Philately - The Fiction Connection
The Mystery Box book is the proud winner of a Silver Medal awarded by the Chicago Philatelic Society CHICAGOPEX Literature Exhibit
Read the Book Review by Barbara Kinne of the APS American Philatelist
We travel back to 18th century Japan and the richly ceremonial world of Sumo wrestling. It seems that the reigning yokozuna, or champion, has keeled over at the dinner table, following a triumphant tournament. Called in to investigate the matter, Judge Nara of the Sumo Wrestling Board quickly decides that Sobosama ate himself to death, but not from gourmandizing—rather from consuming a filet of smoked salmon laced with poison.
Suspicion naturally falls on the ozeki, or contender, a wrestler named Nishi. The other sumotori in the stable are quick to denounce him. Nishi was envious of Sobosama’s glory, they claim. It was Nishi who poisoned the champion. Everyone knew Sobosama couldn’t resist this delicacy. Nishi took advantage of the yokazuna’s weakness and decided to do away with a rival he couldn’t defeat in the ring. Judge Nara, however, is not so sure . . . .
The setting for this mystery as well as clues to the solution of the crime are inspired by a set of Japanese postage stamps, issued in 1978, which celebrate the ancient and honored sport of sumo. Drawn from famous Ukioyo-e or “Floating World” prints of the 18th and 19th centuries, the stamps evoke, with droll characterization, a bygone era and provide the illustrations for a Mystery Box tale entitled Smoked Fish.
What can fiction writing, and mystery writing in particular, have to do with the study of postage stamps? I have been exploring that connection since 1997 in a mystery series featured each month in Global Stamp News and in a the short story collection, published by Ana Libri Press, called The Mystery Box. The guiding idea behind the book and series has been to blend the unique characteristic of the mystery tale with the rich suggestiveness of stamp imagery and the lore of history.
The appearance of postage stamps in mystery fiction is nothing new. Stamps, as plot elements, have played important roles in novels such as Ngaio Marsh's Grave Mistake and Robert Graves' The Antigua Stamp. The Mystery Box stories add a different dimension, however, in that they draw their inspiration from the evocative imagery of the stamp itself. For my writing purposes, it is the stamp that holds the story.
History, fiction writing, and stamp collecting are subjects close to my heart and their roots go right back into my childhood. An elderly aunt shared a passion for breeding prize Boston Terriers and collecting classic American postage stamps. She introduced me to stamp collecting and I am grateful that her love of stamps was tied to her interest in American history. Years later, when I began to write full-time, the connections between history, stamp collecting, and mystery writing took hold of me.
Stamp collectors are, after all, detectives. The whole process of identifying stamp elements such as perforation, watermarks, and shades of color involves the same skills we associate with Miss Marple and Ellery Queen. The symbolism displayed on stamps is a key part of the mystery too, for beneath that symbolism is a history, a history of the country that issued the stamp, and the stamp's purpose and subject. On top of that, the postage stamp has a personal history, reflected by its postmark and its relation to the message it carries. What the postage stamp has, almost unique to any type of collectible, is layers and levels of meaning to explore.
If the idea of mixing philately with the mystery strikes the reader as too curious, it’s worth considering that the mystery itself is a fusion of forms. In her introductory essay to The Omnibus of Crime, an anthology published in 1929, Dorothy L. Sayers reflects on the state of the mystery during its First Golden Age. She traces its modern incarnation to Edgar Allan Poe’s recipe of mixing “pure horror” with “pure detection.” The reader is provided with a blood-curdling crime and then is offered the means to detect the perpetrator. Miss Sayers includes in this broad definition the “natural and supernatural, the explained and unexplained.” Because of this appeal, she points out, the mystery also owes a good deal to the horrific folktale and the adventure story.
From its first flowering at the end of the 19th century, the mystery has had a protean nature and, like the shape-shifter of Greek mythology, has drawn upon many forms of story telling for its inspiration. The fact that the genre has been broad enough to accommodate innovation has not only been good for the genre, but necessary. Miss Sayers notes in her essay that the mystery reader is always in search of the New—and that does not mean, as some may think, with ever-increasing levels of bloody violence and grisly homicide. Rather it often means the method of delivery in the tale—as the growing popularity of interactive computer mystery games suggests. Interactivity, by the way, is one of the hallmarks of the mystery, for, as Miss Sayers points out in her essay, the modern reader wants to participate in the puzzle the writer has composed for his amusement.
My
use of postage stamps as a graphic element in The Mystery Box
stories extends the concept of providing clues to the crime, not so much by
weaving philatelic details into the story, but more often by using the power
of the stamp’s symbolism to evoke a setting, a character, or a theme. In one
Mystery Box story, the Lundy Island stamp pictured here, with
its enigmatic puffin, actually provides the map of the terrain a British
detective must follow to track down the murderer of
The Fallen Vicar (see the stamps and
read the entire story). An Egyptian stamp—issued to celebrate an
optahalmological conference in 1937! - displays the mysterious udjat,
or eye of Horus, employed to set the mood for dynastic skullduggery in an
ancient tomb for a tale entitled The
Scorpion’s Sting (image of stamp).
These stories, as do many others in the Mystery Box book and series, draw upon historical backgrounds and themes the postage stamps readily suggest. Since the stories appear in a philatelic publication that reaches forty thousand readers a month, I also provide a non-fiction commentary following each story. The commentary tells the story of the stamps that inspired the fiction. In the case of Smoked Fish, the sumo tradition is explored as well as the period Japanese prints that provided the images for the stamps.
To return to the scene of our crime, you will no doubt be relieved to know that Judge Nara did get to the bottom of the of the sumo hall mayhem. It seems that the other sumotori did protest too much, and all too envious of both the yokozuna and ozeki, cast suspicion upon themselves. The Judge’s conclusion is confirmed by one of the stamps that illustrates the story—and one that hints at a deadly conspiracy.
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by Frederick Highland On the west coast of North Borneo, there was once a kingdom of vast jungles and great meandering rivers, and gold, and mysterious sea-going tribes, and pirates, and it all belonged to one Englishman. read more |
