He comes striding towards us now, beaming like Old King Cole. You can probably hear him chuckle. If he wheezes a little, that's due to his weighing more than three hundred pounds.You notice the three chins, and the bandit's mustache, and the eyeglasses on the black ribbon. He removes his hat with old-school courtesy. Don't try to bow, doctor! He is Gideon Fell, doctor of philosophy and expert on crime.
In these words, the narrator of one of John Dickson Carr's radio-plays introduced Dr. Gideon Fell. As Anthony Boucher remarked, "the detective story in the grand manner demands a Great Detective," and Dr. Fell is a memorable sleuth. He is larger-than-life both in his appearance and in his actions. Although he is not fiction's most gargantuan crime-solver-that prize belongs to the four hundred pounds of Paul McGuire's Superintendent Fillinger — he puts most detectives literally in the shade. But, to be fair, Carr may have exaggerated Fell's weight for radio audiences; normally he is described as being a relatively svelte twenty stone. It is, however, more than his size which allows Fell to dominate his cases: "A huge joy of life, a piratical swagger merely to be hearing and seeing and thinking, glowed from him like steam from a furnace. It was like meeting Father Christmas." Everything about Fell is in large proportions. He smokes a meerschaum which he fills from an obese pouch. He consumes countless tankards of beer and is fond of whisky ("It would be very interesting to find any whisky that could take the top of my head off'), and he has a tremendous fund of miscellaneous knowledge about obscure subjects.
At the time of HAG'S NOOK, Dr. Fell has been working for six years on his magnum opus, The Drinking Customs of England From The Earliest Days. It was eventually published in 1946, Carr said, by a publishing house with the evocative name of Crippen & Wainwright. Fell is also the author of Romances of the Seventeenth Century and a book on the supernatural in English fiction. He spends his spare time, he explains on several occasions, improving his mind with sensational fiction.
Dr. Fell's name came from the seventeenth-century bishop and dean of Christ Church, Oxford, who was immortalized in Thomas Brown's famous doggerel:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
Fell himself sometimes quotes this verse, and so do the murderers he tracks down, but otherwise he does not take after his rather stern namesake. His appearance and personality were based on Carr's literary idol, G. K. Chesterton, the essayist and author of the Father Brown detective stories. The formality of Fell's speech was borrowed from Dr. Samuel Johnson, a fact which probably explains why Fell is described in HAG'S NOOK as a lexicographer. Fell is, as students of his cases know, a historian, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society with degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Edinburgh. He has occasionally lectured at American universities on such topics as "The Effects of King's Mistresses on Constitutional Government.'
In the Mystery Writers of America Anthology, Four-and-Twenty Bloodhounds (1950), Carr contributed a "Detective's Who's Who entry about Dr. Fell. We learn that he was born in Lincolnshire in 1884 the second son of Sir Digby and Lady Fell; his aristocratic connections help us to understand why he never seems to be earning a living during his cases and why he was able to afford several different residences. Besides Yew Cottage in Lincolnshire, where Fell is living during the events of HAG'S NOOK, he resides at Number 1 Adelphi Terrace in London and, later at 12 Round Pond Place, Hampstead. In one short story, he has a house in Chelsea. Carr added a few more details: Fell is the recipient of the French Grand Cross Legion of Honor, and he is a member of the Garrick, Savage, and Detection Clubs — organizations, incidentally, to which Carr also belonged. (The Detection Club is a society of detective-story writers; Carr was the only American member.)
But what is most noteworthy about the "Detective's Who's Who" is how much Carr left unsaid. We hear nothing about his wife, who plays a subsidiary role in HAG'S NOOK and is mentioned in passing in three or four other cases. Nothing is revealed about Sir Digby Fell's first son or, indeed, of Dr. Fell's other relatives. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (but unlike many modern Holmesians), Carr realized that much of a detective's life should be left vague. A larger-than-life character can be part of this world, but he should not be limited by it. It is insignificant that Hercule Poirot must have been as old as Methuselah in his final cases. Poirot, like Holmes and Fell, has gained an immortality that is unaffected by mere chronological considerations. Glimpses of a detective's background are more effective than elaborate biographical details. Thus Doyle referred to Holmes's unrecorded cases, and Carr mentioned that Fell was involved in such matters as the "Weatherby Grange affair;" the "six blue coins which hanged Paulton of Regent Street, and "the still more curious problem of the inverted room at Waterfall Manor." Tolkien understood in LORD OF THE RINGS the importance of referring to other events which are not detailed in the narrative. Such hints contribute a feeling of depth and timelessness, what Tolkien called "a large history in the background, an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island."
Carr was only twenty-six years old when he wrote HAG'S NOOK, the first Gideon Fell story. He was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on November 30, 1906. Beginning in preparatory school and continuing through his studies at Haverford College, he wrote detective stories and historical romances along with occasional poems and comic tales. After living in Paris in the late 1920s, he returned to the United States and published his first novel, It Walks by Night, featuring the French detective Henri Bencolin. But Carr believed that England — the land of Holmes and Watson, of Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith, of Dr. Thorndyke and Reggie Fortune and the transplanted Belgian Hercule Poirot — was the natural home for a detective-story writer. In 1932, he married an Englishwoman, Clarice Cleaves, moved to England, and began a regimen of writing four or five detective novels a year featuring English sleuths. Under the pseudonym "Carter Dickson" he wrote a series of books about Sir Henry Merrivale, and under his own name he wrote about Gideon Fell, who eventually appeared in twenty-three novels, four short stories, and four radio-plays.
HAG'S NOOK is told from the viewpoint of Tad Rampole, a young American visiting England who clearly represents Carr's own feelings, and it is filled with Anglophilic warmth. I know of no writing that conveys so sensitively the love of England and of the past than the second paragraph of HAG'S NOOK. Rampole will appear in two other Fell cases, The Mad Hatter Mystery, and The Three Coffins, in which his name is unaccountably altered to "Ted." It is the feeling for the past and how it influences the present that dominate HAG'S NOOK. Carr believed that "to write good history is the noblest work of man;" and like Fell he loved the romance of the past. In 1936, he wrote the finest true-crime book, The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, about an unsolved murder of 1678, and later in his career he became the master of the historical detective novel. According to Dr. Fell "the talent for deduction developed by judicious historical research can just as well be applied to detective work."
HAG'S NOOK also reflects Carr's affection for the works of G. K. Chesterton. Dorothy Sayers wrote of Carr's novels: "Chestertonian…are the touches of extravagance in character and plot, and the sensitiveness to symbolism, to historical association, to the shapes and colours of material things, to the crazy terror of the incongruous." Not only Dr. Fell's appearance but his love of paradoxes come directly from Chesterton.
John Dickson Carr was famed for the "miracle crime" the impossible disappearance and the locked-room murder; indeed he found so many ways to explain tricks and impossibilities that as Anthony Boucher remarked, "his own career seems a miraculous event demanding some rational explanation." The seeming impossibilities in HAG'S NOOK are handled subtly, more hinted at than proclaimed. Few tales so perfectly combine atmosphere, mystery, ingenuity, and an extraordinarily well-concealed murderer.
Douglas G. Greene
Norfolk, Virginia April, 1985