This is a frustrating book: it combines an enormous potential with an ultimate failure to face up to it. There are eight stories here about the Philo-Vance like dilettante Trevis Tarrant, who lives a life of luxury in Manhattan with a manservant who is a Japanese spy. His narrator is his friend and would-be brother-in-law Jerry Phelan.
Like Carr, King takes chances; sometimes these come off, as in the excellent stories "The Episode of the Vanishing Harp" and "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem". The first suffers only from a touch of Freudianism and a slight tendency to melodrama: the second is absolutely perfect and couldn't have been bettered. If Daly had been able to keep up this quality throughout he would deserve a place in the front rank of GAD writers.
But he couldn't, or chose not to, and so we have second-rate stories too -- "The Episode of the Codex' Curse" and "The Episode of the Man With Three Eyes" merely scrape by. "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" is entirely predictable and "The Episode of Torment IV" relies on one of those dreary Horrors Unknown to Science, but not, alas, to pulp fiction. "The Episode of the Headless Horrors" is grisly racist fare which casts the police as bumbling morons.
Did King realise he was setting up expectations he couldn't fulfil? It would explain the last story, "The Episode of the Final Bargain", which concludes a long-winded ramble about psychic phenomena with a chance for Tarrant to bow out more or less gracefully. It would explain the references in the text of this story and "The Man With Three Eyes" to other Tarrant stories which appear never to have seen the light of day. It would help to explain how the series combines first-rate tales of deduction with the kind of feeble-minded occultism we associate with Carnacki the Ghost Finder.
If King genuinely believed this claptrap then he needed psychiatric help himself -- not the first psychologist to do so by any means. If he didn't then he has short-changed his readers with patronising nonsense. Don't buy the book: but read the two first-rate stories if you can.
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