Obelists en Route (1934) by C. Daly King

C. Daly King was an American psychologist and mystery writer best remembered today for his Trevis Tarrant series of short stories, collected in The Curious Mr. Tarrant (1935) and The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003), which fared better than his half a dozen detective novel – five of which have become exercises in obscurity. King penned two sets of three novels starting with his so-called "Obelists" series, Obelists at Sea (1932), Obelists en Route (1934) and Obelists Fly High (1935). Closed out his stint as mystery novelist with his three CAB mysteries, Careless Corpse (1937), Arrogant Alibi (1938) and Bermuda Burial (1940).

Obelists Fly High escaped biblioblivion courtesy of several inexpensive, easily available reprint editions in the Dover Mystery Classics series. Obelists at Sea followed at a considerable distance as it received a paperback reprint in the Penguin Green Crime series, but that paperback with wrapper is only marginally less rare than the Knopf first edition. Whenever a copy of Careless Corpse, Arrogant Alibi or Bermuda Burial turns up, it tends to cost an arm and a leg. The last copy of Bermuda Burial I saw for sale had a $1350 prize-tag on it. However, the most well-known of his obscure, out-of-print and practically unobtainable mysteries used to be Obelists en Route. In fact, I remember it being considered as one of the ten, or so, most sought out, out-of-print rarities around the late 2000s.

Last year, Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics reprinted Obelists at Sea and a few months ago, they released a brand new edition of Obelists en Route. This new edition marks its first reprint in over 90 years!

First things, first! King invented the word "obelist" and defined it as "a person of little or no worth" in Obelists at Sea, but changed the definition to "one who views with suspicion" in the two subsequent novels – which is a more suitable definition in the context of a detective story. Especially when they take place in confined locations like this series. Obelists at Sea takes place during a transatlantic voyage, Obelists Fly High is set aboard a passenger plane and Obelists en Route is a good, old-fashioned railway mystery. Agatha Christie and Stuart Palmer famously wrote mysteries that can be linked with the murder on land-sea-and-air motif, but King is the only one who wrote and published them as a set.

Obelists en Route takes place during a three-day, non-stop journey from New York City to San Francisco on an exclusive test run of the newly built, luxurious Transcontinental Limited. A coast-to-coast train constructed like a ritzy, stretched out luxury hotel on wheels complete with wireless phone boots, barber service and even a swimming pool car. Transcontinental Limited is the railroad's answer to commercial air travel ("extra luxury against extra speed"). A small, exclusive selection of guests are invited along on the first, uninterrupted run across the continent aboard the Transcontinental Limited.

There's a prominent banker, Sabot Hodges, his daughter Edvanne, his private secretary Entwerk and a valet, Hopping. Hodges also brought along a world renowned psychoanalyst, Dr. Mabon Raquette, to have himself psychoanalyst. Dr. Raquette is only one, of four, famous psychologist on the train journey. Dr. Iva Poppas, a Hormic psychologist, Prof. Dr. Gottlieb Irrtum, a Gestalt psychologist, and a Integrative psychologist, Dr. L. Reef Pons – whom previously appeared in Obelists at Sea. Noah Hall, an industrial engineer, is part of the trip as an argumentative representative of the "representative of Technocracy" and Hans Summerladd is the publicity director of the Transcontinental company. Last, but not least, is Lt. Michael Lord of the New York City Police Department, who's assigned to trip "just in case." That pertained more to the usual petty crooks or cranks. Not a suspicious death.

On the morning following their departure, Sabot Hodges is found dead at the bottom of the train's swimming pool without a wound or marks of external violence on his body. So nothing to indicate foul play. Lord's initial investigation seems to reveal a bizarre suicide, but when a medical examiner boards the train to perform an autopsy, it's reveals Hodges hadn't drowned at all. The cause of death is undetermined. Now he has a death on his hands that could neither be murder or suicide nor an accident or natural causes. A tricky problem complicated by a Wild West-like shootout targeting Edvanne Hodges, but leaves someone else critically wounded. And the unidentified shooter got away in the melee. However, the shooting convinces Lord there's something fishy about Hodges' death and begins investigating anew now that he has "something to bite on."

Michael Lord is an well-off, upper class policeman who "went into police work for fun" without having to rely on salary. I've seen Lord being compared to other upper class police detectives like Thatcher Colt and Roderick Alleyn, but thought him here to be closer to Inspector French than characters like Colt and Alleyn.

Lord is an intelligent and observant detective with an eye for detail, but not an infallible detective who makes brilliant deductions from the strangest of clues. Lord simply gathers information and evidence from which he tries to reconstruct the truth. More than once, those reconstructions collapse like a false-solutions when new facts emerge ("...his hardly won solution knocked clean from under him"). What should be noted Lord is assisted on several of those solution by ideas (i.e. pet theories) brought to him by the psychologists aboard. For example, Dr. Raquette believes Hodges fell prey to his own "death instinct," while Dr. Pons contributed a traditionally-styled false-solution with a method to sneak poison pass a medical examiner's attention under certain circumstances. So their psychological take on the case made for a distinctly different take on the false-solutions complimenting Lord's investigation and the overall story and plot.

Speaking of the plot, you always hope when finally getting your hands on one of these legendary, out-of-print mysteries, they have a plot to match their near mythical status – like a Death of Laurence Vinning (1928) or Death of Jezebel (1948). That's always a gamble. For example, Leo Bruce's once extremely rare Case with Four Clowns (1939) turned out to be the weakest entry in the Sgt. Beef series upon its re-release in 2010. Fortunately, Obelists en Route more than delivers when it comes to the plot. A small masterclass in simplistic complexity. There's an almost pleasant crudeness to the well-hidden, ultimately simple murder method employed on the banker and simply loved the explanation for the good, old-fashioned American shootout aboard. Something very nearly Lord's denouement with all the suspects gathered in one of the railway compartments. More importantly, King played fairly as can be attested by the inclusion of his patented "Clue Finder" at the end of the book. This comes in addition to half a dozen diagrams and a host of Van Dinean footnotes. So a real treat for Golden Age detective fans.

Only rough patch, or blotch, on this otherwise readable, engaging train-bound mystery are the economic lectures grinding it to a halt several times. No idea why they weren't edited out of the original edition, because they barely serve a purpose to the characters or plot. Well, outside of giving one of the characters a hint of a motive, but that could have been done without those lectures. So you can read pass or ignore them altogether without the risk of missing something essential to the story. That's really its only shortcoming. Not something to sour me on everything else it got right.

So wish I remembered more of the previous two "obelists" mysteries, because I don't recall them being as well written or coherently-plotted as Obelists en Route. Jim, of The Invisible Event, famously gave Obelists Fly High zero stars and vaguely remember Obelists at Sea being a pleasant, but slow-moving, shipboard whodunit. Nothing more than that. Obelists en Route is a a different story altogether. A first-class Golden Age railway mystery and had it been reprinted as a Dover Mystery Classic instead of Obelists Fly High, King likely would have been remembered very differently today. Highly recommended!

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.

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

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.

Once a lost, unpublished story

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!