The Skeleton in the Clock (1948)
Blurb:
My review:
While late Merrivale needs to be eyed askance, for H.M. is apt to behave childishly and obnoxiously, and the plot is often forgotten in a welter of thrillerish or farcical material, there is plenty of entertainment to be found in this tale. Poison pen letters spark off an inquiry into the impossible murder of the local squire, who fell off a roof twenty years before the action of the story; H.M. and a ghastly dowager attempt to purchase a skeleton, leading to a very amusing quarrel in which they attempt to score off each other with gibbering skulls and the biggest travelling fair in the British Isles; the hero succeeds in finding a girl he met only once, only to discover that she is engaged to the dead squire's son; and an expedition to a disused prison results in the discovery of a girl's corpse. It is unpleasant to read of murdered children, especially pretty badly mutilated ones; Carr, however, has the taste not to wallow in gore, but to pass over it with the line ‘Her body mutilations: well, those are for the morbid.’ Would that Julian Symons, P.D. James, and Ruth Rendell were as sensible. The identity of the murderer is a genuine surprise, although similar to Carr's He Who Whispers and My Late Wives (both 1946), and suggests Agatha Christie's Crooked House (1949).