Would you stay the night in a haunted house?

That’s the question that draws the narrator into this creepy book. His friend, who has been acting stranger and stranger, since returning from family exile in Canada after the suicide of his elder brother, which caused the friend to unexpectedly inherit the family estate. An estate which includes a house reputed to be haunted.

A rainy night, pitch black, down a narrow passage off a backstreet in pre-war London. A deserted house, untenanted, powerless, crumbling, diseased. The house was abandoned after the plague years in the 1700’s. The story behind the haunting is revealed to the narrator as he sits, alone, on a packing case in the kitchen of the house, reading by candlelight the diary of a plague survivor, a tenant of the house, who witnessed the gruesome events that led to the cursing of the house.

In another room, a police officer and a morphine-addled medium play cards, also by candlelight. The owner of the estate, his resentful elderly aunt – who loved and believed only good of his dead brother and nothing but the bad of him – his fiancée, her high-strung younger brother, and an elderly friend of the family sit in the dark in the one room supposedly protected from evil, holding hands and praying. Stalking around outside, with one eye on the house, and one on the creepy stone outbuilding in the slick, smoothly-mudded, back yard, is a Scotland Yard Detective who specializes in exposing fake mediums.

Because in that creepy stone outbuilding, with windows too small to admit anyone, and covered in metal grids with holes too small to reach through, and a door padlocked on the outside and sealed with a lock and a great metal bar on the inside, lit only by the fire in the fireplace, is a con man, a charismatic “psychic investigator” who has seduced the prayer circle into believing his medium can contact the dead, specifically the dead brother.

Although he doesn’t believe in all this, the owner of the estate has been questioning his own sanity, wondering if he has been, indeed, possessed by the spirit that haunts the building.

Then the medium is murdered, in a particularly bloody way with a stolen knife, originally used by the hangman’s assistant who died (and was secretly buried in the yard during the plague years) and who cursed the house with his dying breath. In the still-locked building, with no footprints in the mud surrounding the building, with the Scotland Yard detective standing by. Who could have done it? How was it done? Who could possibly tell?

Enter Sir Henry Merrivale, a Falstaffian figure obsessed with himself, determined to burst the pretensions of people who take themselves too seriously, pledged to reunite young lovers and reveal simple answers to supernatural-appearing mysteries. But despite his appearance and the humor that Sir Henry introduces, the supernatural tension continues to rise, until he finally reveals all.

The Plague Court Murders is Sir Henry’s first book, but not Carter Dickson’s, and not his alter ego John Dickson Carr’s. The author switches between three main detectives: Sir Henry Merrivale, who adds a note of humor; Dr. Gideon Fell, who is much more serious, but still punctures locked room mysteries; and M. Henri Bencolin, who solves dark cases that share the creepy atmosphere but with fewer supernatural overtones. I think I first discovered them in the late 80s, in Pocket Book editions, and then added to my collection with IPL editions and used copies from the mystery bookstore that used to be on Greenwich Avenue, and from the English bookstore in Paris.

I’ve read most of them multiple times, but – unlike Christie, Marsh, or Tey – I manage to forget the murderer between each reading, or I remember the murderer but can’t recall how they did it.

Have you read any Carter DIckson or John Dickenson Carr? What makes a good, atmospheric mystery to you?