Seeing is Believing (1941)
Blurb:
My review:
A book which the charitable reader will ascribe to Carter Dickson rather than to John Dickson Carr, for there is very little merit to be found. The murder committed during a demonstration of hypnotism depends heavily on whether or not the reader "buys" hypnotism, as the victim's wife stabs her husband to death with what she believes to be a rubber dagger, for which a real dagger had been substituted. Further attempted murders, by strychnine and strangling, follow, and succeed only in irritating the reader. H.M., here at his most intolerable as he dictates his "me-moirs," produces a solution weak both on believability and on logic. Carr sacrifices both authorial integrity ("admitted fact" indeed!) and believability of characterisation (the jug, to which the average reader will break out into unbridled mirth) in order to produce a surprise solution, in which neither method nor motive convince.