The lost gallows A London mystery

Carr (1906--1977) is at the top of his game in this taut whodunit first published in 1931. Paris police chief Henri Bencolin, who has come to London for a play's opening, is nearly run down in the street by a limousine driven by a dead man, whose throat, he can clearly see, has been slit from ear to ear. The victim turns out to have been the chauffeur for a wealthy Egyptian, Nezam El Moulk. The baffling murder appears connected to a campaign of terror orchestrated against El Moulk by someone who calls himself Jack Ketch after a notorious English hangman. Ketch manages to infiltrate the Egyptian's locked residence to leave ominous objects, such as a wooden model of a gallows. The tension builds after Ketch calls the police and says, "Nezam El Moulk has been hanged on the gallows in Ruination Street," a nonexistent address. The revelation of Ketch's real name is both shocking and logical, and Carr maintains a creepy atmosphere throughout. The British Library Crime Classics series has unearthed another worthy golden age puzzle. (Apr.)

In his second appearance, originally published in 1931, juge d'instruction M. Henri Bencolin, "the most dangerous man in Europe," bets his old friend Sir John Landervorne, retired assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard, that he can solve an impossible crime within 48 hours. Nezam El Moulk, an Egyptian long resident in London, may be wealthy and powerful, but he's scared stiff of whomever left a miniature gallows in his locked flat in the Brimstone Club and sent him notes signed Mr. Jack Ketch, the ancient British sobriquet for the hangman. Jack seems to have a special fondness for terrorizing the people around El Moulk, from young George Dallings, who's confronted with the gallows after wandering lost in the London fog, to Richard Smail, El Moulk's American bodyguard, who's spotted behind the wheel of his employer's otherwise empty car with his throat cut, to Colette Laverne, a friend of Dallings and El Moulk who vanishes soon after telling Bencolin's amanuensis, Jeff Marle, about a 10-year-old murder Jack seems bent on avenging. Even before El Moulk himself is spirited away to the nonexistent Ruination Street, the atmosphere is deliciously creepy, and Bencolin, who "find[s] 'people' eminently dull," does an impressive job of sorting out the evidence left behind by the dead. The appended 1927 story "The Ends of Justice" shows Bencolin and Landervorne puzzling over the impossible murder of Roger Darworth, whom Carr (1906-1977) must have liked enough to kill off again in even more baffling circumstances in The Plague Court Murders (1934). Blood! Thunder! Vengeance served cold! Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.