Scandal at High Chimneys (1959)
Blurb:
My review:
This "Victorian melodrama", with its hero locked in the room with the victim, and the changeling children, is strongly reminiscent of Carr's earlier The Judas Window, and of Christie's Mrs. McGinty's Dead—from which the ending is cribbed. The setting, a gloomy Victorian mansion, is done well enough, but despite a "ghost" on the stairs, there is very little atmosphere of any kind, despite the clichéd pathetic fallacy of the storm. The hero, Clive Strickland, a barrister turned sensational novelist, is a prize fool—he plans an elopement and finds a corpse, but refuses to tell anyone because he wants to elope; and he nearly ruins the remarkably obvious criminal's capture at the Alhambra Theatre. Tired Carr, with too many interruptions.