The Blind Barber

Introduction by Anthony Boucher

This book is a farce about murder.

I feel I should give you fair warning, because this sort of thing hasn't been common lately. But if your instant reaction is shocked withdrawal, please pause a moment and hear me out.

If I have one major complaint about the 300-odd mysteries that I read each year as a reviewer, it is that none of them are funny. Oh, I admit Richard S. Prather or Carter Brown can be amusing, but only in the trimmings: it's the writing that's funny, rather than the story.

And I long for the days of Craig Rice and Alice Tilton and Richard Shattuck and Jonathan Latimer when there was a wild cockeyed preposterousness in the events surrounding murder and even in murder itself — and not just in the style of the narrator.

I suppose this longing dates me. It's a 1930ish attitude. There was a fine film late in the Depression, starring Carole Lombard and written by Ben Hecht, called Nothing Sacred. It was a rowdy comedy about a (supposed) cancer victim. The "nothing-sacred" approach seems out of place today; now we take things more seriously, especially death.

But death and laughter are old friends. The medieval Totentanz is comic; and the macabre poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes christened his major tragedy Death's Jest Book. As Duncan sinks in his gore, the drunken porter rises with merry and improper quips. And the murders of real life seldom lack their element of comedy. One of the most terrible days in the annals of American murder opened on a scorching morning with a man named John Vinnicum Morse eating warmed-over mutton soup for breakfast.

I suspect that many readers — particularly the new young readers of mysteries — may relish a more generous ration of comedy-in-murder than publishers have been giving them; this series hopes to bring you, from time to time, Alan Green, Richard Shattuck and other prime practitioners of the criminally absurd,[1] starting now with John Dickson Carr.

There's a strong comic element in many of Carr's books. It's most prevalent in the cases of Sir Henry Meri-vale, by "Carter Dickson" (and I realize with a sudden shock that it's almost ten years since H. M. has appeared in a new book); but it turns up frequently in Dr. Gideon Fell's cases, too — as in the noble drinking sequences in The Case of the Constant Suicides.

But these are intrusions, like the porter. Just once did Carr set himself to write an all-out farce (with murder as the intrusion). And, being the incomparable technician that he is, he produced something unique.

Wisely, he kept Dr. Fell out of the merry maelstrom and made him act, for once, as a pure armchair detective, in the manner of the Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner. Then he threaded through his fantastic plot a careful set of clues for a faultless formal problem in detection.

Unlike almost all other comedies of terrors, The Blind Barber is a detective story, in the strictest sense. But never was a reader more bedeviled with distractions from detection. Who observes clues while he's wiping his laughter-streaming eyes?

I hope you enjoy the challenge… and the fun.

Anthony Boucher