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DEATH BY SUGGESTION (2018) ed. Donald K. Hartman

5/12/2019

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For crime and mystery writers at the end of the 19th century, hypnotism must have been a thoroughly tantalizing subject for strange and shocking story ideas and plotlines. The still-new quasi-science by definition featured a person in power influencing another to act or think a particular way, even potentially acting against his or her will. Could tales of unscrupulous mesmerists inciting spellbound victims to steal and kill against their conscious nature be far behind?

It turns out, hypnotism stories of vengeance, crime, and tragic outcomes became a cottage industry in the literary world of the 1880s through the 1910s. In Death by Suggestion, a new anthology from Themes & Settings in Fiction Press, editor Donald K. Hartman assembles an impressive collection of 22 tales from that era dealing with the theme.

It appears to have been a great amount of curating (mostly from magazines and digests of the day), and I'm always very happy to see such efforts to archive and present period writing that would otherwise be forgotten. Hartman's introductory description is fair: he writes that "You will find here stories that are preposterous; some that are slightly plausible; a few of them may make you shiver; and a couple may even make you laugh; but hopefully, you will find them all entertaining."

One question I had before reading was whether the assembled stories, focused on so narrow a subject and following an anticipated narrative, would feel repetitive when collected and read in a group. The answer is Yes and No; there is some welcome variety in the use of hypnotism within the plots, as well as differing tones and thematic goals. That's all to the good. Still, I chose to read only a few pieces each week, in between other books and activities, as the turn-of-the-century writing style and the often superficial characterizations were overwhelming when sampled en masse.

But let me get to the stories, of which a number proved intriguing and entertaining. Certainly there are recurring themes here, a principal one being a male hypnotist jealously working to bring about the ruin of a romantic rival (and sometimes ruining the woman in the process). The villain of Julian Hawthorne's "The Irishman's Story" is Dr. Gramery, a mesmerist with "brilliant eyes" – they nearly all have brilliant eyes – who is particularly cruel in seeking his revenge. J.E. Muddock's story "The Crime of the Rue Auber" offers another amoral antihero, where a man hypnotizes his wife to kill his mistress's husband in a kind of two-birds-with-one-stone auto-suggestion. Similarly, "The Playwright's Story" by Willard Douglas Coxey follows a scribe who uncovers an affair between his actress wife and her stage partner, and hypnotizes the man to strangle his wife onstage.

Men aren't the only people to wield deadly power here. The woman with the mesmerizing eyes and the dark, fearsome beauty often manages to kill a succession of men in these stories, either to receive life insurance money (as with "Philip Darrell's Wife" by B.L. Farjeon) or simply to destroy males like a black widow spider (see the entry from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "John Barrington Cowles"). A variation on the latter, and one of the best stories in the collection, is Erckmann-Chatrian's atmospheric "Suggested Suicide," which is unique because the male witness watching a witch-like woman control and kill lodgers staying at an inn learns the rules of hypnotism so he can turn the spell on the caster.

The other stories that were most notable to me were those that managed to use the subject in an unexpected way. Two engrossing pieces explored the toll that hypnotic power may take on user and subject: Hugh Conway's "Paul Vargas: A Mystery" features a mesmeric man who transfers illness from a woman to himself, eventually becoming paralyzed and deathly ill as a result; and Charles Fleming Embree's "A Higher Hypnotism" finds its hypnotist paralyzed as he tries to physically control (as if through real-time telepathy) his subject.

There are two short sketches by Ambrose Bierce included here, and one is the most comical story in the group, simply called "The Hypnotist." A mischievous narrator finds creative ways to bump off those he dislikes, convincing a prison warden that he is an ostrich, who then swallows "a great quantity of indigestible articles mostly of wood and metal", and making his scheming parents believe they are warring broncos.
A few stories went even farther afield (with enjoyable results), such as "The Harmony of Horror" by Havelock Ettrick, a slight but brisk adventure involving a kidnapped concert pianist, a shadowy society, and a deadly piano chord; and "Hypnotism with a Vengeance" by Ichor, a sort of Jonah and the Whale retelling with a spellbound ship's mate remaining unconscious during his fantastic ordeal.

Death by Suggestion makes for fun reading and provides an interesting look at how popular culture was translating the exoticism and dangers of hypnotism in the late 19th century. I'm grateful to Mr. Hartman for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for this (hopefully clear-eyed) review.

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MITCHELL MYSTERY READING GROUP - Come Away, Death - Post #4

5/4/2019

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It has been an interesting – and, for some readers, frustrating – journey through 1937's Come Away, Death for those completing April's Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event. This final, belated post examines the last five chapters in particular, where a body is finally discovered (more accurately, a head), an investigation begun and concluded, and a murderer confronted. It's a very unusual structure for a classic murder mystery, but as I remarked in the previous post, I suspect Gladys Mitchell was more interested in generating atmosphere and intrigue than in delivering a schematically presented puzzle plot. As such, this novel reads more like fatalistic Greek tragedy and less as a conventional whodunit.
And that's fine with me, and it also appealed to Martyn Hobbs, who references some wonderful text examples supporting this idea. Namely, Come Away, Death shows Mrs Bradley as an instrument of justice in the classical sense but not at all concerned with the machinery of modern law, which lacks the nuance to deliver an appropriate fate to the person who rids the world of a blackmailer and sadist.

Martyn writes, "There’s never any question of her bringing the murderer to court. And the idea of the law, British or Greek, seems on holiday with our cast of characters. Greece is another country, a sort of Shakespearean Forest of Arden where normal service no longer applies.  And as we have felt before, the actions of the present day appear so mean and tawdry compared with the tragic misdeeds and suffering of the past. Marie Hopkinson says near the end,
"Athens isn’t like London…  And what’s more, one doesn’t feel the same here about these things – murder, and being suspected of it, and regarding it as something belonging to the Sunday papers, and so on. One remembers all the old stories – one sees things as Homer saw them, and as Aeschylus and Euripides and darling Aristophanes saw them – and they seem – death seems – trivial compared with – I don’t know how to put it – great things looming, and slaves’ lives meaning nothing, and fate hovering – great wings, great mountains, great, clean, sweeping skies."
I return to that parched and inhospitable landscape of Hellenic ruins that the author renders with such sensory description, and I again feel great admiration for Gladys Mitchell's literary intent with this novel. It's not an enjoyable book in terms of light-reading detective fiction, but it is a fascinating and full one. After the discovery of decapitated vipers (originally kept, when alive, in a locked strongbox), Mrs Bradley searches for and finds the original container, which now carries the photographer Armstrong's head.

Martyn remarks that "after the much-delayed arrival of the murder victim, his actual identification is quite perfunctory. No fanfares for Mrs Bradley or any show of horror or hysteria; it is all very dry and matter-of-fact. If anything, we’re given more information about the condition of the box than about her horrific discovery":

She rewarded the husbandman, carried away her treasure trove, and, away from all observation, opened the lid, for the lock had been broken off and the lid lifted easily. Inside the box was the putrefying head of Armstrong. She pushed the box in among some bushes, wrapped up the head in a large coloured handkerchief which she had been wearing as a turban, and walked out on the road which led to Selçuk.
The scene – and especially the detective's strange quasi-forensic decision to poke and bury the gruesome evidence – made an impression on reader Catherine Dilts:  "While I was not surprised Armstrong became the murder victim, I was utterly horrified that Mrs. Bradley played with his head, and then left it in a hole. She is remarkably calm, even while noting the hideous odor and appearance of Armstrong. Perhaps that is due to her reptilian nature?"

The decapitated snakes and the indifferent disposal of a human head were not the only moments which highlight the savagery of the setting. The sight of Ronald Dick hanging from the bent branch of a young tree, his feet just touching the ground, is a ghoulish, merciless image. Martyn adds that the rental by Sir Rudri Hopkinson of dangerous, half-starved village dogs delivers an additional element of "horror and revulsion. Shaggy, snarling, half-wild but wholly savage, they are ‘black as the hounds of hell’. Dick, insisting that they must be humane, had fed the beasts on pieces of rotting meat. Guessing that Dick may have been the assassin, I imagined that he was gorging them on Armstrong’s dismembered remains…"

Joyka noted that the strangely menacing, rather atypical tone of this story (when compared to the other Mrs Bradley mysteries) made her fear for the elderly investigator in this instance. She writes, "I was really worried when I first read this book that Mrs Bradley was going to be the next victim. She will just not leave Armstrong’s “slaying” alone. And despite the fact that everyone in the group is willing to tell any amount of lies to mislead her – except for the small boys – she does solve the mystery."

Mitchell allows Mrs Bradley to transition from passive observer to active theorist and interviewer in the final three chapters, and I enjoyed the change. It can be legitimately argued by critics that she sometimes doesn't approach fair-play puzzle plotting as her contemporaries do; indeed, she often seems more interested in character, situation, and mood than in carefully clued and alibied scenarios. But this difference in perspective and intent is largely why I respond to Gladys Mitchell's stories far more than those from other GAD authors. I would argue that, in her strongest works, Mitchell can generate great interest and mystification in her plotting and clueing. Chapters 19 and 20 here have an energy and clarity that I found extremely satisfying.

Others take a different view. Martyn, who otherwise greatly enjoyed Come Away, Death, did not like the late-chapter change in the old lady, perhaps due to a genre obligation: "There’s the vague sense of Gladys Mitchell going through the necessary motions when she describes Mrs Bradley’s investigation and solving of the mystery. Having been treated with subtlety throughout the story, Mrs B now begins to ‘cackle’ again. And again. In fact, her cackling gets out of hand, breaking out from page to page."

Joyka, who notes that the author revisits a few of these characters in 1971's Lament for Leto, was surprised to find that this group was chosen for a sequel. "Most of the characters are weak-willed and/or self-centered. Even her schoolmate Marie Hopkinson does not trust Mrs B with the truth."


Come Away, Death may be the first Mitchell title to end with the hint of a supernatural occurrence. (From memory, 1978's Wraiths and Changelings and the 1967 Malcolm Torrie title Late and Cold feature similarly ambiguous events.)

From Martyn: "It seems that there was indeed a miracle at Epidaurus, and Aesculapius, god of healing, was in fact the white figure who haunted the maze. Yet in spite of everything and all his endeavours, Sir Rudri never saw him. Megan says ‘there’s death in that’, but Mrs Bradley contradicts her. ‘Not death,’ she says, ‘but only a summing-up of life.’ What is that summing up of life? If not death, is it that all we strive to achieve in life ends inevitably in frustration and defeat? Or are our endeavours lost by simple mischance, by accident, by something as banal as looking the wrong way?"
​

I'm grateful to all the readers who shared their thoughts on this mystery based on the Mysteries of Eleusis, including JF Norris and Nick Fuller (who says astute readers should be able to guess the murderer early if they have been paying attention to the literary clues). I hope to announce another Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event before the year is out. Next time around, it will be a Mrs Bradley title first published in the 1940s, and there are a lot of great options to choose from! All best wishes, intrepid travelers --- Jason H.
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