Currently Reading #2

Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries

Hi, friends,

Despite the subheading above, I’m also still reading about arctic explorers—I just banged through a photobiography of Matthew Henson, which left me wanting to kick just as many rocks as yesterday’s book, but for different reasons. But today, for a change, I wanted to share something that I’ve been finding DELIGHTFUL.

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Book covers: Nine—and Death Means Ten, by Carter Dickson, and The Plague Court Murders, by John Dickson Carr

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A while back, I read another upcoming reprint from American Mystery Classics: John Dickson Carr’s The Red Widow Murders, originally published in 1935 under the pseudonym Carter Dickson.

I. Loved. It.

Smart and funny, starring the cranky-but-brilliant Sir Henry Merrivale—as I mentioned a while back, he’s a lawyer AND a doctor—a plethora of suspects, a locked room murder committed in a supposedly cursed room, a light romance, a surprising amount of warmth, and a good dose of humor. This is going to sound like an impossible comparison, but they kind of read—to me—like if a less-vulgar version of Reginald Hill’s Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel somehow teleported into a slightly-darker version of a Georgette Heyer mystery?

Beyond all that, one of the real selling points on The Red Widow Murders for me was this: Midway through, we get the history of the cursed room via a story within a story—and I got so involved in it that I literally forgot about the original mystery until one of the main characters interrupted the man who was telling the story. Which is profoundly impressive.

It’s the sort of mystery that DOES give you the information you need to solve the mystery, but even though I identified the murderer correctly before the reveal, I absolutely didn’t know the hows or the whys. Immediately after finishing it, I hit up my friends at Mainely Murders—they’re closed for the season, so it pays to have Friends in High Places, heh—and snapped up most of the John Dickson Carr books that they had on hand.

I read three of the Merrivale books out of order, bang bang bang, and then threw up my hands, said the hell with it, and have started buying used copies on eBay so that I can read the whole damn series in order. Because they’re a joy. So far, every one I’ve read has featured a different narrator—sometimes with a history with H.M., sometimes not—and H.M. has only made his entrance about a third of the way in.

You know: like Columbo, or Natasha Lyonne.

So far, I think all of the narrators I’ve spent time with have mentioned a desire to spank ‘difficult’ ladies, and yet because of the era and the general charm of (most) everything involved, I mostly give them a pass. (Note: So far, there has been no actual on-screen spanking, non-consensual or otherwise.)

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I’m currently reading the American Mystery Classics edition of the first H.M. mystery, The Plague Court Murders, and in Michael Dirda’s introduction he basically describes John Dickson Carr as the 1930s-era James Patterson:

Because Carr relied on his fiction to pay the bills, he needed to be prolific. However, his American publisher, Harper & Brothers, didn’t want to bring out more than two of his mysteries each year. Thus was born Carter Dickson.

Hilariously, he goes on to say that the pen name fooled approximately no one. And I mean, I’m not surprised—the similarities between the two names are not exactly subtle.

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And now, a few short excerpts from Nine—and Death Makes Ten to give you an idea of how these read. (This one is actually NOT a locked room mystery, but it involves Impossible Fingerprints, so it’s in the same wheelhouse.)

This made me howl:

Now, the Frenchman doesn’t speak any English: not more than a couple of words, anyway. And I don’t speak much French myself. Cruikshank claims to be able to speak French; but mostly it consists of saying, ‘Ah, oui,’ and looking wise; so I shouldn’t rely too much on his version of the conversation.

I particularly love that the characters live in a universe in which other mystery stories exist:

But, if you ask me, this whole case is screwy. It sounds like Nick Carter. First the bloody thumb-mark, and now the packet of papers. If you can only dig up a hypodermic full of strange Indian arrow-poison. . .

And this last one will give you a good feel for H.M. himself:

“And then, if I remember rightly, it was in the papers that you were going to be given a peerage and go into the House of Lords.”

“It’s a lie!” said H.M., galvanized. “Don’t you believe a word of it. They tried to, yes. They’re still skulkin’ in ambush, just aching for an excuse to grab me and stick me in the House of Lords. But I fooled ‘em twice, and I can fool ‘em again. Phooey.”

I don’t know why, but it’s that ‘phooey’ that gets me. Despite his habit of somewhat affectionately calling all the young women he interacts with ‘wench’, I love him.

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Let me know if you’ve read any of these, I’m so excited to have finally discovered them.

Talk soon,
Leila