The Hand of Mary Constable (1964) by Paul Gallico

Paul Gallico was an American writer and self-described storyteller, perhaps best remembered today as the author of The Snow Goose (1941) and The Poseidon Adventure (1969), who made a brief excursion into the detective genre with Too Many Ghosts (1959) and The Hand of Mary Constable (1964). A pair of unconventional impossible crime novels with a more contemporary take on the turn-of-the-century "ghostbusters" stories by William Hope Hodgson (Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, 1913) and L.T. Meade (A Master of Mysteries, 1898). 

 

The detective, or ghost-breaker, in these novels is the chief investigator for the British Society of

Psychical Research, Alexander Hero, who nevertheless operates as "an independent private detective of the occult." Hero believes the occult can be defined as a compound of "wishful thinking, sleight-of-hand, music-hall tricks, the evidence of idiots, coincidences, unreliable reports, greed, human gullibility" and, to a certain extent, the unexplainable. And, in his opinion, there has "not been a single case proven of the dead returned" or "the existence of a spirit world” up to now. Hero remains open-minded and the next case always remains open until he "can shut the door." 
 

So, while Hero remained eager for genuine proof of the paranormal, he actively destroyed "the charlatans of spiritualism" who "preyed upon the misfortunes of the bereaved and ignorant." 

 

Too Many Ghosts brings Hero to Paradine Hall, filled to capacity with ghosts, where furniture moves around on its own accord, candles extinguish themselves and the ghostly figure of nun can materialize out of nowhere – not to mention the phantom harp player in the locked music-room. The solution to the ghostly fingers, plucking at the harp strings in the music-room, makes Too Many Ghosts a notable locked room mystery of the period. And not just the locked music-room. Hero "de-haunts" every single, seemingly supernatural, occurrence and manifestation.

 

I was glad to learn at the time Gallico penned a sequel, The Hand of Mary Constable, but some lukewarm reviews and comments over the years had condemned it to the Purgatory Zone of my TBR-list. I was in the mood for one of those séance mysteries and wanted to save Patrick Kelley's Sleightly Invisible (1986) for later this year. So here we are.

The Hand of Mary Constable finds Alexander Hero en route to New York City in the wake of an alarming letter from Dr. Frank Ferguson, President of the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research, who tells them there "a number of occurrences" with potentially dangerous, earth-shattering consequences – which involves the U.S. government at its highest level. Ferguson refuses to give any details in his letter, but, when Hero arrives, he's ushered to a private meeting with some mighty important, highly ranked officials. General Walter Augstadt, in charge of a special project, Saul Wiener, the Regional Director of FBI, and an FBI expert specialized in fingerprints, Mr. Ferris. What they tell him could affect the Cold War in a most unexpected way. 

 

Professor Samuel Constable is the head of the Department of Cybernetics, at Columbia University, who has been working with the Department of Defense on the secretive Project Foxglove.
 

The objective of Project Foxglove is to develop a way to intrude upon "the commands taped into a missile" and "persuading it to disobey these commands and in some cases to reverse them," which effectively turns them into homing pigeons. A device that will, one way or another, reshuffle the cards on the world stage. If every nation had the device, computerized technology would be rendered ineffective on the battlefield and fighting would have to be done with field armies or dropping bombs from airplanes, but, if the Soviets gets it first, they're all "dead ducks" – nations around the world have been working hard on similar projects. Professor Constable got it and they were only months away from a breakthrough. But a personal tragedy in his life would end placing the whole world on "the horns of a nasty dilemma." 

 

A year ago, Professor Constable lost his 10-year-old daughter, Mary, who was diagnosed with leukemia and passed away shortly after. Mary's illness and death left her father "a markedly changed man," which made him easy prey for two so-called spiritual mediums, Arnold and Sarah Bessmer. 

 

Professor Constable was told that the Bessmers had receives a message from Mary and he began to attend their weekly séances, during which he heard "a voice purporting to be that of his daughter" and had physical contact with "a figure which he believes to be a materialization of her." Amazingly, they were able to produce physical evidence of Mary's ghostly presence! During a séance, the ghost of Mary had thrust a hand in a bowl of liquid wax and thereafter in cold water, which left behind "the transparent hand and wrist of a child" – an empty glove of wax! It would be impossible for any living flesh or bone to have been withdrawn from it without shattering it. Even more astonishing is that the wax glove has fingerprints belonging to Mary! An impossible-to-fake detail since Mary's body had been cremated.

 

So having one of your most important scientists, who's working on a top secret project, in the clutches of two greedy vultures is bad enough, but things become fishy when Mary begins to talk world politics. Someone is dictating Mary's messages with the intention to make him either defect or voluntarily part with his knowledge. Considering how sensitive the whole situation is, they can't simply cut the professor from the mediums and prevent him from “communicating” with his daughter. A course of action he would most definitely resent intensely. 

 

Ferguson asks Alexander Hero to go undercover at the Church of the Holy Ozone as Peter

Fairweather, a lecturer at Cambridge, who recently lost an entirely fictitious fiancee and gives him the unenviable task of carefully weaning the professor from the mediums without damaging him or force him to defect – which is easier said than done. The only way to go about it is smashing the illusion of the solid, one piece wax glove. And to do that, he has to figure out how "to make a wax glove with the fingerprints of a person who is dead and buried" and duplicate it. An already difficult task made even harder when he also has to content with the personality of his assumed personality, the flesh-and-blood ghost of his dead, nonexistent fiancee, a Russian assassin and skeptical government officials. 
 

The Hand of Mary Constable is a weird kind of crime novel that's not easy to pigeon-hole. The impossibility of the wax glove is the peg on which the plot hangs, recalling the bloodless impossible crime stories by Carter Dickson and David Renwick, but, around the halfway mark, the cold war thriller elements began to intrude on the story without being a hybrid of either. The Hand of Mary Constable is a (crime) novel that happens to have elements of both the impossible crime story and cold war thriller, which is an interesting and unusual blend. But one that began to lose its flavor once the story passed its halfway mark. Gallico also decided to tip his hand to the reader here and it didn't do the plot any favors. 

 

Thankfully, the solution to the impossibility of Mary Constable's hand was better than some reviews suggested and the explanation of how the cast was made certainly was original. Something to be expected from the writer who dreamed up the trick of the phantom harp player in a locked music-room. However, the trick would probably have been better served in tighter, more focused, detective story that would allowed the finer details (i.e. fingerprints) to be tidied up. More importantly, The Hand of Mary Constable is a very well written, imaginative and engrossing novel in spite of its flaws and the only that actually bothered me is that the story undersold how dark and revolting the plot against Professor Constable truly is – occult brainwashing of a grieving father with the memory of his dead child as bait! And it's not just him who's being tortured. Mrs. Constable makes a brief appearance, but that's enough to take pity on that poor, long-suffering woman who first lost her only child and now has to watch her husband slipping from her fingers. 

 

So, with everything told, The Hand of Mary Constable is not an unsung classic of the locked room mystery novel, but it still has a lot to recommend with an intriguingly posed impossibility, the early, eerie atmosphere surrounding the ghostly visitations and the well intended attempt at blending different genres. Gallico betrayed here that he was a better storyteller than plotter, but Too Many Ghosts and The Hand of Mary Constable stand as noteworthy and original contributions from an outside visitor to the impossible crime and detective story. I don't think anything like these two (locked room) mysteries were published until John Sladek wrote Black Aura (1974) and Invisible Green (1977) a decade later.

Crowded with Ghosts

Paul Gallico's Too Many Ghosts (1961), a novel with a plot filled to the brim with impossible situations, was one of the most unexpectant surprises I had in some time – and therefore will not bother with a cutesy introduction and cut right to the review:

Too Much Deviltry

"When the harp strings quiver and you hear the ghostly air, let the Paradines beware! Let the Paradines beware!"

The sands of time have not been kind to the once well-to-do Paradine family. Their vault has been drained of its wealth by modern taxes and heavy death duties, and to maintain a standard of living, their family had for generations, the poverty-stricken bluebloods turned one of the wings of their ancestral home, the illustrious Paradine Hall, into an exclusive country club – where they entertain wearisome and snooty guests, but not all of them have jotted down their names in the registry. Some of them are unregistered and more vexatious than some of the other stuck-up invitees, who, at least, have a pulse. 

These other-worldly visitors try to enliven the place by making an armchair, in front of a dozen witnesses during dinner, shuffle across the floor on its own accord or strike a soulfully tune on a harp, as if the strings were being plucked by invisible hands, in the locked music room – and these are just some of the more innocent escapades of the many ghosts that haven taken up their resident at Paradine Hall. But determined to get rid of all the capricious poltergeists and the unnerving, dematerializing nun, who's the family's harbinger of ill-luck, infesting the old mansion a friend of the family turns to one of his old chums, Alexander Hero, who has made a career out of de-haunting houses and exposing frauds.

Alexander Hero is a likeable and fun character, who, despite being a skeptic, wants to believe in the supernatural, but finds that whenever he arrives at the scene of a haunting the ghosts become very reticent and he never failed in duplicating any of their tricks, making him a literary descendant of two other famous paranormal investigators and debunkers, John Bell and Thomas Carnacki.

L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898) was one of the first short story collections of seemingly impossible crimes, in which John Bell, a professional ghost breaker, tackles cases involving rooms and tunnels that kill, ancient family curses and talking statues. But unlike Hero, Bell has a strict naturalistic worldview and doesn't believe that there are supernatural agencies that intervene in human affairs – and proves his point by exposing the trickery or natural causes behind apparent supernatural events.

The occult detective Thomas Carnacki, a creation of the noted British fantasy writer William Hope Hodgson, is quite a different paranormal sleuth all together and the entries in his casebook vary from cleverly executed hoaxes to brushes with genuine supernatural forces – usually resulting in a dangerous and exhaustive exorcism to vanquish them from our plain of existence. But despite these clashes, Carnacki remains skeptical of ghosts and demons until every possible natural explanation has been eliminated, thereby paying homage, in a slightly topsy-turvy way, to Conan Doyle: "when you eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" – even if that what remains is impossible! Nice, eh? 

These unique exploits are collected in a slender volume entitled, Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (1913).

But Alexander Hero is a much nicer and more rounded character than his forbearers, who's not always sure of his case and with all his knowledge on frauds and spooks gropes, at times, as much in the dark as the reader – which makes you feel a lot a closer to thim than to a detective who says, after only thirty or forty pages, "Aha! I know how this simple parlor trick was perpetrated, and only a novice or a dunce could fail to see the obvious, but I’m not going to divulge the solution until the final chapter." Even so, in the end he vindicates himself, as one of those old fashioned Great Detective of yore, by expertly explaining all the apparent supernatural phenomena, from moving chairs, self-extinguishing candles and a harp playing in a locked room (the books main event), to the apparitions of the nun and all the poltergeist activity, and neatly ties up all the loose ends in a classic drawing room scene.

The book, however, does have its fair share of problems, like its strange lack of atmosphere (the dinner scene is the sole exception). But I'm not entirely sure if that should be put done as a fault on the authors part, as he seems to have done so on purpose. He makes one of his characters observe that the lushly green grass, heavenly blue sky and the gray crumbling walls hardly evokes the horrors one expects of a massive haunting like the one going on at Paradine Hall. There are also some fair play issues, since Hero does not fairly share all his information with the reader, which somewhat mares the overall quality of the book, but again, I'm not sure if that should really count as a weakness – not in this special case, anyway.

I think the only real problem the book has, is that's neither a detective story nor a ghost yarn, but a novel about a quaint collection of mostly British characters, who just happen to have to deal with a series of inexplicable events – that are eventually solved by someone who just happens to be a detective of sorts.

It's exactly like Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), which wasn't written as a detective story but bears all the hallmarks of a traditional locked room mystery. That's how Too Many Ghosts came across to me. It has all the features of a detective story, but at heart it felt very differently.

Still, this is a book that should definitely be read by locked room enthusiasts, since the he locked room, involving the phantom harpist, offers a fairly good and original solution that would've not shamed the pages of a story by Carr, Talbot, Commings or Rawson.

Finally, special thanks have to be given to Patrick for alerting the mystery community at large about the existence of this book. Against expectations, I really enjoyed the story and the conclusion was better than I had dared to hope.