The Hollow Man

John Dickson Carr was a master of the locked room mystery … a murder takes place in circumstances that make it seem impossible for the killer to have escaped undetected … The sheer ingenuity of the plot is a delight * Daily Mail *Very few detective stories baffle me nowadays, but Mr Carr’s always do – Agatha ChristieA key influence on Wake Up Dead Man … It’s renowned for both the ingenuity of its central locked-room mystery - whereby a murderous visitor seemingly disappears into thin air - and a fourth-wall-stretching speech by sleuth Dr Gideon Fell, who lays out the various methods often used by writers to explain such “impossible crimes”. * Radio Times *Carr’s 1935 locked door mystery still rivals any present day crime novel and its status as a textbook for writers in the genre means it is a necessary read * Big Issue in the North *The best Carr is the most ingenious, and my vote would go to THE HOLLOW MAN … The conjuror’s illusion here is marvellously clever – Julian SymonsProbably the most ingenious of all detective story writers in the creation of puzzles – T J BinyonNo one in the history of the genre could match him for sheer sustained ingenuity when it came to devising reader-bamboozling locked rooms and other impossible crimes * Encylopedia Mysteriosa *John Dickson Carr was a master of the locked room mystery. In The Hollow Man, one of his earliest novels, written when he was just 29, a murder takes place in circumstances that make it seem impossible for the killer to have escaped undetected. … The sheer ingenuity of the plot is a delight. * DAILY MAIL *Carr’s 1935 locked door mystery still rivals any present day crime novel and its status as a textbook for writers in the genre means it is a necessary read * BIG ISSUE IN THE NORTH *

John Dickson Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1906. IT WALKS BY NIGHT, his first published detective novel, was published in 1930. Apart from Dr Fell, whose first appearance was in HAG’S NOOK in 1933, Carr’s other series detectives (published under the nom de plume of Carter Dickson) were the barrister Sir Henry Merrivale and Colonel March. Until the end of the Second World War, Carr averaged four books a year. He died in 1977.