The Hollow Man

Description

'The first deadly walking of the hollow man took place when the side streets of London were quiet with snow and the three coffins of the prophecy were filled at last. . .' The murderer of Dr Grimauld walked through a locked door, shot his victim and vanished. He killed his second victim in the middle of an empty street, with watchers at each end, yet nobody saw him, and he left no footprints in the snow. And so it is up to the irrepressible, larger-than-life Dr Gideon Fell to solve this most famous and taxing of locked-room mysteries.

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.

Very few detective stories baffle me nowadays, but Mr Carr's always do -- Agatha Christie 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 *