The Man Who Could Not Shudder by John Dickson Carr

The Man Who Could Not Shudder by John Dickson Carr

published 1940

 

….remembering how we first crossed the threshold of Longwood House.

I remember Tess within a step of the house door; the outline of her rakish fashionable hat with the half-veil, in darkness; and the tense feeling of her rounded shoulders.

 

I hadn’t heard much about this book – just saw it as a Carr that I didn’t believe I had read, and available on Kindle. I am guessing there’s a reason for its flying below the radar: it is not one of his best. Nobody’s putting it in their top 10. (Anyone likes to argue – please do!)

It has a lot of promising features: Dr Gideon Fell and a haunted house and an uncomfortable houseparty. But as everyone who reviews it points out, very little is made of the haunting, and the atmosphere is sadly missing. There have been goings-on in the house some years earlier, but the history aspect is just a bit off.

Someone dies – shot, within sight of several people, by a gun that jumps off the wall and fires itself. Various impossibilities arise and everyone tries to work out what could have been going on. Eventually Dr Fell comes up with the answer, with a couple of different layers of revelation. The whole thing was quite uninvolving as a crime plot, but as ever there was plenty to enjoy on other levels.

The young woman arriving above, Tess Fraser, is unmarried and spending the weekend among various young men. Another young woman, married but otherwise very similar, is another guest:

“How do you do?” smiled Gwyneth. “I’ve been so wanting to meet you, Miss Fraser. I’m your chaperon, you know. You must be tired after that drive. Won’t you all come in and have a drink before you go upstairs?”

(In UK English, chaperon should have an e on the end here: chaperone.) This was a feature of posho life then, but it is rarely reported in books quite like this. Her all-important reputation is being entrusted to a woman she has never met...

A small mystery (which bothered me much more than the moving guns and murders) is this:

…a gold-and-idl triptych which presumably Clarke had brought from Italy.

….That gold-and-idl thing hanging on the wall, for instance.

I cannot find any meaning for idl which fits this, and wonder if it is a transcription error, but am unable to think what it should be. Ideas welcome. If anyone has a paper copy of the book perhaps they could check (it’s chapter 4).

There’s dressing for dinner:

Gwyneth Logan, suddenly beautiful in a low-cut black gown; the candlelight at the dinner table softening her hair and eyes and shoulders; a packet of superfemininity suggesting sheer nakedness.

Then there is a lot of creeping round after dark, with a wide range of dressing gowns and slippers for chaps, (black wool dressing-gown, with white edging, and the monogram JGE).

 

and exotic womenswear:

a flowered silk dressing robe, rich-colored against the dark door, over a lace nightgown

and

She was wearing a peach-colored negligee of heavy lace and silk, about which she seemed to be a little nervous and self-conscious.

 

Gwyneth – the married lady – describes a conversation with her husband where she is concerned that they had sex the night before without precautions, and she hopes she will not get pregnant. This is  most unusual openness in a book of the era…

There is an offstage affair between two people: “That is the man, isn’t it, whom you’ve been in the habit of meeting at the Victoria and Albert Museum?” Which reminded me so much of a part of Stephen Potter’s One-Upmanship that I have had to reproduce the page, in a section on using museums as wooing grounds:

Overall – read for the fun and period detail, not the plot.