One of many classic detection titles I read before I started this blog, The Judas Window (1938) is arguably among the most popular books John Dickson Carr ever wrote, under his nom de plume Carter Dickson or otherwise. The seventh book to feature his barrister-detective Sir Henry ‘H.M.’ Merrivale, and the only time H.M. enters the courtroom in all his cases, this was actually the first Merrivale book I read, way back when, and so a revisit seemed on the cards, especially with the British Library Crime Classics adding Dickson’s The Ten Teacups, a.k.a. The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) to their stable next month. Might this one follow suit? Lord knows it deserves to.

One January morning, James Caplon Answell calls on his prospective father-in-law, Avory Hume, who, it seems, drugs Answell’s whisky-and-soda, rendering him unconscious. When Answell comes to, he is locked in Hume’s study, the door held fast on the inside by a stiff bolt, and Hume himself is dead, an arrow that had previously been mounted on the wall embedded 8 inches into his chest at a downward angle. Oh, and the arrow has Answell’s fingerprints on it, and the carafe of whisky is full and there are no used glasses anywhere in the study. Get out of that one, mate.

The second chapter picks things up two months later, with Answell on trial for murder and H.M. having donned robes once more to act in his defence. Right from the off, Dickson is clear about how serious, albeit disconcertingly formal, the situation is — “It was a schoolroom, with a rope at the end of it when you left the headmaster’s study.” — jettisoning the occasional forays into broad comedy which, I now know, betoken the Merrivale novels because, well, how the hell do you get a man cleared in such an open-and-shut case?

What marks Dickson out here is the way he builds on that impossible murder: the stabbing alone would be enough to sustain most authors, but this author has to stir in extra difficulties just to keep him sharp — contradictory testimony, witnesses who appear to make the case against Answell only more damning, and one of the best mid-books twists of Carr’s career (and this in an era where he dropped some wonderful mid-book twists). Every slight chip in the edifice of Answell’s guilt is countered by a staggering blow to more than reinforce such cracks (“The atmosphere of scepticism was now so heavy that you could feel it in people’s very gravity.”) and yet you know Carr is playing the game properly:

“The door really was tight and solid and bolted; and the windows really were tight and solid and bolted. Nobody monkeyed with a fastening to lock or unlock either. Also, you heard the architect say there wasn’t a chink or crevice or rat-hole in the walls anywhere; also true.”

H.M., however, puts all his faith in the “Judas window” by which the killer was able to make good their scheme…but does he really know what he’s doing? And can he prove it in the face of such overwhelming testimony to the contrary?

Rereading this, knowing how the murder was achieved, was huge fun, and while it’s the case that the book isn’t quite completely fair in its declaration of clues, there’s an immense cleverness behind the workings that you can believe is within the grasp of the intuitive genius Merrivale possesses. I can fault it only in two aspects: the judge’s summing up at the end of the case feels redundant, and the motive comes a little out of nowhere…but arguably the motive wasn’t part of the court case — all H.M. needs is reasonable doubt, as he says — and if you’re going to write a courtroom-based novel, well, you have let the judge have his says, especially as one gets the feeling that Carr is something of a proponent of the judicial system from comments made herein.

As befits a courtroom drama, the minor characters turn up, fix themselves in the mind (“…his hands were so clean that they looked polished.”) and depart, and there is, of course, a barnstorming denouement where the beans are spilled, the imbrications of the various events laid bare, and you feel very silly for having overlooked so much. Carr wrote perhaps ten masterpieces in his career, and this is only possibly one of them: but come on, someone reprint this so that a new generation can be foxed and amazed by the ultimate locked room mystery one more time.

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See also

Nick @ The Grandest Game in the World: Widely believed to be the best of the Merrivales, but I’m not a fan… There’s a great twist halfway through, and the placing of clues and deductions is superb. The solution to the locked room, the “Judas Window” of the title, is disappointingly mechanical, and, on first reading, hard to visualize; and the murderer’s identity is a decided anti-climax. Indeed, the characters are all very flat, and the book moves much more slowly than the average Carr novel.

Ben @ The Green Capsule: The definitive locked room mystery novel… For a story primarily set in court, the pacing is amazing.  Similar to Till Death Do Us Part, pretty much every chapter ends with some jaw dropper of a twist or revelation.  And just like that book, each time you feel that you’ve learned something new, you actually get the sense that the puzzle tightens.

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