Night at the Mocking Widow

Sir Henry Merrivale #20

by Carter Dickson, Bertil Lagerström (Translator)

Horror was quietly taking over the village. On the edge of town, a fantastic stone ruin gave its name to a malicious killer: the Widow... a killer diabolically clever.. or so crazed with hate... that the victims were notified by mail of their coming doom.

One had died. Others had been warned that they were marked to die. And no one, not even the fabulous Sir Henry Merrivale, could say if the Widow were man... woman... or phantom!

Genres: Mystery, Crime, Classics, Detective

319 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

Carter Dickson is a pen name of writer John Dickson Carr.

Reviews

[Bruce]

Mysteries are my bedtime books -- that's what I tell everyone, but I really read them at many other times of the day, often in the morning when I feel I didn't get enough read the night before. John Dickson Carr (or Carter Dickson when Sir Henry Merrivale is the detective) is an all-time favorite. He can be maddeningly inconsistent in quality, but, at his best, has many qualities of a good straight (here meaning serious) novelist. He can create a genuinely compelling dramatic situation apart from the interest of the unsolved crime, and blend the two masterfully. He is also usually fiendishly ingenious AND fair with the reader in regard to clues.

With this novel, Carr did not follow through with the well-conceived dramatic situations built up in the beginning. It ended by being just the usual detective novel. However, since I'm a fan of the genre, this is satisfactory. As in most Carr novels, there is a seemingly impossible crime, the solution to which is most ingenious, and the identity of the culprit is both surprising and logical.

For better Carr mysteries, I suggest It Walks by Night, The Burning Court or the short story collection, The Department of Queer Complaints.

[Peter]

Quite a strong 3 - 3.5?

[Jameson]

Yet another late Carr that I expected to be dull and/or awful but Night at the Mocking Widow is neither. It’s just not great. This Merrivale story benefits from good flesh covering the bones of a simple plot, a genre staple, in fact: poison pen letters kick up scandal and murder in a tight-knit community. I think actually Carr has himself used this plot before, but I can forgive that. I love paranoid mysteries set in small towns. Carr does a great job giving you the lay of the land, showing you how all the characters interact, who loves who, who hates who, town history, etc. His ingenuity for complex locked room murders might have been on the wane but at this point he can still tell a story and he can still write well. Also, we learn a bit more about our hero here: Mrs. Merrivale is named Clemmie or Clementine, way younger than her husband she’s a blonde bombshell who’s just as mischievous as her hubby, and when they get drunk together they get up to shenanigans. This makes me wish Carr wrote a Thin Man-ish tale with the two of them. Also, Merrivale definitely gets up to some hanky-panky with a character who is not his wife. All in all, this was a decent Carr. The ending wasn’t one of his explosive ones, but it was serviceable. The typical Merrivale humor was pretty good, especially his Indian LARP, and the gentlemanly ending is always satisfying. A good read, all in all.


(When was that sixth shot fired? I looked but completely missed it, unless it was one of those Thuds.)

[Dave]

A John Dickson Carr from right about the time the wheels came off. The spookiness and cleverness of the locked rooms are still there, but almost everything else is bad. Overcomplicated story, "romance" between "characters," supposed slapstick humor, reactionary attitudes--these all begin to run roughshod over the good stuff. Never would've read it again had I remembered how "comic" it was.

[C]

Starts well with some genuine laugh out loud moments.The titular "widow"is an interesting and creepy premise,but the story eventually fizzles out to a farcical conclusion.The locked room solution is probably one of Carr's more audacious or just plain bonkers methods of bamboozlement!

[Gabriele Crescenzi]

Uno dei romanzi migliori con il Vecchio. Bellissima l'ambientazione a Stoke Druid, dove grava la figura della Vedova Beffarda. Affascinante la vicenda basata sulle lettere anonime (mi ha affascinato anche nel Terrore viene per posta della zia Agatha). Ci sono inoltre una meravigliosa camera chiusa risolta con arguzia e varie scene umoristiche come la battaglia di fango tra il vescovo e H.M. Unica pecca: nell'edizione che possiedo, la traduttrice non è stata accorta, traducendo in maniera errata un qualcosa (che all'inizio poteva essere anche interpretato in questo modo, ma non dopo aver letto per intero l'opera) essenziale alla soluzione.

[Ian Durham]

Ah, good, old Carter Dickson (AKA John Dickson Carr). My favorite mystery writer (under either name). Another great locked door mystery that had me guessing until the end. I had two complaints. The first was some rather dated humor that was not terribly "woke." The second was the very end which I found a little distasteful (but won't reveal). I hesitated saying anything about the former since it is pretty typical of books written at that time, but I decided I couldn't let that affect my judgment. But the latter seemed odd even for that time period.

[Victor]

A late one... lacks the gothic setup or the creepy atmosphere and has too much romance and tomfoolery . There is a locked room mystery and a nice solution for it ,there is a very decent misdirection but overall there is too little meat and too many feathers on this bird . A decent enough timepass but nowhere near Carrs better ones.

[Simonetta Scotto]

Ho letto altri libri dello stesso autore che mi sono piaciuti di più. Francamente non so se forse per la traduzione probabilmente molto complessa, ho trovato la spiegazione finale molto contorta e poco credibile

[Keith Boynton]

The focus here is so much on the various romantic and comic subplots that the mystery comes across as an afterthought. The resolution is distinctly unsatisfying, and although a lot of the character stuff is engaging, the book needed more of a narrative spine.

[Vintagebooklvr]

2 1/2 stars. A clever turn on the classic locked room crime, but than this writer is known for that. I'm not really a fan of poison pen storylines and I thought the culprit's motive was a bit weak but not bad.

[Juan Carlos]

Nuevamente un buen misterio de Carter Dickson que H.M. resuelve impecablemente. Un final lógico y limpio.

[Renita D'Silva]

Wonderful

[Nigel Callaghan]

Good story, Terrible OCR

A very entertaining yarn from Dickson. Badly let down by terrible OCR and a complete absence of post OCR editing and proof reading.

[Jean]

I was so excited to find what I thought was a poison pen mystery I hadn't read before, but today when I came to record it in my Goodreads shelf, I find I read it four years ago--and I didn't remember a word of it. I conclude that my 3-star rating is the right one.

To me, a mystery that must spend several pages at the end explaining whodunit and why is not a good mystery. If you have to explain how it all worked to the reader, rather than incrementally leading the reader through the story to understanding at the end, then it is not a well-constructed mystery.

Also, there is too much distraction and wandering off-topic. I am especially thinking of the Village Festival fiasco/mud fight which has nothing to do with the mystery other than provide a setting for the perp's death that won't take place in his own home.

I have put my initials in the back of this book so I will remember that I have read it before, should I run across it again in my library.

[Ken]

Not one of the best in the Merrivale series, but definitely an enjoyable must-read for John Dickson Carr (a.k.a. Carter Dickson) fans. Sir Henry's wife and marriage are described briefly in passing. She's very suitable for Sir Henry, but he himself makes it clear that in combination they'd be too much.

[Ellie]

One of the late Sir Henry Merrivale novels, and though amusing, it feels as though the quality is declining. Here, by the way, we have another show of Carr's quirk: his disdain for Russian literature, which seems to have been a bit too en vogue for his taste in his day. He finds it too contemplative, and blasé. S.T. Toshi has a good chapter on this in his book on Carr.

[David F.]

Not one of Carr/Dickson's best but a thoroughly entertaining mystery. The romantic digressions are handled better than in most of his works.

[Irfan Nurhadi]

I loved the heart warming moment between H.M. and Pam Lacey..