#3: The Smiling Corpse (1935) by Philip Wylie and Bernard A. Bergman
The use of real figures in fiction, and particularly crime fiction, usually goes one of two ways. Philip Kerr has enjoyed tremendous success with his Bernie Gunther novels set in and around Nazi Germany and tying in all manner of historical figures, but his earlier Dark Matter – utilising Isaac Newton as a detective – was less successful. And at least Kerr has the freedom of those real people being long departed (conspiracy theories aside) and so largely free to do with as he pleased. When Philip Wylie and Bernard A. Bergman originally published The Smiling Corpse, the four very real detective writers at its centre (plus sundry background artists) were still very much alive, so one can understand their caution in wanting to keep their names of the final manuscript. Imagine a novel published today in which Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell and one of James Patterson’s co-writers solved a crime and you get some idea of what we’re talking about.
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#2: What’s in a name?
So, not to get all insecure and introspective in my first real post, but I wanted to outline choosing “The Invisible Event” as the title for my crime fiction blog. Broadly speaking there are three reasons, and they get more fanciful as they go.
The first comes from my love of impossible crimes and how in impossible crime fiction, by dint of the name, there is something that must have happened but at first glance simply can’t have – a murderer has vanished from a watched room, say. In order for that to have occurred, clearly they must have been invisible and so the “invisible event” is whatever puzzle is presented in a locked room mystery.
The second is a variation on that, the idea of a clue in a crime novel that is so well hidden you miss it completely at first reading, but when brought to your attention at the end it’s the one thing that was to all intents and purposes invisible and would have unlocked everything for you, the reader.
The third, and the phrase itself, comes from from Hamlet, (Act 4 scene 4) who is talking about Fortinbras when he says:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event
The Invisible Event 