The Bride of Newgate (1950)
1950 Hamish Hamilton blurb:
DICK DARWENT was to be hanged
outside Newgate Prison at dawn: he had been sentenced on a charge of
killing Lord Francis Orford, a friend of the Prince Regent's, in a
duel. And when, late on the night of 21st June, 1815, a little
group of strangers made their way into the condemned cell, it was with
no thought of reprieve. Indeed, it was precisely because it
seemed so certain that Darwent would die next morning that the lovely
and impetuous Caroline Ross was there. To inherit her
grandfather's fortune, she must marry by her twenty-fifth birthday;
having no desire for a husband to curb her independence, she hit on the
desperate remedy of becoming a Bride of Newgate and marrying a man who
would be dead on the scaffold by morning.
But the marriage was almost the least surprising of the sequels to
Caroline's visit to the gaol. There was murder—death in a room which all the evidence
showed had been empty and undisturbed for years beneath its cobwebs:
there were duels with pistols and duels with sabres; a phantom coach
lumbering at night through Hyde Park; a riot at the King's Theatre in
the Haymarket and a startlingly unexpected solution.
Mr. John Dickson Carr has, in fact, achieved the remarkable feat of
combining the colour and excitement of a well-told historical novel
with a mystery as baffling to readers to-day as he makes it appear to
the authorities in the year of Waterloo. He has also, in the
person of the bibulous Mr. Hubert Mulberry, devised a detective
engaging by the standards of this century or of any other.
My review:
Carr's first historical detective
novel—and one of his finest. Every conceivable
aspect of 1815 that could lend itself to excitement, tragedy or
melodrama is so used: the Battle of Waterloo, the last-minute repeal of
an accused murderer married not one hour before to an ice maiden, the
duels with sabre and with pistol, and a riot at the Opera.
Throughout, the reader is kept wondering about the identity of the
murderer of Lord Orford, and of the coachman wrapped in graveyard
mould. Superb misdirection, and a particularly clever solution to
the locked room, although the murderer's identity is, although hardly
suspected, perhaps an anti-climax.