REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

CARTER DICKSON – The Cavalier’s Cup. Sir Henry Merrivale #22. William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1953. Zebra, paperback, 1987.

   Another book passed on to me by Dan and another re-read of one of the later Sir Henry Merrivale novels. It is also one that isn’t a murder mystery.

   Lady Brace, the American-born wife of Lord Brace and the daughter of a Congressman from Pennsylvania comes to Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters of Scotland Yard seeking his help to find an explanation for how her husband, having locked himself in the Oak Room of his home, Telford Old Hall, in order to guard the golden bejeweled Cavalier’s Cup, a family heirloom taken from the bank for a museum exhibition, awoke to find the cup on the table before him and no longer in the safe, which is open and the door and windows still locked as they had been when he had locked himself in the night before.

   Masters reluctantly goes along after being ordered to by his superiors, even though he thinks it’s a simple case of Lord Brace walking in his sleep, and even though he knows that Sir Henry Merrivale has been staying in nearby Cranleigh Court for the past six months. Masters is forced to spend a night locked in the Oak Room. where, in the middle of the night, he is knocked out and a sword displayed outside the room is found inside along with the opened safe and the Cavalier’s Cup again out in the open. So it’s up to Sir Henry to explain it all.

   This is a book I completely forgot and I think I know the reason why, since Carr was clearly tiring of the character. In a way this reminded me of The Maltese Falcon. (I’ll wait here while the laughter dies down.) One of the criticisms of that classic was that the murder of Miles Archer was pushed aside while the characters and story concentrated on the Black Bird: who has it and how to get it In response Hammett wrote The Glass Key in which “who killed Taylor Henry” was on everyone’s lips.

   Here, Carr sets up an intriguing locked-room puzzle but spends the whole middle of the book trying to write farce about Merrivale’s singing (with an Italian teacher named Ravioli yet who speaks ,n the sort of Italian accented English that should have the Italian-American Civil Rights League up in arms) and the Congressman’s love at first sight (and sex at second) with the local Labour M. P. Miss E. M. Cheeseman.

   Only then does he go back to the puzzle and Merrivale’s explanation (to the perpetrator who he decides to let get away with it). So let me remember Carr’s glory days and forget this as thoroughly as I did the first time I read it.