The Reader is Warned (1939) by Carter Dickson

Several months ago, I reread and reviewed John Dickson Carr's The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939), whose reputation received a much deserved boost during the internet age as the story magnificently showcases Carr's ability to construct and navigate intricate, maze-like plots – planting clues along the way that double as red herrings. The Problem of the Green Capsule demonstrated he wasn't depended on murders in hermetically sealed rooms and fields of virgin snow to write a baffling detective story. And it made me want to revisit another one of his 1939 mysteries. 

The Reader is Warned (1939) is the ninth novel in the Sir Henry Merrivale series, published as by "Carter Dickson," which has always been somewhat of a low-key masterpiece of the series. A novel generally admired and highly rated when discussed, but rarely referenced or under exposed when discussing Carr's work or impossible crime fiction in general. You can probably put that down to the whole story trying to be as low-key and inconspicuous as possible in spite of it being constructed around some very ambitious and even sensational ideas.

Carr restricted the story to a few locations, centering on half-a-dozen characters, while the sensational, headline-grabbing implications and potentially "an international situation" is played out in the background – ultimately just played for laughs. It all worked out beautifully in the end. Although it likely made the book a little inconspicuous and easy to overlook. Particularly among Carr's impressive body of work, but not something that can't be fixed. 

The Reader is Warned is narrated by a consultant to the Home Office pathologist, Dr. John Sanders, who's invited by a friend and young barrister-about-town, Lawrence Chase to spend the weekend at Fourways. Fourways is the gloomy, Victorian-Gothic home of two great friends of Chase, the Constables. Mina Constable is better known to the general public as the romantic novelist, Mina Shields, who even tried her hands at "a straight detective story" that was "most unmercifully slated." Sam Constable is a retired textile manufacturer and "the complete British clubman" as well as being a bit of a domestic tyrant ("will you stop twitching and jittering with that glass, like an old hag soaking up gin in a pub"). And they'll be entertaining two more guests beside Chase and Sanders. Miss Hilary Keen is the lovely, keen-witted friend of Chase and Herman Pennik is a self-professed mind-reader. Pennik's presence is the reason why Chase asked Sanders "to bring Sir Henry Merrivale as well," but he's away on official business and can't come until Sunday. Too late to prevent the murder.

Herman Pennik regards Sam Constable as "an ill-mannered imbecile, brutal to his wife, insulting to his guests, an obstruction to all mental or moral progress" and confrontation over cocktail gives him an opportunity to demonstrate the full power of his Teleforce – prophesying he would not be alive by the time dinner is served. Just as the clock struck eight, Sam Constable walked down a hallway to the staircase landing when Mina saw him "dancing or staggering" from her bedroom door before he fell across the handrail. Less than a minute later, Sanders caught "a faint flutter of pulse" which stopped the second he found it. This where things not only get really weird, but outright impossible.

Sam Constable died without a mark, external or internal, on his body and there was not a single trace of any kind of poison. Solid, liquid or gaseous. Neither was he anywhere near of an electric fitting. He simply had a fit in the middle of the landing and died a minute later. Things go from bad to worse when Pennik presents himself to Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters as the murderer who can't be arrested or held as a material witness. Pennik is more than willing to talk with the press about his Teleforce.

So the presence of the old man is more than just a little welcome, but Sir Henry Merrivale arrives not in the best of moods as "there's some low, evil-minded talk" about sticking him in the House of Lords. So he expected a quiet Sunday to end the weekend and now he finds himself in the middle of another impossible murder case, which could spell the kind of trouble that could send him away to the House of Lords. H.M. naturally begins to meddle in the case and comes across a parade of seemingly ordinary clues that always become a little bizarre or even sinister in a John Dickson Carr story. Such as the white chef's cap, the burned candles and blobs of grease to a missing scrapbook labeled "New Ways of Committing Murder," which provides the plot with a missing-object mini-puzzle. More complications arise when a second, equally impossible, death occurs. This time, Pennik not only possesses a unimpeachable alibi, but now he can also do astral projection!?!

Some of my fellow reviewers (linked above) have rightly pointed out that Herman Pennik is one of Carr's best characters and villains, but what really made it work is that he's a character in a detective story. Pennik could not have succeeded in any other genre or format except the extremely fair play detective story. If Pennik had been a cartoon or comic book character, he would have been a badly written character with ill-defined powers that change when it suits the story. Pennik goes from being a humble mind-reader and being able to predict the future "to crack a man's bones and skull with thought" and astral projection. But here it served a purpose. For example, Carr used some uncharacteristically cheap, dime-store trickery usually reserved for second-and third tier mystery writers to explain the mind-reading act, predictions and astral projection – which were handily used to further both the plot and Pennik's characterization. There are the scraps and snippets showing the effect of the two mysterious murders have on the outside world ("TELEFORCE: NEW MENACE TO MANKIND?") and how it influenced the jury at the inquest. Just as pure entertainment, The Reader is Warned is as good as any of the better-known H.M. novels.

All of that's merely dressing and the true strength of the story is found in the answers to those three all important questions in any murder investigation. Who, why and how. Yes, the answer to those three questions were very clever indeed and mostly hidden in plain sight!

I've mentioned in my previous reviews Carr was practically unrivaled when it came to parading the naked truth in front of your eyes while simultaneously distracting your attention. You have to be a quick-witted, sharp-eyed reader to catch all of his sleight-of-hands on a first read, but The Reader is Warned might very well have his most daring and inspired pieces of misdirection. So clever and sneakily done, you can only really appreciate it on a second read, because even with all the fairly distributed clues and hints it's almost impossible to anticipate. Carr was very fair with his clues and hints. So fair, he practically spelled out the truth punctuated with several footnotes assuring there were no accomplices or mechanical devices lurking in dark corners. One of the footnotes reminded the reader that there has to be a motive, "though fully indicated in the text, is not obvious on the surface," advising “anyone interested in solving the problem" to "look carefully below the surface." Every footnote ended with the title of the book, The Reader is Warned. Carr was the embodiment of Cavalier sportsmanship!

The only flaw I was able to find, if you can call it a flaw, is that the story is very much a detective reader's detective story and new readers, to Carr and the genre, might want to start somewhere else first. But that hardly takes anything away from this brilliant, expertly cut gem of a detective story.

So what else can I possibly say? You're simply incomplete as a human being without having read and experienced Carr.

The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021) by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr was the undisputed master of the locked room murder and impossible crimes, but not as well-known, or appreciated, was his pioneering work as a historical mystery novelist and writing some of the most suspenseful radio-plays to ever hit the airwaves – even contributing to the war effort with propaganda plays. These were "so effective" that "they led the BBC, unsuccessfully, to urge the American authorities to allow Carr to remain in the United Kingdom for the duration of the war." Carr contributed to some of the popular and classic radio shows, like Suspense and Murder by Experts, but one radio program, Cabin B-13, appeared to have been lost to time. 

Well, all except two, or three, recordings have been lost, but, in the early 1990s, twenty-three scripts were discovered in the Library of Congress. Three decades later, Crippen & Landru gathered those manuscripts under the title The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021). Tony Medawar wrote an insightful foreword, "Suspense at Sea," with "Notes for the Curious" at the end of each play. 

Medawar's foreword and notes are scattered with little gold nuggets of equally fascinating and frustrating pieces of background information. Such as Carr's plan to have Cabin B-13 series-character, Dr. John Fabian, identified as the Man in Black from Suspense or references to his uncompleted and abandoned novels. 

Cabin B-13 was broadcast as two series, or seasons, between July 5, 1948, and January 2, 1949, which originated as a 1943 episode of Suspense – also titled "Cabin B-13." Suspense episode takes place aboard a luxury cruise-liner, Maurevania, which connects all the stories in the series as the protagonist is its "ship's surgeon, world traveler, and teller of strange and incredible tales of mystery and murder," Dr. John Fabian. His role in the story differs from story to story. Sometimes he simply acts as a storyteller and other he plays a minor role in the story itself, but, every now and then, he acts as the detective. When he plays detective, it's usually because the story is a rewrite that requires Dr. Fabian to take over the role of one of Carr's well-known detectives.

So, now that we got the introduction to the collection out of the way, you have to excuse me for a moment as I fanboy all over these radio-plays. 

"The Man Who Couldn't Be Photographed" tells the story of "the greatest romantic film-star in the first decade of talking pictures," Bruce Ransome, who feels like he has outgrown the people he used to care about. This results in a confrontation with his "social secretary" and love interest, Miss Nita Ross. She puts a curse on him before committing suicide. A curse promising that the conceited actor never faces a camera again, which apparently comes true when Ransome is turned away from every photographer in Paris like a leper. A very neat play and a clever inversion on an old urban legend that originated in a now obscure, 1920s detective story. 

"Death Has Four Faces" is different from the play of the same title Carr wrote for BBC's Appointment with Fear. This is a psychological crime tale, of sorts, in which Superintendent Bellman meets a young Canadian on the train, named Steve West, who asks to be handcuffed and escorted to the hotel like a criminal – where a perfect crime is foiled. Not my favorite play in the collection, but it was decent enough. And thought the lingering presence of the Second World War was put to good use. 

"The Blind-Folded Knife Thrower" is one of the highlights of the collection with a minor role for Dr. John Fabian in a tragedy that has become "a grim and evil memory" of what befall Madeline Lane on a previous voyage to Portugal. Madeline is haunted by the ghost, or memories, of her spiteful mother who committed suicide ten years ago by drinking acid. She has begun to haunt her daughter with disembodied whispers and a promise to visit Madeline on her first night in Lisbon. So the people who care about her place her in a room with solid walls, floor and ceiling and two windows "so closely barred that you couldn't even get your hand through." There are two people sitting outside the door until morning, but a figure of a woman with acid-burns round her mouth appears in the room as miraculously as she disappears again! Colonel Da Silva, Chefe da Policia Secreta, discovers a very tricky explanation for the nighttime visitation and the result is a better, fairer and much more convincing take on a particular locked room-trick that would turn up in one of Carr's later novels. 

"No Useless Coffin" is another highlight of the collection, but this time, Carr reworked an earlier short story with Dr. Fabian acting as a stand-in for one of his famous series-detectives. Dr. Fabian is accompanying the recently engaged couple on a picnic to a cottage where many years ago a 12-year-old girl, Vicky Fraser, disappeared from with all the door and windows locked from the inside, which left her parents nearly frantic, but two nights later she reappeared "through the locks and bolts" – "tucked up in bed as usual." Vicky claims to possess an "occult power" giving her the ability to vanish when she likes, where she likes, which the now adult Vicky promises to repeat during the picnic. She disappears "like a soap-bubble under the eyes of witnesses," but, this time around, the fairy tale of the vanishing girl has a dark and gruesome ending. The solution to the impossible disappearance is one of the most original and startling Carr has ever dreamed up. Just as good as the original short story with the only real difference being the detective and motive. 

"The Nine Black Reasons" is, curiously enough, a whydunit and brings "well-known writer of detective-stories," Frank Bentley, to Marseilles, France, where he discovers the body of a murdered man in the Royal Turkish Baths of a hotel. A short while later he meets an old acquaintance, Helen Parker, who witnessed the inexplicable murder of her uncle at the same hotel. Inexplicable because there's no earthly reason why the respectable Mr. Herbert Johnson killed the respectable Mr. Fredric Parker. Two complete strangers! The motive, while good, sorely needed polishing and fine-tuning, which makes it all the more frustrating that Carr abandoned a 1961 novel of the same title despite having completed eight chapters. And, of course, "the typescript of the eight chapters has long been lost."

"The Count of Monte Carlo" has Dr. Fabian coming to the rescue of a young man, Bart Stevens, who's engaged to Janet Derwent, but foolishly has gotten himself involved in "a love-affair to end all love-affairs." Bart has been fooling around with another woman, "Dolores," who's engaged to the Count of Monte Carlo, Jean Ravelle. A messy, tangled square that ends with a murder and two people confessing to have done the dirty deed. A good, but relatively minor, story with an original murder method that Carr reused to much better effect in a later novel. 

"Below Suspicion" shares its title with the contentious Dr. Gideon Fell novel Below Suspicion (1949), but the story has nothing else in common except, perhaps, that Carr would rewrite it in the 1950s as a Dr. Fell short story. Dr. Fabian tells the story of a stage actress, Valerie Blake, who retired from the stage before her time to retreat with her new husband on the Italian coast. Regrettably, Ralph Garrett proved to be a poor husband and two of her old friends came to the rescue, but they were too late to prevent her murder and struggle to find an explanation, because "the murderer must have walked on air" to have left her body on the beach – since there were no footprints except Valerie's. This story is actually better than the later version with a better developed backstory to the murder and always liked the clue of the rifle shots, which helped strengthening a somewhat sketchy murder method. 

"The Power of Darkness" is indelibly "one of his most audacious impossibilities" with two people traveling "back three hundred years in time" and witnessed "a whole suburb disappear" to reveal a scene from centuries ago. Dr. Fabian keeps telling everyone he's "not a detective," but he certainly had a guiding hand in revealing the sordid truth beneath this time shattering miracle. Some of you probably know how fond I'm of these rare kind of time-tampering impossibilities and enjoyed this one as much as the other version Carr wrote. The episode was originally intended to be titled "Last Night in Ghost-Land." A much better title and a pity it was never used for another story. 

"The Footprint in the Sky" is a fairly conventional impossible crime story, but told in a very unconventional way. The luxury liner Maurevania is tossed around during a storm at sea and Dr. Fabian, the ship's surgeon from Cabin B-13, is asked to come down to C-24 where a passenger, Marcia Tate, has lost her mind – believing it's Christmas over a year ago and asking "why she hasn't been hanged for murder." What follows is a backstory recounting a broken engagement and a new one, which resulted in murder with two sets of footprints in the snow pointing an accusatory finger at Marcia. The police "solved that 'studio-mystery' over a year ago" and Dr. Fabian has to retreat their steps to help Marcia regain her memory. A good framing device for a detective story, but have always found the solution to this particular no-footprints scenario to be cheap, hack and unworthy of the maestro. 

"The Man with the Iron Chest" is the nickname given "the best jewel-thief in the trade" whose "only burglar's tools are his ten fingers" and "an iron chest weighing sixty pounds." Why does he drag around a big iron chest? That's something the police from seven cities across the European continent would like to know and he nearly got caught in Amsterdam, which forced him to leave behind his ornamental iron chest. So he remained elusive until a young married couple, Don and Joyce, caught a glimpse of his face during a burglary, which lead the Greek police straight to his doorstep. But he then pulled of a minor miracle by making "an iron chest and a hundred diamonds vanish" from a locked and guarded room "as though they had never existed." A great piece of impossible crime fiction showcasing the author's love for stage magic and illusions. 

"The Street of the Seven Daggers" is a rewrite of one of my favorite short stories by Carr, but he improved the plot with a backstory and setting that really speaks to the imagination of readers who tend to like Carr. Like yours truly. Dr. Fabian is asked by a passenger, Miss Betty Parrish, to prevent her father from going to a certain street in Cairo or he'll be murdered. Who is going to kill him? Absolutely nobody! Mr. Edmund Parrish is "a superstition-breaker" and his attention has now been drawn to a little, dead-end alley called the Street of the Seven Daggers, which used to be the street of the hired killers in ancient times. Three hundred years ago, a bigwig of the Ottoman Empire "got annoyed about hired assassins" and had them executed in front of their houses – burnt out the street. But then people began to die and the rumors began. The "street's full of invisible people" and anyone who walks through the alley, "after midnight and alone," you're supposed to die with a dagger in your back. Dr. Fabian stands at the mouth of dagger-alley when Parrish is knifed while walking down the dark passageway alone. Only someone who's invisible could have stabbed the man, but Dr. Fabian reasons a more earthly explanation from the clue of the two wallets. Great stuff and even better than the original! 

"The Dancer from Stamboul" takes place in Port Said, at the gateway to the Suez Canal, where Dr. Fabian bumps into a New York policeman, Detective Lieutenant Jim Canfield of the Homicide Squad, who came with extradition-papers to take back a dangerous man-eater. Lydia White is suspected of having poisoned three men and the police has received information that she's somewhere in Port Said. So he asks Dr. Fabian to assist him comb out the port town, which leads to the titular dancer and her two lovers. A French fencer and an Italian nobleman. This ends in a duel at a fencing saloon and another poisoning. I liked the fencing scene, but otherwise an unremarkable as a detective story. 

"Death in the Desert" is not a detective or crime story, not even a horror yarn, but a historical adventure with a detective/espionage hook and presented as "a story out of my parents' time," namely 1895, which is set in the Sudanese desert. The crux of the plot is the completion and testing of an improved machine gun. A good story, if you like this kind of historical romancing. 

"The Island of Coffins" is, as Medawar rightly noted, "the most extraordinary story" in the series and demonstrated Carr didn't need to lean on the fancies and phantasms of the impossible crime to be the greatest mystery writer who ever lived. Story begins when the Maurevania, passing the Abyssinian Coast, sees a distress signal coming from Hadar Island. A very small, uninviting island with a big house where someone had sustained a serious bullet-wound. Dr. Fabian is shocked when he finds an elderly lady, Mrs. Almack, who was shot in the arm. She has retreated to the island with her grandson and two children (now all adults) to keep him company. But, when they arrived on the island, she "turned back the calendar to the year 1900." Those were "the only years that were worth living" and the current date on the island is November 12, 1920. Mrs. Almack kept her three wards on the island for two decades and they've no idea about the outside world. But why? And are the coffins on the island really filled with people who tried to leave? Dr. Fabian has to doctor out where the insanity lies and proof "tyrants aren't always so powerful as they think." Nearly as good and unforgettable as Carr's best radio-play, "The Dead Sleep Lightly."

"The Most Respectable Murder" is another one of those complicated eternal triangle stories littering the series. This time, Dr. Fabian goes to the Paris Opera where the future of two friends depended entirely on him finding an explanation how a "murderer could leave behind him a room locked up on the inside," which is easier said than done as Dr. Fabian recognizes it was "done in a completely new way" – openly admires the murderer's intelligence. The locked room-trick is the selling point of the story as it's genuinely original, but Carr would use it to much better effect in one of his late-period novels. No wonder that novel struck me as his last hurrah as the master of all crimes impossible. He came up with the trick a decade earlier! 

"The Curse of the Bronze Lamp" is a condensed version of the Merrivale novel of the same title in which an ancient bronze lamp discovered in a cursed Egyptian tomb is held responsible for blowing its owner to dust "as though she never existed." Regrettably, the shorter version exposed just how weak and unfair the impossibility really is, which needed the novel-length treatment to prop it up more convincingly. Now it felt more like the plot of a season 4 episode of Jonathan Creek. Anyway, whether it's the novel-length version or a short radio-play, I agree with Nick. This should have been "a full-blown Egyptian curse story, set in the Valley of the Kings, with murders in the pyramids, cobras at camp-sites and trouble in the tombs."

"Lair of the Devil-Fish" was an unexpected surprise as it belongs to that rare category of so-called "submerged mysteries," which tend to be impossible crimes and recommend you read my reviews of Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) and Micki Browning's Adrift (2017) to get more background on this type of story – including more links. Carr might have been the first to experiment with this type of setting as the earliest example I've come across previously was Joseph Commings' short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (1953), but, strangely enough, it's not truly an impossible crime. Unless you believe the deep, dark blue ocean is the natural habitat of Lovecraftian monsters. So the story takes place off the southeast coast of Cuba where a small expedition has gotten permission to dive to the wreck of a cabin-cruiser, which sank in a bay during the Spanish-American War of 1898 with a fortune in silver dollars. Legend has it the cabin-cruiser was "dragged under" by the giant, slimy tentacles of a monstrous octopus. What nearly killed their diver? A monster or something a little more human? A solid and entertaining addition to those rare underwater mysteries. 

"The Dead Man's Knock" is a weird crime story in which brash American secret service agent and a British crime writer have to figure out how to kill a closely guarded man in order to protect him. Not really a locked room mystery, but a fun how-can-it-be-done. 

"The Man with Two Heads" is a low-key great story in which Dr. Fabian meets Leonard Wade on the top deck of a bus. Wade is a well-known and celebrated thriller author who might have become the victim of a diabolical plot as he has become a wandering ghost. Or so it feels. And not without reason. Dr. Fabian reads his obituary in the newspaper and Wade tells him he saw his own body in his study. Somewhat reminiscent, in spirit, to Helen McCloy's famous doppelgänger novel Through a Glass, Darkly (1950), but with a slightly more convincing setup and solution. What a shame Carr never expended this idea into a novel-length mystery. 

"Till Death Do Us Part" is another one with an awfully familiar-sounding title, but the plot has no resemblance, whatsoever, to Till Death Do Us Part (1944). This is Carr venturing into the territory of domestic suspense with the backstory to an attempted murder-suicide in a remote house, which comes with a twist in the tail. Anthony Gilbert would have loved it!

So, on a whole, The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 is a stronger than your average collection of short detective stories with the quality ranging from very good to pretty decent, but not a single average or bad story – which says something how good Carr really was. Only drawback is the lack of truly new material as Carr used this series to try out new ideas or retool old tricks or stories. But who cares? Carr is always a treat to read and this volume finally gave us back Carr's obscure, long-lost series-detective. Highly recommended!

The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939) by John Dickson Carr

Somewhat recently, I reread two of John Dickson Carr's reputable locked room mysteries, The Three Coffins (1935) and Till Death Do Us Part (1944), but the latter has only gained its reputation as one of his all-time greats over the past two decades – elevated by the internet from a mid-tier title to top 10 material. At the same time, his monumental, landmark locked room novel received a downgrade. I ended up agreeing about Till Death Do Us Part, but The Three Coffins remained to me an otherworldly performance more than deserving of its once colossal status. 

So decided to reread another one and was torn between The Plague Court Murders (1934) and The Crooked Hinge (1938) with The Reader is Warned (1939) as a dark horse, but ended up with The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939). There are two reason why I picked that one over the other three. 

The Problem of the Green Capsule is another title who received a reputational boost during the internet age of the genre and one that has been at the back of my mind ever since discovering Christopher Bush. Bush was to the unbreakable alibi what Carr was to the locked room, but he tried his hands at a Carr-style impossible crime novel with The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935) and has "a situation worthy of Dr. Fell." In my memory, The Problem of the Green Capsule retroactively became a Bush-style detective novel with an alibi problem that would have delighted Ludovic Travers and wanted to reread it to test my recollection of the plot – which actually fitted the theme of the book like glove. I'm doing it on hard mode as my first read was a Dutch translation titled Blinde ooggetuigen (Blind Eyewitnesses). So let's see how Watson-like my memory really is! 

The Problem of the Green Capsule, originally published as The Black Spectacles and subtitled "being the psychologist's murder case," opened in the Street of Tombs, Pompeii, where Marcus Chesney is holidaying with his family and cronies. A party comprising of his brother, Dr. Joe Chesney, whose professional skills leave something to be desired, but generally well liked and "lots of people swear by him." Marjorie Wills is the sweet, innocent looking niece and ward of Marcus, but she has a temper and "sometimes uses language that would startle a sergeant-major." Professor Ingram is a psychologist and an old crony of Marcus with whom he had "eternal, non-stop arguments" about crime and psychology. Wilbur Emmet is Marcus' tall, wooden and "spectacularly ugly" business manager. Finally, there's a young research chemist, George Harding, who Majorie met on their holiday and they quickly fell in love with each other.

Marcus tells George that, in spite of his wealth, neither he or his inner circle is accustomed to take three-month holidays, but circumstances back home forced them to take a break.

Several months previously, the village of Sodbury Cross became the playground of "a criminal lunatic who enjoys poisoning people wholesale" as three children and an 18-year-old girl were poisoned (one fatal) with strychnine laced chocolates, which came from Mrs. Terry's respectable tobacco-and sweet shop in High Street – who does not sell poisoned chocolates as "a regular thing." So the police believes poisoned sweets were left in the shop when Mrs. Terry's attention was distracted. But there's another possibility suggesting Marjorie had planted the poisoned chocolates. Now she can't even walk down the street without the danger of having mud thrown in her face by the village children, which is why they decided to go on a long holiday. However, the situation had barely improved upon their return. And things got much worse!

Marcus is a peace grower who fancies himself a scholar and his pet theory is that "ninety-nine people out of a hundred, as witnesses, are just plain impossible." To prove his point, Marcus stages a psychological experiment at his home with Marjorie, George and Professor Ingram as audience and eyewitnesses. George is filming the experiment with a small ciné-camera. So nothing what happened on the stage was unobserved.

What they see is Marcus sitting at a table with a box of chocolates and writing instruments when a curious figure enters the room in a long coat, collar turned up, hat pulled down, dark glasses and face wrapped in a muffler – all bundled up like the Invisible Man. The thing in the top-hat carried a black bag with R.H. Nemo, M.D. crudely painted on it. Next thing he does is push "a fat green capsule" down Marcus' throat, took the bag and left through the French windows. A few minutes later, Marcus is dead of cyanide poisoning!

A clever murder serving Chief Constable Major Crow and Detective Inspector Andrew Elliot with a peach of problem, because there are three witnesses who saw the murder happen under their eyes. But they can't agree on what they saw. On top of the blind eyewitnesses, they represent "a triple alibi which all the weight of Scotland Yard cannot break." Carr assured the reader in a footnote "that there was no conspiracy of any kind among the three witnesses." So an exasperated Elliot turns to Dr. Gideon Fell to help him make sense of everything.

Dr. Fell is at the top of his game here and states upon appearing that if he "cannot do the thing handsomely," he's "not going to do it at all," which was a reference to his drinking habits, but can also applied to his detective work. Slowly, but surely, Dr. Fell brings clarity to an incredibly muddled problem by examining the questions Marcus had prepared, which were laced with psychological traps. Why all the answers were different. There's also a brilliant plot-thread with a clock that could be tampered with and how it ruined a fourth unshakable alibi. It's almost a shame Carr used the trick here as a side issue as it could have carried a whole plot by itself. Something as ingenious and inspired as the alibi-trick from Bush's Cut Throat (1932).

More than the galore of alibis, false-solutions and Dr. Fell's booming presence, I enjoyed and marveled at Carr's ability to rub the truth in your face with one hand and pull the wool over your eyes with the other. I remembered the murderer's identity from my first read, but not much else and was amazed to discover how subtly blatant he was here. Carr planted psychological clues in the mind of the reader that doubled as blind spots to hide the murderer without keeping back any clues. Carr was at his best when he was really cavalier with his clues and red herrings.

Another thing that came as a kind of surprise is how spot on my comparison with Bush turned out to be. I discovered Bush long after my first reading of The Problem of the Green Capsule, but it really reads like Carr's take on a Bush-style detective novel with its multiple alibi-puzzle and two different crimes closely-linked in time or place – a staple of Bush's 1930s detective novels (e.g. Dead Man Twice, 1930). I don't think Carr wrote it with Bush in mind and, as the ending demonstrated, Carr was a better showman than Bush. An ending with two things that deserve to be highlighted.

Dr. Fell explains why has an unfair advantage over the police as he started out as a schoolmaster and "every minute of the day the lads were attempting to tell me some weird story or other, smoothly, plausibly, and with a dexterity I have not since heard matched at the Old Bailey." So he has valuable experience with habitual liars and that comes handy in this particular case. Secondly, Dr. Fell precedes his explanation with a lecture on poisoners reminiscent of his locked room lecture from The Three Coffins, in which he famously broke the fourth wall ("because... we're in a detective story, and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not"). The lecture on poisoners also breaks the fourth wall, but in a much more subtle way as Dr. Fell tells his audience he will be discussing a particular type of poisoner by looking at "a dozen well-known examples from real life." More importantly, the psychological profile of the poisoners under discussion fits only one of their suspects. All he has to do after the lecture is explain the nuts and bolts of the case. And those aren't any less ingeniously played out as all the psychological trickery. Carr must have had a blast putting the plot of this one together. 

The Problem of the Green Capsule is a double triumph as Carr demonstrated didn't need to lean on his hermetically sealed rooms, seemingly impossible murders and suggestions of the supernatural to write an elaborate, maze-like and scrupulously fair and logical detective story. The locked room murders and impossible crime are simply there to make everything more challenging and fun. So this triumph is a shining example of the purely plotted, 1930s whodunit and deserves to be reprinted. I suggest that potential reprint edition to be titled either The Case of the Green Capsule or The Case of the Black Spectacles.

Down On His Luck: "The Silver Curtain" (1939) by Carter Dickson

Mike Ashley's momentous anthology The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000) introduced John Dickson Carr as the man whose name has become "indelibly linked with the impossible crime story," which is the indubitable truth, but comes with a caveat – since his short stories seldom reached the same heights as his novel-length locked room mysteries. But the keyword there is seldom. 

"The House in Goblin Wood" (1947) is the crown jewel of Carr's short fiction and together with Joseph Commings' "No Bones for Davy Jones" (1953), Robert Arthur's "The Glass Bridge" (1957) and Arthur Porges' "No Killer Has Wings" (1960) among the best dozen short impossible crime stories ever written. "The Dead Sleep Lightly" (1943) presents the detective story as a ghost yarn and demonstrates Carr easily could have been the next M.R. James as well as having one of my favorite lines in all of detective fiction. "Blind Man's Hood" (1937), "Persons or Things Unknown" (1938) and "Cabin B-13" (1943) have similar qualities (ghostly crimes), but for today, I decided to reread one of his most well-known, often reprinted short stories. 

"The Silver Curtain" (published as by "Carter Dickson") was first printed in the August, 1939, issue of The Strand and reprinted in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), Merrivale, March and Murder (1991) and The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes, which may have been its most important appearance to date – likely introducing the then long out-of-print Carr to many readers at the time. Our current reprint renaissance was still in its infancy in the early 2000s and it was not until recently Carr began to receive the renewed attention he so much deserves. 

"The Silver Curtain" differs from the stories mentioned above as it has none of the trappings of the ghost story, or even a hint of the supernatural, but an ordinary crime that's misunderstood. And the dark, rainy backdrop gives the crime an almost unearthly quality.

The story begins in a French casino where a young man, Jerry Winton, is having a run of bad luck at the tables, which left him practically cleaned out, but gets an unexpected offer from a man who won a pretty packet at the table. A sleek, oily-faced man, Ferdie Davos, asks if Jerry is interested in making ten thousand francs. Only thing Jerry has to do is go "see a doctor" to get a nerve tonic. Jerry gets an address and instructions to be there in about an hour. When Jerry sets out on his shady assignment, he suddenly notices Davos walking along the dim, rainy street and entering a cul-de-sac with two of its three sides being tall, blank brick walls and the third side formed a tall, flat house – "all of whose windows were closely shuttered." There was nowhere to go, or hide, but in "the second's space of time" it took for Jerry to glance back at "the figure of a policeman some distance away," someone killed Davos. A dying Davos is lying on the pavement with a heavy knife in the back of his neck and clutching a well-filled wallet. Even worse, Davos had been all alone in "an empty cul-de-sac as bare as a biscuit-box" and the position of the knife convinces the policeman Jerry killed the man during an attempt to rob him.

So the situation doesn't look very good for our young hero. Luckily, Colonel March, of Scotland Yard, happened to be in France to help investigate "a certain form of activity" that has "became intolerable both to the French and English authorities," which dovetailed with the impossible murder in the cul-de-sac. Colonel March more or less acts as deus ex machina as he doesn't enter the story until the last few pages. What he does is pulling out all of the relevant clues from his coat pockets, "with the air of a conjurer," which spells out a very clever and satisfying explanation to the seemingly impossible. A solution clearly showing just how much of an influence G.K. Chesterton was on Carr's work and perhaps it would have been better had Dr. Gideon Fell been the detective. But other than that, I've no complaints. 

"The Silver Curtain" is a vintage, snack-size impossible crime story and can be counted among Carr's half-dozen best short stories. Recommended!

The Three Coffins (1935) by John Dickson Carr

Back in 2019, I decided to reread Till Death Do Us Part (1944) by John Dickson Carr, the warlock of Golden Age detective fiction, because it underwent a reevaluation over the past fifteen years and its status raised from a mid-tier title to one of Carr's ten best novels – a trend that began on the now defunct JDCarr forum and Yahoo GAD group. A trend that continued through this blogging era. Yeah, it was a deserved, long overdue reevaluation of an often overlooked and underappreciated novel in Carr's oeuvre. 

What's not as well deserved, or acceptable, is the simultaneous devaluation of Carr's landmark locked room mystery novel, The Three Coffins (1935; originally published as The Hollow Man).

I noted in my review of Till Death Do Us Part that book earned its new status on technical points rather than a knockout, but The Three Coffins seems to have lost its classic status on points. Sure, technically, it's perhaps not quite as sound as, let's say, She Died a Lady (1943) or He Who Whispers (1944), but I think readers today miss the point why it was considered a monumental contribution to the genre – a landmark only comparable in status to Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). The Three Coffins is the utterly bizarre and fantastic done right. An impressive juggling act, traversing a slippery tight-rope, which reached the ending without the intricate, complicated plot becoming a tangled, incomprehensible mess. It worked with all the mad logic of a dream! That's what generations of (locked room) mystery readers admired about it.

However, there's one difference between the mystery readers of yesterday and today: we have a larger frame of reference, as there's more available today, which can give a new perspective on a long-held, settled opinion. Just look at my own downgrade of Robert van Gulik's Fantoom in Foe-lai (translated as The Chinese Gold Murders, 1959). So it was time to give The Three Coffins another read to see how well its reputation stands up to rereading and standing it did. The Three Coffins is written proof that there's no one, past, present or future, who can hold a candle to Carr. He proves it on the very first pages of the story! 

The Three Coffins opens with the statement that "those of Dr Fell's friends who like impossible situations will not find in his case–book any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying" than the murder of Professor Grimaud and "later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street" – committed in such a fashion that the murderer must have been invisible and "lighter than air." A stone cold killer with all the otherworldly qualities of a goblin or mage. Some began to wonder that the killer really was nothing more than hollow shell and that if you took away "the cap and the black coat and the child's false–face," you might reveal someone "like the man in a certain famous romance by Mr H.G. Wells." An extraordinary and confusing murder case, but Carr hastens to add that "the reader must be told at the outset" on "whose evidence he can absolutely rely." Such as the witnesses at Professor Grimaud's house and Cagliostro Street. This is the kind of the confident bravado that separated the masters from their apprentices.

Dr. Charles Grimaud a teacher, a popular lecturer and writer whose specialized in "any form of picturesque supernatural devilry from vampirism to the Black Mass." Every week, Dr. Grimaud holds court at the Warwick Tavern in Museum Street with a small group of his cronies, but, during their last meeting, there was an unexpected guest. A magician by the name of Pierre Fley challenges Dr. Grimaud that there are men who can get out of their coffins, move anywhere invisibly and four walls are nothing to them. Frey claims to be one of them and has a brother who can do even more, but he's dangerous and says either himself or his brother will visit Dr. Grimaud very soon. Dr. Grimaud tells him to send his brother and "be damned."

A few days later, Dr. Gideon Fell is sitting in front of a roaring fire of his library with Superintendent Hadley and Ted Rampole when the latter tells them about the incident at the Warwick Tavern. Dr. Fell immediately springs his immense bulk into action to pay Dr. Grimaud a visit, because he fears the worst has already happened.

The "first deadly walking of the hollow man" took place that night, shortly before Dr. Fell, Hadley and Rampole arrived at the scene, when "the side street of London were quiet with snow" and Dr. Grimaud received a strange, bundled up visitor – whose face was obscured by child's false-face resembling a Guy Fawkes mask. He was seen talking with Dr. Grimaud by the open door of his study, before entering and locking it behind them. A gunshot was heard and when the door was finally opened, they found a dying Dr. Grimaud, but not a trace of the shooter or the gun. There's an unlocked window in the study, but it overlooks a large, unbroken blanket of virgin snow and the locked door was under constant observation.

 

So, according to the evidence, the murderer drifted into the house without leaving any footprints on the sidewalk and floated out of the study window!

Dr. Fell is having a field day with this one and is more actively woolgathering than usual, but he still does it with all the tact of "a load of bricks coming through a skylight." He lumbers through the crime scene, while Hadley is questioning people, as he inspects the slashed painting of three coffins, pounces on the most disreputable-looking volumes on the bookshelves and went down wheezingly to look at the fireplace. Somehow, Dr. Fell combined his observation with Dr. Grimaud's dying words and "interpreted in jig–saw fashion" part of the backstory to the murder that's buried in Transylvania. I had completely forgotten The Three Coffins is not only a monumental locked room mystery, but also made perfect use of the dying message and the correct interpretation is another clue that a master was at work here.

There are many layers to this story, which have to be slowly peeled away, but as layer after layer gets removed, they expose new questions and complications. Such as a second, seemingly impossible, murder.

Cagliostro Street is a little cul-de-sac, no more than three minutes' walk from Grimaud's house, where a man was shot and killed under circumstances suggesting that he was "murdered by magic." Several witnesses at either end of the street heard a voice saying, "the second bullet is for you," followed by a laugh, a muffled pistol shot and man walking in the middle of the street pitching forward on his face – shot close enough that the wound was "burnt and singed black." There were no footprints in the snow but his own. This second murder allows Dr. Fell to reach his full potential as he goes into overdrive. Dr. Fell lectures on ghost stories, gets lectured on magic tricks and culminates with one of the most iconic chapters in all of detective fiction, "The Locked Room Lecture," in which Dr. Fell famously breaks the fourth wall ("because... we're in a detective story, and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not") to talk about all the known locked room-tricks at the time! Just one of those many touches that makes this is a genuine classic.

The masterstroke comes when Dr. Fell visits Cagliostro Street and observes "a big round–hooded German clock with moving eyes in its sun of a face," in a shop window, "seeming to watch with idiot amusement the place where a man had been killed" and hears church bells in the distance that he finally sees the whole picture – which translates in one of the best surprise solutions of the period! A beautifully executed solution, reversing everything you thought was true, that pays homage to G.K. Chesterton (plot) and Conan Doyle (backstory). Sure, the critics have a small point that the solution is a little improbable in certain places and aspect can be hard to swallow. But, as stated before, it's the utterly bizarre and fantastic done right with all the mad logic of a dream and (impressively) Carr in full control of every moving bit and piece of a staggeringly complex plot, which is still easy to visualize once everything is explained. 

The Three Coffins is an almost otherworldly performance that nobody else could have pulled off except Carr. There have been those who tried. Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat (1938), John Russell Fearn's The Five Matchboxes (1948) and Paul Halter's La quatrième porte (The Fourth Door, 1987) spring to mind. There even have been those who came close, like Christianna Brand's Death of Jezebel (1948) and Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but there will never be another Carr or The Three Coffins.

So, no, I don't agree with the downgrading of The Three Coffins at all. It's deservedly the most famous of Carr's many masterpieces and a landmark of the locked room mystery. Recommended unreservedly! I hope my fanboyism didn't bleed through too much.

The Dead Sleep Lightly: "Blind Man's Hood" (1937) by Carter Dickson

We're steadily nearing the end of the year and the holiday season is close upon us! I already read two seasonal-themed mysteries some months ago, Brian Flynn's The Murders Near Mapleton (1929) and Moray Dalton's The Night of Fear (1931), but they were not intended as part of my annual Christmas reading. So, over the next two months, I'll try to knock the remaining seasonal detective novels and short stories off my list.

I decided to begin with rereading one of the best short stories ever written in this particular sub-category of the detective story.

John Dickson Carr's "Blind Man's Hood," published as by "Carter Dickson," originally appeared in the Christmas edition of The Sketch in 1937 and was republished as "To Wake the Dead" in the December, 1966, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – collected (fairly) recently in The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014) and The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018). The story's most well-known appearance is in the original hardcover edition of The Department of Queer Complaints (1940).

"Blind Man's Hood" opens with a young married couple, Rodney and Muriel Hunter, arriving at the home of their friends, Jack and Molly, in "the loneliest part of the Weald of Kent." A seventeenth century country house, named "Clearlawns," but the front door is standing open and nobody responds to their knocking.

So they hoisted their luggage and a box of Christmas presents inside, where they are greeted by an young, pleasant-faced woman, who explains everyone's "always out of the house at this hour on this particular date" – attending a special church service. A custom, or pretext, for more than sixty years to give people an excuse to be away from the house between seven and eight o'clock on Christmas Eve. She tells them a winter's tale in two parts that straddled the genres of the detective and ghost story.

During the 1870s, the house was occupied by a newlywed couple, Edward and Jane Waycross, but on a dark, snowy evening in February, Jane found herself all alone in the house.

There were several witnesses who saw her standing behind a window after the snow had stopped falling, but, the following morning, Mrs. Randall, the old servant, is the first to return and finds "the house all locked up." She gets no response to her knocking and decided to smash in a window. What she finds inside is the stuff of horror stories: the body of Mrs. Waycross was lying on her face in the front hall, "soaked in blood and paraffin," with her throat cut and charred from the waist down. A terrible, gruesome and inexplicable murder. All of the doors and windows were securely locked and bolted on the inside. And the only footprints in the snow outside belonged to one of the witnesses and Mrs. Randall.

So how did Mrs. Waycross' murderer entered, or left, the tightly locked house without leaving any footprints in the snow? The police were never able to provide an answer to these questions, but this is not where the story ends, because eight years later there was a Christmas party at the house and one of the attendees was someone involved with the murder case – who dies under ghostly circumstances during an unnerving game of Blind Man's Bluff. This ghost story is the reason why nobody is ever in the house between the hours of seven and eight on Christmas Eve.

Uncharacteristically, of Carr, the impossibility and revelation of the locked room-trick aren't the centerpiece of the story. You can even say that the whole locked room situation is a little underplayed. For example, there's no theorizing how the murder could have been done. This story slowly unravels itself, which can be a disappointing approach, but Carr was a master stylist and you can't help but be fascinated how seamlessly he merged the detective and ghost story without leaving the reader feeling like they were cheated. The result stands as one of Carr's creepiest and darkest story.

My fellow JDC fanboy, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, reviewed "Blind Man's Hood" back in 2016 and he made several astute observations on why Carr was practically unequaled in the genre as a stylist. One of the clearest examples is the contrast between the opening and closing paragraphs of the story. There really was nobody better than Carr.

So, purely as a semi-historical locked room mystery, "Blind Man's Hood" is merely another excellent short story by the Grand Master, but how the ghost story takes possession of the plot without damaging the detective elements makes it a (minor) masterpiece! Highly recommended to everyone who knows how to appreciate good story telling regardless of the genre.

Till Death Do Us Part (1944) by John Dickson Carr

After slogging through Jonathan Latimer's tediously paced The Dead Don't Care (1938), I needed a palate cleanser and there were only two names that immediately came to mind, John Dickson Carr and Bill Pronzini, who have receded into the background of my blog over the last couple of years – which can entirely be blamed on the avalanche of reprints and translations. Don't you dare to stop, DSP and LRI!

Predictably, I decided to go with the inimitable artisan of the pure detective story and purveyor of miracles, but my next read is going to be Pronzini's The Flimflam Affair (2019). So you know what to expect next. But first things first.

I've wanted to reread Carr's Till Death Do Us Part (1944) for a while now, because, over the past fifteen years, the book has been elevated from a mid-rank title in the Dr. Gideon Fell series to one of Carr's ten best (locked room) mystery novels – a trend I first noticed on the message board of the now defunct JDCarr.com (archive). Since then, I've seen nothing but praise and high, often five-star, ratings for Till Death Do Us Part online. So I was curious to see if this newly proclaimed masterpiece stood up to rereading. Yes, it absolutely did!

Till Death Do Us Part is a testament to Carr's gift as a natural storyteller and a demonstration of his abilities as an artisanal craftsman of fantastic, maze-like plots, which beautifully complemented each other here. An ultimately simple idea swathed in layers of obfuscation without the plot becoming a convoluted, tangled mess of plot-threads.

Lesley Grant is the linchpin of the plot of Till Death Do Us Part. A young woman who looked about eighteen years old, "in contrast to the twenty-eight she admitted," who's a recent addition to the charming, old-world village of Six Ashes. Lesley turned "the heads of half the males," but after six months, she becomes engaged to "a rather well-known young playwright" of psychological thrillers, Dick Markham. Very much to the disappointment of Six Ashes. For two years, the village has tried to get their local celebrity together with a local girl, Cynthia Drew, but Dick refused to marry "just to please the community."

When the story opens, Dick and Lesley are on their way to a garden party with a bazaar at Ash Hall. Lesley wants to see the fortune teller before mingling with the rest, but she leaves the tent looking upset. So he goes into the tent to have a word with the Great Swami, palmist and crystal gazer.

The man under the white linen and colored turban is none other than the celebrated Home Office Pathologist, Sir Harvey Gilman, who's "one of the greatest living authorities on crime," but their conversation is cut short by the crack of a rifle-shot – after which "the world dissolved in nightmare." Sir Harvey is struck in the shoulder by a bullet. Before rushing into the tent, Dick had pressed a rifle from Major Price's miniature shooting-range in Lesley's hands. And she says the rifle went off by accident. But did it?

Sir Harvey only has a flesh wound and is brought to his cottage, but instructs Doctor Hugh Middlesworth to circulate the report that he was dying and summoned Dick to tell him an unsettling story.

According to Sir Harvey, Dick's youngish looking fiance is a forty-one year old poisoner, named Jordan, who has killed three men with "a hypodermic full of prussic acid" inside rooms that were found to be locked or bolted from the inside. So they were all as suicides, but Sir Harvey, Superintendent David Hadley and Dr. Gideon Fell believed they had been cleverly murdered. Only the locked rooms had them utterly beat. Someone from Scotland Yard is on his way to Six Ashes to identify Lesley as the elusive poisoner.

Lesley Grant is a very similar character to Fay Seton from He Who Whispers (1946). Two women who find themselves ensnared in a web of murder and suspicion.

Fay Seton is arguably Carr's most well-known tragic (female) characters who became the victim of a slanderous whisper campaign, following her engagement to Harry Brooke, which accused her of being bloodsucking vampire – malicious gossip and rumors are reinforced by two seemingly impossible (attempted) murders. The apparent handiwork of a supernatural being. Lesley is accused of being a serial poisoner of men and this claim is strengthened when her accuser is murdered in circumstances that are identical to the past murders.

On the morning following the incident in fortunetellers tent, Dick receives an early, anonymous phone call telling him to immediately go to Sir Harvey's cottage, because if he doesn't come at once, he'll be too late. So he hurries towards the cottage, but, when he arrives, sees how somebody stuck a rifle over the boundary wall of Ashe Hall Park and fired a shot. And he saw how the star of a bullet-hole jump up in the window-glass of the cottage. However, Sir Harvey was not killed by a bullet.

Sir Harvey is found sitting in an easy-chair, beside a big writing-table, in the middle of the sitting-room with a hypodermic syringe lying on the floor and the unmistakable odor of bitter-almonds in the air. The door to the sitting-room is bolted on the inside and the ordinary sash-windows are fastened with metal catches. So how did the murderer enter or leave the room? And who switched on the lights in the locked sitting-room seconds before the shot was fired? These locked room-tricks are a little bit more technical in nature than most impossible crimes found in Carr's work and basically found a new way to apply a very old locked room-trick, but it was innovating enough to reinvigorate the idea – making it even feel original. Carr pulled off a similar stunt with the impossible murder from the slightly underrated The Dead Man's Knock (1958), which found an ingenious new angle to another age-old locked room-trick.

The murder of Sir Harvey brings Dr. Gideon Fell to the village and the news he brings drops one of many bombshells on the case, but it was great to see the good doctor again when he was at the top of his game.

Dr. Fell enters the story as only he can as he emerged from the back of a car, like "a very large genie out of a very small bottle," clad in a box-pleated cape, shovel hat, a pair of eye-glasses on a broad black ribbon and leaning heavily a crutch-handled cane. A few pages later, Dr. Fell is pacing through the garden of the cottage, immersed deep in thought, addressing "a ghostly parliament" with gestures and inaudible words. This is how I like to see Dr. Fell. A wheezing, larger-than-life Chestertonian figure who can be simultaneously perfectly logical and maddening enigmatic without negatively affecting the plot... usually.

Dr. Fell begins to peel away the various layers of the plot, but the problems remain as baffling and murky as the moment the whole case began in the fortuneteller's tent, because each answer posed new problems and questions – which began to gnaw at my memories of the solution. Where my memories deceiving me? Hey, it has happened to me before! This is why so few can match Carr when it comes to plotting and telling a detective story. Even when you know the solution, the plot still tries to throw sand in your eyes.

The solution is pretty solid and technically sound. An ultimately simple idea complicated by circumstances, personal secrets and an unexpected murder in a locked room. I think it was very impressive how Carr managed to keep everything shrouded in mystery until the ending with even Lesley's guilt or innocence being up in the air until the very last moment. There really was nobody better than Carr. Nobody!

So, all in all, Till Death Do Us Part was even better than I remembered and deserves its current reappraisal as one of Carr's top-tier mystery novels, but I have one caveat. Yes, Till Death Do Us Part is a five-star mystery novel, but it earned those stars on points rather than by a convincing knockout. Still, this is an excellent detective story that comes highly recommended.

A note for the curious: there are numerous references in the story to "a hard path across open fields towards Goblin Wood," which is the setting of Carr's most celebrated impossible crime story, "The House in Goblin Wood" (1947) – published as by "Carter Dickson." I like to believe this means the Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale series take place in the same universe. What a shame so very few writers pooled their series-detectives together.