The Ghosts' High Noon

by John Dickson Carr

On Monday evening, October 14, 1912, Jim Blake, reporter and author of the current best seller, the Count of Monte Carlo, was on a train bound for New Orleans. Colonel George Harvey, the president of Harper's, a stately publishing house in Franklin Square, and editor of a magazine called Harper's Weekly, had sent Jim to do a personality story for the magazine on James Claiborne Blake (known as Blake) who was running for Congress from New Orleans.New Orleans was a torn of enchantment and rumors, and politics, and dark deeds, anonymous letters, odd phone calls--and even a sudden death.

Genres: Mystery, Historical Fiction

255 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

AKA Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger Fairbairn.

John Dickson Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1906. It Walks by Night, his first published detective novel, featuring the Frenchman Henri Bencolin, was published in 1930. Apart from Dr Fell, whose first appearance was in Hag's Nook in 1933, Carr's other series detectives (published under the nom de plume of Carter Dickson) were the barrister Sir Henry Merrivale, who debuted in The Plague Court Murders (1934).

Reviews

[Stephen Osborne · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 This later Carr novel is a historical mystery set in 1912. A lot of the people and places mentioned are real, giving the book a bit of grounding in the real world. The mystery is quite good and solid Carr with a seemingly impossible crime, but my goodness it took a long time to get to it! And Carr's characters like to talk. And talk.

[Eve Lyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Solitamente i romanzi di Dickson Carr sono quelli che adoro per via del suo stile, intrighi, misteri e indagini a seguire ma questo romanzo... mi ha abbastanza delusa. Descrizione dei personaggi ben fatta sebbene durante le indagini dell'omicidio, i vari personaggi erano molto strafottenti e vaghi, persi nella loro vita che nel scoprire il vero colpevole. Noioso e quasi statico, dinamico forse per qualche riga e quando si pensa che la storia ha raggiunto una svolta, ecco che si ricade nella tediosità del racconto...

[Bonnye Reed]

Early Bird Books 199

[Keith Boynton · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a point where Carr's mannerisms – the inconsequent remarks, the constant interruptions at crucial moments of near-revelation, the characters' sometimes baffling indifference to danger – become outright defects. This book is past that point. (Also, the story's cavalier attitude towards pedophilia is pretty damn jarring.)

[Michele bookloverforever · Rating 4 out of 5]

I devoured this author in my teens. Dated now bit still a good tale.

[Bonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a little conflicted about how to rate this book. It was intriguing, though not very innovative. I liked it mostly because the author grew up in the era just after this novel takes place, so the setting was almost familiar to him, and he has a somewhat old fashioned style. It moves along at a good pace, has real places and a few actual people, though the story is fictional.