It is perhaps fitting — though, I assure you, completely accidental — that a locked room murder in a novel by John Dickson Carr, doyen of the apparently undoable nevertheless rationally explained, is the focus of the 500th post on this blog to be tagged “impossible crimes“.  Sure, upon realising this I could have chosen one of Carr’s acknowledged masterpieces to reread, but I enjoyed the divisive barrister Patrick Butler, K.C. at first encounter, and was intrigued to see how the character fared without the support of Carr’s frequent and best sleuth, Dr. Gideon Fell. And, having given up on the two Carr novels I tried to read prior to this, I’m pleased to report that I enjoyed a fair amount of what Carr did here.

It doesn’t hurt that the structure of this one reminded me of one of my very favourite Carr novels, The Punch and Judy Murders, a.k.a. The Magic Lantern Murders (1937) written under his Carter Dickson nom de plume: a baffling crime (here, the stabbing of a man in an otherwise-unoccupied room), a headlong flight into an event-packed unravelling with a ticking-clock deadline (Hugh Prentice, our falsely-suspected hero, gives himself 24 hours to solve the crime before it is pinned on his business partner), with an unpredictable and ultimately comical driving force behind proceedings (Butler, whose self-serious 18th century attitudes that go down poorly with everyone around him). It is my fondest wish that the swathe of Carr reprints of recent years turn their eye upon The Punch and Judy Murders, but this will have to do while we wait for common sense to prevail.

We’re very much in thriller territory here — and decidedly bawdy thriller territory, too, with women taking smacks and casual put-downs like it’s somehow pleasing to them — but while lacking Carr’s purest rigour (and social attitudes that come from the later half of the 20th century) there’s still much skill on display. Carr’s tone-setting is on point — c.f. Hugh kicking against a tide of “white-face, fighting-faced pedestrians” — and his minor character work as tight as ever (see Gerald Lake come to life before you based only on brief descriptions of his haircut and “not good” brown suit). And fog-shrouded London has never seemed so sinister, so bristling with potential threat, as goons loom joyfully out of it and Peelers run to and fro in search of our central duo.

The author’s increasing interest in history peeks around the edges — see the comments on Seven Dials — and he displays a keen sympathy for the work of the modern police force, whose wider function is oft overlooked in the Golden Age as they bumble along in the wake of one genius amateur investigator or another:

“They listen patiently to every [phone] call and deal with it. They listen to their lunatic regulars, who ring up almost every night and soothe ’em to sleep. They listen to some poor devil who’s going round the bend. And God knows how many suicides they’ve prevented by sending a car in time.”

Butler, too, I simply don’t find as irritating as others seem to. Sure, the guy’s a pompous arse, but Carr’s tongue is wedged so firmly in his cheek (“You may be a great barrister, but you’re an absolute child.”) that surely this 18th century throwback isn’t meant to be taken seriously. Plus, he’s not without his moments of charm — his boyish ebullience carrying him through every setback with a puppy-like energy (his reaction to the non-existent fire escape had me hooting), the devil-may-care set of his shoulders as he carries the plot from one contrivance to the next difficult to deny and, for this reader, his faintly ridiculous air is more palatable than the broad comedy that engulfed Sir Henry Merrivale when Carr wrote about him.

Even in the thralls of my enthusiasm, however, I won’t deny that the book starts to grate a little as it continues. Nothing between about chapter 6 and chapter 19 has any material impact on the story — though, for once, the human feelings of a man towards a woman are allowed a little space to develop — and there are only so many sudden appearances of a person previously left elsewhere that such a loose string of incidents can support. It stops feeling like a narrative and begins to feel more like an exercise to turn twenty pages of plot into 200 of content, though fun can be found in the inversion of an impossible disappearance by revealing the workings of how a magician can walk through a brick wall.

In the final analysis, Patrick Butler for the Defence served to remind me why I love The Punch and Judy Murders so much, since this later book lacks much of the design, subtlety, and surprise of that earlier one — and the impossible stabbing is fairly routine, too, so it’s difficult to think what the non-Carr fan would get from this. As a result, it’s easy to understand why this might languish forgotten in the halls of detective fiction, even among those of us who revere Carr at his best. It has, however, had the happy effect of making me want to reread TPaJM, so expect that to be the next Carr title on here at some point.

~

See also

Nick @ The Grandest Game in the World: The plot then degenerates into a pointless chase, beginning with a largely irrelevant fight scene in an antique shop and going downhill from there to the point where the hero throws his sweetheart’s father through a window. Unlike the chases in The Blind Barber or The Punch and Judy Murders, there are no clues concealed in this mess, and the murder is obscured by a flurry of hyperactivity.

Ben @ The Green Capsule: Immediately following the crime, Hugh Prentice ends up on the run from the law, fearing that the circumstances of the murder make him a prime suspect.  His only hope is to solve the crime, and for that he turns to Patrick Butler.  Butler and Prentice undertake an adventure to investigate the murdered man’s past which lasts for the majority of the story.  They brawl with hired thugs, evade the police, learn magician’s tricks, and carouse with a whole slew of women.  The truth to the mystery is always the object, but the story is much more focused on a series of escapades.  Similar to the historical novels released in the surrounding years, this is an engrossing adventure that’s pulled forward by a core puzzle.