Carr, John (Dickson)

(US, 1906–77)

Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where he was educated at Haverford College. From 1932 to 1948 he lived in England, where the majority of his classic detective novels are set. Begin with The Hollow Man (1935), the best of some twenty stories featuring his lexicographer-detective, Dr Gideon Fell. The book is the most celebrated of Carr's ‘locked room’ mysteries, a genre in which no explanation seems possible for the murderer's unobserved entrance and exit. Henri Bencolin is the detective-hero in his earlier works, which are set in Paris. In It Walks by Night (1930) he arrives at the gruesome solution to a mysterious beheading. Carr also wrote as Carter Dickson, his pseudonym for The Plague Court Murders (1934) and numerous other books hinging on the detective abilities of the eccentric Sir Henry Merrivale.

G. K. Chesterton, Ellery Queen  DH