“Life was simply not like a detective novel: motives were not clear, events had not a single cause, things did not wholly explain themselves,” Roy Fuller writes in The Second Curtain (1953), one of the three books in which he played an elegant series of changes on the conventions of the mystery novel.
In The Second Curtain, a second-rate writer, George Garner, divorced, living alone in London, and scrabbling along on the diminishing reputation of a decent first novel published a decade ago, is recruited into the role of amateur sleuth by the sister of a long-ago school chum with whom he’s kept up an intermittent correspondence. Widgery, the chum, head of a small factory in Lancashire that produces some sort of electrical components (Garner is never too clear about the details of the lives of the people he encounters), has disappeared. His sister thinks it may have something–a homosexual crush?–to do with a young man who came to work at the factory and then left suddenly just before Widgery’s own disappearance, and thinks the trails lead to London.
Within days, Widgery’s body is dragged from the Thames. Kershaw, a fellow manager from the factory also following up on the disappearance, is run down by a lorry in a London street. The police question Garner. He himself is at a loss to put the pieces together. He consoles himself in his ability to suppress these strange events into the routines in which he is more comfortable: “… whatever happens to oneself, however extraordinary or painful, becomes eventually commonplace and bearable.The empire of self constantly added to itself new wild tracts of territory which it was able to drain, plough, populate, and thus become once again an ordered, homogeneous entity.”
Yet Garner fails to weave the threads into the answers that become apparent to the reader. “I’m very much afraid you haven’t got the right story,” he says at one point, only to have Fuller write, “Garner’s mind worked furiously: what was the right story?” Ironically, many of his thoughts about the explanations behind Widgery’s death dwell on the question of how he should approach things as a writer–and it also becomes apparent to the reader that Garner lacks the imagination to be much of a writer:
How could one get, if one wanted to, all this into a novel? The power behind the luxury, the figures and men and machines behind the power? Perrott’s desk had been empty, even of a pen. Perhaps he never wrote: a file was merely opened and put before him, and he then nodded or shook his head. Somewhere in other rooms of the building ingenious men sat in front of books on company law, ledger sheets, reports on technical processes, with trade-union leaders, secretaries of trade associations, spoke on the telephone to members of parliament for industrial divisions, factories on bypasses and coalfields, stockbrokers, authors of economic classics, bankers–but for Perrott everything was rendered down to the naked bones of a question. Shall we do this? And the cigar made its indication.
This passage illustrates just the sort of meta-fictional tricks that Fuller plays throughout The Second Curtain. Fuller, who had a successful career as a London solicitor and was involved with substantial commercial matters, knows very well what goes on behind Perrott’s clean desk, while to Garner it is just something of a blur. And he manages to convey this to the reader in a few strokes while leaving Garner in his muddled reality.
In the end, Garner can only write to Widgery’s sister that, “The more I think about the whole affair, the more I feel that it all lies in the realm of accident and coincidence.” And he himself can only sense that “The alien machine into which he had accidentally dropped from his own harmless world had thrown him out again, broken, with scarcely any damage or interruption to its purposive wheels.” Yet Fuller also makes it clear that Widgery and Kershaw’s deaths are quite directly and deliberately linked to a ruthless and objective calculation of gain and loss made by the magnate, Perrot.
The Second Curtain was the second of three meta-mysteries Roy Fuller wrote. With My Little Eye (1948) puts a magistrate’s son in the role of the ad-hoc detective and plays a somewhat less elegant set of changes on what Fuller calls “the fantasy of conspiracy and crime.” Julian Symons included it on his 1957 list of the 100 best crime and mystery novels. Fantasy and Fugue (1956) is Fuller’s most cerebral mystery, taking place in the head of a man who wakes up one morning convinced that he has committed a murder. The three books were collected by Carcanet Press in 1988 in Crime Omnibus and deserve a place on the shelf alongside Graham Greene’s “entertainments” such as Our Man in Havana.