Customer Reviews

Castle Skull

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A burning man is seen staggering across the battlements of Castle Skull before plunging to his death on the banks of the Rhine. The 15th century castle had most recently been the home of the terrifying magician, Maleger who had died seventeen years before this story begins, either as a suicide or a murder victim. His decomposed corpse was found floating down the Rhine, identifiable only through his jewelry and other personal effects. The heirs to Castle Skull are a wealthy Belgian financier, and a vain, ageing actor, both associates of Maleger during the South African diamond rush.

The Versailles Treaty that ended World War I left Germany impoverished and embittered, and smoldering with the short-lived, decadent culture of the Weimar Republic. However, Carr chooses to ignore most of post-WWI German reality. His 1920s Germany is populated with jolly hikers, beer drinkers, and the sinister Prussian, Herr Baron Sigmund von Arnheim--"[he] was...savagely gay, and his almost invisible blond moustache had been waxed until the points stood out like the whiskers of a cat."

Okay, so Herr Baron doesn't click his heels, but he does bow from the hip, has "a cropped skull...eyes of a chill, greenish hue," and dueling scars.

There is also a cast of rich, decadent, and/or eccentric Americans, British, French, and Belgians who inhabit a mansion across the Rhine from Castle Skull, most of whom are suspected, in turn, of torching the actor, Alison after shooting him three times with a Mauser.

Enter the suave, Mephistophelean M. Henri Bencolin, 'juge d'instruction' of the Seine, the head of the Paris police and "the most dangerous man in Europe." He and Baron von Arnheim had played a deadly game of spy-versus-spy during WWI, and now both are invited to solve the case of the flaming 'danse macabre' on the ramparts of Castle Skull.

The cigar-smoking, poker-playing Duchess who owns the mansion across the river from Castle Skull calls her two detectives 'Glass-eye' (did I mention von Arnheim's monocle?) and 'Devil-face,' although M. Bencolin is actually at his most human in this story, in spite of his morbid surroundings.

The setting for the final denouement is a wonderfully grotesque banquet in Castle Skull that will remind you very much of Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." I won't tell you which detective, Prussian or Parisian, ultimately solves the mystery, but the penultimate chapter of "Castle Skull" is called "The Laughter of Von Arnheim."

The ultimate chapter is called "The Laughter of Bencolin."