Years ago I purchased a Dover trade paperback edition of C. Daly King's 1935 novel Obelists Fly High. Dover's catalog featured a few old and obscure -- to me -- authors and titles like The Thinking Machine by Jacques Futrelle and The Old Man in the Corner by Baroness Orczy. The sort of thing you can find easily online today at sites like Project Gutenberg but which were harder to come by years ago.
C. Daly King and his mysteriously named novel (what the heck is an obelist anyway?) were unknown to me. However, I was fascinated by the murder mystery set on a passenger plane making a cross country flight during the 1930s. Unfortunately there were no more King books to be found, at least by a non-collector like myself. The author and his work, although highly rated by critics, had dropped out of sight. Even during the 1930s his six novels had struggled to find American publishers which, perhaps, is why he virtually abandoned detective fiction after 1940 and returned to writing psychology books.
So I was delighted when I ran across The Complete Curious Mr Tarrant, a collection of a dozen stories, mostly published during the 1930s. Ed Hoch ranks the original edition of this book as one of the three greatest locked room mystery collections along with Carter Dickson’s The Department of Queer Complaints and G. K. Chesterton’s The Incredulity of Father Brown. I'd disagree. The locked room collections I've read by Mr Hoch himself struck me as clearly superior. But anyone who's ever met Ed Hoch would know he'd never blow his own trumpet.
Not to say I disliked C. Daly King's short stories. They were intriguing and entertaining in their own eccentric way. Like many amateur sleuths of the period, Trevis Tarrant is a gentleman of independent means with apparently unlimited time for investigations. Unlike most he is assisted by a valet, Katoh, who is a Japanese doctor and in his spare time, a spy. Tarrant is particularly interested in bizarre cases, which usually means cases that appear to involve the supernatural. In fact one case does turn out to be supernatural, a nice touch. I'm reminded of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost Finder stories in which Carnacki sometimes fails to find mundane explanations for strange events.
Tarrant encounters a house that is purportedly haunted and a highway where headless corpses keep showing up. An Irish harp, an ancient codex, and a famous actress are all seemingly spirited out of locked rooms. Maybe best of all is the motor boat which causes its occupants to jump overboard and drown themselves.
As you can imagine, the weird and puzzling events make for fun reading. My problem was with the solutions. The first story, in particular, featured an explanation so obvious, even to me, that I'd have to call it the worst locked room story I've ever read. There's at least one other solution which seemed unsurprising and another whose mechanics didn't appear to be very workable but then I'm not very mechanically inclined.
Although the stories are certainly worth reading, I'd caution you to enjoy the rides but be prepared for some disappointing denouements.
Did I mention C. Daly King is an eccentric writer? Consider that word obelist, used in titles for three of his books. Way back when I read Obelists Fly High I looked the word up in the dictionary. No luck. Over the years I never did find a dictionary definition or anyone who knew what it meant. Not until the all-knowing internet came along did I discover that obelist was an authorism, that is to say a word coined by an author. In this case, King invented obelist to mean one who harbors suspicion, for example an amateur sleuth.
With the renewed popularity of Golden Age of Detection fiction C. Daly King may be emerging from undeserved obscurity but I doubt his authorism (another new word to me!) is going to enter common use.
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