APPOINTMENT WITH CARR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 430, 19 September 1947, Page 13

APPOINTMENT WITH CARR

HE WHO WHISPERS. By John Dickson Carr. Hamish Hamilton (Melbourne). [| HOUGH it is handicapped by poor paper and indifferent typography (and, in the review copy, by a bindery blunder which presents the book to the reader upside-down and _ back-to-front), He Who Whispers is a well-knit story quite up to the standard which keeps John Dickson Carr in the van of contemporary crime writers. It has all the author’s usual trade-marks-his preoccupation with the emotional states of his characters, and those early intimations of spiritual wickedness or the super matural which are so tidily explained away in the later chapters. It might be interesting to speculate on the extent to which the author has been influenced in this direction by the exploits of Father Brown. Certainly Dr. Gideon _Fell, in his corporeal self, suggests a »mewhat rumpled and rumbuctious phesterton. But it would be unfair to ssnply that John Dickson Carr is a copyist. His construction of a story is strongly individual and his experience as @ serial-writer serves him well in maintaining the reader’s interest. He does share with Agatha Christie a weakness for misleading the reader in the matter e clues by underlining the irrelevant, ut many readers would not have it wtherwise. Listeners who have enjoyed ithe BBC recordings of John Dickson

Carr’s Appointment With Fear stories, but who have not met him in print, wiil find He Who Whispers an appointment worth keeping.