He Wouldn’t Kill Patience – John Dickson Carr (1944)

It was back in 2018 when I last read a John Dickson Carr novel that really featured the author in his prime.  The last four years still featured some good reads, but they weren’t the books that drew me to Carr – the kind you press upon others to read with a religious fervor.  I front loaded my Carr reading with the very best of his work (of which there’s a lot), and since then I’ve been slowly hen pecking through the mid to low range material put out mostly during the second half of his career (of which there’s also a lot).  For the most part they’re fine books that would stand out in any other author’s library, but there’s also some stuff that’s grating to read – 50s/60s Fell novels and his last four historicals – due to his writing being influenced by years of writing dialogue heavy radio plays.

With that in mind, He Wouldn’t Kill Patience was a true “coming home” moment for me.  What a breath of fresh air to once again experience the competent prose and artful plotting that first drew me to one of the best mystery writers of the Golden Age.  How enthralling to once more take in a (literally) air-tight locked room murder, after years of stories with impossible crimes that felt loose in their construction or minor to the plot.  To experience one more time what I felt in those first 40 books.

Now, don’t let me give you the sense that He Wouldn’t Kill Patience is a top ten Carr novel, although I have seen it on a number of people’s lists.  It’s Carr doing what he does best, and he executes it well.  This book came out in 1944: the same year as Till Death Do Us Part (popular choice for Carr’s best novel), and the follow up Merrivale novel to She Died a Lady (1943).  Carr probably is at his very peak at this point, and the slow slide starts from here.  He Wouldn’t Kill Patience isn’t quite as good as the two books that I just mentioned, but it solidly represents what you’d expect from the author at this point in his career.

The story unfolds in 1940, during the start of the London bombing campaign, and is one of the few Carr novels to prominently feature the war as it unfolds.  Against that backdrop, two magicians with a lineage of family feuding get swept up in a perplexing murder at a zoo.  A man has seemingly committed suicide by inhalation of coal gas after sealing himself in his office.  “Sealing” is the key word, as all of the cracks on the windows and doors have been covered from the inside with tape.  Suicide is the only possible explanation, but murder is suspected because the victim not only gassed himself, but also a prized snake named Patience (hence the book’s title).

It’s fairly well known that the plot for this book comes from a contest between John Dickson Carr and the magician / mystery writer Clayton Rawson, in which they challenged each other to write a mystery featuring a murder in a room sealed from within by tape.  Rawson’s entry was the short story From Another World, and the trick is accomplished in a near punchline manner that is suiting for the brevity of the piece.  Carr has more of a wow to his solution, and it feels appropriate for a novel length impossible crime.

Carr’s use of a pair of magicians to fill in the requisite romance roles is a nice touch given the Rawson connection.  That the magicians have a family feud going back centuries also provides the vicious romance that Carr does so well in books like The Case of the Constant Suicides.  The background in magic also arms our “observer” characters with insights into how the trick to the impossibility could have been pulled off, although I would have liked to see more theories thrown around, and Carr didn’t capitalize on the potential for false solutions.

“Beware of things which apparently make a trick harder to do… because those are the things that actually make the trick easier.”

Unfortunately I can’t fully judge the effectiveness of the solution to He Wouldn’t Kill Patience, because I went into the book knowing how the trick was pulled off.  Many years ago, when I was first getting into impossible crimes, I skimmed some online forums that gave away some of the solutions to Carr’s novels.  Not having a knowledge of Carr’s library at the time, I forgot all about it, but while reading a review a few years ago things clicked in place when I read the setup to the impossibility.  Sadly these are things that you can’t completely forget.

Luckily though, I did get some payoff.  I was under the impression that I knew who the killer was, and I’m happy to say that I was way off base.  So while I went through the book thinking I knew the full solution, I still got some surprise in the end.

Having known the solution to the impossibility, I can’t quite form a full impression of the novel, but I think He Wouldn’t Kill Patience was likely the last great Merrivale novel.  The Skeleton in the Clock (1948) is an excellent read, but the solution is a bit of a let down.  A Graveyard to Let (1949) is pretty solid all around, but not quite of the same heights.

Fittingly, perhaps, this is also my final Merrivale novel.  A run of 22 books, half of which are absolute classics.  I still have the novella All in a Maze to look forward to.  Published in 1963, it’s a return to the detective after a ten year gap, and comes out at the time that Carr was putting out some really bad Fell novels.  However, I’ve read good things, and perhaps the shorter form will do the story favors.