The Case of the Constant Suicides Read online

  THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

  John Dickson Carr was born in 1906 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a lawyer. While at school and college, he wrote ghost, detective and adventure stories. After studying law, he headed to Paris in 1928. Once there, he lost any desire to study law and soon turned to writing crime fiction full-time. His first novel, It Walks by Night, was published in 1930. Two years later, he moved to England with his English wife; thereafter he became a prolific author and became a master of the locked-room mystery. He also wrote a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, radio plays, dozens of short stories, and magazine reviews. He died in 1977 in South Carolina.

  The Case of the

  Constant Suicides

  A Gideon Fell Mystery

  JOHN DICKSON CARR

  Introduced by Robert J. Harris

  First published in the United States in 1941 by Harper & Brothers.

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2018 by Polygon,

  an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  1

  Copyright © John Dickson Carr 1941

  Introduction copyright © Robert J. Harris 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ISBN 978 1 84697 459 5

  eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 052 0

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request

  from the British Library.

  Typeset by 3btype.com

  John Dickson Carr:

  Master of The Impossible

  One night in 1945 two non-existent characters sat up into the early hours enthusiastically discussing the intricacies of the ‘miracle crime’. These two fictitious persons were Ellery Queen (the joint pen name of cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee) and Carter Dickson (a pen name often adopted by John Dickson Carr, which became nearly as famous as his own). We know this conversation took place from the dedication in the 1945 Carter Dickson novel The Curse of the Bronze Lamp.

  What a pleasure it would have been to eavesdrop on these two giants of the detective genre and hear them explore how a man might walk across the threshold of his own house and disappear into thin air, or be murdered in a locked room that no one else has entered.

  John Dickson Carr has long been regarded as the absolute master of the impossible crime, where the question is not merely who is the culprit, but how could this crime possibly have been committed without violating the laws of time and space? How could a man be stabbed to death standing alone on top of a tower? How could someone be killed by a shot from a gun that is pointed in the opposite direction?

  Carr presented his readers with many such puzzles and solved them all ingeniously. But there is far more to the irresistible appeal of John Dickson Carr than mere cleverness. He also excels in delicious Gothic atmosphere, and creates comic scenes worthy of P.G. Wodehouse. In addition to this, as an American who made his home in Britain, he delights in the English countryside and the Scottish Highlands with the freshness and enthusiasm of one who has dreamed of these places long before ever setting eyes on them.

  Then there is his cast of wonderful, lively characters, chief among them the magnificent Dr Gideon Fell, the brilliant detective whom you will meet in these pages. Carr based Fell on his literary idol G.K. Chesterton, the essayist and author of the Father Brown stories. He is a Falstaffian figure with a bandit moustache who needs two stout walking sticks to support his impressive bulk. In the first Fell novel (Hag’s Nook, 1933), an old friend of the good doctor describes him like this: ‘The man has more obscure, useless and fascinating information than any person I ever met. He’ll ply you with food and whisky until your head reels; he’ll talk interminably, on any subject whatsoever, but particularly on the glories and sports of old-time England. He likes band music, melodrama, beer and slapstick comedies; he’s a great old boy and you’ll like him.’

  Indeed, Dr Fell is the one fictional detective in whose company I would love to spend an evening by a roaring fire (with a plentiful supply of beer and cigars, of course). His irrepressible gusto is surely matched by that of his creator, for in the crime genre, Carr’s writing is unmatched for its sheer exuberance and the pure joy of storytelling.

  And so to The Case of the Constant Suicides, which many regard as the most entertaining book he ever wrote. This is quite a compliment when you consider both the quality and the quantity of his output. Here we have a haunted Scottish castle, colourful dashes of comedy and romance, and a series of impossible deaths to be solved. Who could resist it?

  We’d best hurry along to Euston station now to catch the night train to Glasgow. At the end of our journey waits a thrilling adventure and the very best of company – Dr Gideon Fell.

  Robert J. Harris

  St Andrews

  2018

  Robert J. Harris is the author of The Thirty-One Kings: Richard Hannay Returns and the Artie Conan Doyle Mystery series.

  1

  The 9:15 train for Glasgow pulled out of Euston half an hour late that night, and forty minutes after the sirens had sounded.

  When the sirens went, even the dim blue lights along the platform were extinguished.

  A milling, jostling, swearing crowd, mainly in khaki, groped about the platform, its shins and knuckles barked by kit and luggage, its hearing deadened by the iron coughing of engines. Lost in it was a youngish professor of history, who was trying to find his sleeping compartment on the Glasgow train.

  Not that anyone had cause for apprehension. It was only the first of September, and the heavy raiding of London had not yet begun. We were very young in those days. An air-raid alert meant merely inconvenience, with perhaps one lone raider droning somewhere, and no barrage.

  But the professor of history, Alan Campbell (MA, Oxon.; Ph.D, Harvard) bumped along with unacademic profanity. The first-class sleepers appeared to be at the head of a long train. He could see a porter, with much luggage, striking matches at the open door of a carriage, where names were posted on a board opposite the numbers of the compartments assigned to them.

  Striking a match in his turn, Alan Campbell discovered that the train appeared to be full and that his own compartment was number four.

  He climbed in. Dim little lighted numerals over each door in the corridor showed him the way. When he opened the door of his compartment, he felt distinctly better.

  This, he thought, was really first-rate in the way of comfort. The compartment was a tiny metal room, green-painted, with a single berth, nickel washbasin, and a long mirror on the door communicating with the next compartment. Its blackout consisted of a sliding shutter which sealed the window. Though it was intensely hot and close, he saw over the berth a metal ventilator which you could twist to let in air.

  Pushing his suitcase under the berth, Alan sat down to get his breath. His reading matter, a Penguin novel and a copy of the Sunday Watchman, lay beside him. He eyed the newspaper, and his soul grew dark with bile.

  “May he perish in the everlasting bonfire!” Alan said aloud, referring to his only enemy in the world. “May he –”

  Then he checked himself, remembering that he ought to remain in a good temper. After all, he had a week’s leave; and, though no doubt his mission was sad enough in a formal way, still it was in the nature of a holiday.

  Alan Campbell was a Scot who had never in his life set foot in Scotland. For that matter, except for his years at the American Cambridge and a few visits to the Continent, he had never been out of England. He was thirty-fi
ve: bookish, serious-minded though not without humor, well-enough looking but perhaps already inclined toward stodginess.

  His notions of Scotland were drawn from the novels of Sir Walter Scott or, if he felt in a frivolous mood, John Buchan. Added to this was a vague idea of granite and heather and Scottish jokes – which last he rather resented, showing himself no true Scot in spirit. Now he was at last going to see for himself. And if only –

  The sleeping-car attendant knocked at the door, and put his head in.

  “Mr Campbell?” he inquired, consulting the little imitation ivory card on the door, on which names could be written with a pencil and rubbed out.

  “Dr Campbell,” said Alan, not without stateliness. He was still young enough to get a thrill at the newness and unexpectedness of the title.

  “What time would you like to be called in the morning, sir?”

  “What time do we get to Glasgow?”

  “Well, sir, we’re due in at six-thirty.”

  “Better call me at six, then.”

  The attendant coughed. Alan correctly interpreted this.

  “Call me half an hour before we do get in, then.”

  “Yes, sir. Would you like tea and biscuits in the morning?”

  “Can I get a proper breakfast on the train?”

  “No, sir. Only tea and biscuits.”

  Alan’s heart sank along with his stomach. He had been in such a hurry to pack that he had eaten no dinner, and his inside now felt squeezed up like a concertina. The attendant understood his look.

  “If I was you, sir, I should nip out and get something at the buffet now.”

  “But the train’s due to start in less than five minutes!”

  “I shouldn’t let that worry you, sir. We’ll not be starting as soon as that, to my way of thinking.”

  Yes: he’d better do it.

  Ruffled, he left the train. Ruffled, he groped along a noisy and crowded platform in the dark, back through the barrier. When he stood at the buffet, with a slopped cup of tea and some dry sandwiches containing ham cut so thin as to have achieved a degree of transparency, his eye fell again on the Sunday Watchman. And bile rose again in his soul.

  It has been stated that Alan Campbell had only one enemy in the world. Indeed, except for a fight in his schooldays in which he had exchanged black eyes and a bloody nose with the boy who later became his best friend, he could not even remember disliking anyone very much.

  The man in question was also named Campbell: though he was not, Alan hoped and believed, any relation. The other Campbell lived in a sinister lair at Harpenden, Herts. Alan had never set eyes on him, and did not even know who he was. Yet he disliked him very cordially indeed.

  Mr Belloc has pointed out that no controversy can grow more heated, more bitter (or, to a detached observer, more funny) than a controversy between two learned dons over some obscure point that nobody cares twopence about.

  We have all, with glee, seen the thing happen. Somebody writes in a dignified newspaper or literary weekly that Hannibal, when crossing the Alps, passed close to the village of Viginum. Some other erudite reader then writes in to say that the name of the village was not Viginum, but Biginium. On the following week, the first writer mildly but acidly deplores your correspondent’s ignorance, and begs leave to present the following evidence that it was Viginum. The second writer then says he regrets that an acrimonious note seems to have crept into the discussion, which is no doubt what makes Mr So-and-So forget his manners; but is under the necessity of pointing out –

  And that tears it. The row is sometimes good for two or three months.

  Something of a similar nature had dropped with a splosh into Alan Campbell’s placid life.

  Alan, a kindly soul, had meant no offense. He sometimes reviewed historical works for the Sunday Watchman, a newspaper very similar to the Sunday Times or the Observer.

  In the middle of June this paper had sent him a book called The Last Days of Charles the Second, a weighty study of political events between 1680 and 1685, by K.I. Campbell (MA, Oxon.). Alan’s review of this appeared on the following Sunday, and his sin lay in the following words, toward the end of the notice.

  It cannot be said that Mr Campbell’s book throws any fresh light on the subject; and it is not, indeed, free from minor blemishes. Mr Campbell surely cannot believe that Lord William Russell was ignorant of the Rye House Plot. Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, was created Duchess of Cleveland in 1670: not, as the printer has it, 1680. And what is the reason for Mr Campbell’s extraordinary notion that this lady was ‘small and auburn-haired’?

  Alan sent in his copy on Friday, and forgot the matter. But in the issue nine days later appeared a letter from the author dated at Harpenden, Herts. It concluded:

  May I say that my authority for what your reviewer considers this ‘extraordinary’ notion is Steinmann, the lady’s only biographer. If your reviewer is unfamiliar with this work, I suggest that a visit to the British Museum might repay his trouble.

  This riled Alan considerably.

  While I must apologize for drawing attention to so trivial a matter (he wrote), and thank Mr Campbell for his courtesy in drawing my attention to a book with which I am already familiar, nevertheless, I think a visit to the British Museum would be less profitable than a visit to the National Portrait Gallery. There Mr Campbell will find a portrait, by Lely, of this handsome termagant. The hair is shown as jet-black, the proportions as ample. It might be thought that a painter would flatter his subject. But it cannot be thought that he would turn a blonde into a brunette, or depict any court lady as fatter than she actually was.

  That, Alan thought, was rather neat. And not far from devastating either.

  But the snake from Harpenden now began to hit below the belt. After a discussion of known portraits, he concluded:

  Your reviewer, incidentally, is good enough to refer to this lady as a ‘termagant.’ What are his reasons for this? They appear to be that she had a temper and that she liked to spend money. When any man exhibits astounded horror over these two qualities in a woman, it is permissible to inquire whether he has ever been married.

  This sent Alan clear up in the air. It was not the slur on his historical knowledge that he minded: it was the implication that he knew nothing about women – which, as a matter of fact, was true.

  K.I. Campbell, he thought, was in the wrong; and knew it; and was now, as usual, trying to cloud the matter with side-issues. His reply blistered the paper, the more so as the controversy caught on with other readers.

  Letters poured in. A major wrote from Cheltenham that his family had for generations been in possession of a painting, said to be that of the Duchess of Cleveland, which showed the hair as medium-brown. A savant from the Athenaeum wanted them to define their terms, saying what proportions they meant by “ample,” and in what parts of the body, according to the standards of the present day.

  “Bejasus,” said the editor of the Sunday Watchman, “it’s the best thing we’ve had since Nelson’s glass eye. Leave ’em to it.”

  Throughout July and August the row continued. The unfortunate mistress of Charles the Second came in for almost as much notoriety as she had known in the days of Samuel Pepys. Her anatomy was discussed in some detail. The controversy was entered, though not clarified, by another savant named Dr Gideon Fell, who seemed to take a malicious delight in confusing the two Campbells, and mixing everybody up.

  The editor himself finally called a halt to it. First, because the anatomical detail now verged on the indelicate; and, second, because the parties to the dispute had grown so confused that nobody knew who was calling whom what.

  But it left Alan feeling that he would like to boil K.I. Campbell in oil.

  For K.I. Campbell appeared every week, dodging like a sharpshooter and always stinging Alan. Alan began to acquire a vague but definite reputation for ungallant conduct, as one who has traduced a dead woman and might traduce any lady of his acquaintance. K.I. Campbell’s last
letter more than hinted at this.

  His fellow members of the faculty joked about it. The undergraduates, he suspected, joked about it. “Rip” was one term; “rounder” another.

  He had breathed a prayer of relief when the debate ended. But even now, drinking slopped tea and eating dry sandwiches in a steamy station buffet, Alan stiffened as he turned over the pages of the Sunday Watchman. He feared that his eye might light on some reference to the Duchess of Cleveland, and that K.I. Campbell might have sneaked into the columns again.

  No. Nothing. Well, at least that was a good omen to start the journey.

  The hands of the clock over the buffet stood at twenty minutes to ten.

  In sudden agitation Alan remembered his train. Gulping down his tea (when you are in a hurry there always seems to be about a quart of it, boiling hot), he hurried out into the blackout again. For the second time he took some minutes to find his ticket at the barrier, searching through every pocket before he found it in the first one. He wormed through crowds and luggage trucks, spotted the right platform after some difficulty, and arrived back at the door of his carriage just as doors were slamming all along the train, and the whistle blew.

  Smoothly gliding, the train moved out.

  Off on the great adventure, then. Alan, pleased with life again, stood in the dim corridor and got his breath. Through his mind moved some words out of the letter he had received from Scotland: “The Castle of Shira, at Inveraray, on Loch Fyne.” It had a musical, magical sound. He savored it. Then he walked down to his compartment, threw open the door, and stopped short.

  An open suitcase, not his own, lay on the berth. It contained female wearing apparel. Bending over it and rummaging in it stood a brown-haired girl of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She had been almost knocked sprawling by the opening of the door, and she straightened up to stare at him.

  “Wow!” said Alan inaudibly.

  His first thought was that he must have got the wrong compartment, or the wrong carriage. But a quick glance at the door reassured him. There was his name, Campbell, written in pencil on the imitation-ivory strip.