The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."

- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) 

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories.

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Once a lost, unpublished story

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up!

A Devil of a Time

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

- George Santayana 

If you're one of those souls who haunt this place with a certain degree of regularity, then you have probably spotted my glowing opinion on the greatest mystery writer who ever lived, the wonderful John Dickson Carr, who's still rightfully regarded as the undisputed master of the locked room mystery. But he also dabbled in another field of the genre that's often overlooked: historical mysteries and adventure stories.

During the 1950s, Carr became slightly disillusioned with the modern, post-war world and he began to retreat into historical fiction, which would come to dominate his output in the last decades of his life – beginning with the highly regarded The Bride of Newgate (1950) and ending with the very rare The Hungry Goblin (1972).

As I said before, Carr is seldom recognized for helping popularizing the historical detective story, but even rarer is seeing an acknowledgment for his contributions to an extremely obscure niche within this particular sub-genre: namely time-slip novels!

Carr wrote three of such stories in which the twentieth century protagonists are transported back in time and have to piece together certain events among the ghosts of the past. The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957) are relatively well known to both his fans and readers of historical detective stories, but Fear is the Same (1956) seems to be completely forgotten by everyone and appeared, for some reason, under his penname of "Carter Dickson" – which he primarily used for his Sir Henry Merrivale series. Its neglect is hard to explain and entirely undeserved, because it's as good a story as its two companions.

Fear is the Same has two characters caught in a time-slip, Lord Philip Clavering and Jennifer Baird, who were passionate lovers in the mid-1950s, but "a clap of thunder" and "a roar" flung them back in time – all the way back to the Regency Era in 1795. The experience has pulled a veil over their memory, but one that only vaguely obscured their knowledge of their life in the future. Memories come rushing back when they meet again, "it seems a little ridiculous to ask whether we have met before," but their new situation in this old world is as fraught with complications as their past lives a hundred and fifty some years in the future.

Philip found himself in the body of a rich, but spineless coward, Lord Glenarvon, who's married to a woman he intensely dislikes, named Chloris. Jennifer is a relative and ward of Lady Oldham, who has given her blessing to a marriage between Jenny and Richard Thornton. He's the son of Colonel Tobias Thornton, "of the King's Royal Dragoons," who serves as the story's antagonist and has several confrontations with Philip, which consists of what you probably expect from a rivalry in a period yarn from Carr's hands – fisticuffs and a bit of dueling! Again, what did you expect? It's Carr!

Anyway, there were also the bleary recollections of a murder more than a hundred years in the future. A murder they were so hard on the run for that they ended up in the 18th century, but the consequences seem to be inescapable, because similar events begin to unfold in front of the two lovers.

The maid of the Glenarvons, Molly, has been doubling for her mistress when she was out of the house and this may have resulted in her death, because her body is found in Chrloris' bedroom – strangled to death with a bell rope. Superficially, Philip looks to be guilty of the deed and the magistrate is on his way to procure an arrest, which makes him flee for a second time. This time has to look out for the Robin Redbreasts from the Bow Street Runners. However, the whodunit element is a surprisingly underplayed part of this historical romance and adventure story: there's a sort of set up in the early chapters, the murder itself (chapter 8), a late investigation in chapter 14 and an explanation chapters 19 and 20. The plots in Carr's historical novels tend to be less elaborate than in his regular series, but they're usually nicely done. I found the one in Fear is the Same to be somewhat routine, but it was acceptable enough.

What's written between the detective story is, as said before, a romance adventure set in the Regency Era, but Carr had a strong a love for history as he had for detective stories and it shows. Philip has to outwit Colonel Thornton in a close quartered pistol duel and gets drawn into a fistfight with a guy known as the "Bristol Smasher," which followed by a boxing match towards the end of their journey. But Philip and Jennifer also crossed the path of several historical characters. The most notable is the Prince of Wales, who would be later known as King George IV, who "the lampoonists," of the future, "show as popinjay and jack-fool," but was cast here in a fairly sympathetic light. Carr always had a royalist streak in his historical writing.

Then there are the moments when Philip accidentally betrayed knowledge he was not supposed to have in the 1790s, which includes being familiar with certain people who have not yet risen to prominence ("Who the devil’s Napoleon?") or knowledge of court secrets for which "proofs had been discovered" in "modern times."

So, all of this makes for a well-written, eventful and, above all, a fun historical narrative, in which a mystery plot is expertly wrapped in thick elements of romance and adventure. The ending had a hint of Charles Dickens, which I found slightly disappointing, because I had predicted a very dark ending based on the clap of thunder that threw back into the past. I suspected it was them dying in the 50s and somehow woke up in a parallel time-line, in the past, where they to go threw it again, but this time try to stay alive. But that's more a fault of my expectations. In short: if you enjoyed some of the other historical novels mentioned in this blog-post, you'll probably appreciate Fear is the Same.

The Locked Room Reader III: John Dickson Carr

"My ambition is still to write a really outstanding detective novel, which I honestly do not believe I have yet achieved. When a writer says this, what he really means is that he wants to wrote one which will make all other detective novels look silly. Of course you can't do it. But you can always keep trying."

- John Dickson Carr

Recently, I've been coming across blog-posts such as "Five to Try – Starting John Dickson Carr," which appeared on The Invisible Event, and "A Bit of a Ramble – John Dickson Carr's Great Works" from fellow mystery enthusiast Puzzle Doctor – which reminded me of a shameful omission on my part.

Over the past several years, I wasted a number of opportunities, filler-posts and an immeasurable amount of basic logic by neglecting to assemble my very own list of favorite John Dickson Carr novels. Logically, such a list should've been one of the first entries on this blog. But, hey, better late than never, right?

John Dickson Carr shouldn't require an introduction, especially around these parts, but if you're one of those uncivilized, heathenish infidels, unfamiliar with the Lord of the Locked Room Mystery, you might want to take note of this list – or risk suffering the same faith as Duc de Saligny. The reader has been warned!

I have broken down this best of list in three categories: series-books, standalones and historical mysteries.

The Henri Bencolin-series:

The Lost Gallows (1931) was the second detective-story from the mind of a young John Dickson Carr and can be considered a premonition of things to come, which consists of a lost street and a murderer, known as "Jack Ketch," roaming the fog-bound streets – cumulating in one of the "prettiest fancy in the whole realm of nightmare."

The Four False Weapons (1937) is the last entry in this series and moved away from the gothic, theatrical atmosphere of the earlier books, but without being any less mystifying or satisfying. The plot itself is fantastic: a retired Bencolin unravels a brilliantly contrived murder in France, which was obviously modeled around G.K. Chesterton's "The Three Tools of Death," from The Innocence of Father Brown (1910), and the Hanaud stories by A.E.W. Mason.

The Dr. Gideon Fell-series:

The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) is the second book in the series and while not as atmospheric as its predecessor, Hag's Nook (1933), but the plot is a lot tighter and involves a series of pranks resulting in a crossbow-murder – committed at the historic Tower of London. One of the plot-points involves a long, lost manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe and Carr "reproduces" a short passage from this hitherto unknown Auguste Dupin tale.

The Hollow Man (1935) is, IMHO, a fabulous Chestertonian-tale of the miraculous shooting of Professor Grimaud in his locked/watched study and later an equally baffling crime in Cagliostro Street, but the book seems to have lost some of its popularity in recent years (heresy!). The solution is incredible tricky and I have seen the fairness being called into question, but the story derives its admiration from offering an overly ingenious and complex situation – without the plot becoming a cluttered mess. You can perfectly understand by the end of the book how everything went down. That's what attracted fans of fiction to this book for over half a century: it's the fantastic and nearly unbelievable being pulled off in an almost perfect and convincing manner.

The Arabian Nights Murder (1936) is one of Carr's Baghdad-on-the-Thames stories, in which Dr. Fell makes his only appearances in the opening, middle and ending portion of the book – while listening to three different narratives about a strange night at the Museum of Oriental Art. Highly recommended!

The Crooked Hinge (1938) is often billed as an impossible crime novel, but the eventual explanation makes it more of an improbable murder and a Chestertonian-nightmare, but it's a great one nonetheless. The plot-threads consist of Tichborne claimants-type dispute, witchcraft, the Titanic and a creepy automaton called the Golden Hag.

The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939) is one of Carr's more bizarre, but satisfying, mystery novels, in which an amateur psychologist, Marcus Chesney, stages an observational experiment to oust a murderer in his village – who killed several children with poisoned chocolates. Naturally, in a Carr story, Marcus is murdered in front of his captivated audience without anyone have spotted the murderer.

Till Death Do Us Part (1944) is Carr's most successful attempt at creating an Agatha Christie-type of village, but with his own typical spin on – which includes a persecuted woman and a locked room shooting. This one appears to have gained some popularity with 21st century readers of vintage mysteries.

He Who Whispers (1946) is considered by some as the true masterpiece from this series, because it has everything: dark, grim atmosphere, excellent story telling, misdirection and an improvement on the persecution-plot from Till Death Do Us Part – with a woman who's suspected of being a vampire and therefore a natural suspect of a seemingly impossible stabbing atop of a tower in France. I definitely liked this one, to say the least.  

The Sir Henry Merrivale-series:

The Plague Court Murders (1934) is the one that pushed me over the edge and convinced me of Carr's brilliance as a mystery writer, which was done by murdering a fraudulent medium on the premises of a haunted house – inside a locked room, of course! The solution is incredible tricky, cheeky and the murderer is neatly tugged away from the reader, but all the clues are there and that tightrope was successfully traversed.

The Unicorn Murders (1935) has Carr balancing along a similar tight-rope in order to fool the reader, but it's arguably even more successful as he balances between a formal mystery and a spy-thriller – stranding a group of survivors of an air-plane crash in a French chateau with a legendary criminal a la Arsène Lupin. There are also a couple of interesting and original (impossible) murders: people are being gored to death by an invisible unicorn!

The Punch and Judy Murders (1937) is a wacky mad chase story and pits Ken Blake against Murphy Law, while the tell-tale clues march along noticed and are eventually followed by a couple of false solutions. A very competent and amusing entry in this series.   

The Judas Window (1938) is arguably the most iconic book in this series and sports one of Carr's most original trick, but the clip the length of this blog-post I'll refer you to my full review of the book.

Nine-and Death Makes Ten (1940) is a personal favorite of mine and possibly one of the best shipboard mysteries, which places H.M. aboard a munitions-carrying ship crossing submarine-infested waters and has an interesting impossible situation – that of bloody, "ghostly" fingerprints that doesn't match with any of the passengers.

She Died a Lady (1943) is undoubtedly the masterpiece of this series, but, again, to prevent this post from assuming the size of bloated canal corpse, I'll refer you to the full review of this book.

The Skeleton in the Clock (1948) is, admittedly, the weakest admission on this list, but the plot is still very descent and concerns itself with poison-pen letters, an impossible crime in the past and recent murder at a disused prison complex – which are neatly tied together by the end of the story. But the best parts of the story are the comedic bits-and-pieces, which genuinely made me laugh when I read it for the first time.

The standalone-and historical mysteries:

Poison in Jest (1932) is a gothic-style mystery novel and takes place in a decaying, Pennsylvanian mansion in the dead of winter, which has a creepy, brooding atmosphere depicting such horrors as a disembodied hand from Caligula's statue "run" along the window ledges like a spider. There's also poisoned brandy pored from a sealed bottle and dying laughter echoing through the dilapidated hallways. I really want to re-read this one!

The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) is a brilliantly conceived and convincingly argued reconstruction of a real-life crime from the days of Charles II, but it's mainly included here because it perfect demonstration of the authors gift for resuscitating the past through the written word.

The Emperor's Snuff-Box (1942) is a triumph among Carr's standalone novels, but I'll refer you to my full review for reasons previously stated in this post.

The Bride of Newgate (1950) is Carr's first historical mystery novel and one of his best, but, once again, I have to refer you to my previously review of the book.

The Devil in Velvet (1951) was considered by the author himself to be one of his finest achievements and how can you argue against it? The book revolves around a deal with the devil himself, which sees an exchange of Professor Nicholas Fenton's soul for a one-way trip to the late 1600s – in a futile attempt to prevent a murder by poisoning. However, this capsule synopsis doesn't do any justice to the book as a whole.  

Captain Cut-Throat (1955) is a strange, but massively underrated, hybrid-novel stitching together the seams of the spy-and adventure stories with that of the traditional mystery – which takes the form of an invisible assailant, the titular "Captain Cut-Throat," bumping off Napoleon's sentries on the eve of the planned invasion of England. If there's one of Carr's lesser-known works that deserves recognition, it's this one! And I'll be re-reading and reviewing it before long.

Well, if there's one thing that became obvious after compiling this list, it's that I'm a bit of a heretic myself, because time has dimmed a lot of the details of the books I have read. So this list is already a candidate for revision somewhere in the future.

On a final note, there two more, locked room-related things: yesterday, I posted a review of Michael Bowen's Washington Deceased (1990), which featured a shooting in locked, guarded-and camera-watched supply room inside a prison complex. Secondly, I found an old, beaten-up Dutch paperback edition of Det slutna rummet (The Locked Room, 1972) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, but I begin to regret the purchase – because this duo almost repelled me from the detective story in my early days of discovery. So is this one as good as some fans say it is or is it dreadful and depressing as everything else they wrote?

Anyhow, I'll be back with something from the Golden Age before too long. Stay tuned!

An Air of Suspense

"Tonight's story, I confess, intrigues me; it is another instance from my notebook of the miracles which turn out to be no miracle. You are warned, good friends, that I shall try to deceive you until the end."

- Narrator (John Dickson Carr's "Death Has Many Faces," collected in The Dead Sleep Lightly and Other Mysteries from Radio's Golden Age, 1983) 

A week ago, I posted a review of an obscure, Golden Age mystery novel, namely The Crystal Beads Murder (1930) by Annie Haynes, which is a blog-post I titled for equally obscure reasons "The Devil in the Summer-House" – that also happened to be the title of a radio-play by everyone's favorite composer of seemingly impossible problems.

This prompted a comment from Sergio, who thought it cheeky to caption the post in such a Carrian fashion and how it gave him expectations for "a classic radio review."

I hadn't planned on doing such a review, but I need very, very little encouragement where John Dickson Carr's work is concerned. So why not, I thought, why not listen back to a small selection of Carr's radio-plays and ramble about this often neglected part of his writing career – which tends to be even more overlooked than his contributions as a writer of historical mysteries.

"Cabin B-13" is arguably Carr's most accomplished piece to hit the airwaves and a classic example of the old-time radio shows, which was performed twice on Suspense in 1943.

What's not as widely known is that the episode became the premise for an eponymous titled spin-off series on CBS. Cabin B-13 starred Arnold Moss as Dr. Fabian, an all-but-forgotten series character from Carr's body of work, who's a ship surgeon aboard the luxurious S.S. Maurevania and invited to listeners to come to his cabin to share some horrifying tales of "the strange and the sinister." 

There are only a few episodes that survived the passage of time, but the ones that did are distinctively Carrian in nature.

"The Bride Vanishes" is one of the shipwrecked survivors of this show and the nature of the problem is one of those pesky, apparently impossible problems – a "miracle" if you will. A newlywed couple, Tom and Lucy Courtney, found an inexpensive, but lavishly furnished, abode on the sun-soaked island of Capri, Italy, which comes to no surprise when they learn about the haunted "balcony of death" attached to the villa.

A girl by the name of Josephine Adams "disappeared like soapbubbles" from that balcony in what appeared to be "a first grade miracle." She was "all alone" on that "balcony forty feet up a cliff," which was as "smooth as glass," but she couldn't have fallen or thrown off because "there was no sound of a splash" – and she couldn't have come back because "her mother and sisters were in front of the only door." This vanishing-act happened in less than 15-seconds.

It's remarked upon that Lucy is a spitting image of Josephine and people from the local, English-speaking colony are warning them to stay clear of the balcony or even return to Naples, but that would've made for a very dull story – wouldn't it?

Well, Lucy vanishes under similar, unexplainable circumstances as Josephine and the story begins to uncoil itself during the subsequent search, but even in a suspense story Carr managed to chuck in a few clues to help you piece together the method – which reminded me of a Baynard Kendrick novel and that helped me figuring out the method.

All in all, a good, nice and a well put together story that was nicely brought to life by the performance of the cast. So, yes, I enjoyed this particular play.

The Great John Dickson Carr!

"The Sleep of Death" is another shipwrecked survivor from this series and tells a story of Ned Whitehead, a young American, who has bright, diplomatic career ahead of him and recently has fallen in love with a girl from an old French-Hungarian family – only her stern "dragon uncle," a Hungarian count, "who looks as black as a thundercloud" stands in the way of their marriage.

To proof himself to his future in-laws, Ned proposes to spend a night in "the circular bedroom," better known as the Tapestry Room, which is situated "high in the castle tower" of the family's French chateau. The walls are " hung with rare tapestries" and permeates with "a haunting atmosphere of witchcraft and death." For two hundred years, everyone who slept in that room died without a mark to be found on their body!

If the premise sounds familiar, you would be correct, because it's a slightly altered version of "The Devil’s Saint," originally written for Suspense, which cast Peter Lorre perfectly as the caliginous count. That's really all that can be said in disfavor of this episode: 1) it's a rewrite 2) it lacked Lorre. Otherwise, it's as excellent a suspense story as the original with a nifty twist ending and a logical, fairly clued explanation as to how the previous occupants of the Tapestry Room died – which made the original version a classic episode of that show.

Finally, "London Adventure," also known under the titles "Bill and Brenda Leslie" and "A Razor in Fleet Street," which is one of Carr's Baghdad-on-the-Thames stories and has Bill remarking in the opening scenes of the episode: "It [London] has put a spell on my imagination ever since I was a boy so-high," followed by "Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Fu-Manchu" and "hansom cabs rattling down the fog." Yes, the smell of adventure is in the air!

And, as if on cue, a police-official from Scotland Yard swings by and has brought some bad news for the newly arrived couple. It appears that Bill Leslie, an American diplomat, is a dead ringer for "Flash Morgan," a man wanted for several ripper-style murders, and he might be interested in stealing Leslie's identity – because slipping out of the country is a lot easier when you have the perks that comes with diplomatic immunity.

The inspector urges them to stay in the hotel, but Bill smells adventure and soon finds himself in tight, tension-filled spot when he flees inside a barbershop in Fleet Street. There's an apparently impossible throat-slashing inside the locked barbershop, while Bill and the barber swear they never left each other out of sight, but the locked room is merely the topping on a great (if short) adventure story that Carr's characters always seem to yearn for.

It's another episode I would definitely recommend, especially if your taste or somewhat similar to mine, Bill Leslie and Carr. It's that kind of story.

I hope this classic radio review has earned a few tips from Sergio's fedora and let me end by pointing out the review I posted yesterday of Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders (1956), which also contains a locked room mystery. Because you can never have enough of those. Never!

Just Like in the Movies

"So our final toast is inevitable."

- Gervase Fen (Edmund Crispin's Frequent Hearses, 1950)

My undying love for John Dickson Carr's detective fiction is well documented on this blog and grab every opportunity to reference his stories in otherwise unrelated posts, but the backlog of his unread work has rapidly diminished over the years – leaving only a handful of standalones, historical novels and short stories.

Well, there was one novel in the Sir Henry Merrivale series, And So to Murder (1940), which lingered on the pile for years, but decided it was time to finally wrap up that series. So here we go.

The setting of the story is Pineham Studios during middle-and late August, "before there had come any glimmer of events that were to shatter Europe by the end of the month," where several movies are being shot. One of the productions is based on a best-selling, but scandalous, novel, entitled Desire, which was written by a canon's daughter from a small village.

Monica Stanton is elated to have gained a position at the film studio as a scriptwriter, but those feeling quickly subside when Monica learns she isn't going to work on the adaptation of her own novel. A producer by the name of Tom Hackett assigned her to work on a script based on William Cartwright's latest detective novel, while Cartwright is adapting her novel for the big screen – which brings back memories of Monica's annoying aunt grieving over the fact she didn't write a nice detective story like Cartwright.

Of course, Monica and Cartwright are simply ignoring their true feelings for each other, but, luckily for them, an aspiring murderer is driving them closer together by targeting Monica.

A spate of incidents occur over several weeks, which include water in an innocent looking bottle being replaced with sulfuric acid and the same corrosive liquid is pored down a speaking tube – nearly disfiguring Monica. There are anonymous letters being passed around and a poisoned cigarette almost took the life of one of the actresses, but the problem is that these incidents are merely (detective) interruption in a character-driven, comedy of manners-style novel. And that makes it very difficult to review this book.

There are several titles from the Merrivale-series, written under the name of "Carter Dickson," in which Carr attempted to take a different approach to the detective novel, such as A Graveyard to Let (1949) and The Cavalier's Cup (1953), but they were still detective stories. Surprisingly, for Carr, And So the Murder merely masquerades as one and the mystery elements that are present are poorly handled.

A portion of the information pertaining to the plot was withheld from the reader and that's detrimental to any impact the solution might have had, which had some points of interest. But were ultimately lost in the mess. A lot of the trouble could've been prevented if they simple had decided to lock a few doors or hire security guards. You have to wonder why H.M. even bothered with this case at all.

And So to Murder has some points of interest: the depiction of the film studio and what goes on there were interesting, as were the characters buzzing around the sets and the flashes of humor, but as a detective story it was as unsatisfying as Seeing is Believing (1941) and Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956). I can only really recommend this one to completists.

So, there you have it, after several years I finally wrote and posted as less than enthusiastic review about a John Dickson Carr novel, which I hope will be as rare an occurance as a snow-covered Sphinx.

Previously reviewed on this blog:

John Dickson Carr:

The Emperor's Snuff-Box (1942)
The Bride of Newgate (1950)
The Third Bullet and Other Stories of Detection (1954)
Fire, Burn! (1957)

The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983) 

Carter Dickson:

The Judas Window (1938)

And So to Murder (1940)

The Department of Queer Complaints (1940)
She Died a Lady (1943)
The Cavalier's Cup (1953)