The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) by Mack Reynolds

Back in June, I reviewed Norman Berrow's The Spaniard's Thumb (1949) and began the post, half-jokingly, explaining how Edgar Allan Poe created the detective story by secreting a spare heart from the horror genre underneath the floorboards of the locked room mystery – granting the detective story an immortal quality. You can spot the family resemblance every time the detective story, especially impossible crime fiction, evokes the supernatural or otherworldly entities. The examples are truly legion. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937) to Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017) and James Scott Byrnside's The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020). These type of detective stories have always been popular. Even if they end on a note that leaves the door to the other side standing wide open like a gaping grave.

However, I feel that aspect of the genre, particularly the impossible crime story, never progressed past the Victorian-era and early 20th century. Just take the endearing popularity of spiritual mediums and séances as stock-characters and setting for an impossible crime story. Something that goes all the way back to Max Rittenberg's short story "The Rough Fist of Reason" (1914) right up to the 2010 Detective Conan TV-special The Case of the Séance's Double Locked Room and beyond. You, of course, have your murders in haunted houses and inexplicable deaths in a room that kills, but rarely strays far away from haunted houses, murderous curses, witchcraft and the séance room.

You get your occasional windigo (Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit, 1944), a localized zombie scare (Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way, 1935), some miscellaneous creatures (Carter Dickson's The Unicorn Murders, 1935) and the rare Yeti sighting (Glyn Carr's A Corpse in Camp Two, 1955), but even rarer looked at the post-war urban myths and legends – which would lend themselves perfectly to the impossible crime story. Imagine, if you will, a group of Bigfoot hunters deep in the woods when something begins to pick them off, one by one, in an And Then There Were None-style mystery-thriller. Or an armchair detective reasoning an answer why someone believed they took a wrong turn and briefly ended up in a parallel universe. More importantly, the answer of the modern-day locked room mystery to the haunted houses, spiritualistic mediums and killing curses from the past should be flying saucers, space invaders, miraculous technology and generally The X-Files. UFOs are the perfect vehicles for today's impossible crime fiction playing on otherworldly phenomenon to explore new ideas, tricks and generally freshen up the Western locked room mystery.

Such stories and novels are not completely non-existent, but can hardly think of more than half a dozen examples. Helen McCloy's tackled the flying saucer craze of 1947 in her short story "The Singing Diamonds" (1949) and Clayton Rawson's "Nothing is Impossible" (1958) deals with the impossible murder of a UFO investigator with evidence suggesting the culprit is not originally from this planet. Fredric Brown's The Bloody Moonlight (1949) has a character who believes he's receiving radio signals from Mars and Death Has Many Doors (1951) brings the Hunters a client who's convinces she's being menaced by Martians. And subsequently expires, inexplicably, inside a locked and guarded room! The episode "The Omega Man"  (1999) from Jonathan Creek series had a great premise of a supposedly alien skeleton, deadly to the touch, vanishing from a locked and closely guarded grate, but the solution reveals both Creek and the military to have been as thick as the ice shell on Jupiter's moon Europa. Motohiro Katou lightly touched the subject in two stories from his Q.E.D. series: "In the Corner of the Galaxy" (vol. 12) is a tongue-in-cheek story in which potential evidence of aliens visiting earth gets stolen and "Outer Space Battle" (vol. 25) has a bunch of high school students faking an alien invasion by showcasing so-called "Impossible Technology." These type of impossible crime stories are a bit more common in Japan (Ho-Ling discussed a few of them), but, outside of these eight examples, there's only one Western novel that made an earnest attempt to explore the possibilities of visiting aliens as a framework for an impossible crime novel.

Mack Reynolds is best remembered today as a science-fiction author, but Reynolds started out writing short stories for the detective pulps until his friend, Fredric Brown, suggested to science-fiction – predicting the internet and "pocket computers." A year before selling his first science-fiction short story to Fantastic Adventures, Reynolds completed his first novel, The Case of the Little Green Men (1951), which he wrote as a counter to Brown's "instant classic of science-fiction-fan-related fiction," What Mad Universe (1949). The Case of the Little Green Men was not the first novel to stage a murder mystery among the members of the science-fiction fandom (Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue, 1942), but it predates the fan convention (locked room) mysteries that enjoyed some popularity during the 1980s. Bill Pronzini's Hoodwink (1981), Richard Purtill's Murdercon (1982) and Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987) spring to mind, but Reynolds beat them by three decades.

So plenty of reasons to finally return to this curiously overlooked, somewhat forgotten detective novel and see how it stands up.

First of all, The Case of the Little Green Men is on top of everything else a dark parody of the hardboiled private eyes from the pulps about a down-on-his-luck private investigator, Jeb Knight, who badly bungled a case and received "an awful razzing from the rags" – effectively ending his career as a private eye. So he sits around in the office of the now one-man outfit of Lee and Knight, Private Investigations, counting down the days until the rent was due and that would be the end. One day, three oddball characters come knocking ("...they didn't look like bill collectors"), James Maddigan, Arthur Roget and Harold Shulman, who are members of the Scylla Club. A group of science-fiction fen ("the plural of fan... we science fiction fen have developed quite a vocabulary of our own") who are of the opinion that there are aliens in the United States. Fantastical as it sounds, the three club members intend to hire Jeb Knight to investigate the possibility of there being alien life forms on our planet.

Some convincing is needed, "your tone of voice implies that the very thought of alien life is
ridiculous," but Knight needs a paycheck and "if they want to hire me to look for aliens from space, who am I to argue?" Knight is invited to attend the next meeting of the Scylla Club, "incognito, of course," because the aliens would very likely keep such groups under close observation as they would be naturally aware of their possible presence. However, Knight is a fish out of water among the oddball characters of the science-fiction fandom and the day ends disastrous when the body of one of his clients, Shulman, is found dead in the garden under somewhat peculiar circumstances. The body is squashed and mangled, like he fell from a tall building or airplane, but "the highest building in this vicinity isn't more than three stories." So did a flying saucer beamed him up and dropped him from a tremendous height or is there a more down to earth explanation? Either way, there's no doubt Shulman was murdered and that places Knight in an uncomfortably tight corner.

Shulman was Knight's client and when the newspapers learn what happened, they drag him over the coals all over again ("the Chronicle mentioned casually that in the old days... an aroused citizenry would have escorted me to the city's limits on a rail and garbed in the latest in tar and feathers sportwear") and Lieutenant Philip Davis has Sergeant Mike Quinn regularly escort Knight to his office – yelling at him to keep out of his investigation. But his remaining clients want him to continue his investigation into the alien presence, which may, or may not, be connected to the murder. So the troubled Knight goes on to submerge himself into the strange world of science-fiction fandom, UFO conspiracies, stolen fanzines and a completely motiveless murder as another fan nearly gets killed by something that must have hovered twenty feet in the air and fired a heat ray into his bedroom. Leaving a seared spot on the wall behind the bed. The absolute highlight is Knight attending AnnCon, the tenth anniversary of the World Science Fiction Convention, which the Ramble House/Surinam Turtle Press edition used for a beautiful comic book-style cover illustration. A third, apparently motiveless, attack takes place at AnnCon, but, this time, the alien firing the heat ray had better aim and left a body in one of the hallways of the hotel.

This all makes for a tremendously enjoyable story and fascinating cultural snapshot of the early 1950s science-fiction fandom as the coming Space Race loomed on the horizon, but, plot-wise, The Case of the Little Green Men is not as strong as I remembered.

I clearly recall much more attention being given to the circumstances of the attacks and murders, but Knight only muttered once, or twice, how everything seemed "utterly impossible." Regrettably, the solutions to the impossibilities are not nearly as original or ingenious as their presentation and the scant clueing didn't help. So no idea why the plot and impossibilities impressed me so much on my first read. The Case of the Little Green Men is not a detective story, but simply a story about a detective. You really have to read The Case of the Little Green Men for trials and tribulations of Jeb Knight and the "alien world" he's hurled into, which Reynolds conveys extremely well, but advise plot purists to either adjust their expectations or not bother at all. It's not going to scratch that detective or impossible crime itch.

So, yeah, not the stuff of classics I remembered. Well, where the plot is concerned, but the story itself engrossing from start to finish, even with the downer of an ending, littered with fascinating sidelines on the fandom like a visiting a workshop basement – where fanzines get put together and printed. Reynolds also sneaked a short-short SF story, "Ultimate Destiny," written by one of the characters into the narrative. There's always the bickering and disagreement you'll come across in practically every fandom ("he thinks the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is superior to Astounding"), but found the bits and pieces of early UFO conspiracies, historically-speaking, just as interesting and sometimes downright funny. The Case of the Little Green Men was published years before the Space Race got off the ground. There were no man-made satellites in orbit, the Apollo 11 mission was still eighteen years in the future and the post-war pop-culture legends and conspiracies mentioned above were still very much in their infancy with some stories appearing to have flipped around over the decades. So these lines from Arthur Roget got a good chuckle out of me, "Willy Ley, one of the top rocket authorities, says that with even our present knowledge we have the know-how to get a rocket to the moon. Why, for all we know, the government might have already done it. If they have, it'd probably be on the top secret list, classified."

 

 

The Case of the Little Green Men is not the precious, unearthly gem I remembered and will likely be moved over to "Curiosities & Oddities" whenever the next revision of "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." I must have been impressed with the idea of replacing haunted houses and curses with flying saucers and aliens, but this second read left me wanting something more meaningful or simply clever was done with the premise. However, The Case of the Little Green Men is a hilarious and sometimes sad take on the character of American private eye with the cultural and now historical background carrying the story to the final page. But decide for yourselves.