Scan barcode
A review by michelleful
It Walks by Night by John Dickson Carr
3.0
Wasn't a fan. It felt so over-dramatized. I didn’t get what Carr was going for in making Bencolin feel so Mephistophelian. In the end he was never horribly cruel, just doing his job. I did enjoy some of the use of language and the sardonic humour like “Is this room ever used for any purpose other than assassinating guests?”
Plot-wise, while I managed to predict some of the more obvious aspects of the plot like (For one thing my Kindle edition had no diagram of the scene.) But more generally,
My edition by British Library Crime Classics had a short story also by JDC afterwards, "The Shadow of the Goat", which was better. I think locked room mysteries are hard to sustain over the course of a novel, whereas a short story that reveals the trick quickly is just simpler to believe.
Plot-wise, while I managed to predict some of the more obvious aspects of the plot like
Spoiler
the switcheroo in husbands and the fact that the murder took place before the time imagined, I felt like the solution to the locked-room aspect wasn’t fair.Spoiler
if it was so easy to just walk out without detection, why was it ever considered such an impossible crime?My edition by British Library Crime Classics had a short story also by JDC afterwards, "The Shadow of the Goat", which was better. I think locked room mysteries are hard to sustain over the course of a novel, whereas a short story that reveals the trick quickly is just simpler to believe.