Neither of the two novels I’ve read by Anthony Abbot have exactly thrilled me, but the guy clearly has some good ideas — ideas that, I can’t help but feel, get a little diluted in the need to expand them up to novel length. So the opportunity to read the short story ‘About the Disappearance of Agatha King’ (1939) — listed in Adey — was too tempting to pass up.

The day before his wedding to the beautiful, wilful Agatha King, nightclub owner Reggie Wallace comes to visit Commissioner of Police Thatcher Colt with a wild story, the essential gist of which is that Agatha’s life might well be in danger. In light of this, the King family has decided to throw themselves on the mercy of the police, and Colt in turn arranges for the church to be positively stacked with policemen:

Not in uniform, of course, were these first-grade detectives of the Fifth Avenue Squad. Instead, the men from Headquarters appeared in striped trousers, cutaway coats and bold-wing collars. Stiff and watchful, they sat in the pews, stood sentry by the white ribbons across the aisles, and paced back and forth through the dark corridors that lead to unexpected doorways in old churches.

Surely no nuptials were ever before surrounded with such determined precautions. Yet none of them prevented that singular catastrophe, the instantaneous disappearance of Agatha King!

Precautions are immediately put in place: Agatha is moved to a hotel under an assumed name, and “[e]very corridor was manned with sentries; not a fire escape, air shaft or any other possible means of entrance had been left unwatched”. “[I]t would,” we’re told, “have been impossible for anyone to get to Agatha King’s hotel room without being seen”. And so the scene is set for the miraculous vanishment to occur…except it doesn’t yet, with Colt and Anthony Abbot — I had forgotten that Abbot is a character in these stories, though he has about as much to do and as much impact in events as identical author-insert S.S. van Dine does in the Philo Vance stories — go and visit her and establish her presence. But when they get to the service, the start is delayed by the non-appearance of the bride, and a return to the hotel reveals the impossible has happened.

In her dressing room with her maid, Agatha sent the woman out to collect something and, when the maid returned a few moments later, the door was locked and there was no reply to her knocking. Eventually, General King, Agatha’s uncle and guardian, broke in the door to find…no-one!

Diablerie! An impossible thing, on the face of it. There was no place for Agatha King to go; no corner in which she could hide. For there were police at every door and at every window. It was as if the beautiful girl had literally disintegrated, by spontaneous combustion.

Jumping out the window is out, too, since they “looked down on a sheer drop of fourteen stories to the street” and it’s “another six flights to the roof” above them. And then the oddnesses begin to stack up: all the clothes Agatha had at the hotel seem to remain in the room, including the wedding dress she was wearing when last seen by her maid, and one of her shoes is found with the buckle torn off; and there’s a large, black stain on one of the rugs. Colt, aware he’s in a classically-styled mystery, asks the General some seemingly-pointless questions (“Have you received your telephone bill for this month?”)…round and round we go.

While not exactly prepared for, the answer to all of this isn’t exactly hard to divine. What’s interesting, if not original, is the motive and the roles that various people played to make it happen…though one of the people could feel justifiably irked to learn that the police had searched their office without any warrant:

“Burglary! By the police!”

“Investigation,” corrected Colt.

There’s then a chase and…I’ll tell you no more, given that there’s a chunk of this story I’ve missed out altogether. Colt’s nature certainly comes through in the final stages, and, while I wouldn’t call this a lost classic, I’m glad I read it, since the various happening which come out after the method of vanishing is revealed are well-stacked, and the clues provided do make a sort of sense that points towards the solution (though where did she get the…bottle of [REDACTED]…on such short notice??). Plus I learned something: schizophrenia used to be known as dementia praecox — fun!

This largely supports my impression of Abbot after the small section of his work I’ve sampled, and I’m happy to move on from him now and find someone else obscure who wrote some hard-to-find impossible crimes that I can chase after for a couple of years. Any suggestions?