The Arabian Nights Murder (1936)
Blurb:
My review:
This 1936 novel is perhaps Carr’s finest technical achievement, combining as it does complexity, story-telling, humour, atmosphere, and characterisation—without any obnoxious childish heroes or hyperactive interruptions. The plot of the book is fantastic, bizarre and humorous, with “an unpleasantly queer look as well as a comic look”—it is set in a Museum of Oriental Art, where things are very clearly not as they seem: like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the established order of nature has been overturned for one night, as the Museum has been seized by a group of young lovers anxious (like Oberon) to play a vengeful practical joke on one of their crowd, a joke which goes very badly wrong, with repercussions both comic and disturbing, as an actor—with whom the principal lady has had an affair in the past—echoes of Titania and Bottom, perhaps?—is murdered, his body found in a coach, his chin crested with false whiskers, a cookery book in his hand, and a khanjar in his chest. This sense of the world being turned upside down—of “a world where all commonplace things had gone just a little crazy”—is strengthened by the fact that all the suspects are disguised—playing parts outside of themselves, and so are acting out unnatural lives—while much comedy arises from mistaken identity, as in the wonderful scene where the absent-minded Scottish clergyman Dr. Illingworth confronts Jerry Wade, whom he believes to be the criminal mastermind ‘Dr. Clark Gable’—Carr taking advantage of the humour of the scene to slip in some splendid clues; and the nature of the clues—far from being the typical clues of blood-stained boots and bottles of poison, the clues include false moustaches and lumps of coal thrown at the wall, and footprints in coal—used in a thoroughly original and uninhibited fashion here—‘When the whole case is crazy, the evidence is bound to be crazy too.’ The multiple voices of the story—the “polished irony” of Detective Inspector Carruthers, the “garrulous ease” of Assistant Commissioner Sir Herbert Armstrong, the “lurid and polysyllabic vividness” of Dr. Illingworth, and the “clear, straightforward, logical narrative” of Superintendent Hadley—are very effective, Carruthers setting up the fantastic nature of the problem, Armstrong and Illingworth explaining to some degree Carruthers’ mysteries but discovering new ones, and Hadley solving the mystery with a (false) solution that is a brilliant and oh-so-convincing display of compelling logic, before Dr. Fell—who, as in The Blind Barber, takes a purely armchair detective rôle, appearing only in the prologue and epilogue, serving as a deus ex machina, rather than being directly involved in the whole crazy proceedings—solves the mystery with one of his best solutions..