The Asteroid Murder Case (1970/2011) by Ross Rocklynne and Arthur Jean Cox

Several years ago, I came across a well-known science-fiction novella by Ross Rocklynne, "Time Wants a Skeleton" (1941), in which a human, space suited skeleton is discovered on an asteroid dating back to a time before the human race had come into existence – similar to the premise of James P. Hogan's stellar Inherit the Stars (1977). A science-fiction mystery so good, we had to appropriate it. But don't tell the nerds. We convinced them aliens stole it. 

"Time Wants a Skeleton" is a time travel yarn with a detective hook and more science-fiction than a detective story, but Rocklynne tried his hands at an actual hybrid that's part science-fiction and part whodunit in 1970. Rocklynne was "very much at home in the Asteroid Belt" and his original short story, "The Asteroid Murder Case," is "set against that shifting, fragmented landscape." Rocklynne believed the story was worthy of publication, but the editor of Analog, John W. Campbell, turned it down saying "science-fiction and mystery fiction are incompatible." A claim Isaac Asimov obliterated with The Caves of Steel (1951), The Naked Sun (1957) and the Dr. Wendell Urth stories from Asimov's Mysteries (1986). But when the story was also turned down by Galaxy, the story disappeared in a drawer until he showed it to Arthur Jean Cox.

Cox advised Rocklynne to expand the short story into a novel to do justice to both genres and they had "an eye to collaborating on the larger version," but Rocklynne unexpectedly passed away in 1988. So the story was put back in a drawer, but, over the years, Cox remained convinced a finished, posthumous publication of "The Asteroid Murder Case" could be a fitting capstone to his friends career – a Quintessential Ross Rocklynne Asteroid Story. More than twenty years later, Cox got an opportunity to revise and enlarge Rocklynne's short story. All of the original characters, setting and plot were retained, but Cox "embroidered freely and without hesitation" with several new story elements and "a new character who looms rather large in the last few chapters." A novel-length treatment of The Asteroid Murder Case (2011) finally made it to print as a Wildside Double ("flip one book over the read the second title") together with Cox's A Collector of Ambroses and Other Rare Items (2011). The novel was later reprinted in The Second Science Fiction Novel MEGAPACK (2016) and eventually published as a standalone mystery in 2019.

So the story had a long, difficult road from conception to completion and finally publication, but (as some of you know) I'm not a big fan of writers tinkering with somebody else his characters and stories. However, Cox's argument that the short story barely left any room to explore the science-fiction setting or do any justice to the detective plot echoed my own comments on Kendell Foster Crossen's "The Closed Door" (1953). A really great short science-fiction detective story possessing all the material and potential needed in a novel-length treatment to craft a classic. So why not give it a shot? 

The Asteroid Murder Case opens with the arrival of Thomas Dooley, Chief of Security for the American Sector of the Belt, on a dark, lonely asteroid "which bore the rather romantic name of Albion." A rock in the middle of the Big Nowhere with a pressurized tent, or so-called "igloo," on it with the body of UN observer Carl Neal lying inside on a cot. Apparently, a stray meteor had punched a double hole through the igloo, which is one of "the natural hazards" of life in the Asteroid Belt. Dooley notices a spacesuit hanging on the wall without a helmet and he couldn't have walked the ten yards from his anchored clodhopper to the igloo without a helmet. And that means murder. This opens the question what a "fairly rich, fairly young, rather ambitious and very gregarious" man took "starvation wages" to work a lonely and thankless job as UN Observer in the Belt. Could there be a link between the murder and the tension between America and Russia with the possibility of industrial espionage? Russia have been making a marginal profit out of mining the asteroid belt, while it has been a losing proposition for the US and there have been talks about abandoning the Belt entirely. Something that would effectively hand over the mineral market to the Russians.

It also dates and betrays the Cold War origins of the short story version and some clues places the story sometime in the relatively close future. One of the characters mentions "our written history goes back only five thousand year," which is roughly the same as it's today, but, earlier on in the story, Dooley called a .45 caliber pistol "a relic from our glorious past" – consigned in his time to museums. The Asteroid Murder Case likely takes place sometime during the first three, or four, hundred years of the current millennium with the character rounding down the years of recorded history. You can't blame Rocklynne for not knowing in 1970 that the Cold War would be ended before the new millennium rolled around, but Cox could have made it feel a little less dated by swapping the Russians for another competitor to the American Section. Like the EU and the European Space Agency who could have made a pact with the Russians to explore and mine the stars, which would be of great concerns to the Americans. 

However, The Asteroid Murder Case is not a Cold War spy thriller in space. Just that the ghost of one bleeds through the story from time to time, but the story tries it best to align itself with the traditional detective story with numerous references to the classics. Every spaceship arriving, or departing, from the Asteroid Belt has the name of a celebrated mystery writer. You have the S.S. Doyle, S.S. Van Dine, S.S. Christie, S.S. Raskolnikov (Fyodor Dostoevsky) and even a small, elegant flyer named the Rendell. Ralph Phelps, of the Asteroid Regulatory Commission, has been planning for years to write down Dooley's cases in a book and takes the ancient Chinese style, "like the famous Judge Dee stories," as his model with three separate, unconnected storylines running neck-to-neck. Phelps plans to combine the current case, "The Asteroid Murder Case," with accounts of two of Dooley's unrecorded cases ("The Rain of Terror" and "The Russ Rockland Express") under the title The Big Nowhere.

Regrettably, all of this is merely lip service to the detective story as it's really a crime tale that unravels itself with the science-fiction elements only marginally more fleshed out than the detective plot. There's the initial investigation of the crime scene and briefly going over the discovery of intelligent creatures with a primitive culture on Jupiter largest moon, Ganymede, but it's mostly scenery until the end. So rather disappointing as both a detective and science-fiction novel, but, while the science-fiction elements began to dominate the mystery towards the end, it provided the ending with a much needed payoff – namely a strong and memorable motive to string everything together. A truly original and convincing motive which is on the one hand very human and on the other one unmistakably alien. Something a lot people would value as highly, or higher, as the all the gold and platinum in the asteroids. It's these last few chapters that made up the best and most memorable part of the whole story. 

The Asteroid Murder Case had a promising first chapter and a good ending, but there simply was not enough of either the detective or science-fiction genre to give anything more than a faint glimmer of what can be done with a well-balanced hybrid of the two. And that only towards the end. So a quick, enjoyable enough read, but, on a whole, a little thin to be particularly satisfying to fans of both genres.

Asteroid Blues: "Time Wants a Skeleton" (1941) by Ross Rocklynne

Back in 2015, I reviewed a full-blown science-fiction novel, James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), which was brought to my attention by a 2013 blog-post by Ho-Ling Wong, who was surprised to discover a science-fiction title had procured a high-ranking spot on the Japanese Tozai Mystery Best 100 list – beating such classics as Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937) and William L. DeAndrea's The HOG Murders (1979). And not without reason!

Inherit the Stars is pure science-fiction with the plot of a scientific detective story and has an ending as memorable as its fantastic premise.

A mummified body of a normal sized, anatomically modern man in a spacesuit is found on the Moon in the far-flung year of 2027, but carbon dating says the body and equipment are over 50.000 years old! During this period in history, mankind was a primitive hunter-gatherer. So how did a body from the Upper Paleolithic in a highly advanced, nuclear powered space suit end up on the surface of the Moon in 2027?

Ho-Ling ended his own review with saying that the astonishing answer to this conundrum "makes quite the impression" and he wasn't wrong, which is why we have shamelessly appropriated it from the science-fiction genre and we're not giving it back – it's ours now! Well, I always wanted to read another science-fiction-style mystery novel with a similar kind of premise and I serendipitously found one. It even counts as a Christmas tale!

Ross Louis Rocklin was an American science-fiction writer, under the name of "Ross Rocklynne," who was a regular contributor to such science-fiction magazines as Astounding Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction and Planet Stories. Rocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton" is a novella originally published in the June, 1941, issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is a who-will-be-done-in-type of detective story reminiscent of Pat McGerr (e.g. Pick Your Victim, 1946).

The story begins with Lieutenant Tony Crow of the IPF chasing a couple of outlaws, Johnny Braker and Harry "Jawbone" Yates, across the asteroid belt when his ship crash landed on the base of a mountain on Asteroid 1007 – a shootout ensues and the outlaws are apprehended. During the shooting, Crow found a cave in the base of the mountain and inside was a human skeleton! The remains of a human being who had existed in "the dim, unutterably distant past" before the asteroid and "the human race had come into existence." An old ring or gold, inset with an emerald, gleams on "the long, tapering finger" of the skeleton. And one of his prisoners is wearing an identical ring with exactly the same, very distinctive flaw in the stone!

Crow, Braker and Jawbone are picked up by the ship of Professor Overland and his daughter, Laurette, who were in the asteroid belt to trace faults, strata and striations on one asteroid and link them up with others. They are investigating a theory claiming that "the asteroids used to be a planet." So, when Professor Overland hears of the skeleton, he turns around the ship to return to Asteroid 1007, but the revolutionary new H-H drive in the ship fling them millions of years back into the past. A time before the asteroid belt. A time when it was still a planet, but not for very long.

A crescent-looking planet is visible as a small moon in the sky, but this is an "invading planet" and grows steadily larger with each passing day. And as this moon-like planet grows in the sky, tidal winds increase savagely. So they have roughly nineteen days to patch up their ship and escape being obliterated when these doomed planets collide – except there are some problems. Such as two attempted murders. Another problem is that the entire crew is gripped by the conviction that one of them has to die, in order to provide the skeleton in the cave of the future asteroid, but who's going to be left behind? A conviction strengthened when it proves to be impossible to get rid of the ring.

The problem of the skeleton on Asteroid 1007 is the detective hook of the story and the solution was a truly surprising, but the clues require an imaginative leap of logic to put two and two together. So not every mystery reader is going to be blown away by it or may even regard as a cheat. I simply wanted another relatively good or passable take on an impossibly ancient human remains found on a celestial body and "Time Wants a Skeleton" gave me exactly what I wanted. Only reason why I didn't tagged this review as a "locked room mystery" or "impossible crime" is because time travel was involved, but the identity of the skeleton is what makes it qualify as a genuine hybrid mystery. And a good one at that!

So the story, as a whole, is more science-fiction than mystery, but I thought the time-paradox was very well handled and made for one of the better science-fiction detective stories I have read to date.

Granted, my reading of classic science-fiction has been limited almost entirely to hybrid mysteries and one thing that has always bugged me is that many of them had problems with envisioning a far-flung future beyond the basics – like rocket ships, space suits, robots and laser guns. Not everyone had the world-building abilities of Isaac Asimov (e.g. The Caves of Steel, 1954). Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) takes place on Mars a thousand years in the future, but is littered with 20th century references and clunky technology. Giving you the idea culture and technological has stagnated, before it collapsed, during those thousand years. David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944) concerns a planetoid in the asteroid belt settled by miners with advanced spaceships, but courtroom photographers still used old-school flashbulbs.

This certainly was not the case with "Time Wants a Skeleton." You can really believe the story takes place in the far-flung future. Or, as is the case here, the dim, distant past.

You're probably wondering how a science-fiction story about a time-paradox, a haunting ring and a doomed planet can be considered a Christmas tale. Well, the story takes place between early December and Christmas. Christmas plays a part in the resolution of the time-tied skeleton in the cave on the asteroid that used to be a planet millions of years ago. You have to read the story yourself to find out how that plays out. The good news is that you can find the Astounding Science Fiction issue, which contains this novella, on the Internet Archive by clicking here. Enjoy!

Rocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton" was, as far as I can judge, a good time travel yarn with a detective hook and a solution for the skeleton on the asteroid that's very different from Hogan's Inherit the Stars. So mystery readers who were impressed by Hogan should definitely read Rocklynne's novella.

By the way, I like to believe Lt. Tony Crow is one my distant descendants. :)