The Plague Court Murders: A Sir Henry Merrivale Mystery (An American Mystery Classic)

Sir Henry Merrivale (HM) revels in making outrageous statements. But his audience of policemen and concerned citizens are so clueless, they’re just grateful for any ideas.A psychical researcher, Roger Darworth, has himself locked up in a decrepit stone house, by the grave of a vicious ghost, for the purpose of exorcising that ghost. A small group of believers and disbelievers wait anxiously next door. When Darworth is hacked to death inside the tightly locked house, the police fail utterly to find an explanation. This is when they turn to the eccentric, irritating, but brilliant HM.Sir Merrivale is fat, lazy, garrulous, conceited, and fond of alcohol and bawdy stories. But he’s not fanciful. He says there ought to be a law against deadly gases unknown to science and poisons that leave no trace. He’s out to catch a clever murderer with a flair for elaborate staging.Although HM scorns ghosts, several of the characters don’t. And John Dickson Carr delivers plenty of ghostly chills, sinister atmosphere, and a wonderfully degenerate ghost who died horribly in the Plague years and is looking for a new body to possess!I’m afraid I found the solution of the locked room mystery awfully far-fetched. But the plot offers well drawn characters and tantalizing red herrings. And HM is always fun.

He writes good stories, specializes in locked room murders, is pretty good at not hiding important clues, but he was always a bit on the purple side, and I find it all a little much now. I tend to buy all a particular author has written, but I don't think I'll get any more of his.

This is true vintage Carr at his early best .the rich atmosphere of the lurking supernatural threat from the past that may or may not have a material explanation. The thing for which Carr has most often been faulted by critics is part of what makes him a real favorite of mine he has been accused of Cardboard Characters with spotlight in how the impossible crime could have been managed not what mental processes led the perpetrator to do it .In other words a technical not a psychological puzzle .

I really enjoyed Sir Henry Merrivale, a brilliant sleuth with a flair for comedy. Many thanks to Otto Penzler and Penzler Publishers for including this in their American Mystery Classics series!

This is the first of the Sir Henry Merrivale mysteries, which were originally published under JDC's pseudonym Carter Dickson; this is from 1934. H.M. doesn't appear until halfway through the book and is not at his best (funniest). The story is a mish-mash of pseudo-occult and locked-room murder. This is by far the least clever locked-room puzzle I can recall from the JDC body of work.This e-book edition suffers from a large number of relatively minor proofreading oversights/OCR errors--mostly hyphens that should be dashes and suchlike; there are a few words that passed through the spellchecker but are still wrong. Example: "firm'" should be "firin'" (H.M. drops his terminal g's a lot, which is problematic for spellcheckers); a good human proofreader would've caught it, but the spellchecker ignores extraneous punctuation (the apostrophe after "firm") and is oblivious to context. There were quite a few ellipses (...) that I assume were original, not indicators of missing text, but some of them did seem rather abrupt.

This is a classic Carr locked room mystery set in a spooky old house filled with eccentric ghosthunters. If there's any drawback it's that the first half of the book features March as an active participant along with the narrator and the end features Merrivale in almost an armchair role so there is a little less humor. Carr holds up better than many contemporaries because his characters are less simple and naive. They have their dark sides and secrets. Their romantic relationships are more complex.

Takes awhile to get going, but the first book to feature Sir Henry Merrivale - as much of a character on his own way as the better-known Gideon Fell - is a doozy. Of course it features an impossible locked room murder and general mystification. 3.75 stars.

Not the greatest of Carr's mysteries but essential reading for aficionados since it was the first in a masterful series. Carr was an anglophile American and so can be compared to SS Van Dine and Ellery Queen as much as the English tradition in his emphasis on the 'How done it?' as well as the 'Who done it?'.Immensely entertaining - this is what kept people amused in the days before television. Recommended for your Kindle vacation reading.

I bought this based on a recommendation. The language is very hard to break into (and I'm used to reading 19th century writers), and so far the characters are not well drawn and hard to distinguish from one another. (Think of a lot of men sitting around a club with cigars saying "righty-ho"). I got three or four chapters into the book and it was such a tough and unrewarding effort, that I gave it up. Now I have to find someone else to give it to who might actually be able to stick with it and enjoy...

星の数は、小説の内容ではなく、本そのものについてです。私が購入したのはLANGTAIL PRESSの 2010年版ですが……・章にタイトルがふってありません・翻訳本と比較して、行が抜けていると思われる箇所がいくつかありますただ、物語には影響ありませんので、細かいことは気にしないというかたはどうぞ。

This is John Dickson Carr at his best: a puzzling locked room mystery with an ingenious solution, with a thread of history contributing to the feeling of menace, and a surprise ending. It also avoids what I think could be one of his faults- a tendency to over-complicate. Strongly recommended.

John Dickson Carr used the pseudonym Carter Dickson for his Sir Henry Merrivale novels, the Penguin editions even making a point of refusing to name the real author. In both guises, JDC/CD was a master of the locked room mystery and along with Ngaio Marsh the inspiration for me to become a mystery writer. So pleased they're now available for the Kindle.

Very good, but unnecessarily complicated. Typical JDC.