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The Bowstring Murders (1933) is one of John Dickson Carr's earliest books, the first he put out under the nom-de-plume Carter Dickson (actually in this one case, Carr Dickson) -- he had gotten married and had debts, so he needed money, and with his contract with another publisher who couldn't handle any more books this year from him he had to negotiate with another. Under his old contract he couldn't use the same name, so he did a simple switch. Unfortunately, this is a careless and sloppy piece of hack work, probably an expansion of a story he had written when he was in college, and he had yet to 'invent' Sir Henry Merrivale. It is full of inconsistencies, as well as stereotyped characters, but worst of all is the lack of a 'plan of the murder site', something that used to be fairly common in detective stories but is very rare now. This is a well-considered attempt to remedy that, and it involved careful parsing of the book to find relevant data.
The way the arrangement of this great castle is described in the narration, interspersed randomly with the events of the plot, leads to a lot of confusion about where people are and where things happened. Not to give away too much of the plot, which is basically an expanded short story, it should be pointed out that one Lord Rayle and his housemaid were murdered, in different places and times, on the same day, both apparently by means of medieval equipment such as a crossbow string and metal gauntlets (there is of course a hint of a ghost walking the halls dressed in a suit of armor, but Carr does not make as much of this as he did in similar books). The detective, John Gaunt, a brilliant pathologist who lost his consulting job with Scotland Yard partly because he doesn't approve of modern science (why the hell not?) and partly because of his drinking and erratic behavior, is somewhat of a drunken sad-sack. Carr never reused this character, which is probably just as well, though he could have if he had had him in his better-devised plots. The biggest lack in this novel is that there is no really coherent description of the castle, leaving the reader in a state of confusion and disillusionment. This drawing might make it easier. If you want to read the book, please download this picture, or the 'grayscale' version at The JDC Internet Society, print it, then use it as a reference. |
| Some notes: (1) This picture was drawn freehand using Microsoft Paint, no CAD software that would have provided proper scaling to match the book, where the Great Hall is described as being 100 feet square and the Armory 90 feet long (for example, the inner courtyard and the bedrooms should be much bigger on this plan, but they just wouldn't fit that way -- apparently Carr did not have anything but a rudimentary sketch when he was writing the book; (2) much is conjectural, since it wasn't spelled out in the book -- such as the appearance of the Donjon/Keep, the size and nature of the back-stairs rooms of the building, the outer ward, containing stable and servants' quarters -- this is all guess-work, although any castle would have had such facilities; (3) the author's description seems to be based on a combination of Caister Castle and Oxburgh Hall, both in Norfolk, which he had probably visited; (4) that business about the waterfall filling the moat is extremely kleugy and is rather irrelevant except to explain why nobody heard any screams and other noises save when the author found it convenient to stress what was heard; (5) there are parts of the description that are illogical, even considering the vagaries of medieval architects (e.g., no bathrooms, no staircases save the one in the Great Hall, the 'dummy windows' in the bedrooms overlooking the Armory) -- this can be distracting to the point of irritation to a finicky reader like myself. Also, it makes no sense that the lord and mistress of the house didn't have large suites over the library and drawing room instead of inhabiting those small, cold, dark rooms facing the inner courtyard -- and where did all the guests stay? (probably in those rooms I suggested)
Is this a good book? In comparison with lots of the junk being published at the same time, it isn't half bad and is still worth reading. On the other hand, for Carr aficionados it is lousy compared with his masterpieces. The biggest fault is the slapdash way it was written, and even when he produced dreck, Carr had a character flaw in that he refused to let anybody edit his books, even when some simple changes would have made things better. It comes down often to a simple thing like his insisting on spelling the word wobble as wabble. |
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