Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, Roger Fairbairn. These are pen names of prolific Golden Age author John Dickson Carr, who earned his fame for writing puzzle mysteries. In today’s episode, Brook and Sarah discuss this author who is often considered to be the best in locked room mysteries.
Discussed and mentioned
It Walks By Night (1930) John Dickson Carr
The Hungry Goblin: A Victorian Detective Novel (1972) John Dickson Carr – features Wilkie Collins as the sleuth
The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954) John Dickson Carr with Adrian Conan Doyle
The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949) John Dickson Carr
The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) John Dickson Carr
The Hollow Man (1935) John Dickson Carr
The Black Spectacles (1939) John Dickson Carr
Collection of John Dickson Carr radio mysteries (for purchase)
Suspense – radio plays by John Dickson Carr
The White Priory Murders (1934) John Dickson Carr (published as Carter Dickson)
The Golden Age of Murder (2015) Martin Edwards
The Life of Crime (2022) Martin Edwards
Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1956) Series featuring Boris Karloff
For more information
Instagram: @cluedinmystery
Contact us: hello@cluedinmystery.com
Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com
Sign up for our newsletter: https://cluedinmystery.com/clued-in-chronicle/
Join the Clued in Cartel for as little as $12 USD/year: https://cluedinmystery.com/clued-in-cartel/
Transcript
This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.
| Sarah | Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah. |
| Brook | And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery. |
| Sarah | Hi, Brook. |
| Brook | Hi, Sarah. So today we’re going to talk about another of the Golden Age mystery authors, John Dickson Carr. |
| Sarah | I’m very excited to explore some of his work with you. If you’ve heard his name, John Dickson Carr, you’ve probably heard the phrase “locked room mystery”. Born in Pennsylvania in 1906, this American writer is notable for his contributions to the locked room sub-genre of mystery fiction. His first book, It Walks By Night, was published in 1930 and nearly all of the 70 books that followed used a locked room setup. |
| Sarah | In addition to his novels, Carr wrote a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and an analysis of the theories surrounding the mysterious death in the 17th century of Sir Edmund Barry Godfrey. Carr has several short stories to his name, including a handful that feature Sherlock Holmes, which he co-wrote with Doyle’s son, and published as a collection in 1954. Carr also dabbled in historical mystery, including one in which Wilkie Collins is the sleuth, and authored several rodeo plays that aired on BBC and CBS. His works also appeared under different pen names, including Carter Dickson and Roger Fairbairn. |
| Sarah | John Dickson Carr met the woman who would become his wife in the barbershop of a vessel on a transatlantic journey after visiting the UK. They were married shortly afterwards and lived briefly in New York before returning to England to live closer to her family when she became pregnant. He spent his most prolific years in London, but died in South Carolina in 1977. Carr was a member of the Detection Club, the first American to be invited and one of the only members from outside the UK. |
| Sarah | He was recognized by the mystery writers of America as a grandmaster in 1963. And before we get too much further, Brook, I wonder if maybe we should define a locked room mystery. |
| Brook | Yes, I think that’s a great idea, Sarah. |
| Sarah | So a locked room mystery, the body is found in a room frequently that is locked from the inside and there’s no way for the murderer to have entered or exited without being seen. And in Carr’s 1935 book, The Hollow Man, there is a chapter titled “The Locked Room Lecture” in which the sleuth articulates the various explanations for locked room mysteries. And I imagine that if we mapped that explanation against all of the books that John Dickson Carr wrote, we would be able to see some correlation there and it would be interesting to to analyze which of those methods he drew on the most. |
| Brook | Yes, absolutely. I found it was so interesting to find out that he, they call it “the locked room lecture” in that book. He spells that out. There’s, ah he comes up with four scenarios, which we can get into, but he also explains how a room can appear to be locked, but actually, you know, be accessible to the criminal. So um it interested me in that in a sense he was a magician giving away his tricks of the trade in that lecture, wasn’t he? |
| Sarah | So what’s interesting is that that particular chapter, it begins with the sleuth making this announcement that I’m going to give you a lecture on locked rooms. |
| Sarah | And he actually says it a couple of times. “I will now lecture on the general mechanics and development of that situation, which is known in detective fiction as the hermetically sealed chamber.” |
| Sarah | And then he he goes on to say, “we’re in a detective story and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not.” [ Brook: Mm hmm.] So he’s kind of playing with the reader here um to set up this this lecture that he’s about to give. |
| Sarah | And yeah, he offers several different theories about how um you can explain at what appears to be a locked room, some of them being that, you know, it actually wasn’t murder, but a series of coincidences that that lead to an accidental death or a suicide that was looked a suicide that was made to look like a murder. um And then, yeah, there are several, several others. |
| Brook | Right, so there’s this and meta thing that he has done. I think there’s a several books I’ve actually saw some articles about that some readers don’t like that to have the fourth wall broken or you know this ah They want to keep the detective feeling like we’re in ah fiction but um but I think it’s really interesting and I imagine that they were having a lot of these kind of discussions at the Detection Club meetings and um we see that we’ve talked about that that some of these people who we know were rubbing elbows with their ah fellow Golden Age authors then incorporate some of that material in their books. And in fact, even ah John Dickson Carr’s most famous sleuth, Dr. Gideon Fell, is heavily based on G.K. Chesterton. |
| Sarah | Mm-hmm. That’s right. And I think Chesterton was one of Carr’s significant influences. And I couldn’t find if they ever had actually met. Chesterton died before Carr became a member of the Detection Club. So, you know, he couldn’t have him there at at his induction ceremony, which probably would have been just a wonderful moment for him. But I don’t know if they had any other opportunity to meet. |
| Brook | I found some of the covers of his books interesting because it could have been an actual drawing of G.K. Chesterton, ah but it’s actually Dr. Gideon Fell, who is the sleuth. [Sarah: Mm hmm.] |
| Brook | I was really surprised, Sarah. I did not know that John Dickson Carr was an American. I had him in my head as a British author and I think in some ways they adopted him as a a British author. He obviously as the first American to ever be inducted into the Detection Club. I think he was really accepted in the group. And most of his stories are set in, um you know, in Great Britain. And so that was always my assumption was that he was British. |
| Sarah | Mm-hmm. Yeah, and and he you know worked for the BBC, or he certainly wrote radio plays for the BBC. I was listening to one set of ah radio plays that he had written. ah No, sorry. I’m not sure that he actually wrote the stories, but the opening credits, they say they’re being introduced by him. So you can hear his voice, and you can hear a little bit of an English accent, I think because he’d been living there for um for so long, but the audio quality isn’t great. And so I listened to a couple of them and I wasn’t certain actually if it was the same speaker in both of those introductions. So um i’m I’m going to say that it was, but I i i can’t say for certain. |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. Another connection that he had ah was to Edward Powys Mathers, and he actually dedicated the 1939 book, The Black Spectacles, to him. And this is ah the fellow whose alter ego was “Torquemada”, and he wrote crossword puzzles and reviewed detective fiction. But lately he has been brought back into the public eye because He is the author of Cain’s Jawbone. um And so I really loved that John Dickson Carr dedicated one of his books to him. And he also um wrote an introduction to one of Torquemada’s puzzle books. |
| Brook | So these two puzzle creators were definitely acquainted and I thought it was a neat connection. And interesting because Torquemada wasn’t necessarily a storyteller. He was a puzzle writer. And ah clearly John Dickson Carr appreciated that because, you know, in the end, he was a puzzle maker, wasn’t he? |
| Sarah | Absolutely, he was. And some of his books were sold as what was called sealed mysteries. I hadn’t heard about this before. But the final section of the book, when it’s sold, is secured from the rest of the book. And if a reader makes it through the book without breaking that seal, they could return it to the bookstore and get a refund. |
| Brook | Wow. [Sarah: Yeah] That’s incredible. I and i i think it um goes along so nicely with what we’re what we’re seeing in this day and age with these kind of like sort of interactive but mystery novels and you know turning things gamification, I guess you could call it. [Sarah: yeah] And so that’s really fascinating. |
| Sarah | So you mentioned um Dr. Fell as his main sleuth, and he was the lecturer in the in um the locked room lecture. um Another sleuth was Sir Henry Merrivale, who is often returned often referred to as HM. I read one of the books that features Henry Merrivalle called The White Priory Murders, and in there, HM, the sleuth, he gives a little mini locked room lecture and explains the different mechanics behind a locked room. So um that’s another thing that would be really interesting if we were to read all of Carr’s works is how many times he offers different explanations for how this seemingly locked room mystery occurred. |
| Brook | Definitely. Well, and I think it’s such a wealth of knowledge for future writers who are interested in carrying on this um tradition. I thought a lot this week as we were preparing about Tom Mead and we had Tom on and he is a contemporary author who’s writing mostly locked room mysteries. He has a sleuth, Joseph Spector, who is his specialist in solving locked room mysteries. And um in our interview with Tom, he noted that ah Carr was someone who didn’t repeat or recycle his ah tricks. And he does call them his tricks um very often. And that that was different from many of the other Golden Age authors. And he really felt like Carr was one of the most imaginative authors when it came to creating these stories. |
| Sarah | Yeah, and i I found a couple of references to not necessarily how Carr wrote, but his approach to planting some of those clues for readers. um And so in The Golden Age of Murder, Martin Edwards writes that “John Dickson Carr’s favorite technique was to plant a clue and then follow it immediately with something graphic.” And John Dickson Carr referred to this as “blood on a white bandage.” |
| Sarah | Edwards continues that “Sayers agreed with this approach and saying that you know readers pictured a vivid image and they forgot the clue.” |
| Brook | Oh, fascinating. |
| Sarah | And I get the sense that there was quite a strong connection between Carr and Sayers. I think they really respected each other’s work. |
| Sarah | And then in Martin Edwards’ book, The Life of Crime, he shares Carr’s advice to “write a lie as though it were true. The most important clue should sound like the wildest nonsense. In placing a cryptic clue, be sure that your reader never sees it at level. This can be done by using love scenes or comic scenes.” |
| Brook | Oh, that is such great advice. And again, I’m going to draw back to the idea of a magician ah drawing your attention away from what’s actually important, you know, the stage magician, I’m meaning. So yeah, excellent advice and a way to do that in prose. |
| Sarah | And I like that idea of mixing that clue with romance or comedy, you know, two elements that um can distract the reader’s attention. |
| Brook | And many times when we’re in one of those sections in a book, we just assume that we’re in subplot, don’t we? We’re like, okay, this is the break from the mystery and we’re going to you know hear about what’s going on in their personal lives. ah What a clever way to to hide a clue. |
| Sarah | So I don’t think that there was ever any novels featuring his sleuth, Colonel March, but he did appear in several of Carr’s short stories. And there was a, uh, I think it was 26-episode, um, of a television series featuring Colonel March, and it was called Colonel March of Scotland Yard. It aired in the early 1950s with Boris Karloff playing the detective. And you can see episodes of this are available on YouTube. I think they also are streaming um on some of the streaming services. I think if you searched, you could find them. And they’re short. They’re they’re less than 30 minutes long. |
| Brook | That’s interesting. I didn’t think of catching the radio plays or looking into TV. So that’s something that I’m going to have to follow up on, Sarah. |
| Sarah | I really enjoyed listening to the radio plays and you can buy, it was $5, about $7.50 Canadian, and to pay for um a download of, I think it was maybe 40 radio plays that are about each episode’s maybe 45- or 50-minutes long. I’ve been listening to them and really, really enjoying them. |
| Brook | That’s great. I did, ah I read this week, The Black Spectacles, which is a Gideon Fell novel, but then I definitely wanted to sample and get a feel for ah one of the Merrivale novels and I, out as well, listened to some of the White Priory Murders. um And you definitely can see ah a difference in the two pen names. Merrivale is more upbeat, light-hearted, comedic, ah really fun actually. I really enjoyed it. And then Fell is more, um you know, darker, grimmer, kind of some creepy atmosphere. |
| Brook | So I think that that was, at first when I realized that the pen names were so similar, I was like, wondering what the point was but I think it was a smart business decision to have these two separate brands. He was also a very quick and and prolific author and um especially in those days the traditional publishers weren’t real keen on having more than one book out a year so I think that gave him a way to have more than one release per year. |
| Sarah | No, I think that’s exactly right. Carter Dickson is the author of the books featuring Henry Maraville and John Dickson Carr is noted as the author for the Gideon Fell mysteries. |
| Sarah | He also had a detective um from the French police service, Henri Bencolin. um ah There were only five books featuring him. And I didn’t have a chance to read any of them, so I you know i can’t speak to him. But um I did read that he was ah more like Sherlock Holmes in terms of his approach to solving the crimes. |
| Sarah | Brook, I couldn’t find anything that spoke to how the connection between Carr and the Doyle family began. um But, it might have been that in 1945 Carr wrote two radio adaptations of Conan Doyle stories. |
| Sarah | And that might have led him to um getting to know the family and and having access to some of Doyle’s papers so that he could write that biography and then go on to write um some additional short stories with Doyle’s son. |
| Brook | Yeah. Wow. What an honor to be, you know, tagged as that author. And then I assume that that probably helps. We’ve talked before about the huge Sherlockian community and that probably helps, you know, create new readers for John Dickson Carr because people who are big Sherlock fans are going to then learn about Carr and hopefully keep his work alive as well. |
| Sarah | That’s right. And we know that Doyle wrote locked room mysteries as well, right? |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. |
| Sarah | Brook, it has been lots of fun to dig a little bit deeper into draw the life and works of John Dickson Carr. um And, you know, I’m sure his name is going to come up again as we talk about different kinds of mysteries and certainly locked room mysteries. |
| Brook | Definitely. I learned a lot this week and I hope that you did too listeners. But for today, thank you for joining us on Clued in Mystery. I’m Brook. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery. |
