The White Priory Murders

September 15, 2023
The unmatched master of the impossible crime returns to the limelight in this second case for Sir Henry Merrivale, originally published in 1934. James Boynton Bennett, the nephew H.M.'s just met for the first time, has been invited to spend Christmas at the White Priory, the ancestral home of the Bohun family. The colorless Bennett is outshined in every sense by fellow guest Marcia Tait, a newly crowned Hollywood star who ran out on Cinearts Studios to take a leading role opposite Jervis Willard in The Private Life of Charles the Second, a new play written by Oxford historian Maurice Bohun and produced by his brother, John. But Bennett's on hand when John Bohun finds Marcia beaten to death in the Queen's Mirror, an outbuilding ringed by a pristine coating of snow that's unbroken by any footprints except John's. As usual in Dickson, the question of whodunit--movie director Carl Rainger? press agent Tim Emery? Louise Carewe, daughter and private secretary to powerful newspaper magnate Lord Canifest, who's supposed to be backing the show?--is less interesting than the question of how the killer escaped the murder scene without leaving a trace. Though the few hours before H.M. arrives at the White Priory to investigate seem to take forever, Dickson keeps the pot boiling with a poisoning subplot, a false confession, and two ingenious theories of the murder that turn out to be much less compelling than the true explanation. If this all sounds like kitchen-sink plotting, rest assured that the denouement, by far the best thing here, is brilliant in its simplicity and conceptual elegance. Nothing says Christmas like a pair of corpses from 90 years ago.

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