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Tom Mead's CABARET MACABRE is British crime fiction from the old school, the third in a series of locked-room mysteries that feature Joseph Spector, a retired stage magician turned semi-professional sleuth. In his black velvet suit, with a cloak lined in red silk, Spector is equal parts dolorous and dryly funny; he brings "a touch of old-world flamboyance into the murky 20th century." In the last, chilly weeks of December 1938, Spector is summoned by the haughty Lady Elspeth Drury to her family's country manor, in order to investigate a possible threat against her second husband, Sir Giles Drury.
Sir Giles is a pompous, self-important judge who has been receiving poison-pen letters that may be related to the mysterious death of his former secretary, a decade earlier in that same home. Then again, they might be related to his decision to change his will (the judge has two sons with Lady Elspeth, a third born out of wedlock, and a stepson and everybody wants his money), or to the discovery of the faceless body of a murdered man, stuffed into a steamer trunk, which was found by a couple of children playing at a nearby beach. An elite secret society seems to be involved with either the killings, the cover-ups, or both. And the hits keep on coming, literally.
Spector is originally asked to look into the source of the letters, in light of the fact that the most obvious suspect – billed as "Victor Silvius, a madman" – has been confined to a dreary private sanitarium for the past nine years; he was locked away after attacking the judge in the belief that Sir Giles was responsible for the death of Silvius's one true love, the aforementioned secretary. The investigation becomes more complicated when bodies start piling up: one corpse is splayed in a rowboat, in the middle of a frozen lake, with no footprints in the snow to indicate how it got there. Another victim is shot dead in a room that no one else has entered, from which there is no means of escape, and that's all before the electrocution by automobile, the decapitation, and the gruesome, fatal beating of an orderly at the sanitarium. No one can understand how the deaths are related, because every member of the household is hiding secrets that are unknown to the others.
It is up to Spector, the outsider, to figure out what the secrets are, and how the murders are being carried out. As a magician, he is well acquainted with the arts of deception and sleight of hand, and this knowledge serves him well in determining how these seemingly impossible acts of mayhem are being pulled off. He carries little props around with him so that he can perform magic tricks now and then, to show his "audience" how the illusion of "magic" can be achieved. Each trick is a metaphor for the way the killer, or killers, is confusing the mind by distracting the eye; they are Spector's way of thinking out loud, helping him to ascertain the difference between the impossible and the merely unexpected.
The plot is a complex, cleverly constructed contrivance, like a mechanical toy or one of those films that feature hundreds of dominoes arranged in a convoluted, mazelike pattern, all of which go toppling with the flick of a single finger. How much the reader will enjoy the show depends upon how much patience they have, while waiting for the mechanism to be set up: there are murders galore here, but the "locked room" killing doesn't take place until the end of Chapter 9, more than halfway through the novel. The conclusion is satisfying, however, in the way that it's fun to go backstage and see how the tricks were achieved, and to learn that skill, imagination, and a perceptive understanding of human nature, are their own kind of magic.
§ Mary-Jane Oltarzewski is an Assistant Teaching Professor with the Rutgers University Writing Program. In her spare time, she enjoys coffee crawls, listening to jazz and show tunes, and spending time in the Catskills with her husband, and a cat who bears a strong resemblance to the Reviewing the Evidence mascot.
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski, June 2024
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