Before I say a single word about John Dickson Carr, lock all the doors. Secure the windows. Block any ventilation ducts. Let us get the conditions exactly right.Because the man whose work we are about to discuss is the Master of the Locked Room Mystery,the hideous crime committed in a sealed chamber or in some other location impossible to enter or leave.

The sealed chamber may be a room, a prison cell.a tomb,a bank vault and so on. Other locations include a ship or. in The Problem of  the Wire Cage, a tennis court-the wire cage is a protected area with four high walls. A murder victim is found lying on the court with no footprints in me sand surrounding it. How did the killer get in and out of the cage? Can offers five different explanations, the most ingenious of which is that murderer donned a pair of ballet shoes and made his way along the white basreline on his points before committing the crime,later making his escape by the same balletic route.

Imagine,if you will, Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the villain in a film version of this novel and having to turn himself into a baller dancer to commit this perfect crime. What works superbly on the page would simply not work in visuel terms.

My title for this talk is Follow That Carr-and Step on It! Because no matter how fast you drive, John Dickson Carr always stays ahead of you. Just when you think you 're catching him up, you come to a traffic island with a series of roads leaving off it. One is called Supernatural Street. A secend is Histocal Avenue. A third is Locked Room Lane. A fourth is the Ghost Boulevard. Other roads lead to radio plays,to short stories to essays. to articles, to anything and everything which can be produced by the pen of an indefatigable crime writer.

The moment you believe that you've pinned him down, Carr turns into something.else like a shape-changing alien. What always remains constant, however,is. the cunning of his plots and the brilliance of his imagination.

Let me give you a profıle of a writer. He's a foreigner who marries an Englishwoman and who learns to write her language superbly. A man who falls in love with English history and who takes it to the point of an obsession. A dramatist with a love of the medium of  a radio. A man who reinvents himself with pseudonyms. A versatile and profilic author,who, having mastered one type of crime story, immediately turns his attention to another.

Well, that's enough about me. Let's talk about  John Dickson Carr, an author with whom I feel a deep affinity although I could never match his variety or his remarkable output.

I will not dwell too much on the life of my subject. The definitive biography is John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles. lt is written by Douglus. Greene and is a wonderful piece of scholarship.I urge you to read it as an example of how an authors life is dictated by his compulsion to write. Note the subtitle:The Man Who Explained Miracles.

Carr makes the crime appear miraculous but there is always a logical explanation for them.

John Dickson Carr was born in 1906 in Uniontown Pennsylvania.He studied at Haverford College. His father was a lawyer and an activist in Democratic politics, becoming a member of the House of Representatives.Carr’s first published detective stories appeared in The Haverfordian, his college magazine. And even at that age,we can see flashes of a rare talent and identify the themes and material that were to attract him throughout his career,

With foolish optimism,his parents sent him to the Sorbonne in Paris for an education.What he found in the swirling Bohemian atmosphere of the Left Bank in the 1920s was confirmation of his destiny. He would be a writer. Not for him the security of the law or any other respectable LeCarre profession. in a Paris where Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other literary figures flourished, Carr was in his element.

Before we take him my further, let us see what his relation is to some of the other classic writers being discussed at this convention. Carr did not get on at all with Raymond Chandler or with Dashiell Hammett. Indeed. he had barttles with both in print. They were the chief reprasentatives of the hard-nosed. Hord-boiled, down these-mean-streets detectives from the Black Mask school. Preoccupied as he was with playing fair with his readers, Carr felt that his rivals cheated.

He described Chandler and Hammett as "clueless" in the sense of disdaining clues that would make the solution of a mystery more credible. "'The clueless meandering which run riot through their works is how he described it in a letter to a friend. Carr took issue.

With Chandler in particular and they locked horns.Chandler called him a ‘pipsqueak’ in print,but stronger epithets were no doubt used of Carr in private.Hammett was less objectionable as a writer to Carr and there were aspects of Hammett’s work that he praised.But the Hammet world was so far removed from his own that they could never be looked upon as kindred spirits.

Dorothy L.Sayers was one of his idols and her favorable revered president of The Dedection Club,the elite society of crime writers he was eventually invited to join.And he spent many happy evenings at club meetings,discussing his work with her.

      Edmund Crispin-also to be honoured with a paper at this convention-described Carr as ‘One of the two or three best detective writers since Poe.’When you recall that John Dickson Carr also wrote as Carter Dickson,you might wish to amend that judgement to read that he was ‘at least two of the best three detective writers since the great Edgar Allan.’Crispin made his comment in the 1940s,a time when there were so many fine crime writers at work.You can see what a supreme compliment it was.

      Carr also worshipped Arthur Conan Doyle and co-authored a biography with Doyle’s eldest surviving son,Adrian.Whenever Carr worked on a non-fiction book,its impact could be seen on his subsequent novels.He learned much from Conan Doyle but he was never one to ape another writer slavishly.Carr could be influenced by others without seeming in any way derivative.

       So here  we have a man who is right at the heart of  our classic territory,writing mainly in the 1930s,when it was said of him that one of the great joys of reading was that one could count on no less than four new novels a year from his tireless pen.Each one maintained the same high standart.Having a facility to write is not the same as being facile.Because Carr was so fertile,he must not be dismissed as a machine that turned out books.He was a true Professional with an unending flow of ideas for stories and an eagerness to put them on paper.

     The concept of fair play lies at the centre of his work.I believe that this is because of his crucial meeting with Clarice Cleaves,the charming young Englishwoman whom he encountered on a transatlantic voyage.Marriage to Clarice was not only a consummation of his love affair with England,it encouraged him to emigrate from America and it instilled in him the peculiary English obsession with fair play.

      This obsession was best seen in the sporting arena in the great English public schools of the nineteenth century.It was vital to strive hard in any sporting contest but always within the rules. "Play up! Play up! And play the game" It was still a powerful idea in the 1930s when Carr came to England. National teams did well in a variety of sports. When they were beaten by foreigners the most frequent complaint was tha the victors had cheated-they had played dirty.

Carr had this Anglo-Saxon commitment to fair play. He felt that it was essential for an author to stick by the rules with his readers and play the game. He gave them a wide sprinkling of clues in his books and allowed the reader to discover them at exactly the same time as his detective. When Gideon Fell of Sir Henry Merrivale surprises us with detective powers.they are working from material which has been set out honestly before us. They do not produce vital clues out of the air or know something deliberately kept from the reader.

This means that Carr had to works out his novels in advance in great detail. His carpentry is first rate. Everything is dovetailed. The reader never gets splinters.

His professional career began when he reworked a short story which had first appeared in The Haverfordian. It was called It Walks By Night. The Gothic title was appropriate for a novel with many supernatural elements and some splendid excesses.His protagonist is Henri Bencolin, prefect of police in Paris. What sets him apart from Carr's later and more famous detectives is that Bencolin is French and comes from a wholly different culture, Again. he is a professional with the resources of a police department at his back.And finally, he has very clear principles of detection. When other sleuths rely on intuition and guesswork. Bencolin employs a procedural method.

Carr does not make his detective a shining hero. Indeed he is keen to throw the emphasis on the crime rather than on the man who is trying to solve it. Listen to this description of Henri Bencolin from It Walks By Night. This is now the readers first made his acquaintance.

Your first impression ••• was one of liking and respect. You felt that you could tell him anything,however foolish it sounded and he would be neither suprised nor inclined to laugh at you. Then you studied the face, turned partly sideways--the droop of the eyelids. at once quizzical and tolerant,under hooked eyebrows and the dark veiled light of the eyes themselves. The nose was thin and aquiline,with deep lines running down past his mouth. A faint smile was lost in a smail moustache and a pointed black beard .. He rarely gestured when he spoke, except to shrug his shoulders, and he never raised his voice: but whenever you were in this man's company,you felt uncomfortably conspicuous.

Bencolin is not brought in with a roll of drums nor is he given the handsome features of the standant hero. He is a rather shadowy figure, quiet. reserved, and yet formidable

He investigates the murder of a young woman, an aristocrat, whose dead body is found half-naked. This was a bold rouch in the 1930s when half -naked ladies were simply not found in novels, even when they were set in France. It put a sexual element in the crime which was quite daring for its day.

The novel pursues a wild and somtimes uproarious course with moments of Gothic vividness. Bencolin solves the crime in a manner familiar to readersof Agatha Christie. He gathers his suspects in a room,dissects the motives and behaviour of each one in turn,then identifies the killer. In the earlier version be had them chained to their chairs, but Carr wisely omitted this extravagance in the published novel.

Five more Bencolin novels were to follow, and a clutch of short stories, but Carr wanted to create an English detective who worked in the beloved country which the author had adopted, That is when Carr's finest charecter, Dr. Gideon Fell,stepped on to the page. The name was inspired by the famous epigram:

I do not love thee, Doctor Fell,

The reason why I cannot tell;

But this alone I know full well,

I do not love thee, Doctof Fell.

Gideon Fell is a glorious amateur. Physically, and in other ways,he is based very clearly on G.K.Chesterton, the creator of the immortal Father Brown.Chesterton was a massive man with an international reputotion in the literary field.His agile brain and keen sense of humour made him a distinctive personality.Carr admired him enormously and there are traces of that admiration in the portrait we get of Gideon Fell in his first outing.Hag!s Nook. But what is surprising abouı this book is its 1yrical opening,a reminder that Carr was no mere purveyor of mechanica1 plots. He had the gift of language.

The old lexicographer’s study ran the length of his small house, It was a rafted room. sunk a few feet below the level of the door; the latticed windows at the rear were shaded by the yew tree, through which the late afternoon sun was striking now.

Thcre is something spectral about deep and drowsy beauty or the English countrysider; in the lush dark grass, the evergreens,the grey church spire and the meandering white road.To an American, who remembers his own brisk concrete highways clogged with red  filling stations and the fumes of traffic,it is particularly pleasant.It suggests place where people really can walk without seeming incongruous, even in the middle of the road. Tad Rampole watched the sun through the latticed windows, and the dull red berries glistening in the yew tree, with a feeling which can haunt the traveller only in the British lsles.A feeling that the world is old and enchanted;a sense of reality in all the flashing images which are conjured up by that one word "merrie".

After, this lyrical and semtimental opening we are introduced to the great detective himself. It is not a dramatic entry but Gideon Fell quickly establishes his presence.

Dr. Fell wheezed a little,even with the exertion of filling his pipe. He was very stout, and walked. as a rule,with two canes. Against the light from the front windows,his big mop of dark hair,streaked with a white plume, waved like a war banner.Immense and aggressive,it went blowing before him throogh life. His face was large and round and ruddy, and had a twitching smile somewhere above several chins.But what you noticed there was the twinkle in his eye. He wore eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon…he could be fiercely combative or chuckling, and somehow he contrived to be both at the same time.

The resemblance to Chesterton is unmistakable. Carr was an admirer of his work and of his flamboyant personality. He dearly wanted to meet Chesterton,then president of The Detection Club. By the time that Carr finally joined this exclusive group,Chesterton had died and his admirer was unable to develop the friendship with him he had sought. In the person of Gideon Fell,however, G.K.Chesterton was to live on.

Fell is desaibed as a lexicographer but he is not really compiling a dictionary.Nor does he have Chesteton’s passionate interest in Roman Catholic theology. Fell’s, labour of love is his history of the drinking habits of the English nation, resarch for which is often of a liquid nature. His quaffing of English ale has given him his Falstaffian girth.

The archetypal Fell novel is The Hollow Man. It’s American title was The Three Coffins. It shows Carr at his best and the Locked-Room Mystery at its most baffling.The plot concerns a concerns Grimaud, who assume is French, who meets with a group of friends each week to talk about ghosts and the supernatural. A stranger called Pierre Fley bursts in and warns Grimaud that the latter's brother will try to kill him. Fley announces that he must go because he,too, fears the brother.When the strange visitor rushes out, the only clue he leaves behind is a visiting card: Pierrt Fley,Illusionist.

lt is avital clue to the reader, who is being warned to take nothing on its surface appearance.Illusion is the art of disguise, of showing one thing in order to conceal another. It may involve the cunning use of light, mirrors or special devices and it is a key part of Carr’s own stoekes- in-trade.

When Fell comes on the scene, he discovers that Grimaud has been killed in a locked room. It is a study on the top floor and a plan of that part of the building is given in the book. The study has been locked from the inside by the key in the door. There is a painting,propped up lengthwise aginst the bookshelves. Chairs, sofa and rug have been disarranged. The murder victim lies in the middle of the room.

Here is the ultimate locked room with no means of entry or exit for the killer. How has the crime been committed? Fell smokes a cigar as he listens to statements from those in the house,then he makes his own deductions. Pressing his hands to his temples and ruffling his mop of hair, he startles them all with his insight.

You see neither Grimaud nor Dumont is any more French than I am. A women with those check-bones, a woman who pronounces the silent 'h’ in honest never came from a Latin race. They're both Magyar. To be: precis:e: Grimaud came originaııy from Hungary. His ıal Mmeis Karoly,or Charles Grimaud Horvath. He probably had a French mother. He came from the principality of Transylvania, fonnerly a part of the Hungarian kingdom, but annexed by Rumania since the War. In the late nineties or early nineteen-hundreds, Karoly Grimaud Horvarth and his two brothers were all sent to prison. Did I tell you he had two brothers? One we haven’t seen, the other now calls himself Pierre Fley.

All the information given here is waved before the reader’s eyes in advance. For instance, Hungarian translations of Shakespeare's  plays are on the bookshelf. In the course of his analysis,Gideon Fell says that the three brothers were imprisoned for some unspeakable crime. The three coffins are also mentioned.And the link with Transylvania is set up.

Earlier in the story, Carr has mentioned one of the logical explanations for the Dracula myth. When the contorted and blood –covered bodies  were found in graveyard they were said to be the victims of Count Dracula.Carr argues that they could  just as well have been plague victims,who were sometimes buried before they were properly dead and who, reviving in their coffins,tried desperately to scratch and force their way out. Hence, their contorted limbs and the blood over their hands, face and body.

When the story moves towards its climax,Gideon Fell breaks off to give us The Locked-Room Lecture,the best and fullest description of this pheomenon. Fell does not cheat. He has other people in the room, who question him at every stage and challange him in the way that the reader would. A crime is committed in a hermetically sealed room from which no murderer has escaped because no murderer was actually in the room. Here are Fell's possible explanations in The Hollow Man:

1. It is not murder, but  series of coincidences ending in an accident which looks like murder.

2. lt is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himsef or crash into an accidental death.

3. lt is murder, by a mechanical device already hidden in the room and planted undetectably in some innocent-looking piece of furniture.

4. It is suicide, whith is intended to look like murder.

5. It is a murder which derives its problem from illusion and impersonation.

6. It is a murder which, although committed by somebody outside the room at the time, nevertheless seems to have been committed by somebody who seems to have been inside.

7. lt is a murder in which the victim presumed to be dead long before he actually is. The victim lies asleep (drugged but unharmed) in a locked room. Knocking on the door fail to rouse him. The murderer starts a foul-play scare; forces the door, gets in ahead and kills by stabbing or throat.-cutting.

Fell juggles all the possibilities and comes up with an answer which is truly ingenious and which makes The Hollow Man such a classic of the genre.

Carr’s other great detective is Sir Henry Merriva1e, who made his first appearance in The Plauge Court Murders (1934) and went on to feature in over twenty more novels. All of them were written under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson because publishers could not cope with the prolific output of  John Dickson Carr.

Sir Henry Merrivale is very different from his predecessors. He is not a professional detective like Bencolin but he does have an important job as Chief of the Military Intelligence Department in the War Department. This would seem more to qualify him for tales of espionage than of criminal investigations, but Carr usually assigns him the latter brief.Even where Merrivale is involved in his official function. Carr avoids any discussion of the political impliacation of his work.

In The Plague Court Murders, we have our first encounter with the idiosyncratic Merrivale. Bencolin was not an especially likeable person;Fell was much more appealing and interesting.Carr is keen to estabilish Merrivale as another talented,outrageous and popular figure.

I  thought again of that high room over Whitehall, which I had not seen since 1922. I thought of the extremely lazy, extremly garrulous and slipshod figure who sat grinning with sleepy eyes; his hands folded over his big stomach and his feet propped up on the desk. His chief taste was for lurid reading-matter; his chief complaint that people would not treat him seriously. He was a qualified barrister and qualified physican and he spoke atrocious grammer.He was Sir Henry Merrivale,Baronet and has been a fighting SociaIist all his life. He was vastly conceited and had an inexhaustible fund of bawdy stories.

There is a clownish aspect to Merrivale that is constantly played on in the novels, but his brain is acute.In the end, he is always able to solve the apparently insoluble crimes, Like Gideon Fell, he has a wife and he talks very fondly about her in Night At the Mocking Widow. The fact her name is Clementine-always referred to as ‘Clemmie’ -has confirmed some people in the belief that Sir Henry Merrivale is based loosely on Winston Churchill. There are certain physical similarities,it is true, and Churchill's wife was also called Clementine but one cannot imagine Churchill holding Merrivale’s eccentric political opinions or committing any of the grammatical solecisms which litter Merrivale's speeches.

Sir Henry Merrivale-or H.M. as he is usually called-has a. great concern for his dignity. He is a figure of authority who expects to be accorded the proper respect, H.M. is, in every way, a fully-rounded character who gets involved in a whole range of fascinating cases but he never achieves the lift-off which Carr gives to Gideon Fell. H.M. is amusing where Fell can be hilarious; the former is discursive where the lastter is incisive. And though we get more surface information about Sir Henry Merrivale, we somehow get to know Gideon Fell better.

In Nine-Death Makes Ten (1940). HM.is seen at his most charecteristic. The British edition was published under the title of Murder in the Submarine Zone. It is one of  Carr"s most sombre works and is based on a transatlantic voyage which he and his wife. Clarice, made in September, 1939. Sailing from New York to London was a traumatic experience for them. German submarines had already sunk many Allied ships and there was no mercy shown to civilians on liners. When the SS Athenia was torpedoed on September 4th, 1939, over a hundred passengers lost their lives.

Carr sets his story in January. 1940,when the menace of German submarines had grown. The liner Edwartic sets sail from New York across an Atlantic Ocean infested with U -boats. Its destination is withheld for security reasons because the luxury ship has been converted into a munitions vessel. It travels without a convoy, because of the explosive nature of its cargo,the liner carries only nine passengers and its crew. When one passenger,Mrs.Zia Bey,is murdered,the killer must be aboard,since no one could possibly have joined or left the ship since it sailed.

Carr builds up the tension expertly. Carrying a secret cargo through enemy waters, the ship now has another deadly secret, Fortunately, one of the nine passengers is Sir Henry Merrivale and it is H.M. who leads the murder investigation. The topicality of the subject-matter gave this book a special frisson but it also provides H.M. with one of his most challenging cases, Although more subdued than in his other outings. H.M. finally unravels  the mystery and really does explain a miracle to us. This is a brilliant example of the floating arsenal as a locked room in itself.

 Writing about an existing wartime situation, Carr must also have had at the back of his mind the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine during the First World War. This was a case when a Cunard liner was torpedoed with the loss of 1200 lives, many of them Americans and other neutrals. The German justification for the attack on a passenger vessel was that it was carrying munitions, a contention which is still disputed.

Carr adds to the ever·present danger from outside his ship by giving us the murder inside it. He begins to wonder if espionage is involved and makes his observation about the true nature of spying.

Espionage,son is far from being a joke these days. It's wide and it’s deep and it sinks under your feet-like that water out there. It runs much deeper than it did twenty-five years ago. Not picturesque like all the legends have made it,or always dealin with very important issues.The proper agent’s an ordinary insignificant sort of person. The clerk. the small professional man, the young girl,the middle-aged woman. Not askin' for rewards or even very brainy;but all fanatical idealists. You could shoot the lot of them without causing much of a.il flurry to G. H .Q. But each one of those little mites, individually, is a potential death's head.

This is an interesting aside but the novel is not a spy story. H .M. really belongs to the tradition of amateur espionage which so bedevilled our intelligence service in the first thirty years of this century. Sir Henry Merrivale is worlds away from the sophistication of a John LeCarre or Len Deighton. As a sleuth, he is far more comfortable and convincing.

When the villain has been unmasked,the novel ends with a lyricaş passage which conveys exactly what Carr himself must have felt when his wartime voyage to England ended safely.

A Sunday quiet held the ship. Commander Matthews, holding the bible clumsily,stood by the improvised rostrum and watched his passengers assemble.Again he read the Twenty-Third Psalm…There were no hymns. There was no prayer.But as the orchestra struck up at a signal from Commander Matthews, they sang God Save The King. And never had those words been sung more strongly, never was more sincerity poured from the heart,than when those strains rose to the roof and the great gray ship moved up the Channel; and, steady as a compass-needle in death and storm and peril and the darkness of great waters, the Edwatirtic came home.

Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale are the two major creative achievements of John Dickson Carr but he was not content simply to feature them in alternate novels. During the war,he turned to the writing of radio plays for the BBC. Some had aI propagandist value but many were sheer entertainment.aimed at taking the listener’s mind off the horrors of war. Radio was a medium of prime importance at that time, the best and quickest way to reach almost every household in the land. Not only would people crowd around their wireless sets to hear the latest news of me wat itself,they would switch on in search of reassurance and diversion.

Carr’s most famous radio drama series was Appointment With Fear in which the Man in Black starred. This part was ideally cast,

Valentine Dyall,a fine classical actor with a  deep and dark voice,was the perfect Man In Black and he could send a shivr down the spines of the nation.I heard these plays as a small child and was so impressed with Valentine Dyall that I longed to work with him one day.My chance came twenty years late when I had him cast as the villain in a TV drama series which I wrote.The sepulchral voice was as rich and unsettling as ever.

Carr also wrote a series called Cabin 13,which was heard here in the States as well.The running Character was the ship’s surgeon.Whenever the vessl put into port on its travels,an incident would occur and our hero would be brought in to solve the mystery and save the day.The cabin,of course,is a sealed unit so beloved by Carr,and the nautical setting harks back to that shipboard romance he had with Clarice Cleaves and which helped to shape his whole life.His mastery of thee tecniques of radio drama is evident in every episode of Cabin 13.

In a short paper such as this,I have only been able to touch on part of John Dickson Carr’s astonishing output,There is no room to discuss his historical novels or his many other experiments in fiction.His reputation rests largely on the twin pillars of Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale but there are countless other supporting stanchions.

 Carr’s heyday was the thirties and forties.The intellectual puzzle of the locked room mystery is no longer enough fort he modern reader.Expectations from the crime novel have changed.Today’s audience may find Carr’s characterisation sometimes sketchy and-in the case of his female charecters-rather  unsatisfactory.Young women tend to be pretty ciphers rather than well-delineated human beings with a serious role to play in a novel.Romances are tossed in as backdrops and there is a vein of sentimentality that seeps in at times.

But the main body of John Dickson Carr’s work stil stands comparison with any of our classic authors.He has survived as well as any of them and improved with age.His ingenuity,his deviosness,his watertight plotting,his warm humour and his ağabeyding sense of fair play stil make him a most agrecable writer to read.Nobody produced beter brain-teasers or left his readers with such a wonderfull sense of resolution at the end of his boks.

Follow that Carr-and Step On It!You will never catch up with him but you will have the most exhilarating chase.