John Carr - The Plague Court Murders

Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr)

The Plague Court Murders

(Sir Henry Merrivale 01)

OUT OF THE ORDINARY

They hired psychic Roger Darworth to exorcise the Plague Court ghost.

The ghost of Plague Court was no ordinary ghost. Hardly. Reportedly a malevolent soul on the lower plane, it was always watchful, always cunning, always waiting to possess a living body and to exchange that body's weak brain for its own just as it had done since its first appearance in 1665.

The exorcist, Roger Darworth, was no ordinary exorcist. Of course not. Actually, he was a first-rate fraud who had been under police surveillance for months.

It follows then that the exorcism of Plague Court was no ordinary exorcism. Naturally-or perhaps supernaturally-not after the exorcist was found brutally murdered in a small stone house with its door both padlocked and bolted, its windows barred, and with no secret entrances. And the murder weapon? Far, far from ordinary. It was an ancient knife which was said to be the property of the Plague Court ghost.

By now we all know that Sir Henry Merrivale is no ordinary detective. Here he is in his first recorded appearance. And THE PLAGUE COURT MURDERS is not an ordinary mystery novel. How could it be? After all, it is the first book to bear the name of Carter Dickson, a/k/a John Dickson Carr, and by either name a most extraordinary author.

"This is a genuine baffler, placed in an eerie, ghostly setting. Any reader who is able to guess the solution before Sir Henry chooses to reveal it is entitled to call himself a first-class amateur detective:'

-Isaac Anderson New York Times Book Review

June 3, 1934

"Excellent plus."

Saturday Review of Literature

"This thickly atmospheric work provides a sure and pleasant means of giving yourself the jumps... for those who wish to be scared on every page'

-Will Cuppy Books

THE PLAGUE COURT MURDERS

Copyright © 1934 by William Morrow & Company, Inc. Copyright renewed 1961 by John Dickson Carr. Published with the permission of the author's estate and Harold Ober Associates Inc.

Introduction: Copyright © 1990 by Douglas G. Greene.

Printed and manufactured in the United States of America.

First IPL edition, June 1990.

INTRODUCTION

The Plague Court Murders is a tale of a haunted house as only John Dickson Carr (aka, Carter Dickson) could tell it.

Throughout his life, Carr was fond of ghost stories. In a recently discovered article that Carr wrote when he was fifteen years old, he remarked: "To like such stories is entirely natural. We love to be scared, but unconsciously we challenge anyone to do it.... Despite science, despite common sense, still we lie awake o’ nights with a volume of Poe-of Kipling-of Marion Crawford-in our hands, while outside the circle of light thrown by the lamp at our bedside flit all the mocking phantoms of fancy, defying science, defying common sense to crush the ghost story:' Poe and Kipling are great figures in the history of the supernatural tale (and much else), but F Marion Crawford has been almost forgotten. Nonetheless, Carr praised several of Crawford's short stories, especially a small masterpiece called "The Screaming Skull," whose opening lines Carr liked to quote:

I have often heard it scream. No, I am not nervous or imaginative; and I never believed in ghosts, unless that thing is one. But it hates me as it hated Luke Pratt, and it screams at me.

Four years after the publication of The Plague Court Murders, Carr wrote an article called "...and Things that Go Bump in the Night" about ghosts in fact and fiction. Its discussion of important writers of supernatural fiction indicates Carr's wide reading. Among the authors whom he singled out are W. F. Harvey, M. R. James, L. P. Hartley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Bram Stoker, E. F Benson, Margaret Irwin and Algernon Blackwood.

At least four of Carr's earliest stories are about ghosts. For example, "The Will-0'-The-Wisp;' written while he was still in high school, already combines two of his abiding interests, the supernatural and historical romance. When he went to preparatory school in Autumn 1922, he continued to write such tales: One is a ghost story of Christmas, another comes close to being a historical horror tale, and a third brings together in unexpected fashion ghosts, humor and drinking. In short, the young John Dickson Carr was as interested in ghost stories as he would be in fictional detection.

It was at Haverford College that John Dickson Carr began what we might call "The Carrian Synthesis," the nearly perfect integration of supernatural atmosphere, seemingly impossible events, and rational detection. In several short stories done for The Haverfordian between December 1926 and June 1928 (reprinted in The Door to Doom, 1980), Carr had M. Henri Bencolin of the Surete solve murders and vanishings that take place in locked and guarded rooms. In each of the stories, Carr hints that the answer can only be supernatural. In "The Shadow of the Goat' for example, Sir John Landervorne tells Bencolin that "I shall have to tell you a story which will not interest you, unless you believe in sorcery." "The Murder in Number Four" begins, "During the night run between Dieppe and Paris, on a haunted train called the Blue Arrow, there was murder done." At the conclusion of each tale, however, Bencolin explains that the impossibilities were devised by humans for human reasons. The ghosts disappear, the witchcraft vanishes-until the next story again opens the door to the unknown.

Carr's final story for The Haverfordian was a novella called "Grand GuignolI which also featured Henri Bencolin. Much enlarged, it became his first novel, It Walks By Night, published in February 1930. Like his short stories, the novel begins with the suggestion that the impossible murder-in this case, a grisly beheading in a room under constant observation-must have been committed by someone in league with dark powers. The suspect seems to be a "night monster" who "by night becomes a misshapen beast with blood-bedabbled claws." Carr followed It Walks By Night with three other eerie cases for Bencolin, one of which, Castle Skull (1931), was set in a seemingly haunted castle on the Rhine.

Carr tired of Bencolin but not of creeps and chills. Poison in Jest (1932) comes close to having a haunted house. The events take place in America, in a rambling estate near Carr's hometown of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. In this story, various characters see a disembodied hand, apparently once belonging to a statue of Caligula, crawling about on its own locomotive power. But nothing much is done with this, and the emphasis of the book is not on ghosts. Even closer to housely haunting is the first Dr. Gideon Fell novel, Hag's Nook (1933), with its spirit-ridden prison. The same year, The Bowstring Murders was published under the pseudonym Carr Dickson. Its detective, the elderly and "slightly drunk" Sir John Gaunt, is one of Carr's most interesting characters, but the book shows signs of hurried writing. Carr produced it at white-hot speed toward the end of 1932 to earn money for a trip to England with his new bride. As with Poison in Jest, the novel has much that might have made a good story of hauntings: the murder, which occurs in a room whose entrances are under observation, may have been committed by an ambulatory suit of armor. But Carr doesn't sustain the atmosphere, and the solution to the impossible crime is cribbed from It Walks By Night.

All of which is a lengthy way of saying that The Plague Court Murders, originally published in 1934, is not only the first Sir Henry Merrivale novel, but also Carr's first fully developed hauntedhouse story. Instead of having the ordinary spooks that might congregate around any house that has such a horrid history as Plague Court, Carr based the tale around the fashionable ideas of spiritualism. Beginning with the Fox sisters in 1848, spiritualists claimed to be mediums (or, sometimes, to use others as mediums) to allow the spirits of the dead to communicate with the living.