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Book Review: OBELISTS FLY HIGH (1935) by C. Daly King

8/25/2022

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Obelists Fly High is the third and final entry in psychologist Charles Daly King’s peripatetic mystery series. In previous cases, New York Police detective Michael Lord investigated rather sensational cases of murder while traveling by ship (1932’s Obelists at Sea) and by train (1934’s Obelists en Route); so it is perhaps natural that the only place to go is up. On a small passenger plane traveling from New York to San Francisco, Captain Lord has taken on the role of bodyguard to celebrated surgeon Amos Cutter. The medical man needs to perform a lifesaving and time-sensitive operation on his brother, who happens to be the acting Secretary of State. Before he can make the trip, however, Dr. Cutter receives an anonymous note saying that he will die on April 13th at noon Central Time. The time zone clarification by the assassin is especially thoughtful given that the M.D. will be traveling by plane.

The threat and the stakes are significant enough for everyone except Cutter to view the situation with solemn concern. In the cabin with Cutter’s nieces, research assistant, and a couple scholarly passengers who had already booked their tickets on the commandeered flight, all goes well until the stewardess passes around a box of ampules with liquid designed to combat air sickness. When Cutter breaks his capsule, sniffs, and appears to die from inhaling the vapor, Lord has his hands full keeping the cabin and its occupants under control. After an emergency landing at Medicine Bow’s snowy airfield, Dr. Cutter’s body is removed and placed in the cargo hold by Lord. Attacked from behind, though, the detective is knocked out by a murderer who is eager to ensure that the doctor is truly out of commission.

Admirably plotted and nicely paced, Obelists Fly High is generally regarded as the strongest of Daly King’s three travel stories. It is the only novel of his to date that received a celebratory reprinting, in a Dover trade paperback edition from 1986. It is also a story whose details of 1930s aeroplane flying and functionality feels authentic, tactile, and well-observed. Additionally, the elements of the narrative’s ticking clock – can Lord identify the culprit by journey’s end? – and the claustrophobic atmosphere of suspects trapped in a darkened airplane cabin with a killer are evocative and contribute to the suspense.

Daly King still indulges in a couple of his authorial vices here, which can sometimes test a reader’s patience. As with his other titles, characters are named in a puckishly Dickensian manner that trades on juvenile puns or imagery. The celebrated surgeon is named Cutter, while his nieces are saddled with the names Fonda and Isa Mann. One is a sultry woman whose beauty bewitches Captain Lord while the other is a masculine, off-putting figure; it doesn’t take a detective to guess which is which. And while the multi-page discussions of psychological and economic theory found in the other Obelists books are mercifully absent here, a popular novelist character named Craven talks at length of Fortean paranormal phenomena. Here, he tries to sell Lord on the idea that, through sheer will alone, an absentee murderer brought down the doctor.

It was difficult not to contrast this book with another work with a similar milieu, Death of an Airman (1934) written by Christopher St. John Sprigg, who used his knowledge as a pilot to craft an impossible mid-air crime above an English Aero Club. I mention Airman here because Daly King seems to have delivered much of the authenticity that I found lacking in St. John Sprigg’s story: despite the author’s bona fides, very little of the flying and itinerary evocations felt truthful in Death of an Airman, but rather like someone playing at the scenario as one would stage dolls in a dollhouse. (Airman’s absurdly impractical smuggling plot also didn’t help.) With Obelists Fly High, the reader can feel the weight of the plane and can visualize cabin and cockpit control board through the author’s descriptions. Because of this, the suspense generated from a forced landing due to impaired visibility and freezing ice accumulating on the wings feels authentic.


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But back to the puzzle at the center of C. Daly King’s airborne murder mystery. It’s a good one, and much of the book’s latter half finds Captain Lord fretting over his minute-by-minute suspect timetable, twice reproduced (on pages 175 and 261 of the Dover edition) for the reader to study as well. Obelists Fly High begins with an “Epilogue” – which is actually a spoiler-free glimpse at the climax of the plot right at its crisis moment rather than a true after-events denouement – and ends with a “Prologue”. The “Prologue” is more successful because, in revealing the characters and their mindsets before the fatal flight, it delivers two pieces of information that change our perception of what has happened.

And the author ends with a “Clue Finder” list guiding readers to the pages where motifs and mentions provide the path to the solution. Whether every aspect of the story is genuinely fair play can be debated, but I think most fans of Golden Age Detective fiction will find this journey a memorable one. If you come across the reprint (or any) edition of Obelists Fly High, go ahead and buy a ticket to board.


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Book Review: OBELISTS EN ROUTE (1934) by C. Daly King

11/30/2021

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With much fanfare, The Transcontinental is set to begin a three-day non-stop train journey from New York to California. There are many people on board, of course, but the reader of Obelists en Route is conveniently allowed to dismiss the majority and focus on a handful of essential travelers. Specifically, they are the employees, relatives, and attendants orbiting the powerful banker Sabot Hodges, a man who has the personality and attributes that make him a suitable murder mystery victim. Hodges is very wealthy, there are rumors of a recent change in the particulars of his will, and he has made at least one onboard enemy. So it is perhaps not a surprise when the man’s body is found at the bottom of the train’s novelty boxcar-length swimming pool.
 
But an en route autopsy reveals that Hodges didn’t die by drowning and may have had a heart attack on or near the pool prior to an early morning swim. No poison is detected in the dead man’s system. As a police detective wonders whether the banker’s death was due to an accident, an illness, suicide, or something more sinister, a dangerous bout of gunplay involving Hodges’ secretary, his daughter, and a potential son-in-law points to murderous intentions.
 
Obelists en Route improves greatly on the formula American psychologist Charles Daly King employed for his nautical predecessor and début detective novel, 1932’s Obelists at Sea. The critical change is this: instead of drafting a quartet of psychologists to interview suspects and investigate the crime (with a passive ship’s captain acting as baffled referee), this train-set mystery appoints and stays with one capable and active policeman. Lieutenant Michael Lord assumes the role of sleuth, and the story is all the better for it. While I wasn’t sure whom to follow as leader at Sea – and in whom to place confidence, if anyone – there is no such problem en Route. Additionally, the murder mystery seems cleaner and the scenario doesn’t evoke quite the disbelief that is generated by the previous story’s plotline and events.
 
It is true that we are still comfortably traveling the terrain of Crime Fictionland, and the central mystery – was the financier murdered without a mark on his body, and if so, how and by whom? – is a suitable and enjoyable puzzle for the genre. King plots and writes his murder mystery well, and the trainbound investigation has a lot of period charm. (In later paragraphs I explore King's literary Achilles’ heel.) And true to American form, the author adds in almost as much gangster-like gunfire here as he featured in Obelists at Sea.
 
It is also one of those stories from mystery fiction’s Golden Age that offers some very entertaining anthropology when read more than 80 years later. The eager to please, dialect-sporting “colored” porter James may be an unfortunate characterization (though common for its time in U.S. fiction and film) but other details of the cross-continental rail trip are very instructive. Modern-day comforts made me ignorant of the realities of a 1930’s “non-stop” train journey, for example, which would need to switch out locomotive engines as well as conductors. The former would need changing to undergo maintenance and inspection – coal- and oil-burning engines would overheat on a cross-country trek – and the latter would swap as one conductor’s familiar route territory ends and another’s begins.

When he learned that I had acquired a copy of Obelists en Route (thank you yet again, academic interlibrary loan!), my well-read mystery fiction colleague Nick Fuller told me, “Watch out for the economics lecture.” So I thought I was prepared when self-described “technocrat” and argumentative passenger Noah Hall began to engage Sabot Hodges in a heated debate about “the Energy Survey” and “greenback inflation”, a mélange of ideas that continues on for eight pages. Little did I know that this passage was just a preamble, and that it is, surprisingly, Lieutenant Lord who talks about economics for an additional ten pages mid-book (p. 198-208), trying to make sense of “social credit” and “national dividends”!
 
To say that the crime plot stops during these strange and circuitous conversations is an understatement; they are so inorganic to an otherwise forward-moving mystery that there is little to do other than attend the lectures or skip over them. No diabolically nested clues to the crime or killer's motive are to be found therein. And as on the pages when his psychologist characters take the lectern and explain at length their field of study, the economics dialogue is augmented by multiple footnotes and text citations, in case the besieged reader is interested in learning even more about the subject.

PictureMystery author and psychologist Charles Daly King.
One has to wonder just how successful (or useful) King thought these heady digressions were. I suspect any editor who wasn’t purblind or spineless would clear his or her throat and tactfully suggest omitting the chapter. Or perhaps his publisher felt indulgent, or even rationalized that the economic theorizing was value added. Even so, it is amusing to see a footnote from C. Daly King that directs the mystery reader to a book called Integrative Psychology (1931) which is co-written by someone named Charles Daly King and is, in the author’s own estimate, “entertaining and instructive with many practical hints”.
 
Fortunately, the digressions are limited and Michael Lord’s investigation into murder on the train (when he isn’t holding forth on economic theory) is focused and engaging. The author’s practice of fair play is indeed scrupulously fair, with a Clue Finder indexing all the clues and revealing page, paragraph, and line where they can be found. I was even able to guess the means of murder of the otherwise undrowned and unmolested Sabot Hodges, and being the dope that I am, I usually don’t tumble to those things. Obelists en Route proves a genuinely agreeable journey, should you manage to find a copy of the book and can afford the ticket. Just watch out for the economics lecture.

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Book Review: OBELISTS AT SEA (1932) by C. Daly King

11/21/2021

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​What a strange, contradictory maiden voyage Obelists at Sea is! American psychologist Charles Daly King launched his first detective novel in 1932, and it proves to be a reading experience quite unlike any other mystery novel from the genre’s Golden Age. Obelists at Sea (for me, anyway) is a study in qualitative contrasts: it is by turns engaging and alienating, intelligent and sophomoric, tantalizing and tedious. The author embraces the best, but also the most artificial, qualities of the pure puzzle story and pushes one’s suspension of disbelief – always indulgently permissive with mystery fiction – to the breaking point. The result is that I can appreciate and admire the game being played, but I don’t believe it for a moment. In that regard, Obelists at Sea is almost a meta-mystery, one that claims to search for a solution through the careful application of human psychology and then offers up a cast of clichéd and unreal characters.
 
But is it a good detective story, worth tracking down and reading? Yes, for its delirious, sensational setup and its unconventional approach to the detective investigation format. We are onboard the Meganaut, an enormous cruise ship filled with pleasure seekers traveling from New York to Paris. As tensions mount during an auction where passengers bid on travel pool numbers, the power fails and the smoking room plunges into darkness. A gunshot rings out. When the lights return, a millionaire named Smith is slumped over his table, dead. But an autopsy reveals that he has two bullets in him, not one – both following the same trajectory – and he apparently also ingested cyanide seconds before he was shot. Although Captain Mansfield has two ship detectives on board, for some reason he places his faith in four psychologists traveling to a conference and encourages them to employ the tricks of their trade to interview suspects, expound theories, and uncover the killer.
 
Fun? Yes, but Obelists at Sea is also a slog, full of endless interviews and ultimate solutions that aren’t so much satisfying as anticlimactic. The U.S. edition published by Alfred A. Knopf is 330 dense pages, and although the prose reads well enough, the story arc itself feels a bit of a marathon as it moves from one episodic event to another. I appreciated the Aristotelian unity of a crime commission, investigation, and resolution happening during a voyage, as setting, time, character, and plot are neatly aligned. But that unity also invites stasis and repetition. 

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By making the amateur detective not one figure but four psychologists with competing analytical theories, it seems King had in mind a satire of his profession. It is a genuinely fertile idea, but the author only gets halfway there: each doctor first delivers pages of monologue explaining his area of study. Dr. Frank B. Hayvier describes the concept of subject conditioning, for example, while Dr. Love Rees Pons holds forth on dominance psychology. And yes, this is how C. Daly King chooses to name his characters, and not just his medical men. Among the passenger suspects are a seemingly trusting soul named John I. Gnosens and a man who doesn’t get in the way, Mr. B.Y. Stander. And might Miss Sudeau be traveling under an assumed identity? The name game is either a strange or appropriate piece of pastiche, depending on how engaged you hope to be by the narrative.
 
It is also disappointing to find that the two most dazzling details of the plot – how did the victim receive two bullets along the same trajectory, and how was a man both poisoned and shot as soon as the lights went out? – are explained early and shrugged off with little fanfare. (Weapon capability and coincidence, respectively.) Instead, the story focuses on the hunt for Smith’s killer. By contrast, the author provides a delightful appendix called a Clue Finder where a dozen categories of incrimination, from X’s “opportunity to commit the crime” to “victim’s fear of” the murderer, are referenced by page and paragraph lines. One would conclude that such fastidious presentation of multiple clues within the text would vouchsafe the story as fair play, and yet I’m not fully convinced. Complete details of the relationship between killer and victim are offered only in the book’s final pages, courtesy of another multi-page expositional confession from another character.
 
It is comforting to know that I’m not the only one who finds the stories of C. Daly King a mixed bag. Sergio posted a smart, fair, and comprehensive review of Obelists at Sea a decade ago on his now-retired site Tipping My Fedora. Over the years, crime fiction historian and mystery novelist Martin Edwards has also been reading and reacting to King’s “barmily implausible” books, and his comment on 1939’s Arrogant Alibi seems equally appropriate here: “It’s one thing to have all the right ingredients for a whodunit, quite another to make best use of them.” Obelists at Sea indeed has the very ingredients that stir the senses of the classic mystery reader; it’s how they’re used – and the incidental discourse the reader must push through – that makes the voyage strangely uneven.
 
An obelist, a separate page note tells us, is “one who harbours suspicions.” It is a term the author made up and used in three book titles. Although Obelists Fly High has been reprinted in trade paperback, the other two Obelist books are difficult to find and prohibitively expensive when run to ground. As usual, I am grateful to a vibrant college and university interlibrary loan system that selflessly makes these books available (temporarily) to curious travelers like me. 

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