I hold John Sladek’s second and final detective novel Invisible Green (1977) in very high regard indeed, but have not read his first, the slightly less successful Black Aura (1974), for well over a decade. It’s pretty incredible that something which gave so much air to three baffling impossibilities was written as late as 1974 at all, and so revisiting it and finding a book which doesn’t quite fulfil the expectations of any idiom — it’s too puzzle-focussed for the gritty style that was popular at the time, but too nebulously handled to satisfy true puzzle heads — isn’t really a surprise. There’s still some enjoyable stuff in here, but this is very much the apprentice work for the masterpiece Sladek would produce three years later.

London-based medium Viola Webb is making quite a name for herself among the fashionable and — perhaps more importantly — wealthy Kensington set, with her Aetheric Mandala Society of believers attracting great attention from those outside the townhouse-based commune. Her lectures and demonstrations are often sold out affairs, with many people attending in the hope of contacting loved ones on the other side of the veil. When the Society attracts the attention of displaced American wannabe-sleuth Thackery Phin, it is only a matter of time before Phin is invited into the inner realms…just in time, too, as all manner of inexplicable happenings are about to unfold.

Sladek’s writing is gorgeously atmospheric in the setup, establishing not merely the oddness of Viola Webb’s followers buy also the general drear of London in the 1970s — an early mention of an overpass as “a grey dinosaur’s belly…standing on fat grey dinosaur’s legs” is superb. And it’s clear that Sladek has a keen eye on the potential moodiness of the forthcoming events, noting early on that “[h]umour and horror are never so far apart, and shaking with laughter often looked like shaking with fear”. And he is awake to the humour when it’s there to be found, such as retired Wing Commander Bruce Dank chatting at a seance via Mrs. Webb with “an old RAF mate whose memory was as vague as his vocabulary unmilitary”.

Once Phin is ensconced in the house with the “middle-aged hippies” who will cause Chief Inspector Gaylord such headaches, the book became less well-structured than my memory would have it. We veer from tedious conversations to sudden miraculous happenings, and everyone seems to react as if these are everyday occurrences — even when one of their number plunges to his death having been seen levitating outside a fourth floor window. I know these people are believers, but Sladek rarely invests these incredible events with any sense of incredulity for the reader, who has been invited on more than one occasion — not least through the presence of sceptic Professor Merihew Hackel — to view these people and events askance.

The three impossibilities lived up to my memory of them: the vanishing from a locked toilet is still ridiculous, the levitation doesn’t quite work, and the vanishing of a mourner from a funeral parlour is exceptionally good in its sheer simplicity. There is, however, a disappointing lack of detection — rarely, it must be said, much of a concern for the American writer of puzzle mysteries — and all these years later it really is not simply the what happened of the crime which I enjoy but also the how the sleuth got there. In ever other regard the book almost lived up to my memory, but in this one it drops a little in my reckoning, the final chapter containing much in the way of my never-loved ipsedixitism as Phin simply tells us what he knows and expects the scant clues dropped throughout — a thread here, a coin there — to prove sufficient.

Still, as I say, the existence of this book is pretty miraculous in itself, with impossible crimes being in somewhat short supply in this decade — Leonardo’s Law (1978) by Warren Murphy keeping Sladek company, and proving a hugely enjoyable time in the process — and we should celebrate that Sladek chose to dip his toe in the water and swirl some intriguing patterns for our amusement. And, hey, maybe with slightly lowered expectations I’ll return to this in another decade-plus and find it delightful once again; it certainly doesn’t deserve its obscure status, but quite who would reprint it in these wonderfully GAD-focussed days is another matter…