The Bowstring Murders - Carr Dickson (John Dickson Carr)

I've had my copy of The Bowstring Murders (1933) for decades. Why have I never read it until a few days ago? Well, for one thing it's a treasure. I own the hardcover first edition with the silly attempt at creating a new pseudonym for John Dickson Carr. Instead of "Christopher Street", the name Carr wanted as his pseudonym, an executive at William Morrow slapped the utterly giveaway name of "Carr Dickson" on the book. Copies of the original hardcover with this pseudonym are extremely hard to find these days. It's the only book with that dumb pen name.

Maybe Carr's angry reaction to that decision of which he was not notified as Douglas Greene records in The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995) was the reason that this book is also the only one with John Gaunt, a detective consultant to Scotland Yard who shuns modern scientific advances. I was sorting through a box of vintage paperbacks and I found another copy of The Bowstring Murders, this one a 1970s era reprint from Belmont Books. I figured: Well, no time like the present. So I dashed off my long overdue read of this early John Dickson Carr book in a couple of days last week.  Interestingly, it seems more of a retread of both Carr's own books as well as the work of some of his influences.

The story takes place in a familiar Carr setting: the Gothic castle known as Bowstring, home of Henry Steyne, AKA Lord Rayle. Bowstring comes complete with a moat and a man made waterfall on the vast estate that feeds the water in the moat and keeps it flowing to avoid the stench and health hazards of stagnant water.  The reader is constantly reminded of the presence of the waterfall and its never-ending roar which prevents many of the characters from hearing certain crucial sounds related to the several murders that take place. Also notable is that the story takes place over only three days.

UK 1st edition. Used Carter Dickson as author.
Body is illustrated as face up unlike in the book.

Lord Rayle is an eccentric medievalist who prefers living in the past and lecturing anyone who will indulge him on his vast collection of medieval weaponry and suits of armor. The night before he is killed a pair of gauntlets go missing. Then Lord Rayle decides to nail shut a door hidden behind a tapestry in the armor room that leads to a secret alcove. It's almost a case of shutting barn door after the horse has fled.  Later, we learn that passageway was used a trysting spot for his daughter Patricia. She would use that hidden area to meet a handsome guest, Larry Kestevan, for midnight snogging sessions. As she is thwarted from meeting her lover Patricia eventually discovers her father's body, practically tripping over it in the candlelit armor room. Her father was apparently strangled by a bowstring and his body is crumpled in a strange position face down on the floor of the armor room.

Gaunt is called in to help Inspector Tape. Prior to the arrival of Gaunt the book is fairly colorless with lots of chit chat from Francis Steyne, son to Lord Rayle, and what amounts to a lot of malarkey about the collection of armor. For me, Gaunt was the only really interesting person in the entire cast.  Another in a long line of omniscient detectives with antisocial tendencies, a high opinion of himself, and critical opinions of everyone else, he's also a rampant alcoholic. Carr tries to hint at a tragedy in his past as a reason for his heavy drinking. (He caused the death of one of his partners, I think. I forgot to note it exactly.) Eventually he lost his job with the police due to his drinking, but still manages to be called in regularly to help with unusual crimes. And so we find him at Bowstring trying to make sense of not only the strangling death of Lord Rayle but also the strangling of the maid Doris, who claimed to have seen a suit of armor standing in a stairway a few nights prior to both violent murders. About midway through the book another character is killed. But this person is shot to death which immediately dismisses the idea of anything supernatural related to a ghostly figure in armor.

1973 Belmont paperback
This time the body is face down (sort of), but
his arms are wrong! They should be underneath.
And the clothes are all wrong, too.

The most impressive feature is not the bizarre murder method of strangling by gauntlets (already used by Carolyn Wells in 1931's Horror House) or the impossible circumstances surrounding the brutal murders. Instead what stands out as more ingenious is how Carr manages to take all the minute details -- details most readers will dismiss as ornament and filler -- and apply them to the overarching plot. Offhand comments and one particular insult, for example, all serve to support Gaunt's solution. All details reveal the strange weak character flaw of the murderer, a person with a lack of imagination whose lies are obvious. At least to Gaunt.

Lying and the art of lying seem to be central to the book.  Gaunt has a mini lecture on the dubious science behind the lie detector machine, a fairly new invention and used regularly in police investigations since the mid 1920s. He describes in detail the lack of understanding of psychology of liars' behavior and how that will almost certainly backfire the moment a lie detector machine is introduced.  He believes that the machine's recording of the body's reactions (pulse, heart rate and respiratory signals) are not the telltale signs of lying. In fact, the liar he believes will immediately be put on guard and the usual giveaway of a liar -- elaborate storytelling -- will be substituted for short colorless answers lacking in the details that will always reveal a liar.

Due to a rather small set of suspects the ultimate reveal of the killer is no real gasp-inducing surprise. It's clear that of the small pool of suspects -- Francis, Patricia, Larry, the footman Saunders, and Bruce Massey, Lord Rayle's secretary and financial advisor -- it can only be one of three people. Greene mentions in The Men Who Explained Miracles that the solution seems to very similar to another book Carr wrote prior to 1933 which featured Henri Bencolin.  He says that it may be one of Carr's many cases of self-plagiarism in his early career. Carr was known to recycle ideas form short stories and put them into his novels. This happened several times in the stories that appear in Department of Queer Complaints, for example. Ultimately, it was fun to see just how Gaunt caught the killer who he says acted mostly on impulse even though his crimes had been well thought out in advance. In one way this novel is more satisfying as a howdunit and whydunit than it is the old-fashioned whodunit.