Customer Reviews

The Burning Court

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The title, The Burning Court (1937), derives from the infamous Burning Court that extracted confessions from alleged witches through the use of the wheel and fire during the reign of Louis XIV. However, the setting for this story is not France, but in a small community outside Philadelphia in the spring of 1929.

John Dickson Carr remains famous for his ingenious (perhaps some would say too ingenious) locked room mysteries. The Burning Court mystery offers not one, but two locked rooms: first, a woman in seventeenth century dress is seen walking through a wall where a now bricked-up door once existed, and second, a recently buried body goes missing from a securely sealed, underground crypt. The atmosphere is one of horror and dread. The two occurrences defy logical analysis.

The Burning Court is among the best stories of John Dickson Carr, even though it is atypical in that Carr's legendary investigators (Dr. Gideon Fell, Sir Henry Merrivale, and Henri Ben Colin) are all absent. The capable Captain Brennan of the Philadelphia Police Department and the eccentric author-amateur detective, Gaudan Cross, appear in only this one story.

The Burning Court is completely typical, however, in that the solution is well beyond the reach of the reader. Over fifty pages the section titled Summing-Up slowly unravels these two related locked room puzzles. This summation is actually a continuation of the story in that new, critical information is revealed that helps disperse the supernatural fog. Likewise, this apparently complicated murder is shown to be quite straight-forward, but coincidental events (as often happens in a Carr story, and sometimes in life too) obfuscated matters to a remarkable extent.

The Burning Court is a fascinating story that makes enjoyable reading. Nonetheless, it is always fair to ask whether a John Dickson Carr solution is really fair. Carr has a tendency to withhold key information essential to the solution. The solutions to the two locked room puzzles in my view strayed into that gray area separating fairness from unfairness. (In a footnote Carr does refer the reader to past pages, suggesting that he might have recognized that he overly disguised his clues.)

In a final twist Carr reveals a second solution, a solution within a solution, just when the reader thinks this mystery is finally solved. Four stars to The Burning Court.

This is very much like Carr's previous detective stories in *most* respects. The problems are perplexing and well thought out. The characters are believable and interesting, whether sympathetic or not. The suspense builds steadily making the book hard to put down (I managed, twice). The story is fast paced, taking place from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, with flashbacks of previous events interspersed with much to-ing and fro-ing.

It also differs in a number of respects. It's set in America, not Britain. No Fell or Merrivale, so there is no real anchor for the reader to hold fast to. The supernatural, although present in other Carr books, is really overpowering here. Finally, the ending is controversial, and not to all tastes. It is also open to more than one interpretation. Carr was trying something different here. In my opinion, he largely succeeds.

There is also some historical background given, duly footnoted. Not having any of the quoted references to hand, I reread "The Slow Poisoners" chapter in MacKay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" to get the flavor of the history he was making use of.

I read the Kindle edition. Absolutely no issues to note. Usually there is something no matter how minor but everything here worked well. Linked table of contents, linked footnotes, everything.

All in all, creepier than the Carr books I've read hitherto but still quite enjoyable. Opinions differ on this book, but if you've enjoyed Carr's other works you have to read this one.

A man makes a strange discovery - it seems that his wife bears a striking resemblance to a French woman who had been tried and executed for murder years ago. And to make matters worse, she even had the same name! The man's boss's uncle died under mysterious circumstance, and a witness points to a woman in an old French dress. Just what is going on here? It will take a detective of no small ability to get to the bottom of this mystery!

John Dickson Carr (1906-77) is remembered as one of the great Golden Age writers of American detective stories. This book is one of his more controversial - combining good old fashioned detective literature with supernatural fiction. Overall, I found this to be a fun and interesting read. Sure, if you are expecting Sherlock Holmes, you might be disappointed, but if you like strange and fascinating stories, then I think that you will like it - I know I did!

Opens in stunning fashion with the hero discovering a photograph of his wife, cited as the Marquise de Brinvilliers, in a book of famous poisoners. Following the suspicious death by arsenical poisoning of a neighbour and the vanishing of his corpse from a sealed granite crypt, he becomes convinced that she is a witch risen from the dead. Carr makes this bizarre plot quite convincing through an atmosphere which relies far more on understatement than it does on the thick effects of the Bencolins (or even Hag's Nook). Unfortunately, Carr follows a highly logical and quite convincing plot with a supernatural one that makes nonsense of the other, yet, owing to references made in later books, impossible to credit, making the reader uncertain of what to believe. Thus is a good story and considerable ingenuity tossed carelessly out the window.

Whew! This is John Dickson Carr at his puzzling, ingenious, and atmospheric best, with a sensational, stunning ending. The set-up sounds like a standard Carr plot: a wealthy man is murdered, apparently by poison in a locked room. Subsequently his body disappears from a seemingly impregnable family crypt. The author, the master of the locked-room mystery genre, surprises us, however, with different characters (his familiar series detectives do not appear), a different setting (rural Pennsylvania rather than Britain), and most importantly, a different type of logic in the case's solution. I don't want to be more specific than that so as not to spoil the conclusion.

The novel's main character is well-drawn and faces a very relateable and intense conflict over his efforts to keep his marriage together and both understand and protect his, he fears, troubled and in-trouble wife. The critic Julian Symons, in his idiosyncratic but insightful survey of crime fiction BLOODY MURDER, writes that Carr's fiction for the most part lacks "genuine feeling" (though he generally praises Carr highly). I can see how one could have this impression of Carr, because the coldly calculated puzzles are what one remembers most about his fiction, and are what he is justly most famous for. I think this criticism is off the mark, though, and this book illustrates why. We do vividly feel the narrator's love for his wife, growing panic at his quandry, and other moments of fear and exhilaration. Carr may be a master craftsman, but in this and many of his fine novels, his work is hardly cold or unfeeling.

I can see why some of the reviewers object both to the somewhat atypically dark tone of the ending as well as its internal logic, which are so different from those of most of the Carr/Dickson novels that his readers know and love. But to me that is rather the point--what is especially great about the author's books is that while we expect a certain type of characterization and plot development from him, sometimes he deliberately crosses us up! Carr was a master of the mystery novel form, and part of his mastery was his ability to play with readers' expectations and then subvert them, often with stunning effect, as in this classic, one-of-a-kind book.

This book has all the Carr elements - a great setting, a taste of the supernatural, and an excellent locked room mystery that is also accompanied by a locked tomb mystery. This is a truly chilling ghost story that fires on all cylinders right up to the very end. We have an old man that appeared to die of natural causes, but clues point to poisoning, and when they go into the sealed and locked tomb to get his body in order to do tests, well, the body isn't there! That is all I'm going to say about the plot because half the fun is the getting there in this book. Carr who is often considered as one of the most "British" detective story writers was actually born in Pennsylvania. He writes with a subtelty and ingenuity that is still enjoyable today, even though his books were written mostly in the 30's and 40's. He did write up until his death in 1977 though, and his body of work is long and critically acclaimed.

The Burning Court is John Dickson Carr's most famous independent novel. This is a good thing, for no matter which detective he had(Fell or Merrivale), they would have been wrong.

Edward Stevens is looking at a book manuscript of true crime. This book looks at the trial of murder's. Stevens thoughts drift to his boss's uncle, Miles Despard. Miles Despard died of gasteroenteritis, and was sealed up in the familly crypt. Before he died, one of the servents saw a glowing woman enter the room through a bricked up door, and leave the same way. After the man died, a piec of string tied in nine knots was found under his pillow.

Stevens push's this out of his mind. He opens the book, and sees the picture of Marie D'Aubrey, exicuted for murder in 1869. It is a picture of his wife!

Allthough their seems to be a supernatural reason for all these things, Stevens sets out to prove their is a logical solution. Little does he know, things aren't as they seem.

John Dickson Carr is an author for whom I've always had a lot of respect even though my responses to his books tend to vary widely. An American whose style and locale was most often Great Britain, he had a long and substantial career not only as a genre novelist but also as a successful writer of radio dramas. At his best, he's the master of "locked-room conundrums" with a lot of local color and often a patina of supernatural implications even when his accustomed recurring characters (Dr. Gideon Fell, for example) tend to be on hand to gradually debunk the supernatural elements.

Some of his novels can seem a bit overwrought or over-the-top, the plot details too labored or characterizations too eccentric to really ring true. When he occasionally spreads the melodrama on like so much clotted cream, there are times when the exaggeration of someone like Gideon Fell can irritate.

I would have to say, however, that this book seems to be unique in Carr's output, and easily the best novel of his that I've yet encountered. The characterizations are rich and detailed, and ring true. The desperation of our protagonist, Edward Stevens, as he gradually cannot help but suspect his wife of some complicity in some evil activity in a Philadelphia suburb, is moving and well-drawn. The novel is populated with vivid characters who are never stereotypes. In fact, in many ways the story feels fairly contemporary (even though it was written in 1937) in terms of the behavior of the principal characters and the avoidance of stereotypes in the behavior of the women.

Best of all, the book races forward with both great momentum and an admirable economy. Nothing is extraneous, and a creepy mood (among what is essentially a conventional suburb for well-to-do business types) is established within the first chapter and maintained masterfully and page-turningly for the entire book.

Unlike most of Carr's books, the supernatural aspect is not readily played down or explained away. A genuine sense of something beyond the rational keeps a gnawing presence throughout, even though at times we are made aware of potential "normal" possible explanations for this or that occurence. Carr keeps us a bit off-balance for the entire novel, and in certain ways the book is a masterpiece of manipulating a steady stream of content and imagery which keeps us perpetually thinking and guessing. We are never allowed to be lulled into complacency, and the stakes are kept high for the characters we get to know the best. The pace of the book is so well-maintained that there's a certain exhilaration to it.

In the best traditions of Poe, Bierce or Hawthorne (though with a setting a style more contemporary), this book deserves a distinguished place in the pantheon of American supernatural literature. Uneasiness follows us all the way, and there is certainly not another novel of Carr's in which I had felt I was in surer hands. This is a rather creepy roller-coaster ride of ghostly doings finding their way inexplicably into the household of a conventional suburbanite, and in my opinion Carr never wrote anything better than this one.

Great story. Besides being a superb locked-room mysterey, the atmosphere and the mood are perfectly chilling.

Advertised as a "gothic horror" novel, this book again offers Mr. Carr the opportunity to present an impossible crime. The twist to this is the reader is uncertain if the crime was an ordinary murder or was in fact committed by a legendary murderess, returned from the dead. Written in 1937, the book ages well but there is little to separate it from others of the genre