#144: The Corpse in the Waxworks, a.k.a. The Waxworks Murder (1932) by John Dickson Carr

/ JJ

corpse-in-the-waxworksThe penultimate case for John Dickson Carr’s first sleuth, Henri Bencolin, opens with a wonderful demonstration of the reputation which that juggernaut of justice enjoys among the less salubrious sections of French society: ‘Bencolin was not wearing his evening clothes, and so they knew that nobody was in danger.’  The palpable sense of relief this engenders in all who see him as he travels from tavern to tavern captures the character with a clarity that shows how much Carr grew as an author over his opening five books, and augurs well for the Fellian delights that would follow soon upon the heels of this as Carr hared his way up the detective fiction firmament and into history. And it sets the scene nicely for a deceptively complex little book that almost feels like a short story in its setup, but is wrought into something more by the expert pacing Carr has honed in the couple of short years since It Walks By Night (1930), showing here his emerging talent for taking a situation that many others would struggle to fill 20 pages with and making every nuance and moment of its 188 pages count.

Paris in the early 1930s, and a corpse is found in a waxworks museum following the disappearance of a young lady from the same location.  It will surprise precisely no-one that Carr has the creepiness of his setting down perfectly, and is content to keep you on edge with the kind of tacitly threatening backdrop that typifies his early, more Gothic, sweeps at the genre:

The very quiet of the place made me shiver.  It smelt — I can only describe it this way — of clothes and hair.  We were in an immense grotto, running back nearly eighty feet, and supported by pillars of grotesque fretwork in stone.  It swam in a greenish twilight, emanating from some source I could not trace; like greenish water, it distorted and made spectral each outline, so that arches and pillars seemed to waver and change like the toy caverns inside a goldfish bowl.  They appeared to trail green tentacles, and to be crusted with iridescent slime.

There’s still a slightly amateur bent to his writing — that use of ‘greenish’ twice in the same sentence above, for one — as Carr hasn’t yet got the hang of those simple turns of phrase that would chill the blood so effectively in his later works.  Still, he gives us a cast of grotesques and aristocrats who are believably forced into each others’ lives and keeps you guessing as to the perpetrator of the murder in a very clever fashion, though arguably one of the clues provided much to Bencolin’s delight is not something we readers are able to appreciate until it is made explicit following the murderer’s reveal.

In a way, this reminded me of the apprentice works Robert Ludlum produced in his early years before redefining the international thriller in the 1980s.  There’s a vacillation here between outright detection — Bencolin’s recreation of the central murder in chapter 10 is a marvel of atmosphere and deduction, and the character himself deliberately grinds out some beautiful misdirection to throw as sand into the eyes of others — and a penny dreadful, late Victorian hophouse thriller (chapter 14 is titled simply ‘Knives!’) which can be hard to reconcile at times.  Of these two tones, the former is certainly the most successful, though it’s nice to see Jeff Marle’s mettle being tested in the latter stages as the thriller takes a larger chunk out of proceedings.  In fact, Marle gets a full five chapters to himself towards the end, with no Bencolin in sight, and is even allowed a hint of romantic entanglement…so it would be nice to think that Carr’s loss of interest in M. Henri at least gave poor old Jeff something to look forward to in his later years.

The expansion of the puzzle is very well-handled, and you can see here a fascination with the intricacy of high society that would bring Carr back to the enticements of the proper airs utilised in is historical novels that he started writing in the 1950s.  He loves his setting, and if the plot feels a touch secondary at times, well, so be it.  It lacks the devilish machinations that would be revealed in, say, The Bowstring Murders (1933) or the cramped brilliance of Death-Watch (1934), but the important thing is that Carr went on from here to write those books.  Had this been the final book he ever produced — bloody hell, what a horrible thought! — it would stand up extremely well against that which preceded it, so it coming across as minor in the wake of what followed isn’t really to be held against it.  It is unquestionably a third-tier Carr, but that still commends it above a lot of other books you could read.

It’s interesting to reflect on the over-writing of this in light of how adept Carr would become in his later career, and part of me wonders how much his radio dramas had a hand in this.  Having to set a scene simply by the use of background noises or the tone of someone’s voice would be a distinct step on from his gangling, twisting sentences here, and perhaps as he developed he realised how the same could be done with the written word in much the same way: the twist of an adjective could instill as much menace as the click of heels on a stone pavement, or simply describing someone’s running as “flight” and allowing the implied panic to seep in through other, equally subtle means, rather than detailing their helter-skelter dash from pillar to post for half a page.  It’s not a reflection that sits well in this review, I’m aware, but it occurred to me for the first time while reading this and I wanted to share it with you.  So it’s tacked on here at the end.  Which thankfully isn’t awkward at all.

star filledstar filledstar filledstarsstars

I submit this review for the Golden Age Vintage Cover Scavenger Hunt at My Reader’s Block under the category Statue.

24 thoughts on “#144: The Corpse in the Waxworks, a.k.a. The Waxworks Murder (1932) by John Dickson Carr”

  1. I agree fully with your last paragraph. There is too much over-writing here. Hence I agree with your rating of 3 stars.
    I found the same problem in Hag’s Nook.

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  3. Thanks for the review. 🙂 How does this title compare with ‘It Walks by Night’? Thinking of buying a Bencolin title to read before getting round to ‘Four False Weapons’, so that I save the best for the last. 😛 Would you recommend ‘Corpse in Waxworks’ above ‘It Walks by Night’?

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    • I know the question was not directed at me, but I would rank The Corpse in the Waxworks above It Walks by Night. However, if you want to read a good Bencolin, before the great Four False Weapons, I would recommend The Lost Gallows. It was only his second novel, but showed great improvement over his debut and a wonderfully displayed his wealth of imagination. One of my favorites from Carr’s earliest period.

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        • I found copies of ‘Lost Gallows’, ‘Corpse in Waxwork’ and ‘It Walks by Night’ – and went for ‘Lost Gallows’ as per your and TomCat’s recommendation.

          P.S. In case you don’t see my reply on TomCat’s blog, I think ‘Devotion of Suspect X’ is even better than ‘Salvation of a Saint’. 😀

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          • I did see, many thanks! Interested in the potential fair-playness of it, too, tough there’s a similar argument to be had about …Saint and I realy liked the nature and reveal of the solution. Shall attempt to get to it before too long. Though who knows how long that will actually be?!

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          • Also, hope you enjoy Lost Gallows; early Carr is still kinda special, even though he would massively eclipse these books time and again later in his career.

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          • I’m quite excited about my stack of Carr novels bobbing over the sea towards my mailbox: Lost Gallows; Hag’s Nook; Mad Hatter, Arabian Nights; Bowstring; Crooked Hinge; Five Boxes; Seat of the Scornful; Later Wives. (Couldn’t find cheap copies of Patience or Unicorn.)

            If they arrive on time, I’ll pick one of them for the Carr’s birthday special. 😀

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            • Haven’t read Arabian Nights, Scornful, or Late Wives, but the others are solid…very much look forward to what you pick and what you make of it…

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  4. I need to let the scars of over-writing fade before I tackle another Bencolin, thank you, but I love how you made me hearten back to the days when I tore through one Robert Ludlum thriller after another. I started with The Chancellor Manuscript. I loved it, and I got such a kick over how melodramatically the characters’ inner thoughts were displayed in italics, with multiple exclamation points!!!!!!!!! Then you go back to an early one like The Osterman Weekend and see a fledgling version of his style. It’s daunting to think that, at my stage of life, I’m still in fledgling status and nay never emerge a full-grown — oops, tripped over a metaphor!!!!!!!

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    • Ludlum is a very apposite comparison, actually. Christie feels like Christie throughout her career, but early Carr and Ludlum both feel as if they’re striving for something more than they’re capable of…and then both realised it (though Carr maintained it for longer) and managed to reshape the genres they had operated in. Something significant would have been lost in either case if they’d stopped after, like, four books…

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  7. It’s been years since I read this one, but what I loved about it was the remarkable sportmanship of the killer. As unlikely as the self-imposed fairplay on the murderer’s part might have been, it showed were Carr’s heart lay. Even at this very early stage of his career.

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