The Search for My Great-Uncle's Head - Peter Coffin

Peter Coffin is both the narrator and author of The Search for My Great Uncle's Head (1937). There was a time when there were loads of books "written" by the narrator. I wonder why writers thought this was clever. They weren't fooling anyone. The books were always found in the fiction section of bookstores so why bother with the gimmick at all? In this case Peter Coffin turned out to be a pseudonym for Jonathan Latimer, creator of the Bill Crane private eye novels. The Crane books are completely different in tone and style from this book. From the title you think you'll be getting a very black comedy and there is a smidgen of that here. I'd say it's more of a blend of the fair play detective novel and a surreal nightmare thriller with a trace of the Gothic shocker thrown in for good measure. The wise cracking dialogue of Bill Crane is fairly absent here.

Coffin is summoned to the home of his great-uncle Tobias Coffin where his relatives have gathered for an announcement about Tobias' will. While walking through the woods in the most Gothic scene in the book Coffin encounters a barefoot man skipping along merrily and singing the old nursery rhyme "A tisket, a tasket." Later we discover that he met up with an escaped lunatic who previously had decapitated his wife and children. The police are trying to capture the nut case but are doing a pretty poor job of things. At the home of his great-uncle Coffin is met by his hostile relatives who mistake him for the lunatic due to his rain drenched clothes and his mud stained hands and face. After a brief clean-up and several protestations they allow him to see Great-Uncle Tobias who proceeds to castigate him in a kind of character test. Coffin, disgusted by the poor treatment, tells off his great-uncle and tries to leave the house. Tobias is pleased that Coffin shows a little backbone and convinces him to stay. He also confides in him that there will be a surprise in store for all the relatives the next day alluding to his plans to disperse his fortune in a new will.

But of course, Tobias is done in rather brutally as the title suggests. His headless corpse is discovered in his study and the new will is missing from his papers. Coffin attempts to do some detective work on his own but he proves to be rather dim witted even if he is a college professor of Renaissance English history. He's also ridiculed by nearly all the other characters in the book. Oddly enough, in a scene very reminiscent of ol' Aggy Plum, Coffin proves himself quite an athletic swimmer in the lake. When he practically drowns someone he believes to have taunted him one of the woman changes her initial opinion of him as a wimpy coward.

Our hero dwells too much, however, on what others think of him. He spends much of his time interpreting, often mistakenly, the opinions and actions of others. For a while it seems as if the book has forgotten it is a detective novel as it veers off into an exploration of a comedy of manners.

Coffin is trapped by his intellectual persona. The obvious eludes him. He is taken into confidence by some of his wily relatives who toy with him and yet he is never aware of their manipulations. He is something of an accidental detective like David Frome's Mr. Pinkerton who almost always stumbled into a crime and got entangled in the investigation like a cat playing with a ball of yarn. Still, Coffin is so oblivious he doesn't even realize that he had in his possession from very early in the book the missing will that all the characters are so desperate to locate.

Only late in the book when an insurance investigator, Colonel Black, shows up does the book really start shaping up into a detective novel. Black is the quintessential detective of the Golden Age. He has arcane hobbies (the authenticity of Shakespeare's work), speaks enigmatically, and displays quirky methods of detection. In one scene he's sitting on the floor of his bedroom in lotus position apparently meditating. Later he is seen crawling on all fours at the scene of the crime and looking up at impossible angles. He also suffers from the "Van Dine syndrome" of extemporaneously lecturing on any esoteric topic that captures his fancy whether it relates to the case or not (see my review of The Fifth Tumbler for another of these detectives). But he's far more interesting than Coffin. He's the much needed breath of fresh air in a book that otherwise might have succumbed to a suffocating claustrophobia.

Philip Wylie & the Detective as Superman

I'm putting my money on Wylie's one time amateur sleuth, Agamemnon Telemachus Plum, for the fictional detective with the most ridiculous name. He appears in the 1943 mystery novel Corpses at Indian Stones, an entertaining story with an locked room murder. Our hero prefers to go by Aggie and he's a professor of anthropology, an archaeologist and "something of a hobbyist in vertebrate paleontology." His baggy out of style clothes, stooped posture, "wispish Vandyke" and downward cast eyes give people the impression that he is "wizened." It's no wonder then that he's treated with ridicule and derisive comments. But they don’t seem to bother Aggie too much. He's pretty much a misanthrope and shuns all forms of socializing in groups. But the inhabitants of the town where he's summering are in for a surprise. Appearances are deceiving and Aggie will prove to be someone utterly different than how they perceive him.

Aggie has come with his aunt Sarah Plum to the fictional upstate New York summer getaway of Indian Stones. She has a plan for some matchmaking but Aggie will have nothing to do with that. Within a few hours of arriving he finds a calling card impaled on a knife on the door post of their cottage. He pulls the hunting knife out and sees on the card the name Henry H. Bogarty and wonders who it might be. Without thinking he puts the knife on the porch banister and goes inside. A series of local characters are then introduced in an nicely handled expository section, among them the highly disliked Jim Calder who's come to have it out with Sarah over something very personal. Shortly afterwards Calder is found dead in the woods. He's been crushed between two logs that made up the fatal parts of a deadfall – some kind of bear trap. Aggie's keen powers of observation reveal several clues that make him think it's not an accident.

Enter the local police in the person of sharp witted Wes Wickmann. Wes is not easily persuaded that a murder has been done, but assures Aggie and Sarah he'll keep his eye out for suspicious behavior. A few days later Dr. Davis is seen taking photographs around the gruesome accident site. Later, he also turns up dead. His body found in a locked makeshift photographic darkroom, the missing hunting knife buried in his chest. Wes and Aggie join forces to root out the villain wracking havoc and littering the town with bodies.

This is a book that lends itself to one of those Dell Mapback "What this book is about" teasers. In fact Aggie lists the unusual elements in a long list just to aggravate Wes:  "You've got a knife, a calling card, a fox, an automobile, some veal bones that were in it. [...] You've got the deadfall and the bread and the honey and so on. You've got a wine cellar, a bottle of hock, an open cellar window, a secret door, a secret safe that contains straw and some chips from boxes. You've got broken telephone wires, a missing million in gold and platinum..." And of course two dead bodies. But were they murdered? One seems more like an accident, the body in the locked room might even be a suicide. And what happened to Hank Bogarty? Why was the fox wearing a dog collar? Who took the gold? Where is it? Have no fear, Aggie figures it all out.

To appreciate this deceptively lightweight mystery novel even more you need to know about Wylie's other work. One of Wylie's better known books is the one that directly precedes this mystery novel. A Generation of Vipers, is a polemical work filled with vicious tirades about hypocritical views of sex and his savage indictment on mothers he called "Momism." Earlier in his career, Wylie wrote two books that touched on his interest in the superman archetype. One, The Savage Gentleman, is about a young man raised in the jungles apart from any women or female influence. The other is said to have inspired the superheroes of pulp magazines and comic books like Doc Savage and Superman. That book is Gladiator, his first real novel completed in 1926, accepted by Alfred Knopf in that year, but not published until 1930.

In Gladiator the main character, Hugo Danner, is the product of a scientific experiment in which his father injects his pregnant mother with a serum that later endows Danner with superhuman strength, speed and bulletproof skin. He is seemingly invulnerable, but he keeps all these powers hidden. What he really wants is acceptance. Ironically, Danner is made an outcast, shunned and feared for his freakishness.

All of the ideas presented in those three books resurface in the character of Agamemnon Plum.  In Aggie we see yet another version of Danner with intellect substituted for superpowers and the fear that Danner encountered replaced by ridicule that Aggie experiences. Additionally, unlike Danner who has a tragic end, Aggie is redeemed in the eyes of many of the characters - mostly the women - when he literally must strip himself of his professorial facade and reveal the real man beneath the baggy clothes. Wylie seems fascinated with the virile male physique and its effect on how others perceive it. Aggie, in a scene where he is wearing only swim trunks, is described as "a man knotted with lean muscle, a man with the build of an acrobat, a man of visible, formidable strength." Not at all what most people think of when presented with a "rabbity" professor of anthropology.

It is the women who are primarily impressed and who almost immediately change their opinions of him. Beth Calder, previously his primary taunter, sees him walking to the canoe and rowing out into the lake, and says, "We've got that guy all wrong. He's dangerous." And Mrs. Drayman slightly stunned by Aggie's appearance remarks, "He isn't little, even." The woman who Aggie is most drawn to, however, is not surprised at all.

Danielle Davis - daughter of the second murder victim - is convinced there is something hidden about him. His athletic ability and physique only confirm her suspicions. She is an outspoken, outrageous and defiant young woman who takes every opportunity to draw attention to herself in the most socially inappropriate ways possible. Wylie likes these two extremes of misanthropy - the withdrawn intellect who prefers solitude and loathes people and the über-extroverted rebel who couldn't give a damn what anyone thinks of her behavior. They are - of course- destined to end up together in the book's final pages.

Philip Wylie (from Life, Jan. 1942)

As a detective novelist Wylie tries to honor the traditional fair play tenets of the Golden Age, but there are several instances of Aggie's observations that come up out of nowhere. Aggie may have seen it, but the reader was not told until pages later. These are mere quibbles though. The plot is engaging enough. The banter between Aggie and his bedridden aunt,  suffering a bout of mumps for most of the book, is amusing. The crimes are puzzling including the very odd solution to the locked room murder. Finally, the confrontation between detective and culprit is presented in a well done send-up of the know-it-all amateur sleuth's lecture.

For me the most fascinating part is this odd reworking of the themes in Gladiator and The Savage Gentleman in the character of Aggie. It is almost a complete reversal of the other books. Aggie goes from social outcast to accepted hero merely by taking off his clothes and getting in a canoe. At the same time it's a quaint idea and purely of its time. No writer would ever want to attempt something like this in our age of a health club mad citizenry utterly obsessed with appearance and fitness.

UPDATES (Feb 7, 2011)

1. For more on Gladiator go to this unusual site completely devoted to the book. Make sure you visit "The Inscription" page, especially, to learn how Wylie felt about the sci-fi and mystery books he wrote in the 1930s.

2. Corpses at Indian Stones is the only pure detective novel Wylie wrote solely himself. After 1943 he wrote a handful crime fiction books but they are mostly in the thriller or espionage category. He did, however, write three other detective novels in collaboration with Edwin Balmer who was also co-author on When Worlds Collide and its sequel After Worlds Collide. They are:

Five Fatal Words (Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, 1932)
The Golden Hoard (Stokes, 1934)
The Shield of Silence (Stokes, 1936)