The Ten Teacups

by Carter Dickson, John Dickson Carr

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 256
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating:

Synopsis:

"There will be ten teacups at number 4, Berwick Terrace, W. 8, on Wednesday, July 31, at 5 p.m. precisely. The presence of the Metropolitan Police is respectfully requested."

Writing as Carter Dickson, the master of the locked room mystery John Dickson Carr returns to the Crime Classics series, pitching his series amateur detective Henry Merrivale against a seemingly watertight mystery: after the police are sent a note warning them about a forthcoming crime, a man is shot in a room on the top floor of a Kensington townhouse – a house watched from all sides during the murder. Surely nobody could have gotten in or out? And yet the man is dead, and just like the last time the police received a note like this, there are ten teacups set out at the scene of the crime. H.M. is drawn to unravel this bizarre crime, as the mysterious significance of the ten teacups in murders past and present pushes the police to their limits.

Carter Dickson (AKA John Dickson Carr) was one of the masters of “impossible mysteries”, and to some extent your enjoyment of his work will depend on much you enjoy that genre. I’m not a huge fan, and I previously found Carr’s work frustrating, so even though I’ve come round to some appreciation of it, I found The Ten Teacups a bit frustrating.

The thing that gets me is that they’re always so contrived, with such tight constraints for them to function properly. And this book posits not just one impossible crime, but two. I won’t go too much into the details, but it really requires so much fine-tuning of murder that it always feels artificial to me. I did like the practice of footnoting back the pages where you can find the clues, though — or at least, I found it interesting as a convention.

There is one really macabre moment when you realise that someone has made a corpse into a chair to hide it, and is sitting on the corpse. Just. Yipes. There’s some genuine atmosphere in that portion of the story.

On another note, I found the portrayal of the Welsh character a little discomforting. Perhaps the aspect of him being wild/savage/atavistic wasn’t meant to be correlated with his Welshness, but I suspect it was, and that’s… just weird and unpleasant in a book from 1937. You’d have thought the Welsh would be seen as properly human by then, surely.

Not a favourite of Carr’s work for me, for sure, though your mileage is likely to vary: apparently this is regularly voted one of the best impossible mysteries of all time!

Rating: 2/5