FRIGHT FEST #3: House Party Murders - Edgar Allan Poe, Jr.

THE STORY:  Wayne Schofield is planning a house party for his friends at his estate in Wilmington, Delaware. But business takes precedence and he heads to Philadephia leaving his friends to set up and instruct the servants on what to do. Little does Wayne know that two of the servants hired are imposters, thieves looking to rob the guests when time is appropriate. Also, among his closest friends two marriages are on the rocks and philandering lovers are in attendance providing ample opportunity for jealous rages to be unleashed.  When Jack Skinner, Wayne's business partner, gets the feeling that the butler who speaks like an extra from a gangster movie is not the real McCoy he confronts the imposter and violence erupts.  Soon the house party guests are not only dealing with flowing champagne and high spirits but exploding bullets and flying knives.

THE CHARACTERS:  The first few chapters are overloaded with detailed exposition about the bed hopping quintet of main suspects. Hope and Jack Skinner are having marital difficulties. Hope is spending a lot of time with handsome, much younger, Ed Fitzhugh who is dreaming that Hope will divorce her husband and marry him.  Hope previously was with Sam Davis, Ed's best friend, who quickly tired of her and passed her off to Ed. Jack in the meantime has taken up with Rose Whitcombe who previously was with Sam.  Rose bizarrely is jealous of Hope who is now with Ed. Oh! and Ed and Jack look amazingly alike. They could be twin brothers. This of course will come into to play later on.

It was dizzying trying to keep all of this straight in my head. And while all this was being related Poe Junior decided to add another level of libido gone wild in the person of Carmen Yakatchie, a barmaid at The Black Cat Tavern. Carmen is described as the daughter of Romanian immigrants with gypsy blood. This un-PC term should signal to the reader Carmen is saddled with fraught emotions like easily triggered anger and jealousy. She vows to kill Ed and even fires a rifle at his car as he leaves the Black Cat after formally ending his affair with Carmen. If this sounds like a ridiculous soap opera that's because it is!  But have no fear the mystery elements are cleverly inserted into the storyline in several unexpected inverted detective novel styled narrative sections.

For the bulk of the novel the reader is in on lots of shifty goings-on, Poe Junior's way of creating suspense while also adding layers of deception and guilt to the busy storyline. We know about the two thieves who abduct the servants, tie them up, and assume their identities in order to rob the Schofiled home.  We know about Rose breaking into Wayne's study looking for an incriminating and embarrassing letter that she fears he will use to blackmail her. We know about Jack confronting the phony butler called "Bull" Bogart.  And we watch as Jack fires a gun at Bogart as attacking him while at the same time another gun goes off followed shortly by a knife whizzing through an open second story window barely missing Jack's neck and sticking into the wall behind him.  [Knife throwing! Three characters are found to have this carnival skill.  For more about my favorite crime novel plot motif see this post.]

But wait -- there's more! Bogart is shot dead and Jack has to hide the body and come up with some excuse for the missing servant. We watch him do all of this too. But his plan never really is carried out as he imagined. Someone interrupts him and later another character literally stumbles onto Jack's body outside in a remote part of the estate. He's been stabbed with a knife that Rose found in the study but which we know she put a back into the top drawer of the desk. And right next to Jack is Bogart's body. What? Inspector Grimes must discover how Bogart was shot then dumped beside Jack. We know (and eventually Grimes will figure it out) that Jack hid Bogart's body in a clothes closet in Wayne's study where he shot the fake butler.  This is also the same study where Rose was looking for the letter and found the weird knife with a handle shaped like a woman's leg that is found in Jack's back. Who got into the study, took the knife and stabbed Jack? And how did Bogart's body get from the closet inside to outside the house next to Jack?

Whew! All this in only 63 pages. It's up to Inspector Grimes and his small cadre of diligrnt policemen to make sense of all the chaos.

INNOVATIONS: What I found most intriguing is how Poe Junior blended together the techniques of an author omniscient, inverted crime novel with the traditional narrative elements of a whodunit.  The first half is teeming with incidents of criminal behavior -- characters covering up crime scenes, moving corpses and what have you -- and as soon as Grimes appears on the scene the entire book shifts into a traditional detective novel. It's been several years since I've read such a clever tightly plotted book which at first seems chaotic and convoluted but turns out to be rather straightforward.  Close reading will allow the prominent clues to rise to the surface while the red herrings sink down into the murk. There is a lot of deception as you might imagine and the reader needs to watch for who is lying about their actions and whereabouts.

Artwork by Dean Spencer ©2022

As the author is supposedly related to the Master of the Macabre I expected this story to have some kind of homage to The Real E.A.P.  I guess including a bar called The Black Cat Tavern was a wink-wink kind of allusion. And I was ready to give up when about at the halfway mark there is indeed a weird vignette in which we learn that Wayne has devised a Halloween-like prank and hidden it in an abandoned well.  This is near a gazebo where he plans to escort all the guests for a late night meal and drinks.  I won't go into detail about this as it comes as a real surprise, but rest assured it is utterly bizarre and gruesome. Ultimately it is also utterly superfluous as it has nothing to do with the main story! When the machinery of the prank is engaged the bodies of the murdered characters are discovered and th eprnak is practically forgotten about. Prior to this happening the party approaches something like the hedonistic revelry in "Hop-Frog" and "The Masque of the Red Death.' But perhaps I was reaching for as many Poe allusions as I could.  Still, the requisite grotesquerie does appear. Poe would, I think, approve.

The House Party Murders (1940)  is very much informed of action thrillers and at times has some ingeniously devised cinematic scenes.  I particularly liked a Hitchcockian bit. When Rose is finishing up her rifling of the desk she is interrupted by a knock at the door. She ducks down under the desk. The door we know from a few paragraphs previous has a lock that jams and the person who knocked tries to enter but can't get in due to the door knob malfunctioning. Then Rose look up and sees a face reflected in the glass of a framed photograph. There is someone outside looking into the study. She thinks she recognizes the face, but it quickly fades from view. It was like a screenplay moment.  Brilliant touch! The perfect kind of sequence that builds suspense. All of it informed of cinematic techniques as well as narrative style. Poe Junior has several other similarly concocted scenes that are almost like tightly framed and edited movie shots.

THE DJ: Took me a while to realize that the details in the DJ illustration are 100% accurate to a scene in the book where one of the woman characters also finds Jack's body. I added a close-up photo to show that the artist actually made the knife have a leg shaped handle.  A shoe is superfluously added, I think, to underscore the leg shape idea. But it is a naked woman's leg as described in the text, with no shoe. Also I'm sure the leg should be the other way around -- with the foot facing outward not meeting the blade.

EASY TO FIND?  A handful of copies turn up for sale on various bookselling sites, many with the intriguing dust jacket.  My copy is also for sale here.  It's slightly above a reading copy, a very well read copy with lots of dog-eared pages and some aggravating stain on the page borders. As such it's much cheaper than the other copies out there.