Scandal at High Chimneys
3/5
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About this ebook
In 1865, novelist Clive Strickland is relaxing at his club when his friend Victor Damon comes to him in a panic, begging Clive to help him marry off his sister to a cash-poor marquis whose affections reek of gold-digging. Victor doesn’t care. Something sinister lurks at High Chimneys and he wants his sisters out of the house before their lives are put in danger.
Old Matthew Damon, their father, has long been dogged by scandalous rumors of solitary visits to the cells of women about to be hanged for murder. But when murder is done at High Chimneys, Strickland and private investigator Jonathan Whicher will have to sort out the rumors and look behind the discreetly drawn curtains of High Chimneys for a killer.
John Dickson Carr
John Dickson Carr was born in 1906 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a lawyer. While at school and college, he wrote ghost, detective and adventure stories. After studying law, he headed to Paris in 1928. Once there, he lost any desire to study law and soon turned to writing crime fiction full-time. His first novel, It Walks by Night, was published in 1930. Two years later, he moved to England with his English wife; thereafter he became a prolific author and became a master of the locked-room mystery. He also wrote a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, radio plays, dozens of short stories, and magazine reviews. He died in 1977 in South Carolina.
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Reviews for Scandal at High Chimneys
21 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was written at a time when Carr was moving away from his established detectives. He would come back to Gideon Fell eventually, though he would never visit Sir Henry Merrivale again. During this period he would pick an interesting time or place (or both) and set his mystery there. High Chimneys “attempts to present . . . an accurate picture of life at several levels of society in the year 1865,” as Carr states in the afterward; essentially, the Victorian era. In this he succeeds. As for the mystery, he invokes some fairly dodgy wordplay to initially mislead the reader, rare for Carr, who usually played fair. In the end the characters were barely interesting enough, and the times and atmosphere depicted richly enough, that I didn’t care who the murderer was. An acceptable effort but hardly among his best.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The rating may be unjust; I read this long ago and have only a vague negative impression of it as being too grim for my taste. It is a non-series historical mystery set in a Victorian London mansion where everyone seems to have guilty secrets.