![]() Besides Dr Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, Carr mysteries feature two other series detectives: Henri Bencolin and Colonel March. Henry Merrivale or “H.M.”, on the other hand, although stout and with a majestic “corporation”, is active physically and is feared for his ill-temper and noisy rages. Dr Fell, who is fat and walks only with the aid of two canes, was clearly modeled on the British writer G. Both are large, upper-class, eccentric Englishmen somewhere between middle-aged and elderly. 2008 10 Mar, 2020 )Ĭarr’s two major detective characters, Dr Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, are superficially quite similar. (Source: “John Dickson Carr – Biography” Masterpieces of Fiction, Detective and Mystery Edition Ed. He died on February 27, 1977, in Greenville. Suffering from increasing illness, Carr ceased writing novels after 1972, but he contributed a review column to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and was recognized as a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1963. Except for some time spent in Tangiers working with Adrian Doyle on a series of pastiches of Sherlock Holmes, Carr alternated between Great Britain and Mamaroneck for the next thirteen years before moving to Greenville, South Carolina. In 1951, the Tories won the election, and Carr returned to Great Britain. ![]() After the war, Carr worked with Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate to produce the first authorized biography of Sherlock Holmes’s creator.Ī lifelong conservative, Carr disliked the postwar Labour government, and in 1948 he moved to Mamaroneck, New York. Ironically, the government then sent him back to Great Britain, and for the rest of the war he was on the staff of the BBC, writing propaganda pieces and mystery dramas. He wrote scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and after the United States government ordered him home in 1941 to register for military service, he wrote radio dramas for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) program Suspense. In 1939, Carr found another outlet for his work-the radio. To handle his prolific output, he began to write books under the nonsecret pseudonym of Carter Dickson. In 1932, Carr married an Englishwoman, Clarice Cleaves, moved to Great Britain, and for about a decade wrote an average of four novels a year. (Source: Martin Edwards, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books) After the Second World War, he turned increasingly to historical mysteries, and his final book, The Hungry Goblin (1972) – sadly not in the same league as his early masterpieces – features Wilkie Collins as a detective. The Merrivale books were generally published as by Carter Dickson. Many of his books about Sir Henry Merrivale – another detective with a flair for solving impossible crimes – equal the Fells novels in terms of quality a notable example is The Judas Window (1938). Expanded, it became It Walks by Night, published by Harper and Brothers in 1930, with which he began his career as a published novelist, the first in a series featuring the saturnine French investigator, Henri Bencolin. In 1928, he went to France to study at the Sorbonne, but he preferred writing and completed his first books, a historical novel that he destroyed, and Grand Guignol, a Bencolin novella that was soon published in The Haverfordian. After three years at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, John Carr attended Haverford College and became editor of the student literary magazine, The Haverfordian. His father, a lawyer and politician, served in Congress from 1913 to 1915. (Source: Wikipedia)Ĭarr was born on November 30, 1906, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of Julia Carr and Wooda Nicolas Carr. He also wrote a number of historical mysteries. The Dr Fell mystery The Hollow Man (1935), usually considered Carr’s masterpiece, was selected in 1981 as the best locked-room mystery of all time by a panel of 17 mystery authors and reviewers. He was a master of the so-called locked room mystery, in which a detective solves apparently impossible crimes. He was influenced in this regard by the works of Gaston Leroux and by the Father Brown stories of G. Carr is generally regarded as one of the greatest writers of so-called “Golden Age” mysteries complex, plot-driven stories in which the puzzle is paramount. John Dickson Carr was an American author of detective stories, who also published using the pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn.
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