The Lost Gallows (1931) by John Dickson Carr

Twelve years ago, I read an article that Otto Penzler posted to hype the upcoming The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries. One of the books he mentioned in that article was The Lost Gallows by John Dickson Carr, where a dead man drives a car and a whole street vanishes. Needless to say, I was hooked, and I’m glad to finally have a chance to read it, courtesy of the British Library Crime Classics imprint.

While It Walks by Night was set in France, Gallows moves to England. We open at the Brimstone Club, where narrator Jeff Marle, detective Henri Bencolin, and other guy Sir John Landervorne are discussing crime and mystery. Specifically, they’re talking about a strange incident that happened to Dallings, a friend of Sir John. Dallings met a young woman at a nightclub and enjoyed an evening out. But when he took her home, he missed the address she gave to the cab driver and found himself lost in fog-coated London, on a street he didn’t recognize. And there, he saw the image of a gallows, and a man walking up them.

And someone has left a miniature gallows in the room with them…

The three of them set out for the theater to watch a show and talk to Dallings but are almost run over by a car belonging to Nezam El Moulk, another patron of the Brimstone. But there’s something wrong: The chauffeur is driving, but he’s clearly dead.“We were flying in pursuit of a corpse.” After a wild chase, the car comes to a stop outside the Brimstone, where it’s confirmed that El Moulk is missing. And then a police inspector arrives, asking about Ruination Street. He received a phone call earlier that night:“Nezam El Moulk has been hanged on the gallows in Ruination Street.” El Moulk has run afoul of Jack Ketch,“A familiar hobgoblin of nursery tales […] A hangman, an executioner, applied in general to all hangmen.” Almost ten years ago today, El Moulk was involved in a shady duel that left one man dead and another hanging from the ceiling of his prison cell. It’s this latter death that Ketch wants to avenge, but the man in question was presumed dead in the war and using an alias besides, meaning our heroes will have their work cut out for them.

I should temper expectations now. This isn’t an impossible crime novel. The “dead man driving a car” bit is quickly resolved. The search for Ruination Street isn’t about a vanishing street, but the protagonists trying to find out where it is in the first place. That being said, there is a minor locked room later in the book. It turns out that Ketch has been leaving “gifts” for El Moulk in his rooms and can even make his deliveries while the doors are locked. While the explanation isn’t original, Carr clues it well and Bencolin ties it into some of the other mysteries in the book.

Because Carr puts everything in this book. Dead men driving cars! Dueling detectives! (Not that Sir John does much.) Ancient Egyptian curses! Reincarnation! You name it, Carr probably tried to put it in this book. Carr-through-Bencolin gives a sermon about how“fiction is stranger than truth,” and oh boy does he live up to that. What’s remarkable is that all of this mostly comes together. Bencolin is ten steps ahead of everyone, and Carr uses this in a teasing and creative way. Twice before the ending, Bencolin pauses to explain to Jeff (and thus the reader) some aspect of the plot and clear up some of the mysteries, directing Jeff (and thus the reader) to take that knowledge and apply it to the overall plot. And it is well-clued. When I reviewed Night, I mentioned that the main twist was well-clued but the killer less so. Carr resolves that here. There are plenty of clues, including some very clever ones that made me want to reach through the book and smack him (laudatory). And he doesn’t even bring them all up at the end! The events are confusing, but a careful and thorough reader can see through them to the truth.

My main issue with the book is the suspects. The ones in Night were all insane; these are saner but more annoying. For some reason Carr gives them not accents, but very weird speech patterns. El Moulk’s drunken secretary gets the worst of this. I know that Carr will do this throughout his career, but here it makes the suspects hard to follow. They also aren’t well defined, fading in and out of the plot. The killer is well-concealed, but Carr gets an advantage from how easy it is to forget about some of the suspects.

I enjoyed this book. Like its predecessor, it’s more of a Gothic (and a quite dramatic one) than a mystery, but the mystery aspect is stronger. I don’t know if I’d call this a hidden gem, but I’d call it an underrated Carr. Recommended for Carr fans or those who have read a lot of grounded mystery novels recently and want something a bit mad.

The British Library edition comes with an added short story, “The Ends of Justice,” written for Carr’s college magazine, The Harverfordian. Bencolin is milder in this story, although his wrath is kindled by Bishop Wolfe, a “churchman turned detective.” Wolfe played a key role in the arrest of charitable-but-impoverished Tom Fellows, who now stands under a death sentence. He stands accused of murdering his cousin Roger Darworth, a spiritualist whose death would bring Fellows five hundred thousand pounds. Darworth feared Fellows and brought Bishop Wolfe, a Dr. MacShane, and Sir John to watch his study where he and Fellows would meet. Fellows entered, but when the trio heard nothing, they entered to find Darwroth handcuffed to a chair, stabbed in the heart. And although the window was open, it led out onto a field of unbroken snow…

Luckily for the police, Bishop Wolfe found a witness who saw Fellows leaving through a window, ensuring that Fellows was scheduled for an appointment with the hangman. But Bencolin realizes the truth and rushes to save Fellows’s life. But this is a young man’s work. The solution is set-up well and makes sense of the story in the same way that Gallows does, but the solution is a bit of let-down. This isn’t a lost classic Carr. It’s good work from a twenty-something, but not the work of a prodigy, more notable for its ending and its anti-clericalism. S.T. Joshi thinks that Bishop Wolfe is a jab at Chesterton’s Father Brown. Douglas G. Greene disagrees and I’m inclined towards him, or, if it is a jab, it’s not a good one. There’s really no relation between Bishop Wolfe and Father Brown besides them both being crime-solving churchmen.

But in spite of my grousing, this story is a nice bonus for the British Library edition, and worth reading for Carr fans.

Other Reviews: The Green Capsule, The Invisible Event, Only Detect, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, A Crime is Afoot, Playing Detective, Tangled Yarns. Spoiler-free analysis at At the Villa Rose.

It Walks By Night (1930/2020) by John Dickson Carr

Cover image taken from In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel.

It Walks by Night was the novel debut of John Dickson Carr. Carr had been published beforehand—in fact, this book was an extended version of his novella “Grand Guignol”—but those were stories for his college’s literary magazine. This was his major step into the big boys’ club.

It Walks by Night hits the ground running when narrator Jeff Marle gets a wire from juge d’instruction Henri Bencolin “saying merely that there was danger ahead, and was I interested?” Bencolin is endeavoring to protect the great sportsman “Raoul Jourdain, sixth Duc de Saligny.” The Duc’s new wife, Louise, was married to the mad scholar Alexandre Laurent. Was married, since trying to slash your wife up with a razor out of a cold and senseless bloodlust puts a damper on your relationship. Laurent was institutionalized, but has escaped, and paid a visit to a renowned plastic surgeon. That surgeon is dead now. “They found Rothswold’s head looking out from one of his own jars of alcohol on a shelf.” Bencolin fears that Laurent is posing as someone close to de Saligny, and the great man himself is terrified of Laurent’s wrath.

The incident happens on the Duc’s wedding night, while he and others are celebrating at a shady nightclub. The Duc is seen entering a card room; one door is watched by Bencolin while the other is watched by a loyal police officer. de Saligny is heard to ring for drinks, but the waiter is in for a grotesque shock when he arrives: “The head itself stood in the centre of the red carpet, upright on its neck; it showed white eyeballs, and gaped at us with open mouth in the low red light.” Multiple questions present themselves: Why was the victim kneeling on the floor? Who left a copy of Alice in Wonderland in the nightclub outside? And, most important of all, how did the killer leave a watched room? Laurent’s statement, “I have ways of getting into houses, Herr Doktor, that no one knows but myself,” weighs heavily on the problem.

This is a book that leans heavily on its atmosphere. Carr is writing more in the tradition of the Gothic than a conventional mystery novel and buying into it is vital for enjoying the book. Sadly, I did not read this in the best of conditions, and the already-quite-florid language bounced off me. But there were times when it clicked, and Carr got me to believe in this dark, surreal Paris where the educated man’s idea of a good time is discussing famous murderers, and where you can almost believe that a bloodthirsty werewolf is lurking in the moonlit garden. And the end of chapter 3 is perfect pitch-black comedy.

This is not quite your conventional mystery novel. Oh, there are clues, and plenty of them. I even noticed some but failed to piece together what they meant. But Bencolin is in full omniscient detective mode, a step ahead of everyone, including the reader. The British Library edition is sadly lacking a map that makes the solution quite clear when everything is explained.* The solution a bit of a letdown after all the darkness you have to move through to get to it, but it is a simple and ingenious solution, layered well into the narrative and the other plot twists. The best is one dropped on the reader in the build-up to the finale. It’s very improbable and I don’t quite buy it, but again, Carr clues and justifies it well, and the moment of revelation is a perfect, Poe-style shocker.

The characters aren’t much to write home about. Douglas Greene rather dryly calls them “vengeful or mad,” and yeah, pretty much. I did like Bencolin’s father-son relationship with Jeff, which a dynamic you don’t often see in Holmes-Watson pairings. It humanized him while still letting him be the malevolent chess player, the pieces being human lives. And he gets some funny lines too: “Is this room ever used for any purpose other than assassinating guests?” But Sharon Grey shows Carr has absolutely no idea how men and women talk to each other.

But like I said, this is a book that demands you be invested in the exact mood it’s trying to build. If you’re not, it’ll be a slog full of melodramatic ninnies. If you are, well, they’re all still melodramatic, but they’ll have your attention. While I would not make this your first Carr, it is Recommended, especially if you can read it in the dim light, while wind rattles the windowpanes.

The British Library edition also comes with a bonus short story, “The Shadow of the Goat,” Bencolin’s debut. The story revolves around a bet between dashing young Billy Garrick and the sinister Cyril Merton, an actor with “a medieval soul.” Merton claims he’s read of sorcery that allows a man to vanish from a sealed room and Garrick bets him a thousand pounds that he can’t. The party escorts Merton upstairs where he is left behind in a room with a barred window, and the guests gather outside a door bolted on the outside to see if can escape. Then a loud bang is heard, and when they rush upstairs, they find that Merton has, indeed, vanished.

It seems that becoming invisible has caused Merton to go mad, as he follows up by killing a man in his burglarproof home and then assaulting Garrick before vanishing into thin air. Bencolin quickly wraps the whole case up, exposing Merton’s location and explaining all of crimes. The explanations aren’t Carr’s most brilliant (and indeed, one can question the feasibility of the first disappearance), but this is a young man’s mystery, and is quite well constructed, with a solid ending. (ROT13: Gurer ner nyfb fbzr cnenyyryf jvgu gur fbyhgvba gb gur obbx, juvpu znxrf vg vagrerfgvat gb pbzcner gur gjb.) This is a nice addition that almost makes up for the lack of a map.

*There are conflicting reports about this; as far as I can tell, some copies have the map, some don’t. My e-book copy did not have one. 

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, CrossExaminingCrime, The Green Capsule, Mrs. K Investigates, A Crime is Afoot, Tangled Yarns, Playing Detective, James Scott Byrnside, The Grandest Game in the World (contains labeled spoilers), Ah, Sweet Mystery! (contains vague spoilers), Mysteries Ahoy!, Dead Yesterday, The Reader is Warned (contains vague spoilers), and Bad Player's Good Reviews.

Till Death Do Us Part (1944) by John Dickson Carr

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.

Other Reviews: Beneath the Stains of Time, CrossExaminingCrime (with a look at the different covers here, beware of spoilers in the comments), The Invisible Event, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Green Capsule, Dead Yesterday, The Book Decoder, Golden Age of Detective Fiction (be warned, I think this review goes into too much detail about the plot), Mysteries Ahoy (beware of spoilers in the comments).

The Deceased Sleep In A Restless Manner

Image taken from The Invisible Event.

You know, sometimes I feel like I'm very atypical. I mean, here I am writing a blog meant to mainly on locked-room mysteries (I'll branch out, don't worry), and I haven't done anything about John Dickson Carr!

If you're reading this, then you probably know about Carr, but if you don't, I'll summarize. John Dickson Carr is considered to be the master of the locked-room mystery, and the writer of two of what are considered to be the best in the sub-genre, The Hollow Man and The Judas Window. Needless to say, it was inevitable that I would end up looking at him at some point, but do I start with one of those famous novels or maybe one his most popular? No, I start with radio plays!

The Dead Sleep Lightly is a collection of some of Carr's many radio plays. Really, he wrote a lost of these things, not jus mystery, but propaganda as well. This probably played a role in weakening his later novels, as he seemed to carry over some of the techniques, but that's neither here nor there. We're here to look at the stories presented here, and see if they're worth your time. Let's begin!

The Black Minute

Many, including Dr. Fell , gather for a séance held by a Mr. Riven. He claims that he will contact the wife of one Sir Francis Church. Obviously, this goes wrong, and Riven joins the dead, courtesy of a  knife to the throat. Now there's the problem of figuring out who could have stabbed him in  a locked room, where everyone in there was holding hands...

An excellent start. This is an excellent mystery; fairly clued, and with a simple yet clever solution. No complaints here...

The Devil's Saint

Lord Edward Whiteford, like all of Carr's heroes, has fallen in love at first sight. The object of his affections is Ileana, niece of Count Lorre Kohary. He object to the relationship, but will allow it if Whiteford can survive a night in the Tapestry Room, where people fall asleep and never wake up...

More of a thriller than a mystery story, this is still a great inclusion. Tension is handled well, the ending is good... Really, I only have one question (SPOILERS What will happen to Whiteford now? END SPOLIERS)

The Dragon in the Pool

Swimming pools can be very dangerous places. This is a bizarre enough statement to open a story, and it only get more bizarre form there. Revenge, a mysterious death, a vanishing weapon...All of it will be resolved at an underground swimming pool...

Decent story. Carr's used this trick before, but it's still well done, and the ending is terrifying. Although (SPOILERS I have to wonder why Tony didn't notice the huge spike in the water. Glass or not, I would think that it would be more visible. At least, the tile damage would be. But there I go, nitpicking. END SPOLIERS)

The Dead Sleep Lightly

Kensal Green 1-9-3-3. A number that won't leave George Pendelton's head. It's the number on the gravestone of an old flame of his. Eventually, he accidently calls it and hears her voice...over a disconnected telephone...

As the title story, this has a decent amount of weight to hold up, and it does pretty well. The story is pure Carr, with a focus on the apparent supernatural, a perfectly rational explanation, atmosphere, and a focus on justice than the letter of the law. Unfortunately, the solution is technical, though the intelligent reader (not me) can at least figure out part of the trick. Still a good story.

Death Has Four Faces

An unlucky streak at the gambling tables leaves Ralph Harvey hurting for cash. Lucky for him that this nice man wants him to smuggle a bottle of pills past customs, and he gets paid for it! In the end though, it's the employer who winds up in a mess, stabbed to death in an open square, with no one near him...

Can I just say that I like the scenarios Carr comes up with in his stories? Now that I've got that bit of praise out of the way, I'll say that this is another good story, though the solution doesn't appeal to me. (SPOLIERS How can you drop a knife onto someone's back with enough accuracy for near-instant death? I've read the Colonel March version of this story, and I like it better, because it's easier to buy that the killer could drop the knife onto his neck. END SPOLIERS)

Vampire Tower

"Just how far does any man trust his wife? Or his fiancée for that matter?" It's a question Carr would pose many times, here asking if a man can trust that his fiancée hasn't made a habit of poisoning people despite not getting near the drinks. Of course, one should always remember that Carr loves to twist things....

Once again, more of a suspense story than anything, but it's a good suspense story, even if Barbra's behavior is intensely bizarre. The ending makes up for a lot, though. Except for the fact that there are no vampires (expect the metaphorical kind), towers, and definitely no vampire towers!

The Devil's Manuscript

A young couple has car trouble in the woods and notice a man in a house. The same man who made a bizarre bet with a horror author that has put his life in danger. Is there really a story so terrifying that it can kill?

More suspense than anything, this is an adaption of some horror story that I've never heard of. It's still very good, but I have to wonder (SPOLIERS why Colston was still standing outside that window. It didn't occur to him to run? END SPOLIERS)

White Tiger Passage

Bill Stacey has had enough. For too long he has been Willie Whiskers of the Daily Record, nothing more than a marketing gimmick. Now he's on the something big: the identity of a serial killer. Al he has to do is figure out was his murdered informant meant in his last limerick....

Yes, a comedy with a serial killer. Whether or not you consider it good comedy will depend on your sense of humor, but this is an all-around good mystery.

The Villa of the Damned

Alan Stannard is greatly enjoying his vacation in Italy, taking in all of the sights... including a bizarre ritual that can make a whole suburb disappear in the mists of time..

A great end to the collection. All the usual praise applies, though with one flaw: the situation is audacious yes, but it leaves very little room for any alternate solutions.

All in all, this is an excellent and well-rounded collection. My only real consistent gripe is that some of these are more suspense stories than mystery stories, but they're good anyhow. Besides, they were written for a radio program called Suspense... (and an American counterpart...)

I give this collection a 7.5 out of 10.

Next time, Pronzini! Though it's not Nameless I'm looking at...

Also: I would like to apologize for the atrocious amount of time it took for this. I say that I'll have these done earlier, and then I take forever...