There’s been a some confusing talk of horses here lately, so let’s abandon that metaphor for now and turn to an author who is often entertaining without any weighty expectations of being good: cue Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace and The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1918).

Thriller writer John Lexman, who some might say is an analog for one E. Wallace…

If, in the literary world, he was regarded by superior persons as a writer of “shockers,” he had a large and increasing public who were fascinated by the wholesome and thrilling stories he wrote, and who held on breathlessly to the skein of mystery until they came to the denouement he had planned.

…is in debt to a man named Vassalaro, and, at the urging of his friend Remington Kara, attends a meeting with his creditor carrying an unloaded pistol with which to threaten the man should things get nasty (“[H]e is the greatest coward in the world. You will probably discover he is full of firearms and threats of slaughter, but you have only to click a revolver to see him collapse.”). Alas, the gun Lexman takes turns out to be loaded, and he accidentally shoots Vassalaro dead and gets sent to jail for 15 years. To any but the most credulous reader it is clear what has happened…but part of the joy of Wallace is how he then mixes the brew.

See, just as you think Kara must be the driving force behind Lexman’s imprisonment, he arranges for his friend to be broken out of prison and met by his adoring wife, for whom Kara had at one point had a grand passion, and to live a life of freedom overseas. And, frankly, if you can guess where the story’s going from here…well, I doubt even Wallace knew at this point.

Subsequent to Lexman’s escape, we follow Thomas Xavier “T.X.” Meredith, Assistant Commissioner of Police and close friend of our jailbird, who is rather keen to prove his chum if not exactly innocent — Lexman has never denied shooting Vassalaro — at least manipulated or in some way guilty of a lesser offence. T.X. is an exceedingly likeable character of the sort Wallace could conjure up very easily: gruff, self-effacing, presenting a bluntness to the world that hides a savvy mind, and able to inspire loyalty in his subordinates to the extent that “a word of praise was almost equal to promotion”. I love his offhand manner when dealing with the unpleasantness of crime, especially when confronted with the expectation of omniscience:

“I really know nothing,” [T.X.] continued, “but I guess a lot…”

Some solid detection (“[A] Gold Flake brand [cigarette] smokes for twelve minutes in normal weather, but about eight minutes in gusty weather…”) and by inspiring dogged determination in his subordinate Inspector Mansus, with whom he shares a ribaldry-filled relationship, brings to light some solid clues…but have they arrived too late? And, when a man is stabbed in the heart in a room sealed by a gigantic metal arm across the inside of the door, how does it all tie together?

And then there’s Miss Holland, secretary to Kara, and the explorer George Gathercole, and about six other people who end up stirred into a mix that, even if Wallace has written a second draft, would be just as impossible to explain. Honestly, the whole thing’s a mess, and I repeat my doubt that Wallace ever knew where it was going, but I won’t deny that he, like Arthur Conan Doyle, could write some magnificent prose even when his mind wasn’t on constructing the tightest of plots.

“Cut a man’s flesh and it heals… Whip a man and the memory of it passes, frighten him, fill him with a sense of foreboding and apprehension and let him believe that something dreadful is going to happen either to himself or to someone he loves — better the latter — and you will hurt him beyond forgetfulness. Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the stake. Fear is many-eyed and sees horrors where normal vision only sees the ridiculous.”

I also love T.X.’s attitude, instilled in Mansus, about keeping records about everything they’re told, especially concerning the well-to-do of London:

It was all sordid but, unfortunately, conventional, because highly placed people will always do underbred things, where money or women are concerned, but it was necessary, for the proper conduct of the department which T. X. directed, that, however sordid and however conventional might be the errors which the great ones of the earth committed, they should be filed for reference.

There’s also, amidst the careening plot, plenty of time for small character notes, like the man-servant of Kara’s who knows “his predecessor had lost his job from a too confiding friendliness with spurious electric fitters” and so is staggeringly vague about what information he offers, or T.X. returning from a task to find a witness being entertained by Mansus telling “a wholly fictitious description of the famous criminals he had arrested”. The way the characters fit together is often a little doubtful, but you really do get a good sense of them and what makes them tick, which is surely one of the reasons Wallace became so successful at what he did.

The locked room murder, then, represents a study in contrasts. For one thing, though the title of the book and the crime scene itself both make it clear that a candle is involved in the trick, I cannot, even having read the explanation, work out exactly what was done. The candle is first described as “a bent and twisted little candle such as you find on children’s Christmas trees” and latterly “twisted into a sort of corkscrew shape”…but I can’t see why this matters given my limited grasp of what went on. I don’t doubt Wallace knows, but he’s playing his cards close to his chest here.

Additionally, the candle itself is hardly a meaningful clue, with the killer making a far more telling mistake — “[T]he one error [they] made…” — that had me laughing because of how hilariously right it was that it would a) be wrong in the first place and b) lay clear so much of what actually happened. But I guess that’s a spoiler, so we’re stuck, 107 years later with this nonsense title and me not having a clue what really happened. Still, at least we’re at a stage in the life of the impossible crime where “trap doors, or secret panels [and] mysterious springs in the wall which, when touched, reveal secret staircases” and anything of that ilk is seen as “banal”…not, of course, that it would stop people from using them over the next century.

Freed from the pressure of greatness, The Clue of the Twisted Candle is fast, hilariously unpredictable, and just about everything you’ve come to fear expect from Edgar Wallace. No, for all his nouse, the detective doesn’t actually solve the case, the explanation coming instead in the form of a three-chapter monologue that lays everything bare, but there’s a moment close to the end which, devouring this quickly as I did, caught be by surprise by the swell of emotion it inspired in my iron breast. I enjoy Wallace’s barmy approach, I get completely caught up in his ludicrous structures, I grin all the way through his wild conclusions, and I put each book down ready to read another five…so what’s not to like?