Review by Booklist Review
Everything fans of locked-room crime novels love can be found here, in this reissued 1944 stumper by John Dickson Carr, the master of locked-room and "impossible crime" mysteries that are, at once, whodunnits and howdunnits. There's the body found within a locked room with locked windows in a locked house. The victim has a hypodermic needle filled with prussic acid extending from his arm, suggesting suicide, but events beforehand whisper murder. There's the prime suspect, a seductive woman who knew the victim and may have already dispensed of two husbands and a lover with poison. And there's the conflicted Dick Markham, a playwright who specializes in psychological thrillers and whose very life depends on his figuring out whether his fiancée, the prime suspect, is about to poison him. Enter Dr. Gideon Fell, Oxford don and amateur sleuth, a master at solving impossible crimes. As Fell examines the evidence and premurder events, plot twists and turns abound to a dizzying but delightful degree, until Fell sets all to rights with his brilliant summation. The setting, an English village a few years before WWII, is beautifully well-realized. This is the fifteenth Gideon Fell mystery out of 23, and the ninety-fourth reissue in the British Library Crime Classics series. With an illuminating introduction by British crime writer Martin Edwards.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This nail-biting locked-room puzzle from Carr (1906--1977), set in pre-WWII England and first published in 1944, initially unfolds from the perspective of crime author Dick Markham, who's besotted with his new fiancée, Lesley Grant. Markham is stunned when a fortune-teller visiting the village of Six Ashes has a session with Grant in which he says something that frightens her, which she refuses to disclose to Markham. Then the seer is shot, apparently by a gun Grant claimed discharged accidentally, and the writer learns that the wounded man is a famed criminologist, Sir Harvey Gilman. Gilman, who survives the shooting, rocks Markham with the revelation that Grant's believed to have gotten away with murdering three lovers in two countries with prussic acid in rooms from which no person could have escaped--and which have stumped the police. When a fourth such killing occurs in Six Ashes, series sleuth Gideon Fell is called in to explain the inexplicable. Carr's gift for creating a creepy atmosphere again meshes with a brilliantly constructed and eminently fair whodunit. This epitomizes the goal of the British Library Crime Classics--to reissue outstanding mysteries for a new audience. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dark rumors lay the groundwork for another vintage locked-room puzzle from the acknowledged master of the form. A mere six months after Lesley Grant's arrival in Six Ashes, playwright Dick Markham has persuaded her to let him announce their engagement, thwarting all the villagers who'd been nudging him to pop the question to Cynthia Drew. There's only one fly in the ointment, but it's a whopper. Home Office Pathologist Sir Harvey Gilman, who, as The Great Swami, has been telling fortunes inside a tent at a local fete, informs Dick that his beloved has fatally poisoned two husbands and one fiance under impossible, and remarkably similar, conditions. No sooner has the pathologist finished his announcement than he's shot through the tent by Lesley--accidentally, she maintains--and before dawn the next morning, while Harvey is still recovering from his wound, Dick, brought to the scene by an anonymous phone call, finds him poisoned to death inside a locked room. The mystery cries out for Dr. Gideon Fell, that expert in impossible crimes, and he solves this one brilliantly, though the actions he takes against the killer lead abruptly to another murder that somewhat dampens the closing pages. According to Carr biographer Douglas Greene, the puzzle turns on the author's own "favorite gimmick" from his storied output, and devotees of the formula will devour it, and the prewar trappings that already made this a period piece when it was first published in 1944, with relish. Even seasoned fans who spot the killer will be hard-pressed to explain exactly how this impossible crime was committed. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
