John Dickson Carr’s The Four False Weapons

The Four False Weapons, punished in 1937, was the last of John Dickson Carr’s mysteries to features French detective Henri Bencolin.

The legendary violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini was such an extraordinary virtuoso that there were even rumours that he must have had supernatural aid. He would deliberately break strings during a performance just to make things more difficult for himself and then triumphantly finish the performance anyway. To me The Four False Weapons seems like Carr in Paganini mode. He has created a plot with so many bizarre complications the it can’t possibly work but he’s determined to make it work anyway. And he succeeds.

Richard Curtis, the junior partner in a film of London solicitors, is despatched to Paris to sort out some unspecified problems that one of their clients, a Mr Ralph Douglas, is having. It turns out that the problem is his relationship with a notorious courtesan, Rose Klonec. Or rather his problem is that he is about to marry a charming girl, a Miss Magda Toller, and his now-ended relationship with Rose Klonec is causing difficulties.

Soon after arriving in France Curtis accompanies Ralph to the love nasty he had set up for Rose, where they discover Rose’s body. There’s not the slightest doubt that she was murdered. There’s a great deal of doubt as to how she was murdered. Sometimes the discovery of the murder weapon helps to clarify things but in this case it doesn’t help at all. There are way too many murder weapons. And all of them seem somehow wrong. Other things about the murder scene are decidedly odd. It’s just as well that the legendary detective Henri Bencolin arrives on the scene at this point. Bencolin has retired but he is eager enough to take on this case and does so in a semi-official capacity. Even the Sûreté is willing to admit that Bencolin’s assistance would be invaluable.

There are not only too many clues, there is one vital clue that must be there but it cannot be found. Then there are the alibis. Everybody not only has an alibi, the alibis are absolutely cast-iron.

Bencolin gets some unwanted help from a journalist-criminologist, Auguste Dupin (one of several detective fiction-jokes in this book), whose theories are fantastic but perhaps contain some genuine insights. With the introduction of Dupin it is obvious that Carr is playing with us in a good-natured way. Carr took detective fiction seriously but he also saw no reason why it couldn’t be fun.

The highlight of the story is the game of Basset organised by Bencolin. Basset was a card game (a real one) that enjoyed a vogue during the 17th century. It was a game in which immense fortunes could be won or lost. Many noblemen were ruined by it until it was banned by Louis XIV. In 1937 it was a game that had never been played by any living person, in fact had not been played in France for two-and-a-half centuries but Bencolin has his reasons for reviving this ancient game. The result is one of the great gambling scenes in detective fiction. Will anyone dare to go soissante-et-le-va, with a massive fortune to be won or lost on the turn of a single card? I personally detest gambling but I love gambling scenes in fiction.

The ending is another virtuoso performance by Carr, with twist after twist succeeding each other in dazzling fashion.

Is this a fair-play mystery? On the whole yes, although there are a couple of important clues that rely on specialised knowledge that the leader is unlikely to possess. And is the eventual solution satisfactory? Perhaps, although psychologically it does stretch credibility a little.

So we get a fiendishly complex plot but we also get a great deal of amusement along the way. Very enjoyable and highly recommended.

John Dickson Carr’s The Burning Court

John Dickson Carr’s The Burning Court was published in 1937 and it starts off in a very gothic fashion. A man named Edward Stevens works in the editorial department of a fairly prestigious publishing house. He takes the train to his cottage at Crispen, not far from Philadelphia. He intends to occupy his time on the train reading a manuscript. The manuscript is by an author who specialises in accounts of forgotten but fascinating murder trials. Stevens has a shock in store for him. The manuscript includes a photograph of murderess Marie d’Aubray who was guillotined in 1861. But Marie d’Aubray is his wife’s name, and the woman in the photograph doesn’t just resemble his wife. She is his wife. There can be no doubt of it. Except that this woman was executed in 1861 and his wife is alive and well in 1929 (when the novel takes place).

Carr had a real affinity for the gothic and he lays it on good and thick in this tale. He gives us ghostly apparitions, a woman who walks through walls, body-snatching, ancient hereditary evils and gruesome scenes in crypts. We never really believe there’s anything supernatural going on (Carr at this stage of his career was not going to transgress such a crucial convention of the genre) but it does succeed in giving us the feeling that something sinister is definitely going on. There might not be any ghosts but there’s certainly been dirty work at the cross-roads.

Stevens’ cottage is not far from the estate of the Despard family. Old Miles Despard (who was actually only middle-aged has recently died) and his considerable fortune will go to his younger brother’s three children Mark, Edith and Ogden. Stevens and Mark Despard are on very friendly terms so Stevens agrees to a very curious request from Mark - to join him in a spot of grave-robbing. All in a good cause.

There is some question mark over the death of Miles. The cup that is known to have contained arsenic is a definite worry. The lady who was seen to visit Miles and then left his room through a non-existent door is also a slight cause for concern.

The fortune left by Miles provides obvious motives. There are however some very strong links to celebrated cases of poisoning that occurred in the past, one in the nineteenth century and one in the seventeenth (incidentally the burning court of the title is a seventeenth-century tribunal that meted out justice to poisoners). Those poisonings seemed to have been motivated by something much more evil than mere hope of monetary gain.

This is John Dickson Carr so of course you’re expecting a locked-room puzzle. Actually you get two impossible crimes, or at least two criminal situations containing impossibilities, including a locked-crypt puzzle!

This is not just a detective story with gothic trappings. While it is a detective story it is also a true gothic novel, with the gothic elements fully integrated into the story and handled with skill and also surprising subtlety. It’s unusual for 1930s Carr in having an American setting. This was an interesting and obviously deliberate choice on his part - he’s giving us a story of murder and evil with roots going back several centuries and with references to seventeenth century books on witchcraft so it would have been an obvious move to set in a decaying castle in England or central Europe but Carr sets it in a decaying seventeenth century mansion in Philadelphia, which gives us a wonderful collision of the gothic and the modern.

Carr delivers some bravura plotting in this novel. So many clues, and so many of them so ambiguous, so much misdirection. This is a novel that does not rely on the impossible crime problem. That’s just another element in a fantastically intricate plot with alibis being set up and then exploded with abandon.

We also get a very unusual detective although you won’t know that until quite late.

And then there’s the ending, and I am most definitely not going to offer even the slightest hints as to its nature. This is an ending that you most emphatically do not want to have spoiled. All I will say is that it’s not only the most controversial ending Carr ever wrote it’s possibly the most controversial ending in golden age crime fiction.

I still haven’t quite decided how I feel about the ending but there’s no question that The Burning Court is an unusual and fascinating novel filled to bursting point with staggering amounts of brilliance. Even if you decide you hate it you won’t forget it.

Once you’ve read the book you might want to check out JJ’s review at The Invisible Event. There’s  a lively discussion of that ending in the comments section. But read the book first!

John Dickson Carr’s The Three Coffins (AKA The Hollow Man)

John Dickson Carr’s The Three Coffins (also published as The Hollow Man) is a 1935 Dr Gideon Fell mystery and it is of course a locked-room mystery. And a very celebrated one.

Carr was rather unusual among golden age crime writers in combining a love for the rigorous plotting and implacable logic of the detective story with an equally intense love for the more outré elements of gothic fiction. The remarkable thing about Carr is that he consistently managed to combine these two somewhat contradictory elements so successfully.

The Three Coffins begins in classic gothic style. Professor Grimaud has devoted his life to the study of the occult but he is a very convinced skeptic on the subject. A rather strange individual accosts him at his favourite tavern. This man, Fley, makes some extraordinary claims, claims which appear to be most definitely of an occult or at least a paranormal nature. The claims also sound decidedly like threats.

Then we switch to the classic locked-room genre, Grimaud is murdered. The murderer could only have left the room in which the slaying took place by one of two exits. A quick glance at the window makes it clear that he could not possibly have left by this means. Therefore he must have left by the door but the door was found locked from the inside and was for the whole time during which the murder took place under direct observation by two independent witnesses. Therefore he did not leave by the door either. All this is bad enough but there’s also the matter of the footprints which must be there but they aren’t.

The second murder is even more impossible. A man is shot at close range in the middle of a public street in front of three witnesses but no-one sees the murderer.

Meanwhile the gothic atmosphere keeps creeping back in, with hints of dark deeds in Transylvania (!) and freshly dug graves.

There are magicians, acrobats, amateur criminologists, dusty scholars and mathematical whizz-kids and there are mysterious females with shady backgrounds and any one of them could be the murderer.

This book contain’s Dr Fell’s famous locked-room lecture. Dr Fell justifies this lecture by reminding the other characters that they are after all characters in a detective story so why shouldn’t they discuss the mechanics of detective fiction?

In fact the whole book can be thought of as a detective story about detective stories. There’s a good deal about stage magic in it and a locked-room or impossible crime mystery is after all essentially an exercise in stage magic. The writer is an illusionist, practising the various facets of the craft of illusionism (such as misdirection). Carr is in a sense letting us in on some of the secrets of the trade. It’s a measure of just how confident he’d become by this time - he felt sure he could tell us how his tricks were done and that he could still deceive us.

Magic really is a major theme here, with Grimaud being the expert in real magic (which doesn’t exist) and Fley being the expert in fake magic (which does exist). Illusionism crops up in countless golden age mysteries but I can’t recall any other examples of the theme being explored with the same mixture of intelligence, perceptiveness and playfulness that Carr brings to the subject.

One of the points made in Fell’s lecture is that readers are often disappointed when a really intriguing locked-room mystery turns out to have a simple explanation. There’s no need to worry about that in the case of The Three Coffins - the solution is fiendishly complex. But does it actually work? It was certainly a gamble on Carr’s part - one false step and the whole edifice of the plot would have come crashing down around his ears. I think he gets away with it, although it’s a close-run thing. Which in some ways makes the book even more impressive, since Carr was challenging himself as well as the reader. You get the feeling that Carr loved writing puzzle-plot detective fiction not because it was easy (as so many foolish critics then and now seem to think) but because it was something that was exceptionally difficult to do well.

The Three Coffins is breathtakingly ambitious and it’s also hugely enjoyable. Highly recommended.

Carter Dickson's Skeleton in the Clock

Skeleton in the Clock was one of the crime novels written by John Dickson Carr under the name Carter Dickson. Carr’s specialty was of course the locked room mystery, and while this one doesn’t quite have a locked room, it does have an apparently impossible murder with most of the features of a classic locked room mystery.

Skeleton in the Clock features the formidable blustering and at times frankly terrifying Sir Henry Merrivale (known as H.M.), distinguished barrister and amateur detective.

The book opens with a strange mixture of the gothic and the farcical, with ghost-hunting and with H.M. pursuing Lady Brayle (a formidable figure in her own right) with a 17th century halberd.

Carr loved introducing gothic elements into his mysteries and he had the knack of doing so without the spooky stuff being a mere distraction. Ghosts are the subject of conversation between young Captain Martin Drake, his friend Ruth and middle-aged barrister John Stannard. Stannard makes a suggestion. If ghosts are earthbound spirits and if they’re earthbound because of some traumatic event surrounding their death then there’s one place where you’d be just about certain to find ghosts - the execution shed of a prison. And as luck would have it there’s an old abandoned prison not very far away, and it just so happens that Stannard has obtained the key. He suggests that he and Drake should spend the night there.

Martin Drake accepts the suggestion but he has other things on his mind. Or rather he has one thing on his mind - Jenny. He met Jenny briefly during the war, they fell in love and then he lost her. Literally lost her - they became separated on a railway platform and he has spent three years searching for her.

There’s a third plot element - the mysterious death twenty years earlier of Sir George Fleet. His death could only have been an accident. No other explanation is possible. Murder is certainly an absolute impossibility. Nonetheless H.M. is quite certain it was murder.

With the aid of a few coincidences these three plot strands all come together very satisfactorily.

You expect incredibly complicated plotting and an ingenious but outlandish solution to the crime from this author, and that’s what you get. The plot includes a murder twenty years in the past, another murder twenty years in the past that may or may not be connected with the first, a wartime love affair that ends with the lovers separated on a crowded train station and thinking they’ll never meet again, a strange romantic triangle, a mirror maze, a possibly haunted prison, fencing, 17th century poets, and an actual clock containing an actual skeleton. 

The impossible crime itself does not disappoint. Sir George Fleet fell off the roof of Fleet House. The flat roof was often used for various leisure activities and was supplied with deck chairs and other amenities. As luck would have it at the time of the accident the entire roof was under observation, the observers being perched on the roof of the nearby pub, and all agreed that Sir George was completely alone. Nobody could have pushed him off the roof.

It’s also a book that combines a good deal of humour with the usual crime stuff, and while Carr’s humour isn’t to everyone’s tastes I enjoyed it. Sir Henry Merrivale is definitely one of the more outrageously over-the-top of fictional detectives, and one of the more entertaining. 

First published in 1949, very much in the Golden Age style of detective thrillers, and great fun. Highly recommended.

Carter Dickson's The Judas Window

The Judas Window, written in 1938, is one of the more celebrated Carter Dickson mysteries featuring the delightful H.M. (Sir Henry Merrivale).

Carter Dickson was of course John Dickson Carr so you won’t be surprised to hear that this novel includes a locked room puzzle. This is however a locked room mystery with a difference. The essence of the locked room sub-genre is that the body of the murder victim should be found in a room that is locked from the inside so that  the murderer could not possibly have made his escape. In this case the police are faced with a much simpler problem. The murderer is found locked in the room with his victim. There can be no doubt whatsoever of his guilt. The arrest is made and when the case comes up at the Old Bailey no-one has any doubt that a speedy conviction will ensue and that Jimmy Answell will be hanged.

The only puzzling thing is that Answell’s defence counsel, the irascible Sir Henry Merrivale KC, seems quite confident that he will secure Answell’s acquittal.

Jimmy Answell, a wealthy and quite respectable young man, had been engaged to be married to Mary Hume. Jimmy had been summoned to the London home of Mary’s father, Mr Avory Hume, to receive his formal blessing to the union. Jimmy arrived at 6.10 pm. By 6.30 pm Avory Hume was dead, with an arrow through his heart. Avory Hume had been an archery enthusiast and the arrow, a much-prized trophy, had been affixed to the wall of his study. It is clear that the arrow had not been fired from a bow but used as a dagger. Jimmy’s fingerprints are on the shaft of the arrow. Raised voices had been heard emanating from the room. The two men had obviously quarreled and Jimmy had stabbed his prospective father-in-law with the arrow. It’s as close to being an open-and-shut case as one could ever hope to encounter.

In spite of all this H.M. not only intends to fight the case, he intends to win.

I must confess that I have mixed feelings about locked room mysteries. Even in the hands of a master like John Dickson Carr they can be a little contrived. In this instance however locked room mystery is only one element in a plot constructed with fiendish ingenuity. And it is by no means the most impressive aspect of the plot. There is another crucial element that (in my opinion at least) easily surpasses it in cleverness.

A great golden age detective story requires more than an ingenious murder. It has to conform to the conventions of the fair play mystery which means that not only must the reader be provided with all the clue necessary to solve the puzzle, the way in which the detective uses those clues to unravel the mystery must be plausible and logical without any wild leaps of intuition. The Judas Window succeeds admirably in this regard.

Courtroom scenes can be a little risky - they can be talky and a trifle dull if not handled carefully. Even Erle Stanley Gardner, the grand master of courtroom dramas, generally kept his courtroom scenes in reserve for a vital moment. In The Judas Window Carr chooses a particularly daring option - virtually the whole book is courtroom scenes. It’s a gamble that pays off. A significant chunk of the story is told through the testimony of various witnesses but Carr is able to make it consistently vivid and entertaining. Of course it helps that H.M. is even more fun than usual when he’s in full cry in court. 

It’s to be expected that Carr’s plotting will be top-notch but in this book he also manages to make the motivations of all the suspects (not just the murderer) believable. The actual motive for the murder is perfectly convincing.

This is Carr in very good form indeed. He gives us a carefully constructed and very satisfying plot with a good locked-room mystery component. There’s a judicious leavening of humour but it’s never overdone. The Judas Window is representative of the golden age detective story at its very best. Highly recommended.

John Dickson Carr’s Castle Skull

Castle Skull, published in 1931, was the third of John Dickson Carr’s five Henri Bencolin mysteries. Carr connoisseurs generally regard the first four Bencolin novels as apprentice works. That’s true to some extent but they’re still a lot of fun.

Henri Bencolin has been hired by wealthy Belgian industrialist Jérôme d’Aunay to solve a mystery in Germany. The famous but ageing English actor Myron Alison has been murdered and the murder took place in the forbidding Castle Skull on a rocky eminence overlooking the Rhine. As its name suggests Castle Skull is a castle with a façade that looks uncannily like a human skull. The fifteenth century castle had been owned by the famed stage magician Maleger and thereby hangs another tale. Some years earlier Maleger had been killed by a fall from a railway carriage. It had to be suicide since there were trustworthy witnesses who swore no-one had entered his compartment. If Maleger was murdered it was an impossible crime, but no-one believes he would have taken his own life - and certainly not in such a commonplace manner.

Myron Alison lived in a palatial residence on the opposite bank of the river. On the night of his murder a figure was seen emerging from Castle Skull - a figure enveloped in flames! The victim proved to be Alison although oddly enough he had already sustained fatal gunshot wounds before being set on fire.

Bencolin and Jeff Marle (the narrator and Dr Watson of the story) are invited to stay in Alison’s house. Still present were the house guests who were there at the time of Alison’s murder and logically one of them must be the murderer. There’s temperamental violinist Levasseur, d’Aunay and his pretty (and very much younger) wife Isobel, the mostly somewhat drunken and neurotic young English baronet Sir Marshall Dunstan and Sally Reine (who is obviously in love with Dunstan). There’s also Myron Alison’s sister Agatha, known (for no good reason) as the Duchess. The Duchess had been a noted beauty in her youth; now her passions are confined to chess and poker (especially poker). 

This time Bencolin has a rival, in the person of a celebrated German detective, the Baron von Arnheim - an old school Prussian aristocrat complete with dueling scars. The Frenchman Bencolin and the German von Arnheim had been much deadlier rivals once, as agents of their respective intelligence service. Their rivalry is fierce although tempered by mutual respect.

One of Carr’s great strengths was his genuine feel for the gothic and he gives it full rein in this story. Castle Skull is as forbidding (and spectacular) inside as it is from the outside, a place that has seen much bloodshed and many crimes over the centuries. The story itself is reeking with gothic atmosphere.

Carr’s mastery of plotting is already in evidence. We may think we know where the story is heading but the author has plenty of surprises up his sleeve.

The suspects are a rather colourful bunch, the competitiveness between Bencolin and von Arnheim adds spice, there are some fine if rather grisly set-pieces, the setting is superb and Carr makes the most of it, there are lots of wonderful gothic tropes as well as detective story tropes and the pacing (this is a very short novel) is pleasingly brisk.

Personally I think the fourth of the Henri Bencolin mysteries, The Waxworks Murder, is even better but Castle Skull is nonetheless splendid entertainment. Highly recommended.

The Plague Court Murders

The Plague Court Murders, published in 1934, was the first of the Sir Henry Merrivale mysteries written by John Dickson Carr under the pseudonym Carter Dickson. It boasts a fiendishly complex plot and yes, it is a locked-room mystery (Carr being universally acknowledged as the most enthusiastic practitioner of the locked-room mystery among all golden age writers of detective fiction).

There was something else Carr was noted for - his fondness for combining detective stories with very strong elements of the gothic. There is no shortage of gothic tropes in this novel.

Sir Henry Merrivale does not make his appearance until halfway through the book but once he arrives he takes centre stage. 

The narrator, Ken Blake, worked for a top-secret branch of military intelligence during the Great War. Now he’s been drawn into some curious events in the life of Dean Halliday. Dean is now middle-aged but in his youth he was a bit of a hell-raiser. His now deceased brother James had an even more unfortunate history. These curious events concern James. Dean’s aunt and his fiancée have become involved with a psychic named Darworth. Dean doesn’t know what to think of all this. He is concerned and disturbed. Blake is willing to help but he feels this is a situation in which his friend Chief Inspector Masters may be very interested indeed. Masters has a special interest in phony mediums and other psychic scams. Masters is very anxious to become involved since the Darworth situation may be tied in to a strange theft from a London Museum - a dagger alleged to belong to a 17th century hangman’s assistant with a sinister reputation.

Blake, Masters and Dean Halliday set off for the grim house known as Plague Court, a house that has bee in the Halliday family for several hundred years and which they have never been able to sell or to rent. The ruined house is a suitably gothic setting for occult occurrences and Darworth is supposed to be exorcising it. In the grounds is a smaller single-room house which will be the setting for a murder, a house locked from both the inside and the outside with no possibility of entry by any other means.

There are a number of human suspects belonging to the circle of believers that had gathered around Darworth but there are inhuman suspects as well - some at least of those  involved believe that spirits of the dead were responsible for the crime. This horrific crime may well be the sequel to equally terrible events in the 1660s.

Chief Inspector Masters, his sergeant and Blake are all on hand at the time the murder occurs but they can make nothing of it. Finally Blake realises it’s time to take the obvious step - to call in his old chief at the counter-espionage unit, Sir Henry Merrivale. It’s a difficult case but Merrivale has unbounded confidence in his own ability.

Merrivale is a delightful character. He’s wildly eccentric, rambunctious, rude, vulgar, opinionated, abrasive and has no social skills whatsoever. He is a qualified barrister, physician and rabid socialist. He is large and he is loud. Fortunately his confidence in himself is justified.

Phony spiritualists use many of the same tricks that stage magicians use. Writers of detective fiction use those tricks as well. Misdirection is the key to a successful stage illusion and Carr pulls off some pretty impressive misdirection in this story.

Carr lays out all the clues for us, but is this really a fair-play mystery? The plot is so twisted and the solution is so off-the-wall that I can’t imagine many readers solving the puzzle. They may certainly solve parts of it, but not the whole thing. There are also one or two plot points which really stretch credibility to the limit. Having said that it’s undoubtedly a tour-de-force of grandiose and grotesque ingenuity.

It was quite common in golden age detective fiction for characters to remind us of the essential artificiality of the puzzle-plot mystery school by saying things like, “This isn’t a detective story you know.” I don’t think anyone pushed that tendency further than Carr - at one point Sir Henry Merrivale dismisses one proposed solution on the grounds that the suspect in question can’t be the murderer because he was introduced too late in the story and that’s against the rules of detective fiction.

Carr is regarded as one of the masters of plotting but while the plot of The Plague Court Murders is indubitably impressive it wasn’t the element that impressed me most of all. For me the highlights of this book are Carr’s superb gift for creating gothic atmosphere and his  magnificent creation of the outrageous, deplorable but immensely entertaining Sir Henry Merrivale. 

The Plague Court Murders is a treat. Highly recommended.

John Dickson Carr's The Witch of the Low-Tide

In addition to being the acknowledged master of the “locked-room” mystery story John Dickson Carr also wrote a number of historical detective novels. The most interesting is The Devil in Velvet, a wonderfully entertaining concoction that combines crime fiction, horror and science fiction.  He also wrote three more conventional detective novels with period settings, as a kind of tribute to the evolution of the Metropolitan Police. Fire, Burn! was set in 1829 and The Scandal at High Chimneys takes place in 1865. It’s the third and last of these books, set in 1907, with which we are concerned however - The Witch of the Low-Tide.

Dr David Garth is a prominent London doctor, a pioneer in the fields of neurosurgery and psychiatry. He’s also a man with a secret. He is in love with a young widow, Betty, and she’s a woman with a secret. In fact everybody in this novel has something they’re trying to hide. Garth’s friends Marion and Vince and Marion’s former guardian Colonel Selby are no exception.

These interlocking webs of deception lead to murder, and to a battle of wits that pits amatuer sleuth against professional police detective (in this case the hard-bitten Scotland Yard man Inspector Twigg). Carr manages to insert two locked-room puzzles into the novel, as well as plenty of satisfyingly obscure plot twists. 

Not everybody enjoys John Dickson Carr’s style, but I find him to be consistently entertaining and I particularly like his historical mysteries, although I’ve yet to track down a copy of Fire, Burn! despite my best efforts. Carr wrote The Witch of the Low-Tide  in 1961, and it’s a nice combination of Edwardian period detail with juicy sex scandals, which makes it even more fun. I liked this one quite a bit.

John Dickson Carr’s The Department of Queer Complaints

John Dickson Carr’s The Department of Queer Complaints was published in 1940, under the name Carter Dickson (a pseudonym he often employed). It contains seven short stories featuring his intriguing detective Colonel March. Carr in fact wrote nine Colonel March stories, two of which unfortunately were not included in the 1940 edition of the book (which is the one I have and which is reviewed here).

Colonel March heads D3, a little-known department of Scotland Yard. It is popularly known at the Yard as The Department of Queer Complaints. Any case which seems outlandish and impossible or which sounds like the purest fantasy finds its way to Colonel March. Most such cases turn out to be the products of over-active imaginations but some turn out to be very serious indeed. An ordinary policeman, even an experienced detective, would be able to make no sense of them. Colonel March however has the kind of mind that can take the inexplicable and the bizarre and find a rational explanation. Colonel March’s cases have nothing to do with the occult although some are so puzzling that at first most people would assume that only magic or the supernatural could account for them. Colonel March knows better. It’s just a matter of looking at them in the right way.

Naturally, given the author’s well-known partiality for such tales, the stories can all be described as either locked-room or impossible crime stories. The premise of the book allowed Carr to indulge himself in some particularly odd and baroque variations on his favoured techniques, stories which might otherwise have been considered just a little too quirky.

It is of course impossible to say very much about these kinds of stories without risking spoilers so I will confine myself to giving merely a hint of the flavour of these tales.

In The New Invisible Man a man who takes rather too great an interest in his neighbours witnesses a murder committed by a pair of white gloves. This is a rather light-hearted story and it’s a great deal of fun.

The Footprint in the Sky stretches credibility just a little too far. The footprint in question, at a crime scene, is found where no footprint could possible be found. It is a story which, to my tastes, crosses the line into mere gimmickry and even silliness.

The Crime in Nobody’s Room concerns a murder in a flat. It is not all that unusual for bodies to disappear but in this case the flat itself disappears. It’s rather enjoyable even if the solution depends on a plot device that is rather convenient. But then as Leslie Charteris once observed, coincidences do have a habit of coinciding.

Hot Money has Colonel March trying to recover money stolen in a bank robbery, money which then disappears. This is by far the weakest story and left me feeling just a little cheated.

Things improve markedly with Death in the Dressing-Room, a story involving a Javanese dance in a night-club and a murder. It has a clever and intricate plot that comes together very neatly indeed. A great story and probably the best one in this collection.

The Silver Curtain takes Colonel March to France, to a fashionable casino and a neat impossible crime. A young Englishman who has had very bad luck at the tables almost falls victim to even greater misfortune. 

Error at Daybreak has another impossible crime. A financier suddenly drops dead on a beach. A brief medical examination indicates murder but there was nobody within a hundred yards of him and nobody heard any gunshots. The cause of death points to an unusual murder method. The police have a suspect but little evidence, but luckily Colonel March is on hand. This is another fine story. It uses devices that have been used often since but they’re handled with skill.

This short story collection was the basis for an entertaining 1955 British television series, Colonel March of Scotland Yard, with Boris Karloff as Colonel March. The 26 episodes included adaptations (some more faithful than others) of the seven original stories.

One oddity is that in the TV series Boris Karloff sports an eye-patch. The stories frequently mention Colonel March’s “eye” rather than “eyes” but make no mention of an eye-patch and no explicit mention of a missing eye.  

Any short story collection is likely to be somewhat uneven but five successes out of seven is not a bad result. Colonel March is a genial and rather appealing detective which gives even the weaker stories some entertainment value. On the whole I think I can safely recommend this one.

John Dickson Carr’s The Devil in Velvet

To say that John Dickson Carr’s The Devil in Velvet, which was first published in 1951, is an unconventional detective novel would be a monumental understatement. I mean, how many fictional detectives enlist the help of Satan to solve the crime? And it involves time travel. This is definitely not your average crime novel.

In 1925 a historian becomes obsessed with a murder committed in 1675.  There seem to have been three possible suspects, but although several manuscripts exist that give an account of the events, none name the actual murderer. The historian makes a pact with the Devil, allowing him to travel back in time to 1675, and he finds himself inhabiting the body of the murder victim’s husband. He discovers that the accounts he has read of the crime do not tell the full story.  

He also soon finds himself caught up in the political intrigues of the day, of which there are many – intrigues involving Popish plots, conspiracies against the king, and the vexed problem of the succession (with King Charles II’s Catholic brother being the heir). He finds himself with enemies inside his household, and outside. 

The book is a combination of a clever murder mystery, a strange love story, a political thriller and an enjoyable adventure romp, with some fascinating insights into daily life in the 17th century to add extra interest and spice.  Considering that it was written in the early 1950s it’s also surprisingly frank in dealing with matters of sex. In some ways it has a very modern feel, somewhat akin to the wonderful genre-bending alternative history fantasy novels of writers like Tim Powers and Mary Gentle. In fact it’s a book I can recommend to fantasy and horror fans as well as crime fiction fans. An unusual but very entertaining novel.  

John Dickson Carr’s The Waxworks Murder

John Dickson Carr’s 1932 mystery The Waxworks Murder was the fourth of his five novels featuring French detective Henri Bencolin.

Carr was the acknowledged master of the “locked room” mystery and its near cousin the “impossible murder” mystery. The Waxworks Murder fits more into the latter category although it certainly deals with doors, keys and passage-ways.

Carr (1906-1977) was an American who lived in England for many years, a fact which gives many of his crime novels a feel that is more English than American.

A woman’s body is found in the Musée Augustin, a wax museum in Paris. She is found in the arms of a waxwork monster. The wax museum is not however the main focus of the story. The primary focus is on the Club of the Silver Key next door, although there is an entrance to the club through the wax museum, a point which will become of major importance.

The Club of the Silver Key is a place of assignation. It is, if you like, a high-class sex club for the bored and the wealthy. Several young women have been enticed to this club, some more willingly than others.

There’s the usual assortment of suspects, and there are the plot twists and red herrings you associate with golden age detective novels. There are doors that can only be opened from one side, and the keys associated with the club are important not just as keys but as badges of membership. To add some spice, and to further complicate Bencolin’s task, the members of the Club of the Silver Key are always masked when they attend meetings.

It’s a skillful mixture of clever plotting with high-class sleaze and debauchery. And a very entertaining mixture it is. Recommended.

Scandal at High Chimneys

Scandal at High Chimneys, originally published in 1959, is another of John Dickson Carr’s fascinating crime novels set in London’s past. This time it’s 1865, and a shameful family secret had led to murder.

Carr uses the detective novel as a means to explore the hidden underbelly of respectable Victorian England – a world of blackmail, kept women, disreputable night-spots, prostitutes and habitual criminals. He also shines a light on some characteristic Victorian fears – especially the dread of “tainted blood” and the ever-present horror of scandal.

This book deals with much of the same subject matter as Donald Thomas’s The Victorian Underworld but this time in the form of fiction (although it’s fiction based on what appears to be fairly thorough historical research). The novel is also interesting for its account of 19th century policing and law. Behind the façade of scrupulous respectability the world of the Victorians was as much a world of sex, sleaze and passion as our own world, and Carr brings this world vividly to life. And it’s all great fun.

Incidentally, the ex-inspector of police, Jonathan Whicher, who plays such an important role in the book really did exist, and really did work as a private detective after being forced out of Scotland Yard.