Night Terrors: "The Empty Coffins" (1984/2009) by John Russell Fearn

2021 saw the publication of two so-called hybrid mysteries, Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017), which introduced the living dead into the environment of the traditionally-styled detective story with two vastly different outcomes – ranging from the horrifying to the philosophical. Imamura's Death Among the Undead is a classic locked room mystery cast like a zombie survival horror flick, while Masaya's Death of the Living Dead simply blurred the lines that once separated the dead from the living. And they are both awesome! 

A successful blending of the traditional, fair play detective story and genres like fantasy, horror and science-fiction is very difficult to pull off without compromising one or the other. Masaya and Imamura showed it can be done even with something as fantastical as the walking dead. There happened to be a (very short) pulp novel on my TBR-pile that tried to play a similar game with vampires. But how successful was it? Let's find out! 

John Russell Fearn began "what was to become a fateful association with a new firm of publishers in London," Scion Ltd, in 1948 and first commissions were for romantic novelettes and later novel-length Westerns, but, during the early 1950s, Scion took the leap to science-fiction and played with the idea of a horror-detective line – which was scrapped in favor of their science-fiction line. Several decades later, Philip Harbottle gained access to Fearn's study, untouched since his untimely death in 1960, when his widow, Carrie Fearn, passed away in 1982. The study proved to be "an Aladdin's Cave of manuscripts, books, and cans of films written and produced by Fearn himself." One of the manuscripts was of an unpublished horror-detective, entitled No Grave Need I (c. 1950), which Scion returned and was put away to collect dust. Harbottle published a small chapbook edition of the novel in 1984 followed twenty-five years later by a professional edition under the title "The Empty Coffins" (2009) "along with all of the other unpublished mss" he salvaged. Harbottle is the only one who just walks in and out of the Phantom Library with his arms loaded with lost books and unpublished manuscripts.

Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" takes place in a small village on the south coast, Little Payling, which comprises of two, tightly intertwined plot-threads. One of these threads concern a young widow, Elsie Timperley, who had married a drunk brute, but she put up with George Timperley's abuses to ensure she inherited everything he owned. A small fortune which would open the way to marry her childhood friend and true love, Peter Malden, who's the local motor dealer and garage owner. Little Payling is a small village populated with typical village people "eager to seize on the slightest hint of scandal" and they found it indecent Elsie has been seen the company of Peter so many times George was "barely cold in the grave." Elsie has a good reason to get married as soon as possible, because a well-known mystic and seer, Rawnee Singh, told her she has "no future beyond the next eight months." And that can only mean death.

The second plot-thread is introduced when a local girl is attacked in the cemetery. Madge Paignton used the cemetery as a short cut one night when a barefooted creature in a funeral shroud attacked her and left "two gashes close to the jugular" on her throat. The country GP and student of the occult, Dr. Meadows, believes it was the work of a vampire, which belongs to the realm of "folklore and legend." But the situation has gotten from bad to worse during Elsie and Peter's honeymoon. A farmer and a local builder were brutally murdered within the span of a week and their bodies were "almost drained of blood." This is not the last deadly attacked in the village with everything pointing to Elsie as the next victim.

What about the detective aspect of the story, you ask? Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" actually did a good job in keeping the reader guessing which events have a supernatural origin and which are faked, but eventually it becomes evident "there's a human hand" behind some of the attacks – one of "the worst criminals ever, apparently." Consequently, "The Empty Coffins" turned out to be crammed with impossible crimes and locked room mysteries, but let the reader be warned, the ending plunges the story deep into pulp territory. So don't expect anything too much from their solutions, because, even by pulp-standards, not everything stands up to scrutiny. Such as (ROT13) vzvgngvat n jryy-xabja fcrpvnyvfg va urneg naq oybbq qvfbeqref jura gur arjfcncre urnqyvarf ner fpernzvat nobhg “Gur Yvggyr Cnlyvat Ubeebe” jvgu nyy gur rlrf va gur pbhagel sbphfrq ba gur ivyyntr or gur cercbfgrebhf tenir fvtug zrpunavfz erirnyrq ng gur raq, which was a little too much. The plot was further marred by gur cerfrapr bs n ahzore haxabja nppbzcyvprf, frperg cnffntrf naq ulcabgvfz with the human culprit standing out like a tombstone on a front lawn.

So not one of Fearn's most inspired attempts to create a hybrid, pulp-style mysteries or his most original impossible novel, which he combined in a much better in fashion in novels like Account Settled (1949) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951). There is, however, a brief shimmer of brilliance in how the (incredibly pulpy) motive and some of the (even more pulpier) methods that explained why the corpses had to be sucked bone dry. And the horror-elements of the story were put to good use to create a couple of good scenes. I particularly liked the illegal, moonlit exhumation of George's grave and Peter's nighttime visitor to his bedroom ("...was foul, unclean—something dead yet still alive"). This helped the faked phenomena blend in with the real ones. You'll probably be surprised to learn which were real and which were fake.

The horror aspect of the story is often very well done and, on a whole, "The Empty Coffins" is a readable, pulp-style mystery centering on the activities of a vampire and that's always going to be a different beast from your regular whodunit or locked room mystery. So adjust your expectations going in and remember "The Empty Coffins" is not Fearn at his best or most creative. Just a quick, dark-light and atmospheric read making a spirited attempt to incorporate vampires into a detective story. 

A note for the curious: So, while Fearn was not entirely triumphant, he unwittingly provided a blueprint on how to do it. Dr. Meadows explains "a vampire proper is the ghost of a suicide, or some such excommunicated person, who seeks vengeance on the living by attacking them and sucking away their blood" – which gives him a pretty good idea who the vampire in their cemetery is. This also gave me an idea how a proper, fair play detective story with real vampires could play out. Just imagine one of those small, ancient English villages where over the span of a year half a dozen people have died from various causes. But no murders or suicides. Or so everyone assumes until villagers get attacked and killed by, what appears to be, a real vampire. So the detective has to discover the vampire by delving into the past of the six recently deceased village to see if the country doctor misdiagnosed a suicide as natural causes or accident. A subplot can be added with someone using the activities of the vampire as a cover to commit a murder and stages a locked room/impossible crime to blame the vampire. Anyway, I'll try to pick something a little more conventional next time.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle and John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey wrote in his preface to the second, revised edition of Locked Room Murders (1991) that after the 1930s, "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels" was John Dickson Carr with the only other author "who produced them in any quantity" being a little-known pulp writer, John Russell Fearn – who wrote (roughly) twenty locked room novels between Black Maria, M.A. (1944) and his untimely passing in 1960. These include the posthumously published The Man Who Was Not (2005) and Pattern of Murder (2006).

In my reviews of The Fourth Door (1948) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951), I went over the wealth of fresh ideas and originality Fearn brought to the detective story. And, in particular, to the impossible crime story.

Regrettably, the pile of unread Fearn novels have dwindled over the years and only one, of the twentysome, locked room mysteries remained on my wishlist. An extremely obscure, hard-to-get Western-style mystery, Merridrew Marches On (1951), which has a curious backstory that has remained invisible to most locked room readers until now.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle, editor, writer and Fearn's long-time literary agent, was first published by Robert Hale in their hardcover "Black Horse Western" series and the synopsis had a specific line that attracted my immediate attention – a dead man is found on a mountain trail with "no footprints in the dust beside his body." What can I say? Every body of water has its shallow parts. However, when I contacted Harbottle to inquire about Meredith's Treasure potential status as an impossible crime novel, he told me that it was actually based on two separate already published novels written by Fearn. Namely the previously mentioned, very obscure, Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again (1952). So what's the backstory?

Harbottle explained that, in 2000, Robert Hale had lost a lot of their regular writers and his Cosmos Literary Agency had been hired to help them maintain their ten new titles every month "Black Horse" line. His still active writers were able to supply new novels along with scores of their older titles, which Hale reprinted with due acknowledgments and Harbottle himself supplied a number of new novels that were based around a number of disparate Fearn short stories and novelettes. As copyright holder of all Fearn's stories by virtue of his widow's will, Harbottle was legally entitled to create these posthumous collaborations.

Harbottle explained that he had "to completely rewrite and "stitch" two, and sometimes three, separate stories together, changing all the different heroes and heroines to the same person" to "expand them to novel length" – whilst "retaining much of Fearn's original text." There was, however, an important proviso imposed by Hale's library buyers. They could only reprint old paperbacks and, under no circumstances, would the library buyers accept hardcover reprints. Fortunately, most of his clients had published Westerns mostly in paperbacks and only Fearn had done hardcovers in any quantity, which left out the Merridrew Westerns. A series Harbottle thought "represented some of his very best work." So he decided to rewrite the Merridrew character/books, which made them qualify as brand new works to satisfy Hale's library buyers. Harbottle explained that the originals had modern setting, the 1950s, but all the characters in the small, isolated Arizona town ride around on horses, carry gun belts and six shooters and act just like old-time cowboys. Every now, and then, the town is "invaded" by the modern world when outsiders arrive in cars, or trucks, who bring modern equipment with them. So he decided to rewrite them as all taking place in the old west (c. 1890). No cars, no airplanes, no radios. Merridrew became Meredith. He rewrote the first and second novel, but the third and fourth posed a real problem.

Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again have plots involving their modern-day setting, such as the discovery of uranium and initially secret mining operations, which is why he decided to merge the two novels into Meredith's Treasure. A merger that retained all of the original plot strands, motivations and impossible crime elements, but with all the names of characters changed to those of relatives and friends of Harbottle. One of the characters is named after Robert Adey! Something he very much enjoyed.

So why this long introduction to a pulp western/detective novel? Merridrew Marches On is listed in Adey's Locked Room Murders and so will be known, in name only, to readers of this blog. A blog with a special interest in locked room and impossible crime fiction. However, I doubt very much whether many of you have actually read Merridrew Marches On, because it is extremely scarce and expensive. So the question is whether Harbottle's more readily available Meredith's Treasure, in which he asserts has preserved Fearn's impossible crime plotting, is worth our attention – purely on its own merits. Let's find out!

First of all, I've to acknowledge that the blending, an stitching together, of two different novels was indeed seamlessly done, because the whole plot coherently stuck together. However, it does explain why the story cycles from one genre to another. Story begins as an old-fashioned Western, but quickly turns into a detective story with an impossible crime, covered in the fingerprints of the scientific mystery, before it turns into an all-out adventure-and thriller yarn with all the trappings of the Western. And, all the while, Fearn's science-fiction and pulp roots were showing.

Meredith's Treasure takes place in "a sweltering little township," Mountain Peak, where "every board was warped and every trace of paint had been blistered" by the torrid Arizona sunlight. The small township is governed by the potbellied Mayor Randle Meredith and his son, Sheriff Bart Meredith.

On a blistering, mid-afternoon, Sheriff Meredith is visited by Reverend Maurice Peregrine, creator of the Reformed Sinners' Gospel, whose lectures and sermons converted many hardened criminals in other towns – picked Mountain Peak as his present port of call to spread his gospel. Legally, or morally, there are no objections to him preaching, but the Merediths are worried about the dozen dusty, gruff and impatient-looking horsemen he brought with him. All of them converted criminals. What could go wrong? Their arrival coincides with the appearance in town of a wanted criminal, "Holdup" Hogan, who has been involved "in a sundry of stage holdups and train robberies." As to be expected, this leads to a confrontation between Hogan, Peregrine and the Mayor, but they're interrupted by Brian Teviotdale storming into the saloon. On the foothill trail, Brian encountered a phantom horseman who began to chase him and he fled "like a man with the devil at his heels." One of the patrons, Bob Cook, is skeptical and immediately goes to the spot where Brian saw the phantom horseman, which is where his body is eventually found. There are no marks on the body and no accounting how the body got there or the lack of footprints in the dust. Dr. Adey makes it even more of an impossible situation when he tells the Meredith's Cook was gassed to death!

This is not the last murder, or impossibility, in the first half of the story. A local girl is found murdered in the streets with "Holdup" Hogan next to her. So the towns people are ready to string him up on the spot, but, before he can be swung into eternity, a third body appears out of nowhere in the middle of the main street! The entire crowd stared into the dark sky for an answer, but there was nothing there "but the stars and the silence of the night." Cleverly, the possibility of a hot-air balloon is quickly eliminated as too large and slow moving not to have been spotted by the crowd.

What I liked about the detective bits and pieces, roughly taking up the first half of the story, is how they quickly come to the conclusion that they're "not dealing with hillbillies" who only know "the trigger of a gun" – which doesn't rhyme with the deaths suggesting "intelligence and scientific knowledge." And this apparent fact was cleverly woven into the plot. Admittedly, the people who read Meredith's Treasure as a detective novel will very likely spot the brains behind the plot, but how the bodies miraculously appeared in impossible places is a lot trickier and more in line with the weird menace pulps than with the pure locked room/impossible crime story. On first sight, the method seems out-of-time and the imagery of how it was done would be more at home in a fantasy/science-fiction story, but it actually existed in the 1890s. And it actually figured in one of Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his gun-slinging cowboy sleuth, Ben Snow.

Yes, Harbottle definitely succeeded in preserving Fearn's impossible crime plotting and ideas here, because the solution is unmistakably one of his. It perfectly fits in his with his other pulp-style locked room mysteries, Account Settled (1949) and The Rattenbury Mystery (1955).

After this halfway mark, the story becomes, more and more, an adventure-and thriller yarn with a Western setting centering around the planned assault on a mountain stronghold and the long-buried secrets held inside it. This second half is full of dangerous bluffs, deadly double crosses and a cunning piece of misdirection with the Meredith's finding themselves, more than once, in a very tight corner where death is only a heartbeat away. Mayor Meredith is not exactly, what you would call, an infallible detective and surprisingly hardboiled in his approach, which include a bit of (mental) torture to extract information. An explosive and dangerous situation that eventually devolves in Mexican standoff between the Meredith Posse, a gang of outlaws and a group of natives trying to protect the mountain's long-held secret. This becomes quite a bloody affair that can match one of Paul Doherty's historical bloodbaths. Mayor Meredith concludes the case with a puppeteering act that even Dr. Gideon Fell or H.M. would find questionable. Very hardboiled!

So, on a whole, Meredith's Treasure is a busy, fast-moving and interesting pulp-style take on the Western, but where does it rank among Fearn/Harbottle's output and the former's impossible crime novels? I wouldn't rank it with their best detective/locked room novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947), Except for One Thing (1947), Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder, but still towers over lesser novels like The Tattoo Murders (1949), Ghost Canyon (1950), Lonely Road Murder (1954), Robbery Without Violence (1957) and One Way Out (2012). So very much a mid-tier, or second-string, novel. Nevertheless, it can stand on its own as a fun, pulpy treatment of the Western blended with the traditional detective story that's well worth a read as long as you keep in mind that it was written as a Western first and a detective story second.

I'll return to Fearn's original work sometime in the near future, because my private stash of pulp has been replenished and look forward to reading Fearn's attempt at a mystery novel with real vampires in it.

The Fourth Door (1948) by John Russell Fearn

John Russell Fearn was an incredibly prolific fictioneer who cut his teeth in the American pulp magazines of the 1930s, writing primarily science-fiction, but in the mid-1940s he began to move into the hardcover novel market with wildly imaginative, pulp-style detective novels – bubbling with creativity, original ideas and some innovative tricks. Fearn had an fundamental understanding what makes a detective story tick with his own ideas what can be done with it, but he was also a pulp writer in heart and soul. So he wrote fast and what he wrote often lacked the polish of his more well-known Golden Age contemporaries.

Nevertheless, Fearn could be a tremendously entertaining mystery writer whose rich imagination and original ideas turned many of his second-string mystery novels in clever or innovative pieces of detective fiction. Sometimes, he produced something that was more than merely a fun, second-string pulp mystery.

Within That Room! (1946) is mostly a throwback to the turn-of-the-century detective story, but distinguished itself with a unique locked room-trick concerning a haunted room where, once a year, a demonic entity appears – levitating in mid-air! They Arm Alone (1947) has, what can only be described as, a "once in a lifetime" crime never used before or since in a detective story. Except for One Thing (1947) is an inverted mystery with the main question being what happened to the body and the solution is shockingly original. The Master Must Die (1953) preceded Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954) as an experiment in transporting the traditional (locked room) detective story to the science-fiction genre, which has a sequel in The Lonely Astronomer (1954). A less than perfect blend of the two genre's with an annoying detective at the helm, but the absolute loopy, purely science-fiction solution to the impossible murder was vivid and original.

The inventive impossible crimes, the creative scientific murders and his deeply-rooted ties to the pulps aren't the only things that sets his detective novels apart. Fearn set some of his best detective novels among the lower-and working classes of society, which give them a very unusual atmosphere for traditional detective novels.

One Remained Seated (1946) and the posthumously published masterpiece, Pattern of Murder (2006), take place among the people who work at movie theaters in the 1940s and 50s, while Death in Silhouette (1950) is a locked room mystery with an ordinary, working class family home as the backdrop – which has a great play on the double-solution. Flashpoint (1950) gives the reader flashes of the malaise in post-war Britain. So you don't come across large, sprawling mansions or country houses in Fearn's detective story, but, when they're used as a setting, there tends to be a utilitarian reason behind it.

The Crimson Rambler (1947) takes place in-and around a big, rambling manor house, some hundreds of years old, but a large place with surrounding grounds were needed for the intricate locked room-trick to work. Account Settled (1949) introduced a large, isolated house in its second half that had been converted into a giant, mechanized death trap.

So with all of that in mind, I expected the subject of today's review, The Fourth Door (1948), to follow a similar track with its manor house setting as The Crimson Rambler or Account Settled. Philip Harbottle noted in his 2017 guest-post, "The Detective Fiction of John Russell Fearn," that The Fourth Door has "some impossible crime sub-texts," but that's not the case and the story, while toying with fingerprints, is not one of Fearn's science-based mysteries – instead opting to play around with some dusty old tropes from a bygone era. Fearn emptied a bag of 1920s mystery cliches, a big manor house, twins and an oriental dagger, which he used to confuse and mislead the genre-savvy reader. Something he succeeded in doing for a good chunk of the story!

The Fourth Door takes place amid the flat, densely wooded countryside of Caldon Village, Berkshire, which is overlooked by a hill with a ruined castle perched on its summit. This beautiful, picturesque sight is what greeted Elva Reeves when she arrived there from London.

Elva Reeves has been engaged as the new parlor maid at the home of Drake Caldon, Caldon Manor, where he lives with his cousin, Barry Wood, who works as his estate manager and a small staff – most notably the butler and housekeeper, Mr. and Mrs. Carfax. There used to be a twin brother, Arthur Caldon, but the brothers had one hell of a row three years ago. So now Arthur lives in a cottage, half a mile from the cottage, "where he dabbles at painting for fun," but he still loves to spite his brother. Such as getting engaged to Jessie Standish, who runs a garage with her brother, because getting "the chance of tying up the Caldon name with a garage" amuses him. Arthur also has in his possession a antique, oriental dagger with "an extra long, thin blade" that will become an important piece of evidence in a murder case.

A very conventional premise that seemingly becomes predictable when Wood tries to make a move on Elva, but Drake tells him to go pound dirt, because he intends to make Elva his wife. But then the story unexpectedly abandons the well-trodden path.

Elva has no interest in the salaried estate manager as "a possible man to help her climb the social ladder" and naturally agrees to become Caldon's wife. She goes from parlor maid to personal secretary to lady of the manor in mere weeks, but less successful is her attempt to end the feud between her husband and brother-in-law, which forces her to side with her husband. And it is revealed that Caldon has Wood completely under his thumb, because he has another man's life on his conscience.

So you would assume that everything has been put in place for the murder of either Arthur or Drake, but it's Jessie Standish who's murdered with the oriental dagger in her bedroom and her brother witnessed Arthur fleeing the scene – or was it his brother? After the murder, Arthur disappears and his cottage is torched to the ground. A pretty problem for the rustic Inspector Butteridge, "the best criminal expert for miles around," who's faced with "a lot of tomfool clues" suggesting three equally maddening options: (A) Drake framed his brother and perhaps even murdered him (B) Arthur committed the murder and perhaps could have taken his brother's place at the manor house (C) a third person is pulling the strings from the shadows. A possibility that cannot be discarded out of hand.

The groundwork for The Fourth Door is rock solid with an original take on some old, hackneyed tropes and fully expected the ending would cement it as one of Fearn's best detective novels, but the plot began began to fall apart towards the end of chapter 15. My problem is not that an important clue fortuitously fell into Elva's lap, but that's where the trouble started with the plot. Next thing that happens is unexpected, completely ridiculous, twist in the plot-thread about the past murder. A twist that could not possibly have been secret to Wood, because he kept a steel cashbox in his room with newspaper clippings. I don't believe the newspapers would have neglected to mention such an important and essential detail, but it was necessary to add another dimension to option C and to tidy up another (minor) plot-thread.

What ultimately prevented The Fourth Door from becoming an alternative classic, of sorts, is the ending. Fearn came up with a truly imaginative designed to trick and confuse experienced mystery readers, but he decided to go with obvious and least imaginative explanation. So the intriguing premise was completely wasted. I can't help but think what John Dickson Carr or Agatha Christie could have done with the setup, because The Fourth Door had all the potential to be a detective novel like Carr's Death Turns the Tables (1941) and Christie's Peril at End House (1932). But this unfortunately turned out to be a case in which Fearn's pulp tendencies, fast writing and careless plotting, worked against him. The Fourth Door should have been so much better!

Interestingly, the multi-faceted motive of the murderer showed some of his usual ingenuity and creativity, of which was one facet was something new (certainly at the time) that should have been explored further.

On a whole, The Fourth Door started promising, but failed to deliver on its promise and therefore hard to recommend to anyone who's not a fan of either the author or obscure, second-string mystery novels – which is, admittedly, a very niche corner of the genre. So, if you're new to Fearn, I recommend you start with his masterpiece, Pattern of Murder or the excellent Flashpoint. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, wrote glowing reviews of those two titles here and here.

Framed in Guilt (1947) by John Russell Fearn

John Russell Fearn unexpectedly passed away in 1960, aged 52, when he suffered a heart attack. A fate he unfortunately had to share with his father, Percy Slate Fearn, who died under similar circumstances and influenced Fearn to write a detective novel around "the consequences of early deaths from heart problems."

Framed in Guilt (1947) was originally published under the penname associated with his Maria Black series, "John Slate," but this is a standalone with Superintendent Henshaw on duty and was praised by Philip Harbottle as one Fearn's "most realistic" and "best locked room novels" – a very personal novel for more reasons than one. The backdrop and characters of the story were drawn from his days as a part-time typist for a solicitor's office in Birley Street, Blackpool.

William Barridge is a sober, quiet and meek man of forty-four, but looked "a good twenty years older," who has been married for twenty years and has three "obstreperous children."

However, it has a marriage that has gone cold and loveless, because he's stuck in a dead-end job as head clerk to a solicitor and has neither "the wit nor the courage to attempt anything better." So luxury, such as a maid, eludes them and even his children have just enough respect for him to say goodbye before going to school. And it's not much better at work.

The dingy offices of Henry Minton, solicitor and Commissioner-of-Oath, is located on the first-floor of a converted Georgian dwellinghouse, "smelling of ink, dry parchment, cold air and Monday morning," which is as cheerless as it sounds – brightened only by the presence of the office boy, Jimmy Elgate. A young lad who constantly has his nose buried in an American pulp magazine. Other two people working there are the junior clerk, Arthur Standish, and the typist, Sally Higson.

So they slip into the dull, grinding routine of yet another work day, but the routine is broken when Jimmy, Sally and Arthur Standish return from lunch and find the place locked up. Barridge is nowhere to be found.

One thing you need to know, before going on, that there are two different locks on each office door. A modern Yale lock and underneath it "preposterous keyholes" dating back to the days when a dungeon-like key was needed to (un)lock the doors, which were now redundant except to peek through. Jimmy decided to take peek through the ancient keyhole of Minton's locked office and spotted a body lying on the floor with a large knife protruding from the back.

The body belongs to the meek and mild head clerk, Barridge, but the only key to the door is in the constant possession of Minton and, at the time of the murder, he was in Liverpool on business. So how did Barridge enter the locked office of his employer, or how did his murderer get out, but what baffles Superintendent Henshaw even more is why anyone would want to kill a "harmless, spineless man" – even when evidence emerges casting the shadow of suspicion on two people. One of these two suspects, Mrs. Jennifer Carr, surprisingly falls into the category of cherchez la femme. Or does she?

The detection here is combination of plodding police work, combing over the crime scene, checking alibis, questioning people, musing over clues and possibilities, complimented with bits and pieces of forensic detective work. Henshaw regularly calls upon the forensic experts to analyze the dirt under the victim's fingernails, ink on a letter in order to determine its age and make them do a microscopic examination of the murder weapon. Fearn was a pulp writer who had a tendency to indulge in the fantastic (e.g. Account Settled, 1949), but, sometimes, there are streaks of the Realist School in his work – both in characterization and setting. Such as the undistinguished solicitor's office and the normal, everyday people who work there from the opening chapter. You can also find these traces in Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder (2006) with its working class characters and backdrop.

Needless to say, the opening chapters and Henshaw's investigation are the best parts of the story, but the plot and solution has its problems.

My first problem is that the gist of the solution is kind of obvious and the only reason why it didn't kill the story are two red herrings, which are used here as roadblocks to that obvious answer. But you can still figure it long before Henshaw has worked out all the details. Secondly, the core idea of the plot is something I detest in detective stories, because, more often than not, it's just a lazy cop-out on the writer's part. So it's to Fearn's credit that he succeeded in whipping something decent and acceptable out of this otherwise hack plot-device, but it forces me to disagree with Harbottle that Framed in Guilt is Fearn's best locked room novels.

Admittedly, Fearn tries to do something else with the locked room mystery here, but he has written better and much more original impossible crime novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947) and Vision Sinister (1954), which doesn't mean I didn't appreciate what he was trying to do – especially when juggling with two of my big no-noes. But he has done the locked room better. And when you take a step away from the locked room angle, you have an overall well-done plot put together by "a weaver of a perfect crime." Someone with "the mind of a contortionist" that you can't help but feel a pang of sympathy for. The personal back-story also helped me appreciate the book more than I would otherwise have done.

So, all in all, Framed in Guilt is an interesting and unusual take on the locked room mystery, but by no means a classic of its kind. I think impossible crime fanatics and fans of Fearn will get the most out of this story.

A note for the curious: Philip Harbottle told me about the personal aspects of Framed in Guilt and provided this endearing image of Fearn as a part-time typist as told by a man who was a junior office boy at the time: "...this man was from another world... he showed no knowledge of law, no interest in the clients of the practice and he seldom spoke to anybody. At regular intervals he just was there, hawk-nosed, smouldering eyed, apparently unaware of his surroundings. Usually a cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth, and one eye was half-closed against its rising smoke, as two fingers of each hand pounded the keys of the big, brief-carriage typewriter... faster than the girls could type with five fingers." Even when doing a part-time job, Fearn was the consummate pulp writer!

The Locked Room Reader XI: A Return to the Phantom Library

Back in 2016, I compiled a brief overview, under the title "A Selection of Lost Detective Stories," listing a number of examples of long-lost or unpublished manuscripts from the hands of celebrated and lesser-known mystery writers – such as Glyn Carr, Joseph Commings, Theodora DuBois and Hake Talbot. The idea of the existence, or partial existence, of a phantom library is as fascinating as it's frustrating. Even more so, when it disproportionately affects a writer you happened to be very fond of.

One of my favorite second-stringers, John Russell Fearn, was a prolific writer of lost detective stories and he didn't limit himself to merely losing sight of manuscripts. Philip Harbottle kindly provided me with all the background details.

A fragment from an alt-reality

Harbottle told me that "several wonderful impossible crime novels," written by Fearn in 1946, were lost and apparently destroyed, because hardcover publishing in the U.K. suffered from paper shortages during the post-war years and many books were delayed – often "never appeared at all" and "were lost." Fearn sold three novels under a penname, "Rosina Tarne," of which only one came close to actually being published.

You Murdered Me would have told the story of the ghost of a murdered woman who helps her grieving boyfriend/detective bring her killer to justice and the manuscript was proofed, blurbed and appropriately advertised on the jacket of Gordon Meyrick's The Ghost Hunters (1947). There are only "half a dozen scattered pages of mss carbon" left of the second novel, entitled The Eyes Have It, which reveal that the story followed a husband-and-wife detective team investigating "a dead body in a swimming pool" with resonances of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868). Yes, a Fearn mystery novel along the lines of Kelley Roos' The Frightened Stiff (1942) got lost. God has some serious explaining to do!

Sadly, Murder in Suburbia has been completely erased from existence as nothing, whatsoever, is known about it and "nothing has survived." However, the title makes me wonder if Fearn rewrote the story nearly a decade later as Lonely Road Murder (1954). Murder in Suburbia strikes me as an uncomplicated, straitlaced crime story without any locked rooms, cast-iron alibis or science-based death-traps – like Lonely Road Murder. Something not entirely out of the realm of possibilities, because there's a possible change that the presumed lost Partners in Crime was eventually published as Murder's a Must (1949; retitled later as The Tattoo Murders). However, this is just an educated guess by Harbottle.

The last title to be added to this lamentable list is about "an impossible murder on a railway," titled Unfinished Journey, which he intended to get published under the name of "Hartley Grant," but manuscript was apparently rejected. Regardless, Fearn was an amateur cineaste and, in 1949, created the Fylde Cine Club. One of the movies they made was an ambitious, full-length (silent) movie adaptation of Unfinished Journey starring Fearn, Matt Japp and published author Audrey Weigh, who recorded the lines on a tape recorder – a tape that got either lost or destroyed! However, Harbottle salvaged three boxes of the club's 16mm films and them transferred to VHS tapes, but the firm managed to mix "the running order of the three film spools" and made them run backwards. Harbottle said he only watched the silent VHS once, a quarter of a century ago, and was "so traumatized" that he never watched it again.

Honestly, I would love to get a glimpse of that silent film. Not just to get a taste of a lost impossible crime story, but just to watch Fearn acting. Someone should convert those VHS tapes and upload them to YouTube.

Seems appropriate

Sadly, Fearn is not the only one who lost a handful of manuscripts: R.T. Campbell wrote eight popular detective novels about a botanist and amateur detective, Professor John Stubbs. Five more titles were announced as forthcoming, namely The Hungry Worms Are Waiting, No Man Lives Forever, Death is Not Particular, Death is Our Physician and Mr. Death's Blue-Eyed Boy, but his publisher went into liquidation in 1948 and the manuscripts were lost to history. So just between Campbell and Fearn, you have nine or ten mystery novels that were expunged from our time-line. And, yes, there's more. There's always more of the bad stuff.

Willoughby Sharp was the author of two published detective novels, Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934), who provided this list with the most peculiar and tantalizing lost title. A third novel was announced for 1935, intriguingly titled The Mystery of the Multiplying Mules, which came with a short description of the premise and the story would have made for a most unusual locked room mystery – as mules keep turning up inside the locked barn of the Logan family. No reason was ever given why the book got canceled.

Another mystery writer with a short-lived career was Kirke Mechem and only saw one of his detective novels get published, The Strawstack Murder Case (1936), which has a strong rural flavor. This is likely the reason why his second Steven Steele novel was never published. The plot of the story, titled Mind on Murder, dealt with miscegenation in Kansas and Doubleday, Doran, turned down his manuscript "on account of this sensitive subject matter." The three novels by Mechem and Sharp have been reprinted by Coachwhip Publications.

Christopher St. John Sprigg plunge into Marxism and untimely death in the Spanish Civil War ended a short, but promising, run as a mystery novelist. Recently, Sprigg has profited from our current renaissance era and all of his seven novels has been reprinted as paperbacks and ebooks, but Curt Evans reported in 2013 that there two unpublished short stories, "The Case of the Misjudged Husband" and "The Case of the Jesting Miser" – existing as typed manuscripts in Sprigg's papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Evans describes them as "longish short stories" with a certain appeal and a noteworthy detective, Mrs. Bird.

So these two short stories still have a fighting chance to get published and maybe sooner than we think. A recently published anthology, Bodies from the Library 2 (2019), had never before published material by Christianna Brand, Edmund Crispin and Dorothy L. Sayers. I say we loot salvage as much as possible from this phantom library!

Well, hopefully, this rambling filler-post wasn't too depressing and I'll return to you presently with a regular review of a detective story that wasn't cruelly snatched away from us.