Mon 18 Apr 2022
An Archived Locked Room Mystery Review: JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Sleeping Sphinx.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Sleeping Sphinx. Gideon Fell #17. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1947. Bantam #996, paperback, 1952. Reprinted many times.
Does every man have in his past a girl once loved in silence, in vain? The scene is post-war Britain, and Carr’s hero, falsely reported dead while on an undercover assignment in Italy, returns home to find the breath of murder hovering over his best friend and the girl he loves. Only the genially grumpy Dr. Fell has the answer to what seems to have been a supernatural curse flung down in their midst.
Carr will of course always be best remembered for his supreme expertise with locked rooms, but once again I’m almost equally impressed by the hints of black sinister mystery that his stories always seem possess as well. It’s as if his plots were more the product of a twisted and tormented imagination of a Van Gogh than the clever mind of a master detective story writer, yet when in the final chapter the curtain rises on a bare stage, the collapsible sets and other trappings are finally recognized as the common and prosaic pieces of apparatus they really are.
Perversely, often like the magician who, untrue to hie craft, reveals the cards up his sleeve, the mystery is more fascinating without the solution.
Rating: B
April 18th, 2022 at 11:40 pm
Speaking for myself, almost 45 years later, I wish I’d said more about the specific “impossible crime” and/or “locked room” aspect of this one. But I didn’t, and this is all I tell you about this one.
Until I read it again, that is.
April 20th, 2022 at 8:40 pm
It’s in books like this you can see the influence of Thomas Hanshew and Cleek on Carr and his taste for the suggestion of the macabre and sensational as well as his own Doylian influences to walk that fine line with the supernatural and other worldly then at the last moment pull away and reveal the safe sane world beneath the surface.
Once in a while he hints that there might be chaos beyond the order, the slightly Mephistophiclean nature of Bencolin, the fantasy elements in THE DEVIL IN VELVET and FIRE BURN, the Janus Solution to THE BURNING COURT.
It’s telling he keeps returning to the fire and brimstone and ghosts and goblins at the edge of the genre and again and again explains them away with rationality and reason while never quite letting go of the pleasing frisson that comes with them.
You get a hint in stories like “House in the Goblin Wood”, that there was a fine horror writer lingering beside the even finer spinner of puzzles struggling at times to get out.
April 20th, 2022 at 8:50 pm
You’ve summed Carr up in a nutshell, I think. A four paragraph nutshell, of course, but no matter. Even though there’s always a rational explanation to his locked room mysteries, his hints of the supernatural made his mysteries, well, somehow mysterious in a way no other author I can think of managed to do.