The Hit List: Top 10 Works of Detective Fiction That Have Been Lost to History

Last time, I used the top 10 format to do a follow-up to my list of reprint suggestions, "Curiosity is Killing the Cat: Detective Novels That Need to Be Reprinted," because "Curiosity is Killing the Cat: Non-English Detective Novels That Need to be Translated" lacked the scope and depth of the reprint list – restricted to what I happen to know is out there. Mostly consisting of French and Japanese titles. So whittled down the list to ten tantalizingly-sounding, non-English and untranslated mystery novels covering countries from Europe and Asia to South and North America. That gave me an idea.

For years, I wanted to redo two depressing blog-posts, "The Locked Room Reader: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories" and "The Locked Room Reader: A Return to the Phantom Library," both old, badly written and incomplete. However, the subject of those two blog-posts never stopped fascinating me. A subject known in other parts of the internet as "Lost Media."

John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) introduced me to concept of "lost detective stories" as the plot concerns a rare, hitherto unknown manuscript of an Auguste Dupin short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even convincingly creates a passage from that lost story, but never suspected lost detective stories were more than fiction nor so abundant. Over the years, I've learned of a shocking number of unpublished, now irretrievably lost detective novels written by some respectable names in the genre. And lost came with its own story ranging from genuine tragedy to the mundane. I unfortunately messed up the first two, incomplete posts by muddling the unpublished with truly lost.

So, concentrating only on lost detective stories, you won't find Anthony Boucher's unpublished The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole or Christianna Brand's never seen before The Chinese Puzzle on this list, because both manuscript still exist. And, potentially, could be published at some point in the future. This depressing list will only go over the detective novels which can be labeled as permanently lost or made it to print in an inaccessible, parallel universe. On the other hand, knowing my track record, one of the crumbling, supposedly vanished manuscripts mentioned will magically turn up before the list gets posted and make my half-baked lament look a bit hammy. Let's find out what's currently residing on mystery shelves of the Phantom Library.

 

1. The Last Voyage of Jacques Futrelle and The Thinking Machine

Jacques Futrelle was a journalist, theatrical manager and mystery writer who created America's answer to Britain's Sherlock Holmes, Professor Augustus S.F.X. van Dusen, better known to the world as "The Thinking Machine" – appearing in some forty short stories from 1905 to 1912. Sadly, Futrelle boarded the RMS Titanic and died when it tragically sank during the early hours of April 15, 1912, but not before forcing his wife, May Futrelle, into a lifeboat. The last glimpse she caught of her husband was him casually smoking a cigarette on deck with John Jacob Astor IV (Futrelle's "bravery aboard the Titanic is the ultimate example of manliness and the act of a true gentleman"). All of "the stories that Jacques Futrelle wrote during his stay in Europe were lost as well that terrible night, leaving his canon far short of what it might have been." This is the only lost on this list that does not bother me at all, because I like the idea Van Dusen was right there with Futrelle until the end.

 

2. John Dickson Carr ("Carter Dickson") & J.B. Priestley's Unpublished and Forgotten Mystery Novel/Serial

John Rhode and Carter Dickson's Fatal Descent (1939), alternatively published as Drop to His Death, is one of those rare collaborations between two well-known Golden Age mystery writers. Regrettably, the book is not a crossover between their two series-detectives, Sir Henri Merrivale and Dr. Priestley, but at least it was published. Douglas G. Greene writes in John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995) Carr and playwright J.B. Priestley agreed to write a serial, The Dancing Men, to be serialized in the British magazine Answers and "a book edition was announced under the name The Dancing Postman." Apparently, the story was completed as "the two men were paid three hundred pounds for it," but Answers never published it and "no book under that or a similar title appeared during the 1930s or early 1940s." So unless it was published elsewhere under a different title and pseudonyms, The Dancing Postman is likely lost forever.

 

3. The Self-Destruction of Marcel Lanteaume

In 2019, John Pugmire's Locked Room International published a translation of Marcel Lanteaume's La 13e balle (The Thirteenth Bullet, 1948). One of three unique novels, "the fruit of the unbridled, wild, weird and surprising imagination of a heretofore unknown author," published shortly following the liberation of France. La Labyrinth edition contained "a mouth-watering list" of forthcoming novels, but poor sales numbers prevented their publication. A disappointed and frustrated Lanteaume destroyed all his unpublished manuscripts with such tantalizing titles as Crime rue des Fantasques (Crime in Weird Street), La Morte sous scellés (The Dead Woman under Seal), Le Barbier massacré (The Butchered Barber), La Vallée dans la brume (The Valley in the Mist) and La Plaine sous le soleil (The Plain under the Sun). So "what other marvels of superb logic and subtle wit did they engender? We shall never know." Only bright spot is that non-French speaking mystery fans still have translations of Lanteaume's Orage sur la Grande Semaine (Storm Over Festival Week, 1944) and Trompe-l'œil (Optical Illusion, 1946) to (hopefully) look forward to.

 

4. The Four Lost Mystery Novels of a Short Story Specialist

Joseph Commings was together with Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges a short story writer specialized in locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, but, starting in the early 1960s, the short story market began to stagnate and dry up by the end of the decade – forcing Commings to try his hands at writing novel-length mysteries. The Doctor Died First was his first attempt and abandoned the book after four chapters, but eventually completed four, intriguingly-sounding detective novels starring his short story series-detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. The New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark "was taken by an agent to send to France" and "was never seen again." One for the Devil reportedly was a stunning locked room mystery, "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," but was together with the two non-impossible crime novels, Operation Pink Poodle and The Crimson Stain, rejected by every publisher in New York. So none of them made it to print and the manuscripts were likely reduced to "yellowing crumbling carbons" that "will never be seen this side of heaven." Fortunately, there are still more than enough uncollected short stories to do Banner Warnings: The Inexplicable Cases of Senator Brooks U. Banner (20??), the long-awaited sequel to Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004).

 

5. The Missing Mr. Tarrant

C. Daly King was an American psychologist and mystery writer who penned six detective novels, most extremely obscure today, but earned most of his praise with a series of short stories featuring a garnered most of his fame with a series of short stories about Mr. Trevis Tarrant. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine announced in its December, 1946, issue that King has completed the manuscript of the first Travis Tarrant novel, The Episode of the Demoiselle D'ys ("publishers, get busy! Snag that manuscript!"). There were no takers and the book was never published. Mike Grost cites King's lost novel as "evidence of the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers," which comes with the caveat that the "deliberate suppression" part has been disputed. However, I agree that a trend among publishers emerged at the time to lower the standards of crime fiction and generally began to shy away from the traditional detective story. That closed the door to nearly everyone except the well-known, solidly established names of the genre. More on that in a moment.

 

6. Hake Talbot Sees His Third Novel Vanish Into Thin Air

Henning Nelms was an American magician and under the name "Hake Talbot" penned two beloved fan favorites, The Hangman's Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944), but it proved insufficient to get the third Rogan Kincaid mystery novel published. The Affair of the Half-Witness remained unsold and the whereabouts of the manuscript is unknown, which after all this time means it got destroyed or forgotten about and eventually thrown away. So why did Talbot's third novel fail to find a publisher? Probably the same story as with Commings, King and many others. The publishers began to favor the type of crime fiction that was easier to pump out rather than the traditionally-plotted, Golden Age detective fiction that required some finely-honed skills or talent to do successfully. There are, however, other reasons why some detective novels never got published and faded out of existence.

 

7. When Losing Mystery Novels Becomes a Habit

John Russell Fearn is my favorite pulp writer and second-string mystery novelist. I use the term "second-stringer" affectionately, but even a pet second-stringer has undeniable, often impossible to defend drawbacks that usually have to do with quality control – except my pet second-stringer cultivated a very peculiar drawback. Fearn was as prolific in producing so-called "lost media" as he was in strange, weirdly imaginative science-fiction and detective stories. In 1946, Fearn wrote "several wonderful impossible crime novels" that were axed due to hardcover publishers in the UK struggling with a post-war paper shortage. Fearn also sold three novels under the penname "Rosina Tarne" of which one actually came close to making it into print. You Murdered Me would have been a hybrid mystery in which the ghost of the victim helps her grieving boyfriend and detective to find the murderer. The book was advertised as forthcoming on the jacket of Gordon Meyrick's The Ghost Hunters (1947). The Eyes Have It would have been about a husband-and-wife detective team investigating a murder at a swimming pool, but nothing is known about Murder in Suburbia. A final title to be added to the list is Unfinished Journey, another impossible crime story set on a train, but the manuscript got rejected. Fearn also was a loyal patron of the cinema and an amateur filmmaker who ambitiously made a full-length, home video adaptation of the unpublished novel. A copy, of sorts, still exists, but, reportedly, it's unwatchable.

A note for the curious: all of this information was provided to me by Philip Harbottle, literary agent extraordinaire, who tirelessly worked for decades to preserve Fearn's legacy and work. More importantly, Harbottle rescued several previously unpublished novels from limbo. Such as the pulp-thriller The Man Who Was Not (2005) and the truly excellent Pattern of Murder (2006), which somehow remained unpublished during his lifetime. So not all was.

 

8. Lost in Liquidation

R.T. Campbell was a poet who wrote eight lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek detective novels in the spirit of Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin featuring a parody on John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, Professor John Stubbs – a loud, portly beer guzzling botanist. Five more titles in the series were announced as forthcoming by his publisher, John Westhouse, but, in 1948, they went into liquidation. The Hungry Worms Are Waiting, No Man Lives Forever, Death is Not Particular, Death is Our Physician and Mr. Death's Blue-Eyed Boy never made it to print nor turned up somewhere else. And are now considered to be lost.

 

9. Two for the Price of One

This is twofer! Coachwhip is one of the publishers that made the reprint renaissance possible by bringing unjustly forgotten authors and long out-of-print mysteries back into circulation. Willoughby Sharp (Murder of the Honest Broker, 1934) and Kirke Mechem (The Strawstack Murder Case, 1936) were two of those forgotten authors who had their work finally return to print. Sharp had two mystery novels published and Mechem only one, but not for a lack of trying. In a 2013 blog-post, Curt Evans reveals Sharp "was scheduled to produce a third detective novel in 1935," The Mystery of the Multiplying Mules. A short description was actually given in promotional material, "Inspector Bullock is called in by the Logans not because something has been stolen, but because something has been added to their household," but the book never materialized. In the same post, Curt notes Mechem also wrote an additional detective novel (Mind on Murder), but the manuscript was rejected by his publisher ("...because it dealt with miscegenation") and never got published.

 

10. The Lost Generation

For the last entry on this list, I want to return to King's unpublished and lost mystery novel. I noted how Mike Grost sees the lost of The Episode of the Demoiselle D'ys as evidence of the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story and how some find that a bit too strong. I always assumed it was simply short-minded, heavy-handed favoritism that pushed the traditional detective novel out of the picture during the post-war era. Over the past few years, I've come across the remnants of, what should have been, the new generation of Golden Age-style mystery writers. A small group of writers comprising Kip Chase (Murder Most Ingenious, 1962), Charles Forsyte (Diving Death, 1962), Jack Vance (The Fox Valley Murders, 1966) and a special mention for Paul Gallico's two Alexander Hero novels, Too Many Ghosts (1961) and The Hand of Mary Constable (1964). All tried to continue the Golden Age tradition in their own way, often with a modern slant, but most of them didn't get more than two, or three, novels published – before you can hear the plug being pulled on their little dalliance with the whodunit. If you hold their work up against what was being published at the time, you almost get the idea that they accidentally slipped through the meshes of the net. Just like John Sladek's beloved Black Aura (1974) and Invisible Green (1977) more, or less, came about accidentally, because Sladek won a short story contest with "By an Unknown Hand" (1972).

You would expect more writers to have appeared in the '60s and '70s, who read Golden Age mysteries during the '30s and '40s, wanting to give their take on their favorite type of detective story or character. And the aforementioned author makes their absence look even more conspicuous. So that begs the question... how many Chases, Foresytes and Sladeks got consistently rejected, regardless of quality, because they wrote Golden Age-style, fair play detective fiction containing the p-word (plot)? Is that favoritism or suppression? Either way, I suspect publishers moving away from the traditional detective story and slamming the door in the face of new writers resulted in the lost of an untold amount of detective fiction. Ever since discovering post-1950s writers, like Chase and Forsyte, I can't help but wonder what could have been had the traditional detective story been allowed to change and adept to the times. A legitimate claimant to Agatha Christie's crown might have emerged or enough of an incentive would have existed for Sladek to take on the mantle of John Dickson Carr.

This was depressing enough for one post. I don't know when, or if, I'll do another one of these top 10s. Currently, I've no idea for an original theme or worthy topic to do another one, unless "The Hit List: Top 10 Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be Translated" gets enough suggestions to do a follow-up. So next up is likely going to be a review of either Case Closed or Clayton Rawson. Stay tuned!