"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. 

“The Murder of a Quack” by George Bellairs

British Library Crime Classics has published both The Dead Shall Be Raised and The Murder of a Quack by George Bellairs in one volume. The books were first published in the 1940s; both mysteries reflect World War II although neither has anything directly to do with the war. Mystery expert Martin Edwards, in the introduction, describes them both as short novels. But both seem longer than what we think of as a short novel and shorter than a full-blown novel. 

In The Murder of a Quack, Inspector Thomas Littlejohn of Scotland Yard is called in to assist with  murder in a small English village. Staged as a suicide by hanging, the crime is determined to be a murder – the victim was almost strangled before he was hung. The victim is what was then known as a “bonesetter,” what medical doctors at the time called a quack and what today we would call a chiropractor. Even the man had been a “quack,” he had been a successful one, effecting cures and diagnosing ailments missed by the medical doctor.

 

George Bellairs

At first, few if any clues can be found. The victim was well-liked, or at least he hadn’t seemed capable of provoking anyone to the act of murder. Some of the village residents resent being interviewed by the police. But slowly Littlejohn begins to piece together what happened, eventually identifying the killer. 

 

One hallmark of both stories is the frequent lapse into humor. Bellairs had an eye for the foibles of village life and human nature, and he uses both in these novels to great effect.

 

George Bellairs is a pseudonym of British author Harold Blundell (1902-1982), who was first a banker and philanthropist before turning his hand to writing mystery stories. He wrote more than 50 Inspector Littlejohn mysteries, and also wrote four other books under the pseudonym of Hilary Langdon. He also wrote comedy for radio and was a newspaper columnist and freelance writer. His Littlejohn mysteries, many set outside London, provide a perceptive look at small towns and minor cities.

 

Related:

 

The Dead Shall Be Raised by George Bellairs.

 

My review of Death in the Fearful Night by George Bellairs.

 

My review of Corpses at Enderby by George Bellairs.

 

My review of Death of a Busybody by George Bellairs.

 

My review of Death in High Provence by George Bellairs.

 

Death of a Tin God by George Bellairs.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Campaign 2024: Not Left Versus Right, But Affluent Versus Everyone Else – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

Trail of Tears – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

“The Arsenal Stadium Mystery” by Leonard Gribble

It’s an exciting sports event. The Arsenal football team – the top-rated professional team in the U.K. – is playing an exhibition match against the Trojans, the top-rated amateur football team. Right after the second half of play begins, a Trojan player collapses on the field. Taken inside the treatment room, he is shortly pronounced dead. It turns out that he was poisoned by an alkaloid poison related to nicotine; a pinprick is discovered on his hand.

Chief Inspector Anthony Slade of Scotland Yard is called in. As he investigates, all of the evidence points increasingly to one of the Trojan players as the murderer, the victim’s partner in the insurance business who fiancé was being wooed by the dead man. And the evidence systematically is piling up. While everyone else is convinced of the murderer’s identity, Slade is suspicious; the evidence is just a bit too obvious and looks more orchestrated than real. He goes deeper into the lives and backgrounds of all the people concerned and discovers motives buried in the distant past.

Leonard Gribble

The Arsenal Stadium Mystery by Leonard Gribble (1908-1985) was first published in 1939, and it was notable for a number of reasons. It actually featured the manager and players of the Arsenal football (soccer) club that year. It was serialized in a newspaper before being published as book. And it helped to publicize a movie based on the story released that same year. It’s been republished as part of the British Library’s Crime Classics series.

The author of some 77 books of mystery and suspense, Gribble also wrote under the pen names of Sterry Browning, James Garnett, Leo Grex, Louis Grey, Piers Marlowe, Dexter Muir, and Bruce Sanders. Most of the books were under his own name and starred Inspector (later Superintendent) Anthony Slade. He was also a founding member of the Crime Writers Association in 1953.

The Arsenal Stadium Mystery is one of the classics of the Golden Age of Mystery (1920-1940) and should be appealing to sports fans and mystery lovers alike.

"The Division Bell Mystery" by Ellen Wilkinson

Ellen Wilkinson (1891-1947) was a Labour member of the British Parliament and, at the time of her death, Minister of Education in the Cabinet. She was associated with a number of worker, education, and women’s causes, including what became known as the Jarrow March, a demonstration by the unemployed that culminated in a march from the Manchester area to London. 

For a brief time in the late 1920s and early 1930s, she was out of office, and one of the things she did was to write a mystery novel, The Division Bell Mystery, published in 1932. The British Library recently republished the novel as part of its Crime Classis series. Wilkinson had been a fan of murder mysteries and especially those of Agatha Christie, and she tried her hand at writing one. It’s not a perfect mystery, but it an entertaining one, and it’s filled with details about the workings of Parliament.

Robert West is a young Member of Parliament who serves as Personal Private Secretary to the Home Office Secretary. He’s showing an old friend around Parliament, and they’re near the private dining rooms when the division bell rings, signifying the need for MPs to return to the House of Commons for a vote. It’s 9 p.m.; Big Ben begins to chime at the same time. And so does what clearly sounds like a gunshot.

Ellen Wilkinson

West and his friend discover the body of an American financier, who had been having dinner with the Home Secretary. At first, the death appears to be suicide, but the police come to realize that it’s murder. Then they learn that the dead man’s flat had been burglarized at the same time, and a security man killed there. 

Because of his position with the Home Secretary, West finds himself helping to investigate the murder and burglary and navigating romantic entanglements at the same time. And it’s through West’s eyes that we come to see not only a large number of suspects but also some of the inner workings of Parliament. (There’s even a character who’s an MP and has the same political inclinations as the author.)

The identification of the killer gets a little hurried at the end, but The Division Bell Mystery is still a worthwhile and rather fun read. This new edition by the British Library includes a preface by Rachel Reeves, MP for Leeds West, and a solid introduction on politics in Golden Age detective fiction by crime writer Martin Edwards.

Related: Red Ellen, a biography of Ellen Wilkinson, by Laura Beers (2016).

“The Belting Inheritance” by Julian Symons

Christopher Barrington comes to live with the Wainwright family at their home Belting in southern Kent when he’s 12, following the death of his parents in a plane crash. The family is dominated by Lady Wainwright, Christopher’s great-aunt only surviving relative. The boy knows it’s something of an odd family; Lady Wainwright still mourns the loss of her two older sons, Hugh and David, in World War II; her two younger sons, Stephen and Miles. Completing the family is Clarissa, Stephen’s wife, who seems far more interested in her dogs than anything else. 

The years pass. Now 18, Christopher completes school and wins a scholarship to Oxford. Lady Wainwright is aging and increasingly unwell, and Miles and Stephen seem to be waiting for her to die to get their inheritance. And then a letter arrives, from a man purporting to be David Wainwright, his mother’s favorite who was shot down in a bombing raid in Germany and presumed dead. The letter is soon followed by the man himself. Stephen and Miles don’t believe the man is David, while Lady Wainwright accepts him immediately and moves to rewrite her will.

Julian Symons

And then there’s murder.

The Belting Inheritance was first published by Julian Symons in 1965, and remains one of the best examples of the “return from dead” mystery novel. It’s been republished as part of the British Library’s Crime Classic Series, and it’s an excellent story. 

Symons (1912-1994) was a well-known mystery and crime writer, poet, literary critic, and biographer. He wrote some 29 mystery novels, several short story collections, and a veritable host of non-fiction works, including studies of Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and many other subjects.

Well-written and well-plotted, The Belting Inheritance is Symons at the top of his crime-writing career.

“Quick Curtain” by Alan Melville

“Blue Music” is another musical for the stage by the highly successful producer Douglas B. Douglas. It has all the right ingredients – actors, innuendo, a few double entendres, lively songs – to be another profitable venture. Except, on opening night in London, the scripted shooting of the lead actor turns out to be a real shooting. Shortly after the discovery is made, the actor who fired the gun is found hanging in his dressing room, an apparent suicide.

In fact, that’s what the inquest determines – a murder and suicide, even without an apparent motive. But Inspector Wilson of Scotland Yard, who was in the opening night audience with his journalist son Derek, doesn’t accept the verdict. He determines that the fatal bullet was fired from another location on the stage. But by whom?

Alan Melville

Quick Curtain by Alan Melville is the story of those two deaths and what follows. You might think this would be a rather conventional novel from the Golden Age of Mystery (the book was first published in 1934). It’s anything but conventional. In fact, it’s a great send-up of mystery novels, stage productions, actors and actresses, theater critics, producers, Scotland Yard detectives and just about everything else connected with mystery novels. It offers as much insightful commentary as it tells an intriguing story.

Alan Melville was the pen name for William Melville Caverhill (1910-1983), a British broadcaster, playwright, author, actor, and producer. He created 16 plays for the stage, six novels (mostly mysteries), 12 revues and musicals, 14 television programs, and three non-fiction books. The British Library Crime Series has published two of his other mysteries, Weekend at Thrackley and Death of Anton. Melville’s stage experience in on full display in Quick Curtain.