There were two short stories on the big pile that I wanted to get to sooner rather than later, but the stories differ vastly in nature, one being a classic locked room mystery and the other an archaeological science-fiction tale, which gave me the idea to discuss them together – under the flimsy umbrella-theme of "worlds apart." One concerning a stumbling, shotgun-wielding scarecrow and the secrets of an archaeological dig site on an alien world. So my apologies in advance, if it devolves into some overlong, vaguely coherent rambling.
The victim in question, Beverly Jelke, had been swimming in the creek when she had "half her head had been blown away by the charge of a double-barrelled shotgun" and her murderer likely "fired from the heavy brake that overhung the banks at that point." But who? Beverly Jelke had been bitterly quarreling with her brother, Hudson, to the point of nearly coming to blows. She had wanted to sell the failing family farm, but Hudson flat out refused. And that gives her brother a potential motive. So the elephantine Senator Banner, bombastic as ever, decides to invade the family farm to invite himself and Judge James Z. Skinner to stay the night ("I'll raid your ice chest" as "he patted his punchbowl tummy").
Beside the Hudson siblings, the other people who live, or work, on the farm include Hudson's beautiful wife, Celeste. His ugly, scarecrow-looking eccentric uncle, Magnus Fawlkes. A young, hired farmhand, Wayne Markes, whose mind is entirely occupied by a girl student over at Foxchase Hall. During the night, the sound of a shotgun blast awakens the whole farm and the sprawled body of Hudson, "part of his scalp and his face blown away by buckshot," is discovered on the porch step – which gains an otherworldly quality by the first lights of dawn. The murderer's "heavy, ungainly shoes" left a clear track of prints out towards the open fields. However, the single line of footprints led straight to a gaunt scarecrow that "idly flapping its empty arms at them." A pair of battered, heavy soled shoes were standing under the scarecrow and they "fitted the tracks." A nicely done reversal of the usual single track of footprints normally found these type of impossible crime stories, but the scarecrow is not done yet.
So, on the following night, Banner quarantines everyone by locking them in their bedrooms with a chair placed under the doorknob as an added security, but that night he hears the clumping sound as if the heavy shoes "were hanging loose on feet that were mere bones—or sticks!" This is followed by a scream and the roar of another shotgun blast. Somehow, the scarecrow had materialized in a locked bedrooms and nearly took a third victim before, shotgun in hand, vanished without a trace. There's more than enough here to satisfy the rabid locked room fan with the problem of the scarecrow's footprints being the better of the two, which is original in presentation with a perfectly serviceable solution. Regrettably, the second locked room-trick is nothing special, but not to the overall detriment of the plot because here it couldn't have worked any other way. Just like his previously reviewed short story, "The Grand Guignol Caper" (1984), "The Scarecrow Murders" is arguably a better detective story than a locked room mystery. A richly clued, tapestry-like plotted detective story that works, as a whole, without depending on a single trick, twist or surprise. I didn't catch on to the murderer's identity until the attempted murder in the locked bedroom. Commings added another winner to his name and shows he could have been a credible threat to Edward D. Hoch's title as the King of Short Stories had he been a little more prolific.
On a side note, I previously reviewed Paul Halter's Le masque du vampire (The Mask of the Vampire, 2014) in which I pointed out Halter's greatest weakness is the lack of historical color or characters who act out-of-time – only to encounter a murderer here who could have come creeping out of Halter novel. Maybe his characters didn't always act entirely out of their period. So, if you like Halter, Commings' "The Scarecrow Murder" comes highly recommended.
Last year, I began to dig into Jack McDevitt's science-fiction series featuring two space-faring antique dealers, Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath, who track down and sell ancient artifacts a hundred centuries in the future. There's always a historical mystery attached to their potential merchandise that has waited for centuries, or even millennia, to be solved. So the series has been compared to a space-age Ellery Queen, but McDevitt named G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories as the source of his inspiration. McDevitt focuses on answering the question "what happened?" instead of whodunit, why and how. You can call the series a very distant cousin of our beloved detective story.
Jack McDevitt's "In the Tower" was first published in Terry Carr's Universe 17 (1987), an anthology series of original science-fiction short stories, which was relatively recent reprinted in Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (2009).
"In the Tower" sets up one of the locations from A Talent for War, a settled water world called the Fishbowl, which shares its binary star system with Belarius. There are two very different kind of secrets at the heart of the plot that get terrifyingly twisted together in the final pages. One of the mysteries concerns the melancholy and untimely death of a painter, Durrell Coll, whose work went from "the exuberance of his early period to the bleak unquiet masterpieces of maturity" without "an evolutionary stage" – a series of works "progressively more introspective, technically more accomplished." So his grieving lover, Tiel Chadwick, is determined to get to the bottom of what drove Durrell to his death. A search that brings her to the Fishbowl where she eventually hears the story of an ill-fated attempt to excavate the ruined cities on Belarius.
Firstly, the plot-thread concerning Durrell's depression can be boiled down to a character-driven whydunit of the modern school with a neatly done science-fiction hook. However, the solution and how it tied (cruelly) to the archaeological excavation on Belarius betrayed Chesterton's influence. Secondly, the story about that excavation answered some of my questions. I now get why the Belarians were only mentioned in passing and ignored altogether in Echo. They were a feudal civilization that "never got past a medieval stage" and funding to continue excavations were cut because, whatever they left behind, "could make no conceivable contribution to Confederate technology." And then there's a wide variety of exotic, highly evolved predators who snatched people away or devoured their prey "in full view of a work crew." Not exactly what Tuttle had in mind when searching the stars for another civilization.
I'm still of the opinion Belarius is wasted as a setting and should be used for a cross between Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) and Aliens. Just let a billionaire/amateur archaeologist finance a new expedition to Belarius accompanied by armed mercenaries who have to clear out the site and erect a fence around it. A killer can then pretend they missed one of these clever predators, hiding somewhere in the ruins, as a camouflage for a series of murders. Add to this the archaeological/historical mysteries of the Belarian civilization (e.g. how was it possible for creatures with "pale, bloated, gas-filled bodies" to construct massive buildings without an archaeological trace of "heavy equipment of some kind"). Such a novel has all the potential to be a science-fiction mystery classic rivaling Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1953).
So, all in all, I really enjoyed these two vastly different short stories for vastly different reasons. One is an excellently plotted, Golden Age detective story with a locked room/impossible crime angle and the other a science-fiction story that provided some context to the series it inspired. But enough rambling for one day. The next review is going to be of that obscure, long out-of-print Dutch detective novel I alluded to in my review of Echo.
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