"It can only be attributable to human error."- HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968)
Kate
Wilhelm has a long service record as a fiction writer, debuting
with a short story in a 1956 issue of Fantastic, who
contributed to such a wide variety of publications as Cosmopolitan,
Asimov's Science Fiction, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
and Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – a variation of
genres that can also be found in her novels. Over a period of half a
century, she penned an impressive stack of detective and
science-fiction novels.
Well,
I recently stumbled across one of her many detective stories and
found the book in, what could be considered, an obvious place, but
had not expected to it there: namely my own TBR-pile. I had
completely forgotten about its existence until recently.
Last
week, one of my fellow bloggers, "JJ," attempted to help me find
a modern-day locked
room mystery and hinted, before the blog-post
went live, that the book he had been reading was originally published
in the late 1980s – which activated my fanboyish curiosity and
began to check my backlog. After all, there couldn't be that many
impossible crime novels published on the tail-end of the eighties,
right?
Apparently,
there were enough of the infernal things to prevent me from correctly
identifying the book, but did come across a peculiar looking locked
room title, on the big pile, promising a manor house mystery covered
with the fingerprints of the science-fiction genre.
Smart
House (1989) tells the story of the brainchild of a computer
prodigy, Gary Elringer, who founded the Bellringer Company, but the
hard-and software business stopped being profitable once the boy
genius began to work on his most ambitious project - "a
computerized, automated house." A project that has become a
deep, dark financial rabbit hole and not every one of the the nine
shareholders are thrilled with Smart House. Gary's furious older
brother, Bruce, is even attempting to organize "a palace coup."
However, the computer genius is spoiled to the core and expects
things to go his way, which is how things usually turn out.
So
when Gary invites the shareholders to his futuristic home, situated
on the Oregon coast, everyone turns up. And they all go along with
the ridiculous demonstration he has planned for them.
A "stupid game of murder," called Assassins, in which
players are assigned a designated victim by the computerized house
and they have to eliminate their target "in front of a single
witness" and log the kill into the computer – after which the
house assigns a new victim to the successful killer. Each kill earns
them one vote and the last one standing takes all. The "weapons"
(i.e. toys) are kept in a showroom, inside a case with "a
computer lock," which allows players to pick only one weapon
for every kill.
It's "a game for children," one of them complains, "grown-up
people don't play such childish games," but they all go along
with Gary's wishes. And that makes for some nicely imagined scenes.
The
group of shareholders, and players, consists of professional,
intelligent and respectable people, but Gary puts them in such a
position that they find themselves sneaking around an intelligent
house, logging every step they take, while being armed with
children's toy – such as squirt guns, ribbons and balloons. It's
reminiscent of the surrealistic quality often found in the work of
Ellery
Queen. A feeling strengthened when, shortly after each other, two
people die under seemingly impossible circumstances.
Rich
Schoen is the architect who helped design the house and his body
turns up in a closed elevator, which had the air sucked out of it by
the automatic vacuum system. A short while later Gary's body is found
inside a sealed-off Jacuzzi. The computer logs proved nobody was near
them at the time they died and the police decided there were glitches
in the computer program, but an computerized, semi-sentient house
that can kill its occupants would prevent the company from
recuperating as much as a dime that went into its creation.
So
they engage a couple of private-investigators to prove a human
murderer was responsible for both deaths. Unfortunately, at this
point in the book, the story experienced a slump.
Charles
Meiklejohn and Constance Leidl were obviously meant to be a
modern-day equivalent of Frances
and Richard Lockridge, as they, too, are a childless couple with
a bunch of cats, but the former misses the joie de vivre of
the latter. They did, however, do some proper detective work by going
over everyone's movements, and such, but these chapters were bare of
any interest and the snail pace of the story-telling did not exactly
help either.
What
about the impossible angle, you ask? Well, I should have half
expected this from a hybrid mystery, but the answer to how anyone
could wander around the house without being logged is the
science-fiction equivalent of a murderer using a skeleton key in a
locked room mystery – which is a letdown to say least. Particularly
when its given around the halfway mark. It's a real buzzkill on the
rest of the story.
Smart
House slightly redeemed itself in the end with a somewhat decent
explanation, but it showed that the book should have been written as
a novella-length story.
Well,
as you can judge by my comments on the opening chapters, I really
wanted to like the book, as a whole, which prevented me from skimming
to the end or giving up altogether. However, the story becomes
tedious drag between the discovery of the bodies and the explanation.
A real shame as the ideas present in the story had real potential and
some of the science-fiction elements are now reality (e.g. handheld
computers and A.I. surveillance). So, sadly, I can only recommend
Smart House as a curiosity of both the detective-and
science-fiction genres.
No
idea what I'll dig up next, but, hopefully, something good again and
might pull another impossible crime story from the bookshelf, because
I just noticed this is my 299th blog-post tagged as a locked room
mystery!
