The Ten Teacups by Carter Dickson – Review
By Karl Hornsey
There’s something special about the series of books released under the banner of the British Library Crime Classics. For a start, there’s the look of them on the shelf, that clean and distinctive design that makes them stand out. Any regular reader of them knows what they’re going to get as well, so they’re comforting and reassuring, like slipping into your favourite clothes after a hard day, or visiting a long-cherished favourite holiday destination. By their very nature, the titles in the series are largely from the ‘golden age’ of British crime writing even if, in the case of The Ten Teacups, the author was born in America.
This latest release is of a book first published in 1937, authored by the prolific John Dickson Carr under his pseudonym of Carter Dickson, which he used largely to create the series of ‘Sir Henry Merrivale Murders’, and it’s another story that will appeal to all fans of the BLCC. The White Priory Murders is the previous release in the series that features Merrivale, and hopefully there’ll be more to come. Dickson Carr is a name very well known by fans of crime stories from the 1930s and 40s, with several other titles having been released by the British Library, including It Walks By Night, The Lost Gallows and, a particular favourite of mine, The Corpse in the Waxworks.
“Ingenious”
There’s invariably an ‘impossible’ crime to solve in Dickson Carr’s stories and The Ten Teacups is no exception, with a fiendishly cunning solution kept up the author’s sleeve until the very end. The title, without offering up too many spoilers, is one of those Hitchcockian-style ones, that hints at all manner of things, but ultimately forms little more than a distraction from the parts of the story that really matter, which is just one of the ingenious aspects of the tale. The characters are a cross-section of the society one would expect to find in 1930s England, and will be familiar to anyone who loves a good Miss Marple mystery or, in the more modern world, a Midsomer Murders, where everyone comes under suspicion and death is seldom simple.
Merrivale himself can be something of a frustrating central character, leaving much of the donkey work of detection to the policemen beneath him, while, of course, proving that the methodical approach of simply taxing, to steal from Hercule Poirot, the ‘little grey cells’ will win the day in the end. If I have one criticism of this book, it’s the overuse of some rather dated dialogue that always seems to feature the likes of, “Gor blimey”, “Lummy”, and “Hurrum”, which I’m sure is how Americans believe all ‘stiff upper lip’ Brits speak to this very day. That aside, this is another cracking addition to the collection, and one that will likely leave even the most ardent of crime fan guessing til the very end, such is the remarkable solution reached by one of the undisputable masters of the genre.
‘The Ten Teacups’ by Carter Dickson is published by the British Library
Karl’s love of writing was piqued at the age of eight, when he won a Blue Peter badge in an essay-writing competition. The location of said badge might be a mystery now, but the memory never fades. Hours spent writing about sport as a teenager, in pre-internet years when you had to make your entertainment, honed his skills, and Karl has worked in TV and radio listings at PA Media for 28 years, and the age of hybrid working means 50% of that can be at home listening to Classic FM and thinking about his next visit to his beloved Yorkshire Dales.
@KarlHornsey, hornskar
