Cult of Personality: "The Other Side" (c. 1940s) by Hake Talbot

Previously, on Beneath the Stains of Time, I returned to Hake Talbot's two novel-length contributions to the locked room and impossible crime genre, The Hangman's Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944), while back in 2020 I reviewed one of two of his short stories that made it to print, "The High House" (1948) – which left me with only one short story to reread and review. A short story with an unusual backstory as fascinating as it's frustrating. 

Hake Talbot wrote "The Other Side" sometime in the 1940s, but the manuscript remained unsold and unpublished until it posthumously appeared in Jack Adrian and Robert Adey's Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies & Incredible Crimes (1990). Nevertheless, the story previously appeared in Swedish to pad out the page-count of a Swedish reprint of Rim of the Pit. Something that very well could have spared "The Other Side" from a similar fate as most of Talbot's short stories. According to Adrian and Adey, Talbot wrote more short stories featuring his professional gambler and ex-convict detective, Rogan Kincaid, but nearly all "remained unsold and were either destroyed by their author or simply disappeared." This also happened, "horrifyingly," to his third detective novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. One can only imagine the wonderful horrors Talbot conjured up in those now long-lost short stories and novel. But now to the story at hand.

I noted in my previous reviews how Talbot, not unjustly, tends to be closely-linked to John Dickson Carr and "The Other Side" has been compared to one of his famous locked room mysteries. However, I think it's the least Carr-like of all his novels and short stories as it lacks that dark, brooding atmosphere of an omnipresent evil and actually takes place in a sunny, cult-plagued Hollywood, California. So the storytelling, setting and plot, were more reminiscent of G.K. Chesterton's "The Eye of Apollo" (collected in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911) and Anthony Boucher's Nine Times Nine (1940) than any of Carr's short stories or novels. 

"The Other Side" opens at a shooting gallery where Rogan Kincaid and Svetozar Vok, who previously appeared in Rim of the Pit, catch the attention of a young heiress, Daphne Lathrop, who's escorted by two elderly military men in mufti, Colonel Boyd Lathrop and Major Clifford Lathrop – who are her uncles. Colonel Lathrop recognizes Kincaid and asks him to come along with them, because "they felt called upon to explain their niece's interest in Vok." Daphne had been brought up by her normally levelheaded aunt and guardian, Miss Imogene Lathrop, but she had fallen under the influence of a Hungarian cult leader, Ergon. She had made a will appointing Ergon as guardian and instructed her brothers "to obey him without question," which naturally doesn't sit well with her uncles. Even more so when Ergon tells them he has "communed with the Forces" and they decided Daphne "shall be dedicated to the Temple."

Kincaid overhears a heated confrontation between Ergon and Colonel Lathrop, which ends with Ergon cursing the Colonel, "you have spoken your doom. Unless I can intercede for you, you will die by your own hand." Several minutes later, "the bark of a pistol" announced that the colonel had apparently died by his own hand while alone in the living room. Kincaid had the hallway under observation, the windows were latched and the screens were stuck to the paint. Ergon possesses "a hole-proof alibi" as he was heard chanting in the adjacent apartment and three witnesses saw him come out of his own apartment after they heard the shot. So how could he possibly have shot the colonel? I always loved this too rare take on the inverted mystery in which you know whodunit, but not how it was done.

The locked room-trick, or variation on it, is what earned "The Other Side" its comparison with that John Dickson Carr novel, but something tells me Talbot noticed how the principle behind Carr's trick could be used to improve on the impossible situation from Boucher's Nine Times Nine – dashed it down as "The Other Side." So not a blistering original locked room-trick, but serviceable enough and the story's only real problem is the same that can be found in "The High House." Talbot evidently needed a novel-length canvass to work his magic to full effect, especially in the plotting department. Such as the clueing, or lack thereof, which is only vague hint in the direction of how the colonel was shot (ROT13/SPOILER: "...jubyr ebj bs ncnegzragf vf bar ybat ohvyqvat ernyyl. Bayl cnegvgvbaf orgjrra. Urne rirel jbeq ur fnlf"). But it would have been a much bigger help if the reader was told about (MORE ROT13) gur yvtug svkgher gb gur evtug bs gur svercynpr.

So his two short stories have better storytelling than plotting. "The High House" has the same “dabbed-in touches of the macabre” as The Hangman's Handyman with its lore of the oceans and a native curse from a distant island coming back to haunt a seafaring family, but missing the intricate plotting. Similarly, "The Other Side" has better storytelling than plotting with the highlight being a mesmerizing battle-of-the-minds between Vok and Ergon. You can see how much more Talbot could have done with the plot material and how he could have improved on some of its shortcomings. Like the clueing or the messy handling of the gun, which might be another reason why he didn't destroy the manuscript. Maybe he intended to one day expend the story into a full-fledged novel. Either way, I'm grateful "The Other Side," despite its flaws, was preserved long enough to eventually be published by Adrian and Adey.

So, while "The Other Side" is a fun, well-written mystery, it lacks the sheer complexity, fairness and pure showmanship of his two Rogan Kincaid novels and shows Talbot was more adept at writing novels than short stories. Why does "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes" already feels outdated?

Rim of the Pit (1944) by Hake Talbot

Back in April, I revisited The Hangman's Handyman (1942) by "Hake Talbot," a penname of Henning Nelms, who was an American amateur magician and wrote three, novel-length locked room mysteries and a pair of short stories starring his regrettably short-lived nomadic detective-character, Rogan Kincaid – a kind of anti-hero who "travels around the world and makes his money by gambling." A small body of work rarely bodes well for the longevity of a mystery writer's legacy and Talbot only had 3/5 of his known detective novels and short stories publishing during his lifetime. "The Other Side" was posthumously published in Jack Adrian and Robert Adey's Murder Impossible (1990), but his third, novel-length Rogan Kincaid mystery (The Affair of the Half-Witness) remains unpublished and the manuscript is likely lost to history. 

So it says something about Hake Talbot that not only is he remembered as an important contributor to the locked room mystery, but generally considered to be on equal footing with John Dickson Carr. And he did that on the strength of just two novels! 

Anthony Boucher heralded Talbot as "a thorough craftsman of the detective story" and praised his second novel, Rim of the Pit (1944), which piled "impossibility upon impossibility" until "one feels all but convinced that this is no detective story," but "a genuine post-Gothic tale of terror" – told "in the tradition of Algernon Blackwood or H.P. Lovecraft." Adey cited Rim of the Pit as the only mystery novel to "successfully emulate" the master himself. So after rereading The Hangman's Handyman, I decided to return to Rim of the Pit while the former was still relatively fresh in my memory. I was honestly surprised at how little I remembered from my first read, but did Rim of the Pit stand up to rereading? Let's find out!

I suppose I'm obliged to start with quoting the opening line, "I came up here to make a dead man change his mind," which should give readers unfamiliar with Talbot a clue why he's always compared to Carr. The dead man in question, Grimaud Désanat, died over a decade ago when he got lost in the "winter-struck wilderness" of New England. Grimaud Désanat left behind a daughter, Seré "Sherry" Désanat, whose widowed stepmother, Irene, remarried Frank Ogden two years later. They officially adopted Sherry and she now calls herself Sherry Ogden. So all's well that ends well, or so it appeared, until the dead man's will proved to be stumbling block in a lucrative business deal nearly fifteen years later. Désanat left Irene and Sherry as the sole owners of large, wooded area to be timbered, but not for another twenty years, because it was all second growth that needed time to develop. Frank Ogden has a patent that changed the equation ("small logs are worth as much per board foot as big ones") and now he and a pulp-mill owner, Luke Latham, want to raise his ghost to get permission to log the timber.

So, on the anniversary of his death, a small group of people gathered at Désanat's house, Cabrioun, tucked in the away in the remote, unpopulated and snow-covered wilds of New England to conduct a séance. This party comprises, beside the previously mentioned characters, Luke Latham's nephew, Jeff, who brought along his uncle's soon to be niece-in-law, Barbara. Professor Peyton Ambler, an anthropologist, who came to ask the spirits about an invention a friend spoke of right before his death. Svetozar Vok is a Czech refugee, magician and debunker who "looks like the oldest inhabitant of a graveyard" or "a mummy that’s still smiling over one of the embalmer's jokes." Rogan Kincaid was in Quebec, headed south, when he ran across Luke and got offered a ride. And, intrigued by the prospect of a business meeting with a ghost, decided to stick around. The party is rounded out by the native caretaker of the estate, Madore Troudeau, who "mixed Christian and Indian talismans with complete impartiality." Oh, and there's a Great Dane named Thor. Thor's a good boy. When he arrives, Kincaid learns Grimaud Désanat has already stirred from his slumber and crawled from underneath the veil of the Great Beyond.

Sherry went skiing that day and, when she in the middle of the frozen lake, she heard her father's voice singing the tune to a chillingly familiar song ("Pierre! Death comes for you; the toad digs your grave; the crows sound your knell..."), but there "wasn't a soul within a quarter of a mile" – after which the voice called out her name. A long-dead, disembodied voice coming out of nowhere is small stuff compared to what's in store for them later that evening and the days ahead.

Irene Ogden is not only a woman of material wealth, but claims to be a spiritual medium who can talk to the dead and acts as the medium at their séance. She runs through a number of the usual "miracles" you expect to be treated to at a classy séance. Such as "a rattle of knocks" and the table quivering "like a living thing" to phantom fingers touching faces, but Kincaid is puzzled how she could have read their questions for the spirits that had been sealed away in envelopes. But then something appeared that made even Irene shriek in terror. The ghost of Grimaud Désanat materialized above their heads with "an almost overpowering quality of death about it" and denounced his wife as a swindler, "you dabble in mysteries you are not able to comprehend, like a child playing on the rim of a volcano," who lied about the timber ban. For that, "no punishment is adequate" and promises she soon will learn about his plan "that will make the Master Himself laugh in the depths of Hell." Désanat turned around and "seemed to drift through the railing as though it were not there" as he floated ("almost a foot off the floor!") into the hallway.

Not quite convinced by the authentic looking ghost, Kincaid ran after the ghost, but, when he reached the top of the stairs to peer down the passage, Désanat had already reached the end of the cul-de-sac hallway. Where he simply blotted out of existence. The empty room at the end of the hall offered no way out as the connecting door was bolted on both sides and "three inches of untouched snow" heaped on the windowsill.

This alone would have been enough to cement Rim of the Pit as a classic of the locked room mystery, particularly how the floating apparition is eventually explained, but, barely a quarter into the story, the plot continues to fire on all cylinders – every answer of exposed inch of the truth exposes new problem and questions. The impossibilities come in thick and fast right up until the ending and they come in all varieties. An old, rusted and dusty flintlock, hanging high on the chimney, which could only have been easily taken down without a sound by someone who can levitate. Like someone who's possessed by an evil spirit. Another person is tomahawked to death in a locked room as the murderer escaped through the bathroom window, leaving a line of footprints in the snow on the flat roof below, but the trail eventually ended. That's the only trail in the story ending as abruptly and inexplicably as they have begun, but even Kincaid has to admit "nothing that did not fly could have crossed the belt of unbroken snow that surrounded Cabrioun." And then there's the windigo haunting, or hunting, the local forests. More than once, the dark shape of a huge animal, like a great horned owl the size of a man, chasing people through the dark, wintry landscape. And it goes on, and on, like this right up until the ending.

The unrelenting artillery fire of locked room murders, impossible situations, apparently supernatural phenomena and superb pacing that keeps the story moving (even when the characters just talk) is the strongest feature of Rim of the Pit. However, if you pack your plot with a wild variety of impossible crimes, you create a dangerous pitfall in the process. And while Talbot didn't tumble into it, he nearly tripped over it as he tried to avoid it.

Noel Vindry's A travers les murailles (Through the Walls, 1936), Richard Ellington's Exit for a Dame (1951), John Vance's The Fox Valley Murders (1966), Paul Halter's Le sept merveilles du crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime, 1997) and Taku Ashibe's Koromu no satsujin (Murder in the Red Chamber, 2004) all tried to offer a wild variety of impossible crimes with varying degrees of success. The problem is that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to deliver a satisfying explanation to every single one of them. No matter how ambitious or well intended, the multiple impossible crime story is bound to have some filler material as the number of impossibilities increases. Rim of the Pit has individual parts that are of a lesser quality, which is where Talbot nearly tripped, but (sort of) got away with it in the way how they were integrated into the overall plot. Talbot didn't go all out with locked room slayings and miraculous incidents to camouflage a weakly plotted or routine detective story, but almost like sleight-of-hand applied to the plotting of a detective story ("...when the whole pack is used, the idea that but ten cards are significant is disguised"). More importantly, the impossibilities create the effect of genuine horror and a house under siege by otherworldly entities or creatures that should not exist in our world. It's not difficult to see why it's a favorite among locked room fans.

All that being said, I've to acknowledge a comment that was left on my review of Talbot's The Hangman's Handyman. Isaac Stump, of Solving the Mystery of Murder, commented, "I just feel like this particular school of writers tend to prioritize effect" and "resolution is kind of secondary." I agreed that's definitely true of Clayton Rawson and to some extend applies to Talbot, but Rim of the Pit shows he had a better understanding than Rawson how to use that effect in bulk to punch up the ending. Just compare Rim of the Pit to Rawson's locked room extravaganza, Death from a Top Hat (1938), which didn't fit together as satisfactory as Rim of the Pit. And the latter also has that typically Carrian, morally dodgy as hell resolution to the whole devil of a problem. Not to mention a strong hint of that Merrivalean cussedness of all things general. So is it a masterpiece of the locked room mystery? Yes. Kind of. But it earned that distinction solely on its masterly showmanship rather than craftsmanship or some dazzling new and original trick. 

Notes for the [curious] publishers: there a number of these intriguingly-sounding, multiple locked room and impossible crime novels still out there, but they have not been reprinted in decades. Gaston Leroux has a little-known, impossible crime novel to his name, L'homme qui revient de loin (The Man Who Came Back from the Dead, 1912), which was translated and published in the October, 1916, issue of The Blue Book Magazine – never been reprinted since. Apparently, The Man Who Came Back from the Dead is "a collection of bizarre crimes and impossible murders involving ghosts and seances." Similarly, Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk's Into Thin Air (1928) is perhaps the most well-known of all obscure, long out-of-print mysteries crammed with locked rooms, impossible crimes, dodgy séances and magic. William F. Temple's The Dangerous Edge (1951) is another galore of daring impossibilities in the spirit of Norman Berrow's The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) and Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus (1951), which briefly appeared back in print in 2003, but has since gone out-of-print again. I'm still pretty curious to see if Paul Halter improved on The Seven Wonders of Crime with Le douze crime d'Hercule (The Twelve Crimes of Hercules, 2001).

The Hangman's Handyman (1942) by Hake Talbot

There's one thing readers and publishers of detective fiction have in common: comparing writers to their illustrious predecessors, which is either done to give other readers an idea where a new name fits in the lineage of the genre or simply as a marketing ploy. I remember when an untranslated Paul Halter was talked about as the heir of John Dickson Carr and every new female mystery novelist, since the publication of P.D. James' Cover Her Face (1962), is billed as the second coming of Agatha Christie, but rarely is the comparison accurate or entirely fair – acting more as a millstone around an author's neck. Halter had somewhat of an uphill battle during the 2010s following the translation of his first novel-length locked room mystery, Le roi du désordre (The Lord of Misrule, 1996). Not a story that delivered on the promise of what a novel-length Father Brown tale by G.K. Chesterton would have been like. 

But every now and then, the comparison between two authors click into place like puzzle pieces. And when that happens, it's both a huge compliment and glowing endorsement. Although it happens very rarely.

One such rarity is represented by an American magician, Henning Nelms, who penned two highly regarded locked room mysteries, The Hangman's Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944), which were published as by "Hake Talbot" and often likened to the works of two masters of the form – namely John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson. Robert Adey noted in Locked Room Murders (1991) that Talbot was "the only author to successfully emulate Carr" and "in fact a very satisfactory mixture of Carr and Rawson" combining "Carr's flair for atmosphere and the bizarre with Rawson's magic tricks." I agree! And it was high time to revisit Talbot's classic contributions to the impossible crime story. So where better to begin than with The Hangman's Handyman! 

The Hangman's Handyman brings Talbot's regrettably short-lived series-detective, Rogan Kincaid, to a desolate, rocky island on the Carolina coast. An island curiously named The Kraken with a bay named Gallows Cove where drowned bodies are carried to by the local current and a great stone house. The island is the property of a manufacturing chemist, Jackson B. Frant, who decided to throw a house party. The invitees comprises of his half-brother, Evan Tethryn, who's an English lord and most of the guests were his friends. Such as the girl Evan intends to marry, Miss Sue Braxton. She's accompanied by her father, Dr. Stirling Braxton. Nancy Garwood is another friend of Evan who was introduced to her host only a few days before in a New York night club. Finally, there are the previous owners of the island, Miss Julia Makepeace and her brother, Arnold, who brought along their nephew, Bobby Chatterton. A young man who loves magic tricks and locked rooms.

Rogan Kincaid is a late arrival and finds the gloomy mansion as "quiet as a catacomb" with Nancy Garwood apparently being the only living soul in the place, but she has trouble remembering what, exactly, happened or what happened to the others – until she suddenly recalled that the host had died. Jackson Frant had continued to needle his half-brother during dinner about the family curse that came with his father's title, but not an ordinary family curse. Oh no! This is a "curse that worked backwards" as Evan inherited "the power to curse others," which he demonstrated to half-brother once he had enough of his taunting and sneering jokes. Evan pointed to Jackson and spoke the curse words, "Od rot you, Jack! Od rot you!" Jackson dropped dead on the spot. The body of Jackson was carried up to his own bedroom where, once everyone has come back into the story, a gruesome discovery is made. Jackson had been dead for only two hours, "lying in this cool, wind-swept room," but the body has rotted and decomposed at an almost supernatural rate. And throughout the story evidence is unearthed proving the decomposed body is that of Jackson Frant.

This is not the only impossibility that earned The Hangman's Handyman a permanent place among the most popular and beloved locked room mystery novels. Kincaid is attacked in his dark bedroom by "something smooth, slimy, impalpable," like "a wet slither," who nearly chokes and strangles him to death. This rouses the household and they have to break down the door, because it's locked and bolted on the inside with the key sticking in the lock. But, when the door is busted open, the only person they find inside is an unconscious Kincaid. This attack forces Kincaid to act as a bedridden armchair detective during the second-half of the story.

However, the medical miracle of Jackson Frant's rapidly decomposed body and the assault in the locked bedroom are not the only story elements that makes the book standout. Talbot actually gave his detective an origin story. Rogan Kincaid is a professional gambler and somewhat of an adventurer whose character was formed by the carnival lot, card table and "the crooked little Swiss" who brought him up and taught him "to be cleverer than the other fellow" – which is how Kincaid can make a living by playing "smart poker." A dangerous occupations with people who don't always want to pay their debts, but "the gambler's ruthlessness was matched only by his prowess" and reporter remarks at one point he had seen Kincaid "clean out a poolroom once with eight guys in it." Some were carrying guns, but Kincaid "could throw pool balls faster than they could shoot" and "the way he handled a cue would make your mouth water." This is the only real difference between Talbot and Carr. Talbot leaned ever so slightly towards the better pulp writers like Fredric Brown and Theodore Roscoe. But a mystery writer nonetheless. So the backstory of Kincaid has a thread directly tied to the central puzzle and that spells trouble for the detective when people begin to propose false-solutions. That places him in cross hairs of the police.

So there you have it. A dark, lonely island with a house where people get attacked or perish under seemingly impossible circumstances replete with discussions of elemental spirits, magic trick and locked rooms. Not to mention a man with a grudge and loaded gun roaming the island and the whispered, formless presence of the titular handyman ("the sort that whistles at his work and can tie a noose or pull a customer’s heels with equal alacrity"). The Hangman's Handyman is a remarkable debut brimming with promise, but not without a few imperfections that need to be mentioned. Firstly, while the impossibilities are excellently handled, they are only original in their presentation ("...it dropped on me, as if it had been hanging from the ceiling"). The solutions to both impossibilities are clever variations on tricks seasoned mystery readers have seen before. Secondly, the overall solutions is slightly marred by the fact that the culprit is pretty bad at time management. And being difficult for difficulty's sake. This is what ultimately betrays the murderer even if you fail to figure out how everything was engineers. Talbot badly showed his hand in one brief scene (ROT13/SPOILER: gur puvyqubbq fgbel bs Rina phefvat n xvggra naq svaqvat vgf qrpnlvat pnepnff n qnl yngre vzzrqvngryl pbasvezrq ur jnf ng yrnfg va ba vg. Fhpu na boivbhf cybg-fjrrgrare. That's why the book will always stand in the shadows of Rim of the Pit, but don't let those minor flaws take anything away from The Hangman's Handyman as a delightful, well-handled and slightly pulpy take on the John Dickson Carr-style locked room mystery. Very much recommended to every dedicated locked room reader!

Going Ashore: "The High House" (1948) by Hake Talbot

Henning Nelms was an American magician and authored a trickster's manual, entitled Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurers (1969), but more importantly, he penned two memorable examples of the locked room mystery novel, The Hangman's Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944) – published as by "Hake Talbot." Two very popular novels among devotees of the impossible crime tale.

Robert Adey praised Talbot in Locked Room Murders (1991) as the only mystery writer to "successfully emulate" John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson. A writer who combined "Carr's flair for atmosphere and the bizarre" with "Rawson's magical tricks," which endeared the books to the avid locked room reader. Not as well remembered are Talbot's two short stories.

"The Other Side" was never sold during Talbot's lifetime and remained unpublished until it was included in Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990), but Jack Adrian frustratingly noted in the introduction Talbot wrote numerous short stories featuring his professional gambler and ex-convict, Rogan Kincaid – which also remained unsold and where either destroyed or lost! A similar, horrifying fate befell the third, full-length Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. There is, however, a second story that made it into print long before "The Other Side." It's just a little bit more difficult to find.

As far as I know, "The High House" has only appeared in the Spring, 1948, issue of the Mystery Book Magazine and nowhere else. Not in English anyway.

"The High House" begins, as you would expect from Talbot, with a dark, brooding story of a deadly, century-old curse that lies upon the house of a seafaring family. Back in the 1800s, Captain Thomas Danvers made "a voyage to the Spice Islands" and brought back a handful of natives, a father and four sons, who erected the family mansion. This explains why "the house spoke imperceptibly yet insistently of Oceania." Captain Danvers promised the natives to take them back home on his voyage, but the promise was rescinded when he got into the European trade. So the old native placed a curse on the family home and then, together with his sons, flung themselves into eternity from the captain's walk on the roof.

A curse promising that if "the heads of the Danvers family ever gave up the sea" to settle down in the ancestral seat, "the house would kill them" until "it had taken life for life" and it has lived up to its promise – killing three men over a hundred-year period. So this brings us to the present-day and the elderly, dying Admiral Nat Danvers has returned to the family home.

There are four more people in the house on that fateful evening: Everett Danvers is Uncle Nat's last living relative and the house is being manned by the son of the old Danvers' housekeeper, Steve Phelps. Anne Corwin is Everett's love interest and she brought along that adventurous-minded detective, Rogan Kincaid, who is asked by her "to lift the Doom of the Danvers from Everett." Unfortunately, Kincaid's presence is unable to prevent the Old Admiral falling to his doom from the captain's walk when he was all alone on the roof-top. Or so it appears!

However, "The High House" suffers from the same problem as "The Other Side" in that the premise was better than its ending with a solution lacking the ingenuity of the locked room-tricks from the novels. Another problem here, unlike in "The Other Side," is that the fall from the roof-top is never really presented as an impossible crime, because Talbot never showed why it should be considered a locked room murder of sorts. Something weakening a solution that already some dodgy parts in it.

The premise of "The High House" perfectly demonstrates why Talbot is always compared with Carr, eerily bringing together the lore of the sea with the superstition originating from a far-flung island, but the execution of the plot shows the short story format was not suited for Talbot's talents – who obviously needed a novel-length canvass to work his magic on. Regardless, I'm still grateful to have been able to judge this story for myself and many thanks to a certain person who kindly provided me with a copy.

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."

- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) 

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories.

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Once a lost, unpublished story

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up!