Forgotten Book - The Unicorn Murders

 'You are on holiday in Paris...There is nothing on your mind, and you are utterly at peace with all the world...Then you see walking towards you a girl you have previously known in England...[who] walks straight up to your table and veryy gravely begins to repeat a nursery rhyme. She then sits down at the table and proceeds to tell you what sounds like the most bewildering gibberish you have ever heard in your life.'

So begins The Unicorn Murders by Carter Dickson, narrated by Ken Blake (also the narrator of The Plague Court Murders) who humours the girl, Evelyn Cheyne, and thus 'became involved in a series of events which can still retrospectively give me a shiver...' It's a tantalising start to an unusual story, which blends a secret service thriller with a cerebral 'impossible crime' problem and plenty of twists in the finest tradition of whodunits.

Sir Henry Merrivale is a former employer of Ken and before long he comes on to the scene. After a series of unlikely events, Sir Henry, Ken, and Evelyn wind up in a French chateau, along with a superstar French detective and a French master criminal. But who is the detective and who is the super-criminal? And how are two murders, apparently inflicted by the horn of a unicorn, actually committed?

This is a complex mystery, so complex that Sir Henry's explanation at the end of the book is necessarily lengthy. But he does tie together all the many strands of a convoluted plot that tests one's suspension of disbelief to the limit. However, I'd say that Dickson (aka John Dickson Carr, of course) just about manages to make it all work, quite an achievement. A rollicking read.