John Dickson Carr on Kindle and iBooks

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), among the crime novelists I grew up reading, is the best of the best. US-born but with close ties to the UK, Carr is one of the stars of the Golden Age of crime fiction.

He was the grand master of the 'locked room' mystery (his The Hollow Man [1935] defines the entire sub-genre), author of some 80 books of surprisingly uniform quality, cerebral even when he made the reader laugh (his most-used pseudonym was wrongly suspected of belonging to P. G. Wodehouse), a master of both 'contemporary' and historical mystery fiction. (Incidentally, the first chapter of his first 'historical', The Bride of Newgate, measures up very well to the best of Dumas, and all of Carr's 'Victorian melodramas' are good, too.) Carr even experimented (on rare occasions, but successfully) with such unexpected themes as time travel and witchcraft. His place in my personal list of 26 favorite authors is very secure.

And now you can read him in ebook format. Thanks to the Langtail Press, six of Carr's classic novels are now available--all 'contemporaries', most featuring one or the other of his star detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell (He Who Whispers, The Problem of the Green Capsule) or Sir Henry Merrivale (The Plague Court Murders, And So to Murder, She Died a Lady), with one spectacular non-series novel, The Burning Court, thrown into the mix. (I've provided links to Kindle editions, but all six are also available on iBooks, and Carr is 'priced to sell' in both formats.)

And just in case you're not a fan of locked-room puzzles... neither am I: I just like John Dickson Carr.

Give him a try.