The Strange Message in the Parchment

Caveat lector

Oh man, that Lost Winner mentioned two weeks ago in the comments sounds amazing...

Last year, I discussed Murder Off Miami (1934), the first in the Crime Dossier series by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Link. These Crime Dossiers were not ordinary mystery novels, but instead presented the reader with a folder containing all the relevant documents and physical pieces of evidence regarding a crime that "really" happened. The story was solely told through hand-written letters, typed telegrams, newspaper clippings etc., while further clues were also provided in the form of photographs, pieces of hair and broken matches, all included physically inside the folder (so seperately printed telegrams, matches kept in little pockets etc.) At the end of the book, the reader would find a sealed section, in which the true solution to the crime was revealed. While one could argue that this was more gimmick than truly a game-changer for mystery fiction, I have to say I did like "playing" the first Crime Dossier. It reminded me of Escape Room games, where a story is told minimalistically through objects with which the player/reader can interact and that coupled with a Challenge to the Reader, made Murder Off Miami a unique experience, even if the fundamental mystery plot was fairly simple.

As these Crime Dossiers can be relatively expensive even on the used market, I wasn't planning to go after them, but a while back, I came across the second and third volumes in this series at a local used book store for a neat price, so I picked them up. Who Killed Robert Prentice? was released in 1937, followed by The Malinsay Massacre in 1938. In terms of presentation, both booklets don't differ too much from Murder Off Miami. The first book presented a rather classic closed circle situation, with a murder on a yacht out on sea, but Who Killed Robert Prentice? has a rather mundane crime in return. The titular Robert Prentice is a succesful businessman, who never had much luck with women until he met and fell in love with Cicely, a single mother with one boy. After their marriage, Cicely tried to get Robert into high society, but that also gave him more confidence, and to Cicely's great shock, he fell in love with his beautiful new secretary Suzanne L'Estrange. Hoping it would just be a whim, Cicely agreed to close her eyes for the affair for a short while so Robert could get it out of his system, but he was murdered before it was all over. One morning, Robert's body is found in a little cottage house he rented for his numerous rendezvous' with Miss L'Estrange. But it was not only Cicely who may have had a motive to kill her cheating husband: Cicely's son was also in love with Miss L'Estrange, so that love triangle could also be a motive. Cicely decides to write to Lieutenant Schwab, who is visiting the UK from the US and hopes he can solve the murder on Robert Prentice.

The core mystery plot is fairly simple, and follows a similar design to the first book. You'll be looking for contradictions between the narrative as you learn them from the various documents like personal letters (which may contain lies or not), newspaper articles and the physical evidence you also have, like photographs. Sometimes things said, don't comply with what you see in the photographs, and that's the starting point for your deductions, though as I said, the core plot is ultimately quite simple, so after you pick up on a few discrepencies, you'll quickly have an idea of what really happened. This second volume has some interesting pieces of evidence: there's a torn-up photograph, a train ticket stub and even a complete newspaper, which includes updates on the police investigation and the coroner's court. Going through all these things as you try to solve the mystery is still fun, and like Murder Off Miami, Who Killed Robert Prentice? can provide for an evening of detecting fun. Personally, I liked Murder Off Miami better as a story though.

The Malinsay Massacre has a promising title, but the reader will also quickly notice that this volume is less intricately designed compared to the first two Crime Dossiers. I assume there's a financial reason for this, but the change can also be detected in the narrative. The Malinsay Massacre refers to a series of murders that occured in 1899 and is not a case where Lieutenant Schwab has personally worked on as a police officer. The murders started with the death of the fifth Earl of Malinsay, Malinsay being a small island in Scotland housing Malinsay Castle, a small village of fishermen and some cottage that can be rented. George Malinsay's death had been odd, but further examination proved he had indeed been murdered. He had inhaled a poisonous gas, but strangely enough, it seems impossible anyone could've gone in his bedroom to make him inhale the gas that night, making it a locked room mystery. After George's death, his brother Henry became the next Earl, who is determined to find out who killed George. He not only has his own son come to the island, but he also writes to his nephew Colin, the brains of the family, hoping he might act as their armchair detective. For death seems to be lurking still on the island. Soon after Henry settles on the island, more of his family is murdered, resulting in a massacre of the Malinsay family. The case would remain unsolved, but when Schwab gains access to the old documents of the Malinsay family, he realizes that the murderer had been hiding in plain sight all along.

The Malinsay Massacre has less 'gimmicky stuff' than the previous two volumes. Most of the files includes are just type-written letters, accompanied by 'paper-based' evidence like the Malinsay family tree, a floorplan and a few photographs of the suspects. The only physical piece of evidence is a tablet laced with arsenic, with the helpful note Note to readers: The poison has been extracted from this tablet, in case you were planning to use the poison tablet you got with a book to murder someone. I liked how we got a completely different type of story this time, with a whole family being killed off on some remote island, but focusing solely on the core plot, it does disappoint at times. The locked room murder is not really clever, as there's basically no evidence to what happened and the story is basically just saying "what if you imagine this or that was there, then the murder would've been possible!" Yes, of course, but it's not a proper detective story if you don't properly hint or foreshadow that. The clewing to the solution of a mystery story should never be a digital manner of 1) Either you think of The One Solution or 2) You don't think of the One Solution. It should be clewed, there should be build-up, there should be hinting. I also didn't like how some of the hints to the identity of the murderer were supposed to be visible on the photographs, only not really due to the resolution of said photographs. Obviously, I understand that it's also a matter of the technology at the time of publishing and the previous books had similar issues too, but I think it's a bit more troublesome in this case, as The Malinsay Massacre's hinting is both not as extensive, as well as not as good as the other two books, so it really hurts the narrative when a clue turns out to be barely discernable.

On the whole, I'd say these two volumes share the same basic issues I also had with Murder Off Miami, being that the story can be really dry as there's no narrative voice, no characterization or quotable prose. The cheap paper and enigmatic way in which these books are bound are understandable, considering the contents, but when asked the question of whether these stories couldn't have been written as normal prose stories, I'd say it wouldn't be too hard to change a few clues to make that possible. So the necessity of these Crime Dossiers is definitely a possible topic of discussion. They are fun, gimmicky forms of mystery fiction, but not much more than that. In case you hadn't read the review of Murder Off Miami yet, please do. The three volumes are quite similar, so most of what I wrote there will apply here.

There is a fourth volume titled Herewith the Clues, but again, I am not actively chasing after it unless I happen to find one cheap. While funny anecdotes in the annals of mystery fiction, mystery games and interactive fiction, I don't think these Crime Dossiers are something you should pursue at all costs. If you can find them cheap though, try one out, as they provide an entertaining experience that shows off the possibilities of mystery fiction. If I had to choose one, I still think the first, Murder Off Miami, is the best. Who Killed Robert Prentice? is fairly similar to Murder Off Miami, so if you want to choose two, I'd say The Malinsay Massacre would prove to be the more interesting companion pick, as it's quite different in atmosphere due to the setting.

Who Took the Book?

"Don't judge a book by its cover"

Idiom

Last year, I reviewed Ashibe Taku's Double Mystery, which had an interesting set-up as a physical product: the book consisted of two seperate narratives, each starting at a different end of the book. You could start reading from either side, and in the middle (where the two narratives meet), there was a sealed section, which you had to cut open to find out the solution to the two mysteries presented. ....And next I was going to write that somebody in the comment section there dropped the name Dennis Wheatley in regards to me writing about sealed pages in mystery fiction and how you'd sometimes see them in relatively modern Japanese publications, but.... there's no such comment. Huh. So err, I totally forgot where I first learned of the name Dennis Wheatley. Anyway, Wheatley was an English writer and in the 1930s, he came up with a series of mystery fiction not presented in a novel (story) form, but as actual case files. Inside the folder-like productions, you'd find official police reports, photographs, telegrams, handwritten letters and other physical pieces of evidence like strands of hair and matches. The idea was that you'd get to examine all the facts and evidence yourself. At the end of the booklet, you find a section with sealed pages, and by cutting them open, you could find out whether your solution to the mystery presented was correct.

A while ago, I happened to come across a complete copy of the first of the four Crime Dossiers Dennis Wheatley and writing partner J.G. Links published, titled Murder Off Miami (1934). When you open the folder, you first find a telegram sent from the yacht the Golden Gull, which had left Miami earlier that evening. One of the guests on board of the Golden Gull, the British soap magnate Bolitho Blane, had apparently committed suicide during its trip, prompting the immediate return of the Gull. The next document you find is an internal police memo where Police Captain Schwab puts Inspector Kettering on the case. The Golden Gull is the property of Carlton Rocksavage, a rival soap magnate who lately had been in a very fierce product war with Blane, leaving both of them close to self-destruction. Blane had been invited for the yacht trip, among some other guests of Rocksavage and his daughter, to see if they could work something out that would be less harmful to both of them. Before dinner however, Blane disappeared from the yacht, and in his place a suicide note was found. At first, the case seems simple, but some marks in the carpet indicating a body had been pulled across it then appear to suggest Blane didn't jump out of the window of his cabin on his own. What follows are all the police reports (with the testimonies of all the witnesses and suspects) and the evidence found by Kettering addressed to Schwab. At the end, it seems Kettering is completely baffled by the events, but Schwab manages to solve the whole case based solely on everything Kettering himself had gathered.

I have not played any real Escape Room games myself yet, but I had to think of them constantly as I was going through Murder Off Miami, for the basic concept is the same: within a very minimalistic approach to narrative, "you" (the reader/player) use "real" evidence and reports to solve the crime yourself. It is a game set-up in a sense, but modern mystery videogames are narratively speaking far, far deeper than what Murder Off Miami offers. The whole "narrative" of Murder Off Miami is solely presented through official documents and piece of evidence, so as a tale it's rather bare-bones. You won't be here for the deep characterization, the witty author's voice or for some quotable prose. The exact intention might not be the same, and there is of course the limitations in technology back then, but an actual videogame nowadays usually offers everything Murder Off Miami has (you basically always collect evidence and testimonies in mystery games), but usually presented with an actual story and characters, rather than getting to know everybody through police testimonies. Again, presenting a prose story is not the intention of Wheatly and Links here, but I think it is worth noting that Murder Off Miami will remind of modern mystery videogames, but is at the heart also very different.

The goal is to put yourself in the place of Captain Schwab, and figure out what happened to Blane aboard the Golden Gull based solely on the information obtained from the dossier. As you go through the five different reports of Kettering, you get to know the cast of suspects, among them a wealthy widow who's whole fortune depends on Rocksavage making it through, a Japanese negiotiator who hopes to get a soap deal for his government and a sly society man who is more than meets the eye. But you'll also find a wealth of other evidence: photographs taken from the suspects during their police interviews, a lot of handwritten letters (even on in Japanese!), telegrams, diagrams of the Golden Gull. Heck, even strands of hair retrieved from a comb and a match are included in the dossier!

Given you get all these kinds of documents and pieces of evidence, you of course expect the mystery plot to make use of this fantastic gimmick, right? And in a way, it does. And in a way, it does not. First of all, I think the main mystery is perfectly solvable without even looking at the physical evidence like the hairs and photographs. It's pretty easy to figure out who did it (even if the motive is a bit... undeveloped) based solely on the police interviews. In fact, I pretty much guessed who'd it was in the very first report, even before I got to the photographs and stuff, and all the subsequent reports by Kettering only support my theory. And once you figured out who did it, all the rest is just bonus points. That said, the physical evidence collected in the dossier does help further support the solution, though some of these clues can be a bit hard to figure out (the printing isn't really good and some of the clues I shrugged off as "I totally thought that was how things were in the 30s). I would guess that most people who are able to solve this mystery, figure it out based on the police interviews. Once you think you're done, you have to cut open the seal of the last few pages, in which Schwab explains to Kettering who the murderer is and how he figured it out. My copy was already unsealed of course, but if you happen to have a copy too, you could just seal it yourself with some tape before you start with it, of course.

When these dossiers were first published, there were of course worries about whether they would sell, as they took on a very curious form. In fact, it's insane how they did these books. Everything is printed in different kinds of paper in different formats (the telegram is small on cheap paper, the police reports are on typing paper, a letter is written on good quality paper), there's a sealed section in the back, there's friggin' hair and a match in a little plastic bag... No normal publisher could just print and bind the thing, so it must've taken a lot of labor to put these things together. The whole package reminds more of a board game than a book. Apparently, Murder Off Miami managed to sell 120,000 copies within six months (and it is even said Queen Mary bought six copies on release date), so it definitely did hit it off with this concept, but was it really necessary to publish Murder Off Miami in this manner, in the sense that the mystery plot actually demanded this? No. Not really. They could have just printed the whole thing like a normal book, with photographs of the evidence and it'd still work exactly the same. Of course, it's more fun the way they did, but practical, it certainly was not. Apparently, they later made cheaper versions of the four Crime Dossiers without the physical evidence, sealed pages and the ten types of paper and ink and stuff, and at least for Murder Off Miami, I can't see it hurting the mystery plot in any manner. Funnily enough, it appears there's an actual videogame based of Murder Off Miami too.

I did enjoy Murder Off Miami as an experience: it's really fun going through all the police reports and looking with your own eyes, and even holding all the evidence that is usually just described in a few sentences in a story. As a mystery story however, Murder Off Miami is a bit simple, and it's not a story that is made possible because of the concept, but more a story that also makes use of the concept. So that was a bit disappointing, because I was expecting san experience that could only be presented in this way. As complete, good condition copies of the actual dossiers aren't really cheap, I think that if I were to return to this series, I'll try to find the cheaper reprinted versions.