I read this for the Honkaku Discord server book club.
Dick Markham is the happiest man in the world. He’s just gotten engaged to Lesley Grant, a charming young newcomer to the village of Six Ashes. Other than some slight local grumbling about how he really should have married that nice Cynthia Drew, it looks like smooth sailing ahead. But during the village fête, Lesley enters the tent of the fortune teller and runs out in shock. When Dick confronts the man--who he knows is secretly famed pathologist Sir Harvey Gilman--he tells Dick that he doesn’t know his wife very well at all…before Lesley shoots him through the tent. An accident, she says, someone jostled her arm.
Sir Harvey turns out all right, but Dick’s nightmare is only beginning. Sir Harvey tells him that his sweet young fiancée is really a black widower who’s left multiple husbands and lovers in her wake, all of whom allegedly injected themselves with hypodermics full of poison in locked rooms. It is “one of the few problems that ever defeated my friend Gideon Fell.” Dick agrees to help Sir Harvey to set a trap to find out how Lesley does it. But the following morning, Dick gets a phone call saying “Colonel Pope’s cottage. Come at once. If you don’t come at once, you’ll be too late.” He rushes down to where Sir Harvey is staying, just in time to see someone take a shot into his drawing room with a rifle, the same one that Lesley shot him with. Sir Harvey is dead…but the shot missed him. He has been poisoned with a hypodermic. The doors and windows are locked from the inside.
Carr has yet more twists to throw at the reader. This is a book in motion; things never stop happening. Every chapter has a cliffhanger, and I can only think of one (that ends Chapter 8) that’s a dud. Yet it never feels crowded or confusing. The clues are doled out well, and while I have my issues with Carr’s choice of murderer, there is solid evidence pointing to them; from the clues that point right at them (but are obscure enough that most readers will miss them) to the obvious ones that sail right in front of you that you nonetheless simply don’t think about until Dr. Fell highlights them.
I also enjoyed the locked room. The solution isn’t genre-defining and is in many ways a conventional one. But the key is that Carr uses it in a slightly different way and puts the focus on how it differs from similar tricks. There’s also another minor impossible crime where the rifle that Lesley shot Sir Harvey with goes missing even though no one had the chance to remove it, but I didn’t like this one as much. We simply don’t get a good enough detail about what was and wasn’t possible.
I will give Carr credit for the main relationship between Dick and Lesley. I thought I knew what to expect from a Carr novel, but he made me waver. Near the end I thought, “He’s not actually going to…?” That said, while I was invested in the relationship, I didn’t find the love triangle all that convincing. This might be the fault of expectations; I first read about this book in Douglas Greene’s Carr biography, and he puts a lot of emphasis on the love triangle between Dick, Lesley, and Cynthia. “One of these girls…was clear-eyed and honest, telling the truth with a sincere purpose. The other hid many ugly thoughts behind a pretty face, which might wear a very different expression if you caught it off guard.” But I don’t think Carr sells this. There’s no real effort to implicate Cynthia in the crimes beyond any of the other suspects. She has more motive than they do, but only at one, non-murderous point does the story hinge on whether you believe Lesley or Cynthia.
This ties into another issue I had with the book: the lack of setting. "But…where is everybody?" Lesley asks at the nearly deserted village fête, and I thought the same thing. We never really get any sense of place from Six Ashes, only a small sampling of its citizenry from the suspects. The village lurks in the background, a gossip engine that Lesley is terrified of, but we do not feel that same pressure.
But overall, I enjoyed this book. While I wouldn’t go as far as some to call it an underrated Carr masterpiece, it still presents a solid mystery that will entertain and enthrall readers. Recommended.
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