Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990) created The Casebook of Lucius Leffing in a spirit of another age. Which is fitting, since Leffing himself suffers from the same. These seventeen tales of detection smell of Baker Street but in an age of where even the hard-boiled shamuses of years past are having a hard time finding places to be published. The 1960s was dominated by paperbacks.
The Leffing series begins in Brennan’s own small press magazine, Macabre. the first three stories appeared there and have supernatural if not horrific elements. As the series moved into the Mystery digests hints of the supernatural becomes more frequent in a way that is familiar to fans of Edward D. Hoch’s Simon Ark.
The Casebook of Lucius Leffing was lightly illustrated by Neal MacDonald Jr., best known for his Edgar Rice Burroughs work.
The first story opens with Brennan looking to buy a house and becoming friends with the neighbor, the old-fashioned Lucius Leffing instead. When Leffing hears that Brennan is a writer of supernatural fiction he invites him to act as Watson on an occult detection case. The title “The Haunted Housewife” (Macabre, Winter 1962-63) refers to the woman of the house who feels uneasy in the basement. After looking into one of the men who built the house, the cement is pulled up to reveal the missing partner. A tale as old as Pliny the Younger, Brennan offers little new here but sets up his detective. The typical plot will have three parts, initial details of the case, one investigative scene and a reveal with Leffing doing most of the work offstage. The whole thing feels like a sketch of a Jules de Grandin story.
“Apparition in the Sun” (Macabre, Summer 1963) has the two men investigating a ghost that appears not at dark of night but in the bright afternoon sunshine. The reveal tells how a deformed child was kept in the tower, and liked to dance in the afternoon sun. Not being an evil spirit, exorcism is not an option.
In this story Leffing describes himself:
“Brennan, I was intended for a different century, another age. I am out of sympathy with the milieu; I am attuned to another time.” In this way JPB is using his idol H. P. Lovecraft as a model. HPL often made such claims. Later when the game is afoot, Leffing snaps out of his lethargy just as Sherlock Holmes does. Lucius Leffing is a combination of this real man and this fictional one. Also of interest is Brennan using himself as Watson.
With “In Death as in Life” (Macabre, Winter 1963-64) Brennan finally tells a Leffing story with all the expertise one would expect of a Weird Tales author. Leffing and Brennan investigate the Finchware House, where a dread-filling cloud of evil falls upon its victims. Mr. Finchware described how he saw a terrible shape cross the lawn toward the house. Only turning on the lights and the radio drove away the fear. Staying in the haunted bedroom, Brennan watches Leffing drive away the entity of terror. It finds a weaker victim in Mrs. Finchware. Leffing and Brennan rescue her from drowning in the nearby Mill Pond.
Leffing sends the Finchwares, their nephew and the single servant away. On their second try the thing materializes:
It had the form of the corpse of an old man which had lain for an extended period immersed in muddy water. Its blue-white face was horribly bloated, gouged and torn as by innumerable small teeth or claws. Its black lips were broken and putrescent. The shredded, soaked rags of a shapeless brown suit hung muddily about its puffy frame. A matted mass of raveled hair hung from its head.
The two men flee into the corridor, the squishy footsteps following. They have to leave the house altogether. They take refuge in a nearby hotel. After the encounter, Leffing and Brennan do some digging. Leffing uncovers a local antiquarian, Bennett Proby, who fills him in on the history of Finchware House. It was built by an evil man named Giles Moray after the Revolutionary War. The man seduced and murdered servants and slaves before supposedly dying in the nearby mill pond.
Leffing needs more ammunition so he brings in old friend, Father Muldeen, who performs an exorcism. That night when the specter comes across the lawn, it is driven back by an invisible force field. The ghost is driven away and never returns. Later the Finchwares drain and fill the Mill Pond, finding many bones from Moray’s victims, and possibly himself.
And then things change. “Although my friend, Lucius Leffing preferred to limit himself to those investigations which led him toward the sphere of the supernormal, of later years he frequently interested himself in mysteries of a purely mundane, albeit bizarre, character.” Reading between the lines, the author is now going to change this supernatural series into a mystery deal so he can get published. Which he did. So begins “The Strange Case of Peddler Phelps” (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, September 1965) in which Leffing solves a forty year old cold case. A horse and buggy and man all disappeared mysteriously. Leffing proves it was done by hiding the rig in a hay bin and covering it with fresh hay. The closest we get to a Horror story is rumors the farm is haunted. This story is quite short (under 2000 words) like the first two Leffing stories.
“Death Mask” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1965) is a non-supernatural shocker that I quite liked. Mrs. Mirrow, a widow of recent years hangs herself with a cracked Halloween mask on. Leffing unravels that many years earlier a spoiled little boy, Donald Glaven, disappeared. Leffing concocts a theory to explain the mask and the disappearance. He believes that Mrs. Mirrow killed the boy, probably after ringing her doorbell on Halloween too many times. She hid the body and tried to live with the guilt, having a great dislike of October. Her husband died three years previously while gardening. Leffing proposes he discovered something while transferring some roses, something that gave him his fatal heart attack. More guilt, Mrs. Mirrow finally killed herself, wearing the mask. When Brennan and the cops dig up the rose bed they find the skeleton of a boy.
“The Mantzen Diamond Mystery” (aka “Were You Searched?”) (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, October 1965) very mundane mystery about a missing diamond. And the rest follow pretty much in the same vein. The old ghost hunter has hung up his psychic powers for cops and robbers. And more regular Mystery stories follow:
“The Mystery of Myrrh Lane” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1965) about a portrait of Poe with a hidden copy of Poe’s first book and so on:
“Whirlwind of Blood” (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, April 1966)
“The Intangible Threat” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1966)
“The Ransacked Room” (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, September 1966)
“Death at Draleman’s Pond” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, January 1967)
“Death of a Derelict” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1967)
“The Walford Case” (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, May 1967)
“The Enemy Unknown” (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, January 1968)
“The Dismal Flats Murder” (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, November 1968)
“Fingers of Steel” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1970)
“The Case of the Uncut Corpse” (1973)
Brennan continued telling stories of his ascetic investigator in three more collections.
The Chronicles of Lucius Leffing (1977)
Act of Providence (1979) with Donald M. Grant
The Adventures of Lucius Leffing (1990)
In the end, The Casebook of Lucius Leffing only produced one good occult detective case, “In Death as in Life”. Unlike Manly Wade Wellman, Brennan wasn’t able to sell supernatural tales to Fantasy & Science Fiction with his Silver John stories. Though he may have revived him for the occult boom of the 1970s. The last two books might contain a return to the occult detective form. They were published by Donald M. Grant and are not reprints from the Mystery magazines.
Somehow, I missed the second one