Forgotten Book - The Dead Man's Knock

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a very soft spot for locked room and impossible crime mysteries. Yes, they are artificial, but they can be highly entertaining. And nobody mastered the art of the locked room mystery, and produced so many brilliant variations on the theme, than John Dickson Carr. What is more, he created not only one Great Detective in Dr Gideon Fell, but also a second, Sir Henry Merrivale (although it has to be said that the two have much in common.)

Dickson Carr's heyday was in the 30s and 40s. By the late 50s, he seems to have been running out of steam, although he was not an old man. His powers of invention were, however, flagging, and I'm afraid this is evident in my Forgotten Book for today, The Dead Man's Knock, published in 1958. It's a Fell book, but it's set in the US (Fell is on a trip over there), in academe in Virginia.

The book begins with an account of various spiteful pranks in college, very faintly reminiscent of t those in a very different book, Gaudy Night. We are introduced to Mark Ruthven and his wife Brenda, whose marriage seems to be threatened by a woman called Rose Lestrange who has, Brenda thinks, designs on Mark. Rose hasn't made herself popular in the community, and she soon winds up murdered.

This story has a locked room element, as well as a "lost" Wilkie Collins novel, which gives the book its title. But Carr doesn't make enough of these ingredients, and I'm afraid the result is very thin far. The characters spend too much time in neurotic squabbling, and I found myself unable to care about them, or about the mystery. This isn't a good Carr. I looked around for other views to see if I was being too harsh, but I'm afraid The Puzzle Doctor, for one was also unimpressed.