The Three Coffins by John Dickson CarrMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Also published under the UK title "The Hollow Man," this was my first Dickson Carr novel. Coming from the cosmopolitan, intellectual atmosphere of Van Dine (The Benson Murder Case), I had to get used to the Gothic, 19th century mood of this book (although written in 1935), behind which the shadow of Charles Dickens looms large (not my favorite writer, to say it politely). Other reviewers have pointed at the influence of G.K. Chesterton, whose physical appearance is borrowed by Carr for his detective Doctor Fell – a huge and rather noisy man who is constantly harrumphing, wheezing, blowing his nose and waving his two walking canes around (all characters in this book are often angry and upset - I much prefer the serene Philo Vance). Amateur sleuth Dr Fell assists his friend CID Superintendent Hadley in difficult cases.
Carr has been celebrated as the iconical "locked room" mystery writer and here we get even two such mysteries (one in a closed room, the other in an empty street) - and as additional bonus also Dr Fell's famous lecture on types of locked rooms. That lecture is quite interesting (and fits the story) and divides locked rooms into the following types:
- Not a murder, but a series of coincidences ending in an accident looking like murder.
- It is murder, but the victim is forced to kill himself or crash to an accidental death.
- Murder by a mechanical device already planted in the room.
- Suicide, which is intended to look like murder.
- Murder which derives its problem from illusion and impersonation.
- Again an illusion, but this time the victim is presumed to be dead long before he actually is.
- Murder which, although committed by somebody outside the room, nevertheless seems to have been the deed of somebody inside (the "long distance" or "icicle" crime).
The second crime in the book, in which a man is apparently shot at close range by nobody in an empty, snowy street, is ingenious and also plausible. Chapeau! The first murder in the locked room is a bit more problematical. The killer, a visitor wearing a mask, literally seems to have vanished into thin air. Without giving away the plot, I can say that some kind of illusion is at work here, but by the addition of a (difficult to understand) trick with a mirror, Carr makes it too complex for its own good. It is a series of tricks that in the end doesn't convince - although the central illusion is again a nice idea.
These two murders (the first one of a foreign professor interested in witchcraft living in London, the second one of an illusionist who had threatened him) play our against a back story set around 1900 in Transylvania, about three brothers and three coffins, a daring escape from prison and cruel double-dealing. The story fits well in the overall spooky atmosphere of the novel.
That being said, there are also several problems with this book. I don't know why it was necessary to include the two characters of the American Ted Rampole and his wife Dorothy (friends of Dr Fell), as they have no function at all - Ted is not even a Watson-type. Their ratiocination about the crimes is rather superfluous and leads to the only boring parts in the short book.
The other problem is the forced, narrow-minded coziness. Yes, this novel was written by an American, but, spending most of his working life in London, Carr had become more British than the English themselves. London is described as a cozy Dickensian paradise that never changes. The only danger comes from the outside: those bloody foreigners who start killing each other (Romanians, in this case - to stem their influx, 80 years later Britain would foolishly leave the European Union). British coziness is a form of nationalism, and nationalism was the scourge of the first half of the 20th century - and again of our own troubled times.
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