The House at Satan’s Elbow by John Dickson Carr

published 1965



[The young hero gets on a train and meets a beautiful young woman]


She was alone. In a blue-and-white summer dress, stockingless and with blue shoes, Fay cowered back towards the upholstery of the corner seat by the window. She looked even more alluring and desirable than he remembered. With trembling fingers she fumbled at the clasps of a white handbag and snapped it open. Though they might be in a non-smoking compartment, from the bag Fay juggled out a tortoise-shell cigarette case.




[The train arrives…]

On the platform, amid gathering shadows, waited a brown-haired, hazel-eyed young woman, the outdoor type of girl, in dark slacks and an orange sweater. Garret could not help liking her at once.

[Later that evening, in the eponymous house]

From the east side of the room hurried a middle-sized, middle-aged woman with a kittenish manner and voluminous hair rather obviously tinted red. Though not at all ill-looking, if somewhat scrawny-faced and staring of eye, she wore a jacket and brilliant tartan slacks that would better have suited the figures of [the two young women described above] Deidre Barclay or Fay Wardour.

commentary: This is a late book by John Dickson Carr, close to the end of his writing career, and I found it unexpectedly good. His later works weren’t usually his best, and there are always odd intrusions of contemporary modern life which don’t really seem to fit. That’s true here, with odd mentions of pop music in a grumpy way, but most of the time you could happily imagine it was the 1930s…

Part of the reason I liked it is that the setting is well-known to me: the House of the title is at the end of Lepe Beach in Hampshire – although the house isn’t real, the beach most certainly is. Sadly it doesn’t feature much, except as a place to which the maid sneaks out to meet her boyfriend - a pity as it is a splendid and very lovely place. The train they board in the opening scenes above is the very train that I get home from London, and they pass through my hometown – though I wonder if Carr was bringing his American roots to bear in this section, as he speaks of the travellers finding out what ‘gate’ the train leaves from: this is US-speak, in the UK it would always be the platform.

There is a lot of guff in the book about a certain kind of Victorian window, and its lock, and stap me if they aren’t specifically described as being found in houses in my home town! And our house is the right era, and we have those very locks and handles… I felt as though I was living in this book, I really did.

The House at Satan’s Elbow is properly sinister, as befits the name, with wild previous owners, a history of ghosts, impressionable servants, wills to be lost and found, and a lot of people staring at each other with suspicion and behaving oddly. Dr Gideon Fell turns up to find out what happened to Pennington Barclay, who seems to have seen a ghost and then been shot in a locked room.

As it happens, I spotted the culprit very early on – like the awful red-haired Estelle above I may be psychic, it wasn’t really based on anything but intuition, though the cast of characters was quite small.

Intriguingly- and fairly irrelevantly to the plot – one of the characters has written a serious biography of Macaulay, a 19^th century politician and historian, and this has very unexpectedly been turned into a smash hit musical on Broadway and in the West End. Like a foreshadowing of Hamilton – it must have seemed most unlikely in 1965…
I haven’t been able to find many other reviews of this book – I’ll be curious if any of the usual suspects in the Carr-fan blogging world have comments on the book.

I consider he was a bit harsh on poor old Estelle, above, whose outfit sounds perfectly fine to me.

Both tartan pictures from Kristine’s photostream, as is the blue dress.

While looking for a nice picture of an orange sweater, and there it is up there, I also found this one, which I feel I must share. It is hard to imagine how anyone could ever have thought this photograph was a good thing…. As young people say, I can’t even.