The Hand of Mary Constable by Paul Gallico

As mentioned previously, when I’ve written about Paul Gallico, he is an extremely versatile novelist. And, indeed, a prolific one. This is great – but does mean you never quite know what you’re going to get if, like me, you try not to read blurbs before you start a book. So, when I picked up The Hand of Mary Constable (1964), I didn’t have much to go on. The cover is just wording, and so my preconceptions of the book were based largely on connotations of the title – and I had assumed it was a ghost story. (I also didn’t realise that it was a sequel to Too Many Ghosts, which I own and have not read, but it turns out that the stories are pretty separate.) And I guess it sort of is, but mostly isn’t.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

The sheet of paper clutched in the hand of a backward twisting arm was being jiggled in front of the face of Alexander Hero, investigator for the Society of Psychical Research of Great Britain, and roused him from the doze into which he had fallen. The air in the B.O.A.C. jet airliner had that stale smell of narrow confines, too long occupied by human beings engaged in eating, drinking and sleeping.

I wonder quite why Gallico thought that a good name for his hero was Hero – it feels a bit like a stopgap name – but here he is. He is handsome, intelligent, and (importantly) simultaneously open to ideas of psychical research and keen to crack down on frauds. I liked that touch. Having a hardened cynic would have been less interesting than somebody who is chiefly motivated by the wish to rule out false options, to discover if psychical contact is possible.

Hero has been called over to America, from England, to investigate something – though he doesn’t know what. When he arrives, and talks to various people in the FBI, he learns that Professor Constable has been inducted into a circle of spiritualists who claim that they have contact with his deceased ten-year-old daughter. Mary Constable – for ’tis she, of the title – has apparently been speaking through the Bessmers, and has left (as proof) a wax cast of her hand. This cast even has her fingerprints on it. Is it genuine contact, or is it connected with a slightly confusing plot line about how Constable has influence over a nuclear deal with the Russians?

The Hand of Mary Constable could probably be considered a literary thriller, and there are certainly bits that pretty thrillery. There are even bits that have a James Bond seduction element to them. Those aren’t genres that I usually rush towards, but the mix of that with Gallico’s intriguingly quirky look at spiritualism made me really enjoy reading this book. He brings the sense of the darkly fantastic that made me love his novel Love of Seven Dolls, and is certainly good at creating scenarios that combine the strange and the pacy.

I shan’t spoil the ending, but it did get a little too drawn out with all explanations – the novel would have been unsatisfying without proper explanations, but I wish he’d found a subtler or more concise way to include it all – but I still think #ProjectNames is off to a good start, and I continue to find Gallico an intriguing and unusual writer.