Of particular interest among the items in the “Frederick W. Rolfe, Baron Corvo Collection” at Georgetown University are a pile of letters in which Corvo fanatic Donald Weeks describes his adventures in the U.K., engaging in research for the biography Corvo (1971) and hunting for ephemera related to the Baron. While skimming the letters, I happened upon a fascinating claim by Weeks in a letter to “Stan & Joan” dated October 25, 1970: ‘An inventor, Rolfe may have “invented” the disappearing murder weapon in the form of the icicle (Toto story, 1898-9).’
Although I can’t recall ever reading a story using a melting murder weapon, I’m familiar with the plot device, having first encountered it many years ago in the Colombo episode “The Most Crucial Game." I was astonished at the prospect that the device may have originated with Corvo, and so I decided to go on a hunt to prove it.
I found an early lead in an appendix entry in Weeks’ aforementioned biography. Weeks mentions the Baron’s use of the device in the Toto story “About Our Lady of Dreams” published in the collection, In His Own Image (1901). Julian Symons notes in the same entry that the earliest use of the plot device that he knew of was published 10-years later in Anna Katherine Green’s locked-room mystery Initials Only (1911). Indeed, Green’s novel is generally credited with utilizing the first instance of the icicle weapon, specifically in the form of an exceedingly impractical bullet.
By contrast, Corvo’s icicle was the cause of the mysterious death of the butcher-boy Aristide via stabbing under a secluded cliff summit. In the story, Aristide’s friend Diodato, charged with murder, was eventually exonerated thanks to an angelic dream vision visited on Frat’ Innocente-of-the-Nine-Quires. It’s unknown if Ms. Green had read the Toto story before writing her novel and thus impossible to determine if she found any inspiration there. Therefore, I determined that another angle of attack in my quest was needed to determine if there were any earlier icicle uses than Corvo’s.
I’d be a liar if I said that the prospect of finding an earlier example in the infinity of literature prior to 1901 didn’t intimidate me. However, there was one potential investigative trail immediately available. As I mentioned earlier, Julian Symons mentioned Green’s novel in the Corvo endnote, but he closed with an interesting aside: ‘The actual use of an icicle has been attributed to the Medici’.
This seemed like a promising path for progress as the Medici factored prominently in Corvo’s book Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901). Alas, I couldn’t find a single mention of icicles there at all, and even tracing a significant portion of the reference material listed in the first edition proved fruitless. That said, there are dozens of references that I was unable to gain access to, so there’s a possibility that the Medici icicle simply awaits future discovery. Despite this possibility, the path forward appeared daunting indeed.
However, in my explorations I came across a story of the son of a parish clerk of Brampton in Devon who died from a wound inflicted by an icicle that fell from the local tower in 1776. The epitaph to the child reads:
Bless my i.i.i.i.i.i.
Here he lies
In a sad pickle
Kill’d by icicle
Did Corvo know of this epitaph? Was this the inspiration for his Toto story? These are unanswerable questions of course, and so I found myself back at the beginning. However, during my work as a programming language designer I’ve found value in a powerful technique for problem solving – reframing the question. I determined that it was too much to try and trace the vague idea of “mysterious death by icicle” and instead convinced myself that it would suffice to place the Baron’s use in a historical context instead.
Reframing the problem led me to John Dickson Carr’s famous locked-room mystery novel The Hollow Man (1935). Carr wrote many locked room mysteries in his time, but The Hollow Man is arguably the preeminent example of its kind. The novel itself contains a metanarrative element in which the investigator Dr. Gideon Fell holds a “locked room lecture” enumerating the classes and their instantiations of locked-room murders. In the lecture, Fell outlines two main branches of locked-room murder: one, no murder was in the room; two, murder was in the room.
Like much of the historical analysis around locked-room mysteries, I’ll play fast and loose with the term “room” and liken it to the solitude of an icy summit. The primary type of “no murder” described by Fell are ‘a series of coincidences ending in an accident which looks like a murder.’ Interestingly, Fell outlines particular literary instances of death involving icicles, but they all involved either suicide or murder. Therefore, I think that Corvo’s Toto plot fits nicely into Fell’s accidental death category and occupies a unique niche within it.
I was happy to claim a small victory, but I’m not one for half-measures. Therefore, I decided to read the rest of the “locked room lecture” to see if I could gain more insight into avenues for further exploration. Imagine my surprise when I soon came across an aside on icicles by Fell: ‘To continue with regard to the icicle; its actual use has been attributed to the Medici.’
It was at that moment that the boulder of my free time again slipped from my grasp and rolled back down the proverbial hill. It dawned on me that perhaps trying to trace the lineage of literary firsts was a futile effort and I now consider myself fortunate that I managed to stumble on a fixpoint. Truly, doing so allowed me to take a step back and accept the fact that although I’d like to think that there are deep and finite connections to find, I’m now of the mind that perhaps ideas are hanging in the aether, waiting to embed themselves into the skulls of unsuspecting authors passing underneath.
(Fogus)
