For your own safety, do not destroy Vital Testing Apparatus

I have written some rather harsh things about John Dickson Carr, and I stand by them and by being a hater.

But I wanted to be able to articulate just what it is that bothers me about them, so I started reading some more of his work. I found a GAD blogger who loves the guy and picked ones he mentioned. I quite liked the first Sir Henry Merrivale mystery I read (originally published under the pseudonym Carter Dickson), 1943's She Died A Lady. Then I read 1944's Till Death Do Us Part, which is the first mystery I've ever read with a setup to rival Christie's The Clocks. The setup takes longer: about 30% of the novel. But it is fantastic.

In The Clocks, as you know, Bob, a war-hero sort of young man who later acts as sidekick to Poirot is walking down a residential street when a door opens and a young woman runs out screaming. She just arrived to this house and found it empty except for a dead body; she's a typist and was hired through a secretarial bureau. He goes in with her and they find the corpse in a room that also contains a whole bunch of different clocks for some reason (six maybe?). The owner of the house then returns. She's blind, she didn't hire the typist, she has no connection with the victim and doesn't know how he got there, and she also doesn't own the clocks.

In Till Death Do Us Part the narrator (a playwright of crime thrillers) and his brand new fiancée go to a county fair. His fiancée first appears to have some sort of confrontation with the fortune teller (witnessed in silhouette through the tent), then accidentally shoots said fortune teller with a target rifle from outside the tent just as he was saying to the narrator, "I'm the famous criminologist from the Home Office and there's something I've got to tell you!" He is carried away by the doctor, but sends for the narrator to tell him that his fiancée is a murderess who has gotten away with poisoning two husbands and a past betrothed by injection of prussic acid so they looked like suicide, and that he wants the narrator's help to catch her. ( This is part of the setup but it's also a twist at like 30% of the book so )

As a fan of Golden Age Detective stories I have incidentally read a huge variety of locked room mysteries, even though I don't especially like them more than other mysteries. Occasionally some of them are quite fun, actually, but as you read more and more of them a distinct pattern emerges, and you start just immediately going... Okay, was the murder actually done before the room was locked, or after it was unlocked?

And especially after reading two of John Dickson Carr's exasperating mysteries that are shrouded in heightened spookiness intended to make you wonder whether the solution is supernatural or faked to just LOOK supernatural, only for it to turn out that the corpse was stolen from the locked room before it was locked by the last guy in there, and then that the guy was killed by the last guy to leave before the room was locked (in this case before he was left alone on top of a tower with people watching the entrances).

This must get old even quicker for real fans of the locked room. My impression, without doing any tabulation, is that roughly 95% of locked room murders in GAD are done either before the room was locked or after it was unlocked. This has to take some of the excitement out of it, even if the fan is occupied in theorizing which person did it and exactly how.

Duke’s certainly did not rely for its popularity on external display. It was approached by three flights of narrow and rickety stairs, and the visitors had to satisfy two rather seedy-looking janitors, not in uniform, at top and bottom. And, when they entered the Club itself, Ellery had a still greater surprise. The famous Duke’s consisted of one very long low room—or rather of three long, low attics which had been amateurishly knocked into one. The decorations were old and faded, and the places where the partitions had been were still marked by patches of new paper pasted on to hide the rents in the old. The ventilation was abominable, and what windows there were did not seem to have been cleaned for months. The furniture—a few seedy divans and a large number of common Windsor chairs and kitchen tables—seemed to have been picked up at secondhand from some very inferior dealer. Tables and floor were stained with countless spillings of food and drink, and a thick cloud of tobacco smoke made it quite impossible to see any distance along the room. There was only one redeeming feature, and Ellery’s eye fell upon it almost as soon as he entered the place. Near the door was a magnificent grand piano, on which someone was playing really well an arrangement from Borodine’s Prince Igor.

—GDH Cole, The Brooklyn Murders (1923)