JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Eight of Swords. Dr. Gideon Fell #3. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1934. Paperback reprints include: Detective Novel Classic #32, digest-sized, circa 1942; Berkley G-48, 1957; Collier AS466V, 1962; Zebra, August 1986.

   This early Carr novel seems to show the author still trying to find his voice, and not quite succeeding. Even though it has a deliciously complicated puzzle plots, I don’t consider this to be one of his better ones.

   It starts out in broad farce, with a house party being remembered by all those present with the sight of a bishop sliding down a banister and a poltergeist popping a vicar in the eye with a bottle in ink, and ends in a much darker mood with what Carr believes to be authentic American gangsters having a shootout on the same estate in the dead of night.

   The dead man (for there is one) was a reclusive gent who tried his best to fit into proper British society, but never quite did. There is no locked room in this story, but the circumstances surrounding his murder is so complicated it takes a whole crew of detectives to sort it all out.

   There is Fell himself, of course, as both a shabby, comic figure and the most brilliant man in the room; the bishop, an amateur criminologist par excellence, at least in his own mind; his son, whom he sent to Columbia University to learn criminology but who never attended a class; and a mystery writer named Henry Morgan, who along with his charming wife decides that solving a real life crime may be as much fun as writing one.

   There is also a ginch involved, a term invented (I believe) by none other than John Dickson Carr, an absolutely delectable girl the bishop’s son falls in love with at first sight. She has very little to do with the story, but every one of Carr’s heroes needs a ginch on hand to keep bth the romantic aspects covered and his mind otherwise occupied.

   But any of Carr’s tales, no matter how he tells them, depends on the solution, and this one’s a doozy. It takes 19 pages to explain this one, and I have to admit I was nowhere close to figuring this one out. Stories relying on too may people doing too many unusual things on the same night as they do in this book could never happen in real life, but if you can get over that not insignificant hurdle, final chapters like this ought to be remembered forever.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Case of the Constant Suicides. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1941. H. Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprints include: Dell #91, mapback, n.d. [1945]; Berkley #G-60, 1957; Collier, 1963; Perennial, 1989.

   Both author John Dickson Carr and leading character Dr. Gideon Fell are in fine form in this one, what with two locked room deaths and very nearly a third. As it turns out the first is a suicide that masquerades as a murder (a disputed fact that is of utmost importance to both the dead man’s attorney and his insurance agent, as well as the surviving relatives). In a second instance, a repeat of the first, the victim survives but barely, and the third is a case of murder very cleverly disguised at a suicide.

   The scene is Scotland, a location (and language) that Carr has a lot of fun with, as well as with two distant cousins who are feuding academics who tumble across each other in a blacked-out train on the trip northward to the dead man’s small fortress of a castle. He had earlier been found dead after falling out of his bedroom located in a high turret, with the room itself solidly bolted on the inside.

   Carr’s penchant for broad humor is on full display throughout, and of course one fair lass is referred to as a “wench,” but I guarantee you that there’s no way he ignores the puzzle aspect of the case, one which seems to have Dr. Fell perplexed a little more than usual — and if he doesn’t seem to have the answers right away, then pity the poor reader.

   Between you and me, though, while all the clues are there, the solution to the matter seems a little more forced than the best of Carr’s works. But as any fan of the author knows full well, a little less than his best is better than 98% of what the competition has to offer.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Till Death Do Us Part. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1944. H. Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1944. US paperback reprints include: Bantam #793, 1950; Bantam Books #1683, November 1957; International Polygonics Ltd., April 1985.

   If this isn’t John Dickson Carr at his wicked best, playing the game of cat and mouse in what was to him grandest game in the world, fooling the unwary reader at every turn — and even the wary ones, I’m willing to wager — it comes awfully close to it.

   There’s always a romance in his novels, often between a young man who is in head over heels in love with a young woman, one Lesley Grant in this case, and she in him — or so it seems. Dick Markham’s world is shaken upside down when he’s told that his betrothed may be the murderer of three earlier husbands, each found dead, killed by injections of prussic acid, in rooms that are so hermetically sealed that not even the famed Doctor Gideon Fell has been able to say how it could have been murder.

   If that weren’t enough, the next morning Sir Harvey Gilman, the Home Office pathologist who warned young Dick about his fiancée, is found dead in exactly the same circumstances as the crimes he accused Lesley of committing. It has to be murder — and could Lesley have done it? — but how?

   Almost every character in this superbly atmospheric novel comes under suspicion in some form or another at some time or another, and as always interruptions always occur just as a vital question is asked. Almost every chapter ends as the tables are turned on what we thought we know before. Keep an eye on everything that happens, and I mean everything. The clues are all there. I’ll bet you’ll never spot them.

   The solution to the locked room itself? Well, it’s complicated, but I’m sure it will work, and naturally knowing how the magician did it can often be a letdown. Please don’t let it. This a brilliant piece of work.

   Not long ago I felt the urge to read another novel by that king of the humdrums, John Rhode (1884-1964) and, from the specimens on my shelves, chose THE CLAVERTON AFFAIR (1933). Judging by Rhode’s foremost admirers, it was an excellent choice. “A fine example of good early Priestley,” say Barzun & Taylor in A CATALOGUE OF CRIME. “The puzzle is sound, the atmosphere menacing in a splendidly gloomy way, and the treatment of spiritualistic seances above reproach….[This is] a book to hang onto.” I found it somewhat less impressive.

   As in almost every one of the Rhode novels, the protagonist is curmudgeonly Dr. Priestley, whose rarely seen first name is Lancelot and who is not a doctor, at least not a physician. Paying a visit to his old friend Sir John Claverton, Priestley discovers newly ensconced on the premises Sir John’s estranged sister, who’s a psychic medium, and her daughter, who is nursing him through some gastric problems.

   His physician Dr. Oldland, soon to become a regular character in the series, tells Priestley in confidence that the cause of Sir John’s most serious attack was arsenic. A few days later Sir John dies. Priestley naturally enough suspects another dose of arsenic but medical tests rule out that poison conclusively. Sir John had recently changed his will, replacing what had been a simple testament with an exceedingly strange one. After two seances, the second rigged by Priestley, our sleuth solves the puzzle and the murderer obligingly confesses the whole plot.

   For the most part THE CLAVERTON AFFAIR is on a par with the dozens of other Rhodes. One aspect that makes it unusual is that there are only three suspects, hardly enough for a book that runs more than 270 pages. Another is that the soporific prose is marred by some grammatical lapses of the sort one rarely encounters in the humdrums. “I should like, if possible, to see this Doctor Oldland, whom you say was attending Sir John.” “But that wasn’t the worse.”

   What surprised me more than the moments of bad grammar was some unusual dialogue. Here speaking to Priestley is a man who left his wife for a wealthy younger woman. “I honestly believe that an impartial deity would count her [i.e. the wife’s] petty suffering a very small thing to put against our surpassing happiness.”

   And here is a married woman who had an affair and a child with another man while her husband was overseas in World War I. “…I’m proud of every moment that we spent together. I wouldn’t give up a single one of my memories to save myself from eternal damnation….To me, he was the most wonderful lover that ever lived!” Sentiments like these are rare to say the least in a detective novel more than 80 years old. Is it possible that a stodgy Brit like Rhode was host to an inner swinger?

   There is no Rhode biography and it’s hard to believe that someone who wrote so many books actually had a life, but apparently he did. One of his closest friends among crime novelists was John Dickson Carr, who said of Rhode that he “once boasted of being the Detection Club’s heaviest member, always excepting G.K. Chesterton. I have watched him polish off ten pints of beer before lunch, and more than that after dinner.” I gather from the Web that for many years he lived with a woman whom he married only after his first wife’s death. Swinger indeed!

   In a letter from decades ago, novelist and playwright Ira Levin (1929-2007) described Rhode to me as “still my favorite narcotic and traveling companion.” For me he doesn’t fit well in that slot. Why? Because you can’t read Rhode without keeping your mind engaged to a certain extent. At bedtime and on the road I prefer Peter Cheyney (1896-1951), at least when he’s writing about that rootin’ tootin’ two-gun shootin’ G-man Lemmy Caution.

   Cheyney was blessed with the un-British gift of chutzpah: knowing nothing about the U.S. or the American language, he cranked out a whole series of novels with an allegedly Yank narrator who not only writes in first person but in present tense in what his creator fondly imagined to be the manner of Damon Runyon. I’ve found that the best way to read a Lemmy Caution exploit is to start with the first couple of chapters and then skip around, on the prowl for the Cheyneyisms with which the books are strewn.

   Recently I pulled down my tattered copy of the second Cautionary tale, POISON IVY (1937), which seems never to have been published on this side of the pond. With superhuman restraint I’ll limit myself to quoting seven splendiferous sentences.

      â€œIt sounds to me like a pipe dream from a police nose.”

      â€œToo many guys have had to use hair restorer over goin’ out and meeting a whole lot of grief before it got there.”

      â€œI reckon that they think I’m the cat’s lingerie.”

      â€œLemmy Caution without a Luger under his arm is about as much use as a lump of pickled pork to a rabbi.”

      â€œHe is a big guy with a derby hat an’ he is smilin’ and lookin’ as happy as a sandboy.”

      â€œIf you start anything I reckon I’m goin’ to fill you so full of holes that you’ll think you was a nutmeg grater.”

      â€œWell, sweetheart, if you’re a lady then I’m the King of Siam gettin’ himself elected President of Cuba in a snowstorm.”

   Take that, Raul Castro! And the next time you meet a sandboy, toss him a lump of pickled pork.

   I quoted John Dickson Carr a few pages ago so it’s only fair that I close this column with him too. THE THIRD BULLET is of an unusual length that Carr had never attempted before or since, much shorter than any of his novels but considerably longer than, say, most of the Nero Wolfe novelets.

   It was first published under his Carter Dickson byline in 1937, the same year as Cheyney’s POISON IVY, in a short-lived series of Hodder & Stoughton paperback originals advertised as “new at ninepence.” The only other title in the series likely to be familiar to mystery fans was Margery Allingham’s THE CASE OF THE LATE PIG.

   The detective in Allingham’s contribution was the well-established Albert Campion but Carr’s sleuth was a newcomer, Colonel Marquis, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and something of a rough sketch for the better known Colonel March of Dickson’s later Department of Queer Complaints stories.

   A retired judge is found shot to death in the pavilion behind his Hampstead house. The room is locked — how could it be anything else in a Carr story? — and its only other occupant is a man whom a few years earlier the judge had sentenced to be flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails and who’s found carrying a pistol with one shot fired. He claims that the shot from his pistol had missed and that a third person had fired the fatal bullet with a second gun, which is discovered in the room. There’s a bullet hole in the judge and another, from a different weapon, in one wall of the pavilion.

   But medical evidence establishes that the fatal bullet was fired from yet a third weapon, which is nowhere to be found. Colonel Marquis solves the puzzle neatly, although I doubt that one reader in a million could anticipate his solution and it’s hard to imagine anyone except a Carr character devising a scheme like the one at the center of this story.

   The tale never appeared in the U.S. until after World War II, when Fred Dannay published a heavily edited version in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for January 1948 — edited, I should add, with Carr’s approval. “[D]on’t you think you had better do a lot of cutting?” he wrote Fred. “I remember being uncomfortably verbose in those days.”

   By that time Carr had apparently lost all copies of the Hodder & Stoughton version, which means that Fred must have edited from a carbon of the typescript. It was the Dannay condensation that was used when the tale appeared as the lead item in the Carr collection THE THIRD BULLET AND OTHER STORIES (Harper, 1954) and in all subsequent reprints until Douglas G. Greene included the full original version in FELL AND FOUL PLAY (International Polygonics, 1991).

   Anthony Boucher in the New York Times Book Review (May 30, 1954) described the condensed version as “a somewhat conventional but admirably detailed and intricate locked-room puzzle, ranking as good Grade B Carr.” Barzun & Taylor in A CATALOGUE OF CRIME said: “It is ingenious but told without vim.” By that I assume they meant that it lacks the Poesque atmospheric touches that distinguish so many of Carr’s early novels, as indeed it does, although there’s a tad more atmosphere in the uncut version that only became available after these comments were written.

   THE THIRD BULLET may not be in the same league with Carr classics like THE THREE COFFINS (1935) or THE CROOKED HINGE (1938), but it’s a smooth specimen of the kind of story that will still be linked with JDC when our great-grandkids are reading him on their wristwatch computers as they rocket their way to other galaxies.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Crooked Hinge. The Mystery Library #2, University Extension: Univ. of California at San Diego, hardcover, 1976. Introduction, with notes and checklist, by Robert E. Briney. Illustrations by Dick Connor. Originally published by Harper, US, hardcover, 1938 (shown); H. Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted many times.

   The second in The Mystery Library’s series of reprints is another quality job, and the book itself is a good one. Twenty-five years before the story begins John Farnleigh was packed off to America on the Titanic. He survived and stayed in America, as he was the black sheep of the family, returning only when he inherited the family estate and title.

   Now, a year later, a man shows up claiming to be the real Sir John Farnleigh. On the night the confrontation takes place to determine the impostor, the first Farnleigh is murdered. Dr. Gideon Fell, somewhat less outrageous here than usual, must determine who killed him (or was it suicide?), and why.

   There is also a possible tie-in with another murder that happened a year earlier, and a number of Carr’s usual strange elements. These include an automaton based on Maelzel’s famous Chess Player, a local coven (?), and a truly bizarre solution. An engrossing book.

   For no reason I can put my finger on, I recently felt an urge to reread some of Dashiell Hammett’s shorter work. Again for no particular reason, my starting point was not a Continental Op story but “The Assistant Murderer,” which was first published in Black Mask for February 1926 and is most easily accessed today in Hammett’s Crime Stories & Other Writings (Library of America, 2001).

   In his only published exploit, spectacularly ugly Baltimore PI Alec Rush is retained by a young banker to find out why someone is shadowing a gal he’s sweet on but was forced to fire. Soon Rush discovers that the shadow has been paid by two different women to kill the gal in question.

   From there the plot gets more convoluted by the minute. The journal I kept in my salad days tells me that I first read this novelette early in 1965, not long after my 22nd birthday and during my first year in law school. Back then I loved it. Half a century later I still like it but perhaps with a bit less enthusiasm.

   What I found most interesting today is not so much the plot or characterizations or style but the legal aspects. Which, like those of another Hammett story I discussed in an earlier column, leave something to be desired.

   To explain where Hammett went off the tracks requires me to spoil some of the plot, but I’ll try to minimize the spoliation by translating the situation into a sort of law examination question. A, who died long before the story begins, left an estate of roughly $2,000,000, a princely sum back in the early 20th century and not to be sneezed at even today.

   He had two sons, B and C. His will created a trust excluding B, whose lifestyle he disapproved of, and naming C as sole income beneficiary. The will specified that C was free to share the income with B to whatever extent he chose, which he would have been free to do anyway.

   Typically for a Hammett character, C had chosen to keep the entire income for himself. B dies, a widower survived by a daughter whom we’ll call D. Under A’s will, on C’s death the corpus of the trust is to be divided among A’s grandchildren. Since C is unmarried and childless, this means that on his death everything will go to D. As chance would have it, D is married to a sort of Iago figure who manipulates her into killing Uncle C.

   The husband’s scheme doesn’t require that his wife D be tagged for the murder but whether she is or isn’t leaves him cold. “If they hanged her,” he tells Rush at the climax, “the two million would come to me. If she got a long term in prison, I’d have the handling of the money at least.”

   Wrong, Dash! If D were to be convicted of C’s murder, the old common-law maxim that you can’t profit by your own crime would come into play, and the A trust fund would wind up by intestate succession in the hands of various remote relatives of whose identity Hammett tells us nothing. In the absence of such relatives, the fund would probably end up in the coffers of the state of Maryland by a process known as escheat.

   But suppose D were only suspected of the murder. Suppose she were never tried for it, or were tried and acquitted, or were convicted but had her conviction overturned on appeal? Could those remote relatives or the state of Maryland sue to divest her of the inheritance in civil court, where her guilt would have to be proved by a mere preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt as in a criminal trial?

   You may well ask! I used to throw out that kind of question to my class when I was teaching Decedents’ Estates and Trusts, but this column is already sinking under the weight of legalese and I won’t deal with that issue unless someone asks me to.

   Another aspect of “The Assistant Murderer” that intrigued me was: How many turns of phrase in this almost 90-year-old story need to be explained to readers today? At one point a lowlife tells Alec Rush that “A certain party comes to me with a knock-down from a party that knows me.”

   The Library of America editors explain that a knock-down is slang for an introduction. But a few pages further on, Rush says: “I can see just enough to get myself tangled up if I don’t watch Harvey.” There is no character named Harvey in the story. Did the Library of America people feel that the meaning of this phrase would be clear to readers?

   It certainly wasn’t to me. But googling the two words along with Hammett’s name led me to A Dashiell Hammett Companion (Greenwood Press, 2000) by Robert L. Gale, who calls it “an inexplicable reference.” I concur. And in caps!

   Let’s migrate from one end of the crime spectrum to the other. I scrutinized every line of James E. Keirans’ John Dickson Carr Companion before it was published but somehow I missed the absence of one Carr adaptation that Keirans missed too. Among the flood of TV PI shows that followed in the wake of Peter Gunn was Markham (1959-60), a 30-minute series starring suave Ray Milland as lawyer-turned-private-investigator Roy Markham.

   Most of the scripts for the 59 episodes of this series were originals but a few were based on published short stories by well-known writers — including Ed Lacy and Henry Slesar — and one was adapted from a Carr radio drama. In “The Phantom Archer” (March 31, 1960) an English nobleman calls on Markham to help fight a ghostly archer who is roaming the halls of a historic manor.

   Carr’s radio play of the same name was first heard on the CBS series Suspense (March 9, 1943) and the script was published in EQMM for June 1948 and collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980). Who directed and scripted this Markham episode remain unknown but the cast included Murray Matheson and Eunice Gayson. There are eleven references to “The Phantom Archer” in the index to Keirans’ book but there should have been a twelfth.

   Thanks to being on the road – -among other places, in New York where I’ll attend the MWA annual dinner and find out if I’m going to be the proud recipient of a third Edgar — I need to hold this down to a mini-column. It’s an ancient tradition that when a professor has to miss a class or two, one leaves a homework assignment for the students. You’ll find mine in the next item.

   What an amazing age we live in! I never thought anything could be added to the checklist of adaptations of Cornell Woolrich stories from the golden age of live TV drama that appeared almost thirty years ago in my FIRST YOU DREAM, THEN YOU DIE. Now I’ve just stumbled upon a Woolrich-based teledrama that I had never heard of before.

   Not just a reference to it but the episode itself, and one whose origin was a Woolrich tale I had never known was adapted for TV. It’s available on DVD (SUSPENSE: THE LOST EPISODES, COLLECTION 3) and on YouTube to boot.

   â€œGoodbye, New York” was based on the first-rate Woolrich story of the same name (Story Magazine, October 1937). A Web write-up of the DVD describes it as evoking a mood of “grim…noir-esque despair,” which certainly makes it sound faithful to its source. Meg Mundy starred in the 30-minute drama, which featured Gage Clarke, Philip Coolidge and an unbilled Ray Walston.

   Like 90-odd other SUSPENSE episodes, it was directed by Robert Stevens (1920-1989), who later helmed dozens of filmed episodes of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. (Stevens died in his late sixties after being robbed and beaten by unknown assailants.) As shown on YouTube the episode doesn’t include an air date, but according to other Web sources it was the pilot for the series, broadcast on January 6, 1949, which apparently means that it’s the earliest TV version of any Woolrich tale.

   YouTube claims that Woolrich’s story was also the basis for the 1952 Hollywood feature BEWARE, MY LOVELY, starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, but this is flat-out wrong; the literary source for that picture was Mel Dinelli’s “The Man” which, funnily enough, also first appeared in Story Magazine (May-June 1945).

   Here’s your homework assignment: When you’ve finished reading this column, watch the YouTube video and see if you agree that perhaps the earliest contribution to TV noir has been unearthed.

   If you have it handy you might want to read the Woolrich story too. It closes with lines that come as close as anything to capturing his world in a few words. “Two doomed things, running away. From nothingness, into nothingness….Turn back we dare not, stand still they wouldn’t let us, and to go forward was our destruction at our own hands.”

   There’s just space for a couple of bits of information that I promised to include this month, dealing with adaptations of John Dickson Carr for 60-minute broadcasts during the golden age of live teledrama. The first of these was seen on the CBS anthology series STUDIO ONE the night of January 7, 1952. “The Devil in Velvet” was directed by Paul Nickell from a teleplay by Sumner Locke Elliott based on Carr’s 1951 historical thriller of the same name. The stars were Whit Bissell, Phyllis Kirk and Joan Wetmore.

   Apparently there were no more hour-long Carr adaptations until more than six years later when another CBS anthology series presented a version of by far the best known and most popular Carr radio play, “Cabin B-13″ (CLIMAX!, June 26, 1958). Shortly after a newlywed couple board a luxury liner for their honeymoon cruise, the man vanishes along with the fortune his wife gave him as a wedding present.

   She reports his disappearance to the captain and is told that there’s no record of either herself or her husband as passengers and that what she claims to have been their cabin doesn’t exist. Heading the cast were Barry Sullivan (Dr. Edwards), Kim Hunter (Ann Brewster), Alex Nicol (Robert Brewster), Hurd Hatfield (Morini) and Sebastian Cabot (Capt. Wilkins). The original Carr radio play is easily available both in audio and script form.

   Apparently the last hour-long live Carr adaptation on American TV was aired on NBC’s DOW HOUR OF GREAT MYSTERIES, a short-lived series that aired once a month for seven months during the last year of the Eisenhower administration, by which time live TV drama was pretty much dead.

   Second of the seven episodes was “The Burning Court” (April 24, 1960). The adaptation of Carr’s classic 1937 novel of the same name was by Audrey and William Roos, who were well known for collaborating on whodunits as Kelley Roos. Paul Nickell once again directed. The cast boasted four top names: Barbara Bel Geddes (Marie Stevens), Robert Lansing (Edward Stevens), George C. Scott (Gordon Cross), and Anne Seymour (Mrs. Henderson).

   I can’t remember a thing about this show, probably because I was watching MAVERICK or something that night.

   I own very few European crime novels in both their original language and in English, but one of those is Der Richter und Sein Henker or, as it’s known over here, The Judge and His Hangman (1952; U.S. edition 1955), the first novel of Swiss playwright Friedrich Duerrenmatt (1921-1990).

   I read it in both languages many years ago and again last month. It’s about Hans Bärlach (whose last name in English is missing the umlaut), Kommissär of the Swiss police, a man clearly near death, and his 40-year-long struggle against a sort of existential criminal who committed a motiveless murder in front of the Kommissär’s eyes and dared Bärlach to pin it on him.

   More than sixty years after its first publication the book is still a compelling read, and the German edition (designed for students who are learning the language) adds several dimensions to what readers of the translation are offered, including two maps that make clear the relationship to each other of the various small towns near Bern where much of the story takes place.

   Reading the German side by side with Therese Pol’s English version also reveals where Pol now and then goes her own way. At the end of Chapter 11 (Chapter 8 in the translation), the diabolical Gastmann breaks into Bärlach’s house beside the Aare River and steals the Kommissär’s file on him. “I’m sure you have no copies or photostats. I know you too well, you don’t operate that way.”

   A procedural this novel ain’t. He throws a knife at Bärlach, just missing him, and goes his way. “The old man crept about the room like a wounded animal, floundering across the rug on his hands and knees…, his body covered with a cold sweat.” He moans softly in German: “Was ist der Mensch? Was ist der Mensch?” This simply means “What is man? What is man?” but Therese Pol expands it to: “What sort of animal is man? What sort of animal?”

   That’s not too much of a stretch compared with the last chapter where Bärlach learns that his young assistant Tschanz “sei zwischen Ligerz und Twann unter seinem von Zug erfassten Wagen tot aufgefunden worden,” meaning that between two of the villages shown on the first map he was found dead under his car, which had been struck by a train.

   In English the report is simply “that Tschanz had been found dead under his wrecked car….” The train has vanished, but at least Ms. Pol doesn’t make up Duerrenmatt’s mind for him on whether Tschanz’s death was an accident or suicide. Such are the joys of reading a book in two languages at once. If only my French were good enough to allow me to read Simenon in his own tongue!

   You don’t need to be a linguist to catch some amazing blunders in the versions of Simenon that we get to see. In L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre, first published in French in 1931 and first translated by Margaret Ludwig as The Saint-Fiacre Affair in the double volume Maigret Keeps a Rendezvous (1941), a threat on the life of a countess brings Maigret back to the village where he was born and raised.

   Very early in the morning he wakes up in the village inn and, purely for professional reasons, gets ready to attend Mass in the church where he’d been an altar boy. He goes downstairs and, in one of the later translations, the innkeeper asks him: “Are you going to communicate?” Even one who knows no French and nothing of Catholicism should be able to render the question in English better than that.

   I don’t remember the title of the novel or who translated it but I vividly recall another Simenon where Maigret wakes up in yet another country inn and phones down for, as he puts it in English, “my little lunch.” Again, you don’t need to know more than a soupçon of French to figure out what the translation of petit déjeuner should be.

   As this column is being cobbled together I’m in the middle of going over The John Dickson Carr Companion. And learning some odd trivia about Carr’s novels and stories that had never struck me before. How many of you remember that in the Carter Dickson novel She Died a Lady a gardener claims that on the previous night he went to see the movie Quo Vadis? The book was published in 1943 but, according to the Companion, its events take place in 1940.

   Either way, Carr certainly couldn’t have been referring to the Quo Vadis? that we remember today if we remember the title at all, the 1951 Biblical spectacular that starred Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr. There was a German silent version of the same story, released in 1924 and starring Emil Jannings, but what would a German silent be doing playing in England long after silents had been displaced by talkies and at a time when England and Germany were at war? More important question: What was Carr thinking?

   The adaptations of Carr’s work dating back to the golden age of live TV drama back in the Fifties are not covered in the Companion, at least not in any detail. I happen to have some information on that subject, and chance has now given me an excuse to share it. Anyone remember Danger?

   It was a 30-minute anthology of live teledramas, broadcast on CBS for five seasons (1950-55). My parents hadn’t yet bought their first set when the series began, and when it went off the air I was a child of 12 who hadn’t yet even discovered Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan at my local library.

   I don’t think I ever watched the program, certainly not with any regularity, but I vaguely remember that one of its shticks was a background score of solo guitar music played by a guy named Tony Mottola (1918-2004). Obviously the producers of the show were hoping to duplicate the success of the CBS radio and TV classic Suspense, and the two Carr tales that were broadcast on Danger happened to be radio plays that he had written for Suspense back in the Forties. “Charles Markham, Antique Dealer” (January 2, 1951), was based on the radio play “Mr. Markham, Antique Dealer” (Suspense, May 1, 1943) and starred Jerome Thor, Marianne Stewart and Richard Fraser.

   The director was Ted Post (1918-2013), who later moved into filmed TV series like Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel and Rawhide and, thanks to impressing Clint Eastwood with his Rawhide work, got hired to direct big-budget Eastwood features like Hang ’em High (1968) and Magnum Force (1973).

   We don’t know who directed “Will You Walk Into My Parlor?” (February 27, 1951) but it came from Carr’s radio drama of the same name (Suspense, February 23, 1943). The script was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1945, and collected in Dr. Fell, Detective and Other Stories (1947) and, after Carr’s death, in The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983).

   The cast was headed by Geraldine Brooks, Joseph Anthony and Laurence Hugo. Among the other top-rank mystery writers whose stories were adapted for Danger were Philip MacDonald, Wilbur Daniel Steele, A.H.Z. Carr, Anthony Boucher, MacKinlay Kantor, Steve Fisher, Q. Patrick, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Roald Dahl.

   The roster of authors who scripted original teleplays for the series included Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose and Rod Serling, and among the directors who rose from this and other live teledramas to Hollywood household-name status were John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet.

   The final episode of Danger was a live version of Daphne DuMaurier’s 1952 short story “The Birds,” which Alfred Hitchcock later adapted into one of his best-known films. I can’t imagine anything like Hitchcock’s bird effects being possible on live TV, but either I was watching something else on the night of May 31, 1955 or I went to bed early. If anything from this series is available on DVD, I haven’t heard of it.

   Considering the dozens of scripts Carr wrote for Suspense as a radio series, one might have expected a pile of his radio scripts and short stories to have been used when the program became a staple item on prime-time TV.

   In fact only one of his radio dramas and one of his short tales were adapted for the small screen. Among the earliest of the TV show’s episodes was “Cabin B-13″ (March 16, 1949), which starred Charles Korvin and Eleanor Lynn and was based on perhaps the best known and most successful Carr radio drama, first heard on Suspense on May 25, 1943 and collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980).

   The second and final Carr contribution to Suspense was “The Adventure of the Black Baronet” (May 26, 1953), an adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story written by Carr in collaboration with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Adrian (who according to Douglas G. Greene’s Carr biography did most of the writing) and first published in Collier’s for May 23, 1953, just a few days before the televersion.

   As might have been expected, Basil Rathbone reprised his movie and radio role as Holmes. It might also have been expected that Nigel Bruce would have played Dr. Watson as he had so many times in the movies and on radio. I don’t know why he didn’t, but since he died only a few months later (October 8, 1953), the reason might have had to do with his health. In any event the Watson of this Suspense episode was played by Martyn Green of Gilbert & Sullivan fame.

   As far as I’ve been able to find, Carr’s contributions to 30-minute live TV drama are limited to these four episodes. If any of his short stories or radio plays became the bases of filmed 30-minute dramas, I haven’t found them. There are two fairly well-known teledramas at greater than 30-minute length that owe their origins to Carr, but this column is long enough already so I’ll save them for next time.

   Usually I try to have my column finished by the end of each month so it can be posted around the beginning of the next, but having a February column ready by late January proved impossible. Reason One: To my surprise and delight, a book of mine that came out last year, a little trifle called Judges & Justice & Lawyers & Law, was nominated for an Edgar by Mystery Writers of America, which meant that first I had to decide whether at my advanced age I wanted to come to New York late in April for the Edgars dinner, and second that I had to find a decent place to stay that wouldn’t cost me a pair of limbs that I still need.

   Reason Two: I was recently asked to write something for the 75th anniversary issue of EQMM, which comes out next year, and have been spending time trying to cobble something together that would be worthy of the occasion. I’m happy to report that the piece is coming along nicely.

   Reason Three: I’m also trying to put the final touches on another book — one that has nothing to do with our genre and wouldn’t be nominated for an Edgar even if pigs started to fly — and last-minute glitches have been gathering on the horizon like Hitchcock’s birds.

   Reason Four: Keep reading.

   Reason Five: I simply couldn’t think of anything relevant to the genre that I wanted to say, so finally I decided to give up the idea of a February column and shoot for March. Bang.

   A number of years ago I devoted part of a column to a Stuart Palmer story, now more than 80 years old, which begins at a St. Patrick’s Day parade on which the APRIL sun is shining down. I couldn’t imagine how that howler got past any editor but at least took comfort from the fact that the story never appeared in EQMM and therefore that the gaffe didn’t get by the eagle eye of Fred Dannay, probably the most meticulous editor the genre has ever seen.

   A week or two ago I stumbled upon another Palmer story for which I can’t say the same. “The Riddle of the Green Ice” first appeared in the Chicago Tribune (April 13, 1941) but was reprinted in Volume 1 Number 2 of EQMM (Winter 1941-42) and included in The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (Jonathan pb #J26, 1947), a paperback collection Fred edited.

   In the first scene the display window of a jewelry store on Manhattan’s 57th Street is smashed and the thief gets away. Palmer specifically tells us that the robbery took place on a “rainy Saturday afternoon”. A few pages later he gives us a scene that occurs on the following Monday, which he solemnly assures us is “four days after the shattering of the jewelers’ window….”

   Yikes! How in the world could an eagle-eyed editor like Fred Dannay have missed that? Palmer’s story also appears in Fred’s collection The Female of the Species (1943), and sure enough the same gaffe pops up in that printing. Double yikes!!

   In another column dating back a few years I wrote that of all the authors Anthony Boucher reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle back in the 1940s, Ray Bradbury, who had just died, was probably the last person standing. Recently I learned I was wrong. Surviving Bradbury by several years was Helen Eustis, author of the Edgar-winning novel The Horizontal Man (1946), who died on January 11 of this year at age 98.

   Well, technically perhaps I wasn’t wrong. The book was published during Boucher’s tenure at the Chronicle and he mentioned it a few times, for example when MWA awarded it the best-novel Edgar, but he never actually reviewed it for the paper. I wonder who did. Except for her later novel The Fool Killer (1954), Eustis never wrote anything else in our genre. Our loss.

   For anyone like me who began seriously reading mysteries in the Eisenhower era, the name of John Dickson Carr was then and still is one to conjure with. He’s been dead since 1977, but no one has yet come close to taking over his position as the premier practitioner of the locked-room and impossible-crime type of detective novel.

   We never met but I remain eternally grateful to him not only for giving me countless hours of reading pleasure, but also for telling his readers that in a small way I reciprocated. In the last full year of his life he reviewed my first novel for his EQMM column (March 1976) and called it the most attractive mystery he’d read in months.

   Since his death he’s been the subject of at least two major books: Douglas G. Greene’s biography The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995) and S.T. Joshi’s John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study (1990). Now those volumes are about to be joined by a third. James E. Keirans’ The John Dickson Carr Companion will run around 400 pages and include an entry for every novel, short story and published radio play in the canon and just about every important character in any of the above, not to mention sections on such subjects as Carr-related alcoholic beverages, automobiles, weapons, London landmarks and Latin quotations.

   How do I know so much about this as yet unpublished book? Because I’ve been asked by the publisher (Ramble House) to run my aging eyes over the book in pdf form and make any corrections I think it needs. That, amigos, is Reason Four behind the absence of a February column. I don’t know precisely when the Companion will be ready for prime time, but my best guess is a few months from now.

   I haven’t finished going over the entire book yet but there’s one Carr-related literary incident that I’m willing to bet Keirans doesn’t mention. To know about it you have to have read the published volume of the correspondence between the Russian emigre novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) and the distinguished literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972). Nabokov — or, as Wilson called him, Volodya — was fond of mystery fiction; Wilson — or, as Nabokov called him, Bunny — hated it.

   In a letter dated December 10, 1943 and addressed to Wilson and his then wife, novelist Mary McCarthy, Nabokov indicates that he’d recently read a whodunit entitled The Judas Window. The title of course is that of the novel published in 1938 under Carr’s pseudonym of Carter Dickson, but Nabokov’s letter seems to indicate that he thought the book had been written by McCarthy.

   â€œI did not think much of [it], Mary. It is not your best effort…. [T]hat lucky shot through the keyhole is not quite convincing and you ought to have found something better.” How could such a mistake have happened? Wouldn’t the Dickson byline have been on any copy Nabokov might have read? However it happened, you’d expect that either Wilson or McCarthy would quickly have corrected Nabokov’s misapprehension.

   But in fact there’s not another word about the book anywhere in the correspondence, and the editor of the collection of letters, Prof. Simon Karlinsky, was unfamiliar with detective fiction and printed Nabokov’s words without comment. Somehow I wound up with a copy of the first edition of the correspondence (Harper, 1979) and wrote to Prof. Karlinsky with a correction. In the revised and expanded edition (University of California Press, 2001), both Carr and I are acknowledged in footnotes to the Nabokov letter.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Poison in Jest. Harper, US, hardcover, 1932. H. Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1932. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft.

   The magic word in describing the prose of John Dickson Carr is “atmosphere.” His stories always seem to be taking place in dark and dreary locales even when the sun is shining brightly. Let me quote from pages 28-29 of the British Penguin paperback I’ve just read:

   According to Hubin, this early novel is a non-series one, but the narrator is the same Jeff Marle who assisted Henri Bencolin, the head of the Paris police, in several earlier cases. (This one takes place somewhere in Pennsylvania, and Bencolin does not appear.)

   Even though Marle does his investigative best on the cae of domestic poisonings, he does not have the makings of a true Carr detective Neither does the county detective, Joe Sargent, who is called in. They see things too straight-forwardly, and the fail to see what things really mean.

   It falls upon a friend of the family’s youngest daughter Virginia, an eccentric chap named Rossiter, to come upon the scene and ferret out the truth. In the grand tradition of Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, Rossiter’s appearance makes him seem nearly potty in his behavior — but as is finally revealed, there is method in his madness. (As the saying goes.)

   I don’t believe that this is one of Carr’s finer attempts at massive misdirection, as he is so prone to do, and the pace is rather stodgy and slow. I realized who had done it on page 154 of the Penguin edition (so that this won’t help you any), and there were still over 60 pages to go. (Which rather proves both points, doesn’t it?)

   On the other hand, second-rate John Dickson Carr (which I”m really implying) is still more interesting to read than 90% of the work produced by anyone else who attempts the rigorous challenge of the old-fashioned fair-play detective mystery.

Note:   In the most recent edition of Crime Fiction IV, Al Hubin now lists Jeff Marle as a series character. In the other five cases in which he takes part, it was always in tandem with Henri Bencolin.