HERE WE HAVE something of a rara avis, a locked room murder rendered in science fictional terms. Given that it is SFF, is it possible for it to play fair with the reader? Decide for yourself.
"The Undetected."
By George O. Smith (1911-81).
First appearance: Galaxy, December 1959.
Several reprintings (HERE).
Novelette (30 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE) (text faded), Project Gutenberg (HERE), and Socialpolitan (HERE).
"Nothing can possibly be more baffling than a crime in a sealed room . . . but what if the investigator happens to have an open mind?"
Captain Howard Schnell of Special Detail has been called in to investigate the murder-robbery of "an eccentric old sourpuss who hated to do business with bankers":
I took a quick look around the apartment, even though I already knew what I had to know. Gordon Andrews had been slain in his sleep by the quick thrust of some rapierlike instrument. There was no sign of any struggle. The wall safe stood with its door open and its contents missing. Every door and window was closed, locked, burglar-bugged, and non-openable from the inside; the front door had been forced by the police. Furthermore, it had been raining in wind-whipped torrents for hours, yet there was no trace of moisture on any of the floors.
Of course no one had heard a sound, and naturally there were no fingerprints.
Police Chief Weston spied me and snapped, "What do you make of it, Schnell?"
I shrugged and said, "Completely sealed room."
Call it a hunch, or call it something else, but Schnell knows this crime wasn't committed by just any ordinary thief:
With about ninety-eight per cent of the general public still not quite willing to accept rockets, missiles and space travel, I had a fat chance of convincing anybody that a telepath had kept guard over the slumbering mind of Gordon Andrews, while a perceptive solved the combination to the wall safe, so that a kinematic could twirl the dial; that the imminent awakening of Gordon Andrews had indeed been an imminent physical threat to a delicate extra-sensory under-taking, and that therefore he had been silenced by the kinematic, with a weapon located by the perceptive, after warning from the telepath; after which the crime had continued, with the loot being floated by a levitator along a freeway explor-ed by the perceptive and scouted by the telepath and cleared of barriers by the kinematic who opened and debugged them as he went along—and that the real topper for this whopper was that this operation was not the integrated effort of a clever gang of extra-sensory specialists, but rather the single-handed accom-plishment of one highly talented Psi-man!
A Psi-man ruthless enough to kill before he would permit his victim to watch the turning dial, the floating loot, the opening portal, simply because there stood a probability that one of the two billion persons on Earth might suspect the phenomena as parapsychical activity, instead of the hallucinatory ravings of a rich old eccentric who hated the incumbent political party!
And so begins a dangerous cat-and-mouse contest between Schnell and the Psi-man, someone armed with formidable psychokinetic powers and a willingness to kill again
if anybody gets too close to the truth . . .
Comment: Some well-known writers of the Golden Age of Detection—Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, and John Dickson Carr—get a mention in the context of an interesting little discussion about what constitutes "the perfect crime" that crops up midway through the story.
Resources:
- George O. Smith belonged to the next generation of SFF authors following Hugo Gerns-back; see Wikipedia (HERE), the SFE (HERE), and the ISFDb (HERE) for just about all that's known about him.
- If you're interested in psionics, we can't think of a better introduction to it than the Atomic Rockets website (HERE).
The bottom line: "In science fiction, telepaths often communicate across language barriers, since thoughts are considered to be universal. However, this might not be true. Emotions and feelings may well be nonverbal and universal, so that one could telepathically send them to anyone, but rational thinking is so closely tied to language that it is very unlikely that complex thoughts could be sent across language barriers. Words will still be sent telepath-ically in their original language."
— Michio Kaku
"My Own Murderer."
By E. J. Goodman (1836-1921?).
First appearance: The Idler Magazine, June 1893.
Short story (10 pages, with 10 illos). (Note: One image reverses the text description.)
Online at Project Gutenberg (HERE).
"What do you know of crime?"
Art imitates life at just about every turn, but when life imitates art it's worth noting—and sometimes it can be just plain scary:
When I say that my name is Samuel Chillip, of course you will know who I am. Yes, I am the author—it has been said the famous author—of “The Poisoned Waterbottle,” “Steeped in Gore,” “The Demon Detective,” and other highly sensational and blood-curdling stories. But though these tales of mine have brought me some fame and a fair amount of profit, I am not particularly proud of them. I really don’t know how I, so to speak, drifted into crime. I never liked it, and, of course, never practised it myself. I would much rather have written sentimental or moral stories, but I seemed somehow fated to turn my attention to fraud and violence, and I could not get away from such subjects.
Then one memorable night, life intrudes on Samuel's cozy artistic existence, and things will never be the same again:
Nothing out of the usual course had happened on the memorable evening of which I am about to tell, and which was destined to have so marked an influence on my literary career.
Because there in his seemingly safe and secure study Samuel is about to be forced to consider a question he never thought he'd have to answer: "Would you like to see a murderer?"
Resources:
- We couldn't find out much about our author E. J. Goodman, except that he or she wrote a popular book about touring Norway and a thriller called Paid in His Own Coin (1888), which the Pall Mall Gazette (Thursday, September 20, 1888 (HERE), at a time when all of England was engrossed in the atrocities of Jack the Ripper, characterized as follows:
"Paid in His Own Coin." By E. J. Goodman. Three Vols. (Richard Bentley and Son.) At the present moment, when the horrors of the East End have whetted the taste for, and the interest in, mysterious murders, the present story ought to prove attractive. A young medical man is accused of having caused the death of his father-in-law by administering some strange narcotic, unknown to the medical world, and two drops of which cause a deep sleep, ending in death. The story opens on the scene in the law courts at the end of the trial of Dr. Wynd for murder. He is acquitted for want of evidence, but the uncharitable public declines to believe in his innocence. A gaunt, red-haired fellow who day after day has watched the case with keenest interest - his one interest in life being the study of cases of "scientific" murder - dogs the footsteps of the accused man, and eventually discovers that the latter is indeed the perpetrator of the crime, and is paid in his own coin by being killed in his turn. So far, so well; and if the outline of a plot could make a tale successful there is no reason why the author should not have written a readable book. But after it has been said that the plot is not bad, there remains absolutely nothing more to be said in praise of the novel. Among the puppets who are dragged before the public to represent the "characters" there is not a single one which can boast of possessing an average quantity of common sense or intelligence; and never for a moment is it possible for a reader to have a fellow-feeling for any of the imbecile creatures crawling along towards the final denouement with all its sensational absurdities.
- Our story shouldn't be confused with Richard Hull's 1941 novel (HERE) and (HERE).
The bottom line: "The Edge . . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
— Hunter S. Thompson
"The Fire and the Sword."
By Frank M. Robinson (1926-2014).
First appearance: Galaxy, August 1951.
Several reprintings (HERE).
Novelette (30 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE) (text faded) and Project Gutenberg (HERE).
"Nothing could have seemed pleasanter than that peaceful planet. Then why was a non-suicidal man driven to suicide there? Yet it made sense."
Tunpesh: Tahiti in deep space. A planet blessed with an ideal climate and placid, unimpeach-ably honest, almost impossibly healthy but not overtly sociable people—is it even remotely likely that someone would want to kill himself in such an agreeable place, a veritable para-dise?
Eckert, an anthropologist, and Templin travel to Tunpesh to investigate, as unobtrusively as they can over the next six months, why Pendleton, a colleague, committed suicide there—if, that is, as the natives insist, he did indeed take his own life. What they find has them baffled:
"You know, there isn't any crime here. Except the minor crime wave we caused when we landed here five months ago. No criminals, no villains foreclosing mortgages, no gamblers bleeding the gullible white, and nobody trying to sell gold bricks. I can't get over it."
But getting over it is precisely what they'll have to do if they don't want to share Pendleton's fate, dying in paradise . . .
Typos (Galaxy): "an unhapy love affair"; "went throuh a dizzying."
Resources:
- Frank M. Robinson had a few of his stories made into films; see Wikipedia (HERE), the SFE (HERE), a webpage (HERE), and the ISFDb (HERE).
- Thanks to a Star Trek episode (HERE), what used to be known as the Tahiti Syndrome is now more commonly called the Paradise Syndrome (HERE); for more about Richard Cory, mentioned in the story, see (HERE).
The bottom line: "So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."
— Genesis
SOME OF THE most famous detective fiction authors have turned their hands to accounts of true crime; P. D. James (The Maul and the Pear Tree, 1971 HERE), The Detection Club (The Anatomy of Murder, 1936 HERE), John Dickson Carr (The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 1936 HERE), and Patricia Cornwell (Portrait of a Killer, 2002 HERE) come immediately to mind. Through research, training, and practice mystery writers can make a historical crime fascinating enough to hold the reader's interest, and we normally expect no less.
So it's gratifying when true crime writers are able to make their reporting sound as inter-esting as fiction. John Kobler was a reporter who could do that, as in the three articles below, all from DFW in the mid-'30s:
~ ~ ~
"As for the Cold-blooded Murder of a Feeble, Old Woman, Their Imagination Balked at It"
"The Imperfect Crime."
By John Kobler (1910-2000).
First appearance: Detective Fiction Weekly, October 10, 1936.
True crime account (10 pages).
Online at UNZ (HERE).
(Note: Text smudged but readable.)
"The Police Listened in on Every Detail of This Projected Murder, but They Did Nothing About It, Believing It Was an Elaborate Joke"
April-July 1932: At first it looked like a simple hit-and-run case, but before long it would morph into a full-blown murder-for-gain involving some ex-cons, a lawyer seemingly
above reproach, large-scale embezzlement, and "marks like tiny horse-shoes."
~ ~ ~
"French Detectives Place a Strong Reliance on Intuition As Opposed to Pure Deduction"
"Murder in the Afternoon."
By John Kobler (1910-2000).
First appearance: Detective Fiction Weekly, October 24, 1936.
True crime account (9 pages).
Online at UNZ (HERE).
"Eminent French Pathologists Said of Guy Davin: 'He Is a Moral Madman. He Will Steal. Surely He Will Kill'."
December 1931: What at first looks like a negligible roadside accident turns into a case of cold-blooded murder when, thanks to the intuition and determination of a "suspicious bloodhound" of a commissaire, clue after clue lead to a killer who thinks nothing of firing three bullets into an unsuspecting victim and later making jokes about it.
~ ~ ~
"She Had Done It Simply So That He Would Not Hate Her"
"The Devious Lady."
By John Kobler (1910-2000).
First appearance: Detective Fiction Weekly, November 7, 1936.
True crime account (11 pages).
Online at UNZ (HERE).
"The Fantastic Case of a Society Woman Who, Trying to Escape the Stigma of a Poisoner, Fed Arsenic Bon-bons to an Entire English Town"
June 1871: The death of a 4-year-old boy from strychnine poisoning is just the tip of a murderous iceberg as a madwoman tries to exact revenge for being turned away by the
man she loves.
Resources:
- John Dickson Carr used "The Devious Lady" case as the basis for a novel, The Black Spectacles (1939; a.k.a. The Problem of the Green Capsule); see (HERE) for a spoiler-free précis.
- Our notorious poisoner, Christiana Edmunds, has a Wikipedia page (HERE) and a Murderpedia entry (HERE); Anna Massey portrayed her in a 1970 TV production (HERE).
- Another mass poisoning of an entire town that, depending on whom you choose to believe, was either accidental or intentional occurred in France; Wikipedia has more (HERE).
- John Kobler is remembered for what might be the definitive biography of Al Capone; see his New York Times obit (HERE); he also had one screen credit (HERE).
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| Our author's magnum opus |
- Several other writers, known for their fiction, who could make real life crime interesting were Craig Rice (HERE), Erle Stanley Gardner (HERE), and Lawrence G. Blochman (HERE).
SOMETIMES EDITORS seem to be tone-deaf. When this story was first published, the telegraphic chapter headings, later added by Amazing's editor Hugo Gernsback, weren't there; if you skip over those as you read, you might enjoy it more.
"The White Gold Pirate."
By Merlin Moore Taylor (1886-?).
First appearance: Serialized in Illustrated World, October, November, December 1922 (HERE).
Reprinted in The Regent Magazine, June 1924, and Amazing Stories, April 1927.
Short story (13 pages).
Online at Comic Book Plus (HERE) (select page 31).
(Note: Text is faded but legible.)
"The white gold in this amazing scientific detective tale is, of course, platinum, which is far more precious than gold. It is a story in which science is used at every angle to defeat the criminal—a plausible story, too, that sweeps you along with it until the final denouement. The X-ray episode is particularly interesting an account of its true scientific aspect. We assure you a good half hour's reading in this story."
Chapter I: "A Suspicious Offer by Telephone, for the Sale of Platinum to the Government":
Robert Goodwin is a scientist, inventor, and the head of a group of experimental labora-tories who, along with the Department of Justice (DOJ), has been anticipating that he would soon be contacted by a mysterious individual known to only a few as "The White Gold Thief," and sure enough he gets a phone call from the super criminal offering hundreds of ounces of platinum at a hundred dollars an ounce. The question on Goodwin's mind, and everybody else's who's in the know, is just where is this platinum coming from? There haven't been any reported cases of large-scale theft so far.
Chapter II: "Setting the Trap for the Suspected Thief; It Is Believed the Metal Has Been Stolen from Government Vaults":
Goodwin and his DOJ pal Barry, a detective, decide to go after the platinum pirate independently, with Barry using "tried and tested" detective methods and Goodwin going about it more scientifically. "Why not eliminate the human element as represented by detectives and their stool pigeons," argues Goodwin, "with all of a human being's liability
to err badly and often, and substitute the inventions and devices of science which cannot
go wrong?"
Chapter III: "A Sample of the Platinum Is Left for the Purchaser to Examine":
Overnight the thief manages to leave a little platinum in Goodwin's lab unobserved; through careful analysis Goodwin believes he knows where that sample came from.
Chapter IV: "Some Detective Work à la Sherlock Holmes":
The authorities just miss catching the thief, but Goodwin dazzles his federal agent friend with this Sherlockian characterization based primarily on a few hair strands: ". . . the pirate
is a man in his thirties, fair skinned, wears his hair brushed back from the forehead and rather long. Also he is tall, a neat dresser and left-handed."
Chapter V: "The Clues Interpreted Give the Appearance of the Criminal":
Goodwin impresses Barry again when he comes up with another sample, this one of the pirate's voice.
Chapter VI: "The Government Vault Is X-rayed by the Detectives":
Goodwin and Barry travel to the depository from which, Barry maintains, none of the platinum could have been stolen without being detected.
Chapter VII: "It Is Ascertained That Platinum Has Been Taken from the Vault":
After X-raying the storage vault, it seems as if Goodwin has been wrong, until he stumbles across a box that should be lighter than it is.
Chapter VIII: "Taking Finger Prints from a Bottle Which the Thief Had Used As a Missile":
A violent assault leaves behind some telltale evidence, confirming for the investigators that the theft was an inside job all along.
Chapter IX: "Arrival of the Conspirators by the Air-Route. The Pursuit. The Airplane Disabled":
As usual, the bad guys foolishly fall into a trap.
Chapter X: "The Intricate Plot Unravelled and the Guilt of the Conspirators Proved":
The final confirmation comes with the aid of, would you believe, a sphygmomanomoter.
Resources:
- According to the ISFDb (HERE), our author produced only two stories that could be class-ified as SFF; FictionMags's description: "Journalist and writer; spent time in Papua"—and wrote about it (HERE).
- If you want to know everything about platinum, go (HERE) and (HERE); as for how precious (and pricey) platinum has been to the world market (around a thousand dollars an ounce this afternoon), see (HERE).
The bottom line:
I shoot the Hippopotamus
With bullets made of platinum,
Because if I use leaden ones
His hide is sure to flatten 'em.
— Hillaire Belloc
A HUNDRED YEARS AGO the light-hearted writings of Hoosier scribe Meredith Nicholson that were appearing in the high-paying slicks made him fairly popular with the magazine-reading public, as did his best-selling novels (see "Resources," below). Nicholson couldn't be class-ified with so weighty a label as "mystery writer" (with all of its serious overtones), but to a very limited degree he did dabble in crime fiction.
Nicholson's series character was Webster G. Burgess, described this way:
"Webster Burgess was a banker who had inherited his bank, and he had always found life rather pleasant going. His wife diverted him a good deal, and the fact that she played at being a highbrow amused him almost more that anything else. He had kept his figure, and at forty-two was still able to dance without fear of apoplexy. He chose his haberdashery with taste, and sometimes he sent flowers to ladies without inclosing his wife's card; but his wife said this was tempera-mental, which was a very good name for it." — From "The Susiness of Susan" (1912)
We've been able to pin down three Web Burgess adventures available online that have marginally criminous aspects, and we hope to cover them in the near future. The first one, "The Third Man," has nothing to do with Orson Welles . . .
"The Third Man."
By Meredith Nicholson (1866-1947).
First appearance: Collier's, May 13, 1916.
Collected in Best Laid Schemes (1922, pages 167-196).
Reprinted in EQMM, August 1949.
Novelette (30 pages).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).
"For all anybody ever knew, it was a plain case . . ."
Webster Burgess and his close circle of friends usually have a once monthly dinner bash where one of their number, often Burgess himself, regales the group with some personal adventure he has recently experienced. Tonight's banquet, though, is going to be different: No less a personage than the Governor of the state will be in attendance; and he has in his jacket a piece of paper that, with his signature on it, will pardon a man from spending the rest of his life in prison for murder. But before he signs that paper, the Governor wants to be absolutely certain that (a) the inmate, who has already served seven years, didn't do it and (b) that someone he has long suspected of being the murderer did:
"The law does the best it can, but as you say, mistakes do occur. The old saying that murder will out is no good; we can all remember cases where the truth was never known. Mistakes occur constantly, and it's the fear of not rectifying them that's making a nervous wreck of me."
So with Burgess's connivance, tonight the Governor intends to catch the person who he believes, but isn't quite sure, "had beaten [the victim] on the head, with a club in the most barbarous fashion," then lied about it, leaving an innocent man to take the rap. The Governor also has with him another piece of paper, the only scrap of physical evidence that could possibly help exonerate the prisoner, but in order to use it he will have to get the killer to implicate himself, not consciously but without being aware of it—and that's where a pencil and a blank scratch pad come in . . .
Typo: "the law lays it hand".
Resources:
- About Meredith Nicholson, FictionMags tells us: "Born in Crawfordsville, Indiana; had degrees from Wabash College, Butler College, and Indiana University; newspaperman; author and essayist." Wikipedia (HERE) adds that he was appointed as an envoy to three Latin American countries, after achieving in the early part of the century best sellerdom three times, one of which, The House of a Thousand Candles (1905; online HERE and HERE), was lensed as a silent film and later a talkie (see the IMDb HERE). Leah H. Zeldes, at Manybooks, writes:
"A fast-moving adventure. The plot may seem a bit predictable, but Nicholson packs in so much action that even when you expect what happens, the novel moves you right along. The world-traveling scapegrace grandson of an eccentric architecture buff inherits his grandfather's partly finished Indiana house on condition he live there for a year and not marry the alternate heir who'll get the property if he fails to meet the conditions. On his first night in the house, some-body shoots at him. The house, it seems, is full of mysteries, and what happens next isn't quite what you expect."
- In the story reference is made to a "Bohemian oats swindle"; see (HERE) and (HERE) for full details.
- Even though "The Third Man" is available in its original Collier's incarnation, the photo-copying is especially inferior, so we've gone with the version in Best Laid Schemes, the contents of which are:
"The Susiness of Susan" (1912) (Webster Burgess)
"The Girl with the Red Feather" (1913) (Webster Burgess)
"The Campbells Are Coming" (1921)
"Arabella's House Party" (1914)
"The Third Man" (1916) (Webster Burgess) (above)
"Wrong Number" (1919) (Webster Burgess). . . . and why shouldn't we toss in a bonus one-pager by Nicholson (HERE)?
The bottom line: "And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear."
— The Bible
"The Twist."
By Tim Altom (?-?).
First appearance: Galaxy, October 1974.
Short short story (9 pages).
Reprinted in Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine (UK), October 1974.
Online at Archive.org (HERE).
"Where the checkerboard goes on and on . . ."
Who says criminals can't make a contribution to society?
Resources:
- We couldn't find word one about our author.
- The last time we saw a story character caught up in a situation like this one was (HERE).
The bottom line: "From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent."
— Lovecraft
