The Ghost It Was: "The House of the Shrill Whispers" (1972) by Jon L. Breen

In my previous blog-post, I reviewed "The Bizarre Case Expert" (1970) by Dennis Lynds, published as by “William Arden," which was reprinted in Ellery Queen's Master of Mysteries (1975) and the brief introduction to the story noted an increase in submissions of impossible crime stories to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – suggesting that the "the locked-room 'tec theme" was experiencing a renaissance at the time. So this prompted me to grab another short impossible crime story from the early 1970s as a follow up.

Jon L. Breen is an acclaimed critic and reviewer, who presided over The Jury Box column in EQMM from 1977 to 2011, but his most endearing contribution to the genre is as a premier short story writer of parodies and pastiches. He penned more than a hundred of them!

Back in 2012, I compiled a short list of parodies, pastiches and homages to everyone's favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, which include William Brittain's "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" (1965), William Krohn's "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus" (1965) and Norma Schier's "Hocus-Pocus at Drumis Tree" (1966), but Breen was a notable absentee – while he arguably wrote one of the best parodies of master. Only the little gem of a spoof by Brittain is better.

"The House of the Shrill Whispers" was originally published in the August, 1972, issue of EQMM and reprinted in Ellery Queen's Champions of Mystery (1977).

The story opens in a first-class train carriage where Millard Carstairs meets Nancy Williston and they discover they're both headed to The Clifton Place in Warwick-on-Stems. A place better known under its ominous pet name, The House of the Shrill Whispers, where "the ghost of old Admiral Wilburforce Cogsby" has been seen walking "on July 12 of the last year of every decade since 1880." This ghost story is eerily similar to the impossible situation in John Russell Fearn's "Chamber of Centuries" (1940). Lamentably, nothing of note is done with this ghost story. There is, however, an impossible murder looming on the horizon.

Sir Margrove Clifton is the owner of The House of the Shrill Whispers and shortly after altering his will, cutting off three of his children, he has received death threats and as a precaution he has barricaded himself in the guest cottage – secured from the inside with triple-locks and triple-bolts. The cottage was surrounded by artificial snow and four spotlights illuminated "the premises from sunset to sunrise." There were eighteen private-security agents from the Pinkerton agency who guarded the cottage, but all to no avail, because Sir Margrove is murdered. On top of that locked room murder, it turns out that something very large has disappeared from the crime scene. The whole situation was "impossibly baffling."

By the Luck of Lavington, Millard discovered an old friend on the train, Sir Gideon Merrimac, who's the world's greatest detective and "a chuckling blend of Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale." An enormous presence with ruddy cheeks, two monocles (one in each eye) and a flowered handkerchief into which "its proprietor periodically wheezed with earth-shattering volume." This presence is packaged in a black opera cape.

Sir Gideon Merrimac is a splendid parody of Carr's often larger-than-life detective characters and Breen has given him a great line that will make everyone who's read The Hollow Man (1935) smile: "if we were characters in a novel instead of characters in a short story, I'd discourse with you at appropriate length about the foolishness and absurdity of characters in fiction pretendin' they're real." So, purely as a parody, this story is a success.

Unavoidably in a parody, the solution to the bizarre and baffling locked room murder is extremely disappointing, but this is made up by three things: the surprising amount of clueing, the identity of the culprit and the unique motive for the murder, which was delightfully meta. And to be honest, it was necessary for the solution of the locked room to be a letdown to make the rest of it work.

All in all, "The House of the Shrill Whispers" is a funny, well-written parody of Carr with a beautifully imagined, Spitting Image-like caricature of his two famous detectives melted into one character, but it's disappointing that such a wonderful parody of Carr has a disappointing locked room-trick. Even if it was necessary for the plot to work. Still a very enjoyable story.

On a final, unrelated note: I found a practically unknown Dutch mystery novel from the 1930s for my next read and it looks, if it turns out to be any good, to be something along the lines of Christopher Bush. So stay tuned!

Killing Time: "Persons or Things Unknown" (1938) by Carter Dickson

Back in 2012, I reviewed John Dickson Carr's The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), published as by "Carter Dickson," but my Dell Mapback edition omitted three stories from the original publication, "The Other Hangman," "New Murders for Old" and "Persons or Things Unknown," that are generally regarded as some of his best short stories. Until now, these stories had completely eluded me.

"Persons or Things Unknown" was first published in The Sketch, Christmas Number, 1938, which was later collected in The Department of Queer Complaints and recently reprinted in an anthology of holiday mysteries – entitled Murder Under the Christmas Tree: Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season (2016). So this is going to be first holiday-themed review of 2018. However, the festivities only serves as an ambiance here for "a historical romance" from the distant days of Charles II.

The story opens during a house-warming party in a centuries old home, hidden behind a hill in Sussex, where a group of people have gathered around the fire in the drawing-room after Christmas dinner. When the conversation drifts towards the little room at the head of the stairs, the host tells them the chilling story attached to that room.

A grisly tale of a man who was hacked to death there, with thirteen stab wounds, by "a hand that wasn't there" and "a weapon that didn't exist." An impossible stabbing that occurred there in 1660. Just after the Restoration.

The story comes from a diary kept by Mr. Everard Poynter, which ran from the summer of '60 to the end of '64, who owned the neighboring Manfred Manor and was friends with the then owner of the house with the little room at the head of the stairs, Squire Radlow – which is how he became a witness of the inexplicable murder. Squire Radlow's only daughter, Mistress Mary Radlow, was engaged to be married to Richard Oakley of Rawdene. A serious-minded, studious, but genial, man several years her senior. Nevertheless, the match appears to be a good one and the only obstacle is the potential ruin of Oakley if the sale of his estate, purchased under the Commonwealth, is declared null and void. And then a young man appeared in a blaze of glory.

Gerald Vanning was one of those "confident young men" about "whom we hear so much complaint from old-style Cavaliers" in the early years of the Restoration. Over a period of weeks, it became a given that Vanning would eventually become the Squire's son-in-law. A plan Vanning had been working towards, but then the news broke that an act had passed to confirm all sales or leases of property since the Civil Wars and Oakley was "once more the well-to-do son-in-law" – finalizing his engagement to Mary. Vanning was out of the picture, but around the same time "curious rumors" began to swirl around the countryside about Oakley. Who was he really? Why did he need over a hundred books? Who was the figure that was seen following Oakley? A creature that appeared human, but the witness was not sure if it had been really alive!

On the night of Friday, the 26th November, Vanning returned to the house and appeared to be on "a wire of apprehension" as he kept looking over his shoulder. Vanning instructed the steward to fetch some servants with cudgels and they went to Oakley and Mary in the little room at the head of the stairs. Shortly after he went in, there was a thud and Mary screaming, but servants found it had been bolted and it was Mary who unbolted the door with blood on her dress – what was left of Oakley had fallen near a table. Vanning was immediately seized and justice threatened to be swift and ruthless, but he tells them he has not touched Oakley and had not been carrying a sword or dagger when he came into the house.

So they comb over every inch of the little room and didn't find so much as "a pin in crack or crevice." The question is if Vanning or Mary murdered Oakley, what happened to the murder weapon? If an outsider did the murder, how did this person enter or leave a bolted room with three armed servants at the door?

Here you have an inverted mystery with a historical backdrop and a challenge to the reader to piece together how the murder was done, which is a fairly clued challenge, but where Carr demonstrated his craftsmanship is the false solution that works like a psychological red herring. You rarely get to see a false solution so nicely positioned next to the actual explanation that it camouflages it.

Unfortunately, the locked room-trick failed to take me by surprise, because Carr reused the idea in a radio-play and the solution immediately occurred to me when the room was described. And if you know the trick, the clues are easily spotted. This was hardly enough to keep me from being an unabashed fanboy and marveled at how the plot stuck together with the clues. Or how a long-gone of passage in history was briefly opened through Carr's writing.

On a whole, "Persons or Things Unknown" can be summed up as an atmospheric historical mystery and an inverted detective story with a clever locked room-trick all rolled into one. A minor gem by the undisputed Grand Master of Detection. Highly recommended!

A note for the curious: this is an obscure, little-known fact, but John Dickson Carr is my favorite mystery novelist. Just wanted to state that for the record.

Talking to the Dead

"The ingenuity of the criminal upon whose track we find ourselves is really out of the ordinary."

- Dr. Lancelot Priestley (John Rhode's The House at Tollard Ridge, 1929)

Since the dawn of modern technology and electric communication, the technological innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth century were looked upon in spiritualist circles as potential conduits to the world beyond and experiments were made in an attempt to establish a line of communications with the dearly departed – beginning with the spirit photography craze of the late 1800s. An interest in real-time communication with the dead, using technology, began to emerge in the early 1900s.

Thomas Edison was reportedly asked by Scientific American, in 1920, whether the telephone could be used to talk to the dead and the inventor did not dismiss the possibility. 

However, it would not be until the 1950s and the introduction of the first generation of portable audio recorders that people began to record, what they believed and interpreted to be, the voices of the dead. These recordings are known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and these sound recordings, as I learned, are still very popular today as the countless "Spirit Box Sessions" on YouTube can attest. And these innovations were eagerly adopted by fraudsters and con-artists as tools to prey on grief-stricken people.

However, our beloved, but duplicitous, detective story was perhaps the first medium to explore the criminal possibilities of EVP long before it became a popular tool of ghost-hunters and spiritual mediums. Some of these stories date as far back as the mid-and late 1920s. John Rhode's The House on Tollard Ridge (1929) has an elderly murder victim who lived alone in a desolate house, reputedly haunted, where he spent long evenings listening to voices from the spirit world on the wireless, but the best examples were penned by two of the genre's most celebrated mystery writers – namely John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie.

The first of these two is a short story by Christie, titled "Where There's a Will," which was originally published as "Wireless" in the Sunday Chronicle Annual in December 1926 and collected in The Hound of Death and Other Stories (1933). The second tale is a dark, eerie radio-play, "The Dead Sleep Lightly," of which Carr wrote two versions. One of these versions is the well-known episode from the CBS radio-drama, Suspense, but Carr "lengthened the script by a third to include Dr. Fell and Superintendent Hadley" for the British broadcast of the story. And the script of this second version was collected in The Dead Sleep Lightly and Other Mysteries from Radio's Golden Age (1983).

These two stories work with very similar, almost identical, plot-material and ideas, which makes them interesting reads when taken back-to-back, because they beautifully mirror and even compliment one another. But the treatment of the ideas and resolution to both stories also demonstrate the differences, as mystery writers, between Carr and Christie. I think they are, aptly enough, soul revealing reads that showed that the respective writers had (slender) ties to respectively the horror and romance genre.

You can find three of Carr's short horror stories in The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980) and Christie wrote six "bitter-sweet stories about love" under the penname of "Mary Westmacotts." I think these flirtations with the horror and romance genre are reflected in "Wireless" and "The Dead Sleep Lightly." So let's take a closer look at these stories.

Agatha Christie

The primary character in Christie's "Wireless" is an elderly lady, Mrs. Mary Hatter, who has a weak heart and her doctor pressed her to "avoid all undue exertion." As well as prescribing "plenty of distraction for the mind." An elevator was installed to prevent undue exertion and her beloved nephew, Charles, suggested the installation of a radio-set to provide the mental distraction. Initially, Mrs. Hatter was skeptical and convinced that these "newfangled notions were neither more nor less than unmitigated nuisances," but slowly she began to warm to the "repellent object" and enjoyed listening to a symphony concert or lectures – until, one evening, an unearthly, faraway voice spoke to her over the radio.

A voice that identified himself as Mrs. Hatter's late husband, Patrick, who announced that he would be coming for her soon and asked her to be ready for that moment.

Mrs. Hatter took this message from beyond the grave better than expected and muttered about all that money she wasted on putting in an elevator, but she became convinced when the voice spoke to her a second time. Once again, the voice identified himself as Patrick and announced that he would be coming "very soon now." On top of these ghostly radio-messages, Charles claims to have seen a figure in Victorian garb standing by the window of her late husband's dressing-room!

So Mrs. Hatter begins to put the final touches to the earthly matters she'll be presently be leaving behind. And then the voice comes through a third and final time. The ghostly voice of Patrick tells her to expect him on "Friday at half past nine." And the voice tells her not to be afraid and assures that "there will be no pain." However, when the time arrives her bravery and resolve deserts her as she suddenly realizes that Patrick had been died for twenty-five years and is practically a stranger to her now. But this realization came too late.

This story is a not who-dun-it, because the mind behind these supernatural phenomena is apparent from the beginning. And the why-and-how-dun-it aspects will hardly pose a challenge to the modern armchair detective. What this story does have to offer is a front-row seat to a perfect crime with a twist in the tail. The murderer was clever and devious enough to use the given circumstances as tools to commit an undetectable murder, but the final pages shows an unexpected hitch that undid all of the meticulous scheming – making the death of a Mrs. Hatter a perfect crime without a payoff. And this piece of cosmic justice made for a most delightful ending.

I always loved "Wireless." It's a criminally underrated and grossly overlooked story from Christie's legendary oeuvre that deserves to be better known.

The second story is the British version of Carr's most well-known radio-play, "The Dead Speak Slightly," which begins when Dr. Fell's manservant, Hoskins, wakes his dozing employer with the announcement that there's "a lunatic downstairs." The madman in question turns out to be a publisher, George Pendleton, who's considered to be "a very celebrated and successful man." However, the man seems to be badly shaken and deadly afraid of clay, or soil, of "the sort you often find in graveyards."

John Dickson Carr

On the previous day, Pendleton had attended a funeral of "a fellow club-member" with his secretary, Miss Pamela Bennett, but on their way out of the cemetery they passed a neglected grave with a little stone grave and the publisher recognized it as the final resting place of a person from his own past – a woman by the name of Mary Ellen Kimball. Pendleton briefly reflects on his past and it becomes evident that he had not treated the woman, who rested there, very well when she had been alive.

So his secretary suggested to have the grave tidied up and writes down the identifying number that is cut on the side of the gravestone, which is "Kensal Green 1-9-3-3." They remark how the number sounds like a telephone number and that will come back to haunt the publisher later that evening.

Pendleton returned to his home in St. John's Wood, but he was in process of moving to flat closer to the West End and everything was practically packed up. The house was all but empty. So he decided to give a friend a telephone call and ask him if he wanted to go out for a dinner, but when the switchboard operated asked for a number he blurted out the gravestone number, Kensal Green 1-9-3-3, without thinking and the voice of a woman answered – a woman who identified herself as Mary Ellen!

And when Pendleton screams that she's dead, the voice answers with one of my favorite lines in all of detective-fiction: "Yes, dear," but "the dead sleep lightly" and "they can be lonely too." I don't know why these lines have such an appeal to me, but they never fail to make my soul shiver in absolute delight. Anyway, the voice of Mary Ellen promises to leave her grave and visit him when at his home when "the clock strikes seven." Interestingly, this ghostly phone-call poses somewhat of an impossible problem, because the phone had been disconnected that morning. A man from the telephone company had disconnected all the wires and had taken "the metal box off the baseboard of the wall." It simply was not possible to have made that telephone call.

So the publisher left cartoon smoke, as he bolted out of there, but Dr. Fell refuses to help him as he was not told him the full story. Regardless, Dr. Fell decided to venture outside and follow Pendleton back home, which is where he bumps into Superintendent Hadley. And what they discover is the man lying on the floor of the library with the telephone besides him. His face has an awful color, as if he had a stroke, but even more disturbing is "the clay track across the floor." There's even wet clay on Pendleton "as though somebody covered with clay had tried to hold him."

A fantastic story with a shuddery atmosphere, but, once again, the technical aspect of this seemingly impossible and apparently supernatural problem won't pose too much of a problem to readers in the twenty-first century. But the effects created with the telephone gadget and the simple power of suggestion is absolutely superb! Typically, Dr. Fell sympathizes with the perpetrators of this ghostly plot and covers up the whole business right under Hadley's nose!

I simply can't recommend this radio-play enough, but, if you don't have copy of the previously mentioned The Dead Sleep Lightly knocking about, you can just as easily listen to the equally fantastic Suspense version. It lacks the presence of Dr. Fell and Hadley, but the play can be found all over the internet (like here) and the plot is exactly the same as the British version. And the upside is that you can listen to those marvelous, haunting lines being spoken and get an extra pound of goose-flesh out of it.

So, there you have it, two short detective stories that are, in some regards, mirror-images of one another. Stories with plots that were built and constructed with the same plot-ideas and material, but their respective authors each delivered a very different kind of yarn of haunted murder.

For example, the victim of Christie's "Wireless" is an elderly lady who, initially, faces the possibility of being reunited with her dead husband bravely. Only to crumble when realizing at the last moment she had lived a quarter of a century without him and had become estranged from the dead man who she expected to see any moment. This is the bitter that comes after the sweet that apparently can be found in her romance novels. On a whole, this is a domestic crime story. Carr, on the other hand, showed he sometimes could be very closely related to the ghost story and picked a harsh, cold-hearted businessman as his victim who immediately lost his cool when a skeleton from his past appeared to stir from her grave – with a promise to pay him a visit. And he gave a detective story spin the horror genre's avenger-from-the-grave motif.

There are also the similarities in tricks for the ghostly voices and the fact that the perpetrators are, legally, untouchable, but only Carr lets his perpetrators off the hook.

So these stories show that Christie and Carr, while known for their intricately plotted and fair-play detective stories, were very different mystery writers at heart. And yet, they beautifully compliment one another when read back-to-back. These stories ought to be reissued as a single booklet or anthologized together in some kind of themed anthology with other detective stories involving fraudulant mediums, reputedly haunted crime-scenes and supernormal creatures who belong on the pages of a horror story. Such an anthology would make a for a great read and these two would definitely be the main event of such a collection of short stories! 

Vampire Tower

"It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand."

- Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Curse of the Golden Cross," collected in The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926)

Last week, there was a sudden avalanche of reviews of the work of one of the greatest mystery writers who ever lived, John Dickson Carr, who mastered the art of crafting seemingly impossible crimes and was one of the pioneers of the historical detective story – which is an often overlooked achievement of his.

The titles under examination were It Walks by Night (1930), The Plague Court Murders (1934), The Unicorn Murders (1935), The Burning Court (1937), The Emperor's Snuff-Box (1942) and The Gilded Man (1942). A nice little sampling from Carr's early-and mid period, which were his Golden Years, but the sample was not entirely representative of this period, because none of my fellow reviewers had picked a Dr. Gideon Fell novel to discuss. So this gave me the excuse needed to ignore my semi-sentient TBR-pile and return to a fan-favorite from the Dr. Fell series.

He Who Whispers (1946) is considered by many fans as one of Carr's masterpieces and some even think the book is superior to the other monumental title from the same series, The Hollow Man (1935), which earned its reputation as a classic for its expert handling of a complex, overly ingenious plot – preventing the ending from becoming a cluttered, tangled mess. You can say that the book, while being somewhat artificial, is the fantastic done right.

But what readers seem to admire about He Who Whispers is the delightful simplicity of the well-clued plot and the tense, but understated, atmosphere of the story. And the human element at the heart of the book that turned a sordid, slap-dash crime into "a miracle in spite of itself" and ruined a second cleverly planned, near perfect murder. So the book is a treat for fans of the Golden Age (locked room) mysteries, but I'm getting ahead of myself again.

He Who Whispers begins when the London-based Murder Club reconvenes for the first time since the outbreak of World War II. However, the first peace-time gathering of the club can hardly be described as a success, because only three people turn up and two of them aren't even members.

One of the two guests is a distinguished historian, Miles Hammond, who received an invitation to attend from Dr. Fell and the second guest is a woman, Barbara Morell, who notices that the whole club has, sort of, disappeared – all except for the scheduled speaker of the evening. Professor Rigaud of French Literature was supposed to talk about the Brooke case, in which he was personally involved, but now has to tell his remarkable story to an audience of two. But what a story!

The professor's story takes place in 1939, in the small French town of Chartres, where the largest leather manufacturing company was owned by an Englishman, Mr. Howard Brooke, who lived a quiet, harmonious family life with his wife and son, Harry. A peaceful life that was uprooted when his secretary, alarmed by the looming war, returned to England and her replacement, Fay Seton, irrevocably changed their lives. Harry becomes infatuated with Fay and convinces her to marry him, but the engagement is followed by a malicious whisper campaign and a string of anonymous letters addressed to her future father-in-law. As a consequence, the locals have thrown stones at her, convinced that she's a "drainer of bodies" and "killer of souls," but Mr. Brooke has come to see her as an immoral woman and is determined to buy her off – which ends with his inexplicable death at the top of an old ruined tower.

Mr. Brooke asked Fay to meet him at the top of Henri Quatre's tower, standing on the bank of a river, which has been reduced by time and conflicts to a crumbling, "stone shell" with a staircase leading to a flat roof. There was a family picnicking on the grounds below, who swear nobody else climbed the tower, while the unobserved, river-side part of the structure is forty feet high. And as "smooth as a wet fish." Only someone with the power of levitation could have approached Mr. Brooke, stabbed him with his own sword-stick, vanish again without being seen by the people on the ground. So the local police, unable to come up with an alternative explanation, shelved the case as a suicide.

However, that's not the end of Fay Seton's tragic story. On the day following the professor's curious tale at the Murder Club, she turns up on Hammond's doorstep as the trained librarian he had requested to help him catalog his late uncle's extensive book collection. Admittedly, this coincidence is the only aspect of the story that feels strained and unnatural, but Carr tried to make this plot-shift look as plausible as possible. Once you get pass this point, the story becomes it old brilliant self again.

Seton is a genuine tragic character, one of those pitiful souls who are born into an endless night, with misery dogging every step they take in life. So the rumors, of her being a vampire, come back to life when Hammond's sister, Marion, is nearly frightened to death. Apparently, someone, or something, floated in front of her bedroom window and whispered to her. Similar to how the vampire, in folklore, "whispered softly" in order to throw "the victim into a trance." Only reason Marion lived to tell about it is because she took a shot at the entity.

So there you have the double-pronged problem facing Dr. Fell: a seemingly impossible stabbing on top of crumbling castle tower in pre-war France and an attempted murder in the present by trying to scare someone to death. Only link between the two cases is the presence of Fay Seton.

Dr. Fell's unraveling of all of these plot-threads demonstrates why his creator was the undisputed master of the impossible crime story, but one of the two things that really impressed me this (second) time around were the crisp clues – which helped me fill in the details about the explanation time had obliterated from my memory. I simply marveled at how Carr was capable of hiding the rather obvious murderer and at the same time dangle this person in front of your eyes.

The other part that impressed me was the simplistic, but depressingly human, truth that lay behind the murder of Mr. Brooke in France. There are no gimmicks or cheap, shop-worn magic tricks, but a combination of all the good and bad aspects one finds in humanity. And in this particular case, it resulted in a seemingly impossible murder. Once Dr. Fell reconstructed everything that occurred on the top of that ruined tower, you feel like you just returned from a funeral.

The depressing ending doesn't do much to lighten the dark, tragic mood, but not every story needs a happy ending and this is one of them.

In summation, He Who Whispers can be considered as one of Carr's half dozen, or so, masterpieces, which has everything from a well-worked out solution, splendid clueing and superb characterization to actual tension and a grim, foreboding atmosphere – that was, at times, beautifully understated. One of the best titles from the post-WWII years of the Golden Age.

An Invasive Species

"Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools."

-  Napoléon Bonaparte

Back in October, "JJ," posted an open invitation on his blog, "John Dickson Carr is Going to Be 110 – Calling for Submissions," which gave everyone who wanted to participate a two-month notice and this was sufficient time to prepare – as even I managed to write and schedule this review well ahead of the deadline. Yes, I actually prepared a blog-post in advance! I'm that much of a fanboy for John Dickson Carr.

And picking my Carr-related subject was even easier than preparing this blog-post: the habitually overlooked and criminally underrated Captain Cut-Throat (1955), which is a thunderous blend of ghostly murder, espionage and adventure set in Napoleonic France. Regardless, the book never managed to emerge from the shadow of Carr's better-known historical work (e.g. The Devil in Velvet, 1951), but (at least) deserves to have its existence acknowledged. So let's put some polish on its name recognition!  

Captain Cut-Throat takes place during the warm summer days of August 1805, when "the shadow of the new Emperor lay long across Europe," who has been amassing an invasion force, called the Armée d'Angleterre, "along the whole length of the Iron Coast" – restlessly awaiting the Imperial order to begin the invasion of England. Their stationary position made the soldiers bored, fidgety and restless, but their attention was soon to be occupied by a murderous, wraithlike creature sneaking around the military encampments at Boulogne.

On the night of the 13th August, this shadowy figure began to murder sentries "like a ghost," because he couldn't be seen "even when he walks in the light." It began as a series or relatively ordinary stabbing deaths, but, "step by step and murder by murder," the killer moved from "a point far outside the camp to its very center," which culminated in a seemingly impossible murder. Grenadier Émile Joyet, of the Marine Guard, was one of the sentries patrolling the lighted, oblong enclosure round the Emperor's cliff-top pavilion, but he suddenly shouted, doubled up and collapsed – stabbed through the heart. The other sentries, who could observe "the whole lighted space," both inside the fence and outside, swear they had not seen a soul anywhere near the spot where the stabbing took place. As if the murderer had been invisible!

After some of the killings, the weapon was left behind, namely bloodstained daggers, but in every single instance there was a scrap of paper: signed "Yours sincerely, Captain Cut-Throat." Since the night of the second murder, the Grand Army has talked of nothing else.

The murders came to the attention of the Emperor himself and he has two options: launch his invasion at once, "which would cure everything by curing inaction," or " he must crush Captain Cut-Throat before another murder can be committed." So the Emperor gives Joseph Fouché, the Minister of Police, an impossible task: he has less than a week to ensnarl the cut-throat with his talent for Machiavellian maneuvering. 

M. Fouché has a large, far-reaching network of agents and spies, which captured a foreign agent, named Alan Hepburn, who operated in France under the Lupinian nom de guerre of "Vicomte de Bergerac." He wants to use this British agent to trap a British agent and involves Hepburn secret wife, Madeleine, whom he deserted for unknown reason. But they're not the only ones send into the encampments by Fouché: Hepburn involved himself with another woman, Ida de Sainte-Elme, who's one of Fouché agents and helped to capture Hepburn and they're closely followed by a Prussian horse-rider – Lieutenant Schneider of the Hussars of Bercy. 

Admittedly, a good portion of the first half of the book is one or two paces slower than the rest of the story, because Carr takes the time to introduce the characters, explain their situations and giving the details about the "series of ghost-murders" of Napoleon's sentries. But after these opening chapters, the story becomes somewhat atypical for Carr. One of the most notable examples of this is how he treated the impossible crime element of the story, which does not take the center stage of the plot and is easily explained by Hepburn around the halfway mark of the book. I found this to be a minor mark against the book, but I can understand why it was done as Captain Cut-Throat is more a novel of adventure and intrigue than one of detection and ratiocination. And that may be a problem for even some of Carr's most loyal readers. 

However, purely as a historical novel of romance, intrigue and adventure, Captain Cut-Throat allowed the cavalier attitude of its author to roam freely and let his swashbuckling, adventure-hungry spirit off the chain. This resulted in what is, arguably, Carr's best action scene: Hepburn's night-time flight through the field of balloons. A scene that would, by itself, be justification enough to make an expensive period film out of the book. It's simply that great! 

Of course, even an unapologetic JDC-apologist, like myself, cannot deny all of this running around and adventuring did not came at the cost of the detection, which has some shaky reasoning and fair play, but these elements are still far stronger than your usual run-of-the-mill historical spy-thriller – because this is a Carr novel after all. And the final revelation of the omnipresent villain is perhaps one of the most original plays on the least-likely-suspect gambit. I actually figured out the identity of Captain Cut-Throat the first time I read the book, but (admittedly) arrived to that conclusion instinctively rather than deductively. 

Captain Cut-Throat is not a perfect piece of fiction, but it's tremendous fun with an intriguing premise and plenty of excitement with a dusting of mystery and romance. On top of that, the first half has a good, if simplistic, impossible crime. So Carr really threw everything he had at the plot and the most impressive accomplishment is how he managed to simultaneously use elements of the spy-thriller, adventure story and an impossible crime tale, inside a historical narrative, without reducing the impact or effectiveness of any of them. Therefore, the book really should be better known within the ranks of readers of both Carr and historical mysteries. 

In closing, I would like to wish the ghost of John Dickson Carr a grand 110th birthday. Long may he haunt us!

A Scandal in New Orleans

"When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls, and the bat in the moonlight flies,

and inky clouds, like funeral shrouds, sail over the midnight skies –

When the footpads quail at the night-bird's wail, and black dogs bay at the moon,

Then is the specters' holiday – then is the ghosts' high-noon!"
- Sir Roderic Murgatroyd (Gilbert & Sullivan's Ruddigore, 1887)

Last week, one of my fellow locked room enthusiast, "JJ," posted a two-month notice, "John Dickson Carr is Going to Be 110 – Calling for Submissions," which is an open invitation to post Carr-related reviews and blog-posts on the day marking his 110th birthday – which is on November 30, 2016. I immediately called dibs on the criminally underrated Captain Cut-Throat (1955), but the notice still left me with an urge to return to Carr.

Fortunately, I still have about half a dozen of his (primarily) non-series work residing on my prodigious TBR-pile. And one of them promised a Last Hurrah for my all-time favorite mystery novelist, the great John Dickson Carr. 

The Ghosts' High Noon (1969) is a historical mystery and Carr's third-to-last novel, which would only be followed by penultimate Deadly Hall (1971) and the much-maligned The Hungry Goblin (1972). These titles were published during the last twelve years of Carr's life and this period showed a painful decline in the quality of his writing. A downturn that first overtly manifested itself in The House at Satan's Elbow (1965), but one of these last novels seemed to be relatively rot-free: the aforementioned The Ghosts' High Noon, which received some honest criticism, but never the abuse leveled against its contemporaries – e.g. the mediocre Panic in Box C (1966) and the tedious Dark of the Moon (1967).

On his excellent website, Mike Grost has shown the greatest amount of enthusiasm for the book, which he labeled as "a genuine mystery classic" with "a well done impossible crime."

So it has always struck me as a sudden, but briefly lived, revival during the final stage of Carr's literary career. I simply decided the time had come to take it off my TBR-pile. And I know, I know. I should've probably saved the book for November, but who asked you to drag common sense into my decisions? Get out!

Wooda Nicholas Carr

The Ghosts' High Noon is set during the early days of Carr's early childhood, 1912, when his own father, W.N. Carr of Pennsylvania, was elected to Congress and the United States was in the throes of "a three-cornered fight for the Presidency" – pitting the incumbent W.H. Thaft against Democratic Governor Wilson and the boisterous Teddy Roosevelt for the Progressives. There are references throughout the book to these three gentlemen, because the plot of the story is tinged with political intrigue.

The protagonist of the story is a newspaper reporter, Jim Blake, who wrote bestseller, The Count of Monte Carlo, which gave him new found prosperity and "freedom from the ancient shackles." But he's adverse to take on special assignments as a reporter. So when Colonel George Harvey, "president of the stately old publishing house in Franklin Square" and "the very active editor of Harper's Weekly," contacts him with a particular request he accepts. Colonel Harvey wants him to travel down to New Orleans to write an article on a promising Congressional candidate, James Clairborne "Clay" Blake.

James "Clay" Blake is a young lawyer and a colorful character, who's running for Congress, but he's unopposed and therefore can't help being elected. So the Colonel wants James "Jim" Blake to write a personality piece on his namesake, but there's also an underlying motive: the underground wire is reverberating with rumors "that some enemy is out to ruin him." As an investigative reporter, Blake immediately sets out to work and makes a stopover in Washington before traveling to New Orleans. There he learns from a legendary police reporter, Charley Emerson, what the tool of Clay Blake's potential downfall could be: a high-class courtesan, Yvonne Brissard, who captured the full attention of the future Congressman. In spite of their discreet conduct, it became very evident that "the Creole siren and the Anglo-Saxon lawyer" have "fell for each other like a ton of bricks." A scandal in the making, but could the courtesan be a part of "the alleged plot" against the budding politician?

On his way to New Orleans, Jim encounters a pair of mysterious figures: first of them is his love interest, Gillian "Jill" Matthews, who literary walks into his arms, but also vanishes when she wants to and her role in the overall story is a actually a genuine plot-thread – a pretty good one at that! The second figure is an unknown person on the train, who knocks at his compartment, but when he opened the door there was nobody outside. And the porters on either side of the corridor swear they saw nobody.

This incident is presented as an impossible problem, but the explanation is extremely bad and Robert Adey did not even deign it worthy of being mentioned in Locked Room Murders (1991). Luckily, there's a bone-fide locked room mystery in the second half of the book.

However, the pace of the story considerably slows down until the murder occurs and this section of the book has Jim encountering several characters in the New Orleans setting: the Colonel and Charley recommended Jim to ask Alec Laird for help, the high khan of the Sentinel newspaper, who is described as "an unredeemed puritan," but also someone you want to have in your corner. One of his relatives an elderly dowager, Mathilde Laird, a crusty aristocrat who inexplicably rented the village of her dead and beloved brother to Yvonne Brissard. She has a son, Pete, who she overly mothered and refused to even let him drive his own car. So he has his own personal chauffeur, Raoul. And then there's Flossie Yates. A woman who can discreetly be described as "the madam of a brothel."

Eventually, the plot begins to pick up the pace again. One of Jim's old classmates, Leo Shepley, "a rake and bon viveur," becomes entangled in the plot and this does not end well for him: there are several witnesses, including Jim, who saw him speeding like a devil out of hell in his two-seater Mercer – which ended with a crash and the sound of a gunshot inside a partially locked-and watched shed. Shepley had been shot through the head from close range, but the police fail to find a gun at the scene and nobody could've entered or left the shed without being seen. So how did the murderer or the murder weapon manage to vanish from the closely watched shed?

The seemingly impossibility of the murder frustrates Lieutenant Zack Trowbridge and wonders out loud "what kind of a murderer" vanished "like a soap-bubble as soon as he pulled the trigger," but Jim "pieced the whole thing together less'n twenty-four hours" after the murder. Admittedly, it's a pretty clever piece of work and showed how Carr was still capable of constructing an intricate locked room puzzle. Even if the execution required some low-conscience life forms (i.e. pawns) to make it work. And the motivation for making this an impossible crime is also noteworthy.

So the storytelling, characterization, setting and the plot were somewhat uneven, but, overall, The Ghosts' High Noon is a very consistent detective story. In any case, the plot and writing are far better than what most readers would expect from one of his novels from this late date. That being said, I've to point out one thing: by the late 1960s, Carr had sadly lost his ability to write historical fiction. Carr's writing used to be able to breath life into long-dead, dust covered periods of history (e.g. The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 1937), but here he never came further than making some clunky (pop-culture) references. One of the characters even notes how long-distance phone calls would've been considered a miracle only a couple of years ago, which felt really, really forced.

I thought this was a sad aspect of the book, because Carr was not only the undisputed master of the locked room, but also an early champion of the historical mystery novel. And the historical mystery novel was also his retreat when began to tire of the modern world (i.e. post-WWII England). This allowed him to add a few additional classics to his resume when the quality of his regular series began to suffer. Nobody will deny that his post-1940s historical mysteries were better than any of the Dr. Gideon Fell or H.M. novel that appeared in the same period. So it was sad to see that by the late 1960s he was unable to bring the past back to life as once had done in such delightful works as The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fear is the Same (1956).

Well, look at me, I still managed to end this review on a depressing note! So, yes, The Ghosts' High Noon has some of expected flaws of later-day Carr, but not nearly as many as most would expect and large parts of the plot shows flashes of the old master. That alone should warrant investigation.

Let me end this overlong review by directing your attention to my previous review, which is of the excellent translation of Alice Arisugawa's Koto Pazuru (The Moai Island Puzzle, 1989).