John Dickson Carr's Books

Biography

John Dickson Carr (1906 – 1977) was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. His father was a lawyer and politician and served as a U.S. congressman. Following his father’s footsteps, Carr decided to study law, though that aspiration didn’t last long. While attending the Sorbonne in Paris, he decided he preferred crime writing. He published his first novel, It Walks by Night, in 1930 and moved to Great Britain shortly afterwards.

The Golden Age

Despite being an American, critics often refer to Dickson Carr as one of the greatest writers of the Golden Age of British Mysteries. These were the archetypal whodunnits, detective stories set across England from London to country estates and rural villages. The author provides all the clues, and the reader tries to work out who the murderer is before it is revealed.

More Than Novels

Dickson Carr didn’t limit himself to writing novels. During the second world war, he wrote radio propaganda for the British government and penned numerous short stories. The most notable of these were compiled in The Department of Queer Complaints under the pseudonym Carter Dickson.

He earned one of two Edgar Awards for his biography The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He also wrote several Sherlock Holmes stories along with Conan Doyle’s youngest son, which they published in the collection, The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Each story references a quote from one of the original tales as its inspiration.

The Locked-Room

Dickson Carr is famous for two fictional detectives: Sir Henry Merrivale and Dr Gideon Fells. They solved elaborate, unthinkable crimes or “locked-room mysteries“. Dickson Carr’s art was constructing complex puzzles that left the reader in awe when shown the solution.

In his most famous novel, The Hollow Man, Dr Gideon Fells steps out of the plot and gives a lecture on locked-room mysteries. In this tribute to the author’s craft, Fells details the different ways an author can conceal a crime.

Now, here is your box with one door, one window, and solid walls. In discussing ways of escaping when both door and window are sealed, I shall not mention the low (and nowadays very rare) trick of having a secret passage to a locked-room. This so puts a story beyond the pale that a self-respecting author scarcely needs even to mention that there is no such thing. We don’t need to discuss minor variations of this outrage: the panel which is only large enough to admit a hand; or the plugged hole in the ceiling through which a knife is dropped, the plug replaced undetectably, and the floor of the attic above sprayed with dust so that no one seems to have walked there. This is only the same foul in miniature.
The Hollow Man

He lists the many more legitimate ways an assailant can complete murder in a “hermetically sealed room”.

These include:

The crime isn’t a murder, only a series of coincidences.
The victim was somehow compelled to murder themselves.
A mechanical device concealed in the room killed the victim.
It was a suicide that the victim intended to look like murder.
The murderer locked the door from the outside, leaving the key on the inside.

For the last of these, the killer often turned the stem of the key with pliers from outside the room. According to Dr Fells, “Its variations are too well-known nowadays for anybody to use it seriously.”

The methods go on; the most devious is the “Icicle Crime”. You can deduce that one for yourself.

Puzzles not Crimes

John Dickson Carr’s books are puzzles for the reader to solve, not thrillers or a commentary on contemporary crime, and he had legions of fans.

“Very few detective stories baffle me nowadays, but Mr Carr’s always do.” ~ Agatha Christie

“Every sentence gives a thrill of positive pleasure. [The Mad Hatter Mystery] is the most attractive mystery I have read for a long time.” ~ Dorothy Sayers

The problem with Carr’s books is that whilst the solutions to his mysteries are possible; they are deeply improbable by their very nature. This is the most significant criticism of the genre though Dr Fells makes short shrift of the quibble.

When the cry of “This-sort-of-thing-wouldn’t-happen!” goes up, when you complain about half-faced fiends and hooded phantoms and blond hypnotic sirens, you are merely saying, “I don’t like this sort of story.” That’s fair enough. If you do not like it, you are howlingly right to say so. But when you twist this matter of taste into a rule for judging the merit or even the probability of the story, you are merely saying, “This series of events couldn’t happen, because I shouldn’t enjoy it if it did.”
The Hollow Man

Are Dickson Carr’s novels ludicrous and far-fetched or the ultimate brain teasers? Try one and decide for yourself.