He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944)
Blurb:
My review:
The opening of this 1944 tale introduces the reader to one of Carr’s patented lovers, guaranteed to nauseate the reader, for this pretty pair, both professional magicians, vacillate between quarrelling and canoodling, and the hero is a bone-headed lout who demonstrates his masculinity by throwing people through glass cases, breaking doors down or canoodling in the vicinity of a corpse, that of the Zoo director, an apparent suicide in a locked room sealed up with paper. The alert reader will spot the significance of the hall closet early on, and will not be convinced by H.M.’s statement that a twin-engined bomber sounds like a vacuum cleaner. Unlike many earlier Carrs, the author does not have the energy or ingenuity to suggest false solutions to the puzzle, so the reader’s guess is likely to be the correct one. An application of noughts and crosses will eliminate all suspects bar, two, so the villain is obvious; again there are no double-edged clues so the effect is one of laziness; the unlucky murderer had a lot of luck not to have been caught committing the crime. An absence of sub-plots and of red herrings only confirm the reader’s belief that this tale is little more than an expanded short story.