Customer Reviews

Problem of the Wire Cage

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"The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939)" is the opposite of a locked-room mystery. In this book, a man is strangled to death on a sand tennis court. Only one set of footprints leads across the court--and they belong to the corpse.

Okay, whodunit? As usual in a 'Golden Age' mystery, there are lots of suspects and motives. The corpse was a particularly venomous sort of ladies man who never did an honest day's work. Everyone disliked him except for his adopted father, and that included his two discarded mistresses, his fiancée and the guy who keeps proposing marriage to her, and an acrobat.

Some of my favorite theories as presented by the various characters involved ice skates, sneaking up behind the victim by walking on one's hands, and making one's way to the middle of the court by creeping across the wire netting.

Then a second victim is murdered (taking out my favorite suspect), and Carr's gigantic Dr. Gideon Fell must clear up all of the false theories and discover the real murderer.

Carr plays fair with his readers. All of the clues needed to solve this mystery are presented, including (in my Bantam edition, at least) a diagram of the tennis court. The author demolishes the false theories with ponderous ease, including a hilarious passage where two well-meaning clue-hunters wreck several tennis courts by trying to prove that the murderer could have crept along the overhead netting. The solution involves a fairly complex set-up, but revolves around the particular relationship that the victim had with his murderer, so I don't think Carr was blind-siding his readers.

Although this author was an American most of his mysteries (including this one) are set in England. If you're a fan of the technical, or "Impossible! No one could have committed this murder!" mystery, "The Problem of the Wire Cage" should hold your interest through that proverbial rainy afternoon.

Carr is my favorite mystery writer of all time. I read this book over twenty years ago and most of his others, too. The set up for this story is classic. And you have the added fun of watching the police going off in the wrong direction based on faulty evidence while the heroes of the story stay one step ahead of them in pursuit of the solution to the puzzle. Carr is a master story teller, with a sublime gift of language and a silly streak. While the solution to this book is, perhaps, a bit creaky nowadays, it still is well worth the read. Few too many mystery writers these days would even attempt to create a story with this sort of complexity and panache. I keep looking but have not found one who can hold a candle to Carr.

Carr is among the very top "Whodunnit" Authors of them all, and is always in top form. Here we have a classic love triangle, suspects arguing about how they'd like to "murder" someone after a rainy tennis match, and Carr's unmatched methods to do the dirty deed. Not to mention one of the more bizarre detectives , Dr Gideon Fell, social snobbery at its worst, a yahoo Texan at a circus full of acrobats. The killer is fairly easy to identify, and there's the usual red herrings thrown in, and the solution may be a bit unrealistic, but I've read many at least as zany! You just can't miss with the great John Dickson Carr!

John Dickson Carr is a great mystery writer from the era of Ellery Queen and other masters. This book involves a murder that takes place on a tennis court-- the wire mesh fencing around the court is the "wire cage" of the title. This is one of those murders which "could not possibly have been committed" but was. The riddle type mystery involves interesting characters who have all sorts of dynamics going-- passionate love, old hatreds, rivalries, and so forth. If you like the sort of mystery that challenges you to identify the killer, this one's for you. It's great to see some of these classics in print.

Dull and commonplace suburban setting with tennis court on which vicious Caligulan youth strangled, without any footprints left in the mud. Owing to singular paucity of suspects, reader should be able to spot villain without much difficulty, despite police suspicion of thick-headed hero and lover, who speaks nauseatingly of the victim's "poor old face." Solution is as impossible as the situation: not only difficult to visualise, but Frankly preposterous: would anyone be so stupid? Over-written and under-plotted: thick neurotic atmosphere in which emotions are as much strained to breaking point as the reader's patience; while lacking in the crucial complexity of the author at his best, who admitted "that book should have been a novelette." Too many theatre people, as bad as anything in Clayton Rawson, not enough of whom get murdered; and very little Dr. Fell, who acts badly out of character, gloating at the villain: "I now propose...to give myself the extreme pleasure of telling you where you get off... The gallows. They are going to hang you." The last words suggest a plea on the author's part: "He may, perhaps, be excused for not being up to his usual form." We won't.

This novel is an enjoyable story until the solution, which is completely disappointing. The explanation of the impossible crime is one of Carr's weakest; it leaves the reader thinking "That would _never_ work."

I can only hope that this is a particularly poor example of Carr's work. From the lumbering setup--two notches below a bad episode of "Diagnosis Murder"--to the stretch of a solution, "The Problem of the Wire Cage" tries hard but fails to impress, having all of the characteristics of a modern mystery potboiler, back before the cliches were cliches. Carr's dialog is snappy, and his writing can be nicely descriptive, but he seems intent on using genre conventions (e.g., the old "one of you here is the murderer" line), and the story never livens up as a result. I wanted to like this book, but the flashes of the author's charm were few and far between.

Dull and commonplace suburban setting with tennis court on which vicious Caligulan youth strangled, without any footprints left in the mud. Owing to singular paucity of suspects, reader should be able to spot villain without much difficulty, despite police suspicion of thick-headed hero and lover, who speaks nauseatingly of the victim's "poor old face." Solution is as impossible as the situation: not only difficult to visualise, but Frankly preposterous: would anyone be so stupid? Over-written and under-plotted: thick neurotic atmosphere in which emotions are as much strained to breaking point as the reader's patience; while lacking in the crucial complexity of the author at his best, who admitted "that book should have been a novelette." Too many theatre people, as bad as anything in Clayton Rawson, not enough of whom get murdered; and very little Dr. Fell, who acts badly out of character, gloating at the villain: "I now propose...to give myself the extreme pleasure of telling you where you get off... The gallows. They are going to hang you." The last words suggest a plea on the author's part: "He may, perhaps, be excused for not being up to his usual form." We won't.

Dull and commonplace suburban setting with tennis court on which vicious Caligulan youth strangled, without any footprints left in the mud. Owing to singular paucity of suspects, reader should be able to spot villain without much difficulty, despite police suspicion of thick-headed hero and lover, who speaks nauseatingly of the victim's "poor old face." Solution is as impossible as the situation: not only difficult to visualise, but Frankly preposterous: would anyone be so stupid? Over-written and under-plotted: thick neurotic atmosphere in which emotions are as much strained to breaking point as the reader's patience; while lacking in the crucial complexity of the author at his best, who admitted "that book should have been a novelette." Too many theatre people, as bad as anything in Clayton Rawson, not enough of whom get murdered; and very little Dr. Fell, who acts badly out of character, gloating at the villain: "I now propose...to give myself the extreme pleasure of telling you where you get off... The gallows. They are going to hang you." The last words suggest a plea on the author's part: "He may, perhaps, be excused for not being up to his usual form." We won't.