"The Great Detective."
By Delia Sherman (born 1951).
First appearance: Tor.com, February 17, 2016.
Novelette (45 pages).
Online HERE.
"When Sir Arthur Cwmlech’s home is robbed and the Illogic Engine–his prize invention–stolen, it is only natural that he and his clever assistant Miss Tacy Gof consult with another inventor, the great Mycroft Holmes, about who has taken it. But it is really Mr. Holmes’ Reasoning Machine who they are there to see, for it is only fitting for one automaton to opine on a matter concerning the fate of another of its kind. This charming story by award-winning fiction writer Delia Sherman is a delightful romp set within an a slightly altered version of one of our most beloved literary universes."
Not only does the Illogic Engine go missing but also just about everybody near and dear to Tacy Gof—who, undeterred, sets about tracking them down, with the timely assistance of a wounded Army doctor recently invalided home from the war in Afghanistan.
Main characters:
~ Sir Arthur Cwmlech:
"He was perhaps twenty-two, tall and knobby, with longish light hair and small, round spectacles. His low-crowned hat was crammed to his ears and his coat was buttoned askew. His careless appearance suggested Bohemian tendencies. The carriage’s obviously home-made shaded fog lights revealed a mechanical bent. Not an artisan, not with that coat. A gentleman mechanic, then—possibly an inventor."
~ Miss Tacy Gof:
"Somewhat to her own surprise, Tacy shared neither Sir Arthur’s optimism nor his admira-tion of the big man’s creation. Accustomed to mechanicals from the cradle as she was, she found herself regarding the Reasoning Machine with a discomfort that surprised as much as it distressed her."
~ Mistress Angharad Cwmlech:
"Although the automaton was indeed haunted by the ghost of Sir Arthur’s noble ances-tress, she considered the name bestowed on her by the popular press ['the Ghost in the Machine'] a slight upon her dignity. Tacy had heard her curse an inventor who had addressed her thus in terms that might have distressed him very much, had he been able to understand Welsh. Tacy was relieved when Angharad contented herself with a haughty lift of her molded chin. 'I am Mistress Angharad Cwmlech of Cwmlech Manor. And I believe I am as human as yourself'."
~ Mycroft Holmes:
"He loomed over Sir Arthur—who was himself a tall man—and was easily twice his girth. Tacy judged him to be perhaps thirty, with a heavy, handsome countenance dominated by a hawklike nose and pale eyes that gave back the light of the Smith lamp like pearls."
~ Reasoning Machine:
"The Reasoning Machine’s fine brows lifted in a parody of surprise. 'Engines are, by defini-tion, logical. An Illogic Engine, therefore, cannot exist'."
~ Inspector Gregson:
"This is an investigation, miss, not a tea party. Sir Arthur, if you will show me the work-shop, I can get on with my job."
~ Swindon:
"He was a stately man who, Tacy suspected, felt as if he’d come down in the world. Today, in the wake of a theft, and with police in the house, he had something of the air of an early Christian martyr surrounded by lions."
~ Dr. John Watson:
"As the doctor summoned the waitress, Tacy studied him. He had a pleasant face, she thought, with a firm mouth, though his expression was a little stern. His skin was weathered by the fire of a foreign sun and his mustache was touched with grey, making his age hard to determine."
Resources:
- Delia Sherman's charming fantasy writing has attracted notice: Wikipedia HERE and the ISFDb HERE; her webpage is HERE, and the prequel to "The Great Detective" is HERE.
- Ms. Sherman isn't the only author to give in to the urge to pastiche Sherlock Holmes; at least one former movie actor did it (HERE), and so have dozens of other writers (HERE); and let's not forget TV's cybernetic version of The Sage of Baker Street (HERE).
The bottom line: "It’s hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they’re always smarter than you think."
— Daniel H. Wilson
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), writing in her introduction to The Second Omnibus of Crime (1932), after discussing the vicissitudes affecting the mystery novel and concluding that its future, even with so many factors working against it ("In spite of unfavorable world-condi-tions"), isn't as dire as it could be, turns next to the mystery short story, which, she says, suffers from its own peculiar afflictions, generated most often at the source (i.e., by the authors and editors themselves), especially with respect to the perennial effort versus profit problem:
The consequence is that it is at present very difficult to persuade the best mystery-writers to bother about the short story at all. The very great labour involved in getting a bright, novel and agreeable murder, inventing a suitable detective, dragging in the human interest and then compressing the thing into 6,000 words is scarcely worth while. After an amount of brain exhaustion which would almost suffice to produce a full-length novel, the net result usually is that the writer feels himself to have merely wasted a perfectly good plot. For the central idea—which, as we have seen, is the nucleus about which every plot has to revolve—is used now and cannot as a rule be used again. The writer feels, very properly, that he has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, since the price paid, even by a high-class magazine, for a short detective-story is seldom comparable with the advance payment on a full-length novel.
Of course, those considerations still prevail today, yet because of them Sayers seems to discern an uncertain future for the short form:
The detective short story, therefore, is in the position of a city built between the sea and a precipice. On the one side it is being gradually undermined, while circumstances prevent its expansion on the other. It cannot, like the detective-novel, grow largely and loosely towards a wider psychology and more humane style, because of editorial edicts tending to constrict it; and meanwhile, the available subject-matter is becoming seriously curtailed.
You could get the impression that Sayers foresees a possible extinction event for the short detective tale:
A short story has all its eggs in one basket; it can turn one trick and one trick only; its detective-interest cannot involve a long investigation—it must be summed up in a single surprise. And so hard have detective-writers worked in the last half-century, that there are now remarkably few tricks the reader does not know. The substituted corpse, the gramophone alibi, the murder by means of an animal, the forged finger-print, the key turned from the other side of the door, the put-back clock, the mechanical device for turning the light on and off, the trick flask—the reader knows them all and knows how to detect them as well as the detective himself. In the novel they can still be used—or some of them.(Personally, I think the gramophone should be given a rest.) In the course of telling a long story it is possible to camouflage them by a multitude of compli-cating circumstances. But in the short story they have to stand unsupported, and their eyelids are a little weary. Thus the detective short story, prevented from following the natural line of development of its companion, the detective-novel, is growing rarer and rarer. . . .
. . . but we're happy to report that, Sayers's misgivings notwithstanding, after nearly eighty-five years the detective short story is still with us, as hale and hearty as ever, thanks in no small part to percipient editors like Ellery Queen.
Resources:
- No, we're not playing "Gotcha!" with our author; Dorothy Sayers was responding to current trends in fiction publishing, and her conclusions at the time were perfectly logical. You can find her entertaining introduction to The Second Omnibus HERE.
- Wikipedia (HERE) and the GAD Wiki (HERE) have plenty of information about Sayers.
- Praise and otherwise for DLS's fiction have been collated HERE.
Category: Detective fiction criticism
"Asteroid Justice."
By V. E. Thiessen (Valor E. Thiessen, 1917-2005).
First appearance: Planet Stories, Fall 1947.
Short short story (8 pages).
Online at SFFAudio HERE.
"What was Sam Knox up to now—drifting helplessly in a tiny eggshell across black oceans of space with two weeks' grub? Was this the way the great man-hunter deftly snagged his prey?"
Sam Knox may not officially be a Mountie but he's determined, come what may, to catch a certain fugitive from justice, even out here in the Asteroid Belt millions of miles from home, among a clannish group of asteroid miners who dispense quick and sharp justice; one of them, though, is a thief and murderer cunning enough to frame Sam for his own crimes. In order to clear himself and nail the criminal, Sam will have to resort to a desperate gamble that, if it doesn't work, will result in his own execution.
Main characters:
~ Nancy Rorke of the asteroid mining ship Fleetblast:
"Sam looked at her, this slip of a girl who was undertaking a man's work. For all her courage she was still a woman, slim and lissome. She was not too tall, rounded sweetly, and well-formed. Under Sam's gaze she lifted her eyes to his, eyes as brown as new-plowed soil."
~ Sam Knox of the Department of Terran Justice and captain of the Wanderer:
". . . in his hunt for men a hundred women had tried to deceive him, so that he set his mind against this weakness, and looked away across the room."
~ Timas Rorke, captain of the Fleetblast and Nancy's father:
"There was a faint trace of Irish blood in him, responsible perhaps for the red hair of his daughter. He lay back in bed, complaining at the foolishness that had put him there."
~ Ned Hawkins of the Aeries:
"A young man came from the lock with her. He was dark and saturnine. His glance viewed Sam with open suspicion."
~ Pell, head of the Order of Miners:
"I know from my own experience that the mind-probe is worthless. I was convicted once by a mind-probe trial."
Typos: "that important penicillin derivitive"; "when he though of Nancy Rorke."
Resources:
- You can find an obit for V. E. Thiessen on The Oklahoman website HERE; a true pulpster, he wrote at least five dozen genre stories: mysteries, Westerns, romances, and SF (see the ISFDb HERE).
The bottom line: "Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid."
— Mark Twain
"The Alibi."
By J. C. Squire (1884-1958).
First appearance: ?.
Reprinted in The Second Omnibus of Crime (1932) (TOC HERE).
Short story (17 pages).
Online HERE.
(Parental caution: Strong language.)
A story that you might need to read twice.
A duck hunting expedition ends in the death of one of the hunters, but clearly it's no accident; two characters discuss the tragedy:
"Mr. Henry Henderson, M.P., an unpleasant man of doubtful antecedents, with an ill-treated wife . . ."
"Who said she was ill-treated?"
"I did. But never mind. She at least would never be suspected by anyone. At all events this malodorous, though virile and energetic man, was staying, in his capacity as chosen of the electorate, with Sir Richard Moorhouse at Titford Manor. Is that all right?"
"Oh of course it is."
"On a certain evening of November 1928, Mr. Henderson was found dead by Sir Richard Moorhouse's duck-pond. Two dead ducks accounted for the discharge of his gun barrels and he had obviously been killed by a pistol shot fired by another hand."
"That's all right so far as it goes," said French, looking vacantly, glass in hand, into the great fire of logs.
"Obviously, and perhaps I can skip the rest of the obvious. The question is, who did it?"
"Of course, who did it?"
Dramatis personae:
~ Sir Richard Moorehouse:
The tabloids variously describe him as "a great reader, with a particular penchant for criminology," "a keen student of nature," "a fine shot," "a noted pedestrian," "at one time much sought after as an amateur actor," and a "world-traveller."
~ Henry Henderson:
"Everybody knew the man was a swine, with his red face and beastly curling moustache, his crooked eyes and crooked companions."
~ Gladys Henderson:
". . . nobody told her about her precious husband's seraglio. Just the sort to go mad out of jealousy: but she doted. Perhaps she was more cunning than she looked . . ."
~ Mrs. Rose:
". . . she has got the stony face of a Medusa."
~ Harbutt:
". . . the butler, plump, cheerful and courteous . . ."
~ Major Ted French, Chief Constable of the County:
". . . slightly froglike with his round face and plump waistcoat and hips."
NOTABLE PASSAGES:
Some adroit scene painting:
There was a punt below his feet, but it was full of water and useless. He left his tree and almost fell into the water-filled barrel which long ago had been a hiding-place for duck-shooters. His gun dropped and he picked it up again. He took his torch out and switched it on to guide himself along the neck of bog which led to the mainland: its arc-illuminated tufted rushes, little pits of mud, stones, peaty pools, moths and pointed silver beads of rain. Then some impulse of caution, almost like a voice crying in his ear, made him switch it off again, and he scrambled rapidly along the familiar bank in the rain, with now and then a plunge to the knees in mud and now and then a trip over a curling treeroot. At the western angle of the mere, he stopped, stared into the semi-darkness and listened again. The rain pattered heavily.
An interior monologue:
Relieved to be able to stand aloof he watched them depart from the steps, wondering at the predicaments in which human beings find themselves, at the secrets they carry about in their breasts, musing on the passions of the wronged, the desperate unscrupulousness of the frightened, the general inability of men and women to see their affairs in a due proportion, having regard to time and space, the awful tale of forgotten years, the movements of land and sea, the uncountable wars and plagues of the past, the vast and remote processions of the stars and nebulae. Yet, he reflected, as the closed car rolled off and he turned again to his room, he could hardly be expected to be immune from the general human frailty, and his own preservation and comfort, however momentary in the light of the eternities, were of some importance to him. It occurred to him then—for he was honest with himself—that he was, on the whole, a chivalrous man, though his generally ironic, even cynical, manner effectively disguised it from all except the penetrating: and that this indefensible habit of secrecy might well be useful to him.
Typo: "I was not let uninformed".
Resources:
- J. C. Squire, our author, was extensively preoccupied with poetry (see Wikipedia HERE), so this O'Henry-esque crime story with a twist in its tale is something of a departure; his chief contribution to SF/Fantasy was dabbling in alternate history, editing If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History (see the SFE HERE, the ISFDb HERE and HERE, and Wikipedia HERE).
The bottom line: "The perils of duck hunting are great—especially for the duck."
— Walter Cronkite
"We're Friends, Now."
By Henry Hasse (1913-77).
First appearance: Amazing Stories, April 1960.
Novelette (70 pages).
Online at Project Gutenberg HERE and ManyBooks HERE.
(Parental caution: Strong language.)
"The little man stood in front of the monstrous machine as the synaptic drone heightened to a scream. No ... no, he whispered. Don't you understand...."
Amos Carmack, a very wealthy man indeed, is no more:
"'Now here,' he touched a spool labelled in red, 'is your Basic Invariant. Carmack—Amos T. Murdered man. Found bludgeoned in library of his home, night of April 4. Age 56, held all outstanding patents on ECAIAC, worth millions, and'—he looked up, beaming—'leaves beautiful wife'."
In the not too distant future, a supercomputer dubbed ECAIAC ("Ekky," for short) is assigned the task of "cybernetic detection," with the old methods of criminal investigation only dimly remembered from the faded pages of whodunits:
"Oh, I grant you it used to hold true—principle beneficiary was always prime suspect. Fiction especially was full of it. Queen, Dickson Carr, Boucher—you know the ilk. But with ECAIAC we've gotten away from all that, haven't we?"
So policemen like Raoul Beardsley, once an important man in law enforcement, have no choice but to adapt to this new normal:
. . . there was something about Raoul Beardsley that eternally evoked amusement—an air of vacuous innocence and a remote forlornness. He gave the appearance of a person who sold shoes during the day, washed his wife's dishes at night and then solved two or three galacti-gram puzzles before turning off the light precisely at ten. Few, if any, remembered that this nervous little man had once been top Inspector of New York City's Homicide Bureau ... but that was a dozen long years ago. Since then he had seen the antiquated detective methods of 1960 disappear, and he had died a little, too, seeing his Homicide Bureau relegated to a mere subsidiary with the growth of the Coördinate and Mechanical Divisions.
For Beardsley, working for Crime-Central has become about as interesting as selling insurance, and there's this feeling of nostalgia that he can't seem to shake:
Seven weeks! He clutched the bulging briefcase with a wearisome horror. Twenty-two persona-tapes from Central File, all neatly processed and ready for ECAIAC. End result of the endless chart sifts, emphasis (as always!) on parietosomatic recession, the slow emergence of minor constants, the inexorable trend toward Price Factor and then verification, verifica-tion, to each his own, with all the subtle and shaded values of the Augment Index brought finally to focus on the relevance-graph Carmack.
Sure, thought Beardsley. A thing of augment-indexing and psych-tapes, quite without possibility of error. Now in the old days of crime detection—it might have taken them seven months instead of weeks, not to mention frustration and leg-work and false-leads and sweat, but—
Beardsley finds that even working with ECAIAC, a massive electronic brain, can be an unsettling experience:
There was something about the sight and sound and feel of ECAIAC that got to him, that seeped beneath flesh and bone and into his brain and sent his senses singing. Beardsley managed to gulp, as he observed the shiny black colossus that filled the entire length of the ninety-foot room; a dozen techs scurried around it, taking notes, attentive to the flashing lights in red-and-green and the faint clicking of thousands of relays that rose in susurration.
But more than that arose. It was something that pervaded the room, not a pulsing but a presence, a sort of snapping intangible intelligence that reached beyond the audible and sheared at Beardsley's nerve-ends.
Finding who killed Amos Carmack should be easy for ECAIAC, with all the data that Beardsley and his division have amassed in the past two months; after all, they've finally managed to narrow down the suspects to . . .
"Fifteen possibles, four Logicals and three Primes—" Beardsley stopped abruptly. "Twenty-two who knew Carmack," he went on. "That includes associational as well as motive-oppor-tunity factors, with a probability sphere of .004...."
There's only one problem: As carefully compiled and scientific as that list is, the murderer isn't on it . . .
Random passages:
"And the penalty was in his eyes, if one cared to look beyond the thick-lensed glasses. No one ever did. They were remote eyes, a little bewildered, a little hurt ... a mirror gone dull from times remembered but irretrievably lost."
"'The idea appeals to me! Beardsley versus ECAIAC ... socio-archaism opposed to the machina-ratiocinatrix. Why, it's delicious!'"
"ECAIAC was in finest fettle again as the tapes sped through. Circuits were activated. Codes gave meaning. Synaptic cells summed and integrated, cancelled and compared and with saucy assurance sent the findings on toward Cumulative. The murmur was soft and sustained and somehow apologetic, as if ECAIAC were quite aware that she had failed in her duty but would be just pleased to make amends this time."
"'Ah, yes. The obvious,' Beardsley said with a grimace. 'But you know, I learned a long time ago that the obvious can be a mighty tricky thing. A dangerous thing. The forceps of the mind are greedy, and inclined to crush a little in the seizing....'"
Typo: "the black metal sheathe of the monster"
Resources:
- You'll find entries for Henry Hasse at the SFE HERE and the ISFDb HERE.
- Hardly a day goes by when Hollywood and science fiction writers don't use computers and artificial intelligence as plot devices; here's a micro-list dealing with those particular tropes:
~ Wikipedia HERE
~ "Computers in Fiction" by H. Bruce Franklin HERE
~ and TV Tropes HERE.
The bottom line: "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."
— Steve Wozniak
"The Affair of the Corridor Express."
By Victor L. Whitechurch (1868-1933).
First appearance: Pearson’s Weekly, April 22, 1899.
Collected in Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912).
Short story (27 pages).
Online at Project Gutenberg Australia HERE.
"Thorpe Hazell stood in his study in his London flat. On the opposite wall he had pinned a bit of paper, about an inch square, at the height of his eye, and was now going through the most extraordinary contortions."
Eccentric he may be, but when it comes to mysterious problems relating to the railways, Thorpe Hazell's experience and reasoning ability make him the one to consult in this case of a little boy, a millionaire's son, who has disappeared from a moving train without a trace.
Main characters:
~ Mr. F. W. Wingrave, M.A., B.Sc.:
"I have just been through a very trying experience. A boy I was in charge of has just mysteriously disappeared, and I want you to find him for me . . ."
~ Horace Carr-Mathers, the missing item:
"I tried to kick and shout, but it was no go. They got me into the compartment, stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth, and tied it in. It was just beastly."
~ Thorpe Hazell:
"You will understand that I am going to work upon the theory that the boy has been kidnapped and that the original intention has been carried out, in spite of the accident of your presence in the train. How the boy was disposed of meanwhile is what baffles me; but that is a detail—though it will be interesting to know how it was done. Now, I don't want to raise any false hopes, because I may very likely be wrong, but we are going to take action upon a very feasible assumption, and if I am at all correct, I hope to put you definitely on the track. Mind, I don't promise to do so, and, at best, I don't promise to do more than put you on a track."
~ Mr. Mills:
"It's your duty to warn off strangers. How long have you been stationed here?"
~ A "big, strong-looking man":
"I ain't so much to blame as them as employed me."
~ Mr. Carr-Mathers:
"I understand you are not an ordinary detective."
Typo: "my eard".
Resources:
- Victor L. Whitechurch is mostly known for his railway mysteries featuring Thorpe Hazell; for more about those stories, the author, and his principal character, go HERE (Mike Grost), HERE (the GAD Wiki), HERE (Pretty Sinister Books), HERE (Wikipedia), and HERE (ONTOS).
- For a true life railway crime, go to the Journal of Victorian Culture Online article HERE; apropos of our story, the article informs us:
Compartment style carriages had been employed in Britain since the beginning of passenger railways in the 1830s, being a natural development of the horse-drawn carriage. Following the Briggs murder [in 1865], ‘Muller Lights’, a small glazed porthole between adjoining compartments, were installed by some rail companies, but this ‘safety’ feature was double edged as passengers complained that they allowed prying eyes into private compartments. The American preference for open plan carriages, with transverse seats set either side of a central passageway, only spread to Europe in the 1870s, although British passengers still valued their privacy, leading to the retention of compartments, but with a corridor along one side of the carriage. Flexible gangways linked individual carriages, allowing free movement to lavatories and dining cars. Compartment carriages were still being commissioned into the 1960s and only fell out of favour with British Rail in the 1980s when crime levels, particularly in the South East, rose sharply. Nevertheless, the affection of the British public for the private compartment, more likely the scene of a romantic interlude than a brutal crime, remained and they are now a staple feature of preserved railway travel.
The bottom line: "I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid the best. He said, 'Ransom notes'."
— Harry Zimm
"Delayed Action."
By Charles V. de Vet (1911-97).
First appearance: Galaxy, September 1953.
Short story (19 pages).
Online at Project Gutenberg HERE, Archive.org HERE, and ManyBooks HERE.
"This planet gave him the perfect chance to commit the perfect crime — only he couldn't remember just what it was he had committed."
While it may take a thief to catch a thief, as the old saying has it, in this situation it'll take a man with a blue ribbon case of amnesia:
"You know that Interplanets has branches on more than a thousand worlds. Because of this widespread operation it's particularly vulnerable to robbery. But it would cost more than the Company's earnings to post adequate guards on every station. And it would be impractical to depend on the protection of the local governments, many of which are extremely primitive. On the other hand, allowing themselves to be robbed with impunity would be financial suicide. That is where the Company's Secret Service comes in. It never lets up on the effort it will make to solve a robbery and bring the perpetrators to justice. And it never quits, once it begins an investigation."
Principal characters:
~ Donald Johnson:
"Twenty minutes later Johnson took the job—and twenty years later he was still working for the Company. He worked for them until..."
~ The store manager of Interplanets Trade Company:
"The manager was an old man. Old and black, with the deep blackness only an Earth-born Negro possesses. But his eyes retained their youthful alertness."
~ The black-bearded stranger:
"The gun in his hand was aimed at Johnson."
~ Alton Hawkes:
"He held the pistol like a man who knew how to use it."
Resources:
- Info about Charles V. de Vet can be found HERE (the SFE) and HERE (the ISFDb).
- A Möbius strip plays an important part in our story; you may recall how another one, featured in a different story, did the same (HERE).
The bottom line: "A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory."
― Mark Twain
