1950s detective stories by August Derleth, Lord Dunsany and Evelyn E Smith

On a recent visit to the Wonder Book location in Frederick, MD, I found on the outside 95¢ shelves a pile of old Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines.  I flipped through them and selected some with stories by SF writers I am interested in like Avram Davidson and Robert Bloch.  When I brought them to the counter, the clerk told me that because of a current sale I could get three more for free, so I scooted outside and just grabbed three 1950s issues whose covers I liked because they depicted young ladies in distress.  Fortunately, these issues also included stories by people with ties to the SF community, so I can pretend I bought them for more respectable reasons than is the case.  So, before returning to our regular diet of 1930s Weird Tales, let's read a story from each of those three fetching Fifties issues of the leading mystery magazine.

"The Six Silver Spiders" by August Derleth (1950)   

The prolific August Derleth, co-founder of Arkham House, produced many pastiches of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, slotting into the London detective role a man with the unlikely name of Solar Pons.  People with street cred in the mystery fiction community like Anthony Boucher have effusively praised the Solar Pons stories, as we are reminded in the page-long intro to "The Six Silver Spiders" here in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.  The editors of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine also tell us that "The Six Silver Spiders" is the best Solar Pons story yet!  I've never read one of these before, so I'm starting at the top!

Our narrator, Dr. Lyndon Parker, arrives to have dinner with Solar Pons and the genius immediately deduces, based on how wet his clothes are, that his friend took the subway there rather than walking or taking a cab.  After thus showing off, Pons then introduces his pal to his latest case in a way designed, I guess, to humiliate poor Parker.

You know how your spouse will ask you what day it is and you are expected to know it is your significant other's birthday or your wedding anniversary, or five years to the day since some career milestone or something?  Well, it seems like Pons does this to Parker all the time, making their relationship an endless series of traps.  Today's first trap is a catalog for an auction of rare books on the occult, among the titles are The Necronomicon by Alhazred, Nameless Cults by von Junzt, and The Mysteries of the Worm by Prinn.  Does Parker see anything odd about this brochure?  Parker falls right into the trap--when he says it looks like a normal auction come-on, Pons pounces, explaining that those books are not real, but the fictional creations of minor American authors!

Some Baron who lives close by received this catalog.  As a wealthy collector of occult books, he was excited to attend the auction, which would be held way up in Scotland.  When the Baron got up there, he and five other attendees--fellow students of the supernatural or their representatives--discovered that the auction was a hoax.  The mind reels at the damage suffered by the environment due to this unnecessary trip of over 300 miles--one way!  (It is almost enough to make you stop wondering why six collectors of occult books wouldn't already know that The Necronomicon, Nameless Cults, and The Mysteries of the Worm aren't real.)  What kind of monster would speed the approach of global warming in such a way?  And why?  The Baron has asked Pons to find out the answers to these questions.

Pons quickly figures out what the six people who received the bogus catalog have in common: each of these goofballs owns one of the six miniature books fashioned by master forger Yeovil.  These one-inch-tall handwritten copies of portions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead are each stored inside a silver scarab, which for some reason people call "spiders."  As Pons predicted, opening the Baron's scarab reveals that his copy was stolen while he was up in Scotland, as were the copies of the three other people who physically attended the bogus auction; two of the goofballs sent lackeys to the auction, so their copies of Yeovil's masterpiece are still in their custody. 

Pons borrows these two little books and figures out that each of the six books has, hidden within a decoration drawn on its endpapers, a single letter or number, one sixth of a secret message!  Pons figures a secret message of only six characters, a string not even long enough to constitute a strong Facebook password, must be an abbreviation of an address.  He has two of the characters, and quickly figures out what the address must be--that of a small private museum!  He and Parker go to the museum and with astonishing rapidity Pons figures out that two purportedly medieval items donated anonymously to the museum thirty years ago are in fact Yeovil forgeries.  One is an imposter Norse chest, within the false bottom of which are Yeovil's tools for forging coins.  It is not long before Pons has figured out that Yeovil secreted his tools in the museum and left the secret message as a test for his nephew, to see if said nephew is smart enough to take up his uncle's career as a forger.  It is this nephew who stole the other four miniature books via the ruse of the hoax auction.

The final scenes of the story have Pons not only recovering the stolen one-inch-high books from the nephew's apartment, but convincing the young man to abandon a career in crime because, should be become a forger, Solar Pons will always be there to foil all his enterprises.

It was fun to see Derleth's shout out to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch at the start of the story, and the story is pretty well put together--"The Six Silver Spiders" really does feel like a Sherlock Holmes story, though maybe I am not exactly in a position to judge, not having read any authentic Holmes tales in like two decades.  

"The Six Silver Spiders" was included in the 1951 collection The Memoirs of Solar Pons as "The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders"    

"A Simple Matter of Deduction" by Lord Dunsany (1951)

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Dunsany--who signed his work Lord Dunsany--is widely recognized to be a major influence on the fantasy genre, a writer esteemed by many writers I care about like Lovecraft, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, and others.  Despite his importance, I haven't read anything by Dunsany before.  Maybe it is strange to start with some detective thing, but I guess I gotta start somewhere.

The editors of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine introduce "A Simple Matter of Deduction" by telling us that the story is very much like a Sherlock Holmes story.  I guess I should not be surprised.

Our ersatz Holmes for this story is Mr. Linley.  Our imitation Dr. Watson is Smithers.  There is a perhaps unnecessary frame story in which a journalist asks Smithers to tell him about a case of Linley's he hasn't talked about before, and then comes the meat of the story, told in Smithers's voice.

Scotland Yard turns to Linley for help because they can't figure out who killed a guy who was lured by a phone call to an abandoned house where he was bludgeoned with a hammer.  The bobbies' only clue is a half-finished crossword puzzle found in the house; presumably the killer worked on this puzzle while waiting to ambush the victim.  (Nerves of steel!)  By seeing what parts of the puzzle the assassin filled in, and in what order (Linley can judge this from the boldness and breadth of the murderer's pen and pencil marks) the detective figures out lots of demographic info about the killer (what kind of school he attended, his hobbies, etc.) that allows the police identify him.

This crossword gimmick is practically the entire story; Dunsany does not go into the psychology of killing or being killed like motive or fear or any of that--this story has no human feeling.  In the closing section of the frame story we learn that the killer was put on trial but the jury let him off because they didn't think a crossword puzzle was enough evidence on which to convict a guy for a capital crime.  If you think this is supposed to show how vulnerable a liberal society is to ruthless murderers, think again: we are assured that the killer has been scared straight by this brush with the law.

(Is there a tradition in Sherlock Holmes stories of the criminal not being punished?  I find these sorts of endings unsatisfying; I like the catharsis of seeing the malefactor brought to justice.)

The editors of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine thought "A Simple Matter of Deduction" good enough to include in a reprint magazine in 1963.

"Really It Was Quite Simple" by Evelyn E. Smith (1953)

Years ago I read Evelyn E. Smith's vampire story "Softly While You're Sleeping" and thought it quite good.  More recently I read her crossword-puzzle-inspired alien invasion story "DAXBR/BAXBR" and condemned it for being a silly gimmicky joke story.  Well, let's read a third Evelyn E. Smith story, one which won an Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine contest.  The editors warn us this is a "locked room story."

"Really It Was Quite Simple" is another gimmicky joke story, I guess a sort of "meta" in-joke for mystery readers who already love (or hate) locked-room mysteries.  You might also call it a shaggy dog story as it lacks any kind of resolution.  

Four silly characters are in an apartment hanging out; the host of this little get-together, the Colonel, who served in India, is showing off card tricks he says he learned on the subcontinent.  One of the other characters, admitting he is stupid, says he can't figure out card tricks and can't figure out locked-room mysteries, either.  The Colonel claims he can disappear from a locked room, and bets are placed on whether he can do it.  The Colonel wins the bet--when his guests open the door to the room in which he was locked he is not there.  His explanation, after reappearing in a different room, behind his friends, is that while in India he also earned how to make himself invisible.

Is "Really It Was Quite Simple?" a spoof of locked room mysteries?  Or even an expose of how bogus the entire mystery genre is, Smith arguing that since these stories are entirely made up, the conventional practice of trying to figure them out is nothing but foolishness? 

I have to give "Really It Was Quite Simple" a thumbs down; I feel like Smith is playing a trick on the reader, wasting his time.  However, maybe this joke killed among people who were deeply invested in the mystery genre and read Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine every month and had some strong opinion, pro or con, about the locked-room mystery subgenre.

It seems the British edition of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine had a different cover and somewhat different contents from the US edition, but Smith's "Really It Was Quite Simple?" was included in both.

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I am not the audience for these three stories, which seem to be aimed directly at lovers of detective stories of a specific type that totally lacks human drama or any kind of comment on life and instead consists of incredible Rube Goldberg schemes and equally unbelievable unravelling of said schemes.  The Holmes pastiches by Derleth and Dunsany are cold and mechanical, though they seem competent--I have to assume D and D delivered what Holmes-hungry readers of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine wanted when they wrote them.  As for the Smith, it won a contest so I guess mystery experts thought it worthwhile, but to me it seems almost like an insult to mystery readers, an attempt to subvert the genre to the point of destruction.