Classic Mysteries

"The Case of the Haven Hotel"

Ludovic Travers and his good friend and frequent colleague, Scotland Yard Superintendent George Wharton both needed a rest, a break in the routine. A lovely stay at a seaside resort certainly seemed to be in order. Ludo would go down first to the town of Sandbeach, where rooms had already been reserved at the Haven Hotel; George, trying to clear up a major case involving black marketing, would follow several days later. So Ludovic Travers arrived at the Haven Hotel. And that's when unexpected things began to happen - at the hotel, for example, which didn't seem to be feeling the pinch of rationing as the vast majority of English people did. And it should be noted that the increasingly suspicious problems at the Haven were only the prelude to a number of murders. It happens in The Case of the Haven Hotel, by Golden Age author Christopher Bush. It is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here. The book, originally published in 1948, is being reissued by Dean Street Press, and the publisher provided me with an e-book copy for this review.

When Ludovic Travers arrives at the Haven Hotel, he begins, naturally enough, to talk with the hotel's guests and staff. And he – and we – begin to sense some undercurrents in the relationships among some of those people. Everyday life was something of a struggle in the Britain of the late 1940s. You needed an identity card and a rations book which was used to buy perennially scarce items – everything from a woman’s scarce nylon stockings to sugar, butter and other foodstuffs. So why were so many of these rationed items available for the enjoyment of the guests at the Haven Hotel? Rather clearly that black marketing case George had been working on must be tied in somehow, right? But why did so many of the people at the hotel seem vaguely familiar to both George and Ludo? Why did some of the residents and staff tell obviously false stories about themselves and their identities? There were plenty of questions, all right – and, very soon, there would be murder – plural, actually, murders and attempted murders. And Ludo and George Wharton – who, after all, had no official standing in this investigation - would find themselves helping the local police figure out what was happening – and, most importantly, why these murders were happening.

It’s a very good story indeed. Christopher Bush was roundly praised during his lifetime for his plotting abilities. The characters of the staff and guests at the Haven Hotel are well-drawn, and the author drops in more than a few surprises along the way. This new edition from Dean Street Press is enhanced with an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans, who offers considerable insight into the world of Christopher Bush. Evans calls The Case of the Haven Hotel, "one of Bush’s most beguiling tales, despite the presence of much genteel mayhem, including two murders and two attempted murders along with assorted cases of malfeasance and misalliance.”

You’ll enjoy it.

From the Vault: "A Night of Errors"

Michael Innes has long been among my favorite authors. But then, I do enjoy mysteries with a definite quirk in them, obviously requiring from both author and reader a certain willingness to allow the plot to make rather surrealistic side terms. Surely, A Night of Errors is among his quirkiest. First published in 1948, it stars John Appleby, newly retired from his job as a Scotland Yard inspector (and before his later promotion to Commissioner - well, I said "surrealistic," didn't I?), and may require a passing familiarity with Shakespeare's early comedy, A Comedy of Errors, and a suspension of disbelief that surpasses what, in another author, would be simply unacceptable. But this is Michael Innes, tongue firmly planted in cheek, enjoying himself - and taking us along for the ride. Here's the text of my original review on the Classic Mysteries podcast several years ago - slightly tweaked, as always:

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“My experience in crime is considerable. But never have I faced so complicated a case, or one so bewilderingly huddled up both in space and time.”

The speaker is Sir John Appleby, who is speaking out of considerable frustration, as he tries to make sense out of a hopelessly muddled case involving a couple of murders and some old – and rather confused – families. It all adds up to A Night of Errors, the title of the book by Michael Innes.

Let me start by saying that A Night of Errors owes quite a lot – deliberately – to one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, A Comedy of Errors. And let me say that the parallels between this book and Shakespeare’s plays may provide an extra level of enjoyment for some readers. But you don’t have to be a Shakespearean scholar to savor the very odd events in our mystery – and I intend to focus on the book as a modern mystery, rather than on its Shakespearean roots.

So A Night of Errors begins with the Dromio family – and the murder of what appears to be the last surviving son of that family, who is found dead in the family home, having been bashed on the head – and the body dragged into a fireplace and set ablaze.

Gruesome? To be sure – but that is only the beginning of the complications of this plot. For the dead man was one of identical triplets – and the only survivor, as a baby forty years earlier, of a fire that apparently killed his brothers and may have been set by his father, who later died insane.

With me so far? Good, it’s going to get a lot more complicated.

At this point, with the newly-discovered body in place, the local police inspector, named Hyland, calls on his neighbor, John Appleby, to join the investigation. Appleby, recently having taken early retirement from Scotland Yard, is intrigued by the details of the crime. And as he and Inspector Hyland begin their investigation, the events continue to pile melodrama upon melodrama. The Dromio brothers – who may have survived that fire forty years earlier – get involved. So does another neighboring family, where the relationships turn out to be equally complicated. There are more than enough suspects – and a host of compelling motives.

And through it all, there is fire – the nursery fire forty years earlier, the fire in which the latest victim was found, and a later massive fire in the house, and more. And the cast is made up of wonderful and memorable characters. Surely one of the best of those is the Dromio family butler, an inarticulate, elderly man named Swindle who lords it over the family and the staff – and whose ultimate fate in the book is one of Michael Innes’s finest pieces of surrealism.

There is much that defies realism and logic here, although Appleby does eventually manage to explain and reveal the very complicated plot. For there is a rational explanation for all the odd events – and it is worth noting that all the events in the book take place within less than 24-hours, making all the mistaken identities and confusion and fires part of a brilliant, sometimes quite funny, occasionally horrifying and nearly successful criminal plot. It would, in fact, quite probably have succeeded except for Appleby.

I think it is only fair to warn the reader that the book, with its literary and cultural references (and parallels to Shakespeare’s play) can be more than a little confusing. If you have never read a Michael Innes novel, and enjoyed its quirky humor, this is probably not the place to begin. But if you are familiar with some of Michael Innes’s Appleby books, with classics such as Hamlet, Revenge, or Lament for a Maker or Appleby’s End, you will most probably take the eccentricities, the surreal events, and the sheer good humor of A Night of Errors in stride.

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I should note that A Night of Errors is available in several formats, including paper, ebook and audio mp3, all at the above link.

 

You can listen to the complete version of the original audio review by clicking here.

Next: Charlie Chan Carries On, by Earl Derr Biggers

"Pass the Body" (or "Crime in Kensington")

Like so many other residential hotels in Kensington, the Garden Hotel was an uninspiring arrangement of stucco, tiled doorsteps, aspidistras, revolving doors, verandahs and hall porter.

"It looks neither odd nor comfortable," reflected  Venables, negotiating the steps, the hall porter, the doors and the aspidistra...

Well, Charles Venables is likely to be proven only half correct in his initial assessment of the Garden Hotel. He is correct in assuming that the hotel is unlikely to prove very comfortable. But it most certainly is odd, at the very least, as are many of the rather eccentric residents. And the occurrences of a disappearance from and a murder within a locked room in the hotel surely must be considered as odd. Also, as Charles has discovered, the price paid by its guests was distinctly too low. The details will be found in an English Golden Age mystery that appears to be available, at the moment, under two different titles: as a paperback book, it is called Pass the Body, which was its American title, while as an e-book it is known by the title, Crime in Kensington, by which it was originally published in the U.K. in 1933. It was the first mystery to be written by Christopher St. John Sprigg (who wrote as "Christopher Caudwell"). It is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you may listen to the complete review by clicking here.

Charles Venables, now earning a (somewhat) precarious living as a gossip columnist for the Daily Mercury, finds himself on the scene for the very unfortunate goings-on at the Garden Hotel. His friend, Lady Viola Merritt, daughter of the Earl of Buxley, was already a resident of the Garden Hotel and had suggested that Charles move in to the hotel, because of the low price and the surprisingly high quality of the amenities. Even on the day of his arrival, Charles found the hotel a bit unusual, to say the least. As he reflected:

"This is really too awful...When one hears a bloke threaten to kill his wife and then immediately afterwards meets a sinister and mysterious Oriental, it is time to move somewhere else, for one has obviously walked into the plot of a thriller of the vulgarest and most exciting description."

And that night, Mrs. Budge, who owns the Garden Hotel along with her husband, disappears from her bedroom (and another older resident is attacked in that same room as well) – and yet nobody could have entered or left the room unobserved. It won’t be long before a particularly gruesome discovery brings Scotland Yard – in the person of Detective Inspector Bernard Bray – into the case. Inspector Bray will find an ally in Charles Venables – who has some useful skills in his own background that will be helpful to both of them in solving a shocking murder case – and, with it, uncovering the secrets of the Garden Hotel.

In his brief lifetime, Christopher St. John Sprigg wrote only seven mystery novels – before he went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he died in battle. Pass the Body was the first of his crime books, and it reinforces my enjoyment of, and respect for, Sprigg’s plotting skill and extremely witty writing. It is available as a paperback under the title Pass the Body or as an e-book entitled Crime in Kensington. If you enjoy impossible crimes, interesting characters, and clever writing, you will enjoy this book.

From the Vault: "Death in the Fifth Position"

Every once in a while, I love to -figuratively, at least - tweak the noses of those fine "lit-ra-choor" academics who hold that mysteries and crime fiction can never really be serious literature. I do so by nodding sagely, sighing deeply, and then saying "Yes, to be sure, but what about some of the literary greats who have contributed a few novels to the "academic" side of the equation? People like, say, Charles Dickens? Jules Verne? Arthur Conan Doyle? Edgar Box? Fyodor...whoa, wait a minute! Edgar WHO?

Edgar Box.

You don't know Edgar Box?

You probably know him better under his real name: The late Gore Vidal. Vidal wrote a series of three mystery novels, under the pen name of "Edgar Box," which - while one (such as Vidal himself) may disagree with attempts to characterize them as "serious literature" - quite indisputably are crime novels. Of course he wrote them at the beginning of his literary career, and, from time to time, they do pop up in publishers' lists. And, as Vidal himself was a first-rate "nose-tweaker" of considerable dexterity, I thought we might profitably resurrect one of these novels this week and point out how that distinguished creator of "distinguished" literature managed to have a good deal of fun with those academic noses while at the same time putting food on the family table, which is surely a valid reason for embarking on a literary career. I reviewed the first of these novels, Death in the Fifth Position, on the classic mysteries podcast several years ago. Here's my review, slightly emended as usual:

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It seemed like a pretty simple job for an experienced public relations writer: handle the publicity for a Russian Ballet troupe visiting New York City to introduce a new ballet. Of course, that was before the anti-Communist pickets showed up. Or the backstage rivalries and tensions flared. Or one of the company’s leading ballerinas fell thirty feet to her death on stage during the ballet’s premiere on opening night. It was Death in the Fifth Position – the title of a mystery by Gore Vidal, writing under the name of Edgar Box.

What in the world was Gore Vidal doing writing medium-boiled mysteries – and under a different name? According to Vidal, it was a matter of survival. This was 1952, and the still-new author had managed to so infuriate the staid reviewers of the New York Times that the newspaper refused to review any of his books. At the time – and to some degree even today – that in essence meant invisibility for an author, which is not a good thing if you are making your living by writing. So a publisher suggested that Vidal try his hand at mystery writing. In Vidal’s own words, he “worked very hard at being a mystery writer, somewhat heavily reliant upon Agatha Christie.” He came up with the pen name “Edgar Box” – and proceeded to churn out three mysteries. Each, he says, was written in eight days at the rate of ten thousand words a day, and, he says, he lived on them for the next dozen years.

The first one was called Death in the Fifth Position, and it is set in the world of ballet – a world of passionate dance and passionate dancers. The narrator, and central character, is Peter Sargeant, a former newspaperman, now working as a private public relations consultant. He is hired to do publicity for the Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet Company, which is in New York to perform a new ballet, created by the American choreographer Jed Wilbur. However, an organization representing World War II veterans is accusing Wilbur of membership in the Communist Party. This was in 1952, when that kind of an accusation could mean professional death for an artist – and for any organization brave or foolish enough to hire him or her. The veterans are threatening to picket the ballet’s performances if they don’t fire Wilbur. Peter Sargeant, working on the any-publicity-is-good-publicity theory, believes he can handle the problem.

But as he gets to know the ballet company’s people, he discovers that the place is full of professional and personal jealousies – not to mention a surprising assortment of love affairs. In fact, Sargeant quickly begins a pretty hot-blooded – and quite explicit, by the way, so be forewarned – relationship with a young ballerina. At the same time, he finds himself fending off the unwelcome advances of the company’s leading male dancer.

That’s the situation when – on the ballet’s opening night – the ballerina starring in the new dance dies onstage. At one point in the ballet, she was to be hoisted into the air on a thin cable. Thirty feet above the stage, the cable snapped, and she fell to her death – as noted, in what is called in classical ballet the fifth position. (That’s defined in Wikipedia as “One foot is placed in front of, and in contact with the other, with the heel of one foot aligned with the toe of the other foot. There are two fifth positions, depending on which foot is in front.”)

The police, of course, are summoned and promptly appear to go in all kinds of wrong directions while looking for the culprit. There are additional deaths, of course. The veterans and their pickets grown more and more insistent, and the choreographer finds himself summoned to testify before a Congressional committee. And Peter Sargeant winds up having to solve these murders himself – because the prime police suspect appears to be the ballerina with whom he’s having an affair.

Now all of this is told with the flair you’d expect from Gore Vidal. There’s a great deal of tongue-in-cheek humor – and, yes, there are places where the book certainly reads as if it were written in just eight days. But it is a surprisingly coherent mystery. I’m not thrilled by the fact that the final, convincing evidence of the killer’s guilt is found by Sargeant because of a fortunate coincidence. But there are other clues, rather liberally sprinkled throughout the book, and it’s all so good-natured that it’s hard to complain too much.

I do need to stress again, though, that there is a fair amount of fairly explicit heterosexual and homosexual sex – pretty tame by today’s standards, but certainly more than you’d be likely to find in most traditional mysteries.

Death in the Fifth Position has been reissued, along with the other two volumes in the series, by Random House’s Vintage Crime/Black Lizard imprint. The books are also available in electronic editions for the Amazon Kindle. Whether you call the author Gore Vidal or Edgar Box, they are entertaining and enjoyable reads.

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You can listen to the original audio reviews on the Classic Mysteries podcast by clicking here.

Next: A Night of Errors, by Michael Innes

"And Death Came Too"

It was supposed to be the late-night ending of a three-day festival for charity in the Welsh district of Treve: four young people, Patricia Hands, her husband-to-be, Gerald Lansley, her brother, Martin Hands, and their friend, Barbara Carmichael, would stop by at the home of someone they really didn't know very well for a few drinks and some conversation. That's why, around midnight, the quartet was arriving at a house known as Y Bryn, currently home to a schoolteacher named Arthur Yeldham, who had sent them this late-night invitation. They expected to find their host, exchange some pleasantries, have a few more drinks, and continue the evening - or early morning - hours elsewhere. What they found at Y Bryn was what you might consider an extra uninvited guest - in the form of death. It's all part of a complicated, challenging and entertaining plot in the book And Death Came Too, a 1939 Golden Age mystery by Richard Hull. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.

Richard Hull is probably best remembered for some of his quirky and witty mysteries - books like The Murder of My Aunt, for example, or Excellent Intentions. I've reviewed a few of them on earlier podcasts. And Death Came Too is, perhaps, a more traditional puzzle-plot mystery, but it shares with them their author's sense of style and witty, pointed characterizations.

Our quartet of young people arrive at the house to which they have been invited shortly before midnight. What they discover is anything but reassuring: the front door is standing wide open and nobody appears to be around. When they walk into the dining room, they encounter a number of strange events, all rather disorienting to them. They find a man whom they assume to be Yeldham - but he says he is not Yeldham. They find a mysterious woman, who quietly slips out of the house and vanishes - and nobody knows who she was. They find a police constable who suddenly enters the room - and drinks a glass of champagne. Shortly thereafter, the police constable goes off to another room – he says, to call the police station.

Oh yes – and a murder is discovered.

I hope I haven’t overly confused the issue for you, but – to my mind at least – I found the growing sense of bewilderment, of almost surreal actions (and reactions} to the events Hull is describing, pretty well hooked me. It is a complicated plot, to be sure, with some very interesting characters – not least among them, a police detective sergeant named Scoresby and his Chief Constable, Major Flaxman, the two people who will try to determine what is going on, and, as usual, try to figure out who has done what and to whom. There is more murder to be resolved, and a couple of interesting surprises along the way to a solution. The writing is quite witty as well. And Death Came Too, by Richard Hull, is a pleasant way to spend an evening.

 

 

From the Vault: "If Death Ever Slept"

On my weekly visit to the Classic Mysteries vault, I was delighted to find another adventure starring Rex Stout's enduring characters, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. This time, it's If Death Ever Slept, a 1957 entry in the continuing saga of my favorite American mystery characters. As we'll see, it was not the kind of case where you'd expect either Wolfe or Goodwin to be getting involved. Here's what I had to say about it when I reviewed the book on the Classic Mysteries podcast, some eight years ago. As usual, there has been some light editing of the transcript.

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Anybody who knows Nero Wolfe understands that there is one kind of detective work the corpulent sleuth simply will not do: he will not become involved in divorce cases, refusing to lower himself to spy on the marital and extramarital affairs involved in those situations. So what is Archie Goodwin doing, using a phony name, posing as a businessman’s secretary in order to dig up dirt on that businessman’s daughter-in-law? It happens in If Death Ever Slept, by Rex Stout, an interesting case and somewhat unusual case for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. As I mentioned, it’s highly unusual for Wolfe to accept a case which appears to involve nothing more than a very rich man who eagerly wants to uncover some dirt on his daughter-in-law so that he can break up her marriage and force her out of his house.

The reason becomes a bit more clear when you realize that, at the beginning of this book, Wolfe and Archie are having one of their periodic and not infrequent tiffs, during which they usually annoy each other deliberately. Walking into the middle of one of these – it involves Archie’s dating habits and Wolfe’s telephone and reading habits – comes a very rich businessman named Otis Jarrell. What he wants is very simple – in his own words, “I want you to get a snake out of my family.” He is talking about his daughter-in-law, Susan. Jarrell suspects that someone is leaking information about his prospective business deals to competitors – and he thinks that Susan is the culprit. Susan’s husband, who is Jarrell’s son, doesn’t believe him, and, says Jarrell, Susan is driving a wedge between father and son.

Normally, Wolfe wouldn’t have sat through a recitation of these problems – he doesn’t do divorce investigations. But – because he and Archie are looking for ways to annoy each other, Wolfe pretends a more than courteous interest – and agrees to send Archie to Jarrell’s mansion, posing as the rich man’s new secretary. Archie – who clearly isn’t about to let Wolfe have the satisfaction of knowing that he’s annoyed – plays along. The presence of a ten-thousand dollar retainer check from Jarrell probably doesn’t hurt either. In fact, Archie points out one potential problem to Jarrell – Archie’s luggage is stamped with the initials “A. G.” He’ll need a name with those initials – how about Adonis Guilfoyle? (Yes, that’s a quote.) Jarrell laughs and suggests Alan Green – and so Archie, posing as Alan Green the new secretary, goes to Jarrell’s triplex mansion in New York. He meets the rest of Jarrell’s family and some business associates

And from here on out, the curious events take a much darker turn. First, someone steals Jarrell’s gun – and does so in a way which defeats Jarrell’s in-house security camera. Then there are a couple of murders – I probably don’t need to remind you about that stolen gun, do I? And throughout there’s an increasingly petulant and unhappy Nero Wolfe, trapped in an investigation he didn’t want, trying to deal with Archie’s absence from the brownstone and – obviously – getting into tussles over murder with the ever-intrusive Inspector Cramer. Archie calls it a very interesting period. He describes it this way:

I suppose you noticed what Wolfe said, that he would see no one and hear no one until he had more facts. Exactly how he thought he would get facts, under the conditions he  imposed, seeing or hearing no one, I couldn’t say. Maybe by ESP or holding a séance. However, by noon on Monday it had become evident that he hadn’t meant it that way. What he had really meant was that he wanted no facts. If he had seen a fact coming he would have shut his eyes, and if he had heard one coming he would have stuck fingers in his ears.

Eventually, of course, it will all come down to one of those classic scenes in Wolfe’s office, with all the suspects present, where Wolfe fingers the murderer – relying in this case on evidence gathered by two other people: the female private eye, Dol Bonner – one of the very few female PIs tolerated by Wolfe and Archie anywhere in this series – and the police evidence collected by Inspector Cramer.

As for the initial problem of Susan Jarrell, the one described by her father-in-law as a snake – well, you’ll have to read the book to find out what happens and how much of a role it plays in the overall mystery.

Rex Stout’s If Death Ever Slept was published in 1957, meaning that it’s around the midway point in the Nero Wolfe series. To be honest, there are other Wolfe books which I think are better – they show off Wolfe’s skills, or they provide more details about life in the brownstone, or they have more interesting characters. But a lot of Archie’s monologues and dialogues here are quite good and funny, and the relationship between Wolfe and Inspector Cramer even takes a fascinating turn when Cramer is forced to call Wolfe a man of honor.

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You can listen to the complete audio review by clicking here.

Next: Death in the Fifth Position, by Edgar Box.

"Death of a Doll," by Hilda Lawrence

Ruth Miller, a salesperson at Blackman's Department Store in New York City, was looking forward eagerly to moving into her new home. She had been fortunate enough to complete the process of being interviewed for a room in Hope House, a fairly small but distinctly superior boarding house that provided a safe haven, good home cooking and even potential roommates and friendships for those young women, many of them, like Ruth, working at Black's, as it was called. So how is it that literally within minutes of arriving at Hope House, Ruth Miller suddenly became terrified - frightened for her life, despairing of her safety, afraid to leave the sanctuary of her bedroom. She was so terrified that she began making desperate plans to escape from Hope House and from New York. Just to escape with her life. Too terrified to talk. Too terrified to walk alone down any of the hallways in her building. Giving up hope in Hope House.

And eventually, what she feared came to pass.

The "how," the "who," and the "why" make up a powerful little mystery called Death of a Doll, by Hilda Lawrence. First published in 1947, it has just been republished by Agora Books, and the publisher has sent me a copy as a Kindle e-book for the purpose of this review. Hilda Lawrence wrote only four mysteries, and, according to Agora Books, this one is generally considered to be her best. It is a very powerful book indeed. I would add that it is the subject of today's audio review on the weekly Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are invited to listen to the complete review by clicking here.

“The body of Ruth Miller, a resident of Hope House, was discovered in the hotel courtyard shortly after midnight last night by a woman walking her dog. The position and condition of the body indicated that Miss Miller had jumped to her death earlier in the evening when there was still considerable rain…Miss Miller had been dead approximately three hours. She had been in ill health for some time and had attended a social function in the hotel against the advice of her friends. When found, Miss Miller was still wearing the rag-doll costume in which she had danced a few hours before. The verdict was suicide."

That newspaper version of the events surrounding Ruth Miller’s death convinced almost everyone. The police agreed with it. The people who lived and worked at Hope House agreed with it. But a woman who had been a customer of Ruth Miller’s at Blackman’s department store, a society woman named Roberta Sutton, didn’t believe it – she had seen Ruth Miller just before Ruth went to move into Hope House, and she knew Ruth had been eager and happy about moving. What had changed? Mrs. Sutton had another friend – a detective named Mark East, and she managed to get him interested in the case – which would prove very unfortunate for a desperate murderer. Death of a Doll is a powerfully written and dark boo, and the characters are likely to stay in your mind long after you finish reading it. I recommend it quite highly.

From the Vault: "The Judas Window"

If you are a fan of the impossible crime or locked room story, as I am, then you are probably familiar with the name of John Dickson Carr (who also wrote as "Carter Dickson"). If you are a fan of the impossible crime or locked room story and you are not familiar with the name of John Dickson Carr, then it's time you read at least one of his best books. I'm sure there are good reasons why Carr - so far - has not been widely reprinted by publishers who have been bringing back so many fine Golden Age authors, but I do not know what those reasons are. I do hear, from time to time, rumblings about plans to make some of his books available - and I've found that one of his best is available currently as an e-book. So while we wait for the day when we can again find affordable paper editions of some of Carr's other fine books, here's my review from the Classic Mysteries vault of The Judas Window, originally published in 1938 as being by Carter Dickson and featuring the irascible Sir Henry Merrivale as its detective. As usual, the text of my review has been slightly tweaked:

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How’s this for a nightmare situation: you wake up, aware that you have been drugged, to find yourself alone in a room with a dead man. He appears to have been stabbed with an arrow that had been hanging on the wall. The window is securely shuttered and locked. The door is locked and bolted on the inside. There is no way in or out of the room – and there is nobody else in the room. And someone is knocking on the door. That’s the situation in The Judas Window, by Carter Dickson – the pen name of John Dickson Carr.

John Dickson Carr was, and remains, the acknowledged master of the locked room mystery. As Carter Dickson, he wrote a series of impossible crime novels featuring his detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, H. M. as his friends call him. In The Judas Window, Sir Henry winds up in the role of defense lawyer in court, defending the young man I described a moment ago, who is, of course, accused of the murder.

Let’s recap: James Answell, the young man in question, has been called to the house of his fiancee’s father – a man he has never met. The two enter a room. The father begins – in Answell’s eyes, at least – to act strangely, and appears to be picking a fight. But then Answell passes out. When he wakes, perhaps 20 minutes later, he finds the scene as I described it a moment ago. His future father-in-law has been murdered inside a locked room, with no way in or out. Witnesses, who overheard the start of an argument between the two men, are able to testify that nobody has entered or left the room. The whiskey decanter which Answell says contained the drugged liquor is full (and there are no drugs in it) and the glasses are clean, and a doctor called to the scene says he can see no signs that Answell was drugged.

There is, in short, nothing to believe except that Answell has committed the murder, having quarreled with his fiancee’s father. He is arrested, charged with the murder, and his trial takes place in that great court of London known as the Old Bailey.

But Answell does have one thing going for him: Sir Henry Merrivale agrees to take the case for the defense. Because Sir Henry thinks he knows what really happened. The crime was committed, he says, through use of the Judas Window.

And what, you may ask, is the Judas Window? Obviously it’s going to be a while before Sir Henry reveals that to you. Is it some obscure secret? Hardly. It is, as H.M. says repeatedly, the key to the whole plot (not to mention the title of the book). Some obscure secret passage? No. As H.M. observes pretty early on in the book, you will find a Judas Window in just about every room you enter. The trouble, as he says, is that so few people even notice it.

Does it sound as if Carr is playing with the reader? He is. Most shamelessly. And quite thoroughly. The book is primarily a courtroom drama – something a bit unusual for Carr, but not at all out of place. And the locked room mystery, which is so clearly at the heart of this book, is well and fairly presented to the reader. H. M. even gives the reader a carefully worked-out timetable, with names and events neatly outlined and his own comments penciled carefully into the margin. And yet I’m willing to bet that most readers won’t tumble to the solution before H.M. is ready to deliver it – and that will follow quite a set of courtroom theatrics. As one of the characters says to him, at the very end of the book, “I am inclined to suspect that you are a disgrace to all the splendid traditions of the fairness of English law.”

There are critics who have called The Judas Window the best locked room mystery of all time. I’m not sure I agree with that; as I have said before, I still think Carr’s The Three Coffins (known in England as The Hollow Man), takes that honor. But The Three Coffins is much more complex in its locked rooms and impossible crimes, depending on a series of more-or-less unlikely events and the careful misleading of the reader. The solution to the locked room problem in “The Judas Window,” by contrast, is breathtakingly simple – in fact, as is often the case with such books, there’s a tendency to feel somewhat disappointed, to say, “is that all?” That’s unfair to the genius of the author, who has managed to practically rub our noses in the concept of the Judas Window – and yet conceal his meaning until the end of the novel – and, by doing so, he misdirects us admirably.

As always with Carr, the reader can’t help but be aware that he or she is in the hands of a master manipulator – but one who essentially plays fairly throughout. It is a book that belongs in every mystery lover’s library.

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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here.

Next: If Death Ever Slept, by Rex Stout.