Poison in Jest

"Death mixes equally well with brandy or bromide--in Judge Quayle's still, vast, and terror-filled house." I love the old Collier Books paperback reprints of John Dickson Carr's novels--this is the way I first read POISON IN JEST. I don't know if you can make it out from the little picture of the cover, but there's a bottle of some green labelled poison (marked "poison"), a snifter of brandy, a huge crystal decanter, and out of the decanter, an impressionistic sketch of an elaborate, Gothic bed, with poor Doctor Quills collapsed on it--the bed looks like it's shooting out from the brandy bottle, like the drawer of a cash register. This is the one in which young Jeff Marle, the Watson of M. Bencolin from Carr's earlier novels, returns home to Pennsylvania and pays a bread and butter call on his old childhood friends, the Quayles, only to find that in the ten preceding years the Quayles have been having a long days journey into night. The mother has become a monomaniac, the father a paranoid who sees a white marble hand scuttle towards him like a fat white spider. The five children whom Jeff once knew are now all grown up and all variously in trouble. Jinny, the youngest, is still perhaps the healthiest, and she is engaged to a bizarre detective, Pat Rossiter, who winds up solving the case through sheer mental magic. In one memorable sequence he asks everyone in the room to pretend they are children and to draw pictures with pencils of a man, a woman, a dog, and a house. We each draw simple objects differently, and yet the sane among us all tend to draw certain aspects the same--the mad very scarily. The oldest daughter, Mary, is a repressed spinster type, and her brother, Matt, is her opposite number, the paterfamilias in training. Clarissa, the beauty, is now a selfish hausfrau careless of her devoted husband's love, while Tom, the joker of the pack, was kicked out of the family many years back and now nobody has heard from him for years. Does he lurk somewhere outside Judge Quayle's still, vast, and terror-filled house? Carr does some of his best writing here, and the revelation of the actual relations between father and son that closes chapter 17 is really amazing. Where he falls down a little, as usual, is with his psychological portraits of his women. He's sort of creepy about women at the best of times and here, he offers to explain the "physiological" reasons for Clarissa's accidie in a way that makes one shudder and say, No thanks. But in general I make a bold claim to cite POISON IN JEST as the best (except for THE BURNING COURT) of any of the novels Carr/Carter Dickson set here in the USA. I don't know, how do the rest of you feel?

A poisoner and ax-murderer is stalking through the corridors of Judge Quayle's gloomy old Pennsylvania mansion--or as the lurid cover of the Popular Library edition puts it, "Murder Runs Wild in a House of Fear." Usually poisoners don't switch to axes. It is also normal for them to stick to a single poison. But John Dickson Carr really lets loose in this mystery and gives us a dysfunctional family's gourmet guide to poisons--three of them: arsenic; morphine; and hydrobromide of hyoscin (the infamous Dr. Crippen used hyoscin to dispose of his wife in 1910). In the 1930s, arsenic could be purchased in any pharmacy as a rat poison, but for the latter two poisons to be lying around the mansion, it helps to have a doctor marry in to the family. Sadly enough, the doctor who marries into this family is the third victim to be poisoned and the first to die. A creeping marble hand that has been broken off of a statue of the Emperor Caligula also serves to heighten tensions, especially after two people see it scurrying along window ledges like a big white spider. Jeff Marle, who shows up in many of Carr's Bencolin mysteries as the Parisian juge d'instruction's clueless sidekick, is back in his native Pennsylvania for "Poison in Jest." He is invited over to chez Quayle to critique a manuscript, and almost from the moment he walks through the door, people begin to keel over, including his host. He stays on to help find the poisoner, assisted by the eccentric fiancé of Jinny Quayle. This fiancé is another Dr. Gideon Fell in very slight disguise, e.g. he isn't fat and he doesn't stomp around with crutches. However, he does pop up in the oddest corners, muttering mystical clues that don't really shed any light on the murderer's identity. Luckily this Dr. Fell clone dies a-borning--I believe this is the only book where he shows up, thank god. It wouldn't do to have two of them clumping and mumbling through Carr's mysteries. Read "Poison in Jest" for its brooding Gothic atmosphere--the marble emperor's detached hand; lights that won't stay on; staircases creaking in the night. The mystery in the end is rather easy to solve, since there is only one person left whom nobody would suspect.

A poisoner and ax-murderer is stalking through the corridors of Judge Quayle's gloomy old Pennsylvania mansion--or as the lurid cover of the Popular Library edition puts it, "Murder Runs Wild in a House of Fear." Usually poisoners don't switch to axes. It is also normal for them to stick to a single poison. But John Dickson Carr really lets loose in this mystery and gives us a dysfunctional family's gourmet guide to poisons--three of them: arsenic; morphine; and hydrobromide of hyoscin (the infamous Dr. Crippen used hyoscin to dispose of his wife in 1910). In the 1930s, arsenic could be purchased in any pharmacy as a rat poison, but for the latter two poisons to be lying around the mansion, it helps to have a doctor marry in to the family. Sadly enough, the doctor who marries into this family is the third victim to be poisoned and the first to die. A creeping marble hand that has been broken off of a statue of the Emperor Caligula also serves to heighten tensions, especially after people see it scurrying along window ledges like a big white spider. Jeff Marle, who shows up in many of Carr's Bencolin mysteries as the Parisian juge d'instruction's clueless sidekick, is back in his native Pennsylvania for "Poison in Jest." He is invited over to chez Quayle to critique a manuscript, and almost from the moment he walks through the door, people begin to keel over, including his host. He stays on to help find the poisoner, assisted by the eccentric fiancé of Jinny Quayle. This fiancé is another Dr. Gideon Fell in very slight disguise, e.g. he isn't fat and he doesn't stomp around with crutch-canes. However, he does pop up in the oddest corners, muttering mystical clues that don't really shed any light on the murderer's identity. Luckily this Dr. Fell clone dies a-borning--I believe this is the only book where he appears, thank god. It wouldn't do to have two of them clumping and mumbling through Carr's mysteries. Read "Poison in Jest" for its brooding Gothic atmosphere--the marble emperor's detached hand; lights that won't stay on; staircases creaking in the night. In the end, the mystery is rather easy to solve, since there is only one person left whom nobody would suspect.