by Noel Vindry
THE DOUBLE ALIBI
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Hard Cheese (Ulf Durling) 2015
The Moai Island Puzzle (Alice Arisugawa) 2016
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The Howling Beast (Noël Vindry) 2016
Death in the Dark (Stacey Bishop) 2017
The Ginza Ghost (Keikichi Osaka) 2017
The Realm of the Impossible (anthology) 2017
Death in the House of Rain (Szu-Yen Lin) 2017
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THE DOUBLE ALIBI
Le Double Alibi
Noël Vindry
Translated by John Pugmire
The Double Alibi
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in French in 1934 by
Librairie GALLIMARD as Le Double Alibi
THE DOUBLE ALIBI
English translation copyright © by John Pugmire 2018.
Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright. In the event of any inadvertent transgression of copyright, the editor would like to hear from the author’s representatives. Contact me at pugmire1@ yahoo.com.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover design by Joseph Gérard
For information, contact: [email protected]
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Vindry, Noël
[Le Double Alibi English]
The Double Alibi / Noël Vindry
Translated from the French by John Pugmire
Introduction
Noël Vindry and the Puzzle Novel
Noël Vindry (1896-1954), wrote twelve locked room novels between 1932 and 1937, of a quality and quantity to rival his contemporary, John Dickson Carr (1905-1977), the American writer generally acknowledged to be the master of the sub-genre. Yet today Vindry remains largely forgotten by the French-speaking world and almost completely unknown in the English-speaking.
I first learned about Noël Vindry from Roland Lacourbe, the noted French locked room expert and anthologist, who calls him “the French John Dickson Carr.” Much of what follows is taken from Enigmatika No. 39: Noël Vindry, a private publication edited by Jacques Baudou, Roland Lacourbe and Michel Lebrun, with a contribution from the author’s son, Georges Vindry.
Noël Vindry came from an old Lyon family from whom he inherited his passion for culture and gourmet cuisine. Shortly after acquiring a Bachelor of Philosophy degree, he enlisted in the army, where he fought with distinction, earning a Croix de Guerre, but was invalided out in 1915 with severe lung damage.
During his long convalescence he studied and mastered law sufficiently to become a deputy juge d’instruction (examining magistrate)—a position unique to countries practising the Napoleonic Code, under which a single jurist is given total authority over a case, from investigating crime scenes to questioning witnesses; from ordering the arrest of suspects to preparing the prosecution’s case, if any (see Appendix 1.)
He was appointed to serve in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France which, at the time, boasted the second largest Appeals Court outside of Paris, and which he chose because of its climate. Known as the “city of a thousand fountains,” it holds a music festival every year to rival those of Bayreuth, Glyndebourne and Salzburg. In Vindry’s time, it was known as La Belle Dormante (Sleeping Beauty) because “at night you can hear the grass growing in the streets,” according to Georges Vindry.
His first novel, La Maison Qui Tue (The House That Kills), appeared in 1932, the same year as Carr’s fourth, The Waxworks Murder. Both books featured detectives who were juges d’instruction: Vindry’s M. Allou and Carr’s Henri Bencolin. Vindry’s narrator, Lugrin, is the same age as his creator when he entered chambers, but there are few other autobiographical touches.
Vindry’s book and the others that swiftly followed attracted considerable interest and, by the mid-1930s, he was one of the three most successful mystery writers in the French-speaking world, along with the two Belgian authors Georges Simenon and Stanislas-Andre Steeman. He is the only one of the three not to have had any of his books translated into English, until LRI’s The House That Kills (2015), or brought to the screen.
In France, Vindry was hailed as the undisputed master of the “puzzle novel (roman probleme*),” a term he himself coined. In an essay on the detective novel written in 1933, he distinguished between the adventure novel**; the police novel; and the puzzle novel. The first deals with the acts of the criminal; the second with the capture of the criminal; and the third with the unmasking of the criminal. He held that the puzzle novel should be constructed like a mathematical problem: at a certain point, which is emphasised, all the clues will have been provided fairly, and the rigorous solution will become evident to the astute reader.
Allou himself is a deliberately dry figure about whom we learn very little. The plot and the puzzle are everything. Descriptive passages, even of entire countrysides, are kept to a minimum, as are any revelations in the narrative about characters’ feelings: the omnipresent dialogue allows people to define themselves, providing ample opportunity for deception.
*I prefer “puzzle novel” to “problem novel” which I feel is too ambiguous
**the detective/criminal adventure in the manner of Edgar Wallace’s The Four Just Men and 174 other novels.
Already by 1934 there were rumblings from French critics that the puzzle novel, as so consummately practiced by Noël Vindry, failed to give full rein to character development.
In vain had Vindry pointed out in his essay the previous year that: “The detective novel, as opposed to the psychological one, does not see the interior but only the exterior. ‘States of mind’ are prohibited, because the culprit must remain hidden.” Nevertheless, the prominent critic Robert Brasillach asserted in Marianne (April, 1934) that the reign of the puzzle novel was already over and there were no more tricks left with which to bamboozle the jaded reader! (For the record, this was before Carr’s The Hollow Man in 1935; Carter Dickson’s The Judas Window and Clayton Rawson’s Death from a Top Hat in 1938; and Pierre Boileau’s Six Crimes Sans Assassin, with its s
ix impossible murders, in 1939.) It was time to embrace crime novels rich in characterisation and atmosphere —such as those written by one M. Georges Simenon, for example.
Simenon, as is well-known, disdained the puzzle novel (despite having written several good puzzle short stories in his early career as Georges Sim) because he saw it as too rigid and too much under the influence of Anglo-Saxon writers. In his novels, the plot and the puzzle—if there is one—are a distant second to atmosphere and the psychology of the characters: the complete antithesis of Vindry’s works. And, to further distance himself from the classical detective fiction of the period, it is the humble policeman and not the gifted amateur or the high functionary who solves the case. Thus were the seeds of the police procedural planted at the very peak of the Golden Age.
From 1932 to 1937 both Simenon and Vindry wrote at the same frantic rate as John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson. After that, Vindry wrote only one more puzzle novel before World War II. Even though he announced on a Radio Francaise broadcast in 1941 that he was abandoning detective fiction because it didn’t amuse him any more, he nevertheless wrote three more shortly before he died in 1954; none of them featured M. Allou and, after such a long break from his earlier success, his books failed to sell well.
By this time, however, his views had mellowed and he had become more accommodating towards the detective novel, which he defined, in a 1953 letter to the editor of Mystère-Magazine (see Appendix 2), as “a mystery drama emphasizing logic,” and consisting of three elements:
1. A drama, the part with the action
2. A mystery, the poetic part
3. The logic, the intelligent part
“They are terribly difficult to keep in equilibrium. If drama dominates, we fall into melodrama or worse, as everyone knows; if mystery dominates, we finish up with a fairy tale, something altogether different which doesn’t obey the same laws of credibility; if logic dominates, the work degenerates into a game, a chess problem or a crossword and it’s no longer a novel.”
A great example of equilibrium? Gaston Leroux’s Le Mystere de la Chambre Jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room) published in 1908. This, of course, was also declared by Carr to be the greatest locked room mystery of all.
Meanwhile, Simenon powered on and was next rivalled by Boileau-Narcejac. Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, individually successful as puzzle novel writers, teamed up following an award dinner for Narcejac to which Boileau, as a previous winner, had been invited. Their novels, while maintaining the brilliant puzzle plots dreamt up by Boileau, relaxed the rigid puzzle novel formula espoused by Vindry and incorporated Narcejac’s descriptive and character work.
Although he may have been a shooting star, Noël Vindry was much admired by his peers. Steeman, in a letter to Albert Pigasse, the founder of Le Masque, in 1953, suggested that, even though Vindry’s latest work was his weakest, he deserved a prize which everyone— readers and critics alike—would realise was for the ensemble of his work. Narcejac, writing in Combat after Vindry’s death in 1954, asserted that nobody, not even “those specialists E. Queen and D. Carr” (sic), was the equal of the master, Noël Vindry. Even though the puzzle-novel was well and truly dead, if he had to designate its poet, he would not hesitate: it would be Vindry. And, in their 1964 memoir on Le Roman Policier (The Detective Novel), Boileau and Narcejac spoke of his “unequalled virtuosity” and “stupefying puzzles.”
If Golden Age Detection needed a patron saint, then Noël Vindry would surely be a candidate.
JMP
Chapter I
ANXIETY
In the village, they were known as “the Misses Levalois,” without distinguishing one from the other, because no one had ever dealt with either of them apart from the other. They went out together; walked with the same tiny steps; had the same grey hair, the same wrinkles, the same expressionless eyes—how could they recognise their own hats and coats? They must pick them at random.
And so it was that, little by little, Hortense and Gertrude became a single being with two heads, “the Misses Levalois.”
They were well enough thought of in the village because they possessed just the right degree of affluence to command respect without provoking jealousy. Their house, somewhat isolated at one end of the high street, was small but in good condition and scrupulously well maintained. Far from being spendthrifts, they weren’t tight-fisted either. Whilst they would never have given money to the poor—after all, they didn’t know them—they always put a little money aside for the church collection.
Four times a year they took the tram to Lyon and returned with their arms full of small packages. These trips constituted the only events in their lives in the sixty years of their existence in the village.
Well, not quite. There was one other: ten years ago they had taken in a penniless older aunt.
Although old, Aunt Dorothée wasn’t that much older than her nieces. She was only ten years their elder, but years of hard work had aged her prematurely.
She was already bent over and walking with a cane when “the Misses Levalois” had brought her back with them from Lyon. Since then, her head had sagged further and she had needed a second cane. Even so, she held herself well in the circumstances and hobbled to church every morning, whatever the weather.
The sisters were highly thought of for that act of charity, particularly since no extravagance ensued: Aunt Dorothée was destitute, although she might inherit a modest fortune one day. Her brother, an old miser living in Lyon, seemed certain to leave her something eventually, so the generosity of her nieces was within reasonable limits, and the peasants of Limonest respected them all the more for it.
***
That evening, the sisters prepared dinner as usual. But, since it was a Thursday, they added a fourth place setting. Three times a week, there was a guest—always the same one, naturally.
On each such occasion, either Gertrude or Hortense would unfailingly announce, in a loud voice:
‘We’ll bring out the best silverware.’
It was a compliment addressed to their aunt, who had been left twelve place settings in ornamental silver, and who had sworn never to sell them, even in the worst of times. Her husband, a drunkard, had sold everything else, down to the furniture, but she had hidden them from him until his death. They were a reminder of the times when she had lived comfortably with her parents, and over time she had come to attach an inestimable value to them. They were a guarantee of her dignity, and, from time to time, she would open the sideboard drawer to look lovingly at them.
That was why her nieces never failed to use them on those evenings when their “lawyer” came to dinner.
But he hadn’t been a lawyer in Limonest.
The title had been conferred in good faith on Mr. Epicevieille, Esquire, because he hinted at it in each conversation:
‘When I was leading that important study, one of the first in Lyon….’
People concluded he must have been a lawyer. In fact, he’d never been more than a second clerk.
But his physical appearance, even more than his words, helped with the illusion. Tall, thin, and dry, he held himself very straight, despite his advanced years, and was never seen wearing anything but a frock coat with an overlarge collar and a white tie.
It should have aroused curiosity that a noted lawyer from Lyon should choose to retire to Limonest in a tiny apartment, without even a housekeeper, and preparing his own meals—which must have been frugal, according to the village grocer. But his words were so ponderous and weighty, and his appearance so stern, that people forgot everything else and Epicevieille had become “the lawyer” to everyone.
Needless to say, upon his arrival five years ago, he’d made a point of visiting the notables of the village. He’d made a good impression everywhere, but nowhere more so than with the Misses Levalois. He’d given them some financial advice, which had been very sound, since when they’d considered him someone of importance, which is why they invited him three times a week.
That night, as usual, he arrived punctually, just as the church bells began to strike seven o’clock.
Each time they would sit down to eat, Hortense and Gertrude would take turns to serve. The dishes were copious and, each time one appeared, the “lawyer” would unfailingly announce with compunction:
‘You’re tempting me. I really shouldn’t….’
He would give the impression, just as he had with the grocer, that it was on doctor’s orders that he ate so little. But, as their guest, he would readily devour half a chicken.
‘Your cooking is so tempting,’ he would explain.
‘Good food never hurt anyone,’ Hortense or Gertrude—and sometimes both together—would reply.
It was the same that evening. Once the meal was over, Epicevieille prepared to digest it peacefully in the huge, soft armchair reserved for him.
But, to his great annoyance, he heard the request he dreaded the most:
‘Please explain to our aunt, maître, what to think of her nephew Gustave.’
Hardly a month went by without them making the same request. The “lawyer” let out a sigh, wiped the anticipatory beatific smile off his face, replaced it with a stern, majestic look, and began in a solemn voice:
‘It’s certain, madam, that he’s not someone to be recommended.’
The circumlocution, severe though it appeared, was an understatement. In fact, Gustave Allevaire deserved to be called a criminal.
Not that he’d committed a really serious crime yet. His offences were less serious but numerous, including petty theft, breach of trust, and swindling. At forty years of age, he’d racked up eight convictions, of which three had warranted more than three months in prison.
