For our second investigation, I chose The House of Memphis from the Mansions of Madness book. It isn’t the original 1990 Mansions of Madness book which was also awesome. Two of those mansions I played through back in the Oughts and really liked. Really good scenarios and interior character art by Janet Aulisio who was doing great work in the late 80s/early 90s: big fan.
The new MoM is of similar good quality (two of the scenarios are reprinted, although not my favourite one) and a LOT less tied to the titular Mansions. Scenarios That Also Involve Buildings would have been a fine name too.
Anyway, SPOILERZ.
The dreadful events in Providence could have spelled the end of the Society of the Friends of Abydos, but it ended up not doing that. Certainly most members were done with hanging out and nerding our about Egypt. But many continued; most out of a sense of shared trauma and the understanding of their fellow Society members. The first meeting that rolled around after the return from Providence was tentative, with people showing up just to check on everyone and say goodbye. But there were enough people that resolved to continue to society that some momentum was returned, by the spring of 1925 the membership had stabilized. It wasn’t growing as fast as before and it was never as convivial, but it was obviously still important to people. The interest of the group now skewed decidedly towards the mystical.
Gerald Frazer WAS done. His heart just wasn’t in it any longer. He had a treasury for future events at the “clubhouse” and he transferred control of that over to Bradford, who was congenitally equipped to handle large sums of money with a certain amount of sang-froid. The building they had been using belonged to the bank and there were no particular plans to move it on: instead Frazer hired Tom to take care of the facility in between meetings. The building was set up for hosting and had a catering kitchen and cloakrooms and the like. Tom made himself a humble living area, tucked away in the workings of the building.
Carlton Frazer remained active and would often meet up with Wilbur to discuss papers he was editing or letters he was writing, because (and I’ll type this in big letters because saying it doesn’t work) CARLTON IS A RENOWNED AMATEUR EGYPTOLOGIST. Likewise, Larry Crosswell, NEW ENGLAND FOLKLORIST would use the clubhouse as a place to work on his books. So they are there: a lot.
One day in the Spring of ’25, Tom received a telephone call, intended for the Society at large: would he be able to assemble some people with investigation skills at the law offices of Palmer and Pickering the following morning? Tom got on the blower and gave everyone the invitation so that, come next morning, they were all led into the prestigious law firm of P&P to meet with George Pickering.
Pickering had a job for them: his client, one Memphis the Great had gone missing. A few things: his real name, uttered once, was Axel Schwartz, and since he’d taken to the stage Pickering had been his legal rep. Also Memphis was wildly successful at home and abroad, playing for the crowned heads of Europe and Asia, and setting new high bars for stage magic in the US.
It wasn’t unusual for Memphis to be incommunicado for long periods of time, but he usually gave forewarning. Most importantly, in his apparent absence three burglars at his mansion had been brutally and somewhat implausibly murdered. And that was unusual. The police had wrapped up their investigation, but their inability to get hold of Memphis was troubling to his lawyer, who handled things in his absence.
Pickering introduced them to Caleb, the groundskeeper for Memphis’ mansion and the unfortunate soul who had discovered the burglars bodies. He gave his ghastly testimony, still obviously shaken up, before Pickering dismissed him. Pickering’s job for the investigators: get to the truth of what happened to the burglars and if possible, find Memphis.
In the meantime, to get an idea of the kind of stage magic Memphis performed and perhaps provide a lead to his daughter, Ingrid Schwartz, Pickering provided tickets to the show being performed tonight by Harold Hawkings, Memphis’ former apprentice and Ingrid Schwartz’s fiance. He also told gave them contact information for the police Inspector who had handled the investigation, as well as contact info for Memphis’s theatrical agent.
Shea had her own angle of inquiry though an word on the street was that the burglars were the Leary brothers, largely inoffensive and not particularly successful thieves and word was out that they’d been horribly done in, which was a puzzle because they hadn’t really run afoul of anyone capable of horrible doing-ins.
A quick and masterfully competent trip to the library got them clippings regarding the last time Memphis (and his glamourous assistant Josephine Lynch) went legitimately missing, which was during his 1919 trip to Bhutan.
They attended the Harold Hawkings performance that night at the Wilbur Theatre (above) and witnessed an on-stage accident that left Hawkings shaken. They met Ingrid Schwartz too, who came by to check on Harold. They were intrigued by the black boxes (painted black over a previous hieroglyph decoration) used in Hawkings penultimate illusion that had him seemingly travel across the stage instantaneously. But getting to actually see the boxes was tricky. And just about everyone has warned them about prying too closely into a magician’s secrets.
The next stop the following day was to Memphis’ house, a mansion in a quietly affluent suburb of Boston. Meeting Caleb, he handed off the key but was not keen to go in with them.
The house was designed strangely, but actually not strangely strangely. It is a built in a style called the Shingle Style and I don’t have the architectural lexicon to describe it, but both Kragsyde (below, a famous real life example of Shingle Style) and the Memphis house have in common the incorporation of various different shapes into a coherent, imposing form.
The Memphis house included a wide circular tower as one of it’s corners, an internal circular tower, three verandas, and a two storey theatre.
We got a little distracted by talking about theatrical posters for stage magicians in the 1920s and how dope they were. I mean… look at this!
One of the posters seemed to launch itself at Tom as he passed while Wilbur went all woozy looking at some of the hieroglyphs painted into a stelae in the background of another. Leon saw a shadowy figure roam the house, a bust of Nefertiti (a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm no less) seemed to give the googly eyes and Bradford opened a guest bedroom that blasted him with a few seconds of scorching desert air.
Nevertheless, they did discover some things. They found a key (to something) as well as Memphis’ travel diary which had taken on all his globe trotting excursions, and a notebook with a gold egyptian symbol embossed on it. Shea and Terrance also found the prop storage room where the Learys had met their bizarre ends. The investigation is now over so the prop swords which pinned one Leary to the wall where in a bag, the rope that had hanged another Leary was labelled and coiled neatly and the Hand-Guillotine that had chopped the feet and hands of the other Leary was just sitting there… practically inviting someone to stick their hand in it.
About this time Ingrid Schwartz pulled the bell at the front door of her childhood home. The investigators left their search of the house and went to get some lunch with Ingrid.
Ingrid was primarily worried about Harold and the pressure he was putting himself under. They had noticed his brief spells of disorientation during and after his stage act and Ingrid was concerned about those too. She laid out her side of things: happy upbringing following her father around, growing distance after he took up with Josephine Lynch, final gulf between them when he returned from Bhutan and started treating Harold poorly. She hadn’t been to the home in a long while.
Wilbur and Terrance spend that evening trying to get a lead on these obscure hieroglyphs he had seen on the poster that had such an effect on them. That went okay… they know that the phrase means “Beyond the gate there is no peace” and is written with some early hieroglyphs that have special meanings or connotations. They also thought it may have been a title or a name, despite not being in a cartouche.
Meanwhile everyone else went to get shaken down for cash at The Clamp, the speakeasy/Boss den for Orson Vaughn, local crime boss. Vaughn thought… not much of the Learys, but they did pay him tribute and played by the rules. As for the official story of them killing each other? Absolutely not. They weren’t violent and got on like three idiotic peas in a pod. Their murder ruffled feathers and Vaughn doesn’t like not knowing why someone is criming on his patch or who that someone is… so if they’d tell him what they’d find they’d be in his good books.
Oh and Josephine Lynch was there too. No sign of the Egyptian blue Cadillac V63 that Lynch had been driving around town while Memphis was missing either, but she flirted with and then dismissed Tom. Scary lady. Anyway, after downing LAX-levels of overpriced bad gin, they split.
The group… regrouped and went to Nelson’s restaurant, which was renowned for hosting local magicians for trade talk on Friday and Saturday nights. Breaking into that group was pretty difficult though as they weren’t about to talk trade secrets with a bunch of Howdys there. They were able to talk to the affable Max Marvelo though who confirmed that Memphis changed a lot after his return from Bhutan. He was way more of a dick, especially to Harold, but his illusions got more and more daring: and more difficult to figure out. Max boasted that it usually only took him two viewings to figure out how an illusion was performed, (Hawkings “Instant travel” was almost certainly a double, he thought) but that it took him longer to figure out how Memphis did his newer tricks and some – like a trick where he appeared to materialize at four locations around the theatre – he had never figured out.
They researched the travel diary which gave them some insight into the Bhutan detour and they have a few more untouched leads to follow up on yet: “Philips” is someone who advised/informed Memphis in his post-Bhutan research, Boston’s magic hub The Ace Emporium, and Insp. Robinson at the Police Department, as well as returning to any previous leads.
