"Drug victim's ghost warns pop star at London commune seance" begins the blurb. Says it all, really. ( )

Extremely entertaining near spoof of the classic detective novels of John Dickson Carr. Very funny but never at the expense of the central mystery of the plot.

Thackeray Phin, a transplanted American in London, has dabbled in amateur sleuthing but is weary of the tiresome ordinary crimes that plague contemporary society. In order to alleviate his boredom and tide him over until a truly perplexing crime comes his way he places an ad in the newspaper hiring himself our as an occult investigator. His friend Beeker, a sometime con man, informs Phin of a spiritualist commune calling itself the Aetheric Mandala Society and challenges him to expose the members as frauds. Phin inveigles his way into the group and immediately becomes involved in a series of gruesome deaths and mysterious disappearances. Is there a devilish murderer among the spiritualists? Magic, medium debunking, drug use, a touch of Egyptology all mix together in this madcap romp in which three (possibly four) separate impossible crimes are solved and a diabolical killer is unmasked.

Reminiscent of the best of Carr, Crispin and Robert L. Fish’s Schlock Holmes pun-laden parodies. ( )