Introduction

 

Joel Townsley Rogers was a prolific writer whose career spanned more than half a century, but he is remembered for a single, stunning novel, The Red Right Hand. Interviewed at the age of eighty-two, Rogers told Elliott L. Gilbert that he was “appalled” by the thought, but this gifted and evidently likeable man surely had a twinkle in his eye. There are countless worse fates than having as one’s memorial such a dazzling book.

The Red Right Hand offers a story told in the first person, but the reader cannot help wondering whether Dr. Henry N. Riddle Jr. is a reliable narrator. From the wonderful opening paragraph, the events “of the dark mystery of tonight” seem nightmarish and surreal. Instantly we are presented with a series of questions, as intriguing as they are macabre. Where is the killer of Inis St. Erme? What did he do with St. Erme’s right hand? And what is he trying to achieve?

Inis St. Erme recently became engaged to a pretty young woman called Elinor Darrie. Heading in their car from New York to Vermont, they pick up a strange-looking tramp – and murder swiftly follows. Riddle is a potential witness – but might he also, somehow, be a suspect? He is a surgeon, who thinks of himself as alert and observant, but he finds it hard to believe the evidence of his eyes. Was there “something hellish and impossible about that rushing car, its red-eye sawed-off little driver and its dead passenger” that caused him to fail to see the apparently homicidal tramp suspected of murdering St. Erme? In crime fiction, things are never as they seem; nor are people, and The Red Right Hand stretches this principle to its limits. The effect is deeply unsettling. What should we believe? And whom should we trust?

The events of the novel are bizarre and horrific, and the setting in rural Connecticut provides another reminder of Sherlock Holmes’ remark about the countryside’s “dreadful record of sin”. Names of the locales – the Swamp Road, Dead Bridegroom’s Pond - are as evocative as Rogers’ feverish descriptions. Riddle is haunted by recollections of “the distant baying of the hounds”, and “the voices of the locusts... the gray bird fluttering frantically in my face” as he tries to make sense of the inexplicable. As old MacComerou, who lives in the vicinity, and is an expert in criminal psychology recognises, “there was something in the picture that he knew could not be right.”   

The names of the characters are arresting – Riddle, St. Erme, Dexter, Flail – and chosen to enhance the mood of mysterious uncertainty. Rogers’ prose is lush and lyrical, and it is no surprise to learn that, after leaving Harvard, he wrote poetry before starting to write fiction for the magazines. The story is not structured anything like a conventional “fair play” whodunit, yet Rogers is generous with his clues – one of which takes the form of a word game - despite drowning them in a torrent of coincidences.

All this makes for a heady mixture, one that disconcerted some critics. The famously acerbic Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor dismissed The Red Right Hand as “bore-dumb”. Judges less hidebound by preconceived ideas about crime fiction have applauded the book’s originality, while Rogers’ ability to blend plot, pace and a vivid way with words remains deeply impressive, almost seventy years on. The reward for readers prepared to suspend disbelief is that Rogers will take their breath away.   

The novel, first published in 1945, was a revised and expanded version of a novella which first appeared in the New Detective magazine in March of that year. The book enjoyed a particular vogue in France, and won the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere. French critics compared it not only to the work of Poe, inventor of the “locked room” detective story, and John Dickson Carr, who developed “impossible crime” stories into a fine art, but also to the twisty, atmospheric mysteries of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the duo responsible for the novels filmed as Vertigo and Les Diaboliques. How sad that neither Hitchcock nor Clouzot adapted The Red Right Hand into a movie. Filming such an elaborate, evocative story-line would be a challenge worthy of those masters of suspense.

Joel Townsley Rogers was born in 1896 in Sedalia, Missouri. After Harvard, he joined the naval air corps, although he did not have the chance to fly overseas before the Armistice. He shifted from poetry to writing for the pulp magazines, trying his hand at flying stories, risqué romances, and science fiction as well as mysteries. This seemed to him “better than working at a job”, but he took his craft seriously, and the pressure to produce did not cause his writing to become flavourless. His eerie first novel, Once in a Red Moon, which appeared in 1923, was a highly unconventional story about a rich man still wanted in Ireland for a forty-year old murder. Rogers later described it as “a hocus-pocus semi-mystery” novel, and he did not return to full-length fiction until he decided to fill out his first version of The Red Right Hand, more than twenty years later. The next year, he published Lady with the Dice, and 1958 saw the appearance of his fourth and final novel, The Stopped Clock. Each of his last three books was an expanded version of a shorter story. Late in life, he was working on another novel, but so far this has not seen the light of day. Yet he will remain most celebrated for The Red Right Hand, and rightly so. What crime novelist would not be proud to have written such an unforgettable book?  

 

Martin Edwards

December 2013

Cast of Characters

 

IN THE ORDER OF THEIR APPEARANCE

 

INIS ST. ERME, oilman and promoter, who promoted one scheme too many        

 

ADAM MacCOMEROU, famous murder psychologist, who got too close to the murderer   

 

DR. HENRY N. RIDDLE, JR., brain surgeon, who began to doubt the validity of his own perceptions

 

LIEUTENANT ROSENBLATT, state trooper, who was not fooled by circumstantial evidence 

 

ELINOR DARRIE, St. Erme’s fiancée, who began a wedding trip that ended in a nightmare 

 

JOHN FLAIL, handyman, who might have talked

 

A.M. DEXTER, Professor of Automobilistics, who should have stuck to his trade

 

CORKSCREW, a tramp, who came from nowhere and disappeared leaving destruction behind him    

 

QUELCH, village postmaster, who had a mind for detail and an eye for a pretty girl

 

PETE FLAIL, paroled murderer, who came in handy

 

GREGORI UNISTAIRE, artist, who saw life and the crime from a surrealist point of view 

 

STONE, trooper, who followed his chief’s orders without question