The Magic-Lantern Murders

by Carter Dickson, John Dickson Carr

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 269
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating:

Synopsis:

On the eve of his wedding to Evelyn Cheyne, who he met and fell in love with during the course of The Unicorn Murders, former spy Kenwood Blake is summoned to Devon by spymaster Sir Henry Merrivale, and asked to take part in an undercover operation. Despite being assured he’ll be back in London in time for the wedding the following morning, Blake is unconvinced.

Once in Torquay, he is sent to investigate Paul Hogenauer, a local scientist of German heritage, who has been dabbling in spiritualism and the occult – a man Merrivale and Devon’s Chief Constable Colonel Charters suspect of anti-British espionage. But, on entering his house, he finds Hogenauer dead in a chair in his sitting room, showing all the signs of strychnine poisoning.

When he finds Hogenauer’s friend and confidant Dr Keppel dead in his hotel room in Bristol, also apparently from strychnine poisoning, he has a seemingly impossible mystery to unravel. Can he solve the clues, bring the killer to justice and still get to the church in time to get married in the morning?

After a while, and a few false starts, I did get into some of Carter Dickson AKA John Dickson Carr’s work, but it transpires I haven’t wholly lost my distaste for them. This is one of the Henry Merrivale ones, which are already not my favourites, and my best description of it while reading was that I felt like the soundtrack should be “Yakety Sax”. Coincidences (the worst possible ones for the protagonist) abound, sometimes for the mystery and sometimes for comic effect, and the whole thing is spent running up and down the country chasing will-o-the-wisps.

It perhaps doesn’t help that I don’t find Kenwood Blake that enticing as a character: spending The Unicorn Murders with him was quite enough, thank you. I wouldn’t have minded a bit more focus on Evelyn Cheyne, but she’s just “the wench”, convenient for bringing along a change of clothes and sounding the alert, it seems. Bah.

At least I liked Stone, even though that took a while to solidify for me: he seems a good man.

I am very wary of this kind of ending, as well — I shan’t say too much about it because of spoilers, but I don’t like it when detectives take the law into their own hands, and I especially didn’t like how it was played here.

Overall, not one I can recommend, even though aspects of the mystery were interesting (if you stripped back some of the Yakety Sax moments).

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)