Into Thin Air (1928/29) by Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk

Robert Adey spotlighted Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk's Into Thin Air (1928/29) in his preface to Locked Room Murders (1991), under "The Second Phase 1902-1929," as it concerns "numerous appearances and disappearances of people and things in graveyards and at séances" with "a magnificent detective" – while Pietro de Palma called it "mandatory for those who love the genre." Just one, tiny problem. Winslow and Quirk's Into Thin Air is largely known today for being among the most elusive, out-of-print and nearly impossible to find locked room mysteries. But the key word there is nearly. After all these years, it was practically shoved into my hands like an early Sinterklaas or Christmas present! 

Despite the recommendations, I expected to find little more than a curiosity from the genre's storied history. A pioneering, spirited attempt to present the detective story as an impossibilities galore with perhaps one, or two, good tricks to justify its reputation among locked room devotees like Adey and De Palma. At the very least, I hoped Into Thin Air would outperform Noël Vindry's A travers les murailles (Through the Walls, 1936) and Richard Ellington's Exit for a Dame (1951), which most of us can agree on are the poorest of these miracle parades. I can see now that the reason it clung to its reputation has nothing to do with the procession of seemingly supernatural and otherworldly situations, but that the story reads like it was written in the late 1930s or '40s. Into Thin Air is exactly the kind of impossible crime novel that began to appear in the wake of John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins (1935). Such as Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat (1938), Anthony Boucher's Nine Times Nine (1940) and Derek Smith's Whistle Up the Devil (1954). 

Into Thin Air even has its own meta-discussion on the detective story and its readers, "XII: I Learn How to Write a Detective Story," but more on that in a moment.

Winslow and Quirk's Into Thin Air opens with a series of clippings from Mid-Western American newspapers reporting the wild, unbelievable rise and crashing down to earth again of master thief, "The Salem Spook" – an arch-criminal with a penchant for the impossible. The articles recount the stories of victims and witnesses who saw the Salem Spook passing "through the cement wall" of a solid, brick building or simply disappearing into thin air. One of the victims, tied and gagged, had to look on helplessly as the Salem Spook "flapped his arms, flew about the room like a bird and then soared straight out the fifty-story window." Dr. Klotz, head of the Department of Criminology at an unnamed university, is responsible for the capture and conviction of the Salem Spook, but "visibly disappointed at the leniency of the sentence" and the thief walked out of the prison as quickly as he had entered it. The last clipping reports that the Salem Spook had died in a train wreck and made his last disappearance-act as he vanished "under six feet of clay in the local Potter's Field." This is only the two-page prologue that serves as a taste of things to come. 

Into Thin Air is narrated by a criminologist, Professor Alden T. Nollins, who's on his way to the home of Colonel Carrol to witness Ernest H. Fitkin's "exposé of fraudulent mediums." Colonel Carrol has fought bitterly with Judge Mather over the existence of the supernatural and the former has arranged the exposé of fakery to needle the Judge Mather with Fitkin being no less a person than the Great Galeoto. A retired magician who was the last of the giants from the dying days of the golden age of sleight-of-hand. Dr. Herman Klotz is a late arrival to the demonstration, but, when he finally makes his entrance, his personality monopolizes the entire room.

Nollins had worked under Klotz and knows him as an "unhallowed mixture of cosmopolitan and savant," omniscient, arrogant, curious and conquering, who had confounded, humiliated even, chemists, mathematicians, carpenters, doctors of English literature and cocksure engineers – carrying discussions "into the twilight realms of their own subject." A polymath with a malicious streak who simply couldn't "resist the opportunity of exposing the exposer." However, the demonstration comes to an end when a telephone call summons Dr. Klotz back to his home. The housekeeper, Sarah, had a terrifying experience as the Salem Spook returned from the grave, forced his way into the home and bleated at her like a goat before disappearing in a puff of smoke. Dr. Klotz discovers the Salem Spook took a cameo ring from his private collection and left a fingerprint on a hand mirror. So he convinces the others to go down to the cemetery, where the Salem Spook had been buried three days previously, to illegally exhume the body in order to compare the prints. Not only does the print on the hand mirror match with those of the dead thief, but the body they just dug up is wearing Dr. Klotz's stolen ring on his left hand! How did a ring that had been stolen that evening end up around the finger of dead man who had been buried three days of ago under already hardened clay?

This is still only just the beginning as the ghostly manifestations and impossible situations continue to pile on. The ghost of the Salem Spook, "a faintly incandescent mass hovering near a back window of the Klotz home," is seen by three witnesses in three separate locations as the "luminous figure" float from a window and "flutter around the rear corner of the house." Klotz fired three shots at the manifestation without any effect and a patrolling policeman chases the apparition until it simply vanishes into thin air. The "spectral visitant" also puts in a double appearance during a séance and the Salem Spook is chased a second time through a staircase to the roof, but without making any sound like "he floated right the stairway and out on the roof." Where he, once again, disappeared without a trace. That vanishing-act coincided with a murder discovered later in the same building.

I've glossed over many big plot points and minor details, but you get the idea. Into Thin Air is a very busy, eventful mystery novel with one or two unexpected twists and turns along the way. But how well do all those varied impossible situations stack up? Well, I'm afraid that's a question with two different answers.

On the one hand, the explanations to the various impossibilities are unlikely to excite the true devotees of the locked room mystery, because either you have seen that kind of trickery before and done better or you can make a pretty good guess how it was done – not exactly what you hope to find in a long-lost classic. On the other hand, the explanations were not necessarily bad or downright awful with various degrees in quality and, on a whole, there's an amazing consistency along the entire string of impossible situations. John Pugmire wrote in a 2005 article, "Paul Halter, A Master of Locked Rooms," even "the prolific M. Halter can't string a dozen together in one book" in reference to meager half a dozen impossible crimes in Le douze crime d'Hercule (The Twelve Crimes of Hercules, 2001). This is true for most of these miracle parades that usually have one or two core locked rooms/impossibilities with the remainder being either average or outright filler material. So I expected the glut of disappearances described in the prologue to be waved away as acts of mesmerism and hypnosis, but the authors came up with something a little better to explain how the Salem Spook could have walked through walls or sprouted invisible wings. I don't believe those tricks would have worked every single time, but prefer it over mesmerism and hypnosis. And liked how it defied my expectations. Even better were the incidents with the stolen ring recovered from a sealed grave and the visitations of the Salem Spook's ghost, which immediately recalled similar events from Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944). You can consider Into Thin Air to be a direct ancestor of Talbot's detective fiction and Rim of the Pit in particular. The impossibilities towards the end, like the chase up the staircase, were decent enough. But nothing outstanding.

So, while not anywhere near as good as Carr, Talbot or even Rawson, the avalanche of impossibilities remain consistent from the prologue to the very ending. Not one of them is truly mind-blowing when explained, but neither do they deliver a crushing blow of disappointment. I like to propose a theory how they managed to do that. Winslow and Quirk had collaborated before on a short story, "The All-Seeing Eye," which appeared in the December 5, 1915, publication of Detective Story Magazine. They both have contributed a lot of magazine fiction during the 1910s (here and here). So could they have taken all of their impossible crime ideas from their short stories and combined them into one big story? It's not uncommon for writers to rework their short stories into novel-length stories (see Bill Pronzini). And it would explain why Into Thin Air feels like an American detective story from the first decade of the previous century.

However, as noted above, Into Thin Air appears to have clung to its reputation not necessarily on its strengths as a locked room and impossible crime mystery, but as a really weird prototype of the post-1935 locked room mystery – exemplified by the quasi-meta discussion in Chapter XII. Just like "The Locked Room Lecture" in Carr's The Three Coffins, the chapter “I Learn How to Write a Detective Story” discusses the differences between magicians, mystery writers and readers. The Great Galeoto even slyly acknowledges the fourth wall ("to me these appearances and disappearances of the Salem Spook suggest only the foundation for a detective story") without breaking it like Dr. Gideon Fell ("...we're in a detective story and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not"). I loved the tongue-in-cheek analyzes of the all different types of mystery readers. Not always very flattering, but have a sense of humor about it. I suppose you can file me under the "C" category: "...C is more sophisticated. He has read other books, seen other conjurors, investigated other crimes. The trained detective type. He sorts out the various suspicious characters, tickets each doubtful word or action, decides on the weight of the evidence” and “more often than not he is wrong." Not always, but often. :D

I could go on ballooning this review with irrelevant observations, but, needless to say, I found Into Thin Air to be an entertaining, absorbing and fascinating piece of genre fiction in spite of its shortcomings. Into Thin Air is basically unpolished pulp with shallow, barely existent characterization, but, as a 1930s styled impossible crime novel from the twenties, it will not fail to enrapture students of the genre. And on that count alone, it deserves to be reprinted. 

Hold on a minute: Just one more thing! While quickly going over the review, I noticed I forgot to include something. Mike Grost wrote on his website how the storytelling "suffers from unpleasant characters" that "seem malicious and are not much fun to read about." That's largely true and, while it didn't bother me, it made one character standout as very different, the original Salem Spook. There's a playful, almost childlike innocence to the crimes and tricks described in the prologue. Quite the opposite from the grimmer, present-day impossibilities the story focuses on. The Salem Spook would have made a great and fun regular for a 1920s magazine as he robs crooks of the ill-gotten gains and performs a disappearance-act to make them sound unhinge (officer, you don't understand, I'm not crazy! Salem Spook flew away on the antique rug he stole from me). I'll shut up now.