Wed 9 Jun 2010
A Review by Curt Evans: JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Corpse in the Waxworks.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[11] Comments
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.
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.
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.
June 9th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
I just wanted to mention that I sent Steve a copy of the Man Who Could Not Shudder jacket for the British Hamish Hamilton edition and he posted it on the Shudder review thread, if anyone wanted to see it.
June 9th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
I don’t think I ever finished reading this one. After reading many of the Gideon Fell books, mostly in omnibus editions I bought from the Mystery Guild book club, I remember finding a copy of WAXWORKS in a used book store, probably the Dell edition, and being delighted to having found a title I hadn’t seen before.
But I was severely disappointed to discover that Dr. Fell was not in it. I began the book anyway, manfully plunging on, until I decided that — for whatever reason — it was not for me.
Not for me when I was 15 or so, but if I’ve finished more than one of M. Bencolin’s adventures ever since, I’d be surprised. I just never have.
In any case, here’s another Carr with a wonderfully evocative title, and some covers to go with it.
— Steve
June 9th, 2010 at 7:54 pm
I don’t know how Curt managed to get his comment in before mine, but yes, by all means go back to his previous review and all of the comments that follow, including considerable discussion of covers and how Dr Fell has been portrayed in them.
June 9th, 2010 at 8:14 pm
The Bencolin books are a good deal of fun, though atmosphere and mood do overshadow some of the later Carr staples. But it is here you can see the influence of some of Carr’s early heroes in the genre — such as Thomas Hanshew and the Cleek stories which also went in for a good deal of ‘orrors’ and the bizarre.
It’s interesting to see how Carr developed over the years, experimenting, rejecting, and embracing varying elements as his mature style emerged.
He was never averse to a chill or frisson when he could honestly inject one.
Though better written the Bencolin books recall some of Sax Rohmer’s better attempts to mix horror and thriller elements in books such as THE GREEN EYES OF BAST, GREY FACE, and THE QUEST FOR THE GOLDERN SLIPPER.
And whatever else, Jeff Marle is one of the most proactive Watson’s in the genre.
June 9th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Curt and David
You’ve convinced me. I have a copy of WAXWORKS sitting on a shelf not more than three feet away. I’ll give it a read as soon as I can get those boxes of books moved that are on the floor two feet deep in between.
Or stretch my arm out just a liiiiitle more.
— Steve
June 9th, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Steve, I put off reading the Bencolins for years too. They are so Gothic and florid! I find the style impressive, but kind of remote for me. I prefer later Carr, on the whole, but the Bencolins are a nice change of pace, with a kind of fin de siecle decadence. I need to do Castle Skull and The Lost Gallows sometime too.
Marle is proactive indeed when it comes to investigating that sex club! By the way, I thought that was fairly racy, given the reputation today of Golden Age detective novels. He’s basically describing modern swingers here. P. D. James has something like this in one of her more recent novels, but with Carr it’s much more fun.
What year was that Dell cover? Looks almost sci-fi–1950s?
June 9th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Curt
The Dell is from 1954, and you’ve a good eye for style. The cover was done by Richard Powers, known mostly for his surreal-looking Science Fiction art for paperbacks throughout the 1950s and into the mid-1960s or so.
Steve
June 9th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Carr felt Bencolin was too mean — and I assume too dark — in the novels as compared to the short stories he wrote about the character in college. It may mean nothing, but all his later sleuths, Colonel March included, are corpulent and prone to rather childish behavior at times for humorous effect.
I wonder if he was consciously trying to escape that Mephistophelian image?
As for the sex club, Carr gets pretty racy again in THE DEMONIACS, with a heroine accused of being a bawd (she isn’t) and visits to Mrs. Salmon’s Waxworks and Ranleigh Gardens where pay for play sex is arranged and the women are abroad in states of near nudity. Perhaps not racy by most standards, but by those of the fair play detective story …
As for the Gothic elements it was Carr who wrote: “Let there be a spice of terror, of dark skies and evil things.” Even if in the end the rational world — usually — imposes the light of reason.
Though murder in Carr occurs in benign and even mundane places at times there is apt to be a thunderstorm or looming clouds to remind us of the elemental threat to the everyday world.
June 10th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
I’ve read three of the four Bencolin novels, and this is my favorite. It starts of pretty slow but really gets going towards the end. And the final scene is indeed memorable.
June 11th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
In regard to Carr and his admiration for Thomas Hanshew and Cleek I just recalled that the ship in Carr’s play “Cabin B-13” is the MAUREVANIA, the name of the small country the mysterious Cleek is hereditary monarch of.
February 10th, 2021 at 1:04 pm
[…] Corpse in the Waxworks has been reviewed, among others, at The Grandest Game in the World, Mystery File, Golden Age of Detection Wiki, Vintage Pop Fictions, ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’, […]