"Would you care to marry the daughter of a vicious murderess?"
"You are concerned with sensationalism, Mr. Strickland."
--John Dickson Carr's Scandal at High Chimneys (1959)
The crime writing of John Dickson Carr, like that of Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, clearly entered into a state of decline sometimes in the 1950s. Did Christie ever write a truly first-rate detective novel after 1953, the year she published After the Funeral and A Pocket Full of Rye? The decline was more extreme in Carr's case. To be sure, he reinvigorated his crime writing in the early 1950s with his impressive historical mysteries The Bride of Newgate (1950) and The Devil in Velvet (1951), but how many really first-rate mysteries did he publish in the Fifties? Maybe Captain Cut-Throat and Fire, Burn!?
I have a soft spot for Carr's late Dr. Fell mystery The Dead Man's Knock (1958), which a lot of people seem sort of to hate; but what about Carr's Victorian mystery Scandal at High Chimneys? When I first read it two decades or more ago I was underwhemed; and having reread it more recently, I found that my feeling about it hasn't changed. Is it better than Carr's late Sixties mysteries? Certainly the historical atmosphere is stronger; but the book yet has noteworthy flaws.
In contrast with the author's other historical mysteries, Scandal at High Chimneys is set in Victorian-era England, specifcally the year 1865, the 28th year of Queen Victoria's reign and the fourth year of her stodgy widowhood. Carr was not really temperamentally suited to the Victorian era. One thing a Carr fan will know about their locked room legend is that over and over and over again the author, through his stand-in writer protagonists, condemns puritans as nothing more than canting hypocrites and defends libertines as men (or even women) who at least knew how to live and made no apologies about it.
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| notorious party gal Queen Victoria in 1865 at the time the novel takes place; she was 45 |
Basically Carr never forgave Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell for having had Charles I's kingly head lopped off in 1649 and spoiling everyone's fun in England during the Interegnum until his own death a decade later saw the ascension of Charles II. Aside from the Interregnum itself, there was not a period in English history with which Carr could have been more out-of-sorts than those years when Queen Victoria wore mourning, partook copiously of multi-course meals and glowered at the camera.
Appropriately for a later Carr mystery, Chimneys opens with the ages of two lovely younger women undergoing discussion. These enduring young charmers are sisters Kate and Celia Damon, who when the novel opens are 20 and 19 respectively. (We aren't leeringly told in this particular Carr opus, by the way, that the young ladies "look younger" than their actual ages.)
The sisters' father, the stern and forbidding Victorian criminal prosecutor Matthew Damon, "deeply religious in the old Evangelical way" (a Carr reader will know this means he's really a horny old goat at heart), doesn't seem keen on the girls, one blonde, one brunette, getting married. He proclaims that they are too young for all that, an assertion at which scoffs his kittenish younger second wife, Georgette Damon. Presumably Georgette, a former actress, is in her thirties--the sophisticated adventuress age don't you know--while Matthew is 48 but acts 20 years older.
Nexy we shift over to Carr avatar Clive Strickland, a rising sensation fiction serialist, discussing at his London club with Victor Damon, Kate's and Celia's brother, the matter of just "what's wrong at High Chimneys"--the Damon country domicile. In the usual matter of Carr characters at this time in Carr's career, Victor maddeningly starts to tell Clive, but is immediately interrupted by someone else. Then, when queried again by Clive, he demurs from talking: "I can't tell you....I can't tell you." Whatever the reason, however, Victor seems fervently to desire that his sisters marry and get away from High Chimneys.
This is the first of many times in the novel that a character refuses to tell something important they know or is interrupted (or killed even) when about to tell something important they know. Here are some examples from the book:
"Then it is time for plain speaking--what was that?"
"It's so absurd that I prefer to keep it to myself."
"If you don't mind, I'll keep that to myself...."
Not for nothing does a character beg of another:
"....let us have no more mystification....I beg you to draw it mild and spare me more of your blasted mystification."
This suspensive delay, as it were, is a narrative device which Carr picked up from his radio playwriting that quickly wore out its welcome in his novels. As his biographer, Doug Greene, explains:
Carr artificially creates what he calls an "atmosphere of tension and hysterics" by overusing his trick of saying obscure things, and by beginning to explain a mystery only to have the revelation interrupted. I counted thirteen separate instances in Scandal at High Chimneys in which someone, for insufficent reasons, refuses to reveal something. It is easy to sympathize with the protagonist when he moans that although two people say they know who the murderer is, and two more certainly do, "no one will say a word."
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| just trying to have a little bit of fun King Charles I (1600-1649) |
These stylistic matters--which plague all later Carr books--aside, how is the plot? Plot is, after all, the main thing in a Carr mystery. Here, it's...not so great. As in all late Carr, there's a great deal of mysteriousness (one might say blather), with about everyone acting yet mysteriouser and mysteriouser, but the basic mystery is not all that involved. Let's explain.
At his club Clive Strickland learns an unhappy fact from arrogant Lord Albert Tressider, a sneering snob whom Victor Damon wants to marry his sister Celia. (He could have been borrowed from one of Carr's swashbuckling Jacobean mysteries). It seems that Victor's papa Matthew Damon
"used to have uncommonly queer tastes. He enjoyed making up to women who committed murder. He would prosecute 'em, all as virtuous as an Old Testmament prophet. Afterwards he'd go to Newgate [Prison] and visit 'em any number of times before they were hanged three weeks later. Of course he pretended it was to pray with 'em and relieve his conscience....[In fact he] was quite spooney about two or three 'em, the young and pretty ones. It seems he couldn't resist 'em."
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| darkness and light |
Clive soon apprehends that the scandal at High Chimneys is that one of the Damon girls--either dark-haired, spirited Kate whom he loves or blonde, demure and seemingly submisive Celia (it seems like the The Last of the Mohicans' Cora and Alice all over again)--is the daughter of the executed Harriet Pyke (Harriet Vane?), one of Matthew Damon's convicted murderesses (she shot her lover and then for good measure strangled her maid, who witnessed the crime), whom the prosecutor adopted as an infant in a misplaced act of horndog piety and passed as his own and his first wife's child. Tainted blood! To his credit, Clive doesn't seem too worried about this (Carr heroes like their women to be worldly sisters under the skin), but, this being the Victorian Age, everyone else seems to be in a dither and frantically searching for their fainting couches.
But which sister is which? Matthew Damon is shot in his study before he can tell Clive. Matthew's killer seemingly is a headless spectre in "a frock-coat, a dark waistcoat, and patterned trousers...of a red-and-white checkered design." That's something you don't see every day! Carr does manage to give us a frisson or two with this, but was Damon really killed by a ghost? Fortunately retired copper Jonathan Whicher, he of the infamous 1860 Road Hill House murder case (aka the Constance Kent murder case), is soon on hand to investigate.
At Chimneys as well, I should mention, we find a butler named Burbage and his daughter Penelope, an eyewitness of the "ghost" who seems inspired by The Moonstone's Rosanna Spearman. (In his Notes for the Curious at the end of the novel Carr calls Rosanna "the most moving and effective character in the book.") Also a pompous older society doctor--a favored "type" of Carr's--and a housekeeper, Mrs. Cavanaugh, "a middle-aged, straight-backed woman full of piety and unctuousness," so we know that she's up to no good, anyway!
In his Notes to the Curious Carr allows that he pays scant attention to Victorian poverty and filth, because, heck, that's just not much fun! "[S]qualor and degradation are not necessarily interesting no matter how pitable," he explains. He's writing a mystery not a social document.
This may all sound pretty good, actually, but the telling is flurried, the characters uncompelling and the central deception ploy seemingly cribbed from an earlier mystery by another famous mystery author, just as Carr's immediately previous detective novel The Dead Man's Knock seemingly cribs from Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night. Having forgotten most of the book's plot in the two decades or more interval between my readings, I was still able to spot the trick immediately; and thus I read the rest of the novel merely for confirmation of my near-certain suspicion. Just call it The Suspicions of Mr. Evans.
So regrettably the book all fell rather flat for me. I recollect Carr's slightly later The Witch of the Low Tide (1962) as a better mystery than Chimneys, but I'll have to reread that too again someday. Later Carrs tend to yield disappointments, I find.
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