To Wake the Dead

After arriving in England, a man and his wife on vacation from South Africa are murdered several days apart, and in separate locations. The husband goes first, and even though he is murdered in a country manor, a hotel attendant in a natty jacket with silver buttons is spotted leaving the crime scene. The same hotel attendant appears near the wife's death scene in a ritzy London hotel. The fact that the hotel attendant had showed up at the first murder, where he didn't belong was what really baffled me about this mystery. If I had been the widow, I would have avoided hotels like the plague, especially those where the attendants wore navy jackets with silver buttons. But she didn't, and my favorite suspect was in jail at the time of her murder. Of course, nothing is quite as it seems in a John Dickson Carr mystery. He plays fair and if you assume that there is really no such thing as a 'locked room' you'll soon be hallooing merrily down the murderer's trail. I suspected everyone in turn, even the murder victims, since Carr made a point of saying that their faces had been smashed in. The narrator of "To Wake the Dead" (1938) is a young mystery writer, Christopher Kent, who works his way from South Africa to England after a friend bets him he couldn't travel a step without his rather hefty bank account. He arrives in London well after the murder of his cousin, Rodney and manages to blunder into the hotel room where Rodney's wife has just been killed. Christopher spends the rest of the novel arguing about the murders with Carr's serial detective, Gideon Fell (someone has to) and trying to figure out why his Communist girl friend seems to despise him (I think he deserves a much nicer fiancée). There is Carr's signature denouement where the real murderer is exposed, but not before Christopher is almost killed in a very creepy scene in the graveyard next to the manor house. This is an atmospheric between-the-wars English mystery, full of false suspects and almost-locked rooms. Draw the blinds, pull up a comfy chair in front of the fireplace and try not to spend a lot of time worrying about the hotel attendant with "a hole or something where his eyes ought to be," standing in the shadows behind you.

To my mind John Dickson Carr was the greatest mystery writer of the twentieth century in the sense that he was the most skilled at creating bizarre and fascinating puzzles. No mystery writer who plays at all fair with clues and evidence created works in which it was more difficult to guess the solution and identify the murderer. Though Carr's characters could be a bit flat, their interactions and conversations are refreshingly intelligent and plausible. He usually did a nice job creating a sort of P.G. Wodehouse meets Edgar Allan Poe atmosphere as well, with straight-laced upper-class Brits faced with frightening situations often hinting at the supernatural. TO WAKE THE DEAD is one of his most intricate and baffling puzzles, though I think not one of his very best books. It drags a bit in the middle and the "Watson" character through whose eyes we encounter the action is a bit of a dud. Carr fans will want to check it out though, and if you are a mystery lover and have not read his work, you should!