| The White Priory Murders | [] | (1934) |
| Author: Dickson | Detective: Merrivale | Type: CD |
Publisher's Blurb
|
Comment 1 (Grobius)
Country-house murder; lack of expected footprints in the snow; better than average Dickson. Wodehousian country weekend, with everybody running around at all hours of the night; pretty incoherent, but good dialogue and interesting characters. HM in good form. Explanation of the 'locked room' is very convincing, although requiring a lot of luck on the part of one of the villains (yes, nearly everybody was up to something even if not collaborating). The solution is so effective Carr used variations on it for several of his books. Probably one of the most realistic-to-life explanations of such a thing, even if it never happens -- but then who would have believed the OJ Simpson thing? Oddly enough, this methodology is not really covered fully in Dr Fell's famous Locked Room Lecture.
|
Comment 2 (the_thin_man)
Have to disagree with the administrator on this one. It has one of the least charismatic murderers of the lot, and there's not even a hint of his character or motive before the final revelation. For "Incoherent" above, read "Stupid", and although the explanation of the footprints occurred to me at the start of the book, I dismissed it because ANY INVESTIGATION WHATSOEVER would pretty much discover the trick in about five minutes flat - to say more would be a spoiler but let's just say it was pretty implausible. There's a large number of practically indistinguishable male suspects but everybody keeps suspecting one of the only two surviving females in the novel for absolutely no good reason. In the end I guessed the murderer because he was practically the only person who HADN'T come under suspicion - again, this is a cliche that Carr could usually ride above. Not here. (I defy anybody to spot the clues, though, which are of the type of "one hidden on page twenty in the middle of a bogged-paragraph combines with another hidden on page two hundred and eight in a bit of ordinary dialogue" sort. This by Carr's own standards is NOT PLAYING FAIR.) Practically everything in this novel has been done better by Carr elsewhere.
On multiple plots: one of the most annoying things, and one of the few flaws, about Christie's masterpiece "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", is the fact that EVERYBODY has something to hide. Why? It's ridiculous that everything converges in one house on one night! If you have to resort to limitless false trails in order to cover up your killer then it's a sign of weak plotting. Compare this to, for example, "Death in the Clouds", in which only two of the characters could be said to have a really guilty secret, one of them being the murderer. Carr could usually pull this kind of thing off. He flops abysmally here.
To carry on with the spoiler bit (so don't read on if you want to read this book and haven't done so yet):
1) Is it fair that Carr SPECIFICALLY TELLS US, several times, that the footprints have been minutely examined by the police, and then reveals at the end that there's been a trick with them after all...
And:
2) That the police couldn't spot that those same footprints were made by somebody who effectively was twice as heavy as normal, just because they weren't in deep snow? Footprints don't appear evenly - they change according to which part of the foot is placed on the ground first, and in the case of a man carrying a very heavy weight would look completely different. |
Comment 3 ()
|
Comment 4 (hacklehorn)
Vintage Carr, suffering from a weak ending. All the right ingredients are there: snow-bound country house, a vivid atmosphere, memorable and seemingly insoluble impossible crime (Carr's first no footprints), interesting grotesques, and convincing Christianna Brandish multiple solutions (Carr demonstrates his ability for making the reader think what he wants him to think). The murderer's identity is, however, a disappointment, for the reader has not been psychologically prepared; and the plot is over-complex. The impossible crime, though, is brilliant. |
| URL: | URL: | Rating: 8 |