The Red Right Hand Read online

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  Introduction by Martin Edwards

  Cast of Characters

  Newsletter

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

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  Introduction

  Joel Townsley Rogers was a prolific writer whose career spanned more than half a century, but he is remembered for a single, stunning novel, The Red Right Hand. Interviewed at the age of eighty-two, Rogers told Elliott L. Gilbert that he was “appalled” by the thought, but this gifted and evidently likeable man surely had a twinkle in his eye. There are countless worse fates than having as one’s memorial such a dazzling book.

  The Red Right Hand offers a story told in the first person, but the reader cannot help wondering whether Dr. Henry N. Riddle Jr. is a reliable narrator. From the wonderful opening paragraph, the events “of the dark mystery of tonight” seem nightmarish and surreal. Instantly we are presented with a series of questions, as intriguing as they are macabre. Where is the killer of Inis St. Erme? What did he do with St. Erme’s right hand? And what is he trying to achieve?

  Inis St. Erme recently became engaged to a pretty young woman called Elinor Darrie. Heading in their car from New York to Vermont, they pick up a strange-looking tramp – and murder swiftly follows. Riddle is a potential witness – but might he also, somehow, be a suspect? He is a surgeon, who thinks of himself as alert and observant, but he finds it hard to believe the evidence of his eyes. Was there “something hellish and impossible about that rushing car, its red-eye sawed-off little driver and its dead passenger” that caused him to fail to see the apparently homicidal tramp suspected of murdering St. Erme? In crime fiction, things are never as they seem; nor are people, and The Red Right Hand stretches this principle to its limits. The effect is deeply unsettling. What should we believe? And whom should we trust?

  The events of the novel are bizarre and horrific, and the setting in rural Connecticut provides another reminder of Sherlock Holmes’ remark about the countryside’s “dreadful record of sin”. Names of the locales – the Swamp Road, Dead Bridegroom’s Pond - are as evocative as Rogers’ feverish descriptions. Riddle is haunted by recollections of “the distant baying of the hounds”, and “the voices of the locusts... the gray bird fluttering frantically in my face” as he tries to make sense of the inexplicable. As old MacComerou, who lives in the vicinity, and is an expert in criminal psychology recognises, “there was something in the picture that he knew could not be right.”

  The names of the characters are arresting – Riddle, St. Erme, Dexter, Flail – and chosen to enhance the mood of mysterious uncertainty. Rogers’ prose is lush and lyrical, and it is no surprise to learn that, after leaving Harvard, he wrote poetry before starting to write fiction for the magazines. The story is not structured anything like a conventional “fair play” whodunit, yet Rogers is generous with his clues – one of which takes the form of a word game - despite drowning them in a torrent of coincidences.

  All this makes for a heady mixture, one that disconcerted some critics. The famously acerbic Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor dismissed The Red Right Hand as “bore-dumb”. Judges less hidebound by preconceived ideas about crime fiction have applauded the book’s originality, while Rogers’ ability to blend plot, pace and a vivid way with words remains deeply impressive, almost seventy years on. The reward for readers prepared to suspend disbelief is that Rogers will take their breath away.

  The novel, first published in 1945, was a revised and expanded version of a novella which first appeared in the New Detective magazine in March of that year. The book enjoyed a particular vogue in France, and won the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere. French critics compared it not only to the work of Poe, inventor of the “locked room” detective story, and John Dickson Carr, who developed “impossible crime” stories into a fine art, but also to the twisty, atmospheric mysteries of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the duo responsible for the novels filmed as Vertigo and Les Diaboliques. How sad that neither Hitchcock nor Clouzot adapted The Red Right Hand into a movie. Filming such an elaborate, evocative story-line would be a challenge worthy of those masters of suspense.

  Joel Townsley Rogers was born in 1896 in Sedalia, Missouri. After Harvard, he joined the naval air corps, although he did not have the chance to fly overseas before the Armistice. He shifted from poetry to writing for the pulp magazines, trying his hand at flying stories, risqué romances, and science fiction as well as mysteries. This seemed to him “better than working at a job”, but he took his craft seriously, and the pressure to produce did not cause his writing to become flavourless. His eerie first novel, Once in a Red Moon, which appeared in 1923, was a highly unconventional story about a rich man still wanted in Ireland for a forty-year old murder. Rogers later described it as “a hocus-pocus semi-mystery” novel, and he did not return to full-length fiction until he decided to fill out his first version of The Red Right Hand, more than twenty years later. The next year, he published Lady with the Dice, and 1958 saw the appearance of his fourth and final novel, The Stopped Clock. Each of his last three books was an expanded version of a shorter story. Late in life, he was working on another novel, but so far this has not seen the light of day. Yet he will remain most celebrated for The Red Right Hand, and rightly so. What crime novelist would not be proud to have written such an unforgettable book?

  Martin Edwards

  December 2013

  Cast of Characters

  IN THE ORDER OF THEIR APPEARANCE

  INIS ST. ERME, oilman and promoter, who promoted one scheme too many

  ADAM MacCOMEROU, famous murder psychologist, who got too close to the murderer

  DR. HENRY N. RIDDLE, JR., brain surgeon, who began to doubt the validity of his own perceptions

  LIEUTENANT ROSENBLATT, state trooper, who was not fooled by circumstantial evidence

  ELINOR DARRIE, St. Erme’s fiancée, who began a wedding trip that ended in a nightmare

  JOHN FLAIL, handyman, who might have talked

  A.M. DEXTER, Professor of Automobilistics, who should have stuck to his trade

  CORKSCREW, a tramp, who came from nowhere and disappeared leaving destruction behind him

  QUELCH, village postmaster, who had a mind for detail and an eye for a pretty girl

  PETE FLAIL, paroled murderer, who came in handy

  GREGORI UNISTAIRE, artist, who saw life and the crime from a surrealist point of view

  STONE, trooper, who followed his chief’s orders without question

  There is one thing that is most important, in all the dark mystery of tonight, and that is how that ugly little auburn-haired red-eyed man, with his torn ear and his sharp dog-pointed teeth, with his twisted corkscrew legs and his truncated height, and all the other extraordinary details about him, could have got away and vanished so completely from the face of the countryside after killing Inis St. Erme.

  That is Point One of the whole problem. Point Two is the question of what he did with St. Erme’s right hand, if the state troopers and the posse of neighboring farmers haven’t yet found it on the Swamp Road, along with the rest of the young millionaire bridegroom’s body, by the time I have finished setting down the details for analysis. For St. Erme had a right hand, that much is indisputable. And it must be found.

  Those are the two most essential questions in the sinister problem that confronts me—the problem I must examine carefully in every detail, and find an answer to without a needless moment of delay. Before that killer strikes me down as he struck old MacComerou, the famous mur
der psychologist, with his keen old brain, who had got too close to him in some way, it seems. And how many others out in the darkness where they are hunting him, there is no saying yet.

  To be answered, therefore:

  1. How does he manage to remain unseen?

  2. Assuming that his brain is not just a dead jumble of loose cogwheels and broken springs, what is he trying to accomplish—what makes him tick?

  With an answer to those two question, or either one of them, the police feel that they would have him stopped.

  And yet those aren’t the only questions, the only baffling aspects of the problem. No less inexplicable—to me, at least—is the puzzle, from the beginning, of how that smoke-gray murder car, with its blood-red upholstery and high-pitched wailing horn, could have passed by me while I was at the entrance to the Swamp Road just before twilight with St. Erme in it dying or dead already, and that grinning little hobo murderer driving it like a fiend.

  Was I, Harry Riddle, Dr. Henry N. Riddle, Jr., of St. John’s Medical and New York S. & P.—alert and observant, pragmatic and self-contained surgeon as I like to think myself—asleep with my eyes open? Could it have been a temporary total blanking out of consciousness—a kind of cataleptic trance, descending on me without warning and leaving no trace or realization of its occurrence afterward—which made me fail to see, or at all to be aware of, that death car rushing up the narrow stony road to the fork while I was trying to get my own stalled car started there, and veering off onto the Swamp Road beside me, so close that its door latches must have almost scraped me, and the pebbles shot out by its streaking tires have flicked against my ankles, and the killer’s grinning face behind the wheel been within an arm’s length of my own as he shot by?

  Or was there something darker than a mental lacuna and a moment of sleepwalking on my part? Was there something vaporous and phantasmagorical, was there something supernatural and invisible—was there, in short, something hellish and impossible about the rushing car, about its red-eyed sawed-off little driver and its dead passenger, which caused me to miss it completely?

  For certainly I missed it. I did not see it. I have stated that to Lieutenant Rosenblatt and his troopers in unequivocal words, over and over; and I will not be budged from the assertion. And I think that old MacComerou was beginning at last to believe me a little, and to see some significance in the item; though I am afraid the police still do not.

  It is possible, of course, that I place an undue amount of emphasis on the matter in my own mind. Still, it continues to bother me—my failure to see that murder car— because it involves the validity of my own sense perceptions and mental operations, which I have never felt it necessary to certify to myself before.

  The question is set down, I find, in Lieutenant Rosenblatt’s fat cardboard-covered notebook, in which he painstakingly recorded all his inquiries earlier in the night, and which he left behind him on the table in MacComerou’s living room here when he last went out.

  Q. [To Dr. Riddle] And you were at the Swamp Road entrance all during the murder hour, Dr. Riddle?

  A. I was.

  Q. And you did not see the car pass by at all?

  A. I did not see it.

  Q. You have heard the detailed description of the killer, Doctor, as given by Miss Darrie here, Mr. St.Erme’s fiancée, and by others who saw him. But you did not see him yourself?

  A. I did not see him. To the best of my knowledge, I have never seen him.

  Q. You’ll stand on that?

  A. I’ll stand on that....

  And so I must.

  In the larger view, of course, it makes no actual difference whether or not I saw the murder car go by, since obviously it did go by. Other men saw it all the way along the road, all the way from Dead Bridegroom’s Pond to just before it reached me, and to them it was not invisible or a phantom. It struck big shambling John Flail as he was walking homeward just around the bend from me, and to him—for one dreadful moment, as he tried to spring out of its way with a bleating cry, hearing that demon at the wheel laughing, and feeling the iron blow smash the bones within his flesh like glass—it could certainly have been no phantom. Old MacComerou himself saw it pass his place while he was digging in his garden, with sufficient detail to recognize St. Erme as the stricken man in it, if not the extraordinary little demon at the wheel. And Elinor Darrie, moreover, previously in the day, had driven it a hundred miles up from New York City, on her wedding trip with her handsome, black-eyed lover, who was soon to die.

  They have found it now, finally, down on the Swamp Road where the killer abandoned it after he had passed me by, with its engine still warm and its cushions blood-soaked—a gray Cadillac eight-cylinder sport touring, last of production ‘42, made of steel and aluminum, leather, rubber, glass, and all the other ordinary, solid, visible materials, with its engine and chassis numbers that were stamped on it in the factory, and its Federal tax and gas stickers on its windshield, and its license plate XL 465-297 NY ‘45, together with the coupon books and registration of its owner in its glove compartment, A. M. Dexter of Dexter’s Day and Nite Garage, 6I9 West I4th Street, New York City, who has confirmed by long distance that he lent it to St. Erme. A beautifully kept car, with less than five thousand miles on its speedometer, worth at least thirty-five hundred dollars by OPA prices anywhere today, and certainly no phantom.

  They have found poor Inis St. Erme’s body, too, so he was not a phantom, either. Only the little man with the red eyes and the torn ear—the man in the blue saw-tooth hat, the man who had no name—they haven’t yet quite found.

  And so that aspect of the problem—the puzzle of the murder car’s singular and specific invisibility to me, and to me alone—must be set aside, for the time being, anyway. Whether to be answered finally or never answered makes no difference now.

  The thing that I have to consider now without delay —the thing that I have to consider most intensely, and with all my mind, and now (now, sitting here at the desk in MacComerou’s dusty, old-fashioned country living room, with St Erme’s young bride asleep on the old horsehair sofa beside me, and the hot moonless night still black out-of-doors, though the dawn must break eventually—now, with the lanterns and flashlights moving out in the darkness, and the voices of the troopers and posse men near and far off, calling to each other with the thin, empty sound which men’s voices have in the night: and some of them dropping back a while ago to get hot coffee from the pot left brewing on the kitchen range, with their grim tired faces swollen from mosquito bites and their legs covered to the knees with swamp muck and damp sawdust from the old sawmill pits, glancing in at me and the sleeping girl through the kitchen doorway only briefly while they gulped their drink in deep draughts to keep their brains awake, shaking their heads, in answer to my silent question, to indicate they had found no trace yet, and then out again on farther trails, with an empty slam of the screen door behind them—and now with the lanterns moving farther off through the woods and swamps, over the hills and down into the hollows; and now the distant baying of the hounds that have been brought in from somewhere; and armed men in pairs and squads patrolling every road for miles around, ready to shoot down at the rustle of a leaf that crazy little killer, with his bloody sawtooth knife and fanged grin, creeping so cunningly and red-handed through the dark)—the thing that I have to consider here and without delay, in this deep darkness near the end of night, is this thing, and this thing only:

  Where is that killer now?

  For I have a cold and dismal feeling that he is somewhere near me, no matter how far off the lanterns move and the voices call and the far hounds bay. And near the sleeping girl beside me, his victim’s young wife to be. A feeling that he will strike again. That he knows I am somehow dangerous to him. Though how, I cannot yet perceive.

  Somewhere in the darkness outside the window. Watching me from the black garden.

  Or nearer even than that, perhaps. Inside this creaky two-hundred-year-old-hill-country farmhouse itself, it may b
e, so silent now and temporarily deserted of the hunters.

  A feeling of his silent sardonic laughter because I cannot see him.

  Of the murder in his watching eyes.

  There was a scuttling across the attic floor overhead a few moments ago, but it was probably only a squirrel or a rat. There seem to be a number of them which have been allowed to make their nests in the old house.

  There was the creak of a floorboard just now beyond the door of the small back pantry or woodshed off the kitchen where old MacComerou kept his garden tools. But when I held my pencil and listened for the sound again, turning my eyes, it was not repeated. Old boards sometimes creak that way in old houses. With no step upon them.

  The old-fashioned golden-oak wall telephone beside the stove out in the kitchen gives a brief jangle every now and then, but it is not ringing the house here.

  It is a party line, and the ring here is five long, five short. It is not ringing any number. Just the jangle of free electricity in the bell.

  I must not permit such slight and meaningless sounds to distract mc from the problem. Still there is a perfectly human urge I feel to listen every instant, and to turn my eyes to the shadows around me, while I make my notes.

  I am not a professional policeman, nor what is known as an amateur detective. Crime does not fascinate me. It is no part of my instinct to be a man-hunter, but to save life.

  Yet, as a surgeon I am, I trust, reasonably well disciplined in the scientific method, with a basic instinct for looking at facts objectively. I am analytical and observant, and have always made a habit of noting little details of all sorts to tuck away in the pigeonholes of my mind.