The Burning Court

By John Dickson Carr

Book Overview

When Edward Stevens, an editor at Herald and Son's publishing house, learns of the mysterious events that befell his neighbor's rich uncle, he shrugs off their seemingly supernatural circumstances. He's a logical man and doesn't give much credence to claims of a ghostly figure visiting the man before his death, or the witch's ladder discovered under his pillow after he passed.

But as suspicions of strange murder begin to creep in, it becomes harder for Stevens to ignore their eerie potential. His neighbor breaks into the cement-sealed crypt where his uncle is buried, only to learn that the corpse has vanished. Witness testimony further implicates the intrusion of the spirit world into the affair of the murdered uncle, and unsettling echoes of the past into the present push things even further past Stevens' understanding of reality.

Will the events be logically explained, or is there something unexplainable at work? The answer lies in the pages of this atmospheric and haunting puzzler, which finds Carr, the master of the locked room mystery, operating at the peak of his powers.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1613166990
• ISBN13: 9781613166994
• Release Date: November 2025
• Publisher: American Mystery Classics
• Length: 312 Pages

Customer Reviews

What an ending, what a book.

The Burning Court is John Dickson Carr's most famous independent novel. This is a good thing, for no matter which detective he had(Fell or Merrivale), they would have been wrong. Edward Stevens is looking at a book manuscript of true crime. This book looks at the trial of murder's. Stevens thoughts drift to his boss's uncle, Miles Despard. Miles Despard died of gasteroenteritis, and was sealed up in the familly crypt. Before he died, one of the servents saw a glowing woman enter the room through a bricked up door, and leave the same way. After the man died, a piec of string tied in nine knots was found under his pillow. Stevens push's this out of his mind. He opens the book, and sees the picture of Marie D'Aubrey, exicuted for murder in 1869. It is a picture of his wife! Allthough their seems to be a supernatural reason for all these things, Stevens sets out to prove their is a logical solution. Little does he know, things aren't as they seem.

Spend an evening at the Burning Court

Whew! This is John Dickson Carr at his puzzling, ingenious, and atmospheric best, with a sensational, stunning ending. The set-up sounds like a standard Carr plot: a wealthy man is murdered, apparently by poison in a locked room. Subsequently his body disappears from a seemingly impregnable family crypt. The author, the master of the locked-room mystery genre, surprises us, however, with different characters (his familiar series detectives do not appear), a different setting (rural Pennsylvania rather than Britain), and most importantly, a different type of logic in the case's solution. I don't want to be more specific than that so as not to spoil the conclusion. The novel's main character is well-drawn and faces a very relateable and intense conflict over his efforts to keep his marriage together and both understand and protect his, he fears, troubled and in-trouble wife. The critic Julian Symons, in his idiosyncratic but insightful survey of crime fiction BLOODY MURDER, writes that Carr's fiction for the most part lacks "genuine feeling" (though he generally praises Carr highly). I can see how one could have this impression of Carr, because the coldly calculated puzzles are what one remembers most about his fiction, and are what he is justly most famous for. I think this criticism is off the mark, though, and this book illustrates why. We do vividly feel the narrator's love for his wife, growing panic at his quandry, and other moments of fear and exhilaration. Carr may be a master craftsman, but in this and many of his fine novels, his work is hardly cold or unfeeling. I can see why some of the reviewers object both to the somewhat atypically dark tone of the ending as well as its internal logic, which are so different from those of most of the Carr/Dickson novels that his readers know and love. But to me that is rather the point--what is especially great about the author's books is that while we expect a certain type of characterization and plot development from him, sometimes he deliberately crosses us up! Carr was a master of the mystery novel form, and part of his mastery was his ability to play with readers' expectations and then subvert them, often with stunning effect, as in this classic, one-of-a-kind book.

Among Carr's Best - Supernatural Elements Heighten Suspense

The title, The Burning Court (1937), derives from the infamous Burning Court that extracted confessions from alleged witches through the use of the wheel and fire during the reign of Louis XIV. However, the setting for this story is not France, but in a small community outside Philadelphia in the spring of 1929. John Dickson Carr remains famous for his ingenious (perhaps some would say too ingenious) locked room mysteries. The Burning Court mystery offers not one, but two locked rooms: first, a woman in seventeenth century dress is seen walking through a wall where a now bricked-up door once existed, and second, a recently buried body goes missing from a securely sealed, underground crypt. The atmosphere is one of horror and dread. The two occurrences defy logical analysis. The Burning Court is among the best stories of John Dickson Carr, even though it is atypical in that Carr's legendary investigators (Dr. Gideon Fell, Sir Henry Merrivale, and Henri Ben Colin) are all absent. The capable Captain Brennan of the Philadelphia Police Department and the eccentric author-amateur detective, Gaudan Cross, appear in only this one story. The Burning Court is completely typical, however, in that the solution is well beyond the reach of the reader. Over fifty pages the section titled Summing-Up slowly unravels these two related locked room puzzles. This summation is actually a continuation of the story in that new, critical information is revealed that helps disperse the supernatural fog. Likewise, this apparently complicated murder is shown to be quite straight-forward, but coincidental events (as often happens in a Carr story, and sometimes in life too) obfuscated matters to a remarkable extent. The Burning Court is a fascinating story that makes enjoyable reading. Nonetheless, it is always fair to ask whether a John Dickson Carr solution is really fair. Carr has a tendency to withhold key information essential to the solution. The solutions to the two locked room puzzles in my view strayed into that gray area separating fairness from unfairness. (In a footnote Carr does refer the reader to past pages, suggesting that he might have recognized that he overly disguised his clues.) In a final twist Carr reveals a second solution, a solution within a solution, just when the reader thinks this mystery is finally solved. Four stars to The Burning Court.

Ambiguous and Dubious

Opens in stunning fashion with the hero discovering a photograph of his wife, cited as the Marquise de Brinvilliers, in a book of famous poisoners. Following the suspicious death by arsenical poisoning of a neighbour and the vanishing of his corpse from a sealed granite crypt, he becomes convinced that she is a witch risen from the dead. Carr makes this bizarre plot quite convincing through an atmosphere which relies far more on understatement than it does on the thick effects of the Bencolins (or even Hag's Nook). Unfortunately, Carr follows a highly logical and quite convincing plot with a supernatural one that makes nonsense of the other, yet, owing to references made in later books, impossible to credit, making the reader uncertain of what to believe. Thus is a good story and considerable ingenuity tossed carelessly out the window.

Excellent. Carr's finest.

Great story. Besides being a superb locked-room mysterey, the atmosphere and the mood are perfectly chilling.