Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 10, No. 48, November 1947

Начало книги

About the author: As everyone knows (or should know), Carter Dickson and John Dickson Carr are one and the same. Creator of two of the most famous sleuths in contemporary fiction — Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale (H.M.) — John Dickson Carr grows in stature with each passing year. Long ago the English critic who calls himself Torquemada rated Mr. Carr as “one of the Big Five.” Torquemada probably meant “one of the Big Five” among English writers; actually it is true among all writers of the detective story, past and present. And still John Dickson Carr keeps growing... Born in 1905 at Uniontown, Pa., John is the son of Wooda Nicholas Carr, formerly a United States Congressman. “At the age of eight,” writes John, “I was hauled off to Washington. While my father thundered in Congress, I stood on a table in the members’ anteroom, pinwheeled by a God-awful collar, and recited Hamlet’s Soliloquy to certain gentlemen named Thomas Heflin and Pat Harrison and Claude Kitchin.” At the same tender age John sat on “Uncle Joe” Cannon’s knee listening to ghost stories, learned the great American game of crap-shooting from the legislative page boys, and met Woodrow Wilson. John’s earliest fictional heroes were Sherlock Holmes, d’Artagnan, and the Wizard of Oz, and all three exerted subtle influences on his later creative development. J. B. Priestley has said that John possesses “a sense of the macabre that lifts him high above the average run of detective story writers.” Your Editor once wrote that “despite his preoccupation with Anglo-materia, Mr. Carr is in no sense an expatriate.

Читать дальше →