The Black Spectacles is among the most popular of the Gideon Fell novels written by John Dickson Carr, who is widely recognized as the king of the locked room mystery. Intriguingly, though, this story isn’t a locked room mystery, and Fell doesn’t become involved in the investigation until half-way through the book. What is more, the sub-title, “Being the Psychologists’ Murder Case,” is hardly characteristic of Carr, a mystery author who specialised in dazzling feats of legerdemain rather than the exploration of the criminal psyche. Yet the story brims with classic tropes, above all the ingenious use of illusion to disguise what is really going on. No wonder the late Bob Adey, author of the indispensable reference book Locked Room Murders, regarded this as one of Carr’s best books.
In essence, The Black Spectacles is essentially a classic English village mystery, but this tale of the unexpected opens in Pompeii, of all places, with “the silence of the Street of Tombs broken by English voices.” In this evocative setting, a man (not identified until the end of the chapter) witnesses a curious scene involving a group of British tourists. He is immediately attracted to a young woman, Marjorie, who is accompanied by her Uncle Marcus, a young man called George Harding whose “shipboard flirtation” with Marjorie has become serious, a doctor called Joe who is brother to Marcus, and Marcus’s employee Wilbur Emmet.
George is told a bizarre story about a recent case of poisonings in Sodbury Cross, the home of his companions. Three children and an eighteen-year-old girl were poisoned with strychnine as a result of eating chocolate creams sold by a shopkeeper called Mrs Terry. One of the children—of whom Marjorie was especially fond—died. Alarmingly, “everyone who could have had access to the chocolates, everyone who could have done this at certain established times, is a person well known in Sodbury Cross.” In other words, the case is a “closed circle mystery” with a defined pool of suspects, although as ever with Golden Age detective fiction, readers who hope to solve the puzzle will be well advised to take nothing for granted. In the second chapter, the scene shifts to Sodbury Cross.
Carr’s regular Scotland Yard detective, Superintendent Hadley, despatches young Inspector Elliot—who “did very well on a cold trail in that Crooked Hinge business”—to the village with a view to trying to solve the puzzle of the poisoned children. Almost immediately, however, a further murder is committed. This time the scene of the crime is Bellegarde, Marcus Chesney’s country home, and in the finest Carr tradition, the circumstances of the killing (another poisoning, this time by means of a green capsule) are both strange and melodramatic.
Among the striking features of the story is the attention Carr pays to real life murder mysteries. The initial poisonings recall the case of Christiana Edmunds, who “was mad, if you like, but she had as sound a motive as most murderers. This young lady, in the Brighton of 1871, fell violently in love with a married doctor who gave her no encouragement. She first attempted unsuccessfully to poison the doctor’s wife with strychnine… To show that she was innocent…she conceived the idea of doctoring the chocolate creams in a sweet-shop and killing people wholesale.” The fictional use that Carr makes of this factual precedent is extremely clever.
Baffled by the mystery, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Elliot consults Dr Gideon Fell. The local constabulary has already tried to interest him in the original crimes, but with no luck: “Wasn’t sensational enough for him… No hermetically sealed rooms. No supernatural elements. No funny business at the Royal Scarlet Hotel.” But the weird events at Bellegarde are a different matter, and Fell throws himself into the mystery with his inimitable verve.
Towards the end of the book, Fell gives a fascinating mini-lecture on real life poisoners and their activities. Not for him the cliché that “poison is a woman’s weapon.” He talks about male poisoners who “are usually men of some imagination, education, and even culture. Their professions indicate as much. Palmer, Pritchard, Lamson, Buchanan, and Cream were doctors. Richeson was a clergyman, Wainewright an artist, Armstrong a solicitor, Hoch a chemist, Waite a dental surgeon, Vaquier an inventor, Carlyle Harris a medical student.”
The psychological elements of the story are well done, and focus on the unreliability of witness testimony, an ingredient of high-calibre crime fiction from the days of Wilkie Collins right up to the present. Any lawyer who has interviewed a number of witnesses to an incident (as I have done many times) will confirm that each person sees things differently and from their own perspective. Sometimes the discrepancies are trivial, sometimes they are astonishingly significant. This phenomenon is fundamental to the storyline, and Carr describes it with his customary gusto:
“All witnesses, metaphorically, wear black spectacles. They can neither see clearly, nor interpret what they see in the proper colours. They do not know what goes on on the stage, still less what goes on in the audience… Show them a black-and-white record of it afterwards, and they will believe you; but even then, they will be unable to interpret what they see.” The Black Spectacles was Carr’s preferred choice of title for the novel, but his American publishers were unconvinced of its commercial merits and prevailed upon him to accept their preferred but less sophisticated title, The Problem of the Green Capsule. Carr’s British publisher was happy to call the book The Black Spectacles, as did Carr’s biographer Douglas F. Greene; the British Library also, I’m glad to say, considers that Carr’s original choice was the most suitable one.
Carr published this novel in 1939, and there is a passing negative reference to life in Nazi Germany at that time. The previous September, Carr and his wife had taken a cruise around the Mediterranean, from which came the background for his description of Pompeii.
The novel’s dedication, “to the memory of Powys Mathers,” deserves comment. Edward “Bill” Powys Mathers died not long before the book’s publication, at the age of forty-six.
He was a noted translator, and some of his work was set to music by Aaron Copland, but he owes his lasting fame to his alter ego of “Torquemada,” who set fiendish crossword puzzles for the Observer, for which newspaper he was also an astute reviewer of detective fiction. His work included a play, Cold Blood, staged in London in 1932, and the curious and convoluted mystery Cain’s Jawbone, which originally appeared in The Torquemada Puzzle Book and has recently been reissued in a new edition. Marie Mayhew, who has researched Mathers’s life and work, points out that he made a great impression on Carr, who wrote an introduction to Torquemada’s posthumous 112 Best Crossword Puzzles as well as dedicating this novel to him.
As Douglas Greene’s biography points out, Mathers described Carr as one of “the Big Five” of writers of the classic mystery living in England at that time. The others included Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers; Carr must have been gratified to find himself in such company. On the strength of books such as The Black Spectacles, many readers will agree that the accolade was well deserved.
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