(1906-1977) US writer, mostly resident in the UK until 1948, where many of his famous early detective novels, such as The Three Coffins (1935; vt The Hollow Man 1935), Death-Watch (1935) and The Ten Teacups (1937; vt The Peacock Feather Murders 1937) as by Carter Dickson, and others, are evocatively set. (However, some of his noteworthy early borderline-fantasy detections, such as The Waxworks Murder [1932; vt The Corpse in the Waxworks 1932 US], take place in). Early works like It Walks By Night (1930) or (most significantly) The Burning Court (1937) or He Who Whispers (1946) or (interestingly) Below Suspicion (1949), veer toward but invariably rationalize the supernatural. The Burning Court is exceptional in its capping of the rational explanation with a supernatural twist. Carr's regular detective when writing under his own name is Dr Gideon Fell, who closely resembles G K Chesterton; the Carter Dickson equivalent is Sir Henry Merrivale, who in later adventures showed an increasing likeness to Winston Churchill. Perhaps the most sf-relevant Merrivale detection is The Reader is Warned (1939) as by Carter Dickson, which with great ingenuity builds up the (misleading) conviction that the only possible way for murder to have been committed is via a Psi Power called Teleforce.
After his inspiration regarding intricate locked-room mysteries and the like began to flag, and after a pious biography of Doyle, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949), Carr began to write mysteries less qualifiedly fantastic, in several of which modern detectives are transferred via Time Travel into the England of an earlier era, where they are involved in the unravelling of murders. These books are The Devil in Velvet (1951), set in the seventeenth century, Fear is the Same (1956) as by Carter Dickson, set in the eighteenth, and Fire, Burn! (1957), set in the nineteenth. The first achieves its time travel by diabolical means; the second and third feature unexplained Timeslips. Some of the tales in The Department of Queer Complaints (coll 1940) and The Door to Doom and Other Detections (coll 1980) are supernatural fantasies. [JC/DRL]
John Dickson Carr
born Uniontown, Pennsylvania: 30 November 1906
died Greenville, South Carolina: 27 February 1977
works (highly selected)
nonfiction
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