The Clocks is not my favorite GAD but it is my favorite setup and I love a setup
Feb. 3rd, 2026 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI have written some rather harsh things about John Dickson Carr, and I stand by them and by being a hater.
But I wanted to be able to articulate just what it has that bothers me about them, so I started reading some more of his work. I found a GAD blogger who loves the guy and picked ones he mentioned. I quite liked the first Sir Henry Merrivale mystery I read (originally published under the pseudonym Carter Dickson), 1943's She Died A Lady. Then I read 1944's Till Death Do Us Part, which is the first mystery I've ever read with a setup to rival Christie's The Clocks. The setup takes longer: about 30% of the novel. But it is fantastic.
In The Clocks, as you know, Bob, a war-hero sort of young man who later acts as sidekick to Poirot is walking down a residential street when a door opens and a young woman runs out screaming. She just arrived to this house and found it empty except for a dead body; she's a typist and was hired through a secretarial bureau. He goes in with her and they find the corpse in a room that also contains a whole bunch of different clocks for some reason (six maybe?). The owner of the house then returns. She's blind, she didn't hire the typist, she has no connection with the victim and doesn't know how he got there, and she also doesn't own the clocks.
In Till Death Do Us Part the narrator (a playwright of crime thrillers) and his brand new fiancée go to a county fair. His fiancée first appears to have some sort of confrontation with the fortune teller (witnessed in silhouette through the tent), then accidentally shoots said fortune teller with a target rifle from outside the tent just as he was saying to the narrator, "I'm the famous criminologist from the Home Office and there's something I've got to tell you!" He is carried away by the doctor, but sends for the narrator to tell him that his fiancée is a murderess who has gotten away with poisoning two husbands and a past betrothed by injection of prussic acid so they looked like suicide, and that he wants the narrator's help to catch her. ( This is part of the setup but it's also a twist at like 30% of the book so )
But I wanted to be able to articulate just what it has that bothers me about them, so I started reading some more of his work. I found a GAD blogger who loves the guy and picked ones he mentioned. I quite liked the first Sir Henry Merrivale mystery I read (originally published under the pseudonym Carter Dickson), 1943's She Died A Lady. Then I read 1944's Till Death Do Us Part, which is the first mystery I've ever read with a setup to rival Christie's The Clocks. The setup takes longer: about 30% of the novel. But it is fantastic.
In The Clocks, as you know, Bob, a war-hero sort of young man who later acts as sidekick to Poirot is walking down a residential street when a door opens and a young woman runs out screaming. She just arrived to this house and found it empty except for a dead body; she's a typist and was hired through a secretarial bureau. He goes in with her and they find the corpse in a room that also contains a whole bunch of different clocks for some reason (six maybe?). The owner of the house then returns. She's blind, she didn't hire the typist, she has no connection with the victim and doesn't know how he got there, and she also doesn't own the clocks.
In Till Death Do Us Part the narrator (a playwright of crime thrillers) and his brand new fiancée go to a county fair. His fiancée first appears to have some sort of confrontation with the fortune teller (witnessed in silhouette through the tent), then accidentally shoots said fortune teller with a target rifle from outside the tent just as he was saying to the narrator, "I'm the famous criminologist from the Home Office and there's something I've got to tell you!" He is carried away by the doctor, but sends for the narrator to tell him that his fiancée is a murderess who has gotten away with poisoning two husbands and a past betrothed by injection of prussic acid so they looked like suicide, and that he wants the narrator's help to catch her. ( This is part of the setup but it's also a twist at like 30% of the book so )
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