She Died a Lady

As an American boy in France, I was often drawn to the cliffs of Normandy from which, if I stood on tiptoes, it seemed I could almost see the southeastern quadrant of England, the so-called "hellfire corner" which had borne the brunt of much of the V-2 activity during World War II. The cliffs themselves rose seventy feet in the air, yet during high tide the water rose a good thirty feet, so that a good swimmer might actually make a successful dive off the cliff. We played with white pebbles at its edge, tossing them at the white water rafters at the edge of the sea. Grandfather told us that long ago, Victor Hugo had written about such brave, existentially challenged fishermen, calling them the TOILERS OF THE SEA. In SHE DIED A LADY, one of Dickson Carr's famous "pronoun novels" (including HE WOULDN'T KILL PATIENCE and IT WALKS BY NIGHT), Carr makes use of a similar dramatic cliff vista as the center of his chilling and somewhat far-fetched impossible crime caper. Elderly Alec Wainwright (well, he's 60, not so old, but beyond having sex with his wife) is apparently complaisant to the affair Canadian-born Rita is having with a boy actor, Barry Sullivan. Rita, a sort of Rita Hayworth type, full of animal fire, is 38, while young Barry, a mere stripling of perhaps 25, cuts quite a figure in his trim British bathing trunks with a white belt. Everyone in the village knows they're having an affair, but our narrator (Dr Luke Croxley, not in good health himself) may be the first to suspect they are plotting to kill Alec, a la the famous Edith Thompson case, or perhaps more to the point the Stoner-Rattenbury affair about which Terence Rattigan wrote his underrated play CAUSE CELEBRE. In both true life true crime cases, an elderly husband was brutally struck down by a paiur of adulterous lovers. When one or more of the four characters disappear right off the edge of the cliff, we suspect a dramatic suicide. But is it murder hastily covered up? Anyone who has ever lived in France will agree, men have done strange things for love, and Sir Henry Merrivale knows this better than most men. At first you think this is going to be another MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, and Carr seems to play with our expectations, teasing us into thinking we've got the correct solution taped, them all of a sudden he reveals all that Agatha Christie chazzerai was just another way to casser les couilles à quelqu'un--the reader is warned.