Dr. Morelle Investigates (2009) by Ernest Dudley

Vivian Ernest Coltman-Allen, known better under his adopted stage-and penname of "Ernest Dudley," was an English actor, dramatist and mystery writer who created the popular BBC weekly radio series The Armchair Detective – reviewing "the best of the current releases of detective novels, dramatising a chapter from each." The program reviewed John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946) and that attracted the attention of Fearn's agent-biographer-champion Philip Harbottle some fifty years later. Harbottle became Dudley's friend and agent, which is why Dudley's otherwise obscure detective fiction is still in print today. Harbottle has worked decades to ensure the writers under his care, like John Russell Fearn, Gerald Verner and Ernest Dudley, remain in print.

Dr. Morelle Investigates (2009) collects two long-ish short story adaptations of a radio and stage play, "Locked Room Murder" (1954) and "Act of Violence" (1959), solved by the eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Morelle ("he is also an expert on crime"). Dudley created Dr. Morelle for the BBC radio anthology series Monday Night at Eight and was a hit with the audience leading to a movie, TV series, stage play and a series of short stories and novels. So this two-story collection of a radio-and stage adaptation sounded like a potentially fun and interesting follow up to John Dickson Carr and Val Gielgud's 13 to the Gallows (2008).

“Locked Room Murder” is an adaptation of a stage play, Doctor Morelle, Dudley co-wrote with the then Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, Arthur Watkyn.

The story begins one late Saturday evening when Brian Cartwright is visited by four friends, Philip, Nigel, June and Evelyn, who were involved in a drunken, fatal hit-and-run accident – learning from a radio broadcast the victim had died. So they turn to their friend in something of a jam, but Cartwright happen to be in desperate need of money and turns his hand to a spot of good, old-fashioned blackmail. Cartwright promises to keep his mouth shut in exchange for two-thousand pounds ("between the four of you that shouldn't be embarrassing"). A demand that doesn't go unchallenged as one of them sends Cartwright a death threat, but Cartwright turns the table on them by inviting them to dinner with three additional guests. The first is a journalist, Bill Guthrie, who was already interested to write about the history of the house for his "Criminal Corners of London" column ("some female was battered to death a hundred years ago where your pantry is now"). The last two are Dr. Morelle and his secretary, Miss Frayle.

Cartwright shows them the death threat ("We have till nine o'clock. So have you. R.I.P.") and calls their bluff in front of three witnesses. Either they agree to a simple transaction or he's going to police. Cartwright is going to wait until then in his study with the doors locked from the inside and the windows to the balcony securely bolted, but, when the clock strikes nine, they hear a gunshot from the locked study. Who killed Cartwright and how, when he was all alone with every entrance locked and bolted from the inside? Dr. Morelle takes charge of the case and solves the murder in exactly an hour, but is it any good? That's a bit of a mixed bag.

"Locked Room Murder" is not a very challenging, or fairly played, detective story with, what some would consider to be, a second-rate locked room-trick. There is, however, a pleasing cat-and-mouse atmosphere permeating throughout the story. You have a brazen blackmailer trying to get back at his victims when one of them threatens him anonymously, but the story also appeared to toy with its audience. The locked room-trick might not be the stuff of legends, neither was it overtly apparent from the start with the crime scene littered with "clues" all suggesting different possibilities. From the planned, short blackout as the electricity company changes over to a new grid system and Cartwright smoking a cigar in a pitch-black room to the old-fashioned telephone with separate mouthpiece and receiver bolted to his desk all suggested different possibilities. Even the money troubles and the victim's brazen behavior implied the dreaded suicide-disguised-as-murder was not off the table. Dr. Morelle struggled with spotting the locked room-trick as well and has to accept the murderer's challenge to find it before the hour is out or become the next victim of the devilish murder method.

So, while not one of the most ingenious detective stories ever conceived, "Locked Room Murder" nonetheless turned out to be a fun read with a minor, but pleasing, element of the unexpected.

The second short story, "Act of Violence," is an adaptation of a Dr. Morelle episode from Monday Night at Eight. Dr. Morelle and Miss Frayle are invited over to dinner by Professor Owen a day before he's going to marry his secretary, Mary Lloyd, who secretly loves his laboratory assistant, Glyn Evans. Along the way, Dr. Morelle and Miss Frayle pass a gas station run by a Robert Griffiths. Dr. Morelle recognizes him as the young man who was on trial and sentenced to hang for murder, but had been reprieved to begin life anew. There's a manuscript of a dramatic sketch, sent in anonymously to the local dramatic society, which reenacts the murder that almost hanged Griffiths ("...only a short sketch but it certainly packs a punch"). Griffiths is going to play his own part!

This sounds a little disjointed and Dudley takes his time to set everything up, while leaving the reader in the dark about the direction the story is eventually going to take, but the potential for a good detective story was there – depending on how the ending is going to pull everything together. And that's the problem. Dr. Morelle ties everything together, but the solution is not all that impressive and made the long preamble feel like stalling and padding out the story. Dudley should have focused either on the domestic story of the eternal triangle or gone with the theatrical storyline and the anonymous manuscript, because this didn't work.

So, thematically, Dr. Morelle Investigates makes for interesting comparison material to the stage plays by Carr and Gielgud, but should have read these two adaptations before, not after, 13 to the Gallows as Carr is a hard act to follow. At least "Locked Room Murder" was fun and entertaining.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle and John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey wrote in his preface to the second, revised edition of Locked Room Murders (1991) that after the 1930s, "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels" was John Dickson Carr with the only other author "who produced them in any quantity" being a little-known pulp writer, John Russell Fearn – who wrote (roughly) twenty locked room novels between Black Maria, M.A. (1944) and his untimely passing in 1960. These include the posthumously published The Man Who Was Not (2005) and Pattern of Murder (2006).

In my reviews of The Fourth Door (1948) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951), I went over the wealth of fresh ideas and originality Fearn brought to the detective story. And, in particular, to the impossible crime story.

Regrettably, the pile of unread Fearn novels have dwindled over the years and only one, of the twentysome, locked room mysteries remained on my wishlist. An extremely obscure, hard-to-get Western-style mystery, Merridrew Marches On (1951), which has a curious backstory that has remained invisible to most locked room readers until now.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle, editor, writer and Fearn's long-time literary agent, was first published by Robert Hale in their hardcover "Black Horse Western" series and the synopsis had a specific line that attracted my immediate attention – a dead man is found on a mountain trail with "no footprints in the dust beside his body." What can I say? Every body of water has its shallow parts. However, when I contacted Harbottle to inquire about Meredith's Treasure potential status as an impossible crime novel, he told me that it was actually based on two separate already published novels written by Fearn. Namely the previously mentioned, very obscure, Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again (1952). So what's the backstory?

Harbottle explained that, in 2000, Robert Hale had lost a lot of their regular writers and his Cosmos Literary Agency had been hired to help them maintain their ten new titles every month "Black Horse" line. His still active writers were able to supply new novels along with scores of their older titles, which Hale reprinted with due acknowledgments and Harbottle himself supplied a number of new novels that were based around a number of disparate Fearn short stories and novelettes. As copyright holder of all Fearn's stories by virtue of his widow's will, Harbottle was legally entitled to create these posthumous collaborations.

Harbottle explained that he had "to completely rewrite and "stitch" two, and sometimes three, separate stories together, changing all the different heroes and heroines to the same person" to "expand them to novel length" – whilst "retaining much of Fearn's original text." There was, however, an important proviso imposed by Hale's library buyers. They could only reprint old paperbacks and, under no circumstances, would the library buyers accept hardcover reprints. Fortunately, most of his clients had published Westerns mostly in paperbacks and only Fearn had done hardcovers in any quantity, which left out the Merridrew Westerns. A series Harbottle thought "represented some of his very best work." So he decided to rewrite the Merridrew character/books, which made them qualify as brand new works to satisfy Hale's library buyers. Harbottle explained that the originals had modern setting, the 1950s, but all the characters in the small, isolated Arizona town ride around on horses, carry gun belts and six shooters and act just like old-time cowboys. Every now, and then, the town is "invaded" by the modern world when outsiders arrive in cars, or trucks, who bring modern equipment with them. So he decided to rewrite them as all taking place in the old west (c. 1890). No cars, no airplanes, no radios. Merridrew became Meredith. He rewrote the first and second novel, but the third and fourth posed a real problem.

Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again have plots involving their modern-day setting, such as the discovery of uranium and initially secret mining operations, which is why he decided to merge the two novels into Meredith's Treasure. A merger that retained all of the original plot strands, motivations and impossible crime elements, but with all the names of characters changed to those of relatives and friends of Harbottle. One of the characters is named after Robert Adey! Something he very much enjoyed.

So why this long introduction to a pulp western/detective novel? Merridrew Marches On is listed in Adey's Locked Room Murders and so will be known, in name only, to readers of this blog. A blog with a special interest in locked room and impossible crime fiction. However, I doubt very much whether many of you have actually read Merridrew Marches On, because it is extremely scarce and expensive. So the question is whether Harbottle's more readily available Meredith's Treasure, in which he asserts has preserved Fearn's impossible crime plotting, is worth our attention – purely on its own merits. Let's find out!

First of all, I've to acknowledge that the blending, an stitching together, of two different novels was indeed seamlessly done, because the whole plot coherently stuck together. However, it does explain why the story cycles from one genre to another. Story begins as an old-fashioned Western, but quickly turns into a detective story with an impossible crime, covered in the fingerprints of the scientific mystery, before it turns into an all-out adventure-and thriller yarn with all the trappings of the Western. And, all the while, Fearn's science-fiction and pulp roots were showing.

Meredith's Treasure takes place in "a sweltering little township," Mountain Peak, where "every board was warped and every trace of paint had been blistered" by the torrid Arizona sunlight. The small township is governed by the potbellied Mayor Randle Meredith and his son, Sheriff Bart Meredith.

On a blistering, mid-afternoon, Sheriff Meredith is visited by Reverend Maurice Peregrine, creator of the Reformed Sinners' Gospel, whose lectures and sermons converted many hardened criminals in other towns – picked Mountain Peak as his present port of call to spread his gospel. Legally, or morally, there are no objections to him preaching, but the Merediths are worried about the dozen dusty, gruff and impatient-looking horsemen he brought with him. All of them converted criminals. What could go wrong? Their arrival coincides with the appearance in town of a wanted criminal, "Holdup" Hogan, who has been involved "in a sundry of stage holdups and train robberies." As to be expected, this leads to a confrontation between Hogan, Peregrine and the Mayor, but they're interrupted by Brian Teviotdale storming into the saloon. On the foothill trail, Brian encountered a phantom horseman who began to chase him and he fled "like a man with the devil at his heels." One of the patrons, Bob Cook, is skeptical and immediately goes to the spot where Brian saw the phantom horseman, which is where his body is eventually found. There are no marks on the body and no accounting how the body got there or the lack of footprints in the dust. Dr. Adey makes it even more of an impossible situation when he tells the Meredith's Cook was gassed to death!

This is not the last murder, or impossibility, in the first half of the story. A local girl is found murdered in the streets with "Holdup" Hogan next to her. So the towns people are ready to string him up on the spot, but, before he can be swung into eternity, a third body appears out of nowhere in the middle of the main street! The entire crowd stared into the dark sky for an answer, but there was nothing there "but the stars and the silence of the night." Cleverly, the possibility of a hot-air balloon is quickly eliminated as too large and slow moving not to have been spotted by the crowd.

What I liked about the detective bits and pieces, roughly taking up the first half of the story, is how they quickly come to the conclusion that they're "not dealing with hillbillies" who only know "the trigger of a gun" – which doesn't rhyme with the deaths suggesting "intelligence and scientific knowledge." And this apparent fact was cleverly woven into the plot. Admittedly, the people who read Meredith's Treasure as a detective novel will very likely spot the brains behind the plot, but how the bodies miraculously appeared in impossible places is a lot trickier and more in line with the weird menace pulps than with the pure locked room/impossible crime story. On first sight, the method seems out-of-time and the imagery of how it was done would be more at home in a fantasy/science-fiction story, but it actually existed in the 1890s. And it actually figured in one of Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his gun-slinging cowboy sleuth, Ben Snow.

Yes, Harbottle definitely succeeded in preserving Fearn's impossible crime plotting and ideas here, because the solution is unmistakably one of his. It perfectly fits in his with his other pulp-style locked room mysteries, Account Settled (1949) and The Rattenbury Mystery (1955).

After this halfway mark, the story becomes, more and more, an adventure-and thriller yarn with a Western setting centering around the planned assault on a mountain stronghold and the long-buried secrets held inside it. This second half is full of dangerous bluffs, deadly double crosses and a cunning piece of misdirection with the Meredith's finding themselves, more than once, in a very tight corner where death is only a heartbeat away. Mayor Meredith is not exactly, what you would call, an infallible detective and surprisingly hardboiled in his approach, which include a bit of (mental) torture to extract information. An explosive and dangerous situation that eventually devolves in Mexican standoff between the Meredith Posse, a gang of outlaws and a group of natives trying to protect the mountain's long-held secret. This becomes quite a bloody affair that can match one of Paul Doherty's historical bloodbaths. Mayor Meredith concludes the case with a puppeteering act that even Dr. Gideon Fell or H.M. would find questionable. Very hardboiled!

So, on a whole, Meredith's Treasure is a busy, fast-moving and interesting pulp-style take on the Western, but where does it rank among Fearn/Harbottle's output and the former's impossible crime novels? I wouldn't rank it with their best detective/locked room novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947), Except for One Thing (1947), Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder, but still towers over lesser novels like The Tattoo Murders (1949), Ghost Canyon (1950), Lonely Road Murder (1954), Robbery Without Violence (1957) and One Way Out (2012). So very much a mid-tier, or second-string, novel. Nevertheless, it can stand on its own as a fun, pulpy treatment of the Western blended with the traditional detective story that's well worth a read as long as you keep in mind that it was written as a Western first and a detective story second.

I'll return to Fearn's original work sometime in the near future, because my private stash of pulp has been replenished and look forward to reading Fearn's attempt at a mystery novel with real vampires in it.

The Locked Room Reader XI: A Return to the Phantom Library

Back in 2016, I compiled a brief overview, under the title "A Selection of Lost Detective Stories," listing a number of examples of long-lost or unpublished manuscripts from the hands of celebrated and lesser-known mystery writers – such as Glyn Carr, Joseph Commings, Theodora DuBois and Hake Talbot. The idea of the existence, or partial existence, of a phantom library is as fascinating as it's frustrating. Even more so, when it disproportionately affects a writer you happened to be very fond of.

One of my favorite second-stringers, John Russell Fearn, was a prolific writer of lost detective stories and he didn't limit himself to merely losing sight of manuscripts. Philip Harbottle kindly provided me with all the background details.

A fragment from an alt-reality

Harbottle told me that "several wonderful impossible crime novels," written by Fearn in 1946, were lost and apparently destroyed, because hardcover publishing in the U.K. suffered from paper shortages during the post-war years and many books were delayed – often "never appeared at all" and "were lost." Fearn sold three novels under a penname, "Rosina Tarne," of which only one came close to actually being published.

You Murdered Me would have told the story of the ghost of a murdered woman who helps her grieving boyfriend/detective bring her killer to justice and the manuscript was proofed, blurbed and appropriately advertised on the jacket of Gordon Meyrick's The Ghost Hunters (1947). There are only "half a dozen scattered pages of mss carbon" left of the second novel, entitled The Eyes Have It, which reveal that the story followed a husband-and-wife detective team investigating "a dead body in a swimming pool" with resonances of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868). Yes, a Fearn mystery novel along the lines of Kelley Roos' The Frightened Stiff (1942) got lost. God has some serious explaining to do!

Sadly, Murder in Suburbia has been completely erased from existence as nothing, whatsoever, is known about it and "nothing has survived." However, the title makes me wonder if Fearn rewrote the story nearly a decade later as Lonely Road Murder (1954). Murder in Suburbia strikes me as an uncomplicated, straitlaced crime story without any locked rooms, cast-iron alibis or science-based death-traps – like Lonely Road Murder. Something not entirely out of the realm of possibilities, because there's a possible change that the presumed lost Partners in Crime was eventually published as Murder's a Must (1949; retitled later as The Tattoo Murders). However, this is just an educated guess by Harbottle.

The last title to be added to this lamentable list is about "an impossible murder on a railway," titled Unfinished Journey, which he intended to get published under the name of "Hartley Grant," but manuscript was apparently rejected. Regardless, Fearn was an amateur cineaste and, in 1949, created the Fylde Cine Club. One of the movies they made was an ambitious, full-length (silent) movie adaptation of Unfinished Journey starring Fearn, Matt Japp and published author Audrey Weigh, who recorded the lines on a tape recorder – a tape that got either lost or destroyed! However, Harbottle salvaged three boxes of the club's 16mm films and them transferred to VHS tapes, but the firm managed to mix "the running order of the three film spools" and made them run backwards. Harbottle said he only watched the silent VHS once, a quarter of a century ago, and was "so traumatized" that he never watched it again.

Honestly, I would love to get a glimpse of that silent film. Not just to get a taste of a lost impossible crime story, but just to watch Fearn acting. Someone should convert those VHS tapes and upload them to YouTube.

Seems appropriate

Sadly, Fearn is not the only one who lost a handful of manuscripts: R.T. Campbell wrote eight popular detective novels about a botanist and amateur detective, Professor John Stubbs. Five more titles were announced as forthcoming, namely The Hungry Worms Are Waiting, No Man Lives Forever, Death is Not Particular, Death is Our Physician and Mr. Death's Blue-Eyed Boy, but his publisher went into liquidation in 1948 and the manuscripts were lost to history. So just between Campbell and Fearn, you have nine or ten mystery novels that were expunged from our time-line. And, yes, there's more. There's always more of the bad stuff.

Willoughby Sharp was the author of two published detective novels, Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934), who provided this list with the most peculiar and tantalizing lost title. A third novel was announced for 1935, intriguingly titled The Mystery of the Multiplying Mules, which came with a short description of the premise and the story would have made for a most unusual locked room mystery – as mules keep turning up inside the locked barn of the Logan family. No reason was ever given why the book got canceled.

Another mystery writer with a short-lived career was Kirke Mechem and only saw one of his detective novels get published, The Strawstack Murder Case (1936), which has a strong rural flavor. This is likely the reason why his second Steven Steele novel was never published. The plot of the story, titled Mind on Murder, dealt with miscegenation in Kansas and Doubleday, Doran, turned down his manuscript "on account of this sensitive subject matter." The three novels by Mechem and Sharp have been reprinted by Coachwhip Publications.

Christopher St. John Sprigg plunge into Marxism and untimely death in the Spanish Civil War ended a short, but promising, run as a mystery novelist. Recently, Sprigg has profited from our current renaissance era and all of his seven novels has been reprinted as paperbacks and ebooks, but Curt Evans reported in 2013 that there two unpublished short stories, "The Case of the Misjudged Husband" and "The Case of the Jesting Miser" – existing as typed manuscripts in Sprigg's papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Evans describes them as "longish short stories" with a certain appeal and a noteworthy detective, Mrs. Bird.

So these two short stories still have a fighting chance to get published and maybe sooner than we think. A recently published anthology, Bodies from the Library 2 (2019), had never before published material by Christianna Brand, Edmund Crispin and Dorothy L. Sayers. I say we loot salvage as much as possible from this phantom library!

Well, hopefully, this rambling filler-post wasn't too depressing and I'll return to you presently with a regular review of a detective story that wasn't cruelly snatched away from us.

One Way Out (2012) by John Russell Fearn and Philip Harbottle

John Russell Fearn is my favorite second-stringer who tragically passed away in 1960 at age 52 and left behind an unfinished manuscript of a detective novel, entitled One Way Out (2012), which had "a very brief cryptic scribble" on the final page "setting out his thoughts on how it finished" – except that the scribble was too obscure to envision his intended ending. Philip Harbottle was unable to make heads nor tails of it and the manuscript was shelved for decades.

One day, Harbottle woke up with "an interpretation of what the notes could have meant" and completed the novel within days, which has since been published by Thorpe and Wildside Press.

What surprised me the most about One Way Out is that it read like an unpolished, first or second draft of a Richard Hull novel. The plot had been largely worked out and it toyed with the inverted detective, which is what reminded me of Hull, but One Way Out lacked the satirical touch of The Murder of My Aunt (1934) and Murder Isn't Easy (1936). And sorely missed a clever twist or gut-punch at the end of the story.

One Way Out begins with three passengers aboard the Scots Express bound for Glasgow: a well-known London financier, Morgan Dale, who's accompanied by his chief clerk of twenty years, Martin Lee. The third person is Dale's "no-good ex-secretary," Janice Elton. Dale had dismissed Elton a fortnight ago on account of her "misplaced romanticism" and having "made love to him on several occasions," which had become "the talk of the staff" – something that could tarnish his reputation. And he has a wife and children to think about. However, Elton refuses to let it go.

Elton confronts Dale in his train compartment and tells him she has been diagnosed with leukemia. She only has a little more than a year left to live, but is determined to leave Dale something remember her by. Something that will knock him from that high perch he's sitting on. 

When Lee returned, Dale bundled him into the compartment and told him Elton had committed suicide by emptying a whole bottle of strychnine. Dale wants to pull the communication cord to immediately warn the proper authorities, but Lee urges him to think their next move through, because her death could be interpreted by the police as murder. Lee finds an incriminating letter in her purse accusing her former employer of murder. So they decide to dispose of the body and destroy all of the potential evidence.

However, Lee is "a deep schemer" who has "an insatiable longing" to turn the tables on his employer and the death of Elton handed him that opportunity, because he didn't destroy the purse or its contents – using it as a lever to begin extracting money from Dale. The first four or five chapters are good and somewhat original treatment of the phrase, "what tangled webs we weave." Unfortunately, the story is derailed when one of these two characters is killed in random, unconnected traffic accident. This effectively deflated the strong opening and intriguing premise of the story.

The place of this character was taken by a tireless policeman, Chief-Inspector Royden of Scotland Yard, who's a police-detective in the tradition of Freeman Wills Croft's Inspector French.

A competent, hardworking policeman who diligently collects fingerprints, assiduously pokes around in ash-heaps and toys with his primary suspect like a cat with a captured mouse. However, I think it would have been more beneficial, in terms of story-telling, had this been a three-way between Dale, Lee and Royden – building counterplot upon counterplot. This was now missing and killed any possible excitement the plot could have generated. It didn't help either that the character who was left behind was completely out of his league against the experienced Chief-Inspector Royden.

One Way Out has a solid premise with an interesting take on the inverted detective story format: the unsurprising consequences of turning a suicide into a suspicious-looking death, but these ideas were never fully developed and you can blame part of that on the premature death of one of the main-characters – who should not have died. At least, not that early in the story. Secondly, there's the bland, all's well that ends well ending bare of any twist or surprise, which made the plot feel even more thread-bare than it already did. As said above, Hull came to mind when I read the opening chapters and kept expecting a similar kind of ending, which made me even suspect the suspiciously innocent-looking Mrs. Dale. But the plot was really as simple as it was presented to the reader.

So this was a very short and very minor crime novel that I can only really recommended to loyal readers of John Russell Fearn. Others might be a little more than underwhelmed by it.

The Detective Fiction of John Russell Fearn

"Yesterday's fashion may not be today's; but it may be none worse for that. On the contrary, it may be a devil of a sight better."

- John Dickson Carr ("The Grandest Game in the World," an essay collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections, 1980)

During the past two years, I have been working my through the long-forgotten, criminally neglected detective novels by John Russell Fearn, a prolific writer of science-fiction, westerns and detective stories, who has a complicated, maze-like publication history – involving a battalion of pennames and publishers. This year alone, I read nine of his detective novels and those nine titles had originally appeared under no less than seven different names. And a handful of publishers and periodicals were involved in those initial publications.

John Russell Fearn

Fortunately, reading Fearn today is no longer a labyrinthine exercise in bibliographical genealogy, because nearly all of his work has been restored to print in brand new paperback editions or ebooks. We have one man's indefatigable efforts to thank for that.

Philip Harbottle is a researcher, editor, writer and literary agent who has been tirelessly beating Fearn's drum for decades and wrote extensively on his life and work, which includes John Russell Fearn – An Evaluation (1963), John Russell Fearn: The Ultimate Analysis (1965) and The Multi-Man: A Biographic and Bibliographic Study of John Russell Fearn, 1908-1960 (1968) – which appeared alongside more general studies like Vultures of the Void: A History of British Science-Fiction, 1945-1956 (1993). So it was only a matter of time before the reviews of John Norris, Yvette and yours truly caught his attention.

Earlier this week, I received an email from Harbottle with a question to help him get into contact with John Norris, but we also bounced some emails back and forth about Fearn. Harbottle was kind enough to answer some of my questions, which gave me a better idea who the man behind all those pseudonyms actually was and granted permission to adapt the letter he had drafted for John into a guest-post for this blog.

The letter in question was littered with interesting background information on Harbottle's decades-long quest to get every single title by Fearn back into print and included an informative rundown of eleven of his more interesting detective novels. It was simply too good to allow it to languish in my inbox and had to be shared with my fellow detective-fiction addicts, because I know how famished all of your wish lists are. Particularly with the holidays ahead of us.

For the record, I only made a couple of minor alterations to the original letter in order to make it fit a blog-post format, added links and used the cover art that was supplied for this purpose by Harbottle.

So, without further ado, I'll give the floor to the man who made reading and collecting John Russell Fearn's many fictional endeavors ridiculously easy.

THE DETECTIVE FICTION OF JOHN RUSSELL FEARN BY PHILIP HARBOTTLE

I thought it was about time I dropped you a line to express my appreciation of your positive reviews of some of John Russell Fearn's crime novels, and by following your links I have been pleasantly surprised to discover a few others following your lead. However, it has been a somewhat bitter-sweet experience. 

Some seem to think they are clever to have "discovered" Fearn's crime fiction, which makes me grind my few remaining teeth. I was publishing myriads of articles and even entire books about Fearn more than 50 years ago, wherein I wrote, inter alia, "...Fearn's real potential as an author was brilliantly realised in his mystery and detective novels... Thy Arm Alone by John Slate, first published by Rich and Cowan in 1947...may well have been the best book Fearn ever wrote."

Way back in 1991, I wrote an essay about the "Black Maria" books that appeared in Maxim Jakubowski's book 100 Great Detectives, concluding: "Long out of print, and known only to collectors, the novels were recently rediscovered and successfully translated for an Italian readership. They still await an enterprising UK publisher." But despite the book appearing in both the US and UK in hardcover and paperback (not to mention winning the Anthony Award for Best Critical Work!) no one seemed to have read my article! Or if they did, they ignored it. To understand why, you need to understand Fearn's history.

When Fearn died of a sudden heart attack in 1960 at only 52, he immediately fell out of print, because he had represented himself. His widow (only married in 1957) was so grief- stricken—as well as seriously ill herself—that she was unable to answer would-be-publishers' letters, with which she was being bombarded when news of his death was announced. When she recovered, she consulted her solicitor about them. Sadly, this prize chump actually instructed her to ignore or refuse all requests to reprint his hundreds of books and stories, with the sole exception of his Star Weekly Golden Amazon novels. These had been published under his own name, and contained the tagline © John Russell Fearn. The prize chump instructed her that any and all other pseudonymous work (which comprised most of his output!) could not be reprinted because she "could not prove that Fearn was their author!" So Hugo Blayn and John Slate and Vargo Statten and myriad pen names were consigned to oblivion.

It wasn't until 1969 (when I quit my local government career and became an editor myself, seeking to reprint Fearn's work) that I learned about this stupidity. I requested a personal interview, which Mrs. Fearn kindly agreed to. I was able to explain to her that her solicitor was an idiot, and that I had spent my life uncovering and proving Fearn's authorship of all his pseudonymous output. Fortunately I had earlier corresponded with Fearn—"John did talk about you" she recalled—and Mrs. Fearn eventually appointed me as her literary agent.

Thereafter she became a close and dear friend of my family. But in that "lost decade" Fearn had become almost completely forgotten, and in that pre-PC and internet era when my only tools were a manual typewriter and primitive photocopying, I had an uphill struggle to restore him to print in the UK. I was obliged to resume my local government career, and so could only work as an agent in my spare time. Much of his fiction—sf, westerns, and detective—was first restored to print in Italy, in translation, and included first posthumous publication of some unpublished manuscripts.

When Mrs. Fearn died in 1982, I learned that she had bequeathed to me all of Fearn's copyrights, in her will. Slowly, gradually, I continued to bring his work back into print. In 1996 I made the bold decision to take early retirement at 55, bought myself a PC, learned to use it and the internet, and became a full-time literary agent.

Since when I have succeeded in returning every single one of Fearn's sf, western, and crime books to print in the UK and USA, along with scores of short stories in new collections, and several posthumous collaborations. (I've also done the same for E.C. Tubb and Sydney J. Bounds, but your readers won’t wish to know that...)

Many of these books have actually been available for years, but it is only thanks to John Norris and Tomcat that they are finally being noticed. But sadly, there still seems widespread ignorance of Fearn's crime novels outside of the Black Maria, Garth/Dr. Carruthers novels, which everybody seems to think comprised the totality of his locked room/impossible crime stories. Not so! The Silvered Cage was NOT the final bow of Dr. Carruthers.

Allow me to offer your readers this further slice of information:

1: ROBBERY WITHOUT VIOLENCE

In 1957 wrote a sf detective novel called Robbery Without Violence. The basic plot was very similar to that which Fearn had used in his Garth/Carruthers novel What Happened to Hammond? Although its development was completely different, Fearn considered that Garth and Carruthers could not be the lead characters. So he renamed them as Chief Inspector Hargraves and Sawley Garson (a "specialist in scientific puzzles"—but without Carruthers' egotism and sarcasm).

It was published in Fearn's regular market, the Toronto Star Weekly, who requested Fearn (and others) to submit full length novels, which they then condensed to fit their standard format. Fearn used to send in his novels at 50,000 words; he was happy to do this because he thus had the chance of selling his uncut versions as a book later). Up to 1955, the Star novels ran at 40,000 words; from 1956 on they were reduced to 32,000 words and finally, in 1960, they were cut to only 25,000. (At that point, Fearn wrote them at a length of just 35,000.)

When I sought to have this novel reprinted, I discovered that there was a glaring plot hole because of the Star's cuts, so I had to write in a missing explanation myself! I defy anyone to "spot the join!" (note from TC: I did not spot it!) The cutting of 18,000 words rather vitiated the literary worth of the story, but the original had been destroyed, and we can just be thankful that at least the Star was giving Fearn a regular market.

Robbery Without Violence is currently available from Linford and Wildside, and is a locked room/impossible crime novel.

2. THE MAN WHO WAS NOT

Fearn's next Hargraves/Garson novel was an absolute humdinger, and entirely original—it positively bristled with locked room/impossible crime murders! But it was so complex that the Star rejected it, deciding they would not be able to successfully cut it. Whereupon Fearn promptly rewrote it, essentially unchanged, but reinserting Garth and Carruthers! Sadly, he was unaccountably unable to find a book publisher. I found both 50,000 word manuscript versions in Fearn's effects. When I had the book reprinted, I took the decision to use the Sawley Garson version.

The Man Who Was Not is currently available from Linford and Wildside, and is a locked room/impossible crime novel, par excellence.

3. ACCOUNT SETTLED

This is a "stand alone" novel, first published as a Paget Books paperback in 1949. Paget were already running westerns as by "John Russell Fearn" so they made the decision to publish this as by "John Russell." Consequently it remained completely unknown for many decades until I discovered it. Even Bob Adey had never seen a copy and was unaware of its locked room credentials until I presented him with one a few years ago! It is perhaps the rarest of all his books. I restored Fearn's full name when I had it reprinted.

Account Settled is a terrific fun mystery, with a science fiction flavour, but the (many!) locked room/impossible crime elements are all "straight." It is currently available from Linford and Wildside. (note from TC: can any of you guess which title by Fearn has shot up, like a rocket, on my wish list?).

4) SHATTERING GLASS

Fearn created a fascinating psychiatrist detective in his character "Dr. Castle" for this 1947 Star Weekly novel. It was published as by "Frank Russell" to distinguish it from his regular John Russell Fearn "Golden Amazon" sf novels for the Star. This murder mystery may not be impossible crime, but it is unusual and is strongly recommended. It was reprinted unchanged as a 1953 Brown Watson paperback in 1953. It is incredibly rare. But the good news is that it is currently easily available from Linford and Wildside, under Fearn's own name.

5) REFLECTED GLORY

This second "Dr. Castle" novel was written many years later, and unaccountably remained unpublished during Fearn's lifetime. The 50,000 word manuscript was discovered in his effects. I actually believe this may be his best novel—better than Garth and Black Maria. Whilst not exactly impossible crime, it has a wonderful creepy atmosphere and the plot revolves around psychological quirks and flaws in the characters. It has my highest recommendation.

Reflected Glory is currently available from Linford and Wildside.

6) THE TATTOO MURDERS

This was originally published as Murder's A Must by Fearn, by Muir Watson as a 1949 paperback. It is extremely rare, but is worth trying to chase down because of its superb cover by the great Reina Sington. Well worth the probable high price, because this is a very entertaining and efficient murder mystery. Not impossible crime (and also NOT "hardboiled" either) it is none the worse for that.

The Tattoo Murders is currently available from Linford and is shortly to appear from Fearn’s newest publisher, Endeavour Press. The Wildside edition is now out of print but can still be found on the net

7) THE FOURTH DOOR

This was another "one off" 1947 Star Weekly novel, originally as by Frank Russell. It has some of the same creepy/psychological atmosphere of the "Dr. Castle" novels and some impossible crime sub-texts. The writing is not so polished as in Reflected Glory because it has been cut from 50,000 to 40,000 words. (Once again I had to write in extra "missing" text to cover a plot hole created by the abridging) but the novel is notable enough to have been picked up by Audible.com, and makes very good listening.

The Fourth Door is currently available from Linford and Wildside.

8) LIQUID DEATH

This is a fun-read SF detective thriller with some impossible crime elements. It was first published by Modern fiction in 1953 under their "Griff" house name. Scarce and expensive.

The novel is available from Thorpe, and is shortly to be reprinted by Fearn's newest publisher, Endeavour Press. An earlier Wildside edition is now out of print, but second hand copies will be available for some time on the net. The Wildside edition is worth getting, however, because it is a "double size" book, also containing a collection of Fearn's early short crime stories from diverse hard to find sources—principally Thrilling Mystery Stories, which are very entertaining rationalized supernatural stories.

9) DON'T TOUCH ME

This is a hardboiled gangster thriller first published by Modern Fiction in 1953 under their "Spike Gordon" house name. Expect to pay through the nose if you can find a copy! A quite entertaining "crime noir," it was considered notable enough to have been picked up by Audible.com.

Don't Touch Me is currently available from Linford and Wildside.

10) ONE WAY OUT (with Philip Harbottle)

This is a "straight" detective novel about how an innocent man becomes a murder suspect and is forced to go on the run, that was unfinished at the time of Fearn's death. His final detective novel. On the very last page was a very brief cryptic scribble by Fearn to himself, setting out his thoughts on how it finished. Unfortunately I could not make head nor tail of it, and so the manuscript remained unpublished for more than 20 years. Then, suddenly, I woke up one day with an interpretation of what the notes could have meant! I immediately set to work and within a few days I had completed the novel! It was sent to Thorpe and Wildside and immediately accepted and published by them, and is still available.

11) PATTERN OF MURDER

Fearn's original title on this unpublished manuscript was Many A Slip and he had actually bylined it as by "Hugo Blayn" when he submitted it to the successors to his old UK hardcover publisher in 1957. Unaccountably it was not accepted—God knows why, maybe because the lending library markets were dying out then, and UK genre publishers were tightening their belts.

The story is one of Fearn's very best (it might even be better than Reflected Glory) because he was writing directly from his own life-experiences, so that it is completely authentic. 

This is a murder story set inside a cinema. (During the war, Fearn himself worked as a Chief projectionist in a cinema, as part of his war service, having been graded C3 and unfit for active service). It has an entirely original authentic scientific plot behind the murder, which would have certainly qualified it as an "impossible crime." However, Fearn inverted the plot—anticipating Columbo by several decades—by revealing the modus operandi early on. The suspense derives from how the hero painstakingly uncovers the method and unmasks the murderer.

There is no surviving record of it ever having been submitted anywhere else, until I sent the manuscript to Robert Hale in 1982 (incidentally, along with The Man Who Was Not). Editor John Hale wrote back to say that both stories were "quite good" and that he really would have liked to publish them—but had reluctantly decided against it, because "the author's name is not known." Bah! Humbug! (Ironically, nearly 20 years later, I would sell John Hale some 20 of Fearn's western novels!)

Needless to say it was snapped up by, and is currently available from, both Linford and Wildside. On no account should this one be missed! (note from TC: this one is on my TBR-pile and might be one of my next reads... unless Account Settled overtakes it).

So there you have my top-of-the head selection of some of the best (not all) of Fearn's still largely "unknown" crime novels. I hope it might just interest you.

There are numerous new collections containing all of Fearn's remaining short crime stories, but I don't suppose any of your readers would be interested, as most of them are interspersed with sf stories…

Phil Harbottle

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I would like to append Harbottle's list with two titles that did not make the cut or was mentioned, but deserve to be considered for your wish list: Except for One Thing (1947) is an excellent inverted detective novel with battle-of-wits between the police-inspector and the murderer and an under appreciated locked room novel, Death in Silhouette (1950), which has a splendid have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solution.

So now we have gotten that out of the way, I would like to express my gratitude for all the time and hard work Harbottle has put into preserving Fearn's literary legacy. Fearn was one of the earliest followers (read: fanboy) of my favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, whose influence can often be found in his impossible crime fiction (e.g. the locked room solution in The Five Matchboxes, 1948). 

More often than not, Fearn attempted to bring a new idea, or approach, to the impossible crime genre (e.g. previously mentioned Thy Arm Alone) and that's what attracted me to his work, but only this week have I come to appreciate the time and work that went into making them accessible to a world-wide audience – as well as giving me a glimpse of the man who wrote them. A man who must have been an absolute treasure to have had as a friend.

All of this has completely expunged my recent disappointment over Robbery Without Violence and moved two of the titles mentioned by Harbottle to the top of my to-be-read pile, but before I'll get around to that I'll have special review planned for one my fellow locked room addicts. But that's for the next post. So see you all on the flipside!