Caroline: In the everyday course of modern life, we rarely feel more vulnerable than when we are horizontal, a stranger in a mask looming with a sharp and buzzing implement in hand ready to do violence to our teeth. Of course, we do this willingly, for the sake of good oral health, but it is almost too easy to appreciate the appeal of this scenario to the detective novelist. Physically and mentally subdued, the patient already feels like a victim. A situation familiar to so many, which the reader can easily picture. Plus, on a practical level, in a surgery there are a lot of sharp implements to hand, as well as masks and gowns that easily obscure identity. To the creative imagination seeking a setting for a crime, it’s very fertile ground.
So join me, won’t you, in the dentist’s chair. Open wide.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. A friendly warning: there are going to be some spoilers in this episode. If you want to avoid knowing details about something that you’re reading or planning to read, please consult the list of books and stories in the episode description before proceeding.
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As a dental patient rather than a dentist, first kind of dental-based mystery that comes to mind is, of course, the sort where a murder victim is actually found in the dentist’s chair. Whether you are prey to major anxieties or phobias about dentist appointments or just have a normal amount of apprehension about what might be wrong with your teeth, this feels like the obvious route for a golden age crime writer to go.
We don’t have to look far for a novel that ably fulfils this brief. Death in the Dentist’s Chair by Molly Thynne was published in 1932 and is the dental mystery of our dreams (or nightmares, delete as appropriate). Thynne’s chess-playing detective of Greek origin, Dr Constantine, is awaiting his turn in his dentist’s waiting room when something peculiar occurs. The dentist in question, a Mr Humphrey Davenport, has briefly left a patient alone in his surgery while he went to make a minor adjustment to her dentures. Upon returning, he finds the previously open door locked against him. Once the lock is forced, the dentist discovers that his patient has been murdered, her throat cut while she lies in the dentist’s chair awaiting his return. A shocking, horrifying turn of events.
The dentist himself seems to have a complete alibi, having been visibly in the workroom adjusting the dentures, but the same cannot be said for the other patients in the waiting room. The murderer seems to have escaped through the open window of the surgery, too, so anyone else could have got in that way and attacked Mrs Miller while she was trustingly lying prone in the dentist’s chair. Dr Constantine assists Scotland Yard’s Detective Inspector Arkwright with the investigation in what is the penultimate of Thynne’s six detective novels.
She was from an aristocratic and artistic background, being related to the Marquesses of Bath on her father’s side and the painter James Whistler on her mother’s, and the necessity to earn a living by her pen does not seem to have been very pressing. Mary Thynne published one non-crime novel in 1914, The Uncertain Glory, and then six detective novels between 1928 and 1933, before retiring from writing to live comfortably as a self-proclaimed “spinster” in Devon until her death in 1950. I enjoyed this novel a lot, but since she was never really among the front rank of golden age detective novelists there is only a limited amount of information available about her, and I have sadly not been able to ascertain whether it was an event in her own life that inspired the setting of Death in the Dentist’s Chair. I like to think the idea came to her while at the dentist herself, though.
Mary Thynne’s novel pairs nicely with a short story by the American writer Cornell Woolrich from 1934. “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair“ is told in the first person, narrated by a journalist who is nervously awaiting his turn in the dentist’s hot seat. The current patient has a botched filling that needs urgent attention, and through the door Roger can hear the dentist start drilling to remove it. Then, tragedy strikes — the patient loses consciousness, and despite the best efforts of Roger and the panicked dentist, he dies immediately in the chair. It subsequently turns out that he has perished, improbably, from cyanide poisoning, even though there is no cyanide in the surgery. Where did it come from and how did it get all over the dead man’s mouth? Spoilers for the rest of this story coming up now, so please skip ahead a couple of minutes if you don’t want to hear them.
Woolrich, who really belongs to the American noir school of crime writing that also boasts Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler among its members, does an excellent job of racheting up the suspense in this short dental mystery. While the dentist, Steve Standish, is taken into custody, Roger, the journalist, goes in search of a different suspect — another dentist, a former friend and partner of Standish’s who has recently hit some hard times and fallen prey to professional jealousy.
Roger presents himself as a patient in disguise to this second practitioner, and receives a fake filling full of cyanide along with the instruction to go and have it fixed by Standish. Of course, as soon as the drill penetrated the cap, Roger would die in the chair, just as the previous patient had. Possibly the most tense description of a dental procedure in all of detective fiction, Standish manages to remove the poisoned filling intact. The police accept this evidence of Roger’s alternate explanation for the crime, and he is able to leave the surgery with both his life and the knowledge that he has saved his dentist friend from a cunning plot and a wrongful murder charge.
This was Woolrich’s very first crime story, having spent much of the 1920s writing Jazz Age style fiction in an attempt to fulfil his “dream of being the next Scott Fitzgerald”, as the introduction to a later anthology of his crime fiction puts it. The Depression of the early 1930s had killed off Woolrich’s ambition of supporting himself via literary fiction alone, and thus he began writing for pulp mystery magazines, which was still a lucrative market. “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair” was his first commissioned work for Detective Fiction Weekly and marked the start of a successful publishing career, albeit not the one he had initially desired. He did find many fans, though, although his work can be a little harder to track down today. One of his short stories in the 1940s became source material for the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window and two of his novels were later made into films by François Truffaut.
Before we move on to other variations of the dental mystery, I must give an honourable mention to another work from 1934, Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay. Although primarily known, with good reason, as murder mystery set in and around the trains of the London Underground, this book does actually have a dentist connection too. Miss Euphemia Pongleton is found dead on the steps of Belsize Park tube station early on in the novel, yes, but she is only there because she was on her way to a dentist’s appointment. Was she, perhaps, a narrowly averted death in the dentist’s chair?
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The dentists themselves are hardly safer than their patients, once the detective novelists get going. Agatha Christie indulged in a spot of dentist-disposal in her 1940 novel One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, a Hercule Poirot tale that received mixed reviews upon its initial publication, but which I have found to be rather enjoyable to untangle upon a re-read. As in the case of the Mary Thynne book I mentioned at the start, Christie’s story sees the detective making a trip to the dentist — in this case, Mr Henry Morley of 58, Queen Charlotte Street, London. Poirot dreads this visit to “the Chair” (in caps) and all that it reveals about his own inflated self image, because, as he says, “few men are heroes to themselves at the moment of visiting their dentist”. On his way up to the appointment, everyone Poirot sees looks extremely like a murderer to him, although he does later admit that this might have more to do with his nervousness and pain rather than the people themselves.
Despite Poirot’s apprehensions, three new fillings are introduced to his mouth without undue trouble — Mr Morley is a a very good dentist, we are told — but later the same day Poirot is summoned back to the dentist by his friend Inspector Japp. That same dentist has been discovered shot in his own surgery, ostensibly by his own hand, but the detectives have their doubts, thanks to Morley’s otherwise cheerful demeanour and some rather suspicious dragging marks on the surgery carpet.
Thus, a murder investigation begins, that ends up taking in many other locations and some aspects of international politics. The dentist’s surgery is a convenient meeting place, though, in this book. It is a place where different sorts of people — detective, financier, washed up actress — can all plausibly co-exist in the same waiting room. Although the actual practice of dentistry itself is not at the heart of the mystery in the way it is in the Cornell Woolrich story, it is hard to imagine how One, Two, Buckle My Shoe could work without the opening scenes in the dental surgery.
And although not golden age, I must just mention one other murdered dentist — Frederick Gilchrist, the titular victim of M.C. Beaton’s 1997 novel, Death of a Dentist. A brutal bout of toothache drives Beaton’s series detective Hamish MacBeth to make an appointment and drive 120 miles to keep it, only upon arrival to find Gilchrist dead and almost too many suspects with plausible motives for killing the unpopular, womanising dentist. Being a dentist does give you the opportunity to meet a lot of different people without arousing suspicion, but it is not a profession without its perils — at least in a murder mystery, that is.
After the break: a dentist’s deathly duty.
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So far, the dentists we have looked at in golden age detective fiction have been murdered and framed for murder, but what about instances where they actually embark on a murderous second career? Once again, I must draw your attention to the spoiler warning for this bit.
As I did the research for this episode, I began to wonder whether Agatha Christie had something against dentists. She killed one off in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe as we’ve already covered, but five years before she had also involved one in a rather complicated airborne crime. Death in the Clouds from 1935 is notable for a few things. First, it captures rather brilliantly what civilian aviation was like in the 1930s. Second, it features a mistake with a murder weapon that Christie would humorously correct via her mystery novelist character, Ariadne Oliver, a couple of decades later. And third, we get a major dentist protagonist who reinvents a trick from an earlier era of detective fiction to allow himself to move about a plane unseen. This dentist, Norman Gale, had been in Paris researching and purchasing new dental instruments before taking a flight back to England that just so happens to also contain Hercule Poirot and a murder victim. Then, he follows in the footsteps of a number of previous suspicious Christie characters who have become temporary “sidekicks” for her detectives, assisting with an investigation in which they should, in fact, play a very different role… He’s a fascinating creation, Norman Gale, and I would highly recommend rereading this book just so you can study this dentist up close.
We have yet another Christie dentist in her 1923 short story “The Cornish Mystery”, later collected in the anthology Poirot’s Early Cases. Edward Pengelley practises in Cornwall with the aid of his assistant Miss Marks, and it is his wife who calls in Poirot and Hastings. She fears that she is being poisoned by her husbaPwnd, because although her doctor has diagnosed an unrelated gastric complaint, her symptoms always go away whenever her husband is absent. Slightly dubious, Poirot agrees to travel down to Cornwall to look into the matter further, only to find that Mrs Pengelley has died by the time he arrives. Her husband is later charged with her murder, only for Poirot to secure a different outcome via one of his more dubious extrajudicial acts. This, incidentally, is something that I would like to look into in a future episode — the extent to which some golden age detectives rely on techniques that would never actually hold up in a real life court. Still, this is a good story about how a dentist falls under serious suspicion just because he has a pretty assistant and some skill with anaesthetic chemicals.
John Dickson Carr’s 1936 story “The Wrong Problem” presents a very different kind of atmosphere to Christie’s effort of the decade before, but nonetheless sees a dentist seriously suspected of murder. Two impossible crimes in a short space of time occur in one family: the father, an ear nose and throat doctor, is killed by being stabbed in the ear while alone in a rowing boat, and his daughter is killed in a locked room by being stabbed in the eye. Who could it be, and how? Because of the precise, almost clinical nature of the crimes, suspicion naturally falls on two of his three remaining children, one of whom is a dentist and the other a medical student. Luckily, Dr Gideon Fell is on hand to right the wrongs of this Gothic-feeling tale.
The presence of a dentist or a dental appointment in a mystery doesn’t have to mean murder. It can be a means of misdirection, a sign that the detective novelist is trying to make reader or characters look one way while something important happens in another direction. So it is in the 1938 Freeman Wills Crofts novel, Antidote to Venom, in which a dental appointment forms a crucial alibi for one of the two major suspects. As Inspector French, Crofts’ regular detective puts it, if the statement about the dentist’s appointment was true, “his alibi was stronger than cast steel”. Now, because this is an inverted mystery, the reader already knows whether the alibi is true or not. I talked more about this format in a November 2022 episode called “Howdunnit”, but in brief, this is the sort of story where the murderer’s thoughts are shared the reader from the start, so we’re fully in the picture the whole time. The tension comes from seeing the detective try and reconstruct the crime without already knowing who did it, as we do, and the suspense builds as we wonder whether or not the murderer is going to be able to get away with it. In this case of this novel, which I do recommend, there is the added bonus of an eccentric and complicated murder method — the central character is the director of a zoo, and as the title suggests, his ingenious idea for killing involves snakes.
And then, we must come to Albert Campion. Never have I encountered such a well-timed bit of toothache as in Margery Allingham’s 1933 novel Sweet Danger, in which our hero Campion pulls off a daring escape from abduction through the simple means of pretending very dramatically to have something wrong with his mouth. She really lays it on thick during the chapter concerned, referring to Campion repeatedly as “the pale young man with the toothache” and peppering the dialogue with remarks like “there’s nothing so nasty as a nasty tooth”. His request to be allowed to go to a dentist is turned down, but his captors are content, for a bribe, to allow him to pop home for a scarf to wrap his aching jaw in. He then changes places with a double already position for the purpose, thus evading the trap that has been set for him. “I went into the cupboard with a marble in my cheek and a hanky over it and McCaffy came out with a muffler round his face,” he tells his friends triumphantly. This is, I should say, just one of various madcap adventures that Campion gets up to in the course of “solving” (and I put that in heavy quotation marks) this improbable inheritance mystery. Still, it is further evidence for my theory that you should look twice the second anyone in a detective novel mentions needing to go to the dentist.
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There is one final teeth-related plot point that we find a lot in crime fiction, but this is one that concerns dead people more than those left alive. Posthumous identification via teeth has been going on for a very long time. Supposedly Agrippina, wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, insisted that her assassins bring her the head of her rival, Lollia Paulina, so that she could confirm for herself that those were the teeth of the woman she intended to have murdered. And in 12C India a murdered monarch was identified after death by his false teeth. Battlefield identifications were done this way too, but it wasn’t until 1814 that a criminal case in Britain was decided on this basis, when a charge of graverobbing against an anatomy lecturer in Edinburgh was proved by showing that the deceased’s dentures fit perfectly into one of the “specimens” he had in his lab. By the early twentieth century, when the crime fiction Shedunnit covers was being written, comparing the teeth and dental work visible in a body with any known records was a recognised technique for establishing identity. One of many examples of this method of identifying a victim can be seen in Margery Allingham’s 1938 novel The Fashion in Shrouds, when Campion discovers the skeleton of a long-missing man. At the inquest, the jury hear “the evidence of the self-important little dentist, who had rushed in to rattle off his formidable list of degrees and testify that the dental work in the remains of the dead man’s jaw was his own and that it corresponded to his records”. Dental evidence of this kind is also pivotal in A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, a book I discussed on the show back in May. As a sidenote, I would recommend the G.K. Chesterton story “The Honour of Israel Gow“ for a different perspective on why someone might be interested in the skull and teeth of someone long-dead. Father Brown has a good dentist-related revelation in that one.
Identification, then, is often the role of the dentist in a crime novel. Often, this occurs simply and quickly, as you heard in that example from Margery Allingham, and is not questioned. In one particular story, though, the novelist takes the field of forensic odontology and weaves her entire mystery out of it. I am talking, of course, about the short story “In the Teeth of the Evidence“ by Dorothy L. Sayers from 1939. It begins in a similar way to several of the novels and stories I discussed earlier in the episode, with her detective Lord Peter Wimsey at the dentist, an appointment he approaches with some reluctance. It turns out that his dentist is about to go out on an errand for the police, doing an identification on the body of another dentist who had died in a house fire the previous night. Upon a superficial inspection, everything looks as it should, but when the apparently accident begins to seem more like a suicide, Wimsey encourage that a close look should be taken at the teeth. And lo, there is a surprise to be found in them — evidence of a dastardly murder and a clever fraud that has very nearly been pulled off. This story, which features not one but four dentists in total, is perhaps the pinnacle of dentistry’s appearance in golden age detective fiction. There has even been an academic paper about it published in the British Dental Journal. Dentistry is not just the subject of one scene or the means of establishing a single alibi. It provides the protagonists, the murder method, the suspense, the solution — everything. For a moment, teeth aren’t just evidence. They’re the whole story.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. If you’d like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.
You can find a full list of the books I mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/inthedentistschair. We publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
