Creeping Coffins

What have these three books got in common (apart from being battered mass-market paperbacks dating from the early 60s?). There’s a murder mystery by John Dickson Carr called The Sleeping Sphinx, a science fiction novel by Lionel Fanthorpe (using the pseudonym “Bron Fane”) called U.F.O. 517, and a non-fiction compendium called Great World Mysteries by Eric Frank Russell.

No prizes for guessing the answer is going to be Fortean in some way. Eric Frank Russell, although he was best known as a science fiction author, was one of the earliest British disciples of Charles Fort. There have been several articles about him in the last few issues of Fortean Times, as part of Bob Rickard’s series on “The First Forteans”. The other two authors have also featured in fairly recent FT articles – I know because I was responsible for both of them! I wrote about “Fanthorpe’s Fortean Fiction” in FT297, and about the Fortean aspects of John Dickson Carr’s “Locked Room Mysteries” in FT 288.

The cover of the Carr novel depicts an old coffin, and the strapline mentions “restless coffins”. And that’s the connection between the three books – coffins that move of their own accord!

The relevant chapter in Russell’s book – the only non-fiction one of the three – is called “The Creeping Coffins of Barbados”. This seemingly poltergeist-like case will probably already be familiar to readers who, like me, can remember a time when there was more to Forteana than Bigfoot videos and leaked government UFO documents.

The events occurred in the early 19th century, in a churchyard on the south coast of Barbados. Over a period of several years, every time the Chase family’s private vault was unsealed to add a newly deceased relative, the coffins were found to be in wild disarray – often standing on end. The coffins were always carefully put back in their correct places, only to be found scattered about at random the next time the vault was opened. Increasingly elaborate precautions were taken to prevent unauthorised entry to the vault, but all to no avail. Eventually they gave up and abandoned the vault.

Exactly the same story is recounted in the Fanthorpe novel, where it’s given a characteristically Fanthorpian explanation involving a time-travelling flying saucer. A number of more conventional explanations are discussed in Russell’s book, ranging from malicious damage and natural phenomena to supernatural activity. The Barbados case wasn’t unique – Russell also mentions a similar case that occurred on the island of Oesel in the Baltic, as well as two in England. For himself, Russell says he “refuses to credit that any coffins have been moved around anywhere by ghosties or eerie beasties or things that go bump in the night. Whatever shifted the coffins at Barbados and elsewhere was, I believe, a force natural enough though not within our knowledge even at the present date.”

Others who investigated the case came to very different conclusions. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, favoured a supernatural explanation, referring (as quoted by Russell) to “bodily emanations, and the residual life-force supposedly remaining in the bodies of suicides and others who have died before their time.”

Talk of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes brings us neatly to John Dickson Carr and his own fictional detective, Gideon Fell. Carr is best known for his “locked room murders”... and the creeping coffins case is a classic example of a locked room puzzle. Strangely, however, this particular novel – The Sleeping Sphinx – isn’t a locked room murder at all. It’s a very clever mystery, as you’d expect from Carr, but it’s one of the few Dr Fell stories in which the murder itself doesn’t have any “physically impossible” aspects to it.

My guess is that either Carr’s publisher or his agent told him the novel had to include an “impossible mystery” in order to please his readership (the book dates from 1947, by which time Carr’s name was virtually synonymous with the locked room genre). So the scene with the coffins was tacked on as an afterthought. That’s not a spoiler, by the way – there’s no suggestion in the novel that the “restless coffins” have any direct connection to the murder, except for the tenuous link that one of the coffins involved is that of the murder victim.

In the novel, the solution to the coffin mystery comes at the very end of the book, even after the solution to the murder itself. So I won’t say what it is – except that it’s not supernatural! Carr doesn’t mention the Barbados case explicitly, although he refers briefly to the Oesel case and the two English ones. However, he does borrow a detail from the Barbados case, where fine sand is sprinkled on the floor of the vault in a vain attempt to detect the footprints of any intruders.

In a footnote Carr mentions a book called Oddities, dating from 1928, by Rupert T. Gould. Russell’s book also refers to Gould’s Oddities. I’m not sure if this is the same book, under a different title, as one I saw for sale a few years ago – “A Book of Marvels”, also by Rupert T. Gould. I would have bought it, except that the copy in question was thoroughly saturated with stale cigarette smoke – one of the few things that can totally ruin the pleasure of reading an old book, as far as I’m concerned. So I had to settle for photographing the cover and contents page... which as you can see includes a chapter entitled “The Vault at Barbados”:

The Tamam Shud Mystery

I’m a sucker for any kind of mystery – the more abstruse and intellectually challenging the better. For that reason I’m a great fan of the classic puzzle-style detective novels of the 1920s and 30s, written by people like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. But not everyone agrees. The commonest criticism of such fiction is that it isn’t “true to life” – real world murders don’t take the form of an enigmatic intellectual puzzle. Maybe that’s true as a general rule, but it’s a rule with one striking exception: the Tamam Shud case.

I was reminded of the case by a new blog, TAMAM SHUD, that has just been started by Gordon Cramer (who supplied the information for my recent post about Microwriting). Gordon lives in Australia, where the case is quite well known, but it’s less widely known outside Australia. I first encountered it just 18 months ago, in a blog post by Mike Dash entitled The Body on Somerton Beach. Anyone wanting a broad overview of the case should definitely read Mike’s post, while Gordon’s new blog is a great place to catch up with some recent research on the subject. All I’m going to do here is provide a quick introduction for people who may never have come across the case before, or who want to refresh their memories about it.

It started with the discovery of a dead body on Somerton Beach near Adelaide in South Australia, on the morning of 1 December 1948 (early summer in the southern hemisphere). The man was reported to have been seen sitting in the same spot the previous evening, behaving as if he was drunk. But he’d definitely been alive then – the Coroner set the time of death as some time after 2 am. To this day the victim has never been convincingly identified – he is usually referred to as “the Somerton Man”.

An autopsy revealed extensive lesions of the internal organs consistent with acute poisoning, although no trace of the poison itself was discovered. “Undetectable poisons” are extremely rare, and accident was ruled out. The official view tended towards suicide, although why a suicide should choose to employ an undetectable poison isn’t clear – especially as the extent of internal damage suggests the man died slowly and painfully. The circumstantial evidence points to murder, not suicide.

The same is true of the fact that extreme care had been taken to remove all evidence of the man’s identity. Why would a suicide do that? He was carrying a few commonplace items, but no wallet or keys that could identify him. All the labels had been carefully cut out of his clothes (which incidentally were of high quality, and in good condition – this wasn’t some homeless down-and-out). There was, however, one other item found on his person – the thing that transforms this case from a plodding police-procedural into an intellectual conundrum worthy of John Dickson Carr. And it’s the thing that gives the case its famously evocative name: TAMAM SHUD.

In the fob pocket of the victim’s trousers, there was a small, tightly rolled scrap of paper bearing the words “Tamám Shud” (pictured on the left). Now Tamám Shud is an old Persian phrase corresponding to “The End” in English or “Fin” in French – the words that are traditionally written at the end of a book. But the script isn’t Persian, although it’s printed in a mock-oriental font. The source of the phrase was less of a mystery in 1948 than it would be today. It’s the closing line of a book called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, by a Victorian poet named Edward Fitzgerald. The book is loosely based on a mediaeval Persian work, but it belongs to the mock-oriental genre that was enormously popular in Victorian times, and remained so into the mid-20th century. At the time of the Somerton Man case, in 1948, there were thousands of copies of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam floating around the English-speaking world, in dozens of different editions. All the Adelaide police had to do was find the edition—and preferably the exact copy—that the scrap of paper bearing the words “Tamám Shud” had been torn from.

It wasn’t as easy as they thought. Of all the dozens of editions in circulation, none of them used that particular font. Then after almost eight months of searching, the book suddenly turned up. A local man claimed to have found it, around the time of the Somerton Man’s death, dumped in the back of his car a short distance from where the body was found. He only realized its significance when he saw an appeal in the press. It looked like it was the long sought-after volume all right – even down to the fact that the last page, which should have borne the words “Tamám Shud”, had been torn out. It turned out to be a very rare edition of the work – something similar had been produced by a New Zealand publisher, but it wasn’t quite the same. This copy seemed to be one of a kind.

There was another unusual thing about the book. On the inside rear cover, so faint that it could only be read in ultraviolet light, there was what appeared to be a coded message – five lines of handwritten letters with no obvious meaning. Although it’s a fascinating subject, I won’t say anything else about the code here because the fact is no-one knows what it means. It’s one of the things that particularly intrigues Gordon, and you can read about the Somerton Man Code Page on his blog.

There was also a telephone number pencilled inside the book. This turned out to belong to a young local woman named Jestyn. When questioned by police, she said she had given a copy of The Rubaiyat to a man named Alfred Boxall a few years earlier. So did that mean Alfred Boxall was the Somerton Man? No – because Alfred Boxall was still alive, and he still had his copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam... complete with the Tamam Shud page!

The Somerton Man case was never classified as a murder investigation, or any other kind of crime. The police were simply trying to identify an unidentified body. So their questioning of witnesses—such as Jestyn, and the car-owner who found the discarded book—wasn’t as deep or persistent as it might have been. As a result, the case remains bafflingly unsolved – a striking counterexample to anyone who claims that real life is never as mystifying as a detective novel.

Who was the Somerton Man? How did such an apparently well-to-do individual manage to die without being missed by anyone? If it was suicide, why did he use an untraceable poison? Why did he destroy all evidence of his identity? If he was murdered, who was the murderer and what was the motive? What is the significance of the scrap of paper bearing the words Tamam Shud? Was it torn from the book found in the car? If so, who put it there, and why? Who wrote the five-line coded message, and what does it mean? Why was Jestyn’s phone number written in the book? Is there any significance to the fact that it was a very rare copy of a very popular work?

There are other questions as well, that I haven’t even touched on – peculiarities of the dead man’s physiology, similarities with other unexplained deaths... even links to the murky world of Cold War espionage. Needless to say, many amateur detectives have tried their hand at solving the mystery, leading to many fascinating theories and suggestions. But there is still a shortage of hard facts – the Tamam Shud case remains tantalizingly unsolved.

Simulacra in fiction

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the mystery writer John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) frequently used Fortean sub-themes in his novels. For the most part, these involved things like witchcraft, spiritualism or Egyptology, which were popular subjects at the time he was writing in the mid-twentieth century. However, I've just come across a much more obscure piece of Forteana in one of his books -- an example of what Fortean Times calls a simulacrum, or a natural object in the shape of something else (in this case, a human figure).

The book, dating from 1950, is called Night at the Mocking Widow, and was written (as about half of Carr's novels were) under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson. The illustration on the left is from the first edition of the book -- my own copy is a later paperback reprint which has a much less dramatic cover! The story is set in the fictional village of Stoke Druid, which is supposed to lie just off the main road between Glastonbury and Wells in Somerset. The most prominent feature of the village is a rocky outcrop called "The Mocking Widow", which is the simulacrum in question. The following description is taken from the caption of a fictional postcard in the novel:

The Mocking Widow, Stoke Druid. This stone figure, forty feet high, thirty-eight feet round the base and eight feet round the head, stands in an open meadow below the High Street. Its name is perhaps early Christian in origin, derived from the Biblical story of the Cities of the Plain: tradition stating that there once lived here a woman so wicked she was turned to stone. The eyes are each large enough to contain a human head. A visitor in the lower High Street, looking north-eastwards, can easily discern that look of mockery and cruelty which has given the figure its name.

As usual with the Fortean elements in Carr's work, the simulacrum isn't critical to the central mystery, but just there to add a touch of drama to the story. It's also fair to say that Night at the Mocking Widow isn't one of Carr's best books -- at the latest count, I've read 23 of his novels (either written under his own name or as Carter Dickson) and at least 20 of them are better than this one! On the other hand, none of the others features a simulacrum. Enigmatic stone figures of this type occasionally crop up in science fiction, where they inevitably turn out to be the product of lost civilizations or ancient astronauts, but this is the first time I've ever come across one as background scenery in an ordinary mystery novel.

A Trip to the Witches' Sabbath

The cover picture on the left is from the Summer 1948 issue of Detective Mystery magazine. At first glance, with its dancing witches and leering devil, it appears to be typical of the lowbrow "shudder pulps" of the time. But in fact the cover depicts John Dickson Carr's novel The Crooked Hinge (originally published in book form ten years earlier)... and although this does indeed touch on the subject of witchcraft, it's not in the way you might expect if you're not familiar with Carr's work.

John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was a prolific author of mystery novels, specializing in the sub-genre known as the "locked room mystery" (not necessarily involving a literal "locked room", but always a seemingly impossible crime). Carr's novels (whether written under his own name or the pseudonym of Carter Dickson) are always full of misdirection and obfuscation, and to this end he frequently used Fortean sub-themes -- for example an Egyptian curse (Lord of the Sorcerers), a vampire (He Who Whispers), a ghost (The Case of the Constant Suicides), a mind-reader (The Reader is Warned), spiritualism (The Plague Court Murders), palmistry (Till Death Do Us Part), the Tarot (Eight of Swords)... and witchcraft (The Crooked Hinge). These apparently supernatural elements are always shown to have non-supernatural explanations -- and they usually turn out to be irrelevant to the eventual solution of the mystery!

The sub-theme of witchcraft is just one of several obfuscating elements that Carr throws into Crooked Hinge. A year before the murder, a young local woman was found dead in her own home, her naked body smeared all over with a strange ointment. The explanation for this, when it is eventually given, is fascinating: "For six hundred years there's been a vast mass of testimony from those who claim to have gone to witches' Sabbaths and seen the presence of Satan... What would make a person believe them to be facts? It's been argued that in a great number of cases the 'witch' never left her own house or even her own room. She thought she had attended the Sabbath in the grove. She thought she had been conveyed by magic to the defiled altar and found a demon lover there. She thought so because the two chief ingredients of the ointment were aconite and belladonna. Belladonna, absorbed through the pores of the skin would rapidly produce excitement, then violent hallucinations and delirium, and finally unconsciousness. Add to this the symptoms produced by aconite: mental confusion, dizziness, impaired movement ... a mind steeped in descriptions of Satanist revels would do the rest."

This isn't just Carr's imagination, by the way -- exactly the same theory was put forward by David Hambling in issue 173 of Fortean Times (August 2003). Hambling added the interesting snippet that witches would sometimes smear the end of a broomstick with the ointment before putting it between their legs... interpret that however you want!