Impossible Crimes
#171: JDC OOP – WTF?
In his lifetime, John Dickson Carr published 76 novels and short story collections, plus a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle and a ‘true crime’ novel predating Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey. Following the closure of the Rue Morgue Press, who had five Carr novels in their books, and the coming disappearance of Orion’s ebook undertaking The Murder Room, who have around 14 or so Carr novels in their ranks, we’re not too far from a point in time where only two Car novels will be available to buy: Orion’s perpetually in-print version of The Hollow Man and the Mysterious Press publication of The Devil in Velvet. So, to return to the question in the title of this post: John Dickson Carr’s out of print — where’s the fuss?
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#169: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Man and Superman: Refining the Protagonist in John Dickson Carr’s Historical Mysteries
With the great man’s 110th birthday looming tomorrow — I hope everyone has got their suits dry-cleaned (I’m not the only one who blogs while in full formal dress, right?) — I thought I’d look at an aspect of John Dickson Carr’s writing that came to my attention recently upon reading The Devil in Velvet, namely his use of a modern-day protagonist thrown back into the past.
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#167: Case in the Clinic (1941) by E.C.R. Lorac
Given the number of people who applied themselves to the challenge of writing a novel of detection during the Golden Age (precise dates pending…), it is to be expected that a fair number of wonderful novels, plots, ideas, and authors will have been lost in the tidal wave of creativity. Through the continued efforts of publishers like Ramble House — who were reprinting this stuff before it was cool again — we’ve been able to rediscover Max Afford, Norman Berrow, Rupert Penny, Hake Talbot, and others, and it’s this path of frank fabulousness that has brought me now to E.C.R. Lorac, author of some 70-odd novels under a couple of pseudonyms. Does she belong in the realm of How In The Hell Is This Stuff Overlooked? Well, on this evidence…maybe.
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#164: On Failing to Engage with “the Swedish John Dickson Carr” – Deadly Reunion (1975) by Jan Ekström [trans. Joan Tate 1983]
Given that John Dickson Carr — who would have been 110 at the end of the month, folks — published seventy-eight books over a 41 year career that encompassed such joys as Till Death Do Us Part and such nadirs as Papa La-Bas, there’s probably no-one who couldn’t be compared to him at some point in his career. So when Swedish writer Jan Ekström’s 1975 novel Ättestupan is translated into English and the synopsis opens with the tantalising promise ‘Often called the Swedish John Dickson Carr…’ well, you’re going to get a lot of peoples’ attentions even though it doesn’t at first glance really tell you anything.
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#163: The Spaniard’s Thumb (1949) by Norman Berrow
We should be thankful that Norman Berrow left behind him such wonderful novels as these that make it almost possible to get a glimpse into the workings of his mind. I mean, who else would predicate a novel on the grounds of a giant disembodied thumb vengefully crushing to death anyone who ventures into its lair? It’s a setup too barmy for John Dickson Carr’s fertile impossibilities, too outré for the straight-laced world of Agatha Christie, Miles Burton, Christianna Brand, and their ilk, and doesn’t have enough train journeys for Freeman Wills Crofts. It’s too comedic and explicit for the standard horror get-up of M.R. James or those who followed him…honestly, had Berrow not written this there’s really no-one else who could have.
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#161: Hawk & Fisher (1990) by Simon R. Green
As a parody of the detective novel, the maverick cop genre, and the low Fantasy genre, Simon R. Green’s Hawk & Fisher takes quite some beating — it is an honestly hilarious take on the tropes of three. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much since reading…well, possibly anything; almost every page contains some wonderful joke or savage undercutting of the false sincerity of the situations encountered, not unlike William Goldman’s timeless The Princess Bride. For instance, Hawk is supposedly an expert in hand-to-hand combat with an axe, but he has only one functioning eye and therefore must lack any depth perception; it’s an absolutely genius piece of subversion, and such examples are rife. The only problem is that I have a sneaking suspicion — only a sneaking one, mind — that this book is in fact supposed to be taken seriously. Very Seriously Indeed.
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#160: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Who Can You Trust? Verisimilitude in Paul Doherty’s A Murder in Thebes (1998)
When you stop to think about it, the notion of ‘within living memory’ is a fascinating concept. Very few of us possess the peremptory nature required to call someone a liar to their face, but the idea that something is more accurately recalled when it is within living memory is somewhat false — yes it is recalled, but the precise accuracy of any memory is subject to all sorts of caveats, not least of which are situational bias, subsequent events, personal investment, personal protection, personal interpretation, and the situation that recalled the memory in the first place. Nevertheless, as any historian will tell you, a straw poll of enough people will reproduce a fairly unbiased picture of any event within living memory, and so a range of sources often gives the clearest picture.
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#158: The Tattoo Murder Case, a.k.a. The Tattoo Murder (1948) by Akimitsu Takagi [trans. Deborah Boehm 1998]
Since Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders was republished by Pushkin Vertigo, I’ve found myself reading increasing amounts of Japanese detective fiction: the shin honkaku of The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji and The Moai Island Puzzle by Alice Arisugawa from Locked Room International, The Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino (yes, The Devotion of Suspect X will follow in due course…), and I’ve recently started Gosho Aoyama’s Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) manga. And authors such as Seicho Matsumoto and Kyotaro Nishimura are climbing ever-higher up by TBB list as I encounter more of the high-quality work that has been translated for our pleasure. And, of course, the proliferation of impossible crimes in these stories doesn’t hurt, with the added cross-cultural glimpses also offered simply making them an even more attractive proposition.
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#157: The Tuesday Night Bloggers — A Background of History in The Red Widow Murders (1935) by Carter Dickson
“The story of the Widow’s Room…begins in the month of August, and in the city of Paris, and in the year 1792. It begins with the Terror, but it has not ended yet.”
The Invisible Event 