Night at the Mocking Widow
1950 novel by John Dickson Carr
Night at the Mocking Widow is a mystery novel by the American writer John Dickson Carr, who published it under the pen name of Carter Dickson. It is set in 1938. It is a whodunnit featuring the series detective Sir Henry Merrivale.
Plot summary
The English village of Stoke Druid in Somerset has been plagued by a series of vicious anonymous letters written by a poison-pen who becomes known as the "Mocking Widow", after a forty-foot high rocky feature on the outskirts of the village.
A middle-aged spinster who has been tormented by the letters' suggestions of sexual immorality commits suicide. Sir Henry Merrivale is offered an incredibly rare volume of memoirs by the village bookseller if he exposes the poison-pen, and accepts. During the investigation, a young woman is frightened nearly to death by the Widow's threats to visit her in her bedroom—she sees the Widow in her bedroom at the time and place previously announced, in circumstances that seem impossible for anyone to have been there.
Then a village blackmailer who may have been the Widow's assistant is murdered, and Sir Henry brings the series of crimes home to their perpetrator.
“Night at the Mocking Widow” enters the record as 1950 novel by John Dickson Carr. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Night, Mocking and Widow can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Night at the Mocking Widow” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Night, Mocking and Widow provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7033611. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Night at the Mocking Widow” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.