Open-Door Murder

The more the merrier! When the number of suspects is continually increasing, and the number of corpses remains constant, you get a sort of inflation. The value of your individual suspect, of course, becomes hopelessly depreciated.
"The Woman in the Wardrobe"

Hey! Hey! I finally got started on Umineko no Naku koro ni Saku. With a bit of luck, I'll have a review by the end of the year! Also: an old man crying out the same name over and over again is no way to start a game!

If possible, I usually prefer to read a mystery story in its original language. But this is not always a viable option, even if the book was originally released in a language I can read. The most obvious reason is of course when the original book is out of print and going for a hefty price on the used market, while a translated version is easily available and/or cheaper. Roger Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells was one of those books for me, which I first read in Japanase. It would take another five, six  years after I read that book, before it and other Scarlett books became easily available again in English.

The same almost happened with Peter Schaffer's The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951). I first read about this book in some Japanese publication about locked room murder mysteries and while the Japanese translation was still available then, it appeared that was not the case with the English editions. It kinda fell of my radar then, but last year, I noticed a somewhat familiar-looking name on the release list of the British Crime Library Classics. Somewhat, I say, because as far as I knew, the author was called Peter Anthony, not Shaffer. Turned out that Peter Shaffer originally published the book under the name Peter Anthony, and that this was indeed a brand new release of the book I had read about earlier. So I decided to pick this release up to see what it was all about. The story is set in seaside Amnestie, at the Charter Hotel, which has a somewhat dubious reputation due to the couples who come here to spend the weekend. Private detective Verity has a villa in Amnestie and one early morning, he goes out for a swim when he sees someone climbing out of a bedroom from the window, into another bedroom. Verity goes out to inform the hotel manager of this rather unusual way to exit one's room, but then that same man comes running down to the lobby, saying someone's been murdered. They make their way to the room indicated, but find that it has been locked from the inside. When they finally get in, they find the victim lying on the floor, shot twice in his back. But they also find that not only the door, but the windows had also been locked from the inside, meaning this was a locked room and furthermore, inside the wardrobe, they find the titular woman: the hotel waitress was loosely bound and stuffed inside the wardrobe. Inquiries quickly lead to the conclusion that the victim, a Maxwell, was a blackmailer and that everyone in the hotel had something to do with him, but how did the killer escape from a locked hotel room?

I have to admit I find it hard to express my thoughts on The Woman in the Wardrobe in a way that does justice to both the core ideas of the novel as well as my own experience of it. To start with the conclusion: I think it's a fun novel, with a memorable core idea for the locked room situation, but it's also incredibly stretched out despite its relatively short length, and the plot would've worked much better as a short story. If you're looking for a fun, breezy read, The Woman in the Wardrobe is what you want, as it's a short and pleasant read with a grander-than-life character in the detective Verity and most of the cast is quite colorful too (though the person who thinks he's the rightful heir to the Throne didn't seem to add that much to the plot). But despite how smooth the book reads, I couldn't help but feel like half of the book could've been easily ditched for a more satisfying mystery plot.

The core locked room murder situation has a few interesting points: why was the room locked from the inside after the witness had left the room to warn the people in the lobby? What was the waitress doing in a locked wardrobe? Why were multiple people seen climbing in and out of Maxwell's room? Why did nobody hear the gunshots in the early morning? Schaffer throws all these questions and a lot of red herrings at the reader, but it didn't really work for me, because most of the smokescreen is just abritrary, contrived writing. It's having everyone in the cast doing all kinds of things at the exact right time solely to make the investigation more complex for the reader: it's one coincidence after another, like one person deciding to go to a room just around the exact time another character decided to do that too, or having another person stroll by to witness that "by accident", or having a accidental witness for one event that realistically could've totally unnoticed while another incident should've been heard by everyone else in the hotel and yet it just happened only one person did.  After a while, you realize Schaffer is just stretching everyhing out with events that are just there to make things seem more complex, but they just feel like arbitrary additions to a core idea, with next to no synergy with that core plot. They're filler. 

And it's a shame, because I do like the core solution to the locked room. You can explain what happened in the locked room with one single sentence, and it's this core explanation that makes The Woman in the Wardrobe a memorable novel: it's a variation on a rather familiar trope in locked room mysteries, but it still manages to surprise here, and the implications of the trick are right in line with the funny tone of this novel. But that is also why I'd have preferred a short story version of this idea, that focused solely on bringing this solution: now the plot is just meandering for the sake of meandering and I also think it weakens the moment the truth is revealed, as so much of the novel feels just like one contrived event after another. 

Though I suspect most people will not have any problems with that, and enjoy The Woman in the Wardrobe for the entertaining novel it certainly is. Many readers will probably have no problem with the way the story is structured, as it's a fun book to read and I definitely wouldn't want to discourage people from reading novel. Missed potential or wasted potential are terms I would find too strong myself too, but even now as I'm writing this review, a few days after I finished the book, I can't help but feel that The Woman in the Wardrobe is an amusing mystery novel with a good locked room situation, but it could've been an even better short story.