Back
in January, 2016, I read John Russell Fearn's The
Lonely Astronomer (1954), originally published as by "Volsted
Gridban," which was my introduction to the work of this
astonishingly prolific English pulp writer and since then have burned
through twenty of his detective novels, novellas and short stories –
which were as varied in nature as the many genre's he had dabbled in
during his thirty-year career.
Fearn
had literally turned his hand to every form of detective fiction
imaginable: impossible crimes, inverted detective stories, juvenile
mysteries, genre hybrids, thrillers and even an early precursor
of the contemporary crime novel.
The
Lonely Astronomer is "an impossible crime science-fiction
mystery" and one of only two novels featuring a 22nd century
scientific investigator, Adam Quirke, who's a white-maned,
six-feet-nine intellectual giant prone to uncontrollable fits of
laughter. A very annoying characteristic that was (thankfully) not as
prominent in his first outing as it was in his second recorded case.
It's this first outing that I picked as my next read.
The
Master Must Die (1953) takes place in the far-flung year of 2190
and Gyron de London "one of the most powerful industrialists to
ever be spewed up from the financial and industrial deeps,"
which made him the power behind the government of the British
Federation. De London climbed to eminence over "the bodies of
less of less sagacious and less ruthless people," all of them
long-forgotten, but one person had not forgotten about his victims
and send him a threatening letter – promising that on March 30,
2190, he would die at the hands of a sworn enemy. The letter was
signed with "THE MASTER MUST DIE."
De
London has "enemies by the thousand," but his suspicions
run in the direction of the people from his inner circle.
Against
his wishes, De London's son, Harry, has married the daughter of a
high-born Englishman and an equally high-born Martian woman, named
Owena Tirgard, but he intensely dislikes and distrusts Martians –
descendants of the original settlers who had severed ties with their
home planet and declared themselves independent from Earth. After
all, the stamp on the envelope of the threatening letter was a
Martian stamp. I'm not sure what surprised me more: that people were
sending snail mail from Mars to Earth or that a single airmail stamp
covered the cost through the variable distances and zones between the
two planets.
These
are, however, more suspects to consider. Miss Turner is De London's "inhumanly efficient" secretary and has "gone down
the hill of acid spinsterhood" during the "sixteen
grinding, pitiless years" she has worked for him. De London is
very much aware that she deeply resents him and that she had recently
been on holiday to Mars. Secondly, there was Rogers, De London's
chauffeur and general factotum, whose father was a brilliant physical
scientist who got "swindled and crushed" by the big
business. Something a son would naturally resent.
So
there are more than enough potential murderers surrounding the
powerful industrialist and, as March 30 draws closer, De London
begins to take an extreme, overly expensive measure to ensure that
nothing or nobody can get to him – which includes protection from
lethal cosmic rays!
De
London orders his engineers to convert half of his private-office
into "a radiation-proof chamber of tungsten steel" with a
lining of "a new type of lead composite" used on space
ships to block cosmic radiation. A group of armed guards are
stationed around this so-called "cube-room" throughout the
day. De London is supposed to be untouchable within that vault-like,
radiation-proof chamber, but, when he failed to reemerge from the
room, they had to burn through the door. Only to find his body inside
without a mark on it!
I
have to point out here how similar the premise and setup of the
impossible murder is to one from Christopher
St. John Sprigg's "Death at 8:30," collected in Miraculous
Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017),
but the difference between the two is that The Master Must Die
has a pure science-fiction solution. An ingenious, futuristic method
of killing someone inside a bare, radiation-proof room of steel that
even Quirke found difficult to understand and reconstruct. So the
reader has absolutely no chance whatsoever to work out the locked
room trick for themselves, but the identity of the murderer was
interesting. And somewhat solvable.
Usually,
the murderers in Fearn's detective stories are not very difficult to
spot, because he was more concerned with the nuts-and-bolts aspect of
murder and probably the reason why he was so surprisingly good when
it came to writing inverted detective stories – e.g. Except
for One Thing (1947) and Pattern
of Murder (2006). Anyway, the murderer here appeared to have
presented himself on a silver platter to the reader in the run up to
the murder and Quirke's discoveries, regarding the method, initially
confirmed this character as the killer. By the end, Fearn settled on
another character as the murderer, which was perhaps not properly
clued, but this person possessed the motives, means and opportunity.
So
not exactly a rug-puller of a surprise, but, after reading more than
twenty of his mystery novels and short stories, I found this
divergence from the usual pattern interesting. And this is really all
that can be said about the plot of this very short novel.
I do want to note here the fascinating and, sometimes, hilarious fact
that the vision of the future these classic science-fiction authors
had primarily concerned big objects, like rockets, but rarely the
small, everyday things. Fearn created a world in these two books were
you can take a space liner to Mars, which has "a 3-D projected
orchestra" as entertainment, but the cargo of this liner
probably carried sacks of paper mail. All of them properly stamped. I
also noticed this in David V. Reed's Murder
in Space (1944), which takes place in a fully colonized Milky
Way, but courtroom photographers still used flashbulbs!
I'm
not very familiar with the (classical) science-fiction genre and this
could be something primarily found in the work of the
second-stringers, because I believe Isaac
Asimov got a lot right. However, I find it intriguing that these
early science-fiction authors were able to envision space ships,
asteroid mining operations and terra-forming alien worlds, but had a
glaring blind spot as to how these technologies could possibly impact
and innovate normal, everyday life.
On
a whole, The Master Must Die is not one of Fearn's finest
detective stories or even a noteworthy entry on the list of
science-fiction (locked room) mysteries, but it was a fast, fun read
helped by the fact that Quirke was not half as insufferable as in The
Lonely Astronomer. So this one can only really be recommended to
readers who like Fearn, pulpy science-fiction or genre hybrids.
