Following Footprints in the Snow in THE WHITE PRIORY MURDERS (1934)

Originally posted April 25, 2024.

 While John Dickson Carr (and his alter-ego Carter Dickson) frequently dominates lists of best locked room mysteries, for good reason, I’ve always gotten the sense that The White Priory Murders is a divisive one, so I had some trepidation in checking it out. Some reviewers say that the impossible crime has a brilliant solution; others think that it’s overlong, tedious, and lacking in character. After reading it, I have to agree with both opinions.

Marcia Tait is a British Hollywood actress, returned to her home country to star as Barbara Villiers in a play about Charles II. The playwright’s eccentric, unpleasant brother owns a (fictional, as far as I can tell) historical manse featuring a pavilion called the Queen’s Mirror, where Charles II allegedly conducted numerous liaisons. Marcia decides to sleep there for method purposes, and is found dead early the next morning. The pavilion is not locked; rather, it is surrounded by unblemished snow and broken ice in every direction, and the only footprints are those of the playwright, who discovered the body. Sir Henry Merrivale’s nephew, staying with the production crew, naturally calls in his crime-solving uncle to investigate.

First thing’s first: the impossible crime itself is a good one, with an elegant solution. Unfortunately for me, it has enough copycats in later works for me to have been able to guess, or rather remember, approximately how it was done (I think it was cribbed by Kindaichi Case Files, or possibly one of its sister series). The explanation presented here made better use of the footprints clue, however.

I didn’t guess the killer, partly because one of the clues to their identity involved an element which would have been common in 1934, but which I had never seen before, and which I had to google even after it was explained. The other reason is that I often form my guesses based on who would be the most or least likely suspect, which is difficult to do here, because… well, this book is a good 75% reported action. It is frankly astounding how many key characters never appear “on screen”—you could get smashed making a drinking game of it. Marcia Tait never shows up in person. I started to wonder if this would be the source of some big identity-swap twist. Nothing so exciting.

One point did interest me: H.M. gives a different Locked Room Lecture (one year before the one in The Hollow Man) in which he outlines not the types of locked room, but the reasons why a murderer would go to this trouble at all (p. 175-177 in my edition):

“First, there’s the motive of a fake suicide. […]

“Second, there’s the ghost-fake, where someone tries to make it look like a supernatural killing. That happens seldom; it’s a tricky business at best, and entails a long careful build-up of atmosphere and circumstances. […]

“Finally, there’s accident. There’s the murderer who creates an impossible situation in spite of himself, without wantin’ to.”

As with Dr. Fell’s lecture, I can’t help but feel like this is exactly worded in a way that deliberately excludes the actual reason in the case at hand… Anyway. I think point (2) may be part of why so many people, including myself, find The White Priory Murders a bit of a slog. JDC was a suspense writer first and foremost, and apart from locked-room tricks, atmosphere is one of the areas where his books excel. The Plague Court Murders, The Burning Court, The Crooked Hinge, as well as some of his stories like ‘Persons or Things Unknown’ or ‘Blind Man’s Hood’—all of these combine fairly straightforward mechanical elements with a suffocating sense of horror that turns a mechanical puzzle into a tense page-turner.

But that quite literally can’t be the case in The White Priory Murders. H.M. needs to rule out that the killer was intending to shock or terrify with the crime: it’s “out of the question,” he says, “since nobody’s ever tried to foist any suggestion of the kind or so much as intimated that the pavilion’s haunted by a murderous spook.” True! Thus the humdinger of a creepy setting goes woefully underutilized. The push in the darkened stairway, the mysterious figure with bloody hands, the haunted girl, the suggestions of possession and doubles, that creepy portrait of the Duchess of Cleveland: none of these are played for horror, which is kind of a shame. Successful atmosphere would actually be detrimental to the case, so rather than blitzing through the chapters with my heart in my throat, I had to force myself to keep reading through tepid romance, informed misogynist exposition about Marcia, and a string of phone calls to Sir Not Appearing In This Film to figure out a solution that I was pretty sure I already knew.

So, definitely not one of my favourites, though not one of the worst, either. Mostly, I wish that I hadn’t been pre-spoiled on how the trick could be done.