Appointment with Fear

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 333, 9 November 1945, Page 8

Appointment with Fear

HIS series of spifie-chillers, which has apparently been cheering up the long spring evenings on the West Coast for some time, began from 3YA on October 25th. Observing that the author was John Dickson Carr, known to me as the most ingenious familiariser of the utterly impossible in the whole whodunit field (I should like to put him in a her-metically-sealed room with Edmund Wilson) L listened with eagerness, the more so as I already knew him to have the gift of radio-dialogue. _ You remember his "Army of Shadows" about a fake newspaper brought out in Brussels under the Belgian occupation? Nor were my expectations disappointed. I suppose that since Wallace became king in Thule anybody might have made two gangsters kidnap the Lord Chief Justice and his clerk to prevent him sentencing a confederate; but only Carr would have made the Justice and his clerk physically resemble the gangsters so that the hero can suggest that they set the house on fire and make it appear that theythe gangsters-perished in the flames; so that the gangsters rush off and do so and, soaking the place in benzine, are overcome by the, fumes (which leave hero .and heroine unasphyxiated and even voluble) just as the police burst in. What I like in Carr is that there isn’t any plurry realism about him. Nor would any other mortal man, in trousers or in toga (I am thinking of Julius Caesar, who defeated his kidnappers at athletic exercises and subsequently crusified them) cause the Lord Chief Justice and his clerk to challenge the gangon to poker arid skin them to the back