London, Covent Garden, Thursday 15th August 1929
The woman in the cage swung out over the audience, enthralling them with her bird-like song. Back and forth she swung; her exquisite face, framed by a headdress of feathers, was the visage of an untouchable goddess, while her shapely legs tempted every man and woman in the theatre below. On a nearby balcony, only two men seemed immune to the Canary’s charms: the gentleman detective Philo Vance, and his client, the father of a young man who had fallen victim to the showgirl’s seductive blackmail.
On the other side of the silver screen, through a haze of cigarette smoke, the whirr of the projector was not quite drowned out by the dramatic music accompanying the Canary on her swing and then, when Philo Vance – played by the debonair William Powell – uttered his very first words, the cinema audience gasped and burst into appreciative applause.
Clara Vale, a dark-haired woman of around thirty, had what some would call an air of aloofness (but others, more discerning, a quiet watchfulness), smiled to herself; she too was thrilled to attend her first ‘talkie’. To hear William Powell’s dulcet tones made him even more attractive. Clara wondered what the Canary – the talented Louise Brooks, whom she had previously only seen in silent films – would sound like. The first full talkie, Lights of New York, had been released the previous year, but it had taken time for picture houses to upgrade their facilities to show them – even here in London.
Now here she was, finally, surrounded by men in tuxedos and women in furs, hearing actors speak words to accompany their actions, and with a built-in soundtrack rather than a live piano. It was intoxicating. However, once Clara got over the euphoria of the experience, she settled down to enjoy the flick, and to engage her little grey cells, as Mrs Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot put it, to work out who killed the Canary.
Clara was on the edge of her seat when Vance announced that there were fingerprints on the inside of a closet door, in the room where the Canary was murdered, and that the New York police should ‘dust them’. But then she slumped further and further back as Vance failed to follow through on the scientific method. Yes, the fingerprints were eventually matched to a witness with a criminal record, but he, it turned out, wasn’t the murderer. The murderer, one of four possible suspects who had reason to throttle the scheming Canary, could easily have been identified much earlier if fingerprints were taken of everyone. Why on earth hadn’t Vance done that? And why, Clara asked herself, did Vance not follow through on the voice on the gramophone recording that was apparently a man pretending to be a woman? Scientifically, it could have been proven if the recording was slowed down. Even the greenest of science undergraduates knew that the frequency of a man’s voice differed from that of a woman (85–155 Hz, compared to 165–255 Hz) and that this could be evidenced graphically.
Clara was still muttering to herself as the final credits came up. She applauded with the rest of the audience – genuinely appreciating the technological wizardry that had brought images and sound together – but she was disappointed with the plotting. As she gathered her cloche hat, gloves and coat from the cloakroom, she wondered if one of the fictional lady detectives she knew would have done a better job. Not that there were many … Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver? Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly? Or Mrs Christie’s Miss Marple, from those magazine stories, who – it was rumoured – was about to make her novel debut …
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Clara smiled to herself as she waited for a taxi – the only woman there, it seemed, unaccompanied by a man – and dared to believe she would have done a better job. It was simply logic, wasn’t it?