What Happened to Hammond? (1951) by John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey observed in Locked Room Murders (1991) that there were only two mystery writers, John Dickson Carr and John Russell Fearn, who regularly produced impossible crime novels during and after the Second World War. While Fearn was not as prolific as Carr, he was able to match the master when it came to the sheer ingenuity of his impossible situations and the answers he conjured up to explain all those criminal miracles – which is a contribution that deserves to be acknowledged. Fearn is a fun, pulpy second-stringer with a repertoire of (scientific) locked room stories that should delight fans of Arthur Porges, Paul Halter and Jonathan Creek.

A ghost and a demonic entity physically manifest themselves inside a cursed room in "Chamber of Centuries" (1940) and Within That Room! (1946). A house that kills appears in Account Settled (1949) and a whole laboratory vanishes from a watched room in Vision Sinister (1954). The Silvered Cage (1955) has a woman gradually fading into nothingness during a stage performance and Pattern of Murder (2006) uses the inverted mystery format to show how an impossible murder is engineered, which is unusual, but the method is brilliant. And there are a host of regular locked room mysteries such as Black Maria, M.A. (1944), the Halter-like The Five Matchboxes (1946) and Death in Silhouette (1950). 

What Happened to Hammond? (1951) plays with a rarity of the impossible crime genre, a possible case of teleportation, of which I only know one other example: the Kaito KID heist story from Case Closed, vol. 61.

Before taking a crack at this book, I have to point out that the splendid cover of the 2006 Borgo Press edition was commissioned by Philip Harbottle during the 1980s from Ron Turner, because he had done covers for Fearn in the 1950s and Harbottle envisioned new editions of Fearn's work with old-school Turner covers – placing the commissioned art work in cold storage for when he was able "to get the books reprinted in the future." Harbottle also provided me with a scan of the book cover of the original and rather rare edition of this book. Yes, I'm using the poor man as my personal, interactive encyclopedia on all things Fearn. Just try to stop me! :) 

What Happened to Hammond? was originally published as by "Hugo Blayn" and begins with a shipping-yard tycoon, Benson T. Hammond, consulting Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth of Scotland Yard on a string of weird notes he has received. The latest note read, "Any Moment Now," implying without being actually threatening, but Hammond has a good reason to fear "the lingering threat" of physical violence. Hammond suffers from fragilitas ossiumtarda, an abnormal brittleness of the bones, which makes him "a walking glass ornament" and a series of blows could make him a bedridden invalid for life – or end him permanently. So Garth decides that the strange complaint and his standing in the community entitles him to police protection. Hammond also has trouble brewing at home.

Harvey Dell works as a senior electronic engineer at the Noonhill Teleradio Combine and wants to formally ask Hammand permission to marry his daughter, Miss Claire Hammond, but as soon as he consented to the engagement Dell asked him for a business loan of two million pounds! A quarrel erupted and Claire caught snippets like "some high-flown notion," a chance "to beat the airlines at their own games" and "cuts in shipping rates." The quarrel ends with Hammond branding Dell as a fortune-hunter and kicks him out of the house. Later that evening, Dell sends a letter to Claire, asking her to come to 9 Stanton Street and to destroy the letter, but she only tears it up and throws it in the waste basket – where her father finds it and pastes it together. And, naturally, he goes after her.

When Claire arrives at the house in the dilapidated Stanton Street, the door is answered by a servant who tells him he has never heard of Harvey Dell and closes the door in her face. However, the next part of the plot took a sudden, unexpected turn into the Twilight Zone.

Hammond arrives at the home with two policemen on his tail and they, alongside with Hammond's chauffeur, witness how he entered the 9 Stanton Street, but he never came back out again. But when they enter the house, they found it completely empty. Not "a stick of furniture" and dirty, defaced walls. Even more astonishing is that the place is covered with "a thick, even layer of dust on the floor of the hall" and nowhere was it broken by the marks of where furniture might have stood – nor where there "a trace of a single footprint." Previously, lights have been seen in the house and the door had been answered twice by a servant. So how did a house that had been occupied only moments previously turned into a rundown, abandoned home with a thick carpet of unbroken dust on the floor?

This apparent miracle is compounded when the body of Hammond is found lying on a road between Shoreham and Worthing, sixty miles away from Stanton Street, but only ten minutes had passed since Hammond was seen entering the house and his remains being found on the road! A gruesome detail is that every bone appears not only to be broken, but shattered, which make the body like a partially deflated inner tube.

Chief Inspector Garth has his work cut out for him and the investigation by the police takes up three quarters of the story. This part of the book reads like an early police procedure and has Garth, alongside with his men, doing all of the legwork as they attempt to put together all of the pieces of this complicated puzzle. They figure out the dust-trick and find all of the bigger pieces of the puzzle, but the insurmountable wall they keep bumping into is the problem of a body traveling sixty miles in a mist-enshrouded winter night. So they call upon Dr. Hiram Carruthers, who looks like the bust of Beethoven, to help them figure out scientific end of the investigation.

I think the first three quarters make up the best parts of the story, because the last quarter exposes the same mistake that ruined Robbery Without Violence (1957). I like it when a pure, fair play detective story is placed in a science-fiction setting, but hate it when a science-fiction solution is used in a regular looking detective story. It's plain cheating!

There are, however, mitigating circumstances. Firstly, there's proper foreshadowing and even clueing that the plot is slowly inching towards science-fiction territory (e.g. the autopsy report). Secondly, the science-fiction element, weirdly enough, didn't feel like a cop-out explanation and this probably has to do that the method, like most new sciences, was in its infancy – therefore imperfect and unrefined. Something that needed fine-tuning. This treatment was very different from the way the science-fiction element was handled in Robbery Without Violence, which even had a bad, comic book-like villain who talked about getting delivering the world into the palm of his hand. However, this didn't diminish my disappointment that the teleportation problem didn't have really clever and original solution.

This makes the problem of the empty, dust-covered house bare of any footprints the only real impossible problem of the story. Interestingly, the idea behind this trick is not entirely new and have come across two variations on this trick, but Fearn applied it here to an entire house.

So, on a whole, I was not too let down by What Happened to Hammond? The first three solid quarters read like an early police procedural without the troubled cop trope and a good stand-in impossible crime, but hated that the second impossibility relied on pure science-fiction – which simply does not work for me. I'm too much of a purist to go along with it. Still, I appreciated Fearn clued his way to this U-turn and the book is a decent, middling effort in his body of work, but not one you'll find on my inevitable list of favorite Fearn mystery novels.

On a final note, you might also be interested in reading John Norris' take on this book, which he reviewed here.

The Midsummer Ghost: "Chamber of Centuries" (1940) by John Russell Fearn

Previously, I looked at John Russell Fearn's Within That Room! (1946), a locked room novelette reminiscent of Jonathan Creek, published originally in the Toronto Star Weekly, but the bare-bones of the plot had an earlier incarnation as a short impossible crime story – which is under review today. Initially, I picked two other little-known locked room stories, in order to pad out this post, but I was unimpressed with both them. So I scrapped them.

Fearn's "Chamber of Centuries" was first printed in the September, 1940 issue of Thrilling Mysteries and the plot has all the same ingredients as its extended adaptation, but the story-telling here's a lot tighter. "Chamber of Centuries" is practically the same story as Within That Room!, but tells that story in less than a dozen pages. Only place where they really differ is in the finer details.

Thrilling Mysteries, Sep. 1940

One of these differences are the protagonists, Dick and Jane, who enter the picture here as a recently married couple traveling down to "the sprawling, ill-organized township of Calford."

Jane had no intention to return to the place of her ancestors, but Dick wanted to spend a holiday in the town to "lay the family ghost" who haunts one of the rooms in the dark, gloomy ancestral pile of his wife – a house that had been transported to the Americas stone by stone. Sir Jonathan Melrose was Jane's great-great-great grandfather and he was notorious in his days as a dangerous, irresponsible practical joker, which landed him in a spot of trouble in England. So he had to pack-up, including his home, and sailed across the ocean to the New World. However, he was followed by his enemies, who eventually killed him in his bedroom, but Sir Jonathan foretold that "his presence would forever haunt the room."

The ghost of Sir Jonathan returns to the room every June 22nd, at seven in the evening, until "the house should be demolished." There's also an evil, unsettling influence in the room that prevents everyone from staying there for longer than three minutes.

After the premise has been established, "Chamber of Centuries" largely follows the same sequence of events as Within That Room: Dick and Jane experience the evil influence when they entered the haunted room for the first time. The two servants, Mr. and Mrs. Baxter, are up to no good in the basement and a second inspection of the dusty, ghost-haunted room brings them face to face with the translucent figure of Sir Jonathan – a figure attired in old-fashioned clothes with one hand dramatically out-thrust.

Regrettably, this scene is not as good, or memorable, as the demonic manifestation in the novelette and suppose that has to do with the sort of being that appeared in that room. A trick that makes appear as if one of the devil's henchmen entered a sealed chamber is far more impressive than the ghostly manifestation of a long-dead practical joker.

Anyway, the last part of this short story, like its opening, differs in some regards from the novelette. There's no murder in this story and the culprits are not as harshly punished here as in the novelette. A second notable alteration can be found in the motive. Within That Room! takes place in England, while "Chamber of Centuries" is set in the United States, which required the motive to be slightly modified. A modification that turned the motive into something that some would describe as stereotypical American!

Finally, the mental attacks weren't as well handled, or explained, here and that has to with both a change in the methods and the shorter length of this story, but, besides those minor details, the stories are pretty much the same.

On a whole, "Chamber of Centuries" is a fun, pulp-style impossible crime yarn, but personally, I prefer the extended rendition of the plot, because it allowed the best aspects of the plot to shine – like the two main characters and the impossibilities in the haunted room. It's without doubt the better of the two versions. So if you plan to read one of these two stories, I highly recommend you go with Within That Room! Or read it before the short story.

On a final, unrelated note: I wanted to return to Christopher Bush for my next read, but another short story collection found its way into my hands. So that one is next on the list.

Within That Room! (1946) by John Russell Fearn

John Russell Fearn's Within That Room! (1946) is a novelette originally published in the Toronto Star Weekly and is an expansion of a short story, "Chamber of Centuries," which appeared in a 1940 issue of Thrilling Mystery and was reprinted in a modern anthology – titled More Whodunits: The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories (2011). I was not entirely sure what to expect from this story, as it concerns mental assaults, evil influences and demonic manifestations in a haunted room, but the plot turned out to be just fine. Somewhat reminiscent of the better, earlier episodes of Jonathan Creek with a nod to a well-known Sherlock Holmes story. 

Star Weekly, Jan. 19, 1946

One of the two protagonists of Within That Room! is a young woman, Vera Grantham, who had emerged from the A.T.S. (Auxiliary Territorial Service) full of hopes and plans. During the war, Vera had courageously "defied shells and bombs," but the post-war world had so far defeated her. She had dreams of becoming a commercial artist, but she's buried in debt and then, to make things worse, her landlady announces an unexpected visitor, Mr. Jonathan Thwaite – a solicitor from Manchester. Vera is afraid that Thwaite has come to see her on account of the pile of unpaid bills and bolts before he can serve her with a summons.

However, Thwaite eventually catches up with Vera and informs her that her eccentric uncle, Cyrus Merriforth, has passed away and left her an unusual inheritance.

Cyrus Merriforth was "a very famous entomologist and botanist," who had read of Vera's "gallantry in the A.T.S." during the war, which prompted him to add a codicil to his will leaving her a hundred pounds and his home, Sunny Acres, but the place is more than a mere residence. Sunny Acres was once a feudal castle and has a room in it haunted by "an emissary of the devil." The legend is well-known in the area and not a single person from the nearby village of Waylock Dean dares to go near the place. Vera experiences this first-hand when she decides to inspect her inheritance.

She's unable to find anyone in the village willing to drive her all the way to Sunny Acres and has to make the journey by foot, but, along the way, she's offered a ride from a young man, Dick Wilmott, a former R.A.F. guy – who currently runs a radio repair shop in Godalming. After spending the night at Sunny Acres, Vera calls Dick back to the place to help her figure out what's going on behind its walls.

The former servants, Mr. and Mrs. Falworth, are still present and Mrs. Falworth tries to convince her to never open "the horror-room," which has a door sealed shut with heavy screws. This is the room haunted by an evil entity, a member of the devil's retinue, who's "only visible once a year." But even when the room is empty, there's an overwhelming sense of evil that will blast your senses and reason. Something that has happened to her uncle. Cyrus had entered the room to lay the ghost and had emerged from the room on "the borderline of insanity," which may have landed him in an early grave.

A demon-haunted room that can rob you of your sanity recalls Paul Halter's La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990), but with a slight hint of John Dickson Carr's atmospheric radio-play, "The Devil's Saint," which can be read in The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983). Or listen to it here.

However, a haunted room is not the only unsettling part of Sunny Acres. During her first night, Vera is roused by strange sounds and she did what so many heroines do in these kind of detective stories: get out of bed and investigate, which brought her to a locked door at the bottom of the basement stairs – where she hears clanking and swishing sounds. Not to mention the awful smell that is coming from behind the locked door. When she lays down on the floor, to look through the crack under the door, she sees the feet of a man and a woman moving about. Presumably of the two shifty servants.

I have to point out here that the story is not a traditional, Golden Age whodunit, but has a plot that moves along the lines of a Conan Doyle story with a couple of impossible crimes thrown in for good measure. Anyway...

Vera decides to ask Dick to help her figure out what's going on and installs him in the house as her fiance. So there you have your romantic sub-plot and Fearn's take on the snooping, bantering mystery solving couples of Kelley Roos, Frances Crane, Delano Ames and the Lockridges.

Dick and Vera discover that a floor-plan of the castle and a map of the district had been torn from a book in the library, The History of Sunny Acres, which makes them suspect that Uncle Cyrus had been cleverly murdered, but they also have a face-to-face encounter with the entity haunting the place – beginning with them getting mentally assaulted when they enter the room for the first time. They enter the room a second time, on the day the ghost is reputedly visible, which is when they see the following: 

"A strange, incredible caricature of a being hung in the dusty air, a haze of blurry light surrounding it from the back. There was the pointed tail, the simian ears, the long, needle-chinned face, bent arms flexed as though to pounce forward. He seemed to be grinning horribly. Yet he was in mid-air, and through him the ancient stone wall could be distinctly seen."

As a devout devotee of the impossible crime story, I appreciate these scenes, depicting the apparent disintegration of the fabric of reality, as much as a clever and original locked room trick. And if I have any complaints, it's how easy it was to figure out the ghost-trick. Not only did I figure out how the ghost "materialized into a locked room with solid walls, floor, and ceiling," but I did so based solely on the plot-description of the story. I actually emailed Philip Harbottle to tell him I was going to review Within That Room! and asked him how close my solution was to Fearn's explanation for the apparition, which he answered "you really are a perceptive and ingenious fellow."

Well, it's hard to deny the perceptive and ingenious part, but I have to admit that it helped that I have become somewhat familiar with Fearn's plotting technique. And who he was as a person. This ghost-trick has his personality written all over it and wish I could point it all out, but that would thoroughly spoil the solution.

So, all in all, Within That Room! is perhaps not the best detective story ever written in this sub-category of the locked room genre, namely haunted rooms that kill or do harm, but it's an amusing read harking back to the days of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and tremendously enjoyed reading it – demonstrating once again why Fearn is my favorite second-string mystery writer. I'll be taking a look at the short story that served as the bare-bones for this novelette, "Chamber of Centuries," along with two other little-known locked room short stories. So stay tuned.

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." 

Going Mental

"I see a possibility that real evil is at work here."

- Prof. Niccolo Benedetti (William L. DeAndrea's The HOG Murders, 1979)

John Russell Fearn's The Man Who Was Not (2005) was written on the heels of Robbery Without Violence (1957) and was supposed to be second installment in his Dr. Sawley Garson series, but the plot was "so complex" that the Toronto Star Weekly rejected it on account that the story could not be properly condensed – making it unsuitable for magazine publication. So the story was rewritten with a two different series-characters at the helm, Dr. Hiram Carruthers and Chief Inspector Garth, but Fearn was unable to find a publisher for the book.

Consequently, the finished manuscripts collected dust for more than 45 years until Philip Harbottle found both 50,000 word manuscripts in Fearn's effects. Harbottle succeeded in finally getting the book published and he decided to go with the Sawley Garson version, which is my only real qualm with the story. I would definitely have preferred Carruthers and Garth as the lead characters.

The Man Who Was Not was described by Harbottle as "an absolute humdinger" and "entirely original." A story that "positively bristled" with locked room murders and impossible crimes! I can say that the story, above all else, is a pure pulp (c.f. Account Settled, 1949). Pulp with the capital P.

The premise of The Man Who Was Not is the gradual extermination of the entire Dawson family by an apparently omniscient murderer, who can predict the time of death of his prospected victims, which he tells them about over the telephone. One by one, the Dawsons receive a telephone call from "a soft, mellow voice" telling them they will "die at precisely nine o'clock tonight" and the calls end with a cold "good bye" – all but one of the deadly predictions were on the money. And the murders become progressively more impossible as the killer works his way down the list of family members.

Gerald Dawson is the twenty-six-year-old son of Sir Robert Dawson, "the eminent surgeon," received the first telephone call, but he brushed it off as a prank. However, his car crashes at exactly nine o'clock sharp! The second person to receive the foreboding telephone call is his sister, Trudy, but she had the common sense to call in the police. Unfortunately, they are unable to save her life as she drops dead at, once again, exactly nine o'clock. Someone had fed her stiff dose of slow working poison!

A third telephone call informs Sir Robert Dawson of his imminent demise, but that call was intercepted by the police. They not only managed to capture the murderer's voice on tape, but they were also able to locate "the telephone kiosk" from which the call was made. And there the police bumped into the first genuine locked room mystery of the story.

1950s telephone kiosk (no WiFi)

Elmington Crescent is the location of the telephone kiosk and happens to be place where a squad car is "permanent duty" to enforce speeding laws. So they couldn't have asked for better witnesses and the policemen on duty had been in sight of booth since lunchtime, but they swear that nobody had used it at the time the call was made – which is a technical impossibility. This telephone-trick is repeated a second time later on in the story and is not the only locked room situation in the book.

Sir Robert Dawson is placed under police protection and the men stationed inside his home watch him like a hawk.

So when Sir Robert decides to take a bath, they search the bathroom and place guards in front of the door and underneath the window. Sir Robert is all alone inside a bathroom, bolted from the inside, with guards posted at the two only points of entrance or exit – ensuring that nobody can get to him. Nevertheless, the police is forced to batter down the bathroom door when Sir Robert fails to give a sign of life and what they find inside is the third body of the case.

Chief Inspector Hargraves of Scotland Yard decides this is one impossible murder too many and calls in the help of a scientific consultant, Sawley Garson, who has a reputation as "one of the Yard's most brilliant backroom boys." Garson previously appeared in the extremely disappointing Robbery Without Violence (1957) and he struck me as a bland, stripped-down copy of Dr. Carruthers, but here he was merely a colorless character who simply acted as the Great Detective. I think it helped tremendously that the scientific aspects of the plot remained within the realm of possibilities instead of venturing into science-fiction territory.

I do believe Fearn got ahead of the times when he mentioned a certain object "no larger than a good-sized matchbox," but (amazingly) the part about speech synthesis was within the scientific capabilities of the 1950s. Fearn uses these technological innovations to pit Garson and Hargraves against a ruthless killer who's "a product of the modern age." So the technological plot-strands are, as usual, the highlight of any Fearn detective novel, but The Man Who Was Not is not just a scientific detective novel. The book is largely a pulp thriller and that brings a minor problem to the table.

The murderer is not only well versed in science, but also possesses a particular talent explaining his omniscience when it comes to predicting death. An explanation that's incredible hackneyed and pulpy. I eternally groaned when reading the first chapter, when we got a strong hint about the true nature of this predictive power, but (admittedly) Fearn handles it as best as you could hope for. Actually, he handled it better than a much more respectable mystery writer, Clyde B. Clason, who (inexplicably) used a similar, hackneyed explanation for one of his locked room novels. So there's that. I'm just not a fan of it.

But, on a whole, The Man Who Was Not is a fun, unusual and very pulpy detective-cum-thriller novel with a handful of (semi) impossible crimes thrown into the mix. So this really was sundae with sprinkles for readers who love impossible crime fiction. You should not expect a stone-cold classic, but a quick, fun read that races you through an utterly bizarre murder case.

On a final note, in one of my previous Fearn posts, I noted how the plot-description of The Man Who Was Not struck me as S.S. van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1926) as perceived by Paul Halter. You can definitely say that the book reads like a cross between The Greene Murder Case and Halter's Les sept merveilles du crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime, 1997). You can even give the story a Van Dinean book-title (The Dawson Murder Case), but, while reading, the story began to remind me of Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie's Five Fatal Words (1932), which shares some interesting similarities with The Man Who Was Not – such as warning messages preceding each death and a killer targeting a single family. Five Fatal Words also has a death inside a bolted bathroom with the same cause of death and similar kind of solution! And to top it all of, the authors of these two detective novels are better known for their science-fiction stories. So I thought that was interesting enough to point out.

Well, that's the first review for 2018 and we're off to a (relatively) good start!

The Leading Light

"We've lost a room."

- Ronald Denham (Carter Dickson's "The Crime in Nobody's Room," collected in The Department of Queer Complaints, 1940)

Vision Sinister (1954) revived two of John Russell Fearn's popular series-detectives, Dr. Hiram Carruthers and Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth, but the return of these two characters to the printed page was not entirely spotless. The background details behind the original publication of "this long-lost impossible crime" was supplied to me by the sage of all things Fearn, Philip Harbottle.

During the early 1950s, Fearn signed "an exclusive 5 year contract" with Scion, which obliged him to deliver them two science-fiction novels every year and nothing else – legally forbidding him "to write any other kind of fiction" or work for another publisher. Only exception is that Fearn was allowed to continue writing (short) novels for the Toronto Star Weekly. A very lucrative deal for a full-time writer of popular fiction, but the downside of this "manacling agreement" is that it "put the kibosh" on the detective novels he was putting out as "John Slate" and "Hugo Blayn." Harbottle accurately described this as "a criminal act."

This contract lasted until the Autumn of 1952, when Scion was "fined for gangster obscenity" and the financial strain forced them to default on Fearn's payment. Fearn canceled the contract and briefly freelanced in all genres. Even reselling some of his older material.

Scion eventually recovered and asked Fearn to resume his old contract, but he cleverly renegotiated the terms and was allowed to write whatever he wanted, as long as he delivered them two science-fiction novels every month, which proved to be no problem whatsoever – writing all kinds of fiction for various publications and publishers. A year later the contract changed again when Scion asked Fearn to take over the editing of Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine. Fearn would now deliver "one issue of his magazine in lieu of one SF novel," but, more importantly, the second book in his contract were now allowed to be westerns, romances or detective novels. And only occasionally a science-fiction novel.

So Carruthers and Garth were brought back out of retirement and, as "Hugo Blayn," Fearn delivered a manuscript to Scion of Vision Sinister, but was horrified when they slapped "the Nat Karta sleaze detective label on it." A house-name that originated with Muir-Watson and was sold to Scion. The house-name was used "on more than 40 lurid American gangster novels."  On top of that, the printer erroneously placed "Phil Casey Crime Reporter Plays It Tough" as a banner headline on the front-cover. It was "a template they were using at the time on the previous Nat Karta title."

Fearn "played hell" over these mistakes and the Blayn name was restored on his next book,
The Silvered Cage (1955), but when the contract with Scion's successors, Dragon Books, expired in November, 1955, he "refused to renew it."

Like nearly all of his work, Vision Sinister drifted into obscurity upon Fearn's passing in 1960 and the only person who appears to have discussed the book in recent years is John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books. This persistent obscurity is despite two relatively recent reprints. Vision Sinister was reissued as a (limited) large-print edition by the Linford Mystery Library in 2005 and a regular paperback edition was published by Borgo Press in 2012.

So how does the plot stack up? The central problem of the plot, a witnessed murder in a room that vanishes alongside its occupants, recalled the impossibilities from two novels by two of Fearn's fellow fellows of the locked room master, John Dickson Carr – namely the visions from Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005) and the impossible murder from Jean-Paul Török's L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of the Monte Verita, 2007). John Norris even called the trick behind the disappearing room "the closest thing he came to matching his idol in sheer ingenuity," but with an explanation that is more in line with the scientific (locked room) stories by Arthur Porges. A writer he's perhaps closer related to than Carr

Vision Sinister begins when Cynthia Harwood takes her friend, Janice Worthing, to the photographic laboratory of her fiance, Terry Hewlett, which is located in a basement room in "a dismal neighborhood of fitfully winking gaslights and damply gleaming pavements." The door to the laboratory has a small plate screwed to it with the following message and instruction:

"Terence Hewlett, Photographer. Dark Room. Please look through Inspection Shutter and if Red Light is On there will be delay in answering door."

Cynthia drew back "a small eye-width slide set in the door" and peered through it, but what she say beyond the locked door horrified her. A slim, mid-blonde girl in an amethyst-colored evening dress is laying across a heavy table and is struggling with a man in a white overall who's towering above her. Cynthia recognizes the man as her fiance, Terry, while Janice has to see how the glittering knife he was holding is plunged into the girl. Their subsequent screams attracts the attention of the caretaker and he immediately fetches a policeman, before opening the door with a spare key, but what they find behind the locked door astonished the two women – a bare and empty room!

So "two perfectly sane young women" observed a fully equipped photographic laboratory in which a murder was committed and, while they never moved an inch from the spot at the door, the murderer, his victim and "the whole works" had simply evaporated from existence.

A short time later, the body of a young woman, clad in an amethyst-colored dress and a stab wound in the chest, is found partially buried in a place McCarthy's Slag.

The dead woman is identified as a model and amateur actress, Sandra Melbrane, who was "one of the leading lights" in a local cine club, of which Hewlett was the chairman, as well as being connected to the Yellow Room Players – a local dramatic group. So this established a link between the various characters involved, but left the police with a pretty puzzle of how she, along with her murderer, vanished from a locked and guarded basement room. Or how every piece of equipment disappeared alongside with them.

The dyspeptic Chief Inspector Mortimer "Morty" Garth is completely baffled and decides to call in the help of the ex-boffin "who looks like a bust of Beethoven," Dr. Hiram Carruthers, but his initial inspection of the basement room even puzzles him. Carruthers even briefly shows a human emotion known as self-doubt ("it surely isn't possible that I—Carruthers—can be wrong in my theory?"). Nevertheless, he slowly, but surely, pieces together an answer to the vanished room based on such clues as a curve in the wall, a broken bell and a plug socket. An this answer is as ingenious as it's original, which is both a strength and a weakness of the plot. 

I think the case-hardened armchair detective, or simply an observant reader, can discern the shapes and shadows that outline the truth. You should not have too much of a problem with identifying the murderer or this person's motive. You can probably even make a good guess as to the nature of the locked room trick, but the exact, technical, details is a different story altogether, but the fantastic illusion is certainly possible and the founding principle behind this technique has very deep roots – which extend as far back as the early-and mid 1800s. My only qualm is how this trick was introduced into that basement room. Was this really possible in the 1950s?

Anyway, the locked room trick is not the only aspect of the plot that betrayed Fearn's credentials as a science-fiction author who had a finger on the pulse of scientific and technological progress.

Fascinatingly, the story features an early model of an answering machine with a tape recorder, which is used by Carruthers to match the voice of the murderer with the person who left a message on the answering machine. A technique that involved a film projector and photo-electric equipment, which showed whether two different voice recordings were by the same person when "the jumping lines on the screen" exactly synchronized. So this book is not only a locked room mystery, but also qualifies as a scientific detective story.

Agatha Christie once said in one of her books that "crime is terribly revealing" and this is definitely the case with Vision Sinister, because the fingerprints of Fearn's personality are all over the plot and writing.

Fearn wrote Vision Sinister after he had been absent from the genre for several years, due to his contractual obligations, but upon his return, he sank his entire heart and soul into the plot. There's the elaborate, ambitiously constructed (impossible) crime and the presence of then cutting-edge technology. This really is what distinguishes Fearn's work from other mystery writers. And then there's the presence of a cine club in the story's background, which is a personal touch as Fearn himself stood at the head of a similar club (c.f. my review of Pattern of Murder, 2006).

All in all, Vision Sinister is, plot-wise, perhaps not the most perfect example of the traditional, fair-play detective story, but agree with John Norris that the sheer ingenuity of the (locked room) plot is something to be admired. And the same goes for the technological aspect of the story. Something that can only be described as visionary and the analyses of voice recordings anticipates modern-day forensic detective-series such as CSI. So, yeah, I found this to be an interesting and engrossing read for all of those reasons.

I read and reviewed three of Fearn's detective novels, back to back, but I'll be taking a break from his work for the moment. However, you've not read the last about him on this blog, because there are a ton of his titles cluttering my TBR-pile and wish list, but I'll probably save most of them for 2018. Yes, that leaves open the possibility for one before this year draws to a close. Who knows. So stay tuned.

Update 13-12-2017: Philip Harbottle emailed me to kindly point out a number of mistakes in my post, which have now been corrected. And, in my own defense, I reconstructed the back-story of Fearn, Scion and Vision Sinister from a scattershot of sources and emails. A piss-poor defense, I know, but it's the only one I have to offer.