The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (The Lost Classics) Read online

  The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant

  C. DALY KING

  Introduction by Edward D. Hoch

  Crippen & Landru Publishers

  Norfolk, Virginia 23505

  Copyright © 2003 by Valerie Beatts

  Introduction Copyright © 2003 by Edward D. Hoch

  Cover painting by Deborah Miller

  “Lost Classics” cover design by Deborah Miller

  Crippen & Landru logo by Eric Greene

  ISBN (cloth edition): 1-932009-04-3

  ISBN (trade edition): 1-932009-05-1

  Crippen & Landru Publishers

  P.O. Box 9315

  Norfolk, VA 23505 USA

  www.crippenlandru.com

  [email protected]

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Episode of the Codex’ Curse

  The Episode of the Tangible Illusion

  The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem

  The Episode of “Torment IV”

  The Episode of the Headless Horrors

  The Episode of the Vanishing Harp

  The Episode of the Man with Three Eyes

  The Episode of the Final Bargain

  The Episode of the Little Girl Who Wasn’t There

  The Episode of the Sinister Invention

  The Episode of the Absent Fish

  The Episode of the Perilous Talisman

  The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant

  CRIPPEN & LANDRU LOST CLASSICS

  Introduction

  One of my favorite literary fantasies has been the publication of a series of mystery reprints devoted to locked rooms and impossible crimes, a sort of Locked Room Library. I sometimes speculate on which books I would include in such a project, choosing eight or ten novels and three or four volumes of short stories. My criteria for the short story collections would be that all, or nearly all, of the stories would deal with apparent impossibilities.

  There is little doubt about the first three collections I would choose. There would be Carter Dickson’s The Department of Queer Complaints of course, and G.K. Chesterton’s The Incredulity of Father Brown. It may not be the best of the Father Brown books, but seven of the eight stories are locked room mysteries, including my personal favorite “The Oracle of the Dog.” My third choice would certainly be C. Daly King’s The Curious Mr. Tarrant about a gentleman of leisure who solves particularly bizarre crimes, and whose valet is a Japanese doctor and spy.

  As with the Dickson and Chesterton volumes, all but one of the stories deal with a locked room or impossible crime. The other story is super-natural, but since all begin as accounts of seemingly supernatural crimes, it adds to the reader’s pleasure if I don’t disclose in advance which of these first eight tales defies rational explanation.

  Let it be said, however, that within these pages are to be found headless torsos, a haunted house, a vanishing harp, a museum mystery and other delights. Many critics, including Dorothy L. Sayers, have chosen “The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem” as the best of these, and it’s certainly an excellent locked room tale. My own favorite from the original collection of bizarre wonders, by a narrow margin, is probably “The Episode of Torment IV" a baffling tale that parallels the mystery of the Mary Celeste on a smaller scale. This time it’s not a brig off the Azores that loses its crew but a motorboat that causes passengers and crew to abandon her and drown, each time it’s taken out. Critics frequently complain that solutions to impossible crime tales are always a letdown. Here’s one that’s not!

  Charles Daly King was born in New York City in 1895. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale University and served as a lieutenant in the field artillery during World War I. For a time in the 1920s he flirted with careers in textiles and advertising, but decided instead to study for the master’s degree in psychology. During this period he published his first book, Beyond Behaviorism: The Future of Psychology. Two more psychology books followed in the early 1930s before he turned to detective stories, possibly as a method for demonstrating psychological theories to a larger segment of the reading public.

  All six of his published novels feature detective captain Michael Lord, assisted by a psychologist and Watson-figure named Dr. L. Rees Pons. They were written in Bermuda, where King often journeyed during the 1930s from his principal residence in Summit, New Jersey.

  By general agreement the best of these is Obelists Fly High, first published in 1935, the same year that The Curious Mr. Tarrant appeared in England. In it King repeats a device used a few years earlier by Philip MacDonald in The Rynox Murder, beginning the novels with an epilogue and ending it with a prologue in which the mystery is explained. Having already published mysteries set on a ship and a train (Obelists at Sea and Obelists en Route) King set this one aboard a transcontinental airliner. He also included one of his favorite devices, a “Clue Finder” at the back of the book in which all the clues are indexed.

  Considering the fact that King’s novels and short stories approached the greatness of mystery fiction’s golden age, his reception in American publishing circles has always been baffling. All six novels and the Tarrant collection were published by Collins in England, but he never had the same American publisher twice. Two of the novels still remain unpublished in this country, and The Curious Mr. Tarrant had to wait forty-two years for its first U.S. edition, in a 1977 trade paperback. Julian Symons has speculated that American publishers may have viewed the books as being “too outlandish,” and that might well have been the case.

  It’s likely that this lack of acceptance in his own country, coupled with the outbreak of World War II, led to King’s all but abandoning detective fiction after 1940, when his final published novel appeared. Always interested in psychological research, he returned to Yale to pursue his Ph D with an electromagnetic study of sleep. It was there that Frederic Dannay, editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine found him in 1944 and persuaded him to revive the character of Travis Tarrant. EQMM published two more stories about the character in September 1944 and December 1946. A final story, discovered by the estate’s literary agent after his death, appeared in the April 1979 issue. These have been included in this edition of The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant together with “The Episode of the Perilous Talisman,” which appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1951, under the pseudonym of “Jeremiah Phelan," narrator of the series.

  Encouraged by Dannay’s praise of the Tarrant stories, King completed the manuscript of his first Tarrant novel. The Episode of the Demoiselle D'ys, in 1946, the same year he earned his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale. Apparently the book failed to find a publisher in either the United States or Britain. King devoted the remainder of his life to psychology, publishing two more books on the subject, the last of them posthumously following his death in 1963.

  I am pleased to introduce The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant to a new generation of readers. The original Tarrant collection is listed in Queen’s Quorum as one of the outstanding volumes of short detective fiction. And C. Daly King is an author whom Anthony Boucher called, “one of the most original, inventive, and underrated detective writers of the golden thirties.” I can only echo that praise.

  Edward D. Hoch

  The Episode of the Codex’ Curse

  Characters of the Episode

  Jerry Phelan, the narrator

  James Blake, Curator of Central American Antiquities

  Marius Hartmann, a collector

  Roger Thorpe, a Director of the Metropolitan Museum

  Muchison, a Museum guard

  Trevis Tarrant, interested in the bizarre

  Katoh, Tarrant’s butler
-valet

  I had not wanted to spend the night in the Museum in the first place. It had been a foolish business, as I realised thoroughly now that the lights had gone out. A blown fuse, of course; but what could blow a fuse at this time of night? Still, it must be something of that nature, perhaps a short in the circuit somewhere. Murchison, the guard in the corridor outside, had gone off to investigate. Before leaving he had stepped in and made his intention clear; then he had closed the door, whose handle he had shaken vigorously to assure both of us that it was locked. The lock had had to be turned from the outside, for the door was without means of being secured from within. I was alone.

  The room was in the basement. It was comparatively narrow and about fifty feet long; but, since it was situated at one of the corners of the great building, its shape was that of an L, with the result that, from where I sat near its only door, no more than half of the room could be seen. Of the three barred windows near its ceiling, the one in my half of the room was already becoming dimly visible as a slightly lighter oblong in the darkness.

  The darkness had given me quite a jolt. Earlier, at half-past ten, when I had propped my chair back against the wall and settled down to read my way through the hours ahead with the latest book on tennis strategy, it had been very quiet; I had seen to it that the three windows were all closed and fastened, so that even the distant purr of the cars across Central Park had been inaudible. Murchison, from outside, had reported every hour, but of course he had other duties than patrolling this one corridor, although he was giving it most of his attention tonight. We had considered it better, when he was called away, to leave the door locked and this he had done on each occasion. At first he had unlocked it and either come in or lounged in the doorway when reporting, but lately he had been contenting himself with calling to me through the closed entrance.

  The silence, which to begin with had been complete, seemed somehow to have gotten steadily more and more profound. Imperceptibly but steadily. Oppressive was the word probably, for by two a.m. I had the distinct feeling that it would have been possible to cut off a chunk of it and weigh it on a scales.

  I am a person who is essentially fond of games and outdoor life generally; being cooped up like this was uncongenial as well as unusual. As the silence grew deeper and deeper and Murchison’s visits farther and farther apart, the whole thing commenced to get on my nerves. Inside, I undoubtedly began to fidget. There was no possibility of backing out now, however. The diagrams showing just how one followed the ball to the net for volley (the proper time to do so being explicitly set forth in the text) made less claim upon my attention as the hours drew past. I had finally ended by closing the book and dropping it impatiently to the floor beside me.

  Could there possibly be anything in this Curse business? Absurd! I stared across at the Codex lying on the little table near the closed door. What power for either good or evil could be possessed by some unknown Aztec, dead hundreds of years ago? It was an indication of my unaccustomed nerviness that I found it of comfort to reflect that I was in a world-famous Museum in the centre of modern New York, to be specific on upper Fifth Avenue; there must be a score of guards in the Museum itself, a precinct station was but a few blocks away, the forces of civilisation that never sleep surrounded me on all sides. I glanced at the Codex again and gave something of a start. Had it moved ever so slightly since I had looked at it before? Hell, this was ridiculous. Then the lights went out.

  The effect in any case is startling and in the present instance it was doubly so. Nothing could have been more unexpected. Unconsciously, I suppose, one becomes accustomed to hearing the click of a button or a switch when lights are extinguished; even in a roomful of people, unexpected darkness descending suddenly causes uneasiness. And I was not in a roomful of people by any means. The unbroken silence preceding and following made a sort of continuity that ought to have prevented any abrupt change. Darkness, silently instantaneous, for a moment was unbelievable.

  Murchison’s voice through the door a minute later was, I admit, a bit of a relief. He opened the door, flashed his light about for a moment, then locked it again and hurried away.

  The guard’s light had shown the Codex quietly in its place on the table. Well, naturally; how could it have moved, since I had not been near it and no one else was in the room? A Curse from the dark past of Aztlan. The third night. Nonsense. Here was merely a matter of a short circuit. It suddenly occurred to me that that, too, might not be unimportant. Where there are short circuits, there are sometimes fires. The door was locked on the outside. I could break any of the windows, of course, if they couldn’t be unfastened, but what then? All of them were guarded by sturdy iron bars set in the stone work of the building. It was plain enough that in any emergency I couldn’t get out by myself.

  I simply couldn’t help thinking how often these coincidences seemed to happen. An ancient warning and a modern calamity. It was a silly notion; it persisted in running through my head. In that inanimate manuscript written by dead Aztec hands there couldn’t possibly be anything —

  When I had come into town that morning, nothing had been further from my mind than spending the night in the Metropolitan Museum. At most I had anticipated no more than calling there for a few minutes around noon to take Jim Blake out to lunch. Blake is considerably older than I am, being in fact a friend of one of my aunts; our common interest, however, is not the aunt but the game of golf, as to which we are both enthusiasts. Thus, having some business in town, I thought I might run up and compare notes with him about a recently opened course in New Jersey which we had both played, though not together. Blake had been with the Museum for years and, I understand, is now the Keeper, or whatever they call it, of their Central American antiquities.

  When I found him in his basement office, however, I discovered Marius Hartmann already with him, a fellow about my own age whom I knew slightly at college and never liked very much. A quiet, studious chap, though I suppose that’s nothing against him. What I really disliked was his contempt for all sports, a matter he took little trouble to conceal. I had not seen him since graduation but had heard that he had come into a large inheritance and taken up collecting. This interest, I suppose, had brought him and Blake together but, not knowing of their acquaintance, I was considerably surprised to find him in the office.

  He shook hands with me pleasantly enough but it was evident that his interest had been excited and was wholly taken up by the subject he had been discussing with Blake.

  “Why, a Codex Like that is priceless, literally priceless!” he exclaimed, as soon as the greetings were over. “Such a find isn’t reported once in a century. And when it is, it’s usually spurious."

  Blake, leaning back in his chair with his feet resting on a corner of his desk, grunted acquiescence. “Fortunately there’s no question of authenticity this time," he asserted. “Our own man found it, sealed away in a small stone wall-vault in the teocalli. More by chance than anything else, he says himself. The place where it was must have been rather like a safe; they never did find out how it was properly opened. It was partly broken open during the excavation work and when they saw that some sort of storage chamber had been struck, they finished it up with a pick. As I say, it was only a small receptacle, a few feet each way, I understand."

  “I suppose that accounts for its preservation,” Hartmann reflected. “Over seven hundred years, you say? It’s a long time, that, but if this temple safe was sealed up — Of course, we do know of manuscripts as old as seven hundred years. The oldest Codex I have is about four hundred,” he added.

  I thought it was high time to find out what a Codex is, so I asked.

  “A Codex, Jerry,” replied Blake with half a smile,” is a manuscript book. Strictly speaking, the thing we’re talking about is not a Codex; it’s written on stuff resembling papyrus and it is rolled rather than being separated into leaves and bound. But so many of these Central American records arc Codices written by Spaniards or Spanish-speaking Aztecs af
ter the conquest, that we have been calling this record a Codex, too.”

  “But seven hundred years?” I was puzzled.

  “Oh, yes, it far antedates the conquest. In fact, it purports to have been inscribed by the Chief Priest of the nation at Chapultepec on the occasion of the end of one Great Cycle and the beginning of the next. Tying up the bundles of bundles of years,’ they called it; a bundle, or cycle, being fifty-two years and a bundle of bundles being fifty-two cycles, or twenty-seven hundred and four years. The end of the particular Great Cycle in question has been pretty well identified with our own date, 1195 A.D.”

  Hartmann’s eyes were glistening as he leaned forward, “What a treasure!”

  “You knew of it some time ago, I believe?” Blake asked him.

  “Yes. Yes, I did. Roger Thorpe, one of your directors, told me. I offered the Museum forty thousand dollars for it, through him, before it ever got here. Turned down, of course ... But I had only the vaguest idea about the contents. It appears to be even more valuable than I realised; undoubtedly it contains an historical record of the whole preceding Great Cycle.”

  “More than that,” Blake chuckled, “more than that. When this is published, it is going to make a sensation, you can be sure ... I don’t mind telling you in confidence that the Codex contains the historical high spots of the preceding five Great Cycles, including place names and important dates of the entire Aztec migration. In some way we have not been able to ascertain as yet, the occasion of its writing was even more impressive than the end of a Great Cycle; apparently it was the ending of an especially significant number of Great Cycles in their dating system. Possibly thirteen; we’re not sure.”

  Frankly the subject wasn’t of much interest to me. I couldn’t work up the excitement that Hartmann obviously felt, and Blake, too, to a lesser degree. But I didn’t want to mope in a corner about the thing. More to stay in the conversation than for any other reason, I asked what sort of writing was employed in the manuscript.