Zombie Mail: "The Devil in the Summerhouse" (1942) by John Dickson Carr

Two months ago, John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, posted a review of Charles Ashton's annoyingly obscure, long out-of-print Death Greets a Guest (1936) in which a summerhouse during a storm becomes the scene of an impossible murder – an impossible that got compared to the works of Anthony Wynne. One of the early detective writers to specialize in locked room murders and other impossible crimes. I thought John's description of the inexplicable shooting in the watched summerhouse reminded me of a radio-play John Dickson Carr penned for the CBS radio series Suspense.

There are two versions of "The Devil in the Summerhouse." The first version, featuring Dr. Gideon Fell, takes place in England and aired on BBC radio in 1940, but the second version takes place in New York and Dr. Fell was replaced with Captain Burke of the New York police. I think this Suspense version, originally broadcast on November 3, 1942, is the better known of the two because its script received several notable publications. "The Devil in the Summerhouse" was printed in the September, 1946, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and reprinted in Dr. Fell, Detective and Other Stories (1947) and The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980). So wanted to refresh my memory on this one after John's review of Ashton's Death Greets a Guest.

"The Devil in the Summerhouse" is a small, intimate affair bringing two men to the overgrown grounds of a small house near the Hudson with a spacious garden and "a summerhouse of evil memory." A place where twenty-five years ago Mayor Jerry Kenyon apparently committed suicide.

One of the two men is Captain Burke and the other Joseph Parker, a family lawyer, who received, what should have been, a dead, undelivered letter – dated November 2, 1918! The letter reads "if you want to know how Major Kenyon really died, look in the third drawer of the desk in the library" ("press hard at the back of the drawer"). Parker was present twenty-five years ago when Kenyon was found dead in the summerhouse with a scorched bullet hole in his head and the gun beside him. Others who were around at the time were Mayor Kenyon's wife, Isabel, her younger brother Paul and their maid, Kitty. Angela Fiske, "the other woman," unexpectedly dropped in before the body is discovered. Only these people could have pulled the trigger, but everybody has an alibi. So the police settled on suicide, the case was closed, time moved on "and now they're all dead." And nearly forgotten, until that letter from 1918 arrived. When they open the secret drawer, they discover something that makes the past come alive. More impressively, through Carr's words, it gets the quality of a ghost story with such lines as "don't look at it as if it were alive" and "don't talk back to the thing, man, or you'll drive me crazy."

Fortunately, Burke's reason for being there is to bring the whole case back down to earth, shooting an alibi to pieces to reveal a neatly hidden murderer and to bury the past. Yes, bury the past is a euphemism for covering up the truth in typical Carrian fashion, however, the murderer this time doesn't go unpunished.

I remembered "The Devil in the Summerhouse" being a fully fledged locked room mystery, but it really is more in line with the alibi-breakers of Christopher Bush and not a bad one at that either! A very well done, compactly-plotted murder-from-the-past puzzle calculated to intrigue, to stir your nerves, to offer a precarious situation and then withhold the solution until the last possible moment. In short, "The Devil in the Summerhouse" is a story to keep you in... Suspense!