Philip MacDonald, the author who wrote X v. Rex under the pseudonym Martin Porlock, holds some interesting ground in the field of classic mystery fiction. A number of his books incorporate elements of suspense and fit a thriller style, but their plots also pay tribute to – and work within – the genres of crime and detection. It’s a neat assemblage of working parts, and in books like this one, The Noose (1930), and The List of Adrian Messenger (1960), fans of conventional mystery stories will likely find much to appreciate.
X v. Rex is especially notable because, had the author chosen to take a slightly different approach to the story, this tale of an unknown killer systematically targeting London’s policemen could have been presented as a first-rate classically structured whodunit.
X v. Rex is especially notable because, had the author chosen to take a slightly different approach to the story, this tale of an unknown killer systematically targeting London’s policemen could have been presented as a first-rate classically structured whodunit.
The question of who still remains; X stays an unknown even as MacDonald offers up clues to motive and means through intermittent diary entries. But ultimately the murderer’s identity is secondary to the fate of the characters affected by his vendetta: there is Sir Hector Frensham, an embattled police commissioner, his ingénue daughter Jane, and her fiancé Sir Christopher Vayle, upon whom early suspicion is cast due to a drunken altercation with a patrol officer. So rather than a traditional whodunit with a pool of citizen suspects and a search for a motive, the book instead centers on the literal and existential threat of an outside force creating chaos by literally attacking the values of civilized society.
Academic categorizing aside, X v. Rex (published as The Mystery of the Dead Police in the U.S.) is a very entertaining, fast-moving read. The police attacks are varied and deliberate (and not a little frightening in their violence), and MacDonald creates a nightmare mood with his scenes of authority surprised, compromised, and made victim. (I can recall few Golden Age mysteries that involve the murder of a single policeman, much less the killing of a cumulative squad.) With the rule of authority subverted, the reader readily sympathizes with Sir Hector’s helplessness while trying to combat an unpredictable, malevolent force. Enter Nicholas Revel, an enigmatic man who provides a (forged) alibi for Jane’s boyfriend and surprises Sir Hector, first by correctly describing what the police have done to date in its attempts to capture X, and then by suggesting exactly what they should do to make a successful apprehension. But we are not sure how trustworthy Mr. Revel might be, or whether his interest in the case is altruistic or strikes a little too close to home.
MacDonald’s prose is at times a bit ornate – for Jane Frensham’s introduction, he devotes several lines of text to describe her youthful vivaciousness, for example – but such detail is appealing and vivid in a cinematic sense. He is a writer who experiments with structure and allows otherwise incidental characters and actions to brush up against the throughline of the plot, and I rather enjoyed these singular digressions. One such moment: a governess and her two charges, coming back from the race grounds, briefly cross paths with a mounted policeman who, a few pages later, will cross paths with the murderer. The author allows the family to exit stage left with this amusing run of lines:
"Haven't you seen enough horses for today?" said Miss Rooksby, for the three had just returned from Olympia.
"No!" said Philip stoutly.
"Well, I have," said Miss Rooksby and laughed and hailed a taxi, which presently bore the three of them up the hill and out of this story.
Happily, X v. Rex was brought to my attention by Martin Edwards: The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, his excellent analysis of detective fiction by its genre themes, collects this title under the chapter “Multiplying Murders.” Given Philip MacDonald's penchant for visual descriptions and framing his scenes in smart tableaux, it is not a surprise to learn that the author also had a career as a screenwriter. A very interesting mystery-thriller hybrid from detective fiction's Golden Age.
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