There is a question every magician dreads. After he performs a trick so mysterious, so beyond rational explanation, that spectators are left gasping in a pleasant state of shock someone is bound to ask: “How was it done?” The wise magician knows better than to give up his secret. Once a trick is explained it loses it wonder and the audience goes home disappointed. Writers of locked room mysteries don’t have the luxury of ignoring such questions. Part of their stock in trade is in explaining just how the impossible was accomplished. The best of them play fair with the reader and provide enough clues that the reader can figure out how the murderer penetrated that sealed chamber almost before the Great Detective unmasks killer and method. Almost, of course, is the key word in that sentence. Even the most ardent worker of puzzles likes to be surprised, providing that the solution makes sense. For more than forty years John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) found dozens of ways for murderers to pull off the impossible, if perhaps sometimes stretching the boundaries of plausibility. Writing under his own name or as Carter Dickson, Carr was, without a doubt, the leading player in the subgenre he so lovingly referred to as “the grandest game.”

That game began in 1930 with It Walks by Night when the body of a headless man is found shortly after he walked into an empty room whose every entrance was under observation. That case featured Parisian sleuth Henri Bencolin, but the American-born Carr was to make his lasting reputation on the exploits of two flamboyant Englishmen, Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale.

Hag’s Nook, the first Fell novel, appeared in 1933. Carr wanted to create a likable sleuth and he modeled Fell after G. K. Chesterton, the creator of Father Brown. Quite tall and corpulent, Fell needs a pair of canes to move about. He invariably dresses in shovel hat and a pleated cape and claims he learned to spot liars while serving as the headmaster of a boys’ school. Sporting a bushy mustache and peering at suspects through the lens of his pince nez, he’s truly an imposing figure. A writer by trade, he is frequently required to halt work on his monumental study of English drinking habits through the ages to solve a crime whose peculiarities are beyond the scope of the professionals at Scotland Yard.

Carr’s other major sleuth, Sir Henry Merrivale, known affectionately as H.M., is equally eccentric and made his debut a year later in The Plague Court Murders. Given his prolific output as John Dickson Carr (four books a year), Carr had taken The Bowstring Murders (1933) to another publishing house. But Carr was not pleased with that publisher’s choice of a pseudonym, Carr Dickson, and subsequent books from this publisher, most featuring Merrivale, appeared under the byline Carter Dickson. As stout as Fell but bald as a cue ball, Merrivale is both a physician and a barrister as well as the holder of one the oldest baronetcies in England. In spite of his uncanny ability to solve impossible crimes, H.M. is intended to be a comic figure. Carr, an ultraconservative who in 1948 fled England for his native America after enduring three years of the postwar Labor government, thought it amusing to make his titled character a socialist.

Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania on November 30, 1906, the son of a lawyer who briefly served in Congress. While in Washington, the young Carr said he once surprised Woodrow Wilson by asking him what his name was. His family wanted him to study law and after graduating from Haverford College in Pennsylvania he set off  in 1928 for additional studies in Europe with an eye toward doing just that. He saw himself using ringing words to move juries with hearts of stone. Once in Europe, he lost any desire to study law. His circle of friends included lords and ladies as well as some “pretty tough specimens” and one detective. Soon after he turned to writing crime fiction full time, a passion he had first embraced as a college student.

In addition to scores of novels, including a number of historicals, Carr also wrote a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a study of the Sir Edmund Godrey murder case, several radio plays, dozens of short stories, and he also reviewed mysteries for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He won Edgars in 1949 and 1969 from the Mystery Writers of America and was named their Grand Master in 1962. In his final years he lived in Greenville, South Carolina, whose climate, both political and temperature-wise, no doubt appealed to the aging writer.  He died of lung cancer on February 27, 1977, sure in the knowledge that he was the foremost literary cracksman of his time.

Tom & Enid Schantz
March 2008