Customer Reviews

Fire Burn!

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Closely related to The Devil in Velvet: a time-travelling policeman, in love with a woman whose picture he saw at the Victoria and Albert Museum, finds himself involved in a late nineteenth-century murder (impossible, of course). Although unnecessarily emotive in parts, there is plenty of action and local colour, although the gambling den brawls and fisticuffs with Captain Hogben somewhat obscure the truly ingenious murder and surprising murderer.

"Didn't you want to see the first Scotland Yard in history? When the mob was a tiger, when gangs were more murderous, when the police were hated and attacked as interferers with personal liberty? When puzzling crimes, of house-breaking or murder, could be solved only by a blunder of luck or the whisper of the informer?"

Those thoughts ran thru the mind of John Cheviot, Detective Superintendent of the Murder Squad, when he found himself flung more than a hundred years into the past, back to the days when Scotland Yard was a struggling infant institution, deeply mistrusted and loathed by the masses. A man displaced, Cheviot has no time at all to acclimate to his strange new surroundings. Soon enough an impossible crime would challenge Cheviot's modern-day investigative skills even as memories of his former life begin to fade away. But it starts with his being asked to look into a simple theft of bird seeds.

This is FIRE, BURN! and it was written by John Dickson Carr, who is right up there as one of my all-time go-to mystery writers. Love his other stuff featuring his series detectives, Sir Henry Merrivale and Dr. Gideon Fell, but this one may be my favorite novel by Carr. FIRE, BURN! is a stand-alone historical mystery, set in 1829, in the post-Regency era, and if you're a history buff, I don't doubt that you'll soak in the period authenticity Carr infuses into the novel. But that's only one element which makes this book such a terrific read.

John Cheviot is a really intriguing character. A self-possessed man, Cheviot nevertheless has a fiery temper he struggles to harness. He's quick to anger, quick to take up a challenge. And as we learn, he's a man of action and he readily applies his knowledge of judo and his crackerjack marksmanship. In this vanished time and place Cheviot already exists, but a poorer version of him. In 1829 John Cheviot is a rakish gentleman rumored to hold with "notoriously loose morals." Some of this ill reputation is apparently rooted to his dubious, already existing acquaintanceship with the enchanting, infuriating Flora. So add a tempestuous romance, too, to Cheviot's plate of duress.

The mystery Cheviot faces confounds him and, ironically, it's partly because he is a man from the future. John Dickson Carr sets up another baffling murder and once more dabbles at misdirection. This time, he spins a variation on the locked room murder mystery. Only instead of in a locked room, the crime takes place in a grand hallway in which all the doors have remained shut while the deed was committed and the few people in the hallway (including Cheviot himself) simply couldn't have done it.

John Dickson Carr time and again has proven to be a mesmerizing storyteller. His mysteries are always tricky things, but he also has a knack for developing his characters and adding touches which render them memorable. I read and re-read FIRE, BURN! a long time ago, and it never gets old, that fusion of compelling characters, the moody, almost surreal atmosphere, the action sequences, the whodunit elements, and the verve and liveliness with which the author brings the historical setting to life. Cheviot rubs elbows with historical figures and Carr makes them a vital, interactive part of the story. A truly fascinating aspect is that, in its early stages, Scotland Yard and its rough and tumble "Peelers" were regarded with scorn and suspicion by gentry and mob alike. Cheviot gets a taste of this first hand as he applies and becomes the new Superintendent of the world's first true police force.

FIRE, BURN! came out in 1957, but the past half century hasn't diminished the sense of excitement, unease, and delirium which this book delivers, and I mention "delirium" and, before that, "almost surreal" because Cheviot thru the course of his adventure tends to fall into this almost fugue-like state in which his past and present get jumbled. It adds a dreamlike quality to the narrative. Carr wrote two time travel thrillers that I know of, this one and THE DEVIL IN VELVET, and since I'm a big fan of time travel stories, these two books quickly turned my head. And, apologies to Sir Henry Merrivale, Dr. Gideon Fell, and even to Henri Bencolin, but no one in Carr's gallery of sleuths handles his business quite like our guy John Cheviot. I don't believe any of Carr's other detectives could've bested the haughty but physically skilled Captain Hogben so dominatingly in a shooting exhibition or in a rugged contest of fists to the face. And I'm still halfway in love with the glorious Flora.

There is some similarity to "The Devil in Velvet" with this, but the time is certainly different. A policeman from 50's London is transported back in time to 1829 in London. He is placed smack in the middle of a crime when he is sent to investigate missing bird seed of all things. While he is at the house where the birdseed has disappeared, a murder occurs, and Detective-Superintendent John Cheviot is right in the middle of a puzzling "locked-room" mystery. As we know this type of mystery is Carr's forte, and he handles this one with his usual aplomb. I loved the time-travel angle, and I really like Cheviot. Carr's characters are very realistic. These books are timeless.