Today I continue my series about books set during December holidays with The White Priory Murders by Carter Dickson.

I’ve read this mystery several times and each time I re-read it, I couldn’t remember whodunnit right up until the very end of the book, very unusual for me.¹ And, reading the back of the book, you would think it fits into my holiday mystery series. But I imagine a conversation between the author and his publisher that went something like this:

Publisher: We want you to do holiday-themed mysteries. Other authors have. It’s a trend.

Author: Cheap trick designed to just sell books. I am an artist and will not prostitute my work, etc. etc.

Publisher: It made a lot of money for them.

Author: Oh, all right. [grumble grumble grumble]

So Dickson takes this book, which is set during winter because a key aspect of the “locked room mystery” is a single set of footprints that crosses a large field of otherwise unbroken snow, and he states at the start of the book that it takes place the week before Christmas. He has Henry Merrivale [AKA, H.M., the detective] invite the “sympathetic character”² to spend Christmas at his house. He puts Chief Inspector Masters on the spot by stating that Masters is spending the holidays with his sister and her husband, who happens to be the local inspector, and even state that Masters is supposed to dress up as Santa Claus and hand out presents to local children. When Masters tricks H.M. into dropping his holiday plans and rushing right down to the White Priory, H.M. shows up in what can be construed as his version of Father Christmas’s costume. And H.M. declares that he will reveal the solution to the mystery before Christmas Day.

Once Dickson has inserted these requisite references to Christmas – all within the first few chapters – he never mentions the holiday again, and the book could take place any time during the winter. There’s no talk of presents, Christmas Trees, Christmas Crackers, fig pudding, or any other British holiday traditions.

One of the things about holiday murder mysteries is that they generally contrast the horror of murder with the joy and Christmas spirit. Generally, the books are bedecked in great swaths of holiday decorations – sometimes, overpoweringly so, sometimes tattered around the edges – and holiday customs. Families come together for the season – or, alternately, people choose to avoid their families during the season. Often people are experiencing holiday elation and are then are plunged into confusion and despair by the murder. Christmas acts as an antagonist during the book, causing witnesses to be unavailable, travel to be challenging, important resources to become unavailable, and even decorations to impede the pursue of clues.

There is none of that here: the book doesn’t waiver from the dark and creepy atmosphere of Dickson’s other books. The sense of foreboding starts when Bennett³, a young American diplomat who happens to be Sir Henry Merrivale’s nephew, arrives at H.M.’s office, ostensibly to honor his mother’s wishes to meet her brother but with his father’s words about H.M.’s brilliant ability to cut to the heart of impenetrable mysteries foremost in mind. In the course of his diplomatic duties, Bennett has met a famous screen star, the director who made her a star, her overbearing agent/publicist, her British Historian secret lover, and the British aristocrat who is determined to sponsor her London stage comeback and her husband, and his disapproving adult daughter – and he worries that something bad is about to happen.

From the start, Bennett has had a pessimistic feeling about this mix of people, reinforced the previous night by a mysterious box of chocolates that showed up at the private apartment where her entourage has hidden the screen star away from her adoring public. One of her posse insists that the chocolates are poisoned; another insists that they aren’t. And a third declares that they can prove that they aren’t by each eating one. As a result, one of the men ends up in the hospital with strychnine poisoning. And tonight, they are all – with the exception of the man in the hospital – heading down to her lover’s family estate, White Priory.

Bennett, committed to a diplomatic cocktail party that evening cannot travel with the rest of the bunch and, owing to some heavy drinking, unfamiliar roads, and a heavy snowfall, doesn’t arrive at White Priory until just before dawn of the following morning. He is just in time to witness the discovery of the screen star’s murder in a small guest house accessible only across a wide field of snow, broken by only two sets of footsteps: Bennett’s and the man who he saw enter the building moments before he did.

How could the murder have been committed in a way that left the snow untouched? The perfect locked room mystery!

One of the techniques that makes Carter Dickson (whether writing under that name, or the name of John Dickson Carr) so effective in building atmosphere is the way that he weaves theories into his book, and then knocks them down, leaving you baffled. Sometimes these theories are presented by the person who is putting them forth (Inspector Masters, for example); sometimes the sympathetic character describes them to someone else (in this case, Bennett to the love interest he meets right after discovering the murder). It’s like listening to people theorize how magicians work their tricks – and then being shown that those theories are wrong.

It leaves you with a that cognitive dissonance between “there is no way that this could have happened so it must be supernatural” and “there’s no such thing as the supernatural, so there must be a logical explanation but danged if I can figure out what it is.” That dissonance makes the atmosphere so effectively creepy.

If you haven’t tried a Sir Henry Merrivale mystery, this is one of the best. It lacks some of the wild farce of his other books⁴, but it is a fun, spooky tale that will leave you wondering until the last page.

1. My husband used to complain, when we were watching X-Files first run, about how, during the teaser, I would say, “OH, it’s aliens [or insects, or whatever]” completely ruining the episode for him. Although I do not attribute that to my ability to seeing into the heart of the mystery – I had just done a lot of reading about many of the topics that the X-Files focused on – aliens, parapsychology, cryptozoology, obscure medical diseases, LSD / MKUltra, and conspiracy theories – and recognized the references that the X-Files writers slipped into the teasers. At the time, X-Files was groundbreaking and DiscoveryTV had not taken off yet, so viewers had less exposure to these topics, making them more mysterious for most viewers. ↩︎
2. The “sympathetic character” is a character that the author inserts in a mystery book who couldn’t possibly be the murderer – and usually isn’t, although it sometimes happens – who isn’t the detective and isn’t necessarily the “Watson” helping the detective solve the murder. They are, for the most part, a neutral character with an outside perspective, who sometimes witnesses and is sometimes caught up in the action. They’re someone you have sympathy for, who represents your feelings about the murder and who asks the questions and says the things you might say if you were in that situation. (Although many of us might say, three murders in this remote house? I’m outa here! ↩︎
3. The sympathetic character. ↩︎
4. Here’s an example. At the end of the book, Bennett returns to H.M.’s lair at the War Office and inadvertently wakes him up from a nap. Startled and half-awake, H.M. spews out, “Go ‘way! Out! I won’t be disturbed dammit! I set you that report on the accordion-player yesterday afternoon; and if you wanta know why the key of G had anything to do with Robrett’s dyin’, then you look in there and you’ll see. I’m busy!” And it’s so plausible that you immediately wonder where you can put your hand on that book because it does sound like a Sir Henry Merrivale murder mystery. ↩︎