Ballard’s ‘The Beach Murders’: a Solution to a 1960’s Mystery

I am an admirer of J.G. Ballard. I find that his prose is almost hypnotic in the way that it generates a convincing feeling of “realistic unreality”. What I mean by this is that the settings for many of his stories are deeply impossible, almost always dystopian but beautiful in their own way. From the point of view of a misanthrope who would happily live in a nearly empty Vermilion Sands, where cerise dusk lasts indefinitely, they are almost utopian. And yet these places, that exist only in Ballard’s powerful and tormented imagination, are always impeccably believable. This realistic unreality is what comes to my mind when I see the adjective ‘ballardian’. The formal definition of ‘ballardian’ emphasizes the conflict between humanity, technology and environmental calamity, that is the obsessive focus of many of his stories. All true, but I always tend to focus on the stark beauty of Ballard’s empty landscapes more than anything else.

What matters to me when reading Ballard is the journey, because when one reaches the destination another beautiful empty world always disappears. Ballard’s “The Beach Murders” is a different kind of journey, however. Not so much in the way that it is structured, as a series of paragraphs tossed at random as if they were the playing cards with which one of the characters passes the time. This random structure is used elsewhere, by Ballard himself as well as by others. What is different is that this is one of his few short stories that he may have written just for fun. There is no attempt at deep philosophical musings, no deeply conflicted characters, no dystopian geography. It is a perfectly believable spy thriller set during the apogee of the Cold War, in a very real place (Spain’s Mediterranean coast), with characters, places and fashions that those of us who are old enough to remember the 1960’s can immediately relate to.

The story can be read superficially, or it can be scoured repeatedly, searching for who murdered who and why. It is not a typical crime story, as there are no detectives searching for clues, other than the reader. Ballard states that more than one solution is possible, and that there are some questions in the story that have no answers. Below, then, is my incomplete solution to Ballard’s puzzle.

Dramatis personae (in alphabetical order)

Kovarski: a Russian agent who is part of an operation to take Quimby, the American cipher chief, to Russia. He is initially unaware that an exchange for a Russian princess is being planned. He wonders, when he finds out, what interest can the Russians possibly have in a Romanoff princess. As the reader, he is kept in the dark about this aspect of the operation.

Lydia: a young American woman. All we know for certain is that she is a limbo dancer, but is she only a tourist? Lydia and Kovarski become romantically involved and rent Sir Giles’ villa. Because Kovarski uses the villa to watch Quimby’s apartment, it may be that Kovarski is only using Lydia as a cover to rent the villa. But it is more likely that Lydia is an American agent who is monitoring Kovarski. Statler, the CIA agent, knows who she is. Or perhaps she is ultimately working with Quimby behind the CIA’s back? The heading of one of the segments in which she appears – Fata Morgana – is certainly meant by Ballard to suggest that she is not what she appears to be.

Manon: a Russian princess, heiress to the Romanoffs, although at one point she is also, confusingly, referred to as being Serbo-Croat. Is this a historical slip on Ballard’s part, a clue, or simply a passing reference to her exile birth in Yugoslavia? She is a hemophiliac, a detail that is perhaps given in order to give bona fides to her Romannoff ancestry, but does this detail have something to do with the blood-stained bra that Statler washes in the sea? The fact that she is not bitter about Ekaterinenburg may be meant to suggest that she may be a Russian plant, and that the Russians never intended to follow through with the exchange.

Quimby: an American cipher chief who has fled to the coast of Alicante. He might have either defected to the Russians or have been captured by them, but he most likely simply wishes to disappear in Spain and live the good life there. In order to accomplish this he has to fool and eliminate both the Russian and the American agents who are attempting to either take him to the USSR or return him to the US via an exchange for the Russian princess. He is staying in an apartment by the beach where he is sometimes joined by Raissa.

Raissa: an ambitious Russian agent. She appears to be Quimby’s handler, and is eager to make an impression on her superiors in order to gain promotion and privileges. She will almost certainly follow any order given to her, regardless of her personal feelings.

Sir Giles: an eccentric British expat. He owns a villa located 300 yards away from Quimby’s apartment. He rents out the villa, and lives either in some section of the villa or in an adjoining house. We know that Sir Giles visits the princess’ hotel room and finds her dead in the bathtub, but we don’t know what brought him there.

Statler: a CIA agent. He is in Spain to lure the Russian princess into some kind of trap and exchange her to the Russians for Quimby. He is probably unaware that the Russians do not intend to follow through with the exchange, and that they will attempt to kill him regardless of whether or not the exchange takes place.

The murders (in chronological order)

Raissa is killed by Quimby in Sir Giles’ villa. We know this because Quimby walks in on her while she is putting her pants on, and when she is later found dead by Kovarski she is not wearing her pants. Statler finds the body before Kovarski and discovers a secret message next to it. He then approaches Kovarski’s typewriter, that had been previously tampered-with by Lydia, and presumably types something in it. There is also a pony skin on which Raissa’s body lies, and on which Lydia has previously stood naked, when she catches Sir Giles peeping at her. It is not clear how and when Raissa and Quimby got to the villa. We do know that she has been trying, unsuccessfully, to lure Quimby to the villa, presumably to meet up with Kovarski and manhandle Quimby to the sub if necessary. We also know that at one point Quimby discovers the antenna of Raissa’s secret transmitter, presumably by looking at Sir Giles’s villa from his apartment, and that Raissa is about to operate the transmitter just before she is killed. It is possible that Quimby let himself be lured to the villa, with the purpose of killing Raissa.

Kovarski kills the Romanoff princess at her hotel room by bludgeoning her to death. Why? Perhaps to eliminate her as a possible witness of the Russians’ duplicity? Or so as not to be duty-bound to surrender Quimby to the Americans?

Lydia shoots Kovarski after he has rigged a Mercedes, possibly Statler’s car, with a bomb intended for Statler, and perhaps for Lydia as well. The car is parked along a beach road, at a point where the Russians are supposed to make contact with the submarine that will exfiltrate them. The location may have been discovered by Statler in a message written in tissue and hidden inside a capsule that he finds with Raissa’s body. He then types this information in Kovarski’s typewriter and Lydia retrieves it later from the new ribbon that she had installed in it.

Lydia starts the Mercedes after pushing Kovarski out off the car, and is killed by the explosion. We know that she flashes the headlights before that and that Statler sees the headlights from the beach, which suggests that the bloodied bra that Statler carries along the beach did not belong to Lydia. It could have been Raissa’s, but why would Statler take it with him?

Statler is killed by a Russian submariner. As he dies in the water he sees the burning wreck of the Mercedes and the Russian sailors dragging the corpses of two Russians towards the submarine, presumably Kovarski and Raissa, but it is not clear how Raissa’s body was carried to the beach, nor how Statler knows that the bodies are those of two Russians.

Open questions

Whose side is the Romanoff princess on?

What is Lydia’s game?

Who does the blood-stained bra belong to, and why does Ballard bring up this detail?

And the most important one: what is Sir Giles’ role in the story? He is almost certainly more than an innocent bystander, but what exactly, I cannot fathom. He and Quimby are the only ones to leave the story alive, which to me suggests that they are conspirators in Quimby’s disappearing act.