Black Aura

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 show more 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. show less

Extremely entertaining near spoof of the classic detective novels of John Dickson Carr. Very funny but never at the expense of the central mystery of the plot.

Thackeray Phin, a transplanted American in London, has dabbled in amateur sleuthing but is weary of the tiresome ordinary crimes that plague contemporary society. In order to alleviate his boredom and tide him over until a truly perplexing crime comes his way he places an ad in the newspaper hiring himself our as an occult investigator. His friend Beeker, a sometime con man, informs Phin of a spiritualist commune calling itself the Aetheric Mandala Society and challenges him to expose the members as frauds. Phin inveigles his way into the group and immediately becomes involved in show more a series of gruesome deaths and mysterious disappearances. Is there a devilish murderer among the spiritualists? Magic, medium debunking, drug use, a touch of Egyptology all mix together in this madcap romp in which three (possibly four) separate impossible crimes are solved and a diabolical killer is unmasked.

Reminiscent of the best of Carr, Crispin and Robert L. Fish’s Schlock Holmes pun-laden parodies. show less

"Drug victim's ghost warns pop star at London commune seance" begins the blurb. Says it all, really.