The Devil Drives (1932)

I’ve had a few stuffy reads lately. Well regarded, well written, well mannered—well, well, well. And then, I read this pulpy, wild tale. It’s freeing. The novel teems with coincidences and improbable turns, yet they never feel arbitrary. Within Markham’s feverish style, these chance encounters take on the rhythm of a nightmare—events emerging and dissolving according to a private, psychological logic rather than realism. It’s as if the whole thing takes place inside some overgrown doll’s house—each room opening unexpectedly into another, the walls sliding aside to reveal new faces and new dangers, but the remants of the past always waiting to achive some new importance to the plot.

Our story begins with a young warden (Peters) in New Jersey who, after turning down an offer from a prisoner awaiting execution, begins receiving mysterious letters from a young girl to a pirate named Dubrosky. There’s talk of a doll house and treasure. The letters eventually lead to a mysterious meeting with the owner of the letters, a man interested in the pirate’s buried treasure. It turns out that the executed prisoner had been on the very same mission.

If this sounds ridiculous, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Peters agrees to find the treasure. His mission leads him straight into the clutches of a vicious gangster named Raffy the Guk and a sinister blackmailer (and checkers enthusiast!) named Gray Mason.

Markham paints all this with a fever-dream vividness—rain-slick streets, half-lit rooms, faces glimpsed through misted glass. The book smells of damp cellars and cheap cigars; it has the texture of a nightmare you can almost believe.

The Devil Drives leads us to so many new and seemingly unimportant places that you invariably get the feeling that no one is at the wheel. Rest assured, the novel has a strategy. Arbitrarily introduced characters vanish and are then brought back with satisfying significance. The plot stretches thin at times, but by the time the irony of the ending becomes clear, the whole affair looks like a perfectly plotted Möbius strip of a novel. It’s a little mechanical, yes—but in the way a toy theater is mechanical: a stage where destiny clicks and clacks behind the curtains.

And there is an impossible crime (at about the 3/4 mark). When you encounter it, you might believe it’s nothing but a tacked-on affectation. In one sense, you’d be correct, but the groundwork for the principle has been laid earlier in the novel—well before death occurred. In fact, the solution for the drowned man in a locked room has been hinted at within this very review. So there!