In Spite of Thunder

Rating:
Summary: A later Carr and that's no picnic
Review: John Dickson Carr, for so many years a genius when it came to constructing impossible crime puzzles and also a fantastic builder of atmosphere . . . and then, by the time the fifties roll around, he gets a bit leaden. In this late Dr. Fell novel, the entire backdrop of Hitler's mountain eyrie at Berchtesgaden is built up bit by bit, a marvelous exercise in brooding evil, only to be dismissed a few chapters later when the book lands with a thud in bourgeois Geneva (Switzerland), as the middle-aged painter Brian Innes tries to cope with his attraction to the youngish daughter of an old friend. Innes nowhere seems like a painter, and never is his supposed knowledge of art or color used to indicate anything. But the puzzle is ingenious. What could cause a once-famous actress to tumble off a balcony in full view of two people--without being touched? And the back story, where it does not involve Eve Eden's abortive 1939 pilgrimage to Hitler, is absorbing indeed. Basically the problem is one that even Carr's greatest partisans have to acknowledge reluctantly, a constant flow of exposition badly delivered by people who already know everything, and a continual swarm of interruptions to the dialogue that serve no other purpose but to pad the plot and slow down the storyline. The "Macbeth" inspired title, "In Spite of Thunder," should say it all, but doesn't actually mean anything in context.

Rating:
Summary: A later Carr and that's no picnic
Review: John Dickson Carr, for so many years a genius when it came to constructing impossible crime puzzles and also a fantastic builder of atmosphere . . . and then, by the time the fifties roll around, he gets a bit leaden. In this late Dr. Fell novel, the entire backdrop of Hitler's mountain eyrie at Berchtesgaden is built up bit by bit, a marvelous exercise in brooding evil, only to be dismissed a few chapters later when the book lands with a thud in bourgeois Geneva (Switzerland), as the middle-aged painter Brian Innes tries to cope with his attraction to the youngish daughter of an old friend. Innes nowhere seems like a painter, and never is his supposed knowledge of art or color used to indicate anything. But the puzzle is ingenious. What could cause a once-famous actress to tumble off a balcony in full view of two people--without being touched? And the back story, where it does not involve Eve Eden's abortive 1939 pilgrimage to Hitler, is absorbing indeed. Basically the problem is one that even Carr's greatest partisans have to acknowledge reluctantly, a constant flow of exposition badly delivered by people who already know everything, and a continual swarm of interruptions to the dialogue that serve no other purpose but to pad the plot and slow down the storyline. The "Macbeth" inspired title, "In Spite of Thunder," should say it all, but doesn't actually mean anything in context.