The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941)
Blurb:
My review:
One of the shortest books Carr wrote (166 pages in my edition), and so more a long novella than a novel, but undoubtedly first-class Carr. The setting is the Western Highlands, inevitably challenging comparison with Gladys Mitchell's romantic Scotland in Hangman's Curfew (1941) and My Father Sleeps (1944), although Carr emphasises the comic side of Scotland, with drinking bouts and Scottish jokes. Despite the comedy and drinking, the deaths, suicides which Dr. Fell believes to be ingenious murders due to the presence of the dog-carrier under the bed, the quarrel with a neighbour and a missing diary, are seriously and soberly handled. The solution, which relies on a clever application of chemistry, is ingenious, and the way in which a small detail causes a best-laid plan to gang agley is equally so; the second death is more mechanical, and so less interesting.