Saddle up for some curious killings

”Doctor, I think I’m losing my mind,” Jacob Blunt tells Dr. George Matthews, a psychiatrist. Before long, Matthews seems to be losing his too. It’s a weird tale all right, and Bardin must have had some particularly unusual thoughts himself – if not actually losing his mind – and we readers too might begin to question things as we get stuck in. It’s out-there stuff, very readable but concentrate hard.

Strange as it all is, one has to read on. There is an irresistible lure, like wanting to touch an electric fence just to see if you really will get a shock. Or walk on ice to see if it will hold. (Both silly ideas and not recommended.) Mystery number one – what on earth is a percheron?

This reader had to reach for an encyclopaedia to find out, and the answer is a breed of draught horse that originated in the Huisne river valley in western France. True, the artwork on the front cover of this 2024 reissue from Penguin Random House does show the shape of a horse. But how many people really know what a percheron is?

And, oddest of all, Bardin’s murderer, who in true fashion is revealed at the very end, uses a couple of percherons as his deadly trademark, tying one to a lamp post a couple of times after committing his foul acts. Now really, this in Manhattan! And such a big, heavy animal. No wonder everyone is baffled in this story of murder, torture, amnesia, disfigurement, lost and found love, and general mayhem.

As Dr. Matthews says: ”It looks like whoever is behind these killings has plenty of money. Ten thousand dollars for a horse! And, as far as I can see, it plays no essential part in the murder!”

Detective Anderson replies: ”Criminals, especially murderers, are fond of the sensational. They frequently trip themselves up by adding a useless, but sensational, touch to their crimes. I hope it works out that way this time.”

His colleague, Detective Bill Sommers, concurs: ”Now I gotta theory about that horse. I think that horse is the most important clue we got… Only a guy with a sense of humour would think up a gag like that. The horses don’t serve any useful purpose that I can see. He just thought it would be cute to tie a big horse to a lamp post every time he killed somebody.”

To the reader, it wouldn’t seem to be too difficult for the cops to find out where percherons can be obtained, and who has done so recently. Bardin, though, has us balanced between something at least partly believable and something partly ludicrous. It can go either way.

Somerset Maugham also opined that the end of the story should be the natural consequence of the beginning, and whether Bardin thought similarly or not, well, we’re still trying to figure it out. In line with all that’s gone before, there’s an unexpected finale.

Wanting to find out more about this author who died in 1981, one opinion seen is that his novels were not the neatly plotted crime detection puzzles popular at the time, the 1940s. Instead, they were characterised by a concern with abnormal psychology. As Dr. Matthews observes about Blunt: ”I had never before met a neurotic who admitted wanting to lose his mind. Nor had I seen one who felt happy about it.”

Blunt’s concern is that he has met Joe, a leprechaun in a purple suit who gives him ten dollars a day to wear a flower in his hair; also Harry, a leprechaun in a green suit who gives him ten dollars a day to whistle at Carnegie Hall; and Eustace, a leprechaun in a tattersall waistcoat who gives him another ten dollars a day to hand out 20 quarters to people.

Matthews again: ”It’s not often you find a man as imaginatively insane as Jacob Blunt seemed to be.” And that’s just the beginning to set up the middle and end of this twisty tale.

John Franklin Bardin was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 30, 1916. During his teens he lost nearly all his immediate family to various ailments. As he approached 30 he moved to New York City where he became an executive of an advertising agency.

In 1946 Bardin entered what has  been described as a period of intense creativity during which he wrote three crime novels that were relatively unsuccessful at first. One of them was not even published in America until the late 1960s but they have since become well-regarded cult novels.

These three, ”The Deadly Percheron” (1946), ‘The Last of Philip Banter” (1947) and ”Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly” (1948), experienced renewed interest in the 1970s when they were discovered by British readers. They were reissued in 1976 by Penguin as a single-volume ”The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus” at the urging of these fans. Now ”The Deadly Percheron” is back with us again in Penguin’s Crime & Espionage reissues.

Overall Bardin published 10 novels, mostly in the detective-mystery genre, including ”The Burning Glass” (1950), ”A Shroud for Grandmama” (1951) and ”Christmas Comes but Once a Year” (1954). Some of his titles appeared under the pseudonyms Gregory Tree and Douglas Ashe.

When the omnibus was in preparation, the compiler apparently had difficulty tracking down information on Bardin. He was unable to find any American critic who had heard of him, and his original publishers and agents did not know how to contact him or even whether he was still alive.

Bardin taught creative writing as well as advertising at the New School for Social Research in New York City, before dying on July 9, 1981, age 64.

Isn’t it some sort of a tragedy when an author’s (or any artist’s) works are largely ignored at the time, then find posthumous recognition? This is at least some measure of compensation but, given a choice, every writer would opt for success in their lifetime, wouldn’t they? Sometimes we readers are too slow to catch on.