“Obelists at Sea” by C. Daly King

In his introduction to the recent American Mystery Classics reprint of Charles Daly King’s Obelists at Sea, Martin Edwards lists E. C. Bentley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Boucher, Julian Symons, and Storm Jameson (alongside Edwards himself) among the critical admirers of King’s detective fiction. Clearly, King must have done something right to gain so many fans across his fellow GAD authors and beyond. However, it’s clear as well that King’s oeuvre has not been so memorable as to carry on into the present day and age. Right now, only Obelists at Sea is currently in print, and the only other books of his that are easy to find for a reasonable price are the novel Obelists Fly High and the short story collection The Curious Mr. Tarrant. His other four novels, which fall into the same series as the two “Obelist” novels thus mentioned, are some of the most highly sought after titles in GAD-dom, especially without any e-book versions to fall back on.

King himself was a learned psychologist, having obtained a degree from Columbia University, collaborated with William Moulton Marston (yes, the creator of Wonder Woman,) and published his own works in the field. Eventually King pivoted to a career of writing detective fiction, and with his first three books (Obelists at Sea, Obelists en Route, and Obelists Fly High) he quickly asserted his hallmarks as an author. His writing style included a juxtaposition of psychological studies and complex Van Dine-school crime plotting, he loved to make his characters’ names blatant puns; and he had a penchant for proto-Pynchonesque diversions of topic. While these novels found success, it seems his greatest achievement was as a short story writer: his Mr. Tarrant stories (12 in total) are considered masterpieces of plot, form, and atmosphere. He wrote three more novels with his crime-solving team of Michael Lord and L. Rees Pons, and closed up shop in 1940 just as the war was getting serious and the pure detective story was losing steam as a global phenomenon. 

Decades later, and as a resurgence in interest for GAD is well under way, many authors, including C. Daly King, have slowly found themselves back in print. How does King’s reputation hold up today? In my opinion, while there are many facets of Obelists at Sea which are commendable and show King’s strengths as an author, there are also many apparent weaknesses to the novel. While I generally enjoyed the book, I ultimately find myself conflicted about it.

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room. What exactly is an “obelist”? Short answer: it’s a word King made up. Long answer, per Edwards’ introduction: the original British edition of Obelists at Sea provided the definition “a person of little or no value.” However, in the American first edition of Obelists at Sea and both first editions of Obelists Fly High, the word is defined as “one who harbours suspicion.” King preferred the second definition and blamed the first on the British “not knowing their own language.” It should be noted that the original British edition of Obelists at Sea also had vast differences in character names and lacked the detailed clue finder which would become King’s specialty.

The plot concerns the peregrinations of the S.S. Meganaut, cruise liner, its crew and passengers, and the events that happen on its journey from New York to Cherbourg. Victor Timothy Smith, one of America’s richest men (although nobody is quite sure what field he made his money in,) is on board with his daughter Coralie. Every night there is an auction event in the smoking room, where passengers bid on numbers corresponding to the number of nautical miles the ship traverses from the previous noon to the next; whomever has the correct number each day wins a prize, but anybody can make money when their number is sold off each night. Smith, sitting with Coralie and two young men who may be her possible suitors, gets into a heated bidding war one night with the crooked lawyer Saul de Brasto; Smith keeps outbidding de Brasto for every number he wants in what seems to be a thinly-veiled act of anti-Semitism. Suddenly, the lights flicker and go out for a couple of minutes, during which time the passengers hear simultaneously the crash of a body, a hissing noise, and the report of a gun, as well as see the gun’s flash. When the lights come back on, Smith has been shot dead, Coralie has fainted, and de Brasto is quite literally holding a smoking gun.

The two ship’s detectives are quick to action, and of course immediately accuse de Brasto of the crime. De Brasto denies any involvement; he claims he shot in the opposite direction of where Smith was sitting because he saw someone he believed was an assassin about to kill him. It’s a pretty flimsy alibi, but eventually the evidence bolsters the story: Smith has been shot twice, one bullet just above the other, and clearly the bullets were both fired around the same time. De Brasto’s bullet is found lodged in a table. Meanwhile, Coralie is pronounced dead from her shock. Captain Mansfield of the Meganaut, distraught at the violence that has taken place aboard his ship, and eager to catch the criminal, allows four psychologists, who are all traveling to a decennial convention in London, to investigate in turn. Each psychologist brings their own unique brand of study to their investigation, but ultimately comes up short; their apparently brilliant solutions are brought down either by psychiatric tests or by outside events. It will take an unlikely character in the end to reveal an equally unlikely murderer.

When a murder mystery (or really any piece of literature) is set on a boat or ship, that setting becomes paramount in the creation of mood and emotional temperature. A ship may seem big, but ultimately it is a contained environment, with finite places to run or hide or live or love. King does a magnificent job of creating the tension he needs through the description of the Meganaut and its happenings, even if it is a much less cramped space than, say, the Karnak in Death on the Nile. Detail is poured in about the ship’s electrical system, room layouts, and order of command. If this is not enough, King includes no less than five diagrams of various parts of the ship (i.e. the smoking room, the hospital, their respective levels) to make sure readers can picture the Meganaut exactly as he sees it himself. These diagrams are a bit misleading because, besides the smoking room diagram, none of them are very useful in puzzling out the solution for yourself – any details about the ship that end up pertinent are explained well enough that a diagram is unnecessary. Nonetheless, it helps in creating the juxtaposition of isolation and claustrophobia that occurs when a murderer is loose onboard a well-populated ship in the middle of the Atlantic.

However, with such an isolated setting, and such a long text for a GAD novel, (the AMC reprint is 357 pages,) there is bound to be some padding. Possibly the detailed descriptions of just about every single part of the ship contributes towards this. King includes on top of this several discussions of topics that have little to do with the mystery. This seems to be one of his (lesser-loved) literary habits; those who are lucky enough to have read Obelists en Route complain about its chapter on economics. The diversions here are not as snore-inducing, though. Many of them relate to each psychologists’ specialty, or the tools they use to conduct their “tests” on each suspect. For instance, there are fascinating looks at an early prototype of the lie detector as well as the science behind word association tests. Sometimes the story veers off-topic, and when it does it can get weird. Take, for instance, this passage from a long lecture that Dr. Pons gives to a woman he is courting about how his psychological theories can be applied to make romantic relationships as meaningful as possible:

“That is the function of women, to lead in all relationships between persons, and especially between men and women, because they are equipped for that and men are not. Until they do fulfill their function and take the leadership that is theirs, we shall have the stupid, ignorant, wasteful, appetitive world that is making all of us sick. But the difficulty is to find women who possess the intelligence.”

Obelists at Sea, Part Five: “Professor Knott Coe Mittle: Middle Grounding”

Honestly, I wasn’t even sure what I was reading! Somehow King managed to write something that is simultaneously progressive and misogynistic. And it’s just sitting there, nestled two-thirds of the way into a dense murder mystery. I had no choice but to wonder if King forgot what he was writing about all of a sudden and then slowly remembered again.

King’s prose style is dry and matter-of-fact. For 350 pages he tells you what’s what and not much more. There is a clear following of the Van Dine school in this regard: the story of the crime and the progress of the detectives is paramount, and little else gets in the way. King makes few diversions to focus on characters or atmosphere, even if he does pause everything to discuss random subjects for ten pages. Nonetheless, he is capable of some beautiful writing too, such as this brilliant imagery that one has to wait until the final pages for:

Outside the night was quiet, a night through which an illusory moon sailed high with deceptive slowness. The reaches of the sun deck were hazy under the drifting light that filtered down from far above and covered them like a flood of ultra-microscopic snowflakes. Unimaginably distant, but seemingly as close as the moon, the stars glowed brightly, rather than sparkled, in the dark blue canopy overhead. On the deck a few confined circles of yellower light, widely separated from each other, attested that the troublesome dynamos were still functioning.

Obelists at Sea, Part Six: “The Criminal: Trial and Error”

Perhaps it makes sense that this passage occurs right when King finally gives in after an entire novel’s worth, and includes a resolution to a romance plot that you barely even know was going on. But this is a unique example; most of this book is not nearly as interestingly written, and I must admit that there were portions I struggled to get through – especially in the final section, where despite constant plot twists it continually felt like I was still 50 or 60 pages away from the reveal of the killer.

Usually I discuss characters in terms of which ones I felt were well written and which ones were not. This time I will have to make more of a general assessment: King, following the Van Dine / Queen tradition, has put little effort into characterization. Each character essentially fills in a role in the plot, and any developments or twists King adds for a character have an ulterior motive in furthering that plot. The characters are paper-thin, because the only “”character” King really cares about developing is the puzzle plot. There are a couple ways that King further shows the puzzle-piece nature of his characters, and these methods I actually quite enjoyed. One was the character list that is provided at the novel’s start. Each character’s description more or less tells you everything you need to know about them, which will be just about everything you’ll get to know about them. However, it is blunt and curt, serving as both a guide to the personages aboard the Meganaut and a reminder that King is not hiding the killer from his readers through cheap trickery.

The other method King has of reducing his characters to their roles is their names. Here is another of King’s hallmarks as an author: just about every one of his characters across his oeuvre has some kind of punny name. I can understand how these names can quickly become annoying, but as a Phoenix Wright fan (those games are chock full of puns in character names) I couldn’t help but enjoy the humorous nature of it all. For instance, Victor Timothy Smith. Take the first syllable of his first two names, and you get the word victim. De Brasto’s law partner is named B. Y. Stander; the two ship detectives’ names are Bone and Heddes (boneheads;) one of Coralie’s suitors is named John I. Gnosens (“no sense” or “innocence,” depending on your outlook;) a woman is traveling under the assumed name Mme. Sudeau (pseudonym;) a career criminal named Stymond has a false passport under the name Desmond Gize (disguise,) which he reveals to one of the psychologists who has passed himself off to Stymond as a lawyer named “F. A. Kerr;” and there’s even a witness to the hissing noise in the smoking room named—I kid you not—De Witt van Ness. It’s lunacy at its most brilliant.

(Speaking of that character list, one of the entries in it under the “passengers” section reads “Gunne, an elusive passenger.” I am 99% sure that this character is not once mentioned by name in the course of the book, but I suspect I know who it’s supposed to be. ROT13: Vf Thaar gur tnatfgre nffnffva jub nggrzcgf gb, naq riraghnyyl qbrf, xvyy qr Oenfgb, orsber trggvat fubg uvzfrys ol Yvrhgranag Ynar? It’s the only plausible explanation I can think of, and in that case, did King purposely give the character a name only in the list, or did he simply forget to elaborate on that point?)

But the best pun-names belong to the best characters, the four psychologists. They are, in order of when they investigate, Dr. Frank B. Hayvier (the behavioralist,) Dr. Malcolm Plechs (who dabbles with the topic of inferiority,) Dr. L. Rees Pons (L. stands for Love, and his big theory is about “love responses,”) and Prof. Knott Coe Mittle (a psychological moderate.) Through these four characters the entire novel breathes. King, as a psychologist himself, wanted to write a novel that both showed off the different aspects of psychological study and poked fun at them too. In this regard he was entirely successful. He encapsulates the intrigue and modernism of each psychologists’ specialty, highlighted by their style of investigation or interrogation, and knocks it all over through the destruction of their theory, and through their often snide comments to one another. King’s love for psychology comes through these four characters; although they are clear caricatures, they emanate true pathos and clearly act as something deeper than a repudiation on King’s part of the psychologists of the time.

King’s main goal besides the psychological aspect was to write a complex, intellectual murder mystery, and in this regard he has succeeded. There is a certain beauty in how he takes such a simple seeming crime, smoking gun and all, and slowly peels away its layers, which manages to make things less clear rather than more. From the point when de Brasto shared his strange story about the hitman he saw, it’s clear that there is something more to Smith’s death than meets the eye (of course there is, it’s a murder mystery!) But King knows how to pull out all of the stops: he adds several twists to the case that completely restructures the detectives’, and our, thinking about how the crime occurred. If the business with the two bullets that killed Smith and the separate bullet that de Brasto fired wasn’t complicated enough, wait until you learn what actually killed Smith. And don’t miss the corpse that vanishes from the ship’s hospital… or is it really a corpse? All this, well under halfway through the novel. There are no impossibilities per se, but some of the circumstances are unusual enough that it feels at least semi-impossible. And the false solutions from the psychologists are played smartly. It’s as if King structured each one in such a way that he slowly ticks off each person the reader will successively suspect; the astute reader says “Aha, here would be a clever choice of murderer, more clever than the last!” and King is right there to play along until it tumbles down. I appreciated as well how the four false solution take up so much of the novel’s space; like with Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case, the false solutions themselves are what further the plot, rather than acting as diversions or checkpoints.

So can King deliver a solution which lives up to all these shenanigans? I would say so, for I did not correctly guess whodunit. ROT13 about my theory about who the killer was while I read: V jnf pbaivaprq vg jnf Pncgnva Znafsvryq sbe ab ernfba orfvqrf ur jnf gur pncgnva. V qba’g xabj jung vg vf jvgu gurfr fuvc-frg obbxf gung V nyjnlf vzzrqvngryl fhfcrpg gur pncgnva; gur fnzr guvat unccrarq gb zr jvgu Avar naq Qrngu Znxrf Gra. But King has hidden his killer well, throwing suspicion away from them enough but not too much. The solution is definitely well-clued: in his final literary calling card, King has included a clue-finder which contains dozens of page, paragraph, and even line references to different facets of the murderer’s guilt shown in all stages of the book, from their attempts to implicate an innocent party, to fear shown towards them by their victim(s). (Thankfully, the AMC reprint has changed the actual page references from the first edition to match their copy. I remember that was a problem with the Pocket Books edition of The Peacock Feather Murders where they just copy-pasted the page numbers from the hardback, which meant the footnotes led to completely random things.) There’s a bit of a double-whammy aspect to this because the identity of who solves the case is just as surprising. You’ll probably suspect that somehow Michael Lord is involved in all this because he’s the other series detective besides Pons. But who Lord actually is, is the question.

My one qualm about the solution is that, ironically, while the book seems to imply that the solution will be found through material evidence and that the psychological solutions will ultimately fail, the solution is in essence psychological. Not in the way of lie detectors and “Marston-Troland voice keys,” though; what I mean is that the evidence that proves the murderer’s guilt lies much less in the physical evidence involved than in things like how the murderer acts in certain scenarios, and how certain other characters act around them. Of course being more specific would spoil everything. The Van Dine school is all about how these psychological factors can help solve crimes, so I was a bit dismayed that a book which seemed to subvert those expectations by the mechanics of its very plot ended up falling exactly in line with that. The motive is a problem as well; do not bother trying to figure it out, because there is no way to guess the murderer’s true relation to Smith before it’s all explained around page 300, such that you know said relation but not their identity. However, these are small criticisms on my part; I take more trouble with the other weaknesses in the book mentioned earlier. I will note as well that Smith’s murder takes place 6.7% of the way through the novel, and the reveal of the murderer happens 95.2% of the way through the novel. While the murderer’s identity is plenty surprising, I’m not sure it warrants the the over 300 pages I waded through to get to it.

Obelists at Sea has many aspects that should make it an instant GAD classic: a well-imagined ship setting, authorial quirks like punny names and a clue-finder, detailed false solutions, a farcical subversion of expectations with psychological detection, and a complex but thought-out Van Dinian plot with a well-hidden killer. But problems like dry prose, bizarre thematic entr’actes, mostly uninteresting characters, and its sheer length prevent it from that title. I really wanted to love it, because there’s so much about it that I do love. As it stands, I can judge it to be a pretty decent and creative authorial debut, one that has problems that need to be worked out. Apparently King will not work out these problems, which dismays me somewhat. Even if it was ultimately a strong 3/5 for me, I was impressed enough to give King another chance. I’ve purchased Obelists Fly High, since most people who have read King agree that it is his masterpiece, due to its unique structure and even crazier plot. I’ve seen a few dissenting opinions for it as well, which actually makes me even more intrigued to see what the deal is. What I do know is that I’ll miss Drs. Hayvier and Plechs and Professor Mittle – I would have loved to see all four psychologists give their own false solutions in each book; their chemistry together is great. At some point I’ll try The Curious Mr. Tarrant, which many prefer over the Lord / Pons series altogether. For now, at least, I shall middle-ground in the manner of Knott Coe Mittle, and remain a humble obelist when it comes to C. Daly King’s reputation.

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New Horizons Challenge: 9 works out of 25

Author: C. Daly King

The Challenge Requirements so far:

1/3 works translated into English

4/3 works written in English after 1970

1/2 works that are hardboiled or noir

2/2 works written by an American minority author

0/2 works with a musical setting

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Other Reviews:

‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’ (Martin Edwards)

Jason Half

Mystery*File (William F. Deeck)

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Tipping My Fedora