SCATHING ATTACK ON CELEBRATED MYSTERY WRITER

What I am going to say now may shock some people (in which case I apologise). John Dickson Carr is not one of the top five writers of detective stories. Gladys Mitchell, G.K. Chesterton, H.C. Bailey, Agatha Christie, and Nicholas Blake all come before him. I enjoy John Dickson Carr's books, and think that he is one of the best devisers of plots. But he is not one of the top five writers of detective stories.

Why? Simple. Carr was not a very good story-teller, and his grasp of characterisation is weak. He often has the reader turning the pages at a very rapid rate (but most of these pages are taken up with interruption after interruption, and hysterical outburst after hysterical outburst), and his atmosphere is often very good (where it doesn't degenerate into dark and gloomy nightmarish prose of death from the ghostly side of the shattered veil of fear—c.f. the Bencolin stories in particular), but, at the same time, one gets the impression that he is concerned with nothing more than the puzzle—he does not interest himself in characters, he does not interest himself in the possible themes of setting, situation, and solution. For him, the story always takes back place to the plot, and this by a very long way. The four authors I mentioned above used the form as a spring-board for ideas. St. Peter’s Finger looks at the importance of religion in life, at repentance and obsession, and at good coming through evil and evil coming through the desire to do good. The Father Brown stories are parables Black Land, White Land examines man's relationship with his land. Nicholas Blake deals with real people, and with human tragedies. Even Agatha Christie is interested in the existence of evil in the world.

What does Carr do in his books? Solves a puzzle. Certainly, his solutions are often very clever, but, after 1939, he goes rapidly downhill—very, very quickly. One sees the same character as the murderer over and over again. One sees the same lovers with their "comical" misunderstandings realising that they are in love. And, even in those books from the 1930s, he neglects character. He can produce interesting gargoyles—Lady Benning, Roger Darworth, Lady Mantling, Pennik—but quite often these characters are too gargoylesque to be interesting: M. Bencolin and Sir Henry Merrivale come to mind. What are his clues based on? Not dialogue or actions which, when interpreted the right way, mean something entirely different, but technical clues: little-known facts about clocks, cars, or pathology. Not character-based clues. And this is, truth to tell, rather dull—something I found with The Problem of the Green Capsule, at the same time as I found the solution highly ingenious. The human interest is lacking. Only in a handful of books does he really succeed in successfully mingling the story with the plot: Hag’s Nook, The Mad Hatter Mystery (perhaps his best book), The Plague Court Murders, The Arabian Nights Murder, The Burning Court, The Crooked Hinge, and The Reader is Warned. The rest are too technical, with their cardboard cut-outs running around hysterically. Just as someone is about to say something important they...

Outside it had grown dark. The trees, bare and outstretched like the horrible claws of decaying and leprous witches rotting in eternal hellfire, scraped against the window-panes. Sir Leopold turned to us.

‘Throughout this case, my friend, I have had inklings of the truth—only inklings, but inklings nonetheless. And now, it is clear my friend, that the…’

I do not know for how long I had had the impression that somebody had been listening at the door, but at that moment the door was flung open, with a resounding crash, and Marguerite, Baroness Death, swept into the room, a carved Assyrian dagger in her begloved hand.

‘Sir Leopold! I have news of the utmost importance to tell you! Outside in the garden, while investigating the explosively pneumatic potentials of bird-baths, I saw…’

She got no further in her statement however, for at that moment, the window-pane smashed, and, through the gaping hole, Cyril Knode crawled, his head covered with blood.

‘My God, Sir Leopold! The most dreadful thing has happened. Do you remember how Mrs. Smith told us that “in the kitchen, there was…” before she was interrupted by the dog scratching at the pantry door to be fed? I now know what it was that she was going to tell us! I was in a certain room, the identity of which I will later disclose, when I was…’

It was at that moment that a hideous scream echoed through the house. The party turned and looked at one another. What dreadful calamity had befallen this poor group of benighted guests now? What, indeed? As one, the party turned and dispersed throughout the house.

We never saw any of them again.

And another thing that really irks me: Carr's humour. The Blind Barber can be funny in patches, but his funniest books are The Mad Hatter Mystery and The Arabian Nights Murder, where the humour is kept under control—the humour does not come from people rolling around in the mud or stepping on bananas, but instead from false beards and horses in barristers’ wigs—to borrow a phrase from The Reader is Warned, “the comedy of meaningless clues”. But, on the flip side of the coin, Sir Henry Merrivale. Is it possible that a man presented as so childish and tantrummy could solve a crime? His constant clownish antics detract considerably from the belief that he can solve crimes. One can accept that Mrs. Bradley, despite her considerable array of eccentricities (cackling, leering, dropping from windows), is a genius, because her dialogue is always witty, stylish, and highly insightful, be it on any subject from receiving mail at the breakfast-table to capital punishment and the fate of lunatics. Sir Henry Merrivale is nearly as bad as Joyce Porter's Dover. He is certainly less interesting than Dr. Gideon Fell, whose last appearance ought to have been in The Sleeping Sphinx—a very good Carr novel, one that avoids the faults of his books of the 1940s. The Dr. Fell that appears in Below Suspicion and The Dead Man’s Knock is a nuisance—an elephantine figure who goes ‘Harrumph, sir!’ at every possible opportunity, and declaims at the drop of a shovel-hat.

To end on a more positive note. What really strikes me is that Carr’s best work is not in novels, but in short stories. “Terror’s Dark Tower” has one of Carr's best plots--and one of his best stories. “The Wrong Problem” is a wonderful tale—perhaps Carr’s best piece of story-telling ever—the grasp of landscape, of character, even of psychology… The sense of golden light suffusing the landscape, while, in an ornamental pond, a swan floats with a cut throat… Distinctly memorable imagery. Perhaps it is only that Carr’s faults are less evident in the short form, but the short stories are more satisfying.

Yes, Carr can often be very good, but he comes a long way down on my list of good writers of detective stories, if that.