Black Aura (1974) by John Sladek

John Sladek was an American science-fiction writer who lived in London, England, from the mid-1960s to 1986 where he sold his first short stories to the British science-fiction magazine New Worlds and got his debut novel, The Reproductive System (1968), published – a novel about out-of-control, self-replicating machines. More importantly, Sladek loved detective stories and won the Times of London 1972 short story competition with a clever locked room mystery, "By an Unknown Hand" (1972). A part of the prize was the publication of the short story in The Times Anthology of Detective Stories (1973) and a contract to write a novel-length mystery about the detective Sladek introduced in "By an Unknown Hand," Thackeray Phin. 

Sladek ended up writing two, classically-styled and plotted homages to the Golden Age detective story, Black Aura (1974) and Invisible Green (1977), which became and stayed fan favorites despite being out-of-print since the seventies. 

Robert Adey wrote in Locked Room Murders (1991) that Black Aura is "very good in all respects and dealt, among other things, with an impossible disappearance and even more incredible levitation." Adey daringly called Invisible Green "an even better impossible crime novel" giving "high hopes of a major series," but Sladek bowed out of the detective story to return to science-fiction genre. But the situation at the time more or less dictated his early retirement as a mystery writer. Sladek told in 1982 interview "those two novels suffered mainly from being written about 50 years after the fashion for puzzles of detection" as he "enjoyed writing them, planning the absurd crimes and clues," but likened it "turning out a product the supermarket didn't need any more," like "stove polish or yellow cakes of laundry soap" – a writer "could starve very quickly writing locked-room mysteries like those." Regrettably, Sladek had arrived way too late on the scene as the traditional detective story had entered a dark age after the 1950s and the only notable names who stubbornly continued writing locked room mysteries regularly were Edward D. Hoch and Bill Pronzini. Or, perhaps, he arrived a decade too soon as there was brief revival during the 1980s courtesy of writers like Herbert Resnicow and William L. DeAndrea.

Either way, you can hardly blame him choosing the more profitable science-fiction genre over the locked room mystery, but I love Sladek's detective fiction that actually extends beyond those two Thackery Phin novels and two short stories. "The Locked Room" (1972) is a short-short parody with a story-within-a-story structure inexplicably buried in the SF collection Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978), while "Scenes from the Country of the Blind" (1977) can be found in Alien Accounts (1982) and concerns the disappearance of an entire village. Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2002) has in addition to the two short Phin stories eight inverted crime stories of which "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National" (1968) is a minor gem. Not a single real dud! The pickings have become slimmer over the years and hold out no hope that a manuscript of a third, unpublished Thackeray Phin novel (Scarlet Thief? Sky-blue Herrings? Violet Oracle? Gray Locks?) will turn up out of the blue one day. So decided to simply revisit Black Aura and Invisible Green. Beginning with one of my all-time favorite locked room mysteries. Can it stand up to rereading? Let's find out! 

Thackeray Phin is an American philosopher and aspiring detective, living London, whose "career as an amateur detective had begun promisingly a few months before" with "a locked room murder" known to the public as the Aaron Wallis Murder Case – which is the impossible crime he solved in "By an Unknown Hand." However, the murder of Aaron Wallis has been his only case, so far. Phin even runs a newspaper ad, "professional logician and amateur sleuth would like a challenge," but without much result. So he decides to practice on humbler mysteries like occultism, faith healers, mind readers and mediums. What he plans to do is ingratiate himself into Mrs. Viola Webb's Aetheric Mandala Society.

Mrs. Viola Webb is a very well-known, expensive spiritualist medium with a posh clientele comprising of true believers, skeptics and truth seekers who live in a commune. But there has been gossip about the society ever since one of its members, David Lauderdale, died from a heroine overdose in the house. Rumor has it, David wore "this sacred amulet from some Egyptian tomb" around his neck and there's "supposed to be some kind of curse on it." Recently, the death was mentioned again in the paper under the headline, "DRUG VICTIM'S GHOST WARNS POP STAR AT LONDON COMMUNE SEANCE." So the Aetheric Mandala Society promises enough parlor tricks to debunk and initially encounters nothing more than cold readings ("really a game of Twenty Questions"), ghosts playing around with trumpets during a séance and a spectral Indian chief who warns Phin "that there are some mysteries better left alone." Aaron Wallis also dropped in on the séance to thank Phin for solving his murder. So the usual, standard fare for a table-tapping session, but, pretty soon, the strangest of things begin to happen in-and around the house of the society.

Firstly, Dr. Andrew Lauderdale, father of David Lauderdale, who gave up science to become a member and use to the society as "a lifeline to what he imagines is the ghost of his son" goes missing under seemingly impossible circumstances. Dr. Lauderdale was seen entering a bathroom, locked it behind him, but never came out or responds to them hammering on the door. So they fetch a spare key to open the door, but they only find the tap running and an Egyptian scarab on the glass shelf above the sink. Otherwise, "the room was empty." Secondly, a little later on in the story, another member temporarily vanishes from a chapel at a funeral home with all the entrances and exits under observation. However, the centerpiece of the plot involves a truly staggering, impressively-staged miraculous murder while the victim was observed floating mid-air!

Steve Sonday, the pop singer who was warned by Dave's ghost, gives a demonstration of the "aetheric forces" generated during a trance state and is locks himself inside a small, triangular box-like room – called the Quiet Room. While the rest wait in the room, where the triangular box-like room stands, it appears as if Steve has astral projected his body outside the room. They see Steve Sonday outside the window, "floating in mid-air about ten foot straight out from the balcony" and "illuminating his face with a pocket torch." Just standing there in mid-air! But when they rush to open the window, the spell is broken and Steve plunges to his death onto the iron-spiked fence below. How did manage to levitate in front of a fourth-story window when he was supposed to be locked up in a small room?

There you have to setup to one hell of a locked room mystery and the temptation is there to draw a comparison with Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but Talbot employed the seances, apparently supernatural occurrences and the string of impossibilities to create a genuine horror of a house under siege by otherworldly entities. Sladek's Black Aura is much more lighthearted, kindred spirit of John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins (1935) with a dash of the self-aware, nearly punching through the fourth wall humor of Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin. Just like Carr, Sladek lived in England and both depicted London as Baghdad-on-the-Thames. A fantastical place where high adventure awaits all who dares to seek it and miraculous things could happen like people levitating in mid-air. However, the playful ("I usually just hope the killer blurts out his guilt in front of witnesses"), self-aware detective ("I can't think of a single brilliant, but confusing, thing to say") and comedy is streaked with a kind of melancholic nostalgia (anemoia?) and day dreams of wish fulfillment.

I remember from my first reading being very amused about Phin's day dreaming about being a Great Detective. 

For example, the fifth chapter ("Scorpio Descending") has Phin day dreaming he's sitting next to a warm fire in his Baker Street rooms explaining to Dr. Watson who was behind the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 ("Surely... that is elementary, Watson"). Phin immediately sobers up when he comes out of it as he observes that, nowadays, "the police did not wait politely behind the arras while the amateur investigator produced his dazzling deductions" and how "the worlds of crime and crime detection alike were infected with business efficiency." Now "they had computers capable of piling up great heaps of punched cards at astonishing speed" and "indentikits capable of rendering any human face whatever with the realism of a Disney cartoon." So considering the state of the genre in 1974 and his comments in 1982, it seems like Sladek took the opportunity winning the Times of London competition handed him to give the classic detective story and locked room mystery the sendoff they deserve. What a sendoff!

Admittedly, there are one, or two, minor smudged. I mentioned in my review of Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk's Into Thin Air (1928/29) the trickiest thing with these miracle parades is delivering good, or acceptable enough, solutions to every single one of them and usually one or more tend to be of a lesser quality – even outright filler material. That's unfortunately true of Black Aura as the impossible disappearances from the bathroom and chapel had nothing new or different to offer to the locked room mystery, merely smaller cogs and wheels in the machine of the overall plot, but the overall plot is what makes it a modern classic.

Firstly, there's the marvelous levitation-trick. The presentation of the impossibility is as memorable as it's original and the solution along with its superb clueing, including one of those shimmering tell-tale clues, you either spot or miss entirely, earning Black Aura its status as a classic of the locked room and impossible crime genre. Secondly, there's the wonderfully dovetailing of all the plot-threads, the nostalgic mood swings in the storytelling and the Golden Age-style characterization that even today makes it standout as an authentic, post-1950s continuation of the Golden Age tradition of the '30s and '40s. It's sad Sladek thought the genre was on its last leg in the 1970s and had to write one of its closing chapters, perhaps even its eulogy. But wonder what he (a science-fiction) would have thought, if he knew the futuristic internet would end up paving the way to a glorious Renaissance Era of the classic reprints and traditionally-styled (locked room) mysteries in the 21st century? I don't think even Sladek could have foreseen that development or us talking about him online, but something tells me would have approved.

So, to cut this overlong, sloppy and rambling review short, Sladek's Black Aura very much stood up to rereading and remains one of my all-time favorite locked room mysteries that needs to return to print! I'm very curious now to see if Invisible Green is actually better than Black Aura. I remember thinking Invisible Green was a step down from Black Aura, but so many keep insisting it's the superior of the two. So that one is next on the chopping block!