"Murder!" He Rasped: The Rasp (1924), by Philip MacDonald

"What do they call the thing?"

"Wood-rasp [answered Gethryn].  A file for wood."

"If you love me, call me mister, call me mister, Boydie dear."

Boyd Laughed.  He found Anthony refreshingly unofficial.

"I love little pussy, her hair is so black, and if I don't catch her she'll never come back.  Now, where did you come from, Blackie dear?  And have you left any other cards?  O, Shades of Doyle!  What a game!"

"I am Dupont [Dupin?], I am Lecoq, I'm Fortune, Holmes and Rouletabille.  Good night."  

"Gethryn, you're fatuous.  Take to crochet."  

Anthony Gethryn speaks in The Rasp (1924)

two Forties Penguin eds

We often refer carelessly to "detective fiction from the Golden Age," which is generally taken to mean mysteries published in the period between the two world wars, but if fans of the period really think about it, it probably occurs to them that most of their favorite mysteries from this period, with perhaps a few exceptions like books by Christie, Sayers or Crofts (or Van Dine to the diehards), come from the Thirties not the Twenties.  

Many of the "Golden Age" mystery favorites did not even begin publishing books until the Thirties or the very late Twenties (Queen, Carr, Allingham, Mitchell, Marsh, Innes, Blake, Bruce etc., etc.).  The Detection Club did not form until 1930.  Really, the Twenties is best understood as the decade when the form was only beginning to establish itself and take firm shape.  The hangman's tree was planted in the Twenties, one might say, but it didn't fully bloom until the Thirties.  

I think British crime writer Philip MacDonald personified this phenomenon.  He published two series Anthony Ruthven (pronounced "Riven") Gethryn detective novels in 1924 and 1928, then opened a floodgate of inventiveness between 1930 and 1933, producing no fewer than 14 detective and crime novels during this time, along with two more mainstream novels, averaging four books a year.  MacDonald grew restive with straight detective fiction and at least six of his novels in this period can better be termed mystery thrillers rather than detective fiction.  Perhaps his major innovation was the serial killer novel.  He was one of the most important popularizers of this subgenre with his books Murder Gone Mad (1931) and X v. Rex, aka The Mystery of the Dead Police (1933).  

After MacDonald moved to California to write screenplays for the film industry, his book output dropped significantly.  There came just five more crime novels: another thriller (with Gethryn) in 1938, one if his most highly regarded, Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared, then a spy novel in 1941, a psychological thriller in 1948, a domestic suspense thriller in 1955 and an adieu to the genre with a final Gethryn novel, The List of Adrian Messenger, more a thriller, in 1959.  

MacDonald said that during these years he wrote an occasional novel to "let off steam."  Afterward he mostly retired from writing for the most part, having reached his sixties.  In the 35 years between 1924 and 1959 he published 21 crime and detective novels, 14 of them between 1930 and 1933 (plus one more in 1938).  

The Thirties truly were the author's heyday as a crime writer, though his sporadic work in the forties and fifties is worthy of his name.  His two Twenties Anthony Gethryn novels, now, I'm not as crazy as about.  I see them rather as 'prentice works and curate's eggs, with some good parts but not the main components of a truly enticing omelet.  

I recently reread MacDonald's debut detective novel (discounting two which he wrote with his father in the early twenties), The Rasp, and confirmed my original judgment of it; and I am now rereading his follow-up, The White Crow.  Both of these novels received boffo reviews back in the day, and The Rasp, which saw its 100th anniversary last year, remained in print over much of that time and is still in print today.  From the very year it was published The Rasp was praised as a crime fiction classic, and for many decades it was regarded as such, though today it strikes me as quite dated.  (It struck me as such back in 1990s as well to be honest.)

young MacDonald

Philip MacDonald was all of 23 when he published The Rasp.  If that didn't make him a prodigy like, say, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (I'm listening to his third violin concerto right now, which he composed 250 years ago at age 19 in 1775), Mac compared well with other crime juveniles like John Dickson Carr, who published his first, It Walks by Night, at the same age, 23, in 1930 and Margery Allingham, who made her mystery debut at 24, I think, with The White Cottage Mystery in 1928.  

World War One had been over for less than six years when Mac--I have no reason to believe this was his nickname but for convenience I'm using it henceforth--published The Rasp and he claimed to be a war veteran of four years' experience.  This claim has never been challenged as far as I know, but I simply don't see how to swallow it.  MacDonald was only 13 when the Great War, as it was then known, commenced, and just barely 18 when it ended.  If he lied about his age and served in 1917-18, say, surely he could not have gotten away with serving at 13 or 14!  This was no longer the age of drummer boys.  

Whatever the truth of MacDonald's war service (I've never actually seen any record of it), he created in Colonel Anthony Ruthven Gethryn (he modestly prefers to be called Mister), a suitably heroic personal alter ego.  Yes, it seems an author once again has gone aMarySueing, or whatever the male equivalent of that form of dream casting is called.  

English author EC Bentley had supposedly cut the Great Detective down to human size with his mystery Trent's Last Case in 1913, but if these men (and they were almost almost always men) were, in contrast with Holmes, constantly flippant and insouciant about life, they were also something in the way of amateur geniuses.  Gethryn is very much in the mold of Bentley's Trent and Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, not to mention Van Dine's Philo Vance, who was to pop up in a couple of years, dropping his 'g's, patronizing everyone around him and airily discoursing on everything under the sun, like tropical fish, scotties and Chinese and Egyptian antiquities.   

Mac actually provides us with a bio of the amateur detective in chapter two of The Rasp--very kind of him, I'm sure.  We learn from it that he's the "son of a hunting country gentleman of the old type, who was yet one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his day, and of a Spanish lady of impoverished and exiled family who had, before her marriage with Sir William Gethryn, been in turn governess, dancer, mannequin, actress and portrait painter."

Mac allows that with such parentage "it was perhaps to be expected that [Anthony Gethryn] should be no ordinary child.  And he was not."  Of course among Golden Age gentleman amateur detectives Anthony was a dime a dozen, a penny packet.

Gethryn would have been right at home with the Crime Queens' Wimsey, Albert Campion and Roderick Alleyn, a natural genius who wears his genius lightly if not frivolously, and a consummate charmer of the ladies.  Let's see how many other boxes he ticks:

prep school and Oxford, where "he covered himself with academic glory which outshone even that of his excellence at racquets and Rugby football" and excelled not just at math but history and classics

left Oxford at 23 (he was born in 1886, btw), then "read for the bar; was called, but did not answer.  He went instead round and about the world...."

after four years "returned home to settle down, painted two pictures which he gave to his father, wrote a novel which was lauded by the critics and brought him not a penny, and followed up with a book of verse which, though damned by the critics, was yet remunerative to the extent of one hundred and fifty pounds."

served as private secretary to a promising M.P.

joined the army eleven days after the British declaration of war on Germany and was wounded in 1915 ("a rifle bullet, an attack of trench fever, and three pieces of shrapnel"), but was soon in Germany doing intelligence work due to an intervention by his uncle Sir Charles Haultevieux de Courcy Gethryn, "a personage at the War Office." ("Anthony spoke German like a German.")  Promoted to the rank of colonel, he was awarded a bunch of medals, but he doesn't talk about those and he prefers to be called mister.  

His father and mother died, leaving him only "a few hundreds a year," so he had to find work.  He wrote another novel and painted three more pictures, then returned to his secretaryship with the M. P. but was "bored to extinction."  

Fortunately (?) his uncle died, leaving him "a dreadful house in Knightsbridge and nine or ten thousand a year [about three-quarters of a million pounds today!].  Anthony left the secretaryship, sold the house, set up in a flat and removed from carking care, did as his fancy took him."  (I don't know about you, but I had to look up "carking.")

Getting reacquainted with an old college friend, Spencer Hastings, Anthony--I'll get familiar like the author--decided to invest in Hastings' weekly London review The Owl.  He also "designed the cover, wrote a verse for the paper now and then, sometimes a bravura essay."

I don't know about you, but after learning all these details about Anthony, I hated the guy.  

But he's not as bad as all that in practice.  Raymond Chandler abominated these sorts of Mary Sueish gentleman detectives, most of them created by middle-class women (though his antidote was to create a Mary Sueish professional detective), but plenty of people loved them.  Although Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey preceded Anthony by a single year, in The Rasp Anthony set the mold for this superior genteel breed in many ways, most notably in falling madly in love with a suspect in the case and later marrying her in the second novel.  By the time Wimsey, Campion and Alleyn had got around to getting hitched Anthony had mostly retired from the game.  

*******

It's through The Owl that Anthony is called into the murder case in The Rasp.  At the prompting of his efficient secretary Margaret Warren, Spencer Hastings sends him down to Abbotshall, the Surrey country house where cabinet minister John Hoode has been beaten to death in his study with a wood-rasp.  (Yes, you read that right.)  

Down there Gethryn encounters Superintendent Boyd of Scotland Yard, a former pal from his intelligence days when he was "lent" to Anthony during a "great and secret roundup" of German spies in London in 1917.  Happily Boyd evinces "none of the chagrin commonly attributed to police detectives when faced with the amateur who is to prove them fools at every turn."

As that quote shows The Rasp is filled with meta observations about detective fiction, about which many cliches had accumulated even by 1924.  Earlier Anthony thinks to himself: "A cabinet minister murdered without a mystery?  Impossible!  All the canons were against it."  Later we get:

"No originality!" said Anthony plaintively.  "It's all exactly the same.  Ever read detective stories, Boyd?  They're always killed in studies.  Always!  Ever notice that?"

"It's too rule of thumb.  The Profligate Secretary, the Missing-Banknotes, The Fingerprinted Blunt Instrument!  It's not even a good shilling shocker.  It's too damnation ordinary, that's what it is!"

Anthony continually invokes past masters like Doyle, Gaboriau and Freeman, insisting that the case is more complex than it seems.  It's a sort of locked room situation, but the police go for the obvious solution, naturally, and quickly fasten upon Hoode's manly private secretary, Archibald Basil Travers Deacon.  (Carr actually once pronounced the private secretary the most likely to be the murderer in a Twenties mystery, and he should know.)  

When the police find Deacon's fingerprints on the rasp, it's all over bar the hanging, as far as officialdom is concerned.  But Anthony thinks otherwise; and flippant gentleman amateur sleuths can never be wrong, surely.  You can be certain he will clear A. B. T. Deacon and find the real dastardly killer who has set the private secretary up for a fall.  By the way, could Deacon, with his cumbersome Christian names and his initials, have helped inspire, over a decade later, Agatha Christie's Alexander Bonaparte Cust?  

Anthony also falls in love with a neighbor of Hoode's, Lucia "Loo" Masterson Lemesurier, a beautiful youngish brunette war widow.  At least I think she's a war widow, the book tells us her husband died four years earlier, which I'm guessing would have been 1918, setting the book in 1922. She's involved in the case because on the night of the murder she was trying to protect her brother, a neurasthenic war veteran who was Hoode's previous private secretary.  Gosh, what is it with these private secretaries?  

Lucia thus falls in with the long line of magnificently devoted sisters who will nobly sacrifice all to help deeply problematical male siblings.  Jefferson Farjeon, mystery writer and brother of children's writer Eleanor Farjeon, simply adored this trope.  Don't know what Eleanor thought of it!

The older book this mystery actually most resembles is the prewar Trent's Last Case, though I don't believe Anthony mentions Bentley or Trent.  He does Bentley two better (or worse), however, with not just one falling in love story but three!  There are three impending marriages at the end of this book: Anthony and Lucia, the exonerated Deacon and Loo's younger sister Dora, and Spencer Hastings and Margaret Warren.  It's a bit much, I think.  This matrimonial plum pudding is too fruity.

I regret to say it, but I think the best section of this mystery is the first chapter, which is not even about Anthony, but rather Spencer and Margaret.  Their relationship is charming and the satire of the press is cute.  "Abbotshall Murder!  Cabinet Minister Assassinated!  Horrible Atrocity!  Is it Bolshevism?"  (This sounds like FOX News on antifa.)  Mac could have made Margaret an intrepid girl reporter and sent her down to investigate the murder rather than Anthony, but, alas, convention demanded an insouciant gent for the occasion rather than a plucky lady. 

I like the title of the novel: there's something sinister about a rasp as a murder implement.  But also, the explanation for Doyle's fingerprints being on the weapon is very clever, probably the cleverest thing about the book.   Gethryn makes a 35-page written explanation of how he solved the case (45 pages in the hardcover editions), which may be a little too much of a good thing even for puzzle fans.  

Happily, however, both Anthony and the author improved in later outings.  It's only fair to add that the book was raved in its day and became an almost instant "landmark" of detective fiction.  Five years after it was published in 1924, S. S. Van Dine included The Rasp as a selection in his Scribner's Detective Library, six volumes with, in addition to The Rasp, the following titles: Doyle's The Sign of Four/Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery, Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Freeman's The Eye of Osiris, Crofts' The Cask and Mason's The House of the Arrow.  

The Twenties were represented by Crofts, Mason and MacDonald; Van Dine evidently could not bring himself to include Mary Roberts Rinehart or Anna Katharine Green or Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or something by Sayers (women, bah!); and modesty (ha!) compelled him to omit one of his own books.  But, still, whatever Van Dine's own biases, The Rasp would reappear again and again, remaining in print, I believe, over every decade of the twentieth century.  Ellery Queen, a great Philip  MacDonald admirer, would declare it a cornerstone of mystery fiction.  It was reprinted by three different American publishers as late as the 1980s.  Just in that one decade!

But I think Mac went on to do much better things, a sentiment with which the author himself would have agreed.  In his introduction to a 1963 omnibus volume of three of his novels, including The Rasp, he wrote of his debut solo effort that after he was finished with writing it, he wasn't sure whether it was any good at all.  The writing of mysteries that were "literate and credible as well as scrupulously fair to the reader," he declared, was "pure self-torture!"  

Perhaps this is why afterward Mac gravitated increasingly to crime novels with strong thriller elements.  Puzzle construction needs more than a rasp to fashion things into shape.  Mac never did become a member of the Detection Club, something which still seems rather odd, come to think of it.  He remained in the UK for part of the early 1930s, as we will see.  

A Sprig of Laurel: Philip MacDonald, Some Preliminary Biography and Bibliography

Phillip MacDonald (1900-1980)
in his early thirties at the time of his
height of popularity as a crime writer

British novelist and screenwriter Philip MacDonald (1900-1980) was once of the most famous crime writers extant, but today he seems something of a forgotten man. Some of his books actually remained in print into the 1980s, after his death at age eighty in 1980, and for many decades at least five of them were deemed classics by vintage mystery aficionados: his debut mystery The Rasp (1924) and the crime novels Murder Gone Mad (1931), X v. Rex (1933), Warrant for X (1938) and The List of Adrian Messenger (1959), several of which were pioneering serial killer novels.  

Part of the reason for MacDonald's comparative obscurity is due, surely, to the fact that he did little to publicize himself personally.  

When he died in 1980 at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, his obit in the Los Angeles Times was pitifully short, neglecting even to mention his crime writing career, describing him as a "veteran motion picture screenwriter" and "playwright in his native Scotland."  Prior to coming to California he was born and and lived in London and as far as I can tell did not write a play.  There are many other recorded details about his life that are in error as well, I have found.  

one of the many reprint editions  
of The Rasp

Several of MacDonald's titles had been reprinted by Avon and the Collins Crime Club in the 1970s and Dover Press reprinted The Rasp in 1979.  Vintage Books would reprint another round of his titles in the early 1980s after his death.  Carroll & Graf would reprint The Rasp in 1984.  When I started reading mysteries as a young man MacDonald was one of the authors I used to look for in used bookstores, where something by him usually could readily be found.  

One senses that MacDonald himself had something of an aversion to being known as a mystery writer.  After publishing The Rasp, which introduced the author's future series sleuth Colonel Anthony Gethryn, in 1924, when he was only 23 years old, MacDonald did not publish another Gethryn saga for four years, despite the acclaim that The Rasp had won acclaim from reviewers.  

MacDonald married the following year and the couple had a daughter in 1926, additional facts the recorded history omits to mention.  Unfortunately the marriage would founder in the 1930s.  

Also in 1927 MacDonald published a very successful war thriller novel Patrol, in it allegedly drawing partly on his own combat experiences.  It is said that he served in "all the campaigns in Mesopotamia for three years during the World War," but if he did he must have lied about his age, because he turned eighteen less than a week before the armistice was signed.  I know teenagers of the day lied about their ages to serve in the war (one was supposed to be nineteen to serve overseas), but it seems a bit much to believe that MacDonald got away with serving in combat at the age of fourteen or fifteen.  If he did, that is some story in itself!

One of the few facts that ever was consistently reported about MacDonald was that he was a grandson of Scottish minister and noted fantasy fiction author George MacDonald (1824-1905), who must have been a remarkably charismatic person indeed, judging from his rather mesmeric, Rasputin-like photos.  In contrast with the great big bushy beard of his Victorian grandfather, who died in 1905 when he, Philip, was shy of five years of age, Philip sported only a fashionably clipped moustache.  Oddly when Philip died in 1980, it was on the same date, December 10, that George had been born in 1825.  

not the mystic Rasputin
but the minister George MacDonald

George MacDonald's most renowned grandson published a second Gethryn mystery, The White Crow, in 1928, but he did not open the crime fiction spigot until 1930.  Then he kept it flowing at an impressive rate for the next four years. Between 1930 and 1933 MacDonald published 14 mystery novels, eight of them with Gethryn and three of them under the pen name Martin Porlock.  These were successful and highly publicized works in both the United States and the United Kingdom.  Then there was a gap before a single Gethryn mystery, The Nursemaid who Disappeared, aka Warrant for X, appeared in 1938.

What else was going with the author in the Thirties?  Well, it is said that MacDonald moved out to Hollywood to write screenplays in 1931, but I query this.  

The author's first wife seems to have been living with their daughter in London in Earl's Court in 1934, but both mother and child traveled by ship from London to Los Angeles that year.  Was MacDonald living in LA alone for three years, or did he maintain a transatlantic existence, or was he simply in London for most of that time?  I think Macdonald probably did not actually relocate to LA until 1932/33 (not that long after Edgar Wallace went there to work on the script for King Kong and ended  up dying there), and his wife and daughter followed him out there in 1934.

Both grandfather and and son were tellers
of tales with lively imaginations.  
George had eleven children; Philip just one.

Between 1929 and 1931, MacDonald was involved as a screenwriter with seven ENGLISH films.  The first of these was Lost Patrol, a silent adaptation of MacDonald's novel Patrol.  Then there came Raise the Roof, the first British musical (a talkie obviously).  Then there came five films helmed by noted director Michael Powell (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, etc.).  The first two of these, Rynox and The Rasp, were co-written with Powell and crime writer Jefferson Farjeon (who himself had a famous grandfather) and adapted from Macdonald mysteries.  

There in fact appears to be no connection between MacDonald and Hollywood until 1933/4, when director John Ford made his own film version of Patrol, called The Lost Patrol.  Made around the same time was The Mystery of Mr. X, which obviously was an adaptation of MacDonald's X v. Rex, and Menace, adapted from MacDonald's novel RIP.  MacDonald also worked at the time on three other screenplays, including the series mystery Charlie Chan in London.  He stayed a busy fella in the Thirties!

In the early 1930s
MacDonald left England and made
a name for himself in Hollywood

I don't believe it's any coincidence that MacDonald's American screenwriting credits start in 1934, nor do I think it's incidental that the author's crime fiction career suddenly comes to a screeching halt, for four full years, at the end of 1933.  For what it is worth, his paltry 1980 LA Times obit states that he began his screenwriting career in 1933.  

Moreover, a 1933 newspaper publicity article (one of the rare ones) about Macdonald posted from Hollywood certainly makes it sounds as if the author is a newcomer to LA.  Ironically the main theme of the piece is how Macdonald hates publicity: "A comfortable apartment, a pipe and a can of shag is more to his style."  How English!

Some time between 1934 and 1943, MacDonald and his first wife divorced, for he married again in 1943.  (She remarried too.)  Their daughter married in California in 1947.  The two women were still alive in 1980, when MacDonald died, but sadly he seems to have been estranged from them.  No mention of them, or of his first wife, or even of his grandfather is made in his obituary.    

Ellery Queen, or more precisely Fred Dannay, seems to have cajoled MacDonald back to mystery fiction again in 1946, when he published MacDonald's "Malice Domestic" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1946.  A Gethryn story, "The-Wood-for-the-Trees," would follow the next year.  A suspense novel, The Dark Wheel, which MacDonald co-wrote with a friend, appeared in 1948, making it the author's first novel in a decade.  

a much lauded crime writer in both the US and UK

Four years later in 1952 MacDonald published his first crime story collection, Something To Hide (Fingers of Fear in the UK), which was awarded the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for best short fiction in 1953.  Three years after that MacDonald published a second short story collection, The Man out of the Rain, and a suspense novel, Guest in the House.  "Dream No More," one of the stories from the second collection, won a short fiction Edgar as well in 1956.  

Gethryn returned in the final, much-lauded MacDonald novel, The List of Adrian Messenger, in 1959 (it was nominated for an Edgar for best novel, though it did not win); and a final fanciful short fiction collection, Death and Chicanery, appeared in 1962.  I'll be back soon to post on some of MacDonald's short fiction, providing some more details about his life as well.

I am pleased to say that I will be involved in the upcoming months with reprinting some of his work.  

The Adventure of the Two Collaborators: The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), by John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle

1952-53 was a tough time for John Dickson Carr, who in his mid-forties suffered from physical illness and overall disenchantment with life.  But still the man persevered.  At the end of 1952 he was working on finishing the Sir Henry Merrivale detective novel The Cavalier's Cup (1953) and had started the historical mystery thriller Captain Cut-Throat (1955); he was also trying to write Sherlock Holmes radio scripts for the BBC (based on the original tales) and to complete his series of Sherlock Holmes short story pastiches with Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle.  With the cooperation of Adrian and the rest of the Doyle family, Carr had published an acclaimed Arthur Conan Doyle biography in 1949 and he and Adrian, who was four years younger than Carr, became friends.  

the two collaborators
Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr

The disgruntled Carr was quite struck with wanderlust at this point in his life and he bopped back and forth among New York, London and Tangier in the early Fifties.  His eldest daughter Julia had married in July 1951, but he still had two young daughters and his native British wife Clarice with him and they all moved to London after the wedding.  By the end of the year they were all in Tangier, Morocco, where they stayed for four months and Carr completed his non-series mystery novel The Nine Wrong Answers.  

In April 1952 they were all back in London again and in July Carr returned alone to New York, leaving his family at Bristol.  In New York he rejoined Adrian Conan Doyle, who was there for a Sherlock Holmes exhibit (a recreation of the sitting room at 221b Baker Street), and there the two men decided together to write a dozen Sherlock Holmes pastiches for a short story collection, drawing on cases briefly mentioned in the canonical Holmes stories.

The was a significant moment in Holmes history because Adrian Conan Doyle had always zealously fended off attempts by others to write Holmes pastiches and parodies, even going so far as to get Ellery Queen's 1944 anthology, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, suppressed.  Adrian seems to have come to feel differently about it, however, when he was involved and stood to profit from it.  Although his two siblings from Doyle's second marriage, Denis and Jean, disliked the project, Adrian was able to go forth with it anyway, and he was convinced that it would be a big moneymaker.  

John and Adrian wrote "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks" together in July and started another pastiche, "The Adventure of the Gold Hunter."  Adrian announced the project to the press in August, but it took Carr until November to get everything ironed out with publishers.

Meanwhile, Carr had returned to Tangier, where he in October completed "The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers" and "The Adventure of the Highgate Miracle," and had devised plots for "The Adventure of the Black Baronet" (for which Adrian was to do most of the writing) and "The Adventure of the Sealed Room" (which Carr was to write).  There would be six more tales after that, for which the two men would have primary individual responsibility.  

Life magazine contracted to pay $10,000 for "Clocks" and Collier's was to publish the rest of the stories for $40,000.  This is about $600,000 today!  A third was to go to Doyle, a third to Carr and a third to the Doyle estate.  

In The Man who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, modern Arthur Conan Doyle biographer Andrew Lycett takes a decidedly dim view of the Doyle boy duo, his two surviving sons from Sir Arthur's second marriage:

Denis and Adrian (and the latter in particular) were both spendthrift playboys.  Denis married Nina Mdivani, who claimed to be a Georgian princess....Adrian took a more sober Danish woman, Anna Andersen, as his wife, but lived at a chateau in Switzerland, surrounded by Ferraris and mistresses.  

These two sons used the Conan Doyle estate as a milch-cow....Because neither man ever did anything useful in his life, they both took pleasure in making things difficult for anyone who tried to write about their father.  The even bridled at the Baker Street Irregulars' conceit of playing the game....

But even the two sons came to realize that a good biography can be useful for a dead author's reputation.  

Carr had been able to break through the temperamental claptrap and establish a good relationship with Adrian. To be sure, the two men had certain qualities in common, like their love of the aristocratic past and their florid romanticism, though Carr was a crime writing genius and Adrian patently was not.  But by the end of December 1952 came Carr's crack-up.  Carr's biographer Doug Greene describes what brought on the author's disintegration:

Carr could no longer take the pressure.  Not only was Doyle demanding more stories, but Carr' health was breaking down; he was having difficulties with agents and publishers; and the BBC was exerting pressure on Carr to complete the Sherlock Holmes radio plays for which he had already received a partial payment. 

Doyle had just finished "The Black Baronet" (for which, he said, he did 90% of the writing), and Carr had written the first three pages of "The Sealed Room" when on Jan. 2 he commenced what Doug Greene calls "a two-month drinking binge."  (He also had been working on completing The Cavelier's Cup and commencing Captain Cut-Throat.)

In March 1953, writes Doug, Carr's wife Clarice "flew from England to Tangier to rescue him.  With the fistula, the drinking and the chloral hydrate, he was in bad shape, weighing about ninety pounds. [5'6" Carr normally weighed around 140.]  Clarice took him back to the United States where he began to recover from some of his health problems."  

Adrian Doyle "was in a tizzy," writes Doug, because "he had no choice but to complete the final six stories himself."  Adrian was no plotting genius, it is evident, for in the six stories for which he assumed complete responsibility, it's obvious, when one reads them, that he looted his father's tales for ideas.  Over at his review of the stories at his blog, Nick Fuller outlines Adrian's borrowings.  Most obviously "The Adventure of the Deptford Horror" (which Nick thinks is the best of the "Adrian Six") cribs Sir Arthur's classic Holmes tale "The Adventure of the Speckled Band."  If you're going to steal, steal from the best!

"The Black Baronet" was televised, with Basil Rathbone in the part of Holmes, in May 1953 for CBS' anthology series Suspense.  Sadly, the episode, the last time Rathbone ever played Sherlock Holmes on film, is not believed to have survived.

Under the title The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes the book collection of the tales was published in the US and the UK in 1954 and it is in print as an eBook today.  How does it stand up after seven decades?  Let's take a look.

*******

Adrian Conan Doyle
taking a break from playing knight
in 1948 (with his wife Anna Andersen)
like John Dickson Carr
Adrian expressed alienation
from modern life
see Life magazine

First let me say, I'm not reviewing the strictly Adrian Conan Doyle tales, the Adrian Six, which I'm not impressed with at all.  I agree the best of the bunch is "The Deptford Horror," with a memorably creepy-crawly climax, but it's such an obvious crib job I can't get into it.  So let me just move on to the six stories which Carr was actually involved with.  (All of them were at least plotted by him.)  These are, again:

The Adventure of the Seven Clocks (Carr and Doyle) ***1/2

The Adventure of the Gold Hunter (Carr and Doyle) ***1/2

The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers (Carr) ****1/2

The Adventure of Highgate Miracle (Carr) ****1/2

The Adventure of the Black Baronet (plotted by Carr, mostly written by Doyle) ****

The Adventure of the Sealed Room (mostly Carr?) ****1/2

My verdict: they are very good!  I first read these tales around thirty years ago and I remembered them favorably, though I only remembered Clocks in detail for some reason. In them Carr's plotting genius clearly remains intact and his writing (and Doyle's) is quite good, though the two exclusively (or nearly so) written by Carr definitely bear his imprint more than Arthur Conan Doyle's.  It's very difficult, I think, for a first-rate author is his own right to write pure pastiche.  Adrian was better at imitating his father's style.  But than Adrian was a vastly lesser talent than Arthur Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr both.  But let's get on with it all, shall we, the game is afoot!

The Seven Clocks 

"Mr. Holmes, he cannot endure the sight of a clock!...In the past fortnight, sir, and for no explicable reason, he has destroyed seven clocks.  Two of them he smashed in public, and before my own eyes!"

Celia Forsythe, lovely young companion to Lady Mayo of Groxton Low Hall, comes to Holmes and Watson with the strange case of Charles Hendon, a man who simply cannot abide the presence of clocks.  Is he simply deranged, or is something altogether more sinister afoot?

This is a clever story with an intriguing mystery and a smash climax sharing similarity, in that respect, with a certain detective novel by Carr's friend John Street, aka John Rhode and Miles Burton.  I definitely see the hand of Carr in the plotting as well as the writing, both in the bits of humor and Carr's characteristic writing, at the time, about women.  

Watson is very smitten indeed with Celia Forsythe, seeming rather like Chief Inspector Masters for the first time meeting scrumptious young (and looking young younger) Ginny Brace in The Cavalier's Cup: "our caller was a young lady: a girl, rather, since she could hardly have been as much as eighteen, and seldom in a young face have I seen such beauty and refinement...."  

Holmes jabs poor Watson about his drinking and his newlywed status, throwing in a little sexual innuendo.  This is very Carr!  Watson's wife Mary appears briefly and it seems that the bloom is already off the rose of their marriage, not something I recall from the stories:

That night, as we sat hand in hand before the fire in our lodgings, I told her something of the strange problem before me.  I spoke of Miss Forsythe, touching on her parlous plight, and on her youth and beauty and refinement.  My wife did not reply, but sat looking thoughtfully at the fire.  

When Watson remembers that he is supposed that evening to go to Baker Street, where Celia will be, here is his wife's response:

My wife drew back her hand.

"Then you had best be off at once," said she, with a coldness which astonished me.  "You are always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes' cases."

These two here are behaving a lot more like a pair of jealous, bickering lovers from a Carr novel (admittedly with Victorian restraint).  Probably the most discordant element in the Carr pastiches.  It makes me want to write a parody of a Carr pastiche of Holmes, with Carr going full Carr on poor Holmes.

Lady Mayo is very much a Carr bluff older gentry woman, while there are references to the author's, Carr's, beloved Jacobean era.  

To Watson a bored Holmes make a very Carrian observation early in the tale: "Where is crime, Watson?  Where is the weird, where is that touch of the outre without which a problem is as sand and dry grass?  Have we lost them forever?"

The emphasis on the weird and outre being essential to a mystery sounds more like Carr than Doyle.  If Carr was worried he was running out of inspiration, however, it happily is still very evident in these six stories, more so than in his immediately contemporary novels.

The Gold Hunter

"Mr. Holmes, it was death by the visitation of God!"

This is the Rev. Mr. James Appley telling Holmes and Watson about the strange death in his small parish in Somerset of Squire Trelawney, "the richest landowner for miles about."  

"[P]oor Trelawney did not die a natural death.  Not only the police but Scotland Yard have been called in," the good reverend explains, adding dramatically that nor was Trelawney murdered: "[H]e could not possibly have been murdered.  The greatest medical skill has been used to pronounce that he could not have died from any cause whatsoever."

If murder could be proved the reverend's own nephew, Dr. Paul Griffin, would be a suspect, for Trelawney "changed his will" shortly before his death, he divulges, "leaving his entire fortune" to his nephew.  Trelawney disinherited his niece, Dolores Dale, whom he considered a frivolous wench.  She is engaged to a young solicitor named Jeffrey Ainsworth.  For some reason Dolores is "gratuitously offensive" to the young doctor.  

This one is basically an enjoyable country house murder mystery with definite Carr touches.  The story is very well-clued, although one point is effectively withheld, Carr playing the sort of politician's linguistic games with a key detail that he sometimes did in his novels.  

I can't say more, but Dolores Dale is very much a Carr girl.  When we learn that Squire Trelawney "thrashed poor Dolores with a razor-strop, and confined her to her room on bread and water, because she had gone to Bristol to see a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera, Patience," it seems very much a Carr detail.  Carr did hate puritanical types.

Carr drew the "impossible" murder method in the story from one of his excellent Forties radio plays, which I believe Doug Greene collected in the anthology The Dead Sleep Lightly.  I actually liked the play better than the story, but some people don't go in for reading radio plays.

Inspector Lestrade puts in an appearance, and he is as dim as ever, if not more so.  The "gold hunter" of the title is a watch, which helps Holmes crack the case.

The Wax Gamblers

"I don't like it a bit when those blessed wax figures begin to play a hand of cards!"

In this one an old man, Sam Baxter, nightwatchman at a famed wax museum, Madame Taupin's (aka Madame Tussaud's) calls at 221b Baker Street late at night with his granddaughter Eleanor.  He's convinced someone has been monkeying with an exhibit of card players in the Room of Horrors.  Either that or the gamblers become animated when no one is watching!  

This is a neat little story, rather humorous, and more Carrian than Doyleish.  It also works in one of those nasty, sneering aristocratic villains Carr employed so much in his historical mysteries.  It draws upon, and improves, a 1942 Carr radio play.

The closing line expresses a classic Carr sentiment in its dig at modern intellectuals:

"There is more wisdom in that French epigram than in the whole works of Henrik Ibsen."  

It also has a classic Carr triplet from a hysterical young woman: "Never! Never! Never!"

Ironically in real life in 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle  presided over a meeting of the Upper Norwood Literary and Scientific Society, of which he was president, at which English critic Edmund Gosse spoke sympathetically about controversial Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, author of such notorious problem plays as A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler.  Afterward Doyle spoke, broadminedly comparing Ibsen to Russian novelist Leo Tolstoi and opining that "frankness in dealing with unconventional themes was a less evil than the bolstering up of conventional untruths."  

The Highgate Miracle

"That umbrella will be the death of me; yet I must not relinquish it!"

Another classic Carr variant on the impossible vanishing, a miracle plot which he used in A Graveyard to Let (1949) and The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (1945).  It concerns a henpecked married man by the name of Cabpleasure (Carr will have his fun with that name) and his strange obsession with his umbrella.  Mrs.  Cabpleasure is one of Carr's classic "bossy" matrons; her acid repartee with Holmes is quite amusing.  Lestrade appears in this one, in his stupidity provoking Holmes ironically to comment to Watson: "It is only when I have been with Lestrade that I learn to value you."  

In return Carr allows Watson to ding Conan Doyle's penultimate (I believe) Sherlock Holmes story, the not very well-regarded "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger" (1927), a problem which the doctor admits "afforded little scope for my friend's great powers."

Not so this tale: it's a Carr classic which gives Holmes ample opportunity to shine.  

The Black Baronet

"My guide-book says that at Lavington the past is more real than the present."

This serious tale, full of romantic melodrama, as mentioned was probably written mostly by Adrian Conan Doyle, but the murder gimmick is classic Carr.  Doug Greene explains that Carr reached back for it to a college story that he published in 1926, when he was only 20.  

The story concerns the stabbing death of Colonel Jocelyn Dacey, a guest of Sir Reginald Lavington at his old moated manor, Lavington Hall, in Kent.  There is a woman in the case too, Sir Reginald's wife Lady Lavington, a former stage actress.  Inspector Tobias Gregson, a Lestrade upgrade, is on the case, and suspects Sir Reginald did the foul deed in a fatal moment of violent passion, but where is the murder weapon?  

This is a fine story (with an excellent final line) that one can definitely see both writers having contributed to, given their romantic temperaments.  

The Sealed Room

"A sealed room!  "Oh, my God, a sealed room!"

No, it's not Chief Inspector Masters, but another one of Carr's distraught young ladies.

Arguably the best of the Carr Six as a miracle murder problem is this final story in the group.  Carr would use the ploy again in his last published mystery in his lifetime, the novel The Hungry Goblin (1972).  

The tale starts off with Watson and his wife being visited by a hysterical young woman, Cora Murray, who promptly faints, but after coming to consciousness again tells a tale of woe.  It seems that her friend from India Army days, Eleanor Grand, married a certain Colonel Warburton and went to live in England.  Cora went to live with them too.  

Now Colonel Warburton is dead from a gunshot wound and Eleanor gravely wounded, the colonel apparently having shot his wife and then himself in his sealed curio room.  The atmosphere of the curio room, "heavy with the aromatic mustiness of an oriental museum," reminded me of Carr's The Arabian Nights Murder (1936).

Also present on the night of the Warburton tragedy were Chundra Lal, a sinister Hindu manservant, Major Earnshaw, a seemingly permanent houseguest, and Captain Lasher, the Colonel's visiting nephew (a lot of ranks in this case).  Youthful Inspector Macdonald from The Valley of Fear intelligently assists in this one.  Holmes even gets to make use of his great knowledge of tobacco. 

This is a classic Carr tale that reads like it was not only plotted but written by Carr as well, though Doug says the author went on his drinking binge after finishing only the first three pages of it.  I think he must have returned to it at some point in 1953, because to me it definitely has the authentic Carr touch.  In an interview in 1969 (see below), a year before his death at age sixty, Adrian mentions having entirely written "six or seven" of the tales.  This would be the last six, plus, with a little exaggeration, The Black Baronet.  Let's credit The Sealed Room to Carr.  It does him, as well as Sir Arthur, proud.

"He's Dead but He Won't Lie Down!" Carter Dickson's The Cavalier's Cup (1953)

Let's face it.  The thing does have an element of--well, of what some people would call the ridiculous.  But does that make the problem any less difficult?...Who got into that locked room?  And how was it done?  And why should the cup have been moved again?  We're up against the essential detective problems of who, how and why.  Simply because there's no murder or near-murder, does that make the mystery one bit less baffling?

--Lady Ginny Brace, aka "the small girl," prettily philosophizes about mystery aesthetics in The Cavalier's Cup

"I can't stand anymore of these things that couldn't possibly have happened, but did happen!"

--an exasperated Chief Inspector Masters on locked rooms in The Cavalier's Cup

"He's crackers!  He's off his rocker at last!  I always knew it would happen!"

--an exasperated Chief Inspector Masters on Sir Henry Merrivale, locked room solver extraordinaire, in The Cavalier's Cup

I see the cavalier
but where's the cup?

The Cavalier's Cup, John Dickson Carr's final Sir Henry Merrivale detective novel, was published in the United States in the summer of 1953 and in the United Kingdom about six months later.  (It's retroactively set in 1951, when the Labour government was still in power in England.)  When Cup appeared in the US, Carr was 46 years old, the prime of life for a lot of people, but it did not feel that way to him.  

Carr hated the modern world, symbolized for him by England's Labour government, which came to power in 1945 and enacted significant social reform on behalf of the "working man," including nationalized health care.  In 1947-48 the American-born Carr with his wife and three daughters relocated to a fine Victorian house in the affluent community of Mamaroneck, New York, near  New York City.  Despite the move to the more conservative US, however, Carr's interest in writing detective fiction set in the present day still waned, and the quality of his work declined.  

After publishing Below Suspicion in 1949 Carr dropped his famed series sleuth Dr. Gideon Fell for nearly a decade and turned to writing, under his own name, historical mystery adventure novels, the first two of which, The Bride of Newgate (1950) and The Devil in Velvet (1951), seemed to revive his work.  (They are usually cited as his best historical mysteries.)  Both books were set far in the romantic English past of the author's sympathetic imagination.  

Meanwhile Carr attempted to keep going with his "Carter Dickson" series of mysteries, which were helmed by his increasingly ornery, if not positively demented, amatuer sleuth Sir Henry Merrivale; but the Merrivale mysteries he published in these years were of successively declining quality.  I recall The Skeleton in the Clock (1948), read many years ago, as pretty good, and A Graveyard to Let (1949), set in New York as the first Merrivale Carr wrote in Mamaroneck, as flawed but not bad.  The swimming pool disappearance is a thing of beauty if you go in for "miracle" problems. 

Night at the Mocking Widow (1950), a poison pen mystery set in a rather unconvincing English village, is barely passable, being full of bad things, like, as I recollect, an increasingly erratic and intolerant Sir Henry Merrivale (HM) "curing" an intensely serious teenage girl from reading grim Russian novelists by destroying her books, and a bunch of ostensibly intelligent and sound English adults getting in a public mud fight, including a bishop, a vicar and a beautiful heroine clad only in her underwear.  (It sounds like a pub joke, or Lucy Ricardo on television stomping grapes.)

Carr himself grew increasingly intolerant of other people's opinions--his biographer, Doug Greene, writes that Carr couldn't understand how anyone could like something which he himself hated--and his fondness for pranks and childish behavior increased, as if he was trying to return to his younger years, when he was happier, or thought he had been.  It's all kind of sad.

Morrow works hard to convince
prospective readers this is 
actually a murder mystery

But compared to Behind the Crimson Blind and The Cavalier's Cup, which followed in 1952 and 1953, respectively, The Skeleton in the Clock and A Graveyard to Let (I won't go so far as to include Night at the Mocking Widow) seem like blooming masterpieces.  In 1963, I found in a letter quoted in Doug's bio, Carr wrote a Swedish mystery critic that in the early Fifties he turned to historicals because he had lost interest in traditional detective fiction.  Coming from a man who saw himself as one of the prime keepers of the fair play puzzle tradition, it's a striking admission.  

It's hard to care who stabbed Sir Oswald in a locked library or to imagine the readers will care either.  But a writer must enjoy what he doing, or he can't expect to communicate enthusiasm.  If his secondary interest has always been history, it occurs to him that he may generate enthusiasm by combining the two techniques.

But Carr's historicals were hardly the rigorous puzzles he had written of yore, though they did still retain mystery interest.  (Bride even has a disappearing room.)  And in the Merrivale mysteries Blind and Cup, the mysteries, which include miracle problems, are constantly undermined by heavy-handed comic relief and tendentious social philosophizing.  Dorothy L. Sayers called her last Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel, Busman's Honeymoon (1937), "a love story with detective interruptions"; well, these last two Merrivales (also Window), might be called comic stories with detective interruptions.  Which would be fine in its own way (Michael Innes, Edmund Crispin and Joyce Porter are very good at that sort of thing), were the comic stuff not more appalling than appealing.

"the small girl" Ginny Brace
is 28 but looks 15

Today I'm looking at The Cavalier's Cup, because I finally read it, never having been able before to get past the leeringly inappropriate tone of the book's opening pages.  I actually quoted from these pages in my piece from last month, when discussing the hebephilia (sexual attraction to pubescent children age 11-14) Carr depicts in his mystery novel The Ghosts' High Noon (1969).  

In the opening of Cup, lovely, little Lady Virginia "Ginny" Brace, who is 28 but looks 15 and is described as "the small girl," pays a visit upon middle-aged, long-married Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters, and in her enticingly provocative girlishness all but, to be blunt, gives the poor man a chubby.  Looking at Ginny, Masters lasciviously thinks to himself, "this child's figure was very well developed," before hastily "averting his eyes and thoughts."  Am I the only Carr fan this gives the hebe-jeebies?  

Carr's daughter Julia

Taking a closer look at the novel I saw that Carr triply dedicated it to his daughter and son-in-law and his ailing father.  Doug writes that "he wrote all three dedicatees into the book": 

his eldest daughter Julia, then 19, as the aforementioned "small girl" Lady Ginny Brace

his son-in-law Dick McNiven, nearly 30, as Lady Brace's husband Tom 

his father Wooda Nicholas Carr, who died at age 82 not long after the novel was published in the US, as Lady Brace's American father, Congressman William Tecumseh Harvey.  

Julia had begun dating McNiven, who lived across the street from the Carrs in Mamaroneck, when she was 16 and he was 26, marrying him after two years when she was 18.  This is a relationship, as far as age disparities between the man and the "girl" go, that is right out of Carr's books.  

Lolita (1962)
Masters and Ginny never get quite this close,
which isn't to say the lawman isn't tempted.

Doug Greene writes that Ginny Brace, as she is physically described in the novel, resembles Julia Carr McNiven.  However, he also notes that Carr discordantly portrays Ginny as "an empty-headed ginch"--Carr's word in his novels for a sexy, enticingly child-like woman.  

Doug calls ginch a "portmanteau word," combining "girl with wench" to describe a woman who behaves both as a "child and seductress."  He argues that as Carr matured in the 1930s and 1940s he dropped his ginches in favor of stronger women, but by the early Fifties, the ginches were back, like a flock of fair, flirting nymphs.  

Indeed, Carr actually coins a new term for Ginny in Cup: her husband Tom calls her a ginchlet.  All I can conclude from that is that Ginny is an even more childlike seductress than the earlier ginches.  Again, Ginny's main characteristic in this book is how adorably, youthfully enticing the older male characters find her.

Her cups are full:
Carr girl filling her sweater
--with a little technological
assistance, perhaps

"Women ought to be healthy and ripe," Carr once pronounced around this time, according to an interviewer, making them sound like, well, a carton of voluptuously fleshy, juicy-to-bursting tomatoes.  The male interviewer approvingly confirmed: "Carr's women love life; their sweaters are full, their blood warm."  And some of them, whether in their full fuzzy sweaters or stripped down to their pretty lacy scanties, are--or look like they are--barely legal.  

Doug Greene dryly notes that "it is not surprising" that his daughter Julia was "not altogether delighted" when Carr presented Julia with a signed copy of his book and told her that he based Ginny the Ginchlet on her.  For this assertion Doug cites a letter Julia wrote him many years later in 1989--I do wish he had quoted directly from it!  As it stands the character conveys the idea that Carr was sexually attracted to his own daughter.  It's no wonder that Julia was not altogether charmed to see herself as the novel sees her.  

My view though is that Carr surely meant well: however these characters were conceived, the author just ended up per usual turning them, Tom and Representative Harvey as well, into his usual unfortunate stock types from this period.  Poor Mr. Harvey seems even more libelled than Ginny by the time the book is over.  It may seem incredible that Carr had no notion how poorly the dedicatees might take these juvenile characters out of a French bedroom farce, but Carr could be awfully myopic about the feelings of other people.  

house in Tangier

In Carr's defense Doug also notes that aside from his general malaise, Carr was dreadfully sick when he wrote Blind and Cup.  He was alone in Tangier, suffering from a fistula that was threatening to become abscessed and drinking heavily.  By the end of 1952 he was completing Cup and starting the historical mystery Captain Cut-Throat (1955) in addition to trying desperately to complete his assigned stories for the jointly-authored (with Adrian Conan Doyle) Sherlock Holmes pastiche collection The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), when he decided he just couldn't take it all anymore.  Immediately after New Year's Day 1953 Carr commenced, Doug tells us, "a two-month drinking binge."

Carr as a young man
before alcohol and cigarettes took
their inevitable toll

When Carr's wife Clarice finally flew to Tangier to collect him, writes Doug, he was, due to the combined effects of fistula, drinking and constant doses to himself of chloral hydrate, "in bad shape, weighing only ninety pounds."  It was as if he had been living not in Tangier but present-day Gaza.  Carr was a small man to start with, to be sure, about 5'6" and 140 pounds normally, but this is horrific, rather like Cornell Woolrich level self-abuse.  During the summer Carr came close to death when the fistula finally abscessed.  The Cavalier's Cup might well have become a posthumous novel.  

The next year Carr with hindsight's vast wisdom wrote his friend Anthony Boucher: "Like a fool I would write during this time, against all advice," resulting in "several indifferent novels."  Doug believes that this judgment was "overly generous" to both Blind and Cup.  

I have to reread Blind to be truly fair to Carr, but having finally read Cup I can say that, while it's not actually the worst book he ever wrote, it's pretty damn dreadful, due to the soapbox political preachments and the unending flow of adolescent sex comedy slapstick. With the novel's dire low humor Carr understandably may have tried to cheer himself, which I understand, but to the poor reader it can all get pretty ghastly.  Though to be fair the locked room problem is actually rather, like Ginny, a honey!

So now let me finally say something of the formal mystery plot of Cup, because there actually is one, even though Carr like a desperate, vain, aging diva sickeningly dowses it in a heavy mist of farce like perfume.  It's enough to kill any flies that might be hovering around this rotting animated corpse of a book.  But to get to the plot....

*******

It may be ersatz Jacobean but it's still
fabulously valuable to a thief.
So why wasn't it actually 
stolen and merely left on a table?

Teensy-tiny, delectably scrumptious jailbait (but not really, wink, wink) Lady Ginny Brace pays a call in his office on Chief Inspector Masters to investigate a certain matter for her: the theft-not-theft of the fabled "cavalier's cup" from her husband Tom's ancestral home, Telford Old Hall, in Sussex.  Someone somehow got in and out of the locked Oak Room, where the cup, actually an ersatz Victorian pseudo-relic, was temporarily being kept, but neither the valuable gold, jewel-encrusted cup, nor anything else, was actually stolen; the cup was merely taken out of the safe and left on the table.  So the mystery, in addition to howdunit and whodunit, is why didn't the culprit do it (steal the cup).

I'll just say the explanation to this which we finally get, after all the other damn nonsense, from Sir Henry Merrivale, whose own ancestral country estate is not far from Telford Old Hall, is really clever and very nicely clued indeed, in terms of the how, who and why.  In this respect the book is the work of a man whose technical plotting powers are still very formidable indeed.  But now, sadly, I have to move on to the nonsense, which fills, sadly two-thirds or more of the book.

Chief Inspector Masters enjoys ogling charming young (and looking younger) Ginny, to be sure, but the last thing he wants to get involved with is another damn miracle problem, especially when no real crime has been committed anyway.  But since Ginny is old money English upper crust, or rather her husband is, she is able to extract more than crumbs from the authorities, even in an England run by the Labour Party.  

Sir Herbert Armstrong, Assistant Commissioner of the C.I.D., calls to tell Masters to get on it, "as a special favor to her ladyship."  They decide that Masters will rout out Sir Henry Merrivale, a Sussex neighbor of the Braces at his rural fastness at Cranleigh Court, to help Masters, Sir Henry being, along with Dr. Gideon Fell one presumes, England's greatest authority on locked room mysteries.  So off Masters and Ginny go to Sussex.

There's a strong tone of nostalgia to Cup, both when Carr writes about England and his own work.  There are references to his earlier Forties novels The Curse of the Bronze Lamp and My Late Wives, both of them much superior books to this one, I think.  

Of course Carr romanticizes Thirties England, for him forever a paradise lost ("the ever-glorious days before that war").  Most of Carr's colleagues from the Detection Club had tremendous trouble adjusting themselves to the postwar years, but Carr was, perhaps, the most vocally disgruntled of them all.  

Carr decided, it appears to me, fundamentally to alter the relationship between Masters and HM, in a way that does no favors to Masters, at least in the author's eyes.  Masters had last appeared, I think, in The Skeleton in the Clock, which would have made a good finale for him and HM, by the by.  I can't recall that their relationship was ever as acrimonious as it is in Cup, where they positively despise each other.  (Carr refers to their "mutual distrust and loathing.")  

For his part Masters has embraced the Labour Party reforms and HM, who in the Thirties used to be a socialist as I recollect, is now an ultra-reactionary Tory, like Carr himself.  It's also evident to me, though I doubt that Carr intended it this way, that HM is suffering from the rapid onset of dementia.  

The Old Man's last hurrah is
more of a raspberry

Increasingly Carr used HM to provide both comic relief and crime solutions, crafting extensive comic bits for his eccentric sleuth in the later novels.  In The Gilded Man (1942) the Old Man's doing a magic show at a country house.  In the Curse of the Bronze Lamp he has an altercation with an Egyptian cabbie.  In My Late Wives, he's getting golfing lessons from a very Scottish instructor.  In The Skeleton in the Clock he's competing with a starchy matron to get ahold of the titular clock.  

These bits are all amusing, at least to me, but by the last four books HM's actions get increasingly egomaniacal and antisocial.  He also clearly is suffering, like our current president, from confabulation, false memories of great past exploits.  (This malady is much in evidence in Cup.)  

Carr himself was a great liar about himself, though he would fess up when called on his bullshit.  An undersized man, he yearned to have been a great athlete and the sort of romantic hero he wrote about in his historical mysteries.  But he was a great charmer, possessed of much charisma, and usually could carry people away with the tide of his bluff and blarney.  

Anyway, in Cup Carr has Masters pontificate about Labour reforms all the way out to Sussex, "preaching a strong sermon about the righting of social injustice."  Carr as far as I can tell cared not one whit about "social injustice," unless it consisted of government attempts to interfere with things he personally enjoyed doing, like drinking himself into oblivion, or, of course, taxation, which he cordially hated.  Neither do Ginny and Tom Brace or HM care about it.  

Aneurin "Nye" Bevan
righter of social injustices

Ginny dismisses "talking about righting social injustices" as ever so dreary and depressing.  On another occasion, when Ginny's impossible Democratic politician father pontificates about how "we should all humbly all bow down" before "the average man, the little man, the common man," Ginny mumbles under her breath: "To hell with the average man."  Carr may have been conservative and anti-intellectual (certain kinds of them, anyway), but he was no populist.  

Carr makes poor, inoffensive Masters the novel's primary whipping boy for the evils of socialism, although he also invents a couple of Labour politicians to ridicule and takes potshots at real life people like Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health in Clement Attlee's Labour government (1945-51), Hewlett Johnson, the Soviet-sympathizing "red" Dean of Canterbury, and even long dead King William III, nemesis of Carr's beloved Jacobite cavaliers. (There's a lot about them in this book too.)  The author gratuitously and rather disloyally denounces William as a "detestable sourpuss."  

Eventually Masters and Ginny get to Cranleigh Court, where we learn that HM is taking singing lessons from a walking caricature Italian music master named Signor Luigi Ravioli (yes, really).  In his madness Merrivale is planning to give a concert of "old English ballads of a somewhat vulgar nature" at the Tuesday Evening Ladies' Church Society of Great Yewborough.  With Luigi he is practicing a particular ditty called "He's Dead but He Won't Lie Down," which was actually not an old song, but a 1932 hit comic tune by English popular singer Gracie Fields (see below), which was referenced in George Orwell's novel Coming up for Air (1939).  There's an extended, and quite unamusing, "bit" with this song involving Merrivale and Signor Ravioli in Carr's novel.  

Signor Ravioli arguably is the most egregiously stereotypical character in the entire Carr canon, but in any event the whole book is larded like a plum pudding with great indigestible lumps of forced comedy.  There's also Ginny's and Tom's nine-year-old son, who takes greatly to HM naturally, and--well, I talk about some of this below.  

Masters and Ginny manage to get HM to come to Telford Old Hall, sadly with Signor Ravioli in tow, to look over this locked room situation.  Masters continues tiresomely to pronounce on politics and society, saying silly things I never would have expected him to say like "Not....That anybody cares two pins about history in these days.  We've got rid of history; history's all my eye."  

As I mentioned above Doug Greene is his Carr bio explained that when Carr hated something, he could never understand how anyone could like it, which explains these sorts of heavy caricatures of politics which he indulged himself in later in life.  They'd be so much more effective if they were subtle, but Carr had the subtlety of a loudly blown raspberry. 

Tellingly, in this book he has an aside dinging Henry James' masterpiece of ambiguity, the ghost story (?) The Turn of the Screw, as overly subtle. Make yourself clear, sir!

Luigi: Thatsa Italian!

Masters also calls Signor Ravioli, if you didn't think it could get worse, Signor Spaghetti.  Why not Signor Linguini or Signor Puttanesca?  Late in the novel HM starts calling Luigi nicknames like Rossini, Puccini, Paganini, Pagliacci, Julius Caesar and Appius Claudius, which I think is the origin of Carr's truly unfortunate predilection for pointless facetious nicknames in his later books.  I haven't come across this cartoonish an Italian since the old Alka Seltzer "Mamma mia! Thatsa spicy meatball!" ad.  

So far on this summary I've made it to page 58 in the narrative and, as you will have noted yourselves, practically nothing has actually happened.  It goes on like this for about 200 more pages, until HM gives about a forty-page explanation of the "crimes" (very clever) and the book ends.  But in between there's about 200 more pages of crap (with admittedly well-concealed clues) to get through.  

Masters gets sidelined around page 100 after he spends the night in the Oak Room with the cup, getting coshed for his pains.  Carr seems to find concussing Masters with a blackjack amusing and for good measure he has the Yard man fall down a flight of stairs and get knocked out again.  We never hear from the unfortunate again, making this the inglorious exit of Masters from the Merrivale canon.  

We learn about Eleanor Cheeseman, the Labour Member of Parliament from East Whistlefield, who HM recently debated, in a matter of speaking, at a theater at Cherriton.  Showing his interest in debate, HM bribed the stage hands to open a trapdoor under her on the stage during her rebuttal, dropping her sixteen feet into the cellar, where HM mercifully had mattresses placed.  So much for debate.  

Miss Cheeseman though unhurt is decidedly steamed about this and threatening to take HM to court.  Her boyfriend is Hereward Wake, a Labour economist.  HM of course decounces Labour MPs as not true working men but "half-baked intellectuals who've specialized in economics or some such dreary muck."  You won't be surprised to learn Carr hated mathematics and economics--unless these fields had some some sort of practical application to devising his beloved locked rooms, he had no use for them.

What did he really get up to 
with ladies in libraries?

Then we meet Ginny's father, William T. Harvey of the 23 and a 1/2 congressional district of Pennsylvania.  That "half" is another one of Carr's lumbering jokes, but Harvey is genuinely based on his own father, Wooda Nicholas Carr, a lawyer who served one term in the House of Representatives, 1913-15, when his son was a small child.  Unlike his son Wooda Carr was a Democrat, but like John he was a romantic, a bibliophile and a speechifier who loved being the center of attention.  WT Harvey captures these qualities in Cup, though he's also a randy widowed womanizer who falls in love at first sight with Eleanor Cheeseman, who despite being a dour leftist politician is actually an Amazonian beauty of about forty years of age.  (She's 5'7" but then Ginny is barely 5" in heels, making her about the height of a 12-year-old girl.)

We barely see mighty Miss Cheeseman in the book, Carr telling more of her exploits at secondhand. (A lot of the action in this book is told at secondhand.) Honestly it's just as well.  When they encounter each other again at Telford Old Hall, Miss Cheeseman and Mr. Harvey are so horny for each other that they go off to the library, where, we are told, they proceed to go at it together for four-and-a-half hours.  

Fortunately Ginny and Tom are indulgent with all this.  "Dad's a widower and rather susceptible," blandly explains Ginny to the others.  Elsewhere she announces euphemistically that "It always pleases me when Dad succeeds...in his educational endeavors."

Carr's octogenarian father died not long after 
The Cavalier's Cup was published,
presumably not of mortification

Was Carr's father really such a horny old goat?  In real life his wife outlived him, but they seem to have been a mismatched pair.  (Carr certainly much preferred his father to his mother, whom he couldn't abide.)  Or considering how Ginny was based on Carr's daughter, maybe this was special pleading for the author's own adultery. 

WT Harvey is much given, like Masters, to anti-traditionalist sentiments and is a decided anti-monarchist and America firster type.  "Dad hates tradition and respecting anything that's old," artlessly explains Ginny.  "He says all the stately homes of England ought to be torn down and replaced with modern apartment houses with steam heat."

Harvey, like Masters, says a lot of stupid things like this in the book, things that it's hard to imagine an American of the time actually saying.  If there is one thing a lot of Americans adored back then, it was tracing their ancestry back to Europe.  "Patriotic" Americans loved to distinguish themselves from recent swarthy immigrant arrivals from Italy and the Balkans and such places by asserting their impeccable WASP lineages (real or not), to the Mayflower, or to Jamestown, or, failing that, at least to someone who fought gloriously (or not) in the American Revolution.  This was what the zealously patriotic Daughters of the American Revolution was all about.

But not WT Harvey though!  He pronounces: "No American citizen, if he's a really patriotic American citizen, has anybody related to him who came to our great country before the year 1900.  If he has, he's no true American and he'd better hide it p. d. q.!  Ancestors?  I've got no ancestors!" 

Harvey says he hates England (he later recants from all this nonsense), but Miss Cheeseman he loves, in his sexist way.  "Madam," he tells her, "the hell with your intellect!  You're the most beautiful thing I ever saw!"  

the congressman is a big hit with
genteel English ladies

The good woman succumbs to this charm and soon the two are fucking like rabbits in the library.  "Harvey did not know it," we are told, "but he had a technique which would knock Englishwoman silly, and though Mr. Harvey himself would never have used so crude a term, made them pushovers."  This despite the politician's "homely dial."  Was this describing Carr himself, who despite his unprepossessing appearance seems to have been a hit with English women, gentle and otherwise?  

When, after the amorous pair have finally exhausted themselves in the library and Eleanor's boyfriend Hereward Wake shows up on the lawn, they espy the unfortunate economist through a window and proceed to pursue him with play bows and arrows, shooting him in the rump as he runs for his life.  Just another day at the stately home!

Eleanor, Carr salaciously tells us, is dressed only in her bra and panties.  Women stripped down to their unmentionables is a recurrent fantasy of Carr's in these years.  Carr believed that every woman, no matter how prim and proper, was a wanton deep inside, if she could only be reached there as it were; and in this book he "proves" it with Eleanor Cheeseman.

Ginny's husband Tom is as masterful a man as her father, if not more, when it comes to the ladies.  Verily, in today's internet manosphere, these two bros would be deemed the Alphaest of Alpha Males.  

At one point when the principals in the tale (all of them men but Ginny) are confabbing, Tom bossily tells Ginny, whom he later terms ginchlet, "I'll sit down in your chair, and you sit in my lap.  But none of your tricks, mind!"  A few pages later the compliant Ginny tries "hard to sound dense so as to make her husband her husband appear more brilliant."  Straight out of Dear Abby Fifties relationship advice columns!  In real life I can't imagine Carr's wife Clarice, whom he seems to have had genuine affection for, was anything like this.

Honestly it's not my aim in life to speculate about Carr's mental state and his sex life, but when he writes a book like this, what should he have expected? I'm not surprised his daughter was a bit mystified; I wonder what his father would have made of it.  

John Dickson Carr
working in radio in the 1940s (?)

At least Tom Brace becomes, like other of Carr's hero-projections, a fine athlete, a male Mary Sue.  Ginny asks Masters, "Did you ever see Tom play polo," burbling: "He beat the Indian Army practically single-handed.  And with a revolver he can shoot the centre out of the ace of diamonds at twenty yards."  Masters, this novel's punching bag, admits he has never heard of the great Tom Brace, provoking an outraged HM to sneer: "You wouldn't, you weasel.  He's not keen on Association football, and he's never gone in for much amateur boxin', so he's no hero of the great British public.  But he's got very few superiors as a swordsman, horseman and pistol-shot....All the romantic sports...."

And Tom and Ginny both "adore detective stories" Ginny confides, as she sits on Tom's lap and he fingers her "backbone in a way which makes her wriggle."  That is as long, Tom explains, as they are "proper detective stories" that "present a tricky, highly sophisticated problem which you're given fair opportunity to solve."  Not those "psychological studies," Ginny adds.  Tom amplifies: "[I] Couldn't care less when you're supposed to get all excited whether the innocent man will be hanged or the innocent heroine will be seduced.  Heroine ought to be seduced; what's she there for?  The thing is the mystery...."  

Carr's own mysteries often have considerable suspense, and sometimes they even give great play to the question of whether an innocent man will be hanged, but it's not the first time Carr's thinking on a given matter has been muddled and inconsistent.  His thinking often is more interesting not for its incisive clarity, but for what it tells us about the man.  "Heroine ought to be seduced; what's she there for?" is a sweeping reduction of the worth of women in mysteries and reflective of an adolescent male mindset that has never really grown up.  Such sexism riddles this book.  Elsewhere Carr says all women have an instinctive preference for lying.  All part of that famous Carr charm?  

Of course Carr, like other crime writers in his English peer group, didn't think much of psychiatrists (probably because they didn't really want to know about themselves; many of us don't).  Carr insisted that he was an advocate of the simon-pure detective story, but he always spiced his problem story with atmospherics.  In his heyday, these atmospherics greatly enhanced his tales, but by the time of The Cavalier's Cup, they merely distracted and detracted.  Setting his historicals aside, Carr never again wrote a great contemporary-set mystery after the Forties.  (There were only ten of them, five Fells, three Merrivales and two nonseries.)  Some might argue that he never even wrote a good one after the Forties.  I find The Nine Wrong Answers (1951) seriously overrated, but have a soft spot for The Dead Man's Knock (1958).  

"Obviously, ze locked room all zeese men wish so badly to enter symbolizes ze vagina!"

Certainly The Cavalier's Cup as a novel is neither great, nor good.  The most striking thing is that the puzzle itself, what there is of it, is rather good, in terms of its formal design.  Carr could still write a good puzzle; what he couldn't do anymore is make a contemporary mystery live as a novel.  Cup is a poisoned chalice of a book, though it might have made a boffo short story.  

It might have even made a good novel, had Carr approached the idea earlier in life.  He could have opened it with the incident of the seventeenth century cavalier in the Oak Room, which is told as a legend in the book by Ginny.  Carr was a storyteller who loved history and he often took an indirect approach to his narratives, when a direct one might have been better (certainly more cinematic).

suave SS Van Dine hitting it with a lady
(actress Jean Arthur)

Cup could even have been a dramatic story with an actual murder, but Carr began taking the detective novel less seriously.  Even traditionalist mystery writer and theorist S. S. Van Dine (see left) said that aesthetically murder was the appropriate crime in a detective novel, because it leant moral urgency to the proceedings.  Lesser crimes like theft belonged to short stories.  

Carr, however, was at a point in his life when he had started to sympathize with the criminals, certainly if they were merely thieves acting against the government.  His moral sense arguably had become distorted, to the point where he thought coshing a cop--in a book at least (and if the cop was of the Labour persuasion)--was just another bit of fun.  

For better or worse, HM became the voice of the author in these books, so let's give the Old Man the Last Word (or nearly so), on the ethics of theft:

In my philosophy, if somebody swindles or cheats or acts too sharp in a business deal, it's the lowest trick on earth and deserves years in prison.  But to pinch a book or a painting or an objet d'art out of a public institution--where, like heavy-game huntin', the odds are even--that's all right.  It shows the fine spark of individualism still burns in the brutish mass.

At least, unlike a lot of people in the States today, HM doesn't turn a blind eye to business corruption.  Carr seems never to have had an interest in, or sympathy for, the business world and the people of it.  But his notion that looting public museums and libraries is a-ok, indeed admirable, is one I find baffling.  When a painting is taken from a public museum to become part of some billionaire's private collection, it's real people, those of the art-loving public, who suffer.  

But then "to hell with the average man," right?  Certainly Carr did not see himself as an average man, nor was he such, to be fair.  Seemingly he also was not a man greatly troubled by social inequities in life.  What did bother him was losing his freedom of independent action, even a bit, to an all-powerful government.  Before her sexual conversion, as it were, Eleanor Cheeseman tellingly is reading a dreary tome entitled Our Duty to the State.

While it's not true that The Cavalier's Cup received entirely poor reviews, many reviewers were appalled with it.  Despite praising the "nice English scene" and "crisp and amusing writing," Avis DeVoto in the Boston Globe called the book "daffy," adding that "dementia in this series has grown to the point where it should be firmly checked."  

A reviewer in another American paper denounced the book's "caricatures parading as people, sniggering sexiness and schoolboy jokes."  Yet another complained that "the characters are ridiculous and the mystery is entirely obscured by the comic relief."  Sir Henry Merrivale was dubbed, fairly enough I think, "senile."  

Over in ye olde country socialist crime writer Julian Symons, decidedly unamused like the Queen, dubbed Carr's humor "elephantine" and pronounced Cup "a painful book, which, without Carter Dickson's name on it, would have been lucky to find a publisher." 

Symons is just lucky that Carr didn't retaliate by sending Eleanor Cheeseman, MP,  and US Representative Harvey after him, armed with their bows and arrows.  Hereward Wake could have warned him of the dire fate which lay in wait for dour socialists.  

NOTE: HM did have one final crime solving adventure, in short form, three years later in the story "Ministry of Miracles," also known as "The Man Who Explained Miracles" and "All in a Maze."  It's a huge improvement on Cup!