My Late Wives by Carter Dickson – #ABookADayInMay Day 11

Carter Dickson is the not-especially-hidden pseudonym of John Dickson Carr, and he wrote murder mysteries under both names and a handful more. He specialises in the locked-room mystery, which is one of my favourite tropes – though I have only read one of his books, his first novel It Walks By Night, which I thought was pretty poor. Thankfully, My Late Wives (1947) is a significant improvement on that novel, particularly in character and in writing style, and it has restored my hopes in pursuing him as a writer.

There’s quite a convoluted set up to the novel, so bear with me. It somehow makes sense on the page. We open with the speedy account of Roger Bewlay – a serial killer, who has murdered four wives in turn, while living under different aliases. None of their bodies have ever been discovered – despite there being a young woman who witnessed the final dead body through the window, watching Roger Bewlay casually lighting a cigarette.

Fast forward 11 years. A lawyer called Dennis Forster – an upstanding, stolid, not especially characterful character – is going to see his friend Beryl, a theatre producer. Her big theatre star, Bruce Ransom, is coming to the end of a long run and is eyeing up his new project. An anonymous script has come through the post about the life and crimes of Roger Bewlay – and a bet about the likelihood of the ending gets out of hand. Ransom vows to masquerade as Roger Bewlay – or, rather, as someone pretending not to be Roger Bewlay, but deliberately making a poor job of it. As part of this, he must woo a naive young woman of his choosing. As I said, it’s quite convolted, and it’s impressive that Dickson makes it very clear what’s going on.

Dennis wants to warn Scotland Yard, so that they at least won’t burst onto the scene and arrest Bruce Ransom – and that’s how series detective Sir Henry Merrivale (‘H.M.’) gets involved. It’s strange to encounter a series detective in his 17th outing, because so little is done to contextualise him. There’s really no reason for him to be involved in this story, and his disappears for long stretches of time. It often felt like he was fighting with Dennis in being our primary perspective and, particularly towards the end, seemed to only turn up to be needlessly cryptic about what he’d worked out.

From what I can gather, he is a jumble of affable eccentricities – with a bullish, toughman overlay, so he doesn’t feel too much like a P.G. Wodehouse character. E.g. ‘H.M., if the truth must be told, is a notoriously bad driver with an absentminded habit of leaving the handbrake on, or of sitting and thinking about something else while the car bears straight towards a stone wall.’ Or this explosion:

“I really am a meek sort of feller, my wench. Honest. I’m a man of mild language. I never use profantiy, God damn it. Otherwise, so help me! I’d have told him to take his ruddy file and stick it…

“What I mean is,” coughed H.M., suddenly remembering his high-mindedness and assuming an air of piety, “that it wasn’t a very nice thing to do; now was it?”

He is ebullient and larger-than-life and I’m sure Dickson had many longstanding readers who rejoiced and seeing him again. I quite enjoyed my time with him, but he didn’t really feel like he matched the tone of the novel or contributed much to its plot. And his insistence on calling Beryl ‘my wench’ was pretty tiring.

In the final quarter or so of the novel, My Late Wives does what so many novels of this genre seem to do – become suddenly an adventure novel. I prefer detective novels to maintain their even tone right to the end, keeping to the drama of the drawing room rather than car chases, overblown fights etc. But this one was so overblown that I could enjoy the theatrical silliness of it – and maybe Dickson was reflecting the theatrical lives of his main characters.

Dickson’s writing in My Late Wives is so much better than his debut novel. Witty, pacy, shrewd – and not overwritten in the way of my only other experience with him. I really enjoyed rattling through the plot, and particularly Beryl as a character. What I will say about the plot is that it is not subtle. I am terrible at working things out, and the solution to this one was pretty glaring. (This isn’t really a locked-rooom mystery, incidentally.) Some ‘clues’ stood out a mile and, to be honest, there just weren’t enough male characters in the book for Roger Bewlay’s true identity to be much of a mystery. One key ‘shock twist’ is more or less spelled out earlier in the novel, to the point where it didn’t even seem like it needed revealing. But there was one element that was hidden in plain sight and which totally passed me by, and I thought that was an excellent gamble.

Normally, a weak plot or an easy-to-guess plot would spoil this sort of novel for me, but there was something in the spirit and vim of My Late Wives that meant it didn’t much matter. I still really joyed this one, and I’m glad I’ve got a couple more on my shelves.