John Dickson Carr

American · 1906 to 1977

Born on November 30, 1906, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of Wooda Nicholas Carr, a Democratic congressman from western Pennsylvania, John Dickson Carr grew up in a household where Sherlock Holmes and the Father Brown stories were read aloud. He prepared at The Hill School in Pottstown, graduated from Haverford College in 1929, and made his name almost at once with the Henri Bencolin novels set in Paris. In the early 1930s he moved to England, married the Bristol-born Clarice Cleaves, and produced for the next twenty years the most ingenious locked-room mysteries ever written. Dr. Gideon Fell, a vast bewhiskered lexicographer modelled on G. K. Chesterton, first appeared in Hag's Nook (1933). Sir Henry Merrivale, the bald and Churchillian baronet known to readers as H. M., arrived a year later under the pen name Carter Dickson. The Hollow Man (1935) was voted by a panel of seventeen mystery writers and critics in 1981 the finest locked-room novel of all time; its chapter seventeen, in which Dr. Fell lectures on the locked-room form, is sometimes anthologised on its own. Carr returned to America in 1948 with an international reputation. His Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949) won the first of his two Edgar Awards. He was made a Grand Master in 1963 and one of only two Americans ever admitted to the British Detection Club. A stroke in 1963 paralysed his left side; he continued to write one-handed and reviewed crime fiction for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine until the end. He died of lung cancer on February 27, 1977, in Greenville, South Carolina, at the age of seventy.