Obelists at Sea (An American Mystery Classic)


 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title
 Introduction
 Note
 Contents
 Part One: Anonymous: Behaviour
 Part Two: Dr. Frank B. Hayvier: Conditioning
 Part Three: Dr. Malcolm Plechs: Inferiorities
 Part Four: Dr. L. Rees Pons: Dominance
 Part Five: Professor Knott Coe Mittle: Middle Grounding
 Part Six: The Criminal: Trial and Error
 The Clue Finder
 Discussion Questions
 About the Authors
 Copyright
 
 
 
 
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 A
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 Guide
 
 Cover
 Title
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 OBELISTSAT SEA
 
 C. DALYKING
 Introduction by
 MARTINEDWARDS
 AMERICANMYSTERYCLASSICS
 
 
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION
 
 Obelists at Sea is a striking example of American Golden Age detective fiction at its most convoluted and self-confident. This novel launched the brief and remarkable career of Charles Daly King, whose contributions to the crime genre were as outlandish as they were intriguing. The book has an odd literary history which somehow typifies the unorthodox nature of King’s writing.
 King’s stories exert a special appeal for connoisseurs of the curious, partly because the scarcity of his books has made them highly collectable, but also because at his best he was admirably ingenious and inventive. No author skilled enough to win the praise of such discerning novelists as E.C. Bentley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Boucher, Julian Symons, and (perhaps more surprisingly) Storm Jameson can sensibly be dismissed as a mere eccentric. King’s fiction has a distinctive and sometimes pungent flavor and anyone who enjoys an intricately plotted whodunit may well develop a taste for it. Until the appearance of this edition, however, copies of his debut novel have been vanishingly scarce.
 King summarizes the key distinguishing feature of the story in a prefatory note: “four psychologists, representing different schools within their science, apply their particular theories toward the solution of the mystery.” The four men are passengers on the S.S. Meganaut, one of the most luxurious of the North Atlantic liners, and are travelling from New York, their ultimate destination a convention in London.
 Victor Timothy Smith, a millionaire accompanied by his glamorous mistress, is killed after the lights suddenly go out in the Meganaut’s crowded smoking-room. When emergency lighting illuminates the scene, a still smoking revolver falls from the hand of a shady lawyer called de Brasto, Not surprisingly, the lawyer is seized, but it soon becomes evident that the case against him is far from watertight.
 As complication piles on complication, Captain Horace Mansfield decides that he cannot simply rely on the ship’s detectives to solve such an unconventional puzzle. Desperate for enlightenment and having recently read “a tale of mystery in which a noted psychologist had successfully baffled the more ordinary agents of justice and had produced, at the conclusion, a brilliant train of reasoning through which the villain had been seized,” he consults the psychologists.
 As in so many Golden Age whodunits, the main characters are listed at the beginning of the book. The four amateur sleuths in the ship’s company are: Dr Frank B. Hayvier, “a popular psychologist”; Dr Malcolm Plechs, “a fashionable psychologist”; Dr Love Rees Pons, “an earnest psychologist”; and Prof. Knott Coe Mittle, “a cautious psychologist.” The jokey names reflect the men’s specialisms and King’s lack of interest in the realistic characterization of his puppets. They also illustrate his satiric approach to crime writing, as do the headings of the sections into which the book is divided. They include “Behaviour,” “Conditioning,” “Inferiorities,” and “Dominance”—only for the final section to be headed: “The Criminal: Trial and Error.”
 There is fun to be had in the way each of the four men, in turn, approaches the task of explaining the apparently inexplicable, although some of the humor and theorizing is dated, while King’s enthusiasm for psychology causes him to linger over the detail. The most appealing member of the quartet is Pons, whose interests reflects those of his creator. In one