"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unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I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.
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| 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From all of the missing and unpublished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.
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| 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!
