Earlier
this year, I put together a depressing list of our genre's so-called "lost media" section, "The
Hit List: Top 10 Works of Detective Fiction That Have Been Lost to
History," which focused exclusively on destroyed or
irretrievably lost novels and short stories – eschewing still
existent, unpublished manuscripts. Anthony
Boucher's The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole and Christianna
Brand's The Chinese Puzzle are merely taking their time to
get to the printers.
So
the list ranges from Jacques
Futrelle and the last batch of "The Thinking Machine" being
among the casualties of the Titanic disaster to a
collaboration between John
Dickson Carr and playwright J.B. Priestley which never
materialized. All the entries on the list were in various stages of
completion, before the manuscripts got lost in a shuffle or simply
destroyed. Never to be seen again in our reality, but I like to
believe there's an alternate reality where Joseph
Commings' One for the Devil and Hake
Talbot's The Affair of the Half-Witness secured a place on
"The
Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders &
Impossible Crimes."I
wanted to do another one of these lists, but had no original idea or
worthy topic and "The
Hit List: Top 10 Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be
Translated" didn't garner nearly enough reader suggestions to
do a follow-up. Only recently it hit me. Something was left on the
cutting room floor of the previous hit list that could be marshaled
into a small, hopefully interesting addendum to the list of lost
detective stories.
From
my studies of Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and
Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019), I found
several novels and a collection of short stories of a particularly
elusive nature going beyond being out-of-print, scarce and expensive
– like A. & P. Shaffer's Withered
Murder (1955). A short list of titles that were, technically
speaking, published, but barely left a trace of their existence. Some
would have been all but forgotten today had they not been listed by
Adey and Skupin in Locked Room Murders. So here are five
published locked room mysteries and impossible crime fiction that
appear to have vanished into thin air.
1.
Murder Through Locked Doors and Other Stories (????) by Jan
Deuell
The
first title on this list Jan Deuell's Murder Through Locked Doors
and Other Stories. A collection of short stories listed in Skupin
with three stories, "Murder Through Locked Doors," "The
Spread-Eagled Man" and "The Case of the Castle Keep," published
by Llanelli. Nobody knows when the collection was originally
published and no copies can be found online or anywhere else for that
matter. Only site mentioning the collection is Allen J. Hubin's "CrimeFiction
IV, Part 31," suggesting "Jan Deuell" is probably a
pseudonym and lists an additional, presumably non-impossible crime,
story for the collection, "The Edinburgh Mail." These often
tantalizing-sounding puzzles are solved by Gorden Darch and Doctor
Jan, but not much else is known about this truly forgotten series.
However, I have a theory to explain it.
I
think the Gordon Darch and Doctor Jan stories were published or
serialized in the Welsh newspaper The Llanelly Mercury, but
never officially collected and published. This very ephemeral Murder
Through Locked Doors and Other Stories could be nothing more than
a scrapbook with the clippings of Deuell's newspaper serials or
stories, which somehow ended up in Adey's impossible crime
collection. A single, undated scrapbook of newspaper cuttings
explains why neither Adey nor Skupin could give its original
publication date, because the idea of Murder Through Locked Doors
and Other Stories never got that far.
2.
The Thirteenth Bed in the Ballroom (1937) by Esther Fonseca
This
is the only dodgy title on the list as it's closer to an scarce
extremely, out-of-print novel, but the reportedly 2012 reprint
apparently disappeared without a trace.
I
first learned of Esther
Fonseca's The Thirteenth Bed in the Ballroom in Locked
Room Murders: Supplement and noted a UK edition from 2012, but
all the internet could turn up was a contemporary
review of the original, 1937 US edition – published by
Doubleday, Doran. I eventually cottoned on to the fact that the
opposite page has a number of entries from Christopher
Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series from the 2010s. So to the
mention of a 2012 reprint of The Thirteenth Bed in the Ballroom
is simply a print error, which doesn't make the original edition any
less obscure or rare. It has a few mentions online and that one
review, but nothing else. Not even a book cover. Fonseca's Death
Below the Dam (1936) fared a little better as used copies are
still available. Just not cheaply. A shame. Something about the plot
speaks to me ("a breaking dam... raging flood waters... an
isolated island... and a murderer at large").
3.
Pattern of Terror (1987) by Ayresome Johns
"Ayresome
Johns" is the pseudonym of the late George
Locke, pharmacist, antiquarian bookseller, bibliographer and
publisher, who was primarily involved in the science-fiction and
fantasy genres. Locke was also involved with the detective genre and
not only published the first version of Adey's Locked Room Murders
in 1979, but also published The Roger Sheringham Stories
(1993) and The Anthony Berkeley Cox Files: Notes Towards a
Bibliography (1993). A good two decades ahead of the reprint
renaissance. More importantly, Locke wrote a fascinating sounding
impossible crime novel under his "Ayresome Johns" penname.
Adey
lists Pattern of Terror with no less than three impossible
situations: death by shooting with "no external wound to
correspond with the heart wound," an inexplicable poisoning and
"various locked room murder" – "actual and
proposed." The detective tackling these problems is "ace
investigator of the Antiquarian Booksellers Society of Great
Britain," John Anderson. I peeked at Adey's comment at the back
of the book, while holding my hand over the solutions, praising it as "a great pudding-mix of a novel" and called the solution
to the first impossibility ingenious. Regrettably, Locke was a small,
independent publisher who only printed limited copies. So available
copies or additional information are non-existent. I really would
like to see Pattern of Terror return to print, because it
strikes me as the kind of wildly imaginative detective story that
would be much appreciated in today's reprint renaissance and locked
room revival. Fingers crossed!
4.
Murder at the Drum Tower (1965?) by Ning Xu
Just
like the previous entry is a perfect fit for today's locked room
revival, Ning Xu's Murder at the Drum Tower sounds like it
missed out on the current translation wave. Skupin notes in Locked
Room Murders: Supplement that Murder at the Drum Tower was
published by Australian publisher Whitecross in 1994, but good luck
finding any trace or scrap of information on the book. You really to
vary and juggle your search terms to get an
atom of proof the book actually exists. So there's a ready-made
translation out there, somewhere in the Australian outbacks, of a
Chinese detective novel centering on a stabbing and shooting inside a
locked tower room. For some, unsubstantiated reason I assume Murder
at the Drum Tower is a historical mystery. So a reprint would
make an interesting companion piece to Chin Shunshin's Pekin
yūyūkan
(Murder in a Peking Studio,
1976), Futaro Yamada's Meiji
dantodai (The
Meiji Guillotine Murders,
1979) and Taku Ashibe's Koromu
no satusjin (Murder
in the Red Chamber, 2004)
5.
The Mountain by Night (1997) by Maisie Birmingham
Maisie
Birmingham is the author of the short-lived Kate
Weatherly series, published during the 1970s, but added one last
title to the series decades later. Skupin's introduction to Locked
Room Murders: Supplement
highlighted The
Mountain by Night
as "worthy
of note"
concerning a strangulation in a locked house, but, once again, copies
appeared to be non-existent. I suspected at the time Birmingham had
privately published The
Mountain by Night,
because Amazon
gives "M.P. Birmingham" as its publisher. This proved to be a
correct assumption.
A
2021 comment
from Jamie Sturgeon shed some light on the elusiveness of The
Mountain by Night: "the
Maisie Birmingham was published by the author herself, I corresponded
briefly with her (in the early 2000s I think it was) and she sent me
a copy, all I remember is that it was spiral bound and was a locked
room mystery, I sold the book to Bob Adey hence it turning up in the
Skupin book. As to what happened to Bob Adey's copy I do not know."
I later came across this archived
link providing some background on the series, a plot description
of The
Mountain by Night
and how "copies
of the book can be purchased from the author."
So a limited print run of a privately published novel is the culprit
once again and fear detective novels like Pattern
of Terror
and The
Mountain by Night
are in danger of eventually becoming irretrievably lost. But not all
hope is lost. Derek
Smith's Come
to Paddington Fair
started out as an unpublished manuscript written in the 1950s, before
Japanese collector Mori Hideo published it in a limited print-run of
a hundred copies. John Pugmire's Locked
Room International finally made it widely available a decade ago
when they published The
Derek Smith Omnibus
(2014). A year later, LRI reprinted a separate, long overdue edition
of Come
to Paddington Fair.
So there's still some hope, but time in their case is probably
ticking.
An
honorable mention:
Jacques Aanrooy's Off
the Track
(1895) and Sir Henry Juta's Off
the Track
(1925). The 1895 novel was published in South Africa by J.C. Juta &
Co and has a detective by the name of Donald Fraser cracking the case
of a fatal stabbing in a locked surgery, while the 1925 novel has a
Ronald Fraser tackling a stabbing in a locked consulting room. A case
of parallel thinking? Blatant plagiarism? Well, neither. Jacques
Aanrooy was the pseudonym of a South African judge, lawyer and
politician, Sir Henry Juta, who probably reworked his old, forgotten
novel to be republished under his own name. It's impossible to check
to what extend the 1925 title is a rewrite of the 1895 original,
because the one thing both versions have in common is how just how
scarce they have managed to made themselves. If they differ
enormously, I would love to see a twofer reprint edition. Yes, this
honorable mention is just an excuse to have a cover included in this
poor excuse of a filler-post and "off the track" fits the theme of the list. So there you go.
If
I'm going to do another one of these hit lists, I'm going to pick a
more upbeat topic without trying to find an excuse to meander on
about obscure, long-lost locked room mysteries.