When Words Collide

"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"

- The Mad Hatter (Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

So recently, I reviewed a locked room mystery by Philip Wylie, entitled Corpses at Indian Stones (1943), in which I referenced a second detective novel by Wylie that was catalogued by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crime (1991) – namely the tantalizingly titled Five Fatal Words (1932). I promised a review would soon follow and, well, here you are.

Five Fatal Words was co-authored by Edwin Balmer and appears to have been the first collaboration between Wylie and Balmer, but it wouldn't be the last. In the following years, they penned two science-fiction novels, When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934), which seem to be still fairly well remembered among science-fiction readers – as well as giving me a punning post-title for this review. I know it'll probably make some people cringe, but I couldn't let it pass.

Interestingly, there are some mild science-fiction elements evoked in the second half of the book, but the first part seems to have taken its cue from the Victorian-era detective stories.

I found the opening chapter and immediate aftermath to be somewhat reminiscent of "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891), which begins with an unusual advertisement in the "Help Wanted—Female" column – asking for a young lady who "must have no ties" and "willing to devote entire time for one year" to her job.

Melicent Waring has been out of a job for nine weeks and is becoming desperate now that her money, and that of her friend and roommate, has dwindled to a grand total of seven dollars and forty-two cents. So, of course, she goes to the job interview and the person who placed the advertisement, Mr. Robert Reese, turns out to be very reputable lawyer.

The advertisement was placed on behalf Miss Hannah Cornwall, who belongs to one of the wealthiest families in the world and has a habit of replacing her entire staff once a year. Miss Waring assumes she merely has "to read" and "be polite to a rich old lady of sixty who wants a lot of attention," but she soon figures out that her new job also consists of having to share her new employers fear and dread – which she fully comes to realize when she has to switch beds with Miss Hannah on her first night at the Cornwall estate.

Miss Hannah Cornwall's fear is rooted in the will of her long-departed father, Silas Cornwall, who bequeathed his six children a regular income drawn from his two hundred million dollar estate, but the only person who can inherit it all is the last survivor. That's simply asking for trouble!

A recent letter Miss Hannah received from a nephew in Dutch Guiana has greatly disturbed her: one of her brothers, Daniel Cornwall, has possibly succumbed from poisoning after receiving a weird and cryptic five letter message – which read "Doubtless Even a Tulip Hopes." A second brother, Everitt, dies under her roof and behind the locked-and bolted door of a bathroom after receiving a cryptic message saying "Don't Ever Alter These Horoscopes." There are more brothers and sisters who'll follow their unfortunate fate.

Destruction on a larger scale

I've always associated the tontine-scheme and sole survivor plot-line with Ellery Queen, who successfully played up this device in "The Inner Circle" and "The Gettysburg Bugle," collected in Calendar of Crime (1952), but it's also present in Will Levinrew's little-known Death Points a Finger (1933) – which appeared a year after Five Fatal Words. So maybe there was a cross-pollination of ideas there.

In any case, Five Fatal Words and Death Points a Finger are of interest to Ellery Queen fans as being early examples (and possible) inspirations for that typical Queen-ish plot-device.

Well, after the suspicious-looking death in the bolted bathroom and discovery of a potential, tale-tell clue to a possible explanation they're being abruptly forced from the estate. This marks an unfortunate decline in the plot and begins a thug-of-war with the reader’s credulity.

First of all, they make a brief excursion to Belgium, where a sister of Miss Hannah lives in a chateau on the river, but death even follows them there and strikes in a most unusual way – a deadly, poisonous mist smothers Domrey Valley and Alice Cornwall died alongside "sixty other old people" in "the Belgian fog."

If it’s murder, the murderer racked up quite a body count to get to one person, but be prepared to throw the book across the room when you reach the "explanation" for this death-mist. I always thought Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913) had a cop-out ending, but Balmer and Wylie showed him!

The quality briefly picks up again when they go back to America to visit Theodore Cornwall in New York.

Theodore Cornwall is a health-obsessed vegetarian who paradoxically praises science that "has made it possible for us the extend" the "great gift" that’s life, but completely allows astrology to dictate his life. A man who trusted science with his health believed "stars and constellations so immense and far away that the mind could not encompass their distances" concerned themselves with the "petty, individual, human fates and affairs," which seems to be confirmed when Theodore has a close-encounter with a "bit of cosmic debris" – when "a shred of some star" is catapulted into his bedroom.

The meteorite failed to kill him and, obviously, it had fallen from space long before it was hurled through Theodore’s bedroom window, but it was interesting to see how the science-fiction background of the writers crept into this story. It just struck a false note in the overall structure of the book. The bits and pieces with Theodore seemed to have been more at home in the pages of a screwball-type of mystery instead of dark, dreadful crime story about the slow extermination of a family.

I probably should mention Michael Innes' The Weight of Evidence (1944) here, which has a nifty, well-done murder with a chunk of meteorite an English university.

Anyhow, I guess the overall theme of the story is that everything seemed of the mark. The death messages were mystifying and had an Alice-in-Wonderland quality about them, especially the first two or so, but they were just side dressing to the plot. The locked room mystery was interesting, but was only a minor part of the overall plot and one part of the explanation left me unsatisfied. The deadly mist was obviously meant to make the murderer look omnipotent, but how it ended up fitting into the story makes you want to bludgeon the authors with a ball-peen hammer. The final explanation... well, I can't say I was either impressed or surprised by it, but the unusual chase at the end was nice.

I'm afraid Five Fatal Words is a little more than a curiosity of the Golden Age of the American detective story. A curiosity with some points of interest, but a curiosity nonetheless. So read it at your own discretion. 

And thus ends one of my longest runs of reviews of good, great and downright excellent mysteries. Well, hope to pick it up again with the next one. Stay tuned! 

Death Trap

"I often think that a highly expert archaeologist would make a perfect detective. He has the education that the best of professional policemen often lack and the knowledge of things as such that the theorist and literary man never has at all."

- Canon Burbery (Stanley Casson's Murder by Burial, 1938)

In his introduction for Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Tales of Mystery (2010), Bill Pronzini described Philip Wylie as a versatile writer who had a broad range of interests, encompassing many fields of expertise, such as science, education, deep-sea fishing, UFOs and pretty much every kind of genre-fiction out there – including our beloved detective-and thriller stories.

Wylie's detective stories that are of special interest to me are, of course, those catalogued in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). Hey, I came close to churning out five successive blog-posts without touching upon a single locked room mystery or rambling semi-coherently about impossible crime stories in general. It was an untenable state of affairs and you know it!

Corpses at Indian Stones (1943) is, reportedly, the only mystery novel Wylie wrote single-handedly and collaborated with Edwin Balmer on some of his other forays into the genre such as Five Fatal Words (1932) – which also happened to be a locked room novel and one I'll be reading before long. But lets get this review out of the way first.

I think the first thing I should mention about Corpses at Indian Stones is that Wylie used both the figure of the amateur sleuth and the traditional mystery as vehicles for a very peculiar coming-of-age story. One with a protagonist who's already in his thirties.

The detective duties in Corpses at Indian Stones are relegated to an introversive, classically named professor of anthropology and distinguished archaeologist, Agamemnon Telemachus Plum, who'd spend most of his days digging up old bones and excavating ancient cities.

Professor Plum is referred to by everyone as "Aggie" and has come to "prefer a book to a tea dance" and "an assorted stack of petrified bones to a pack of playing cards," which came from spending his days "seal-hunting in kayaks" and "pushing dugouts into the Everglades and up the reaches of the Amazon" – basically living in the boys' adventure stories from his youth.

Unfortunately, for Aggie, his aunt, Sarah, has plans to drastically change all of that. She believes the time has come for Aggie to get a wife and making sure the family name lives on. Luckily, for her, they're going on holiday together and therefore has ample opportunity to find a suitable match for her nephew.

They'll be spending the summer days together at a place where Aggie left some memories from his youth, a place named Indian Stones in upstate New York, which brings him back into contact with people he hadn't seen for decades.

However, his first, genuine recorded emotion in this story was getting misty-eyed when being reunited with the objects from his childhood, such as "banners, pictures, trophies, knickknacks and books," in his old bedroom – which is fitting for a misanthropic archaeologist. He also retraces some of the routes he had memorized as a teenager of the surrounding woods, but that's where the trouble begins as he stumbles across the first, suspicious-looking death in the area.

Jim Calder was an unpopular figure at Indian Stones. He had managed the finances of several prominent residents with varying degrees of success, which made Calder's presence at such a tranquil place like having "a ghoul at a feast," but did this provoke someone in doing something irrevocable? Calder's cold, lifeless body is found trapped between a pair of heavy logs of a deadfall, which is a bear trap and the trigger seems to have required a heavy pull. And that places a prominent question mark behind the possibility of it being an accident. 

The intended victim of a deadfall-trap

Aggie begins to act as a sort of unofficial deputy to Captain Wesley "Wes" Wickman, a good-humored state trooper, who doesn't seem to mind all too much that someone's meddling in his case – which he's willing to write-off as a simple accident.

So, while the professor is slowly becoming used to socializing (read: being domesticated) he wades through such nebulous clues as a fox with a dog collar and a calling card pinned with a knife to a door. A guest who didn't show up and a submerged car with veal bones as its "cargo." A forgotten, hidden piece of architecture of the place they're staying and it's connection to the financial panic of 1907, Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the gold hoarding during the 1930s, but the best possible evidence for murder proved to be a second body.

The local doctor, George Davis, was seen taking photographs of the accident-site and evidently made someone very nervous, because he's discovered in his makeshift darkroom with a hunting knife buried in his chest. However, complicating a verdict of a plain and simple homicide is the locked-and bolted door and a window the size of a book, which makes the doctor's violent passing either a case of suicide or an impossible murder.

Because the reader knows just as well as Aggie that the Dr. Davis was murdered, but the question is how the killer left a door locked-and bolted on the inside or a passed through a tiny window. 

The answer to that particular question was disappointingly simplistic, but there were other interesting aspect about the explanation that should be pointed out. It's one of those tricks that's hard to believe was pulled off in one go, especially considering the lack of wiggle room the murderer had to work with, but Wylie carefully avoided that particular pitfall and in the process provided an original explanation as to why the telephone lines were pulled down. A more original explanation would've been preferred, but Wylie worked well with what he put into the plot. 

Well, I feel like I've been droning on without saying too much of substance, because Corpses at Indian Stones is essentially a light-weight mystery novel with an easily discernable plot, which is why I have been dancing around the finer plot-details – afraid of giving away anything of importance. But I liked it, because despite its shortcomings and simplicity, it's a very enjoyable detective story with an interesting sleuth who solves a couple of bizarre murder during one of the most important weeks of his personal life. I also loved how his background and skills as an archaeologist was used to literarily unearth parts of the truth towards the end and even dug up something a little more animated than your basic, run-of-the-mill skeletons.   

So, yes, Corpses at Indian Stones is less than perfect as a detective story, but I still very much enjoyed the read and the book comes recommended if you simply love a fun, little detective story – or an attempt at one. I'd also recommend reading John Norris' review on Pretty Sinister Books, which interestingly contrasts the book with Wylie's other, non-mystery novels.

Well, that was almost two pages worth of text with very little to no substance at all, but, as always, I'll try to do better in my next post.