The Magic Grandfather - Doris Miles Disney

Something Special!  The exclamation mark in a circle on the bottom of the front flap of The Magic Grandfather's hardcover 1st edition dust jacket indicates that this Doris Miles Disney mystery defies simple subgenre categorization. I was excited to read it.  Would it deliver the goods like so many of L. P. Davies' similarly tagged and utterly unique crime novels? Would it too be a daring shake-up of crime fiction conventions? Well, yes and no.

Like most of Doris Miles Disney’s crime fiction The Magic Grandfather (1966) is one of her many books in Doubleday’s Crime Club. In the late 1950s and 1960s the editors devised a special marketing tactic with clever logos to indicate if a book has a Favorite Sleuth, is a Damsel in Distress story, a Chase and Adventure thriller, Classic Puzzler or fits into some other subgenre (see the chart with all the logos below). The “Something Special” tag and logo indicates a book not easy to stuff into any recognizable subgenre yet were always standouts for plotting and characters. The Something Special books almost always prove to be intriguingly constructed novels that play with detective fiction conventions, add modern touches to the plot, and still manage to surprise and bring a smile to my face. I have made a concerted effort to seek out as many of these books with the exclamation mark logo as I can find and read. More often than not these books are the cream of the crop of the Crime Club imprint. Only rarely do they disappoint with a final twist that was not a surprise at all.

The Magic Grandfather (1966) has a relatively simple plot: it’s revenge pure and simple. But there are secrets in the past that remain hidden until the final utterly bizarre chapter. In a nutshell – Etta Lane has been living happily as a widow for over 27 years until Dan Ferris, her ex-father-in-law, who has been hunting for her since 1925 finally finds her. Then he slowly makes her life hell blackmailing her for something criminal that happened in her past and extorting her lucrative dividends from wisely invested stocks. The secret in the past involves her dead husband Jim, Ferris’ son. Just what exactly happened we will not know until Part Two in the novel which takes place in 1925. We learn about Etta's life with Jim and his father in a vaudeville touring company that climaxes in a courtroom trial for the crime Ferris alludes to throughout Part One. The story wraps up in an 13 year flash forward to 1965 when Sarah Prince, who was a precocious and intrusive 5 year-old in 1952 back in Part One, comes of age and is in her first year of college. On her Thanksgiving holiday she visits Dan Ferris who now lives in Etta Lane’s house in order to deliver him some food for his lonely holiday. What she sees and hears is a nightmare come true and explains the various mysteries left hanging back in Parts One and Two.

So is this deceptively simple plot really Something Special? As you know I’ve seen every trick a writer can pull in detective and crime fiction since I first fell in love with the genre as a teen back in the 1970s. It’s a matter of being able to perform even the oldest trick in the book with finesse and panache that will make me stand up and cheer. I’ve also sampled more than my fair share of very weird books with bizarre endings like the one that appears in The Magic Grandfather. And sorry to report, my friends, I saw this trick coming pages before the shattering climax.

Oh yes! I figured out the entire book, all the twists, even the detailed and unusual vaudeville act that Dan Ferris alludes to repeatedly but never once describes to anyone, and of course the bizarre final scene was telegraphed all because of a simple few sentences that occur in Part One. And though I shouted aloud “I KNEW IT!” when I got to the end I was a bit let down that it was all so obvious.  At least to me. I enjoyed what Disney attempted to pull off. But she let the ace fall from her sleeve rather clumsily.  I really wanted this to be a winner for me like so many of the Crime Club's "Something Special" mystery novels. Simultaneously and ironically, I was rather astounded that I managed to get it all so accurately.

This may be a truly flipped out suspense thriller with genuine shocks for some of you. Granted it is well constructed and has genuinely suspenseful moments. The characters are well done and you are rooting for Etta from the outset and hoping Dan gets what's coming to him. But savvy readers who have seen a lot of horror movies and read a lot of Robert Bloch, John Keir Cross and seen a few specific Alfred Hitchcock episodes from his two TV series will most likely be able to figure it all out. And that's a disappointment.

As a concluding coda for any of you still interested in reading this book I offer a warning. By all means avoid buying the Zebra paperback which has as its cover illustration a massive spoiler that will fairly ruin the book before you even read the first sentence. I mean MASSIVE. Unbelievable!  I have chosen not to include that cover among the paperback reprint edition photos used here.  This title was one of Disney's most financially successful, if not artistically competent, books with at least six editions in English that I uncovered, two from the same publisher. But what editor or publisher would ever allow that kind of artwork on a mystery novel? The mind boggles. Also, one publicity blurb I found online says that Dan Ferris, the title character who survives to age 90+, is murdered. And that is utterly wrong. Caveat emptor! And Caveat lector, too.