Invisible Green (1977) by John Sladek

In my previous blog-post, I returned to an old favorite of mine, John Sladek's Black Aura (1974), which, barring one or two small blemishes, turned out to be as great as I remembered and still regard it as one of the finest locked room mysteries crafted during the second-half of the previous century – a classic worthy of the name. So with Black Aura still fresh in my mind, I wanted to see how well Sladek's second and final mystery novel, Invisible Green (1977), compares to its prodigious predecessor. 

I read Black Aura and Invisible Green back in the late 2000s and thought at the time Invisible Green to be a marked step down. Sure, it's an excellent detective novel with an even better locked room-puzzle at its core, but felt like a hollow shell coming after Sladek's grandiosely-staged and executed homage to the detective story's Golden Age. Although tinged and streaked with bouts of melancholic nostalgia and wishful daydreaming, it gave Black Aura the panache Invisible Green simply lacked. But not everyone shares that opinion.

In 1981, Edward D. Hoch asked a group of mystery writers and reviewers to list up to ten of their favorite locked room and impossible crime novels, which resulted in a top 14 and Invisible Green secured the last slot on the list. Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) called it "an even better impossible crime novel" than Black Aura and JJ, of The Invisible Event, declared Invisible Green to be "the last possible hurrah for the classically-style detective novel." And they're not alone. So was my initial read a bit of a letdown, because I expected an encore of Black Aura and got something entirely different? Or is everyone else wrong as usually? Time to find out!

Sladek's Invisible Green opens with a prologue set in autumn, 1939, introducing the reader to a murder-of-the-month club, the Seven Unravellers, to whom "murder meant a game with rules" and "suspects with false alibis, clues becoming red herrings, and courtroom revelations" – who have regular meetings "to chew over the latest murder fiction." Miss Dorothea Pharaoh is an armchair logician who has a "genius for playing word games and solving logic puzzles" as well as the club's only female member. Major Edgar Stokes is a retired army man and "a bit of a crypto-Nazi" complete with visions of a New Anglo-German Europe, but he's also very weary and paranoid of a Communist conspiracy. Gervase Hyde is an artistic, bohemian eccentric interested in the psychological angle and "real crimes seemed to interest him more than fictional ones." More than one meeting ended with Major Stokes and Hyde yelling Nazi and Communist at each other. Frank Danby, a London police constable, is "a big, violent, short-tempered young man" who "delighted in sensational news stories of shotgun murders" and “did not fit in with the Unravellers.” Leonard Latimer and Derek Portman were the hope for the club's future. Latimer studies chemistry at London University and preferred detective stories in which the "murderer is hanged by the evidence from a single speck of dust," while Portman is a young solicitor's clerk "honing his already sharp intellect on the legalistic turns of Perry Mason novels" and "cutting into the legal fabric of other murder mysteries." Finally, there's the old baronet, Sir Anthony Fitch, who everyone calls Sir Tony.

So the Seven Unraveller were not unlike "a lot of suspects in an old country house murder," but the club was dissolved in 1940 and they would not meet again until more than thirty years later. 

During the 1970s, Miss Pharaoh decides to hold a reunion for the six surviving Unravellers ("Sir Tony was gone these many years") and begins to send out invitation, but Major Stokes has sunken neck deep into paranoia. Major Stokes believes he's the target of an international conspiracy who sees "secret clues in the Times crossword" and hears "the old cough code" at the cinema. So he reads a secret message ("miss it") in the invitation and a potential ally in Miss Pharaoh, but becomes genuinely worried when she learns Major Stokes has been threatened by someone calling himself Green. Mr. Green has called on Major Stokes twice to either offer him money to go away on a long holiday or to explain "how an old person living on his own can slip and fall in the bath," which culminated with the murder of his cat. Miss Pharaoh used to exchange chess problems and logic puzzles with Thackeray Phin through the mail and asks him to investigate this Mr Green character. And that brings the story to the first locked room-puzzle of the story.

Major Stokes had turned his house into a small fortress. The front-and back doors were locked, chained and barred and "every single window was nailed shut with ten-penny spikes." The passages were strewn with talcum powder to show footprints and "there were threads strung across one or two steps on the stairway," which left "no chance of entry at all." On top of that all, Phin was watching the house when Major Stokes died in the hall toilet of his fortified home. Apparently, he died of a heart attack, but why were his fingers nails broken and bloody? And if he clawed at the dry, flaky paint on the walls, why was there no dried paint under his nails? Sladek really knew how to stage an impossible crime and deliver on its promise!

Firstly, I was surprised at how much I had forgotten about the plot, characters and story in general. Based on my shoddy, often Watson-like memory, I assumed my conclusion on why so many preferred Invisible Green over Black Aura was going to be that former has only one, really well-done and original locked room-trick – which made it a much tighter and focused story. Secondly, I had not only forgotten how brilliantly that locked room-trick is put together, but that there are two additional impossibilities. A second murder is committed roughly halfway through the story as one of the Seven Unravellers is stabbed "inside a house which was watched and guarded at every exit." The third murder has "a twist on the locked- or guarded-house theme" as nearly every suspect worthy of investigation "was locked up in another house, miles away at the time of the crime." Admittedly, the second locked room murder has nothing special, or innovative, but the third murder pretty much applies the locked room mystery to the problem of the unbreakable alibi. I think it would have carried the approval of both Christopher Bush and Tetsuya Ayukawa. Thirdly, the story and characters were not as drab or humorless as I remembered them being.

My first reading left me with the impression that Sladek had resigned to the reality he rebelled against in Black Aura with bouts of nostalgia, daydreaming, humor and baroque crimes. Just compare the magnificently-staged levitation murder of a pop-star in the house of spiritual commune to the death of a lonely, paranoid pensioner in a tiny toilet with dry, flaky walls. That's how the whole story must have impressed me at the time, coming right off Black Aura. It must have struck me at the time as a Thackeray Phin mystery drained of its color and spirit. I probably even thought the color-coded clues were an attempt to give the story some much needed color, but Phin is practically the same right down to his strange, outlandish garb ("...on your way to the set of a 1930s jungle film?") to the way he tackles a particular problem or piece of the puzzle. I liked how he got to see Portman without an appointment ("The tapes. You know?") or twisting the arm of a commercial laboratory to test the remains of the murdered cat he had dug up for poisons ("...otherwise, we might begin to believe you're doing animal experiments in your lab, eh? Vivisection?"). Just toned down a little. Or, perhaps, you can say Black Aura played to the crowd while Invisible Green simply told the story. So no daydream sequences. And very likely another reason why some prefer it over its predecessor.

More importantly, Sladek demonstrated he could do so much more than constructing locked room-tricks as Invisible Green is also an excellently plotted, old-fashioned whodunit. How the awful, highly elusive Mr. Green fits into the overall plot shined with that Golden Age brilliance, but with a decidedly modern twist. However, it showed that a changing world offered new possibilities to plot and tell a detective story. Not less. Just look back at the turn-of-the-century mystery writers who began to apply science and naturalism to a genre previous dominated by secret passageways, fictitious poisons and overwrought melodrama. But, as to be expected, Sladek also tipped his deerstalker to some of the greats of the past. The color-coded clues everyone receives like an orange tossed through a window, blue paint on a gravestone, ripped up Yellow Pages (etc.) is straight out of the playbook of Ellery Queen and the alice-door an obvious nod to John Dickson Carr. I liked the idea of an alice-door and how it was eventually used. Not as subtle as a Judas window, but, you know, it gets the job done.

So, yeah, Sladek's Invisible Green is light-years better than I remembered, but is it a better detective novel than Black Aura and has it any shot at becoming my favorite Sladek locked room mystery? Maybe and absolutely not! Judging purely based on their merits as plot-driven detective novels, they're about even-keeled and picking a favorite comes down to personal taste. I'm not blind to the convincing case that can be put forward in favor of Invisible Green as its the more subtle of the two, which is an important trait for a classic mystery novel to possess. However, if you stage a grand-style locked room mystery that feels like a genuine continuation of the 1930s detective story, you simply have my heart and soul by the balls!

That being said and having reread Black Aura and Invisible Green back-to-back, I can feel the blackhole Sladek left behind when abandoned the detective story. Not only because we very likely missed out on several top-tier locked room mysteries, but because he decided to bow out at a time when the traditional, fair play detective story needed someone like him the most. Sladek's regrettably small, but significant and relentlessly amusing, detective fiction gets reprinted in the hopefully not so distant future.