John Dickson Carr - Dr. Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale

Dr. Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale

Carr's two major detectives, Dr. Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, are superficially quite similar. Both are large, blustery, upper-class, eccentric Englishmen somewhere between middle-aged and elderly. Dr. Fell, who is frankly fat and walks only with the aid of two canes, was clearly modelled on the British writer G. K. Chesterton and is at all times a model of civility and geniality. He has a great mop of untidy hair that is often covered by a "shovel hat" and he generally wears a cape. He lives in a modest cottage and has no official connection to any public authorities.

"H.M.", on the other hand, although stout and with a majestic "corporation", is physically active and is feared for his ill-temper and noisy rages. In a 1949 novel, A Graveyard to Let, for example, he demonstrates an unexpected talent for hitting baseballs improbable distances. A well-heeled descendant of the "oldest baronetcy" in England, he is an Establishment figure (even though he frequently rails against it) and in the earlier novels is the head of the British Secret Service. In The Plague Court Murders he is said to be qualified as both a barrister and a medical doctor. Even in the earliest books the bald, bespectacled, and scowling H.M. is clearly a Churchillian figure and in the later novels this similarity is somewhat more consciously evoked.

Many of the Fell novels feature two or more different impossible crimes, including He Who Whispers (1946) and The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941). The novel The Crooked Hinge (1938) weaves a seemingly impossible throat-slashing, witchcraft, a survivor of the Titanic, an eerie automaton modelled on Johann Maelzel's chess player, and a case similar to that of the Tichborne claimant into what is often cited as one of the greatest classics of detective fiction. But even Carr's biographer, Douglas G. Greene, notes that the explanation, like many of Carr's in other books, seriously stretches plausibility and the reader's credulity.

Dr. Fell's own discourse on locked room mysteries in chapter 17 of The Hollow Man is critically acclaimed and is sometimes printed as a stand-alone essay in its own right.