The Judas Window

by John Dickson Carr, Carter Dickson

Synopsis:

Avory Hume is found stabbed to death with an arrow - in a study with bolted steel shutters and a heavy door locked from the inside. In the same room James Caplon Answell lies unconscious, his clothes disordered as though from a struggle, his fingerprints on the damning arrow.

Here is the unique Carter Dickson "impossible situation" - yet the great, explosive Sir Henry Merrivale gets down to serious sleuthing and at last startles the crowd in the Old Bailey with a reconstruction of the crime along logical, convincing lines.

H.M. in his most exciting case - an original, unconventional mystery, with a rich story background and a thrilling trial scene.

Every time the British Library Crime Classics series republish one of John Dickson Carr’s mysteries (under that name or as Carter Dickson), the intro hyperbolically refers to it as one of the greatest locked room mysteries ever, etc etc. The Judas Window was a genuinely fun one though, with one of the least goofy explanations of how the locked room wasn’t actually impenetrable, and it’s one of the books in John Dickson Carr’s oeuvre that I got on with best so far (not always having been much of a fan).

It certainly helps that much of it is courtroom drama, with the larger-than-life H.M. defending the prisoner in court, with a few sensations along the way. The character of Mary Hume is pretty amazing, and a rare one in crime fiction: having allowed a lover to take erotic photos of her and then been blackmailed about them, she comes out in court to take all the power out of it by forthrightly admitting the whole thing. I feel like this doesn’t get as much spotlight as it deserves in the story, because it’s a heck of a power play.

The puzzle works out nicely, with my only quibble being that I didn’t think the actual culprit made a lot of sense without some more clues or build-up. But that wasn’t so much the point of the story, I think, so it wasn’t a huge downside. Overall, I really liked this one.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

The Ten Teacups

by Carter Dickson, John Dickson Carr

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