** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 665 4 February 2016 MISTERIOUS MYSTERIES

ORDINARY INVESTIGATORS FAIL TO SOLVE SOME CRIMES. ONLY SUPERNATURAL DETECTIVES COULD HELP.
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In November 1974 Lord Lucan, a dissolute English aristocrat, vanished into thin air. His nanny was found beaten to death inside the Peer’s home in elegant Belgravia. His wife too had been wounded. Now at last a High Court judge has declared Lucan officially dead but the mystery endures…

Lucan was an inveterate gambler, a member of the Clermont Club in Mayfair. A gaming coterie including the Clermont’s larger-than-life owner, John Aspinall, and the financier Jimmy Goldsmith, Lucan’s close mates. Wild theories and fantasies concerning Lucan’s end have proliferated. Was he killed by the friends who sheltered him initially and then liquidated him after he became an embarrassment? Or did he commit suicide? Or does live on obscurely, a miserable old man, in Chicago, or Melbourne or Tel Aviv? God knows.

One meaning of ‘mystery’ is that of a fictional narrative dealing with an unsolved crime. But people also speak of the mystery of little Maddie McCann, who disappeared overnight in the Algarve nine years ago. Despite massive searches and investigations by the Portuguese and British police, and by other forces across Europe and the world…nothing. Innumerable trails have been pursued but to no effect:  Maddie has gone.

Of course, fiction is just that. Not true. But Lord Lucan and Maddie were not imaginary. Not the creations of a novelist but real human beings. Their fate is both part of the bloody annals of crime and a hidden, inexplicable matter. That is why no brilliant and non-existent detectives like Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Lord Dunsany, Lieutenant Columbo, Inspectors Barnaby, Morse and Wallander could not do a sausage about those harrowing but real, all too real cases.

However, the mysteries of such vanishings are contingent affairs. It is not impossible that evidence could turn up any moment dispelling the murk. As Sherlock Holmes reasons in The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plan ‘…when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ But how many improbabilities, how many possible truths are there? Could poor Maddie have been stolen by the fairies? Or, less implausibly, by lawless comprachicos like those mentioned in Victor Hugo’s The Laughing Man? Did Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence, spirit away Lord Lucan? Have a go!

Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia in his The Vanishing of Majorana describes the case of an atomic scientist who in 1938 went missing between Naples and Sicily and was never found. Was he a peace-loving man terrified about the lethal consequences of his research? Sciascia speculates that Majorana might have become a monk, a lowly hermit and maybe died obscurely as a wretched tramp. Another author, Pasolini, observed (before being mysteriously murdered himself) how the search for Majorana was a gripping mystery precisely because ‘the truth remains hidden’. The reason for the scientist’s occultation Sciascia never disclosed, whether true or not.

All cases in the realm of the contingent. But are there mysteries of a stranger, more metaphysical nature? Here is my personal example, both banal and brain-racking. When a fresh-faced student at London University Fr Frank (not yet ordained) after a lecture was invited to dinner, along with other students, by Professor Hamlyn and Dr Ian McFetridge. We were feasting away when Professor Hamlyn dropped a heavy spoon. The thud made by the utensil was quite audible. We all heard it. The professor looked under the table – nothing. Piqued, he looked again. We all did. Ian got down on all fours. No joy. Never mind how much we looked and searched under and near the table, the spoon had gone. What had happened to it? Slipped into another dimension? Or were we too tipsy or…what?

Human sleuths, flesh-and-blood ones, are fallible, the cases of Lord Lucan and little Maddie sadly indicate. They don’t always get their man. In the Chinese tradition, however, an investigator can solve the mystery by having recourse to supernatural help. Ghosts and other spiritual entities can be summoned to help the detective. Robert Van Gulick composed the entertaining mysteries of Judge Dee, a Chinese magistrate in medieval China, but disappointingly left out the occult characters of the original material he had studied as a sinologist. Because not congenial to a rationalist Western readership, he thought. What a pity…

I prefer the al-Azhar Islamic scholar who supposedly uses Jinns (beings made of fire documented in the Qur’an) to find the answer to all sorts of difficult, practical problems. And a certain Rabbi I met in Riga way back told me that the Kabbalah could be a guide to finding out the most hermetic puzzles. He also offered to teach me the way of the Kabbalah, how to play the stock market, too. Maybe he thought I was gullible? He was a nice guy, though. Without the beard, he looked like Woody Allen!

The dazzling cosmic system and beliefs set out in the Kabbalah are hardly Orthodox Judaism. But how could a priest object to the idea that the Holy Scriptures contain the key to all things, all mysteries, all secrets? A pious Muslim would similarly consider the Qur’an, whose prototype, the Mother of the Book, predates creation, is kept in Heaven and is worshipped by the angels - I am told.

Lord Lucan and Maddie and many other mysteries… Supernatural investigators are sorely wanted, methinks.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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