She Died a Lady John Dickson Carr 9781780020051 Books
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A SIR HENRY MERRIVALE MYSTERY. A suicide pact was just the sort of notion that would appeal to Rita Wainwright. Her notorious love affair with the young American actor, Barry Sullivan, was flamboyant enough to warrant a dramatic ending, so when the two of them vanished over a cliff one rainy night, leaving only a farewell note for Rita's husband and a pair of footprints to the edge, no one doubted that it was suicide. No one, that is, but Doctor Luke, Rita's old family doctor and one of the few people in the seaside village of Lyncombe who genuinely liked her. When amateur detective Sir Henry Merrivale, who is in the district having his portrait done by a local artist, agrees to investigate, the questions start piling up. But what of it? Are the doctor's doubts without merit, or was there a more sinister plot at play? It takes the blustering, rampaging H. M. to solve this baffling mystery.
She Died a Lady John Dickson Carr 9781780020051 Books
John Dickson Carr (JDC) was a major figure in the Golden Age of crime fiction, an American who loved Britain. His most popular and important works were written between 1930 and 1950.He was once called the King of Crime, reigning with Agatha Christie as the Queen of Crime during the Golden Age of detective fiction, roughly between the world wars, when the essence of the story was the plot. "Fair-clued" these plots were called, meaning that the reader had all the clues available to the detective, before the deneuoment. Ellery Queen was most famous for challenging the reader with "You know what Ellery knows. Can you solve the crime before he does in the last chapters?" The characters in these plots were stock players, and the author's ingenuity was shown in how they could shuffle the same deck and once again pull off a three-card monte.
Agatha Christie is still one of the world's best-selling authors, but JDC is known only to afficionados of the locked-room mystery, his forte. There are several reasons for this. Most important is that Christie's prose is timelessly bland (like Conan Doyle's), as easy reading as it was a century ago. JDC is melodramatically breathless. Every time he uses the phrase "the emotional temperature rose to fever pitch", which he does in almost every novel and story, I want to stab the book with a knife. His prose was appropriate for the Golden Age, but in his works after that until his death in 1977 it just seemed silly.
Christie created Poirot and Marple. JDC created Merrivale and Fell, two characters at least as deserving of remembrance. More importantly, JDC was the master of the fiendishly difficult locked-room plot, a tradition often disdained by high-brow critics, but relished by the rest of us plebs, and resurrected in recent decades by Banacek and Jonathon Creek.
John Dickson Carr, and his alter ego Carter Dickson, is worthy of your attention. Imagine you are in London in 1941, the BBC radio has closed for the night, and you are tucked up in bed with a hot water bottle at your feet. Before the air-raid sirens sound and you have to leave for the shelter, you might be able to get in a few chapters of Mr Carr's latest.
This novel (1943) features Merrivale at his comic best (or worst, depending on your point of view). In this book, Carr is at the height of his powers. A short ten years later, he will be a bewildered American who has lost the pre-War England he loved, writing books in a style that no one wants to read.
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She Died a Lady John Dickson Carr 9781780020051 Books Reviews
As an American boy in France, I was often drawn to the cliffs of Normandy from which, if I stood on tiptoes, it seemed I could almost see the southeastern quadrant of England, the so-called "hellfire corner" which had borne the brunt of much of the V-2 activity during World War II. The cliffs themselves rose seventy feet in the air, yet during high tide the water rose a good thirty feet, so that a good swimmer might actually make a successful dive off the cliff. We played with white pebbles at its edge, tossing them at the white water rafters at the edge of the sea. Grandfather told us that long ago, Victor Hugo had written about such brave, existentially challenged fishermen, calling them the TOILERS OF THE SEA. In SHE DIED A LADY, one of Dickson Carr's famous "pronoun novels" (including HE WOULDN'T KILL PATIENCE and IT WALKS BY NIGHT), Carr makes use of a similar dramatic cliff vista as the center of his chilling and somewhat far-fetched impossible crime caper.
Elderly Alec Wainwright (well, he's 60, not so old, but beyond having sex with his wife) is apparently complaisant to the affair Canadian-born Rita is having with a boy actor, Barry Sullivan. Rita, a sort of Rita Hayworth type, full of animal fire, is 38, while young Barry, a mere stripling of perhaps 25, cuts quite a figure in his trim British bathing trunks with a white belt. Everyone in the village knows they're having an affair, but our narrator (Dr Luke Croxley, not in good health himself) may be the first to suspect they are plotting to kill Alec, a la the famous Edith Thompson case, or perhaps more to the point the Stoner-Rattenbury affair about which Terence Rattigan wrote his underrated play CAUSE CELEBRE. In both true life true crime cases, an elderly husband was brutally struck down by a paiur of adulterous lovers.
When one or more of the four characters disappear right off the edge of the cliff, we suspect a dramatic suicide. But is it murder hastily covered up? Anyone who has ever lived in France will agree, men have done strange things for love, and Sir Henry Merrivale knows this better than most men. At first you think this is going to be another MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, and Carr seems to play with our expectations, teasing us into thinking we've got the correct solution taped, them all of a sudden he reveals all that Agatha Christie chazzerai was just another way to casser les couilles à quelqu'un--the reader is warned.
Could have been better if the central character, Rita , had been shown in more detail. Same for the lover.
Well, this is Sir Henry Merrivale. There's nothing much to add, really. This last sentence is written only because required more words.
John Dickson Carr tended to avoid setting his mysteries during the war years, which makes this novel possibly unique among his works. Not only does it take place during the opening years of World War II in England, but the wartime setting is integral to the mystery.
Carr, writing under his Carter Dickson pseudonym, created once again an "impossible" crime for his detective Sir Henry Merrivale to solve. In yet another departure from Carr's usual style (but not unique to this tale) the novel is narrated for the most part in the first person by Dr. Luke, and that is a very careful strategy of the author, as he wants you to draw a parallel to a famous Agatha Christie novel.
It's a great setup, a baffling mystery, and oddly for Carr, a rather poignant conclusion.
Since this is a Merrivale story, there are also some good slapstick comedy scenes.
John Dickson Carr may not be as widely read as Agatha Christie or
Dorothy L. Sayers, but he deserves to be. One of the first recipients
of the Grand Master award, in fact. The Henry Merrivale mysteries--
turned out under the pen name "Carter Dickson"--are brilliantly funny,
eerie, and incredibly well-plotted. Don't miss!
John Dickson Carr (JDC) was a major figure in the Golden Age of crime fiction, an American who loved Britain. His most popular and important works were written between 1930 and 1950.
He was once called the King of Crime, reigning with Agatha Christie as the Queen of Crime during the Golden Age of detective fiction, roughly between the world wars, when the essence of the story was the plot. "Fair-clued" these plots were called, meaning that the reader had all the clues available to the detective, before the deneuoment. Ellery Queen was most famous for challenging the reader with "You know what Ellery knows. Can you solve the crime before he does in the last chapters?" The characters in these plots were stock players, and the author's ingenuity was shown in how they could shuffle the same deck and once again pull off a three-card monte.
Agatha Christie is still one of the world's best-selling authors, but JDC is known only to afficionados of the locked-room mystery, his forte. There are several reasons for this. Most important is that Christie's prose is timelessly bland (like Conan Doyle's), as easy reading as it was a century ago. JDC is melodramatically breathless. Every time he uses the phrase "the emotional temperature rose to fever pitch", which he does in almost every novel and story, I want to stab the book with a knife. His prose was appropriate for the Golden Age, but in his works after that until his death in 1977 it just seemed silly.
Christie created Poirot and Marple. JDC created Merrivale and Fell, two characters at least as deserving of remembrance. More importantly, JDC was the master of the fiendishly difficult locked-room plot, a tradition often disdained by high-brow critics, but relished by the rest of us plebs, and resurrected in recent decades by Banacek and Jonathon Creek.
John Dickson Carr, and his alter ego Carter Dickson, is worthy of your attention. Imagine you are in London in 1941, the BBC radio has closed for the night, and you are tucked up in bed with a hot water bottle at your feet. Before the air-raid sirens sound and you have to leave for the shelter, you might be able to get in a few chapters of Mr Carr's latest.
This novel (1943) features Merrivale at his comic best (or worst, depending on your point of view). In this book, Carr is at the height of his powers. A short ten years later, he will be a bewildered American who has lost the pre-War England he loved, writing books in a style that no one wants to read.
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