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 Sleeping Sphinx	[]	(1947)
Author: Carr	Detective: Fell	Type: CD
Publisher's Blurb 1947 Hamish Hamilton: When Major Sir Donald Holden returned to the house in Regent's Park where he expected to find all the people he liked best, he knew that things would be changed. He had been away from his friends for seven years and there were reasons why he had been blotted out of their lives. He returned to find Thorley Marsh, his closest friend, in the arms of a nineteen-year-old girl, and to hear that a death had occurred from what the doctor insisted were natural causes. But Donald Holden feared that the death was not a natural one, a fear that was enhanced when the dead refused to rest quietly and tormented the living. Holden had come back to seek the girl he loved. Instead, he found himself in a situation in which one or the other of the two persons he liked best must be lying cruelly and vindictively, or must be mad. There seemed to be no other possible choice. Confronted by this problem, by the story of a dangerous game in which everyone wore the masks of executed murderers, by evidence that someone had walked through an impenetrable stone wall and left no footprints in the enclosed sand, Holden felt that think and struggle though he might, the mystery would overpower him. Then Dr. Gideon Fell appeared on this scene of terror and heartbreak. Little by little, with Dr. Fell's keen mind probing the facts and fancies, with Dr. Fell's strength a refuge for the frightened, floundering people, the problem was solved. John Dickson Carr, writing with his usual superb skill, has produced another mystery which should delight his old fans and win him many new ones.
Comment 1 (Grobius) Post-War; good creepy moments, but too many unnecessary interruptions and coincidences. It becomes very irritating in later Carr books when the phone rings just as somebody is saying 'the poison was -- ' especially when the reader's having to wait for the answer has no relevance to the movement or explication of the plot. The only baffling locked-room element really has nothing to do with the story at all, as though the author came up with a gimmick and didn't know how else to use it -- waste not, want not. He should have used it in The Burning Court instead of the similar but not as convincing thing he did use there.
Comment 2 (hacklehorn) The hero of this book is dead--that is to say, legally dead: the first of many intriguing and original situations in this classic. Margot Marsh dies of a cerebral haemorrhage following a masked game of Murder-in-the-Dark, but her sister, Celia, suspects that she was driven to suicide by her husband; ghosts manifest themselves in portrait galleries; Celia is proved to be mad; and coffins are flung around a tomb. The atmosphere is sinister and intriguing; Dr. Fell is in good form; the characters are vivid; and the murderer is genuinely surprising. Only two problems with the book: the protracted disclosure of Celia's ghost story, and the awkward phraseology of one of the clues.
Comment 3 ()
Comment 4 ()
URL:	URL:	Rating: 7

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