The Adventure of the Two Collaborators: The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), by John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle

1952-53 was a tough time for John Dickson Carr, who in his mid-forties suffered from physical illness and overall disenchantment with life.  But still the man persevered.  At the end of 1952 he was working on finishing the Sir Henry Merrivale detective novel The Cavalier's Cup (1953) and had started the historical mystery thriller Captain Cut-Throat (1955); he was also trying to write Sherlock Holmes radio scripts for the BBC (based on the original tales) and to complete his series of Sherlock Holmes short story pastiches with Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle.  With the cooperation of Adrian and the rest of the Doyle family, Carr had published an acclaimed Arthur Conan Doyle biography in 1949 and he and Adrian, who was four years younger than Carr, became friends.  

the two collaborators
Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr

The disgruntled Carr was quite struck with wanderlust at this point in his life and he bopped back and forth among New York, London and Tangier in the early Fifties.  His eldest daughter Julia had married in July 1951, but he still had two young daughters and his native British wife Clarice with him and they all moved to London after the wedding.  By the end of the year they were all in Tangier, Morocco, where they stayed for four months and Carr completed his non-series mystery novel The Nine Wrong Answers.  

In April 1952 they were all back in London again and in July Carr returned alone to New York, leaving his family at Bristol.  In New York he rejoined Adrian Conan Doyle, who was there for a Sherlock Holmes exhibit (a recreation of the sitting room at 221b Baker Street), and there the two men decided together to write a dozen Sherlock Holmes pastiches for a short story collection, drawing on cases briefly mentioned in the canonical Holmes stories.

The was a significant moment in Holmes history because Adrian Conan Doyle had always zealously fended off attempts by others to write Holmes pastiches and parodies, even going so far as to get Ellery Queen's 1944 anthology, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, suppressed.  Adrian seems to have come to feel differently about it, however, when he was involved and stood to profit from it.  Although his two siblings from Doyle's second marriage, Denis and Jean, disliked the project, Adrian was able to go forth with it anyway, and he was convinced that it would be a big moneymaker.  

John and Adrian wrote "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks" together in July and started another pastiche, "The Adventure of the Gold Hunter."  Adrian announced the project to the press in August, but it took Carr until November to get everything ironed out with publishers.

Meanwhile, Carr had returned to Tangier, where he in October completed "The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers" and "The Adventure of the Highgate Miracle," and had devised plots for "The Adventure of the Black Baronet" (for which Adrian was to do most of the writing) and "The Adventure of the Sealed Room" (which Carr was to write).  There would be six more tales after that, for which the two men would have primary individual responsibility.  

Life magazine contracted to pay $10,000 for "Clocks" and Collier's was to publish the rest of the stories for $40,000.  This is about $600,000 today!  A third was to go to Doyle, a third to Carr and a third to the Doyle estate.  

In The Man who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, modern Arthur Conan Doyle biographer Andrew Lycett takes a decidedly dim view of the Doyle boy duo, his two surviving sons from Sir Arthur's second marriage:

Denis and Adrian (and the latter in particular) were both spendthrift playboys.  Denis married Nina Mdivani, who claimed to be a Georgian princess....Adrian took a more sober Danish woman, Anna Andersen, as his wife, but lived at a chateau in Switzerland, surrounded by Ferraris and mistresses.  

These two sons used the Conan Doyle estate as a milch-cow....Because neither man ever did anything useful in his life, they both took pleasure in making things difficult for anyone who tried to write about their father.  The even bridled at the Baker Street Irregulars' conceit of playing the game....

But even the two sons came to realize that a good biography can be useful for a dead author's reputation.  

Carr had been able to break through the temperamental claptrap and establish a good relationship with Adrian. To be sure, the two men had certain qualities in common, like their love of the aristocratic past and their florid romanticism, though Carr was a crime writing genius and Adrian patently was not.  But by the end of December 1952 came Carr's crack-up.  Carr's biographer Doug Greene describes what brought on the author's disintegration:

Carr could no longer take the pressure.  Not only was Doyle demanding more stories, but Carr' health was breaking down; he was having difficulties with agents and publishers; and the BBC was exerting pressure on Carr to complete the Sherlock Holmes radio plays for which he had already received a partial payment. 

Doyle had just finished "The Black Baronet" (for which, he said, he did 90% of the writing), and Carr had written the first three pages of "The Sealed Room" when on Jan. 2 he commenced what Doug Greene calls "a two-month drinking binge."  (He also had been working on completing The Cavelier's Cup and commencing Captain Cut-Throat.)

In March 1953, writes Doug, Carr's wife Clarice "flew from England to Tangier to rescue him.  With the fistula, the drinking and the chloral hydrate, he was in bad shape, weighing about ninety pounds. [5'6" Carr normally weighed around 140.]  Clarice took him back to the United States where he began to recover from some of his health problems."  

Adrian Doyle "was in a tizzy," writes Doug, because "he had no choice but to complete the final six stories himself."  Adrian was no plotting genius, it is evident, for in the six stories for which he assumed complete responsibility, it's obvious, when one reads them, that he looted his father's tales for ideas.  Over at his review of the stories at his blog, Nick Fuller outlines Adrian's borrowings.  Most obviously "The Adventure of the Deptford Horror" (which Nick thinks is the best of the "Adrian Six") cribs Sir Arthur's classic Holmes tale "The Adventure of the Speckled Band."  If you're going to steal, steal from the best!

"The Black Baronet" was televised, with Basil Rathbone in the part of Holmes, in May 1953 for CBS' anthology series Suspense.  Sadly, the episode, the last time Rathbone ever played Sherlock Holmes on film, is not believed to have survived.

Under the title The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes the book collection of the tales was published in the US and the UK in 1954 and it is in print as an eBook today.  How does it stand up after seven decades?  Let's take a look.

*******

Adrian Conan Doyle
taking a break from playing knight
in 1948 (with his wife Anna Andersen)
like John Dickson Carr
Adrian expressed alienation
from modern life
see Life magazine

First let me say, I'm not reviewing the strictly Adrian Conan Doyle tales, the Adrian Six, which I'm not impressed with at all.  I agree the best of the bunch is "The Deptford Horror," with a memorably creepy-crawly climax, but it's such an obvious crib job I can't get into it.  So let me just move on to the six stories which Carr was actually involved with.  (All of them were at least plotted by him.)  These are, again:

The Adventure of the Seven Clocks (Carr and Doyle) ***1/2

The Adventure of the Gold Hunter (Carr and Doyle) ***1/2

The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers (Carr) ****1/2

The Adventure of Highgate Miracle (Carr) ****1/2

The Adventure of the Black Baronet (plotted by Carr, mostly written by Doyle) ****

The Adventure of the Sealed Room (mostly Carr?) ****1/2

My verdict: they are very good!  I first read these tales around thirty years ago and I remembered them favorably, though I only remembered Clocks in detail for some reason. In them Carr's plotting genius clearly remains intact and his writing (and Doyle's) is quite good, though the two exclusively (or nearly so) written by Carr definitely bear his imprint more than Arthur Conan Doyle's.  It's very difficult, I think, for a first-rate author is his own right to write pure pastiche.  Adrian was better at imitating his father's style.  But than Adrian was a vastly lesser talent than Arthur Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr both.  But let's get on with it all, shall we, the game is afoot!

The Seven Clocks 

"Mr. Holmes, he cannot endure the sight of a clock!...In the past fortnight, sir, and for no explicable reason, he has destroyed seven clocks.  Two of them he smashed in public, and before my own eyes!"

Celia Forsythe, lovely young companion to Lady Mayo of Groxton Low Hall, comes to Holmes and Watson with the strange case of Charles Hendon, a man who simply cannot abide the presence of clocks.  Is he simply deranged, or is something altogether more sinister afoot?

This is a clever story with an intriguing mystery and a smash climax sharing similarity, in that respect, with a certain detective novel by Carr's friend John Street, aka John Rhode and Miles Burton.  I definitely see the hand of Carr in the plotting as well as the writing, both in the bits of humor and Carr's characteristic writing, at the time, about women.  

Watson is very smitten indeed with Celia Forsythe, seeming rather like Chief Inspector Masters for the first time meeting scrumptious young (and looking young younger) Ginny Brace in The Cavalier's Cup: "our caller was a young lady: a girl, rather, since she could hardly have been as much as eighteen, and seldom in a young face have I seen such beauty and refinement...."  

Holmes jabs poor Watson about his drinking and his newlywed status, throwing in a little sexual innuendo.  This is very Carr!  Watson's wife Mary appears briefly and it seems that the bloom is already off the rose of their marriage, not something I recall from the stories:

That night, as we sat hand in hand before the fire in our lodgings, I told her something of the strange problem before me.  I spoke of Miss Forsythe, touching on her parlous plight, and on her youth and beauty and refinement.  My wife did not reply, but sat looking thoughtfully at the fire.  

When Watson remembers that he is supposed that evening to go to Baker Street, where Celia will be, here is his wife's response:

My wife drew back her hand.

"Then you had best be off at once," said she, with a coldness which astonished me.  "You are always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes' cases."

These two here are behaving a lot more like a pair of jealous, bickering lovers from a Carr novel (admittedly with Victorian restraint).  Probably the most discordant element in the Carr pastiches.  It makes me want to write a parody of a Carr pastiche of Holmes, with Carr going full Carr on poor Holmes.

Lady Mayo is very much a Carr bluff older gentry woman, while there are references to the author's, Carr's, beloved Jacobean era.  

To Watson a bored Holmes make a very Carrian observation early in the tale: "Where is crime, Watson?  Where is the weird, where is that touch of the outre without which a problem is as sand and dry grass?  Have we lost them forever?"

The emphasis on the weird and outre being essential to a mystery sounds more like Carr than Doyle.  If Carr was worried he was running out of inspiration, however, it happily is still very evident in these six stories, more so than in his immediately contemporary novels.

The Gold Hunter

"Mr. Holmes, it was death by the visitation of God!"

This is the Rev. Mr. James Appley telling Holmes and Watson about the strange death in his small parish in Somerset of Squire Trelawney, "the richest landowner for miles about."  

"[P]oor Trelawney did not die a natural death.  Not only the police but Scotland Yard have been called in," the good reverend explains, adding dramatically that nor was Trelawney murdered: "[H]e could not possibly have been murdered.  The greatest medical skill has been used to pronounce that he could not have died from any cause whatsoever."

If murder could be proved the reverend's own nephew, Dr. Paul Griffin, would be a suspect, for Trelawney "changed his will" shortly before his death, he divulges, "leaving his entire fortune" to his nephew.  Trelawney disinherited his niece, Dolores Dale, whom he considered a frivolous wench.  She is engaged to a young solicitor named Jeffrey Ainsworth.  For some reason Dolores is "gratuitously offensive" to the young doctor.  

This one is basically an enjoyable country house murder mystery with definite Carr touches.  The story is very well-clued, although one point is effectively withheld, Carr playing the sort of politician's linguistic games with a key detail that he sometimes did in his novels.  

I can't say more, but Dolores Dale is very much a Carr girl.  When we learn that Squire Trelawney "thrashed poor Dolores with a razor-strop, and confined her to her room on bread and water, because she had gone to Bristol to see a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera, Patience," it seems very much a Carr detail.  Carr did hate puritanical types.

Carr drew the "impossible" murder method in the story from one of his excellent Forties radio plays, which I believe Doug Greene collected in the anthology The Dead Sleep Lightly.  I actually liked the play better than the story, but some people don't go in for reading radio plays.

Inspector Lestrade puts in an appearance, and he is as dim as ever, if not more so.  The "gold hunter" of the title is a watch, which helps Holmes crack the case.

The Wax Gamblers

"I don't like it a bit when those blessed wax figures begin to play a hand of cards!"

In this one an old man, Sam Baxter, nightwatchman at a famed wax museum, Madame Taupin's (aka Madame Tussaud's) calls at 221b Baker Street late at night with his granddaughter Eleanor.  He's convinced someone has been monkeying with an exhibit of card players in the Room of Horrors.  Either that or the gamblers become animated when no one is watching!  

This is a neat little story, rather humorous, and more Carrian than Doyleish.  It also works in one of those nasty, sneering aristocratic villains Carr employed so much in his historical mysteries.  It draws upon, and improves, a 1942 Carr radio play.

The closing line expresses a classic Carr sentiment in its dig at modern intellectuals:

"There is more wisdom in that French epigram than in the whole works of Henrik Ibsen."  

It also has a classic Carr triplet from a hysterical young woman: "Never! Never! Never!"

Ironically in real life in 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle  presided over a meeting of the Upper Norwood Literary and Scientific Society, of which he was president, at which English critic Edmund Gosse spoke sympathetically about controversial Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, author of such notorious problem plays as A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler.  Afterward Doyle spoke, broadminedly comparing Ibsen to Russian novelist Leo Tolstoi and opining that "frankness in dealing with unconventional themes was a less evil than the bolstering up of conventional untruths."  

The Highgate Miracle

"That umbrella will be the death of me; yet I must not relinquish it!"

Another classic Carr variant on the impossible vanishing, a miracle plot which he used in A Graveyard to Let (1949) and The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (1945).  It concerns a henpecked married man by the name of Cabpleasure (Carr will have his fun with that name) and his strange obsession with his umbrella.  Mrs.  Cabpleasure is one of Carr's classic "bossy" matrons; her acid repartee with Holmes is quite amusing.  Lestrade appears in this one, in his stupidity provoking Holmes ironically to comment to Watson: "It is only when I have been with Lestrade that I learn to value you."  

In return Carr allows Watson to ding Conan Doyle's penultimate (I believe) Sherlock Holmes story, the not very well-regarded "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger" (1927), a problem which the doctor admits "afforded little scope for my friend's great powers."

Not so this tale: it's a Carr classic which gives Holmes ample opportunity to shine.  

The Black Baronet

"My guide-book says that at Lavington the past is more real than the present."

This serious tale, full of romantic melodrama, as mentioned was probably written mostly by Adrian Conan Doyle, but the murder gimmick is classic Carr.  Doug Greene explains that Carr reached back for it to a college story that he published in 1926, when he was only 20.  

The story concerns the stabbing death of Colonel Jocelyn Dacey, a guest of Sir Reginald Lavington at his old moated manor, Lavington Hall, in Kent.  There is a woman in the case too, Sir Reginald's wife Lady Lavington, a former stage actress.  Inspector Tobias Gregson, a Lestrade upgrade, is on the case, and suspects Sir Reginald did the foul deed in a fatal moment of violent passion, but where is the murder weapon?  

This is a fine story (with an excellent final line) that one can definitely see both writers having contributed to, given their romantic temperaments.  

The Sealed Room

"A sealed room!  "Oh, my God, a sealed room!"

No, it's not Chief Inspector Masters, but another one of Carr's distraught young ladies.

Arguably the best of the Carr Six as a miracle murder problem is this final story in the group.  Carr would use the ploy again in his last published mystery in his lifetime, the novel The Hungry Goblin (1972).  

The tale starts off with Watson and his wife being visited by a hysterical young woman, Cora Murray, who promptly faints, but after coming to consciousness again tells a tale of woe.  It seems that her friend from India Army days, Eleanor Grand, married a certain Colonel Warburton and went to live in England.  Cora went to live with them too.  

Now Colonel Warburton is dead from a gunshot wound and Eleanor gravely wounded, the colonel apparently having shot his wife and then himself in his sealed curio room.  The atmosphere of the curio room, "heavy with the aromatic mustiness of an oriental museum," reminded me of Carr's The Arabian Nights Murder (1936).

Also present on the night of the Warburton tragedy were Chundra Lal, a sinister Hindu manservant, Major Earnshaw, a seemingly permanent houseguest, and Captain Lasher, the Colonel's visiting nephew (a lot of ranks in this case).  Youthful Inspector Macdonald from The Valley of Fear intelligently assists in this one.  Holmes even gets to make use of his great knowledge of tobacco. 

This is a classic Carr tale that reads like it was not only plotted but written by Carr as well, though Doug says the author went on his drinking binge after finishing only the first three pages of it.  I think he must have returned to it at some point in 1953, because to me it definitely has the authentic Carr touch.  In an interview in 1969 (see below), a year before his death at age sixty, Adrian mentions having entirely written "six or seven" of the tales.  This would be the last six, plus, with a little exaggeration, The Black Baronet.  Let's credit The Sealed Room to Carr.  It does him, as well as Sir Arthur, proud.

"He's Dead but He Won't Lie Down!" Carter Dickson's The Cavalier's Cup (1953)

Let's face it.  The thing does have an element of--well, of what some people would call the ridiculous.  But does that make the problem any less difficult?...Who got into that locked room?  And how was it done?  And why should the cup have been moved again?  We're up against the essential detective problems of who, how and why.  Simply because there's no murder or near-murder, does that make the mystery one bit less baffling?

--Lady Ginny Brace, aka "the small girl," prettily philosophizes about mystery aesthetics in The Cavalier's Cup

"I can't stand anymore of these things that couldn't possibly have happened, but did happen!"

--an exasperated Chief Inspector Masters on locked rooms in The Cavalier's Cup

"He's crackers!  He's off his rocker at last!  I always knew it would happen!"

--an exasperated Chief Inspector Masters on Sir Henry Merrivale, locked room solver extraordinaire, in The Cavalier's Cup

I see the cavalier
but where's the cup?

The Cavalier's Cup, John Dickson Carr's final Sir Henry Merrivale detective novel, was published in the United States in the summer of 1953 and in the United Kingdom about six months later.  (It's retroactively set in 1951, when the Labour government was still in power in England.)  When Cup appeared in the US, Carr was 46 years old, the prime of life for a lot of people, but it did not feel that way to him.  

Carr hated the modern world, symbolized for him by England's Labour government, which came to power in 1945 and enacted significant social reform on behalf of the "working man," including nationalized health care.  In 1947-48 the American-born Carr with his wife and three daughters relocated to a fine Victorian house in the affluent community of Mamaroneck, New York, near  New York City.  Despite the move to the more conservative US, however, Carr's interest in writing detective fiction set in the present day still waned, and the quality of his work declined.  

After publishing Below Suspicion in 1949 Carr dropped his famed series sleuth Dr. Gideon Fell for nearly a decade and turned to writing, under his own name, historical mystery adventure novels, the first two of which, The Bride of Newgate (1950) and The Devil in Velvet (1951), seemed to revive his work.  (They are usually cited as his best historical mysteries.)  Both books were set far in the romantic English past of the author's sympathetic imagination.  

Meanwhile Carr attempted to keep going with his "Carter Dickson" series of mysteries, which were helmed by his increasingly ornery, if not positively demented, amatuer sleuth Sir Henry Merrivale; but the Merrivale mysteries he published in these years were of successively declining quality.  I recall The Skeleton in the Clock (1948), read many years ago, as pretty good, and A Graveyard to Let (1949), set in New York as the first Merrivale Carr wrote in Mamaroneck, as flawed but not bad.  The swimming pool disappearance is a thing of beauty if you go in for "miracle" problems. 

Night at the Mocking Widow (1950), a poison pen mystery set in a rather unconvincing English village, is barely passable, being full of bad things, like, as I recollect, an increasingly erratic and intolerant Sir Henry Merrivale (HM) "curing" an intensely serious teenage girl from reading grim Russian novelists by destroying her books, and a bunch of ostensibly intelligent and sound English adults getting in a public mud fight, including a bishop, a vicar and a beautiful heroine clad only in her underwear.  (It sounds like a pub joke, or Lucy Ricardo on television stomping grapes.)

Carr himself grew increasingly intolerant of other people's opinions--his biographer, Doug Greene, writes that Carr couldn't understand how anyone could like something which he himself hated--and his fondness for pranks and childish behavior increased, as if he was trying to return to his younger years, when he was happier, or thought he had been.  It's all kind of sad.

Morrow works hard to convince
prospective readers this is 
actually a murder mystery

But compared to Behind the Crimson Blind and The Cavalier's Cup, which followed in 1952 and 1953, respectively, The Skeleton in the Clock and A Graveyard to Let (I won't go so far as to include Night at the Mocking Widow) seem like blooming masterpieces.  In 1963, I found in a letter quoted in Doug's bio, Carr wrote a Swedish mystery critic that in the early Fifties he turned to historicals because he had lost interest in traditional detective fiction.  Coming from a man who saw himself as one of the prime keepers of the fair play puzzle tradition, it's a striking admission.  

It's hard to care who stabbed Sir Oswald in a locked library or to imagine the readers will care either.  But a writer must enjoy what he doing, or he can't expect to communicate enthusiasm.  If his secondary interest has always been history, it occurs to him that he may generate enthusiasm by combining the two techniques.

But Carr's historicals were hardly the rigorous puzzles he had written of yore, though they did still retain mystery interest.  (Bride even has a disappearing room.)  And in the Merrivale mysteries Blind and Cup, the mysteries, which include miracle problems, are constantly undermined by heavy-handed comic relief and tendentious social philosophizing.  Dorothy L. Sayers called her last Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel, Busman's Honeymoon (1937), "a love story with detective interruptions"; well, these last two Merrivales (also Window), might be called comic stories with detective interruptions.  Which would be fine in its own way (Michael Innes, Edmund Crispin and Joyce Porter are very good at that sort of thing), were the comic stuff not more appalling than appealing.

"the small girl" Ginny Brace
is 28 but looks 15

Today I'm looking at The Cavalier's Cup, because I finally read it, never having been able before to get past the leeringly inappropriate tone of the book's opening pages.  I actually quoted from these pages in my piece from last month, when discussing the hebephilia (sexual attraction to pubescent children age 11-14) Carr depicts in his mystery novel The Ghosts' High Noon (1969).  

In the opening of Cup, lovely, little Lady Virginia "Ginny" Brace, who is 28 but looks 15 and is described as "the small girl," pays a visit upon middle-aged, long-married Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters, and in her enticingly provocative girlishness all but, to be blunt, gives the poor man a chubby.  Looking at Ginny, Masters lasciviously thinks to himself, "this child's figure was very well developed," before hastily "averting his eyes and thoughts."  Am I the only Carr fan this gives the hebe-jeebies?  

Carr's daughter Julia

Taking a closer look at the novel I saw that Carr triply dedicated it to his daughter and son-in-law and his ailing father.  Doug writes that "he wrote all three dedicatees into the book": 

his eldest daughter Julia, then 19, as the aforementioned "small girl" Lady Ginny Brace

his son-in-law Dick McNiven, nearly 30, as Lady Brace's husband Tom 

his father Wooda Nicholas Carr, who died at age 82 not long after the novel was published in the US, as Lady Brace's American father, Congressman William Tecumseh Harvey.  

Julia had begun dating McNiven, who lived across the street from the Carrs in Mamaroneck, when she was 16 and he was 26, marrying him after two years when she was 18.  This is a relationship, as far as age disparities between the man and the "girl" go, that is right out of Carr's books.  

Lolita (1962)
Masters and Ginny never get quite this close,
which isn't to say the lawman isn't tempted.

Doug Greene writes that Ginny Brace, as she is physically described in the novel, resembles Julia Carr McNiven.  However, he also notes that Carr discordantly portrays Ginny as "an empty-headed ginch"--Carr's word in his novels for a sexy, enticingly child-like woman.  

Doug calls ginch a "portmanteau word," combining "girl with wench" to describe a woman who behaves both as a "child and seductress."  He argues that as Carr matured in the 1930s and 1940s he dropped his ginches in favor of stronger women, but by the early Fifties, the ginches were back, like a flock of fair, flirting nymphs.  

Indeed, Carr actually coins a new term for Ginny in Cup: her husband Tom calls her a ginchlet.  All I can conclude from that is that Ginny is an even more childlike seductress than the earlier ginches.  Again, Ginny's main characteristic in this book is how adorably, youthfully enticing the older male characters find her.

Her cups are full:
Carr girl filling her sweater
--with a little technological
assistance, perhaps

"Women ought to be healthy and ripe," Carr once pronounced around this time, according to an interviewer, making them sound like, well, a carton of voluptuously fleshy, juicy-to-bursting tomatoes.  The male interviewer approvingly confirmed: "Carr's women love life; their sweaters are full, their blood warm."  And some of them, whether in their full fuzzy sweaters or stripped down to their pretty lacy scanties, are--or look like they are--barely legal.  

Doug Greene dryly notes that "it is not surprising" that his daughter Julia was "not altogether delighted" when Carr presented Julia with a signed copy of his book and told her that he based Ginny the Ginchlet on her.  For this assertion Doug cites a letter Julia wrote him many years later in 1989--I do wish he had quoted directly from it!  As it stands the character conveys the idea that Carr was sexually attracted to his own daughter.  It's no wonder that Julia was not altogether charmed to see herself as the novel sees her.  

My view though is that Carr surely meant well: however these characters were conceived, the author just ended up per usual turning them, Tom and Representative Harvey as well, into his usual unfortunate stock types from this period.  Poor Mr. Harvey seems even more libelled than Ginny by the time the book is over.  It may seem incredible that Carr had no notion how poorly the dedicatees might take these juvenile characters out of a French bedroom farce, but Carr could be awfully myopic about the feelings of other people.  

house in Tangier

In Carr's defense Doug also notes that aside from his general malaise, Carr was dreadfully sick when he wrote Blind and Cup.  He was alone in Tangier, suffering from a fistula that was threatening to become abscessed and drinking heavily.  By the end of 1952 he was completing Cup and starting the historical mystery Captain Cut-Throat (1955) in addition to trying desperately to complete his assigned stories for the jointly-authored (with Adrian Conan Doyle) Sherlock Holmes pastiche collection The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), when he decided he just couldn't take it all anymore.  Immediately after New Year's Day 1953 Carr commenced, Doug tells us, "a two-month drinking binge."

Carr as a young man
before alcohol and cigarettes took
their inevitable toll

When Carr's wife Clarice finally flew to Tangier to collect him, writes Doug, he was, due to the combined effects of fistula, drinking and constant doses to himself of chloral hydrate, "in bad shape, weighing only ninety pounds."  It was as if he had been living not in Tangier but present-day Gaza.  Carr was a small man to start with, to be sure, about 5'6" and 140 pounds normally, but this is horrific, rather like Cornell Woolrich level self-abuse.  During the summer Carr came close to death when the fistula finally abscessed.  The Cavalier's Cup might well have become a posthumous novel.  

The next year Carr with hindsight's vast wisdom wrote his friend Anthony Boucher: "Like a fool I would write during this time, against all advice," resulting in "several indifferent novels."  Doug believes that this judgment was "overly generous" to both Blind and Cup.  

I have to reread Blind to be truly fair to Carr, but having finally read Cup I can say that, while it's not actually the worst book he ever wrote, it's pretty damn dreadful, due to the soapbox political preachments and the unending flow of adolescent sex comedy slapstick. With the novel's dire low humor Carr understandably may have tried to cheer himself, which I understand, but to the poor reader it can all get pretty ghastly.  Though to be fair the locked room problem is actually rather, like Ginny, a honey!

So now let me finally say something of the formal mystery plot of Cup, because there actually is one, even though Carr like a desperate, vain, aging diva sickeningly dowses it in a heavy mist of farce like perfume.  It's enough to kill any flies that might be hovering around this rotting animated corpse of a book.  But to get to the plot....

*******

It may be ersatz Jacobean but it's still
fabulously valuable to a thief.
So why wasn't it actually 
stolen and merely left on a table?

Teensy-tiny, delectably scrumptious jailbait (but not really, wink, wink) Lady Ginny Brace pays a call in his office on Chief Inspector Masters to investigate a certain matter for her: the theft-not-theft of the fabled "cavalier's cup" from her husband Tom's ancestral home, Telford Old Hall, in Sussex.  Someone somehow got in and out of the locked Oak Room, where the cup, actually an ersatz Victorian pseudo-relic, was temporarily being kept, but neither the valuable gold, jewel-encrusted cup, nor anything else, was actually stolen; the cup was merely taken out of the safe and left on the table.  So the mystery, in addition to howdunit and whodunit, is why didn't the culprit do it (steal the cup).

I'll just say the explanation to this which we finally get, after all the other damn nonsense, from Sir Henry Merrivale, whose own ancestral country estate is not far from Telford Old Hall, is really clever and very nicely clued indeed, in terms of the how, who and why.  In this respect the book is the work of a man whose technical plotting powers are still very formidable indeed.  But now, sadly, I have to move on to the nonsense, which fills, sadly two-thirds or more of the book.

Chief Inspector Masters enjoys ogling charming young (and looking younger) Ginny, to be sure, but the last thing he wants to get involved with is another damn miracle problem, especially when no real crime has been committed anyway.  But since Ginny is old money English upper crust, or rather her husband is, she is able to extract more than crumbs from the authorities, even in an England run by the Labour Party.  

Sir Herbert Armstrong, Assistant Commissioner of the C.I.D., calls to tell Masters to get on it, "as a special favor to her ladyship."  They decide that Masters will rout out Sir Henry Merrivale, a Sussex neighbor of the Braces at his rural fastness at Cranleigh Court, to help Masters, Sir Henry being, along with Dr. Gideon Fell one presumes, England's greatest authority on locked room mysteries.  So off Masters and Ginny go to Sussex.

There's a strong tone of nostalgia to Cup, both when Carr writes about England and his own work.  There are references to his earlier Forties novels The Curse of the Bronze Lamp and My Late Wives, both of them much superior books to this one, I think.  

Of course Carr romanticizes Thirties England, for him forever a paradise lost ("the ever-glorious days before that war").  Most of Carr's colleagues from the Detection Club had tremendous trouble adjusting themselves to the postwar years, but Carr was, perhaps, the most vocally disgruntled of them all.  

Carr decided, it appears to me, fundamentally to alter the relationship between Masters and HM, in a way that does no favors to Masters, at least in the author's eyes.  Masters had last appeared, I think, in The Skeleton in the Clock, which would have made a good finale for him and HM, by the by.  I can't recall that their relationship was ever as acrimonious as it is in Cup, where they positively despise each other.  (Carr refers to their "mutual distrust and loathing.")  

For his part Masters has embraced the Labour Party reforms and HM, who in the Thirties used to be a socialist as I recollect, is now an ultra-reactionary Tory, like Carr himself.  It's also evident to me, though I doubt that Carr intended it this way, that HM is suffering from the rapid onset of dementia.  

The Old Man's last hurrah is
more of a raspberry

Increasingly Carr used HM to provide both comic relief and crime solutions, crafting extensive comic bits for his eccentric sleuth in the later novels.  In The Gilded Man (1942) the Old Man's doing a magic show at a country house.  In the Curse of the Bronze Lamp he has an altercation with an Egyptian cabbie.  In My Late Wives, he's getting golfing lessons from a very Scottish instructor.  In The Skeleton in the Clock he's competing with a starchy matron to get ahold of the titular clock.  

These bits are all amusing, at least to me, but by the last four books HM's actions get increasingly egomaniacal and antisocial.  He also clearly is suffering, like our current president, from confabulation, false memories of great past exploits.  (This malady is much in evidence in Cup.)  

Carr himself was a great liar about himself, though he would fess up when called on his bullshit.  An undersized man, he yearned to have been a great athlete and the sort of romantic hero he wrote about in his historical mysteries.  But he was a great charmer, possessed of much charisma, and usually could carry people away with the tide of his bluff and blarney.  

Anyway, in Cup Carr has Masters pontificate about Labour reforms all the way out to Sussex, "preaching a strong sermon about the righting of social injustice."  Carr as far as I can tell cared not one whit about "social injustice," unless it consisted of government attempts to interfere with things he personally enjoyed doing, like drinking himself into oblivion, or, of course, taxation, which he cordially hated.  Neither do Ginny and Tom Brace or HM care about it.  

Aneurin "Nye" Bevan
righter of social injustices

Ginny dismisses "talking about righting social injustices" as ever so dreary and depressing.  On another occasion, when Ginny's impossible Democratic politician father pontificates about how "we should all humbly all bow down" before "the average man, the little man, the common man," Ginny mumbles under her breath: "To hell with the average man."  Carr may have been conservative and anti-intellectual (certain kinds of them, anyway), but he was no populist.  

Carr makes poor, inoffensive Masters the novel's primary whipping boy for the evils of socialism, although he also invents a couple of Labour politicians to ridicule and takes potshots at real life people like Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health in Clement Attlee's Labour government (1945-51), Hewlett Johnson, the Soviet-sympathizing "red" Dean of Canterbury, and even long dead King William III, nemesis of Carr's beloved Jacobite cavaliers. (There's a lot about them in this book too.)  The author gratuitously and rather disloyally denounces William as a "detestable sourpuss."  

Eventually Masters and Ginny get to Cranleigh Court, where we learn that HM is taking singing lessons from a walking caricature Italian music master named Signor Luigi Ravioli (yes, really).  In his madness Merrivale is planning to give a concert of "old English ballads of a somewhat vulgar nature" at the Tuesday Evening Ladies' Church Society of Great Yewborough.  With Luigi he is practicing a particular ditty called "He's Dead but He Won't Lie Down," which was actually not an old song, but a 1932 hit comic tune by English popular singer Gracie Fields (see below), which was referenced in George Orwell's novel Coming up for Air (1939).  There's an extended, and quite unamusing, "bit" with this song involving Merrivale and Signor Ravioli in Carr's novel.  

Signor Ravioli arguably is the most egregiously stereotypical character in the entire Carr canon, but in any event the whole book is larded like a plum pudding with great indigestible lumps of forced comedy.  There's also Ginny's and Tom's nine-year-old son, who takes greatly to HM naturally, and--well, I talk about some of this below.  

Masters and Ginny manage to get HM to come to Telford Old Hall, sadly with Signor Ravioli in tow, to look over this locked room situation.  Masters continues tiresomely to pronounce on politics and society, saying silly things I never would have expected him to say like "Not....That anybody cares two pins about history in these days.  We've got rid of history; history's all my eye."  

As I mentioned above Doug Greene is his Carr bio explained that when Carr hated something, he could never understand how anyone could like it, which explains these sorts of heavy caricatures of politics which he indulged himself in later in life.  They'd be so much more effective if they were subtle, but Carr had the subtlety of a loudly blown raspberry. 

Tellingly, in this book he has an aside dinging Henry James' masterpiece of ambiguity, the ghost story (?) The Turn of the Screw, as overly subtle. Make yourself clear, sir!

Luigi: Thatsa Italian!

Masters also calls Signor Ravioli, if you didn't think it could get worse, Signor Spaghetti.  Why not Signor Linguini or Signor Puttanesca?  Late in the novel HM starts calling Luigi nicknames like Rossini, Puccini, Paganini, Pagliacci, Julius Caesar and Appius Claudius, which I think is the origin of Carr's truly unfortunate predilection for pointless facetious nicknames in his later books.  I haven't come across this cartoonish an Italian since the old Alka Seltzer "Mamma mia! Thatsa spicy meatball!" ad.  

So far on this summary I've made it to page 58 in the narrative and, as you will have noted yourselves, practically nothing has actually happened.  It goes on like this for about 200 more pages, until HM gives about a forty-page explanation of the "crimes" (very clever) and the book ends.  But in between there's about 200 more pages of crap (with admittedly well-concealed clues) to get through.  

Masters gets sidelined around page 100 after he spends the night in the Oak Room with the cup, getting coshed for his pains.  Carr seems to find concussing Masters with a blackjack amusing and for good measure he has the Yard man fall down a flight of stairs and get knocked out again.  We never hear from the unfortunate again, making this the inglorious exit of Masters from the Merrivale canon.  

We learn about Eleanor Cheeseman, the Labour Member of Parliament from East Whistlefield, who HM recently debated, in a matter of speaking, at a theater at Cherriton.  Showing his interest in debate, HM bribed the stage hands to open a trapdoor under her on the stage during her rebuttal, dropping her sixteen feet into the cellar, where HM mercifully had mattresses placed.  So much for debate.  

Miss Cheeseman though unhurt is decidedly steamed about this and threatening to take HM to court.  Her boyfriend is Hereward Wake, a Labour economist.  HM of course decounces Labour MPs as not true working men but "half-baked intellectuals who've specialized in economics or some such dreary muck."  You won't be surprised to learn Carr hated mathematics and economics--unless these fields had some some sort of practical application to devising his beloved locked rooms, he had no use for them.

What did he really get up to 
with ladies in libraries?

Then we meet Ginny's father, William T. Harvey of the 23 and a 1/2 congressional district of Pennsylvania.  That "half" is another one of Carr's lumbering jokes, but Harvey is genuinely based on his own father, Wooda Nicholas Carr, a lawyer who served one term in the House of Representatives, 1913-15, when his son was a small child.  Unlike his son Wooda Carr was a Democrat, but like John he was a romantic, a bibliophile and a speechifier who loved being the center of attention.  WT Harvey captures these qualities in Cup, though he's also a randy widowed womanizer who falls in love at first sight with Eleanor Cheeseman, who despite being a dour leftist politician is actually an Amazonian beauty of about forty years of age.  (She's 5'7" but then Ginny is barely 5" in heels, making her about the height of a 12-year-old girl.)

We barely see mighty Miss Cheeseman in the book, Carr telling more of her exploits at secondhand. (A lot of the action in this book is told at secondhand.) Honestly it's just as well.  When they encounter each other again at Telford Old Hall, Miss Cheeseman and Mr. Harvey are so horny for each other that they go off to the library, where, we are told, they proceed to go at it together for four-and-a-half hours.  

Fortunately Ginny and Tom are indulgent with all this.  "Dad's a widower and rather susceptible," blandly explains Ginny to the others.  Elsewhere she announces euphemistically that "It always pleases me when Dad succeeds...in his educational endeavors."

Carr's octogenarian father died not long after 
The Cavalier's Cup was published,
presumably not of mortification

Was Carr's father really such a horny old goat?  In real life his wife outlived him, but they seem to have been a mismatched pair.  (Carr certainly much preferred his father to his mother, whom he couldn't abide.)  Or considering how Ginny was based on Carr's daughter, maybe this was special pleading for the author's own adultery. 

WT Harvey is much given, like Masters, to anti-traditionalist sentiments and is a decided anti-monarchist and America firster type.  "Dad hates tradition and respecting anything that's old," artlessly explains Ginny.  "He says all the stately homes of England ought to be torn down and replaced with modern apartment houses with steam heat."

Harvey, like Masters, says a lot of stupid things like this in the book, things that it's hard to imagine an American of the time actually saying.  If there is one thing a lot of Americans adored back then, it was tracing their ancestry back to Europe.  "Patriotic" Americans loved to distinguish themselves from recent swarthy immigrant arrivals from Italy and the Balkans and such places by asserting their impeccable WASP lineages (real or not), to the Mayflower, or to Jamestown, or, failing that, at least to someone who fought gloriously (or not) in the American Revolution.  This was what the zealously patriotic Daughters of the American Revolution was all about.

But not WT Harvey though!  He pronounces: "No American citizen, if he's a really patriotic American citizen, has anybody related to him who came to our great country before the year 1900.  If he has, he's no true American and he'd better hide it p. d. q.!  Ancestors?  I've got no ancestors!" 

Harvey says he hates England (he later recants from all this nonsense), but Miss Cheeseman he loves, in his sexist way.  "Madam," he tells her, "the hell with your intellect!  You're the most beautiful thing I ever saw!"  

the congressman is a big hit with
genteel English ladies

The good woman succumbs to this charm and soon the two are fucking like rabbits in the library.  "Harvey did not know it," we are told, "but he had a technique which would knock Englishwoman silly, and though Mr. Harvey himself would never have used so crude a term, made them pushovers."  This despite the politician's "homely dial."  Was this describing Carr himself, who despite his unprepossessing appearance seems to have been a hit with English women, gentle and otherwise?  

When, after the amorous pair have finally exhausted themselves in the library and Eleanor's boyfriend Hereward Wake shows up on the lawn, they espy the unfortunate economist through a window and proceed to pursue him with play bows and arrows, shooting him in the rump as he runs for his life.  Just another day at the stately home!

Eleanor, Carr salaciously tells us, is dressed only in her bra and panties.  Women stripped down to their unmentionables is a recurrent fantasy of Carr's in these years.  Carr believed that every woman, no matter how prim and proper, was a wanton deep inside, if she could only be reached there as it were; and in this book he "proves" it with Eleanor Cheeseman.

Ginny's husband Tom is as masterful a man as her father, if not more, when it comes to the ladies.  Verily, in today's internet manosphere, these two bros would be deemed the Alphaest of Alpha Males.  

At one point when the principals in the tale (all of them men but Ginny) are confabbing, Tom bossily tells Ginny, whom he later terms ginchlet, "I'll sit down in your chair, and you sit in my lap.  But none of your tricks, mind!"  A few pages later the compliant Ginny tries "hard to sound dense so as to make her husband her husband appear more brilliant."  Straight out of Dear Abby Fifties relationship advice columns!  In real life I can't imagine Carr's wife Clarice, whom he seems to have had genuine affection for, was anything like this.

Honestly it's not my aim in life to speculate about Carr's mental state and his sex life, but when he writes a book like this, what should he have expected? I'm not surprised his daughter was a bit mystified; I wonder what his father would have made of it.  

John Dickson Carr
working in radio in the 1940s (?)

At least Tom Brace becomes, like other of Carr's hero-projections, a fine athlete, a male Mary Sue.  Ginny asks Masters, "Did you ever see Tom play polo," burbling: "He beat the Indian Army practically single-handed.  And with a revolver he can shoot the centre out of the ace of diamonds at twenty yards."  Masters, this novel's punching bag, admits he has never heard of the great Tom Brace, provoking an outraged HM to sneer: "You wouldn't, you weasel.  He's not keen on Association football, and he's never gone in for much amateur boxin', so he's no hero of the great British public.  But he's got very few superiors as a swordsman, horseman and pistol-shot....All the romantic sports...."

And Tom and Ginny both "adore detective stories" Ginny confides, as she sits on Tom's lap and he fingers her "backbone in a way which makes her wriggle."  That is as long, Tom explains, as they are "proper detective stories" that "present a tricky, highly sophisticated problem which you're given fair opportunity to solve."  Not those "psychological studies," Ginny adds.  Tom amplifies: "[I] Couldn't care less when you're supposed to get all excited whether the innocent man will be hanged or the innocent heroine will be seduced.  Heroine ought to be seduced; what's she there for?  The thing is the mystery...."  

Carr's own mysteries often have considerable suspense, and sometimes they even give great play to the question of whether an innocent man will be hanged, but it's not the first time Carr's thinking on a given matter has been muddled and inconsistent.  His thinking often is more interesting not for its incisive clarity, but for what it tells us about the man.  "Heroine ought to be seduced; what's she there for?" is a sweeping reduction of the worth of women in mysteries and reflective of an adolescent male mindset that has never really grown up.  Such sexism riddles this book.  Elsewhere Carr says all women have an instinctive preference for lying.  All part of that famous Carr charm?  

Of course Carr, like other crime writers in his English peer group, didn't think much of psychiatrists (probably because they didn't really want to know about themselves; many of us don't).  Carr insisted that he was an advocate of the simon-pure detective story, but he always spiced his problem story with atmospherics.  In his heyday, these atmospherics greatly enhanced his tales, but by the time of The Cavalier's Cup, they merely distracted and detracted.  Setting his historicals aside, Carr never again wrote a great contemporary-set mystery after the Forties.  (There were only ten of them, five Fells, three Merrivales and two nonseries.)  Some might argue that he never even wrote a good one after the Forties.  I find The Nine Wrong Answers (1951) seriously overrated, but have a soft spot for The Dead Man's Knock (1958).  

"Obviously, ze locked room all zeese men wish so badly to enter symbolizes ze vagina!"

Certainly The Cavalier's Cup as a novel is neither great, nor good.  The most striking thing is that the puzzle itself, what there is of it, is rather good, in terms of its formal design.  Carr could still write a good puzzle; what he couldn't do anymore is make a contemporary mystery live as a novel.  Cup is a poisoned chalice of a book, though it might have made a boffo short story.  

It might have even made a good novel, had Carr approached the idea earlier in life.  He could have opened it with the incident of the seventeenth century cavalier in the Oak Room, which is told as a legend in the book by Ginny.  Carr was a storyteller who loved history and he often took an indirect approach to his narratives, when a direct one might have been better (certainly more cinematic).

suave SS Van Dine hitting it with a lady
(actress Jean Arthur)

Cup could even have been a dramatic story with an actual murder, but Carr began taking the detective novel less seriously.  Even traditionalist mystery writer and theorist S. S. Van Dine (see left) said that aesthetically murder was the appropriate crime in a detective novel, because it leant moral urgency to the proceedings.  

Carr, however, was at a point in his life when he had started to sympathize with the criminals, certainly if they were merely thieves acting against the government.  His moral sense arguably had become distorted, to the point where he thought coshing a cop--in a book at least (and if the cop was of the Labour persuasion)--was just another bit of fun.  

For better or worse, HM became the voice of the author in these books, so let's give the Old Man the Last Word (or nearly so), on the ethics of theft:

In my philosophy, if somebody swindles or cheats or acts too sharp in a business deal, it's the lowest trick on earth and deserves years in prison.  But to pinch a book or a painting or an objet d'art out of a public institution--where, like heavy-game huntin', the odds are even--that's all right.  It shows the fine spark of individualism still burns in the brutish mass.

At least, unlike a lot of people in the States today, HM doesn't turn a blind eye to business corruption.  Carr seems never to have had an interest in, or sympathy for, the business world and the people of it.  But his notion that looting public museums and libraries is a-ok, indeed admirable, is one I find baffling.  When a painting is taken from a public museum to become part of some billionaire's private collection, it's real people, those of the art-loving public, who suffer.  

But then "to hell with the average man," right?  Certainly Carr did not see himself as an average man, nor was he such, to be fair.  Seemingly he also was not a man greatly troubled by social inequities in life.  What did bother him was losing his freedom of independent action, even a bit, to an all-powerful government.  Before her sexual conversion, as it were, Eleanor Cheeseman tellingly is reading a dreary tome entitled Our Duty to the State.

While it's not true that The Cavalier's Cup received entirely poor reviews, many reviewers were appalled with it.  Despite praising the "nice English scene" and "crisp and amusing writing," Avis DeVoto in the Boston Globe called the book "daffy," adding that "dementia in this series has grown to the point where it should be firmly checked."  

A reviewer in another American paper denounced the book's "caricatures parading as people, sniggering sexiness and schoolboy jokes."  Yet another complained that "the characters are ridiculous and the mystery is entirely obscured by the comic relief."  Sir Henry Merrivale was dubbed, fairly enough I think, "senile."  

Over in ye olde country socialist crime writer Julian Symons, decidedly unamused like the Queen, dubbed Carr's humor "elephantine" and pronounced Cup "a painful book, which, without Carter Dickson's name on it, would have been lucky to find a publisher." 

Symons is just lucky that Carr didn't retaliate by sending Eleanor Cheeseman, MP,  and US Representative Harvey after him, armed with their bows and arrows.  Hereward Wake could have warned him of the dire fate which lay in wait for dour socialists.  

NOTE: HM did have one final crime solving adventure, in short form, three years later in the story "Ministry of Miracles," also known as "The Man Who Explained Miracles" and "All in a Maze."  It's a huge improvement on Cup!

Bled on the Bayou: Papa La-bas (1968) and The Ghosts' High Noon (1969), by John Dickson Carr

"...he's being deliberately mysterious."

"Well, so are you."

"It's sex, Leo....Sex! The unbreakable taboo!"

"...he wants no traffic with sweeping reform."

"Good for him!"

"I am glad to hear you say so."

"Crime and the sensational!...We have a sufficiency of both in New Orleans."

"How the hell...can a man be shot through the head at the wheel of an automobile when there's nobody there to do it?"

--From The Ghosts' High Noon, by John Dickson Carr

I.

Mystery Girls

Inspired by some recent sites I saw in Memphis I decided to take a look at one of the last mysteries John Dickson Carr ever wrote: The Ghosts' High Noon, which is set in New Orleans in 1912.  

Memphis you may know is about 400 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and is the biggest city on the river between the Crescent City and St. Louis. A few weeks ago in Midtown I came across a short street called Carr Avenue.  I like to imagine it was named for John Dickson Carr, even though sadly that is not the case.  However most of the homes on it were built around 1912, many of them New Orleans style shotgun houses for streetcar workers.  Walking down it, it's like being back in 1912.  You can imagine you are in a period Carr miracle mystery, with an automobile incredibly entering the avenue, then disappearing before reaching the end of it.

As Carr fans will know the locked room maestro in his writing turned increasingly to historical mysteries with the publication of The Bride of Newgate in 1950, when he was 44 years old.  Over the next 22 years he published only five contemporary Dr. Fell detective novels, these in two brief spurts over 1958-60 and 1965-67, while his Sir Henry Merrivale detective novels petered out with a trio of volumes published over 1950-53.  Compared to these eight books, he published fully a dozen historical mystery novels over this two decade period.  

Carr suffered a significantly debilitating stroke in 1962 after publishing the historical mystery The Demoniacs, and, while his books had already suffered something of a decline in the 1950s, their quality "fell" more afterward.  Like Agatha Christie an annual producer of a mystery tome (a Carr for Christmas), Carr could only put together a collection of previously published short stories for his 1963 outing and in 1964 he revised an older obscure historical mystery from the Thirties for publication.  It was not until 1965, three years after the publication of The Demoniacs, that he was able to produce an original volume, The House at Satan's Elbow, in 1965.

While in my opinion Elbow, a Dr. Fell mystery, is the best of the seven mysteries Carr published between 1965 and 1972, the drop-off in writing quality from earlier Fell tales, even In Spite of Thunder (1960), is definitely discernible.  Anyone who reads my review of Thunder will see I didn't like it much at all, and the truth is I actually enjoyed Elbow more for perhaps sentimental reasons of my own; but I'll readily concede it's a more lumbering, listless narrative than what is found in his earlier tales.  However, compared to the final pair of Fell mysteries, Panic in Box C and Dark of the Moon, which followed over the next two years, it almost seems like a masterpiece.

Panic and Moon share the general problems from which Carr's mysteries had been suffering for some time, elevated to the nth degree: too much talk, too much mysteriousness, irritating, adolescent characters who frequently act like idiots.  Despite his insistence that he was one of the pillars of the true, simon-pure detective novel, Carr for some time had been littering his mysteries with as much irrelevant incident as any hard-boiled detective novel.  Raymond Chandler may have advised mystery writers that when stumped they should have have a man come through the door with a gun, but with Carr it is more a maddening woman with a silly, overblown secret or a load of some supernatural folderal.  

In his heyday, Carr was able effectively to incorporate such business into a mystery: novels like The Burning Court (1937), The Crooked Hinge (1938) and He Who Whispers (1946) are compelling and atmospheric genre masterpieces.  But even before his stroke Carr was fumbling the ball, as it were.  I'll quote myself in my review of In Spite of Thunder:

Again, for someone who professed to hate hard-boiled mysteries, Carr evidently felt that in his story he had to pile on incident (shouting and screaming if not actual fisticuffs and sex).  If "Humdrum" mysteries can err on the side of being too cerebral, Carr's books at this time can err on the side of being too emotional.  Carr is always telling us, as if we can't tell for ourselves from all the exclamation points, that the emotional temperature in the room is going through the roof, etc.  Yes, there's a very heavy use of exclamation points (!), what with characters shouting and roaring and crying "Yes!" and "No!"  You just want everyone to calm the f--- down already.

One of Carr's most irritating quirks is to introduce the woman who is acting mysteriously for what turns out to be a remarkably insufficient reason.  The worst of these women is actually Audrey Page in In Spite of Thunder:

Audrey is a stock character too, and not just because she's a young and sexually attractive "heroine" and love interest.  There is nothing else to her personality besides that she's a maddening ditz.  She's there simply to bewitch and frustrate, to tantalize and tease, the hero, Brian, through a series of annoyingly capricious actions.  This sort of thing became a given in Carr novels, but the problem here is that Audrey really is exceptionally irksome even by Carr's standard of irksome women.  "I've been very silly, you know, and I've behaved about as stupidly as anyone could behave," she admits to Brian.  Yes, indeed you have, Audrey!  But does that stop her from continuing to behave that way?  As a Carr character would say: "No, no, a thousand times no!"

We learn that Audrey came to Geneva simply to get Brian Innes to chase after her, because, you know, she simply couldn't tell Brian she loved him, I guess.  It's interesting that Carr expressed hatred for hard-boiled crime fiction, because characters like Audrey behave a lot like femmes fatales in those books, existing solely to bedevil the hero, though ultimately Carr's young "charmers" usually prove to be good girls after all, just rather maddeningly flighty and childish.  She "began to slap at the table like a woman in a frenzy or a child in a tantrum," writes Carr of Audrey at one point, mentally likening women to children in an unflattering comparison. 

All Brian and Audrey do the whole book (until the very end) is bicker.  This "battle of the sexes" motif is a prominent feature in later Carr (indeed it features in earlier Carr too), but it's so damn obtrusive in this novel.  It's hard to understand just why these two love each other--they certainly don't seem to like each other,  What they really need is not a murder investigation but a relationship counselor:

"But can't you s-say you love me," Audrey cried out at him, "without swearing at me and looking as though you wanted to strangle me?" 
"No I can't.  That's how you affect people."
"All right.  I don't mind; I love it."

Brian tells Audrey, in the anachronistically stilted language characters in which male characters speak in this book, "You're a female devil, a succubus of near-thirty masquerading as nineteen....I've been looking for you my whole life."  What a charmer!  I guess Audrey, who seems to have masochistic tendencies, loved that endearment as well.

Audrey is the most tiresome of these she-witch Carr characters, but they pop up over and over again.  We'll get to more in the books I'm going to talk about below.  

But Carr has all sorts of tiresome quirks in the later books, all of which have been noted by Douglas G. Greene in his masterful Carr biography, The Man Who Explained Miracles, published thirty years ago this year.  There are the radio-script style stage directions, a carry-over from his work in that field in the Forties and Fifties.  Carr was probably the greatest radio mystery writer who ever lived, even better than Ellery Queen and Anthony Boucher, but what worked in radio doesn't work in novels.  

In his narrative Carr will include these long descriptions of house layouts which read like radio stage directions; whether put in his characters' mouths or in the third person narrative, it's tedious writing indeed.  Then he will stop a chapter with some sort of contrived climax and then open the next chapter several hours later with characters talking about what happened in the intervening period, promptly deflating his climax.  

But there is so much talk generally it's hard ever for Carr to sustain the excitement he is going for.  It doesn't help that the characters speak so anachronistically and floridly and oracularly.  Carr does a thing I call "dashing," where he has a character about to tell something pertinent to the mystery, only promptly to interrupt him or herself with some sidetrack, like this:

"But you simply must hear this minute what I finally have come to realize, the precious golden key to the mystery that we all in our varying fumbling ways have been striving so desperately to grasp in order to unlock this devilish puzzle box of a conundrum!  The reason no footprints were left in the dust in the armaments room room of the castle was--"

"Is that the tea kettle I hear whistling?"

Then five chapters later, if we're lucky, this person, if they aren't aren't murdered in the meantime, may get around to telling what they know.

All of these faults are present in the earlier Fell mysteries In Spite of Thunder and The Dead Man's Knock, but Panic in Box C and Dark of the Moon (and The House at Satan's Elbow to a lesser extent) take these and add some more.  At least in the earlier books Carr was able to generate a sort of synthetic excitement, even if he was trying much too hard.  These later books are just dull, the characters tiresomely verbose and silly, the narratives prolix, the climaxes duds. The characters behave like juveniles (or immature college students), even calling each other by silly nicknames.  In Dark of the Moon Dr. Fell gets called magister, maestro, gargantua, Torquemada and other terms I can't recall.  It just makes me want to tear my hair out.

Part of the problem was Carr just could not believably portray the contemporary scene, with which he himself was completely out of sorts.  Increasingly he put his heroes' ages in their thirties or even forties, while making his heroines shy of thirty (though they usually "look nineteen"); yet none of them, however old, sound like actual people who could have lived in the mod era.  

Happily Carr finally dropped Dr. Fell and the modern world after Moon and his last four novels--Papa La-bas, The Ghosts' High Noon, Deadly Hall and The Hungry Goblin--were set in the past, two in the Victorian era and two in 1912 and 1927 respectively.  Are they any better?  I haven't read The Hungry Goblin, which the estate oddly has repressed from republication, apparently on the grounds that it is such a terrible book (could it really be worse than Dark of the Moon?), but I would say that the New Orleans trilogy of novels is at least a little better than the final two Fells.

II.

The first of these novels, Papa La-bas, launched Carr's New Orleans trilogy of mystery novels.  It's an improvement over Panic and Moon, but it's still not actually good.  It exhibits all of the problems of his later books, if somewhat less conspicuously than the previous two.  

Delphine LaLaurie
(colorized)

There was actually material here to make a good book, had the younger Carr written it.  Set in 1858, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War (or War Between the States as Carr, like Raymond Chandler, always called it), the novel draws on the notorious real life case of Delphine LaLaurie, a New Orleans socialite believed to have tortured and murdered many of her slaves.  

An infuriated city mob actually invaded and razed her mansion in 1834, forcing her to flee the state and the country and settle in Paris, where she died fifteen years later.  In Carr's novel it appears fairly early on that LaLaurie's adopted son--a character invented by the author--has returned to New Orleans to avenge himself on the mob's ringleaders, all of whom are socially prominent men (in Carr's handling).  

As stated, this is good material for a mystery melodrama, but sadly none of it ever really takes flight, being held down by the prolix, tedious narrative.  Carr introduces voodoo--or more accurately rumors of voodoo--but this never really goes anywhere, despite much mention being made of real life New Orleans "Voodoo Queen" Marie Laveau.  

Very quickly the book descends into characters dully orating at each other, including the book's nominal amateur detective, historically prominent real-life southern politician Judah Benjamin (nicknamed "Benjie" in the book).  The fictional character Isabelle de Sancerre, a wealthy slave owning matron, goes on and on to similarly fictional English (actually Scottish) consul Richard "Dick" Macrae about various New Orleans legends.  Even Carr refers to this lady in the book's Notes for the Curious as "that tireless talker."  

Then as love interests there are two young women--Margot de Sancerre, Isabelle's willful southern belle daughter, and Ursula Ede, her steadfast second banana friend (what I call in Carr's books the brunette one and the blonde one)--both of whom are behaving maddeningly mysteriously.  

There's not much nicknaming in this one, though Ursula insists on calling Dick "Quentin" for some reason.  There are a couple of stock English comic cockney characters who vexsomely speak in ponderously overdrawn dialect.  The murder method in the killing of Judge Rutherford (a cameo character who exists only to be killed) Carr presumably cribbed from a Dorothy L. Sayers novel, while the central concealment device for the murderer he probably derived from a certain opus by Cornell Woolrich, an author with whom he had qualities in common.  I think it becomes screamingly obvious who the murderer is around page 100, yet unrelentingly the book goes on.  

All in all it's another tired work by Carr.  One thing this time around I noticed (it's my second read) that I thought was kind of funny, however: Dick has two pals, Tom Clayton and Harry Ludlow, whom he goes to a "quadroon ball" with; and it finally occurred to me this time that together they are "Tom, Dick and Harry."

Speaking of quadroons (people one-fourth black), Carr basically seems to view slavery as more or less on par with the old English class system of masters and servants.  (It's how southern slave-holding "aristocrats" liked to view themselves, however self-deceivingly.)  This doesn't add one bit to the charm of the book, to say the least.  When a character casually mentions having won himself a slave in a card game, no one bats an eyelash.  The fundamental inhumanity of it all Carr doesn't seem to get.  

At one point our good English consul, the "hero" of the story, so lectures his underling Harry when he thinks (wrongly) that Harry is about to object to the morality of quadroon balls, which are attended by comely free "mulatto" women in hopes of finding wealthy white men to make mistresses of them: 

"The situation exists, and must be faced; let's have no moralizing or cant!"  

"The Quadroon"
1911 poem by black reformer W.E.B Du Bois

Well, isn't that special?  Actually it's quite clear that all three men are rather sexually titillated by these balls.  Of course they are all sexists as well, thinking spanking is a great way of disciplining willful, headstrong women like Margot, who shockingly shows up at the ball too, even though she is not of mixed race. Conversely, little problem apparently is seen with beautiful women having essentially to sell themselves sexually because they have in them some drops of "black blood." The situation, according to Dick, must be faced, but it need not be faced and corrected, apparently.  Tell that to W.E.B. Du Bois.  (See pic to left.)

Reformers, after all, are just a bunch of self-righteous sermonizers, right?  Nothing more than a sourfaced pack of puritanical blue noses and spoilsports.  

Did Carr see all moral stances as cant (i.e., sanctimonious lecturing), or just the ones he himself didn't care about personally?  What about, say, concern over genocide or pedophilia?  (On the latter matter see below.)  Elsewhere Dick Macrae sneeringly refers to objecting to slavery as singing "pious hymns" and Harry Ludlow announces: "I can't be as shocked by slavery as people at home think I ought to be." 

Judah Benjamin, a real-life character whom Carr clearly admires, when queried about his convictions on the subject, states: "I do not say slavery is wrong, as I do not say any property owning is wrong."  In real life Carr like Benjie was a great defender of the rights of property owners and he thunderously damned British postwar taxation as iniquitous oppression.  Perhaps he was right about this.  But not to appreciate that human property belongs in a different category from mere inanimate objects is what seems truly iniquitous to me.  To take away someone's independent personhood through enslavement strikes me as  one of the worst sins one can commit.  

Judah Benjamin
a proslavery Jewish US senator from Louisiana
at the time Papa La-bas takes place

Doug Greene in his Carr biography states that social systems per se did not trouble Carr, though he did think one had an obligation to behave "honorably" within them: i.e., masters should not mistreat servants, freed or enslaved, like Delphine LaLaurie allegedly did.  There's a gambler character who behaves badly to Dick's free black servants and is upbraided by Dick for doing so.  

Yet surely sometimes social systems are so bad that they ought to be drastically reformed; individual acts of kindness don't do nearly enough to mitigate the overall evil of the system in place.  But Carr and the characters with whom he sympathizes in his books are all self-proclaimed "conservatives" who instinctively oppose social reform as dangerously "radical."  

Carr himself, like his dearest enemy Raymond Chandler, professed to take the part of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, likening southerners to his beloved English cavaliers; and in his later years he left England to settle in Greenville, South Carolina, of all places, where he praised the southern states as bedrocks of conservatism and sarcastically dismissed concerns about civil rights as lurid exaggerations.  (My family moved to Alabama the same year but my parents never deluded themselves like Carr about the reality of the region's endemic racism.)  

III.

Compared to Papa La-bas, The Ghosts' High Noon is actually something of an improvement, and not just because we aren't having slavery thrown in our faces.  (In slavery's place we get something else odious and objectionable thrown in our faces; see below.)  Carr actually repeats some of the plot points from Papa, but he at least comes up, this time around, with a pretty good and apparently original "impossible" murder.  

homes along Bayou Saint John, scene of crime in The Ghosts' High Noon

It's 1912 and our hero, James "Jim" Blake, is an admired journalist turned successful spy novelist.  His recently published debut novel, a bestseller, is The Count of Monte Carlo.  Carr here alludes, accurately enough, to the English crime writer E. Phillips Oppenheim, who had already become a hugely popular author in the United States with his tales of international intrigue in Monte Carlo and other swanky European locales.  

In New York Jim is asked by George Brinton McClellan Harvey, a real life prominent conservative Democrat (soon to become a Republican) and editor of Harper's Weekly, to report on rumors of political intrigue in a congressional race in New Orleans concerning Democratic nominee Jim Clayton "Clay" Blake.  "The underground wire has it that some enemy is out to ruin him,"  Harvey explains.  

Carr's kind of guy
prominent anti-progressive 
George Harvey

Clay, Harvey tells Jim, is "like most southerners...as conservative as you are."  (Harvey means white southerners of course.)  Jim himself confirms, without explanation: "I'm a conservative, even a reactionary...I distrust progressives and hate reformers."  

113 years ago near the height of the Progressive Era, there was much, one might believe, that needed reforming, such as the franchise (women could not vote) and racist Jim Crow laws, but not so to our Jim Blake, who, conveniently for himself, doesn't actually like talking about politics.  If he did, he might have to articulate defenses of some of his heinous positions!

But anyway off goes Jim by train to New Orleans, with a stop at Washington, D.C., which allows Carr to indulge himself in some nostalgia about streetcars and such.  (He lived in DC as a small boy when his father briefly served as a US congressman--a Democrat!)  

Chunks of exposition have already been served up to Jim and the reader by George Harvey; and in DC yet more is ladled out by Charley Emerson, an old bachelor whose interests, sounding a lot like Carr, are "old books and toy trains."  Then it's off to New Orleans!

Along the way on his New York trip Jim literally twice runs into fetching, fair-haired Jill Matthews, for whom in Carr tradition he immediately falls emotionally.  Yes, it's another one of Carr's age-mismatched romances, Jim being thirty-five and "not ill-looking in a strongly Anglo-Saxon way [?]" and Jill being twenty-seven and "very pretty" with "admirable body proportions" and "a sense of humor struggling through" her delectable "pink mouth."  Very soon Jim is rather familiarly calling Jill "my sugar-candy witch," one of those weird anachronistic endearments (even for 1912 I suspect) for which Carr had a penchant. Indeed, this phrase seems unique to Carr.  Women also get called "wench" a lot in his books.

suffragist Aimee Hutchinson was fired from her teaching job at a Catholic school for attending a 
suffrage parade in 1912, the same year as The Ghost' High Noon. (See here.)
Carr's hero in that novel is a self-described reactionary who firmly opposes sweeping social reform.

Jill, however, justifies the endearment (?) when she maddeningly keeps running away throughout much of the book.  When she explains her behavior much later on, her explanation hardly seems sufficient.  Unfortunately this not very compelling subsidiary mystery around vanishing Jill swallows much of this book, like the proverbial gnat swallowing the whale. 

There is eventually a "miracle" murder but it's not until around page 200 in a 300 page book that Carr really gets serious with it. There's also the supposed "miracle" mystery of the person who knocked on the door of the train compartment where Jim, Jill, and a New Orleans bon vivant friend of Jim's, Leo Shepley, are discussing the Clay Blake matter and then vanished, but this little mystery, never very compelling in the first place, fizzles miserably.  At least it doesn't take up as much of the book as the matter of Jill's Jilting Behavior.

Jim finally gets to New Orleans on page 84 and the murder of Leo Shepley takes place about fifty pages later.  Witnesses, including Jim and Jill, see him drive down the Bayou St. John road in his snazzy red Mercer Raceabout into a barn-like shed on the grounds of a mansion and then hear him apparently shoot himself.  But, wait, where's the gun?!  Could it be murder?!  

I still like miracle problems (Carr at his best is an abiding delight in this regard) and this was an enjoyable one, much better than the shenanigans in Papa La-bas, where there are also a surfeit of mysteries, including Margot's vanishing from a moving carriage, and not a single one of them compelling.

"The Mercer Raceabout is considered the most prized original American sports car.  
Known for its enhanced design, magnificent handling and high speed, these cars won five of
six races they entered in 1911.  Mercers came with the unheard of guarantee that each Raceabout
would achieve a minimum of seventy miles per hour without modification on public roads."
See Heritage Museum and Gardens  

I found the period atmosphere in Noon enjoyable enough, though many of the characters in the book sound more like callow 1920s college students (like Carr, now 63, had been four decades earlier) rather than Edwardian adults.  This is how Jim and Leo greet each other on the train:

New Orleans' Hotel Grunewald 
setting for a late tete-a-tete
between Jim and Jill 

"Leo, you old bastard, how are you?"

"Jim, you unregenerate son-of-a-bitch, have you visited any good whorehouses recently?"

Later this boyish pair sits down in a compartment with Jill, have drinks and chat about whores and homosexuals.  Jill is Carr's perfect type of girl, the kind that looks prim and proper on the outside, but is really way into sex underneath (even wanton), pally with the boys and sympathetic to all of her beau's charmingly masculine foibles.  

She's the kind of girl you can throw up on at the college football game when you're drunk out of your mind and she will gamely smile and wipe your vomit off her dress with a handkerchief (or more likely several of them).  

"I want you to do mad things," Jill admiringly tells Jim.  "I love it!"  Remembering that she's living in the Edwardian era, she won't smoke in public, however, at least until late in the book. 

Jim and Jill share a romantic rendezvous at The Cave,
a fanciful grotto-like dining room in the Grunewald Hotel

IV.

In a good number of later Carrs, illicit sex between older men and younger women (or "girls" as they are called) is a central interest.  And of course in the case of Ghosts' High Noon the setting is New Orleans, which had an infamous red-light district known as Storyville, so Carr has come to the right place!  I don't know of any reviews explicitly mentioning this (or Doug's bio either) but the illicit sex in this one takes place between adult men and what Carr refers to as "pubescent girls" around the ages of 12 or 13, which raises the "ick" factor considerably.  

Worse yet, Carr adopts the same attitude to child prostitution that he does to the quadroon balls: judiciously neutral, if one wants to be generous, though one might more accurately say pruriently interested.  Despite dwelling on this subject at considerable length in his novel, in his Notes for the Curious Carr himself completely avoids the subject of Storyville child prostitution.  Did the subject spring entirely from his own mind?

Storyville prostitute
photographed by E. J. Bellocq

The Green Capsule in its review of the novel very delicately and disapprovingly approaches this matter: "There is a particularly vile subject needlessly included in the story, and I'm not even going to mention what it is.  That Carr treats it with a "men will be men" attitude is beyond me, and I could imagine some readers just shutting the book."  

Well, I'm going to dare to discuss this "vile subject" in depth below, so take heed.  You can draw your own conclusions as to what it says about the author.  Carr seems to intimate that a sexual predilection for young girls, at least when the girls are ostensibly "willing" participants, is rather less aberrant than homosexuality.  

This take first comes up when Dick, Leo and Jill are discussing the Clay Blake affair.  The rumors about Clay Blake concern "something abnormal or unnatural," speculates Jim.  "The slightest suggestion of homosexuality, for example...."  This speculation provokes an infuriated Leo to smite his fist on the table, rattling the glasses and china. 

 "What kind of friends do you think I have, for God's sake?" Leo roars.  "No, Jim, I won't hear that for a minute!  It's nothing at all abnormal or unnatural, at least in the way you mean."

So Leo objects to Jim suggesting he might have gay friends, but pedophiles (or near-pedophiles) are a-ok, apparently.  Later on in New Orleans Jim discusses with a couple of Crescent City pressmen the criminal case of Etienne Deschamps, a New Orleans dentist who in 1892 was tried and executed at the age of 62 for the murder three years earlier, when he was 59, of 13-year-old Juliette Deitsh.  (She was actually, contra Jim/Carr, 12.)  Dr. Deschamps had a habit of chloroforming and sexually assaulting Julia, but one day he administered too much chloroform to her and she died.  

Jerry Lee Lewis and his 
"half-grown nymph" Myra

Jim declares of young Juliette that Deschamps "made the girl his mistress" and that "she seems to have entered heartily into the affair and had all the essential attributes of a woman."  Pardon the canting and pious hymning here, but isn't this stance rather on the grotesque side?  

Okay, I'll allow that in Mississippi in 1957 22-year-old rock singer Jerry Lee Lewis married a 13-year-old cousin and that under the English common law of rape the age of consent was set at twelve or even ten, meaning that if a man had sex with a twelve-year-old, the girl was compelled to prove that she had not consented to her physical violation in order for the act to be deemed rape.  So Carr's attitude is actually a traditional one and we all know Carr loved tradition.

Still Carr was writing in 1969 not 1669, for God's sake.  Back in the 1950s Jerry Lee Lewis' career suffered a significant setback over his marriage.  (It didn't help that the couple were cousins as well.)  Okay, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, notorious Jeffrey Epstein pal, in a 1997 newspaper editorial, "Statutory Rape is an Outmoded Concept," pronounced: "Reasonable people can disagree whether the age of consent should be as low as 14.  Fifteen would seem like an appropriate compromise."  But even he wasn't going for 12.  

On Carr goes about this subject throughout this book.  Later Jim visits Flossie Yates, a New Orleans madam who specializes in procuring young girls for her clients, what Carr calls "pubescent girls," presumably meaning they have "all the essential attributes of a woman."  Flossie chattily talks of two such girls, Sue, who is 14, and Billie Jean (had Michael Jackson read this book?), who is not much over 12.  Billie Jean, she declares, "is exceptionally mature for her years."  She calls her charming girls "half-grown nymphs."  

Other characters, when this topic comes up (which it does frequently), call them "the near nubile" and refer blithely to Flossie's "stable of underage ones" and "the joys of the pubescent" and "men with a passion for half-formed bodies and the caresses of the immature."  Clay Blake explains that he was "accused of spending my nights in orgies with girls twelve or thirteen years old.  Don't look so shocked, any of you."  He adds this even though, Carr pointedly tells us, "in fact nobody did look shocked; the women merely looked thoughtful."  Women in Carr's books strive hard to look proper, but under the skin, they are, like the colonel's lady one imagines, greatly interested, perhaps even more than men, in sex of all stripes.

Storyville

V.

Let me make clear that I'm not suggesting that Carr was, like occasional mystery writer Eden Phillpotts. a secret pedophile.  Actually, to be accurate, I have discovered that the technically accurate term for what Carr is describing, a person attracted to pubescent children (as opposed to pre-pubescent children), is hebephile.  I'm not even saying Carr was one of those either, like those fictional clients of Sue and Billie Jean in The Ghosts' High Noon.  Yet to me a lot of the notions expressed about sex in Carr's books come off as juvenile, sexist, prurient and occasionally disgusting.  

Others have agreed.  "Sex amateurish and repulsive at the same time," wrote Humdrum mystery devotee Jacques Barzun in his and Wendell Hertig Taylor's tome A Catalogue of Crime of Carr's 1949 detective novel Below Suspicion, though ironically The Ghosts' High Noon was one of the few Carrs Barzun actually liked.  "One of his sober and sustained efforts," he declares.  (Barzun doesn't mention the child prostitution either.)  Of Noon specifically a nonplussed Keith Boynton at Goodreads avowed, "the story's cavalier attitude towards pedophilia is pretty damn jarring."

Over and over Carr's later novels feature older men attracted to much younger women, often women who "look about nineteen."  Then there's this very sexualized and smitten description of Lady Brace in the The Cavalier's Cup (1953), who enticingly looks for all the world like jailbait, though she actually isn't.  Evidently a real dream girl fantasy in high heels:

Actress and "small girl"
Shirley Temple receiving a corsage
on her fifteenth birthday in 1943.
Like Carr's Lady Brace, her hair 
"fell to her shoulders and curled out 
a little in artless, young-girl fashion."
Six years earlier, when Temple
was only nine years old, author
Graham Greene had scandalously
asserted in a film review that
Temple's "admirers" consisted of
"middle-aged men and clergymen"
who were attracted to her
"well-shaped and desirable little body."

The very pretty girl who entered [Chief Inspector Masters'] office, he would have sworn at a first quick glance, could not have been more than fifteen years old, despite her modish clothes.  

First of all, even wearing her heels she was only five feet tall. Her soft and silky light-brown hair fell to her shoulders and curled out a little in artless, young-girl fashion....

[...]

"I'm awfully sorry to intrude, Chief Inspector said the small girl, in a warm and sweet voice as feminine as herself.  "But do you mind if I sit down?"

[...]

....her figure...was a fine one....for all its innocent and demure appearance, her expression held a quality of the impish.  The small girl...used her rather heavy-lidded gray eyes and pink lips in a way which would have inspired speculation in any man who had been married for fewer years than Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters. 

1953 was the time, I have speculated, that Carr, a happily married yet perpetually dissatisfied man who engaged in a number of extra-marital affairs or assignations, was having a midlife crisis.  (He was 47.) In his books and his life in his later years he seems to have been obsessed with recovering the unrecoverable past, the world's and his own, wanting desperately to relive the joys of his lost youth, when life had more zest.

All the essential attributes of a woman?
Brooke Shields as a child prostitute
in the 1978 film Pretty Baby

Back to The Ghosts' High Noon, late in the novel police detective Zack Trowbridge, who calls Jim Franz Joseph (don't ask), admits that the police know all about Flossie Yates and her underage girl harem.  Why isn't she prosecuted?  It seems that "if the girls are proved professionals [!] it's hard to touch anybody."  So these decidedly pro young girls remain readily available to to gratify the lusts of "anybody who's got the dough."  Storyville, it seems, is a perfect island of depravity, rather like the late Mr. Epstein's literal one.  

(The red light district was finally shut down in 1917 when the US entered World War One and established a military base in New Orleans.  The government emphatically did not want the troops dallying with Storyville whores. My then twenty-one-year-old paternal grandfather, incidentally, was stationed down there at the time.)

Interestingly five years after the appearance of The Ghosts' High Noon, Louisiana writer Al Rose published Storyville, a history of New Orleans' red light district which included an account of a young girl who was forced into prostitution by her own mother. The account in turn served as the inspiration for the 1978 movie Pretty Baby, which starred actual twelve-year-old model and actress Brooke Shields as the titular child prostitute.  Carr died the year before the release of this flick at age 71, so he never got see how his then forgotten novel anticipated one of the most controversial films of the Seventies. To me all this adds unexpected piquancy to The Ghosts' High Noon, however problematic Carr's take on the subject of child prostitution is.