Mysteries Ahoy!

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One of my goals for my leisure reading, at least for the next few months, is to make a serious effort to work my way through my TBR pile. I decided that it would be a good idea to start by reading a John Dickson Carr, particularly given I apparently haven’t reviewed any of his novels on this blog since late 2021!

The selection of The Eight of Swords was a pretty easy one, given that I was keen to return to Dr. Gideon Fell who is still my favorite of his regular detectives. I was also intrigued because of the various books that have been reprinted, this is the one I knew least about beyond having a vague recollection that people were baffled and a little disappointed that this made it into the American Mystery Classics range before some other, better known titles. In other words, I came to this with pretty low expectations and so I was rather pleased to find that it proved a far more interesting read than I expected.

The premise of the book is that Dr. Fell, newly returned from a tour of America where he has apparently been judging beauty contests and dressing as a fireman, is pressed by Chief Inspector Hadley to go to look into a ‘utterly commonplace’ case on behalf of Scotland Yard. Hadley insists that Fell will benefit from dealing with a less showy, everyday sort of murder, but Fell finds a point of intrigue in a small detail of the case, that the murder victim had been found clutching a tarot card in their hand. He agrees to look into the matter and heads to the crime scene, an English country house, to investigate further.

Carr both undersells the case but also perhaps overblows the element that Fell finds so very interesting. It’s not flashy or gimmicky like some of his best-known work, but this demonstrates that the value of a single, simple hook can be overstated. There is definitely a place for a story that just builds on the confusion of lots of small, apparently contradictory details.

When I reflect on the book and its appeal, it lies not in its lurid or showy elements, but rather in the very solid passages of reasoning that occur early in the novel as Dr. Fell begins to figure out what has happened. It is those early chapters, in which oddities are pointed out and then pieced together to explain how things were not as they may initially appear, that really captured my imagination and drew me into the story.

Those first few chapters of investigation feel really fast-paced, with Fell making observation after observation, managing to pull together a vision of what happened without ever really examining the evidence for himself. For fans of reasoning, it’s pretty magnificent. While there may be no impossibility here, I found picking apart the sequence of events and working through their implications to be quite fascinating. The problem for me is that once Fell has worked through his series of deductions the book undergoes a stylistic shift that really doesn’t work for me at all.

The issue for me is that Carr relies on some tropes that feel rather corny and sensationalistic, meaning that the middle of the book features a lot of material that feels almost like a work of pastiche. This may have been exactly what the author intended but it reads really clumsily to me, and misses what I had been enjoying about the first third of the novel. It’s not unreadable – I read this book cover-to-cover over the course of an evening so clearly I was engaged, but I was disappointed that Fell gets lost for me in the middle of the book and by the time he reasserts himself at the end, much of what has happened seems clear.

The character of Dr. Fell remains somewhat nebulous at this point in his development. Carr is still pitching him as a comical figure, hence a rather awkward introduction. I suspect anyone encountering Fell for the first time in this book would have questions about why ‘Gid’ would be asked to do any of the things he has done in his tour of America, or why he would be seen as newsworthy in the first place. Yet, for all the questions I have about how Carr was seeing the character, I really enjoyed Fell’s energy and the way he seems to instantly pull this case together. This is particularly the case when his actions are compared with those of the police actually assigned to investigate.

Where Carr’s sense of humor hits most effectively for me are in his little commentaries on the writing of mystery fiction through the character of detective writer Henry Morgan, and the moments in this novel where he breaks the fourth wall, having his characters reflect on how things would progress if they were in a mystery novel. This sort of meta touch can be a little wearing, but I think here Carr pitches it perfectly, finding the charm in those moments and reflections and poking a little fun at his own image as a writer.

I am a little confused about what to make of the book’s solution, in part because I happened to guess at almost all of the details quite early on. I do not necessarily think this is the author’s fault – the puzzle is quite intricately constructed – but perhaps my knowledge of the author and their style helped me intuit what elements of the story would be relevant and how things might be pieced together. I was satisfied by how things fit together at the end but I was never surprised. Here again though, I think the book’s lower key approach actually does it some favors. Yes, there are aspects of the ending that feel a little underwhelming but because Carr never oversells the puzzle or its mysterious elements, it is hard to feel too disappointed by the journey we take.

The Verdict: The Eight of Swords isn’t quite Carr at the height of his powers but it’s a solidly entertaining story with some really fun ideas. Approach it with lower expectations and you will probably come away happy!