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- Synopsis -- GO AWAY IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK. Dan is a self-made millionaire and politician (probably anti-apartheid or at least anti-Boer, though this is never mentioned) based in South Africa and he has an entourage of English South Africans that he brings to a classy London hotel managed by a friend of his, rents a whole wing in the newly contructed top floor of the Royal Scarlet Hotel overlooking Piccadilly. Kent is a mystery novelist and good friend who has made a bet with Dan that he can fulfil the standard author blurb that he has been a bartender, lumberjack, etc. in his career and can leave Capetown without a penny and get to London, to this hotel suite, on his own by Feb 1 without any aid except his own wits. Well, he gets there a day early, but is starving by now so he tries a scam to cadge a breakfast from the hotel using a room number on a bill of prices that conveniently floated down into his hand at the beginning of a snow storm. Turns out the wife (Jenny) of his cousin (Rod) is dead, murdered, in the room, and Rod had been murdered the same way in a country house, by somebody apparently wearing the uniform of a hotel porter, a couple of weeks before while Kent was still en-route. Kent flees from the hotel at this point and ends up at Dr Fell's house. He is quickly cleared of suspicion, which is disappointing to a reader expecting one of those 'falsely-accused-got-to-get-out-of-this' plots. Then is all the police investigation, etc. in the hotel and in a Kentish village -- good stuff, but no point in my going over it because it takes up about 200 pages.
- Setting -- A first-class, but not major, hotel of the 1930's, facing Piccadilly,
well-rendered even down to the details of uniformed hall porters and what their work hours and responsibilities were (shoe-shining of footwear left in the corridor of course, but more than that). [Be warned, do not expect to be put up by your travel agent in The Royal Scarlet Hotel.] Our basically financially rich hero, acting on his drunken bet that he couldn't get from Capetown to London on his own without a penny in his pocket (shades of 'Around the World in Eighty Days', although Fogg could spend any amount he wanted), ends up a day before the bet is due stumbling into a murder mystery beyond his comprehension in the very place he is due to redeem his bet. The dead lady turns out to be his cousin's wife. Hoo! Is this going to end up as one of those stories where somebody is falsely accused of murder without knowing a damn thing about what is happening to him (as in a classic Cornell Woolrich)? No, Dr Fell and Superintendent Hadley throw out that problem and enroll the hero as the point-of-view Watson character.
[Does our hero get punished or even scolded for his activities? No, of course not. In the JDC world this sort of thing is totally acceptable as long as it isn't perpetrated by a 'low life' such as an Italian or a Cockney. Bets, duels, having affairs with young married women whose husbands are old men, are fine. Wreck a place when blotto drunk, as long as you are an English gentleman or somebody in a near category, is just good fun, otherwise any similar activity by some other character is considered hopeless drug dependency and corruption.] But the initial scenario of this novel is compelling, especially in its details; the author certainly knew this environment -- drama opens brilliantly in this vein and is prime Carr.
- Characters -- First of all, the Carr heroine ('point-of-view' person's girlfriend) is not such a 'ginch' or bimbo as in the later JDC books. She is an intelligent woman who can actually challenge with her 'modern' feminism and human rights views her mystery-writer/swashbuckler's 18th-century Tory attitudes -- there isn't the late Carr bullshit where the 50-year-old hero gooses the woman and she slaps him, calls her wench, and then gets with her because she wanted to be abused all the time.[Don't want to get into the subject of the author's personal wenching and drinking -- just realize that he did that in his own life, no matter how faithful he was in the long run to his wife.]. Carr has been criticized for making his characters puppets, which is true given the roles that have to be fitted into the plots (admit that these are fantasy novels of a sort, not character studies, read them according to the rules of the genre) -- to say he had no sense of character when it came to defining women is a denigration. There was Eve in In Spite of Thunder, the wonderful Fay in He Who Whispers, and several others. Mrs Kent, the victim, in this book, is a well-realized person, even though she never appears live and is only described by other people's reflections about her. And equally good are several other characters, Sir Gyles Gay for example. In the end, although one feels a lot of sympathy for the killer, his nasty technique condemns him to the hangman -- no Gideon Fell obfuscation to allow suicide or escape in this case. (By the way, he is partially crippled -- Carr used this ploy in at least two other books to divert suspicion.)
- Plot -- Well... One would expect, intitially, that this would be one of those Woolrichian plots where the guy is in a quagmire beyond his comprehension and has to get out of it or get arrested for murder. Not so in this case (though if it had been, it would have made for some tension in this plot, which is otherwise pretty staid). But just look at the brilliant manipulation, such as when Rayburn the secretary who is in love with Jenny Kent, pulls a nice bit of legerdemain in two minutes with the jewellery just before the cops come -- unfortunately, another throwaway thing; Carr really doesn't want you to suspect anybody in this case, so one is led by default to the only person who couldn't possibly have committed the crime (and did). The main clue is that a hotel porter's uniform resembles a police uniform, especially when a helmet is not involved.
- The Alibi -- It all falls apart here. No longer a straight narrative with mysterious elements. There is a sort of irrelevant murder that takes place before the events in this story (Mrs Kent's husband). But they had already arrested the alleged murderer out in the country village for trespassing, the town drunk, who was on the scene -- his alibi even though caught on the premises passed out on a couch, was that he was drunk and saw the 'real' murderer dressed up in a hotel porter uniform -- couldn't go from there to commit the London murder -- because he was in jail. But even here, JDC makes the town drunk more than a stereotype, and actually comes up with a very convincing motivation for the crime -- in fact he distracts so well that most people will never spot it. A locked motive rather than a locked room! One additional problem, and a howler, is that there is a secret door in the cells of the village police station, hence the murderer could sneak out at night (knowing about this because his father had built the place and most of the other houses in town, and had a predeliction for this sort of foolery). Come now, this is silly.
I wish I liked this book more, since it has so many good elements. Unfortunately, it is not one of my favorites by this author. Can one just come out and say that the middle bits are just boring and go on too long?
Minor quibble: My Collier Book edition (1965/76), while having an evocative cover, gives away the solution right there in the illustration. The maniac looks like he's a cop, but such a uniform would pass for a hotel one. Also you can see his paralyzed left arm (which explains his peculiar strangling methodology).
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