Monday, May 30, 2022

The Room With the Tassels by Carolyn Wells (1918)

 


About the author: Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was married to Hadwin Houghton, the heir of the Houghton-Mifflin publishing empire. Like Mary Roberts Rinehart, being in a publishing family created an easy pipeline for getting her works into print. She wrote a total of more than 170 books. See this Wikipedia article.

Major characters:

  • Rudolph Braye
  • Eve Carnforth
  • Professor Hardwick
  • Milly Landon
  • Wynne Landon, her husband
  • Gifford Bruce
  • Vernie Reid, Gifford's 16-year old niece
  • Norma Cameron, a sensitive
  • John Tracy, a minister
  • Elijah Stebbins, owner of Black Aspens
  • Hester, housekeeper
  • Jed Thorpe, manservant
  • Dan Peterson, an ineffective detective
  • Pennington Wise
  • Zizi, Pennington's 15-year old muse

Locale: Vermont

Synopsis: A group of New York City friends (first seven in above list) have a conversation about whether ghosts are real. They decide to find a supposedly-haunted house and see for themselves. They locate a large old mansion in Vermont called Black Aspens - locally referred to as the Old Montgomery mansion. They arrange to rent the house for several weeks, and invite Norma Cameron, a 'sensitive' who can supposedly sense spirits, and a minister John Tracy.

The owner, Elijah Stebbins, shows them a room with ornate draperies with tassels, in which a long-ago murder occurred. The old owner, Montgomery himself, was poisoned by his wife with prussic acid. The only "ha'nt" still occurring is that the candlestick she carried seems to change locations in the house all by itself.

The friends try sleeping in different rooms in different combinations. Nothing significant occurs except the candlestick changes rooms, until young Vernie Reid sleeps in the Tassel room, and is visited by a spectre. The spectre holds two cups and holds up four fingers. Vernie interprets this to mean two will die at 4:00.

Everyone is alert at 4:00 AM but nothing happens. When they gather for afternoon tea at 4:00 PM, Gifford Bruce and Vernie Read suddenly collapse - dead. The bodies are moved to bedrooms and the doctor called. Upon arrival, he finds Bruce's body, but the body of Vernie has disappeared.

Review: (Some spoilers ahead): Unlike some fiction of the time (Mary Roberts Rinehart comes to mind), spiritualism is not treated as a real thing here. Wells gives the feeling that you know and she knows it is all fakery and the characters know it, and they are just fooling around for the fun of it. 

I figured out aspect of the mystery right away - how the secret entrance to the house worked. It was called out in detail twice which led me to suspect it immediately.

Wells fooled me in another way, though. As soon as the body of Vernie disappeared I figured she was not really dead, and was part of the plot. I was wrong. 

One-dimensional detective Dan Peterson didn't add anything to the story, and just serves as a foil. Wells' usual formula is to have her star detective - Wise or Fleming Stone - show up at the last possible moment to amaze the befuddled one. Zizi is another matter. She is always delightful as she flits about and sees things no one else notices. And she is only fifteen!

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