JOHN DICKSON CARR (1906-1977)Henri Bencolin Series and Other Carr BooksDr Fell | Bencolin & Others | Historical Novels | Henry Merrivale | Carr Main PageWARNING: Some of these capsule reviews hint at the solution, so do not read the footnote to the review if you have not read the bookAnnotated Book ListJuge d'Instruction Henri Bencolin
1. IT WALKS BY NIGHT (1930) §
* When he says of a character that she will be dead in five years from smoking marijuana or hashish, he must be alluding to cocaine or heroin or something more insidious, otherwise this lad Carr from Pennsylvania wasted his time in Paris. Fie! The spookiness and atmosphere of this book is faked. He got this sort of thing better a few years later when he knew more about it.
-- The influence of Gaston Leroux, who is a very bad role model, is very evident in this early story. JDC's favorite mystery, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, is (at least in the translation I've read) a dog turd, especially with its 16-year-old detective Rouletabille and a bunch of ponderously stupid gendarmes. It is, frankly, awful -- though I like LeRoux's book Phantom of the Opera (it's better than the movies and Broadway show that were based on it).
* A persistent theme in JDC's books, but he hasn't got it down yet. Absurd to have Scotland Yard searching the British Library to find references to Ruination Street, which doesn't exist, and is not backed up by any pseudo-manuscript. Also, the murderer, while least likely, is easy to spot. Pick your most hated school-teacher / headmaster, dean, principal then have him hanged for murder.
* Nice setting, well described and atmospheric, but reads as though the author had just had a good vacation and decided to set a mystery there -- 'tain't real. The Rhine is Germany at its best, yet this book somehow misses the point with all its allusions to drama -- actors and stage magicians -- Grand Guignol with no Guig.
* I am a sucker for mysteries that take place in wax museums and in private clubs where people wear masks. And the true heroine here is not a girlfriend but a really admirable non-entity. This novel is beautifully done even if it is totally unrealistic.
* There is a hint in Castle Skull that Bencolin was a rich man who had bought his position as juge d'instruction in the Paris prefecture; well, no sign of it here, and what had he done to lose his job? Bencolin was inconsistently depicted in Carr's career, from the down-to-earth and sympathetic man of the early stories, through the devilish Machiavellian head of the Paris police, to this kindly humorous person. Oh, well.   Other Novels; Anthologies; Miscellaneous
1. POISON IN JEST (1932) § * Book would have been a good subject for a Hitchcock-type movie; this is a very Van Dine sort of mystery in that the least-likely suspect is really the ONLY one if you keep your eyes open. 2. THE BURNING COURT (1937) §§§(Set in Pennsylvania; a real supernatural classic*) [Detective: Gaudan Cross, Crime Writer] [The French made a movie of this, Le Chambre Ardente, but I've never seen it on screen or mentioned in video catalogs; but supposedly they totally screwed up the setting and plot] * The body of a murder victim disappears from a sealed crypt; he had been seen drinking poison from the hand of a woman who left the room by a non-existent door. Solved by the monkeylike charlatan Cross, but there is an interesting epilogue.... 3. THE EMPEROR'S SNUFF BOX (1942) §(Set in a French Channel resort; least likely suspect is guilty*) [Detective: Dermot Kinross, Psychologist] [Carr could have made him a series character -- he must have been searching for new ones then, Col. March for example, but there just wasn't enough there so he put him away with the 'zizipompom' line.] * An excellent piece of misdirection, one of Carr's cleverest; the hypocrisy of some of the characters is well done too -- the sleazy villain comes across better than the upright fiancé. 4. THE 9 WRONG ANSWERS (1952)(Gimmick is contained in footnotes*; experiment doesn't really work) [This is a sheer adventure novel, complete with sinister villain in a wheelchair] * There are nine footnotes inserted at various places where the author supposes an experienced mystery reader will have come up with some conclusion about the plot solution; there could have been more, and a couple of them are intentionally misleading and in fact are part of the story. Is this fair? Of course it is, in a JDC novel -- he does this frequently in the course of a narrative when he says 'this was perfectly true', but this is one of only a couple of experiments where he actually used footnotes as clues (see Reader Is Warned). 5. THE EXPLOITS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1952)[Co-author Adrian Conan Doyle*] [Sherlock Holmes pastiches; OK, but not the real thing -- i.e., you get the unwritten tales mentioned by Doyle about the Giant Rat of Sumatra and the guy who disappeared on the way to the mail box and so on. They are in the proper spirit and style, though.] * Carr was involved in only about half of these 12 stories. He dropped out of the project ostensibly because of illness (but more likely because Doyle's son was hard to get along with). 6. THE THIRD BULLET AND OTHER STORIES (1954) (short stories)(See below; some JDC and some CD; confusing edition history) 7. PATRICK BUTLER FOR THE DEFENSE (1956) (One of Carr's good fast-moving adventure plots with fun characters and a simple but not-bad mystery*; nice dying-message trick) [Detective: Patrick Butler, Barrister] [London fog in November, crooked lawyers, gangsters, hijinks in a dark theatre, and love elements that are not too childish] * This is a book that was read many years ago but was not in my library for ages; recently got a disintegrating 1950s paperback copy and stayed up most of the night reading it -- good and fast-moving, so you don't have to mull over the illogicalities and coincidences, and a really unbelievable bit of luck for the murderer not to have been caught in the act. Butler, in fact, is a lot less obnoxious than he was in Below Suspicion. 8. FATAL DESCENT (Fall to His Death) (1939)[Co-author John Rhode] (Good 'mechanical device'* crime set in a 'mulitimedia' publishing company) [Detective: Dr. Horatio Glass, Doctor] [One of Carr's few collaborations, not counting some multi-author round-robins he did with the Detection Club] * A booby trap, however, is always unsatisfactory in a detective story. There is absolutely no guarantee that it would ever work as the killer intended. Judging by the style, it would seem JDC did most of the writing, with Rhode just contributing some technical details and characterizations. But Glass is an interesting detective. Carr and Rhode should have done some more of these.... ¶9. DR. FELL, DETECTIVE, AND OTHER STORIES (1947)(Know nothing about this book, but presume it contains stories that have been collected elsewhere) 10. THE MEN WHO EXPLAINED MIRACLES (1964) (Short stories) [Carr wrote very few short stories, at least compared to his output of novels, but the ones he wrote were anthologized all over the place -- this one has Col. March*, HM, etc.] * Colonel March was seemingly modelled after JDC's friend John Rhode, and he also resembles both Hadley and Masters (big bland colorful face, etc.) Unfortunately, he seems to lack any personality, although this works fine in the short-story form where the plot is everything. 11. THE DOOR TO DOOM AND OTHER DETECTIONS (1980) (Short stories) §(Early stories, including several Bencolins*; good collection with nice introductory editor's notes) [Note: This is where I got my chronology for the books; my thanks to Douglas Greene] * The book is starred here because of its overall contents; it was not starred under the Bencolin heading, because those stories are really lousy. 12. THE DEPARTMENT OF QUEER COMPLAINTS (collected 1981) §(Colonel March of the Yard & other stories; nice collection of shorts) [Colonel March is described as having a bland and speckled face -- more like one of Carr's police officials than his 'amateur' detectives -- one would prefer a Fell or Merrivale, but perhaps it is better in the short-story form not to distract with an eccentric detective. The idea of Scotland Yard having a bureau* dealing with odd unsolvable crimes is good (Roy Vickers, for example, had his Department of Dead Ends), but of course no police department can afford a luxury like that] * Just as an aside, the NYC Police Department had an inspector who specialized in art thefts and had a world-wide reputation, ran a special squad. Sadly, his son followed him into the police department but ended up in different circumstances, in the 1990s convicted of unspeakable brutality in the notorious Abner Louima case. 13. THE DEAD SLEEP LIGHTLY (1983) (Radio plays; exotic nowadays) §(He wrote a lot of radio plays; some have Dr. Fell in them) [It would be nice to listen to some of these, but I haven't found any on audio like the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes's.] ¶14. SPEAK OF THE DEVIL (1994) (A long 8-episode historical mystery radio play originally broadcast by the BBC in 1941; printed for the first time by Crippen & Landru publishers) Plea: Doug Greene -- please reissue this book! (Oct. 2003, finally got a copy of this book from ABEbooks; although still not reissued. It is a precursor to JDC's historical novels, which he started seriously writing ten years later. An amusing romp, but nothing special.) and... 15. THE LIFE OF SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1949) §§ (The 'official' biography, with support from Lady Doyle and Adrian Conan Doyle; very good and doesn't try to 'pyschoanalyze' the subject; if you are interested in Doyle and Holmes, read this one in preference to others) [His only non-fiction book* (unless you count The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey), although he wrote some articles, such as the 'Grandest Game in the World' (in Door to Doom and originally in EQ Mystery Magazine) and was book reviewer for that same publication towards the end of his life. He also started a series for them on famous highwaymen.] * It should be mentioned that whatever you think of his literary style or characterization, Carr was an excellent historian in that he did his research very well, even with his 'forensic' clues, which he usually got from Gross or Taylor. Whether he was perceptive or empathic beyond his own preconceptions and prejudices is another matter! Hans Gross of Austria's Criminalanspielern or whatever it was called, and Taylor's Jurisprudence were right next to the Oxford Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, and Bartlett's Quotations on any mystery writer's desk back then. Of course they are way outdated these days.
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