The Corpse in the Waxworks

August 15, 2021
The title says it all: juge d'instruction Henri Bencolin outdoes himself in this 1932 yarn, perhaps the most atmospheric of all Carr's floridly atmospheric mysteries. Bencolin and his American sidekick, Jeff Marle, have come to the Mus�e Augustin following the trail of Odette Duch�ne, whose father, a Cabinet minister, shot himself 10 years ago. Odette's fiance, Capt. Robert Chaumont, saw her go into the waxworks, but she was never seen again until her body was fished from the Seine. Searching for clues to her death, Bencolin and Marle find something even more shocking: the corpse of Odette's friend Claudine Martel nestled in the arms of the Satyr of the Seine, one of the Mus�e Augustin's signature attractions. A telltale scrap of paper leads the sleuths to Etienne Galant, the owner of the neighboring Club of Coloured Masks, who retired from teaching English literature at Christ Church College, Oxford, to blackmail high-society contemporaries like Odette's father whose depravity made them irresistible targets. Any neighborhood that features both a waxworks and a house of debauchery guarantees the creeps, and the denouement features one of the weirdest, wildest confrontations ever between the detective and the murderer. An earlier, lesser bonus story from Carr's college days, "The Murder in Number Four," sets Bencolin the task of figuring out who strangled a notorious diamond smuggler without being seen entering or leaving his compartment aboard the Blue Arrow train from Dieppe to Paris. If this slice of Grand Guignol doesn't give you the yips, you're probably yip-proof. Your loss.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 13, 2021
In this superior British Library Crime Classics reissue from Carr (1906–1977), first published in 1932, Paris examining magistrate Henri Bencolin investigates the murder of Odette Duchêne, a former cabinet minister’s daughter, whose bruised and stabbed body was found floating in the Seine. Odette was last seen entering the Musée Augustin, which displays waxworks. Her murder may be part of a pattern linked to the sparsely attended museum, as another young woman seen there disappeared six months earlier. That theory’s strengthened after Bencolin and his sidekick, Jeff Marle, visit the Musée Augustin, where what Marle took to be an effigy in the arms of a wax satyr is actually the stabbed corpse of Claudine Martel, Odette’s best friend, also a retired cabinet minister’s daughter. Carr matches the creepy Grand Guignol atmosphere with an utterly fair solution that reinforces the importance of reading every word. Though the Bencolin tales lack the humor of Carr’s Gideon Fell and Henry Merrivale impossible crime novels, golden age fans who haven’t encountered them are in for a treat.