Paul
Gallico was an American writer and self-described storyteller,
perhaps best remembered today as the author of The Snow Goose
(1941) and The Poseidon Adventure (1969), who made a brief
excursion into the detective genre with Too
Many Ghosts (1959) and The Hand of Mary Constable
(1964). A pair of unconventional impossible crime novels with a more
contemporary take on the turn-of-the-century "ghostbusters"
stories by William Hope Hodgson (Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder,
1913) and L.T. Meade (A
Master of Mysteries, 1898).
The detective, or ghost-breaker, in
these novels is the chief investigator for the British Society of
So, while Hero remained eager for
genuine proof of the paranormal, he actively destroyed "the
charlatans of spiritualism" who "preyed
upon the misfortunes of the bereaved and ignorant."
Too Many Ghosts brings Hero to
Paradine Hall, filled to capacity with ghosts, where furniture moves
around on its own accord, candles extinguish themselves and the
ghostly figure of nun can materialize out of nowhere – not to
mention the phantom harp player in the locked music-room. The
solution to the ghostly fingers, plucking at the harp strings in the
music-room, makes Too Many Ghosts a notable locked
room mystery of the period. And not just the locked music-room.
Hero "de-haunts" every single, seemingly supernatural, occurrence
and manifestation.
I was glad to learn at the time
Gallico penned a sequel, The Hand of Mary Constable, but some
lukewarm reviews and comments over the years had condemned it to the
Purgatory Zone of my TBR-list. I was in the mood for one of those
séance
mysteries and wanted to save Patrick
Kelley's Sleightly Invisible (1986) for later this year.
So here we are.
The Hand of Mary Constable
finds Alexander Hero en route to New York City in the wake of an
alarming letter from Dr. Frank Ferguson, President of the American
branch of the Society for Psychical Research, who tells them there "a
number of occurrences" with potentially dangerous,
earth-shattering consequences – which involves the U.S. government
at its highest level. Ferguson refuses to give any details in his
letter, but, when Hero arrives, he's ushered to a private meeting
with some mighty important, highly ranked officials. General Walter
Augstadt, in charge of a special project, Saul Wiener, the Regional
Director of FBI, and an FBI expert specialized in fingerprints, Mr.
Ferris. What they tell him could affect the Cold War in a most
unexpected way.
The objective of Project Foxglove is
to develop a way to intrude upon "the commands taped into a
missile" and "persuading it to disobey these commands and
in some cases to reverse them," which effectively turns them
into homing pigeons. A device that will, one way or another,
reshuffle the cards on the world stage. If every nation had the
device, computerized technology would be rendered ineffective on the
battlefield and fighting would have to be done with field armies or
dropping bombs from airplanes, but, if the Soviets gets it first,
they're all "dead ducks" – nations around the world have
been working hard on similar projects. Professor Constable got it and
they were only months away from a breakthrough. But a personal
tragedy in his life would end placing the whole world on "the
horns of a nasty dilemma."
A year ago, Professor Constable lost
his 10-year-old daughter, Mary, who was diagnosed with leukemia and
passed away shortly after. Mary's illness and death left her father "a markedly changed man," which made him easy prey for two
so-called spiritual mediums, Arnold and Sarah Bessmer.
Professor Constable was told that the
Bessmers had receives a message from Mary and he began to attend
their weekly séances, during which he heard "a voice purporting
to be that of his daughter" and had physical contact with "a
figure which he believes to be a materialization of her."
Amazingly, they were able to produce physical evidence of Mary's
ghostly presence! During a séance, the ghost of Mary had thrust a
hand in a bowl of liquid wax and thereafter in cold water, which left
behind "the transparent hand and wrist of a child" – an
empty glove of wax! It would be impossible for any living flesh or
bone to have been withdrawn from it without shattering it. Even more
astonishing is that the wax glove has fingerprints belonging to Mary!
An impossible-to-fake detail since Mary's body had been cremated.
So having one of your most important
scientists, who's working on a top secret project, in the clutches of
two greedy vultures is bad enough, but things become fishy when Mary
begins to talk world politics. Someone is dictating Mary's messages
with the intention to make him either defect or voluntarily part with
his knowledge. Considering how sensitive the whole situation is, they
can't simply cut the professor from the mediums and prevent him from
“communicating” with his daughter. A course of action he would
most definitely resent intensely.
Ferguson asks Alexander Hero to go
undercover at the Church of the Holy Ozone as Peter
The Hand of Mary Constable is a
weird kind of crime novel that's not easy to pigeon-hole. The
impossibility of the wax glove is the peg on which the plot hangs,
recalling the bloodless impossible crime stories by Carter
Dickson and David
Renwick, but, around the halfway mark, the cold war thriller
elements began to intrude on the story without being a hybrid of
either. The Hand of Mary Constable is a (crime) novel that
happens to have elements of both the impossible crime story and cold
war thriller, which is an interesting and unusual blend. But one that
began to lose its flavor once the story passed its halfway mark.
Gallico also decided to tip his hand to the reader here and it didn't
do the plot any favors.
Thankfully, the solution to the
impossibility of Mary Constable's hand was better than some reviews
suggested and the explanation of how the cast was made certainly was
original. Something to be expected from the writer who dreamed up the
trick of the phantom harp player in a locked music-room. However, the
trick would probably have been better served in tighter, more
focused, detective story that would allowed the finer details (i.e.
fingerprints) to be tidied up. More importantly, The Hand of Mary
Constable is a very well written, imaginative and engrossing
novel in spite of its flaws and the only that actually bothered me is
that the story undersold how dark and revolting the plot against
Professor Constable truly is – occult brainwashing of a grieving
father with the memory of his dead child as bait! And it's not just
him who's being tortured. Mrs. Constable makes a brief appearance,
but that's enough to take pity on that poor, long-suffering woman who
first lost her only child and now has to watch her husband slipping
from her fingers.
So, with everything told, The Hand
of Mary Constable is not an unsung classic of the locked room
mystery novel, but it still has a lot to recommend with an
intriguingly posed impossibility, the early, eerie atmosphere
surrounding the ghostly visitations and the well intended attempt at
blending different genres. Gallico betrayed here that he was a better
storyteller than plotter, but Too Many Ghosts and The Hand
of Mary Constable stand as noteworthy and original contributions
from an outside visitor to the impossible crime and detective story.
I don't think anything like these two (locked room) mysteries were
published until John
Sladek wrote Black
Aura (1974) and Invisible
Green (1977) a decade later.
It's been nearly 20 years since I read this, but I remember enjoying it. Like you, I think I found it a better novel than a detective story; characterisation rather than plotting was Gallico's strength.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to venture outside detective fiction, "The Snow Goose" is a beautiful novella - one of my late mother's favourites. I have a 1950s paperback, published by Michael Joseph (better known, of course, for Gladys Mitchell).
You also have to take into consideration Gallico probably wrote them as ghost stories with a rational ending and not as pure detective novels. This is likely why they even escaped the attention of Adey. If I remember correctly, Too Many Ghosts and The Hand of Mary Constable weren't even known as locked room/impossible crime mysteries until Patrick reviewed them 10 years ago. I suspect your reading predates the GAD Yahoo mailing list by a good year or two.
DeleteThanks for the recommendation! I'll keep it mind.
Belatedly:
ReplyDeleteSaw this entry while browsing around here, and I suddenly had a memory flash.
DDid you know that The Hand of Mary Constable was made into an ABC Movie of The Week in 1969 (one of the first, if memory serves)?
The movie was titled Daughter Of The Mind: Don Murray played the investigator, who was renamed 'Dr. Alex Lauder', while RayMilland and Gene Tierney were top-billed as Dr. and Mrs. Constable (they were the major gets here: it was Tierney's first TV-movie, and the debut of Milland's new toupee).
I have a bootleg DVD of this movie, and I'm now trying to track down a reasonably priced copy of the novel (I like sets of things).
Just thought you'd like to know ...
I remember the movie was brought up somewhere, some time ago, when it turned up on YouTube. Just checked. It's still up.
Delete