“His presence was sanity and reassurance.” #BLCC150 #carterdickson

May sees a very special event taking place, and that’s the release of the 150th title in the British Library Crime Classics series. These have been a massive success, bringing back into print some wonderful, lost Golden Age crime mysteries, and I, for one, am a huge fan (as you’ll no doubt realise from the amount of titles I’ve covered!) The celebratory book is a good one, too – it’s by the master of the locked room mystery, John Dickson Carr, but under one of his aliases: “The Unicorn Murders” by Carter Dickson (whom I’ll refer to as Carr throughout this post). First published in 1935, “Unicorn…” is a gripping mixture of ‘impossible’ murder mystery and spy thriller which features one of Carr’s series detectives, Sir Henry Merrivale (known as ‘H.M.’). Set in France, the story find Europe in a state of turmoil, and an important item known only as the ‘Unicorn’ is being transported through the country back to the UK by the diplomat, Sir George Ramsden. Our narrator is one Kenwood Blake,…