The Tangled Miracle by Bertram Brooker

Fiction
Author: Bertram Brooker, A.K.A. Huxley Herne
Softcover, 272 pages, 8 x 5 inches
Invisible Publishing, 2021

Originally published in 1936, this edition features a new introduction by poet and academic Gregory Betts.

A first-rate thriller from one of Canada’s pioneer abstract painters.

A cult leader announces a miracle will take place and she will rise to heaven. A medium prophesies the date, publicity gets to work, and all of America hums with anticipation. On the appointed day, she disappears and scientist Mortimer Hood, there to verify the miracle, must investigate how—and whether—the whole thing is a hoax, or if the priestess has been murdered.

Bertram Brooker (1888–1955) was one of Canada’s first abstract painters. A self-taught polymath, in addition to being a visual artist, Brooker was a Governor General’s Award–winning novelist, as well as a poet, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, copywriter, graphic designer, and advertising executive.

From the original dust jacket: Here is that rarity, a detective novel with an original setting. A miracle is expected at Port Fletcher, Connecticut. Mrs. Agatha Weir, priestess of a strange new cult of “Assumptionism,” is to be some day recieved up into heaven as were Enoch and Elijah; and her bedroom in the temple has been specially constructed for such an eventuality. A medium prophesies the date, publicity gets to work, and all America hums with anticipation. The lady disappears. Mortimer Hood, the scientist who was called in to vouch for the miracle, finds himself with a very pretty problem to investigate. The priestess has indubitably disappeared. But how? Had her disciples faked the miracle? If so, why? Why was there a stain of egg nog on the bedspread? And why was Mrs. Weir’s old mother so sure she was dead? This is a first-rate and most thrilling thriller.