Rim of the pit, p.1
Rim of the Pit, page 1
OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS
AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS
RIM
OF THE PIT
HAKE TALBOT is a pen name of the American writer Henning Nelms (1900-1986). Nelms reserved his real name for writing non-fiction about showmanship (his chief occupation was as a stage magician), but wrote several mysteries and stories under the Talbot moniker.
RUPERT HOLMES is a two-time Edgar award-winner and the New York Times best-selling author of Murder Your Employer, volume one in The McMasters Guide to Homicide.
RIM
OF THE PIT
HAKE
TALBOT
Introduction by
RUPERT
HOLMES
AMERICAN
MYSTERY
CLASSICS
Penzler Publishers
New York
INTRODUCTION
From the very first sentence . . . we are into the realm of nightmare. Miracles gather and explode. A dead man returns—or does not return. A flying ghost, apparently, swoops down and attacks. No angels, but goblins and wizards seem to dance on a pin. Rim of the Pit is a beauty.
—John Dickson Carr
THIS MAY be the first you’ve heard of Rim of the Pit and its author Hake Talbot. But as indicated by the above quote from his review of Talbot’s 1944 gem, it was held in high esteem by John Dickson Carr, acknowledged master of the locked room mystery. In the early nineteen-eighties, a panel of experts selected by Edward D. Hoch—no stranger himself to impossible murders in hunting lodges and snowbound cabins—voted it second only to Carr’s own masterpiece The Hollow Man (known to American readers as The Three Coffins) as landmarks of that sub-genre.
But to call Rim of the Pit a locked room mystery barely begins to describe this outré and unrelenting “long night’s journey into Hades.” For while it contains many components of a Golden Age classic—relatives and relative strangers are sequestered at a remote lodge in the wilderness during a fiendish blizzard and one of them is brutally murdered—there is nothing even remotely cozy about this avalanche of impossible events. Enough plasma is spilled to satiate the most hematophagous reader, topped off by the discovery of a body fully drained of blood. Both demonic possession and the flesh-eating “Windigo” (mythological winter monster of indigenous tribes of North America) are given serious consideration as the agents of murder. Rarely has the supernatural been accommodated so credibly and articulately in a mystery, to such an extent that you may find yourself agreeing with the characters that a deceased person might qualify as an ongoing suspect.
At times teetering on the brink of horror, Talbot further lends his mystery the pernicious aura of a textbook of Forbidden Arts with the epigraphs that commence each chapter, several times quoting Eliphas Levi, a nineteenth-century occultist who wove his Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic around the tarot deck and alchemy. The book begins to feel dangerous in one’s hands as the unholy implausible transmutes into the wholly feasible, especially if you’re reading Rim of the Pit in “those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted”—quoting Conan Doyle and The Hound of the Baskervilles . . . and, of course, a supernaturally-attuned black hound named Thor figures in the story just for good measure.
If a whodunit is a mystery, then a howdunit is a magic act, and Rim of the Pit is a howdunit written by a magician. “Hake Talbot” was the pen name of Henning Nelms, a bona fide Renaissance man: attorney, advertising expert, college drama professor, and author of tomes on the stagecraft of magic, set design, and old-fashioned melodrama. His Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurors was not a book of magic tricks but a serious guide for professional magicians seeking to infuse their performances (or staged séances) with the same approaches and techniques used in legitimate theatre.
Thus, it’s hardly surprising if, while reading Rim of the Pit, one might envision a bravura stage thriller, its cast of ten trapped by the elements in an impressively handsome two-level cabin set. The plot hits the ground running for dear life with the memorable first sentence: “I came up here to make a dead man change his mind.” And when we immediately learn that these Ten Little Individuals have assembled to hold a séance—not a harmless parlor game for an evening’s diversion but a concerted attempt to make contact with someone from beyond the grave—we expect the evening may quickly go south . . . assuming the pit of Hell is a compass point.
There are indications that Hake Talbot, who was forty-four when Rim was published, knew his John Dickson Carr, who specialized in impossible crimes that often bore the stage dressing of the preternatural until well into his detective’s final summation. In The Hollow Man, published ten years before Rim, a Professor Charles Grimaud is murdered in inexplicable fashion; in Talbot’s tale, a character central to the mystery bears the name Grimaud Désanat—please also note the last name is an anagram of “de Satan.” Talbot’s Grimaud may or may not be dead but, in his macabre tale, it matters little: dead or alive, he’s still a suspect!
And just as in The Hollow Man there is a legendary chapter devoted to a discussion of the genre by detective Gideon Fell himself, Rim contains several fascinating sidebars about the mechanics of magic, with particular emphasis on phony séances; these play out not as digression but informed discourse among the characters relevant to the nightmarish events unfolding. Yet even this discussion of the fakery behind some phony mediums’ ghostly effects only makes us more seriously ponder if genuine supernatural elements are at play here . . . much like the magician’s device of “exposing” to the audience how a miraculous feat was accomplished, only to repeat the trick minus the revealed flummery and miraculously achieving the same results.
Finally, both Hollow and Rim feature corpses discovered upon a field of unblemished snow, the apparent victims of gunshot wounds; how could they have been wounded when there are no footprints anywhere near the body? Rest assured the explanations offered are as wildly divergent in both books as are the two author’s voices throughout.
It will not betray any secrets to reveal that the role of detective in this extraordinary mystery is taken by one Rogan Kincaid, although for the first few chapters you might have considered him a suspect until a footnote reveals that he was central to the author’s previous mystery, The Haunted Hangman—this being the only other novel penned by “Hake Talbot.”
Kincaid is introduced as a professional gambler, adventurer, and apparent rake (the novel boasts not one but two surprisingly amenable young women who may have raised readers’ eyebrows or pulses in the years just prior to Mickey Spillane). As the mystery deepens, Kincaid at times blends into the background, more like another “man who explained miracles,” G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, who could go unnoticed amid impossible crimes until quietly weighing in with an observation that sends the scenery crashing down upon the stage. But once the snowstorm and deaths subside, Kincaid takes charge to offer a way out of the abyss for those who have survived the night, as well as an explanation of the night itself for an audience of one (plus you, of course).
In his textbook Magic and Showmanship, Henning Nelms asserts that “the art of conjuring consists in creating illusions of the impossible.” Under the nom de plume of Hake Talbot, he conjured up the grand illusion that is Rim of the Pit. And before you begin reading his tour de force, let me hijack one of Sherlock Holmes’ most famous observations by way of advice: when you have eliminated all which is impossible, you may have eliminated too much.
Hey, it’s really snowing up a blizzard, isn’t it? Better toss another log on the fire . . . and if you must step outside, make sure to bundle up. You could catch your death out there.
—RUPERT HOLMES
RIM
OF THE PIT
TO
Melville Davisson Post
I
Dead of Winter
There are dead people whom we mistake for living beings.
—ELIPHAS LÉVI, Dogme de la Haute Magie
“I CAME up here to make a dead man change his mind.”
There was earnestness behind the quiet statement.
It was growing dark. The blaze in the huge fireplace flickered on the face of the speaker and made its expression difficult to read. The fingers of his left hand moved restlessly over the smooth coat of the great dog that lay on the sofa beside him. Round-faced, round-bodied, in worn hunting clothes that gave no hint of his wealth, Luke Latham stared belligerently up at his tall house guest.
“Well, go on. Why don’t you laugh?”
“Not until I’m sure it’s funny.”
Latham hunched his shoulders. “It isn’t. It’s plain Hell.”
The black Dane pricked his ears, then sprang to the floor and stood with head erect, growling softly. His master looked at him in surprise. A moment later his own ears caught the crunch of feet on snow. Latham moved around the corner of the fireplace into the hall wing of the low L-shaped room, and opened the door.
The girl outside wore ski togs that took advantage of slim hips and brought out the long lines of her figure. The wind had tinted her cheeks, but her face looked pale against her blue-black hair, and her gray eyes were troubled.
Before Latham could speak, the man with him said, “Hello, Sherry Ogden,” and fresh color leaped in the girl’s face.
“Rogan Kincaid!” She held out both hands. “Jeff told me he drove you up this morning, but I couldn’t imagine anything dragging you this far from civilization.”
“I wasn’t dragged. I was attracted.”
Sherry tilted her head to one side and looked at him.
“Lots of men have had cracks at my hide,” Latham chuckled, “but I’m still wearing it. Truth is, Rogan was in Quebec, headed south. Jeff met him and offered him a ride this far. But where did you see that nephew of mine, Sherry? He was in such a rush to go hunting, he grabbed his gun and left while the pie we had for lunch was still sticking out the corners of his mouth.”
“Jeff didn’t need a gun,” Sherry confided. “The game he’s after has baby-blue eyes and answers to the name of ‘Barbara.’ As a matter of fact, there’s some doubt about who’s doing the hunting. Either way, the betting is you’re going to acquire a niece. They’re over at my place now, swapping coos.”
Latham took the girl’s parka and they strolled to the fire, where the Dane greeted her by thrusting a cold muzzle into her gloved hand. She curled on one end of the sofa and sat looking up at Rogan. Tall, lean, enigmatic, with strong unsymmetrical features, he was in such striking contrast to his host’s dumpy rotundity that for a moment a smile touched the corners of her lips. Then she caught the older man’s shrewd eyes and her glance dropped. The color had gone from her cheeks, and the hand that pushed back her black curls trembled.
“This isn’t just a social visit, Sherry.” Latham’s voice was kindly. “What’s bothering you?”
Her fingers locked together in her lap. She twisted them apart, and drew a long breath before she spoke.
“Luke, are you certain my father is dead?”
Rogan read surprise in his friend’s face, but there was none in the voice that answered.
“I saw his body.”
“Are you absolutely sure it was Father?” the girl insisted. “I mean, they said he was . . . Besides, it was all so impossible.”
A puzzled expression puckered the corners of Latham’s eyes. “Lots of men get lost in the snow, my dear.”
“I know, but not Father. He’d spent half his life outdoors. And that other man . . . Everyone told me he was a regular old woman about marking a trail. They said he never took any chances. A person like that couldn’t wander away.”
“I’m sorry, Sherry.” Rogan spoke softly. “I didn’t realize. . . . Jeff said nothing about Mr. Ogden’s—”
“Frank Ogden isn’t my father,” she interrupted. “He isn’t even my stepfather.”
“When Sherry was born her mother died,” explained Latham. “Her father married again.”
“I was about twelve when Father . . . was lost.” She began pulling off her gloves with little nervous gestures. “Then my stepmother married Frank. They adopted me, and I’ve called myself ‘Ogden’ ever since. Father was French—from Provence. My real name is Seré Désanat.”
Mr. Kincaid was puzzled. “But if your father died ten years ago . . . ?”
The girl flashed him a smile. “It was fourteen, but thanks. I know I’m being a fool . . . only . . . only . . .” Her lips began to tremble and she huddled back on the sofa. “I’m scared.”
“Don’t see what’s troubling you,” said Latham. “Never was any doubt about his death. Made the funeral arrangements myself. That’s how I happened to see the body. Some fool may have told you he was pretty badly . . . changed by exposure. He was. Recognized him, though . . . No question at all.”
“I know,” Sherry admitted doubtfully, “and you couldn’t have made a mistake about his left hand. But”—she gave a little gesture of helplessness—“he couldn’t have gotten lost, either—not Father. He could find his way anywhere, like an animal . . . places he’d never been before. The lumberjacks used to make bets on him.”
“That part of the Hudson Bay country is Hell’s icebox, they tell me. Your father and that other man—Querns, wasn’t that his name?—had never hunted it before. Top of that a storm came up—bad one. Fellow wrote me that even the guide got lost hunting your father. Said the poor devil wouldn’t have come out alive himself if he hadn’t run into some explorers.” Latham moved closer to the fire. “Country like that does things to a man sometimes. Gets inside his mind—changes it around. Saw a trapper once who’d been lost for three days. He walked right across a railroad track without seeing it. Started to run away from us when we shouted at him.”
“I know I’m being a fool . . . but . . .” Sherry broke off as the black dog moved over and put his head in her lap. She stared down at him. “Thanks, Thor. You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”
“We don’t either,” Latham grunted. “Can’t help, though, unless you tell us what’s wrong.”
“It’s . . . oh, so many things.” Again the little helpless gesture. “Luke, why did Frank bring Mr. Vok here? Is it because of the séance?”
“What séance?” asked Kincaid. “And who is Mr. Vok?”
“Svetozar Vok,” Latham informed him. “Frank Ogden picked him up in Quebec. Refugee from Czechoslovakia.”
“He’s more like a refugee from a horror movie.” Sherry shuddered. “Wait till you see him, Rogan. He’s a mile high and looks like the oldest inhabitant of a graveyard.”
Her host chuckled. “Vok’s not that bad, Sherry. Queer bird, but I like him. Struck me as rather witty.”
“He gives me the creeps. He’s like a mummy that’s still smiling over one of the embalmer’s jokes.” She glanced up at Latham. “Besides, why is he at Cabrioun? It’s not like Frank to pick up a refugee. Particularly a penniless one. Frank isn’t the kind to help lame dogs over stiles.”
“That’s not fair, Sherry. I don’t get along with Frank too well myself, but he can be generous when he likes. Practically pensioned Madore Troudeau by making him caretaker at Cabrioun. Frank didn’t get any good out of that. None of the family’s been up here for years.”
The girl was not satisfied. “There are other things too, Luke. We haven’t been here since Father died. Why did we come now? And why didn’t we bring any of the servants? Why has Frank been so jumpy lately? And what has the séance got to do with it? And . . . and . . . lots of things.”
Latham hesitated. “I know you’re not a believer, Sherry. Though how you can help it after what you’ve seen your stepmother do time and time again . . .”
“I think it’s mostly Irene who’s kept me from believing. I admit queer things occur at her séances . . . things nobody’s ever been able to explain. But she’s such a fraud, I can’t put faith in a thing she does. Everything about her is phony. That’s why this . . .”
The words trailed off. Latham sat on the sofa and took Sherry’s hand.
“Something’s happened to you. You came here to tell us about it. Maybe we can help.”
The girl stared into the fire. Then without looking at either of the men she said:
“Today I heard my father’s voice.”
There was a long silence after that. Thor stirred uneasily. Sherry put her hand on his head and crumpled his ears.
“I didn’t have much to do this morning,” she went on. “Frank was out hunting with Madore and that Professor Ambler who’s staying with you. Irene locked herself in her room, like she’s been doing since we came. Barbara was fixing her hair in case Jeff got here. At last I decided that even Mr. Vok’s company was better than being left alone, so I screwed up my courage and took him skiing. He turned out to be pretty good at it. We went across the lake to slide down The Snake’s Back. It was when we were coming home I heard Father. We were in the middle of the lake. There wasn’t a soul within a quarter of a mile. There couldn’t have been.”
She stood and began walking back and forth before the fire.
“It was the song I heard first, an old Provençal thing. There’s a high note in it Father could never reach. He used to make a funny little trill instead. The words were perfectly beastly. ‘Pierre! Death comes for you; the toad digs your grave; the crows sound your knell . . .’ I hated it,” Sherry grimaced at the recollection. “It’s been a long time since then. I’d even forgotten the tune until I heard it today.”
“Sound travels pretty far over ice,” Latham reminded her. “Wind plays tricks with it, too.”
“Do you think I haven’t told myself all that?” The girl turned and threw out her hands. “It wasn’t only the song. Afterward a man’s voice spoke. It was Father.”
