Lost in Space-Time: "Scenes from the Country of the Blind" (1977) by John Sladek

Back in 2017, I reviewed John Sladek's often overlooked short detective stories, collected in Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2002), but there are a few stray stories that, somehow, ended up in his science-and weird fiction themed collections – such as the short-short parody "The Locked Room" (collected in Keep the Giraffe Burning, 1978). Someone at the the time pointed out he wrote another, virtually unknown, impossible crime story about a town vanishing into thin air. 

"Scenes from the Country of the Blind" was originally published in the anthology A Book of Contemporary Nightmares (1977), reprinted in the August, 1983, issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and collected in Sladek's Alien Accounts (1982). So you know where to find it.

The story concerns three scientists, Latham, Corcoran and Smith, who run the Paranormal Experience Research Group and hope to "pry open a few eyelids" with their experiments. What they try to do is "test for ESP in animals" with a maze experiment involving two groups of rats, which have yielded promising results, but they have to deal with "a creature who swam in a private sea of skepticism," Dr. Harry Beddoes – who's always willing to test their theories to destruction. Dr. Beddoes wields Occam's Razor with "relentless skepticism," which began to annoy Latham. But he has something that might blunt his razor.

In their personal Library of Paranormal Experiences, they have thousands of letters on file from ordinary, reasonable intelligent people who "had some puzzling, even inexplicable experience." One letter told a story both "uncanny and evidential."

Mr. Durkell wrote the scientists to tell how he glimpsed a village, through a small copse, on his daily commute, where he knew there shouldn't be a village. There it was, complete with half-timbered houses and smoking chimneys, only to wink out of existence a few seconds later. Leaving behind nothing but empty fields! The village reappeared a week later, on the same day, which was seen by two witnesses and a road map showed the place, Mons, actually exists. But not for very long! The whole village disappeared a second time and another look at the road map showed nothing remotely close to a place named Mons!

This puzzling phenomena of a village that doesn't exist, except on Tuesdays, coincided with the disappearance of a farmer's wife in the same vicinity. So what's going on?

Dr. Beddoes naturally doesn't believe in a "rupture in the space-time fabric" or "some other universe running parallel to ours" and delivers to Latham a completely logical and rational explanation for the vanishing village and disappearing name on the road map – pointing out all the clues in Mr. Durkell's letter. I've seen variations on that map-trick before, but Sladek came up with something entirely new to make a whole village vanish like a popped soap bubble. Every locked room reader knows how restrictive this kind of impossibility really is, because a moving train, a room or even a house doesn't allow for much wiggle room or trickery. So it was impressive to see him do it with a populated village. My only gripe is that it probably wouldn't work a second time with the same witness. I can believe an unsuspecting person can be fooled by it, but, someone on the lookout, is likely to notice something.

Other than that little niggle, "Scenes from the Country of the Blind" is another weirdly overlooked, practically unknown, but excellent, short detective story by that unsung master of the post-war locked room mystery – effortlessly combining an original impossible crime with a multi-layered, story-within-a-story plot. Just like in "The Locked Room," Sladek told multiple, overlapping stories on a little more than a dozen pages. So more than deserving of your attention and to be considered for a future locked room-themed anthology.

John Sladek: Short Slayings

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

- Douglas Adams (Mostly Harmless, 1992)

John Sladek is perhaps best remembered as a satirist and an author of science-and speculative fiction, usually written with a humorous bend, but he also made a brief excursion into the realm of crime-fiction during the 1970s and penned two highly regarded locked room novels – alongside a few surprisingly obscure short stories.

During the early 70s, the Times of London held a short story competition for detective fiction and no less a figure than Agatha Christie served on the jury. Over a thousand short stories were submitted, but Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand" emerged victorious and became the centerpiece of The Times of London Anthology of Detective Stories (1973). However, the real prize for Sladek was an opportunity to write a full-length mystery novel and this resulted in a shimmering gem of the modern, post-World War II era. A genuine classic!

Black Aura (1974) is widely regarded as one of the best locked room novels the genre has ever produced and was followed by Invisible Green (1977), which is less popular, but still relatively well thought of by aficionados of impossible crime fiction – who usually acknowledge that the latter failed to live up to its predecessor. Regardless of the uneven quality between both titles, they cemented Sladek's reputation as a notable practitioner of the locked room mystery and we all mourned the fact that the he only wrote two of them. But as Sladek once remarked in jest, "one could starve very quickly writing locked room mysteries" in the modern era.

Nevertheless, most readers who loved his two novels seem to be unaware he penned nearly a dozen short detective stories, which were largely gathered in the posthumously published Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2002). The highlight of that compilation, for mystery readers, is the inclusion of two short stories about Thackeray Phin, who was also at the helm of Black Aura and Invisible Green, but these short pieces definitely measure up to the novels.

The first of these short stories is, of course, "By an Unknown Hand," which introduces Sladek's take on the Great Detective, Thackeray Phin, who's an American philosophy professor living in England and advertises himself as a "professional logician and amateur sleuth" - one who would welcome a challenge. Phin has always dreamed of being a detective and is elated when the owner of an art gallery, Anthony Moon, engages him as a bodyguard to protect an unpopular artist, Aaron Wallis. Someone has been sending him letters promising to end his life.

Wallis lives in an apartment on the 11th floor of a soulless apartment building and he had all the windows bricked up, because he has an aversion for natural light. So the windows offered no way in or out for the occupants would-be assassin. Before Phin began his watchman's duty, the apartment was searched by Wallis himself and the door was both locked and chain-locked from the inside, which was done with a very though chain. The door needed to be battered half a dozen times before the staple was torn from the wall and they could enter the apartment. Why did the door required battering, you ask? Somehow, someone managed to enter the sealed apartment and strangle the unpopular artist.

There are two points of interest that should be pointed out: once our detective realizes that "Sherlock Holmes wasn't going to be any help at all," Phin hurried home "to read some locked room mysteries," because, "if Dr. Fell could not cure this devil case," perhaps "Father Brown could exorcise it" - really showing where this story fits in the scheme of the overall genre. Secondly, the brother of the victim, Hector Wallis, is a clairvoyant, known as "Ozanam," who is seen giving a demonstration of the ability of his third eye. I think this particular scene, in combination with Phin's explanation, makes for a nice semi-impossible situation straight out of Clayton Rawson or Jonathan Creek. The solution to the locked room problem also somewhat resembled the work of that mystery writer and TV-series.

You can divide the crux of the impossible situation in two sections. The first part concerns the setup of the trick and plays out like an elaborate stage illusion, which is as risky as it's clever and lot's of fun. And there's something in the story that should set the seasoned armchair detective on the right track. However, the method for the sealed nature of the room was a lot more routine, but, overall, a very solid and promising debut for, what potentially could have been, John Dickson Carr's successor.

I'm also baffled why this story never found its way into one of the many locked room themed anthologies that have appeared since the early 1970s.

The second short story from this series, "It Takes Your Breath Away," was syndicated in 1974 in various London theater programs, which included A Streetcar Named Desire at the Piccadilly Theatre and is really just a short-short – covering only a scant three pages. Phin finds himself "far back at the discouraging end" of long cinema queue that twisted round a corner. One of the people waiting in line ends up with a knife in his chest, but that's all I really can say about the plot without giving anything away. But the plot is surprisingly rich and involved for a short-short of only three pages.

Well, most mystery readers are probably aware of the first short story discussed here and some known of the second, but very few are aware that Maps has a section, entitled "Sladek Incognito," which gathered eight virtually unknown crime story – originally published in the late 1960s and some were published as by "Dale Johns." Most of them are short-short inverted mysteries, usually no more than four pages, in which the plans of the culprit usually backfires on them. So you could call them A-Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard stories.

My personal favorite is "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National," originally published in a 1968 issue of Tit-Bits, which has a clever money scheme with cheque deposits go horribly wrong when an unpolished specimen of the criminal classes intervene. A very short piece, but also very good. Loved as much the second time as when I first read it. Deserves to be better known!

"Just Another Victim" comes from the pages of the same publication and has a jealous woman plotting the murder of a friend, planning to make it look like the work of an active serial killer, but you can probably guess the twist in that story. "The Switch" was also published as "The Train," again in Tit-Bits, in which a husband is plotting the murder of his wife by creating a train disaster, but the disaster is not what he expected. A somewhat technical short-short that could have been more interesting had it been a little bit longer. "Timetable" is a murder for hire gone wrong for the person who paid for the professional assassins, because he forgot a small, silly detail. This one also came from Tit-Bits. "Now That I'm Free" is a very good take on the multi-sided love affair that end in murder. I would imagine Christie would have a good chuckle at this story. The last of the short-shorts, "Practical Joke," has a thoroughly unpleasant character getting his much deserved comeuppance.

The next short story, "Publish and Perish," came from a June 1968 issue of a publication known as If and comes highly recommended to fans of Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes and crime stories with an academic setting – because this one is almost a parody of such kind of crime stories. A young associate professor of physics, Gleason, has an opportunity to rise in the academic ranks when a professor passes away, but his university has a strange tradition to decide who fills a seat: murder! Gleason not only has to survive the attempts on his life, such as a bomb in the coffee maker, but also has get dispose of his rival. A fun and unusual type of crime story that some of you will no doubt be able to appreciate.

Finally, there's a rather unusual hybrid-type of story, "In the Oligocene," culled from the pages of the July 1968 issue of If and has a time-traveler from the 1978 return to 1939 to save the woman he loved as a young man. Unfortunately, he is now a man in his sixties and to ensure she only loves him he takes her to the Oligocene period. A "comparatively gentle era in the earth's history," when the great reptiles had gone the way of the dinosaurs and the largest mammals weren't numerous enough to pose a danger, but she not thrilled by the prospect of being stranded in ancient history – without any other living soul to communicate with. So the reunion is not going as envisioned and the way this situation gets resolved is a science-fiction imagining of a deus ex machina. Hands down one of the weirdest kidnap stories in all of detective fiction.

So, that's all of the detective fiction that can be found in Maps, which have been long overlooked, but these stories are well worth possessing the entire collection. And if you like humorous science-fiction (e.g. Douglas Adams), you'll probably enjoy the non-criminal content of this collection. But the main reason for me was the hidden treasure trove of excellent detective stories.

On a final note, Sladek also wrote a non-series short locked room mystery, titled "The Locked Room," which is collected in Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978) and a review of that story can be read here.

The Locked Room: A Little-Known John Sladek Story

"I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read."

- John Sladek.

In 1972, the Times of London organized a short story competition for detective stories and after the jury, comprising of Lord Butler, Tom Stoppard and the Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, had ploughed through a 1000 stories – it was John Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand" who let his fellow competitors biting the dust of defeat. His award: the story was published in The Times Anthology of Detective Stories (1972) and a contract to pen one of my all-time favorite locked room novels, Black Aura (1974), and he wrote a follow up a few years later entitled Invisible Green (1977).

These stories are very well-known among locked room enthusiasts, like yours truly, but a let less familiar are the (non-impossible) short-short story "It Takes Your Breath Away," featuring Sladek's series detective Thackeray Phin, and a body of inverted mysteries with a twist, collected in Maps (2002), which I recommend without hesitation. But Sladek also wrote a parody on the impossible crime genre, aptly titled "The Locked Room," which is virtually unknown because it's inexplicably buried in a volume of science-fiction stories – Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978). It you've always wondered what would happen if you tossed Douglas Adams or Monty Python into the blender with John Dickson Carr's "The Locked Lecture," a chapter from The Hollow Man (1935), than you have to read this story.

The protagonists of this yarn are Fenton Worth, a lauded private investigator, and his valet, Bozo, but instead of taking on a case that's probably on their doorstep waiting to be let in he locks himself up in his library to read a mystery novel with The Locked Room (????) as its tantalizing title. As he reads through the pages, he begins to reflect on the miracles he has explained himself and goes over a lot of the familiar (and often trite) methods mentioned in Dr. Fell's lecture and has a good laugh at their expense. He also a few, uhm, interruptions from prospective clients.

Sladek also wrote a mini-short story into this already short, short story and has Worth reflecting back on "The Case of the Parched Adjutant," in which "a retired military gentleman of sober and regular habits" and "an ardent anti-vivisectionist" is murdered in his locked study on the day the circus was in town. It's campy and absurd, but futile to suppress a grin while reading it. 

One more thing worth mentioning, is that Worth had to cut open the pages of the book he was reading. I was aware you had to do this back in the days with (some) hard covers, but I think this is the first time I have seen it being described in a story. 

John Sladek (1937-2000): another man who did not believe in miracles

Yes! I have broken the dry spell of not reading any mysteries since posting my review of Max Murray's The Sunshine Corpse (1954)! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to tackle a monument of a locked room story. As much as Carr hated the modern era, I think/want to believe he would have liked this galore of busted doors and broken locks that is my blog.

And in case you've missed it, take a peek at my second installment of favorite locked room mysteries: short stories and novellas.