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