John Dickson Carr Data Base: Books

Full Listing by Date (click on the dagger to view the entry, then scroll down the page) or else you can go to Search

"The Shadow of the Goat" (1926) [SS]
"The Fourth Suspect" (1927) [SS]
"The Ends of Justice" (1927) [SS]
"The Murder in Number Four" (1928) [SS]
It Walks by Night (1930) [CD]
The Lost Gallows (1931) [CD]
Castle Skull (1931) [CD]
The Corpse in the Waxworks (1932) [CD]
Poison in Jest (1932) [CD]
Hag's Nook (1933) [CD]
The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) [CD]
The Bowstring Murders (1933) [CD]
The Eight of Swords (1934) [CD]
The Blind Barber (1934) [CD]
Devil Kinsmere (1934) [HN]
The Plague Court Murders (1934) [CD]
The White Priory Murders (1934) [CD]
Death-Watch (1935) [CD]
The Three Coffins (1935) [CD]
The Red Widow Murders (1935) [CD]
The Unicorn Murders (1935) [CD]
The Arabian Nights Murder (1936) [CD]
The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) [NF]
The Punch and Judy Murders (1936) [CD]
"The Wrong Problem" (1936) [SS]
The Four False Weapons (1937) [CD]
The Burning Court (1937) [MS]
The Third Bullet (1937) [SS]
The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) [CD]
"The Third Bullet" (1937) [SS]
To Wake the Dead (1938) [CD]
The Crooked Hinge (1938) [CD]
The Judas Window (1938) [CD]
Death in Five Boxes (1938) [CD]
"The New Invisible Man" (1938) [SS]
"The Crime in Nobody's Room" (1938) [SS]
"Error at Daybreak" (1938) [SS]
Fatal Descent (1939) [CD]
The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939) [CD]
The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939) [CD]
The Reader Is Warned (1939) [CD]
"Hot Money" (1939) [SS]
"Death in the Dressing Room" (1939) [SS]
"The Empty Flat" (1939) [SS]
"The Silver Curtain" (1939) [SS]
"Who Killed Matthew Corbin?" (1939) [RP]
The Man Who Could Not Shudder (1940) [CD]
And So to Murder (1940) [CD]
Nine -- and Death Makes Ten (1940) [CD]
"The Footprint in the Sky" (1940) [SS]
"The Proverbial Murder" (1940) [SS]
"The Locked Room" (1940) [SS]
"The Incautious Burglar" (1940) [SS]
"The Devil in the Summer-house" (1940) [RP]
The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941) [CD]
Seeing Is Believing (1941) [CD]
"William Wilson's Racket" (1941) [SS]
"The Black Minute" (1941) [RP]
"Speak of the Devil" (1941) [RP]
The Emperor's Snuff Box (1942) [CD]
Death Turns the Tables (1942) [CD]
The Gilded Man (1942) [CD]
"The Bride Vanishes" (1942) [RP]
"Will You Make a Bet with Death?" (1942) [RP]
She Died a Lady (1943) [CD]
"Cabin B-13" (1943) [RP]
"The Hangman Won't Wait" (1943) [RP]
"The Phantom Archer" (1943) [RP]
"The Dead Sleep Lightly" (1943) [RP]
"The Devil's Saint" (1943) [RP]
Till Death Do Us Part (1944) [CD]
He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944) [CD]
"The Dragon in the Pool" (1944) [RP]
"Death Has Four Faces" (1944) [RP]
"Vampire Tower" (1944) [RP]
"The Devil's Manuscript" (1944) [RP]
The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (1945) [CD]
He Who Whispers (1946) [CD]
My Late Wives (1946) [CD]
"The House in Goblin Wood" (1946) [SS]
"The Grandest Game in the World" (1946) [NF]
The Sleeping Sphinx (1947) [CD]
The Skeleton in the Clock (1948) [CD]
The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949) [NF]
Below Suspicion (1949) [CD]
A Graveyard to Let (1949) [CD]
The Bride of Newgate (1950) [HN]
Night at the Mocking Widow (1950) [CD]
The Devil in Velvet (1951) [HN]
The Nine Wrong Answers (1952) [CD]
The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1952) [SS]
Behind the Crimson Blind (1952) [CD]
The Cavalier's Cup (1953) [CD]
Captain Cut-Throat (1955) [HN]
"White Tiger Passage" (1955) [RP]
"The Villa of the Damned" (1955) [RP]
Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956) [CD]
Fear Is the Same (1956) [HN]
"All in a Maze" (1956) [SS]
Fire, Burn! (1957) [HN]
"Invisible Hands" (1957) [SS]
The Dead Man's Knock (1958) [CD]
Scandal at High Chimneys (1959) [HN]
In Spite of Thunder (1960) [CD]
The Witch of the Low Tide (1961) [HN]
The Demoniacs (1962) [HN]
The Men Who Explained Miracles (1964) [SS]
Most Secret (1964) [HN]
The House at Satan's Elbow (1965) [CD]
Panic in Box C (1966) [CD]
Dark of the Moon (1967) [CD]
Papa La-Bas (1968) [HN]
The Ghost's High Noon (1969) [HN]
Deadly Hall (1971) [HN]
The Hungry Goblin (1972) [HN]
"Stand and Deliver" (1973) [NF]
The Door to Doom (1980) [SS]
The Department of Queer Complaints (1981) [SS]
The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983) [RP]
Fell and Foul Play (1991) [SS]
Merrivale, March, and Murder (1991) [SS]
Speak of the Devil (1994) [RP]
The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995) [MS]

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The Case of the Constant Suicides	[]	(1941)
Author: Carr	Detective: Fell	Type: CD
Publisher's Blurb
Comment 1 (Grobius) Scottish castle; good locked-room murders and drunken hijinks. Apart from an absurd show of ignorance on the author's part about a simple, well-known substance, this is a very entertaining mystery, one of JDC's most fun to read; but the ending is a cop-out. Best part is the setting. Carr's only book with a Scottish setting, even though he was of Scottish ancestry; too bad he didn't set one in Edinburgh, which is a perfect 'murder' city.
Comment 2 (The_Thin_Man) You remembers "Bowstring" and "Castle Skull". Then you reads that "Constant Suicides" is ALSO set in a castle, and your hopes hit the floor. Thankfully this is great stuff. The plot is basically a re-hash of "The Hound of the Baskervilles", but you could find worse books to copy! What's great about this book is that it is absurdly, hilariously funny. It contains drunken antics to rival those in "The Blind Barber" and some of Carr's best hero-heroine dialogue. The killer, however, is rather obvious - there's really only two serious suspects - while I would have liked to see more detailed characterisation of a few of the characters. Barring these quibbles - which are minor - this is a great book, one of the best of JDC's later ones. The "locked tower" element in particular is superbly ingenious, although perhaps a different form of the object in question would have worked better? It frankly doesn't sound very deadly in its current form.
Comment 3 ()
Comment 4 ()
URL:	URL:	Rating: 4

* Type: CD (classic detective), NF (non-fiction), SS (short stories), RP (radio plays), HN (historical novels), MS (miscellaneous). Short pieces are in quotation marks.