IN BRIEF: Pattern of Murder - John Russell Fearn

Any fans of Columbo out there? Of course there are. Well, let me point you to your next required read:  Pattern of Murder (1957) by the ambitious and prolific John Russell Fearn. Decades before Link and Levinson dreamed up their wily, cigar chomping police lieutenant who matched wits with egotistical murderers foolishly content with their supposed perfect crimes Fearn wrote this masterful example of the inverted crime novel. Like the best Columbo episodes Fearn's novel is chockful of specialized background info.  In fact, while reading Fearn's book I could not help but remember an episode featuring Trish Van Devere (George C. Scott's one time actress wife) as the killer whose supposed alibi is tied to her knowledge of how movie reels are changed in a projection room.  For that's exactly what is featured in all its mechanical marvel in Pattern of Murder. The two main characters Sid and Terry work in a movie theater and run the movie projectors.  A minor character who provides some key info is their assistant who tends to do nothing more than cracks jokes and rewind all the spools of film in the rear of their projector rooms.

What makes this book even more remarkable is that it is both an inverted detective novel AND a traditional detective novel.  As with the inverted form we are privy to a killer's murder plan. Here it is gambling addict Terry who plots a gruesome and fiendishly designed deathtrap for an usherette who knows he is a thief and is threatening to expose him.  We have little sympathy for the victim Vera, however, because she too is a thief!  She stole two hundred pounds from Terry the day he lost a bet at the race track and that loss drives him to steal from his employer. He threatens Vera with exposure too. They seem to be at a sort of Mexican standoff, each waiting for the other to make their move.  Terry decides he must carry out his murder plan and yet as we watch him plan it and rehearse it (!) there is much that occurs that he never anticipated.

Sid was Vera's boyfriend and he can't understand Terry's callous attitude after her death. Terry, after all, was friendly with Vera and the two went off to the horse races a few weeks before her death. But then the theft occurred. Was Terry responsible for that?

Assisted by his movie theater co-workers Sid comes across oddities that make him question what the coroner and police seem to think was a bizarre accident. What happened to the glass tumbler in the bathroom Sid and Terry use? Why did Terry claim the film broke just prior to the accident? Why did he also jam his hand into the projector claiming he was fixing the film? Why did the short travel film go back to the movie distributor with a ruined soundtrack when the main feature that followed the travel short was perfectly fine? Sid becomes the amateur sleuth and puts it all together. Then it's a game of cat and mouse as Sid tries to prove Terry a killer while Terry tries to outwit Sid.

This is a fascinating book on so many levels -- the mix of traditional and inverted detective novel plot techniques, the eye-opening world of a 1950s movie theater business, and the ingenious murder method employed -- all of it adds up to a truly engrossing, page-turner. If you must choose to read only one mystery novel by John Russell Fearn, then this is it. It's quintessential Fearn - some of his best plotting, his love of scientific detection, arcane background info and an exciting, fast paced story.

Pattern of Murder is available as a digital download or paperback book from Wildside Press as well as paperback copy (albeit a large print edition) from Linford Mystery. There are many used copies all priced cheaply of the Linford edition, almost all of them ex-library editions, for sale on multiple bookselling outlets in this vast digital shopping mall we call the internet.

In a bit of a role reversal I have chosen to be very bare bones about this book. If you want more detail about the story and Fearn's life as both a cinéaste and a movie projectionist then read TomCat's meaty post on Pattern of Murder.  He is the vintage mystery blogosphere's #1 JRF fan and like me he found this to be one of Fearn's best mystery novels.

Reflected Glory - John Russell Fearn

The forensic psychology subgenre was not well known or often utilized until the tail end of the Golden Age of Detection. It really only became popular with the rise of the serial killer novels in the mid 1980s when protagonists who were adept at criminal profiling become more and more popular. With the advent of TV series like Criminal Minds there seemed to be no stopping the trend of creating lurid murders committed by truly disturbed killers. Nevertheless, the idea of solving a crime based solely on the construction of the murderer’s psychological history and behavior can be traced back as early as the novels of Charles J. Dutton whose series detective John Hartley, a professor in abnormal psychology, aided police in gruesome multiple murder cases detailed in novels like The Crooked Cross (1923) and Streaked with Crimson (1929). Similar landmark novels appeared in the following decades as exemplified by The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) by Harriette Ashbrook, The Horizontal Man (1946) by Helen Eustis, and Ellery Queen’s seminal serial killer mystery Cat of Many Tails (1949). John Russell Fearn also entered the realm of abnormal psychology when he created psychologist and criminologist Dr. Adam Castle who appears in at least two novels: Shattering Glass (1947) and Reflected Glory (2005). The second of these was never published in Fearn’s lifetime though it was, according to Philip Harbottle Fearn’s literary executor, written many years later than Shattering Glass. Having just completed the second Castle title it is clear to me why it was left alone.  As an example of a crime plot based on rudimentary pop psychology it doesn’t hold up well at all.

The first half of Reflected Glory is perfectly fine. It’s all set up and exposition and it promises an intriguing story of impassioned characters, lovers betrayed and rejected, and rampant jealousies. There is a bizarre practical joke that takes place in an early chapter that results in a dreadful injury rendering painter Clive Hexley’s hand practically useless. As Clive is an artist he is horrified that he may never be able to paint again. And Elsa Farraday, his most recent muse, sees Clive’s injury as life altering to them both. If the story was to be focussed on psychology here was a veritable Pandora’s box of ills and troubles to write about. But instead we get the story of a troubled young woman haunted by her past with the cliché abusive parent who tortured and scarred her for life.

I thought this kind of thing wasn’t really part of pop fiction well until the late 1960s or mid 1970s. Hard to tell when exactly Reflected Glory was originally written, perhaps it did come from that time. Poor Elsa Farraday truly seems like she could only have been created after the publication of Sybil (1975) and similar stories both fictional and non-fictional. Yet here was Fearn dreaming up a little girl terrorized by a brutal father and imprisoned like a Gothic heroine. Granted monstrous mothers seemed to be more prevalent in this kind of fiction with Carrie White’s mother taking the grand prize, but a brutal abusive father was probably easier to dream up and possibly more palatable for the reader.

The detective plot involves the disappearance of Clive and Elsa’s apparent guilt surrounding his possible murder. Late in the novel (given away on the plot blurb of my edition) she confesses to his murder but the police don’t take her seriously. Without a body the confession is legally useless to them. They continue to search for the body in vain. The reason for Elsa’s open and brazen confession will not be entirely explained until the final pages. Rest assured it has a lot to do with her “abnormal” behavior. A major clue for that behavior comes in the explanation of the title which Elsa talks about with Clive prior to his disappearance: “My glory such as it is, Mr. Hexley, is reflected. I said that I am not an artist in the same sense that you are. By that I mean I cannot paint or draw I’m a writer.”

This idea of “reflected glory” is key to understanding Elsa. The reader should be allowed to slowly realize that Elsa prefers to seek attention through anonymous means. Thus she chooses a pen name to write under. The chance to model for Hexley’s most recent portrait she sees as the crown jewel in her vying for attention without truly being seen or known. But we never slowly realize any of this; we have all of it spelled out for us. Repeatedly, Elsa will explain everything in confessional dialogue as if the reader is not smart enough to glean it all from situations and behavior. Dr. Castle uses the term “reflected glory” often throughout the story as he comes to understand Elsa’s decidedly perverse form of an “inferiority complex.” And he too will lecture and explain what we may have missed in an earlier scene.

The trouble with many of these fictional mysteries that rely solely on psychology as their method of detection is that the plots tend to be fabricated with utterly phony business that never rings true. When a writer creates a psychologist character he ought to have a sophisticated knowledge of the behavioral sciences and psychology theorists and their work that can then be diffused through the character. Relying solely on pop psychological terms like “inferiority complex” and then using some of the most absurd abnormal behavior to explain that complex may make for some luridly eyebrow-raising reading but it has not a shred of authenticity. For example, we are asked to believe that Elsa finds it easier to concentrate in her writing persona if she dresses up as a ten year-old girl and retreats to a reconstructed childhood bedroom with child-sized furniture. As someone suffering from “inferiority complex” her retreat to the safety of childhood is comforting and simultaneously she is dominant as she is an adult in a room of miniature furniture. If she was an abused kid why would she find it necessary to dress up as one? We are told she is haunted by her cruel past. And yet she has an entire wardrobe of little girl’s clothes she dons in order to feel safe and enable her to concentrate on her writing? Which of course is all about violence and torture.

The entrance to a forbidden basement in Elsa’s home has been screwed up tight. Castle manages to surreptitiously unscrew the doorway and gain entry. (Don’t get me started on the ridiculous stunt which results in his visit to Elsa’s home under an assumed identity. It involves his wife and daughter and is 100% unethical.) What he finds beyond that door is sure to startle any reader but will not shock or thrill as was probably intended. Fearn draws on Gothic novel horror motifs but then undermines the horrible with kitschy bad taste and sophomoric character traits. Elsa, who writes grisly crime novels, uses the pen name “Hardy Strong”. This Castle tells us is another signifier of her desire to be a dominant personality and yet paradoxically she prefers to be remain hidden in the guise of an assumed persona.

While reading Reflected Glory I was continually reminded of drecky horror movies of the 1960s like The Mad Room and Picture Mommy Dead, both of which make use of kitschy pop-psych motives for the criminal acts. Dr. Castle’s lectures when he attempts to explain Elsa’s troubles are less revelatory than they are predictable, and sometimes – unfortunately – laughable. Only in the final two pages when Castle adopts a paternal tone and reminds Elsa of her genuine self-worth and counsels her to abandon her strange rituals and pretenses does the story finally become what Fearn intended. But by then it’s really too late to care for Elsa or her future.

FFB: Merridrew Follows the Trail - John Russell Fearn

THE STORY:  A series of gruesome murders in which the victims are mutilated and bodies disposed of in quicklime are plaguing the denizens of Double Peak, Arizona. Mayor Jenkinson Talbot Merridrew joins forces with Sheriff Brad Wood to discover who has a grudge against the family of Jacob Tilsden, long deceased head of a dye manufacturing company.

THE CHARACTERS: This is pretty much a stock in trade western with a unique murder mystery tacked on that probably would've been better as a short story. The book is dragged out to novel length with a series of set pieces drawn from American western movies of the late 1940s and early 1950s. There are barroom fights, shootouts in the hills, an engineered landslide to trap some bandits, chases on horseback, and a barrage of bullets flying from Derringers, pistols and rifles. And like a typical B movie Western we have stock characters with typically Hollywood style names. There's Rock McAllister, the villain dressed in black and his posse of bad guys menacing the townspeople and out to get Merridrew; Mike Tanner, the saloon keeper who's just hired West Virginia transplant Sylvia Danning as his latest singer/ hostess for the entertainment of his mostly male patrons; Clem Dawlish, the lugubrious undertaker with plenty of bodies to bury; and my favorite -- Hap Hazard, whose name tells you all you need to know about him. Hap, of course, is not his real first name, but he's pretty much a loser from the get go and is Sheriff Wood's prime suspect as the murderer of the various members of the Tilsden family.

Merridrew is the most colorful of the bunch. He's a former butler who emigrated from England and somehow became mayor of the town after first serving as valet to Wood. Oddly (and in a forced kind of humor) he still serves as manservant to Wood while at the same time leading the town as mayor. He has an arch sense of humor, a sophisticated vocabulary and is a sharpshooter of the highest order. Merridrew Follows the Trail (1953) is his final adventure in a quintet of books. I'm guessing his origin and how he came to be mayor is detailed in the previous titles. Here we get only a few sentences to fill us in on his background. Like many of Fearn's detectives, he has a unique blend of basic science knowledge and arcane information to stun both the characters and the reader. Here we get a mini lecture on various dying processes since that is a crucial element of a very original crime plot.

INNOVATIONS: Those of you familiar with H. Rider Haggard's only detective novel Mr. Meeson's Will (1888) will probably catch on to the one truly unique aspect of the crime plot. Because I'm familiar with that book it was easy for me to figure out why the bodies were being mutilated or disposed of in quicklime.

ATMOSPHERE: One of my problems with the book is that I never really knew if this was supposed to be 19th or 20th century American West. Modern references to fingerprints, medical examination of the bodies, and legal aspects of the story seemed to indicate a contemporary setting. But then the absence of cars, phones, even a telegraph made it all seem ersatz 19th century. Most of the story seemed more like Fearn was drawing from Hollywood's imagining of the Old West than he was from genuine history. Everyone lives on a ranch, vigilante style justice is rampant, disputes are settled more often with gunfire than with common sense. Wood and Merridrew are often forced to resort to violence as much as they try to keep the peace among the rowdy, lawless citizens.

THINGS I LEARNED: The crux of the plot involves a secret dye manufacturing process. I learned about something called Turkey red, a deep rich red dye made from the root of the madder plant. The name of the dye refers to its country of origin and not the edible fowl. There is lots of talk about various sources of black dye and the importance to the textile industry in finding dyes that are resistant to sun fading, especially in the arid, sun-drenched desert climates of the American West.

A buckboard is "an open, four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage with seating that is attached to a plank stretching between the front and rear axles," basically a type of wagon used to deliver goods. Merridrew is often hopping aboard one or borrowing one from the Double Peak general store keeper to get out to the remote ranches where the various murders take place. The name refers to the wooden board that protects the rider/driver from the hazards of bucking horse hooves.

EASY TO FIND? Like most of John Russell Fearn's books this one has been reprinted by the UK publisher Linford Western Library in a large print format edition. They publish nearly all of his traditional detective novels and crime fiction under their Linford Mystery Library imprint. Luckily, for all your 21sst century readers this title (as are many of Fearn's westerns) is also available as an eBook. I found my copy, the incredibly scarce first edition, in one of my lucky book hunting searches. I've never seen a copy since I bought mine. The DJ shown at the top of this post has got to be a true rarity and I'm sure that the hardcover book is just as uncommon.

Jenkinson Talbot Merridrew Western Detective Novels
Valley of the Doomed (1949)
Merridrew Rides Again (1950)
Merridrew Marches On (1951)
Merridrew Fights Again (1952)
Merridrew Follows the Trail (1953)

FFB: Flashpoint - John Russell Fearn

THE STORY: Oscar Bilkin, grocer and fishmonger in the village of Halingford, receives an anonymous letter warning he and his family to "GET OUT BEFORE TOMORROW. YOU ARE ALL IN DANGER". He has no idea why he was warned nor who might have sent such an ominous letter. his family is convinced it's a nasty joke so Bilkin asks around and approaches a local known for stupid pranks. Everyone including the prankster (aptly named Wagstaff) denies sending the note. He heads to the police thinking it may not be a joke at all. They provide him with protection for the next two days. The policeman sent to guard the place will intervene if he sees anything remotely suspicious about to take place. the next day shortly after the daily delivery of Bilkin's ice he does as he always does - takes a hammer and chisel to the big slab to break it up for the fish display. After one strike of the chisel there is a horrible explosion and the Bilkin's shop goes up in flames. Everyone in the vicinity is knocked to ground. Mr. Bilkin does not fare as well. The police seem to have a sinister arsonist in their midst. Soon another building is targeted. Can the police prevent another raging fire and stop a mad arsonist from destroying the village?

THE CHARACTERS: Flashpoint (1950) is unlike many of the previous Dr. Hugo Carruthers detective novels I've read. First, Inspector Garth is nowhere in sight. Instead we have Supt. Denning and his crew of policeman in Halingford. Also, the suspect pool is much larger than usual and Fearn does a good job of making the arson attacks appear to be the work of several different people with different motives over the course of the story. There are more women characters than usual with a surprise coming in the form of Claire Denbury, a chorus girl who provides one of the more satisfying dramatic moments late in the book.

In this second outing in a relatively short series Dr. Carruthers proves to be less irascible than usual and reveals a hidden romantic side. He has hired as his assistant Gordon Drew recently returned to his hometown after losing his job when the London firm he was working for was destroyed in a fire. Pure coincidence that arson rears its ugly head again when Gordon comes to Halingford? Drew claims to have come to town to renew his friendship with Janet Lloyd, his former sweetheart. Dr. Carruthers approves and makes light jibes about Gordon and Janet whenever he has a chance. But of course the real reason he is on hand is to help the police solve the mystery of the fires. How did someone manage to start a fire in what appears to have been an explosive chunk of ice? Later the physicist is asked to explain the eerie purple color of a second fire (reminding me of The Case of the Violet Smoke by Nigel Morland writing as "John Donavan") and how the arsonist managed to set fire to a building when the place was under constant guard. Students of basic chemistry might be able to uncover these two mysteries pages before Carruthers stuns everyone with his knowledge.

INNOVATIONS: The means of the first arson is extremely clever. I managed to figure it out based solely on the description of how the ice was delivered and its odd appearance. Going into anymore detail might ruin what amounts to several well hidden clues. The second quasi-impossible fire was less impressive but did include similar unusual chemical properties that made it less than an average firebug's crime.

Apart from the chemistry involved in the arson Fearn neatly handles other clues related to motive and the identity of the culprit behind the fires and a later murder. By far this is the most mature detective novel of Fearn's I have read. It suffers not from Fearn's usual pulpy style of writing or the sense that it was a padded short story. All the characters were much more human, and believable than in other books in this series. This one resembles more closely the style of the Maria Black detective novels with their emphasis on character relationships and human drama, rather than outlandish plotting and detective novel gimmickry.

QUOTES: "The modern criminal, my boy is one of the most scientific beings alive," Caruuthers answered. "... The average murderer you'll find plastered in every newspaper in the country, but not the ingenious one--unless he's caught. That's where I come in--and other experts like me. We are dedicated to the task of defeating the new criminal, the man or woman who makes use of modern methods to perpetrate his or her villainy. ...Why else do you imagine the Yard has become so highly scientific these days? Only to keep pace with the even more subtle ways of the scientific evil-doer."

THINGS I LEARNED: This book was teeming with trivia and odd vocabulary. I haven't included this section in a while so here's a delayed avalanche for all you who have missed this regular feature.

Prior to his unfortunate death Mr. Bilkin spends the morning "arranging cabbages in the form of an Aunt Sally". I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. Off to the internet I went. Took a couple of searches before I came up with the right Aunt Sally. Turns out Fearn was alluding to a traditional pub game (see illustration at right). Players throw sticks at a model of a woman's head that had come to be called Aunt Sally. The game dates back to the 17th century apparently and today is still played by teams in pubs. However, the Aunt Sally now resembles something like a giant chess pawn than it does a woman's head.

pernoctation - multisyllabic, fancy way to say night vigil. Comes from the nearly obsolete verb "pernoctate" meaning "to stay up or out all night; especially: to pass the night in vigil or prayer."

Hans Gross is mentioned in passing when Carruthers is discoursing on the psychology behind and methods of arson. I vaguely recalled his name but had to resort to Googling to refresh my memory. Gross is a name that crops up many times in Golden Age detective fiction, especially in the works of John Dickson Carr. An Austrian psychologist who specialized in criminal behavior Hans Gross has been dubbed the "father of forensics" in various website articles. His seminal work, Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik (1893) was a groundbreaking manual for the intended audience of police coroners but also was useful for judges and lawyers. In it Gross called attention to the psychology of the criminal mind and warned members of the police and legal professions to pay heed to everything over the course of a criminal investigation. He stressed preserving the integrity of a crime scene, to treat all physical evidence with care, and even discussed the importance of noting the body language of the accused while in the courtroom.

Chemical properties of elements and compounds are discussed in detail with an emphasis on flame color and smoke color. I can't say anything else about this or else the mystery of the arson methods will be spoiled.

EASY TO FIND? This was at one time one of the most difficult titles in John Russell Fearn's large output of detective fiction. Originally published under his pseudonym "Hugo Blayn" it was reprinted at least four times according to the copy I own. But used hardcover copies of this 1950s edition are rare these days. According to the email exchange I had with Philip Harbottle, Fearn's literary executor and tireless champion of his friend's work, this book will be reprinted by Endeavour Press and made available as an eBook. I'm unsure when it will be released. Until then you can find Flashpoint in a paperback, large print edition put out by Linford Mystery Library. Currently, there are at least five used copies available for sale online.


NEWS FLASH! Be sure to read TomCat's post "The Detective Fiction of John Russell Fearn", a guest post consisting of a long letter that Philip Harbottle wrote to me. But he made an error in typing my email address and it went into digital limbo. He then asked for TomCat's help in contacting me. Eventually I got the letter and he and I also exchanged some emails of our own. In the meantime TomCat had an idea to share this letter with everyone and Phil granted permission to have the letter uploaded to TomCat's blog.

FFB: What Happened to Hammond? - John Russell Fearn

THE STORY: Shipping magnate Benson T. Hammond is being threatened with anonymous letters promising his imminent demise.  As if that isn't enough to worry him his daughter announces her engagement to a man he thinks is a fortune hunter. Hours after an argument with the young man during which he refuses permission to marry his daughter Hammond is found dead -- 60 miles from a house he was seen to last enter but never exited. Inspector Garth much to his consternation is forced to once again collaborate with the irascible Dr. Hiram Carruthers, physicist and genius detective, to discover who killed Hammond and how his body ended up being so mysteriously transported from the house to Worthing Road such a far distance in less than ten minutes.

THE CHARACTERS: Garth and his crew of policemen do most of the real detective work. About three quarters of the book is modeled on a standard police procedural. There are several constables and sergeants who do much of the legwork and a pathologist who delivers all the gruesome news about What Happened to Hammond? (1951). Carruthers is called upon late in the book, a bit past the midpoint, when the case seems to involve a strange invention that most likely has something to do with radio transmission.

Hiram Carruthers is one of Fearn's series detectives and he belongs to the group of what I've grown to call the "arrogant prick" detectives. He likes to call himself the "Admirable Crichton of Science" alluding to James Barrie's play in which the title character, a butler with common sense, saves his employer and a group of know-nothing aristocrats when they are shipwrecked on a deserted island. I can't imagine a more inappropriate nickname for Carruthers since the Crichton of Barrie's play is the model of civility. Obviously it's meant to be ironic. Carruthers is ridiculously egocentric, belittles everyone for their ignorance, openly insults Garth and his colleagues, and loves to flaunt his knowledge unchecked by anyone. He alone solves the bizarre case by managing to rebuild the strange invention that was discovered dismantled with several parts disposed of in an underground river. He accomplishes this feat with little help from anyone other than a few clever engineers who build him some custom parts, and using the design plans recovered from a safe in the offices of one of the suspects.

INNOVATIONS: As with most of Fearn's novels, most of which are structured as long form short stories, he has a limited number of suspects. Figuring out who the guilty parties are in this very short novel is rather easy. The bulk of Fearn's work was in short story format and I think he found it easiest to write his longer works, including all his novels, using the basic rule of short story writing that only the essentials are necessary. Red herrings in the form of characters rarely occur in his novels. We get only the people who are needed to tell the story. In this book there is the additional element of multiple culprits, when all is revealed and the villains are identified there is hardly one innocent character left over.

When originally published in 1951 the solution was perhaps a shocker. More than any other of his mystery novels I've read here Fearn resorts to science fiction in explaining just how Benton Hammond disappeared from the house on Stanton Street and ended up on Worthing Road. Modern readers may find it easy to guess what happened without needing any real understanding of physics or radio transmission since many of us are familiar with some well known TV shows that employ similar mysterious inventions. As the plot progressed I was reminded of the experiments depicted in a cult horror movie based on a story written in 1957. Turns out my analogy was right.

THINGS I LEARNED: Hammond suffers from fragilitus ossiumtarda, a genetic bone disorder now known as osteogenesis imperfecta or "brittle bone disease," an incurable condition that forces the sufferer to live a life of diminished athletic activity less they fracture a bone doing something as simple as running or lifting a heavy object. When Hammond's body is found nearly every bone in his body has been reduced to a jelly-like state making the police think that he fell from a great height. The real solution to his death is grounded more in science fiction than reality.

THE AUTHOR: John Russell Fearn was a prolific pulp writer who is better known for his science fiction though he also wrote many detective stories and mystery novels, even dabbling in romance. Sometimes he wrote detective stories like What Happened to Hammond? in which the solution melds with the world of science fiction. He wrote under numerous pseudonyms and finding his work in original format tends to be a chore if you are not familiar with his assortment of odd pen names like Vargo Statten, Thornton Ayre, Polton Cross among many others. The Dr. Hiram Carruthers detective novels apparently did not first appear in the pulps like many of his other work and were written under the pen name "Hugo Blayn." Luckily, much of Fearn's fiction has been reprinted under his real name and can be found in Linford Mystery Library series, part of F.A. Thorpe Publishing's large print reprint series for readers with poor eyesight. Wildside Press has also reprinted a lot of Fearn's crime fiction.

You can find a lot of bibliographies and biographical information on John Russell Fearn through a general internet search, but you will most likely turn up only his science fiction stories and novels and little about his crime fiction. Thanks to TomCat at the Beneath the Stains of Time blog most of Fearn's impossible crime novels have been reviewed in depth, including nearly all of the books in the Garth/Carruthers series. You can read about them by clicking here.  I hope to review the only "un-covered" Hugo Blayn book left -- Flashpoint -- later this month.

Dr. Hiram Carruthers/Inspector Garth Detective Novels
Except for One Thing (1947) - without Dr. Carruthers
The Five Matchboxes (1948)
Flashpoint (1950)
What Happened to Hammond? (1951)
Vision Sinister (1954)
The Silvered Cage (1955)

NEW STUFF: The Invisible Code - Christopher Fowler

Each new Bryant & May crime novel brings with it the anticipatory thrill of discovering more arcana of London that Christopher Fowler loves to share with his readers. (There should be a word for all these nuggets of England's past. Londoniana? Albionisms? Mull those over.) The latest escapade of the Peculiar Crimes Unit or PCU does not disappoint. Within the labyrinthine plot of The Invisible Code (2012) the reader is treated to the fascinating world of Sir John Soane's museum housed at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields; the secrets of the "Scarlet Thread" and what it means to the Knights Templar; St. Bride's, the church of journalists; and more tidbits about the occult that always work their way into the adventures London's much maligned and unappreciated specialized police squad. For fans of vintage crime and adventure novels there is the added bonus of allusions to the work of Dennis Wheatley and especially a particular title by Fritz Leiber.

Oskar Kasavian (familiarly known to the PCU staff as The Prince of Darkness), an executive in the Home Office, is the top level overseer of this unusual police unit set up to protect the public. He is also their number one enemy. For years Kasavian has been doing his best to shut them down and now Arthur Bryant and John May are surprised to be called into his office for a personal favor. He needs their specialized help in handling the embarrassing public behavior of his wife Sabira who is becoming increasingly erratic and violent. She's been raving about demons and witches and seems to have submerged herself into a world of paranoid imaginings. Kasavian thinks for that reason the PCU team are perfect for discovering the cause of Sabira's delusions. Or are they delusions? And what about the odd death of the woman found in St. Bride's Church who apparently was the target of some children playing an RPG called Witch Hunter? Like all PCU cases the coincidences prove to have more significance the further the team plows.

Arthur Bryant talks about the importance of connections and patterns at one point in the book. This is the basis for all the PCU books. There is a wealth of information that at first comes at the reader in random incidents, then are fired out in rapid succession. Fowler, unwittingly perhaps, is one of the greatest modern practitioners of an old subgenre known as the webwork novel. Harry Stephen Keeler was the best known American writer of webwork novels. He even wrote a manifesto -- "The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction" -- about the art of creating a single story out of random multiple narrative threads. John Russell Fearn, prolific British pulp magazine writer of SF and detective fiction, credited Keeler with influencing him in his SF webwork stories.

Synopsis in diagram form depicting the webwork plot of Keeler's Voice of the Seven Sparrows (1924)

Fowler's story incorporates the mysterious death of Amy O'Connor in the opening chapter, the death of a character in a previous novel, the madness of Sabira Kasavian, and several other apparently random acts of violence in a tour de force of webwork plotting. Webwork might be called the fictional counterpart of a conspiracy theorist's obsessive hunt for nefarious patterns real and imagined in the operations of global conglomerates and world politics. Allusions in The Invisible Code to modern paranoid thrillers like Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and the movie The Parallax View add another level of enjoyment to the randomness that will eventually reveal a pattern of sinister construction. The novel is the best of this type I have read in all of the ten Bryant & May detective series. Though there is sometimes a tendency towards didactic dialogue passages -- the kind typified by forensic crime TV shows and The X Files -- Fowler mostly manages to introduce the Albionisms (I used it!) in a way that flows naturally out of the densely compacted action.


Bryant & May find a victim in St Bride's Church
(Artwork by Keith Page)

 The series characters each have a turn in the spotlight with some interesting developments in Janice Longbright's life and the usually bickering partnership of detective constables Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar. Dan Banbury and Giles Kershaw do their usual forensic wizardry in the morgue and in the technosphere. Maggie Armitage, the "white witch", is featured prominently offering much lore and occult knowledge to help Arthur Bryant in explaining some of the baffling elements of the case. And, finally, we are introduced to a new character, Mr. Merry, who appears to be a 21st century Aleister Crowley and who promises to be a formidable foe in the future books as hinted at in a teasing final chapter.

Sampling the escapades of the Peculiar Crimes Unit can be an addictive reading experience but also a dangerous one. In relating to us his love for all things bizarre and strange about the city he loves so unabashedly Fowler not only fuels a crime fiction lover's taste for the bizarre he is something of an alluring siren for the armchair traveller in all of us. He sings a song of London better than any music hall chanteuse. This armchair traveller has been tempted more than once to dip into the savings for a overseas trip to see up close and personal the many unusual places recounted in these extremely entertaining books. And that's the kind of connection I like between a writer and his readership.

Bryant & May and The Invisible Code by Christopher Fowler
Transworld/Doubleday,  August 2012
ISBN: 978-0857520500 (hardcover in UK and Canada only)
GBP 16.99

Available as an eBook and audio book in the US now
US hardcover edition release date is unknown

NEW STUFF: An Uncertain Place - Fred Vargas

There is no one quite like Fred Vargas in crime fiction today. You have to go back to the "webwork" novels of Harry Stephen Keeler and John Russell Fearn to find any writer who comes close to her unique way of constructing novels that blend the weird, the bizarre and the absurd into a mind-tripping, eye-opening, jaw-dropping phantasmagoria. Luckily with Vargas you also get dreamy readable prose and not convoluted syntax or wacky word-winging as in the case of Keeler or mysteries with transparent solutions as in the case of Fearn. In the Vargas universe everything is truly connected. There is a ubiquity of significance in her books. The absurdities and oddities of life cease to be merely strange and carry a hidden meaning that sometimes borders on the supernatural. She brings the mystery back to the mystery novel on so many levels.

Randomness has no place and there are no coincidences. In a Keeler book, for example, the works of George Barr McCutcheon, a mysterious violin playing thief, and the science of acoustics all come together in the plot of The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman. A man eating a bowl of chow mein nearly chokes on a tiny hand made of jade in The Green Jade Hand, but the scene is not there merely to make us laugh it will have some greater importance to the story. Similarly, with Vargas the birth of a kitten is not thrown into the story offhandedly for cuteness factor; it will have repercussions throughout the entire novel. Likewise other events and discussions that seem to be mentioned in passing -- a brief talk about a man who decided to eat his wooden wardrobe piece by piece, the macabre history of Highgate Cemetery including what was discovered when the body of Dante Rossetti's wife was exhumed nine years after her death -- all have later ramifications in this hypnotically addictive book.

The ripple effect begins when Adamsberg who is in England for an international police conference quite by accident stumbles across a bizarre crime. Eighteen pairs of shoes have been found in front of Highgate Cemetery. And the shoes still contain feet. They have all been cut from nine different corpses and none of them are English. The shoes show signs of Eastern European manufacture and many of them are decades old. It appears that the feet have been collected over a period of years. But who on earth has dismembered several dead bodies and placed their feet in front of a cemetery with a past of legendary proportions? What have those feet do to with the horribly mutilated corpse of a reclusive Frenchman whose body quite literally was chopped up to tiny bits? Why are so many variations of a single name continually turning up in the course of the investigation - Plogerstein, Plögener, Plogoff, Plogodrescu.These names become so prevalent that one of the characters coins the term "Plog" as an exclamation denoting significance or surprise.

Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg will face one of the most unusual criminals in his career. He will discover that nearly everything in his life will be related to the solution of the crime. The people he encounters and takes for granted will play major roles. And most importantly he will discover that a long forgotten night in his past will come back to haunt him with a startling revelation. The less said about the wild fantastical plot the better.

And now a word about the oft forgotten yet very important translator. Sian Reynolds' translation is an intricately built, ingenious example of how translation can become a true art. Finding the right word is less important than crafting sentences that retain the original flavor of the author's native language. Vargas' books are intrinsically French and in this case have an added international dimension when Adamsberg must travel to England and later Serbia where he does not speak either language. There are ample opportunities for linguistic wordplay in these new settings. There are amusing scenes with Adamsberg repeatedly mispronouncing the name of a British police officer and his habit of calling the infamous cemetery Higg-gate and in Serbia he goes out of his way to learn a handful of Serbian words to better impress a woman who runs the guest house where he is staying. Finally, there is a policeman on Adamsberg staff who speaks in alexandrines a French verse of 12 syllables which Reynolds has confessed to being one of the most difficult tasks she tried to duplicate in English. For that alone she deserves the awards she has garnered from the CWA.

This is the time of the year when everyone is making lists of the Best of the Year. I can never make one of those lists. But I can tell you that An Uncertain Place is definitely a book I would consider to be included as one of the best of the new books, if not the absolute best, I have read this year. A little masterpiece of a book that is also an enviable work of contemporary fiction. It may not be to everyone's taste judging from a variety of indifferent and confused reactions in other reviews I've come across on other blogs. For me, however, this is pretty damn awesome crime fiction.

FFB: Vision Sinister - John Russell Fearn

Scientific detection shows up in the history of the detective novel as early as the late 19th century with the investigations of the physician sleuth who appears in Stories from the Diary of a Doctor by L.T. Meade and Clifford Halifax. Vicious murders are committed with x-rays, micro-organisms, and other unusual methods of a scientific nature. It is further developed in the work of R. Austin Freeman with his Dr.Thorndyke novels, the varied and often fantastical adventures of Professor Craig Kennedy in the work of Arthur B. Reeve, Scientific Sprague created by Francis Lynde, continues into the 1930s with various pseudonymous books by Nigel Morland and well into the 1950s with the Lawrence Blochman's Dr. Coffee, a forerunner of the contemporary forensic pathology detectives.  By the 1950s scientific detective stories were being experimented with by writers mostly known for their science fiction stories. It was probably only natural that John Russell Fearn, who began his career as a science fiction writer, should also turn to scientific detection when he began writing crime fiction.

Professor Hiram Carruthers looks "like a bust of Beethoven," is as obnoxious as Roger Shearingham, and - of course - the only person who can explain the seemingly miraculous and bamboozling crimes that face Chief Inspector Monty Garth in his exhausting job. In Vision Sinister (1954) Garth is forced once again to consult with the irascible Carruthers, suffer drinking the"pallid muck" he calls tea, and endure insults as he asks for Carruthers' advice on yet another unsolvable impossible crime. Carruthers is an egotist of immense proportions and says things like "We have here a most ingenious killer, even one with a scientific turn of mind, but not one with the ability to defeat me." In this particular investigation Garth and Carruthers need to unravel the mystery of a photographic laboratory that vanished in an instant and a murder victim who was transported over mile in less than a few minutes.

Cynthia Harwood and her friend Janice make their way to a basement laboratory of Thomas , Cynthia's fiancee. On the front door the find a sign instructing them to ring the bell and then look through a glass slide. What they see is a man in a lab coat stabbing a woman dressed in a purple evening gown. They call for help and ask the caretaker of the building to unlock the door. When the door is opened the room is completely empty. No lab equipment, no table, no dead body. Nothing, but white room lit by a single overhead light and an empty electric socket in the wall. Only minutes had passed and yet the entire room and its occupants seemed to have vanished. Later that evening a woman dressed in a purple evening gown is found dead in a rubbish heap one mile away from the photo lab. She has been stabbed to death. How did she get from one place to the other?

Unlike the Maria Black novels this is a fast paced tale with a limited amount of suspects. The impossible problem is ingeniously carried out and rivals the death trap machinery in Rhode & Carr's Fatal Descent (aka Drop to His Death), a 1939 mystery of a murder committed in an elevator. There are fine examples of scientific detection in Fearn's book reflecting the advances of modern technology in the 1950s. An early answering machine with a built in tape recorder, three dimensional motion picture photography, push button electronics, and a rudimentary but involved method of voice print technology all play a crucial part in solving the elaborately constructed crime. Fearn was an admirer of John Dickson Carr and this book more than any that I have read of his seems to be the closest thing he came to matching his idol in sheer ingenuity.

In closing, I'll add an interesting bibliographic oddity. While most of the Dr. Hiram Carruthers books were originally published under the pseudonym Hugo Blayn for hardcover publisher Stanley Paul, this one was published by a cheap paperback outfit called Dragon Books and their house name "Nat Karta" was slapped on the cover. Odd because most of the Nat Karta books featured a series character called Dana Dallas or were hardboiled crime stories not the kind of puzzle detective story Fearn wrote when he turned to crime fiction. This is the only instance I have come across of a writer using series characters under two different pseudonyms.

NEGLECTED DETECTIVES: Maria Black, M.A.

John Russell Fearn was a prolific science fiction and detective story writer who penned numerous books under a variety of strange pseudonyms each name signaling the genre in which he was working: Hugo Blayn, Spike Gordon and Dennis Clive for crime thrillers; Volstad Gridban, Vargo Statten, and Thornton Ayre for sci-fi pulp; John Slate for the detective novels featuring Maria Black; and many others. In some cases he blended sci-fi elements or, more accurately, scientific detection into his mystery novels.

After several years of languishing in the limbo of out-of-printdom nearly all of Fearn's books have been reprinted, albeit in large print format. They can be found as part of the Linford Mystery Library, published by F.A. Thorpe in England. Luckily, the books are now being reissued under Fearn's real name. The publisher along with Philip Harbottle, Fearn's literary executor, did a remarkable job of gleaning the detective and crime fiction from of the purely sci-fi works. Though there are still a few detective novels which blend both genres and defy categorization as one or the other.

Maria Marches On is the second book in the Maria Black series written under the "John Slate" pseudonym. Slate’s mysteries featuring this headmistress of a Rosewell College for Young Ladies school border on the scientific detective category but only barely so. This one is also a quasi-impossible crime, a subgenre of the detective novel that Fearn dabbled in almost as much as John Dickson Carr, Clyde Clason and Anthony Wynne. Unfortunately, Slate’s mysteries are fairly transparent from the get-go and some of the murderers are fairly obvious by around the midpoint of the book. His clues are not well hidden in his descriptive passages. On the contrary -- they stick out like sore thumbs. The reader keeps waiting for some character other than Black to notice them. Still, there is no dismissing the telling of the story and his intricate plots. Fearn can write an entertaining tale despite his faults in construction and misdirection.

Maria Black is a colorfully drawn, imaginatively realized character. She holds the reader’s interest and carries each story to its satisfying conclusion. A no-nonsense, tough woman with a near perverse interest in the criminal mind, Black has a mathematics background (she teaches the subject at her school) but is also well versed in physical sciences, notably biology and chemistry. She will often do a little research to fill in gaps in her knowledge or even dabble in experiments in the school lab to prove her theories.

In Maria Marches On she investigates the hanging death of a newly enrolled student who was found dead in a clearing in the woods outside the school grounds. Nearby, two schoolmates are discovered unconscious and barefoot lying next to the tree where the body is strung up. The method of the crime is what’s most puzzling, the criminal is not. The quasi-impossible aspect is that the ground surrounding the victims (both dead and unconscious) shows no sign of being trampled and gives the appearance that the killer escaped into the air or climbed into the trees. A subplot involves a formula for a secret explosive that has been tattooed onto the dead girl’s arm using an ink visible only under ultraviolet light.

Other books in the Maria Black series also feature impossible crimes. The first book in the series, Black Maria, M.A., is a locked room mystery in which she travels to America to solve the murder of her own brother. One Who Remained Seated deals with a man found stabbed in a movie theater yet no one was sitting or seen anywhere near him. The corpse in Thy Arm Alone is found burnt to a crisp in a convertible automobile on a lonely road in the countryside. The car is not damaged at all, but the man's face is destroyed and most of his upper body has suffered extreme burns. The killing in Thy Arm Alone is one of the most bizarrely executed and ingeniously planned murders in all of detective fiction. I have yet to read a book employing the same murder method. It is unusual and imaginative ideas like this that make the Maria Black books worth tracking down and reading.

The Maria Black Detective Novels
Black Maria, M.A. (1944)
Maria Marches On (1945)
One Remained Seated (1946)
Thy Arm Alone (1947)
Framed in Guilt (1948)
Death in Silhouette (1950)