In the crypt, the Bloodhounds were in full cry.
"The puzzle is the thing," Milo Motion bayed. "The challenge of the puzzle. Without that, there's nothing."
"You said it!" Jessica rounded on him. "There's nothing in those books except the puzzle, and if the puzzle's no good you feel cheated at the end. Most of those so-called classic detective stories are flawed. Agatha Christie went to preposterous lengths to mystify her readers and she's reckoned to be the best of them. Take the plot of The Mousetrap."
"Better not," Polly Wycherley gently cautioned her. "Just in case any of us hasn't seen the play."
Jessica jerked her head toward Polly in annoyance, and the flounce of the blond curls drew an envious sigh from Shirley-Ann. "Have a heart, Polly," Jessica said. "How can we have a serious discussion if we aren't allowed to analyze the plots?"
The reason why Polly was everyone's choice as chairman was made clear. She explained evenly, but with a distinct note of authority, "Jessica, dear, we all love discussing crime stories, or we wouldn't be here, but another reason for coming is to get recommendations from each other of marvelous books we haven't read. Don't let's rob any book of its mystery."
"I deliberately mentioned The Mousetrap because it isn't a book," Jessica pointed out.
"Yes, and we appreciate your restraint, but just in case some of us haven't seen the play…"
"Is that a ruling from the chair?"
"No, we don't go in for rules," Polly said serenely. "If you want to criticize the puzzle story in general terms, my dear, I'm positive that you can do it, and still make the points you wish to."
"All right," offered Jessica. "What I'm saying without mentioning any titles-"
"Thank you, dear," murmured Polly.
"is that in order to mystify people, really fox them, I mean, writers were forced into concocting story lines that were just plain silly, like one very well-known whodunit in which the person who tells the story is revealed as the killer in the last chapter."
"The last chapter but two, if my memory serves me right," put in Shirley-Ann.
Jessica widened her eyes. "I can see we're going to have to watch what we say in future."
Shirley-Ann felt herself reddening and was relieved when Jessica softened the remark with a smile.
Milo was not smiling. "What's wrong with the narrator doing it?"
"Because that's a trick," said Jessica. "A piece of literary sleight-of-hand. She had to go to absurd lengths to make it work. I mean, the writer did. This is so difficult, Polly."
"It didn't trouble me," said Milo. "And it didn't trouble millions of other people, judged by the success of the book you're talking about. It's still in print after seventy years."
"Is that how long ago it was written?" said Polly, dangerously close to offending the principle she had recommended a second or two before. But it seemed she was only steering the discussion in a less adversarial direction. Her piloting couldn't be faulted.
Miss Chilmark, the dragon empress, who had been silent up to now, waded in. "There's really no reason why a puzzle story shouldn't have other merits. I can think of a work with a wonderful, intricate puzzle that is intellectually pleasing as well as theologically instructive. A novel of character, with a respect for history…"
"Any guesses? I never got past page forty-two," murmured Jessica, unheard by Miss Chilmark, who continued to rhapsodize on the merits of The Name of the Rose until she was interrupted by the barking of a dog.
"This will be Rupert," Jessica informed Shirley-Ann.
"With a dog?"
"The dog isn't the problem," said Milo.
As it turned out, Milo was mistaken. The dog was a problem. Everyone looked toward the door, and a large brown mongrel, perhaps a cross between a setter and a German shepherd, stepped in and sniffed the air. It had a thick, wavy coat gleaming from the drenching it had got, and it trotted directly to the center of the circle and shook itself vigorously. Everyone was spattered. There were shrieks of outrage, and the meeting broke up in disorder. A chair was overturned, and Polly's handbag tipped upside down. The dog, excited by the commotion, rolled on its back, got up, and barked some more.
Miss Chilmark cried, "Somebody take it outside. My dress is ruined."
The owner appeared, a tall, thin, staring man in a black leather jacket, dark blue corduroys and a black beret, and rapped out a command.
"Marlowe, heel!"
The dog wagged its tail, gave another shimmy, and distributed more moisture.
"It takes no notice of you whatsoever," Miss Chilmark complained. "You ought to have it on a leash. Or, better still, leave it at home."
"That's a flint-hearted attitude, if I may say so, madam," Rupert replied in an accent redolent of one of the better public schools. "Coming here is the high point of Marlowe's week. He's merely doing what dogs do to dry themselves."
Milo said, "And what about all the other things dogs do? Are we going to be treated to those? I can't bear the suspense."
"What have you got against dumb animals?" said Rupert. "How would you like to sit here in a sopping wet coat?"
"How would you like it if I sent you the dry-cleaning bill?" Miss Chilmark riposted.
"Call yourselves Bloodhounds, and you panic when a real dog turns up," Rupert said, with a grin that displayed more gaps than teeth.
Polly Wycherley judged this as the proper moment to restore order. "Why don't we all go back to our seats? Then Marlowe ought to settle down. He's usually no trouble."
"The chairs are wet," Miss Chilmark objected. "I refuse to sit on a wet chair."
A cloth was produced, the seats were wiped, and the meeting resumed with Marlowe in disgrace, anchored by a lead to his master's chair leg, and forced to lie outside the circle.
Shirley-Ann was intrigued that Rupert could appear so indifferent to the chaos he and his dog had just inflicted. He sat between Polly and Milo in a relaxed attitude with legs crossed and his left hand cupping his chin. It was a face without much flesh, dominated by a beak of a nose and dark, deepset, alert eyes overlapped by the front edge of the black beret.
Polly said, "We were having quite a fruitful discussion about the predominance of the puzzle in the classic detective novel."
"Tiresome, isn't it?" Rupert took up the challenge at once. "Totally unconnected with the real world. All those eccentric detectives-snobbish lords and little old ladies and Belgian refugees looking for unconsidered clues. Absolute codswallop. In the whole history of crime in this country, real crime, I defy you to name one murder that was solved by a private detective. You can't." His owlish eyes scanned the circle. "You can't."
"That doesn't put me off," Milo gamely answered. "I don't want my reading too close to real life."
"Or real death," said Jessica.
"Exactly." But Milo had missed the point.
Rupert laughed and displayed even more gum. He was quite a ruin, but extremely watchable. "Fairy stories for grownups."
"Why not?" said Milo. "I like a little magic, even if it turns out to have been a trick."
Shirley-Ann chimed in, "That goes for me, too."
Rupert gave her a pained look. "Another one suffering from arrested development. Hell's teeth, I'm seriously outnumbered now."
Polly sounded a lighter note. "When some of us heard P. D. James at the Pump Room a few years ago, she said she must have had the mind of a crime writer even as a child, because when she first heard the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, her thought was 'Did he fall, or was he pushed?'"
Even Rupert smiled, and then went straight on to the offensive again. "And they all live happily ever after?" he pressed them. "Is that what you want from your reading?"
"A sense of order restored, anyway," said Shirley-Ann. "Is that the same thing?"
Milo remarked, "I like the loose ends tidied up."