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i 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 have given myself a project this summer, which is to watch as many of the Agatha Christie film adaptations as I can and make a list of the campiest. This was inspired by my love of Evil Under the Sun (1982), which it should go without saying gets the top prize. In the course of this project, I am watching a lot of christies which will not make the list but which I still want to talk about! So they will go here.

Starting with: Lord Edgware Dies (1934)



I was pretty sure this one wasn't going to fit the brief but wanted to watch it anyway because it's probably the earliest surviving christie*! This was actually Austin Trevor's third go as Poirot, but the preceding two--Alibi and Black Coffee--are thought lost. So much about Poirot as a character has come to represent the 1930s, so it was fascinating to see him in his time, as it was. Also fascinating to see him like THIS!



You might think that Poirot is the man on the right--short, balding, mustachioed, yes? no. Poirot is on the left. In this film, he is tall, slim, and clean-shaven. Hastings is the one on the right, bless him. This is a detective duo clearly seen through the lens of Sherlock Holmes adaptations of the time: the gentleman detective and his bumbling assistant. And this Hastings is so dumbed down that it's a wonder he's able to feed himself. He walks into walls, gets his umbrella caught on multiple people and objects, and is consistently so many steps behind Poirot that he's not even on the same map. He reminded me nothing so much as Kate Beaton's Jam Watson.

Aside from that, this suffers from the same issues as many films of the time: it's glacially paced, woodenly acted, and largely lacking in charm--aside from Jane Carr's Lady Edgware, who was delightfully stylish and morally bereft. There were a couple of set pieces which felt modern to me, but only coincidentally. My favourite period detail was how loud the soda siphon was whenever someone made themselves a drink. 

I have a few other very early Christies on my list, and am looking forward to seeing how they compare! Especially since Christie herself was adapting her own work for the stage (and vice versa) at this point.

* Le Coffret de Laque ("The Lacquered Box"--a French adaptation of Black Coffee) dates from 1932 and may be retained somewhere. I doubt I'll be able to find it, however.