This was not the first time that mystery author Henry Morgan has relied on Dr Gideon Fell’s help to solve a bizarre murder and it won’t be the last (although the problem of the two hangman can’t have been that interesting as Carr couldn’t be bothered to write that one up.)  When the Queen Victoria docked at Southampton from New York, Morgan raced to Fell to help him sort out the mysteries involved in that voyage – and most notably bringing the so-called Blind Barber to justice.

A missing piece of film that could incriminate one of the great and good, assaults in the dark, an appearing and disappearing emerald elephant and an appearing and disappearing dead woman all combine to cause a puzzling case for Morgan and his friends – and it would help them a lot if they stopped making things worse with their investigations…

The Blind Barber was the fourth Gideon Fell mystery, following Hag’s Nook, The Mad Hatter Mystery and The Eight Of Swords. It’s got something of a bad press, for a few reasons. Some of them are deserved, some are not. I first read it… probably twenty years ago and have never gone back to it, but after success with The Eight Of Swords, which I had similar less-fond memories of, I was quite pleased when Book Club chose this one.

The first “issue” is that for John Dickson Carr, the King Of The Impossible Crime, there isn’t one here. Yes, there’s a vanishing body, but you’re on a ship in the middle of the ocean, it’s not too hard to work out where it’s gone… But at this stage in his career, Carr wasn’t writing impossible crimes that often. Hag’s Nook has one, as do a few others, but in his books to date, it’s more common for there not to be one.

The second “issue” is the lack of Fell. There’s a similarity to the lack of Hercule Poirot in The Clocks, with an appearance in the middle and the end but not in the main narrative (we also get Fell in the first chapter in this one – take that, Poirot!). There’s a real sense that the original book didn’t have Fell in it, and Carr was persuaded to include him – the middle section and the prologue could have been added after the fact. Having said that, Morgan doesn’t seem to be doing any actual detecting during his story and given the sixteen clues that Fell cites that Morgan has missed, it does seem as if it could have been deliberately constructed this way from the start. Who knows?

Having said that, it’s still not the sort of thing that really works for me. It’s a comedy caper of a mystery, where most of the problems caused are due to Morgan’s team of sleuths being full of people inclined to do something stupid at the drop of the hat, often when putting on a very silly voice. Prince Ludwig the Indestructible would be very proud…

If you can follow everything that is going on, between a game of Find The Elephant, the disappearing body and various other subplots, you’re a better reader than me, butyou can lay back and just nod when things happen. You’ll probably still guess the murderer as there aren’t a lot of suspects. There’s some reasonable deduction in the penultimate chapter but spotting the clues is like being asked what colour the cup holders were after staring at a fully occupied clown car. Having said all that, the last page is brilliant. Almost worth the effort.

So, go into this knowing what to expect and you’ll get much more out of it. This second read, knowing about the first two issues, made it a much better read for me. But given that I hated it the first time I read it though, that’s not exactly a glowing endorsement.