The Mad Hatter Mystery Read online

  THE MAD HATTER

  MYSTERY

  JOHN DICKSON

  CARR

  Introduction by

  OTTO PENZLER

  AMERICAN

  MYSTERY

  CLASSICS

  Penzler Publishers

  New York

  OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS

  AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS

  THE MAD HATTER

  MYSTERY

  JOHN DICKSON CARR (1906-1977) was one of the greatest writers of the American Golden Age mystery, and the only American author to be included in England’s legendary Detection Club during his lifetime. Though he was born and died in the United States, Carr began his writing career while living in England, where he remained for nearly twenty years. Under his own name and various pseudonyms, he wrote more than seventy novels and numerous short stories, and is best known today for his locked-room mysteries. His beloved series character, Dr. Gideon Fell, was based on author G. K. Chesterton and appeared in twenty-four novels.

  OTTO PENZLER, the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of the Mysterious Press (1975), a literary crime imprint now associated with Grove/Atlantic; MysteriousPress.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; and New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop (1979). He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from NoirCon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 70 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE MYSTERY story has undergone incalculable developments since its creation. What had for many years been assumed to be a mystery—the detective story­­—was, in fact, merely one slice of the very large pie that also includes wedges of crime fiction, thrillers, police procedurals, espionage novels and tales of suspense.

  Of these sub-genres of the mystery, it is my contention that the most difficult to produce, or rather to produce well, is the novel of pure detection. There can be no slovenliness of plot here, or else there will be an element, however innocuous it may seem, upon which the astute reader will pounce and, when it remains unexplained or unremarked upon at the end of the book, the novel will be dismissed as being unfair, no matter how brilliantly executed all else may have been accomplished.

  The greatest of the great names continue to be read today, coming on a hundred years, because they understood the rules, adhered to them, and had the talent, if not the outright genius, to produce works within the precise strictures of what was permitted. Who are the immortals who wrote these towering monuments of detection fiction? You know their names already: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, S.S. Van Dine, Philip MacDonald, R. Austin Freeman, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, A.E.W. Mason and, of course, John Dickson Carr. These were the first gods in the pantheon of detective fiction authors. Some are undoubtedly more readable than others. Try as I might, I could never make it from beginning to end of a Crofts novel without losing the battle against Morpheus. There are other greats who fail to make the list because the purity of their detective puzzles suffered by comparison, even though they created charming and often baffling plots which were often transparent or left unexplained gaps.

  Carr once provided his definition of a detective story, and it is a good one, however simple it may seem. “The detective story,” he wrote in an introduction to The Ten Best Detective Novels, an anthology he prepared but which was never published, “is a conflict between criminal and detective in which the criminal, by means of some ingenious device—alibi, novel murder-method, or what you like—remains unconvicted or even unsuspected until the detective reveals his identity by means of evidence which has also been conveyed to the reader.

  “This is the skeleton,” he continues, “the framework, the Christmas tree on which all the ornaments are hung. If the skeleton has been badly hung, or the tree clumsily set in its base, no amount of glittering ornament will save it. It will fall over with a flop. Its fall may create a momentary sensation, especially among children; but adults are only depressed when they see the same sort of thing happen in fiction.”

  Although the majority of his books were set in England, Carr was born in the United States, in Pennsylvania, in 1906. His first detective novel, It Walks by Night, was published in 1930 when he was 24 years old. During an Atlantic crossing, he met an English woman, Clarice Cleaves, who he married in the United States but, deciding that England was the ideal place in which to write detective stories, settled there in 1932.

  He was immediately successful and prolific, publishing 30 books by the end of 1939. Writing books in such enormous quantities forced him to create a second identity, Carr Dickson, quickly changed to Carter Dickson when his original publisher, Harpers, protested that the name was too similar to the original.

  After Henri Bencolin solved the crime in the first book, Carr created Dr. Gideon Fell, his best-known and most popular character. A voracious reader of detective stories as a child and young man, Carr greatly admired G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories and modeled Fell on the author. They came to know each other in the 1930s, as both were members of London’s famous and very prestigious Detection Club, where they vehemently disagreed about the only two things Chesterton felt worthy of discussion, religion and politics; Chesterton was a Catholic and left wing, while Carr was Presbyterian and conservative.

  Chesterton’s girth was as prodigious as his ego, hence the estimable figure cut by Dr. Fell, who is described in a scene in The Mad Hatter Mystery thus: “There was the doctor, bigger and stouter than ever. He wheezed. His red face shone, and his small eyes twinkled over eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon. There was a grin under his bandit’s mustache, and chuckling upheavals animated his several chins. On his head was the inevitable black shovel-hat; his paunch projected from a voluminous black cloak. Filling the stairs in grandeur, he leaned on an ash cane with one hand and flourished another cane with the other. It was like meeting Father Christmas or Old King Cole.”

  Under the Carter Dickson name, he produced a series of novels featuring Sir Henry Merrivale, who was often likened to Winston Churchill. Although not originally patterned after him, the curmudgeonly Merrivale acquired more and more of the future prime minister’s characteristics as the series progressed.

  When World War II erupted, Carr was summoned by the U.S. military and returned to America, only to have the BBC request his services and be promptly returned to London, where he produced propaganda programs and a popular weekly show titled Appointment with Fear.

  After the war, he wrote the official biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When a left-wing government came into power, he took his wife and three daughters, as well as their English nurse, back to America to “escape Socialism,” as he stated it. When the Labour Party was voted out in 1951, he and his family returned to England, staying until 1958 when he moved to Greenville, S.C., where he lived until his death in 1977.

  The undisputed alcove he holds and will forever hold in the virtual Mystery Hall of Fame is as the creator of the most brilliant “locked-room” mysteries ever written. While many writers tried their hands at producing “impossible” crimes, they were generally able to sustain the endeavor for a only book or two, while the vast majority of Carr/Dickson titles were in this most demanding of all sub-genres. These mysteries, as one would suspect, generally involve murder in a sealed room, often guarded, in which a hapless victim is executed, often at a specific hour, as warned by the unsuspected killer. Secret doors, hidden panels and other obvious devices are not permitted—especially not in Carr’s books. His imagination was so fertile in this regard that in one of his most famous no
vels, The Hollow Man (titled The Three Coffins in the United States), Fell delivers a lecture regarding impossible crimes in which he offers several dozen methods by which the murders may be accomplished.

  The Mad Hatter Mystery is one of Carr’s masterpieces, with all the essential elements of his finest work: an impossible crime, a dark atmosphere and the inimitable Dr. Fell. It also is a high spot in the rarified world of bibliomysteries—stories in which rare books and manuscripts play a major role; in this case, the theft of a previously unknown manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe, and not just any manuscript, but one of towering historical significance. What this superb detective story also has is a last word which many readers may find shocking. Do not peek!

  If you have an intellectual mind, one that enjoys being challenged by an author who openly dares you to be as clever as he is, all of the early works of Carr and Dickson will give you all the mental gymnastics you can handle. So will the works of other authors who worked in the rarified atmosphere of impossible crimes. In addition to the greatest of the greats mentioned above (though few are impossible crimes), you might want to try any of the four novels about The Great Merlini, the stage magician created by Clayton Rawson; Too Many Magicians by Randall Garrett, in which he establishes a parallel universe where the laws of magic apply, yet writes a superb, fair-play locked room mystery; or Gaston Leroux’ superb, if slightly slow-moving, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, in which the young police reporter Joseph Rouletabille discovers how someone in a hermetically sealed room could have been murdered.

  —OTTO PENZLER

  THE MAD HATTER

  MYSTERY

  Plan of the Tower of London’s South Side, Giving on the Thames Wharf, where the Action of this Story takes Place.

  The reader will please observe that the Bloody Tower, to which frequent reference is made, is built above the gate marked 3 in the plan; that the gate of this tower does not lead into the tower itself, but to a roadway going past the Wakefield Tower. The door of the Bloody Tower faces Tower Green, and is reached by a stairway from the roadway mentioned (8).

  1. TRAITOR’S GATE.

  2. STEPS WHERE THE BODY WAS FOUND.

  3. GATEWAY OF BLOODY TOWER.

  4. WINDOW FROM WHICH PARKER SAW DRISCOLL AND THE UNKNOWN.

  5. SMALL WARDER’S ROOM, NORTHERN SIDE OF BYWARD TOWER, WHERE QUESTIONING TOOK PLACE.

  6. WARDERS’ HALL, SOUTHERN SIDE OF BLOODY TOWER, WHERE VISITORS WERE DETAINED.

  7. WHERE MRS. LARKIN STOOD.

  I

  A Cab Horse in a Barrister’s Wig

  IT BEGAN, like most of Dr. Fell’s adventures, in a bar. It dealt with the reason why a man was found dead on the steps of Traitors’ Gate, at the Tower of London, and with the odd headgear of this man in the golf suit. That was the worst part of it. The whole case threatened for a time to become a nightmare of hats.

  Abstractly considered, there is nothing very terrifying about a hat. We may pass a shop window full of them without the slightest qualm. We may even see a policeman’s helmet decorating the top of a lamp-post, or a pearl-gray top hat perched on the head of one of the lions in Trafalgar Square, with no more than an impression that some practical joker is exercising a primitive sense of humor. Young Rampole, when he saw the newspaper, was inclined to grin at the matter as just that.

  Chief Inspector Hadley was not so sure.

  They were waiting for Dr. Fell at Scott’s, which is in the heart of Piccadilly Circus. You descend a flight of stairs from Great Windmill Street to a lounge like a club, brown panels and easy-chairs in red leather, with the brass-bound kegs behind the bar and the model of a ship on the ledge of the stone mantelpiece. Sitting in an alcove with a glass of beer, Rampole studied the chief inspector. He was wondering. He had only arrived from America that morning, and the press of events seemed rather sudden.

  He said, “I’ve often wondered, sir, about Dr. Fell. I mean—his position. He seems to be all sorts of things.”

  The other nodded, smiling faintly. You could not, Rampole felt, help liking the chief inspector of the C.I.D. He was the sort of man who might be described as compact; not tall or heavy, yet giving the impression of being so; very neatly dressed, with a military mustache and smooth hair the color of dull steel. If there was a quality about him you noticed at once, it was a quality of repose, of quiet watchfulness. His movements were deliberate. Even his eyes, which seemed to go from gray to black, had that deliberate faculty, and he rarely raised his voice.

  “Have you known him long?” Hadley asked, examining his glass.

  “As a matter of fact, only since last July.” The American found himself rather startled to remember that. “Good Lord! It seems years! He—well, in a manner of speaking, he introduced me to my wife.”

  Hadley nodded. “I know. That would be the Starberth case. He wired me from Lincolnshire, and I sent the men he wanted.”

  A little more than eight months ago. Rampole looked back on those terrifying scenes in the Hag’s Nook, and the twilight by the railway station where Dr. Fell had put his hand on the shoulder of Martin Starberth’s murderer. Now there were only happiness and Dorothy. Now there was London in the cool, misty days of March, revisited for the first time since then.

  Again the chief inspector smiled faintly. “And you, I believe,” he continued in his deliberate voice, “carried off the young lady. I hear glowing reports of you from Fell. He did rather a brilliant piece of work in that affair,” Hadley added abruptly. “I wonder—”

  “Whether he can do it again?”

  The other’s expression grew quizzical. He turned his head. “Not so fast, please. You seem to be scenting crime again.”

  “Well, sir, he wrote me a note to meet you here.”

  “And,” said Hadley, “you may be right. I have a feeling,” he touched a folded newspaper in his pocket, hesitated and frowned. “Still, I thought that this thing might be rather more in his line than mine. Bitton appealed to me personally, as a friend, and it’s hardly a job for the Yard. I don’t want to turn him down.”

  Rampole wondered whether he was supposed to know what his companion was talking about. The chief inspector seemed to be musing, in a hesitant fashion, and his hand kept straying to the newspaper in his pocket.

  He added, “I suppose you’ve heard of Sir William Bitton?”

  “The collector?”

  “Ah,” said Hadley; “I fancied you would. Fell said it would be in your line, too. The book-collector, yes. Though I knew him better before he retired from politics.” He glanced at his watch. “He should be here by two o’clock, and so should Fell. There’s a train from Lincoln which gets into King’s Cross at one-thirty.”

  A thunderous voice boomed, “Aha!” They were conscious of somebody flourishing a cane at them from across the room, and of a great bulk filling the stairway to the street. The bar had been very quiet; this entrance caused one white-jacketed bartender to start violently. The only other occupants of the room were two business men conversing in low tones in one corner, and they jerked round to stare at the beaming appearance of Gideon Fell.

  All the old genial days, all the beer-drinking and fiery moods and table-pounding conversations, beamed back at Rampole in the person of Dr. Fell. The American felt like calling for another drink and striking up a song for sheer joyousness. There was the doctor, bigger and stouter than ever. He wheezed. His red face shone, and his small eyes twinkled over eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon. There was a grin under his bandit’s mustache, and chuckling upheavals animated his several chins. On his head was the inevitable black shovel hat; his paunch projected from a voluminous black cloak. Filling the stairs in grandeur, he leaned on an ash cane with one hand and flourished another cane with the other. It was like meeting Father Christmas or Old King Cole. Indeed, Dr. Fell had frequently impersonated Old King Cole at garden pageants, and enjoyed the role immensely.

  “Heh,” he said. “Heh-heh-heh.” He came rolling over to the alcove and wrung Rampole’s hand. “My boy, I�
�m delighted. Delighted! Heh. I say, you’re looking fine. And Dorothy? . . . Excellent; I’m glad to hear it. My wife sends her warmest regards. We’re going to take you back to Chatterham as soon as Hadley tells me what he wants with me. Eh, Hadley? Here, let’s all have a drink.”

  There are people before whom you instantly unbend. Dr. Fell was one of them. No constraint could exist before him; he blew it away with a superb puff; and, if you had any affectations, you forgot them immediately. Hadley looked indulgent, and beckoned a waiter.

  “This might interest you,” the chief inspector suggested, handing Dr. Fell a wine-card. He assumed a placid, innocent air. “The cocktails are recommended. There is one called an ‘Angel’s Kiss’—”

  “Hah?” said Dr. Fell, starting in his seat.

  “—or a ‘Love’s Delight’—”

  “Gurk!” said Dr. Fell. He stared at the card. “Young man, do you serve these?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the waiter, jumping involuntarily.

  “You serve an ‘Angel’s Kiss,’ a ‘Love’s Delight,’ and—ah—if my eyes do not deceive me, a ‘Happy Virgin’?

  “Young man,” continued the doctor, rumbling and polishing his glasses, “have you never reflected on what American influence has done to stalwart England? Where are your finer instincts? This is enough to make decent tipplers shudder. Instead of saying, ‘A bitter,’ or ‘A Scotch and splash, please,’ like scholars and gentlemen, we are now expected to coo for— Hah!” He broke off and scowled ferociously. “Can you imagine Buffalo Bill striding into a Western saloon and roaring for an ‘Angel’s Kiss’? Can you fancy what Tony Weller would have said if he called for hot rum punch and received a ‘Love’s Delight’?”

  “No, sir,” said the waiter.

  “I think you’d better order something,” suggested Hadley.

  “A large glass of beer,” said the doctor. “Lager.”