Connington, JJ - Jack-in-the-Box (1944)

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

Despite Barzun and Taylor’s belief that this is “not good Connington,” it is interesting and well-handled until the end, when it degenerates into blatant melodrama, using the titular Jack-in-the-Box (the apparatus which kills two of the victims). The plot, dealing with the mass extermination of a series of heirs, has been used before by Connington in Murder in the Maze and The Sweepstake Murders; ideas from Mystery at Lynden Sands and a short story “by somebody Connington” are mentioned. The occult comes in, in the form of impossible events (talking tables, dying fish, rabbits and people) associated with the spiritualist Jehudi Ashmun (similar figures appear in The Reader is Warned and Nine Times Nine). There is good reasoning from physical clues, as always with J.J.C., and an armament of scientific murder methods are used to dispatch the victims. Scientific procedure is barbaric, as evidenced by the cat’s eye on p. 99.

Connington’s masterpiece. The plot involves a wholesale holocaust of which Van Dine would have been proud, but is handled in a superior manner: the murders are all committed by a novel and ingenious application of scientific principles (piezoelectricity, supersonic waves, Henry’s law and nickel carbonyl), and the plot is sufficiently complicated to make the murderer not too easy to spot. Sir Clinton and Wendover (one of the trustees) are both at the top of their form, arguing with great glee. The only flaw is the melodramatic finish, straight from some 1940s Hammer film.