Caroline: If you are a character in a classic murder mystery novel, there are few things worse than stumbling across an unexpected corpse. There you were, going about your business, innocently opening a door to a house or a room or cupboard or making your way down a secluded country lane or path, and suddenly, there it is. A dead body that you never expected to see, suddenly right in front of you.
What do you do next? Go for help, of course, ideally after noticing a few basic details about your deceased companion and their environment. The best case scenario would be to return quickly with someone in a position of authority in the criminal justice system, like a police officer or a judge, but in a pinch any capable adult will do. Someone who can guard the scene from further disturbance while you take all the proper steps to ensure the victim is respected, the investigation has every facility, and that you don’t personally make that unfortunate transition from witness to suspect.
Your bad day will become a lot worse, though, if you return with your helper and find that the scene is empty — deserted, not a body to be seen. Of course, you know what you saw, but without that vital second pair of eyes, will anyone believe you? And how can it be that a dead body was here just a few short moments ago, and is now completely gone? That begins to feel a bit weird, spooky even. You could be forgiven for feeling a shiver go down your spine.
But don’t worry, because all is not lost. An answer will be found, because today, we’re investigating the vanishing corpses.
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Golden age detective fiction loves a vanishing corpse. So much so that there are, to my knowledge, two books with that very title: The Vanishing Corpse. One is a 1941 novel by Anthony Gilbert, and the other is a novelisation of an Ellery Queen film from 1940. There are also books called The Case of the Runaway Corpse, The Corpse Steps Out, Case Without A Corpse, The Disappearing Corpse… I think you get the idea. There are so many that I’m not going to be able to cover them all in detail in this episode, but I hope to highlight the titles that shed light on this fascinating and popular plot device. Writers in this genre really enjoyed making dead bodies appear and then disappear in their stories. In fact, in that Ellery Queen book, the corpse vanishes not once but twice.
But before we get into any of those, I want to take a little trip back in time, before the interwar period we call the golden age of detective fiction, and take a look at an example from 1914. In A Silent Witness by R. Austin Freeman, a newly-qualified young doctor called Humphrey Jardine is taking his habitual late night walk on Hampstead Heath in the pouring rain when he stumbles upon the dead body of a man lying in a lonely lane. He hurries back off the Heath and into the residential streets where he finds a constable, who quickly gathers some other officers and they all head out with a stretcher to retrieve the corpse. Of course, when they get to the place where it lay, there is nothing there.
This is how Freeman describes that moment, writing from Jardine’s point of view: “When we reached the corner, I stopped short in utter amazement. The body had vanished!” That exclamation mark after vanished says it all, really. He and the police officers search the area, looking for any sign that a body has been there and then removed, but find nothing — not helped by the heavy rain, which is of course all the while muddying the paths and obscuring all tracks. And, I presume, shortening the tempers of police officers would would rather be doing anything else, ideally indoors.
It doesn’t take long before the inspector is saying aloud what they are all thinking: was the body ever even there to begin with? Jardine begins the scene absolutely convinced of what he has seen, but by the end doubts are creeping in. Was the man perhaps just unconscious, as the sergeant kindly suggests, and had revived and removed himself during his discoverer’s absence fetching help? Was there anyone there at all, or did he imagine it? Has he witnessed a supernatural event?
The doubts gnaw away at him enough that he returns to the place the following morning. A more thorough search in the light of day reveals certain physical clues that suggest something was indeed there and then removed, but when he reports his new discoveries to the police it is clear that the “he’s imagining it” narrative has already taken firm hold in that quarter. We are told of the inspector that “his manner expressed frank disbelief, and was even a trifle hostile; and his emphatic request that I would abstain from mentioning the matter to anyone left me in no doubt that he regarded both my communications as wild delusions if not as a deliberate hoax”. They think Jardine made up the body, in other words, and resent that he was able to waste their time the night before.
Of course, the story does not end there. Jardine teams up with Freeman’s recurring detective, medical jurisprudence expert Dr John Thorndyke, and the mystery is eventually solved. But this atmosphere of unease and doubt about whether or not he really saw a body on the Heath that night haunts Jardine throughout the book — it takes three attempts on his own life before he begins to realise that something quite sinister and serious is going on.
This isn’t a proper puzzle mystery of the kind in which Thorndyke would star in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s more of a bridge between the Gothic-tinged novels of sensation written by the likes of Wilkie Collins and the true golden age murder mystery. But along with some rather evocative descriptive writing, it foregrounds a very important component of what would become the vanishing corpse trope: its use as a way of casting doubt on the discoverer of the body and undermining their trustworthiness both for other characters and for the reader. Time and time again we’ll see this happen — did so and so really find a body that has now disappeared, or are they lying, or losing it, or both? Was it a ghost, or a mirage, or some other kind of vision? It’s a brilliant way to destabilise and complicate a narrative. It’s really no wonder detective novelists enjoyed using it so much.
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From the wilds of Hampstead Heath on a dark and stormy night, we must now move to the East End of London and London’s Docklands. It is in St. Katherine’s Docks that Freeman Wills Crofts set the memorable opening scene of his 1920 debut mystery novel The Cask, with a clerk sent down to meet a ship and check a consignment of wine barrels that have recently arrived from France. During the course of the unloading, a few slip and fall onto the wharf, leading to the discovery that one cask is not like all the other casks. It is heavier, made of different materials, and, as they begin to pry it open, most certainly not being used as a container for wine. Some gold sovereigns spill out as a plank is pried free, and within, packed in sawdust, the workers are able to spy the hand and wrist of a very clearly dead woman.
Of course, the clerk departs to fetch the police immediately, but when he brings them aboard the ship to view the suspicious cask, it has, of course, vanished, as has the body within. This is the end of chapter one cliffhanger that Crofts gives his readers — a mysterious Frenchman has arrived and claimed the cask as his own, and Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard must now track this man, his barrel, and the body it contains. The first act of the novel is spent doing this, and then it must be done again when the titular cask vanishes a second time later on. Crofts really did have fun with the whole “now you see it, now you don’t” aspect of this plot.
Where this all becomes interesting for our consideration of the vanishing corpse trope is in the way in which Crofts handles the hunt for the cask and its contents. While that setup, with the body in a barrel at the docks, sounds quite lurid, worthy of a penny dreadful or a Victorian thriller, the investigation in this book is actually conducted quite meticulously. Hercule Poirot himself would have been delighted by Inspector Burnley’s painstaking method and assiduous attention to detail. It is quite forensic, even though many of the forensics techniques we know by that name barely existed in 1912 when this book is set. This is not a rambunctious adventure story, but rather a careful and logical investigation of a crime.
Set against this, then, is the criminal’s attempt to evade capture by confusing the whole situation. Making the corpse vanish not once but twice makes it much harder for Inspector Burnley, with his desire to make logical deductions based on present evidence, to pin down what has really happened. Throwing doubt on the original discovery gains the malefactor crucial time to plan and execute their next move. In this variant of the trope, the vanishing is very intentional, done to muddy the waters long enough for a murderer to vanish, too.
Sometimes, the murderer doesn’t even need to plan for a vanishing corpse to achieve this baffling effect. In two of my favourite instances of this trope, the witness to the vanishing takes on the mantel of making it all seem doubtful and perplexing because the scenario of the crime happens to play to their pre-existing psychological issues. In Untimely Death by Cyril Hare, protagonist Francis Pettigrew comes across a dead body at a place called Bolter’s Tussock on Exmoor, in a horrifying repeat of an incident that had happened to him when on holiday as a child.
In both cases, the pony he was riding bolts at the shock of the discovery, but as an adult he leads others back to the spot to institute further inquiries. Of course, the body is gone, and because of the similarities to this terrifying childhood memory, Francis then spends many chapters at least partially convinced that the situation has been engineered by his own mind, rather than a third party. As he says: “After all, the Tussock was haunted for him, and in a very particular way. The conditions for a hallucination were ideal. He had been all day obsessed with the recollections of the past, of which this one, because so long suppressed, had become by far the most powerful.”
The vanishing corpse here has become a psychological as well as a practical plot device. Something similar happens in The Vanishing Corpse by Anthony Gilbert, when Miss Laura Verity, a 50-year-old spinster who has rented an extremely isolated rural cottage for the express purpose of taking her own life in solitude and peace, arrives there on a dark and snowy night and discovers the dead body of a girl already in residence. She passes a long and terrifying night locked in the cottage with the corpse, hearing noises every second and convinced that the murderer is about to return to eliminate her as the sole witness to his crimes.
By the time she goes for help the next day, she is in quite a state. Walking back to the cottage with the police, she feels like she is in a fairy tale, all landmarks unrecognisably covered in snow, nothing quite real. And of course, the body is gone — the cottage is deserted. The only trace Miss Verity has is the scrap of paper she pried out of the dead girl’s fist before going for help, thinking that would act as “proof” of her story, only to find it easily dismissed as something she could have fabricated herself. Given her original motivation in renting the cottage, the presence of death within it is all the more destabilising to her. The opening chapters of this book, with all their spooky, stormy atmosphere, are really quite chilling.
The police are immediately convinced that the vanishing corpse is nothing but the product of a spinster’s over-active imagination and depart in disgust. Miss Verity is defiant in the face of their dismissals, but as the rest of the story unfolds, she can’t quite shake her own creeping uncertainty about what she saw, and this kernel of doubt continues to undermine her as a witness in the eyes of the law. I think this is my favourite vanishing corpse novel of all the ones I have read for this episode — the balance of psychological and practical elements is perfect for my tastes, and I think the eventual twists and solution are very well done.
After the break: the many inconveniences of a corpse.
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There are certainly instances in crime fiction where the vanishing of a corpse is accidental. A witness just happens to come upon the scene when the job is not complete, in between a murder and the planned clean-up afterwards, so that when they return it seems as if the body has vanished of its own accord. But more often than not, the vanishing is intentional. As we have already discussed, this can be done to cast doubt upon the witness or impede an investigation. But it can also be done with the express intention of incriminating an innocent person.
The Corpse Steps Out by Craig Rice, a pseudonym of the American writer Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, is almost overwhelmed by the sheer number of wandering and vanishing corpses it contains. Rice’s work has some overlap with a more humorous, screwball style of fiction that was already very popular when this book came out in 1940. Although she does plot her books like whodunnits, her characters’ more morally dubious actions are sometimes dispensed with quickly as comic plot points in a way that would not work in the more rules-based Detection Club fiction of the same time. Phoebe Atwood Taylor is another American writer who cleverly married screwball, noir and detection in her novels, and her corpses are also prone to energetic movement after death.
Nevertheless, The Corpse Steps Out is an interesting example of how a body can be deliberately moved around for incriminating reasons. First discovered by radio star Nelle Brown, multiple characters view the body and search it for incriminating blackmail materials before leaving it in situ to be “discovered” by the authorities, only for there to be no discovery at all because the corpse then vanishes. Other deaths quickly follow, all of people who seem to be in Ms Brown’s way professionally, until the deliberate wandering of said corpse starts to feel like part of an elaborate setup. There are many more twists and turns to the plot than I can amply summarise here, but suffice to say this book might have the highest traffic of intentionally vanishing corpses I have yet encountered, and is to be valued as such.
Adders on the Heath by Gladys Mitchell is a little quieter, but no less devastating in its effect to use a vanishing corpse to incriminate someone. This 1963 novel begins with a young man called Richardson enjoying a few days camping solo and badger-watching in the New Forest while he waits for a friend to join him at a nearby hotel for their planned holiday. One evening, he returns as usual to his tent to find it already occupied by the dead body of one A.B. Colnbrook, a fellow amateur cross country runner with whom Richardson is known to have a rather acrimonious relationship.
Richardson soon recognises the danger he is in: after trying and failing to resuscitate his erstwhile rival in the dark tent, he exclaims: “Why the devil, Colnbrook, did you have to die on me?” He knows that the situation does not look good for him — what other natural explanations are there for him having Colnbrook’s body in his tent in the middle of a forest at night — but things get worse than that. When he manages to bring the police to the spot, the body is no longer that of Colnbrook, but somebody else that he doesn’t recognise. In attempting to explain this improbable switch, Richardson only manages to dig himself into a deeper hole. His problems compound when the first body is found in a different location out in the forest, and he finds himself squarely in the frame for at least one murder. Someone is doing this to him deliberately, but who can it be, and why? Mitchell’s regular detective Mrs Bradley is soon on the spot to uncover all.
Although the initial corpse that Richardson discovered, that of Colnbrook, has vanished, the fact that it has been substituted with another as well is something that crops up occasionally in this little canon. Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie and The Red House Mystery by AA Milne are all books where bodies are ultimately present at a crime scene, but not necessarily the body that is expected.
Of course, a corpse may be made to vanish not just to incriminate another, but to allow the original perpetrator time to get away with their crime. Agatha Christie does a famous version of this in her novel The 4.50 from Paddington, in which a friend of Miss Marple’s, Elspeth McGillicuddy, is travelling on a train when she sees a woman being strangled in another train on the parallel track. The woman is clearly dead, but no body is found in the train or along the line. Where did the corpse go?
Miss Marple, by now in Christie’s series much older and infirm, recruits a younger woman, Lucy Eylesbarrow, to track it down. When she does eventually run it to earth, it is quite clear that the murderer has planned everything very deliberately. It is no accident that the woman was strangled on that particular stretch of train line, nor that her body was whisked away to the place where Lucy found it. It was supposed to stay vanished for long enough for all trails to go cold, and for decomposition to take care of any possibility of identification. And one reason why this is one of Christie’s more chilling crimes, in my opinion, is that it so clearly would have worked, if it were not for the coincidence of Mrs McGillicuddy being on the right train to see the crime occurring. So many vanishing corpses in golden age detective fiction are hidden from view only temporarily, but this is one that almost disappeared for good.
Golden age detective fiction, throughout the interwar period, set itself in opposition to unexplainable or illogical events. As Ronald Knox’s “decalogue” puts it: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” Writers like John Dickson Carr liked to flirt with this commandment, setting up impossible-seeming crimes that looked as if they could only have been committed by ghosts or by magic, but then revealing a perfectly logical, rational solution in the end.
The vanishing corpse was an excellent tool for this — Carr’s books like The Case of the Blind Barber and The Burning Court both feature bodies that are not where they are initially supposed to be, in a way that seems to defy rational explanation. Indeed, the later even features an exhumation as part of an investigation. The deceased has been interred in an underground crypt made of granite, with entry only possible through a passage covered by a thousand-pound slab of stone that requires four men and several hours of digging to remove. And yet, when the tomb is opened, it is found to be empty — the body has gone, or else was never there. A master of horror writing would struggle to come up with a creepier scene than this.
Even as the genre’s writers tended to shield the reader from graphic descriptions of violence and its consequence, they still enjoyed flirting with that shiver down the spine that the intimate presence of death can provoke. Carr especially is a master of delivering genuine jump scares, all while staying within the puzzle-based framework of the classic murder mystery. As we cosy up to turn the pages of yet another vanishing corpse whodunnit, it is worth taking a moment to marvel at how talented writers still managed to deliver supernatural thrills in this most logic-bound and rational of genres.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written and narrated hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. If you’d like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.
It’s an especially good time to join, because we are currently in the middle of the Shedunnit Pledge Drive, the annual event where I ask the podcast’s community to help me fund it for another year, and we’re already half way to our goal. If you’d like to be part of that and get an excellent free audiobook of pre golden age detective stories read by me, join now at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive.
All the books we mentioned in this episode are listed at shedunnitshow.com/vanishingcorpses. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
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