"The Plague Court Murders"

Murder inside a locked and bolted room, practically under the eyes of the police. Inside the room, only the victim - and the peculiar knife which was used. No sign of the murderer. Could it have been a malevolent ghost?

That's the central question in John Dickson Carr's "The Plague Court Murders," written in 1934 using the pseudonym "Carter Dickson." It's the topic of today's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can listen to by clicking here. The book introduced another of Carr's series detectives, the irascible Sir Henry Merrivale, known as "H.M." to his associates and his readers. There's a lot of slapstick comedy in some of the later books starring H.M., but not in "The Plague Court Murders." Instead, we are given some marvelous and frightening atmospherics, for it appears that only a ghost could have committed the murder in the locked room.

But this is a John Dickson Carr book, and the reader can be assured that H.M. doesn't believe in ghosts - at least not the kind that go around murdering people. And so the reader will be given some well-disguised clues about what's really happening here - and the reader's path will take some dizzying twists before the solution is ultimately revealed.

It's all great fun, nicely written and plotted, and definitely worth adding to your library.