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…

The Phantom of the Dagonet

I read Puzzle for Players bit by bit with a fellow mystery aficionado, trying to piece the puzzle together before it was unveiled by Patrick Quentin. In retrospect, it might not have been the wisest reading strategy. Throughout this time, I read other mystery novels. As good as my memory is, it’s little wonder that small and seemingly irrelevant plot points got deleted from my memory. As a result, when the solution was revealed, I stared in disbelief, not remembering a single one of the facts that Patrick Quentin referred to. Frankly, I felt cheated, and although glances at previous pages revealed that some clues were there after all, the overall feeling of dissatisfaction remains, as the solution is kind of problematic. There’s an inherent weakness in the murderer’s plot that no amount of red herring can disguise, and one of its main “clues” is basically ignorant of the theatre’s workings.

That’s somewhat surprising, because Puzzle for Players is a very well-done theatre mystery. I just love these: death is hiding in the shadows in the wings, waiting to strike again, while the actors are on stage rehearsing… This particular theatre is the Dagonet, which comes complete with an age-old jinx (shows that play there constantly fail) and a ghost named Lillian, who has a nasty habit of turning up in mirrors. The theatrical atmosphere is nicely done— Quentin captures the general bedlam of backstage before the performance. The petty, pointless rivalries, the progression of the show as the performance is being moulded… It’s really nicely done.

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.