Do you enjoy a great "impossible crime story? Love John Dickson Carr's books and stories? Is the name "Henri Bencolin" familiar to you?
A lot of people might answer "yes" to the first two questions and wind up scratching their heads at the third. Henri Bencolin was the name of the first series detective created by John Dickson Carr. His first published novel, It Walks By Night, which appeared in 1930, featured Bencolin (and was reviewed here late last year). Now, Carr's second novel about Bencolin, The Lost Gallows (1931) is being released during the first week of April. It's being re-published by Poisoned Pen Press as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, and the publisher has provided me with a copy for this review. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to that complete review by clicking here.
The scene is set in London, on a foggy night. In the course of that terrifying night:
- Our detective, Henri Bencolin, and his friend Jeff Marle (who is also our narrator) are nearly run down in the busy streets of London by a limousine apparently being driven by a dead man whose throat has been cut;
- An apparently invisible joker keeps moving a small and rather gruesome toy – a model of a hangman’s gibbet - from place to place, and nobody can see who is doing it – or how;
- That murderer taunts the police – and his victims – by claiming as his own the name “Jack Ketch,” a name once used to hide the identity of a notorious English executioner of the seventeenth century;
- And this Jack Ketch advises police (and others) that he will hang his chosen (and kidnapped) victims on a gallows situated on "Ruination Street"…and that is, apparently, the one lost street that cannot be found on any map of London.
Bencolin is different from Carr's better-known series detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. All three specialize - as a general rule - in solving "impossible" crimes. Carr creates an eerie atmosphere of nightmare in almost all his books. But there is more relief to be found in the humor displayed in the Merrivale or Fell mysteries. Bencolin is more somber - and, perhaps, more terrifying. If you don't know Bencolin yet, this is a splendid opportunity to meet him.
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