Some gushing about John Dickson Carr (The Black Spectacles, She Died a Lady, etc)

I have got back to reading John Dickson Carr mysteries from what is generally regarded his peak phase (mid-1930s to mid-40s) – a few of these can now be bought online at not horrendous prices, and delivered within a week or two. (Reading e-books is still not my thing, at least not for cosy Golden Age crime fiction.) Finished and greatly enjoyed his 1939 novel The Black Spectacles over the course of a day. Premise: a nasty episode of poisoning in an English village results in suspicion and hostility directed at a young woman – and is followed a few months later by a strange experiment conducted by this woman’s uncle at his country house, apparently to prove to a small audience that they can’t always trust the evidence of their eyes. (A Hindi translation of this book could be titled Ankhon Dekhi.) Of course, a second murder takes place at this demonstration – practically in front of everyone’s eyes, but with no clarity about exactly what transpired – and soon the formidable, harrumphing Dr Gideon Fell is called in to investigate.

As most serious crime buffs know, Carr’s reputation and popularity were once almost at Agatha Christie’s level – but he never became a bestselling author worldwide on anything like the scale she did, and many of his books are very hard to obtain today. (One reason may be that some things about Christie’s work – the simplicity of her prose, the tidiness of her plotting – travelled and endured better; so that she was more accessible to readers outside the Anglophone world, including those for whom English wasn’t a first language.)

Something I struggle to articulate about the effect of my favourite Carr novels: I am not usually blown away by the denouement – I mean, I do appreciate the skill and craft, and how carefully plotted the thing was, but it doesn’t necessarily build up to a specific “oh wow!” moment that you sometimes want from a whodunit. At the same time, I can see that this could be because Carr has so much going on simultaneously that his solutions tend to be long and winding, covering much terrain, and you can’t distill the finale to a single gasp-inducing revelation (“They *all* did it!” or “The detective is the murderer!”) More importantly: the fact that the reveal isn’t the most thrilling part of the book – the build-up and the anticipation are more exciting – doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the whole. Carr is great at creating some genuinely unsettling, creepy moments early on, which work entirely on their own terms as atmosphere-generators for the mystery. (Take the beginning of The Hollow Man, with a masked man gaining entry to a private club and having an enigmatic interaction with one of the patrons.)

That said, The Black Spectacles does have a satisfying and well-worked-out solution; nothing to quibble with on that front. It’s just that I find other parts of the book equally or more compelling – such as the speculation around the possible ways that regular chocolates at a sweet-shop could have been replaced with poisoned ones, or the opening chapter which presents a view of some of the central characters during a trip to Pompeii (as seen through the eyes of a young detective who will later get involved in the case).

P.S. Carr’s most celebrated work is probably The Hollow Man (also published as The Three Coffins), but I tend to agree with Carr aficionados who consider this novel overhyped. (My reasons: engrossing and atmospheric though the book as a whole is – certainly worth a second read – the final explanation is too long and complicated, and I think it can be argued that Carr “cheats” a bit when it comes to the chronology of events in the story; or at least holds back a piece of information that makes it almost impossible for a reader to work things out.)

What The Hollow Man does have going for it – and this is a big reason for its reputation – is an almost standalone chapter titled “The Locked-Room Lecture”, in which the voluble Dr Gideon Fell holds forth on “the general mechanics and development of the situation which is known in detective fiction as the hermetically sealed chamber”. It’s a beautifully audacious ploy to include something like this in a mystery novel (complete with references to famous earlier books such as Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room), and it’s done with wit too. (“All those opposing can skip this chapter,” Dr Fell says – and also “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories.”)

Incidentally, The Black Spectacles has a fun segment about the mental makeup and methods of the “male poisoner” – drawing on famous real-life cases such as those of EW Pritchard, TG Wainewright and Thomas Neill Cream – that reminded me of the Locked Room Lecture. Not as elaborate, but wry and informative, even as Gideon Fell is being his exasperating self.

P.P.S. perhaps my favourite Carr novel so far is She Died a Lady, a very good mystery on its own terms, with a typically confounding premise (two adulterous lovers appear to have walked to the edge of a cliff and thrown themselves off it – the footprints confirm this beyond a doubt – but when the bodies are recovered, it turns out they were *first* shot and killed at close range!) – but equally fascinating is a narrative ploy that makes the book a very interesting companion piece to one of Agatha Christie’s most famous works. Not saying more.