A man sleeping alone in a bolted room, five storeys up in the tower attached to his grand old house, wakes in the night and hurls himself out of the window to his death. Refusing to believe in spooks, spectres, and eldritch terrors, the man’s son determines to sleep in the room as well, and similarly hurls himself from the sole window while alone and the door is again bolted. And if that setup doesn’t entice you to read The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), John Dickson Carr’s lucky thirteenth long form case for Dr. Gideon Fell, then, well, I don’t know how else to entice you in. It was this book that convinced me Carr was going to be my flavour of jam years ago, and I returned to it with great eagerness.

Of course, the book is not quite as I remembered it: the opening on the train is still good fun, with our bland-man-who-will-find-love Dr. Alan Campbell reliving an academic debate he is having in the newspapers with another expert about the Duchess of Cleveland, but there’s a lot more meeting people in Scotland on our way to the Castle of Shira on the isolated Loch Fyne. It turns out we’re about a quarter of the way in before that impossible death of Duncan Campbell is related, and the second plunge from the tower occurs well past the halfway point. It still nips along, though, and proves to be plenty of fun in the telling.

Carr seems to have hit here a lovely balance between the atmospheric…

Southwards, above spiky pines, you could see far away the great castle of Argyll, with the four great towers whose roofs change colour when it rains. Beyond would be the estate office, once the court house, where James Stewart, guardian of Allan Breck Stewart, had been tried and con­demned for the Appin murder. All the earth was rich and breathing with names, with songs, with traditions, with superstitions.

…and broad comedy (a man getting stabbed in the arse, or having two buckets of water emptied over his head), rooted is some good character notes (“You know, I can’t decide whether I like that old woman or whether I’d like to murder her…”) and a solid mystery which, if it doesn’t quite exploit its setting, at least stirs in a ghost with only half a face and some lovely, mist-drenched scenes of chaos and ill reason.

You could not get away from anything that chose to pursue you here.

The unflappable Dr. Fell, then, who has been “haunted and pursued by such matters”, gets to the bottom of those plunges very quickly indeed, and the reader isn’t left in the dark for very long, with the mystery of what chased those men out of that window tied up much earlier than I recalled…and incorrectly, too. One wonders if this was the book that Isaac Asimov was referring to when he said that Carr’s lack of awareness in certain matters saw a plot “reduced…to a shambles”, and it’s amusing, too, to open the book and see the early line “Errors are errors, whoever writes them” lurking as if in early apology. Still, the principle holds even if the details aren’t precise.

And the plot has some good foundation for confoundment, too, such as our dead man taking out £35,000 worth of insurance policies on his life and so being unlikely to kill himself knowing there was a suicide clause in every policy. It’s not the sort of rippling, seething problem that confronts his players in the masterpieces Carr penned, but as an isolated little tale with its compact cast in this forgotten corner of the country it’s a nice little problem for an insurance man to be understandably reticent to pay out on, and for everyone else to be cudgelling their brains about how to convince him otherwise.

I can fault the book really in two areas: first the killer is barely in it and so unlikely to be landed on fairly by any reader, and secondly that the key piece of convincing information comes in the form of a photograph. Both are rather too key to be avoided altogether, and knocked my enjoyment of this down a star from what I remembered when it was 50% of the Carr I had read. In its favour, however, is a pleasing portrait of how the Second World War has affected even these isolated corners (“You should have remembered how [the roads] are patrolled late at night…”) and a sort of reminder of how much the war had worn on its contemporary audience:

It was only the first of September, and the heavy raiding of London had not yet begun. We were very young in those days. An air-­raid alert meant merely inconvenience, with perhaps one lone raider droning somewhere, and no barrage.

One also takes comfort in knowing that the state of public transport remains about the same 80 years later (“The 9.15 train from Glasgow to Euston slid into Euston only four hours late…”).

I enjoyed this return, then, and would still hold up The Case of the Constant Suicides as a good place to start on your Carr journey. The Polygon Books reprint is a lovely artefact and, with some wonderful Carr novels also readily available, I am very envious of anyone who gets to experience him as a new prospect in this day and age. What a wonderful reading life you have ahead of you.