Mason, AEW - The House of the Arrow (1924)

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

Carr’s favourite detective story — fitting, for it is one of the very few pseudo-Carrs (unless one should call Carr pseudo-Mason or pseudo-Chesterton) which has all his authorial trademarks: not the impossible crime, heavy facetiousness or steady vulgarity of Boucher, Crispin or Rawson (for one does not read Carr for these), but the atmosphere of overwhelming dread, as though all Hell was, quite literally, about to break loose; the praiseworthily difficult problem, not so much impossible as inexplicable; and the carefully concealed clues, all above board and visible, but never seen by the reader — one thinks of the pen-holder, of the smoke in the chimneys, and, above all, of the clock — an object-lesson in making innocent characters unwittingly lie. A genuine classic of the genre.