Customer Reviews

Lost Gallows

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"The Lost Gallows (1931)" stars 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." His eyelid droops lazily. His "cloven hoof peeps out suavely." He has "narrow, cruel" eyes. When he was hot on the scent of a criminal, he was "outwardly cool, but his nostrils were dilated, and in him smouldered a subdued, terrible joy."

John Dickson Carr descends from 'atmospheric' to 'lurid' in his Bencolin mysteries. The bad women chain-smoke. Their eyes "smoulder deeply." They wear blood-red lipstick. They cross their long, silk-clad legs and let their negligees fall open. They frequent jazz nightclubs and say things like, "Ce chameau, ce sal fils de putain!" when speaking of Bencolin.

The bad guys are also easy to identify. Their eyes "glare spongily." Their faces "screw up ferociously, resembling malevolent gnomes." If one of them leers, "...the drunken leer... metamorphosed into a thing chuckling and leprous." If one of them laughs, "the echo of evil jollity coiled around [the] silent room."

If you relish a brooding, almost supernatural horror mixing it up with your detective story, and if you are immune to the snotty racism of a 1930s Anglo-French upperclass, you'll love Carr's Bencolin mysteries. I certainly do.

"The Lost Gallows" begins when the rich Egyptian El Moulk's limousine plunges out of a London fog and crashes to a halt in front of London's notorious Brimstone club. Its driver has been dead for a long time, his throat slit from ear-to-ear. El Moulk himself has vanished from the limousine.

The Brimstone's cavernous rooms and gaslit passages provide an eerie backdrop for a murderer who threatens to hang his victims on a gallows located on the mysterious 'Ruination Street,' which is not on any modern London map. Ever since he took rooms at the Brimstone Club, El Moulk has been terrified by a series of 'gifts' from the man who calls himself 'Jack Ketch'--the name applied in general to all English hangmen. These gifts included a miniature gibbet, a length of rope, and an ancient Egyptian curse.

Now El Moulk has gone missing out of a limousine driven by a dead man. Will Bencolin and his friends from New Scotland Yard locate the lost Ruination Street in time to prevent another murder?

I wish my copy of "The Lost Gallows" hadn't fallen apart, because I know I'll want to read it again. To quote Bencolin's American side-kick just slightly out of context, "the tides of death and silence bore me into [the] murky realms..." of the best Bencolin mystery I've yet read.

It says much for Carr's style that he is able to make this story of a Jack Ketch who kidnaps his victims in order to hang them on a private gallows to avenge a private wrong not only entertaining but convincing. The duel between the suavely witty Bencolin and Sir John Landervorne; the superb use of the London fog and what Dr. Pilgrim saw; and the lost street, "the prettiest fancy in the whole realm of nightmare," form a logical whole. Carr's style has greatly improved since It Walks by Night; even though lurid in parts, the prose is generally excellent, and gives the impression of moving through a nightmare, at once theatrical and melodramatic, but thoroughly entertaining. The only serious flaw is that Jack Ketch is far too easily spotted. Note also a very strange but effective ending.