History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 5/10

• Accuracy: Pleasant period detail on 1869 London and on Wilkie Collins, but the history is decorative.
• Plot: Wilkie Collins turns detective to solve a disappearance and a death among fashionable Londoners.
• Clues: Carr’s usual misdirection, but less inventive than his best.
• Reveal: Competent but predictable.

In 1869, shortly after the success of The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins is drawn into a case involving a young man back from abroad, a mysterious woman, and a death that looks impossible. Collins, witty and observant, uses his novelist’s intuition to solve it.

John Dickson Carr’s final novel is an affectionate tribute to Collins, the father of the English detective novel. Carr clearly enjoyed writing about Victorian London and about Collins’s personality, his humour, his unconventional domestic life, and his interest in crime.

But the book shows Carr in decline. The plot is thin, the impossible crime is less ingenious than in his classics, and the characters are stock figures. The dialogue is often stilted, and the romance is perfunctory. The 5 reflects a pleasant but minor work, interesting mainly as Carr’s farewell and as an early example of real authors turned into fictional detectives, a device that later became very popular.