Invisible Green (1977) by John Sladek

In my previous blog-post, I returned to an old favorite of mine, John Sladek's Black Aura (1974), which, barring one or two small blemishes, turned out to be as great as I remembered and still regard it as one of the finest locked room mysteries crafted during the second-half of the previous century – a classic worthy of the name. So with Black Aura still fresh in my mind, I wanted to see how well Sladek's second and final mystery novel, Invisible Green (1977), compares to its prodigious predecessor. 

I read Black Aura and Invisible Green back in the late 2000s and thought at the time Invisible Green to be a marked step down. Sure, it's an excellent detective novel with an even better locked room-puzzle at its core, but felt like a hollow shell coming after Sladek's grandiosely-staged and executed homage to the detective story's Golden Age. Although tinged and streaked with bouts of melancholic nostalgia and wishful daydreaming, it gave Black Aura the panache Invisible Green simply lacked. But not everyone shares that opinion.

In 1981, Edward D. Hoch asked a group of mystery writers and reviewers to list up to ten of their favorite locked room and impossible crime novels, which resulted in a top 14 and Invisible Green secured the last slot on the list. Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) called it "an even better impossible crime novel" than Black Aura and JJ, of The Invisible Event, declared Invisible Green to be "the last possible hurrah for the classically-style detective novel." And they're not alone. So was my initial read a bit of a letdown, because I expected an encore of Black Aura and got something entirely different? Or is everyone else wrong as usually? Time to find out!

Sladek's Invisible Green opens with a prologue set in autumn, 1939, introducing the reader to a murder-of-the-month club, the Seven Unravellers, to whom "murder meant a game with rules" and "suspects with false alibis, clues becoming red herrings, and courtroom revelations" – who have regular meetings "to chew over the latest murder fiction." Miss Dorothea Pharaoh is an armchair logician who has a "genius for playing word games and solving logic puzzles" as well as the club's only female member. Major Edgar Stokes is a retired army man and "a bit of a crypto-Nazi" complete with visions of a New Anglo-German Europe, but he's also very weary and paranoid of a Communist conspiracy. Gervase Hyde is an artistic, bohemian eccentric interested in the psychological angle and "real crimes seemed to interest him more than fictional ones." More than one meeting ended with Major Stokes and Hyde yelling Nazi and Communist at each other. Frank Danby, a London police constable, is "a big, violent, short-tempered young man" who "delighted in sensational news stories of shotgun murders" and “did not fit in with the Unravellers.” Leonard Latimer and Derek Portman were the hope for the club's future. Latimer studies chemistry at London University and preferred detective stories in which the "murderer is hanged by the evidence from a single speck of dust," while Portman is a young solicitor's clerk "honing his already sharp intellect on the legalistic turns of Perry Mason novels" and "cutting into the legal fabric of other murder mysteries." Finally, there's the old baronet, Sir Anthony Fitch, who everyone calls Sir Tony.

So the Seven Unraveller were not unlike "a lot of suspects in an old country house murder," but the club was dissolved in 1940 and they would not meet again until more than thirty years later. 

During the 1970s, Miss Pharaoh decides to hold a reunion for the six surviving Unravellers ("Sir Tony was gone these many years") and begins to send out invitation, but Major Stokes has sunken neck deep into paranoia. Major Stokes believes he's the target of an international conspiracy who sees "secret clues in the Times crossword" and hears "the old cough code" at the cinema. So he reads a secret message ("miss it") in the invitation and a potential ally in Miss Pharaoh, but becomes genuinely worried when she learns Major Stokes has been threatened by someone calling himself Green. Mr. Green has called on Major Stokes twice to either offer him money to go away on a long holiday or to explain "how an old person living on his own can slip and fall in the bath," which culminated with the murder of his cat. Miss Pharaoh used to exchange chess problems and logic puzzles with Thackeray Phin through the mail and asks him to investigate this Mr Green character. And that brings the story to the first locked room-puzzle of the story.

Major Stokes had turned his house into a small fortress. The front-and back doors were locked, chained and barred and "every single window was nailed shut with ten-penny spikes." The passages were strewn with talcum powder to show footprints and "there were threads strung across one or two steps on the stairway," which left "no chance of entry at all." On top of that all, Phin was watching the house when Major Stokes died in the hall toilet of his fortified home. Apparently, he died of a heart attack, but why were his fingers nails broken and bloody? And if he clawed at the dry, flaky paint on the walls, why was there no dried paint under his nails? Sladek really knew how to stage an impossible crime and deliver on its promise!

Firstly, I was surprised at how much I had forgotten about the plot, characters and story in general. Based on my shoddy, often Watson-like memory, I assumed my conclusion on why so many preferred Invisible Green over Black Aura was going to be that former has only one, really well-done and original locked room-trick – which made it a much tighter and focused story. Secondly, I had not only forgotten how brilliantly that locked room-trick is put together, but that there are two additional impossibilities. A second murder is committed roughly halfway through the story as one of the Seven Unravellers is stabbed "inside a house which was watched and guarded at every exit." The third murder has "a twist on the locked- or guarded-house theme" as nearly every suspect worthy of investigation "was locked up in another house, miles away at the time of the crime." Admittedly, the second locked room murder has nothing special, or innovative, but the third murder pretty much applies the locked room mystery to the problem of the unbreakable alibi. I think it would have carried the approval of both Christopher Bush and Tetsuya Ayukawa. Thirdly, the story and characters were not as drab or humorless as I remembered them being.

My first reading left me with the impression that Sladek had resigned to the reality he rebelled against in Black Aura with bouts of nostalgia, daydreaming, humor and baroque crimes. Just compare the magnificently-staged levitation murder of a pop-star in the house of spiritual commune to the death of a lonely, paranoid pensioner in a tiny toilet with dry, flaky walls. That's how the whole story must have impressed me at the time, coming right off Black Aura. It must have struck me at the time as a Thackeray Phin mystery drained of its color and spirit. I probably even thought the color-coded clues were an attempt to give the story some much needed color, but Phin is practically the same right down to his strange, outlandish garb ("...on your way to the set of a 1930s jungle film?") to the way he tackles a particular problem or piece of the puzzle. I liked how he got to see Portman without an appointment ("The tapes. You know?") or twisting the arm of a commercial laboratory to test the remains of the murdered cat he had dug up for poisons ("...otherwise, we might begin to believe you're doing animal experiments in your lab, eh? Vivisection?"). Just toned down a little. Or, perhaps, you can say Black Aura played to the crowd while Invisible Green simply told the story. So no daydream sequences. And very likely another reason why some prefer it over its predecessor.

More importantly, Sladek demonstrated he could do so much more than constructing locked room-tricks as Invisible Green is also an excellently plotted, old-fashioned whodunit. How the awful, highly elusive Mr. Green fits into the overall plot shined with that Golden Age brilliance, but with a decidedly modern twist. However, it showed that a changing world offered new possibilities to plot and tell a detective story. Not less. Just look back at the turn-of-the-century mystery writers who began to apply science and naturalism to a genre previous dominated by secret passageways, fictitious poisons and overwrought melodrama. But, as to be expected, Sladek also tipped his deerstalker to some of the greats of the past. The color-coded clues everyone receives like an orange tossed through a window, blue paint on a gravestone, ripped up Yellow Pages (etc.) is straight out of the playbook of Ellery Queen and the alice-door an obvious nod to John Dickson Carr. I liked the idea of an alice-door and how it was eventually used. Not as subtle as a Judas window, but, you know, it gets the job done.

So, yeah, Sladek's Invisible Green is light-years better than I remembered, but is it a better detective novel than Black Aura and has it any shot at becoming my favorite Sladek locked room mystery? Maybe and absolutely not! Judging purely based on their merits as plot-driven detective novels, they're about even-keeled and picking a favorite comes down to personal taste. I'm not blind to the convincing case that can be put forward in favor of Invisible Green as its the more subtle of the two, which is an important trait for a classic mystery novel to possess. However, if you stage a grand-style locked room mystery that feels like a genuine continuation of the 1930s detective story, you simply have my heart and soul by the balls!

That being said and having reread Black Aura and Invisible Green back-to-back, I can feel the blackhole Sladek left behind when abandoned the detective story. Not only because we very likely missed out on several top-tier locked room mysteries, but because he decided to bow out at a time when the traditional, fair play detective story needed someone like him the most. Sladek's regrettably small, but significant and relentlessly amusing, detective fiction gets reprinted in the hopefully not so distant future.

Black Aura (1974) by John Sladek

John Sladek was an American science-fiction writer who lived in London, England, from the mid-1960s to 1986 where he sold his first short stories to the British science-fiction magazine New Worlds and got his debut novel, The Reproductive System (1968), published – a novel about out-of-control, self-replicating machines. More importantly, Sladek loved detective stories and won the Times of London 1972 short story competition with a clever locked room mystery, "By an Unknown Hand" (1972). A part of the prize was the publication of the short story in The Times Anthology of Detective Stories (1973) and a contract to write a novel-length mystery about the detective Sladek introduced in "By an Unknown Hand," Thackeray Phin. 

Sladek ended up writing two, classically-styled and plotted homages to the Golden Age detective story, Black Aura (1974) and Invisible Green (1977), which became and stayed fan favorites despite being out-of-print since the seventies. 

Robert Adey wrote in Locked Room Murders (1991) that Black Aura is "very good in all respects and dealt, among other things, with an impossible disappearance and even more incredible levitation." Adey daringly called Invisible Green "an even better impossible crime novel" giving "high hopes of a major series," but Sladek bowed out of the detective story to return to science-fiction genre. But the situation at the time more or less dictated his early retirement as a mystery writer. Sladek told in 1982 interview "those two novels suffered mainly from being written about 50 years after the fashion for puzzles of detection" as he "enjoyed writing them, planning the absurd crimes and clues," but likened it "turning out a product the supermarket didn't need any more," like "stove polish or yellow cakes of laundry soap" – a writer "could starve very quickly writing locked-room mysteries like those." Regrettably, Sladek had arrived way too late on the scene as the traditional detective story had entered a dark age after the 1950s and the only notable names who stubbornly continued writing locked room mysteries regularly were Edward D. Hoch and Bill Pronzini. Or, perhaps, he arrived a decade too soon as there was brief revival during the 1980s courtesy of writers like Herbert Resnicow and William L. DeAndrea.

Either way, you can hardly blame him choosing the more profitable science-fiction genre over the locked room mystery, but I love Sladek's detective fiction that actually extends beyond those two Thackery Phin novels and two short stories. "The Locked Room" (1972) is a short-short parody with a story-within-a-story structure inexplicably buried in the SF collection Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978), while "Scenes from the Country of the Blind" (1977) can be found in Alien Accounts (1982) and concerns the disappearance of an entire village. Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2002) has in addition to the two short Phin stories eight inverted crime stories of which "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National" (1968) is a minor gem. Not a single real dud! The pickings have become slimmer over the years and hold out no hope that a manuscript of a third, unpublished Thackeray Phin novel (Scarlet Thief? Sky-blue Herrings? Violet Oracle? Gray Locks?) will turn up out of the blue one day. So decided to simply revisit Black Aura and Invisible Green. Beginning with one of my all-time favorite locked room mysteries. Can it stand up to rereading? Let's find out! 

Thackeray Phin is an American philosopher and aspiring detective, living London, whose "career as an amateur detective had begun promisingly a few months before" with "a locked room murder" known to the public as the Aaron Wallis Murder Case – which is the impossible crime he solved in "By an Unknown Hand." However, the murder of Aaron Wallis has been his only case, so far. Phin even runs a newspaper ad, "professional logician and amateur sleuth would like a challenge," but without much result. So he decides to practice on humbler mysteries like occultism, faith healers, mind readers and mediums. What he plans to do is ingratiate himself into Mrs. Viola Webb's Aetheric Mandala Society.

Mrs. Viola Webb is a very well-known, expensive spiritualist medium with a posh clientele comprising of true believers, skeptics and truth seekers who live in a commune. But there has been gossip about the society ever since one of its members, David Lauderdale, died from a heroine overdose in the house. Rumor has it, David wore "this sacred amulet from some Egyptian tomb" around his neck and there's "supposed to be some kind of curse on it." Recently, the death was mentioned again in the paper under the headline, "DRUG VICTIM'S GHOST WARNS POP STAR AT LONDON COMMUNE SEANCE." So the Aetheric Mandala Society promises enough parlor tricks to debunk and initially encounters nothing more than cold readings ("really a game of Twenty Questions"), ghosts playing around with trumpets during a séance and a spectral Indian chief who warns Phin "that there are some mysteries better left alone." Aaron Wallis also dropped in on the séance to thank Phin for solving his murder. So the usual, standard fare for a table-tapping session, but, pretty soon, the strangest of things begin to happen in-and around the house of the society.

Firstly, Dr. Andrew Lauderdale, father of David Lauderdale, who gave up science to become a member and use to the society as "a lifeline to what he imagines is the ghost of his son" goes missing under seemingly impossible circumstances. Dr. Lauderdale was seen entering a bathroom, locked it behind him, but never came out or responds to them hammering on the door. So they fetch a spare key to open the door, but they only find the tap running and an Egyptian scarab on the glass shelf above the sink. Otherwise, "the room was empty." Secondly, a little later on in the story, another member temporarily vanishes from a chapel at a funeral home with all the entrances and exits under observation. However, the centerpiece of the plot involves a truly staggering, impressively-staged miraculous murder while the victim was observed floating mid-air!

Steve Sonday, the pop singer who was warned by Dave's ghost, gives a demonstration of the "aetheric forces" generated during a trance state and is locks himself inside a small, triangular box-like room – called the Quiet Room. While the rest wait in the room, where the triangular box-like room stands, it appears as if Steve has astral projected his body outside the room. They see Steve Sonday outside the window, "floating in mid-air about ten foot straight out from the balcony" and "illuminating his face with a pocket torch." Just standing there in mid-air! But when they rush to open the window, the spell is broken and Steve plunges to his death onto the iron-spiked fence below. How did manage to levitate in front of a fourth-story window when he was supposed to be locked up in a small room?

There you have to setup to one hell of a locked room mystery and the temptation is there to draw a comparison with Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but Talbot employed the seances, apparently supernatural occurrences and the string of impossibilities to create a genuine horror of a house under siege by otherworldly entities. Sladek's Black Aura is much more lighthearted, kindred spirit of John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins (1935) with a dash of the self-aware, nearly punching through the fourth wall humor of Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin. Just like Carr, Sladek lived in England and both depicted London as Baghdad-on-the-Thames. A fantastical place where high adventure awaits all who dares to seek it and miraculous things could happen like people levitating in mid-air. However, the playful ("I usually just hope the killer blurts out his guilt in front of witnesses"), self-aware detective ("I can't think of a single brilliant, but confusing, thing to say") and comedy is streaked with a kind of melancholic nostalgia (anemoia?) and day dreams of wish fulfillment.

I remember from my first reading being very amused about Phin's day dreaming about being a Great Detective. 

For example, the fifth chapter ("Scorpio Descending") has Phin day dreaming he's sitting next to a warm fire in his Baker Street rooms explaining to Dr. Watson who was behind the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 ("Surely... that is elementary, Watson"). Phin immediately sobers up when he comes out of it as he observes that, nowadays, "the police did not wait politely behind the arras while the amateur investigator produced his dazzling deductions" and how "the worlds of crime and crime detection alike were infected with business efficiency." Now "they had computers capable of piling up great heaps of punched cards at astonishing speed" and "indentikits capable of rendering any human face whatever with the realism of a Disney cartoon." So considering the state of the genre in 1974 and his comments in 1982, it seems like Sladek took the opportunity winning the Times of London competition handed him to give the classic detective story and locked room mystery the sendoff they deserve. What a sendoff!

Admittedly, there are one, or two, minor smudged. I mentioned in my review of Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk's Into Thin Air (1928/29) the trickiest thing with these miracle parades is delivering good, or acceptable enough, solutions to every single one of them and usually one or more tend to be of a lesser quality – even outright filler material. That's unfortunately true of Black Aura as the impossible disappearances from the bathroom and chapel had nothing new or different to offer to the locked room mystery, merely smaller cogs and wheels in the machine of the overall plot, but the overall plot is what makes it a modern classic.

Firstly, there's the marvelous levitation-trick. The presentation of the impossibility is as memorable as it's original and the solution along with its superb clueing, including one of those shimmering tell-tale clues, you either spot or miss entirely, earning Black Aura its status as a classic of the locked room and impossible crime genre. Secondly, there's the wonderfully dovetailing of all the plot-threads, the nostalgic mood swings in the storytelling and the Golden Age-style characterization that even today makes it standout as an authentic, post-1950s continuation of the Golden Age tradition of the '30s and '40s. It's sad Sladek thought the genre was on its last leg in the 1970s and had to write one of its closing chapters, perhaps even its eulogy. But wonder what he (a science-fiction) would have thought, if he knew the futuristic internet would end up paving the way to a glorious Renaissance Era of the classic reprints and traditionally-styled (locked room) mysteries in the 21st century? I don't think even Sladek could have foreseen that development or us talking about him online, but something tells me would have approved.

So, to cut this overlong, sloppy and rambling review short, Sladek's Black Aura very much stood up to rereading and remains one of my all-time favorite locked room mysteries that needs to return to print! I'm very curious now to see if Invisible Green is actually better than Black Aura. I remember thinking Invisible Green was a step down from Black Aura, but so many keep insisting it's the superior of the two. So that one is next on the chopping block!

Lost in Space-Time: "Scenes from the Country of the Blind" (1977) by John Sladek

Back in 2017, I reviewed John Sladek's often overlooked short detective stories, collected in Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2002), but there are a few stray stories that, somehow, ended up in his science-and weird fiction themed collections – such as the short-short parody "The Locked Room" (collected in Keep the Giraffe Burning, 1978). Someone at the the time pointed out he wrote another, virtually unknown, impossible crime story about a town vanishing into thin air. 

"Scenes from the Country of the Blind" was originally published in the anthology A Book of Contemporary Nightmares (1977), reprinted in the August, 1983, issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and collected in Sladek's Alien Accounts (1982). So you know where to find it.

The story concerns three scientists, Latham, Corcoran and Smith, who run the Paranormal Experience Research Group and hope to "pry open a few eyelids" with their experiments. What they try to do is "test for ESP in animals" with a maze experiment involving two groups of rats, which have yielded promising results, but they have to deal with "a creature who swam in a private sea of skepticism," Dr. Harry Beddoes – who's always willing to test their theories to destruction. Dr. Beddoes wields Occam's Razor with "relentless skepticism," which began to annoy Latham. But he has something that might blunt his razor.

In their personal Library of Paranormal Experiences, they have thousands of letters on file from ordinary, reasonable intelligent people who "had some puzzling, even inexplicable experience." One letter told a story both "uncanny and evidential."

Mr. Durkell wrote the scientists to tell how he glimpsed a village, through a small copse, on his daily commute, where he knew there shouldn't be a village. There it was, complete with half-timbered houses and smoking chimneys, only to wink out of existence a few seconds later. Leaving behind nothing but empty fields! The village reappeared a week later, on the same day, which was seen by two witnesses and a road map showed the place, Mons, actually exists. But not for very long! The whole village disappeared a second time and another look at the road map showed nothing remotely close to a place named Mons!

This puzzling phenomena of a village that doesn't exist, except on Tuesdays, coincided with the disappearance of a farmer's wife in the same vicinity. So what's going on?

Dr. Beddoes naturally doesn't believe in a "rupture in the space-time fabric" or "some other universe running parallel to ours" and delivers to Latham a completely logical and rational explanation for the vanishing village and disappearing name on the road map – pointing out all the clues in Mr. Durkell's letter. I've seen variations on that map-trick before, but Sladek came up with something entirely new to make a whole village vanish like a popped soap bubble. Every locked room reader knows how restrictive this kind of impossibility really is, because a moving train, a room or even a house doesn't allow for much wiggle room or trickery. So it was impressive to see him do it with a populated village. My only gripe is that it probably wouldn't work a second time with the same witness. I can believe an unsuspecting person can be fooled by it, but, someone on the lookout, is likely to notice something.

Other than that little niggle, "Scenes from the Country of the Blind" is another weirdly overlooked, practically unknown, but excellent, short detective story by that unsung master of the post-war locked room mystery – effortlessly combining an original impossible crime with a multi-layered, story-within-a-story plot. Just like in "The Locked Room," Sladek told multiple, overlapping stories on a little more than a dozen pages. So more than deserving of your attention and to be considered for a future locked room-themed anthology.

John Sladek: Short Slayings

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

- Douglas Adams (Mostly Harmless, 1992)

John Sladek is perhaps best remembered as a satirist and an author of science-and speculative fiction, usually written with a humorous bend, but he also made a brief excursion into the realm of crime-fiction during the 1970s and penned two highly regarded locked room novels – alongside a few surprisingly obscure short stories.

During the early 70s, the Times of London held a short story competition for detective fiction and no less a figure than Agatha Christie served on the jury. Over a thousand short stories were submitted, but Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand" emerged victorious and became the centerpiece of The Times of London Anthology of Detective Stories (1973). However, the real prize for Sladek was an opportunity to write a full-length mystery novel and this resulted in a shimmering gem of the modern, post-World War II era. A genuine classic!

Black Aura (1974) is widely regarded as one of the best locked room novels the genre has ever produced and was followed by Invisible Green (1977), which is less popular, but still relatively well thought of by aficionados of impossible crime fiction – who usually acknowledge that the latter failed to live up to its predecessor. Regardless of the uneven quality between both titles, they cemented Sladek's reputation as a notable practitioner of the locked room mystery and we all mourned the fact that the he only wrote two of them. But as Sladek once remarked in jest, "one could starve very quickly writing locked room mysteries" in the modern era.

Nevertheless, most readers who loved his two novels seem to be unaware he penned nearly a dozen short detective stories, which were largely gathered in the posthumously published Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2002). The highlight of that compilation, for mystery readers, is the inclusion of two short stories about Thackeray Phin, who was also at the helm of Black Aura and Invisible Green, but these short pieces definitely measure up to the novels.

The first of these short stories is, of course, "By an Unknown Hand," which introduces Sladek's take on the Great Detective, Thackeray Phin, who's an American philosophy professor living in England and advertises himself as a "professional logician and amateur sleuth" - one who would welcome a challenge. Phin has always dreamed of being a detective and is elated when the owner of an art gallery, Anthony Moon, engages him as a bodyguard to protect an unpopular artist, Aaron Wallis. Someone has been sending him letters promising to end his life.

Wallis lives in an apartment on the 11th floor of a soulless apartment building and he had all the windows bricked up, because he has an aversion for natural light. So the windows offered no way in or out for the occupants would-be assassin. Before Phin began his watchman's duty, the apartment was searched by Wallis himself and the door was both locked and chain-locked from the inside, which was done with a very though chain. The door needed to be battered half a dozen times before the staple was torn from the wall and they could enter the apartment. Why did the door required battering, you ask? Somehow, someone managed to enter the sealed apartment and strangle the unpopular artist.

There are two points of interest that should be pointed out: once our detective realizes that "Sherlock Holmes wasn't going to be any help at all," Phin hurried home "to read some locked room mysteries," because, "if Dr. Fell could not cure this devil case," perhaps "Father Brown could exorcise it" - really showing where this story fits in the scheme of the overall genre. Secondly, the brother of the victim, Hector Wallis, is a clairvoyant, known as "Ozanam," who is seen giving a demonstration of the ability of his third eye. I think this particular scene, in combination with Phin's explanation, makes for a nice semi-impossible situation straight out of Clayton Rawson or Jonathan Creek. The solution to the locked room problem also somewhat resembled the work of that mystery writer and TV-series.

You can divide the crux of the impossible situation in two sections. The first part concerns the setup of the trick and plays out like an elaborate stage illusion, which is as risky as it's clever and lot's of fun. And there's something in the story that should set the seasoned armchair detective on the right track. However, the method for the sealed nature of the room was a lot more routine, but, overall, a very solid and promising debut for, what potentially could have been, John Dickson Carr's successor.

I'm also baffled why this story never found its way into one of the many locked room themed anthologies that have appeared since the early 1970s.

The second short story from this series, "It Takes Your Breath Away," was syndicated in 1974 in various London theater programs, which included A Streetcar Named Desire at the Piccadilly Theatre and is really just a short-short – covering only a scant three pages. Phin finds himself "far back at the discouraging end" of long cinema queue that twisted round a corner. One of the people waiting in line ends up with a knife in his chest, but that's all I really can say about the plot without giving anything away. But the plot is surprisingly rich and involved for a short-short of only three pages.

Well, most mystery readers are probably aware of the first short story discussed here and some known of the second, but very few are aware that Maps has a section, entitled "Sladek Incognito," which gathered eight virtually unknown crime story – originally published in the late 1960s and some were published as by "Dale Johns." Most of them are short-short inverted mysteries, usually no more than four pages, in which the plans of the culprit usually backfires on them. So you could call them A-Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard stories.

My personal favorite is "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National," originally published in a 1968 issue of Tit-Bits, which has a clever money scheme with cheque deposits go horribly wrong when an unpolished specimen of the criminal classes intervene. A very short piece, but also very good. Loved as much the second time as when I first read it. Deserves to be better known!

"Just Another Victim" comes from the pages of the same publication and has a jealous woman plotting the murder of a friend, planning to make it look like the work of an active serial killer, but you can probably guess the twist in that story. "The Switch" was also published as "The Train," again in Tit-Bits, in which a husband is plotting the murder of his wife by creating a train disaster, but the disaster is not what he expected. A somewhat technical short-short that could have been more interesting had it been a little bit longer. "Timetable" is a murder for hire gone wrong for the person who paid for the professional assassins, because he forgot a small, silly detail. This one also came from Tit-Bits. "Now That I'm Free" is a very good take on the multi-sided love affair that end in murder. I would imagine Christie would have a good chuckle at this story. The last of the short-shorts, "Practical Joke," has a thoroughly unpleasant character getting his much deserved comeuppance.

The next short story, "Publish and Perish," came from a June 1968 issue of a publication known as If and comes highly recommended to fans of Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes and crime stories with an academic setting – because this one is almost a parody of such kind of crime stories. A young associate professor of physics, Gleason, has an opportunity to rise in the academic ranks when a professor passes away, but his university has a strange tradition to decide who fills a seat: murder! Gleason not only has to survive the attempts on his life, such as a bomb in the coffee maker, but also has get dispose of his rival. A fun and unusual type of crime story that some of you will no doubt be able to appreciate.

Finally, there's a rather unusual hybrid-type of story, "In the Oligocene," culled from the pages of the July 1968 issue of If and has a time-traveler from the 1978 return to 1939 to save the woman he loved as a young man. Unfortunately, he is now a man in his sixties and to ensure she only loves him he takes her to the Oligocene period. A "comparatively gentle era in the earth's history," when the great reptiles had gone the way of the dinosaurs and the largest mammals weren't numerous enough to pose a danger, but she not thrilled by the prospect of being stranded in ancient history – without any other living soul to communicate with. So the reunion is not going as envisioned and the way this situation gets resolved is a science-fiction imagining of a deus ex machina. Hands down one of the weirdest kidnap stories in all of detective fiction.

So, that's all of the detective fiction that can be found in Maps, which have been long overlooked, but these stories are well worth possessing the entire collection. And if you like humorous science-fiction (e.g. Douglas Adams), you'll probably enjoy the non-criminal content of this collection. But the main reason for me was the hidden treasure trove of excellent detective stories.

On a final note, Sladek also wrote a non-series short locked room mystery, titled "The Locked Room," which is collected in Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978) and a review of that story can be read here.

The Locked Room: A Little-Known John Sladek Story

"I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read."

- John Sladek.

In 1972, the Times of London organized a short story competition for detective stories and after the jury, comprising of Lord Butler, Tom Stoppard and the Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, had ploughed through a 1000 stories – it was John Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand" who let his fellow competitors biting the dust of defeat. His award: the story was published in The Times Anthology of Detective Stories (1972) and a contract to pen one of my all-time favorite locked room novels, Black Aura (1974), and he wrote a follow up a few years later entitled Invisible Green (1977).

These stories are very well-known among locked room enthusiasts, like yours truly, but a let less familiar are the (non-impossible) short-short story "It Takes Your Breath Away," featuring Sladek's series detective Thackeray Phin, and a body of inverted mysteries with a twist, collected in Maps (2002), which I recommend without hesitation. But Sladek also wrote a parody on the impossible crime genre, aptly titled "The Locked Room," which is virtually unknown because it's inexplicably buried in a volume of science-fiction stories – Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978). It you've always wondered what would happen if you tossed Douglas Adams or Monty Python into the blender with John Dickson Carr's "The Locked Lecture," a chapter from The Hollow Man (1935), than you have to read this story.

The protagonists of this yarn are Fenton Worth, a lauded private investigator, and his valet, Bozo, but instead of taking on a case that's probably on their doorstep waiting to be let in he locks himself up in his library to read a mystery novel with The Locked Room (????) as its tantalizing title. As he reads through the pages, he begins to reflect on the miracles he has explained himself and goes over a lot of the familiar (and often trite) methods mentioned in Dr. Fell's lecture and has a good laugh at their expense. He also a few, uhm, interruptions from prospective clients.

Sladek also wrote a mini-short story into this already short, short story and has Worth reflecting back on "The Case of the Parched Adjutant," in which "a retired military gentleman of sober and regular habits" and "an ardent anti-vivisectionist" is murdered in his locked study on the day the circus was in town. It's campy and absurd, but futile to suppress a grin while reading it. 

One more thing worth mentioning, is that Worth had to cut open the pages of the book he was reading. I was aware you had to do this back in the days with (some) hard covers, but I think this is the first time I have seen it being described in a story. 

John Sladek (1937-2000): another man who did not believe in miracles

Yes! I have broken the dry spell of not reading any mysteries since posting my review of Max Murray's The Sunshine Corpse (1954)! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to tackle a monument of a locked room story. As much as Carr hated the modern era, I think/want to believe he would have liked this galore of busted doors and broken locks that is my blog.

And in case you've missed it, take a peek at my second installment of favorite locked room mysteries: short stories and novellas.