I’ve been blowing hot and cold on the work of Roger Ormerod, with his often superb ideas bogged down in tedious — sometimes incomprehensible — telling, marked by the narrative grinding to a halt at some point, and his sometimes-ingenious solutions reached via a complete absence of anything approaching detection.
More Dead Than Alive (1980), then, is the point where a decision has to be made: I either commit fully to Ormerod after this, or he’s going to become an increasingly occasional thing in my reading life. And the signs were good: the book is in Skupin, where it’s called “Ormerod’s best locked room puzzle”; Tom Mead selected it as an underrated locked room mystery; Libby Stump says that it “provides a thoroughly satisfying and well-crafted impossible crime puzzle”; and TomCat praising it as “an imaginative locked room novel that reads like a predecessor of the Jonathan Creek”. I wouldn’t say my hopes were exactly high, but there was clearly something praiseworthy in here that warranted investigating.
The setup certainly supports that Jonathan Creek comparison. Once-great stage illusionist Konrad Klein has developed a new trick, which he is practising in the locked room at the top of the tower which adjoins his isolated castle-ish home. With various guests in the house, including Elsa Mallin, the wife of Ormerod’s ex-detective David Mallin and our narrator for this book, Klein is locked away and gunshots are occasionally heard echoing down from the tower…until one particularly loud crash summons the household to the tower room where they must break in the door in order to find a cabinet tipped over and blocking the door and no sign of Klein at all. And the window’s open.
Now, you need to remember that open window. The characters don’t but you, dear reader, must keep it in mind.
Elsa summons David, and the book opens with David and his partner George Coe arriving at Klein Kastle, the police having already investigated proceedings for the best part of a week and gotten nowhere. In fast order we’re brought up to date on the denizens of the house, including the representative of the insurance company who must decide if this warrants a hefty payout on the part of his company (stipulations in a life insurance policy, see, mean that Klein’s death is worth either £100,000 or £200,000 depending on the circumstances — he’s worth (duh, duuh, duuuuuh) more dead than alive) and we learn about the trick, which seemed to involve Klein shutting his assistant Amaryllis in a cabinet and quickly firing a bullet through the side panel, which would pass through without hurting her.
Now.
Never mind that this trick isn’t terribly impressive — the one-time ballet dancer Amaryllis could easily flatten herself against the back of the 18-inch deep cabinet so that the bullet wouldn’t go anywhere near her — but the setup for the crime is, well, hardly baffling. When Klein disappears, the room must be broken into because the cabinet had fallen over against the door, and when they eventually break in, there’s no sign of Klein, no evidence he’s been killed, and nothing remotely baffling except how the cabinet could have come to be that way. A surprising amount of good physics is used in investigating this — one of the life-sized dolls used to stand in for Amaryllis has been thrown from the cabinet — and Ormerod is to be commended for considering the physical implications of his setup, but when we get to the elements of the crime that are supposed to baffle, well, there’s a problem.
Remember that open window?
Where’s Klein’s body gone? It could have gone out the window. If he was shot, as the presence of the gun implies, why is there no sign of a bullet? He could have been shot while in front of the window and the bullet passed through him and out the window into the ocean beyond. I’m not saying this did happen, but the fact is that this is possible, and that the gloomy upper eaves of the room are mentioned at least twice and could have been the perfect place for the killer to hide, is never addressed, or if it is I’d lost interest because frankly this sort of thing should have been the very first principle established.
It is, frankly, generous to talk of this as an impossible crime novel. It’s times like this when I can understand how people genuinely misuse the term ‘locked room mystery’ to mean ‘closed circle’, because all the talk of this as a locked room mystery overlooks the simple explanation staring you in the face, and there’s nothing done until possibly very late on — by which time I had lost interest — to establish the impossibility or otherwise.
In fairness to Ormerod, the book rattles along, devoid of the usual midway slump, as David and George bounce around the castle and uncover various secrets. In fact, I was starting to think that Ormerod had finally broken his duck and was going to get through this without a stretch of tedious irritation…and then, at about the 70% mark, Elsa sees David come out of Amaryllis’ room and decides for no reason that he’s having some sort of affair, and the whole thing veers off the rails. Someone sets fire to a room, absolute nonsense abounds, and the dialogue and action lurches into periods of such staggering incomprehensibility that when the solution finally comes I honestly didn’t realise we were being told what happened.
However, that solution is amazing
Ormerod has done incredibly subtle work in setting up so many of the ideas that must come together for it to work that for about three pages you’ll overlook how goddamn unlikely it is that the killer could do all those things in the, like, two (?) minutes available to them. It might well be the best job Ormerod ever does in setting up a truly superb reveal, but, once again, it just comes out because we’ve explored a few other ideas that don’t really go anywhere, ignored the most obvious question that has to be answered, and then David Mallin knows there are 11 pages remaining in the book and so it’s time to come out with the real answer.
At times, it’s like Ormerod is indulging in a sort of anti-detection: one development involves the discovery of a hitherto-unsuspected room, in which it’s established that Klein can’t have been shot because there’s no bullet casing. Because, of course, you can’t pick up a bullet casing and move or hide it, can you. Honestly, if you told me everyone in this book was suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, I’d believe you — their inability to think in straight lines, or for any of them to behave like actual people when there are more than three of them in a room (someone screams at someone else, a third person says something which doesn’t fit in the circumstances, two other people are flirting or dancing — god, the interminable dancing — and the insurance man talks about saving money as if anyone ever has ever had any sympathy for the financial concerns of an insurance company). Solutions are discarded left and right because someone just remembers…it’s a mess. It’s a Roger Ormerod novel.
It’s with a heavy heart that I finally have to admit that Ormerod probably isn’t going to be for me, then. I’ll probably dip into one every couple of years, and that’s my loss because the setups the man dreams up can be brilliant and the solutions on other occasions really do impress…but he hasn’t yet linked the former to the latter by means of a cogent, coherent, comprehensible, tolerable, well-paced, tightly-focussed, well-written, realistically-characterised, ideas-rich, professionally-edited, engagingly-structured middle section, and I don’t enjoy that plunging drop into trivialities to make up his one-stranded plots into novel length. You may shake your head; I’m off to read something I’ll hopefully enjoy.
