The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories by Martin Edwards

Author:Martin Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

Blind Man’s Hood

Carter Dickson

Carter Dickson was a pen name of John Dickson Carr (1906–1977), widely regarded as the most gifted of all exponents of the locked room mystery. A native of Pennsylvania, he relocated to Britain after marrying a young Englishwoman, and launched a career as a detective novelist with a taste for the baroque. His first Great Detective, the French examining magistrate Henri Bencolin, was succeeded by Dr Gideon Fell, a rumbustious character modelled on G.K. Chesterton, whom Carr much admired. When Carr was elected to membership of the Detection Club, he was thrilled by the prospect that, as Chesterton was the Club’s first President, he would at last meet his hero; sadly, Chesterton’s death meant that this ambition remained unfulfilled.

As Carter Dickson, he wrote primarily about Sir Henry Merrivale, a baronet and (rather improbably) a barrister who shared Fell’s penchant for solving baffling impossible crimes. He also created Colonel March, a senior cop whose exploits were ultimately brought together in a book with a title very much of its time, The Department of Queer Complaints. March was based on Carr’s friend and fellow Detection Club member John Rhode (Major Cecil John Street, who also wrote as Miles Burton and Cecil Waye). A television series, Colonel March of Scotland Yard, ran for twenty-six episodes from 1955–56, with Boris Karloff cast as March and given an eye patch to wear. This story was inspired by the unsolved Peasenhall murder case of 1902 (Carr was an aficionado of true crime), and first published in the Christmas edition of The Sketch in 1937.

Although one snowflake had already sifted past the lights, the great doors of the house stood open. It seemed less a snowflake than a shadow; for a bitter wind whipped after it, and the doors creaked. Inside, Rodney and Muriel Hunter could see a dingy, narrow hall paved in dull red tiles, with a Jacobean staircase at the rear. (At that time, of course, there was no dead woman lying inside.)

To find such a place in the loneliest part of the Weald of Kent—a seventeenth-century country house whose floors had grown humped and its beams scrubbed by the years—was what they had expected. Even to find electricity was not surprising. But Rodney Hunter thought he had seldom seen so many lights in one house, and Muriel had been wondering about it ever since their car turned the bend in the road. “Clearlawns” lived up to its name. It stood in the midst of a slope of flat grass, now wiry white with frost, and there was no tree or shrub within twenty yards of it. Those lights contrasted with a certain inhospitable and damp air about the house, as though the owner were compelled to keep them burning.

“But why is the front door open?” insisted Muriel.

In the driveway, the engine of their car coughed and died. The house was now a secret blackness of gables, emitting light at every chink, and silhouetting the stalks of the wisteria vines which climbed it.

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