The Suburbs of Hell (21 page)

The title of the novel and its epigraphs come from plays by John Webster. Stow, like Webster, was ‘much possessed by death’, and this wasn’t the first time he had turned to the playwright for an epigraph. Like the reference to the Nedlands Monster, the quotations from Webster are ominous, and prepare the reader familiar with the Jacobean stage for a proliferation of corpses.

The Duchess of Malfi
provides Stow’s title: ‘Security some men call the suburbs of hell, / Only a dead wall between.’ Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the Perth killings was that most of them took place in the victims’ homes in quiet, well-to-do suburbs. People who had answered a knock at the door after dark were shot at close range; others were murdered in their beds. The Tornwich Monster, too, uses this modus operandi, one that guarantees psychosocial panic. ‘Safe as houses’, we say; but the security of houses is deceptive. Ena makes the point: ‘When you think of your house, normally, you think of doors and windows that lock and walls that are solid. But suddenly you find yourself thinking about windowpanes that break and bolts that don’t hold and smugglers’ tunnels into the cellar.’

All this ratchets up suspense, in keeping with the novel’s whodunnit mode. But Webster borrowed his line from Thomas Adams, a London clergyman who in 1610 preached a sermon that warned, ‘Securitie is the very suburbs of Hell.’ Adams’ message is direct and uncompromising: wealth paves the way to damnation and death is always close at hand. It’s not surprising that this sentiment resonated with Stow, a communing Anglican with a strong interest in Taoism.
The Suburbs of Hell
opens with Death quoting the Bible: ‘Behold, I come as a thief’ and—a verse I found terrifying as a child—‘Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.’ These warnings have a worldly application in the whodunnit, but their metaphysical significance is more chilling and more profound.

Allegory, no matter what it points to, has a tendency to disturb. A refracted mode, it treats the world as a sign, always gesturing beyond the tangible. While realism deals in solid projections, allegory is hollowed out, an eyeless socket. Walter Benjamin likened it to a ruin, and allegory can feel as desolate as glassless windows and roofless walls. The events narrated in
The Suburbs of Hell
are only one source of the novel’s wintry bleakness; its cold is formal and ingrained, a zero at the bone.

The novel’s web of literary allusion is apparent in its liberal use of quotation. There’s nothing necessarily sinister about that. But, each time I re-read
The Suburbs of Hell,
I find the presence of those quotations creepier: they eat into the body of the text like worms. If that’s fanciful, it also testifies to the pervasive sense of menace generated by Stow’s poetics of dread.

Stow drew attention to the novel’s intertextuality by describing it as a reworking of ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’. Chaucer’s Pardoner, an itinerant clergyman and audacious con artist, models his tale on a mediæval sermon. It was customary to enliven sermons with moral anecdotes, and the Pardoner illustrates his message that greed is the root of all evil with a story about the falling out of three ‘rioters’ that has fatal consequences for all three. This parable can be traced back to the
Vedabbha Jataka
, a collection of ancient Buddhist tales. Variants of the story exist in many cultures; all of them concern characters who kill each other in their lust for material gain, leaving death in sole possession of the scene.

Stow’s revisioning of this classic tale is plain in the latter part of the novel, which revolves around the local drug pushers, Dave Sutton and Frank De Vere. When Harry discovers their dealing, Frank wants him out of the way. As Frank’s paranoia flares, he persuades himself that Harry is the killer, a view he communicates to Dave. Whether or not Dave acts on this theory is left unresolved, but Frank later comes to believe that the killer is actually Dave. This proves to be the undoing of both men.

William Grono has said that Stow was distressed by the atmosphere of suspicion in Perth in the months leading up to Eric Edgar Cooke’s arrest, and
The Suburbs of Hell
is, among other things, a study in the corrosive effect of rumour. By the end of the novel, the murderer’s victims are outnumbered by those whom suspicion has killed. (Possibly not outnumbered: the score might be a draw, depending on whether one of the deaths is accidental or not.) But whatever the cause of individual deaths, Death itself carries the day.

The metaphoric import of Stow’s first epigraph, taken from
The White Devil
, now becomes clear. The Tornwich killings, too, are mere ‘flea-bitings’ in the comprehensive triumph of Death.

While the whodunnit flourished in the interwar period, Stow composed his novel in the nuclear age, and at a time when the nature and spread of HIV was just starting to emerge in the public consciousness. Whodunnits typically offer the reassuring fiction that there is an end to killing when the murderer is caught, but in Stow’s novel the killing goes on.
The Suburbs of Hell
concludes with newspaper headlines that announce untimely deaths from around the world. The narrator of
The Waste Land
famously shored fragments against his ruin; the collapse into fragments of Stow’s narrative foreshadows only all-encompassing destruction. The last page of the novel features a Tarot card that represents Death—the sole image reproduced in the book.

Under that image Stow places a couplet from
Fasciculus Morum
, a mediæval preacher’s handbook, where it concludes a catalogue of the physical symptoms of death: ‘All too late, all too late, / when the bier is at the gate.’ The doleful acknowledgment that our spiritual house is never in sufficient order echoes Adams’ sermon and emphasises the moral underpinning of the novel.

Where does that leave the murder mystery? There are readers who decide that the Tornwich Monster is Death. If that solution feels inherently unsatisfying, it’s because it belongs to the metaphysical order of the novel rather than to the whodunnit; it’s the coexistence, not the blending, of those orders that constitutes the genius of
The Suburbs of Hell
.

Other readers buy the proposal, put forward by a child called Killer, that the murderer is Dave. But ‘country boy’ Dave’s bewilderment when the murder weapon is discovered seems genuine, as does his instant if fleeting assumption that Frank is the Monster. Besides, Stow is mounting an ethical argument about the destructiveness of ‘lethal tongues’ and ‘condemning eyes’, and his case is lost if Killer is right. Furthermore, the coroner finds that Frank’s death wasn’t due to poison, but to the inhalation of his vomit. If Stow goes to the trouble of providing this information, it’s surely to demonstrate that Killer’s theory was only a deadly guess.

As a whodunnit addict, I can’t resist coming up with a theory of my own. I think the killer is Killer: I like the narrative cheek of hiding ‘whodunnit’ in plain view. Here is a child who roams the town after dark, a knowing child who propagates lethal gossip, a child who,
qua
child, embodies innocence and thereby fulfils the time-honoured requirement of the whodunnit that the murderer must turn out to be the least likely suspect. It’s a solution I find nifty, plausible, satisfying and laughable. The thing is, there’s no solution to the identity of the Tornwich Monster: the heart of darkness contains only the absence that signifies oblivion. Stow’s intelligence is remorseless here. The novel’s central blank is an invitation to fill in the murderer’s name. It’s also a moral trap. The demonstration of our readiness to speculate and point is a form of authorial rebuke.

The Suburbs of Hell
constructs a narrative as starkly simple as an image from the Tarot and as endlessly open to interpretation. Like Killer’s name, it can be read literally or as a trope. But if Stow had written a conventional whodunnit that also functioned as a morality tale, his achievement would have been merely great.
The Suburbs of Hell
goes further. It subverts an impeccably contrived murder mystery, tantalising us with a question—
whodunnit?
—that it dismisses as trivial, a ‘flea-biting’. Auden described the whodunnit as ‘a dialectic between innocence and guilt’, where the revelation of the murderer secures our disassociation from guilt. By contrast, the only ‘securitie’ Stow offers is none at all: the grave reminder that death will come as surely as night. One of the names given to Cooke was the Night Caller.

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