A Graveyard to Let (1949)
Blurb:
My review:
Superficially light-hearted, to anyone who knows about Carr's life the book is amazingly dark. Carr's alter ego, the unemployed journalist Cy Norton, who lived for 16 years in England, cannot face the fact that England—the England of the past—is gone forever. (From 1949 on, Carr wrote very few books set in modern England, and very few H.M.s—Merrivale ended his career before Fell did.) The plot deals with the (impossible) disappearance of a millionaire accused of fraud—he dives into a pool in broad daylight, and is subsequently found stabbed in a graveyard. The plot is amazingly improbable—full of logical holes and inconsistencies in character: Why doesn't the killer (whom H.M. clears of all blame in an attempt to mislead the reader) steal the incriminating document? Why did Irene Stanley attempt suicide? Parts of the solution owe something to The Mad Hatter Mystery, and parts of the book were later used in The Dark of the Moon. The plot, however, is very similar to S.S. Van Dine's Dragon Murder Case of 1933 (which it parodies)—e.g., the actual crime, the graveyard, the condition on which the motive is based, the setting. It is hard to say which book is poorer.