Abstract
Edward D. Hoch, a critic and prolific writer of locked room mysteries, claimed in 1981 that ‘the locked room story has a long and noble history, going back to Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’.2 In the period after the First World War the genre began to see a return to the notion in Poe’s detective fiction that theme was a direct consequence of the nature of the detective narrative structure. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, Poe’s theme of ratiocination in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ complemented the closed nature of the story’s construction by appearing as a frame for the narrative. In this respect the locked room mysteries written by John Dickson Carr between 1930 and the outbreak of the Second World War are of particular relevance.3 Although Carr continued to write until his death in 1977, it is his novels of the 1930s, written in the genre’s Golden Age, a period of increasing conventions for the genre, which exhibit some of the most notable examples of the locked room mystery anywhere.
Theatrical magic in the mystery story, as on the stage, is always a matter of worldly means, whether mechanical, manipulative, or psychological…. Exposure hurts magic, because the explanations are always and necessarily deflationary.
Cushing Strout, ‘Theatrical Magic and the Novel’1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Cushing Strout, ‘Theatrical Magic and the Novel’, Sewanee Review 111.1 (2003), 175.
Edward D. Hoch, ‘Introduction’, in All But Impossible: An Anthology of Locked Room & Impossible Crime Stories, ed. Edward D. Hoch (London: Robert Hale, 1981), p. viii.
In all, Carr wrote 31 novels in the 1930s. As John Dickson Carr: It Walks by Night (1930), The Lost Gallows (1931), Castle Skull (1931), The Corpse in the Waxworks (1932), Poison in Jest (1932), Hag’s Nook (1933), The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933), The Eight of Swords (1934), The Blind Barber (1934), Death-Watch (1935), The Hollow Man (1935), The Arabian Nights Murder (1936), The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936), The Burning Court (1937), The Four False Weapons (1937), To Wake the Dead (1937), The Crooked Hinge (1938), The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939), The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939). Under the pseudonym ‘Carr Dickson’: The Bowstring Murders (1933). Under the pseudonym ‘Carter Dickson’: The Plague Court Murders (1934), The White Priory Murders (1934), The Red Widow Murders (1935), The Unicorn Murders (1935), The Punch and Judy Murders (1937), The Peacock Feather Murders (1937), The Third Bullet (1937), The Judas Window (1938), Deathin Five Boxes (1938), Fatal Descent (1939), The Reader is Warned (1939). John Dickson Carr (1906–77), the son of a prominent lawyer and Democratic Congressman, was born into a well-to-do Pennsylvanian family, although he resisted the importunities of his father to follow him into the law. Carr first became interested in the world of letters by reading and memorizing Shakespeare while watching his father in debate at the House of Congress. His scholarship, however, was always rather inconsistent and, after a brief spell at Harvard, he entered the more liberal atmosphere of Haverford College, where he began writing both fictional prose and poetry. Carr married an Englishwoman in 1932 and spent much of the pre-war period in his adopted country. For a more comprehensive biographical account see Douglas G. Greene’s John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (New York: Otto Penzler, 1995). Carr produced a considerable body of non-fiction including essays and articles, all of which have been documented by Douglas Greene. Dennis Porter, in The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), has described him as ‘The best known biographer of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’, a work which Carr completed in 1949.
Michael Dirda, ‘John Dickson Carr’, in Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. Robin Winks (New York: Scrribners, 1998), p. 113.
S. T. Joshi, John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990), p. 33.
LeRoy Lad Panek, An Introduction to the Detective Story (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), pp. 130–1.
John Dickson Carr, The Hollow Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1935), originally published in America as John Dickson Carr, The Three Coffins (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935).
The full list of judges comprised Robert Adey, Jack Adrian, Jacques Barzun, Jon l. Breen, Robert E. Briney, Jan Broberg, Frederick Dannay (Ellery Queen), Douglas G. Greene, Howard Haycraft, Edward D. Hoch, Marvin Lachman, Richard Levinson, William Link, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., Otto Penzler, Bill Pronzini, Julian Symons and Donald A. Yates. Hoch’s description of the competition can be found in Edward D. Hoch, ‘Introduction’, in All But Impossible, ed. Edward D. Hoch (Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk: St Edmundsberry Press, 1981), pp. viii–x.
John Dickson Carr, ‘The Grandest Game in the World’, in The Door to Doom (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), pp. 308–25.
Linda Semple and Rosalind Coward, ‘Introduction’, in London Particular (London: Pandora, 1988), p. ii. See also Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 149.
David Glover, ‘The Writers Who Knew Too Much: Populism and Paradox in Detective Fiction’s Golden Age’, in The Art of Detective Fiction, ed. Warren Chernaik, Martin Smales and Robert Vilain (London: MacMillan, 2000), p. 45.
George N. Dove, The Reader and the Detective Story (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), p. 19.
S. S. Van Dine, ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’, American Magazine 14 (September 1928), pp. 26–30; repr. in S. S. Van Dine, ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’, in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), pp. 189–93. S. S. Van Dine is the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright who was originally an important literary editor and art critic.
Ronald Knox, ‘Decalogue’, in Murder For Pleasure, ed. Howard Haycraft (D. Appleton-Century: New York, 1941), p. 256.
The full ritual can be found in ‘The Detection Club Oath’, in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946) pp. 197–9.
Carolyn Wells, The Technique of the Mystery Story (Springfield, MA: The Home Correspondence School, 1913), p. 317.
Kathleen Gregory Klein and Joseph Keller, ‘Deductive Detective Fiction: The Self-Destructive Genre’, Genre 19 (1986), 156.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) p. 25.
Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 45.
Lee Horsley, The ‘Noir’ Thriller (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 1.
Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Atlantic Monthly (December 1944), pp. 31–46; repr. in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), p. 222.
John Dickson Carr, ‘As We See It’, Uniontown Daily News Standard (4 May 1922), p. 8.
Douglas G. Greene, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (New York: Otto Penzler, 1995), p. 167.
John Dickson Carr, The Burning Court (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1937).
Marjorie Nicolson, ‘The Professor and the Detective’, in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), pp. 113–14.
David I. Grossvogel, Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie (Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 40.
David Lehman, The Perfect Murder (New York: The Free Press, 1989), p. 102.
Ross Macdonald, ‘The Writer as Detective Hero’, in The Capra Chapbook Anthology, ed. Noel Young (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1973), p. 80.
Roger Caillois, ‘The Detective Novel as Game’, trans. William W. Stowe, in The Poetics of Murder, ed. Glen W. Most and William W. Stowe (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 3.
Christianna Brand, Death of Jezebel (New York: Cornwall Press, 1948).
Edmund Miller, ‘Stanislav Lem and John Dickson Carr: Critics of the Scientific World-View’, Armchair Detective 14.4 (1981), 342.
Marty Roth, Foul and Fair Play (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press), p. 36.
John Dickson Carr, It Walks By Night (Grosset & Dunlap: New York, 1930), p. 15.
Robert E. Briney, ‘The Art of the Magician’, in The Cooked Hinge (San Diego: University Extension, University of California, 1976), p. vii.
Clayton Rawson, Death from a Top Hat (London: Collins, 1938) and Clayton Rawson, The Footprints on the Ceiling (London: Collins, 1939).
A comprehensive account of the performance and history of stage magic can be found in James Randi, Conjuring: A Definitive History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
For an account of Cagliostro’s life see: W. R. H. Trowbridge, Cagliostro: The Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926).
Harry Houdini, Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (New York: Dutton, 1922).
John Dickson Carr, The Plague Court Murders (New York: Avon Book Company, 1934), p. 7.
Werner Wolf, ‘Illusion and Breaking Illusion in Twentieth-Century Fiction’, in Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches, ed. Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape (Berlin: Walter de Gruyer, 1990), p. 288.
John Dickson Carr, The Eight of Swords (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934), p. 215.
John Dickson Carr, To Wake the Dead (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1937), p. 231.
John Dickson Carr, The Lost Gallows (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934), pp. 121–2.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, ‘Self-Reference in Literature’, Poetics 18 (1989), pp. 491–515.
Anthony Boucher, Nine Times Nine (New York: Duell, 1940), p. 163.
Roger Herzel, ‘John Dickson Carr’, in Minor American Novelists (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), p. 70.
Copyright information
© 2011 Michael Cook
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cook, M. (2011). The Hollow Text: Illusion as Theme in John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man. In: Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230313736_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230313736_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32531-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-31373-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)