Comic books and Hallowe'en.

I've never made any secret of the fact that I have a great affection for comics, particularly American comics. My favourite comic company is D.C. comics. In my mind their product is always associated with crime and mystery fiction. That's not just because the acronym stands for "Detective Comics", the company's flagship title, nor because they have featured a huge variety of detectives over the years from the hardboiled Slam Bradley through Roy Raymond "T.V. Detective" to Bobo, the Detective Chimp. (I don't think this character had any conscious influence on my adoption of our mutt Bobo from the Dog's Trust last year. He may have been at the back of my mind when I bought my "deerstalker" hat though.) I formed the association between D.C. and mystery because it was through one of their comics that I first became aware of the "fair play" detective story.

Despite trawling through the internet I've not been able to track down the story title. I know that it involved Batman and Robin solving a murder where the victim had left a clue as he was dying. He was an amateur artist who worked in a travelling circus and was slain while working on a painting. Even as he was dying he managed to scrawl a cryptic clue onto the corner of the canvas: a minus sign ( -) followed by the letter Q.

I know that in a previous post I've written that I'll never give away the solution to a mystery but I have to if I'm going to illustrate how I became hooked on detective stories. Please take this as a spoiler alert and, if you're an aficionado of early Batman and Robin stories in particular, skip the following paragraph if needs be.

Anyway, of the 4 or 5 suspects one had the surname Dial. The Batman, being the world's greatest detective and able to tell that an ex-con thrown into the mix was only a red herring, knew that Dial was the murderer. The story was written long before key pad telephones and I certainly read it when we still were on a "party line" and had to spin a DIAL when making a call. The only letter of the alphabet missing from such a dial is the letter Q, hence "minus Q". This struck me as being unbelievably clever especially since I was only about 7 or 8 at the time. Looking back I should probably have been puzzled by the convoluted path that a dying man's thoughts could take but I was overawed by Batman's deductive skills.

The Mysterious demise of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre.

The "Fortean Times" is a magazine that I've been buying every month for a long time. I see it pretty much as an entertainment but I must admit that SF writer Ken MacLeod turned it into a guilty pleasure for me with the incisive comments on his blog back in January.


Most issues contain a "necrolog" or collection of obituaries about individuals who existed on the fringes of the weirdness which the magazine serves up. The latest came as something of a shock when I read about the death of an author by the name of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre.


It was a fairly long obituary and each new paragraph seemed to cram in more and more outrageous details of a very eccentric individual's life.From his tales of being abused as a child in Scotland (or possibly Wales), through his time living with Australian aborigines to his final years in New York where he had abducted and tied up a neighbour the details of his life seem increasingly preposterous. By the time I'd finished reading I was 75% sure that it was a hoax. You can judge for yourself. A more detailed story in the New York Times makes it seem even more incredible.


MacIntyre wasn't the most productive of writers but I'd read and enjoyed several of his short stories over the years. He was a regular contributor to the "Mammoth Book of...." series produced by Robinson publishing. I particularly remember a Sherlock Holmes pastiche involving Ambrose Bierce, Aleister Crowley and the early days of silent film. It appeared in "The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures" and was entitled "The Enigma of the Warwickshire Vortex". It combines many of MacIntyre's enthusiasms to entertaining effect.


Interest in the occult along with his fantasy and science fiction meant that his death was bound to be flagged up by "Fortean Times" but, in researching the details of his death on line, I also discovered that he regularly reviewed films on IMDB and was well known (or infamous) among cinephiles. The discussion on this message board will give you some sense of this. A website dedicated to the silent film comedienne Mabel Normand contains a rather cutting variation on MacIntyre's "necrolog".

Ultimately it's a rather sad end for an enigmatic character but I suspect that he would have taken a perverse pleasure in the mystery he left behind. Is his review of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" a sardonic joke or a very strange suicide note ?

Never Tell Whodunit !

The word on the street is that you should always give your taxi driver a good tip if you're being dropped off at the St. Martins Theatre in London where Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" will have been running for 58 years come the 25th of November. Fail to do so and he, or she, is likely to punish you by shouting out the name of the murderer. This would make for rather a frustrating 2 hours 20 minutes of theatre-going.

I've never managed to read "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" because I made the mistake of reading a "spoiler" synopsis of the plot. A few weeks back (September6th.) there was a post on Martin Edwards' excellent blog ("Do you write under your own name?") which pointed out that there are two types of mystery readers- those who try to solve the mystery ahead of the author's revelation and those who simply go along for the story. Like Martin I'm firmly in the former group. Let's face it, Dame Agatha was a great entertainer but no-one reads her for her literary style. Take away the puzzle and the novels fire blanks, hence my inability to finish " 'Ackroyd".

When Anne and I visited Rome my second bedside book was "Shutter Island" by Dennis Lehane. I really enjoyed it ,as I have most of Mr. Lehane's novels, but the edge was taken off it slightly by a spoiler I happened to read on another website. This made me resolve never to give away plot details and aslo never to knowingly read another spoiler.

All of this reminds me of an idea thought up by the wonderful and much missed Bob Shaw in his comic SF novel "Who goes here?". One of the main characters enjoys reading but is often disappointed in novels picked at random. His solution: find a book that you really enjoy then use futuristic mind-wipe technology to erase it's plot and characters from your memory. By keeping the book you're then guaranteed a wonderful reading experience. Forever. If that technology becomes available I'll give "Roger Ackroyd" another try.

When does a crime novel become a travel guide ?

My Open University German exam is a thing of the past, though I've picked up my Monday evening class at the Goethe institute again. Anne and I have been back from Rome for over a week now and I note, with genuine shock, that it's almost a month since I last posted. Time for a major effort.

One thing I enjoy almost as much as a holiday is the discovery of a new crime series to savour. Heading for Rome I managed to combine the two. I'd bought "A Season for the Dead" the first in the "Nic Costa" series of police procedurals by David Hewson. The Roman setting appealed to me and I found myself caught up in a thrilling plot to the extent that the 3 hour flight passed me by completely. I finished the novel on our second evening in Rome with a single regret. I hadn't bought the second in the series.

The plot involves a series of gory murders seemingly influenced by the martyrdom of several early saints and overshadowed by politics in the Vatican. For the very first time I found myself learning about a city while reading crime fiction during my visit.

We walked along the bank of the Tiber and I was able to tell Anne a little about the church and hospital on Tiber island (cribbed from the novel, of course). In our visit to San Giovanni's church, St. John Lateran, I was also able to pick out the massive statue of St. Matthew from among the other, equally monumental apostles. He was the one carrying his own skin in a basket. His martyrdom entailed being flayed alive. Anne also pointed out that his name was in foot high letters on the pedestal making me feel, yet again, like her Dr. Watson.

Anyway, Rome was wonderful and we plan on going back next Autumn. In addition I've found a new series to follow. What's even better is that I can claim that the books are educational, the literary equivalent of a tasty, healthy Mediterranean diet.