Obituary for a Dead Anchor

If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by the wind and spray together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection. 

"A Descent into the Maelström"

I honestly don't like writing posts about books I didn't really like. Which is also the reason why reviews on my blog tend to be relatively positive: if I really didn't like something, I probably didn't finish it, or I didn't want to spend more time on it by also writing a post.

The S.S. Meganaut is en route from New York to Cherbourg. Every night, an auction is held in the smoking room, when guests can bid on numbers, which correspond to the number of nautical niles they think the ship will be able to traverse the coming day (so, it's gambling). One of the passengers on board is the wealthy Victor Timothy Smith, accompanied by his daughter Coralie. He and his entourage seem to have quite some fun bidding against, and winning from the lawyer Saul de Brasto, who has not been able to even buy one number because Smith constantly uses his immense fortune to outbid de Brasto. The lights in the smoking room suddenly go out however, followed by a pistol shot. When the lights go back on again, Smith is lying dead on the floor, daughter Coralie has passed out and Saul de Brasto is holding a smoking gun in his hand. Not surprisingly, de Brasto is immediately detained by the ship detectives for the murder on Smith, but he denies having shot Smith, claiming he shot his pistol at someone else in the room, a hitman who was trying to shoot him! However, an examination of the crime scene soon proves de Brasto right: Smith was shot by two bullets one after another, while de Brasto only shot once, and his bullet is found buried in a table in the other direction than where Smith was. The detectives are baffled as to who the murderer then is, especially as the case becomes even grimmer with Coralie dying from the sheer shock of what occured, but it happens four psychologists on their way to London develop an interest in the case too, and they each think they can explain who the murderer really is in C. Daly King's Obelists at Sea (1932).

A few years ago, I read King's Obelists Fly High, a book that was certainly not perfect, but which I did think was a fun read due to some interesting points, most notably the Clue-Finder: an appendix at the very end of the book, a list of all the hints complete with page and line reference, sorted by category (clues to how, who, motive etc.). It was a very daring way to prove to the reader the game was being played in a fair manner, and I had always wanted to read the other Obelists books too, to see whether the other books could perhaps improve on the points I did find less impressive about Fly High.

Obelists at Sea is not that book. Oh well, there's always En Route...

Obelists at Sea is a book that has many of the same elements of Fly High, elements that can provide for an interesting mystery story. We have the murder happening in a closed circle situation (a luxury liner), a story built around multiple solutions, as provided by the four psychologists, a mystery surrounding someone being able to shoot twice at Smith in the dark and of course the promise of a Clue-Finder, a multi-page proof to show King has indeed provided enough clues for you to solve the murder. The book even features multiple very detailed floorplans of the S.S. Meganaut. Memorable are the punny names of most of the characters (Victim = Victor Timothy) too.

But all of this goes nowhere good. The floorplans for example? Basically just there for fluff, because they don't actually serve any role mystery-wise. There's plenty of interesting moments and points of mystery throughout the novel, like a corpse disappearing from the doctor's quarters and the mystery of the two bullets in the victim, but the actual solutions for these events are basically shrugged over, quickly explained in like two or three sentences without giving those moments any weight. The book focuses much, muuuuch more on the idea of having four different psychologists, who each champion a different school, offer different theories for the murder (of course all pointing at different people, based on different evidence). Of course, we have seen other books utilize such structures too, from The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which too has multiple detectives proposing different theories, similar to a lot of Brand's work, but also something like Ellery Queen, where sometimes you'll see Ellery himself proposing multiple solutions. But Obelists At Sea doesn't work for me, because the theories are all so based on pscyhology (King was a psychologist), I just can't take them really seriously in a mystery novel. In a way, I do get King attempted to portray psychology from a slightly ironic angle, making fun of the four psychologists (who are basically caricatures, embodiments of their respective schools) and their theories that aren't really based on anything but "X has shown indications they are of a certain character type, so they would have done Y", but this gets tiring very fast, especically as the majority of the book is written around this gimmick. The theories presented here feel like they would be spouted by a random character and immediately brushed off in a Queen-style, evidence-and-logic-based mystery novel, not the types you can structure a whole novel around. What doesn't help either is that while the book kinda wants to say "see, psychology doesn't work" by showing these psychologists arriving at very different solutions simply because they adhere to different schools, the final solution and the clues found in the Clue-Finder are still mostly built around psychological clues! So I don't really get what King was going for. The final solution does have elements I like for a final solution (the whodunnit etc.), but by that time, I didn't really care anymore, and I think the route towards this solution could've been so much more interesting and satisfying.

The book also has a rather noticable anti-semetic tone throughout. The book never, ever forgets to remind you the main suspect Saul de Brasto is a Jew. The book starting with Victor Smith harrassing de Brasto by outbidding him every time can still be seen as a form of anti-semitism commited by one character alone, but even after he's dead, everyone from the ship's detectives to the captain keep referring to de Brasto as the Jew or the Hebrew (note that no other character in the book is referred to constantly by their background), which isn't helped when they also learn he's a lawyer, because of course he'd be a crooked lawyer (because he's a....). Even after the initial supsicion on de Brasto should be cleared, the man is treated as as if they had preferred to have jailed him anyway. It gets very tiring very quickly.

Obelists At Sea just didn't do it for me. While on the surface, it has elements that seemed promising, or at least, elements that I have seen used in plenty of mystery novels that were fun, beneath the water level, it just ended up as a book I didn't enjoy. The main structure just doesn't work for me because I am not interested in solutions based solely on psychological analyses of characters, the more interesting elements mystery-wise for some reason are underplayed because of that and the Clue-Finder gimmick is still focused on psychological clues, something I had hoped it would have done differently from Obelists Fly High. I bought a Japanese translation of Obelists En Route (translated by Ayukawa Tetsuya!) a while back, so I'll probably get to that eventually!

Blue Air Message

上空　舞うもの達と Over Drive

どこまでも青い世界にいたい

紙吹雪のように鳥が舞う　キレイね

 『Over Drive』（Garnet Crow）

In Over Drive with those dancing high in the sky

I want to be surrounded by a world of blue

The birds are fluttering around like confetti, how pretty

"Over Drive" (Garnet Crow)

I don't fly that often, but only once have I experienced the "Is there a doctor on the plane?" myself. There were none present, by the way (or least nobody said they were).

C. Daly King's Obelist Fly High (1935) starts with a visit by Dr. Cutter to the New York City Police, as he has received an alarming letter, stating: "YOU WILL DIE APRIL THIRTEENTH AT NOON EXACTLY CENTRAL TIME". The death threat is especially dangerous, because Dr. Cutter happens the only surgeon on American soil at the moment who can perform a certain life-saving operation, and luck has it the Secretary of State, who is also his own brother, is in desperate need of that very procedure right now. Captain Michael Lord is given the mission to travel  together with Dr. Cutter and his entourage (his nieces and assistent) in their trip from New York to Reno and protect the doctor from harm. After some diversionary tactics plotted by Lord, the Cutter entourage makes it safely into a plane heading for Reno (with stops in between). However, on April thirteenth, at noon (Central Time), Dr. Cutter does indeed drop dead from his seat. Who could've committed the murder on the small plane?

Like many people in today's world, I too have to think a lot of time zones and stuff while working, but as I live in a country with just one time zone, I do have to admit I had never thought of having to specify a time zone in a murder announcement (within one country).

First time I read something by Daly King actually. I'll leave the details about him as a writer to other writers (the internet is a wonderful thing), because let's be honest, considering I know next to nothing about him, I'd be simply copying from other writers. Anyway, I first learned of this book while I was reading up on Ayukawa Tetsuya, a Japanese writer who wrote a lot of (great!) alibi-cracking mysteries and mysteries set on trains (transport). With novels like Obelists at Sea and Obelists Fly High, it appeared Daly King would very likely be a writer who could interest me, so I picked up the first easily available release.

Overall, I think Obelists Fly High is an entertaining mystery novel, but one that has some obvious flaws. First of all, this story is probably much longer than it should've been, because it drags quite a lot from the midsection on. There is only one murder in this novel, and it's also mostly set inside a small plane (they do have to change planes a couple of times), so everything feels incredibly cramped, both in terms of 'space for the characters to move in' as well as the focus of the story. Over the course of the story, we'll see several characters propose theories as to the how and who of the murder, but these theories are not like those you'll see in a Berkeley novel, or something like the theories in Kyomu he no Kumotsu. The theories are incredibly simple, and mostly driven by psychology rather than a logical analysis of the cirumstances, so they don't really feel satisfying. They're really nothing but conjecture, with nothing to prove or disprove them.

Speaking of that, it appears Daly King was a psychologist, so that would explain the emphasis on psychology in the story, though I am not sure whether I can call his usage of it in this book a success. On a side note, this book has some very old-fashioned views on topics like homosexuality, presented through the mouth of protagonist Captain Lord, and I am not sure whether they're "character traits", or more likely seeing how it's presented here, Daly King's personal views. But when you have characters discussing theories about who the murderer is based on 'the perverted psychology of homosexuality'... It's tiring to read, especially as I already noted that these theories hinge on little less than these psychological analyses..

A fair amount of the story is taken up by a very detailed examination in the alibis of all the people on the plane. Let me confess right away that I had to think back to Aosaki Yuugo's Suizokukan no Satsujin right away, which revolved around the alibis of 11(!) suspects. I really didn't like it there and I still didn't like it in Obelists Fly High. It's too detailed, too many time stamps that say too little. Ayakawa Tetsuya has also written novels that revolve around the whereabouts of persons/objects down to the minute (Kuroi Trunk, Doukeshi no Ori amongst others), but they were about the movements of ONE person/object at a time. In Obelists Fly High, you have more than ten persons to keep track off, with some persons vouching for other persons' alibis at set times. I just lose interest with all these interlinked alibis. The final resolution of this alibi part is also ridiculously simple and should not have needed a set-up like this.

The book does have an interesting structure, starting with the epilogue, and ending with the prologue. The final solution presented is... I think supposed to be very surprising, except for the fact it is not. I think the premise behind the solution is great though, and I think it's the best part of the book, but it is also so obvious because of the way the narrative tries to cast as little suspicion as possible in that direction, almost conspiciously so. The way it was done, would also demand for some of the characters in this story to act as stupidly as possible. Seriously, Captain Lord is horrible as a detective character. The things he does are idiotic at times, and not in the hahahaha-Roger-Sheringham-oh-you-silly-fop way, but oh-my-god-why-would-you-even way (seriously,  what eventually happens in that plane is all his fault). In fact, he even creates a kind of plot mistake through his actions. Seriously, the plot as presented in Obelists Fly High contains a rather fatal mistake and it's all Lord's fault (though one could "explain" it by saying that shows how bad a detective Lord is).

I did like the Clue Finder at the end of the book a lot. It's a list of all the hints contained in the text, complete with page and line reference, all sorted by category (clues to how, who, motive etc.). It's a great, and daring way to 'prove' a story is fair to the reader, and it's actually quite fun as a reader to see how many of the hints you picked up. This is not a Queen story though, so a lot of the clues are more psychological (of course), than physical or based on logic.

Which reminds me, there is a moment in the book where Captain Lord declares he knows who the murderer is, similar to the moment right before Queen or other writers would insert a Challenge to the Reader. The thing is: there is no reason for that moment to happen then. In Arisugawa's works for example, such Challenges always follow after the introduction of the final, decisive clue. So the detective character couldn't solve the crime until they got posssession of that particular clue. That is a logical structure. In Obelists Fly High, Captain Lord is sitting on the same clues for a while, when he suddenly figures out what happens, without any stimulus for why then, and not earlier. It's really weird, because narrative-wise, there is no reason why he couldn't have figured it out earlier.

Like Berkeley's work, Obelists Fly High does obviously takes some cues from the anti-mystery, that use the form of a mystery novel to criticize the possibilities and tropes of the genre itself (for example, seeing Captain Lord basically screwing up in a lot of ways even though he probably means well). It works quite well in this novel actually, and is one of the reasons why I did have a good feeling about this book on the whole.

As I'm lining up my ideas on this book, you might think I might not have liked Obelists Fly High, but despite the annoyances I named, I really did enjoy the book overall. I think a lot of the ideas in the book are really sound, and even if they weren't all great in terms of execution, in the end, if you were to ask me yay or nay with a pistol pointed at me inside a flying plane, I'd say yay (there are of course many examples where a botched idea ends up in a complete failure). I for one am quite curious to other novels by C. Daly King.