Carr, Christie and others: about a few more Golden Age crime novels

“Reader’s block” is something that has afflicted me a lot in recent years – some of it having to do with guilt about reading other things when I’m supposed to be concentrating on my own book (and also, an increasing fatigue about doing the sorts of long book reviews that I once enjoyed writing). But one almost fool-proof way of emerging from this is to bury myself in Golden Age crime fiction. I have written a few posts already about my encounters with John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Helen McCloy, Stanley Ellin, Edward Hoch, Josephine Tey and others, in addition to the novellas and short stories in enormous crime anthologies edited by Otto Penzler – but here is a brief update post. A few mystery novels from that era that I have recently read (or reread):

First-time read: He Who Whispers (by John Dickson Carr)

I have been reading a lot of JDC, partly because the British Library Crime Classics editions have made his work a little more easily available than it used to be. He Who Whispers has quickly become one of my favourite Carr novels, despite my having come to it with very high expectations (because of its reputation among crime-writing experts).

The murder here – the stabbing of a man who was alone at the top of an inaccessible tower that was being watched from all sides – is one of Carr’s most intriguing “locked-room” or “impossible-crime” scenarios; but there is a lot else going on. There is the central character Fay Seton, one of the most mysterious of Carr’s doomed women (or femme fatales who may not be femme fatales); there is the hint of something supernatural afoot, which Carr was always so good at suggesting (before giving us the purely rational explanation); there is a second attempted murder which is almost as puzzling; and there are some fine passages such as one in a London subway train where two characters get together and exchange vital information (giving us, the readers, a firmer grasp on what is going on) while in the background the conductor at regular intervals calls out the name of each train station, and we just *know* that they are going to end up missing the vital stop that they must get off at.

Re-read: She Died a Lady (by Carr)
I have alluded to this one before, but it’s difficult to properly discuss it without giving away something essential. So for now I’ll just say that 1) it is probably my favourite Carr novel, 2) that it held up equally well on a second read, and 3) it includes another “impossible crime” (involving inexplicable footprints) that is hard to work out.

Also that (no spoiler) I absolutely love the little trick he plays at the end of the book, a trick that is comparable in some ways to what Agatha Christie did in arguably her most famous mystery – but this one is subtler; it isn’t as dramatic or as gasp-inducing as Christie’s denouement, but it lingers in the mind long after one has finished the book, and I think it would work very well for a creative-writing class that is examining the nuts and bolts of structure.

Re-read: Till Death Do Us Part (by Carr)
A nice cosy well-plotted village mystery that should appeal to Christie fans who like the Miss Marple books. While I would recommend this one enthusiastically to anyone, I have a slight reservation: a piece of information that we are given early in the book – involving a fascinating, seemingly impossible series of crimes – turns out to be misleading, and this can make a reader feel let down or even a little cheated (that is, if you have set a very high bar for these things when reading Carr: of course the *actual* mystery that he manufactures here is hard to solve too).

Re-read: The ABC Murders (by Agatha Christie)
Most Christie aficionados rate this as one of the very best of the Hercule Poirot novels: though it has never had the larger-than-life reputation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, or Death on the Nile, for many of us it is up there with those works. (I would include at least two other Poirot books – Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and Five Little Pigs a.k.a. Murder in Retrospect – in my personal list.)

The ABC Murders is also perhaps the only Christie novel that deals with an apparent serial killer (the term isn’t used in the book, but there are allusions to Jack the Ripper). I first read this one at the age of 12, and I may not have been equipped to fully appreciate it then – in the sense that there is something disorienting about the narrative shifts between Hastings’s regular first-person voice (where he chronicles Poirot’s investigation) and the chapters where he reconstructs things that he didn’t experience firsthand, involving another important character. Glad I reread it after all these decades.

Re-read: Through a Glass Darkly (by Helen McCloy)
I love this poignant, haunting and gently philosophical 1949 thriller, though I wish I had a more elegant-looking edition – this one makes its tragic heroine look like a scream-queen from a B-movie. (Incidentally I have the opposite problem with the John Dickson Carr editions I have bought online – the British Library covers are much too prim and antiseptic, not even hinting at the more pulpy aspects of those mysteries.)

To my mind, this book falls in a special sub-category of the thriller and horror genres – a narrative that centres around an imperilled woman, not so much a helpless “ablaa naari” as someone who is dealing, as best as she can, with a cruel, all-consuming and perhaps inescapable destiny. (When I picture the protagonist Faustina, I always see her as resembling the melancholy Christiane in the brilliant film Eyes Without a Face, trapped in her father’s mansion as he seeks a cure for her disfigured face.)

A no-spoilers plot outline of Through a Glass Darkly: Faustina, a young teacher at a girls’ school, is abruptly dismissed from her position because many terrified people believe that she has a silent, ghostly double – a doppelganger or a Fetch – that can materialise in one place while Faustina herself is in another. As the psychiatrist Dr Basil Willing investigates, he must pit his own rationality against the knowledge that there are things about our own minds which we don’t know; that science has so many secrets to reveal yet. Meanwhile Faustina grows more melancholy as she grapples with the possibility of something un-human within herself.

Wonderfully written book, with a beautiful, ambiguous ending. I wrote a review for Scroll many years ago – here is the link. (Avoid reading the comments section there, since there is a spoiler.)

(More to come, since I have just ordered a few more crime novels of this vintage, including by a couple of authors whom I haven't read before. Meanwhile here are a couple of my earlier crime-fiction pieces for Scroll: impossible crime, rational explanation; and how to make things disappear)