Something Old: The Baffle Book (1928), Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay

Something New: The Baffle Book (2006), Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay

Sometimes something old is something new. If you noticed The Baffle Book (“Fifteen Fiendishly Challenging Detective Puzzles”) in bookstores or on Amazon in the last year or so, you might not have known that it’s a reprint of an 80-year-old book.

In 1928, two minor New York detective story writers, Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay, published a book of 30 short mysteries to be solved, with answers in the back. They’d invented a game, played “in New York studio parties last winter” that they variously called “Clues”, “Baffles”, or “Baffling Mysteries”, and in which they set mystery problems for party guests to play. The stories were also printed up in magazines, and then collected in The Baffle Book. Readers were encouraged to score themselves on how well they did using a points-per-question system, or to buy two copies and play competitively with friends at Baffle Parties.

These were the first mini-mysteries, but they’re a bit more fleshed out than the more recent incarnations, with a fair amount of descriptive detail. And you need to pay a little closer attention to solve these, especially those in the first book, which don’t always depend on one single trick, but actually require some analysis.

The book was popular. Vanity Fair said that the game was “sweeping the country like new brooms”, and 1929 and 1930 saw The 2^nd Baffle Book and The 3^rd Baffle Book. The first book was translated into German, Hungarian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Some of the Baffles came with diagrams or charts, showing samples of evidence or clues found at the crime scene, and readers or players needed to interpret fingerprints, perform handwriting analysis, and decode secret messages in order to solve the mysteries. (The idea behind the Baffle Books was later extended by Dennis Wheatley, who sold actual crime dossiers, collections of hair samples, bloodstains, police reports, and so on, which could be used to solve fictional felonies.)

In 2006, the fine independent Boston publisher David R. Godine issued a trade paperback version of The Baffle Book, consisting of the first 15 puzzles from the original book, which held 30 in all. Interestingly, although the puzzles are referred to as “old-fashioned” on the back cover description, no mention is made of the fact that this is an excerpt of an older book. In fact the original introduction is retained exactly as it was written in 1928, including the line about the puzzles being used in “studio parties last winter.”

No selection or editing has been done on the puzzles themselves, and so, as the back cover proclaims, they remain gloriously old-fashioned. The first 15 mysteries from the original Baffle Book are reprinted exactly as they were, and since each puzzle really is a very short story, the flavor of the late-20’s period comes across, although the wisdom of retaining phrases such as “his Negro servant” is debatable. New York still had an elevated train, the rich people have servants galore, “gangsters” are everywhere, and all the cops in Chicago are Irish.

As far as I can tell the only thing added to the original text is a note about the typeface used to produce this new edition. Presumably Godine saw an opportunity to put out a puzzle book at low cost, since the original Baffle Books have fallen out of copyright.

If you enjoy mini-mysteries, five-minute mysteries, ten-minute mysteries, or even the Encyclopedia Brown stories, then you might have fun working out these slightly more challenging puzzles. Or perhaps you’ll just want to settle down in an armchair with a hot mug of tea, read about old-time New York and Chicago and London between the wars, and revel in how everything old is new again.

Bonus Bookfling: At least one writer of mysteries found inspiration in the Baffle Books. According to Doug Greene, John Dickson Carr worked out the plot to his book The White Priory Murders after reading The Sandy Peninsula Footprint Mystery in the original Baffle Book.

Something Old: Stronghold, by Stanley Ellin

Something New: The Husband, by Dean Koontz

Stanley Ellin (1916-1986) was surely one of the best writers in the history of the mystery short story. Beginning with his first published story, the classic “The Specialty of the House,” Ellin wrote stories outside the usual run of detective fiction being published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and Fred Dannay, editor of EQMM, published many of his stories and promoted him heartily.

Ellin won two Edgar awards for his short stories, and although his novels may be slightly lesser known in the genre, he won another Edgar for his 1972 book Mirror Mirror on the Wall. At the time on the cutting edge with respect to the use of sex in crime fiction, it has dated a bit now, although the plot is dazzlingly pyrotechnic. Meanwhile, several of his other books have not dated at all, like House of Cards, The Dark Fantastic… or Stronghold.

Written in 1975, Stronghold is an unusual tale of a hostage-taking and a ransom demand, with a non-violent protagonist you would think little prepared to take on the kidnappers. Marcus Hayworth, along with the other leaders of a Quaker community in upstate New York, had at one time tried to help a young troublemaker named James Flood. Despite their efforts, Flood came to no good, and now has returned to the community to seek revenge by taking several members of Hayworth’s household hostage and demanding a four million dollar ransom. Hayworth himself is not one of the hostages, and instead of calling in the authorities he decides on a bold plan: he will devises a strategy intended to free the hostages without paying the ransom–and without violence in keeping with Quaker philosophy.

Don’t imagine for a minute that you can’t be ruthless without being violent. Hayworth’s first move in the stand-off is breathtakingly audacious. Before the tense standoff is over both Hayworth and the reader have had to examine their own convictions several times over.

Dean Koontz has been writing since 1968, and his first of many bestsellers came in 1980 with Whispers. Most of the time he writes either straight thrillers or thrillers with a bit of the paranormal mixed in. Until recently I would have said that my favorite Koontz was either The Servants of Twilight or Watchers, both of the paranormal variety. But in 2006 he wrote The Husband.

The Husband is an unusual tale of a hostage-taking and a ransom demand with a non-violent protagonist you would think little prepared to take on the kidnapers. Mitchell Rafferty is a professional gardener, and one day on the job his cell phone rings. It’s his wife:

“Mitch, I love you,” Holly said.

“Hey, sweetie.”

“Whatever happens, I love you.”

She cried out in pain. A clatter and crash suggested a struggle. Alarmed, Mitch rose to his feet. “Holly?”

Some guy said something, some guy who now had the phone. Mitch didn’t hear the words because he was focused on the background noise.

Holly squealed. He’d never heard such a sound from her, such fear.

She was silenced by a sharp crack, as though she’d been slapped.

The stranger on the phone said, “You hear me, Rafferty?”

The stranger goes on to demand two million dollars in ransom money, money that Mitch doesn’t have, money that the stranger knows Mitch doesn’t have. The kidnappers prove via a violent demonstration that they are serious, and Mitch finds out that, gardener or no gardener, he will do just about anything to get his wife back. You’ll believe it too. There are a couple of mind-blowing plot twists along the way, and a very satisfying ending. Don’t miss it.

Some people can’t, or choose not to, get published through traditional channels. The conventional wisdom is that most of these stories could not, and should not, be published simply because they’re bad. While finding a publisher can be hard, if you have a good story, well-written, then you’ll eventually be published. Anyone stooping to self-publishing is either too impatient or too egotistical to go through the process, and they don’t do themselves any favors, because they’re putting out unedited work that will never be distributed to readers.

Well, is it really that bad? I’ve dipped my toe into the pool of self-publishing. For the best possible results, I’ve selected stories in one of the sub-genres I love: the locked-room mystery.

First up is “The Cruise Ship Murder” by Jean Marie Stine, a short story in audiobook form. It’s described as follows:

Classic Locked-Room Mystery and Romance! In this widely reprinted romantic mystery short story by Jean Marie Stine, Dr. Devlin Blake thinks the life of a doctor on a cruise ship will be exciting and romantic. But at first he finds his duties aboard the Pacific Princess dull and monotonous. Then he is called on to solve an “impossible” locked-room murder!

This downloadable audio file contains both the short story and “the author’s homage to John Dickson Carr, the legendary mystery novelist who helped define the “locked room” mystery and the Golden Age of detection.

The homage to Carr actually comes in three ways: the locked room plot, the cabin number, and a post-story summary of Carr’s career.

First: the locked room. A man is found dead on a ship in Cabin A-13, locked from the inside, a knife in his back. His wife is in the cabin with him, but the reader knows she is innocent. So how was the man killed?

It’s a version of the situation in Carr’s (writing as Carter Dickson) The Judas Window, certainly one of the top 5 locked rooms ever. But nothing new is brought to it here, so I’m not sure Carr is getting a tribute so much as Stine is getting a free plot. And the clue that theoretically “proves” who the murderer is has a hole you could navigate a cruise ship through.

Second: the Cabin number. Carr became well-known for his novels, but during World War II embarked on a second career writing radio plays. One of his most famous was The Mystery of Cabin B-13, a brilliant and practical variation on the Paris Exposition story. Here Stine has the action take place in Cabin A-13, but otherwise there is no connection.

Third: the summary of Carr’s career at the end. This is a by-the-numbers overview of Carr which could be useful to readers (listeners) who’ve never heard of him. Sadly, the narrator reads the wrong title for The Judas Window, the novel on which this short story is based.

All in all, this story gave me little faith in self-published works.

My second expedition took me to the book Alias: Simon Hawkes: The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in New York, by Phillip Carraher. These are stories supposedly taken from Watson’s notes about what Holmes did after the struggle with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls and before his reappearance in The Empty House. Apparently he took the alias Simon Hawkes and lived in Manhattan.

Holmes later told Watson of these adventures, but Watson never wrote stories based on them. So Carraher is free to write about Holmes (Hawkes) without trying to duplicate Doyle’s writing style.

The plots are terrific! Carraher has two locked room mysteries here, and both are clever. In “The Adventure of the Magic Alibi” the killer is locked in a room at the time the murder occurs outside the room, and in “The Adventure of the Glass Room” two victims are found dead inside a glass room, which is inside a second locked room! Both are well worth reading.

The problems? Well, I believe this is a case where the author would have been better served by traditional publishing. The text is riddled with typos, including the misspelling of the detective’s name, which really leaps out at you. “Magic Alibi” is actually a novella, but should have been a short story. An editor would likely have removed the tedious middle section which is so long that you figure out the solution to the mystery before it’s over. And if we hadn’t been told that these were Holmes stories, we would have no idea, since there is no indication of it from the detective’s methods or manner. 

Of course traditional publishing is no guarantee of quality either, and I’ve read many stories published in national magazines and major anthologies that are worse than Carraher’s—minus the typos. I have no idea if he’s submitting his stories to traditional publishers, but he should be.

So that’s a look at two self-published works. Hardly a comprehensive or fair overview, so I’ll do some more in the future.