"The White Priory Murders" by Carter Dickson

It’s the early 1930s. An English actress has become an American movie superstar. She is wowing the public with her return to England, intent on appearing in a West End play of the type she was booted from years before. She attracts admirers, crowds, and reporters wherever she goes (not unlike a Depression-era Taylor Swift). She’s also attracting danger, as in the arrival of a poisoned box of chocolates. 

The actress and some of her immediate circle are invited to spend a long week at White Priory, a 17^th century estate with supposed connections to Charles II and his mistress. She insists on having a large, enclosed pavilion as her room. Separate from the house, it’s next to a small currently frozen lake. 

 

When the actress is found bludgeoned to death in the pavilion’s bedroom, the most obvious fact is that the murder couldn’t have happened. There is only one set of footprints in the snow leading to the pavilion, and none returning. The snow on the frozen lake is undisturbed. So how could she have been killed?

 

Carter Dickson, aka John Dickson Carr

The White Priory Murders by Carter Dickson (aka John Dickson Carr) was first published in 1934; the mystery novel has now been republished by the British Library Crime Classics. It’s billed as a Christmas mystery, although the only connection to the season is that the story happens near Christmas. It’s the second novel in the Sir Henri Merivale detective series. As British author and crime story expert Martin Edwards notes in the introduction, Merivale became a major player in the stories almost by accident; the first in the series was supposed to feature another detective but Sir Henri kept butting his nose in, and the author gave the character his head and let him go.

 

Carr (1906-1977) write under his own name and four pseudonyms – Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn. One of the Golden Age mystery writers, he’s best known for his Gideon Fell and Sir Henri Merivale mysteries. He’s often grouped among British authors, and while he lived in England for many years, he was actually an American (in the story, Merivale talks like an American and his nephew is an American). He was also known for an esteemed biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even after suffering a stroke and some paralysis in 1963, he continued to write stories and a column for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He published some 73 mystery novels, numerous collection of short stories, several stage and radio plays, and three works of non-fiction.

 

If you like locked-room mysteries, The Murders at White Priory, with its slight variation on that theme, might be your cup of tea (if you’re British) or coffee (if you’re American). 

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

Paradise for the broken – poem by Franco Amati at Garbage Notes.

 

The 1954 London Yearbook – A London Inheritance.

 

I Keep Pretending – poem by Paul Wittenberger at Paul’s Substack.

 

Old Trees in Greenwich Park – Spitalfields Life.

 

Keep or Toss? My Personal Criteria for Culling a Library – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.