Mysteries Featuring Anonymous Notes As Catalysts

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There’s nothing quite like an anonymous note for stirring up trouble. The hapless victim is usually going about their business, pleasantly unaware they’re being watched and judged, until the day something nasty arrives in the post. (Unsigned missives may also be pinned to a pillow, shoved beneath a door, or tucked under a plate of crumpets on the tea tray. According to one scurrilous story, Marie Antoinette found a particularly foul pamphlet tacked on her bathroom door. It must have been hard to take a relaxing bubble bath after that.)

However it materializes, the note marks a change. Suddenly, the victim’s peace of mind is shattered and paranoia sets in. Everyone becomes a suspect; every conversation is examined for clues to the sender’s identity and motive. Nerves are shot, sleep disturbed. Victims begin to jump at shadows and consider even their most devoted friends through new and suspicious eyes.

Of course, much depends upon the sender’s ultimate intention. Unlike blackmail notes, the typical poison pen letter doesn’t demand money or favors to purchase peace. It exists—at least at first—solely to torment. It is the refuge of an unhealthy mind that longs to do something more visceral than poking pins into a poppet. Unwilling to accept the burden of garden-variety hatred or resentment, the sender indulges in a special kind of malice, exercising their spite by taking it out for a walk. At the start, composing the messages can act as a sort of safety valve, releasing the pressure of too much strong emotion. But when that fails, matters invariably escalate to vandalism and veiled threats. And when that happens, it isn’t long before someone too fragile for these assaults on their mental health contemplates ending it all as the only means of escape. The villain in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night starts modestly, tormenting the students and staff at Oxford’s Shrewsbury College with damning notes before ratcheting up the tension to almost supernatural heights. It’s no accident the miscreant is dubbed “the college poltergeist” before it’s revealed to be all too human.

An anonymous note can also serve as a direct threat as in the Sherlock Holmes story “Five Orange Pips”, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Although a handful of orange seeds seem unlikely to spark dread, an envelope bearing only those small pips and the initials “K.K.K.” are sent to several men in the Openshaw family just before their deaths. By the time the third Openshaw receives his botanical warning, he realizes he is doomed and looks to Holmes to save him from certain destruction. It is a task Holmes—unusually—fails, making it one of the more interesting stories in the canon. The pips and their brief cover notes are intended as a promise of inescapable vengeance, and they are completely successful. In fact they are so successful, that Holmes uses the same tactic as a means of harassing the villainous brain behind the plot, turning the tables on the shadowy killer who never actually makes an appearance.

Poison pen letters have still other uses. Upon occasion, they can be a diversion, throwing peaceful villages into chaos to shroud a nefarious plot. This is how events kick off in Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger. Recuperating from the novelty of a plane crash, Londoner Jerry Burton moves to Lymstock with his sister, Joanna, only to find themselves the latest recipients of a series of vicious anonymous notes that have cast a sinister shadow over the village. After one letter apparently drives a local woman to take her own life, spinster sleuth Miss Marple pootles in to investigate. With her considerable experience and insights into human nature, she is the perfect detective to unravel the tangle, and she understands instinctively that there is something not quite right about the snippets of cruel gossip related in the notes. She soon uncovers the fact that the letters were a ruse meant to sow confusion and lend credibility to a murder that had successfully masqueraded as a suicide—a homicidal conjuring trick that very nearly worked.

An anonymous note also features in my favorite Holmes adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Upon arriving in England to take possession of his allegedly cursed inheritance, Sir Henry Baskerville receives an unsigned letter pieced together from words clipped out of the newspaper and glued into a hasty warning to stay away from the moor where his estate is located. Intended as an honest discouragement to keep the young baronet from harm, the letter backfires from the start. Sir Henry takes it as a joke, and for Holmes the lure of an anonymous note is as seductive as catnip to a bored tom. If anything, the letter makes it likelier that Sir Henry will travel to Baskerville Hall where his murder is actively being plotted. The hapless sender has failed entirely in the attempt to save him.

Of course, in an age of text messages and emails, the notion of someone putting pen to paper and going to the trouble of finding a stamp or snipping words from a newspaper seems positively quaint. But there is something altogether more insidious about destroying a person’s peace of mind as a prelude to destruction. It’s one thing to kill, quite another to play with one’s prey.

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