No more fooling around: John Dickson Carr and the Second World War in Nine – And Death Makes Ten (1940)

Of all the Golden Age authors charged with ignoring socio-cultural realities, John Dickson Carr, the mastery of the locked room mystery, is one of the most frequently named, and perhaps the most guilty. Carr’s professed on countless occasions his preference for escapism over any kind of realist literature, and recent scholarly attention has focused on the overlap between interwar detective fiction, horror, and the fantastic in his writing. This chapter highlights an anomaly within such a view of Carr, performing a close reading of Nine – and Death Makes Ten (1940). For once a Carr novel is haunted not by witches or vampires, but by Nazis and U-boats. The first part of the chapter will focus on space, considering how the Second World War changes the spaces traditionally seen in Carr’s work and interwar detective fiction more broadly. The setting is not a sprawling country manor, but a strictly policed naval vessel. The detective cannot detect as usual, outranked by and bound to the orders of military authorities. Space ultimately dictates the events, pace, and tone of the narrative: whether the ship is in international waters, a specific nation’s territory, or in the dreaded submarine zone. Also of key interest is how the military space clashes and eventually synthesises with the gothic and the detective space. Nine – and Death Makes Ten is a perfect example of hybridisation within detective fiction, depicting a ‘military gothic’ or ‘military detective fiction’, the latter requiring its own methods of detection, knowledge, clues, alibis, and morality. Comparisons with Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937) – also depicting a series of murders on a luxury boat in foreign waters – throw the unique space Carr has created into sharp relief. The second part of the chapter will link space to national identity. Carr is set apart from other Golden Age writers in his dual identity as both Englishman and American. Nine – and Death Makes Ten was written before America entered the Second War World, a crucial detail that hangs over the novel. There is a distinct uneasiness between the British and the Americans aboard the ship (who are not quite allies, not quite enemies), casting an unnervingly ambiguous lens upon Britishness, radically unlike the rose-tinted lens Carr usually deploys. In this way Nine – and Death Makes Ten complicates our image of John Dickson Carr, and contextualises wartime English detective fiction within a wider, more complex framework of international relations and national identity – in which Britannia does not necessarily rule the waves.