My Late Wives by John Dickson Carr

The Grand master of mystery returns! JDC is back with another mystery involving the 'old man', perhaps one of the greatest detectives in detective fiction, Sir Henry Merrivale(HM). My Late wives is not a locked room mystery nor an impossible crime novel, but it is an excellent murder mystery. Very different from the standard Christie fare.

My Late wives offers a serial killer as the pivot to the engrossing story. Roger Bewlay is a serial murderer, he preys on young lonely woman and when he has taken what he needs, he kills them. Roger has been elusive and enigmatic to the police.  They don't even have an accurate description of the charlatan. Chief Inspector Masters(Watson to HM) has been trying to hunt down Roger for years without any success.

Enter Bruce, a well known actor who receives a script on the life of Roger Bewlay. The content of the script are suspiciously detailed. This makes Bruce and his coterie of friends to think about a most dangerous plan i.e. to act out the script in real life and see how the unwitting participants react. This decision sets off chain of events which leads to murder, mystery and the eventual discovery of Roger Bewlay.

Nine and Death makes Ten aka Murder in the Submarine Zone by Carter Dickson

When I first started reading mysteries, I was greatly influenced by "And then there were none" by Agatha Christie and so I started looking for books similar to it. My arduous search efforts led me to "Nine and Death makes Ten" and corollary the discovery of John Dickson Carr, but alas the book was out of print and me being a novice classic mystery hunter had no idea on how to get my covetous hands on it. So I searched some more titles from the then obscure author, and ordered The Judas Window from an online bookstore.

I kept reading others books and simultaneously kept looking for that elusive book with the cover of a black ship in the front and that green skull in the background. Finally after much efforts and properly utilizing a lot of money and time I have got hold of the 1940 Classic.

Plot:

Abroad an ocean liner called the Edwardic, are nine passengers who are travelling at the beginning of the second world war from New York to England. The ship has to go through the submarine zone where a Nazi torpedo could sink them to the bottom of the sea. The Edwardic's nine passengers who are risking their lives for this travel are faced with the additional problem of Murder!

One of the passengers among the nine is found murdered, throat slit and blood splattered in the cabin, but the   murderer has committed a grave mistake and left his/her fingerprints at the scene of the crime. The ship's Captain orders that everyone's fingerprints be taken and then matched with the murderer's to determine the perpetrator of this ghastly crime, next comes the impossible mystery which is that the murderer's fingerprints do not match with anyone on board the Edwardic, neither the passengers nor anyone from the ship's crew. The Ship's Captain orders the old man to take over the investigation but this time HM is up against a willy opponent who might just make it his last case.

The White Priory Murders by Carter Dickson

Plot:Sir Henry Merrivale’s favorite sex siren, Marcia Tait has been murdered. She is found bludgeoned to death in a room called the Queen’s mirror, which was the 17th Century trysting place for King Charles II. Queen’s mirror is surrounded by a frozen lake if anyone steps on it then the ice would crack and that person would die a freezing death. Entry and exit to the room is restricted by only a pavilion, which is covered by snow.

Now, what is baffling the police is that there is only one set of footprints which leads towards the room. So, how did the murderer managed to escape without leaving another set of footprints?

And like in all murder mysteries there is another murder and that too of the most likely suspect.

HM and the newly promoted Chief Inspector Master’s investigate the White Priory Murders.

The Plague Court murders by Carter Dickson

Ken Blake the faithful assistant of HM(Henry Merrivale) is bored to death sitting in a bar drinking, Ken is approached by Halliday an old friend who asks Ken to spend a night with him in a haunted house. Ken readily takes up the challenge. On a rainy, dark and mysterious night Blake and Halliday reach a house like no other, the house is known to be haunted by no other then Louis Plague a malevolent soul always watchful, always cunning and always waiting to posses a living body and to exchange that body's weak brain with its own just had it done since it's first appearance in 1665.

The family of Halliday hires a Psychic Roger Darworth to exorcise the Plague court ghost, the exorcist was not an ordinary one. He was a first rate fraud and under police surveillance for months. Darworth wanting to Impress his Acolytes by exorcising the ghost of Plague court, locks himself in a small stone house which has solid stone walls on four sides, a wooden door locked from both inside and outside, its windows barred and with no secret weapon is found brutally murdered. And the murder weapon? no ordinary one. It was the ancient knife which was the property of the Plague Court ghost.

Review:

The Plague Court murders starts of as a haunted house story which gives you the chills on every page and then very soon it becomes a Locked room murder mystery. This was Carr's genre and he was the master at it. In many Carr books you will find the element of Supernatural. Carr will put forward an impossible crime and then have you believe that there could be no other explanation for it other then the supernatural and then HM or Dr. Gideon Fell would prove otherwise. This is the debut of the "Old Man" i.e. Henry Merrivale. This is a good debut not HM's best but still good enough. The locked room itself is pretty solid but how it was cracked was not very satisfactory also it won't be easy to guess the identity of the murderer because of a twist in the end which I was not content with. In conclusion this is a nice read with an impenetrable locked room murder, a ghost story and HM making his debut.

Ratings: 3 out of 5

Where can you get this: Unfortunately this is not easy to get as this book is out of print, I found a second hand book on Infibeam in a good condition worth Rs 580.

And So To Murder by Carter Dickson

And so to murder by John Dickson Carr was written in 1940 at the early stages of the second world war, this is NOT a locked room mystery and like many Carr books this also has a lot of Anti-Nazi themes (which is not surprising since Carr was a part of the English Governments propaganda for the Allies i.e. US, UK, France and the rest of the West), but the underlying theme of this book is not War but Movies and the Film Industry in merry old England, Carr takes us through movie sets and characters typical to the Film Industry.



Plot:

Monica Stanton, the pretty and rather naive daughter of a British clergyman, is the author of a surprisingly scandalous best-seller. As a result, she's been hired as a script writer for Albion Films, working with William Cartwright, a script writer from the world of detective novels.

However, she's not going to be working on her own novel—she's helping Cartwright adapt his latest detective novel, “And So To Murder”. Tilly Parson is a dumpy, bustling chain-smoking American woman in her early fifties who is the highest-paid scenario writer in the world, imported from Hollywood at great expense to adapt Monica's novel.

Glamorous movie star Frances Fleur, whose punctilious husband Kurt selects all her parts, will be the star. Against the backdrop of Pineham Studios and Fleur's current movie, a series of mysterious attempts on Monica's life begin—they are exceptionally nasty and completely inexplicable, involving sulfuric acid.

When someone poisons Tilly Parsons' cigarette and nearly kills her, Sir Henry Merrivale helps Chief Inspector Masters to bring home the crimes to their unlikely perpetrator.

Review:

To begin with I have a complaint with Carr, I think Carr broke a rule of the Fair play detection which is rule number 8 "The Detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover", I think Carr cheated on this one by giving the murderer a very strong alibi and then falsifying the alibi, I can't reveal the exact details cause this is a spoiler free blog, besides that I thought the writing was poor and since there was no murder committed it can't be termed as a murder mystery and with all the talk about movies, Nazis and poisons this seems more like a James Bond novel then a John Dickson Carr, Carr should stick to Locked room mysteries, this is Carr at his weakest only good thing is the humor in the book especially between the idiotic Director and his Assistant.

Ratings: 2 out of 5

Where can you buy it: it's in print and you can get it from any online book selling website like Flipkart or Infibeam.

She Died a Lady by Carter Dickson

Carter Dickson is the Pseudonym of John Dickson Carr, Carr wrote this in 1943 at the height of the second world war and the overtones of the second world war cannot be missed in the book. There are constant references to the fuhrer of Germany in the story and the impending doom of the arrival of the Nazis on sleepy English villages acts as a tension builder in the novel.

Plot:

Rita Wainwright is having an affair with a man fifteen years younger then her, she and her lover decide to commit suicide by throwing themselves over the edge of a cliff but when there dead bodies are found it is concluded that they have been shot at close range through the heart, there are only two set of footprints on the spot of the alleged suicide and no way of anyone climbing behind them from a 70 foot cliff, did they commit suicide? or were they murdered by someone who floats in the air?

Henry Merrivale is at hand to Investigate.

Review:

Another baffling mystery by Carr, this one has loads of humor as HM is confined to a motorized wheel chair after hurting his big toe and has many jocular incidents where he is cursing and bumbling in his invalid state. The mystery is intriguing and very well written, certainly one of Carr's most loved works and less gimmicky.

The solution in the end is satisfactory and well explained, also guessing the murderer is not easy, if someone has read "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" by Agatha Christie then the identity of the murderer might come to them like it did to me(this is not a spoiler). You have to be vary careful with Carr he leaves clues in the story line and he leaves them in a such way that you are sure to miss them and then it turns out that those clues lead to the murderer, it will be a very careful reader who will guess Whodunit

Ratings:

Where can you buy it - This is in print and you can get it for Rs 550 from flipkart or infibeam