The setting is the home and laboratory of Damian Strengland, former medical doctor who was stripped of his license after ethical questions about his research. The man has been involved in some genetics research and behavioral studies of chimpanzees. The usual glandular and endocrine mad scientist stuff crops up in the story and we learn that in addition to producing chimps who are now capable of performing human tasks and following orders guided by simple language commands some of the ape servants are actually hybrids of chimps and humans, altered by experimentally changing their endocrine systems that result in physiological changes like lightening of skin. One of the chimps in fact is completely hairless, wears human clothes and responds in simple, one word guttural syllables that seem like genuine speech. Another chimp has mastered spelling out the word "mad" on a typewriter which later turns out to be a key plot element in the solution of the various mysteries.
Hairless chimps and gorillas are a natural phenomena of aging apes. |
As the story progresses and Strengland's monomania for his ape research begins to affect his sanity the story often also descends into scenes of unintentional self-parody. During the investigation of the violent deaths the police begin to treat the apes as suspects and Strengland launches into a series of tirades. In one scene after trying to figure out how a window that was always locked is now unbolted and hearing one of his chimps accused of fiddling with the bolt he sees the accused ape in his cage locked and secure. He turns to the others and says: "This ape is innocent. Thank goodness! He's a valuable one!" Later Strengland rants about the most dangerous animal of all: "The police! What do they know of apes? They think all apes are dangerous. Any young fool in a sports car is ten times more dangerous than an ape!"
One of the many splendid pulps offered for sale at John W Knott Jr., Bookseller |
I am so tempted to reveal some of the more outrageously horrific sequences but will only allude to Hare's clear influences of H.G.Wells, Maurice Renard, and a humorous nod to Poe. There is quite a bit of Dr. Moreau in this story and more than a fair share of homage to French crime novels, weird menace pulp magazine stories, and mad scientist movies of the 1930s.
THINGS I LEARNED: Greek lessons! Strengland and Lenka (and of course this is really Hare speaking) claim that Vlaha means "blabber" (name of a chittering female chimp) but the closest Greek word I found was Vlacha and that translates as shepherdess; Tima he says means "timid" but I got honors in my translation. Basho (name of the gorilla at the lab) does not come up in the Greek dictionary at all. Hare says its English equivalent is "horrible", but the closest phonetic match (páscho) translates as to suffer. Only Philologos, the ape who has mastered the typewriter and can speak a few words, has a name that any elementary Greek student could figure out and that's because it's a neologism coined by Hare, an elementary student of Greek himself who perhaps got very poor grades in both transliteration and translation.
I wanted to find out how early ape and primate research was being conducted in the United States and that's how I discovered Robert Mearns Yerkes (1876-1956) who is shown above. Yerkes was a prominent psychologist and academic who studied at Harvard and taught at both Harvard (1902-1917) and Yale (1924-1944). His research was varied beginning with intelligence studies (he developed as test used by the military during WW2) then moving on to human behavior and eventually correlations between ape and human behavior. In an article for a 1916 issue of Science he wrote: “I am wholly convinced that the various medical sciences and medical practices have vastly more to gain from the persistent and ingenious use of the monkeys and the anthropoid apes in experimental inquiry.” He founded the research laboratory for primate study in 1930 and based it in Orange Park, Florida. The Yale Laboratories for Primate Biology belonged to Yale University for decades but was sold to Emory University in 1956 upon Yerkes death. It was renamed Yerkes Primate Research Center and eventually relocated in 1965 to its present location in Atlanta where Yerkes' work and vision still continue.
Oliver, a trained chimp that started the human/ape hybrid insanity |
HARE & YERKES: Robert Hare Hutchinson was a 1910 graduate of Harvard University. After his marriage to Delia Dana in 1912 and their tour of New Zealand he returned to the US and planned on getting his Masters degree at Harvard. He attended the university at the graduate level from 1912-1913. There he met Robert Mearns Yerkes who was Assistant Professor in Comparative Psychology during the same time span. Both men were also active in the eugenics movement. The Hand of The Chimpanzee addresses the concept of eugenics and ethical medicine at various points in the book. The unusual dedication of the novel coupled with their shared Harvard background leads me to believe that Hutchinson kept in contact with Yerkes and must have visited his research center in Florida prior to writing this detective novel.
Don't mess with me, Doctor! |
EASY TO FIND? Those interested in owning their own copy ought to act fast. There
UPDATE: Please note the strikeouts and grammatical changes in the above paragraph. Once again, within one week after I wrote about an obscure book nearly every available copy was sold to readers of this blog. Where are my referral royalties?
The Russians were also interested in ape/human hybrids:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926701-000-blasts-from-the-past-the-soviet-ape-man-scandal/
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/09/a-mad-scientists-insane-quest-for-a-human-ape-hybrid/
Lord have mercy! That's more nightmarish than what Hare dreamed up as Damian Strengland's research. There is a single scene late in the book that approaches the horror of Ivanov's experiments. It's a flesh creeping sequence, eerily cinematic in how it's all described.
DeleteThe early USSR had some very odd ideas about altering and improving humans. The Immortalisation Commission by John Gray discusses some of them and the "hero" of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog is the result of just such an experiment.
DeletePeter Dickinson's The Poison Oracle doesn't feature ape-men but an ape which has been taught sign language and witnessed a crime. His Eva is about a teenage girl in an ape's body.
One of the great unwritten crime novels features in Evelyn Waugh's Work Suspended and a key element is establishing that an orang-utang [?] is left-handed.