Carr, John Dickson - The Arabian Nights Murder (1936)

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

This 1936 novel is perhaps Carr’s finest technical achievement, combining as it does complexity, story-telling, humour, atmosphere, and characterisation. The plot of the book is fantastic, bizarre and humorous, with “an unpleasantly queer look as well as a comic look”. It is set in a Museum of Oriental Art, where things are very clearly not as they seem. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the established order of nature has been overturned for one night, as the Museum has been seized by a group of young lovers anxious (like Oberon) to play a vengeful practical joke on one of their crowd, a joke which goes very badly wrong, with repercussions both comic and disturbing, as an actor — with whom the principal lady has had an affair in the past (echoes of Titania and Bottom, perhaps?) - is murdered, his body found in a coach, his chin crested with false whiskers, a cookery book in his hand, and a khanjar in his chest. This sense of the world being turned upside down — of “a world where all commonplace things had gone just a little crazy” — is strengthened by the fact that all the suspects are disguised, playing parts outside of themselves, and so are acting out unnatural lives, while much comedy arises from mistaken identity, as in the wonderful scene where the absent-minded Scottish clergyman Dr. Illingworth confronts Jerry Wade, whom he believes to be the criminal mastermind ‘Dr. Clark Gable’ (Carr taking advantage of the humour of the scene to slip in some splendid clues); and the nature of the clues — far from being the typical clues of blood-stained boots and bottles of poison, the clues include false moustaches and lumps of coal thrown at the wall, and footprints in coal — used in a thoroughly original and uninhibited fashion here — "When the whole case is crazy, the evidence is bound to be crazy too." The multiple voices of the story — the “polished irony” of Detective Inspector Carruthers, the “garrulous ease” of Assistant Commissioner Sir Herbert Armstrong, the “lurid and polysyllabic vividness” of Dr. Illingworth, and the “clear, straightforward, logical narrative” of Superintendent Hadley — are very effective, Carruthers setting up the fantastic nature of the problem, Armstrong and Illingworth explaining to some degree Carruthers’ mysteries but discovering new ones, and Hadley solving the mystery with a (false) solution that is a brilliant and oh-so-convincing display of compelling logic, before Dr. Fell — who, as in The Blind Barber, takes a purely armchair detective rôle, appearing only in the prologue and epilogue, serving as a deus ex machina, rather than being directly involved in the whole crazy proceedings — solves the mystery with one of his best solutions..

The Arabian Nights Murder (1936) shows a framework reminiscent of the Van Dine school. As in Van Dine's The Scarab Murder Case (1929), the tale takes place in a private museum, here containing Arabian art. The suspects are mainly experts in this subject area, just as in Van Dine. Building a mystery around a group of intellectuals who are all specialists in some collectible subject is a classic Van Dine school approach. Carr also avoids the fake supernatural atmosphere of many of his tales in favor of a rollicking style of grand adventure. The emphasis on surrealist plot twists also recalls such Van Dine members as Ellery Queen. So does the huge flood of complex plotting in the story.

Van Dine and his follower Clyde B. Clason are both interested in world cultures for their art and mythology. By contrast, Carr tends to see Arabian culture through the prism of history. The book is full of fascinating sidelights on the history of the Middle East. This is consistent with Carr's deep interest in English history, that infuses so many of his novels.

Characters in the book have two opinions about history. Some are antiquarians, deeply interested in the history of the objects and the region. Other characters mainly love the Arabian Nights as stories, and pooh-pooh scholars who try to view them as historical documents. One suspects that Carr was of two minds on this issue himself. One part of Carr loved romance, adventure and magic. This part of Carr responds to the Arabian Nights purely as examples of great storytelling. But Carr also loved history too, and he delights in having his historian characters offer colorful anecdotes about the past.

The Arabian Nights Murder has some of Carr's structural features. The first half of the book contains the initial investigation of the crime, the second half follow-up detective work; Carr used this exact mathematical division in other novels. As usual, Carr provides what Carolyn Wells called a tabulation in between these two halves, summing up all the mysterious questions still to be unraveled.

Also Carr-like: some sort of sinister, secret events have taken place immediately before and during the crime; everyone present is now covering up the details and stonewalling the police. The sleuths first have to figure out what these secret events were, then try to understand how one person present slipped a murder into them. During the preliminary investigation, immediately following the murder, the sleuths see a confusing mix of traces of the secret event, and clues to the murder itself. The secret event when revealed (usually around a quarter way into the story) tends to be quite ingenious. However, it is not clear that a reader would really be able to deduce its nature from the clues given. In other words, it is not entirely fair play. However, it is richly clued.

Once the secret event is revealed, we are in a full, fair play detective story. Carr starts weaving hidden patterns out of clues embedded in his very complex narrative. These emerging patterns are often highly ingenious. Carr often likes to track patterns historically, along time lines that can contain anything from months to minutes.

The story about the actor's background recalls the frame story of Death Turns the Tables. Here, it is part of a mystery plot; there, it is the foreground, non-mystery part of the novel.

Mike Grost