M. Scott Michel's The Black Key

The Black Key is an obscure 1946 murder mystery which belongs to a bizarre but fascinating sub-genre - the psychiatric murder mystery.

M. Scott Michel (1916-1992) was an American playwright and crime writer. He wrote a handful of mysteries in the late 40s and early 50s. Intriguingly Michel seems to have written at least one other psychiatric mystery.

Alex Cornell is a prominent psychoanalyst who has a disturbing patient show up on his doorstep. A pretty young blonde Englishwoman has no idea of her own name or where she comes from, she has no memory of anything, but she fears she has murdered a woman. She doesn’t remember doing so but she does remember the woman’s murdered body at her feet. Alex is dubious until he sees the body for himself.

Obviously he should turn the young woman over to the police but he doesn’t. He is fascinated by her. He is also fascinated by the opportunity to play amateur detective and to solve the murder by means of psychoanalysis.

He discovers that the girl’s name is Serena. The murdered woman was Marion. Marion was a live-in nurse employed by a rich old guy named Dudley Briggs. The Briggs household also includes Dudley’s niece Pauline, his nephew Richard and Pauline’s friend Serena.

Dudley had intended to marry Marion, which would have put the inheritances of Pauline and Richard in doubt. Richard is an idle drunk who hopes for a political carer. Pauline is a doctor and she has lots of secrets. For starters there’s the mysterious deaths of her parents many years earlier. Her father may have been a madman and it may have been a murder-suicide. There’s also something involving Pauline that happened years ago in London.

There’s another doctor involved with this household. There’s Richard’s fiancée Edna and Edna’s father. There’s also Roff. We don’t know where he fits in. Perhaps he’s Pauline’s lover. And there’s the Cockney blackmailer. 

All of these people seem to have motives for murder. Perhaps Serena had a motive as well. The second murder makes things even more puzzling.

Alex is frantically analysing Serena’s dreams. He is sure they will provide the answers. This is not just a psychiatric mystery, it’s a Freudian psychiatric mystery. We get lots of wacky psychobabble and Freudian psychobabble is even more fun than the regular kind. Alex is excited to find all kinds of symbols in Serena’s dreams. Flowers, coffins, clouds, mysterious bearded men, men with thick glasses, a sinister ugly man. And most of all, the black key. Alex is in Seventh Heaven. He comes up with all kinds of delightfully loopy explanations for these symbols.

Alex does a bit of regular amateur detective stuff as well, with mixed success.

Of course Alex and Serena start to fall in love, so we get even more musing psychobabble about transference.

Of course it is impossible today to take any of this seriously, it all just seems so silly and wacky, but in 1946 people took psychoanalysis very seriously indeed. And it was a very big thing in the arts and entertainment.

I simply adore 1940s mystery novels and movies dealing with psychiatry, like Hitchcock’s 
Spellbound (1945) and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool (1949).

The Black Key is totally off-the-wall and I won’t pretend that the plot is even slightly believable. The dream clues are just crazy and ludicrously contrived. But if you don’t mind that it doesn’t make sense it is entertaining and it’s highly recommended if only for its oddness.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Robert Moore Williams’ Somebody Wants You Dead in a two-novel paperback edition.