"They were not ordinary women. They will be restless."
"This is April, not Halloween. Women on broomsticks are a little out of my line."
--The Burning Court, John Dickson Carr
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| suspected multiple poisoner Marie-Madeleine d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers undergoing the "water cure" torture in 1676 before her subsequent beheading and immolation this event provided the inspiration for both Arthur Conan Doyle's 1902 horror story "The Leather Funnel" and John Dickson Carr's 1937 detective novel The Burning Court for more on the outre "Affair of the Poisons" in the 1670s see Atlas Obscura 1878 painting by Jean-Baptiste Cariven |
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| Powell's Books in Chicago I was not in the theology section but theology may not be inappropriate in the case of The Burning Court |
The others were Hag's Nook and The Judas Window, respectively headlining Carr's greatest series detectives Dr. Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, but The Burning Court was the one that looked especially intriguing; so I started that first, while still in Chicago. I remember actually reading it at my friend's apartment, which he was renting with two or three other people, in a beaux arts building of some sort. I remember sitting out in the dusk on a balcony reading Court--great atmosphere for an atmospheric novel.
I hadn't read the novel since until just recently, but I remembered it very favorably. Carr of course loved not merely murder mysteries and miracle problems, but Gothic supernatural trappings--and he did not hold back with such devices in Court.
I had forgotten a lot of the book's details, but I remembered the opening and closing pages of the novel quite well, I can assure you. Court represents Carr at the height of his creative powers, making the book a contrast with his later rather tired and jejune efforts from the Fifties and Sixties which I have often reviewed here over the years.
The 1937 book is all about Ted Stevens, a young (or so 32 seems to me now) editor at a Philadelphia publishing firm, and the incredible situation into which he is plunged over an April weekend in 1929. (The book is back set, for some reason, eight years, a year before Carr, who was 30 in 1937, published his first detective novel.) Ted's on his way back, via the Pennsylvania Railroad, to Crispen, the affluent tiny Main Line village where he resides with his lovely angelically feminine Canadian wife Marie. (Could Crispen have suggested the adopted surname of mystery writer Edmund Crispin, a great Carr admirer?)
On the train Ted's looking over a book being published by his firm, the latest true crime tome, this one about women poisoners, from author Gaudan Cross, when he makes a startling, chapter-ending discovery: his wife bears an astonishing resemblance to a notorious French poisoner, guillotined for murder in 1861! This startling revelation may not be quite up there with, "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" but it's pretty close.
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| 1985 IPL pb edition |
When Ted arrives home to his loving wife Marie, things get very weird quite quickly. Marie is acting rather strangely, and soon his neighbor Mark Despard shows up with a friend from England, a certain Partington, to divulge that he, Mark, knows that his wealthy, lately deceased uncle, who died from gastroenteritis supposedly, was actually fatally poisoned with arsenic!
Mark wants to disinter Uncle Miles from the crypt to see--without involving the police, mind you. Ted being the kind of Carr hero who thinks obedience to mere norms of the law is but a whimsical trifle, he agrees. But when they open the crypt they discover that the corpse of Uncle Miles has vanished!
Did a non-dead Miles get up to take a stroll around Crispen?!
Then when Mark returns home, Marie has disappeared, leaving him only an enigmatic note! (You'll notice I'm using a lot of emphatic italics and exclamation marks; the novel seems to call for them.)
Incredibly (once again), I think everything is wrapped up--or seems to be--the next day, when Gaudan Cross himself shows up. very late in the book, to solve the case in the grand manner, Dr. Fell being over in England one imagines. Of course there is an epilogue as well, which offers something of a new perspective on things....
Though controversial The Burning Court has traditionally been deemed one of Carr's finest detective novels--justifiably so, I think. There are two miracle problems--how a woman could poison a man and then vanish through a door which no longer exists and how the dead man's body could be removed from a crypt--which, while perhaps not in the upper tier of Carr's catalogue of impossibilities, are still nicely contrived.
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In the tale there are tantalizing suggestions of the supernatural, that the non-dead might be afoot and cruelly bedeviling the few inhabitants of little Crispen. There is a bravura mystery plot in which two (or really three*) different explanations seem plausible, or at least possible-- the kind of narrative switcheroo which vintage crime writers Ellery Queen and Anthony Berkeley so loved to contrive.
All in all it's a fine, accomplished detective novel; my only complaint might be a general one, that the detective element and the seeming supernatural element are somewhat at war with each other. Like his "humdrum" friend John Street, Carr was a lover of true, systematic detection but he also adored suspense and sensation. Sometimes the narrative in Court seems to bog down in detective details, alibis and room furnishings and such mechanics. (Floor plans of both Miles' bedroom and the Despard family crypt are desperately called for, I believe.)
Much of the novel is retrospective; so much time is spent with the principals discussing Miles Despard's murder in the recent past. There isn't much forward movement or much actual action, just a great deal of chitchat about the recent past and the poisoning career of a certain long-dead Frenchwoman (or should that be certain long-dead Frenchwomen).
As a suspense tale Court might have been better served opening with the situation at the Despard mansion and moving forward from there. But the novel's impressive final (?) elucidation, with footnotes, and its rug-pulling postscript redeem the earlier fiddly parts, or so it seems to me.
I had forgotten all the characters in the book aside from Ted and Marie Stevens and the great Gaudan Cross, for the simple reason, I see now, that the other characters are entirely forgettable. I was interested, however, to see Carr indulge himself a bit in some racy, for the day, sexual details.
Of another French murder case, this a real one concerning the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was beheaded and burned for her manifold evil deeds in 1676, we are told salaciously that the good lady's confession included "some remarkable sexual statements." We learn that the character Partington, who is not negatively portrayed, had to flee the country for performing an illegal abortion on a woman, supposedly his mistress. A woman is said to have appeared, during a discussion of past murders, as if she were aroused to a state of "sexual excitement."
Carr always had interesting, shall we say, notions about women and sexuality, including some ideas that admittedly are rather offputting today.
One isn't used to mysteries from that era that are quite so explicit about things like abortion and women's sadistic sexual titillation, especially when the implication is that seeming "good girls" might be like their erring sisters under the skin. Daughters of Eve all, it would seem. This went against the norm in popular lit of the day, which was to divide women into clearly demarcated good and bad girl camps. Ambiguous girls, like ambiguus boys, make better suspects!
When I saw the recent Knives Out mystery film, Wake Up Dead Man, in which Benoit Blanc mentions Carr by name several times, I had to wonder whether the portion of the mystery concerning the dead man in his crypt was inspired by The Burning Court. Having reread the novel, I think so more than ever. If so director/screenwriter Rian Johnson has chalked up another good source of inspiration.
*SPOILER BELOW
I agree with the suggestion of my friend Carr biographer Doug Greene's brother, David, that the thoughts of a certain character at the end of the novel may reflect that character's mental derangement and are not necessarily to be taken literally. (See appendix 3 of The Man Who Explained Miracles). That's my preferred solution to the mystery! Ted would still be well-advised to stay wary, however.
