Out of His Head: A Romance was written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Though little read today, Aldrich (1836-1907) was a prolific, successful, and critically-respected poet, novelist, and magazine editor who influenced both children’s fiction (with his 1868 The Story of a Bad Boy, which established the “naughty boy” subgenre of American children’s literature) and realist fiction.

Paul Lynde is only a minor character in Out of His Head, and his portion of the novel consists only of Chapters 11 to 14, but those four chapters are a complete, contained detective novelette. Lynde narrates the four chapters. Mary Ware, a celebrated danseuse, lives opposite Lynde’s apartment. Lynde and Ware have had unpleasant dealings in the past, and Lynde carefully watches Ware. Ware has two lovers. One, a naval Lieutenant, is “commonplace enough—well-made, well-dressed, shallow, flaccid.”¹ The other, Julius Kenneth, is a tall, strong man: “every line of his countenance denoted character; a certain capability, I mean, but whether for good or evil was not so plain.”² Mary Ware eventually chooses Kenneth, and they become engaged, although she is rumored to still wear the Lieutenant’s roses. One rainy November morning Lynde is awoken with the news that someone has killed Mary Ware. He goes to her apartment. Already inside it are the coroner, some policeman, and Julius Kenneth, who holds Ware’s dead hand and kisses it. The crime is a strange one, for the door to the room was locked from the inside, and the windows are too far from the ground for anyone to jump into the room. The relevant parties all give their alibis and accounts, and it is clear that no one was seen entering or leaving the building.

Lynde volunteers himself to the police as the killer. His arrest causes a sensation. He refuses to tell anyone why he killed her or how, but he sends Kenneth a note and tells Kenneth the circumstances of Ware’s murder. Lynde reconstructs it precisely: the murderer already had access to Ware’s key and hid inside the room until she returned, then chloroformed her with a glove, threw the chloroform and the glove in the stove, and then got on to the water-spout of the adjacent building and shimmied down. Kenneth is furious, as he was the one who killed Ware and he wants to know how Lynde found him out. Lynde says that he observed the clues, which Kenneth wasn’t quite clever enough to dispose of properly. Lynde says he has no reason to betray Kenneth:

I believe there are vast, intense sensations from which we are excluded, by the conventional fear of a certain kind of death. Now, this pleasure, this ecstasy, this something, I don’t know what, which I have striven for all my days, is known only to a privileged few—innocent men, who, through some oversight of the law, are hanged by the neck! How rich is Nature in compensations! Some men are born to be hung, some have hanging thrust upon them, and some (as I hope to do) achieve hanging. It appears ages since I commenced watching for an opportunity like this. Worlds could not tempt me to divulge your guilt, nor could worlds have tempted me to commit your crime, for a man’s conscience should be at ease to enjoy, to the utmost, this delicious death!³

But it was Lynde who sent Kenneth a note, a month before the murder, telling Kenneth to watch Ware, since she was continuing to see the naval Lieutenant. Unfortunately for Lynde, “two officious friends of mine, who had played chess with me, at my lodgings, on the night of the 3rd, proved an alibi.”⁴ Lynde concludes by stating his resentment at being called a monomaniac.

The Paul Lynde chapters of Out of His Head are an interesting oddity. Despite its debt to Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries)—the obvious inspiration for Lynde’s story, which was the first major locked room murder mystery since Poe—the story has enough other elements to make itself memorable. The prose is dated at times, but there are several amusing lines, and overall the story has a pleasing irony to it. Aldrich nicely captures the tone of the monomaniac, so that he is rational and articulate until his pet subject is touched upon, at which time his mania and instability becomes clear. Lynde is beyond eccentric and into disturbed, the first insane detective in American fiction, but he is neither stupid nor deluded, and his reconstruction of Ware’s murder is a clever piece of detecting.

The Lynde story is one of the earliest to make use of newspaper reports to provide the reader with evidence, witness accounts, and depositions. Anna Katherine Green (see: The Amelia Butterworth Mysteries, The Leavenworth Case) would expand on this, but not for several years. The Lynde story is also one of the first mysteries in which a victim is knocked out by chloroform. Lynde himself is an interesting example of the mid-century American detective (see: Detectives). In 1862 there was no single mystery novel which exercised the influence over American writers which Dickens’ Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White had over English novels. Edgar Allan Poe was still influential on American writers, but most American mysteries were in short story form, and by the early 1860s it was the casebook writers rather than Poe who were the most dominant influence on American mystery writers, despite the large number of detective stories appearing in American magazines and newspapers.⁵ Detectives in American mysteries in the 1860s were professionals, not amateurs (see: “Mr. Furbush”), and those who were amateurs were not true amateurs but rather gentlemen of special abilities who solved crime while performing other jobs (see: “In a Cellar”). Lynde is as much influenced by the Chevalier Dupin as the Lynde chapters are influenced by “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” but by stripping Lynde of Dupin’s Gothic gloom and making Lynde into a modern gentleman of leisure, Aldrich anticipates the type of amateur detective which would become common following Sherlock Holmes’ debut (See: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries).

Lynde is a haunted, doomed man, similar in temperament to Poe’s Dupin. Like Dupin he is observant and clever, although Lynde lacks Dupin’s scorn for the police. But where Dupin is a night-owl and hermit, Lynde is obsessed with experiencing death. Dupin’s Gothic angst is as much a pose as it is his mental condition. Lynde’s insanity is a mental illness.

Print: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Out of His Head: A Romance. Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010.

¹ Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Out of His Head: A Romance (New York: Carlton, 1862), 87.

² Aldrich, Out of His Head, 88.

³ Aldrich, Out of His Head, 111.

⁴ Aldrich, Out of His Head, 112.

⁵ The Westminster Detective Library (https://wdl.mcdaniel.edu/), a formidable attempt at cataloging “all the short fiction dealing with detectives and detection published in the United States before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891),” lists 156 detective stories as being published from 1857-1862—a number that will continue to grow as the researchers behind the Library discover further detective stories in the press of the era.