The pulpy cover of my copy of Fear is the Same by Carter Dickson (1956) along with the back cover copy that screams: "Many men held her body -- did any man hold her heart?" would make one think that this is a classic 1950s crime novel. Instead, it's an unusual time-travel / historical romance / murder mystery / adventure novel. While some readers of the genre might be upset about the bait and switch, I rather liked the unexpected story. This book is occasionally more complicated than it needs to be and frequently reveals its author's delight in the details of the Regency period, but it pulls the reader along with the action sequences and has some unexpectedly great character development. I could have asked for a slightly less abrupt ending, but the book holds together well as a whole.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2014/08/fear-is-same-by-carter-dickson-1956.html ] ( )

This completes my reading of the three John Dickson Carr timeslip historical detections (the others being The Devil in Velvet and Fire, Burn!). This, the second to be written (and done under his Dickson pseudonym), is much of a muchness with the other two -- which is to say, it's a tremendous amount of fun, the mystery aspect of it is well handled, but the timeslip element is perfunctory. In this instance Jennifer Baird and Philip Clavering, Lord Glenarvon, find themselves in Regency London with a feeling that they've known another life, and that they've known each other, and been romantically entwined, in that life. Jenny, whose "memories" of that life, 150 years in the future, expand slightly ahead of Philip's, soon dimly recalls they were tangled up in a murder case then and that when Phil was in terrible danger -- presumably because convincingly framed for the crime -- she'd impassionedly wished they could be carried off into a different time altogether. Well, so they have been . . . but it looks as if the events of the 20th century are going to be "repeated" back here at the end of the 18th.

Phil's wife Chloris is magnetically sexy but poisonous. Expecting him soon to drop dead of a heart attack so that she can inherit his fortune, she has been carrying on an affair with pompous stuffed-shirt swordsman Colonel Thornton, a man swift to defend his honour even though he evidently has none. When Phil -- "inexplicably changed" into a much stronger and more vibrant man than Chloris has known him, capable of kicking Thornton downstairs -- knowing now that he loves Jenny, starts to demand a divorce, Chloris says she'll think about it, but not tonight. Even so, that night he goes to her room to demand they talk terms, only to find her place has been taken by her similar-looking maid Molly, Chloris having slipped out the back way presumably to the arms of her fancy man. Phil leaves the maid, having helped himself to a glass of what proves to be opium-laced wine, and falls into profound slumber in his own room. The next morning the maid is found strangled in Chloris's room, and everyone assumes Phil went there in the dark and accidentally killed the wrong woman.

The lovers go on the run, being sheltered first by Richard Brinsley Sheridan at the Drury Lane Theatre, then by vicious, untrustworthy underworld boss Samuel Holder. They are rescued from Holder's clutches by a cluster of Regency notables headed by the Prince of Wales himself, who has befriended them and whom Carr/Dickson portrays as a figure not blatantly distinguishable from his series character Sir Henry Merrivale. But even after Phil has unravelled the facts of the murder, events conspire against them . . . In the last few pages, they return to their present, where they find a very similar murder case has been solved in their absence, and that the menace Jenny "remembered" has now evaporated.

For most of the book, my interest had no chance to flag. The sole exception came fairly late on (pp214-43), where Carr indulged in one of those big, contrived set pieces that mar a few of his other novels. Here the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, Sheridan, etc., all descend on a disused church where Holder intends to force Phil (whose secret life in the 20th century is as a pugilist) to take on Gentleman Jackson in a bareknuckle fight to the finish; the dignitaries intervene, for reasons that aren't terribly clear; the Prince acts as referee while boxer Phil takes on in the ring swordsmen Thornton and Holder simultaneously; when he wins, the dignitaries face down an army of Bow Street Runners to give the lovers safe conduct to Carlton House. I suppose this sequence is all right in its way; it reminded me, though, of one of those stupid Hollywood movies where the directors have thought it witty to stuff in as many cameo parts as possible -- I didn't know whether to yawn or be irritated.

And there's an odd bit. At one point Phil, coloured by his more brutal Regency persona, dishes out a backhander to Chloris. When she picks herself up, she makes it plain that she quite likes a bit of the rough. I'd not have thought much about this except that I recalled, back in The Devil in Velvet, one of Sir Nick's floozies had similar masochistic tendencies. What dark little secret, I wonder, lurked behind the urbane mask of one of my favourite mystery writers . . . ( )