FFB: The Crime in the Crystal - Robert Hare

THE STORY: Portrait painter Elton Cleeves sees a vision of his nephew he before the man is found dead. Cleeve’s vision showed his nephew grasping one wrist then holding the other arm outstretched before collapsing. Minutes later Cleeves receives a telephone call informing that his nephew’s body has been found in a wood not far from the uncle’s home, he has been clubbed to death, a wound to the left temple and a bruise on his right wrist – exactly as in the painter’s vision. Believing he is clairvoyant Elton begins to investigate the crime by psychic means. He consults a crystal ball and believes he has seen The Crime in the Crystal (1933)

THE  CHARACTERS: His physician Dr. Adrian Berwick is concerned for Elton’s mental health. He thinks the elderly man is crumbling under stress and suffering from hallucinations. Adrian confiscates the crystal ball and keeps a watch on his patient. A physical examination raises concerns about the possibility of poison. Berwick does some sleuthing by analyzing chemical properties of Elton’s art supplies and uncovers a shocking plot.

Meanwhile Inspector Gearing is beginning his investigation of Dr. Michael Cleeves’ murder. Though the many routine interrogations we learn that Cleeves, the nephew, was an intolerable hedonist, nearly always drunk, gambling, and leading a libertine’s life. Uncle Elton lost all respect for his nephew, had turned his back on him and instead focused his attention and affection on his grandniece, Helena, the physician’s daughter. There are two guests of the physician who have moved into a small cottage on the Cleeve’s estate and they have had an insidious influence on Helena, normally a simple conservative young woman, almost a relic of the Edwardian era like her great uncle, she is surrendering to her father and his guests’ wild pursuit of cafes, bars and urban nightlife. Uncle Elton convinces Insp. Gearing that these guests, a brother and sister named Vincent and Irene Youles, have had a hand in his nephew’s death. Vincent has been paying extra attention to Helena with the intent of proposing marriage. Irene had been flirting with Dr. Cleeves and seemed to be thinking the same. The Youles, Elton tells the police, are nothing but “avaricious adventurers” and he is certain they plotted to do in the doctor hoping that Helena would inherit his money.

The joke’s on them, however, for Elton had several weeks ago disinherited Michael and made Helena his primary beneficiary. This makes the possible poisoning of Elton Cleeves all the more sinister. It is entirely possible that the Youles are so eager to marry rich that they will murder anyone who stands in the way of their plot to gain control of Helena’s money.

INNOVATIONS: Gearing and Dr. Berwick make an interesting detective team. Berwick with his scientific mind and a clearheaded common sense outlook contrasts with the near inhuman determination and obsessive mind of Gearing. Amusingly, Berwick tutors himself on “Investigation, Criminal” by reading a lengthy entry in an encyclopedia in the Cleeves library. He looks to this anonymous article as his inspiration to find the killer of Dr. Cleeves’ and the poisoner trying to murder Elton Cleeves.

All the while the idea of clairvoyance, omens, messages from beyond and the ability to have visions about the past and future haunt both Dr. Berwick and Elton Cleeves. A watercolor portrait of what appears to be Helena as a child turns up, but the date of 1885 proves it cannot be the grandniece because she was not born until 1911. Is it possible that this painting is also proof that Elton has some psychic gift? Could he have foretold the birth of his nephew’s daughter decades before she was even alive?

QUOTES:   All things are born and make their first growth in the dark, and premature exposure may kill them. So it is with ideas.

Was not the whole world made up of strange and extraordinary things which only the dullness of our senses had reduced to the level of the drab and commonplace?

The reawakening of memory! he pondered upon that, and with the thought there came -- as though it had sprang from the crystal itself -- an idea as startling in its inception as it was terrible in its implications, a supposition not quickly to be set aside. The shadows which darken the corners of a room...have a disturbing quality in their shapelessness which induces the beholder to clothe them with images of his own creation; because there is nothing we fear so much as a thing without form. ...[A]re they real, or must we account them the unnatural vapors of a disturbed imagination? For it is to be remembered, Adrian realized, that there are shadows in the corners of the mind as well as in the rooms of an old country house.

SUMMATION: The Crime in the Crystal is the first of three works of ingenious crime fiction by American writer Robert Hare. It’s a remarkable debut, such that in marketing the book Longman’s managed to get bestselling detective novelist J. S. Fletcher to write a laudatory foreword in which he succinctly describes why the book is a noteworthy contribution to the genre. Fletcher summed up Hare's work: "The highest praise that can be given to this first effort is to say that here is a story not only worth telling but told in really distinguished fashion." This is no hype, circa 1933, it's 100% accurate.

Hare’s second novel was an equally praiseworthy amalgam of inverted crime novel and detective novel The Doctor’s First Murder (1933) He rounded out his trio of works with The Hand of the Chimpanzee (1934), an over-the-top homage to weird menace stories of the 1930s pulp magazines like Dime Detective that nevertheless is an ingeniously plotted, albeit lurid and outlandish, traditional detective novel. I have recently discussed ad nauseum all three of these books in the "In GAD We Trust" podcast about rare and hard to find books that deserve reprinting. Having finally read the first of this trio of highly inventive and imaginative detective novels I will just reiterate what we’ve all said many at time: Will some enterprising publisher please reprint these books? Thank you.

ODDITIES: The Hand of the Chimpanzee - Robert Hare

Imagine a mystery novel that is an extravagant conglomeration of Planet of the Apes, The Island of Dr. Moreau and that creepy cult classic 1973 TV movie A Cold Night's Death. Is such a melange possible? Oh yes my friends, it is. It's called The Hand of Chimpanzee, written in 1934 by Robert Hare who was inspired to write his fantastical novel after a visit to a primate research center. He even dedicates the novel to four "anthropoid apes" that he observed at that center. And what -- I hear you ask -- exactly goes on in this genre-blending alternative classic? Is it a detective novel? A horror novel? Or science fiction? Do the apes talk as in Pierre Boulle's novel and the later fantastic series of 1970s movies? Calm down, gang. All will be revealed.

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.

There are several murders, all of them rather gruesome, all of them apparently the work of either the gorilla in the research facility or the most violent chimp named Sebastian. Long finger marks and scratches are found on each of the strangled victims. Fingers that are too long to be human. Everyone is convinced that someone among the lab staff has trained one of the apes to become a killer. Increasingly it appears that Strengland whose behavior becomes more unhinged and erratic might be the culprit. But might it also be Gatrall, the slovenly lab assistant? He view their work as the wave of the future when all menial jobs will be performed by apes allowing humans more free time and better job opportunities in more challenging and cerebral work. Or perhaps De Silva, the primary trainer and caretaker of the apes? An aloof and cynical man DeSilva has the cruel streak of sadism in his blood. And what of Lenka, the sinister Greek housekeeper? Thanks to her creativity the apes have all been named, names which supposedly come from her native language. In my translations, however, I get completely different meanings in English (see THINGS I LEARNED for more).

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

Sometime in the late 1970s and becoming blown out of proportion by the age of the internet in the late 1990s several bizarre conspiracy theories began to surface about human and ape hybridization projects conducted at the Yerkes Primate Research Center. Although there have been factual stories of horrible cruelties perpetuated on the animals during one period of poor management when the facility was under the direction of a non-scientist there has been no proof of the existence of "humanzees" being created at the facility. I wonder if anyone had read this book and used it as fodder for the rumor mill and creating the Wellsian nightmare conspiracy theories.

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!

INNOVATIONS:  The first murder to occur in Strengland's home involves a locked laboratory with a body found on a table several feet away from the door and the key still in the corpse's hand.  The two self-appointed amateur sleuths, Evan Heath and his fiancee Jessie (Strengland's niece), try to convince the police that the victim could not possibly have locked the lab and kept the key in his hand afterwards. He would've locked the door, put the key in his pocket or the desk. But the key is found lying loose inside the dead man's hand. And so there is, in fact, a locked room problem, one not listed in Adey's bibliography Locked Room Murders. The solution is suitably bizarre for such a fantastical book.

EASY TO FIND? Those interested in owning their own copy ought to act fast. There are is only five  ONE! copy for sale on the usual bookselling sites. Three copies are priced fairly but have no dust jackets. The other two copy is in better condition, comes with the original DJ, and of course is priced well above $100. Though published both in the US and the UK I only uncovered US editions for sale. I guess the UK first edition is a genuine rarity. I'd suggest trying libraries for other copies out 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?

FFB: The Doctor's First Murder - Robert Hare

THE STORY: Dr. Amos Truppen meticulously plans the death of Henry Updike in order to steal his formula for a medicine that supposedly can cure cancer. Truppen feels that if he can get that formula he'll be a very wealthy man. On the day of the murder Truppen stages a car accident and does everything according to his elaborate plan. But when the time comes to the actual murder Truppen discovers his intended victim is already dead, killed in exactly the same bizarre manner that Truppen had planned. Who got there first? But more importantly -- who knew of Truppen's plan and why did they kill Updike in exactly the same manner?

THE CHARACTERS: Like many other crime novels that detail the plans of a murder gone awry The Doctor's First Murder is told entirely from the viewpoint of the killer. Amos Truppen is disillusioned with his practice, less than satisfied with his partner Dr. Claude Dastin and eager to find a way to improve his reputation and position in town as one of only two physicians. We think that the story will be about Truppen and the way he will elude detection and get away with his ostensibly "perfect crime."  But when he is outwitted by another killer we see the novel transform immediately into an engaging suspense novel with some very good detective work both on Truppen's part and other characters.

Dastin, his physician partner, is highly suspicious of the accident and points out some odd details like the roofing tile nail supposedly causing a blowout that led to the car crashing into an oak tree and killing Updike.  Dastin points out that no houses anywhere on Updike's route had been recently repaired and that no one in town had a roof repair in years. Where did the new nail come from and how did Updike accidentally drive over it? Of course this was part of Truppen's plan to make it appear that the car had an accident. The reader knows this having watched Truppen drive the nail into the tire with a hammer after he let the car coast in neutral into the tree and crash there. This is only the first sign that Truppen's plan was not as perfect as he envisioned. Updike's apparent cause of death involves a broken glass vial that stabbed him and this also raises questions. When the body is exhumed Truppen really begins to sweat.

The bulk of the novel is an excellent portrait in guilt commingled with paranoia. Truppen is an intelligent and shrewd man and is determined not to be tried and executed for a crime that he may have planned but that someone else carried out. However, he is not immune to fear. He finds himself haunted, losing sleep and dwelling repeatedly on a paranoid refrain in his imagination: "I'm caught! I'm caught! I'm caught!"  The story becomes a deadly game of cat-and-mouse as Truppen matches wits with his unknown antagonist. He focuses first on Dastin who seems to stumble on clues too easily, but Dastin's long visit with Sir Jeremy Henders gives him an alibi for the night of Updike's death.  Truppen then sets his eyes on Updike's wife, Rascha, a research scientist who helped her husband create and improve the formula.

The introduction of Meino Voss into the story allows Hare to address the question of Fate. Voss is a composer and was Updike's only patient receiving the secret medicine that had been doing miraculous wonders. But Voss is a melancholy man and his latest composition, a symphony inspired by his impending death from a terminal illness, is a dark and brooding piece of music.  He talks to Truppen about how he is trying capture in sound and tone the quality of Nemesis, expounding on both the Greek mythological figure and its place in his music. The names of Fate and Nemesis as well as their shared concepts and role in Truppen's life will recur throughout the novel until the staggering and ironic finale.

INNOVATIONS: The Doctor's First Murder (1933) seems at first to be an inverted detective novel from the very first sentence. The ingenious surprise at the end of Chapter Two transforms the book into a detective novel. Truppen finds himself ironically changing from incipient murderer into full-fledged detective then again into an agent of retribution. There are other books that use this convention, but this is not only one of the first to be written combining both subgenres it is also one of the best constructed and impressively inventive in plotting. The final chapters are fraught with tension and suspense and the ending is an unexpected shocker.

Hare makes use of excellent examples of detective novel conventions like the decoding of a strange message in a New Year's Day card sent to Truppen from someone signing himself Trench, and the examination of a substitute formula found in Updike's waistcoat that appears to have been composed on Truppen's typewriter. The more Truppen uncovers the more it seems that someone had been watching his every move, knowing exactly what he had planned, and finding ways to make it appear that no one other than Truppen could have anything to do with the death. Yet we know he did not kill Updike! It's a marvel of psychological torture. We see Truppen slowly falling apart only to finally see the truth and turn Nemesis himself.

The recurring motif of Fate and Nemesis is one of the novel's literary strengths.  Voss describes his symphony to Truppen as a work that embodies the idea of struggle directed towards "the joy of approaching triumph" only to be crushed with a "punishment that awaits the man who dares to lift his head as high as that of the gods." The reader knows that this is both foreshadowing and a compact message of the novel's intent.

QUOTES: Voss: "You note that the Scherzo is the shortest movement."
Dr. Truppen nodded.
"Is not triumph always short-lived, Amos?"

...[H]ow had he ever discovered Truppen's plan? No secret had been guarded more closely. It had been shared with no one. It had been closeted in his mind, in the depths of it, in the very innermost part where, one might say, this curious, rhythmical repetition of questions was hammering away. Going on and on...

It was so like a spider enticing a fly into its web, and he wondered whether a spider could be so attracted to its victim as he was to Rascha; whether he could see beauty actually in the thing he wished to destroy. His feelings were torn by two opposing desires which struggled against each other within him: the one to take Rascha in his arms and embrace her, the other to set his fingers about he throat and kill her.

It gave [Truppen] enormous satisfaction to know that he could deceive her. It was a weapon which he might have occasion to use later on.

THE AUTHOR: Robert Hare Hutchinson wrote three detective novels and a handful of articles for magazines. His first book, interestingly, was a nonfiction work that may indicate what his first profession might have been: The Socialism of New Zealand (1916). The research for that book was done in collaboration with his wife while both were on their honeymoon. Fun couple! Hutchinson married into a wealthy Philadelphia family with an rich literary heritage. His wife Delia Farley Dana, on her father's side, was the granddaughter of Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of the sailor's memoir Two Years Before the Mast and an attorney well noted for his work defending slaves brought to trial under the Fugitive Slave Act. Delia's maternal grandfather was the noted "Poet Laureate of the Atlantic magazine" Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, once a mainstay of elementary and high school literature classes in the USA. A search of newspaper articles featuring Hutchinson and his wife turned up the notice in the Philadelphia Enquirer of their unusual marriage ceremony in 1913 which made the front page. They were married in an "ethical eugenic" wedding ceremony, a practice that the Dana family made somewhat popular at the time. The entire text of the marriage, wholly absent of any religious verbiage or theological content, was included in the article and included this bizarre statement Delia uttered to her husband to be: "I, Delia Farley Dana, take you, Robert Hare Hutchinson, to be my lawful husband, and I hope so to live that you may be enabled to attain your highest efficiency." The Hutchinsons lived for a time in Philadelphia but eventually emigrated to England and lived in London, no doubt in order to live under the type of socialist government they had studied and preferred. This also explains why although Hutchinson was an American his detective novels appeared first in UK editions.

EASY TO FIND? Well, this is quite a surprise to me. Four days ago when I checked there were three copies of the US first edition available for sale and one other reprint. Today there is only one copy (the reprint) offered. I feel a bit like Dr. Truppen: Who knew I was going to review this so favorably and went looking in advance to buy one of the few copies out there?  And not just one person -- three people! [insert Twilight Zone theme]

I'm not sure anyone would want the reprint I mentioned. That lone copy is being sold by Gyan Books Pvt. Ltd based in Delhi, India, another internet pirate who manufactures POD copies. Gyan Books is different from most of these thieves however, because they make their pirated copies seem like a collector's item. They bind their editions in "leather" boards and include a ribbon book marker. Here's how they describe the process: "This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, Printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents." It's only $33 (cheap for a leather bound book, I think) and they offer free shipping. Someone ought to buy one of these (I'll never patronize an internet pirate "publisher"; they're really only printers) and let me know if it's worth the money or if it's, as I suspect, shoddily produced.

Robert Hare's Crime & Detective Novels
The Crime in the Crystal (1932)
  -- UK title: Spectral Evidence
The Doctor's First Murder (1933)
The Hand of the Chimpanzee (1934)