleth loves to use. His literary allusions to antiquarian books further proves he is something of a writer lost out of time.  In The Narracong Riddle, for example, he makes a reference to Miss Wilberforce as a nasty nickname for Thomas, the butler in the Narracong household.  I had to do some intense searching on the internet to turn up the source. She is a character in South Wind (1917) by Norman Douglas. In the context of the story Miss Wilberforce drinks heavily and undresses in the streets causing quite an uproar. Thomas, the reader will discover midway through the book, has the habit of sleepwalking naked.

J F Norris (Feb 2011)