Death in Five Boxes - Carter Dickson

Here's another greatly under appreciated book in the Sir Henry Merrivale series.  This has -- flat out -- the best opening of any of the books in the series. The first three chapters whiz by and are as action-filled as one of the dizzying comic book hero movies that are flooding the cinemas these days.  A young girl runs out of the rainy darkness into the arms of a passing doctor, pleading with him to go inside the building across the street and rescue her father only to discover a roomful of drugged people and one stabbed corpse. Oh, and I shouldn't forget the bloodstained umbrella-cum-swordstick that comes bouncing down the staircase as the two race up before they even set foot in the room. You just can't stop reading there, can you?  Of course not.

And there are impossible situations in abundance here.  Who drugged the guests in Felix Hayes home?  How was the poison administered when the cocktail shaker that contained most of the drinks had not a trace of poison in it?  How did the murderer escape the building when the rear entrance was locked?  What is the meaning of the five boxes sent to a lawyer's office that were then stolen only a day later?  There are these and many other puzzles that will baffle even the most astute reader.

In the process of unraveling all the baffling elements of the crime and the discoveries at the scene of the crime it is learned that the four drugged guests found in Felix Hayes' apartment all have one thing in common - they apparently have all committed a crime that escaped detection and prosecution. Was Hayes blackmailing them all and did one of them do him in to prevent the secret form being publicized?  It's a bit more complicated than simple blackmail.

I would count this book as one of Top 10 of the Carter Dickson books.  I'm surprised not much is written about it.  I found it to be a perfect example of what Carr/Dickson did so well. Create an impossible situation, complicate it with lots of odd behavior, throw in numerous red herring bizarreness and deliver a walloping surprise. Yes, I gasped.  I was reminded of my stunned reaction to Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery. It's a corker for sure.

And just for the heck of it below this paragraph is the cover of the Belmont Tower reissue paperback version of Death in Five Boxes.  The illustrations have absolutely NOTHING to do with the story.  I'm positive this publisher lifted their artwork from other books and slapped it on their books without regard to the story's content. There is no bearded men with a German Luger. There is no Gothic looking castle. What are those five ghostly figures loating beneath the castle? Are they children? Mannequins? Dead bodies?  If you own this copy and have yet to read it rest assured the cover is one huge illustrated non sequitar.

FFB: The Sorceress of the Strand

Dixon Druce faces off with the villainous Madame Sara

The female master criminal is an under used stock character in crime and adventure fiction. Ask any crime fiction aficionado for master criminals and the list will be almost exclusively made up of male characters.  Whether they be from the the Victorian and Edwardian eras (Prof. Moriarty, Dr. Nikola, Fu Manchu, Fantomas) or the pulp period (Wu Fang, the Octopus, Dr. Death, Dr. Satan) or the heyday of the super spy (Goldfinger, Blofeld, and all the Bond villains) the female of the species is sadly lacking or completely absent or -- worst of all -- relegated to the master criminal's sidekick. Yet as early as 1902 L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace were daring and original enough to create what is certainly one of the earliest woman criminal masterminds in the genre.  Her exploits are related in the six stories compiled under the title The Sorceress of the Strand.  She is the stunningly beautiful and thoroughly treacherous Madame Sara.

Earlier the same writing duo attempted to create a female Napoleon of Crime in Madame Kalouchy.  She appears in the stories that are collected as The Brotherhood of  the Seven Kings (1895).  Although Madame K. acts as the head of this secret society of criminals and guides their nefarious acts she is not operating alone.  She pales in comparison to Madame Sara who is described repeatedly by our hero Dixon Druce as a genius of evil and unscrupulous on all counts.  When he hears her name he all but gasps and warns everyone to stay away.  But her gullible prey find it impossible to believe that Madame Sara is anything but charming, kind and extremely helpful. Oh, the folly of seeing only the surface character!

When we first meet this most fatal of femme fatales she is the proprietor of a perfume business.  Here she also has a laboratory purportedly set up for researching and manufacturing all sorts of beauty aids.  What she's really up to is anyone's guess.  Usually it involves some fiendish deathtrap that will ensure she gets her hands on someone's fortune. In addition to chemical laboratory skills Madame Sara is adept at concocting poisons, constructing wigs, applying ghostly make-up, supplying custom dentures and tooth stops with extra surprise ingredients. She is a Renaissance woman by way of the gates of Hell.  You most assuredly don't want her as your cosmetician or your dentist.

Madame Sara's primary adversary, Dixon Druce, is the manager of the Solvency Inquiry Agency,  a government watchdog and protector against fraud.  He spends much of his time overseeing the practices of wholesale and retail businesses and confesses to being witness to some of the best in financial chicanery.  He is assisted in his battle against the scheming villainess by Dr. Eric Vandeleur, a police surgeon.  Vandeleur is the de facto detective in the stories.  He steps in at the final moment and reveals all by lecturing and pontificating and unveiling all sorts of devilry like the booby-trapped artificial palm tree that disperses carbon monoxide gas.  That's only one of the bizarre murder methods employed by Madame Sara who seems to have one of the most outrageous imaginations in Edwardian fiction.

Dixon Druce (left) and Dr. Eric Vandeleur (right)

The stories of Meade and Eustace are not really detective stories. There is no investigation at all.  There is merely the presentation of a dilemma, the intervention of Druce and Vandeleur as soon as they hear the mention of Madame Sara's name and the rush to discover what she has planned before anyone suffers injury or dies at her hands.  Or at the hands of one of her confederates employing one of the many baroque deathtraps like the one mentioned previously.  The fun is in trying to figure out what wicked thing she has whipped up. You may just be astonished at a few of them.

Reading this from a modern perspective and therefore being familiar with so many later works that have most assuredly been influenced by Meade and Eustace (even if unknowingly) may lessen the power that these stories first had more a century ago. But I still find in them an inventiveness and an energy that makes them enlivening. Of the six stories I was surprised that more than half of them had true early 20th century ingenuity invested in the plot.  The impassioned dialog is priceless. At one point Vandeleur says of Madame Sara, "Hunting her as recreation is as good as hunting a man-eating tiger."  And watching the hunt take place is just as good.

The Madame Sara stories are:

"Madame Sara"
"The Blood Red Cross"
"The Face of the Abbott" (a haunted castle and a ghost - the only attempt at supernatural in this series)
"The Talk of the Town"
"The Bloodstone"
"The Teeth of the Wolf" (which includes Mrs. Bensasan, a wild animal trainer who is trying to tame a Siberian wolf, and a horrid hunchbacked dwarf betrothed to her beautiful young daughter. It's the most Gothic and nasty of all the tales.)