John Sladek (1937–2000)

Black Aura is a bit of an oddity: a locked-room mystery written in the seventies, a decade not necessarily known for its interest in impossible crimes or classically styled detective puzzles. Sladek is clearly a fan of mystery fiction and he manages to give the story a unique spin by setting it among hippies, weirdos and junkies. If anything, the book is very good at conveying a strong sense of time and place.

It’s main downfall, to me, was its lack of originality. We get two puzzles here: a man disappearing from a locked bathroom, and another person seemingly levitating in mid-air before falling to his death. I already feared the locked-room mystery would have one of those infuriatingly trivial solutions, hinging on the entire locked-room aspect being a misconception of sorts and sadly that’s exactly what I got. The solution to the impossible crime meanwhile could be described by using an Agatha Christie title (hint: it’s a Miss Marple novel). The master John Dickson Carr did this much better in one of his best-known works.

As a pure homage to Golden Age detective fiction this is serviceable. I did not care much for the humour, but understand, that this is a subjective thing. I thought the follow-up Invisible Green was marginally superior to this, since it at least tried to do something new with its locked-room trick.… (more)