A REVIEW BY CURT J. EVANS:         


JOHN DICKSON CARR Corpse in the Waxworks

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Corpse in the Waxworks. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1932. British edition published as The Waxworks Murder: Hamish Hamilton, hc, 1932. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft, including: Avon, paperback, no number [#33], 1943; Dell #775, pb,1954; Collier, pb, 1965 plus several reprintings.

   The Corpse in the Waxworks is an early John Dickson Carr novel, one of the small set of highly Gothic tales set in France with “Satanic” series detective Henri Bencolin, whom Carr was to abandon after this tale (with the exception of one 1937 novel, The Four False Weapons, where Bencolin unfortunately is much toned down as a menacing, Mephistophelian character).

   It’s an effective tale, and it offers a nice break in style from many of the Fell and Merrivale stories.

JOHN DICKSON CARR Corpse in the Waxworks

   Waxworks quotes Edgar Allen Poe, and for good reason. The book is filled with gloom and grotesques and the writing is highly florid, with long descriptive paragraphs. Though not on the whole so much to my taste as his later, rather more stripped-down (though often still evocative) style, I think it is quite well done in Waxworks.

JOHN DICKSON CARR Corpse in the Waxworks

   The mystery, involving a girl stabbed to death and left in the arms of a wax satyr in a museum’s Hall of Horrors, is a good one and fairly clued, although without all the long descriptive passages and a lengthy dramatic episode involving the dubious infiltration of a sinister sex club, the Club of Masks, by Jeff Marle, Bencolin’s young “Watson,” the book would actually be pretty short.

   Overall, I’m reminded with Waxworks of Carr’s later historical mysteries from the 1950s and 1960s, though Waxworks is much more Gothic. Systematic criminal investigation seems to take something of a back seat to colorful, exciting episodes.

   For me the very best part of Waxworks is the conclusion, highly dramatic confrontation between Bencolin and the murderer. I cannot say much, but I’ll just point out that Bencolin stays true to the rather the formidable, merciless self Carr fashioned for him in these early tales. You’ll remember this ending.

Editorial Comment:   Curt has recently been re-reading a number of books by John Dickson Carr. This is the third in a series of reviews he wrote as a result. The Man Who Could Not Shudder was the second, and you can read it here.

JOHN DICKSON CARR Corpse in the Waxworks