I have in the past referred to The Punch and Judy Murders, a.k.a. The Magic Lantern Murders (1936) — the fifth book to feature Sir Henry ‘H.M.’ Merrivale under John Dickson Carr’s Carter Dickson nom de plume — as an underacknowledged masterpiece in the oeuvre of an author who produced more than his fair share of masterpieces in the genre. So let’s examine that, eh? That sort of claim can’t possibly backfire.

The evening before his wedding, Kenwood ‘Ken’ Blake, who assisted Merrivale so assiduously in The Unicorn Murders (1935), receives a telegram from the Old Man demanding Blake’s presence in Devon where is it an “ABSOLUTE BURNING IMPERATIVE THAT YOU BE BUTLER”. So, after some attempts to delay which result only in Merrivale getting his way, Blake heads down to Devon and discovers that a plot is in place to capture the criminal spy known only as “L.”, “the cleverest limb of Satan that ever plagued the Counter-Espionage Service”. Blake’s presence is necessary because it was while working in counter-intelligence that he met Paul Hogenauer, a German scientist-dilettante, who is now in Devon and whose recent experiments might give a clue to L.’s whereabouts and identity. And so the madness begins…

Starting with a spot of breaking and entering, Blake’s pre-nuptial evening only gets worse from there, with an accusation of murder soon levelled at him, added to which we soon have impersonating a policeman and, in time, a member of the clergy. And, just as it seems the maelstrom of lunacy can’t get any more frenzied, two men appear to have died in nearly-identical circumstances while several hundred miles apart in bafflingly-arranged rooms…what possible sense could it make? And how could rumours of L.’s presence in the country tie into it all?

I’ll be honest, I picked this up post-The Nameless Crime (1932) by Walter S. Masterman, a novel which left me somewhat disaffected, because I was in the mood for something I hoped would liven me up a bit, and I remember Carr’s narrative barrelling along while cunningly laying clever clues that all came together in the final stretch. As it turns out — and, hey, I read about 130 books a year, so it’s hardly unexpected — my memory was a little off, and it’s difficult to know whether this or the general air of discontent laid across my shoulder’s by Masterman is to blame for me not loving this as much at second visit. I’m inclined to believe that even the most delightful of narratives would have fallen a little flat for me, so maybe I should have set my sights a little lower, but, well, a second-tier experience with Carr still comes in well above a lot of other authors’ prime output.

The first two-thirds of The Punch and Judy Murders, then, presents that fast-paced rollicking adventure I remembered. True, Carr hasn’t quite the grease on the wheels that I recalled, with Blake sliding into one perplexing situation and the stalling there for a few chapters before sliding effortlessly into the next, but the situations are engagingly wrought and the prose shows signs of how much Carr has matured as an author in the short time he’d been published (this being, by my estimation, his eighteenth book in six years):

Once the chandelier was illuminated in that large white-papered room with the etchings on the walls, it had lost most of its terror. It was still bleak. The little corpse in the chair was still grotesque enough. But we had learned the explanation and dug the core out of the mystery: there could now be room for pity. 

Carr juggles the tone superbly, too, with the likes of chapter nine, ‘The Two Clergymen’, leaning well into a sort of bawdy comedy, and chapter ten, ‘The Flying Corpse’, extricating us from that setup to drop a superb mid-book shock of the type Carr excelled at delivering — c.f. The Judas Window (1938), The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939), Till Death Do Us Part (1944) among others — in its final line. It seems churlish to complain of feet of clay given the invention Carr displays here, but for all the success it would be nice if it didn’t feel so much like he was just lugging you from set-piece to set-piece, and that the scenes once we got there contained the same crazy energy that kept shunting events on so energetically…hell, I’m advocating for this to be more like The Blind Barber (1934), aren’t I? Who had that on their bingo card, eh?

In the final third, then, much against my memory of events, the book settles down and becomes a more traditional murder mystery:

“[B]urn me, in this business we got it all turned round backwards. The skylarkin,’ the Harlequinad-ein-Suburbia, had to come first. You acted your summer pantomime before anybody (including myself) quite knew what was goin’ on. And when we did learn what was goin’ on it still didn’t make sense about the murder. Consequently, at long last, we start to question the suspects.”

Here, then, is where the book might drop a little in my estimations, with a round of interviews that bring in new considerations and evidence, rather than all being carefully dredged from the zoetrope of flickering events that has passed before our eyes in that opening race. L.’s hand starts to come more into sight, and the events which have shaped this evening — Ken’s getting married in the morning, don’t forget — are finally given their proper form, in a fabulous piece of multipurpose plot-and-counter-plot, with a reveal of the guilty party behind it all which is still rather thrilling even when you know it’s coming. I’ve reread several Carrs in recent years and found my recall of their structure to be slightly off — The Eight of Swords (1934), The Plague Court Murders (1934), The White Priory Murders (1934)…maybe I just have a block where the year 1934 is concerned, I should reread Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and see — so it’s interesting to realise just how poorly I had remembered this one. Clearly the 900+ books I’ve read in the meantime have pushed out some of the finer details. I must be getting old.

Altogether, though, I did enjoy revisiting this, and I look forward to a third read now that I have my thoughts on record so that I can give it another, even fairer go in the years ahead. This is certainly more a title for the American Mystery Classics range than the British Library Crime Classics one, its challenging of genre conventions being, to my eye, more suited to the broader brief of that first series, but whoever reprints it — and I hope someone does, it deserves a larger audience — I look forward to the opportunity to sit down with a pristine new copy and barrel through its loopy events all over again.

~

See also

Nick @ The Grandest Game in the World: Ken Blake’s pre-nuptial adventures, in which he is chased by the police and eludes them by putting on a series of disguises, are superbly funny, and the plot twists and turns like an anaconda in an epileptic fit. Fortunately, H.M. — more serious than usual, perhaps in contrast to the humour of the rest of the book — is there to disentangle the whole preposterous gallimaufry. … A book as light, as complex, and as hilariously unpredictable as North by Northwest.

Ben @ The Green Capsule: After thirteen chapters of pure madness unfolding, there isn’t actually too much mystery remaining at the end.  The final unmasking of the killer is nicely done, and the culprit is a nice choice, but I couldn’t help thinking “I wanted there to be more to it.”  You see, Carr constructs this towering mystery, but then so little of it really matters in the end.  It’s all very nicely explained, and you’ll be well engrossed while it is, but it unfolds in some sense outside of expectations.  Of course, this criticism is based purely on who the author is.  If this was anyone else whose name isn’t tied to impossible crimes, then I think this would be a perfectly successful finale.

Puzzle Doctor @ In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel: It passes the time nicely, but it’s by no means Carr’s finest hour. It feels a bit like a cross between The Thirty-Nine Steps and a fairly lazy Agatha Christie, and the relatively slight mystery is buried beneath a hoard of irrelevances. It can be seen as an attempt to do something a bit different with the formula, but there are other books from the era that are demonstrate [sic] Carr’s skills as a writer and professional trickster far better.