the blind barber (1934)
Jul. 29th, 2024 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porticoi love to haunt used bookshops, particularly when traveling, and i'm always looking for interesting golden age mystery paperbacks. i hit the jackpot with this one, found in dogtown books in gloucester, ma.
i'd never read any of carr's work before, but i knew of him from the shedunnit podcast, and i love a boat as a setting for a mystery. having now read it, i'm not sure what to think about this being my first carr--it's apparently very unusual for him! it was likewise unusual for golden age mysteries on the whole.
to begin with, the book's "detective" was only nominally dr. gideon fell. he is not present on the boat where the events occur, and is playing armchair detective while henry morgan, a mystery writer and acquaintance of his who was aboard, describes it all to him. as a result, you are only with fell in the very beginning, an intermission in the middle while morgan has a drink before he loses his voice, and finally, at the end. i found him unobjectionable, although i have gathered that other readers think him very irritating, so perhaps this was the ideal book in which to encounter him. the other unusual element of the blind barber is that it's a farce. my copy begins with a forward from someone delicately explaining that this is going to be a funny book and if you don't like that sort of thing, you should take yourself elsewhere. i do, so i enjoyed it, although i think of 1934 as still fairly early in the long life of the detective novel as we now know it, so it's funny to think that the genre had already reached a point where writers were lampooning it. it's a GOOD lampoon, however, and a good farce. i have acted in farces before, and their defining element in my experience is that folks MUST be rushing in and out of doors all the time. at that, this book excels.
here's the plot: our main cast of characters are morgan (british), curt warren (american, diplomatic corps, nephew of a Certain Personage in american government), peggy glenn (british, the sort of intrepid girl who is indigenous to detective stories, niece of a french puppeteer, also on board), and capt. thomassen valvick (norwegian, retired sea captain, acquainted with the ship's captain, loves to tell a tale). the thing kicks off when some film that warren has of his uncle dunking on every other world leader he can think of on film, which warren thought he destroyed but survived is stolen from his stateroom. they lay a trap with more of the film, fail to capture the culprit and instead assault the ship's captain, who is transporting a valuable emerald necklace from a viscount's suite to the safe, and in the course of the whole affair the necklace goes missing, a badly injured woman is both found and vanishes, and the rest of the film is lost. if this doesn't make plain the core point of the book, then i will: these people are so bad at solving mysteries.
the rest of the book is near nonstop slapstick action, and i had a wonderful time. one of the cleverest things about the blind barber is that it follows the rules of fair play (meaning that every clue that the reader would need to solve the crime is in the book), and to prove it carr even provides footnotes throughout fell's explanation telling the reader where precisely the clue was revealed in the book. morgan bemoans his stupidity in not solving it himself, but fell points out, correctly, that he was far too busy falling over tables and such.
i had a couple of issues with the book, the first being the phonetic language used for anyone with an accent--this was the worst for capt. valvick, the norwegian, who spoke a LOT, but it came up with other characters, too. additionally, there's some mild, period-typical racism, and curt warren ends the book in blackface.
all in all, while it may not have made me want to read more books featuring dr. gideon fell, i do think i'll be reading other ones by john dickson carr.
i'd never read any of carr's work before, but i knew of him from the shedunnit podcast, and i love a boat as a setting for a mystery. having now read it, i'm not sure what to think about this being my first carr--it's apparently very unusual for him! it was likewise unusual for golden age mysteries on the whole.
to begin with, the book's "detective" was only nominally dr. gideon fell. he is not present on the boat where the events occur, and is playing armchair detective while henry morgan, a mystery writer and acquaintance of his who was aboard, describes it all to him. as a result, you are only with fell in the very beginning, an intermission in the middle while morgan has a drink before he loses his voice, and finally, at the end. i found him unobjectionable, although i have gathered that other readers think him very irritating, so perhaps this was the ideal book in which to encounter him. the other unusual element of the blind barber is that it's a farce. my copy begins with a forward from someone delicately explaining that this is going to be a funny book and if you don't like that sort of thing, you should take yourself elsewhere. i do, so i enjoyed it, although i think of 1934 as still fairly early in the long life of the detective novel as we now know it, so it's funny to think that the genre had already reached a point where writers were lampooning it. it's a GOOD lampoon, however, and a good farce. i have acted in farces before, and their defining element in my experience is that folks MUST be rushing in and out of doors all the time. at that, this book excels.
here's the plot: our main cast of characters are morgan (british), curt warren (american, diplomatic corps, nephew of a Certain Personage in american government), peggy glenn (british, the sort of intrepid girl who is indigenous to detective stories, niece of a french puppeteer, also on board), and capt. thomassen valvick (norwegian, retired sea captain, acquainted with the ship's captain, loves to tell a tale). the thing kicks off when some film that warren has of his uncle dunking on every other world leader he can think of on film, which warren thought he destroyed but survived is stolen from his stateroom. they lay a trap with more of the film, fail to capture the culprit and instead assault the ship's captain, who is transporting a valuable emerald necklace from a viscount's suite to the safe, and in the course of the whole affair the necklace goes missing, a badly injured woman is both found and vanishes, and the rest of the film is lost. if this doesn't make plain the core point of the book, then i will: these people are so bad at solving mysteries.
the rest of the book is near nonstop slapstick action, and i had a wonderful time. one of the cleverest things about the blind barber is that it follows the rules of fair play (meaning that every clue that the reader would need to solve the crime is in the book), and to prove it carr even provides footnotes throughout fell's explanation telling the reader where precisely the clue was revealed in the book. morgan bemoans his stupidity in not solving it himself, but fell points out, correctly, that he was far too busy falling over tables and such.
i had a couple of issues with the book, the first being the phonetic language used for anyone with an accent--this was the worst for capt. valvick, the norwegian, who spoke a LOT, but it came up with other characters, too. additionally, there's some mild, period-typical racism, and curt warren ends the book in blackface.
all in all, while it may not have made me want to read more books featuring dr. gideon fell, i do think i'll be reading other ones by john dickson carr.
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Date: 2024-07-30 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-30 04:29 am (UTC)