The Corpse in the Waxworks
A Paris Mystery
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"The purpose, the illusion, the spirit of a waxworks. It is an atmosphere of death. It is soundless and motionless… Do you see?"
Last night Mademoiselle Duchêne was seen heading into the Gallery of Horrors at the Musée Augustin waxworks, alive. Today she was found in the Seine, murdered. The museum's proprietor, long perturbed by the unnatural vitality of his figures, claims that he saw one of them following the victim into the dark—a lead that Henri Bencolin, head of the Paris police and expert of 'impossible' crimes, cannot possibly resist.
Surrounded by the eerie noises of the night, Bencolin prepares to enter the ill-fated waxworks, his associate Jeff Marle and the victim's fiancé in tow. Waiting within, beneath the glass-eyed gaze of a leering waxen satyr, is a gruesome discovery and the first clues of a twisted and ingenious mystery.
First published in 1932 at the height of crime fiction's Golden Age, this macabre and atmospheric dive into the murky underground of Parisian society presents an intelligent puzzle delivered at a stunning pace. This new edition also includes the rare Inspector Bencolin short story "The Murder in Number Four" by John Dickson Carr, and an Introduction by CWA Diamond Dagger-Award winning author Martin Edwards.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
