Poison in Jest: A Perennial Classic Mystery

Rating:
Summary: The marble hand
Review: A poisoner and ax-murderer is stalking through the corridors of Judge Quayle's gloomy old Pennsylvania mansion--or as the lurid cover of the Popular Library edition puts it, "Murder Runs Wild in a House of Fear."

Usually poisoners don't switch to axes. It is also normal for them to stick to a single poison. But John Dickson Carr really lets loose in this mystery and gives us a dysfunctional family's gourmet guide to poisons--three of them: arsenic; morphine; and hydrobromide of hyoscin (the infamous Dr. Crippen used hyoscin to dispose of his wife in 1910).

In the 1930s, arsenic could be purchased in any pharmacy as a rat poison, but for the latter two poisons to be lying around the mansion, it helps to have a doctor marry in to the family. Sadly enough, the doctor who marries into this family is the third victim to be poisoned and the first to die.

A creeping marble hand that has been broken off of a statue of the Emperor Caligula also serves to heighten tensions, especially after two people see it scurrying along window ledges like a big white spider.

Jeff Marle, who shows up in many of Carr's Bencolin mysteries as the Parisian juge d'instruction's clueless sidekick, is back in his native Pennsylvania for "Poison in Jest." He is invited over to chez Quayle to critique a manuscript, and almost from the moment he walks through the door, people begin to keel over, including his host. He stays on to help find the poisoner, assisted by the eccentric fiancé of Jinny Quayle. This fiancé is another Dr. Gideon Fell in very slight disguise, e.g. he isn't fat and he doesn't stomp around with crutches. However, he does pop up in the oddest corners, muttering mystical clues that don't really shed any light on the murderer's identity.

Luckily this Dr. Fell clone dies a-borning--I believe this is the only book where he shows up, thank god. It wouldn't do to have two of them clumping and mumbling through Carr's mysteries.

Read "Poison in Jest" for its brooding Gothic atmosphere--the marble emperor's detached hand; lights that won't stay on; staircases creaking in the night. The mystery in the end is rather easy to solve, since there is only one person left whom nobody would suspect.