Carr, John Dickson as Carter Dickson - The Reader is Warned (1939)

A masterpiece of misdirection. We begin with the highly improbable and descend rapidly into the impossible, knowing all the time that the maestro is there to guide us back to sanity at the end of it all.

Herman Pennik is a telepath; or claims to be. He can read minds, and demonstrates it; worse, he claims that he can kill someone with a thought. Sam Constable doesn't believe it when Pennik predicts his death; but Constable dies that night without a mark on his body.

The second victim is Constable's wife Mina; and the third looks set to be the young narrator Dr. Sanders, but he is saved by the timely intervention of H.M. and Inspector Masters. H.M., threatened with elevation to the House of Lords, is his usual irascible self; Masters a little more on the ball than usual. A murderer is caught and Pennik gets his comeuppance.

Could it actually have happened? Who knows? But if it had, this is surely the way it would have. Carr is in top form here, strewing red herrings around with wild abandon. Only an ugly and uncharacteristic piece of racial prejudice prevents it from reaching the top rank of his works.

Jon.

I offhandedly pronounced this the best of Carr's novels a decade or so ago.  On rereading I'd say it's close but I prefer the plainer and comparatively more sober courtroom classic, The Judas Window (both are Sir Henry Merrivale tales; I prefer him to Carr's other main series detective, Dr. Fell).

What people rightly love about The Reader is Warned is its exceptional impossibility and the sinister idea of "teleforce."  A mysterious psychic, Herman Pennik, pronounces that one of the people at a country house gathering will die at a certain time; and, sure enough, that person does die.  No indication of how the man came to die can be found.  Pennik helpfully declares he killed the man psychically, through the operation of teleforce.  The next day, the man's widow challenges Pennik as a fraud and he, nettled by the challenge, tells her that she too will die by the means of his teleforce.  And she does indeed die.  But how she came to die is yet another mystery.  Could it really have been due to teleforce?!

One can think of thrillers with outlandish premises like that in TRIW that ultimately disappoint, but, amazingly, Carr comes up with a plausible (well, by Golden Age standards, anyway) and fairly-clued solution. The resolution, which involves a rather melodramatic and implausible trap and a quite incredibly garrulous murderer, is the main weakness of the tale, I think.  But the teleforce idea that the tale is built around is a brilliant, bravura device and the last lines of the book are unusually thoughtful for Carr (if perhaps a bit optimistic -- one thinks of the advent of atomic weaponry).

Despite my praise of this book a decade ago, in the intervening decades I actually had forgotten the culprit and the method (I find I often forget those details in Carr, but never in Christie).  On rereading, I saw indications of who the murderer might be be, but I had trouble with the motive question, because I missed another point completely.  But it was fairly clued, I maintain!  As for the method, I was pleased to find it rather John Street-ish.  In fact, is some ways the novel is similar to one by Street from the same time.  Since the two men were working on Drop to His Death/Fatal Descent at this time, I suspect they may have discussed other murder methods as well!

Certain Carrisms irritate me slightly.  Not as much as H. C. Bailey's Reggie-isms, but still.  Why do Carr character always shout "Hoy!" and "Oi!" at each other?  Were these really British expressions?  They seem more American to me (maybe I'm wrong).  But Carr seems the only mystery author who ever has them in his books, in any event.  And characters are always shouting at each other to "Stop a bit!"  And there's an anachronistic theatricality to their speech, with characters often addressing each other as "Sir" and "Madam," for example (the worst instance in TRIW is when Pennik actually addresses a woman as "my poppet" -- say what?)  Obviously this practice reflects Carr's highly romantic love of pre-modern British history, particularly the age of the Cavalier and his derring-do.  This tendency grew much more pronounced over the years, making many of his post-WW2 books less readable (I've always been of the opinion that his best books from 1950 on easily are the actual historicals, like The Devil in Velvet).  And when characters are talking about raspberries and they don't mean fruit--surely this is a clear Americanism?

But these are things I'm sure most people don't care about and even for me are only minor blemishes in a brilliantly constructed and engagingly told novel.

Curt Evans

See also: http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/carr-talk-four-capsule-carr-reviews.html