Rope’s End, Rogue’s End
A review of Rope’s End, Rogue’s End by E C R Lorac
Edith Caroline Rivett, who wrote prolifically under the pseudonyms of E C R Lorac and Carol Carnac, is fast becoming one of my favourite writers of the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction. Rope’s End, Rogue’s End, originally published in 1942, features Lorac’s go-to police detective, Inspector Robert MacDonald and is an excellent piece of writing which sustains the sense of tension and danger until the end.
Missing is Lorac’s profound sense of place and love of the English countryside but she replaces it with an element of Gothic, a country house, Wulfstane Manor, at first blush a seemingly unpromising and unoriginal place to stage a murder mystery, that is broody, gloomy, falling into disrepair, and with a profound sense of doom and malice in its eery atmosphere. It is a rabbit warren of unused rooms, winding staircases, cellars, not forgetting its twenty-eight ground floor entrances, offering every opportunity for a determined murderer to plot the victim’s demise and hope to get away with it.
Living at the Manor are twins, Veronica and Martin Mallowood. They were bequeathed the house on their father’s death, much to the chagrin of their elder brothers, Paul and Basil who have made fortunes in the City, and the more studied indifference of Richard who has spent his life as a traveller and explorer. Veronica is struggling to make ends meet and Paul tries to pressurise her into letting him occupy part of the house in return for taking care of the maintenance costs. Veronica, who hates Pual, is determined to resist.
In their different ways all the Mallowoods are deeply unpleasant, unloveable characters and the divisions in their relationships are deeper than the Rift Valley. The family have a gathering, a rarity in itself, to say farewell to Paul who is going into semi-retirement and travelling. He takes his formal goodbyes after dinner, but the following morning is waved off by Richard and seen departing by Martin.
Later that morning a shot is heard in the playroom and when the locked door is broken down, the mutilated body of Basil is found, having shot himself, or so it seems. At the precise moment that the body is being discovered a police officer arrives with a warrant for Basil’s arrest for embezzlement. Was it suicide and, if not, how was the murder committed? Was the body really that of Basil’s, why was Veronica convinced initially that it was Martin in the room? What had Martin seen that caused him to disappear from the house and why did Veronica give him such an unconvincing alibi?
The worthy MacDonald, brought in to investigate, does not buy the suicide theory. As he digs into the backgrounds of the Mallowoods he discovers a trail of embezzlement, false identities and double lives. Angling for a lead he finds a fishing rod in Martin’s room, the importance of which most readers will immediately realise but the method in which the person in the playroom met their death is highly ingenious and the precise mechanics of it would elude most.
With such a small list of possible suspects, Lorac does a fine job in maintaining the air of mystery with the finger of suspicion vacillating between the characters before the secret passages and hidden rooms reveal their deadly secret and whodunit. I found myself thinking it was one and then another and the question of the victim’s identity had not really entered my mind until late on.
My only cavils are with MacDonald himself and this reprint . He is a dry old stick, who gets on with the grind of following up the clues wherever they take him. He does not really have a character of his own, Lorac quite content to use him as a plot device and to concentrate her impressive literary firepower on the odious Mallowoods and their gloomy pile. And such a fine story deserves a better edition than the current one available on Amazon. I know Lorac novels are hard to find and the emphasis, rightly, should be on bringing more back to life, but an edition that has fewer typos than this one would be greatly welcomed. There is more than enough to guess about with the story!
