John Dickson Carr: The Shape of His Career | Impossible Crimes | The Incautious Burglar | Carr's Subjects and Politics | Detectives: Male | Detectives: Female | Architecture and Landscape | Carr's Techniques | Carr and the Realist School | Wax | Film and Television adaptations
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Douglas G. Greene's John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995) is an excellent biography and critical study of Carr's writings. It covers all of Carr's novels and short stories, as well as many of Carr's radio plays. Greene is especially illuminating about the development of Carr's story ideas from one work to the next, tracing connections between Carr's radio plays, and novels, for instance. He also has much to say about Carr's characters, and their human, social, and emotional attitudes.
Castle Skull (1931) (Chapters 1 - 10)
Hag's Nook (1933)
The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933)
The Plague Court Murders (1934)
The White Priory Murders (1934)
The Three Coffins / The Hollow Man (1935)
The Unicorn Murders (1935)
The Punch and Judy Murders (1936)
The Crooked Hinge (1938)
The Judas Window (1938)
Death in Five Boxes (1938)
The Black Spectacles / The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939)
The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939)
Nine - And Death Makes Ten (1940)
The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941)
The Seat of the Scornful / Death Turns the Tables (1941)
She Died A Lady (1943)
He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944)
Till Death Do Us Part (1944)
The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (1945)
A Graveyard to Let (1949)
Night at the Mocking Widow (1950)
The Nine Wrong Answers (1952)
The Cavalier's Cup (1953)
Captain Cut-Throat (1955)
The Ghost's High Noon (1969)
The Department of Queer Complaints (most of these stories are also in collection Merrivale, March and Murder)
The Third Bullet
The Men Who Explained Miracles
The Door to Doom
The Dead Sleep Lightly
The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13
Dr. Carteret radio plays
Uncollected radio plays
The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (collected 1954)
The above list contains the books and stories by Carr that I personally enjoyed, and recommend reading. It is not a complete bibliography.
13 to the Gallows and The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 are available from their publisher Crippen & Landru.
Carr is a great inventor of "impossible crime" mystery plots: crimes which look as if they were impossible to commit, but which get a rational explanation at the story's solution. Carr published one hundred of these. There are reportedly a sizable number of unpublished Carr radio plays and stage plays, as well, several of which contain locked rooms and other impossible crimes.
Carr wrote several stories as an undergraduate. The most important of these, "The Shadow of the Goat" (1926), is notable for containing germs in outline of two of his best later novels, The Three Coffins and The Nine Wrong Answers. It focuses right at the start of Carr's career on an Impossible Disappearance from a locked room, a kind of problem that will be one of Carr's central mystery puzzles throughout his writing. This tale created sleuth Henri Bencolin, a French policeman. Carr's succeeding short stories and his first four novels star Bencolin. The best of these early Bencolin novels is The Lost Gallows (1931). This book shows Carr's skill at compressing a very complex plot into a fabulously small space. As a work of storytelling it fascinates.
In 1933 he created one of his two main detectives, Dr. Fell, in Hag's Nook. This is a good novel. Carr's best period was from 1933 to 1945. Most of his great works of mystery fiction were written in those years.
In many ways the first "real" Carr novel was The Plague Court Murders (1934). This tale marks the debut of Carr's other principal detective Sir Henry Merrivale. It also shows Carr making a permanent commitment to the impossible crime story.
The great works of 1935 are of fabulous plot complexity. They are more complicated than even the average Golden Age detective novel. The best of them, The Three Coffins (1935), contains "The Locked Room Lecture", a chapter in which Dr. Fell sums up the main approaches used to commit impossible crimes in detective fiction up to that point. Both the "Lecture", and the solution to the novel itself, are among the high points of the Golden Age of mystery fiction. The Unicorn Murders (1935) contains one of Carr's most inventive impossible crime plots.
Carr's work in 1936 and 1937 was not as good, but 1938 and 1939 found Carr in absolutely top form again. His four best novels of those years are perfectly proportioned, complex without going to extremes. They are probably the Carr novels that adhere most closely to the canons of the Golden Age, in terms of plot density and the overall architecture of a detective novel. They are also endlessly inventive, as is all of Carr's best fiction.
The Judas Window (1938) impressed me deeply when I first read it, as did many other Carr books. Traditionally, Carr's masterpiece was always considered to be The Three Coffins. That book has "The Locked Room Lecture" and some remarkable impossible crimes. However, in recent years, The Judas Window is often being cited as Carr's other major masterpiece. Carr authority Douglas G. Greene regards it as so, and author Barbara D'Amato pays homage to both works in her novel Hard Case. The storytelling in The Judas Window is especially good. It has a rich vein of comedy, and a wonderful courtroom drama. It makes a very satisfying reading experience: every plot element falls into place in the work just the way a reader would want.
The Crooked Hinge (1938) has one of Carr's most inventive solutions. In fact, it has almost more explanations than there are mysteries in the original text! This is how a mystery should be. Hint to authors: the solution to a mystery is the finale of your novel. It should not be hurried over, giving the most minimal explanation of the mysteries in your book. Instead it should be as rich and creative as possible. Good models here are the finales of many Mozart operas, such as the Act 2 finale of The Marriage of Figaro. Mozart pulls out all the stops here, writing his most complex and spectacular music. I do not make a comparison between Carr and Mozart lightly. Carr is as creative a figure in our medium, the mystery, as Mozart was in his.
Carr also began to write short stories heavily in these years. Many of his best short pieces date from 1938 - 1940. My favorite of all is "The Locked Room" (1940). Carr eventually went to work in radio, in late 1939, and the flood of short stories was replaced by a flood of radio plays, fairly brief works that served a similar function as his short stories. These radio plays are still largely uncollected and unpublished, although The Door to Doom and The Dead Sleep Lightly contain some first rate works. Forty-six of Carr's published short stories and radio plays contain impossible crimes. This is nearly half of Carr's total of 100 published works in the impossible crime field. Carr's short stories from 1938 on are uniformly good: wonderful, richly inventive pieces that show an astonishing flood of plot ideas and atmospheric backgrounds. The radio mysteries are more uneven, but contain some excellent works. When Carr was writing, audiences loved both short stories and all kinds of stage and radio drama. The popularity of these media has taken a nose dive in recent years, at least in the English speaking world, and there is a tendency among many readers to concentrate entirely on novels. A novel-only approach is going to miss half of Carr's achievement as a writer.
Carr's impossible crime novels in 1940-1942 seem thinner than his earlier books. The one with the best locked room concepts is The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941). The best book of this era shows Carr's skills away from the impossible crime genre. Death Turns the Tables (1941) is a brilliant "straight" mystery. It reminds one that impossible crimes, however well done, are not the only features of Carr's books. They are also full fledged detective novels with clues and many ingenious plot ideas not dependent on locked room techniques. I would like to see this book develop a "cult" reputation.
Carr's creativity showed a major flair up in 1943 and 1944. Some of his best radio plays date from 1943, including the impossible crime "Cabin B-13" and "The Dead Sleep Lightly". He also wrote three classic novels. The best novels of this period, such as She Died a Lady and Till Death Do Us Part, center around the same sort of brilliant impossible crime ideas one finds in his short works.
A Graveyard to Let (1949) and Night at the Mocking Widow (1950) are both novels, which show similar construction. Both contain impossible disappearances, with imaginative solutions. In both, the disappearance is essentially a short story contained within the larger novel, and only loosely connected with the rest of the book. In both, the bulk of the novel is taken up by an absorbing non-impossible crime narrative, about an absconding financier and poison pen letters, respectively. Both include a love story subplot about an older woman's romance towards the end. Both have some of the better humorous writing about sleuth Sir Henry Merrivale, and public disturbances he causes. Both refer to used bookstores, and both share with us Carr's ideas about literature, with Night at the Mocking Widow being especially trenchant in favoring the Dumas-Stevenson romance over the "serious" novel. Both of these books have many outdoor scenes; A Graveyard to Let shows Carr's flair for landscape architecture, a popular feature of Golden Age mystery writing.
Carr's work had a flair-up of brilliance in 1952-1956. The Nine Wrong Answers (1952) has a tiny impossible crime in it. But mainly, it is a remarkably inventive book that shows Carr's skill with the "straight" mystery novel. The book has an experimental quality, playfully altering and inverting the paradigms of the conventional mystery book. The Cavalier's Cup (1953) is one of Carr's funniest works. Much of the early parts of this book are just one long farce. However, fair play clues are embedded in the work, and gradually it turns into a working detective story. This is the last Sir Henry Merrivale novel. There was a year long pause in which Carr published little. However in 1955 he brought forth some of his finest fiction. Captain Cut-Throat (1955) is Carr's best historical novel. Mainly this is a spy novel, not a detective story, unlike most of Carr's historical fiction, although an impossible crime mystery occupying a small percentage of the plot allows it to be classified as a mystery novel. It is a fascinating piece of storytelling, somewhat in the tradition of Dumas. Carr also brought Sir Henry Merrivale back for his final appearance in "All in a Maze" (1956). This novella turns into a definitive expression of Carr's ideas about impossible crimes. It makes an outstanding finale for Merrivale's career. If I were to introduce a new reader to Carr's world, I would include this story, the Locked Room Lecture from The Three Coffins, (or maybe the whole great novel), and the short story "The Locked Room".
Carr also revived his career as a radio writer in 1955, writing some fine scripts. "White Tiger Passage" (1955) is a rollicking adventure story, in which a young newspaperman tracks down a killer, showing more persistence than detectival brilliance, one has to admit. It recalls the adventuresome young hero of Captain Cut-Throat. And "The Villa of the Damned" (1955) develops one of Carr's strange impossible crime illusions, in the tradition of The Three Coffins, "The New Invisible Man" (1938) and "The Crime in Nobody's Room" (1938). So all in all, 1955 was an annus mirabilis for Carr's later work.
Carr's work after this shows a ten year decline. Most of these later books, both historical and contemporary, are labored and uninventive. They do show Carr's gift for atmosphere, however; they also show a consistent level of craftsmanship and fair play. In 1967 Carr's Dark of the Moon showed the beginning of a late revival of his talent. There is a greater sense of mystery in this book than many of its predecessors, simply more mysterious incidents to be explained at the finale, and a greater sense of enthusiasm for the mysterious that the elderly (and it turns out, often ill) Carr had shown for a long time. The book was set in the Carolinas, where Carr had gone to live. It is not a great mystery novel, but it was heartening. Carr's comeback continued, and in 1969 he published a genuine mystery classic, The Ghost's High Noon. Although a "historical" novel, the book is actually set in the world of Carr's childhood, the only Carr novel so placed. The book contains a well done impossible crime, that while by no means as good as The Three Coffins, say, is still a real achievement. This book makes a fine Last Hurrah for Carr's career. He published only two more detective novels, and some well informed mystery criticism in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, that should be collected and made available.
Following in the footsteps of John Dickson Carr as a purveyor of locked room puzzles have come a steady succession of authors. Many of these seem to be consciously imitating Carr's work. By the way, Carr was extremely generous to his successors, sponsoring Edmund Crispin into the Detection Club, becoming a personal friend of Clayton Rawson and Joseph Commings, and writing rave reviews of Hake Talbot, Bill Pronzini and Edward D. Hoch.
There are other types of problems in Carr, each of which involves fewer examples:
Other authors have produced locked rooms, and bodies isolated on beaches and in snow. But the crime actually witnessed - but not understood, and with no apparent murderer - seems to be a very difficult trick to pull off, and perhaps less common:
Disappearances: The Three Coffins tradition. The remarkable disappearance in the book known as The Hollow Man or The Three Coffins (1935) greatly develops ideas from the crime in "The Ends of Justice", with some ideas also thrown in from the first crime in "The Shadow of the Goat".
Night at the Mocking Widow (1950) also offers an unusual disappearance, related to The Three Coffins. Night at the Mocking Widow is strangely imaginative in its solution. Like The Three Coffins, albeit in a more modest way, it is a book that stimulates the reader's imagination, causing them to see new possibilities of plot and the mystery.
The unclassifiable "The New Invisible Man" (1938) is also in the tradition of The Three Coffins.
Perhaps related is the primary disappearance in The Burning Court (1937). This too shows real imagination, although I confess I have never liked the supernatural novel which surrounds it. Carr has come up with an impossible situation here that is genuinely original.
Objects impossibly disappear in "The Man with the Iron Chest" (1948). And from a room watched from outside by an honest witness, as in The Three Coffins. The solution is linked to an element in the solution of The Three Coffins. It's a minor (but sound) element in The Three Coffins - not the main solution idea reflected in these other stories.
Other Tales. The locked room murder in "The Fourth Suspect" (1927) is the least original of Carr's early impossible crime Bencolin short stories. Its ideas derive from Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1890). Admittedly, Carr's version here is hard to guess - and he also throws in an alternative solution, also fairly conventional. Carr emphasized both of these approaches in his "locked room lecture" in The Hollow Man, which discusses the typical solutions used by locked room authors as a whole. But he rarely used these conventional ideas again in his fiction. He instead preferred completely original approaches.
"The Murder in Number Four" (1928) suffers from a subplot about a disappearing ghost, that is a cheat. There are also some fairness problems with some of the exposition surrounding the actual murder. Carr will do a much better job of scrupulous fairness throughout the rest of his published fiction. These problems aside, the actual murder is an impressive locked room idea.
Failed Escape Routes. In "The Ends of Justice" the killer leaves the room's window open, figuring that everyone would conclude that the killer escaped by the window. But the killer didn't anticipate it would snow, and that the lack of footprints would indicate that escape from the window was impossible. This bad luck turns what was planned as an ordinary-looking murder into a locked room mystery.
Something similar happens in "The Third Bullet". Here the killer is misinformed about a window being able to open. It can't - thus turning what was intended as an ordinary -looking crime into something bizarre.
These windows don't explain how the impossible crimes were committed. They are therefore not the central ideas of their stories. But they form an interesting, logical and sound addition to the plots of their tales.
The tale opens with an evening gathering at a country house. It is conventional: a card party. Yet there is an ominous atmosphere. Repeated references to a series of valuable paintings on the walls suggest a theft might soon occur. The title "The Incautious Burglar" also suggests a theft is in the offing.
The story points out that seeing such pictures hang in an open place is unusual. This fact that the situation is unusual is the main subject of the second scene, where the heroine explains in detail all the very odd features of how the paintings are housed but left unprotected. She cannot figure out what the owner of the house and paintings is up to - but believes he is about to do something very odd. But she has no idea what.
The man with her makes suggestions about what the owner might be doing. But she rejects them: she has thought of these ideas before, but investigation has shown her they are not true.
This situation already poses a mystery: what is the owner up to? It is hard for the heroine or the reader to solve this mystery.
This situation also generates suspense: something dramatic and unexpected is about to happen.
Soon, something odd does indeed happen. The situation is spectacularly odd: thus making the solution to the mystery puzzle "what is the hero up to" even more striking and surreal than the mystery itself. This is a good thing: a surprising solution to a mystery is usually desirable. Also, Carr has not disappointed the reader: the story suggests something unusual will happen - and it soon does, in spades.
What happens itself brings on more mysteries. They are really puzzling. They are not explained till the end of the story. All in all, this mystery plot has a two-part structure:
Carr's supernatural scenes tend to evoke the horrors of history. In The Plague Court Murders the menace is a hangman's assistant from the 1600's Newgate Prison. Carr evokes all the horrors of 17th century prisons, capital punishment, and the plague. The purported supernatural menace of the novel is that the ghost of this boogie man has come back, and is pursuing the characters of the novel - at night of course, and in the decaying old house of the title. This is plenty creepy, even overwhelmingly so, without Carr having to stress much supernatural mechanism. Villains in Carr novels tend to be disasters from the past come back to haunt the present. Carr's work does not contain a tremendous political charge. But it tends to invoke the idea of progress - we know that history was full of really bad old institutions that are now gone, and Carr dredges them up to chill us. Other early Carr books are dominated by motifs of ancient prisons as well: Hag's Nook (1933) takes place in the ruins of England's first detention prison, and The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) in England's most famous prison, the Tower of London. Later Carr will deal with modern defects of the judicial system: corrupt police in Death-Watch (1935), and a hanging judge in Death Turns the Tables (1941).
"Persons or Things Unknown" (1938) shows a whole series of bad social ideas from the past to horrify us:
Both "The New Invisible Man" (1938) and "Persons or Things Unknown" can be considered as about men stalking women, broadly speaking: also a feminist issue.
Carr's novels have a uniformity of approach: they tend to be complexly plotted formal detective stories; and of tone: an eerie atmosphere. Because of this they are instantly recognizable as Carr's work. But these similarities tend to disguise and obscure the sheer variety of subject matter in Carr's books. For example, there is a startling gap between Death-Watch, a set against a realistic background of the politics of police corruption in London, and Castle Skull, which is a baroque Gothic tale of revenge at a magician's castle in Germany. And unlike many historical novelists, such as Georgette Heyer, who found one favorite historical period and stuck with it, each of Carr's historical mysteries is set in a different time period.
Carr's politics go through three stages:
Poison in Jest. The opening of Poison in Jest (1932) contrasts the joy of spring in Vienna, with a judge's gloomy library back in the United States. The book's first three long paragraphs, describing Vienna, are full of color imagery. This contrasts with the judge's gloomy brown library. The judge's black suit is the opposite of "the flame of uniforms" (Carr's phrase) men used to wear to the opera in Vienna.
The dour judge represents both patriarchal and political power. He's the representative of the US Government. About the only color in the judge's house is gold: picture frames, a clock, gilt fasteners. The gold perhaps represents the power of money.
Nine - And Death Makes Ten. The opening chapters of Nine - And Death Makes Ten (1940) have imagery that echoes Poison in Jest. Once again a colorless U.S.A. is contrasted with a colorful, appealing Europe. The first page takes place in New York City. The city is shown as gray, dark, and completely drained of color. The exterior of the ship has also been painted gray, as wartime camouflage. But when we get inside the English ship, the rooms are a riot of color. And like the Vienna of Poison in Jest, men in dressy uniform are everywhere. The uniforms too are full of color.
Gold is present in both works. In Nine - And Death Makes Ten gold is on the uniform caps the ship's officers wear. And on the stripes indicating rank. It explicitly symbolizes Authority. And adds to the sexiness of the officers.
Sexuality is everywhere on the ship, and often in non-standard forms. By contrast, the hero in New York City was in a hospital that enforced abstinence.
Almost everyone on ship is English, both crew and passengers. There is only one American, and one Frenchman.
The mixture of cruise ship luxury and war-time precautions is surreal. Surrealism is also present in some of the clues, such as the bottle of ink. Surrealism in Nine - And Death Makes Ten heightens the atmosphere of sexuality.
The thoughtful, responsible Captain epitomizes what a good leader should be. He listens to his men, and the passengers too. This is a portrait of a good ruler, like the king in Seven Against Thebes (467 BC) by Aeschylus. The other officers and crew are depicted positively too. This is a patriotic portrait, showing a positive image of responsible men in England.
Carr was an American who adopted England as a second country. His depictions of English officers are as idealized as possible. By contrast, the native-born English mystery writer Christopher Bush gave a scathingly negative portrait of a British officer as vicious and incompetent, in The Case of the Murdered Major (1941).
The young hero Max previously worked on a New York City newspaper as a reporter. His former work is depicted in a low key manner:
A footnote might mention the food served on ship. This includes the heavy, multi-course dinners beloved of upper class Brits of the era (first part of Chapter 2). Such meat-centered fare seems bizarre to us today. Maybe back then it seemed reassuringly traditional, at least to upper class people who could afford it.
Nine - And Death Makes Ten (1940) has a similar setting to Carr's The Blind Barber (1934). Both mainly take place on British ocean liners, making a run from New York City to England.
Colonel March of Scotland Yard appears in some very good short stories, but he personally seems fairly colorless.
Carr's other series detectives are less interesting. Henri Bencolin is largely an apprentice character, although The Lost Gallows is a major Carr novel and "The Shadow of the Goat" an inventive short story. Bencolin is a professional policeman, and he indicates how Carr's sleuths tend to be professionals, rather than amateurs. Dr. Fell is a true amateur detective, but Merrivale is a British Government official with ties to Intelligence, and other Carr sleuths include Scotland Yard figures and barristers. These men tend to have colorful, eccentric personalities, of the kind often associated with amateur Great Detectives, and are far from the colorless officials favored by Freeman Wills Crofts and his followers.
Barrister-sleuth Patrick Butler's two novels Below Suspicion (1949) and Patrick Butler for the Defence (1956) are among Carr's worst books.
The Island of Coffins. Dr. Fabian is a ship's doctor on a cruise ship. He narrates the series of 1948 radio plays collected in the book The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13. On fairly rare occasions, he solves the mystery: see "No Useless Coffin", "The Count of Monte Carlo".
Sometimes Dr. Fabian mainly just appears at the start of the story, to introduce the characters and setting. Other times, he has a small role in the tale itself, and appears at intervals throughout the story. His role tends to be passive and impersonal: he just goes along with events, and doesn't do anything of significance.
We don't learn much about Dr. Fabian. He seems less like a full-fledged character, and more like that convention, a "man who narrates the story".
Each radio play in The Island of Coffins is set in a different country. Often the mysteries are solved by a policeman or policeman-like government official in that country. Carr tries to make these policemen colorful, somewhat in the tradition of Bencolin, his colorful French policeman. These police officers are always sympathetic. Each one has a different personality: each one is colorful in his own way.
As a group, these cops remind one of the colorful, sympathetic foreign policeman in tales by H. C. Bailey, such as Stein from Switzerland and Dubois from France. Stein and Dubois first appeared in the 1920's before Carr became a professional author.
Dr. Carteret radio plays. The BBC had a series of short radio plays, featuring coroner-sleuth Dr. Carteret. Carr was one of several authors who contributed scripts. Along with his Sherlock Holmes pastiches, this is a rare example of Carr writing a mystery featuring a detective created by somebody else. Carr wrote two scripts for the series.
"The Riddle of the Cabin Cruiser" (1943) is the first of two Carr mysteries with Carteret. It is one of Carr's briefest mysteries. It's an example of a standard kind of mystery: challenging the detective and the reader, to spot a false statement among various witnesses' testimony. This sort of mystery puzzle, and the tale's brief length, anticipate Donald J. Sobol.
Carr does a good job with all aspects of the tale: mystery plot, characters, the inquest format.
Links to Atkey?. Bertram Atkey created the crook hero Smiler Bunn, long before Carr started writing. "The Un-Punctual Painting" (1923) is a short story from Atkey's collection Smiler Bunn, Gentleman Adventurer (1926). In it, Smiler Bunn shows traits that anticipate Carr's later hero Sir Henry Merrivale. Bunn:
However the pair of reporters in the radio play "Menace in Wax" (1942) are also a male-female pair. And the woman reporter is named Suzy Dubois. She speaks with a French accent, and bears some resemblance to the earlier Jacqueline Dubois. Like Jacqueline Dubois, she works for the London newspaper The Daily Record. Both women have an English-speaking mother: a cockney for Jacqueline Dubois, a New Yorker for Suzy Dubois. The male reporter Rogers is further from the original Inspector Adam Bell from "The Clue of the Red Wig". Both reporters in "Menace in Wax" do detective work, that helps solve the mystery.
"Persons or Things Unknown" (1938) is a non-series historical mystery. A woman is the only person who learns the truth, in the era in which the crime occurred. Unfortunately, she learns this not through detective work, but by hearing the killer talk in his sleep. She thus cannot be considered a genuine detective character.
The couple in "All in a Maze" somewhat recall the pair in "The Clue of the Red Wig". SPOILERS. The man is not from Scotland Yard, but he does have a family connection to the Yard. The woman is technically English, not French, but she was raised in France. This couple are not detectives, though, unlike the pair in "The Clue of the Red Wig".
SPOILERS. "A Razor in Fleet Street" (1948) has the crime unexpectedly solved at the end, by the hero's wife. Partly this is simply that she saw the crime being committed, through a window. But she also shows how this aspect of the crime could be solved through detective reasoning. She also does some actual detective reasoning, about what the killer knew. Once again, I wish Carr had brought back this heroine for an encore tale.
The Bencolin Books. The first half of Castle Skull (1931), Carr's third novel, offers superb scene painting of the Rhine River in Germany, and of two elaborate buildings on it, a country house mansion, and across the river from it, a restored Castle. Both buildings are outré to the max. Carr is very good at imagining their ornate and ominous furniture, carpets, wall hangings and rare objets d'art, in a tradition that goes back to Poe. Carr has vivid descriptive skills. The reader has a "you are there" feel, whether Carr is evoking the houses, the river, the eccentric characters, or the storm at night.
The middle section (Chapter 8 to the start of Chapter 14) of Carr's first mystery novel, It Walks By Night (1930), has a rich Parisian atmosphere. While the opening and closing sections of this book are full of an overdone horror, these middle sections give an indication of Carr's great talent to come. Carr describes two houses set in the Paris suburbs in these middle chapters. His description of the lights of Paris and these houses by twilight, by night and in the rain is especially rich. There is also considerable delicacy in the depictions of the characters' emotions.
Carr's very first Bencolin mysteries, the short stories he wrote as a college student such as "The Shadow of the Goat" (1926), are also full of atmosphere and scene painting, of both France and England.
Hag's Nook. The book which introduces Dr. Fell, Hag's Nook (1933), does a similar vivid job recreating the Fen Country. This is Carr's first novel set in the English countryside, and one of his first with an English detective.
The Gilded Man. Carr wrote a first-rate short story "The Incautious Burglar" (1940). He then took its plot and expanded it into the novel The Gilded Man (1942). Unfortunately The Gilded Man is only occasionally interesting.
But its opening in a small private theatre is well-done (Chapter 1). The theater is unexpectedly geometric, and aspects of it are described in terms of geometric patterns. The theater is circular. This anticipates the circular Whispering Gallery in "All in a Maze". The Coliseum in Rome in "The Power of Darkness" (1948) is also a rounded real-life public space, like the Whispering Gallery. Both are settings that occur early in their tales, before moving on to other locales. Both contrast with the locales of the tales' finales, which are rectilinear but visually bewildering: the villa in "The Power of Darkness", the maze in "All in a Maze".
Carr's hero and heroine in The Gilded Man wind up in a back area where they can view the theater. Such observation points recall the positions of witnesses in "The New Invisible Man" and The Three Coffins.
A scene outdoors has a pleasant if simple landscape (Chapter 9). This scene is cheerful fun. It gets a light-hearted follow-up indoors (last part of Chapter 10, first half of Chapter 11).
A woman says the handsome but mysterious hero looks like her idea of an explorer (Chapter 2). This recalls the explorer Gregory Mannering in The Arabian Nights Mystery (Chapter 1), perhaps the most glamorized man in Carr.
Carr's impossible crime technique was strongly influenced by G.K Chesterton. His series detective Dr. Fell is an affectionate pastiche of Chesterton.
Carr's work reflects other authors, as well. The "older detective solving the case while the young man narrator has adventures and finds a love interest" paradigm derives from the books of R Austin Freeman, such as The Eye of Osiris. This pattern is already present in Carr's first novel, It Walks By Night, and it will persist throughout his entire career. Chapter 13 of It Walks By Night also contains a small scene set in a lane next to a garden in which a murder has been committed. The country lane, complete with hedge, immediately recalls a setting much used in Freeman's books. So does the use of classical detection in this scene: Bencolin examines tire tracks and footprints, make deductions from them, and finds the murder weapon.
Both Castle Skull (1931) and Death-Watch (1935) split into halves, with the first half of each being the initial investigation, the second half being the follow up and solution. In both books, the split comes at virtually the mathematical center point of the novel, in terms of the number of pages. It is hard to believe that Carr did not consciously plan the books this way, with a mathematical precision of design that recalls Emily Brontë. In each book, the initial investigation starts at night, and ends when the detective characters give up and go to bed. The second half of each novel begins at the sunny start of the next day, and is much more diffuse than the first half, which concentrates on a single continuous investigation. In both books the first half is a gripping piece of storytelling, but the second half generally disappoints. (For reference, in Castle Skull the first half is Chapters 1 - 10, while in Death-Watch the first half consists of Chapters 1 - 11, while Chapter 12 consists of a summing up of the initial investigation, with Dr. Fell listing five unanswered questions: what Carolyn Wells called a tabulation.)
The article on J.J. Connington describes how Connington's techniques of plot construction may have influenced Carr. Connington used the mathematical concept of the "permutation" in The Case With Nine Solutions (1928), and somewhat similar permutations pop up in Carr's Locked Room Lecture. Carr particularly admired Connington's "sheer brain power", as he referred to it in "The Grandest Game in the World" (1946), and he also became a close friend and collaborator with John Rhode, creator of mathematician detective Dr. Priestly. Carr had trouble with math in school, and comic mathematicians turn up in such Carr works as The Cavalier's Cup. Yet Carr also had a deep respect for mathematics, and it plays more of a role in his works than is initially apparent.
Carr's stories, which often focus on exploring the aftermath of sinister crimes committed at night, recall in approach those of Anna Katherine Green, who he read extensively as a child. There is little fake supernatural atmosphere in her books, but there is plenty of a feeling of nocturnal horror. (Although Green did occasionally write stories with a mock supernatural appearance, for example, "The Gray Lady" in her collection Masterpieces of Mystery.) Douglas G. Greene has pointed out the similarities of a plot element in Carr's "The Gentleman From Paris" (1950), and an episode in Green's The Leavenworth Case (1878). Carr's childhood reading of Green finds other echoes in his work: his radio play "Cabin B-13" deals with a situation similar to her "Room No. 3" (1909), while it finds a very different solution, and his "The Door to Doom" (1935) recycles plot material from Green's "The Staircase at Heart's Delight" (1894). (See the article on Sir Basil Thomson for a discussion of "Cabin B-13" and its predecessors.)
With The Plague Court Murders (1934), his first novel featuring his other series detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, Carr will commit himself to the Impossible Crime, and take a radically different road, that of the intuitionist, Chesterton based school. As Douglas G. Greene has pointed out, with The Three Coffins (1935), Dr. Fell will be retooled as a specialist in impossible crimes as well, something not part of his original characterization. The experiment with Realism will be just a brief phase in Carr's career. Carr's early Fell books have aspects of a young writer trying to adapt himself to a popular tradition, Realism, while coming out of an intuitionist, Chesterton tradition that is fundamentally different. Carr's plot solutions in subsequent early Fell books like The Mad Hatter Mystery and Death-Watch seem to come more out of the Chesterton tradition, favoring rearrangements in time and space, rather than the Realist school's "breakdown of identity" he used in Hag's Nook. And Carr's lyrical, emotionally rich travel descriptions seem a long way from the analytical depictions of social and technical institutions found in Crofts and the other Realist school writers. They instead seem part of an atmospheric mise-en-scène. Carr is not the only intuitionist, Chesterton based writer to go through a brief Realist phase: Agatha Christie experimented with Realist traditions around 1925 - 1926.
Carr will not entirely abandon Realist school traditions. Nine - And Death Makes Ten (1940) contains Realist features:
Several other of Carr's works circa 1940 also use scientific ideas in the solution of their impossible crimes.
Death in Five Boxes (1938) begins with a sentence whose form, content and style seems to come right out an H. C. Bailey tale about Mr. Fortune. It serves to introduce Dr. John Sanders, a forensic pathologist attached to the British Home Office - a job similar to Mr. Fortune's. From that point on, however, the two writers diverge. Dr. Sanders is immediately plunged into a fantastic adventure in midnight London, in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights (1878). As the tale progresses, Dr. Sanders' expertise on poisons is used, but mainly to set up the facts about the murder, and to show how impossible it was for anyone to have committed it. The crime is actually solved by Sir Henry Merrivale, using non-technical, common sense ideas that anyone would know. H.M. uses brain power and reasoning, not any scientific expertise. As the story progresses, young Dr. Sanders assumes the role of the young, brave, noble man who typically accompanies Carr's middle-aged sleuths, but who does not solve the mystery. In "Error at Daybreak" (1938), the equivalent young man is actually referred to as a "young man" who is "imbecile". Dr. Sanders is far more intelligent than this - but he actually does little to solve the mystery. Carr would make some inventive variations of the opening scenes and plot ideas of Death in Five Boxes in his radio play, "The Black Minute" (1940).
One might note that Carr's reputation as a detective writer was not made with his early, extravagantly gothic Bencolin novels (1930 - 1932), nor with the impossible crime stories of 1934 - 1950 on which so much of his current reputation rests. Instead, Carr became famous when Dorothy L. Sayers praised his The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) in a rave review. Sayers was one of the main leaders of the British Realist school, and she especially admired this book, a product of the brief era of Carr's adherence to Realist school traditions.
The threatened factory recalls the threatened munitions ship in Nine - And Death Makes Ten (1940).
"The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers" (1953) is a later short story Carr wrote. It's a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. As Douglas G. Greene pointed out in John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, "The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers" draws on "Menace in Wax" for its main mystery idea. However, the characters, motives and storytelling surrounding this idea are quite different in the two works.
"The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers" pleasantly reflects some Sherlock Holmes traditions. These help make the tale a good Holmes pastiche. BIG SPOILERS.:
Both Holmes and Watson are more physically combative, than they often are in Doyle's tales.
By contrast, Dangerous Crossing (1953) is a well-made mystery-thriller based on Carr's famous radio play "Cabin B-13". It manages to set forth Carr's baffling puzzle with clarity and aplomb, while telling an exciting story that catches one up in suspense. Dangerous Crossing was directed by Joseph M. Newman.
Dangerous Crossing was remade as a made-for-TV-movie Treacherous Crossing (Tony Wharmby, 1992), with middling results. The remake has location photography aboard the real life ship Queen Mary, and a glamorous turn by Grant Show, but never captures the storytelling vigor of the original Dangerous Crossing.
The Burning Court (1962) is a French-language adaptation of Carr's 1937 novel made by the veteran French director Julien Duvivier. I have only managed to see an English-dubbed version. This is not a clearly told detective story of the kind British TV has accustomed us with excellent TV series like Poirot. It is instead a loosely told poetic meditation on themes from Carr's novel, with a plot-line that is difficult to follow. However, it has beautiful, atmospheric photography, and rich acting by luminaries of the 1960's Nouvelle Vague. The scenes of the main mystery itself, and their later explanation, are visually striking. They also faithfully recreate on screen one of Carr's wildest disappearance puzzles.
Carr's Colonel March short stories inspired a TV series Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1953-1956). Some of the episodes were based on Carr tales. The Silver Curtain (1956) is based on Carr's 1939 short story of the same title. The Silver Curtain makes a commendable attempt to stay mainly faithful to Carr's plot. But its story telling is rather staid: sometimes interesting, sometimes dull. On the plus side talented Arthur Hiller does a good job as Carr's young hero Jerry Winton. The whole cast tries to create vivid characters, in fact.