"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 Big Bow Mystery” by Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) was an author, playwright, teacher, journalist, and champion of cultural Zionism. H was born in London, the son of Jewish emigrants from what was then the Russian Empire and is now Latvia and Poland. He attended the Jews’ Free School in Spitalfields in east London and eventually graduated from the University of London with a B.A. degree (triple honours). Much of his writing was about the Jewish community in London, and he earned the nickname “the Dickens of the ghetto.”

Among his other recognitions, the phrase “the melting pot” came from his play (1909) of the same name and was especially popular in the United States. Theodore Roosevelt loved the play and wrote Zangwill a fan letter.

He also has the distinction in mystery writing circles of having written the first locked room mystery, The Big Bow Mystery, first published in 1891 and never out of print. The reader sees the influence from the first page, with the opening description of a December fog and the introduction of a landlady with the Dickensian name of Mrs. Drabdump, who operates a boarding house on Glover Street in the Bow Street area of near northeast London. One morning she oversleeps, an unusual occurrence for her, and races to wake one pf her lodgers, Arthur Constant, who had asked to be awakened early for an appointment.

When he doesn’t respond to her repeated poundings on the door, she fears the worst. She has her neighbor across the street, a retired Scotland Yard detective named George Grodman, break down the door. They find Mr. Constant in bed – with his throat slit. The windows are locked, and the door had been locked and bolted from the inside. And the death was not suicide, since no trace of a weapon can be found. It is indeed a locked room mystery.

Israel Zangwill

The murder becomes sensational news in late Victorian London, and here we see Zangwill not only telling a mystery story with overtones of Dickens but also producing something of a parody of the era and the city. And it is a story laced with (Victorian) humor throughout.

The Big Bow Mystery was written in two weeks for serialization in a London newspaper, and the fascination with the mystery story by the newspaper’s reader led Zangwill to incorporate readers and their letters suggesting solutions into the story itself. Obviously, Zangwill was having a good time.

It remains a classic, the first of the locked-room sub-genre stories with a human murderer (Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue inspired the locked room mysteries but his story wasn’t set in a locked room, only one from which a human couldn’t enter or leave). And it is still great fun to read.

Top photograph: The Bow Street area of London in the 1890s.

Anthony Wynne’s “Murder of a Lady”

Robert McNair Wilson (1882-1963) was an English physician and author who wrote some 28 mystery novels under the name of Anthony Wynne. He wrote during the Golden Age of mystery and detective fiction, roughly the period between the two world wars. His primary protagonist in these novels was Dr. Eustace Hailey. And what Hailey particularly specialized in was the locked room mystery.

Wynne’s novels have long been out of print, although a few can be found in used bookstores and online used book services (a few are listed on Amazon). The British Library Crime Classics series has, however, resurrected Dr. Hailey in Murder of a Lady: A Scottish Mystery. The series is edited by British mystery writer Martin Edwards, and he provides a succinct introduction to both Wynne and the story. The book was originally published in 1931.

Dr. Hailey, who lives in London and works on Harley Street, is visiting a fellow physician in the Scottish Highlands. The regional procurator fiscal arrives late one evening to announce that a marauder has been committed at nearly Duchlan Castle, and he needs the two doctors’ assistance. (The author makes good use of his medical knowledge and expertise to develop the story.)

Anthony Wynne

The victim is Mary Gregor, the elder sister of Duchlan Gregor, lord of the castle. Her head has been rather viciously bashed in, as if struck by an ax from behind. But there is little blood in her bedroom; and more significantly, her door was locked from the inside and the windows overlooking the local loch were bolted. She has been clearly murdered, but no one is able to understand how the killer entered or left the room. One other odd clue surfaces – a herring fish scale is found in the wound. (The book was first published in the U.K. under the title of The Silver Scale Mystery.)

The police investigator assigned to the case is a young man full of enthusiasm and action, but he accomplishes little except to offend the family, the servants, the doctors, the villagers, and anyone else living in the area. He asks for Hailey’s help. But soon there is a second murder, with the victim killed the same way as Mary Gregor, and Hailey understands what the police do not – this murder has its roots in the distant past, and in the character of the original victim.

Murder of a Lady is a classic locked room mystery, written by one of the masters of locked room mysteries.

Photograph: A scene in the Scottish Highlands by Steve Bryant via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.