“… I prefer to explain all differently”: A Specious Rationalization of the Criminal Impulse to Possess Forbidden Fruit in Eden Phillpotts’ “The Iron Pineapple”

Trying to live up to its title, A Century of Detective Stories is a brick of pulp, and it is not easy to handle when you are reclining in a lounge chair hoping to catch those rare vernal rays that are the oft unfulfilled promise of summer on the typically temperamental and frequently bleak west coast of Britain.  

I had not long read, in the same volume, the rather creaky adventure yarn “The Aztec Skull” by Gavin Holt (the pseudonym of the Australian-born writer Charles Rodda).  While it features Holt’s serial detective Professor Bastion, “The Aztec Skull” is not much of a detective story, even though the titular issue of skulduggery—a drawing of which is somewhat pointlessly reproduced in the text—provides a cranio-graphic clew that is key to the discovery of a hidden loot.  All the same, Holt’s hollow and dust-gathering “Skull,” more sooty veneer than souvenir, does not exactly constitute a Herculean workout for anyone’s little grey cells.

I was none too hopeful, then, turning to “The Iron Pineapple,” the next “detective” story in the book, especially given that its prolific and long-lived author, Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960)—mostly remembered now, if at all, for his comedy The Farmer’s Wife (1916; but based on a scenario written even earlier), a 1928 silent screen adaptation of which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock—is not generally considered among the authors of whodunits and crime puzzles that seem to us now to define the so-called “golden age” of British mystery fiction, well outside of which restrictive perimeter “The Iron Pineapple” first hit the ground, being that, although anthologized in the 1920s and ‘30s, its earliest publication dates from 1910. Besides, Phillpotts penned many of his thrillers under the pseudonym of Harrington Hext.

As detective fiction aficionado Mike Grost points out, Phillpotts is a “writer difficult to classify today.”  And while he commends “The Iron Pineapple,” Grost insists that it is “not a mystery story.”  That, to be sure, is a matter not of opinion but of definition.  After all, not every tale of mystery is also a detective story, and “The Iron Pineapple,” while lacking a detective, is as much a mystery as the medieval “mystery plays” that, as an undergraduate expecting thrills and suspense, momentarily perplexed me before I was being disabused of my assumptions as to the nature of the “mystery” in question.

“The Iron Pineapple”—which has been misclassified as a “ghost story” and was included in Cornish Tales of Terror, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes—gripped me, at least initially, as an account of obsessive-compulsive behavior.  As it turns out, I was too quick to label and explain the condition that threatens not only the narrator’s orderly and unremarkable existence but also the life of a stranger for whom he develops an unfathomable hatred.

This is how, early in the story, the narrator describes his affliction:

I had a way to take some particular matter into my mind, as the hedge-sparrow takes the cuckoo’s egg into her nest, and then, when the thing hatched out, all else had to go down before it, and for a season I was a man of one idea, and only one.  Had those ideas been important; had I conceived brilliant plans for [his hometown of] Bude, or even for myself, none could have quarrelled with this power of concentration, or suspected that any infirmity of mind lurked behind it, but, as my wife too faithfully pointed out, I was prone to expend my rich stores of nervous energy upon the most trifling and insignificant matters.

That last sentence, in particular, drew me in, even though the peculiar phrase “too faithfully” did not at first strike me as significant.  I often feel compelled—but at the same time unable—to defend whatever I permit my mind to expend a modicum of effort on, including the “trifle” of this convoluted entry in my journal.  To misquote Twelfth Night: Some are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, … and some thrust it away in pursuit of small matters.

Beyond desperate rationalization, is there a way of making sense of such seemingly self-destructive abandonment and brazen disregard for presumed “greatness”? Might it all be part of that mighty maze, that, according to Alexander Pope, is “not without a plan”? If so, whose plan? Those last two questions are at the heart of the Phillpotts’ Pineapple puzzle, the mystery of which is not who or how the crime was committed—but why.

That there will be murder is not clear from the outset, neither to the narrator nor to the reader.  The first crime committed—the theft of a fence post ornament—is comparatively harmless; but it is so ludicrous and seemingly gratuitous as to be perceived as a disturbing threat to the narrator’s mental well-being.

According to the narrator, “[n]aked roads” marked the scene of that initial crime; they

ran through fields, presently to be built upon […].  I was able, therefore, to haunt the iron pineapple, to stroke it, gloat over it, and gratify in some sort my abnormal desire toward it without exciting attention.  Indeed, the cunning of actual lunacy marked each new downfall, and, with the exception of [my wife] Mabel, no human creature as yet had suspected my infirmity.

What is it that turns a common symbol of hospitality into a forbidden fruit, the object of an “all-absorbing passion” against the “fascination of which the narrator fights “without avail”?

The desire for possession made this experience especially difficult, because as a rule the attractive object always drew me to be with it, whereas, in this case, there came a frantic longing to have the pineapple with me.  I must have thought of the rubbish as a sentient being; I must have exaggerated it into a creature that could feel and sorrow and understand.

The specificity of the fixation is expounded on at length and with a bathos that turns the ludicrous into lunacy, the ridiculous into the sublime:

[T]here burst upon me a frantic lust for one of these same abortions in iron! My soul poured out upon a metal pineapple; and no general hunger or distributed desire for the vile things took hold upon me, but I found my life’s energy focussed and concentrated upon the third pineapple on the north side of the railing.  For the rest I entertained no attachment; I even disliked them; but the third on the northern side exercised an absolute mastery.

Eventually, obsession leads to murder, and the seemingly trivial object of desire is turned into a deadly weapon.  Speculating upon the motive for murder in Busman’s Holiday (1937), Lord Peter Whimsey invokes the spirit of “The Iron Pineapple,” which Sayers accommodated as well in one of her anthologies of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror:

The vicar may have had a morbid fancy for something else—a passion à la Plato for an aspidistra, or a strange, covetous longing for a cactus.  He’s a great gardener, you know, and these vegetable and mineral loves can be very sinister indeed.  Remember the man in the Eden Philpotts [sic] story who set his heart on an iron pineapple and brained a fellow with it?

Crime puzzle writers like Agatha Christie—who expressed her “gratitude” to Phillpotts in her autobiography and credits him for having encouraged her to embark on a literary career—contrive to obscure the motive for murder so as to make it difficult for the reader to associate any number of possible suspects with the crime and its victim.  Christie’s The ABC Murders (1936) is especially ingenious in that respect, even though it also draws attention to the flaws inherent in detective fiction: must murderers have motives? Might they be driven to crime without being able to account for the drive?

In “The Iron Pineapple,” the murderer turns out to be an instrument of providence, an unwitting avenger whose crime is ultimately justified as fruitful and thus unpunished.  How was Phillpotts’ non-detective story motivated? Reading up on his private life, I began to wonder whether he was trying to justify his own illicit impulses.

Christie describes Phillpotts as

an odd-looking man, with a face more like a faun’s than an ordinary human being’s: an interesting face, with its long eyes turned up at the corners. He suffered terribly from gout, and often when we went to see him was sitting with his leg bound up with masses of bandages on a stool.  He hated social functions and hardly ever went out; in fact he disliked seeing people.  His wife, on the other hand, was extremely sociable—a handsome and charming woman, who had many friends.

Just why Phillpotts preferred to stay home while his wife sought the company of friends and neighbors remained a secret for decades.  At the time “The Iron Pineapple” was published, Phillpotts’ daughter Adelaide was a teenager.  It was not until 1976, long after her father’s death, that she revealed to have been the object of her controlling father’s obsessive love, trapped in a secret incestuous relationship from which she extricated herself only at the age of 55, through matrimony, at which point her jealous father severed their ties.

Written about the time when Adelaide became the object of Phillpotts’ desire, “The Iron Pineapple” seems to be an attempt to brush aside any question of culpability as an act preordained by a higher power.  “There may be scientific people who could explain what happened to me” the narrator begins his story.

[T]here may be names for the state, and it is possible that others have suffered similarly, and done equally amazing things, but in my humble position of life one has no time for works on morbid psychology or its therapeutics, and I prefer to explain all differently and directly.  I choose rather to assert that it pleased Providence to select me on a unique occasion for its own profound purposes.

Rejecting the criminalization and pathologizing of his desire, Phillpotts appears to have created a narrative that provides an apology for his longings, for his inability to help himself as he helped himself to an illicit fruit so readily available to him.

What motivates the narrator’s telling of his story is not an unburdening of a guilty conscience.  Writing, as he states in the opening paragraph of the story, “will comfort me,” as does the construction of a spurious explanation founded on the existence of a higher power and couched in terms of the mysterious.

“The Iron Pineapple” is a type of mystery that, elsewhere, I referred to as the “supernatural absolvent.” By that I meant to denote a mystery that, being miraculous, does not commit to an adherence to the conventions of detective fiction and the rules and mores that such tales of crime encode.  The “supernatural absolvent” can thus be employed—or weaponized—to sanction criminal and immoral conduct as being ordained and orchestrated by a higher power operating from a mythical beyond that is itself the construct and cornerstone of patriarchy.