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Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me 8/2/16 Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016 Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories "It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories. The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list. During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts! One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence. From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this. Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories. A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it. The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career. Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970). So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog. Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists." Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them. Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast." So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them. Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax. Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up! +2 Recommend this on Google Replies 18 comments: Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947. Reply TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience. I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade- off for these lost mysteries. Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room. TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected. During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt. Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all. I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities. But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever. Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!) Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West. TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM @Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage. And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW! TomCat a.k.a. Last Century Detective View my complete profile The Usual Suspect Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants. An Elementary Observation "It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..." - Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre). "The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods." - Anthony Boucher. "I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul." - Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933). Witnesses' Statements Currently tailing me... Follow by Email (Papertrail) Email address... Subm it Insightful Informants 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review 4 hours ago The Invisible Event #122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: A guest post by Matt Ingwalson 6 hours ago Mystery File An Old Time Radio Review by Michael Shonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT (1939-40). 12 hours ago Ontos "You Can't Escape Me, Stenton" 15 hours ago The Case Files of Ho-Ling Lovely But Lethal 16 hours ago The Rap Sheet McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots 23 hours ago In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel Puzzle Doctor At The Movies – Ghostbusters (2016) 1 day ago Tipping My Fedora Jason Bourne – cinema review 1 day ago Past Offences ‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944book reviews 1 day ago Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema The Intern, 2015 1 day ago My Reader's Block August Read It Again, Sam Reviews 1 day ago Noah's Archives A quick note on opposites (Crosses, Coffins, and Oranges) 2 days ago Classic Mysteries "The Dancing Druids" 2 days ago Vintage Pop Fictions G.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair 2 days ago Pretty Sinister Books "Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time" 2 days ago a hot cup of pleasure TERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL (Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHEN MORTON 3 days ago My Japanese bookshelf The Ghost Murder Case 3 days ago The Passing Tramp Classic Crime, Classic Parodies 4 days ago Escape to Adventure! Featuring the Saint 5 days ago The Study Lamp This Post is Brought to You By.... 5 weeks ago The Consulting Detective Update - Back on Baker Street 5 weeks ago Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog Boring First-Person Narrators 1 month ago At the Scene of the Crime You are not the millionth visitor! 2 months ago At the Villa Rose Ba-bye 2 months ago A Penguin a Week Penguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy 2 months ago A Perfect Locked Room I Object! 2 months ago The Corpse Steps Out EQMM 3 months ago Complete Disregard for Spoilers Death at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934) 7 months ago Vanished Into Thin Air Peter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 1996 8 months ago The Locked Room Mystery and More Mystery by Robert Arthur 1 year ago Only Detect RICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004). 2 years ago The Ingenious Game Of Murder Detective Novels of Todd Downing 2 years ago On the Threshold of Chaos 3 weeks already... 3 years ago The John Dickson Carr Collector Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Golden Age of Detection Wiki GADetection Group Locked Room International Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries) Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction M.P.O. Books (Dutch) Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site The Ultimate Columbo Site! Bureaus of Investigation ▼ 2016 (75) ▼ August (1) The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Dete... ► July (13) ► June (9) ► May (11) ► April (11) ► March (9) ► February (9) ► January (12) ► 2015 (80) ► 2014 (68) ► 2013 (94) ► 2012 (113) ► 2011 (140) The Newgate Calendar The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist " The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary ." - Donald A. Yates ("The L... The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories " It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ... Devil's Delicacies " The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the fore... Risen from the Grave " All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned b... Cat's Cradle " You see... assuming this to be murder, we have to go look for a motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Ca... The Most Consulted Dossiers This Week More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me 8/2/16 Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016 Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories "It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories. The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list. During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts! One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence. From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this. Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories. A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it. The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career. Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970). So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog. Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists." Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them. Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast." So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them. Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax. Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up! +2 Recommend this on Google Replies 18 comments: Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947. Reply TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience. I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade- off for these lost mysteries. Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room. TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected. During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt. Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all. I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities. But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever. Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!) Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West. TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM @Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage. And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW! TomCat a.k.a. Last Century Detective View my complete profile The Usual Suspect Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants. An Elementary Observation "It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..." - Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre). "The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods." - Anthony Boucher. "I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul." - Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933). Witnesses' Statements Currently tailing me... Follow by Email (Papertrail) Email address... Subm it Insightful Informants 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review 4 hours ago The Invisible Event #122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: A guest post by Matt Ingwalson 6 hours ago Mystery File An Old Time Radio Review by Michael Shonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT (1939-40). 12 hours ago Ontos "You Can't Escape Me, Stenton" 15 hours ago The Case Files of Ho-Ling Lovely But Lethal 16 hours ago The Rap Sheet McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots 23 hours ago In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel Puzzle Doctor At The Movies – Ghostbusters (2016) 1 day ago Tipping My Fedora Jason Bourne – cinema review 1 day ago Past Offences ‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944book reviews 1 day ago Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema The Intern, 2015 1 day ago My Reader's Block August Read It Again, Sam Reviews 1 day ago Noah's Archives A quick note on opposites (Crosses, Coffins, and Oranges) 2 days ago Classic Mysteries "The Dancing Druids" 2 days ago Vintage Pop Fictions G.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair 2 days ago Pretty Sinister Books "Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time" 2 days ago a hot cup of pleasure TERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL (Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHEN MORTON 3 days ago My Japanese bookshelf The Ghost Murder Case 3 days ago The Passing Tramp Classic Crime, Classic Parodies 4 days ago Escape to Adventure! Featuring the Saint 5 days ago The Study Lamp This Post is Brought to You By.... 5 weeks ago The Consulting Detective Update - Back on Baker Street 5 weeks ago Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog Boring First-Person Narrators 1 month ago At the Scene of the Crime You are not the millionth visitor! 2 months ago At the Villa Rose Ba-bye 2 months ago A Penguin a Week Penguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy 2 months ago A Perfect Locked Room I Object! 2 months ago The Corpse Steps Out EQMM 3 months ago Complete Disregard for Spoilers Death at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934) 7 months ago Vanished Into Thin Air Peter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 1996 8 months ago The Locked Room Mystery and More Mystery by Robert Arthur 1 year ago Only Detect RICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004). 2 years ago The Ingenious Game Of Murder Detective Novels of Todd Downing 2 years ago On the Threshold of Chaos 3 weeks already... 3 years ago The John Dickson Carr Collector Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Golden Age of Detection Wiki GADetection Group Locked Room International Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries) Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction M.P.O. Books (Dutch) Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site The Ultimate Columbo Site! Bureaus of Investigation ▼ 2016 (75) ▼ August (1) The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Dete... ► July (13) ► June (9) ► May (11) ► April (11) ► March (9) ► February (9) ► January (12) ► 2015 (80) ► 2014 (68) ► 2013 (94) ► 2012 (113) ► 2011 (140) The Newgate Calendar The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist " The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary ." - Donald A. Yates ("The L... The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories " It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ... Devil's Delicacies " The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the fore... Risen from the Grave " All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned b... Cat's Cradle " You see... assuming this to be murder, we have to go look for a motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Ca... The Most Consulted Dossiers This Week More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me 8/2/16 Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016 Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories "It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories. The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list. During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts! One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence. From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this. Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories. A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it. The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career. Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970). So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog. Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists." Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them. Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast." So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them. Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax. Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up! +2 Recommend this on Google Replies 18 comments: Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947. Reply TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience. I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade- off for these lost mysteries. Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room. TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected. During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt. Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all. I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities. But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever. Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!) Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West. TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM @Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage. And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW! TomCat a.k.a. Last Century Detective View my complete profile The Usual Suspect Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants. An Elementary Observation "It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..." - Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre). "The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods." - Anthony Boucher. "I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul." - Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933). Witnesses' Statements Currently tailing me... Follow by Email (Papertrail) Email address... Subm it Insightful Informants 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' 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Little Girl Lost (2004). 2 years ago The Ingenious Game Of Murder Detective Novels of Todd Downing 2 years ago On the Threshold of Chaos 3 weeks already... 3 years ago The John Dickson Carr Collector Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Golden Age of Detection Wiki GADetection Group Locked Room International Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries) Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction M.P.O. Books (Dutch) Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site The Ultimate Columbo Site! Bureaus of Investigation ▼ 2016 (75) ▼ August (1) The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Dete... ► July (13) ► June (9) ► May (11) ► April (11) ► March (9) ► February (9) ► January (12) ► 2015 (80) ► 2014 (68) ► 2013 (94) ► 2012 (113) ► 2011 (140) The Newgate Calendar The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist " The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary ." - Donald A. Yates ("The L... The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories " It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ... Devil's Delicacies " The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the fore... Risen from the Grave " All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned b... Cat's Cradle " You see... assuming this to be murder, we have to go look for a motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Ca... The Most Consulted Dossiers This Week More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me 8/2/16 Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016 Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories "It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories. The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list. During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts! One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence. From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this. Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories. A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it. The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career. Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970). So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog. Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists." Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them. Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast." So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them. Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax. Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up! +2 Recommend this on Google Replies 18 comments: Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947. Reply TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience. I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade- off for these lost mysteries. Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room. TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected. During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt. Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all. I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities. But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever. Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!) Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West. TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM @Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage. And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW! TomCat a.k.a. Last Century Detective View my complete profile The Usual Suspect Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants. An Elementary Observation "It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..." - Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre). "The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods." - Anthony Boucher. "I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul." - Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933). Witnesses' Statements Currently tailing me... Follow by Email (Papertrail) Email address... Subm it Insightful Informants 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review 4 hours ago The Invisible Event #122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: A guest post by Matt Ingwalson 6 hours ago Mystery File An Old Time Radio Review by Michael Shonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT (1939-40). 12 hours ago Ontos "You Can't Escape Me, Stenton" 15 hours ago The Case Files of Ho-Ling Lovely But Lethal 16 hours ago The Rap Sheet McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots 23 hours ago In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel Puzzle Doctor At The Movies – Ghostbusters (2016) 1 day ago Tipping My Fedora Jason Bourne – cinema review 1 day ago Past Offences ‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944book reviews 1 day ago Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema The Intern, 2015 1 day ago My Reader's Block August Read It Again, Sam Reviews 1 day ago Noah's Archives A quick note on opposites (Crosses, Coffins, and Oranges) 2 days ago Classic Mysteries "The Dancing Druids" 2 days ago Vintage Pop Fictions G.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair 2 days ago Pretty Sinister Books "Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time" 2 days ago a hot cup of pleasure TERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL (Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHEN MORTON 3 days ago My Japanese bookshelf The Ghost Murder Case 3 days ago The Passing Tramp Classic Crime, Classic Parodies 4 days ago Escape to Adventure! Featuring the Saint 5 days ago The Study Lamp This Post is Brought to You By.... 5 weeks ago The Consulting Detective Update - Back on Baker Street 5 weeks ago Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog Boring First-Person Narrators 1 month ago At the Scene of the Crime You are not the millionth visitor! 2 months ago At the Villa Rose Ba-bye 2 months ago A Penguin a Week Penguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy 2 months ago A Perfect Locked Room I Object! 2 months ago The Corpse Steps Out EQMM 3 months ago Complete Disregard for Spoilers Death at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934) 7 months ago Vanished Into Thin Air Peter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 1996 8 months ago The Locked Room Mystery and More Mystery by Robert Arthur 1 year ago Only Detect RICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004). 2 years ago The Ingenious Game Of Murder Detective Novels of Todd Downing 2 years ago On the Threshold of Chaos 3 weeks already... 3 years ago The John Dickson Carr Collector Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Golden Age of Detection Wiki GADetection Group Locked Room International Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries) Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction M.P.O. Books (Dutch) Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site The Ultimate Columbo Site! Bureaus of Investigation ▼ 2016 (75) ▼ August (1) The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Dete... ► July (13) ► June (9) ► May (11) ► April (11) ► March (9) ► February (9) ► January (12) ► 2015 (80) ► 2014 (68) ► 2013 (94) ► 2012 (113) ► 2011 (140) The Newgate Calendar The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist " The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary ." - Donald A. Yates ("The L... The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories " It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ... Devil's Delicacies " The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the fore... Risen from the Grave " All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned b... Cat's Cradle " You see... assuming this to be murder, we have to go look for a motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Ca... The Most Consulted Dossiers This Week More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me 8/2/16 Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016 Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories "It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories. The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list. During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts! One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence. From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this. Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories. A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it. The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career. Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970). So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog. Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists." Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them. Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast." So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them. Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax. Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up! +2 Recommend this on Google Replies 18 comments: Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947. Reply TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience. I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade- off for these lost mysteries. Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room. TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected. During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt. Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all. I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities. But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever. Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!) Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West. TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM @Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage. And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW! TomCat a.k.a. Last Century Detective View my complete profile The Usual Suspect Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants. An Elementary Observation "It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..." - Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre). "The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods." - Anthony Boucher. "I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul." - Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933). Witnesses' Statements Currently tailing me... Follow by Email (Papertrail) Email address... Subm it Insightful Informants 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review 4 hours ago The Invisible Event #122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: A guest post by Matt Ingwalson 6 hours ago Mystery File An Old Time Radio Review by Michael Shonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT (1939-40). 12 hours ago Ontos "You Can't Escape Me, Stenton" 15 hours ago The Case Files of Ho-Ling Lovely But Lethal 16 hours ago The Rap Sheet McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots 23 hours ago In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel Puzzle Doctor At The Movies – Ghostbusters (2016) 1 day ago Tipping My Fedora Jason Bourne – cinema review 1 day ago Past Offences ‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944book reviews 1 day ago Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema The Intern, 2015 1 day ago My Reader's Block August Read It Again, Sam Reviews 1 day ago Noah's Archives A quick note on opposites (Crosses, Coffins, and Oranges) 2 days ago Classic Mysteries "The Dancing Druids" 2 days ago Vintage Pop Fictions G.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair 2 days ago Pretty Sinister Books "Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time" 2 days ago a hot cup of pleasure TERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL (Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHEN MORTON 3 days ago My Japanese bookshelf The Ghost Murder Case 3 days ago The Passing Tramp Classic Crime, Classic Parodies 4 days ago Escape to Adventure! Featuring the Saint 5 days ago The Study Lamp This Post is Brought to You By.... 5 weeks ago The Consulting Detective Update - Back on Baker Street 5 weeks ago Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog Boring First-Person Narrators 1 month ago At the Scene of the Crime You are not the millionth visitor! 2 months ago At the Villa Rose Ba-bye 2 months ago A Penguin a Week Penguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy 2 months ago A Perfect Locked Room I Object! 2 months ago The Corpse Steps Out EQMM 3 months ago Complete Disregard for Spoilers Death at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934) 7 months ago Vanished Into Thin Air Peter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 1996 8 months ago The Locked Room Mystery and More Mystery by Robert Arthur 1 year ago Only Detect RICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004). 2 years ago The Ingenious Game Of Murder Detective Novels of Todd Downing 2 years ago On the Threshold of Chaos 3 weeks already... 3 years ago The John Dickson Carr Collector Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Golden Age of Detection Wiki GADetection Group Locked Room International Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries) Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction M.P.O. Books (Dutch) Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site The Ultimate Columbo Site! Bureaus of Investigation ▼ 2016 (75) ▼ August (1) The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Dete... ► July (13) ► June (9) ► May (11) ► April (11) ► March (9) ► February (9) ► January (12) ► 2015 (80) ► 2014 (68) ► 2013 (94) ► 2012 (113) ► 2011 (140) The Newgate Calendar The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist " The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary ." - Donald A. Yates ("The L... The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories " It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ... Devil's Delicacies " The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the fore... Risen from the Grave " All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned b... Cat's Cradle " You see... assuming this to be murder, we have to go look for a motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Ca... The Most Consulted Dossiers This Week More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me 8/2/16 Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016 Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories "It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories. The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list. During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts! One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence. From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this. Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories. A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it. The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career. Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970). So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog. Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists." Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them. Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast." So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them. Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax. Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up! +2 Recommend this on Google Replies 18 comments: Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947. Reply TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience. I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade- off for these lost mysteries. Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room. TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected. During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt. Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all. I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities. But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever. Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!) Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West. TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM @Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage. And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW! TomCat a.k.a. Last Century Detective View my complete profile The Usual Suspect Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants. An Elementary Observation "It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..." - Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre). "The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods." - Anthony Boucher. "I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul." - Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933). Witnesses' Statements Currently tailing me... Follow by Email (Papertrail) Email address... Subm it Insightful Informants 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review 4 hours ago The Invisible Event #122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: A guest post by Matt Ingwalson 6 hours ago Mystery File An Old Time Radio Review by Michael Shonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT (1939-40). 12 hours ago Ontos "You Can't Escape Me, Stenton" 15 hours ago The Case Files of Ho-Ling Lovely But Lethal 16 hours ago The Rap Sheet McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots 23 hours ago In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel Puzzle Doctor At The Movies – Ghostbusters (2016) 1 day ago Tipping My Fedora Jason Bourne – cinema review 1 day ago Past Offences ‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944book reviews 1 day ago Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema The Intern, 2015 1 day ago My Reader's Block August Read It Again, Sam Reviews 1 day ago Noah's Archives A quick note on opposites (Crosses, Coffins, and Oranges) 2 days ago Classic Mysteries "The Dancing Druids" 2 days ago Vintage Pop Fictions G.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair 2 days ago Pretty Sinister Books "Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time" 2 days ago a hot cup of pleasure TERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL (Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHEN MORTON 3 days ago My Japanese bookshelf The Ghost Murder Case 3 days ago The Passing Tramp Classic Crime, Classic Parodies 4 days ago Escape to Adventure! Featuring the Saint 5 days ago The Study Lamp This Post is Brought to You By.... 5 weeks ago The Consulting Detective Update - Back on Baker Street 5 weeks ago Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog Boring First-Person Narrators 1 month ago At the Scene of the Crime You are not the millionth visitor! 2 months ago At the Villa Rose Ba-bye 2 months ago A Penguin a Week Penguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy 2 months ago A Perfect Locked Room I Object! 2 months ago The Corpse Steps Out EQMM 3 months ago Complete Disregard for Spoilers Death at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934) 7 months ago Vanished Into Thin Air Peter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 1996 8 months ago The Locked Room Mystery and More Mystery by Robert Arthur 1 year ago Only Detect RICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004). 2 years ago The Ingenious Game Of Murder Detective Novels of Todd Downing 2 years ago On the Threshold of Chaos 3 weeks already... 3 years ago The John Dickson Carr Collector Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Golden Age of Detection Wiki GADetection Group Locked Room International Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries) Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction M.P.O. Books (Dutch) Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site The Ultimate Columbo Site! Bureaus of Investigation ▼ 2016 (75) ▼ August (1) The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Dete... ► July (13) ► June (9) ► May (11) ► April (11) ► March (9) ► February (9) ► January (12) ► 2015 (80) ► 2014 (68) ► 2013 (94) ► 2012 (113) ► 2011 (140) The Newgate Calendar The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist " The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary ." - Donald A. Yates ("The L... The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories " It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ... Devil's Delicacies " The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the fore... Risen from the Grave " All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned b... Cat's Cradle " You see... assuming this to be murder, we have to go look for a motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Ca... The Most Consulted Dossiers This Week More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me 8/2/16 Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016 Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories "It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories. The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list. During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts! One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence. From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this. Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories. A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it. The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career. Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970). So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog. Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists." Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them. Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast." So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them. Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax. Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up! +2 Recommend this on Google Replies 18 comments: Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947. Reply TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience. I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade- off for these lost mysteries. Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room. TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected. During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt. Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all. I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities. But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever. Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!) Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West. TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM @Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage. And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW! TomCat a.k.a. Last Century Detective View my complete profile The Usual Suspect Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants. An Elementary Observation "It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..." - Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre). "The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods." - Anthony Boucher. "I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul." - Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933). Witnesses' Statements Currently tailing me... Follow by Email (Papertrail) Email address... Subm it Insightful Informants 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review 4 hours ago The Invisible Event #122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: A guest post by Matt Ingwalson 6 hours ago Mystery File An Old Time Radio Review by Michael Shonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT (1939-40). 12 hours ago Ontos "You Can't Escape Me, Stenton" 15 hours ago The Case Files of Ho-Ling Lovely But Lethal 16 hours ago The Rap Sheet McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots 23 hours ago In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel Puzzle Doctor At The Movies – Ghostbusters (2016) 1 day ago Tipping My Fedora Jason Bourne – cinema review 1 day ago Past Offences ‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944book reviews 1 day ago Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema The Intern, 2015 1 day ago My Reader's Block August Read It Again, Sam Reviews 1 day ago Noah's Archives A quick note on opposites (Crosses, Coffins, and Oranges) 2 days ago Classic Mysteries "The Dancing Druids" 2 days ago Vintage Pop Fictions G.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair 2 days ago Pretty Sinister Books "Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time" 2 days ago a hot cup of pleasure TERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL (Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHEN MORTON 3 days ago My Japanese bookshelf The Ghost Murder Case 3 days ago The Passing Tramp Classic Crime, Classic Parodies 4 days ago Escape to Adventure! Featuring the Saint 5 days ago The Study Lamp This Post is Brought to You By.... 5 weeks ago The Consulting Detective Update - Back on Baker Street 5 weeks ago Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog Boring First-Person Narrators 1 month ago At the Scene of the Crime You are not the millionth visitor! 2 months ago At the Villa Rose Ba-bye 2 months ago A Penguin a Week Penguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy 2 months ago A Perfect Locked Room I Object! 2 months ago The Corpse Steps Out EQMM 3 months ago Complete Disregard for Spoilers Death at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934) 7 months ago Vanished Into Thin Air Peter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 1996 8 months ago The Locked Room Mystery and More Mystery by Robert Arthur 1 year ago Only Detect RICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004). 2 years ago The Ingenious Game Of Murder Detective Novels of Todd Downing 2 years ago On the Threshold of Chaos 3 weeks already... 3 years ago The John Dickson Carr Collector Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Golden Age of Detection Wiki GADetection Group Locked Room International Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries) Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction M.P.O. Books (Dutch) Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site The Ultimate Columbo Site! Bureaus of Investigation ▼ 2016 (75) ▼ August (1) The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Dete... ► July (13) ► June (9) ► May (11) ► April (11) ► March (9) ► February (9) ► January (12) ► 2015 (80) ► 2014 (68) ► 2013 (94) ► 2012 (113) ► 2011 (140) The Newgate Calendar The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist " The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary ." - Donald A. Yates ("The L... The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories " It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ... Devil's Delicacies " The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the fore... Risen from the Grave " All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned b... Cat's Cradle " You see... assuming this to be murder, we have to go look for a motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Ca... The Most Consulted Dossiers This Week More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me 8/2/16 Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016 Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories "It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories. The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list. During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts! One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence. From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this. Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories. A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it. The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career. Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970). So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog. Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists." Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them. Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast." So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them. Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax. Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up! +2 Recommend this on Google Replies 18 comments: Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947. Reply TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience. I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade- off for these lost mysteries. Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room. TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected. During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt. Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all. I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities. But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever. Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!) Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West. TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM @Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage. And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW! TomCat a.k.a. Last Century Detective View my complete profile The Usual Suspect Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants. An Elementary Observation "It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..." - Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre). "The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods." - Anthony Boucher. "I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul." - Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933). Witnesses' Statements Currently tailing me... Follow by Email (Papertrail) Email address... Subm it Insightful Informants 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review 4 hours ago The Invisible Event #122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: A guest post by Matt Ingwalson 6 hours ago Mystery File An Old Time Radio Review by Michael Shonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT (1939-40). 12 hours ago Ontos "You Can't Escape Me, Stenton" 15 hours ago The Case Files of Ho-Ling Lovely But Lethal 16 hours ago The Rap Sheet McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots 23 hours ago In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel Puzzle Doctor At The Movies – Ghostbusters (2016) 1 day ago Tipping My Fedora Jason Bourne – cinema review 1 day ago Past Offences ‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944book reviews 1 day ago Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema The Intern, 2015 1 day ago My Reader's Block August Read It Again, Sam Reviews 1 day ago Noah's Archives A quick note on opposites (Crosses, Coffins, and Oranges) 2 days ago Classic Mysteries "The Dancing Druids" 2 days ago Vintage Pop Fictions G.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair 2 days ago Pretty Sinister Books "Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time" 2 days ago a hot cup of pleasure TERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL (Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHEN MORTON 3 days ago My Japanese bookshelf The Ghost Murder Case 3 days ago The Passing Tramp Classic Crime, Classic Parodies 4 days ago Escape to Adventure! Featuring the Saint 5 days ago The Study Lamp This Post is Brought to You By.... 5 weeks ago The Consulting Detective Update - Back on Baker Street 5 weeks ago Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog Boring First-Person Narrators 1 month ago At the Scene of the Crime You are not the millionth visitor! 2 months ago At the Villa Rose Ba-bye 2 months ago A Penguin a Week Penguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy 2 months ago A Perfect Locked Room I Object! 2 months ago The Corpse Steps Out EQMM 3 months ago Complete Disregard for Spoilers Death at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934) 7 months ago Vanished Into Thin Air Peter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 1996 8 months ago The Locked Room Mystery and More Mystery by Robert Arthur 1 year ago Only Detect RICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004). 2 years ago The Ingenious Game Of Murder Detective Novels of Todd Downing 2 years ago On the Threshold of Chaos 3 weeks already... 3 years ago The John Dickson Carr Collector Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Golden Age of Detection Wiki GADetection Group Locked Room International Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries) Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction M.P.O. Books (Dutch) Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site The Ultimate Columbo Site! Bureaus of Investigation ▼ 2016 (75) ▼ August (1) The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Dete... ► July (13) ► June (9) ► May (11) ► April (11) ► March (9) ► February (9) ► January (12) ► 2015 (80) ► 2014 (68) ► 2013 (94) ► 2012 (113) ► 2011 (140) The Newgate Calendar The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist " The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary ." - Donald A. Yates ("The L... The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories " It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ... Devil's Delicacies " The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the fore... Risen from the Grave " All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned b... Cat's Cradle " You see... assuming this to be murder, we have to go look for a motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Ca... The Most Consulted Dossiers This Week More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me 8/2/16 Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016 Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories "It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories. The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list. During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts! One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence. From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this. Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories. A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it. The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career. Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970). So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog. Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists." Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them. Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast." So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them. Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax. Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up! A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel? Once a lost, unpublished story +2 Recommend this on Google Replies 18 comments: Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947. Reply TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience. I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade- off for these lost mysteries. Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room. TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected. During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt. Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all. I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities. But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever. Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!) Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West. TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM @Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage. And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW! TomCat a.k.a. Last Century Detective View my complete profile The Usual Suspect Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants. An Elementary Observation "It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..." - Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre). "The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods." - Anthony Boucher. "I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul." - Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933). Witnesses' Statements Currently tailing me... Follow by Email (Papertrail) Email address... Subm it Insightful Informants 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review 4 hours ago The Invisible Event #122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: A guest post by Matt Ingwalson 6 hours ago Mystery File An Old Time Radio Review by Michael Shonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT (1939-40). 12 hours ago Ontos "You Can't Escape Me, Stenton" 15 hours ago The Case Files of Ho-Ling Lovely But Lethal 16 hours ago The Rap Sheet McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots 23 hours ago In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel Puzzle Doctor At The Movies – Ghostbusters (2016) 1 day ago Tipping My Fedora Jason Bourne – cinema review 1 day ago Past Offences ‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944book reviews 1 day ago Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema The Intern, 2015 1 day ago My Reader's Block August Read It Again, Sam Reviews 1 day ago Noah's Archives A quick note on opposites (Crosses, Coffins, and Oranges) 2 days ago Classic Mysteries "The Dancing Druids" 2 days ago Vintage Pop Fictions G.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair 2 days ago Pretty Sinister Books "Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time" 2 days ago a hot cup of pleasure TERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL (Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHEN MORTON 3 days ago My Japanese bookshelf The Ghost Murder Case 3 days ago The Passing Tramp Classic Crime, Classic Parodies 4 days ago Escape to Adventure! Featuring the Saint 5 days ago The Study Lamp This Post is Brought to You By.... 5 weeks ago The Consulting Detective Update - Back on Baker Street 5 weeks ago Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog Boring First-Person Narrators 1 month ago At the Scene of the Crime You are not the millionth visitor! 2 months ago At the Villa Rose Ba-bye 2 months ago A Penguin a Week Penguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy 2 months ago A Perfect Locked Room I Object! 2 months ago The Corpse Steps Out EQMM 3 months ago Complete Disregard for Spoilers Death at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934) 7 months ago Vanished Into Thin Air Peter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 1996 8 months ago The Locked Room Mystery and More Mystery by Robert Arthur 1 year ago Only Detect RICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004). 2 years ago The Ingenious Game Of Murder Detective Novels of Todd Downing 2 years ago On the Threshold of Chaos 3 weeks already... 3 years ago The John Dickson Carr Collector Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Golden Age of Detection Wiki GADetection Group Locked Room International Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries) Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction M.P.O. Books (Dutch) Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site The Ultimate Columbo Site! Bureaus of Investigation ▼ 2016 (75) ▼ August (1) The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Dete... ► July (13) ► June (9) ► May (11) ► April (11) ► March (9) ► February (9) ► January (12) ► 2015 (80) ► 2014 (68) ► 2013 (94) ► 2012 (113) ► 2011 (140) The Newgate Calendar The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist " The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary ." - Donald A. Yates ("The L... The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories " It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ... Devil's Delicacies " The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the fore... Risen from the Grave " All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned b... Cat's Cradle " You see... assuming this to be murder, we have to go look for a motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Ca... The Most Consulted Dossiers This Week More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Beneath the Stains of Time The Locked Room Reader V A Selection of Lost Detective Stories.pdf Saved to Dropbox • Aug 3, 2016, 10:33 AM

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Page 1: Beneath the Stains of Time The Locked Room Reader V A … · 2016. 8. 3. · Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery,

Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me

8/2/16

Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016

Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot,John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection ofLost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933)

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of afamous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of acliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad HatterMystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carreven "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively,assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories andunpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. Thisrealization came with a collection of short stories.

The late Robert Adey, who compiledLocked Room Murders (1991), wrote anintroduction for Banner Deadlines: TheImpossible Files of Senator Brooks U.Banner (2004), in which he mentionedJoseph Commings attempted to transitionfrom writing short stories to writing novels– an attempt that ended in the most tragicloss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "salesof short fiction were either slow orstationary" and tried his hand as novelist.Adey mentioned how Commings "vividlyrecalled a lunch he once had with JohnDickson Carr," someone he greatlyadmired, who was very enthusiastic aboutthe idea and had some sage advice for thebudding novelist: "why not make it alocked room?" The first attempt, TheDoctor Died First, was aborted after onlyfour chapters, but Commings eventuallycompleted four, full-length mystery novelsstarring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lostmanuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent toFrance and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, TheCrimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel andcontaining two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and timeprobably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain ofexistence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings themost. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchangefor One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) andmentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completedthe manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was tobe published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in ElleryQueen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeledKing's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditionaldetective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writerswho began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S.Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – alocked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair ofthe Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detectivestories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, GlynCarr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissuedby the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revisedintroduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carrproduced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "onelast, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts toa long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930sand early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red(1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of herwork. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and thecollection contains several unpublishedmanuscripts written in her later years." Herpapers are archived at the City University ofNew York and you can find a listing of herunpublished work on their website, whichincludes such titles as The Fearful Guest(1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) andSweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I'veseveral more of such examples, but firstthere's one more lost manuscript that ought tobe acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewedseveral novels from The Three Investigatorsseries, which were penned by such writers asRobert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey,but even this fairly innocent series suffered agreat loss: a number of websites, dedicated to

The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey andan editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not knownwith certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in"cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalonemystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which ispatiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington,Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand'sshort fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previouslyunpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar droppeda message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublishednovel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center ofunpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lostdetective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck SeasonDeath (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten,unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's afuture opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-whitephotocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really along-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete andutter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher ofa 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors intobelieving they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperbackoutfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story,because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch wasapparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of youfound it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recentlybrought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

Once a lost, unpublished story

+2 Recommend this on Google

Replies

18 comments:Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of themwere probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't haveit. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-playstyle mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C.Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It isjust that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode ofproduction after 1947.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones whosuffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smallerreadership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such anaudience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-upto Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dulldud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries.Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and RossMacdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just thatthey were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. Iimagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mysteryreaders, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just wasnot dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that pointanyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play andlocked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room themeand some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have comeout of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers hadcontinued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read inthe Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, Inevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparageit--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schoolsdominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel wasfairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seemingimpossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out,one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre.Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that hissense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the bigdramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barringhappy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live longenough to read them if they surface!)

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, inthat the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technologyhad been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social andtechnological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries(except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the newopportunities here in the West.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder UnderGlass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) anda clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complexsolution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and originalas "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

TomCat

a.k.a. Last CenturyDetective

View my complete profile

The Usual Suspect

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated tothe great detective stories of yore and theirneo-classical descendants.

An Elementary Observation

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imaginationwith tales of doom and gloom; right now I haveanother chilling tale for you. A tale of dangerand mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre).

"The detectives who explain miracles, evenmore than their colleagues who clarify moresecular matters, play the Promethean role ofasserting man's intellect and inventivenesseven against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, andgrotesque. I like some vividness of colour andimagination flashing out of my plot, since Icannot find a story enthralling solely on thegrounds that it sounds as though it might reallyhave happened. I do not care to hear the humof everyday life; I much prefer to hear thechuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadlybells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).

Witnesses' Statements

Currently tailing me...

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Insightful Informants'Do You Write Under Your OwnName?'Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review4 hours ago

The Invisible Event#122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: Aguest post by Matt Ingwalson6 hours ago

Mystery FileAn Old Time Radio Review by MichaelShonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT(1939-40).12 hours ago

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The Case Files of Ho-LingLovely But Lethal16 hours ago

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In Search of the Classic MysteryNovelPuzzle Doctor At The Movies –Ghostbusters (2016)1 day ago

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The Study LampThis Post is Brought to You By....5 weeks ago

The Consulting DetectiveUpdate - Back on Baker Street5 weeks ago

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At the Scene of the CrimeYou are not the millionth visitor!2 months ago

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On the Threshold of Chaos3 weeks already...3 years ago

The John Dickson Carr Collector

Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection

Golden Age of Detection Wiki

GADetection Group

Locked Room International

Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries)

Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction

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8/2/16

Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016

Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot,John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection ofLost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933)

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of afamous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of acliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad HatterMystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carreven "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively,assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories andunpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. Thisrealization came with a collection of short stories.

The late Robert Adey, who compiledLocked Room Murders (1991), wrote anintroduction for Banner Deadlines: TheImpossible Files of Senator Brooks U.Banner (2004), in which he mentionedJoseph Commings attempted to transitionfrom writing short stories to writing novels– an attempt that ended in the most tragicloss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "salesof short fiction were either slow orstationary" and tried his hand as novelist.Adey mentioned how Commings "vividlyrecalled a lunch he once had with JohnDickson Carr," someone he greatlyadmired, who was very enthusiastic aboutthe idea and had some sage advice for thebudding novelist: "why not make it alocked room?" The first attempt, TheDoctor Died First, was aborted after onlyfour chapters, but Commings eventuallycompleted four, full-length mystery novelsstarring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lostmanuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent toFrance and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, TheCrimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel andcontaining two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and timeprobably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain ofexistence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings themost. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchangefor One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) andmentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completedthe manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was tobe published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in ElleryQueen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeledKing's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditionaldetective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writerswho began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S.Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – alocked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair ofthe Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detectivestories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, GlynCarr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissuedby the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revisedintroduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carrproduced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "onelast, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts toa long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930sand early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red(1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of herwork. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and thecollection contains several unpublishedmanuscripts written in her later years." Herpapers are archived at the City University ofNew York and you can find a listing of herunpublished work on their website, whichincludes such titles as The Fearful Guest(1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) andSweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I'veseveral more of such examples, but firstthere's one more lost manuscript that ought tobe acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewedseveral novels from The Three Investigatorsseries, which were penned by such writers asRobert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey,but even this fairly innocent series suffered agreat loss: a number of websites, dedicated to

The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey andan editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not knownwith certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in"cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalonemystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which ispatiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington,Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand'sshort fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previouslyunpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar droppeda message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublishednovel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center ofunpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lostdetective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck SeasonDeath (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten,unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's afuture opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-whitephotocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really along-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete andutter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher ofa 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors intobelieving they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperbackoutfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story,because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch wasapparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of youfound it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recentlybrought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

Once a lost, unpublished story

+2 Recommend this on Google

Replies

18 comments:Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of themwere probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't haveit. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-playstyle mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C.Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It isjust that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode ofproduction after 1947.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones whosuffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smallerreadership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such anaudience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-upto Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dulldud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries.Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and RossMacdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just thatthey were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. Iimagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mysteryreaders, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just wasnot dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that pointanyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play andlocked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room themeand some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have comeout of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers hadcontinued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read inthe Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, Inevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparageit--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schoolsdominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel wasfairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seemingimpossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out,one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre.Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that hissense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the bigdramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barringhappy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live longenough to read them if they surface!)

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, inthat the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technologyhad been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social andtechnological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries(except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the newopportunities here in the West.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder UnderGlass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) anda clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complexsolution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and originalas "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

TomCat

a.k.a. Last CenturyDetective

View my complete profile

The Usual Suspect

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated tothe great detective stories of yore and theirneo-classical descendants.

An Elementary Observation

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imaginationwith tales of doom and gloom; right now I haveanother chilling tale for you. A tale of dangerand mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre).

"The detectives who explain miracles, evenmore than their colleagues who clarify moresecular matters, play the Promethean role ofasserting man's intellect and inventivenesseven against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, andgrotesque. I like some vividness of colour andimagination flashing out of my plot, since Icannot find a story enthralling solely on thegrounds that it sounds as though it might reallyhave happened. I do not care to hear the humof everyday life; I much prefer to hear thechuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadlybells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).

Witnesses' Statements

Currently tailing me...

Follow by Email (Papertrail)

Email address... Submit

Insightful Informants'Do You Write Under Your OwnName?'Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review4 hours ago

The Invisible Event#122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: Aguest post by Matt Ingwalson6 hours ago

Mystery FileAn Old Time Radio Review by MichaelShonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT(1939-40).12 hours ago

Ontos"You Can't Escape Me, Stenton"15 hours ago

The Case Files of Ho-LingLovely But Lethal16 hours ago

The Rap SheetMcFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots23 hours ago

In Search of the Classic MysteryNovelPuzzle Doctor At The Movies –Ghostbusters (2016)1 day ago

Tipping My FedoraJason Bourne – cinema review1 day ago

Past Offences‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944bookreviews1 day ago

Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books,Music, CinemaThe Intern, 20151 day ago

My Reader's BlockAugust Read It Again, Sam Reviews1 day ago

Noah's ArchivesA quick note on opposites (Crosses,Coffins, and Oranges)2 days ago

Classic Mysteries"The Dancing Druids"2 days ago

Vintage Pop FictionsG.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair2 days ago

Pretty Sinister Books"Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time"2 days ago

a hot cup of pleasureTERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL(Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHENMORTON3 days ago

My Japanese bookshelfThe Ghost Murder Case3 days ago

The Passing TrampClassic Crime, Classic Parodies4 days ago

Escape to Adventure!Featuring the Saint5 days ago

The Study LampThis Post is Brought to You By....5 weeks ago

The Consulting DetectiveUpdate - Back on Baker Street5 weeks ago

Yet Another Crime Fiction BlogBoring First-Person Narrators1 month ago

At the Scene of the CrimeYou are not the millionth visitor!2 months ago

At the Villa RoseBa-bye2 months ago

A Penguin a WeekPenguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by JamesLeo Herlihy2 months ago

A Perfect Locked RoomI Object!2 months ago

The Corpse Steps OutEQMM3 months ago

Complete Disregard for SpoilersDeath at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934)7 months ago

Vanished Into Thin AirPeter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 19968 months ago

The Locked RoomMystery and More Mystery by RobertArthur1 year ago

Only DetectRICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004).2 years ago

The Ingenious Game Of MurderDetective Novels of Todd Downing2 years ago

On the Threshold of Chaos3 weeks already...3 years ago

The John Dickson Carr Collector

Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection

Golden Age of Detection Wiki

GADetection Group

Locked Room International

Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries)

Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction

M.P.O. Books (Dutch)

Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page

The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell TributeSite

The Ultimate Columbo Site!

Bureaus of Investigation

▼ 2016 (75)

▼ August (1)

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selectionof Lost Dete...

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The Newgate Calendar

The Locked Room Reader IV:The Lazy Anthologist" The career of the locked-roommystery in literature has beennothing short of exemplary ." -Donald A. Yates ("The L...

The Locked Room Reader V: ASelection of Lost DetectiveStories" It is the manuscript of acompletely unknown story byEdgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir

William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ...

Devil's Delicacies" The true witch-magic of awood on a midsummer nightwhen the trees are heavy withleaves, and every leaf, howeverstill the fore...

Risen from the Grave" All I shall beg leave tomurmur, gently, is: rubbish. Youcannot mix the two worlds likethat. This was a human crime,planned b...

Cat's Cradle" You see... assuming this to bemurder, we have to go look fora motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell(John Dickson Carr's The Ca...

The Most Consulted DossiersThis Week

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Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me

8/2/16

Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016

Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot,John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection ofLost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933)

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of afamous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of acliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad HatterMystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carreven "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively,assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories andunpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. Thisrealization came with a collection of short stories.

The late Robert Adey, who compiledLocked Room Murders (1991), wrote anintroduction for Banner Deadlines: TheImpossible Files of Senator Brooks U.Banner (2004), in which he mentionedJoseph Commings attempted to transitionfrom writing short stories to writing novels– an attempt that ended in the most tragicloss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "salesof short fiction were either slow orstationary" and tried his hand as novelist.Adey mentioned how Commings "vividlyrecalled a lunch he once had with JohnDickson Carr," someone he greatlyadmired, who was very enthusiastic aboutthe idea and had some sage advice for thebudding novelist: "why not make it alocked room?" The first attempt, TheDoctor Died First, was aborted after onlyfour chapters, but Commings eventuallycompleted four, full-length mystery novelsstarring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lostmanuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent toFrance and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, TheCrimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel andcontaining two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and timeprobably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain ofexistence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings themost. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchangefor One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) andmentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completedthe manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was tobe published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in ElleryQueen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeledKing's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditionaldetective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writerswho began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S.Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – alocked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair ofthe Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detectivestories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, GlynCarr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissuedby the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revisedintroduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carrproduced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "onelast, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts toa long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930sand early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red(1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of herwork. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and thecollection contains several unpublishedmanuscripts written in her later years." Herpapers are archived at the City University ofNew York and you can find a listing of herunpublished work on their website, whichincludes such titles as The Fearful Guest(1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) andSweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I'veseveral more of such examples, but firstthere's one more lost manuscript that ought tobe acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewedseveral novels from The Three Investigatorsseries, which were penned by such writers asRobert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey,but even this fairly innocent series suffered agreat loss: a number of websites, dedicated to

The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey andan editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not knownwith certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in"cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalonemystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which ispatiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington,Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand'sshort fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previouslyunpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar droppeda message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublishednovel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center ofunpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lostdetective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck SeasonDeath (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten,unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's afuture opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-whitephotocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really along-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete andutter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher ofa 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors intobelieving they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperbackoutfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story,because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch wasapparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of youfound it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recentlybrought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

Once a lost, unpublished story

+2 Recommend this on Google

Replies

18 comments:Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of themwere probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't haveit. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-playstyle mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C.Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It isjust that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode ofproduction after 1947.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones whosuffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smallerreadership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such anaudience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-upto Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dulldud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries.Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and RossMacdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just thatthey were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. Iimagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mysteryreaders, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just wasnot dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that pointanyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play andlocked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room themeand some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have comeout of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers hadcontinued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read inthe Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, Inevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparageit--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schoolsdominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel wasfairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seemingimpossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out,one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre.Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that hissense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the bigdramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barringhappy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live longenough to read them if they surface!)

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, inthat the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technologyhad been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social andtechnological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries(except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the newopportunities here in the West.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder UnderGlass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) anda clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complexsolution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and originalas "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

TomCat

a.k.a. Last CenturyDetective

View my complete profile

The Usual Suspect

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated tothe great detective stories of yore and theirneo-classical descendants.

An Elementary Observation

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imaginationwith tales of doom and gloom; right now I haveanother chilling tale for you. A tale of dangerand mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre).

"The detectives who explain miracles, evenmore than their colleagues who clarify moresecular matters, play the Promethean role ofasserting man's intellect and inventivenesseven against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, andgrotesque. I like some vividness of colour andimagination flashing out of my plot, since Icannot find a story enthralling solely on thegrounds that it sounds as though it might reallyhave happened. I do not care to hear the humof everyday life; I much prefer to hear thechuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadlybells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).

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The Locked Room Reader V: A Selectionof Lost Dete...

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The Newgate Calendar

The Locked Room Reader IV:The Lazy Anthologist" The career of the locked-roommystery in literature has beennothing short of exemplary ." -Donald A. Yates ("The L...

The Locked Room Reader V: ASelection of Lost DetectiveStories" It is the manuscript of acompletely unknown story byEdgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir

William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ...

Devil's Delicacies" The true witch-magic of awood on a midsummer nightwhen the trees are heavy withleaves, and every leaf, howeverstill the fore...

Risen from the Grave" All I shall beg leave tomurmur, gently, is: rubbish. Youcannot mix the two worlds likethat. This was a human crime,planned b...

Cat's Cradle" You see... assuming this to bemurder, we have to go look fora motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell(John Dickson Carr's The Ca...

The Most Consulted DossiersThis Week

More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In

Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me

8/2/16

Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016

Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot,John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection ofLost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933)

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of afamous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of acliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad HatterMystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carreven "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively,assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories andunpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. Thisrealization came with a collection of short stories.

The late Robert Adey, who compiledLocked Room Murders (1991), wrote anintroduction for Banner Deadlines: TheImpossible Files of Senator Brooks U.Banner (2004), in which he mentionedJoseph Commings attempted to transitionfrom writing short stories to writing novels– an attempt that ended in the most tragicloss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "salesof short fiction were either slow orstationary" and tried his hand as novelist.Adey mentioned how Commings "vividlyrecalled a lunch he once had with JohnDickson Carr," someone he greatlyadmired, who was very enthusiastic aboutthe idea and had some sage advice for thebudding novelist: "why not make it alocked room?" The first attempt, TheDoctor Died First, was aborted after onlyfour chapters, but Commings eventuallycompleted four, full-length mystery novelsstarring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lostmanuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent toFrance and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, TheCrimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel andcontaining two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and timeprobably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain ofexistence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings themost. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchangefor One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) andmentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completedthe manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was tobe published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in ElleryQueen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeledKing's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditionaldetective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writerswho began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S.Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – alocked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair ofthe Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detectivestories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, GlynCarr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissuedby the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revisedintroduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carrproduced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "onelast, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts toa long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930sand early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red(1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of herwork. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and thecollection contains several unpublishedmanuscripts written in her later years." Herpapers are archived at the City University ofNew York and you can find a listing of herunpublished work on their website, whichincludes such titles as The Fearful Guest(1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) andSweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I'veseveral more of such examples, but firstthere's one more lost manuscript that ought tobe acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewedseveral novels from The Three Investigatorsseries, which were penned by such writers asRobert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey,but even this fairly innocent series suffered agreat loss: a number of websites, dedicated to

The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey andan editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not knownwith certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in"cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalonemystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which ispatiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington,Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand'sshort fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previouslyunpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar droppeda message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublishednovel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center ofunpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lostdetective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck SeasonDeath (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten,unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's afuture opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-whitephotocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really along-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete andutter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher ofa 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors intobelieving they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperbackoutfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story,because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch wasapparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of youfound it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recentlybrought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

Once a lost, unpublished story

+2 Recommend this on Google

Replies

18 comments:Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of themwere probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't haveit. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-playstyle mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C.Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It isjust that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode ofproduction after 1947.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones whosuffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smallerreadership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such anaudience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-upto Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dulldud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries.Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and RossMacdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just thatthey were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. Iimagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mysteryreaders, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just wasnot dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that pointanyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play andlocked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room themeand some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have comeout of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers hadcontinued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read inthe Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, Inevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparageit--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schoolsdominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel wasfairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seemingimpossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out,one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre.Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that hissense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the bigdramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barringhappy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live longenough to read them if they surface!)

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, inthat the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technologyhad been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social andtechnological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries(except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the newopportunities here in the West.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder UnderGlass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) anda clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complexsolution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and originalas "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

TomCat

a.k.a. Last CenturyDetective

View my complete profile

The Usual Suspect

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated tothe great detective stories of yore and theirneo-classical descendants.

An Elementary Observation

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imaginationwith tales of doom and gloom; right now I haveanother chilling tale for you. A tale of dangerand mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre).

"The detectives who explain miracles, evenmore than their colleagues who clarify moresecular matters, play the Promethean role ofasserting man's intellect and inventivenesseven against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, andgrotesque. I like some vividness of colour andimagination flashing out of my plot, since Icannot find a story enthralling solely on thegrounds that it sounds as though it might reallyhave happened. I do not care to hear the humof everyday life; I much prefer to hear thechuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadlybells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).

Witnesses' Statements

Currently tailing me...

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Insightful Informants'Do You Write Under Your OwnName?'Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review4 hours ago

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Mystery FileAn Old Time Radio Review by MichaelShonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT(1939-40).12 hours ago

Ontos"You Can't Escape Me, Stenton"15 hours ago

The Case Files of Ho-LingLovely But Lethal16 hours ago

The Rap SheetMcFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots23 hours ago

In Search of the Classic MysteryNovelPuzzle Doctor At The Movies –Ghostbusters (2016)1 day ago

Tipping My FedoraJason Bourne – cinema review1 day ago

Past Offences‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944bookreviews1 day ago

Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books,Music, CinemaThe Intern, 20151 day ago

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Noah's ArchivesA quick note on opposites (Crosses,Coffins, and Oranges)2 days ago

Classic Mysteries"The Dancing Druids"2 days ago

Vintage Pop FictionsG.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair2 days ago

Pretty Sinister Books"Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time"2 days ago

a hot cup of pleasureTERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL(Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHENMORTON3 days ago

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The Passing TrampClassic Crime, Classic Parodies4 days ago

Escape to Adventure!Featuring the Saint5 days ago

The Study LampThis Post is Brought to You By....5 weeks ago

The Consulting DetectiveUpdate - Back on Baker Street5 weeks ago

Yet Another Crime Fiction BlogBoring First-Person Narrators1 month ago

At the Scene of the CrimeYou are not the millionth visitor!2 months ago

At the Villa RoseBa-bye2 months ago

A Penguin a WeekPenguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by JamesLeo Herlihy2 months ago

A Perfect Locked RoomI Object!2 months ago

The Corpse Steps OutEQMM3 months ago

Complete Disregard for SpoilersDeath at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934)7 months ago

Vanished Into Thin AirPeter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 19968 months ago

The Locked RoomMystery and More Mystery by RobertArthur1 year ago

Only DetectRICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004).2 years ago

The Ingenious Game Of MurderDetective Novels of Todd Downing2 years ago

On the Threshold of Chaos3 weeks already...3 years ago

The John Dickson Carr Collector

Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection

Golden Age of Detection Wiki

GADetection Group

Locked Room International

Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries)

Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction

M.P.O. Books (Dutch)

Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page

The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell TributeSite

The Ultimate Columbo Site!

Bureaus of Investigation

▼ 2016 (75)

▼ August (1)

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selectionof Lost Dete...

► July (13)

► June (9)

► May (11)

► April (11)

► March (9)

► February (9)

► January (12)

► 2015 (80)

► 2014 (68)

► 2013 (94)

► 2012 (113)

► 2011 (140)

The Newgate Calendar

The Locked Room Reader IV:The Lazy Anthologist" The career of the locked-roommystery in literature has beennothing short of exemplary ." -Donald A. Yates ("The L...

The Locked Room Reader V: ASelection of Lost DetectiveStories" It is the manuscript of acompletely unknown story byEdgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir

William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ...

Devil's Delicacies" The true witch-magic of awood on a midsummer nightwhen the trees are heavy withleaves, and every leaf, howeverstill the fore...

Risen from the Grave" All I shall beg leave tomurmur, gently, is: rubbish. Youcannot mix the two worlds likethat. This was a human crime,planned b...

Cat's Cradle" You see... assuming this to bemurder, we have to go look fora motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell(John Dickson Carr's The Ca...

The Most Consulted DossiersThis Week

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Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me

8/2/16

Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016

Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot,John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection ofLost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933)

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of afamous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of acliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad HatterMystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carreven "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively,assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories andunpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. Thisrealization came with a collection of short stories.

The late Robert Adey, who compiledLocked Room Murders (1991), wrote anintroduction for Banner Deadlines: TheImpossible Files of Senator Brooks U.Banner (2004), in which he mentionedJoseph Commings attempted to transitionfrom writing short stories to writing novels– an attempt that ended in the most tragicloss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "salesof short fiction were either slow orstationary" and tried his hand as novelist.Adey mentioned how Commings "vividlyrecalled a lunch he once had with JohnDickson Carr," someone he greatlyadmired, who was very enthusiastic aboutthe idea and had some sage advice for thebudding novelist: "why not make it alocked room?" The first attempt, TheDoctor Died First, was aborted after onlyfour chapters, but Commings eventuallycompleted four, full-length mystery novelsstarring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lostmanuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent toFrance and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, TheCrimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel andcontaining two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and timeprobably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain ofexistence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings themost. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchangefor One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) andmentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completedthe manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was tobe published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in ElleryQueen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeledKing's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditionaldetective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writerswho began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S.Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – alocked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair ofthe Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detectivestories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, GlynCarr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissuedby the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revisedintroduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carrproduced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "onelast, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts toa long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930sand early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red(1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of herwork. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and thecollection contains several unpublishedmanuscripts written in her later years." Herpapers are archived at the City University ofNew York and you can find a listing of herunpublished work on their website, whichincludes such titles as The Fearful Guest(1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) andSweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I'veseveral more of such examples, but firstthere's one more lost manuscript that ought tobe acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewedseveral novels from The Three Investigatorsseries, which were penned by such writers asRobert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey,but even this fairly innocent series suffered agreat loss: a number of websites, dedicated to

The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey andan editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not knownwith certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in"cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalonemystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which ispatiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington,Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand'sshort fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previouslyunpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar droppeda message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublishednovel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center ofunpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lostdetective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck SeasonDeath (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten,unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's afuture opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-whitephotocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really along-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete andutter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher ofa 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors intobelieving they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperbackoutfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story,because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch wasapparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of youfound it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recentlybrought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

Once a lost, unpublished story

+2 Recommend this on Google

Replies

18 comments:Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of themwere probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't haveit. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-playstyle mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C.Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It isjust that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode ofproduction after 1947.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones whosuffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smallerreadership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such anaudience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-upto Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dulldud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries.Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and RossMacdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just thatthey were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. Iimagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mysteryreaders, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just wasnot dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that pointanyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play andlocked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room themeand some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have comeout of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers hadcontinued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read inthe Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, Inevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparageit--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schoolsdominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel wasfairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seemingimpossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out,one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre.Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that hissense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the bigdramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barringhappy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live longenough to read them if they surface!)

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, inthat the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technologyhad been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social andtechnological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries(except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the newopportunities here in the West.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder UnderGlass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) anda clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complexsolution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and originalas "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

TomCat

a.k.a. Last CenturyDetective

View my complete profile

The Usual Suspect

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated tothe great detective stories of yore and theirneo-classical descendants.

An Elementary Observation

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imaginationwith tales of doom and gloom; right now I haveanother chilling tale for you. A tale of dangerand mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre).

"The detectives who explain miracles, evenmore than their colleagues who clarify moresecular matters, play the Promethean role ofasserting man's intellect and inventivenesseven against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, andgrotesque. I like some vividness of colour andimagination flashing out of my plot, since Icannot find a story enthralling solely on thegrounds that it sounds as though it might reallyhave happened. I do not care to hear the humof everyday life; I much prefer to hear thechuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadlybells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).

Witnesses' Statements

Currently tailing me...

Follow by Email (Papertrail)

Email address... Submit

Insightful Informants'Do You Write Under Your OwnName?'Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review4 hours ago

The Invisible Event#122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: Aguest post by Matt Ingwalson6 hours ago

Mystery FileAn Old Time Radio Review by MichaelShonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT(1939-40).12 hours ago

Ontos"You Can't Escape Me, Stenton"15 hours ago

The Case Files of Ho-LingLovely But Lethal16 hours ago

The Rap SheetMcFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots23 hours ago

In Search of the Classic MysteryNovelPuzzle Doctor At The Movies –Ghostbusters (2016)1 day ago

Tipping My FedoraJason Bourne – cinema review1 day ago

Past Offences‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944bookreviews1 day ago

Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books,Music, CinemaThe Intern, 20151 day ago

My Reader's BlockAugust Read It Again, Sam Reviews1 day ago

Noah's ArchivesA quick note on opposites (Crosses,Coffins, and Oranges)2 days ago

Classic Mysteries"The Dancing Druids"2 days ago

Vintage Pop FictionsG.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair2 days ago

Pretty Sinister Books"Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time"2 days ago

a hot cup of pleasureTERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL(Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHENMORTON3 days ago

My Japanese bookshelfThe Ghost Murder Case3 days ago

The Passing TrampClassic Crime, Classic Parodies4 days ago

Escape to Adventure!Featuring the Saint5 days ago

The Study LampThis Post is Brought to You By....5 weeks ago

The Consulting DetectiveUpdate - Back on Baker Street5 weeks ago

Yet Another Crime Fiction BlogBoring First-Person Narrators1 month ago

At the Scene of the CrimeYou are not the millionth visitor!2 months ago

At the Villa RoseBa-bye2 months ago

A Penguin a WeekPenguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by JamesLeo Herlihy2 months ago

A Perfect Locked RoomI Object!2 months ago

The Corpse Steps OutEQMM3 months ago

Complete Disregard for SpoilersDeath at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934)7 months ago

Vanished Into Thin AirPeter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 19968 months ago

The Locked RoomMystery and More Mystery by RobertArthur1 year ago

Only DetectRICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004).2 years ago

The Ingenious Game Of MurderDetective Novels of Todd Downing2 years ago

On the Threshold of Chaos3 weeks already...3 years ago

The John Dickson Carr Collector

Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection

Golden Age of Detection Wiki

GADetection Group

Locked Room International

Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries)

Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction

M.P.O. Books (Dutch)

Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page

The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell TributeSite

The Ultimate Columbo Site!

Bureaus of Investigation

▼ 2016 (75)

▼ August (1)

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selectionof Lost Dete...

► July (13)

► June (9)

► May (11)

► April (11)

► March (9)

► February (9)

► January (12)

► 2015 (80)

► 2014 (68)

► 2013 (94)

► 2012 (113)

► 2011 (140)

The Newgate Calendar

The Locked Room Reader IV:The Lazy Anthologist" The career of the locked-roommystery in literature has beennothing short of exemplary ." -Donald A. Yates ("The L...

The Locked Room Reader V: ASelection of Lost DetectiveStories" It is the manuscript of acompletely unknown story byEdgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir

William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ...

Devil's Delicacies" The true witch-magic of awood on a midsummer nightwhen the trees are heavy withleaves, and every leaf, howeverstill the fore...

Risen from the Grave" All I shall beg leave tomurmur, gently, is: rubbish. Youcannot mix the two worlds likethat. This was a human crime,planned b...

Cat's Cradle" You see... assuming this to bemurder, we have to go look fora motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell(John Dickson Carr's The Ca...

The Most Consulted DossiersThis Week

More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In

Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me

8/2/16

Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016

Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot,John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection ofLost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933)

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of afamous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of acliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad HatterMystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carreven "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively,assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories andunpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. Thisrealization came with a collection of short stories.

The late Robert Adey, who compiledLocked Room Murders (1991), wrote anintroduction for Banner Deadlines: TheImpossible Files of Senator Brooks U.Banner (2004), in which he mentionedJoseph Commings attempted to transitionfrom writing short stories to writing novels– an attempt that ended in the most tragicloss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "salesof short fiction were either slow orstationary" and tried his hand as novelist.Adey mentioned how Commings "vividlyrecalled a lunch he once had with JohnDickson Carr," someone he greatlyadmired, who was very enthusiastic aboutthe idea and had some sage advice for thebudding novelist: "why not make it alocked room?" The first attempt, TheDoctor Died First, was aborted after onlyfour chapters, but Commings eventuallycompleted four, full-length mystery novelsstarring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lostmanuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent toFrance and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, TheCrimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel andcontaining two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and timeprobably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain ofexistence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings themost. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchangefor One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) andmentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completedthe manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was tobe published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in ElleryQueen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeledKing's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditionaldetective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writerswho began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S.Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – alocked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair ofthe Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detectivestories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, GlynCarr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissuedby the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revisedintroduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carrproduced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "onelast, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts toa long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930sand early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red(1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of herwork. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and thecollection contains several unpublishedmanuscripts written in her later years." Herpapers are archived at the City University ofNew York and you can find a listing of herunpublished work on their website, whichincludes such titles as The Fearful Guest(1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) andSweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I'veseveral more of such examples, but firstthere's one more lost manuscript that ought tobe acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewedseveral novels from The Three Investigatorsseries, which were penned by such writers asRobert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey,but even this fairly innocent series suffered agreat loss: a number of websites, dedicated to

The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey andan editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not knownwith certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in"cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalonemystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which ispatiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington,Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand'sshort fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previouslyunpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar droppeda message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublishednovel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center ofunpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lostdetective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck SeasonDeath (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten,unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's afuture opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-whitephotocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really along-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete andutter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher ofa 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors intobelieving they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperbackoutfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story,because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch wasapparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of youfound it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recentlybrought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

Once a lost, unpublished story

+2 Recommend this on Google

Replies

18 comments:Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of themwere probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't haveit. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-playstyle mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C.Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It isjust that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode ofproduction after 1947.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones whosuffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smallerreadership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such anaudience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-upto Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dulldud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries.Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and RossMacdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just thatthey were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. Iimagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mysteryreaders, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just wasnot dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that pointanyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play andlocked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room themeand some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have comeout of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers hadcontinued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read inthe Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, Inevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparageit--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schoolsdominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel wasfairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seemingimpossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out,one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre.Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that hissense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the bigdramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barringhappy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live longenough to read them if they surface!)

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, inthat the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technologyhad been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social andtechnological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries(except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the newopportunities here in the West.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder UnderGlass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) anda clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complexsolution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and originalas "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

TomCat

a.k.a. Last CenturyDetective

View my complete profile

The Usual Suspect

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated tothe great detective stories of yore and theirneo-classical descendants.

An Elementary Observation

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imaginationwith tales of doom and gloom; right now I haveanother chilling tale for you. A tale of dangerand mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre).

"The detectives who explain miracles, evenmore than their colleagues who clarify moresecular matters, play the Promethean role ofasserting man's intellect and inventivenesseven against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, andgrotesque. I like some vividness of colour andimagination flashing out of my plot, since Icannot find a story enthralling solely on thegrounds that it sounds as though it might reallyhave happened. I do not care to hear the humof everyday life; I much prefer to hear thechuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadlybells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).

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Mystery FileAn Old Time Radio Review by MichaelShonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT(1939-40).12 hours ago

Ontos"You Can't Escape Me, Stenton"15 hours ago

The Case Files of Ho-LingLovely But Lethal16 hours ago

The Rap SheetMcFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots23 hours ago

In Search of the Classic MysteryNovelPuzzle Doctor At The Movies –Ghostbusters (2016)1 day ago

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Past Offences‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944bookreviews1 day ago

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Pretty Sinister Books"Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time"2 days ago

a hot cup of pleasureTERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL(Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHENMORTON3 days ago

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The Study LampThis Post is Brought to You By....5 weeks ago

The Consulting DetectiveUpdate - Back on Baker Street5 weeks ago

Yet Another Crime Fiction BlogBoring First-Person Narrators1 month ago

At the Scene of the CrimeYou are not the millionth visitor!2 months ago

At the Villa RoseBa-bye2 months ago

A Penguin a WeekPenguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by JamesLeo Herlihy2 months ago

A Perfect Locked RoomI Object!2 months ago

The Corpse Steps OutEQMM3 months ago

Complete Disregard for SpoilersDeath at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934)7 months ago

Vanished Into Thin AirPeter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 19968 months ago

The Locked RoomMystery and More Mystery by RobertArthur1 year ago

Only DetectRICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004).2 years ago

The Ingenious Game Of MurderDetective Novels of Todd Downing2 years ago

On the Threshold of Chaos3 weeks already...3 years ago

The John Dickson Carr Collector

Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection

Golden Age of Detection Wiki

GADetection Group

Locked Room International

Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries)

Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction

M.P.O. Books (Dutch)

Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page

The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell TributeSite

The Ultimate Columbo Site!

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The Locked Room Reader V: A Selectionof Lost Dete...

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The Newgate Calendar

The Locked Room Reader IV:The Lazy Anthologist" The career of the locked-roommystery in literature has beennothing short of exemplary ." -Donald A. Yates ("The L...

The Locked Room Reader V: ASelection of Lost DetectiveStories" It is the manuscript of acompletely unknown story byEdgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir

William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ...

Devil's Delicacies" The true witch-magic of awood on a midsummer nightwhen the trees are heavy withleaves, and every leaf, howeverstill the fore...

Risen from the Grave" All I shall beg leave tomurmur, gently, is: rubbish. Youcannot mix the two worlds likethat. This was a human crime,planned b...

Cat's Cradle" You see... assuming this to bemurder, we have to go look fora motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell(John Dickson Carr's The Ca...

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8/2/16

Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016

Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot,John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection ofLost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933)

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of afamous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of acliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad HatterMystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carreven "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively,assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories andunpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. Thisrealization came with a collection of short stories.

The late Robert Adey, who compiledLocked Room Murders (1991), wrote anintroduction for Banner Deadlines: TheImpossible Files of Senator Brooks U.Banner (2004), in which he mentionedJoseph Commings attempted to transitionfrom writing short stories to writing novels– an attempt that ended in the most tragicloss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "salesof short fiction were either slow orstationary" and tried his hand as novelist.Adey mentioned how Commings "vividlyrecalled a lunch he once had with JohnDickson Carr," someone he greatlyadmired, who was very enthusiastic aboutthe idea and had some sage advice for thebudding novelist: "why not make it alocked room?" The first attempt, TheDoctor Died First, was aborted after onlyfour chapters, but Commings eventuallycompleted four, full-length mystery novelsstarring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lostmanuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent toFrance and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, TheCrimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel andcontaining two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and timeprobably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain ofexistence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings themost. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchangefor One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) andmentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completedthe manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was tobe published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in ElleryQueen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeledKing's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditionaldetective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writerswho began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S.Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – alocked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair ofthe Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detectivestories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, GlynCarr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissuedby the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revisedintroduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carrproduced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "onelast, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts toa long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930sand early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red(1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of herwork. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and thecollection contains several unpublishedmanuscripts written in her later years." Herpapers are archived at the City University ofNew York and you can find a listing of herunpublished work on their website, whichincludes such titles as The Fearful Guest(1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) andSweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I'veseveral more of such examples, but firstthere's one more lost manuscript that ought tobe acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewedseveral novels from The Three Investigatorsseries, which were penned by such writers asRobert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey,but even this fairly innocent series suffered agreat loss: a number of websites, dedicated to

The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey andan editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not knownwith certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in"cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalonemystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which ispatiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington,Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand'sshort fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previouslyunpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar droppeda message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublishednovel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center ofunpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lostdetective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck SeasonDeath (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten,unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's afuture opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-whitephotocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really along-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete andutter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher ofa 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors intobelieving they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperbackoutfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story,because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch wasapparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of youfound it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recentlybrought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

Once a lost, unpublished story

+2 Recommend this on Google

Replies

18 comments:Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of themwere probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't haveit. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-playstyle mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C.Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It isjust that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode ofproduction after 1947.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones whosuffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smallerreadership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such anaudience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-upto Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dulldud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries.Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and RossMacdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just thatthey were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. Iimagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mysteryreaders, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just wasnot dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that pointanyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play andlocked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room themeand some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have comeout of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers hadcontinued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read inthe Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, Inevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparageit--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schoolsdominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel wasfairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seemingimpossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out,one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre.Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that hissense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the bigdramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barringhappy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live longenough to read them if they surface!)

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, inthat the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technologyhad been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social andtechnological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries(except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the newopportunities here in the West.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder UnderGlass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) anda clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complexsolution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and originalas "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

TomCat

a.k.a. Last CenturyDetective

View my complete profile

The Usual Suspect

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated tothe great detective stories of yore and theirneo-classical descendants.

An Elementary Observation

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imaginationwith tales of doom and gloom; right now I haveanother chilling tale for you. A tale of dangerand mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre).

"The detectives who explain miracles, evenmore than their colleagues who clarify moresecular matters, play the Promethean role ofasserting man's intellect and inventivenesseven against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, andgrotesque. I like some vividness of colour andimagination flashing out of my plot, since Icannot find a story enthralling solely on thegrounds that it sounds as though it might reallyhave happened. I do not care to hear the humof everyday life; I much prefer to hear thechuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadlybells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).

Witnesses' Statements

Currently tailing me...

Follow by Email (Papertrail)

Email address... Submit

Insightful Informants'Do You Write Under Your OwnName?'Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review4 hours ago

The Invisible Event#122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: Aguest post by Matt Ingwalson6 hours ago

Mystery FileAn Old Time Radio Review by MichaelShonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT(1939-40).12 hours ago

Ontos"You Can't Escape Me, Stenton"15 hours ago

The Case Files of Ho-LingLovely But Lethal16 hours ago

The Rap SheetMcFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots23 hours ago

In Search of the Classic MysteryNovelPuzzle Doctor At The Movies –Ghostbusters (2016)1 day ago

Tipping My FedoraJason Bourne – cinema review1 day ago

Past Offences‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944bookreviews1 day ago

Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books,Music, CinemaThe Intern, 20151 day ago

My Reader's BlockAugust Read It Again, Sam Reviews1 day ago

Noah's ArchivesA quick note on opposites (Crosses,Coffins, and Oranges)2 days ago

Classic Mysteries"The Dancing Druids"2 days ago

Vintage Pop FictionsG.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair2 days ago

Pretty Sinister Books"Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time"2 days ago

a hot cup of pleasureTERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL(Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHENMORTON3 days ago

My Japanese bookshelfThe Ghost Murder Case3 days ago

The Passing TrampClassic Crime, Classic Parodies4 days ago

Escape to Adventure!Featuring the Saint5 days ago

The Study LampThis Post is Brought to You By....5 weeks ago

The Consulting DetectiveUpdate - Back on Baker Street5 weeks ago

Yet Another Crime Fiction BlogBoring First-Person Narrators1 month ago

At the Scene of the CrimeYou are not the millionth visitor!2 months ago

At the Villa RoseBa-bye2 months ago

A Penguin a WeekPenguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by JamesLeo Herlihy2 months ago

A Perfect Locked RoomI Object!2 months ago

The Corpse Steps OutEQMM3 months ago

Complete Disregard for SpoilersDeath at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934)7 months ago

Vanished Into Thin AirPeter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 19968 months ago

The Locked RoomMystery and More Mystery by RobertArthur1 year ago

Only DetectRICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004).2 years ago

The Ingenious Game Of MurderDetective Novels of Todd Downing2 years ago

On the Threshold of Chaos3 weeks already...3 years ago

The John Dickson Carr Collector

Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection

Golden Age of Detection Wiki

GADetection Group

Locked Room International

Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries)

Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction

M.P.O. Books (Dutch)

Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page

The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell TributeSite

The Ultimate Columbo Site!

Bureaus of Investigation

▼ 2016 (75)

▼ August (1)

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selectionof Lost Dete...

► July (13)

► June (9)

► May (11)

► April (11)

► March (9)

► February (9)

► January (12)

► 2015 (80)

► 2014 (68)

► 2013 (94)

► 2012 (113)

► 2011 (140)

The Newgate Calendar

The Locked Room Reader IV:The Lazy Anthologist" The career of the locked-roommystery in literature has beennothing short of exemplary ." -Donald A. Yates ("The L...

The Locked Room Reader V: ASelection of Lost DetectiveStories" It is the manuscript of acompletely unknown story byEdgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir

William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ...

Devil's Delicacies" The true witch-magic of awood on a midsummer nightwhen the trees are heavy withleaves, and every leaf, howeverstill the fore...

Risen from the Grave" All I shall beg leave tomurmur, gently, is: rubbish. Youcannot mix the two worlds likethat. This was a human crime,planned b...

Cat's Cradle" You see... assuming this to bemurder, we have to go look fora motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell(John Dickson Carr's The Ca...

The Most Consulted DossiersThis Week

More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In

Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me

8/2/16

Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016

Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot,John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection ofLost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933)

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of afamous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of acliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad HatterMystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carreven "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively,assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories andunpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. Thisrealization came with a collection of short stories.

The late Robert Adey, who compiledLocked Room Murders (1991), wrote anintroduction for Banner Deadlines: TheImpossible Files of Senator Brooks U.Banner (2004), in which he mentionedJoseph Commings attempted to transitionfrom writing short stories to writing novels– an attempt that ended in the most tragicloss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "salesof short fiction were either slow orstationary" and tried his hand as novelist.Adey mentioned how Commings "vividlyrecalled a lunch he once had with JohnDickson Carr," someone he greatlyadmired, who was very enthusiastic aboutthe idea and had some sage advice for thebudding novelist: "why not make it alocked room?" The first attempt, TheDoctor Died First, was aborted after onlyfour chapters, but Commings eventuallycompleted four, full-length mystery novelsstarring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lostmanuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent toFrance and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, TheCrimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel andcontaining two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and timeprobably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain ofexistence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings themost. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchangefor One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) andmentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completedthe manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was tobe published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in ElleryQueen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeledKing's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditionaldetective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writerswho began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S.Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – alocked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair ofthe Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detectivestories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, GlynCarr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissuedby the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revisedintroduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carrproduced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "onelast, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts toa long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930sand early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red(1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of herwork. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and thecollection contains several unpublishedmanuscripts written in her later years." Herpapers are archived at the City University ofNew York and you can find a listing of herunpublished work on their website, whichincludes such titles as The Fearful Guest(1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) andSweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I'veseveral more of such examples, but firstthere's one more lost manuscript that ought tobe acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewedseveral novels from The Three Investigatorsseries, which were penned by such writers asRobert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey,but even this fairly innocent series suffered agreat loss: a number of websites, dedicated to

The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey andan editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not knownwith certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in"cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalonemystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which ispatiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington,Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand'sshort fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previouslyunpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar droppeda message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublishednovel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center ofunpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lostdetective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck SeasonDeath (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten,unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's afuture opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-whitephotocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really along-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete andutter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher ofa 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors intobelieving they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperbackoutfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story,because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch wasapparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of youfound it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recentlybrought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

Once a lost, unpublished story

+2 Recommend this on Google

Replies

18 comments:Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of themwere probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't haveit. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-playstyle mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C.Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It isjust that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode ofproduction after 1947.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones whosuffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smallerreadership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such anaudience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-upto Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dulldud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries.Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and RossMacdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just thatthey were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. Iimagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mysteryreaders, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just wasnot dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that pointanyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play andlocked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room themeand some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have comeout of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers hadcontinued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read inthe Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, Inevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparageit--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schoolsdominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel wasfairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seemingimpossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out,one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre.Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that hissense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the bigdramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barringhappy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live longenough to read them if they surface!)

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, inthat the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technologyhad been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social andtechnological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries(except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the newopportunities here in the West.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder UnderGlass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) anda clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complexsolution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and originalas "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

TomCat

a.k.a. Last CenturyDetective

View my complete profile

The Usual Suspect

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated tothe great detective stories of yore and theirneo-classical descendants.

An Elementary Observation

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imaginationwith tales of doom and gloom; right now I haveanother chilling tale for you. A tale of dangerand mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre).

"The detectives who explain miracles, evenmore than their colleagues who clarify moresecular matters, play the Promethean role ofasserting man's intellect and inventivenesseven against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, andgrotesque. I like some vividness of colour andimagination flashing out of my plot, since Icannot find a story enthralling solely on thegrounds that it sounds as though it might reallyhave happened. I do not care to hear the humof everyday life; I much prefer to hear thechuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadlybells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).

Witnesses' Statements

Currently tailing me...

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Email address... Submit

Insightful Informants'Do You Write Under Your OwnName?'Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review4 hours ago

The Invisible Event#122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: Aguest post by Matt Ingwalson6 hours ago

Mystery FileAn Old Time Radio Review by MichaelShonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT(1939-40).12 hours ago

Ontos"You Can't Escape Me, Stenton"15 hours ago

The Case Files of Ho-LingLovely But Lethal16 hours ago

The Rap SheetMcFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots23 hours ago

In Search of the Classic MysteryNovelPuzzle Doctor At The Movies –Ghostbusters (2016)1 day ago

Tipping My FedoraJason Bourne – cinema review1 day ago

Past Offences‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944bookreviews1 day ago

Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books,Music, CinemaThe Intern, 20151 day ago

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Classic Mysteries"The Dancing Druids"2 days ago

Vintage Pop FictionsG.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair2 days ago

Pretty Sinister Books"Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time"2 days ago

a hot cup of pleasureTERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL(Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHENMORTON3 days ago

My Japanese bookshelfThe Ghost Murder Case3 days ago

The Passing TrampClassic Crime, Classic Parodies4 days ago

Escape to Adventure!Featuring the Saint5 days ago

The Study LampThis Post is Brought to You By....5 weeks ago

The Consulting DetectiveUpdate - Back on Baker Street5 weeks ago

Yet Another Crime Fiction BlogBoring First-Person Narrators1 month ago

At the Scene of the CrimeYou are not the millionth visitor!2 months ago

At the Villa RoseBa-bye2 months ago

A Penguin a WeekPenguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by JamesLeo Herlihy2 months ago

A Perfect Locked RoomI Object!2 months ago

The Corpse Steps OutEQMM3 months ago

Complete Disregard for SpoilersDeath at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934)7 months ago

Vanished Into Thin AirPeter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 19968 months ago

The Locked RoomMystery and More Mystery by RobertArthur1 year ago

Only DetectRICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004).2 years ago

The Ingenious Game Of MurderDetective Novels of Todd Downing2 years ago

On the Threshold of Chaos3 weeks already...3 years ago

The John Dickson Carr Collector

Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection

Golden Age of Detection Wiki

GADetection Group

Locked Room International

Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries)

Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction

M.P.O. Books (Dutch)

Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page

The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell TributeSite

The Ultimate Columbo Site!

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The Locked Room Reader V: A Selectionof Lost Dete...

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The Newgate Calendar

The Locked Room Reader IV:The Lazy Anthologist" The career of the locked-roommystery in literature has beennothing short of exemplary ." -Donald A. Yates ("The L...

The Locked Room Reader V: ASelection of Lost DetectiveStories" It is the manuscript of acompletely unknown story byEdgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir

William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ...

Devil's Delicacies" The true witch-magic of awood on a midsummer nightwhen the trees are heavy withleaves, and every leaf, howeverstill the fore...

Risen from the Grave" All I shall beg leave tomurmur, gently, is: rubbish. Youcannot mix the two worlds likethat. This was a human crime,planned b...

Cat's Cradle" You see... assuming this to bemurder, we have to go look fora motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell(John Dickson Carr's The Ca...

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Headquarters The Muniment Room Contact Me

8/2/16

Posted by TomCat on 8/02/2016

Toe-Tags: Anthony Boucher, Bill Pronzini, C. Daly King, Edward D. Hoch, Glyn Carr, Hake Talbot,John Dickson Carr, Joseph Commings, Locked Room Mysteries, M.V. Carey, Theodora DuBois

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection ofLost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933)

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of afamous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of acliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad HatterMystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carreven "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively,assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories andunpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. Thisrealization came with a collection of short stories.

The late Robert Adey, who compiledLocked Room Murders (1991), wrote anintroduction for Banner Deadlines: TheImpossible Files of Senator Brooks U.Banner (2004), in which he mentionedJoseph Commings attempted to transitionfrom writing short stories to writing novels– an attempt that ended in the most tragicloss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "salesof short fiction were either slow orstationary" and tried his hand as novelist.Adey mentioned how Commings "vividlyrecalled a lunch he once had with JohnDickson Carr," someone he greatlyadmired, who was very enthusiastic aboutthe idea and had some sage advice for thebudding novelist: "why not make it alocked room?" The first attempt, TheDoctor Died First, was aborted after onlyfour chapters, but Commings eventuallycompleted four, full-length mystery novelsstarring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lostmanuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent toFrance and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, TheCrimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel andcontaining two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and timeprobably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain ofexistence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings themost. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchangefor One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) andmentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completedthe manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was tobe published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in ElleryQueen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeledKing's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditionaldetective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writerswho began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S.Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – alocked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair ofthe Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detectivestories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, GlynCarr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissuedby the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revisedintroduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carrproduced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "onelast, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts toa long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930sand early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red(1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of herwork. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and thecollection contains several unpublishedmanuscripts written in her later years." Herpapers are archived at the City University ofNew York and you can find a listing of herunpublished work on their website, whichincludes such titles as The Fearful Guest(1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) andSweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I'veseveral more of such examples, but firstthere's one more lost manuscript that ought tobe acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewedseveral novels from The Three Investigatorsseries, which were penned by such writers asRobert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey,but even this fairly innocent series suffered agreat loss: a number of websites, dedicated to

The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey andan editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not knownwith certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in"cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalonemystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which ispatiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington,Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand'sshort fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previouslyunpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar droppeda message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublishednovel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center ofunpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lostdetective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck SeasonDeath (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten,unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's afuture opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-whitephotocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really along-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete andutter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher ofa 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors intobelieving they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperbackoutfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story,because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch wasapparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of youfound it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recentlybrought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

Once a lost, unpublished story

+2 Recommend this on Google

Replies

18 comments:Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 9:43 AM

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of themwere probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't haveit. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-playstyle mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C.Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It isjust that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode ofproduction after 1947.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:24 AM

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones whosuffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smallerreadership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such anaudience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-upto Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dulldud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries.Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 12:06 PM

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and RossMacdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just thatthey were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. Iimagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mysteryreaders, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just wasnot dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that pointanyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 12:20 PM

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play andlocked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room themeand some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have comeout of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers hadcontinued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:05 PM

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read inthe Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, Inevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparageit--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schoolsdominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel wasfairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seemingimpossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out,one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre.Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that hissense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the bigdramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barringhappy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live longenough to read them if they surface!)

Anonymous August 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, inthat the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technologyhad been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social andtechnological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries(except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the newopportunities here in the West.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder UnderGlass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) anda clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complexsolution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and originalas "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

TomCat

a.k.a. Last CenturyDetective

View my complete profile

The Usual Suspect

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated tothe great detective stories of yore and theirneo-classical descendants.

An Elementary Observation

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imaginationwith tales of doom and gloom; right now I haveanother chilling tale for you. A tale of dangerand mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre).

"The detectives who explain miracles, evenmore than their colleagues who clarify moresecular matters, play the Promethean role ofasserting man's intellect and inventivenesseven against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, andgrotesque. I like some vividness of colour andimagination flashing out of my plot, since Icannot find a story enthralling solely on thegrounds that it sounds as though it might reallyhave happened. I do not care to hear the humof everyday life; I much prefer to hear thechuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadlybells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).

Witnesses' Statements

Currently tailing me...

Follow by Email (Papertrail)

Email address... Submit

Insightful Informants'Do You Write Under Your OwnName?'Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review4 hours ago

The Invisible Event#122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: Aguest post by Matt Ingwalson6 hours ago

Mystery FileAn Old Time Radio Review by MichaelShonk: BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT(1939-40).12 hours ago

Ontos"You Can't Escape Me, Stenton"15 hours ago

The Case Files of Ho-LingLovely But Lethal16 hours ago

The Rap SheetMcFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots23 hours ago

In Search of the Classic MysteryNovelPuzzle Doctor At The Movies –Ghostbusters (2016)1 day ago

Tipping My FedoraJason Bourne – cinema review1 day ago

Past Offences‘Stop reading NOW’: The #1944bookreviews1 day ago

Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books,Music, CinemaThe Intern, 20151 day ago

My Reader's BlockAugust Read It Again, Sam Reviews1 day ago

Noah's ArchivesA quick note on opposites (Crosses,Coffins, and Oranges)2 days ago

Classic Mysteries"The Dancing Druids"2 days ago

Vintage Pop FictionsG.K. Chesterton's The Donnington Affair2 days ago

Pretty Sinister Books"Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time"2 days ago

a hot cup of pleasureTERROR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL(Ed.) ELLEKE BOEHMER & STEPHENMORTON3 days ago

My Japanese bookshelfThe Ghost Murder Case3 days ago

The Passing TrampClassic Crime, Classic Parodies4 days ago

Escape to Adventure!Featuring the Saint5 days ago

The Study LampThis Post is Brought to You By....5 weeks ago

The Consulting DetectiveUpdate - Back on Baker Street5 weeks ago

Yet Another Crime Fiction BlogBoring First-Person Narrators1 month ago

At the Scene of the CrimeYou are not the millionth visitor!2 months ago

At the Villa RoseBa-bye2 months ago

A Penguin a WeekPenguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by JamesLeo Herlihy2 months ago

A Perfect Locked RoomI Object!2 months ago

The Corpse Steps OutEQMM3 months ago

Complete Disregard for SpoilersDeath at the Opera (Gladys Mitchell, 1934)7 months ago

Vanished Into Thin AirPeter Lovesey – Bloodhounds, 19968 months ago

The Locked RoomMystery and More Mystery by RobertArthur1 year ago

Only DetectRICHARD ALEAS. Little Girl Lost (2004).2 years ago

The Ingenious Game Of MurderDetective Novels of Todd Downing2 years ago

On the Threshold of Chaos3 weeks already...3 years ago

The John Dickson Carr Collector

Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection

Golden Age of Detection Wiki

GADetection Group

Locked Room International

Hal White (author of the Rev. Dean Mysteries)

Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction

M.P.O. Books (Dutch)

Grobius Shortling Mystery Start Page

The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell TributeSite

The Ultimate Columbo Site!

Bureaus of Investigation

▼ 2016 (75)

▼ August (1)

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selectionof Lost Dete...

► July (13)

► June (9)

► May (11)

► April (11)

► March (9)

► February (9)

► January (12)

► 2015 (80)

► 2014 (68)

► 2013 (94)

► 2012 (113)

► 2011 (140)

The Newgate Calendar

The Locked Room Reader IV:The Lazy Anthologist" The career of the locked-roommystery in literature has beennothing short of exemplary ." -Donald A. Yates ("The L...

The Locked Room Reader V: ASelection of Lost DetectiveStories" It is the manuscript of acompletely unknown story byEdgar Allan Poe ..." - Sir

William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's ...

Devil's Delicacies" The true witch-magic of awood on a midsummer nightwhen the trees are heavy withleaves, and every leaf, howeverstill the fore...

Risen from the Grave" All I shall beg leave tomurmur, gently, is: rubbish. Youcannot mix the two worlds likethat. This was a human crime,planned b...

Cat's Cradle" You see... assuming this to bemurder, we have to go look fora motive ." - Dr. Gideon Fell(John Dickson Carr's The Ca...

The Most Consulted DossiersThis Week

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Beneath the Stains of Time The Locked Room Reader V A Selection of Lost Detective Stories.pdfSaved to Dropbox • Aug 3, 2016, 10:33 AM

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Page 2: Beneath the Stains of Time The Locked Room Reader V A … · 2016. 8. 3. · Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery,

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

Presents from the Past" ...And all that was left to dowas put together the pieces ." -Hajime Kindaichi ( TheKindaichi Case Files: Smokeand ...My Favorite Locked RoomMysteries I: The Novels(Updated: Jan 3, 2015)" The detectives who explainmiracles, even more than theircolleagues who clarify more

secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

Nowhere to Hide" The lamps are going out allover Europe... " - EdwardGrey The first conflict ofinterests on a global scale,usual...Haunted House Hang-Up" You know, we do make apretty good team... especiallywhen the chips are down ." -Jonny Quest ( The RealAdventures of ...

Days of Yore" I am bound to tell what I ambeing told, but not in everycase to believe it ." - HerodotusEdgar Allan Poe 's &q...

77 Sunset Strip (1)

A.B. Cunningham (1)

A.C. Baantjer (14)

A.E.W. Mason (1)

A.M. de Jong (1)

Adventure (1)

Adventure Story (13)

Agatha Christie (3)

Aircraft Mysteries (2)

Alan Melville (1)

Alex Atkinson (1)

Alexander Laing (1)

Alexandre Dumas (1)

Anita Blackmon (1)

Anne Rowe (1)

Annie Haynes (5)

Anniversary (3)

Anthony Abbot (2)

Anthony Berkeley (4)

Anthony Boucher (6)

Anthony Gilbert (6)

Anthony Wynne (3)

Archaeological Mysteries (6)

Armstrong Livingston (1)

Art of the Detective Story (3)

Arthur J. Rees (1)

Arthur Porges (1)

Arthur W. Upfield (5)

Barry Ergang (1)

Baynard Kendrick (3)

Ben van Eysselsteijn (1)

Bertus Aafjes (2)

Best of Lists (13)

Beverley Nichols (1)

Bill Pronzini (25)

Bill S. Ballinger (1)

Blacke's Magic (1)

Boekan Saja (1)

C. Brahms and S.J. Simon (1)

C. Daly King (1)

C.H.B. Kitchin (2)

Carter Dickson (9)

Case Closed aka Detective Conan (20)

Cecil Jenkins (1)

Charles Osborne (1)

Charlotte Armstrong (2)

Christianna Brand (2)

Christopher Fowler (1)

Clayton Rawson (2)

Cleve Cartmill (1)

Clyde B. Clason (3)

Code Cracking (34)

College Crime (7)

Collin Wilcox (1)

Columbo (3)

Conmen (12)

Cor Docter (3)

Courtroom Drama (18)

Cover Art (1)

Craig Rice (7)

Crime Comics (2)

Crippen and Landru (7)

Crossover (10)

Cyril Hare (3)

Dale C. Andrews (1)

Daniel Stashower (1)

Daphne Sanders (1)

Darwin L. Teilhet (3)

David Alexander (2)

David Cargill (1)

David Duncan (1)

David Renwick (5)

David Stuart Davies (1)

David V. Reed (1)

Delano Ames (1)

Dell Mapback (23)

Denis Green (1)

Derek Smith (1)

Donald A. Yates (1)

Donald McGibney (1)

Dorothy Cameron Disney (4)

Dorothy L. Sayers (2)

Double Review (4)

Dying Message (36)

E.C.R. Lorac (2)

E.R. Punshon (9)

Early Forensic Methodology (3)

Ed McBain (4)

Edgar Allan Poe (2)

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1)

Edmund Crispin (1)

Edogawa Rampo (1)

Edward D. Hoch (7)

Edward I. Koch (1)

Edward Multon (1)

Edwin Balmer (1)

Eleazar Lipsky (1)

Elizabeth Ferrars (2)

Elizabeth Lemarchand (1)

Ellery Queen (8)

Elsa Barker (1)

Elspeth Huxley (1)

Emma Lathen (1)

Eoin Colfer (1)

Eric Keith (1)

Erle Stanley Gardner (6)

Espionage (5)

F.R. Eckmar (1)

Filler Posts (1)

Foreign Mysteries (80)

Frances and Richard Lockridge (2)

Frances Crane (2)

Franklyn Pell (1)

Frederic Arnold Kummer (1)

Fredric Brown (2)

Fredric Neuman (2)

Freeman Wills Crofts (2)

G.D.H and M. Cole (1)

G.D.H. and M. Cole (1)

G.E. Locke (2)

GAD (268)

Gentlemen Thieves (20)

Geoffrey Bush (1)

George Bellairs (1)

George Harmon Coxe (2)

George Sanders (1)

Georges Simenon (2)

Georgette Heyer (1)

Geraldine Bridgman (2)

Gladys Mitchell (6)

Glen Trevor (1)

Glyn Carr (1)

Gosho Aoyama (18)

Guest Blog (4)

Gypsy Rose Lee (2)

H. Edward Hunsburger (2)

H.A. Ripley (1)

H.C. Bailey (1)

H.R.F. Keating (5)

Had-I-But-Known (8)

Hake Talbot (1)

Harriet Rutland (3)

Harriette Ashbrook (1)

Harrison R. Steeves (1)

Helen McCloy (3)

Helen Reilly (1)

Helen Simpson (2)

Hellinga Sr (1)

Herbert Adams (2)

Herbert Brean (1)

Herbert Resnicow (10)

Herman Heijermans (1)

Herodotus (1)

Hilary St. George Saunders (1)

Hildegarde Teilhet (1)

Historical Mysteries (58)

Horror (1)

Hybrid Mysteries (17)

Ianthe Jerrold (4)

Impossible Crimes (182)

Inverted Detective Story (40)

IPL (2)

Isaac Asimov (6)

Ivans (1)

J. Jefferson Farjeon (2)

J. Michael Orenduff (1)

J.C. Masterman (1)

Jack Iams (2)

Jack the Ripper (2)

Jacques Futrelle (2)

James Hilton (1)

James P. Hogan (1)

James Powell (1)

James Randi (1)

James Yaffe (1)

Jan Ekström (1)

Janwillem van de Wetering (1)

Japanese Detective Fiction (9)

Jason Shiga (1)

Jean-Paul Török (1)

Jeremy Sturrock (1)

Jesse Carmack (1)

Jill McGown (1)

Jill Paton Walsh (1)

Joe Gores (1)

John Basye Price (1)

John Bude (2)

John Dickson Carr (19)

John Rhode (8)

John Rowland (1)

John Russell Fearn (2)

John Sladek (1)

John Slate (1)

John Vandercook (1)

Jon L. Breen (1)

Jonathan Creek (7)

Jonathan Latimer (2)

Josef Skvorecky (1)

Joseph B. Carr (1)

Joseph Bowen (1)

Joseph Commings (1)

Judge Dee (1)

June Wright (1)

Juvenile Mysteries (10)

K.K. Beck (1)

Toe-Tags

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

Presents from the Past" ...And all that was left to dowas put together the pieces ." -Hajime Kindaichi ( TheKindaichi Case Files: Smokeand ...My Favorite Locked RoomMysteries I: The Novels(Updated: Jan 3, 2015)" The detectives who explainmiracles, even more than theircolleagues who clarify more

secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

Nowhere to Hide" The lamps are going out allover Europe... " - EdwardGrey The first conflict ofinterests on a global scale,usual...Haunted House Hang-Up" You know, we do make apretty good team... especiallywhen the chips are down ." -Jonny Quest ( The RealAdventures of ...

Days of Yore" I am bound to tell what I ambeing told, but not in everycase to believe it ." - HerodotusEdgar Allan Poe 's &q...

77 Sunset Strip (1)

A.B. Cunningham (1)

A.C. Baantjer (14)

A.E.W. Mason (1)

A.M. de Jong (1)

Adventure (1)

Adventure Story (13)

Agatha Christie (3)

Aircraft Mysteries (2)

Alan Melville (1)

Alex Atkinson (1)

Alexander Laing (1)

Alexandre Dumas (1)

Anita Blackmon (1)

Anne Rowe (1)

Annie Haynes (5)

Anniversary (3)

Anthony Abbot (2)

Anthony Berkeley (4)

Anthony Boucher (6)

Anthony Gilbert (6)

Anthony Wynne (3)

Archaeological Mysteries (6)

Armstrong Livingston (1)

Art of the Detective Story (3)

Arthur J. Rees (1)

Arthur Porges (1)

Arthur W. Upfield (5)

Barry Ergang (1)

Baynard Kendrick (3)

Ben van Eysselsteijn (1)

Bertus Aafjes (2)

Best of Lists (13)

Beverley Nichols (1)

Bill Pronzini (25)

Bill S. Ballinger (1)

Blacke's Magic (1)

Boekan Saja (1)

C. Brahms and S.J. Simon (1)

C. Daly King (1)

C.H.B. Kitchin (2)

Carter Dickson (9)

Case Closed aka Detective Conan (20)

Cecil Jenkins (1)

Charles Osborne (1)

Charlotte Armstrong (2)

Christianna Brand (2)

Christopher Fowler (1)

Clayton Rawson (2)

Cleve Cartmill (1)

Clyde B. Clason (3)

Code Cracking (34)

College Crime (7)

Collin Wilcox (1)

Columbo (3)

Conmen (12)

Cor Docter (3)

Courtroom Drama (18)

Cover Art (1)

Craig Rice (7)

Crime Comics (2)

Crippen and Landru (7)

Crossover (10)

Cyril Hare (3)

Dale C. Andrews (1)

Daniel Stashower (1)

Daphne Sanders (1)

Darwin L. Teilhet (3)

David Alexander (2)

David Cargill (1)

David Duncan (1)

David Renwick (5)

David Stuart Davies (1)

David V. Reed (1)

Delano Ames (1)

Dell Mapback (23)

Denis Green (1)

Derek Smith (1)

Donald A. Yates (1)

Donald McGibney (1)

Dorothy Cameron Disney (4)

Dorothy L. Sayers (2)

Double Review (4)

Dying Message (36)

E.C.R. Lorac (2)

E.R. Punshon (9)

Early Forensic Methodology (3)

Ed McBain (4)

Edgar Allan Poe (2)

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1)

Edmund Crispin (1)

Edogawa Rampo (1)

Edward D. Hoch (7)

Edward I. Koch (1)

Edward Multon (1)

Edwin Balmer (1)

Eleazar Lipsky (1)

Elizabeth Ferrars (2)

Elizabeth Lemarchand (1)

Ellery Queen (8)

Elsa Barker (1)

Elspeth Huxley (1)

Emma Lathen (1)

Eoin Colfer (1)

Eric Keith (1)

Erle Stanley Gardner (6)

Espionage (5)

F.R. Eckmar (1)

Filler Posts (1)

Foreign Mysteries (80)

Frances and Richard Lockridge (2)

Frances Crane (2)

Franklyn Pell (1)

Frederic Arnold Kummer (1)

Fredric Brown (2)

Fredric Neuman (2)

Freeman Wills Crofts (2)

G.D.H and M. Cole (1)

G.D.H. and M. Cole (1)

G.E. Locke (2)

GAD (268)

Gentlemen Thieves (20)

Geoffrey Bush (1)

George Bellairs (1)

George Harmon Coxe (2)

George Sanders (1)

Georges Simenon (2)

Georgette Heyer (1)

Geraldine Bridgman (2)

Gladys Mitchell (6)

Glen Trevor (1)

Glyn Carr (1)

Gosho Aoyama (18)

Guest Blog (4)

Gypsy Rose Lee (2)

H. Edward Hunsburger (2)

H.A. Ripley (1)

H.C. Bailey (1)

H.R.F. Keating (5)

Had-I-But-Known (8)

Hake Talbot (1)

Harriet Rutland (3)

Harriette Ashbrook (1)

Harrison R. Steeves (1)

Helen McCloy (3)

Helen Reilly (1)

Helen Simpson (2)

Hellinga Sr (1)

Herbert Adams (2)

Herbert Brean (1)

Herbert Resnicow (10)

Herman Heijermans (1)

Herodotus (1)

Hilary St. George Saunders (1)

Hildegarde Teilhet (1)

Historical Mysteries (58)

Horror (1)

Hybrid Mysteries (17)

Ianthe Jerrold (4)

Impossible Crimes (182)

Inverted Detective Story (40)

IPL (2)

Isaac Asimov (6)

Ivans (1)

J. Jefferson Farjeon (2)

J. Michael Orenduff (1)

J.C. Masterman (1)

Jack Iams (2)

Jack the Ripper (2)

Jacques Futrelle (2)

James Hilton (1)

James P. Hogan (1)

James Powell (1)

James Randi (1)

James Yaffe (1)

Jan Ekström (1)

Janwillem van de Wetering (1)

Japanese Detective Fiction (9)

Jason Shiga (1)

Jean-Paul Török (1)

Jeremy Sturrock (1)

Jesse Carmack (1)

Jill McGown (1)

Jill Paton Walsh (1)

Joe Gores (1)

John Basye Price (1)

John Bude (2)

John Dickson Carr (19)

John Rhode (8)

John Rowland (1)

John Russell Fearn (2)

John Sladek (1)

John Slate (1)

John Vandercook (1)

Jon L. Breen (1)

Jonathan Creek (7)

Jonathan Latimer (2)

Josef Skvorecky (1)

Joseph B. Carr (1)

Joseph Bowen (1)

Joseph Commings (1)

Judge Dee (1)

June Wright (1)

Juvenile Mysteries (10)

K.K. Beck (1)

Toe-Tags

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

Presents from the Past" ...And all that was left to dowas put together the pieces ." -Hajime Kindaichi ( TheKindaichi Case Files: Smokeand ...My Favorite Locked RoomMysteries I: The Novels(Updated: Jan 3, 2015)" The detectives who explainmiracles, even more than theircolleagues who clarify more

secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

Nowhere to Hide" The lamps are going out allover Europe... " - EdwardGrey The first conflict ofinterests on a global scale,usual...Haunted House Hang-Up" You know, we do make apretty good team... especiallywhen the chips are down ." -Jonny Quest ( The RealAdventures of ...

Days of Yore" I am bound to tell what I ambeing told, but not in everycase to believe it ." - HerodotusEdgar Allan Poe 's &q...

77 Sunset Strip (1)

A.B. Cunningham (1)

A.C. Baantjer (14)

A.E.W. Mason (1)

A.M. de Jong (1)

Adventure (1)

Adventure Story (13)

Agatha Christie (3)

Aircraft Mysteries (2)

Alan Melville (1)

Alex Atkinson (1)

Alexander Laing (1)

Alexandre Dumas (1)

Anita Blackmon (1)

Anne Rowe (1)

Annie Haynes (5)

Anniversary (3)

Anthony Abbot (2)

Anthony Berkeley (4)

Anthony Boucher (6)

Anthony Gilbert (6)

Anthony Wynne (3)

Archaeological Mysteries (6)

Armstrong Livingston (1)

Art of the Detective Story (3)

Arthur J. Rees (1)

Arthur Porges (1)

Arthur W. Upfield (5)

Barry Ergang (1)

Baynard Kendrick (3)

Ben van Eysselsteijn (1)

Bertus Aafjes (2)

Best of Lists (13)

Beverley Nichols (1)

Bill Pronzini (25)

Bill S. Ballinger (1)

Blacke's Magic (1)

Boekan Saja (1)

C. Brahms and S.J. Simon (1)

C. Daly King (1)

C.H.B. Kitchin (2)

Carter Dickson (9)

Case Closed aka Detective Conan (20)

Cecil Jenkins (1)

Charles Osborne (1)

Charlotte Armstrong (2)

Christianna Brand (2)

Christopher Fowler (1)

Clayton Rawson (2)

Cleve Cartmill (1)

Clyde B. Clason (3)

Code Cracking (34)

College Crime (7)

Collin Wilcox (1)

Columbo (3)

Conmen (12)

Cor Docter (3)

Courtroom Drama (18)

Cover Art (1)

Craig Rice (7)

Crime Comics (2)

Crippen and Landru (7)

Crossover (10)

Cyril Hare (3)

Dale C. Andrews (1)

Daniel Stashower (1)

Daphne Sanders (1)

Darwin L. Teilhet (3)

David Alexander (2)

David Cargill (1)

David Duncan (1)

David Renwick (5)

David Stuart Davies (1)

David V. Reed (1)

Delano Ames (1)

Dell Mapback (23)

Denis Green (1)

Derek Smith (1)

Donald A. Yates (1)

Donald McGibney (1)

Dorothy Cameron Disney (4)

Dorothy L. Sayers (2)

Double Review (4)

Dying Message (36)

E.C.R. Lorac (2)

E.R. Punshon (9)

Early Forensic Methodology (3)

Ed McBain (4)

Edgar Allan Poe (2)

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1)

Edmund Crispin (1)

Edogawa Rampo (1)

Edward D. Hoch (7)

Edward I. Koch (1)

Edward Multon (1)

Edwin Balmer (1)

Eleazar Lipsky (1)

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

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secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

Presents from the Past" ...And all that was left to dowas put together the pieces ." -Hajime Kindaichi ( TheKindaichi Case Files: Smokeand ...My Favorite Locked RoomMysteries I: The Novels(Updated: Jan 3, 2015)" The detectives who explainmiracles, even more than theircolleagues who clarify more

secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

Nowhere to Hide" The lamps are going out allover Europe... " - EdwardGrey The first conflict ofinterests on a global scale,usual...Haunted House Hang-Up" You know, we do make apretty good team... especiallywhen the chips are down ." -Jonny Quest ( The RealAdventures of ...

Days of Yore" I am bound to tell what I ambeing told, but not in everycase to believe it ." - HerodotusEdgar Allan Poe 's &q...

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

Presents from the Past" ...And all that was left to dowas put together the pieces ." -Hajime Kindaichi ( TheKindaichi Case Files: Smokeand ...My Favorite Locked RoomMysteries I: The Novels(Updated: Jan 3, 2015)" The detectives who explainmiracles, even more than theircolleagues who clarify more

secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

Nowhere to Hide" The lamps are going out allover Europe... " - EdwardGrey The first conflict ofinterests on a global scale,usual...Haunted House Hang-Up" You know, we do make apretty good team... especiallywhen the chips are down ." -Jonny Quest ( The RealAdventures of ...

Days of Yore" I am bound to tell what I ambeing told, but not in everycase to believe it ." - HerodotusEdgar Allan Poe 's &q...

77 Sunset Strip (1)

A.B. Cunningham (1)

A.C. Baantjer (14)

A.E.W. Mason (1)

A.M. de Jong (1)

Adventure (1)

Adventure Story (13)

Agatha Christie (3)

Aircraft Mysteries (2)

Alan Melville (1)

Alex Atkinson (1)

Alexander Laing (1)

Alexandre Dumas (1)

Anita Blackmon (1)

Anne Rowe (1)

Annie Haynes (5)

Anniversary (3)

Anthony Abbot (2)

Anthony Berkeley (4)

Anthony Boucher (6)

Anthony Gilbert (6)

Anthony Wynne (3)

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Armstrong Livingston (1)

Art of the Detective Story (3)

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

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secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

Nowhere to Hide" The lamps are going out allover Europe... " - EdwardGrey The first conflict ofinterests on a global scale,usual...Haunted House Hang-Up" You know, we do make apretty good team... especiallywhen the chips are down ." -Jonny Quest ( The RealAdventures of ...

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

Presents from the Past" ...And all that was left to dowas put together the pieces ." -Hajime Kindaichi ( TheKindaichi Case Files: Smokeand ...My Favorite Locked RoomMysteries I: The Novels(Updated: Jan 3, 2015)" The detectives who explainmiracles, even more than theircolleagues who clarify more

secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

Nowhere to Hide" The lamps are going out allover Europe... " - EdwardGrey The first conflict ofinterests on a global scale,usual...Haunted House Hang-Up" You know, we do make apretty good team... especiallywhen the chips are down ." -Jonny Quest ( The RealAdventures of ...

Days of Yore" I am bound to tell what I ambeing told, but not in everycase to believe it ." - HerodotusEdgar Allan Poe 's &q...

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

Presents from the Past" ...And all that was left to dowas put together the pieces ." -Hajime Kindaichi ( TheKindaichi Case Files: Smokeand ...My Favorite Locked RoomMysteries I: The Novels(Updated: Jan 3, 2015)" The detectives who explainmiracles, even more than theircolleagues who clarify more

secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

Presents from the Past" ...And all that was left to dowas put together the pieces ." -Hajime Kindaichi ( TheKindaichi Case Files: Smokeand ...My Favorite Locked RoomMysteries I: The Novels(Updated: Jan 3, 2015)" The detectives who explainmiracles, even more than theircolleagues who clarify more

secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

Nowhere to Hide" The lamps are going out allover Europe... " - EdwardGrey The first conflict ofinterests on a global scale,usual...Haunted House Hang-Up" You know, we do make apretty good team... especiallywhen the chips are down ." -Jonny Quest ( The RealAdventures of ...

Days of Yore" I am bound to tell what I ambeing told, but not in everycase to believe it ." - HerodotusEdgar Allan Poe 's &q...

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

Presents from the Past" ...And all that was left to dowas put together the pieces ." -Hajime Kindaichi ( TheKindaichi Case Files: Smokeand ...My Favorite Locked RoomMysteries I: The Novels(Updated: Jan 3, 2015)" The detectives who explainmiracles, even more than theircolleagues who clarify more

secular matters, play the Promethean role o...

Nowhere to Hide" The lamps are going out allover Europe... " - EdwardGrey The first conflict ofinterests on a global scale,usual...Haunted House Hang-Up" You know, we do make apretty good team... especiallywhen the chips are down ." -Jonny Quest ( The RealAdventures of ...

Days of Yore" I am bound to tell what I ambeing told, but not in everycase to believe it ." - HerodotusEdgar Allan Poe 's &q...

77 Sunset Strip (1)

A.B. Cunningham (1)

A.C. Baantjer (14)

A.E.W. Mason (1)

A.M. de Jong (1)

Adventure (1)

Adventure Story (13)

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Aircraft Mysteries (2)

Alan Melville (1)

Alex Atkinson (1)

Alexander Laing (1)

Alexandre Dumas (1)

Anita Blackmon (1)

Anne Rowe (1)

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Anniversary (3)

Anthony Abbot (2)

Anthony Berkeley (4)

Anthony Boucher (6)

Anthony Gilbert (6)

Anthony Wynne (3)

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Armstrong Livingston (1)

Art of the Detective Story (3)

Arthur J. Rees (1)

Arthur Porges (1)

Arthur W. Upfield (5)

Barry Ergang (1)

Baynard Kendrick (3)

Ben van Eysselsteijn (1)

Bertus Aafjes (2)

Best of Lists (13)

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Bill S. Ballinger (1)

Blacke's Magic (1)

Boekan Saja (1)

C. Brahms and S.J. Simon (1)

C. Daly King (1)

C.H.B. Kitchin (2)

Carter Dickson (9)

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Cecil Jenkins (1)

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Christopher Fowler (1)

Clayton Rawson (2)

Cleve Cartmill (1)

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Collin Wilcox (1)

Columbo (3)

Conmen (12)

Cor Docter (3)

Courtroom Drama (18)

Cover Art (1)

Craig Rice (7)

Crime Comics (2)

Crippen and Landru (7)

Crossover (10)

Cyril Hare (3)

Dale C. Andrews (1)

Daniel Stashower (1)

Daphne Sanders (1)

Darwin L. Teilhet (3)

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Double Review (4)

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E.C.R. Lorac (2)

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G.E. Locke (2)

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Harriette Ashbrook (1)

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Helen McCloy (3)

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Helen Simpson (2)

Hellinga Sr (1)

Herbert Adams (2)

Herbert Brean (1)

Herbert Resnicow (10)

Herman Heijermans (1)

Herodotus (1)

Hilary St. George Saunders (1)

Hildegarde Teilhet (1)

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JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 10:08 AM

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyondthe availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classicsnever even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren'tespecially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it tonot be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others youmention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it ontoRamble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man candream...

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:33 AM

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is aCarr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had topick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutualfriend in Carr. ;)

JJ @ The Invisible Event August 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM

Ah, but if Hangman and Rim are anything to go by, Half-Witness would havebeen an impossible stew...no mere two impossibilities, but a Tower of Babel Itell you!

Barry Ergang August 2, 2016 at 3:09 PM

Merely two?

Paul Halter wrote one--though not, to my taste, one of his best--that containsseven impossible situations.

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:08 AM

A-a... Towe-er of B-babel? I-impossible stew? Of impossible crimes!?

...

Guys, call CERN. We're going to break open a time-portal!

J F Norris August 2, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector orbookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted fromPenguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Reply

TomCat August 2, 2016 at 11:56 AM

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in thedays before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simplefake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote aconvincing account of how he came across the book with a report on theobscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why thecover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

classicmystery August 2, 2016 at 2:43 PM

Fascinating post, TomCat. Nice work.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:10 AM

Thanks!

Dave August 2, 2016 at 4:48 PM

Great read.

Reply

TomCat August 3, 2016 at 1:11 AM

Thanks!

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