--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? |
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.
"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.
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) which Carr depicts in his late mystery novel The Ghosts' High Noon.
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 impish 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 who finds this hebe-creepy?
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, and 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. How charming, you might say, a family album! But it's a very strange album indeed.
 |
| 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.
 |
| Carr girl filling her sweater |
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 much superior to this novel. And 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.
In this summary I'm at page 58 in the narrative and practically nothing has 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."
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 hit with the 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 him through a window and proceed to pursue him with play bows and arrows, shooting him in the rump as he runs for his life. 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, the locked room all these men want to get into symbolizes the vagina!" |
Certainly The Cavalier's Cup 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 novel, 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).
 |
| 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 rich man's private collection, it's the art-loving public who suffers.
But then to hell with the average man, right? Certainly Carr did not see himself as an average man, nor was he, 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.
