Under that image Stow places a couplet from Fasciculus Morum, a mediæval preacher’s handbook, where it concludes a catalogue of the physical symptoms of death: ‘All too late, all too late, / when the bier is at the gate.’ The doleful acknowledgment that our spiritual house is never in sufficient order echoes Adams’ sermon and emphasises the moral underpinning of the novel.
Where does that leave the murder mystery? There are readers who decide that the Tornwich Monster is Death. If that solution feels inherently unsatisfying, it’s because it belongs to the metaphysical order of the novel rather than to the whodunnit; it’s the coexistence, not the blending, of those orders that constitutes the genius of The Suburbs of Hell.
Other readers buy the proposal, put forward by a child called Killer, that the murderer is Dave. But ‘country boy’ Dave’s bewilderment when the murder weapon is discovered seems genuine, as does his instant if fleeting assumption that Frank is the Monster. Besides, Stow is mounting an ethical argument about the destructiveness of ‘lethal tongues’ and ‘condemning eyes’, and his case is lost if Killer is right. Furthermore, the coroner finds that Frank’s death wasn’t due to poison, but to the inhalation of his vomit. If Stow goes to the trouble of providing this information, it’s surely to demonstrate that Killer’s theory was only a deadly guess.
As a whodunnit addict, I can’t resist coming up with a theory of my own. I think the killer is Killer: I like the narrative cheek of hiding ‘whodunnit’ in plain view. Here is a child who roams the town after dark, a knowing child who propagates lethal gossip, a child who, qua child, embodies innocence and thereby fulfils the time-honoured requirement of the whodunnit that the murderer must turn out to be the least likely suspect. It’s a solution I find nifty, plausible, satisfying and laughable. The thing is, there’s no solution to the identity of the Tornwich Monster: the heart of darkness contains only the absence that signifies oblivion. Stow’s intelligence is remorseless here. The novel’s central blank is an invitation to fill in the murderer’s name. It’s also a moral trap. The demonstration of our readiness to speculate and point is a form of authorial rebuke.
The Suburbs of Hell constructs a narrative as starkly simple as an image from the Tarot and as endlessly open to interpretation. Like Killer’s name, it can be read literally or as a trope. But if Stow had written a conventional whodunnit that also functioned as a morality tale, his achievement would have been merely great. The Suburbs of Hell goes further. It subverts an impeccably contrived murder mystery, tantalising us with a question—whodunnit?—that it dismisses as trivial, a ‘flea-biting’. Auden described the whodunnit as ‘a dialectic between innocence and guilt’, where the revelation of the murderer secures our disassociation from guilt. By contrast, the only ‘securitie’ Stow offers is none at all: the grave reminder that death will come as surely as night. One of the names given to Cooke was the Night Caller.
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