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.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Something Old, Something New. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.