CARTER DICKSON – The Plague Court Murders. Morrow, hardcover, 1934. Reprinted several times in paperback, including: Avon, 1941. Berkley G267, 1959. Belmont-Tower, 1974. IPL, 1990. American Mystery Classics, 2021.

   The house in Plague Court had come into the hands of the Halliday family in 1833, having earlier been associated with the horrific figure of Louis Playge, a hangman’s assistant in the time of the Great Plague. For a hundred years, odd happenings, illnesses, suicides, and rumors of haunting had kept the house a white elephant that the family could neither use profitably nor get rid of.

   Now a group of people is invited to spend the night in the house. The group includes Ken Blake, the book’s narrator; Inspector Masters of Scotland Yard; the current head of the Halliday family and his fiancee; and a psychical. researcher named Darworth, who has lately gained influence over two of the Halliday women.

   The night is filled with unexplained incidents, but the climax comes when Masters breaks into the small stone house in the rear court and finds Darworth’s dead body. The door had been double-locked, from inside and from outside; there arc no other exits; and no one else is inside the house. Yet Darworth was stabbed with a dagger that once belonged to Louis Playge and was stolen the day before from a London museum.

   Blake once worked for H. M. [Sir Henry Merrivale] in Military Intelligence, and Masters is a friend of both men. This connection draws H.M. into his first recorded case. He is memorably eccentric, but not yet the full-blown comic figure of the later books in the series. The atmosphere of Plague Court, in fact, is anything but light. An air of brooding and macabre menace is set up in the early pages and expertly maintained throughout. A second grisly murder occurs before H.M. finally traps a truly surprising “least likely” murderer.

   Other H.M. cases include such ingenious locked-room murders as The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) and The Judas Window (1938), both justly regarded as classics of the form. A Graveyard to Let (1949) is set in New York and features another miraculous disappearance, in which a man dives into a swimming pool in full view of family and friends, and never reappears. The series comes to an end in a blaze of comic glory in The Cavalier’s Cup (1953), a substantial crime puzzle (although there is no murder) that reads like a combination of P. G. Wodehouse and Thorne Smith.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

CARTER DICKSON – The Judas Window. Sir Henry Merrivale #8, William Morrow, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted as The Crossbow Murder, Berkley, paperback, 1964. Many other reprint editions exist, both in hardcover and paperback.

   John Dickson Carr, the old maestro of the mystery story has left us forever, but his books go on and on. The Judas Window features Sir Henry Merrivale, another old maestro, as the detective, and what a glorious locked room puzzle it is, with a brilliant solution.

   In this one, James Caplon Answell is being tried for the murder of his fiancee’s father, Avery Hume. The two were talking in Mr. Hume’s study, with steel shutters over the windows and the door’ bolted. When Answell responded to the cries of the butler and secretary, he was found with Hume dead on the floor, an arrow through his  heart. The victim, an expert archer, had three arrows over the mantel as trophies.

   Answell cla1ms to have been drugged, and to have no recollection or what happened thereafter. The police arrest him, his solicitor quits, and Sir Henry is left to defend him all alone. Well, not quite. He has his secretary Lollypop and two old friends to run errands and keep an eye on proceedings.

   Sir Henry establishes that there was  a case of mistaken identity., that Mr. Hume had mistaken Answell for his cousin of a similar name who had been blackmailing Miss Hume. Hume and his brother, a doctor, had cooked up a plan to remove the blackmailer and get his documents.

   But the plan misfires in more than one way. In a tour de force of reasoning, Sir Henry recovers the missing crossbow, complete with piece of feather from the arrow-weapon, and shows how a crossbow could be shot so as to kill a man in a looked and bolted room.

   Readers are challenged to realize where the “Judas Window” in every room is; this one reader was stunned to find that she should have known it all the time!

CARTER DICKSON – The Skeleton in the Clock.  Sir Henry Merrivale #18. Morrow, hardcover, 1948. Dell #481, paperback, 1951. Berkley X1479, paperback, 1967. Belmont, paperback, 1973. Leisure, paperback, 1977.  Bantam, paperback, 1982.

   Three postcards send Sir Henry Merrivale off to Fleet House to solve a twenty year old mystery. When Martin Drake’s search for a girl met briefly during the war comes to an end, he discovers her already engaged, and his attempts to break up the marriage bring about the murderer’s wrath.

   One night is spent in the condemned cell of local prison looking for ghosts, and a mutilated body is found the next morning. In addition, the final capture takes place in a house of mirrors belonging to a traveling fair, so there can be no complaints about adequate background.

   However, there is a bit too many interrupted explanations (taken care of later after they are forgotten) and a bit too great a fatalistic attitude by some characters as they refuse to question unlikely business and to press unanswered questions. One obvious mistake (page 146 of the Berkley paperback) does not confuse anything, but the last 28 pages are needed to explain all.

   The “locked room” is satisfactorily done, and is actually underplayed this time. As it turns out, the clock containing the skeleton might also be considered the family closet.

Rating: ***

   CARTER DICKSON  “The Footprint in the Sky.” Short story. Colonel March. First published in The Strand, January 1940, as “Clue in the Snow.” Collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, hardcover, 1940). Also collected in Merrivale, March and Murder (IPL, hardcover, 1991) as by John Dickson Carr. Reprinted in Murder in Spades, edited by Ellery Queen (Pyramid, paperback, 1969), also as by Carr.

   Strictly speaking, perhaps, not a locked room mystery, but an impossible crime, once you accept the fact that the young girl framed for the crime is innocent, a premise hard to believe, given the facts. A woman living in the house next door, separated by a tall hedge, has been clubbed several times on the head and robbed. It has snowed overnight and the only footprints going back and forth between the two houses are hers. She has size four shoes and the bottoms of hers are soaking wet.

   Carr’s books and stories are always permeated with eerie settings and backgrounds, and this one is no exception. The girl is known for sleepwalking and waking up having no idea what she may have done while doing so. For all she knows, she may have done it. Only Colonel March, head of Scotland Yard’s Department of Queer Complaints, believes her story at once, as soon as he’s on the scene.

   Carr was also known for playing “fair” with the reader, and again this one is no exception, but only once the reader, as soon as the rather outrageous solution is revealed, says, “Hey! What?” (quoting me exactly) and goes back into the story to discover what it was the March used to base his deductions on. Sure enough, it’s there. Right in plain sight, but totally buried in a paragraph used quite innocuously to describe a room.

   Note my use of the word “outrageous” in the paragraph above. I still don’t believe what he says happened could actually be done, but I guess I’d have to grant you that it *could* have.

JOHN RHODE & CARTER DICKSON – Fatal Descent. Dr. Horatio Glass & Chief Inspector Hornbeam #1. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1939. Popular Library #87, paperback, 1946. Dover, US, paperback, 1987. Published first in the UK as Drop to His Death (William Heinemann, hardcover, 1939).

   Carter Dickson is of course better known as John Dickson Carr, the most famous locked-room mystery writer of all time, and the locked room in this collaboration with John Rhode, author of many many Dr. Priestley novels, is a doozy. It’s an elevator, and to all practical purposes, a hermetically sealed elevator, into which a man steps in alone at the top floor of a five story office building. When it reaches the bottom floor, he is found dead, shot to death in the head.

   As the elevator passes each floor on its way down, no one is able to stop the car either to get in or get off. Nor could have anyone been able to stand on the roof of the car. He was alone all the way down, but someone managed to kill him anyway. The question is how? And of course, secondarily, why?

   This was the only pairing in print of the two authors and of the two detectives who handle the case. In this instance, it is the professional, Chief Inspector Hornbeam whose technique depends on interpreting facts, while Dr. Glass relies on people, psychology and motive. It is the latter, however, who comes up with more than possible solution, one of which (in my opinion) is as good as the real one, if not better.

   But of course, which checked out, Dr. Glass’s solution does not fit the facts, and that is what finely detailed detective novels depend on. In that regard, this book delivers the goods one hundred percent. Unless uncommonly diligent, the reader will still be fooled every step of the way. My only regret is how complicated the murder plan was, even though the authors do a fine job in trying to explain why the killer had to do it the way he did. (UPDATE: For more on this, please see the comments that follow this review, especially #12.)

   I do not know which author wrote what in this novel, or if one did all of the plotting and the other did the writing. I suspect it was Carr who did the bulk of the work. I recognize his style in detail and humor, but I may be swayed in this regard by having read much more of his work than I have of Rhode’s. Either way, this is a fine example of late 1930s detective fiction writing, and especially if you’re also a fan of locked room mysteries, you should not miss this one.

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.

CARTER DICKSON “Blind Man’s Hood.” Short story. First published in The Sketch, UK, Christmas 1937. Collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, 1940). Reprinted in Best Ghost Stories (edited by Anne Ridler, Faber and Faber, 1945), The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (edited by Otto Penzler, Black Lizard, 2014) and The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (edited by Martin Edwards, British Library, 2018). Also reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1966, as “To Wake the Dead,” as by John Dickson Carr.

   And with all of those credentials on this story’s résumé, I’m sure I missed some, but this is one story that deserves all of them. Personally, I usually feel that tales in which the real story is told to listeners in the present as already having taken place in the place are awkward and forced, but not this time.

   A young married couple visiting a manor home on Christmas Eve find the front door open, all the lights on, a fire igoing, but otherwise the house is empty. Finally a young girl appears, perhaps a governess or a secretary, who then explains why the family themselves are not at home. They are, in fact, deliberately staying away. It seems that a murder had once taken place in the house, one that had never been solved.

   The woman who had died was found alone in the house, with all of the doors and windows locked. There were also no footprints in the snow surrounding the house, other than those made by the man who had walked up to it while under full observation.

   The house is spooky, and the story the girl tells is spookier still. This also a ghost story, but the the solution to the crime has nothing to do with the supernatural. I do not think that anyone but John Dickson Carr could have conjured up a story such as this one, a tale that combines the two so well — a logical puzzle and a more than a wisp of the eerie — and yet keeps the two parts completely separated.

   This one was an absolute pleasure to read. (I read the story in EQMM. I wish I owned the original Morrow hardcover edition!)

CARTER DICKSON “Persons or Things Unknown.” Short story. First published in The Sketch, UK, Christmas 1938. Collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, US, hardcover, 1940). Reprinted in Line-Up, edited by John Rhode (Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1940) as by J. Dickson Carr, and probably several other places as well.

   With only one possible flaw as far as I could see, and that one exceedingly non-major, this is one small gem of a story, especially if you’re as big a fan of locked room mysteries as I am. It’s a standalone story with none of Carr/Dickson’s favorite detective characters: Fell, March or Merrivale.

   The story is told instead by the owner of an old drafty manor house in England during a party he’s holding at Christmas time. It seems that there is a story attached to one of the rooms located upstairs, one dating back to the 1600s and the days of the Restoration. As recorded in an old diary and the coroner’s report at the time, it seems that one of two rivals for the hand of the then owner of the house was found stabbed to death in that room, while the other two were there with no other entry possible.

   But the lights had gone out before the fatal attack and no sign of the murder weapon could be found, no matter how hard they looked. It is obvious, so to speak, who the killer was, but without murder weapon to be found, he was never convicted.

   All the clues are there, and in plain sight — with a story from John Dickson Carr, you can count on that — and more than that, one suggestion from the current listeners to the story is made and immediately discounted. I’ve always thought using an icicle to kill someone without a trace would be a good basis for a short story (and it’s probably been done), but it was a warm day for Christmas, and there was a huge shortage of icicles to be used. Furthermore icicles are too fragile to be used very effectively as a weapon, especially many times over.

   As I said earlier, this is a small gem of a tale. My only wish is that it Carr hadn’t needed to tell it as a story within a story, a device I’m never all that crazy about, but that’s a small quibble about a story that’s as good as his one is.

CARTER DICKSON – Seeing Is Believing. William Morrow, US, hardcover, 1941. Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1942. Paperback reprints include: Pocket #386, 1946; Berkley F1282, 1966; Zebra, 1990.

   A small gem from the Golden Age of Detection, no doubt about it, even though the setup involves hypnotism and whether or not a person can be commanded to kill someone while under the spell. More specifically, though, this is the case of someone switching a knife with a rubber blade with a real one, one that does the job very nicely — but in a room full of observers watching intently but who never saw the switch being made.

   Sir Henry is in fine form with this one, full of mysterious hints of what he knows but without ever quite telling until the end. There is the usual bit of grand buffoonery as well, as he spends his spare moments dictating his memoirs to a poor fellow who soon wishes ne never signed up for the job.

   Unfortunately while the solution to the mystery sounds possible, if you think about it more than once, the killer really had to have been quite lucky to have pulled it off. John Dickson Carr / Carter Dickson was also a master of using exactly the right word in his stories, often just managing for them to qualify as “fair play” puzzles.

   Take this line, for example, which comes early on. [WARNING: Plot Alert Ahead]. When he uses the sentence “That was the admitted fact,” which is precisely correct, but not in the way the reader reads it the way Carr/Dickson wants him to. Clever? It’s the key to unraveling the whole case.

   And if you think this is a complaint, you’d be wrong. It’s like a wicked clue in a crossword puzzle, one if you see it the right way, it’s easy. Otherwise, not. Misdirection? It’s the name of the game.

CARTER DICKSON – The Punch and Judy Murders. Sir Henry Merrivale #5. William Morrow & Co., US, hardcover, 1937. Pocket #219, US, paperback; 1st printing, March 1943. Berkley, paperback, April 1964. International Polygonics, paperback, 1988. First published in the UK as The Magic Lantern Murders by Wm Heinemann, hardcover, 1936.

   There is no locked room or impossible crime in this early adventure of Sir Henry Merrivale, but there is certainly everything else but. Two men being watched by the police die simultaneously, 70 miles apart, poisoned by strychnine. Psychic research is hinted at.

   I really enjoyed this one. On page 185 (of the Pocket edition) even though many of the apparently unexplainable happenings have already been explained, there is what amounts to one final “Challenge to the Reader,” wherein H. M. invites both of his fellow investigators to name the killer. Each of them names another person, and each of them has a finely worked set of motives and opportunities to support their suggestions.

   They’re both wrong, of course, but not Merrivale. He’s right on the money. Me, I wasn’t even close. Fooled again, and I think it’s terrific! There are so many things going on, and so quickly, that the short summary that takes up all of page 67 is a must. This is detective fiction for dyed-in-the-wool detective fiction fans at its finest.

   What’s more, what I think is also unique about John Dickson Carr’s work is that while he always wrote rationally based detective fiction, his stories always seem to take place in a setting and an atmosphere producing more shivers and chills than any other mystery writer I know.