Merrivale Holds the Key: Two Classic Locked-Room Mysteries

The Plague Court Murders (1934) and The Red Widow Murders (1935) are two of the first, and best, mysteries featuring John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson's detective Sir Henry Merrivale. In the first, a cynical promoter of séances is brutally murdered while in a locked room, and a legendary local ghost is seemingly the only suspect. In the second, a young man agrees to spend the night in a haunted room, and when the room is unlocked after two hours he is dead of no apparent cause, and had been for more than an hour--though he had seemingly answered calls from his friends waiting outside the room during that time. The mysteries baffle everyone, including especially the readers--no detective fiction writer ever produced mysteries that, while being fair in the presentation of clues, were harder to figure out--but H.M. is always equal to the challenge. While in some of his later (postwar) appearances H.M. became a more comic figure, given to tantrums and buffoonery, this tendency was as yet under control in these works, which established the character's well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest literary detectives of the so-called Golden Age of mysteries. His introduction in Plague Court Murders is classic. The "Maestro" welcomes old friends and colleagues who he worked alongside as espionage agents during the "Great War" into his shabby Whitehall office, unapologetically drinking brandy and smoking cigars while at work, and in his inimitable cranky, intimidating style, begins to get to the bottom of gruesome, baffling, seemingly supernatural crimes. But there is a real sense of sadness as well as fun about H.M., whose loud antics thinly veil his regret over the deaths and disappointment his cases invariably bring to light, and his keen, watchful intelligence--he is like a poker player (and H.M. is mentioned off-handedly as being a fine one) whose bluster and jokes are intended to distract his opponents and observers from figuring out what he is really thinking and planning. One can readily see how H.M. could have been a formidable intelligence officer (where deception is so critical) as well as a masterful detective. But what really sets him apart from the Holmeses and Queens and Wolfes is perhaps that he seems immensely more sheer fun to spend time with. At one point in The Red Widow Murders (Chapter 11) H.M. insists that his "Watson" spend a late night with him at home, drinking whiskey and coffee, conversing interestingly and intelligently but rarely to the point, and playing board games ("what looked like children's pursuits") until the sun comes up. There likely has never been another fictional detective as amusing, interesting, and impressive, and he was never more so then in these two classic novels.