Carr, John Dickson as Carter Dickson - The Skeleton in the Clock (1949)

The first mystery is the title. Is it THE Skeleton in the Clock, as the title page has it, or Skeleton in the Clock, which appears on the cover of the Pan edition? No matter: it remains a splendid exercise in deduction and an outing for Sir Henry Merrivale, who has to deal not only with a murderer but an aggressive peeress too.

Two deaths have already occurred when the novel begins: a young girl has been viciously mutilated twenty years before, and soon after that Sir George Fleet has fallen off the flat roof of his country residence, Fleet House. But the focus of the early part of the book is the execution shed at nearby Pentecost Prison, where one man dares another to spend the night with him. By the following morning, another death has taken place.

The second man is the hero, Martin Drake, and by the end of the book he has re-encountered a lost love, spent the night in prison, been pushed off a roof and got lost in a mirror maze. H.M., his mentor, has inadvertently acquired a grandfather clock case containing a skeleton, gone three rounds with Lady Brayle, baffled poor Chief Inspector Masters once again and - of course - ultimately explained the mystery of the pink flash. Clues are subtle and psychological, but reasonably fair, and there are broad touches of Wodehousian humour amongst the horrific and grotesque. Surely someone can revive interest in Carr by making these stories into a first-rate TV series?

I have posted a picture of the cover here. Carr fans will notice that as well as a missing The, it also contains a major pictorial error.

Jon.