This month my book group are venturing into waters unknown with an author (I think) we have not tried before.* Early bird Brad has already reviewed this mystery, which you can read here. More by chance than design our first encounter with King’s work is the first novel in his 11-book-long Lieutenant Valcour series. This story was included in Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen’s ‘A Reader’s List of Detective Story Cornerstones’, a point which intrigued me, along with the fact that the plot takes place mostly over one night, a structure which reminded me of Cornell Woolrich’s Deadline at Dawn (1944).
Kelli Stanley writes the introduction to the American Mystery Classics reprint. I appreciated the effort to draw upon contemporary resources in order to explore King as a person and a writer, such as 1930s gossip columns, and I enjoyed reading about his screenplay writing career.
In addition, I was interested in the comments Kelli makes about the character and role of Lieutenant Valcour:
‘But what sets it apart from many of its contemporaries is the nonconformist status of Lieutenant Valcour […] Rather than what would become the standard trope of the stoic, hardworking, step-by-procedural-step police officer, Valcour is an introspective dreamer. Though the novel hops into other voices occasionally, his predominates. He stands apart, alone and comments on other characters and on his own thoughts in a reverie of near-meta self-awareness and observation. He is as much a Greek Chorus commenting on life as he is a detective.’
This is something I will look at a little more in the body of my review.
*Upon searching my blog, I did find I had previously read one short story by this author, but it had not really left much of an impression on me, so it still felt like I was going into this author’s work fresh.
Synopsis
‘The body of Herbert Endicott is discovered by his wife at 8:37 PM, dead in his walk-in closet. The circumstances seem suspicious but there is no evidence of foul play, so Lieutenant Valcour, New York’s most astute investigator, orders an autopsy on site. The doctor discovers a faint heartbeat and, with an injection of adrenaline, Endicott is alive again. But just a few hours later, he has been shot dead—this time for good.’
Overall Thoughts
Chapter 1 begins with Mrs Endicott, seemingly worried that her husband Herbert is in some kind of danger. She vacillates on the best course of action. Should she call the police or not? From her viewpoint the reader gets the impression that the police are inhuman, faceless and anonymous, lacking individual identities:
‘Mrs Endicott had never had any personal contact with the police. Whenever she thought about it at all she thought of the force as an efficient piece of machinery, the active parts of which one observed daily from one’s motor […]’
This quote perhaps also offers an indication of Mrs Endicott’s class status, as does the fact that she knows there is a patrolman who passes her home as part of his beat, and her husband even tips him at Christmas, but she does not know his name.
Moreover, quotes like the one above also tapped into the modernist preoccupation with technology and its capacity to dehumanise people and erase individuality. Mrs Endicott sees traffic cops and patrolmen as simply being part of the greater whole, the police force as an organisation rather than as people with their own identities. Even when she finally decides to call the police, the operative who takes her call is said to have ‘an impersonal, efficient voice with no overtones about it.’ It was surprising how often the word ‘efficiency’ or ‘efficient’ was used in relation to the police and police activity and I found it reinforced the police-as-machinery theme. Yet there is a brief moment where Mrs Endicott too loses her voice and personality, whilst waiting for Lieutenant Valcour to arrive:
‘Her sense of aloneness became stifling. The conceit grew upon her nervous condition that she had changed places with the furniture. She had become inanimate and the furniture endowed with attributes of life, as if her being were under the influence of some dispassionate regard by something that had no eyes with which to see.’
Furthermore, Mrs Endicott does not avoid all connotations with machinery herself, as at one stage her voice is described as ‘metallic’. Mrs Endicott’s most detailed and vivid impressions of the police come from plays she has seen at the theatre:
‘Most of the characters had been brutal, in spite of a pleasant tender-heartedness reluctantly betrayed toward the final curtain, and just at present she wanted quiet, competent understanding – not brutality.’
However, her ideal policeman might not be what she really wants, as such a detective is liable to uncover more than she wishes to reveal about her life. I am not sure if it will just be me in book group, but I was quite surprised to learn that Mrs Endicott was only 25 years old, as before that revelation the way the narrative portrayed her, made her seem older.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the discovery of Herbert in the cupboard, as Lieutenant Valcour does not really see much to investigate when he first arrives, as it seems more likely that Mrs Endicott is unhappy about her husband having an affair. Yet opening the cupboard soon alters this opinion and sees the beginning of a truly bizarre and difficult night for Valcour.
The first chapter only lets us observe the lieutenant from the outside. He comes across as respectable, police, polished, middle class even – yet there is still an unexpected tough side to him: ‘She went past him and toward the cupboard door. He shrugged. The value of her reaction would offset the brutality of not stopping her.’ However, the second chapter allows us to see inside Lieutenant Valcour’s head, which I found to be an interesting experience:
‘How pleasant it would be, he reflected, to come across the perfect imprint of a shoe, or a rubber, or – what was it that was so popular at the moment? – of course: the footprint of a gorilla. The case would then be what was technically known as an open-and-shut-one […] But enough.’
This passage might be a sort of reference to Poe’s orangutan character, however a brief look online showed that in 1927 a film called The Gorilla was released, in which a series of killings are committed and attributed to the work of a violent and murderous gorilla. So King might be making a reference to the recent film instead, which was based on a play by Ralph Spence.
After looking at some evidence, Lieutenant Valcour muses:
‘That, of course, eliminated the gorilla. What a pity it was, he reflected, that he was so constantly obsessed with infernal absurdities. Even though he tried to keep them under triple lock and key when working with his associates on the force, they had a distressing habit at times of cropping out into the open where they could be seen. Nor were they of a humour especially in vogue among his contemporaries […] As a result there were occasions when he rested under the cloud of being considered mildly lunatic. It was bad business […] Success and humour formed bedfellows as agreeable as an absent-minded dog would be en négligé in the boudoir of a surprised cat.’
Nowadays, the police officer who does not fit in with the rest of their colleagues is quite a common trope, although their reason for being a loner varies, so it was interesting to see this theme in a mystery from the 1920s, where I do not think it was so prevalent or overused.
Lieutenant Valcour is also not immune from perceiving the police force as machine-like, and his thoughts on this subject also emphasised how he does not necessarily feel truly part of the policing community:
‘He held a sincere respect for the Central Office men, but at the same time felt that their work was too methodically routine to permit their darting along interesting tangents or wasting their time in strolls along bypaths that might lead to fertile fields. There was no criticism in his mind at all. He admired the system that had been established, and the expert functioning of its units and departments. He knew very well that its average of successes was greater than its average of failures. But it was deficient in that elusive, time-taking, and sometimes expensive thing known as the “personal equation.” It remained, at its best, a machine.’
A further thing I found interesting was the sequence of Herbert being found (and presumed dead), Herbert being deemed saveable, and then Herbert being definitely killed. From a narrative direction point of view this added excitement as you’re not sure what will happen next, and I also liked seeing how characters react to these dramatic developments. In some ways I would say most characters are more shocked and horrified when Herbert is declared to still be alive, than when he is first believed to be dead. This story was originally serialised before being published as a novel, and I think this helped to shape the action and influence how and where plot developments were delivered in the narrative. There are a number of chapters which end in a great fashion due to this. The conclusion to chapter five is a particular favourite. I love how King builds up the tension, making you think X or Y will occur, only to suggest that such a conclusion won’t be reached, but then moments later reveals that it already has, despite the characters’ best efforts. The reader is able to share the shocks with the characters as they come to pass and the novel’s high drama factor is one of its key strengths and makes it an exciting read.
Kelli Stanley suggests in her introduction that Murder by the Clock, in tone, ‘seemed akin to S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance novels’. Although, I have not read a Vance novel in quite a while, I didn’t really see this parallel when reading the mystery, except perhaps during some of Lieutenant Valcour’s conversations where his dialogue becomes quite abstract, convoluted and bordering on the highfalutin. This mars some earlier parts of the book when Valcour talks more with Mrs Endicott, so I was glad when this feature became less prevalent as the book progressed.
It is fascinating how readers can have such a varied experience reading a book, as Kelli Stanley opines that ‘King overall seems less interested in the plot (some elements stretch credulity) than in drawing interesting, compelling people […]’. This opinion intrigued me later on as I was reading the mystery, as for me I had the opposite experience, finding the plot to the main priority and the characterisation weaker. This is a shame as Mrs Endicott had great potential as a character and whilst she is increasingly posed as hardboiled and as a femme fatale, I do not think the associated psychology with this role is sufficiently grounded within the narrative. It is undeniable that Mrs Endicott’s personality and the nature of her relationship with her husband is a key part of the tale, yet we tend to receive this information second hand, through biased eyes, so the impressions we get of the psychological darkness of the piece are less vibrant. In addition, I also felt some of Mrs Endicott’s developments have loose plot threads and therefore possible plot holes if you scrutinize them intently enough.
However, this is perhaps part and parcel of the increasingly thriller nature of the narrative. Lieutenant Valcour must juggle a lot of new events and information over the course of a twelve-hour period, so he cannot pause to think a lot of the time. He has to respond to the next situation. This, I think, helps the reader to jump over some of the plot’s implausibility. The thriller tone is good for demonstrating how Valcour is plunged into a set of circumstances which become ever more nightmarish as the evening carries on. Murder by the Clock is a wild ride of a read, like going white water rafting, and if you go into this book with that sort of expectation, you are more likely to enjoy it.
The choice of denouement is interesting, as it simultaneously ties things up, but also leaves some aspects open-ended and Valcour is aware of the tension between the two. He gets the feeling that there are more sinister events to come, yet he is not afraid of them. Whilst not a perfect read, I would want to try other books in the series, so if you have any favourites do let me know!
Rating: 4.25/5
Source: Review Copy (American Mystery Classics)