The Plague Court Murders

1848, spiritualists claimed to be mediums (or, sometimes, to use others as mediums) to allow the spirits of the dead to communicate with the living.

Carr's interest in spiritualism began with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's lecture tour of the United States in 1922. Doyle had lost a son during the First World War, and using his wife as medium, he believed that he had contacted him in the afterlife which he called, in a rather discordant note, 'Summerland.' Doyle was also a fervent advocate of the genuineness of spirit photography and even of photographs of fairies. At the age of fifteen, Carr wrote no fewer than five articles for his local newspaper disagreeing with Doyle's views. 'Is it possible that the master mind who conceived Sherlock Holmes and gave to him the keenest intellect of any detective in fiction, has been deceived by parlor magic? Many think so.' Carr then recounted various methods that fake mediums use to produce their effects.

Moreover, he objected to spiritualism on artistic as well as materialistic grounds. The great people of the past, he said, would not 'return to earth to bang tamborines and maltreat furniture' People who believe that the dead can contact the living have usually suffered a recent bereavement and are therefore in a receptive frame of mind. 'The hope that they may yet bring back their lost has affected them so that they imagine they feel the soft caress of hands on their cheek, or hear musical voices whispering secrets into their ears.' This was probably the case with Doyle himself, and in The Plague Court Murders, with Lady Benning. A few years later, Carr read Harry Houdini's classic expose of spiritualism,A Magician Among the Spirits (1924), and he used several of the tricks described in that book as plot devices in his own stories, including the one you are about to read.

Carr created his effects by using atmospheric writing to prepare the reader for horrors, and then bringing in common sense to dispel them. The house at Plague Court is described in words reminiscent of the old writers of Gothic terror:

It had almost a senile appearance, as of a brain gone, but its heavy cornices were carved with horrible gaiety in cupids and roses and grapes: a wreath oil the head of an idiot.... In the vast fireplace burnt a very small and smoky fire. Strung along the hood of the mantelpiece were half a dozen candles burning in tall brass ` holders. They flickered in the damp, showing above the mantelpiece, decaying fragments of wallpaper that had once been purple and gold. There were two occupants of the room-both women. , It added a sort of witch-like eeriness to the place. J

Sometimes, however, Carr's language is understated. Of all ghost-story writers after Poe, he may have most admired Montague Rhodes James, whose trick of making the commonplace redolent with terror he borrowed forThe Plague Court Murders. In his article, '... and Things that Go Bump in the Night,' Can wrote that James's stories contain 'no sensations in crude colours. They are for the sophisticated. Dr. James never `cracks the whip or goads the adjective, but terror comes as lightly as a face poked suddenly around a corner.' Probably the most terrifying image inThe Plague Court Murders, the one that seems ordinary in itself yet suggests supernatural horror, is the man glimpsed only from the back who holds his neck at an odd angle.

Into this story comes Detective-Inspector Humphrey Masters, cynical and unruffled. It may be that Carr originally planned to make Masters the sole detective in the story. He so dominates the early sections that the publishers of the first paperback edition (Avon, 1941) described the book on the front cover as 'A Chief-Inspector Masters Mystery.' But whatever Carr's original plans were, he decided that Masters would not solve the mystery. The reader who expects common sense to overcome all the terrors, instead finds Masters' knowledge of mediumistic tricks to be insufficient. Then enters Sir. Henry Merrivale - H.M. with his fund of bawdy stories, his constant fear that someone (perhaps Masters) is out to get him, and his earthy enjoyment of life. His biography has been given in the introduction to the IPL edition of one of his finest adventures, The Judas Window, but the point to be made here is that he is without pretensions and it is this very fact that lets him bring sanity to bear on the matter of Plague Court and so many later cases.

In the opening scene ofThe Plague Court Murders, Dean Halliday asks the narrator, Ken Blake, 'to spend a night in a haunted house:' Blake 'felt an anticipatory pleasure.' A few years after writing these words, John Dickson Carr was asked to spend a night in a haunted house owned by his friend, the novelist J. B. Priestley. He too felt an anticipatory pleasure, and was disappointed when nothing even mildly ghostly occurred. But plenty of ghostly things will happen on the following pages, and no reader will be disappointed.

Douglas G. Greene Norfolk, Virginia December 1989

Series consultant Douglas G. Greene is busily at work on the authorized biography of John Dickson Carr. He is also putting the finishing touches to the first volume of the collected short fiction of that author which will be entitled Fell and Foul Play, and will be published in the fall of 1990 by IPL:

I

THE HOUSE IN PLAGUE COURT

OLD MERRIVALE, that astute and garrulous lump who sits with his feet on the desk at the War Office, has been growling again for somebody to write the story of the Plague Court murders; chiefly, it is believed, to glorify himself. He does not have so much glory nowadays. His department has ceased to be called the Counter Espionage Service; it has become merely the M.I.D., and its work is somewhat less dangerous than taking photographs of the Nelson Monument.

I have pointed out to him that neither of us has any connection with the police, and that, since I left his service some years ago, I have not even his excuse. Besides, our friend Masters-now Chief Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department-might not like it. I was, therefore, inveigled into playing a cold poker-hand to determine whether I should write it, or somebody else. I forget who the other person was to be, but it was not Sir Henry Merrivale.

My own connection with the case began on the night of September 6, 1930: the rainy night when Dean Halliday walked into the smoking-room of the Noughts-and-Crosses Club and made his startling statements. And one fact must be emphasized. Had it not been for the streak of morbidity that ran through his whole family-as witness James-or possibly for Dean's fits of hard drinking during the years he was in Canada, he would never have reached a dangerous state of nerves. You saw him at the dub, wiry and vital in his movements, with his sandy mustache, his young-old face and reddish hair, his heavy forehead above sardonic eyes. Yet you invariably felt there was a shadow there-some snag out of the past. Once, in one of those casual shifting discussions, somebody was haranguing us about the newest scientific terms for madness; and Halliday said suddenly, blasting the talk with the personal, 'You never know, do you? My brother James, now-' Then he laughed.

I had known him for some time before we became at all friendly. We used to fall into casual conversation in the smoking-room at the club. What I knew of Halliday -for we never talked of personal matters-was fired at me by my sister, who happened to be well acquainted with Lady Benning, Halliday's aunt.

He was, it appeared, the younger son of a tea-importer who had got so rich that he could refuse a title, and say that his firm was too old for that sort of thing. The old man, Dean's father, had side-whiskers and a turkeycock nose. He was sour enough to his associates, but fairly indulgent toward his sons. The real head of the family, however, was Lady Benning, his sister.

Dean went through a number of phases. Before the war, as an undergraduate, he was one-of the customary down from-Cambridge bloods. Then the war came along. Like a number of others, the drawler suddenly became an amazingly good soldier. He left the army with a D.S.O. and a lot of shrapnel inside, and then started raising hell in earnest. There was trouble; a dubious nymph sued for breach of promise; family portraits wriggled with horror; and, with that happy British optimism which decides that bad ways always change if they are practiced somewhere else, Dean was packed off to Canada.

Meantime, his brother had inherited Halliday and Son at the death of the old man. Brother James was Lady Benning's favorite and darling; James was this, James was that, James was a model of soft-spoken rectitude and precision.... The truth of the matter lay in the fact that James was a decayed little prig. He used to go on ostensible business-trips and lie speechlessly fuddled in bawdy houses for two-week periods, then slip back quietly to Lancaster Gate, with his hair brushed straight again, complaining resignedly of his health. I knew him slightly-a smiling man always in a mild sweat, who couldn't sit still in a chair. All this mightn't have hurt him, if it hadn't been for what he called his conscience. His conscience got him, presently. He went home one night and shot himself.

Lady Benning was distracted. She had never liked Dean - I think it probable that, in some obscure way, she