Going Ashore: "The High House" (1948) by Hake Talbot

Henning Nelms was an American magician and authored a trickster's manual, entitled Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurers (1969), but more importantly, he penned two memorable examples of the locked room mystery novel, The Hangman's Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944) – published as by "Hake Talbot." Two very popular novels among devotees of the impossible crime tale.

Robert Adey praised Talbot in Locked Room Murders (1991) as the only mystery writer to "successfully emulate" John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson. A writer who combined "Carr's flair for atmosphere and the bizarre" with "Rawson's magical tricks," which endeared the books to the avid locked room reader. Not as well remembered are Talbot's two short stories.

"The Other Side" was never sold during Talbot's lifetime and remained unpublished until it was included in Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990), but Jack Adrian frustratingly noted in the introduction Talbot wrote numerous short stories featuring his professional gambler and ex-convict, Rogan Kincaid – which also remained unsold and where either destroyed or lost! A similar, horrifying fate befell the third, full-length Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. There is, however, a second story that made it into print long before "The Other Side." It's just a little bit more difficult to find.

As far as I know, "The High House" has only appeared in the Spring, 1948, issue of the Mystery Book Magazine and nowhere else. Not in English anyway.

"The High House" begins, as you would expect from Talbot, with a dark, brooding story of a deadly, century-old curse that lies upon the house of a seafaring family. Back in the 1800s, Captain Thomas Danvers made "a voyage to the Spice Islands" and brought back a handful of natives, a father and four sons, who erected the family mansion. This explains why "the house spoke imperceptibly yet insistently of Oceania." Captain Danvers promised the natives to take them back home on his voyage, but the promise was rescinded when he got into the European trade. So the old native placed a curse on the family home and then, together with his sons, flung themselves into eternity from the captain's walk on the roof.

A curse promising that if "the heads of the Danvers family ever gave up the sea" to settle down in the ancestral seat, "the house would kill them" until "it had taken life for life" and it has lived up to its promise – killing three men over a hundred-year period. So this brings us to the present-day and the elderly, dying Admiral Nat Danvers has returned to the family home.

There are four more people in the house on that fateful evening: Everett Danvers is Uncle Nat's last living relative and the house is being manned by the son of the old Danvers' housekeeper, Steve Phelps. Anne Corwin is Everett's love interest and she brought along that adventurous-minded detective, Rogan Kincaid, who is asked by her "to lift the Doom of the Danvers from Everett." Unfortunately, Kincaid's presence is unable to prevent the Old Admiral falling to his doom from the captain's walk when he was all alone on the roof-top. Or so it appears!

However, "The High House" suffers from the same problem as "The Other Side" in that the premise was better than its ending with a solution lacking the ingenuity of the locked room-tricks from the novels. Another problem here, unlike in "The Other Side," is that the fall from the roof-top is never really presented as an impossible crime, because Talbot never showed why it should be considered a locked room murder of sorts. Something weakening a solution that already some dodgy parts in it.

The premise of "The High House" perfectly demonstrates why Talbot is always compared with Carr, eerily bringing together the lore of the sea with the superstition originating from a far-flung island, but the execution of the plot shows the short story format was not suited for Talbot's talents – who obviously needed a novel-length canvass to work his magic on. Regardless, I'm still grateful to have been able to judge this story for myself and many thanks to a certain person who kindly provided me with a copy.

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."

- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) 

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories.

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Once a lost, unpublished story

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up!