Miracle Wave: Joseph Commings' "Assassination—Middle East" (1981), "Murder of a Mermaid" (1982) & "The Grand Guignol Caper" (1984)

Joseph Commings began writing detective stories against "the unlikely backdrop of a pup tent in Sardinia during the Second World War" simply for "the amusement of his fellow soldiers," but back home there was a booming market for magazine fiction and his short stories appeared in numerous publications over the decades – ranging from Ten Detective Aces to The Saint Mystery Magazine. During those decades, Commings carved out a niche as one of America's premier writers of short impossible crime stories that can stand comparison with the best by Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges. 

Nearly all of his stories featuring his "formidable extrovert Yankee congressman" detective, Senator Brooks Urban Banner, are "stuffed to the gills with locked room lore and traditional Golden Age ambience." Sadly, the magazine market had largely dried up by the 1950s and Commings went through periods of complete obscurity and rediscovery, which came on top of a massive stroke in the early seventies that took away most of the use of his right hand side. A bright light came twelve years after he passed away when Crippen & Landru published Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004) collecting fourteen stories and came with an excellent introduction by the late Robert Adey. We've been waiting ever since for a second volume.

So why not treat myself to a little preview of that future second collection of Banner stories by reading three, previously uncollected, stories with one of America's greatest detectives in the lead? Actually two uncollected stories, because the third was collected in Banner Deadlines under a different title, but I sorely needed reminding how great that story is. And, as usual, special thanks to Alex, of The Detection Collection, who helped guide me to these stories. 

"Assassination—Middle East" was originally published in the May, 1981, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and presents the gargantuan, harrumphing Senator Brooks U. Banner with a two-pronged problem within the American Consulate in Turkey – a disappearance and shooting like the one "that fired off World War I." Nathan Cross works in the Foreign Service at the American Consulate and is on his way to deliver passports and visas to two West Germans immigrants, Peter and Arla Geist. There was, however, a small oversight. Peter Geist forgot to sign his application and Cross needs his signature before he can hand over his passport, but all Geist does is performing a vanishing act with Cross as a witness. During his absence, "the Consul General had been shot dead by an Arab assassin" during a dinner for ambassadors, diplomats and VIPs. Luckily, one of the guests was nobody less than Senator Brooks U. Banner.

Simply as an impossible crime story, "Assassination—Middle East" cannot be counted among Commings best and most inspired stories with two simple problems with equally simple solutions. But, to his credit, my solution to Geist's disappearance was only half correct. Just nothing to get excited over. What was interesting is the story's setting and the diplomatic background, which reminded me of the recently discussed, 1960s mysteries by Charles Forsyte. 

"Murder of a Mermaid" was originally published in the August, 1982, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and is the shortest of the three stories discussed here. Senator Banner was driving back to New York when he decided to invite himself to the estate of a champion swimmer, Aimee Waverly, but found her half submerged body in the swimming pool. Aimee Waverly's body had been in the water for nearly a week and coroner is stumped, because she "fought something in the water until she went under" that left no bruises on her body. She was a championship swimmer who could out swim anybody and "break any death grip you get on her," which begs the question how someone could have drowned her without leaving a mark on the body. Something supernatural?

So more of a how-was-it-done than an impossible crime, but with a truly diabolical and original solution that can only be described as vintage Commings. I thought the murderer had thrown a weighted net over Aimee, which would have been a simple, elegant explanation for the signs of a struggle (worn nails and torn, scraped fingers) with something that didn't leave any marks on her – a net that could later be retrieved with a pool safety hook. I thought it made sense. Commings had a better and much more ingenious kind of trick hidden up his sleeve.

The third and last story is better known today under its alternative title, "The Vampire in the Iron Mask" (collected in Banner Deadlines), but first appeared in the November, 1984, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine as "The Grand Guignol Caper." I'm afraid I didn't fully appreciated "The Grand Guignon Caper" the first time around, because it's an unapologetic imitation of John Dickson Carr that can stand with the best by Paul Halter!

Colonel Walter Seven, of the Division of Criminal Investigation of US Army, is dispatched to post-war France to track down a hero of the resistance, Guy St. Hilaire, to pin the Medal of Honor on him. Guy St. Hilaire "killed over forty Krauts in hand-to-hand combat" and made "the way a little easier for the entrance of General Leclerc's armored division into Paris on the Day of Liberation," which brings him to an old chateau converted into a school on the outskirts of Paris. He lives and works there as a reclusive schoolteacher and reluctant to accept the medal, but Colonel Seven notices the bruises on the arms of a female schoolteacher, Lucienne Gallon. And that leads to a fight. Before they can come to serious blows, a schoolboy runs in to tell that his friend was just strangled by a vampire in the cemetery!

Achille Simplon, Pierre Cricq and Raoul Pax were in the cemetery, "horsing and pegging snowballs at one another," when a cloaked, faceless figure with iron teeth came up from behind a tombstone – seized and strangled Raoul. Achille and Raoul managed to get away and when they investigated found the footprints of the monster. These "particular tracks" lead from an old mausoleum dedicated to Duc de Gotha and back to it again, but Duc de Gotha had been beheaded during the French revolution and his resting place had not been entered in more than a century. It took two people to unlock and push open the rusted door with the cobwebs hanging undisturbed across the entrance, but upon entering, they discover someone had recently written "VAMPIR" in the dust on the coffin.

While all of this is going on, Senator Banner arrives to pin a medal on St. Hilaire and immediately has to give away his best imitation of Sir Henry Merrivale as Colonel Seven wonders whether it was "too many locked rooms" or "too many aperitifs" that "finally made Banner as crazy as a bedbug." But there's reason to his madness. Whether it's stating that knowing the answer to the locked tomb would leave them even further away from the solution to trampling on evidence in the snow. Everything worked and fitted together better than my Watson-like memory recalled. 

"The Grand Guignol Caper" succeeds not because of a single trick, twist or a grand surprise, but it's tapestry plotting with its various, independently moving parts coming together in a logical and convincing way to create a truly baffling crime. Something in the spirit of the cussedness of all things general. And to make it even more Carr-like, the story has a short, but spirited, fencing scene when Colonel Seven and St. Hilaire decide to have a duel. Because why not? Highly recommended! 

So, to make a long story short, these three stories perfectly samples Commings ability as a short story writer and plotter with and imaginative, often original bent of mind. A genuine unsung master of the short locked room mystery story. Just listen to the deafening silence emanating from The Invisible Event.

The Music Box: "Serenade to a Killer" (1957) by Joseph Commings

Robert Adey wrote in his introduction to Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), a collection of short stories, that the author, Joseph Commings, began his writing career against "the unlikely backdrop of a pup tent in Sardinia during the Second World War" – where he penned detective stories for "the amusement of his fellow soldiers." But when he returned home, Commings discovered there were magazine editors willing to pay money for them.

Commings almost exclusively wrote short stories published in such magazines as 10-Story Detective Magazines, Ten Detective Aces and Mystery Digest, but, where he left his mark on the genre, was as a specialist in locked room murders and miraculous crimes. A writing career somewhat comparable to those two giants of the short impossible crime story, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges. More importantly, Commings brought a large quantity of ingenuity and originality to the impossible crime story.

A famous glassblower is found murdered inside a sealed, room-like glass case ("Murder Under Glass," 1947). Another man is shot in an office room, under observation, while the smoking gun is delivered to the receptionist inside a sealed envelope ("The X Street Murders," 1962). A dodgy art-dealer is run through by large, burdensome sword that could not have been wielded by human hands ("The Giant's Sword," 1963). An old-fashioned, hard-hat diver is fatally knife while alone in a recently sunken shipwreck ("Bones for Davy Jones," 1953). This makes it all the more depressing only a tiny fraction of his work is currently in print.

Besides the short story collection, Banner Deadlines, you can find "The Glass Gravestone" (1966) in the massive anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014), which I reviewed here, but a year before another one of Commings' stories was anthologized, "Serenade to a Killer" (1957) – reprinted in The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries (2013). So it was about time I got around to reading it.

"Serenade to a Killer" was originally published in the July, 1957, issue of Mystery Digest and Adey noted in Banner Deadlines that critics consider this story to be one of Commings' handful of masterpieces.

The story opens at the Cobleskill Orphanage, at Christmas, where Senator Brooks U. Banner, who began life as "a parentless tyke," is handing out toys and tells the children "a fruity true crime story" about a lonely-hearts killer who he helped capture. Scandalizing the two old maids who run the orphanage. This festive scene comes to an end when Banner is approached by a local newspaper reporter, Verl Griffon, who has read about his handling of inexplicable, often seemingly impossible murders. Exactly such a kind of murder had been committed early that morning.

A well-known pianist and local celebrity, Caspar Woolfolk, lives at a manor house on the outskirts of the town and on the grounds stands "a little octagonal house," called the Music Box, where he kept his piano and music library – which is where he's found shot to death at close range. Ora Spires is the governess of Woolfolk's ten-year-old daughter, Daisy, who claims to have committed the murder. However, the doors and windows were closed and the structure was surrounded by a thick blanket of snow with only Ora's footprints leading up to the front door. So how did the murderer escape across "a hundred yards of snow without leaving a mark on it?"

Just as baffling as the murderer vanishing inexplicably from the scene of the crime is Ora's fear that she might have shot her employer or why there were incriminating diary entries she has no memory of writing. She also has no recollection, whatsoever, of attending a concert the previous day with her friends, which was briefly hinted at as a doppelgänger reminiscent of Helen McCloy's Through a Glass, Darkly (1950). I guess this story can, sort of, be described as a pulpy reimagining of McCloy.

You see, the most impressive aspect of "Serenade to a Killer" is not the mechanics of the locked room or its explanation, which lacked the ingenuity and originality of his better-known work, but the fact Commings wrangled an acceptable, entirely fair detective story from an array of hacky, outdated tropes. Abnormal psychology, hypnosis, sleepwalking and the sheer madness of the murderer all form part of the puzzle. So the story could have easily degenerated into a painfully bad, second-rate hack work that belonged to a different era, but Commings was an expert plotter and, somehow, he found a way to make it work!

So, personally, I wouldn't rank "Serenade to a Killer" as highly as "The X Street Murders" or "Bones for Davy Jones," but the story was better than it had any right to be considering the normally atrocious plot-ingredients – a testament to Commings' talent and skills as a plotter. The fact that so much of his detective fiction is currently out-of-print is nothing less than a gross violation of my human rights!

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

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

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

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

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

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once a lost, unpublished story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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