The Perfume of the Lady in Black, Page 26

  Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is probably the earliest example of the genre, and certainly one of the most successful. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle confronted Sherlock Holmes with locked-room mysteries on a number of occasions – notably in ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ and ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’. John Dickson Carr, uniquely perhaps among crime writers, returned time and time again to the locked-room mystery in one form or another. Indeed, in The Hollow Man (1935) he even devoted an entire chapter to a defence of the genre:

  When I say that a story about a hermetically sealed chamber is more interesting than anything else in detective fiction, that’s merely a prejudice. I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plots, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. [ … ]

  Most people, I am delighted to say, are fond of the locked room. But – here’s the damned rub – even its friends are often dubious. I cheerfully admit that I frequently am. [ … ] Why are we dubious when we hear the explanation of the locked room? Not in the least because we are incredulous, but simply because in some vague way we are disappointed. [ … ]

  You see, the effect is so magical that we somehow expect the cause to be magical also. When we see that it isn’t wizardry, we call it tomfoolery. Which is hardly fair play. The last thing we should complain about with regard to the murderer is his erratic conduct. The whole test is, can the thing be done? If so, the question of whether it would be done does not enter into it. A man escapes from a locked room – well? Since apparently he has violated the laws of nature for our entertainment, then heaven knows he is entitled to violate the laws of Probable Behaviour! If a man offers to stand on his head, we can hardly make the stipulation that he must keep his feet on the ground while he does it.’1

  Naturally, Carr placed The Mystery of the Yellow Room at the top of his reading list – ‘the best detective tale ever written.’ This is quite right and proper for, as I argued in my afterword to the recent Dedalus edition, not only did Leroux display matchless ‘wizardry’ (to borrow Carr’s term) in that work but he also rescued the locked-room mystery from semi-oblivion. In some respects, however, The Perfume of the Lady in Black is the more interesting novel. Joseph Rouletabille, the young journalist turned detective, is once more pitted against his arch-enemy Frédéric Larsan. The mysterious crime committed in the Square Tower again directly challenges the reader to find the correct solution – though to do so tests even Rouletabille’s powers of logic and deduction. But The Perfume of the Lady in Black is also a novel which – through its implicit accommodation of recent developments in the new science of psychology, particularly Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex – was even further ahead of its time than The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Arguably, Leroux’s sequel is the first detective story consciously to explore such ideas as oedipal rivalry and adolescent identity crises, and, consequently, the first such story to present a credible (in modern terms) rationale for the behaviour of the characters. Indeed, without The Perfume of the Lady in Black, novels such as Robert Bloch’s Psycho (and Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation) would hardly have been possible.

  It is unlikely, however, that Gaston Leroux ever read Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in which the Oedipus complex made its first published appearance. By profession and temperament, Leroux was a journalist not an academic, a man of action rather than a thinker – though it is more than possible that he came across articles in various journals and magazines on the subject of Freud’s work (like many popular writers he would seem to have had an antenna for ideas of this kind which were in the air). For thirteen years he had written for Le Matin, during which time he had covered the famous anarchist trials of the period, interviewed Swedish explorers just returning from two years in the Antarctic wastes and Russian survivors of Japanese shelling at Inchon, he had reported on Alfred Dreyfus’s second trial in Rennes in 1899, the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the 1907 eruption of Vesuvius – until an unexpected disagreement with the editor suddenly deprived him of his livelihood. It was at that moment that he turned to popular fiction, though some years before he had penned a peculiar potboiler – La Double vie de Théophraste Longuet (1903; tr. The Double Life, 1909) – about the transmigration of the soul of the seventeenth-century Parisian gangster Cartouche into the body of a minor manufacturer of office equipment whose wife is deceiving him.

  But there are some other curious links between Freud and Leroux. One of these is that Leroux, like Freud, was much drawn to myths. This is particularly true of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910; tr. The Phantom of the Opera, 1911), the other work with which Gaston Leroux is nowadays most closely associated. Indeed, it would not be far from the truth to suggest that in the creation of Erik – the brilliant but physically repulsive ‘monster’ of the opera – Leroux was not only imitating Mary Shelley, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker, but also adding to our stock of mythological characters. Frédéric Larsan himself in the present work – terrifying and omnipresent – is in many respects a superhuman creation (as is the master-criminal Cheri Bibi, another of Leroux’s popular inventions, whom the author also identified with Oedipus). It would seem that Leroux was happiest when working on this larger scale. Although Rouletabille would investigate a further five cases after The Perfume of the Lady in Black, these are at best competent works. Not even Russian Nihilists or the combined German army and navy seem to represent such a threat as the dastardly Frédéric Larsan.1

  Another link is that just as Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex arose out of the self-analysis he conducted after the death of his father, much of the biographical detail that Leroux supplies concerning the childhood of his detective Joseph Rouletabille in The Perfume of the Lady in Black – especially the description of being sent away at twelve to boarding school at Eu in Normandy – is the author’s own private history. Leroux’s mother (who died while he was a teenager) was the daughter of a Fécamp bailiff while his father (who died when Leroux was twenty), a public works contractor, came from Mayenne. Edgar Faure recounts a story of Leroux at this time tracing with his finger on a steamy window: ‘I do not want to be head of the family.’2

  In a sense, despite the formal brilliance of the intrigue, the universe of Gaston Leroux is an uneasy space forever teetering between the scientific rationalism of the detective story and the macabre of the Gothic (or what Freudians would call the Uncanny). It is no coincidence that The Perfume of the Lady in Black commences with a wedding staged in a dingy, obscure church or that the action culminates in a medieval castle. Nor is it any accident that, as if to heighten the contrast, other aspects of the story are uncompromisingly modern (for 1909 at least): travel to the Riviera (though it is still possible to obtain writing materials in the station buffet), telegrams, newspaper reports, even the memories evoked by a whiff of perfume seem to anticipate Proust, though the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu was still four years away.

  But the modernity of Leroux is visible elsewhere too. As Julian Symons has noted: ‘The plan of the house indicating where the body was found, the map of the grounds showing the garden and the summerhouse, were standard accessories to the story of the period [the Golden Age], and in many British books a timetable appeared too. This timetable, often of a railway or bus journey, was offered in preparation for the breaking of an alibi’.1 Although Leroux cannot offer an entire railway timetable, he comes close to rivalling Freeman Wills Crofts (a former railway engineer and Golden Age author who had frequent, if not exactly varied, recourse to the device) in Chapter Five of the present work.

  In other respects both The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Perfume of the Lady in Black are classic Golden Age detective stories in terms of the ‘standard accessories’ employed. In the former the reader is accorded the assistance of a clear plan of the pavilion where the attempt is made
on the life of Professor Stangerson’s daughter; in the latter the reader is not only provided with a general plan of the Chateau d’Hercule, where the strange series of crimes investigated by Rouletabille occurs, but also a detailed plan of the interior of the Square Tower and even a map of the entire peninsula where the action is set. In both cases the author’s intention is perfectly transparent: a clear challenge to the reader.

  Not surprisingly perhaps, The Phantom of the Opera may also be read as a detective story. In almost ironic acknowledgement of The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Perfume of the Lady in Black, Leroux has the Opera Ghost abduct the heroine from the centre of the stage in front of a packed house. The mystery of the impossible crime committed in a hermetically sealed room is replaced by its obverse: the impossible crime committed in an entirely open space.

  Reading The Perfume of the Lady in Black it is sometimes difficult to imagine that the action is supposed to occur in the mid-1890s – a newspaper report towards the beginning of The Mystery of the Yellow Room firmly sets the scene as October 1892 and it is clear that the sequel takes place not long afterwards – a decade defined, in true Symbolist fashion, by a colour: the Yellow Nineties.

  Strictly speaking, the close identification of the final decade of the nineteenth century with the colour yellow leaves something to be desired. Yellow had been a favoured colour of the Pre-Raphelites, especially with Rossetti and Burne-Jones, as early as the 1860s; Whistler, who also painted the beautiful Lily Langtry in a gorgeous yellow robe, had hosted yellow breakfasts with orange nasturtiums in the 1870s; by the early 1880s, Oscar Wilde’s obsession with the gaudy beauty of the yellow sunflower was an easy target for the group of Harvard students who arrived at one of his lectures each ceremonially bearing an artificial yellow blossom. In America, Charlotte Perkins Gilman lingered over her description of the smouldering unclean yellow wallpaper with its uncertain curves which ‘suddenly commit suicide’ and slowly drives her heroine to distraction. ‘People were puzzled and shocked and delighted,’ wrote Holbrook Jackson, ‘and yellow became the colour of the hour, the symbol of the time-spirit. It was associated with all that was bizarre and queer in art and life, with all that was outrageously modern.’1

  With The Mystery of the Yellow Room and its sequel Leroux again provides a powerful contrast, for yellow and black, as all who have visited France and seen the eye-catching covers of the Série Noire paperbacks will agree, is one of the most striking of colour combinations. The books also serve to remind us that the powerful aesthetic associations connected with the word ‘yellow’ lingered long into the new century. As late as 1936 Stevie Smith could entitle her fictional autobiography Novel on Yellow Paper.

  A decade or two older than the British and American writers most closely associated with the Golden Age – Freeman Wills Crofts, Ronald Knox, S. S. Van Dine, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, John Dickson Carr and the rest – Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) left an indelible mark on the development of the British and American detective story. In France, where he is considered one of the great popular writers of the early twentieth century, he is still read with pleasure today and all the Rouletabille novels are currently in print. Curiously, Joseph Rouletabille is also clearly to be seen in Tintin, whose Belgian creator, Hergé, was likewise a great admirer of Leroux’s writing. But in The Perfume of the Lady in Black, Leroux proves John Dickson Carr wrong. The test is not only can the thing be done but also, psychologically, whether it would be done.

  – Terry Hale

  Notes

  1 Cited by Julian Symons, Bloody Murder. From the detective story to the crime novel: a history (London: Papermac, 1992), p. 109.

  1 John Dickson Carr, The Hollow Man (1935; rept. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), pp. 187–189.

  1 In Rouletabille chez le Tsar (1913; tr. The Secret of the Night, 1914), mentioned in the closing pages of the present work, Gaston Leroux made use of the knowledge of Russian politics he had gained almost a decade earlier as Rouletabille is called in by the Tsar to protect the life of one of his generals whom a group of Nihilists have pledged to assassinate. Set in St Petersburg on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Leroux performs a sort of variation on The Mystery of the Yellow Room as his celebrated detective sets out to prevent a murder from being committed. In Rouletabille chez Krupp (1917; untranslated), Leroux’s detective is dispatched to operate behind enemy lines.

  2 Edgar Faure, Preface to Gaston Leroux: Histoires épouvantables (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Baudinière, 1977), p. 24.

  1 Symons, pp. 103–104.

  1 Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931), p. 46.

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  Publishing History

  First published in France in 1909

  First published by Dedalus in 1998

  First ebook edition in 2012

  Translation copyright © Dedalus Limited 1998

  The translation is based on the original 1909 anonymous translation which has been substantially edited and revised by Margaret Jull Costa.

  Printed in Finland by W. S. Bookwell

  Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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