The Golden Age of detective fiction - mainly between the two world wars of the twentieth century - was populated by a ridiculously large number of detectives. It was the age of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and a myriad of others but how many of those others can you name?
John Dickson Carr was a notable 'other' and with his sleuth Dr Gideon Fell he loved to examine impossible situations and locked room mysteries. He tackled other styles using other detectives and adventurers but rationally decided that simple adventures had become obsolete with the advent of the Second World War, that the world had become too small and in my opinion probably too wearied. In retrospect he was proven right as adventures then moved on to the next broad canvasses supplied by science fiction and fantasy. The old canvas had become too small as he said.
Expertise in the field is not something even vaguely within my experience but this is probably the best known of his mysteries and encapsulates his mighty abilities as an intellectual puzzle maker adroitly and exactly. It's a macabre mix of old Transylvanian mythology, locked room murder, invisible people, and red herrings aplenty. Transylvanian mythology come in that the primary victim actually hails from the Old Dark Country and coffins feature heavily in the narrative, as does as a heavy dose of mysterious magical goings-on.
I'm not going to talk about the plot much, beyond the fact that Dr Fell is a very well developed character at this point. His worries about the cost of revealing truth recalls some of the best moments of Poirot and Holmes, but with added weariness at the motivations of the culprits. Fell also does something very unusual in this story which none of the other detectives I've read ever do and gives a lecture on locked room mysteries directly to the reader. The idea of the fourth wall being directly breached in 1935 is quite astounding, and rather profound. The speech itself feels rather out of place, and not only because of that meta-awareness, but rather because this is not exactly a locked room mystery, but really only pretends to be. It is actually a supposedly supernatural or magical murder which is solved in the most simple of ways once you realise the truth of it all. There aren't that many climaxes or revelations that are more pleasing in their simplicity, and it seems to have been something unique to Carr. He was a puzzle man.
The Dr Gideon Fell stories aren't easy to obtain in print any more and I read this on Kindle, but that's not how I first experienced this story. If we journey back in time a younger Oliver listened to a Radio 4 dramatisation of 'The Hollow Man', featuring the sumptuously voiced British national treasure Sir Donald Sinden. As far as I know you can't listen to it anymore and it's a shame as he did wonderfully. No-one else could have harrumphed in the required manner! If only the Radio 4 dramatised archive could be accessed for such things like this: It would be an amazing thing. There's a version of 'The Murders In The Rue Morgue' in that archive I would love to find and purchase forever more. Come on, BBC, there has to be a way! I'd collect the whole little series of Dr Fells you produced and a mass more!
Moving back to the origin of this piece, I can recommend this book highly to people who appreciate mysteries from that Golden Age. Dickson Carr was underrated then and is seemingly forgotten now but there is material there that is well worth perusing. There are ways and they are legal.
O.
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