Gaston Leroux’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black

Gaston Leroux’s impossible crime novel The Perfume of the Lady in Black (the original French title is Le parfum de la dame en noir) was published in 1908.

Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) is best known in the English-speaking world as the author of The Phantom of the Opera. Keen detective fiction fans are also aware of his 1907 locked-room mystery The Mystery of the Yellow Room but Leroux is not regarded as a big deal in the Anglophone world. Leroux was however a prolific and extremely successful author and in France he is definitely a big deal, being considered one of the greats of genre fiction.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black is a kind of sequel to The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Once again the hero is Joseph Rouletabille, newspaper reporter and amateur detective. Joseph Rouletabille was a mere teenager when the events recounted in The Mystery of the Yellow Room took place. Since this book constantly refers to the events of The Mystery of the Yellow Room you probably should read that one first. To avoid spoilers I’ll be very vague about plot details.

There’s a man who should be dead but may not be. He was (or is) a nefarious villain, cunning and ruthless.

Rouletabille has become obsessed with the perfume of the Lady in Black. It’s a childhood memory with immense significance for him.

Most of the story takes place in a castle on the border between France and Italy. The castle was built in the 12th century, extended in the 15th century and again in the 17th century. It’s a maze of intact and partially ruined towers on a peninsula which is almost an island. It’s a great setting for a story of mystery and terror and Leroux makes extensive and skilful use of it. The castle has withstood attack many times and now Rouletabille is hoping it can withstand a more modern type of attack - by a master criminal.

Leroux goes to extraordinary lengths to convince us that the impossible crime which occurs really is impossible. He provides us with floor plans. The big problem is that there is one body too many.

There are several murders and several disappearances. Rouletabille is sure that Larsan is not far away.

The plot hinges on a device that was immensely popular in the mystery and thriller fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s device which most modern readers will find much too far-fetched. The plot is ingenious but contains a number of elements of doubtful plausibility. Very few readers today will be satisfied with the solution to the impossible crime angle.

Modern readers will also have problems with the pacing.

There are two major plot strands. One concerns events in the here and now and one concerns events in the past, events which concern Rouletabille. The perfume of the Lady in Black continues to haunt him. He feels it is the key not just to his past but to his future happiness and sanity.

Rouletabille is a boy genius detective who enjoys keeping his secrets. He knows certain things which he has reasons not to reveal to anyone else. His plan to apprehend a dangerous criminal depends on secrecy.

I like the breathless sensational tone and the general atmosphere of overheated emotional hysteria.

The concept of fair play had not yet become an accepted part of the detective fiction genre but if you’re familiar with the conventions of the crime fiction of that era you will have your suspicions as to at least a part of what is going on.

There are also several interlocking romance subplots.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black is, to be honest, mainly of historical interest. It has some slight affinities to the 19th century English sensation novel. I enjoyed it well enough but you do have to be a fan of the crime fiction of that era. If you fall into the category you’ll find it worth a look.

There have been several film adaptations of this novel, including Francesco Barilli’s giallo Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974).

Lady Audley’s Secret

One of the most important ancestors of the classical detective story was the Victorian sensation novel. Wilkie Collins is perhaps the best-known author of such books, with The Woman in White in 1860 and The Moonstone in 1868 cementing his reputation. J. Sheridan le Fanu was another master of the genre with Wylder's Hand being a particularly fine example. Equally popular at the time was Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, published in 1862. 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) was a prolific writer although none of her other books has achieved the same kind of lasting reputation as Lady Audley’s Secret. Her lover’s literary magazine being in desperate need of material she dashed the novel off in a matter of weeks between other writing tasks. 

Despite the haste with which it was written it’s a superbly constructed mystery, and like Collins’ sensation novels it gives considerable scope to characterisation and she manages to slip in some subtle social commentary, especially in regards to the position of women.

The somewhat mysterious but ravishingly beautiful Lucy Graham has charmed a wealthy and kindly baronet more than thirty years her senior, Sir Michael Audley, into marriage. When the baronet’s good-natured but incurably lazy nephew Robert Audley arrives at the family seat with an old acquaintance recently returned from the Australian goldfields a series of dramatic events is triggered off, events which in the fullness of time will reveal the secret of the young Lady Audley. Robert Audley’s indolent lifestyle is changed forever by madness, murder and the threat of shameful scandals that now hang over the house of Audley. 

Lady Audley’s Secret combines enormous fun with some wonderfully memorable characters, and for anyone with even the mildest interest in the development of the crime novel it’s essential reading, as well as being immensely entertaining.

Wylder’s Hand by J. Sheridan le Fanu

I’m a big fan of Joseph Sheridan le Fanu’s gothic fictions, especially Carmilla and Green Tea, but until now I hadn’t sampled any of his sensation novels. After reading his 1864 novel Wylder’s Hand I can see myself tracking down  lot more of his work in this genre!

The sensation novel was a kind of Victorian ancestor to the detective novel, with a crime as the lynchpin of the plot but generally without an actual detective as hero, and with a pinch of melodrama.

The plot of Wylder’s Hand is convoluted and contrived to an extraordinary degree, but I’d see that as a plus rather than a minus. It was really a convention of the genre (and I suppose it’s a convention of crime fiction in general) to have a fiendishly complicated plot.

The Wylder and Brandon families are in fact branches of the same family, and the vast Brandon estates have for generations passed back and forth between the two families. It’s become a tradition for the current holder of the estate to leave a devious will that renders the future ownership of the estates open to all kinds of legal wranglings and bitter family disputes. As the novel opens the provisions of the latest will have made it highly desirable for a marriage to take place between the young and beautiful Dorcas Brandon and Mark Wylder, a marriage that would unite two fortunes and clarify the complex ownership situation. Which would be all well and good, apart from the inconvenient fact that Mark isn’t especially attracted to Dorcas while Dorcas dislikes Mark quite intensely, and Mark has an unexpected rival.

There’s an important sub-plot involving Mark’s impoverished brother, the Reverend William Wylder, and the machinations of the unscrupulous lawyer Josiah Larkin. Other important players are Rachel and Stanley Lake, brother and sister and belonging to yet another branch of the same family tree.

The main plot unfolds slowly, with a mysterious disappearance and dark hints of past crimes and shameful secrets. The fairly leisurely pacing works well, building the tension very effectively.

While the plot is highly melodramatic the characters are complex and sometimes surprising. The chief villain is not a stock villain out of melodrama at all. He’s certainly selfish and ruthless, but as the narrator points out there’s no actual malice in him. He won’t hesitate to hurt anyone who gets in his way, but he won’t inflict injury for the mere pleasure of doing so. The secondary villain is much more sinister. He is a chilling portrait of hypocrisy in action, a man who has even managed to convince himself that he is virtuous whilst he commits the most outrageous frauds.

Wylder’s Hand is a must for any fans of the Victorian sensation novel.

The Gauntlet of Alceste

The two 1920s Addison Kent mystery novels of Hopkins Moorhouse have been published in one volume by Coachwhip Press as The Addison Kent Mysteries. The Gauntlet of Alceste was originally published in 1921. The Golden Scarab followed in 1926. I have no idea if these were Moorhouse’s only attempts at detective fiction. The Coachwhip Press edition lacks an introduction, possibly because the author is so obscure that there was insufficient information to provide such an introduction. All that I can tell you is that Hopkins Moorhouse was a pseudonym used by Herbert Joseph Moorhouse (1882-1960).

It is The Gauntlet of Alceste with which we’re concerned at the moment.

This book seems at first to be a typical English country house murder mystery except that the setting in this case, the author being American, is in the United States. Henry C. Radcliffe lives with his daughter Rose in Hillcrest, a large and comfortable mansion in Westchester county in New York State. As is usual in this type of mystery several guests are staying at the house. Mrs St Anton, a handsome lady of mature years, and her nephew Roger Levering seem to be rather unwelcome guests and their presence at Hillcrest is a matter of some perplexity to Rose Radcliffe. The other guest is far more welcome - Tommy Traynor is a personable young man who works for a new York City gem merchant. Traynor is in love with Rose, a matter of which her father is unaware. Traynor has not yet achieved sufficient wealth or social standing to ask for Rose’s hand but he is a young man on the way up and he is confident that this unfortunate circumstance will soon be remedied.

Naturally there is a murder and it occurs quite early in the book. Everyone in the house is a potential suspect. Tommy Traynor feels that it might be advisable at this stage to call in his friend Addison Kent, a popular writer of murder mysteries who has had some success as an amateur detective. Kent is well-known to Detective-Lieutenant Bob Fargey, the investigating officer. Fargey has a reputation as an ambitious publicity-seeker who is nonetheless an honest and efficient police officer. He and Kent get on well and he is quite happy to have Kent’s assistance.

So far it all seems like a by-the-numbers fair-play country house murder mystery but two-thirds of the way through the book that changes dramatically. One of the characters introduces an outlandish and incredibly complex backstory that has no connection with anything that has happened so far and that introduces important new motives and new suspects the existence of which was entirely unknown to the reader up to that point. This in itself is just about enough to disqualify this novel as a fair-play mystery.

Worse is to come. The book proceeds to break most of the rules that would come to govern the golden age detective story. Those rules had not yet been codified of course, and most of the detective story writers of the golden age would at some time bend or break some of those rules. Nevertheless The Gauntlet of Alceste demonstrates the necessity for some sort of rules, and it tellingly demonstrates that while you might get away with breaking one of those rules if you break a whole swag of the rules then the reader is entitled to feel that the author is most definitely not playing fair.

The Gauntlet of Alceste also relies to a perilous extent on coincidence. Not just one coincidence either, but a whole series of very unlikely coincidences.

Despite its 1921 publication date The Gauntlet of Alceste has little in common with the classic puzle-plot mystery of the 1920s and 1930s. It has much more in common with Edwardian crime fiction, and in some ways it has even more in common with the Victorian sensation novel. I am personally quite fond of the sensation novel but it is as well for the reader approaching this book to be prepared for the fact that it does not conform to the pattern of the crime novel of the 20s and 30s.

If you are prepared to make such allowances you might enjoy the sheer outrageousness of the plot, involving as it does secret passage-ways, ghostly apparitions, masked balls, disguises, duels and characters who are not the characters we were led to believe they were.

The key role played by the master jewel-thief Alceste also suggests the influence of the gentleman-thief crime thrillers of the preceding age such as Hornung’s Raffles stories and Leblanc’s adventures of Arsène Lupin.

The characterisation, such as it is, is what you would expect from a Victorian penny dreadful or from melodrama.

Judged by the standards of the contemporary crime novels of Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts, Van Dine and company The Gauntlet of Alceste just won’t do at all and if that’s the sort of thing you’re expecting you may be tempted to throw this one across the room. If you accept it as an outlandish anachronism, a throwback to an earlier age, then you might find some enjoyment here.

Mad Monkton and Other Stories

The Moonstone Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was one of the most popular writers of the “sensation novels” of the 1860s and 1870s. These were in some respects forerunners of the true detective story although they were also heavily influenced by the gothic novel. Collins’ two masterpieces in this genre were The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). Mad Monkton and Other Stories is a collection of his short stories, mostly dating from before his major commercial breakthrough with The Woman in White.

Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens were very close friends and occasional literary collaborators. Dickens published many of Collins’ stories in the weekly magazine Household Words.

Mad Monkton, dating from 1855, is the longest story here and it’s one of his best. As its title suggests it’s a tale of madness although as the story unfolds the reader will feel increasing doubts as to whether Monkton is actually mad or whether he really is the victim of a family curse. It’s also a tale of obsession. This is one of Collins’ more gothic tales and its ambiguity makes it exceptionally disturbing and fascinating.

The Ostler (which also saw publication under the title The Dream Woman) is a horrifying tale of a man who has made a very unfortunate marriage indeed. He has driven himself at least half mad with fear, but are his fears warranted or merely a delusion. This is the kind of ambiguity at which Collins excelled.

In The Clergyman’s Confession (also published as Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman) a man was acquitted of murder but an elderly dying clergyman knows far more about the murder than was revealed at the trial.

In The Dead Hand a man finds himself spending the night in an inn with a dead man. But is the man truly dead? A Terribly Strange Bed is one of Collins’ best known stories in the gothic vein, and a very effective little chiller it is. The Lady of Glenwith Grange is a less successful story involving one of the favoured themes of gothic fiction, the double.

The Biter Bit, Who Killed Zebedee? and The Diary of Anne Rodway, both dating from the 1850s, mark important steps in the evolution of the detective story. The Biter Bit also demonstrates the author’s flair for comedy while The Diary of Anne Rodway may perhaps mark the first appearance of the amateur detective, in this a girl who believes her friend’s death was due to foul play. She is determined to see justice done.

A Stolen Letter is clearly influenced by the best of Poe’s detective stories, The Purloined Letter, although Collins gives it his own twist.

John Jago’s Ghost concerns what would today be labelled a very dysfunctional family indeed. The disappearance of John Jago brings matters to a crisis, but is he dead? Is he a ghost? Has there been a murder? It’s another skillful blending of the mystery and gothic genres.

The Captain’s Last Love is the odd man out here, being more of a quirky romantic adventure fantasy which works more successfully than it has any right to do.

This is a collection that neatly demonstrates the author’s considerable importance to both the crime story and the gothic tale, while also displaying the breadth and inventiveness of his writing. The immense success of The Woman in White and (and they are undeniably superb) have unjustly overshadowed his other works. This collection is a fine starting point for anyone wanting to explore his very underrated short fiction. Highly recommended.

The Haunted Hotel and Other Stories

English novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was one of the most successful writers of the so-called “sensation novels” which were so popular in the 1860s and 1870s. Collins enjoyed a close friendship with Charles Dickens.

While Collins was best-known for his sensation novels he also, like most writers of his era, wrote ghost stories. The Wordsworth paperback The Haunted Hotel and Other Stories contains the short novel The Haunted Hotel and an assortment of short stories that displays both the originality and the quality of Collins’ ghost stories.

In fact only a few of these stories are conventional ghost stories. The others could be described as tales of terror, tales of the uncanny or (perhaps most appropriately) as weird fiction. Some of the stories very definitely involve the supernatural. One or two contain no such elements whatsoever. In the majority the reader is left to decide if anything truly supernatural has occurred. The only thing that all these stories have in common is that they are all either very good or at the very least uncommonly interesting - this really is a very strong collection.

The title story is a fascinating mix of mystery fiction and the gothic, although of course such genres were quite unknown at the time. What makes it intriguing is that it takes Collins a very large portion of the book’s fairly short length to let us know exactly what type of story it is. And even at the end there remains some doubt. Until quite late in the tale we’re not even sure that anything criminal or mysterious has actually happened. We have a series of   mildly questionable occurrences that appear to have plausibly innocent explanations, but while one such event might not arouse our suspicions, it’s the combination of events that causes us to have doubts. This technique actually works extremely well.

By the standards of many later crime novelists Collins was more interested in character and in social relations than in merely creating a puzzle to be solved. The combination of mystery and gothic elements and the introduction of what seem to be ghostly influences are handled quite skillfully. The way in which Collins unfolds his plot is more interesting than the plot itself, but it’s still an effective and highly entertaining story.

In The Dream Woman a man who has made a very unfortunate marriage believes his wife intends to kill him. He sees her attempting to kill him in a dream. Is the dream a true foretelling of the future or merely the product of his own fears?

Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman deals with events in the past. A man was acquitted of murder but an elderly clergyman on his deathbed believes he knows far more than was revealed at the trial. There is no element of the supernatural but the mood is gothic enough.

In The Dead Hand a man finds himself spending the night in an inn with a dead man. Or at least with what appears to be a dead man. Nine O’Clock is another tale dealing with the relationship between the past, the present and the future. A condemned man, an early victim of The Terror in France, knows the exact time at which he will meet his death although no time has yet been set for his execution.

In Mrs Zant and the Ghost a woman believes she has been contacted by her dead husband, although she has neither seen nor heard him. And she believes he will protect her although she does not know what it is she will need protection from. The Devil’s Spectacles are exactly that - a pair of spectacles presented to a man by the Devil. The spectacles allow the wearer to know what is in other people’s hearts, but does anyone really want to know such things?

Collins achieves his gothic effects with great subtlety. There are no ruined castles or decaying mansions, no clattering chains in the night, no spectral visions. The mystery of human life, ordinary human desires and fears - these are sufficient material for Collins, material with which he manages to create an atmosphere of the uncanny and at times a considerable sense of dread. For those whose tastes run to subtle horror this collection can be very highly recommended.