About Candles and Hidden Messages

WHILE he was an expert with impossible crime story plots, Joseph Commings sometimes wandered away from them to produce fascinating excursions into the outré, one of which would be . . .

(1) "The Cardinal's Candles."

By Joseph Commings (1913-92; Wikipedia HERE and the ISFDb HERE).

First appearance: Suspense (U.K.), November 1959.

Reprinted in Suspense (Australia), November 1959.

Short short story (5 pages).

Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE; go to text page 81).

   ". . . if he really suspects he's being poisoned, I can free him of it."

DO you trust your doctor—with your life? The Cardinal of France is about to do just that—"Although," he says, "in another respect you are said to be a dangerous man." Ah, but 

just how dangerous?

Main characters:

~ Alessandro Cagliostro ("Who gave you these candles, Your Eminence?"), the captain of the French Life Guards ("His Eminence trusts you"), and "the beautiful Marchioness d'Auz" ("what was wrong with the Cardinal?").

Typo: "Your Emneince".

References and resources:

- "Monseigneur le Cardinal!":

  If we go with Cagliostro's lifespan, then this cardinal would have to be . . .

  "Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne (1727–1794), a French clergyman, bishop, cardinal, politician and finance minister of King Louis XVI." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "a turnspit dog":

  Now, sad to say, no more, a victim of domestic technology:

  "The turnspit dog is an extinct short-legged, long-bodied dog bred to run on a wheel, called a turnspit or dog wheel, to turn meat. It is mentioned in Of English Dogs in 1576 under the name 'Turnespete.' William Bingley's Memoirs of British Quadrupeds (1809) also talks of a dog employed to help chefs and cooks. It is also known as the Kitchen Dog, the Cooking Dog, the Wheeling Dog, the Underdog and the Vernepator." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- Depending on who you ask, Alessandro Cagliostro (1743-95) was either one of history's greatest sorcerers or a notorious con artist:

  "Cagliostro was an Italian adventurer and self-styled magician. He became a glamorous figure associated with the royal courts of Europe where he pursued various occult arts, including psychic healing, alchemy, and scrying. His reputation lingered for many decades after his death but continued to deteriorate, as he came to be regarded as a charlatan and impostor, this view fortified by the savage attack of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in 1833, who pronounced him the 'Quack of Quacks.' Later works—such as that of W. R. H. Trowbridge (1866–1938) in his Cagliostro: The Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic (1910)—attempted a rehabilitation."

  . . . "There are numerous references to Cagliostro in the detective novel He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr (a.k.a. Carter Dickson), one of his Dr. Gideon Fell mysteries, published by Hamish Hamilton (U.K.) & Harper (U.S.A.) in 1946. In this book, a French professor, Georges Antoine Rigaud, has written a history: Life of Cagliostro. An attempted murder committed in He Who Whispers is similar in technique to part of an initiation ceremony undergone by Cagliostro into the lodge of a secret society. Cagliostro Street appears as a location in Carr's 1935 novel The Hollow Man (published in the U.S. as The Three Coffins)." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- A magician calling himself "Cagliostro" is murdered in a locked room in front of six useless witnesses in "Death Casts a Spell," an episode of the Murder: She Wrote TV series. (IMDb HERE). For background in how prestidigitation and detective fiction interact, also see Steve Steinbock's Criminal Brief article "Magic and Mystery" (HERE).

- Holmes encountered a somewhat similar situation (but with a different causation) in "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" (Wikisource HERE; IMDb HERE).

- If you like your crime fiction with supernatural elements, see A. C. Spahn's mini-dozen (HERE).

COMMINGS now returns to the more familiar territory inhabited by B.U.B. with . . .

(2) "The Moving Finger."

By Joseph Commings (1913-92).

First appearance: Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, April 1968.

Short short short story (4 pages).

Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE; go to text page 111).

   "'I've noticed,' he said, 'that there's something that you can see—yet you can't see'."

HIDING something in plain sight normally works if that something blends in with its surround-ings. Military snipers, for example, not only thrive but also live or die by it. In this story, Sena-tor Banner could justifiably quote Holmes's admonition to Watson: "You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear."

Main characters:

~ U.S. Senator Brooks U. Banner ("Yet you still feel that there's writing left there some-where?"), Sheik Ali Sa'ab ("I'm positive. But where?"), and Bernice ("tall, blonde, and beautiful").

Reference and resources:

- "The Moving Finger":

  Like many other authors (Agatha among them), Commings just can't resist "borrowing" from the Rubaiyat:

  "The quatrain by Omar Khayyam known as 'The Moving Finger,' in the form of its translation by the English poet Edward Fitzgerald is one of the most popular quatrains in the Anglosphere. It reads:

    The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,

    Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

    Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

    Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

  "The title of the novel The Moving Finger written by Agatha Christie and published in 1942 was inspired by this quatrain of the translation of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- ONTOS's previous encounters with Joseph Commings: "Gems Glow with Blood" (HERE), "The Black Friar Murders" (HERE), and "Ghost in the Gallery" (HERE).

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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