VINCENT FULLER – The Long Green Gaze. B. W. Huebsch, hardcover, 1925.

   According to Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, the author of this book, one “Vincent Fuller,” is a pseudonym, and this is his only entry. And from the title alone, if you saw this book misfiled on a shelf in a used bookshop, spine out, I can’t see how you could tell this was a work of crime fiction, until and unless you somehow happened to open it up and see the subtitle inside: “A Cross Word Puzzle Mystery.”

   As such, this The Long Green Gaze very possibly makes the first mystery ever to have a crossword puzzle theme or background. (And if someone would like to send me a list of all crossword puzzle related mysteries, I’d be happy to post it.)

   But while the novel itself, a relative obscurity, may have something extra to make it worth seeking out, as a detective story, everything else aside, its obscurity is, by most other standards, well deserved.

   It begins at a Thanksgiving gathering of Aunt Emily’s various relatives, some of whom, like Ted Dunsheath, recently booted out of his latest university, are well-described. Others seem to flit in and out of the background as needed, although Janet Marsden, whom Ted is quite fond of, does make her presence known to Aunt Emily at the breakfast table. From page 21:

   At the table, Emily pushed her grapefruit aside with a murmur about acid stomach, called for an orange, and then turned to glare at Janet. “Young lady, you look altogether too much like a giddy flapper to suit my taste. I certainly got a poor penny’s worth when I paid for your education. In my day, any girl who came to breakfast with no more to hold her together than you have, would have been spanked and sent to her room.”

   Janet’s crime: She was not wearing a corset.

   The title of the book refers to a fabulous luminous emerald that glows in the dark. Aunt Emily owns it, but unfortunately she does not survive that very same breakfast, poisoned, but how, and by whom, completely unknown.

   No one could have known she would have eaten the unexpected orange, and she had nothing else to eat or drink, except for half a cup of coffee from the percolator, and the first cup was passed on to someone else.

   The mystery deepens when a second body is found, alone in a locked room, poisoned again with the same fast-acting toxin, but with nothing in the room to suggest where it may have come from.

   Which is certainly all to the good. Where do the crossword puzzles come in? After Emily’s death and the police have gone, one of the family takes the floor. From page 33:

    “…One of us is a murderer. Bear in mind the fact that one who has murdered once may do it again. I wouldn’t advise any of you to confide suspicions to another. You might be confiding them to the person we’re all after. I guess that’s all I have to say.”

   Which means that when someone finds a clue about someone else or starts to suspect someone of something guilty to hide, they formulate a message to be hidden in the words of a crossword puzzle, complete with clues, and when the puzzle — left in someone’s room or in a place easily found — is solved, a warning about someone is at length discerned.

   The puzzles, by the way, are included for the reader to solve on his or her own, with solutions in a sealed section that can be opened in the back of the book. And for a short while after the characters of the novel have solved the puzzle, their conversation goes something like this:

   Page 48:   “Burke … called Chalfonte into the deserted kitchen and insisted on an explanation of the object named in vertical 25 and horizontal 38.”

   Page 50:   “I’ll tell you in advance that I’m doing just that just to watch some of the people concerned, the individual named in vertical 9 particularly.”

   And on page 53, that same suspect is hustled off to jail, never named, not even on page 55, in which he is still referred to as “vertical 9.”

   A technique of story-telling more awkward (and challenging) than this is difficult to imagine, but without the artifice of the crossword puzzles, I’d have to admit that it’s also as fun to read as any other obscure mystery written in 1925, complete with the mysterious Hindu servant of the world-traveler Chalfonte mentioned above, and perhaps even more so.

PostScript:   The puzzles are tough, and I confess. I looked in the back of the book. Just what I tell all of my (math) students not to do.

— February 2004 (slightly revised)


[UPDATE] 03-12-13.   Not only is this mystery novel all but unknown, it’s also scarce, but for some reason, not pricey. There are two copies presently offered for sale on ABE, for example, one for $4.00, the other $20.00. Neither has a dust jacket, nor does mine.