The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries (2012) by Andrew May

Recently, I stumbled across a modern, little-known volume of short stories with a book-title that captured my imagination, The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries (2012), which had an equally alluring sub-title – "Old Style Mysteries Set Amidst the Dreaming Spires of Oxford." This collection is comprised of seven (very) short stories, written by Andrew May, who published his own work under the banner of Post-Fortean Books.

So, naturally, I approached this self-published collection of detective stories with a great deal of trepidation, but an internet search brought some promising facts to light.

I found a rare review of The Case of the Invisible College, which was generally positive, but, more importantly, the reviewer noted that the lively stories were written by someone who evidently spent time learning how to write – rendering the customary criticism of self-published fiction irrelevant. The reviewer also suspected the stories were reprinted from “some periodical” and this turned out to be correct. All seven stories were originally published in the British Mensa Folio newsletters of 2009 and 2010. Mensa is the high IQ society. So I believe we can infer from this that May is probably a smart guy.

Secondly, I found May's blog, Retro-Forteana, which is dedicated to "the weirder fringes of history," but, to my delight, discovered he had also written about John Dickson Carr. I would really like to read his article about "the Fortean aspects of John Dickson Carr's 'Locked Room Mysteries'" in Fortean Times, 288.

So that was all I needed to know to take the plunge on these Fortean detective tales, but what I found was still different from what I was expecting.

The cases in this collection are tackled by SOLVED: the Secret Oxford League of Volunteer Extracurricular Detectives. A crime-fighting network lead by Pierce Stormson, Professor of Advanced Studies, who functions as "the central coordinating brain" of the league and "bore a close resemblance to the fiction character he admired so much," Sherlock Holmes – which is one of the many Holmesian charms of this series. For example, Stormson has the habit to deduce the name or occupations of clients who visit him from the first time and the stories are littered with references to previous cases (The Case of the Weeping Buddha, The Case of the Somerville Stripper, The Case of the Devil's Footprints, etc). And then there's the Watson-like narrator of the series.

Melvin Root is doing his Ph.D. on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and acts as both the chronicler of SOLVED and Stormson's right-hand man, but is prone to jump to the most outrageous conclusions imaginable. Stormson and Root draw on the specialized knowledge and talents of the various SOLVED members who are scattered throughout the university and beyond. SOLVED is pretty much the Baker Street Irregulars, the College Years.

"The Case of the Dangerous Book" is the first story and has Miss Higgs, a librarian of Old College, consulting Stormson on an 18th century book. A book bound in human-skin, belonging to a man who studied at the college in the early 1700, but the book was gifted to the college under the condition that it should never taken from its shelf as it was "a dangerous book" - only problem is that it had been taken of its shelf. The book was kept in the Lower Library, where book can only be read, which are then left at the table to be collected by the librarian. And this dangerous book was one of them. So who consulted this obscure book and why? Only three students were present at the time, but they appear to be innocent.

Stormson and Root discover a coded message inside the book and the decoding the message helps them to uncover a sordid attempt at an equally sordid crime. The culprit was a dunce, but, on a whole, this was a fun, little introductory story. Nothing outstanding, but fun.

The second tale is "The Case of the Invisible College" and, in spite of the promising title, it's not a grand-scale impossible crime story about an entire college building vanishing from our plane of existence. I'm not going to lie, I was mildly disappointed.

Stormson is called upon by Dr. John Philpott, a post-doctoral research assistant at the Department of Experimental Physics, who claims to be on the brink of a breakthrough in cold fusion, but "they" are out to suppress his work. Dr. Philpott has received a threatening letter from this nebulous group, telling him not to mess with the Invisible College, which is why he convinced the head of his department, Professor Carr, to move his equipment to a secure laboratory – a laboratory only four people had access to. However, this did not prevent the destruction of a valuable piece of research equipment. And, no, this problem isn't an impossible crime either.

The solution reveals that a respectable university, once again, served as a respectable front for a sordid criminal operation. So not a bad story, but again, nothing outstanding.

"The Case of the Shakespearaan Super-Chimp" is the shortest story in this collection, but also one of my two favorites. Bonzo, the experimental chimp of the university, is wired up to a machine and pictures appear on the screen that shows what the monkey is thinking. Like a picture of a banana. However, all of a sudden, passages from Shakespeare's Hamlet began to appear on screen. Root solves this case with the help of Sanyo Fujitsu, an "electronics wizard," but without Stormson. A nice story for something so short.

"The Case of the Abducted Astrobiologist" is next and begins when Stormson is visited by Anna Moletsky, the conference manager of Wolfsbane College, which has a profitable sideline conferences during the summer vacation when students are away. A conference is about to be held there on astrobiology and the keynote speaker is Dr. Haakon Asgrad from Oslo University, who was to give presentation on images from the Mars Rover, but Asgrad has gone missing – leaving behind an empty hotel room. Root immediately suggests that aliens come for him, but Stormson uncovered a more conventional answer rooted in academic backstabbery. Plot-wise, not a very interesting story, but ended amusingly when SOLVED dished out their own brand of justice to the culprit.

The next story, "The Case of the Ghost in the Machine," is only interesting to readers who are really fond of lurid pulp-thrillers from yesteryear, because the story reads like a tongue-in-cheek treatment of such stories.

A SOLVED member from a previous case, Sanyo Fujitsu, receives an unusual email, asking her to come to an address in North Oxford. A connection is quickly with Professor Maxwell Quain, a once eminent nuclear physicist, who went mad and began to obsess over alchemy and the occult – earning him the reputation of a mad scientist. Root is ready to tackle the case, but loses all interest in the case when he gets invited to a pagan orgy. Fortunately, for Fujitsu, he mixed up the addresses and ended up at the home of the mad scientist, who has sinister intentions and comic villain motive, but it's Stormson who comes to their rescue and saves the day.

A very pulpy story that had its moments, such as when Root broke into the locked house, because he assumed the screaming meant that the orgy had started without him, but nothing of interest for the amateur armchair detective.

However, the next story, "The Case of the Shocking Science Quarterly," is the standout title of this collection and is only story here with a truly inspired plot. I was pleasantly reminded of Charles Ardai's "The Last Story," collected in The Return of the Black Widowers (2003), which both fall in the same pulpy sub-category of the bibliomystery.

The plot concerns the extremely rare issue 23 of the Shocking Science Quarterly, a British pulp magazine, which was printed in the Summer of 1938, but, as soon as they were reprinted, the Home Office recalled all copies and had them destroyed – as it reputedly violated "one of the many obscenity laws of the time." There are, however, conspiracy theorists who claim to government wanted to suppress important scientific ideas in the back-up story, "The Amazing Anti-Gravity Machine" by Wilfred Barnes. So all 750,000 copies were recalled, but only 749,999 copies were destroyed. One copy was retained for legal reasons and stored in a sealed vault at the Bodleian Library.

This 1938 copy was finally released to the public, under the Freedom of Information Act, but the only surviving copy disappeared that same day. Or, rather, the original copy was replaced with a false copy. A switch that was discovered when Root, who studies gives him a natural interest early twenty century fiction, found a peculiar print-error on one of the pages, "Error! Reference source not found." Sure, it was a science-fiction magazine, but "a modern-day computer error" is unlikely to appear on the pages of even the most visionary science-fiction publication of the 1930s. So who made the switch and how was the person able to fabricate an almost perfect copy of a pulp magazine that had been sealed for seventy years?

A handful of people studied the magazine when it was released and all of them have potential motives.

A number of people studied the magazine and they all have agendas, and thus potential, motives to take or destroy it: Sam Rosenberg is a multimillionaire and well-known collector of 1930s ephemera. Ms. Arcadia Wolfe is a feminist writer and an anti-pornography crusader. Professor Harrison Carr is the nuclear physicist who previously appeared in "The Case of the Invisible College." Finally, Lancelot Austin, the elderly art-critic and political loudmouth.

All of them had the opportunity and motive turns out to be key that unlocks this case. This story is really a why-dun-it, but an excellent specimen of its kind with a beautiful answer as to why a false copy had to be supplied. Even more importantly, this is the only SOLVED story that actually has clues in them! So, yes, this is unquestionably the best one of the lot.

Finally, this volumes closes with "The Case of the Inverted Pyramid," which sounds interesting, but the story is a complete dud and the plot reworked Agatha Christie's "The Case of the Missing Lady," from Partners in Crime (1929), which is acknowledged by the end of the story – all that can be said about this story.

On a whole, these Fortean detective tales were entertaining, well written stories, but with exception of "The Case of the Shocking Science Quarterly," the plots tended to be unimpressive. Honestly, I was surprised that these stories, originally published in a Mensa newsletter, turned out to be relatively light-weight pastiches of Sherlock Holmes instead of Ellery Queen-like Puzzle Club stories. Nevertheless, despite their short comings, this collection stands head and shoulders above most self-published books. I think readers of Holmesian fiction will particular like this short series and anthologists should keep "Shocking Science Quarterly" and "The Shakespearean Super-Chimp" in mind. Those two stories deserve to be preserved.

The Sinister Student (2016) by Kel Richards

Back in 2016, I reviewed The Floating Body (2015) by Kel Richards, an Australian journalist and broadcaster, who has been writing crime-fiction since the early nineties and his latest undertaking is a series of historical impossible crime novels – casting C.S. Lewis in the role of both detective and lay theologian. I commented at the time that the book was a bit of a genre-mutt. A mutt who was not entirely devoid of charm, but a mutt nonetheless.

Richards attempted to write a book that was a historical novel, a detective story, a reminiscence of public school fiction, a Wodehousean homage and a sermon.

Regrettably, the result was less than perfect and an anonymous commentator observed that everything about the book struck him as recycled, "even the cover is a phony," which is hard to argue against as Richards was obviously riffing on his pet writers and hobby-horse subjects (e.g. theology and morality). 

However, I promised at the end of my review to return to this series for a second serving and, at the time, a fourth book had been announced with a curiously gruesome murder inside a locked room, but, to be upfront about it, it turned out to be more of the same – even if the impossible murder had a novel explanation. But more on that later.

The Sinister Student (2016) is the fourth book in this series and takes place in 1936, among the dreaming spires of Oxford, where the narrator of the series, Tom Morris, returns after a year of absence. Morris is hoping to secure a position as the leader writer at the Oxford Mail, but shortly after his arrival he meets his old mentor, C.S. Lewis, who invites him to a meeting of the Inklings. A real-life literary discussion club that included J.R.R. Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, Rev. Adam Fox and Neville Coghill.

All of them make an appearance in this book and Tolkien even becomes a supporting character. During their meeting, he even reads the latest chapter from a book he has been writing, The Hobbit (1937), which delights all but one person who attended the meeting.

The Honorable Aubrey Willesden is a high-handed, unlikable student who, somehow, received an invitation to the meeting, but, to Morris' shock, Willesden is of the opinion that the circle is "vastly overrated" and dismisses Tolkien's story as a mere fairy tale, which has no place in a prestigious university – only in a nursery. Morris can't believe that anyone, who listened to "the vivid storytelling in the classic tradition of the great epics," could have left the meeting unaffected, but he awakes the following morning to something even more unbelievable.

A house scout was asked by Willesden to wake him up that morning, to catch a train to London, but he can't rouse him and the solid door to his room was locked from the inside. The door is broken down by two gardeners and they make a gruesome discovery inside the room.

Willesden had been "savagely beheaded" and the wound, where his neck had been, had oozed "a great pool of blood across the floor," but the head and murder weapon were miraculously missing from the room! The only door had not only been locked from the inside, but bolted as well and the windows had been securely latched. So there was no way, whatsoever, a murderer could have entered, or left, the room carrying a severed head and a bloodied weapon. However, everything at the scene of the crime suggests that's exactly what happened.

Written at the time of this case

A local policeman, Inspector Fleming, failed to find the head and immediately handed over the case to Scotland Yard, which brings Detective Inspector Gideon Crispin and Sergeant Henry Merrivale to the university. Yes, these two characters aren't exactly, what you call, a subtle nod at John Dickson Carr and Edmund Crispin. And they don't do all that much in the story exact dragging a nearby river for the head and murder weapon.

There's also a sub-plot running through the story, known as "The Mystery of the Missing Milton," concerning a first edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), which has gone missing from the Bodleian Library and the last person who had handled it was Lewis – who is (unofficially) suspected of being the book thief. This angers his brother, "Warnie," who's determined to clear his brother's name, but, in my opinion, this plot-thread is merely filler to pad out the story. So this is as good a point as to make up the balance between the good and bad points of the book. I'll start with the bad aspects of the story.

First of all, there's the ongoing theological discussion between Lewis (a Christian) and Morris (an atheist), which are hammered, like doorstops, into various points of the narrative and this can be rather awkward as well as annoying. For example, early on in the story Lewis and Morris are looking out of the window, observing the line of policemen combing the school lawn for the missing head, when the former says "ah, yes" we "were talking about the way in which people die" and "the reason why people die." And they simply resume their discussion about the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the cross. This stop-and-go discussion littered the pages from beginning to end.

In my opinion, the book, or rather the whole series, would have been better served had Richards contained these theological discussions to a single (long-ish) chapter, somewhere, in the middle of a book – like a locked room sermon. Unfortunately, I don't believe Richards is really interested in writing strong Christian-themed mystery novels. Obviously, he likes the classic detective stories and the locked room mystery, but my impression is that he sees them as a pulpit to preach from and this comes at the expense of the plot. And that's, in my book, an unpardonable sin.

A second sin is that the story, as a whole, is pretty dull and nothing of interest really happens until the end, which is quite an accomplish for a detective story about a brutal decapitation inside a locked and bolted room. The murderer, along with the motive, is even presented to the reader on a silver platter and then gets ignored by everyone until the final chapters. This is not what a good detective story should be like!

Lastly, I really began to dislike Morris over the course of this book, who comes across here as a weak-kneed pushover, which is exemplified in how he's used by a potential love-interest, the haughty Penelope Robertson-Smyth, who treats him with a complete lack of respect – like he's nothing more than a piece of modeling clay who might be molded in something remotely desirable. It's not until the end, when she tells him she never wants to see him again, that he finally pulls himself up by his own spine and whimpers, "I'm over her now." Morris also never provides any real opposition to Lewis, who lectures him like a child.

Luckily, the book was not entirely bad and had some positive aspects. One of these aspects is that story, like its predecessor, had a good amount of charm and was very readable, but also appreciated the cryptic clue Lewis gave to Morris. Lewis told him that, over the years, some of his students have been adroit and some have been sinister. Statistically, "most have been adroit" and "only a minority sinister." Morris was an adroit student and Willesden was a sinister student. Although, I think Richards should have used the word dexterous, instead of adroit, this clue was neatly tied to the solution of the locked room murder.

A pretty good locked room trick, all things considered, that deserved a better treatment. One that would have used the arterial gushing of the neck wound as a clue. The spurt of blood, after the head came off, would have literally pointed in the direction of the (locked room) solution, but here I go nitpicking again. So let me tell you about the one thing I, as a purist, should have hated, but ended up loving it.

There's a foreign student at the university, David Bracken, who has an old-fashioned wardrobe in his room, but this wardrobe has a special quality that transported the book to the border-region where genres meet. Admittedly, this element is completely out-of-place in historical mystery novels, but this part was surprisingly well-handled and loved the reason why Bracken was present there. Not everyone is going to like it, but I was pleasantly surprised by it. 

 

On a whole, The Sinister Student wasn't an unpleasant read, but neither was it a very exciting one and the overall plot was, in spite of a relatively good locked room trick, mediocre at best. And this can be solely blamed on the author who preferred proselytizing over plotting. The storytelling and characters have their charm, sure, but this is not enough for readers to whom plot is the most important feature of a detective novel.

I'm not entirely sure whether I'll be taking a crack at the other titles in this series, The Country House Murders (2015) and The Corpse in the Cellar (2015), which are impossible crime novels, but everything suggests they suffer from the same weaknesses as The Floating Body and The Sinister Student. So, if I take another look at this locked room series, it won't be for another year or two.

So far this overlong, drag of a review and I'll try to grab something good from the pile for the next time.

Culture Clash: "The Puzzle Duel" (1928) by Miles J. Breuer, M.D.

Miles J. Breuer was an American physician and short story writer, who wrote science-fiction for Amazing Stories and Amazing Stories Quarterly, but Michael Gray, of Ontos, unearthed a scientific detective story by Breuer back in 2015 – which he accurately described as "a locked room mystery of sorts." Another locked room story that was overlooked by Robert Adey in Locked Room Mysteries (1991).

However, the locked room murder is simplistic and breaks one of Father Knox's ten commandments, but what's interesting is the inverted nature of the plot that comes with a nifty, little twist in its forked tail.

"The Puzzle Duel" was originally published in the 1928 winter issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly and is narrated by a young man, Peters, who's a student at the University of Chicago where he befriends his roommate, Raputra Avedian – a young Hindu who studies electrical theory in the physics department. They got along very well, but one day, Peter is a witness how the normally calm and composed Raputra slaps a German student across the face. Schleicher has a reputation of being personally difficult to get along with and, in response to the slap, challenges Raputra to a duel. Raputra is insulted enough to pick up the challenge.

Peters and Jerry Stoner, another student, conclude that these "benighted foreigners" consider them "under obligation to arrange a fight between them." And this where the story becomes both interesting and unintentionally funny.

You see, Peters and Stoner aren't so much worried about two students "hungering for the other's life," as they are about the police or their professors finding they're planning a duel, which resulted in an unorthodox compromise – "a modern, scientific duel." The fight is going to be "a battle of wits" to devise "a secret, silent blow." Because, you know, having them plot and scheme a perfect murder in secrecy is guaranteed to have a better outcome than as when they would have simply met in an open clearing with rapiers or pistols.

In any case, the idea is a novel variation on the inverted mystery, in which you have two known parties plotting each others demise and the premise, like was the case with the previous short story I reviewed, deserved further exploration. A mere four pages was hardly enough to do the idea any form of justice.

So, after setting the stage, the murder is committed and it's Raputra who bites the dust inside the college dorm-room he shares with Peters. The door that opens into the corridor was locked from the inside and the only window in the room had also been closed from the inside, but somehow, Raputra died on the floor of their bathroom without a mark on his body. However, this locked room trick is not a very interesting one and a blatant cheat to boot, but how the murderer received his much deserved punishment, after apparently having gotten away with murder, ended the story on a high-note – particularly liked the instrument of justice.

You can probably see the twist coming, only a four-page story, but how it was done is what made it memorable. Something John Rhode could have come up with!

So, on a whole, "The Puzzle Duel" is not a overlooked, long-lost classic of locked room genre, but, as a short story, it was a nice, quick and diverting read. You can read the story here (scroll to page 135).

Don't worry, I'll get back to a full-length mystery novel for my next review. So don't touch that dial!

The Murdered Schoolgirl (1945) by John Russell Fearn

John Russell Fearn's The Murdered Schoolgirl (1945) is the second of five titles in his lamentably short-lived series about Miss Maria Black, or "Black Maria," who's the "crime sensitive" headmistress of Roseway College for Young Ladies and educated herself on criminology by ransacking the school library – as well as patronizing her local cinema whenever they're screening an American gangster movie (e.g. One Remained Seated, 1946). During her first case, Black Maria, M.A. (1944), made an unlikely ally, "Pulp" Martin, who's an American ex-thief and confidence trickster. Martin is as loyal as a dog to the headmistress and she often engages his services to do the legwork in an investigation.

Initially, the series was published under one of Fearn's innumerable pseudonyms, namely "John Slate," but were reissued during the 2000s under his own name and that's not the only (cosmetic) change to be found in the series.

The Murdered Schoolgirl was originally titled Maria Marches On and retained its original book-title when it was first reprinted in 2003, by Wildside Press, but when Philip Harbottle submitted it to Thorpe (Linford Mystery Library) he gave the book "a more exciting generic title" – hoping that it would help "clinch the sale." Obviously, it did. Harbottle later appropriated the title for one of the Ernest Dudley short story collections he compiled and sold to the same publisher (i.e. Dr. Morelle Marches On, 2010).

As some of you probably gauged from my previous reviews, Miss Maria Black is my favorite Fearn series-character, closely followed by Chief Inspector Garth, but my reason for waiting almost a year to finish the series has nothing to do with saving the best for last. Oh, no! Our mutual friend, John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books, took the wind out my sails in the comment-section of my review of One Remained Seated.

According to John, I left "the least appealing" title in the series for the end and recommended I moved on to the Dr. Hiram Carruthers series, which bristled with seemingly impossible crimes and locked room murders (e.g. Vision Sinister, 1954). Admittedly, I was aware the book had a plot-thread about an invisible ink tattoo and an invention that could be of great value to the war effort. So I feared that the detective-element was diluted by tacky, pulpy spy material, but this turned out not to be the case and the plot actually reminded me of Agatha Christie's Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) – which also takes place at a girl's college and they even share a very specific plot-point. Something that made me wonder if Christie had read the book herself and the idea had stuck with her. Anyway...

The book begins with Miss Black receiving two guests, Major Hasleigh and his daughter, Frances, who are faced with a problem. Major Hasleigh has been widowed and has been ordered to join his unit abroad immediately, but their house has already been sold and now has nowhere to leave his daughter. So he asked if she could be enrolled into Roseway College, even though the new term had already began, but Miss Black accepts Frances as a student. And the problems begin before Major Hasleigh has even left the premise. Miss Black notices something peculiar about the military man who had appeared before her and he had given her contact information of relations that appear to be nonexistent, but Frances also turns out to be a handful.

Frances is domiciled by the Housemistress, Miss Tanby, in Study F with Beryl Mather and Joan Dawson, but she's not very sociable and "broke bounds" by sneaking away to ask an unusual question to the science teacher, Robert Lever. She wants to know "the exact position of the star Sirius." However, they get caught by Miss Tanby and she drags them to the desk of Miss Black, because fraternity between pupils and teachers of the opposite sex is strictly verböten. Frances falsely accuses Lever of attempting to kiss her against her will, which forces Miss Black to unceremoniously sack her science teacher and ground Frances for a week.

However, she keeps sneaking out in the middle of the night and gets into a scrap with the head girl of the Sixth Form, Vera Randal, who's "a vindictive bully" and decides to teach Frances, Byril and Joan a lesson leaving them in Bollin's Wood – all tied-up and without their shoes. When the three girls failed to reappear, Vera returned to the spot, but what she found was two of the girls, Byril and Joan, bound and gagged on the ground. They're both unconscious. Frances is hanging from a tree branch by the neck! So that leaves Miss Black with a dead student and a possible murderer sneaking around her college.

Miss Maria Black's double role as an amateur detective and the responsibilities that comes with being a headmistress of a college are the true highlight of this entry in the series.

The position of Miss Black, as headmistress of a girl's college, has always been in the background of the other four novels, but here the reader got to see her in the role of stern headmistress who disciplines her pupils and has to brave "a whole host of parents" after the murder – all of them loaded. She also has a Board of School Governors to please and take on such duties as arranging the funeral of Frances. A position Miss Black tries to combine with her own private investigation and such clues as silk shreds in the hanging rope, triple knots and a lack of footprints in the clearing where the hanging took place greatly occupy her mind. And then there are such complications as who stole the body or why the body-snatcher horribly burned her left arm.

As to be expected, her duties as headmistress and indulging her hobby as an amateur criminologist intertwine on more than one occasion.

I was pleasantly reminded of when Reverend Ebenezer Buckle had to pull double-duty, in Nicholas Brady's Ebenezer Investigates (1934), when a member of his flock is murdered and he had to play detective without neglecting his duty as the spiritual leader of the community.

Unfortunately, the overall plot is rather weak and easily seen through. The murderer becomes painfully obvious after the girls are discovered in the clearing, but Fearn deserves props for giving it the old college try, because he did everything he could to convince the reader to remove this character from the list of suspects. The best red herring he planted was separating the obvious motive from the murderer, but I did not slip over it. Granted, the motive did puzzle me for a while. However, there really was only one person who could have done it. So that did not deter me from solving this one long before Miss Black.

So, I would not recommend readers who are new to the series, but start with Black Maria, M.A. or Death in Silhouette (1950). Or Thy Arm Alone (1947), if you want a truly original ending for a detective story (your slanderous opinion is not wanted on this flawless gem, JJ). If you take a liking to Miss Black, you'll be able to appreciate how she plays her roles here as headmistress and amateur detective, because the plot is, regrettably, one of Fearn's weaker efforts.

A stronger plot would have been nice, but, as a fan of the series, I do not regret having saved this one for last. Sadly, I do regret that this is the last time I got to follow Miss Black around as she poked her nose where it usually doesn't belong. On the bright side, my stack of Fearn's detective novels has not subsided. On the contrary! So you can expect much, much more Fearn on this blog in the future. 

Postscript Feb. 3, 2018: Philip Harbottle emailed me the following relevant background information about the book: 

"The only thing I would add to your review (which you couldn’t have known)  is that the patriotic second world war plot—irrespective of whether or not it was a little weak—was one that Fearn deeply believed in. He wrote the book during the war and had been inspired by the death in action of his cousin (a great family friend). The Rich and Cowan edition was “Dedicated to the Memory of my Cousin, Flying Officer "Rusty" Baker." 

The Man in the Moonlight (1940) by Helen McCloy

Helen Clarkson was the birth name of "Helen McCloy," an American mystery writer, who served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and they awarded her with an Edgar statuette, in 1953, for her literary criticism, but, more importantly, McCloy is remembered for her body of work – consisting of roughly thirty novels and a dusting of short stories. McCloy distinguished herself as a mystery novelist by incorporating elements of morbid psychology and (domestic) suspense into her otherwise traditional detective plots. And the result is usually outstanding!

I've only read a handful of her detective novels, but all but one were good to excellent reads with the late-period Mr. Splitfoot (1968) being the standout title of the lot. Regardless of McCloy's successful track record, I read her only very sporadically (only two since the inception of this blog) and decided to finally pick up her much lauded Dr. Basil Willing series again this year. My perusing eye fell upon one of her earlier titles, which is a period in her career that I have criminally overlooked.

The Man in the Moonlight (1940) is not a typical American college mystery, like Clifford Orr's The Dartmouth Murders (1929), Timothy Fuller's Harvard Has a Homicide (1936) and Patrick Quentin's Death and the Maiden (1939), because the plot is driven by the war that was brewing on the European continent at the time – which I say on the assumption that the book was written during the last days of peace. However, the book already deals with refugees from Austria and Germany who fled when the Nazis took over. And one of these refugees brought a deadly problem to a small, unassuming American college.

Assistant Chief Inspector Patrick Foyle is sitting in a park outside Yorkville University, where he plans to send his own boy to, pouring over college bulletins when he notices a piece of paper. A stray bit of paper that looked out of place in the clean, tidy park.

Out of curiosity, Foyle picks up the piece of paper and astonishing reads the following, "I take pleasure in informing you that you have been chosen as murderer for Group No. 1" and to "please follow these instructions with as great exactness as possible." An astonishing note for a policeman to find, but the surprises don't end there as he's addressed by Professor Franz Konradi, a research bio-chemist, who escaped from Austria. Konradi happened to be missing paperwork and assumed Foyle had found one sheet of it.

They discuss the murderous message of the note, but their conversation ends with Konradi telling Foyle that "no matter what happens" he shall "not commit suicide." An unsettling end of a conversation. Particularly, when "the academic peace was shattered by a pistol shot" emanating from Southerland Hall.

Raymond Prickett, Professor of Experimental Psychology, was conducting an experiment by firing blank pistol shots above his infant son and meticulously writing down the reactions – not believing in the "vulgar superstition" of the Freudian mythology that his experiments will saddle his son with complexes when he gets older. So not exactly father of the year material, but the stage was now properly set and Professor Konradi dies that same evening inside his laboratory at Southerland Hall. Apparently, he actually did take his own life. Or so the evidence suggests.

According to the evidence, Konradi placed the muzzle of a revolver between his teeth, in contact with the roof of his mouth, and simply pulled the trigger and blew out the top of his head.

There were no marks of violence on the body. The lips and teeth were uninjured, which is considered clear proof of suicide, because a murderer could not make such a clean shot with an unwilling victim. An assumption strengthened by the fact that there was no smell of chloroform or tell-tale symptoms of a narcotic drug, but Foyle had not forgotten about Konradi's assurance that would never commit suicide and decided to call in the help of an old friend, Dr. Basil Willing. A psychologist who acts as a medical assistant to the District Attorney and is often consulted whenever a case needed a psychologist. However, a seemingly perfect murder is not the only problem the detective-psychologist has to contend with.

At the time of the murder, Southerland Hall was used by Prickett to stage "a shame crime" as part of psychological test and he wanted to put everyone involved (willing or unwilling) through a lie-detector test, but now that Konradi has died nobody who was present wanted to be subjected to a lie-detector test – including Prickett! But that's not the only problem muddying the waters.

There's the titular man in the moonlight who was seen that night and three different witnesses gave three different descriptions of this elusive person. A policeman who was task with guarding the crime-scene swore he heard a typing machine rattling inside the empty building that was followed by an inhuman scream, which "sounded like a lost soul cursing' the devil" and "callin' on God to let him out of hell." There are two additional murders and (of course) the potential presence of Nazi spies. Even the identity of Konradi is put into question, because he only used his elaborate equipment for simple, routine experiments.

Plot-wise, I think the best part of The Man in the Moonlight is Willing separating the red herrings from the clues as he tries to figure out what happened that night and why everyone refused the lie-detector test. This part of the plot is also peppered with the kind of arcane medical, psychological and historical facts that John Norris touched upon in his review of the book, which make for interesting reading if you love these obscure tidbits of history. I never knew the preferred method of suicide for Austrians, at the time, was a bullet through the roof of the mouth or how a certain medical condition can influence the results of a word-association test.

Only downside is that, by the end of this, there's one (somewhat obvious) suspect left standing and this person is brought to heel by a psychological analyses of the various lies this person told throughout the story. I think Willing's analyses could have used a physical clue, or two, to backup his psychological analyses, but, on a whole, the plot fitted nicely together and the motive for these murders was an original one – which affected the decisions of several characters. So, when you take a step back to look at the overall story, you can see how this book could very well have been titled A Web of Lies and Willing cutting through those lies is the real attraction of The Man in the Moonlight. It's a clever, well-written detective novel with a pleasantly entangled plot.

All in all, I really enjoyed my time with The Man in the Moonlight, even if my reading of the book was plagued by interruptions, but it convinced me to return to McCloy's work more often. She genuinely was an American Crime Queen! I have already set my sights on such titles as Dance of Death (1938), Cue for Murder (1942) and The Further Side of Fear (1967), but I'll get to at least one or two of them later this year.

So... that brings this review to an end. The first blog-post since my inaugural review of Pat McGerr's Pick Your Victim (1946), back in 2011, which does not use one of those confusing post-titles and vaguely related opening quotes. Admittedly, I cranked out this review a lot quicker now those first hurdles of finding a quote and coming up with a post-title have been removed!

The Casebook of Miss Victoria Lincoln

"I notice while all people are agreed as to the variety of motives that instigate crime, very few allow sufficient margin for variety of character in the criminal. We are apt to imagine that he stalks about the world with a bundle of deadly motives under his arm, and cannot picture him at his work with a twinkle in his eye and a keen sense of fun, such as honest folk have sometimes when at work at their calling."

- Loveday Brooke (C.L. Pirkis' "The Black Bag Left on the Doorstep," collected in The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, 1894)

John Russell Fearn has been discussed on this blog before and noted in those previous posts how incredible prolific he was as a writer of science-fiction, westerns and detective stories, published under a small army of pen names, but surprisingly, he also penned a series of adolescent detective stories for teenage girls – using the byline of "Diana Kenyon." The stories originally appeared in a monthly magazine, titled Girls' Fun, during the late 1940s.

The protagonist is Miss Victoria Lincoln, "a lady detective," who's introduced to the reader as a perfectly precious thing. A young college graduate who excelled at almost everything in school and you could find her name "on practically every plaque in the school hall." After she graduated, her rich parents helped her pursue a career as a private investigator and opened a office for her in Regent Street, in London, which came with a big paragraph in the newspaper to announce she was open for business.

So you can say Miss Victoria Lincoln is pretty much a Mary Sue at heart. Thankfully, she's not one of those insufferable, overbearing characters and keeps to her role as investigator without displaying any pesky habits or annoying character-traits – which ensured the stories were readable and fun. Something I feared would not be the case after reading the first pages of the opening story.

There are, as far as I can tell, sixteen short stories in this series that were written by Fearn. However, the character of Miss Lincoln looks to have been the property of the magazine, because I also came across a series-listing that catalogs a clump of additional stories written mostly by Hilary Ashton and Vera Painter. But only a small selection of stories that were penned by Fearn appear to have been collected after their original magazine publication.

The Haunted Gallery: The Adventures of Miss Victoria Lincoln, Private Detective (2011) collects six of the sixteen short stories that Fearn wrote and they were written in the tradition of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and his contemporaries. Some of the stories, like the first one, definitely shows they were written with the Great Detective in mind.

I'll try to run through them as fast as possible and attempt not to bloat this blog-post to the same monstrous size as most of my reviews of short story collections. But no promises.

The first story gave this collection its book-title, "The Haunted Gallery," which takes place at a "lovely and historic old pile of Bartley Towers" that had "a cloak of gloom," sorrow and mystery draped over it ever since its owner, Professor Marchant, passed away, but ever since his passing someone has been paying nightly visits to the locked gallery – which housed the late professor's collection of antiques and curios. Every night, this intruder would smash a valuable antique to smithereens on the floor. And then there's "a ghostly female form in white draperies" who's been witnessed gliding around the place.

So the niece of the professor, Caroline Gerrard, and his former secretary, Dorothy Mannall, who felt "responsible for the safety of the collection" decide to call in outside help to put a stop to the intruder. Gerrard and Mannall have both attended Shelburne College and they recall a particular talented student, Miss Victoria Lincoln, who became a private detective. She came up with an interesting, two-pronged solution to the problem: one pertained to the person who opened the gallery door at night and how that related to the ghostly figure, while the other half revealed who smashed the precious antiques and why.

This double-layered solution struck me as an amalgamation of the plots from Sax Rohmer's "The Case of the Tragedies in the Greek Room," recently reprinted in Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017), and a well-known story from Conan Doyle's The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904). No idea whether Fearn had those stories in mind when he wrote this "The Haunted Gallery," but the result is a decent enough story of this sort and a good introduction to the main-characters.

Note for the curious: Miss Lincoln recruits one of the characters, Caroline Gerrard, to become her personal assistance, once she finishes her final term at college, which she does in the third story.

The second story, "The Clue of the Blue Powder," is a mild dame-in-danger tale and begins when Lincoln meets a young woman, named Anne Seymour, standing forlornly at the little train station of Denbury. Seymour ask Lincoln where she can get a taxi, or "a pony and trap," so she can get to Riverdale Hall, but Lincoln offers her a ride and even decided to stay the night at the country house when discovering a message chalked on her suitcase – warning her to "keep away from the green room." This green room is Seymour's old nursery and the persistent threats makes Lincoln suspect there's something about the room that's very important to someone in the house.

So not a bad read at all, but the plot is nothing special and will probably prove itself to be quite a forgettable yarn.

The third story in this collection, "The Thief of Claygate Farm," is a personal favorite and marks the arrival of Caroline Gerrard to take her position as Victoria Lincoln's assistance, which had been offered to her in the opening story. Gerrard immediately has to accompany her new employer to a farm in Esher, Surrey, where Professor Lynch rented Claygate Farm as a place where he could safely store his collection of antiques and curios. Several attempts had been made to break into his London home, but the burglar is a persistent one and looks to have been more successful getting in, and out, of the farmhouse, because rings and pendants keep disappearing as if by magic – taken from "a locked room one by one."

However, what endeared this story to me was not a clever or original impossible situation. On the contrary. The problem of the locked barn house is explained with one of the oldest tricks of the trade. What made me like this story is how the false solution was used. The only opening in the locked room was "a small fanlight" set high in the far wall and this immediately made me suspicious of the pet jackdaw, Kim, that belonged to a farm boy, Tom Derry, who were both introduced at the start of the story. Only problem is that the possibility of the bird being the thief was eliminated halfway through the story and this meant they had to clear the bird's good name by finding the actual thief.

A very good and amusing short story that's actually a better introduction to the main characters than the opening story. Only drawback is the mundane explanation for the locked barn house, but that can easily be forgiven by everything that was written around it.

The fourth story of the lot, "No Shred of Evidence," can best be described as a Sherlockian tale with a classical, Golden Age-style plot and is easily the best item in this collection. I suspect this story will prove to be favorite with many of the more seasoned mystery readers.

Lincoln and Gerrard are traveling to St. Hilda's College for Girls, in Somerset, where the music teacher, Edsel B. Baxter, has gone missing and left behind a disturbing note telling that he had decided to end his own life – intending to do it in such way that his "body never will be found." But when the question his housekeeper, Lincoln and Gerrard learn that there were many suspicious anomalies in the life of the missing music teacher. One of them is that he looked remarkably slimmer when he wore his pajamas, while another concerned a pronounced limp that disappeared when he was (heard) pacing around his room.

So this makes for a typical Holmesian problem that enters Golden Age territory when the body of a man is found dangling from a tree branch in the leafiest corner of a small forest, but the victim is not the missing music teacher! As noted, this story will probably be best appreciated by seasoned armchair detectives, because the plot is a traditional one and surprisingly mature (see motive) compared to the earlier stories in this collection. Plot-wise, this is easily the best one of the lot.

The penultimate story, "The Visitors Who Vanished," can only be taken seriously when read as a spoof of the genre, because the story is borderline ridiculous with an explanation that plays on an exaggerated cliché outsiders have of classic detective stories. A cliché that never fails to make me cringe whenever it actually turns up in a detective story.

Lincoln and Gerrard are engaged by Mr. Graham West, a well-known art dealer, who had a silver statuette of a horseman stolen under seemingly impossible circumstances. One evening, someone who was pretending to be Professor Garston, a famous sculptor, called on West and was alone for less than a minute, but when West returned the study was deserted and one of his statuettes had vanished – only problem is that the entire house was either locked from the inside or had people mooning about the place. A stranger simply could not have left the house, in less than a minute, without being seen.

Obviously, the explanation hinges on a disguise and this makes it very apparent how the vanishing act was done. Something that would have been slightly more acceptable had Fearn picked a different kind of culprit. So not exactly the gemstone of this volume.

Finally, we have the story that closes this collection, titled "From Beyond the Grave," which has perhaps the most original plot of all six stories and only the second one that deals with a murder.

Lincoln and Gerrard are asked by Miss Mary Reid to prevent the murder of her beloved sister, Margaret, who's engaged to Sir Robert Carson, but Miss Reid suspects Sir Robert is only interested in Margaret's money. She's even convinced he murdered his previous wife, Lady Enid, who supposedly fell overboard from a Channel steamer and her body was never recovered. Miss Reid did some detective work of her own and believes the poor woman never set foot aboard the steamer, but was murdered "at some point en route" and the body had been hidden somewhere along the road, which makes it crystal clear how the case can be solved – namely by finding the place where the body had been stowed away.

A very well-written, good and, above all, a fun story to read. The highlight of the story is without doubt the trap that was laid for the murderer, which saw the murder victim stir from her makeshift grave and disturb her murderer's peace of mind. I might be remembering this wrong, but certain aspects of the plot appeared to be anticipating Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington (1957) by nearly two decades.

However, my memory might be playing tricks on me, because it has been eons since I read 4.50 from Paddington. In any case, "From Beyond the Grave" perfectly served its role as a memorable closing act to the overall collection.

All in all, The Haunted Gallery is an attractive collection of short stories that are either playfully innocent or deadly serious. Only the second story attempted to do a bit of both. But whether the stories are playful or serious, the plots clearly showed they were written for a younger audience, because all of them come with training wheels on. So they only pose a challenge to young neophytes, but the bright-eyed innocence of some of these stories might warm the hearts of the more jaded readers of crime-and detective fiction. Personally, I was warmed by the third one, which is a wonderful yarn in every sense of the word. I did not even care by the standard locked room trick that was used. The rest of the story was too good to disqualify it on a technicality. 

 

So my love-affair with Fearn continues! And I have, what looks to be, a first-rate village mystery novel for my next review. So stay tuned!