Alien Autopsy: "The Walking Corpse" (1950) by Clayre and Michel Lipman

Clayre and Michel Lipman were a husband-and-wife writing team who worked together on a number of plays (The Night We Ate Aunt Minnie, 1943), guidebooks (The Modern Key to Money Management, 1955) and even tried their hands at a crime novel (House of Evil, 1953) in addition to a handful of short detective stories – two of which are listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). One of those two stories provided Locked Room Murders with the strangest description of an apparent impossibility of its more than 2000 entries! Something of an accomplishment in itself.

"The Walking Corpse" made its first and only appearance in the September, 1950, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has an impossibility Adey described as "death, disappearance and reappearance of a man whose vital organs, on analysis, prove not to be human." A problem coming under the investigation of the Chief of the U.N. Division of Interplanetary Defense, George Washington Neff. What it doesn't make clear is whether "The Walking Corpse" is a science-fiction/mystery hybrid or straight detective fiction experimenting with the suggestion of something truly alien to construct an impossible crime plot around. Either way, the story sounded like a potentially interesting follow up to my previous review of Mack Reynolds' The Case of the Little Green Men (1951). Well, I was not wrong.

The story begins routinely with the harbor patrol fishing a dead man from the bay and delivering the body to the city morgue, where the body is processed and identified as G. Dorcas registered at the Hotel Clarency. A physician determines Dorcas had been in the water for about thirty-six hours and death was probably due to drowning. So far, so good, but then the vital organs get removed for analysis and the lab results blows an otherwise routine case out of orbit: the lab man's report states that the "subject was alive at the time samples were taken" and "samples are not from a human organism." That revelation brings the case under the jurisdiction of the D.I.D.

George Washington Neff is the man who convinced the U.N. Security Council to establish the Division of Interplanetary Defense, "it would be a tragic blunder to secure peace on earth, cast away our armaments and then be attacked by interstellar invaders," who appointed him the first chief of D.I.D. – despite "the subsequent uproar over his qualifications." Neff holds no university degrees or other qualifications and "his knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, astrophysics, nuclear fission, chemistry and military science was gained primarily from newspapers and science-fiction magazines." But he has a penchant for getting to the basic facts. And a knack for making pretty accurate guesses. Neff uses his own brand of truth-finding to investigate everything from the possible presence of interplanetary visitors to singing alarm clocks, sea serpents and poltergeists ("...when the first flying saucer was reported in the Northwest, a D.I.D. Observer was there in a jet-propelled plane ten minutes later"). The division is headquartered near Los Angeles "since statistics show—91.4% of all unnatural occurences in the world happen within a 600-mile radios of L.A.," but "this fact has never been publicized by that city's energetic and efficient Chamber of Commerce." So this story and short-lived series is what you get when you toss The X-Files, Scooby Doo and Fringe into the blender together with mystery writers like Theodore Roscoe and Hake Talbot. The problem of the suspected dead extraterrestrial in the morgue only gets stranger and weirder as the story goes on. How much stranger and weirder, you ask? Try a zombie not native to our solar system!

Apparently, Dorcas got up and "walked out of the morgue carrying two glass jars full of his own organs away with him." Dorcas turned up at the hotel, frightening the employees who identified the body, before putting in an appearance at the scene of a brutal murder. The newspapers have a field day with the reports of an undead alien prowling the city, but Neff reasons "there isn't any man born, and I don't care if he's from Planets X, Y, Z, or even Q, who can walk around without his brains in his head." That's where the story crashes into problem reducing it to nothing more than a curiosity.

The central plot-idea is imaginative, original and so incredibly specific, there's only one way it could have (roughly) been done without having to turn to science-fiction and fantasy for answers. So even with the sparse clueing, it should be possible to make an educated guess about the more salient details of the solution. You have to give the Lipmans some credit for going with a somewhat grounded explanation to the presence of a body with non-human organs who gets up, shakes off his rigor mortis and goes out for a stroll – scaring witnesses or leaving bodies wherever he turns up next. It would have been easy with the stated premise to pull a Thomas Carnacki and write a full-blown hybrid mystery, but the Lipmans tried to write a legitimate impossible crime about the possibility of a non-human presence in the city morgue. Just like Mack Reynolds in The Case of the Little Green Men, the Lipman's got hold of an idea that could have shaped the locked room mystery and impossible crime genre during the second-half of the 20th century, but had no idea how to deliver on it with something that would leave an indelible impression. Both are better and more memorable for their science-fiction and pop-culture dressing than their mystery plots.

So impossible crime short stories and novels swapping haunted houses, spiritual mediums and ancient curses for extraterrestrials, men in black and UFOs never got off the ground. A shame as such a type of impossible crime fiction might have enticed someone like John Sladek to stick around our genre a little longer.

Nevertheless, I'm still going to hunt down a copy of the second short story, "Man Out of Time" (1954), mentioned in Locked Room Murders as it sounds like a potentially more successful detective story than "The Walking Corpse." I peeked ahead and Adey's comment added more intrigue ("...starts with a black snow storm and a naked man claiming to be a visitor from another planet. Quite well handled throughout"). More on that sometime in the future. Next up is a Golden Age WWII-era detective novel. So stay tuned!