Forgotten Book - Death Watch

John Dickson Carr published Death Watch in 1935. It's not a locked room mystery, but it does feature the great Dr Gideon Fell. At this point, Carr was still very young, not even thirty years old, yet he was already approaching the peak of his powers. The next Fell novel, appearing later that same year, was The Hollow Man, often cited as the finest of all impossible crime stories.

Death Watch is crammed with wonderful ingredients. The house of Johannus Carver is in Lincoln's Inn Fields, a great setting. Carver is a clockmaker and there is some fascinating stuff about timepieces. The characters include a female solicitor, and I've not read many Golden Age novels which feature such a person. The motive is unusual and very dark. And in a preamble to the story, the story is hailed as Fell's greatest case. Unfortunately, the whole strikes me as amounting to less than the sum of its parts.

There are a number of reasons why I think Death Watch is an interesting failure rather than the triumph I'd hoped for. Most commentators accept that it's not a story in which Carr plays fair and that's certainly my view. Above all, the storyline is regrettably static. Although the events are told from the point of view of a chap called Walter Melson, he plays no real part in the story, a wasted opportunity. There's a lot of talk and not much action. For instance, events in a department store called Gambridge's, which play an important part, are merely reported, and thus their impact is much diminished. A good example of why authors are urged to 'show, not tell'. And I'm afraid I didn't find the murderer's psychological make-up convincing.

I've tried to understand Carr's approach from my perspective as a fellow writer. I've come to the conclusion that he rushed the story. It would have been possible to revise it - substantially - and turn it into something much more vivid and powerful, that would actually have justified the hype in the opening pages. A plan of the house where most of the events take place would also have helped. Really, it illustrates the truth that even terrific writers get things wrong some times. I was disappointed, but I don't want to over-state the book's weaknesses. As I say, the raw material was brilliant and it's worth reading, even if one regrets the possible masterpiece that got away.