The Long Halloween: Who is Holiday?

[Rikdad]

This is a look back at an old classic story. Many of the points I make have been made elsewhere, but I think I make a few significant points that I haven't seen anywhere else. And as long as readers keep reading this story and discussing it, I think it's worth consolidating analysis of the mystery where interested readers can check their solution versus someone else's.

http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2015/04/r...en-who-is.html

Does anyone disagree with my conclusion?

[JBatmanFan05]

I definitely have to take time & read this & reassess my existing conclusion, but it's another story where I tend to feel no clear answer was given or intended.

[Vakanai]

I still say the story showed it was Mr. and Mrs. Dent, with what's his face the Roman's son at the very end or whatever. I'd have to reread it, but the panels in the book showed that.

[Rikdad]

There is a confession (to herself) directly stating that Gilda committed three of them. However, do we believe that? In the real world, nobody could have possibly done what she would have needed to do to commit the second one. So, do we say it's just a comic book and accept the confession? Or do we say she's meant to be a realistic person (not, e.g., Zatanna or Wonder Woman) and reject her confession?

I think there are so many little things (not just the physical impossibility of her carrying out the second murder) that undermine her confession that it makes more sense to reject it. And once you reject it, you're left with Alberto as the only killer.

A similar argument tears down the possibility of Harvey Dent having committed some of the murders. We know Alberto committed some. So how do two uncoordinated killers randomly happen to strike on exactly the dates that the other one doesn't, with no dates with two murders, and no months without a murder? How do two killers manage to choose the exact same apparel to wear for the crimes? Implausible.

Alberto's birthday was a holiday and he says that that's a motive for the murders taking place on holidays. How did Gilda Dent choose the holiday theme that matches Alberto's birthday motive? Coincidence? Implausible.

Again, if you say, it's just a comic book and logic doesn't apply, then there's no solving the mystery at all.

[Rikdad]

JB, I'd appreciate your take on it! I put the book down thinking Batman failed to solve it (e.g., Gilda's confession was valid), but the more carefully I read it, the more I find that Batman solved it exactly correctly, and Gilda's confession doesn't hold water.

[resipsaloquitur]

Oh, not this again. At this point, I am convinced that there is no definitive answer that can be gleaned from the story itself. An equally compelling case can be made that it was Gilda, Harvey, Alberto, all, or none of them. You can make a case for each based on what appeared in the story, but there's no solid answer until Loeb clarifies it himself.

This is not a "whodunnit" where the clues add up. I think the April issue symbolizes the whole story: neither Batman nor the Riddler can add up the clues and come up with a satisfying answer. The Riddler's spontaneous gues that it was *Carmine* is, sadly, about as good as anyone else's guess. The. Clues. Do. Not. Add. Up. To. Anything.

In the end, I read the story on its face: the killers were a combination of all three suspects, not orking in unison. I'm taking the story on its face until Loeb says otherwise.

[resipsaloquitur]

I'm going to illustrate our problem with two points. One: Holiday him(her)self. Whoever Holiday was was quick, sneaky, and good with a gun. Consider the February issue where Holiday is able to run around a car, shoot four armed mobsters, and then blow them up. Which of our three suspects is fast and athletic enough to do that? Answer: we don't know. If the story had dropped a line about Alberto being a marksman in Harvard's gun club or Gilda having been a track runner, we might have a clue. But we don't. we have no indication that any of the three met Holiday's physical characteristics.

Two: Alberto's disappearance from January to August. We honestly have no idea what happened there. We saw what appeared to be Alberto get shot. Was it him, or a body double? We don't know. We saw blood in the water. Was that from the shooting victim? We don't know. We saw Carmine identify a body. Did he know it wasn't Alberto? Was he faking it when he broke down in front of the coroner? We don't know. Did Carmine hide Alberto somewhere, or did Alberto do that on his own? Batman guesses that Carmine was in on it, but again...we don't know. A few lines of dialogue or a flashback would have helped, but we never got them. We can only guess at what happened between the panels.

My larger point is that this story doesn't give enough information on what happened. It only gives you enough to speculate and imagine what happened. I'm not sure that the story is intended to have enough information to piece it together in the end.

[Rikdad]

The Riddler and Batman don't have all the information we have, and yet, Batman's answer is exactly what I see as the answer: It was always Alberto until we actually saw Harvey Dent shoot the final two. And inasmuch as the killings were directed by Carmine, the Riddler wasn't wrong, either, and that fits what Batman said, too.

You're quite right that we can wonder about the skill and tactics involved with the mass shootings or Alberto's disappearance, but those are beside the whodunit element of the mystery. Not knowing about those things doesn't impact on the solvability of the mystery. We also don't know anybody's blood type, but so what? We don't need to. We can work with the information we do have.

We know that Gilda was categorically sidelined during one of the killings she claimed. We know that Carmine ordered people to and from several of the crime scenes, sometimes exactly in time for them to be there or not be there as was convenient. We know that Gilda claimed to start the "holiday" pattern that Alberto says is tied to his birthday. We know that at least two separate people claimed to have used the hat disguise without having coordinated. We know that there were never two attacks on the same night or a month without an attack. We know a lot.

The fact that we don't know some things we'd like to know doesn't eliminate the value of the information that we do have.

[resipsaloquitur]

The Riddler and Batman don't have all the information we have, and yet, Batman's answer is exactly what I see as the answer: It was always Alberto until we actually saw Harvey Dent shoot the final two. And inasmuch as the killings were directed by Carmine, the Riddler wasn't wrong, either, and that fits what Batman said, too.

You're quite right that we can wonder about the skill and tactics involved with the mass shootings or Alberto's disappearance, but those are beside the whodunit element of the mystery. Not knowing about those things doesn't impact on the solvability of the mystery. We also don't know anybody's blood type, but so what? We don't need to. We can work with the information we do have.

We know that Gilda was categorically sidelined during one of the killings she claimed. We know that Carmine ordered people to and from several of the crime scenes, sometimes exactly in time for them to be there or not be there as was convenient. We know that Gilda claimed to start the "holiday" pattern that Alberto says is tied to his birthday. We know that at least two separate people claimed to have used the hat disguise without having coordinated. We know that there were never two attacks on the same night or a month without an attack. We know a lot.

The fact that we don't know some things we'd like to know doesn't eliminate the value of the information that we do have.

Sure, we have information. We might even have enough information that if Loeb ever wants to publicly explain who Holiday was, he could point to something in the story. My point is that we don't have enough information--probably that last critical bit being Loeb's official, final answer on who it is. There are at least four different theories as to who the October to August killer is, and they can't all be right. If somebody could satisfactorially explain to me, using something in story, about how any of the three characters fits Holiday's characteristics--stealth, speed, and marksmanship--I'd be more inclined to believe them.

[Rikdad]

I don't see how an absence of information about their shooting ability leaves us stuck. It could be that all three of the suspects, and fifty other people, have exceptional firearms skill. It could be that only one of them does. But we know that someone performed the shootings. This only means that we have no information regarding firearms skill to advance or rebut any particular solution. So we use other information. And using other information, we know that Alberto is involved with some of the shootings, Gilda's confession doesn't hold water, and that the involvement of multiple uncoordinated killers is logically improbable.

You could just as well say that we don't know where any of the suspects were during the April shooting, so we don't have a solution. Whoever performed the April shooting was at the scene of the April shooting. We don't know who has exceptional firearms skill, but we know that whoever performed the St. Patrick's Day hit has exceptional firearms skill. So we use other information to narrow down who that is.

[resipsaloquitur]

Here's a question: if Gilda is a red herring, why would he include the red herring at the end of the story? That's a colossal "**** you" to the readers. If the story ended without the Gilda epilogue, there'd be much less room for debate here.

[Rikdad]

Here's a question: if Gilda is a red herring, why would he include the red herring at the end of the story? That's a colossal "**** you" to the readers. If the story ended without the Gilda epilogue, there'd be much less room for debate here.

Good question. I have no doubt that the Gilda ending is accepted without question by many readers, in large part because of that.

It would be interesting to reconstruct Loeb's likely thought process behind each possible solution and ask why he made the decisions he did if that solution is valid. And your point there is a great lead-in to that.

If Gilda's confession is pure delusion, why would he put it in at the end? Obviously, it would hook a lot of readers into simply accepting it without question. So Loeb would have to believe that it's so absurd, and readers would be so devoted to solving the mystery, that rather than putting the book down and walking away after shooting through the last few pages, they would instead pick apart the confession and find the logical inconsistencies. Are they there? I think so. She says she was lightening Harvey's workload, although killing a few minor mobsters obviously wouldn't eliminate his workload, and would add a serial killer case to his worries. She said she snuck out of the hospital in November, but she was on an IV, had no home to get the gun from, and was still in questionable shape a month later. I think those problems are pretty accessible to readers. But only if they keep reading rather than zip through the end and put the book away.

[resipsaloquitur]

**Warning: This is Personal Interpretation**

I tend to see Long Halloween as a literary puzzle, not a scientific one. Loeb's other mysteries--Dark Victory and the Red Hulk sagarrare true "whodunnits" because the clues all go somewhere and the grand tapestry is revealed in the end. With Long Halloween, we have a bunch of clues, a bunch of solutions, and all of them can be made to work with varying degrees of logic. However, no solution is conclusive without Loeb showing his hand. It's entirely possible that Gilda was the killer IF that's what Loeb really wanted; we just have to accept comic book logic.

I see the solution as being tied to the story itself--what's the story Loeb is trying to tell, and why? Well, we know that he wanted to write about two specific things: 1) Gotham's change from a "crime" to a "freak" city, and 2) Harvey Dent's downfall. To that extent, I think that this being a story about Harvey likely absolves him. Traditionally, Harvey didn't go bad until the acid hit his face. Certainly, Loeb shows Harvey slowly cracking as we move towards August, but the fatal blow is in the courtrom scene. Before that, Harvey is generally a good man, but one who's slowly losing it. To have Harvey running around committing murder prior to that kind of cheapens the character. Now it's no longer the acid moment which breaks Harvey, but the statement would be that Harvey was nuts all along, going back at least to issue #1. Also, if Harvey had done any of the holiday killings, why would he adopt a new identity in #13? Why not just reveal himself as Holiday?

Besides, Loeb throws that "it could be Harvey" card so much in the series that we should be able to rule it out based on the rule of "it's so obvious that this can't be it." I accept that Harvey is "a" Holiday on the second Halloween, but that's as far as I'll take it on sheer storytelling principles.

In my mind, Alberto is clearly the killer from February to August (if Gilda were delusional, there'd be no reason for her to stop with December). Whether he was the killer from October to December is a separate question in my mind, and I'm not sure what the "literary" answer to that question is other than to again ask why Loeb even bothered with Gilda's confession at the end of the story if it was only a red herring. An end-of-story red herring makes no sense.

[ImprobableQuestion]

Harvey's line "Holiday is two people," that ultimately led Batman and Gordon to Alberto, was very interesting. They initially thought that at least one of the people he meant was Two-Face, but could the other one have been a warning about Gilda? I like to think of it two ways (though bear with me, it's been nearly a year since I read Long Halloween)

1. Gilda committed at least one murder to "help" her husband, he took the fall after discovering her insantity. Any additional murders are her delusions and were likely Alberto

2. Harvey and Gilda both committed early Holiday crimes. Gilda having been broken by the realisation that her husband was a killer, either rationalized in her head that it was her or took to finishing her husbands work to absolve him of any further guilt.

Both of these obviously don't gel with the "Harvey = Good, Two-Face = Bad" element of the character, but consider the Batman TAS version of the Two-Face origin from several years prior. Harvey had a bad side, a "Big Bad Harv" that he had learned to repress since childhood. The two got merged into a single persona after Harvey's accident, posessing BBH's temperament but ultimately deciding based on the coin which Harvey gets a say. I don't think Loeb was going for that homage, but there is precedent.

[resipsaloquitur]

Well, there's no need for Harvey to take the blame for Gilda by October II, since Alberto took the credit by that point. So that at least damages your theory #1.

What is odd is that towards the end of the series, Gilda discovers that Harvey's been bringing guns home and confronts him about it, seemingly bewildered. It could be an act, but on the surface, it's at odds with her behavior in the epilogue. (I think the likely answer is that Harvey's been trying to recreate Holiday's actions to see how it's done, but as I've said, there's a lot of things in the story where we don't get enough information. We don't know why Harvey was bringing home guns, except that Harvey said he was. BTW, I'm a lawyer, and it's typically a bad idea for prosecutors to be fooling around with the evidence.)