Scientific Detectives | L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace | C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne | P. G. Wodehouse | Victor L. Whitechurch | Stacy Aumonier | Nigel Morland | Samuel Hopkins Adams | Cleveland L. Moffett | William MacHarg & Edwin Balmer | Arthur B. Reeve | Francis Lynde | Clinton H. Stagg | Psychology and Ernest M. Poate | Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk | Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning | Philip Wylie | Theodora Du Bois
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
Stories From the Diary of a Doctor
The Master of Mystery (collected 1898) (available on-line at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22278)
Miss Florence Cusack stories
The Sorceress of the Strand
"The Man Who Disappeared" (1901)
"The Tea-Leaf" (1925) (available on-line at http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/gaslight/tealeaf.htm)
QC Grayson-Clerk Elk-Solicitor Barnes-O'Malley stories
The Investigations of Godfrey Page, Railwayac (collected 1990)
Stories of the Railway (collected 1912)
The Adventures of Captain Ivan Koravitch (collected 1925)
The Floating Admiral (1931)
Murder at the College / Murder at Exbridge (1932)
"Death at the Excelsior" (1914) (available on-line at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8176)
Miss Bracegirdle and Others (collected 1923)
The Case of the Rusted Room (1937) (Chapters 1-14, 26)
The Flying Death
Average Jones (collected 1911) (available on-line at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6864)
"Aunt Minnie and the Accessory After the Fact" (1945)
Through the Wall (1909) (available on-line at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11373)
"The Mysterious Card" (1896) (available on-line at http://www.everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=1915233)
The Achievements of Luther Trant (collected 1910)
The Affairs of O'Malley (collected 1940)
Uncollected O'Malley stories
Note: most Reeve stories below are available on-line, at http://manybooks.net/series/47.html and at http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/r#a752
The Silent Bullet (1911)
The Poisoned Pen (1912)
The Dream Doctor (1913 - 1914)
Constance Dunlap (1913 - 1914)
The War Terror (collected 1915)
The Social Gangster (collected 1916)
The Panama Plot: Pan-American Adventures of Craig Kennedy (collected 1918)
Scientific Sprague (collected 1912)
Thornley Colton (collected 1915)
Into Thin Air (1929) (Prologue, Chapters 3, 4, 5, 21)
Willis Perkins stories
American Magazine novellas
Three To Be Read
Death Dines Out (1939) (Chapters 1 - 4, 8)
While Golden Age mystery fiction largely shows little interest in science, perhaps the majority of detective stories of the Doyle era paid tribute to science and technology. Science was in fact part of the very genre of detective fiction, in many people's eyes. Some authors, such as Doyle, emphasized scientific crime detection. Sherlock Holmes was a chemist, and did lab analysis of physical clues. This was echoed by other authors. Other writers used scientific marvels for the backgrounds of their stories. Arthur Morrison's "Nicobar Bullion Case" (1894) is partly set under the ocean, with a diver connected to surface air searching the ocean floor. His "Mr. Geldard's Elopement" (1895) deals with industrial machinery in a truly bizarre and surrealistic way. (By all means, read this classic, nutty story, my favorite of Morrison's work.) These two strategies were used by other authors. Arnold Bennett, for example, used the harbor of London, and modern medicine, in The Great Babylon Hotel. Even the proud description of the Great Hotel itself, with its electric lights and high tech kitchens, indicates a pride in technology and progress that is largely absent in Golden Age writers. Even Mary Wilkins Freeman's spinster sleuth engaged in a scientific search for physical clues, and was involved in the chemical process of dyeing cloth.
While all these writers included aspects of science in their works, it was still a leap to create the first detective stories totally centered on science. Scientific detection began to flourish, according to Dorothy L. Sayers, with L.T. Meade and Halifax's Stories From The Diary of a Doctor (1894). L.T. Meade pioneered the story whose solution was fundamentally based on technology and science. After her came the science-based O'Malley tales of C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne, which were apparently never collected in book form, but which are turning up in anthologies, and the much longer lasting series of Dr. Thorndyke tales by R. Austin Freeman (no relation to Mary). Next came Futrelle, and the American school of scientific detection. The American writer Samuel Hopkins Adams' tales followed the traditions of Meade & Eustace. Adams' stories, like those of Meade & Eustace and other early writers in this school, tend to be horror filled in tone.
A more purely American school will be born with the Luther Trant stories (1909 - 1910) of MacHarg and Balmer, which emphasize high technology. Instead of the horror based writing of earlier authors, these American writers will stress the pleasure and thrills of high technology. Cleveland Moffett's Through the Wall (1909) also contains a pioneering American look at scientific crime fighting, one that has much in common with MacHarg and Balmer. They are followed by Arthur B. Reeve, whose works form the climax of the American school. As Sam Moskowitz pointed out, Reeve's book The Silent Bullet (1911) was directly inspired by the works of MacHarg and Balmer. I think also that Reeves' story of "The Diamond Maker" might draw upon Futrelle's "The Diamond Master" (1909).
Mary Roberts Rinehart's first two Miss Pinkerton stories (1914), were also in this tradition, with a nurse detective and science based mysteries. The two Miss Pinkerton novels, much later (1932, 1942) were not especially science oriented, but the final Miss Pinkerton novella, "The Secret" (1950), reverts to the scientific detection paradigm, over thirty years after it was abandoned by nearly everyone but Freeman! Rinehart's connection with the science tradition is not generally pointed out by commentators, who insist on tagging her with the Had I But Known label, but it is abundantly clear to anyone who reads the stories. Rinehart's detective Miss Pinkerton is a nurse, one of the few science/medicine professions generally open to women in those days. Rinehart was a nurse herself. This was not unusual; Doyle, Chekhov and Freeman were all doctors.
A few Golden Age (1920 - 1950, roughly) mystery writers continued the scientific detection genre: Nigel Morland, Philip Wylie, Theodora Du Bois. None of their detective books is well known today, unfortunately. One can also see elements of scientific detection in some of the Golden Age followers of Mary Roberts Rinehart, such as Dorothy Cameron Disney, and Mignon G. Eberhart.
Hugo Gernsback was the editor of the first science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories (1926 - ). Gernsback published many scientific detective tales from 1920 on in the magazines he edited, such as Electrical Experimenter, Science and Invention, Radio News and Amazing Stories. A detailed account can be found in the article Scientific Detectives by science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz, in The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976), edited by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler. Moskowitz discusses many scientific detective writers, both in and outside the Gernsback magazines, whose works are not widely available today.
Gernsback also created a pulp magazine that specialized in high tech sleuthing, Scientific Detective Monthly. It only lasted for ten issues in 1930. It reprinted tales by MacHarg & Balmer, and Arthur B. Reeve, as well as publishing new tales by science fiction pulp writers like Edmond Hamilton and Clark Ashton Smith. Gernsback's writers' guidelines are available on-line here. They give an unusually clear and detailed contemporary view of the Scientific Detective subgenre.
The disappearance of science from much of the non-pulp mystery story during the Golden Age is perhaps echoed by other literary phenomena. In particular, science fiction was ghettoized from a subject of general purpose fiction suitable for all readers and the greatest writers, into the pulps and comic strips. In general, sf was not even published in the form of books during this era. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, Sinclair Lewis Arrowsmith, and Henry Ford served as a villain in Dos Passos' USA, but in general, science and progress were completely ignored in modernist literature. "Serious" writers promoted Fascism and Communism, not science and progress, as a solution to human problems. How wrong they were! Others, like Lawrence, Joyce and Fitzgerald, concentrated on the 1920's sexual revolution. Few writers for grownups during 1916-1945 treated science as worth discussing.
In the previous generation, characters in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs sailed, gathered herbs, ran farms and explored the Arctic. All were proud of their technical skills. This whole attitude had changed later.
This article looks at early scientific detection, in both Britain and the United States. People interested in the subject might want to explore other articles on scientific sleuths in this Guide:
But since then, people tend to regard them as a bunch of separate narrow fields:
Today, mystery fans love to read about forensic detectives, and TV shows about scientific crime investigation are hugely popular. But the ancestors of these contemporary scientific detectives seem little remembered. There is some very good reading here!
L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's tales, in addition to the mystery plot, often contain a brilliant melodrama. This melodrama is rich in mise-en-scène, with elaborate events, strange forebodings, unusual settings, and sinister characters. It is the exact opposite of the dispassionate, financially oriented, daytime literature of Bodkin and Orczy. Many of Meade and Eustace's characters are the victims of romantic obsessions, obsessions exploited by the villains, and which cause them to behave foolishly. The villains often have strange powers, connected to science. Meade and Eustace's slogan could be "Poorer Living Through Chemistry", as this subject is often the sinister source of their villains' power.
Meade and Eustace's tales anticipate, and probably influenced, those of Arthur B. Reeve. Some points of similarity: There is the story built around a scientific innovation. There is a common interest in drugs. There is an international perspective, with characters often from foreign countries, and international financial schemes part of the plot. Industrial enterprises and high finance play a role in both writers. There is the similar emphasis on dramatic storytelling. Police raids occur in both authors. The villains are often high-powered, influential people. Female characters are often prominent, with a scientific background.
Meade and Eustace's "The Man Who Disappeared" (1901) contains imagery that will find echoes in Freeman's "A Silent Witness" (1914): there is the well described Hampstead Heath, the use of sinister basements, and the similar use of chemistry as well. Also, the desire for an autopsy in Meade & Halifax's "Without Witnesses" anticipates attitudes of Freeman, as does the doctor detective of the series. However, Freeman's work in general seems much less related to what I have read of these authors.
Meade and Eustace's sense of magic is also strong. Like many impossible crime writers, the apparently impossible framework's of their tales are set forth with a magical atmosphere. I use the word magic, and not the word supernatural, because unlike John Dickson Carr, Meade and Eustace's work has little invocation of traditional supernatural events, such as ghosts, witches, etc. Instead it has an overwhelming effect of magic breaking through into people's lives. Their "The Secret of Emu Plain", a story of apparently magical events in the Australian Outback, is a definitive look at the eerie properties of that region, anticipating the great Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The Florence Cusack stories open with "Mr. Bovey's Unexpected Will" (1899). This tale's plot, in its comic mode, shows signs of being a dry run for the more sinister "The Man Who Disappeared". If Meade's grimmer stories invoke magic, this light hearted one recalls fairy tales. It also begins with the detective Miss Cusack announcing that she is suffering from nervous problems, a plot thread that is dropped. Sympathetic characters who suffer from mental illness run through the Meade tales.
"The Tea Leaf", Eustace's late (1925) collaboration with Edgar Jepson, finds him pursuing many of the same themes, some 20 years after his collaboration with Meade ended. There is the same interest in freezing, the same impossible crimes explained through chemistry, the same interest in the geometry of rooms and buildings, the same obsessive characters, and the same brilliant female scientists: here one serves as the detective. The plot of this story has been re-used and summarized so many times it has passed into the folklore of the detective story, so this tale has lost some of the punch it must have originally had. But it is still a very well done story.
Another early look at scientific sleuthing was the series of tales by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne that appeared in The Harmsworth Magazine. These tales show some similarity to R. Austin Freeman's later Thorndyke stories, and may be an ancestor. "The Tragedy of a Third Smoker" (1898) deals with a death on a railroad, that is hard to ascribe to anyone other than a single suspect, who was the only one with access to the dead man. The suspect's legal team showed how it actually occurred, clearing their client. Freeman used a similar basic pattern for his story "The Blue Sequin" (1908). "The Banknote Forgery" (1899) deals with forgery and uses photography, both key elements on Freeman's work in later years - see, for example, The Red Thumb Mark. Another similarity to the Thorndyke tales is the use of a legal team as detectives. A whole series of four persons on the team serve as continuing characters in Hyne's stories.
The famed humor writer P. G. Wodehouse made a brief excursion into mystery fiction in the days before World War I. "Death at the Excelsior" (1914) is a nicely done impossible crime short story. Its tradition seems closest to the Scientific detective story, then at the height of its popularity. Its locked room ideas have little in common with the Zangwill-Chesterton school of "rearrangements in space and time". Instead, they are based in the scientific ideas of the sort found in Meade and Eustace. Wodehouse also shows the fondness for poisonous snakes, found both in Meade and Eustace, and later in William Hope Hodgson and Arthur B. Reeve.
Stories of the Railway (collected 1912) contains nine stories about Railway Detective Thorpe Hazell, and 6 other non-series tales. The book is also known as Thrilling Stories of the Railway. Hazell is a wealthy amateur, vegetarian, and health nut, who studies railways as a hobby. Hazell's vegetarian diet was intended by his author to be both humorous and grotesque, and I took it so when I first read these tales years ago; but today many people are moving toward a vegetarian diet for health reasons, and what Hazell eats in the stories seems more and more normal all the time.
Whitechurch's early fiction is hard to classify. It mixes railroad technology with spy, mystery and adventure elements, and seems designed to please railroad enthusiasts as much as mystery fans. It also oscillates between impossible crime and technology based fiction, with stops along the way for just plain mystery writing. The tone is far removed from Meade and Eustace, or Arthur B. Reeve, and one hesitates to include it in the "scientific detection" tradition. Whitechurch's tone is light. There is a sense of "artificiality" about his plot elements, such as the mystery, crime, or espionage stories. They seem to be constructed as a support element for his ingenious railroading ideas. Despite this, they are often very good pieces of storytelling in their own right.
Several of the best Hazell tales deal with thefts from the railways. These include "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture" (1905), "The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box", and "The Stolen Necklace". These stories are often impossible crime tales, or border on them. There is a family resemblance between the techniques used to pull off the thefts in "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture" and "The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box". And both involve duplicate copies of the objects to be stolen. These two stories have been reprinted in anthologies, and are much better known than anything else Whitechurch wrote. They are the works that have kept Whitechurch's reputation alive, for over a century.
There is also a good natured adventure story among the Hazell tales, "How the Bishop Kept His Appointment". A non-mystery, it is linked to the often humorous "clerical" fiction that Whitechurch also wrote.
The 6 non-Hazell stories are a mixed bag. Mostly they are best classified as "ingenious tales about railroads", not mystery fiction, strictly speaking (they largely do not contain puzzles or mysterious situations to be solved). Yet their clever plotting, and crime or spy backgrounds, will commend them to mystery fans. Two of them deal with the technology of railway signaling: "How the Express Was Saved" and "Winning the Race"; these are among the most science oriented of Whitechurch's works. "Winning the Race" is the better story, but it is recommended to read the earlier tale first, as it helps set up the technological background of this otherwise abstruse topic; this is a subject about which I knew nothing before reading Whitechurch. "The Strikers" and the Hazell tale "The Adventure of the Pilot Engine" have affinities to these tales, but are much weaker works (and indeed seem to be variations of each other, to boot). "A Case of Signaling", despite its title, is not about the technology of railway signaling. This tale is unusual among British mystery fiction in that its clever heroine and hero are members of the lower classes. It is a very sweet piece of storytelling, and shows Whitechurch's gift of humor.
A spy name Koravitch is a minor character in the Thorpe Hazell tale "The Adventure of the Pilot Engine". Whitechurch would go on to write a whole book of spy short stories, The Adventures of Captain Ivan Koravitch (collected 1925). I have only read one story in a Sayers anthology from this rare book, and don't know if it is the same character. The tale, "How The Captain Tracked a German Spy", is a nicely told account of tailing a suspect on a train; it has no puzzle element, but it does include some good train atmosphere.
There is some evidence that Whitechurch's short tales appeared in magazines long before book publication. Peter Haining's picture book, The Art of Mystery & Detective Stories (1977), has an illustration of a Whitechurch tale "The Convict's Revenge" (1898) which he claims stars Thorpe Hazell, from the Strand magazine. It is unclear whether this is really a Hazell tale, or if a renamed version of it appears in the Hazell stories collected in Railway in 1912. By contrast, Allen J. Hubin gives firm dates of the Thorpe Hazell "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture" as appearing in the October 1905 The Royal Magazine. Similarly, Ivan Koravitch was collected in book form in 1925, but some Koravitch stories appeared in The Railway Magazine in 1897. This means Whitechurch's stories appeared early in the Impossible Crimes movement, and very early in the Technological Detective movement too. Both genres had already been piloted by L.T. Meade in this era, but just barely: the medical stories in "The Diary of a Doctor" appearing in 1894, and the impossible crimes of "The Master of Mystery" in book form in 1898. The spy elements in Whitechurch's tale were also fairly brand new in this era. Whitechurch may not have been the originator of these movements, but he was an early contributor, someone who helped turn them into actual flourishing literary trends. It also helps explain a certain casualness or tentativeness in his approach. Hazell is presented as an expert on railways. But he is not depicted as the Most Advanced Scientific Genius of Our Time, the way Dr. Thorndyke or Craig Kennedy are. (OK, so I'm exaggerating a little!) Similarly, the frequently impossible nature of Whitechurch's crimes is not underlined by fake supernatural atmosphere, or an elaborately surrealistic mise-en-scène.
Whitechurch's contribution to the Detection Club round robin The Floating Admiral (1931) is vigorously told. It concentrates on travel by boat up and down a river, in the same way his earlier fiction focused on railways. Two boys, appearing at the end of the chapter, speak for their author when they celebrate the chance to have a river mystery adventure.
Murder at the Pageant (1930) is the Whitechurch novel most readily found today, because it was reprinted in paperback in 1987. Unfortunately, this book is not one of Whitechurch's better works. It suffers from not containing most of Whitechurch's strong suits: there are no impossible crimes, and only a little bit about trains. The best part of the book is the first third (Chapters 1 - 5), which contains the main plot set-up of the mystery. The solution (Chapter 15) has little to do with most of the events in the early part of the tale, including the pageant itself. Nor does it show much ingenuity - the clue about the address excepted. It just seems arbitrary.
The best aspects of the tale, as a mystery puzzle plot, involve interpreting two pieces of text. This is a kind of mystery that runs through Whitechurch. 1) The address found in the victim's notebook is a clever clue. It is explained towards the end of Chapter 12. 2) A separate piece of text, the dying message, is not as ingenious, but actually is more in line with the text interpretation puzzles in "The Murder on the Okehampton Line" (1903) and Murder at the College (1932). It is simpler than either. The dying message relates to a subplot in the novel, not the main murder mystery. The text interpretation problem in Murder at the College will also relate to a similar subplot.
The motive for the actual killing is similar to the one in Murder at the College. It is part of a richer structure in that latter book.
The victims in the two novels turn out to have similar professions and activities.
Both Murder at the Pageant and Murder at the College have subplots, in which a suspect is made to seem guilty, through a long train of circumstantial evidence. Then the suspect will be cleared, by new revelations, that show he was innocent after all. Both the original trail, and the story that clears them, tend to be long, event-filled accounts of what the suspect might have been doing, or actually was doing, during the time surrounding the murder. Whitechurch shows ingenuity in constructing these trails.
The Pageant description (Chapter 1), the most colorful part of the book, displays the interest in antiquarianism often found in R. Austin Freeman. However, Whitechurch is more interested in clothes, while Freeman loves antiques. The clothes relate to Whitechurch's interest in disguise, which throughout his work centers around people dressing up in costumes. Whitechurch's clerical romance The Canon in Residence also opens with his hero getting into new clothes, which lead to a new attitude and comical misadventures.
Whitechurch's last detective novel is known as Murder at the College (1932) in Britain, and as Murder at Exbridge in the United States. The story admirably sticks very purely to detection, with the police constantly following up clues to the killing throughout the book. Unlike many "mystery" novels about British Universities, Murder at the College is a genuine detective story, not a mainstream novel about academic life with a little mystery thrown in. In fact, many of the characters are not residents at the college at all, but merely visitors that day at a meeting at the college attended by the victim, and academia is not really the center of the story.
Murder at the College is far from being a great detective novel: much of it depends on some unfortunate coincidences, the part of the mystery involving a criminal scheme lacks fair play clues that would allow the reader to deduce it in advance of the solution, and the ingenuity of the solution, while pleasant, is fairly mild and simple. Still, it is surprisingly readable throughout, due to its wealth of precisely imagined detail.
The rest of this discussion might contain SPOILERS.
Murder at the College is in some ways a police procedural in the Freeman Wills Crofts tradition, as was Murder at the Pageant (1930). 1) Routine sleuthing by policemen forms the detective investigation; 2) the police are affable, suave and slick in their interviewing technique, like Crofts' Inspector French; 3) as in Crofts, we learn all the police's ideas about the mystery's solution step by step through the novel, rather than in one big surprise at the end; 4) the police make a side trip to the Continent, also a Crofts tradition; 5) a criminal scheme forms a subplot, a scheme that involves some hidden architectural features, as in Crofts' The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922) and The Box Office Murders (1929), although Whitechurch's scheme is far simpler than Crofts'.
However, many Croftsian features are absent: there is only a mild interest in alibis; there are no racial minorities; the vivid details of the characters' professional lives, while absorbing, never quite form a unified Background on a specific topic; and the characters are not so much Croftsian businessmen as they are either dons or professional men. The many clergymen characters remind us that Whitechurch wrote clerical romances earlier in his career, as well as mysteries. Whitechurch also does a good job with the working class characters in the story, reminding us he wrote "A Case of Signaling", with its lower class heroes.
A subplot in Murder at the College is directly in the tradition of "The Murder on the Okehampton Line" (1903), one of Whitechurch's series of short tales about railway detective Godfrey Page, the "railway maniac" or "railwayac", as Whitechurch humorously dubbed him for short. In both works, the sleuths find cryptic notes left behind by the victim, which mainly consist of a string of letters and numbers. In both they have to interpret the notes. Both interpretations have some common features involving architecture, in the broad sense of the term. And in both, it leads the sleuths to a key piece of the puzzle, the MacGuffin behind the story. Godfrey Page is an amateur detective; by profession he is an architect, like many of the characters in Murder at the College.
Murder at the College shows the Golden Age interest in architecture, with the crime scene a precisely described locale in the college buildings. The architecture plays a role throughout the mystery and its solution. In some ways, the architecture has the same central role as trains did in earlier Whitechurch stories, forming a locale in which the crime is carried out. The biggest mystery in Murder at the College, how the killer left the crime scene without being seen by the numerous witnesses, links Murder at the College to the impossible crime tale. This recalls the several borderline impossible crimes in Stories of the Railway. The impossible exit of the killer in Murder at the College is as linked to the architecture, as the impossible thefts in Stories of the Railway are linked to the set-up of the trains.
Some other points. 1) A pleasant theme throughout Murder at the College are the many characters who engage in detection. At a number of points, we see the story through fresh eyes, while these sleuths investigate some aspect of the mystery. There is something almost Pirandellian about this, a mildly avant-garde feature. None of these characters ever meet each other. Instead, they share their ideas in interviews with the tale's chief sleuth, policeman Sgt. Ambrose. "The Murder on the Okehampton Line" and Murder at the Pageant also had a profusion of sleuth characters. 2) The Thorpe Hazell tales in Stories of the Railway also contain a number of characters whose amateur sleuthing aids the hero. Both Ambrose and Hazell also have Scotland Yard contacts, who can be employed to answer questions that require serious police assistance. 3) The victim in Murder at the College is an amateur sleuth, who bears some resemblance to Thorpe Hazell. At the end of the novel, we learn he refused to cover up his findings - which is why the murderer killed him. This is the exact opposite of Hazell, who conceals his discoveries at the end of "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture", because the culprit is an aristocrat, and Hazell wants to prevent scandal. This is incredibly snobbish - but one feels Whitechurch has some sympathy with Hazell, and the murderer in the novel. 4) There are other similarities between Murder at the College and "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture": both involve complex rings of thieves, who are stealing priceless art objects for unscrupulous collectors. 5) The disguise used by the villain in Murder at the College was previously used by Hazell in "The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box".
Stacy Aumonier is included here, not because of any scientific background to his work, but because of a perceived similarity to Victor L. Whitechurch's work. Aumonier's delightful story "Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty" (1922) seems to be in the tradition of clerical fiction, a once popular subgenre of British storytelling, These tales focus, often humorously, on life in British clerical families and cathedral towns. Whitechurch published a great deal of material of this sort. "Miss Bracegirdle" resembles in a general way the opening chapters of Whitechurch's The Canon in Residence (1903); both concern Britishers, associated with the clergy, who have misadventures abroad. In both stories the misadventures concern loosening up, and throwing off the inhibitions that dominated their previous life.
Long after the early vogue for scientific detection stories had passed, the prolific Nigel Morland wrote his series of five novels about young London policeman sleuth Sgt. Johnny Lamb (1937-1940). These were published under one of Morland's many pseudonyms, John Donavan (and the middle letter A in Donavan is not a misspelling). Sgt. Johnny Lamb is the son of the late Home Office pathologist Sir David Lamb. The brilliant young Johnny is a fully trained scientific pathologist, but one who has preferred to work his way up in the police service as a regular copper. His gifts and gung-ho determination have earned him the rank of Sergeant, and he works as assistant to homicide specialist Detective-Inspector Cross, his old school but kind-hearted and friendly superior. Morland was a protégé of Edgar Wallace, and this set-up recalls a bit Wallace's Sergeant Sir Peter (1929 - 1930), which stars an aristocratic young man who works as a British police Sergeant. It also recalls Scotland Yard Detective-Constable Bobby Owen, the series sleuth of E. R. Punshon, another public school educated young officer who is working as a policeman in Depression era England. Owen appeared in around 35 books (1933-1956). One also recalls young Sgt. Ambrose of Victor L. Whitechurch's last detective novel Murder at the College (1932), who is the public school educated and gentlemanly son of a clergyman. However, neither Wallace's nor Punshon's nor Whitechurch's sleuths are scientific detectives.
Even during this period Morland was self-educating himself in forensic science, and in later years would edit scientific journals and publish textbooks in this area.
The Case of the Rusted Room (1937) gets the Johnny Lamb series off with a bang. It contains a vivid telling of a murder both committed and detected by scientific means. The story is at its best in the first half (Chapters 1-14). After this, it runs out of inventiveness, and there is nothing interesting in the arbitrary choice of villain at the end. The story shows the Golden Age interest in architecture.
Morland also has a good grasp of commercial life in 1930's England, with convincing looks at engineering businesses and shady financial transactions. Such a flair for business Backgrounds recalls the Realist School of British detection, which grew out of the Scientific School via the works of Freeman Wills Crofts. Lamb's policeman boss Cross is depicted as a methodical, plodding officer, recalling Crofts' sleuth Inspector French, and other policeman heroes of the Realist school writers. Both Cross' presence, and the attention Morland devotes to in-depth looks at business enterprises, represent the incorporation of Realist School approaches as a subsidiary element in his story. Morland has fun contrasting the plodding Cross with his lightning-fast assistant Lamb, the two men also standing for two different schools of detective fiction.
Samuel Hopkins Adams' Average Jones short stories (collected in book form 1911), are memorable works of the scientific school of crime detection. Most feature villains who use science to pull off nefarious schemes. Their publication perhaps owes something to the popularity of MacHarg and Balmer's tales. Adams was a famous muckraker, whose works led to the founding of the Food and Drug Administration. Several of these stories expose public corruption, both in America and abroad, something that will be continued by Arthur B. Reeve. Adams' breezy prose style, with its cheerful cynicism about public institutions, and humorous asides, is a big plus here. Adams' prose is gracefully literate, with many cleverly turned phrases and gentle wordplays based on literary allusions.
If Adams' tales derive commercially from MacHarg and Balmer, artistically they seem closest to those founders of the scientific school, Meade and Eustace. Several of the plots involve chemistry, others poisonous animals; both are Meade and Eustace trademarks. Just as in M&E, there is often more emphasis on the villain's schemes than on the hero's detection. Adams' villains are more sympathetic than M&E's, however; often they are attacking bad guys who really deserve it, whereas M&E's villains tend to go after innocent victims and nice people.
The Mercy Sign. There is often an atmosphere of horror in Adams's stories, like those of M&E. Adams' "The Mercy Sign" has the best horror mise-en-scène of any story since Meade and Eustace's "Madame Sara" (1902). "The Mercy Sign" is the best story in the collection. It also has the strongest elements of mystery, as opposed to the thriller. It builds up a deep sense of mystery. Strange event follows strange event, all unexplained (till the finale), and all adding to the puzzle. An eerie atmosphere builds up, the sense that that the reader is journeying to the heart of something strange and sinister.
"The Mercy Sign" is in two distinct parts, each with its own characters and setting. The first half recalls Adams' "The Flying Death", with its scientific characters, and outdoor setting in a lonely nature-filled area surprisingly close to New York City. The second half of "The Mercy Sign" instead resembles Adams' "The One Best Bet", with its tale of a political assassination plot, played out against urban buildings.
"The Mercy Sign" is filled with the liberal politics, that one often finds in the American Scientific School. It is one of the most politically significant of detective stories.
The One Best Bet. The tales in the first half of Adams' book tend to have more mystery than those in the second half, the latter being closer to pure thrillers - and less interesting for it. The least likable tale is "The One Best Bet". I read Adams' book twice, many years apart, and both times this story gave me the creeps.
The Man Who Spoke Latin. "The Man Who Spoke Latin" is one of Adams' most comic tales. Like his non-series story "The Flying Death", it involves the bizarre eruption into the present of something from the distant past. The story is set among the intelligentsia and collectors, the same terrain that will be explored so well by S. S. Van Dine and his successors, starting in the 1920's. The story was reprinted by Ellery Queen, who often specialized in such settings.
"The Man Who Spoke Latin" is notable for the exuberance and invention of its undercover roles, something adopted by both villains and heroes in the story. One finds a more serious, or at least more solemn, treatment of undercover work, in MacHarg and Balmer's "The Man Higher Up" (1909). Adams shows good plotting, with the careful elaboration of the undercover identities. There is also much careful detective work, with each new discovery by the hero being justified by a clue he has unearthed through sleuthing. This detective work is inventive, too.
Before the Average Jones stories, Adams published "The Flying Death" (1903). This is a hair raising impossible crime short story in the full weird menace tradition. Adams' story is different from much weird menace, however, in that its plot ideas are centered not in the supernatural, but in science. The tale anticipates Adams' interest in both the horror filled narrative and scientific detection of the Average Jones stories.
It has three detective characters, each scientifically skilled in different ways. Together, they make up a team. Male bonding runs through the Average Jones stories, as well. A story like "The Mercy Sign" also eventually builds up a team of sleuths.
"The Flying Death" is told with multiple narrators, each producing documents that narrate their part of the case. Such document narration was common in 19th Century authors like Wilkie Collins. It is less frequently seen in 20th Century authors.
"The Flying Death" has less actual detection than the Average Jones stories, which often feature complex deductions by their sleuths. Instead, it simply states a baffling impossible crime problem, then provides a solution at the end.
It is set at Montauk Point, on the far Eastern tip of Long Island in New York. In Adams' era, this locale was nearly devoid of human settlement; today it is the populous summer home of America's snootiest millionaires, and is known as "the Hamptons". More importantly, abstract painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning lived there.
A character in the story is named Colton, anticipating Clinton H. Stagg's detective, Thornley Colton.
Adams expanded the short story "The Flying Death" into a novel, also called The Flying Death (1908). The novel is less of a pure mystery than the short story, mixing in science fiction elements.
Moffett's Through the Wall (1909) was described by Ellery Queen as "a neglected high spot". Both parts of this description seem accurate. It is a good book, and seems to have not many literary offspring. One suspects not many people have ever even read it, let alone been influenced by it, although it was known to Dorothy L Sayers, as well, who has Lord Peter Wimsey praise it in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928).
Moffett's novel is set in 1907 Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent, and is rich in period atmosphere. It is long (400 pages) and leisurely, and filled with humor, melodrama, Great Detectives and master villains, and everything else one can think of. It is also a genuine detective story, with a complex, admirable plot. There is less emphasis on "playing fair" with the reader, and on deduction in obtaining the solution, than in Freeman or later Golden Age writers, however. Moffett does excel, however, at the gradual uncovering and unveiling of the truth behind the mysterious situation through detective work, a skill he could have learned from Anna Katherine Green, or other early writers. His detective is named Paul Coquenil, recalling Émile Gaboriau's Parisian detective Lecoq. The villain in Moffett's book and the plot intrigues which surround this villain, bear a family resemblance to those in Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1868).
The sheer size of Wall, together with the complexity and tremendous variety of the scope of the plot, gives one an "oceanic" feeling, of being involved in a large world where anything can happen. Wall changes its "scale of focus" many times, in a way different from most Golden Age detective novels. It contains everything from the minute examination of physical clues, to complex struggles of political intrigue, from personal attacks on its detective hero, to puzzle plots and scientific detection. At the end one feels that one has lived through a complex experience, one that involves many pauses for reflection, and several gradually dawning new perspectives and points of view.
Toward the end, Moffett makes a sudden detour into "scientific detection", and introduces an early version of both the lie detector and the word association test. He does this with his usual vivid storytelling, and eye for almost surrealistic detail. Both of these devices are used by MacHarg & Balmer. Did he influence MacHarg & Balmer - or vice versa? It would be interesting to find out. I have seen references to non-fiction articles of the period on such devices; perhaps both independently drew on such non-fiction accounts.
Through the Wall makes an interesting contrast with Crofts' The Cask (1920); it shows the romantic's Paris, while The Cask shows the businessman's Paris. Oddly enough, there is plenty of excitement and even romance, too, in The Cask; the two books are complimentary.
Moffett is perhaps best known today for a pair of riddle stories, "The Mysterious Card" (1896) and its sequel, "The Mysterious Card Unveiled" (1896). Both were collected into a single small book - the stories together don't add up to 50 pages. The first story describes a series of sinister, hard to explain events that overtake the hero when he is given the card. The events are catastrophes, and leave the hero feeling persecuted. Unfortunately, at the end of the tale, none of the mysterious events in the story are explained. The sequel gives an explanation, but it is couched in the sort of paranormal phenomena that show up on The X-Files. Anyone who reads these stories as a mystery is going to feel cheated. Both the paranormal theme and the paranoia in the plotting will seem immediately familiar to anyone who watches The X-Files, and the story could easily be an episode of that show, even though it was written 100 years ago.
There are thematic links between the Card stories and Through the Wall, although they cannot be discussed without giving away their plots.
While "The Mysterious Card Unveiled" involves the paranormal, the events in the much better first story, "The Mysterious Card", are completely naturalistic. Looking at "The Mysterious Card" just by itself, without reference to the sequel, the plot elements form a mystery without a solution. In theory, this mystery could be given a naturalistic solution, although Moffett does not do so. I have always believed that the events in "The Mysterious Card" are so extreme, that it is hard to imagine any solution being created for them. However, the modern writer Edward D. Hoch came up with a reasonably plausible explanation of them in his "The Spy and the Mysterious Card" (EQMM, October 1975), an imaginative feat.
The Bishop's Purse (1912), written with Oliver Herford, is misleadingly billed in its reprint edition as "a mystery story". It has crime elements - one of the characters is a lady thief - but there are no mysterious events for the reader or a detective to solve. Mainly, it is what used to be called a "clerical romance" - a good humored, genteel, slightly comic tale of adventures among the British clergy and their relatives. This genre used to be popular in Edwardian England; Victor Whitechurch wrote several such books. The lady thief's attempts to steal a purse filled with money the Bishop has raised for charity form only one plot thread here, among romances, comedy and stock market manipulations by big businessmen, the last also a popular fiction subject in the early 1900's. This uninspired book shows little of Moffett's talents.
William MacHarg and Edwin Balmer's The Achievements of Luther Trant (1909 - 1910) are some of the pioneering American scientific detective stories. Trant is a psychologist, Chicago based, who works as a criminological consultant on mysteries. He is a young, clean cut and dynamic scientist, a characterization that probably influenced Arthur B. Reeve's detective Craig Kennedy. While this rare book is long out of print, two of its best tales can be found in the anthology The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1976), edited by Hugh Greene.
The Man Higher Up. My favorite short story in the collection is "The Man Higher Up" (1909). This tale has brilliant mise-en-scène, where it generates higher and higher excitement as the detectives get closer and closer to nailing the title villain. The story also shows a great deal of realism, taking the reader back stage at the docks, a place and time now preserved forever in their fiction. Arthur B. Reeve, who wrote many scientific detective stories in the 1910's following MacHarg and Balmer, also regularly employed such detailed background portraits of a business or institution in his fiction. One wonders if the "background" in this story and Reeve's work influenced the Freeman-Crofts school's interests in backgrounds, which began with Freeman Wills Crofts' detailed portrait of the shipping industry in The Cask (1920).
"The Man Higher Up" (1909), along with Cleveland L. Moffett's Through the Wall of the same year, marks the first use of the lie detector in fiction.
"The Man Higher Up" is perhaps the most ferocious work of liberal social criticism in detective fiction history. Its attack on corporate corruption seems even more relevant today. The story has an odd sidelight: the heroine of this tale drives an electric car, which were common in 1909, but which Americans cannot buy for love or money in 2006. The oil industry, which considers Americans its slaves, won't let them.
"The Man Higher Up" has a mystery plot, but one which focuses more on understanding a complex, mysterious situation, and less on who done it. The mystery plot is both baffling, and fairly clued. Such an approach will also often be followed by Arthur B. Reeve, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Rinehart's tales will often focus on a Big Secret shared by some of the characters. Finding the secret will be a more central part of the mystery, than identifying the murderer.
The Axton Letters. "The Axton Letters" (1910) is apparently the first of all mystery tales wherein the detective deduces psychological or sociological facts about a bad guy, based on clues he inadvertently included in a letter he wrote. MacHarg and Balmer here deserve credit here as pioneers, but I confess that I have always had considerable skepticism about both this story, and the genre as a whole. Detectives in stories are always noticing that a letter writer spelled a date English style, and rushing out to arrest the Duke of York, the only Englishman among the suspects. But couldn't such a thing be a personal affectation of an American crook? Couldn't the writer have just received a note from a British cousin, and subconsciously imitated his dating style? Suppose it were just a typo? Or what if it were done on purpose, to mislead? Or suppose that the writer's first grade teacher was from England, and taught our crook the English way of doing things. Detectives in stories never seem to encounter any of these glitches. In any case, the storytelling here is nowhere as good as "The Man Higher Up".
The other Trant story in anthologies, "The Private Bank Puzzle", just seems mediocre.
MacHarg's solo collection The Affairs of O'Malley (collected 1940) is written in a different style, one that only rarely invokes anything scientific. This is a large group (33 stories) of police procedural tales, each around four to eight pages long. O'Malley is a New York City cop; in each tale he solves a mystery, usually a murder. Each story opens with O'Malley explaining why he probably won't be able to solve the case; then he solves it; each story similarly closes humorously with O'Malley's explanation about why he won't get any credit for solving the case.
Most of the cases have realistic New York City backgrounds, ranging from the poor in tenement halls to rich people hanging out in night clubs. They probably served as a model for Ellery Queen's later series of short mysteries with realistic New York settings, Q.B.I. (1949-1954). Very few of the cases have mob or underworld settings. The stories are full of a tough, low key realism, but are not especially hard-boiled or in any Hammett derived pulp tradition. Whether rich, poor, working or middle class, the characters in the story are depicted as "typical New Yorkers".
The brief tales are heavily plot oriented. Some of them have mystery puzzle plots, in others the killer's identity is simply found through police work.
O'Malley puts great emphasis on coming up with ingenious ideas to make the killer confess, or make a damaging admission of guilt; the stories contain numerous gimmicks of this type. These stories form a subcategory of the inverted stories of Freeman; here it is not so much how the police are going to discover the killer's identity that is important, as how they are going to trick him into confessing. One sees a similar emphasis on tricking the killer into confession in some of the inverted stories Cornell Woolrich wrote in the early 1940's, and one wonders if Woolrich used the O'Malley tales as a model. The O'Malley stories appeared in slick magazines, such as Colliers, in the 1930's, and some of the police schemes in stories like "No Evidence" remind one of Frederick Irving Anderson's 1920's Book of Murder, which also appeared in the slick Saturday Evening Post. Erle Stanley Gardner's The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939) also contains a look at psychological pressure on a criminal to get him to confess. Clearly this idea was "in the air" around 1940. (Gardner's novel also resembles the O'Malley tale "Too Many Miles" in that both deal with mileage on automobiles.)
The science in the early Luther Trant tales tended to be based on psychology, such as the lie detector, or what the killer's words revealed about his mental makeup. The emphasis was on getting the criminal to reveal his mental secrets. This is related to the later approach of the O'Malley tales, with their emphasis on triggering criminal confession. What science there is in the O'Malley stories tends to invoke altered states of consciousness, in which killers might talk, such as "The Sleeptalker" (1931), or the anesthetic based dentistry of "The Man on the Truck". The O'Malley stories also include episodes in which the detective gets small children ("The Sleeptalker", "The Key Man"), naive adolescents ("Too Bad") or animals ("The Scotty Dog", "Dumb Witness") to reveal what they know. In each case, O'Malley has to coax the knowledge out of a brain that is different from an adult's, finding ways of interpreting the non-standard psychology of the witness.
Another persistent theme in the tales concerns O'Malley's ingeniously tracking down suspects, by following up often meager clues. One suspect often leads to another suspect, who in turn leads to a third, until ultimately the actual killer is traced. In general, the O'Malley tales emphasize the ideas of the detective, whether they consist of novel ways to get a killer to confess, or finding ways to track down suspects from the slenderest of clues. Almost none of them glamorize the "routine police work" beloved of the Freeman Wills Crofts school of police procedurals. O'Malley does a good deal of routine investigation, and more frequently delegates this to other cops, but the knowledge gained therefrom is more often treated as the raw material for O'Malley's clever ideas, not as an ultimate end in itself.
Several of the cases involve a tangle of personal relationships, with jealous love triangles and rival lovers. The pattern of interrelationships can get complex, and forms a major part of the plot.
"Written in Dust" and "The Widow's Share" (1937) deal with payroll robberies, a subject that would later be popular in books and films. As in "The Man Higher Up", these stories take one back stage at a business. So, in its own way, does "The Locked Door", a tale that shows some interesting geographical patterns.
The story "Man Missing" (1935) suggests that MacHarg had been reading Freeman Wills Crofts' The Cask (1920). "The Right Gun" (1939) recalls Ellery Queen, with its boxing arena setting, and search for a missing gun. Also Queen like is this stories' sympathetic black character.
The cover of the 1951 paperback of The Affairs of O'Malley (1940) (retitled Smart Guy) shows a vivid illustration taken from the story "A Little More Evidence". I don't know the name of the artist.
The Silent Bullet. Arthur B. Reeve's stories deal with High Technology way back when. The Silent Bullet (1911) is still exhilarating, with its picture of advanced technology opening limitless frontiers for humankind. Many of its technological images are still relevant; in fact, much of the book seems more plausible today than it might have seemed to more skeptical readers back then. Reeve's book is a climax of a whole tradition of scientific detective stories. The short stories in The Silent Bullet star Craig Kennedy, a brainy young professor at New York City's Columbia University, who uses science to solve a series of mysteries. The Silent Bullet is the first of many short story collections Reeve would write about Craig Kennedy.
S.S. Van Dine started a tradition, followed by Ellery Queen and other later commentators, of slamming Reeve's work, and suggesting that it is less "realistic" than R. Austin Freeman's. This is a complex issue. Freeman's work tends to deal with detection using small, scientifically accurate facts. In this sense there is probably more accuracy in Freeman's work. Freeman's cases tend to be ordinary crimes, and only the detection draws on scientific methods. These detective methods are presented with meticulous, accurate care. They form a realistic picture of the best aspects of scientific lab work used in crime detection of their era.
Reeve tends to deal with sweeping advances in technology, and use these as the center of his mystery plots. Reeve undoubtedly oversteps the bounds of accuracy on several occasions. But his work is inspiring in the way Freeman's is not. In Reeve one gets the sense of massive waves of technological advance breaking on humanity's shores. These advances will change the way in which people live. It is easy to understand why The Silent Bullet caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1910's. It paints an electrifying picture of the march of science. Sam Moskowitz has aptly linked Reeve's popularity, to the eventual rise of Hugo Gernsback and the first American science fiction magazines. His work certainly seems ancestral to the sense of wonder found in 1930's and 1940's sf.
In the first two volumes of Kennedy tales, the detective gathers all the suspects together at the end of the story, then reveals the identity of the killer to them during his final speech solving the crime. This is a plot device that will be greatly reused by later writers. Reeve is the first writer known to me systematically to adopt this approach.
Scientist Craig Kennedy is assisted in all the tales by his "Watson", newspaper reporter Walter Jameson. These professions recall Jacques Futrelle's scientist-detective, the Thinking Machine, and the newsman Hutchinson Hatch who assists him. While some of the Thinking Machine stories center on science, the series as a whole is not systematically science oriented, the way the Craig Kennedy stories are. Both Craig Kennedy and the Thinking Machine frequently send their aides out on mysterious errands, connected with the case.
Reeve's tales are far less puzzle plot oriented than Futrelle's, and many other mystery writers; there are few impossible crime tales among Reeve's huge output, unlike Futrelle, who specialized in such works. Paradoxically, while there are many vividly described locales in Reeve's work, there are few maps, and the actual geometric layout of a room or building is rarely relevant to Reeve's plots. The same can be said of the scientific detection school as a whole: the locale and architecture are important, the geometric layout is not, and I cannot recall ever seeing a map or floor plan diagram in any scientific detective work.
The Poisoned Pen. The short stories in Reeve's second collection The Poisoned Pen are a direct continuation of the Craig Kennedy series in The Silent Bullet. Although not quite as intense, they too are often outstanding works of detective literature.
"The Campaign Grafter" in The Poisoned Pen takes us backstage at a political campaign, showing us its operation in detail. Many of Reeve's stories give a detailed, systematic exposition of some institution of public life. The campaign here is run on organized principles, with the aid of both technology and modern methods of business organization: also typical of the institutions or businesses Reeve shows us. Such backgrounds were present in Reeve's fiction, many years before Freeman Wills Crofts introduced the Background as part of British Realist School's approach, in The Cask (1920). Reeve's work could easily have been influenced by the background in MacHarg and Balmer's "The Man Higher Up" (1909).
Hugh Greene, in his introduction to The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1976), noted all the social criticism in this and other American detective stories of the period. The characters in "The Campaign Grafter" are explicitly involved in liberal politics. Samuel Hopkins Adams was a liberal crusader outside of his fiction work, and there are liberal political orientations in MacHarg and Balmer, and Francis Lynde, as well. One can see strong liberal social criticism in Mary Roberts Rinehart's scientific detective novella, "The Curve of the Catenary" (1915). Such liberalism seems to be common in American scientific detective school writers. So far, I have seen little sign of it in their British scientific detective fiction predecessors.
"The Campaign Grafter" looks at scientific aspects of interpreting photographs, and at the use of sound communication technology, such as dictaphones. Both image and sound technology will run through Reeve's fiction, in some of his best stories.
The Dream Doctor. Reeve's third Craig Kennedy collection, The Dream Doctor (collected 1914), continues the scientific detection of the first two. Especially interesting in it are "The Phantom Circuit" and "The Green Curse". These inventive stories show the possibilities of technological variations on the telephone, utilized both for crime and detection. Both stories differ from most earlier Kennedy tales in that they have suspense-oriented climaxes, instead of the pick-the-killer finales of earlier Reeve stories. The finale of "The Green Curse" is especially well done. Both stories also have criminals from outside of the characters depicted in the story; Reeve experiments here with sinister European radical groups as villains. "The Kleptomaniac" (1912) is another story in the same telephone-oriented approach, but it is not quite as inventive. It includes an early description of a wire recorder, later a much used device in real life.
"The Vampire" (1913) is a rich story. Part of it shows us the world of industrial research, a subject that will return in later scientific detective authors, such as Lawrence G. Blochman's "A Taste for Tea" (1958). Part of it also explores the world of microbiology, a subject that had recently been written about by R. Austin Freeman, in "A Message From the Deep Sea" and "A Wastrel's Romance". Reeve extends this study of the very small to the medium of motion pictures, an imaginative idea for 1913. The finale of the tale shows many different clues dovetailing together to reveal a coherent solution: always an exciting experience for mystery fans.
"The Ghouls" also deals with innovative motion picture bio-photography, the best part of a more minor story.
The scientific aspects of "The Death House" seem dubious, especially the idea that other scientists would overlook the discoveries made so easily by Craig Kennedy in the tale. The story does contain a touching account of a widow's attempt to help her husband, who is in Sing Sing Prison. Director Maurice Tourneur would soon make a film on location at this famous US prison in Ossining, New York, Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915). This delightful crime movie was released on video from the US Library of Congress. Among prose writers, Jacques Futrelle's famous "The Problem of Cell 13" (1905) had also dealt with a prison, and Jack Boyle would soon write about prison life in Boston Blackie.
The War Terror. Reeve's fourth Craig Kennedy collection, The War Terror (collected 1915), opens with a politically remarkable story, "The War Terror" (1914), which appeared shortly after the start of the war in Europe in August 1914. Reeve indicates sympathy with the anti-war goals of the villains, but is opposed to their violent methods.
"The Air Pirate" is one of Reeve's most lyrical stories. It creates an elaborate land-and-waterscape, centering on a bay in Long Island, and populates it with different kinds of light. It has the visionary qualities one associates with William Hope Hodgson, but in a gentler and more joyous spirit. Its setting among rich socialites enjoying themselves anticipates Reeve's "The Social Gangster" in his next collection, and its water and boats subject matter anticipates "The Sixth Sense" in that same upcoming collection.
The Social Gangster. Reeve's fifth Craig Kennedy collection, The Social Gangster (collected 1916), is set at a turning point in American history. It is the period just before the Jazz Age. There are clear signs here that Americans want to party, and live wilder and more bon vivant life styles than before. The two opening tales in the collection, "The Social Gangster" and "The Tango Thief" (1915), offer vivid and frank looks at this new attitude. (These tales seem to be known as "To Save Gloria" and "The Dancing Blackmailer" in the British edition.) "The Social Gangster" depicts nightclubs as places where women can hire "a new class of men", gigolos or lounge lizards who quietly sell their romantic services to women. Here it is men who have become the sex objects, dressing up in fashionable clothes, and having elaborate manners. But the story also shows that mainstream men are part of the same movement, with the wealthy husband showing off his social status by dressing up as the Master of the Fox Hunt at the Hunt Club where he is president. This is a place where nouveau riche Americans can pretend to be part of ancient English traditions. It's a "swagger organization", Reeve points out. It's all an elaborate pretense: there is no actual fox in the hunt, which is simply following trails of scent. This is both humane, and an expression of the swagger of the characters in creating social rituals. A decade later, Jazz Age chronicler F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby (1925) will have his hero dressed to the teeth in the male finery used by Reeve's lounge lizards, and his rich villain in the hunt costume used by the wealthy man in Reeve's story. Reeve's tale is a vivid look at these new possibilities for men. Reeve locates all of this as part of New York City culture, as Fitzgerald later will, with the rich Society types in both hanging out on Long Island. In both Reeve and Fitzgerald, women find these kind of men irresistible, something that both the men and the women seem to enjoy, despite all of Reeve's narrator's moralistic clucking. Coincidentally or not, Reeve and Fitzgerald both attended Princeton University, very much a home in that era of this sort of high life.
The other best detective tale in The Social Gangster, "The Sixth Sense" (1915), deals with a whole host of new communication devices. Like the best stories in The Dream Doctor, these are creative versions of the telephone. "The Social Gangster" also has a subplot, dealing with a different sort of extension of another communications medium, radio. Both tales also have Italian characters, probably reflecting the fact that Marconi, the famous inventor of radio, was Italian. Among the most vivid images in "The Sixth Sense" are the sparks in the stable. This image is echoed by the iodine at the end of "The Evil Eye", another tale in the collection.
"The Evil Eye" is an entertaining tale, involving strange chemicals, as well as some non-stereotyped sidelights on race relations circa 1915. Its basic plot has similarities to Agatha Christie's "The Cretan Bull" in The Labors of Hercules (1939 - 1940). One of the chemicals in "The Evil Eye", pilocarpine, also turns up in Christie's "The Thumb Mark of St. Peter" (1928) in The Thirteen Problems. Reeve's nightclub in "The Social Gangster" with its irresistible gigolo finds an echo in a similar club in Christie's "The Capture of Cerberus" in The Labors of Hercules. Reeve's constant use of romantic subplots playing both a role in the mystery, and a love interest strand for readers who like love stories, is also a feature of much of Christie's fiction.
The Panama Plot. Reeve's seventh Craig Kennedy collection, The Panama Plot (collected 1918), starts out with six tales set in Latin America, followed by four US laid tales. The Latin American stories have some common features. All have detailed Backgrounds, dealing with life in the countries they are set. Several deal with shipping. The murders in the story are almost all poisoning cases. Reeve takes a double point of view on these poisons: he shows their unusual symptoms, and builds scientific detective stories out of these. He also looks at the sources of the poisons, and how they fit into the economic life and industries of the various countries. Finally, there is a good deal of spy material here - the stories are set at the era of first involvement of the USA in World War I in 1917. These stories are as knowledge based as Reeve's earlier fiction - they are packed with information on Latin America, shipping and poisons - but they do not deal with scientific advances, the way the first two volumes of Craig Kennedy stories do. Instead, they are based on general scientific and social knowledge. The tales are somewhat on the middle level of Reeve's achievement. They all tend to be weak as mystery stories, with the exception of "The Black Diamond". The identity of the criminal in them is often arbitrary. However, the knowledge makes a good reading experience.
Arthur B. Reeve's Constance Dunlap stories (1913-1914) often seem to deal with mental states. "The Dope Fiends" depicts cocaine usage, and is a fiercely anti-drug tale. It is a full early map to how both drug addiction and drug use are portrayed in literature. There are the lying addicts, willing to do anything for a fix; the sleazy low level dealers, cheaply hip, who could have stepped right out of Miami Vice; the crooked pharmacist; the Dr. Feelgoods; and the man higher up behind it all, the one the detectives really want to catch. There is also a complete portrait of the economics of the trade. The emphasis on top criminals probably came from Reeve's fictional role model, MacHarg and Balmer's Luther Trant stories (1909 - 1910), which include the classic "The Man Higher Up" (not a story about drugs). Reeve's depiction of cocaine is also strikingly modern: the temporary exhilaration, the association with the popular performing arts, in this case exotic dancing, and the delusory sense of unlimited potential for success. There is also the dependency on ever greater doses of the drug, and the negative reactions from repeated use. It is hard to see anything in subsequent literature that extends this portrait: Reeve was doing first in the 1910's what most subsequent authors will simply repeat. One wonders where Reeve got his information. Other stories in Constance Dunlap series are the pioneer depiction of Freud's ideas in literature, and perhaps Reeve started with Freud on cocaine, and went on to other sources, such as the police. Reeve describes cocaine as being only recently outlawed in this story, so perhaps it was much on the public mind. Here as elsewhere Reeve is completely modern in tone. Drugs, such as mescal, make prominent appearances in some of the Craig Kennedy stories. Later, in the 1930's, both Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie will include the dope trade in their stories, with a singular lack of realism: both make it sound like a Satanic cult participated in mainly by rich members of Cafe society, and sold by ingenious if implausible drug supply networks whose literary source seems to be cheap spy thrillers. The sorts of spy rings prominent in English fiction, with secret warehouses, ingenious means of transporting secret documents, members with aliases, and odd communication schemes have simply been adapted by 1930's British writers to form a portrait of drug cartels. Reeve is far more realistic, and leaves behind a grim portrait of some of the human wreckage caused by the drug traffic.
The drugstores here and in Morley's The Haunted Bookshop (1919) are so sinister that one wonders what ordinary people thought about them in the teens. Later in the 30's Mary Roberts Rinehart will depict them mainly as well lit places that are open all night and where one can make a telephone call: this suggests urban alienation and the sort of loneliness shown in Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks (1942).
Reeve's work in these tales is more cynical than his Craig Kennedy stories. Those tales often depicted the well to do as corrupt, and had plenty of social commentary. But they usually showed the police as honest. Here there is Drummond, a crooked cop, who makes deals with and shakes down the drug dealers. Constance Dunlop herself is a reformed thief, and her friends are deep in vice and drug use. It is a very dark portrait, and definitive in its condemnation of drug use. I liked the world of the heroic, idealistic Kennedy better, but have to admit that this one has compelling qualities, too.
Francis Lynde's Scientific Sprague (collected 1912) is a series of six longish thrillers, set against a railway background in the American West. The short stories differ from Victor L. Whitechurch's railway mysteries in that Lynde often shows us railroads and tunnels being constructed by crews of engineers and workmen, while Whitechurch confines himself to long established railways in Britain. Lynde's stories deal not just with railway lore, but a whole world of engineering, technical and building detail. This detail is often heavily grounded in science and technology. It relates Lynde's work not just to "railway" fiction, but to the broader world of scientific detection as practiced in England and the United States. Lynde's detective, Calvin Sprague, is in fact of chemist, not a railroad man, sent out West by the US Government to study soil samples. Sprague's vast array of scientific knowledge of all types gives him the ability to penetrate and counteract a wide variety of criminal schemes.
The emphasis on public and industrial life in Lynde, and the fighting of villains composed of wealthy, robber baron era plutocratic forces, links Lynde's tales to other American scientific detective writers of the era, such as MacHarg and Balmer. Lynde in fact uses "the man higher up" to refer to such big time corporate crooks, just as MacHarg and Balmer did in their Luther Trant mystery short story, "The Man Higher Up" (1909). Since one does not know the original date of Lynde's stories publication in magazines, it is hard to tell whether Lynde has priority is using this phrase, or MacHarg and Balmer. Peter Haining, in the excellent anthology Murder on the Railways (1996), says the first Sprague stories appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1911. Also, at least two of Lynde's Sprague tales first appeared in The Popular Magazine in 1912. Meanwhile MacHarg and Balmer's The Achievements of Luther Trant was in book form in 1910, so one suspects that MacHarg and Balmer came first.
A limitation of Lynde's work is its simplicity as a mystery. The mystery plot of "The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three" will be easily guessed by most readers. The unfolding "mystery" is so obvious, in fact, that the story seems more like a non-mystery oriented thriller, rather than a true work of mystery and detection.
Lynde's characters are largely engineers and railway men. They have a uniform characterization: most are handsome, virile young men, out to build great railways across the vast continent. This can lead to a story in which the twenty main characters all have nearly the same personality and characterization. Tales about such daring young engineers, building great projects in remote locations, were standard in the adventure fiction of the time, often having no mystery elements. Lynde's work, with its rich engineering and railroad detail, and skimpy mystery aspects, can often seem to be essentially part of this non-mystery adventure genre. Lynde's characters have almost no private lives; the romantic intrigues prevalent in most mystery fiction are simply absent here, and the stories tend to have all-male casts.
Lynde's emphasis on complex, constructed landscapes can recall the works of Arthur Morrison. The tunnel and surrounding railroad lines in "The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three" are described in vivid detail. As in Morrison, this landscape is full of technology, and its operation is explained in terms of scientific principles.
Stagg's short stories about the blind detective Thornley Colton are tentatively placed among the scientific detectives, on the evidence of the one, likable, tale easily available today, "The Keyboard of Silence". (This story is reprinted in The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories (1996), edited by Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert.) Both Stagg's mystery plot, and the detective work by Colton, seem to be based in scientific or medical facts or theories. And the story takes place in the public realm familiar to us from Arthur B. Reeve. Stagg uses the same sort of embezzlement from a bank situation that another scientifically oriented detective writer, Mary Roberts Rinehart, used in The Circular Staircase (1907). While Rinehart set her story in a country house in the days following the embezzlement, Stagg set his tale in the bank itself, right at the time of the robbery. While Stagg's plot is based on science, he is not trying to show his readers technical wonders, or push the edge of the technological envelope, the way Reeve and Freeman are.
Stagg's story also reminds one more than a little of Stagg's other American contemporaries Jacques Futrelle and Thomas Hanshew, both of whom fall among the impossible crime specialists of their time. The story does not promote itself as an impossible crime tale, but it is indeed darned hard to figure out how this crime could have been committed. Futrelle also wrote a classic involving bank embezzlement: "The Man Who Was Lost". "The Fee", the New York City working class kid who assists Colton, recalls a similar boy Dollops, who works with Hanshew's detective Hamilton Cleek.
Stagg's tale is also much more a full fledged puzzle plot detective story than are the works of S.H. Adams, for instance. Indeed, S.S. Van Dine clearly tagged Stagg as an intuitionist writer. Stagg was one of the authors burlesqued by Agatha Christie in Partners in Crime (1929); and this story in particular seems to be the subject of Christie's spoof. So for all its obscurity today, Stagg's work was fully known to some of the major intuitionist writers of the Golden Age, Van Dine and Christie. Van Dine also felt the compensating powers given to Colton by his creator were unbelievable, and that he suffered in realism compared with Bramah's blind sleuth Max Carrados. Christie's parody also hints at a lack of realism in Colton's treatment. I would extend these remarks to a broader criticism, that not only the treatment of blindness, but many aspects of Stagg's writing, suffer from implausibility. Still, even if implausible, it is joyously inventive, and I am looking forward to more of Stagg's fiction.
The Thornley Colton short stories were collected in book form in 1915. At least some of the Colton tales first appeared as a series in People's Ideal Fiction Magazine in early 1913. It is hard to know who the first blind detective in fiction was. The other early blind sleuth, Ernest Bramah's detective Max Carrados, also appeared at roughly the same time. At least some of the short stories in Bramah's first collection about Max Carrados were first published in late 1913 in the periodical News of the World. The collection, entitled Max Carrados, then appeared in book form in 1914. Until there is a full bibliography of periodical appearances for each writer, it will be hard to establish priority. Warning to readers: the common assertions by several mystery historians that Max Carrados is the "first blind detective in literature" cannot be firmly backed up by what we know today about the subject. Thornley Colton could well be the first blind detective of fiction.
Isabel Ostrander also created the blind sleuth Damon Gaunt, who appeared in the pleasant-enough but fairly ordinary mystery novel At One-Thirty (1915); he seems just a bit later than Thornley Colton and Max Carrados, although it is possible that he too might have appeared earlier in some periodical. MacHarg and Balmer also produced a mystery novel with a blind hero, The Blind Man's Eyes (serialized in The Blue Book Magazine in 1915, in book form 1916). Later, in the 1930's, Baynard Kendrick will create famed blind detective Captain Duncan Maclain.
There is also a novel about Thornley Colton, Silver Sandals. This was serialized in 1914 in People's Magazine, and appeared in book form in 1916. The novel contains a preface, in which Stagg tries to justify some of Colton's amazing abilities, by linking them to accomplishments of real-life blind people of the era, including a blind doctor. The novel itself opens in a fancy restaurant, just like the opening of "The Keyboard of Silence". Such sections seem like overtures, or curtain raisers, to the main acts of Stagg's tales.
Silver Sandals is an inoffensive novel, but uneven in its quality. It has a startling opening scene, the best thing in the book. But the macabre scene is eventually "explained" in an arbitrary fashion, that never links the opening events to any motive that is part of the real world, or to anything that is logical or consistent. This non-explanation is bound to disappoint any fan of Golden Age mystery fiction, who expects a logically constructed puzzle. Stagg sometimes wrote excellent puzzle plot mysteries, such as "The Keyboard of Silence" - but not here.
The actual murder mystery does get fully solved: this book is a real detective novel, not a thriller.
The subplot about the missing waiter is inventive, in a pure mystery sense. It comes to an impressive solution in Chapter 9, halfway through the book.
Silver Sandals has a quality of sinister mystery hanging over the characters, the sense they are all trapped in some dark, secret events. This quality is quite powerful in some early American detective novels, such as Cleveland Moffett's Through the Wall (1909), and the works of Anna Katherine Green. As in such Green books as The Chief Legatee (1906), we eventually discover that many of the characters have been involved in sinister subcultures, that stretch back over decades of their lives. Also somewhat Green-like, is the way that partial explanations of the mysterious plot keep dribbling out, chapter after chapter, with a sense that the darkness of the mystery is slowly being penetrated. Stagg manages to make most of these revelations fairly interesting. They are not fair play: the reader cannot logically anticipate them through the use of clues. But they do form logical extensions of preceding events. The revelations come at a fairly slow pace: Stagg is trying to fill up 300 pages. But they do have a relentless, implacable quality.
Stagg has more Green-like features, in which Colton looks over the crime scene, gathering clues that help him reconstruct the crime (Chapter 11). Such reconstructions were Green specialties, something she inherited from Gaboriau. Colton's version is also logically designed, to show off his blind detective's special skills.
Should you read Silver Sandals? Only if you have a special interest in this sort of Edwardian melodrama kind of detective fiction. The book is best in its first half (Chapters 1 - 11), which has atmosphere and storytelling. The book would make a good movie, especially if the action concentrates on the first half of Stagg's novel.
In his history of detective fiction, S.S. Van Dine grouped Ernest M. Poate, A.E.W. Mason, and himself all together; there are suggestions that this is because all use a "psychological" approach to detection. However, the authors are all very different. Poate's main series detective character, Dr. Bentiron, is a New York City psychiatrist, and Poate's works are full of a doctrinaire Freudianism. The detection in a Poate story such as his novella "In Self Defense" (1920), is little more than a series of Freudian profiles of the main suspects. Arthur B. Reeve had introduced Freud in one of his Constance Dunlap stories (1914), as well as in his Craig Kennedy story, "The Dream Doctor" (1913), but Poate's fiction is apparently its first systematic use in mystery fiction. Dr. Bentiron uses such MacHarg and Balmer like devices as a lie detector at the climax of this story, and his detective is a psychologist like MacHarg and Balmer's sleuth Luther Trant, but his main interest here is psychopathology. I confess that I am really allergic to Poate's Freudian sludge, and enjoy it not at all. Other early looks at Freudianism in mystery fiction include Harvey J. O'Higgins' Detective Duff Unravels It (collected in book form 1929, but probably earlier in magazines) and Nancy Barr Mavity's The Tule Marsh Murder (1928-1929). All of these works seem colossally unappealing to me. They are all downright depressing.
A. E. W. Mason's interest, by contrast, is in the depiction of monstrously abnormal killers. These characters are rooted in horror fiction. While clearly depicted by Mason as mentally aberrant, they are mainly used to give the reader chills.
Van Dine's approach is very different from either of these writers. It is based in what we would today call cognitive psychology. Philo Vance believes that all people have characteristic mental patterns, and that by studying the patterns of a crime and its suspects, one can identify the author of a crime. It is similar to the way an art historian can identify the authorship of an anonymous painting, by comparing its visual style to those of known painters. This is an interesting idea, and one that would appeal to an art connoisseur like Van Dine, but one which he never really applies in much depth to his detective novels.
Rufus King also has his detective interested in psychology. In King's case, this is mainly the aberrant psychology of criminals, but King's own popularized brand of the same. Valcour mainly encounters beautiful but evil seductresses, weaving their webs of crime, and his female characters often encounter handsome, suave crooks whose appeal masks heaven knows what deviltry. "Psychology" in King is often limited to an exploration of what these sexy villainesses and villains are up to.
Poate's The Trouble at Pinelands (1922) also has a psychologist detective hero, but it has a different feel from Poate's Bentiron stories. Here the psychologist is a younger man, Doctor Floyd Somers, a zany eccentric, who is full of personality and comic digressions. He is energetic, courageous, and something of an action hero as well. He also gets involved in romance. Somers is an alienist in a mental hospital in the North. Somers also has a degree in law, as well as medicine, and works sometimes in the field of medical jurisprudence, just like Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke. Aspects of the mystery plot are based on Freudian medical ideas, and the tale can be considered as a scientific detective story, Freudian subdivision. But all of this is embedded in a Carolina based tale, which also makes it very different in feel from Bentiron. Poate has loaded his story with traditional Southern atmosphere, including white columned mansions for the town's leading citizens, shrewd, homespun country sheriffs, small town politics and bootleggers in the hills who are afraid of revenuers. Think of a cross between Gone With the Wind and The Dukes of Hazzard, and you will get the idea. Poate has some good descriptive writing: see the scrub oak country visit at the start of Chapter 21. Mainly this book is a minor curiosity. Its leisurely paced storytelling is sometimes fun to read, but anyone should be able to figure out the mystery. The solution involves one of the mystery clichés Craig Rice later said she would love to spoof: see the introduction to Rice's People Vs Withers and Malone. I've always wondered about the origin of this cliché: maybe this book is it!
Into Thin Air (1929) is an unusual combination of the scientific-psychological detective novel, with the impossible crime story. The novel, which is the sole known detective work of its authors, reflects many features of the American Scientific school of its day. Both the young narrator, and his famous professor boss at the University, are professional academic criminologists. Their work is rooted in science, and the professor has laboratories at both at home, and the University. The professor is brought in the consult on crimes, just like Luther Trant, Craig Kennedy, Dr. Bentiron, and other scientific criminologists of the day. As in other American Scientific school works, there is an emphasis on scientific psychology. The psychology involved in the mystery deals with perception and the manipulation of crowds: it is not Freudian. The use of psychology also extends to other aspects of the story, that are not directly involved in the impossible crime. Several of the characters seem psychologically disturbed, for example. There is also a disquisition on how different types of readers approach detective fiction (Chapter 12), which is moderately interesting, and which seems somewhat psychological in nature.
There three different sets of impossibilities in the story: those contained in the Prologue are the first group. These get an explanation in Chapter 21. Their solutions shows imagination, although perhaps a bit too much faith in the powers of psychology. This section is the most psychological of the book's three main groups of impossibilities.
The impossible situation developed in Chapters 3 - 5 is the most imaginative in the book, and with the most ingenious solution (also in Chapter 21). This impossibility reflects the Zangwill tradition of impossible crime writing, and is a creative addition to it. This is the section of the work that is most in the main tradition of impossible crime writing, and which is based the least in psychology. It does reflect the "scientific" approach, however.
By contrast, while the later chapters of Into Thin Air contains numerous impossible situations, most are variations on one common approach, one whose "magic trick" style explanation is only moderately interesting. Most of these later chapters seem in general less creative than the opening sections, which are the best part of the work. In general, the plotting is better than the writing or characterization in this novel.
There are other scientific aspects of the book. 1) The scientific approach affects the background events of Into Thin Air. Like many impossible crime tales, it has a fake supernatural atmosphere: a common approach in John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot. Into Thin Air has mediums and seances, just as in Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) to come. But there is an addition of scientific investigation of such phenomena, in the tradition of scientific psychical research. 2) The story opens with an invocation of modernity versus tradition, in the life styles of the various characters. Modernity is a subject sometimes invoked in the American Scientific school, with its emphasis on the latest advances in science transforming our lives. 3) There are hints that the writers are familiar with R. Austin Freeman's pioneering scientific detective novel, The Red Thumb Mark (1907), although Freeman and his book are not mentioned by name. Early on, the criminologist explicitly disavows in the current case the possibility of manipulation, that is used by Freeman's novel. 4) The novel is set in a series of small towns, apparently in Wisconsin. This reflects the American Scientific school, which set its tales all over the United States, as opposed to the favored New York City locale of the Van Dine school.
Into Thin Air contains a number of experimental features, offering variations on the typical detective story construction. Such experimentation derives not from the Scientific School, but from an eclectic series of general purpose detective novels.
Into Thin Air suffers from unpleasant characters. They seem malicious, and are not much fun to read about. The unpleasant tone reflects that of other 1920's, late American Scientific school writers who emphasize psychology, such as Harvey J. O'Higgins, Ernest M. Poate and Nancy Barr Mavity. These books lack the upbeat escapism that helps make many Golden Age novels a fun reading experience. However, Into Thin Air does deal with some of the ugly realities that other more escapist authors tended to sweep under the carpet. It contains an unvarnished look at the exploitation of women, that would later become a feminist issue, for example. This trenchant look at genuine issues helps raise the book above more superficial writers of its day, both within and without the Scientific School.
The Invisible Host (1930) is a combination thriller and fair play detective novel, by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning.
An unknown person invites eight guests to a party at a swank penthouse apartment. No one knows who the host is. But the guests discover that they are locked in. And the radio tells them that their host is going to kill them, one by one. This is largely the same setup Agatha Christie used eight years later in And Then There Were None. Christie undoubtedly knew this book, and built upon its ideas. However, Christie's version is also much more entertaining. While both authors eventually provide a fair play solution to the mystery, Christie's is different - and vastly more imaginative.
Another key difference in the two works. The Invisible Host is steeped in technology. The authors have come up with endless high tech devices to keep the guests trapped in the penthouse. For example, doors that will electrocute anyone who touches them. In many ways, this is a scientific detective story. They also make a big deal about the radio that speaks with messages from their sinister host all night. Christie has none of this. Christie instead isolates her guests by the simple device of having them all stranded on an island. Low tech, but effective. There is also no equivalent of the radio in Christie's novel.
The Invisible Host is pretty grim. It is full of despairing meditations by the guests about approaching death. This might be realistic, but it is not what most people want to read after a hard day's work. Nor are the endless sadistic technological traps set by the bad guy really much fun. The book is a disappointing curiosity of detective fiction history.
Wylie's "Perkins Finds $3,400,000" (1931) is a charming humorous short story about amateur detective Willis Perkins and his attempt to solve a bank robbery. It originally appeared as "In a Hole" in the July 11, 1931 Colliers magazine, and was reprinted in the anthology Ellery Queen's Mystery Jackpot (1970). It is similar to a good deal of other mystery fiction in slick magazines of its era: it features an ordinary middle class guy who gets involved with crimefighting; and it has a playful sense of genre bending, the sense that a mainstream storyteller is exploring the detective story form to see what sort of storytelling opportunities it contains.
Death Flies East. "Death Flies East" (1934) is Wylie's first mystery novella for The American Magazine, a popular "slick" magazine of its era. "Death Flies East" is full of coincidences and is labored in its plotting. It lacks the inventiveness and storytelling charm of Wylie's later novellas. "Death Flies East" has been reprinted, in the Breens' anthology American Murders. This anthology also reprints the story's illustration from its original magazine appearance. It shows the ultra-glamorous pilot, aboard the airplane that is the tale's setting.
Murder at Galleon Key. "Murder at Galleon Key" (1935) is Wylie's second American Magazine novella. It was reprinted in the anthology Murder in Miami, edited by Brett Halliday. It was the first Wylie mystery novella set in South Florida, this time at a fishing camp in the Florida keys. Like "Death Flies East" (1934), it is not as good as Wylie's later stories. Its best feature is a look at ocean currents, and how they affected the transport of a body. Wylie will look at ocean currents in greater depth in the later "Stab in the Back" (1943). That later story includes a whole ocean seascape, precisely defined, in the Golden Age tradition of creative use of landscape.
The Trial of Mark Adams. "The Trial of Mark Adams" (1935) is Wylie's third American Magazine novella. It was reprinted in the October 1965 EQMM as "Not Easy To Kill", and under that title in the anthology Ellery Queen's Cops and Capers (1977). The tale is a combined thriller with mild whodunit features. It is exceptionally readable, with many absorbing events.
Both the shipboard setting and first method of murder in this tale recall Stuart Palmer's The Puzzle of the Silver Persian (1934) of the previous year.
Many familiar Wylie character types appear in this tale:
The Paradise Canyon Mystery. "The Paradise Canyon Mystery" (1936) was reprinted in the August 1966 EQMM. "The Paradise Canyon Mystery" is a good piece of storytelling. While it does not have a solution of Agatha Christie level brilliance, the way the characters dance in and out of the Golden Age style whodunit plot is most satisfying. The story has a musical quality, with each event unfolding at precisely the right moment in the tale.
Both "Death Flies East" and "The Paradise Canyon Mystery" have heroes involved in science and engineering. They show a 1930's faith that dynamic young men will make discoveries in science and get the country moving again, despite the Depression. Wylie also wrote a great deal of science fiction, much of it with Edwin Balmer, and his mystery work shows some continuity with the tradition of American Scientific Detection that Balmer helped to found. Wylie's "Perkins Finds $3,400,000" also has a construction site location that reflects an interest in engineering.
Wylie's content bears a resemblance to that of Earl Derr Biggers, a mystery writer who was a frequent contributor to The Saturday Evening Post. One might compare "The Paradise Canyon Mystery" to Biggers' Post novella "The Dollar Chasers" (1924). Both deal with a likable young middle class working man of modest means who spends time with a bunch of rich people at an upper class retreat - a yachting party in Biggers, a desert resort hotel in Wylie. In both the young man solves a light hearted mystery, while romancing a young woman, and having some pleasant adventures.
Murderers Welcome. Ellery Queen also reprinted others of Wylie's novellas. "Murderers Welcome" (1936) originally appeared in Liberty, another slick magazine of the era. It was reprinted in the November 1968 EQMM as "Invitation to Murder". It is an uninspired novella about a 1930's millionaire trying to smoke out his attempted killer.
Puzzle in Snow. "Puzzle in Snow" (1937), another American Magazine novella, was reprinted in the February 1964 EQMM as "The Blizzard Murder Case". Like "Murderers Welcome", it too has a sympathetic businessman hero, and both stories depict businessmen as the wellsprings of American prosperity.
The first third of "Puzzle in Snow", setting up the mystery plot, is pretty good, but then the story drags. The puzzle plot shows some mild technical merits, but the story is nowhere as much fun to read as "The Paradise Canyon Mystery".
The solution seems influenced by R. Austin Freeman's A Silent Witness (1914), and shows Wylie's interest in the scientific detective story. Although Wylie shows interest in science in his tales, his work has otherwise little in common with the realist school of Freeman and Crofts; instead his American Magazine novellas are classical detective stories in the intuitionist, Golden Age tradition.
Rx: Death. "Rx: Death" (1941) is a medical mystery novella. It shows Wylie's ties to the Scientific School. Medicine is heavily employed in the crimes, but plays little role in the detection. While the solution shows little ingenuity, once again the complex storytelling makes interesting reading.
Its young doctor hero once again finds himself dealing with a lot of rich suspects, in a vacation area, this time Key West. However, the tone is much more somber than Wylie's other novellas, grim and joyless. Unlike Wylie's 1930's tales, both the rich and Key West are depicted as sinister and unpleasant.
"Rx: Death" was reprinted in The Third Mystery Book (1941), an anthology of long tales.
Stab in the Back. "Stab in the Back" (1943) returns to Florida, this time a suburban housing area on a man-made island off Miami. It shows the Golden Age fascination with architecture. This time we see a whole island, together with its homes and the surrounding sea area. Wylie even roots the story in the construction of the island years ago, with the developer being a character. The first two thirds of this tale is delightful, with a vivid description of a mystery based in and closely linked to the architecture of the island. The last sections of the story are not as good, with a completely arbitrary, un-clued choice of murderer. Still, most lovers of Golden Age mystery fiction will enjoy this piece, especially those who like Golden Age buildings and landscapes. The precise technical treatment of the building construction and ocean aspects give the tale something of the flavor of a science based detective story.
"Stab in the Back" was reprinted in The Fifth Mystery Book (1944), an anthology of long tales. It originally appeared in the October 1943 American Magazine.
The story has links with other Wylie works. While the island is not a vacation area, it is a retirement community for the well to do, and it has much the same feel as the resort in "The Paradise Canyon Mystery". The South Florida setting is a favorite with Wylie. And there is another of Wylie's young inventors. Like most of Wylie's sleuths, the hero here is an amateur detective.
Experiment in Crime. "Experiment in Crime" (1949) is a long post war novella. It has been reprinted as both a small book, and as part of the larger Wylie collection Three To Be Read. It originally appeared as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post in 1949. It is a pure thriller, and has no mystery or puzzle plot elements per se. It is set in a more underworld milieu than Wylie's American Magazine novellas, with both gangsters and crime rings. This is in accord with the more hard-boiled world that was fashionable in crime fiction after World War II. It falls naturally in two sections. Chapters 1 - 8 form a light hearted, delightful tongue in cheek narrative of how a young professor became involved with the underworld. The rest of the book narrates a more serious adventure of the professor. It is pleasant enough, but not as good as the opening chapters.
Plot elements of "The Trial of Mark Adams" recur with variations in the opening section of "Experiment in Crime". The young professor recalls the scientist heroes of Wylie's 30's fiction. The professor's adventures among gangsters in the opening recall the adventures of young men among the rich in Wylie's earlier fiction - the two kinds of plot are formally nearly identical. In fact, these gangsters are rich, and seem quite similar in personality to Wylie's earlier millionaires. As in "The Trial of Mark Adams", the young hero discovers a whole new personality for himself, and a new role in life.
Some clues in the story come from botany; in fact, Wylie picks up strongly on the plant life of South Florida throughout the tale. There is also the ingenious mangrove disguise in Chapter 11.
Wylie likes to set his work on high tech transportation systems. The hydroplane in "Experiment in Crime" recalls the airplane in "Death Flies East", the ocean liner in "The Trial of Mark Adams", as well as the many modest little boats and diving equipment in "Stab in the Back". There is also a vacation or travel feel to Wylie's work. In addition to all these means of transportation, we have the desert resort locale of "The Paradise Canyon Mystery". "Experiment in Crime" takes place during the Christmas holidays, and many of its settings are the night clubs and casinos of a tourist's Miami.
"Experiment in Crime" is filled with local color. Many of the scenes are very visual, and one suspects that Wylie hoped it would be made into a movie. Its light hearted tone would have been out of synch with 1940's film noir, when it was written. But it would fit in very well with today's comedy cop shows, location filming, and color cinematography. Adrian Pasdar would make an ideal hero for the story as the professor.
Corpses at Indian Stones (1943) takes Wylie into Mary Roberts Rinehart territory. While the young scientists heroes of other Wylie works tend to be relatively poor outsiders who are working among the rich, here the archaeologist hero is the nephew of a wealthy society spinster. Like Rinehart's spinster in The Circular Staircase (1908), the story opens with closing down her winter home, and moving into a country house for the summer. As in Rinehart's The Wall (1938) and The Yellow Room (1945), here the story takes place at an exclusive summer colony, where all the families know one another, and where the families have been interacting for years, having a tangled personal history. Like the heroine of Rinehart's The Great Mistake (1940), the aunt has a secret that she is scared to share with the rest of the world, either her nephew or the police, and she is caught up with sinister doings with the other older characters in the story. As in Rinehart's The Album (1933), the older characters condescend to the younger ones in their 20's, and do not share information with them. And the secret, when it is revealed halfway through the novel, seems directly related to one in The Album. Wylie's sociological explanation of that secret in Chapter 9 is actually pretty detailed and interesting, and helped me understand some of the social background of The Album, which Rinehart treats more matter of factly.
Corpses at Indian Stones is not that satisfying a read. Too much of the book is soap opera, dealing with the lives of the unappealing characters. The hero is never especially believable. Although he is a Great Explorer who has done archaeology all over the jungles of the world, he is also a mousy, shy man who dresses like a wimp and has no confidence. We are supposed to welcome his blossoming out during the story, but with all of his advantages of wealth and social position, it is hard to identify with him or care that much about his social problems finding acceptance with High Society. Admittedly, many people are far better at their job than in impressing other people at a party, and this book could be construed to be about them. The story does pick up during the crime investigations: Chapter 4 looks at the first murder, Chapter 9 at the big secret, Chapter 10 at the second murder, which has mildly locked room features, and Chapter 15 at its explanation.
Wylie's novel shows the dark side of the business relationships he extolled in his 1930's American Magazine novellas. In them, businessmen were dynamic figures whose enterprise created American prosperity. Here, they are a bunch of WASP's who have inherited money, and who will do anything to hang on to it. They get involved in a bunch of schemes, some legal, some not, some admirable, some despicable, to try to extend their wealth. It is a far less glamorized picture. It also seems one with far fewer idealized consequences for the United States and its society. Also looked at from a new point of view is the treatment of the poor young men. In the 30's stories, the best thing that could happen to a young guy was to be taken up by these millionaires and brought into their business. This was treated as a full Cinderella story for the young man, one that opens all his dreams. Here, we get a darker picture. The rich WASP's sponsor a series of young men, setting them up in enterprises or sending them off to college. The relationship that develops is far from ideal, however; after a while frightful tensions erupt between the young businessman and the rich people, tensions that lead to the murderous events of the novel. Even at its best, as in the young police chief whose education they have sponsored, one wonders if young men really want to have this sort of feudal vassal relationship to a bunch of rich liege lords. After World War II, the GI Bill would make it possible for young men to go to college on their own. This must have been like getting out of prison for America's lower class youth.
Theodora Du Bois' Death Dines Out (1939) is constructed as a combination medical detective novel and HIBK mystery. The narrator is a young woman who takes part in suburban New York Society, and who is always prowling HIBK style around houses gathering up clues, and learning about the suspects' tangled emotional lives. She also serves as Watson to her husband, a doctor who performs medical detection in the tradition of Dr. Thorndyke. This book involves genuine medical mysteries. It is close in style to the later, 1940's work of George Harmon Coxe's Dr. Paul Standish, and Lawrence Blochman's Dr. Coffee, but earlier than either. Du Bois seems to be a genuine original, someone who started new trends in American mystery fiction in her day. Her work seems to have few precedents. She is not closely related to the American Scientific school of Reeve and Balmer, who flourished twenty years before her. Realist School signs seem to be absent, as well: there is no Background, no "breakdown of identity". There is some resemblance in her books to the Rinehart school. Both Rinehart herself, and such Rinehart followers as Dorothy Cameron Disney, sometimes included medical mysteries in their books. Still, these writers did not usually include doctor-detectives, or make medical detection so absolutely central to their writings, although Rinehart came close in her early Miss Pinkerton novellas (1914).
The book is closer to the classic puzzle plot mystery than are some HIBK novels: after an introductory chapter, it moves right away to a murder with a closed circle of suspects. The narration follows the continuous, event after event, "and then I did" tradition of Mary Roberts Rinehart. There is also some good romance between the narrator and her husband: at one point they are compared to the leads of the animated film, Snow White (1936). Despite the narrator's modest denial, they do resemble Snow White and Prince Charming.
Du Bois, like Coxe after her, tends to include much interesting medical detail in the crime itself, detail which soon after is elucidated by the doctor sleuth investigating the crime. This is good in itself, and it makes the early chapters of the book lively reading, but it does not leave much medical mystery left over for the later chapters of the story. By contrast, Blochman tends to include genuine medical mysteries in his tales: puzzling events that are part of the mystery throughout the entire work, and whose solution is only revealed in the final pages.
Du Bois' medical detective, Dr. Jeffrey McNeill, is much more closely involved with the crime scene than are most medical detectives of fiction. Dr. Thorndyke seems to be called in later by the insurance company, and Dr. Coffee is a pathologist who does much of his work in the lab. By contrast, McNeill is right in there from the start, doing a hands on investigation of everything people have eaten, drinked or touched. He reminds one more of the real life medical sleuths of today, who show up in their anti-viral suits and immediately dig in. He has a great sense of urgency, as well. Du Bois' HIBK approach gets him on the crime scene early: he and his wife tend to be personal friends of the people involved in the case, and in Death Dines Out they are present socially at the time of the murder. Even after the original crime, however, the hands on approach persists: McNeill is out at garbage dumps, investigating food remains, and interrogating witnesses.