John Dickson Carr Quotes

I am a mathematician, sir. I never permit myself to think.

We don't fall in love with a woman because of her good character.

I have committed another crime, Hadley,' he said. 'I have guessed the truth again.

John Le Carre said that authenticity is less important than plausibility.

Alan Campbell opened one eye. From somewhere in remote distances, muffled beyond sight or sound, his soul crawled back painfully, through subterranean corridors, up into his body again. Toward the last it moved to a cacophony of hammers and lights. Then he was awake. The first eye was bad enough. But, when he opened his second eye, such as rush of anguish flowed through his brain that he hastily closed them again.

My only claim to distinction among writers is that I do not believe my life contains any materials for a novel. I have prowled around Limehouse and the gamiest sections of Paris, but I have never yet seen (a) a really choice murder in a locked room, (b) a mysterious mastermind or (c) a really good‐looking adventuress with slant eyes.

To write good history is the noblest work of man.

books by her favorite “Golden Age” British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil

It’s all very well to have your eight suspects parading in their endless ring-around-the-rosebush outside the library. That’s fine. But give some sensible reason why they were there. If you must shower the room with bus tickets, provide a reason for that too. In other words, construct your story. Your present problem is not to explain the villainy of the guilty: it’s to explain the stupidity of the innocent.

The poor fool hadn't realized that if all mankind shares a folly or an illusion, and likes to share it even knowing what it is, then the illusion is much more valuable and fine a kind of thing than the ass who wants to upset it.

If you stood motionless in the stream of time, listening to crying voices out of the past, you might presently believe that your feelings or your neighbour's were of puny significance because they had been experienced so often before and would be experienced again when you had gone. Whereas they did matter; they were the only reality; there was no shame in feeling the hurt.

In an extraordinarily bold move, Carr allows Fell in chapter seventeen [in, The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr (1935)] to address the reader directly, giving a disquisition on the lockedroom mystery that has often been reprinted as an essay on the subject: ‘We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not . . . Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuit possible to characters in a book . . . When I say that a story about a hermetically sealed chamber is more interesting than anything else in detective fiction, that’s merely prejudice. I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened.’ Fell proceeds to offer an analysis of different types of locked-room scenarios so impressively detailed that it has never been surpassed.

paperchase. And it is on a deduction drawn from

But for the greatest long - range murder ever committed in a locked room, gents, I commend you to one of the most brilliant short detective stories in the history of detective fiction. (In fact, it shares the honours for supreme untouchable top - notch excellence with Thomas Burke's The Hands of Mr Ottermole, Chesterton's The Man in the Passage, and Jacques Futrelle's The Problem of Cell 13.) This is Melville Davisson Post's The Doomdorf Mystery

We’ve all met one or two women, I daresay, it would have been better if we hadn’t met.” “Now there,” observed Cullingford Abbot, “we have a short history of mankind expressed with admirable terseness.

I beg your pardon,” said Abbot. “You are quite right, of course. I am not myself fond of bad taste, though I am always displaying it. Go on.

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coining,

Have you ever read The Hollow Man, by John Dickson Carr?

Люди не составляют представление о членах семьи. Они принимают то, что есть, и, видит бог, это ещё не самое худшее.

There’s no keeping anything from you, is there, Devil-face?” she demanded, rolling about in her seat almost gaily. “Now, then, how did you know that?

They got the body out this morning, with a little silver crucifix twined about the neck. She had already written a note which she just addressed ‘To the Police Department,’ confessing that she had shot LaGarde. She confessed to a crime she did not commit.

Son, frankness is a virtue only when you're talkin' about yourself, and then it's a nuisance.

As a general rule, these sleight-of-hand tricks are a dead give-away to the murderer once you've tumbled to the means of workin' the illusion. A special sort of crime indicates a special set of circumstances, and those circumstances narrow down to fit one person like a hangman's cap when you know what they are.

Rampole,

Every time he spoke, in fact, he had the appearance of thinly addressing an audience, raising and lowering his head as though from notes, and speaking in a penetrating singsong towards a point over his listeners' heads. You would have diagnosed a Physics B.Sc. with Socialist platform tendencies, and you would have been right.

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John Dickson Carr’s novel The Burning Court.

The Three Coffins and The Crooked Hinge by John Dickson Carr.

How’s it going, Inspector?” Halliday inquired, somewhat genially.

I was startled to see that there was neither nervousness nor affected ease about him.

Try reading The Hollow Man, written by the ‘king of crime’, John Dickson Carr, in 1935. It’s unquestionably brilliant, often cited as the best locked-room mystery ever written.