A Deed of Dreadful Note

The scene of the crime is Scamnum Court, seat of the Duke of Horton. As for the crime itself, it is one of the most bizarre in all of detective fiction. Someone has shot the Lord Chancellor in the middle of a production of Hamlet. The Lord Chancellor was playing the part of Polonius in a production that attempted to reproduce Hamlet as it would have been originally performed. So when Hamlet is supposed to stab Polonius through an arras, a gunshot sounds. When “Hamlet” reaches the curtained-off rear stage, he finds “Polonius” very much dead of a gunshot wound, the weapon nowhere in sight.

In due course, a document vital to national security goes missing, and so the Prime Minister himself asks Inspector John Appleby to investigate the goings-on at Scamnum Court. And investigate he does—it turns out to be a complex case. The killer took several foolhardy risks, but all of them seem to have paid off! Are there accomplices? Was the killer working alone? And when a second murder takes place, suicide seems most unlikely indeed…

Death makes a curtain-call...

It is a peculiar irony that, although I always claim John Dickson Carr is my favourite mystery author of all-time, I have not yet reviewed one of his novels on my blog. When I decided to begin this blog, I just missed the opportunity of writing a post on Carr’s brilliant tour-de-force, Fear is the Same. I don’t want to blaze through what little Carr is left unread by me, which is why of late I’ve spread out my Carr reads. However, I have abstained from Carr far too long by my estimation— I just turned 18 last month, and I decided (as a belated gift to myself) to treat myself to a John Dickson Carr trio. This is the first of these novels: John Dickson Carr’s Panic in Box C.

Lady Tiverton, before she married the late Lord Tiverton, was an actress named Margery Vane. As a young girl of 18, she bewitched the famous ageing actor Adam Cayley, who created a theatre company and determined to perform Romeo and Juliet, with him and his beloved in the main parts, despite his being over 60. He dismissed the doctors’ warnings about his weak heart and subsequently died onstage. The company subsequently failed and eventually disbanded. Margery Vane went on to have a rather successful career before retiring.