Fatal Descent

Today's headline on the Chronicle blares FATAL FALL AT YOSEMITE SHOCKS CLIMBING WORLD and when I was finishing up this book on the subway someone asked me if I was reading about mountaineering. But FATAL DESCENT is the one about a publishing magnate, Sir Ernest Tallent, who exits his penthouse office via elevator, getting on alone at the top, and when the doors open in the lobby, he's sitting there leaning against the wall, his vest a bloody mess--he's been shot to death but there's no gun and no one could have done it. John Dickson Carr played infinite variations on the "locked room" theme, but this is the only one I remember that takes place in an elevator. Oh, no, wait, there was that story in "The Department of Queer Complaints" in which the murderer is revealed to be colorblind because red blood looked gray to him splattered along the gray rubber walls and floor of an elevator cab. Wonder what John Rhode, his collaorator, really did on this book since it seems "so" much like a Carter Dickson written alone? Maybe Rhode thought up the book's most winning feature, the byplay of the two detectives. The sensitive doctor, Horatio Glass, depends on psychological subtleties and nuances, to the exasperation of his friend, the stolid police chief Dave Hornbeam who's all "Just the facts, Horatio," but who conceals an acuity of mind fully the equal of his psychologist pal. Each of them gets his licks in to present his own solution to the baffling case. The love interest is considerably tamped down--I did notice that. Usually in a Carr novel, the hero sees things from his own point of view, and we see the detection through his baffled eyes; we also see his sexual passion for the ingenue rise high, and feel the fear through him. Here Carr abandons his usual point of view and I can't say the book is worse for that, indeed we appreciate the novelty. Nevertheless it does leave Bill Lester, the young hero, and Patricia Tallent, his girlfriend, singularly without charm or interest. Pity that, because in Patricia you're getting a heroine with a bit more spunk than the average Carr thriller. But you don't miss Gideon Fell or Henry Merrivale an iota! The story gets murky with a second, nearly unexpected murder, that of Sir Ernest's second in command, and then at the end a pair of final chapters which are spectacularly persuasive, making the unimaginable real.