Physics of the Impossible

"...from this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
- Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980)

Thirty-three years after publishing a very unconventionally structured locked room mystery, The Seclusion Room (1978), Dr. Fredric Neuman, Director of the Anxiety and Phobia Treatment Center at White Plains Hospital, came out with a sequel, Come One, Come All (2011) – which is synopsized as a "a locked room mystery, and a take-off on the locked mystery" as well as a "comic novel, but realistic." I mentioned this prospect of a new, potentially interesting impossible crime yarn in the penultimate paragraph of my review, but this news was received with a bit of skepticism from the proprietor of Pretty Sinister Books, John Norris.

Come One, Come All is a chunky, self-published novel, but the only real faults to be detected were those of a typographical nature that one expects from a book that was wrung through the innards of an independent printing press and even these printer's errors were kept at a minimum – and with that I mean that I have seen much, much worse. This is a more than passable edition for a self-published novel, comparable to John Pugmire's self-published translations of Paul Halter's locked room mysteries, and the only real drawback is that the text is sparsely spread out over the pages, which gives it a bloated and off-putting appearance. I estimate that the actual page count would be around 250-300 pages instead of the 455 pages that it counts now.

But now, on to the review! Psychiatrist Abe Redden, the main protagonist from the previous book, The Seclusion Room, is pried loose from his comfort spot, at Four Elms psychiatric hospital, to temporarily strengthen the staff of The Women's Health Center – where the winds of change are whipping up a storm in 1970s New York City. Abortion has been legalized and due to some controversial treatment programs, the health center is now under constant siege, from pro-life supporters and gay rights activists, but internally the place also rambles like a biscuit tin full of loose screws, nuts and bolts.

The man who occupied the seat of director, Charles Wegner, was transferred to the morgue after a fatal heart attack, but a whiff of gossip can be detected in the corridors, suggesting that the director was poisoned, and one of their doctors, Tina Cantor, in charge of a controversial new treatment program, may be a nymphomaniac with literary aspirations – who seems to already have penned a best-selling, fictionalized expose of her private life under the nom-de-plum of Dr. Y. Naturally, she becomes the love interest of Dr. Redden, but he's also confronted with problems of a professional nature: there's a patient, checked in under the name Adam Adamson, who claims to come from 150 years in the future and knows from his time that Redden will end up burning down the hospital, that is professionally attached to the health center, but he's unable to remember specific details about this historic event in the making.

Adamson's zany lectures on 22nd century life makes him sound as a writer for The Guide attempting to describe a futuristic incarnation of the human race, but then again, these short vignettes impressed me from the very start as an unabashed homage to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979). Adamson after all does mean "son of Adam." Yeah, it makes more sense if you have one of my mental afflictions, but you get my drift.

Anyway, the first part of the book, roughly 170 pages, does not read like a detective story at all, but as a warped comedy of manners that is unable to restrain Murphy's Law and twists like a knife in everyone and everything that is brought up on its pages. It's not until the center is confronted with the physically impossible murder of their new director, Patricia Robinson, that the detective story begins to the feel the knifepoint pricking its jugular.

Robinson was discovered behind the door of her examination room, locked with a key from the inside that was still in the lock when it was busted open, and the broken window only affords an easy entrance and quick exist with the aid of a ladder – not to mention that the alleyway beneath the window was guarded at each end by a policeman. At first, Dr. Abe Redden, backed-up by a few other characters, appear to approach this problem in a light hearted, comical way, throwing allusions around to Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and Rex Stout and proposing prosperous solution, such as an examination table that was fixed to propel Robinson head-first against a filing cabinet, but the actual answer to this locked room problem is as solid a put-down as the door itself!

This joke-explenation, at the expense of the locked room mystery, was probably meant to be somewhat of a letdown, but the solution is so incredibly simple and rational that Neuman just might have come up with something completely new here. It's so simple, that it could've easily been overlooked from the time Edgar Allan Poe penned "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). I tend to like in the context of this story.

Unfortunately, the other compartments of the solution, the identity of the murderer and the accompanying motive, proved to be far less interesting and suffered from under exposure and sparse clueing. But this hardly affected the enjoyment derived from the overall story, which, I think, says something about how much I have begun to enjoy Neuman's take on the detective story – in spite of the fact that they are awfully modern in tone and take frequent potshots at our beloved impossible crime story. However, Neuman seems to understand that you can bring up loaded topics, like abortion, religion and sexuality, in a detective story without overburdening your characters with them and make them wallow in angst for hundreds of pages on end. I also appreciated the fact that he didn't walk around on tip-toes and blatantly poked fun at everything, which is how it should be done.

Hopefully, I have not over praised this book, but I completely enjoyed this funny, but also intelligent, take-off on the locked room mystery, the characters that wandered across its pages and its sense of humor – which hovered between darkly twisted and delightfully juvenile.

Simply put, I found this book a riot!

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

 "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

 - Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

According to the back-flap of the dust cover, wrapped around the binding of the first printing of The Seclusion Room (1978), its author, Dr. Fredric Neuman, is a practicing psychiatrist from New York – which probably explains why this story left me in a confusing, dual state of adoration and detestation. Psychiatrists are apt to mess with your mind like that.

In many ways, The Seclusion Room is a model of what contemporary mystery crime writers, who took it upon themselves to blur the borders and shove the genre into the mainstream, should be aiming for. On the other hand, the inveterate classicist within me was not amused at the solution, which, admittedly, was clever enough, but something important and essential was sacrificed in order to achieve its effect. But let's begin at the beginning.

The backdrop of this story is a psychiatric hospital, named Four Elms, where, during the waking hours of a particular dreary and unwelcoming morning, Dr. Abe Redden is roused from his reverie by the ringing of the telephone – which conveys immediate summons to one of the wards. One of his patients, Seymour Ratner, seems to have committed suicide behind the blocked door of the seclusion room, one end of a strip of cloth knotted around his neck and the other end tied to the radiator, but the circumstances in this bare room, with check-ups at fifteen minute interval, should've made this impossible. Even more baffling is the fact that Seymour Ratner was thoroughly searched before being secluded, however, when they finally pried open the door to the room they discovered that he had a knife in his possession and used this to carve the words THEY HAVE KILLED ME in the linoleum floor!

But murder is as infeasible as suicide, since this hypothetical murderer would not only have to be invisible, in order to sneak around in the hallway unobserved, but also able to phase through a solid door of a room that was temporarily made inaccessible by plugging the keyhole with a wad of wires – and a freak accident doesn't account for the presence of the knife and wire in the room.

Detective William Moore is not only confronted with a death that seems factually impossible on all counts, but also with an assortments of suspects and witnesses that could've wandered from a nightmarish rewrite of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Schizophrenics, alcoholics, child abusers, manic-depressives, rapists and half of these people are on the staff of the hospital!

However, it's not Detective Moore's footsteps who the readers follows, as you wander through the dimmed corridors of this institution, but those of one of their staff members, Dr. Abe Redden – whose wry and cynical narrative voice will delight fans of such writers as William DeAndrea and Raymond Chandler. The way in which he delineates characters, both patients and staff members, sketches situations and his pessimistic observations makes this an enthralling read, which, at times, really made this a book elevate itself above its status as genre fiction.

The Seclusion Room is a very modern novel that takes a serious approach at characterizing and fleshing out the inhabitants of the psychiatric wards, nurses stations and doctors offices at Four Elms and grapples with serious topics, such as a rape, but this does not mean that the book takes itself too seriously – as the characters and setting also easily lend themselves to a few very funny, but dark, comedic sequences. My favorite part from the book is probably when Redden and Moore visit the pathologist, who lectures them and tells anecdotes while his arms are buried in the abdominal regions of his latest patient. Yes, I'm aware that I have issues.

So, I hear you wonder, what's exactly the problem with this book? Everything I have said up this point indicates that I regard this a novel as a companion to those that were penned by Bill Pronzini, Herbert Resnicow and William DeAndrea. The problem is that the cleverness of this detective story is that the plot starts out with a baffling, classically-styled locked room problem that could've been lifted from the pages of a John Dickson Carr novel, "with all the mad logic of a dream," but once the story has descried itself, after a morbid send-up of the classic scene in which all of the suspects are gathered in the library, what is left of the problem is nothing more than a routine, common garden-variety crime, which, in essence, I liked, but to achieve this effect the locked room angle was turned into a sacrificial lamb. 

In spite of the fascinating set-up and the fact that it secured a spot in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), this is not a locked room mystery and the explanation to why I was dropped-off at the final page of this story with a split personality.

Overall, this is a very well written novel, populated with intriguingly sketched characters set in a world that sometimes resembles a ghoulish fun-house packed with cracked mirrors, and the modernistic approach to the traditional detective story definitely deserves praise, but this was one of the first novels I picked from Adey's listing of locked rooms and expected much more of this as an impossible crime story.

The technical aspect of the solution was a bit of a let down, but not disappointing enough to prevent me from further pursuing this author and he recently published another detective novel, Come One, Come All (2011), which is described as "a locked-room mystery, and a take-off on locked room murder mysteries" as well as a "comic novel, but realistic." So that one will be near the top of the heap for next year.

In conclusion, I'm left with only one more thing to say: Dr. Neuman, if you read this, you owe me a free consult! ;)