He Who Whispers is one of John Dickson Carr’s Dr Gideon Fell mysteries, originally published in 1946 and recently reissued as a British Library Crime Classic. I read another in the series, The Black Spectacles, earlier this year and loved it, so I had high hopes for this one.

The book is set in the aftermath of World War II and is written from the perspective of Miles Hammond, a Nobel Prize winning historian who has just inherited his uncle’s estate, which includes a house in the New Forest containing a large collection of books. As the novel opens, Miles is in London looking for a librarian to assist with his uncle’s collection, and while there he accepts an invitation to attend a meeting of the Murder Club, a group who get together regularly to try to solve true crime cases. On arriving at the venue, Miles is surprised to find that nobody else is there apart from a young woman, Barbara Morrell, and tonight’s speaker, Professor Rigaud.

Despite only having an audience of two, Rigaud proceeds to tell them the story of a crime which took place in France before the war and is both unsolved and seemingly impossible. It involves the murder of a wealthy Englishman, Howard Brooke, found stabbed with his own sword-stick while apparently alone on top of a high tower with witnesses on three sides and the fourth unreachable as it overlooks the river. Fay Seton, Brooke’s secretary, is suspected of the crime for the dubious reason that she is believed to be a vampire – and only a creature that can fly through the air could have reached the top of the tower!

Miles is intrigued by Rigaud’s story and when Fay Seton turns up in London, he offers her the job of librarian so that he can find out more. Heading for his uncle’s house in the New Forest with Fay and his sister Marion, Miles finds that he is becoming increasingly fascinated by the suspected vampire – but when Marion has a terrifying experience while alone upstairs in her bedroom, does this mean Fay has struck again or is there another explanation for the strange occurrences? Luckily, Gideon Fell arrives that same night and begins to investigate!

I enjoyed He Who Whispers, but not nearly as much as I enjoyed The Black Spectacles and I’m not really sure why this particular book is considered one of Carr’s best (apparently even by Carr himself). Yes, the solution is very clever, but I felt that we, the reader, are given very little chance of solving it ourselves, particularly as we don’t really see any of Fell’s thought processes during the novel. He reveals everything in the denouement at the end, but until then we’re as much in the dark as Miles Hammond. There was also too much focus on the vampire storyline for my taste; I thought the mystery was interesting enough without the supernatural element, but I expect other readers will love that aspect of the plot.

Carr captures the feel of post-war Britain very well; a surprising number of 1940s crime novels barely refer to the war at all, but in this one it’s an integral part of the story. Several of the characters in the novel have served in the war, there are mentions of rationing and bombed-out streets and of the effect all of these things have had on people’s mental health. There’s quite a small cast of characters and Carr takes the time to flesh each of them out, but I never really warmed to our protagonist, Miles – he has two possible love interests throughout the novel and although his final decision could have gone either way, I felt that he made the wrong choice in the end!

I want to read more of the Gideon Fell mysteries, so if you’ve read any of them please let me know which ones you particularly enjoyed.

This is only the second book I’ve read by the very prolific John Dickson Carr, who also wrote under several pseudonyms including Carter Dickson. The first one I read was It Walks By Night, one of his Henri Bencolin mysteries, and although I enjoyed it overall, I found the plot too far-fetched and I didn’t much like Bencolin himself. The Black Spectacles, first published in 1939 and recently reissued as a British Library Crime Classic, is from a different series, featuring a different detective – Dr Gideon Fell – so I hoped it would be more to my taste. And it was – I loved it!

The novel is set in the small English village of Sodbury Cross, where a child has died after eating poisoned chocolates. The culprit has not been found, but suspicion has fallen on Marjorie Wells, because she was the one who sent the little boy to the shop to buy chocolates that day. Marjorie’s uncle, Marcus Chesney, believes that most people see the world through ‘black spectacles’, unable to correctly observe what is right in front of their eyes. To prove his point, he decides to stage a performance showing exactly how the real chocolates were substituted with the poisoned ones – and invites Marjorie, her fiancé George Harding and a family friend, Professor Ingram, along to watch. The performance is being filmed with a cine-camera and Marcus has compiled a list of questions to test the observational skills of the three people watching. But when he is found dead, murdered in full view of both the camera and his audience, each of the three witnesses seems to have seen something completely different!

I’ve said that this is a Dr Gideon Fell mystery, but Fell himself doesn’t appear until halfway through the novel. Until that point, the investigations are handled by Inspector Elliot of Scotland Yard, who seems quite competent and thorough…until we discover that he is not being entirely honest with the reader. By the time Fell is brought into the story, most of the clues are in place, but Elliot and the local Sodbury Cross police have failed to interpret them correctly. I’m not surprised they were struggling, because this is a very clever mystery with lots of twists and turns and an ingenious solution. I certainly couldn’t solve it and had to wait for Fell to explain it all, which he does bit by bit as each piece of the puzzle falls into place. I was particularly impressed by a clue involving a clock, which I would never have worked out for myself.

There are so many other things I loved about this book. Carr does an excellent job of capturing the mood and atmosphere of a little English village where the people are trying to come to terms with the discovery that there’s a poisoner in their midst. Some references to real life crimes and poisoning cases are worked into the plot – in particular the case of Christiana Edmunds, who was known as the ‘Chocolate Cream Killer’. I was also fascinated by the descriptions of 1930s film and camera technology, with the recording made of Marcus Chesney’s dramatic scene playing a very important part in the solving of the mystery.

Having enjoyed The Black Spectacles so much, I’m sure I’ll be reading more of the Gideon Fell mysteries soon. You may want to note that this book has also been published in the US as The Problem of the Green Capsule, just in case anyone buys the same book twice!