Window of Opportunity

"The most creative people have this childlike facility to play."

- John Cleese

Last Friday, Sergio from Tipping My Fedora posted a glowing review of He Who Whispers (1946), which came out on top of a John Dickson Carr poll that was held on his blog in late 2014 and the results were very interesting.

The internet has done its fair share in bringing about a Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction, giving (secondhand) book dealers and independent publishers an open market place, which made hoarding Golden Age mystery writers as easy as pulling a coin from a child's ear. Once popular writers that were relegated to obscurity are being discovered and appreciated again by a whole new crop of readers. John Dickson Carr is one of the mystery writers who benefited from this, as nearly all of his novels are easy to come by today, but this seems to have resulted in a reassessment of what readers consider to be Carr's best work – swapping The Hollow Man (1935), The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) and The Crooked Hinge (1938) for He Who Whispers, She Died a Lady (1943) and Till Death Do Us Part (1944).

Only The Judas Window (1938), published as if by "Carter Dickson," seems to be as popular as ever, which made me wonder: would the story stand up to re-reading? The short, easy answer is: yes. But that would make for a rather short review.

The Judas Window is, unusually for Carr, structured as a courtroom drama with the scowling, Churchillian figure of Sir Henry Merrivale acting for the defense at the Old Bailey in a murder trial. James "Jim" Caplon Answell stands accused of the murder of his future father-in-law, Mr. Avory Hume, who could've only been killed by Answell – despite a clear lack of motive. They were the only occupants of Hume's practically bare and hermitically sealed study. A solid, wooden oak door, bolted from the inside, fits tightly in its frame and the windows were latched and covered with steel, burglarproof shutters. The decanter of the doctored whiskey, which made Answell pass out, has been replaced and Hume lays sprawled on the ground – a trophy arrow wrenched from the wall protruding from his chest.

Nobody believes in Answell's innocence. Nobody, except for Merrivale, his unshakable believe in the "blinkin' awful cussedness of things in general" and knowledge of the existence of a Judas window. And with that, Carr did what he did best and spun something perfectly sinister around something innocuous and everyday as an unseen opening. 

A Judas window is a window in a cell door to the see the prisoner, but H.M. points out there are more of them, "you've got a Judas window in your own room at home; there's one in this room, and there's one in every courtroom in the Old Bailey. The trouble is that so few people ever notice it," which is why H.M. so strenuously objected to the study being described as "sealed." H.M. assured that the door/windows were really "tight and solid and bolted" and "nobody monkeyed with a fastening to lock or unlock either," which was the same for the walls – bare of any crevices or rat-holes. A tough nut to crack and it's an impossible situation begging for a mind bending simple explanation, which (IMO) is a challenge that was met. It was simple and original, but without reducing the sinister aspect of the titular window. This alone will secure it as a favorite among locked room enthusiasts for many decades to come.

The other part that probably made this book an endearing to JDC fans is Merrivale's one-off appearance as a barrister, which was the first time in fifteen years and there was (of course!) some commotion the last time he appeared in court – addressing the jury indiscreetly with, "well, my fatheads." H.M. is prone to theatrics (e.g. The Gilded Man (1942) and The Skeleton in the Clock, 1948), but is more contained here and pounds the enigmatic facts of a perfectly sealed room that wasn't sealed, a missing piece of goose feather from an arrow, golf suits and inkpads, and compiling a "Time-Table for Archers" – while witnesses who were milling in-and around of the house take their seat in the witness boxes. Slowly, but surely, Merrivale peels away the many layers of confusion wrapped around Hume's murder and the Old Man's performance at the Old Bailey would've gotten the slow-clap from Perry Mason, John J. Malone and Francis Pettigrew after concluding the evidence for the defense with "Bah!"

If there's anything to be said against The Judas Window, it's that H.M. takes his sweet time to arrive at the final conclusion and that made it, at times, feel a tad bit padded. Alex Atkinson spoofed this wonderfully in "Chapter the Last: Merriman Explains," from Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990), but I only mention this to proof I can be critical of Carr. The Judas Window stood more than up to re-reading.

Note for the curious: Chapter Fourteen, "Time-Table for Archers," mentions a locked room murder in tower looking out over the sea, but not the title of the story or the name of the writer. Well, it's one of the stories from Otto Penzler's The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014). SPOILER: ["The Badmoor Murder" by Melville Davisson Post].

Solving the Unsolvable

"In my cases, sir, you can have practically everything."

- Dr. Gideon Fell ("The Hangman Won't Wait," collected in The Door to Doom, 1980) 

Yes, I know. I have criminally neglected this blog over the past few months, but, hopefully, activity will now revert back to its regular pace without any interruptions. And now, without further ado...

The Third Bullet and Other Stories of Detection (1954) is a collection of short stories by John Dickson Carr, one of the Old Masters of the Impossible Crime tale, who seldomly disappoints – even if I knew a few stories from other books and incarnations (i.e. radio plays). A novella, "The Third Bullet," opens the collections and stars a prototype of Colonel March (e.g. The Department of Queer Complaints, 1940), Colonel Marquis, tasked with looking into the seemingly impossible shooting of Charles Mortlake. Mortlake was shot in his pavilion, which exits where either bolted shut or under observation and the evidence points to one person. The explanation follows Merrivale's Law of the "blinkin' cussedness of things in general," which made an extremely confusing murder appear to be completely impossible, however, it's main weakness is its length. It should've been much, much shorter. I can also recommend the mini-anthology Locked Room Puzzles (1986), which includes this novella and three others by Bill Pronzini, Clayton Rawson and Edward D. Hoch.

"The Clue of the Red Wig" details the peculiar circumstances surrounding the murder of Hazel Loring, a columnist with a loyal following of housewives who read her weekly column, "Smile and Grow Fit," whose denuded body was found on a park bench in Victoria Square on a cold December night – most of her clothes neatly folded besides her. A young, cheeky Franco-British journalist, Jacqueline Dubois, takes on the case on behalf of the Daily Record and helps Inspector Adam Bell find a clever answer to the baffling problem. Miss Dubois herself brings some Gallic flair to a quintessential English detective story, saying such things like "hot ziggety dame!" and offering to make love to the Assistant Commissioner in exchange for a scoop. And, of course, casting a young, French journalist as one of the detectives is nothing more than a poorly disguised nod and a wink at one of Carr's favorite locked room mysteries, Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907) by Gaston Leroux.

"The House in Goblin Wood" is one of few short story appearances for the Old Maestro, Sir Henry Merrivale, and it's generally considered to be on par with the best full-length cases of H.M. Twenty years before the opening of the story, a young girl, named Vicky, disappeared from a house that was locked and bolted from the inside – only to reappear a week later with a story of having lived with the fairies. When she returns to the house two decades later, she disappears again under similar circumstances, however, this time it becomes a grim fairy-tale. This is like G.K. Chesterton at his best: treacherously benevolent on the surface.

"The Wrong Problem" is a semi-inverted mystery with the tendency to twist and turn, in which Dr. Gideon Fell has a talk with a man by a lake, located in a valley in Somerset, about a crime that has been buried in the distant past. There's an artificial island in the lake with a summerhouse and the man was suspected to be responsible for the death of two of his family members, who died in the summerhouse. One of them in a bare, top-floor room with bars decorating the sole window and the only door was under constant observation. The method was recycled from another story, but, as a whole, it was nice, leisurely and well clued detective story.

"The Proverbial Murder" involves the fatal shooting of Dr. Ludwig Meyer, a German refugee, working a dissertation on atoms and the police surrounded the cottage at the time, because his English wife had reported him as a spy. Ardent readers of Carr will probably figure out large swats of the solution before Dr. Fell. There are bits and pieces that cropped in other stories, but even without that it's not that difficult to get on the right track. A simple, but nice, detective-meets-spy story.

I was already familiar with "The Locked Room" as a radio play, in sound and script, in which a book collector, Francis Seton, is assaulted inside his locked and guarded office, but Dr. Fell makes short work of the problem. And, to be honest, the story is a notch or two below Carr's best and the locked room problem/solution impressed me as sloppy in their presentation. Not all that bad, but also far from the best.

"The Man from Paris" shows why John Dickson Carr is grossly underrated as a writer of historical mystery-and adventure stories and here he combines it with his talent to imitate 19th century fiction writers. In the Dr. Gideon Fell mystery The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933), Carr wrote a completely imaginary, but very convincing, passage from a lost Edgar Allan Poe tale. Here a Parisian travels to America to right a wrong, but is confronted with a dying woman and her will that has disappeared under impossible circumstances, however, as a mystery, it’s only of interest for the secret identity of one of the characters – and the historical atmosphere of mid-19th century America, if you enjoy historical mystery. By the way, while I was reading the story, I suddenly wondered who the president was at the time and the story immediately answered with a reference to Zachary Taylor. As to say, here dummy. Hey, it could've been James Polk, right?

And thus concludes my first, proper review in what feels like ages and I have still failed in giving my all-time favorite mystery writer a bad review, which I solely blame on Carr for insisting on being an unapologetic mystery writer. I mean, how can snooty purist like me take umbrage at a man who loudly proclaimed: "...I wanted to write detective stories. I don't mean that I wanted to write great novels, or any nonsense like that! I mean that I simply damn well wanted to write detective stories." It's an attitude that's strongly reflected in his work and it's a stance that's still hugely appreciated! 

Secrets of the Heart

"Oh, my son! You don't know my history. I've seen a feller who was dead, and yet who wasn't dead. I've seen a man make two different sets of finger-prints with the same hands. I've seen a poisoner get atropine into a clean glass that nobody touched... as for a murderer floating in the air, I'm expectin' to meet one any day. It would just round out my cycle before the old man goes into the dustbin."

- Sir Henry Merrivale (She Died a Lady, 1943)

There are only about half a dozen reviews posted on this blog concerning my all-time favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr a.k.a. "Carter Dickson," whose name, however, I drop whenever as much as a particle of an opportunity presents itself. You only have to look at the number of posts labeled "Locked Room Mysteries" or "Impossible Crimes" to know I had no shortage of opportunities.

I felt that a return to the maestro himself was in order, and Sir Henry Merrivale in particular, but had only And So to Murder (1940) left to explore and I was in the mood for something grander – ending up re-reading one of the best titles in the H.M. series.

She Died a Lady (1943) is set during the most defining period of the previous century, when Adolf Hitler had set out to conquer Europe and England was one of the last strongholds of the continent where his troops hadn't put boots on the ground... yet. The isolated, seaside town of Lyncombe with its sheer cliffs overlooking the sea, is almost a stand-in for the rest of the country. On top of that stone protrusion a small group of people begin to feel the effects of the war when it begins to intermingle with their normal, everyday problems.

Dr. Luke Croxley's narration of the events begin with a visit from Rita Wainwright, a patient of his son, Tom, who caught herself up in an affair with an American actor named Barry Sullivan, while still being legally tied to her husband Alec – of whom she’s fond and wants to spare his feeling. But her desire to be with Barry grows with the day and Alec's only occupied nowadays with listening to gloomy news broadcasts on the wireless on the war. There, amidst the blackouts and rationing, someone cuts the phone lines and drains the petrol from the cars. Rita and Barry vanish. They only leave a trail of footprints behind on sandy ground of a cliff, "a romantic promontory called Lovers' Leap," which looks out over a seventy-foot drop into the unforgiving tides and rocks below. Everything points to a suicide pact, until they wash ashore and bullets peeled out of the body indicate that they were shot at close range before falling from the cliff. This does not preclude suicide, if the gun had been found at the top of the cliff or somewhere below, but it was discovered somewhere discarded on a road!

This means, according to the evidence, that Rita and Barry were facing their murderer while standing on the edge of a cliff, which entails that the shooter was lighter than air, but still capable of lifting a gun, before apparently ceasing to exist. Or hovered back over the foot prints on to solid ground. 

Luckily, H.M. happens to be in the neighborhood to have his portrait done as a Roman senator and being bound to a (motorized!) wheelchair, on account of a broken toe, does not prevent him from leaving an ever-lasting impression on the village – frightening a few of its inhabitants by racing through the town as a cross between Winston Churchill and emperor Nero. However, the comedy does not intrude on the serious and somber tone of the story. It's Merrivale's way of coping with life and he becomes, IMO, more human as the story progresses. H.M. knows how to deal with supposedly cursed rooms that kill, dagger-waving poltergeists and the pseudo-science of telepathy, but a worldwide conflict the size of WWII reduces him to a rather helpless figure vowing "to be some use to this ruddy country yet... just you wait and see!" Before H.M. helped the allied forces plotting Hitler's downfall (you know he did), he did what he does best, find a natural explanation for everything.  

The impossibilities about footprints, whether it’s a single set of footprints where there were supposed to be two or the complete lack of them altogether, always struck me as one of the more difficult tricks to pull-off successfully – even more so if you try to be original. They always have me struggling for possible explanations and She Died a Lady is arguably Carr's most successful treatment of this type of impossible crime, because it's not a stock-in-trade situation the footprints emerge in and thus the solution is original. It's one of those tailor-made for the plot and setting types of solutions that Herbert Resnicow loved to play with during the 1980s (c.f. The Gold Deadline (1984) and The Dead Room, 1987), but the impossible elements do not dominate the story. They're a part of the larger picture that's not only one of Carr's most accomplished mystery novels, but also one of his most mature and character-driven stories, which deserves the reputation of The Judas Window (1938) – as good as that book is in it's own right, it lacks the depth of She Died a Lady.

She Died a Lady is in my eyes Carr's Death on the Nile (1937), one of his favorite mystery novels, and if you look closely at the plot, you may agree with me that Lady might be a very cleverly disguised homage to Nile. If you can't see it, think of a water mirror effect with ripples in it, caused by Carr to give it his own touch. And that's not a spoiler, because (SPOILER, select of CTRL+A to read): it's not giving anything away when Carr’s Eternal Triangle has a fourth side. Vintage JDC!

Finally, I found two more clock-quotes! I know, I know, but I'm still fascinated how the passing of time and the faces of clocks are associated in Carr's stories with impending doom, sickness or herald the death of a character. Sometimes, they even have the face of death, e.g. Death Watch (1935) and The Skeleton in the Clock (1948).

From chapter 13, page 126 (penguin edition):

"It inspired in me, I must confess, much the same sense of impending disaster as was inspired in Captain Hook by the approach of the crocodile with the clock inside."

From chapter 18, page 180:

"A clock ticked asthmatically in the dark hall."

I remain convinced that clocks are the source of all-evil in Carr's universe.

Like a Ghost

"One, two, Freddy's coming for you.
Three, four, better lock your door.
Five, six, grab your crucifix.
Seven, eight, gonna stay up late.
Nine, ten, never sleep again."

- Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

A question was posted on the GAD group asking the list-members whom of John Dickson Carr's series detectives they preferred, Dr. Gideon Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale?

As you may or may not have noticed, John Dickson Carr happens to be my favorite mystery writer and having to pick a favorite character seems like an impossibility fitting the motif of his overall work, however, I have no problem with picking H.M. over Fell. No problem whatsoever. The "Old Man" is a more lively and entertaining character, whose cases often are an odd, but strangely balanced, hodgepodge of gothic material, farcical comedy, spies and criminals of international repute – while upholding the standards of the traditional detective story. And the impossible crimes, of course!

But, for me, it's also H.M.’s childlike embrace of life and schoolboy antics, as childish and petty as they can actually be at times, which made the entire series fun to read – even the supposedly bad ones from a later vintage. That's not something I can say for Dr. Fell's involvement in The House at Satan’s Elbow (1965), Panic in Box C (1966) and Dark of the Moon (1967). A Graveyard to Let (1949) and Night at the Mocking Widow (1950) may not be the greatest mystery novels ever committed to paper, but they were, at least, fun to read thanks to H.M. creating a riot in the subway and handing out cigars to children. Even the worst of the Merrivale mysteries, Seeing is Believing (1941), was brightened up with the "Old Man" dictating his memoirs.

One of the list-members, Bob Houk, responded to this with, "but then there's Cavalier's Cup, for which no excuse is possible, in my opinion," which is the last of the Merrivale novels and one of two I had not yet read – until today!

First off, I'll concede that The Cavalier's Cup (1953) is sub-par in comparison with Carr's best work, but still, it wasn’t that bad.

The setting is Tellford Old Hall, where the Oak Room was once haunted by the image of a long-dead Cavalier, Sir Byng Rawdon, who carved his final words in a windowpane with a diamond ring – before dashing off to his final battle on the lawn outside. But lately, the ghost of Sir Byng seems to have returned to the room not long after the titular cup is briefly returned to the hall, before being carted back to the bank vault, and Lord "Tom" Brace stands on personally guarding the family heirloom. Tom locks himself up in the Oak Room, a pair of stiff bolts on a door tightly wedge in its frame and windows fastened from within, while the cup stands in a safe with its sole key inside the room, but when dayspring wakes him up he's confronted with what appears to be the handy work of a poltergeist. The cup has been removed from the safe and stands in front of him on the table! Thinking he has become prone to sleepwalking, Tom refuses to go back to sleep (hence the opening quote!) and this brings his wife, Virginia, to call on Chief Inspector Masters to explain the impossible to ease her husband's mind.

Naturally, Sir Henry Merrivale is drawn into the case, who has buried himself for the last six months at Cranleigh Court to take private singing lessons under the tutelage of Signor Ravioli much to the horror of Masters – who presumed that the lack of public scandals for the last few months meant that H.M. was finally struck with a serious case of sanity. 

Anyway, the miraculous occurrence of the moving cup happens again, but this time when Masters is guarding the cup and is knocked unconscious for his trouble, however, even more baffling is the appearance in the room of a cup-handled rapier that hung outside of the sealed Oak Room! The bits and pieces that make up this problem show that Carr was still a good plotter at this point in his career, but it would've worked better as a short story or a novella (e.g. the H.M. novella "All in a Maze" from The Men Who Explained Miracles, 1963) where there could've been more emphasis on the locked room trick – which was clever, well-clued and both of the occurrences properly motivated. The motive was very clever, indeed, even if it became questionable by the execution of the trick by the culprit. A sort of last minute change, but that's all I can say without spoiling it.

The problem with The Cavalier's Cup is that it's too wordy and chatty that, more often than not, merely functioned to pad out the book as it took a whopping hundred pages to get to the point of the whole story. But more than that, I think some readers disliked seeing one of their favorite writers, whose books always gave off the impression of someone who thought life was something worth fighting for, reduced to bitterly ranting about the then Labor government like an Irish poet – which makes for an odd mixture of a novel when you throw in the comedic and detective bits. Personally, I found the righteous indignation of Masters, who's a shadow of the man who first appeared in The Plague Court Murders (1934), to be most insufferable part of this book and I agree with Nick Fuller who wrote on his (I think) now defunct website, Ministry of Miracles, that the perfect ending to this novel would've been H.M. as the mastermind behind the prank to stick it to Masters, who really seem to have started disliking H.M. And after having revealed himself, H.M. throws a snowball in Masters' face! I added that last part for even more comedic effect. 

So I recognize and suffered through it flaws, but did not end up hating it and liked the overall idea of the story – even if the execution leaves a lot to be desired (and cut). The whole idea was almost Scooby Doo-ish (and s/he would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling snoops) or could've been an episode for Jonathan Creek (like The Scented Room). This book really should’ve been entitled The Cavalier's Cup: A Ranting Comedy With Detective Interruptions.

And no. I'm not unable to give Carr a bad review, but I'm not going to reread Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956). Satan himself would've to draw up a pretty sweet contract to make that happen. By the way, Carr's historical mysteries from the same period were much better than the ones set in contemporary times, which, I think proves my theory that Carr was a chronophobiac.

Anyway, the next review will be of a modern day writer taking a shot at the locked room mystery.

Colonel March of Scotland Yard: Miraculous Shades of Black and White

"My work in the Department of Queer Complaints is concerned only with the improbable and, well, frankly, the unbelievable."

- Colonel March (The Sorcerer).

John Dickson Carr's Mephistophelean cunning and his incurable romantic disposition proved to be a fruitful union that gave birth to a number of memorable detectives, like the Chestertonian Dr. Gideon Fell and the curmudgeonly Sir Henry Merrivale, but it was his official policeman, Colonel March of Department 3-D of Scotland Yard, who became a regular on the small screen between 1956 and 1957 – finding an explanation for more than twenty cases of the bizarre and impossible.

Col. March has an eye for details

The thirty-minute episodes were (loosely) based on the stories in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), in which Colonel March is called upon to investigate implausible stories in order to determine whether they are exaggerations, hoaxes or cleverly disguised crimes. Colonel March of Scotland Yard follows the pattern of the short stories, but the inescapable modifications are present as well and the most "eye-catching" one is Boris Karloff as March – who doesn't fit the description of a speckled man with bland eyes and a short pipe projecting from under a cropped moustache (which may be sandy or gray). Inexplicably, March was given an eye-patch, which occasionally causes a collision with one of the sets that wobbled in the background, but Karloff played the amiable detective convincingly and actually gave March more of a personality than he had in the original stories.

I finally decided to watch a few episodes and in spite of the dated production values, retooled stories or forgetting to drop a clue here and there it was a blast to watch. It’s basically a direct ancestor of Jonathan Creek with its locked rooms, bizarre occurrences and light-hearted undertone.

The framework of The New Invisible Man is the same as its eponymous story and has March looking into the unbelievable story of Major Henry Rodman, who witnessed a shooting in the apartment of his neighbors and the only description he was able to give of the murderer is that of a pair of floating, disembodied gloves – filled with invisible hands. However, this amusing yarn Carr spun was merely a subplot in the episode and a layer saturated with criminal intent was added to the story, which, IMO, was a mistake. The story from the collection perfectly demonstrated what kind of unusual problems March's department handles and tossing a common garden variety of crime cheapened the plot. But it was fun to see with my own eyes how the trick looks like in real-life. 

"Piltdown Man" hoax inspired the following episode.

An ancient skull called "Damascus Man," known as The Missing Link, which's also the title that was slapped on this episode and opens with an attempted theft of the skull by two museum employees, Tom Grafton and Evelyn Innes, in order to expose Sir Henry Danier as a fraud – except that the skull does end being stolen but by whom and why? This is more a story of crime and archeological skullduggery than of detection, but an enjoyable one at that.

Over the course of the next episode, The Sorcerer, John Cusby suspect his wife's psycho-analyst, Dr. James Patten, of plotting her demise and fumes with malicious intent, but it's his wife who ends up as a suspect when Dr. Patten is stabbed to death with one of her hatpins inside his, locked and windowless, treatment room – with Mrs. Cusby as its only other occupant. I was afraid the entire episode that the plot would hinge on hypnosis with Mrs. Cusby as a remote-controlled assassin, but the trick used to enter the sealed room was surprisingly good. Simple but effective. 

Death in Inner Space is Carter Dickson as conceived by Clayton Rawson or Fredric Brown, opening with March giving a speech for the Society of Interplanetary Communication, where’s invited by Dr. Hodek to spend a few days at his home – where's working on experiments with suspended animation. He’s convinced that he has been receiving radio signals from Mars and that, one day, we will be able to visit our Martian neighbors and his work is the first step. Unfortunately, one of his experiments goes horribly wrong and his volunteer dies due to a lack of oxygen in spite of a perfectly working alarm system that should've warned Hodek in case anything went wrong. Not all that bad, but the premise was more interesting than the solution and the ending was ambiguous.

The Invisible Knife has an unusual take on the multiple spouse-killers: a man who regularly has to bury business partners. Basil Pennacott had them all over the world, from Bombay to Tangier, and he profited from all of them – especially after they died. Four of them appeared to have died of natural causes, but the fifth, Edmund Hays, was stabbed in the proverbial locked room while attempting to summon demons. Pennacott was there with him, but was never charged because the police was unable to find the murder weapon. But now that Basil has come back to England, he finds himself being threatened by the Hays' brother, who mailed him a dead parrot with a poisoned beak, and asks March to protect his life. This gives the story a nice dual conflict of having to protect an unscrupulous murderer on one hand and trying to prevent an innocent man from becoming one on the other. The trick for the vanishing murder weapon was culled from "The Dragon in the Pool," which was a radio play Carr penned for Appointment with Fear.

You can expect more posts on this series in the not-so distant future, but you can also discover them for yourselves on YouTube. 

Sealed Rooms and Ghoulish Laughter: Tributes to John Dickson Carr

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

The man who explained miracles...

After perusing the article "C is for... John Dickson Carr," an unabashed piece of hero worship from fellow blogger Sergio, a germ of an idea began to fester and grow in my mind, but with it came a knock on the door and found a problem on my doorstep. The instrument I exert to trumpet his praise broke after beating a dead horse with it and more than enough people are already of the opinion that I should get a room for me and the ghost of John Dickson Carr. So I decided to adjust my focus for this post and take a look at some of the stories that he inspired others to write.

Well, I guess I have to start with the late William Brittain, a novelist and school teacher, who scattered the pages of The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine with an abundance of short stories – including "The Man Who Read" series. It's a series of stand-alone mysteries centering on readers of detective fiction that are put in a position where they have to apply the knowledge culled from the stories of their favorite mystery writer to solve a problem of their own... or to create one.

William Brittain (1930-2011)

"The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" is a young orphan, named Edgar Gault, who discovered the undisputed master of the locked room mystery at the impressionable age of fourteen, imbuing him with the conviction that, one day, he will bring his stories to life – preferably with his unpleasant uncle as the victim. The trick of the locked door is almost as good as the final sentence of the story, which is a real kicker, and it's just overall an amusing and a very rich story. It places the inverted mystery in the convinces of the locked room and even gives you, somewhat, of a character study of the protagonist, but, above all, it's just fun story to read. I wish the entire series, all ten of them, were gathered in one easily accessible volume. Messrs Crippen and Landru, are you taking notes? Until then, you can find this story in Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories (1998).

Norma Schier was another mystery writer who had her tongue firmly planted in her cheek when she began to pen a series of short stories for The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, in which she harlequinade her most famous predecessors – from Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh to Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr. Most of her stories perfectly captured the heart and soul of the originals and have the added bonus of being anagram puzzles. You can figure out whodunit and who's being spoofed by simply decoding the anagrams.

"Hocus-Pocus at Drumis Tree" (published under the byline Handon C. Jorricks) was her nod to John Dickson Carr, which takes place in a reputable restaurant where it's not the custom to spike a glass of champagne with poison and then pass it around, but that's exactly what happened. Enter Sir Marvin Rhyerlee! Who's miffed that he can't enjoy a quiet lunch without someone dying under impossible circumstances. Schier admitted that her little pastiche does little justice to Carr's plotting technique and knack for coming up with impossible situations, but the attempt that was made here is definitely being appreciated. You can find this story in the collection The Anagram Detectives (1979).

Alex Atkinson wrote another parody, "Chapter the Last: Merriman Explains," which is more a spoof on Carr's detectives than his plotting technique and someone on the JDCarr forum noted that the more Carr you've read the more you'll appreciate it. I agree. It's a brief, but fun, distraction and can be read in the anthology Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990). 

Another humorous excerpt, lampooning Dr. Gideon Fell, comes from the word processor of one of our very own, Barry Ergang, who was inspired to write "Dr. Gideon Fell, Hardboiled Sawbones" after a comment from Nick Fuller berating the atrocity that was The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries – a TV series that butchered a number of Gladys Mitchell's most enjoyable novels. Here is Nick's full-comment that can double as a synopsis for Barry's story: "It is like adapting Carr, and making Dr. Fell a cantankerous hard-drinking medico on the sleazy streets of London's East End who deals with professional crime of the hard-boiled variety and with an awful number of demented blondes, without an impossible crime in sight." The story can still be read by clicking here (GAD archive).

William Krohn's "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus" was written in a more serious and darker vein, when the author was only 18-years-old, and almost reads like a love letter to John Dickson Carr and the locked room mystery. Krohn's introduction to the genre came a few years previously, when he read The Three Coffins (1935) and the Cult of Carr welcomed another member in their midst. The story itself dribs with Carrian influences, involving the stabbing of a magician in closed and moving elevator, with a solution that does not rely on gizmos like a certain other story I could mention – and I can only imagine that Carr himself must have beamed with pride after finishing the story (it was published during his lifetime). Krohn penned a second story for the EQMM, but it was rejected as too complex and eventually moved away from detective fiction to become a film critic and expert on Alfred Hitchcock. I wonder if a copy of that story survived. Anyway, as Darrell from The Study Lamp remarked, the story has been deservedly reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2007).

By the same token, I should also mention Paul Halter's The Fourth Door (1987), whose Dr. Alan Twist is a "thinly" disguised version of Dr. Gideon Fell, and Jean-Paul Török's The Riddle of Monte Verita (2007), but I already discussed them in depth on this blog. However, Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1997) should be mentioned, even if it's more of a general wink at the genre than one specifically meant for Carr. The bloodhounds of the title are a group of fanatical mystery fans, ranging from locked room enthusiasts to hardboiled fanatics, who meet once a week to discuss detective stories – until one of them is murdered aboard a locked houseboat. A very clever, fun and eerily recognizable book that should belong on the shelves of everyone who's permanently under the weather with the sleuth flu. It's about us!

I probably missed a few and could probably find more, but I think this was more than enough hero worship for this Sunday. My next sermon will be on how Carr has fed our hungry brains and banished mediocrity from our bookshelves. Thank you Carr for unlocking doors and forgiving our sins, like you did with the murderers in so many of your books, past, present and future. In name of the Father (Edgar Allan Poe), the Son (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the Holy Spirit (G.K. Chesterton). Amen.  

The Man Who Explained Miracles

"Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- The White Queen (Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, 1871)

A furnished room, alongside with the corpus delictis, vanishes from an apartment building, a burglar traverses a stretch of snow without leaving footprints and a man witnesses how a floating glove snatches up a gun and shoots a man point blank in the chest. These are only a few examples of problems brought to Colonel March's attention, who, as the head of Department D-3 of Scotland Yard, has to decide whether these implausible stories are either gross exaggerations, elaborate hoaxes or perhaps cleverly disguised crimes.

If such a department would exist in our everyday world, its sole task would be to keep the confused souls, who occasionally feel the urge to confess that it was them who surreptitiously stole the Crown Jewels when nobody was looking, from bothering the regular police, however, this is John Dickson Carr's mad, mad, mad universe – and not everyone raving feverishly about disappearing rooms and invisible men is a head case. The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), published under the byline "Carter Dickson," collects seven of the nine-recorded cases that passed through the office of Colonel March. 

The New Invisible Man

Colonel March finds a confused man, named Horace Rodman, sitting on the other side of his desk, relating a bizarre story of a disembodied glove who shot a man in the apartment across the street, which had an even more unlikely follow-up when he stormed the apartment with a policeman in tow – only to discover an empty room and a broken window "magically" restored. March never leaves his desk to the make the invisible marksman emerge from our blind spot and it did not disappoint. It's perhaps a tad-bit over elaborate, but that's smoothed over once you learn of the motive. Great ending that was very much in the Carrian spirit.

Part of the plot of this story was used for the radio play "Man Without a Body," which also recycled the impossible crime from the stage-play "Thirteen to the Gallows."

The Footprints in the Sky

Dorothy Brant loathed Mrs. Topham and the fact that her footprints where the only traces in the snow, leading to and from the doorstep of Mrs. Topham, makes her the only suspect when the hated woman was brutally beaten and robbed on the evening when Brant visited her. Luckily, Colonel March noticed the footprints in the sky. The solution is something Clayton Rawson might have come up with (e.g. The Footprints on the Ceiling, 1939) and the circumstances of the crime recalled Paul Halter's The Lord of Misrule (1994), which isn't necessary a good thing (in this case it's kind of corny), but overall, it was a fun story and loved the idea of the metaphorical footprints left on the night sky.

The Crime in Nobody's Room

An entire room, harboring the body of a dead man, vanishes from an apartment building, but it's not a very good or clever story – I'm afraid. The solution to the disappearing room was blindingly obvious and the overall plot only so-so. Oh well, every short story collection has its duds.

Carr rewrote this story as the radio play, "Five Canaries in a Room."

Hot Money

Unusually, for Carr, this story opens with a messy bank robbery, more reminiscent of the hardboiled writers who described the seamier side of life than a cerebral puzzle, but one is eventually deposited on the desk of Colonel March – and involves locating an invisible piece of furniture. The bank robbers were caught, but the money was probably dropped off at a fence, who specializes in laundering dirty money, and the police have a pretty good idea who this guy is, however, the only proof (i.e. the stolen money) vanished from a locked room. The room was strip-searched without finding as much as a snippet of cash, but Colonel March believes they might have overlooked a big piece of furniture that nobody ever seems to notice. 

A big, chunky piece of furniture that everyone has in his home, but never notices, resonated the "Judas Window," which every room has but only murderers could look through, and "The Silver Curtain," from which they can cut a figuritive invisibility cloak. Carr loved to create domestic horrors! The only weakness in thia story arises if you reject the launderers hiding hole as a piece of furniture.

"Hot Money" was also rewritten as a radio play and broadcasted under the title "Nothing Up My Sleeve." Arthur Porges' collection of locked room mysteries, The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), has a lot of impossible situations like this one – c.f. "The Scientist and the Invisible Safe."

Death in the Dressing Room

A pick-pocket has been looting the wallets of the patrons of The Orient Club and one the dancers is stabbed to death in her dressing room, but Colonel March is on the scene (originally to look into the unusual pick-pocket case) to take charge of the case and turns a cast-iron alibi into scrap metal. A well-written and deftly plotted story.

This story was rewritten for Murder Clinic, instead of Suspense, and, IIRC, March was replaced with H.M.

The Silver Curtain

A young man looses everything, except his ticket to return home, in a French casino and is approached by a shady characters who offers him a wad of money in exchange for a favor: he has to sneak a bottle of pills pass custom services. However, the entire plan collapses like a house of cards when he witnesses how an invisible assailant stabs his new employer in an empty cul-de-sac. Upon re-reading this story, first read in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room and Impossible Crimes (2000), I have to come to the conclusion that this is perhaps one of my favorite tricks for this kind of impossible crime. So simple and effective.

Error at Daybreak

The final case for Colonel March in this collection offers a similar problem as in his previous outing: a man is stabbed to death while standing alone on a remote, rocky spot of the beach, under observation of three witnesses, who see him waving at one of them before he collapses – stabbed in the back with something like a thin, old-fashioned hairpin. It's a decent enough story that did nice job of leading me up the garden path. I was convinced that the victim was stabbed (without noticing it because of the nature of the weapon) before he had reached that desolate spot and had either a) succumbed at that place from internal bleeding or b) waving had ruptured the wound. This would have been a neat method for the murderer to (accidentally?) finish off the victim after he didn't die instantly from the stab wound. Just imagine, murdering someone by waving at him or her. I think I would've let Colonel Race wave at the victim and accidentally create the impossible situation.

All in all, this was a solid collection showing Carr as one of the most versatile and inspired writers of his generation, who was not satisfied with merely explaining who dented the skull of Sir Ivan Pale in his windowless séance room with a crystal sphere, but also finding a way for the murderer to aparantly phase through a solid oaken door that was locked and bolted from the inside. Carr purposely placed hurdles in front of him to make things more interesting and fun, and that he tripped once or twice did nothing to lessen that effect. Carr simply was one of the best and most enthusiastic players of the Grandest Game in the World and that rubs off on the reader. 

The Night Can Keep a Secret

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."

- Vincent van Gogh.

John Dickson Carr's The Bride of Newgate (1950) represents his first foray into historical mysteries, taking the reader to the grimy and overcrowded Newgate Prison in 1815, where we intrude on the final hours of Dick Darwent's life – as he waits for the hollow tread of the hangman's boot that will escort him to the gallows for the murder of Lord Francis Orford.

The official reading of the murder of Lord Francis Orford tells of a duel fought during the wee hours of the morning, but the defendant had a different story to tell. At first, anyway. Darwent declared that he was snatched from Hyde Park by a coachman, wrapped in a dirty coat stained with graveyard mould, and dropped off at the estate of Ordford, Kinsmere House, where he was shoved into a room occupied by the now departed Lord of the Manor – skewered to his chair with a French rapier. Next time Darwent opened his eyes, he was lying not far from his fencing school and next to him was the body of his supposed opponent. They do a check-up on Darwent's story, however, when the room is investigated they come to conclusion that it has been untouched for the past two years and because a room can't grow thick with dust and cobwebs overnight he's penciled in for an appointment with the hangman.

A less talented mystery writer would have had his hands full in coming up with a way to establish Darwent's innocence and explaining away a room that never was, but Carr was never a writer who preferred to side-step a problem and allowed Lady Caroline Ross and Sir John Buckstone to knock on the door of Dick Darwent's cell with an obscene proposition. Caroline wants to cash in on her grandfather's inheritance, but the old man's will states that she has to be married before her 25th birthday and this brought her to the condemned cell. She offers the fencing master fifty pounds to marry her on the eve of his execution and plans to enjoy widowhood with a champagne breakfast, as she watches how her husband is led to the scaffold and dropped through the trap-door with a stiff rope tied around his neck, and with nothing to lose (and intending to leave the money to his mistress, the actress Dolly Spencer) he agrees to become her husband for the remaining hours of his life.

I think the opening chapters of The Bride of Newgate form the strongest portion of this book. It not only sets-up a platform as strong as a gallows structure for the plot to stand on, but also gives us some solid, individual characterization as that dark, dismal prison cell seems to burst when the different personalities of the weakened Darwent, the haughty Sir John Buckstone, the ice-cold Caroline and the Reverend Horace Cotton, Ordinary of Newgate who stands up for Darwent, collide with one another and shows that John Dickson Carr was so much more than just a mere genre writer. 

A drawing of Newgate Prison

Of course, the trouble, for everyone who's involved in this case, really begins when Darwent's lawyer, Mr. Mulberry, appears with a last minute repeal and his clients not only finds himself a free man again but also a titled man with a wife he doesn't know and a mistress whose health has become a matter of grave concern – as well as fighting duels with gleaming swords and hand wrought dueling pistols and participating in a full-out riot at the Opera. Duels and brawls appear to be a staple of Carr's historical fiction and can also be found in such novels as The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957). 

There's also the problem of the room that dilapidated and blackened with age over the course of a single night and an explanation for this miracle may provide them with a key that could unlock all of the answers for them. The solution is not bad, but, as is the case with the seemingly impossible disappearances of large objects (like trains and houses), the range of possible solutions are limited and this one sticks out not for coming up with something different, but how carefully and cleverly it was constructed. Because it's not just the problem of how to make a room disappear, but also finding a reasonable explanation why a room should disappear and I think Carr did an admirable job at providing an answer for that little side-puzzle.

All in all, this may very well be one of Carr's finest attempts at using the ghosts of past centuries as a backdrop for one of his ingenious schemes and the vividly sketched images of the condemned cell, the early morning duels, the brawl at the Opera and that eternal triangle between Darwent, Caroline and Dolly also makes this book stand on itself as a historical novel. In short, it's a little bit more than just your average detective story, but without throwing any of the fun or cleverness overboard.