Historical Novels

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WARNING: Some of these capsule reviews hint at the solution, so do not read the footnote to the review if you have not read the book

John Dickson Carr, as he grew older, grew increasingly disenchanted with modern life (especially 'socialism' and other regimentation/homogenization). So he got more and more into historical novels where his favorite type characters could behave according to his ideas of how humans should behave. To a lot of readers, that meant irresponsibly or childishly, but there are many good things to say about these books.

They generally fall into two categories, (1) the swashbuckler ("The Devil in Velvet," for example -- great title), and (2) the police novel ("The Witch of the Low Tide," for example -- another great title). The Notes for the Curious, where he verifies his research, are wonderful, but not present in all of the historicals. The best of the swashbucklers are "Devil in Velvet," "Bride of Newgate," "Captain Cut-throat," and "Most Secret." Not so good are "The Demoniacs" and "Fear Is the Same." Best of the 'mystery' novels are "Fire, Burn" (which is also partially a swashbuckler) and "Witch of the Low Tide." "Scandal at High Chimneys" -- another great title -- is disappointing, and the New Orleans trilogy is mostly bad. "The Hungry Goblin" is best forgotten by all but die-hard fans. All of them have at least SOME merit, even the awful ones such as "Papa la-Bas."

Also, highly recommended is Carr's non-fiction book "The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey," an excellently researched analysis of a real crime taking place during the Restoration period. His alternative solutions are brilliant, his 'true' one being the most convincing. Scholars quibble, of course, but it seems far more likely that this was a 'personal' rather than a 'political' crime, in spite of all the political implications of it that were taken advantage of on all sides by propagandists.

Annotated Book List

1. THE BRIDE OF NEWGATE (1815; 1950) §§
(A Regency set in London; good stuff)
[A Regency Romance* from John Dickson Carr? Well, yes. A typical swashbuckler of his, but the setting is right, the writing is elegant, and this works both as that and as a good mystery novel. Lots of fun and escapism. Historically, very well researched, as was his habit when he 'invented' this historical mystery genre.]

* Lady Caroline, a Bluestocking, to get her inheritance, has to be married before her 25th birthday, so she arranges by various bribes to marry a convicted felon in the condemned cell the night before he is to be hanged, and does. But guess what? He is reprieved. Take it from there... The action is fast, incident follows incident -- the riot at the opera house is marvellous.

2. THE DEVIL IN VELVET (1675; 1951) §§§
(The best of these; real swashbuckler; 'time-traveling' hero; an all-time classic)
[Carr at his very best in an early divergence from straight mystery novel*. As with all his historical books, one can complain of 'travelogitis' but that adds interest in my opinion. The characters in this are more interesting and less stereotyped than the author's usual run (not that that ever really detracts from the plots). A masterpiece.]

* Here are a couple of quotations from the book, by Nick Fenton, an elderly Cambridge don obsessed with the Restoration perod who makes a deal with the Devil and is transposed into the body of one of his ancestors, and one of Carr's best heroes. They sum up the author's attitude very well.

    "How strange," he reflected, "have been the minds of authors I have read, setting a character hundreds of years back in time! I think their learning is not wide enough. For they never allow the poor devil to have a good time. He must fret and fume because progress -- accursed progress and thrice-damned machinery -- have not come to wreck men's lives.
   "He is infuriated by the lack of telephones and motorcars. I felt no need of them when I studied, in rural Somerset, for some dreary degree or other. Our author, through his hero, is appalled at the sanitation, the harsh laws, the power of King or Parliament. Yet in my heart, I confess these matters trouble me not at all."

And this: He learned to eat the food, mainly meat with heavy rich sauces, which his young digestion enjoyed. Vegetables you could have in moderation, potatoes, eggs fish, and good cheese [sic]. Nobody, he noted in high pleasure, ever pestered you to eat vegetables for your health. Except for potatoes, he discarded them.

It should be noted, however, that he insists on having a sewer built and bathtubs installed in his house. He also acts brainlessly by blurting out historical details that haven't occurred yet (or been revealed); if you're going to go back in time, you must be a clever actor and watch your tongue.

-- As with all of his 'historicals' there is a lot of detail as to costumes, city 'topography', and furnishings, a bit boring unless you care about that stuff. The plot emphasis is normally very Romantic and escapist, which is fine. A personal note: While always sympathetic to the Royalist mentality emotionally (Cavaliers vs Roundheads), I believe rationally that Cromwell and his cause was in the right in a progressive political sense, otherwise England would have gone through a really bloody 'French Revolution' in the course of events had Parliament not been firmly established as opposed to absolute monarchical power. James II was rightly deposed for religious reasons (and political). 'Bonnie Prince Charlie', as a type of Divine-Righter, would have been a disastrous king as opposed to the boring Georges.

3. CAPTAIN CUT-THROAT (1805; 1955) §§
(Set in France; Napoleonic spies à la Scarlet Pimpernel)
[Alan Hepburn is Carr's version of James Bond* in this fine swashbuckler. Fouché and other good cameo characters abound, and the fast-moving plot obscures the improbabilities.]

* Such as in one of the best scenes, the midnight chase through the woods, where the hero causes the explosion of the armada of invasion balloons (I didn't know they had hydrogen balloons as early as that, but Carr wouldn't have made a mistake about this).

-- Of the modern editions of Carr, IPL and Carroll & Graf have the best cover drawings; this one, in C&G's characteristic 'crayon', is especially good. Quite often, though, the C&G's are irrelevant 'lady-in-distress' pictures.

4. FIRE, BURN! (1829; 1957) §§
(A Regency -- well George IV -- set in London; good atmosphere; 'transported' hero)
[This is a 'time-travelling' fantasy, such as Carr essayed a couple of times, in that the hero, a Scotland Yard Superintendent, is inexplicably transposed into a ready-made person back in the period of his obsessive interest in the early history of the Yard; nice device if not explained very well (as an experienced science-fiction writer would have done). The period details and the mystery plot are excellent.*]

* Given the situation, a modern policeman hoping to awe his predecessors with knowledge of fingerprints, etc., it depends on the nice misdirection of something existing then before one would suspect they had thought of such a thing yet. One flaw, apart from the hero's tendency to blurt out unthinkingly about things he shouldn't show awareness of (like details from biographies that won't be written for 50 years or so), is the really exasperating airhead heroine -- a Gracie Allen or Lucy type. Maybe such a woman is amusing to watch get herself into trouble out of 'idiocy', but nobody with any reasonable sense would put up with that behavior. And why is it that Carr seems to think instant irrational jealousy and rage is a proper manly and womanly reaction to any encounter with another person one might dislike on sight?

-- This was the first Carr book I ever read -- 1959 on a horrible trip by Constellation prop-plane from Chicago to London that had bad weather (a hurricane) and engine problems and took 23 hours to get there, time to read the book twice and enough to enlist a permanent fan of that author!

5. SCANDAL AT HIGH CHIMNEYS (1865; 1959)
(Victorian country-house murder; good period piece -- and we know they were into sex then, as long as it didn't frighten the horses)
[The mid-Victorian setting is well done*, but the mystery is not -- fairly obvious whodunnit. Atmosphere is nice, and the sexual hypocrisy well described.]

* Trains then had locked compartments and the ticket-collector used a running board along the outside to do his thing through the windows. London of that time was a lot different from modern times, especially in the Regent's Street area.

6. THE WITCH OF THE LOW TIDE (1907; 1961) §
(Edwardian; 'no footprints on a beach' situation; but some stylistic flaws -- pity)
[Very well-rendered Edwardian setting* in London and an imaginary seaside resort resembling Broadstairs or Margate. Good mystery 'gimmick' though not new for this author. Nicely described nasty Lestrade-type cop. Sensible comments, for once, by JDC on the subject of sex. The hero follows the new-fangled profession of 'psychanalysis'.]

* For, example, wooden sidewalks, and cars with no windshields that keep breaking down -- and are cursed by hackney cab drivers.

7. THE DEMONIACS (1757; 1962)
(Bow Street Runners; bit of a bore, well maybe not -- try it)
[Sort of a locked-room murder, set interestingly enough on London Bridge just before they tore down the medieval houses on it; the rest of the historical setting is well researched too. Flaws are the stilted dialogue, the phony business of explication by speech ('over our heads are two rooms...'), and the 'idiocy' of some of the characters*.]

* The hero is one of Carr's typical pig-headed and impulsive swashbucklers, with a big dash of cruelty especially toward women. Nearly all the fictional people in the book are villains of one sort or another.

It is interesting to compare this book with Bruce Alexander's series about Sir John Fielding and the Bow Street magistrate's court. There are also quite a lot of other well-known real figures from this era in Carr's book, including one of my ancestors, Dr William Hunter.

8. MOST SECRET (1670; 1964) §
(Nice intrigue in the Court of Charles II)
[revision of Devil Kinsmere*, 1934, by Roger Fairbairn]
[A tale told by an octogenarian about his grandfather on the eve of Waterloo. Boisterous drunken fun,* with a typical Carr idiotic hot-headed hero who can't keep from speaking his mind no matter how dangerous or undiplomatic the consequences.]

* Pure swashbuckling, since the court intrigue is extremely romanticized. The villains are exaggerated in the Bondish style. There are some good Dickensian set pieces (London, the theatre, and Whitehall Palace).

* Douglas Greene very kindly sent me a Xerox copy of Devil Kinsmere, which is very interesting to read in comparison with this revision of 30 years later. The changes were not so much in plot as in idiomatic dialogue -- the later version is more accurate but more pedantic, the early one is inaccurate but exuberant.

9. PAPA LA-BAS (1858; 1968)
(Victorian New Orleans*; not my cup of tea; voodoo nowhere near the level of Anne Rice's)
[Lots of talky-talky with not much happening apart from a lot of running around, and the 'impossible' situation solution is improbable and silly to say the least. There are also a couple of very mawkish love affairs, which makes one doubt the amatory sanity of the author at this stage of his life -- spanking, indeed! -- and 'my hero, you threw that guy through the window, how gloriously impulsive of you'!]

* Reads like a Travel Guide -- we don't need that raw detail of street and building layouts just plopped into the story and impeding the narrative flow. But Senator Judah Benjamin (a real person) serves as the detective, and rather well; and the atmosphere is good and well-presented -- when it is relevant. Voodoo really has little to do with the story except as a red herring.

-- Query: Did they have rubber slingshots in 1858? (Yah, I'm a crab and am giving away the secret.) When was the 'vulcanization' of latex invented? Anyway, he should have cleared this up in his Notes for the Curious, as he did about another weapon in "Fire, Burn."

10. THE GHOST'S HIGH NOON (1912; 1969)
(New Orleans again; exhibits the later Carr's worst habits in dialogue and false suspense)
[Good plot*, and the characters come alive more than some others at this stage of his writing.]

* Some great stuff in this book about really antique cars, such as the first self-starter (Cadillac), the 50-horsepower Peerless, a 'battered Stoddard Dayton', Chadwicks, etc. Nice cameo settings briefly in Manhattan and Washington, well done. The dialogue is very slangy, but who's to say it isn't accurate -- Carr grew up in this era. This is a better book than the previous one, but still has major flaws in narrative and talk and attitude. Childishly adolescent behavior -- quick with fist, stupid in love -- is held up as a paradigm of manhood.

-- As an aside, this has Carr's Notes for the Curious as an afterword, like many of these historicals. I love those notes, but have the bad habit of reading such things before starting a book, and Carr does an unbelievably bad thing, revealing the name of the murderer in that section. Maybe he wanted to discourage reading of postscripts before the fact. Well, bah! Who cares where Vauxhall Gardens were, or what they looked like and were used for, after the story is over? You want to know ahead of time.

11. DEADLY HALL (1927; 1971)
(English country house transported to New Orleans; not too bad a plot, but absurd dialogue)
[The story is quite good, with a couple of real surprises in it. Does violate one of the 'Locked-room Lecture' strictures about booby traps. The clues are all there, but are cleverly hidden among all the false, and stupid, obfuscations of the characters who will never complete an insight or observation*.]

* Carr's characters were always predictable (the heroes and heroines and many others, except for 'cameo' types that were always well done -- couple of good ones here that are just 'thrown away'), but their behavior tends to be cloying in the later books -- how often do we have to put up with the insanely jealous guy and the oh-so-proper girl playing coyness who either fall into each others embraces at the first opportunity or else, usually, fall into a messy and pointless misunderstanding? Too distracting from a rather interesting plot, although not as jejune as in some of the other books of this period.

-- As you might gather, I am not very fond of Carr's three New Orleans books. Not his proper milieu. And the later mannerisms are irritating. After all, who, when about to say 'The Murderer Is...' stops then because the doorbell just rang or because the listener interpolates 'hey, just thought of something, see you later', and then you have to wait for three chapters?

12. THE HUNGRY GOBLIN (1869; 1972)
(His last book -- awful; it does, however, star Wilkie Collins as the detective)
[Set in Victorian times, the characters do not speak and behave like any Victorians we would recognize as such. The story line* is needlessly and hopelessly complex and pointless, lots of running around and lying and not coming to the point in conversation, although the mystery itself is secondary and is easily solved by the reader.]

* Carr was very ill at this stage of life and also going through a retrogressive adolescence. The novel plot -- not the mystery, which really has nothing to do with the story and is 'motiveless' -- involves sex and a ridiculous mutual impersonation by two women named Muriel who though not related happen to be identical in appearance and behavior. Just trying to keep track of their multiple social identities and pseudonyms, and the shenanigans and obfuscations of all the characters, is a headache. The dialogue is a joke: 1920s college slang with no attempt to be 'period' as he had done in the other historicals, except for an occasional 'sir' or 'madam'. But Wilkie Collins is presented fairly well.

and...
13. THE MURDER OF SIR EDMUND GODFREY (1678; 1936) §§§
(Historical Reconstruction; well researched -- good job, a masterpiece of 'true crime'!)
[This really belongs on everybody's "Classic Crime" shelf. It is as much about the "Popish Plot" in the reign of Charles II as it is about the historically unsolved mystery of who killed the magistrate.*]

* This book has all the virtues of Carr's historical swashbucklers along with very excellent research. He offers a round dozen possible solutions to the mystery, and as usual his own is the most convincing. One will find concepts of 'justice' very much different from what we are now used to -- from the way trials were conducted to the barbaric punishments meted out. The 'Catholic bashing', however, is very much parallel to McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s.

More on this book...

See also...
FEAR IS THE SAME (1795; 1956)
[published as a Carter Dickson]
(Historical Regency Novel* -- Greene calls this Carr's best historical novel)
[Pretty lousy, in fact, with the later JDC's worst faults: "Here we are now turning down Bow Street, with Drury Lane, in this age called Paradise Row, over there on your left..." -- scene-setting via dialogue that nobody would ever speak, especially when driving a gig through dense traffic. But the plot is OK, if very swashbuckling-standard, with the hero being a real idiot and lout and the heroine a classic Carrian ditz]

* This involves a time-travel fantasy where the modern hero is transferred back into the personage of an ancestor of some kind as was also done in The Devil in Velvet and Fire, Burn, with the settings well-researched, but the hero having trouble controlling his anachronisms, especially this hero, who is a boxing champion with a short fuse, and is stupid enough to blurt out at a dinner party with the Prince of Wales that he knows the prince is secretly married to Mrs Fitzherbert. He had read it in a book 150 years later and is too impulsive a person not to mention it at a time it was not generally known. Neat idea, this transference, but often forced, especially the 'touristy' bits.

There is a wonderful, absurd scene in this book where the hero fights two expert swordsmen simultaneously with his fists only, while the Prince of Wales and his brother the Duke of York (later to be William IV) watch and wager, in an abandoned chapel. He wins, of course. Then a magistrate and 50 Bow Street Runners, come to arrest the hero for murder, are faced down, while Prinnie and his entourage escort him out with a colossal bluff. A lot of good and bad things have been written about George IV, but I doubt if he ever had a finer moment than this fictional one. This is swash at its most buckling.

Click skull for a short write-up on locked-room and other impossible-crime subjects.

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