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 Judas Window	[The Crossbow Murders]	(1938)
Author: Dickson	Detective: Merrivale	Type: CD
Publisher's Blurb
Comment 1 (Grobius) A courtroom drama at the Old Bailey; H.M. as a lawyer; Ken Blake; superb and you'll never guess what a Judas Window is! One Dickson's best-constructed plots, dramatically and logically, the only major flaw being, if H.M. had all his proofs and witnesses before the trial, why did the case ever come to court? There are a couple of other nits one could pick, but they are not worth mentioning. This should have been made into a movie with Charles Laughton, like "Witness for the Prosecution", which it resembles. This is a case where all the facts apparently point to the defendant's guilt, and only the brilliance of the defense barrister can save him.
Comment 2 (The_Thin_Man) This book had the potential to be great, but suffers from infuriatingly bad construction. Why on earth isn't the secret of the "Judas Window" revealed much earlier? Nobody could work it out from the information that Carr gives us, and it would leave the reader free to start the deductions about the murderer's identity in earnest. Also, the fact that H.M. says right at the beginning that he knows the accused person is innocent takes away a lot of the tension. The book also suffers from a wealth of nonentities as characters, including the murderer, to the extent that I had completely forgotten who he / she actually was; when the name was announced, my first reaction was, "Who?" Some of the courtroom action, however, is excellent, and it is for this reason that you should buy the book. The solution is one of Carr's best, but fails, once again, because of the poor construction of the book. It presumes knowledge of the secret of the "Judas Window", which no reader could deduce; and it suffers because the murderer is basically such an uninteresting character that its only appeal is intellectual, not emotional.
Comment 3 ()
Comment 4 ()
URL:	URL:	Rating: 6

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