The Nine Wrong
Answers (1952)
1952 Hamish Hamilton blurb:
After two highly successful excursions into historical fiction with The Devil in Velvet and The Bride of Newgate, John Dickson
Carr celebrates his return to the present day with a tale of crime in
London and New York more puzzling than any this master of mystification
has ever conjured up before.
The story, which the author calls A Novel for the Curious, opens late
one night in a lawyer's office on Broadway. To this office, in
response to an advertisement, comes Bill Dawson, a hungry young
Englishman with only a shilling between him and the future.
From the law office to a Greenwich Village bar (where there was a
murder that couldn't have happened), to a B.O.A.C. airliner, heading
for England and for still more death went Bill, on a strange
mission. Arrived in London, he finds himself involved in a series
of hair-raising scenes, first in South Kensington, then at the top of a
Georgian house in St. James's Place, and later in the B.B.C. Bill
is faced with a clever and sadistic old man in a wheel chair, a tall
manservant who must once have been a professional wrestler, a
typewriter, whose keys change colour, two ladies with passport
problems, and a number of skilful attempts at murder.
And at last, in a most suitable setting indeed, the puzzles, the
threats, the split-second chases are finally resolved in a solution
that will test the most astute reader's ingenuity to the full.
My review:
One of the most consistently
entertaining late Carrs, reminiscent of classic Hitchcock. Bill
Dawson, a young Englishman working in America, is employed by a fellow
expatriate to impersonate him for six months in order to inherit his
splendidly sadistic uncle's fortune; the nephew is poisoned, and
suspicion falls upon Dawson, who travels to Britain to avenge the
crime. Full of excitement and tension, with just a touch of
diffuseness in the shift from America to England—note
splendid scenes at the B.B.C. and in wicked Uncle Gaylord's flat.
Smash surprise solution given, very aptly, in Sherlock Holmes's
rooms. Catch this Carr.
Why does Bill call his mother 'Mom'? (p. 254)
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