The Burning Court (1937) by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937), published during the Goldilocks years of the Golden Age, enjoys the status of a fan favorite and hailed by its champions as "a standalone tour-de-force" for its unconventional conclusion – ending with a gutsy, genre-defying twist. Carr reportedly claimed (Douglas G. Greene's The Man Who Explained Miracles, 1995) he wrote The Burning Court in response to "a critic who said that no really terrifying supernatural story could have an American setting" and delivered one of the strangest mystery novels of the decade. A strange mystery novel that, as said, has become something of a fan favorite, but the book also has its fair share of critics.

The critic comes down to that final, genre-defying twist. A twist not like other twists of the period that gets applauded by some for its daring brazenness, while others think it ruined a perfectly good detective novel. For example, Nick Fuller noted in his 2003 review how that twist filled "a highly logical and convincing solution" with "all manner of logical holes."

I didn't get to complain about the twisted epilogue, because The Burning Court as a whole failed to impress. Notably the atmosphere. However, I read a Dutch translation at the time, Het lijk in de crypte (The Corpse in the Crypt), and over the years began to suspect something might have been lost in translation – considering its popularity among fans. So decided to get a copy in English and give The Burning Court a retrial.

If memory is not betraying me, I'll say right off the bat the translation was definitely the problem when it comes to the brooding, creepy atmosphere. Just the opening chapter alone is a case in point why Carr himself is a fan favorite as he was the only one who consistently wrote detective yarns that have very little to do with ordinary, everyday life, but crafted highly imaginative and fantastic tales of mystery, wonder and horror presented as fair play detective stories. I suppose you can describe Carr's best and most imaginative works like The Three Coffins (1935), The Arabian Nights Murder (1936), The Crooked Hinge (1938) and The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939) as grounded precursors to the The Twilight Zone (mostly) without the supernatural or extraterrestrial elements. Well, mostly without those elements. And often start out with a fantastic events or outlandish incidents mysterious enough that could sustain a detective story without anyone getting impossibly killed or disappeared. The Burning Court is a perfect example of Carr spinning a very unlikely, but intriguing, yarn and stringing the reader along on one of the most outre detective novels of the 1930s.

The Burning Court, set in 1929, takes place in the fictitious Pennsylvanian town of Crispen where Edward Stevens, of the publishing house Herald & Sons, has a cottage and headed that way to meet his wife, Marie. Stevens has brought along the manuscript of the new Gaudan Cross book. Cross is a hermit writer devoted to retelling the histories of famous murder cases or "unearthing picturesque crimes" with "a narrative vividness which was like that of an eye-witness." And his latest manuscript is dedicated to women poisoners ("...strong stuff") throughout history. So, on his way to the cottage, Stevens looks through the manuscript and is shocked to find an old photograph of his wife accompanying the sensationally-titled chapter "The Affair of the Non-dead Mistress" – photograph is captioned, "Marie D'Aubray: Guillotined for Murder, 1861." Marie D'Aubray is not only the spitting image of Marie Stevens, but she had an identical mole on her jaw and an identical-looking, antique bracelet on her left wrist "he had seen Marie wear a hundred times." Even her expression is uncannily like Marie Stevens.

Was the Marie who was guillotined over seventy years ago a relative of the present-day Marie? Maybe something weirder and unsettling? Stevens is not given much time to consider this extraordinary problem as their next door neighbor, Mark Despard, comes knocking with another problem and an even stranger request.

Old Miles Despard, "that stately reprobate," died two weeks ago from gastro-enteritis, "after reducing the lining of his stomach to a pulp with nearly forty years' high living," but there are some suspicious features to his not entirely unexpected passing. Firstly, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning resemble those of gastro-enteritis. Secondly, the cook, Mrs. Henderson, swears she saw a woman in "queer old-fashioned clothes" standing in Miles' bedroom on the day he died. Mrs. Henderson witnessed the woman handing Miles a cup, turning around and exited through "a door which does not exist." A door bricked up and paneled over for over two hundred years! That's not all. On that night, Mark and his wife, Lucy, went to a masquerade ball at St. Davids. Lucy was dressed as Madame de Montespan in a period clothing.

As noted above, Carr knew how to lay the groundwork for a detective story and this has been merely the prelude. Mark wants to secretly break open the crypt under cover of night and test the body of his uncle for arsenic poison, which is why he brought along a disgraced physician, Mr. Partington. Mark asks Stevens to help them open the crypt together with Mr. Henderson. A four-men job that took two hours and "making a racket fit to wake the dead," but, when they finally can enter the underground crypt, they discover the body of Miles Despard has somehow disappeared from what was supposed to be his final resting place.

What follows has to be one of the most intimate, tightly drawn mysteries Carr has written. Not because of the small pool of potential suspects or their movement being largely limited to a single location, but because the problems they're trying to untangle makes it feel like they're marooned from the rest of the world – like they piece of space-time broke-off from reality. After all, this is a detective story involving dead poisoners decapitated or burnt decades or even centuries ago on order of the Burning Court ("...established to deal with poisoning cases"), talks of the un-dead, witchcraft and satanism. A woman in period dressing making her exit through a phantom door and a dead man inexplicably vanishing from a burial vault closed with a stone slab, soil, gravel and a concrete-sealed pavement ("...which one witness is willing to swear has not been disturbed"). The disappearance, and reappearance, of a bottle of morphine tablets and several pieces of knotted string are fairly normal complications by comparison. But does it all hold up?

First of all, The Burning Court is unquestionably better than I remembered and the problem probably was the translation. However, I don't think The Burning Court is the best (locked room) mystery Carr wrote during this period. The detective portion of the story comes with one hell of a premise and a solid enough plot complimented by a very well done "physical explanation" ("...a thing of sizes and dimensions and stone walls..."). But the locked room trickery is not even the best part. Carr had already put together better, more original locked room mysteries at this point. What makes The Burning Court particularly enjoyable is Carr's often overlooked, maybe even misunderstood, talent to grab the utterly fantastic or otherworldly and whittle it back down to human proportions. Carr exaggerated in order to clarify and find it a very attractive approach to crafting a detective novel or locked room mystery. Like creating a canal system for wild, imaginative ideas to flow freely without swamping half the land/story. Just compare Carr's The Unicorn Murders (1935; as by "Carter Dickson") with John Rhode's Invisible Weapons (1938), which center on similar kind of impossible crimes regarding unseen murder weapons and murderers. Rhode delivered a solid locked room mystery, but I think everyone agrees The Unicorn Murders is the most attractive and memorable of the two.

So with that out of the way, I come to the controversial epilogue kicking open the door to another genre. The short and simple answer is that I didn't care for the twist, but not because I resent Carr trying to mix genres. Something he would go on to do with much more success in his historical time travel mysteries like The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957). You only have to look under the "Hybrid Mysteries" toe-tag to see my growing interest in this rare bird. My problem is that the shocking, genre-defying twist here is just that. A shocking twist for the sake of having a shocking twist, which is never good and Carr is no exception. Fortunately, Carr saved it for the epilogue. So you can take it or leave it. But it's a regrettably missed opportunity. If the supernatural element had been better integrated into the plot, the epilogue could created a very pleasing effect of seamlessly turning a perfectly rational detective story into waking nightmare. A reversal of what he normally does or a prose version of the old woman/young woman optical illusion. Is it a G.K. Chesterton-style detective story or M.R. James-like ghost yarn?

I didn't care about the twist-ending and opt to ignore it, because the rational detective novel preceding the epilogue with its fantastic premise, two impossibilities, bizarre clues and solution presents Carr at the top of his game. If not exactly a legitimate, Golden Age classic, The Burning Court is at least a deserved fan favorite.

A note for the curious: speaking of fan favorites... Hake Talbot style of detective fiction inextricably-linking him to Carr and often referenced Talbot's third, unpublished and lost novel on this blog. Having now reread The Burning Court, I wonder if The Affair of the Half-Witness was Talbot's take on the impossible exit of the woman in period dress witnessed by Mrs. Henderson. The book title could be a nod to the chapter titles ("each was called The Affair of the—Something") from Gaudan Cross' manuscript. Just a bit of fan speculation.