This is a 1935 locked room mystery featuring H.M. again, but no Ken/Evelyn team to add a touch of romance. This is my least favorite sort of cozy mystery as it has that Victorian "spooky" mood that Authur Conan Doyle favored. The book is ok, but I don't like the irrational/overly emotional element. To create the mood, all the characters (except HM of course) believe that "spirits" or "evil influences" kill people because they are too stupid (or, doing the killing themselves) to think of an alternative. Everyone spends most of the book sneaking around a big, decrepit Vicotorian house (on another one of those London streets with more empty/rotting houses that adds to the feeling of menace and isolation) in the wee hours, falling down stairs, tripping on rugs, whacking people they think are ghosts with fire irons and South American arrows tipped with curare...In total, a parrot, a dog and two humans get killed in this one, and two "deranged" people are diagnosed and dealt with. It seems to be always pitch black out: if it isn't actually 2:00 in the morning, the fog is so think that the sun is completely blackened out and it LOOKS like 2:00 in the morning. And people never sleep so everyone is crazed with exhaustion and on the edge of hysteria. Also, hypnotism features....In the end, of course, the cold eye of science wins out and the murders (all four) were done by an ordinary human using ordinary methods.
I'll just go over the basics as it's another one of those Carter Dickson novels that is so complicated (with every single character proposing an entirely new explanation each time one single piece of evidence is discovered) that by the time I got to the end of the book, I couldn't quite remember where the murderer actually was at the time of the murders. I just had to take HM's word for it.
Our hero (the innocent person swept up in the madness, just like us) is a guy named Tairlaine who knows Lord Mantling (the owner of all the arrows and blow darts he kept as souveniers from his war times in South America and who says things like "What rot!" and "What, ho?" and calls everyone 50 years old and younger "boy") because they are members of the same club. The story begins with them drinking and smoking cigars when Mantling reminds Tairlaine about their appointment later this evening at his house: they are going to do a bit of spooky nonsense to find out if a room in Mantling's house is haunted or not. Tairlaine is game, but thinks the whole thing is pretty ridiculous and perhaps evidence that Lord Mantling is slightly "odd". Around midnight they head out and of course see murky shadows all around, some of which turn out to be other people who have been invited to the shindig. In all, the ghost party is made up of 8 people: Mantling; Tairlaine; Mantling's "odd" brother, Guy; a French guy with a off/on French accent (I was really expecting him to be posing as a French person but that wasn't the case--he was just a French man who spoke French with a bad English-French accent), named Ravelle; Carstairs, another friend of Mantling from his club; Bender, a very odd duck who lives in the house but isn't related to anyone and no one likes him because he sneaks around, spying on people; Mantling's old aunt Isobel who is always being dramatic and talking about how her father was killed by the haunted room; and HM. All assemble in the diningroom to eat an awkward dinner (it's about 11 at night--a really late dinner, I would think) and most don't have much of an appetite or have much to say to one another. Then, after a servant (there are random servants in the house but they feature not a whit) clears everything away and brings Mantling a brand new still-in-the-wrapper deck of cards, Mantling orders everyone to pick a card--highest card has to sit in the haunted room alone for two hours and hope they do not die. Bender picks the ace of spades (card of death!!) and seals his fate. Mantling then opens a set of double doors, leads the gang down a hallway and to a door that is locked (but the lock has been greased and the hallway has been cleaned--someone has been here recently!!). He opens it and they all go into the room and are instructed to inspect it to make sure there is NO WAY someone could get murdered by the room itself--no poison-tipped needles in a chair cushion, no anvils suspended above anyone's head....They all do and see nothing odd about the room: it has a big iron bed frame with an old mattress and bedding, a mirror on the wall, a small writing desk with its chair, and a card table circled by four more chairs--and a small gas fireplace that is completely sealed up. There are two windows but they have steel shutters that are nailed tightly shut. Ok, there are no secret panels, no one hiding in the room, no way to get in except through the hallway they came down, and no tricky traps in the room itself. Bender sits in a chair at the writing desk and says he's fine, and they can go. He tells them he is going to keep notes the whole time, and pulls out his notepad and a pen from his dinner jacket. So the idea is that he stays in the room for two hours and during that tiem the rest of the group will yell out to him every 15 minutes and he is to answer that he is ok. Then, after two hours he is free!
(Wait--why are they even doing this? Because ever since the family moved into this house 120 odd years ago someone who was in this room alone died mysteriously and it's the anniversary of those death dates. After two deaths you'd think they'd move away, but there always seemed to be someone in the family who was a skeptic and they would die for their disbelief. So Lord Mantling, who is a non-believer, stages this party to prove the whole thing is "Utter rot!")
The door shuts and the seven others head down the hall and back to the diningroom. At first they are calm and joking but as the clock hands get closer to the two hour time, they get increasingly whipped up and on edge. Every 15 minutes they yell, and always immediately Bender answers. Then, with just 15 minutes to go, they yell and again he again answers--whoops all around! It seems they have broken the curse and Bender will live!!! At two hours to the second, they rush down the hallway, throw open the door and find Bender stone cold dead--and he HAS been dead for almost 90 minutes!! (Remember HM is a licensed surgeon.) Well, this is a head scratcher.
Almost immediately, Judith, the requisite dainty young lady and her boyfriend, the unbelievably obnoxious Dr. Arnold, walk in after their evening at the theater with friends. They are appalled with Judith's uncle, Lord Mantling, for setting up this dangerous stunt--but, to be honest, no one is really all that sad that Bender is dead because they don't know who he is or why he is there.
And then into this arrives our friend, Inspector Masters, whom we've seen before, who brings a no-nonsense pragmatism to the whole situation. Though he isn't as creatively clever as HM, he is perfectly intelligent and a hard worker--he doesn't get any sleep for the next three days as everyone remains trapped in this murderous house and forced to answer his questions.
HM's and Masters' questioning reveals:
- Aunt Isobel is nutty as a loon and angry that no one cares that her beloved parrot was garroted.(They don't care because they all hated its screeching--I was on their side with that, though they could have just let the thing loose.)
- Bender was in fact a renown psychologist who had been secretly hired by someone (I will not say whom) to find out if there is insanity in the family--well, he certainly found out...
- Dr. Arnold is a pretentious prig who is a eugenicist who favors "getting rid of" impure blood
- Judy is prone to making moralisitic speeches but when push comes to shove she'll do the traditional thing to prevent scandal in the family and is perfectly happy to lie to keep people she loves out of trouble--even though it was her dog that had been savagely dismembered.
- Tairlaine remains our neutral authorial voice and frequently mentions that he wishes he hadn't agreed to this stupid idea.
- Ravelle, being French I guess, is prone to making dramatic declarations and storming out of rooms--he secretly loves Judith and despises Dr Arnold with a murderous passion. Though a relationship with Judith is probably not wise as (a) there is clearly insanity in the tree line and (b) he's a distant cousin who is descended from famous furniture makers, one of whom crafted all the wood furniture in the Murder Room and so he gets defensive when it is suggested that the furniture somehow conceals a deadly trick.
- Carstairs, like Tairlaine, remains pleasantly sane though he regrets getting involved with this family--but he is pleased to meet the famous HM.
- Guy, Lord Mantling's brother (and Judy's uncle) gets even more odd: he wears black glass glasses (if you know what I mean) indoors at all times--not because he needs corrective lenses but because his eyes are "sensitive to all forces" and he lapses into telling overly academic narratives of all the misfortunes that have befallen the family since its orgins--he's the family tree record keeper. (There's always one). His specialty is to emerge slowly from dark corners of a room when everyone thought he was somewhere else and respond to the rude things they said about him.
Ok, now you know as much as I did when HM revealed the whole thing.
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