Carter Dickson

John Dickson Carr (November 30, 1905 - February 27, 1977) was a prolific American author of detective stories who also published under the pen names Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn. He is generally considered, along with Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and a few others, as one of the greatest practitioners of the so-called "Golden Age" mysteries, which were complicated, plot-driven stories in which the puzzle was paramount. He was also particularly noted for the macabre and seemingly supernatural atmosphere with which he invested many of his stories before giving the reader at the end of the book a rational and down-to-earth explanation of the seemingly paranormal mystery.

Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a sometime Democratic Congressman. He attended Hill School, where he was a mediocre student preoccupied with fledgling attempts at writing mystery stories. While studying abroad he married an Englishwoman, Clarice Cleaves, in 1931 and settled in England. They raised three children there before moving to the United States in 1948. Most of his books written through the mid-1950s are set in England or in Europe and at one point there was speculation that "Carr" was a pen name used by the famous English humorist P. G. Wodehouse!

He was a master of the locked room mystery, in which victims are killed under apparently impossible circumstances, such as in a locked room, or in the middle of a wet clay tennis court on which there are no footprints but the victim's own (The Problem of the Wire Cage).

Carr has been widely praised for the ingenuity of his plots, although many of his novels have been criticized for the flatness of characterization. In this respect, The Black Spectacles (1939, aka The Problem of the Green Capsule), with its undistinguished characters but brilliant central puzzle, may be the quintessential Carr. Many of Carr's most celebrated works feature more than one impossible crime of different kinds, including The Hollow Man (1935, aka The Three Coffins), The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), and He Who Whispers (1946). The novel The Crooked Hinge (1938) is also reckoned a masterpiece of the genre, and features more fully developed characters than most locked-room mysteries. All five of these books feature the Chestertonian detective Dr. Gideon Fell, around whom Carr constructed most of his best books.

Besides Dr. Fell, Carr mysteries feature three other series detectives: Sir Henry Merrivale (H.M.), Henri Bencolin, and Colonel March. Some of Carr's most ingenious books, including The Judas Window and The White Priory Murders, were written around Merrivale under the Carter Dickson byline and many critics in the 1930s and 1940s preferred Merrivale to Fell as a character. One of Carr's most famous, and effective, books, the eerie The Burning Court, features none of these detectives and is notable for what apparently is a supernatural ending that overturns an earlier rational explanation of the mysterious events.

Carr also wrote many radio scripts, particularly for the BBC, and some film scripts. His 1943 half-hour radio play Cabin B-13 was expanded into a series on CBS in the early 1950s, and he wrote all those scripts. That radio play was also expanded into the script for the 1953 film Dangerous Crossing, directed by Joseph M. Newman and starring Michael Rennie and Jeanne Crain.

Carr's 1937 novel The Burning Court was adapted for the screen in the 1962 French film La Chambre Ardente. 1942's The Emperor's Snuffbox became the 1957 British film production That Woman Opposite.

In 1950 Carr produced a novel called The Bride of Newgate, set during the Napoleonic Wars, and this may be called the first full-length historical whodunnit. The Devil in Velvet and Fire, Burn! are the two historicals of which he himself was most pleased.

With Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Carr wrote a majority of the Sherlock Holmes stories that were published in the 1954 collection The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes {ISBN 0157203383}.

Late in life Carr developed an interest in the Southern United States, and a number of his last books are set there. He died in South Carolina.

Novels as John Dickson Carr

• It Walks By Night (detective Henri Bencolin) - 1930
• Castle Skull (Bencolin) - 1931
• The Lost Gallows (Bencolin) - 1931
• Poison In Jest - 1932
• The Corpse In The Waxworks (Bencolin) - 1932 (British title: The Waxworks Murder)
• Hag's Nook (detective Dr. Gideon Fell) - 1933
• The Mad Hatter Mystery (Fell) - 1933
• The Blind Barber (Fell) - 1934
• The Eight Of Swords (Fell) - 1934
• Death-Watch (Fell) - 1935
• The Three Coffins (Fell) - 1935 (British title: The Hollow Man)
• The Arabian Nights Murder (Fell) - 1936
• The Burning Court - 1937
• The Four False Weapons, Being the Return of Bencolin (Bencolin) - 1938
• To Wake The Dead (Fell) - 1938
• The Crooked Hinge (Fell) - 1938
• The Black Spectacles)
• The Problem Of The Wire Cage (Fell) - 1939
• The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Fell) - 1940
• He Who Whispers (Fell) - 1946
• The Sleeping Sphinx (Fell) - 1947
• The Dead Man's Knock (Fell) - 1948
• Below Suspicion (Fell) - 1949 (also features Patrick Butler)
• The Bride Of Newgate - 1950, historical mystery
• The Judas Window (Merrivale) - 1938
• Fatal Descent (in collaboration with