Panic in Box C – John Dickson Carr

I’m taking a jump towards the end of Carr’s career as I return to our regularly scheduled program.  Published in 1966, Panic in Box C is the second to last Dr Fell story and the sixth to last novel by the author.  Popular consensus tends to regard the previous year’s House at Satan’s Elbow as the beginning of Carr’s end of career slide, although I have seen some reviewers state that they enjoyed Panic in Box C, Dark of the Moon, and The Ghosts’ High Noon.

Panic in Box C feels different than earlier Fell works, although there is also much that is the same.  At this point, the author had been living in the United States and focusing much of his output on historical mysteries.  Nearly 20 years has passed since the core run of well-regarded Fell and Merrivale novels.  The historical mysteries that filled the gap (as far as I’ve read) have been deep in research and adventure, but lighter on mystery.  You can somewhat feel that effect on Panic in Box C.  The fact that this is a Fell novel seems to result in Carr putting more focus on the mystery, yet he also applies a liberal sprinkling of trivia on wide range of subjects.

To Be Read – Ellery Queen edition

Alternative title – what you can accomplish with $70 on eBay.

If there’s one thing I love about John Dickson Carr besides the quality of his work, it’s the quantity.  70+ titles to look forward to.  Sure, the quality ebbs and flows a bit, but I’ve yet to encounter a title that I regret reading.  I’m sure I’ll encounter a few late career ones eventually, but when my worst reads so far are The Lost Gallows, The Demoniacs, and My Late Wives, you know the author is doing something right.

There are undoubtably many GAD authors who produced a string of high quality works – Christianna Brand seems like an obvious example.  Yet her entries into the mystery genre are less than 10.  How many authors like Carr do you get who provide such high quality and sustain it for 30+ novels?  Agatha Christie is a definite qualifier.  The other author(s) likely to come to your mind is Ellery Queen.

Green for Danger – Christianna Brand

John Dickson Carr has left me with some emotional moments – the anger followed by enlightenment at the reveal of It Walks By Night; the poignancy of the end of He Who Whispers; the shock and disbelief of The Burning Court; the haunting conclusion of She Died a Lady.  Never though, have I been so impacted as the final chapters of Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger.

I was bound to delve into non-Carr works eventually and so why not take the leap with a classic?  I’ve started to accrue a backlog of books by other authors, and the temptation to branch out proved to be too much.  My first choice would have been Brand’s The Death of Jezebel, but that title has proven itself hard to find in physical form.  My tipping point was a recent purchase of Tour de Force and Green for Danger by the same author.  I desperately wanted to read the former, but worried that it may contain some end of series reveals, I opted for the earlier work.

The Mad Hatter Mystery

The second Dr Fell novel, The Mad Hatter Mystery finds us in fog-soaked London.  Ted Rampole (previously in Hag’s Nook) reunites with the doctor as they investigate a string of hat thefts plaguing the city and confounding the police.  We’re also introduced to Chief Inspector Hadley, who will go on to be the Fell equivalent of Merrivale’s Chief Inspector Masters – a likable investigator lured to false conclusions by the clues of the crime, only to eventually be shown the light by the omniscient series detective.

The stolen hats go beyond just simple theft – someone is snatching hats from people in positions of powers and placing them in conspicuous places.  On top of that, we have the theft of a rare manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe – a lost story featuring the first appearance of detective Auguste Dupin.  All of this in the first chapter of the book, plus one more thing – murder.

My Late Wives

Roger Bewlay has made his fortune by marrying women who have a habit of disappearing without a trace.  His use of aliases has allowed his first two crimes to pass by unnoticed, but a slight slip up with his third wife has drawn the attention of the police.  Under the close observation of the law, Bewlay goes on holiday with a fourth lover.  She vanishes from a guarded house, and the next day, Bewlay is gone, never to be seen again.

That was 11 years ago.  The police were never able to track down the killer, nor did they ever figure out what happened to any of the bodies.  Now, a script for a play shows up at a theatre company in London.  The author is unknown, but the play tells the tale of the infamous wife-killer’s life, both before and after the murders.  The script reveals too much – facts that would only be known by the police…or the killer.

The Bowstring Murders

Before there was Merrivale and Carter Dickson, there was Carr Dickson.  You see, John Dickson Carr was cranking out books at such a ridiculous rate that he was producing more than his publisher would bear (2 books a year).  Rather than let up the gas or build a backlog, Carr created his first pseudonym and started releasing works under another publisher.  The Bowstring Murders was the first of these efforts, and the only work published under the name Carr Dickson.  His original publisher complained that the name was too similar, so Carr adopted the much less similar Carter Dickson.  Superman himself would be proud of such a clever disguise.

The Bowstring Murders catches Carr at an interesting transition in his early career.  He’s recently wrapped up his main Bencolin works, only resurrecting the detective once more in 1938’s The Four False Weapons.  1933 has given us the first two Dr Gideon Fell works – Hag’s Nook and The Mad Hatter Mystery – providing a glimpse of the fledgling series detective.  We stand at the precipice of greatness – 1934 will start a landslide of killer puzzles that doesn’t let up for the better part of a decade.  The early Merrivale works will find Carr at a completely new level in terms of the impossibilities that he offers.

To Be Read – John Dickson Carr edition

Part of the joy of devouring a genre (or in my current case, an author) is deciding what to read next.  I imagine we all have some weird technique behind how we do it, whether it’s fully conscious or not.  For me it verges on a hobby.  That isn’t to say that I spend grotesque amounts of time thinking about reading order, but it definitely crosses my mind more than it should.  From time to time – typically spurred by a new arrival or two – I’ll examine my stack and shift things around.

My technique has evolved over time.  When I was first filling out my Carr library, I was typically buying packs of 5-15 books off of eBay.  As each batch would arrive, I’d separate it into “books I really really want to read” and “books I might get to if I decide to keep going with Carr”.  The better books would find themselves mixed into the top of my TBR pile, with the lesser titles getting dispersed towards the bottom.  At that point, the order of my overall stack was based pretty much on my research of conventional opinion of Carr book quality, and so it tended to be a best-to-worst affair.  I didn’t rely solely on lists though – certain titles like The Reader is Warned, The White Priory Murders, and The Red Widow Murders made their way to the top, bolstered in part by an interesting premise and also… well, I owned them, and I didn’t own others.