John Dickson Carr's To Wake The Dead

To Wake The Dead is a Dr. Gideon Fell mystery by John Dickson Carr from 1938. It has an odd, and frankly pretty unnecessary, setup in which Christopher Kent discovers the body of his cousin-in-law Jenny Kent in the top floor of a luxury hotel. He's been incommunicado for six weeks so he doesn't know that his cousin Rodney, Jenny's husband, has also been murdered in the same brutal fashion: strangled and then beaten around the face.

While I wouldn't exactly call this a cozy, it is Golden Age, and the brutality isn't dwelt on. Thankfully.

The top floor where Jenny Kent was murdered is entirely taken up by a party associated with South African millionaire Dan Reaper. For various reasons no one else has access to the top floor, or so it seems, establishing a country house murder scenario, without the country house.

Rodney Kent's earlier murder occurs in an actual country house with the same limited set of suspects.

As a fair-play cluing mystery, this was a superb entry. Everything was there to point to the murderer, but for me at least the killer came as a complete surprise. Perhaps the killer's seeming alibi for Jenny Kent's murder was a little improbable, but there were enough hints that it didn't seem unfair. And as I say I had no idea who it would be. Quite often in a Golden Age mystery I know who will turn out the killer less by the clues than by how the author writes about the killer.

There was a romantic comedy side plot in this one, but it felt like a bit of an afterthought. It involved Christopher Kent and one of the suspects. Now--of course--the mystery should be the main thing in a mystery novel, but I like a romantic comedy side plot, and Carr can and did do better. Oh, well.

I also thought about structure in this in a way I'm not really sure I should. But it brings up an interesting point.

In the beginning, there was Watson. (Well, not really, but go with me.) Our entry point into the story was not the genius detective, but the sidekick who was writing the story. Sidekicks can be first-person narrators or third-person focus characters. They can be useful and relatively competent (Watson of the books or Archie Goodwin) or amiable duffers (Nigel Bruce as Watson). Agatha Christie starts with Hastings as Poirot's regular sidekick before gradually letting him slip away.

The detective can be the focal point. This is certainly the case with the hard boiled style: the Continental Op, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe. But many of the Ellery Queen mysteries work this way, too, as do the Perry Mason novels. As a general rule, the focal point character is present in every scene. Scenes where that character wasn't present can only appear by report.

We can also have no single character through whose eyes we see events, but shift as needed. This is less used in mysteries, though standard in literary fiction, especially of an earlier era. Partly this is because then what do you do with the murderer's thoughts? In any case Msgr. Knox forbade that in his list of rules, though yes, it does happen.

And you can have a one-time sidekick. That's what Carr does in this one, and while I haven't by any means read all of Carr's novels, it seems a common approach for him and others. There are one-time sidekicks in Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen mysteries as well, for example. In this mystery it's Christopher Kent who is present in every scene. But Christopher Kent is or should be a suspect! He's given an alibi very early to make it seem somewhat acceptable he's invited into the room when Dr. Fell or Inspector Hadley interview suspects. I've swallowed this device in other mysteries, but this time it stuck out as unduly improbable. I understand why you might not want a regularly occurring dunce, but if your detective is professional or semi-professional, (Dr. Gideon Fell, though he doesn't seem to be paid, is regularly consulted) it just seems improbable that an amateur implicated in the case gets to be in the room all the time.

Ah, well. An observation. But still enjoyable anyway.

Tombstone. Golden Age. My Readers Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

John Dickson Carr's The Man Who Could Not Shudder

Martin Clarke has just bought a house famous for its haunting, and he invites six people to test it out as it were, to see if indeed it is haunted. Four of these people are his only friends in England--he has just returned from years as a commercial agent in Italy--and two others are friends of those friends. It will be an experiment: see how different personality types handle a haunting. Though, of course, they might see nothing.

Needless to say, they do not see nothing.

The next morning after they've all arrived a revolver (featured on the cover!) jumps off the wall, shoots and kills one of the guests. Two people see the inexplicable event, and are able to say that the other did not do it. Powder burns on the wall indicate the gun wasn't in anybody's hand when it went off. But there's clearly a dead body, and it seems likely it was a murder. How was it done? Was it the ghost?

Fortunately, the night before, somebody telegraphed to Scotland Yard; Inspector Elliot and Dr. Gideon Fell in his box-pleated cape and shovel hat are there shortly after the body is discovered.

From very near the start there's not much doubt as to who the mastermind of the affair was; it's up to Dr. Fell to discover by what agency the murder was committed. He does so. It's a wonderfully intricate solution that takes years (though under 200 pages) to fully reveal itself. "This is not Roger Ackroyd all over again," he says at one point. But for just a moment it looks like it might be!

His final conversation with the murderer:

"Sir," he [the murderer] said, "acknowledge yourself beaten."
"Sir," replied Dr. Fell, "apparently I must."
"Badly beaten, I think."
"So it seems."
"In fact, made a fool of."
"So it would seem."

But, of course, Dr. Fell has not been made a fool of...

This wasn't as delightful as The Case of the Constant Suicides in my rediscovery of Carr, but it was lot of fun, and the solution was far more convincing and mysterious. Recommended.

Golden Age. Revolver. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

John Dickson Carr's The Case Of The Constant Suicides

Wow.

Bradley at ahsweetmysteryblog has a post about Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries in which he observed that one's sense of an author can be thrown entirely off by starting with the wrong book. There are very few authors (Sarah Caudwell comes to mind) whose works are all equally good and (as in the case of Sarah Caudwell) if that's true, it's usually because there just aren't very many.

I think I've been a victim of this with regard to John Dickson Carr.

There are a lot of John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson novels out there and before this I'd read only three. I'm not surprised they're not all equally good. But based on the three I'd read, I'd decided that despite all the good things I'd heard, John Dickson Carr wasn't really for me. But there were a few more on my shelf--this one's been here since 2000, I'm sorry to report--and since it would do double duty for both the Vintage Mystery Cover Scavenger Hunt and the Mount TBR Challenge, I thought, well, I could try another.

As I said: wow. I've clearly been denying myself a considerable pleasure.

I wasn't very far into this volume and I knew mistakes had been made. I typed 'best john dickson carr' into my Google search bar and this post appeared at the top of the list. It turned out two of the three I'd read were down at the bottom among those the post's author said would appear in nobody's best Carr list, and the other certainly wasn't in the top five. And this one was in that top five.

Where was the wisdom of the Internet when I was last reading Carr? Still in the future, I'm afraid.

This one starts out with two Doctors Campbell summoned to Scotland for a Campbell family conference; they're both assigned the same sleeper on the overnight from Euston station to Glasgow. One is a male Doctor Campbell (Alan) and the other is a female Doctor Campbell (Kitty-Kat, among other names) who have never met, and know nothing about each other, but have been conducting a feud in the letters section about the Duchess of Cleveland. They would be played by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in the movie version and we know how that will turn out. That's fine. I completely approve of RomCom subplots in my mysteries:

Colin's eyes opened wide.

"Do you mean," he bellowed delightedly, "there's going to be a wedding?"

"Can I print that?"

"Yes to both questions," replied Alan.

There is also the Doom of the Campbells, and despite the one dead Campbell, the Doom is actually a whiskey:

"You must remember," said Alan, not without reason on his side, "that I spent three years in the United States during Prohibition days. Anybody who can survive that experience has nothing to fear from any liquor that ever came out of a still--or didn't."

"You think so, eh?" mused Colin. "Do you now? Well, well, well! Elspat, this calls for heroic measures. Bring out the Doom of the Campbells."

With all this the mystery might even be secondary, and who would mind? But it isn't. The plot is strong, the room is locked, and Dr. Gideon Fell is summoned to investigate. There are only two clues: a disappeared and eventually reappeared diary, and a dog carrier or suitcase that somehow appears inside the locked room. Eventually a second body is found with an accompanying suicide note that indicates the suicidee is the perpetrator of the first crime. The fact that the suicide note is typed tells us all we need to know about that.

The solution is very satisfactory, though I admit to doubts about the science of it. But that doesn't matter. Superb. A real discovery for me.

And it does double duty. While I'd definitely call that a dog carrier on the cover, it's also called a suitcase in the novel, and the fact that it is, is important to the plot, so:

Golden Age. Suitcase/Briefcase. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

And it's been aging on the shelf for years, like the fine wine (or whiskey) it is: Mount TBR Challenge.