John Dickson Carr
John Dickson Carr was an American who moved to Britain in the thirties and became an overly prolific writer of gentleman sleuth type "cosy crime" mysteries. He sold so many he was compelled to split himself in two, giving off an alternate persona as Carter Dixon, a rather transparent ruse unworthy of the convoluted and unlikely twists his tales hang on.
Carr/Dixon's big thing was the impossible crime or locked-room mystery. He focussed on it obsessively, autistically, to the exclusion of all else. Probably only half of his plots would have any kind of chance of being enacted in reality, so prospective murderers need not look to him for pointers: in one book he has his lead detective proclaim, "We are not concerned with whether the thing would be done, only if it could be done." But even given the occasional disappointing denouement, there is much to commend this oddball.
As Carr, he created a memorable detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, a morbidly obese genius who moves with the aid of two canes. His extravagant appearance was patterned on fellow crime-writer G.K. Chesterton, his name taken from a comic verse by one Tom Brown:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why – I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
As Dixon, he wrote about Sir Henry Merrivale, who resembled a boiled owl.
The books have veddy English dialogue with a charming thirties idiom, and there's a lot of drinking in them. They're rowdier and sillier than your Agatha Christies and all that. In The Hollow Men, Carr has Fell eat up a whole chapter expounding the five basic ways a locked room mystery can work. They are:
1) The room wasn't really locked, there's some kind of opening
2) The room was locked but the crime was committed, despite appearances, before it was locked
3) The room was locked but the crime was committed, despite appearances, after it was unlocked
4) The room was locked but the criminal is somehow concealed in it, along with the victim
Maybe there's one more I'm not remembering. The point is, even after Fell explains the only ways the trick can be pulled, the novel's two mysteries are solved in ways the reader is highly unlikely to guess. One of them is nonsense, but one is really good, especially because it uses a respectable variant on the locked room, the snowy landscape. The victim is shot at close range, but there are no tracks in the snow save his own. Oh, and there are witnesses who turn, hearing the shot, and see the victim, utterly alone, fall to the ground. The murder weapon is found twenty feet away.
Pretty good, eh?
The other thing I like about Carr's stuff is the genuine supernatural dread that creeps into them when the irrationality mounts into a conundrum and Scotland Yard is Baffled. The author did write a few short stories with genuinely ghostly elements, but these are never used to explain the central mystery. A "rational explanation" is always forthcoming, but it perhaps does not quite restore the cosiness: in this world of death by humane killer, by icicle (which melts away and leaves no trace), by rock salt bullet (which dissolves into the bloodstream, ditto), where a doorknob will lower itself from its usual position, dangling on a string, before a crossbow bolt kills the puzzled onlooker, we can't be confident of anything.
Carr's decline was sad: he suffered a stroke, but also started writing for the radio. Some combination of these two misfortunes led him to start writing mysteries almost entirely in dialogue form (shades of Harry Stephen Keeler), with the characters laboriously describing what they were doing. It's a format parodied by a short playlet written for the BBC to guide radio scribes in what not to do, and which was entitled, "This Gun, Which I Am Holding in My Hand, Is Loaded."
by David Cairns