Lawrence Ong (who writes under a pseudonym based on a family name) is an instructor in the writing program at the University of Chicago, where he teaches academic writing. He will make his debut as a fiction writer in the Department of First Stories of EQMM’s March/April 2024 issue (on sale February 13) with the story “Murder Under Sedation.”  It’s an excellent “fair play” detective story—a story of a kind we see too seldom these days. I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons the classical detective story has fallen out of favor with writers is that it requires so much skill at plotting (not to mention a lot of subtlety!) to pull it off. In this post, through the analysis of a story by the iconic John Dickson Carr, Lawrence Ong shares some insights into how the misdirection of a classical whodunit is achieved.  —Janet Hutchings

When I was eleven, my parents bought me The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories, edited by Patricia Craig. I was already a seasoned veteran of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. But the other dozens of authors in the anthology were new to me. Among them were two of my future constant companions. Their surnames began with C: G.K. Chesterton and Edmund Crispin. So did the surname of the author of my favorite item in the book: “The House in Goblin Wood” by John Dickson Carr (who wrote it under the pseudonym Carter Dickson), which was originally published in EQMM in 1947. When I first encountered it, I thought it was the best mystery short story I’d ever read. Decades (and hundreds of stories) later, I still think that.

Back then, I likely valued the story’s solution (ingenious yet simple) and the impact of its final line. By my teenaged years, I appreciated the subtle (not overdone) spookiness of the atmosphere and the economy of characterization. But as I grew older, my orientation to mysteries changed. I became something I’d like to coin a term for: an encluesiast. (Rhymes with and is derived from “enthusiast.”) Encluesiasts do prize the solution itself. (Who doesn’t like a clever one?) But they attach far greater importance to how the solution has been signaled all along. They live for those little tidbits of pivotal information slipped into otherwise innocent paragraphs, like covert operatives trying to blend in with a crowd—the hints that cause you to smite your forehead with self-reproach when they hoodwink you, but pump you full of pride when you spot them before the detective does.

“The House in Goblin Wood” is an encluesiast’s Eden. It consists of a little over 7000 words. But Carr manages to pack in at least eight solid clues. That is more than one typically finds in novels many times longer, where clues have hundreds of pages to hide in. Goblin Wood may seem too sparsely planted for camouflage, and the trail leading out of it has breadcrumbs aplenty. Yet, how many readers have gotten lost in it?

“The House in Goblin Wood” is what taught me that mystery short stories can have the depth of cluing and misdirection typically associated with novels only. It is precisely that aspect that I propose to explore in this essay.

If you have not read “The House in Goblin Wood,” please stop reading this now, and start reading the story itself. Not just because I’ll spoil everything in the next section. Go read it even if you have no intention of returning to this essay afterwards. It is time well spent. And if you’ve read it before, re-read it. Carr’s transatlantic identity means that you can find it not only in The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories but also in Twelve American Detective Stories (edited by Edward D. Hoch). It’s also in the Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction and (of course) The Third Bullet and Other Stories, an all-Carr collection. (Or break out your handy copy of the November 1947 issue of EQMM!)

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SPOILERS BEGIN HERE

Let’s begin with the story’s premise. Not the premise from the reader’s perspective. The premise that Carr himself most likely started with:

Solution: A body “disappears” by being dismembered and transported from the crime scene in picnic hampers.

Such a scheme has at least six crucial requirements:

(a) The hampers must be large enough

(b) The victim must be small enough

(c) The original contents of the hampers must be disposed of, to create room for the body

(d) The murderer must have expertise in dismembering

(e) There must be a way to commit the murder without creating a telltale mess

(f) There must be a way to transport the body in the hampers without creating a telltale mess

Before the solution is revealed at the story’s end, Carr has provided the readers with all six of these facts.

This is not quite enough, however. If the reader knows that a corpse has disappeared, their eyes will naturally alight on the picnic hampers—the only large receptacles removed from the house. Therefore, one essential piece of misdirection needs to be in place. The reader must think that the crime is an impossible escape, rather than an impossible murder. The victim must be seen or heard alive after their death. This adds an additional requirement:

(g) Someone must be capable of impersonating the victim

(About the supposed escape, little needs to be said. The house’s trick window is cheap. It suffices only because the escape is not the story’s true focus.)

Last, of course, is a requirement common to any good murder story:

(h) There must be a motive

Let’s proceed through the story in chronological order. The first of these requirements to be satisfied is (d). We are told very early that Bill is a surgeon. This is not one of those jobs or hobbies that immediately hangs a “culprit” sign around one’s neck. (“Hmm, the killer somehow left no footprints in the snow… I wonder which one did it: stockbroker Smith, journalist Jones, or circus acrobat The Amazing Antonio…”) Nonetheless, Carr clearly wants something more artful than (e.g.):

“Mr. Merrivale, this is my fiancé, Dr. William Sage.”

“A doctor, eh? What sort?”

“A surgeon.”

Carr’s clues need to be “motivated,” as magicians use the word. In magic, every gesture a magician makes must seem justified. If they transfer an object from one hand to another, if they reach into their pocket, if they riffle through the deck face-up—there must be a good reason why. (A good fake reason, of course.) Likewise, Carr’s clues are motivated in the sense that there is a within-story justification for why this information is being revealed.

And so, Carr drops Bill’s occupation in the midst of a comic misunderstanding. H.M. has slipped on a banana peel, which he wrongly believes was placed there by Eve; and he suggests that the presence of a doctor is in case the slip resulted in injury. Bill quickly reassures H.M. that he’s not that sort of doctor, but rather a surgeon. One has to wonder whether Carr designed this whole banana peel incident as motivation, to justify why Bill volunteers this specific fact.

Elements (a), (b), and (g) are all provided in the space of two paragraphs. They do most of the story’s “dirty work” and are worth quoting in full:

H.M.—though cheered by three good-sized picnic hampers from Fortnum & Mason, their wickerwork lids bulging with a feast—did not seem happy. Nobody in that car was happy, with the possible exception of Miss Adams herself.

Vicky, unlike Eve, was small and dark and vivacious. Her large light-brown eyes, with very black lashes, could be arch and coy; or they could be dreamily intense. The late Sir James Barrie might have called her a sprite. Those of more sober views would have recognized a different quality: she had an inordinate sex appeal, which was as palpable as a physical touch to any male within yards. And despite her smallness, Vicky had a full voice like Eve’s. All these qualities she used even in so simple a matter as giving traffic directions. “First right,” she would say, leaning forward to put her hands on Bill Sage’s shoulders. “Then straight on until the next traffic light. Ah, clever boy!”

First, note that the hampers are not given a sentence all to themselves. (Perhaps Carr thought that would draw too much attention to them?) They are in a subordinate clause. This can have the psychological effect of diminishing their seeming importance. To establish (a), Carr doesn’t say “large” directly. He says “good-sized.” And in the penultimate paragraph of the story, when the hampers’ role is revealed, H.M. will again describe them as “good-sized.” (Only then do we know precisely what their size is “good” for…)

This sentence also reveals two other necessary facts about the hampers. They have lids. (Obviously, we need them to conceal the hampers’ contents.) And—as the phrase “bulging with a feast” implies—they currently have a lot in them. This is key. When a third of a corpse (presumably weighing at least thirty pounds) is placed in each, it cannot be noticeably much heavier than the original contents of the hampers, or H.M. might say, “Humph. Why is this hamper so heavy?” (Here, Carr might still be stretching a point, though. Just how much could there have been in them originally that the crockery and any leftovers alone could plausibly weigh that much?)

Then, there is the paragraph describing Vicky. Her crucial smallness, (b), is conveyed by one of three adjectives in the opening sentence, sitting innocently alongside “dark” and “vivacious,” so it doesn’t jut out. Carr will tell it to us again, however, in the fourth sentence, which is what also gives us (g). Despite Vicky’s smallness, her voice is as full as Eve’s. Note the brilliance of this. Thanks to the first sentence, the paragraph as a whole might seem to be about how unalike the two women are, and yet one of its two main purposes is to tell us that they are alike enough for one to impersonate the other!

Next, Carr lays the groundwork for (e). Bill needs to dismember Vicky in the bathtub. Truly, Carr didn’t need to clue this beyond mentioning that the bathroom contains a bath. (More on this soon.) But he is a virtuoso, and so he decides to provide a clue: that bath-tap will drip, even though no one has visited the house in a while, signaling that the bath has been used recently. Here is how he sets that up:

“I must apologize,” [Vicky] said, “For the state the house is in. I haven’t been out here for months and months. There’s a modern bathroom, I’m glad to say. Only paraffin lamps, of course. [….]”

Note that Carr has again justified why this fact was mentioned. He doesn’t just have the narrator say, “The house hadn’t been used for months.” Rather, Vicky mentions it to explain why the house is in disarray. The modernity of the bathroom is also juxtaposed with the antiquated lighting, so that she is not mentioning the former for no reason.

This brings us to (c). After the picnic is done, Carr writes:

It was only afterwards, when the cloth was cleared, the furniture and hampers pushed indoors, the empty bottles flung away, that danger tapped a warning.

Again: camouflage. The hampers and the jettisoning of their former contents hide mid-sentence.

All that’s left to prepare are (f) and (h). We get the motive first. But it’s not the motive the reader might suspect on a first reading—for Carr plants a false motive in addition to the true one.

H.M. asks Eve, “Are you pretty well acquainted with this Adams gal?”. The response:

“I’m her first cousin,” Eve answered simply. “Now that her parents are dead, I’m the only relative she’s got. I know all about her.”

Answered “simply,” indeed! This is the motive—a mercenary one. But Carr’s false plant is romantic jealousy, having Eve later cry out, “I won’t let her have him […] I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”. Why this false motive? Because it’s the motive of someone working alone. It’s fine for the reader to suspect Eve. Carr, in fact, probably wants the reader to do so. But they should suspect Eve in a way that rules out the possibility that she’s in league with Bill.

Of course, this is not enough cluing for Carr. He has Eve say something else too, something that acquires new meaning by the story’s end:

“I’m patient,” said Eve. Her blue eyes were fixed. “I’m terribly, terribly patient. I can wait years for what I want. Bill’s not making much money now, and I haven’t got a bean. But Bill’s got great talent under that easy-going manner of his. He must have the right girl to help him. If only . . .”

This is less about motive itself (although the financial angle is highlighted by the fact that Eve and Bill are poor), and more about establishing that she has the temperament to hatch the scheme. If Vicky disappeared, it would take years for Eve to inherit the family wealth. Eve needs to be “terribly, terribly patient” about money. And she is.

There’s no way to be coy about (f). Carr needs to give us the oilskin and let us scratch our heads about how it could have been used. But when we consider (f) and (h) in close succession, it is worth observing how skilled Carr is at setting up retrospective reinterpretations of facial and vocal expressions. Eve’s “blue eyes were fixed” when she declares her willingness to wait for money, an expression that H.M. will later refer to when he says, “And, burn me, how her eyes meant it when she said that!”. Likewise, H.M. says, “It must have given young Sage a shock […] when I found that piece of waterproof oilskin he’d washed but dropped.” We see this shock when Bill asks H.M. (who has just run across the oilskin) “Have you found anything?” in what we are told is a “strained voice.” The source of strain has become clear.

The last new element, then, is (e). For once, Carr is so unartful here that one almost has to give him credit for the gall. (I have to admit, though, that this is my least favorite bit of cluing in the story.) He writes:

They had gathered, by what idiotic impulse not even H.M. could have said, just outside the open door of the bathroom. A bath-tap dripped monotonously.

This is what writers call “lampshading”: drawing attention to an implausible event’s implausibility rather than trying to ignore it. There is no good reason why Bill, Eve, and H.M. should have this conversation by the bathroom, except to give an excuse to mention the clue of the telltale dripping. So, Carr doesn’t try to give a good reason. They had an idiotic impulse, okay! What more do you want?

The way (g) is finally deployed is wonderful, precisely because it seems like something from another genre, like from a horror or suspense novel:

[Bill said,] “Anyway, we won’t hear from Vicky until tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, yes, you will.” whispered Vicky’s voice out of the darkness.

Eve screamed. They lighted a lamp. But there was nobody there.

Their retreat from the cottage, it must be admitted, was not very dignified.

How they stumbled down that ragged lawn in the dark, how they piled rugs and picnic hampers into the car, how they eventually found the main road again, is best left undescribed.

How often does the false evidence that a person is still alive send people fleeing with fear out of a house?

A reader, caught in the rush of the characters’ hasty exit, is liable to miss the reappearance (and removal) of the hampers. (This time paired with the rugs for cover.) There is another reward to re-encountering this passage after knowing the solution. How they piled those hampers in the car “is best left undescribed,” eh? I wonder why the narrator doesn’t describe it…

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There you have it. A short road to a clever solution, but one meticulously paved with even cleverer clues. I hope you’ve enjoyed traveling down this road again. And perhaps we might observe a moment of silence for poor Vicky, who died so more encluesiasts could be born.