John Dickson Carr

That is the case. Alison has been murdered. His blazing body was seen running about the battlements of Castle Skull. And so a dark shadow looms over the Rhineland where Inspector Henri Bencolin and his accomplice Jeff Marle have arrived from Paris. Entreated by the Belgian financier D'Aunay to investigate the gruesome and grimly theatrical death of actor Myron Alison,...

There will be ten teacups at number 4, Berwick Terrace, W. 8, on Wednesday, July 31, at 5 p.m. precisely. The presence of the Metropolitan Police is respectfully requested. Writing as Carter Dickson, the master of the locked room mystery, John Dickson Carr, returns to the Crime Classics series. He pitches his series amateur detective, Henry Merrivale, against a seemingly...

One of the greatest locked-room murder mysteries of all time, hailing from 1938, returns to baffle a new bevy of armchair detectives. James Answell, visiting his father-in-law Avery Hume in his locked study, has the misfortune to wake up from a drugged-Whisky swoon to find his host dead, skewered with an arrow. He is, of course, the prime suspect. After...

It almost seemed that the murder, if it was a murder, must have been committed by someone who could rise up unsupported in the air... When Miles Hammond is invited to a meeting of the Murder Club in London, he is met instead with just two other guests and is treated to a strange tale of an impossible crime in...

We are thrilled to welcome John Dickson Carr into the Crime Classics series with his first novel, a brooding locked room mystery in the gathering dusk of the French capital. In the smoke-wreathed gloom of a Parisian salon, Inspector Bencolin has summoned his allies to discuss a peculiar case. A would-be murderer, imprisoned for his attempt to kill his wife,...

A sinister case of deadly poisoned chocolates from Sodbury Cross's high street shop haunts the group of friends and relatives assembled at Bellegarde, among the orchards of 'peach-fancier' Marcus Chesney. To prove a point about how the sweets could have been poisoned under the nose of the shopkeeper, Chesney stages an elaborate memory game to test whether any of his...

The purpose, the illusion, the spirit of a waxworks. It is an atmosphere of death. It is soundless and motionless... Do you see? Last night, Mademoiselle Duchene was seen heading into the Gallery of Horrors at the Musee Augustin waxworks, alive. Today, she was found in the Seine, murdered. The museum's proprietor, long perturbed by the unnatural vitality of his...

As the thick, autumnal fog chokes the capital, within the fire-lit lounge of London's notorious Brimstone Club a bizarre tale is being spun for Inspector Bencolin and his friend Jeff Marle. A member of the club has been sent a model of a tiny gallows, and the word is that the folkloric hangman Jack Ketch has been stalking the streets...

Over a long career in the courts, Justice Horace Ireton has garnered a reputation for merciless rulings and his dedication to meting out strict, impartial justice. Taking a break from his duty after a session of assizes, Ireton retreats to his seaside bungalow in Devon and turns his attention to family, specifically in attempting to bribe his daughter's lover, Morrell,...

Crime author Dick Markham is in love again; his fiancée is the mysterious newcomer to the village, Lesley Grant. When Grant accidentally shoots the fortune teller through the side of his tent at the local fair, following a very strange reaction to his predictions, Markham is reluctantly brought into a scheme to expose his betrothed as a suspected serial husband-poisoner....

The White Priory Murders presents an 'impossible situation' regarded as the best Mr Dickson has given us, according to Torquemada in The Observer, 1935. "Sir Henry is at his best in this baffling yarn, and so is Carter Dickson," praised The New York Times in 1934. James Bennett has been invited to stay at White Priory for Christmas among the...

John Dickson Carr is famous for his puzzling "impossible crime" plots, in which corpses are discovered in scenarios that seem to lack any logical explanation, concealing clues as to how the murder was committed and how the body arrived in its current setting. Among all of Carr's ingenious crime scenes, the present case is one of his best known: a...

John Dickson Carr is famous for his puzzling "impossible crime” plots, in which corpses are discovered in scenarios that seem to lack any logical explanation, concealing clues as to how the murder was committed and how the body arrived in its current setting. Among all of Carr's ingenious crime scenes, the present case is one of his best known: a...

They say that Lord Mantling's mansion is haunted—at least, one room of it is. Known as the Red Widow's Chamber, the now-sealed quarters once housed the wife of a guillotine operator in the French Revolution. Since her passing, the chamber has been host to a century of unsolved horrors, including the death of a man in 1802, the death of...