THE CORPSE IN THE WAXWORKS

The title says it all: juge d’instruction Henri Bencolin outdoes himself in this 1932 yarn, perhaps the most atmospheric of all Carr’s floridly atmospheric mysteries.

Bencolin and his American sidekick, Jeff Marle, have come to the Musée Augustin following the trail of Odette Duchêne, whose father, a Cabinet minister, shot himself 10 years ago. Odette’s fiance, Capt. Robert Chaumont, saw her go into the waxworks, but she was never seen again until her body was fished from the Seine. Searching for clues to her death, Bencolin and Marle find something even more shocking: the corpse of Odette’s friend Claudine Martel nestled in the arms of the Satyr of the Seine, one of the Musée Augustin’s signature attractions. A telltale scrap of paper leads the sleuths to Etienne Galant, the owner of the neighboring Club of Coloured Masks, who retired from teaching English literature at Christ Church College, Oxford, to blackmail high-society contemporaries like Odette’s father whose depravity made them irresistible targets. Any neighborhood that features both a waxworks and a house of debauchery guarantees the creeps, and the denouement features one of the weirdest, wildest confrontations ever between the detective and the murderer. An earlier, lesser bonus story from Carr’s college days, “The Murder in Number Four,” sets Bencolin the task of figuring out who strangled a notorious diamond smuggler without being seen entering or leaving his compartment aboard the Blue Arrow train from Dieppe to Paris.

If this slice of Grand Guignol doesn’t give you the yips, you’re probably yip-proof. Your loss.