John Dickson Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on 30 November 1906. As a child, he attended Uniontown High School where he took part in several theatre productions. Fired up by his father’s extensive library and inspired by ghost stories he had been told as a boy, Carr’s first short story was published in the school magazine. More stories appeared and, despite being written by a teenager, all are immensely enjoyable. After school and in the holidays he hung around the offices of the Uniontown Daily Herald, which his father had at one time edited. He managed to secure ad hoc employment reviewing sporting events and theatre as well as what would now be styled an op-ed, in which he expressed sometimes controversial opinions on anything from politics to spiritualism, even the Darwinian theory of evolution.
Journalism and the pressure to meet deadlines gave Carr invaluable experience but his real love was storytelling. From Uniontown High School he went to the Hill, where he wrote detective stories and ghost stories, an adventure serial and essays on political themes like the value of supranational leadership through the League of Nations. On leaving the Hill, Carr went up to Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where unsurprisingly he quickly began writing for the college magazine—mysteries, historical romances, ghost stories, poetry and humorous stories, including one that advocated raising babies on a diet of beer. He was soon appointed editor of The Haverfordian and sat on the board of Snooze, the college humour magazine.
In the autumn of 1926, Carr created the character of Henri Bencolin—a French investigator who owes something to Aristide Valentin, the anti-companion of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown—who would appear in several novels and short stories. In the early 1930s, Carr created his best-known character, Dr Gideon Fell, whose intellect and physique were inspired by Chesterton himself. Over the next thirty-five years Fell would appear in short stories, radio plays and twenty-three novels confronting Carr’s hallmark mystery, the impossible crime: murder behind locked doors, in the middle of a snowy street or in plain view of spectators when no murderer can be seen; death in the centre of an unmarked tennis court, on top of an inaccessible tower or during a séance when everyone in the room is holding hands. Carr’s ingenuity was boundless.
Carr also started writing under other names. As ‘Carter Dickson’, the best known of his pseudonyms, he created the ebullient and eccentric British peer Sir Henry Merrivale, known to one and all as ‘H.M.’, who was based on Carr’s father but also has something in common with Sherlock Holmes’ brother, the intelligent if indolent Mycroft Holmes. The Merrivale mysteries are also concerned with impossible crimes, although the problems are, if anything, even more incredible than those encountered by Dr Fell: in one book someone disappears after diving into a swimming pool; in another, a man is apparently ejected from a roof by invisible hands; victims are shot or stabbed within locked rooms or found clubbed to death within a building that is surrounded by unbroken snow. ‘H.M.’ appears in twenty novels and a few Merrivale short stories.
As well as several standalone novels, Carr collaborated on one mystery with his friend John Street, who wrote as ‘John Rhode’, whom Carr used as the basis for another detective, Colonel March of The Department of Queer Complaints (1940). Carr was passionate about history, which led to The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) in which he investigated a crime that had taken place almost 300 years earlier, the mysterious stabbing of a magistrate close to Carr’s London home.
In 1939, Carr joined the British Broadcasting Corporation, primarily to write morale-boosting propaganda plays for the radio like Britain Shall Not Burn and Gun-site Girl, to highlight bad behaviour at home in docu-dramas such as Black Market or to expose Nazi atrocities in thrilling dramas like Starvation in Greece. Of course he also wrote mysteries, including one with an extraordinary ‘least likely suspect’ solution that Agatha Christie herself would have envied. Carr loved writing for radio and he has a good claim to be the most important author of Golden Age radio mysteries. He is certainly the only person to do so on both sides of the Atlantic, with plays in two major, long-running series—Suspense in the US and Appointment with Fear in the UK. Carr also created the series Cabin B-13, scripts from which are to be published by Crippen and Landru. While working for the BBC, as well as writing original plays and adapting his own short stories, Carr adapted the work of some of the writers who had most influenced him, including that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (whose biography he wrote in later years), along with a series of pastiche adventures, The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), co-authored with Conan Doyle’s son Adrian.
After the Second World War, Carr turned to historical mysteries as a means of escaping post-war austerity, including the excellent The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957). In 1958 Carr and his wife left Britain for America, where they set up home near Fred Dannay—half of the ‘Ellery Queen’ partnership—and the magician Clayton Rawson. Both were luminaries of the Mystery Writers of America, of which Carr had been made President in 1949 and was the only person to hold that position as well as Secretary of the Detection Club in Britain. Carr continued to write and he also undertook a lecture tour, but his health was beginning to decline and in the spring of 1963 he suffered a stroke, which paralysed his left side. Even after this he did not stop writing, now using only one hand, although his later novels do not compare well to the superbly plotted mysteries he produced in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. For several years Carr also reviewed books for Harper’s and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He died of lung cancer on 27 February 1977.
Grand Guignol, the only uncollected novella to feature Henri Bencolin, was first published in The Haverfordian in March and April 1929. It was expanded by Carr into his first novel It Walks by Night (1930).