Deadly Hall (1971)
1971 Harper & Row blurb:
It was April 1927, and novelist Jeff Caldwell, New Orleans born and bred but educated in the North, was coming back home. Jeff was a wealthy man (his grandfather had founded the Dixieland Tobacco Company), and just then he was a curious man, travelling back to the city of his birth in response to an unexpected and half-frantic letter from a boyhood friend, Dave Hobart.
Dave’s grandfather, Commodore Fitzhugh Hobart, had also been rich enough to satisfy his whims, and one of them had been to move an immense 1560 manor house from England to New Orleans.
He had willed the remarkable Tudor building to his grandchildren, David and Serena. But there was a number of stipulations in the will, which, together with the possibility of hidden treasure, made for a great deal of trouble. Was Delys Hall haunted? Certainly it wouldn’t have been nicknamed Deadly Hall unless some pretty awful things had taken place in its great stone hallways. What was the real mystery of the place? Who walked it in the dark of the night? Jeff quickly found himself embroiled in old legends and new terrors, in local politics—in love—and, eventually, in a very murderous atmosphere.
JOHN DICKSON CARR has caught the miasma of New Orleans, which intermingled so terrifyingly with the old Tudor stones—and his expert re-creation of a time and a place plus his skilled twists of the wrist and his ability to produce a puzzle that seems almost impossible to solve make for most entertaining reading and fine suspense.
My review:
Carr's penultimate novel is an improvement on its immediate predecessors, but suffers from stylistic problems: the dialogue is a "verbose tirade, which would be a bore and a nuisance if it weren't so completely ludicrous," an impression by no means denied by the nasty habit of conversational description; there is an excess of "mysterious allusions [and] sentences not one of 'em will explain," complicated by "a trick of turning every straight question crooked [so that] it's like lunging at a fencer"; the narrative flow is routinely broken a—what's that? The characters are afflicted with annoyingly facetious nicknames. This is frustrating, for the plot—buried treasure in a country house exported from Lincolnshire, a sinister staircase, and a will productive of several (attempted) murders—is solid enough, despite the unconvincing flowerpot business and the attack on Dave Hobart; and the gimmick, borrowed (with a central clue) from The Man Who Could Not Shudder, is ingenious and practical.