Ghouls on Wheels

"Everything's just a game to you, something to make a story out of."

 - Sgt. Beef (Leo Bruce's Case with Four Clowns, 1939)

Last year, I read and reviewed the two sole "Jay Omega" mysteries, Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987) and Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992), written by award winning novelist Sharyn McCrumb. They are detectives stories steeped in science-fiction lore and very much off the beaten track. Fortunately, McCrumb's bibliography extends pass those two mysteries and I recently dug up one of her Elizabeth MacPherson novels – a humorous, inverted crime story by the title of Missing Susan (1991).

Rowan Rover is the bored, waspish guide of a Jack the Ripper tour and an amateur "criminologist extraordinaire," who tries to summon the ghosts of that long-gone East End London of the late 1880s for a few quid per person, but it's not enough to keep the wolves from the door. There are several ex-wives, tuition fees for his son and a smoking habit to sustain. So how could Rowan have turned down Aaron Kosminski's offer to subtly murder his cousin, Susan Cohen, during a three week murder tour in the south of England – in exchange for a nice fee, of course. Susan came into the family money and decided to retire at the age of thirty-six, which didn't garner much sympathy from either the family or Rover.

After this set-up, Missing Susan becomes a strange, but enjoyable, travelogue filled with the chatter of crime lore, detective fiction and the blood-soaked history of the English countryside.

The references to mystery-and crime fiction is perhaps what you'd expect from detective readers and amateur criminologists from the early 1990s: Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael, Jeremy Brett's interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie's disappearance and mentions of Dorothy L. Sayers, Colin Dexter and there's one tour-member who wants to buy a Reginald Hill novel that hasn’t been published in the U.S. yet. They also visit the area in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) is set and the disappointing Agatha Christie exhibit in Torre Abbey, among other historical sights, but the snippets of "True Crime" were equally interesting. The murder of William II in 1100 is discussed, Dr. Crippen receives an obligatory mention and the Constance Kent case, known best today from The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2008) by Kate Summerscale, function as a story-within-a-story – as MacPherson and the tour members try to piece together an alternative solution.

Meanwhile, Susan Cohen isn't making herself popular and beloved among the group, especially with her would-be-assassin, as she's an easy person to dislike: a self-absorbed, draining personality without a glimmer of self-reflection. However, it took nearly two/thirds of the book before Rover began to make serious attempts at earning his fee. The result is a comedy of errors only Rover is aware of and only the reader can appreciate.

Sharyn McCrumb

Missing Susan may come across like a snail-paced, overly chatty and fictionalized travel guide posing as a cozy mystery novel, which is a suspicion I began to harbor halfway through the story, but the ending is worth the grand tour of south England. I have read a lot of detective stories with takes on the supposedly "perfect crime," but McCrumb may very well have the best one I've yet encountered. It's delightfully ironic, beautifully understated and simply tucked away in the final pages of the book, which also has an interesting part to play for Elizabeth MacPherson – who manages to be both right and wrong about the solution at the same time.

Hell, it was infinitely better than the solution I pieced together based on Susan's expensive makeover and the outdated photograph in her passport, which gave her trouble at the airport. I assumed Susan had been "disappeared" before Kosminski approached Rover with his offer. The Susan on the murder tour had to be Kosminski’s accomplish in the murder of the real Susan, but had been convinced to take the tour in England to make it look as if Susan had disappeared abroad – while they (i.e. he) has an unshakable alibi. That would (at least) freeze the money until she was declared dead, but Kosminski wanted to kill two birds with one stone: if "Susan" dies in an unfortunate accident abroad, nobody will be looking for her body back home and he has silenced a potential danger. Rover could never put the squeeze on Kosminski, because it would be his word against his (and a confession to being a murderer).

Well, I was wrong. And my reason for jotting down my failure as an armchair detective is because this is the second mystery novel in a row that I liked, but doesn't give any room to discuss plot. It's a very talky, but fun, mystery with lots of sight seeing and crime discussions, but the ending is worth it.

P.S. the post-title is a reference from the book refering the tour group as "ghouls on wheels." They sure love their bloody history and murder stories.

A Grave Must Be Deep

"A zombie, m'sieu, a zombie is one who has died but is not yet dead. A corpse resurrected by witch’s doctors magic from the grave."

- Comte de Limonade (Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way, 1935)

After posting my review of Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987), a breezy detective story taking place during a Sci-Fi and Fantasy Con, I learned of a sequel with another outlandish title – Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992). I checked for the book and it was available, but what made it a grabber was the synopsis outlining a plot reminiscent of one of those pesky, untranslated neo-orthodox Japanese mysteries that Ho-Ling and Mousoukyoko blog about from time to time.

Zombies of the Gene Pool centers on a group of SF-writers/fans, who shared a farmhouse in Wall Hollow, Tennessee, and a dream of becoming celebrated fictioneers in the field they loved. In commemoration of their stay at the farm, they bury a time capsule, filled with handwritten stories, letters and memorabilia – like pulp magazines and a film poster of The War of the Worlds. That was back in the 1950s and some succeeded in catching up with their dreams, and over the decades, the anthology of unpublished stories grew in notable names from the realm of Sci-Fi. Unfortunately, the groups initial plans to retrieve the capsule in 1984 was thwarted when the valley, shortly after their departure, was flooded and turned into an artificial lake. Oh, well, cue sera, sera.

Fast forward to the early 1990s and maintenance work to the dam requires the lake to be drained and brings the farmhouses and dormant ghosts of the valley back to the surface. In a weird kind of way, it felt like a collision of Reginald Hill's On Beulah Heights (1998) and Charles Ardai’s "The Last Story," collected in The Return of the Black Widowers (2003), which also revolve around a drowned valley and an unpublished Sci-Fi anthology.

Dr. James Owen Mega from Bimbos of the Death Sun is referred to in this book mainly by his penname, "Jay Omega," and he still has a relationship with the sharp-tongued Dr. Marion Farley of the English department – and a colleague of theirs, Prof. Erik Giles, asks them a favor. Omega and Farley are invited as guests to a reunion, because they're the only ones who know about Giles' skeleton in the book-closet: he wrote science-fiction.

I have to mention here that the first two-thirds of the story concerns itself with fleshing out the characters, telling back stories of the failed attempt at attending Worldcon and the time capsule, peppered with critical satire of the fan community of the time, but nothing of the mundane and kept me reading at a steady pace. On the other hand, I feel forced to draw the conclusion that, from paper fanzines and dial-up bulletin boards to what we have now, we have not grown along with our technology. Yes. That conclusion is based solely on the depictions in this work of fiction and a casual glance at the internet. And I, for one, will welcome our new robotic overlords.

Anyway, one of the extraordinary things to happen, before the reunion is well under way, is the reappearance of the bêta noire to the community of SF-fans, Pat Malone, presumed to be among the dead for decades. Malone was the author of a single novel, River of Neptune, but achieved ever lasting notoriety when many within the community of fans felt his barbed tongue in his underground publication entitled The Last Fandango. Interestingly, McCrumb includes reproductions from old fanzines discussing Malone's death and, again, judging solely by this book, they were paper blogs that published reader comments on the previous issue. Technology appears to be the only difference between fanzines then and blogs/websites now. 

Well, Malone has risen from the grave, but more as a malevolent specter than as zombie, because he's as spiteful as ever and knows what each member of the group has the hide from the world. This is still a mystery novel and with a hundred pages left to go, they find Malone slumped on the bathroom floor of his hotel room – victim of an apparent heart attack. While the group makes their expedition to the remnants of the farm to retrieve "The Dead Sea Scrolls of Science Fiction," Jay Omega crosses miles of land on the digital highway in a relative short time to gather information on Malone and piece together the puzzle before confronting all the suspects. The drawing out of the culprit was not as originally done as in Bimbos of the Death Sun, but as a mystery, Zombies of the Gene Pool was a richer story with a more involved plot and just enough clues not to make you feel cheated.

Another recommendation and enough to warrant a look at some of her other mystery novels.

A Journey to Remember

"Evil deeds do return to their source. They always come full circle, and their evil will never end until the circle is broken."

- Dungeon Master (Dungeons & Dragons, The Animated Series)

Every now and then patterns emerge in my reading. They have varied over the years from unwittingly picking up detective stories, one after another, featuring magicians or medieval armory, but they're usually nothing more than coincidences – either that or the ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler has been hanging around longer than we thought.

The mystery novel set at a convention is now officially a pattern, having previously reviewed Isaac Asimov's Murder at the ABA (1976) and Matt Forbeck's The Con Job (2012), with this additional review of Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987) – which won the Edgar statuette in 1988 for "Best Paperback Original." Except this time it was premeditated and have no regrets! 

Dr. James Owen Mega is our protagonist and scientist, who molded one of his theories into a hard-science fiction book entitled Bimbos of the Death Sun, which was an "idea" from his publisher, but fortunately, he had the foresight to use a penname and hopes he doesn't bump into one of his students at Rubicon. Mega is there to play second fiddle to the main guest of honor, Appin Dungannon, chronicler of the fantasy adventures of the Viking warrior Tratyn Runewind. 

Dungannon can be called a commercial success, whose books have spawned games and a Saturday morning cartoon show Dungannon's Dragons, but ignored when it's time to pass around the awards. Granted, Dungannon's vile temper also does very little for his popularity, however, they make for great anecdotes and draws larger crowds to cons. And I have to admit, I took a liking to that fire-breathing pixy when he spit a verbal dress down at his fans during a costume contest: "shut up, cretin, I'm vilifying you." Delivered like a comedian!

The first hundred or so pages are devoted to these sorts of events that happened at Rubicon, and even though it wasn't my world at all, I appreciated the guided tour that spun a background for murder. I'm always willing to take peek in a strange and different world, and SF/Fantasy fandom is a strange and different world to say the least! Bimbos of the Death Sun takes its time to show you around and meet many peculiar characters roaming the place. Like the visiting Scottish folksinger, Donnie McRory, who stumbles around the con like Arthur Dent slogged through space and time or Monk Malone, who's really good at being a fan, and than there are Clifford Morgan, only man brave/stupid enough to cosplay as Tratyn Runewind while Dungannon is in attendance and the "Guarantuan Femmefan," Brenda Lindenfeld – among other aspiring writers, fanzine editors, wargame players and more fans. I should also mention that the book has a bunch of nifty, comic-style illustrations of most of the characters that you meet.

Another thing worth mentioning is that characters discuss "electronic mail" and deem paper mail as a thing of the past. Home computers, portable printers and technology were firmly present in this story, but they hadn't quite caught up yet with the ideas of their creators/users. But the most interesting part was perhaps to see that these SF/Fantasy cons, from Mack Reynolds' The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) to Matt Forbeck's The Con Job, have stayed the same in spirit. Well, at least in the realm of fiction.

Back to Bimbos of the Death Sun. Appin Dungannon is shot through the heart in his hotel room, while putting the finishing touch to his latest fantasy epic, and is found slouched with a spilled bottle of scotch next to him  – with the printer spitting out pages. Lt. Ayhan is put in charge of the investigation and he can't stop extrapolating how much he loves this case based on how different it is from the usual crimes he has to investigate, but it's Mega who draws out the murderer during a deadly game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was surprised how quick I caught on to Mega's plan considering that I know next to nothing about the game and coupled with the unusual motive made for quite a satisfying conclusion. Bimbos of the Death Sun was not an elaborate and complicated affair, but everything came together in the end and made sense – making this a fast paced and fun read that I recommend unreservedly.